t 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

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