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too tall to fit in one of the trays). In the cell next to ours, someone complained that the john did not work. Spock shouted, “The john in cell 38, you have to kick the button in the wall.” Noisy efforts, with no success. “When I say kick it, I mean kick it.” Noisy success.
    Someone was fingering a flute. The actor Howard da Silva shouted that he should give it to someone who knows music. “David” (the composer David Amram), “where are you?” When Amram answered, down the line, da Silva said to pass the flute to him. After some obscure fumblings from Amram, da Silva shouted, “Send it back!” At this point, Mark Lane went from cell to cell. He had signed the petition the previous night but had kept from arrest, and now entered the lockup pretending to be our lawyer. He came to our cell, instructing us not to plead nolo contendere and pay our fine in the morning, but to demand a trial and make a test case against the war, with him as our attorney. None of us were buying from the self-promoting con man. He wanted a big case he could write about.
    Later, I would learn what the women’s stay was like from Ida. She said that a guard brought them stew in a styrofoam cup and coffee thick as syrup with cream and sugar. The diet-conscious ladies in their cells—who included Felicia Bernstein and Francine du Plessix Gray—shuddered at the sugary mix. Ida explained to them that poor people all drink their coffee that way, since they are starved for nourishment. Judy Collins gave their cells better music than da Silva had been able to coax from Amram.
    During the hours of that long night, I talked mainly with one of my cell mates, Karl Hess. We knew each other from being fellows at the Institute for Policy Studies. Hess was known for being Barry Goldwater’s speechwriter in the 1964 presidential campaign. Since then, he had gone from being a libertarian to being an anarchist. He refused to pay taxes used for war purposes, and lived on a farm, creating metal sculptures. An autodidact and devourer of books, he asked what was the volume I carried with me through the arrest. It was the Greek New Testament. He asked why I had it. I answered that I read it every day for spiritual sustenance. Besides, “It’s the most influential book in Western culture.” Yeah, but why Greek?
    I said that learning Greek is the most economical intellectual investment one can make. On many things that might interest one—law and politics, philosophy, oratory, history, lyric poetry, epic poetry, drama—there will be constant reference back to the founders of those forms in our civilization. Politics and law will refer to Aristotle on constitutions and balanced government. Philosophy will argue endlessly with Plato. Historians must go back to Herodotus and Thucydides. Students of Virgil or Milton have to gauge their dependence on Homer. Drama harks back to Sophocles or Euripides for tragedy, to Aristophanes or Menander for comedy. Oratory is measured against Demosthenes or Isocrates, lyric poetry against Sappho or Anacreon. The novel begins with Longus and others. It helps, in all these cases, to know something about the originals. He objected that the remains of ancient literature seem exiguous. That is partly true. Only three of the dozens of Greek tragedians survive, and only about 10 percent of their output. But that gives a kind of detective-story interest to their study. To rebuild the social setting for judging them, one must call on the study of papyri, coins, inscriptions, vase paintings, and archaeological ruins. (The only art history course I ever took was a graduate class on Greek vases.) Karl liked the puzzle aspect of this.
    In the morning, after the judge arrived, we were allowed to make individual statements before pleading nolo contendere and paying our fine (I had to borrow some money to pay mine). We scrambled for the few cabs outside the lockup. I ended up in one