Abstract

When Socrates overwhelms the youth Phaedrus with his proposal that the true art of rhetoric can only consist of an all inclusive knowledge of souls, he effectively prevents the realization, at least along these lines, of any art called rhetoric. His motive is to disempower the unphilosophical verbal magic, the mere cookery, of Gorgias and the Sophists. In spite of this, Marsilio Ficino, working with a sure knowledge of Neoplatonic exegesis, demonstrates that magic is in fact the only true art of rhetoric, and that the Magus, neither the Philosopher nor the Sophist, is the true orator. I demonstrate Ficino's position through a reading of his commentaries on the Phaedrus, Sophist, and Symposium. I also argue that a magical art of rhetoric is possible only within a cosmology in which language functions as more than an arbitrary sign of something else. This magical cosmology informs an undercurrent within the Renaissance while it also forms the view against which post Renaissance rhetorics define language and rhetoric