Marsilio Ficino

The Florentine priest and translator who, when a manuscript of the Greek Hermetica reached Cosimo de' Medici in 1462, was told to put Plato aside and do this one first. He finished in a few months. It was printed in 1471 and went through sixteen editions before the century was out.

The single most consequential act of queue-jumping in intellectual history. Europe met Hermes before it met Plotinus — and met him believing he was older than Moses. Everything on the descendants' bench drinks downstream of that mistake.