Very well, said, SJL. I had intended to discuss the same things with Don awhile back regarding Socrates. I don't think his death was in any way due to him "threatening democracy", but rather to him embarrassing the conventional minds of his time by showing them up to be, in short, a bunch of conformist dullards. He rocked their comfy little boat of conventional thinking, woke up their young people to consider new ideas, and they didn't like it, so they killed him, thereby murdering an innocent man, and a far better man than themselves.

A civilized form of mob rule may appear to be democracy or legal propriety...but it is actually a grand failure of both ethics and vision. It was a similarly "civilized" form of mob rule that condemned both Jesus (Yeshua) and Joan of Arc to death: all quite legal and proper by the rules of the day, yet utterly unjust in consequence.