33 pages • 1 hour read
PlatoPhaedo
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Analogy
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.
Dialog and Dialectic
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 Socratic method. In a dialog the student presents a problem to be solved, or the teacher raises a question, and the speakers take turns making points and counterpoints until the problem is resolved.
Since the dialog derives from Socrates’s method, it’s not the author’s device so much as a natural outgrowth of Socrates’s way of speaking. The dialog thus imposes itself on the manuscript. In that respect, Plato merely had to write down the conversations as they occurred, and a dialog is the result.
Plato’s dialogs are accounts of talks that occurred in real life, but they also reflect the appearance of a written play, with main characters sometimes listed by name as they take turns speaking. The dialogs often have a dramatic quality to them, and people have wondered whether they were read aloud as performances in the ancient world. (Now and then, someone today gets the idea to turn them into dramas, but the practice is controversial, as they aren’t really plays, and presenting them in that form might not be the best way to teach them.)
Frame Story/Flashback
A frame story is a story-within-a-story. Phaedo is a kind of frame story, though based on real events, where Echecrates asks Phaedo to tell what he saw and heard on the last day of Socrates’s life. Phaedo obliges; his report constitutes a flashback, yet another literary device, as it is a record of events that happened weeks earlier.
Almost exactly midway through the essay—at a dramatic point in the dialog, when a student challenges Socrates to prove a difficult point—Echecrates interrupts Phaedo’s report to declare his own shock at hearing the master’s argument questioned so compellingly by a student. Phaedo concurs and adds some detail about sitting next to Socrates while the teacher plays idly with Phaedo’s curly hair. This entire interruption pulls the reader out of the flashback and back to the outer frame. The sudden break acts as a momentary intermission, as if Plato understands the need for his audience to catch its breath.
Plato’s works as a whole have an implicit frame wrapped around them: the history of his apprenticeship to Socrates. Plato’s presence hovers throughout these writings, sometimes only in the background. He reports on Socrates’s brilliant philosophical conclusions somewhat in the manner of Dr. Watson describing his adventures in deduction with Sherlock Holmes.
In the case of Phaedo, the frame grows complex: Socrates speaks to his students; one of them, Phaedo, relates the philosopher’s words to Echecrates; Plato listens in, taking notes; finally, his reading audience absorbs it all, wrapped in its multiple levels. With Plato, then, there are frames within frames.
Repetition
Socrates uses repetition to hammer home a point. He will ask a student a series of closely related questions, concepts that overlap and tend to repeat themselves. He wants to tie down every edge of the concept, so that nothing might loosen later and peel back up. For example, in a discussion about qualities and their opposites, Socrates asks Cebes:
‘[…] those things which are possessed by the number three must not only be three in number, but must also be odd.’ ‘Quite true.’ ‘And on this oddness, of which the number three has the impress, the opposite idea will never intrude?’ ‘No.’ ‘And this impress was given by the odd principle?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And to the odd is opposed the even?’ ‘True.’ ‘Then the idea of the even number will never arrive at three?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then three has no part in the even?’ ‘None.’ ‘Then the triad or number three is uneven?’ ‘Very true’ (55).
Socrates gets agreement at every step in his reasoning, so that, when the conclusion arrives—in this case that the number three is essentially and forever odd—his argument, locked down tightly, permits no crack with which someone could wedge it apart. Repetition is a vital part of that process.
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