  As mentioned, Ficino lived in an era when interpretive exegesis represented a form of philosophical composition. He believed, on the one hand, that he needed to bring out the philosophical truth for his own times and, moreover, that the truth was contained in Plato’s works. On the other hand, these works were filled with dialogical ambiguity and passages which, if not read carefully, could prove dangerous if not overtly heretical. So Ficino’s enterprise of translation was as much designed to render the texts themselves from Greek into Latin as it was to translate Plato, and indeed the entire “ancient theology” of which Plato had been the prime representative, into the cultural idiom of the late medieval and Renaissance world in which Ficino found himself.