Plato's Academy (c. 387 BC): The First School of Philosophy

Plato’s Academy was the school of philosophy that Plato founded in Athens around 387 BC, in a sacred grove just outside the city walls. For about three centuries it was one of the leading centres of thought in the Greek world, and its members included Aristotle and some of the finest mathematicians of the age. Its name lives on in every academy, academic and academic year today.

Background: Plato after Socrates

Plato was born into an aristocratic Athenian family around 428/427 BC. As a young man he became a follower of Socrates, and the Trial of Socrates in 399 BC shook him deeply. In a letter attributed to him, the Seventh Letter, he says that the injustices of both the oligarchy and the restored democracy turned him away from a political career.

In the following years he travelled. He seems to have visited Megara and perhaps Egypt, and around 388 BC he went to southern Italy and Sicily. There he met Archytas of Tarentum, a statesman and mathematician of the Pythagorean tradition, and visited the court of Dionysius I of Syracuse. Soon after his return, around 387 BC, he began teaching at the Academy.

The place: a grove outside the walls

The Academy took its name from the hero Akademos (or Hekademos), whose shrine stood in a grove of olive trees about 1.5 kilometres north-west of the Dipylon Gate, the main gate of Athens. The area already had a public gymnasium, a place for exercise and conversation, with walks, shaded paths and an altar of the Muses. Sacred olive trees there supplied the oil given as prizes at the Panathenaic Games.

Plato owned a small property nearby with a garden. Teaching seems to have taken place both in the public gymnasium and on Plato’s land. The school was not a university in the modern sense, with buildings, fees and degrees, but a community of people who met regularly to study and debate.

Teaching and research

Plato believed that the highest knowledge comes from reasoning, not from the senses, and that mathematics trains the mind to think about unchanging truths. The Academy therefore placed great weight on geometry, arithmetic and astronomy, alongside dialectic, the art of discussion by question and answer. Ethics, politics and the theory of forms were central themes.

Members did not simply listen to lectures. They worked on problems together and criticised one another’s ideas, including Plato’s own. The mathematicians Theaetetus and Eudoxus of Cnidus, who made major advances in geometry and astronomy, were connected with the school. Plato is also reported to have given a public lecture “On the Good” that baffled an audience expecting practical advice and hearing mathematics instead.

Diogenes Laertius records that two women, Axiothea of Phlius and Lasthenia of Mantinea, studied there, the former reportedly dressed in men’s clothes.

Aristotle and the Old Academy

The most famous student was Aristotle, who arrived from northern Greece at about 17, around 367 BC, and stayed for some 20 years. He absorbed and challenged Plato’s ideas, especially the theory of forms, and later founded his own school, the Lyceum, in 335 BC.

When Plato died in 348/347 BC, leadership passed to his nephew Speusippus, then to Xenocrates and Polemon. This first phase is known as the Old Academy. Its heads developed Plato’s teachings into a more systematic doctrine, and the school remained an important rival to the Lyceum and, later, to the Stoics and the Epicureans.

The sceptical Academy

Around 266 BC Arcesilaus became head and turned the school in a new direction. Inspired by Socrates’ admission of ignorance, he argued that certain knowledge was impossible and that a wise person should suspend judgement. This sceptical phase is often called the Middle or New Academy.

Its most brilliant spokesman was Carneades, who in 155 BC visited Rome as an ambassador and caused a sensation by arguing for justice one day and against it the next. The last undisputed head of the Academy, Philo of Larissa, fled to Rome around 88 BC during the war between Rome and King Mithridates. The young Cicero heard him lecture there and remained a lifelong admirer of the Academic method.

Destruction and revival

In 86 BC the Roman general Sulla besieged Athens. Plutarch reports that he cut down the trees of the Academy and the Lyceum to build siege engines. The original institution does not seem to have survived these events, although philosophers continued to call themselves Platonists.

From the late fourth century AD a Neoplatonist school flourished in Athens, led by thinkers such as Plutarch of Athens, Syrianus and Proclus. They saw themselves as Plato’s successors and their school is often called the Academy, though it met in the city rather than in the old grove. In AD 529 the emperor Justinian issued a law forbidding pagans to teach, and the school’s activity ended. Its last head, Damascius, and several colleagues went to the court of the Persian king Khosrow I for a time around 531-532.

Rediscovery and legacy

The site of the Academy was identified in the twentieth century. Excavations began in 1929 and continued at intervals, revealing parts of the gymnasium, a large peristyle building, earlier houses and boundary stones. Today the area is a public park in the Akadimia Platonos district of Athens.

The name of the school passed into many languages. Renaissance humanists in Florence formed a circle they called the Platonic Academy, and from the seventeenth century learned societies such as the French Academy adopted the title. Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens (1509-1511) in the Vatican, with Plato and Aristotle at its centre, became the best-known image of ancient philosophy. Other famous schools, such as that of Diogenes and the Cynics, defined themselves partly against Plato’s.

Myths and facts

• Myth: a sign over the door read “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter”. The story is first recorded by commentators of late antiquity, many centuries after Plato’s death. It captures the school’s love of mathematics, but there is no early evidence for the inscription.
• Myth: the Academy was the first university. It had no formal admissions, examinations, degrees or set syllabus. Universities in the modern sense developed in medieval Europe, although they borrowed the ideal of a learned community.
• Myth: the Academy lasted unbroken for 900 years. The institution Plato founded seems to have ended in the first century BC. The school closed in AD 529 was a later revival that claimed his inheritance.
• Fact: Plato’s own works survive complete. Unlike most ancient philosophers, all of Plato’s known dialogues have come down to us, largely because the Platonic schools kept copying them. Several works in the collection are probably by his followers rather than by Plato himself.

Timeline

• c. 428/427 BC: Plato is born in Athens.
• 399 BC: Execution of Socrates.
• c. 388-387 BC: Plato visits southern Italy and Sicily.
• c. 387 BC: Plato begins teaching at the Academy.
• c. 367 BC: Aristotle joins the school.
• 348/347 BC: Plato dies; Speusippus succeeds him.
• c. 266 BC: Arcesilaus takes the school in a sceptical direction.
• 86 BC: Sulla’s siege of Athens damages the Academy grove.
• AD 529: Justinian’s law ends pagan philosophical teaching in Athens.

Why it matters

The Academy was the first long-lasting institution devoted to philosophical and scientific research in Europe. It established the idea that learning happens in a community of teachers and students who question and test ideas, a model that still shapes universities and research institutes today.