The Crito and Socrates’ Refusal to Escape

The day before Socrates’ trial begun, the Athenians launched a ship to Delos, dedicated to Apollo and commemorating Theseus’ legendary victory over the Minotaur (Phd. 58a-b). During this annual event, Athenian law demanded exceptional purity, so no executions were allowed. Although the duration of the voyage varied with conditions, Xenophon says it took 31 days in 399 (Mem. 4.8.2); if correct, Socrates lived 30 days beyond his trial, into the month of Skirophorion (June-July 399). A day or two before the end, Socrates’ childhood friend Crito - sleepless, distraught, depressed - visits Socrates in the prison, armed with arguments for why Socrates should escape before it is too late. Socrates replies that he ‘‘listens to nothing... but the argument that on reflection seems best’’ (Cri. 46b4-6), whereupon a reflective conversation begins.

Socrates’ argument that he must not escape is a continuation of his refrain from the Apology (28b, 29b, 32a, 32b, 37a, 37b) that he never willingly does wrong (Cri. 49b-d). The principle is absolute. Wrongdoing, mistreating people, and injustice are the same, ‘‘in everyway harmful and shameful to the wrongdoer’’ (49b5), never to be inflicted, not even in return for wrongdoing suffered (cf. Tht. 173a8), not even under threat of death (cf. Ap. 32a), not even for one’s family (Cri. 54b3-4). Clearly Socrates cannot be morally consistent and inflict harm on Athens in return for harm endured, as Crito would prefer (50c1-3). Note, however, that although one should keep one’s agreements (49e6-8) - one’s social contract as it were - one cannot always keep all one’s agreements at the same time. Socrates is right not to equate injustice with lawbreaking. We have already seen that (a) cities legislate their good to the best of their ability, but can be mistaken about what is in their interest, consequently establishing unjust laws; (b) Athens’ law against impiety, insofar as it required acceptance of the quarreling, wrongdoing gods of the poets, was an unjust law; (c) orders from lawful governments to commit wrongdoing are not binding because they are unjust; and (d) Athens’ one-day limit on all trials was an unjust law. Socrates had already found it necessary to violate the law of (b) when it conflicted with both his spiritual monitor and reason, and to disobey an order of type (c) when following it would have harmed someone else. Nevertheless, Socrates says he would be mistreating Athens to escape and must therefore remain in prison (49e9-50a3). To understand why that is so, we should take into account the argument of the Theaetetus and the Apology that (e) the correct response to unwilling wrongdoing is not punishment but wise counsel, instruction - the positive corollary to the negative principle of do-no-harm. When the laws tell Socrates to persuade or obey them (Cri. 51b9-c1), they give a nod to this principle. Like keeping agreements, however, persuasion is not always possible and is thus subordinate to do-no-harm.

One might say Socrates should have attempted to persuade the Thirty, and perhaps he did, but that situation differed importantly: undermining a corrupt government by refusing to harm a good man was unlawful, but it was not unjust. In the present case, having already said that death may be a blessing, Socrates cannot point to a harm that would outweigh the harm he would be inflicting on the city if he now exiled himself unlawfully when he could earlier have left lawfully (52c3-6). In this case, the laws are right to say that if Socrates destroys them, he will manifestly confirm the jury’s judgment that he is a corrupter of the young (53b7-c3).

The impiety law Socrates violated is interesting in a different way. Whereas one can destroy laws by undermining them, one cannot persuade laws; one must rather persuade men. And that presents an insurmountable obstacle: in 410, a commission was established to inscribe all the laws, the Athenian Constitution, in stone on the walls of the king-archon’s court. Just as the task was completed in 404, a series of calamities - Athens’ defeat by Sparta, the establishment of the Thirty, then bitter civil war - persuaded the citizens that, however useful it was to have the newly inscribed laws readily available, those laws themselves had failed to prevent disastrous decisions over a generation of war in which the empire had been lost. When the democracy was restored in 403, a board of legislators (nomothetai) was instituted to write additional laws, assisted by the Council. A new legal era was proclaimed from the year 403/2, Ionic lettering replaced Attic for inscriptions, and a public archive was established so laws written on papyrus could be consulted and cited. From that year, only laws inscribed from 410 to 404, or from 403 at the behest of the new legislators, were valid; an official religious calendar was adopted and inscribed; and decrees of the Assembly and Council could no longer override laws (such as had enabled the six generals to be tried as a group over Socrates’ objections).

However useful the reforms were, the board was not a public institution seeking advice or holding hearings. Furthermore, it was a crime for anyone else even to propose a law or decree in conflict with the inscribed laws. Still, Socrates did what he could: he never shrank from discussing whether the gods were capable of evil and conflict. It is anachronistic to use the phrase ‘‘academic freedom’’ of the era before Plato had established the Academy, but what is denoted by the phrase owes its authority to Socrates’ steadfast principle of following nothing but the argument that on reflection seemed best to him.