Abstract: This dissertation argues that erôs plays a central role both in Socrates' protreptic mission as it is represented by Plato and in the version of philosophical protreptic Plato himself carries out in the form of written dialogues. Plato characterizes the desire that Socrates' logoi arouse both in his interlocutors and in those who experience these logoi indirectly as the result of Socrates' erôtikê technê, his erotic expertise. The first two chapters situate Plato's representation of Socrates' erôtikê in the context of a changing discourse on desire in the late fifth and early fourth centuries. A survey of traditional representations of erôs in Greek literature in Chapter 1 opens a discussion of a crucial shift observable in Euripides' staging of good and bad erôtes. Chapter 2 takes up the ethics of erôs in two late-fifth-century rhetorical genres, the erôtikos logos and the protreptikos logos, which inform Plato's representation of the philosopher's erotic protreptic in relation to rhetoric and politics. The three chapters that follow offer readings of dialogues that present Socrates in protreptic conversations with young, aristocratic men, intended to turn them toward the pursuit of philosophy. Chapter 3 reads the Lysis as a Socratic ars amatoria, in which Socrates gives a demonstration of his erôtikê for the benefit of Lysis' erastês. The essence of his approach is the humbling of Lysis, in order to provoke him to further conversation. A treatment of Socrates' appropriation of the seductive art of the hetaira in Xenophon's Memorabilia 3.11 concludes the chapter. Chapter 4 considers Socrates' first protreptic conversation with Alcibiades in the Alcibiades I and explores the engagement of Socrates' erôtikê with the central theme of the care of the self and the uneasy relationship of Socratic seduction to the politics of the polis. Finally, Chapter 5 argues that the central model of dialectic in the Charmides is a stripping of the soul for examination, which constitutes a peculiarly Socratic strip-tease, in which the beauty of the philosopher's soul is revealed as an object of desire. Strip-tease in turn provides a model for the seduction of Plato's reader through an analogous eroticism of the written text.