His work, through Augustine of Hippo, the Cappadocian Fathers, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and several subsequent Christian and Muslim thinkers, has greatly influenced Western and Near-Eastern thought.
After correcting and naming each treatise, Porphyry wrote a biography of his master, Life of Plotinus, intended to be an introduction to the Enneads.
The Fourth concerns the Soul, the Fifth knowledge and intelligible reality, and finally the Sixth covers being and what is above it, the One or first principle of all.
Since the publishing of a modern critical edition of the Greek text by Paul Henry and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer (Plotini Opera.
The numbers in square brackets before the individual works refer to the chronological order they were written according to Porphyry's Life of Plotinus.
Many passages of Enneads IV-VI, now known as Plotiniana Arabica, circulated among Islamic scholars (as Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi and Avicenna) under the name The Theology of Aristotle or quoted as "Sayings of an old [wise] man".