In 2006 I decided that instead of studying what I was supposed to be studying, I wanted to learn ancient Greek. I went to Black Oak Books in north Berkeley and found a Loeb Oresteia and an Oxford Thucydides; Berkeley is a good town for this. On my way to the register I opened the covers and, there on the flyleaf I saw "Don Davidson," Harvard '38 and '39.
This is what happens to the libraries of eminent philosophers after they change state.
Young Don's notes on the Oresteia:
Woman like man
night like day
tragedy like joy
fire + darkness
Eumenides: Orestes saved because matter is not blood. Cf. Aristotle's idea of form & matter.
Orestes goes mad: the charioteer image p. 261
Appearance & Reality, p. 67
Depends upon assumption that there's a dichotomy.
Ulysses, p. 69, again, 123
If the date on the flyleaf is accurate, the European war had just started or was just about to start. Either way, young Don's own country would have a couple more years in the Spartan position of standing by.
Young Don's notes on Thucydides are more philological, but he wrote "cf. Nazi Germany" next to the Corinthians warning the Lacedaemonians about the Athenian national character:
"Thus they toil on in trouble and danger all the days of their life... to them laborious occupation is less of a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life. To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others." [1.70]