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
