The Hemlock Cup

"In this book, Bettany Hughes does hardest job of all: recreating 5th century Athens. It’s similar to the late Republic in that we’ve heard of all the people who were there—Socrates, Plato, Aristophanes, the tragedians, Pericles. But can we actually paint a picture of what Athens was like on a day-to-day level? Even when you go to Athens now, you don’t really get a sense of how small a place it would have been, how intimate, how everyone would have known each other—of day-to-day life. What was the life of women, the life of slaves likes? When Socrates leaves his house to go and lecture people in the agora, how far is his journey? What would he go past, what would he have for breakfast? The book just allows you to understand the context really nicely. When I went up to university, I had it in the back of my mind that I couldn’t wait to ‘read some Socrates.’ Fortunately I didn’t say it out loud because obviously we don’t have any. We know so much about this man and we want to know so much about this man who never wrote anything down. All we have is Plato and a few other texts. There’s something quite quixotic about trying to find out about Athens. It isn’t really there, but it’s a worthwhile quest. Yes, there’s a lot out there and there’s more work being done, particularly in the streets around the Acropolis. For years your mind just got drawn to the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the agora. Now there are more studies being done of the slums, of what it would have been like at Piraeus, at the city walls. She’s building on a lot of recent scholarship, but she’s the first to admit that it’s not an easy subject. We’re always going to have holes there but we have to try to fill in those gaps as best we can—which is what classics is about, really. My son really enjoyed The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson. Deeply engaging book— Pete Hall It is important to understand how mythology shaped the classical world and I would add this great read — Peter Jackson Great list, but from personal experience it was the Classics-infused fiction of The Secret History that got me emotionally attached to Classics— Anthony Sanders"

"I know it sounds rather odd, but it does. I went to the Hay Festival and I heard Bettany Hughes speak on this and then I read her book. It is very detailed about Socrates’s life and where he grew up, and is a very practical book in that it discusses the world around him rather than his philosophy. The nub of the book is all around his death with the hemlock cup and his criticism of the emerging democracy of the day. Socrates basically was saying he wasn’t sure that the democracy that they were trying to sell to us was really the way forward. What was really interesting about it was that he wasn’t worried so much about democracy itself but about the way they were doing it. They were creating huge amounts of wealth in a single place and forcing everyone to become a democracy. It made me think that maybe Socrates was one of the first environmentalists when he began to see that greed wasn’t the best way forward. Although it was sold under the guise of a democracy, using up lots of resources and gathering lots of wealth from different places wasn’t actually making Athenians any happier. And they ended up putting up huge walls to protect themselves and prevent other people from coming to steal back their wealth. It really is interesting to go back in time and look at alternative societies and democracies and where they succeeded and failed. Yes. I know it is not as direct as my other choices but it is important to me. We talk about growth but what we don’t talk about is the shrinking of the environment that we use to increase that growth. Our use of high-carbon energy is the main problem. The downturn has had the welcome effect – if you can put it like that – of reducing the total amount of energy we are using, but we continue to use a lot of fossil fuel-based energy. People go around saying lots of small actions don’t make a difference, but actually they do. Many of us are beginning to feel the pinch when it comes to petrol but we still manage to make a lot of trips. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Another important area is our homes. We all want to be warm and have light and many of us want to watch TV. All of those things use energy. One way to help with that is, first of all, to understand just how much energy we are using. Everyone can get a hand-held meter, connect it in your home and begin to see how much energy you use. Insulation is another key area. We have quite a lot of windows in our home. I have just put double-glazing in two of them and I am going to slowly save up and work through the whole house, because it makes a huge difference. You don’t have to do it all at once but you can do it slowly over time. Put curtains over doors to reduce draughts and look at the insulation in your roof. Most people don’t have enough insulation in their roof. Even if you already put one layer down, you should actually put two or even three layers down. These are very simple things you can do. It takes time and money, but all of those things will in the long term save people money and improve their impact on the environment."