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Socrates cross-examined other people on moral and political issues. Though he claimed to know nothing about these issues himself, his questions reduced his interlocutors to such confusion and puzzlement that their firmest and most cherished beliefs seemed to waver under Socrates' patient, polite, but insistent and irritating scrutiny. In the Laches the Athenian general Nicias warns his friends that a discussion with Socrates will involve an examination of their whole life:

You seem not to know that if you meet Socrates in discussion, you are bound to find that even if you begin by discussing something else, before you are done you will be led around in argument by Socrates, until you are trapped into giving an account of yourself--of how you are living your present life and how you have lived your life in the past. And once you are trapped, Socrates will not let you go until he has tried and tested you thoroughly on each point.

In the Gorgias Callicles sees that the results of a Socratic examination may be uncomfortable:

Tell me, Socrates, should we take you to be joking or in earnest? If you're in earnest, and what you say is true, doesn't it follow that our human life is upside down, and that everything we do is the exact opposite, it would seem, of what we ought to do?

Nicias is an admirer of Socrates; Callicles is an articulate and vigorous opponent; but they both expect radical criticism from him.

He was well known for his strikingly ugly face and for his eccentric austerity in dress and habit; that was part of the reason why the comic dramatist Aristophanes found him useful as a typical sophist to be caricatured in the Clouds. Socrates claimed not to be a sophist; he did not offer to teach anything, wrote no books, and took no money as payment (he does not claim to refuse gifts from his friends). But he discussed the moral and political issues that concerned the sophists and their audiences; and the suspicion that the sophists aroused in some conservative Athenians fell on him.

Socrates also aroused suspicion because of the company he kept. He was himself neither rich nor well-born, but he found rich and aristocratic young men to be both sexually attractive and suitable partners in philosophical discussion. They became his disciples, and at the same time his patrons; and some of them were bitter and ruthless conspirators against the democracy. The orator Aeschines reminds the jury, representing the Athenian people, of an incident that he takes to be a matter of common knowledge: 'You put to death Socrates the sophist, because he was exposed as the educator of Critias, one of the Thirty who overthrew the democracy.' They were quite right to hate Critias, and justifiably suspicious of the anti-democratic tendencies of Alcibiades, another companion of Socrates.

In 403, after the overthrow of the Thirty, the restored democracy was anxious to unify the city, and declared an amnesty for supporters of the Thirty. This meant that Socrates' opponents could not legally attack him for his well-known relations with enemies of the democracy. But in 399 they prosecuted him none the less, on grounds that explain their distrust of him.

Their first charge was religious, and it made two complaints. Socrates was accused of speculations about the heavens that resulted in rejection of the city's recognized gods; and he was accused of introducing new divinities. The first complaint was the more important. Even though some naturalists had claimed to describe, not to deny, the gods and cosmic justice, Democritus eliminated them from control of the universe; and such denial of the gods' power could be expected to provoke their anger.

The second charge against Socrates was moral; it also included two complaints. Socrates was accused of 'making the inferior argument superior' and of 'corrupting the young men'. The first complaint implies that a skilled orator could make the inferior argument (the one that deserved to lose) superior (the actual winner) by his rhetorical skill; and the accusers assume that Socrates taught his own brand of rhetorical tricks. The second complaint suggests that Socrates' disciples were taken in by his tricks. Since he could apparently refute any argument in support of any conventional moral rule, his followers concluded that the conventional rules had nothing to be said for them. The behaviour of Critias or Alcibiades was simply (in the view of Socrates' prosecutors) the natural result of Socratic argument.

It is easy to understand the combination of a religious and a moral charge. The two charges are combined in Aristophanes' crude and malicious attack on sophists in the Clouds. Many Athenians probably agreed with Aristophanes, and found both the main currents of Greek speculation--naturalism and the sophistic movement--offensive and dangerous to religion and morality. They found their fears confirmed in the apparent results of Socrates' teaching. . .

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