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The Voices of Law in Plato's Crito

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The Voices of Law in Plato's Crito FIRST DRAFT: NOT FOR CITATION OR CIRCULATION COMMENTS WELCOME THE VOICES OF LAW IN PLATO’S CRITO Robert Howse University of Michigan Law School, Ann Arbor Email: [email protected] 18 May 2002 Copyright, Robert Howse, 2002 *This essay owes much to my students at the University of Toronto, where I taught the Crito in the late 1990s, and especially to Michal Gal and Zvi Kahana. With few exceptions, this first draft does not address the massive secondary literature on the Crito, but I have had constantly in mind the interpretations of my colleague J.B. White and my former colleague, Ernie Weinrib, as well as that of Leo Strauss. 2 Introduction The theme of Plato’s Crito is, apparently, obedience to law. Socrates discusses this subject with a man who has just admitted to corrupting a law-enforcement official-- the dialogue begins with Crito’s admission (or perhaps even boast) that he obtained access to Socrates through doing something for the prison guard. Crito’s expressed purpose in coming to see Socrates is to persuade him to escape from prison and go into exile, thereby avoiding the sentence of death. As we shall later learn in the Crito, there were options available to Socrates to avoid the sentence of death at the time of his trial, options of which Crito himself is fully aware. Had Socrates acted earlier, he could have avoided death without acting against the laws of Athens. Thus, if his intent were to persuade Socrates to escape, Crito would have to change Socrates’ mind in a very dramatic manner—he would have to convince Socrates to avoid now, at a cost of breaking the law, what he did not want to avoid before, when it did not entail breaking the law. Why should Socrates’ mind be capable of being changed? What considerations could Crito bring to bear now, that would not have been thoroughly weighed by Socrates already? When Crito arrives at the prison, Socrates is sleeping soundly—Crito himself is perceptive enough to draw the appropriate psychological insight: unlikely other men, including other men his age, Socrates is not frightened or panicked by the imminence of death. Thus, the mere fact that the date of his execution is drawing near, would not be a sufficient consideration for second thoughts. Crito is under the impression that Socrates 3 will be executed tomorrow, if he does not escape. To say the least, this is a tight time frame in which to plan an adequate escape; Crito has some ideas about how to do it, but as he presents them to Socrates, the ideas leave many questions unanswered. This raises doubts about whether Crito has come to Socrates with a genuine, realistic expectation that escape remains a viable possibility. Socrates, however, recounts a dream to Crito, which suggests to Socrates that the execution will not happen at least for one more day. “I dreamed that a beautiful and attractive woman in white dress approached me and said “Socrates on the third day you would come to fertile Phthia”. Crito initially regards this dream as odd (atopon, “out of place”). Then, he instantly agrees when Socrates replies that its’ meaning is clear. Crito’s purpose has little to do with the investigation with Socrates of his dream life; he is in a hurry or must appear to be so, since the instant aim must be to make the best effort to convince Socrates to let his life be saved.1 1 Ernie Weinrib makes much of the content of the dream itself, which is an allusion to the Illiad, and ultimately to Achilles. In the Illiad, Achilles resists the entreaties of his friends to keep fighting, instead deciding to return to his home Phthia after the third day. Then, after his true friend Patroclus is slain, he decides to remain to fight in order to avenge Patroclus’s death. Having explicated the allusion very clearly, Weinrib’s interpretation of it is obscure. He says that in staying at his station, unlike what Achilles was prepared to do, Socrates was showing is superiority to Achilles. My own reading is different. The example of Achilles shows that while Achilles was not moved by the entreaties of his friends, or the kind of friends who came to him in a delegation, he was far from incapable of being moved by friendship itself. The dream suggests that we should not judge the importance of friendship in Socratic morality by the way in which Socrates responds to Crito’s entreaties based on friendship. J.B. White also places some emphasis on the dream, suggesting that the dream indicates that for Socrates death is a homecoming (in implicit contrast to the case of Achilles, for whom the homecoming is the alternative to continuing to risk his life). What White’s reading reminds us, is that Crito could easily have interpreted the dream as a sign to Socrates that his fate is to escape death, if Crito were truly convinced in his mission to change Socrates’ mind: after all, what Achilles was supposed to be doing after the third day, was taking himself away from mortal danger, to understand the homecoming as death is as White suggests Socratic, but it is not Homeric. This would have led into a debate about the meaning of the dream between Crito and Socrates, which Crito is quick to accept Socrates’ invitation to avoid by accepting that the meaning is clear. Deep down Crito is resigned to Socrates’ acceptance of death. The irony is that as I have suggested Crito might be concerned not to appear to be wasting crucial time by having a conversation with Socrates about his dreams, while on the other hand someone truly convinced about the continuing possibility of escape would have precisely contested the interpretation of the dream. Finally, perhaps there is yet another level in this dream. Achilles had to chose between coming home and avenging his friend Patrocles. Because for Socrates death (in these circumstances, i.e. at his age and in his situation) is itself a homecoming, he need not make such a choice— by going to his death Socrates both comes home and avenges his true friends, by punishing the city of Athens for unjustly condemning him for philosophizing. He shames Athens for its unjust verdict by 4 At the same time, Crito had hesitated to bother waking up Socrates from this very dream in order to make his pitch. We can suspect that Crito does not really believe that he can change Socrates’ mind, and is inconsistent in presenting himself as urgently seized with that task. But, to preserve his reputation, he has to give it the old college try. While Crito’s first appeal to Socrates is that he does not want to lose an irreplaceable friend, the second appeal concerns reputation, Crito’s not Socrates’. Crito must surely know that if Socrates’ much closer friends and associates have not dissuaded him from accepting the death penalty, Crito himself has no chance. Having weighed all other considerations and so far stuck to his decision, would Socrates really be inclined to change his course of action to save Crito from the reputation of putting money above friendship? Crito would have to be both enormously egotistical and stupid to believe any such thing. But there may be another way for Socrates to solve Crito’s problem: Socrates could give to Crito a response to Crito’s entreaties that makes it plain that Socrates is going to his death for reasons that have nothing to do with Crito’s lack of generosity. To take suspicion off of Crito (who is instinctively minded to think in terms of preserving money—he makes a point of how cheap it would be to facilitate Socrates’ escape), those reasons would have to be comprehensible to the people among whom Crito cares about his reputation. Thus, Crito is asking Socrates, in all probability, not to change his course of action, but to provide a rationale for that course of action that absolves Crito of all suspicion in the eyes of those whose opinion he cares about. The performance of proving, through obeying the death sentence, that he and his friends (who might have conspired with him in escape) are not the lawless persons that the prosecutors depicted them as. This last possibility is explored in the conclusion to this paper as the culmination of the argument of the dialogue. But the varying interpretations of the dream illustrate that how we read the dream depends on how we read the dialogue as a whole, the basic “hermeneutic” circle. It may also depend on more systematic scholarly attention to the heremeneutic challenge posed by dreams in Plato: see for example C. Tarnopolsky, “Fantasy, Dreams and the Logic of Mimesis in Plato’s Republic”, unpublished manuscript, Department of Government, Harvard University (on file with the author). 5 Socrates—and Crito—is for others. Is it possible that, given the notoriety of and fascination with Socrates, not to mention the probable rumors about an escape, the prison guard is eavesdropping on the conservation between Crito and Socrates? In the absence of a witness, would the associates of Crito among whom Crito’s reputation is a stake be inclined to believe Crito’s own self-serving account of the conversation between himself and Socrates? We know, in any case, that the prison guard has already been bribed by Crito, and has previously been acquainted with him. There is every reason to believe that the guard may well talk to others about what he has heard.
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