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Dramatis Personæ

• Socrates
• Phaedrus
• Lysias (in absentia)

Lysias was one of the three sons of Cephalus, the patriarch whose home is the setting for Plato's Republic. Lysias was perhaps the most famous "logo-graphos" - lit. "argument writer" - in Athens during the time of Plato. Lysias was a rhetorician and a sophist whose best-known extant work is a defense speech, "On the Murder of Eratosthenes." The speech is a masterpiece in which a man who murdered his wife's lover claims that the laws of Athens required him to do it. The outcome of this speech is unknown.