The Hemlock Hour 

Athens in 399 BC was a city recovering from defeat. The long war with Sparta had ended five years earlier, the democracy had been overthrown, restored, and was nervous about who had helped whom. Into that atmosphere came a charge against a 70-year-old man for impiety and corrupting the young.

Socrates wrote nothing. Everything we have comes through Plato, Xenophon and a hostile comedy by Aristophanes, and the collection is honest about that: reading Socrates means reading his witnesses. What survives consistently across the sources is the method. He asked people to define a word they used confidently, then followed the definition until it contradicted itself.

At the trial he did not plead. Offered the chance to propose his own penalty, he suggested, at least initially, that the city should feed him at public expense as it fed Olympic victors. The jury voted for death by a wider margin than it had voted to convict, which tells you something about how the defence landed.

The last act is the one that made him a philosopher rather than a defendant. His friend Crito arrived with a bribed guard, a ship and a plan. Socrates argued him out of it, on the grounds that a citizen who accepts a city's laws when they suit him cannot break them when they do not. Then he drank the hemlock, and Plato built a discipline on the scene.