School
c. 387 BCE – 529 CE
The Academy was the school Plato founded around 387 BCE in a grove sacred to the hero Academus on the outskirts of Athens, from which it took its name. More a community of shared inquiry than a place of fixed doctrine, it gathered students for research and discussion in mathematics, dialectic, and philosophy, and it endured, with interruptions, until the emperor Justinian's edict against pagan teaching in 529 CE — close to nine centuries.
Under Plato's immediate successors — his nephew Speusippus, then Xenocrates, and after them Polemo and Crates — the early or 'Old' Academy developed his teaching in a mathematical and systematic direction, elaborating the doctrine of the Forms and the first principles, the One and the Indefinite Dyad.
Around 266 BCE, under Arcesilaus, the school took a startling turn into scepticism. Seizing on the questioning, profession-of-ignorance side of Socrates, the 'New Academy' of Arcesilaus and later Carneades suspended judgment on all things and made its name by arguing against the dogmatism of the Stoics. For nearly two centuries the school of Plato was the headquarters of doubt.
From the first century BCE, under Antiochus of Ascalon and then in the broader movement of Middle Platonism, the tradition returned to positive doctrine, and this revival flowered into the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and his heirs. The Athenian school of the fifth and sixth centuries — Syrianus, Proclus, Damascius — consciously saw itself as the Academy reborn, until the lights were finally put out.
PLATO SCROLL