2 A letter to Barron Trump

 2 The second bone of contention between me and classicists concerned the dating of Plato's  Phaedrus. Dr Wilkes visited me on May 16, eager to know what actually happened with Dr Kenny. At that time I knew nothing about the expulsion of Dr Kenny from Czechoslovakia; for all knew they could still be in prison. And so I concentrated on the moment that triggered the police disruption of our meeting.

I explained to Kathy how Kenny opened his talk by explaining that he would speak about Aristotle's Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics, focussing on a passage from each: 'He then asked me to translate those two passages in Czech. When I did so I opened the discussion with a few words in defence of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: "Tony, I think that when Aristotle wrote our Nicomachean passage he had in front of his mind Socrates' days in prison, before his execution." Kenny retorted: "But Julius, don't you agree that Socrates was a man of high moral principles, but a poor philosopher, whereas Plato was a great philosopher but a questionable character?"

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The big bold letters is an unwanted intervention. Obviously, anything I write on my computer is closely watched, but this is the first time that my writing on my blog was interfered with.

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I replied: "Tony, you appear to make such a cut through Plato's dialogues that you find Socrates below the line which you draw between poor philosophy and great philosophy. I don't make any such cut through Plato's dialogues." As I said this, the Czech police marched in.'

My response to Dr Kenny was abrupt, and so I said: 'You know, Kathy, that passage in Diogenes Laertius that there was a story (logos) that the Phaedrus was Plato's first dialogue? In all my reading of Plato I haven't come across anything that might contradict that logos.' Kathy exclaimed: 'But it can't be.' And so I suggested to Kathy to come to Prague in July, for a month, so that we could read the Phaedrus together and see. 

Kathy came in July, we read the dialogue; Kathy could not think of anything in Plato that might contradict the logos of the Phaedrus being Plato's first dialogue, but we came across a passage that suggests that the Phaedrus was written several years prior to Socrates' trial and execution. 

Since the point is important and involves references to Lysias' speech favouring sex unaccompanied by love and a quotation from the speech in which Socrates refutes Lysias, I shall leave the corroboration of the ancient dating of the Phaedrus to the next entry in my blog.