4 A letter to Barron Trump

 Dear Barron Trump,

There are two bones of contention between me and the classicists:

1 When I read a Greek text, I understand it directly, in Greek; Classicist all around the world must translate the Greek into their mother tongue, and only thus they can understand the given text.

How do I know this? When I began to learn Ancient Greek I did so with the help of German, English, and French text books and dictionaries. Thus I learnt that students all around the world learnt their Greek by translating chosen texts from their mother tongue into Greek, from Greek into their mother tongue.

When Dr Wilkes from St Hilda's came to my seminar, she could not believe that I understood Greek Greek, without translating it into English; she believed that I was quick thinking and translated the chosen sentence so quickly into Czech or English that I could maintain that I understood it directly, in Greek. But of course, if that were the case, I could have done it with a chosen sentence or two, I could not possibly do it with a whole paragraph, let alone a whole page. This is where Kenny's attempt to expose me as a fibber comes to the fore.

As I mentioned in the quotation from the 'Pursuit of Philosophy', Kenny's visit was expected with great expectations. Everybody in Prague and in Oxford expected that Kenny would put me to my place and  liberate the seminar from Tomin. Kenny was going to Prague with his wife, and to make his visit secure, he discussed it (on March 19th) with Minister-Counsellor Dr Telička, the second in command in Czechoslovak Embassy in London. (See Barbara Day The Velvet Philosophers, London, 1999)

Nobody expected that instead of exposing me as a fibber Kenny would provide me with an opportunity to excel in the last meeting with my students. Interestingly, the secret police who bugged my seminar did not interfere during my translation of the two pages from Aristotle's 2 Ethics. The police burst into my room only after I finished my translation and opened the discussion with a remark in support of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethic:

'Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics views philosophy as a key to good life, for it is independent of external circumstances, whereas the other virtues need something extra, e.g. generosity, justice... I believe that when Aristotle wrote that Nicomachean passage he had Socrates in mind.'

Kenny did not dispute my Socratic view of the passage; instead, he asked: 'Julius, Don't you agree that Socrates was a man of high moral principles, but a poor philosopher, whereas Plato was a morally dubious character, but a great philosopher?' I replied:

'Tony, you obviously make such a cut through Plato's dialogues, that you view as Socratic everything that falls below the line thus determined, and all that is above that line is genuinely Plato's. I do not draw any such dividing line through Plato's works.' 

At that point the police marched in.

***

Barbara Day wrote in The Velvet Philosophers:

'Anthony Kenny and his American-born wife had been the fist to be driven to Bartolomějská [the police headquarters], were held until three in the morning and interrogated in separate rooms... The Kennys were delivered to the border-crossing with West Germany, and, carrying their luggage, walked through the woods of Rozvadov in the frosty dawn of an April morning.

Tomin and his students remained locked  up for something over the statutory 48 hours.'