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For over two millennia, India has been at the centre of world history. But how did India come to be? What is India? These are the big questions behind this intrepid journey around the contemporary subcontinent. In this landmark series, historian and acclaimed writer Michael Wood embarks on a dazzling and exciting expedition through today's India, looking to the present for clues to her past, and to the past for clues to her future. The journey takes the viewer through majestic landscapes and reveals some of the greatest monuments and artistic treasures on Earth. From Buddhism to Bollywood, from mathematics to outsourcing, Michael Wood discovers India's impact on history - and on us.

Acclaimed presenter of historic documentaries, Bettany Hughes, embarks on a journey across the eastern Mediterranean to discover the truth about HELEN OF TROY, the woman blamed for causing the Trojan War. Following weapons experts, the two-hour film shows how the conflict in Helen's name would have been fought, unraveling the reality from the myths and putting flesh on "the face that launched a thousand ships."

Against the glorious backdrop of ancient Greece, classical historian Bettany Hughes (THE SPARTANS, HELEN OF TROY) explores the truth about the "Golden Age" of ancient Athens. Far from an environment of peace and tranquility, democratic Athens was a bloody, tumultuous place of both brilliant ideas and a repressive regime with a darker side.

The last section of the film opens at Delphi and takes a look at Greek religion and Spartan attitudes toward the gods and oracles before resuming the history of the Peloponnesian War. Alcibiades, the Syracuse expedition, and Lysander are all examined, taking up half of Part 3. Then the period of the Spartan Hegemony is briefly described, shaped by the "crippled kingship" of Agesilaus and marked by power struggles among Sparta's ruling factions.

Part 2 This segment begins by exploring at how Sparta and Athens fell out after the Persian Wars, with a look at Athenian politics and society and how these contrasted to Sparta's. This is a refreshingly non-partisan treatment, not hesitating to be equally critical of Athens. Women's life in Sparta is given much attention. Sparta comes off as considerably more enlightened, by modern Western standards, than Athens.

Part 1 THE SPARTANS opens at Thermopylae and with the epitaph of the Three Hundred -- and very stirring it is to hear this spoken in the original Greek -- before introducing some of the topics that will be addressed in the program. After the introduction, we journey to the Dark Ages of Greece, the end of the Achaean Age and the coming of the Dorian Greeks to the Peloponnesus and Laconia. An effective look at the development of hoplite warfare is presented. Next comes the Messenian conquest, then the establishment of the Spartan constitution. The upbringing of Spartan youths, warts and all, is then addressed at length.