ABSTRACT

Platonic concepts were also known, of course, from such authorities as Cicero, Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, and Boethius and from the numerous cosmological works that drew upon the Timaeus. Augustine was a philosopher of great depth and originality—many would call him the father of Christian philosophy—and his compelling account of the part played by Greek metaphysics, and signally by Platonic metaphysics, in returning him to the faith of his mother and his youth had special meaning for Renaissance thinkers. The notion of a pre-Platonic succession of sages in possession of Platonic truths was an ancient one that long antedated Augustine's strategy of "back-reading". By late antiquity, the Platonists had worked out a pre-Platonic genealogy of wisdom stemming from Zoroaster in Persia and Hermes Trismegistus in Egypt and then passing through Orpheus and Pythagoras down to such sages as Aglaophemus and Philolaus and on to Plato.