Meet Peri and The Lukeion Project

"To Begin, begin." ~William Wordsworth

Aristotle was the kind of person that I could invite over for dinner but never for a grand holiday feast. He would likely occupy the whole conversation at the dinner table and then eventually wander off to look at the garden and tree fungi well before dessert was served but well after everyone was riled up about metaphysics or politics.  Aristotle was a Friday dinner kind of philosopher. If you fed him some souvlaki, he would grab a fast nosh and still have plenty of time to browse the library, watch the sunset, and make predictions about where our copious hummingbirds sleep at night.
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher who also happened to make his reputation by teaching. His most distinguished student was Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s teaching success is best demonstrated by the fact that Alexander prized his copy of Homer’s Iliad more than anything else, even tons of Persian gold.

Aristotle had troupes of students who rallied around him at the Athenian Lyceum (Ancient Greek: Λύκειον) from which our online program, The Lukeion Project, takes its name. This temple library served as the world’s first university. Aristotle wasn’t much for staying put in the library, so he would always teach on the go, a real mobile school, one might say. The sight of Aristotle leading his gaggle of students around Attica like a flock of geese prompted people to refer to them as Peripatetics, the walkabouts.

Athens was already famous for smart people walking about the place, and for good reason. Their patron was Athena. Her symbol was her wise little owl as the official town mascot. Aristotle, like Athena and her wee owl, was famous for a type of practical hands-on wisdom that is still popular today in all circle of academic interests. He was as likely to touch on topics of physics, biology, and zoology as he was on logic, ethics, rhetoric, and linguistics.

Thus, the name The Lukeion Project was given to our (then) little online program which was founded way back in 2005 by a couple of Classical archaeologists who also happened to teach Latin, Greek, mythology, and history. Now we have a bigger teaching staff and even more classes, but we can’t yet compete with Aristotle nor his original Λύκειον (or Lyceum). Still, we offer a lot compared to not only most online programs but even compared to most college Classics degrees.

Our mascot looks like Athena's little owl and he’s also a walkabout. We gave him the name Peri the Peripatetic because the Latin name for owl, Bubo, was voted “not nearly cute enough” by all our AP Latin students at the time.