From the Socratics to Augustine, men used women’s voices in philosophical dialogues to speak as experts on the body, especially in three aspects: birth, the physical details of death, and erotic desire. These connections were inaugurated by Plato and Xenophon. However, a changing anthropology, and especially the belief that the body persisted after death, led certain Christian authors to increase the role given to female characters. When the body was revalued and brought into the centre of philosophical focus, women’s voices moved from reported speech into direct speech. Simultaneously, late ancient Christian authors reflected on the inherent connection between erotic desire and the genre of the dialogue itself, matching their subject to their form. Using female characters in their dialogues helped male authors come to know certain things that using male voices could not do as well, by thinking through specific topics ‘like a woman’; the female, with her culturally embodied nature, became a model of an ideal life which insisted on the persistence of the body, even in the afterlife.

Because dialogue represents philosophy happening in the context of interpersonal relationships, it is a natural place to investigate power dynamics, both displays of power and displays of resistance. But in literature, unlike in life, the power dynamics are completely within the control of one person, the author, who can script the situation as he chooses. In this chapter, I argue that there was a change in the rules of comportment found in literary dialogues between the first and fourth centuries CE that can be traced through paying close attention first to the appearance and then to the development of a new character in these discussions – a judge. A shared embrace of forensic rhetoric to express philosophical antagonism existed across changing modes of judgement in the Roman Empire. I argue that this forensic dialogic mode was introduced as a mode of sublimation of political energy, as a rerouting of resistance into a safer domain of scholastic antagonism.