of Plato with a lacuna, and trying to fill it. When Oppenheimer asked me what I would do with such a passage, I began stumbling, and he said, "Well that's very stupid. A great text should have blanks." There I happily lost my temper: "Of all the pompous clichés," I said. "First of all, that's a quote from Mallarmé, as you, sir, must know. Secondly, it's the kind of paradox you could play with till the cows come home. But when you're asked to do an edition of a Plato text for us ordinary human beings, I am most grateful if the blanks are filled." Oppenheimer fought back superbly. He said, "No, precisely in philosophy you should know more than in poetry. It is the implicit missing that stimulates the argument." Cherniss discussed Renaissance philosophy with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a friend of the art historian Erwin Panofsky, at the Institute for Advanced Study. Cherniss spoke at a memorial service for Erwin Panofsky, a colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study, and said the "strong but subtle joys of private friendship that he afforded are too sensitive to endure expression …" David Keyt spent a year at the Institute in 1983–4, when Cherniss was nearly eighty years old, and recalled that: Harold Cherniss was a professor emeritus at the Institute when I arrived, though he still had an office and came to it every day. (What is retirement like at a research institution? Cherniss remarked once that all it amounted to was having one's pay cut in half.) He spent most of his time maintaining his elaborate bibliography of Plato, carefully entering the information on each new book and article on an index card. He was still sharp and I was pleased to be able to discuss Plato with him … Cherniss served at the Institute for Advanced Study until his death in 1987. According to a notice in the local paper, he died "after a long illness" in the Princeton Medical Center and "... was preparing the second volume [of Aristotle's Criticism of Plato and the Academy] when illness overtook him." In a memoir, Tarán said "this country has lost one of its greatest Hellenists and the history of ancient Greek philosophy one of its foremost scholars in the last two centuries." Family and friends Harold Cherniss married Ruth Meyer Cherniss in 1929. Her father was Max Meyer (March