Plato and Xenophon on the Different Reasons That Socrates Always Obeys the Law

Plato and Xenophon on the Different Reasons that Socrates Always Obeys the Law

Louis-André Dorion

Plato and Xenophon agree that Socrates always obeys the law. In the Crito and the Memorabilia (4.4 and 4.6), we see that they also agree that Socrates gives reasons for his obedience to the law. Despite this common ground, Plato and Xenophon disagree about the reasons that justify obedience to the law, as can be shown by a comparative analysis of Plato and Xenophon on the important Socratic theme of obedience to the law. I intend to show, as I have done for other Socratic positions shared by Plato and Xenophon, that the Crito and the Memorabilia provide different reasons for holding the same Socratic position on obedience to the law. Although Plato’s Crito has been the subject of numer- ous studies and greater attention is now being paid to Xenophon’s Memorabilia 4.4,1 it appears that no one has yet attempted a comparative analysis of these two texts. However, I will not provide a new interpretation of the Crito. My aim is to compare the Memorabilia with the Crito in order to highlight what is unique to the argument of the Memorabilia and, consequently, to the argument of the Crito as well. I will limit myself to the most noteworthy differences.

The Context of the Discussion

It is probably not a coincidence that Plato and Xenophon situate their respec- tive discussions of obedience to the law in an apologetic context. In the Crito, the immediate context is the prison where Socrates awaits the day of his execu- tion after his trial. In Mem. 4.4, the four first paragraphs also recall the context of the accusation against Socrates and underline his opposition to tyranny. The two discussions have without doubt an apologetic goal: both Xenophon and Plato want to show that Socrates was respectful of the laws of the state and that his teachings did not subvert its institutions and laws.2

1 Cf. Morrison 1995, Johnson 2003, Gray 2004, Stavru 2008, Dorion 2010. 2 Cf. Mem. 1.2.9: “But, said his accuser, he taught his companions to despise the established laws (τῶν καθεστώτων νόμων) by insisting on the folly of appointing public officials by lot, when none would choose a pilot or builder or flautist by lot, nor any other craftsman for work in

While the two texts share the same apologetic aim, their dramatic settings are very different. In the Crito, it is Crito’s offer to help Socrates escape from prison that sets the stage for the discussion of obedience to the laws of the state; in the Memorabilia, Xenophon never mentions such an offer, although the character Crito is present. Xenophon even has Socrates discuss with Crito how one ought to deal with sycophants (2.9), but he never attributes the inten- tion of helping Socrates escape from prison to Crito. In the first four paragraphs of Memorabilia 4.4, where he enumerates instances when Socrates refused to break the law, Xenophon makes no allusion to Socrates’ refusal to accept Crito’s offer to help him escape. Why this silence? Arguments from silence are usually weak, but in this case there is one plausible argument from silence that needs to be addressed: Xenophon insists on a number of occasions that Socrates was useful to his companions and that he rendered them virtuous, indeed, so virtuous that he even says that in their entire lives none of them, including Crito, ever “did evil or incurred censure” (Mem. 1.2.48, tr. Marchant). Given this position on Socrates’ usefulness, it would probably have been unwise, from an apologetic viewpoint, to write a scene in which a close friend of Socrates openly offers to commit an injustice by helping him escape from prison. However, this explanation is at odds with a passage from Xenophon’s Apol- ogy (23) where he tells us unequivocally that Socrates turned down his friends’ offers to help him escape from prison: “In the second place, when his friends (τῶν ἑταίρων) wanted to get him secretly away, he refused to go, but instead seemed to make fun of them, asking them whether they knew of some spot beyond Attica’s borders which was inaccessible to death!” (Ap. 23, tr. Treden- nick/Waterfield). This passage from Xenophon’s Apology calls for two obser- vations: first, Xenophon says that it was some of Socrates’ friends who had devised the plans for his prison escape but, giving no further details, he does not mention Crito. In Plato’s Crito, it is sometimes suggested that Crito is the unique instigator of the escape plan (44b9–c2), but at other times, the plan is attributed to a group of Socrates’ friends that includes Crito (44c5, 44e2–45a3, 45b1–5, 45e1–46a4). Let me remark in passing that other Socratics credited dis- ciples other than Crito for planning Socrates’ escape from prison. Diogenes Laertius (2.35, 2.60, 3.36) reports that Plato replaced the name of Aeschines by that of Crito because of his hostility to Aeschines. True or not, this story is a very good example of what O. Gigon called Sokratesdichtung. Second, in Xeno-

which mistakes are far less disastrous than mistakes in statecraft. Such sayings, he argued, led the young to despise the established constitution (τῆς καθεστώσης πολιτείας) and made them violent” (tr. Marchant).