_Sokr._--My disputatious friend will not accept your answer. He wants you to tell him, What is the Self-Beautiful?--that Something through which all beautiful things become beautiful. Am I to tell him, it is because a beautiful maiden is a beautiful thing? He will say--Is not a beautiful mare a beautiful thing also? and a beautiful lyre as well? _Hip._--Yes;--both of them are so. _Sokr._--Ay, and a beautiful pot, my friend will add, well moulded and rounded by a skilful potter, is a beautiful thing too. _Hip._--How, Sokrates? Who can your disputatious friend be? Some ill-taught man, surely; since he introduces such trivial names into a dignified debate. _Sokr._--Yes; that is his character: not polite, but vulgar, anxious for nothing else but the truth. _Hip._--A pot, if it be beautifully made, must certainly be called beautiful; yet still, all such objects are unworthy to be counted as beautiful, if compared with a maiden, a mare, or a lyre. [Side-note: Cross-questioning by Sokrates--Other things also are beautiful; but each thing is beautiful only by comparison, or under some particular circumstances--it is sometimes beautiful, sometimes not beautiful.] _Sokr._--I understand. You follow the analogy suggested by Herakleitus in his dictum--That the most beautiful ape is ugly, if compared with the human race. So you say, the most beautiful pot is ugly, when compared with the race of maidens. _Hip_--Yes. That is my meaning. _Sokr._--Then my friend will ask you in return, whether the race of maidens is not as much inferior to the race of Gods, as the pot to the maiden? whether the most beautiful maiden will not appear ugly, when compared to a Goddess? whether the wisest of men will not appear an ape, when compared to the Gods, either in beauty or in wisdom.[14] _Hip._--No one can dispute it. _Sokr._--My friend will smile and say--You forget what was the question put. I asked you, What is the Beautiful?--the Self-Beautiful: and your answer gives me, as the Self-Beautiful, something which you yourself acknowledge to be no more beautiful than ugly? If I had asked you, from the first, what it was that was both beautiful and ugly, your answer would have been pertinent to the question. Can you still think that the Self-Beautiful,--that Something, by the presence of which all other things become beautiful,--is a maiden, or a mare, or a lyre? [Footnote 14: Plat. Hipp. Maj. 289.] [Side-note: Second answer of Hippias--_Gold_, is that by the presence of which all things become beautiful--scrutiny applied to the answer. Complaint by Hippias about vulgar analogies.]