 That debate has had to confront the fact that Socrates did not actually disobey his own death sentence with which his trial concluded: when the time came, he drank the poisonous hemlock as prescribed by the jury. Before that moment, Plato imagines Socrates being visited in prison by his friend Crito (in a dialogue which bears the latter’s name), and urged to escape for the sake of his friends and family, a practice which was frequently tolerated in Athens so long as the escapee fled into exile. Socrates is not persuaded by Crito’s arguments. He begins his examination of them by recalling principles to which he and Crito had in the past agreed, including the principle that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it (Cri. 47a–50a). He then goes on to ventriloquize a series of speeches against escape, which he ascribes to the “Laws of  Athens”.[6]  These speeches articulate a set of special connections between Socrates and the Laws of Athens which, depending on one’s reading, either flesh out the principle that it is better to suffer injustice than to do it (by dramatizing reasons for which it would unjust for Socrates to escape), or else stand in tension with it by invoking absolutist grounds with implications more extensive than such a principle would authorize (Harte 1999). On any reading, it is important to bear in mind that Socrates is choosing to obey a jury verdict that has commanded him to suffer what is arguably an injustice, but not to commit one, so that one of his fundamental ethical principles here as elsewhere in Plato (that it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one) is at least compatible with his acceptance of the jury’s sentence.