Plato's Dialogues: A Form of Drama

We need to speak of Plato's Socrates. It's a weird fact and hard to get our heads around today, but the platonic dialogues are peopled with many real historical folk,. But Plato makes them say all sorts of stuff, which they probably wouldn't have said in reality. The exact degree to which this is the case remains frustratingly unprovable. We shall return to this dialogue and its esoteric afterlife in greater depth when we discuss Platonisms of later antiquity.