ed that, in elections for the councils, their favored candidates would win. Cosimo succeeded in gaining this group's loyalty away from the Albizzi family, and keeping that loyalty was the job of his son Piero and then Lorenzo. This circumstance "bred a permanent insecurity" into the family which is manifested, in part, in the "sense of transience" that characterized Lorenzo's writings (Hook 5). It also made impossible Lorenzo's refusal, at 21, to follow in his father's footsteps. When his father died, a delegation of leading citizens went to Lorenzo and asked him, as he wrote, "to take on myself the care of the State" and, "considering that the burden and danger were great, I consented unwillingly" (Lorenzo de' Medici, quoted in Hibbert 123).
Lorenzo had been trained to govern since he was a child. But his excellent education taught him to appreciate more than this. In taking on the State, he was giving up the "independence as a private citizen" and the "writing, study, and contemplation which leisure affords" (Sturm 17). For Lorenzo, this was a great deal to surrender. If he had learned statesmanship in his home with his father and grandfather, he had learned a great deal more that seemed more interesting to him. He was very lucky in his parents and the surroundings in which he was raised. Both Cosimo and Piero had been active supporters of the arts and, more important for Lorenzo, of scholarship.
In the early 1440s, Cosimo had met the Greek Gemistos, who called himself Plethon in honor of Plato. Plethon traveled around spreading the word of Neoplatonism, a set of ideas based on those of Plato which should, he believed, replace the Christian faith. Though Plethon's ideas were a strange blend of Platonism, magic and religion, his idea of academies devoted to the thought of Plato appealed to Cosimo, who established and supported such an informal group at Florence. Cosimo was interested not in replacing Christianity w...