SAPERE XXXVIII: The Divine Wisdom of Hermes Trismegistos

Edited by Dorothee Gall. Introduced, translated, and with interpretive essays by Sydney H. Aufrère, Dorothee Gall, Claudio Moreschini, Zlatko Pleše, Joachim F. Quack, Heike Sternberg el-Hotabi, Christian Tornau.

As a doctrinal dialogue translated from Greek, the Latin Asclepius is an important textual witness to Hermetism, a spiritual movement that grew out of the encounter between Greeks and Egyptians and flourished in the 1st to 4th centuries AD. Its namesake teacher is Hermes Trismegistos. In the Asclepius , he instructs his pupil Asclepius about the nature of God and his creation and about the place of man in the world. Included is an apocalyptic passage predicting the fall of Egypt.
This volume contains the Latin text, a translation with commentary, and six essays that examine Asclepius and Hermetism in light of the mixed Egyptian-Greek culture of its time, Platonic philosophy, the tradition of apocalyptic literature, and its aftermath in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Text and translation of a fragmentary Coptic parallel version are included.