The Eleventh-Century Shift in the Reception of Plato's Timaeus and Calcidius's Commentary

Abstract

T he Timaeus is the only one of Plato's dialogues to have been continuously available in Latin translation in the West from the time of classical antiquity.' Two Latin versions, both incomplete, circulated in the period prior to the Renaissance: one by Cicero from the first century BC (Timaeus, 27D-47B, with some passages omitted), the other by Calcidius from around 400 AD (Timaeus, 17A-53C), accompanied by his Latin Commentary. In his Middle Platonic commentary Calcidius does not provide a detailed explanation of each theme which arises in the Timaeus. Instead he discusses selected issues dealt with in the portion of the dialogue which he translated and considered by him to be in need of further explanation. The Commentary was often copied and bound together with Plato's dialogue in medieval manuscripts. Scant knowledge of Greek in the Middle Ages blocked access to Plato's original text and the extant Greek commentaries and scholia. Calcidius's Commentary consequently became the most important tool for the interpretation of the Timaeus. The manuscript evidence shows that the Commentary was annotated by its earliest medieval readers long before the dialogue itself became the object of scrutiny. The twelfth-century glosses on the Timaeus, attributed to Bernard of Chartres and William of Conches, also relied on Calcidius as their chief source. And even this new twelfth-century hermeneutic apparatus did not displace the Commentary, which attained renewed popularity during the Renaissance. In order to understand the medieval reception of the Timaeus, therefore, we have to explore the transmission of Calcidius's Commentary. There are in total 156 extant medieval manuscripts of the two translations, many equipped with marginal and interlinear glosses and diagrams which were produced and later augmented by generations of scholars. These annotations, some dating from the ninth century and still found in fifteenth-century manuscripts, were often copied together with the texts. Their presence made possible a variety of readings and interpretations, generating an ongoing dialogue with the texts of Plato and Calcidius. Apart from registering the impressions of readers, the glosses outline the main currents of interpretation. The central aim of my inquiry is to determine how the transmission and interpretation of Plato's Timaeus and the Commentary of Calcidius changed over the course of the eleventh