"Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas"

Ficino's Commentary on the Eighth Book of the Republic

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. Necessarily the mathematical structures in the world were
part of the divine figuration, and a sense of this figuration provided the
foundation for both the methods and the goals of such learned disciplines
as arithmology and numerology, astrology, iatromathematics, and musical
therapy, the mathematical or at least computational arts that the age
regarded as legitimate branches of learning and of proven utility. For the
influential book of the Apocrypha known as the Wisdom of Solomon had
proclaimed in a much-quoted text that God had made all things "in
number, weight, and measure" (11.20[21]) as the architect of the world, as
the heavenly geometer, as the musical master of a divine harmonics. And
man in the divine image of God the Creator had been designed with a
body of geometrical proportions, with a harmoniously balanced
temperament, with a mathematical mind. The supreme ancient authority
of this mathematical view of man as mathematician was Plato, spokesman
for what was preeminently the Pythagorean tradition in which his own
scientific studies had been nurtured.

Renaissance scholars were familiar with the report that the inscrip-
―4―

tion in the vestibule of the Academy had forbidden anyone unskilled in

geometry to cross the threshold and seek initiation into the sacred
mysteries.[1] For geometry was a marvelous art that the Epinomis 990D
had claimed was of divine not human origin, even though, as the Republic
had argued at 6.511B ff. and 7.531D–534E, it was subordinate, like all its
"sister" mathematical arts, to the "comprehensive" power of dialectic, "the
coping stone" of the intellectual skills. Scholars were also aware that in
the Timaeus , the dialogue on the Demiurge and his creation and the one
most familiar to and most treasured by the medieval and the Renaissance
West, Plato had advanced various Pythagorean notions—with what degree
of seriousness it is now virtually impossible to say—on the harmonies
governing the soul, and on the structure of the elements and the
geometrical figures that constituted them.[2] Although none of Plato's
dialogues focus primarily on mathematics, several do contain significant
loci mathematici . Apart from the Timaeus with its exceptionally important
sections on means and proportions at 34B–36D and on the five regular
polyhedra at 53C–56C, the Meno has two well-known passages on the
duplication of the square at 82B–85B and on the measurement of areas at
86E–87B, the Theaetetus raises the issue of irrational or incommensurable
roots at 147D–148B, and the Epinomis (which the Renaissance considered
authentic) has an arresting section at 990C–991A on astronomy, geometry,
progressions, the mean proportions, and the formation of numbers. Other
dialogues contain mathematical references or observations: for instance,
the Euthyphro at 12D, the Hippias Major at 303BC, the Philebus at 56D,
the Charmides at 166A, the Statesman at 266AB, the Phaedrus at 274C,
and the Laws 7 at 817E–820C.[3]
―5―

More generally, the Parmenides is concerned throughout with the

metaphysics of the one and the many, of unity and plurality; and the
Republic 7.521C–531D outlines a mathematics curriculum in five parts
beginning with arithmetic and ratio theory and thence proceeding to plane
and solid geometry, and ending with astronomy and music. Finally, there
are the complicated metaphysical issues of Plato's postulation, at least
according to Aristotle in his Metaphysics 991b9, 1082b23–24, 1086a10–11,
and De Anima 404b24, etc., of numbers as Forms, of the mathematicals as
intelligible pluralities.

However, the most intractable or mystagogical of all Plato's mathematical

speculations (depending on one's point of view) occurs in a passage
towards the beginning of the eighth book of the Republic at 546A ff. Here
Socrates refers to a mysterious geometric or "fatal" number in order to
explain why it is that even perfectly constituted republics—those that do
not contain within themselves the seeds of their own decay and ruin—
decline nevertheless after the passage of many years into the first of four
degenerate forms ending in a tyranny: into a contentious timarchy
governed by the passionate pursuit of honor and "a fierce secret longing"
for money instead of justice and the good. They are subject, it would
seem, to some cyclical cosmic pattern, to an inexorable fate that
overwhelms them despite their innate, their Platonic excellence. In the
course of this baffling passage on the geometric number Socrates also
argues for the necessity of state-planned eugenics. Citizens approaching
parenthood must be adjusted to each other, like proportionate numbers, in
order that they may breed good, tempered offspring and thus ensure the
continuance of balance in the state. And the balance can indeed be
maintained for a time: with Platonic planning and Platonic virtue men can
work with Fate to ensure the continuance of their state's life or prosperity,
as long, that is, as the fatal cycle of years has not yet been fulfilled. After
that, no legislation by the magistrates, however wise and however
rigorously enforced, can prevail against the inevitable, the periodic
change. The eugenic theme is so prominent indeed that Plutarch,
Nicomachus of Gerasa, Iamblichus, and Boethius, among others, did not
hesitate to identify the fatal geometric number with the notion of a
"nuptial" number,[4] presumably because of the sovereign role it plays
―6―

in determining, for better or for worse, the fertility of a republic and thus
the success of its marriages, begettings, and births.
Of particular importance for Platonic commentators is the fact that
Aristotle commented upon this passage adversely in his Politics 5 at
1316a1–b26 in an arresting discussion and dismissal of Socrates' views on
the causes of change affecting a perfect commonwealth, such as the
hypothetical first state. Aristotle objects that Socrates "treats of
revolutions, but not well, for he mentions no cause of change which
peculiarly affects the first or perfect state. He only says that the cause is
that nothing is abiding, but all things change in a certain cycle; and that
the origin of the change consists in those numbers 'of which 4 and 3,
married with 5, furnish two harmonies' (he means when the number of
this figure becomes solid)."[5] Aristotle is prepared to admit that at times
nature may produce bad men who will not submit to education, "in which
latter particular he [Socrates] may very likely be not far wrong, for there
may well be some men who cannot be educated and made virtuous."
Aristotle, who is insisting on the distinction between the "cause" of
change and its actual "onset," then raises various objections, among them
the following five: Why is "such a cause of change peculiar to his
[Socrates'] ideal state, and not rather common to all states, or indeed, to
everything which comes into being at all?" Is it merely attributable to the
agency of time that "things which did not begin together change
together?" Why postulate cyclical change and not merely change, since
history furnishes us with many examples of one tyranny passing into
another tyranny, not necessarily into another form of government
entirely? Isn't it foolish to suppose that a state changes for the worse only
because the ruling class begins to acquire
―7―

too much money? The causes of change are numerous, and yet Socrates
mentions only one—the gradual impoverishment of the citizens—as if the
citizens had been originally all equally well off. And why speak of
revolutions in oligarchies and democracies, as though they each existed in
only one form when in fact they exist in many forms?

In short, Aristotle marshals a sequence of powerful objections that

charges Socrates with confusing the notion of a temporal cycle with that
of temporal change and dismisses his conception of a historical cause as
too naive or too simplistic. To anyone who believed in Plato's supremacy
over Aristotle, or who was bent upon reconciling the two thinkers, these
objections presented a formidable challenge, particularly given Aristotle's
belligerent tone, his taking issue with an indisputably major dialogue, and
his contentious impatience with the way Socrates had elected to present
an important and influential Platonic theme, that of the ideal republic.

The mathematical enigmas in Plato's passage—along with Aristotle's

objections—have occasioned speculative debate and intricate analysis
since the fifteenth century when they were first rediscovered by the West.
A number of "solutions" have been and are still being suggested, and
translators have learned to approach Plato's veiled description of the
geometric number with some wariness. In the past some have even
declined to render it at all. One of the most distinguished of these was
Victor Cousin (1792–1867), who footnoted his omission thus: "Ce qui me
confond le plus dans cette phrase, d'une obscurité devenue proverbiale,
c'est qu'elle n'ait pas plus tourmenté les philosophes grecs, venus après
Platon, et qu'ils la citent, la critiquent, la commentent, en n'ayant pas l'air
de n'y rien comprendre. . . . [J]e demeure très convaincu qu'une phrase
écrite par Platon et commentée par Aristote, est fort intelligible en elle-
même."[6] Cousin assumed that an enhanced understanding of ancient
mathematics and its terminology would assuredly lead to the untying of
what he thought
―8―

of as "ce noeud embarrassé." The great Friedrich Schleiermacher before

him had declared in 1828 that his inability to understand Plato's
intentions here and his continually renewed and continually thwarted
hopes of doing so had interrupted his work on translating the canon for
twelve entire years.[7] Eventually he had reluctantly decided that the
value of the geometric number must be 216 (or its square), the product of
8 times 27, the first two "solids" at the two feet of the Platonic lambda as
set forth in the Timaeus 35B ff., a text with a special role to play, as we
shall see, in the launching of the modern, as well as the ancient, history of
the number's interpretation. In our own day another great scholar, Francis
M. Cornford, omitted the passage in his 1941 translation of the Republic .

The path of interpretation, moreover, is strewn with failures to calculate

the value of this number convincingly for others, though most of these
failures are themselves remarkable for their learning and ingenuity. The
two preeminent twentieth-century interpreters are James Adam and
Auguste Diès;[8] and a shaky consensus arrived at by them and by other
scholars has established 12,960,000 as the value that Plato may have had
in mind.[9] Even so, discussion continues.[10]
―9―

The first modern contributor to the problem of Plato's geometric number,

though he has not hitherto received appropriate recognition as we shall
see, was Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the leading Florentine Neoplatonist
of the Renaissance and the architect of Platonism's revival and European
dissemination. His most formidable scholarly achievements were
undoubtedly his Latin translations of the complete works of both Plato
(Florence, 1484; 2d ed., Venice, 1491) and Plotinus (Florence, 1492); and
he was recognized in his own age as the supreme interpreter and
commentator on Plato. In 1576, nearly eighty years after Ficino's death,
Jean Bodin for instance in his Les six livres de la République 4.2 refers to
him as "(in mine opinion) the sharpest of all the Academikes."[11] Not
surprisingly then, the distinguished Florentine attracted the attention of J.
Dupuis in a review of earlier attempts to decipher Plato's enigma that he
included in an 1881 monograph, a monograph he subsequently revised
and appended to his 1892 edition and French translation of Theon of
Smyrna's Expositio .[12]

Following in the footsteps of the great nineteenth-century editor of the

Republic , Carl Ernst Christopher Schneider,[13] Dupuis commences his
doxology of post-ancient views with Ficino, "le plus ancien interpréte de
Platon parmi les modernes." But both merely recall a passing remark in
Ficino's argumentum for book 8 as it appeared in his 1484 and 1491 Plato
editions—Dupuis uses the 1491—"Quid vero si in eiusmodi verbis plus
difficultatis sit quam ponderis"; and this they take
― 10 ―

to mean that for Ficino the passage contained "more of difficulty than of
real substance." Schneider assumes that Ficino never followed through on
his promise to write more fully on the matter in his Timaeus Commentary;
and Dupuis concludes, "il n'indique aucun nombre."[14] Interestingly, this
joint dismissal merely echoes a comment made in 1581 by Jean Bodin:
"Marsilius Ficinus . . . plainely confesseth himself not to know what Plato
in that place ment, fearing lest it should so fall out with him as it did with
Iamblichus, who seemeth to have been willing in three words not to have
manifested a thing of it selfe most obscure, but rather to have made it
darker."[15] Bodin had already followed Ficino in his argumentum in
mockingly observing that Aristotle "skippeth over this place as over a
dich, neither doth here carpe his maister (as his maner is) when as for the
obscuritie thereof he had not wherefore he might reprove him."[16]

Ficino's argumentum , upon which these assumptions of Bodin, of

Schneider, and of Dupuis are based, is not without interest. It is one of a
number of prefatory argumenta or epitomes that Ficino prepared for each
book of the Republic and the Laws and for the other dialogues. They were
first published in his 1484 Plato edition and continued to appear in later
editions of it and also in the three editions of
― 11 ―

Ficino's own Opera Omnia (where the argumentum for the eighth book
appears on p. 1413). Professor Paul Oskar Kristeller has argued
convincingly that each argumentum was composed as Ficino completed
his translation of the dialogue it was to preface, though the argumenta as
a body were probably revised later and further crossreferences added.[17]
If he is correct, then the argumentum for the eighth book would date from
the late 1460s, since the book itself is number 38 in the sequence of the
dialogues as he translated them (counting each book of the Republic
separately) and a draft of the sequence was completed during the rule of
Piero, Cosimo de' Medici's son and successor, who did not die until
1469.[18]

In the argumentum Ficino observes that it was not unjustly that Cicero
had written that Plato's fatal number had become proverbial for obscurity
—a reference to the Epistle to Atticus 7.13.5—and that Theon of Smyrna,
otherwise the principal expounder of Platonic mathematics, had very
astutely decided to omit all consideration of the number in his Expositio
on the grounds that Plato's mystery was "inexplicable."

As the champion of Plato, Ficino has as his immediate goal, however, to

refute Aristotle's objections to—what he characterizes as "calumnies"
against—the views of Socrates concerning the cause of a perfectly
constituted state's ultimate decline, the state that Ficino interprets
Socrates as having already fully described in the first seven books of the
Republic . Since this is one of the most prominent instances of
disagreement between Plato and Aristotle, it naturally forced itself upon
Ficino's attention.[19]
― 12 ―

He counters the Stagirite's arguments by postulating two kinds of causes

of change. The first is specific in that it occasions "the permutations alike
of souls and of states from one form to another," the changes particular to
an imperfect soul or state. But a perfect soul or state, such as that
postulated here by Socrates, cannot be supposed to contain this kind of
cause on the Platonic grounds that that which is perfect cannot
degenerate. The second kind is a "common" or universal cause of change
and it is to be identified, if not with Fate itself, then certainly with the
"fatal order" that governs the temporal realm. For change in this realm is
brought about by the shifting configurations, the "fatal order" of the
celestial spheres and the planetary conjunctions and oppositions. Against
the great cycles of Fate and its instrument, the stars, no sublunar form,
perfect or imperfect, is immune. While men and states may possess the
internal fortitude and virtue to endure for the full duration of their
destined, their fatal time on earth, they must succumb eventually to
change, not necessarily because of any innate defect—though most
sublunar entities have such defects—but because of the universal
condition of mutability. Interestingly, Ficino, the son of a physician and
himself trained initially as a physician, suggests that we might think of
the contrast as that between an endemic and an epidemic disease. Thus
Ficino distinguishes between the minor "revolutions" that concern
Aristotle and the great cycles of time that concern Plato.

The greatest astronomical cycle is the Platonic "great year," which is

defined in the Timaeus 39D as the time it takes for the seven planetary
spheres and the sphere of the fixed stars to return to the positions they
had occupied at the beginning of the cycle—a "Pythagorean"
― 13 ―

conception that can be traced back at least to Oenopides of Chios (fl. c.

450–425 B.C. ).[20] The Platonists (and Stoics) entertained the corollary
speculation that mankind too is governed by its own great year, which
they identified as the time when history comes full circle and begins to
repeat itself. The obvious question arises whether the two great years—
that of the celestial spheres and that of mankind—are coterminous.
Plutarch, for instance, had argued that they were in his essay De Fato 3
(Moralia 569A-C). When the heavens are restored to the state they were in
at the beginning of the great year, then everything on earth including man
will return to its first condition and history begin again; fate is thus both
finite and infinite.[21] But others had
[1946]
― 14 ―

contended that the one great year was a multiple of the other. Proclus, for
instance, had held that the great year of mankind was a multiple of the
cosmic great year, whereas others had argued precisely the opposite.[22]
Moreover, the value of the cosmic great year was variously reckoned.
Macrobius, for instance, had calculated it as 15,000 ordinary years,[23]
while the Neoplatonic and Ptolemaic traditions to which Ficino is here
subscribing had determined upon 36,000 years.[24]

In the Republic Plato does not actually say, however, that the period of the
cosmic great year is measured by the perfect number or numbers, but
declares rather at 546B3–4 that the perfect number presides over the
period of "divine begettings." And though Theon of Smyrna for one had
assumed that the cosmic great year was governed by a perfect number—in
this case six, the first of such numbers—and was therefore indeed a
"divine begetting,"[25] nonetheless we must dis-
― 15 ―

tinguish in our own minds, at least initially, between the notions of the
cosmic great year, of the perfect number(s), and of the fatal number(s),
remembering that the Platonic number, which presides over "mortal"
begettings, is a fatal number.

Ficino's position is this. The period of the great year necessarily contains
lesser periods, and these are the periods of human engendering which are
under the sway of the fatal geometric number. However, this number is
itself subordinate to the perfect number that governs the divine cosmic
creature which is the world (the "divine begetting"). The perfect number,
not the fatal number, therefore is the ultimate determinant of celestial
time, the world's time that is intermediary between terrestrial time and
timeless eternity. But such a number eludes human intelligence, says
Ficino, and is known to the gods, to God alone, for whom a thousand
years, in the words of Psalm 90:4, are but as yesterday when it is past. If
the Psalmist is to be believed, however, there emerges the possibility at
least of an analogical relationship between God's measures and man's,
and thus of our predicating on the basis of our circumscribed notion of a
period (and thence of periodicity) the existence of divinely ordered
periods that God has ordained should govern the world until the dawning
of the great Sabaoth of His eternity.

However speculatively appealing, the task of actually measuring periodic

time and its constitutive units, and therefore of establishing the basis for
prediction itself, is utterly beyond man's reasoning powers. In the first
place, the reason has no way of determining our position in a period
(which may be part of a greater and even more mysterious period or cycle,
and so on), and hence of determining when it began and when it will end.
Thus it cannot know the number that governs our present period as its
originating and therefore as its final cause. Yet such a cause, such a
universal cause, and not particular and local causes, is precisely what
Plato is concerned with. Accordingly, Plato does not resort, Ficino argues
in this argumentum , to "the civil faculty" of the reason, like his
calumniator, Aristotle, in order to measure the ultimate life of a state.
Rather he has recourse to the faculty that transcends man's reason, to the
suprarational, intuitive understanding (the mens ) that, insofar as it is
concerned with the apprehension of time, is identical with "Apollo's
prophetic art," or what Ficino refers to also as the "oracular" power
bestowed on us by the Muses.[26]
― 16 ―

Ficino's account of prophecy has never been fully analyzed, nor for that
matter has his conception of Apollo or the Muses; and it is part of his
general theory, derived principally from the Phaedrus 244A–245C, of the
four divine furies. We learn from an important section in his Platonic
Theology 13.2 (completed, at least in draft, by 1474 but not published
until 1482) that he viewed prophecy as culminating in the soul's ascension
from the body and "comprehension of all place and time." At that moment
the intuitive intellect is flooded with the splendor of the Ideas, the radiant
Beauty that is the emanating light of Truth.[27] But the prophetic "art"
involves more than the initiatory rapture and then the intellectual skill
and insight to interpret it correctly. In the argumentum , Ficino claims,
perhaps extravagantly or facetiously, that the mysteries of the passage on
the fatal geometric number and the mystery of that number itself not only
defy interpretation by the process of normal discursive reasoning (the
ratio ) and require intuitive or even mantic powers, but demand ultimately
the descent of a god, of a divine and overwhelming force. Perhaps we
should bear in mind a claim that Ficino had made elsewhere, namely that
mathematics is the particular domain of the daemons and that skill with
numbers is in essence a daemonic skill and the gift of the daemons,[28]
something that most of us have suspected since childhood.

Even so, the argumentum strikes a note of doubt. In the light of Theon of
Smyrna's refusal to address the great mystery, despite his expertise in
Platonic mathematics, Ficino wonders, as we have seen, whether there is
"more of difficulty than of real weight" in Plato's reference to the fatal
geometric number, especially given the reference at 545DE to the
stupefying effect of the Muses' "tragically inflated" mode on a simple
youthful soul. At this point he declines, furthermore, to address the
technical difficulties of the passage or indeed to confront the mystery
itself of the fatal number; and he suggests in-
― 17 ―

stead that the reader should turn to his Timaeus Commentary—his earliest
commentary, we recall—for whatever is "more useful or opportune" in
Plato's baffling discussion, though we should note that in that
commentary Ficino does not take up the issue of the fatal number, despite
his odd references to the pertinent passage in the Republic .[29] The
remaining sentences of the argumentum merely cull some "moral
precepts" from the rest of book 8.

Clearly, at this stage in his Platonic career Ficino did not have the
confidence to expatiate on an issue he had not yet resolved; indeed he
was probably ambivalent, on the one hand suspecting that Plato was
playing or joking with his reader, on the other believing that a divine
inspiration was required for an interpreter to pierce through the cloudy
veils with which Plato had encompassed the number to conceal it from the
vulgar gaze.[30] In either event, it was clear that Plato had hedged the
passage around with apotropaic devices, with Pythagorean prohibitions,
with learned silence. And not only to the young and uninitiated, and to
those with the mere rudiments of geometry had he denied its resolution:
Ficino himself felt compelled to wait upon some future inspiration, some
descent of Apollo or his daemon.[31] Having
― 18 ―

said this, we should note that Ficino did accept the scholarly responsibility
of attempting a translation of the passage; and in doing so he relied upon
his exemplar, the Laurenziana's 85.9.[32]

However, the story of Ficino's involvement did not end here, as Bodin,
Schneider, Dupuis, and others have too precipitately supposed.

Apparently, these scholars were familiar only with Ficino's argumentum ,

which offers no solution to the problem of the geometric number. They
were obviously completely unaware, as all more recent
― 19 ―

scholars too have been unaware, of a major essay on the theme and its
implications that Marsilio wrote some thirty years later in the early 1490s
and published in 1496. There he takes up several of the many problems in
some detail, and having insisted on the role of the diagonal numbers
(diametri or diametrales ) as we shall see, he advances a solution
consonant with Aristotle's gloss, namely, 12 to the third power. This
solution apparently became generally accepted during the first half at
least of the sixteenth century. It was adopted, for instance, by Raphael
(Maffei) Volaterranus in the 35th book of his Commentaria urbana
published in Rome in 1506 (though he proferred another solution in his
36th book!),[33] and adopted too, more significantly, by Iacobus Faber
Stapulensis (Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples), again in 1506, in annotations to
the last chapter of his commentary on book 5 of Aristotle's Politics, a
commentary that was reprinted a number of times and exerted
considerable influence in its day.[34] It was also adopted, but with more
detailed argumentation and annotation and
― 20 ―

again with an insistence on the bearing of the diagonal numbers, by the

distinguished Venetian mathematician Francesco Barozzi in his
Commentarius in Locum Platonis Obscurissimum published in Bologna in
1566.[35]

The history, rich and curious in itself, of interpretative attempts before the
twentieth century should therefore be rewritten to accord Ficino, and not
Faber, the accolade of being the architect of the first modern
interpretation of Plato's enigma and the first scholar since antiquity to
confront a number of the major cruces and to address the issues and
possibilities in the light of research into Platonic mathematics.[36] We
might note, incidentally, that Girolamo Cardano (1501–
― 21 ―
1576), in his Opus Novum de Proportionibus (Basel, 1570), was to propose
as a solution another number occurring in Ficino's analysis, 8128, the
fourth in the series of perfect numbers; and that the disciple and friend of
Descartes, Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), in book 2 of his Traité de
l'harmonie universelle (Paris, 1627), was to propose a "lesser fatal
number" that Ficino had actually entertained—since Plato himself had
introduced it in the ninth book of the Republic —namely 729;[37] and so
forth. Clearly, early modern scholarship had not yet forgotten Ficino's role
in the explication of Plato's refractory passage.

Ficino's essay takes the form of a commentary on book 8 of the Republic ,

which he first published along with others in 1496 (no earlier manuscript
is extant). It therefore postdates the Plato editions of 1484 and 1491 and
represents a renewed attempt by Ficino late in his life to come to grips
with the value of Plato's geometric number. From the onset of his
professional academic career he had committed himself to the task of
extensive commentary on the Platonic dialogues. Even before he had
learned Greek in the 1450s, he had written at length on the Timaeus ,
though he was to do so again on several other occasions—the Timaeus
Commentary we now possess being the product of maturer
explication.[38] By 1469 he had already completed a fullscale commentary
on the Symposium and written a substantial portion of another one on the
Philebus (though this he never completed despite returning to it on at
least two more occasions).[39] In the following years, as he prepared his
Plato translation for the press, he finished composing his epitomes and
introductions for all the dialogues.[40]
― 22 ―

Eventually in 1496 he assembled five long commentaries together with

chapter breakdowns and summaries in one volume—those on the Timaeus,
Philebus, Parmenides, Sophist, and Phaedrus (though two of them only
can be said to be complete). To these he added a commentary focusing on
the "fatal" number in the eighth book of the Republic , and dedicated the
resulting collection to Niccolò Valori.[41] It is

(footnote continued on the next page)

― 23 ―

Ficino's only full-length treatise devoted to the Republic , despite the

work's prominence for him and in the Neoplatonic tradition; and it is
remarkable that its subject should be the "fatal" number and not the
allegory of the Cave, the myth of Er, the figure of the Divided Line, or the
Idea of the Good—the "set pieces" of other more famous books.
Nonetheless, the essay is an anomalous inclusion in the 1496 volume
insofar as it is not a commentary upon an entire dialogue but rather a
largely self-contained discussion of the issues raised by just a few lines in
that dialogue. Perhaps Ficino felt he had covered the general territory of
the Republic sufficiently in the course of his quite lengthy epitomes (no
epitome exists for book 8, though the argumentum functions as such).[42]
The 1496 volume was apparently in lieu of a deluxe revised edition of the
1484 Plato volume, which Ficino had envisaged before Lorenzo's death on
8 April 1492 and the expulsion of the Medici in the November of 1494, and
which he had hoped would include even more extensive commentaries on
many, if not on all, of the dialogues as well as revised translations and
chapter breakdowns and summaries. Those for the five dialogues,
incidentally, include further revisions for Ficino's Plato translations; and
the volume concludes with a corrigenda list that occasionally corrects
these revisions! In the event, the Commentaria in Platonem was to be the
terminus of his specifically Platonic labors, since the last three or so years
of his life were devoted to lecturing on and analyzing Saint Paul's Epistles
and notably the Epistle to the Romans.[43]

Even as late as 1496, however, Ficino was still uncharacteristically

circumspect about Plato's intentions, as one can see from his prefacing
expositio . He writes,

The prodigious enigmas of this chapter above [i.e., 546A–D] have

terrified me and indeed other Platonists too for a long time from trying to
explicate them. Nevertheless, the things in it that I am relatively sure
about—having thought about the passage for many years—I will deal with
first. At the end I shall take the plunge and deal with what is merely
probable. The totally inexplicable I will omit altogether. For Plato wanted
[only] certain things to be

― 24 ―

explained. Words that men cannot understand, however, he justly

attributed to the Muses—to the Muses at play—for what is hidden is
something playful.

This is a revealing set of provisos and caveats. First it suggests that Ficino
had carefully pondered the challenges of the "prodigious" chapter and
deliberately postponed commenting upon it as long as possible, or at least
until he had garnered a number of insights into its enigmas. In this regard
we should note the emendations to his translation of the chapter for the
1484 Plato edition—particularly of the phrasing at note 16 of the
apparatus criticus to Text 2 on p. 163 below—bearing in mind that his
exemplar remained the Laurenziana's Greek manuscript 85.9.[44]

Second, besides the "fatal" number, Ficino is predictably concerned with

the number known in the Pythagorean manner, as we have seen, as the
"nuptial" number because of its importance in Plato's advocacy of
eugenics; and, in dealing with both numbers, he consciously prepares us
to move from the certain, to the probable, to the inexplicable. Elsewhere,
notably in the Vita Platonis which prefaces the 1484 Plato edition,[45] and
in the Platonic Theology 17.4,[46] he had spoken of
― 25 ―

Plato as habitually presenting us with the merely probable and as

declining to promulgate certainties or dogmas. Only in the Laws (which for
him included the Epinomis as an epilogue) and the Letters , the last works
of Plato's career, does he see him prepared to commit himself publicly,
and even then with regard to just three deeply held convictions: that
Providence exists; that the soul is immortal; and that there is a scheme of
reward and punishment in the afterlife for the good deeds we have
effected or the sins we have committed in this life, in other words that a
divine justice presides over all things.[47]

Finally, Ficino makes an ambiguous reference to the Muses, something,

significantly, that he elects to do again at the very end of his commentary:
"But we have debated enough in the company of Plato and the Muses as
they play with a serious and inextricable matter." While we might point to
similar statements in the Parmenides Commentary for instance,[48] in no
other commentary do we find Ficino quite so candidly admitting that he
has failed to unravel completely, or to his full satisfaction, the
complexities of a Pythagorean-Platonic mystery, failed to penetrate to the
core of the sapiential fruit. In none, moreover, do we find him more
attuned to the seriocomic tone, to the presence of a mystagogic irony and
obliquity in Plato's style and presentation. By way of explanation, he
warns us in the prefatory expositio that we must remember that Plato had
decided from the beginning to remain silent on certain issues: "certain
things Plato himself chose not to unfold" ("quaedam noluit explicari"). The
old Pytha-
― 26 ―

gorean commitment to silence is assumed to be Plato's too, for all his

volubility and eloquence.[49]

Marsilio, however, was committed by his expository program to unfolding

as much as he possibly could about Plato's most obscure passage in the
Republic , and when he sat down he produced something that was for him
—a constitutionally digressive and endlessly parenthetical and repetitive
thinker—a passably compact, organized, and self-contained treatise. By
the time he had reached his conclusion, moreover, he was convinced that
he had resolved some at least of Plato's enigmas. Above all he had
established a value for the fatal geometric number.

In the course of his inquiry, as we shall see, he also raised a number of

questions of abiding interest to scholars both of the Platonic tradition and
of Renaissance conceptions of man, of history, and of time, questions that
as historians we are drawn to set against the backdrop of Florentine
religion and politics at the close of the fifteenth century. For Plato's ideal
city brought low by the fatal number prefigures a Florence inflamed by the
Savonarolan reform movement with its apocalyptic predictions that an
aeon was coming to an end. Ficino was certainly personally affected by
the convulsive millenarianism of the 1490s, and brooding on the numbers
of time and its dreadful passing was a preoccupation he undoubtedly
shared with many of his friends and compatriots, quite apart from the
professional astrologers and the self-appointed prophets, in those
turbulent, unhappy years preceding the calamità .[50]
More particularly, as a Platonist, he had by then been immersed in the
canon for some thirty years and become thoroughly familiar with its
allusions to a cyclical time in such works as the Statesman , the Timaeus ,
and the third book of the Laws . He had become convinced too that Plato
had been a reformer and prophet, who had called for change in the
polities of Athens and Syracuse, and had predicted, from the Neoplatonic
viewpoint at least, the return of the age of gold.[51] However, his
acquaintance with Christian, and specifically with Au-
― 27 ―

gustinian, historiography and with Joachimite prophecy had also exposed

him to the contrary notion of a linear time with its successions: the reigns
of nature, law, and grace; the four monarchies of Daniel 2:31–45 and 7:17–
27; the six historical epochs as defined, for instance, in Augustine's City of
God 22.30; the seven kingdoms of Revelation 17.10—the Jesse tree of
durations, however numbered, in the history of man and his generations.
How then to reconcile the two, since, given his Platonic (and we might add
his humanist) assumptions, he was unwilling to accept Augustine's
outright rejection in the City of God 12.14 of a cyclical dimension to time?
I shall suggest in Chapter 4 that, a syncretist by temperament, he seems
to have been drawn rather to the notion of a third temporal order as it
were mediating between us and eternity: a spiraling providential time that
governs alike the cyclical realm of the stars and the transitory linear
history of the sublunar realm that gazes on and depends upon those stars.

Fundamental in this regard is the haunting presence in his mind not only
of Hesiod's myth of the golden age and the possibility of its return[52] —
predictably so, given Plato's own allusion to Hesiod at the close of his
description of the fatal number at 546E ff.—but also, and more
importantly, of the myth of the Demiurge in the Timaeus and of the
mathematical and musical formulas presented there for the composition
of the World-Soul.[53] For this creation myth, which problematizes for us
the dualism of other prominent dialogues such as the Phaedo , presented
Ficino with a Plato who was a visionary historian, an Attic Moses in
Numenius's memorable phrase, whose intuitive, whose prophetic
intelligence had been granted an insight both into the actual numbers of
time, and thus into their concomitant geometrical figures and ratios, and
into the numerical Ideas according to which the Demiurge and his sons
had first fashioned a spatiotemporal reality in the image of the true and
the good.
― 28 ―

In order to arrive at an understanding of Ficino's determination of the

fatal number, we must eventually tread some unfamiliar mathematical
ground. For an introduction to his approach to Platonic mathematics and
to its close links with harmonics and therefore with music and astronomy,
we cannot do better, however, than to turn to a concluding section of his
epitome for the Epinomis . Ficino thought of this apocryphal dialogue—the
author is probably Philip of Opus or another member of the early
Academy[54] —as Plato's authentic appendix to the Laws (as its name
suggests), and therefore as being endowed with the singular and august
authority he attributed to Plato's last work.[55] It has a particular
pertinence here in that earlier at 978B ff. the Athenian Stranger had been
held to assert that the origin of our sense of numbers derives from our
gazing up at the night sky and especially at the changing countenance of
the Moon.[56] The Epinomis epitome was probably written in the early
1470s and provides us with a general framework for an understanding of
Ficino's more advanced treatment of individual topics in the commentaries
on the Timaeus and eventually in the De Numero Fatali .

He is epitomizing the section (990C–991B) on the progression from

arithmetic to geometry and then to stereometry.[57] To begin with, he
writes, numbers are "in themselves incorporeal" (990C), because they "are
nothing other than the number 1 repeated" and 1 is indivisible and
therefore without body. Following a Pythagorean formula (found, for
instance, in Aristotle's De Caelo 1.1.268a7 ff. and De Anima 1.2.404b21 ff.
and repeated throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages), Ficino proceeds
to plot number geometrically as first a point, then a line, then a plane
(superficies ), and finally a volume (profundum ). Hence there are three
kinds of divisible numbers after the one as the indivisible point: linear,
planar, and solid. Thus the doubling of 1 makes the linear 2, which in turn
becomes the square 4 and eventually the cube 8 (991A).
― 29 ―

The perfect proportion or ratio[58] is the double, and this "contains all the
[other] proportions within itself." In effect, Ficino is concerned only with
the three primary ratios that govern both music and the cosmos: those of
the double (for us the ratio of 2:1), of the sesquialteral (i.e., of one and a
half to one—the ratio of 3:2), and of the sesquitertial (i.e., of one and a
third to one—the ratio of 4:3). These ratios he sees Plato deriving from the
first four numbers, the Pythagoreans' tetraktys, which when added
together make up ten. The four numbers, in short, encode two
fundamental kinds of relationship: that of being arithmetically equal to
and that of being geometrically proportional to. This is self-evident of
course, but fraught with Pythagorean and Platonic implications, not least
in the spheres of ethics and of politics.[59]

With these primary ratios Ficino moves to the equivalent musical intervals
of the diapason, the diapente, and the diatesseron, the "consonances" or
harmonic ratios of the octave (2:1), the perfect fifth (3:2), and the perfect
fourth (4:3) respectively. And this musical extension leads in turn: first, to
the Pythagorean theory of the music of the spheres and the Sirens' song
which Plato identified with it in the Republic at 616B–617E, where each
Siren sings one of the eight notes of the octave; and, second, to the
theory of harmonious proportions governing the cosmos and thus the
distances between the Earth, the various planetary spheres, and the
firmament of the fixed stars. Hence Ficino sees Plato postulating that "the
interval" (with a play upon both the spatial and the musical meanings)
from the Earth to the Sun compared to the interval from the Sun to the
firmament of the fixed stars is in the proportion of 3:2 to 4:3, the first
ratio creating the harmony of the diapente, the second that of the
diatesseron. The diatesseron is also the harmony created by the interval
between the Earth and the Moon.[60]
― 30 ―

These summary remarks are sufficient for us to see the nature for Ficino
of the inextricable links between number theory, geometry, harmonics,
and Chaldaean-Ptolemaic cosmology. He had inherited these directly of
course from Plato and then from the Neoplatonists, but also from the
medieval tradition and more particularly from his youthful study of
Calcidius's commentary on the Timaeus. [61] The web of debts and
influences may be a complicated one, but it is all of a piece.

The Epinomis epitome also emphasizes, as do many other passages in

Ficino's commentaries, the Platonic significance of the number 12, 12
being the number of the world spheres—the eight celestial and the four
elementary—in the Chaldaean system which Plato inherited.[62] Under the
World-Soul, Ficino writes, there are twelve souls for the twelve spheres,
and within each sphere there are twelve orders of rational souls. In the
eight celestial spheres we find the eight orders of souls of the
constellations and stars; on earth, the one order of men (and we might
add of the lowest daemons); and in the aether (fire), air, and water, the
three orders of the higher daemons. From the onset, that is, there is a
dramatic contrast between the fingers-and-toes world of 10 and the
duodecimal world of the rational souls, divine, daemonic, and human,
encompassing as it does the primary ratios and musical harmonies.

Before entering further into an account of the duodecimal mysteries Ficino

saw at the heart of the Republic' s reference to a geometric number, I
think it useful to conclude this opening chapter with a review of the
ancient texts Ficino probably turned to for guidance, though none of them
is a source as such, since none of them provided
― 31 ―

him with "the answer."[63] Ironically, the one Neoplatonic treatise he

would surely have been most excited and convinced by, Proclus's
thirteenth treatise in his Republic Commentary, was completely unknown
to him and to his contemporaries, as we shall see; and the work he looked
to most consistently for help with Platonic mathematics, a treatise by
Theon of Smyrna, a Middle Platonist, has nothing whatsoever to say about
Plato's great mathematical crux.[64] In fact, Ficino's best guides remained
the other texts of Plato himself, as our analysis of the Epinomis epitome
has already in part indicated, though Auguste Diès has suggested,
perversely, that Plato may have wanted to throw his readers off the scent
by endowing technical terms here with different meanings than he had
allotted them elsewhere.[65]

As always with a medieval and Renaissance scholar, the question of

"sources" is complicated; in Ficino's case particularly so, given his eclectic
methods and wide scholarship, his continual reworking of ideas and motifs
throughout his life, his recourse at times to secondary guides—compendia,
epitomes, and digests—and on occasions his failure (or perhaps his refusal
even) to identify his authorities, let alone his specific sources. One should
add, however, that his scholarly standards, if we compare them with those
of the majority of his contemporaries, were exceptionally rigorous.

We know by virtue of his explicit reference that he knew Theon of

Smyrna's three-book (originally apparently five-book) treatise, Expositio
Rerum Mathematicarum ad Legendum Platonero Utilium , an elementary
work in Greek on arithmetic and the types of numbers, and on the theory
of musical harmony and astronomy. It is valuable for its citations from a
number of pre-Euclidean mathematicians, and notably for its long
passages quoted verbatim from Adrastus of Aphrodisias and Thrasyllus.
Indeed, John Dillon asserts that it is "essentially a compilation from these
two immediate sources."[66] Dating from the
― 32 ―

first half of the second century A.D. , it is usually referred to by its Latin
title simply as the Expositio .[67] We can deduce, furthermore, from a
notice in a letter Ficino wrote to Angelo Poliziano on 6 September 1474 or
shortly thereafter,[68] that sometime before that Ficino had translated
the first part of the Expositio into Latin, though he never published the
translation and had probably never intended to publish it. It has only
survived, albeit anonymously, in the Vatican library's MS Vat. lat. 4530,
fols. 119–151, and in Hamburg's Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek's MS
cod. philol. 305, fols. 139–191v (a manuscript that was copied from the
Vatican MS by Lucas Holstenius in the seventeenth century).[69] Though
anonymous, the Expositio follows in both manuscripts upon a Latin
version, which has been convincingly attributed to Ficino, of Iamblichus's
De Secta Pythagorica Libri Quattuor , a collection of four treatises
consisting of the De Vita Pythagorica , the Protrepticus , the De Communi
Mathematica Scientia , and the In Nicomachi Arithmeticam Introductionem
.[70] In Sebastiano Gen-
― 33 ―

tile's words there is no doubting the Theon translation's "paternità

ficiniana."[71] Moreover, if Gentile is correct in arguing that the
"translations" of the treatises constituting the De Secta Pythagorica show
the telltale signs of being among Ficino's earliest attempts (being too
literal and at the same time inexact) and that they were therefore
probably written prior to 1464,[72] then it would suggest a similarly early
dating for the Theon translation, even though our first notice of it is in the
Poliziano letter. I have placed "translations" in quotation marks, however,
because my own cursory examination of Ficino's rendering of the In
Nicomachi Arithmeticam encountered paraphrasing, summarizing, and
some omissions (though not on the scale of that found in the De Vita
Pythagorica ). Thus, we should probably think of the Iamblichus collection
not just as an early but as a personal, working translation only; and this
may also be true, as Gentile has suggested, of Ficino's work on Theon. The
question awaits further investigation. Presumably, Ficino's copy text for
the Expositio was the Laurenziana's 85.9, folios 12v–26r, part of the huge
codex he had received from Cosimo de' Medici in 1462 containing the
Plato text he was to use principally for his great translation.73
Another parallel resource for Ficino might have been the better organized
but less sophisticated treatise, again in Greek, by the Neopythagorean
Nicomachus of Gerasa (who probably flourished also in the first half of the
second century A.D. ), the two-book Arithmetica Introductio .
Nevertheless, this too has nothing specific to say about Plato's number
except for a passing allusion at 2.24.11 to the effect that some of the
things Nicomachus has just discussed are best illuminated by Plato in the
passage in the Republic (i.e., at 546A ff.).[74] The
[73]
― 34 ―

Introductio was translated into Latin by Apuleius, according to a notice by

Cassiodorus, though the translation has not survived.[75] The work was
apparently unknown to the younger but still contemporary Theon, but was
commented upon expansively by Iamblichus in one of his "Pythagorean"
treatises, the In Nicomachi Arithmeticam, [76] and therefore translated
with the others by Ficino, as we have seen. It was also commented upon
by Philoponus, by Sotericos, and by Asclepius of Tralles; and it was
translated, paraphrased, expanded here and condensed there by Boethius
in his De Institutione Arithmetica , and reproduced in part and more
distantly by Martianus Capella, Isidore of Seville, and Cassiodorus.[77] In
fact, Ficino's vague allusion to Boethius at one point may be to the De
Institutione Arithmetica in general or specifically to 2.46 (which is
rendering Nicomachus's Introductio 2.24.11 and therefore refers to Plato's
"nuptial" passage in the Republic 8); however, it could equally well be to
Boethius's De Institutione Musica or to various passages in his many
commentaries on Aristotle.[78]

Finally, there is the possibility that he might have known the anonymous
Theologumena Arithmeticae , which includes notice of Nicomachus's
views.[79] This is often attributed to Iamblichus but may indeed be by
Nicomachus; for Nicomachus certainly wrote a treatise of
― 35 ―

that name.[80] Interestingly, a manuscript containing the Theologumena

appears in the Laurenziana as Plut. 71.30. It has notations by Poliziano
(though these are not on the Theologumena , which appears on fols. 92–
145) and was copied apparently from a manuscript of Bessarion's now in
the Marciana as Marc. gr. 234 (667).[81] The two manuscripts and others
assuredly testify to the awareness at least of the text in Platonic circles.

We should also recall a tradition surely known to Ficino from Marinus's

Vita Procli 28 to the effect that Proclus claimed to be the reincarnation of
Nicomachus's soul, having been born 216 years after Nicomachus's death.
Two hundred and sixteen years is the Pythagorean number assigned to
the interval between lives, since it is the cube of 6 and also the sum of the
cubes of the three numbers of the perfect Pythagorean triangle, i.e., of 3,
4, and 5.[82] This would effectively invest Nicomachus with Proclus's
authority, or at least validate his status as a Platonist-Pythagorean.
Nevertheless, Ficino never mentions him anywhere in his Opera even
though he must have known of him.

In the argumentum for the Republic book 8, having dismissed Theon,

Ficino dismisses Iamblichus also, declaring that although Iamblichus had
tried to unravel Plato's knot, he had only succeeded in making it the
tighter. This is an explicit reference either to Iamblichus's In Nicomachi
Arithmeticam 82.20–24, 83.13–18, or, more probably, to his De Vita
Pythagorica 27.130–131, though in neither passage does Iamblichus
determine Plato's number.[83]
― 36 ―

Ficino probably scanned two other ancient authorities—both of them

eminent Platonici in his genealogical tree of the Platonic wisdom—for their
views on Plato's celebrated crux, though he only mentions one of them
once and in passing in his De Numero Fatali .

In his notable essay, De Iside et Osiride 56 (Moralia 373F ff.), Plutarch

(A.D. c. 46–c. 120) speaks of the right-angled scalene triangle so dear to
the Pythagoreans, and observes parenthetically that "Plato seems to avail
himself of this triangle in the Republic in order to form the nuptial figure
(to gamêlion diagramma syntattôn ). In it the vertical side is worth 3, the
base 4, and the hypotenuse, whose square equals the sum of the squares
of the other two sides, is worth 5." It is "the most beautiful of triangles" to
Plutarch (presumably because all three sides are rational whole
numbers).[84] This would have certainly confirmed Ficino's assumption,
which he derived from Aristotle's gloss, that 12 was the secret key to the
Platonic riddle. It also suggests, as Depuis notes, that Plutarch was
unfamiliar with any comprehensive interpretation of the passage.[85]
Schneider, Dupuis, and others have
― 37 ―

adduced too a similar passage from the treatise On Music 3.23 by

Aristides Quintilianus (probably third or fourth century A.D. ); but it is less
likely though not impossible that Ficino had read it. It argues that "the
sides of the triangle being 3, 4, and 5, if we take the sum of them, we
obtain the number 12; . . . the sides at the right angle are in the
relationship of epitritus [4:3], and it is the root of epitritus added to 5 that
Plato is referring to [in the Republic ]."[86] The observations here not only
speak to the importance of the Pythagoreans' "beautiful" triangle but
underscore the importance of the sum of its sides being 12, and the fact
that the "root" of epitritus means 3 plus 4. We might note that other
Plutarchan essays familiar to Ficino address a variety of related
mathematical topics: these include the De Musica 22 on the harmonic
means; the De E apud Delphos on the properties of the number 5; and, as
we have seen, the De Animae Procreatione in Timaeo Platonis , especially
chapters 11–20 and 29–30, on Plato's philosophy of numbers and the
harmonic means and intervals.[87]

The second authority, and the most problematic, was certainly Proclus
(A.D. 412–485), the Platonist Ficino knew most thoroughly after Plato and
Plotinus and to whom he was deeply indebted throughout his career.
Indeed, Ficino must have at one time turned to the Successor as his best
hope. For he first encountered the opening half of Proclus's huge
commentary on the Republic in 1492, after Janus Lascaris had purchased a
manuscript of the first twelve treatises in Greece, probably in Crete, and
sent it in excellent condition to Florence to Lorenzo's library, where it
eventually became the Laurenziana's 80.9.[88] Ficino must have borrowed
it almost immediately,
― 38 ―

for we have a note attesting to his loan dated 7 July 1492.[89] By as early
as 3 August 1492 he had gathered some "flowers" from its "delightful
meadows" which he epitomized in a letter to his close friend Martinus
Uranius (alias Prenninger) and later published in 1495 in the eleventh
book of his Letters .[90] However, from Proclus's massive treatise Ficino
received in fact no illumination. For the meadows he had wandered in
treat only of the first seven books of the Republic , and Proclus does not
deal with the Discourse of the Muses in book 8 until his thirteenth
treatise, the Melissa . But this Ficino and his contemporaries could not
have known, since the second half of Proclus's commentary—now the
Vatican's MS Vat. gr. 2197—did not arrive in the West until years later
(how many exactly I cannot discover)[91] and was for all intents and
purposes hidden from the scholarly world until the appearance in 1886 of
Richard Schoell's edition.[92] Thus, notwithstanding his erudition,
Schneider was completely unaware of its existence in 1830, and even
more tellingly Dupuis was unaware of it as late as 1881. As Diès observes,
"les recherches sur le nombre géométrique de Platon durent se
poursuivre, même après la Renaissance,
― 39 ―

comme si Proclus n'eût pas existé."[93] Furthermore, even had Ficino

been able to gain access by some stroke of fortune to this second half, his
interpretative skills would have been challenged to the utmost, for its
leaves, and notably those containing the Melissa , had probably already
sustained some at least of their present damage.[94]

While he did not know the pertinent treatise of Proclus's commentary on

the Republic , however, he was certainly well acquainted with Proclus's
Timaeus Commentary and its detailed analysis of the loci mathematici in
that dialogue. Also, it is just possible he had skimmed through Proclus's
commentary on the first book of Euclid where there are some obvious
references to Plato's passage. The prologue, for instance, declares first
that "matters pertaining to powers (dunameis ) . . . whether they be roots
or squares . . . Socrates in the Republic puts into the mouth of the loftily-
speaking Muses, bringing together in determinate limits the elements
common to all mathematical ratios and setting them up in specific
numbers by which the periods of fruitful birth and its opposite,
unfruitfulness, can be discerned"; and then again that the Republic 's
"geometrical number" is "the factor that de-
― 40 ―
termines whether births will be better or worse."[95] However, in the
analysis of proposition 47 near the very end of his commentary, having
noted that the hypotenuse and side of an isosceles right triangle cannot
both be expressed in rational numbers, Proclus turns to the Pythagoreans'
"beautiful" scalene, where indeed the "square on the side subtending the
right angle is equal to the squares on the sides containing it," and boldly
declares, perhaps echoing Plutarch, "Such is the triangle in the Republic ,
where sides of three and four contain the right angle and a side of five
subtends it."[96] By contrast, as we shall see, Ficino will take up the
isosceles triangle, not the exemplary scalene, as the key to Plato's
mystery. Characteristically, moreover, he will fail to mention Proclus at all
in his De Numero Fatali ,[97] except to say once, at the end of chapter 7,
that Plotinus and Proclus had proven "most subtly that numbers exist in
the prime being itself as the first distinguishers there both of beings and
of ideas."

Indeed, given Ficino's profound, acknowledged, and lasting indebtedness

to Plotinus, and given that he had just finished translating and analyzing
the Enneads in their entirety—his Plotini Enneades being published in
1492—we might have expected certain Plotinian treatises to be in the
forefront of his mind; and notably perhaps 6.6 [34 in the chronological
order] entitled "On Numbers," one of the great meditations of Plotinus's
maturity. But Plotinus's concerns here are exclusively ontological, and he
gives no indication of being influenced by, or interested in, the
arithmological tradition as developed
― 41 ―

by the Pythagoreans.[98] For him, as apparently for the later Plato,

ordinary quantitative numbers are merely images of the ideal numbers,
which, he argues, on the basis of his metaphysical conviction that the One
is above Being, are in Intellect but higher than other Ideas. These ideal
numbers are thus at the very apex of the intelligible world and serve as
the principles of being, as the highest level of Ideas, as the measures of
all reality. Indeed, according to Porphyry's Life 14.7–10, Plotinus seems to
have dismissed the preoccupations of ordinary mathematicians as
irrelevant to the philosopher, though he was well acquainted with Plato's
various mathematical concerns and alludes to the account in the Timaeus
39BC and 47A ff. of the origins of man's idea of number in his exposure to
the alternation of night and day. Indeed, despite the De Numero Fatali and
various disquisitions of his own on the musical proportions, Ficino
probably willingly embraced this Plotinian dismissal, sanctioned as it was
by such passages in the Republic as 7.529CD where Socrates insists that
genuinely philosophical astronomy is concerned with "true" number and
figure and not with the visible motions of the heavenly bodies. Be that as
it may, the larger underlying issues of the passage in the Republic 8,
namely the nature and function of the celestial circuits and their role in
the providential plan, and the question of man's freedom of choice in the
midst of a sensible reality governed by destiny, are very much Plotinian
issues and figure prominently in 3.2–3 [47–48], the late treatise on
providence, in 2.3 [52], the even later treatise on astrology, and in 3.1 [3],
the early treatise on destiny. Nonetheless, despite his fundamental
Plotinianism, one does not sense here the presence, or at least the
pressure, of Plotinian texts, except perhaps in his concluding chapter on
astrology.[99]
― 42 ―

In short, having found no guidance earlier in the Platonic tradition, and

having wandered earnestly in the "delightful meadows" of the first twelve
treatises of Proclus's Republic Commentary that had come to his attention
as late as 1492 and still found nothing, Ficino must have gradually
concluded that he would have to attempt an independent explication of
the geometric number. For the mathematical treatises of Theon, of
Nicomachus, and of Iamblichus, the extant philosophical treatises of his
two most revered Platonic authorities, Plotinus and Proclus, the essays
even of Plutarch—all had maintained a judicious Pythagorean silence. The
sources of Ficino's wider knowledge of astronomy, judicial astrology, and
harmonics are of course another matter, but would include Ptolemy,
Calcidius, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, Proclus again, Boethius, and a
number of medieval figures, along with medieval epitomes and
handbooks.

Thus the starting point for him clearly remained: first, the contentious
passage in the fifth book of Aristotle's Politics ; and second, what Plato
had to say about the cosmological significance of numbers and their
proportions in the Timaeus [100] and Epinomis . These texts—
― 43 ―

along of course with the Platonic lemmata of 546A-D[101] —account for

the musical and astronomical-astrological cast of the argument
throughout Ficino's De Numero Fatali , and for its concern with why a
perfectly constituted state must necessarily decline along with all other
things after what is a finite term, however vast, however indeterminable it
may seem in the darkened glass of our understandings. At stake, as the
last chapter testifies, is the status of astrological disposition and
influence in the providential order, and thus the problematic relationship
between man's divinely ordained freedom and the motion of the stars—the
relationship, that is, between transitory human time and what the
Timaeus 40C calls the intricate "choric dances" of celestial time.
― 44 ―
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