For eight centuries, the West met Plato through a translator barely anyone has heard of now
Calcidius translated the first half of Plato's Timaeus into Latin and wrote a very detailed commentary on its technical aspects. These days, barely anyone has heard of him, let alone read his work.
For eight centuries, he was the main source of knowledge about Plato in the western world, revered as a Latin Plato.
His reputation has always been polarizing: he drew either extravagant praise or excessive scorn. Gercke, then in his twenties and just starting as a language instructor at the Luisengymnasium in Berlin, made a pronouncement whose harshness may owe something to youth and a desire to appear as a linguistic connoisseur.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The oddity is that obscurity and centrality are not opposites here: the same man could be the West's main Plato for eight centuries and a name almost nobody knows now.
But the reverence was never simple. A figure who draws either extravagant praise or excessive scorn is hard to treat as a calm authority.