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Athens, 399 BCE. Seventy years old and convicted of corrupting the youth, Socrates had an easy choice: accept exile and live comfortably, or drink the hemlock and die. He chose death, not from despair, but from consistency.

For thirty years, Socrates practiced a systematic method of examining beliefs through relentless questioning. We know exactly what he did because his students documented it obsessively. Plato gave us dialogue transcripts. Xenophon recorded his conversations. Even Aristophanes satirized him on stage. These aren't legends, they're eyewitness accounts of a specific technique applied consistently across decades.

This episode examines the elenchus, Socrates's cross-examination method, not as abstract philosophy, but as a practical decision-making framework. We trace his documented practice through the Athenian agora, analyze the strategic choices behind his approach, and extract the systematic process he used to eliminate false certainty.

The pattern is clear across the primary sources: identify the claim, examine underlying assumptions, test for logical consistency, eliminate contradictions, see what survives. Socrates proved the method worked by betting his life on it, when examination showed that escaping execution would contradict everything he'd practiced, he drank the poison instead.

No speculation about internal processes. No romanticizing his death. Just the documented choices of someone who valued systematic thinking more than survival, and the framework those choices reveal.