Figure 63 Detail of bronze krater discovered in 1962 at Derveni, near Thessaloniki, showing a satyr
under a vine tendril; height of vase 0.91 m, mid-fourth century BC. Archaeological Museum of
Thessaloniki.

Source: Konstantinos Kontos / Photostock.

Attic Oratory in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries

Plato’s influence was exercised not only through his written works. In about 385 BC, Plato established in
Athens an institute for higher learning in a public gymnasium dedicated to the hero Academus. The
institute, called The Academy, continued in existence for nearly a millennium, until it was closed down in
AD 529, along with other pagan institutions, by the Christian emperor Justinian. The Academy attracted
philosophers from all over the Greek world – one of its earliest students was Aristotle, from Stagira in
the northern Aegean – who investigated the philosophical questions raised by Plato. Not surprisingly,
given Plato’s conviction that the everyday world of the senses is of lesser importance than the world of
the Forms, these investigations were carried out at a rather high level of abstraction. In his dialogues,
Plato presents an unflattering image of the more practical type of instruction engaged in by the sophists,
and his Academy sought to distance itself from the practices of those teachers of rhetoric. But the sophists
attracted an impressive number of pupils willing to pay impressively high fees because the instruction that
they offered was designed to enable their pupils to succeed in the world. For Athenians, that world was