An earlier dialogue, the Crito, tells how certain friends and disciples of Socrates arranged a plan
by which he could escape to Thessaly. Probably the Athenian authorities would have been quite
glad if he had escaped, and the scheme suggested may be assumed to have been very likely to
succeed. Socrates, however, would have none of it. He contended that he had been condemned by
due process of law, and that it would be wrong to do anything illegal to avoid punishment. He first
proclaimed the principle which we associate with the Sermon on the Mount, that "we ought not to
retaliate evil for evil to any one, whatever evil we may have suffered from him." He then imagines
himself engaged in a dialogue with the laws of Athens, in which they point out that he owes them
the kind of respect that a son owes to a father or a slave to his master, but in an even higher
degree; and that, moreover, every Athenian citizen is free to emigrate if he dislikes the Athenian
State. The laws end a long speech with the words:
Listen, then, Socrates, to us who have brought you up. Think not of life and children first, and of
justice afterwards, but of justice first, that you may be justified before the princes of the world
below. For neither will you nor any that belong to you be happier or holier or juster in this life, or
happier in another, if you do as Crito bids. Now you depart in innocence, a sufferer and not a doer
of evil; a victim, not of the laws, but of men. But if you go forth, returning evil for evil, and injury
for injury, breaking the covenants and agreements which you have made with us, and wronging
those whom you ought least of all to wrong, that is to say, yourself, your friends, your country, and
us, we shall be angry with you while you live, and our brethren, the laws in the world below, will
receive you as an enemy; for they will know that you have done your best to destroy us.
This voice, Socrates says, "I seem to hear humming in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the
ears of the mystic." He decides, accordingly, that it is his duty to stay and abide the death
sentence.
In the Phaedo, the last hour has come; his chains are taken off, and he is allowed to converse
freely with his friends. He sends away his weeping wife, in order that her grief may not interfere
with the discussion.
Socrates begins by maintaining that, though any one who has the