Plato teaching in his open-air school. Not far from Athens was a beautiful plantation that was called the academy, after one of the Greek heroes Academus, who had once owned the place. Here, amid the plane and olive trees, Plato gathered his disciples and held his open-air school, and in this picture we see him teaching his followers, many of whom were old men. After Plato died, the academy was for many centuries still used as a place in which philosophers taught their disciples.