HERMIAS. - No ancient source speaks of this writer, who is known only from the title of his brief work: Hermiae philosophi irrisio gentilium philosophorum, which has come down to us in 16 manuscripts, the best of which is cod. Patmos 202, attributed to the 10th century. Taking as its starting point St. Paul, who calls the wisdom of this world foolishness (I Cor. 3:19), it surveys the theories of the pagan philosophers on the nature and destiny of the soul and on the ultimate principles of things, holding them up to mockery and revealing how they contradict one another.
About the author, once the attempts to identify him on the sole basis of the identity of the name with E. Sozomen, the historian who continued Eusebius, or with the E. (more probably Hermogenes) mentioned by Philaster of Brescia (De haeresibus, 55) and by St. Augustine (De haeresibus, 59), had fallen through, nothing can be said beyond what emerges from the writing itself. On this basis, some (Menzel, Diels, Harnack, Wendland) placed him in the 5th to 6th centuries; others (Otto, Di Pauli, Bardenhewer, Puech, Stählin), with better reason, relying on the name of "philosopher" given by the manuscripts as to several apologists of the 2nd century, on the omission of any allusion to Neoplatonism, on the liveliness of the polemic which presupposes a setting of heated conflict between paganism and Christianity, and on the dependence of the Cohortatio ad Graecos of Pseudo-Justin on the Irrisio, assign this writing to the end of the 2nd century or the beginning of the 3rd.
The work has no particular value of thought. Its theme is a commonplace of skeptical sophistry, widely taken up by apologists hostile to pagan culture. The religious element is little developed, greater prominence being given to physical theories than to theology. One does not find properly philosophical judgments in it. More than a "philosopher", E. is a rhetorician endowed with good resources as a polemicist, who knows how to be ironic by casting ridicule on his opponents, even very great ones, such as Plato and Aristotle.
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Michele Pellegrino