 That engagement with political philosophy was dramatically intensified when Socrates was, at the age of seventy, arraigned, tried, and sentenced to death by an Athenian popular jury. In a prosecution brought by a group of his fellow citizens who claimed to be shouldering that burden for the sake of the city (the usual way in which prosecutions were brought in Athens), the charges laid were against him were three-fold: not acknowledging the city’s gods; introducing new gods; and corrupting the young (Apol. 24b). Each of these had a political dimension, given the civic control of central religious cults mentioned earlier, and the broad political importance of educating the young to take their place in the civic order. Timed a few years after the overthrow of a short-lived oligarchic regime (known as that of “The Thirty”) which had been led by several of Socrates’ sometime associates (Critias, Charmides), itself following the ignominious Athenian defeat in the war with Sparta which had earlier seen another associate of Socrates (Alcibiades) turn traitor to Athens, the trial must be suspected of having served as a substitute for the prohibited political trials of the oligarchic partisans (such trials having been generally barred by an amnesty passed in 403 BCE by the restored democracy; see Cartledge 2009, Ch.7, Carawan 2013, Shear 2011).