sentences:  On obtaining another scholarship to King's College, Cambridge he came under the influence of the pre-Socratics specialist John Raven.He spent a year in Athens (1954–1955) where, apart from learning modern Greek, he also mastered the bouzouki.A keen interest in anthropology informed his reading of ancient Greek philosophy, and his doctoral studies, conducted under the supervision of Geoffrey Kirk, focused on patterns of polarity and analogy in Greek thought, a thesis which, revised, was eventually published in 1966.