“This place is sacred, for it teems with laurel, olive, and the vine. Within its very heart a multitude of feathered nightingales make music.”
The venerable olive trees, self propagated through generations from the parent stump, are, indeed, a feature in the Attic landscape. Sophocles does not fail to include them in his catalogue of Attic blessings:—
“There’s no such shoot on the Asian coast, of none such do I hear in Doris great, in Pelops-isle—a plant unvanquished, self-renewing, terror unto foemen’s spears—nay, none like this, child-nurturing, that groweth greatest in our land, the gray-green olive’s foliage.”
And in the neighbouring Academy the youths ran off their races beneath the sacred olive trees. To the joyous associations that for nearly two centuries had been accumulating about the Academy Plato added the overshadowing greatness of his own name and teaching. He has incidentally perpetuated the name of the original modest freeholder, Academus, to be a part of the vocabulary of every school-boy. Near the Academy, making a fitting goal for the avenue leading from the Dipylon gate between the monuments of illustrious dead, the Athenians gave Plato magnificent interment. An epigram by Antipater transfers to Plato the indifference expressed by Socrates in regard to his untenanted body when he says in the prison death-scene:—
“Bury me however you will,—if you can catch me—for, when I drink the poison, I shall not remain here with you, but shall make my way to a blissful life with the Blessed.... So don’t let Crito be vexed on my behalf when he sees my body being burnt or buried as though I were having some awful experience.”
Shelley in his fine paraphrase of the epigram inexactly substitutes Athens for Attica and fails to include the epithet “earth-born,” the conventional boast of the autochthonous men of Attica:—
“Eagle! why soarest thou above that tomb?
To what sublime and starry-paven home
Floatest thou?
‘I am the image of swift Plato’s spirit