A short dialogue set in Socrates' prison cell where he refuses his friend Crito's offer to bribe the guards and escape execution.
Crito is a brief Socratic dialogue set in the days before Socrates' execution in Athens. His wealthy friend Crito arrives at dawn to report that the ship from Delos, whose return marks the day of execution, is due to arrive, and urges Socrates to let himself be smuggled out of prison. Crito has already arranged money and hosts abroad; he argues that Socrates' death will bring shame on his friends for failing to save him, and that he is abandoning his own sons.
Socrates refuses, and the dialogue becomes an examination of why. He insists that the only question worth asking is not what most people will think, but what is just, and that one should attend to the judgment of the person who actually understands justice rather than public opinion. He gets Crito to agree to principles that one must never do wrong, never return wrong for wrong even when wronged, and never harm anyone even in retaliation. From there he stages an imagined cross-examination by "the Laws" of Athens personified, who ask Socrates whether escaping would amount to breaking an implicit agreement: having been born, raised, and educated under these laws, and having chosen to remain in the city as an adult rather than leave, he has tacitly agreed to obey its judgments, win or lose. The Laws argue that fleeing now, after benefiting from the city his whole life, would return harm for harm and undermine the very legal order that makes justice possible at all.
The dialogue matters as one of the founding texts of political obligation and civil disobedience debate: it is regularly read alongside Antigone and Thoreau as a counter-case for why one might obey an unjust verdict rather than resist it. It also shows Socrates practicing at the edge of his own death exactly the method of question-and-answer argument he used throughout his life, refusing to abandon it even when the stakes are his own life.
“SOCRATES: But Crito, my friend, why should the opinion of the many matter so much to us? The most reasonable people, whose opinion is more worth our attention, will believe things were done exactly as they were done.”
— Crito · read this chapter →
“SOCRATES: If only, Crito, the many were able to do the greatest evils, so that they were also able to do the greatest goods — that would be fine. But as it is, they can do neither: they can't make a man wise or foolish; they just do whatever they happen to do.”
— Crito · read this chapter →
“So tell us: do you have some complaint against those of us laws that govern marriage, that they're not good?”
— Crito · read this chapter →
“These things, my dear friend Crito, you can be sure I seem to hear, as the Corybants seem to hear the pipes, and this echo of these words hums within me and makes me unable to hear anything else.”
— Crito · read this chapter →
It is a short dialogue set in Socrates' prison cell shortly before his execution, in which his friend Crito urges him to escape with the help of bribed guards, and Socrates argues through his usual question-and-answer method that doing so would be unjust. The dialogue ends with Socrates accepting his death as required by his lifelong agreement with the laws of Athens.
He argues that one must never do wrong or return harm for harm, even when one has been wronged, and that escaping would break an implicit lifelong agreement with the city's laws that raised, educated, and protected him. He imagines the Laws of Athens personified, cross-examining him on exactly these grounds.
Crito is a wealthy, loyal friend of Socrates who visits him at dawn in prison to report that the ship from Delos is arriving, meaning Socrates' execution is imminent, and to press him to flee. Crito has already arranged money and safe places abroad for Socrates to go.
Socrates does not say all laws or verdicts are automatically just; rather, through the voice of the personified Laws, he argues that having accepted the benefits of the city his whole life and having had the chance to leave or persuade the court, he is now bound to abide by its judgment rather than destroy the legal order by fleeing.
Socrates recounts a dream of a beautiful woman in white who tells him he will arrive at Phthia on the third day, a line borrowed from Homer. He interprets this as a sign that he will die not that day but the day after.
The dialogue is often read as an early argument for obeying the state's judgments even when they seem wrong to the individual, and is frequently contrasted with texts like Thoreau's civil disobedience or Sophocles' Antigone, which argue for resisting unjust authority.
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