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
