Plato's Persona. Denis J.-J. Robichaud

they not only demarcate concrete designations (being or ens, for example) from abstract ones (essentia), they also differentiate a third class, abstractions of abstractions (essentialitas), which push Latin as a lingua artificialis to its limits. There, Ficino notes, language seems out of place and even ludicrous.⁸³ His point, however, is not to dismiss abstract neologisms altogether, nor to dismiss the triad of being-life-intellect. Quite the contrary: he frequently employs neologisms and the triad. To be more precise, in his commentary Ficino is observing Proclus’s remarks regarding the arguments of certain Platonists who claim that, since the first principle of all things—the One—is above the triad of being-life-intellect, which for the Neoplatonists was situated at the second hypostasis of Intellect, “it possesses within itself in some way the causes of all these things unutterably and unimaginably and in the most unified way, and in a way unknowable to us but knowable to itself.”⁸⁴ These higher abstract neologisms demonstrate an attempt to designate what cannot be designated since they would speak from the perspective of the One. Ficino’s Latin neologisms speak more to language’s failure to assert and to its capabilities to negate. In short, the philosophical brevity of Neoplatonic dialectic begins to turn toward apophatic philosophy.

      Turning to the second facet of his education and his relationship to humanistic rhetoric, Ficino employs his rhetorical training in various forms. For example, in addition to his philosophical occupations he taught the liberal arts, including oratorical composition and progymnasmata exercises, to some of the noble youth of Florence.⁸⁵ It has been noted by past scholars that although his prose is polished, clear, and precise, Ficino does not often bother with the same kinds of ornate figures of speech as those used by his often more Ciceronian humanist contemporaries.⁸⁶ Gianfrancesco Pico and Bembo noted that however much humanists tried to revive Cicero’s eloquence they would never hear him speak or see his features in person. They were acutely aware that although many wished to fashion Ciceronian personae, they could never fully achieve their aims, since an oratorical persona, as Cicero and other ancient rhetoricians explained, is not only formed by the style (elocutio) and narrative content (inventio and dispositio) of recorded speech but is made of the actual oratorical delivery. The absence of the persona of pronuntiatio and actio, that is, of the orator’s own voice and performance, thus led to important debates among humanists regarding their relationship to the past and concerning the fabrication of rhetorical personae.

      Ficino’s approach to the recovery of Plato’s voice reveals similar preoccupations. Giovanni Corsi’s biography of Ficino exactly expresses this when Corsi explains that under Cicero’s influence Ficino desired to be able to speak to Plato and the Platonists face to face. It is of course a humanist commonplace to wish to speak with the ancients. To cite two famous examples, Petrarch was in the habit of writing that he would speak with Cicero and longed to converse with Homer and Plato, and Machiavelli described how at the end of the day he would dress in his best clothes to enter into conversation with the ancients.⁸⁷ It is equally apparent, however, that Corsi is not simply drawing on current intellectual fashions but working explicitly with Ficino’s own writings to describe Ficino’s conversations and communions with Plato and the Platonists. Already in 1464, in the preface to his first Latin translation of ten of Plato’s dialogues, Ficino wrote to Cosimo de’ Medici: “As you saw already some time ago Plato’s spirit echoing with a living Attic voice in the text itself flew from Byzantium to Florence to Cosimo de’ Medici. So that he may discuss with him not only in Greek but also in Latin, it seemed to me worthwhile to translate some of the many things he says in Greek into Latin.”⁸⁸ What at first sight comes across as a somewhat superficial humanist commonplace turns out in Ficino’s hands to be part of a sophisticated approach toward Plato’s texts.

      In a passage from the preface to his commentaries on Plato’s dialogues, addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Ficino draws on the trope of Socratic serioludere to interpret Plato’s style of writing:

      Meanwhile, while our Plato discusses often in a hidden manner the duty belonging to mankind it sometimes seems as though he is joking and playing. But Platonic games and jokes are much more serious than the serious things of the Stoics. For he does not disdain to wander occasionally through certain humble matters, if only gradually to guide his listeners, who grasp humble things more easily, to more elevated matters. With the most serious purpose he often mixes the useful with the sweet, by which with the modest grace of charming speech he may lure minds that are naturally prone to pleasure to sustenance with the bait of pleasure itself. And he often composes fables in a poetic manner, for in fact the style itself of Plato seems not so much philosophical as poetic. For he sometimes raves and wanders, as a vates, all the while paying no attention to a human order but to one prophetic and divine. And he acts not so much in the persona of a teacher as in the persona of a certain priest or vates, at times in furor but sometimes purifying others and seizing them similarly in divine fury…. However, Plato delivers everything in the dialogues so that he may place living speeches, as speaking personae before our eyes, as well as persuade effectively and move vehemently.⁸⁹

      I want to emphasize that in this passage Ficino is calling upon the rhetorical concept of persona in two separate ways, which one can compare to the distinction made in Cicero’s De Oratore between the actoris persona, the mask of the actor, and the auctoris persona, the mask of the author.⁹⁰ First, Ficino is approaching Cicero’s explanation of the rhetorical persona in the De Oratore insofar as personae are understood as how one presents oneself distinctly through discursive techniques that in effect become the textual masks of the author. The persona Platonis, Ficino tells us, is less a docentis persona than a sacerdotis atque vatis persona.⁹¹ In other words, following Cicero’s three levels of style, the high, middle, and low, Ficino is drawing attention to the fact that Plato’s prose is only expressed in the low or humble style, the sermo humilis or the stylus sobrius, when it aims at elevating the reader’s thoughts. The prose’s lighthearted treatment of grave matters, Plato’s serioludere, hovers around the middle style, which aims to teach serious topics in a pleasing manner, before it reaches toward the sublime heights of the persona of the priest or prophet (sacerdotis atque vatis persona).

      Second, and most important, by saying that Plato is writing living speeches that bring speaking personae before our eyes, Ficino offers an insightful etymological explanation of the dialogic role of the actoris persona, insofar as he is not invoking the Latin auditory etymology of persona but rather the Greek visual etymology of prosopon. As the prefix pros indicates, for the Greeks the prosopon, the mask and the face, is literally that which is seen in front of or facing something. Ficino here offers a corrective to Boethius’s erroneous etymology by telling his readers that Plato’s prosopa are masks placed not on top of our eyes (ante oculos obtegant, as Boethius has it) but in front of our eyes, speaking before us (personas loquentes ante oculos ponat, as Ficino expresses the etymology).⁹² To quote from Ficino again, the use of dialogic personae allows Plato to present various levels of style and different opinions within one text by offering various actorum personae. His dialogic personae serve as the reader’s interlocutors and invoke Plato’s argument expressed in the Republic that the prosopon is intimately related to the Greek prosrhesis, or man’s ability to address someone in speech and name things. That is, in order to begin to do philosophy one first needs to turn one’s head and begin a face-to-face dialogue with another interlocutor, which Plato’s allegorical prisoners were unable to do.

      Ficino’s letters often exhibit similar Platonic dialogic qualities. For example, in a series of letters written in 1468 to his dear friend Giovanni Cavalcanti (1444–1509), of the same patrician family as the poet Guido Cavalcanti, Ficino, who was thirty-five years old then, plays the part of the Socratic lover and casts the younger twenty-four-year-old Cavalcanti in the role of his beloved, his Hellen, his Achates, or his Eros.⁹³ The letters are the first of many that reperform the Phaedrus’s dialogic structure. As a group they offer an example of a constant in Ficino’s work: the investigation and imitation of Socratic/Platonic serioludere. In the second letter of the series, written to Cavalcanti not too long after the first, Ficino renews the game:

      I have often searched for myself, Giovanni, first laying my hands on