This volume investigates the Early Neoplatonists’ conception of Socrates and of his status and role in Plato's dialogues, and his significance to them. Ironically, in this last regard, while the volume states as one of its principal aims to debunk the ‘undeserving characterization of the Neoplatonic project as “one without Socrates”’ (p. 5), or one which regards Socrates as ‘a mere literary device’ (p. 14), the overall portrait that emerges from the volume seems almost to invert Socrates’ and Plato's significance for the Neoplatonists, relegating Plato mainly to the role of a masterful literary and pedagogic packager of his teacher's mission and message – even and including in those dialogues where Socrates exits the Platonic literary stage (cf. p. 105). This said, however, the volume's methodology is predominantly synthetic, not analytic: articulating how the Neoplatonists understood and conceived of Socrates and of Plato's dialogues from their own philosophical standpoint, not (in general) how they may have derived their particular doctrines and world view from the dialogues. The ten papers comprising the volume tend to overlap, at times substantially, to a large extent because of the limited number of texts available on which to ground their exegesies. Their overlapping accounts do, however, reinforce and corroborate one another's principal conclusions and arguments; and each adds unique insight to the overall project.

The opening paper by G. Roskam introduces the theme of Socrates’ historical mission and dialogic role to be one of ‘purifying power and providential care’ (p. 27) for his students and interlocutors, seeking to effect ‘a lifting up of the soul out of sensible things’ (p. 33) towards the intelligible. The following three papers (by J. Finamore, C. Addey and C.-P. Manolea) refine this Neoplatonic perspective on Socrates with special focus on the Neoplatonists’ acceptance and explications of Socrates’ daimon. Two central themes here are the consistency and coherence of Socrates’ daimon and its function with Socratic rationalism, and the uniquely special ontological status of his daimon – so that, for example, while (for Apuleius) ‘we all contain a daimon in ourselves, our intellect’, Socrates’ daimon uniquely belongs to ‘a superior class of daimons that has never been in a human body’ (p. 41) and it asserts itself when Socrates’ ‘wisdom is insufficient to give him an indication of the correct action to take’ (p. 42) even though he uniquely ‘had such great wisdom that he was coequal to the gods’ (p. 43).

The theme of Socrates’ pre-eminent character and status for the Neoplatonists – as in effect and indeed the wisest of men, as uniquely Intellect's avatar on earth – is further bolstered by M. Lawerence's explication of some Neoplatonists’ treatment of moral weakness (akrasia) in light of the Socratic doctrine that we cannot knowingly err, where (I take Lawrence's explication to imply) Socrates is understood to propound this doctrine from and with respect to his own unique and uniquely ‘wise’ and ‘purified’ standpoint. So, in this way too, it seems ‘in the Neoplatonic view, [it is] Socrates [who] becomes the fullest culmination of the philosophical life’ (p. 58). Also, though, Lawrence's paper is one of the rare places in the volume where the intervening centuries between Plato's dialogues and the Early, or Late-Antique, Neoplatonists are brought into play as influencing their understanding and perspective on Socrates, his mission and his message.

Another potential shortcoming of the volume is its generally simplistic reading of the Socratic elenchus – Socrates’ reasoned engagements with his students and interlocutors. Papers by L. and M. Griffin broaden the investigation from the Neoplatonists’ conception of Socrates as such to the dialogues in their entireties, wherein Socrates’ role may be paramount but ‘the Neoplatonists often avoided conflating the personality of Socrates with Plato … [whose] voice [is] not solely identifiable with Socrates’ (p. 81). Rather, for example, ‘[f]or Proclus, to understand a Platonic dialogue one must examine and understand all of its various parts [including all its participants], recognizing their relation and their contribution to the whole’ (p. 83). An awkward moment does occur when Griffin continues developing its argument for what he characterises as the Neoplatonists’ ‘hypostasizing’ of Socrates in (all of) the dialogues after quoting Proclus identifying in the Parmenides Parmenides as the one who ‘should be ranked as an analogue to the unparticipated and divine Intellect’ (p. 104), though Proclus then waffles on this when trying to decide Socrates’ status in relation to the dialogue.

Papers by J.M. Ambury and F. Renaud somewhat continue the theme that Socrates is but one part, or character, in the Neoplatonists’ conception of Plato's dialogue; but they nevertheless focus mainly on Socrates’ elenchus strategy, as leading his interlocutors (for example, Alcibiades) to see that ‘knowledge of intelligible being is possible only for those that first know themselves’ (p. 117) and as primarily directed towards refuting false opinions or revealing contradictions in an interlocutor's thinking (p. 122). A richer, more nuanced understanding of Socrates’ elenchus and of Plato's role not merely in reporting it but in understanding it would be one way to reinstate Plato's primacy in relation to the Neoplatonists’ conception of Socrates.

An example is Thrasymachus’ account of justice in the Republic, which is not merely refuted or shown to be inconsistent. Rather, it in fact is correct in identifying justice as a human benefit having special relevance to life in the polis and which, importantly, leads Socrates first to search for justice in the polis – even though Thrasymachus’ account is incorrect regarding whom it benefits (principally the soul, derivatively the polis’ citizens) and how (principally when a soul's ‘parts’ each functions properly and appropriately, derivatively when a polis’ citizens – its artisans, rulers and auxiliaries – are all thusly virtuous). Here, it indeed may be Socrates whose wisdom and noetic inspiration guides the interlocution towards the dialogue's truth regarding justice, but perhaps it is Plato who not only reports that truth and how Socrates arrives at it but who fully understands, for example, Thrasymachus’ contribution – his own status and role in the ‘cosmos’ of the dialogue – and Plato does so without need for a daimon of his own, or needing to be identified or hypostasised with respect to any particular principle or component in the Neoplatonists’ conception of the real cosmos and its metaphysical structure and causes.

On this approach Socrates may indeed be the ‘wisest’ of men by virtue of his unique relation to (or even identification with) the Neoplatonists’ Intellect, but perhaps Plato nevertheless remains for them the more knowledgeable in his all-inclusive understanding of all ‘cosmic’ matters (of not only the intelligible but also the sensible, everything in between, and their relations and structure) – an approach which may also be hinted at in the concluding paper by T., who articulates the ‘many voices’ which Plato (the gifted and early-on, when still known as Agathon, successful tragic poet) gives to Socrates in the dialogues and argues that the Neoplatonists recognised differences especially between Socrates’ more plain-speaking and elenchtic prose and when he ‘moved into poetic or mythic mode, or into some other kind of inspired speech’ (p. 153) and they accorded greater significance and insight to the latter.