A region of the northwestern Peloponnese that guarded the sanctuary of Olympia and its Games, and whose native sons included the sophist Hippias and Pyrrho, founder of Greek Skepticism.
Elis (Peloponnese) through the eras
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Classical Age
An independent polis that administered the Panhellenic sanctuary at Olympia, Elis steered through the rivalries of Sparta and Athens during the Peloponnesian War—at one point breaking with Sparta and suffering invasion for it. From here came Hippias of Elis, one of the most versatile of the sophists: a polymath who boasted he could speak on any subject and who appears as an interlocutor in two of Plato's dialogues, carrying the new professional teaching of rhetoric and learning from city to city.
Hellenistic Age
After the campaigns of Alexander, Elis gave the Greek world Pyrrho, who had traveled east with Alexander's army as far as India and returned to found the skeptical way of thought. Teaching in his home city, Pyrrho urged the suspension of judgment (epoché) about the true nature of things as the path to tranquility (ataraxia); though he wrote nothing himself, his pupil Timon of Phlius spread his ideas, and 'Pyrrhonism' became the enduring name for radical Greek Skepticism.