Then may we not say, Simmias, that if, as we are always repeating, there is an absolute beauty, and goodness, and an absolute essence of all things; and if to this, which is now discovered to have existed in our former state, we refer all our sensations, and with this compare them, finding these ideas to be pre-existent and our inborn possession-then our souls must have had a prior existence, but if not, there would be no force in the argument? There is the same proof that these ideas must have existed before we were born, as that our souls existed before we were born; and if not the ideas, then not the souls. Yes, Socrates; I am convinced that there is precisely the same necessity for the one as for the other; and the argument retreats successfully to the position that the existence of the soul before birth cannot be separated from the existence of the essence of which you speak. For there is nothing which to my mind is so patent as that beauty, goodness, and the other notions of which you were just now speaking, have a most real and absolute existence; and I am satisfied with the proof.
— Plato
Simmias is satisfied, and that satisfaction is worth pausing over. He has just accepted, in a single movement, that the soul's pre-existence is proven because beauty and goodness have absolute, prior existence — and that this in turn proves the soul. The argument is circular in the most elegant way: each claim shores up the other, and together they build a platform above the mess of sensory life. Notice what has been accomplished structurally, not just logically. Plato has made suffering optional. If beauty, goodness, and essence exist in a realm the soul already knew before birth, then what we lack here is not really lost — it is merely obscured. The pain of imperfection becomes a problem of remembering, not a problem of enduring. This is the move that will run for two and a half millennia: the soul's ache is reframed as nostalgia for a prior fullness, and the task becomes ascent rather than descent into what actually hurts. Simmias is satisfied because the argument gives him somewhere to stand that is not the ground. The question the *Phaedo* does not ask — cannot ask from inside its own logic — is what happens to the soul that cannot remember, or refuses to, or finds that the beautiful forms stay stubbornly abstract while the body continues to suffer in the particular.
Plato·Phaedo