Corpus Hermeticum I (Poemandres) 1-3

Frances Yates's study, itself flagged in this atlas's own source record as influential but now substantially contested on some of its larger claims, still reliably tells the story of how this text was dated and then redated. Renaissance readers inherited a belief that its purported author, Hermes Trismegistus, was an Egyptian sage who lived before or alongside Moses, which made the Corpus Hermeticum prisca theologia, ancient wisdom that anticipated and therefore confirmed Christian truth from outside its own revelation. Marsilio Ficino found the assumption compelling enough to set aside his own Plato translation, already underway, and translate the newly arrived Hermetic manuscripts first, in 1463, on the strength of Hermes's supposed antiquity over the Greek philosopher.

In 1614 the classicist Isaac Casaubon examined the corpus's Greek philologically, word choices, grammatical forms, philosophical vocabulary, and showed it belonged to the Koine Greek of the early centuries after Christ, centuries after Moses rather than before him, work that effectively ended the text's status as ancient wisdom almost overnight among serious scholars. Casaubon's redating is now a standard example in the history of philology of how close textual analysis overturned an assumption tradition had simply inherited; this opening vision of Poemandres, whatever else it is, is a document of the early centuries of the common era rather than a survival of pharaonic Egypt.