Everybody’s Plato: One

Plato’s Works Explained in Plain English

The Background

In 1977, I went to Munich, Germany, to study linguistics at Ludwig-Maximillians Universitat. In those days, the tuition was free to everyone; all you had to do as a foreign student was pass a German-language examination, proving you could do college-level work in German.

I had taken a couple of semester courses in German at SUNY Oswego, but I was no-way ready for college work, so I enrolled in an intensive German-language course to get up to speed.

In that course, I befriended a guy my age from the Greek-speaking part of Cyprus who spoke excellent English. He was planning to enroll in the Technical University and study computer science.

His name was Christos, and as he came from a very well-to-do family in Cyprus, he had had excellent private tutors for his entire life.

In those days, as in most days, the Greeks on Cyprus were basically at war with the Turks on Cyprus, and Christos was as Greek as Greek could be. He loved to tell me about the wonders of Greek Culture, ancient and modern alike.

I had told Christos that my immediate plan was to study linguistics, but that my true love was philosophy, so he was quite shocked when one day he asked me what I thought…