It’s a metaphor Plato himself would have appreciated.4 The Middle Ages had known Plato’s Timaeus in various versions; its cosmology was unimaginable without it. The rest of his works, however, were a closed book for nearly five hundred years. In the 1100s, Arab libraries yielded up a sprinkling of Platonic dialogues, which found Latin translators. Leonardo Bruni himself did several, including the Phaedo and the Laws, which were widely admired.5 But none of this was enough to shake loose Aristotle’s iron grip on the Western mind. It was the influx of Greek scholars into Italy in the 1400s, both
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