Biography | Aristotle — The Walks That Named the Peripatetics

The Lyceum was already a gymnasium before it was a school. Aristotle moved into a working athletic ground east of the city walls.

He returned to Athens in 335 BC, after Alexander's accession, and began teaching here. He was about fifty.

The precinct belonged to Apollo Lykeios. It lay between the Ilissos and the Eridanos, under Lycabettus, just outside the Diochares Gate.

The school took its later name from the habit of walking while talking. Peripatetikos means the one who walks about.

For roughly twelve or thirteen years this was the workshop: logic, biology, constitutions, rhetoric, poetics. Theophrastus ran the research beside him and inherited the library.

The buildings you see in the pit today are the palaestra of that gymnasium, found in 1996 when the plot was being cleared for a museum of modern art.

The site sits at the junction of Rigillis and Vasilissis Sofias, behind the Byzantine and Christian Museum. It opened to the public in 2009.

This is not the whole Lyceum. Ancient descriptions stretch the grounds from Kolonaki toward the National Garden. The excavated rectangle is the wrestling court, not the lecture hall.

In 323 BC Alexander died in Babylon. Anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens turned on Aristotle, who had been the prince's teacher and was tied to Antipater.

He left for his mother's family estate at Chalcis in 322 BC. A later anecdote has him saying he would not let Athens wrong philosophy twice. The wording is not a primary transcript.

Sulla wrecked the area in 86 BC. The school as an institution did not survive that sack in the form Aristotle left it.

Photo: Tomisti, CC BY-SA, Lyceum palaestra on Rigillis Street, via Wikimedia Commons