Historical context
The Crito takes place in the Athenian prison in 399 BCE, in the days between Socrates' condemnation and his execution, while the sacred ship whose return will end the reprieve is still at sea. His wealthy friend Crito has come at dawn with a plan: he has bribed the guards, and Socrates can escape into exile and live. The platform reads the dialogue as Plato's treatment of one of the oldest questions in political philosophy — why should one obey the law, even an unjust application of it? — staged at the most testing possible moment, when obedience means death.
Central argument
The platform reads the dialogue's argument as Socrates' refusal to escape, grounded in two principles and a famous personification. First, one must never do wrong, even in return for wrong — so the injustice of his conviction does not license him to injure the city by breaking its laws. Second, in the dialogue's most influential passage, Socrates imagines the Laws of Athens themselves coming to argue with him: he has lived his whole life under them, accepted their benefits, never left the city, and so has made a tacit agreement to abide by them; to break them now would be to destroy, as far as he can, the laws and the city that made him. The platform reads this as the ancestor of every later social-contract argument for political obligation.
Political and philosophical significance
The platform reads the Crito as posing the permanent tension between conscience and law, and as standing in deliberate counterpoint to the Apology. In the Apology Socrates says he would disobey any order to stop philosophizing; in the Crito he refuses to disobey the law that condemns him. The platform reads the apparent contradiction as the dialogue's depth: Socrates will not do an injustice at the city's command (he would refuse an order to harm), but neither will he evade a lawful punishment by an unlawful act. The line he draws — obey the law, but never commit injustice — is one political philosophy has argued over ever since.
Reception and influence
The platform reads the Crito as one of the foundational texts of the theory of political obligation and the rule of law. Its argument that the citizen who accepts a state's benefits incurs an obligation to obey its laws runs through the social-contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau to modern debates over civil disobedience — where Socrates' acceptance of an unjust verdict is weighed against the conscientious refusal the Apology seems to license. The platform reads it as the indispensable companion to the Apology and Phaedo in the record of Socrates' last days, and central to the legacy of Socrates in Plato.