Phaedo

What It Is

A dialogue of about eighty pages, written around 370 BC, set in the prison at Athens where Socrates is being held. Friends have gathered, and the conversation turns, as he wants it to, to the soul and what becomes of it. The whole day reaches us at second hand, narrated later by Phaedo, one of the men who was there, to someone who was not.

Plato was absent. He says so, inside the dialogue, in a single quiet line that scholars have been chewing on ever since. Whatever else this is, it is not a transcript.

The Phaedo is where Plato stops reporting Socrates and starts using him. The theory of Forms, the eternal realities standing behind the shifting world of appearances, gets its first full statement here, and it is the idea that made Plato the most consequential philosopher who has ever lived. Four separate arguments for the immortality of the soul are put forward, examined and pressed. It is also, by common consent, the most beautiful thing he wrote.

Why It Matters

Nearly everything the West believes about the soul comes through this dialogue. The body as temporary housing, the self as something that can survive its own dissolution, philosophy as a preparation for death: these are Platonic ideas before they are Christian ones. Augustine read the Phaedo. So did the whole medieval tradition that shaped how a billion people still picture what happens when they die.

The influence is not only religious. Montaigne built an essay on its central claim. Moses Mendelssohn rewrote it for the eighteenth century and it made him famous across Europe. The notion that the mind must get free of the body's noise before it can see anything at all has run through Western intellectual life ever since, and it was not obvious until Plato made it so.

What keeps the Phaedo alive as philosophy rather than as scripture is its honesty. The arguments do not all work. And the strongest objections to them are inside the dialogue, spoken by Socrates's own friends, who are not satisfied and say so. Plato put the counterattack in the text himself. Few founders of a doctrine have had that kind of nerve.

Before You Read

Three hours. Harder than the Apology or the Crito, and the first technical Plato most readers meet.

Read the Apology and the Crito first. All three are printed together in every standard edition, and the Phaedo is the third act.

Do not skim the objections. When Simmias and Cebes push back, the dialogue is at its best, and a reader who treats their doubts as speed bumps has missed why it has lasted.

One thing to protect: the closing pages are among the most famous in Greek prose. Do not let an introduction, a search engine or a well-meaning friend get to them before you do.

Which Translation to Read

• G. M. A. Grube, revised by John Cooper (Hackett) — recommended. The standard English text, in the Five Dialogues volume that also gives you Euthyphro, Apology, Crito and Meno. Clear, careful and unobtrusive, as a translation of an argument should be. The cost: specialists rate Sedley and Long as more exact on the technical vocabulary, and they are right. Grube never gets between you and the sentence; he never lifts it either. For a first reading, in the right company, he remains the sensible choice. View on Amazon →
• David Sedley and Alex Long (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, 2010), in the volume Meno and Phaedo. The most precise version available, from two scholars at the top of the field, with the best short guide to the argument in print. The cost: it is edited for students of philosophy, and pairing the dialogue with the Meno rather than the trial breaks the natural sequence.
• David Gallop (Oxford World's Classics). Exact, austere, and backed by a commentary that remains a landmark. The right choice if you intend to fight the arguments line by line. The cost: dry. Gallop is translating a proof, and the Phaedo is a proof and a piece of drama at once.

Take Grube for the reading, Sedley and Long for the argument, Gallop if you mean to go to war with it. Christopher Rowe's Penguin version, in The Last Days of Socrates, has the best commentary of any popular edition.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it slowly and read it whole. It should be a single long evening, because that is what it is.

Keep score of the arguments. Write each one down, and where you think it fails. Then check your objections against the ones the characters raise. Plato anticipated more of them than you will like.

Read the introduction afterwards. Every good one discusses the closing pages, and those pages have been landing on readers for two and a half thousand years. It would be a shame to be told.