WTF Is the Crito? Reading Plato's Crito

The trial is over. Socrates has been convicted and sentenced to death. But he is not dead yet.

In Athens at this time, there was a religious custom. Every year, a state galley sailed to the island of Delos for a sacred mission, and no executions were permitted while the ship was away. The ship had left the day before the trial, which means Socrates gets roughly a month in prison before his execution.

The Crito takes place in that prison, early one morning, very close to the end. His old friend Crito has come to tell him the ship is almost back and to make one final argument: Socrates should escape.

Socrates refuses. The question is why, and whether he is right.

The Setup

Crito arrives before dawn. He has bribed the prison warder and slipped in. He watches Socrates sleeping peacefully and does not wake him. When Socrates wakes on his own, he is not surprised to see Crito. He tells him about a dream he had: a beautiful woman in white told him he would arrive at fertile Phthia on the third day. This is a quote from Homer, where Achilles says his ships will reach home in three days. Socrates takes it to mean his soul will reach its home in three days, which means the ship has not arrived yet and will not arrive today.

Crito confirms the ship is expected today. Socrates says it will be tomorrow. Either way, time is very short.

Crito's Arguments for Escaping

Crito makes several arguments. Lets go through each one.

His own reputation. If Socrates dies when he could have been saved, people will think Crito valued money more than his friend. He will be blamed for not doing enough.

Socrates dismisses this immediately. Why should we care what the majority thinks? The majority cannot make a man wise or foolish. They inflict things haphazardly. What matters is what reasonable, informed people think, not the crowd.

The money is there. Crito says not to worry about cost. He has the money, and so do friends like Simmias and Cebes. There are people in other cities like Thessaly who would welcome Socrates and keep him safe.

Socrates does not directly respond to this but it becomes irrelevant once he establishes the core argument.

Socrates is abandoning his children. This is Crito's most emotionally charged point. By accepting death, Socrates is leaving his sons, one a teenager and two younger, effectively as orphans. He had a choice. He could have proposed exile as his penalty at the trial. He did not. Now he is choosing death when escape is possible. That is not courage, Crito says. It is the easy path. A good and courageous man would choose to stay alive for his children.

It would be unjust to stay. Crito also argues that it would actually be unjust for Socrates to accept the verdict. It hands a victory to his enemies. It abandons his friends. It means accepting a result that was itself unjust.

Socrates' Framework

Before addressing any of this directly, Socrates lays down the principle he will reason from. He says he is not about to start listening to different things just because he is in danger of death. His principles are the same as they have always been.

The first principle: you should only follow the opinions of those who know, not the opinions of the majority. He walks Crito through an example. A man who is serious about physical training listens to his trainer, not to the crowd. The crowd's praise and blame do not determine what is actually good for his body. The expert's judgment does. The majority can sometimes put you to death, sure. But they cannot make something true or false, right or wrong. The one whose opinion matters is the one with genuine knowledge of the subject.

The second principle: the most important thing is not life, but the good life. And the good life, the beautiful life, and the just life are the same thing. Crito agrees with both of these.

This means the question is not "will Socrates survive?" but "will escaping be just or unjust?" Everything else, reputation, money, children, follows from that.

The Voice of the Laws

Here is where the Crito gets genuinely original. Socrates says: imagine the Laws of Athens came to us right now and spoke. What would they say?

He then gives them a voice and lets them make the argument against escaping. This is one of the earliest examples of a social contract argument in philosophy.

The Laws say this: You cannot destroy us just because a court made an error in your case.

Their argument has several layers.

First, the Laws point out what they have done for Socrates. They governed the marriage of his parents, which is how he was born. They supervised his upbringing and education. They gave him everything he has. In that sense, he is their offspring. And you do not get to strike back at your parents just because they discipline you unfairly on one occasion.

Second, the Laws gave him a real choice. Every Athenian, when they reach adulthood, can look at how the city is run and decide to leave. No one is forced to stay. If you stay, you implicitly agree to live under the laws. Socrates stayed for 70 years. He barely left the city except for military service. He raised a family here. He chose this city more completely than almost any other Athenian. That choice is a binding agreement.

Third, the Laws point out that Socrates had a chance to propose exile as his penalty at the trial and did not. He chose to stay and fight. He even said in court he would rather die than stop doing philosophy. He cannot now, when the result has gone against him, decide exile is acceptable after all.

Fourth, the Laws ask what happens if he escapes. He goes to a nearby well-governed city like Thebes or Megara and arrives as a man who broke his agreement with Athens. Anyone who cares about the law will see him as a threat, someone who destroys the very thing that holds cities together. Or he goes to Thessaly, where Crito has friends, and lives out his days eating at banquets and telling people how he escaped in a disguise. What happens to his philosophical life then? And what happens to his children, who will either follow him as strangers in a foreign city or stay behind without him, with friends theoretically looking after them? The Laws point out that those same friends will look after the children whether Socrates goes to Thessaly or to the underworld, so his children are not actually a good reason to escape.

Fifth, and most sharply: if Socrates escapes, he has done a wrong in return for a wrong. He was wronged by men, not by the Laws. The Laws themselves did not fail him. A court of humans made an unjust decision using a just process. Responding to that by escaping means attacking the process itself, not the people who abused it.

The Core Principle: No Retaliation

Throughout this whole argument, Socrates has established one underlying rule that he keeps returning to. You should never do wrong in return for wrong done to you.

This was not a commonly accepted view in ancient Athens. The traditional Greek idea of justice was helping your friends and harming your enemies. Crito would have been very comfortable with that framing. But Socrates rejects it completely. Doing harm is always wrong, regardless of what was done to you first. Retaliation does not become just because the original injury was real.

This is why the personal arguments about reputation, money, and children do not move him. All of those are arguments about consequences, about what will happen to various people. Socrates has already decided to reason from principle. If escaping is unjust, no consequence makes it right.

And then he adds something that shows he really means it. He says that the people who hold this view and the people who do not share no common ground. They inevitably despise each other's positions. He is not trying to win an argument about whether retaliation is generally a bad idea. He is identifying a genuine philosophical divide. If Crito agrees that you should never do wrong in return for wrong, then the rest of the argument follows. If he does not, they have nothing to talk about on this subject.

Crito agrees with the principle.