Hippias’s “Collection” — a handbook for a man of wisdom

Abstract

Despite the obvious revival of interest in the First Sophistry in recent decades, Hippias of Elis is poorly considered in the con-text of the history of ancient education. Evidences about his phil-osophical views are not investigated as something significant in the development of ancient philosophy. Usually Hippias is inter-preted as a representative of the nascent genre of doxography. Meanwhile, there is an opportunity to consider evidence of his work, teaching, genre of his texts as an element of the history of the “higher” levels of ancient education, intended for successful and self-sufficient members of ancient society. This social type was formed precisely in the era of the First Sophistry. The cen-tral subject of this paper is the «Collection» of Hippias. Despite the minimum of information about this text available to a mod-ern scholar, there is a steady tendency to associate a number of evidences about the work of Hippias with this text. I will try to show that the hypothetical content of the “Collection” is in good agreement with the available information about the wisdom of Hippias. First of all, it corresponds to his belief in the diversity and plurality of being. This is the origin of the sophist's multi-scholarship — the multiplicity of being (the bodies of beings) forces us to develop a variety of knowledge concerning the most diverse aspects of life, its various manifestations. The methodol-ogy of his work was connected with this: Hippias singled out the most important and “homogeneous”. It allowed him to classify the material in full accordance with the tasks facing him. As a re-sult, firstly, this text was an attempt to systematize human knowledge about existence in its most important sections (the beginning of everything, the gods, history, the experience of re-markable people). Secondly, it was a teaching guide that allowed not only to learn various facts, but also helped to formulate judgments about the past so that it became a source of experience for the present. And thirdly, it was an auxiliary mnemonic tool, important for the process of writing speeches or rhetorical im-provisation.