Nearly 2,400-year-old school where Aristotle taught Alexander the Great discovered in Greece

The school where Alexander the Great was educated by Aristotle more than 2,300 years ago has been uncovered in the ancient Macedonian city of Mieza, now in northern Greece, the Hellenic Ministry of Culture said in a translated statement .

Archaeologists unearthed a building complex containing two banquet halls, a sporting arena, a stadium, a roofed porch and a lecture hall with stone desks, according to the statement. Mosaic floors and columns decorated the complex. The banquet halls had raised pedestals where nearly a dozen couches would originally have been placed.

The decoration and architecture of the school is similar to that of the Macedonian royal palace at Aigai (modern Vergina in northern Greece), where Philip II and his son Alexander the Great lived, the statement noted.

Among the building ruins, which date to the fourth century B.C., archaeologists discovered coins, ceramics and four styluses that ancient pupils used for writing, providing clues to who might have been educated there.

Alexander the Great was educated at a school in Mieza where Aristotle taught, the ancient writer Plutarch (who lived circa A.D. 50 to 120) wrote in his biography " Life of Alexander ." Because of this, Angeliki Kottaridi , an archaeologist and director emerita of antiquities with the Hellenic Ministry of Culture who is leading excavations at the site, believes that the building complex is the very school where Alexander the Great studied.

According to Plutarch, Philip II, had this school built "for the education of his son Alexander and the children of the noble Macedonians," Kottaridi told Live Science in an email. Schools in the ancient Greek world, called "gymnasia," taught students a variety of subjects and also trained them physically.

The discovery of the school was a bit indirect, Kottaridi said. "A few years ago, I identified the ancient remains next to the ancient theater of Mieza," she said, and her team began excavating the building complex in 2024. But some excavation of the complex had been done more than 20 years earlier, she explained, when a monument dedicated to the nymphs was found nearby.

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