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
