Phaedo

Introduction

On the day the sacred ship returned from Delos, the friends of Socrates gathered at the prison at first light. It was his last day. Some time later, in the town of Phlius in the Peloponnese, Echecrates asks Phaedo of Elis, who was there, to tell him everything that was said and done; and Phaedo's account is the dialogue we read. He remembers a strange mixture of feeling: no pity, as one would expect at the death of a friend, but a kind of wonder, for Socrates seemed happy, and the day passed, as always, in philosophy.

The question of the day is death itself. Why should a philosopher be glad to die, and yet not take his own life? Socrates answers that philosophy is nothing other than a practice for dying: the soul gathering itself away from the body, its pleasures, fears and distractions, so as to see things as they are by thought alone. If that is so, death is the very goal the philosopher has pursued all his life. But his two young friends from Thebes, Simmias and Cebes, will not let him off so lightly. Is the soul not perhaps scattered like smoke at the moment of death? Everything depends on whether it is immortal.

There follow, one after another, the arguments that have shaped Western thought about the soul for twenty-four centuries: that opposites come from opposites, so that the living come from the dead as the dead from the living; that learning is recollection of what the soul knew before birth; that the soul is akin to the invisible and unchanging, the body to the visible and perishable. Simmias objects that the soul may be like the harmony of a lyre, which perishes with the instrument; Cebes, that it may outlast many bodies, like a weaver who wears out many cloaks, and yet perish in the end. At this point the dialogue stops, and Socrates warns his friends against the worst of misfortunes: to come to hate arguments themselves.

The answer he then gives is the most important passage in the dialogue. Socrates tells how, as a young man, he hoped to find in the science of nature, and in Anaxagoras, the true causes of things, and was disappointed; how he then undertook a "second voyage", seeking the truth of things in arguments; and how he came to the hypothesis of the Forms — the beautiful itself, the good itself, the large itself — by which all beautiful, good and large things are what they are. Here Plato sets out, more fully than anywhere before, the theory of Forms and the method of hypothesis on which the rest of his philosophy is built. From it Socrates draws his final proof: the soul, which brings life to whatever it enters, can never admit death, and is therefore immortal and imperishable.

The dialogue closes with a myth of the true earth and of the judgment of souls, and then with the scene of Socrates' death — the bath, the farewell to his family, the jailer's tears, the cup drunk calmly to the end, and his last words to Crito. Few pages in any literature have been so often read. This translation is made from the Greek text of John Burnet's Oxford edition. The numbers in the margin (57a, 57b …) are the Stephanus references used in every edition and translation of Plato, so that any passage can be found and cited.