"Socrates and friends request the pleasure of your company. RSVP and please bring two bottles."

Imagine that kind of time-travelling invitation fell onto your doormat. Would you leap at it, or make a polite, "Thanks, but no, thanks" kind of reply?

"Yes please", answer Oliver Taplin and MM McCabe.

"I'm washing my hair that night", say Mary Beard and Tom Holland.

Socrates himself may never have put pen to paper, but we know quite a lot about his conversational, dinner-party style from Plato's accounts of it in Dialogues. "Monologues", for Beard, would be a better term:

"The usual pattern goes something like this. Enter Socrates, posing some pretentious question, which usually boils down to 'What is Good?' One of his long-suffering friends provides a perfectly reasonable, cogent and worldly answer. This is the cue for the tiresome guru to embark on a long homily, until eventually, drummed into submission and too tired to resist, the friend concedes complete defeat. Socrates is left smugly holding the floor, his preposterous ideas that Good is something to do with the soul still intact."

Philosophical golden age in Ancient Athens? Blokeish and narcissistic? You decide. Either way, the industrial quantities of alcohol inevitably consumed might sweeten the pill.

Put your thoughts in the comment box below. The best will be used as ammunition for the debate.

Buy tickets for the TLS debate at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival, Chaired by TLS Editor Peter Stothard.
April 1st at 8pm, Newman Rooms, St Aldate's. Tickets £7.50.

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