Plato Founds the Academy
Around 387 BCE, after returning from travels in Sicily and southern Italy, Plato established a school in a grove sacred to the hero Academus, about a mile northwest of Athens' city walls. The school, which became known as the Academy (Akademia), would operate continuously for approximately 900 years until the Byzantine emperor Justinian closed it in 529 CE as part of his suppression of pagan institutions. Plato had been present at Socrates' trial and execution in 399 BCE, an event that convinced him that philosophy and politics were fatally entangled and that the training of future leaders required a structured philosophical education. He spent roughly twelve years travelling — to Megara, Cyrene, Egypt, and twice to Syracuse in Sicily, where he attempted unsuccessfully to educate the tyrant Dionysius I and later his son Dionysius II — before settling in Athens to found the Academy. The Academy was not a school in any modern institutional sense: there was no fixed curriculum, no fees, and no formal enrolment. It functioned as a community of inquiry, with Plato hosting discussions on mathematics, philosophy, rhetoric, and astronomy. The method was dialectical: propositions were advanced, tested against objections, refined or abandoned. Plato himself wrote in dialogue form throughout his life, and many of the dialogues (including the Republic, the Phaedo, the Symposium, and the Laws) were probably written and discussed at the Academy. The institution attracted the greatest minds of the ancient world. Its most famous student was Aristotle, who arrived from Stagira in Macedonia at the age of seventeen, around 367 BCE, and remained for twenty years until Plato's death. The Academy also produced Speusippus (Plato's nephew, who succeeded him as head), Xenocrates, and Eudoxus of Cnidus — the mathematician who made decisive contributions to the theory of proportion and astronomical modelling. After Plato's death in 347 BCE, the Academy continued under a succession of heads (scholarchs). It transformed in character over the centuries, passing through sceptical phases (the Middle and New Academy of Arcesilaus and Carneades) before a Platonist revival in the first century BCE. In its later phase it became closely identified with Neoplatonism under Plotinus and Proclus.
- Year: 387 BCE
- Category: Cultural
