Platonic Academy

Before it was a school, and before Cimon walled its precincts, the site held a sacred grove of olive trees dedicated to Athena outside the walls of Athens, named for the legendary hero Akademos. Out of respect for that tradition the Spartans left the groves untouched when they invaded Attica in 413 BC. Plato founded his school there in about 387 BC, though no record fixes the exact date and modern scholars place it in the mid-380s, probably after he returned from his first journey to Italy and Sicily. The club charged no fees in his lifetime, and two women are known to have studied with him there, Axiothea of Phlius and Lasthenia of Mantinea. Aristotle studied at the Academy for twenty years, from 367 to 347 BC, before founding his own school, the Lyceum.

Diogenes Laërtius divided the school's history into an Old, a Middle and a New Academy, heading them with Plato, Arcesilaus and Lacydes. Plato's immediate successors as scholarch were Speusippus, from 347 to 339 BC, and Xenocrates, from 339 to 314 BC. Arcesilaus took over in about 266 BC, and under him the school turned strongly to Academic scepticism; Carneades opened the New Academy in 155 BC.

When the First Mithridatic War began in 88 BC, Philo of Larissa, the last undisputed head of the Academy, left Athens for Rome, where he seems to have stayed until his death. In 86 BC Lucius Cornelius Sulla besieged and took the city, felling the sacred olive trees of Athena to build siege engines: "he laid hands upon the sacred groves, and ravaged the Academy, which was the most wooded of the city's suburbs, as well as the Lyceum". The damage seems to have been severe enough to make rebuilding impossible. When Antiochus of Ascalon returned from Alexandria in about 84 BC he resumed teaching, but not at the Academy, and Cicero, who studied under him a few years later, describes finding the site "quiet and deserted at that hour of the day".

Platonism was still taught in Athens under Roman rule, but it was not until about 410 that leading Neoplatonists established a revived Academy, which seems to have been a private foundation run from a large house. Its heads were Plutarch of Athens, Syrianus, Proclus, Marinus, Isidore and finally Damascius, and it reached its height under Proclus, who died in 485. Its members called themselves successors of Plato, though there can have been no institutional continuity with the original school. The emperor Justinian closed it in 529. On the account of the historian Agathias, the sole witness, the remaining members sought protection at the court of the Sassanid king Khosrau I at Ctesiphon, carrying scrolls of literature and philosophy with them; a peace treaty between the Persian and Byzantine empires in 532 guaranteed their personal security.

The site lies near Colonus, about 1.5 km north of the Dipylon gates, and was rediscovered in the twentieth century in the modern Akadimia Platonos neighbourhood. Considerable excavation has been carried out; it is protected as an archaeological site of Greece and free to visit. The monuments uncovered include a sacred house of the Geometric period, a peristyle building of the fourth century BC and a gymnasium where the students exercised. The Digital Museum of the Platonic Academy opened in the small park beside the site at the end of November 2015.