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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: Hippias, like Protagoras and Gorgias, though civil, is vain and boastful:
he knows all things; he can make anything, including his own clothes; he is
a manufacturer of poems and declamations, and also of seal-rings, shoes,
strigils; his girdle, which he has woven himself, is of a finer than
Persian quality. He is a vainer, lighter nature than the two great
Sophists (compare Protag.), but of the same character with them, and
equally impatient of the short cut-and-thrust method of Socrates, whom he
endeavours to draw into a long oration. At last, he gets tired of being
defeated at every point by Socrates, and is with difficulty induced to
proceed (compare Thrasymachus, Protagoras, Callicles, and others, to whom
the same reluctance is ascribed).
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