The dialogues of Plato in five volumes, Vol. 2 (of 5) : $b Translated into English with analyses and introductions
Plato · en
if they are out of temper you will hear many degrading
things; you will live, but how?—as the flatterer of all men,
and the servant of all men; and doing what?—eating and
drinking in Thessaly, having gone abroad in order that you
may get a dinner. And where will be your fine sentiments
about justice and virtue? Say that you wish to live for the 54
sake of your children—you want to bring them up and
educate them—will you take them into Thessaly and deprive
them of Athenian citizenship? Is this the benefit which
you will confer upon them? Or are you under the impression
that they will be better cared for and educated
here if you are still alive, although absent from them; for
your friends will take care of them? Do you fancy that if
you are an inhabitant of Thessaly they will take care of them,
and if you are an inhabitant of the other world that they
will not take care of them? Nay; but if they who call
themselves friends are good for anything, they will—to be
sure they will.
[Sidenote: _There is no answer._]
[Sidenote: Let him think of justice first, and of life and children
afterwards.]
‘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. Listen, then, to us and not to Crito.’
[Sidenote: The mystic voice.]
This, dear Crito, is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring
in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of
the mystic; that voice, I say, is humming in my ears, and
prevents me from hearing any other. And I know that
anything more which you may say will be vain. Yet speak,
if you have anything to say.
_Cr._ I have nothing to say, Socrates.
_Soc._ Leave me then, Crito, to fulfil the will of God, and to
follow whither he leads.
FOOTNOTES
[17] Homer, Il. ix. 363.
[18] Cp. Apol. 37 C, D.
[19] Cp. Apol. 30 C.
[20] e. g. cp. Rep. i. 335 E.
[21] Cp. Phaedr. 230 C.
[22] Cp. Apol. 37 D.
PHAEDO.
INTRODUCTION.
[Sidenote: _Phaedo._]
[Sidenote: ANALYSIS.]