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The mosaic from Pompeii — first century AD, found in the Villa of T. Siminius Stephanus — shows seven philosophers gathered under a tree. The central figure, pointing at a globe, is believed to be me. Behind us rises the Acropolis.

The Academy I founded in 387 BC was not a building but a grove — the grove of Academus, a hero whose precinct lay just outside the city walls to the northwest. We gathered there to talk, and we talked there for nearly nine hundred years, until Justinian closed the pagan schools in 529 AD.

Nine hundred years. My arguments about the immortality of the soul, the theory of Forms, the philosopher-king — these were argued over, modified, rejected, and revived for nine centuries in the same grove. Whether I was right about any particular doctrine matters less than whether the practice of rigorous inquiry was valuable. I believe it was. I believe it is the only thing that was.