In their screenplay for the entertaining film Shakespeare in Love, Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard create a fictional character, Viola de Lesseps, to serve as the love-interest who puts an end to the writer’s block that had been hindering the Bard’s progress on the composition of Romeo and Juliet. The love-interest in Armand D’Angour’s similarly entertaining Socrates in Love is the historical Aspasia of Miletus, who is imagined as changing the course of Western philosophy by transforming the young Socrates from “a man of action” into “a thinker” (35). The reader, however, must wait until p. 191 (“Enter Aspasia”) for the appearance of D’Angour’s leading lady. That appearance, which has been repeatedly foreshadowed, is brief and lasts only a dozen pages. Before that, we are given a detailed account of Socrates’ life. The account is designed to correct certain misperceptions—straw men include Aristophanes, Nietzsche and Gore Vidal (151-2, 170-1)—namely that Socrates was poor, congenitally ugly and devoted exclusively to intellectual pursuits. Rather, the “highly-sexed” (56) Socrates came from a reasonably well-off family of hoplite status (168), was an energetic dancer (163-5) and intrepid warrior (Chapter 2) and, at least in his youth, exhibited an unremarkable, if not downright handsome, appearance, such that the philosopher Archelaus chose the “physically impressive teenager” (124) as his paidika. Apart from D’Angour’s determination to downplay Socrates’ singular appearance (to which we will return), none of this is controversial. What is novel is the dramatic development in Socrates’ character and Aspasia’s role in bringing it about.