The works in this group (to be discussed in alphabetical order below) represent Plato’s reception of the legacy of the historical Socrates; many feature his characteristic activity, elenchos, or testing of putative experts. The early dialogues serve well as an introduction to the corpus. They are short and entertaining and fairly accessible, even to readers with no background in philosophy. Indeed, they were probably intended by Plato to draw such readers into the subject. In them, Socrates typically engages a prominent contemporary about some facet of human excellence (virtue) that he is presumed to understand, but by the end of ...(100 of 10147 words)