Lesser Hippias | Page 6

confused with the writings of his disciples: this was probably due to
their definite form, and to their inimitable excellence. The three
dialogues which we have offered in the Appendix to the criticism of the
reader may be partly spurious and partly genuine; they may be
altogether spurious;--that is an alternative which must be frankly
admitted. Nor can we maintain of some other dialogues, such as the
Parmenides, and the Sophist, and Politicus, that no considerable
objection can be urged against them, though greatly overbalanced by
the weight (chiefly) of internal evidence in their favour. Nor, on the
other hand, can we exclude a bare possibility that some dialogues
which are usually rejected, such as the Greater Hippias and the
Cleitophon, may be genuine. The nature and object of these
semi-Platonic writings require more careful study and more comparison
of them with one another, and with forged writings in general, than
they have yet received, before we can finally decide on their character.
We do not consider them all as genuine until they can be proved to be
spurious, as is often maintained and still more often implied in this and
similar discussions; but should say of some of them, that their
genuineness is neither proven nor disproven until further evidence
about them can be adduced. And we are as confident that the Epistles
are spurious, as that the Republic, the Timaeus, and the Laws are
genuine.
On the whole, not a twentieth part of the writings which pass under the
name of Plato, if we exclude the works rejected by the ancients
themselves and two or three other plausible inventions, can be fairly
doubted by those who are willing to allow that a considerable change
and growth may have taken place in his philosophy (see above). That
twentieth debatable portion scarcely in any degree affects our judgment
of Plato, either as a thinker or a writer, and though suggesting some

interesting questions to the scholar and critic, is of little importance to
the general reader.
LESSER HIPPIAS
by
Plato (see Appendix I above)
Translated by Benjamin Jowett
INTRODUCTION.
The Lesser Hippias may be compared with the earlier dialogues of
Plato, in which the contrast of Socrates and the Sophists is most
strongly exhibited. Hippias, like Protagoras and Gorgias, though civil,
is vain and boastful: he knows all things; he can make anything,
including his own clothes; he is a manufacturer of poems and
declamations, and also of seal-rings, shoes, strigils; his girdle, which he
has woven himself, is of a finer than Persian quality. He is a vainer,
lighter nature than the two great Sophists (compare Protag.), but of the
same character with them, and equally impatient of the short
cut-and-thrust method of Socrates, whom he endeavours to draw into a
long oration. At last, he gets tired of being defeated at every point by
Socrates, and is with difficulty induced to proceed (compare
Thrasymachus, Protagoras, Callicles, and others, to whom the same
reluctance is ascribed).
Hippias like Protagoras has common sense on his side, when he argues,
citing passages of the Iliad in support of his view, that Homer intended
Achilles to be the bravest, Odysseus the wisest of the Greeks. But he is
easily overthrown by the superior dialectics of Socrates, who pretends
to show that Achilles is not true to his word, and that no similar
inconsistency is to be found in Odysseus. Hippias replies that Achilles
unintentionally, but Odysseus intentionally, speaks falsehood. But is it
better to do wrong intentionally or unintentionally? Socrates, relying on
the analogy of the arts, maintains the former, Hippias the latter of the
two alternatives...All this is quite conceived in the spirit of Plato, who
is very far from making Socrates always argue on the side of truth. The
over-reasoning on Homer, which is of course satirical, is also in the
spirit of Plato. Poetry turned logic is even more ridiculous than 'rhetoric
turned logic,' and equally fallacious. There were reasoners in ancient as
well as in modern times, who could never receive the natural
impression of Homer, or of any other book which they read. The

argument of Socrates, in which he picks out the apparent
inconsistencies and discrepancies in the speech and actions of Achilles,
and the final paradox, 'that he who is true is also false,' remind us of the
interpretation by Socrates of Simonides in the Protagoras, and of
similar reasonings in the first book of the Republic. The discrepancies
which Socrates discovers in the words of Achilles are perhaps as great
as those discovered by some of the modern separatists of the Homeric
poems...
At last, Socrates having caught Hippias in the toils of the voluntary and
involuntary, is obliged to confess that he is wandering about in the
same labyrinth; he makes the reflection on himself