![]() In the notable nineteenth expostulation in his Devotions, John Donne refers to God as a metaphorical God and the Renaissance in general was enthusiastically attuned to the assumption that the world was itself a figure, a cipher. įicino's Commentary on the Eighth Book of the Republic This book is dedicated to my hebdomadal dart-partners, Mithraic devotees over the years of the fatal numbers from 14 to 20, of any double and the double bull: my mortal foes, Reg Foakes and Alan Roper, and my immortal ally, Al Braunmuller. The frontispiece is of an oil, a gift on my fiftieth, by my wife, Elena. For annual research grants, I am grateful, as in the past, to UCLA's Academic Senate. ![]() I would also like to thank Michael Haslam for checking my readings of the Greek MS Ficino used for the passage on the Number, and Nicholas Goodhue and Owen Staley for both their scholarly and their editorial help. In particular, I am greatly indebted to Paul Oskar Kristeller, to Brian Copenhaver, and to James Hankins, who worked through my typescript offering the kind of valuable suggestions- quid possit oriri, quid nequeat -that only their immense and generous scholarship could provide. In this doubtless Sisyphean labor, I have called on the patience and erudition of several friends. I was also convinced that further progress in our understanding of Ficino's manifold contributions to Renaissance thought will depend on scholars embarking on similarly detailed analyses of a number of his other treatises, many of which have been barely skimmed in modern times, and then only by a handful of Ficinians in search of a particular reference or a complementary argument. I embarked on this study in the anticipation that I could sharpen my own appreciation of one of the age's seminal thinkers by grinding and polishing the lens of a new and fascinating text. My second part presents the first critical edition and translation of the De Numero Fatali and its relaxed texts, with accompanying notes. ![]() Plato's political dialogue and his premonitory sense of an imminent star-governed change in the destiny of Florence, a city already in the grip of the tumultuous millenarian passions of the 1490s. ![]() For students of Ficino and of Quattrocento cultural and intellectual history, however, I hope the last two chapters particularly will cast fresh light on a number of challenging philosophical and mythological issues, and suggest some elusive linkages between Ficino's reaction to My first part deals in general with the commentary's features, themes, and difficulties, and in particular with its composition, sources, and context with Ficino's analyses of the role in Plato of figured numbers including fatal numbers with his treatment of the interwoven motifs of eugenics, the habitus, the spirit, and the daemons and with the ambivalent roles he assigns to astrology in the instauration of a golden age under a Jupiter reunited with his father, Saturn.įor historians of the transmission and interpretation of classical texts, the evidence marshaled here should be persuasive enough to ensure the recognition for the first time of Ficino's rightful place at the head of the long line of modern exegetes of the Platonic passage. I shall refer to it for convenience' sake by one of its titles as the De Numero Fatali. ![]() The treatise is an arcane and hitherto unexplored commentary focusing on a notoriously intractable mathematical passage in the eighth book of Plato's Republic. This book is concerned with a treatise written late in the career of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the influential philosophermagus of Medicean Florence and the presiding genius of Renaissance Neoplatonism. Nuptial Arithmetic: Marsilio Ficino's Commentary on the Fatal Number in Book VIII of Plato's Republic. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994 1994. ![]()
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