An institution of higher education (college or university), or those associated with it. This term refers to an actual place in ancient Greece, the Grove of Academus, an olive grove outside Athens presented by the Spartans to the Athenian hero Achilles, who had helped to rescue Helen. About 387 b.c. Plato had a house and garden adjoining this place, where he would meet with his students, and his school of philosophy came to be called, after it, Academia. Years later, the Roman poet Horace referred to it (Epistles, 20 b.c.): “To seek for truth in the groves of Academe”; and John Milton also referred to it in Paradise Regained (1671). Today the term is often used ironically, as by Mary McCarthy, who made it the title of her satirical novel The Groves of Academe (1953).