 Ficino translated Iamblichus’ four works on Pythagoreanism for his own use and Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life had particular influence on him. Ficino felt that in his time there was a need for a divinely inspired guide on earth and fashioned himself as such a prophet under the influence of Iamblichus’ presentation of Pythagoras as a divine guide sent by the gods to save mankind (Celenza 1999, 667–674). The Pythagorean musical practice that he found in Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life , with its emphasis on the impact of music on the soul, shaped his own music making and his presentation of himself as a Pythagorean and Orphic holy man (Allen 2014, 436–440). Ficino and other Renaissance thinkers grappled with the challenge that the Pythagorean notion of metempsychosis presented to Christiantiy and how it might be reconciled with Christian views (Allen 2014, 440–446). Ficino was eager to absolve Plato from such a heresy. He does this in part by treating metempsychosis metaphorically as referring to the soul’s ability to remake itself, but he also emphasized that metempsychosis was not present in Plato’s latest work, Laws, and made the Pythagoreans scapegoats by suggesting that other passages in Plato refer not to Plato’s own doctrines but the Pythagoreans (Celenza 1999, 681–691). Ficino saw his own arithmology as Pythgorean and study of Neopythagorean mathematical treatises by Nicomachus and Theon led Ficino to conclude that Plato’s nuptial number in Book 8 of the Republic was 12 (Allen 2014, 446–450). He also mistakenly and paradoxically followed the Neopythagoreans in thinking that the Pythagoreans occupied the crucial position in the history of philosophy of the first philosophers to distinguish between the corporeal and incorporeal and to assert the superiority of the latter, an achievement that is more reasonably assigned to Ficino’s hero Plato (Celenza 1999, 699–706). 