Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: When did Plato start the Academy?
The Academy (Ancient Greek: Ἀκαδημία) was founded by Plato (428/427 BC – 348/347 BC) in c. 387 BC in Athens. Aristotle (384–322 BC) studied there for twenty years (367–347 BC) before founding his own school, the Lyceum. The Academy persisted throughout the Hellenistic period as a skeptical school, until coming to an end after the death of Philo of Larissa in 83 BC. The Platonic Academy was destroyed by the Roman dictator Sulla in 86 BC.[1]
The original Academy of Plato had been destroyed by the Roman dictator Sulla in 86 BC. Several centuries later, in 410 AD, a Neoplatonic academy was established that had no institutional continuity with Plato's Academy, and which served as a center for Neoplatonism and mysticism. It persisted until 529 AD when it was finally closed by Justinian I. Other schools in Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria, which were the centers of Justinian's empire, continued.
Plato's Academy mosaic was created in the villa of T. Siminius Stephanus in Pompeii, around 100 BC to 100 CE.
When a military junta ('the Colonels') took power in 1967, he was one of the many intellectuals arrested, sacked from their posts then confined to restricted residence. He then started what he called an informal new 'Plato's Academy' - his old students would gather at his house in Athens and his teaching continued there.
Although Greco-Bactrian or Indo-Greek kings generally did not put dates on their coins, some of them Plato (circa 140 BCE) and Heliocles uncharacteristically do so. Some of the coins of Plato have inscriptions such as MZ, MT, MN which can be interpreted as dates in the Greek numerals system using the Yavana era which started around 186 BCE. In that case Plato ruled around 140 BCE. This matches the dating given by numismatician Bopearachchi, who places Plato between 145–140 BCE, since his coins are not found in the ruins of Ai Khanoum, a Bactrian city which was destroyed during the reign of Eucratides.
Diogenes Laërtius divided the history of the Academy into three: the Old, the Middle, and the New. At the head of the Old he put Plato, at the head of the Middle Academy, Arcesilaus, and of the New, Lacydes. Sextus Empiricus enumerated five divisions of the followers of Plato. He made Plato founder of the first Academy; Arcesilaus of the second; Carneades of the third; Philo and Charmadas of the fourth; and Antiochus of the fifth. Cicero recognised only two Academies, the Old and New, and had the latter commence with Arcesilaus.[27]
Speusippus (; ; c. 408 – 339/8 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher. Speusippus was Plato's nephew by his sister Potone. After Plato's death, c.348 BC, Speusippus inherited the Academy, near age 60, and remained its head for the next eight years. However, following a stroke, he passed the chair to Xenocrates. Although the successor to Plato in the Academy, Speusippus frequently diverged from Plato's teachings. He rejected Plato's Theory of Forms, and whereas Plato had identified the Good with the ultimate "principle", Speusippus maintained that the Good was merely secondary. He also argued that it is impossible to have satisfactory knowledge of any thing without knowing all the differences by which it is separated from everything else.
In at least Plato's time, the school did not have any particular doctrine to teach; rather, Plato (and probably other associates of his) posed problems to be studied and solved by the others.[18] There is evidence of lectures given, most notably Plato's lecture "On the Good"; but probably the use of dialectic was more common.[19] According to an unverifiable story, dated of some 700 years after the founding of the school, above the entrance to the Academy was inscribed the phrase "Let None But Geometers Enter Here."[20]
In 87 BC, Philo of Larissa, the head of the Academy that was founded by Plato in Athens about 300 years earlier, arrived in Rome. Cicero, "inspired by an extraordinary zeal for philosophy", sat enthusiastically at his feet and absorbed Plato's philosophy, even calling Plato his god. He most admired Plato's moral and political seriousness, but he also respected his breadth of imagination. Cicero nonetheless rejected Plato's theory of Ideas.
According to Diogenes Laërtius, when Plato gave the tongue-in-cheek definition of man as "featherless bipeds," Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Behold! I've brought you a man," and so the Academy added "with broad flat nails" to the definition.
What was later to be known as Plato's school probably originated around the time Plato inherited the property at the age of thirty, with informal gatherings which included Theaetetus of Sunium, Archytas of Tarentum, Leodamas of Thasos, and Neoclides.[10] According to Debra Nails, Speusippus "joined the group in about 390 BC". She claims, "It is not until Eudoxus of Cnidos arrives in the mid-380s BC that Eudemus recognizes a formal Academy." There is no historical record of the exact time the school was officially founded, but modern scholars generally agree that the time was the mid-380s, probably sometime after 387 BC, when Plato is thought to have returned from his first visit to Italy and Sicily.[11] Originally, the meetings were held on Plato's property as often as they were at the nearby Academy gymnasium; this remained so throughout the fourth century.[12]
In ancient Greece, after the establishment of the original Academy, Plato's colleagues and pupils developed spin-offs of his method. Arcesilaus, a Greek student of Plato established the Middle Academy. Carneades, another student, established the New Academy. In 335 BC, Aristotle refined the method with his own theories and established the Lyceum in another gymnasium.
After Aristotle left the Academy and founded his own school, he did not seem to share the ambivalence toward allegoresis expressed in Plato's dialogues. He regarded the ancient Greek myths, for example, as allegorical expressions of philosophical truths: 
An argument that has been used against ascribing ironic intent to Plato is that Plato's Academy produced a number of tyrants who seized political power and abandoned philosophy for ruling a city. Despite being well-versed in Greek and having direct contact with Plato himself, some of Plato's former students like Clearchus, tyrant of Heraclea; Chaeron, tyrant of Pellene; Erastus and Coriscus, tyrants of Skepsis; Hermias of Atarneus and Assos; and Calippus, tyrant of Syracuse ruled people and did not impose anything like a philosopher-kingship. However, it can be argued whether these men became "tyrants" through studying in the Academy. Plato's school had an elite student body, some of whom would by birth, and family expectation, end up in the seats of power. Additionally, it is important to remember that it is by no means obvious that these men were tyrants in the modern, totalitarian sense of the concept. Finally, since very little is actually known about what was taught at Plato's Academy, there is no small controversy over whether it was even in the business of teaching politics at all.[33]
The Neoplatonic Florentine Academy was founded after Gemistus Pletho reintroduced Plato's thoughts to Western Europe during the 1438–39 Council of Florence. It was sponsored by Cosimo de' Medici, led by Marsilio Ficino and supported by Medici until death of Lorenzo Medici. It was never a formal group but the members considered themselves a modern form of Plato's Academy. Important members were Poliziano, Cristoforo Landino, Pico della Mirandola, and Gentile de' Becchi. The academy would proceed to translate into Latin all of Plato's works, the Enneads of Plotinus, and various other Neoplatonic works.
Baltes, M. 1993. "Plato's School, the Academy." Hermathena, (155): 5-26. Brunt, P. A. 1993. "Plato's Academy and Politics." In Studies in Greek History and Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cherniss, H. 1945. The Riddle of the Early Academy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Dancy, R. M. 1991. Two Studies in the Early Academy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Dillon, J. M. 1979. "The Academy in the Middle Platonic Period." Dionysius, 3: 63-77. Dillon, J. 2003. The Heirs of Plato. A Study of the Old Academy, 347–274 BC. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dorandi, T. 1999. "Chronology: The Academy." In The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy. Edited by Keimpe Algra, Jonathan Barnes, Jaap Mansfeld, and Malcolm Schofield, 31–35. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. Glucker, J. 1978. Antiochus and the Late Academy. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Lynch, J. P. 1972. Aristotle's School: A Study of a Greek Educational Institution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Murray, J. S. 2006. "Searching for Plato's Academy, 1929-1940." Mouseion: Journal of the Classical Association of Canada, 6 (2): 219-56 Russell, J. H. 2012. "When Philosophers Rule: The Platonic Academy and Statesmanship." History of Political Thought, 33 (2): 209-230. Wallach, J. R. 2002. "The Platonic Academy and Democracy." Polis (Exeter), 19 (1-2): 7-27 Watts, E. 2007. "Creating the Academy: Historical Discourse and the Shape of Community in the Old Academy." The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 127: 106–122. Wycherley, R. 1961. "Peripatos: The Athenian Philosophical Scene--I." Greece & Rome, 8(2), 152-163. Wycherley, R. 1962. Peripatos: The Athenian Philosophical Scene--II. Greece & Rome, 9(1), 2-21. Zhmud, Leonid. 2006. "Science in the Platonic Academy.: In The Origin of the History of Science in Classical Antiquity. By Leonid Zhmud, 82–116. Berlin: De Gruyter.
The vigorous polemic contained in this small volume (109 pp.) significantly shaped later Plato scholarship and began the process that split much of English-language and Continental Plato research into two communities. The unitarianism of Shorey and Cherniss holds that Plato's dialogues are both a consistent and complete exposition of Plato's system. Cherniss saw both contentions under attack by the "higher critics" of Plato scholarship in his day. Burnet, Taylor, and others argued for radical changes in Plato's theories and an esoteric mathematical ontology taught orally in the Academy. According to Cherniss:
Besides Plato himself, Ariston and Perictione had three other children; these were two sons, Adeimantus and Glaucon, and a daughter, Potone, the mother of Speusippus (the nephew and successor of Plato as head of his philosophical Academy). According to the "Republic", Adeimantus and Glaucon were older than Plato; the two brothers distinguished themselves in the Battle of Megara, when Plato could not have been more than 5 years old. Nevertheless, in his "Memorabilia", Xenophon presents Glaucon as younger than Plato.
The chief evidence and arguments for the existence of Plato's unwritten doctrines are the following:
If the "Seventh Letter" is authentic, Plato sharply disapproved of disclosing the contents of the supposed unwritten doctrines in writing. However, no obligation to remain silent was imposed upon the 'initiated.' The 'esoteric' character of the teachings should not be understood as a requirement to keep them secret or as a ban on writing about them. Indeed, students in the Academy did later publish writings about the unwritten doctrines or reuse them in their own works. This 'indirect tradition,' the evidence drawn from other ancient authors, supplies a basis for the reconstruction of doctrines that Plato communicated only orally.
When Cosimo decided to refound Plato's Academy at Florence he chose Ficino as its head. In 1462, Cosimo supplied Ficino with Greek manuscripts of Plato's work, whereupon Ficino started translating the entire corpus to Latin (draft translation of the dialogues finished 1468–9; published 1484). Ficino also produced a translation of a collection of Hellenistic Greek documents found by Leonardo da Pistoia later called Hermetica, and the writings of many of the Neoplatonists, including Porphyry, Iamblichus and Plotinus.
In these gardens, the philosopher Plato conversed with followers. Plato developed his sessions into a method of teaching philosophy and in 387 BC, established what is known today as the Old Academy.
Visitors today can visit the archaeological site of the Academy located on either side of the Cratylus street in the area of Colonos and Plato's Academy (Postal Code GR10442). On either side of the Cratylus street are important monuments, including the Sacred House Geometric Era, the Gymnasium (1stcenturyBC – 1stcenturyAD), the Proto-Helladic Vaulted House and the Peristyle Building (4thcenturyBC), which is perhaps the only major building that belonged to the actual Academy of Plato.
There is some suggestion that Plato did have some relationship with Perdiccas, though it is difficult to determine the degree to which the Fifth Letter influenced this perception, and thus the relevance of this material in examining its authenticity. A fragment of Carystius' "Historical Notes" preserved by Athenaeus in Book XI of the "Deipnosophistae" reports that "Speusippus, learning that Philip was uttering slanders about Plato, wrote in a letter something of this sort: 'As if the whole world did not know that Philip acquired the beginning of his kingship through Plato’s agency. For Plato sent to Perdiccas Euphraeus of Oreus, who persuaded Perdiccas to portion off some territory to Philip. Here Philip kept a force, and when Perdiccas died, since he had this force in readiness, he at once plunged into the control of affairs.'" Demosthenes notes in his "Third Philippic" that Euphraeus once resided in Athens, and portrays him as being active in politics, albeit in opposition to Philip.
Norris continued to praise PLATO, announcing that it would be only a few years before it represented a major source of income for CDC as late as 1984. In 1986, Norris stepped down as CEO, and the PLATO service was slowly killed off. He later claimed that Micro-PLATO was one of the reasons PLATO got off-track. They had started on the TI-99/4A, but then Texas Instruments pulled the plug and they moved to other systems like the Atari, who soon did the same. He felt that it was a waste of time anyway, as the system's value was in its online nature, which Micro-PLATO lacked initially.
Platonism was originally expressed in the dialogues of Plato, in which the figure of Socrates is used to expound certain doctrines, that may or may not be similar to the thought of the historical Socrates, Plato's master. Plato delivered his lectures at the Academy, a precinct containing a sacred grove outside the walls of Athens. The school continued there long after Plato's death. There were three periods: the Old, Middle, and New Academy. The chief figures in the Old Academy were Speusippus (Plato's nephew), who succeeded him as the head of the school (until 339 BC), and Xenocrates (until 313 BC). Both of them sought to fuse Pythagorean speculations on number with Plato's theory of forms.