What later esotericism took from Plato was rarely his dialectic and almost always his myths. The Timaeus supplied a craftsman god who shapes the world after an eternal pattern, a world soul, and a mathematics of creation, and for a thousand years of readers who had no other dialogue in Latin, the Timaeus simply was Plato. The myth of Er at the end of the Republic supplied a geography of the afterlife: souls choosing their next lives, the spindle of Necessity, the Sirens singing the planetary scale, and a forgetting drunk on the plain of Lethe.
The Phaedrus supplied the soul's chariot, its wings, and its climb toward the vision of true being. The Symposium supplied the ladder of love, ascending from one beautiful body to beauty itself. Atlantis, told in the Timaeus and left unfinished in the Critias, supplied a drowned world that has never since stopped being rediscovered.
Later Platonists treated these stories as deliberate veils over doctrine, and the reports of unwritten teachings on the One and the indefinite dyad, preserved chiefly through Aristotle, encouraged the conviction that the dialogues concealed more than they said. Whether Plato meant his myths as doctrine, as persuasion for the parts of the soul that argument cannot reach, or as play, is still argued; that they did the work of doctrine in every later esoteric reading of him is not.