Stone

"I've tried to enrich my writing and commentary with a philosophical and historical perspective," Stone said, insisting he always wanted his weekly to contain more than "Just gossip."

But since 1971, Stone applied his special and journalism to his old hobby--Socrates and classical literature. As he explained his examination of the number one gadfly of antiquity, "Its sort of a way to show how a reporter could go to work covering a trial that happened 2.500 years ago."

And Stone quite evidently believes he has a scoop on the case of Socrates, which he began interpreting older than average) Forum crowd.

Following a wistful nod to his surroundings--"I have had an unrequited love for Harvard ever since they refused to let me in, quite properly"-Stone launched into an hour-long "case for the prosecution," showing several ways in which Socrates and Plato were indeed "enemies of their city," and that Athenians were justified in bringing Socrates to trial.

Sitting throughout and speaking entirely without any prepared text or notes, the rumpled classicist drew from the range of ancient Greek literature, as he built up his unorthodox argument that Socrates and Plato were totalitarian, absolutist, and elitists to boot. Along the way, he made brief detours, for instance to call Solon the "Franklin D. Roosevelt of Athens" or to make a plug for studying the great classes ("All our feelings as human beings are there").

Despite his disdain for Socrates, Stone concluded his discussion with a preview of his next talk--scheduled for Thursday--is which he said he would show that not withstanding the case against him. Socrates could have won acquittal. His third and final speech next week will attack Plato's vision of what Athens should have been.

For the next two weeks, Some will stay at a guest suite in Winthrop House. "He asked to stay in an undergraduate house rather than in the Faculty Club," explained James C. Thomson, curator of the Nieman Foundation for journalists, one of the series's sponsors. Besides preparing the lecture series--which he delivered in similar form at Georgetown and other universities--Stone is expected to meet informally with students and faculty members, along with making an address on Reagan's space-war proposals at Northeastern University in Boston.

One Harvard professor who has already had one of those informal chats is Chairman of the Classics Department Albert Henrichs. Though he acknowledged that he has not yet read any of Stone's few published articles on the Greeks, Henrichs joined other Classics professors in welcoming a new colleague to his relatively unpopulated field. As even a self-avowed dissenter to Stone's interpretation of Socrates trial. Assistant Professor of Classics Ruth S. Scodel put it, classicists are "always happy to have the issue brought up."