George Gemistos Plethon

Georgios Gemistos Plethon, commonly known as Gemistos Plethon, lived circa 1355 or 1360 to 1452 or 1454 and was a Greek scholar and one of the most renowned philosophers of the Late Byzantine era, a chief pioneer of the revival of Greek scholarship in Western Europe. In his last literary work, the Nomoi or Book of Laws, circulated only among close friends, he rejected Christianity in favor of a return to the worship of the classical Hellenic gods mixed with ancient wisdom based on Zoroaster and the Magi. In 1438 to 1439 he reintroduced Plato's ideas to Western Europe during the Council of Florence in a failed attempt to reconcile the East-West Schism, and formulated a political vision proposing a reborn Byzantine Empire on a utopian Hellenic system of government centered at Mystras; his boast that we are Hellenes by race and culture has generated discussion about Byzantine and modern Greek identity, and he has been labeled both the last Hellene and the first modern Greek.