On the Mysteries and Life of Pythagoras, Iamblichus, trans. Thomas Taylor, The Prometheus Trust, 194 The Butts, Frome, Somerset BS11 4AG, UK, 1999, ISBN 1 898910 16 2, hardback, 450 pp., £21.

This is volume 17 in the Prometheus Trust’s new edition of the works of Thomas Taylor (1758-1835), the ‘English Platonist’. Iamblichus (d.330) was a noted neo-Platonic philosopher, and this edition contains three of his works, On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians, The Life of Pythagoras and Ethical and Political Fragments of the Pythagoreans. Together these works constitute an essential source work for Pythagorean cosmology and for the philosophical debates concerning divination, including astrology, under the Roman Empire.