Treason to Greek

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Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), Europe without Baedeker, rev. ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), p. 348 (from Homecoming; Final Reflections, describing a visit to Norman Kemp Smith in Edinburgh):

I remember one man especially, who wanted to talk about nothing but Greek. He came from the country and had had few "advantages," but had made himself a formidable scholar. He now lived retired and alone, in shabby high-ceilinged rooms, and devoted himself to Plato. I had met C.M. Bowra in London and introduced his name, but Kemp Smith's friend was positively shocked at Bowra's recent interest in Russian, as if it were a treason to Greek, and said sharply that the understanding of a single Greek writer like Plato made such demands on the reader that one's whole life was not enough to exhaust him.