The Plea and the Argument

Crito's case is not simple. He makes three distinct arguments. First, he will be personally shamed: people will say he had the money to save Socrates and chose not to spend it. Second, Socrates is failing his children: he could raise and educate them but instead is choosing to abandon them to the fate of orphans. Third, escape is not even difficult: foreigners have raised large sums, friends in Thessaly are waiting, the informers ask for little. He ends with the most direct accusation: Socrates is choosing the easier path, not the better one. Socrates, says Crito, has always claimed to care about virtue.

Socrates's response is methodical. He cannot be guided by love or by pity. He is — and has always been — the kind of man who can only be moved by the best argument on reflection. The situation does not change that. The question of whether to escape must be decided by the same method as any other question. And the method begins, as it always has, with first principles. Are all opinions equal? No — we follow the physician's opinion about the body, not the crowd's. Is the soul more important than the body? Yes — we agreed on this. Then should we damage the soul to save the body? No. And does injustice damage the soul? Yes — we agreed on this too. Then escaping through injustice, even to save a life, is the wrong choice. Not because life is unimportant, but because the soul is more important than life.

The argument narrows until only one question remains: is escaping — against the explicit decision of the city, without its consent — itself an injustice? Socrates frames it precisely. He is not asking whether the verdict was just (it was not). He is asking whether a private man may answer the city's injustice with an injustice of his own. The crowd believes you can — that returning evil for evil is simply fair. Socrates has never believed this. May we do evil? No. May we return evil for evil? No — the same principle applies. Then may we wrong those we should least of all wrong? The city? Crito cannot answer. He says: I do not know.