Did hemlock make Socrates famous?

Okay, before I start receiving death threats, seeing lynching mobs round the corner of my street, and generaly start feeling like an endangered species, let me make one thing clear. I'm not trying to take away any of the glory that Socrates already has. He very well deserves it. I really admire him for being the first thinker in the western civilization. What I'm going to discuss here is why he had to drink hemlock.

Let me first start by noting Socrates' contributions to philosophy

One of Socrates' greatest gift to mankind was the lesson that one has to question beliefs. He became famous for his questioning of the, then current, ideas about virtue and the belief of the people that virtue is defined by the gods. He also attacked the notion of piety and what being pious means. This one is really very intersting:
Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?

It is particularly pointed when thought of in this way:
Does the College forbid this activity because it is wrong, or is it wrong because the College forbids it?

His other repetetive demand was that people try to understand, 'get', themselves, probably a precursor to the "know thyself" in the Matrix (even though that one is in latin not greek). Know the reason why you're doing what you're doing. Analyse, criticise, think!!!

But having said all that, why did he have to drink hemlock? No, I'm not going to give the reasons he gave and the reasons that his associates gave him while they were trying to persuade him to run away. It's done very well and briefly here. Instead I'm going to try and analyse whether Socrates would have been more famous than, say, Plato or Aristotle, or even at par with these comics, if he hadn't made that critical, ethical decision.

That one thing that he did, did really make him immortal. It showed that this fellow really did practice what he preached. He was the real thing... what he did was so very absurd, and unprogrammed, in the psyche of all (except that miniscule exception that we call fundamentalists), that he made his beliefs a legend. Ask anyone who Socrates was and for all the people who answer "That dude who drank poison to prove that he was right", or some similar misappropriation, ask who Plato or Aristotle was.

Get my point? Though is teachings were great, and laudable, they didn't make him famous... they just made him more famous. What really takes the cake is that if he'd run away and continued preaching somewhere else, he'd probably have been as famous as Aristotle or Plato. Or worse, these two wouldn't have been famous at all, because their teacher (hierarchically) wasn't famous.

So, did hemlock make Socrates famous? Yes.

Did Socrates make hemlock famous? Yes!