Crito

While confined awaiting a death sentence, a man receives an early-morning visit from a close friend who urges him to escape, offering money and warning of damage to reputation and his children’s prospects. The friend advances practical and social reasons for flight, but the prisoner reframes the issue as a moral question about whether one should repay injustice with injustice. He argues that citizens are bound by obligations to the laws and the community that shaped them, that expert judgment about justice matters more than popular opinion, and that preserving virtue matters more than preserving life. He therefore refuses the proposed escape.