Closing of the Academy

In 529 CE the emperor Justinian issued measures forbidding pagans to teach, which fell upon the Neoplatonic school at Athens — the heir to Plato’s Academy. Its last head, Damascius, and colleagues including Simplicius departed, for a time seeking refuge at the Persian court of Khosrow I.

The event is traditionally taken as the symbolic end of ancient pagan philosophy — though Platonism continued at Alexandria for decades, and passed through Dionysius, Boethius, and the later Arabic and Byzantine traditions into the medieval world.