Bettany Hughes: 'The Hemlock Cup' on the Life of Socrates

This is genuinely a moment of truth because I've just come into my publishers and I've been given this which is the first ever copy of “The Hemlock Cup”, the book that I've written about Socrates that has taken me 10 years to research and write. So I almost can't bear to look at it in case there's a mistake in there or some sort of printing error that we haven't noticed! But so far, it's looking good. It's very lovely to see all the pictures in here.

There's a lot of detail in here of journeys that I made to go to research Socrates' life. I thought it was a terrible shame that he seemed such a remote figure to people, this rather aloof philosopher who just thought grand thoughts, and of course he was really a man of the world. He lived very full bloodedly in fifth century Athens; he travelled right across the Eastern Mediterranean and so to try to piece together the story of his life, I've made those journeys too, so I followed in his footsteps everywhere. I've been to the battlegrounds he fought upon, I've gone to the back streets of Athens where he lay and drank and ate and joked with his friends. I've gone down to the religious sanctuaries in the South of Greece where he's said to have gone to visit the great festivals and indulged his thoughts. And where really he was thought to have started his ideas of trying to grapple with what it was to be human.

So it's a very physical book – someone said to me that I'm putting the physical back into the metaphysical – but I think you've got to do that, really, because he is such an important man.

In the West, we think the way we do because Socrates thought the way he did. And in the East too, he was immensely influential. I just happened to have turned onto this page here. This is an early 13th century miniature which shows Socrates speaking to two of his students. He was incredibly important to the development of thought in Islam too.

This is a chapter where I describe Socrates' birth, and his entry into the world.

As is often the way with great men from history, we know precise and intimate details of their death, and very little about their birth. What we do know is that Socrates was born in the long shadow of the Acropolis – or to be more accurate, with the proud, 230-foot-high rock at eye level. He was the son of Sophroniscus and Phaenarete, a man-child of the tribe of Antiochis and of the deme-district of Alopeke. South-east of the city centre, Alopeke sits snug and high on the slopes of the foothills of Mount Hymettos.

The Acropolis, with its crusting of world-class buildings, is unavoidable today. Its profile, dominated by the Parthenon, has become an old friend; the Parthenon itself has come to represent, across the globe, a certain kind of civilisation. Of course Socrates' view would not have been ours; the classical Parthenon was not yet dreamed of; Socrates' Athens was innocent of the bold beauty to come. Instead he would have woken each morning to the silhouette of war-ruins – the Archaic Parthenon temple a jagged gash, toppled and burned by Persian battering-rams, Persian torches, Persian swords. But already there were whisperings that a phoenix would somehow rise from the ashes.

So he is an essential man for our times. He spoke freely in a city that was supposed to have vaunted the importance of freedom of speech, and yet because he spoke freely, because he spoke his mind, he was poisoned with Hemlock poison and died at the age of 70. So he was an extraordinary man and I just really hope that I've done him justice in this book.