Why did Plato bring Anytus in for a dialogue-within-a-dialogue?  The topic under discussion is, Are there any teachers of virtue?  The further issue is: Can virtuous individuals pass on their virtue (teach it) to others, and in particular, their children?  Anytus is the offspring of a self-made man, a successful businessman and a good citizen.  We meet his son, who happens to be one of the leading citizens of Athens at the time of the restoration of the democracy.  We find that he has strong but ungrounded prejudices against sophists and other outsiders.  Socrates may share some of his misgivings, but in the case of Socrates, his suspicions are well-grounded in personal experiences with several sophists. 

            We see, moreover, that Anytus is quick to take offense and to threaten retaliation against Socrates for his generous attitude toward sophists and other professed teachers of virtue.  Anytus, in short, is not a virtuous person, though he has had every advantage of having a virtuous father and of rubbing shoulders with other gentlemen, whom he trusts to exude virtue to all about them. 

            In the background, of course, is our knowledge that Anytus led the political prosecution of Socrates.  He initiated and brought about the judicial murder of the man that Plato declared the  wisest, best, and most virtuous man of his generation. 

            Plato is probably not fair to Anytus here.  He makes it look as if the politician had a personal vendetta against Socrates for making him lose face in a conversation.  No doubt Anytus’ motives were, by his own lights, patriotic, not personal: to get rid of persons who were a threat to democracy.  Anytus misunderstood Socrates and his project: Socrates was not trying to overthrow democracy but to reform it.  Socrates had, in fact, put his life on the line at least twice to defend the democratic rule of law: in his management of the trial of the generals of the Battle of Arginusae, and in his refusal to participate in the arrest of Leon of Salamis. 

Anytus was playing the political game as most political animals did in Athens: help your friends and harm your enemies—which in political terms meant to protect your political allies and do away with your political opponents.  That game was often played out in courtrooms, where individuals were wont to accuse their political opponents of serious crimes.  (There was no district attorney or office of prosecution in Athens; individual citizens were expected to uphold the law.)  The game of doing unto others before they do it unto you was immoral by Socrates’ reckoning.  But it was how political agendas were advanced, and it provided one of many reasons for Socrates—and ultimately Plato—not to engage in political causes.

            Socrates would not retaliate against Anytus even if he could.  Plato, however, had already launched a public (if veiled) attack on the sworn enemies of Socrates.  He had defended the memory of Socrates in the Apology and the Crito. He had attacked the posthumous critics of Socrates in the Gorgias.  He now took on Anytus.  He would not go after him in court, like a political activist, but he would blacken his reputation for all time.  Anytus would become an object lesson in the failure of virtuous individuals to transmit their virtue. 

Plato would continue to defend Socrates, notably in the Symposium, probably written about the same time as the Meno.  And he would throw down the gauntlet to democracy in the Republic.  Plato had declared war in the Gorgias, against a system that pandered to the whims of the Many and avenged itself on the honest critics of democracy (see Plato 11.8*).  This was a culture war Plato could not avoid, and he would be a warrior to the end.