Summary
Echecrates asks Phaedo for an exact account of Socrates’ death. Phaedo explains that the execution was delayed while Athens observed the sacred mission to Delos. He describes the friends present in prison and the strange mixture of pleasure, grief and admiration produced by Socrates’ calmness.
When Socrates’ chains are removed, he reflects upon the closeness of pleasure and pain. He discusses a dream that repeatedly instructed him to practise music and explains why he has recently composed a hymn and turned Aesop’s fables into verse.
After Socrates sends a message telling the poet Evenus to follow him if he is wise, Simmias asks why suicide is forbidden if death is desirable to philosophers. Socrates answers that human beings belong to the gods and should not leave life without divine necessity.
Socrates offers a defence of his confidence. A philosopher seeks wisdom, and bodily senses, appetites and fears interfere with pure understanding. Death separates soul and body; philosophical discipline practises that separation by allowing reason to govern. A genuine lover of wisdom should therefore not cling to life at every cost.
Cebes objects that the soul may disperse when the body dies. Socrates begins with the cyclical argument. Opposites come from opposites through paired processes: waking from sleeping and sleeping from waking, becoming greater from being smaller, and living from the dead. Without reciprocal generation, all life would eventually disappear into death.
The recollection argument follows. People recognise sensible equals as imperfect when compared with Equality itself. They must possess some awareness of this standard in order to judge the deficiency. Socrates concludes that knowledge is recollected and that the soul existed before birth.
Simmias notes that pre-existence does not alone prove survival after death. Socrates combines the previous arguments, then develops the affinity argument. Visible, composite things change and dissolve; invisible and intelligible realities remain stable. The body resembles the first class and the soul the second.
A soul trained by philosophy departs towards what is divine and intelligible. A soul dominated by bodily appetite remains attached to the visible and may enter another embodied life suited to its character. Moral purification and metaphysical orientation are therefore connected.
Simmias and Cebes remain dissatisfied. Simmias suggests that the soul may be like the harmony of a lyre: invisible and beautiful but dependent upon a physical arrangement. Cebes compares the soul to a weaver who outlives many cloaks but eventually dies; a long-lived soul might survive several bodies yet perish at last.
The company loses confidence. Socrates warns Phaedo against misology, the hatred of arguments. Disappointment with unreliable reasoning should produce greater care, not rejection of reason itself.
He answers Simmias by showing that harmony conflicts with recollection: a harmony cannot pre-exist its instrument. Harmony also follows its physical elements, whereas the soul directs and resists the body. If souls were harmonies, degrees of virtue and vice would also become difficult to explain.
Cebes’ objection requires an account of generation and destruction. Socrates describes his early interest in natural causes and his hope that Anaxagoras would explain everything through Mind and what is best. He found instead that material conditions were substituted for genuine reasons.
Socrates distinguishes conditions from causes. His bones and sinews enable him to sit in prison, but his judgement that remaining is just explains why he has not escaped. He adopts a safer method: things are beautiful through Beauty, equal through Equality and so forth.
The final argument examines Forms and their opposites. Fire brings heat and excludes cold; snow brings cold and excludes heat; three is odd and excludes evenness. The soul brings life to whatever it occupies and will not admit death, life’s opposite.
If what is deathless is imperishable, the soul cannot be destroyed when death approaches. It withdraws while the mortal body dies. Cebes is convinced, though Simmias retains a cautious sense of the subject’s magnitude. Socrates encourages continued testing of first principles.
Socrates then gives an ethical account of the soul’s journey and a myth of the earth. Souls are guided to judgement and receive conditions suited to their lives. The earth humans know is described as one of many cavities beneath a purer and more beautiful true earth.
Rivers, chasms and regions of purification form part of the afterlife geography. Incurably wicked souls suffer lasting punishment; those capable of improvement are purified; the virtuous reach better dwellings; and souls purified through philosophy live without bodies in still fairer places.
Socrates says that no sensible person should insist that every detail is exactly true. Yet believing something of this kind is a worthy venture if the soul is immortal. The myth encourages care of the soul through wisdom, justice, courage and truth.
Crito asks about Socrates’ children and burial. Socrates tells the friends to care for themselves and jokes that they may bury him however they like if they can catch him, distinguishing his person from the body that will remain.
After bathing and saying farewell to his family, Socrates returns at sunset. The attendant praises him as the noblest and gentlest prisoner. Socrates receives the cup, refuses to delay and drinks the hemlock without trembling.
His friends begin to weep, but Socrates asks them to remain composed. He walks until his legs grow heavy, lies down and gradually loses sensation as the cold rises. His last words ask Crito to repay a cock owed to Asclepius. Phaedo closes by calling Socrates the wisest, justest and best person he had known.