The Objections

Simmias speaks first. He has been holding back an objection, and he wants to raise it before the day is over. His objection is this: someone could use the same style of argument to defend the soul's destruction. Suppose the soul is to the body what a harmony is to a lyre — an attunement of its physical elements, invisible and beautiful and divine-seeming, but utterly dependent on the instrument that produces it. When the lyre is broken, the harmony does not survive. If the soul is a harmony, neither does it.

Cebes then adds his own objection. He is willing to grant everything Socrates has argued: that the soul is stronger than the body, that it can outlast many bodies the way a weaver outlasts many cloaks, wearing each out in turn. But the weaver still dies at the end. Being more durable than the body does not make the soul immortal — it makes it longer-lasting, which is a very different thing. A soul that has survived a hundred deaths might die on the hundred-and-first.

The room falls into what Phaedo calls an unpleasant feeling. They had been convinced. Now they are not sure whether they were ever capable of forming a reliable judgment, or whether any argument could hold. Echecrates, hearing this account later, says he felt the same: "What argument can I ever trust again?" Phaedo reassures him — Socrates, watching the room, knew exactly what had happened, and rallied them like a general who gathers a routed army and returns to the field.