The Mysteries (as Crito himself called them) are mostly written in the first person. The main exception is his account of how he solved the mystery of the murder of one of his students in Delphi, in the episode entitled Thistle. It may be surmised that he used the third person in this narrative to distance himself from events which were painful for him to recount.
The language of the Mysteries is a racy and informal but elegant Attic Greek, which, in spite or perhaps even because of some alien intrusions and vulgarisms (and a few apparent prosodic solecisms in his occasional uses of verse) has the ring of a lively demotic tongue of classical mercantile Athens. Stylistically, the Mysteries stand to established literary Greek much as the picaresque novel of Petronius Arbiter stands to the Latin of Cicero and Cæsar.
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