In 399 BC, the world’s first democracy put its most famous philosopher on trial and sentenced him to death. Socrates was not charged with violence or treason but with corrupting the youth and disrespecting the gods — charges that masked a deeper political reckoning with a man who had spent decades publicly embarrassing Athens’s most powerful citizens.

This episode examines why democratic Athens felt threatened enough by a barefoot philosopher asking questions to execute him, tracing Socrates’s method of relentless questioning, his connections to controversial political figures, and the trial that became Western philosophy’s founding martyrdom.

• Socrates’s method of questioning and why it infuriated Athenian elites
• His connections to Alcibiades, Critias, and other controversial political figures
• The trial — the actual charges, the defense, and the jury’s decision
• Why Socrates refused to escape and chose to drink the hemlock