by Plato
(c) Having said so much, I feel moved to prophesy to you who have given your vote against me; for I am now at that point where the gift of prophecy comes most readily to men: at the point of death. I tell you, my executioners, that as soon as I am dead, vengeance shall fall upon you with a punishment far more painful than your killing of me. You have brought about my death in the belief that through it you will be delivered from submitting the conduct of your lives to criticism; but I say that the result will be just the opposite. You will have more critics, (d) whom up till now I have restrained without your knowing it; and being younger they will be harsher to you and will cause you more annoyance.
If you expect to stop denunciation of your wrong way of life by putting people to death, there is something amiss with your reasoning. This way of escape is neither possible nor creditable; the best and easiest way is not to stop the mouths of others, but to make yourselves as well behaved as possible. This is my last message to you who voted for my condemnation.
(e) As for you who voted for my acquittal, I should very much like to say a few words to reconcile you to this result, while the officials are busy and I am not yet on my way to the place where I must die. I ask you, gentlemen, to spare me these few moments; there is no reason why we should not exchange a few words 40(a) while the law permits. I look upon you as my friends, and I want to show you the meaning of what has now happened to me.
Gentlemen of the jury79 – for you deserve to be so called – I have had a remarkable experience. In the past the prophetic voice to which I have become accustomed has always been my constant companion, opposing me even in quite trivial things if I was going to take the wrong course. Now something has happened to me, as you can see, which might be thought and is (b) commonly considered to be a supreme calamity; yet neither when I left home this morning, nor when I was taking my place here in the court, nor at any point in any part of my speech, did the divine sign oppose me. In other discussions it has often checked me in the middle of a sentence; but this time it has never opposed me in any part of this business in anything that I have said or done. What do I suppose to be the explanation? I will tell you. I suspect that this thing that has happened to me is a blessing, and we are quite mistaken in supposing death to be (c) an evil. I have good grounds for thinking this, because my accustomed sign could not have failed to oppose me if what I was doing had not been sure to bring some good result.
We should reflect that there is much reason to hope for a good result on other grounds as well. Death is one of two things. Either it is annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything; or, as we are told,80 it is really a change: a migration of the soul from this place to another. (d) Now if there is no consciousness but only a dreamless sleep, death must be a marvellous gain. (e)I suppose that if anyone were told to pick out the night on which he slept so soundly as not even to dream, and then to compare it with all the other nights and days of his life, and then were told to say, after due consideration, how many better and happier days and nights than this he had spent in the course of his life – well, I think that the Great King himself,81 to say nothing of any private person, would find these days and nights easy to count in comparison with the rest. If death is like this, then, I call it gain; because the whole of time, if you look at it in this way, can be regarded as no more than one single night. If on the other hand death is a removal from here to some other place, and if what we are told is true, that all the dead are there, what greater blessing could there be than this, gentlemen 41(a) of the jury? If on arrival in the other world, beyond the reach of these so-called jurors here, one will find there the true jurors who are said to preside in those courts, Minos and Rhadamanthys and Aeacus82 and Triptolemus83 and all those other demigods who were upright in their earthly life, would that be an unrewarding place to settle? Put it in this way: how much would one of you give to meet Orpheus and Musaeus, Hesiod and Homer?84 I am willing to die ten times over if this account is true. For me at least it would be a wonderful personal experience (b) to join them there, to meet Palamedes and Ajax the son of Telamon85 and any other heroes of the old days who met their death through an unjust trial, and to compare my fortunes with theirs – it would be rather amusing, I think – and above all I should like to spend my time there, as here, in examining and searching people’s minds, to find out who is really wise among them, and who only thinks that he is. What would one not give, (c) gentlemen, to be able to scrutinize the leader of that great host against Troy, or Odysseus, or Sisyphus,86 or the thousands of other men and women whom one could mention? Their company and conversation – like the chance to examine them – would be unimaginable happiness. At any rate I presume that they do not put one to death there for such conduct; because apart from the other happiness in which their world surpasses ours, they are now immortal for the rest of time, if what we are told is true.
You too, gentlemen of the jury, must look forward to death with confidence, and fix your minds on this one belief, which is (d) certain: that nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death, and his fortunes are not a matter of indifference to the gods. This present experience of mine does not result from mere earthly causes; I am quite clear that the time had come when it was better for me to die and be released from my distractions. That is why my sign never turned me back. (e) For my own part I bear no grudge at all against those who condemned me and accused me, although it was not with this kind intention that they did so, but because they thought that they were hurting me; and that is culpable of them. However, I ask them to grant me one favour. When my sons grow up, gentlemen, if you think that they are putting money or anything else before goodness, take your revenge by plaguing them as I plagued you; and if they fancy themselves for no reason, you must scold them just as I scolded you, for neglecting the important things and thinking that they are good for something when they are good for 42(a) nothing. If you do this, I shall have had justice at your hands – I and my children.
Well, now it is time to be off, I to die and you to live; but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God.
Crito – Justice and Duty (ii)
Socrates in Prison
Introduction
The Crito is a short but highly controversial work. This controversy is focused upon the theory set forth in the speech of the Laws of Athens, as improvised by Socrates at the end of the work. The basic question is quite simple: can one reconcile the relations between individual and State recommended here with what we hear elsewhere from Plato’s Socrates?
This issue is not helped, perhaps, by the confidence with which scholars usually assume that this is an early, and therefore ‘Socratic’ work of Plato. Even when the question of how true to Socrates any of Plato’s works really are is very much contested,1 scholars assume that the task must somehow be to reconcile the Crito with what Socrates says in the Apology and elsewhere. In a sense they are right; Socrates did stay in prison when he might very well have escaped, and it is clear that his profound reluctance to flout the law must have outweighed a man’s natural desire to stay alive, make provision for his family and continue to enjoy the occasional society of his friends in exile.
Yet the difficulties in accepting as Socrates’ own the ‘social-contract theory’2 (and more particularly the apparent sacrifice of the individual’s moral independence for the rule of conventional law) naturally lead to questioning whether this is really Socratic or even Platonic. It has recently been proposed that Plato’s nephew and successor Speusippus wrote the work.3 There are certainly oddities about it which need explaining: a lack of any obvious Socratic irony,4 unusual religious elements,5 the absence of the Socratic elenchus,6 and a lack of any obviously ‘Platonic’ metaphysical or psychological infrastructure. The last feature is perhaps explicable in an early work; the first three are still more difficult to explain on this hypothesis. It is in fact difficult to accept that it is very early, as at 53b there appears to be an allusion to Polycrates’ Accusation of
Socrates, in which he had called Socrates a ‘destroyer of the laws’.7 A significant problem of language occurs in the central discussion of the constant need to be just.8 Recent work on Platonic chronology has indicated that there is unusually little homogeneity of style in the Crito.9 The work is often assumed to be early because it seems simple and because it is allegedly Socratic. But is it really as Socratic as assumed? Readers ought to keep this question in the forefront of their minds as they read the work.
As they do so they should also bear in mind a significant difference from other Socratic works. Elsewhere the setting is chosen in order to maximize the impact and the relevance of the philosophy, but it remains secondary; we are asked to approve the doctrine, not the events which occurred. Here, while the setting and the philosophy again go hand in hand, the philosophy evolves in order to explain the events. The chief question is whether Socrates’ actions are explicable in terms of Socratic philosophy, and what we are asked to approve are the actions rather than the philosophy. It was not a question that any follower of Socrates could give a simple answer to, for while they hoped to see his conduct as consistent with his beliefs so that his philosophy would turn out to be viable, nothing suggests that the political and legal theory used to explain his behaviour was routinely associated with Socrates.
The structure of the Crito is fairly simple. There is (i) a scene-setting introduction where we meet a serene Socrates in prison, two days before his death, and a distraught Crito trying to arrange his escape; (ii) a speech by Crito in which he pleads with Socrates to escape now; (iii) a discussion in which Socrates goes over his habitual arguments for putting justice first; and (iv) a reply by Socrates to Crito’s arguments for escaping, cast in the form of an address to Socrates by the Laws of Athens. Section iii is what seems so Socratic, for it painstakingly sets out the Socratic doctrine on the basis of which his unwillingness to escape is explained. But it assumes that the reader is familiar with this doctrine, perhaps with Plato’s own account of it in the Gorgias. It does not follow that section iv must be Socratic; it is emphasized in section iii that what is being propounded is long-standing Socratic theory, but the theory of iv is presented as an external voice which he currently finds persuasive.
Why is this external voice introduced? Not merely to distance Socrates from the views there expounded, nor simply to avoid Socrates having to deliver an uncharacteristic monologue in courtroom fashion. It was more important that the personification of the Laws of Athens in this way lends much-needed credibility to the notion that Socrates could have personal obligations towards them and could commit injustice against them. Socrates justifies his unwillingness to escape by claiming that it would be unjust to do so. Being unjust traditionally involved being unjust to somebody.
It is beneficial here to consider how Socrates’ opponents would have regarded his staying to face the death penalty. They could readily use the argument that either his friends had failed him because they realized his guilt, or that he himself had recognized that death was what he deserved according to law and had decided to pay the penalty. Supposing Socrates was innocent of the charges brought by Meletus, was he not guilty of bringing the law into disrepute by allowing himself to be convicted and put to death? Had he not committed a kind of suicide by default which reflected badly on the Athenian legal system? As Crito shows at 45e, the whole episode from trial to death would have made ordinary Athenians view Socrates and his followers in a very bad light.
Any author defending Socrates’ failure to escape from prison would have had to work within narrow limits. He would have to have shown a respect in Socrates for the due processes of Athenian law without showing a respect for the verdict and sentence which he had received. Thus Plato must establish that Socrates would have been unjust in escaping, not because he owed it to his accusers and jurymen to stay, but because he owed it to the city and its legal system considered in abstract. Obligations in the eyes of the Greeks were either to living human beings, or to departed humans, or to the gods. Justice looked after the first kind, piety (often regarded as a branch of justice) the other two. It was not natural to think of injustice towards abstract institutions, only towards people. But Socrates would not be wronging people by escaping, only the law of the state. So in order that the notion of injustice may be made plausible the Laws of Athens have to be seen as themselves akin to rational animate beings.
Furthermore, men do not have any obligations of justice to all rational animate beings; there must exist some tie which imposes a duty on one or both parties. Socrates is made to view the Laws as akin to those human beings to whom the Greek has his foremost duty, his parents. It was not just his human parents who brought him up; in a sense they were only serving the Laws of the city, which prescribed how it should all be done. Socrates is therefore obliged to obey them as he would a parent, and (it is argued) had on reaching maturity agreed to respect their authority by the very act of remaining in their city. He has two alternatives: either he must persuade them to change their mind, or else he must do as they command. He must obey not because it is naturally unjust to disobey the established law, but because it is naturally unjust to disobey an agreement that has been (i) freely and honestly made, and (ii) made with good reason.10
The personification of the Laws, and the fact that they are cast in the role of parents with high expectations, has great emotional impact – more so for the Greeks than for us – but the theory is incredibly strained. It raises a whole series of new questions about Socrates’ conduct. If injustice is the greatest of evils for the person who commits it, then the son who cherishes his parent ought to do his utmost to avoid having that parent be unjust to him. It may be argued that it is not the Laws so much as a percentage of the people of Athens who have wronged Socrates, but the argument lacks any conviction. If the Laws, not persons, were responsible for raising Socrates, then the Laws were responsible also for his downfall.
Whether these were the same laws as those under which Socrates was brought up some sixty or so years before is also an issue. The agreement made between Socrates and the Laws had been made long ago; thus the Laws can represent only the long-standing aspects of the Athenian legal system. Certainly they cannot embrace ad hoc decrees, or recent emendations out of sympathy with the traditional law of the city; certainly they cannot embrace legislation passed by the oligarchic regimes of 411 and 404 BC. But even on this point Socrates’ situation is unclear. He had remained in the city during the latter regime, when he might very well have followed the example of many of his fellow-Athenians and gone into exile. By staying in the city, had he made an agreement with Critias and his followers, and the dictatorial system which they were introducing?
One should not leave these questions without mentioning the character of Crito: he is a man of the same generation as Socrates, generally respected, concerned for the things which an Athenian ought to be concerned for. Thus the somewhat patriotic arguments of the Laws would have been expected to appeal to him. He is also a follower of Socrates, owing some loyalty to Socratic moral principles, but perhaps no great intellectual. This is likely to tell us something about the intended audience for this work. It is not to Athenian intellectuals that Plato addresses himself, but to the many patriotic citizens who found Socrates’ failure to escape difficult to explain.
Notes
1. See in particular Charles Kahn, ‘Did Plato write Socratic Dialogues?’, Classical Quarterly 31 (1981), pp. 305–20.
2. This may be the wrong term, for theories of social contract generally involve an agreement between the citizens; Socrates’ agreement has been made with the city and its laws, not with citizens and legislators.
3. See, in particular, H. Thesleff, ‘Platonic Chronology’, Phronesis 34 (1989), pp. 1–26, with note 76.
4. This is not explained by the fact that Socrates is chatting to a respected friend; he can be ironical enough when talking to Crito in the Euthydemus.
5. On this, see the general introduction, pp. xxv–x
xvi.
6. Socrates is not eliciting statements from Crito for the purpose of demonstrating an inconsistency in his belief that he, Socrates, should escape.
7. Thesleff, ‘Platonic Chronology’, note 76. Polycrates appears not to have been writing early in the 390s BC.
8. Crito uses the learned verbal forms in -teon far more frequently than any other Platonic work. A high rate normally characterizes later dialogues, though also Republic. All these forms except one group of four occur in this section.
9. See Gerard Ledger, Recounting Plato (Oxford, 1989), p. 185.
10. R. E. Allen in his conclusion to Socrates and Legal Obligation (Minneapolis, 1980, p. 111) emphasizes that legal obligation ‘rests essentially neither on force nor on a set of rules fixed in the nature of things or in the mind of God’. It is rather a powerful moral obligation resting on the twin premises that one must not return injustice and one must abide by just agreements.
CRITO
Tredennick described the scene in his original edition of this book as follows: ‘A room in the State prison at Athens in the year 399 BC. The time is half an hour before dawn and the room would be almost dark but for the light of a little oil lamp. There is a pallet bed against the back wall. At the head of it a small table supports the lamp; near the foot of it CRITO is sitting patiently on a stool. He is an old man, kindly, practical, simple minded; at present he is suffering from acute emotional strain. On the bed lies SOCRATES asleep. He stirs, yawns, opens his eyes and sees CRITO.’
SOCRATES: Here at this hour, Crito? Surely it’s still early? 43(a)