Visiting museums has been difficult this year, so it is with even greater longing that I often think these days of what is, to me, one of the most moving objects to have survived from antiquity: the gravestone of ‘Lysis, son of Democrates, of the deme Aexone’ (to cite the inscription), dating from around 350 BC and preserved in the Museum of Piraeus.

I find it moving because the handsome bearded man on the relief, depicted together with his son and perhaps his daughter, is none other than the Lysis from Plato’s eponymous dialogue. It is wonderful, among so many sculptures and gravestones in museums, suddenly to see the face of someone we feel we know thanks to Plato’s superb penmanship. Archaeologists tell us that the gravestone is modest for its time, suggesting that the family had fallen on hard times after the Peloponnesian War.

I’d love to extend a dinner invitation to Lysis and satisfy my curiosity: how does he look back on his life? What was it like to grow up in the fifth century BCE among the Athenian jeunesse dorée and to talk to Socrates about friendship (the topic of Lysis)?  What was it like to read his ‘own’ Platonic dialogue, and did it make him a celebrity? Did Plato do him justice? And – after a few glasses of wine – did he ever become the lover of Hippothales, who Plato says could not stop talking about him and composed love poems for him?

Dr. Luuk Huitink is Assistant Professor in Ancient Greek at the University of Amsterdam. He is co-author of the books Xenophon: Anabasis Book III and The Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek, both published by Cambridge University Press.