Hippias of Elis

A prominent sophist of the late 5th century BCE from Elis, famous for polymathy — he professed to know and teach virtually everything (mathematics, astronomy, geometry, grammar, rhetoric, mnemonics, genealogy, poetry, history) and boasted of having made with his own hands everything he wore. He served Elis as an ambassador (most often to Sparta) and earned a great deal of money giving public displays. In Plato he is the named interlocutor of the two dialogues that bear his name — the Hippias Major (on "the fine," to kalon) and the Hippias Minor (on truthfulness, deception, and voluntary wrongdoing) — and he appears among the assembled sophists in the Protagoras. Plato uses him as a foil whose confident, encyclopedic "wisdom" collapses under questioning: in the Hippias Major he embodies the naive miss of the form/instance distinction (answering "what is the fine?" with "a fine girl"); in the Hippias Minor his Homeric criticism cannot survive Socrates' deception paradox.

Key Points

  • The polymath sophist: claims expertise in all the arts and sciences; a memory-artist (a mnemonic technique) and self-described maker of his own clothes, ring, oil-flask, and sandals (Hippias Minor 368b–c).
  • Ambassador and money-maker: represents Elis on civic missions and "made more money from wisdom than any craftsman" (Hippias Major 282d–e).
  • The Hippias Major foil: offers three instance-definitions of the fine (a fine girl, gold, the prosperous-and-finely-buried life), never grasping that Socrates wants "the fine itself" (287e); defends a "continuous theory of being" against the both/each puzzle (301b).
  • The Hippias Minor foil: holds Homer's Achilles ("best and truthful") and Odysseus ("wily and false") to be opposite types; supplies the voluntary/involuntary distinction (370e) that Socrates turns into the paradox that "the voluntary wrongdoer is the good man."
  • Dramatic function: the confident encyclopedic claimant whose refutation exhibits the gap between accumulated information and the single account (essence) Socrates demands.

Role in the Arguments

  • In the Hippias Major, Hippias is the answerer whose every definition is refuted; his blindness to the form/instance gap is the dialogue's engine, and his holism about "being" is the foil for the koinon (both/each) puzzle.
  • In the Hippias Minor, his concessions (that liars are "powerful and wise"; that Odysseus lies "voluntarily") are the premises Socrates binds him by — a textbook ad hominem elenchus whose unpalatable conclusion Socrates himself disavows.

Connections

Open Questions

  • How much of Plato's portrait is caricature? The dialogues lampoon Hippias's vanity and polymathy; the historical Hippias's actual doctrines (in mathematics and on nomos/phusis) survive only in fragments and later report.
  • The Hippias Major's disputed authenticity bears on how much of "Plato's Hippias" is Plato's: if the dialogue is by an imitator, its portrait is a reception of the Platonic foil, not Plato's own.

Sources

  • plato-hippias-major — Hippias as polymath, ambassador, and money-maker (281a–283b); the answerer refuted across every definition of the fine.
  • plato-hippias-minor — Hippias on Achilles and Odysseus; his self-made-craftsman boast (368b); the concessions on lying and the voluntary/involuntary distinction that drive the paradox.