In the last decades scholarship has increasingly stressed the importance of literary aspects in Plato’s dialogues. James Collins’ inspiring book attempts to develop such literary readings by taking into consideration the educational context of the dialogues and focusing on protreptic as an emergent literary genre in 4th-century BC Athens. His argument is based on a simple and yet often underestimated characteristic of Athenian culture: at the latest since the expansion of the sophistic movement,2 philosophers and educators competed as ‘sellers’ in the ‘marketplace of ideas’ (passim) and tried to persuade students that they were the best teachers. Beginning with this assumption, Collins explores the strategies and mechanisms used by the best representatives of the protreptic genre —Plato and Isocrates—in order to undermine the claims of their rivals and argue for their own ‘superiority’ in educational matters. He argues especially that the techniques of Plato and Isocrates show how protreptic was still a developing genre at this time, and how both Plato and Isocrates attempted to absorb and replace other literary genres.