Читать книгу Plato's Persona - Denis J.-J. Robichaud - Страница 9

CHAPTER 2

Ficino and the Platonic Corpus

Moreover, one can certainly conjecture that the titles of these dialogues proceed in an ordered mode of succession from this reason, because the desire for the Good is inborn in all.

Therefore in the Phaedo and the Theaetetus Plato says the soul’s highest good is to be like God.

—Ficino, The Philebus Commentary

Plato’s Words: Divine or Confused?

Paul O. Kristeller’s pioneering work on Marsilio Ficino characterized Ficino as both a philosopher and a humanist. Yet Kristeller also differentiated Ficino from his humanist contemporaries insofar as he thought Ficino was primarily a systematic metaphysician, whereas other humanists were only thinkers of moral philosophy, one of the five disciplines in his definition of the studia humanitatis. His approach—sometimes mischaracterized and misinterpreted—is still very much present in the study of Renaissance humanism and philosophy in general, and Ficino and Plato in particular. In the hands of others, Kristeller’s categories have sometimes had the net effect of classifying humanists only as rhetoricians and of isolating Ficino.¹ On the one hand, researchers of humanist rhetoric and dialogue are often too quick to cast aside Ficino the philosopher, and on the other hand, scholars of Ficino all too often neglect the rhetorical facets of Ficino’s work.² Yet Ficino is very much invested in rhetoric, primarily in studying Plato’s own artistry and in forming his own oratorical and epistolary persona. In both cases, Ficino works with various rhetorical stratagems, but notably prosopopoeia and enargeia—in other words, the fabrication and vivid presentation of personae. If one looks exclusively for narrowly defined elegantia in humanist rhetoric, one runs the risk of being blind to the sophisticated and philosophical aspects of Ficino’s style.

These rhetorical stratagems also influenced Ficino’s hermeneutical approach to Plato’s style and corpus. Plato’s style was not only the subject of ancient interpretation; his first translators in the Renaissance also discussed his prose, often in prefaces to their Latin translations of his works. As humanists honed their skills in Greek many soon began studying Plato, whose own prose seemed to evoke equal parts admiration and confusion in his first quattrocento readers. Many humanists would pick out scattered images, sentences, or small morsels of wisdom from Plato’s dialogues for their florilegia, saving them to adorn their own writings or to support their future arguments with the weight of his authority. Others undertook a more sustained study of Plato. Leonardo Bruni, the brilliant humanist and translator of the Phaedo, Crito, Apology, Gorgias, Phaedrus, and Letters, remarked to Niccolò Niccoli (1364–1437) that Plato conveys divine opinions with a pleasant style, that nothing in his prose is forced, and that he expresses all with ease and grace.³ This kind of praise for his style was common among many translators of Plato. After all, by lauding their chosen subject they in turn basked in his reflected glow. Along similar lines, Pier Candido Decembrio (1399–1477) wrote a few lines of praise in his preface to his translation of the fifth book of the Republic while employing the trope of inviting his reader to speak with Socrates: “His eloquence is brilliant to such an extent that he is held first among the Greeks no less for the charm of his style than the weight of his thinking. But more is said about this elsewhere, let us now hear Socrates speak.”⁴ Antonio da Rho (c. 1398–after 1450) might have been inspired by Pier Candido’s actual opinions, since in his Dialogorum in lactantium the interlocutor Pier Candido, repeating Cicero and Quintilian’s opinions, continues to admire Plato’s prose: “Who would doubt that Plato himself was exceptional either in his sharpness of argument or in his ease of eloquence, which is a certain divine and Homeric style. For he greatly rises above the prose and style that the Greeks call pedestrian, as it seems to me that it does not come from a human ingenium, but yet from a certain Delphic oracle of God.”⁵ The stylistic considerations of Plato’s prose by Latin humanists largely emerged either from the practice of doing their own Greek to Latin translations of some of Plato’s compositions or from their readings of ancient opinions on Plato—for example, from Latin authors, such as Cicero and Quintilian, and Greek ones, such as Plutarch (c. 46–120 CE), Dio Chrysostom (c. 40–c. 115 CE), and other second sophistic authors—many of whom compared Plato’s abilities to Homer’s.⁶

Two of Ficino’s closest interlocutors, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Poliziano, also made similar comparisons between the stylistic qualities of Homer and Plato. Pico wrote to Ermolao Barbaro that Plato and Aristotle agree in doctrine but differ in style.⁷ Ficino too says something similar in his preface to his commentary on Priscian Lydus on Theophrastus, claiming that he learned of their agreement from Themistius.⁸ For his part, Poliziano, employing architectural metaphors in the preface to his Latin translation of the Charmides, writes that Plato is similar to ancient poet-theologians whose writings permit one to penetrate into the inner sanctum or adytum of wisdom:

But this is certainly why those ancient theologians, Homer, Orpheus, Hesiod, Pythagoras, and also he himself about whom we are speaking at present, Plato, and many other divine mouthpieces of the true wisdom of the muses communicated that complex knowledge of all of philosophy through certain myths and symbols, as well as through concealing and disguising words (involucra and integumenta), and it is as though they barricaded their meaning with certain cancelli (or church screens), lest the religious mysteries of the Eleusinian deities become profaned, and lest they were to throw pearls to swine, as one is wont to say. For what the Pythagorean Lysis writes in his letter to Hipparchus is most true: “One who would intermingle divine speeches and thoughts with corrupt and obscene disturbances, acts in a contrary manner no less than one who pours out the most pure water into a muddy well; in disturbing the mud he contaminates the purity of the water.”⁹

These quattrocento praises of Plato’s writing refer to ancient comparisons between Plato’s and Homer’s abilities to tell readers that both ancient Greeks are capable of speaking from the perspective of the gods. Indeed, these comparisons from antiquity do nothing more than turn Plato’s own judgment on its head regarding the poet’s ability for divine prosopopoeia, that is, for speaking in the person of the Olympian gods. This is why Plato’s ingenium is said to be their mouthpiece, like the Delphic oracle. Poliziano’s metaphors from religious architecture reinforce this interpretation of Plato. A lexical or grammatical interpretation of Plato’s text will always remain at the threshold, Poliziano reasons, while figurative readings enter into the edifice but also establish boundaries, rood or chancel screens (cancelli), protecting the philosophical or even anagogical meaning of the dialogues (the Platonic adytum and altar, so to speak).¹⁰ But, as Poliziano’s metaphors imply, everyone knows that oracles do not speak clearly; they require interpreters. Or if one wishes to transpose the metaphor into Christian terms, as Poliziano himself does, intercessors or priests are required to serve as mediators with the divine.

Very early on in Plato’s reception in the quattrocento, Latin humanists needed to address why, despite Plato’s stylistic merits, so many of his interpreters debated his meaning. As we saw, one strategy was to turn any confusion into a positive judgment on his Homeric style, his divine ingenium, his oracular nature, or (as Poliziano mentioned) his Pythagorean wisdom. Yet not everyone was so easily convinced. Antonio Cassarino, for instance, who also translated the Republic into Latin, feared that few would appreciate Plato’s style, since it is pleasing neither to humanists educated in the Latin eloquence of Cicero and Livy nor to scholastic philosophers accustomed to the clear precision and brevity of Aristotelian terminology.¹¹ The humanists not only had ancient examples of praise of Plato’s eloquence, they also had ancient precedents that judged his style to be confused. The most common of these would have been Augustine. In the De civitate Dei, after stating that Plato joined Socratic practical philosophy with Pythagorean theoretical philosophy, Augustine writes that Plato’s confused use of dialogic personae conceals his true doctrines: “For since Plato aspired to preserve the most notorious practice of hiding his knowledge and opinions of his master Socrates, whom he makes an interlocutor in his books, and because this Socratic practice pleased Plato, the fact remains that it is not easy also to uncover Plato’s own doctrines on important matters.”¹² Augustine’s response to Plato’s style is essentially to characterize it as esoteric—although this intentional concealment does not have the same positive connotations as are seen in Poliziano’s preface. Augustine famously praises Plato’s preeminence over other pagan philosophers, and claims that among all philosophers the Platonists are the closest to Christianity. Yet Plato’s confused esoteric style is also exceptionally dangerous insofar as it became a model for later Platonists’ esoteric strategies. Platonic verisimilitude, Augustine writes, might resemble truth, but it is not the same thing as truth. In fact, Augustine thinks that because of their confused and esoteric doctrines, which often resemble Christianity, the Platonists, hiding their true opinion, can deceive and lead their readers astray from Christianity.

No one shaped Plato’s reception in the Latin West more than Augustine, but perhaps the strongest accusations against Plato’s confused style in the quattrocento came from the Greeks. The De differentis of Georgius Gemistus Pletho (c. 1355–1454) raised the stakes in the Latin West by sending the first volley in a series of exchanges, commonly known as the Plato-Aristotle controversies, that were largely contested between Greek scholars and émigrés.¹³ There is no need to step into the fray to study the Byzantine origins of these debates or to survey the question as a whole, but I do wish to discuss briefly the exchanges from the second generation of the controversy, between George of Trebizond (1395–1472/3) and Cardinal Bessarion (1403–72), particularly because Ficino was aware of them, and it was George who, despite translating Plato’s Parmenides and Laws, waged the Greek war on Plato on a Latin front.¹⁴ Drawing on his native knowledge of Greek, his translations of Plato, and his studies of rhetoric and Aristotelian philosophy, George critiqued Plato in his Comparatio Platonis et Aristotelis (1458), among other reasons, for being an inferior philosopher to Aristotle (in the fields of rhetoric, dialectic, logic, natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics), for being incompatible with Christianity, for being a hotbed of heresies and vices, and for having a confused style. George largely dismisses Plato’s dialogic form, claiming that the argumentative method of Platonic dialectic is far coarser (rudis) than Aristotle’s demonstrations and syllogistics. Addressing the question why Plato is famous for his style, George asks, “But where did Plato teach on rhetorical invention? Where did he communicate lessons on eloquence? Where on poetics? For this subject also concerns greatly what he says, did this scholar of myths teach anything about his own vigilance and expertise? But Aristotle opened the fonts of poetics and disclosed the rivers of oratory.”¹⁵ Similarly, if one studies and imitates Plato’s prose, George believes, one realizes that Plato’s elevated and sublime style is nothing more than a confusion of symbols and enigmas.¹⁶ In comparing Plato to Aristotle, George in effect presents a dogmatic Plato who is inferior in rank to the dogmatisms of Aristotle and Christianity. In sum, George wrote that Plato’s dialogues were poor teachers of style and philosophy, as well as being unorthodox or heretical works.

Bessarion, as everyone knows, responded. First writing the In calumniatorem Platonis in Greek and later composing and circulating the work with the help of Niccolò Perotti’s (1429–80) Latin, he drew on a much larger corpus of Neoplatonic texts to come to Plato’s aid. The broad strokes of Bessarion’s response to George are to present a dogmatic Plato who, at the bedrock of his argument, is largely a Pythagorean who does not divulge all matters pertaining to the divine to the public. We have seen how Poliziano later adopts a similar strategy, but Bessarion goes much further. In the second chapter of In calumniatorem Platonis, responding to the charge that because of his enigmatic style Plato does not write clear teachings in the manner of Aristotle, Bessarion, like Poliziano, quotes the famous pseudepigraphic letter attributed to the Pythagorean Lysis and written to a certain Hipparchus, who was condemned for having revealed the master’s teachings to noninitiates.¹⁷ Bessarion concludes his comparison of Plato with the Pythagorean motivations in the letter: “This mos Pythagoricus was guarded until Plato’s time, and through all of the successors of his school. Plato also always protected this very truth itself most diligently. For Plato taught neither with books, but orally, nor about those matters, which he had taught, did he leave behind books. If he wrote something it is Socrates not Plato himself who speaks. Besides about divine matters he briefly transmits implicit and obscure teachings, which are not easily understood by reading.”¹⁸ To support his claims, Bessarion then appeals to Plato’s famous (or infamous) supposed Second Letter to confirm this interpretation of Plato’s oral teachings. Thus, the dialogic role of Socrates only comes into play for Bessarion as a cover to hide Plato’s own unwritten Pythagorean doctrines. In arguing in this manner, Bessarion proleptically stole his adversary’s weapon, that is, the accusation that Plato’s writings were unclear or confused, and turned it against his critic by arguing for the philosophical virtues of Plato’s enigmatic or esoteric style. To drive his point home to a Christian audience, Bessarion compares Plato’s strategy to Matthew 7:6 (as Poliziano once more also does), where it is written that one ought not to give what is sacred to dogs, nor throw pearls to pigs. Plato, therefore, like a good Pythagorean, never wrote down his oral teachings explicitly; he did so only through symbols.

Ficino encompasses some of the same strategies as those listed above, but he is much more complete in trying to fit Plato’s form of writing into a comprehensive hermeneutical understanding of his philosophy. For Ficino, Plato’s style of writing and his chosen dialogic form are directly related to the dialogue’s purpose. In a passage from the preface to his Commentaria in Platonem, addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Ficino describes Plato’s prose as lofty and elevated, reaching sublime heights almost unattainable by human language. Like his predecessors, Ficino thinks Plato calls down the heavens in his writings “as lofty thunder.”¹⁹ Ficino’s humility regarding his incapacity to imitate fully Plato’s Greek prose in his Latin translation, or to convey its qualities in his commentaries, only confirms how important Plato’s style was to him. The description of Plato’s prose as lofty and elevated dates back even earlier than its common occurrence among second sophistic authors, such as Dio Chrysostom, who would compare it to Homer’s sublime style. After quoting in his De vita Platonis Aristotle’s opinion, as recorded in Diogenes Laertius (fl. c. third century CE), that Plato’s style flows somewhere between oratorical prose and poetry and that Plato’s writings are full of charm and abundance, Ficino also paraphrases Cicero’s opinion from the Brutus that “if Jupiter wished to speak with a human tongue he would use no other tongue than the one with which Plato speaks,” which is a testament to Plato’s almost divine ability for prosopopoeia. Thus, like some of his humanist contemporaries, Ficino also compares Plato’s style to Homer’s capacity (pace what Plato says himself in the third book of the Republic) to give an adequate voice to the gods.²⁰

Ficino also knows of the comparison by the Alexandrian Longinus (c. 213–73 CE) of the Athenian philosopher’s prose with Homer’s epos through the In Timaeum of Proclus. But because Proclus reiterates in the same breath the quotations from Longinus as well as Plotinus’s opinion that Longinus may have been a philologist but not a philosopher, he reveals a Neoplatonic assessment of stylistic criticism. He does not altogether disregard Plato’s style of writing but rather contends that by keeping his reading of the dialogues only to the level of textual interpretation Longinus misses the point of Plato’s elevated style.²¹ Proclus probably learned this interpretive approach from his teacher Syrianus († c. 437 CE), who saw in Plato’s different uses of language evidence of divine inspiration, that is, moments often interrupting the dialogues’ conversational logoi where Socrates launches into one of his many myths. These later Neoplatonists are not simply content to repeat tropes regarding the oracular or Homeric qualities of Plato’s style. They compare different passages in the corpus where Plato’s writing changes, and they interpret the philosophical significance of the different stylistic registers.

Hermias’s prosopopoeic interpretation of Socrates’ famous palinode from the Phaedrus is a prime example of this mode of interpreting the dialogues in Syrianus’s school.²² Hermias reminds his readers that after listening to Phaedrus deliver Lysias’s speech that it is best to gratify the nonlover, and before reciprocating with his own discourse on how one ought to avoid the lover, Socrates covers his head and face in order to avoid the shame of the speech’s subject matter.²³ Thereafter, Socrates delivers the third speech of the dialogue in the persona of Stesichorus (c. 640–555 BCE), the famous lyric poet who was supposedly blinded for offending Helen with his poetry and who subsequently composed a palinode to recant this offense.²⁴

It is mainly because of his assiduous study of late ancient Neoplatonists that Ficino goes beyond the traditional comparisons of Plato and Homer by quattrocento humanists and interprets philosophical meaning in Plato’s myths. Ficino thus appropriates Hermias’s reading of Socrates’ speeches in his commentary on the Phaedrus: “In all this, take note of the modesty of Socratic love; for Socrates begins with his head veiled since he is about to say something less than honorable.”²⁵ Socrates uncovers his face for the second speech, a palinode and recantation to the gods, in which he proffers his myth of the charioteer and the celestial chain of divinities, revealing the heavens, the afterlife, the nature of soul, and its return to earth.²⁶ According to the logic of the interpretation, in the second speech Socrates’ Stesichoran prosopon is turned forward to speak with the gods and to see into the future—as the Timaeus also explains is its purpose. Accordingly, Ficino and Hermias distinguish between the persona of shame through which Socrates pronounces his first speech, delivered not merely in dithyrambs but in hexameter, which Socrates ironically characterizes as divinely inspired, and the Stesichoran persona of the palinode, which they believe is actually divinely inspired. Ficino translated Hermias’s commentary on the Phaedrus at an early stage in his career, probably to help him decipher Plato’s writings. Its influence in seeing Socrates as a divinely inspired philosopher is felt not only in his own commentary on the Phaedrus but also in other writings where he recalled Hermias’s opinion that Socrates was a soteriological figure sent down from heaven to save the youth.²⁷

These prosopopoeic interpretations of Plato’s corpus also clearly influenced Ficino’s epistolary voice. Ficino turned to these ancient commentary traditions to help him conceive of his epistolary persona. For instance, in his commentary on the Phaedrus, Hermias speaks of Plato’s use of prosopopoeia or personification (προσποιεῖται) for Socrates’ change of register in order to compare the respective offenses and their resulting damages and pollutions (μόλυσμα) in the persons of Homer, Stesichorus, and Socrates: the first does not notice the offense and damage (blindness), the second notices both and is healed of his blindness through a palinode, and the third notices the offense, not against Helen but against Eros, and is healed through a recantation before any damage or defilement can happen to him.²⁸ In one of his Platonic letters to Cavalcanti, dated 15 October 1468, Ficino employs Hermias’s interpretation of Phaedrus by including himself in the aforementioned company of poets: “Thus Stesichorus was more prudent than Homer, but wiser than both was Socrates. I was certainly less cautious than Socrates; may I not become more unfortunate than Stesichorus. Why do I say this? In truth, because I wrote a letter to you in the morning of the ninth day of this month to rebuke your long silence, in which I accused you of being untamable and the cruelest of all, and in the evening I was overcome with an adverse illness. On account of this, and dreading that an adversity hangs over me for vituperating a hero, I decided to compose a palinode, albeit a brief one, to expiate my guilt.”²⁹ Ficino’s letters thus convey more than his mastery of Plato’s corpus to his audience, they also portray him as a successor in ancient Platonic interpretive traditions.

Although Ficino is not the first in the Renaissance to address the question of Platonic style, he is a better reader of Plato’s Greek corpus than other quattrocento humanists, insofar as he is the sole person to translate all the dialogues into Latin, and he is probably also the only one among his contemporaries to read the complete corpus in Greek. This is partially due to his access to manuscripts.³⁰ But, to undertake this comprehensive study of Plato, Ficino also turned to a much larger body of exegetical material on Plato’s prose than his predecessors (much of which comes from late ancient Neoplatonism). Like Bessarion, Ficino saw Plato as a Pythagorean disciple.³¹ Unlike Bessarion, however, Ficino does not simply interpret the Platonic corpus through a single dogmatic voice. He is sensitive to changes of stylistic registers and dramatic personae within the dialogic corpus itself. It is to Ficino’s great credit that he neither ignores Plato’s choice of writing styles by distilling the corpus solely into a list of dogmatic sententiae (although this is a strategy that he on occasion employs) nor condemns Plato for dialogic confusion (although he must have certainly felt perplexed at times by the dialogues’ intricacies). Ficino certainly adorns his writings with Platonic images, but his rhetorical employment of Plato is much more complex and continuously cuts across his complete epistolography. Similarly, while Ficino does indeed pick out and repeatedly quote significant sententiae from Plato in his own writings, Plato’s Neoplatonic interpreters also help Ficino aim at a comprehensive hermeneutics to study Plato’s writings as a unitary corpus.³²

Plato’s Corpus: Ficino’s First Translation of Ten Platonic Dialogues

Ficino famously prepared his first translations of a selection of Plato’s dialogues for Cosimo de’ Medici. What emerges from the brief argumenta and the preface that accompany these early translations is that Ficino might very well be the first philosopher in the Latin West, at least since antiquity, to interpret Plato’s works as a coherent and singular corpus.³³ Ever since Schleiermacher’s influential hermeneutical analysis of Plato in the early nineteenth century, a dominant approach for interpreting Plato has been to understand all his dialogues as a singular corpus, that is, each dialogue ought to be read in view of the Platonic corpus as a whole, and vice versa. Since then, scholars undertaking the study of Plato’s complete works have often been concerned with questions of authenticating a canon of dialogues (and letters) and of establishing their order (chronological, pedagogical, or philosophical). Most interpreters of Plato, especially in Anglo-American scholarship, now adhere to a general developmental approach toward organizing Plato’s works. That is, even contemporary studies of Plato that do not explicitly argue for a developmental interpretation of the corpus often implicitly believe that one can divide the dialogues into an early period (Socratic or aporetic dialogues), a middle period (dialogues that argue for classic Platonic doctrines like recollection and the immortality of the soul), and a late period (where Plato is sometimes believed to have challenged earlier positions). These modern developmental categories were a feature of neither ancient nor Renaissance interpretations of the corpus.

The organization of Plato’s dialogues and letters into a corpus is not new, however. It is reasonable to say in broad terms that in antiquity there were five major organizational approaches to the Platonic corpus. The earliest known is attributed to Aristophanes of Byzantium (c. 257–c. 180 BCE). While the exact nature of Aristophanes’ organization is still somewhat unclear, it is reported that he grouped fifteen of Plato’s dialogues into five trilogies based on dramatic principles. According to this model, for instance, the Republic, the Timaeus, and the Crito form a trilogy because the dramatic setting from the Timaeus encourages their association. The second approach to the corpus is that of Thrasyllus (fl. second half of the first century BCE), who was probably a court astrologer for the emperor Tiberius. Thrasyllus arranged the corpus into tetralogies, inspired by the Greek thematic grouping of three tragedies plus a satyr play. Certain dramatic themes encourage the association of four dialogues into a group. For example, the events and conversations leading to Socrates’ death in the Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo make a coherent group for Thrasyllus’s first tetralogy.³⁴ The Thrasyllan order is also accompanied by subtitles, presumably to indicate the dialogue’s particular subject matter. The Meno, for example, is also known by the subtitle On Virtue. The Thrasyllan corpus had an important legacy, since most of the manuscripts of Plato’s works are organized into tetralogies that preserve the Thrasyllan subtitles. A third classification of the dialogues is according to character types, beginning with the classes of hyphegetic (doctrinal) and zetetic (inquisitive) dialogues, followed by other subspecies. Evidence of this arrangement for reading the corpus survives primarily in the Middle Platonist Albinus’s Prologue and in Diogenes Laertius. The fourth prominent organization of Plato’s corpus in antiquity comes from the Neoplatonist Iamblichus’s arrangement of Plato’s dialogues into a series of ten, followed by two culminating dialogues: the Timaeus and the Parmenides. In Iamblichus’s hermeneutics each dialogue also has a specific goal (or skopos) directing its philosophical purpose. This organizational unit became important for the philosophical and pedagogical needs of later Neoplatonic schools. A final interpretive strategy is to study Plato’s use of prosopopoeia, that is, by interpreting the dialogic interlocutors, which some at times have understood to be Plato’s spokespersons expressing various positions. To be more accurate, this hermeneutical approach does not necessarily organize the corpus into a particular order, and it seems to have found its way into the strategies of various ancient interpreters at different times.

It is important to realize that Ficino is familiar to various degrees with all these ancient interpretive approaches, appropriating some of their principles and methods while ignoring others. As will be seen below, his own manuscripts provide evidence for his study of ancient interpretive traditions. For instance, the Greek manuscript containing the complete Platonic corpus that Cosimo gave to Ficino introduces Plato’s dialogues with a series of interpretive paratexts: Pythagoras’s Aurea verba, Alcinous’s Didaskalikos, Theon of Smyrna’s (fl. c. 100 CE) Mathematica, Diogenes Laertius’s Life of Plato, and Albinus’s Prologue, as well as a number of marginal scholia.³⁵ Scholars have long overlooked the simple fact that Ficino often relied on these manuscript paratexts to orient himself in his studies of Plato. In fact, for Ficino the very nature of the material codex seems to be more than a transparent container of Plato’s works. The form and organization of the manuscript codex bind together various hermeneutical traditions into a phenomenological unity, which establishes certain horizons for Ficino’s reading experience. This is not to say that Ficino follows these different—at times conflicting—positions blindly or that he relies on all of them. What is important to observe is that his recovery and appropriations of these ancient interpretive traditions are also integral parts of his own hermeneutics of the Platonic corpus. Although his reliance on various ancient interpretive guides—scholia and pseudo-Pythagorean material, for instance—might not always appeal to present-day Plato scholars, his Platonic interpretations are nonetheless an important part of the fabric of the histories and traditions of Platonism, and cannot be ignored.

Scholarship has also been slow to recognize that Ficino had already interpreted Plato’s dialogues as a unitary corpus with a particular order. Given the little that his medieval predecessors and even his contemporaries knew of Plato, this level of interpretative sophistication was quite a feat for his day.³⁶ His interpretation of the Platonic corpus is indeed closer to what modern scholars would call a unitary approach, but Ficino is nonetheless aware of certain developmental features of Plato’s works. First, he knows of an old tradition that identifies the Phaedrus as Plato’s first and most youthful composition.³⁷ He also indicates in his commentary on the Symposium that he has discovered a certain development in Plato’s epistemology regarding how he thinks humans receive knowledge of the ideas. He traces Plato’s philosophy from an earlier position that argues that humans comprehend by way of reasons inborn in their intellect to a later theory that humans comprehend by way of divine illumination: “In what manner, moreover, are such reasons in the intellect? The answer varies in Plato. If one were to follow the books that Plato wrote when he was young, the Phaedrus, the Meno, the Phaedo, one would just think therefore that they were painted onto the substance of the intellect, as though they were figures on a wall, which is what we often held in our earlier discussions. And it also seems to be mentioned here [i.e., in the Symposium]. In the sixth book of the Republic, however, that divine man brings the whole matter out into the open, and says that the light by which our mind understands all things is God himself, by which all things are made.”³⁸ In this passage, the interlocutor in Ficino’s dialogue-commentary on the Symposium, Tommaso Benci (speaking in Socrates’ place in the banquet), relates that the Symposium’s epistemology has much in common with the Phaedrus, the Meno, and the Phaedo concerning the presence and recollection of innate ideas in our intellect. It differs from the Republic where Plato argues for an epistemological theory of transcendental illumination and emanation from the Good. Benci’s elaborations make it clear that Ficino has Plato’s allegory of the cave and the divided line in mind. To Ficino this change in Plato’s epistemological theory of ideas not only indicates a chronology for Plato’s compositions but also suggests, as I argue in Chapter 4, a change in Plato’s prose to a register that corresponds to Pythagorean philosophy and anticipates the Neoplatonists. In this Symposium passage Benci presents the second theory as a fulfillment of the first. As far as I can tell, this developmental approach toward Plato’s epistemology seems to be Ficino’s own invention.

In addition to the belief that Plato wrote the Phaedrus in his youth, and that one can chart a development in Plato’s epistemology, Ficino agrees with the older tradition that Plato composed the Laws last in his old age. Like Thrasyllus, Ficino places the Laws (followed by the Epinomis and the Letters) in the last place of his order as it is found in the 1484 and 1491 editions, but he does not follow Thrasyllus’s sequence otherwise. Ficino’s decision to place the Laws, the Epinomis, and the Letters as the culmination of the Platonic corpus is likely deliberate, since it is precisely in these very works that Ficino believes Plato communicates his thinking in his own persona. Schleiermacher, the first major modern interpreter to arrange the corpus into a developmental order, interestingly also began with the youthful Phaedrus and placed the Laws last in his third and final period. This is not to say that Schleiermacher follows Ficino’s approach to the corpus, even if the comparison shows an unexpected commonality in a long-lasting and traditional perspective on Plato.³⁹ Schleiermacher, like Ficino, did not finish all of his planned translations of and commentaries on the dialogues. The grand hermeneutical design Ficino had to edit and print a unitary corpus remained unfinished at his death. Evidence remains, however, for the way in which he conceived of the unitary Platonic corpus in the first group of dialogues translated for Lorenzo’s grandfather Cosimo in 1464, which also remain the first ten dialogues of the 1484 and 1491 editions.

There is no need to retell and examine in detail the story that has been recounted since its first modern retelling by Arnaldo della Torre about how Cosimo requested a translation of Plato from Ficino. Indeed, the story is as old as the Renaissance itself.⁴⁰ It is, however, worth recalling that much of the content in this narrative, which has become central to modern histories of Renaissance Florence, comes largely from Ficino himself. If we believe that Cosimo’s letter to Ficino, entitled On Desiring Happiness, of January 1464 is authentic, an aging Cosimo approaching death asked Ficino to join him at his villa in Careggi and to bring with him his Orphic lyre and the Philebus, the dialogue on the highest Good, in order to learn the way to happiness.⁴¹ Ficino responded that he would meet him soon, in a letter entitled The Way to Happiness, on Platonic happiness, which concludes with Theaetetus 176a–c: “For thus our rational soul flees to become like God, who is wisdom itself. Indeed, Plato thinks that the highest level of happiness (beatitudinis) is this assimilation to God.”⁴² Ficino, however, was apparently unable to reach Cosimo. He wrote back that he had finished nine short works by Plato and that, “God willing, he would also translate an additional three more that seem to examine the highest order.”⁴³ Another document, the preface to Xenocrates’ De morte composed for Cosimo’s son Piero (1416–69), is also important for establishing Ficino’s early work on Plato. In the preface Ficino writes that Cosimo had asked him to translate from Greek to Latin ten Platonic dialogues and one book by Mercurius (that is, Hermes Trismegistus), and that having read them all—and only twelve days after finishing the Parmenides, which Ficino characterizes as the dialogue on the One principle of all things, and the Philebus, which he calls the dialogue on the highest Good—Cosimo passed away, on 1 August 1464. As Ficino says, he left the shadow of this life and, having been called back whence he came, entered into the supernal light.⁴⁴ Ficino’s work on these Platonic dialogues survives in a manuscript now in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, copied in haste by seven scribes (as Kristeller has suggested) probably for the dying Cosimo himself, and in two further fragments of drafts of the argumenta now in Paris and Parma.⁴⁵

Despite apparently finishing the translation of Plato’s complete corpus five years later, in 1469, Ficino waited until 1484 to publish them with a printer in San Iacopo di Ripoli.⁴⁶ Even then he did not stop working on the dialogues. A second corrected edition was printed in Venice in 1491. In the 1484 and 1491 editions Ficino largely accepts as authentic the same dialogues as Thrasyllus, but he ignores Thrasyllus’s order, even though his primary manuscript follows it. He does not think the Clitophon and Letter XIII are authentic, and of the other dialogues indicated as spurious by Diogenes Laertius—the Demodocus, the Sisyphus, Eryxias, Axiochus, Alcyon, De iusto, and De virtute—he translates only Axiochus, but attributes it to Xenocrates (probably on the authority of Diogenes Laertius).⁴⁷

It appears that Ficino was still dissatisfied with these first two editions of Plato (1484 and 1491), since he planned to prepare a monumental edition of the Platonic corpus. It would have included a revised translation of the dialogues and, intriguingly, have been arranged in a precise order, accompanied by short introductions and long commentaries for each dialogue.⁴⁸ Lorenzo de’ Medici was supposed to finance the whole editorial scheme, but his early death in 1492 canceled their ambitious plans. Ficino had to content himself with publishing a revised edition of his still incomplete commentaries on Plato in 1496, three years before his own death.⁴⁹

One can hypothesize how Ficino would have ordered the corpus, but it seems that all there is to work on from the period are two letters accompanying the 1496 edition. In the dedicatory letter to Niccolò Valori, Ficino argues that he has arranged the corpus (catalogus dialogorum omnium Platonicorum) in order (ordo; dispositio). The first five dialogues follow the order of the universe (ordinem universi): Parmenides (on the One); Sophist (on being and nonbeing); Timaeus (on nature); Phaedrus (on the divine, nature, and man); and the Philebus (which also discusses all of the above). The rest of the dialogues, Ficino says, will be arranged in a certain human order (humano quodam ordine). There is further plausible evidence to think that this is more than wishful thinking, since, as I argue below, Ficino had already conceived of his first translations for Cosimo according to a specific dialogic arrangement (ordo). This is further corroborated by the terminology employed in the second letter, to Paolo Orlandini, accompanying the 1496 edition. It explains Plato’s and Ficino’s views on happiness following a virtue theory very similar to that which Ficino employs in his interpretation of Plato in a number of earlier writings, namely, that Plato’s philosophy prepares the inborn qualities of the intellect to receive the infused light of divine power or virtue to help it assimilate to God. To adumbrate the argument that I will soon make, in 1496 Ficino still thought—as I will argue in this chapter for his 1464 arrangement of the dialogues for Cosimo and in the next chapter for his De amore—that the correct reading and arrangement of Plato’s corpus should prepare one for the goal of Platonism: to become godlike in a state of bliss.⁵⁰

A few scholars have been puzzled both by the preface that Ficino addressed to Cosimo and by his choice and arrangement of these ten translations of complete dialogues.⁵¹ A manuscript at Oxford preserves them in Ficino’s specific order, along with their Thrasyllan subtitles as modified by Ficino. His three significant corrections are changing the Parmenides from De ideis to De uno; the Philebus from De voluptate to De summo bono; and the Euthydemus from Contensiosus to De felicitate. These changes in effect help communicate a Neoplatonic interpretation in three ways: Ficino presents the Neoplatonic reading of the Parmenides that it is about the One, he agrees with Iamblichus that the skopos of the Philebus is the Good, and he thinks that the Euthydemus is about happiness and virtue ethics.⁵² The manuscript also includes his translations of Alcinous, Speusippus, and Pythagoras (which he prepared for Cosimo), and Xenocrates (which he later translated for Cosimo’s son Piero). An argumentum for each dialogue precedes its translation. The contents of the manuscript are listed in Table 1.

To get beyond simplifications and generalizations it is necessary to analyze possible reconstructions of the work Ficino did on the first ten dialogues and consider more detailed sources for the Neoplatonic character of his decade’s order. The first thing to observe is an interpretive problem that has largely gone unnoticed in three documents: his letter to Cosimo de’ Medici of 11 January, his preface to Cosimo for his translation of ten complete Platonic dialogues, and his preface to Xenocrates for Cosimo’s son Piero. In the preface addressed to Piero, Ficino writes that he translated ten Platonic dialogues, and scholars have rightly taken this to be the list of ten Platonic dialogues found in the Bodleian manuscript.⁵³ In his earlier letter to Cosimo, however, Ficino speaks not of completing a translation of ten dialogues but of having translated nine short Platonic works and exerting himself to finish three more.⁵⁴ Most have read this to mean that by the time he wrote to Cosimo, Ficino had completed nine of his ten dialogues, and that the three other works he mentions correspond to a tenth dialogue, as well as the De dogmatibus Platonis (often known as the Didaskalikos) by the second-century CE Middle Platonist Alcinous and the Platonic definitions supposedly written by Plato’s disciple and nephew Speusippus (c. 408–339/8 BCE)—both of which are in the Bodleian manuscript. This would agree nicely with Ficino’s statement to Cosimo in his preface to his ten dialogues: “Therefore, happy Cosimo, accept twelve Platonic books, namely, ten of Plato’s dialogues and the two works by the Platonists Speusippus and Alcinous.”⁵⁵ This is perhaps likely, but it is not absolutely certain.

Table 1. MS. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canon. Class. Lat. 163

— Argumentum Marsili Ficini Florentini in decem a se traductos
Platonis dialogos ad Cosmum Medicem patrie patrem	ff. 1r–2r
i) Arg. in Hipparchum: De lucri cupiditate	ff. 2r–5v
ii) Arg. in librum de philosophia/Amatores	ff. 5v–9r
iii) Arg. in Theagem: De sapientia	ff. 9r–14r
iv) Arg. in Menonem: De virtute	ff. 14v–30v
v) Arg. in Alcibiadem primum: De natura hominis	ff. 30v–45v
vi) Arg. in Alcibiadem secundum: De voto	ff. 45v–51v
vii) Arg. in Minoem: De lege	ff. 51v–57r
viii) Arg. in Euthyphronem: De sanctitate	ff. 57r–64v
ix) Arg. in Parmenidem: De uno	ff. 65r–87v
x) Arg. in Philebum: De summo bono	ff. 88r–113r
— In Eutydemo: De Felicitate	ff. 113r–13v
Inc. Plato in Eutydemo de Felicitate, hec ait omnes homines bene agere hoc est bene vivere volumus.
Des. Sic enim animus noster deo qui sapientia ipsa est evadit simillimus in qua quidem similitudine summum Plato consistere gradum beatitudines arbitratur.
— Excerpts-summary related to Euthydemus	278e–82a.
— In Teeteto: De scientia	ff. 113v–114r
Inc. Mala radicitus extirpare / des. cum sapientia sanctitas. The passage corresponds to Theaetetus 176a–c
— Alcinoi liber de dogmatibus Platonis	ff. 114r–132v
— Speusippi de definitionibus Platonis	ff. 132v–136v
— Pythagoras Aurea verba	ff. 137r–37v
— Pythagoras de symbola	ff. 137v–38v
— Preface to Piero de’ Medici	ff. 138v–39r
— Xenocrates, Axiochus: De morte	ff. 139r–43r

For one thing, if these twelve Platonic works correspond to the ten Platonic dialogues as well as the works by Alcinous and Speusippus, Ficino would have left out of his description in the letter to Cosimo the excerpts of the Euthydemus and the Theaetetus as well as the final translations of Pythagoras’s Aurea verba and Symbola—all of which are in the Bodleian manuscript. When taken into account these other texts bring the total number of works that Ficino translates in this manuscript for Cosimo (depending on how one counts the Pythagorean works) to fifteen—that is, if one also keeps in mind that Xenocrates was added to the end of the manuscript at a later date for Piero de’ Medici.⁵⁶ In fact, it is possible that the three Platonic works Ficino mentions in his letter to Cosimo are not a final tenth Platonic dialogue, along with Alcinous and Speusippus, but simply three other Platonic dialogues added to the nine dialogues that he had already finished translating. According to this hypothesis he would have wanted to translate twelve dialogues and not ten (as is normally repeated). Since in the letter in question to Cosimo he writes that these last three works speak of the highest order of things—which would be a very odd way to characterize Speusippus’s rather scholastic definitions, that is, if one wishes, as the usual hypothetical reconstruction posits, to count it among the three works mentioned in the letter to Cosimo—they would have included the Philebus and the Parmenides, as well as a third, which might have been the Theaetetus.⁵⁷ And since he finally completed the translation of the Parmenides, the Philebus, and eight other shorter dialogues for Cosimo, the twelfth dialogue would probably have been another shorter dialogue, which might have been the Euthydemus.

This second hypothesis would agree with the fact that the Bodleian manuscript contains Latin excerpts of the Theaetetus and the Euthydemus after the completed translation of ten dialogues, but it too is not absolutely certain. To recap, while he was in the process of translating his intended dialogues and probably when he was preparing the requested Latin manuscript in haste, Ficino wrote to Cosimo: “So far I have translated nine works of Plato. I will, God willing, translate three other works that survey the higher order of things.”⁵⁸ That he was in a rush to complete his work is evident from his statement that after finishing nine works by Plato, “God willing,” that is, if time permitted, he would translate three more. Could it be that Ficino was also planning on translating the Theaetetus and the Euthydemus but ran out of time, settling for including only brief excerpts of the two dialogues in the manuscript?

The question cannot be definitively answered, but there are persuasive reasons at least to connect the fragmentary translations of the Euthydemus and the Theaetetus in the Bodleian manuscripts and Ficino’s aforementioned letter to Cosimo.⁵⁹ In that letter Ficino tells Cosimo that while he waits for his translations of Plato he can happily read new material by Plato on happiness. He explains that Plato teaches about happiness (beatitudinem) for the active life in the Euthydemus and for the contemplative life in the Theaetetus. He then quotes two passages from these dialogues identical to those in the Bodleian manuscript.⁶⁰ In explaining that happiness resides in becoming godlike, he ends this letter to Cosimo by drawing parallels between the highest Good in the Philebus, the One in the Parmenides, the King and Father in the Second Letter, and the Good itself in the Republic. He concludes by arguing that Plato’s happiness is neither identical to Diogenes Laertius’s opinion that it should be thought of in terms of our happy fortunes nor, as the Peripatetics think, that it is the source of goodness in the order of ideas, but that it is found above ideas, intellect, life, and essence. Cosimo knew about peripatetic ethics, since he supported the work of John Argyropoulos (c. 1415–87) on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, and about Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Philosophers, as he commissioned Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1439) to translate it.⁶¹ In his letter Ficino is therefore appealing to these items of interest to Cosimo, but he does so in order to claim the superiority of Plato’s divine ethics. The letter’s conclusion that Plato’s highest Good and our happiness are above the ideas, and indeed above the intellectual triad of being-life-intellect, explicitly follows Neoplatonic philolosophy. It further helps us understand the philosophical hermeneutics behind Ficino’s early translations for Cosimo.⁶²

At first glance the dialogues for Cosimo share certain resemblances with the late ancient Neoplatonic corpus of Platonic dialogues used in the teaching curriculum of their academies. Historians of philosophy often speak of the teaching corpus established by Iamblichus as composed of ten Platonic dialogues, but in reality it is formed by a series of twelve dialogues: a first decade of dialogues, which interestingly ends with the Philebus, followed by the two “perfect” dialogues, the Timaeus and the Parmenides. The Timaeus and the Parmenides are two Pythagorean works, according to Iamblichus, that are by themselves supposed to encapsulate self-autonomously, as in a cosmos, the whole order of the prior dialogues.⁶³ Iamblichus’s order for Plato’s corpus can be reconstructed as in Table 2.

Iamblichus’s organization was part of the teaching curriculum of the Platonic academies of late antiquity for more than two hundred years. Its influence was due in part to the fact that Iamblichus arranged this corpus and its study according to a specific order (τάξις), corresponding to the Neoplatonic hierarchy of virtues: political virtues dealing with the affairs of others, cathartic virtues concerned with the care of the self, and theoretical virtues that turn the mind toward the intelligibles so that it may reach toward the sight of the higher truths of the One-Good. In addition to the number of dialogues, there are other similarities between Iamblichus’s and Ficino’s orders. They both assign a privileged place to the Philebus as the tenth dialogue in the series. Likewise, they both categorize the Sophist as a “physical” dialogue, presumably because it deals with sensibles.⁶⁴ The similarities do not end there. In the argumentum to the Parmenides prepared for Cosimo to accompany its translation, Ficino writes:

Table 2. Iamblichus’s Order for Plato’s Corpus

Since Plato sowed the seeds of all wisdom throughout all of his dialogues, in the Republic he harvested all the principles of moral philosophy, in the Timaeus all of the knowledge of nature, in the Parmenides he encloses all theology as a whole…. On account of this in the present dialogue [i.e., the Parmenides], first Zeno the Eleatic, the disciple of the Pythagorean Parmenides, proves that the One is in the sensibles, by showing that if these many were in no way participating in the One, a number of errors would follow…. One ought to pay attention to the fact that in this dialogue [i.e., the Parmenides] when Plato speaks of “the One” in a Pythagorean manner (Pythagoreorum more) it can signify any one substance completely free from mater, for instance, God, intellect, and soul. But when he speaks of “other” and “others” one can understand both matter and those [forms] that come to be in matter.⁶⁵

Both philosophers, therefore, understand the Timaeus and the Parmenides as complementary Pythagorean dialogues: one dealing with questions of nature, the other with theological questions. Furthermore, like Iamblichus, Ficino arranges the corpus of dialogues according to a specific philosophical order. He writes in the preface to Cosimo:

Moreover, one can certainly conjecture that the titles of these dialogues proceed in an ordered mode of succession (successionis ordinem) from this reason, because the desire for the Good is inborn in all. In truth, in their youth men, deceived by their senses and by opinion, think that the Good is the possession of wealth, whence they labor with all their force to attain it, and it is for this reason that the De lucri cupiditate [Hipparchus] is first. But since in advanced years and whenever prompted by reason they begin to love the knowledge of divine things as a good, and the love of wisdom is philosophy, the book De philosophia [Amatores] is assigned the following place according to this order. For this reason the book De sapientia [Theages] follows them, since wisdom is sought through love, before we can possess it.⁶⁶

Also like Iamblichus, Ficino employs a tripartite Neoplatonic scale of virtues to explain the philosophical order. I continue where I left off from the preface:

To this the Meno, or De virtute, is added, since the light of wisdom, when it first appears, establishes decorum with each power and motion of the rational soul (animus), which clearly is called by the name virtue. But virtue bestows three things on the rational soul, that it may revert to itself, that it may convert toward its cause, and that it may oversee things below it. Since clearly the rational soul is an intermediary nature between divine and bodily things, it is then provided with virtue, when it cares for its own nature and does not mingle with worse things, and when it is converted to superior truths, while not neglecting the providence of inferior things. So that it reverts to itself, the First Alcibiades presents the nature of man (De natura hominis), and so that it is turned toward supernal realities, the Second Alcibiades makes visible the subject of prayer (De voto), and so that it governs inferior things, the Minos expounds on law (De lege).⁶⁷

Despite all these similarities, there is one fatal problem with the argument that Ficino followed Iamblichus’s curriculum as we know it: namely, the fact that this specific order of dialogues is only available in one source text, the Anonymous Prolegomena to Plato’s Philosophy, which is extant in only one manuscript—and there is no evidence that Ficino knew it. In fact, Ficino’s order of dialogues is not identical to Iamblichus’s. How, then, does one make sense of the fact that the schema that Ficino developed bears resemblances to a Iamblichean model without his knowledge of this single valuable manuscript that contains Iamblichus’s precise order for the dialogues?