Socrates believed that we each owe our final allegiance to the gods and the truth. These matter much more than any merely human authority. He claimed, according to Plato's Apology, that he valued his duty to obey 'the god' over his ties to his fellow citizens, declaring, 'Men of Athens, I respect you and I love you, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I live and breathe, I will never stop doing philosophy, not even if I were to die many times over' (Plato, Apology 29d). The will of the god trumps any merely human power. These lines lie behind many later reinventions of the dying Socrates as a proponent of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech.
But Plato's Crito presents a Socrates who is strikingly dif- ferent from the speaker of the Apology. He is far less agnostic about the proper course of action for himself or others, and far more willing to identify his own interests with those of the city.
The Crito is an account of a conversation in prison between Socrates and an old friend, Crito, two days before the execution. In this text, Socrates seems like the answer to a riddle about how to die deliberately, but not by one's own hand. The philosopher submits to death, longs for it, lives for it and dies entirely on his own terms, and yet does not commit suicide.
Socrates' death was delayed for some weeks after the sentence had been passed, because the trial happened at the time of a religious festival, when no public executions could be carried out. The delay is significant in that it gave Socrates enough time to escape from prison. Crito comes to Socrates with a promise of help. He has gathered money from some foreign friends of Socrates. Crito himself has friends in Thessaly who can offer Socrates protection. There is no need for him to await his sentence. But he chooses to be executed: the paradox is an essential element in the story.
Socrates explains his decision not to allow his friends to ferry him to safety by emphasising his duty to obey the city's laws - regardless of whether they are just or unjust. In contrast to the Apology, Socrates is now a figure who insists on conformity with the will of the city, even when the city makes a mistake.
Crito offers several inducements to Socrates to leave, some of which are extremely compelling. Crito admits that he is concerned for his own reputation: he worries about what 'the many' will say if they learn that he could have saved his beloved friend from death and did not do it. But he also argues that Socrates himself will behave wrongly if he submits to death. After all, he has a wife and young children, who will be left destitute if he dies. Crito argues on principle: 'Either one ought not to have children at all, or one should stay with them, and bring them up, and educate them.'
2. In this moving lost painting, by an unknown follower of Caravaggio from the early seventeenth century, we see Xanthippe and her sons leaving
Socrates in prison, preparing to philosophise and drink the poison in the company of his male friends. He has already got rid of the leg fetters, which
lie on the ground between husband and wife. One of the touchingly fat- legged toddlers reaches longingly back to his father, who does not notice him.
Socrates' pose here must have been an influence on David.
Socrates pays little heed to his parental duties. Instead, he attacks those who pay attention to the opinions of society. He insists that death is not to be feared by the person dying. But it is hard not to feel that Socrates has missed the most impor- tant point in what Crito was saying. He does not discuss his children's fear of their father's death. Instead, he redirects the whole conversation, and begins to ventriloquise the Laws of Athens, who will challenge him if he should attempt to escape from prison once he has been condemned to death by the court. They will say, 'What are you doing, Socrates?
Are you attempting anything other than the destruction of us, the Laws, and the entire state, in so far as you can do so?' Socrates turns from the family as the primary locus of responsibility, to the abstraction of the laws.
In the Apology, Socrates had insisted on the duty of all adult human beings to think for themselves, deferring only to the gods. But Socrates in the Crito suggests that he must conform to the city's decisions, whether they are just or not. Children and slaves, the Laws suggest, are property, and all citizens are like children or slaves before the law. This analogy provides an implicit answer to Crito's question about Socrates' own living children. The Laws imply that he owes no more responsibility to provide for his sons than he does for his sandals, cloak, or any other item of property.
Scholars call the conflict between the apparent conform- ism of the end of the Crito, and the gadfly Socrates of the Apology, 'The Apology-Crito Problem'. There are various ways to try to resolve the contradiction. Some insist that the situation in the Apology is quite different from that of the Crito. When Socrates says to the jury in the Apology, 'I will obey the god rather than you', he need not be talking about actual civil disobedience. One could believe that opposi- tion to unjust laws is sometimes justifiable, without believ- ing that it is right to escape from a punishment imposed by a legitimate jury in a democratic city-state. No society can function if every law can be broken.
But this kind of approach is ultimately unconvincing because the voice of the Laws is so vehement and unre- strained. No distinction is made between yielding to a sentence and obeying a law. The possibility of an unjust law is never discussed by the Laws. Their metaphors suggest that the rule of law is absolute: a slave must obey his or her master, whether or not the master's commands are fair.
A more convincing approach is to remember that the Crito includes three quite distinct voices: the voice of Crito, the voice of Socrates and the ventriloquised voice of the Laws. The text juxtaposes three incompatible points of view: the responsibility of human beings to one another, represented by Crito; the responsibility of philosophers to truth, justice and the unknown will of the gods, represented by Socrates; and the responsibility of underlings to their superiors and of citizens to the state, represented by the Laws.
But the Apology cannot - in my opinion - be fully recon- ciled with the views expressed in the Crito. In each of these texts, but in strikingly different ways, Plato uses the scene of the death of Socrates to provoke hard questions about how to make good choices in an unjust world.
socrates' strangeness
In historical terms, the trial of Socrates remains puzzling. Plenty of people, in this period of political upheaval, could have been considered guilty of anti-democratic sentiment - whether or not this perception was true. Why, then, was it Socrates who drank the hemlock?
One possible answer is that it just happened to be Socrates: it could have been anyone. He was killed pour encourager les autres. Perhaps Socrates was chosen because he was one of the oldest and most famous of the sophists. He was a con- venient figurehead for all kinds of free-thinking, standing in for a whole set of current cultural anxieties and fears about the coming generations, and a sense of disruption in the old ways.
In Plato's account, Socrates himself believes he is a typical, exemplary human being. When the oracle of Apollo at Delphi declared that nobody was wiser than Socrates, the man decided, 'He is not referring literally to Socrates, but has merely taken my name as an example, as if he would say to us, "The wisest of you men is he who has realised, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless"' (Plato, Apology 23b). Socrates denied that he was anything special. If we all could recognise our own ignorance, then the world would be full of Socrateses.