 The Hippias Major follows Socrates and the Sophist Hippias through a sequence of attempts to define to kalon. Socrates badgers Hippias, in classic Socratic ways, to identify beauty’s general nature; Hippias offers three definitions. Quite preposterously for instance “a beautiful young woman is beautiful” (287e). Hippias had a reputation for the breadth of his factual knowledge. He compiled the first list of Olympic victors, and he might have written the first history of philosophy. But his over-ingestion of specifics has evidently left him unable to digest his experience and generalize to a philosophical definition.