Table 1. MS. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canon. Class. Lat. 163
| — Argumentum Marsili Ficini Florentini in decem a se traductos | ||
| Platonis dialogos ad Cosmum Medicem patrie patrem | ff. 1r–2r | |
| i) Arg. in Hipparchum: De lucri cupiditate | ff. 2r–5v | |
| ii) Arg. in librum de philosophia/Amatores | ff. 5v–9r | |
| iii) Arg. in Theagem: De sapientia | ff. 9r–14r | |
| iv) Arg. in Menonem: De virtute | ff. 14v–30v | |
| v) Arg. in Alcibiadem primum: De natura hominis | ff. 30v–45v | |
| vi) Arg. in Alcibiadem secundum: De voto | ff. 45v–51v | |
| vii) Arg. in Minoem: De lege | ff. 51v–57r | |
| viii) Arg. in Euthyphronem: De sanctitate | ff. 57r–64v | |
| ix) Arg. in Parmenidem: De uno | ff. 65r–87v | |
| x) Arg. in Philebum: De summo bono | ff. 88r–113r | |
| — In Eutydemo: De Felicitate | ff. 113r–13v | |
| Inc. Plato in Eutydemo de Felicitate, hec ait omnes homines bene agere hoc est bene vivere volumus. | ||
| Des. Sic enim animus noster deo qui sapientia ipsa est evadit simillimus in qua quidem similitudine summum Plato consistere gradum beatitudines arbitratur. | ||
| — Excerpts-summary related to Euthydemus | 278e–82a. | |
| — In Teeteto: De scientia | ff. 113v–114r | |
| Inc. Mala radicitus extirpare / des. cum sapientia sanctitas. The passage corresponds to Theaetetus 176a–c | ||
| — Alcinoi liber de dogmatibus Platonis | ff. 114r–132v | |
| — Speusippi de definitionibus Platonis | ff. 132v–136v | |
| — Pythagoras Aurea verba | ff. 137r–37v | |
| — Pythagoras de symbola | ff. 137v–38v | |
| — Preface to Piero de’ Medici | ff. 138v–39r | |
| — Xenocrates, Axiochus: De morte | ff. 139r–43r |
For one thing, if these twelve Platonic works correspond to the ten Platonic dialogues as well as the works by Alcinous and Speusippus, Ficino would have left out of his description in the letter to Cosimo the excerpts of the Euthydemus and the Theaetetus as well as the final translations of Pythagoras’s Aurea verba and Symbola—all of which are in the Bodleian manuscript. When taken into account these other texts bring the total number of works that Ficino translates in this manuscript for Cosimo (depending on how one counts the Pythagorean works) to fifteen—that is, if one also keeps in mind that Xenocrates was added to the end of the manuscript at a later date for Piero de’ Medici.56 In fact, it is possible that the three Platonic works Ficino mentions in his letter to Cosimo are not a final tenth Platonic dialogue, along with Alcinous and Speusippus, but simply three other Platonic dialogues added to the nine dialogues that he had already finished translating. According to this hypothesis he would have wanted to translate twelve dialogues and not ten (as is normally repeated). Since in the letter in question to Cosimo he writes that these last three works speak of the highest order of things—which would be a very odd way to characterize Speusippus’s rather scholastic definitions, that is, if one wishes, as the usual hypothetical reconstruction posits, to count it among the three works mentioned in the letter to Cosimo—they would have included the Philebus and the Parmenides, as well as a third, which might have been the Theaetetus.57 And since he finally completed the translation of the Parmenides, the Philebus, and eight other shorter dialogues for Cosimo, the twelfth dialogue would probably have been another shorter dialogue, which might have been the Euthydemus.
This second hypothesis would agree with the fact that the Bodleian manuscript contains Latin excerpts of the Theaetetus and the Euthydemus after the completed translation of ten dialogues, but it too is not absolutely certain. To recap, while he was in the process of translating his intended dialogues and probably when he was preparing the requested Latin manuscript in haste, Ficino wrote to Cosimo: “So far I have translated nine works of Plato. I will, God willing, translate three other works that survey the higher order of things.”58 That he was in a rush to complete his work is evident from his statement that after finishing nine works by Plato, “God willing,” that is, if time permitted, he would translate three more. Could it be that Ficino was also planning on translating the Theaetetus and the Euthydemus but ran out of time, settling for including only brief excerpts of the two dialogues in the manuscript?
The question cannot be definitively answered, but there are persuasive reasons at least to connect the fragmentary translations of the Euthydemus and the Theaetetus in the Bodleian manuscripts and Ficino’s aforementioned letter to Cosimo.59 In that letter Ficino tells Cosimo that while he waits for his translations of Plato he can happily read new material by Plato on happiness. He explains that Plato teaches about happiness (beatitudinem) for the active life in the Euthydemus and for the contemplative life in the Theaetetus. He then quotes two passages from these dialogues identical to those in the Bodleian manuscript.60 In explaining that happiness resides in becoming godlike, he ends this letter to Cosimo by drawing parallels between the highest Good in the Philebus, the One in the Parmenides, the King and Father in the Second Letter, and the Good itself in the Republic. He concludes by arguing that Plato’s happiness is neither identical to Diogenes Laertius’s opinion that it should be thought of in terms of our happy fortunes nor, as the Peripatetics think, that it is the source of goodness in the order of ideas, but that it is found above ideas, intellect, life, and essence. Cosimo knew about peripatetic ethics, since he supported the work of John Argyropoulos (c. 1415–87) on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, and about Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Philosophers, as he commissioned Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1439) to translate it.61 In his letter Ficino is therefore appealing to these items of interest to Cosimo, but he does so in order to claim the superiority of Plato’s divine ethics. The letter’s conclusion that Plato’s highest Good and our happiness are above the ideas, and indeed above the intellectual triad of being-life-intellect, explicitly follows Neoplatonic philolosophy. It further helps us understand the philosophical hermeneutics behind Ficino’s early translations for Cosimo.62
At first glance the dialogues for Cosimo share certain resemblances with the late ancient Neoplatonic corpus of Platonic dialogues used in the teaching curriculum of their academies. Historians of philosophy often speak of the teaching corpus established by Iamblichus as composed of ten Platonic dialogues, but in reality it is formed by a series of twelve dialogues: a first decade of dialogues, which interestingly ends with the Philebus, followed by the two “perfect” dialogues, the Timaeus and the Parmenides. The Timaeus and the Parmenides are two Pythagorean works, according to Iamblichus, that are by themselves supposed to encapsulate self-autonomously, as in a cosmos, the whole order of the prior dialogues.63 Iamblichus’s order for Plato’s corpus can be reconstructed as in Table 2.
Iamblichus’s organization was part of the teaching curriculum of the Platonic academies of late antiquity for more than two hundred years. Its influence was due in part to the fact that Iamblichus arranged this corpus and its study according to a specific order (τάξις), corresponding to the Neoplatonic hierarchy of virtues: political virtues dealing with the affairs of others, cathartic virtues concerned with the care of the self, and theoretical virtues that turn the mind toward the intelligibles so that it may reach toward the sight of the higher truths of the One-Good. In addition to the number of dialogues, there are other similarities between Iamblichus’s and Ficino’s orders. They both assign a privileged place to the Philebus as the tenth dialogue in the series. Likewise, they both categorize