or, so far as you are
able, in return, to destroy us, the laws, and your country; and in doing
this will you say that you act justly--you who, in reality, make virtue
your chief object? Or are you so wise as not to know that one's country
is more honorable, venerable, and sacred, and more highly prized both by
gods, and men possessed of understanding, than mother and father, and
all other progenitors; and that one ought to reverence, submit to, and
appease one's country, when angry, rather than one's father; and either
persuade it or do what it orders, and to suffer quietly if it bids one
suffer, whether to be beaten, or put in bonds; or if it sends one out to
battle there to be wounded or slain, this must be done; for justice so
requires, and one must not give way, or retreat, or leave one's post;
but that both in war and in a court of justice, and everywhere one must
do what one's city and country enjoin, or persuade it in such manner as
justice allows; but that to offer violence either to one's mother or
father is not holy, much less to one's country? What shall we say to
these things, Crito? That the laws speak the truth, or not?

_Cri._ It seems so to me.

13. _Socr._ "Consider, then, Socrates," the laws perhaps might say,
"whether we say truly that in what you are now attempting you are
attempting to do what is not just toward us. For we, having given you
birth, nurtured, instructed you, and having imparted to you and all
other citizens all the good in our power, still proclaim, by giving the
power to every Athenian who pleases, when he has arrived at years of
discretion, and become acquainted with the business of the state, and
us, the laws, that any one who is not satisfied with us may take his
property, and go wherever he pleases. And if any one of you wishes to go
to a colony, if he is not satisfied with us and the city, or to migrate
and settle in another country, none of us, the laws, hinder or forbid
him going whithersoever he pleases, taking with him all his property.
But whoever continues with us after he has seen the manner in which we
administer justice, and in other respects govern the city, we now say
that he has in fact entered into a compact with us to do what we order;
and we affirm that he who does not obey is in three respects guilty of
injustice--because he does not obey us who gave him being, and because
he does not obey us who nurtured him, and because, having made a compact
that he would obe