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Updated: June 4, 2025
"But now I wish to render an account to you, my judges, of the reason why a man who has really devoted his life to philosophy, when he is about to die appears to me, on good grounds, to have confidence, and to entertain a firm hope that the greatest good will befall him in the other world, when he has departed this life. How then this comes to pass, Simmias and Cebes, I will endeavor to explain.
Or, to represent the same thing under a third supposition; if Socrates had professed to perform public miracles at Athens; if the friends of Socrates, Phaedo, Cebes, Crito, and Simmias, together with Plato, and many of his followers, relying upon the attestations which these miracles afforded to his pretensions, had, at the hazard of their lives, and the certain expense of their ease and tranquillity, gone about Greece, after his death, to publish and propagate his doctrines: and if these things had come to our knowledge, in the same way as that in which the life of Socrates is now transmitted to us through the hands of his companions and disciples, that is, by writings received without doubt as theirs, from the age in which they were published to the present, I should have believed this likewise.
Shall we not allow that the number three would first perish, and suffer any thing whatever, rather than endure, while it is still three, to become even?" "Most certainly," said Cebes. "And yet," said he, "the number two is not contrary to three." "Surely not."
"Would they not then, Cebes," he said, "be such things as, whatever they occupy, compel that thing not only to retain its own idea, but also that of something which is always a contrary?" "How do you mean?" "As we just now said. For you know, surely, that whatever things the idea of three occupies must of necessity not only be three, but also odd?" "Certainly."
But whether, when we are dead, it will still exist does not appear to me to have been demonstrated, Socrates," he continued; "but that popular doubt, which Cebes just now mentioned, still stands in our way, whether, when a man dies, the soul is not dispersed, and this is the end of its existence. 59.
This, again, seems a contradiction to Simmias; but Socrates explains it by showing that our souls are placed in the body by God, and may not leave it without his permission. Whereupon Cebes objects that in that case foolish men only would wish to die, and quit the service of the best of masters, to which Simmias agrees.
"It must, of necessity, be so." "When, therefore, death approaches a man, the mortal part of him, as it appears, dies, but the immortal part departs safe and uncorrupted, having withdrawn itself from death?" "It appears so." "The soul, therefore," he said, "Cebes, is most certainly immortal and imperishable, and our souls will really exist in Hades."
For if the living spring from any other things, and they too die, must not all things at last be swallowed up in death? There is no escape, Socrates, said Cebes; and to me your argument seems to be absolutely true.
The wealthy Crito constantly attended him; Plato and Xenophon were enthusiastic pupils; even Alcibiades was charmed by his conversation; Apollodorus and Antisthenes rarely quitted his side; Cebes and Simonides came from Thebes to hear him; Isocrates and Aristippus followed in his train; Euclid of Megara sought his society, at the risk of his life; the tyrant Critias, and even the Sophist Protagoras, acknowledged his marvellous power.
"Tell him the truth, then, Cebes," he replied, "that I did not make them from a wish to compete with him, or his poems, for I knew that this would be no easy matter; but that I might discover the meaning of certain dreams, and discharge my conscience, if this should happen to be the music which they have often ordered me to apply myself to.
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