Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/328

 304 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE scriptions had been already collected, devoted the money to buying the philosopher a house and garden to teach in, about twenty minutes' walk from Athens, near the gymnasium sacred to the hero Academus. This was in 387, at least two years before the Symposium. But every detail in this story varies, and our oldest evidence, the Seventh Letter, gives nothing beyond the fact of a dis- appointing visit. The founding of the school was a return to the habit of the older philosophers. The Academy was technically a ' T/nasos,' or religious organisation, for the worship of the Muses, with officers, a constitution, and landed pro- perty. The head was elected ; mathematics, astronomy, and various sciences were taught, as well as philosophy. The lecturers overflowed from the ' Scholarch's ' modest house and library into the garden and public gym- nasium; it was only later that they acquired adequate buildings. Women students attended as well as men. The institution preserved its unity, and regularly burned incense to Plato as 'hero-founder' upon his birthday, amid the most complete changes of tendency and doc- trine, till it was despoiled and abolished by Justinian in 529 A.D. as a stronghold of Paganism. The early fourth century was a great period for school-founding. Antis- thenes had begun his lectures in Kynosarges, the gym- nasium of the base-born, soon after Socrates's death. Isocrates had followed with his system of general culture about 390 B.C. The next generation saw the establish- ment of the Lyceum or Peripatos by Aristotle, the Stoa by Zeno, and the Garden by Epicurus. Whatever the date of the founding of the Academy, after the Sy7nposium there appears, on internal evidence, to be a marked interval in Plato's literary work. The