1In Athens, a short walk from the marketplace, stood the prison of the city, and its keeper under the magistrates was a man named Dromon. He had held the keys for twenty years. He locked men in, and he fed them, and when the order came he brought in the one who carried the cup. For in Athens a citizen condemned to die was given hemlock to drink, and drank it with his own hand.
2It is not work that makes a man loved. Dromon had been cursed by the dying more times than he could count, as if he had passed the sentence himself. He had grown a hide over all of it, like the hard skin on a rower's hand.
3He had one soft place. He had a daughter, Kleio, sixteen years old, and there was a young potter who looked at her. But a jailer earns little, and Dromon had no dowry to give, and he knew that no decent family takes a girl who comes with nothing. He lay awake over it. He would have done almost anything for thirty pieces of silver.
4In the spring of that year, four years after the tyrants fell, an old man was put on trial. You know his name. Three citizens accused him of two things: that he did not honour the gods of the city, and that he corrupted the young. The penalty asked was death.
5Dromon stood at the door of the court that day with the other officers. There were five hundred and one jurors on the benches. He heard the whole of it.
6The old man did not do what the accused do. He did not bring his wife and small sons to weep before the jury. He said that he had spent his life asking questions because it was his post, as a soldier is given a post, and he would not desert it for fear of death. He said he had been to the city what a stinging fly is to a big, lazy horse.
7The jurors voted. Guilty: but by so few that if thirty had gone the other way, he would have walked out free.
8Then came the choosing of the penalty, and by the law the condemned man might propose his own. Everyone waited for him to ask for exile. Instead he said that what he truly deserved was his dinners at the public table, like a winner at the games. Then, more soberly, he offered a fine. And he told them why he could not simply go away and be quiet. Dromon did not understand the words then, but he remembered them:
9"The life which is unexamined is not worth living."
10The jurors voted again. More of them voted for his death than had voted him guilty.
11The old man had one more thing to say before they led him out. He was not angry:
12"The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows."
13Now on the day before the trial, the city had sent its sacred ship to the island of Delos, as it did every year. Until that ship came home, no one might be put to death. The winds were contrary. So Socrates lay in Dromon's prison, with a chain on his ankle, for thirty days.
14Dromon had never had such a prisoner. He slept soundly. He thanked the one who brought his food. In the mornings he amused himself by putting the old fables of Aesop into verse. His friends came every day at the opening of the doors, and they talked from morning till dusk, like free men in a garden.
15And he asked Dromon questions. That was his way with everyone. Dromon gave short answers. He was not there to be made a fool of.
16"You are troubled about something," the old man said one evening, when Dromon came to see to the lamp. "You carry it in your shoulders. It is not me, I think."
17Dromon had not meant to say it. But no one had asked him in years. He told about Kleio, and the potter, and the dowry.
18"And the young man has said that he will not have her without it?"
19"He has not said. It does not need saying. No one takes a girl with nothing."
20"I see. Then you have not asked him."
21"I know what he would answer."
22"Do you? That is a fine thing, to know another man's answer before he has given it. I have never managed it. I have to ask."
23Among the friends who came was a rich man named Crito, who had known the prisoner since they were boys. On the twenty-seventh day Crito stayed behind in the porch after the others had gone.
24He spoke quietly. There were friends with money ready; some had come from as far as Thebes. There was a house in Thessaly where a man could live out his days. Half the city would breathe easier if the old man were simply gone in the morning. All that was wanted was a door left unbarred, on one night, for one hour. Crito named a sum.
25It was a dowry three times over.
26Dromon's hide was not thick enough for that. He thought of Kleio. He thought also of what is done to a jailer whose prisoner walks out. He said yes. His hands were wet.
27Two mornings later, in the dark before dawn, word came that the ship had been sighted off the cape. Crito came at once. Dromon let him in, and drew the bar from the outer door, and stood in the porch with his heart beating in his ears.
28Through the wall he heard the two old voices, low. It went on a long time. The sky began to pale.
29The inner door opened. Crito came out alone. His face was wet.
30"He will not come," he said.
31Dromon did not at first take it in. Then the anger rose in him as it had not risen in years. He had sold his oath and risked his neck, and seen his daughter married in his mind, and it was all to be thrown away by the man it was meant to save. He pushed past Crito and went in.
32The old man was sitting on his cot, rubbing his ankle where the chain went.
33"The door is open," said Dromon. "Do you understand? It is paid for. There is a horse. You could be in the hills by sunrise. Everyone wants it. Even the men who accused you want it. Why will you not go?"
34"Sit down, Dromon," said the old man. "You are owed an answer. I am costing you something, I think."
35Dromon did not sit.
36"I have lived seventy years in this city," said Socrates. "I could have left at any time. I stayed, and I had the good of its laws all my life. Now those same laws have gone against me. It was men who did me the wrong, not the laws. But if I slip away by night because the verdict displeased me, what am I saying? That an agreement holds only while it suits me. And I have gone about for fifty years telling people that it is never right to do a wrong, not even in answer to a wrong. Shall I say now that I meant: unless it is my own neck?"
37"No one would blame you."
38"I would know. I have had my own company for seventy years, and I have taken some care to make it company I can bear." He looked up. "And there is this. What would they have done to you, when they found the bar drawn?"
39Dromon said nothing.
40"You did not think I had thought of it. But I did. A jailer's life for a philosopher's is not a bargain I would make. It was for your daughter, was it not?"
41Dromon sat down then, on the stool by the door. He was ashamed, and he was not sure of what. No prisoner in twenty years had ever asked what would become of the jailer.
42"Go and ask the potter," said the old man gently. "Before you decide what he will say."
43Dromon barred the outer door again. He took nothing from Crito. That evening, when the ship had come in and the magistrates had fixed the next day for the end, he went to the potters' quarter with his cap in his hands, and asked.
44The young man heard him out with clay to his elbows. He said that he had a wheel and a kiln and two good hands, and had been wondering for a year how to tell the jailer that he wanted his daughter and did not care what came with her. He had thought he knew what the answer would be.
45Dromon walked home through the dark streets. He had lost a year's sleep over a thing that one question would have ended. He wondered what else in his life stood like that, behind a door he had never tried.
46The last day came. In the morning the chain was struck off. The old man's wife was there with their youngest child in her arms, and she cried out, and he asked Crito to have someone take her home.
47They talked all that day. Dromon knew that they spoke of death, and of what a man is, and that the old man was the most cheerful person in the room. One who ought to have been there was not; they said he was ill. His name was Plato.
48Toward sunset the old man went to bathe. He saw his sons and sent them home. Then it was Dromon's part to come in, and say that the time was near.
49He had said those words to a hundred men. He stood in the door and could hardly get them out. He said that the others had all raged at him and cursed him when he brought this news. "But you," he said, "I have found the noblest and the gentlest and the best man who ever came into this place. I know you are not angry with me. You know whose doing it is." Then he turned his face away and wept, and went out.
50He heard the old man say behind him, to the others, how courteous the fellow was, and how generously he wept.
51The cup was brought. Dromon made himself stand in the doorway. The old man took it as easily as a man takes wine at a feast, and asked what he must do. Walk about, he was told, until your legs are heavy; then lie down. He drank it off, steadily, without a change of colour.
52At that his friends broke down, all of them. He told them, with some sharpness, to be quiet and be brave. They were ashamed, and held back their tears.
53He walked. When his legs grew heavy he lay down on his back and covered his face. The cold rose in him slowly from the feet. A little later he drew the cloth from his face, for he had remembered something. These were the last words he spoke:
54"Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?"
55Crito said that it would be done, and asked if there was anything else. There was no answer. In a little while Crito reached out and closed his eyes.
56It was a debt of thanks, the sort a man pays to the god of healing when he has got well. Dromon thought only that it was like the man to remember, at that hour, something he owed.
57When they had carried the body out, Dromon swept the cell. He was a plain man. But he had watched people face that cup for twenty years, and as he swept he tried to say to himself what the difference had been.
58He saw straight, thought Dromon. He looked at a thing, whether it was a verdict or a jailer or his own death, and he saw what it was and not what he feared or wished. That was the first.
59And he did not flinch. He stood where he had put himself, in the court and in this room, and nothing could push him off it.
60And he wanted so little. One cloak. No shoes. He could not be bought, because there was nothing he was hungry for. I had a man in here once who owned three ships, and he cried for his mother.
61And he was fair. He gave each one what was due: to the laws, to his friends, to the god his cock. He even reckoned what was due to me.
62Four things. Dromon leaned on his broom. He did not think the old man had been born with them, like a snub nose. He had seen him at work on them every day for a month, asking, and asking again. It was more like a fire that he kept. And the strangest part was that he seemed to think it was in everyone. He had gone looking for it in a jailer.
63The lamp was still burning on its shelf, the small clay lamp that had lit thirty evenings of talk. One of the young men had come back for a forgotten cloak, and stood in the doorway with red eyes, looking at the empty cot.
64"Take it," said Dromon, and put the lamp into his hands, still lit. "Go on. I shall not want to see it."
65The young man carried it out, shielding the flame with his hand.
66Kleio married her potter in the autumn. The friends of the dead man scattered for a time. But the one who had been ill came back. He wrote down the talk of his teacher, year after year, as he remembered it and as he understood it. And in a grove of olive trees outside the walls, he began a school that drew the young from every city of the Greeks.
67One of them came down from the north at seventeen, a doctor's son with thin legs and a quick tongue, who read so much that they called him the Reader. Now hear what came after.