Bettany Hughes (London, Lion Television): I've just embarked on writing a book about Socrates, and am tussling with an age old paradox: here is a state - Athens - that so fetishises freedom of speech it names one of its warships parrhessi, and yet convicts a wise old man of moral corruption because he speaks his mind freely. How much internal criticism can a democracy take?
There couldn't be a more useful sounding board to explore our own troubles with liberty, consensus and freedom to offend. And so I managed to persuade TV commissioners that we should make a film about the Athenian Golden Age: recognising that Attica has a mass of new archaeological evidence to offer (thanks to the Olympics building-binge), the time seemed ripe.
The hope was to fill out the picture a little - the working title of the film was in fact Hidden Athens. This would be a project that would aim to uncover aspects of the 5th century BC that history-makers have chosen to ignore. The ambition would be to look beyond the rhetoric and speech-writing (all very accomplished, all very persuasive) to ascertain the Realpolitik of the time. Not a crass exercise in revisionism, but a way of adding nuance to our memories of ‘violet-crowned' Athens. To remember that her epithets were also ‘sleek/oily' and ‘busy-body.' To interrogate its democratic development in order to know it better.
And so after a year of development, in two films we chart the progression of democracy from 507/8 BC, to the death of Socrates in 399BC. We visit places you might not expect; the forts on overseas territories that Athens built to protect their corn-supply in an ever-expanding democratic empire, the niches in the rock of Aphrodite where citizens tried to evoke the spirit of ‘Harmonia' for their fragile city-state.
A piece of script that sadly never made the final cut talks about our need to cherish our democratic rights and responsibilities a little more. The Greeks called those who preferred a private to a publicly-orientated life ‘idiotes.' Forget the inconvenient truth of the slaves, prisoners of war, ‘sub-standard' humans (Athenian women) - the Athenians did achieve something extra-ordinary: a moment in time where each adult male citizen was a politician - where all knew what it was to rule, and be ruled in turn.
Athens: The Truth About Democracy is on Channel 4 at 8.00pm on Saturday July 21 and Saturday July 28.
