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Plato (±428 - ±348 BC), as is well known, lived in a pingle, which is to say a paddock or grove, or garden if need be. Pingle is also a verb, meaning either to struggle with difficulties or to trifle, piddle or dally — all of which sums up the work of teaching philosophy rather neatly, which is convenient because that is what Plato did in place of getting what is called a real job.
The particular paddock in which Plato pingled was a public park, specifically the Athenian garden of Achadomye — or Achademe, or Academeca, or Academe, or even Academy if you want to be particularly plebeian. The park was named after someone named Academus, who was either an ancient hero or just the previous owner of the garden and in any case he's dead now. Thus — with Plato, a pingle, and at least one pupil — was the Academe founded.¹ The whole business may seem slapdash, but bear in mind that it happened in 385 BC and the Romans hadn't gotten around to organizing Greece yet.²
One of Plato's pupils was Aristotle, who after a subsequent period of being the world's pre-eminent graduate student became a teacher at the Academe. After being passed over for the position of headmaster in the wake of Plato's death — the job went to Plato's nephew Speussipus in an notable act of nepinglepanism — Aristotle went off and got his own Athenian garden, with covered walks, named after the nearby temple of Apollo Lykeios, and Aristotle's Lyceum drew sufficient business away from the competition that its name is today emblazoned on lecture halls worldwide, to say nothing of being adopted by the French as their word for school (lycée). (Apollo Lykeios apparently merited note as a killer of wolves. Or werewolves. Or possibly even werespacebears, which is a bit of a stretch but research really does indicate a shameful lack of quality control in the mythology department.)
Lyceum did not become the pre-eminent scholastic generic, however, because Plato was still the bigger name and trademarks would not be invented for another 1,919 years. Arcesilaus and Carneades put up the Under New Management signs for the Middle and New Academies in the 200s and 100s respectively, with Philo and Antiochus hot on their heels, and after the switch from BC to AD the philosophical synthesist Proclus started up a neo-Platonist Academy — which was shut down on grounds of paganism, which probably comes as no surprise to some people, in 562, but 900 years later Cosimo de Medici hired Marsilio Ficino to run the Platonic Academy of Florence, and the rest is, well, academic.
Addendum: If you play ping-pong with a pingle-pan while pingling in a pingle, you are trying too hard.
A pingle-pan is a small iron pot. Apparently no one knows why.
¹ Plato bought a house and estate in the pingle, in case you thought he just slept under a bush.
² Mixing Greek and Roman terminology is therefore particularly plebeian.
Aristotle tried to develop a philosophy encompassing all knowledge but mathematics. In his mathless book called Physics he asserted that objects fall at a speed proportionate to their mass, and took up the philosophical question of how people develop a tan. All this is why Isaac Newton is called the father of physics and why physicists are so frequently found pallidly wandering the famous halls of academe rather than hanging out at topless beaches in France.
Arcesilaus did nothing else but attack Stoics and write poetry, while Carneades was incapable of commitment. What kind of legacies are these? Proclus at least influenced Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite, who would later attain fame by being mistaken for someone else, and Ficino may have convinced the Catholic Church to dogmatize the immortality of the soul, which is nothing to sneeze at.
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