Featured image is a scholar with his books and globe.
Meredith L. Patterson has a wonderful post on the Platonic dialogues, and the different roles particular characters fill in them.
At a high level, there are just two roles: smart guy and dumb guy. Socrates is the only smart guy, so if you are his interlocutor, you’re the dumb guy.
But on the dumb guy side, Meredith makes a further distinction:
Broadly, they fall into two classes: hubristic dumb guys and epistemically humble dumb guys. Hubristic dumb guys think they know all the answers, and by definition don’t, because nobody does. Epistemically humble dumb guys know they don’t know most of the answers, and don’t mind, apart from the whole not-knowing part, and would like to know more.
You’d think that for your self-image it would be better to be Socrates, but I honestly kinda like being the second kind of dumb guy.
I think this is on the mark. To see why, consider two extreme interpretations of Socrates.