Whatever rules of life you have deliberately proposed to yourself, abide by them as laws, and as if it were impious to transgress them; and do not regard what anyone says of you; for this, after all, is no concern of yours.  Let whatever appears to you to be the best be to you an inviolable law.  Socrates became perfect, improving himself in everything by attending to reason only.  And though you be not yet a Socrates, live as one who would become a Socrates.

Upon all occasions we ought to have ready at hand these three maxims: 

    Conduct me, God, and thou, O Destiny,
    Wherever your decrees have fixed my station. 
    I follow cheerfully.  And did I not,
    Wicked and wretched, I must follow still.

    Whoe’er yields properly to Fate is deemed
    Wise among men and knows the laws of heaven.

“O Crito, if it thus pleases the gods, thus let it be.  Anytus and Melitus may kill me indeed, but hurt my soul they cannot.”

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES

Footnote 1:  The deceased speaks constantly as if he were Osiris or some other god.  This is supposed to give him the privileges and power of the god whose name he bears.

Footnote 2:  The Egyptians thought that in the lower world the heart or conscience was weighed, i.e., judged.

Footnote 3:  This chapter and the like are found on stone, wood, porcelain, etc., figures, and attached to the mummy.  It was supposed to act magically in transferring the tasks of the underworld from the person.

Footnote 4:  The storm-god, the arch-fiend of Ra, the sun-god

Footnote 5:  The suppliant has made a wax figure of Apepi, and, by sympathetic magic, imagines that by burning it he is destroying the power of the original.  Such wax figures of the gods made for magical purposes were generally illegal.

Footnote 6:  There are many examples in the Book of the Dead of the magical potency attached to names.  To invoke a god by his name was to control him.

Footnote 7:  The ass stands for Ra, the sun-god, and the eater of the ass is darkness or some eclipse, represented as one of the foes of Ra, in the vignette figured as a serpent on the back of an ass.  Compare the Babylonian myth of Marduk and Tiamat.

Footnote 8:  The married name of Confucius.

Footnote 9:  Compare the method of Socrates in the investigation of truth.

Footnote 10:  In the above four “difficulties,” note the reappearance of the law of reciprocity, the negative form of the Golden Rule.

Footnote 11:  A technical name for China, which was supposed to be enclosed by the four great oceans of the world.  China is also called “The Middle Kingdom.”

Footnote 12:  That is, those who have been invested with the sacred thread, which is a sign of having been initiated into the paternal caste.  This ceremony takes place at the age of seven or nine years, but is only observed by the three higher castes.  It is to be compared with the Christian rites of baptism and confirmation.  Hindu boys, when invested with the sacred thread or cord, are said to be born again.