Athens in pieces: The stench of the academy

The weekend traffic in the center of Athens was awful on the late January day I decided to visit the site of Plato’s Academy. Each of the narrow, slightly dog-legged streets in Plaka, the old city, was completely jammed, because recent angry protests, some of them violent, had forced the closing of roads around Syntagma, or Constitution, Square. Still, pedestrians were out in impressive force, filling the streets, intent on enjoying their Saturday shopping. Athenians take their weekends very seriously. Pantelis, my cabdriver, threaded his way delicately around people suddenly lurching, seemingly semioblivious, into the street and the constant chorus of motorcycles appearing out of nowhere and disappearing noisily into the distance.

Once past the clogged junction at Monastiraki Square, we pushed more easily along Ermou Street and headed northwest. We came to an area scattered with warehouses and former factories. The cab stopped by a huddle of abandoned buses. Ahead of us was what looked like an open area of greenery. Pantelis pointed and said, “Akadimia Platonos.” This must be the place, I thought. Plato’s Academy is now a public park in a not particularly nice part of town. It is just next to Colonus, Sophocles’ birthplace and, according to the legend he helped to invent, the final resting place of Oedipus.

The day was cool and sunny, but the previous 48 hours had been filled with storms, strong winds and intense rain. As I entered the park from the south, the ground was muddy with large puddles. My boots slipped and slid underfoot as I made my way past a man talking loudly on a cellphone in what I think was Bengali. A couple were playing in the distance with their dog. There was an empty playground and a rather nice gravel area for playing pétanque, which is apparently popular with the locals. It was also deserted. I oriented myself with notes and guidebooks and made my way to the ruins of Gymnasium, which is thought to have been the main building of the Academy.

A large grassy hollow indicated the site of a former archaeological dig. I peered through some trees into the open, green area of the ruins. There was a solitary man standing, very reflectively, smoking a huge joint with what appeared to be a bottle of water at his feet. In fact, the only people I saw around the various ruins were doing exactly the same thing as this man: quietly getting wasted on a Saturday lunchtime. I began to doubt whether the liquid was water or some kind of clear alcohol, as these men didn’t have the appearance of compulsive Brooklyn yoga hydrators. Ah, the sacred groves of academe!After a moment’s hesitation, I walked down into the ruins, exchanged a brief “ya sass,” or “hello,” with the man, who didn’t seem to care in the slightest that I was there.

It was very quiet, and all around was a calming, low chatter of birds. No riots here. I began to try to imagine the Academy. The school, founded by Plato around 387 B.C., was named the Hecademia and later Academia after the nearby sanctuary dedicated to the hero Hecademus. In Plato’s time, the area occupied about 1.5 hectares (about 3.5 acres) and was reached by leaving the city of Athens by the Diplon gate and walking along a road flanked by a public cemetery. The Gymnasium was a rectangular complex, approximately 200 feet long and 100 feet wide. Standing in the ruins, the scale of the building felt larger than I had anticipated. The site was excavated in 1929-39 and a plan of the main building was published.

An open courtyard or atrium was surrounded on three sides by a single-story, roofed colonnade or peristyle, which may have provided shelter for academicians engaged in reading and copying papyri or perhaps just passing the time. In the middle of the atrium stood a cistern, which supplied water, and farther north are the remains of a pedestal on which stood statues of the nine muses, the protectresses of the arts and letters. The Academy is literally a museum, a temple or a sacred space, an association that is continued in Aristotle’s Lyceum and on into the most famous library of the ancient world: the Museum of Alexandria (which contained its famous and famously destroyed library), founded by the Ptolemies after 297 B.C. Although the splendidly unreliable Diogenes Laertius says that Plato possessed no property other than what is mentioned in his will, he received a large sum of money from Dionysius I.

Plato had a significant fund of money at his disposal (the exorbitant figure of 80 talents is mentioned). Indeed, Plato is also said to have had a banker called Andromedes. In other words, Plato was rich and had wealthy patrons and very probably wealthy students. We are less attracted to the idea of the wealthy Aristocratic philosopher sequestered in his research facility and making occasional overseas trips to visit foreign tyrants than the image of the poor, shoeless Socrates causing trouble in the marketplace, refusing to be paid and getting killed by the city for his trouble. But our captivation with this image, once again, is overwhelmingly Plato’s invention. And behind his extraordinary inventiveness, Plato performs a characteristic disappearing trick. Truth to tell, we know very little about Plato. According to Plutarch, he was a lover of figs. Big deal! Plato is mentioned only a couple of times in the many dialogues that bear his name.

He was present at Socrates’ trial but — in a beautifully reflexive moment that he describes in the Phaedo — absent from the moment of Socrates’ death, because he was sick. In fact, we don’t even know that he was called Plato, which might have been a nickname. Laertius claims that he was actually called Aristocles, after his grandfather. “Plato” is close to the word “broad” in Greek, like the broad leaves of the platanos or plane tree under which Socrates and Phaedrus sit and talk about eros. Some think that Plato was so called because he was broad-shouldered because of his prowess in wrestling. I began to ponder and wandered from the Gymnasium, across the park and a street to the scant remains of another building in the Academy complex, which is approximately 130 feet square.

It has the typical dimensions of a “palaestra,” or “wrestling school.” In my mind’s eye, I saw an elderly Plato sitting watching his academicians wrestle, occasionally offering coaching advice and encouragement. Sometimes the less we know, the more space is open to the imagination. Plato worked at the Academy until his death in 347 BC, interrupted only by two more extended trips to Sicily. The academy survived for a few more centuries until it was destroyed by the Roman general Sulla in 87 BC during the sack of Athens. The buildings were probably burned along with many other sanctuaries, and the trees from the grove of academe were felled to provide timber for his siege machines.

So it goes, I thought. A faint but clearly perceptible smell of urine hung in the air of the palaestra. On the corner as I looked up, two men were rummaging carefully and quietly through a baby-blue refuse bin. What was striking was how exposed and all these remains were: no fences, no border walls and no security cameras. It was time to go. On the corner of Hodos Platonos, Plato Street, I noticed a bar unsurprisingly called Platon. I thought about having a quick glass of red wine in Plato’s honour, but lost courage, took two photos, and left.