Why were the Platonic Socrates and Aristotle suspicious of orators in their day?

The orators claimed to be wise (sophos in Greek), but they specialized in using rhetorical (verbal) tricks to win any argument. When someone asked Aristotle if he considered himself a wise person (sophist) he said he wasn't sure, but he had always been a lover (philos=love) of wisdom - a philosophos. Socrates went even further, after a famous oracle (priestess) declared that he was the wisest man in Athens he denied that he possessed any wisdom at all (which is called Socratic ignorance). He began searching for someone wiser than himself by asking everyone he met questions about things he himself was unsure of. Many people thought they knew the answers to Socrates' questions. Rather than directly arguing with them (as the sophists did), Socrates would respond with more questions, exposing flaws in their reasoning (this came to be called the Socratic Method). When no one could successfully answer his questions, he concluded that the oracle had been right because while the other Athenians had believed they were wise when they were not, Socrates had always known that he did not know and this was his only wisdom (philosophers call that Socratic irony).