mathematical theory. Lecture III was a broad attack on the notion of oral teaching in the Academy: … the inconsistency of Aristotle's own testimony and the discordant opinions of the different members of the Academy show definitely that Plato did not himself "teach" his pupils or associates a doctrine of mathematical objects at all and did not even resolve their disagreement about the meaning of what he had written on the subject by laying down an authoritative interpretation… All the evidence points unmistakably to the same conclusion: the Academy was not a school in which an orthodox metaphysical doctrine was taught, or an association the members of which were expected to subscribe to the theory of ideas. In the course of his lectures, Cherniss also mocked scholars' aggrandizing myths about the nature of Plato's Academy: … in most of the authoritative treatments of Plato, after a scholarly reference to [Plato's single attested public] lecture on the Good, the singular becomes an unexplained plural within the paragraph, the lecture a whole series of lectures, and before the section has been finished we are being told that Plato gave "regular lectures," "systematic and continuous expositions in lecture form on some of the most important points in his doctrine." This "expansion" of the evidence -- if I may use the term -- has been embellished by the different expositors with different details, a comparison of which would afford a certain cynical amusement to the historian of critical scholarship. Cherniss concluded: "The external evidence for the nature of the Academy in Plato's time is extremely slight …" Post-War work and the Cherniss–Owen Debate Taran summarized Cherniss's later work: Cherniss's own work after the Second World War was in breadth and quality as exact, remarkable, and original as his earlier work. Part of it took the form of long and detailed book-reviews which constitute short monographs containing important and original research. He also published several long and masterly articles. Four of these, on Plato's Timaeus, could by themselves form a monograph, and are probably the most distinguished and important work on Plato done within the last forty years. The most well-known of Cherniss's post-war publications was his rebuttal of a new attack on Platonic unitarianism that arose in 1953. In a famous paper that explicitly criticized Cherniss, the Oxford philosopher G. E. L. Owen argued that Plato's Parmenides marked a radical change in the Theory