And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast podcast brought to you with the support of the

Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich online at History of Philosophy.

Net. Today's episode, Footnotes to Plato, Marsilio Ficino.

When I started talking about Plato back on episode 18 of this podcast, I mentioned

Alfred North Whitehead's famous remark that the European philosophical tradition consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

I can just about go along with that with the provisor that a good footnote like an empty pepper mill is nothing to sneeze at.

Back when I was a grad student, I found myself in the library one day and realized that I was

scanning through an article more or less ignoring the main text and reading only the footnotes.

This I thought must be some kind of milestone in my scholarly formation for better or worse.

And since those early podcasts on Plato, we've seen time and again that glosses, commentaries and

other exegetical labors have played a central role in the history of philosophy, inside and

outside the European tradition.

So I mean it as the highest of compliments when I say that no one has written

greater footnotes to Plato than Marcilio Fichino. Well, not footnotes exactly, but full-blown

commentaries, which Fichino produced in addition to his full Latin translation of Plato's dialogues.

As we saw last time, Ficino tells us himself that this prodigious feat of scholarship was done at the behest of the Medici.

He even read from his translations of Plato to Cosimo de Medici

while the latter lay on his deathbed.

That was in 1464, the year after Cosimo's gift to Fucino of a villa on the outskirts of Florence.

Heedy stuff for a young scholar who was still in his early 30s having been born in 1433.

Originally, he planned to become a doctor like his father before him and Ficino never

entirely lost his interest in medicine. Indeed, no less an authority than Paracelsus wrote in 1527 that just as Avicenna was the greatest of the

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