The accuracy of the early parts of Hippias' catalog of Olympic victors has been much debated. The most important and conclusive arguments are treated in Sections 2.5 and 2.6. It is also worthwhile to review briefly the other arguments that have been brought forward because some readers will be curious to know how particular issues and evidence have been treated in the scholarly literature. Debate has been driven by the attacks launched by critics against the assumption that the Olympic victor list is trustworthy, and subsequent rebuttals by its defenders. There are seven points to be considered, all of which are based on too little evidence to be conclusive one way or the other.

The first point involves Plutarch's remark about Hippias relying upon untrustworthy sources in compiling the Olympic victor list (Numa 1.4; see Section 2.1 for the text). Critics of the accuracy of the Olympic victor list see Plutarch's remark as indicative of obvious problems with Hippias' work, in part because it is taken to be representative of a long tradition of doubt going back to Eratosthenes, Timaeus, and possibly Aristotle. Defenders of the accuracy of the list see this remark as nothing more than Plutarch's own, uninformed judgment, an “embarrassed phrase” from a scholar with no real interest or expertise in chronology. Defenders of the accuracy of the list also invoke Aristotle, but as a guarantor of its reliability, based on the idea that Aristotle, who produced a version of the Olympic victor list and had access to records at Olympia, would not have put his name on an unreliable document.