ABSTRACT
This paper explores Marsilio Ficino’s several attempts over his scholarly career to engage the ancient myth of the Titan Prometheus as it appears in Plato’s works, and most notably in the Protagoras and the Philebus. Its collateral aim is to explore the notion of Neoplatonic commentary and its transformative philosophical and theological agenda, given that myth, theology, and philosophy inhabit for a Neoplatonist the same intellectual system. From being a supernumerary, a lesser Mercury or a mercurial daemon, Prometheus eventually became for the Renaissance Florentine the divine dialectician. It was his dialectical fire and his foreknowledge that enabled him to see the providential plan that a benevolent Olympian Jupiter had always had in mind for us and for the world, and to serve indeed as Jupiter’s beneficent messenger and intermediary rather than as a thief of heavenly fire. This Ficinian Titan reminds us of the peaks of contemplation that are ours to attain, if we avail ourselves of the supreme Platonic art or discipline that can initiate us into the nature of the Good itself. As such, he continued to play a role in Ficino’s evolving understanding of Neoplatonic method, and specifically of the centrality of its exfoliating metaphysical triads.
