Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- Platonic dialogue
- Author
- Plato
- Genre
- dialogue
- Series
- Platonic dialogue
- Image
- Plato Pio-Clemetino Inv305.jpg
Show 5 more facts
- title
- Ἱππίας μείζων
- language of work or name
- Ancient Greek
- characters
- Socrates
- Commons category
- Hippias Major
- entry in abbreviations table
- Plat. Hipp. Maj.
via Wikidata · CC0
~15 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Hippias Major (or What is Beauty? or Greater Hippias (Greek: Ἱππίας μείζων, Hippías meízōn), to distinguish it from the Hippias Minor, which has the same chief character), is one of the dialogues of Plato, although its authenticity has been doubted. It belongs to the early dialogues, written while the author was still young. Its precise date is uncertain, although a date of c. 390 BC has been suggested.
In the Hippias Major, Socrates and Hippias set out to find a definition for "beauty", but are destined to fail due to their inability to formulate an answer which encompasses the entire concept. The actual Greek term that is used in the dialogue is καλόν, which as an adjective often means fine or noble as well as beautiful. For this reason, translators such as Paul Woodruff typically translate the term (τὸ καλόν—the abstract noun of the adjective) as "the Fine" (things) instead of "Beauty."
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Hippias Major” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.