Plato and the founding of the Academy

Socrates died in 399 BC, condemned by an Athenian jury on charges of impiety and corrupting the young. Plato was not present at the execution itself — he tells us in the Phaedo that he was ill that day — but he had witnessed everything leading up to it, and the event reorganized the rest of his life.

Within a few years he had left Athens entirely, traveling to Megara, reportedly to Cyrene and Egypt, and eventually to southern Italy and Sicily, where he encountered the Pythagorean communities of Magna Graecia and became entangled in the politics of Syracuse through his friendship with Dion.

It was his attempt to create the very first king philosopher.

When it failed drastically, he returned to Athens around 387 BC and founded a school in a grove sacred to the hero Academus, just outside the city walls. The school took its name from that grove: the Academy.

What the Academy actually was

It is tempting to picture the Academy as something like a modern university, but the comparison misleads more than it clarifies. There was no fixed curriculum, no degree, no single doctrine handed down from Plato to his students.

The Academy was, first, a physical space — a gymnasium with gardens, shared meals, communal life — and second, a standing community organized around joint inquiry rather than the transmission of settled conclusions.

It endured for roughly nine centuries, until the Christian emperor Justinian closed the pagan philosophical schools of Athens in 529 AD. No comparable institution existed anywhere in the Greek world before it.

This has consequences for how the Academy’s founder ought to be read: Giovanni Reale, alongside the German scholars Hans Krämer and Konrad Gaiser, argued for what has come to be called the “unwritten doctrines” — the thesis that Plato reserved his most fundamental teachings, concerning the first principles of reality, for oral instruction inside the Academy, and never committed them fully to the dialogues we possess.

The argument leans heavily on Plato’s Seventh Letter, where he states outright that he has never written, and never will write, on the matters he takes most seriously.

The thesis remains contested — many scholars hold that the dialogues are complete in themselves or, at least, hold that the dialogues capture Plato’s major thesis.

If Reale, Krämer, and Gaiser are right, the school was not simply a place where Plato’s books were discussed. It was the place where the students initiated by the books acquired the deepest knowledge of Platonic thinking.

The Republic and the structure of the just soul

Among the surviving dialogues, none is more closely tied to the Academy’s founding purpose than the Republic.

G. R. F. Ferrari, in City and Soul in Plato’s Republic, examines the analogy on which the entire work depends: that justice in a city and justice in a single soul are structurally the same thing, examined at two different scales.

The city divides into three classes — guardians who rule, auxiliaries who defend, producers who provide — and the soul divides correspondingly into reason, spirit, and appetite. Justice, in both cases, consists not in one part dominating by force, but in each part performing its proper function under reason’s guidance.

Ferrari’s contribution is to take seriously how much interpretive weight this analogy is asked to bear, and how carefully Plato manages the slippage between the political and psychological register throughout the work.

The city does not merely illustrate the soul. The two are meant to explain each other: the order of the soul was found in the order of the city, which corresponded to the order of the universe itself.

Translation and the Academy’s afterlife

However, the ideas that brewed within the walls of the Academy did not survive on their own or through a direct text to us; they survived through the labor of the translations — which contain with the translator’s own interpretation of Plato.

Luc Brisson, who produced one of the standard modern French editions of Plato’s complete works, has written extensively on how deeply a philosophical reading of Plato depends on decisions made at the level of the sentence — a Greek term with no exact equivalent, a clause whose interpretive weight shifts depending on where it’s judged to end.

A reader encountering the Republic in any modern language is already encountering a text shaped by centuries of this largely invisible scholarly labor.

Plato without the historical Plato

Lloyd P. Gerson, in From Plato to Platonism, makes a related but distinct argument: that “Platonism” as a coherent philosophical position — committed to the rejection of materialism, relativism, and skepticism, and to an intelligible order beyond the changing physical world — should be understood as something larger than the historical Plato or the literal content of his dialogues, because the Plato we know is how Plato was interpreted by Western philosophical tradition, and he outgrows the historical Plato himself.

In this view, the later Platonic tradition was not simply commenting on Plato from the outside. It was working out commitments already present in the founding texts, even where they were not made fully explicit.

One reader, centuries later

That tradition reached further than Athens. In the Confessions, Book VII, Saint Augustine describes reading “the books of the Platonists” — almost certainly Latin translations of Plotinus — shortly before his conversion, crediting them with giving him, for the first time, a way of conceiving God and the soul as immaterial.

Eight hundred years after its founding, a school built by a grieving student in a garden outside Athens was still reorganizing minds — this time, the mind of a man whose own conversion would change Western philosophy completely.

Next newsletter

Not every student who passed through the Academy remained convinced by it. Next week: Aristotle, the prodigal student who attended there for twenty years and then left to build something different.