 The Pythagorean symbola were important to Ficino and the Renaissance. They had already been interpreted as moral maxims by the early church fathers (e.g., Clement, Origen and Ambrose). Ambrose, for example, interpreted the Pythagorean “do not take the public path” to mean that priests should live lives of exceptional purity (Ep. 81). Jerome discussed 13 symbola in his Epistle Against Rufinus and this list became the basis for medieval discussions of the symbola in texts such as the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais and the Lives and Habits of the Philosophers  of Walter Burley (Celenza 2001, 11–12). Ficino particularly encountered them in Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life and Protrepticus. For Ficino, their brevity was appropriate to revealing the supreme reality, since he argued that the closer the mind approaches to the One the fewer words it needs (Allen 2014, 450–451). In addition, he found them relevant to the preparation and purification of the soul (Celenza, 1999, 693). They were widely discussed by Ficino’s contemporaries and successors (Celenza 2001, 52–81). Some figures wrote treatises devoted to their interpretation (Ficino’s mentor Antonio degli Agli, his follower Giovanni Nesi [for an edition of Nesi’s work see Celenza 2001], Filippo Beroaldo the Elder and Lilio Gregorio Giraldi), while others discussed them as part of larger works (Erasmus and Reuchlin). Not everyone took the symbola seriously; Angelo Poliziano, the great Florentine philologist and professor, presents a satire on them in the fashion of Lucian, joking about Pythagoras’ ability to talk to animals and ridiculing the prohibition on beans (Celenza 2001, 33).