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PlatoCrito
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Dialogue Format
Like much of Plato’s corpus, Crito is a dialogue—a written account of a conversation between characters. The word “dialogue” itself comes from the ancient Greek word dialogos, which means conversation. Many of Plato’s dialogues involve the character of Socrates. Plato modeled this literary Socrates after the historical Socrates, who was Plato’s teacher. Although Socrates does not play a starring role in all of Plato’s dialogues, he does in many. Crito is named for Socrates’s interlocutor—the person with whom he speaks—who was modeled after a historical friend of Socrates. Plato was not the only ancient author to write in dialogue format—others include Xenophon (Plato’s rough contemporary) and the Roman author Cicero.
There are other surviving forms of ancient philosophy in addition to dialogues. Authors frequently wrote treatises (a written prose work that systematically discusses a particular topic) and even philosophical poetry. The benefit of the dialogue format for Plato’s purposes is that it can closely follow the method of Socrates’s style of teaching, now known as the “Socratic method.” It involves the educator posing question after question to the student until the student eliminates all but the correct answers. As Socrates left no writing of his own, dialogues like those by Plato and Xenophon are extremely valuable for investigating both what and how he taught.
Analogy
Often when Plato’s Socrates makes his arguments and poses his questions to his interlocutors, he does so through analogy. An analogy is a comparison between two concepts or things that illuminates something unfamiliar by reference to something known. The word “analogy” even comes from the ancient Greek word analogos, which means proportionate or similar. Analogies are similar to metaphors, although metaphors involve comparing two things in a literary or even poetical way for effect, even when the two things are not related. Plato’s Socrates often uses analogies because they allow him to lead the interlocutors or students to the correct conclusions by relating difficult or potentially ambiguous concepts, such as justice and virtue, to more concrete aspects of their lives. For example, in Crito, Socrates uses the analogy of fitness to explain the concept of expertise. Fitness and exercise were extremely important to the ancient Athenians, and thus this topic is one with which Socrates’s students (or Plato’s readers) would have been familiar. By starting with fitness, Socrates can lead Crito to understand the importance of expertise when it comes to justice—a far more elusive topic.
Allusion
No literature exists in a vacuum—all literature is in conversation with other literature and art. Some of these points of connection can be difficult to tease out. One way that an author can make an explicit connection between their work and that of another is through allusion, which is the act of referring to another’s work indirectly or in passing. Plato does this at the beginning of Crito in Socrates’s dream. When the woman in Socrates’s dream tells him, “Socrates, may you arrive at fertile Phthia on the third day” (44a-b), she quotes Homer’s Iliad (Book 9, line 363). The Iliad was an epic poem originally presented orally throughout Greece for centuries before Plato lived, although the version known to both Plato and people today came together around the eighth century BCE (roughly three centuries before Plato). Even in Plato’s time, the Iliad was a canonical work of literature. By alluding to it in Socrates’s dream, Plato gives more weight to the dream’s importance and links his dialogue to a work of incredible importance in his culture.
Personification
Although Crito has seemingly only two characters—Socrates and Crito—Socrates invents a kind of third character in the latter part of the dialogue. Socrates asks Crito what would happen if he were, upon trying to escape, to be confronted by the laws of Athens. These laws are of course not actual people (and therefore cannot speak to Socrates). Instead, Socrates presents a personified version of the laws, who then interrogate Socrates. Personification is the act of giving human or personal attributes to something abstract or otherwise nonhuman. Speaking is an integral part of any dialogue (which is, by nature, a record of a conversation). Plato has Socrates show the importance of Athenian law by giving it one of the most important human abilities—speech. By introducing the laws as a kind of character, Plato can also add another layer of Socratic method to Crito. In addition to Socrates questioning Crito, Socrates can now question himself through the laws of Athens. Socrates seems to be on a more equal footing with Crito as they can both learn from what the laws say, although ultimately it is Crito learning from the words Socrates speaks in the voice of the laws.
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