socrates

Much controversy continues over Socrates's attitude towards democracy. I.F. Stone, embarrassed that the first democracy should have killed a man for exercising freedom of speech and freedom of religion, attempted to justify this by going after Socrates as an enemy of democracy (The Trial of Socrates); but since Stone was busy defending Josef Stalin back in the Thirties, and even wrote a book in 1952, the Hidden History of the Korean War, defending the communist …

…ike the Thesmophoria. Aristophanes exploits this kind of thing for its comic possibilities (as he does in Lysistrata, where the women of Athens go on a sex strike until the men agree to end the war with Sparta), but such themes also have a serious side, i.e. the implied judgment that Athenian men have so botched political affairs that it is time for the women to put in their two cents