The Lyceum in Twilight: Athens’ “Second School” and its Struggle to Re-Invent Itself and Survive in the Last Years of the Roman Republic

Abstract

After the Athenian crisis of the early 80’s, which saw the ancient city held hostage between an Anatolian military expedition (whose leader at least claimed some intellectual credentials from Athenian schools including the Lyceum) and a renegade Roman with only the most cynical interest in heritage or culture, the schools of Athens – in particular the “peripatetic” school which dated back to Aristotle – faced challenges of identity, recruiting students, and in holding its own, perhaps too “peripatetic,” faculty. In early post-classical and Hellenistic times the second and third generation Lyceum had been successful, even when it had lost intellectual “stars” like Theophrastus, and (worse) its original library, to rivals like Pergamum – but as the other schools attracted career-minded students from the west, Aristotle’s foundation of a broad-minded liberal arts approach to learning in the Lyceum grove was in danger. The Lyceum seems actually to have failed for a time, or at least to have limped through the middle first century with faculty borrowed from the Akademe, in spite of a reputation for teaching practical politics which neither the Epicureans nor the Stoics could substitute for very well. Experts of the Aristotelian sort found either too-attractive employment in an Italy closer to the centers of power, or too strong a lure toward traveling consulting positions with neophyte Romans trying to learn the eastern Mediterranean “on their jobs.” At its Athenian home, it moved a significant part of its teaching into the city and melded it into the ephebeia or “civic school” for young Athenian citizens (but in the new Athens, those included a more and more multi-cultural mix of foreign youth as the Republic’s business class and students arrived in town). And then, it also attracted those in retirement from the turmoil of the disintegrating Republic, who valued the Lyceum more as a refuge than as a provider of power-skills for “players,” the sort of thing the Akademe or the Epicurean ‘Garden’ did. The solution itself endangered Aristotle’s idea for the school. As the Republic died, the “Peripatetic” school’s greatest teachers were more often on the road with its “players” than home. What it kept at its home, though, it re-invested in the educational life of its own city. The Lyceum, like the Stoa, found its new Athenian home “downtown” in more ways than one, and faced challenges quite familiar both in modern “peripatetic” and in “career-direct” higher education.