Micah Stubbs' Weblog

A booklet, an audio reading and a glossary for Plato’s Crito and Phaedo

28th October 2026

Tonight the Phil@Viv philosophy group goes back to Athens for the death of Socrates. The assigned readings are Plato’s Crito and Phaedo in G. M. A. Grube’s translation, shared by the host as a PDF on Google Drive. I wanted something I could hold, something I could listen to, and a list of who everyone is, so I made three things from that PDF.

A printed booklet

The source is 64 letter-size pages, each a book page sitting in a wide white margin. I printed it as a pocket booklet on precut 6.125 x 9.25 inch stock, the size of a Supreme Court brief.

The cover has a Greek-key band at the top and bottom, the two titles with their Greek names, and Socrates’ last words from Phaedo 118a in Greek and in Grube’s English: “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; make this offering to him and do not forget.” It is set in TeX Gyre Pagella, with the Greek in GFS Didot so the iota subscripts survive, and printed one-sided on 65 lb cover stock.

For the interior, each page is cropped to its text block, with separate crop boxes for odd and even pages because the book’s gutter shifts the type. The crop is then scaled to fill the trim size, about 0.65 inch at the sides and 0.8 inch at the top and bottom. The Stephanus numbers in the margin stay in, so the group’s section references (59c to 69e, 72e to 84b, 89b to 91c, 96a to 102a, 107c to the end) can be found on the page. The 64 pages print duplex on 32 sheets, with the cover’s blank back facing page 37, the first page of the Crito.

Two pages, to show the result:

The paper

The paper comes from CutCardStock, which sells letter-size packs and will cut every sheet to a custom size for $3 a pack. I ordered these, each with Add Custom Cutting set to YES and a cut size of 6⅛ × 9¼:

1. Cover: Cougar White Card Stock, 8.5x11, 65 lb / 176 gsm, Smooth. One pack yields 250 covers, $33.95 with cutting.
2. Interior: Cougar White Digital Super Smooth Color Copy Paper, 8.5x11, 60 lb / 89 gsm. One pack yields 500 sheets, $30.50 with cutting.
3. Also on the order, as a second interior paper: Lynx Opaque Smooth Paper, 8.5x11, 60 lb / 89 gsm, 500 sheets, $29.75 with cutting.

Pick the size option on each product page before adding it to the cart, then turn on custom cutting. Custom-cut orders can’t be returned, so check the cut size line before you pay. Both stocks run through an Epson EcoTank ET-2988 at a custom 6.125 x 9.25 inch page size, with the interior printed duplex.

The booklet reproduces the whole translation, so I am not posting the print files. If you have the reading, you can make your own the same way.

A dramatic audio reading

Listen to Crito and Phaedo on papertospeech.com, or download the MP3. It runs 3 hours 17 minutes.

Before upload I built a listening edition of the text. It drops the running heads, page numbers, margin references and footnotes, and it labels every speech with its speaker, so the dialogue reads as a conversation instead of a wall of text. Both editor’s introductions are kept. All 2,456 substantial lines of the source appear in the listening text, in order, about 32,500 spoken words.

A glossary

Download the glossary (PDF). It is written for this meeting and covers the people, the places and rites, the ideas and arguments, and the closing myth, each with Stephanus references. A short guide at the top maps the group’s key Phaedo sections to the entries that matter in each.

Links

1. Phil@Viv on Partiful, the event and the reading assignment
2. The reading as shared by the host (Google Drive)
3. Audio reading on papertospeech.com
4. Audio reading MP3
5. Glossary PDF
6. Booklet cover, page 38 and page 100
7. Cougar 65 lb cover stock, Cougar Super Smooth 60 lb text paper and Lynx Opaque 60 lb text paper at CutCardStock
8. Earlier booklets: Plato’s Euthyphro and Apology, Negarestani’s The Labor of the Inhuman and Wolf Tivy’s Don’t Learn Value From Society