Plato's Persona. Denis J.-J. Robichaud
by the Epinomis and the Letters) in the last place of his order as it is found in the 1484 and 1491 editions, but he does not follow Thrasyllus’s sequence otherwise. Ficino’s decision to place the Laws, the Epinomis, and the Letters as the culmination of the Platonic corpus is likely deliberate, since it is precisely in these very works that Ficino believes Plato communicates his thinking in his own persona. Schleiermacher, the first major modern interpreter to arrange the corpus into a developmental order, interestingly also began with the youthful Phaedrus and placed the Laws last in his third and final period. This is not to say that Schleiermacher follows Ficino’s approach to the corpus, even if the comparison shows an unexpected commonality in a long-lasting and traditional perspective on Plato.39 Schleiermacher, like Ficino, did not finish all of his planned translations of and commentaries on the dialogues. The grand hermeneutical design Ficino had to edit and print a unitary corpus remained unfinished at his death. Evidence remains, however, for the way in which he conceived of the unitary Platonic corpus in the first group of dialogues translated for Lorenzo’s grandfather Cosimo in 1464, which also remain the first ten dialogues of the 1484 and 1491 editions.
There is no need to retell and examine in detail the story that has been recounted since its first modern retelling by Arnaldo della Torre about how Cosimo requested a translation of Plato from Ficino. Indeed, the story is as old as the Renaissance itself.40 It is, however, worth recalling that much of the content in this narrative, which has become central to modern histories of Renaissance Florence, comes largely from Ficino himself. If we believe that Cosimo’s letter to Ficino, entitled On Desiring Happiness, of January 1464 is authentic, an aging Cosimo approaching death asked Ficino to join him at his villa in Careggi and to bring with him his Orphic lyre and the Philebus, the dialogue on the highest Good, in order to learn the way to happiness.41 Ficino responded that he would meet him soon, in a letter entitled The Way to Happiness, on Platonic happiness, which concludes with Theaetetus 176a–c: “For thus our rational soul flees to become like God, who is wisdom itself. Indeed, Plato thinks that the highest level of happiness (beatitudinis) is this assimilation to God.”42 Ficino, however, was apparently unable to reach Cosimo. He wrote back that he had finished nine short works by Plato and that, “God willing, he would also translate an additional three more that seem to examine the highest order.”43 Another document, the preface to Xenocrates’ De morte composed for Cosimo’s son Piero (1416–69), is also important for establishing Ficino’s early work on Plato. In the preface Ficino writes that Cosimo had asked him to translate from Greek to Latin ten Platonic dialogues and one book by Mercurius (that is, Hermes Trismegistus), and that having read them all—and only twelve days after finishing the Parmenides, which Ficino characterizes as the dialogue on the One principle of all things, and the Philebus, which he calls the dialogue on the highest Good—Cosimo passed away, on 1 August 1464. As Ficino says, he left the shadow of this life and, having been called back whence he came, entered into the supernal light.44 Ficino’s work on these Platonic dialogues survives in a manuscript now in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, copied in haste by seven scribes (as Kristeller has suggested) probably for the dying Cosimo himself, and in two further fragments of drafts of the argumenta now in Paris and Parma.45
Despite apparently finishing the translation of Plato’s complete corpus five years later, in 1469, Ficino waited until 1484 to publish them with a printer in San Iacopo di Ripoli.46 Even then he did not stop working on the dialogues. A second corrected edition was printed in Venice in 1491. In the 1484 and 1491 editions Ficino largely accepts as authentic the same dialogues as Thrasyllus, but he ignores Thrasyllus’s order, even though his primary manuscript follows it. He does not think the Clitophon and Letter XIII are authentic, and of the other dialogues indicated as spurious by Diogenes Laertius—the Demodocus, the Sisyphus, Eryxias, Axiochus, Alcyon, De iusto, and De virtute—he 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