‘They say, too, that when Socrates heard Plato reading the Lysis, he said “Heracles! How many lies the young man tells about me!” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophersiii.35) This apocryphal story – apocryphal, if only because Socrates was surely dead before the Lysis was written – might perhaps be taken as an ancient counterpart of one typical modern reaction to the Lysis: that it misrepresents Socrates. In particular, so the modern story goes, it misrepresents him by making him into a kind of sophist, the sort that uses any means down to and including mere trickery in order to defeat his opponents (in this case a pair of teenagers; a particularly pointless and silly exercise, then). Sometimes the dialogue has been declared not to be by Plato at all, so bad the arguments seemed to be; and even if the twentieth century tended to back off from that view, the general view was, and still remains, that the Lysis is not a philosophical success. Its ancient subtitle was ‘On friendship’ – or rather ‘On philia’, which already has wider connotations; on that subject, says the standard modern reading, what little the Lysis has to tell us, and so far as we can make it out, is mostly false.

The outcome of the present book is an absolute and complete rejection of that standard verdict – which, despite what may or may not be implied by any whisperings recorded by Diogenes, was certainly not standard in antiquity (a thesis for which we provide some evidence in our Epilogue).