B. is Professor Emerita of Classics at the University of Minnesota. She has had long-standing interests in Greek philosophy and tragedy. She has examined closely the topic of friendship, including some unexpected twists. She published Murder among Friends: Violation of Philia in Greek Tragedy (2000) and a range of articles dealing with love, poetry and myth in Plato, Aristotle and Greek tragedy. She is thus well prepared to take on the conjunct themes involved in ‘Socrates’ daimonic art', the ‘love for wisdom’, with a detailed textual analysis of Alcibiades I, Lysis, Symposium and Phaedrus.

B. carefully fuses her consideration of the literary aspects of the Platonic works with her analysis of the arguments. It was not that long ago that the majority of Anglo-American philosophers dismissed analysts of the dramatic elements of the dialogues as literary critics rather than philosophers – or, for that matter, ‘Straussians’. They neglected the ‘meat of the argument’ and were just chewing on the ‘bones’ or perhaps the ‘skin’. But is the ‘skin’ not the outer layer we must penetrate in order to find what lies beneath; and is the ‘bone’ not the solid structure and arrangement upon which all the argument has its place? The day of belittling the literary and dramatic seems to be past; and B. illustrates that we are the richer for it.

In the introduction B. lays out the guiding principles of her investigation and identifies the following components of Socrates' daimonic art: (1) his devotion to Eros and ta erôtica, i.e. wisdom, beauty and other good things which are the objects of his desire; (2) his recognition of what he lacks (wisdom, beauty and other good things); which leads to (3) his passionate desire for what he lacks; (4) he is marvellously skilled (deinos) in searching for what he lacks; (5) and is skilled to help others to attain as much of wisdom as they can (p. 6). This provides B. with a matrix upon which she can chart the development of Socrates' erotic art in the four dialogues dealing with erôs or philia or both.

In the Alcibiades I we observe how Alcibiades is transformed from an arrogant boaster full of himself to someone who recognises that he lacks the knowledge necessary to gain what he so much desires (power), which leads him to the desire to become like Socrates. Early in the dialogue Socrates makes it clear that Alcibiades needs his help to get what he wants and that the desire to rule over others requires philosophical support, and this turns out to be nothing other than a quest for self-knowledge and self-care. To effect this transformation Socrates makes Alcibiades feel shame at his lack of knowledge of ignorance by accusing him of the greatest stupidity (118b), namely, thinking he knows when in fact he does not know. In the Lysis we are treated to a display of Socrates' skill in his discussion with two young boys about philia. In her discussion B. highlights that although the interlocutors do not arrive at a satisfactory definition of a friend (philos), it is clear that they do plenty of liking (philein), and that this feature especially needs to be presumed for Socrates' erotic art to work at all. In looking at these two aporetic dialogues that Socrates conducts with young interlocutors, it is noteworthy that in both cases he is dealing with ‘friendly’ companions, who like him, and he is thereby successful in persuading them also to like wisdom, i.e. to join him in his pursuit of what he is lacking.

In the Symposium B.'s argument reaches its crescendo: in her examination of Socrates' recounting of Diotima's teaching on erôs and Alcibiades' description of Socrates, she shows that ‘Socrates resembles both Erôs and Marsyas, daimôn and satyr, because he is a philosopher, who has the erotic, daimonic art’ (p. 195). After analysing the first five speeches, and establishing the various literary sources the speakers draw upon, she declares all of them to be suffering from amathia (ignorance), because they accept the ideas lifted from the poets uncritically. Socrates in contrast presents himself as puzzled and full of questions in response to Diotima's teaching about the ladder of love (206b). Like Eros, a daimôn, he occupies a position between amathia and sophia, aware of his lack and desiring to fulfil his needs, i.e. unlike the prophetess Diotima who is in possession of wisdom, he is a philosopher who desires wisdom, beauty and other good things. Alcibiades' description of Socrates as a Silenus figure confirms the identification of Socrates as an erotic daimôn.

The Phaedrus completes the picture of Socrates' success as a practitioner of daimonic art: here he is portrayed as most successful in seducing a friendly interlocutor to care as much about wisdom as he himself does, and to pass on this passion to others. What is most notable in B.'s interpretation of this dialogue is her analysis of the myth of the horses and the charioteer, which she traces back to Euripides' Hippolytus, where Hippolytus has to control a frightened team of horses to survive. B. takes that to be the paradigm case for creating psychic equilibrium; it is the task of the charioteer to find balance among the horses. The balance is tantamount to creating philia among the parts of the soul, which in turn enables the lover to display philia towards his beloved, the best relationship to obtain: to be friends engaging in philosophical discussion. It is almost like sublimating erôs by making its object not the other person but instead ta erôtica, wisdom and other good things. It is in the final chapter that B. reveals what she considers the greatest accomplishment of Socrates' art: the combining of erôs and philia. Throughout her examination of the Symposium she wonders about the role of interpersonal relationships in getting to the top of Diotima's ladder: the first couple of rungs involve a relationship with another person, but what about the top steps? In the Phaedrus it is clear, she thinks, that it is friendship which ought to govern the relation between lover and beloved, thus creating a mutual beneficial love, while erôs is directed to that which they are both lacking – and in the case of this dialogue it would be directed to the god they both followed.

A great virtue of this work is that B. is particularly detailed and thorough in tracing the themes under consideration – the daimonic, erôs, poetry, education and their relation to one another – though this sometimes results in repetition. Despite this, B. never clearly defines what she (or Plato) means by ‘wisdom’; she regularly has it as the object of erôs or philia, suggesting that philosophy is a philia of wisdom, but why not an erôs? B. is thorough and eminently fair in her utilisation of secondary sources, drawn from a wide array of scholarship. The book is a mine of reliable information for scholars working on any of the relevant themes.