Plato: Crito

Crito

When Socrates was sentenced to die, there was still enough jail time for a rescue, but a mysterious dream came to him that he recounted to his friend Crito when he was awoken. “A woman appeared to me. She came, fair and beautiful of form, clothed in white, and she called to me and said, ‘Socrates, on the third day shalt thou go to fertile Phthia.'” This appeared as a divine sanction and conscience to allow the execution to go forward, as the reference to the goddess Thetis who described the place where her son Achilles was not able to reach. Crito was having nothing of it. He felt that one should worry about what people think in a community that one lives in, especially because Socrates’ predicament was precisely because of what groups can do when they are out of control with power looking for a scapegoat. “Socrates, I think the thing you’re doing is wrong. You betray yourself when you could be saved. You hasten a thing for yourself of a kind your very enemies might hasten for you—and have hastened, wishing you destroyed. In addition, I think you’re betraying your sons. You desert them when you could raise and educate them; so far as you’re concerned, they’re to take what comes, and what is likely to come is just what usually comes to orphans in the poverty of their orphanhood. No. Either a man shouldn’t have children, or he should accept the burden of raising and educating them; the choice you’re making is one of the most heedless indifference. Your choice should be that of a good and courageous man—especially since you say you’ve had a lifelong concern for virtue. I’m ashamed, Socrates, ashamed both for you and for your friends, because it’s going to seem that the whole business was done through a kind of cowardice in us. The case was brought to court when it needn’t have been. Then there was the conduct of the trial. And now, as the final absurdity of the whole affair, it will look as if we let slip this final opportunity because of our own badness and cowardice, whereas we could have saved you or you could have saved yourself if we were worth anything at all. These things are bad, and shameful both to you and to us. Decide. Or rather, at this hour, it isn’t time to decide but to have decided. This is the last chance, because everything must be done this coming night, and if we wait it will not be possible any longer. Please, Socrates, be persuaded by me and do as I ask.”

Always afraid of being carried away by emotion, Socrates preferred to make the decision after consulting his own reason and the consequences for his philosophy if he escaped. “We must consider carefully whether this thing is to be done, for I am now and always have been the sort of man who is persuaded only by the argument which on reflection proves best to me, and I cannot throw over arguments I formerly accepted merely because of what has come; they still seem much the same to me, and I honor them as I did before…Perhaps we should first take up this argument of yours about beliefs. We often used to say that some beliefs are worth paying attention to and others not. Was that wrong? Or was it right before I had to die, whereas it is now obviously idle nonsense put for the sake of arguing? Now, it’s useful beliefs which should be valued, not harmful or bad ones? Useful ones being those of the wise, bad ones those of the foolish? Suppose a man goes in for athletics. Does he pay attention to the opinions, the praise and blame, of everybody, or only the one man who is his physician or trainer? Then he ought to welcome the praise and fear the blame of that one man, not of the multitude. But if he disobeys that supervisor, scorns his judgment and praises, values those of the multitude who are without understanding, won’t he suffer an evil? Are we to fear and follow the multitude in such matters? Or is it rather the opinion of one man, if he but have knowledge, which we must reverence and fear beyond all the rest? Since, if we do not follow it, we will permanently damage and corrupt something that we used to say becomes better by justice and is harmed by injustice. Perhaps we shouldn’t give much thought to what the multitude tells us, my friend. Perhaps we should rather think of what he will say who understands things just and unjust—he being but one man, and the very Truth itself.”

Socrates then went into an analysis of justice contemplating whether escaping was actually injustice to an authority on justice. “Do we say that there are any circumstances in which injustice ought willingly or wittingly be done? Or is injustice to be done in some circumstances but not others? Is the doing of injustice in no way honorable or good, as we often in the past agreed, or have those former agreements been cast aside these last few days? Has it long escaped our notice, Crito, that as old men in serious discussion with each other we were really no better than children, or is it rather precisely as we used to claim: that whether the multitude agrees or not, whether we must suffer things still worse than this or things more easy to bear, still, the doing of injustice is in every circumstance shameful and evil for him who does it. Do we affirm that, or not? One must never do injustice. Nor, as most people think, return injustice for injustice, since one must never do injustice…Suppose I was about to run off from here, or whatever the thing should be called. And suppose the Laws, the common constitution of the City, came and stood before me and said, ‘Tell us, Socrates, what you intend to do. Do you mean by this to destroy us? To destroy, as far as in you lies, the Laws and the City as a whole? Or do you think that a city can continue to exist and not be overturned, in which legal judgments once rendered are without force, but may be rendered unauthoritative by private citizens and so corrupted? Or are we to reply that the City did us an injustice and didn’t decide the case correctly. Is that what we’re to say?”

Because laws can be good or bad, Socrates wrestled with the possibility of Athens becoming unstable if he broke the law to escape. Treating laws like they were a person that could be injured, he entertained their response, both regressive and infantile, where being an example one must tolerate an abusive father for philosophical reasons. “We bore you, reared you, educated you. Can you then say, first of all, that you are not our offspring and our slave—you, and your fathers before you? And if that’s true, do you think that justice is on a level between you and us—that it is right for you to do in return what we may undertake to do to you? Was there such an equality relative to your father, or your master if you had one, so that you might return whatever was done to you—strike back when struck, speak ill when spoken ill to, things like that? Does such a possibility then exist toward your Country and its Laws, so that if we should undertake to destroy you, believing it just, you in return will undertake so far as you are able to destroy us, your Country and its Laws? Will you claim that this is right—you, who are so profoundly concerned about virtue? Or are you so wise that you have let it escape your notice that Country is to be honored beyond mother and father or any forebears; that it is more holy, more to be revered, of greater apportionment among both gods and men of understanding; that an angered Country must be reverenced and obeyed and given way to even more than an angered father; that you must either persuade it to the contrary or do what it bids and suffer quietly what it prescribes, whether blows or bonds, whether you are led to war for wounds or death, still, these things are to be done. The just lies here: never to give way, never to desert, never to leave your post, but in war or court of law or any other place to do what City and Country command—that, or to persuade it of what is by nature just. It is not holy to use force against a mother or father; and it is far more unholy to use force against your Country.”