Plato’s Hippias Major, on Beauty (Live Reading)

Hippias of Elis travels throughout the Greek world practicing and teaching the art of making beautiful speeches. On a rare visit to Athens, he meets Socrates, who questions him about the nature of his art. Socrates is especially curious about how Hippias would define beauty. They agree that beauty makes all beautiful things beautiful, but when Socrates presses him to say precisely what he means, Hippias is unable to deliver such a definition. The more Socrates probes, the more absurd the responses from Hippias become.

The Hippias "Major" (aka the Greater Hippias) is one of Plato's most comedic dialogues and one of his finest efforts at posing the philosophical problem of the difference between particular things and universal qualities.

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This will be a live reading of Plato's Hippias Major (or "Greater Hippias"). Saturday September 12 will be the first session and thus the ideal time to join our group. Reference will be made to contemporary and older scholarship. Historical context will be brought up whenever necessary to illuminate the dialogue.

A translation can be found here.

This Plato group meets on Saturdays and has previously read the Symposium, Phaedo, the Apology, Philebus, Gorgias, Critias, Laches, Timaeus, Euthyphro, Crito, Protagoras, Hippias Minor, and other works, including ancient commentaries and texts for contextualisation such as Gorgias’ Praise of Helen. It is our aspiration to read the Platonic corpus over a long period of time.

The host is Constantine Lerounis, a distinguished Greek philologist and poet, author of Four Access Points to Shakespeare’s Works (in Greek) and Former Advisor to the President of the Hellenic Republic.