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Socrates is murdered with the creed of immortality on his very lips; hardly had he spoken the wonderful words recorded in the Phaedo when the fatal poison sent its deathly chill through his limbs; the Greeks are gone, yet the Hermes of Olympia remains, mutilated and maimed, indeed, but faultless still, and still supreme. The very name of Homer is grown wellnigh as mythic as his blindness.
That is quite true, I said. Yes, Phaedo, he replied, and how melancholy, if there be such a thing as truth or certainty or possibility of knowledge that a man should have lighted upon some argument or other which at first seemed true and then turned out to be false, and instead of blaming himself and his own want of wit, because he is annoyed, should at last be too glad to transfer the blame from himself to arguments in general: and for ever afterwards should hate and revile them, and lose truth and the knowledge of realities.
Similar gossiping stories are told about the sources of the Republic and the Phaedo. That there really existed in antiquity a work passing under the name of Philolaus there can be no doubt. Fragments of this work are preserved to us, chiefly in Stobaeus, a few in Boethius and other writers. They remind us of the Timaeus, as well as of the Phaedrus and Philebus.
Then, too, as he says in the Phaedrus, being winged, she governs the world in conjunction with the gods. And this indeed is the most beautiful end of her labors. This is what he calls in the Phaedo, a great contest and a mighty hope.
Nevertheless it is clear that they did not forget him; for we must accept Plato's statement in the Phaedo that many of the most distinguished philosophers of the time came to Athens to be with Socrates when he was put to death, and that those of them who could not come were eager to hear a full account of what happened.
The one firm certainty which Socrates seems to have held, "No evil can happen to a good man in life or death," flashes in Plato's mind into a glorious hope of immortality, embodied in his loftiest passage, the picture of the dying Socrates. The soul when withdrawn from all outward objects and rapt in contemplation is nearest to the divine, this is the central thought of the Phaedo.
"But if it be requisite to lay before the reader those dialogues out of many which principally unfold to us the mystic discipline about the gods, I shall not err in ranking among this number the Phaedo and Phaedrus, the Banquet and the Philebus, and together with these the Sophista and Politicus, the Cratylus and the Timaeus.
XXXVI. After the Persian war, in the archonship of Phaedo, the Athenians were told by the Delphian Oracle to take home the bones of Theseus and keep them with the greatest care and honour. There was great difficulty in obtaining them and in discovering his tomb, on account of the wild and savage habits of the natives of the island.
In Phaedo, he demonstrates the immortality of the soul from its simplicity, and in the Republic, he demonstrates the simplicity of the soul from its immortality. The following fragment of a brief argues in a circle: I. This principle is in accordance with the principles of the Democratic party, since A. The leader of the Democratic party believes in it, for
Were you personally present, Phaedo, with Socrates on that day when he drank the poison in prison? or did you hear an account of it from someone else? Phæd. I was there myself, Echecrates. Ech.
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