Piling Pelion on Ossa

Bettany Hughes is the Nigella Lawson of the classical world — all tumbling raven curls and smoky-voiced seduction, as she takes telly viewers through the greatest hits of the olden days; recent programmes have covered the Spartans, Athens and the Bible.

Bettany Hughes is the Nigella Lawson of the classical world — all tumbling raven curls and smoky-voiced seduction, as she takes telly viewers through the greatest hits of the olden days; recent programmes have covered the Spartans, Athens and the Bible. She’s just been on Radio 4 talking about Britain under the Romans. She’s no slouch on the academic side, either: a scholar at Oxford and a research fellow at King’s College, London, she got rave reviews for her first book on Helen of Troy.

And she’s certainly done her scholarly homework on her latest greatest hit —Socrates — taking in the primary texts in the original language, and a good chunk of the secondary ones. It’s a clever enough idea, too: explain fifth-century Athens, the principal city of ancient Greece, in its golden age, through the life of the philosopher; in particular, through his 399 BC trial for insulting the gods and corrupting the young, and his suicide with a cup of hemlock.

Socrates, born in around 469 BC, witnessed or took part in many of the events that lodged Greek civilisation in the western mind as the bedrock of democracy, architecture and tragic and comic drama. He grew up as Pericles came to power, as the Parthenon was constructed, and as the first Peloponnesian War began. Unlike most modern philosophers, Socrates got out of his garret quite a bit, serving in the Athenian siege of Potidea in 432 BC and at the battle of Amphipolis in 422 BC.