Even in a translation, and still more in the brief indications to which
we are here compelled to limit ourselves, this chief merit of his book
is lost. Without being a great writer, he was thoroughly familiar with
the subject he wrote on, and had a deep sense of its intellectual
significance.
If we seek to analyze the charm which the Medici of the fifteenth
century, especially Cosimo the Elder (d. 1464) and Lorenzo the
Magnificent (d. 1492 ) exercised over Florence and over all their
contemporaries, we shall find that it lay less in their political
capacity than in their leadership in the culture of the age. A man in
Cosimo's position--a great merchant and party leader, who also had on
his side all the thinkers, writers and investigators, a man who was the
first of the Florentines by birth and the first of the Italians by
culture such a man was to all intents and purposes already a prince. To
Cosimo belongs the special glory of recognizing in the Platonic
philosophy the fairest flower of the ancient world of thought, of
inspiring his friends with the same belief, and thus of fostering
within humanistic circles themselves another and a higher resuscitation
of antiquity. The story is known to us minutely. It all hangs on the
calling of the learned Johannes Argyropulos, and on the personal
enthusiasm of Cosimo himself in his last years, which was such that the
great Marsilio Ficino could style himself, as far as Platonism was
concerned, the spiritual son of Cosimo.
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