Philosophers of Athens
In 1996, workers in Athens were clearing a weedy parking lot to pour the foundations of a new museum. Their shovels struck stone — two football fields of buried ruins packed under the gravel. The museum was canceled on the spot. The crew had hit the ground where a single teacher once tried to write down the entire world. I visited that site, imagining being a student where a teacher paced as he lectured.
Key Terms
- Socrates
- In 399 BC, 501 Athenian citizens voted this seventy-year-old teacher to death for asking too many questions.
- Plato
- Socrates’ grieving pupil, who planted a school in a sacred grove and taught that real truth lived beyond the physical world.
- Aristotle
- The sharp northern boy who studied twenty years under Plato, then doubted his master’s invisible Forms.
- The Academy
- The school Plato planted about a mile northwest of Athens, in a grove of olive and tall plane trees.
- Forms
- Plato’s name for the perfect, unchanging ideas he believed existed beyond the messy physical world.
- The Lyceum
- The school Aristotle founded in 335 BC on ground sacred to the wolf-god Apollo Lyceus.
- Peripatetic
- The nickname earned by Aristotle’s followers, the "walkers," from his habit of teaching while pacing.
- Palaestra
- The wrestling arena inside the Lyceum, about half a football field of sand for grappling.
- Teleology
- Aristotle’s idea that everything in nature has a built-in purpose, called its telos.
- Eudaimonia
- Not quick fun, but a whole life lived well — the deep flourishing of a person doing what people are made to do.
- Phronesis
- The practical wisdom to work out the right thing to do in a real, specific situation.
- Golden Mean
- Aristotle’s name for the right action that sits between two faults — too little and too much.
- Stagira
- Aristotle’s hometown, burned flat by Philip’s army and later rebuilt as the price of tutoring a prince.
- Mieza
- The wooded royal retreat, carved into stone terraces, where Aristotle tutored the young Alexander.
- Philip II
- The King of Macedon who once burned Aristotle’s hometown, then hired him to tutor his son.
- Nicomachean Ethics
- The rough lecture notes — dense, clipped, never meant for publication — that still guide readers today.
- Rigillis Street
- The modern Athens street where a canceled museum project uncovered the ruins of the Lyceum in 1996.
- Olive Leaf
- The fallen object young Aristotle bent down to study, instead of staring at Plato’s diagram drawn in the sand.
- Bull’s-eye
- What Aristotle compared the good life to hitting — easy to miss, difficult to strike dead center.
- Apollo Lyceus
- The wolf-god whose sacred ground, just outside Athens’ eastern walls, gave the Lyceum its name.