Character guide

Socrates

major

Also known as Young Socrates, Socrates Mark, Socrates Nor, Socrates Oedipus, Socrates Madness, Socrates Such, Socrates Theaetetus, Socrates Here, Socrates Polus, Socrates O, Socrates O Hippias, Socrates The wise, Socrates Philebus, Socrates Eryxias Erasistratus Critias, Socrates Euthyphro, Socrates Poseidon, Socrates Lysimachus, Socrates Menexenus Socrates, Socrates Dear Crito, Socrates Beloved Pan

Socrates moves through Athens as a self-described common man who only speaks the truth, cornering rhapsodes, generals, and sophists until their expertise collapses into contradiction. His irony cuts both ways: he insists he is no expert while exposing the gap between what others profess and what they actually know, as when he traps Ion into admitting that a man who judges one poet well should judge all poets alike. That tension between humility and relentless interrogation makes him the engine of nearly every dialogue, the fixed point around which the argument turns.

Plato

major

Also known as the Materialists of Plato, the Protagoras of Plato, Plato Plato

Plato writes himself into the dialogues as both narrator and absent presence, the mind arranging the scenes in which Socrates speaks. In later works like the Philebus, his touch grows drier and more abstract, trading mystic rapture for careful analysis of pleasure, knowledge, and the good, with the plan sometimes straining under the weight of its own ideas. That shift from youthful drama to late-life system-building is itself part of the reading experience, showing a thinker revising his own methods across a lifetime.

Glaucon

supporting

Also known as 215 Glaucon, Glaucon impatiently

Glaucon appears as the eager listener who catches Apollodorus on the road to Athens and demands a full account of the speeches at Agathon's feast, insisting the walk itself was made for conversation. He is impatient, curious, and hungry for philosophy, pressing for the tale to be rehearsed again rather than letting it fade into hearsay. His appetite for the argument makes him the reader's stand-in, the one whose questions keep the dialogue moving forward.

Adeimantus

supporting

Adeimantus belongs to the intimate Athenian circle around Socrates, the brothers and friends who turn casual encounters into extended inquiry. He shares Glaucon's hunger for the speeches on love and his willingness to rehearse them aloud, part of the social world in which philosophy is a daily habit rather than a profession. His presence signals that the dialogues are conversations among familiars, not lectures, and that the argument depends on who is willing to keep talking.

Phaedrus

supporting

Also known as dear Phaedrus, sweet Phaedrus, Phaedrus Granted, Phaedrus Isocrates

Phaedrus is the enthusiast of rhetoric, so captivated by Lysias's speech on love that he carries the scroll under his cloak and practices it aloud until Socrates catches him. His weakness is charming and transparent: he wants a partner in his revels, someone to hear the words he cannot stop repeating. That eagerness draws Socrates away from the city and into the countryside, where the dialogue on love, madness, and the soul can unfold beneath the plane tree.

Callicles

supporting

Also known as Callicles That, most excellent Callicles, Callicles O Socrates

Callicles opens his home to Gorgias and to Socrates, playing the confident host who treats philosophy as a feast to be enjoyed and a fray to be entered. He is impatient with Socratic humility and champions a might-makes-right view of virtue, the kind of opponent who forces Socrates to argue about justice rather than definitions. His bluntness gives the Gorgias its edge, turning a polite gathering into a contest over how one should live.

Protagoras

supporting

Also known as the old Protagoras, O Protagoras

Protagoras is the visiting celebrity of the dialogue that bears his name, a famous teacher from Abdera whose reputation draws Hippocrates to wake Socrates before dawn. He sells wisdom, and the tension is whether virtue can be taught like grammar or flute-playing, or whether the fee purchases only the appearance of it. His calm, self-assured presence makes him a worthy sparring partner, and the early debate over what a sophist actually is sets the terms for everything that follows.

Gorgias

supporting

Also known as Compare Gorgias, the Gorgias

Gorgias is the honored guest at Callicles' house, fresh from a public display of his rhetorical skill, and he agrees to answer any question put to him. His confidence rests on long experience and the claim that rhetoric is the master art of persuasion, yet he cannot say what rhetoric is about or whether its practitioners know the good they praise. His exchange with Socrates opens the central quarrel over whether persuasive speech is a genuine craft or a flattering knack.

Thrasymachus

supporting

Thrasymachus is the impatient challenger who refuses Socrates' usual question-and-answer politeness and demands a straight definition of justice. His thesis, that law is made by rulers for their own benefit and that injustice pays better than justice, is the sharpest provocation in the early books. Even when he falls silent, his argument is taken up by Glaucon and Adeimantus, so his challenge drives the Republic's long inquiry into why anyone should be just.

Crito

supporting

Also known as Dear Crito

Crito is a practical, well-connected Athenian who has stood by Socrates for decades and cannot understand why his friend will not let him arrange an escape. His love is genuine and his arguments are sensible, but they measure life by years, reputation, and the opinions of the many, while Socrates measures it by what is right. Their conversation turns a prison visit into a meditation on obligation, and Crito's grief gives the dialogue its human weight.

Phaedo

supporting

Phaedo of Elis is present at Socrates' death and later recounts the whole scene to Echecrates and his companions in Phlius. He is devoted, attentive, and still shaken, and his narration frames the argument about the immortality of the soul with the intimacy of a witness. His grief and reverence make the dialogue not just a philosophical treatise but a portrait of how a beloved teacher faced the end.

Theaetetus

supporting

Also known as the youthful Theaetetus

Theaetetus is introduced by Theodorus as a promising student of geometry, and he agrees to answer Socrates' questions even though he warns that he may tire. He is earnest, self-deprecating, and willing to follow an argument wherever it leads, which is exactly the temperament the dialogue needs. His attempts to define knowledge, and his willingness to abandon each definition when it fails, give the Theaetetus its distinctive combination of intellectual rigor and youthful honesty.

Theodorus

supporting

Also known as Theodorus the geometrician, Theodorus the Samian, Theodorus Disciples

Theodorus is the host and catalyst of the late dialogues, a mathematician from Cyrene whose conversation with Socrates sets the stage for the Eleatic Stranger's interrogation of the Sophist. He is deferential but firm, willing to yield the floor yet insistent that the matter at hand deserves a proper answer. His role is to bridge the worlds of Socratic inquiry and Eleatic method, making him the hinge on which the dialogue's early momentum turns.

Parmenides

supporting

Also known as The Eleatic Parmenides, the great Parmenides

Parmenides appears in memory as the noble elder who once argued with a youthful Socrates, his method of question and answer recalled with admiration and some unease. He represents a philosophical authority so formidable that even Socrates defers to it, and his shadow shapes the Stranger's approach to definition and division. His presence raises the stakes of every subsequent inquiry: can the old Eleatic method be surpassed, or only repeated?

Timaeus

supporting

Also known as the Timaeus, Timaeus

Timaeus is the principal speaker of the dialogue that bears his name, a visitor whose Pythagorean sympathies lead him to expound on physics, the nature of God, and the construction of the heavens. He is aware that his subject is uncertain and that his account is a likely story rather than certain knowledge, yet he proceeds with a craftsman's confidence. His speech marks Plato's most ambitious attempt to bridge the sensible and intellectual realms, making him essential to the dialogue's central arc.

Critias

supporting

Also known as 297 Critias

Critias is the narrator of the Atlantis myth, a figure whose political experience and family prestige lend weight to his account of an ancient war between Athens and a vanished island empire. He presents the story as both history and moral exemplar, but his own entanglement in Athenian politics casts a shadow over his authority. His tale sets up the dialogue's exploration of ideal states and their decline, making him the bridge between philosophy and political reality.

Alcibiades

supporting

Also known as noble Alcibiades, Alcibiades Good, Alcibiades True, Alcibiades Arithmetic, the fair Alcibiades

Alcibiades arrives late and drunk at the Symposium, a charismatic general whose relationship with Socrates is as charged as it is complicated. He is both admirer and accuser, offering a portrait of Socrates that is intimate, comic, and unsettling. His speech transforms the dialogue from abstract eulogy to lived drama, exposing the tension between philosophy and political ambition that defines his own tragic career.

Aristophanes

supporting

Also known as Aristophanes Clouds

Aristophanes is the comic poet among the tragedians and philosophers at Agathon's feast, a man whose professional irreverence does not prevent him from offering a deeply moving account of love. His speech, delivered after a bout of hiccups, explains erotic desire as the search for one's lost other half, a myth that has outlived every other speech in the dialogue. He embodies the dialogue's blend of humor and profundity, and his presence reminds us that Plato's Socrates is not the only voice worth hearing.

Agathon

supporting

Agathon is the celebrated host whose recent prize-winning tragedy occasions the gathering, and whose house becomes the stage for the evening's contest of speeches on love. He is youthful, beautiful, and self-consciously the center of attention, a man whose charm and theatrical sensibility make him both a gracious host and a subtle rival to Socrates. His absence from Athens in later years is what makes the night so hard to reconstruct, and his presence at its center is what makes it worth reconstructing at all.

Eryximachus

supporting

Also known as Eryximachus Love

Eryximachus is the sober professional among the revelers, a doctor who takes charge of the symposium's practical arrangements and then takes charge of its intellectual agenda. He treats love as a force to be balanced like bodily humors, extending his medical expertise into cosmology with confident, sometimes comic, generality. His speech sets the pattern the others will follow and vary, making him the evening's quiet architect.

Pausanias

supporting

Pausanias speaks as a man with a personal stake in the question, defending a refined and lawful love while his relationship with Agathon sits visibly in the room. He draws careful distinctions between common and heavenly love, and between the customs of different cities, in a speech that is as much about social respectability as about desire. His earnest legalism gives the evening its first real argument and its first real tension between theory and life.

Meno

supporting

Also known as Meno O Socrates, Meno Socrates

Meno is wealthy, well-connected, and accustomed to getting answers, which makes him an ideal interlocutor for Socrates and an ideal target for his questions. He wants to know whether virtue can be taught, and he wants to know it quickly, but his certainty unravels under questioning into the famous paradox of inquiry. His encounter with Socrates turns a social visit into one of the most enduring puzzles in philosophy.

Euthyphro

supporting

Euthyphro is a man of strong convictions and stronger confidence, prosecuting his own father for murder on religious grounds and certain of his own righteousness. Socrates' request for a definition of piety exposes the gap between Euthyphro's certainty and his ability to say what he means, producing the dilemma that still bears his name. His brief, tense exchange with Socrates frames the question of whether goodness is good because the gods love it, or loved because it is good.

Ion

supporting

Also known as the rhapsode Ion, Ion the rhapsode, Ion the Ephesian

Ion is a professional reciter of Homer, proud of his craft and genuinely puzzled by his own uneven powers, which Socrates seizes on as evidence that poetry works by divine inspiration rather than knowledge. He is vain, charming, and disarmingly honest about his limitations, admitting he falls asleep over Hesiod but wakes at a mention of Homer. His conversation with Socrates turns a performer's boast into a lasting question about whether artists understand what they do.

Hippias

supporting

Also known as Hippias the Elean, sweet Hippias, Hippias True, Lesser Hippias

Hippias is the touring celebrity of the sophistic circuit, a man whose memory, craftsmanship, and self-assurance have made him famous across Greece. His confidence is genuine but brittle: he needs an audience, and Socrates' habit of asking small, stubborn questions turns admiration into a public test. Their encounters matter because Hippias embodies everything the dialogues are weighing — expertise as performance versus inquiry as a way of life.

Euthydemus

supporting

Euthydemus arrives in Athens with his brother and a chorus of admirers, offering to improve young Cleinias through debate. His method is dazzling and hollow: he asks whether the wise or the ignorant learn, then refutes whichever answer he receives, while his followers laugh on cue. He matters because he forces Socrates to defend what serious teaching actually looks like, and because his verbal victories expose the difference between winning an argument and learning anything from it.

Dionysodorus

supporting

Dionysodorus works the room alongside Euthydemus, leaning in close with a face beaming with laughter to predict a boy's refutation before the boy has finished answering. Where his brother opens the exchange, Dionysodorus closes it, flipping the same question to produce the opposite conclusion and another round of applause. He matters because he shows how easily cleverness becomes cruelty, and because Socrates must untangle the pair's double act to keep Cleinias from being shamed out of philosophy.

Ctesippus

supporting

Also known as The sceptical Ctesippus, O Ctesippus

Ctesippus is the friend who says out loud what everyone else is thinking, mocking Hippothales for composing hymns to a boy he has not yet won and reciting the family's horses and victories instead of anything a lover might actually say. His irreverence is not idle: it exposes how much of courtship, like argument, is performance. He matters because his willingness to answer the sophists rudely, and to keep answering, keeps the conversation honest when everyone else is laughing.

Cleinias

supporting

Also known as Dear Cleinias, O Cleinias, Cleinias Everyone, Cleinias That, Cleinias Most, Cleinias Excellent, Cleinias of Cnosus, the Cretan Cleinias, sweet son of Cleinias and Dinomache

Cleinias is young, well connected, and newly the object of adult hopes: his family fears he will be turned in a wrong direction before his mind is formed. When Euthydemus asks whether the wise or the ignorant learn, Cleinias blushes, looks to Socrates for help, and answers honestly, only to be refuted and laughed at. He matters because his composure under that laughter is the dialogue's real stake — whether a boy can be taught to think without being humiliated into silence.

Cratylus

supporting

Also known as the real Cratylus

Cratylus holds that names belong to things by nature, the same for Greeks and barbarians, and that correctness in language is a real standard rather than a convention. His position is uncompromising and a little unnerving: if everything flows and words must capture it, then even speaking becomes precarious. He matters because he pushes Socrates past ordinary definitions into the question of whether language can be true at all, setting the stakes for the whole inquiry.

Hermogenes

supporting

Hermogenes moves through Athens as the brother of the wealthy Callias, which places him at the edges of the city's intellectual circles without ever quite commanding them. His defining trait is a willingness to be refuted: he proposes that names are purely conventional, then follows Socrates through a dizzying chain of word-origins without flinching. That stubborn openness makes him the ideal foil in the Cratylus, where the argument over whether language carries truth or merely custom needs someone unafraid to lose.

Lysimachus

supporting

Also known as Socrates Lysimachus

Lysimachus belongs to the generation of Athenians whose fathers were famous and whose own lives feel diminished by comparison. He and his friend Melesias approach Socrates with a practical worry — how to raise their boys well — but their real anxiety is that they themselves never learned what virtue is. That gap between public standing and private uncertainty drives the Laches, where two old men ask two generals to define courage and discover that neither can.

Melesias

supporting

Also known as Aristides Melesias

Melesias stands beside Lysimachus as one of two older Athenians who feel their sons deserve better teachers than they themselves had. His concern is not abstract: he wants Thucydides to grow into something he never became, and that quiet regret sharpens every question he asks. In the Laches, his presence turns a debate about definitions into something more urgent — a reckoning with what fathers owe their children and what they cannot give.

Nicias

supporting

Also known as The more enlightened Nicias, Nicias Laches

Nicias arrives in the Laches as one of Athens' most respected commanders, a man whose caution is both his strength and his reputation. Where his fellow general Laches speaks from instinct and battlefield experience, Nicias reaches for definitions — courage as a kind of knowledge — and his precision reveals a mind that trusts theory more than impulse. His exchange with Socrates exposes the tension between a soldier's life and a philosopher's demand for exactness, a tension that will shadow his career.

Laches

supporting

Laches is a soldier's soldier — direct, impatient with cleverness, and proud of a life spent in the field rather than the assembly. He agrees to define courage but keeps running into the problem that his examples are not definitions, and his frustration with Socrates is genuine and revealing. His willingness to keep talking anyway, even as his confidence erodes, makes him the emotional center of the Laches: a man discovering that experience alone cannot answer the questions he thought he had settled.

Charmides

supporting

Also known as the beautiful Charmides, the virtuous Charmides, Dialogues Charmides

Charmides enters the dialogue like a vision — every head turns, lovers trail behind him, and Socrates admits he is undone by the sight. He is Critias's cousin and Plato's relative, a youth whose beauty and lineage have always preceded him, and who now must speak for himself. When Socrates draws him into a conversation about self-knowledge, his initial confidence gives way to genuine perplexity, and that shift — from being admired to being questioned — is what makes him memorable.

Critias

supporting

Critias moves through the early dialogues as a polished aristocrat with a taste for poetry, politics, and definitions, and in the Charmides he presses Socrates to say what temperance really is. His confidence in his own wisdom sits uneasily beside his willingness to let Socrates lead, hinting at a man who wants mastery without submitting to the discipline of philosophy. He matters because his presence shadows the whole Socratic circle: the relative who heard the arguments and, in the end, helped destroy the city that produced them.

Chaerephon

supporting

Chaerephon is the kind of companion who runs ahead of the conversation, eager to fetch Socrates, introduce strangers, and keep the argument moving. His famous visit to the oracle, asking whether anyone was wiser than Socrates, gives the Apology its starting point and turns a private friendship into a public provocation. He matters because his impulsive loyalty shows the social texture of Socratic philosophy: it was not a solitary pursuit but a circle of friends who dragged one another into questions.

Apollodorus

supporting

Also known as Apollodorus of Cyzicus

Apollodorus walks the road to Athens retelling the speeches on love, insisting he knows them by heart because he has made it his daily business to know everything Socrates says and does. He calls his former self wretched and pities his companions for thinking they are doing something when they are doing nothing, a mixture of zeal and self-reproach that makes him both comic and touching. He matters because his obsessive memory preserves the Symposium for us, and his conversion from aimless businessman to philosopher shows what Socratic eros can do to a life.

Simmias

supporting

Also known as Simmias the Theban, the Theban

Simmias arrives at Socrates' cell with his friend Cebes, bringing Pythagorean interests and a willingness to argue rather than merely mourn. He offers the image of the soul as a harmony of the body, then worries that this analogy may not support immortality, showing a mind that would rather follow the argument than accept comfort. He matters because his objections force Socrates to refine the case for the soul's survival, turning the last hours into a genuine philosophical inquiry rather than a farewell.

Cebes

supporting

Cebes sits with Simmias in the Phaedo, steady and persistent, and puts the objection that even if the soul survives many bodies it might still wear out in the end. His weaver analogy is cautious rather than hostile, the question of a man who wants the argument to hold before he stakes his life on it. He matters because his resistance keeps Socrates honest, and his eventual willingness to follow the reasoning shows what philosophical friendship looks like at the edge of death.

Echecrates

supporting

Also known as Phlius Echecrates

Echecrates opens the Phaedo by pressing Phaedo for the whole story, admitting he has heard only vague reports and wants to know exactly what was said. His eagerness is the frame that turns a private death into a shared inheritance, and his Pythagorean background gives him a stake in the question of the soul's fate. He matters because his request makes the reader a listener too, drawing us into the room where Socrates argues and dies.

Xenophon

minor

Also known as Xenophon Memorabilia

Historian and soldier who wrote about Socrates.

Aristotle

minor

Also known as Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle De coelo, Aristotle Politics, Aristotle Politics VII, Aristotle Ethics X

Philosopher frequently cited in the introductory material.

Homer

minor

Also known as Friend Homer, Homer of Tragedy, the divine Homer

Epic poet frequently quoted and discussed by Socrates.

Hesiod

minor

Also known as the noble Hesiod

Poet and contemporary of Homer, cited in dialogues.

Pindar

minor

Lyric poet whose works are referenced in the dialogues.

Anaxagoras

minor

Pre-Socratic philosopher whose ideas are discussed by Socrates.

Heracleitus

minor

Pre-Socratic philosopher known for the doctrine of flux.

Protagoras

supporting

Protagoras is the professional teacher of wisdom whose arrival in Athens draws Hippocrates before dawn and Socrates along as wary chaperone. He trades in the most dangerous commodity of all — the shaping of souls — and charges accordingly, which makes him both magnetic and suspect. His calm claim to teach virtue forces the dialogue's central question: can excellence be taught at all, or is he selling something he cannot deliver?

Prodicus

minor

Also known as Prodicus the Cean

Sophist known for precise linguistic distinctions.

Polus

supporting

Also known as the youthful Polus, noble Polus, Socrates Polus, Whereupon Polus

Polus is the youthful understudy in Callicles' house, quick to volunteer when Gorgias has spoken long enough, certain his own answers will satisfy. He mistakes rhetorical skill for wisdom and treats argument as performance, which is precisely the opening Socrates exploits. His impatience to score points against the older man makes him the first casualty of the dialogue's long examination of what rhetoric actually is.

Cephalus

minor

Also known as the aged Cephalus

Wealthy elder who discusses justice in Republic Book I.

Polemarchus

minor

Also known as Polemarchus he

Son of Cephalus who inherits the discussion on justice.

Thrasymachus

supporting

Thrasymachus bursts into the Republic's conversation like a wild beast, impatient with polite hedging and determined to say what everyone else only whispers. He argues that justice is a convention imposed by the powerful for their own benefit, and that the truly strong man ignores it. His challenge forces Socrates to move beyond definitions and defend justice as a good in itself — the question that drives the entire work.

Glaucon

supporting

Glaucon is the young Athenian who refuses to be satisfied with easy praise of justice and instead revives Thrasymachus' hardest challenge in his own voice. He wants to hear justice honored for itself, stripped of reputation and consequence, and he is willing to argue the unjust life's case to get there. His insistence turns the Republic from a definition game into a founding of cities and souls.

Adeimantus

supporting

Adeimantus joins Glaucon in demanding that Socrates defend justice without appealing to the rewards of reputation that parents and poets dangle before the young. He is the more patient of the two brothers, but his challenge cuts deeper: if justice is praised only for its consequences, what reason remains to be just when no one sees? His question shapes the Republic's turn toward the soul's own order as the answer.

Protarchus

supporting

Also known as Protarchus Socrates

Protarchus takes up the case his older companion Philebus abandons, arguing that pleasure is what all living things pursue and the good itself. He is less doctrinaire than his predecessor, willing to follow Socrates into the difficult territory of one and many, and his openness makes genuine inquiry possible. His willingness to concede points without surrendering the thesis keeps the Philebus a conversation rather than a lecture.

Philebus

supporting

Also known as the Philebus, Socrates Philebus

Philebus opens the dialogue by handing his position to Protarchus and letting others fight for it, a move that reveals both his certainty and his reluctance to defend it under pressure. His wager—that pleasure, not wisdom, is what every living thing pursues—sets the terms of the entire inquiry and gives Socrates a worthy target. Whether he is right matters less than what his challenge forces the company to examine: the kinds of pleasure, the kinds of knowledge, and what a genuinely good life would require.

Athenian Stranger

major

Also known as Stranger, the Eleatic Stranger, Athenian Stranger, Stranger Excellent, Stranger Strange, Stranger Carding, Stranger Anyone, Stranger Reflect, Stranger Such a one, the Eleatic stranger, the philosophical stranger

He arrives as a visitor among Cretans and Spartans, yet quickly becomes the guiding voice, drawing out his companions' institutions and then pressing them to justify what they have always taken for granted. His method is patient and digressive, but beneath it lies a conviction that law must be grounded in reason and reverence for the divine, not merely custom. He matters because he turns a casual pilgrimage into a sustained inquiry into how human beings should live together—and whether anyone can say.

Megillus

supporting

Also known as Megillus O Athenian Stranger, O Megillus, Megillus Stranger, the Lacedaemonian Megillus, Megillus Heaven, Megillus Impossible, Megillus Good, Megillus Dear Cleinias

Megillus represents the Spartan way of life at its most dignified: terse, disciplined, and suspicious of long speeches, yet willing to hear them when the occasion demands. His instinct is to defend his ancestral lawgiver against criticism, and he bristles when the Athenian questions Spartan institutions, especially regarding women. He matters because his resistance tests the Athenian's arguments in real time, showing how hard it is to move a good man from the laws he was raised to revere.

Cleinias

supporting

Also known as Cleinias of Cnosus, the Cretan Cleinias, Cleinias Excellent

Cleinias brings the perspective of a man who will have to implement whatever is decided, which makes him both more receptive to the Athenian's ideas and more insistent on their feasibility. He is pious, traditional, and genuinely curious, but he also gently checks Megillus when Spartan pride threatens to derail the conversation. He matters because he is the dialogue's hinge between theory and practice: the one who must decide whether the city being described in words can ever exist on Cretan soil.

Diotima

supporting

Also known as Diotima of Mantineia

Diotima appears in the Symposium only through Socrates' recollection, yet her voice reshapes the entire dialogue, replacing the flattery of lovers with a ladder of ascent from beautiful bodies to Beauty itself. She is a woman speaking with authority in a room of men, and her teaching is as demanding as it is strange: love is lack, pregnancy, and the desire to give birth in beauty. She matters because she gives Socrates the argument that turns a drinking party's speeches about love into a philosophical ascent toward what truly is.

Menexenus

supporting

Also known as the more talkative Menexenus, O Menexenus, Menexenus Truly, Socrates O Menexenus

Menexenus is the kind of young man Socrates enjoys teasing: earnest, impressionable, and pleased to be included in serious conversation. When he asks Socrates to deliver a funeral speech, he gets more than he bargained for—a rhetoric-soaked oration that Socrates claims to have learned from Aspasia. He matters because his request lets Plato stage a dazzling parody of Athenian self-congratulation, and because his youth embodies the city's future, the very thing the speech claims to honor.

Lysis

supporting

Also known as grandfather Lysis

Lysis is the beloved of the excitable Hippothales, who has been serenading the whole palaestra with verses about him until everyone's ears ache. Modest and quick, he is drawn into Socrates' questioning about friendship, only to find that liking someone and being liked may not be the same thing at all. His easy confidence in his own friendships becomes the raw material for a puzzle that neither he nor his admirers can easily solve, making him the quiet center of the dialogue's early and middle movement.

Hippothales

minor

Also known as O Hippothales

Lover of Lysis who sets up the conversation.

Meletus

minor

Also known as Friend Meletus

Prosecutor of Socrates in the Apology.

Anytus

minor

Powerful Athenian who prosecutes Socrates.

Lycon

minor

One of Socrates' accusers in the Apology.

Eryxias

minor

Character in the spurious dialogue Eryxias.

Erasistratus

minor

Character in the spurious dialogue Eryxias.

Antiphon

minor

Also known as Antiphon of Cephisus, Antiphon the Rhamnusian

Brother of Plato who recounts the Parmenides.

Pythodorus

minor

Follower of Zeno who narrates the Parmenides.

Zeno

minor

Eleatic philosopher known for paradoxes, appears in Parmenides.

Young Socrates

supporting

Also known as Young Socrates True, Young Socrates Impossible, the younger Socrates

This younger Socrates appears among Plato's later dialogues, a figure whose first taste of dialectic has left him delighted and relentless. He turns every conversation into a hunt, rolling many things into one and splitting one into many, puzzling himself before he puzzles anyone else. His exuberance is both charming and alarming, a portrait of philosophy before it learned restraint, and he matters because he shows what the examined life looks like when it is still a young man's fever.

Empedocles

minor

Pre-Socratic philosopher and poet cited in the dialogues.

Democritus

minor

Atomist philosopher mentioned in the introductory material.

Hippocrates

minor

Young Athenian who wishes to study with Protagoras.

Cleitophon

minor

Minor interlocutor who challenges Socrates in the Republic.

Euclid

minor

Also known as Euclides

Megarian philosopher who narrates the Theaetetus.

Terpsion

minor

Friend of Euclid who hears the Theaetetus narrative.

Aristodemus

minor

Follower of Socrates who attends the Symposium.

Xanthippe

minor

Socrates' wife, mentioned in the Phaedo.

Critobulus

minor

Son of Crito and friend of Socrates.

Simonides

minor

Also known as Simonides of Ceos, Simonides Socrates

Poet whose sayings are analyzed in the Protagoras.

Theages

minor

Young man who seeks to study with Socrates.