Euthyphro

Euthyphro (/ˈjuːθɪfroʊ/; Ancient Greek: Εὐθύφρων, Euthuphrōn), one of Plato's early dialogues, has been variously dated from 399 to 395 BCE, shortly after the death of Socrates in 399 BCE. Set in the weeks leading up to Socrates's trial, it features Socrates and Euthyphro, a religious expert who attempts to define piety or holiness.

Background

The dialogue is set near the king-archon's court, where the two men encounter each other. They are both there for preliminary hearings before possible trials (2a).

Euthyphro has come to lay manslaughter charges against his father, as his father had allowed one of his workers to die exposed to the elements without proper care and attention (3e–4d). This worker had killed a slave belonging to the family estate on the island of Naxos; while Euthyphro's father waited to hear from the expounders of religious law (exegetes cf. Laws 759d) about how to proceed, the worker died bound and gagged in a ditch. Socrates expresses his astonishment at the confidence of a man able to take his own father to court on such a serious charge, even when Athenian Law allows only relatives of the deceased to sue for murder (Dem. 43 § 57). Euthyphro misses the astonishment, and merely confirms his overconfidence in his own judgment of religious/ethical matters. In an example of "Socratic irony," Socrates states that Euthyphro obviously has a clear understanding of what is pious (τὸ ὅσιον to hosion) and impious (τὸ ἀνόσιον to anosion). Since Socrates himself is facing a charge of impiety, he expresses the hope to learn from Euthyphro, all the better to defend himself in his own trial.

Euthyphro (prophet)

Euthyphro of Prospalta (/ˈjuːθɪfroʊ/; Greek: Εὑθύφρων Προσπάλτιος, Euthύphrōn Prospáltios; fl. 400 BCE) was an ancient Athenian religious prophet (mantis) best known for his role in his eponymous dialogue written by the philosopher Plato. The debate between Euthyphro and Socrates therein influenced generations of theologians and gave rise to the question of the relationship between God and morality known as the Euthyphro dilemma.

Life

Euthyphro's biography can only be reconstructed through the details revealed by Plato in the Euthyphro and Cratylus, as no further contemporaneous sources exist. While the dramatic date of the former may be definitively set at 399 BCE, the latter is uncertain, argued alternately as 422 and 399; this makes gauging Euthyphro's period of activity difficult, but the former dating paradigm suggests that he may have been a long-lived figure in Athens. He was an Athenian citizen of the Prospalta deme old enough to have appeared multiple times before the Athenian assembly in 399, placing his birth somewhere in the mid-5th century. Euthyphro had evidently farmed on Naxos, probably as part of the cleruchy established by Pericles in 447 to which his father may have belonged. If in fact historical, the trial he instigated against his father depicted in the Euthyphro may have begun as early as 404.