From the Beginning to Plato

238 THE SOPHISTS
historical chronology. The collection of Plato’s writings includes two dialogues
directly concerned with Hippias, the Hippias Major and the Hippias Minor. The
authenticity of each of these dialogues has been questioned by modern scholars,
probably wrongly at least in the case of the Hippias Major. But in either case,
they provide evidence which there is good reason for us to accept. Hippias is
presented throughout as incapable of standing up to the questioning of Socrates.
It has been suggested that Hippias came close to personifying the type Plato
most abhorred as a generic sophist. None the less his intellectual versatility is
clearly represented, even though it is always dismissed as accompanied by
superficiality.
When we turn to consider the philosophic doctrines associated with Hippias
we are confronted with an initial difficulty. We do not know for certain whether
Hippias held any overall or unifying basis for his polymathy. But there is some
evidence for an overall philosophical position given in the Hippias Major (301b–
e) where reference is made to a ‘continuous theory of being’. This is apparently
based on the view that there is something continuous that is carried through
classes as well as through the physical bodies of things without interruption, and
this is wrongly divided or cut up by the use of words. The implication here is
that language cannot represent the true nature of the external world.
That he did have a doctrine of some kind about nature is supported by what we
are told about him in Plato’s Protagoras, where he contrasted law and nature; he
favoured nature against law, which acts as a tyrant and compels human beings to
do or submit to many things which are contrary to nature. He further argued that
like is akin to like by nature, and called for men to draw the logical
consequences from this. One of these consequences is that some or even all men
are alike by nature, and as a result we should recognize as friends and kinsmen
those men who are alike by nature. Unfortunately the context in Plato
(Protagoras 337d-e) does not make it clear exactly what he supposed was the
range of the likeness to be found in men. If, as is possible, he held the view that
it is all men who are alike by nature he would then be seen as an advocate of the
doctrine of the unity of mankind. But other scholars have supposed that he may
have been confining his remarks to Greeks only, and so to have been preaching
simply pan-Hellenism. An even more restricted interpretation is possible. What,
according to Plato, Hippias is actually saying is that he considers those whom he
is addressing, namely ‘you’, as kinsmen and intimates and fellow citizens by
nature, not by law, on the basis that like is akin to like by nature. We who are the
wisest of the Greeks, no doubt meaning by this sophists, should accordingly
refrain from quarrelling with each other like the basest of men. This suggests
that he is advocating a recognition of the unity of wise men or scholars, as
distinct from ordinary people. The people to whom he is speaking are those who
‘know the nature of things’ and are the wisest people among the Greeks. In that
case what he is advocating is the unity of Greek scholars rather than the unity of
mankind as a whole, or perhaps even only the unity of sophists within the Sophistic
Movement.