 The main root of the four branches of medieval philosophy—Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Jewish—is in the two great so-called Platonic Schools of Athens and Alexandria, although each tradition also had its own special roots  (§1.4).  The new version of Platonism formulated by Plotinus (d. 270) had replaced the Hellenistic Schools (Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics etc.) as the dominant type of philosophy in the late Roman Empire. But Plotinus’s star pupil, Porphyry (c. 232–305), had given his master’s teaching a decisive twist. Plotinus considered Aristotle an opponent of Plato and regarded him with hostility. Porphyry held, rather, that Aristotle’s thought, which was about the sensibly-perceptible world, harmonized with Plato’s, about super-sensible reality. Following Porphyry’s lead, students at the “Platonic” Schools began by studying the whole Aristotelian corpus, logic first, and only then moved on to Plato’s dialogues. In all four branches, it was the Aristotelian curriculum that survived, in whole or part. Medieval philosophy is, therefore, to some extent the history of Aristotelianism, but transmitted within a Platonist context, shaped by the different religious traditions and transformed both by individual thinkers and various, changing cultural circumstances.