David Butterfield

speaker

739 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 20 May

David Butterfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Anyone could stand up in that assembly.

If they had something to say, they would be heard out and people could act on it or reject it as they saw it.

Everyone had the right to speak among the male citizens.

Then there was paresia, which is the freedom to say whatever you want.

And this wasn't, you know, standing on awkward eggshells about this or that particular issue.

It was the freedom to be as offensive and as extreme in your criticism of your fellow people as you wish.

And on the stage, especially in comedy, we see full-blown heresia.

So the kind of people being ostracized were not those saying awkward things or things that were offensive.

Instead, they were people whom the Athenian demos felt were on the trajectory that was going to cause Athens problems.

So maybe they were gathering power to such a degree that they might attempt a tyrannical coup and overthrow democracy.

Or maybe they were showing an allegiance to Persia or to Sparta, which was not in Athens' interest, and they just needed to be out of the system.

So please don't get me wrong, ostracism was not used to shut down free speech or cancel people in the way one might think it was.

On the contrary, it was political dangers rather than intellectual challenges.

Socrates is a classic case in point.

Socrates spends his whole life doing nothing more than asking awkward questions of people who should know better.

He ended up being killed for that, ultimately.

But not ostracized.

He stayed in Athens.

David, let me try and have a go at the ancient Greeks from a different perspective.

I mean, the system you're describing sounds pretty wild.

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