Since comedians these days seem to be the authorities on all matters spiritual and temporal (puts on funny voice, knife-crime ends), who better than the comic playwright Aristophanes to show us how, despite our feckless MPs, we can leave the EU?
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James Delingpole
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In 425 bc Athens had for six years been locked in a grinding war against Sparta. Because Pericles had persuaded the assembly not to take on Sparta by land, the people of Attica (Athens’s territory) had abandoned their farms and crops to the enemy and withdrawn inside Athens’s long walls, where a dreadful plague had killed about a quarter of them (including Pericles).
In the comic festival of that year, Aristophanes began his Men from Akharnai (an area in the front line of Spartan crop devastation) with a farmer, Dikaiopolis (‘Honest Citizen’), waiting for the assembly to begin, and lamenting the fact that no one seemed the slightest bit interested in making peace.
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