Achilles Tatius' novelLeucippe and Clitophonis widely recognised by critics as generally ‘philosophical’, even ‘Platonic’, but critics also agree that the meaning of this philosophy and Platonism–whether it is serious or satiric, semantic or aesthetic–is unclear. As a result of this ambivalence, a perplexity confronts the reader who wants to understand the particularlypoliticalphilosophical meaning of Achilles' novel, especially through its depiction of gender norms and hierarchies. The purpose of this article is to revisit the philosophical possibilities of Achilles' novel in view of its various literary and social-historical contexts. To do this, I work through rather than against the perplexity that confronts the reader ofL&C, proposing a relational, reflexive mode of reading that attends to the interplay of Platonism, Stoicism and the social-historical associations that Achilles' mobilisation of each imparts. Such a mode of reading suggests, against numerous critical interpretations, thatL&Cmay actually relate the feminine to the world in a progressive way. In addition, the development of this mode of reading in response toL&Cpotentially undermines, not only the masculinist gender norms that the novel seems to reinforce, but also the very subject-object dualism that underpins mainstream historicist modes of relating to ancient texts as something out there in the walled-off universe of competing textualities that is ‘the past’.