 Ficino’s friend and younger contemporary, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), advanced an even more radical doctrine of universal truth, according to which all philosophies had a share of truth and could be reconciled in a comprehensive philosophy (Kristeller 1979, 205). His Oration on the Dignity of Man shows the variety of ways in which he was influenced by the Pythagorean tradition. He equates the friendship that the Pythagoreans saw as the goal of philosophy (see, e.g., Iamblichus, VP 229) with the peace that the angels announced to men of good will (1965, 11–12); the Pythagorean symbola forbidding urinating towards the sun or cutting the nails during sacrifice are interpreted allegorically as calling on us to relieve ourselves of excessive appetite for sensual pleasures and to trim the pricks of anger (1965, 15); the practice of philosophizing through numbers is assigned to Pythagoras along with Philolaus, Plato and the early Platonists (1965, 25–26); Pythagoras is said to have modeled his philosophy on the Orphic theology (1965, 33). Finally, on the basis of the pseudo-Pythagorean letter of Lysis to Hipparchus, Pythagoras is said to have kept silent about his doctrine and left just a few things in writing to his daughter at his death. In observing such silence, Pythagoras is portrayed as following an earlier practice symbolized by the sphinx in Egypt and most of all by Moses, who indeed published the law to men but supposedly kept the interpretation of that law a secret. Pico equates this secret interpretation of the law with the Cabala, an esoteric doctrine in which the words and numbers of Hebrew scripture are interpreted according to a mystical system (1965, 30; see also Heptaplus 1965, 68).