  There are more precise ways of looking at what Ficino’s “academic” activity might have entailed. He continues, in that same letter, to separate his friends into three categories. There are “patrons” (in which category all the Medici family members were included). These are followed by “familiar friends, fellow conversationalists, so to speak” (“consuetudine familiares, ut ita loquar, confabulatores”); and third, there are “auditores” or “students.” The confabulatores include numerous prominent intellectuals, among them Leon Battista Alberti, Angelo Poliziano and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Ficino writes that, if the people he lists are “almost pupils [discipuli], still, they aren’t really pupils, since I wouldn’t want to imply that I had taught or am teaching any of them, but rather, in a Socratic fashion, I ask them all questions and encourage them, and I persistently call forth the fertile geniuses of my friends to bring about birth.” Ficino saw his influence in the classic Socratic manner, as midwifery of knowledge, an image made famous in Plato’s Theaetetus. Uniting his medical and priestly missions, Ficino’s goal was to help cure the diseases of ignorance and impiety, which he regarded as related.