Hermetica: The Greek "Corpus Hermeticum" and the Latin "Asclepius" (review)

608 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:4 OCTOBER 1996 a monopoly on rights and rights talk. Indeed, argues Miller in the concluding chapter of his book, a theory of rights, including natural rights, based on Aristotle is likely to prove better and to make more sense, logically and politically, than current theories based on Hobbes and Locke. Miller is not alone in suggesting for our modern times a political theory of rights inspired by Aristotle, but he has gone furthest in showing just how much of such a theory can be bodily extracted from Aristotle's text. Miller is, nevertheless, right to stress certain distinctive features of Aristotle's theory, notably that political rights are prior to and delimit property rights (the reverse, of course, is true for Locke), and that Aristotle can only be said to recognize natural rights in the sense of "rights based on natural justice" and not in the sense of "rights possessed in a (prepolitical) state of nature" (88). Miller might have better said here "rights derivedfrom a state of nature" than "rights possessedin a state of nature." For, as he himself is careful to point out, Aristotle also thinks there are rights and justice that are possessed in a non- or prepolitical state; it is only that Aristotle does derive these from the political state, not from the pre-polidcal state. Justice and rights at all levels are to be understood in terms of the end and perfection of human life in the best regime, not in terms of its presumed primitive beginnings. The true state of nature is the perfected political state. In short, this is an impressive work, and required reading for all students of Aristotle and political theory. PETER SIMPSON Collegeof Staten Island and The GraduateCenter,CityUniversityofNew York Brian P. Copenhaver, ed. and trans. Hermetica: The Greek"CorpusHermeticum" and the Lat/n "Asc/ep/us." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. lxxxiii + 320. Cloth, $74-95. The Hermeticaare a collection of treatises which were composed between loo and 3oo A.D. and which were the product, according to the most recent scholarship, of the syncretistic religious and philosophical culture of Ptolemaic, Roman, and early Christian Egypt. Two categories of Hermetic writings can be identified, although both seem to derive from the same milieu: "technical" treatises, directly concerned with astrology, magic, and alchemy; and "theoretical" ones, containing a "blend of theology, cosmogony , anthropogony, ethics, soteriology, and eschatology" and paying very little attention to astrology or magic and none at all to alchemy. The seventeen treatises which make up the Greek CorpusHermaicura firmly belong, along with the Latin Asclepius, to the second category. These were the works which influenced many early modern thinkers, who believed them to be written by the Egyptian god Thoth or, as he was known in Greek, Hermes Trismegistus, a near contemporary of Moses. As Brian Copenhaver suggests in the introduction and notes to his new English version of the Hermetica, the exiguous amount of occult material to be found in the Hermetic treatises known to the Renaissance may be the result of the abhorrence of magic felt by the Byzantine scholars who first put together and edited the Greek corpus and who may BOOK REVIEWS 609 have deliberately excluded from it the so-called "technical" treatises. The Byzantine codex used by Marsilio Ficino, author of the earliest Latin translation of the corpus (completed in 1463 and first printed in 1471), belonged, moreover, to a family of manuscripts which contain only the first fourteen treatises, in which occultism is even less conspicuous than in the final three treatises. The virtual absence of magic from Ficino's Hermetica will no doubt come as a surprise--and perhaps a disappointment--to those who have become interested in the corpus through the works of Frances Yates, especially her hugely popular Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964). She regarded the recovery of the Greek treatises in the Renaissance as important primarily because they placed Hermes Trismegistus within a context of Mosaic piety which legidmized the dubious magical practices described in the Latin Asc/ep/us. Even in the Asclepius, however, occultism plays a very minor role: only four out of...