 After Hippias fails, Socrates tries three definitions. These are general but they fail too, and—again in classic Socratic mode—the dialogue ends unresolved. In one excursus Socrates says beauty “is appropriate [prepei]” and proposes defining it as “what is appropriate [to prepon]” (290d). Although ending in refutation this discussion (to 294e) is worth a look as the anticipation of a modern debate. Philosophers of the eighteenth century argue over whether an object is beautiful by satisfying the definition of the object, or independently of that definition (Guyer 1993). Kant calls the beauty that is appropriateness “dependent beauty” (Critique of Judgment, section 16). Such beauty threatens to become a species of the good. Within the accepted corpus of genuine Platonic works beauty is never subsumed within the good, the appropriate, or the beneficial; Plato seems to belong in the same camp as Kant in this respect. (On Platonic beauty and the good see Barney 2010.) Nevertheless, and of course, he is no simple sensualist about beauty either. The very temptation in Plato to link the beautiful with the good and to assess it intellectually is part of why Porter calls him and Aristotle “formalists,” who diverted ancient theorizing about art from its sensualist origins (Porter 2010).