The original philosopher

As The Hemlock Cup is released in paperback, Daisy Dunn engages in some Socratic Dialogue with its author, historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes

I get the impression from your book that Socrates must have been quite aware of his own eccentricity, or oddness.  Do you think he knew he was doomed from the start?

In a way that’s a level of knowledge of Socrates I don’t think I could have, even having studied him for ten years. Our problem is we don’t have any of his words, so it’s a case of jigsaw-puzzling. I think what is certain, from all accounts, is that he doesn’t seem to have cared about the fact he was different from the run of the mill heroic, democratic Athenian.  And he didn’t seem to change in order to adapt to that, which is interesting, because in the classical world at this time there is a way of being – a way of behaving  – it’s an extremely public world.