Hippias

Hippias of Elis worked in the late 5th century BC, a contemporary of Socrates moving through the same intellectual circles of ancient Greece. He lectured widely, positioning himself as an authority on an uncommonly broad range: poetry, grammar, history, politics, mathematics, and more. That sweeping self-assurance became his signature and his liability. Most of what survives about him comes through Plato's dialogues, where he appears not as a thinker to admire but as a foil — vain, arrogant, the sophist as overreach. The portrait stuck.