The Greeks wouldn’t have accepted Cambridge’s ‘respect’ policy either

Professor Toope, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge university, had proposed a motion ordering all members of the university to ‘respect’ each other, or else.

But significant numbers of members argued strongly against it, and rightly so: ‘respect’ is an emotional term implying deferential regard or special concern or solicitude for someone, a response more in line with the world of counselling and social welfare than with rigorous academic debate. Further, if ‘respect’ became justiciable because an academic appealed against dismissal from his job on that account, where would that end?

Thankfully Professor Toope failed, as history suggests he should have. On the ancients’ intellectual agenda, respect had to be earned. Rival Greek thinkers on matters medical, scientific and philosophical constantly kicked lumps out of each other. The philosopher Heraclitus said: ‘Much learning does not teach intelligence. If it did, it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras.’ Laertius wrote that Epicurus, inventor of epicureanism, ‘used to call Nausiphanes a jellyfish who was illiterate, a cheat and a whore, Plato a sucker-up to tyrants, Aristotle a waster who, after he spent his inheritance, became a mercenary and drug-dealer’.