Academy
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Raphael's portrait of Plato, a detail of The School of Athens fresco |
An
academy is an institution for the study of (usually) higher learning.
The name
Academy rose from
Plato's
Athenian school of
philosophy, founded in approximately
385 BC.
The term is also used for various other institutions in modern times (see below).
Before the
Akademeia was a school, and even before
Cimon enclosed its precincts with a wall (
Plutarch Life of Cimon xiii:7), it contained a sacred grove of olive trees outside the city walls of ancient
Athens (
Thucydides ii:34). The archaic name for the site was
Hekademeia, which by classical times evolved into
Akademeia and was explained, at least as early as the beginning of the
6th century BC, by linking it to an
eponymous Athenian
hero, a legendary "
Akademos".
The site of the Academy was sacred to Athena and other immortals; it had sheltered religious cult since the Bronze Age, a cult that was perhaps associated with the
hero-gods the
Dioscuri (Castor and Polydeukes), for the hero Akademos associated with the site was credited with revealing to the Divine Twins where
Theseus had hidden
Helen. Out of respect for its association with the Dioskouri, the Spartans would not ravage these original "groves of Academe" when they invaded Attica (Plutarch,
Life of Theseus xxxii), a piety not shared by the Roman
Sulla, who axed the sacred olive trees in
86 BC to build siege engines.
Among the religious observations that took place at the Akademeia was a torchlit night race from altars within the city to the Promemeikos altar in the Akademeia. Funeral games also took place in the area as well as a Dionysiac procession from Athens to the Hekademeia and then back to the polis (Paus. i 29.2, 30.2; Plut. Vit. Sol. i 7). The road to Akademeia was lined with the gravestones of Athenians.
The Platonic Academy is usually contrasted with
Aristotle's own creation, the
Peripatetics.
Famous philosophers entrusted with running the Academy include
Arcesilaus,
Speusippus,
Xenocrates and
Proclus.
After a lapse during the early Roman occupation, the Academy was refounded (Cameron 1965) as a new institution of some outstanding Platonists of late antiquity who called themselves "successors" (
diadochoi, but of Plato) and presented themselves as an uninterrupted tradition reaching back to Plato. However, there cannot have actually been any geographical, institutional, economic or personal continuity with the original Academy in the new organizational entity (Bechtle).
The last "Greek" philosophers of the revived Academy in the 6th century were drawn from various parts of the
Hellenistic cultural world and suggest the broad
syncretism of the common culture (see
koine): Five of the seven Academy philosophers mentioned by Agathias were
Syriac in their cultural origin: Hermias and Diogenes (both from Phoenicia), Isidorus of Gaza, Damascius of Syria, Iamblichus of Coele-Syria and perhaps even Simplicius of Cilicia himself (Thiele).
The
emperor Justinian closed the school in AD
529, a date that is often cited for the end of
Antiquity. According to the sole witness, the historian
Agathias, its remaining members looked for protection under the rule of
Sassanid king
Khosrau I in his capital at
Ctesiphon, carrying with them precious scrolls of literature and philosophy, and to a lesser degree of science. After a peace treaty between the Persian and the Byzantine empire in 532 guaranteed their personal security (an early document in the history of
freedom of religion), some members found sanctuary in the
pagan stronghold of
Harran, near
Edessa. One of the last leading figures of this group was Simplicius, a pupil of Damascius, the last head of the Athenian school. The students of the Academy-in-exile, an authentic and important Neoplatonic school surviving at least until the 10th century, contributed to the
Islamic preservation of Greek science and medicine, when Islamic forces took the area in the 7th century (Thiele). One of the earliest academies established in the east was the
7th century Academy of Gundishapur in
Sassanid Persia.
Raphael painted a famous
fresco depicting "The School of Athens" in the
16th century.
The site of the Academy was rediscovered in the
20th century; considerable excavation has been accomplished. The Church of St. Triton on Kolokynthou Street, Athens, occupies the southern corner of the Academy, confirmed in 1966 by the discovery of a boundary stone dated to
500 BC.
Due to the tradition of intellectual brilliance associated with this institution, many groups have chosen to use the word "Academy" in their name.
During the
Florentine Renaissance,
Cosimo de' Medici took a personal interest in the new Platonic Academy that he determined to re-establish in 1439, centered on the marvellous promise shown by
Marsilio Ficino, scarcely more than a lad. Cosimo had been inspired by the arrival at the otherwise ineffective
Council of Florence of
Gemistos Plethon, who seemed like a Plato reborn to the Florentine intellectuals. In 1462 Cosimo gave Ficino a villa at
Careggi for the Academy's use, situated where Cosimo could descry it from his own villa. The Renaissance drew potent intellectual and spiritual strength from the academy at Careggi. During the course of the following century many Italian cities established an Academy, of which the oldest survivor is the
Accademia dei Lincei of Rome, which became a national academy for a reunited Italy.Other national academies include the
Académie Francaise; the
Royal Academy of the
United Kingdom; the
International Academy of Science; the
United States Military Academy at
West Point,
New York; the
United States Naval Academy;
United States Air Force Academy; and the
Australian Defence Force Academy. In emulation of the military academies, police in the United States are trained in
police academies. The
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presents the annual
Academy awards.
A fundamental feature of academic discipline in those academies that were training-schools for artists was regular practice in making accurate drawings from antiquities, or from casts of antiquities, on the one hand, and on the other, in deriving inspiration from the other fount, the human form. Students assembled in sessions drawing the draped and undraped human form, and such drawings, which survive in the tens of thousands from the 17th through the 19th century, are termed
académies.
In the early 19th century "academy" took the connotations that "
gymnasium" was acquiring in German-speaking lands, of school that was less advanced than a college (for which it might prepare students) but considerably more than elementary. An early example are the two academies founded at
Andover and
Phillips Exeter Academy. Amherst Academy expanded with time to form
Amherst College.
Mozart organized public subscription performances of his music in Vienna in the 1780s and 1790s, he called the
concerts "academies." This usage in musical terms survives in the concert orchestra
Academy of St Martin in the Fields and in the
Brixton Academy, a concert hall in Brixton, South London.
Academies proliferated in the 20th century until even a three-week series of lectures and discussions would be termed an "academy." In addition, the generic term "the academy" is sometimes used to refer to all of
academia, which is sometimes considered a global successor to the Academy of Athens.
See also:
national academy,
list of honorary societies,
academician,
military academyHonorary Academy
See the
Académie Française and its many emulators among national honorary academies of strictly limited membership..
Research Academy
In
Imperial Russia and
Soviet Union the term "academy", or
Academy of Scienceswas reserved to denote a state research establishment, see
Russian Academy of Sciences. The latter one still exists in the
Russian Federation, although other types of academies (study and honorary) appeared as well.
United Kingdom school type
As a British school type, privately funded Academies first became popular in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. At this time the offer of a place at an English public school and university generally required conformity to the
Church of England; the Academies or
Dissenting Academies provided an alternative for those with different religious views, called
nonconformists.
University College London (UCL) was founded in the early nineteenth century as the first publicly funded English university to admit anyone regardless of religious adherence; and the Test and Corporation Acts that had imposed a wide range of restrictions on citizens who were not in conformity to the Church of England, were also abolished at about that date.
Recently
Academies have been reintroduced. Today they are a type of secondary school - they no longer teach up to university degree level - and unlike their predecessors are only partly privately sponsored and independent, being partly paid for and controlled by the state. They have been introduced in the early years of the 21st century and though mainly state funded have a significant measure of administrative autonomy. Some of the early ones were briefly known as "City Academies".
*
Christopher Planeaux' history of the site of the Academy*
Site of the Academy rediscovered (needs better site linked)
*
Site of the Academy*
The Demosion Sema along the road to the Academy*
Film Academy*
The Academy at Charlemont*
Academy of Athens official website (mostly in Greek)
*
Ardennes Outdoor Academy, reminiscent of Plato's Academy, at the
Thierry Graduate School of Leadership*
The Jewish Academy*Alan Cameron, "The last days of the Academy at Athens," in
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society vol 195 (n.s. 15), 1969, pp 7-29.
*
Gerald Bechtle, Bryn Mawr Classical Review of Rainer Thiel, Simplikios und das Ende der neuplatonischen Schule in Athen. Stuttgart, 1999 (in English).
*John Glucker,
Antiochus and the Late Academy, Göttingen 1978.
**Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, 1981.
Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press)
