In response to:

Hanging Out with Greeks from the May 13, 1993 issue

To the Editors:

I hope it will not be thought ungrateful on my part if I suggest a small correction in the extremely favorable review of my books written by my fellow-Hellenist Garry Wills [“Hanging Out with Greeks,” NYR, May 13]; I do so only to clarify a passage that may have given readers a wrong impression. After citing, from the May-June issue of Humanities, an interview in which Lynne Cheney and I expressed fundamental disagreement on the subject of Plato and the Sophists, he proceeds: “If Lynne Cheney thought, during the interview, that the Endowment might have chosen the wrong [Jefferson] lecturer for her purposes.…” At the time of the interview, however, Lynne Cheney had long been fully aware of our disagreement on this point and had been so long before she invited me, late in 1991, to give the Jefferson Lecture in May 1992. In November 1990 I was one of four recipients of the Endowment’s Charles Frankel Prize, and on that occasion she asked me to address the Endowment staff on a subject of my own choosing. I spoke on the Sophists and their invention of an education for democracy. The talk was published in the July–August 1991 issue of Humanities.

Bernard Knox
Darnestown, Maryland

This Issue

July 15, 1993