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The Platonic Dialogues for English Readers (1860)
The Platonic Dialogues for English Readers - 1860 Author:Plato Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION TO THE GREATER HIPPIAS. HIPPIAS is one of the " Sophists" whom we have seen in the Protagoras, making part of the great gathering of such persons... more » at the house of Kallias the rich Athenian. He is there represented as discoursing in a somewhat pompous and artificial style, as introducing into his discourse something of astronomy and mathematics, and as carrying on a sort of rivalry with Protagoras in the profession of an instructor of young men. He was of Elis, a city of Peloponnesus, and was employed by his own city as an ambassador on various occasions; a circumstance which Plato regards as inconsistent with his character as a philosopher. We in modern times have seen so many professors and literary men in France, Germany, Belgium and America become ambassadors and ministers of state, that we can hardly sympathize with Plato in his view of this as an inconsistency and degradation. Hippias is represented also as a very accomplished but very vain man. He boasted indeed to have made himself master of all the manual as well as intellectual arts, and appeared, at the Olympic games, wearing clothes that were made by himself and a seal-ring which he had himself engraved, as we are told in the Lesser Hippias. He had an art ofmemory, and could repeat fifty names upon hearing them once over, as he boasts in this Dialogue, In Plato's Dialogue he is introduced as just arrived at Athens. Xenophon gives us a Dialogue which passed between him and Socrates on such an occasion, but that has no resemblance with this Imaginary Dialogue of Plato, which appears plainly intended in the first place to exhibit the vanity of the man, represented with the full license of comedy. But the Dialogue has also another professed object; namely, the discussion of the question, What is t...« less