The Academy

Certain · excavated, NW Athens

A gymnasium in a sacred grove of olives outside the Dipylon gate, named for the hero Academus, where Plato taught from the 380s BCE until his death. Legend set over its door “let no one unversed in geometry enter.” The school persisted, through skeptical and dogmatic turns, until Justinian’s closure of the pagan schools in 529 CE — the longest-lived institution of learning in the ancient world, and the reason the word survives in every language of Europe.