Hermetic texts: ancient wisdom or later writing?
The Hermetic treatises present themselves as teachings of an ancient Egyptian sage. Each text needs its own dating; its title is not proof of age.
Dating the Hermetic treatises
Copenhaver's Hermetica, published by Cambridge, translates the Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius with notes and an introduction. The research record characterizes the corpus as late antique and requires a separate composition and witness record for each treatise. Cambridge University Press ↗
Not one book, not one date
A corpus assembled from treatises of different dates has no single composition date. The record's rule is explicit: do not assign one date to all treatises, and do not project the corpus's authorship back into pharaonic prehistory, whatever the texts themselves claim about Hermes Trismegistus.
The Latin witness
The Asclepius survives in Latin, and the record models that witness history separately from the Greek treatises. A translation's manuscript tradition is its own chain of evidence.
How to check a text’s claim to great age
Texts that present themselves as ancient wisdom invite a date much older than their language and references support. What internal evidence would you check first to date a treatise: vocabulary, quoted authors, or doctrines?