THE ART OF PLATO AND SOCRATES' MISSION

ABSTRACT. Plato's dialogues provide us with two cases in which citizens become recruited as instruments of the state in carrying out unjust legal judgments made by the state. The claim that Socrates would violate a legally valid law proscribing philosophizing must provide an explanation of how such a law might be worded in a way that makes such a law conceivable in democratic Athens.