Academy (Athens)

Reading notes

• Ad Atticum 1.4 §3 an ornament fit for my Academy

  Cicero named the gymnasium-and-garden at his Tusculan villa the 'Academy' after Plato's school at Athens, and stocked it with appropriate Greek statuary. The Hermathena was a fitting ornament for such a space.

• Ad Atticum 1.9 §2 worthy of the Academy

  Cicero had named a colonnaded walk at his Tusculan villa "the Academy," after Plato's school outside Athens. The art he asks Atticus to send is to suit this philosophically themed space.

• Ad Atticum 1.11 §3 our Academy

  Cicero's name for a colonnaded walk at his Tusculan villa, modelled on Plato's Academy at Athens; he is impatient for the Greek art and books Atticus has gathered to furnish it.

• Ad Atticum 6.6 §2 the Academy

  The grove and gymnasium northwest of Athens where Plato taught; Atticus had urged Cicero to fund a monumental gateway (propylon) for it, just as Appius had planned an Eleusinion (a temple of the Eleusinian goddesses) at Eleusis.

• Ad Atticum 13.25 §3 O the flighty Academy

  A play on the Academy, Plato's philosophical school: Cicero mocks his own dithering over the dedication as the 'flighty Academy,' the sceptical New Academy that suspends judgment and shifts about. 'Now here, now there' caps the joke.

• Ad Familiares 4.12 §3 in the most famous gymnasium in the world, the place of the Academy

  The Academy was the grove and gymnasium northwest of Athens where Plato had taught; it lay outside the city and gave its name to the Academic philosophical school. Burying and commemorating Marcellus there was a signal honour, associating him with the intellectual glory of Athens that he, a cultivated exile, had shared.

• Ad Familiares 9.8 §1 the brashness of that younger Academy

  Cicero puns on the 'younger' (or New) Academy, the sceptical phase of Plato's school associated with Arcesilaus and Carneades and continued by Philo of Larissa, whose hallmark was aggressive dialectical questioning. The joke is that his four 'reminder' books, steeped in that argumentative spirit, will badger Varro for his promised work.

• Ad Familiares 9.22 §1 even if our Academy has a great quarrel with him

  Cicero identifies himself with the Academy, the sceptical school descended from Plato, which disputed Stoic certainty in epistemology. The aside concedes the Stoics a point on language while reaffirming his own philosophical allegiance.

• On His Consulship §2 and in the shaded Academy and the gleaming Lyceum

  The Academy (Plato's school) and the Lyceum (Aristotle's), the two great philosophical groves of Athens, stand for the contemplative learning that, in Cicero's argument, equips men to govern wisely.

• The Subdivisions of Oratory §139 that have flowered from that Academy of ours

  Cicero traces his whole method---division, definition, the topics, dialectical argument---to the Academy, the philosophical school of Plato in whose skeptical New Academy tradition Cicero placed himself. He grounds rhetoric in philosophical dialectic rather than treating it as a self-contained craft.