Daniel Orr: People and Places of Greek Philosophy

In the fall semester of 2022, I read what at the time I thought was the best academic paper on Plato ever written.  “‘I Went Down to the Piraeus Yesterday’: Routes, Roads, and Plato’s Republic” (Hesperia Vol. 89 No. 4. Oct-Dec. 2020. 725-755) cracked open Plato’s Republic in a way that I had never before thought possible: asking what route Socrates and Glaucon son of Ariston (and older brother of Plato) had taken from the city to house of Cephalus in the Piraeus in the opening lines of the Republic.  The article showed the possibility of subjecting Platonic art to archaeological scrutiny that actually shed light on how we should read and understand the great dialogue.

Three years later, in the brutal heat of a humid Aegean morning, I was retracing those steps of Socrates and Glaucon over what remained of the foundations of the main gate of the Piraeus, the port of fifth-century Athens, with Geoffrey Bakewell (Rhodes College), the author of the article that had so impressed me, and the director of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (ASCSA) summer seminar, “People and Places of Ancient Philosophy.”  Eighteen days of blood, toil, and sweat did nothing to diminish the elation of the moment.

From June 9-June 27, “People and Places of Ancient Philosophy,” took me and some twenty other philomathic students to what still seems like an improbable swath of the city of Athens, Attica, and mainland Greece—all the while inquiring into the geographic and topographic realia in which Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, St. Paul, Diogenes of Cyrene, Prodicus, and so many others knew so well. There’s nothing quite like the experience of sweating out a gallon of water on the windless and unshaded South Slope of the Acropolis to understand just how far-removed Thesaurus Linguae Graecae word searches in air-conditioned American university libraries are from the lived experiences of seemingly disembodied philosophers we studied. Climbing Lykabettos, surviving the onslaught of insects at Pella, nearly suffocating to death in an airless Thessaloniki church, and, yes, losing red blood cells to a window-pane in Ioannina in Epirus made our group of peppy undergraduates, grizzled PhD students, teachers, and JD-PhD all a little more skeptical of those who tell us to distrust the phainomena. 

But more than just delivering physical and philosophical training, “People and Places of Ancient Philosophy,” crystallized so much of what I had been working on at Duke up to that point.  The program was a capstone to my independent studies with Josh Sosin that have informed my dissertation topic on Thucydides and his reception as a political thinker in times of civil strife (which includes the strife-torn Athens of the late fifth century); it also capped Catharine Judson’s Athenian Archaeology course for which I was TA.  Timely visits to the National Epigraphic Museum with Danielle Kellogg, a ceramics masterclass at the National Archaeological Museum with Kathleen Lynch, tromping around the Agora with THE John Camp, and the opportunity to do a site report in Eleusis about the last refuge of the Thirty tyrants and partisans helped me process and reconsider my work on Athenian politics and the place of philosophy in the late fifth century. 

Exposure to the resources of ASCSA proved to be more than a boon: it was an inspiration.  There is nothing quite like the chance to walk up the stairs of the Parthenon with Julia Shear (whose company proved a sheer delight) or the privilege of standing on the temple of Zeus at Olympia with Oliver Pfilz. And to do this all in the company of Geoffrey Bakewell and students whose talents soared as high as Olympos made it the acme of my time in graduate school.  For this, I want to convey my thanks to Geoffrey Bakewell, Sondra Horn and Nicole Coscolluela for administering the Research Travel Grants, Clare Woods, Josh Sosin, my letter writers (who literally came to my aid at the last minute), and the generous supporters of the Department of Classical Studies who made this experience possible.