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Nuptial Arithmetic
Marsilio Ficino's Commentary on the Fatal Number in Book VIII of Plato's Republic
Michael J. B. Allen
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley / Los Angeles / London
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Page iv
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press
London, England
Copyright © 1994 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Allen, Michael J. B.
Nuptial arithmetic: Marsilio Ficino's commentary on the fatal
number in Book VIII of Plato's Republic / Michael J. B. Allen
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-08143-9 (alk. paper)
1. Ficino, Marsilio, 14331499. De numero fatali. 2. Plato
Republic. Book 8. 3. Symbolism of numbersHistory.
4. EugenicsHistory. 5. AstrologyHistory. I. Title.
BF1623.P9A57 1994
133.3'359dc20 92-26074
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for
Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984
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Page v
". . . come quei che va di notte,
che porta illume retro e sè non giova,
ma dopo sè fa le persone dotte."
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Page vi
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Page vii
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Part One: Study
1
Ficino's Commentary on the Eighth Book of the Republic 3
2
Figured Numbers and the Fatal Number 44
3
Eugenics, the Habitus, and the Spirit 81
4
Jupiter, the Stars, and the Golden Age 106
Epilogue 143
Part Two: Texts
Headnote and Sigla 149
Text 1
Argumentum 153
Text 2
Ficino's Rendering of Republic VIII.546A1-D3 161
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Page viii
Text 3
De Numero Fatali 171
Appendix 1: Ficino's Greek Exemplar 255
Appendix 2: Ficino and The Earlier Humanist Versions of Republic 546A FF. 257
Appendix 3: "In Number, Weight, and Measure" 260
Appendix 4: Conversion Table 263
Select Bibliography 265
Index Auctorum Et Nominum 279
Index to Part One 281
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Page ix
PREFACE
"Non cortex nutrit"
This book is concerned with a treatise written late in the career of Marsilio Ficino (14331499), the influential
philosophermagus of Medicean Florence and the presiding genius of Renaissance Neoplatonism. The treatise is an
arcane and hitherto unexplored commentary focusing on a notoriously intractable mathematical passage in the
eighth book of Plato's Republic. I shall refer to it for convenience' sake by one of its titles as the De Numero Fatali.
My first part deals in general with the commentary's features, themes, and difficulties, and in particular with its
composition, sources, and context; with Ficino's analyses of the role in Plato of figured numbers including fatal
numbers; with his treatment of the interwoven motifs of eugenics, the habitus, the spirit, and the daemons; and
with the ambivalent roles he assigns to astrology in the instauration of a golden age under a Jupiter reunited with
his father, Saturn.
For historians of the transmission and interpretation of classical texts, the evidence marshaled here should be
persuasive enough to ensure the recognition for the first time of Ficino's rightful place at the head of the long line
of modern exegetes of the Platonic passage. For students of Ficino and of Quattrocento cultural and intellectual
history, however, I hope the last two chapters particularly will cast fresh light on a number of challenging
philosophical and mythological issues, and suggest some elusive linkages between Ficino's reaction to
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Page x
Plato's political dialogue and his premonitory sense of an imminent star-governed change in the destiny of
Florence, a city already in the grip of the tumultuous millenarian passions of the 1490s.
My second part presents the first critical edition and translation of the De Numero Fatali and its relaxed texts, with
accompanying notes.
I embarked on this study in the anticipation that I could sharpen my own appreciation of one of the age's seminal
thinkers by grinding and polishing the lens of a new and fascinating text. I was also convinced that further progress
in our understanding of Ficino's manifold contributions to Renaissance thought will depend on scholars embarking
on similarly detailed analyses of a number of his other treatises, many of which have been barely skimmed in
modern times, and then only by a handful of Ficinians in search of a particular reference or a complementary
argument.
In this doubtless Sisyphean labor, I have called on the patience and erudition of several friends. In particular, I am
greatly indebted to Paul Oskar Kristeller, to Brian Copenhaver, and to James Hankins, who worked through my
typescript offering the kind of valuable suggestionsquid possit oriri, quid nequeatthat only their immense and
generous scholarship could provide. I would also like to thank Michael Haslam for checking my readings of the
Greek MS Ficino used for the passage on the Number, and Nicholas Goodhue and Owen Staley for both their
scholarly and their editorial help. For annual research grants, I am grateful, as in the past, to UCLA's Academic
Senate. The frontispiece is of an oil, a gift on my fiftieth, by my wife, Elena.
This book is dedicated to my hebdomadal dart-partners, Mithraic devotees over the years of the fatal numbers from
14 to 20, of any double and the double bull: my mortal foes, Reg Foakes and Alan Roper, and my immortal ally,
Al Braunmuller. Iaculatores nonnunquam sagittarii.
SANTA MONICA,
1 APRIL 1993
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Page 1
PART ONE
STUDY
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