Bettany Hughes on Socrates, 'The Hemlock Cup', at 5x15

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Bettany Hughes on Socrates, 'The Hemlock Cup', at 5x15

16 May 2011

Speakers: Bettany Hughes

“Socrates would have loved this evening” Bettany Hughes tells us. He would have enjoyed the drink, the beauty, the talking – especially the talking. And therein lies the challenge of chronicling the life of the great man: he chose to speak rather than write, as words, he found, “always need their father to protect them”. As a fellow author pointed out to her Socrates was the ‘ring doughnut’ of subjects, so much delicious information but in the centre just a vacuum of information.

So why did Hughes take on the monumental task? The simple answer is because she believes he is an extraordinary man. And to explain to us why she takes us back to fifth century Athens, “a world with one foot in the stone age and one foot in modernity”, the world in which Socrates lived, and one which bore witness to the birth of society as we know it today, from “extraordinary materialism” to the perpetual grapples with democracy.

But Socrates was not like the other men of his age, he had the foresight to question Athenian society, “what was life worth living for?”, “was this really the good life?”. These questions that are at the heart of the zeitgeist today, did not exist at the time, indeed Hughes suggests he “spoke not of his world, but our own”. In an era when nobody else realised the intellectual challenges the “Greek Miracle” would create, and continue to present, Socrates posed questions that remain unanswered to this day. That, Hughes concludes is his brilliance, and her reason for taking on the ‘ring doughnut’