Athens

Certain · the living city

Nearly everything in this library passes through Athens: the tragedies were staged at her Dionysia; Socrates never left her except on campaign; Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum stood in her suburbs; and centuries later Proclus still taught Platonism beneath the Acropolis. The city is the unnamed second character of every dialogue — its assembly, agora, gymnasia, and law-courts the scenery of Socratic conversation, its execution of Socrates philosophy’s founding wound.