Few educational institutions have been as much mythologised as Plato's Academy, the school and meeting place for philosophers established by Plato close to the gymnasium of that name just outside Athens’ city walls. This edited volume, which originates from a conference held in Athens in 2012, aims to elucidate how the Academy operated and to survey its history. Both of these questions are harder to answer than might be imagined. The beginnings of the Academy and what happened there in Plato's time remain obscure; how and even whether Plato taught students in an organised way is uncertain, as J. Glucker notes in his chapter ‘Plato in the Academy: Some Cautious Reflections’. Glucker challenges the popular views of Plato teaching through readings of the Socratic dialogues with students, still regarded by some as the best possible form of education, or through lectures such as the infamous ‘On the Good’, which he treats as a one-off disaster. After marshalling the scant evidence, this chapter concludes rather Socratically, with no firm conclusions about how Plato interacted with students and visiting philosophers. Like many of the central chapters in this volume, this one deconstructs myths of the Academy and demonstrates how to read the often fragmentary sources from which its history can be excavated.
This volume is focused on the Hellenistic period, before the point where Platonism and the Academy developed into very different traditions, and before the departure of Philo, the last formal head of the Academy, to Rome in 89 bce Cicero described the Academy's grounds as deserted, in a discussion set not long after Sulla's assault on Athens (De finibus 5.1–2), centuries before. Contributors take varying views on the question of whether any philosophical activity associated with the Academy took place on the site after Philo's departure and before the final closure of the city's philosophical schools in 529 ce; M. Bonazzi's chapter ‘The End of the Academy’ describes the debate clearly. Other chapters perform a similar role in setting out complex debates turning on fragmentary and contradictory evidence, drawing on contributors’ specialist expertise but still for the most part accessible to those without a grounding in the arcana of Hellenistic philosophy.
Between Plato and Philo, philosophers associated with the Academy made profound and lasting contributions of their own to the shaping of the Western philosophical tradition as well as tending the legacy of Socrates and Plato. This volume emphasises the Academy as a physical space as well as an intellectual community. In doing so, it makes a strong case both for an interdisciplinary and contextualist approach to the history of ancient philosophy and for the importance of the history of philosophy to the practice of the discipline. It shows the philosophers associated with the Academy engaged in a wider intellectual world as well as considering the way in which the succession of scholarchs invented and maintained the cult of Plato and Socrates.
Excavations in the twentieth century revealed the Academy's location in Athens and even some buildings. D. Marchiandi's chapter ‘In the Shadow of Athena Polias’ makes a compelling case for a contextualist reading of Plato by setting out the archaeology of the ancient cults established in the area of the Academy. While she does not thoroughly join the dots between the material evidence for these cults and Academic texts and thought, she outlines a space within which a rich Platonic psychogeography can develop. The spaces of Athens are of supreme importance in understanding the dialogues – that the Republic's setting in the Piraeus provides a katabasis for Socrates to match the descent into the Cave is well recognised. Yet the space of the Academy itself has not been thoroughly explored in this respect. Connecting the cult of Eros on the site to the erotic dialogues adds a further layer to these already complex texts and a further dimension to the topic of Plato's own religious choices. Two further chapters explore the detailed archaeology of the site and the wider archaeology of Athenian philosophy.
Athenians were not entirely positive about the Academy, its teachers or its students. Opponents suggested that its students were politically disreputable and that its most significant export was tyranny. M. Haake analyses interactions between Athenian democracy and philosophy during the Academy's early years, starting from Plato's return from his probable journey to Sicily in 387/6 bce and ending with the decrees of Sophocles and Demochares, which closed and then re-opened the schools. Haake notes the specific circumstances that emboldened the democracy against the schools and suggests that the Academy was never ‘a political cell that pursued a specific political agenda’, but a ‘socially exclusive establishment’ (pp. 73–4) that drew affluent young men from across the Greek world and, as such, an easy target for anti-oligarchic critique.
Several chapters explore the early Academy's intellectual context, its relationships with other traditions and its contribution to specific fields of enquiry. Karasmanis and M. Sialaros investigate the Academy's history as a centre for mathematics. Nobody disputes Plato's interest in numbers and geometry, particularly evident in the Timaeus; early criticism of the Academy from Isocrates hints at its members excessive interest in mathematical studies, but many have disputed whether members of the Academy were serious mathematicians. Karasmanis makes a case, against the view of some historians of mathematics, for treating Plato himself as ‘a foundationalist and a theorist of mathematics’ (p. 139) whose own interventions and support for the emergent discipline played an important part in its development. Sialaros offers a more cautious exploration of the relationship of Euclid and his work to the Academy and its traditions. If the Academy welcomed those who knew geometry, it does not mean that all geometers necessarily entered its doors.
Another question muddied by the extant sources is the relationship between Platonism and the Pythagorean heritage, explored by P.S. Horky through a study of the Academy's reception of central Pythagorean ideas known as the acusmata. Horky provides a careful reading of the biographical sources and the philosophical fragments embedded within them, to reconstruct Xenophanes’ and Eudoxus’ dialectical engagement with these ideas, getting beyond the claims that the Academy plagiarised the Pythagorean tradition.
The later history of the Academy involves both revival and rejection of different aspects of Plato's legacy. A recurring theme is the centrifugal role of the Academy, as philosophers left to found their own schools, right from the earliest contested successions in which Xenocrates and Aristotle departed; I. Bodnár's chapter on natural philosophy explores what ideas they may have taken with them. While controversy between schools was a feature of Hellenistic philosophy, D. Sedley makes a strong case for not treating Carneades’ theological arguments as attacks on Stoicism, but as defences of atheism.
H. Tarrant, in examining the transition between the Old and the New Academy, makes an intriguing case for reading some of the dubia in the Platonic corpus as remnants of a Socratic revival in the final stages of the Old Academy. It would be good to see more of the detailed data on which this enterprise depends, rather than the summary tables presented. Some might be more sceptical about finding any close connection between dialogues like Alcibiades II and the genuine Socratic and Platonic tradition.
The final section of the volume is devoted to the fragments of Philodemus’ History of the Academy, originally published as Index Academicorum, part of a synoptic history of philosophy. The text was recovered from two papyrus scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum (PHerc. 1021 and 164), with the first transcriptions published in 1862. In ‘The Academy Through Epicurean Eyes: Some Lives of Academic Philosophers in Philodemus’ Syntaxis’ M. Hatzimichali sets out the contribution to the Academy's history this work makes, providing a thorough and helpful introduction to an appendix, which in turn presents its Greek text and an English translation.
Hatzimichali points out the contextual value of Philodemus’ Epicurean perspective as well as some puzzles, including the work's generic affiliations with successor lists (Diadochai), the prominent role of prosopography and the relative absence of doxographical material in the surviving sections. The brief character sketches and anecdotes are perhaps disappointing when Philodemus draws on earlier historical works from figures such as Dicaearchus. He offers little argument or controversy, either. Hatzimichali also provides useful historical and prosopographical notes to the translation, noting Philodemus’ probable sources and parallels with related texts.
The final section, an appendix to the main papers, provides the first published English translation of this text, based on T. Dorandi's 1991 authoritative edition, Filodemo: Storia dei filosofi, Platone e L'Academia (PHerc. 1021 e 164); here Kalligas and V. Tsouna make some minor emendations, presenting the Greek text more clearly in its columnar layout. Their translation unhelpfully follows Dorandi's minimal presentation of textual lacunae, using ellipses without any indication of the size of the gap. With no explicit lineation for the English text, it might be difficult for a reader with little or no Greek to understand where the major lacunae fall, as for example in Column XVII, which like many others has major lacunae in the middle.
While the range of the papers is admirable, the book's integration into a whole has gaps, rather like Philodemus’ papyrus. In a volume in which a new translation plays a key role, it is disappointing to find swathes of untranslated Greek in a key chapter. An index locorum can certainly stand as the only index in a philosophy book, but the archaeological and historical chapters lose out from this; an index of physical as well as textual loci, people as well as texts, would have been helpful. The index also has omissions – Bodnár's discussion of Epicrates Fr. 10, a comic presentation of the Academy that parallels Aristophanes’ Socratic phrontisterion from the Clouds, is absent, although his are among the most interesting points in the several separate discussions throughout the volume. More dialogue between the chapters would also have been interesting; and although many of them draw on and refer to the Philodemus text, none of their notes point the reader to the edition later in the volume, but rather to Dorandi's edition.
These reservations do not detract from the usefulness and interest of the volume as a whole. Several of its more thoroughly philosophical chapters constitute exemplary lessons in handling the complex indirect sources for important figures in the Academy's history. But its greatest significance lies in signposting a promising interdisciplinary direction for future studies of Plato and his dialogues.
