Why Hermes interrupted Ficino’s Plato project
In the 1460s, the Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino was preparing Latin translations of Plato’s works. Then a Greek manuscript of writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus came into his hands. Ficino set Plato aside and translated the Hermetic texts first—not because Plato had lost importance, but because he believed Hermes offered an even earlier source of wisdom.
Hermes Trismegistus was a legendary sage whose name joined the Greek god Hermes with the Egyptian god Thoth. Renaissance readers treated the writings attributed to him as the work of a very ancient teacher. Ficino saw them as part of a chain of “ancient theology”: teachings that, in his view, had anticipated truths later expressed in Greek philosophy and Christianity.
Translation as a choice about authority
The priority mattered. Translating a text made it available to scholars who could not read Greek, and Ficino’s Latin version helped bring Hermetic ideas into the intellectual life of Renaissance Europe. By putting Hermes first, he was effectively presenting these writings as a foundation for the philosophical tradition, not merely an unusual addition to it.
Ficino’s confidence rested on the age he believed the texts had. Their authorship and dating are now understood differently: the Hermetic writings were composed in the early centuries CE, rather than in the remote antiquity Renaissance readers imagined. But that later reassessment does not erase the historical consequence of Ficino’s decision. For his readers, the manuscript seemed to carry wisdom from before Plato—and that perceived antiquity was enough to move Plato’s translation down the queue.
