The Phaedo portrays Socrates in a long discussion with members of his inner circle, which leads the dialogue to portray a very different sort of conversation from those found in most of Plato’s other dialogues. The chapter begins by considering why Plato makes Phaedo the narrator of such a significant event: the death of Socrates. The chapter also discusses Socrates’ main interlocutors, Simmias and Cebes. I argue that both are skilled, both make mistakes, and both need to be cautious lest they fall into misology. They are sympathetic to a variety of Pythagorean and Orphic ideas, but are by no means committed followers of Philolaus, a Pythagorean. The end of the chapter turns to the portrayal of Socrates, arguing that Socrates seeks not to be treated as an authority and that the Phaedo presents Socrates’ questions and views as naturally emerging from those in the Socratic dialogues.

This chapter traces a genealogy of pneumatic cosmology, covering the Pythagoreans of the fifth century BCE, the Stoics of the third and second centuries BCE, the Jews writing in Alexandria in the first century BCE and the Christians of the first century CE. Starting from the early Pythagoreans, ‘breath’ and ‘breathing’ function to draw analogies between cosmogony and anthropogony – a notion ultimately rejected by Plato in the Timaeus and Aristotle in his cosmological works, but taken up by the Posidonius and expanded into a rich and challenging corporeal metaphysics. Similarly, the Post-Hellenistic philosopher and biblical exegete Philo of Alexandria approaches the cosmogony and anthropogony described in Genesis (1:1-3 and 1:7) through Platonist-Stoic philosophy, in his attempt to provide a philosophically rigorous explanation for why Moses employed certain terms or phrases when writing his book of creation. Finally, the chapter sees a determined shift in the direction of rejecting pneumatic cosmology for a revised pneumatic anthropogony in the writings of the New Testament: by appeal to the ‘Holy Spirit’ (πνεῦμα ἅγιον), early Christians effectively adapted the Stoic metaphysics of ‘breath’, with its notions of divine intelligence and bonding, to the ecclesiastical project of building a Christian community conceived of as the ‘body of Christ’.