 The connection—amounting to an identification—between the art of discussion and the art of loving boys explored in the Lysis allows us to see why Plato’s own explorations of love invariably involve an exploration of discussion too—love-talk in the Lysis, symposiastic speech-making and drama in the Symposium, oratory and rhetoric in the Phaedrus. Loving boys correctly, after all, is—in part at least—just a matter of knowing how to talk to them, of how to persuade them to love you back.