  Illustrative on a number of levels is a letter of 1491 written to a German friend and correspondent, Martin Prenninger (in Ficino 1576, 936–37). There, Ficino discusses his network of friends and acquaintances. Though it does not contain the word “academy” or “academic,” the letter gives a good idea of what Ficino believed he was doing when it came to his program of sharing Platonic wisdom, which was linked with what he saw as true Christianity. His correspondent had asked him about his friends, and Ficino is careful in response to qualify what “friend” means: “Know that all [of my friends] are indeed well-tested both with respect to their intellectual talent and their character. I have never considered anyone a friend unless I also determined that he had joined literary learning together with uprightness of character.” For Ficino, the notion that one should combine book learning with good moral character was “Platonic,” and immediately after the cited section he alludes to a passage in the (for Ficino authentic) Platonic Letters, expressing a similar sentiment. In truth, however, this sentiment (and countless others like it in Ficino’s work) belongs to no specific school of thought; rather, it is part of a long, pre-modern tradition stressing the need to link learning with morals. For Ficino, it was “Platonic” because it was true, and it was “true” because it was Platonic. For us, however, Ficino’s framing of his catalogue of friends in this way reminds us just how generally and broadly he believed “Platonic” wisdom to extend. That is, in the broadest sense, for Ficino, everything he did could be considered “Platonic.”