 While depicting himself in his defense speeches in Plato’s Apology as a new kind of virtuous citizen, Socrates makes three remarks which have in modern times been seized upon as indications of the principled limits which he might have put on the requirement to obey the law. The first two recalled political incidents: while serving on the Council, he had voted against an illegal proposal (32b–c); and under the brief oligarchical domination of “The Thirty”, he had disobeyed an order of the ruling body to arrest a democratic partisan for execution (32c–d). The third is a hypothetical remark. If, he imagines, the jurors were to say to him, “we acquit you, but only on condition that you spend no more time on this investigation and do not practice philosophy, and if you are caught doing so you will die,” his reply would be: “I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy” (both quotations excerpted from longer sentences, 29c–d). Particularly in twentieth-century Anglophone scholarship, these remarks have engendered a view of Socrates as endorsing civil disobedience in certain circumstances, and so have framed the question of civil disobedience and the grounds for political obligation as arising in Plato. A significant debate on these matters took shape in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s at the time of widespread civil disobedience relating to civil rights and the Vietnam War: see for example Konvitz 1964, Woozley 1972.