|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: take care of them? Nay; but if they who call themselves friends are good
for anything, they will--to be sure they will.
'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,
|