ABSTRACT
Although history acquired its name right from the start, erudition had to wait longer. The most important word describing this sort of enquiry was the term archaiologia which firstly appeared in Plato's Hippias Major. It was put in the mouth of the sophist Hippias, who in his discussion with Socrates proudly asserts that nobody is indifferent to his services, not even the Spartans; they do not show any interest in the subjects he mainly specialises in (that is, astronomy, geometry, arithmetics, rhetoric or language), but they are interested in the genealogies of heroes and men, traditions about the foundation of cities and lists of eponymous magistrates - all those parts of a science called archaiologia. This new word, the creation of the sophist movement - although perhaps not devised by Hippias himself — is not intended to describe a new discipline; rather it is a new term, devised in order to include all those descriptions of origins, of 'antiquity' as a period and the antiquities as objects of knowledge. In this sense, the term reveals an interest in the past which is less determined by the explanation than by the description (Schnapp, 1996: 61; and Momigliano, 1950).
