Socrates and Legal Obligation

163 Pages·1980·7.64 MB·English

by  R.E. Allen

Socrates and Legal Obligation
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Socrates
and Legal
Obligation
R. E. Allen
Department of Philosophy and Classics
Northwestern University
University of Minnesota Press • Minneapolis
Copyright © 1980 by the University of Minnesota.
All rights reserved.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press,
2037 University Avenue Southeast,
Minneapolis MN 55414
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Allen, Reginald E. 1931-
Socrates and legal obligation.
Includes the author's translations of Plato's Apology
and Crito.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
I.Plato. Apologia. 2. Plato. Crito.
3. Socrates. 4. Law-Philosophy. I. Plato. Apologia.
English. 1980. II. Plato. Crito. English. 1980.
III. Title.
B365.A95 184 80-18193
ISBN 0-8166-09624
ISBN 0-8166-0965-9 (pbk.)
The University of Minnesota
is an equal-opportuntity
educator and employer.
For Ruth and Elisabeth
Although I cannot say that I am utterly untrained
in those rules which best rhetoricians have given
or unacquainted with those examples which the prime
authors of eloquence have written in any learned
tongue, yet true eloquence I find to be none but
the serious and hearty love of truth; and that
whose mind is soever fully possessed with a desire
to know good things, and with the dearest charity to
infuse the knowledge of them into others, when such
should speak, his words (by what I can express) like
so many nimble and airy servitors trip about him at
command, and in well-ordered files, as he would
wish, fall aptly into their places.
John Milton, Apology
Introduction
The association between Plato's Crito and Apology is close and na-
tural. They were anciently grouped by Thrasyllus with the Euthyphro
and Phaedo as members of a single tetralogy, the first, for the reason
that they bear on the events of Socrates' trial and death. The scene
of the Euthyphro is the Porch of the King Archon, where Socrates
has come to answer in preliminary hearing the charges brought against
him by Meletus; the Apology presents Socrates' courtroom defense
and condemnation; the Crito, his refusal to escape the death sentence
a few days before it was to be executed; the Phaedo, his last hours
and death, and promise of immortality. This order has to do with the
sequence of events described, not with the chronology of description.
On stylistic grounds, the Phaedo must be classified as a middle dia-
logue, written well after its tetralogical companions. But there is no
compelling reason, stylistic or otherwise,to suppose that the Crito
was written after rather than before the Apology,1 or for that matter
the Euthyphro. It is sufficient to observe that they are works of
Plato's early period, probably written between 399 and 387 B.C.,
when Plato was in his thirties.
What follows is not meant as a commentary, which Burnet has ad-
mirably provided. My aim has been to help the reader understand
certain elements in the Apology and Crito which have often proved
obscure, and the comment is relatively more full in dealing with the
viii Introduction
Crito than the Apology because of the greater complexity of the juris-
prudential issues there raised. The interpretation of the Apology in-
volves questions of literature, philosophy, and comparative law
which have not, in general, been asked; the reasons for the peculiar
kind of defense Socrates made at his trial have passed largely unrecog-
nized, as has the complex irony which that defense displays, and the
legal quality of the conviction. If this is reason enough for fresh com-
ment on the Apology, the subtle and cogent argument of the Crito
provides better reason still: for the Crito has not been well under-
stood even by those professionally concerned to interpret it, with the
result that one of the great masterpieces of legal philosophy in wes-
tern literature has been made to seem philosophically trivial. If the
account which follows succeeds in making the Apology better under-
stood, and helps restore the Crito to its rightful place as a classic
statement of the grounds of legal obligation, it will have served its
purpose.
Portions of the account have appeared elsewhere. The first chapter,
"Irony and Rhetoric in Plato's Apology," was the Cowling Lecture in
Philosophy for 1977 at Carleton College, where such colleagues and
friends as David and Mary Alice Sipfle, Fred and Judy Stoutland of
St. Olaf's, and Gary and Andrea Iseminger, added zest for teaching
and hospitality to the slow glories of a Minnesota spring. A draft of
the lecture in cruder form had previously been read to the classics
departments at Princeton and Pittsburgh; it has since been published
in Paideia. The chapter on legality, in much revised form, was first
read in 1974 before the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, as
part of a series of seminars sponsored by the Canadian Commission
on Law Reform; it was afterward published in Courts and Trials,
edited by Dean M. L. Friedland and presented to The Right Honorable
Borah Laskin, Chief Justice of Canada. The analysis of the Crito of-
fered here was first presented in outline form in a paper entitled
"Law and Justice in Plato's Crito," read as part of a symposium of
the American Philosophical Association in 1971 given with Charles
Kahn and G. E. L. Owen, and printed in the Journal of Philosophy
for 1972. It remains to say that it is unlikely that the present form
of this work would be as it is had it not been for Mrs. Clare Kirk-
patrick, R.N., Nurse Clinician, who, out of sheer humanity, exhibited
in practical application the truth of the Socratic theorem that the vir-
tues are one, and especially the virtues of courage and wisdom.
My debts are many and various. Jerome Hall first directed my at-
tention to many of the jurisprudential problems here discussed. Har-
old Cherniss was responsible for many improvements, and lent loyal
Introduction ix
support. John Swan and Ernest Weinrib, in a series of seminars on
jurisprudence in the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, taught
me more philosophy than I would otherwise have known. Dean
Eugene V. Rostow took time from a busy schedule to criticize my in-
terpretation of the Crito in terms of his own valuable analysis in
"The Rightful Limits of Freedom."2 The account that follows has
also benefitted in many ways, indirect but certain, from the hospitali-
ty and instruction of The Honorable Edwin H. Stier, Director of the
Division of Criminal Justice of the State of New Jersey, and of Wil-
liam F. Bolan, Jr., now Chief of the Educational and Legislative Ser-
vices Section, who introduced me to the law in action at a level of
highest professionalism, and confirmed my belief that many of the is-
sues here discussed in terms of the past belong to the living present.
It goes without saying that the mistakes which remain philosophical,
philological, historical, and legal-are my own.
Translations of the Apology and Crito have been included, not
because the world is groaning for them—they have been well translat-
ed already—but as an aid to the reader and a control on interpreta-
tion. Translation and comment alike are much indebted to Burnet,
whose scholarship does not wear out.