"This extraordinary new work" by the philosopher and author of Plato's Cratylus "has given us nothing less than a radically new Socrates" (Michael Naas, author of Plato and the Invention of Life).

Who is Socrates? While most readers know him as the central figure in Plato's work, he is hard to characterize. In this book, S. Montgomery Ewegen opens this long-standing and difficult question once again. Reading Socrates against a number of Platonic texts, Ewegen sets out to understand the way of Socrates.

Looking closely at the Socrates that emerges from the dramatic and philosophical contexts of Plato's works, Ewegen considers questions of withdrawal, retreat, powerlessness, poverty, concealment, and release and how they construct a new view of this powerful but strange and uncanny figure. Ewegen's withdrawn Socrates forever evades rigid interpretation and must instead remain a deep and insoluble question.