  After the year 1469, Ficino changed the order and placed Zoroaster first, linking him to the Magi who visited the infant Christ (Allen 1998, 1–49). Unphilosophical though such speculations might seem to modern readers, there are at least two ways in which Ficino’s ancient theology manifested ties to what, in his era, could be considered part of philosophy. First, the model of “successions” (Latin “successiones”, Greek “diadochai”) would have been intuitively familiar to many thinkers. At its most emblematic in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers, the “succession” model posited the notion that a powerful initial figure, whose style of life and doctrines were considered exemplary, would have founded a “school” in which many others had followed. (The 1433 translation into Latin of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives vaulted it onto Renaissance thinkers’ desks; it had a significant predecessor in the Middle Ages in a series of Lives then attributed to Walter Burley, though see now Grignaschi). Second, and more powerfully, like medieval thinkers before him, Ficino saw “philosophy” and “theology” as linked domains, with philosophy as subordinate to theology (Marenbon 2000, esp. studies XII and XV). “Philosophers” could only be considered authentic lovers of wisdom if they graduated from disputatious word games, which Ficino thought were commonly taught as dialectic, to the source of ultimate truth.