ABSTRACT
Both Sophokles’s Philoktetes and Plato’s Lysis – the former contemporaneously, the latter retrospectively – reflect upon issues relevant to the aristocratic coup in Athens of 411 BCE and its aftermath: the education of the aristocratic young, as well as the personal and political entanglements of friendship and erotic love. This essay explores Sophokles’s and Plato’s use of mythical and historical contrafactuals in their respective dramatisations of education; as well, I argue that contrafactuals mark the generic possibilities and limits of both tragedy and of Sokratic dialogue.
