The Closing of the Athenian Academy
In 529 AD Damascius, the last head of the Academy in Athens, closed down the philosophical school and, with several fellow scholars, went into exile in Persia. This is often portrayed as the final act in “the closing of the western mind” and the beginning of “the darkening age”; the symbolic closing of an institution founded by Plato himself almost a millennium earlier. It is regularly portrayed in popular writing and anti-theist polemic as the end of ancient science and…