  A few years after his appointment as patriarch in 1454 (thus after the fall of Constantinople), Scholarios gave orders for all existing copies of Plethon’s Book of Laws to be destroyed. It is clear from the remaining fragments that this work constituted Plethon’s prescription for a happy life for humankind, advocating an ethics and a politics inspired by Plato himself as well as by Middle Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Stoic writers, and propagating a philosophically refined form of the old Olympian religion. It has been claimed (by Tambrun 2007 and Siniossoglou 2011) that Plethon rejected the transcendence of the highest god (Zeus), and that his theology therefore, in contrast to both the Christian and the Neoplatonic consensus, was entirely positive, but this appears dubious (see Hladký 2014). One surviving chapter of the Book of Laws (De fato) argues, both from the nature of causation and from the assumption that the gods have foreknowledge, that all events are determined by fate. According to Plethon, this is compatible with freedom, not in the sense that human beings are not ruled by anything, but in the sense that they are ruled by their own intellect: being free is simply submitting to the decree of Zeus. Divine punishment is justified as a method for teaching human beings to become free. A combination of Platonic and Stoic influences is also manifest in another short treatise by Plethon, On Virtues.