 On account of his idealistic belief in the correspondence between the arts—including their concepts and words—and being, some scholars have assumed that Ramus was reliant on Platonism. In his early writings he certainly assumed a clear metaphysical link between nature, mathematics and dialectic. Indeed, his contemporaries sometimes called him the Plato Gallicus, the French Plato; but, in reality, the Platonic influences on him were rather vague and often concealed. Gradually, the Platonic ontological strains in his works lost importance and faded away. Although he at times claimed to be a Platonist, his references to Plato were mostly aimed at distancing himself from Aristotle and, above all, from contemporary Aristotelians. In practice, he was more often inspired by Cicero and by Stoicism than by Platonism. And despite his attacks on Aristotle, he was essentially dependent on the scholastic tradition (cf. Bruyère 1984, who takes the opposite view on this issue).