Plato founds the Academy at Athens
- Date
- c. 387 BCE
- Category
- Culture, arts & philosophy
- Region
- Greece (Attica)
- Era
- Classical Antiquity
- Significance
Around 387 BCE, after travels in southern Italy and Sicily, Plato established a school in a grove sacred to the hero Academus outside Athens — the Academy, often regarded as the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.
There Plato taught and wrote dialogues that systematised Socratic inquiry into a vast philosophical project spanning ethics, politics, metaphysics, mathematics and the theory of Forms — eternal, perfect realities behind the changing world of appearances. The Academy gathered students and researchers in subjects from geometry to astronomy; tradition held that the inscription 'let no one ignorant of geometry enter' stood over its gate. Aristotle studied there for some twenty years before founding his own school. As an enduring community of teaching and research, the Academy provided an institutional model for organised education and persisted in various forms for centuries. Plato's writings became among the most influential in the history of thought, shaping philosophy, political theory, theology and science across the ancient, medieval and modern worlds.
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Empires active in c. 387 BCE
- Achaemenid Empire550 BCE – 330 BCE
- Roman Republic509 BCE – 27 BCE
- Carthaginian Empire650 BCE – 146 BCE
- Kingdom of Kush1070 BCE – 350 CE
- Scythians800 BCE – 300 BCE
- Odrysian Kingdom480 BCE – 46 CE
Related culture, arts & philosophy events
- Trial and execution of Socrates399 BCE
- Panini composes the Ashtadhyayi, the first systematic grammarc. 400 BCE
- Compilation of the Daodejing and the rise of Daoismc. 4th century BCE
- Herodotus completes the Histories, founding the writing of historyc. 430–425 BCE
- Life and teaching of Confucius in China551–479 BCE
- Construction of the Parthenon in Periclean Athens447–432 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
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