In the Shadow of Athena Polias. The Divinities of the Academy, the Training of Politai and Death in Service to Athens

As it is well known, Plato taught for many years in the pre-existing gymnasium of the Academy and after the return from the second trip to Sicily he bought a garden nearby, where founded his school. I argue that the choice of the site was not coincidental, but instead reflects the roots of Plato and his followers within a specific cultural and ideological background of which the Academy has served for a long time as the very heart. From this point of view, the essay intends to draw attention to the pre-Platonic history of the Academy. Since the archaic age this gymnasium, the older of Athens, had been a milestone in the ideology of the polis. In fact, the Academy was the main place of education for citizens belonging to the élite: here the young people not only learned the cardinal principles of culture, physical exercise and military service, but were trained to social life, laying the foundations for their future participation in the managing of the city. For this reason, a pantheon of divinities was selected ad hoc to oversee the different fields of politai training, probably as a result of a specific initiative of the tyrants, Peisistratus and his sons Hippias and Hipparchus. Eros, Herakles, Hermes, the Muses, Prometheus and Hephaestus are well attested at the Academy by literary and archaeological sources, for the most part since the VIth century B.C. They all operated in the shadow of an Athena Polias specially brought from the Acropolis to keep the sacred olive trees, the moriai from which the oil given as a prize to the winners of Panathenaic games was drawn. On this basis, it is not difficult to understand why, in a time not easy to determine, certainly between the end of the VIth and the first decades of the Vth century B.C., the Demosion Sema, the cemetery reserved to the fallen soldiers, was placed along the road linking the Academy with the Acropolis. Evidently, it was a very appropriate place for the monuments that commemorated the Athenians who died on the battlefield in service to the polis: the landscape itself becomes a sort of pedagogical itinerary for young people who routinely walked that way. The history of the Academy can thus contribute to understand the reasons that guided Plato when he chose the north-western suburbs of Athens to exercise his magisterium: probably he intended to place his school in ideal continuity with the strongly connoted past of that area.