  Ficino’s wide ranging conception of what it meant to practice, rather than only to theorize about, philosophy inflected his entire career, marked as it was by a series of works, from translations, to letters, to philosophical treatises. Ficino’s initial activity, in the late 1450s, included short treatises, mostly epistolary, on certain basic philosophical matters. The 1460s saw him come into his own as a translator; these years also represent the beginnings of his work as a commentator and exegete. In 1464, when Cosimo de’ Medici was in the final stages of his life, Ficino read to him his new translations of certain Platonic dialogues (some of which are now considered spurious). And it is noteworthy that, by this point in the fifteenth century, Platonic sources seemed suitable for traditional, Christian end of life preparation; admittedly it is Ficino’s own much later account from which this story is drawn, but he would hardly have mentioned it had such a scenario been wholly implausible (Hankins 1989, 267–68). As that decade wore on Ficino authored commentaries on and summaries of Plato’s writings, many of which he continued to work on for the rest of his career; these included the Timaeus, Phaedrus, Symposium (less a commentary and more of a free-standing dialogue), and the Philebus.