Our sources tell us that after returning from his trip to southern Italy and Sicily, Plato purchased a plot of land near the sanctuary of Hecademus or Academus, known as the Academy. Northwest of the city wall of Athens was a gymnasium called the Academy, where boys and men could exercise and engage in athletics. Like the other two major gymnasia of Athens, the Lyceum (to the east of Athens) and Cynosarges (to the south), the Academy also had public meeting rooms, a public park, and facilities where groups could congregate.
Plato built a house on his land, which seems to have served as his main residence. He also collected a library. The practice of writing was relatively new in Greece, where the alphabet was developed in the eighth century BC. Books in the form of papyrus rolls were now common. The philosopher Anaximander seems to have been a kind of pioneer in prose writing in the sixth century BC, being one of the first thinkers to commit his wisdom to the writing. He and many of the Presocratic philosophers had left a record in the form of a book. With the rise of writing, the practice of giving books titles also developed. Most of the books authored by philosophers bore the title On Nature (Peri physeōs) (probably applied ex post facto to many treatises). By the fifth century there were books of poetry, scripts of popular plays, collections of public speeches, as well as classics such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey that could be purchased.
There were, we must remember, no printing presses in the ancient world, so books had to be copied by hand by a literate person, perhaps an educated slave, but someone whose work had to be compensated. So books were not cheap. But they were not expensive either. Socrates notes that Anaxagoras’ treatise On Nature could be purchased in the marketplace for one drachma, when minimum wage for a day’s work was half a drachma.[23]
Plato had reservations about the effects of literacy: people were losing the ability to commit to memory large tracts of spoken language, such as the Homeric poems.[24] Yet he also assembled an impressive library for his own study and, potentially the study of his own students. His library became a significant resource for his nascent school.
One thing we are not informed about by our sources is how Plato got started as a teacher of others. The founding of Plato’s Academy, using his personal library and the facilities of the nearby gymnasium was certainly a significant event. But he may well have had students before he had a school. And, thanks to Plato’s villa, his group of followers became a school in a more institutional sense than the gatherings of earlier philosophers.
Plato’s Socratic dialogues served a double purpose: they not only gave readers access to the world of Socrates’ inquiries, where the readers could listen in to fictional but probably typical conversations conducted by the master; the dialogues also instilled in readers a lively curiosity to find answers to the questions Socrates asked. For in most of the dialogues, Socrates asked for definitions of virtues, but his interlocutors’ proffered definitions were refuted. What then is piety, or justice, or temperance, or courage? We learn from the dialogue what the virtues are not, but not what they are.
The dialogues are, in the parlance of the time, “protreptic.” They turn us (trepein) towards (pro) philosophy. They are invitations to take up the inquiry and pursue it to its end—if there is an end; is there? They provide a much more powerful motivation to the reader than a dry treatise which supplies all the answers one by one to questions the reader has not asked.
Did Plato have a following before he purchased the property in the suburbs of Athens? It is difficult to imagine him actually playing Socrates. Plato, from what we can tell, was not the magnetic personality that Socrates was; he did not flourish in the rough-and-tumble of a drinking contest or a debate. He probably could not engage a group of schoolboys at a wrestling ground. From what we know, he would not, on principle, share his wisdom with random strangers on the street—the uneducated, the uncultured, the rabble. Certainly he would not ask their opinion on any important matter. He would not be a friend to Simon the shoemaker or get into a beauty contest with handsome young men at a drinking party. He would not drink everyone under the table and go off to the bath house. He would not flatter and fawn over a sophist, before refuting him. Plato could not, in short, be Socrates, however much he might admire the man.
Indeed, Plato could not, given his patrician values and his mandarin predilections, have mingled in Socrates’ world without cringing at the boorishness of the masses. The craftsmen whom Socrates holds up as paradigms for their mastery of knowledge with practical applications, Plato rails against for their pretensions to wisdom.[25] Yet Plato must have witnessed many conversations between Socrates and craftsmen and other members of the “working classes.” And profited from them, at least in what he learned from Socrates. And perhaps he got a glimpse of how education, skillfully imparted, might help even the most benighted of people.
Through his writings, if not his own conversations, Plato became the educator of a generation of students. And indeed, he became the educator of all future generations of Greek intellectuals. He was Homer and Socrates was his Achilles. He let young men encounter Socrates as he had, the jovial and self-effacing and ever-curious inquirer, the walking enigma. And it seems likely that students attached themselves to Plato, informally at first, to hear more about the legendary street philosopher. Then, when Plato organized a school, they attached themselves to him formally, as the heir apparent to an amazing philosophical legacy.
And as his school grew, it attracted the best and brightest thinkers from across the Greek world. More on that anon. But the Grove of Hecademe was destined to become a center of learning like none other in the Greek world, a proto-university and think tank unrivaled in the Mediterranean world. It was the right institution at the right place in the right time, when knowledge was exploding, when Athens was reinventing itself as a center of commerce and learning, and when Greek culture was coming to dominate the western world. The name ‘Academy’ would become synonymous with educational excellence and civic importance forever after.
[23] Plato Apology 26d-e.
[24] Plato Phaedrus 274c-275b; Havelock 1963.
[25] Plato Republic VI, 495c-496a.