Read The Trial and Death of Socrates by email.
A man talks himself into a death sentence, on principle.
The four dialogues of Socrates’ last month, read in order as one story: the indictment on the courthouse steps, the most famous defence speech ever given, the prison argument about obeying an unjust judgment, and the hemlock.
Two or three minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Three months from now, you will have read Plato.
81 installments, one an email
- First published
- c. 399–380 BC
- Translation
- Jowett
- Installments
- 81
- Each installment
- 2–3 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 50,635
- Reading time
- 3 hours 31 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 6 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 3 weeks
- At 20 minutes a day
- 11 days
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read The Trial and Death of Socrates?
Publishers have bound exactly these four dialogues together for over a century, and for good reason: Euthyphro, the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo are one continuous story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Socrates is indicted, defends himself before five hundred jurors, refuses to escape the sentence, and spends his final day arguing about the soul — then drinks the poison, surrounded by his friends. It reads like a short novel that happens to contain the foundations of Western philosophy.
It is also, morning by morning, an argument you can actually follow. Plato wrote in short exchanges — question, answer, objection — and a daily installment of a few minutes holds one or two moves of the argument, no more. Each email opens with a recap that carries the thread: where the definition stood, what got refuted yesterday. This is the difference between reading Plato and having read about Plato.
Lawyers in particular will find the middle two dialogues uncomfortably close to home. The Apology is the defence speech every advocate should read once — Socrates cross-examines his own accuser — and Crito is the founding text on whether a citizen must obey a judgment he knows to be wrong. Jowett’s Victorian translation remains the classic English rendering, clear and unfussy.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read The Trial and Death of Socrates?
About three and a half hours straight through (50,635 words). By email, it’s 81 daily installments of two to three minutes — about twelve weeks, or faster at a premium pace of two or three installments a day.
Why these four dialogues together?
They are the traditional tetralogy of Socrates’ trial and death, printed together as one volume since the nineteenth century. Read in order — Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo — they run in strict story sequence, from the eve of the trial to the execution.
Is this the complete, unabridged text?
All four dialogues are complete and unabridged, in Benjamin Jowett’s classic translation from the Standard Ebooks edition. Jowett’s own analytical introductions — Victorian essays about the dialogues, nearly half as long as the dialogues themselves — are not included: you get Plato, not commentary on Plato.
I’ve never read philosophy. Can I start here?
This is the traditional starting point. The dialogues are conversations, not treatises — Socrates questions a self-proclaimed expert, a courtroom, an old friend — and Jowett renders them in plain English. Each installment opens with a recap of where the argument stood.
Do the recaps spoil anything?
The title tells you how it ends — Plato’s readers knew too. Each recap still covers only the previous installment, so every turn of the argument, and the final scene itself, arrives only when Plato delivers it.
How does it arrive?
One installment per email, one email a day, at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous installment at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Benjamin Jowett translation, Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.