Abaris the Hyperborean: a legendary shamanistic healer from the far north. The Hyperboreans were supposed to live ‘beyond the north wind (Boreas)’ in a kind of magical paradise sacred to Apollo.
Aeneas: a Trojan hero from the legendary Trojan War, later credited with the foundation of Rome.
Aleuadae: see ARISTIPPUS.
Anacreon: a famous sixth-century lyric poet, from the island of Teos. Over 150 fragments of his work survive, in various metres.
Anytus: a prominent democratic politician at the end of the fifth century, he is best known as one of the three prosecutors of Socrates at his trial in 399—so it is perhaps not surprising that Plato’s portrait is barbed.
Aristeides: a famous Athenian statesman, prominent along with his political rival Themistocles in the second Persian invasion of 480–479, and called ‘the Just’ for his equitable treatment of Athenian allies.
Aristippus: from Larisa in Thessaly, a friend and the lover of Meno. He was due to join Cyrus on the ill-fated expedition to Persia, and so features briefly in Xenophon’s The Expedition of Cyrus. He was a member of the Aleuadae clan, the leading family of Larisa.
Chaerephon: a constant friend and a disciple of Socrates whose devotion bordered on fanaticism (hence his ‘madness’—Charmides 153b), best known for the story of his visit to the Delphic oracle to ask whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates (Plato, Apology 20e–21a). He was exiled during the junta of the Thirty Tyrants (404–403 BCE.), returned to Athens after they had been driven out, and died in about 401.
Charmides: the uncle of Plato and a recurrent figure in his dialogues, he became a confirmed oligarch who died fighting against the democratic counter-revolution after the Thirty Tyrants had taken over the government of Athens in 404 BCE. During this brief period of oligarchy, Charmides was one of the ten-man committee which administered Athens’ port, Piraeus.
Cleophantus: son of Themistocles, and famous for being a spoiled brat.
Critias: the leader of the Thirty Tyrants whose brutal oligarchic regime in Athens was a cacophonous coda at the end of the Peloponnesian War. He died during the democratic counter-revolution of 403, after only a few months in power. He was the uncle and guardian of Charmides, and a composer of tragedies.
Critias the son of Dropides: the great-great-grandfather of CRITIAS, and a contemporary of SOLON.
Ctesippus: a young Athenian, and part of the inner circle of Socrates’ followers, if his presence at Socrates’ death is anything to go by (Plato, Phaedo 59b). He also plays a part in Plato’s dialogue Euthydemus.
Cydias: a little-known lyric poet. The lines paraphrased and partially quoted at Charmides 155d constitute his longest, and perhaps his only fragment. He may have come from the town of Hermione in the Argolis area of the Peloponnese.
Daedalus: a legendary sculptor, creator (most famously) of the labyrinth in Knossos, the wings on which he and his son Icarus flew from Crete, and numerous statues which were said to be so lifelike that they could move.
Damon: a prominent Athenian Sophist in the middle of the fifth century, and a personal friend and adviser of Pericles, the leading statesman of the era. He was particularly famous for his musical teaching (about which we can do little more than conjecture now), and had studied under the most famous teacher of the previous generation, Agathocles (also mentioned at Protagoras 316e).
Darius: the name of several Achaemenid rulers of the Persian empire. Before or during Socrates’ time, there had been Darius I (522–486), the invader of Greece in 490, and Darius II (424–405).
Empedocles: from Acragas in Sicily, a prominent fifth-century philosopher, scientist, and shaman.
Eudorus: an otherwise unknown wrestling coach.
Gorgias: c.480–376 BCE., from Leontini in Sicily, one of the most prominent members of the Sophistic movement. He specialized in the budding art of rhetoric (Meno 95c), in which he was a great innovator. Although many elements of his style seem florid and artificial to us today, he appears to have dazzled his contemporaries.
Hera: the divine wife of Zeus, king of gods and men. Her chief provinces were royalty, childbirth, and marriage.
Heracles: the legendary son of Zeus, famous for his civilizing labours, who transcended his mortal nature to become a god.
Hesiod: fl. c.700 BCE.; considered the second epic poet of Greece, after HOMER. His Theogony orders the gods into rationalistic genealogies and recounts stories about many of them, while Works and Days is full of practical and moral advice on daily life for the peasant farmer.
Hippothales: a youngish Athenian at the time of Lysis; nothing is known of him beyond his presence in this dialogue.
Homer: fl. c.750; the greatest epic poet of Greece. His Iliad sings of the death and glory of the legendary Trojan War, while his Odyssey recounts the fanciful and marvellous adventures of one Greek hero, Odysseus, returning from the war to his homeland.
Ismenias: a democrat and leader of Thebes at the end of the fifth and beginning of the fourth century BCE.
Laches: a prominent Athenian general and political conservative during the early part of the Peloponnesian War, he was killed at the Battle of Mantinea in 418.
Lamachus: one of the leading Athenian generals in the Peloponnesian War, and one of Nicias’ colleagues on the expedition to Sicily, where he lost his life in 414.
Lysimachus: a wealthy but undistinguished Athenian nobleman. His son Aristeides was for a short while a member of Socrates’ circle, but left (according to Plato, at Theaetetus 150e–151a, imitated by ps.-Plato, Theages 130a–e) before reaping the full benefits. Born about 480 BCE., Lysimachus was still alive in 402, the dramatic date of Meno: see Meno 94a.
Lysis: a young aristocratic Athenian boy, aged about 12 at the time of this conversation with Socrates. As was usual in Athenian society, he was named after his paternal grandfather.
Melesias: virtually unknown apart from his mentions in Laches. His son Thucydides may have been an associate of Socrates (ps.-Plato, Theages 130a–b). Melesias himself was one of the moderate oligarchs who seized power in Athens in 411 and ruled for a few months as a Council of 400 members.
Menexenus: a young aristocratic Athenian associate of Socrates, cousin of Ctesippus, and the chief interlocutor of the dialogue Menexenus.
Meno: a young Thessalian aristocrat from Pharsalus, whose family had long had ties to Athens. Xenophon gives him a savage obituary (The Expedition of Cyrus 2.6.21–9), after his death during the campaign of the Persian prince Cyrus to wrest the throne of the Persian empire from his brother, as avaricious, scheming, self-interested, and lacking any sense of justice.
Miccus: the owner of the wrestling-school where the conversation of Lysis takes place, and otherwise unknown.
Nicias: an Athenian nobleman who combined enormous wealth with political and military caution, and died partly as a result of the latter trait during the catastrophic Athenian attempt to conquer Sicily in 415–413. His son Niceratus (Laches 200d) was put to death by the oligarchs who were briefly in control of Athens in 404 and 403.
Paralus: along with Xanthippus, the two legitimate sons of PERICLES, who also had a son by his non-Greek mistress Aspasia, and adopted both Alcibiades and his brother Cleinias. Both Paralus and Xanthippus died of the plague in 429 BCE.
Pericles: c.495–429, an outstanding statesman and the virtual ruler of supposedly democratic Athens from about 450 until his death from the plague.
Persephone: legendary daughter of Demeter and, as wife of Hades, queen of the underworld.
Pheidias: the most famous sculptor of fifth-century Greece, famed for his statue of Zeus in Olympia (one of the wonders of the ancient world) and in Athens especially for the statue of Athena Promachos on the Acropolis and the cult statue of Athena in the Parthenon. He was a close associate of Pericles, at whose instigation the great temples and memorials of classical Athens were built, and was the supervisor of the construction of the Parthenon.
Pindar: 518–c.440, from Cynoscephalae in Boeotia, the most famous lyric poet of ancient Greece. Quite a few of his poems survive, particularly those he was commissioned to write in celebration of athletic victories.
Polycrates: an Athenian democrat at the end of the fifth and beginning of the fourth centuries BCE. Some time early in the fourth century, he wrote a pamphlet attacking Socrates on political grounds. The pamphlet forms the background to much of the defence of Socrates in the first two chapters of Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates.
Prodicus: originally from the island of Ceos, Prodicus was one of the most famous of the itinerant Sophists who spent time in Athens. He was an atheist and a moralist, but was most famous for his work towards establishing what we might call the first Greek dictionary, especially by distinguishing near synonyms. Plato is generally more respectful of him than he is of most Sophists, though from time to time he gently mocks this aspect of his work – in this volume, at Charmides 163d and Meno 75e– and when he has Socrates claim to be the pupil of Prodicus (as at Meno 96d), this is certainly ironic.
Protagoras: from Abdera in northern Greece, the first and greatest Sophist (c.490–c.420 BCE). His views are extensively discussed by Plato in Protagoras and Theaetetus. An original thinker in many fields, he was a relativist, a humanist, a liberal political thinker, and an agnostic, but was most famous as a teacher of rhetoric.
Pyrilampes: a fifth-century Athenian aristocrat, famous for having introduced peacocks into Athens, which he brought back from a diplomatic mission to Persia. He became Plato’s stepfather when he married his niece, Plato’s mother Perictione.
Socrates: the constant protagonist of Plato’s dialogues, witty, wise, merciless with his interlocutors’ pretensions, and equipped with a devastating method for exposing flaws in their thinking. He was born in Athens in 469 BCE and was put to death by the restored democracy in 399 on the charges of irreligion and corrupting the young men of the city.
Solon: the Athenian lawgiver of the early sixth century, whom fourth-century Athenians looked back on as the founder of their democracy, though the system he established was actually a graduated timocracy: the wealthier one was, the more political power one could gain. Solon became one of the traditional Seven Sages of Greece, and many wise and pithy sayings were attributed to him. He was an excellent poet– poetry being in his day the only medium for didactic work– and he wrote poems to explain and justify his political policies as well as on lighter subjects. He was the remote ancestor of the family to which Critias, Charmides, and Plato himself belonged.
Stephanus: brother of Melesias, otherwise unknown.
Stesilaus: the teacher of the art of fighting in armour whose display occasions the conversation of Laches. He is otherwise unknown, but his subject was popular. At any rate, we know of others working in the same or similar fields at much the same time: the brothers Euthydemus and Dionysodorus (Plato, Euthydemus 271c–d; Xenophon, Memorabilia 3.1), and Phalinus (Xenophon, The Expedition of Cyrus 2.1.7).
Taureas: owner of a wrestling-ground, and wealthy enough to be required under Athenian law to finance the production of plays at a dramatic festival (Plutarch, Life of Alcibiades 16), but otherwise unknown. The wrestling-grounds and gymnasia of Athens were popular meeting-places for men of the leisured class.
Teiresias: legendary blind prophet, capable of understanding the language of birds and beasts as well as of predicting the future, whose adventures included a spell as a woman.
Themistocles: c.530–462 BCE. A great Athenian military commander during the second Persian War (490–489), and one of the statesmen chiefly responsible for establishing Athens’ potential for greatness afterwards.
Theognis: elegiac poet of the later sixth century BCE., from Megara. A large number of short poems or couplets survive under his name, but not all are genuine.
Thucydides: not to be confused with the historian, this Thucydides was one of the most important conservative politicians in Athens in the 440s, during the inexorable rise to power of his rival, PERICLES. His son Melesias features in Laches.
Xanthias: an otherwise unknown wrestling coach.
Xanthippus: see PARALUS.
Zalmoxis: a god of the Getae (a tribe from Thrace – roughly, Bulgaria and the bit of northern Greece just south of Bulgaria), who was said by Herodotus to have been originally a slave of the mystic Greek philosopher Pythagoras, from whom he learnt his shamanistic powers. He returned to his people, used his knowledge to become their king, and was later deified.
Zeus: the divine lord and father of gods and men.