He learnt gymnastics under Ariston, the Argive wrestler. – Diogenes Laertius, on Plato
Report IX. Filed from the Palaestra. Each academy fights as it thinks. I have now trained, badly, with three of them, and can report. The Grove wrestles. Its house is the Palaestra, a court of yellow sand inside a colonnade, and over its door is carved the Grove's answer to the inscription said to have stood over Plato's: let no one ignorant of wrestling enter. The Grove likes to remind visitors that Plato was a wrestler, that his trainer gave him his name, and that the first Academy was built round a gymnasium. Its rule is that only the one who holds may speak. You do not argue with a logician of the Grove; you take a grip, and then you may ask your question, for as long as you can keep the grip. They call this holding a thesis and do not think it a metaphor. The Lyceum walks. Its fighters never stand still and never face you squarely; they circle, as their founders' teacher taught them, a botanist of 1958 who had learned in his youth to walk the circle in the Chinese manner and ga...
From the lore of The Möbius Academy.