Hippias Minor

The sophist Hippias is visiting Athens from his home city of Elis on the occasion of the Olympic festival. An artisan, poet, rhetor, astronomer and arithmetician, Hippias has also appointed himself an expert on Homer. He has been favoring the crowds with displays of his literary opinions. Hippias' most recent display of oratory concerned who is the better man, Achilles or Odysseus. Socrates says that he could not follow his argument, but did not want to interrupt. Now that the three men are separated from the crowd, Socrates, encouraged by Eudicus, quizzes Hippias on the particulars of his opinion.

Socrates asks Hippias if Homer has not portrayed Achilles as a wily man. Hippias counters that Achilles is the most straightforward of men, simple and true, and cites a passage where Achilles declares his hatred for men who think one thing and say another, or who do not do what they say they will do. Socrates does not object to Hippias' literalism, and seems to abandon the literary question, saying that Homer is dead, and the thing cannot be resolved (365d). He tells Hippias that because he agrees with Homer that a simple and true man is better than a wily and cunning one, he will let him speak for Homer.

Socrates gets Hippias to agree that the more a man knows about a subject, the better position he will be in to lie about it. He argues that the man who knows the subjects about which he tells lies, whether arithmetic, geometry, or astronomy, is twice as powerful as the man who does not know his subjects. The simple man might accidentally tell the truth when asked a question because he does not actually know the answer and is guessing while the knowledgeable has access to both true and false and can tell the false from the true always. Socrates never indicates what a man might stand to gain from lying about such matters, but brings the conversation back around to Achilles, and what kind of man Homer intended to portray.

Socrates argues that Achilles is such a good liar in the Iliad that he fools even Odysseus, who never notices his duplicity (371a). Citing the passages where Achilles tells Odysseus that he will not rejoin the war but will sail away with the early dawn, and Ajax a different story, that he will wait for Hector to come and burn his ship and tent himself. Socrates says this is a cunning man (Iliad, IX, 357–363.) If Achilles is so shifty that even Odysseus, whose middle name is cunning, cannot spot it, Achilles must be the better liar. Achilles, of course, never carried out his threat to leave, but remained at his camp. Hippias, quite foolishly, insists that Achilles told two different stories "in innocence."

Hippias objects, saying that the laws punish people who harm others deliberately with purposeful lies, and are more apt to excuse those who do harm by making mistakes. Socrates insists that those who injure people, tell deliberate lies, and err voluntarily are better than people who simply make mistakes (372d). Hippias suspects at this point that Socrates is being dishonest in the debate. Socrates counters that if he is troublesome, it is unintentional, that if he were being difficult deliberately, then he would be wily, which he is not. This is a kind of liar's paradox.

Socrates invokes a comparison between athletic competitions and debate. He argues that a runner or wrestler who throws the contest by doing worse than he is capable of doing is a more skillful combatant than the one who does his best and loses. Socrates multiplies the analogy, adding that, whether it is a singer off key, a gymnast who appears ungraceful, or a man who pretends to be lame or blind, it is always better to have the power to do it right and pretend to do it wrong than to be helpless to do it right.

Socrates convinces Hippias that Justice is a matter of both power and knowledge, and that the powerful (i.e., truly skilled) man is "better" than the clumsy one who makes mistakes from lack of knowledge and skill. The dialogue ends with Hippias' incredulity and helplessness at Socrates' verbal dexterity. Socrates tells Hippias that he does not agree with himself, and is perplexed about his own conclusion.