The trial: 501 jurors, one question 

An Athenian trial was not a courtroom in our sense. There was no judge instructing anyone, no professional advocates, and no appeal. A magistrate kept order and time with a water clock. The jury was a large panel of citizens chosen by lot, in this case usually given as 501, seated in the open, and they were both judge and jury, deciding guilt and penalty by simple majority with no deliberation between them. Cases were brought by private citizens, not by the state.

The three prosecutors were Meletus, who filed the indictment, the orator Lycon, and Anytus, a tanner by fortune and a substantial democratic politician. The charge was asebeia, impiety, specified in the sources as failing to honour the gods the city honours, introducing new divinities, and corrupting the young men of Athens. The reference to new divinities probably touched Socrates' habit of describing a personal divine sign, a daimonion, that warned him away from certain actions.

Read literally the charges look thin. Read in context they were sharp. Athens in 399 BC had lost the Peloponnesian War five years earlier, had endured the brutal oligarchy of the Thirty and a civil conflict to restore the democracy, and was governed under an amnesty of 403 that forbade prosecution for political acts committed before it. Several of Socrates' famous associates were on the wrong side of that memory. Alcibiades had defected to Sparta. Critias and Charmides had been leaders of the Thirty. Nobody could indict Socrates for that, because the amnesty stood. Corrupting the young was the available charge that pointed at it.

Both surviving accounts of his defence, Plato's Apology and Xenophon's, agree that he did not behave like a man trying to win. He declined the standard tactics of the Athenian courts entirely: no weeping, no parading of children before the jury, no appeal to his war service. Instead he cross-examined Meletus in the manner he used on everyone, argued that a good man cannot be harmed by an unjust verdict, and told the court that he would not stop philosophising if acquitted. Xenophon adds a further claim, that Socrates believed at seventy that death was preferable to the decline ahead and made no serious attempt at acquittal. Plato's Socrates is defiant in service of a mission. Xenophon's is serenely ready to go. They are not the same portrait, and both were written by admirers with something to prove.

The jury convicted, by a margin the ancient tradition puts at roughly sixty votes. Then it asked him what he thought his punishment should be.