We have already made considerable use of the opening pages of the dialogue in analysing the rest: enough use, in fact, to make it unnecessary to provide any further justification for treating them as organically related to those other parts. Just because 203a–207b appears devoid of philosophical content, or at any rate of philosophical argument, a reader might be inclined to treat it merely as a kind of dramatic introduction, attractive in its own way but, in the end, dispensable, so that one could begin reading at 207b8 without losing anything essential. However our analysis has shown that the passage not only looks forward (introduces us), in a variety of ways, to the following conversation between the three protagonists, but is actually of a piece with it. The present short chapter, in which we revisit 203a–207b, is designed mainly to confirm and deepen that point.

What most of all ties this opening passage, 203a1–207b7, to the main part of the dialogue is the way the conclusion of that main part, at 222a6–7, is addressed (as it were) to Hippothales. We have suggested more than once that the whole of 207b–222a by this simple device becomes the promised demonstration to Hippothales of ‘the things a lover should say about a beloved to him or to others’ (205a1–2). Originally it seemed as if the demonstration extended only as far as Socrates' humbling of Lysis and the supposed demolition of his claim that his parents love him, in 207d–210d.