Lyceum

The Lyceum was an ancient grove sacred to Apollo Lykeios with an attached gymnasium just outside Athens, where in 334 BC Aristotle founded his philosophical school, the Peripatos. Here he walked with his students through the colonnades, debating ethics, politics, biology and logic. The exact location was lost for centuries and only rediscovered by accident in 1996 during excavations for a planned museum of modern art, east of the Acropolis near the Byzantine Museum. Visible today are wall fragments of a palaestra courtyard, water basins and ground levels. The site is open as a small archaeological park, with panels in Greek and English explaining what was once thought here over 2,300 years ago.