Crito's offer 

The execution was delayed. A state ship had sailed on the annual sacred mission to Delos, and by custom no one could be put to death in Athens until it returned. That gave Socrates roughly a month in prison, and it gave his friends time.

Plato's dialogue Crito opens before dawn with an elderly, wealthy friend sitting beside the sleeping prisoner. Crito has arranged everything: money to bribe the guards, informers who can be bought off, a destination in Thessaly, hosts who will receive him. His arguments are the ones anyone would make. The verdict was unjust. Socrates has children who will be left fatherless. And his friends will be disgraced, because people will say they were too cheap or too cowardly to save him.

Socrates refuses, and the reasoning has shaped political philosophy ever since. He starts with a principle he has argued all his life, that one must never return a wrong for a wrong, so an unjust verdict does not license an unjust response. Then he imagines the Laws of Athens themselves speaking, and they make a case in three parts. They gave him birth, upbringing and education, so his relationship to them is not contractual between equals but closer to filial. He had seventy years in which he was free to leave the city and take his property elsewhere, and he stayed, raised children and used the courts, which amounts to an agreement to abide by their judgments. And a citizen who obeys the law only when the verdict suits him destroys the law's authority for everyone.

It is a powerful argument and it is not airtight, which is why the dialogue is still assigned. The consent it describes is tacit rather than given, and staying in the city where you were born is thin ground for inferring a promise. The filial analogy proves too much, since we do not think a parent's authority extends to killing an innocent child. Socrates himself, in the Apology, states that he would disobey an order to stop philosophising, and had earlier refused an unlawful instruction from the Thirty, so his obedience is clearly not unconditional. He obeys a lawful verdict he thinks wrong while refusing an unlawful command, and the line between those cases is exactly where later thinkers about civil disobedience have done their work.

Crito lost the argument. When the ship returned from Delos, the officer came with the cup.