Cosimo de' Medici

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Cosimo de’ Medici was a Florentine banker and statesman who, without ever holding formal sovereign office, governed Florence as its leading citizen from 1434 until his death, and whose patronage gave the Renaissance revival of Plato its first institutional footing. His standing rested on the Medici bank, one of the wealthiest financial houses in Europe; he spent its returns on building, manuscripts, and scholars, and was honored after his death with the title pater patriae, father of the country.

His place in the history of Western esotericism turns on a single decision near the end of his life. Cosimo had gathered Greek manuscripts and supported the young scholar Marsilio Ficino, intending him to render the complete dialogues of Plato into Latin. Around 1462 a manuscript of the Corpus Hermeticum — the Greek philosophical-religious treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus — reached Florence, brought from Macedonia by an agent of the Medici. Ficino, in the preface he later wrote to his translation, recorded that Cosimo instructed him to set Plato aside and translate the Hermetic books first. Ficino completed that Latin version, the Pimander, in 1463, the year before Cosimo died; the Plato followed afterward.

The order of work reflected what the age believed about the texts rather than what is now established. Cosimo, Ficino, and their contemporaries held Hermes Trismegistus to be an ancient Egyptian sage who had lived close to the time of Moses — a source from whom Plato’s own wisdom was thought to descend. To translate Hermes before Plato was, on that understanding, to begin at the headwaters. Modern scholarship dates the Hermetic treatises to the first centuries of the Common Era, products of Greco-Roman Egypt rather than remote antiquity; the chronology that gave Cosimo’s instruction its urgency was an error of dating, exposed only in 1614 by Isaac Casaubon. The consequence, however, was real: the Latin Hermetica entered European thought as venerable scripture, and shaped the magic, natural philosophy, and religious speculation of the next century and a half.

The “Platonic Academy” sometimes credited to Cosimo’s founding is treated with caution by historians. The phrase suggests a chartered institution on the ancient model; the evidence points rather to an informal circle of scholars, gathered around Ficino under Medici support and given a villa at Careggi, that later tradition magnified into an academy. What is not in doubt is the patronage itself, and what it released. A banker’s decision about which book to translate first opened the channel through which a body of late-antique Egyptian philosophy became one of the formative currents of the European Renaissance.

→ In the library: Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres · The Dialogues of Plato (Jowett, 1892)

→ Related: Marsilio Ficino · Hermes Trismegistus · Neoplatonism · The One