The outline of the book is best indicated by listing the chapters: ‘Introduction’; Chapter 1: ‘Socrates on Homer, Part 1: 364b3–365d5’; Chapter 2: ‘Δύναμις in Action: 365d6–366c4’; Chapter 3: ‘Calculated Deception: 366c5–369c2’; Chapter 4: ‘Socrates on Homer, Part 2: 369b8–371e5’; Chapter 5: ‘“If in Fact There is Such a Person”: 372b–End’; ‘Conclusion’; ‘Epilogue: the Influence of the Hippias Minor on Aristotle's Ethics’; bibliography; index.
Anyone expecting the book to reflect C.'s 2011 Ph.D. dissertation ‘Plato's Hippias Minor: a Translation and Critical Commentary’ will be disappointed. There is no mention of the thesis in the bibliography, while in the acknowledgments C. states cryptically: ‘This book is the product of a decade-long preoccupation with this vexing dialogue. I never planned to focus and write exclusively on it then or now’ (p. ix).
The ‘play of ambiguity’ of the book's title would appear to place C. in the more recent camp of scholars who, as C. puts it, have ‘absolved’ the dialogue of its fallacies (p. 1). The two notorious and unambiguous fallacies in the dialogue are that the true and false are the same person and that only the just man does injustice willingly. The second fallacy is here explained away by the rider, which is the title for Chapter 5, ‘If in fact there is such a person’, indicating that Socrates has doubts. Any apparent Socratic ‘wavering’ (Chapter 5, passim, based on a 2017 article by R. Jones and R. Sharma, CP 112 [p. 79]), however, does not make the assertion itself any less fallacious, since anyone willingly committing injustice should be considered unjust, not just, whether such a person exists or not. The first fallacy is never addressed, but side-stepped. What is discussed in the early chapters is how one person may make true and false statements, which is not the same thing as the assertion that the true is the false.
Positing ambiguity is perhaps the only way to transform this quasi-eristic dialogue into something approaching a philosophical investigation: ‘The portrait of Socrates in HiMi reveals how easy it is to mistake his words for deception given how close he treads to it’ (p. 102). C. accepts that ‘the dialogue is about deception’ (p. 101), perhaps influenced by the dialogue's traditional alternative title (unmentioned) περὶ τοῦ ψευδοῦς (‘About the false’). Indeed, deception even becomes one reason for the appearance of ambiguity: ‘Socrates and Hippias are inquiring about deception in a context that is itself potentially deceptive’ (p. 4).
C. claims ‘to treat the dialogue as a self-contained entity, without relying on other dialogues for interpreting it’ (p. 13), but his comparison with other dialogues leads him to treat Hippias Minor as an insight into Socrates’ thinking at an early stage on his journey towards a supposedly mature position on arete (virtue), which we apparently see only in later dialogues (based on yet another idea by Jones and Sharma [p. 13 n. 5]). Consequently, much is made of an ‘analysis of δύναμις’ in the second chapter (p. 35), which turns out to have more to do with what Socrates should have said were he working towards this mature position on virtue. C. in fact constructs not an analysis of ability, but a list of conditions arguably necessary for ability to be actualised, which C. calls for convenience Δ, as if it were an analysis of dynamis: ‘(Δ) A person is able to act F-ly only if he (a) is not hindered by external constraints from acting F-ly, (b) has knowledge of the relevant facts involved in acting F-ly, (c) knows what he is doing when he acts F-ly, and (d) does what he wants when he wants in acting F-ly’ (p. 42). The main problem with this list is that it is not based on a series of claims by Socrates, but is inferred from a series of questions that Socrates asks Hippias, and which Hippias, for his own eristic/sophistic reasons, actually answers – one way or another – with no difficulty. C., however, regards this questioning as an attempt to convince Hippias of something: ‘From 365d6 to 365e10, Socrates gets Hippias to agree to the following:’ (p. 35); ‘Socrates gets him to agree to the following:’ (p. 37); and later, for example, ‘in an effort to convince Hippias’ (p. 43).
It is in the same chapter on dynamis that we find that C. follows P. Carelli in locating the reason for the introduction of dynamis into the conversation in Achilles’ words, ‘I will do exactly as I intend to do’, which appear in a longer quotation by Hippias. C. does not agree with Carelli's explanation for this and yet holds fast to the hypothesis of a Homeric origin: ‘If Socrates’ introduction of δύναμις originates from Il. 9, it should be because the passage suggests the false person lacks power and Socrates wants to explore why and to what extent’ (p. 33). Does Homer suggest that the false person lacks power? Does Homer, indeed, even portray any false person? C.'s whole discussion of Homer is predicated upon the assumption that Socrates wishes to learn from Homer.
Given that C. had translated the text of Hippias Minor in his Ph.D. dissertation, one might have expected a certain familiarity with Plato's Greek, or indeed, Greek. Instead, we find an abundance of errors, with the more innocuous ranging from misplaced accents (usually based on Latin pronunciation rules rather than Greek) and misspelt words, both categories exemplified by the word πόνερος for πονηρός (p. 91), through frequent confusions of numbers and cases (e.g. ‘these positions are δεινὸς’, p. 9), to confusions between parts of speech, such as ‘Achilles’ own “bluntness” or ἀπηλεγέως’ (p. 39, adverb for noun); ‘blunt’ is also used to translate another adverb, ἁπλῶς (e.g. p. 22). Other errors include this unlucky guess in locating the Greek source for a translation: ‘Even Ajax … says Achilles “has made his great heart savage (μεγαλήτορα θυμόν σχέτλιος)”’ (p. 24); C. assumes that σχέτλιος, coming as it does after μεγαλήτορα θυμόν (= ‘great heart’), must mean the translation's final word ‘savage’, but has overlooked the issue of agreement of cases; σχέτλιος in the nominative refers to Achilles the merciless, while the accusative μεγαλήτορα θυμόν is described by the accusative ἄγριον (‘savage’), which, however, comes at the beginning of the same line as the great ‘heart’ (αὐτὰρ Ἀχιλλεὺς / ἄγριον ἐν στήθεσσι θέτο μεγαλήτορα θυμὸν / σχέτλιος). C. may also have been misled by LSJ who allow ‘savage’ as a translation of σχέτλιος from Herodotus onwards, when referring to wild beasts (s.v. ‘σχέτλιος’ I.2 fin.).
The book is entirely based on misinterpretation of the Greek text, but not all the errors should be ascribed to C., since much of his work is based on various translations frequently cited. When a Greek term is discussed, it is occasionally difficult to disentangle C.'s contribution from that of earlier scholars mentioned either in the text or in the notes: for example, a contemptuous δή in the first line of the dialogue affects our understanding of Eudicus, the speaker, and C. here follows B. Ovink (p. 14 n. 13); and the ethical dative αὐτῷ (pertaining to Homer) becomes ‘to Agamemnon’, following J. Hainsworth, and others (p. 28 n. 13).
The ‘Epilogue’ defends P. Shorey's claim (not entertained by most scholars) that Hippias Minor influenced Aristotle's distinction between δύναμις and ἕξις (p. 107). This would have been less implausible if Hippias Minor had had anything to say about hexis.
