“Here Crito interposed and said, Be it so! but have you no last commands to give to these your friends or to me, in relation to your children, or any matter by attending to which we might do you a pleasure? Nothing but what I am always saying, O Crito: if you will seriously attend to your own lives and characters, you will do what is most pleasurable to me and mine, and to yourselves, even though you should not be able to agree with me in all that we have been discoursing; but if you live at random, and neglect yourselves, and do not strive to follow in the traces of a virtuous life, such as we have marked out now, and in many former conversations, you will do no good either to me or to yourselves. Well then, said Crito, we will apply ourselves with all our hearts to this matter; but in {122} what way do you wish that we should bury you? Any way you like, said he, if you can only get hold of me! then with a quiet smile, and looking round upon us, he said: I cannot persuade this good Crito that I who am now talking to him, and marshalling the heads of my argument, am the veritable Socrates; but he persists in thinking Socrates is that body which he will see by and by stretched out on the floor, and he asks how he is to bury me? but as to what I have been asserting with many words, that after I have drunk the hemlock I shall be with you no longer, but shall depart to some blessedness of the blest, this I seem to have spoken all in vain, so far as he is concerned. Only, for a little comfort to you, and to myself, I beseech you, dear friends, give Crito security for me, and pledge yourself to the opposite effect of the pledge he gave in my behalf before the jury. For he stood guarantee that I should remain and wait the result of the trial; but from you I request that you give him security that, after I die, I shall not remain, but forthwith depart, that, in this way, my excellent friend may suffer less grief, and when he sees my body either burnt or inhumated, may not grieve for me, as if I were suffering maltreatment, nor say in reference to my body, that they are either laying out Socrates on a bier, or carrying him forth to the place of the dead, or laying him in the ground. For be assured of this, most excellent Crito, that to use words in an improper sense is not only a bad thing in itself, but it generates a bad habit in the soul. Be of good cheer therefore, and talk about burying my body, not burying me; and as to the manner, manage this business as it shall seem best to you, or as may be most in accordance with law and custom. {123}