The Laws of Athens Speak

Socrates does something unexpected. Instead of continuing to argue in the abstract, he stages a dialogue within the dialogue. He imagines himself slipping out of the prison — call it whatever you like — and the Laws of Athens appearing before him. "Tell us, Socrates, what are you doing? By this action, aren't you trying to overturn us, the Laws, and the whole state, as far as you can?" He puts the argument in their mouths rather than his own. An abstract principle can be reasoned with. A speaker looks you in the eye. By giving the Laws a voice, Socrates forces Crito to hear the argument as if it were a charge from a person, not a theorem.

The Laws make two distinct arguments. First, the parental argument: they brought Socrates into existence through the institutions governing marriage, raised him, educated him, gave him the conditions under which philosophy was possible. Against that debt, a citizen's grievance — even a genuine one — does not justify striking back. A son does not hit his father even when the father is wrong. Obedience or persuasion: those are the only legitimate responses. Second, the contract argument: Socrates was free to leave Athens at any point in seventy years. He admires Sparta and Crete — he could have gone there. He never went. He stayed, married, fathered children, built his life in the agora. Staying was consent. At his own trial he could have proposed exile instead of death; he declined, as if he preferred death. To run now, only because the verdict has gone against him, is to confess that the agreement was always conditional — and only a slave runs from his master rather than persuading him.

The Laws close by tracing out what flight would mean in practice. In nearby cities — Thebes, Megara — Socrates will arrive as an enemy of the law. In Thessaly, where disorder prevails, he will be welcomed as an entertainer, invited to tell the story of his prison-break in comic detail, and reduced to flattering every host for his next meal. His children will not be better off abroad — his friends can care for them here, whether he is alive in Thessaly or dead in the ground below. The Laws end with the starkest version of the choice: die here, innocent, wronged by men but not by the Laws; or go, having broken faith with the city that made you, and be received below as an enemy by the Laws of the underworld too. The voice, Socrates tells Crito, is humming in his ears like the flute in the ears of a mystic — stopping him from hearing anything else. He asks if Crito has anything left to say. Crito says: I have nothing to say, Socrates. And Socrates says: then leave me to follow the will of God, and to go wherever he leads.