 Dates and historical background. The dramatic date appears to be before the birth of Plato. The main characters aside from Socrates are Charmides (a teenager at the time) and Plato’s relative Critias. By the time Plato wrote the dialogue, both men had been killed in the battle of the Piraeus, in 403BCE. Critias had been the leader of the group known to their enemies as the Thirty Tyrants, and Charmides had been among the extended leadership established by the Thirty. The excesses of the Thirty, who had conducted a violent and rapacious reign of terror in 404–03, provide an historical counterpoint to the declared interest of these men in sophrosune almost thirty years earlier.