Socrates's trial and death have been immortalised in Plato's Dialogues, particularly the Apologia which is one of the greatest and most moving works in classical Greek. Plato was not writing history, however, and many people have suspected that he used Socrates as a mouthpiece for his own ideas. The fact that Socrates, a non violent, gabby, eccentric street philosopher with apparently only a coterie following, should have been condemned to the ultimate penalty by a citizens jury under a democratic regime has always stuck in the craws of modern democrats and liberals. I.F. Stone is in this tradition: just how, he wonders, could it have happened? The answer seems plain enough and has often been given before: Socrates had offended the democratic consensus of his day, was seen as a perverter of youth, and ultimately a threat to the Athenian state. In Russia of the 1930s, he would have ended up in the Gulag - where, no doubt, he would have harangued his fellow prisoners dialectically up to the very end.