When Crito came to rescue his friend, an aged and imprisoned Socrates, the philosopher denied any need to be rescued. At least, he did not need the kind of rescue Crito had planned. In Plato’s telling, Crito is the last and most dramatic in a series of friends who, over Socrates’s long life of wisdom-loving, thought he needed to be saved. Some thought to save a maladroit Socrates from one or another social blunder into which he regularly stumbled. Others sought to rehabilitate his reputation, persuading his fellow citizens that he was more than just a troublemaker. Still others wanted to rescue Socrates from the dangerous enemies he had made by speaking the unvarnished truth. At last, sentenced to die, Socrates awoke in an Athenian jail to find Crito quietly watching over him, armed with plans for an escape and decampment to Thessaly. He demurred, in his insistent, philosophical way. The only rescue Socrates ever sought was from ignorance and vice.
