The Hour of Prime

by Marsilio Ficino, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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On the fourth morning Marsilio Ficino woke before light with his throat shut like a purse, and lay for a while working out by touch where the swelling had got to. It was on the left side, under the angle of the jaw, the size of a walnut in its green husk. When he swallowed, the pain went up into his ear. When he did not swallow, his mouth filled. He sat up and spat into the basin and did not look at what he had spat.

The tramontana had been blowing down from the Mugello for a week. It came through the shutters of the villa at Careggi in thin blades, and it had frozen the water in the ewer to a skin. He broke the skin with his thumb and wet his face.

The word for what he had was squinantia. He had written it on the wax tablet on the first day, in a good clear hand, for his own instruction, and under it the remedies: a gargle of mulberry syrup with honey and rose vinegar, warm; a poultice of figs boiled in milk to the throat; no bleeding. The barber from Rifredi had come up the hill on the second day with his little knife and his bowl, meaning to open the vein under the tongue, and Ficino had written no on the tablet and turned it round to him. The barber had argued. Ficino had written, under the no, that blood is the mother of the spirit, and that a man born with Saturn rising, who is cold and dry already, does not give his blood away to anyone who asks for it in January. The barber had read it slowly, moving his lips, and gone back down the hill with his bowl clean and his fee in his hand.

The tablet lay on the chest by the bed now, its wax scratched over and smoothed and scratched again. Four days of a man's conversation. More wood. The Plotinus, not the Proclus. Is the boy eating? No. No. Tell him I am asleep.

---

He had not sung for four days.

He did not think of it so, at first. He thought of it as the hour of the Sun passing, as one notices a bell that has not rung. Every morning of his life that he was well and at Careggi, and many when he was not well, he had stood at the east window of this room when the Sun came up out of the hills toward Settignano, and taken the lira from its peg, and sung. The Orphic hymn to the Sun, in the Latin he had made of it at twenty-eight, and showed to no one outside the house, and would not have printed for a cardinal's hat. Then, if there was time, the hymn to Jupiter. Then down to his desk.

On the first morning of the squinantia he had tried, and the sound that came out of him was the sound of a door with a stone in its hinge. On the second he had stood at the window with the lira and played the hymn's air without the words, the bow drawing it out slow and full, and when it was done he had felt nothing at all except the wind on his neck. The strings were only strings. The air they moved went into the room and died there. It was the voice that carried what the mind conceived into the air, and from the air into the spirit; the voice was the bridge, and he had no bridge. He had put the lira back on its peg.

By the third day he had stopped wanting to get up. He knew this for a symptom. He had described it himself, in letters to friends who studied too hard: the cold that gets into the spirit and thickens it, so that the soul's commands come to the limbs as though through wet wool. He knew precisely what he should prescribe for a man in this condition. He lay in bed and could not be bothered to prescribe it.

On the fourth morning, lying awake in the dark with the walnut in his throat, he heard Betto singing through the wall.

---

Betto di Lapo had come up from the city at Epiphany, sent by a canon of the cathedral who owed Ficino a favour for a horoscope and had found a way to pay it that cost him nothing. He was sixteen and in minor orders and had a hand that was small, upright and very nearly beautiful, and Ficino had set him to making the fair copy of the Platonic Theology at a table under the stairs, where the light was good from ten until two. He was from Borgo San Lorenzo, in the Mugello, the country the wind came from. He was thin as a heron, and his fingers were swollen with chilblains so that he wrapped them in rags between pages, and he ate, as far as Ficino could discover, a crust at noon and nothing else. At night, in the little room next to Ficino's that had been a store-room for apples, he coughed.

Ficino knew the cough. He had been sixteen himself, in Figline, with the Greek grammar under his pillow.

Now through the wall, very low, as a boy sings who has been told all his life by a choirmaster not to strain, Betto was singing Prime.

Iam lucis orto sidere, Deum precemur supplices—

Now that the star of light is risen, let us pray to God as suppliants. The plain old hymn, four short lines to a stanza, on the weekday tune. Ficino had sung it ten thousand times; he would sing it, he supposed, until he died, at the first hour, in choir or alone. He had never once thought about what it said. He lay and listened to it now.

Linguam refrenans temperet, ne litis horror insonet—

May He bridle and temper the tongue, lest the horror of strife ring out. Ficino put his hand to his throat. Bridled, certainly. Tempered, he could not say.

The boy came to the end and said the Amen, and coughed, and then there was the scrape of the stool as he went to the window. Ficino heard the shutter-bar lifted. A grey light came under the connecting door.

He got out of bed.

---

When Betto opened the door to the knock, Ficino was standing in his shirt and his fur-lined gown with the tablet in one hand and a little quire of paper in the other, and the boy's face did several things in turn, of which the last was alarm.

"Father, you should be lying down. The barber said—"

Ficino held up the tablet. On it he had written, in large letters: SING.

Betto read it, and looked at him.

"I was singing Prime. I'm sorry. I thought you were sleeping."

Ficino shook his head. He smoothed the wax with his thumb and wrote, more slowly, because his hand was cold: Sing this. For me. At the window. He held out the quire.

The boy took it. It was eight leaves, folded and stitched, in Ficino's own hand from fourteen years before, a fast careless hand with the ink gone brown. Betto turned the first leaf and his lips moved over the title, and stopped.

"Orpheus to the Sun," he read. He looked up. "Is it a psalm?"

Ficino wrote, and the wax took the stylus badly in the cold: It is a hymn. Very old. Older than Plato. He considered the tablet. There was a great deal more that could go on it. That the hymns of Orpheus were the theology of the most ancient Greeks, from whom Plato had drunk at one remove; that the Sun of the hymn was the visible image of the invisible Good, as Plato said and Dionysius after him; that the virtue of the Sun was a natural virtue, flowing through the spirit of the world into the spirit of a man as heat flows through a wall, and that to sing to it was to tune oneself, as one tunes a string, so that what was always coming down could be received; that a physician who prescribed pepper for a cold stomach was not thought to be praying to pepper. He had all this by heart. He had said it in letters, at table, on the road down to the city in the mornings. The tablet was the size of his two palms.

He wrote: It is a medicine. And then, since that was not the whole of it, and the boy was a cleric and was owed the whole of it: Mine. I cannot take it without a voice.

Betto read it twice. He turned another leaf of the quire. Ficino watched his eyes go down the page and stop, and go on.

"I don't know the tune."

Ficino could not sing it to him. He held up a finger, went back through to his own room, and came back with the lira, and stood in the doorway in his gown and drew the bow across the strings, and played the first phrase of the air. It sounded in the cold room like a thing taken out of a box.

Betto listened with his head on one side, the way one listens to a foreigner. When it was done he said, honestly: "I can't sing that, Father. It goes up in the wrong places. I don't know where the words go in it." He looked down at the quire, then out of the window, where the sky over the hills had gone from grey to the colour of a pigeon's breast. "I could say it on the tone. On the eighth tone, like a psalm. You can put any words on that."

Ficino stood holding the lira. The eighth tone: the plain recitation of the choir, the voice held on one note and dropping at the half-verse and dropping again at the end, the tone that the Church laid over the words of David at every hour of every day so that the words could be heard and the singer could not be. It had nothing in it of the air he had spent fifteen years recovering from scraps of Greek and his own ear.

The Sun was coming. He could see the rim of the hills sharpen.

He nodded.

Betto went to the window and stood in it. He held the quire up to the light in his rag-wrapped fingers, and Ficino saw him take a breath, and then let it go again, and cross himself. Then he sang Iam lucis orto sidere through once more from the beginning to the doxology, quickly, as a boy runs up a stair he knows. Ficino did not stop him. He could not have stopped him; and he found, standing in the doorway with the bow in his hand, that he did not want to.

Then the boy turned the leaf and began the other.

Hear me, blessed one—

He took it on the reciting note and held it there, line after line, dropping at the half-verse where the Latin let him and sometimes where it did not, so that the golden Titan and the lord of the seasons and the eye that sees all things came out level and even, one after another, like the names of the patriarchs. He mispronounced Titan. He hesitated at one line, as if he had heard something in it he wanted to look at again, and went on. Ficino laid the bow on the lira and played under him, not the air, only the open fifth, held, the drone the shepherds play under anything at all.

The Sun came up out of the hills toward Settignano and laid its light along the boy's face and the quire and the rags on his hands.

It took perhaps a quarter of an hour. When it was done Betto closed the quire and stood holding it against his chest. His ears, which had been white with the cold, were red.

Ficino waited for something in his own throat or chest. There was nothing he could have named. The walnut was where it had been. The wind still came in at the shutter's edge.

He wrote on the tablet: Now eat.

---

He made the boy sing it every morning after that, and every morning Betto sang Prime first, and crossed himself, and then turned the leaf. Ficino stood in the doorway with the lira and played the drone. On the second morning he wrote, The Jupiter also, and found the leaf, and Betto said the Jupiter hymn on the eighth tone too, with the same faint unwillingness at the start and the same evenness once he was in it. The Monday after, Ficino found him at the copying-table at ten with the quire open beside the Theology, mouthing the hymn to Jupiter under his breath as he ruled the page.

He wrote on the tablet, Do not copy that, and the boy coloured to the hair and closed it.

But he ate. Ficino made sure of it: soft eggs, white bread toasted, a little thin white wine with water and a pinch of cinnamon in it, which Betto drank as though it might be poison, and then as though it might not. The gardener's wife brought up a pan of coals for the room under the stairs, and Ficino wrote out a salve for chilblains of goose-grease and myrrh and had it sent for from the apothecary in the Canto alla Paglia. The cough at night grew less. By the end of the week Betto was copying a gathering a day where he had been copying half of one, and the pages were no worse; and once, coming down the stair, Ficino heard him laugh at something the gardener said in the yard, a short surprised bark, as if he had not known he was going to do it.

Ficino's own throat went on as before. He slept badly. He rose at sunrise for the boy's sake, and went back to bed afterwards for his own, and lay looking at the beams with the old heaviness on his chest like a dog lying there. He was the patient, and the medicine was going into the wrong man.

He knew why, too. That was the joke of it. He had read it and reasoned it and would one day write it in a book: that the song works first and most on the spirit of the one who sings, because the singer's own spirit is moved and shaped by it, his breath and blood and inmost air set in order by the order he is making; and only afterwards, and less, on anyone who listens. A physician does not take a dose by watching a boy swallow it.

On the eighth night the walnut broke. He woke choking, and stumbled to the basin, and what came out of him was so foul that he laughed, or would have laughed if he had had the means. Afterwards he could swallow. He gargled with the mulberry syrup until the cup was empty and lay down and slept as he had not slept in a fortnight, and woke at full day, long after the Sun, with the boy's voice coming faint through the wall, and the drone missing under it.

---

On the Sunday Betto went down to the city for Mass and confession, as the canon required of him. He went before light, on foot, with a cloak of Ficino's over his own because the wind had not dropped. He was to be back by vespers.

Ficino spent the day at his desk, with the Theology in front of him and a blanket over his knees, not working. He could speak now, a little, in a voice like a man calling across a river; he used it to tell the gardener's wife twice that he did not want any dinner. In the afternoon he found that he had written on the margin of the page he was supposed to be correcting, in small letters, the name of the boy's confessor, which he did not know, and then what will he say, and he scraped it out with his penknife until the paper was thin.

He had a letter half-composed in his head, to the canon, explaining. He had another, to the Archbishop's vicar, who had never yet written to him and to whom he did not need to write. He had the whole argument, the pepper and the wall and the string: and he knew, as he went through it for the fifth time looking out at the road, that he had put it into the hands of a boy of sixteen who could not have repeated a word of it and would not have been believed if he had. He had made a cleric say an Orphic hymn at a window every morning for a week, and the only defence of it that would reach a friar's ear in a side-chapel of Santa Maria Novella was a boy saying the old man was sick, Father, and he asked me to.

He thought that was probably the truest defence there was. He did not find it a comfort.

Betto came up the road an hour before vespers, red in the face from the walk, with the cloak flapping. Ficino went down to the gate himself, which he had told himself he would not do.

"Well," he said, in his ruined voice.

The boy unfastened the cloak and gave it back to him, folded, with great care, as if it were part of an answer.

"I told him," he said. "About the singing. He asked me what it was, and I said it was a hymn to the Sun by a Greek called Orpheus, that the Father at Careggi had put into Latin, and that the Father was sick and couldn't sing and it was medicine for him." He paused. "He was quiet for a long time. I thought he'd gone to sleep. Then he asked me what I sang first."

Ficino waited.

"I said Prime. Iam lucis. He asked was I sure. I said every morning. And he said—" Betto frowned, getting it right. "He said, Then keep the order. God first and the Sun after, as at the Creation; and say a Paternoster for the old man's throat. And he gave me my penance for the other things, which was only the usual, and that was all."

They stood in the gateway. The wind went over the wall into the olive trees and turned all the leaves silver at once.

"Did he give you a name?" said Ficino.

"For you? No, Father. I didn't give him yours." Betto looked at him with some surprise. "He didn't ask."

Ficino laughed then, properly, for the first time in a fortnight, and it hurt, and he went on doing it with his hand on the gatepost while the boy looked politely at the olives.

---

The copy of the Theology was finished at Candlemas. The canon wanted his clerk back for the feast. Betto packed his things in a cloth, his chilblains healed to pink, the rags gone, and Ficino gave him a florin for his work and a little jar of the myrrh salve for next winter, and wrote him a letter of commendation to the canon that said a good deal about his hand and nothing at all about his voice.

He left before light, to be at the cathedral for the procession.

Ficino did not go down to the gate. He got up and took the lira from its peg and went to the east window and opened the shutter on a morning gone suddenly mild, the wind dropped in the night, the hills toward Settignano sharp and dark against a sky the colour of the inside of a shell. Below the garden wall the road ran down toward the city between its cypresses, and on it, a long way off already and getting smaller, a thin figure was walking with a bundle on its shoulder.

The Sun was coming. Ficino set the lira to his shoulder and drew breath to see what was in it.

Before he could find out, from down on the road, small and clear in the still air, came the boy's voice, on the plain tone of the choir, not straining: Iam lucis orto sidere. The whole of it, to the doxology, walking. Then a pause, about the length of a leaf being turned, though there was no leaf. Then, on the same note, held and even:

Hear me, blessed one—

The figure went round the bend by the last cypress, and the voice went with it.

Ficino stood with the bow above the strings. Then he began, in a voice like a cracked bell, Iam lucis orto sidere, and sang it through to the Amen, and drew the bow, and went on into the other.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ā Marsiliō Ficīnō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Marsilio Ficino, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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