The Translation Cosimo de Medici Wanted Before He Died

The Corpus Hermeticum reached the Latin reading world of Renaissance Europe because of a specific, well documented commission. Cosimo de Medici, ruler of Florence and patron of the scholar Marsilio Ficino, had Ficino already at work translating Plato when a manuscript of the Hermetic texts arrived in Florence, and Cosimo, elderly and reportedly eager to read it before he died, ordered Ficino to set Plato aside and translate the Hermetica first. Ficino completed the Latin version in 1463, and it was the Asclepius rather than this new translation that had circulated in the Latin Middle Ages, since the Asclepius alone had survived antiquity in a Latin text, so Ficino's work was most readers' first encounter with the rest of the corpus at all. The urgency behind the commission reflects the reputation these texts already carried, a belief that Hermes Trismegistus was an Egyptian sage of tremendous antiquity whose wisdom anticipated and confirmed Christian revelation, a dating later scholarship overturned when the corpus was shown to be Greek philosophical writing from the early centuries after Christ rather than ancient Egyptian material. Ficino's translation, made under a dying patron's order and resting on a mistaken date, is nonetheless the single act most responsible for Hermeticism's influence on the following two centuries of European thought.