The Chaldaick Oracles (Thomas Stanley, 1661)

Thomas Stanley, an English poet and classical scholar, included the Chaldaean Oracles in his History of Philosophy, the first comprehensive history of ancient philosophy in English, and the archive presents his 1661 edition. Stanley printed the Greek fragments with a Latin version on facing pages and his own English translation, arranging the sayings under headings such as the Monad, mind, intelligibles, Hecate, the soul, the world, heaven and daemons. He followed the Renaissance tradition, established by Gemistos Plethon in the fifteenth century, of treating them as the oracles of Zoroaster and his followers, and he added the Byzantine commentaries of Plethon and Michael Psellos. Plethon's commentary interprets the oracles as an ancient Platonic theology centred on the soul's descent into the body and its return, while Psellos, a Christian, comments more critically, distancing himself from their divinatory and ritual teachings. Stanley also offered textual conjectures on the Greek. His edition was the main English source for the Oracles for over two centuries and influenced later Platonists such as Thomas Taylor, and through them nineteenth-century occultists including Westcott, whose edition partly depends on this tradition. The fragments known to Stanley were far fewer than those collected by modern editors, who have gathered further quotations from Proclus and Damascius; Majercik's 1989 edition is now standard. Stanley's book remains significant for the history of Platonism and of the idea of an ancient theology.

What it contains

• Introduction on authenticity and transmission
• Greek and Latin texts arranged by theme
• English translation of the oracles
• Commentary of Gemistos Plethon
• Commentary of Michael Psellos
• Stanley's conjectural emendations