Plato’s Crito is a short dialogue, just eleven Stephanus pages, less than five thousand words. It has attracted significant controversy for many reasons, not least because of its apparent political messages. For in this dialogue Socrates argues that he should remain in prison to suffer execution, even though there is a realistic opportunity for him to escape; part of the reason for not escaping concerns an obligation he has to the city of Athens. In our political and legal environment there is a wholly justified concern for erroneous convictions and their consequences, especially when we think about jurisdictions that practice capital punishment, as ancient Athens did. The Innocence Project (https://innocenceproject.org/) in the United States is a particularly powerful, but hardly unique, manifestation of this concern. The dialogue has also provoked questions about the relationship between the citizen and the state, especially in cases where an individual’s sense of moral urgency conflicts with the law or policy of their state. These are vitally important political and moral issues that citizens in democracies and elsewhere need to be thinking about, and, despite the differences between ancient and modern democracies, the situation of Socrates in his trial, conviction and execution remains a valuable focus for that reflection. The Apology of Socrates and the Crito have long had an important role in curricula for these and other reasons, and scholarly analysis has often centred on those issues.

But that’s not the approach taken here to Plato’s Crito. In this short analysisFootnote ¹ of the dialogue, the plan is to consider the dialogue in its own right; the justification for doing so is the subject of Chapter 1. The result of doing so will be an interpretation of the dialogue as essentially concerned with ethical questions, in particular the ethical demands on Socrates in the concrete situation that he found himself in, rather than in larger questions of political and legal philosophy.Footnote ² That is not to deny that the dialogue has been a valuable stimulus to a great deal of subsequent philosophy in those areas, but I argue that questions arising from the reception of the Crito and from the later development of political theory are not what the dialogue was originally aimed at exploring. This does not, however, mean that the Crito is nothing more than Plato’s reflections on Socrates’ idiosyncratic situation. For the moral principles and process of deliberation exemplified in the dialogue are relevant to many other situations that reflective agents might find themselves in. In hard-case situations, where there may be no optimal decision to make, agents need a way to think through their practical problem in the light of principles that they can endorse. They must live with the results of their choices and must make their decision in the face of the likely consequences of those choices, consequences that are often unpleasant or inconvenient. The Crito displays Socrates doing exactly this, in a situation where the stakes could not be higher, and in so doing it provides a model for such practical deliberation that anyone can look to in any circumstances. That, I think, is the true focus of the dialogue and the analysis that follows is aimed at supporting that interpretation. In the analysis of the argument that occupies Chapter 3, I hope to show that this more modest approach stays closer to the content of the dialogue itself (no matter what other important questions it might provoke). In Chapter 5, I will return to this issue and consider again the relationship between ethical and political readings of the dialogue.