The Year the Last Pagans of Athens Closed Their School and Walked East

The school called the Academy — the philosophical institution founded by Plato in 387 BC in a grove of olive trees outside the Athenian city wall — operated, with various interruptions and refoundings, for approximately 916 years. It closed in 529 AD.

The closure was not an accident. The Emperor Justinian I of the Eastern Roman Empire had issued a series of religious-policy edicts in 528 and 529 that progressively restricted the legal position of non-Christian institutions across the empire. The most consequential — the imperial constitution recorded in Codex Justinianus I.11.10 — prohibited pagans from teaching philosophy or law and from receiving public salary. The Academy at Athens, which had operated for centuries with imperial subsidy and a substantial pagan teaching staff, could not continue under the new framework. Its current head, the Syrian philosopher Damascius, closed the institution and dispersed the remaining teachers.

The seven who left

Damascius and six of his senior colleagues did not go quietly into private retirement. They concluded that the Eastern Roman Empire under a Christian emperor had no further place for them and decided to seek asylum at the court of the Sasanian Persian king Khosrow I, whose reputation for tolerance and intellectual patronage had reached the Mediterranean philosophical community.

The seven left Athens in 531 or 532 and traveled east through Anatolia and Syria to the Sasanian capital at Ctesiphon, near modern Baghdad. The contemporary historian Agathias — who knew several of them personally — preserves the names: Damascius himself, Simplicius of Cilicia (whose surviving commentaries on Aristotle would be one of the major channels through which Aristotelian physics reached medieval Europe), Priscianus Lydus, Eulamius the Phrygian, Hermeias the Phoenician, Diogenes the Phoenician, and Isidore of Gaza.

Khosrow received them with substantial ceremony, hosted them for several months at his palace, and conducted philosophical discussions with them through court interpreters. The Persian court intellectual culture was substantially different from the Athenian tradition the seven had brought with them — more closely integrated with the official Zoroastrian religious establishment, more directly concerned with political-administrative questions — and the visitors’ position progressively soured.

By the spring of 532 the seven had concluded that the Persian court was no more congenial than the Christian Eastern Empire had been. They asked Khosrow’s permission to leave. He granted it.

The treaty clause

The seven philosophers’ return to the Roman Empire was negotiated under specific protection. Khosrow personally inserted a clause into the Treaty of Eternal Peace of August 532 — the formal Sasanian-Roman peace agreement that ended a recent border war — stipulating that the seven philosophers and any other pagan refugees could return to Roman territory under guarantee of legal protection from the Christian-religious restrictions of Justinian’s 529 edict.

Justinian accepted the clause. The seven returned to the Roman Empire (most settled in Roman-controlled Mesopotamian frontier cities — Carrhae, Edessa, Harran — where pagan communities had survived the late-fourth-century Christianisation more successfully than in metropolitan centers). Damascius probably returned to his native Syria and continued teaching privately in the city of Emesa (modern Homs). The latest documented Damascius reference is approximately 538. The date and place of his death are unknown.

What was lost

The closure of the Academy at Athens did not end Greek philosophical education in the Eastern Roman Empire. Christian and quasi-Christian philosophical schools at Constantinople, Alexandria, Gaza, and several smaller centers continued through the next century. The Aristotelian commentary tradition — particularly the work of Simplicius — survived intact and would be the major channel through which Aristotelian physics, ethics, and metaphysics reached the medieval Islamic world (where Aristotle was preserved at substantial scale by the 8th-9th century Abbasid translation movement) and from there to medieval Latin Europe.

What did die was the institutional continuity of pagan-Hellenic philosophical training. The Athenian Academy’s 916 years had spanned the entire arc from Plato’s first lectures to the late Roman religious crisis. After 529 there was no longer an institution anywhere in the Roman Empire whose staff and curriculum descended in unbroken succession from the classical Athenian tradition. The substantial portion of the Greek philosophical inheritance that survived to the medieval and modern periods did so through Christian, Islamic, and Byzantine intermediaries — not through the direct teacher-to-student transmission the closed Academy had represented.

The site

The Academy site outside the modern Athenian city center — Akadimia Platonos — was excavated by Greek archaeologists in the 1930s and 1960s. The remains of the gymnasium complex, the boundary walls, and several philosophical inscriptions are now an open public park. The site is approximately 3 km northwest of the Athenian Acropolis. The olive grove that gave the institution its name was reportedly destroyed by the Roman general Sulla during his 86 BC siege of Athens; the trees on the modern site are 20th-century replantings.

The institution’s substantive intellectual descendants are everywhere in subsequent European philosophy. The continuous biographical-institutional tradition that produced Hypatia, Synesius, Theon, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Damascius — the late Platonic schools of the third-to-sixth centuries — ended in 529 with Justinian’s edict and 532 with the disillusioned philosophers’ return from Persia.