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Dr. G's Hypertext Notes for "Phaedo" |
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Echecrates, like Phaedo, was a Pythagorean, and Phlius was the location of a Phythagorean school. On the Pythagorean elements in this dislogue, see Dr. G's Introduction. Theseus, legendary king of Athens, rescued the youths of Athens who had been given as tribute to King Minos, legendary King of Crete and judge of the underworld. Minos kept the Athenians in a convoluted labyrinth guarded by a monster bull, the Minotaur. The maze had been designed for total security by Socrates' heroic ancestor Daedalus, so when Theseus and his party escaped from the labyrinth, Minos imprisoned Daedalus and his son Icarus in it, but Daedalus made wings of wax, and he and his son flew away. The Athenian festival commemorating these events in celebration of Theseus forms the backdrop for Plato's account of the trial, imprisonment, and death of Socrates. "he seemed to me to be blessed": As Phaedo speaks, of course, Socrates is with the dead, but Plato's dialogue develops the idea that Socrates is dead before his execution and he speaks happily from beyond the grave to his sad friends in prison. He is newly released from his chains. "Plato, I think, was ill." Is Plato the writer imagining the story of Socrates' last day, based on an account that he heard or read from Phaedo? One possible interpretation is that Plato the writer did not want to make more trouble for Socrates or his followers by claiming directly that Socrates held unorthodox Pythagorean views of death and the afterlife, so he put these concepts into the mouth of Phaedo, whose credibility could be questioned. Theban Simmias and his friend Cebes, like Phaedo and Echecrates, are Pythagoreans, but Simmias and Cebes are young skeptical ones who have not yet become true believers. Plato's dialogue Crito portrays them as having come to Athens to buy Socrates' freedom from the jailkeeper. Their willingness to help Socrates shows that their hearts are in the right place, but their idea that Socrates can be helped by prolonging his life shows that they do not yet believe in immortality of the soul. They can't understand Socrates' willingness to die, and throughout Phaedo they tempt him with arguments in favor of life. Some scholars believe that, historically, after Socrates' execution, Plato visited Philolaus, the teacher of Simmias and Cebes. To repeat the whole conversation would have been an impossibility. Phaedo reenacts the discussion in more detail than anyone could possibly have remembered, which raises the issue of Phaedo's credibility. Presumably, if Plato believed that Phaedo's account of Socrates' last day was totally reliable, he would not have used Phaedo to narrate the scene. He would have presented the scene without a narrator. The Eleven were the officials of Athens who saw that the laws were carried out. The Athenians used multiple city administrators in an attempt to curb official corruption. Xanthippe was Socrates' wife. Women are notably absent from Plato's dialogues, but Socrates (in The Republic) had espoused that women should be educated and should hold the same political offices in the state as men. Socrates turns poet in prison by putting Aesop into verse and writing a hymn to Apollo. Aesop's animal fables were already ancient in Socrates' time, but strangely they were not in verse, as all other archaic literature was. Socrates serves the god Apollo who is lord of poetry and death. In ancient Greek hero rituals, Apollo crowned the singer with a wreath, enabling the singer to impersonate the dead. The god of the festival is Apollo. Doric was a Greek dialect, quite distinct from the Ionian Greek spoken at Athens. From an Athenian point of view, Ionian was the learned, scientific, academic, "correct" language of the day, while Doric was seen as uncultured and alien. Cebes uses his best Ionian when speaking to Socrates in front of the whole company of Athenians who are present, but when he forgets himself he lapses back into Doric. Mysteries: the Hellenic mystery rituals, where initiates visited simulated underworlds to learn the secrets of the afterlife. The idea that man is a prisoner who has no right to break out of jail and run away echoes the situation of "Crito." Indictment against Socrates: Socrates pretends that Cebes has indicted him for impiety. Other gods who are wise and good: Socrates imagines that he is going into the company of gods and heroes, a literary dream world, a better place than Athens! Temperature: Eastern meditation is known to elevate body temperature. Socrates in a meditative trance was able to stand all night barefoot in the snow; Buddhists in Nepal today perform similar feats of melting snow with their naked bodies. A true philosopher is of good cheer when dying: philosophy, as developed by Pythagoras and others, is a specialized branch of the Greek mystery religion. The Mysteries showed initiates simulations of death to make them "wise" with the knowledge of the world of the dead. The true philosopher is wise in the knowledge of death also, but the philosopher understands it through logic or reasoning, not by viewing simulations of the underworld. Immoral majority: as a Pythagorean, Simmias feels persecuted by the religious majority who are ignorant of truth and vicious toward those who do not share their beliefs. Food and drink, sex, clothes: always thinking positively, Socrates is trying to see all the advantages in doing away with his body. In death he will be free of preoccupations of the body Chains of the body: Socrates has shaken off his chains at the start of the scene; symbolically, he is speaking as a "purified soul" already. Courage and temperance are the two great virtues of the philosopher; these are fearless for the body and control of bodily appetites. The mysteries were the ancient mystery religions that prepared initiates for death by showing them "mysteries" or simulations of the world of the dead. By experiencing the mystery, the initiate was equipped with beliefs about death that overcame all fear. The thyrsus bearers were the initiates who carried flowers at these rituals and became "wise" in knowing about death. The comic poet: Aristophanes, author of The Clouds (419 BCE), a satirical send-up of Socrates. The foolish "Socrates" in this farce is absurdly preoccupied with the underworld below and the heavens above the earth. Ancient belief here refers to Pythagorean teaching of reincarnation, the idea that the immortal soul is caught in a cycle of deaths and rebirths. See Dr. G's introduction to Phaedo. Endymion loved the moon so much that he slept eternally. Knowledge is recollection: Socrates in the dialogues "Meno" and "Phaedo" teaches that learning is recollection of past knowledge that the soul gained before birth. These proofs would have been attractive to Pythagoreans, explaining why they came to Athens to free him from jail. He once proved that an uneducated slave boy actually knew geometry, an episode recounted in the dialogue called the Meno. Equality in the abstract: in the argument from sticks and stones, Socrates deduces that we must know abstract things by recollecting them from our prior experience of them in another world that is more perfect than ours on earth. Abstract things don't exist here on earth, so we must know of them from somewhere else, where they actually exist. Socrates proposes dualism, that there is an ideal world, separate and apart from the imperfect world that we know through our senses. The dead are in the ideal world; the living are in the world of imperfection. Dying Socrates is going to the superior world where the ideals actually exist. The role of philosophy is to help us "remember" the ideal world that we have forgotten at our birth. When we learn the ideas, we learn something about where we are going in death. The process is one of revelation as in ancient mystery religion, except that it is intellectualized. All people know these things: young Simmias is dependent upon Socrates for his knowledge; Socrates tries to encourage his independence by instilling the idea that "everybody knows." After death, will the soul continue to exist? Cebes picks up the the remaining issue in the argument for the immortality of the soul: whether the soul perishes at death. Socrates with his magic spells drives away the bogey-man death. Wisdom: Socrates holds a traditional Hellenic conception of wisdom, like that found in the mystery religions. Wisdom= the soul after death, in the state of bliss. Initiates in the mysteries visited the afterlife to become "wise," to "know." Ghostly apparitions: Socrates' theory of ghosts (as corrupted souls) may be original or more have been a part of Pythagorean belief. Traditionally Greeks believed that ghosts were spirits of the dead that had not been given proper burial or that had been murdered (and remained to accuse their murderers). Penelope's web: In Homer's Odyssey, Penelope's undesired suitors wait for her to finish weaving a shroud, but what she weaves during the day she unweaves at night, so they are frustrated. Silence: Everybody recognizes that Socrates' argument on the immortality of the soul is not conclusive. I, like the swans, have the spirit of prophecy in me now: the argument now returns to Apollo's swans, where it began. That people when dying receive the gift of prophecy was a common ancient belief. The lyre was used to call souls up from the dead in Greek mystery rites; it was the instrument of bards and sacred to Apollo, so it was strongly associated with the soul. As an old weaver may outlive many of his coats, so a soul may outlast several bodies and yet still die at some time, according to Cebes' analogy. The Argives
were the heroes who fought the Trojans in the Trojan War. (Greek warriors
took pride in their long hair and it was the custom to comb their locks
prior to battle--as here Phaedo claims that Socrates' stroked his hair.) Euripus was a channel in the sea noted for its strong, alternating currents. The partisan: Socrates distinguishes partisan argument from argument to find the truth. He recognizes that his situation is leading him to make partisan arguments that suit him at the moment, though they are not persuasive to others. Socrates answers Simmias. The soul preexisted the body but the harmony did not exist before the lyre, so Simmias' analogy is false. Homer's Odysseus is a type of the wise man, using cunning and strategy, often suppressing his instinctive reactions to dangerous situations. From this behavior Socrates infers that Odysseus has a soul that commands his body. The passage that Socrates quotes (Odyssey xx. 17-18) is one of the most original of Homer's great similes, comparing Odysseus' restless heart to a sausage being turned over a fire. Harmonia: the legendary founder of Thebes, Cadmus, took as his queen the goddess Harmonia. (Simmias and Cebes come from Thebes.) I was wholly incapable of these inquiries: Socrates disavows any interest in science. He criticizes scientific explanation of causes on moral grounds; science doesn't establish the purposes or values of things. Anaxagoras' scientific method could not account for the purposes or meanings of things; it generated only mechanical descriptions, so Socrates lost interest in it. Unlike Socrates, Anaxagoras fled from execution at Athens; apparently he went to Megara and Boetia. Socrates links Anaxagoras' science with his unethical conduct. If Socrates was content to explain himself mechanically, as a set of bones and muscles held together by skin, he would attempted to save his bones and muscles and skin, as Anaxagoras did, by running away from Athens. The truth of existence: Socrates' realm of investigation is the world of ideas, not the natural world. Aeschylus' play Telephus has been lost. The dead are gathered for judgment: the conclusion of the Socrates' speech--his vision of the afterlife, hell and heaven--places "Phaedo" in the context of Hellenic mystery ritual, where the initiates are made wise with knowledge of the world beyond. Glaucus: Plato's reference is uncertain. In Homer's Iliad, the Trojan Glaucus strikes a foolish bargain by exchanging his prize golden armor for Greek Diomedes' cheap bronze armor. Earth is a round body, held in place by evenly distributed weights and counterweights, in Socrates' cosmology. The view of the planet from outer space is a surprising accomplishment in 399 BCE, except that Homer accomplished a similar feat hundreds of years earlier in his description of the shield of Achilles. It seems to have been standard poetic excellence in ancient Greece to offer a cosmological overview or vision of the whole earth, including both the surface and the underworld below. From the river Phasis to the Pillars of Herakles: the area of the Mediterranean Sea from east to west. To fly up and reach the upper surface of the air: Socrates' imagination soars, as if he is Daedalus escaping the labyrinth. Socrates' extreme dualism takes the graphic form of a "true" earth beyond (which only a great flier may see) and a "false" earth in which we live. True colors: Socrates did not have the Hubble Space Telescope to show him the colors beyond. Homer: Iliad 8.14, 8.481, Acheron: a famous lake in ancient times where necromantic magic illusions were performed; the spirits of the dead were raised in the water for amazed spectators to see. Dante uses the lake in The Inferno as the site where the souls of the damned depart for hell. Phaedo is one of Dante's major sources. We owe a cock to Aesclepius: in the ancient world sick people sought cures at the temples of the medicine god Aesclepius, and many were cured due to the placebo effect of belief. Socrates' last words often are interpreted to mean that he wishes to give thanks that he has been cured of life.
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