The End of the Academy

Abstract

What happened to the Platonic Academy in late Hellenistic and Early Imperial Age is a controversial point. For a long period it has been a widely held view that the Academy continued to operate until the Emperor Justinian closed it in the 529 A.D. But in opposition to this view some challenging studies argued that it rather ended its activity around 86 b.C., during and in consequence of the Mithridatic War, when the garden of the Academy was destroyed by Sulla's troops. Needless to say, neither this new (and more solid) reconstruction solved all the ambiguities, and more recently some doubts have been raised against it. By reconsidering the available evidence, aim of the paper is a reapprisal of this vetus quaestio. In fact, the problems are two: the problem of the end of the Academy as a working institution is not the same as its end in the sense of its destruction. The two points not necessarily imply each other. And even though one may cast doubts that the Academy was physically destroyed, the surviving testimonies appear to show that there was not anymore Academic teaching in Athens. Even more fatal than Sulla's troops, were the internal struggles. But not everything went lost, for the term 'Academic' continued to be used in the following centuries, confirming the importance of the tradition stemming from Plato: for at stake in the use and appropriation of the term was not so much the membership to the institution as Plato's heritage – an everlasting problem.(Mauro Bonazi, University of Milan)