Crito

Overview

The Crito is about twenty pages and has two characters. It belongs to a sequence: the Euthyphro takes place before the trial, the Apology is the trial, the Crito is the month or so afterwards in prison, and the Phaedo is the day of the execution. Socrates was convicted in 399 BCE on charges of impiety and corrupting the young, and his death was delayed because a sacred ship had sailed to Delos and no execution could take place until it returned. Crito arrives at dawn with the news that the ship is expected, which means Socrates has a day or two.

The setting matters. Socrates is seventy, his escape has been arranged and paid for, the jailer has been managed, friends in Thessaly are ready to receive him, and nobody in Athens would have been surprised or particularly offended if he had gone. Wealthy men facing conviction often left. The dialogue is therefore not about whether escape is possible. It is about whether a man who has spent his life arguing that one should never act unjustly can make an exception for his own execution.

Plato structures it in two halves. First Socrates and Crito establish the principles together, in the usual question-and-answer form. Then Socrates does something he does nowhere else: he stops arguing in his own voice and delivers a long speech on behalf of the Laws of Athens, personified, who address him directly and accuse him.

The argument

Crito’s case comes first, and it is the ordinary decent one. People will think his friends were too cheap or too cowardly to save him. His sons will be orphaned and badly brought up. He was convicted unjustly, so the verdict has no claim on him. Time is short and the arrangements are made.

Socrates answers Crito’s reasons one at a time and then sets them aside as the wrong kind of reason. What most people will think is not evidence about what is right: in every skill we follow the one who knows rather than the many, and there is no reason to treat the care of the soul differently. Nor does the length of life matter, since the question is not how to stay alive but how to live well. That leaves one question: is escaping just?

Two premises settle it, and Crito agrees to both. One must never act unjustly. And, harder, one must never act unjustly even in return, so retaliation is out. Socrates notes that few people accept this second premise and that those who do not will have no common ground with those who do.

Then the Laws speak. Their argument comes in stages. If Socrates escapes, he attempts to destroy the laws and the city, since a verdict that individuals may nullify at will is no verdict. To this they add that he owes them more than a citizen owes an equal: they oversaw his parents’ marriage, his birth, his upbringing and his education, and a child may not strike a parent back. Then they shift from the language of debt to the language of agreement. Athens gave every young man who came of age the option to take his property and leave, without penalty, if he did not like the arrangements. Socrates never left, not once in seventy years except on military service. He made his life there and raised children there, which is the clearest possible endorsement. At his trial he could have proposed exile as his penalty and refused. Having accepted the benefits and declined every exit, he cannot now claim that the agreement does not bind him when it costs him something.

The Laws finish by warning him what escape would look like. He would arrive in a well-governed city as a known lawbreaker, or in a disorderly one where his talk about virtue would be a joke; his friends would risk exile; his children would be raised as foreigners. And he would face the judges in the next world having broken the very agreements he had spent his life defending.

Crito has nothing left to say. Socrates tells him the words are ringing in his ears like the flutes of the Corybantes, and that he must be allowed to follow where the god leads.

How to read it

Read the Apology first, in the same sitting if possible. Much of the Crito only registers if you have just heard Socrates tell the court that he would never stop philosophising even if ordered to, because that is a refusal to obey, and now he is refusing to disobey. Whether the two positions are consistent is the main question courses ask.

Read the speech of the Laws twice, and separate its threads. The parent argument, the benefits argument and the tacit consent argument are three different claims with three different weaknesses, and the speech slides between them. Notice also that Socrates does not make the speech himself. He reports what the Laws would say, which some readers take as a sign of distance.

Do not skip Crito’s opening. It is easy to treat him as a foil, but his reasons are the ones most people would give, and Socrates’ dismissal of what the many think is one of the places where students most often want to push back.

Grube’s Hackett translation, revised by Cooper, is the standard assignment and comes packaged with the other dialogues you will want. Rowe’s Penguin is the better introduction if you want the legal background of Athenian courts.

Questions it raises

• Does living in a city amount to agreeing to obey it? What would count as refusing?
• Socrates will not obey an order to stop philosophising but will accept an unjust death sentence. Is that a coherent position?
• The Laws compare themselves to parents and to partners in a contract. Can both analogies hold at once?
• If a verdict is unjust, what exactly does escaping destroy?
• Why does Plato have the Laws speak instead of Socrates? Does the device commit Socrates to everything they say?
• Could the arguments here be used to justify obedience to a tyranny? What resource does the dialogue offer against that?