A library for the Platonism that ran from third‑century Rome through Athens, Alexandria, Baghdad and Paris to Ficino's Florence — the Greek and Latin texts from public‑domain editions, freshly translated, with their commentators, translators and critics set in the margins around them.
The golden chain, as Proclus and Ficino each called it — laid out end to end for the first time. Names in ink have texts to read now; the rest are on the shelf still to be filled.
The first treatise Plotinus wrote, in nine pages: what makes a body beautiful, the ugliness of a soul, and the sculptor at work on his own statue.
The Latin with the Arabic beside it, the Proclus each proposition was quarried from, and Aquinas noticing the source — and §8, the one proposition with no Greek behind it at all.
Nature makes without hands or levers, by contemplating; in chapter 4 nature speaks for itself.
Aristotle's objection that separate Forms cannot explain how anything comes to be, set beside the page it presses on, with the replies: Syrianus, Plotinus on the rational forms in plants and stones, Proclus, and Aquinas answering Avicenna.
Also: a glossary of the tradition's own words, fixed across every page, and the search. Everything here is a first draft done in public: each page says what it was checked against, and what is still owed.
Each passage is set the way a Talmud page or a glossed Bible is set. The text under study sits in the centre. Above it, what it drew on. Below it, what drew on it. Beside it, how it was translated and read — Moerbeke's Latin, Ficino's Latin, Taylor's English — and where a critic pushed back.
So a single proposition of the Liber de causis carries, on one page, the Proclus it was quarried from, the Arabic it passed through, Albert's and Aquinas's commentary on it, and the moment Aquinas notices the source. Disagreement across the tradition is visible in the layout, not buried in footnotes.
The daf layout, as used on the Bereshit and Sentences projects.
¶Plotinian. Plotinus, Porphyry. Rome, third century. · 1 to read
¶Syrian and Pergamene. Iamblichus, Julian, Sallustius.
¶Athenian. Syrianus, Proclus, Marinus, Hermias, Damascius, Simplicius. · 2 to read
¶Alexandrian. Hierocles, Ammonius, Olympiodorus, Philoponus.
¶Latin. Chalcidius, Marius Victorinus, Augustine, Macrobius, Boethius.
¶Greek Christian. Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus, Synesius.
¶Arabic. The Theology of Aristotle, the Book of the Pure Good, Avicenna. · 1 to read
¶Medieval Latin. Eriugena, the Liber de causis, Albert, Aquinas, Cusanus. · 3 to read
¶Renaissance. Bessarion, Ficino, Pico.
¶English reception. Thomas Taylor, MacKenna, Guthrie, Parker, Dodds.
And, outside the benches, one critic: Aristotle, whose objection to the Forms stands in the margin where the tradition answers it.
Every Greek and Latin text is transcribed from an edition in the public domain — Volkmann's Plotinus, Diehl's and Kroll's and Cousin's Proclus, Ruelle's Damascius, the Berlin commentaries on Aristotle, Migne's Dionysius, Bardenhewer's Liber de causis, the Basel Ficino. Modern critical editions are cited for their numbering and nothing else.
The working English is translated fresh, here. The older English of Taylor, MacKenna, Guthrie and Parker is kept too, but as part of the reception: a witness with a date, not a substitute for the text.
Where a text's authorship is disputed — the Areopagite who was not, the "Aristotle" who was Plotinus — the page says so, and says who first noticed.
The rest of Forms and generation: Proclus on which things have Forms, and on mathematics as an intermediate, not a cause. Plotinus in Arabic, from the Theology of Aristotle. Dionysius on the beautiful and the good. Aquinas's commentary on the Liber de causis in English beyond its first proposition, and Ficino's and MacKenna's readings set beside On Beauty.
The whole of the Elements of Theology. Then the Athenian commentaries on the Timaeus and Parmenides entire, the Arabic texts themselves, Eckhart and Berthold.