Aristophanes would have had a field day with Greta Thunberg

Last week Athenian free speech was contrasted with a demand from some dons at Buckingham University to ban a ‘heterodox’ Social Science Centre questioning woke ‘culture’. The Centre should stage an Aristophanic comedy on the subject.

In the 5th century bc Athens was a hotbed of controversial ideas being taught, for money, by people called ‘sophists’ (lit. ‘experts, teachers’) about the gods, the nature of the universe, how to win political arguments and so on. Socrates was different: an ugly man with crab-like bulging eyes, bare-footed, badly dressed, never washed, with no interest in money, who spent his time in the marketplace, claiming to know nothing and mixing with anyone wishing to debate, he made fools of the pretentious and argued that nothing was more important than being good – but how then would one define ‘goodness’?