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Phaedo
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The first exchange between Echecrates and Phaedo
ECHECRATES: Were you yourself, Phaedo, in the prison with Socrates on the day when he drank the poison?
PHAEDO: Yes, Echecrates, I was.
ECHECRATES: I should so like to hear about his death. What did he say in his last hours? We were informed that he died by taking poison, but no one knew anything more; for no Phliasian ever goes to Athens now, and it is a long time since any stranger from Athens has found his way hither; so that we had no clear account.
The excerpt below is the opening of the dialogue proper, after Jowett’s introduction and the list of persons. Echecrates of Phlius asks Phaedo whether he was himself in the prison on the day Socrates drank the poison, and Phaedo says that he was. Echecrates then asks to hear what Socrates said in his last hours, and admits that the Phliasians know almost nothing: nobody from Phlius goes to Athens now, and no stranger from Athens has found his way to them for a long time, so they have had no clear account. The two questions set the frame for everything that follows, since the whole dialogue is Phaedo’s answer to them.
Download Full EPUBc. 370 BC
Dialogue
~46,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 2.5 hours
Standalone
The prison of Socrates at Athens, 399 BC; the dialogue is narrated afterwards at Phlius, in the Peloponnese.
Jowett’s introduction and ten parts of the dialogue, in eleven groups
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0.14 MB (EPUB) · 0.21 MB (AZW3) · 0.15 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #1658
Phaedo is the dialogue in which Socrates, on the last day of his life, argues that the soul is immortal. The frame is a conversation at Phlius, where Phaedo tells Echecrates what happened in the Athenian prison that day: the chains taken off, Xanthippe led away crying, the sacred ship from Delos arrived at last, and the order to drink the hemlock before sunset. What follows is not consolation but argument. Socrates gives his proofs of immortality, answers two serious objections from his friends, describes the country of the dead, and then drinks, talking with them until the cold reaches his heart.
The argument moves in stages. Everything comes to be from its opposite, so the living come from the dead. We knew equality and beauty before we were born, since the senses only remind us of standards they never supply. The soul is simple and invisible, the body compound and visible, so the soul is the likelier to survive. Against Simmias, who calls the soul a harmony of the body, and Cebes, who says it may wear out many bodies and perish at last, Socrates argues that the soul brings life and cannot admit its opposite. The Wikipedia article on Phaedo places the dialogue among Plato’s middle works. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #1658.
Phaedo by Plato: Summary, Ideas & Arguments
This page offers a summary and analysis of Phaedo, following the dialogue from the frame at Phlius to the drinking of the hemlock, with each proof set out in the order Socrates gives it and each objection answered where it is raised. Plato wrote the dialogue in his middle period, and the edition printed here is Benjamin Jowett’s translation of 1871, which opens with his long introduction analysing the arguments and closes with the death. The text is a reported conversation, not a treatise: Phaedo narrates, Echecrates breaks in with questions from the Peloponnese, and the proofs are spoken by men who are afraid of the answer they want and ashamed of doubting it. Jowett’s introduction is editorial and is marked as his, with sections that follow the argument in order and a closing discussion of the dialogue as drama. The dialogue sits with the other Philosophy Classics on this site, and the text follows the Project Gutenberg transcription line for line.
The frame is carefully built. Echecrates asks Phaedo for an account of the death, and Phaedo explains why the execution was so long delayed: the ship sent to Delos with the yearly offering had been crowned the day before the trial, and no execution may pollute the city until it comes back. The friends had heard the evening before that the ship was back, and came earlier than usual. Inside the prison Socrates is released from his chains, remarks that pleasure and pain follow one another, puts Aesop into verse because a dream told him to practise music, and learns from the Eleven, who are with him that morning, that he must die that day. Xanthippe is led away crying and beating herself, and returns with the children after his bath for a last farewell; he speaks to them and sends them home.
The first argument is not a proof but a prohibition. Suicide is forbidden, Socrates says, because a man belongs to the gods and stands guard at a post he did not choose; the doctrine that the soul is imprisoned in the body is reported as a thing whispered in secret rather than demonstrated. Cebes, who has heard Philolaus teach it, presses him on the point, and Socrates answers that he is going to other gods who are wise and good, and, though he is less sure of this, to men departed who are better than those he leaves behind. From this comes the theme of the day: philosophy is the practice of dying, death is the separation of soul from body, and the body is a hindrance to knowledge, since sight and hearing never give us anything exact. The courage and temperance of ordinary men, courage that comes from fear and temperance that comes from appetite, are shown to be a contradiction.
Then the proofs begin. Generation runs from opposites to opposites, so the dead must give rise to the living as the living do to the dead. Knowledge is recollection: we judge pieces of wood and stone equal only because we already hold a standard of equality that no pair of them supplies, and that standard must have been acquired before birth. The soul resembles the simple, invisible and unchanging, the body the compound and the changing, and what is uncompounded is not liable to be dissolved. The soul that departs pure goes to the invisible world, while the soul stained with the body’s pleasures is drawn back into another birth, into a nature congenial to what it practised. Jowett’s introduction describes the pleasures and pains of the body as nails that fasten the soul to it, and Socrates says the same thing in the argument, that each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which rivets the soul to the body.
Simmias objects that the soul may be a harmony of the body, and Cebes that it may outlive many bodies as a weaver outlives many coats and still perish with the last. Socrates answers both: a harmony is an effect and admits of degrees, while the soul rules and is a cause; and the soul, being what brings life, can never admit death, so that if the immortal is imperishable the soul cannot perish. He then describes the earth, the four rivers and the judgment, admitting that no man of sense will be confident of the details. Project Gutenberg #1658 holds the whole text. The Apology gives the trial, and the Phaedrus argues immortality from the soul’s own motion.
Historical Context
Socrates was tried at Athens and condemned to death, and the dialogue is set on the last day of his life, in the prison where he had waited a month. Plato was not there; Phaedo says that he was ill, and Jowett’s introduction reads the mention of his absence as an expression of sorrow and as a hint that the report is not to be taken literally. The narration is put into the mouth of Phaedo, who tells it months or years later at Phlius, to Echecrates and other Phliasians. Jowett’s introduction also notes that the doctrine of ideas here goes further than in Plato’s earlier Socratic writings, and that the dialogue has more system in it than appears at first sight.
The month of waiting was religious, not legal. The Athenians sent a ship every year to Delos with offerings in memory of Theseus and the fourteen youths, and from the day its stern was crowned until its return the city might not be polluted by a public execution. Jowett’s introduction says the voyage occupied thirty days, and the dialogue opens with the ship already back from Delos, so the execution is fixed for that evening. The jailer tells the friends, waiting at the door, that the Eleven are with Socrates, taking off his chains and giving orders that he is to die that day. The delay is the reason the conversation can be so long, and the reason his friends have had time to gather.
Jowett’s translation was published in 1871, and the edition printed here is his: the dialogue in his English, with his introduction before it. That introduction is a long editorial essay, not part of the dialogue. It analyses the proofs in order, weighs the dialogue’s place among Plato’s writings, and calls it the tragedy of which Socrates is the protagonist. On that question it is cautious. The Phaedo, it says, is not one of the Socratic dialogues, and belongs rather to the intermediate period, roughly with the Phaedrus, Gorgias, Republic and Theaetetus. It adds that no answer can be given to the question of how far the words attributed to Socrates were actually uttered by him.
Key Ideas & Arguments
- The soul: The prisoner released at death. It is simple, invisible, unchanging and rational, akin to the Forms rather than to the body; it rules the body as a master rules a servant. Because it brings life wherever it goes, Socrates argues, it cannot receive the opposite of what it brings, and so cannot die.
- Recollection: Learning as remembering. We call pieces of wood and stone equal although they fall short of equality itself, which means we measured them against a standard we already had. Sight and touch only remind the soul of what it knew before birth, and the argument from recollection gives the pre-existence of the soul as well as its survival.
- The Forms: The absolute equality, beauty and greatness that particular things strive after and never reach. Socrates calls them the safe and simple answer to the question why a thing is beautiful, and the method of hypothesis works upward from them toward a principle that needs no further assumption. They are what the soul contemplates when it thinks without the senses.
- Misology: The hatred of argument, set beside misanthropy. It comes from trusting an argument too much and being deceived by it, and Socrates warns the company against it when the proofs seem to fail, promising to come to the rescue as Iolaus came to Heracles rather than give up the search. The warning is a defence of the method, not of any particular conclusion.
- Hypothesis: Socrates’ second-best method. Unable to explain causes through mind, he takes a position he judges strongest and treats whatever agrees with it as true, going back to a higher hypothesis until he reaches something sufficient. The method is offered as a way of making progress without claiming direct knowledge of causes, and it is the ancestor of later accounts of reasoning from assumptions.
- The practice of death: Philosophy as the separation of the soul from the body. The body fills us with desires, fears and distractions, and the senses never give exact knowledge; the philosopher trains in dying by attending to the soul alone, and so is cheerful at the end, when the separation the whole life rehearsed is carried out. The phrase gives the dialogue its name for the philosophical life.
Core Arguments & Influence
- Immortality argued, not assumed: The dialogue is built as a sequence of proofs rather than a declaration of hope: the cycle of opposites, recollection, the affinity of the soul with the Forms, and the exclusion of death by what brings life. Each is met by an objection and each answer is tested in turn. Socrates says at the end that he is more confident of the conclusion than of his own arguments, and the text lets the confidence rest on the character of the man who dies rather than on the chain of reasoning alone. The proofs carry the reader even where the logic is strained.
- The body as an obstacle to knowledge: Sight and hearing are not exact, and the body’s needs interrupt thought. Knowledge of equality, beauty and goodness cannot come from the senses, which supply only approximations. This makes the separation of soul and body not only a hope about death but a condition of knowing anything at all, and it gives the dialogue its standing argument for the philosophical life as a discipline of attention. The doctrine shapes the whole later history of the idea that the mind is not the senses.
- The care of the soul: If the soul survives and carries its habits with it, then what one does with it matters more than anything else. The purified soul departs to the invisible and the company of the gods; the soul soaked in bodily pleasures is dragged back into another birth, into a nature like its own. The myth of judgment turns this into a picture, and the death scene shows the doctrine acted out in a man who is calm when everyone around him is not. The argument is practical at the root, since it ends in advice about how to live.
- Myth and the country of the dead: The last part of the dialogue leaves argument for description. The earth is a round body held in balance at the centre of the heavens, we live in a hollow of it, and the true surface above is brighter and more various than anything we see. Four rivers run through Tartarus, and souls are judged, purified or cast out. Socrates refuses to insist on the details and says only that something of the kind is true, which marks the boundary between reasoning and story in the dialogue. Jowett calls this the point where the veil of mythology descends on the argument.
- The dialogue’s place among Plato’s works: Jowett’s introduction weighs where the Phaedo belongs and decides that it is not one of the Socratic dialogues but a work of the intermediate period, close to the Phaedrus, Gorgias, Republic and Theaetetus. It notes that the doctrine of ideas is carried further here than anywhere else in Plato, and that the dialogue has the unity of a tragedy, with Socrates as protagonist, Simmias and Cebes as secondary figures, and a chorus at the end. It also observes that the arguments rest on earlier philosophies in turn, from the mysteries and the alternation of opposites to the Pythagorean harmony and the mind of Anaxagoras.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Phaedo?
No other free file of this dialogue gives you the whole of Jowett’s edition in one place. The introduction that analyses the arguments, the list of persons, the scene headings, the dialogue itself and the death scene are all here in the order the edition prints them, transcribed from the Project Gutenberg text and checked against it. Nothing has been summarised, cut or rearranged to make it easier to skim.
The three files are built from that one transcription, so the paragraphing, the speakers’ names and the wording are the same whichever you open. EPUB for most readers, AZW3 for Kindle, KEPUB for Kobo: no account, no sample, no registration, and nothing to install beyond the reading app you already use. The files stay on your device and open without a connection.
Read in order, the groups below follow the argument as Socrates gives it, from the frame at Phlius through the four proofs and the two objections to the myth and the hemlock. That makes the page usable for a first reading, for a seminar, or for checking where a particular step in the argument is made without hunting through an unbroken wall of text. The labels name the subject of each group, not the page numbers of a printed book.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #1658 — the complete Jowett text, with the introduction, the persons of the dialogue, the scene headings and the death scene as the edition prints them.
- Three formats, one text EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB are generated from the same transcription, so a passage you find in one file is in the same place in the others, and nothing has been abridged or modernised.
- Nothing between you and the page No account, no sample, no registration. The files download and open in the reading app you already use, and they keep the em dashes, the Greek names and the speakers’ turns as the edition has them.
- Made for study The eleven groups below follow the order of the argument, so a reading schedule, a seminar or a set of notes can be built from the labels alone without opening the text first.
- The Apology gives the trial that led to this day: the charges, Socrates’ defence, the vote and the sentence, in the same Jowett translation. Read it first for the scene, then read the Phaedo for the last day of the same story, with the same man speaking and the same friends in the room. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Phaedrus argues that the soul is immortal because it moves itself, and sets the proof inside a conversation about love, rhetoric and writing. It shares the doctrine of the ideas with the Phaedo and takes a different road to the same conclusion, which makes the two dialogues useful to read together. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The rest of the philosophy shelf collects the dialogues of Plato and the works that answer them, each with a summary of the argument, the text in a free edition and the same three downloads. Start there if you want to read the Phaedo in the company of the Republic, the Meno or the Symposium. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The eleven groups below follow the edition’s own order. The first covers Jowett’s editorial introduction, which is not part of the dialogue and is marked as his. The remaining ten follow the conversation from the frame at Phlius to the hemlock, divided where the argument changes ground: the setting and the last morning, the prohibition of suicide, the practice of death, the cyclical argument, recollection, the affinity of soul and Forms, the misology warning with the two objections and their answers, the final argument with the myth, and the death. Nothing has been moved out of sequence and no group covers material that is not in the text.
- Part 1 — Jowett’s introduction: An editorial essay that summarises the argument step by step, notes who was present and who was absent, weighs the dialogue’s place among Plato’s writings, and defends its dramatic art, calling it the tragedy of which Socrates is the protagonist. Its second part adds twenty-one numbered sections on the belief in immortality and on the difficulties the dialogue leaves open. Read it after the dialogue if you want the argument first.
- Part 2 — The frame at Phlius: Echecrates asks Phaedo whether he was in the prison on the last day, and then asks to hear what Socrates said. Phaedo explains the delay: the ship for Delos had been crowned the day before the trial, and the city may not execute anyone until it returns. News had come the evening before that the ship was back, so the execution is fixed for sunset.
- Part 3 — The last morning in the prison: Socrates is released from his chains and says that pleasure and pain follow one another, and that Aesop would have made them a two-headed creature. Cebes asks why he has been putting Aesop into verse, and he explains that a dream kept telling him to practise music, so he obeyed it literally before dying. The officers of the Eleven then tell him he must die that day.
- Part 4 — The forbidden suicide: Cebes asks why suicide is said to be wrong. Socrates answers that men are the possessions of the gods and stand guard at a post, so a man may not open the door of his prison and run away; he waits for the god to summon him. He adds that the doctrine is one whispered in secret, and that he is going to other gods who are wise and good, and, less certainly, to better men among the dead.
- Part 5 — Philosophy as the practice of death: Death is the separation of soul from body, and the philosopher has spent his life trying to keep the soul apart from the body’s needs and pleasures. The body is a hindrance to knowledge, since sight and hearing are not exact, and the soul reasons best when it is undisturbed by the senses. Ordinary courage and temperance are shown to be exchanges of one pleasure or fear for another, not virtue itself.
- Part 6 — The cyclical argument: If all things come to be from their opposites, then the living come from the dead as the dead come from the living. Socrates runs through the pairs: weaker and stronger, sleeping and waking, greater and less. If generation ran only one way, everything would end in death and there would be no return. The argument gives survival, though not yet a life that lasts forever, and it is the first of the four proofs.
- Part 7 — Recollection and equality: We call two pieces of wood equal although they fall short of equality itself, and we could not do that without knowing the standard beforehand. The knowledge must come from somewhere before birth, since the senses only remind us of it. Socrates draws out the consequence: the soul existed before the body, and learning is the recovery of what it once knew, forgotten at birth and stirred by what we see and hear.
- Part 8 — The affinity of soul and Forms: The compound can be dissolved, the uncompounded cannot; the changing is compound, the unchanging simple. The soul is invisible, rational and unchanging in its own thought, the body visible and changing, and the soul rules while the body serves. So the pure soul departs to the invisible, while the soul soaked in bodily pleasure is drawn back into a nature like the one it practised, from beasts of prey to the social kinds, bees and ants.
- Part 9 — Misology, harmony and the weaver: The company loses heart and Socrates warns them against hating argument as men come to hate people. Simmias then offers his objection: the soul may be a harmony of the body, invisible but perishing with the instrument. Cebes adds that the soul may outlive many bodies as a weaver outlives many coats and still perish with the last. Socrates calls the two objections Harmonia and Cadmus, and answers both at length.
- Part 10 — The final argument and the myth: Things that exclude their opposites cannot receive them, so the soul, which brings life, cannot admit death, and if the immortal is imperishable the soul is too. Socrates then describes the earth as a round body held in balance, the hollow in which we live, the four rivers, the judgment and the Acherusian lake, and says that no man of sense will be confident of the details, though something of the kind is true.
- Part 11 — The hemlock and the end: Crito asks how to bury him, and Socrates laughs: they will bury only his body, and he asks them to get hold of him and see that he does not run away. He bathes, takes leave of the children and the women, and refuses Crito’s offer to delay until the sun sets. He prays, drinks cheerfully, walks until his legs are heavy, lies down, and gives his last instruction: a cock is owed to Asclepius.
Phaedo: Frequently Asked Questions
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Part of: Philosophy Classics · Plato
