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.
¶Plotinian. Plotinus, Porphyry. Rome, third century.
¶Syrian and Pergamene. Iamblichus, Julian, Sallustius.
¶Athenian. Syrianus, Proclus, Marinus, Hermias, Damascius, Simplicius.
¶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.
¶Medieval Latin. Eriugena, the Liber de causis, Albert, Aquinas, Cusanus.
¶Renaissance. Bessarion, Ficino, Pico.
¶English reception. Thomas Taylor, MacKenna, Guthrie, Parker, Dodds.
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.
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.
All eight propositions of the Liber de causis, each on its own page — start at proposition 1, or go straight to proposition 8, the one place the book has no source in Proclus at all. The thread that connects them, start to finish. A glossary of the tradition's own words, fixed across every page.
An English page for Aquinas's own commentary, which for now stands only in his Latin. Taylor's, Portus's, and Albert's readings, extracted from the plate rather than named only as sources. The other six threads, built out from their seed to a page of their own.
Ennead I.6, On Beauty, with Ficino and Augustine. Dionysius on the beautiful and the good. The whole of the Elements of Theology. Then the Athenian commentaries on the Timaeus and Parmenides entire, the Arabic texts themselves, Eckhart, Berthold, the Cambridge Platonists.