There was more freedom of speech 2,500 years ago than in Britain today

In recent years successive governments have sought to close down free speech. If we are to avoid the enslavement of our thoughts, it’s time to heed the wisdom of the ancients, says Melanie McDonagh

- Melanie McDonagh

When it comes to the question of free speech, the Greeks said it best. “Parrhesia” or “uninhibited speech” means to speak freely or frankly. Euripides the dramatist, below, depicts Athens as a place where free males can speak freely on public affairs. In his play The Phoenician Women he says: “This is slavery: not to speak one’s thought.”

This is the most fundamental aspect of the question of free speech: it is freedom of thought. And that entails the freedom literally to speak our mind.

In the ancient world of Athens and later, republican Rome, there were certainly curbs on some aspects of speech — slander, for instance — but for free citizens, the freedom to take part in public debate was a crucial aspect of liberty. Conversely, to be denied that right was, as Euripides put it, slavery.

For much of British history, there have been restrictions on the free expression of opinion, chiefly in respect of religion. Henry VIII imposed restrictions on printing in 1538, whereby books had to be approved in advance of publication by the Privy Council to suppress dissent against his own ideological project, the English Reformation.

John Milton’s Areopagitica, published in 1644, argued against that control and some of his arguments haven't been improved on since. He opposed the 1643 Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing, whereby Parliament required authors to have a licence for their work to be published.

Milton, obviously, was not a libertarian; he was not in favour of publishing libellous or blasphemous books. But his defence of authors should give us pause: “As good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.”