Kenneth John Freeman

Kenneth John Freeman was a young Cambridge classical scholar whose dissertation, Schools of Hellas: An Essay on the Practice and Theory of Ancient Greek Education from 600 to 300 B.C., was published posthumously in 1907 (edited by M. J. Rendall, with a preface by A. W. Verrall). On page 74 he paraphrased the standard ancient grumbles about badly-behaved youth to give readers the flavour of the era. He never presented the lines as a quotation — and certainly not as the words of Socrates. Decades of newspapers turned his summary into a fake ‘Socrates said’ quotation.