Socrates and the youth are agreed that philosophy is to be studied, they
are not able to arrive at any certain result about the art which is to
teach it. This is a question which will hereafter be answered in the
Republic; as the conception of the kingly art is more fully developed in
the Politicus, and the caricature of rhetoric in the Gorgias.

The characters of the Dialogue are easily intelligible. There is Socrates
once more in the character of an old man; and his equal in years, Crito,
the father of Critobulus, like Lysimachus in the Laches, his fellow
demesman (Apol.), to whom the scene is narrated, and who once or twice
interrupts with a remark after the manner of the interlocutor in the
Phaedo, and adds his commentary at the end; Socrates makes a playful
allusion to his money-getting habits. There is the youth Cleinias, the
grandson of Alcibiades, who may be compared with Lysis, Charmides,
Menexenus, and other ingenuous youths out of whose mouths Socrates draws
his own lessons, and to whom he always seems to stand in a kindly and
sympathetic relation. Crito will not believe that Socrates has not
improved or perhaps invented the answers of Cleinias (compare Phaedrus).
The name of the grandson of Alcibiades, who is described as long dead,
(Greek), and who died at the age of forty-four, in the year 404 B.C.,
suggests not only that the intended scene of the Euthydemus could not have
been earlier than 404, but that as a fact this Dialogue could not have been
composed before 390 at the soonest. Ctesippus, who is the lover of
Cleinias, has been already introduced to us in the Lysis, and seems there
too to deserve the character which is here given him, of a somewhat
uproarious young man. But the chief study of all is the picture of the two
brothers, who are unapproachable in their effrontery, equally careless of
what they say to others and of what is said to them, and never at a loss.
They are 'Arcades ambo et cantare pares et respondere parati.' Some
superior degree of wit or subtlety is attributed to Euthydemus, who sees