Phaedo (Φαίδων)

The Phaedo is a Platonic dialogue depicting the conversation Socrates holds with his disciples on the day of his execution by hemlock in 399 BCE. The dialogue is set within a remembered frame: Phaedo of Elis, who was present, recounts the day's discussion to Echecrates some time later. The setting is the Athenian prison; the philosophical movement is from a series of arguments about the soul's persistence after death toward the actual moment of dying with which the dialogue closes.

Within the Phaedo, the philosophical practice that comes to be called meletē thanátou is articulated. Socrates argues that those who pursue philosophy rightly are practicing nothing other than dying and being dead — the formulation that enters Greek philosophical vocabulary here and is taken up across the subsequent tradition, including by the Roman Stoics whose engagement with death the architecture also holds.

Notes

The dialogue's textual transmission is stable; the standard reference apparatus is the Stephanus pagination established in the 1578 edition and used continuously since. The architecture engages a single brief passage from the dialogue's opening philosophical movement; the immortality arguments, the dramatic frame, and the dialogue's reception history are not rendered.