Crito

Introduction

A month has passed since Socrates was condemned to death. The execution has been delayed because a sacred ship is away at Delos, and no one may be put to death until it returns. Now the ship has been sighted off Cape Sunium. Before dawn, Crito — Socrates' old friend from the same district of Athens, a man of means — slips into the prison. Everything is ready: the guards can be bribed, money has been raised, friends in Thessaly will shelter him. Socrates has only to agree.

Crito pleads with every argument a loving friend can find. What will people say of friends who let him die to save their money? Who will bring up his sons? Is it not cowardice to hand himself over to his enemies when he could escape? Socrates answers that the question is not what the many will think, but whether escape would be just. It is not living that matters most, but living well — and living well is the same as living justly. From this follows the principle at the heart of the dialogue: one must never do wrong, not even in return for a wrong suffered.

Then Socrates imagines the Laws of Athens standing before him and asking what he means to do. In one of the most celebrated speeches in Plato, the Laws remind him that they gave him birth, nurture and education; that every citizen who dislikes them is free to leave with all he owns; and that by staying in Athens for seventy years, scarcely ever leaving it, he has agreed in deed to abide by its judgements. A citizen may try to persuade his city that it is wrong; he may not destroy its laws by force. The verdict against Socrates was unjust, but the injustice came from men, not from the Laws.

The Crito is the first great work on political obligation, and it has never ceased to provoke. Read together with the Apology, where Socrates declares that he would sooner die than obey an order to stop practising philosophy, it raises a question that every age must answer for itself: when may conscience resist the law, and when must it submit? The idea that by living under a state's laws a citizen tacitly agrees to them reappears two thousand years later in the theories of the social contract. And the dialogue leaves an unforgettable image of a man who, at the hour of death, holds to reason as calmly as he held to it all his life.

This translation is made from the Greek text of John Burnet's Oxford edition. The numbers in the margin (43a, 43b …) are the Stephanus references used in every edition and translation of Plato, so that any passage can be found and cited.