Plato's Persona. Denis J.-J. Robichaud
Translation of Ten Platonic Dialogues
Ficino famously prepared his first translations of a selection of Plato’s dialogues for Cosimo de’ Medici. What emerges from the brief argumenta and the preface that accompany these early translations is that Ficino might very well be the first philosopher in the Latin West, at least since antiquity, to interpret Plato’s works as a coherent and singular corpus.33 Ever since Schleiermacher’s influential hermeneutical analysis of Plato in the early nineteenth century, a dominant approach for interpreting Plato has been to understand all his dialogues as a singular corpus, that is, each dialogue ought to be read in view of the Platonic corpus as a whole, and vice versa. Since then, scholars undertaking the study of Plato’s complete works have often been concerned with questions of authenticating a canon of dialogues (and letters) and of establishing their order (chronological, pedagogical, or philosophical). Most interpreters of Plato, especially in Anglo-American scholarship, now adhere to a general developmental approach toward organizing Plato’s works. That is, even contemporary studies of Plato that do not explicitly argue for a developmental interpretation of the corpus often implicitly believe that one can divide the dialogues into an early period (Socratic or aporetic dialogues), a middle period (dialogues that argue for classic Platonic doctrines like recollection and the immortality of the soul), and a late period (where Plato is sometimes believed to have challenged earlier positions). These modern developmental categories were a feature of neither ancient nor Renaissance interpretations of the corpus.
The organization of Plato’s dialogues and letters into a corpus is not new, however. It is reasonable to say in broad terms that in antiquity there were five major organizational approaches to the Platonic corpus. The earliest known is attributed to Aristophanes of Byzantium (c. 257–c. 180 BCE). While the exact nature of Aristophanes’ organization is still somewhat unclear, it is reported that he grouped fifteen of Plato’s dialogues into five trilogies based on dramatic principles. According to this model, for instance, the Republic, the Timaeus, and the Crito form a trilogy because the dramatic setting from the Timaeus encourages their association. The second approach to the corpus is that of Thrasyllus (fl. second half of the first century BCE), who was probably a court astrologer for the emperor Tiberius. Thrasyllus arranged the corpus into tetralogies, inspired by the Greek thematic grouping of three tragedies plus a satyr play. Certain dramatic themes encourage the association of four dialogues into a group. For example, the events and conversations leading to Socrates’ death in the Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo make a coherent group for Thrasyllus’s first tetralogy.34 The Thrasyllan order is also accompanied by subtitles, presumably to indicate the dialogue’s particular subject matter. The Meno, for example, is also known by the subtitle On Virtue. The Thrasyllan corpus had an important legacy, since most of the manuscripts of Plato’s works are organized into tetralogies that preserve the Thrasyllan subtitles. A third classification of the dialogues is according to character types, beginning with the classes of hyphegetic (doctrinal) and zetetic (inquisitive) dialogues, followed by other subspecies. Evidence of this arrangement for reading the corpus survives primarily in the Middle Platonist Albinus’s Prologue and in Diogenes Laertius. The fourth prominent organization of Plato’s corpus in antiquity comes from the Neoplatonist Iamblichus’s arrangement of Plato’s dialogues into a series of ten, followed by two culminating dialogues: the Timaeus and the Parmenides. In Iamblichus’s hermeneutics each dialogue also has a specific goal (or skopos) directing its philosophical purpose. This organizational unit became important for the philosophical and pedagogical needs of later Neoplatonic schools. A final interpretive strategy is to study Plato’s use of prosopopoeia, that is, by interpreting the dialogic interlocutors, which some at times have understood to be Plato’s spokespersons expressing various positions. To be more accurate, this hermeneutical approach does not necessarily organize the corpus into a particular order, and it seems to have found its way into the strategies of various ancient interpreters at different times.
It 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