PHAEDO (Phaidon)

The Death of Socrates, 399 B.C. Echecrates, Phaidon. Apollodoros, Socrates, Cebes, Simmias, Criton.

ECHECRATES: Were you there yourself, Phaidon, with Socrates, on the day when he took the poison in prison, or did you hear about it from someone?

PHAIDON: I was there myself, Echecrates.

ECHECRATES: Then what was it our friend said before his death? And how did he end? I should be glad to hear. You see no one at all from our part of the world* goes now to visit in Athens, and no visitor has come to us from there this long time who might be able to tell us properly what happened; all they could say was, he took the poison and died; no one could tell us anything about the other details.

PHAIDON: Then you never heard how things went at the trial?

ECHECRATES: Yes, somebody did bring news of that, and we were surprised how long it seemed between the sentence and his death. Why was that, Phaidon?

PHAIDON: It was just a piece of luck, Echecrates; for the day before the trial it so happened that the wreath was put on the poop of the ship which the Athenians send to Delos.

ECHECRATES: What ship is that?

PHAIDON: That is the ship, as the Athenians say, in which Theseus once went off to Crete with those “twice seven,” you know, and saved them and saved himself.* The Athenians vowed to Apollo then, so it is said, that if the lives of these were saved, they would send a sacred mission every year to Delos; and they do send it still, every year ever since that, to honour the god. As soon as the mission has begun, then, it is their law to keep the city pure during that time, and to put no one to death before the ship arrives at Delos and comes back again here; this often takes some time, when the winds happen to delay them. The beginning of the mission is when the priest of Apollo lays a wreath on the poop of the ship, and this happened, as I say, the day before the trial. Accordingly Socrates had a long time in prison between the trial and his death.

ECHECRATES: Then what about the death itself, Phaidon? What was said or done, and which of his friends were with him? Or did the magistrates forbid their presence, and did he die alone with no friends there?

PHAIDON: Oh no, friends were with him, quite a number of them.

ECHECRATES: That’s just what I want to know; please be so kind as to tell me all about it as clearly as possible, unless you happen to be busy.

PHAIDON: Oh, I have plenty of time, and I will try to tell you the whole story; indeed, to remember Socrates, and what he said himself, and what was said to him is always the most precious thing in the world to me.

ECHECRATES: Well, Phaidon, those who are going to hear you will feel the same; pray try to tell the whole story as exactly as you can.

PHAIDON: I must say I had the strangest feeling being there. I felt no pity, as one might, being present at the death of a dear friend; for the man seemed happy to me, Echecrates, in bearing and in speech. How fearlessly and nobly he met his end! I could not help thinking that divine providence was with that man as he passed from this world to the next, and on coming there also it would be well with him, if ever with anyone that ever was. For this reason I felt no pity at all, as one might at a scene of mourning; and yet not the pleasure we used to have in our philosophic discussions. The conversation was certainly of that sort, but I really had an extraordinary feeling, a strange mixture of pleasure and pain at once, when I remembered that then and there that man was to make his end. And all of us who were present were very much in the same state, sometimes laughing, sometimes shedding tears, and one of us particularly, Apollodoros*—no doubt you know the man and his ways.

ECHECRATES: Oh yes, of course.

PHAIDON: Well, he behaved quite as usual, and I was broken down myself, and so were others.

ECHECRATES: But who were they, Phaidon?

PHAIDON: Of our countrymen† there was this Apollodoros I have mentioned, and Critobulos and his father, and, besides, Hermogenes and Epigenes and Aischines and Antisthenes; there was also Ctesippos the Paianian and Menexenos, and others of our countrymen; but Plato was ill, I think.

ECHECRATES: Were any foreigners present?

PHAIDON: Yes, Simmias the Theban and Cebes and Phaidondes; and from Megara, Eucleides and Terpsion.

ECHECRATES: Oh, were not Aristippos and Cleombrotos present?

PHAIDON: No, they were said to be in Aegina.

ECHECRATES: Was anyone else there?

PHAIDON: I think these are about all who were present.

ECHECRATES: Very well; tell me, what did you talk about?

PHAIDON: I will try to tell you the whole story from the beginning. You see we had been accustomed during all the former days to visit Socrates, myself and the rest. We used to gather early at the court where the trial had been, for that was near the prison. We always waited until the prison was opened, passing the time together, for it was not opened early; and when it was opened we went in to Socrates and generally spent the day with him. That day, however, we gathered earlier than usual; for the day before, after we left the prison in the evening, we learnt that the ship had come in from Delos; so we warned one another to come as early as possible to the usual place. We came early, then, and the porter who used to answer the door came out to us, and told us to wait and not to go in till he gave the word; for, he said, “The Eleven are knocking off his fetters and informing him that he must die today.”

After a short while he came back and told us to go in. So we went in, and found Socrates just released, and Xanthippe,† you know her, with his little boy, sitting beside him. Then when Xanthippe saw us, she cried out in lamentation and said as women do, “O Socrates! Here is the last time your friends will speak to you and you to them!”

Socrates glanced at Criton and said quietly, “Please let someone take her home, Criton.”

Then some of Criton’s people led her away crying and beating her breast. Socrates sat up on his bed, and bent back his leg and rubbed it with his hand, and said while he rubbed it, “How strange a thing it seems, my friends, that which people call pleasure! And how wonderful is its relation to pain, which they suppose to be its opposite; both together they will not come to a man, yet if he pursues one of the pair, and catches it, he is almost compelled to catch the other, too; so they seem to be both hung together from one head. I think that Aesop would have made a fable, if he had noticed this; he would have said they were at war, and God wanted to make peace between them and could not and accordingly hung them together by their heads to the same thing, and therefore whenever you get one, the other follows after. That’s just what it seems like to me; first came the pain in my leg from the irons, and here seems to come following after it, pleasure.”

Cebes took up here, and said, “Upon my word, Socrates, I am much obliged to you for reminding me. About your poems, I mean, when you put into verse Aesop’s fables, and the prelude for Apollo; many people have asked me, for example Euenos, the other day, what on earth put it in your mind to make those poems after you came into prison, although you never made any before. Then if you care that I should be able to answer Euenos, next time he asks me, and I’m sure he will, tell me what to say.”

“Tell him then, Cebes,” he said, “just the truth: that I did not want to rival him or his creations when I did it, for I knew it would not be easy; but I was trying to find out the meaning of certain dreams, and getting it off my conscience, in case they meant to command me to attempt that sort of composition. The dreams went like this: In my past life, the same dream often used to come to me, in different shapes at different times, but saying the same thing, ‘Socrates, get to work and compose music!’* Formerly I took this to mean what I was already doing; I thought the dream was urging and encouraging me, as people do in cheering on their own men when they are running a race, to compose—which, taking philosophy to be the highest form of composition, I was doing already; but now after the trial, while the festival was putting off my execution, I thought that, if the dream should really command me to work at this common kind of composition, I ought not to disobey the dream but to do so. For it seemed safer not to go away before getting it off my conscience by composing poetry, and so obeying the dream. So first of all I composed in honour of the god* whose festival this was; after the god, I considered that a poet must compose fiction if he was to be a poet, not true tales, and I was no fiction-monger, and therefore I took the fictions that I found to my hand and knew, namely Aesop’s, and composed the first that came. Then tell Euenos that, Cebes, and bid him farewell, and tell him to follow me as soon as he can, if he is sensible. I am going away, as it seems, today; for so the Athenians command.”

“What advice, Socrates,” he said, “to give to Euenos! I have often met the man; from what I have seen of him so far he will be the last man to obey!”

“Why,” said he, “is not Euenos a philosopher?”

“I think so,” said Simmias.

“Then Euenos will be willing enough, and so will everyone who goes properly into the subject. But perhaps he will not do violence to himself; for they say that is not lawful.”

As he spoke, he let down his legs on to the ground, and sat thus during the rest of the talk. Then Cebes asked him, “What do you mean, Socrates, by saying that it is not lawful for a man to do violence to himself, but that the philosopher would be willing to follow the dying?”

“Why, Cebes,” he said, “have not you and Simmias heard all about such things from Philolaos, when you were his pupils?”

“Nothing clear, Socrates.”

“Well truly, all I say myself is only from hearsay; however, what I happen to have heard I don’t mind telling you. Indeed, it is perhaps most proper that one who is going to depart and take up his abode in that world should think about the life over there and say what sort of life we imagine it to be: for what else could one do with the time till sunset?”

“Well then, why pray do they say it is not lawful for a man to take his own life, my dear Socrates? I have already heard Philolaos myself, as you asked me just now, when he was staying in our parts, and I have heard others too, and they all said we must not do that; but I never heard anything clear about it.”

“Well, go on trying,” said Socrates, “and perhaps you may hear something. It might perhaps seem surprising to you if in this one thing, of all that happens to a human being, there is never any exception—if it never chances to a man amongst the other chances of his life that sometimes for some people it is better to die than to live; but it does probably seem surprising to you if those people for whom it is better to die may not rightly do this good to themselves, but must wait for some other benefactor.”

And Cebes answered, with a light laugh, “True for ye, by Zeus!” using his native Doric.

“Indeed, put like this,” said Socrates, “it would seem unreasonable; but possibly there is a grain of reason in it. At least, the tale whispered in secret about these things is that we men are in a sort of custody, and a man must not release himself or run away, which appears a great mystery to me and not easy to see through. But I do think, Cebes, it is right to say the gods are those who take care of us, and that we men are one of the gods’ possessions—don’t you think so?”

“Yes, I do,” said Cebes.

“Then,” said he, “if one of your own possessions, your slave, should kill himself, without your indicating to him that you wanted him to die, you would be angry with him, and punish him if there were any punishment?”

“Certainly,” said he.

“Possibly, then, it is not unreasonable in that sense, that a man must not kill himself before God sends on him some necessity, like that which is present here now.”

“Yes indeed, that seems likely,” said Cebes. “But you said just now, Socrates, that philosophers ought cheerfully to be willing to die; that does seem unreasonable, at least if there is reason in what we have just said, that God is he who cares for us and we are his possessions. That the wisest men should not object to depart out of this service in which we are overseen by the best overseers there are, gods, there is no reason in that. For I don’t suppose a wise man thinks he will care better for himself when he is free. But a foolish man might well believe that he should run away from an owner; and he would not remember that from a good one he ought not to run away but to stay as long as he could, and so he would thoughtlessly run away, while the man of sense would desire always to be with one better than himself. Indeed, in this case, Socrates, the opposite of what was said would be likely: It is proper that wise men should object to die, and foolish men should be glad.”

Socrates, hearing this, was pleased, I thought, at the way Cebes dealt with the matter; and, glancing away at us, he said, “Cebes is always on the hunt for arguments, and won’t believe straight off whatever one says.”

And Simmias added, “But I tell you, Socrates, I think I now see something in what Cebes says, myself; for what could men want, if they are truly wise, in running away from owners better than themselves, and lightly shaking them off? And I really think Cebes is aiming his argument at you, because you take it so easily to leave both us and good masters, as you admit yourself, gods!”

“Quite right,” said he. “I think I must answer this before you just as if you were a court!”

“Exactly,” said Simmias.

“Very well,” said he, “I will try to convince you better than I did my judges. I believe, my dear Simmias and Cebes, that I shall pass over first of all to other gods, both wise and good, secondly to dead men better than those in this world; and if I did not think so, I should do wrong in not objecting to death; but, believing this, be assured that I hope I shall find myself in the company of good men, although I would not maintain it for certain; but that I shall pass over to gods who are very good masters, be assured that if I would maintain for certain anything else of the kind, I would with certainty maintain this. Then for these reasons, so far from objecting, I have good hopes that something remains for the dead, as has been the belief from time immemorial, and something much better for the good than for the bad.”

“Then,” said Simmias, “do you mean to keep this idea to yourself and go away with it, or will you give us a share? This good find seems to be a case of findings is sharings* between us, and don’t forget you are on your defence, to see if you can convince us.”

“Well, I’ll try,” he said. “But first I see Criton here has been wanting to say something ever so long; let’s ask what it is.”

“Only this,” Criton said, “the man who is to give you the poison keeps telling me to advise you not to talk too much. He says people get hotter by talking, and nothing like that ought to accompany the poison; otherwise people who do that often have to take two or three potions.”

And Socrates said, “Oh, let him be; he must just be ready to give me two, or three if necessary.”

“I guessed as much,” said Criton, “but he keeps bothering me.”

“Oh, let him be,” said he. “Now then, I want to give the proof at once, to you as my judges, why I think it likely that one who has spent his life in philosophy should be confident when he is going to die, and have good hopes that he will win the greatest blessings in the next world when he has ended: so Simmias and Cebes my judges, I will try to show how this could be true.

“The fact is, those who tackle philosophy aright are simply and solely practising dying, practising death, all the time, but nobody sees it. If this is true, then it would surely be unreasonable that they should earnestly do this, and nothing else all their lives, yet when death comes they should object to what they had been so long earnestly practising.”

Simmias laughed at this, and said, “I don’t feel like laughing just now, Socrates, but you have made me laugh. I think the many if they heard that would say, ‘That’s a good one for the philosophers!’ And other people in my city would heartily agree that philosophers are really suffering from a wish to die, and now they have found them out, that they richly deserve it!”

“That would be true, Simmias,” said Socrates, “except the words ‘found out.’ For they have not found out in what sense the real philosophers wish to die and deserve to die, and what kind of death it is. Let us say good-bye to them,” he went on, “and ask ourselves: Do we think there is such a thing as death?”

“Certainly,” Simmias put in.

“Is it anything more than the separation of the soul from the body?” said Socrates. “Death is, that the body separates from the soul, and remains by itself apart from the soul, and the soul, separated from the body, exists by itself apart from the body. Is death anything but that?”

“No,” he said, “that is what death is.”

“Then consider, my good friend, if you agree with me here, for I think this is the best way to understand the question we are examining. Do you think it the part of a philosopher to be earnestly concerned with what are called pleasures, such as these—eating and drinking, for example?”

“Not at all,” said Simmias.

“The pleasures of love, then?”

“Oh no.”

“Well, do you suppose a man like that regards the other bodily indulgences as precious? Getting fine clothes and shoes and other bodily adornments—ought he to price them high or low, beyond whatever share of them it is absolutely necessary to have?”

“Low, I think,” he said, “if he is a true philosopher.”

“Then in general,” he said, “do you think that such a man’s concern is not for the body, but as far as he can he stands aloof from that and turns towards the soul?”

“I do.”

“Then firstly, is it not clear that in such things the philosopher as much as possible sets free the soul from communion with the body, more than other men?”

“So it appears.”

“And I suppose, Simmias, it must seem to most men that he who has no pleasure in such things and takes no share in them does not deserve to live, but he is getting pretty close to death if he does not care about pleasures which he has by means of the body.”

“Quite true, indeed.”

“Well then, what about the actual getting of wisdom? Is the body in the way or not, if a man takes it with him as companion in the search? I mean, for example, is there any truth for men in their sight and hearing? Or as poets are forever dinning into our ears, do we hear nothing and see nothing exactly? Yet if these of our bodily senses are not exact and clear, the others will hardly be, for they are all inferior to these, don’t you think so?”

“Certainly,” Simmias said.

“Then,” said Socrates, “when does the soul get hold of the truth? For whenever the soul tries to examine anything in company with the body, it is plain that it is deceived by it.”

“Quite true.”

“Then is it not clear that in reasoning, if anywhere, something of the realities becomes visible to it?”

“Yes.”

“And I suppose it reasons best when none of these senses disturbs it, hearing or sight, or pain, or pleasure indeed, but when it is completely by itself and says good-bye to the body, and so far as possible has no dealings with it, when it reaches out and grasps that which really is.”

“That is true.”

“And is it not then that the philosopher’s soul chiefly holds the body cheap and escapes from it, while it seeks to be by itself?”

“So it seems.”

“Let us pass on, Simmias. Do we say there is such a thing as justice by itself, or not?”

“We do say so, certainly!”

“Such a thing as the good and beautiful?”

“Of course!”

“And did you ever see one of them with your eyes?”

“Never,” said he.

“By any other sense of those the body has did you ever grasp them? I mean all such things, greatness, health, strength, in short everything that really is the nature of things whatever they are: Is it through the body that the real truth is perceived? Or is this better—whoever of us prepares himself most completely and most exactly to comprehend each thing which he examines would come nearest to knowing each one?”

“Certainly.”

“And would he do that most purely who should approach each with his intelligence alone, not adding sight to intelligence, or dragging in any other sense along with reasoning, but using the intelligence uncontaminated alone by itself, while he tries to hunt out each essence uncontaminated, keeping clear of eyes and ears and, one might say, of the whole body, because he thinks the body disturbs him and hinders the soul from getting possession of truth and wisdom when body and soul are companions—is not this the man, Simmias, if anyone, who will hit reality?”

“Nothing could be more true, Socrates,” said Simmias.

“Then from all this,” said Socrates, “genuine philosophers must come to some such opinion as follows, so as to make to one another statements such as these: ‘A sort of direct path, so to speak, seems to take us to the conclusion that so long as we have the body with us in our enquiry, and our soul is mixed up with so great an evil, we shall never attain sufficiently what we desire, and that, we say, is the truth. For the body provides thousands of busy distractions because of its necessary food; besides, if diseases fall upon us, they hinder us from the pursuit of the real. With loves and desires and fears and all kinds of fancies and much rubbish, it infects us, and really and truly makes us, as they say, unable to think one little bit about anything at any time. Indeed, wars and factions and battles all come from the body and its desires, and from nothing else. For the desire of getting wealth causes all wars, and we are compelled to desire wealth by the body, being slaves to its culture; therefore we have no leisure for philosophy, from all these reasons. Chief of all is that if we do have some leisure, and turn away from the body to speculate on something, in our searches it is everywhere interfering, it causes confusion and disturbance, and dazzles us so that it will not let us see the truth; so in fact we see that if we are ever to know anything purely we must get rid of it, and examine the real things by the soul alone; and then, it seems, after we are dead, as the reasoning shows, not while we live, we shall possess that which we desire, lovers of which we say we are, namely wisdom. For if it is impossible in company with the body to know anything purely, one thing of two follows: either knowledge is possible nowhere, or only after death; for then alone the soul will be quite by itself apart from the body, but not before. And while we are alive, we shall be nearest to knowing, as it seems, if as far as possible we have no commerce or communion with the body which is not absolutely necessary, and if we are not infected with its nature, but keep ourselves pure from it, until God himself shall set us free. And so, pure and rid of the body’s foolishness, we shall probably be in the company of those like ourselves, and shall know through our own selves complete incontamination, and that is perhaps the truth. But for the impure to grasp the pure is not, it seems, allowed.’ So we must think, Simmias, and so we must say to one another, all who are rightly lovers of learning; don’t you agree?”

“Assuredly, Socrates.”

“Then,” said Socrates, “if this is true, my comrade, there is great hope that when I arrive where I am travelling, there if anywhere I shall sufficiently possess that for which all our study has been pursued in this past life. So the journey which has been commanded for me is made with good hope, and the same for any other man who believes he has got his mind purified, as I may call it.”

“Certainly,” replied Simmias.

“And is not purification really that which has been mentioned so often in our discussion, to separate as far as possible the soul from the body, and to accustom it to collect itself together out of the body in every part, and to dwell alone by itself as far as it can, both at this present and in the future, being freed from the body as if from a prison?”

“By all means,” said he.

“Then is not this called death—a freeing and separation of soul from body?”

“Not a doubt of that,” said he.

“But to set it free, as we say, is the chief endeavour of those who rightly love wisdom, nay, of those alone, and the very care and practice of the philosophers is nothing but the freeing and separation of soul from body—don’t you think so?”

“It appears to be so.”

“Then, as I said at first, it would be absurd for a man preparing himself in his life to be as near as possible to death, so to live, and then when death came, to object?”

“Of course.”

“Then in fact, Simmias,” he said, “those who rightly love wisdom are practising dying, and death to them is the least terrible thing in the world. Look at it in this way: If they are everywhere at enmity with the body, and desire the soul to be alone by itself, and if, when this very thing happens, they shall fear and object—would not that be wholly unreasonable? Should they not willingly go to a place where there is good hope of finding what they were in love with all through life (and they loved wisdom), and of ridding themselves of the companion which they hated? When human favourites and wives and sons have died, many have been willing to go down to the grave, drawn by the hope of seeing there those they used to desire, and of being with them; but one who is really in love with wisdom and holds firm to this same hope, that he will find it in the grave, and nowhere else worth speaking of—will he then fret at dying and not go thither rejoicing? We must surely think, my comrade, that he will go rejoicing, if he is really a philosopher; he will surely believe that he will find wisdom in its purity there and there alone. If this is true, would it not be most unreasonable, as I said just now, if such a one feared death?”

“Unreasonable, I do declare,” said he.

“Then this is proof enough,” he said, “that if you see a man fretting because he is to die, he was not really a philosopher, but a philosma—not a wisdom-lover but a body-lover. And no doubt the same man is money-lover and honours-lover, one or both.”

“It certainly is so, as you say,” he replied.

“Then, Simmias,” he said, “does not what is called courage belong specially to persons so disposed as philosophers are?”

“I have no doubt of it,” said he.

“And the same with temperance, what the many call temperance, not to be agitated about desires but to hold them lightly and decently; does not this belong to those alone who hold the body lightly and live in philosophy?”

“That must be so,” Simmias said.

“You see,” said he, “if you will consider the courage and temperance of others, you will think it strange.”

“How so, Socrates?”

“You know,” said he, “that everyone else thinks death one of the greatest evils?”

“Indeed I do,” he said.

“Then is it not fear of greater evils which makes the brave endure death, when they do?”

“That is true.”

“Then fear, and fearing, makes all men brave, except philosophers. Yet it is unreasonable to become brave by fear and cowardice!”

“Certainly.”

“And what of the decent men? Are they not in the same case? A sort of intemperance makes them temperate! Although we say such a thing is impossible, nevertheless with that self-complacent temperance they are in a similar case; because they fear to be deprived of other pleasures, and because they desire them, they abstain from some because they are mastered by others. They say, of course, intemperance is ‘to be ruled by pleasures’; yet what happens to them is, to master some pleasures and to be mastered by others, and this is much the same as what was said just now, that in a way intemperance has made them temperate.”

“So it seems.”

“Bless you, Simmias! This is hardly an honest deal in virtue—to trade pleasure for pleasure, and pain for pain, and fear for fear, and even greater for less, as if they were current coin; no, the only honest currency, for which all these must be traded, is wisdom, and all things are in truth to be bought with this and sold for this.* And courage and temperance and justice and, in short, true virtue, depend on wisdom, whether pleasure and fear and all other such things are added or taken away. But when they are deprived of wisdom and exchanged one for another, virtue of that kind is no more than a make-believe,* a thing in reality slavish and having no health or truth in it; and truth is in reality a cleansing from all such things, and temperance and justice and courage, and wisdom itself, are a means of purification. Indeed, it seems those who established our mystic rites were no fools; they in truth spoke with a hidden meaning long ago when they said that whoever is uninitiated and unconsecrated when he comes to the house of Hades will lie in mud, but the purified and consecrated when he goes there will dwell with gods. Indeed, as they say in the rites, ‘Many are called but few are chosen’,† and these few are in my opinion no others than those who have loved wisdom in the right way. One of these I have tried to be by every effort in all my life, and I have left nothing undone according to my ability; if I have endeavoured in the right way, if we have succeeded at all, we shall know clearly when we get there; very soon, if God will, as I think. There is my defence before you gentlemen on the bench, Simmias and Cebes, showing that in leaving you and my masters here, I am reasonable in not fretting or being upset, because I believe that I shall find there good masters and good comrades. So if I am more convincing to you in my defence than I was to the Athenian judges, I should be satisfied.”

When Socrates had thus finished, Cebes took up the word: “Socrates,” he said, “on the whole I think you speak well; but that about the soul is a thing which people find very hard to believe. They fear that when it parts from the body it is nowhere any more; but on the day when a man dies, as it parts from the body, and goes out like a breath or a whiff of smoke, it is dispersed and flies away and is gone and is nowhere any more. If it existed anywhere, gathered together by itself, and rid of these evils which you have just described, there would be great and good hope, Socrates, that what you say is true; but this very thing needs no small reassurance and faith, that the soul exists when the man dies, and that it has some power and sense.”

“Quite true,” said Socrates, “quite true, Cebes; well, what are we to do? Shall we discuss this very question, whether such a thing is likely or not?”

“For my part,” said Cebes, “I should very much like to know what your opinion is about it.”

Then Socrates answered, “I think no one who heard us now could say, not even a composer of comedies,* that I am babbling nonsense and talking about things I have nothing to do with! So if you like, we must make a full enquiry.

“Let us enquire whether the souls of dead men really exist in the house of Hades or not. Well, there is the very ancient legend which we remember, that they are continually arriving there from this world, and further that they come back here and are born again from the dead. If that is true, and the living are born again from the dead, must not our souls exist there? For they could not be born again if they did not exist; and this would be sufficient proof that it is true, if it should be really shown that the living are born from the dead and from nowhere else. But if this be not true, we must take some other line.”

“Certainly,” said Cebes.

“Then don’t consider it as regards men only,” he said;

“if you wish to understand more easily, think of all animals and vegetables, and, in a word, everything that has birth, let us see if everything comes into being like that, always opposite from opposite and from nowhere else; whenever there happens to be a pair of opposites, such as beautiful and ugly, just and unjust, and thousands of others like these. So let us enquire whether everything that has an opposite must come from its opposite and from nowhere else. For example, when anything becomes bigger, it must, I suppose, become bigger from being smaller before.”

“Yes.”

“And if it becomes smaller, it was bigger before and became smaller after that?”

“True,” he said.

“And again, weaker from stronger, and slower from quicker?”

“Certainly.”

“Very well, if a thing becomes worse, is it from being better, and more just from more unjust?”

“Of course.”

“Have we established that sufficiently, then, that everything comes into being in this way, opposite from opposite?”

“Certainly.”

“Again, is there not the same sort of thing in them all, between the two opposites two becomings, from the first to the second, and back from the second to the first; between greater and lesser increase and diminution, and we call one increasing and the other diminishing?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And being separated and being mingled, growing cold and growing hot, and so with all; even if we have sometimes no names for them, yet in fact at least it must be the same everywhere, that they come into being from each other, and that there is a becoming from one to the other?”

“Certainly,” said he.

“Well then,” he said, “is there something opposite to being alive, as sleeping is opposite to being awake?”

“There is,” he said.

“What?”

“Being dead,” he said.

“Well, all these things come into being from each other, if they are opposites, and there are two becomings between each two?”

“Of course.”

“Then,” said Socrates, “I will speak of one of the two pairs that I mentioned just now, and its becomings; you tell me about the other. My pair is sleeping and being awake, and I say that being awake comes into being from sleeping and sleeping from being awake, and that their becomings are falling asleep and waking up. Is that satisfactory?”

“Quite so.”

“Then you tell me in the same way about life and death. Do you not say that to be alive is the opposite of to be dead?”

“I do.”

“And that they come into being from each other?”

“Yes.”

“From the living, then, what comes into being?”

“The dead,” he said.

“And what from the dead?”

“The living, I must admit.”

“Then from the dead, Cebes, come living things and living men?”

“So it appears,” he said.

“Then,” said he, “our souls exist in the house of Hades.”

“It seems so.”

“Well, of the two becomings between them, one is quite clear. For dying is clear, I suppose, don’t you think so?”

“Oh yes,” said he.

“Then what shall we do?” he said. “Shall we refuse to grant in return the opposite becoming; and shall nature be lame in this point? Is it not a necessity to grant some becoming opposite to dying?”

“Surely it is,” he said.

“What is that?”

“Coming to life again.”

“Then,” said he, “if there is coming to life again, this coming to life would be a being born from the dead into the living.”

“Certainly.”

“It is agreed between us, then, in this way also that the living are born from the dead, no less than the dead from the living: and since this is true, there would seem to be sufficient proof that the souls of the dead must of necessity exist somewhere, whence we assume they are born again.”

“It seems to me, Socrates,” he answered, “from our admissions that must of necessity be true.”

“Another way of looking at this, Cebes,” he said,

“shows, as I think, that we were right to make those admissions. If opposites did not return back continually to replace opposites, coming into being just as if going round in a circle, but if birth were something going direct from the opposite once only into the exact opposite and never bent back and returned back again to its original, be sure that in the end all things would get the same form and go through the same process, and becomings would cease.”

“How do you mean?” he asked.

“What I mean is nothing difficult to understand,” said he. “For example, if there were falling asleep, but waking up did not return back in its place, coming into being from the sleeping, be sure that in the end Endymion* would be nowhere and this would show his story to be nonsense, because everything else would be in the same state as he, fast asleep. And if everything were combined and nothing split up, the result would be the Chaos of Anaxagoras, ‘all things together.’ In the same way, my dear Cebes, if everything died that had any life, and when it died, the dead things remained in that state and never came to life again, is it not absolutely necessary that in the end all things would be dead and nothing alive? For if the living things came into being from things other than the dead, and the living died, all things must be swallowed up in death, and what device could possibly prevent it?”

“Nothing could possibly prevent it, Socrates, and what you say I think perfectly true.”

“Yes, Cebes,” he said, “I think this is all perfectly true, and we are not deceived in admitting what we did; but in fact coming to life again is really true, and living persons are born from the dead, and the souls of the dead exist.”†

“Another thing,” said Cebes, putting in, “you know that favourite argument of yours, Socrates, which we so often heard from you, that our learning is simply recollection: that also makes it necessary, I suppose, if it is true, that we learnt at some former time what we now remember; but this is impossible unless our soul existed somewhere before it was born in this human shape. In this way also the soul seems to be something immortal.”

Then Simmias put in, “But, Cebes, what are the proofs of this? Remind me, for I don’t quite remember now.”

“There is one very beautiful proof,” said Cebes, “that people, when asked questions, if they are properly asked, say of themselves everything correctly; yet if there were not knowledge in them, and right reason, they would not be able to do this. You see, if you show someone a diagram* or anything like that, he proves most clearly that this is true.”

Socrates said, “If you don’t believe this, Simmias, look at it in another way and see whether you agree. You disbelieve, I take it, how what is called learning can be recollection?”

“Disbelieve you,” said Simmias, “not I! I just want to have an experience of what we are now discussing—recollection. I almost remember and believe already from what Cebes tried to say; yet none the less I should like to hear how you were going to put it.”

“This is how,” he answered. “We agree, I suppose, that if anyone remembers something he must have known it before at some time.”

“Certainly,” he said.

“Then do we agree on this also, that when knowledge comes to him in such a way, it is recollection? What I mean is something like this: If a man has seen or heard something or perceived it by some other sense, and he not only knows that, but thinks of something else of which the knowledge is not the same but different, is it not right for us to say he remembered that which he thought of?”

“How do you mean?”

“Here is an example: Knowledge of a man and knowledge of a lyre are different.”

“Of course.”

“Well, you know about lovers, that when they see a lyre or a dress or anything else which their beloved uses, this is what happens to them: they know the lyre, and they conceive in the mind the figure of the boy whose lyre it is? Now this is recollection; just as when one sees Simmias, one often remembers Cebes, and there would be thousands of things like that.”

“Thousands, indeed!” said Simmias.

“Then is that sort of thing,” said he, “a kind of recollection? Especially when one feels this about things which one had forgotten because of time and neglect?”

“Certainly,” he said.

“Very well then,” said Socrates. “When you see a horse in a picture, or a lyre in a picture, is it possible to remember a man? And when you see Simmias in a picture, to remember Cebes?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Or when you see Simmias in a picture, to remember Simmias himself?”

“Oh yes,” said he.

[“These being either like or unlike?”

“Yes.”

“It makes no difference,” he said. “Whenever, seeing one thing, from sight of this you think of another thing whether like or unlike, it is necessary that that was recollection.”

“Certainly.”]*

“Does it not follow from all this that recollection is both from like and from unlike things?”

“It does.”

“But when a man remembers something from like things, must this not necessarily occur to him also—to reflect whether anything is lacking or not from the likeness of what he remembers?”

“He must.”

“Consider then,” he said, “if this is true. We say, I suppose, there is such a thing as the equal, not a stick equal to a stick, or a stone to a stone, or anything like that, but something independent which is alongside all of them, the equal itself, equality; yes or no?”

“Yes, indeed,” said Simmias, “upon my word, no doubt about it.”

“And do we understand what that is?”

“Certainly,” he said.

“Where did we get the knowledge of it? Was it not from such examples as we gave just now, by seeing equal sticks or stones and so forth, from these we conceived that, which was something distinct from them? Don’t you think it is distinct? Look at it this way also: Do not the same stones or sticks appear equal to one person and unequal to another?”

“Certainly.”

“Well, did the really-equals ever seem unequal to you, I mean did equality ever seem to be inequality?”

“Never, Socrates.”

“Then those equal things,” said he, “are not the same as the equal itself.”

“Not at all, I think, Socrates.”

“Yet from these equals,” he said, “being distinct from that equal, you nevertheless conceived and received knowledge of that equal?”

“Very true,” he said.*

“Well,” said he, “how do we feel about the sticks as compared with the real equals we spoke of just now; do the equal sticks seem to us to be as equal as equality itself, or do they fall somewhat short of the essential nature of equality; or nothing short?”

“They fall short,” he said, “a great deal.”

“Then we agree on this: When one sees a thing, and thinks, ‘This which I now see wants to be like something else—like one of the things that are, but falls short and is unable to be such as that is, it is inferior,’ it is necessary, I suppose, that he who thinks thus has previous knowledge of that which he thinks it resembles but falls short of?”

“That is necessary.”

“Very well, do we feel like that or not about equal things and the equal?”

“Assuredly we do.”

“It is necessary then that we knew the equal before that time when, first seeing the equal things, we thought that all these aim at being such as the equal, but fall short.”

“That is true.”

“Well, we go on to agree here also: we did not and we could not get a notion of the equal by any other means than by seeing or grasping, or perceiving by some other sense. I say the same of equal and all the rest.”

“And they are the same, Socrates, for what the argument wants to prove.”

“Look here, then; it is from the senses we must get the notion that all these things of sense aim at that which is the equal, and fall short of it; or how do we say?”

“Yes.”

“Then before we began to see and hear and use our other senses, we must have got somewhere knowledge of what the equal is, if we were going to compare with it the things judged equal by the senses and see that all things are eager to be such as that equal is, but are inferior to it.”

“This is necessary from what we agreed, Socrates.”

“Well, as soon as we were born we saw and heard and had our other senses?”

“Certainly.”

“Then, we say, we must have got knowledge of the equal before that?”

“Yes.”

“Before we were born, then, it is necessary that we must have got it.”

“So it seems.”

“Then if we got it before we were born and we were born having it, we knew before we were born and as soon as we were born, not only the equal and the greater and the less but all the rest of such things? For our argument now is no more about the equal than about the beautiful itself, and the good itself, and the just and the pious, and I mean everything which we seal with the name of ‘that which is,’ the essence, when we ask our questions and respond with our answers in discussion. So we must have got the proper knowledge of each of these before we were born.”

“That is true.”

“And if having got the knowledge, in each case, we have not forgotten, we must continue knowing this and know it through life; for to know is, having got knowledge of something, to keep it and not to lose it; dropping knowledge, Simmias, is what we call forgetfulness, isn’t it?”

“Just so, Socrates,” he said.

“But, I think, if we got it before birth, and lost it at birth, and if afterwards, using our senses about these things, we recover the knowledge which once before we had, would not what we call learning be to recover our own knowledge? And this we should rightly call recollection?”

“Certainly.”

“For, you see, it has been shown to be possible that a man perceiving something, by sight or hearing or some other sense, thinks, from this perception, of some other thing which he has forgotten, to which he compares this as being like or unlike. So as I say, there is choice of two things: either we were all born knowing them and we all know them throughout life; or afterwards those who we say learn just remember, and nothing more, and learning would be recollection.”

“That is certainly true, Socrates.”

“Which do you choose then, Simmias? Were we born knowing, or do we remember afterwards what we had got knowledge of before?”

“I can’t choose all at once, Socrates.”

“Another question, then; you can choose, and have some opinion about this. When a man knows anything, could he give an account of what he knows or not?”

“He must be able to do that, Socrates.”

“Do you think that all could give account of the matters we have been discussing?”

“I would that they could,” said Simmias, “but so far from that, I fear that tomorrow at this time there may be no one left in the world able to do that properly.”

“Then, Simmias, you don’t think that all know them?”

“Oh, no!”

“Then are they trying to remember what they once learnt?”

“It must be so.”

“When did our souls get the knowledge of these things? For surely it is not since we became human beings.”

“Certainly not.”

“Then before.”

“Yes.”

“So, Simmias, our souls existed long ago, before they were in human shape, apart from bodies, and then had wisdom.”

“Unless, indeed, we get all these knowledges at birth, Socrates; for this time is still left.”

“Very well, my comrade; at what other time do we lose them? For we are not born having them, as we admitted just now. Do we lose them at the very same time as we get them? Can you suggest any other time?”

“Oh no, Socrates, I did not see I was talking nonsense.”

“Is this the case then, Simmias?” he asked. “If all these exist which we are always harping on, the beautiful and the good and every such essence; and if we refer to these essences all the things which our senses perceive, finding out that the essences existed before and are ours now, and compare our sensations with them, it necessarily follows that, just as these exist, so our soul must have existed before our birth; but if they do not exist, this argument will be worthless. Is this true, and is there equal necessity that these things exist and our souls did before our birth, or if they do not exist, neither did our souls?”

“I am quite convinced, Socrates,” said Simmias, “that there is the same necessity; our argument has found an excellent refuge when it maintains equally that our soul exists before we are born, and the essences likewise which you speak of. Nothing is clearer to me than this, that all such things exist most assuredly, beauty and good and the others which you named; and I think it has been sufficiently proved.”

“And what thinks Cebes?” said Socrates. “We must convince Cebes too.”

“It is good enough for him,” said Simmias, “as I believe; but he is the most obstinate man in the world at disbelieving what is said; however, I believe he really is convinced that our soul existed before our birth.

“Yet will it exist after death too?” he went on. “I don’t think myself that has been proved yet, Socrates. We are confronted still with what Cebes said just now: Can it be that when the man dies his soul is scattered abroad and that is the end of it, as so many say? For supposing it is composed from somewhere or other, and comes into existence before it even enters a human body; what hinders it, when it has entered and finally got rid of that body, from ending at that moment also, and being itself destroyed?”

“Well said, Simmias,” said Cebes. “It does seem that half of what ought to be proved has been proved, that our soul exists before our birth; it must also be proved that when we die it will exist no less than before our birth, if the proof is to be completed.”

“It has been proved already, my dear Simmias and Cebes,” said Socrates, “if you choose to combine this argument with what we agreed to before it, that all the living comes from the dead. For if the soul exists before, and if it is necessary that when coming into life and being born it comes from death and from nothing else at all, it must certainly be necessary that it exists even when one dies, since it must be born again. Well then, what you said has in fact been proved already. Still, I think you and Cebes would be glad to investigate this argument yet further, and you seem to me to have the fear which children have—that really, when it leaves the body, the wind blows it away and scatters it, especially if anyone dies not in calm weather but in a great tempest.”

Cebes laughed, and said, “Then think we are afraid of that, Socrates,” he said, “and try to convince us against it; or better, don’t think we are afraid, but imagine there is a kind of child in us which has such fears; then let us try to persuade this child not to fear death as if it were a bogey.”

“No,” said Socrates, “you must sing incantations over it every day, until you charm it out.”

“My dear Socrates,” he said, “where shall we get a good charmer of such things, since you are leaving us?”

“Hellas is a big place, my dear Cebes,” he replied,

“and there are many good men in it, and there are many barbarian nations too; and you must search through them all looking for such a charmer; you must spare neither money nor pains, since you could not spend money on anything more important. And you must not forget to search among yourselves; for perhaps you could not easily find any better able than yourselves to do that.”

“Oh, that shall be done, of course,” said Cebes; “but let us go back to where we left off—if you would like to.”

“But certainly I should like to,” he said; “of course I should!”

“That’s well said,” said Cebes.

“Very well then,” said Socrates, “we must ask ourselves what sorts of things properly undergo this; I mean, what sorts of things are dissolved and scattered, for what sorts we must fear such an end, and for what not; next we must consider which sort the soul belongs to. We shall know then whether to be confident or fearful for our own soul.”

“True,” he said.

“Isn’t it to the composite, which is by nature compounded, that dissolution is proper—I mean it is dissolved just as it was composed? And, on the other hand, an uncompounded thing, if indeed such exists, is least of all things naturally liable to dissolution?”

“That seems to me correct,” said Cebes.

“Then what is always the same and in the same state is likely to be the uncompounded, but what is always changing and never keeps in the same state is likely to be the compounded?”

“I think so.”

“Let us turn to what we have discussed already,” he said. “This essence which we describe in all our questions and answers as existing—is it always in the same state or does it change? I mean the equal itself, the beautiful itself, everything which exists by itself, that which is—does it admit of any changes whatever? Or is it true that each thing that so exists, being of one form and itself alone, is always in the same state, and never admits of any change whatever in any way or at any time or in any place?”

“It must necessarily be always in the same state,” said Cebes.

“And what of the many particulars, men or horses or dresses or what you will, things equal or beautiful and so forth, all that have the same name as those essences? Are they always in the same state; or, quite opposite to the essences, are they not constantly changing in themselves and in relation to each other, and, one might say, never keep in the same state?”

“That again is right,” said Cebes, “they never keep in the same state.”

“These, then, you could touch or see or perceive by the other senses, but those which continue in the same state cannot be grasped by anything except intellectual reasoning, and such things are unseen* and not visible?”

“Certainly that is true,” he said.

“Shall we lay down, then, that there are two kinds of existing things, one visible, one unseen?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And the unseen is always in the same state, but the visible constantly changing?”

“Yes to that also,” he said.

“Now come,” said he, “in ourselves one part is body and one part soul?”

“Just so,” he said.

“Then which kind do we say the body would be more like and akin to?”

“The visible,” he said, “that is clear to anyone.”

“And the soul—is it visible, or unseen?”

“Not visible to mankind at least, Socrates,” he said.

“But when we say visible and not visible, we mean to human senses, don’t we?”

“Yes, we do.”

“Then what of the soul—do we say that is visible or invisible?”

“Not visible.”

“Unseen, then?”

“Yes.”

“Then soul is more like to the unseen, and body to the visible.”

“It surely must be.”

“Now you remember that we were saying some time ago that the soul, when it has the body to help in examining things, either through sight or hearing or any other sense—for to examine something through the body means through the senses—then it is dragged by the body towards what is always changing, and the soul goes astray and is confused and staggers about like one drunken because she is taking hold of such things.”

“Certainly.”

“But when she examines by herself, she goes away yonder to the pure and everlasting and immortal and unchanging; and being akin to that, she abides ever with it, whenever it becomes possible for her to abide by herself. And there she rests from her wanderings, and while she is amongst those things she is herself unchanging because what she takes hold of is unchanging: and this state of the soul has the name of wisdom?”

“Most excellent and true, Socrates.”

“Then which of the two kinds is she more like and more akin to, judging from what we said before and what we are saying now?”

“Everyone, even the most ignorant, would admit, I think, Socrates,” he said, “from that way of reasoning, that soul is wholly and altogether more like the unchanging than the changing.”

“And the body?”

“More like the changing.”

“Look at it in this way also: When soul and body are together, our nature assigns the body to be slave and to be ruled, and the soul to be ruler and master; now, then, further, which of the two seems to be like the divine, and which like the mortal? Don’t you think the divine is naturally such as to rule and to guide, and the mortal such as to be ruled and to be a slave?”

“I do.”

“Then which is the soul like?”

“It is clear, Socrates, that the soul is like the divine, and the body like the mortal.”

“Consider now, Cebes, whether it follows from all that we have said, that the soul is most like the divine and immortal and intellectual and simple and indissoluble and self-unchangeable, but on the contrary, the body is most like the human and mortal and manifold and unintellectual and dissoluble and ever-changing. Can we say anything to contradict that, my dear Cebes, or is that correct?”

“We cannot contradict it.”

“Very well. This being so, is it not proper to the body to be quickly dissolved, but on the contrary to the soul to be wholly indissoluble or very nearly so?”

“Of course.”

“You understand, then,” he said, “that when the man dies, the visible part of him, the body—that which lies in the visible world, and which we call the corpse, for which it is proper to dissolve and disappear—does not suffer any of this at once but instead remains a good long time, and if a man dies with his body in a nice condition and age, a very long time. For if the body is shrivelled up and mummified like the mummies in Egypt it lasts almost whole, for an incredibly long time. And some portions of the body, even when it decays, bones and sinews and so forth, may almost be called immortal.”

“Yes.”

“But the soul, the ‘unseen’ part of us, which goes to another place noble and pure and unseen like itself, a true unseen Hades, to the presence of the good and wise God, where, if God will, my own soul must go very soon—shall our soul, then, being such and of such nature, when released from the body be straightway scattered by the winds and perish, as most men say? Far from it, my dear Simmias! This is much more likely: If it is pure when it gets free, and drags nothing of the body with it, since it has no communion with the body in life if it can help it, but avoids the body and gathers itself into itself, since it is always practising this—here we have nothing else but a soul loving wisdom rightly, and in reality practising death—don’t you think this would be a practice of death?”

“By all means.”

“Then, being thus, it goes away into the unseen, which is like itself, the divine and immortal and wise, where on arrival it has the opportunity to be happy, freed from wandering and folly and fears and wild loves and all other human evils, and, as they say of the initiated, really and truly passing the rest of time with the gods. Is that what we are to say, Cebes?”

“Yes indeed,” said Cebes.

“But if contrariwise, I think, if it leaves the body polluted and unpurified, as having been always with it and attending it and in love with it and bewitched by it through desires and pleasures, so that it thinks nothing to be true but the bodily—what one could touch and see and drink and eat and use for carnal passion; if what is darksome to the eyes and ‘unseen’ but intellectual and to be caught by philosophy, if this, I say, it is accustomed to hate and fear and flee; do you think a soul in that state will get away pure and incorrupt in itself?”

“By no possible means whatever,” he said.

“No, I think it is interpenetrated by the bodily, which the association and union with it of the body has by constant practice made ingrained.”

“Exactly.”

“A heavy load, my friend, we must believe that to be, heavy and earthy and visible; and such a soul with this on board is weighed down and dragged back into the visible world, by fear of the unseen,* Hades so-called, and cruises† about restless among tombs and graves, where you know shadowy apparitions of souls have often been seen, phantoms such as are produced by souls like this, which have not been released purely, but keep something of the visible, and so they are seen.”

“That is likely, Socrates.”

“Indeed it is likely; and likely that these are not the souls of the good, but souls of the mean, which are compelled to wander about such places as a penalty for their former way of fife, which was evil; and wander they must until by desire for the bodily which is always in their company they are imprisoned once more in a body. And they are imprisoned, as is likely, into the same habits which they had practised in life before.”

“What sort of habits do you mean, Socrates?”

“It is likely, for example, that those who have practised gluttony and violence and drunkenness and have not taken heed to their ways enter the bodies of asses and suchlike beasts, don’t you think so?”

“Very likely indeed.”

“Those, again, who have preferred injustice and tyrannies and robberies, into the bodies of wolves and hawks and kites; or where else do we say they would go?”

“No doubt,” said Cebes, “they pass into creatures like these.”

“Then it is clear,” said he, “that the rest go wherever they do go, to suit their own likenesses and habits?”

“Quite clear, of course,” he said.

“Then of these the happiest people,” he said, “and those who go to the best place, are those who have practised the public and political virtues which they call temperance and justice, got from habit and custom without philosophy and reason?”

“How are these happiest, pray?”

“Why, isn’t it likely that they pass into another similar political and gentle race, perhaps bees or wasps or ants; or even into the same human race again, and that there are born from them decent men?”

“Yes, that is likely.”

“But into the family of gods, unless one is a philosopher and departs wholly pure, it is not permitted for any to enter, except the lover of learning. Indeed, it is for the sake of this purity, Simmias and Cebes, my two good comrades, that those who truly seek wisdom steadfastly abstain from all bodily desires and refuse to give themselves over to them, not from having any fear of ruin of their home or of poverty, as the money-loving multitude has; and again, not from being afraid of dishonour, or a bad reputation for wickedness, as the honour-lovers and power-lovers are; that is why these abstain from them.”

“No, Socrates,” said Cebes, “that would not be proper.”

“Not at all, by heaven,” said he. “Therefore those who care at all for their own soul and do not live just serving* the body say good-bye to everyone of that kind and walk not after guides who know not where they are going; for they themselves believe they must not act contrary to philosophy, and its deliverance and purification, and so they turn to philosophy and follow by the way she leads them.”

“How, Socrates?”

“I will tell you,” he said.

“The lovers of learning understand,” said he, “that philosophy found their soul simply imprisoned in the body and welded to it, and compelled to survey through this as if through prison bars the things that are, not by itself through itself, but wallowing in all ignorance; and she saw that the danger of this prison came through desire, so that the prisoner himself would be chief helper in his own imprisonment. As I say then, lovers of learning understand that philosophy, taking possession of their soul in this state, gently encourages it and tries to free it, by showing that surveying through the eyes is full of deceit, and so is perception through the ears and the other senses; she persuades the soul to withdraw from these, except so far as there is necessity to use them, and exhorts it to collect itself together and gather itself into itself, and to trust nothing at all but itself, and only whatever of the realities each in itself the soul itself by itself can understand; but that whatever of what varies with its environs the soul examines through other means, it must consider this to be no part of truth; such a thing, philosophy tells it, is a thing of the senses and of the visible, but what it sees itself is a thing of the intellect and of the ‘unseen.’ So the soul of the true philosopher believes that it must not oppose this deliverance, and therefore abstains from pleasures and desires and griefs and fears as much as possible, counting that when a man feels great pleasure or fear or pain or desire, he suffers not only the evil that one might think (for example, being ill or squandering money through his desires), but the greatest and worst of all evils, which he suffers and never counts.”

“What is that, Socrates?” asked Cebes.

“That the soul of every man suffers this double compulsion: At the same time as it is compelled to feel great pleasure or pain about anything, it is compelled also to believe that the thing for which it specially feels this is most clearly real and true, when it is not. These are generally the visible things, aren’t they?”

“Certainly.”

“Then in this state especially the soul is imprisoned by the body?”

“Pray how?”

“Because each pleasure and pain seems to have a nail, and nails the soul to the body and pins it on and makes it bodily, and so it thinks the same things are true which the body says are true. For by having the same opinion as the body, and liking the same things, it is compelled, I believe, to adopt the same ways and the same nourishment, and to become such as never could come pure to the house of Hades, but would always go forth infected by the body; so it would fall again quickly into another body and there be sown and grown, and therefore would have neither part nor lot in communion with the divine and pure and simple.”

“Most true, indeed,” said Cebes.

“So then it is for these reasons, Cebes, that those who rightly love learning are decent and brave, not for the reasons which the many give; what do you think?”

“Certainly not.”

“No, indeed. Such would be the reasoning of the philosopher. His soul would not think it right that philosophy should set her free, and that while being set free she herself should surrender herself back again in bondage to pleasures and pains, and so perform the endless task of a Penelope unweaving the work of her loom.* No, she thinks she must calm these passions; and, following reason and keeping always in it, beholding the true and the divine and the certain, and nourishing herself on this, his soul believes that she ought to live thus, as long as she does live, and when she dies she will join what is akin and like herself, and be rid of human evils. After nurture of this kind there is nothing to fear, my dear Simmias and Cebes, and she need not expect in parting from the body to be scattered about and blown away by the winds, and to be gone like a bird and be nowhere anymore.”

There was a long silence after Socrates had ended; Socrates himself was deep in these thoughts, or appeared to be, and so were most of us. But Cebes and Simmias whispered together a bit, and when Socrates noticed them he said, “What’s the matter? Surely you don’t think our argument has missed anything? Indeed, there are a good many suspicions and objections, if one is to go through it thoroughly. If, then, you are considering something else, I say nothing; but if you are at all puzzled about what we have been saying, don’t hesitate to speak yourselves. Go through it, and see if you think it might have been improved; and take me with you through it again if you think I can help you any more at all in your difficulties.”

Simmias answered, “Well then, Socrates, I will tell you the truth. We have been puzzled for a long time, both of us, and each pushes on the other and bids him ask; because we wish to hear and don’t want to be a nuisance, in case you are feeling unhappy about the present misfortune!”

Socrates laughed gently as he heard this, and said, “Bless me, my dear Simmias! Surely I could hardly persuade others that I don’t think the present fortune a misfortune, when I can’t persuade even you, but you fear I am more fretful now than I have been in my past life. Apparently it seems to you that I’m a worse prophet than the swans. When they perceive that they must die, you know, they sing more and better than they ever did before, glad to be going away into the presence of that god whose servants they are. But men tell lies against them because they fear death themselves, and they say that the swans are mourning their death and singing a dirge for sorrow; men don’t take into account that no bird ever sings when it is hungry or cold or feels any other pain, not the swallow or the hoopoe or even the nightingale, which they say all sing a dirge for sorrow. But I don’t believe those birds do sing in sorrow, nor do the swans, but these, I think, because they belong to Apollo, are prophets and know beforehand the good things in the other world, and sing and rejoice on that day far more than ever before. Indeed I think myself that I am the swans’ fellow-slave, and sacred to the same god, and I think I have prophecy from my master no less than they have, and I depart from life no more dispirited than they do. No, as far as that matters, you should speak and ask what you will, so long as we have leave of the Athenian Board of Eleven.”

“Good,” said Simmias, “then I will speak out, and tell you my difficulty, and Cebes too, where he does not accept all you have said. For I think, as perhaps you do, Socrates, that to know the plain truth about such matters in this present life is impossible, or at least very difficult; but only a very soft man would refuse to test in every possible way what is said about them, and would give up before examining them all over till he was tired out. I think a man’s duty is one of two things: either to be taught or to find out where the truth is, or if he cannot, at least to take the best possible human doctrine and the hardest to disprove, and to ride on this like a raft over the waters of life and take the risk; unless he could have a more seaworthy vessel to carry him more safely and with less danger, some divine doctrine to bring him through. So now I will not be ashamed to ask, since you tell me yourself to do it; and I shall not blame myself afterwards because I did not now say what I think. Well, my opinion is, Socrates, when I consider what has been said in my own mind and with Cebes here, that it is not quite satisfactory.”

Socrates said, “Perhaps, my comrade, your opinion is true. But say where it is not satisfactory.”

“Here,” said he: “That one could say the same about harmony* and a harp with strings; that the harmony is invisible and bodiless and all-beautiful and divine on the tuned harp; but the harp itself and the strings are bodies and bodily and composite and earthy and akin to the mortal. So when someone breaks the harp, or cuts and bursts the strings, suppose he should maintain by the same argument as yours that it is necessary the harmony should still exist and not perish; for it would be just as impossible that the harp should still exist when the strings are broken, and the strings should still exist which are of mortal kind, as that the harmony should perish—harmony, which is of the same kith and kin as the divine and immortal, perishing before the mortal; no, he would say, the harmony must necessarily exist somewhere, and wood and strings must rot away first, before anything could happen to the harmony! Well, Socrates, I think you yourself must have noticed that we conceive the soul to be something like this—that our body being tuned and held together by hot and cold and dry and wet and suchlike, our soul is a kind of mixture and harmony of these very things, when they are well and harmoniously mixed together. If, then, our soul is a kind of harmony, it is plain that when the body is slackened inharmoniously or too highly strung, by diseases and other evils, the soul must necessarily perish, although it is most divine, just as the other harmonies do, those in sounds and those in all the works of craftsmen, but the relics of each body will remain until it rots or is burnt. Then consider what we must answer to this argument, if anyone claims that the soul is a mixture of the things in the body, and at what is called death, it is the first to perish.”

Socrates gazed at us with his eyes wide open, as he usually did, and said, smiling, “What Simmias says is quite fair. Then if any of you is readier than I am, why didn’t he reply? I think he tackles the question neatly. But before the answer comes, I think we ought to hear Cebes first, what fault he, too, has to find with our argument. Then there will be a little time and we can consider what to say; afterwards, when we have heard them, we ought to agree with them if they seem to be in tune with us, or if not, we should continue as before to defend our doctrine. Come along, Cebes,” he said, “speak! What worried you?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Cebes. “I think the argument is where it was, and has the same objection which I made before. That our soul existed before it came into this form, I do not retract; it was a nice, neat proof, and quite satisfactory, if I may say so without offence; but that when we are dead the soul will still exist somewhere, I can’t say the same of that. However, I do not agree with the objection of Simmias, that the soul is not stronger and much longer-lasting than the body; for I think it is very far superior in all those respects. ‘Well,’ the argument might say to me, ‘why do you still disbelieve? You can see when the man is dead the weaker part still existing, and don’t you think the longer-lasting must necessarily survive during this time?’ Well, see if you think anything of this answer of mine; really, it seems that I also want a simile, like Simmias. I think all this is very much the same as saying as follows of a weaver who died old: The man is not dead but exists somewhere safe and sound, and here is a proof one might offer—here is the cloak which he wove himself, and used to wear, safe and sound, and it has not perished. If someone disbelieved, one might ask him,

‘Which kind of thing is longer-lasting, a man, or a cloak in use and wear?’ If the answer was, ‘A man lasts longer than a cloak,’ one might imagine that this proved that the man was certainly safe and sound, since the shorter-lasting thing had not perished. But I don’t think that is right, Simmias; just consider what I have to say now. Everyone would understand that such an argument is silly; for this weaver had woven and worn out many such cloaks and died later than all except the last, when he died before it, yet for all that a man is neither inferior to a cloak nor weaker. Soul and body might admit of the same simile, and one might fairly say the same about them, I think, that the soul is long-lasting, the body weaker and shorter-lasting; but one might say more, that each of the souls wears out many bodies, especially if it lives many years. For if the body wastes and perishes while the man still lives, but the soul always weaves anew what is worn away, it would, however, be necessary that when the soul perished it would happen to be wearing the last body and it would perish before this last only, and when the soul perished, the body would show at once the nature of its weakness and would quickly rot and vanish in decay. This argument, then, is not yet enough to give confidence that when we die our soul exists somewhere. For if one should grant your supporter even more than what you say, and admitted to him not only that our souls existed in the time before our birth, but that nothing hindered the souls of some of us from still existing when we die, and continuing to exist, and from being born and dying again and again, for so strong is its nature that the soul endures being born many times: one might admit that, and yet never admit that it does not suffer in these many births, and at last in one of its deaths does not perish outright. But one might say that no one knows which death and dissolution of the body brings death of the soul; for it is impossible for any one of us to distinguish it beforehand. Now if this is correct, it follows that anyone who is confident about death is foolish in his confidence, unless he can show that the soul is wholly immortal and imperishable; for if he cannot show this, it is necessary that he who is about to die must always fear for his soul lest at the present separation from the body it may utterly perish.”

When we had heard these two we were very unhappy, as we told one another afterwards. We had been firmly convinced by the earlier arguments, and now we seemed to be thrown back by the speakers into confusion and disbelief; we distrusted not only the earlier arguments but those which were coming, and we thought that either we were worthless judges, or else there could be nothing to trust in the whole thing.

ECHECRATES: By heaven, Phaidon, I feel with you. As I heard you tell such a story, I felt like asking myself, “Then what argument can we trust any longer?” That one seemed quite convincing when Socrates spoke, but now it has fallen into distrust. This notion has a wonderful hold of me and always did, that our soul is a kind of harmony, and when you spoke of it I was, one might say, reminded that I had once thought so too. Now again we must start from the beginning, for I very much want another argument to persuade me that the soul of the dead does not die with him. Tell me this in heaven’s name, how did Socrates follow up the discussion? Was he also put out like the rest of you? Did he show it or not? If not, did he quietly defend the reasoning? And did he defend it enough, or too little? Tell us the whole story as exactly as you can.

PHAIDON: Well, I must say, Echecrates, I always wondered at Socrates, but I never wondered at him more than when I was with him then. To have something to say was perhaps no novelty in that man; but what most surprised me was, how pleasant and friendly and respectful he was in welcoming the speculations of the young men, and then how sharply he saw how we were affected by what was said, and then how well he treated us, and rallied us like a lot of beaten runaways, and headed us back to follow the argument and examine it along with him.

ECHECRATES: Well, how?

PHAIDON: I will tell you. I happened to be sitting on his right hand, on a low stool beside his bed, and his seat was much higher than mine. Then he stroked my head and pinched together the hair on my neck—he used occasionally to play with my hair—and said, “Tomorrow perhaps, Phaidon, you’ll cut off this pretty hair.”*

“It seems like it, Socrates,” I said.

“Well, you won’t, if you will listen to me.”

“But why?” said I.

“Today,” he said, “you shall cut off this, and I mine, at least if our argument comes to its latter end and we can’t bring it to life again. In fact if I were you, and if the argument escaped me, I would swear an oath like the Argives,† never to let my hair grow long again till I renew the fight with Simmias and Cebes and beat their argument.”

“But, Socrates,” I said, “two to one! Not even Heracles could be a match for two, as they say!”*

“Then,” he said, “call me in as your Ioleos, while there is daylight still.”

“I call you to help, then,” said I, “not as Heracles did to Ioleos; but like an Ioleos to Heracles.”

“That will be the same thing,” he said. “But first let us be careful against a danger.”

“What is the danger?” said I.

“Don’t let us be ‘misologues,’ hating argument as misanthropes hate men; the worst disease one can have is to hate arguments. Misology and misanthropy come in the same way. Misanthropy is put on from believing someone too completely without discrimination, and thinking the man to be speaking the truth wholly and wholesomely, and then finding out soon afterwards that he is bad and untrustworthy and quite different; when this happens often to a man, especially from those he thought to be his closest and truest friends, at last, after so many knocks, he hates everybody, and believes there is no soundness in anyone at all. Haven’t you noticed that happening?”

“Oh yes,” I said.

“Then that is an ugly thing,” he said, “and it is clear such a man tries to deal with men when he has no skill in human affairs. For if he had that technical skill when he dealt with them, he would take them as they are, and believe that the very good and very bad are few, but most are betwixt and between.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“As with very big and very small men. Don’t you think the rarest thing is to find a very big or a very small man, or dog, or anything else? So with quick and slow, ugly and handsome, white and black? Don’t you see that in all these the extremes are few and rare, but the betweens plenty and many?”

“Oh, yes, indeed,” I said.

“Then,” said he, “if there were a competition in wickedness, there, too, the prize-winners would be few?”

“Quite likely,” I said.

“Yes, quite likely,” said he, “but in that respect arguments are not like men. I have been following your lead so far, but I think the likeness lies in this: when a person without technical skill in words believes an argument to be true, and soon afterwards thinks it false, sometimes when it is and sometimes when it is not, and so again one person after another—and especially those who spend their time arguing against each other—you know that in the end they think they are the wisest men in the world, and that they alone understand how there is nothing sound and wholesome either in practical affairs or in arguments, but all real things are just like a Euripos,* a tide moving up and down and never remaining the same.”

“That is truly stated indeed,” I said.

“Then, Phaidon,” he said, “it would be a pitiable disease, when there is an argument true and sound and such as can be understood, if through the pain of meeting so many which seem sometimes to be true and sometimes not, instead of blaming himself and his own clumsiness a man should in the end gladly throw the blame from himself upon the arguments, and for the rest of his life should continually hate and abuse them, and deprive himself of the truth and the knowledge of what is real.”

“Yes, I do declare,” said I, “it would be pitiable.”

“First, then, let us be careful,” he said, “and let us not admit into our souls the belief that there really is no health or soundness in arguments. Much rather let us think that we are not sound ourselves, let us be men and take pains to become sound: you and the others to prepare you for all your coming life, I to prepare myself for death. For in fact as regards this very matter I am just now no philosopher, I am a philovictor—I want to win, as much as the most uneducated men do. Such men, you know, when there is difference of opinion, care nothing how the truth stands in a question, but do their very best to make their audience believe whatever they have laid down. Just now I am the same as they are, with only one difference: I shall do my very best to convince of the truth—not my audience, except by the way, but to convince myself that what seems true to me is perfectly true. For, my dear comrade, see how selfishly I reckon it up! If what I say is really true, then it is well to be convinced; but if for the dead nothing remains, then at least for just this time before death, I shall not be disagreeable to you here by lamentations. And this ignorance* of mine will not last, which would be an evil thing, but very soon it will perish. Thus prepared, then,” he said, “my dear Simmias and Cebes, I proceed to the question; but you, if you please, do not be anxious about Socrates, not a bit, but be very anxious about truth; if you think I say anything true, agree with me, and if not, oppose me with all your might, that my eagerness may not deceive both myself and you—-I don’t want to be like a bee and leave my sting in you when I go.

“Forward, now,” he went on. “First remind me what you said, if I don’t seem to remember. Simmias, as I think, disbelieves, and fears that the soul, although something more divine and beautiful than the body, may perish before the body like a sort of harmony. Cebes I thought admitted with me that soul was at least longer-lasting than body, but everyone must doubt whether the soul has already worn out many bodies, and now, leaving the last body, it may perish itself; and death may be just this, the destruction of soul, since body is perishing continually and never stops. Are not these the matters which we must consider, Simmias and Cebes?” Both agreed to this. “Well, do you reject all the earlier arguments, or only some?”

“Some only,” they replied.

“And what of that one,” said he, “when we said learning was recollection, and that therefore our soul must exist somewhere before being imprisoned in the body?”

“That one,” said Cebes, “seemed to me wonderfully convincing, and I abide by it now as by no other argument.”

“Yes, and so do I, too,” said Simmias, “and I should be surprised if I could ever think otherwise about that.”

Socrates answered, “Well, my good friend from Thebes,” he said, “you must think otherwise, if the notion holds that harmony is a thing composite, and soul is a harmony arising from all the elements strung and tuned in the body. For you will not allow yourself to say that a composite harmony existed before the elements from which it had to be composed—eh, Simmias?”

“Oh dear me no, Socrates!”

“You perceive, then,” said he, “that this is what you really affirm, when you say that the soul existed before it came into human shape and body, and that it existed composed of things which did not exist. But see, harmony is not such a thing as you likened it to; no, first the harp and the strings and their tones not yet harmonised come into being, and last of all the harmony is composed, and it is first to perish. Then how will your argument be in tune* with that?”

“It will not,” said Simmias.

“And yet,” said he, “it ought to be in tune with the argument about harmony, if with any at all.”

“So it ought,” said Simmias.

“Then your argument,” he said, “is not in tune. But look here: Which of the two do you choose—is learning recollection, or is the soul a harmony?”

“I much rather choose the first,” said he. “Perhaps the other came without proof from a likely comparison that looked good, which makes most people pleased with it; but I am conscious that arguments proved from likelihood are humbugs, and if we are not careful they deceive us, in geometry and everything else. But the argument about recollection and learning has been shown to stand on a good foundation. What was said, I think, was that our soul existed before coming into the body just as that essence exists which has the name of ‘real being.’ This I have accepted, I am convinced, with right and sufficient reason. I must therefore refuse now, as it seems, to accept for myself or anyone else that account of the soul which calls it a harmony.”

“Very well, Simmias,” said he. “What do you think of this: Is it proper for a harmony, or any other composite thing, to exist in any other state than the state of its component parts?”

“No,” he said.

“Again, it cannot do, or be done to, anything else than they do or are done to?” He said no. “Then it is proper that a harmony does not lead the things which compose it, but follows?” He agreed. “Then a harmony cannot be moved and cannot sound or do anything else in opposition to its own parts?”

“Impossible,” he said.

“Well, is not each harmony naturally so much a harmony according as it is harmonised?”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Listen,” said he, “if it is more harmonised and more intensely, supposing that to be possible, would it be more a harmony and more intense, and if less harmonised and less intensely, would it be less a harmony and less intense?”

“Certainly.”

“Is this true, then, of soul—that even in the smallest degree one soul can be more intensely and more completely, or less intensely and less completely, that very thing, a soul, than another is?”

“Not in the least,” he said.

“Very well, then,” he said, “in God’s name: Is it said that one soul has sense and virtue and is good, but another has folly and wickedness and is bad, and is this true?”

“Quite true,” he said.

“Then what will they say, those who lay down that soul is harmony, what will they say these things are which are in the souls, virtue and vice? Will they say these are yet another harmony, and a discord? And say that one soul is harmonised, the good one, and, being itself harmony, has in it another harmony, but the other is discordant itself and has in it no other harmony?”

“I can’t say,” said Simmias, “but it is clear that one who laid that down would say something of that kind.”

“But we agreed before,” said Socrates, “that one soul is not more or less soul than another; that means it is agreed that one is not more or less harmony than another, nor to a greater or less degree than another. Is that so?”

“Certainly.”

“But that which is neither more nor less harmony has been neither more nor less harmonised. Is that true?”

“That is true.”

“When it is neither more nor less harmonised, can it partake of harmony to a greater or less degree, or only the same?”

“The same.”

“Then soul, since one is no more than another what we actually mean by soul, consequently is neither more nor less harmonised?”

“Just so.”

“In this condition, it would have no greater share of discord or harmony?”

“No, indeed.”

“Then in this condition one would not partake of vice or virtue more than another, if vice is discord and virtue harmony?”

“No more.”

“Rather I think, Simmias, according to right reasoning, no soul will partake of vice, if it is really harmony; for harmony which is wholly this very thing harmony could never partake of discord.”

“Never, surely.”

“Nor could soul partake of vice, if it is wholly soul.”

“How could it, after what we admitted?”

“By this our reasoning then, all souls of all living creatures will be equally good, if they are equally and actually souls.”

“I think so, Socrates,” he said.

“Do you think that is correct,” said he, “and do you think our argument would have come to this state, if the foundation were right, that is, that soul is harmony?”

“Not in the least,” he said.

“Well now,” said Socrates, “of all that there is in man, would you say anything rules but soul, especially a wise one?”

“No, not I.”

“A soul which gives way to the feelings of the body, or one that even opposes them? I mean something like this—suppose fever be in the body and thirst, would you say soul drags it in the opposite way, so as not to drink, and if hunger be in it, not to eat? And we see the soul opposing the body in thousands of other things, don’t we?”

“We do.”

“Well then; did we not moreover agree earlier, that if it be indeed a harmony it would never sound a tune opposing the elements from which it arises, according as they are strung tight or loose, and twangled, and however else they are treated? It must follow these, it could never lead them?”

“Yes,” he said, “we did agree. Of course.”

“Very well: Don’t we see it now doing the very opposite, leading all the things from which it is said to be composed, and opposing almost always all through life, a tyrant in every way, punishing them sometimes harshly and with bodily pain, that is, through gymnastic and physic, sometimes gently, giving now threats and now advice, talking to desires and angers and fears just as if it was different from them and they from it? Remember, too, Homer’s lines in the Odyssey, where he says somewhere of Odysseus*

Striking his chest, he thus reproached his heart,

My heart, bear up! You have borne worse than this!

Do you think when he composed this he regarded the soul as a kind of harmony, something to be led by the body’s feelings?—surely not, but as something able to lead these and play the tyrant, something much more divine than a harmony!”

“Yes indeed, Socrates, I agree,” he said.

“Then, my good sir,” he said, “it is quite wrong altogether to say that the soul is a harmony; for it appears we should contradict Homer, the divine poet, and ourselves too.”

“Just so,” he said.

“So much for that, then,” said Socrates. “Our Theban Harmonia* has been appeased, it seems, pretty well; but what of Cadmos? My dear Cebes,” he said, “how shall we appease Cadmos? What argument will do?”

“You’ll find one, I think,” said Cebes; “this one at least, against the harmony, was amazingly unexpected. When Simmias was telling what he was puzzled about, I wondered very much if anyone could deal with his argument at all, and to my surprise it couldn’t stand your argument’s first attack. I shouldn’t wonder if the same happened to the argument of Cadmos.”

“My good man,” said Socrates, “don’t tempt Providence, or some evil eye may overturn the argument which is coming. But God will care for that; let us charge into the fray like Homeric heroes, and try if there’s anything in your contention. This is the sum of what you seek: You demand that it be proved that our soul is imperishable and immortal, if a student of philosophy, being about to die, and being confident, and believing that after death he will be better off in that world than if he had lived to the end a different life, is not to be found foolish and senseless in this confidence. But to show that the soul is something strong and godlike and existed before we were born men, all this you say may be no more than to indicate, not immortality, but that the soul is something long-lasting, and that it existed somewhere before for an immeasurable time, and knew and did many things; but it is not really any more immortal, but in fact its entry into the body of a man was the beginning of destruction for it, like a disease; it lives this life in distress, and last of all, at what is called death, it perishes. So there is no difference at all, you say, whether it comes once into the body or often, at least as regards our feeling of fear; for fear is proper, if one is not senseless, for him that knows not and cannot prove that the soul is immortal. That is very much what you say, Cebes; and I repeat it often on purpose that nothing may escape us; pray add or subtract if you wish.”

And Cebes replied, “No, there is nothing I wish to add or subtract now; that is what I do say.”

Socrates was silent for some time, thinking to himself; then he said, “That is no trifle you seek, Cebes; we are bound to discuss generally the cause of generation and destruction. If you allow me, I will run through my own experience in these matters. Then if anything of what I shall say seems useful, you shall use it to prove whatever you may say.”

“By all means,” Cebes said.

“Then listen, and I will tell you. When I was a young man, Cebes, I was most amazingly interested in the lore which they call natural philosophy. For I thought it magnificent to know the causes of everything, why it comes into being and why it is destroyed and why it exists; I kept turning myself upside down to consider things like the following: Is it when hot and cold get some fermentation in them, as some said,* that living things are bred? Is it the blood by which we think,† or air‡ or fire;¶ or whether it is none of these, but the brain is what provides the senses of hearing and sight and smell, and from these arise memory and opinion, and from memory and opinion in tranquillity comes knowledge; again I considered the destructions of these things, and what happens about heaven and earth. At last I believed myself as unfitted for this study as anything could be. I will tell you a sufficient proof: I found myself then so completely blinded by this study that I unlearned even what I used to think that I knew—what I understood clearly before, as I thought and others thought—about many other things and particularly as to the reason why man grows. I used to think that this was clear to all—by eating and drinking; for when from his foods flesh was added to flesh, and bones to bones, and in the same way the other parts each had added to them what was their own, then what was the little mass before became great later, and so the small man became big. That is what I believed then; isn’t it a natural opinion?”

“I think so,” said Cebes.

“Look next at this, then. I believed that when a big man stood by a small man, it was correct enough to suppose that he was bigger by the head, and so horse and horse; more clearly still, I thought ten was greater than eight because two was added to it, and the two-cubit bigger than the one-cubit because it over-reached it by half.”

“But now,” said Cebes, “what do you think about them?”

“I’m very far, I swear, from thinking I know the cause of any of these things, for I can’t agree with myself, even when one is added to one, either that the one to which it was added has become two, or the one which was added has become two, or that the one added and the one it was added to become two, by the adding of the one to the other; for I am surprised that when they were apart from each other each was one and they were not then two, but when they approached each other this was the cause of their becoming two, the meeting, their being near together. Or again, if a one is cut in half I cannot be convinced any longer that this, the cutting, was the cause of its becoming two; then it was because they were brought close together and one was added to the other, now because one is taken away and separated from the other. Nor can I even convince myself any longer that I know how the one is generated, or in a word how anything else is generated or perishes or exists; I can’t do it by this kind of method, but I am muddling along with another of my own* and I don’t allow this one at all.

“Well, I heard someone reading once out of a book, by Anaxagoras he said, how mind is really the arranger and cause of all things; I was delighted with this cause, and it seemed to me in a certain way to be correct that mind is the cause of all, and I thought that if this is true, mind arranging all things places everything as it is best. If, therefore, one wishes to find out the cause of anything, how it is generated or perishes or exists, what one ought to find out is how it is best for it to exist or to do or feel everything; from this reasoning, then, all that is proper for man to seek about this and everything is only the perfect and the best; but the same man necessarily knows the worse, too, for the same knowledge includes both. Reasoning thus, then, I was glad to think I had found a teacher of the cause of things after my own mind in Anaxagoras: I thought he would show me first whether the earth is flat or round, and when he had shown this, he would proceed to explain the cause and the necessity, by showing that it was better that it should be such; and if he said it was in the middle of the universe, he would proceed to explain how it was better for it to be in the middle; and if he would explain all these things to me, I was prepared not to want any other kind of cause. And about the sun too I was equally prepared to learn in the same way, and the moon and stars besides, their speed as compared with one another, their turnings, and whatever else happens to them, how these things are better in each case for them to do or to be done to. For I did not believe that, when he said all this was ordered by mind, he would bring in any other cause for them than that it was best they should be as they are. So I thought that, when he had given the cause for each and for all together, that which is best for each, he would proceed to explain the common good of all; and I would not have sold my hopes for anything, but I got his books eagerly as quick as I could, and read them, that I might learn as soon as possible the best and the worse.

“Oh, what a wonderful hope! How high I soared, how low I fell! When as I went on reading I saw the man using mind not at all; and stating no valid causes of the arrangement of all things, but giving airs and ethers* and waters as causes, and many other strange things. I felt very much as I should feel if someone said, ‘Socrates does by mind all he does’; and then, trying to tell the causes of each thing I do, if he should say first that the reason why I sit here now is, that my body consists of bones and sinews, and the bones are hard and have joints between them, and the sinews can be tightened and slackened, surrounding the bones along with flesh and the skin which holds them together; so when the bones are uplifted in their sockets, the sinews slackening and tightening make me able to bend my limbs now, and for this cause I have bent together and sit here; and if next he should give you other such causes of my conversing with you, alleging as causes voices and airs and hearings and a thousand others like that, and neglecting to give the real causes. These are that since the Athenians thought it was better to condemn me, for this very reason I have thought it better to sit here, and more just to remain and submit to any sentence they may give. For, by the Dog! these bones and sinews, I think, would have been somewhere near Megara or Boeotia long ago, carried there by an opinion of what is best, if I had not believed it better and more just to submit to any sentence which my city gives than to take to my heels and run. But to call such things causes is strange indeed. If one should say that unless I had such things, bones and sinews and all the rest I have, I should not have been able to do what I thought best, that would be true; but to say that these, and not my choice of the best, are the causes of my doing what I do (and when I act by mind, too!), would be a very far-fetched and slovenly way of speaking. For it shows inability to distinguish that the real cause is one thing, and that without which the cause could not be a cause is another thing. This is what most people seem to me to be fumbling after in the dark, when they use a borrowed name for it and call it cause! And so one man makes the earth remain under the sky, if you please, by putting a rotation about the earth; another thinks it is like the bottom of a flat kneading-trough and puts the air underneath to support it; but they never look for the power which has placed things so that they are in the best possible state, nor do they think it has a divine strength, but they believe they will some time find an Atlas* more mighty and more immortal and more able than ours to hold all together, and really they think nothing of the good which must necessarily bind and hold all things together. How glad I should be to be anyone’s pupil in learning what such a cause really is! But since I have missed this, since I could not find it myself or learn it from another, would you like me to show you, Cebes,” he said, “how I managed my second voyage in search for the cause?”

“Would I not!” said he: “more than anything else in the world!”

“Well then,” he said, “it occurred to me after all this—and it was then I gave up contemplating the realities—that I must be careful not to be affected like people who observe and watch an eclipse of the sun. What happens to them is that some lose their sight, unless they look at his reflection in water or something of that sort. This passed through my mind, and I feared that I might wholly blind my soul by gazing at practical things* with my eyes and trying to grasp them by each of the senses. So I thought I must take refuge in reasoning, to examine the truth of the realities. There is, however, something not like in my image; for I do not admit at all that one who examines the realities by reasoning makes use of images, more than one who examines them in deeds and facts. Well anyway, this is how I set out; and laying down in each case the reasoning which I think best fortified, I consider as true whatever seems to harmonise with that, both about causes and about everything else, and as untrue whatever does not. But I wish to make it clearer, for I think you do not understand yet.”

“Indeed I do not,” said Cebes, “not well.”

“Well, this is what I mean,” he said, “nothing new, but the same as I have been saying all this time in our conversation, and on other occasions. I am going to try to show you the nature of the cause, which I have been working out. I shall go back to the old song and begin from there, supposing that there exists a beautiful something all by itself, and a good something and great and all the rest of it; and if you grant this and admit it, I hope from these to discover and show you the cause, that the soul is something immortal.”

“I grant it to you,” said Cebes; “pray be quick and go on to the end.”

“Then consider,” he said, “what follows, and see if you agree with me. What appears to me is, that if anything else is beautiful besides beauty itself, what makes it beautiful is simply that it partakes of that beauty; and so I say with everything. Do you agree with such a cause?”

“I agree,” said he.

“Very well,” he said, “I can no longer recognise or understand all those clever causes we heard of; and if anyone tells me that anything is beautiful because it has a fine flowery colour or shape or anything like that, I thank him and let all that go; for I get confused in all those, but this one thing I hold to myself simply and completely, and foolishly perhaps, that what makes it beautiful is only that beauty, whether its presence or a share in it or however it may be with the thing, for I am not positive about the manner, but only that beautiful things are beautiful by that beauty. For this I think to be the safest answer to give to myself or anyone else, and clinging to this I think I shall never fall, but it is a safe answer for me and everyone else, that by that beauty all beautiful things are beautiful. Don’t you think so?”

“I do.”

“And by greatness the great things are great, and the greater greater, and by smallness small things are small?”

“Yes.”

“So you would not accept it if you were told that one person was greater than another by a head, or less by the same, but you would protest that you say every greater is greater than another because of greatness alone, and the smaller is smaller by reason of smallness alone; you would fear, I think, that a contradictory reasoning might meet you if you said someone is greater or less by a head, first that the same thing is making the greater greater and the lesser lesser, and next that a small thing like a head is making the greater greater, which is a monstrosity—that a small thing should make anyone great. Would you not fear that?”

And Cebes said, with a laugh, “I should!”

“So,” said he, “you would not dare to say that ten is more than eight by two, but you would say it is more by number and because of number?—and the two-cubit measure greater than the cubit not by half, but by length? For you would fear the same each time.”

“Certainly,” he said.

“Well, if one has been added, you would be careful not to say the addition caused the two, or if one is divided, the division caused the two. And you would shout that you do not know how each thing comes to be, except by partaking of its own proper essence, whatever each partakes of; in these examples, you see for instance no other cause for becoming two but partaking of two-hood, and whatever is to be two must partake of this, and of onehood whatever is to be one, while these splittings and addings and such niceties you would just bow to and let them go, leaving cleverer men than you to answer. For you would be frightened of your own shadow, as people say, your inexperience, and you would cling to that safe supposition,* and so you would answer. If anyone should attack the supposition itself, you would let him be and would not answer, until you examined the consequences to see if they were in agreement or discord together; and when you must give account of that supposition itself, you would do it in the same way by supposing another supposition, whichever seemed best of the higher suppositions, until you came to something satisfactory; at the same time you would not make a muddle like the dialecticians, by confusing arguments about the beginning with arguments about the consequences of the beginning, if you wished to find out something of reality. For those people, perhaps, think and care nothing at all about this; they are clever enough to make a mess of the whole business and yet to be pleased with themselves; but if you are a true philosopher, I believe you would do as I say.”

“Very true,” said Simmias and Cebes together.

ECHECRATES: Reasonable too, I do declare, Phaidon. Amazingly clear he makes it, as anyone with a grain of sense can see.

PHAIDON: Yes indeed, Echecrates, and all of them thought so who were present.

ECHECRATES: So do we who were not present, but are hearing of it now. But what was said after that?

PHAIDON: As I think, when this was granted, and all agreed that each of these ideal qualities has a kind of existence, and the particular things that partake of them get their name from them,* next he asked: “Well then,” said he, “if that is what you agree, when you say Simmias is bigger than Socrates, and smaller than Phaidon, you say that both are in Simmias, both bigness and smallness?”

“I do.”

“But all the same you agree that for Simmias to overtop Socrates is not true as the words describe it. For Simmias, I suppose, does not naturally overtop Socrates by being Simmias, but by the bigness which he happens to have; nor does he overtop Socrates because Socrates is Socrates, but because Socrates has smallness as against the other’s bigness.”

“True.”

“Nor again is he overtopped by Phaidon because Phaidon is Phaidon, but because Phaidon has bigness as against the smallness of Simmias?”

“That is right.”

“Thus, then, Simmias has the title of being both small and great, being between both, in the first case submitting his smallness for the other’s bigness to surpass, in the second offering his bigness which surpasses the other’s smallness. At the same time,” he said, smiling, “I seem to speak like a lawyer’s deed, but that is very much how things are.” He said yes. “I say this,” he added,

“because I want you to agree with me. For it appears to me that bigness itself never consents to be big and small at the same time, and not only that, even the bigness in us never accepts smallness and will not be surpassed; but one of two things, it must either depart and retreat whenever its opposite, smallness, comes near, or else must perish at its approach; it does not consent to submit and receive the smallness, and so to become other than what it was. Just so I, receiving and submitting to smallness, am still the man I am, I’m still this same small person; but the bigness in me, being big, has not dared to become small! In the same way, the smallness in us does not want to become or be big, nor does any other of the opposites, being still what it was, want to become and be the opposite; but either it goes away or it is destroyed in this change.”

“Certainly,” said Cebes, “that is what I think.”

One of those present, hearing this, said—I do not clearly remember who it was—“Good heavens, didn’t we admit in our former discussion the very opposite of what we are saying now—that the greater came from the less and the less from the greater, and in fact this is how opposites are generated, from opposites? Now it seems to be said that this could never be.”

Socrates bent down his head to listen, and said, “Spoken like a man! I thank you for reminding me, but you don’t understand the difference between what we are saying now and what we said then. For then* we said that the practical opposite thing is generated from its practical opposite, but now we are saying that the opposite quality itself could never become the quality opposite to itself, either in us or in nature. Then, my friend, we were speaking of things which have opposites, these being named by the name of their (opposite) qualities, but now we are speaking of the opposite qualities themselves, from which being in the things, the things are named: those qualities themselves, we say, could never accept generation from each other.” Then, with a glance at Cebes, he added, “Is it possible that you too, Cebes, were disturbed by what our friend spoke of?”

“No, not by this,” replied Cebes, “but I don’t deny that I get disturbed a good deal.”

“Well, then, are we agreed,” said Socrates, “simply on this, that nothing will ever be opposite to itself?”

“Quite agreed,” he said.

“Here is something else,” he said, “see if you will agree to this. You speak of hot and cold?”

“Yes.”

“Is it the same as fire and snow?”

“Not at all.”

“But the hot is something other than fire, and the cold other than snow?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I suppose you agree that snow receiving fire (to use our former way of putting it) will never be what it was, snow, and also be hot, but when the hot approaches it will either retreat from it or be destroyed.”

“Certainly.”

“Fire, also, when the cold approaches, will either go away from it or be destroyed, but it will never endure to receive the coldness and still be what it was, fire, and cold too.”

“True,” said he.

“Then it is possible,” he said, “with some such things, that not only the essence is thought worthy of the same name forever, but something else also is worthy, which is not that essence but which, when it exists, always has the form of that essence. Perhaps it will be a little clearer as follows. Odd numbers must always be called odd, I suppose, mustn’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Of all things do we use this name only for oddness, for that is what I ask, or is there something else, not oddness, but what must be called always by that name because its nature is never to be deserted by oddness? For example, triplet and so forth. Now consider the triplet: Don’t you think it should be called always both by its own name and also by the name of odd, although oddness is not the same as triplet? Still it is the nature of triplet and quintet and half of all the numbers, that each of them is odd although it is not the same thing as oddness; so also two and four and all the other row of numbers are each of them always even, although none is the same thing as evenness; do you agree?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Now attend, this is what I want to make clear. It seems that not only those real opposites do not receive each other, but also things which not being opposites of each other yet always have those real opposites in them, these also do not look like things which receive that reality which is opposite to the reality in them, but when it approaches they either are destroyed or retire. We shall say, for example, that a triplet will be destroyed before any such thing happens to it, before it remains and becomes even, while it is still three?”

“Certainly,” said Cebes.

“Nor, again,” he said, “is twin the opposite of triplet.”

“Not at all.”

“Then not only the opposite essences do not remain at the approach of each other, but some other things do not await the approach of the opposites.”

“Very true,” he said.

“Then shall we distinguish what sorts of things these are,” he said, “if we can?”

“Certainly.”

“Then, Cebes, would they be those which compel whatever they occupy not only to get their own essence but also the essence of some opposite?”

“How so?”

“As we said just now. You know, I suppose, that whatever the essence of three occupies must necessarily be not only three but odd.”

“Certainly.”

“And the essense opposite to that which does this we say could never come near such a thing.”

“It could not.”

“And what has done this? Was not it oddness?”

“Yes.”

“And opposite to this is the essence of even?”

“Yes.”

“Then the essence of even will never approach three.”

“No.”

“So three has no part in the even.”

“None.”

“Then the triplet is uneven.”

“Yes.”

“Now for my distinction. What things, not being opposite to something, yet do not receive the opposite itself which is in that something? For instance now, the triplet is not the opposite to the even, yet still does not receive it because it always brings the opposite against it; and a pair brings the opposite against the odd, and fire against cold, and so with very many others. Just look then, if you distinguish thus, not only the opposite does not receive the opposite, but that also which brings anything opposite to whatever it approaches never receives the opposite to that which it brings. Recollect once more; there’s no harm to hear the same thing often. Five will not receive the essence of even, or its double ten the essence of odd; yet this same double will not receive the essence of odd, although it is not opposite to anything. Again, one and a half and other such things with a half in them will not receive the essence of whole, nor will one-third and all such fractions, if you follow and agree with me in this.”

“I do agree certainly, and I follow.”

“Once more, then,” he said, “go back to the beginning. And don’t answer the questions I ask, till I show you how. I want something more than the first answer I mentioned, the safe one; I see a new safety from what we have been saying now. If you ask me what must be in any body if that body is to be hot, I will not give you that safe answer, the stupid answer, ‘Heat,’ but a more subtle answer from our present reasoning, ‘Fire’; or if you ask what must be in a body if it is to be diseased, I will not answer ‘Disease,’ but ‘Fever’; or if you ask what must be in a number if it is to be odd, I will not say ‘Oddness,’ but ‘Onehood,’ and so forth. Now then, do you know clearly enough what I want?”

“Oh yes,” he said.

“Answer then,” said he, “what must be in a body if it is to be living?”

“Soul,” said he.

“Is this always true?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Well now, whatever the soul occupies, she always comes to it bringing life?”

“She does, indeed,” he said.

“Is there an opposite to life, or not?”

“There is.”

“What?”

“Death.”

“Then soul will never receive the opposite to that which she brings, as we have agreed already.”

“Most assuredly,” said Cebes.

“Well, what name did we give just now to that which did not receive the essence of the even?”

“Uneven,” he said.

“And what name to that which does not receive what is just, or to that which does not receive music?”

“Unmusical,” he said, “and unjust the other.”

“Very well. What do we call that which does not receive death?”

“Immortal,” he said.

“And the soul does not receive death?”

“No.”

“Then the soul is a thing immortal?”

“It is,” he said.

“Very well,” said he. “Shall we say this has been proved? Or what do you think?”

“Proved, and amply proved, Socrates.”

“Now then, Cebes,” he said, “if the uneven were necessarily imperishable, would not three be imperishable?”

“Of course.”

“And if the not-hot were necessarily imperishable, when someone brought a hot thing to snow, the snow would retire safe and unmelted? For it would not be destroyed, nor would it remain and receive the heat.”

“Quite true,” he said.

“So also if the not-cold were imperishable, when something cold was brought to fire, the fire would not be quenched or destroyed, but it would go away safe.”

“That is necessary,” he said.

“And is it equally necessary to say that of the immortal? If the immortal is also imperishable, it is impossible for the soul to be destroyed when death comes to it; for death it will never receive, by our argument, and it will never be dead, just as we showed that the three would never be even, nor the odd be even, nor indeed would fire, or the heat in the fire, ever be cold. But someone might say, ‘The odd will not become even, when the even comes near, as we have agreed, but what is to hinder its being destroyed and an even being made instead?’ In answer to the man who said that, we could not maintain that it is not destroyed; for the uneven is not imperishable; since if that had been granted us we could easily maintain that when the even approached, the odd, and the three, go clean off; and we could do the same about fire and heat and all the rest, couldn’t we?”

“Certainly.”

“So about the immortal, if we agree that this is imperishable, the soul would be imperishable as well as immortal; but if we do not, we need a new argument.”

“There’s no need of that in this case,” said he, “nothing could escape destruction if the immortal, which is everlasting, could be destroyed.”

“God himself, I think,” said Socrates, “and the very essence of life, and whatever else is immortal, would be admitted by all never to suffer destruction.”

“Yes, admitted by all indeed,” he said, “by men of course and still more, I think, by the gods.”

“Then, since the immortal is also imperishable, the soul if it is immortal would be imperishable too?”

“That must certainly be.”

“So when death approaches a man, the mortal in him dies, as it seems, but the immortal part goes away undestroyed, giving place to death.”

“So it seems.”

“Then beyond all doubt, Cebes,” he said, “soul is immortal and imperishable, and in fact our souls will exist in the house of Hades.”

“I have nothing else to say to the contrary, Socrates,” he answered, “and I cannot disbelieve you in any way.”

“But now if Simmias has something to say, or anyone else, it is well not to be silent. I don’t know what better opportunity we could have; we can’t put it off now; there is only this chance if anyone wishes to say or hear more about such matters as this.”

“No, indeed,” said Simmias, “I can’t find anything myself to disbelieve after what has been said. But in the momentous matter which we are discussing, I do distrust human weakness, and I am compelled to have a little incredulity in my mind about what we say.”

“Not only that, Simmias,” said Socrates; “you are quite right, and you ought still to scrutinise our first suppositions and see if you can trust them; and if you test them sufficiently, you will follow our reasoning, I think, as well as it is possible for man to follow it; and if only this be made clear, you will seek nothing further.”

“True,” he said.

“Well, here is something more, gentlemen,” said Socrates, “that we ought to understand. If the soul is immortal, she needs care, not only for the time which we call life, but for all time, and the danger indeed would seem to be terrible if one is ready to neglect her. For if death were release from everything, a great blessing it would be for evil men to be rid of the body and their own wickedness along with the soul. But since, as things are, she appears to be immortal, there could be no escape from evil for her and no salvation, except that she should become as good and wise as possible. For when the soul comes to Hades she brings with her nothing but her education and training; and this is said to do the greatest help or hurt to the dead man at the very beginning of his course thither. What men say is this. At death the guardian spirit of each, to whom each was allotted for life, undertakes to lead each to a certain place; there those gathered must stand their trial, and then pass on to the house of Hades with the guide whose duty it is to conduct them hence to that place. When they have met there what they must meet with, and remained such time as they should, another guide again brings them back after many long periods of time. The journey is not as Telephos describes in Aeschylus, for he says that a simple way leads to Hades, but this appears to me neither simple nor single. If so, there would be no need of guides, for no one could miss one way to anywhere. But really, it seems to have many breaks and branches; I judge by the pious offerings made to the dead among us.* The wise and decent soul follows and understands the circumstances; but the soul which has desire for the body, as I said once before, flutters about it for a long time and about the visible world, resisting much and suffering much, and the appointed spirit drags her away by force not easily. When she comes where the others are, the unpurified soul, which has done deeds like herself, which has touched unjust murders, or done other such deeds which are akin to these and are the acts of kindred souls, is avoided by all; each one turns from her and will neither be fellow-traveller nor guide, but she wanders by herself in complete helplessness, until certain times come: when they come she is carried by necessity to her proper dwelling place. But the soul which has passed through life purely and decently finds gods for fellow-travellers and leaders, and each soul dwells in her own proper dwelling place. There are many wonderful regions in the earth, and the earth itself is not of such a quality or such a size as it is thought to be by those who are accustomed to describe the earth, so a certain man has convinced me.”

Then Simmias asked, “What is this you say, Socrates? I have heard much about the earth myself, but not this story that convinced you. So I should be very glad to hear it.”

He answered, “Why indeed, Simmias, I am afraid I lack a Glaucos’ handbook* to tell you all that! But truly I think it is too hard for Glaucos’ book, and besides my not perhaps being equal to it, at the same time even if I understood it, my life, Simmias, seems to me insufficient for such a long story. But what I believe to be the shape of the earth and its regions, I can tell you, there’s nothing to hinder that.”

“Well,” said Simmias, “that will do.”

“I believe, then,” said he, “that first, if it is round and in the middle of the heavens, it needs nothing to keep it from falling, neither air nor any other such necessity, but the uniformity of the heavens,† themselves alike all through, is enough to keep it there, and the equilibrium of earth itself; for a thing in equilibrium and placed in the middle of something which is everywhere alike will not incline in any direction, but will remain steady and in like condition. First I believe that,” he said.

“Quite right too,” said Simmias.

“Next, I believe it is very large indeed, and we live in a little bit of it between the Pillars of Heracles‡ and the river Phasis,* like ants or frogs in a marsh, lodging round the sea, and that many other people live in many other such regions. For there are everywhere about the earth many hollows of all sorts in shape and size, into which have collected water and mist and air; but the earth itself is pure and lies in the pure heavens where the stars are, which is called ether by most of those who are accustomed to explain such things; of which all this is a sediment, which is always collecting into the hollows of the earth. We then, who lodge in its hollows, know nothing about it, and think we are living upon the earth; as if one living deep on the bottom of the sea should think he was at the top, and, seeing through the water sun and stars, should think the sea was heaven, but from sluggishness and weakness should never come to the surface and never get out and peep up out of the sea into this place, or observe how much more pure and beautiful it is than his own place, and should never have heard from anyone who saw it. This very thing has happened to us; for we live in a hollow of the earth and think we live on the surface, and call the air heaven, thinking that the stars move through that and that is heaven; but the fact is the same, from weakness and sluggishness we cannot get through to the surface of the air, since if a man could come to the top of it, and get wings and fly up, he could peep over and look, just as fishes here peep up out of the sea and look round at what is here, so he could look at what is there, and if his nature allowed him to endure the sight, he could learn and know that that is the true heaven and the true light and the true earth. For this earth and the stones and all the place here are corrupted and corroded, as things in the sea are by the brine so that nothing worth mention grows in the sea, and there is nothing perfect there, one might say, but caves and sand and infinite mud and slime wherever there is any earth, things worth nothing at all as compared with the beauties we have; but again those above as compared with ours would seem to be much superior. But if I must tell you a story, Simmias, it is worth hearing what things really are like on the earth under the heavens.”

“Indeed, Socrates,” said Simmias, “we should be glad to hear this story.”

“It is said then, my comrade,” he went on, “that first of all the earth itself looks from above, if you could see it, like those twelve-patch leathern balls,* variegated, with strips of colour of which the colours here, such as are used by painters, are a sort of specimens; but there the whole earth is made of such as these, and much brighter and purer than these; one is sea purple wonderfully beautiful, one is like gold, the white is whiter than chalk or snow, and the earth is made of these and other colours, more in number and more beautiful than any we have seen. For indeed the very hollows full of water and mist present a colour of their own as they shine in the variety of other colours, so that the one whole looks like a continuous coloured pattern. Such is the earth, and all that grows in it is in accord, trees and flowers and fruits; and again mountains and rocks in like manner have their smoothness and transparency and colours more beautiful, and the precious stones which are so much valued here are just chips of those, sard and jaspers and emerald and so forth, but there every single one is such and they are still more beautiful. The cause of that is that those stones are pure and not corroded or corrupted as ours are by the rot and brine of stuff which has gathered here, which bring ugliness and disease on stones and earth and everything else, living creatures and plants. But the real earth is adorned with all these and with gold and silver and all such things as these. For there they are clearly to be seen, being many in number and large and all over the earth, so that to see it is a sight for happy spectators. Animals there are on it many and various, and men too, some living inland, some round the air as we do round the sea, some in islands surrounded by the flowing air near the mainland; in a word, what water and sea are to us for our use, the air is to them, and what the air is to us, ether is to them. The seasons have such temperature that the people there are free from disease and live a much longer time than we do, and in sight and hearing and intelligence and so forth they are as different from us as air is different from water and ether from air in purity. Groves of the gods also they have and sanctuaries, and the gods really dwell in them, and there are between them and the gods voices and prophecies and perceptions and other such communions; sun and moon and stars are seen by them as they are, and their happiness in all other respects is according.

“This, then, is the nature of the whole earth and all that is about it; but there are many regions in it and hollows of it all round, some deeper and spreading wider than the one we live in, some deeper but having their gap smaller than ours, some again shallower in depth than ours and wider; but these are all connected together by tunnels in many places narrower or wider, and they have many passages where floods of water run through from one to another as into a mixing-bowl, and huge rivers ever flowing underground both of hot waters and cold, where also are masses of fire and great rivers of fire, and many rivers of liquid mud, some clearer, some muddier, like the rivers of mud which run in Sicily before the lava,* and the lava itself. And each of these regions is filled with this, according as the overflow comes in each case. All these things are moved up and down by a sort of seesaw which there is in the earth, and the nature of this seesaw movement is this. One of the chasms in the earth is largest of all, and, besides, it has a tunnel which goes right through the earth, the same which Homer speaks of when he says,

Far, far away, where is the lowest pit

Beneath the earth,†

and which elsewhere he and many other poets have called Tartaros. For into this chasm all the rivers flow together, and from this again they flow out, and they are each like the earth through which they flow. The cause which makes all the streams run out from there and run in is that this fluid has no bottom or foundation to rest on. So it seesaws and swells up and down, and the air and wind about it do the same; for they follow with it, both when the rivers move towards that side of the earth, and when they move towards this side, and just as the breath always goes in and out when men breathe, so there, too, the wind is lifted up and down with the liquid and makes terrible tempests both coming in and going out. Therefore whenever the water goes back into the place which is called ‘down,’ it rushes in along those rivers and fills them up like water pumped in; but when, again, it leaves that part and moves this way, it fills up our region once more, and when the rivers are filled they flow through the channels and through the earth, and, coming each to those places where their several paths lead, they make seas and lakes and rivers and fountains. After that they sink into the earth again, some passing round larger regions and more numerous, some round fewer and smaller, and plunge again into Tartaros, some far below their source, some but little, but all below the place where they came out. Some flow in opposite where they tumbled out, some in the same place; and there are others which go right round the earth in a circle, curling about it like serpents once or many times, and then fall and discharge as low down as possible. It is possible from each side to go down as far as the centre, but no farther, for beyond that the opposite part is uphill from both sides.

“All these rivers are large, and they are of many kinds; but among these many are four in especial. The greatest of these, and the outermost, running right round, is that called Ocean; opposite this and flowing in the contrary direction is Acheron, the River of Pain, which flows through a number of desert places, and also flowing under the earth comes to the Acherusian Lake, to which come the souls of most of the dead, and when they have remained there certain ordained times, some longer and some shorter, they are sent out again to birth in living creatures. The third of these rivers issues forth in the middle, and near its issue it falls into a large region blazing with much fire, and makes a lake larger than our* sea, boiling with water and mud; from there it moves round turbid and muddy, and rolls winding about the earth as far as another place at the extreme end of the Acherusian Lake, without mingling with the water; when it has rolled many times round it falls into a lower depth than Tartaros. This is what they call Pyriphlegethon, the River of Burning Fire, and its lava streams blow up bits of it wherever they are found on the earth. Opposite this again the fourth river discharges at first into a region terrible and wild, it is said, all having the colour of dark blue; this they call the Stygian, the River of Hate, and the lake which the river makes they call Styx. But the river, falling into this and receiving terrible powers in the water, plunges beneath the earth and, rolling round, moves contrary to Pyriphlegethon and meets it in the Acherusian Lake on the opposite side. The water of this, too, mixes with none, but this also goes round and falls into Tartaros opposite to Pyriphlegethon. The name of this, as the poets say, is Cocytos, the River of Wailing.

“Such is the nature of the world. So when the dead come to the place whither the spirit conveys each, first the judges divide them into those who have lived well and piously, and those who have not. And those who are thought to have been between the two travel to the Acheron, then embark in the vessels which are said to be there for them, and in these come to the lake, and there they dwell, being purified from their wrongdoings; and after punishment for any wrong they have done they are released, and receive rewards for their good deeds each according to his merit. But those who are thought to be incurable because of the greatness of their sins, those who have done many great acts of sacrilege or many unrighteous and lawless murders or other such crimes, these the proper fate throws into Tartaros whence they never come out. Those who are thought to have committed crimes curable although great, if they have done some violence to father or mother, say, from anger, and have lived the rest of their lives in repentance, or if they have become manslaughterers in some other such way, these must of necessity be cast into Tartaros; but when they have been cast in and been there a year the wave throws them out, the manslaughterers by way of Cocytos, the patricides and matricides by way of Pyriphlegethon; and when they have been carried down to the Acherusian Lake, there they shriek and call to those whom they slew or treated violently, and, calling on them, they beg and beseech them to accept them and let them go out into the lake; if they win consent, they come out and cease from their sufferings; if not, they are carried back into Tartaros and from there into the rivers again, and they never cease from this treatment until they win the consent of those whom they wronged: for this was the sentence passed on them by the judges. But those who are thought to have lived in especial holiness, they are those who are set free and released from these places here in the earth as from a prison house, and come up into the pure dwelling place and are settled upon earth. Of these same, again, those who have purified themselves enough by philosophy live without bodies altogether forever after, and come into dwellings even more beautiful than the others, which it is not easy to describe nor is there time enough at this present. But for the reasons which we have given, Simmias, we must do everything so as to have our share of wisdom and virtue in life; for the prize is noble and the hope great.

“No sensible man would think it proper to rely on things of this kind being just as I have described; but that, since the soul is clearly immortal, this or something like this at any rate is what happens in regard to our souls and their habitations—that this is so seems to me proper and worthy of the risk of believing; for the risk is noble. Such things he must sing like a healing charm to himself, and that is why I have lingered so long over the story. But these are the reasons for a man to be confident about his own soul, when in his life he has bidden farewell to all other pleasures, the pleasures and adornments of the body, thinking them alien and such as do more harm than good, and has been earnest only for the pleasure of learning; and having adorned the soul with no alien ornaments, but with her own—with temperance and justice and courage and freedom and truth, thus he awaits the journey to the house of Hades, ready to travel when the doom ordained shall call. You indeed,” he said, “Simmias and Cebes and all, hereafter at some certain time shall each travel on that journey: but me—‘Fate calls me now,’ as a man might say in a tragedy, and it is almost time for me to travel towards the bath; for I am sure you think it better to have a bath before drinking the potion, and to save the women the trouble of washing a corpse.”

When he had spoken, Criton said, “Ah well, Socrates, what injunctions have you for these friends or for me, about your children or anything else? What could we do for you to gratify you most?”

“What I always say, Criton,” he said, “nothing very new: Take good care of yourselves, and you will gratify me and mine and yourselves whatever you do, even if you promise nothing now. But if you neglect yourselves, and won’t take care to live your lives following the footsteps, so to speak, of both this last conversation and those we have had in former times, you will do no good even if you promise ever so much at present and ever so faithfully.”

“Then we will do our best about that,” he said; “but how are we to bury you?”

“How you like,” said he, “if you catch me and I don’t escape you.” At the same time, laughing gently and looking towards us, he said, “Criton doesn’t believe me, my friends, that this is I, Socrates, now talking with you and laying down each of my injunctions, but he thinks me to be what he will see shortly, a corpse, and asks, if you please, how to bury me! I have been saying all this long time, that when I have drunk the potion, I shall not be here then with you; I shall have gone clear away to some bliss of the blest, as they call it. But he thinks I am talking nonsense, just to console myself, yes and you too. Then go bail for me to Criton,” he said, “the opposite of the bail he gave to those judges. He gave bail that I would remain; you please, give bail that I will not remain after I die, but I shall get off clear and clean, that Criton may take it more easily, and may not be vexed by seeing my body either being burnt or buried; don’t let him worry for me and think I’m in a dreadful state, or say at the funeral that he is laying out or carrying out or digging in Socrates. Be sure, Criton, best of friends,” he said, “to use ugly words not only is out of tune with the event, but it even infects the soul with something evil. Now, be confident and say you are burying my body, and then bury it as you please and as you think would be most according to custom.”

With these words, he got up and retired into another room for the bath, and Criton went after him, telling us to wait. So we waited discussing and talking together about what had been said, or sometimes speaking of the great misfortune which had befallen us, for we felt really as if we had lost a father and had to spend the rest of our lives as orphans. When he had bathed, and his children had been brought to see him—for he had two little sons, and one big—and when the women of his family had come, he talked to them before Criton and gave what instructions he wished. Then he asked the women and children to go, and came back to us. It was now near sunset, for he had spent a long time within. He came and sat down after his bath, and he had not talked long after this when the servant of the Eleven came in, and standing by him said, “O Socrates! I have not to complain of you as I do of others, that they are angry with me, and curse me, because I bring them word to drink their potion, which my officers make me do! But I have always found you in this time most generous and gentle, and the best man who ever came here. And now too, I know well you are not angry with me, for you know who are responsible, and you keep it for them. Now you know what I came to tell you, so farewell, and try to bear as well as you can what can’t be helped.”

Then he turned and was going out, with tears running down his cheeks. And Socrates looked up at him and said, “Farewell to you also, I will do so.” Then, at the same time turning to us, “What a nice fellow!” he said. “All the time he has been coming and talking to me, a real good sort, and now how generously he sheds tears for me! Come along, Criton, let’s obey him. Someone bring the potion, if the stuff has been ground; if not, let the fellow grind it.”

Then Criton said, “But, Socrates, I think the sun is still over the hills, it has not set yet. Yes, and I know of others who, having been told to drink the poison, have done it very late; they had dinner first and a good one, and some enjoyed the company of any they wanted. Please don’t be in a hurry, there is time to spare.”

But Socrates said, “Those you speak of have very good reason for doing that, for they think they will gain by doing it; and I have good reasons why I won’t do it. For I think I shall gain nothing by drinking a little later, only that I shall think myself a fool for clinging to life and sparing when the cask’s empty.* Come along,” he said, “do what I tell you, if you please.”

And Criton, hearing this, nodded to the boy who stood near. The boy went out, and after spending a long time, came in with the man who was to give the poison† carrying it ground ready in a cup. Socrates caught sight of the man and said, “Here, my good man, you know about these things; what must I do?”

“Just drink it,” he said, “and walk about till your legs get heavy, then lie down. In that way the drug will act of itself.”

At the same time, he held out the cup to Socrates, and he took it quite cheerfully, Echecrates, not a tremble, not a change in colour or looks; but looking full at the man under his brows, as he used to do, he asked him, “What do you say about this drink? What of a libation to someone?‡ Is that allowed, or not?”

He said, “We only grind so much as we think enough for a moderate potion.”

“I understand,” he said, “but at least, I suppose, it is allowed to offer a prayer to the gods and that must be done, for good luck in the migration from here to there. Then that is my prayer, and so may it be!”

With these words he put the cup to his lips and, quite easy and contented, drank it up. So far most of us had been able to hold back our tears pretty well; but when we saw him begin drinking and end drinking, we could no longer. I burst into a flood of tears for all I could do, so I wrapped up my face and cried myself out; not for him indeed, but for my own misfortune in losing such a man and such a comrade. Criton had got up and gone out even before I did, for he could not hold the tears in. Apollodoros had never ceased weeping all this time, and now he burst out into loud sobs, and by his weeping and lamentations completely broke down every man there except Socrates himself. He only said, “What a scene! You amaze me. That’s just why I sent the women away, to keep them from making a scene like this. I’ve heard that one ought to make an end in decent silence. Quiet yourselves and endure.”

When we heard him we felt ashamed and restrained our tears. He walked about, and when he said that his legs were feeling heavy, he lay down on his back, as the man told him to do; at the same time the one who gave him the potion felt him, and after a while examined his feet and legs; then pinching a foot hard, he asked if he felt anything; he said no. After this, again, he pressed the shins; and, moving up like this, he showed us that he was growing cold and stiff. Again he felt him, and told us that when it came to his heart, he would be gone. Already the cold had come nearly as far as the abdomen, when Socrates threw off the covering from his face—for he had covered it over—and said, the last words he uttered, “Criton,” he said, “we owe a cock to Asclepios;* pay it without fail.”

“That indeed shall be done,” said Criton. “Have you anything more to say?”

When Criton had asked this, Socrates gave no further answer, but after a little time, he stirred, and the man uncovered him, and his eyes were still. Criton, seeing this, closed the mouth and eyelids.

This was the end of our comrade, Echecrates, a man, as we would say, of all then living we had ever met, the noblest and the wisest and most just.