 It is true that in the Republic Plato has the following advice for philosophers: “like someone who takes refuge under a little wall from a storm of dust or hail driven by the wind, the philosopher—seeing others filled with lawlessness—is satisfied if he can somehow lead his present life free from injustice and impious acts and depart from it with good hope, blameless and content” (496d–e) (unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Plato are from the translations included in Plato (1997)). He was certainly very bitter about Socrates’ fate. In his controversial interpretation Strauss (1964) argues that in Plato’s view the philosopher should stay disconnected from society. This interpretation is too extreme. Plato did not abandon Socrates’ credo, that the philosopher has a duty towards his fellow-citizens who do not devote their lives to philosophy. For him philosophy has a civic dimension. The one who makes it outside the cave should not forget about those who are still down there and believe that the shadows they see there are real beings. The philosopher should try to transmit his knowledge and his wisdom to the others, and he knows that he has a difficult mission. But Plato was not willing to go as far as Socrates did. He preferred to address the public at large through his written dialogues rather than conducting dialogues in the agora. He did not write abstruse philosophical treatises but engaging philosophical dialogues meant to appeal to a less philosophically inclined audience. The dialogues are, most of the time, prefaced by a sort of mise en scène in which the reader learns who the participants to the dialogue are, when, where and how they presently met, and what made them start their dialogue. The participants are historical and fictional characters. Whether historical or fictional, they meet in historical or plausible settings, and the prefatory mises en scène contain only some incidental anachronisms. Plato wanted his dialogues to look like genuine, spontaneous dialogues accurately preserved. How much of these stories and dialogues is fictional? It is hard to tell, but he surely invented a great deal of them. References to traditional myths and mythical characters occur throughout the dialogues. However, starting with the Protagoras and Gorgias, which are usually regarded as the last of his early writings, Plato begins to season his dialogues with self-contained, fantastical narratives that we usually label his ‘myths’. His myths are meant, among other things, to make philosophy more accessible.