Five Plato dialogues are on this shelf, and they are not the same kind of thing: four short Socratic conversations and one very long constitutional dialogue.
The Apology is the shortest at 19,000 words, and it is the one to read first because it is the scene the others refer back to. The Phaedo, at 45,812 words, is the one that shows what happened next.
The five dialogues here are Benjamin Jowett’s translations, published in 1871 and still the version most public-domain editions reprint. They are not a sequence. The Apology is a speech at a trial, the Phaedo the account of the last day, the Symposium a set of after-dinner speeches, the Phaedrus a walk outside the city walls, and the Republic a long argument about justice that contains a city inside it.
Reading times follow the site’s estimate: the Apology about an hour, the Symposium two, the Phaedrus two and a quarter, the Phaedo two and a half, the Republic twelve. That gap is the point of the shelf. With an afternoon, read the Apology; with a month, the Republic will repay it, though most readers find the first book of it enough and the rest a project.
Start here: Apology. It is Socrates’ defence speech at his trial in 399 BC, about an hour of reading, and it explains why the rest of the dialogues exist.
Plato: which book first
Every Plato title on editions.ink, with the reading time for each. The first row is the one to start with.
| Book | Year | Words | Read time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apology — start here | c. 399 BC | 19,000 | 1 h |
| Symposium | c. 385 BC | 35,600 | 2 h |
| Phaedrus | c. 370 BC | 41,200 | 2 h |
| The Republic | c. 375 BC | 212,446 | 12 h |
| Phaedo by Plato: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download | -380 | 45,812 | 3 h |
| All five | 354,058 | 20 h |
What to read after the first one
- Phaedo — the death of Socrates, and the argument about the soul that the Apology leaves open
- Symposium — the literary one, a set of speeches about love at a dinner party
If you would rather see the whole shelf in chronological order first, the Plato books in order page lists every title by publication year with the same word counts. The Plato author page collects all the editions in one place,, and the author index has the other writers on the site. If you want a follow-up by a different author, the read next guide pairs ten classics with what to read after them.
Questions readers ask
Which Plato dialogue should I read first?
Apology (c. 399 BC, 19,000 words). It is the shortest and it sets up the trial that the other dialogues refer to.
Why is The Republic so much longer?
It is a full constitutional dialogue rather than a single scene: 212,446 words, about twelve hours, against roughly an hour for the Apology.
Are these Plato editions free?
Yes, DRM-free EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files.