29 definitions
The book's index
Crito
22 concepts · 29 definitions
Escape (n.) would turn Socrates into the very thing he was convicted of: arriving in a well-governed city as a destroyer of laws, he would confirm the jury's verdict that he corrupts the young.
Escape (n.) poses only one question for Socrates — not money, reputation or children, but whether it would be just; if not, death itself does not enter the reckoning.
Escape (n.) would make the old man a story: slipping out in a leather jerkin, so greedy for life with so little left that he broke the greatest laws.
Law (n.) are a citizen's parents: through them his father married his mother, and by them he was nurtured and educated — so he is their offspring and servant.
Law (n.) dies when the verdicts of its courts can be set at naught by private individuals — a city cannot survive that.
Law (n.) in Athens does not issue savage commands: it only proposes, and gives two alternatives, persuade or do what is said.
Retaliation (n.) is still wrongdoing: one must never, when wronged, inflict wrong in return, as the majority believe — no matter how one has been mistreated.
Retaliation (n.) against one's country is forbidden as it is against a father: the citizen is not on an equal footing to destroy the laws because they undertake to destroy him.
Many (n.) put men to death easily and would bring them back to life again if they could, all without thinking.
Many (n.) cannot do the greatest evil — for then they could do the greatest good; they can make no man wise or foolish, and inflict whatever they inflict haphazardly.
Injustice (n.) is in every way harmful and shameful to the one who does it, whether the majority agree or not.
Injustice (n.) done to Socrates came from men, not from the laws — and only by escaping would he make it the laws he wronged.
Consent (n.) is given by deeds, not words: seventy years of never leaving the city — less often away than the lame or the blind — is Socrates' signature on his agreement with the laws.
Persuasion (n.) at its most complete is like the Corybants' flutes: the words echo so loudly within that one cannot hear anything else.
A Country (n.) is to be honored more than mother, father and all one's ancestors — more revered, more sacred, counting for more among gods and sensible men.
Disagreement (n.) over whether one may return wrong for wrong has no common ground: the few who hold that one may not and the many who hold that one may inevitably despise each other's views.
Disobedience (n.) wrongs the laws three times over: it disobeys one's parents, one's upbringers, and one's own agreement — and it neither obeys nor tries to persuade.