Well aware of the enticements of philosophic pleasure and the difficulties of achieving that “true virtue” of the princeps, Cicero gave his son the following advice in his last philosophic work, the work that More would later echo “almost word for word.”

Because his son was studying then in Athens with the best philosophers of the time “to purchase, as it were, … a store of bonarum artium,” Cicero warns him that the intense effort involved may well be “work rather than pleasure,” but that he had a “heavy responsibility” to succeed in doing so (6). When More translates the reference to this passage in the Life of Pico, he eliminates Cicero's name and substitutes “doctrine” for “good arts” (bonarum artium), and although he translates studia humanitatis as “studies of humanity,” More indicates in this early work that Pico's idea of humanitas is far different from Cicero's and his own.