A three-part BBC series. Historian Bettany Hughes travels to India, Greece and China on the trail of three giants of ancient philosophy - Buddha, Socrates and Confucius. All three philosophers lived between the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, during a period of unprecedented and intense intellectual development.Trailblazers whose radical ideas signalled a key change in human consciousness, each embodied the shift from a reliance on the supernatural, as the sole way to explain humankind’s place in the cosmos, to one where rational argument and logical reasoning offered new, exciting possibilities.Drawing on archaeology and expert opinion, Bettany Hughes follows in the footsteps of these great figures, in her quest to unpack their philosophy in the context of their age. She reveals how, even though their ideas came about two and a half thousand years ago, their thinking still shapes, and continues to provide solutions to, our own lives.

Genius of the Ancient World:Episode 2- Socrates | (59:13 min; 2015; English)

In the second Episode, Bettany Hughes investigates the revolutionary ideas of Socrates. Socrates was born in Athens during a creative, yet extremely tumultuous period of Greek history.Athens had given birth to democracy, and become a hotbed of new philosophical ideas. Socrates would become, arguably, it’s most vocal and charismatic thinker.He set about scrutinizing, and working through, the key moral issues of his day. His technique, a systematic form of question and answer 'the Socratic method', was delivered with such a dazzling irony, that he became a celebrity in his day.Yet, by challenging tradition and convention, he also made enemies. Eventually he was put on trial, found guilty, and sentenced to drink deadly hemlock.