ABSTRACT
Introduction “Athenian men, I respect you and love you but I will be persuaded more by god than by you, and as long as I live and am able, I will not stop doing philosophy and exhorting you” (Apology 29d2-5).1 With these words, Plato’s Socrates defies the jury that will decide whether he lives or dies. Perhaps we should link Socrates with modern heroes like Gandhi and Martin Luther King as a champion of the individual’s right to resist the forces of collective conformity. And yet in another dialogue Plato puts the following in Socrates’ mouth: “Are you so wise that it has escaped your notice that your fatherland is more honorable, reverend, and holy, and that it is held in higher esteem by gods and by men with sense than your mother and father and all your ancestors?” (Crito 51a7-b2).2 Here the individual seems to get lost in subservience to mother and father, the weight of ancestry and heritage, the duty to heed “men with sense,” the power of the gods and the ultimate fact that even the gods bow before fatherland. If his defiance in the Apology seems individualistic or libertarian, in the Crito he seems beyond Tory. But then in the Euthyphro he seems to portray himself as an ignorant and apolitical innocent:
Where are you going, my companion? By leaving you are taking away the great hope I had of learning from you what is and what is not holy, and of escaping the indictment of Meletus. I hoped to show him that because of Euthyphro I have become wise in matters pertaining to the gods, that I will no longer ignorantly say novel things about them, and that I’ve changed my ways and will live a better life.3
