In 1966, Italian director Roberto Rossellini embarked on a series of historical films to which he would devote the rest of his career. Taking as his heroes such figures as Christ, St. Augustine, Pascal and Socrates, he endeavored to portray them as key figures in the development of consciousness, but stripped of the layers of conventional reverence with which they have been cloaked over generations. Socrates is far from a traditional film documentary; rather, it is a carefully researched historical tableau, eschewing melodrama and spectacle in favor of an economic exposition of the ideas of Socrates and some key incidents in his last years. Rossellini establishes a thoroughly believable and lovely sense of the period by noting simple details of everyday life; Socrates, for instance, is introduced buying octopus at the market, taking a coin from his mouth as the clothes of the period had no pockets. Plot and dialogue alike were culled from Plato, and the film brims with Socrates' ideas on madness, death, justice, politics, beauty, knowledge and the immortality of the soul. Jean Sylvere is a wry Socrates, both engaging and detached.