  Yet Ficino needed to guard not only against the seductive danger of these “new” ancient texts, important though they were for the simultaneous appeal and potential instability they generated.  He also inherited from his humanist counterparts in the earlier part of the fifteenth century (men like Leonardo Bruni, 1370–1444) the notion that it was imperative to educate society’s elites, the ingeniosi, or acute wits, as Michael Allen translated the term (see Allen 1998). His Platonic Theology, Ficino hoped, would contain genres of argumentation and styles of language that, together, would represent a treasury of wisdom, perfectly apt for different varieties of his contemporaries who might have wavered in their faith. For those inclined to the newly fashionable classicizing Latinity, Ficino includes in the Platonic Theology countless quotations from Latin classics; for those of an Aristotelian bent, Ficino has natural philosophical arguments (for one example see Allen and Hankins (eds.) 2001–06, 5.4, vol. 2, pp. 20–23 and cf. Aristotle, Meteor., 1.3 and 1.9 for descriptions of “antiperistasis” to which Ficino seems there to be alluding); and for those who might be more inclined to an anti-rationalist religiosity, Ficino includes copious biblical allusions and quotations. Ficino even has an entire book of the Platonic Theology devoted to refuting Avveroistic ideas, in which the lion’s share of argumentation harks back in content, if not always in form, to Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic tradition. The Platonic Theology was a work of synthesis, but not of systematic philosophy, as thinkers from the eighteenth century on would have understood that latter term. Different styles of argumentation, flights of rhetorical fancy, numerous puns, intertextual allusions, un-sourced citations, and overt appeals to faith all compete for the reader’s attention.