4
Jupiter, the Stars, and the Golden Age

"Iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto"

Ironically, Ficino himself uses the ominous notion of an occasio to take up some of the astrological and astronomical implications he perceives in Plato's presentation of the geometric number, and in particular, he says, to dispute with the astrologers. In a letter to Angelo Poliziano, he had likened them to the earth giants, Antaeus and Cacus, whom Hercules had vanquished and whom Pico and Poliziano, Hercules' successors, had vanquished again in his own time.^[1] Ficino's ambivalent relationship to astrology has long been the subject, however, of debate and disagreement.^[2] One finds him, for instance, in the third book of his Epistulae , in the course of letters written within a few weeks, perhaps even a few days, of each other in 1476, complaining to his great friend Giovanni Cavalcanti that he

[1] The letter is dated 20 August 1494 and is now in the twelfth and last book of Ficino's Epistulae (Opera , p. 958.1).

[2] Most recently, see Garin, Lo zodiaco della vita , chapter 4; Giancarlo Zanier, La medicina astrologica e la sua teoria: Marsilio Ficino e i suoi critici contemporanei (Rome, 1977), pp. 5–60; D. P. Walker, "Ficino and Astrology," in Garfagnini, Ritorno 2:341–349; Carol V. Kaske, "Ficino's Shifting Attitude towards Astrology in the De Vita Coelitus Comparanda , the Letter to Poliziano, and the Apologia to the Cardinals," in Garfagnini, Ritorno 2:371–381; eadem, "Introduction," in Marsilio Ficino: Three Books on Life , ed. and trans. Kaske and Clark, pp. 17–70; Cesare Vasoli, "Le débat sur l'astrologie ô Florence: Ficin, Pic de la Mirandole, Savonarole," in Divination et controverse en France au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1987), pp. 19–33; Brian P. Copenhaver, "As-

trology and Magic," in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy , ed. Charles B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 274–285; and Melissa Meriam Bullard, "The Inward Zodiac: A Development in Ficino's Thoughts on Astrology," Renaissance Quarterly 43.4 (1990), 687–708. References to earlier scholarship can be found in Kaske's authoritative "Introduction." For Ficino's place in the larger context, Garin's work has been especially illuminating.

Bullard's recent thesis that Ficino gradually internalizes astrology neglects evidence both from the later years when Ficino is often very much concerned with traditional astrology, and from the early years when he frequently internalizes it: outward and inward zodiacs, that is, coexisted in his thinking throughout his life. This is made especially clear by his famous letter to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, now in the fifth book of his Epistulae (Opera , pp. 805.2–806; trans. in Letters 4:61–63 [no. 46]), which argues that the heavens are also within, "Non enim sunt haec alicubi nobis extra quaerenda, nempe totum in nobis est coelum" (and cf. the letter immediately following to Giorgio Antonio Vespucci, Opera , p. 806.2). A similar objection undermines Walker's attempt to redate the Disputatio and thus arrive at one anti-astrological phase, inspired by Savonarola, late in Ficino's career. The De Numero Fatali has material that both scholars were unfamiliar with; and the Timaeus Commentary and the De Vita , two major texts, also sit on the proverbial fence with both ears to the ground! Ficino was always open, moreover, to figurative banter; see, for instance, the letter to the Cardinal of Siena in the first book of his Epistulae (ed. Gentile, pp. 234–235; trans. in Letters 1:195–196 [no. 128]).

For a Jungian perspective on Ficino as the practitioner, even the inventor, of a psychological or "esoteric" astrology, see Angela Voss, "Ficino and Astrology," The Astrologers' Quarterly 60 (1986), 126–138, 191–199 (with references on p. 136 n. 2 to the similar views of James Hillman, Thomas Moore, and Liz Greene).

could not be writing to him, according to the astronomers, at a more inauspicious hour; to the Archbishop of Florence, Rinaldo Orsini, that he had been prevented from rendering thanks to him personally by "a malign aspect of Saturn which was square to the Moon"; to the Bishop of Volterra, Antonio degli Agli, that, while some had attributed the current "calamity in the church" to the retrogression of Saturn in Leo and of Jupiter in Pisces, his own view was rather that "stars are adverse only to those with perverse minds"; and to Cavalcanti again that his melancholy was indeed due to that retrogression of Saturn in Leo, more particularly since Saturn had set the seal of melancholy upon him from his birth, even if he was perhaps indebted to the planet, as Cavalcanti had argued, for his scholarly powers, or rather to God who is the beginning and end of all.^[3]

Such vacillation is typical in the letters and is frequently tuned to the amicable or complimentary occasion. But one finds it throughout his works, the two extremes being the incredulous but incomplete

[3] Opera , pp. 724.2, 726.3, 729.3, 731.3–733.1; trans. in Letters 2:11, 15–16, 24–25, 30–34 (nos. 4, 10, 17, 22, 23 [a letter by Cavalcanti], 24). See Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy , pp. 257–258.

The third book comprises letters dating from August 1476 to May 1477.

Disputatio contra Iudicium Astrologorum of 1477,^[4] and the credulous but complete De Vita of 1489, whose three books set forth in encyclopedic detail the kind of help that the astrological lore of planetary and stellar influences and the natural and medical lore of sympathies and antipathies together can provide us with in our quest for a longer and better life, particularly as scholars; and whose theories led to Ficino's being accused briefly before Pope Innocent VIII of heresy and magic, despite his garland of caveats, qualifications, and invocations of Aquinas in the offending third book.^[5] Here I shall focus upon the points that he raises in the De Numero Fatali and that are germane to our understanding of his interpretation of the mathematical "mystery" in book 8 of Plato's Republic . For they provide us with evidence that has not hitherto been weighed or even recognized concerning his views on astrology, and on the nature of human choice and human freedom that astrology calls continually into question. They also affect our ability to arrive at a full appreciation of the subtle discriminations, and nor merely indecisions or confusions, that Ficino customarily drew upon in formulating his reactions both towards the universally accepted notion that the stars influence the sublunar world of nature and of man, and towards the theological problem of future contingents that that notion necessarily raises.

In a moral essay entitled "How False Is Human Prosperity," again in the third book of his Epistulae , Ficino addresses Bernardo Bembo, the Venetian ambassador, and outlines what he calls the four universal "causes" of the transiency of earthly happiness as designated by the philosophers: divine providence; "the fateful law of heavenly bodies," which is tempered by divine providence; the "natural order," which arranges the elements under the heavens and their fateful law; and the "human" cause in its degenerate form as "free licence" (solutior licencia ), arrogance, and insolence.^[6] It is clear from this, and from similar passages, that Ficino views all events involving man as the result of these four causes working, now in harmony, now in discord, under

[4] Ed. Kristeller, Supplementum 2:11–76. See Gentile in Mostra , pp. 97–99 (no. 74), and Vasoli, "Le débat sur l'astrologie," pp. 22–26.

[5] See Paul Oskar Kristeller, "Marsilio Ficino and the Roman Curia," Humanistica Lovaniensia 34A (1985), 83–99 at 93–95; also Kaske, "Introduction," pp. 55–70, and, more generally, Brian P. Copenhaver, "Scholastic Philosophy and Renaissance Magic in the De Vita of Marsilio Ficino," Renaissance Quarterly 37 (1984), 523–554. Ficino's accusers are unknown and no documents on the matter have come to light; it was quietly resolved in his favor.

[6] Opera , pp. 722.2–723; trans. in Letters 2:5–8 (no. 2).

the rule or the divine law of providence. Fate as the "law" governing the celestial realm is the minister of this providence and the governor in turn of nature and its order; it is associated preeminently with Jupiter as the presiding deity of law. Insofar as the different faculties of man participate in different realms, they are governed by providence, fate, nature, and their own desire and passions. That is to say, man's intuitive intelligence (mens ) and his free will (arbitrium ) are governed by providence,^[7] while his discursive reason is governed by fate, the faculties of his lower soul by nature, and his body by his passions.^[8] What then is the kind and the degree of their interaction? What is the timing and the agency of the ideal accord that will banish all discord and make these warring faculties part of a unified whole in man, and man part of a unitary moment in tumultuous nature, and nature at one with the moving heavens and their law, and all subservient to eternal providence, which, as the opening letter of book 4 addressed to Lorenzo Franceschi declares, will "gently temper stern fate in accordance with the good"?^[9] To answer this question, which lies at the core of

[7] Cf. Ficino's letter to Cavalcanti in the first book of his Epistulae (ed. Gentile, pp. 97–98; trans. in Letters , 1:94–95 [no. 50]): "the force of fate does not penetrate the mind unless the mind of its own accord has first become submerged in the body which is subject to fate"; also the letter of 28 June 1477 to Francesco Marescalchi, now in the fourth book (Opera , p. 776.3; trans. in Letters 3:63–64 [no. 29]), which insists on the fact that the mind (mens ) and the "free judgement of the will" (liberum voluntatis arbitrium ) are above the compulsion of "celestial fate" and are guided rather by "supercelestial providence" ("quasi non a coelesti fato coactus fuerit sed a supercoelesti tum Dei providentia tum mentis libertate perductus"). Instances could be multiplied. See Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought , 2 vols. (London, 1970), 2:476–478.

[8] Cf. Ficino's Platonic Theology 13.2 (ed. Marcel, 2:206–214). Despite the authority of this work, this is not his clearest account of the relationship between providence, fate, and nature, and the human faculties of the mens, ratio, idolum, and natura . Not only does he encounter problems in integrating the ancient concept of the idolum , but he is intent on schematically isolating our ratio : whereas our mens is tied (subnectatur ) to providence, our idolum to fate, and our single natura to universal nature, our ratio is free to ally itself now with this faculty, now with that ("per rationem nostri iuris sumus omnino") (p. 211). But our true goal is to become one with our mens and thus one with providence. As Kaske notes in her "Introduction," p. 59, Ficino's vacillations always left intact "his orthodox and sincere belief in free will"; for which in particular see the Platonic Theology 9.4. In general, see Kristeller, Philosophy of Ficino , pp. 368–388.

[9] Opera , p. 751.3–752; trans. in Letters 3:3–4 (no. 1). The letter is undated, but book 4 includes letters in the main from 1 March to 1 August 1477. Even the De Vita rejects the notion of an inimical heaven: at 2.16.1–3 (ed. Kaske and Clark) Ficino declares that there is no hate among the stars, only movement and diversity. Hence malefic Mars and Saturn are ultimately beneficial in the sense that their influences play a part in the celestial harmony; see Kaske, "Introduction," p. 34. This would imply that fate is always beneficent, something that, however philosophically persuasive the arguments, flies in the face of ordinary experience.

Greek philosophy, Ficino again resorts, like Plato in the Timaeus before him, to geometrical proportion and the three primary ratios.^[10]

In speaking of the proportions that must ideally pertain in the balance of man's bodily humors and in the climate and air of a salubrious place, Ficino assumes in chapter 12 that these govern the four primary qualities of hotness, coldness, wetness, and dryness in us and our habitus , and also and preeminently the influences of the "life-giving" planets on our lives.^[11] If we are ever to seize the proper opportunity—"to capture the favor of the heavens as best we can" (a notion with a long and intricate history and one of the leitmotifs of Ficino's De Vita )^[12] —then we must start with the fundamental recognition that, since the "distance" of Jupiter to Venus is in the ratio of 4:3, that of Venus to the Sun of 3:2, and that of the Sun to the Moon of 2:1, we should be influenced by these four in the same ratios. For the Sun and the Moon bestow life in itself, while Jupiter and Venus bestow prosperity, increase, and fertility besides, though in these dual pairings the Sun and Jupiter are the senior partners.^[13] In "elections" therefore we must begin by assigning the proportional values of 4, 3, 2, and 1 to Jupiter, Venus, the Sun, and the Moon respectively.^[14] This has nothing of course to do with the actual distances of the planets from the Earth in the Ptolemaic scheme, nor, as we might otherwise expect, with their angular distances from each other and thus with their "aspects." It refers rather, as Ficino's reference to his own epitome for the Epinomis clearly demonstrates, to the musical intervals between the planetary spheres. Thus, if the interval of the Earth to the Moon is a fourth, of

[10] See Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to the Interpretation of the Word "Stimmung," ed. A. G. Hatcher (Baltimore, 1963); and E. A. Lippman, Musical Thought in Ancient Greece (New York, 1964), esp. chapter 1.

[11] Cf. Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos 1.4–8. The humoral theory had the effect of bonding medicine to astronomy-astrology and both to harmonics, meaning the science of ratios and proportions. On the ideal proportions, the balance, among the humors, cf. De Vita 1.5.47–75, and Kaske, "Introduction," p. 31.

[12] It is this "elective" or "catarchic" (katarchikos ), rather than "interrogatory" or horary, astrology that Kaske maintains is Ficino's principal concern ("Introduction," pp. 36–38); see Chapter 3, n. 5 above. The third book deals with the controversial topic of capturing planetary influences by way of talismans and images.

[13] In the De Vita at 3.5.3–5 he identifies Jupiter, Venus, and the Sun as the three Graces; and at 3.6.40 ff. he virtually identifies the Sun with Jupiter. Deciding on the preeminence of any one of these good planets, particularly of the Sun or Jupiter, is an elaborate game and depends on one's point of view.

[14] See Eugenio Garin, "Le 'elezioni' e il problema dell'astrologia," in L'età nuova (Naples, 1969), pp. 421–447; it first appeared in Umanesimo e esoterismo: Atti del V Convegno Internazionale di Studi Umanistici , ed. Enrico Castelli (Padua, 1960), pp. 17–37.

Earth to the Sun a fifth, of the Sun to the firmament another fourth, then the interval of Jupiter to Venus is another fourth, of Venus to the Sun another fifth, and so on.^[15] One wonders how far Ficino meant us to pursue the establishment of correspondences between differing relationships that share the same ratios, between the spirit, say, and the life-giving planets, both of which embrace in different ways the same ratios and suggest therefore that the four planets constitute a kind of spirit or even represent the World-Spirit that the De Vita had ingeniously postulated as linking the World-Soul to the World-Body. In

[15] Platonis Opera Omnia (1491), fol. 324v (sig. R4v) (i.e., Opera , p. 1529):

Pythagorici enim, ubi spherarum intervalla dimetiuntur, terram ad firmamentum comparant, item ad lunam et solem, solem quoque ad firmamentum. In quibus sane comparationibus intervallum a terra ad solem comparatum ad intervallum ab eodem ad firmamentum efficit quidem inter terram ac solem sesquialteram, inter hunc vero et firmamentum sesquitertiam; et in illa quidem proportione diapente consonantia nascitur, ex hac autem diatessaron; ex quibus certe ambabus conficitur proportio dupla consonantiaque diapason. Volunt et a terra ad lunam fieri diatessaron, sicut ad solem fit diapente, et a sole ad firmamentum iterum diatessaron. Quemadmodum vero natura proportiones eiusmodi observat in spheris, ita in actionibus passionibusque elementorum.

For, in measuring the intervals of the spheres, the Pythagoreans compare the Earth to the firmament, and again to the Moon and the Sun, and the Sun too to the firmament. In these comparisons the interval from the Earth to the Sun is contrasted with the interval from the Sun to the firmament. Thus there is a sesquialteral interval [of 3:2] between the Earth and the Sun, but a sesquitertial interval [of 4:3] between the Sun and the firmament. From the first proportion is born the consonance of diapente, from the second that of diatessaron. From both together comes the double proportion or consonance of the diapason. The Pythagoreans also want the interval from the Earth to the Moon to be a fourth (just as that from the Earth to the Sun is a fifth, and that from the Sun to the firmament is again a fourth). In the same way that nature observes such proportions among the spheres, so it observes them too in the actions and passions of the elements.

Cf. Theon, Expositio 3.15; Macrobius, Somnium Scipionis 2.1.1–25, 2.4.1–10; and Ficino's own De Rationibus Musicae (ed. Kristeller, Supplementum , 1:51–56). This tuning system was known to both antiquity and the Renaissance as "the eight-stringed lyre of Pythagoras."

In his Timaeus Commentary 35 (Opera , p. 1461.1), Ficino propounds another analysis of the planetary "distances," this time in terms of the lambda. His proximate source is Macrobius, Somnium Scipionis 2.3.14–15, who attributes it to Porphyry; their ultimate source is of course the Timaeus 35B ff. In the Porphyrian order the proportionate "distances" from Earth are: to the Moon 1, to the Sun 2 (being double that of Earth to Moon), to Venus 3 (being triple that of Earth to Sun), to Mercury 4 (being quadruple that of Earth to Venus), to Mars 9 (being nine times that of Earth to Mercury), to Jupiter 8 (being eight times that of Earth to Mars), and to Saturn 27 (being twenty-seven times that of Earth to Jupiter). The left foot of the lambda therefore becomes Moon-Sun-Mercury-Jupiter, the right foot Moon-Venus-Mars-Saturn. Whether these twin alignments (which privilege the Moon) are especially significant for Ficino is doubtful, but he does stress that the arrangement gives the solid numbers (meaning the

cubes) to "the graver planets Jupiter and Saturn." He goes on to note, "Although I have elsewhere reviewed other measures for the planetary intervals according to the opinion of several Pythagoreans, yet I esteem these Platonic measures the more probable. Perhaps we can use these measures to understand those in the tenth book of the Republic which are more obscure and concern the spheres. Again we can use what we have said here about the power of numbers and proportions to conjecture what might be involved in the eighth book of the Republic and what it has to say about the celestial circuit and numbers and proportions." The lambda, in other words, can help to explain the passages on the sirens and on the fatal and perfect numbers!

See Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony , pp. 93–100, 179–187.

any event, Ficino is enjoining us before all else to contemplate the harmonies of the spheres, and to attune our spirit to those harmonies.^[16]

Though linked with the Sun in the musical ratio of 2:1, the Moon is in many ways an anomaly: it should be considered, he says in chapter 14, in terms of its ever-changing aspects to the six other planets (again privileging 6 as a number), while the six other planets should be considered in terms of their varying aspects not so much to each other as to the sphere of the fixed stars. And Ficino speaks loosely here of a kind of proportionality between the relationship of the Moon to the other planets, and of these to the sphere of the fixed stars (and of the "humor of the elements" to the Moon and of their heat to the Sun). As the planet presiding over humor, the Moon presides over the durations of animal and vegetative life, and is thus of particular concern to the doctor as well as the farmer, the gardener, and those dependent on the tides.^[17]

Once again, however, Ficino is drawn to the particular mathematical categories he has already used to decipher Plato's enigmatic passage on the fatal number, although he is not working with a tightly organized series of analogies and is continuously aware of conceptual parallax: what is odd or unequilateral in one context can be viewed as even or equilateral in another, depending on what is being measured. Since the even numbers and the equilateral numbers (which are alternately odd and even) can signify the firmament and its stars (especially of course 100 and 10,000, their geometric mean being the unequilateral 1000), the odd numbers and the unequilateral numbers (all of which are even and are either long or oblong and which include, we recall, the perfect number 6) must signify the planets. The more regu-

[16] This great Pythagorean theme, sanctioned as it was by Plato's account of the sirens in the Republic 10.617B, Ficino treated on many occasions, beginning perhaps with his early treatise De Divino Furore . This was addressed to Peregrino Agli and dated 1 December 1457; it is now in the first book of his Epistulae (ed. Gentile, pp. 19–28 [no. 6]; trans. in Letters 1:42–48 [no. 7]).

[17] See Kaske, "Introduction," p. 36.

lar planets, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and the Sun, are long, while Mars, Mercury, and the Moon are oblong, because they are the authors of the greatest "motions" among the planets. Contrariwise, if we compare the planets to the elements, then the planets, because their motion is comparatively even, must be associated with the equilateral numbers. Similarly with the associations of odd or even numbers. If we look at the planets in relation to each other and not to the firmament, then we must assign evenness to the Sun, to Jupiter, to Venus, and among the elemental spheres to the aether and to the middle air; and we must assign oddness to the Moon, Mercury, Mars, and Saturn, and to fire, water, and earth (though this distribution among the elements is uneven and arbitrary).

Chapter 14 assumes, furthermore, that Plato is attributing both plane and solid numbers to the planets. The solid numbers are attributed to the planets which "have the fullness of their class," that is, to Sol, Jupiter, and Saturn, the Sun signifying fertility in general, Saturn the fertility of the incorporeal and divine life, and Jove the contrasting fertility of corporeal life and of human action (Ficino inherited these distinctions from the Neoplatonic interpretation of certain arresting phrases in the Cratylus and the Laws ).^[18] The plane numbers by contrast are attributed to Mars and the Moon as ministers of Sol, to Mercury as the minister of Saturn (the former's swiftness tempers the latter's tardiness), and to Venus as the minister of Jove.^[19] Interestingly, these comments seem to be privileging being solid over being plane, even though the planar realm is closer to the dimensionless world of pure intelligibility. Among the plane planets, additionally, some are "lateral," some "diagonal" ("diametral"). Thus the Moon is a diagonal to Venus's lateral in that, while Venus presides over

[18] Cratylus , 395E–396C (cf. 410D); Laws 4.713A–714A; also Plotinus, Enneads 3.5.9 (esp. 9.18 ff.: "but Intellect possesses itself in satiety [en korôi ]"), and Proclus, Platonic Theology 5.5, 22, 25 (ed. and trans. Saffrey and Westerink, 5:21.1–24.21, 78.26–83.26, 96.5–7). Cf. Ficino's Philebus Commentary 1.11, 26, 27 (ed. Allen, pp. 135–137, 243–247, 253), his Cratylus epitome (Opera , p. 1311), and, for Jove, his De Vita 3.6.7–8. For his Plotinian etymologizing of Saturn as deriving from satur "filled or sated," see, for example, his Phaedrus Commentary 10 (ed. Allen, p. 111); and cf. Pico's letter to Ficino in the eighth book of Ficino's Epistulae (Opera , p. 889.4). See my Platonism , chapter 5.

The notion of Saturn's fullness or satiety is of course in stark contrast with the astrological image of him as the senile, debile, and tardy Father Time (the Cronos-Chronos pun derives from antiquity).

[19] An oft-repeated arrangement: see, for instance, Ficino's letter to Bernardo Bembo in the fifth book of his Epistulae (Opera , p. 799.1; trans. in Letters 4:44–45 [no. 30]).

love and conception, the Moon (as Lucina) possesses the power over birth—and Ficino has in mind specifically the birth of Love from Venus's side. Similarly Mars is a diagonal to Mercury's lateral. These diagonal-lateral relationships enable Ficino to suggest an alternative but complementary model for the distribution of the four planes among the three solids. "It is not new," he argues, "for Platonists to entertain such translations," though one wonders how far to press them.^[20]

All this suggests that for the Florentine, as for Proclus before him (though this he could not know), the passage in the Republic book 8 had profound astrological implications and that the geometric number was fraught with secret planetary formulas and significations. In commenting upon it, Ficino chose not to adopt the confrontational positions championed by his "brother Platonist," Pico della Mirandola, in his sustained polemic against the astrologers, the Disputationes adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem , a work that Ficino admired and praised in other contexts.^[21] Rather he is setting forth, in the main though not exclusively, the assumptions of a "high" Platonic astrology concerned with the geometrical ratios that govern the heavenly bodies and their spheres (as the Timaeus and Epinomis had declared), assumptions—or at least their implications—that must be kept quite distinct from those which underlie divinatory or predictive astrology, whether genethliacal or horary.^[22] Nonetheless, he is not rejecting that ordinary astrology entirely: after all, he had to account for the Republic 's explicit admonition to the magistrates to allow marriage and conception in the com-

[20] For "translation" cf. Ficino's Timaeus Commentary 35 (Opera , p. 1461.1): "Dupla igitur et tripla et caetera intervalla in prima numerorum figura descripta Plato inveniri arbitratus in sphaeris, ad animae partes et vires unde in sphaeris translata sunt retulit."

[21] Again see Ficino's letter to Angelo Poliziano of 20 August 1494 (cf. n. 1 above): "Astrologica portenta fuisse a Pico nostro Mirandula singulariter confutata. Quae enim ego nusquam affirmo, immo et cum Plotino derideo, explodi a Mirandula gaudeo, superstitiosam praeterea vanitatem ab illo tanquam a Phoebo Pithonicum virus extingui tecum Politiane congratulor."

Ficino's own treatise Disputatio contra Iudicium Astrologorum , together with its accompanying 1477 letter to Francesco Ippoliti—now in the fourth book of his Epistulae (Opera , pp. 781.2–782.1; trans. in Letters 3:75–77 [no. 37])—attacks the astrologers for three pernicious errors: denying God His providence, denying justice to the angels who move the celestial spheres, and denying free will to man. Ficino rejects the fallacious argument that fate can compel men to deny fate, and he pours scorn on the inability of the astrologers to make a success, financial and otherwise, of their own lives.

[22] For the distinctions, see Chapter 3, n. 5 above. We should recall that Ficino had no hesitation in giving the pope astrological advice when the curial dust-cloud raised by his De Vita had barely settled. See Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic , p. 53.

monwealth only at the most auspicious times. In order to determine the imminence of such "opportunities," the magistrates would have had to consult presumably either their own or the nocturnal council's interpretation of the positions of the planets at a precise moment, "dancing the fairest and most magnificent of all the dances in the world," as the Epinomis suggests at 982E; or else they would have had to turn to the advice of professional astrologers.

Indeed, professional astrologers had been kept frenetically busy accounting for the portentous events of the 1480s and 1490s, and notably for the decade between 1484—the date of the publication, as we have seen, of Ficino's great Plato translation—and 1494, the year that witnessed the deaths of Poliziano and Pico, the expulsion of Piero de' Medici, the advent of Charles VIII, and the triumph of Savonarola. These events and the blaze of astrological activity attending them would explain in themselves the intensity of Ficino's engagement with a question raised by Plotinus, who had been the primary focus of his scholarly activity for the first eight years of that decade: namely, what is the degree to which the stars play a determining in addition to a signifying role, not only over nature and the corporeal realms, but over the lives of men and over the "lives" of their social and even their intellectual institutions?^[23] If wary of giving much credence to astrological prediction, particularly in the light of Pico's corrosive reiteration in the Disputationes of the many objections traditionally brought to bear on the accuracy of astronomical observation and computation, Ficino was still haunted, and perhaps increasingly so in these turbulent later years, by a vague sense that the stars had presided not just over his health and temperament, but over his life's work as a scholar and interpreter, and thus over the destiny of his attempt to revive the spirit of Plato. We have a number of intimations—notably in his exchange with Janus Pannonius,^[24] and in his well-known letter to the as-

[23] Of particular importance here were Plotinus's treatises, the Enneads 2.3 [52 in the chronological order], "Are the stars causes?" which begins, "That the course of the stars indicates what is going to happen in particular cases, but does not itself cause everything, as most people think, has been said before elsewhere" (trans. Armstrong); and 3.1 [3 in the chronological order], the treatise on fate, the treatise to which 2.3 is almost certainly referring. See Ficino's detailed commentaries in his Opera , pp. 1609–1642, 1671.3–1684. The problem was of ancient standing; see Auguste Bouché-Leclercq, L'astrologie grecque (Paris, 1899), pp. 600–604.

[24] Opera , p. 871.2 (Janus's letter to Ficino accusing him of curiositas for his attempt to revive the theology of the ancients and querying the authority contemporary astrologers had bestowed upon that attempt) and pp. 871.3–872 (Ficino's reply invoking the role of providence)—they occur towards the beginning of the eighth book of

Ficino's Epistulae . See Hankins, Plato , pp. 302–303; and Gentile, Ficino: Lettere 1: xxxv–xxxvi. This Janus, incidentally, is not the famous bishop of Pécs (1434–1472), as Hungarian scholars since Huszti in 1924 have repeatedly pointed out; see Marianna D. Birnbaum, Janus Pannonius, Poet and Politician (Zagreb, 1981), pp. 167–168, with further references.

trologer-bishop Paul of Middelburg^[25] —that he regarded this revival and his role in it as something that had been configured, or at least signified, by the stars circling in their "fairest dance."

Perhaps no text is more prominent in this regard than the conclusion he wrote for the preface to his translation of Plotinus's treatise, the Enneads 3.4. Speculating as to why certain men achieve extraordinary feats even though they lack teachers and other resources, he underscores the role of personal daemons: it is they who arrange for the various factors such as the occasion, the place, the necessary people and equipment, and so on, to conjoin. These daemons are subject to particular planets and their houses, however, and to particular celestial dispositions. To that degree our entering upon some ultimately successful design is always predetermined by the stars. But Ficino hastens to assert that it is up to ourselves to follow through; for the completion of that design will almost certainly occur long after the heavenly aspects that presided over its inception have passed away, never in a lifetime to return. Hence we may deduce that the stars signify but do not directly or wholly cause the successful attainment of some goal; but the goal was made possible nonetheless by a daemon subject to the stars. If the final and perfecting cause is in ourselves, yet the efficient cause remains a heavenly disposition.^[26]

The taproot that sustained this equivocal approach to stellar agency was not Ficino's attempt to reconcile various passages in Plato that are open to a fatalistic reading—those, for instance, in the Republic , the Timaeus , the Laws , and the Epinomis ²⁷ —with others that stress the soul's freedom or autonomy, though his impulse to reconcile, adjust, and syncretize was overriding. Rather, it was his medical, or perhaps

[25] Opera , p. 944.3 (dated 13 September 1492—this is the last item in the eleventh book of Ficino's Epistulae )—note that Averrois in the title should be aureis . In his Prognostica ad Viginti Annos Duratura (Antwerp, 1484) Paul had predicted, we recall, that 1484, the year in which Saturn was conjunct with Jupiter, heralded changes in Christianity itself; see Chapter 3, n. 1 above.

[26] Opera , pp. 1707–1709 (in Ficino's 1492 Plotini Enneades the preface appears on sig. u vii –viii . See my "Summoning Plotinus: Ficino, Smoke, and the Strangled Chickens."

[27] Republic 10.617C ff., Timacus 47E ff., 86B–87B (the mind can be healthy only in a healthy body), Laws 12.960CD, Epinomis 982A ff., etc.

we should say his psycho-therapeutic, training and orientation, and his inability to conceive, like the vast majority of his contemporaries, of an effective regimen, let alone a pharmacopoeia, that was not governed by planetary influences. We might even contend that he was never able fully to liberate himself from his medical, and therefore from his astrological, education and experience; and accordingly from his familiarity with so much of the weighty and obscure pharmacological, lapidological, botanical, zoological, bestiarial, and daemonological lore that was the underpinning of the medical astrology which he and his contemporaries had inherited from the Aristotelian and Galenic traditions by way of the mediation and augmentation of the great Arab and Persian commentators.^[28] We must remember, however, that Socrates, with varying degrees of irony as a midwife's son, regarded the philosopher as a midwife, and that the Timaeus , with its burden of medical learning in the later sections, is one of the seminal texts in the Neoplatonic tradition and authorized one of Ficino's favorite tropes: that the philosopher is the doctor of the soul.^[29] We have only to look at two pieces in praise of medicine, now in the first and fourth books of his Epistulae , to see the depth of his commitment to the typically

[28] For the depth and density of his learning, see Kaske and Clark's notes and indices for their edition of the De Vita . We should bear in mind that in the Italian universities medicine and Aristotelian philosophy were closely allied, the latter being a prerequisite for the former in the degree program. Thus philosophers received a training in astrological medicine and often taught it besides (in his De Vita 3.8.69–70 Ficino agrees with Galen that a doctor must have regard to astrology, and at 3.21.51–53 he notes that Iamblichus and Apollonius of Tyana had testified that "all medicine had its origin in inspired prophecy"); see Paul Oskar Kristeller, "Philosophy and Medicine in Medieval and Renaissance Italy," in Organism, Medicine, and Metaphysics: Essays in Honor of Hans Jonas , ed. Stuart F. Spicker (Dordrecht, 1978), pp. 29–40. The medical curriculum at Bologna even had Aristotle's De Caelo as a required text; see Nancy Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils (Princeton, 1981), p. 152 (as cited in Kaske, "Introduction," pp. 81–82).

[29] This derives from Plato himself, or from an epitaph on Plato to the effect that Phoebus had begotten Aesculapius to heal bodies, Plato to heal souls; see Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Philosophers 3.45 and Ficino's Vita Platonis (trans. in Letters 3:47), and cf. the dedicatory proem to Ficino's De Vita (ed. Kaske and Clark, pp. 102.21–22). Corsi in his Vita Ficini 5 (trans. in Letters 3:138) attributed to Cosimo the witticism that, while the elder Ficino had been sent to heal bodies, his son had been sent down from heaven to heal souls—Cosimo was doubtless personally hardened to the puns on cosmos and medicus long before Ficino added his quota. See Hankins, Plato , pp. 291, 326.

We should recall that Ficino had a number of medical friends and correspondents, the most notable perhaps being Pier Leoni of Spoleto, Lorenzo de' Medici's physician and a bibliophile; and that he was himself a practitioner and a theorist of medicine (notably of epidemiology) and of psychiatry.

Platonic tenets that "the health of the soul is in fact cared for by certain invocations to Apollo, namely by philosophical principles," and that "everything belonging to the body, good or bad, flows from the soul," and not, we might note, from the stars (though in his treatise of 1481, Consiglio contro la pestilenza, he would accuse Mars and Saturn of causing the outbreak of plague in Florence in 1478–1480!).^[30]

Certainly here in the 1490s, in the last of his specifically Platonic labors, Ficino was working through a text that focuses on the biomedical problem of the inevitable exhaustion of, and the inbuilt limitations to, the life cycle of the state; and we can reasonably suppose that it must have heightened his awareness of the approaching close of his own life cycle, an awareness that surely had already been quickened by an encounter with a major illness in 1492, the year of Lorenzo's portent-shrouded demise.^[31] In any event, his long professional experience as a doctor of bodies and souls and his familiarity with their cycles and rhythms—and therefore with the workings of the "harmony" of the Pythagoreans in embryology, in the development, maturation, and dissolution of all animate entities, in the life itself of diseases physical and mental—must have deepened his understanding not just of the inevitability but of the measurability, at least in certain instances of sick-

[30] Opera , pp. 645.2–646 (ed. Gentile, pp. 142–145), 759.2–760; trans. in Letters 1:127–130 (no. 81)—a letter to Tommaso Valeri—and 3:22–25 (no. 14)—a speech written in his youth presumably for an academic audience. I am citing from the speech. In Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos 1.5, Mars and Saturn are described as the lesser and greater "misfortunes"; and this is their traditionally malefic role, which Ficino of course rejected when he turned away from predictive to elective astrology.

[31] There are numerous contemporary witnesses to the events immediately preceding and accompanying Lorenzo's death on 8 April 1492, which included comets, meteors, wolves heard in the countryside, will-o'-the-wisps at Careggi, and a great storm on the night of 5 April during which a lightning bolt struck the lantern of the cathedral cupola and in the resulting damage to the marbles and vaulting a falling tile broke one of the "palle" in a Medici coat of arms (on the following morning Savonarola delivered his famous apocalyptic sermon: "Ecce gladius Domini super terram cito et velociter"). See, for instance, the diary of Luca Landucci, Diario fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516 continuato da un anonimo fino al 1542 , ed. Iodoco Del Badia (Florence, 1883), pp. 63–65; and three of Ficino's letters written in the April of 1492, one now prefacing his translation of Porphyry's Vita Plotini and addressed to Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici (Opera , p. 1538.2), and two now in the eleventh book of his Epistulae , that of 15 April to the young Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici and that of 25 April to Filippo Valori, who was then the Florentine ambassador to Rome (Opera , pp. 930.4, 931.3—see Kristeller, Supplementum 1:36, for the revealing postscript to this letter in a Munich MS). For Ficino's illness, see his letter, again to Valori, of 26 June (Opera , p. 932.3). See Marcel, Marsile Ficin , pp. 512–519; and Roberto Ridolfi, Vita di Girolamo Savonarola , 2 vols. (Rome, 1952), 1:73–75; and in general Garin, Lo zodiaco , chapters 3 and 4.

ness, of the body's progress towards death. In this regard the later books of the Republic , culminating as they do in the story of Er's initiation into the mysteries of translation and of interpretation beyond the grave, together constitute a monitory and a premonitory text.

But if history—biological, personal, and institutional—is governed by durations, it is because time itself, as Plato had declared in a famous image in the Timaeus 37D–38E, is the "moving image of eternity"; and because our notion of time is keyed from the beginning to our mathematical, and not just to our observational, understanding of the relative motions of the planets, preeminently of the Sun and the Moon, and of the interplay of their cycles and epicycles, their progressions and retrogressions.^[32] How then does Ficino conceive of the planetary motions, the signifiers and the causes of the moving course of time and of the history of man in time?³³

He begins his first chapter with some key definitions of the movements assigned to the celestial spheres or circles, stressing in particular Plato's distinction between peritropai and periphorai . For these he is indebted in the main again to Theon.^[34] The first he Latins as conversiones and takes to mean the regular circling motions of the spheres, including the planetary spheres, about their own centers—in the Ptolemaic system the Earth—and visibly and specifically the circling conversion of the sphere of the fixed stars. Periphorai he Latins as ambitus or revolutiones and takes to mean the irregularly regular circuits of the planets themselves as seen against the backdrop of the fixed stars—circuits that move at times through all four points of the compass and through retrogressions as well as progressions. The ambits of the planets are governed by the conversions of the sphere of

[32] In the Republic 7.529C–531C, in a section immediately preceding the famous allegory of the Cave, Plato had argued that the astronomer depends on his sight, as the musician on his ear. For the true mathematician, however, the stars are like diagrams that enable him to meditate upon the true numbers and figures that they merely represent: "the starry heavens . . . must necessarily be deemed inferior far to the true motions with which the real swiftness and the real slowness move in their relation to each other" (529CD). Note that the relative motions of the planets are more important than the qualities associated with them or than their influences; and important only insofar as they point to "real" swiftness or slowness.

[33] In the Laws 4.721C, in the section on "the law of marriage," the Athenian Stranger argues that mankind is "coeval with time and is ever following and will ever follow the course of time": it therefore "partakes of immortality through the generation of children."

[34] Theon, Expositio 3 passim (ed. Hiller, pp. 120.1–205.6).

the fixed stars, of the crystalline sphere if there is one,^[35] and of the primum mobile , even as things on earth are governed by and are ultimately in accord with these ambits. The planetary revolutions thus serve to "adapt or accommodate"—meaning presumably to mediate between—the higher spherical conversions and the revolutions of all things on earth. It is therefore the conversions which ultimately ensure earthly flourishing or decline, fertility or sterility, even though the immediate "measure" is the particular planet or planetary revolution presiding not so much over a specific location or moment as over the "nature" itself of every entity. For each terrene entity—though Ficino is thinking of a living entity since he is examining the notions of fertility and sterility—is governed in particular by a planet and by one or more of that planet's revolutions or measures, and belongs to a chain of other entities under the same planet.^[36] He apparently accepts this in the literal sense that one revolution of Saturn, for instance, may be the appropriate measure for one plant or animal while four revolutions is the appropriate measure for another. By "measure" he means precisely the span or duration of that entity's flourishing or life, the period during which the special or singular nature of the entity enables it to thrive. For some living beings, like insects or blossoms obviously, it is not a complete planetary ambit or measure, but merely a partial one of a few days or even hours, that determines the life span, the fatal period, of their existence.

Mysteriously, some entities—and Ficino does not specify which—are governed by conversions other than those of the planets, presumably still about the Earth as the orbital center, though these conversions are unknown to us. I believe Ficino is referring here to a recurring assumption in his thought, and one familiar to him again from the Ptolemaic tradition, that invisible constellations and stars, the paranatelonta (the thirty-six decan daemons in the faces of the zodiacal signs being the most powerful), crowd the skies and add their

[35] Ficino habitually equates it with the primum mobile ; see, for instance, his De Christiana Religione 14 (Opera , p. 19). Cf. Dante, Convivio 2.6; and Pico, Heptaplus 2.2 (ed. and trans. Eugenio Garin, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: De Hominis Dignitate, Heptaplus, De Ente et Uno, e scritti vari [Florence, 1942], pp. 230–231), and Commento 2.15 (ibid., p. 506).

[36] The De Vita at 3.1.99–104 gives us the entities of a solar chain, and at 110–116 of a jovial one; see Copenhaver, "Scholastic Philosophy and Renaissance Magic," p. 551, with further references. For a mercurial chain, see Ficino's Phaedrus Commentary, summa 49 (ed. Allen, pp. 208–209). In general, see A.-J. Festugière, La révélation d'Hermès Trismégiste , 4 vols. (Paris, 1949–1954), 1:134.

influences to those of the seven visible planets, the myriad of stars and the forty-eight "universal figures" of the constellations.^[37] Such invisible beings are symbolized, as we have seen, by the 100 carried to its third power. The implications of such an assumption for Ficino are legion, in that he is admitting, is indeed requiring in this instance, not so much an alternative as a vastly expanded astronomy, and therefore astrology, that takes into account the invisible signs and stars and their invisible conversiones . Whereas ordinary astrology is based upon the examination of the planetary positions and those of the zodiacal signs and may be sufficient at times for determining mundane personal and biological matters, it is clearly insufficient for determining the chronology of the great world periods. For this we need another, a metaastrology. In other words, despite his Plotinian convictions, Ficino remained tied to the notion that events and people are governed by, are attuned to, the mathematical harmonies that govern the visible and the invisible starry cycles—though individual higher souls can to a degree liberate themselves from certain of the determinations that would otherwise afflict or bind them emotionally or physically.^[38] The postulation of a web of unseen ambits and conversions means that we cannot ever properly determine the time propitious for anything more than a simple physical "effect" or "operation," even though such a propitious time does in fact exist; and presumably Ficino had hoped 1484 would bring with it such an opportunity and had delayed publication of his Platonis Opera Omnia in that hope.^[39] Even so, we can make some tentative approaches to the notion of propitiousness.

Propitiousness, he writes, occurs when the conversions of the heavenly spheres necessary for the "effect" are in a particular harmony or accord with the stellar and planetary revolutions necessary also for the effect, seen or unseen. This particular harmony only occurs or reoc-

[37] See Ficino's own De Vita 3.1.46–55 and 3.18.2–8. Cf. Macrobius, In Somnium Scipionis 2.20, and Pico, Heptaplus 2.4–5. For the "figures" and other technical terms, see Franz Boll, Carl Bezold, and Wilhelm Gundel, Sternglaube und Sterndeutung: Die Geschichte und das Wesen der Astrologie , rev. Wilhelm Gundel (Stuttgart, 1931; reprint 1966).

[38] A good case in point is his relationship to his own horoscope—for which see his letter to Cavalcanti in Opera , pp. 732.3–733 (trans. in Letters 2:33–34 [no. 24]), and his letter to Prenninger, Opera , p. 901.2–and his interpretation of Plato's horoscope in his Vita Platonis (cf. Chapter 3, n. 6 above). For the ideal horoscope, see his letter to Lorenzo, Opera , pp. 805.2–806 (trans. in Letters 4:61–63 [no. 46]). Kaske argues that the De Vita was closely associated in Ficino's mind with his own saturnian horoscope: "Introduction," p. 19. See his letter to Filippo Valori of 7 November 1492, Opera , p. 948, and his letter to Pico, Opera , p. 888.

[39] See Chapter 3, n. 1 above.

curs at a destined time in the kaleidoscopic cycle of celestial motions, even though, from a philosophical viewpoint, these motions are always in general harmony.^[40] To compound the situation, natural sublunar things must themselves arrive at a state of perfect preparation; and there must be a harmonious "accommodation" (coaptatio ) of such a preparation with the stellar and planetary revolutions at the appropriately complementary moment in their cycles. "Fate" is the generic term for the course of the celestials' conjunctions, aspects, and oppositions; and the best, most propitious "effects" are achieved when fate is in accord with, is congruent with, nature. By "effects" Ficino means here the complex of astronomical events—the precise working moment—that prospers or impedes fertility or sterility, that is, the growth or the decay of any sublunar entity or institution. Hence the interplay between what he constantly refers to in traditional terms as the "fatal" and the "natural" law, an interplay that governs our bodies and our feelings, temperaments, mental dispositions, and psychological and social habits (mores ). The larger workings of fate, if known in principle, are therefore unknowable in practice in the sense that their intricacy defies the computational and observational skills of all stargazers, however learned in the lore of Ptolemy's Almagest and Tetrabiblos and their Arab commentators, and likewise of all mathematicians, who gaze upon the stars as a diagrammatic aid to the contemplation of their abstract, their musical and geometrical relationships. The general principle, however, is clear, namely that governing the heavenly machinery are fundamental ratios and harmonies that together constitute a greater harmony, the music of the spheres that an enraptured Pythagoras had heard with his inner ear.⁴¹

Ficino introduces, however, a major exception to the theory of man's ignorance of the future, given the appearance in certain ages of "certain divine ingenia ." These ingenia may themselves be the result of a harmonious accord between the conversions of the spheres and the fixed stars and the planetary revolutions, but in any event God bestows on them an intuitive, a prophetic understanding of such accords, which are otherwise known only to Him and are especially ordained by Him. The postulation of such divine ingenia implies a con-

[40] Again cf. Republic 7.529C–531C and of course the Timaeus . Ficino would also have recalled Macrobius's In Sommium Scipionis 2.1.8–13.

[41] See my Platonism , pp. 53–55, and n. 16 above; also Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony , pp. 31, 100.

ception on Ficino's part not of a quasi-Stoic fortune, let alone of mere chance,^[42] giving birth to the "great men" of history, but rather of the God-determined prospering of certain philosopher-theologian-poet-seers at certain times, human intelligences to whom He has granted preternatural, godlike powers. Ficino envisages indeed a kind of apostolic succession of Platonic ingeniosi or theologi , each presiding spiritually over an epoch.

Now the mid Quattrocento had nurtured Ficino himself as a saturnian thinker, as a Plato redivivus in the witty eyes of his contemporaries; and he had labored like a prophet to revive Platonism in Florence—to revive indeed the Pythagoreanism to which Plato had owed his most profound metaphysical and theological debts and which had flourished in the Magna Graecia of ancient Italy as the fruit preeminently of Italic intellect. Nonetheless, I believe Ficino was too diffident and too intelligent to suppose that his own scholarly and pedagogical accomplishments—though to a degree divinely inspired, as friends assured him flatteringly,^[43] and though an instrument assuredly of providence^[44] —constituted the work of a divinum ingenium , of some new Zoroaster or Hermes inaugurating an epochal rebirth of the spirit. For such a seer would be endowed with an insight into his own destiny centered on the perception of the dominance at last of a perfect number, since the ages that witness the prospering of "certain divine ingenia " are always measured, writes Ficino, by such a number. But is such a number the instrument of fate?

The nuptial and trigon 6 is also the first of a handful of perfect numbers familiar to us, as chapter 17 of the De Numero Fatali de-

[42] For mere chance or fortune, see the letter to Lorenzo Franceschi which opens Ficino's fourth book of Epistulae (Opera , pp. 751.3–752; trans. in Letters 3:3–4): "Denique sive fortuna res nostrae sive fato provenire dicantur, divina providentia irrationalem fortunam in ordinem ratione disponit, immite etiam fatum ad bonum suavissime temperat."

[43] See, for instance, Cavalcanti's letter, now no. 23 in Ficino's fourth book of Epistulae (Opera , p. 732.2), already referred to above in n. 3. Having exhorted Ficino to thank Saturn for his intellectual gifts, Cavalcanti proceeds to remind him of the Herculean strength by which he has made his way through the whole of Greece and even Egypt to bring back the wise men of old on his shoulders: "You have cleansed our eyes of all mists . . . through you this age has looked deeply into those whom Italy had never seen. . . . Will you therefore accuse Saturn, he who purposed that you should rise above other men?" (trans. in Letters 2:32). For a complete list of testimonies to Ficino and his work, see Kristeller, Supplementum 2:204–318, 369–371; and idem, Ficino and His Work , pp. 169–180.

[44] See his notable reply to the accusatory letter of John, the Hungarian. Both are now in the eighth book of his Epistulae (Opera , pp. 871.2–872) and date from the second luster of the 1480s. See n. 24 above.

clares, the others being 28, 496 and 8128, the numbers chapter 4 had defined as the products of their own factors.^[45] But are any of these the number Ficino has in mind? Presumably all four could somehow be involved in determining the onset and duration of a new era.^[46] However, if all four perfect numbers are involved together and not separately, or if various units measured by one such number are superimposed on each other, or if various units measured by all such numbers are in turn superimposed on all the other such units as well as on each other, then once again computing the combinations will become staggeringly complex and testify dramatically to God's omniscience. Moreover, perfect numbers higher than 8128 exist—though Ficino omits any mention of them—which could be factored in ad libitum . Finally, the obvious, equally superhuman, problem confronts us of determining when to begin and end a computation, when to start the numbering of any given span either with a perfect number or with the perfect numbers or indeed with any number. The advent of the perfect number or numbers remains therefore a sublime mystery, and the "perfect" succession of ages that it signifies is known only to God and to the prophet He inspires. It comes as the instrument not of celestial fate but of divine providence, and predicting it defies our mathematical as well as our astrological powers. Again, we are dealing with a different order of magnitude entirely from that confronting the ordinary astrologer, whether his concerns be genethliacal or horary.^[47]

We are now in a position to appreciate more fully the aura surrounding Savonarola and something of the enthusiasm, the ambivalence, the hopes, the uncertainties, the fears his apocalyptic vision aroused in the republic, a vision that swept away, incidentally, some of Ficino's closest friends, including Pico. Was this at last an inspired prophet? Would he predict, even as he vehemently attacked the follies of the astrologers, that the numbering of time was approaching perfection, that the governance by one or by all of the perfect numbers

[45] Each is also, we might add, a multiple of increasing powers of 2: of 2(x3), 2 (x7), 2 (x31), 2 (x127).

[46] We should be prepared, I suppose, to interpret them variously, however, in that 496, for instance, could mark the number of centuries, of years, of months, of days, or even conceivably of hours, minutes, and seconds (496 months being 41 1/3 years, 496 hours being 20 2/3 days, and so on).

[47] Since elective or catarchic astrology is oriented towards the constant factors, the unchanging characteristics, of the stars, it is less dependent on their motions and thus on the computation of such motions. This is why one thematic half of the De Vita can ignore the whole question of timing while the other half is obsessed with it. Again see Garin, Lo zodiaco , chapter 2.

was now at hand? Or would he point rather towards an imperfect and imperfecting number, or such a number within the fatal number, hanging like a sword over the unhappy age and betokening endless internecine wars and horrendous disasters? Or was he just another in the long line of false prophets who could only lie about the units of God's time for Florence, for the world? Perhaps his uncompromising attack on all astrology was itself a daemonic ruse? Was he the Antichrist? In the event Ficino's sense of betrayal would be shared by a number of his contemporaries and must account, in part at least, for the unworthy and uncharacteristic tone of the condemnatory Apologia which he wrote after the Dominican's fiery execution on 23 May 1498 in the Piazza della Signoria.^[48] In the years immediately following the De Numero Fatali 's publication in the December of 1496, the Empedoclean strife of the 1490s would conclude, that is, in a bewilderingly calamitous arithmetic, and not in the longed-for imminence of 6 or 28.

If the complexity and variety of stellar durations and motions had always been the Achilles' heel of astrology as a predictive science, nevertheless a heavenly variety is required, writes Ficino, if we are to measure "the whole life of the world," to measure the multifarious units of duration that govern the sequence of the ages, and the lives of men, their nations, their communities, their institutions, visible and invisible, as well as the lives of all natural entities animate and inanimate alike. Necessarily many units must be less than the century of the saeculum in that they have their own peculiar relationship to the secular age and to each and every other unit that arches into or through or out of it, however small; equally, other units must be greater than the saeculum . The 100, that is, is not the governor of time.

Ficino's second chapter begins indeed with the postulation of many-centuried periods that extend from flood to flood, the cataclysmic markers of the world's history^[49] and of the great cycles of "re-

[48] We should align the Apologia with the anti-Savonarolan aspects of Ficino's lectures on Saint Paul, which have been discussed by Father A. F. Verde in his Lo studio fiorentino, 1473–1503: Ricerche e documenti , vol. 4, La vita universitaria (Florence, 1985), pp. 1270–1273. See also Gentile in Mostra , pp. 159–160 (no. 123).

[49] Apart from the Statesman , the most famous Platonic notices of such inundations, and their accompanying conflagrations, are in the Timaeus 22C–23C, Laws 3.677AB (cf. 3.702A), and Critias 109D, 112A (for which see Ficino's epitome, Opera , pp. 1486–1487). See also Aristotle's mention of the Great Winter in his Meteorology 352a28 ff.

formation" or cyclical renewal that punctuate or possibly even coincide with the Platonic great year. Here discord is endemic. Just as we suffocate to death whenever the primary ratios of the qualities in us or the air we breathe are disrupted, so the disruption caused by "multiple [grand?] conjunctions in heaven" results in cataclysmic inundations and conflagrations.

The theory that natural disasters are the result of stellar disproportions has a long history, and Ficino is warily echoing an Empedoclean and Stoic commonplace even though it conflicts with his allegiance both to the Plotinian view that the stars in themselves are beautiful and good and to the Pythagorean belief that they circle above us in perpetual harmony.^[50] His primary Platonic guide to this theme, however, was the myth about the reversals in the direction of the world's rotation, with their accompanying earthquakes and mass destructions, in the Statesman 268E–274D, a dialogue, significantly, which also focuses on the idea of the perfect state.^[51] Notably among the ancients, Proclus in his Platonic Theology 5.6–7 and 25 had labored at its interpretation, though Ficino was to follow him only in part in his epitome for the dialogue, our chief source for his interpretation.^[52] In the myth, Ficino writes, Plato opposes the reign of Saturn over the earth-born race to that of Jove over our current generations, and declares that Saturn's was the prior and more blessed. Under Saturn men contemplated the divine, whereas under Jove they have given themselves over to action and to human affairs and pleasure (actio vitaque humana ). The Statesman 's Saturn—and here Ficino refers to the Cratylus 's defi-

[50] See Cavalcanti's letter to Ficino, now the 23d letter in the third book of Ficino's Epistulae (Opera , p. 732.2; trans. in Letters 2:31–32): "By Hercules, the stars can do us no harm; they cannot, I say, because they do not wish to."

[51] We should recall that the Statesman was a sequel to the Sophist and was intended to be a prologue to the Philosopher , which was never written. It foregrounds, that is, the problem of the relationship between philosopher and ruler and suggests, like the Republic , the possibility of an ideal philosopher-king. We should bear in mind Ficino's repeated references to such an ideal in his references to the Medici, to Matthias Corvinus, to friends; and also that he translated the De Monarchia of Dante as a token gesture perhaps to the Ghibelline model of the ideal ruler.

However, in a letter to Cherubino Quarquagli in the third book of his Epistulae (Opera , p. 744; trans. in Letters 2:64–67 [no. 53] at 67), Ficino writes that "a philosopher is a philosopher against the will of the state (civitas ) in which he is born and in spite of its active resistance." This seems to run counter to the role assigned the Platonic guardians in the Republic and to reflect rather the unhappy lot of Socrates in the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo .

[52] Ed. Saffrey and Westerink, 5:24.22–26.20, 91.19–96.24. Ficino's epitome is to be found in his Opera , pp. 1294.4–1296.

nition at 396B—"comprehends the purity and inviolable integrity of mind"; and during his reign the divine mind ruled supreme over man, and all his actions were undertaken for the sake of, and in light of, contemplation:

Saturn (Cronos ) is the supreme intellect among the angels by whose rays souls in addition to the angels are illumined and inflamed and are raised continually with all their might to the intellectual life. Whenever souls are converted to this life, they are said to live under Saturn's rule in that they live by the understanding. Consequently, in this life they are said to be regenerated by their own will because they choose to be reformed for the better. Again they are said to grow young again daily (that is, if days can be numbered then) and to blossom more and more. Hence the words of the Apostle Paul, "The inward man is renewed day by day." Finally, fruits are said to be supplied men in abundance, produced unbidden and in a perpetual spring; and this is because there—not by way of their senses and laborious discipline but by way of the inner light—men enjoy to the highest degree the tranquillity of life and pleasure, along with the wonderful spectacles of truth itself.^[53]

Jove's rule by contrast appears to be marked by accelerating disorder, mounting chaos.

In the Republic 8.546E ff., however, Plato had introduced, as we

[53] Platonis Opera Omnia (1491) fols. 70v–71r (sig. i[6]v-i[7]r) (i.e., Opera , p. 1296):

Saturnum vero supremum inter angelos intellectum, cuius radiis illustrentur ultra [Op. inter] angelos animae accendanturque et ad intellectualem vitam continue pro viribus erigantur, quae quotiens [Op. quoties] ad vitam eiusmodi convertuntur eatenus sub regno Saturni dicuntur vivere quatenus intelligentia vivunt. Proinde in ea vita ideo sponte dicuntur regenerari quia electione propria in melius reformantur. Rursus in dies reiuvenescere, id est, in dies si modo ibi dies dinumerantur, magis magisque florescere. Hoc illud Apostoli Pauli: Homo interior renovatur in dies. Denique illis alimenta sponte affatim sub perpetuo vere suppeditari quia non per sensus operosamque [Op. operamque] disciplinam, sed per lumen intimum, summaque cum vitae tranquillitate atque voluptate miris veritatis ipsius spectaculis perfruuntur.

The Pauline reference is to 2 Corinthians 4:16 ("is qui intus est renovatur de die in diem"), and the reference to "spectacles" alludes to the Phaedrus 247A4–5 (for Ficino's gloss on which, see my Platonism , p. 151). See Cesare Vasoli, "Juste, justice et loi dans les commentaires de Marsile Ficin," in Le juste et l'injuste à la Renaissance et à l'âge classique , ed. Christiane Lauvergnat-Gagnière and Bernard Yon (Saint-Etienne, 1987), pp. 11–22 at 20–22.

Cf. the passage in the Laws 4.713A ff. on the blessed time of Cronos "of which the best-ordered of existing states is a copy," and in which men were ruled by demigods, daemons, who gave men "peace, reverence, order, and justice never failing" (713DE). Significantly, law is the key to any attempt we might have to recapture that happy life (714A), and law is the domain of Jupiter. Thus the answer to the question posed at 713A—Who is the god who should give his name to the true state?—can be either Cronos or Jupiter or Cronos-Jupiter.

have seen, Hesiod's reference in his Works and Days 110–200 to the goodness of the gold and silver ages and to their succession by the degenerate ages of bronze and iron. To juxtapose the two passages is therefore to problematize the rule of Jove: Is his a good reign or a bad? Is his silver age potentially gold or iron?

In the Statesman 's myth our present circuit is from east to west and is jovian and therefore fatal; the contrary, more blessed circuit is from west to east and is saturnian and providential; and this might suggest that the planet Saturn serves as the mediator between the realms governed by planetary fate and the realm governed by providence alone. Since the course of time is thus reversed, old men—or more generally the old world—return to their youth and pass from hoary age to babbling infancy. But we must see this reversal through the eyes of the Neoplatonists, though Ficino does not adopt the radical interpretation proposed in Proclus's Platonic Theology 5.6 and 25. For there Zeus is equated with the "demiurge and father" of the Timaeus 41A7 (on the basis of the Statesman 's own reference at 273B1–2) and adjudged—insofar as "he raises all who exist and turns them back again towards Cronos"—to be the cause of both the reversals in the myth and not just of the reversal that has produced the present fatal age.^[54]

In his argumentum for the Statesman , Ficino writes that, while Plato may call "jovian the life of souls in elemental bodies—the life devoted to the senses and to action," yet he calls Jove himself the World-Soul "by whose fatal law the manifest order of the manifest world is arranged."^[55] This implies that the fatal numbers, and the proportions that they contain and that govern them, belong to Jove as the World-Soul. At the nadir of the cycle, a conversio will occur and the cycle will be reversed. Underlying the myth, therefore, is the notion of a new "birth" that is at the same time a return. Though the time frame itself is hidden from mortal understandings, still we have an evident disjunction between the artificial hundred-year century cycle and the more fundamental cycles both of fatal and of providential history, a disjunction keyed not only to the two kinds of measures—man's with his 5's and 10's and God's with his 6's and 12's—but to the proportions that govern them. Juxtaposed in effect are

[54] Cf. Hesiod, Works and Days 181 (and in general 110–200).

[55] Platonis Opera Omnia (1491) fol. 70v (sig. i[6]v) (i.e., Opera , p. 1296), "Iovem, ut arbitror, animam mundi vocat, cuius lege fatali manifestus hic manifesti mundi ordo disponitur. Praeterea vitam animorum in corporibus elementalibus ioviam esse vult sensibus actionique deditam."

alternative calendars with internal geometric (as well as, presumably, arithmetic and harmonic) ratios; and to superimpose them confronts us with the prospect that at certain rare and extraordinary moments the parameters of these calendars, and the ratios that govern them, will coincide, will mesh together. At such a time, man's inner and outer calendars will be brought back into line with the great star calendar and hence with God's calendar. The measure of man's time will become, for a divinely appointed moment or period, coincident with the measure of cosmic time. And this the prophets alone can predict.

Nevertheless, without being prophets we can at least glimpse something of the basic mathematics involved. In order to approach such huge expanses of cyclical, fatal, and providential time as are called for in the myth in the Statesman , Ficino argues that Plato requires us to multiply "such a perfect number . . . to the numberless," meaning, I take it, to multiply 6 by 100 or its multiples. For chapter 15 metaphorically refers to the 10² , that is, to 100, as the plane of the 10, and to the 10,000, that is, to 100² , as the "numberless" number. Effectively, however, Ficino thinks of all multiples of 10 as "proceeding" to the numberless, since 10 signifies the universe in its plurality, 10² the universe in its dimensionality, 10³ the universe in its solidity and cubicity, 1000 being defined as the "solid" number. Accordingly, by "such a perfect number [proceeding] . . . to the numberless" he probably means 36,000 (i.e., 6² x10³ ), the number of the great year.

Moreover, the "parts" of a perfect number measure the forming or "reformation" of lesser public or private durations. An example is 7, a "part" of 28, the second perfect number: just as seven years mark the basic divisions in life—the seven ages of man—so seven days mark the progress of a fever or disease, and seven hours the "lesser mutations" we undergo for good or ill. The reformation is complete when the number "arrives at" 6—meaning I take it when we reach the sixth year (or a multiple of 6)—for then we have reached a perfectly balanced condition, the perfect habitus . When the number arrives at 8 (or a multiple of 8), however, then we are in the opposite condition of deficiency and need, since 8 as a number is deficient in parts, meaning, as chapter 4 makes clear, that its factors add up to a product less than itself—4+2+1=7. Even so, Ficino adds diplomatically, since 8 is 2x2x2, it is a "solid" number—indeed, the first of the solid numbers—and this solidity may serve at times to "balance" or counteract its basic deficiency (in astrology, we might note, the eighth house is the house of death).

Perhaps it is coincidental that Ficino chooses to end his commentary on the fatal number with a brief discussion with the astrologers for whom 6 and 6² play such a major role, given the division of the celestial circle into 36 arcs each of 10 degrees, given the dodecade of the zodiacal signs each with three faces, and given the dodecatropos of the mundane houses again divided into three that we establish for an individual astrological chart.^[56] However, his choice of 17 as the chapter in which to do this was a witty choice in that 17 is the diagonal number for a square with sides of 12;^[57] and the course of the argument, moreover, leads him to address the theme at the root of the entire discussion, namely, the nature of human dependency on, and accord with, the heavens. His vehicle is the polyonymous figure of Jupiter, the planet and the father of gods and men, the philandering deity and the god of law, the Olympian thunderer and the temperer, the august keeper of oaths. For this fatal and yet providential king provides us with the key to an understanding of the power of the perfect numbers and the fatal numbers and their awful interaction.

To Jupiter the ancients had attributed the number 6, the first of the perfect numbers and the geometric mean at the heart of the Platonic lambda, and thus the power to unite human with divine generation, the two themes so obviously juxtaposed by Plato in the Republic 's eighth book. Indeed, although Ficino declares, as we have seen, that the perfect number is known to God alone, yet he proceeds as if it were Jove's number 6 or a multiple of 6.^[58] Furthermore, while he seems committed to the notion that 6 is the key to the number of divine generation, and that its double 12 is the key to mortal generation, in fact he has 6 in mind for mortal life as well—the life of individuals as mortals and of mankind as a mortal species (subject to the cycle of 36,000 years). Insofar as Jupiter is the sixth planet, Ficino is

[56] See Kaske, "Introduction," pp. 35–36. The dodecatropos is the result of dividing the ecliptic, numbering downwards from the ascendant on the eastern horizon and thence up from the descendant on the western, into twelve arcs of 30° called the "mundane houses" or plagae . The zodiac is deemed to revolve through this fixed circle (the creation of spherical trigonometry) each plaga of which denotes an area of life: the sixth, for instance, indicates health, the eighth death, the twelfth tribulation.

[57] We might also note that the sum of the first seventeen numbers is 153, the catch of fishes netted by the seven Apostles at the bidding of the risen Christ in John 21:11, as Augustine had pointed out in his Contra Faustum 6; and that 17 is the number of the famous chapter in Revelation on the whore of Babylon seated on the beast with seven heads and ten horns.

[58] The last digits in the four perfect numbers known to Ficino alternate in a 6–8 pattern: that is, perfection and imperfection (in this case deficiency) are contained within perfection.

able to sidestep the implications of subordinating all even numbers to all odd numbers as female to male. As the first perfect number, 6 signifies constancy, equality, temperance, and thus the jovian "complexion" in man, a complexion as rare as the perfect number (17.63–67).^[59] Six also signifies the "whole harmony of celestials" under the leadership of Jove. Additionally, the powers of 6 identify it as a circular number with 5 and 4 under it, 6 in this context referring to the circuit of the firmament, as 5 to that of the planets, and 4 to that of the elements. This, the complexion of Jupiter himself, is the paradigm, therefore, for heavenly harmony and for its images on earth: the harmony of the perfect republic, of the perfect family, of the perfect marriage, of the perfect procreating and the perfect offspring—"as rare as is the perfection, so rare is the divine progeny" (17.47–48).^[60]

Not only are the complexions of the marriage or mating partners keyed to 6 (6 being the first of the nuptial numbers), but so too is the opportunitas for marriage itself, along with the propitiousness of the sixth month of conception and of the sixth year as witnessing the onset of education. The jovian, the perfect 6 is the key for capturing the best auspices, the opportunitas indeed, in any undertaking; for it is neither wanting nor overflowing, neither lacking nor exceeding. Whereas the fatal number is the multiple, writes Ficino, of an abundant number (and not of a deficient, interestingly),^[61] the perfect number by contrast is neither abundant nor the offspring of abundance, but constant, tempered, equal—"standing firm in its parts and powers"—and therefore properly the first of the spousal numbers (17.56–62).

In praising Jove as the sixth of the planets from Earth, Ficino also notes that Venus is the sixth planet from the firmament and thus in a way a lesser Jove like Juno, as Plotinus had enigmatically affirmed.^[62] In

[59] The De Vita constantly holds Jupiter up as the supremely tempered planet, e.g., 3.5.16–21 (Jove is "wholly tempered in quality . . . and in all things totally in accord [maxime congruentem ] with human nature"), 3.16.114–117.

[60] Ficino surely noticed that Plato's prescription in the Republic 5.454–463 (as he interpreted it in the De Numero Fatali 16)—namely, that men should begin procreating at 30 (5x6) and women at 20 (5x4), and that men's procreating should last 25 years (5x5) and women's 20—plays upon the symbolism of 4, 5, and 6.

[61] Hence the situation is weighted towards fertility, not sterility, though Ficino keeps this as an option.

[62] See Enneads 3.5.3–5 (Venus as the World-Soul, i.e., Jove), 3.5.8 (Venus as Juno); also my Platonism , pp. 130–132. We might also note that, in the PlatonicPorphyrian order, the Sun is sixth from Saturn and the Moon from Jupiter: six governs, that is, the four life-giving planets.

addition he addresses the issue of the six's presence in planetary aspects, conjunctions, and oppositions, the most problematic of all being, as we might have anticipated, the conjunctions of Jupiter with Saturn, wherein Jupiter "conciliates" Saturn, who is otherwise "discordant to us."^[63] The astrologers had declared that the influence of "such a league" flourishes for twenty years; and within that twenty-year span, Ficino writes, Saturn and Jupiter alternate "perhaps" in exercising sovereign sway over the successive years. Thus we must elect for our best advantage either the time of their conjunction or the alternating jovian years and especially the sixth, twelfth, and eighteenth—the years that are the multiples of 6.^[64] Correspondingly, we should elect the sextile aspect of Jove to Saturn or the trine, which is double the sextile, since both aspects represent the "affection" of the 6 and thus of a perfect number.^[65]

The jovian virtues, furthermore, are reproduced by the Moon in certain aspects to the Sun: in conjunction (i.e. pre-new Moon, not eclipse),^[66] and in sextile and trine aspects. For then the Moon mixes

[63] For the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, cf. Ficino's long letter of 6 January 1481 (Florentine style) to Federico, Duke of Urbino, now in the seventh book of his Epistulae (Opera , pp. 849–853). Here he refutes those astrologers who affirm that Christianity arose because of an ordinary conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter on the grounds that such occurs every twenty years, whereas the "grand conjunction," i.e., returning to conjunction in the sign of Aries, takes 960 years (often rounded up to 1000 years). We should bear in mind, however, that the definition of a "grand" conjunction was continually disputed. He goes on to adduce the ninth-century Albumasar's deterministic views (including those on the decan sign in the first face of Virgo); to cite Plotinus's contrary views on the stars as signs, not causes; to take up the theme of the Magi's star; and so forth. See Garin's edition of Pico's Disputationes 1:635–639, with further references; his Lo zodiaco , chapter 1 and passim; and his "Renovatio e 'l'oroscopo delle religioni,'" and "Il 'nuovo secolo' e i suoi annunciatori," both in his La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano (Florence, 1961), pp. 155–158 and 224–228.

[64] One wonders whether Ficino charted his own intellectual biography on the basis of such jovian predominances. See his letter to Giovanni Niccolini, Archbishop of Amalfi, in the fifth book of his Epistulae (trans. in Letters 4:60–61 [no. 45]), where he declares, "I have long wanted to live my life with someone of a jovian nature, so that something of a bitter, and, as I might say, saturnian element, which either my natal star has bestowed on me or which philosophy has added, might eventually be alleviated."

[65] The aspects refer to the planets' distances from each other as measured by degrees of the heavenly arc; they are defined by Ficino in his De Vita 3.4.66–69, 3.10.34–36. Ptolemy observes in the Tetrabiblos 1.13 that of the four aspects "the trine [120° apart] and the sextile [60° apart] are called harmonious because they are composed of zodiacal signs of the same kind, either entirely female or entirely male; while the square [90° apart] and the opposite [180° apart] are discordant because they are composed of signs of opposite kinds." See too Ficino's letter to Bernardo Bembo in the third book of his Epistulae (Opera , p. 722.2; trans. in Letters 2:7 [no. 2]).

[66] Conjunction can mean that one planet is eclipsing another (a rare occurrence),

or is on the same celestial longitude with it, or is in the process of traversing it within a certain number of degrees (called the "orb"). A planet so close to the Sun as to be invisible is said to be "combust." See Kaske, "Introduction," pp. 34–35.

its qualities temperately with those of the Sun and presides over the six-associated qualities of Jove: temperance, constancy, firmness. We are dealing, if you will, with the Moon's jovian aspects. Ficino is bolstered in this speculation by its association with 12, the first of the abundant numbers, since the Moon waxes in twelve days and wanes in the same. Thus for the best offspring we should beget only when the Moon is waxing; and perhaps on only six of those twelve waxing days. For Ficino speculates that the Moon and Sun must share the rule in the days of waxing by alternating as Saturn and Jupiter do over the years. Thus the Moon would possess the second day after the union (i.e., the conjunction) with the Sun, each tempering the other. Again, presumably, the sixth and the twelfth days are especially favorable.^[67] The Moon endows things subject to fate with the second perfection, as we have seen, since 28 is the second perfect number as well as the number of days in the month.

All these aspects governed by 6 must be uncovered and analyzed "with all our strength" if we are to acquire temperance in ourselves and a stable prosperity in our spirits and in our bodies. After we have acquired this prosperous temperance, and only then, will we be in a position to devote ourselves to saturnian contemplation. This is an important proviso that weakens the force of Panofsky, Saxl, and Klibansky's analysis in Saturn and Melancholy , as we have seen.^[68] For it is the jovian man preeminently who can approach the contemplative life of Saturn, since the jovian man is the perfectly tempered or complexioned man, as the De Vita had insisted despite its preoccupation with the unique capacities, indebtedness, and problems of the saturnian scholar.^[69] Ficino exhorts us to make ready our ingenia under jovian

[67] We should bear in mind that the Moon returns to the same point of the zodiac every 28 days, but to the Sun every 29—a fact Ficino sees Plato alluding to in the Republic 9 at 587E–588A (see De Numero Fatali 3.3). The mean for the lunar synodic month, incidentally, is 29.53059 days.

[68] See Chapter 3, n. 6 above. Other studies of Renaissance melancholy have understandably used Saturn and Melancholy as their starting point and thus misrepresented Ficino's complex position on the role of Saturn. In general see now Massimo Ciavolella and Amilcare A. Iannucci, eds., Saturn from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Ottowa, 1992).

[69] If you insist, as Ficino does in the De Vita at 3.12.107–109, that mensura is the first universal principle, then the preeminence of Jove as the supremely measured deity logically follows. Whatever Saturn's gifts, Ficino always viewed Saturn and his influence as extreme and in need of being tempered by Jove (Iuppiter ipse, Saturni temperies ); see, for instance, 3.22.18–44, 59–83.

auspices, so that "whenever" the saturnian ages return—meaning the times of golden contemplation—they themselves may be instantly transformed into silver and gold. This is a cautious statement, however, that conceals Ficino's belief, and notably here in the De Numero Fatali , that this "whenever" can only be predicted and then expedited by "certain divine men" endowed by God with a visionary insight into the providential and the fatal orders and their concordant interaction.

While the Statesman 's myth of the golden age privileges Saturn over Jupiter and depicts the jovian age as a fatal, increasingly discordant self-piloting (273C), the time when God has let go the world and no longer guides it in its course (269C), Ficino, like Proclus, could not accept this at face value, given Plotinus's decision on several occasions to identify the providential Zeus both with the World-Soul and with the World-Mind, and thus effectively to equate, or at least accommodate, the aged father and the Olympian son.^[70] At the heart of what Ficino predictably sees as a mystery is the notion again of conceptual parallax: what is superior from one perspective is inferior from another and yet each perspective is valid; the parts must be seen in the context of the whole. Thus Jupiter and Saturn become complementary figures, become aspects of each other; they are the father-in-the-son of the Hermetic mystery, which, from Ficino's point of view, Plato, Plotinus, Iamblichus, and all the Platonici had inherited from Egypt.^[71]

To penetrate fully to this synthetic vision, we must return as interpreters to the golden age of saturnian contemplation. But for our vision to be universal and lasting, we must await the return of that age in present time, in something more, that is, than the imagination's prospect or the memory's retrospection. Indeed, the power of the myth of the golden age over Ficino and his Medicean contemporaries lay in the belief that it might be made actually to come again; that it

[70] See my Platonism , pp. 123–129, 138, 144–156, 193–194, 238–240. One of the primary texts for the Neoplatonists was the reference in the Philebus at 30D: "And in the divine nature of Zeus would you not say that there is the soul and the mind of a king?" This they interpreted to mean that Jove was both the World-Soul and Mind, the third and the second of the Plotinian hypostases, or powers within these hypostases.

[71] See Ficino's adversion to the great "mystery" concerning the son and the father in Iamblichus's De Mysteriis 6.2 (ed. E. Des Places [Paris, 1966], pp. 195–196) in his epitome for book 6 of the Republic (Opera , p. 1408). As for the references to the father and the son in the Corpus Hermeticum , treatises 1, 10, and 12 would have been particularly significant for Ficino. See my "Marsilio Ficino, Hermes, and the Corpus Hermeticum ," in New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought , ed. John Henry and Sarah Hutton (London, 1990), pp. 38–47 at 42–43, 45–47.

could be reinvoked and captured from the heavens by certain "divine" or "daemonic" men who would effectively be magicians over, as well as prophets of, time. However, for this to happen, such men would have to call upon Jove, even if they themselves were saturnian. In order to reunite the two primal progenitors in the mind's eye as a unitary Jove-in-Saturn, and to recreate both the original and the final perfective union in ourselves of the realms of Soul and of Intellect, we must wait upon the jovian action of such saturnian men, invoke and await the coming of thinker-rulers. When the saturnian "shepherds" of time, the demi-gods, from the Statesman 's great myth, are born again, then "the ends of the ages" will dawn with them, the dies novissimi .^[72] And yet these shepherds will come and transform the jovian world—guide idyll into epic and epic into idyll—only at Jove's command.

In Ficino's syncretistic hermeneutics this command will coincide with Jove's decision to begin the cosmic cavalcade, in the Phaedrus 's myth of the charioteer, back towards saturnian contemplation: to release, if you will, Saturn from his captivity within the active jovian soul. It is indeed the Jove of the charioteer myth at 247C–248A—the myth that Proclus too had invoked in the same context in his Platonic Theology 5.25, though again his interpretation is different from Ficino's^[73] —that enables Ficino to resolve the mystery of the Statesman 's apparently absolute dichotomy between the halcyon reign of Saturn and the tumultuous reign of his usurping youngest son. For Jove, not Saturn, holds the key to the instauration of the golden age: from him comes the divine decision to reverse the disorder of an iron time, to spin the rotation of the world towards the east. For Jove as the Orphic fragment declares is the first, the last, the head and the center, and all things are created and provided for by him,^[74] including

[72] Cf. Laws 4.713A–714B, Critias 109BC, and–on the testimony of Ficino's De Vita 3.22.45–51—the Phaedo 110B–111C; also Cratylus 397E–398C (on the men of Hesiod's golden age as being "daemons," meaning knowing and wise).

[73] See my Platonism , pp. 249–255 and passim.

[74] Kern fr. 21a. This shorter version of the "Hymn to Jove" (Kern fr. 168) was familiar to Ficino from [Pseudo-]Aristotle's De Mundo 7.401a28–b7 and was referred to by Plato in his Laws 4.715E (as the De Mundo itself goes on to suggest at b24 ff.) and by Eusebius in his De Praeparatione Evangelica 3.9. One of its first appearances in Ficino's work is in the De Divino Furore of 1457 (ed. Gentile, p. 27; cf. n. 16 above), where it is juxtaposed with the famous line from Vergil's third Eclogue , "Ab Iove principium Muse, Iovis omnia plena" (60), and with Lucan's line in the Pharsalia , "Iupiter est quodcunque vides, quocunque moveris" (9.580). Gentile's apparatus identifies a number of quotations in Ficino's first book of letters that have hitherto escaped us (the line from Lucan being an example); see also his "In margine," 60 ff.

the intelligible time that is the image of eternity, even of Saturn's eternity.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Ficino should turn for his envoy to the most authoritative of all the magician-prophet-poets of time in the Latin-Italic tradition, to Vergil who had sung of the philosopher-king Aeneas and his jovian wanderings to the land of Saturnus, and had prepared himself to do so by singing of the golden world of the pastoral, of the piping shepherds and their wandering flocks. For at the heart of Ficino's vision of Platonic eschatology is the yearning for the dawning of another, of an idyllic, an intelligible time. Predictably this moved him to cite from the famous prophecy in the Fourth Eclogue that trumpets forth that "The great order is born from the whole of the generations."^[75] With the new order of time, the "last age of the Cumaean song," men themselves will beget a new and more perfect progeny, a progeny of golden wits who will restore the golden age not of Saturn alone but of Saturn and of Jupiter in beneficent conjunction. The jovian decision to restore the golden age is therefore bound up with the notion of progeny, of the decision to beget a new son. And Jove, not Saturn, is the begetting deity of the poets' prurient and copious imaginations.

One might say that Vergil's Fourth Eclogue is a soteriological restatement for Ficino of Plato's enigmatic passage on the fatal number. Certainly, the Vergilian citation helped him to understand the profoundly prophetic cast of that passage, from which Plato emerges as a consummate numerologist, arithmologist, and astrologer, a Greek Isaiah prophesying the coming of a new birth, of a more perfect progeny, of a golden saturnian king of the gods and men, of a maguschild whose name shall be called wonderful.^[76] In terms of the

[75] For a survey and bibliography of Christian interpretations of this prophecy—it was cited, for instance, by Statius in Dante's Purgatorio 22.70–72—see Pierre Courcelle, "Les exégèses chrétiennes de la Quatrième Éclogue," Revue des études ancinnes 59 (1957), 294–319. For Vergil's medieval reputation, see the classic study by Domenico Comparetti, Virgilio nel medio evo , rev. Giorgio Pasquali, 2 vols. (Florence, 1937); and Henri de Lubac, L'exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens de l'Écriture , 4 vols. (Paris, 1959–1964), 2:233–262. For later, see Vladimir Zabughin, Vergilio nel Rinascimento italiano (Bologna, 1921).

[76] Ficino's sense of Plato as a prophet was reinforced by the Second Letter at 314A, to which he refers, for instance, in a letter to Cardinal Bessarion now in the first book of his Epistulae (ed. Gentile, pp. 35–36; trans. in Letters 1:52–53): "Hoc vaticinatus Plato: fore tempus multa post secula, regi Dionysio inquit, quo theologie mysteria exactissima discussione velut igne aurum purgarentur" (12.23–25). See too his Commentary on Saint Paul, chapter 3 (Opera , p. 431.1).

Christian-Neoplatonic interpretation that was Ficino's goal, it had been Jove's decision to beget a new son that will ensure eventually the return paradoxically of Saturn's, of the father's, age of gold. We can now see why Ficino and others had trouble with any straightforward accommodation of the Greek mythological generational triad of Uranus-Saturn-Jove with the Christian Trinity. In particular Saturn and Jove were only partially identifiable with the Son and the Holy Spirit, and Ficino had already expressed reservations in his Phaedrus Commentary 10 and 11 about identifying Uranus with the Father even as he had utilized Plotinian and Proclian conceptions to postulate a triple Jupiter.^[77] In the event, attributes were transferred and Jove became the Father in his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, despite Augustine's strident arguments against such an accommodation.^[78] Hence for Renaissance Platonists in search of a pagan symbol for the Son the attraction of the candidacy of Hercules, a candidacy first seriously mooted in antiquity and prevalent in the later Middle Ages, and one that reached its apogee in the sixteenth century in Ronsard's ode to Odet de Coligny, "Hercule Chrestien," in his second book of hymns.^[79] "The bravest of the gentiles," in Ficino's words,^[80] and a son of Jove, Hercules had duly accomplished the greatest of worldly labors and been translated, after an agonizing death occasioned by a centaur's hatred and the venomous blood of the Hydra, into a constellation: a mortal man, he had been made into an immortal god.^[81]

Like the Hebrew prophets, possessed of a Mosaic but not yet a Christian wisdom, Plato had predicted the dawning of a new dispensation, the advent of a truly theological philosophy that would supersede his own, the gift of an heroic strength that would defeat the

[77] Ed. Allen, pp. 110–129, esp. 110–115, 118–119, 128–129. See my Platonism , chapters 5 and 6, esp. pp. 119–120, 123–128, 152–155. In his Platonic Theology 5.6, 25, Proclus had maintained that the Statesman was about the "greatest" of the Joves.

[78] De Civitate Dei 4.11. In general see Kristeller, Philosophy of Ficino , pp. 168–169, and my "Absent Angel," pp. 227–228.

[79] See Marcel Simon, Hercule et le christianisme (Paris, 1955).

[80] Opera , pp. 800.2–801; trans. in Letters 4:49 [no. 34]—a letter to Cardinal Riario.

[81] And Ficino frequently calls to mind the haunting lines in Boethius's Consolatio at 4.7.32–35 which conclude "superata tellus sidera donat"—lines that were apparently very familiar to the Renaissance humanists. See my "Homo ad Zodiacum: Marsilio Ficino and the Boethian Hercules," in Forma e parola: Studi in memoria di Fredi Chiappelli , ed. Dennis J. Dutschke, Pier Massimo Forni, Filippo Grazzini, Benjamin R. Lawton, and Laura Sanguineti White (Rome, 1992), pp. 205–221.

Hydra of desire and sin. And his insights as a geometer had enabled him to see that the golden age would dawn under the presidency of both the perfect and the fatal numbers; that a child of Zeus would be born to preside over time's perfect measure, over the jovian decision to renew the saturnian measure of the Statesman 's myth. But, despite his "trinitarian" enigmas in the second and sixth Letters and his suggestive wording in the Timaeus about a triple causality, Plato had not foreseen, could not have foreseen clearly, the dogma itself of the Trinity, of the threefold consubstantiality in which the Son is one with the Father and the Father's Spirit.^[82] For no pagan filiatory myth of Uranus, Saturn, and Jove, however Orphically or Platonically unfolded, however sympathetically interpreted by a Christian allegorist, could ever do more than dimly adumbrate the unique, the mystical relationship of the three persons in one substance which is the very God not of the philosophers but of revelation.^[83]

One of the Bible's most famous triple formulations serves Ficino, appropriately, as his point of closure, the phrase from the Wisdom of Solomon 11:20 [21] that God the Creator has arranged all things in "number, weight, and measure."^[84] The implication here is not only

[82] See Wind, Pagan Mysteries , pp. 241–244, and my "Marsilio Ficino on Plato, the Neoplatonists and the Christian Doctrine of the Trinity," Renaissance Quarterly 37 (1984), 555–584. On Ficino's fascination in general with Biblical prophecy, and with the theme of the Second Coming and the dies novissimi , see Cesare Vasoli, "Per le fonti del 'De Christiana Religione' di Marsilio Ficino," Rinascimento , 2d. ser., 28 (1988), 135–233 at 139–141.

[83] Hence Ficino's guarded words on Plotinus, along with Plato his acknowledged master: "Plotinus Apostoli Ioannis et Pauli mysteria saepe tangit, mysterium tamen Trinitatis non tam assecutus videtur quam perscrutatus et pro viribus imitatus" (Opera , p. 1770.1; cf. pp. 1714.2, 1757. 1758.8, 1761.3, 1766.1).

Nonetheless, he asserts towards the end of the fifth chapter of his Commentary on Saint Paul that Socrates and Plato, along with the Gospel (i.e., Christ, as Ficino goes on to determine), had all improved on the Mosaic law: "Item legem Mosaicam, quasi non penitus absolutam sed pro capacitate suscipientium datam, non solum Dominus in Evangelio emendavit sed Socrates etiam atque Plato" (Opera , p. 434). This suggests that the Platonici , in some areas at least, are more important than the Law, if not than the Prophets. For a list of the Platonici 's theological achievements, see the second chapter of his Commentary on Saint Paul (Opera , p. 430.1).

[84] See Appendix 3 below. For God as Himself the measure in Ficino, see the important article by Edward P. Mahoney, "Metaphysical Foundations of the Hierarchy of Being according to Some Late-Medieval and Renaissance Philosophers," in Philosophies of Existence, Ancient and Modern , ed. Parviz Morewedge (New York, 1982), pp. 165–257 at 189–192; idem, "Neoplatonism, the Greek Commentators, and Renaissance Aristotelianism," in Neoplatonism and Christian Thought , ed. Dominic J. O'Meara (Albany, N.Y., 1982), pp. 169–177 and 264–282 at 174–176; idem, "Lovejoy and the Hierarchy of Being," Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987), 211–230 at 224.

that the world has been created and organized on mathematical principles—preeminently for Ficino as we have reiterated, as for anyone in the Pythagorean tradition, a matter of ratios and proportions—but also that God has disposed time itself in order. A truly divinely inspired prophet is able to hear, if only in passing, the harmonies governing this order and therefore to predict and to invoke the ends and beginnings of new eras and epochs, of other dispensations, of restitutory cycles for nations, for families, for individuals, for the works and deeds of men. Among the prophets of the Gentiles, as Augustine had personally testified, Plato was preeminent.^[85] He was the philosopher-theologian who had inherited the prophetic powers of Hermes Trismegistus, of Orpheus, of Sibyls such as Diotima of Mantinea, and whose prophecies could be set beside, if subordinated to, those of Balaam, of Isaiah, of Malachi, of Micah and Zechariah, as bearing witness to the future advent of Christ, of the Platonic Adam, of the Idea of Man.^[86] For Christ was to come as the new star in the astrology of ancient belief, the new anima mundi of the old philosophers, the Son divinely begotten at the conjunction of the fatal, the providential, and the nuptial numbers known only to his Father.

We have been granted intimations too of a time when once again man's nuptial and fatal numbers will be governed by the perfect numbers, when both occasion and opportunity will be married to eternity, and mankind married to the Lamb, the bride of the universal Church to the Son whose countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars. Although it receives no mention in this commentary, Solomon's Canticle of Canticles, as the great biblical text on amatory union, must surely have subtly conditioned Ficino's reading of the crucial passages in Plato's Republic and Laws on the ideal marriage and the ideal off-

[85] For Augustine's praise of Plato see Ficino's remarks in his Vita Platonis sub "Quae Plato affirmavit et qui eum confirmaverunt" (Opera , pp. 769.3–770.1; trans. in Letters 3:45); he refers to the Contra Academicos 3.20.43, De Vera Religione 4.7, Confessions 7.9, and the City of God 2.14.

[86] The Idea of Man was raised as an issue by Plato in the Parmenides 130C1–2. This was commented upon particularly by Proclus in his In Parmenidem 3.812 ff. (ed. Cousin; trans. Glenn R. Morrow and John M. Dillon [Princeton, 1987], pp. 176–177) and then by Ficino in his own Parmenides Commentary 4 (Opera , p. 1139), Ficino being indebted, in part at least, to William of Moerbeke's highly literal Latin translation of Proclus's commentary done around 1285 (ed. Carlos Steel, 2 vols. [Louvain and Leiden, 1982–1985]). Indeed as the logos, the verbum Dei , Christ is the Idea of all things, as the De Christiana Religione explicitly argues. See also Ficino's letter to Cavalcanti on the theory of the Ideas according to the Timaeus (ed. Gentile, pp. 82–85 [no. 42]; trans. in Letters 1:85–88 [no. 43]) and his Commentary on Saint Paul's Epistle to the Romans, chapter 5 (Opera , pp. 433.2–435).

spring.^[87] For his eugenics are keyed, not to the renewal of some peninsular successor of an ancient Greek city-state, but to the peopling of the future City of God into which all the cities of men, liberated from the sway of fatal numbers, will be at last transformed, Rome on its seven hills having become the New Jerusalem. In Ficino's interpretation, in any Christian Platonist's interpretation, it is the New Jerusalem of Ezekiel and the other Prophets, of St. John on Patmos, and of St. Augustine's greatest work that constitutes the ideal Platonic polis, the city of the Savior. The enigmatic passage in the Republic 's eighth book was thus a gentile's prophecy, seen through a glass darkly, concerning the grafting of the limb of perfection onto the fatal numbering of the Jesse tree of the world, the breeding from the fatal stock of Adam's progeny of a second Adam, of the ideally tempered Man.

If these speculative possibilities were running at all in Ficino's mind, did Plato's passage also evoke various pictorial images associated with the familiar theme of the Annunciation, the moment of Christ's conception and golden begetting, the entry of the perfect jovian numbers into the calculations and computations of the starled wizards from the East?^[88] And did Gabriel, the angel of that Annunciation, take on some of the attributes of a Platonic geometermagus in proclaiming the descent of such numbers not only into our soul's planar triangularity but into the regular solids constituted from the triangles of Plato's Timaeus , the solidity, the cubicity of the material creation that bore within it still the vestiges of the Trinity?^[89] Was God's divine purpose a kind of spiritual eugenics and the providential course of history the story of how man had been taught through the mystery of the Incarnation to breed the best men, the best deeds, the

[87] See his Phaedrus Commentary 2 (ed. Allen, p. 79), and his letter to Cosimo on Lorenzo Pisano's commentary on Canticles, which is now in the first book of his Epistulae (ed. Gentile, p. 29 [no. 7]; trans. in Letters , 1:48–49 [no. 8]); see also my Platonism , p. 64 and note.

[88] Of course, one of the disputed issues in casting a horoscope, including the horoscope of Christ, is whether to start with the moment of birth or of conception. The latter may have been more astrologically satisfactory but was harder to come by for the obvious reasons of discretion or modesty. It would be idle to speculate about which paintings of the Annunciation would recur to Ficino, given the wealth of possibilities on the walls of late-Quattrocento Florence. Jupiter's ravishment of Danae in a shower of gold is one of the obvious parallels from pagan theology.

[89] Augustine's De Trinitate 9–15 served to justify on theological grounds Ficino's Neoplatonic philosophical and methodological fascination with triads. In general, see Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance , pp. 37n, 41–44, 241–255; also Chapter 2, n. 62 above.

best thoughts, the best souls; taught to model all his endeavors after the supreme breeding achievement, the generation of the Son of Man? In which case, was Christ's conception and Christ's birth presided over by the nuptial, the fatal, and the perfect numbers in unique accord? And had this accord been symbolized by the new star in the East, as Balaam had foretold in Numbers 24:17, a comet that had been condensed from the air and illuminated by Gabriel, and that had led the Magi, the philosopher-king-geometers, the "wisest of the Chaldaeans," to the crib of a perfectly tempered child, the perfect Timaean triangle, all music's diapason?^[90] And when would this accord recur?

Gabriel as a geometer or as a Platonic magistrate determining the best breeding time for Mary, Christ as the ideal citizen of Plato's Republic , the babe in the manger as the triangle or the lambda of the Timaeus , the Savior as a number which is the sum of its parts, these and the other figures and formulations I have just invoked by way of rhetorical questions may be difficult initially for us to credit as being either relevant or sound. Nonetheless, the issues they raise concerning the themes of the immaculate conception, the perfect birth, and the pleroma are in line with those raised by Ficino's many other bold attempts to arrive at an accommodation between Platonism and Christianity, between Pallas and Themis, philosophia and pietas , an accommodation whose principles he always adhered to with unwavering enthusiasm.^[91] Indeed, the chiliastic and messianic energies that swirled around the unaccommodating Savonarola in the 1490s must themselves have contributed to his championship here of Plato, the last in the hexadic (the jovian?) succession of ancient theologians, as the culminating prophet in pagan antiquity of rebirth and renovation, of a spiraling ascent into eternity and not just a cyclical return.^[92] Mani-

[90] Ficino's sermon, De Stella Magorum , and his Apologia (Opera , pp. 489–491, 572–574) focus on Gabriel's role in creating the comet (the star) that led the magi to Bethlehem rather than on the conception; see Rab Hatfield, "The Compagnia de' Magi," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970), 107–161; Stephen M. Buhler, "Marsilio Ficino's De Stella Magorum and Renaissance Views of the Magi," Renaissance Quarterly 43.2 (1990), 348–371, with further references; and in general J. L. Jervis, Cometary Theory in Fifteenth-Century Europe (Wroclaw, 1985).

[91] See Cesare Vasoli, Filosofia e religione nella cultura del Rinascimento (Naples, 1988), pp. 19–73; idem, "Ficino e il 'De Christiana Religione,'" in Die Philosophie im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert: In Memoriam Konstanty Michalski (1879–1947) ), ed. Olaf Pluta (Amsterdam, 1988), pp. 151–190.

[92] For the diffusion of chiliastic and Joachimite conceptions in the late Quattrocento and early Cinquecento, see, for example, Marjorie Reeves, Influence of Prophecy

in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford, 1969), pp. 185 ff.; Ottavia Niccoli, Profeti e popolo nell'Italia del Rinascimento (Rome and Bari, 1987)—this has been translated by Lydia G. Cochrane as Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, 1990); and the essays by various hands in Prophetic Rome in the High Renaissance Period , ed. Marjorie Reeves (Oxford, 1992) (this includes a comprehensive bibliography). Awaiting investigation, however, is Ficino's own relationship to Franciscan eschatology and Joachimism, and notably to the prophecies concerning the imminent third Age of the Spirit and the middle of three Advents of Christ, for which see Reeves, Influence , pp. 140–144, 198–199. But we can say that, in the 1490s at least, he was not promoting any particular imperial, papal or Medicean candidate as the key to inaugurating the golden age, the Platonic republic, or the New Jerusalem.

festly, none of the dialogues spoke more eloquently to this annunciatory theme, and to the theme of the providentially ordered, the ideal commonwealth, than the ten books of the Republic . And no book within it spoke with more esoteric wisdom than the eighth, the book of the great fatal number that ended in the second perfect number that itself ended in 8, the number of death, deficiency and solidity and yet the measure of the octave. In the face both of Savonarola's fulminations against the vanity of pagan learning and philosophy and of the ebbing away of faith in Ficino's whole apologetic enterprise on the part of some of his closest friends, Ficino remained stubbornly and still ardently committed to apology: to the unequivocal promotion of the accommodating argument that Solomon's Jehovah was Plato's Idea of the Good who had arranged all things, including surely the books of the philosopher, in number, weight, and measure. The De Numero Fatali , we recall, was the last of his Platonic commentaries, but it has the same undiminished faith in the validity of the ancient mysteries for a Christian as the De Amore of his youth.