The worst plea bargain in history 

Athenian sentencing worked by competing proposals. The prosecution named a penalty, the convicted man named an alternative, and the jury chose between the two with no power to invent a third. The system rewarded a defendant who offered something plausible, because jurors who thought the prosecution's demand excessive needed somewhere else to put their vote. Meletus asked for death.

A conventional response was available and everyone in the room knew it. Exile was ordinary, often expected, and would probably have carried a majority. Socrates was seventy, he had friends in Thessaly and Megara, and no one wanted a spectacle. Instead, in Plato's account, he began by observing that a man who had spent his life neglecting his own affairs to urge his fellow citizens towards virtue deserved not punishment but a benefit, and proposed that he be maintained at public expense in the Prytaneum, the honour given to Olympic victors and to men who had served the city outstandingly.

It is difficult to read that as anything other than a refusal to participate in the bargain. He then moved, on the reasoning that he would not claim to deserve any harm, to a small fine, saying he had almost no money. Plato has Crito, Plato himself and others offer to guarantee a much larger sum, thirty minae, which he put forward on their behalf. The jury voted for death, and the ancient tradition records that the margin was larger than the one that had convicted him, meaning some jurors who thought him innocent, or at least not guilty as charged, voted to execute him after hearing him speak.

Whether this was principle or catastrophic tactics is the question the chapter cannot close, and honest readers have landed in both places for two thousand years. The case for principle is that his whole position rested on the claim that he had done nothing wrong, and that accepting exile or a heavy fine would have conceded guilt and abandoned the mission he said a god had given him. Accepting exile also meant accepting silence, since he would have had to stop questioning to be allowed to live anywhere quietly.

The case for something less noble is that he was old, that Xenophon presents him as unwilling to face physical decline, and that provoking the jury guaranteed the outcome he had reasons to prefer. There is also the plain possibility that a man who had made a career of refusing to flatter simply could not perform contrition, whatever the cost.

Execution was not immediate, and in the interval a friend arrived at the prison with a boat, a bribed guard and a plan.