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Phaedo

Phaedo

by Plato

Original title: Φαίδων · First published 1713 · 195 pages · about 3 hours to read

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About this book

After an interval of some months or years, and at Phlius, a town of Peloponnesus, the tale of the last hours of Socrates is narrated to Echecrates and other Phliasians by Phaedo the 'beloved disciple.' The Dialogue necessarily takes the form of a narrative, because Socrates has to be described acting as well as speaking. The minutest particulars of the event are interesting to distant friends, and the narrator has an equal interest in them.

Quotes

  • “He who has sought after the pleasures of knowledge and rejected the pleasures of the body, has reason to be of good hope at the approach of death; whose voice is already speaking to him, and who will one day be heard calling all men.”
  • “The denial of the belief takes the heart out of human life; it lowers men to the level of the material. As Goethe also says, 'He is dead even in this world who has no belief in another.'”
  • “The Dialogue must be read in the light of the situation. And first of all we are struck by the calmness of the scene. Like the spectators at the time, we cannot pity Socrates; his mien and his language are so noble and fearless.”
  • “He is himself more confident of immortality than he is of his own arguments; and the confidence which he expresses is less strong than that which his cheerfulness and composure in death inspire in us.”
  • “And the chorus at the end might have interpreted the feeling of the play: 'There can no evil happen to a good man in life or death.'”

Passages chosen with AI from the book's public-domain text on Project Gutenberg. Translated by Benjamin Jowett.

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