Volume 40, Number 9 · May 13, 1993
Hanging Out with Greeks
By Garry Wills
The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics
by Bernard Knox
Norton, 144 pp., $15.95
New Perspectives in Early Greek Art England
edited by Diana Buittron-Oliver
National Gallery of Art/distributed by the University Press of New, 308 pp., $25.00 (paper)
The Norton Book of Classical Literature
edited by Bernard Knox
Norton, 866 pp., $29.95
When Bernard Knox was chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities to give the 1992 Jefferson Lecture, the head of the Endowment at the time, Lynne Cheney, interviewed Knox for the Endowment's magazine. Expressing her amazement that Knox had a good word for the Sophists, Cheney argued: 'Is it possible that that is a bit of sophistry? Are you making the worse the better cause when you write about the sophists?'[1] Knox pointed out that the Sophists brought skills to the democracy. Cheney: 'But the worse is still the worse cause.' Knox said the Greek for 'worse' need not mean more than 'weaker.' Cheney: 'So it's complete relativism, then.' When Knox said the study of the humanities—Cheney's field of expertise—came from the Sophists, she tried to derive humane studies from Plato: 'The Sophists had one approach to the humanities and the Platonists another, an approach that emphasized the idea of truth, as opposed to the extreme relativistic stance of the Sophists.'
Review, 4067 words
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