Ever since Plato wrote the Gorgias, philosophers have been trying to determine the proper relationship, if any, of their discipline to rhetoric. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's contribution to this long-running debate, particularly in a famous letter to his humanist friend Ermolao Barbaro (1454–93), has attracted considerable scholarly attention. The letter is full of paradoxes and ambiguities, however. So if we are to understand Pico's true position on the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy, we cannot read it in isolation. This complex document needs to be interpreted in light of his other writings and activities. In addition, it is necessary to take into account not only the views of his sparring partner Barbaro but also those of another humanist, Angelo Poliziano (1454–94), a close friend of both men and a kindred spirit of Pico's.

His enigmatic pronouncement on the “type of discourse appropriate to philosophers” came in a letter of June 3, 1485, written from Florence, replying to a missive sent to him from Venice a month earlier by Barbaro. A Venetian patrician and humanist, Barbaro shared with Pico, nine years his junior, a keen interest in philosophy. After studying Greek in Rome during the 1460s with the Byzantine humanist and philosopher Theodore Gaza, whom he greatly admired, Barbaro went on to take degrees in arts and then civil and canon law at the University of Padua, where he also lectured on Aristotle's Ethics and Politics in the mid-1470s.