Crito

What It Is

A short dialogue, fifteen pages, written by Plato perhaps a decade after the events it describes. The setting is a cell in Athens in 399 BC. Crito, a wealthy man who has been Socrates's friend since boyhood, has bribed his way in early, and he has not come empty-handed.

What follows is not a rescue scene. It is an argument about the citizen and the city, conducted at the pace Socrates always sets, and it moves by steps so small and so reasonable-looking that a reader can be a long way in before noticing the ground has shifted. The question on the table is whether a man who believes the law has wronged him may break it to save his life.

It takes half an hour to read and a good deal longer to get out of your head. Partway through, Plato does something formally strange that no summary of this dialogue prepares you for, and it is the reason people are still arguing about the Crito.

Why It Matters

This is the founding text of political obligation. Every later account of consent, of the social contract, of why the state's commands bind you when you did not choose to be born under them, is working ground that Socrates broke here. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau are all, in part, answers to it.

It is also the text that civil disobedience keeps having to get past. Thoreau, Gandhi and Martin Luther King all claim Socrates as an ancestor. Whether the Crito licenses them is a live question, and reading it will make you less confident of the answer than you were.

Its deepest interest is the friction with the Apology. The Socrates of the courtroom and the Socrates of the cell can look like two different men on the question of what a city may demand of the person inside it. Two thousand years of scholarship has not settled whether one man can hold both positions. It is one of the few philosophical problems a first-time reader is fully equipped to enter.

Before You Read

Thirty minutes. No technical vocabulary, no metaphysics, nothing to look up. The difficulty of the Crito is entirely concealed.

Read the Apology first. Every standard edition prints them in one volume, and this dialogue assumes you have heard the speech.

Go slowly at the joints of the argument. Socrates asks for small concessions and each looks harmless. Stop and ask whether you would have granted it, because by the time you feel the weight of what you agreed to, you have already agreed.

Do not read it as moral uplift. It is a piece of reasoning, and some of it is doing more work than it admits to.

Which Translation to Read

• G. M. A. Grube, revised by John Cooper (Hackett) — recommended. The standard English Socrates, taught everywhere, and printed in Hackett's Five Dialogues alongside Euthyphro, Apology, Meno and Phaedo. Exact, plain, unhurried, and the cheapest way to own the entire Socratic core. The cost: Grube makes no attempt at the texture of the Greek, and the book is a student paperback rather than something you will keep on a shelf. View on Amazon →
• David Gallop (Oxford World's Classics, 1997), in Defence of Socrates, Euthyphro, Crito. The most scrupulous popular version, by a philosopher who spent a career on these texts. His notes tell you where the Greek is doing something the English cannot, which is exactly what you want in a dialogue that turns on single words. The cost: austere reading, and the volume leaves out Phaedo and Meno.
• Christopher Rowe (Penguin Classics, 2010), in The Last Days of Socrates. The most literary English and the best commentary in any mass-market edition. Rowe is superb on Plato as a writer. The cost: his introduction and notes go through the argument in full, so they belong after the dialogue.

Take Grube for the reading text and the company it keeps. Take Rowe if you want a guide at your elbow, Gallop if you want to be certain of a sentence.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it aloud with someone else, one voice each. It is a conversation between two men who have known each other for fifty years, and it only sounds like one when two people hold it.

Then reread the Apology. The Crito changes what you thought the speech meant, and the speech changes what you think the Crito is doing.

Read the introduction afterwards. And do not treat this as an appendix to the trial, a minor coda to the more famous speech. It is fifteen pages, and no other fifteen pages have done more to shape how states claim the right to be obeyed.