  As time went by, Ficino’s intellectual energies moved in the direction of deepening his understanding of Platonism and of expanding this project of cultural translation. Having translated and explicated much of Plato’s work, he shifted, in the late 1480s, to Plotinus, an exegetical project that included the first full Greek to Latin translation of Plotinus’s works along with commentary.   In 1489, Ficino published a work, Three Books on Life (De vita libri tres), that had a substantial printing history in early modern Europe, even as its contents contributed to his later reputation as a less-than-serious philosopher (see Kaske and Clark; and Robichaud 2017a). The manuscript tradition prior to its printing tells the story of a work composed of three separate books: ‘On Healthy Life’ (De vita sana), completed around 1480, corresponded to Book One in the eventual printed edition. An amalgam of folk medicine and learned commentary, De vita sana was intended to help scholars, thought to have a “melancholic” humoral temperament, achieve a healthy style of life.  Toward that end, it counseled various recipes, dietary regimes, and personal habits, all to be undertaken under the umbrella of what were considered proper astrological conditions. The second book, ‘On Long Life’ (De vita longa), completed in 1489, was written in a similar vein and directed to the aged. Finally, the third book, ‘On Obtaining Life from the Heavens’ (De vita coelitus comparanda), composed sometime between the first two books, grew out of Ficino’s commentary project on Plotinus (it was specifically a commentary on Enneads, 4.3.11).