Ever since modern people began to spread from Africa,
our biggest battles had been with the forces of nature.
But, as we created the first civilisations,
we found we faced a sharper threat...
CHANTING
...human nature.
SHOUTING
3,000 years ago,
the world was being churned and pulled apart
in the first great age of empire.
This was a time of vicious civil wars,
all the way from China, through India, to the Mediterranean.
And you'd think that all this violence
would push the human story back.
The awkward truth is that all the violence in fact drove the human story forward.
This is a period of extraordinary new thinking
on everything from democracy to God,
from some of the greatest minds we've ever come across.
War is always terrible.
But here, in a way, is the case for war.
SHOUTING
The first empires spread
a pall of smoke and a stench of death.
From their grand palaces, kings and emperors
assumed that to be great was to conquer, burn and enslave.
And yet, from this blood-soaked soil,
new ideas about how to rule and how to live would flower.
The palace of Nineveh in what is now Iraq.
So massive, it was known as the palace without rival,
a stony monument to the power and determination
of one of the earliest great empire builders -
Sennacherib, king of the Assyrians.
Underneath the eyeliner, a tiger of a man.
Sennacherib was the original, the prototype,
for the empire-building maniac.
With an army better than anyone else's,
he had around 200,000 battle-hardened regular troops.
And he knew how to use them.
In 701 BC, the Assyrians had the world's most potent empire.
And then, ridiculously, the King of Judah dared to rebel.
Retribution came like a thunderbolt.
The city of Lachish was about to find itself
on the wrong end of the most terrifying military machine of the age.
The first thing Sennacherib did
was to get his army to build a massive siege ramp
up against the city walls.
25,000 tonnes of earth and stone.
A big lump, and it's still there.
Lachish, on the other hand...isn't.
Today, we talk about "total war" and "shock and awe".
Well, invented by the Assyrians.
The Bible calls them "a nation grim of face, like a vulture in flight...
"ruthless towards the old...
"...pitiless towards the young."
What happened if you fought back?
Well, captives were flayed alive.
Their leaders had their heads displayed on stakes,
and anyone who survived was deported and enslaved.
SCREAMING
Anything left behind was torched.
1,500 men, women and children died at Lachish.
Archaeologists have found their remains in a mass grave.
It's been estimated that the Assyrians deported
more than four million people
during three centuries of dominance -
slave labour to build monuments to the glory of their captors.
You may ask how we know about all of this.
Well, the truth is that Assyrian leaders boasted about it
on clay tablets, and had huge friezes,
in effect propaganda pictures,
made of their victories.
The palace walls of Nineveh displayed
this gruesome catalogue of brutality.
The flayings.
The impalings.
The deportations.
What kind of civilisation chooses this as its wallpaper?
But the ruthless warmongers have left little trace on the world,
and the biggest legacy of this time
was one the Assyrians were barely aware of.
Sennacherib had conquered most of the world he knew about.
But he could never have dreamed
that the great gift of the Assyrian age to humanity
had nothing to do with his terror tactics or his glittering palaces.
It was the scratchings of a group of sailors and tradesmen
that he had terrorised and forced out over the seas.
They were a seafaring people.
The Greeks called them Phoenicians,
living on the coast of today's Lebanon and Syria.
Being merchants, they tried to buy off the Assyrian invaders.
They sailed the length of the Mediterranean
to trade silver and other gifts which they then offered as tribute.
And as they sailed, these traders carried
something remarkable with them.
The Phoenicians' great export was something
that surrounds us all today -
the alphabet.
Before then, writing was basically
lots of simplified little pictures of things.
So you might have a picture of a fish.
But it didn't tell you how to say "fish".
What the Phoenicians did was,
they started to use little symbols for sounds.
And then you put the sounds together
and you can say them back and you've got words.
It's an incredibly useful, revolutionary breakthrough.
This is part of the Phoenician alphabet.
Aleph,
beth,
gimel...
daleth...
It's beginning to look rather familiar, isn't it?
Just imagine how useful this is going to be to a trading people,
bouncing around the coast of the Mediterranean,
doing deals with peoples with many different languages
and having to note those deals down.
The Phoenicians simply found the alphabet a very useful tool.
And so, since then, have many of the rest of us.
The alphabet spread quickly.
The Greeks adapted it with vowel sounds.
And then, later on, the Romans - it forms the basis of Latin.
The Hebrews used a version for their Bible.
In fact, it's thought that
all today's Western alphabets spread from here.
Other cultures left behind palaces or pyramids.
The Phoenicians left something far more impressive.
Within 100 years of Sennacherib's rampage through Judah,
the Assyrians were a spent force...
making way for the next new empire, that of the Persians.
And their most famous ruler wasn't exactly a wallflower either.
"I am Cyrus. Great king, mighty king.
"King of the globe.
"King of the four quarters of the Earth."
We have heard this kind of thing before in world history.
We'll hear a lot of it again.
But what does make Cyrus the Great different and possibly even great
is that unlike any previous ruler,
he listened to the people he conquered,
he was open to cultural and religious influences.
And if that makes him sound like an early liberal, think again,
because before the listening came the old business
of the conquering and the slaughtering.
In 547 BC, the mighty Cyrus turned his attention
to one of the wealthiest little kingdoms in the world.
These are the ruins of Sardis,
the capital of Lydia, in what is now Turkey.
The Persians were hitting back against a troublesome rival
but they were also following the money
because the Lydians were rich.
And when the invaders came knocking,
they knew exactly who they were looking for...
...Croesus, the king of Lydia.
YELLING
He may have been the richest man in the world
but now, as he tried to hide with his son,
his great wealth was putting his life in danger.
DOORS THUDDING
And that great wealth came from right here.
This doesn't look much like a significant site
in the history of the world economy, but it is.
This is the river bed of the Pactolus, which in ancient times
was a stream running with very rich gold and silver deposits,
which the Lydians learned to refine
and turn into reliable, valuable coins
which circulated all around this part of Asia.
There was gold in the hills up there and this is why, even today,
when we're talking about somebody who's loaded,
we say, "He's rich as Croesus."
Croesus's gold coins were stamped with symbols of power and strength -
the lion and the bull.
Now, other cultures had had currencies before.
They'd had bronze, or silver, or even rare seashells.
But what the Lydians did for the first time
was produce gold coins of a reliable weight and purity.
Even today when people are frightened
about the banks and governments,
they go to gold.
Well, it started here.
CLATTERING AND THUDDING
SCREAMS
The fate of King Croesus now lay at the mercy of the Persian leader -
Cyrus.
Lessons from history -
if a Persian king invites you to a barbecue,
it's probably wise to say no.
Solon! Solon!
Croesus called on the god Apollo to save him.
COUGHS
Aargh! Apollon...!
THUNDERCLAP
And he sent down a shower of rain to douse the flames.
LAUGHS
Well, maybe, maybe not.
Some of what we know about Cyrus and Croesus, we think we know
because of the writings of the great Greek historian Herodotus.
LAUGHS
The trouble is that he is not an entirely reliable witness.
Apart from being known as "the father of history",
Herodotus is also sometimes called "the father of lies".
He certainly had that fatal journalistic weakness
for a great story.
According to Herodotus,
the Persian king asked his prisoner why he'd fought him.
Croesus, typically, blamed the gods.
"Mmm," thought Cyrus, "bad advice?"
"Well," said Croesus,
"in peace, sons bury their fathers.
"But in wartime, fathers bury their sons."
SPEAKS IN ANCIENT GREEK
"Mm, fair point,"
thought Cyrus. "Rather well put."
And so he let Croesus off the hook
and appointed him as his adviser instead.
CHUCKLING
But it wasn't just wise advice and mottos that Cyrus got from Croesus.
The Persians also picked up the Lydians' great invention -
reliable, effective currency.
Coins begin to spread around a large area at this time
because of the Persian Empire.
Currency becomes current because of war.
Enriched with the gold from Croesus,
Cyrus carried on his rampage across the Middle East.
And eight years later, he conquered the great city of Babylon.
There, the Hebrews of Jerusalem had been exiled and enslaved.
"Weeping by the waters of Babylon," says the Bible,
and Cyrus set them free, sending them home.
Cyrus even paid for the rebuilding of their temple in Jerusalem.
The Wailing Wall is part of it,
and remains the most sacred Jewish site to this day.
Through these acts of religious tolerance,
the Persian king became the only Gentile ever
to be honoured with the title messiah.
Like the Assyrians, like every great ruler before him,
Cyrus had hacked and slaughtered his way to power.
This period of history is a long catalogue of butchery and burning.
But, out of it comes the alphabet, the first standardised currency
and the birth of one of the world's great religions.
Free and back in Jerusalem, the Jewish faith really developed.
And one big idea set them apart
from most other religious groups at the time.
They believed in one god.
The great discovery, or invention, of the Jews was monotheism -
the belief in one god only.
And in a world of so many billions of Christians and Muslims,
it might seem an obvious idea,
but in the ancient world, it was truly odd.
Then, wherever you looked around the world,
there were huge numbers of gods -
gods on mountains, gods in rivers and forests, father gods,
mother gods, child gods.
So how was it that this people
came up with something so radical and so different?
There had been one-god cults and faiths before in world history,
but the Jewish experience of exile would produce a much stronger story.
And that's partly because they could write it all down
using one of those wonderful, flexible, new-fangled alphabets.
In the Book of Isaiah, God says,
"...there is no other god but me.
"No god was formed before me, nor will be after me."
Just one god.
The Hebrews had never said it as loudly and clearly before.
Monotheism is one of the most powerful ideas in world history.
And without war and exile, it might never have happened.
BELL RESOUNDS
CHANTING
In India, a similar time of warfare and turmoil
was also making people question
and explore the meaning of life.
And here, the search for an answer was to lead
to a creed of compassion, tolerance and non-violence.
HORNS BEEPING
In the 5th century BC,
India was going through a period of massive social change.
The new technology was iron, which made ploughing much more effective.
Agriculture was spreading.
The ancient forests were being torn down.
Towns and even cities were appearing.
And everywhere there were vicious little wars.
So it's not surprising that at a time of such social shaking,
people are asking themselves, "Isn't there something more?"
There is a hunger for new ideas.
Life in India was shaped by the caste system -
a fixed hierarchy of classes.
At the top were rulers like Siddhartha Gautama.
His family were wealthy clan leaders in the foothills of the Himalayas.
He lived a remarkably easy life for the time -
cut off from the suffering and the turmoil outside.
A loving wife, a newborn boy -
what more could any man ask for?
By his late twenties, Siddhartha was becoming frustrated.
He became sickened by his easy life,
reflecting that even his comparative wealth
wouldn't stop him from suffering, growing old and sick.
And so he began to ask the fundamental questions.
Life, what is it for? What is it about?
INSECTS CHIRRUP
After much anguish, Siddhartha abandoned his family
and his life of privilege
and went in search of an answer to the questions that haunted him.
EERIE MUSIC AND LAUGHTER
In the streets outside, he came face to face
with poverty, pain and illness.
For six years, he wandered through the forests of northern India.
This was a time of wandering prophets,
and on his travels he came across holy men,
but they didn't have the answers he was looking for.
He tried almost suicidal fasting.
That didn't work either.
Eventually, he concluded that to discover wisdom,
compassion and insight,
he needed to meditate about the meaning of life.
One day, he came upon a bodhi tree -
it's a kind of big fig tree -
and he settled himself down
and vowed to remain more or less literally rooted here
until his concentration and his focus
allowed him to break open the great secret that he was searching for.
Slowly, Siddhartha was able to let go of the world's distractions.
THUNDERCLAP
Hour by hour,
day by day,
his mind became clearer.
GASPS
EXHALES
BREATHES DEEPLY
At last, he reached a state of radiant inner peace -
spiritual liberation...
...enlightenment.
BIRDSONG
Tradition says that Siddhartha sat under his bodhi tree
for 49 days and 49 nights,
right here.
And this tree is said to be a cutting
of a cutting of the original tree.
So a kind of grandson of Siddhartha's tree.
Siddhartha himself became known as The Buddha -
"the awakened one".
A temple was built next to the tree where he had sat and meditated.
Pilgrims come here to Bodh Gaya from all over the world.
It's the nearest thing that Buddhism has to a Jerusalem or Rome or Mecca.
But it's small and quiet and very little developed.
THEY CHANT
For the rest of his life, the Buddha travelled and taught.
"But how," you may ask, "can we know anything
"about the life or the words of someone who lived so far back,
"before there were books in India?"
Well, the group chanting of stories and sayings -
so that everybody remembers the same words together -
is partly a way of trying to stop things being distorted or forgotten.
This is the power of oral history.
The Buddha was one of the first,
great radical thinkers in world history.
At a time of shaking social change and civil war,
he said, "Turn inward."
When all of what we call history
is about technology and violence thrusting forward in one direction,
he is saying, "No, no, no! Walk the other way."
And his version of enlightenment
contained no hierarchy, no aggression,
it was open to everybody - from kings to paupers.
Compared to other creeds,
this was a remarkably unpolitical reply
to an unfair and painful world.
But in a corner of Europe,
at around the same time, politics became central,
as another people asked, "How shall we live together?"
In Greece, one of the original experiments in Western civilisation
was about to begin.
It was led, not by a king or a prophet,
but by the ordinary, dusty citizens of the city state of Athens...
who'd had enough of the tyrant of the day.
And so they did something extraordinary and new.
They threw him out.
The world's first democratic revolution started here
at the Acropolis in Athens.
The people massed in this area and refused to leave
until the tyrant was sent off into exile.
And after he'd gone, remarkable reforms followed.
All male citizens had complete freedom of speech in public
and they could vote on almost everything.
It didn't matter how rich or poor you were,
your vote counted just the same.
The Greeks had two words -
"demos", people and "kratos" for power or rule.
Demos kratos, the rule of the people.
Democracy.
Next door to the Acropolis is the actual site - the Pnyx -
where this new democracy was put into practice.
For anyone interested in politics,
this is sacred ground, because it was right here
that the 6,000 Athenian citizens would meet
and listen to arguments and debate and then vote.
On this meagre soil, something was grown
which has been transplanted to every democracy in the world.
And yet it's very important to remember
that Greek democracy was not our version of democracy.
It excluded all women
and it excluded slaves,
because Athens was a slave-owning society.
For every free Athenian, it's been estimated
there were at least two slaves working the soil,
cutting the stone, cleaning, doing all the jobs
which allowed free Athenian men to sit here and listen and choose.
But, within 20 years, this fledgling experiment in democracy
was about to face a life-or-death struggle
with our old friends, the Persians.
They had the biggest empire in the world
and they were determined to conquer the Athenians.
A massive invasion force was dispatched.
The armies met face to face, a short distance from Athens,
on the coast at a place called Marathon.
490 BC, and the Battle of Marathon -
the most important battle in the ancient world.
On the one side, a free, citizen army
fighting for the right to think and speak as they wished.
On the other side, the army of a despot.
On the outcome of the Battle of Marathon
hung not only the fate of this part of the world,
but also, in many ways, how we still think today.
No Greek army had ever defeated the Persians in open combat.
The very name struck fear into the heart of the Athenians.
And now, as the Greeks confronted the invaders across the battlefield,
they could see that they were hugely outnumbered by at least two to one.
The Persian commander was convinced that,
faced with such overwhelming force,
the Greeks would do the obvious and simply surrender.
This was not a professional army.
These were craftsmen and farmers and tradesmen
and writers, protecting one another.
In the ranks of this citizen army
was a young playwright called Aeschylus.
Alongside him, his brother, Cynegeirus.
The Athenian commander, Miltiades, had a bold strategy -
he ordered his troops to do something almost ridiculous.
YELLS ORDER
TROOPS CHANT
YELLS ORDER
Drawn up opposite the Greek army,
the Persians looked on with amazement.
The Greeks were doing the one thing that made no sense at all.
They were attacking.
YELLS ORDER
To the vastly superior Persian force,
the Greek tactics must have seemed like suicide.
But there was method in the madness.
Now, the Athenians were of course hugely outnumbered,
but Miltiades had a cunning plan.
He had deliberately weakened the Greek front line.
YELLING
The Persians punched through them with deceptive ease.
Miltiades now had them outflanked.
He ordered his two wings to act like pincers...
gripping the Persian enemy tight...
...and squeezing it slowly to death.
That day at Marathon,
6,000 Persian soldiers were slaughtered.
But just 200 Athenians died.
The brother of Aeschylus was among them.
YELLS
Every Greek who died at the Battle of Marathon
was remembered as a hero.
Uniquely, in the story of ancient Athens,
their bodies were not brought back to the city.
Instead, they were buried here
on the battlefield where they'd died.
And 2,500 years on,
here they are still -
under a simple, modest mound of earth and grass.
Can you imagine anything
less like the pompous monuments raised for tyrants?
But back on that extraordinary day, the danger was far from over.
The surviving Persians returned to their ships
and set sail for Athens.
The exhausted Athenians now had to race back to defend their city
before the Persians could get there.
The Greek army's heroic 26-mile run
back to defend their city
is of course remembered today in the Olympic Games,
the ultimate test of courage and stamina -
the marathon.
The Athenian soldiers got there just in time,
and the Persian fleet turned tail and sailed home.
The young soldier Aeschylus went on to become
one of history's greatest playwrights.
YELLS
The Parthenon itself, the crowning achievement of Greek architecture,
is a remarkable offering of thanks
for the Athenian victory over the Persians.
If the Persians had won at Marathon,
the world today would feel different.
Greek culture would be just a footnote.
And however we governed ourselves,
we certainly wouldn't call it democracy.
But the victory gave the Athenians
the most extraordinary outpouring
of self-confidence and cultural brilliance.
Yes, this is a story about war,
but there was once a golden age.
And it happened here.
While the Greeks were developing the idea of democracy,
a very different set of values was beginning to take shape in the East.
This new thinking was also born in a time of turmoil and chaos.
In 500 BC, much of the land we now call China
was dominated by the Zhou dynasty -
a line of rulers going back hundreds of years.
But now, the country was at risk
of fragmenting into small rival states.
The threat of war dominated the times.
Out of these wobbly, anxious years came one man with a clear vision
of a safer, kinder, better-ordered world.
The man was an official,
a bureaucrat, who'd worked his way up.
He famously liked his food
and he was very proud of his ability to hold his drink.
The Chinese know him as K'ung Fu-tzu.
We call him Confucius.
Confucius worked in the court of Lu in eastern China.
He was one of the old school who yearned for the good society
and the stability of the past. And he could see
that standards of discipline, behaviour and respect were slipping.
'Without feelings of respect,
'what is there to distinguish men from beasts?'
Confucius thought that the best way to rebuild the good society
was to encourage the proper performance of rites.
Now, that meant the proper way to mourn, to praise and to pray,
the proper way to conduct celebrations and anniversaries,
even the proper way to eat a meal and dress.
This is no easy matter.
In traditional Chinese society,
a well-educated gentleman had to know around 3,000 different rules.
And yet, for Confucius, this is an essential moral crusade.
Confucius began a campaign of reforms
to improve standards in the court, and he had some success.
But then he was to face a further challenge from his master himself.
He started neglecting his duties after he was introduced
to some particularly enticing new courtesans.
Audiences were cancelled, work was left undone.
Confucius believed that if you didn't set
a good example at the top,
there was little hope for anyone else.
SPEAKS IN CHINESE
Feeling bitterly let down,
Confucius packed up and left the court.
He was having one of the most important mid-life crises
in the history of ideas.
In his mid-50s, he was completely sure that he was a failure.
But he was walking out to change China.
Like The Buddha in India, Confucius went on the road.
He travelled through China, listening,
teaching, gathering converts.
He was convinced that individual actions on a small scale
could shape the whole of society.
And so he urged his followers to honour tradition,
respect their families and follow ancient rules of good behaviour.
'Respect yourself and others...'
'And not to do it is to...'
'Do not do unto others
'what you would not like done to yourself.'
Confucius died aged 72,
and his story might have ended in failure
were it not for the fact that his followers wrote down
his wise sayings and his teachings in a book called The Analects.
After his death, his followers spread his ideas
with remarkable success, and a cult developed,
which was eventually embraced by the rulers of China themselves.
The social philosophy of Confucius took root in Chinese society.
Over time, it became deeply embedded in state institutions.
Confucian teaching was drilled into
generation after generation of Chinese civil servants.
And the emperors, for hundreds of years, had a bureaucracy
that was infinitely more efficient and effective and just
than anything in the West.
2,400 years after his death,
Confucian ideas are still enduring in today's China.
WOMAN SPEAKS IN CHINESE
CLASS RESPONDS IN CHINESE
For those looking for something more than Communist ideology
or mere materialism,
his teachings on morality and good conduct are still seen
as an important lesson for the next generation.
THEY RECITE IN CHINESE
Confucius' ideas were a response to disorder,
and they made Chinese civilisation more distinctive, more itself,
even unique.
But in the Mediterranean, just the opposite would happen.
HORSE WHINNIES
Conflict was about to crash rival civilisations together.
In 356 BC, a legend was born.
He'd be a new kind of empire builder.
According to legend, when he was a boy, a wild, unbroken horse
was brought to his father's court in Macedonia.
The boy begged his father to let him try to tame the beast.
He had noticed that the horse was afraid of its own shadow.
WHINNIES AND SNORTS
The horse was called Bucephalus.
And the boy would, of course, grow up to be...
..Alexander the Great.
Alexander was brought up on stories
of Homer's heroes from the Trojan wars.
He was a true child of the Greek golden age.
His father hired the great philosopher Aristotle
and asked him to create a little school,
here in a remote part of Macedonia,
where he spent three years
intensively teaching the young Alexander
everything from history and geography
to mathematics and philosophy.
And one of the things that started to entrance Alexander
were the stories of the Persians.
Cyrus the Great became a particular hero of his.
His father said to him, "My son,
"seek out a kingdom worthy of yourself.
"Macedonia's too small for you."
Alexander became king of Macedonia at the age of 20
after his father was assassinated.
His imperial ambition was said to be limitless.
After finishing off independent Greece,
he crashed through today's Turkey,
marched into the Middle East, then into Egypt,
before conquering the old enemy - Persia -
and carrying on towards Afghanistan and the borders of India.
Along with war and conquest...
...Alexander founded 70 Greek-style towns...
across North Africa and Asia.
And Greek became the new common language across his empire.
Alexander's Macedonian veterans scattered his enemies
wherever he led them,
but, like his hero Cyrus,
Alexander was fascinated by the people he conquered.
And he thought that knitting together their different traditions
could create a new kind of almost multicultural empire.
Cyrus the Great had tempered tyranny with tolerance,
but Alexander wanted to go a lot further
and actually mingle Macedonian and Greek customs
with Persian customs.
So he started wearing Persian clothes
and the Persian royal crown,
and even making people prostrate themselves in front of him
in the Asian manner.
So it's not surprising
that his plain-speaking Macedonian generals became outraged
at his decadent clothing and his increasingly foreign habits.
Even Alexander's trusted friend Cleitus
thought he was going too far.
Alexander! Cleitus?
Cleitus was the leader of the Macedonian cavalry.
He'd once saved Alexander's life in battle.
Now, he was taunting him for being more Persian than Greek.
The Macedonians were famous across Greece for being great drinkers,
and Alexander was no exception.
YELLING
But this fight was just a bit worse than your average drunken brawl.
After the death of Cleitus,
Alexander is said to have wept and fasted for three days.
But he then briskly wiped the tears away and marched straight on,
until his empire was the biggest the world had ever known.
And to bond his peoples, he went far further
in trying to fuse the cultures of Greece and Asia.
He married not one, but two Asian princesses himself.
And he then applied the same logic to his troops.
Alexander organised a mass wedding of Macedonian soldiers
and Persian women and gave them all
generous golden dowries.
And the marriages were extended way down into the Macedonian army.
Alexander hoped that the children would become
rulers for his new empire - a literal marriage of East and West.
Alexander wanted the children
of these hundreds of Greek and Persian marriages
to be the beginning of a new warrior people
who'd preserve his empire long into the future.
But within a year of the mass wedding, aged just 32,
Alexander was dead - some say poisoned.
It's more likely that he died unheroically of typhoid fever.
Alexander's gigantic empire was divided up between feuding successors,
but the spread of the Greek language and culture continued
from Athens to Syria, North Africa, right the way to Afghanistan.
And the culture of ancient Greece,
its architecture and its legends, its poetry and its philosophy
would shape the classical world
and then, later, all the West.
In the broad sweep of human history, Alexander's empire was a heartbeat,
a mere puff of smoke,
but he acted as a kind of giant, bloody, cultural whisk -
churning together the Greek and the Persian worlds.
And his story reminds us of the uncomfortable truth
that war, however horrible,
is one of the great change-makers in human history.
To achieve his empire, Alexander had swept aside
all remnants of Greek democracy,
but the deeper challenge to the idea of democracy
didn't come merely from force of arms,
but from the sheer difficulty of running an open society.
CHANTING
And this challenge had been thrown down 80 years earlier,
not by a glory-drunk hero,
but an old man who asked awkward questions -
questions which are still being asked today.
400 BC, and the Athens of this time wasn't a happy place.
Wars had drained away her wealth
and social conflict ate away at her young democracy.
Tyrants had briefly seized power and used thuggery
to suppress the voice of poorer citizens.
When democracy was restored, it felt itself besieged.
And one of its most contemptuous critics
was the philosopher Socrates.
Today we remember Socrates as the father of philosophy,
the founder of a tradition picked up by Plato and Aristotle.
But in Athens, at the time,
he was seen as a dangerous influence -
a dissident who was a genuine threat to this embattled democracy.
He taught his students to question everything.
For him, learning to ask challenging questions was essential
to the development of a mature civilisation.
So he jabbed and pinched the Athenian democracy.
Political leaders lacked virtue
and some voters were simply too stupid to choose well.
This was dangerous stuff.
And Socrates' adoring pupils included aristocrats
who would later revolt against the democracy,
turning tyrant themselves.
The greatest problems for would-be democracies have never really been
about voting systems or institutions,
hard though those are to get right.
It's about how an open society deals with genuinely subversive critics.
Socrates was challenging the Athenian democrats
to come up with an answer to this dilemma.
When the democracy is under threat,
for how long do you hold on
to your principles of free thought and free speech?
When do you give way to censorship and repression?
By 399 BC, the authorities had had enough of Socrates' awkward questions.
SPEAKS IN ANCIENT GREEK
They panicked and arrested him.
Socrates was tried on charges of corrupting the youth of the city
and undermining the government.
He gently mocked the court as he forced them to confront
the consequences of their own censorship.
He was narrowly convicted.
The sentence was death.
In Athens, the death sentence was carried out
by making the prisoner drink
the poisonous juice of the hemlock plant.
Socrates could easily have bolted for exile,
which would perhaps be an easier way out for his critics as well,
but his principles would not allow that.
And so he said goodbye to his wife and his family
and, with his students around him, he calmly prepared to die.
Better that than shut up or live as a hypocrite.
Confucius had argued that the good society is ordered and obedient.
For Socrates, it was stroppy, dissident and open.
Thinking of the differences between China and the West today,
it's pretty obvious that these ancient stories
still haunt the modern world.
And so they should.
One of the great Greek tragedies was the death of Socrates.
He showed that even this wonderful, brave, pioneering society thought
there were some questions too dangerous to ask.
And even the greatest minds were not able to express themselves quite freely.
And he leaves all open societies with the same dilemma.
When you feel genuinely threatened by a dissident,
when you may feel your own liberties are challenged,
do you lock them up? Do you shut them up?
Ancient Athens didn't have the answer to this, and nor do we.
In the next programme,
the word and the sword.
Allah...
Who would rule the world?
Kings and emperors...
..or the gods?
If you'd like to a little bit more about how the past is revealed,
you can order a free booklet called How Do They Know That?
Just call 0845 366 0255,
or go to bbc.co.uk/history
and follow the links to the Open University.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd