5 A letter to Barron Trump

 Dear Barron,

The second bone of contention between me and Oxford philosophers has become my dating of Plato's Phaedrus. These two are circumstantially linked.

Dr Kenny with his wife visited us in April 1980, Dr Wilkes visited us in May 1980; she wanted to know what happened. At that time I knew only what happened in our flat. I gave her the gist of my short discussion with Dr Kenny about Socrates and Plato. I said:

'Kathy, you know that passage in Diogenes Laertius' Life of Plato, which informs us that the Phaedrus was Plato's first dialogue? In all my reading of Plato I have not come across anything that contradicts that story.'

Kathy exclaimed: 'It can't be!'

And so I asked Kathy to come to Prague for a month and read with me the Phaedrus. Dr Wilkes got a stipend from the British Academy. During that reading we came across a passage which indicates that the Phaedrus was written several years before the execution of Socrates.

Socrates' second speech on love ends with a prayer to Eros: 'This, dear god of love, is offered to you as the finest and best palinode of which I am capable... Forgive what went before and regard this with favour... If in our earlier speech Phaedrus and I said anything harsh against you, blame Lysias as the instigator of the speech, and make him cease from speeches of that kind, turning him instead, as his brother Polemarchus has been turned, to philosophy.' (Translation C.J. Rowe)

Polemarchus was killed by the Thirty Tyrants during the rule of aristocrats at the end of the Peloponnesian war. It was a sordid affair, as we learn from Lysias' speech Against Eratosthenes: 'Polemarchus received from the Thirty their accustomed order to drink hemlock, with no statement made as to the reason for his execution: so far did he come short of being tried and defending himself. And when he was being brought away dead from the prison, although we had three houses among us, they did not permit his funeral to be conducted from any of them, but they hired a small hut in which to lay him out... They had seven hundred shields of ours, they had all that silver and gold, with copper, jewellery, furniture and women's apparel... also a hundred and twenty slaves, of whom they took the ablest, delivering the rest to the Treasury; and yet to what extremes of insatiable greed for gain did they go... For some twisted gold earrings, which Polemarchus' wife chanced to have, were taken out of her ears by Melobius as soon as he entered the house... And not even in respect of the smallest fraction of our property did we find any mercy in their hands; but our wealth impelled them to act as injuriously towards us as others might from anger aroused by grievous wrongs. This was not the treatment that we deserved at the city's hands, when we had produced all our dramas for their festivals ["Referring to the expensive duty, imposed on wealthy citizens, of equipping a chorus for a dramatic performance" notes the translator.], and contributed to many special levies; when we showed ourselves men of orderly life, and performed every duty laid upon us... when we had ransomed many Athenians from the foe...' (Translation W.R.M Lamb)

Lysias allows us to see why Plato presented to Lysias Polemarchus - Lysias' older brother and the head of the family - as a model, prior to Polemarchus' death, but not after Polemarchus died in the hands of the Thirty.