Plato's Persona. Denis J.-J. Robichaud
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 with the moral and societal impact of poetic impiety, Socrates proposes in book 2 of the Republic that lawmakers ought to establish guiding myths to counter three Homeric offenses against the gods: the statement by one of the suitors in the Odyssey that gods travel among men in disguise (Resp. 381d), the “falsehoods about Proteus and Thetis,” and the false dream sent by Zeus to Agamemnon in the Iliad (Resp. 383a).7 These passages imply three problems: that the gods deceive men, are mutable, and are somehow responsible for evil. Socrates and Adeimantus agree that the most perfect form of anything cannot admit change and alteration. Even the gods cannot alter themselves. After disparaging the poets for lying about Proteus, Socrates turns on mothers who scare their children by speaking evil of the gods in nursery tales. Finally Socrates says: “May we suppose that while the gods themselves are incapable of change they cause us to fancy that they appear in many shapes deceiving and practicing magic upon us?”8 In book 3 of the Republic, Socrates continues his critique and censures Homer for concealing himself behind his characters, Chryses for example, by imitating another in speech and manner (ἢ κατὰ φωνὴν ἢ κατὰ σχῆμα).9 Socrates’ criticism is directed against Homer’s use of prosopopoeia, that is, the adoption of different mimetic figurative prosopa or personae for speeches in his diegetic tale. Socrates’ focus on the imitation of speech and figure reveals how his critique of Homer extends more broadly into poetry’s realm of performative and theatrical imitation. At its best, the ability to imitate another’s voice and appearance is the work of a Protean poet capable of personifying all, from shameful drunks to the gods themselves.10 Yet one does not need to stray from this way of thinking to see how one can direct the same criticism at Plato’s own personifications and polyphonic dialogues. The Athenian philosopher’s dialogic imitations are therefore in public competition with other forms of education.
The Gorgias’s narrative framework clearly shows how Plato publicly stages an agonistic competition between Socrates’ philosophy and Gorgias’s rhetoric. The fearsome and formidable Callicles brings this clash of disciplines to life by embodying the rhetorician’s use of epic poetry, tragedy,