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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: his lifetime, which has been often repeated in later ages. The crimes of
Alcibiades, Critias, and Charmides, who had been his pupils, were still
recent in the memory of the now restored democracy. The fact that he had
been neutral in the death-struggle of Athens was not likely to conciliate
popular good-will. Plato, writing probably in the next generation,
undertakes the defence of his friend and master in this particular, not to
the Athenians of his day, but to posterity and the world at large.
Whether such an incident ever really occurred as the visit of Crito and the
proposal of escape is uncertain: Plato could easily have invented far more
than that (Phaedr.); and in the selection of Crito, the aged friend, as the
fittest person to make the proposal to Socrates, we seem to recognize the
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