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
