Phaedo

Socrates and his students use examples to explain their concepts; many of these take the form of analogies. The purpose is to clarify a concept that might otherwise be too cerebral to understand; the analogy makes it vivid. Cebes, for example, describes a tailor who makes many coats, one of which outlives him, to suggest that a soul might inhabit many bodies, yet one body might outlast it. Socrates compares good souls and their community spirit to bees and ants, which devote their lives to their fellows; he goes so far as to declare that such souls sometimes reincarnate into those very insects.

Socrates also describes his vision of the afterlife—a vision he admits may or may not be true—in which the good are rewarded and the wicked punished. Punishments are determined by the bad souls’ victims. This imagery also serves as a slyly crafted depiction of the kind of justice Socrates would like to see meted out during life on earth.

Plato’s Phaedo is written in his most famous format, the dialog, or a back-and-forth between student and teacher. This format is meant to reflect Socrates’s instructional technique, the