3
Among these men Hippias, our own contemporary, deserves mention. Not only is he trained as highly in the art of speech as any of his predecessors, and alike quick of comprehension and clear in exposition, but he is better at action than speech, and fulfils his professional promises, not merely doing so in those matters in which his predecessors succeeded in getting to the fore, but, as the geometricians put it, knowing how to construct a triangle accurately on a given base.In other words, he has originality. Moreover, whereas each of the others marked off some one department of science and sought fame in it, making a name for himself in spite of this delimitation, he, on the contrary, is clearly a leader in harmony and music as well as in engineering and geometry, and yet he shows as great perfection in each of these fields as if he knew nothing else. It would take no little time to sing his praises in the doctrine of rays and refraction and mirrors, or in astronomy, in which he made his predecessors appear’ children,
