The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life by Bettany Hughes

(Knopf, $35)

“Despite his insistence on the examined life,” Socrates has never been a figure the rest of us have known well, said Walter Isaacson in The New York Times. Western philosophy’s first great thinker never wrote anything, so our knowledge of him comes mostly from two acolytes and a parodist—“each of whom had his own agenda.” Though “academic purists may chafe” at the “imaginative leaps” historian Bettany Hughes makes in order to help us see the man himself, she’s thoroughly succeeded in her ambition. By the end of her 500-page book, “we can almost see and smell the man, with all of his quirks and foibles and questioning brilliance.”

Hughes’s Socrates is “a towering yet intensely human figure,” said Steve Donoghue in The Washington Post. Born in 469 B.C., he was a soldier into his 40s, serving Athens valiantly in the Peloponnesian War before creating a life built around ideas. Hanging out in Athens’s agora, or marketplace, he fashioned himself as a teacher and dedicated his life to the search for “the good.” His insistence, as we might say, that “the enemy is always within” must have been “extremely annoying” to his fellow Athenians at a time when their rivals from Sparta were burning down warehouses and otherwise terrorizing the very market Socrates haunted. Hughes is at her best helping us understand why this pest eventually would be sentenced to death for supposedly corrupting the city’s youth and “inventing false gods.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Hughes’s Athens isn’t at all the “fair, ordered society” we tend to conjure in our imaginations, said Troy Jollimore in BarnesandNobleReview.com. The city Socrates lived and died for was instead a place where “political coups, internecine strife, and pointless foreign wars” were common. Socrates’ trial, in which a jury of 500 fellow citizens listened to evidence and then sentenced him to die “for what were essentially thought crimes,” remains a black stain on the history of democracy. It isn’t a story we like hearing, but we’re lucky Hughes has restaged it in such a

“satisfyingly vivid” new way.