There is something faintly demonic about the Minoan figurine that first sparked Bettany Hughes’s interest in Greek civilisation. The so-called ‘snake goddess’, found in Crete in 1903 by archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, stands at just over a foot tall and depicts a fiery-eyed, buxom woman brandishing two slithering serpents. The statuette resides at the Ashmolean Museum and is a mysterious relic from an enigmatic culture, dating back three millennia.

“I vividly remember those flashing eyes, her hands grappling those snakes and those amazing breasts of hers, when I was first taken to the Ashmolean as a teenager,” recalls historian and TV presenter Hughes. “I remember being told that we don’t know who she is — a goddess or high priestess or what. But she’s such a striking figure. I thought: ‘Let’s not pass over her. Let’s try and at least imagine who she might have been’.” Much of Hughes’s subsequent career has been about piecing together the scattered jigsaw puzzle of the ancient world. She studied ancient and modern history at Oxford University, did post-graduate research in the Balkans and Asia Minor, then embarked on a career lecturing, writing and broadcasting about the obscure, beguiling realm of pre-Christian Europe.

Her latest book, The Hemlock Cup, centres on ancient philosopher Socrates. But it is as much concerned with unravelling Athens, the socially complex city that he inhabited, as unpicking the thoughts and life of this colossal thinker. It was an enigma, again, that drew her to her subject: although Socrates was much written about in ancient times (by his student Plato, for instance, and by historian Xenophon), he never wrote a word himself and little is definitely known about his life.

“I do sometime lie awake at night, wondering why I’ve chosen to write a book about Socrates,” she said. “There are much easier subjects and characters to do. Perhaps it is for that very reason that I was drawn to him; that he is such a hugely influential character and his ideas about life are so interesting and so eternally relevant.”

The portrait that emerges is of both an impressive and awkward figure: a formidable thinker, radical and restlessly inquisitive. But equally, he is an ugly, pot-bellied eccentric who walks bare-footed around the agora (market place), picking arguments: a spiky, combative character who — surely disingenuously — claims that the only thing he knows is that he knows nothing at all. The book is scholarly yet readable. It teems with vivid descriptions of the ancient Athens (“I wanted to put the sweat of the agora, the smell of frying fish at Piraeus into the book,” she explains).

She meshes written sources with archaeological evidence. “There’s a lot of new and exciting archaeology coming out of Athens at the moment. For the first time, we are able to put together a very cogent picture of his life, his world.”

Recent excavations showed a walkway with a packed earth floor, as opposed to flagstones, helping her to envisage Socrates with fresh eyes. “People imagine Socrates sweeping down a marble staircase, but he was padding around in the mud, talking about his ideas. Somehow, for me, that’s terribly touching, seeing Socrates with his bare feet walking along on this cool earth. He was both living in this immensely sophisticated, forward-thinking, high-achieving world and one that still had one foot in the Stone Age.”

Hughes, who grew up in West London and is the sister of cricketer and commentator Simon Hughes, has covered other historical periods in her writing and documentaries, but classical Greece has been a focal point. Her 2002 three-part series on Sparta was a key inspiration for recent Hollywood swords-and-sandals adventure 300, while her book and documentary Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore, saw her revisiting the even more distant world of Homer.

She is passionate about classical studies. “People sometimes have this notion that classics is an elitist subject, but it will remain elitist if you just allow the elite to gain access to it. I was walking through a rough estate in Acton when two 16-year-old boys, who recognised me from my Sparta programme, came up to a nervous me and said: ‘So why did Sparta have two kings then?’ We got into an impromptu seminar on Greek history there and then! It just shows that the appetite for learning about the ancient world is alive and well.”

* Bettany Hughes will talking about The Hemlock Cup at Blackwell’s on Monday at 7pm.