In the winter of 1437–38 a delegation of Greeks sailed to Italy to argue about the Holy Spirit. The Byzantine Empire had shrunk to Constantinople, the Peloponnese and a few islands, and the emperor needed Western armies. The price was reunion with Rome. The council opened at Ferrara in 1438 and moved to Florence the next year, and among the scholars who came with the emperor was a man of about eighty who had been born George Gemistos and is known to posterity by a name he kept, in his lifetime, for his secret book: Plethon.
He was a layman, and the emperor had told the laymen in his party not to speak in the theological debate. He sat in the sessions and intervened once. Asked later by Bessarion why he had never used his arguments at the Council, he answered that he did not think it right, as a layman, to intervene in a debate among priests. Between sessions, from a sickbed in Florence, he set down for the Italians who had asked him the differences between Plato and Aristotle. The resulting treatise started an argument that ran for the rest of the century.
That is the part everyone agrees on. What Plethon was actually teaching is less familiar, and it is the reason this series begins with him.
A book of oracles
Plethon carried with him, or produced soon after, a small edition of sixty Greek hexameters. They were fragments of a work modern scholars call the Chaldaean Oracles, a second-century collection of oracles in verse that had come down through Neoplatonic commentary and survived in Byzantium chiefly because Michael Psellos had written on it in the eleventh century.
Plethon gave his edition a title. Magical Oracles of the Magi descended from Zoroaster.
He forged nothing. Every line in his text is already in Psellos. His copy is shorter, and why is disputed. Polymnia Athanassiadi argues that he cut six of Psellos’ oracles to suit his own pagan and anti-ascetic theology. Dylan Burns thinks some of the differences are what centuries of copying do to a text on their own. What Plethon supplied for certain was the heading, and the heading moved the text back by several thousand years, on his own dating of Zoroaster, and several thousand miles east. Woodhouse notes that the composition is attributed to Julianus the Chaldaean and his son Julianus the Theurgist in the second century, and that there is no authentic ground for associating it with Zoroaster or the Persian Magi. The loose association may be older than Plethon. Burns, following Bidez and Cumont, thinks the theurgic Neoplatonists had probably already felt the Oracles had something to do with Zoroaster, on the strength of Plutarch’s interest in him. What nobody had done before was put the name at the head of the text. Michael Stausberg, whose history of Zoroaster in early modern Europe is the standard account, gives the episode its own heading. The invention of a Zoroaster pseudepigraph.
Stausberg also makes the point that matters for everything that follows. Plethon’s title is programmatic and not historical. It is a claim about where truth comes from, dressed as a bibliographical fact.
Readers of this series will meet that manoeuvre again and again. Half a century later the Dominican Annius of Viterbo announced ancient monuments unearthed at Viterbo, and in 1498 published the collection of recovered texts they had been dug up to corroborate. The most influential was a chronicle of the world attributed to the Babylonian priest Berosus, and Europe spent two hundred years arguing with a book Annius had written himself. Dylan Burns puts Plethon beside the most famous case of all. Frances Yates opens her history of the Renaissance Hermetic tradition with the mistake that made it possible, Lactantius dating the writings of Hermes Trismegistus to the age of Moses. Burns points out that there is a second error of sourcing, closely entwined with the first, of which little is said, and it is this one.
Two texts, two mis-datings, the same move. One of them became famous. The other became the head of the chain.
One difference, and this series turns on it. Annius wrote Berosus himself. Plethon wrote none of the sixty lines he set down. He had an old text, an imperfect copy of it, a rule that age decides, and sources telling him the Magi were the oldest teachers in the world. The title followed. Burns argues the case against reading him as a fraud, and it is worth having whole. There is no need, he writes, to imagine Plethon as some demented antichrist maliciously slapping Zoroaster’s name on the Chaldean Oracles to attack Christendom and confound modern historians. Neoplatonic to the core, he betrays no sense of cunning, cynicism or sarcasm in his writings, despite his occasional ferocity or harshness. Moreover, he speaks of Zoroaster so reverently that one cannot imagine that his mistaken attribution of the Oracles to the Persian sage was intentional; and to leave the matter as a case of philological naiveté is uncurious and boring (a great Zoroastrian sin!).
Neither a liar nor a fool, then. A man with a method. Most of the people in this archive are the same, which is why it documents what was in print and what readers did with it rather than ranking motives. The forgeries matter. The honest mistakes matter more, because those are the ones that lasted.
The method has a name. Burns calls Plethon a “Platonic Orientalist,” using a term coined by John Walbridge, and describes him as “deriving from Neoplatonic sources a fascination with the exotic, decadent East as the source of arcane mystical wisdom.” Wouter Hanegraaff has since made Platonic Orientalism the starting point of his history of Western esotericism. It is the belief that Plato did not invent his philosophy but received it, as one link in a chain of sages reaching back to the East. Plethon did not have to discover that belief. He had only to decide who stood at the head of the chain.
What he actually taught
Plethon’s own religion has to be read in a book that no longer exists in full. The Nomoi, his book of laws, was burned after his death by George Scholarios, who as Gennadios had become patriarch of Constantinople, and survives in the chapter lists and hymns Scholarios kept to justify the burning, and in the partial copies Plethon’s pupils had made. Charles Alexandre gathered what was left and printed it in Paris in 1858 with Augustin Pellissier’s French translation. It is still the edition everyone cites, and the English renderings below are made from it.
In the second chapter of the first book, Plethon names his authorities. He begins with Zoroaster, the most ancient of those whose names have come down to us, who revealed the truth about divine things to the Medes, the Persians and most of the other ancient peoples of Asia. Then the lawgivers, Eumolpus who founded the Eleusinian mysteries to teach the immortality of the soul, Minos for Crete, Lycurgus for Sparta, Iphitus and Numa.
Then the sages, and here the list opens outward. Among the barbarians, the Brahmans of India and the Magi of Media; among the Greeks, above all the Kouretes, the most ancient in memory.
After the Kouretes come the priests of Zeus at Dodona and the interpreters of his oracles, the diviner Polyidus, Teiresias, who “developed most brilliantly the theory of the migrations of the soul and its endless returns to the earth,” and Cheiron, tutor of heroes. Then the Seven Sages by name. Then Pythagoras and Plato. Then Parmenides, Timaeus, Plutarch, Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus.
The Kouretes are not a passing name. Book II of the Nomoi carries a chapter titled on the worship of the gods according to the Kouretes, so that Plethon’s own religion, by his own heading, has a Greek name rather than a Persian one. Ancient sources made them Cretan, lawgivers and specialists in rite, and in Apollodorus it is the Kouretes whose riddle leads Minos to the seer Polyidus, a little further down Plethon’s list.
It is a chain, and it is a chain with a history. The Kouretes, Plethon says, restored a doctrine that had been lost. The teaching about the gods of the second and third rank and the eternity of the world had been destroyed among the Greeks by the Giants, whom he is careful to describe not as monsters but as “impious men who fought against the gods.” The Kouretes defeated them by the compulsion of irrefutable arguments, and the doctrine came back.
It is worth pausing on what the Giants believed. Plethon says they held all things mortal except the one eldest begetter. Pellissier renders it that everything is mortal save the sole creator, the ancient principle of all things. Set beside the Kouretes, who restored the eternity of the lesser gods and of the cosmos, the Giants are in effect monotheists, and that is how Opsopaus reads them. Nearly every later figure in this series assumes the first religion was monotheist and that polytheism is the corruption. Plethon runs it the other way. In his account monotheism is the heresy, and what was restored was the many.
A first teaching, a fall, a recovery, and a named line of men who carried it. Written in Greek in a fortress town in the Peloponnese, over many years. Scholarios says he had indications of the work before the Council as well as later in Italy.
Two rules
What makes Plethon the right man to open this series is not the list. Lists of ancient sages were common. It is that he states the rules by which the list was built, and they are the rules the next four hundred years will run on.
The first rule is antiquity. In the same chapter, directly after the list, he explains how to tell a sage from a sophist. Sages hold opinions always in harmony with older beliefs, so that by their very antiquity the true doctrines prevail over the erroneous ones, whereas the sophists aim always at novelty.
Age is not evidence for the truth. Age is the truth’s signature. A doctrine that agrees with older doctrine is thereby shown to be sound, and the man who offers something new has confessed that he has nothing.
The rule was not his invention. Hanegraaff, describing the first Christian centuries in a lecture, puts the shared assumption plainly: “Anything that was new had to be superficial. Anything that was profound had to show that it was old.” The Christian apologists had used the rule to make their own faith older than the Greeks, by putting Moses at the head. Plethon kept the rule and changed the name at the top.
He meant it as law. Woodhouse quotes a provision of the Nomoi that any sophist convicted of philosophising contrary to these doctrines of ours shall be burnt alive, and notes that when Plethon wrote sophist he regularly meant an Orthodox theologian, men such as Scholarios. The code prescribed the fire for the kind of man who would one day light it.
The second rule is agreement. Plethon’s authorities are to be trusted, in Woodhouse’s rendering, “since all of them have agreed with each other on most of the important questions,” and so “they are regarded by the majority of right-thinking men at all periods as having expressed the most authoritative views.” Scattered witnesses who concur must be reporting something they did not invent.
Antiquity and consensus. Hold those two together and you have a method, and the method has a consequence its users rarely noticed. It rewards whoever can produce the oldest document, and it rewards whoever can produce the widest agreement. Both are forgeable.
There is a third rule behind both, and it is the one the chapter on Egypt and the chapter on India depend on. In the closing chapter of the Nomoi Plethon attributes his doctrines to Zoroaster and then denies in the same breath that they began with him. Not thinking that they began from him, he writes, for these true doctrines are coeternal with the whole heaven and among men. Pellissier has it that these principles, as old as the world, have existed in all ages among men. Zoroaster is the oldest expounder whose name has reached us, not the author. The head of the chain is not a man at all, and the doctrine sometimes prevails among more men and sometimes among fewer.
Augustine had said something very like it. The true religion, he wrote, in Edgar Wind’s translation, “was with the human race from its beginning,” and only later “began to be called the Christian.” Plethon’s sentence is Augustine’s with the last clause removed. The doctrine is as old as the world, and it never becomes Christian.
Plethon used the method himself. In 1450 he wrote a funeral oration for Helena Dragas, widow of Manuel II and mother of the last two emperors, and argued the immortality of the soul from the consent of nations, naming them in order. The Iberians, the Celts, the Hyrcanians, the Thracians, the Hellenes, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Medes and the Indians.
Who is missing
Several names are absent from Plethon’s list, and each absence is doing work.
Hermes Trismegistus. The Egyptian sage who would dominate the next century of European thought does not appear. C. M. Woodhouse, reviewing Plethon’s sources, singles out two notable absentees, the Jewish Kabbalah and the Graeco-Egyptian writings attributed to Hermes, and observes that neither is ever mentioned. The surviving works confirm it. There is no Hermes Trismegistus in them by name.
This was not ignorance. Vojtech Hladky traces Plethon’s material on Egypt to Diodorus Siculus, whom Plethon excerpted, and suspects the same source behind his Indians. Diodorus lists the ancient lawgivers and the gods each claimed to have received his laws from, and Hermes is there, invoked by the first lawgiver of Egypt, alongside Minos, Zoroaster, Zalmoxis and Moses. Plethon had the passage. He made a different list.
Nor was Hermes left out for want of a category. Plethon’s canon is two lists, the lawgivers and then, in his own words, the other sages, and that second list holds a diviner, a seer, a centaur, the men who read the oracles at Dodona, and an open place for others. There was a shelf for a sage who revealed rather than legislated. Plethon did not use it.
What there is, in the Nomoi, is Hermes the god. He stands among the legitimate children of Zeus with a defined office, authority over the terrestrial daemons, the lowest rank of the subordinate divinities, and he is named daily in the afternoon address to Poseidon. Plethon kept the god and gave him a department. What he would not have was the author.
One reading says the absence is only nominal. Brigitte Tambrun-Krasker has argued that the Egyptian priests who appear in the last chapter of the Nomoi are Hermes under a veil, passed over in silence because the Church Fathers had coupled Hermes with Moses; Siniossoglou finds the suggestion plausible, while Hladky records the absence and offers a plainer reason, that Hermes, like Orpheus, was never a lawgiver. Either way the name is not there, and the section on Egypt below shows what Plethon did with the country instead.
Diodorus did not stay unused. In 1482 Lodovico Lazzarelli, citing an earlier book of the same historian, the one on the dynasties of the gods, put Hermes long before Moses, in the age when gods reigned in Egypt. The author Plethon had excerpted and set aside became, a generation later, the warrant for Zoroaster’s rival.
Orpheus. Ficino’s mature sequence will run Zoroaster, Hermes, Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, Plato. Only the first of the six came to him from Plethon. The rest he had already, and Orpheus heads the succession he copied into his own manuscript of Proclus by 1463, before, so far as anyone can show, he had read Plethon. Tambrun-Krasker notes that Orpheus is missing from both the opening list of the Nomoi and the closing one, and that where Plethon does name him, twice in the Reply to Scholarios, he is filed at once among the poets who deformed what philosophy had revealed about the gods. That is a stated reason, and unlike the silence about Hermes it is Plethon’s own. The chapter that names the guides begins by ruling poets and sophists out as guides in such matters.
Moses and Jesus. Niketas Siniossoglou puts it plainly. Moses and Jesus are excluded from the list of sages in the first book of the Nomoi. For a thousand years Christian scholarship had run the opposite argument. Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius of Caesarea had placed Moses upstream of Greek philosophy, so that whatever the Greeks knew they had taken from Hebrew scripture. Plethon kept the architecture and reversed the flow. Tambrun-Krasker identifies the move he used to do it. It is Celsus’, the second-century pagan critic whom Origen answered at length, and it consists in passing over Moses in silence on the ground that he was not the first wise lawgiver at all but, in her phrase, the gravedigger of polytheism. Plethon reached back past twelve hundred years of Christian argument and picked up, through Origen, the pagan objection that the argument had been built to answer. The oldest witness is Persian, and the biblical line is not in the chain at all.
That reversal is the hinge of this series. Once the oldest thing in the world can be something other than scripture, the search is open, and it will run through Egypt, India, China, the Druids and the mounds of the Ohio valley before it is done.
George of Trebizond claimed to have heard Plethon say the rest of it out loud at Florence. The whole world, in a few years, would adopt one and the same religion, with one mind, one intelligence, one teaching. Asked whether he meant Christ’s or Muhammad’s, Plethon answered neither, but one not differing from paganism. Trebizond loathed him and the story has been called a fabrication, though Woodhouse holds that it has been called so without good reason. Woodhouse then draws the consequence as a plain inference, and it is the engine of this entire archive stated in one sentence. If there were a common substratum to all religions, it would be natural to identify it with the oldest known form of religion.
Egypt, and why it froze
There is one more absence, and it is the strangest, because Egypt is the country the next two centuries will be obsessed with.
Plethon knew about Egyptian antiquity. He simply refused to credit it. In the Nomoi he grants that the Egyptian priests came to hold principles resembling Zoroaster’s, then denies they received them from Men, the first king of Egypt. They worked them out later, by their own leisure for wisdom, and by then they could not act on them. Men had forbidden any change to ancestral law, “even in the smallest thing.” So the priests understood the truth while the people went on with rites that Plethon calls worthless.
Alexandre, printing the passage in 1858, thought he had caught Plethon breaking his own rule. In his text Men is older than Zoroaster by three thousand years, and is condemned anyway, in rather harsh terms. Woodhouse followed him. But Alexandre had emended the manuscript to get there. Hladky restores the reading, and the arithmetic changes. Zoroaster is dated more than five thousand years before the return of the Heraclids, Men more than three thousand, both counted from the same point. Men is old. Zoroaster is older, as Plethon says on the same page. The rule held.
It held because the authority Plethon trusted had already done the ranking. Diogenes Laertius, who supported the enormous date for Zoroaster that Plethon took from Plutarch, also claims that the Magi are more ancient than the Egyptians, and Hladky suspects this is one of the reasons, perhaps the main one, that Plethon put Zoroaster first of all. He did not bend his method to reach Persia. Egypt lost on the calendar.
Egypt in Plethon is not a source. It is a warning about what happens to a tradition with bad laws that forbids itself to change.
Eleven years after his death, Florence would put Egypt back into the chain, at its head for about a year and then a step below Persia, and the Hermetic writings kept their authority there until Isaac Casaubon broke their chronology in 1614.
The branch that lived and the branch that died
The passage that matters most to the rest of this series sits in the last chapter of the Nomoi, the one Alexandre heads Epinomis.
Plethon is ranking the nations by how near their laws come to Zoroaster’s, and the measure is precision. Some fall short but are “not out of tune.” He names two, at opposite ends of the world he knew. The Indians and the western Iberians, both roughly contemporaries of Zoroaster.
Then the detail that sends people travelling.
Of the Iberians, nothing survives. Not the laws, and not even the name of the lawgiver. Of the Indians, “many of the laws still remain,” and their lawgiver was Dionysos, who came from outside, conquered India and ordered it with equitable laws. The later Dionysos, son of Semele, is either the same soul or a close imitator of his life.
One branch is lost beyond recovery. The other is still standing and can still be consulted.
That asymmetry is the engine of the whole search. If the first teaching survives anywhere, it survives where the line was never broken, and for four centuries Europeans will conclude that the place is east. Readers who reach the eighteenth century in this series will find John Zephaniah Holwell claiming to translate a Hindu scripture older than Genesis, and Anquetil-Duperron sailing to India as a private soldier to get the books of the Parsis. Plethon had named the destination in the 1440s and given the reason.
One honest limit. This particular argument went almost nowhere. The Brahmans are named once in the Nomoi and the Indians twice; outside it they recur only in a list of nations in a funeral oration; and the Nomoi is the book that Scholarios burned. What travelled west was the oracles, not the Indians. When India returns to this story three centuries later it comes by other roads. What Plethon shows is not a line of transmission but the shape of the idea, already fully formed at the moment the search begins.
The fire
Plethon died in 1452, about a year before Constantinople fell, though a minority of scholars, following John Monfasani, put it in 1454. His copy of the Nomoi reached Scholarios, who had been his opponent in the Plato and Aristotle dispute and had by then been patriarch. Scholarios read it, kept part of it, burned the rest, and wrote an account of why.
His account included a story about the young Plethon studying at the Ottoman court under a Jewish teacher named Elissaios, a polytheist, who introduced him to the doctrines of Zoroaster and was later burned himself. Whether Elissaios existed is still argued. Stausberg raises the possibility that Scholarios invented him in order to make the heresy biographically plausible.
The burning and the story reach us through one hand. The book came to Theodora Asenina, wife of Demetrios Palaiologos, the last despot at Mistra, when Plethon died. She was horrified by it and sent it to Scholarios, who read it in four hours, sent it back, and told her to burn it herself and earn the reward of her piety. She could not bring herself to do it. When Mistra fell to the Turks in 1460 she and Demetrios carried the manuscript to Constantinople and put it in his hands, and this time he did the burning, keeping the chapter lists and the hymns so that no one could say the judgement had been unjust. The fuller of his two versions of the Elissaios story sits in the letter he had written to her. The account of why the book had to burn he wrote afterwards, to the Exarch Joseph, from a monastery. Plethon may already have pointed at her while he was alive. His Reply accuses Scholarios of boasting about the influence of a wretched woman, and a scribe recorded his complaint that Demetrios and Asenina had conspired with Scholarios against him.
The burning did not work in the way Scholarios intended. It destroyed the argument and, because he kept the hymns as evidence, preserved the liturgy; it ended the religion and made the reputation. What travelled was not Plethon’s system but his oracles.
Ficino, and what he changed
Marsilio Ficino owned a copy of Plethon’s edition. When he made his Latin translation of the Chaldaean Oracles he worked from that text and not another. Woodhouse puts it flatly: Ficino’s version gives the same sixty lines in the same order as Plethon’s, and he probably used the commentary too without translating it. He followed Plethon in attributing the doctrine of the soul’s vehicle to the Magi following Zoroaster, an attribution Plethon was the first to make. Francesco Filelfo, who had known Plethon personally, had the edition and commentary by 1464. John Argyropoulos owned the commentary. Plethon’s text stood as the text of the Oracles until Francesco Patrizi replaced it in 1591.
He also gave the text the name it still carries. Plethon had been careful about that name. His title says Magi and not Chaldaeans, and the distinction was the point, since Chaldaean pointed at Babylon while Magian pointed at Persia and at Zoroaster. Tambrun-Krasker observes that Ficino did not know why Plethon had changed the title, and so did not always keep the distinction. The Latin West settled on Chaldaean and has kept it for five centuries. Every modern edition, and every sentence in this chapter, uses the label Plethon had deliberately set aside.
And Ficino changed his mind about who came first. Hladky states it directly. Ficino originally held Hermes Trismegistus to be the first sage in the line of the wise men in his ancient theology, but under Plethon’s influence opted for Zoroaster. Tambrun-Krasker supplies the dates, and Michael Allen the casualty. Hermes heads the list in 1463, in the preface to Ficino’s Hermes. Within a year the order had changed. By 1464, in a summary of Plato’s Minos, Ficino already set Zoroaster before both Hermes and Moses as a lawgiver, a point Hanegraaff takes from Stausberg against the usual later date. The full new sequence appears in 1469, in the Philebus commentary, thirty years after the council, and Philolaus is dropped to make room. By 1474 the oracles are Zoroaster’s in the Platonic Theology and in On the Christian Religion, and Plethon’s commentary can be shown in Ficino’s hands by 1467 or 1469, so how Zoroaster reached him in 1464 is not documented.
So the famous sequence is a weld, and it is worth being exact about which part Plethon welded. Ficino had the frame first. His own annotation in his manuscript of Proclus, made by 1463, runs Orpheus to Aglaophemus to Pythagoras to Philolaus to Plato, and the earliest version of his ancient theology has no Zoroaster in it. James Hankins argues that Ficino’s original versions of the ancient theology owe nothing to Plethon, and that the only element he can be shown to have borrowed is the identification of Zoroaster as the author of the oracles. Plethon supplied the head. The rest of the line was already standing.
Ficino changed something larger too. Siniossoglou draws the distinction that the rest of this series depends on. Plethon was not proposing what Ficino proposed. His true doctrines are “coeval with man and the universe” and terminate nowhere. Ficino’s ancient philosophy prioritises Judaeo-Christian revelation. It is not indifferent to Christian doctrines but culminates in them. It cannot stand without Christianity.
Plethon built a pagan frame with no Christian terminus. Ficino put the terminus back. What Europe inherited, and what nearly everyone in this series after Plethon is working with, is Ficino’s Christianised version of Plethon’s pagan structure. That is why the next four centuries are spent trying to make an original religion agree with Genesis. The tension was built into the structure at Florence in the 1460s, and it never came out.
What became of the oracles
The oracles outlived both men. Patrizi did more than replace Plethon’s text; he swelled it, printing three hundred and twenty oracles of Zoroaster where Plethon had given sixty lines. Both texts ran on. Johannes Opsopoeus had printed Plethon’s sixty lines with Plethon’s commentary in 1589, Thomas Stanley put them into English in 1661, and Thomas Taylor and the Theosophists took it up again in the nineteenth century. Dylan Burns observes that everyone from Ficino to Madame Blavatsky read a text descended from Plethon’s and kept his attribution.
The title carried more than antiquity. Zoroaster was, for anyone who had read Pliny, the inventor of magic, and Plethon had called the oracles magical. Hanegraaff draws the consequence. Once the chief of the Magi stood first among the sages, “nothing could be more logical than seeing the ancient wisdom and mageia as equivalent.” The road from Plethon’s heading runs to Ficino’s astrological medicine, and to Pico della Mirandola and Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy.
And it met the same end as Hermes. Wilhelm Kroll’s edition of 1894 fixed the oracles where the Neoplatonists had always placed them, in the second century with Julianus the Theurgist, the blow Casaubon had dealt the Hermetic corpus in 1614 delivered to Zoroaster two hundred and eighty years later. The title had done its work for two centuries unchallenged, and for two more against growing doubt. Stausberg’s verdict is blunt. Plethon gave the European reception of Zoroaster its decisive impulses, and without his attribution of the oracles to Zoroaster’s Magi, interest in Zoroaster would probably never have reached the intensity that made a history of it worth writing.
A story about a story
There is one more thing, and it belongs at the end because it is the first appearance of this series’ own subject.
The reason everyone knows Plethon’s name is a story. In it, Plethon lectures at Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici sits in the audience, and Cosimo leaves determined to refound Plato’s Academy on Italian soil, waiting decades until he finds the right translator in the young son of his physician. That translator is Ficino.
The story has one source. It is the preface Ficino wrote for his translation of Plotinus, published in 1492, fifty-three years after the council.
The objections are not subtle. John Wilson Taylor made them in 1921. Ficino could not have been present, being five years old in 1439 (Taylor says six). There is no reason to suppose Cosimo understood Greek, and it is very doubtful whether Plethon understood Latin. Taylor adds that the two Byzantine writers who praised Plethon’s eloquence before an Italian audience were both writing funeral tributes and neither had been in Italy with him. Only the second objection has been answered, and only in part: Woodhouse notes that Cosimo had studied Greek under Roberto de’ Rossi, a pupil of Chrysoloras, though how much of it survived into a Neoplatonic lecture is another question. Woodhouse reaches the same difficulty from the other side and concludes that Plethon must have worked through interpreters, noting that the obvious candidates were either occupied by the Council, not yet fluent enough in Latin, or reluctant to serve him. The Academy itself is first named in a letter from Ficino to Cosimo of September 1462, twenty-three years after the council. James Hankins has since argued that the Platonic Academy of Florence, as an institution, is itself a myth. Stausberg calls the tale a cleverly staged legend. Siniossoglou records that for some scholars it is simply a Ficinean legend, and cites John Monfasani’s observation that Ficino was elsewhere harshly critical of Plethon.
Others defend it. Francois Masai, who wrote the fullest study of Plethon at Mistra, argues that if anything in Ficino’s account was exaggerated it was Cosimo’s role rather than Plethon’s presence, since nothing pushed Ficino to emphasise the Greek except historical truth. The dispute is open.
What is not in dispute is the shape of the thing. A man at the end of his career wrote an account in which the wisdom he had spent his life translating reached him through a chain of named predecessors going back to an ancient sage from the East, and in which he himself was the appointed heir. He was describing his own line of descent in exactly the form he believed truth was transmitted.
Tambrun-Krasker has noticed something that makes the picture stranger and is not a matter of testimony at all. In 1459 Cosimo had Benozzo Gozzoli paint the journey of the Magi on the walls of his palace chapel, and the Medici maintained a family confraternity in Florence called the Compagnia de’ Magi. Plethon’s oracles were titled the oracles of the Magi descended from Zoroaster. On Tambrun’s reading, as Siniossoglou summarises it, Cosimo’s interest in getting Plato translated was an interest in reaching the most ancient wisdom of the Magi. Ficino himself would read the Magi at Bethlehem as Zoroastrians who worshipped the Christ Child as, in the phrase Hanegraaff takes from Allen, “the ultimate Zoroastrian,” and he suggested that Abraham had carried their wisdom out of Ur of the Chaldees. Whatever passed between an old Greek and a Florentine banker in 1439, the word was already in the family’s mouth.
This is a series about people who believed the world’s religions were broken pieces of one original revelation, and who built genealogies to prove it. It opens with a text made ancient by its title, a doctrine recovered from before the Giants, two rules for telling truth by age and agreement, and a founding legend written by the man it made an heir.
Everything after this is variation.
Sources
Charles Alexandre, ed., Pletho: Traite des lois, trans. A. Pellissier (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1858).
Michael J. B. Allen, Synoptic Art: Marsilio Ficino on the History of Platonic Interpretation (Florence: Olschki, 1998).
Polymnia Athanassiadi, “Byzantine Commentators on the Chaldaean Oracles,” as cited and discussed in Burns.
Augustine, Retractationes I.12.3, trans. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Faber, 1958).
Joseph Bidez and Franz Cumont, Les Mages hellenises, 2 vols (Les Belles Lettres, 1938).
Dylan M. Burns, “The Chaldean Oracles of Zoroaster, Hekate’s Couch, and Platonic Orientalism in Psellos and Plethon,” Aries 6, no. 2 (2006), 158-179.
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2012), ch. 1; “Platonic Orientalism,” Infinite Fire Webinar IV (Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica / Ritman Library), undated lecture.
Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Ruud M. Bouthoorn, Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447-1500): The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005).
James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Brill, 1990); “Cosimo de’ Medici and the ‘Platonic Academy’,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990), 144-162; and “The Myth of the Platonic Academy of Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly 44 (1991), 429-475.
Vojtech Hladky, The Philosophy of Gemistos Plethon: Platonism in Late Byzantium (Ashgate, 2014).
Wilhelm Kroll, De oraculis chaldaicis (Breslau: Koebner, 1894).
Francois Masai, Pletho et le platonisme de Mistra (Les Belles Lettres, 1956).
John Monfasani, “Marsilio Ficino and the Plato-Aristotle Controversy,” in Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy (Brill, 2002), as cited in Siniossoglou; and his case for a 1454 death date, as reported in Hladky and Siniossoglou.
John Opsopaus, The Secret Texts of Hellenic Polytheism: Plethon’s Restored Pagan Religion (Llewellyn, 2022).
Pliny the Elder, Natural History XXX.2.
Niketas Siniossoglou, Radical Platonism in Byzantium: Illumination and Utopia in Gemistos Plethon (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and “Sect and Utopia in Shifting Empires: Plethon, Elissaios, Bedreddin,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 36 (2012), 38-55.
Thomas Stanley, trans., The Chaldaick Oracles of Zoroaster and His Followers, with the Expositions of Pletho and Psellus (London: Thomas Dring, 1661).
Michael Stausberg, Faszination Zarathushtra: Zoroaster und die Europaische Religionsgeschichte der Fruhen Neuzeit, 2 vols (de Gruyter, 1998).
Brigitte Tambrun-Krasker and Michel Tardieu, eds., Oracles chaldaiques: Recension de Georges Gemiste Plethon (Academy of Athens / Vrin, 1995); Brigitte Tambrun-Krasker, “Marsile Ficin et le Commentaire de Plethon sur les Oracles chaldaiques,” Accademia. Revue de la Societe Marsile Ficin 1 (1999), 9-48; “Plethon, Georgios Gemistos,” in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Brill, 2006), as cited in Siniossoglou 2012; “Plethon: le retour de Platon, Pythagore et Zoroastre,” HAL preprint halshs-00293417 (2008), summarising her Plethon: Le retour de Platon (Vrin, 2006); and “Pourquoi Cosme de Medicis a fait traduire Platon,” in Pensee grecque et sagesse orientale: hommage a Michel Tardieu (Turnhout, 2010), 625-648, as summarised in Siniossoglou 2011.
John Wilson Taylor, Georgius Gemistus Pletho’s Criticism of Plato and Aristotle (Menasha, Wisc., 1921).
John Walbridge, The Wisdom of the Mystic East: Suhrawardī and Platonic Orientalism (State University of New York Press, 2001).
C. M. Woodhouse, George Gemistos Plethon: The Last of the Hellenes (Clarendon, 1986).