  Ficino considered himself a Platonist, but a Platonist in a very specific mold: as part of a long tradition of which Plato was a key part but which needed interpreters to keep it going. This “ancient theology” included figures who, divinely inspired, advanced true philosophy. One of the key figures in this sequence was the ancient sage Hermes “Trismegistus” (“thrice great,” because he was considered the greatest king, philosopher, and priest). For Ficino, as for the late ancient Platonists he admired, Hermes was an ancient Egyptian, roughly contemporary with Moses. In the early seventeenth century, Isaac Casaubon would prove that the writings attributed to Hermes could not have been as ancient as they were believed to be (they are considered now to be products of late antiquity). Ficino described the ancient theology in this fashion in his Preface to his Latin translation of the Hermetic Corpus, discussing Hermes as first in this chain of sages (Ficino 1576, 1836, cit. and tr. in Copenhaver and Schmitt 1992, 147):