of prose, in effect devising a humanist rhetorical persona as a Platonic philosopher. Second, I propose that Ficino reads Plato in a prosopopoeic manner, that is, he seeks to understand the Athenian philosopher’s persona(e) among all of the dialogues’ interlocutors. Third, and related to the two previous points, I show how Ficino becomes Plato’s Latin spokesperson in the Renaissance. It is a role which he cherishes and with which he fabricates his own identity.
The first chapter of this book is based on a study of the semantic fields stemming from the Greek prosopon, which means both mask and face, and is equally the term used to denote the interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues. The anthropological differences and variances in meaning that come from the fact that prosopon has been translated by the Latin persona led to important developments for philosophy and rhetoric. This chapter delineates Ficino’s understanding of Platonic personae (conceived as interlocutors in dialogues and as personal identities). It shows how the study by Ficino of Plato’s artistry as a writer of dialogues shaped his own style of prose and rhetorical persona in his humanistic letters. Studying the Platonic corpus or writing philosophical letters to his contemporaries, Ficino works with various rhetorical stratagems but most notably prosopopoeia and enargeia, the fabrication and presentation of vivid personae.
I devote the second chapter to Ficino’s interpretation of Plato’s dialogues as a coherent corpus. It is divided into four topics. First, I study how Plato’s style and dialogues posed interpretive challenges to Ficino and other Renaissance humanists. Second, I examine the manuscript sources for his famous first translation of a corpus of ten dialogues (along with a preface and argumenta) that he gave to Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464) as the elder statesman lay dying. Through manuscript evidence I establish Ficino’s early reliance on Iamblichus’s De secta Pythagorica for organizing this small corpus of Platonic dialogues into a philosophical order. Already at such an early stage in his career Ficino adopts Neopythagorean and Neoplatonic tendencies that will orient his later work, and delineates true happiness and the goal of Platonism as man’s deification, divinization, or assimilation to the divine. Third, I discuss the sources for Ficino’s understanding of the organization of the Platonic corpus, including the Middle Platonists Albinus (fl. c. second century CE) and Alcinous’s (fl. c. second century CE) divisions of the corpus into dialogic characters. Finally, after demonstrating how Ficino adopts a tripartite division of dialogic characters (dialogues that refute sophists, dialogues that exhort youth, and dialogues that teach adults), I conclude by analyzing the ancient sources for the prosopopoeic interpretation of Plato’s corpus and argue why it is essential for Ficino’s Platonic project.
The following three chapters examine how Ficino employs a prosopopoeic interpretation of the corpus by identifying dialogues and passages where Plato speaks in particular voices. Chapter 3 is dedicated to Socrates, Chapter 4 to Pythagoreans, and Chapter 5 to Plato himself. Ficino cultivated his role as the gatekeeper to the Platonic tradition, and he liked to tell his readers that he had the task of being Plato’s interpreter, teaching the Athenian foreigner in Italy how to speak Latin. Plato, for Ficino, played a similar role to that of Janus, since his writings were fundamentally doorways into the philosophy of two great predecessors who chose principally to communicate their thought orally: Pythagoras and Socrates. According to Ficino, therefore, Plato wrote in three principal prosopa or personae: his own persona, as Socrates, and as a Pythagorean. The dialogues’ interlocutors are in other words mouths through which Plato can transcribe and communicate voices of philosophical traditions in order to record them in writing.
FIGURE 6. Diagram of Ficino’s reading of Plato.
The reading of Plato that Ficino offers relies on his understanding of Socrates and Pythagoras, but since neither of them wrote—although there is pseudepigraphic material ascribed to Pythagoras that I discuss in Chapter 4—his interpretation of them in turn relies on Plato and later Platonic (principally Middle Platonic and Neoplatonic) sources, which themselves depend on Plato. This can be represented in a rudimentary diagram (Figure 6). There is therefore a central hermeneutic circle present in most of Ficino’s interpretations. This diagrammatic structure, however, is, sensu stricto, too simplistic. Ficino’s interpretation relies on a multiplicity of other Greek and Latin sources, such as Aristotle, Xenophon, Speusippus, Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Quintilian, and Apuleius, to name a few, including also Christian ones, such as Augustine, Eusebius, and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (to keep the list short).
The theologian, biblical scholar, and Plato translator Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), whose writings have fundamentally shaped how we now conceive of the hermeneutic circle, sought to break through the circular reading of the Platonic corpus by proposing that an authentic Plato can be formed only from internal and direct sources. One ought to interpret the parts of the corpus in light of the whole, and the whole in light of the parts. Ficino was quite simply a bibliophile (or bibliomaniac) who read a vast number of works of various genres, which found their way into his exegesis of the Platonic corpus. Therefore, in order to describe more adequately the hermeneutic circle that I attributed to him above one would need to punctuate it on all sides with exegetical influences from external and indirect sources—“contaminations” according to Schleiermacher’s sola scriptura hermeneutics.32
Whether or not Ficino got Plato right by Schleiermacher’s or present standards is not, however, of primary concern in the book. Rather the questions how and why Ficino interpreted Plato guide my work’s historical approach toward its subject matter. The use of the dialogue form by Plato has often puzzled his interpreters. Modern developmentalists tend to smooth out the wrinkles of inconsistencies, if not outright contradictions, in the fabric of the different dialogues by dividing Plato’s corpus into early, middle, and late periods.33 Even if Ficino follows the ancient tradition of assuming that Plato wrote the Phaedrus first, as he also believes that Plato wrote the Laws last as an old man, and puts forward something like a developmental account of Plato’s epistemology (which I examine in Chapter 3), his reading of the corpus would fall closer to what is now called a unitarian approach. Whereas developmentalists aim at arranging the differences in the dialogues into coherent stages of Plato’s philosophical development, Ficino tries his hand early on at arranging a set of ten dialogues into a philosophical order. In general he discusses the differences in Plato’s dialogues in terms of the philosopher’s polyphony or symphony of voices. Ficino’s Plato speaks in different registers and adopts various personae for different purposes.
My book examines Ficino’s appropriation of Plato and Platonisms to form a Plato, who in turn becomes the primary Plato of the Italian (and later) European Renaissance. The book adopts the hermeneutical strategy of following Ficino’s own prescriptive hermeneutics of dividing the Platonic corpus into three primary personae—Socratic, Pythagorean, and Platonic—and studies the historical effect of this approach on the formation of Ficino’s Platonism. It analyses the specific sources for Ficino’s hermeneutics and does not shy away from pointing out the limits of his schema, identifying moments where Ficino strays from his own route. The structure of Chapters 3, 4, and 5 follows Ficino’s map, but the reader should bear in mind that the parameters of Socratic, Pythagorean, and Platonic personae are at times nothing more than a heuristic roadmap even for Ficino.
It is not my aim to convince the reader to adopt any particular Ficinian interpretation of Plato. Just as scholars of Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) would presumably not try to convince present-day students to follow him in rejecting the Laws as a completely spurious dialogue, so I have no intention of persuading the reader to adopt Ficino’s opinion that Plato wrote the Laws in his
