Plato’s Academy and the “Roman Market”: A Case Study in “Humanities Education” During Times of Crisis or Recession

Abstract

The innovative (and sometimes painful) story of Athens’ self-transformation from a self-defined and self-confident independent city-state to a culture-market and service economy that discovered it could thrive best by selling its heritage to others is one I have written on in the past from a number of angles. To the elite of Athens, both community leaders and leaders in the city’s culture, the most poignant stories may have been those of the city’s schools, in particular the school that defined (for traditionalists who were not themselves philosophers) what “Athenian philosophy” meant: the Academy, the school of Plato. I should like in this short study to follow the leaders, the ‘scholarchs’ of that school – all of them ‘working philosophers’ as well as what we would call administrators – who successfully adapted it to survive through, and draw on the clientele of, the last three generations or so of the Roman Republic. I should like to see if these behaviors and characters – and they, while they do not always fit what we expect from a classical philosopher, make more sense if understood by the school’s ‘driving clientele,’ and finally what sort of story this adds up to.