Bettany Hughes interview: on how Socrates would have solved Greece's problems

This is rather feeble. Forgiveness is a luxury, as revealed entirely in Ms Hughes' rather safe example. While her example has the luxury of a western middle class safety net and the fawning media attention showered on her for making a public announcement of her generous act of forgiveness, the victims of the atrocities unleashed by her government in her name post-9/11 have had no such luxury. They continue to grieve, suffer and die namelessly in Iraq and Afghanistan in their countless thousands. 'Forgiveness' is thus a fairly meaningless concept for them.

This is the problem. Ms Hughes is a celebrity, not a real historian wrestling with the difficult issues (and suffering for them) that her philosophers from antiquity did.

Diogenes of Sinope had the best rebuke for the rich and comfortable he observed playing idly with ideas like expendable commodities, surrounded by their slaves: 'In a rich man's house, there's nowhere to spit, except in his face'.