Homer plays an important role in the discussion in the Hippias Minor of voluntary and involuntary action and their relation to knowledge and goodness. Unlike the Ion, to which it bears in some ways a striking resemblance, and not merely in the manifestly parodic presentation of the eponymous figures of the two dialogues,Footnote ¹ poetry and performance are not the principal subjects of the Hippias Minor. However, this dialogue arguably sheds as much or even more light on the Homeric criticism of the late fifth and early fourth centuries as does the Ion, and – again like the Ion – it looks forward to, and significantly influenced, the rich tradition of Hellenistic and later Homeric criticism, for which our best witnesses are the Homeric scholia.Footnote ² In this paper, I want both to consider how PlatoFootnote ³ presents Socrates' treatment of Achilles and Odysseus in the Hippias Minor and also to make the case more strongly than it has been made before that this dialogue was an important influence on the later critical tradition.Footnote ⁴ I hope also to highlight some of the important and still pressing critical questions that this dialogue's treatment of Homer brings to the fore, even when they are not formulated explicitly here by Plato.

When the dialogue opens, Hippias has just delivered an ἐπίδειξις on poetry (363c1–3), including περὶ Ὀμήρου (cf. 363b1, c2–3).Footnote ⁵ Eudikos is encouraging Socrates to react to Hippias' performance by either ‘joining in the praise’ (a possibility that shows how little Eudikos knows of Socrates) or by proving him wrong (ἐλέγχειν), and Socrates tells him that one thing he would like to ask Hippias derives from an opinion that he had heard expressed by Eudikos' own father, Apemantos:

How banal is Apemantos' view intended to sound? Is it simply the late fifth-century communis opinio, at least as Plato reconstructs it?Footnote ⁸ We might think that such a synkrisis leading to the establishment of a hierarchy of value came naturally to agonistic Greek gentlemen, particularly when the Homeric poems themselves and the literature which they influenced gave such prominence to comparisons between individual characters;Footnote ⁹ nevertheless, the translation of what turns out to be a moralising or ethical judgement about the central characters of the poems into a judgement about the value of the respective poems is, however unsurprising it may now seem to us, deceptively significant.Footnote ¹⁰ It would be a familiar move for the Platonic Socrates to begin his discussion from a piece of very commonplace wisdom, which he can then proceed to deconstruct, but – as again with the Ion – we should sense here a long history of ancient criticism beginning to unfold. In the Ion also, one of the things at issue was the καλόν in poetry, what makes a poem καλῶς πεποιημένον and who is to judge this; in that dialogue the criterion which was made to bear the principal weight was that of the accuracy of the information provided in the poem. In the Hippias Minor, however, moral judgements about the characters are to carry that weight, but both dialogues lead forward to a style of criticism in which the καλόν of poetry indeed subsumes judgements about such things as the accuracy of what is described and the moral value of the characters, and also looks to other, what we might loosely call ‘aesthetic’, criteria. Moralising always remained at the very heart of mainstream criticism, and it could hardly be otherwise, given the very close links between ‘literary criticism’, education and rhetoric. Characters who were morally questionable, let alone morally worthless, were always to prove a bit awkward to handle. Aristotle found no place in tragedy for the μοχθηροί (Poetics 1452b36–3a4), and he condemned the Menelaos of Euripides' Orestes as showing ‘unnecessary πονηρία of character’ (1454a29); as is well known, Aristophanes of Byzantium elaborated this into a view that all the characters of that play except Pylades were φαῦλοι – the play was χείριστον τοῖς ἤθεσι – although the play itself was a great success (Hypoth. 43–4 Diggle).Footnote ¹¹

One detail of expression which is connected to this link between the moral goodness of characters and critical judgements about the works in which they appear is the oscillation between Socrates' original question as to ‘which (of Achilles and Odysseus) is better’ (cf. 363b7–c1, 364b4) and Hippias' answer in terms of characteristics ‘made by Homer’ (364c5); Socrates then adopts Hippias' mode in referring to his initial question at 370d7–e1 (and cf. 364e5–6). However inconsequential this may seem, the difference between ‘Achilles is better than Odysseus’ and ‘Homer has made Achilles better than Odysseus’ is, from the perspective of the history of criticism, potentially very significant, particularly when it is placed, as it is in the Hippias Minor, within the overall context of a question as to which of their respective poems is ‘better’. If we translate ποιεῖν as ‘represent’, then we can see how easy is the slippage between ‘represent a character as better’ and ‘represent a character better’; the predicative adjective fuses eventually into a quality of the representation rather than of the character, and this was clearly a significant development towards a ‘literary’ or ‘aesthetic’ mode of criticism. This is not Plato's concern in the Hippias Minor, but the part that this dialogue played in opening up potentially powerful critical questions certainly deserves more attention than it normally receives.

Another Platonic passage which Apemantos' view should call to mind is Protagoras' famous view of the ‘most important part of education’, expressed at the head of the discussion of Simonides' poem for Scopas:

The Platonic Hippias will indeed claim to be περὶ ἐπῶν δεινός and to be able to ‘make distinctions’; Socrates asks Hippias ‘How did you distinguish between (διέκρινες) Achilles and Odysseus?’ (364c2), and he later claims that he had thought that it was ‘difficult to judge (δύσκριτον) which of the two was better concerning lying and truth-telling and the rest of virtue’ (370e2–3). Protagoras' discussion of Simonides' ode is to draw attention to an alleged inconsistency in the poem, an inconsistency which, so Protagoras claims, would deprive it of the soubriquet of being καλῶς (or ὀρθῶς) πεποιημένον (339b7–10); the epideixis by Socrates which follows in that dialogue is (in part) an attempt to remove the charge of inconsistency. In the Hippias Minor also, conversation will turn to an alleged inconsistency in Achilles' words and deeds in Iliad 9. In this dialogue, it will be Socrates who insists on the inconsistency, though not (at any rate, not explicitly) in order to ‘downgrade’ Homer, but rather simply to refute Hippias' view of the relative merits of Achilles and Odysseus; Hippias, for his part, admits the inconsistency, but seeks to explain it. The recurrent pattern running through the Protagoras and the Hippias Minor may be thought to point to a Platonic recreation of a genuine moment (or moments) in the history of criticism; it is, for example, easy enough to imagine a setting (and/or an origin) both for such ‘comparative’ criticism and for allegations of ‘inconsistency’ in sympotic discussion, and we shall see that Hippias' answer to Socrates' initial question may lend some weight to that suspicion.

Finally, we may wonder to what extent the view ascribed to Apemantos is reflected elsewhere in the literature of the late fifth century. It is, for example, a stand-by of modern criticism of Sophocles' Philoctetes that Odysseus is somehow ‘sophistic’ and that the confrontation of Achilles and Odysseus in Iliad 9 forms a particularly important part of the background to Sophocles' play. The Hippias Minor can serve to remind us that behind the tragedy lies not only Homer, but also contemporary and earlier discussion of the Homeric poems. When Odysseus (v. 119) holds out to Neoptolemus the possibility of winning a reputation as both σοφός and ἀγαθός, i.e. both an Odyssean and an Achillean reputation, it is hard not to think of the kind of debates which we see reflected in the Platonic dialogue. When, moreover, Neoptolemus tells Odysseus that he would ‘rather act nobly and fail than win an ignoble victory’ (vv. 94–5), the Sophoclean scholia (on v. 94) gloss this distinction as one between ‘telling the truth’ and ‘lying’ (ψευδολογία), and observe that ‘Sophocles brings [Neoptolemus] on speaking his father's speech, “Hateful to me like the gates of Hades …”’. As is very well recognised, the opening scene between Odysseus and Neoptolemus replays in various ways the exchange of speeches between Odysseus and Achilles in Iliad 9; the scholiast certainly did not need the Hippias Minor to remind him of Achilles' famous opening words, but we may well suspect that those words came as readily to the minds of some of Sophocles' audience as they did to that of the scholiast, and the Hippias Minor may thus shed suggestive light on aspects of the reception of Homer at the end of the fifth century. Sophocles' play was not an ‘unmediated’ creative response to Homer and the cyclic poems, but rather one which reflected contemporary discussion of early epic, and itself was a contribution to an on-going and vibrant debate. Drama is in fact some of our best evidence for such critical debates, however difficult this evidence is to use at the level of detail.

When Socrates gets his chance to question Hippias, he asks him ‘Which (of Achilles and Odysseus) do you say is better (ἀμείνων) and in what respect (κατὰ τί)?’ (364b4–5) and (a potentially different question) ‘How did you distinguish them?’ (364c2). Hippias' answer has perhaps become stale with familiarity, but its oddness is important:

In ascribing ἄριστος to Achilles, Hippias might be thought to be picking up Socrates' question as to which of the two was ἀμείνων, but the manner of the answer, in which three, not two, heroes are ascribed superlative qualities, suggests that Hippias rather is referring to Achilles' unchallenged supremacy in battle – he is ‘best of the Achaeans' – whereas it is others who take the prize in other qualities. The form of Hippias' answer may be seen as a version of the familiar sympotic ‘What is best?’ question or of the kind of popular ‘priamel’ of which we find ‘literary’ instances in, for example, Sappho fr. 16 Voigt and at the head of Pindar's First Olympian. An elegiac couplet which turns up in various forms in archaic and classical literature (cf. Soph. fr. 356 R) offers one of the clearest instances of the pattern:

Despite the familiarity of its form, however, there is something remarkable in Hippias' answer which is rarely acknowledged. It would be easy enough to imagine a fifth-century discussion as to which of Homer's heroes was ‘best’ or ‘wisest’, as the quality being judged (prowess in battle, wisdom) was shared among more than one hero, although Achilles was always likely to be ἄριστος, provided that word was interpreted as Homer was normally understood to have used it, for Homer himself appeared to have cast his vote for that hero (cf. esp. Il. 2.768–9). The crown for σοφία, particularly as exhibited in rhetoric,Footnote ¹² might, however, well have been disputed between Nestor and Odysseus, and there is some late evidence that a way was discovered to accommodate the claims of both; here again it is not difficult to see the Hippias Minor as a stimulus to the critical tradition. In his commentary on the proem of the Odyssey, Eustathius notes that in the Iliad Odysseus was not yet ‘wiser’ (σοφώτερος) than Nestor, but his great wanderings after the war brought him huge ἐμπειρία, ‘experience’, which allowed him to surpass even Nestor (Hom. 1381.61–1382.2, cf. also 240.17–18); this interpretation is connected with a view that νόον ἔγνω in Od. 1.3 does not (or not only) mean ‘[Odysseus] learned the minds [of many men]’ but rather ‘[Odysseus] gathered intelligence’, i.e. became himself more intelligent as a result of his wanderings.Footnote ¹³ The opening of the Odyssey clearly produced ancient responses along the lines of ‘travel broadens the mind’; a scholion on v. 3 explains that Homer added νόον ἔγνω because ‘there are foolish people who visit many cities and lands and never learn anything’ (Schol. 1.3 g Pontani). How far back such criticism goes we cannot of course say, but the idea that Odysseus' wisdom developed through his adventures certainly set in early in the critical tradition, and of course many modern critics have argued that such a development is already discernible in the Odyssey itself, as Odysseus seeks not to repeat the nearly terminal ‘mistakes’ of the Cyclops-episode.

If, however, one might reasonably debate about ‘Who was the wisest of the Greeks?’, the same could hardly be said of ‘Who was the most πολύτροπος?’. This epithet occurs only twice in the Homeric corpus (Od. 1.1, 10.330), on both occasions with reference to the Odysseus of the Odyssey; that it is applied to Odysseus in the opening verse of that poem makes it, of course, almost his signature epithet. The question ‘Which of the heroes was most polytropos?’ would, on the face of it, be to anyone but the Platonic Socrates a non-question.Footnote ¹⁴ One can just about imagine a sophistic epideixis demonstrating that a hero other than Odysseus was the most πολύτροπος, because although this epithet is only applied by Homer to Odysseus, it actually refers to a quality shared by more than one hero; if indeed we can imagine this, however, it is primarily because that is what Socrates in fact offers us in the Hippias Minor.Footnote ¹⁵ It is presumably important that no one in the Hippias Minor makes the (to us obvious) point that Homer applies the epithet only to Odysseus, and that fact was hardly unavailable or unknown in the fifth and fourth centuries BC; certainly, one does not need the TLG to discover it. When Socrates claims that he had absolutely no idea what Hippias meant by saying that Homer made Odysseus ‘most polytropos’, his words presumably gesture to a debate about the term,Footnote ¹⁶ but they leave us no wiser as to why Plato made Hippias answer in this way.

One common (and attractive) answer to this problem is that Plato here preserves a genuine fragment of Hippias' Homeric criticism; Diels–Kranz offer it a place as illustrative of Hippias' Lehre (86 A10), and the manner of Hippias' response to Socrates, ‘I am willing to go through for you even more clearly than I did then what I say both about these men and others' (364c3–4), suggests that we are to imagine that Hippias' epideixis was a frequently heard performance (note the present tense of λέγω at 364c4). So too, it is regularly argued that the discussion which follows, which highlights Hippias' negative view of πολυτροπία, shadows the real Hippias' discussion of Odysseus, to a greater or lesser degree.Footnote ¹⁷ Not incompatible with the view that we have here a ‘fragment’ of Hippias would be the observation that Hippias thus not only denies to Odysseus the acclaim of being σοφώτατος, but also avoids the obviousness of a simple synkrisis between bravery and wisdom, with the central figure of each poem assigned to one category; such a simple distinction would have foreshadowed the interpretation of the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles, reported in Demodocus' song at Od. 8.75–7, as a dispute over the relative merits of ἀνδρεία and σύνεσις or φρόνησις (cf. scholia on vv. 75, 77), an interpretation which may well in fact go back to the fifth century at least (we think again of Sophocles' Philoctetes). So obvious a gambit is, however, not worthy of a Hippias in his epideictic pomp, a figure who, moreover, clearly sets himself up as ‘the Nestor for this generation’.Footnote ¹⁸ The smart paradox (as Hippias sees it) in his answer, a paradox which Socrates' exclamatory βαβαί in part acknowledges (364c7), is that he finds a hero other than Odysseus who is σοφώτατος and is thus able to assign another (very surprising) superlative to the Ithacan hero.

In seeking to unravel this question further, we enter the very murky waters of the relationship between the Hippias Minor, the known views of the ‘real’ Hippias, and the discussion of πολύτροπος by Antisthenes, which is partially preserved for us by Porphyry in his note on the opening verse of the Odyssey. The problems surrounding this fascinating text cannot be dealt with here at any length,Footnote ¹⁹ but they can also not simply be ignored. The relevant part of the scholion reads as follows in Pontani's text:Footnote ²⁰

The obvious contradiction between the two claims in the scholion about what Antisthenes said is most easily explained by the fact that the negative view of πολύτροπος with which the text opens was indeed expressed in a work of Antisthenes, but it is not a view to which Antisthenes himself subscribed. This has often led to the view that this work was very likely a dialogue, and the suggestion (or assumption) has, moreover, often been made that this will have been a dialogue between Hippias, who expressed the negative view with which the text begins, and Socrates. I am very sceptical of at least the second half of this account, and Maria Luzzatto rightly, I think, remains non-committal about the nature of Antisthenes' text; Porphyry offers the familiar shape of a Homeric ‘problem’ and its ‘solution’, but we cannot assume that this is how Antisthenes presented it – his work, perhaps the περὶ Ὀδυσσείας, might have been an essay, not a dialogue. Be that as it may, the Hippias Minor certainly lends colour to the suggestion that the negative view of πολύτροπος expressed in Antisthenes' work was there associated with Hippias; the features shared between the two texts, including the quotation of the opening of Achilles' speech to Odysseus in Iliad 9, are certainly very striking. Scholars have sought arguments as to whether Plato is responding to Antisthenes, or vice versa, or whether both are responding independently to Hippias, or indeed whether the truth lies in some combination of these possibilities; the problem has both a specific interest for the history of Socratic discussion, and also a broader methodological importance for the study of fourth-century philosophical texts in general, but neither can properly be pursued here.

Antisthenes' account of πολύτροπος turns on a semantic analysis of the kind in which we know he was very interested. τρόπος has, in this analysis, two meanings, and in πολύτροπος Homer is alleged to use the noun in its linguistic sense of ‘form of speech, speech-usage’; the evidence for this claim is apparently found in the use of τρωπάω of the nightingale and its voice in one verse of the Odyssey. There is no other evidence to support this alleged usage of Homer, and so we might at least wonder in passing what was the tone of Antisthenes' defence of Odysseus. Modern readers are very quick to see Socrates' treatment of Achilles in the Hippias Minor as unserious or even as a parody of Homeric criticism,Footnote ²² but we might think that Antisthenes' argument, as far as the scholion of Porphyry allows us to reconstruct it, has at least as good a claim to have been ‘playful’, in whatever sense we wish to interpret that. That Antisthenes seems to have represented Odysseus as a master of Socratic-style dialectic must increase our sense that this epideixis, like so many sophistic performances, was leavened with a generous dose of the humorously paradoxical. We may perhaps compare the claim of the Platonic Protagoras that Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and so forth were all sophists avant la lettre (Prt. 316d–e). As for what might have been Antisthenes' discussion of the other meaning of τρόπος, namely ἦθος, ‘character’, we can reconstruct little of this, but – as critics have noted – Eustathius' observation (Hom. 1381.41) that Homer never uses τρόπος in this sense, and so πολύτροπος could not mean ‘having an unstable/changeable character’, may eventually go back to a fuller version of Antisthenes' text; certainly, Porphyry's citation is in turn an important source for Eustathius' discussion.

One further aspect of Porphyry's summary of Antisthenes is important in the present context. Although the negative view of πολύτροπος, whether that was expressed in the character of Hippias or by Antisthenes himself before he demolished it, contrasts Odysseus with Achilles and Ajax and cites Achilles' speech from Iliad 9, it is hard to believe that Antisthenes' defence of Odysseus and of the positive meaning of πολύτροπος was not rooted in the Odyssey, rather than in the Iliad. As Socrates' initial citation of Apemantos' view in the Hippias Minor shows, a contrast between Achilles and Odysseus must (almost inevitably) be a contrast between the central figure of the Iliad and the central figure of the Odyssey; it is, after all, the Odysseus of the Odyssey whom Homer called πολύτροπος. Hippias' mistake (or one of them) was to ground his argument in Book 9 of the Iliad, despite how Socrates introduced the subject; Hippias does observe that ‘Homer made Odysseus [a liar] in many places both in the Iliad and in the Odyssey’ (365c1–2), but in making no distinction between the character in the two poems, he not only shows himself (again) a not particularly sophisticated reader, but also plays into Socrates' hands. As we have already seen, later criticism at least was clear that Odysseus' character ‘developed’ between the two poems,Footnote ²³ and it would not surprise to learn that such views were already familiar in the late fifth and fourth centuries. One might indeed think that Hippias' confusion in the Hippias Minor either must be read against the existence of such a critical view or itself was one of the stimuli to this later view.

When Socrates asks Hippias for clarification of his view, the question is again phrased not as we might have expected: ‘Was not Achilles represented as polytropos by Homer?’ (364e5–6). Hippias' answer had in fact not excluded the possibility that Achilles had been so represented, as Hippias had been dealing in superlatives; our inference from what follows may be that Socrates phrased his question in this way because he did not (yet) understand how Hippias was using the term, for it is only after Hippias' fuller response that he claims to begin to see that, for Hippias, πολύτροπος is a synonym of ψευδής (365b7–8, cited below). The technique of slow revelation suggests, as indeed we would have known from elsewhere, that the actual meaning of πολύτροπος was anything but undisputed. Hippias' response is that the Homeric Achilles was ‘not at all’ πολύτροπος, but rather ‘very straightforward and most truthful’ (ἁπλούστατος καὶ ἀληθέστατος), and in support of this he cites, as apparently also did Antisthenes, the opening of Achilles' great speech to Odysseus in Iliad 9:

Here the later critical tradition was to follow where Hippias, at least the Platonic one, had led,Footnote ²⁵ and it is worth pausing a moment to note the conclusions which were later drawn from these verses. The exegetical scholia on vv. 307–9 claim that they represent Achilles as φιλότιμος, ἁπλοῦς, φιλαλήθης, βαρύθυμος, εἴρων, and the scholia on v. 309 note that his speech is, as we might say, a rhetoric-free zone: περιπλοκὰς οὐκ οἶδε λόγων. His speech is marked by ‘unelaborated free-speaking’ (ἀκόσμητος παρρησία). The contrast, of course, as in Hippias' account, is with Odysseus. περιπλοκὰς οὐκ οἶδε λόγων (of Achilles) all but explicitly denies that one of the most familiar ancient interpretations of πολύτροπος was applicable to Achilles, whereas the whole thrust of the exegetical scholia to Odysseus' speech had been towards working out its strategies, why he speaks as he does and what implicit, ‘concealed’ meanings lie behind his words (cf. e.g. scholia on 226, 252, 259–60); with Achilles, however, it is changes of style which are foregrounded, for there is no doubt (for the scholia) about what he is actually saying. As for Hippias' understanding of πολύτροπος as synonymous with ψευδής, it is a reasonable conclusion that something very like this was mooted (only to be rejected) by Antisthenes, but there is in fact no other evidence to suggest that such an interpretation was generally familiar before, or indeed widespread thereafter, although πολύτροπος, ‘cunning’, might at any time carry a negative resonance.Footnote ²⁶ It is Antisthenes and Plato who established that interpretation within the tradition.

The description of Achilles in the scholia on vv. 307–9 as εἴρων is of some interest also in this connection. The Homeric scholia and other critics regularly see the trope of εἰρωνεία in Homeric speeches,Footnote ²⁷ and in those of Achilles no less than any others, including his speech to Odysseus in Book 9 (cf. scholia on vv. 348, 359, 399). Outside Aristotle, εἰρωνεία is not necessarily incompatible with a commitment to truth-telling,Footnote ²⁸ but in the binary system of oppositions between Achilles and Odysseus which the scholia have inherited and which they elaborate, it is hard not to see the suggestion that, if Achilles is εἴρων, then Odysseus must be ἀλαζών; even in the Aristotelian system, although the mean between ἀλαζονεία and εἰρωνεία is the condition (ἕξις) of being truthful, it is in fact the alazon who ‘takes delight in ψεῦδος’ (EN 4.1127b9-11), who is truly the opposite of the truthful man, ‘for [the alazon] is worse [than the eiron]’ (EN 4.1127b31–2). The scholia attribute ἀλαζονεία to a number of Homeric characters and speeches, including in fact to one verse (v. 401) of Achilles' speech to Odysseus in Iliad 9, but it is for the scholia a particular characteristic of Hector and the Trojans, often labelled as ἀλαζονεία βαρβαρική.Footnote ²⁹ Although we ought not place too much weight upon the fact, it is certainly noteworthy in this connection that the principal term used in the Hippias Minor to denote ‘deceivers’, such as (in the common view) Odysseus, against whom Achilles' speech is directed, is indeed ἀλαζών (cf. 369e4, 371d2), and it is precisely in this quality that Socrates, with shocking paradox, claims Achilles surpassed Odysseus (371a2–7). It would of course not be sensible to claim that the Hippias Minor lies at the root of a distinction between Achilles and Odysseus as εἴρων and ἀλαζών: too much of what Odysseus says in the Odyssey, notably in Books 9–12, was (or could be taken as) such obvious ἀλαζονεία that the idea must have been a commonplace.Footnote ³⁰ Rather, we might think of such a commonplace coming together with an opposition between Odysseus and Achilles, an opposition centred upon their confrontation in Iliad 9, and itself engendering, perhaps under the influence of Aristotle, the idea that Achilles was εἴρων. The process was presumably messy and unsystematic, but it is hard to doubt (I think) that the Hippias Minor played some part in this critical development also, particularly as Odysseus' speech to Achilles is not, as Socrates is going to make very clear, ἀλαζονικός, certainly by Odysseus' standards elsewhere. As is well known, binary oppositions tend to multiply, even where they do not all equally fit the case.

The embassy to Achilles in Iliad 9 was a very famous text for later rhetoricians and declaimers,Footnote ³¹ and Achilles' opening words are very often cited or evoked. A history of that reception would in fact deserve its own essay, and the Hippias Minor would play a major part in any such history,Footnote ³² but let me point to only one further aspect of Hippias' quotation which looks forward to the later critical tradition. ‘In these verses’, says Hippias, ‘he reveals each man's character (τρόπος) …’ (365b5–6); Hippias twice in this passage makes clear that the verses are spoken by Achilles, but the subject of δηλοῖ, ‘he reveals’, must be Homer. Nothing of course is more familiar in ancient quotation-practice than the ascription of the views of a character in a narrative or drama to the poet himself, and the present case is normally dismissed in this way.Footnote ³³ This may, however, be to let Hippias off too lightly. An Aristotle certainly would have known that although these verses tell us much about Achilles, we should judge Odysseus from his own words, not from those of others; when Aristotle says (Poetics 1450b7–10) that ‘character (ἦθος) reveals (δηλοῖ) the nature of moral choice (προαίρεσις)’, he might almost have been thinking of this same opening to Achilles' speech in Iliad 9. Socrates' refusal to take Achilles' self-presentation at face value, without also examining his actions (which also, of course, are revelatory of προαίρεσις (Poetics 1454a17–18)), might then be thought to be a simple critical step forward, but it is one whose repercussions are still with us. We might also recall that, in later Homeric criticism at least, many apparent ‘problems’ in the Homeric text were solved by appealing to the fact that they arise from what a character, not the poet himself, says; this is the so-called λύσις ἐκ τοῦ προσώπου. Something like this can be identified as early as Aristotle (frr. 146, 163 Rose = 370, 387 Gigon),Footnote ³⁴ but familiarity with the general principle might again be much earlier, and in the present context it is of some interest that Lucia Prauscello has identified such a case, and one associated with Antisthenes, in Plato's Laws.Footnote ³⁵ Here again, then, is another simple critical principle of which the Platonic Hippias is ignorant.

When Socrates picks up the Homeric thread at 369a8, he has apparently established that the true and the false man must be the same, not different, but Hippias is not convinced and wants to restart the debate about Achilles and Odysseus; as several critics have recognised, the argument with Socrates as to whose opinion will prevail is set up by Hippias as a kind of internal reflection of the debate as to which of Achilles and Odysseus is ‘better’:

Ancient criticism was indeed a very competitive, agonistic business. In Hippias' mind, so we are to understand, it is also clear that he himself is the Achilles; at the beginning of the dialogue he had presented himself as ‘never having met anyone better (κρείττων) than himself’ in the business of ἀγωνίζεσθαι at Olympia (364a6–8),Footnote ³⁶ and now he portrays Socrates as an Odysseus:

Socrates turns this pattern also on its head when he subsequently accuses Hippias of himself playing the role (μιμεῖσθαι) of Odysseus (370e10–11). That Hippias shows both Achillean and Odyssean traits might be seen as an ironic dramatisation of Socrates' argument that the true and the false person are one and the same.Footnote ³⁸

Socrates proceeds to identify inconsistency, and hence ‘falsehood’, in Achilles' speech.Footnote ³⁹ The hero said, as he had already said to Agamemnon (Il. 1.169–71), that he would return home ‘tomorrow’, but there is no sign that he ever made the slightest move towards doing so (Il. 9.357–63). Odysseus, on the other hand, tells no lies in the verses which Hippias had quoted, by which Socrates presumably means all of Odysseus' speech to Achilles in Book 9.Footnote ⁴⁰ Modern criticism has made much of Odysseus' ‘economical’ report to Achilles of what Agamemnon had said,Footnote ⁴¹ although (interestingly) it is not clear that anyone in antiquity ever did; the scholia on v. 392 do link Achilles' use of the term βασιλεύτερος to Agamemnon's use at v. 160, but that is not the same as accusing Odysseus of deliberate misrepresentation. Hippias makes no attempt to deny the facts as Socrates stated them, but rather seeks to explain them away; here, as we have seen, the discussion takes the familiar (later) form of a Homeric ‘problem’ and its ‘solution’.Footnote ⁴² Hippias' defence of Achilles appeals to a distinction between voluntary and involuntary falsehood, something which any follower of the Platonic Socrates will recognise as very likely to lead to dialectical disaster:

When Socrates returns to the attack by noting that Achilles says something different yet again to Ajax, namely that he will not fight until the Trojan advance reaches his very own camp (9.650–5), Hippias can explain that as well:

Hippias' explanations have received a favourable reception in modern criticism, from Wilamowitz on.Footnote ⁴³ In her study of the debate about the term πολύτροπος, Maria Luzzatto described Hippias' account as ‘from Homer's point of view undoubtedly correct’,Footnote ⁴⁴ and in her important discussion of the Hippias Minor Ruby Blondell describes Hippias' views as ‘perfectly plausible’, whereas Socrates' treatment of the Homeric scene is ‘farcical’, ‘absurd’ and ‘ludicrous’;Footnote ⁴⁵ Charles Kahn too describes Socrates' account as ‘a deliberately misleading account of Achilles’ character, supported by a deep knowledge of the Homeric text … [a] distorted picture of Achilles',Footnote ⁴⁶ and suggests that the whole dialogue may be seen ‘as a kind of reductio of the moralizing or “allegorical” interpretation of Homer’. There may, again, be something to be said on the other side.

Before turning to Hippias' account itself, however, we may consider (again) the versions offered by the extant scholia, which themselves of course may (and probably do) show the influence of the Hippias Minor.Footnote ⁴⁷ The exegetical scholia on v. 309c note the variations in Achilles' statements: he tells Odysseus that he will go away, Phoenix that he will stay, but not fight, which is in fact a not very accurate account of Il. 9. 618–19, and Ajax that he will fight when ‘necessity’ makes him do so. In the context of explaining Achilles' adverb ἀπηλεγέως in v. 309, the scholia also note that ‘those who wish to cause pain remove any optimistic hopes’, and it may be thought that this applies particularly to the answer to Odysseus. The scholia on vv. 651–2 tell a similar, though rather more nuanced, story:Footnote ⁴⁸

Whether or not this account of Achilles' behaviour is plausible, it does have the merit of at least taking account of the important interchange with Phoenix, which Hippias and Socrates both ignore in the Hippias Minor. Whether Plato expects us to notice the omission from Socrates' account of Phoenix's speech and of Achilles' non-committal response to him (vv. 618–19) may be thought uncertain; if the omission is deliberate, then it is tempting to see such an omission as a trap for Hippias, who proves not sharp enough to pick up the point, although some later critics obviously did.Footnote ⁴⁹

Hippias explains the fact that Achilles did remain at Troy from the fact that ‘he was compelled by the disaster which befell the army to remain and come to their aid’ (370e7–8). As we have seen, the scholia on 309c also appeal to ‘necessity’, but very differently so: on this view, Achilles tells Ajax that he will fight when he has to. The theme of ‘constraint’ upon Achilles appears elsewhere in the scholia, but I think we are at least entitled to ask how ‘plausible’ Hippias' account at 370e7–8 (cited above) actually is. We might take βοηθῆσαι to refer to Achilles allowing Patroclus to go out to fight in his own armour, but I doubt that many will be convinced that this is what Hippias means; at its best, his is a very loose paraphrase of what happens in the poem, and one of which no sophist, let alone a modern critic, should be proud. It is, of course, fair to point out that many ancient plot summaries may seem to us quite far removed from ‘what actually happens’, but Hippias' account in 370e is anything but a ‘close reading’. As for Achilles' reply to Ajax, Hippias (371e1) ascribes this to εὐήθεια or εὔνοια, depending on the reading adopted,Footnote ⁵⁰ whereas the scholia put it down to αἰδώς, as the A-scholia on vv. 618–19 also explain Achilles' concession to Phoenix. This latter motive is easy enough to understand: Ajax's words, like Phoenix's much longer speech before him, have stung Achilles' sense of how he is perceived by his colleagues – he acknowledges that Ajax's words are κατὰ θυμόν to him (v. 645) – and how it is expected that he should react to the supplicatory embassy which has now come to him; this precisely falls in the realm of αἰδώς (note also αἴδεσσαι in v. 640).Footnote ⁵¹ It is this too which inhibits the hero from simply leaving his colleagues to their fate and/or from refusing to meet Hector's challenge when his own fate and that of his beloved Myrmidons are at stake; he will, however, exact a very high price for the damage which has been done to his honour. It obviously makes a difference, as the scholia recognise, that he is speaking to Phoenix and to Ajax, not to Agamemnon, but we may well doubt whether either εὐήθεια or εὔνοια is a particularly good explanation for saying to Ajax that he will rejoin the fighting once Hector reaches the Myrmidon camp, ‘after killing Argives and setting fire to the ships’, a verse missing from Porphyry's quotation of the passage; at the very least, Ajax must have had mixed feelings about Achilles' professed intentions. Once again, it may be objected that I am in danger of demanding from Hippias the kind of ‘close reading’ and interpretation which we ourselves take for granted, and the absence of which is (notoriously) one of the things which often seems most puzzling about ancient discussions of literature. Whatever view one takes, however, it is I think clear that Hippias' brief explanation hardly does any kind of justice to the Homeric text.

As for the choice between εὐήθεια and εὔνοια, Giuliano has argued strongly in favour of the first alternative, which is that of the principal branch of the tradition, in the sense of ‘(possession of) good ἦθος’ (cf. Rep. 3.400d11–e4), as ἦθος is always a central part of ancient discussions of Achilles; we might note that [Plutarch] precisely observes that Achilles' answer to each of the three ambassadors reveals his ἦθος γενναῖον ἅμα καὶ ἁπλοῦν (De Hom. 2.169),Footnote ⁵² and it might be argued that εὐηθείας offers a better contrast to ἐπιβουλεύσας (371e3) than would εὐνοίας. Giuliano further notes that the alternative reading might have arisen because, as time passed, the pejorative sense of εὐήθεια had come to dominate.Footnote ⁵³ On the other hand, we might be reminded of the link which Thucydides draws between τὸ γενναῖον, which Achilles certainly possesses, and τὸ εὔηθες (3.83.1), and it is at least curious that when Achilles observes to Odysseus that he will not allow Agamemnon to deceive him a second time (Il. 9.375–6), the AbT-scholia observe that it is a mark of εὐήθεια to be deceived once by a φίλος, but of μωρία to let it happen twice. Moreover, εὔνοια (towards Ajax) would be an explanation which minimised Achilles' ‘deceitfulness’, thus bringing him closer to an action which could be described as ἄκων, and would also acknowledge Ajax as a brave (and ἁπλοῦς)Footnote ⁵⁴ hero in the Achillean mould; in other words, it explains specifically why it is Ajax to whom these words were spoken, and thus gestures towards the very long tradition of myth, art and literature linking these two heroes, not least with regard to the award of Achilles' arms after his death. The reading εὐνοίας thus seems to give Hippias a rather stronger rhetorical point against Socrates, if not necessarily a better reading of Homer.

If it is indeed the case that Hippias' defence of the ‘inconsistency’ in his and Achilles' position is not a very strong one, we might reflect that it could have been worse, when we remember how Ion ‘defends’ his position in the dialogue named after him. Socrates, of course, is not particularly interested in the interpretation of Iliad 9 for its own sake: the fact that Odysseus appears to tell the truth here but be a notorious liar elsewhere becomes one manifestation of the apparent paradox that the truth-teller and the liar are one and the same, together with the further problems to which that conclusion leads. For the Platonic Socrates, the Homeric text is a useful jumping-off point, not an end in itself. Plato, however, also pushes us towards a more far-reaching view, and one which still presses us urgently today, about the characters of literature. What kinds of questions are we to ask of what they say? How are we to move from what is said in epic or drama to the ethical situations which we ourselves face? By ‘defamiliarising’ Achilles for us, by showing us a πολύτροπος Achilles, Socrates, who is certainly in this dialogue a ‘closer reader’ than is Hippias, makes us confront the comfortable (and comforting) assumptions into which criticism of classic (and classical) texts too easily sinks. Socrates may not be particularly interested in proceeding much further down that path, but we can hardly shun the trail towards which he beckons us. Moreover, if we were to substitute ἀνώμαλος for πολύτροπος, the Hippias Minor would take us very close to a prominent ancient view of Achilles' character. Apparently in connection with Achilles' behaviour towards Priam in Iliad 24, Aristotle declared that Achilles' character was ‘changeable, unstable’, ἀνώμαλον,Footnote ⁵⁵ and certainly his changes of mood in that climactic episode might well deserve such a label, however psychologically true modern readers might find this extraordinary portrait of emotional fragility.

Ancient scholars, like their modern descendants, were also much interested in the question of why, when the ambassadors report back at the end of Iliad 9, Odysseus only reports the straightforward refusal which Achilles gave to him, without mentioning the rather more hopeful responses to Phoenix and Ajax.Footnote ⁵⁶ The exegetical scholia on vv. 682–3 ascribe various motives, honourable as well as disreputable, to Odysseus, but in his extended discussion of the matter Eustathius adds (inter alia) that one reason for Ajax's own silence might have been his knowledge of the fact that Achilles had made different promises to each of the three ambassadors; as a result of this, Ajax does not think that one should pay any attention to Achilles, given that hero's ‘inconsistency’ (παλιμβολία).Footnote ⁵⁷ Whether or not such an observation had ancient forerunners we cannot say,Footnote ⁵⁸ but it is very hard here not to be reminded of the Hippias Minor, where Achilles' πολυτροπία consists precisely in the different responses he gave to Odysseus and Ajax. So too, Porphyry reports that one of the Homeric ‘problems’ discussed at the Museum in Alexandria was why Odysseus' report back to the Greeks omitted what Achilles had said to Ajax, thereby not reporting ‘the truth’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The solution offered was that Odysseus did indeed give a true report of what Achilles had said to him, but by saying that Achilles only ‘threatened’ (v. 682) to sail away on the following morning, Odysseus in fact takes account of the different answers which Phoenix and Ajax had received and which he had heard. Here again, then, is a debate in which Odysseus' truthfulness is championed and Achilles' changefulness, whether that be ἀνώμαλον or πολύτροπον, hangs heavy in the background.

The Hippias Minor, then, may well lie, at an unknown number of removes, behind more than one important strand of the ancient discussion of Iliad 9. More importantly perhaps, we will again be reminded that Socrates' account of Achilles and Odysseus in that book pointed the way towards a reading which was certainly not dismissed out of hand, as it too often is today, by various communities of readers at particular times in the past. With our own philosophical and moral concerns, we may want to insist, like Hippias, that Achilles may be ‘inconsistent’, but that does not make him a ‘liar’ or indeed even πολύτροπος; that, however, is a different matter from seeking fairly to assess the claims of the Hippias Minor and the critical tradition which seems to have been influenced by it.

I have been largely concerned in this essay with critical traditions which are most visible to us from the Homeric scholia, but it may be that we can in fact trace the influence of the Hippias Minor at a much earlier date and in a very significant place. The meeting of Odysseus and Achilles in Iliad 9, and in particular Hippias' account of the opening of Achilles' speech, might well be seen with hindsight not merely as a confrontation of two very different characters (in both senses), but also as a marker of the difference between the two poems of which they are the principal focus; the same, of course, might be true for their subsequent meeting in the Underworld in Odyssey 11, but that is not something to be pursued here. Certainly, it would not be difficult to show that the Iliad is in many senses ἁπλοῦς, whereas the Odyssey is both complex and πολύτροπος.Footnote ⁶⁰ One reason, of course, that it would not be difficult is that Aristotle has already shown the way. For Aristotle, the Iliad is ἁπλοῦν καὶ παθητικόν, whereas the Odyssey is πεπλεγμένον καὶ ἠθική (Poetics 1459b14–16).Footnote ⁶¹ When Aristotle describes the well-constructed tragic plot (ὁ καλῶς ἔχων μῦθος) as ‘single’ and as involving a ‘change from good fortune to bad fortune, not because of any wickedness, but because of a great hamartia on the part of a character such as I have stated [i.e. someone of high reputation and prosperity] or a character who is better rather than worse’ (1453a12–16), it is hard not to think of the Iliad, if only because Aristotle proceeds to award second prize to a plot which is explicitly like the Odyssey (1453a32), and if Homer comes second, then only Homer can also come first.

The essence of the πεπλεγμένον lies in περιπέτεια καὶ ἀναγνώρισις (Poetics 1455b33), and the Odyssey in fact is ‘recognition all the way through’ (1459b15); recognition itself is defined as ‘a change from ignorance to knowledge, [leading to] either friendship or hostility’ (1452a29–30). There is much that could be (and has been) said about both the power and the limits of Aristotle's distinctions, but his categorisation of the Odyssey clearly gives the greatest weight to ‘recognitions’ of personal identity, which are central to Odysseus' poem. There is, moreover, another way in which the Odyssey cannot be ἁπλοῦς for Aristotle, namely that its structure (σύστασις) is double, διπλῆ, because ‘the better and worse characters end up in opposite ways’ (Poetics 1453a31–3); we are probably entitled to draw the inference that I just have, namely that the Iliad is, in this respect also, ἁπλοῦς (cf. also 1453a12), though we are here entering some of the thorniest problems of the Poetics. Nevertheless, a link between the discussion of the characters of Achilles and Odysseus in the Hippias Minor and Aristotle's classification of narrative and plot structures seems not implausible.

Aristotle's view of the two Homeric poems, at least in the relevant parts of the Poetics, seems to follow, almost as an afterthought, from his developed views about tragedy. Nevertheless, epic may well have played a role in the development of those views, both of the ‘simple’ and the ‘complex’ and of pathos and ethos, given the stark nature of some of the differences between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Pathos and ethos would require extended discussion, but for what it is worth Aristotle at one point defines πάθος as πρᾶξις φθαρτικὴ ἢ ὀδυνηρά (1452b11), and he exemplifies such an action by ‘deaths in full view, great agonies and woundings and such things’; he is writing of tragedy, but it is hard not to think of the opening of the Iliad, with the griefs and deaths caused by the μῆνις of Achilles; as for the Odyssey, there too we have ‘many griefs suffered on the sea’, but before that we are promised a poem about an ἀνὴρ πολύτροπος, a poem (in other words) of ἦθος. This is, however, a man whom we do not really get to see until Book 5, whereas in the Iliad the μῆνις and its consequences burst upon us almost immediately. The poem of outburst and confrontation is set against the poem of brooding and biding one's time, of plotting and deception. The point is familiar enough to need no further labouring.Footnote ⁶² Aristotle needed nothing other than the poems themselves to see how their plot structures differed and to formulate a distinction between them in terms of ‘the simple’ and ‘the complex’ (or ‘entwined’), but we know that he knew the Hippias Minor (we would have assumed this anyway)Footnote ⁶³ and it does not seem utterly implausible that the distinctions made in that dialogue about Achilles and Odysseus have had some influence on the arguments, or the formulation of the arguments, about plot structures in the Poetics. In other words, although epic follows in the Poetics on the coat-tails of tragedy, epic, mediated in part through the Hippias Minor, might have nudged Aristotle down the path he followed.