living speeches, as speaking personae before our eyes, as well as persuade effectively and move vehemently.89
I want to emphasize that in this passage Ficino is calling upon the rhetorical concept of persona in two separate ways, which one can compare to the distinction made in Cicero’s De Oratore between the actoris persona, the mask of the actor, and the auctoris persona, the mask of the author.90 First, Ficino is approaching Cicero’s explanation of the rhetorical persona in the De Oratore insofar as personae are understood as how one presents oneself distinctly through discursive techniques that in effect become the textual masks of the author. The persona Platonis, Ficino tells us, is less a docentis persona than a sacerdotis atque vatis persona.91 In other words, following Cicero’s three levels of style, the high, middle, and low, Ficino is drawing attention to the fact that Plato’s prose is only expressed in the low or humble style, the sermo humilis or the stylus sobrius, when it aims at elevating the reader’s thoughts. The prose’s lighthearted treatment of grave matters, Plato’s serioludere, hovers around the middle style, which aims to teach serious topics in a pleasing manner, before it reaches toward the sublime heights of the persona of the priest or prophet (sacerdotis atque vatis persona).
Second, and most important, by saying that Plato is writing living speeches that bring speaking personae before our eyes, Ficino offers an insightful etymological explanation of the dialogic role of the actoris persona, insofar as he is not invoking the Latin auditory etymology of persona but rather the Greek visual etymology of prosopon. As the prefix pros indicates, for the Greeks the prosopon, the mask and the face, is literally that which is seen in front of or facing something. Ficino here offers a corrective to Boethius’s erroneous etymology by telling his readers that Plato’s prosopa are masks placed not on top of our eyes (ante oculos obtegant, as Boethius has it) but in front of our eyes, speaking before us (personas loquentes ante oculos ponat, as Ficino expresses the etymology).92 To quote from Ficino again, the use of dialogic personae allows Plato to present various levels of style and different opinions within one text by offering various actorum personae. His dialogic personae serve as the reader’s interlocutors and invoke Plato’s argument expressed in the Republic that the prosopon is intimately related to the Greek prosrhesis, or man’s ability to address someone in speech and name things. That is, in order to begin to do philosophy one first needs to turn one’s head and begin a face-to-face dialogue with another interlocutor, which Plato’s allegorical prisoners were unable to do.
Ficino’s letters often exhibit similar Platonic dialogic qualities. For example, in a series of letters written in 1468 to his dear friend Giovanni Cavalcanti (1444–1509), of the same patrician family as the poet Guido Cavalcanti, Ficino, who was thirty-five years old then, plays the part of the Socratic lover and casts the younger twenty-four-year-old Cavalcanti in the role of his beloved, his Hellen, his Achates, or his Eros.93 The letters are the first of many that reperform the Phaedrus’s dialogic structure. As a group they offer an example of a constant in Ficino’s work: the investigation and imitation of Socratic/Platonic serioludere. In the second letter of the series, written to Cavalcanti not too long after the first, Ficino renews the game:
I have often searched for myself, Giovanni, first laying my hands on my chest, then I would often see this face in a mirror, but I can claim that on the one hand I could never really touch myself, nor on the other ever see myself. For when I seek myself I in fact seek none other than the one who is searching, whereby it is altogether the same Marsilio who is searching and who is sought. Who therefore is seeking? Only the rational soul can decide. Therefore, I seek only the rational soul when I search for myself, inasmuch as I am only the rational soul itself…. Clearly, in this interior gaze of mine I am neither pleased enough nor at rest. However, he who tracks down what is sought, immediately rejoices and is at peace, therefore I do not discover myself in me. But if I seek myself in another, how will I apprehend myself? If I do not have myself through which alone I am able to grasp whatever I am able to grasp. Therefore return and give yourself, or rather myself, back to me.94
Ficino’s love letters to Cavalcanti are occasions, as letters often are, to reflect on the distance between sender and recipient. In this case, Ficino plays with the distance of longing as a demonstration of the Meno’s paradox (80d–e) that one cannot search for what one already has, but that one will also not know what to search for if one does not already have it. Yet Ficino’s letters also evoke the proximity of the closest intimacy. In his letters, Ficino engages in a discursive process of self-knowledge whereby before one turns inward toward one’s own spirit or inner self, one seeks oneself in another person, just as though one were to look at one’s face in the mirror; that is, he enacts Socrates’ claim in the Phaedrus (255d) that the lover sees himself in his beloved. Ficino’s letter to Cavalcanti evokes similar aesthetics to later Renaissance depictions of Socratic philosophy in the visual arts. Ficino’s description of Cavalcanti holding his letter as though it were a mirror reflecting Ficino and Cavalcanti’s countenance uniting two persons in a single gaze is analogous to the later canvas by Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652) of a philosopher seeing his Socratic reflection in a mirror (Figure 8). In turn, like Socrates and Theaetetus studying each other’s faces, Ficino’s letters reveal Cavalcanti’s own countenance to himself and are meant to serve as mirrors for Cavalcanti’s own interiorization of discursive self-knowledge. Ficino proclaims to his friend: “The same, or at least the most similar, spirit (genius) directs both of us.”95 In asking Cavalcanti to return himself, Ficino playfully requests a reply to his letter.
The theme of friendship is also central to the Petrarchan revival of the Ciceronian form of letters to friends. Thus, on the one hand, in his letters to Cavalcanti Ficino rehearses what was becoming a standard mode of humanistic expression. Yet, on the other, Ficino demarcates himself from his company by framing the letters to friends in the mos Platonicus of Socratic love. In the same group of letters Ficino reveals some of the mechanisms of his artifice to Cavalcanti: “I wrote a few letters to you, my greatest friend, in which I tried my hand in a certain way at the style of lovers, which indeed seems to be appropriate to our intimacy, and is not far from that honest free speech of Socrates and Plato. However, in the manner of the Platonists, now after the lovers’ game (for this is the Platonic manner of introduction) we come to serious matters. Now hear what was said with Bernardo Giugni and Bartolomeo Fortini, excellent citizens in justice, when we discussed the intellect.”96 The ludus now over (at least temporarily), what follows in this other letter is Ficino’s serious and quite sober transcription of questions concerning the mind and soul, which he claims to have discussed with two learned Florentine statesmen. In this second exposition of questions concerning the mind and soul Ficino considers it important to argue against the so-called Averroist opinion on the unity of the intellect, that is, that all men share a single intellect. This is all the more significant for Ficino because in writing to Cavalcanti that the real self is an interior person, he wishes to maintain its individuality while also explaining how it unites with others. Ficino is therefore carefully avoiding the risk of being interpreted as advocating the so-called Averroist position on the unity of the intellect.
In response to an inquiry by the humanist Bartolomeo della Fonte (1445–1513) about his own style of prose, Ficino took the opportunity to explain how the best writers—Plato chief of all—mixed poetry into prose: “You recognize that Plato’s style surges high above pedestrian style and prose, as Quintilian says, so much that our Plato seems not to have a human ingenium, but is instead inspired by a certain Delphic oracle. In fact, Plato’s mixing and combination of poetry and prose pleased Cicero to such an extent that he claimed that if Jupiter wished to speak with a human tongue he would use no other tongue than the one with which Plato speaks.”97 Plato’s style takes on universal proportions for Ficino. He compares what he takes to be similar infusions of poetic rhythms into prose in the Old Testament, in the Egyptian works of Hermes (that is, the Corpus Hermeticum), among eloquent Greeks (Gorgias, Isocrates, Herodotus, Aristides), among Latin authors of the golden age (Livy and Cicero), and later (Apuleius, Jerome, and Boethius). Following further reflection
