 Plato’s so-called ‘Socratic’ dialogues share certain characteristics as a group. They are short interrogations by Socrates of the kind indicated in his explanation of his divine mission in the Apology. They seem designed to undermine unquestioned traditional views and values rather than to develop positive accounts, although they sometimes contain indications that seeming dead ends are not real dead ends. The positive accounts contained in the middle dialogues – the so-called ‘Platonic’ dialogues – that are grouped around the Republic – treat happiness in different ways as a state of perfection. The exact nature of this state is not easy to pinpoint, however, because it is based on metaphysical presuppositions that are, at least prima facie, both hazy and out of the realm of ordinary understanding. There is not, as there is in Aristotle, an explicit determination of happiness as a self-sufficient state of the active individual. Instead, at least in some texts, Plato’s moral ideals appear both austere and self-abnegating: The soul is to remain aloof from the pleasures of the body in the pursuit of higher knowledge, while communal life demands the subordination of individual wishes and aims to the common good. 