Socrates backs May

SIR – It is unlikely that, as Denis Macshane suggests (Letters, September 30), Socrates said he was a citizen of the world. The claim, as Whitehall’s classicists will have known, is made by Plutarch, a late and cosmopolitan author doubtless foisting his own beliefs on to Socrates.

The real Socrates fought in battle for Athens three times, said that he owed everything to the city that had brought him up, and when it condemned him to death refused to evade the sentence by going into exile elsewhere.

He would have agreed with Theresa May that someone claiming to be a citizen of the world was in fact a citizen of nowhere. David J Critchley

Winslow, Buckinghamshire