Plato’s Hippias Minor as literary criticism

Plato’s Hippias Minor makes a previously overlooked contribution to ancient criticism, in recommending two principles for interpreting passages of literary dialogue in context. According to Socrates, a character’s words should be interpreted against the broader background of the entire narrative, and also according to the interpersonal aspect in the immediate scene. Thus, their meaning can be influenced by the speaker’s communicational goals, as s/he reacts to past, and anticipates future, discourse by the addressee. Socrates presents these principles implicitly as he argues by reductio ad absurdum against the principles Hippias uses to interpret Iliad 9.308–14.