Ficino encompasses some of the same strategies as those listed above, but he is much more complete in trying to fit Plato’s form of writing into a comprehensive hermeneutical understanding of his philosophy. For Ficino, Plato’s style of writing and his chosen dialogic form are directly related to the dialogue’s purpose. In a passage from the preface to his Commentaria in Platonem, addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Ficino describes Plato’s prose as lofty and elevated, reaching sublime heights almost unattainable by human language. Like his predecessors, Ficino thinks Plato calls down the heavens in his writings “as lofty thunder.”19 Ficino’s humility regarding his incapacity to imitate fully Plato’s Greek prose in his Latin translation, or to convey its qualities in his commentaries, only confirms how important Plato’s style was to him. The description of Plato’s prose as lofty and elevated dates back even earlier than its common occurrence among second sophistic authors, such as Dio Chrysostom, who would compare it to Homer’s sublime style. After quoting in his De vita Platonis Aristotle’s opinion, as recorded in Diogenes Laertius (fl. c. third century CE), that Plato’s style flows somewhere between oratorical prose and poetry and that Plato’s writings are full of charm and abundance, Ficino also paraphrases Cicero’s opinion from the Brutus that “if Jupiter wished to speak with a human tongue he would use no other tongue than the one with which Plato speaks,” which is a testament to Plato’s almost divine ability for prosopopoeia. Thus, like some of his humanist contemporaries, Ficino also compares Plato’s style to Homer’s capacity (pace what Plato says himself in the third book of the Republic) to give an adequate voice to the gods.20
Ficino also knows of the comparison by the Alexandrian Longinus (c. 213–73 CE) of the Athenian philosopher’s prose with Homer’s epos through the In Timaeum of Proclus. But because Proclus reiterates in the same breath the quotations from Longinus as well as Plotinus’s opinion that Longinus may have been a philologist but not a philosopher, he reveals a Neoplatonic assessment of stylistic criticism. He does not altogether disregard Plato’s style of writing but rather contends that by keeping his reading of the dialogues only to the level of textual interpretation Longinus misses the point of Plato’s elevated style.21 Proclus probably learned this interpretive approach from his teacher Syrianus († c. 437 CE), who saw in Plato’s different uses of language evidence of divine inspiration, that is, moments often interrupting the dialogues’ conversational logoi where Socrates launches into one of his many myths. These later Neoplatonists are not simply content to repeat tropes regarding the oracular or Homeric qualities of Plato’s style. They compare different passages in the corpus where Plato’s writing changes, and they interpret the philosophical significance of the different stylistic registers.
Hermias’s prosopopoeic interpretation of Socrates’ famous palinode from the Phaedrus is a prime example of this mode of interpreting the dialogues in Syrianus’s school.22 Hermias reminds his readers that after listening to Phaedrus deliver Lysias’s speech that it is best to gratify the nonlover, and before reciprocating with his own discourse on how one ought to avoid the lover, Socrates covers his head and face in order to avoid the shame of the speech’s subject matter.23 Thereafter, Socrates delivers the third speech of the dialogue in the persona of Stesichorus (c. 640–555 BCE), the famous lyric poet who was supposedly blinded for offending Helen with his poetry and who subsequently composed a palinode to recant this offense.24
It is mainly because of his assiduous study of late ancient Neoplatonists that Ficino goes beyond the traditional comparisons of Plato and Homer by quattrocento humanists and interprets philosophical meaning in Plato’s myths. Ficino thus appropriates Hermias’s reading of Socrates’ speeches in his commentary on the Phaedrus: “In all this, take note of the modesty of Socratic love; for Socrates begins with his head veiled since he is about to say something less than honorable.”25 Socrates uncovers his face for the second speech, a palinode and recantation to the gods, in which he proffers his myth of the charioteer and the celestial chain of divinities, revealing the heavens, the afterlife, the nature of soul, and its return to earth.26 According to the logic of the interpretation, in the second speech Socrates’ Stesichoran prosopon is turned forward to speak with the gods and to see into the future—as the Timaeus also explains is its purpose. Accordingly, Ficino and Hermias distinguish between the persona of shame through which Socrates pronounces his first speech, delivered not merely in dithyrambs but in hexameter, which Socrates ironically characterizes as divinely inspired, and the Stesichoran persona of the palinode, which they believe is actually divinely inspired. Ficino translated Hermias’s commentary on the Phaedrus at an early stage in his career, probably to help him decipher Plato’s writings. Its influence in seeing Socrates as a divinely inspired philosopher is felt not only in his own commentary on the Phaedrus but also in other writings where he recalled Hermias’s opinion that Socrates was a soteriological figure sent down from heaven to save the youth.27
These prosopopoeic interpretations of Plato’s corpus also clearly influenced Ficino’s epistolary voice. Ficino turned to these ancient commentary traditions to help him conceive of his epistolary persona. For instance, in his commentary on the Phaedrus, Hermias speaks of Plato’s use of prosopopoeia or personification (προσποιεῖται) for Socrates’ change of register in order to compare the respective offenses and their resulting damages and pollutions (μόλυσμα) in the persons of Homer, Stesichorus, and Socrates: the first does not notice the offense and damage (blindness), the second notices both and is healed of his blindness through a palinode, and the third notices the offense, not against Helen but against Eros, and is healed through a recantation before any damage or defilement can happen to him.28 In one of his Platonic letters to Cavalcanti, dated 15 October 1468, Ficino employs Hermias’s interpretation of Phaedrus by including himself in the aforementioned company of poets: “Thus Stesichorus was more prudent than Homer, but wiser than both was Socrates. I was certainly less cautious than Socrates; may I not become more unfortunate than Stesichorus. Why do I say this? In truth, because I wrote a letter to you in the morning of the ninth day of this month to rebuke your long silence, in which I accused you of being untamable and the cruelest of all, and in the evening I was overcome with an adverse illness. On account of this, and dreading that an adversity hangs over me for vituperating a hero, I decided to compose a palinode, albeit a brief one, to expiate my guilt.”29 Ficino’s letters thus convey more than his mastery of Plato’s corpus to his audience, they also portray him as a successor in ancient Platonic interpretive traditions.
Although Ficino is not the first in the Renaissance to address the question of Platonic style, he is a better reader of Plato’s Greek corpus than other quattrocento humanists, insofar as he is the sole person to translate all the dialogues into Latin, and he is probably also the only one among his contemporaries to read the complete corpus in Greek. This is partially due to his access to manuscripts.30 But, to undertake this comprehensive study of Plato, Ficino also turned to a much larger body of exegetical material on Plato’s prose than his predecessors (much of which comes from late ancient Neoplatonism). Like Bessarion, Ficino saw Plato as a Pythagorean disciple.31 Unlike Bessarion, however, Ficino does not simply interpret the Platonic corpus through a single dogmatic voice. He is sensitive to changes of stylistic registers and dramatic personae within the dialogic corpus itself. It is to Ficino’s great credit that he neither ignores Plato’s choice of writing styles by distilling the corpus solely into a list of dogmatic sententiae (although this is a strategy that he on occasion employs) nor condemns Plato for dialogic confusion (although he must have certainly felt perplexed at times by the dialogues’ intricacies). Ficino certainly adorns his writings with Platonic images, but his rhetorical employment of Plato is much more complex and continuously cuts across his complete epistolography. Similarly, while Ficino does indeed pick out and repeatedly quote significant sententiae from Plato in his own writings, Plato’s Neoplatonic interpreters also help Ficino aim at a comprehensive hermeneutics to study Plato’s writings as a unitary