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and the mouths of the Informers stopped with gold. He will find a home ready for him in Thessaly, where he will be loved and honoured. "It would be sheer folly," Crito continues, "to play into the hands of his enemies, and to leave his children outcasts on the world. If the sentence of death is carried out, it will be an absurd and miserable end of a trial which ought to have been brought to another issue."

But Socrates has only one answer to these arguments, which might have persuaded any but himself. Would it be right or lawful for him to escape now? Shall he who for half a century has been preaching obedience to the law, now, in the hour of trial, stultify the precepts of a lifetime! For all those years he has been enjoying the privileges of citizenship and the blessings of a free state, and shall he now be tempted by the fear of death to break his tacit covenant with the laws, and turn his back upon his city "like a miserable slave"?

He can fancy the spirit of the laws themselves upbraiding him:—

"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 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 to wrong—that is to say, yourself, your friends, your country, and us—we