When Ancient and Modern Worlds Collide: Notes on the Profane Fate of Plato's Sacred Olive Tree

A preserved section of Plato's olive tree

Agricultural University of Athens

According to legend, the ancient Greeks had the minor deity and culture-hero Aristaeus to thank for teaching them three essential skills: cheese-making, bee-keeping and - most crucially of all - the care and cultivation of olive trees.

For whilst the Greeks liked their feta and honey, they really loved their olive oil ...

Not only was the latter a key ingredient in their cuisine, for example, but they would anoint their kings and champion athletes with it. Indeed, even ordinary citizens, including philosophers, liked to rub olive oil onto their bodies in order to keep the skin supple and healthy.

Thus, it's really no surprise to discover that Plato's Academy was situated next to a sacred olive grove dedicated to the goddess Athena. It's believed that each of the twelve gated entrances to the school had its own tree standing as an evergreen sentinel and symbol of wisdom, fertility, and purity.

But there was also one very special olive tree under which Plato was said to have taught his students. And this tree continued to stand for thousands of years - long after the Academy itself had crumbled into dust - until, on one fateful day in October 1976, a bus was driven into it, breaking the noble trunk in two.

The upper section was taken to the Agricultural University where it has been preserved and displayed ever since. The lower part, however, including the enormous roots, remained at the original site until being dug up in January 2013 to serve as firewood by local people adversely affected by the Greek financial crisis.

Or so the popular story goes, as reported widely at the time by both local and international media ...  

Seeking to clarify the situation, however, the General Directorate of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage issued a (seemingly little-read) statement a few days later explaining that Plato's olive tree had, in fact, been uprooted and killed - not merely damaged - as a result of the accident 37 years earlier.

A new tree, with three trunks, had been planted in its place by the Agricultural University of Athens and it was one of these that was removed, having died, on January 6th, 2013 (the other two trunks remaining intact and in situ).       

Whilst there are amusing aspects to this tale, one can very well imagine what Plato - who esteemed truth above all things - would think of fake news: False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Photo: Olive Oil Times Collection

In My Secret Garden

Bust of Epicurus against a background of wild flowers 

One of the very few consolations of living in isolated exile here in Essex is having a small garden in which to sit, drink wine, and listen to the birds sing whilst the Little Greek tends to her plants and battles with the snails.

One suddenly feels a real sense of kinship with Epicurus, who, famously, established his school of philosophy in a beautiful garden on the outskirts of Athens, c.307 BC. This green oasis - not far from the site of Plato's Academy, but far enough and of such a contrasting character as to suggest it belonged to a very different world - symbolised the idyllic yet worldly nature of Epicureanism.

Inscribed above the garden gate was a sign that read: Welcome dear guest - please stay a while and discover for yourself that the highest good is happiness. Men - and women - came here to practise and cultivate an ethics immanent to existence that valued reason, pleasure, friendship, and flowers.  

Modern scholars are not quite sure of the exact location of the garden, but, given the fondness amongst early Christians for building churches upon ancient sites of learning and pagan temples - and considering the hostility that many medieval theologians exhibited towards all forms of material hedonism - it's very possible that the Byzantine Church of Haghios Georgios [St. George] was erected upon it.     

That's a shame. Because no matter how beautiful the church or magnificent the cathedral, the sky above and the earth below remain more beautiful and more magnificent. This is something that even the devoted Christian Will Brangwen is forced to accept in D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow:

"He listened to the thrushes in the gardens and heard a note which the cathedrals did not include: something free and careless and joyous. He crossed a field that was all yellow with dandelions, on his way to work, and the bath of yellow glowing was something at once so sumptuous and so fresh, that he was glad he was away from his shadowy cathedral.

      There was life outside the Church. There was much that the Church did not include. He thought of God, and of the whole blue rotunda of the day. That was something great and free. He thought of the ruins of the Grecian worship, and it seemed, a temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs." [Ch. 7] 

Epicurus would, I'm sure, thoroughly endorse this passage by Lawrence, which promotes belief in the ruins and affirms the joy of living amidst the natural world having seen through the false promise of the Absolute.

And Nietzsche too would approve. For, as Keith Ansell-Pearson reminds us, there was nothing Nietzsche loved more during his mid-period than the thought of strolling in a peaceful garden:

"He wants a new vita contemplativa to be cultivated in the midst of the speed and rapidity of modern life; we need to [...] go slowly and create the time needed to work through our experiences. Even we godless anti-metaphysicians need places for contemplation and in which we can reflect on ourselves and encounter ourselves. However, we are not to do this in the typical spiritual manner of transcendent loftiness, but rather take walks in botanical gardens [...] and look at ourselves 'translated', as Nietzsche memorably puts it, 'into stones and plants' (GS 280)."

Ansell-Pearson concludes, in an absolutely crucial passage for those who would understand Epicurus-Nietzsche-Lawrence and their non-idealistic (in fact, counter-idealistic) Naturphilosophie:

"We free spirits have more in common with phenomena of the natural world than we do with the heavenly projections of a religious humanity: we can be blissfully silent like stones and we have specific conditions of growth like plants, being nourished by the elements of the earth and by the light and heat of the sun."

Notes

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 141-42. Note that GS 280 refers, of course, to section 280 of Nietzsche's The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974).  

Epicurus, The Art of Living, ed. and trans. George K. Strodach, (Penguin Books, 2013).

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).  

For a sister post to this one on the notion of ataraxia, click here. 

Musical bonus: click here to play a much under-appreciated track by Madonna, from the album Erotica (Maverick Records, 1992), which supplied the title to this post. 

At the Gym with D. H. Lawrence

Natural born pedagogue and former Croydon school teacher, D. H. Lawrence, was keenly interested in the subject of education and spilt a great deal of ink addressing the question of what its purpose is and how it might be reformed upon non-idealistic lines. That is to say, turned from an intellectual pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, into an activity that awakens the primary affective centres.

Perhaps not surprisingly therefore, Lawrence was a passionate advocate of games and physical instruction and valued the sports hall or gym as a place of vital learning as much as the science lab or art class: "Let us have a gymnasium as the Greeks had it, and for the same purpose: the purpose of pure, perilous delight in contest, and profound, mystic delight in unified motion." [158]

Lawrence wants boys to learn how to fight - "like young bantam cocks"- with fists and with foils: "Teach fencing, teach wrestling, teach jiu-jitsu, every form of fierce hand to hand contest." [159] Football, however, would be taken off the curriculum - as would self-conscious body building or any wilful attempt to keep fit. Lawrence loathes the thought of someone sweating and grunting in the gym merely to develop muscles and perversely flaunt their healthy physique. He writes:

"The modern athlete parading the self-conscious mechanism of his body, reeking with a degraded physical, muscular self-consciousness ... is one of the most stupid phenomena mankind has ever witnessed. The physique is alright in itself. But to have your physique in your head, like having sex in the head, is unspeakably repulsive. To have your own physique on your mind all the time: why, it is a semi-pathological state, the exact counterpoise to the querulous peevish invalid." [157-58]

Clearly, for Lawrence, who subscribes to a system of dualism in which mind and body are forever distinct in polarised opposition, the problem is that modern athletes and keep-fit fanatics mix the two modes of consciousness; they prostitute the primary self to the secondary idea (which, of course, is Lawrence’s definition of masturbation).

What, then, are we to make of this? I suppose, in reply, I would wish to make three points:

Firstly, not all invalids are querulous or peevish and most do not wish for others to define, categorise, or stereotype them by their disability or illness, let alone allow it to obsessively dominate their own thoughts and behaviour. Lawrence, who spent a good deal of time in bed either ill or recovering from illness, may be speaking for himself and from his own experience here, but he shouldn’t generalise in such a manner.

Secondly, I’m sensitive also to Lawrence’s problematic gender politics and the fact that he only considers the physical education of boys in the above. The girls, presumably, will be too busy making their own dresses "and delicately unfolding the skirts and bodices, or the loose Turkish trousers and little vests, or whatever else they like to wear" [152-53]. They needn’t concern themselves with contest and naked wrestling, because, according to Lawrence, the soul of woman resides in fashion not fighting: "She puts on her clothes as a flower unfolds its petals, as an utterance from her own nature, instinctive and individual." [153]

Finally, despite referring his own model of a physical training facility back to ancient Greece, I’m not sure Lawrence fully appreciates to what extent the γυμνάσιον also functioned as a place for socializing, communal bathing and, crucially, engaging in intellectual pursuits. The nakedness of the athletes encouraged an aesthetic appreciation of the male body glistening with oil, and lectures and discussions on philosophy and the arts were frequently held at the gymnasia.

The Greeks certainly didn’t suspend all moralizing and put off all idea when they stripped for exercise as Lawrence likes to imagine; provisions were made not only for physical training, but ethical instruction. Plato’s Academy was, first and foremost, a gymnasium. As was the Lyceum, at which Aristotle established his school.

In sum: agon is a wider, more complex, and more ideal concept than Lawrence seems to realise ...

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 85-166.