Socrates was said by his contemporaries to be astonishingly ugly. Plato, his student, compared him to a Silenus – grotesque on the outside but containing gods within. It’s a fitting image for a man who had little interest in appearances. Despite being the foundational figure of Western civilisation, he never wrote a word. Everything we know comes largely through Plato, who wrote him into his dialogues, thus preserving his method – what we now call the Socratic method.

Socrates wandered Athens asking questions and challenging assumptions in a way that exposed how the moral and intellectual fashions of the day so often get mistaken for wisdom. This habit earned him the name “the gadfly of Athens” and, eventually, a death sentence for “impiety” and “corrupting the youth” – a polite way of saying he embarrassed and humiliated the powerful with his relentless probing.

Power has always resented being interrogated. It’s as true today as it ever was, and always will be. Socrates matters because his method is about puncturing fashionable delusions and moral vanity in search of what’s true – even when the truth is uncomfortable and inconvenient. Especially then. It remains a test of whether a society corrects itself through argument and dissent or moves to silence those who expose its pretensions.