Would the real Socrates please stand up

The latest book by Bethany Hughes is currently being serialised on Radio 4 and 'The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life' is very good indeed.  At least, her reading of it is.  The book itself is something else for my Christmas list.  I'm still struggling with the idea of a city-state putting to death one of its greatest men, but the stakes seem to have been high.  Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth, the young men of Athens.  Given that the city's young men were held in such high esteem by Athenian society, it was a serious accusation.  But worthy of the death penalty?  I'm interested in discovering how the story unfolds because although I know the rough outline of what happened to Socrates, I am distinctly fuzzy on the details (can you be 'distinctly fuzzy' about anything?).  So it was I found myself trying to cut and paste a chronology of Ancient Greece, which turned out to be easier said than done.  I was determined to sharpen my vagueness surrounding the timeline of what happened when, and still find it tricky getting my head around the concept of dates BCE, but I'm getting there.

Curiously today's Radio 4's 'Thinking Aloud' programme featured an item on moral panic (and yes, I am a R4 fanatic).  I wonder if the diagnosis of moral panic could usefully be applied to the treatment of Socrates?  Did Socrates undermine the social order of Ancient Athens?  Or more pertinently, was there a widespread perception that Socrates undermined the social order?  A  key feature of moral panics is the existence of  media that spread the contagious notion, to help it along, but is there an absolute need for media involvement?  Was there such a media in Ancient Athens, or an equivalent?  I feel a research thesis coming on ...