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 rationalism in the west and the beginning of a one thousand year medieval dark age. But is this true? What was the Academy and why did it close? And what does this tell us about Christianity and intellectual history?

Dan Jones is a British writer of popular history for the general reader and the author of best-selling works such as The Plantagenets: The Kings Who Made England (HarperPress, 2012) and Magna Carta: The Making and Legacy of the Great Charter (Head of Zeus, 2014). Given his background in mainly later medieval English history, his more recent book – Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages (Head of Zeus, 2021) – could be said to have been rather ambitious, given its much wider scope. On the whole it was well-received by reviewers, though they tend to be non-historians. No historian can be a specialist in all periods or even all centuries within a given period and all writers can have their biases. So, unfortunately, in his discussion of the end of pagan antiquity and the rise of the Christianity of the Later Roman Empire in Powers and Thrones, Jones appears to decided to take a very particular line.

In 2017 Jones gave newspaper arts journalist Catherine Nixey a glowing pre-publication review for her notorious book The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, (Macmillan, 2017), which featured prominently on the book’s cover and in its publicity material. Jones announced enthusiastically that “Nixey’s debut challenges our whole understanding of Christianity’s earliest years and the medieval society that followed” and declared her “a formidable classicist and historian”. Actual experts in the relevant period and subject matter, on the other hand, were rather less than impressed with Nixey’s biased and polemical work, with Oxford Classicist Peter Thonemann pointing to her reliance on “quite a bit of nifty footwork” and Dame Averil Cameron calling it “overstated and unbalanced” and “a travesty” (see “Review – Catherine Nixey ‘The Darkening Age'” for my full critique of Nixey’s rather terrible book).

So perhaps Jones was depending on Nixey when he turned his attention to the subject of Christian responses to Classical philosophy and learning while writing Power and Thrones. He certainly argues along similar lines. Writing of the anti-pagan legislation of the emperor Justinian I (482-565), Jones puts emphasis on what he regards as a key event:

Among the rash of laws passed in the first decade of Justinian’s reign was a decree that pagans were not allowed to teach students. In itself this did not stand out from the other collections of anti-pagan legislation collected in Justinian’s law codes. But its effect on one important institution was soon made clear. John Malalas spelled out what it meant. In an entry covering the year 529, he wrote, “the emperor issued a decree and sent it to Athens ordering that no-one should teach philosophy nor interpret the laws.”

Another chronicler, Agathius, reported that the last headmaster of the Athens school was forced to leave not only the school and the city, but the empire itself. (In 531 he and several of his fellow teachers fled to Persia.) And this was more than mere relocation. In effect, Justinian’s diktat had spelled the end for the famous school in the ancient Greek capital – the city of Plato and Aristotle – where students had absorbed the insights of classical philosophy and natural science for generations.

Jones does not explicitly overstate the significance of this event, but he chooses his words carefully while working hard to make his reader understand that the closure of this Athenian school represented the end of something important:

The closure of the Athens school was important. It did not kill at a stroke all non-Christian learning in the eastern empire. Nor did it immediately throw up an intellectual wall between the classical age and the dawning era of Christian hegemony in Europe and the west. But it was both significant and symbolic.

He goes on to emphasise “scholarship in Persia and other eastern parts” and their role in “preserving and transmitting copies of the works of Aristotle and other non-Christian greats”, before stressing “a self-blinkering in the Christian world” and how “the transmission of ancient learning throughout the empire began to fail.” In case his readers had not yet got the message, he concludes:

One reason that the label ‘the Dark Ages’ has proven so hard to untie from the neck of the Middle Ages is that for hundreds of years – between the sixth century and the first beginnings of the Renaissance in the late thirteenth – the scientific and rational insights of the ancient world were forgotten or suppressed in the west. This was not simply an unfortunate symptom of creeping cultural dementia. It sprang from the deliberate policies of eastern emperors like Justinian, who made it their business to hound out of their world the self-appointed but unfortunately unchristian guardians of priceless knowledge.

As already noted, this is very much the message of Catherine Nixey’s book. Indeed, she ends her work with a highly dramatic rendering of the closure of the Athenian Academy. Writing of Justinian’s law, she says:

This was this (sic) law that forced Damascius and his followers to leave Athens. It was this law that caused the Academy to close. It was this law that led the English scholar Edward Gibbon to declare that the entirity of the barbarian invasions had been less damaging to Athenian philosophy than Christianity was. This law’s consequences were described more simply by later historians. It was from this moment, they said, that a Dark Age began to descend upon Europe.

(Nixey, pp 236-7)

Nixey rhapsodises and speculates about the last days of Damascius and his Academy in Athens before describing the final end:

Damascius was, once again, creeping out of a city like a criminal. More than that. Not like a criminal: as a criminal. And one who, as the hysterical language of the laws put it, was insane, wicked and iniquitous. [The Academy’s] beautiful house was prepared for desertion. In 532, the philosophers finally left Athens. The Academy closed. True – free -Athenian philosophy was over.

(Nixey, p. 243)

Other polemicists with similar axes to grind also depict things in these dramatic terms. Charles Freeman, a retired school teacher who writes a certain kind of popular history, refers to the story briefly in his The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (Pimlico, 2002):

Justinian was not content with empire-wide bans, which could easily be evaded by local elites, but aimed at specific centres of paganism. So it was now, after nine hundred years of teaching, Plato’s Academy was closed in Athens in 529 (the displaced philosophers sought refuge in Persia).

(Freeman, p. 275)

Like Nixey’s book, Freeman’s was not highly regarded by specialists, with everyone from Classicist Mary Beard to the eminent historian of science David Lindberg criticising it sharply for its distortions. But, unsurprisingly, certain anti-theistic activists have happily absorbed this story and present it as bald and plain historical fact. In December 2019 the New Atheist luminary and philosopher A.C. Grayling debated history writer Tom Holland on Justin Brierley’s Christian radio show/podcast Unbelievable on the subject of Christanity’s supposed suppression and destruction of ancient learning. Grayling insisted that Christians had waged a relentless campaign of destruction and deliberate elimination of ancient learning, though when challenged by Holland to provide evidence, responded with a blustering mixture of indignation, annoyance and frustration, because it was clear he actually had very little. But he did have the closing of the Academy in Athens. He insisted this was the culmination of a century of Christian destruction “right up to 529 AD when Justinian closed the School of Athens after 900 years of Plato’s Academy … was closed” and, he insisted, “the philosophers were driven out, there’d been a systematic attempt to try to efface that … the record and … and the remains of classical civilisation in order to impose the Christian view on it.”

So, since Edward Gibbon at least, the story of the closing of the Athenian Academy, founded by Plato and the centre of philosophy and wisdom for nine hundred years, has been presented as the end of a tradition of rationalism and learning and the beginning of one thousand years of Christian darkness. But is this true?

The Academies (plural) of Athens

The original Athenian Akademía was founded by Plato in 387 BC. It was established outside the walls of the city in an olive grove supposedly originally established by the mythic hero Academus, though it was initially a meeting of Plato’s followers at his nearby home and, later, at the Academy gymnasium. After Plato’s death in 348 BC the Academy was headed by a succession of “scholarchs” and developed a more formal structure, with distinctions between masters and pupils and an established curriculum.  

But this was not the Academy that closed in 529 AD. The actual Academy of Plato came to an end when Athens became caught up in the first war between the Roman Republic and Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus, with the Roman consul Lucius Cornelius Sulla laying siege to the city and laying waste to the Academy area in the process. The last scholarch of the Academy, Antiochus of Ascalon, returned to Athens after the war, but never re-established the Academy itself, which later writers such as Cicero describe as a ruin.

It was the latter day namesake of this original Academy that is our focus here, which makes the lamentations of Grayling and some others about it being the end “after 900 years of Plato’s Academy” total nonsense. This later Academy was established at some point at the end of the fourth century AD by an Athenian Neoplatonist named Plutarch, though probably not formalised as a school until he was succeeded by Syrianus. He was, in turn, succeeded by his pupil Proclus, who helped make the school a well-known and established institution that attracted pupils from all over the eastern Roman world. Neoplatonism was a later development of Platonic philosophy and Proclus and his successors in the Athenian Academy represented an extension of the strand of this tradition established by Iamblichus (c. 245 – c. 325). This was a highly structured system of entities and divinities that linked the material world of mortals to the ultimate, divine, monistic entity known as “the One”.

These early scholarchs of the new Academy maintained the school thanks to the political and financial support of local pagan aristocrats, despite the increasing Christianisation of the Empire and various periods of pressure and occasional low level persecution of overt paganism. These local networks of support were weakened in the later fifth century by some succession struggles within the school and the flamboyantly public pagan activity of Hegias, who was either a prominent member of the Academy or perhaps a scholarch of it. The sources agree that this weakness led to a diminishing of the school’s influence and attractiveness.

This appears to have been reversed by Damascius, who seems to have studied under Proclus and then studied in Alexandria before returning to Athens and taking up the leadership of the Academy around 515 AD. Damascius disavowed the provocative public paganism of Hegias and established a new doctrinal basis for the school based on Iamblicus, and drawing on the works of Plato and Aristotle and the mystery poem called The Chaldean Oracles. This latter text, now only known from fragments, was a highly mystical and metaphysical work and indicative of the kind of thinking and practice that was the focus of the Athenian Academy.

Contrary to much of the popular commentary on its closing, the Academy was not a centre of modern-style rationalism and scepticism, let alone a school of proto-science or anything much that a modern rationalist would recognise. Damascius’ semi-autobiographical Philosophical History, other writings members of the Academy and commentary on it show that it was, to modern thinking, a deeply mystical affair and elements of its activity would be, to us, very strange. His lost work, the Paradoxa, is known to us only by its epitome preserved in the Christian bishop Photius’ Bibliotheke, but he was unimpressed with its catalogue of divine marvels and manifestations, appearances of the dead and strange miracles (though he had no problem with similar tales if they were told by Christians). Similarly, the Academy masters practiced various forms of divination (see below), magic and theurgy, using incantations and nonsense formulae designed to commune with the higher powers. Proclus, it was said, could summon spirits and was good at rain-making spells.

Proclus ascribed the theurgical work later called On the Mysteries to Iamblicus and it makes the mysticism of the school very clear:

It is not thought that links the theurgists with the gods: else what should hinder theoretical philosophers from enjoying theurgic union with them? The case is not so. Theurgic union is attained only by the efficacy of the unspeakable acts performed in the appropriate manner, acts which are beyond all comprehension, and by the potency of the unutterable symbols which are comprehended only by the gods . . . Without intellectual effort on our part the tokens by their own virtue accomplish their proper work.

(Quoted in E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Uni of California Press, 1951, p. 287)

As Dodds summarises in pithy fashion, this was “a manifesto of irrationalism, as assertion that the road to salvation is found not in reason but in ritual”. If A.C. Grayling, Nixey, Freeman or Jones were under the impression the Athenian Academy was some grove of sober rational analysis, reading of Dodd’s appendix on “Theurgy” (pp. 283-311) would disabuse them sharply. By this stage much of the use of Plato and Aristotle was allegorical interpretation of their works in service of this mystical cosmology. And even if the very public and ostentatious pagan practices of Hegias were toned down by Damascius, the Academy remained steadfastly pagan and anti-Christian. This is why Edward Watts, in his excellent recent analysis of the context and meaning of the closing of the Academy (see “Justinian, Malalas and the End of Athenian Philosophical Teaching in A.D. 529”, The Journal of Roman Studies, 94, 2004, pp. 168-182) notes that the former pagan patrons and protectors of the Academy were now long gone and the school was in the sights of the Christian political leaders in the city who still resented this pagan institution. Damascius had reinvigorated it and this is the likely context for a sequence of events that led to its closure. But untangling those events is rather more difficult than the glib summaries in secondary works would have us understand.

So, What Happened?

The popular works noted above make what happened seem rather straightforward: the wicked Christian emperor Justinian passed an edict declaring all teaching of philosophy to be forbidden and/or that the Academy in Athens was to close. However, no edict fitting this description survives to us in the Code of Justinian, the emperor’s compilation of late Roman law; which is extensive but not wholly comprehensive. So, rather than being based on some clear, surviving declaration, as the account by Jones tells it, the story of the closing of the Academy is, like so much ancient history, something pieced together from fragments of evidence. And the problem here is: they really do not fit together very neatly at all.

The most substantial of these fragments is found in the Chronicle of John Malalas (c. 491 – 578) which Watts renders as follows:

During the consulship of Decius, the emperor issued a decree and sent it to Athens ordering that no one should teach philosophy nor interpret astronomy nor in any city should there be lots cast using dice; for some who cast dice had been discovered in Byzantium indulging themselves in dreadful blasphemies. Their hands were cut off and they were paraded around on camels.

(Chronicle, XVIII.47)

This is the passage Jones quotes from in his account mentioned above, though a quick comparison shows that Jones has trimmed the passage considerably to get his quote (“the emperor issued a decree and sent it to Athens ordering that no-one should teach philosophy nor interpret the laws”). All of the rather odd context about lot casting with dice, dice-casters uttering blasphemies and then getting mutilated and paraded on camels have been removed by Jones, despite all of these things being, as Watts highlights (p. 172), grammatically and stylistically closely connected by Malalas to the decree about Athenians and teaching philosophy. So what is going on here? It will also be noted that Watts’ translation says the decree said the Athenians could not “teach philosophy nor interpret astronomy”, while Jones’ version says “teach philosophy nor interpret the laws”.

This last difference is the key to understanding the whole reference. Jones and most other writers are, directly or indirectly, working from the 1831 edition of Malalas by Ludwig Dindorf (loannis Malalae Chronographia. Accedunt Chilmeadi Hodiique Annotationes et Ric. Bentleii Epistola ad lo. Milliu) which gives the word as “laws”. But Watts notes this edition was based on a single seventeenth century transcription of one manuscript and when all other manuscripts are examined it is shown that the word should be “astronomy”. This makes more sense given that earlier scholars, using Dindorf’s edition had puzzled over the “laws” reference, given Athens had no law schools in this period.

So what appears to connect all the seemingly disparate elements in this passage is divination of the future. Casting dice to gain divine answers to questions about what is going to come to pass was a well-known pagan practice, as detailed in late Roman texts like the Sortes Sanctorum. So it makes sense that, in a crack down on pagan divinatory practices, Justinian would be moved to ban this ritual after a prominent case of it in Constantinople led to its practitioners, “indulging themselves in dreadful blasphemies”, being punished with public mutilation.

This is why the edict Malalas refers to says that no-one in any city could cast lots using dice. There were already laws against common gambling and they merely incurred fines, not mutilation. So this was clearly something considered much more dangerous and forbidden. And this is why, Watts argues, the Malalas reference notes the edict targeting Athens, teaching philosophy and interpreting astronomy. As noted above, the Neoplatonic Athenian Academy was renowned for its various mystical practices, including forms of divination. These almost certainly included astrology and, as the Malalas passage indicates, assessing the gods’ will via divinatory dice casting.

Watts’ analysis shows that it is very unlikely that whatever edict Malalas is referring to here targeted the Athenian Academy specifically. The cumbersome process by which these edicts were promulgated, interpreted and implemented meant it is much more likely that a general edict against divinatory dice casting, triggered by the cause célèbre in the capital that led to the mutilation and camel parade of the culprits, found its way to the provincial governor of Achaea and then on to the local officials in Athens. At each stage in this process, the edict was given a more local spin and application, with additions made for how it was to be applied. So it is most likely that the application to the Academy was not something mandated by the edict itself, but by the governor of Achaea or the local Christian city officials. As Watts notes, this should be seen as part of a culmination of “nearly a century of sporadic attempts by Athenian and Achaean Christians to attack the pagan intellectuals in their midst”.

But this does not seem to have been the end of the Academy. Watts generally accepts the detailed analysis of a range of evidence by earlier scholars, particularly Alan Cameron (see “The Last Days of the Academy of Athens”, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society , 1969, New Series, No. 15, 195, 1969, pp. 7-29) that shows this edict most likely dated to 529 AD, but the actual closure of the Academy and the self-imposed exile of its seven philosophers did not happen till 531 AD. So while this prohibition would have curtailed the Academy, it does not seem to have killed it off.

Watts, like both Cameron and H.J. Blumenthal (see his “529 and Its Sequel: What Happened to the Academy?”, Byzantion, Vol. 48, No. 2, 1978, pp. 369-385), refers to two other laws that seem relevant here. He points out that we do not have the edict Malalas seems to be refer to, though he does not doubt it existed. But we do have two laws in the Justinian Code that shed some light on what happened next.

The first is Codex Justinianus 1.11.10 which, as Watts summarises it “exhorts pagans to be baptized, prohibits them from teaching and receiving a municipal salary, mandates the confiscation of property and exile of recalcitrant pagans, ordains that children of pagans shall be forcibly instructed in Christian teaching, [and] specifies penalties for those who accept baptism disingenuously” (Watts, p. 178). This is a very broad anti-pagan edict and it does not specifically target the teaching of philosophy per se, let alone target Athens or its Academy. Clearly it could be used to do so, but the fact that the Neoplatonic school in Alexandria continued to be led by the pagan Olympiodrus for several decades after this edict shows, as Watts has already detailed, that much depended on how this kind of law was interpreted, embroidered, applied and enforced locally. Or how it was not.

The same can be said for the second relevant law, which was likely passed at the same time or slightly earlier: Codex Justinianus 1.11.9. This one prevented pagans or their institutions from receiving funding bequests, substantially cutting off the source of sustaining income from patrons. Taken together, these two laws cut off public funding to pagan schools like the Academy and also greatly restricted private funding as well. The intention would have been very clear to the scholars of the Academy who, unlike Olympiodrus in Alexandria, were operating in a particularly hostile political environment. As Watts sums it up:

The prohibition of teaching was an institutional death blow, but one that would not be felt fully for many years. Indeed, it seems that the philosophers responded to this initial set of restrictions by keeping a low profile and waiting for circumstances to change. The severe personal and property
restrictions issued in A.D. 531 were a different matter. …. [T]hese laws would not have permitted the philosophers to survive simply by keeping a low profile. Perhaps sensing the inevitability of this fate, they left Athens for Persia.

(Watts, p. 182)

So while the story is far from simple and it is one that has to be pieced together from a number of pieces of evidence, none of which fit together neatly, the upshot is that while there was no direct edict closing the Academy, its overtly pagan and religious nature meant a ratcheting up of anti-pagan legislation and the hostility of its local political enemies, until it became increasingly unviable. Olympiodrus’ school did not have the same problems as the Academy and so continued operation, but the leading scholars from Athens took themselves into philosophical exile in Persia in 531.

Significance?

So the story is not as simple or as clear as the popular accounts would have us believe. Unsurprisingly, neither is its historical significance. As already detailed, the Academy that closed was not the one founded by Plato 900 years earlier. It is also clear that this school was far from the centre of rationalism, scepticism and science imagined by some who try to use this story as simplistic moral fable. The idea that this closure saw the end of the study of all ancient philosophy or, even more fancifully, all ancient learning is also a complete fantasy.

Despite Nixey’s wildly dramatic narrative and even Jones’ more judicious but no less misleading version, this event was not some death knell to Classical philosophy. Both mention Watts in their footnotes or endnotes and Jones also cites Cameron and Blumenthal. It has to be wondered how closely they read these scholars. Watts and Cameron in particular have little time for those who try to dress this up as the calamitous beginning of “a darkening age” and “the closing of the western mind” as per Nixey and Freeman. Christianity had come to terms with and began to absorb most of the useful material of the Classical intellectual inheritance centuries before these events and the philosophical and intellectual heritage of the pagan world continued to be taught in the schools of Alexandria, Antioch, Berytus, Nisibis and Constantinople long before and long after the last pagan scholars died. For details on this process of assimilation, accomodation and synthesis see “The Great Myths 8 – The Loss of Ancient Learning”. Almost a century after the closing of the Athenian Academy, the emperor Heraclius invited the Neoplatonist Stephanus of Alexandria, an heir of Olympiodrus’ school in that city, to Constantinople to hold the chair of philosophy at the capital’s Imperial Academy, one of 28 such positions. Jones’ dark muttering about a “creeping cultural dementia” are total nonsense, as is his implication that this learning only survived thanks to Nestorian and Muslim scholars. That Jones should be completely unaware of the the ongoing and uninterrupted role of Byzantine scholars in this is remarkable. That a writer who specialises in the medieval period should, in 2021, prop up the myth of “the Dark Ages” is both disturbing and depressing.

The popular accounts of the Athenian Academy like to emphasise its scholars “fleeing” to Persia. They usually place less emphasis on their return a few short years later. The source of all this is Agathias and his account is likely not wholly reliable. But it is clear that they continued to work on their return to the Roman Empire. And their work was, in key cases, not suppressed by Christian scholars but widely copied and utilised. We may not have much of the theurgic formulae and nonsensical incantations that made up most of the Academy’s activities, but Damascius’ commentaries on Plato were copied an studied and his fellow there-and-back-again exile to Persia, Simplicius of Cilicia, left us extensive commentaries on Aristotle. Both were used by medieval scholars as far away as Paris and Oxford in later centuries, thanks to their careful preservation and study by Byzantine scholars for centuries before that. So much for Jones’ solemn sermon about how “the scientific and rational insights of the ancient world were forgotten or suppressed in the west”. As ever, popular writing on this subject needs to be handled with extreme care. And its use by polemicists like Freeman, Nixey and Grayling can be readily ignored completely.

Further Reading

H.J. Blumenthal,“529 and Its Sequel: What Happened to the Academy?”, Byzantion, Vol. 48, No. 2, 1978, pp. 369-385.

Alan Cameron, “The Last Days of the Academy of Athens”, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society , 1969, New Series, No. 15, 195, 1969, pp. 7-29.

E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, (Uni of California Press, 1951)

James Hannam, “Emperor Justinian’s Closure of the School of Athens”, Bede’s Library, 2008, revised 2013

Edward Watts, “Justinian, Malalas and the End of Athenian Philosophical Teaching in A.D. 529”, The Journal of Roman Studies, 94, 2004, pp. 168-182.