crito   

covenants and agreements which you made with us at your leisure, not
in any haste or under any compulsion or deception, but having had
seventy years to think of them, during which time you were at liberty
to leave the city, if we were not to your mind, or if our covenants
appeared to you to be unfair. You had your choice, and might have gone
either to Lacedaemon or Crete, which you often praise for their good
government, or to some other Hellenic or foreign State. Whereas you,
above all other Athenians, seemed to be so fond of the State, or, in
other words, of us her laws (for who would like a State that has no
laws?), that you never stirred out of her: the halt, the blind, the
maimed, were not more stationary in her than you were. And now you run
away and forsake your agreements. Not so, Socrates, if you will take
our advice; do not make yourself ridiculous by escaping out of the
city.
"For just consider, if you transgress and err in this sort of way,
what good will you do, either to yourself or to your friends? That
your friends will be driven into exile and deprived of citizenship, or
will lose their property, is tolerably certain; and you yourself, if
you fly to one of the neighboring cities, as, for example, Thebes or
Megara, both of which are well-governed cities, will come to them as
an enemy, Socrates, and their government will be against you, and all
patriotic citizens will cast an evil eye upon you as a subverter of
the laws, and you will confirm in the minds of the judges the justice
of their own condemnation of you. For he who is a corrupter of the
laws is more than likely to be corrupter of the young and foolish
portion of mankind. Will you then flee from well-ordered cities and
virtuous men? and is existence worth having on these terms? Or will
you go to them without shame, and talk to them, Socrates? And what
will you say to them? What you say here about virtue and justice and
institutions and laws being the best things among men? Would that be
decent of you? Surely not. But if you go away from well-governed
States to Crito's friends in Thessaly, where there is great disorder
and license, they will be charmed to have the tale of your escape from
prison, set off with ludicrous particulars of the manner in which you
were wrapped in a goatskin or some other disguise, and metamorphosed
as the fashion of runaways is- that is very likely; but will there be
no one to remind you that in your old age you violated the most sacred
laws from a miserable desire of a little more life? Perhaps not, if
you keep them in a good temper; but if they are out of temper you will
hear many degrading things; you will live, but how?- as the flatterer
of all men, and the servant of all men; and doing what?- eating and
drinking in Thessaly, having gone abroad in order that you may get a
dinner. And where will be your fine sentiments about justice and
virtue then? Say that you wish to live for the sake of your children,
that you may bring them up and educate them- will you take them into
Thessaly and deprive them of Athenian citizenship? Is that the benefit
which you would confer upon them? Or are you under the impression that
they will be better cared for and educated here if you are still
alive, although absent from them; for that your friends will take care
of them? Do you fancy that if you are an inhabitant of Thessaly they
will take care of them, and if you are an inhabitant of the other
world they will not take care of them? Nay; but if they who call
themselves friends are truly friends, they surely will.
"Listen, then, Socrates, to us who have brought you up. Think not of
life and children first, and of justice afterwards, but of justice
first, that you may be justified before the princes of the world
below. For neither will you nor any that belong to you be happier or
holier or juster in this life, or happier in another, if you do as
Crito bids. Now you depart in innocence, a sufferer and not a doer of
evil; a victim, not of the laws, but of men. But if you go forth,
returning evil for evil, and injury for injury, breaking the covenants
and agreements which you have made with us, and wronging those whom
you ought least to wrong, that is to say, yourself, your friends, your
country, and us, we shall be angry with you while you live, and our