and therefore he reversed the chronological order of influence by hypothesizing him as a source for later Platonic writers, but his ability to draw on previous Platonists while reading Pseudo-Dionysius permitted him to comment on the complex affinities and differences of their respective Platonisms.44 Ficino is immersed in Augustine, but by pulling the writings of Platonic castaways out of neglect, and by helping them reach safe harbors, he incrementally emancipated Platonism from Augustine’s interpretation, and while it was never his desire to dislodge Plato and the Platonists from Christianity’s orbit, he succeeded in giving them a self-autonomy unimaginable to Augustine.
CHAPTER 1
Prosopon/Persona
Philosophy and Rhetoric
But meanwhile closely inspect what hides under the mask (sub persona lateat). You will say, am I not contemplating youthful features instead of Marsilio’s face (vultus)?
—Marsilio Ficino, letter to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, 1488
Prosopa and Personae: Of Masks, Faces, and Persons
It is a commonplace in Renaissance scholarship to speak about the rediscovery of the dialogue genre. Why, then, did Marsilio Ficino, the Renaissance’s greatest student of the Platonic dialogue, write so few dialogues himself? Instead of concluding too quickly that he was too dogmatic, systematic, or insensitive to the dialogic nature of Plato as well as to stylistic questions of philosophical prose, and therefore not of the same ilk as his humanist contemporaries who were immersed in the dialogic form of Cicero’s (106–43 BCE) writings, one ought to examine how Ficino understood Plato’s use of interlocutors (prosopa/personae).1 Such a study reveals that at the same time as his contemporaries were studying and imitating the Ciceronian concept of the rhetorical persona, Ficino was busy studying the Platonic one and imitating it as his own written persona. A comparison of Ficino’s letters with three famous epistolary debates over Ciceronianism and humanist Latin will make this clear. I will argue that Ficino is in fact deeply invested in questions about personae, in terms of both Platonic prosopopoeia and Ciceronian rhetorical personae. Like his fellow humanists Ficino employed the epistolary form to fabricate his own discursive rhetorical persona, yet in his case he worked at being known as the public spokesperson for Plato. Just as investigations into the rhetorical imitation of past and silent voices (especially Cicero’s) lead some humanists to question how someone’s discursive oratorical persona relates to their prediscursive person, so Ficino’s preoccupation with Platonic style and dialogic characters also helped shape his epistolary style and person. The examples I study below do not show Ficino in the ongoing Ciceronian controversies, debating the merit of imitating an ancient style and rhetorical persona; instead they reveal him in the process of crafting a rhetorical mask for philosophical purposes.
The Greeks had four words for masks: gorgoneion, mormolukeion, prosopon, and prosopeion. The first, as the name clearly indicates, denotes the mask of the Gorgons, three nightmarish sisters with snakes for hair, whom Plato evokes in the Symposium (198a–199b) to describe Agathon’s speech as an imitation of Gorgias’s style, whose long discourses, rhetorical figures, and public exhibitions would petrify his listeners, or render them speechless. Plato there plays with the reduplicative sound of Gorgias/Gorgon, and Gorgon itself derives from the word gorgos, whose meaning “grim” or “terrible” is reinforced again by the reduplication of the sound of “g” with the growling “gor,” or “gar” as it is also in the names of Rabelais’s giants Gargantua and Gargamelle. Plato’s description of Gorgias’s rhetoric as a frightful disguise woven in words points to the related fearful mask: the mormolukeion. The word itself derives from mormo, a fearsome female monster or a bugbear whose very name was shouted at children to frighten them (often translated as lamia and larva in Latin). Plato famously invokes the mormolukeion in the Phaedo, where, in a philosophical image that had a lasting impact on Lucian, Epictetus, Plutarch, and others, he presents Socrates as the philosophical magus who dispels the fear of death as one dispels a child’s fear of a terrifying mask by turning it upside down to show that it is merely a plaything that is empty on the reverse.2 The mask of the mormolukeion found a later audience in the visual arts of the ancient Romans (often on sarcophagi) and later in the Italian Renaissance, where youthful putti spooked each other while wearing larva masks (Figure 7).3 As will be seen, in the Renaissance this kind of larva mask often had Platonic connotations. Finally, the related prosopon and prosopeion are by far the most common words for mask in ancient Greek. The latter, however, is derived from the former and only came into use in the third century BCE. The word prosopon is used to denote all forms of masks, including theatrical, religious, ritualistic masks, the two types previously mentioned, as well as the interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues. Most important, the Greeks also used the word prosopon to denote faces as well as masks.
FIGURE 7. Putti Playing with Masks, attributed to Girolamo Mocetto, after Mantegna, pen and ink on paper, c. 1485–95. Louvre, Paris, inv. 5072, nouveau 2854 (Martineau, 1992, cat. 149).
There is therefore an important anthropological difference to be noted between the Greeks and Romans that bears philosophical significance for Platonism. Unlike the Romans and moderns who distinguish between a mask (persona) and a face (os, vultus, and facies), the early Greeks did not make such a clear distinction. There is no duplicity, dissimilitude, or deceit in masks for the early Greeks. Rather, masks present and embody. As the prefix pros indicates, for the Greeks, the prosopon, the mask and the face, is literally that which is seen in front or facing something. Instead of this Greek visual etymology, Aulus Gellius (c. 125–180 CE, or later) records the Roman understanding of persona according to an auditory etymology, per-sonare, as that through which a voice resounds (a spokesperson or megaphone), and therefore something placed over the face.4 Beginning with Polybius (264–146 BCE) and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60–7 BCE, or later) we can detect that the influence of the Latin persona began to be felt on the Greek prosopeion, which came to be used for a mask concealing the face. The distance from the early Greeks is evident. Their masks display, while the Romans’ and ours conceal. Classicists have studied and documented this problem carefully, replacing the old etymology of persona that offers a sonorous and phonetic derivation with the modern etymology derived from the darkness of infernal regions of the obscure Etruscan demon Phersu. Both cases, either sounds or shadows, deny sight and a visible presence.5
Plato’s Prosopon and the Greeks
Boethius’s often repeated reputation as the last Roman and the first medieval philosopher may have its roots in the desire of Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) to expose his stylistic barbarisms, but there is nevertheless some sense in seeing him on one side of the intersection of Greek Platonism and Latin philosophy, and seeing Renaissance Hellenism on the other. Already in the sixth century Boethius made the distinction between the phonetic etymology of the Latin persona and the visual etymology of the Greek prosopon, and corrected the former with the latter. According to Boethius’s visual etymology, however, instead of being what stands open and visible in front of the face, the prosopon becomes what is placed on top of the face, and therefore what covers it: a mask.6 Hence, despite switching out the Roman auditory meaning for a visual one, Boethius makes the Greek prosopon function like the Latin persona: it conceals. Yet Boethius is not simply applying a Latin understanding of the etymology of persona to the Greek prosopon; in fact he follows the logic of Plato’s prosopon all too closely.
As was often the case, Plato bucked the trends, traditions, received assumptions, and epistemic status quo of his age. As the example of the mask of the mormolukeion in the Phaedo illustrates, for Plato the prosopon can in fact deceive. Concerned
