Socrates had already been sentenced to death when his friends went to his cell to tell him the escape was ready. That is the starting point of the Crito, Plato's short dialogue about the night Socrates refused his own rescue.
What the dialogue is
The Crito is one of the shortest texts Plato wrote about Socrates: a few pages, a single scene, two characters, no audience and no prepared speech. It is not a trial, it is a conversation at dawn, inside the prison, between a condemned man and the friend who comes to try to save him. The dialogue is named after that friend, and it is from him that the proposal Socrates refuses comes.
The escape was ready
After the conviction told in the Apology of Socrates, there was still time. His friends, Crito among them, arranged everything: they raised the money, bribed whoever needed to be bribed, and came to tell Socrates it was ready. Nothing was missing, not courage, not resources: all that was missing was for him to agree to leave.
Socrates did not leave.
He stayed to argue, not to escape in silence
And he did not refuse right away, like someone who already had the answer ready. He stayed, and argued with his friends, until the end, over whether escaping would be just. It is the same habit he carried through the city of Athens his whole life: faced with a question that seems to call only for courage or only for caution, he insists on examining it before acting.
It is not the silence of someone who has already decided and is only waiting for the moment to announce it, nor the grand gesture of someone who wants to look brave in front of friends saying goodbye. It is the same procedure he used with any interlocutor, in the public square or in prison: ask before concluding, and do not accept your own position without examining it first, even when the question at stake is the last one he will have time to answer.
The text itself sums up, in a single line, the standard he uses to weigh the decision:
"We must not place the highest value on living, but on living well." (Plato, Crito; passage translated from the Portuguese edition As Grandes Obras de Platão, Mimética, 2019, trans. Carlos Alberto Nunes)
Living well, here, is not surviving at any cost. It is sustaining, in what one does, the same reasoning that sustained one's whole life. That is why escaping does not become, for him, a practical matter of risk and logistics. It becomes a matter of justice: examining whether the act of escaping itself would be right, before asking whether it would be safe.
The hemlock that closes the coherence
The conversation goes on until the end, without him deciding in the heat of the offer. And the answer he reaches is no: escaping would not be just.
He drank the hemlock so as not to contradict, in the last act of his life, the only thing he had taught his whole life. A few days earlier, before the court, he had said that a life without examination is not worth living. Had he accepted the escape without discussing it, that line would have died right there, contradicted by the very man who said it.
Why the whole text is worth reading
The Crito is not a text about obeying or disobeying a law, in the abstract sense of the question. It is about what it means to remain the same person when no one else is watching, when your friends have already guaranteed no one will find out, and when staying coherent costs your own life.
It is only a few pages long, and the Crito reads in one sitting, right after the Apology of Socrates. Together, the two texts show not a hero of a single day of courage, but a man coherent to the very last conversation he had.
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See recommended readingsFrequently asked questions
What is Plato's dialogue Crito about?
It is a short dialogue, set in the prison of Athens, between the conviction of Socrates and his execution. His friend Crito visits him at dawn to propose the escape, already paid for and arranged, and Socrates argues with him over whether escaping would be just.
Why didn't Socrates escape, when he could have?
Because he argued the question with his friend Crito until the end, and concluded that escaping would not be just. He drank the hemlock so as not to contradict, in the last act of his life, the only thing he had taught his whole life.
When does the Crito take place in relation to the Apology?
Afterward. The Apology narrates the trial and the conviction; the Crito takes place in prison, in the following days, before the execution described in the dialogue Phaedo.
Continue: Apology of Socrates: not calendar wisdom · Why Athens condemned Socrates · Holy Socrates, pray for us: what Erasmus meant · To read is not to agree: the hardest Odyssey passage
Source class: Sócrates e o conhece-te a ti mesmo: autoconhecimento, virtude e maiêutica