Tarrant examines whether the relationship between Socrates and his young followers could ever have been treated by Plato in the same fashion as it is treated in the Platonic Theages, where the terminology of synousia is repeatedly applied to it. In minimizing the part played by knowledge and maximizing the role of the divine and of eros, the work creates a "Socrates" who conforms to the educational ideology of the Academy of Polemo in the period 314-270 BC.