Phaedo was written many years after the events it describes. It captures the contrast between the calm teacher giving his final lesson and the anxious students who grasp at the last interaction they will have with him. Socrates is the first philosopher to be executed for his beliefs; his serenity in the face of his own demise highlights one of the most dramatic moments in the history of philosophy.

The work begins in the style of a drama, listing the setting and the persons involved, and begins each spoken part by the name of the two opening speakers, Echecrates and Phaedo. Within a page or so, this structure falls away, and the rest of the dialog mainly consists of Phaedo’s report on the final conversations between Socrates and his students.

Echecrates is a follower of Pythagoras, who believed the soul moves to a new body after death, and that the stars and planets resonate to a kind of mathematical music. Socrates and his student Plato studied Pythagoras. (Every modern student of geometry knows him through his Pythagorean theorem, the formula for finding the area of right triangles.