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KING ARCHON: There were nine 'archons' in Athens. The term derives from the verb meaning 'to rule'. They were magistrates, with various duties. They were 'elected' (chosen by lot from a set of candidates from 'good families') for terms of a year. The archon known as KING [basileus] wasn't really king. He was just the official in charge of hearing cases involving charges of murder and religious crime, e.g. impiety, oath-breaking, temple robbing, desecration.

A bit more about the 'king archon'. The Greek word, 'basileus', doesn't exactly mean king - one guy with more or less absolute power, maybe a pointy crown and self-satisfied smirk on his face. It's complicated, and has to do with four centuries of Greek history. (I can't very well narrate all that.) Basileus means, roughly, 'chief'; which is convenient, because we are familiar with titles like 'chief justice' or 'chief of police'. That said, the 'chief archon' - or, simply, 'the chief' - isn't the ruler over the other eight. His extra-fancy job title is, one might say, a reverend nod towards the venerable nature of his office and jurisdiction: prosecuting murder and religious crime.

Speaking of which: murder plus religious crime seems to us today like a distinctly mixed bag. But to the Athenians (and other Greeks) it made sense. Murder was religious crime. How so? Murder was thought to cause pollution [miasma - hence our word for the bad fumes coming off a swamp.] So murderers (along with oath-breakers, temple-robbers and the like) are polluted, and they pollute those they associate with - including whole cities. The gods hate pollution. Hence the existence of a legitimate public, religious interest in seeing murderers brought to justice. (You'd be pretty upset if a chemical plant was dumping toxic sludge behind your house, wouldn't you? It isn't too much of a stretch to say that the the king-archon is a divine sanitation engineer for the whole city.)

Euthyphro emphasizes the danger of pollution in explaining to Socrates why he needs to prosecute his own father. (He has to live with the guy, and he doesn't want moral slime all over the house.)

I'll finish out this entry by providing a link to a relevant passage from a famous ancient Greek work, Hesiod's Words and Days (7th century BC). Hesiod - anyway, the narrator - is a good, sturdy farmer, and you get to hear a lot about how to be a good sturdy farmer. One of the main events that gets narrated is the death of Hesiod's father, after which Hesiod's brother, Perses, swindles Hesiod out of a fair share of the inheritance by bribing the basileus. Hence this rather famous speech against crooked judges. (The word that gets translated 'prince', by the by, is basileus.)

There's a lot in the speech about the dangers of being unjust. You get a vivid sense of the Greek sense that moral badness - miasma - is contagious and will lead to all sorts of diverse, Zeus-given disasters: crop-failure and other community-wide events that terrify farmers. (Hesiod broadens Zeus' brief from murder to all sorts of wrong-doing by giving him 30,000 invisible spirits as roving policemen, in effect.)

One of the funny things things about the speech - the sort of thing that Socrates invariably picks on when he talks about poets (here and here, for example) - is that Hesiod's ethical outlook is apparently inconsistent.

How so?

Hesiod starts off by telling a little fable about a hawk that grabs a nightingale by the neck and then, when she complains, tells her to shut up, even though she sings sweetly. The stronger do what they like to the weak, you see. (And that is what Thrasymachus argues here. Socrates - and Plato - are always very concerned about this cynical point of view.) Hesiod, in confronting the judge, is obviously casting himself in the role of nightingale, telling the hawk not to believe that might makes right. But, ultimately, the moral of the speech as a whole is that the judge is the nightingale in the clutches of the yet greater hawk, Zeus. And that is a good thing.

Do you see how there is a tension here? A very Euthyphro-like muddle, potentially.

Or maybe Hesiod is being knowingly, craftily ironic, with his little hawk-nightingale moral fable. What do you think?

Meletus &
Socrates' other accusers
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There's a complex political backstory to Socrates' indictment.

Socrates had three accusers: Lycon, Meletus and Anytus. We hear about Meletus here in the "Euthyphro", and he is cross-examined rather devastatingly in "The Apology". We get to meet Anytus at the tail end of the "Meno". Socrates makes him look a bit off a fool. Anytus makes a veiled threat that Socrates could get himself in trouble this way. Socrates sighs that Anytus doesn't know what's good for him. So, a bit of dramatic foreshadowing.

And Lycon? - I don't know about Lycon. He was an orator, but not a very prominent one.

Meletus - who apparently brought suit against Socrates 'on behalf of the poets' - is sort of young and dumb. Like Euthyphro says: 'never heard of him.' Anytus, a master-tanner and military general, was more formidable and prominent and was probably the real muscle behind the indictment. (When I get around to commenting on the "Meno", I'll write a note about him.)

But what was the real motive behind this legal muscle? There are some grounds to think the whole indictment was somewhat pretextual, as follows. The trial took place in 399 BC. In 404 BC - five years earlier - Athenian democracy was restored after the fall of the so-called Thirty Tyrants. (They were oligarchs put in power in 411 BC by the Spartans, after they defeated Athens in the Peleponnesian War.) After the Thirty were defeated and democracy restored, a general amnesty was declared: no one could bring suit against anyone for having collaborated. This was very wise and generous in light of the fact that the tyrants sneakily forced otherwise innocent people, under dire threat, to do their dirty work for them. In "Apology", Socrates defends his good character on the grounds that he is known to have refused to collaborate with the tyrants, even under threat of death. Which is a pretty strong point in favor of his character.

Yet there is reason to believe that Socrates was widely suspected of being an anti-democratic, pro-Spartan sympathizer with oligarchy, if not with the Thirty - whom pretty much everyone agreed were very bad indeed. Could these suspicions have been warranted? Was Socrates really an anti-democrat? It's unlikely that he was in any simple or uncomplicated sense. (But that says nothing. There's never anything simple or uncomplicated about Socrates' views.) But there could substantial truth to the charge. Plato, after all, is strongly opposed to democracy. Maybe I'll talk about all this in lecture, or write a longer note on the subject.

At any rate, it would not have been possible to prosecute Socrates on grounds of political disloyalty, due to the amnesty. So it may be that rather generic charges of 'impiety, not believing in the gods of the city, corrupting youth' were trumped up, and the whole thing landed in a religious court (see entry on King Archon, above. Enough democrats on the jury might have been happy for a pretext to put this inconvenient man to death.

After telling Euthyphro about the case against him, Socrates rather wryly observes:

The Athenians don’t mind clever-types, so long as no one tries to teach his peculiar brand of wisdom. But if someone starts bringing others round to his way of thinking, then the Athenians get angry – either because they are jealous, as you say, or for some other reason.

The 'other reason' could be: fear of someone fomenting revolt against the newly-restored, fledgling democracy in favor of a more aristocratic form of government.

But all this is quite speculative.

Socrates' Daimonion
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A curious fact about Socrates. In a few dialogues - and from a few other sources - we hear that, periodically, a 'daimonion' speaks to him.

What's a daimonion?

'Demon' derives from this word, but 2000+ years of intervening Christianity have given it a distinctly negative connotation originally lacking. 'Spirit' would be a better translation. The Greeks were animists, believing there are 'spirits' in rocks, trees, rivers, pretty much everything. ['anima' means breath, which is the beginning of another interesting etymological story. Another day, another day.] Anyway, Socrates hears an inner spirit voice that - so we are told - tells him not to do things.

For example, in "Apology", Socrates defends his way of life - making his fellow citizens look like fools by asking them questions they can't answer; not engaging in the legal affairs of the assembly - as follows:

"There is a divine, spiritual sign which comes to me, which Meletus makes fun of in his indictment. It started when I was a child. It is a voice, and whenever it speaks it holds me back from something I was about to do, but it never spurs me on to anything. This is what has kept me from taking part in public affairs, and I think the voice was right to prevent me. You can be sure, gentlemen of the jury, that if I had early on tried to get into politics, I would have died long ago, leaving neither of us - you nor me - better off. Don't be angry at me for speaking the truth; no man will survive who forthrightly opposes you or any other crowd, trying to hinder all kinds of unjust, illegal goings-on in the city. A man who really fights for justice must stand alone, apart from public affairs, if he is to stay alive even a little while." (31c-e)

Having in effect bragged on his spiritual superiority, while calling the jury a pack of criminals not worthy of being associated with - supreme strategy for losing friends and being executed by people - Socrates is convicted and sentenced to death. Then, when he addresses the portion of the jury that supported him, he brings up his daimonion again.

"To you, who are my friends, I want to reveal the meaning of what has just taken place. A surprising thing has happened to me, judges - you truly are judges, and deserve that name. Always in the past my familiar power of prophecy, my spiritual sign, has frequently opposed me even in small things, when I was about to do wrong. But now, as you all see, I am faced with what one might think - what is generally thought - the most terrible of evils. Yet my sign did not oppose me. Not when I left home at down, nor when I entered the court, nor at any point when I was about to say something in my speech. Though at other times when I have been speaking it has held me back in midstream, now it opposes me neither in word nor deed. What do I think the reason is for this? I will tell you. What has happened to me may well be a good thing, and those among us who think death is an evil thing are certainly mistaken. I can produce sound proof this is so, for my daimonion could not fail to oppose me if I was not about to do the right thing." (40b)

And here's another link, to a relevant passage from Xenophon, who was Socrates' second most famous pupil, after Plato.

All this is quite mysterious, and you are as free to advance speculative interpretations of Socrates' 'spirit voice' as I am. I would not advise doing so on your papers, however. Because we don't encourage you to just make stuff up.

Euthyphro's Failure to Win Respect in the Assembly
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His sort of straightforward belief in stories about the gods is evidently a bit old-fashioned by the cosmopolitan standards of bustling, up-to-the-minute, modern, 5th century BC Athens.

There's something distinctly schizophrenic about a culture that can laugh at someone for taking tales of the gods seriously, then turn around and put someone to death for not taking tales of the gods seriously. So there is something richly comical about about these two someones - Euthyphro and Socrates - bonking their heads together to have a serious little argument about it all.

Really. I realize I'm killing it by explaining it, but often people don't see how funny Plato can be. His sense of situational comedy is subtle and very understated. The whole conversation between Euthyphro and Socrates isn't like loud slaps of the slapstick. It's one of those jokes that just rolls and rolls its tongue round its cheek while keeping a completely straight face. The joke consists in placing luckless characters in an incongruous social/cultural setting, where they are incapable of being themselves and doing the right thing. Everything they say and do becomes an arrow pointing up the very fact that it makes no sense for them to be in this situation. It's comedy of manners.

So the explicit philosophical issues discussed are very interesting and important in themselves. But what is surely equally important to Plato is the implied, broad - indeed, sweeping - cultural critique. To the extent that either Euthyphro or Socrates starts to make any sense (the latter, in particular), Athens itself - the situation: socially and culturally and legally - starts to become the butt of the sit com.

Traditional religion, in Athens, was ceasing to govern people's lives as perhaps it once had. So what comes after religion? If you don't quite take stories about Zeus seriously - or if you think modern city life is just too complicated for the old stories to provide complete guidance - what new compass are you going to steer by? Reason, maybe? That would be rather a bold notion. You've got to replace the old ways with something, apparently. (Or maybe you don't.)

It wouldn't be right to compare ancient Athens with Victorian England - but, since we're reading Plato and Mill, I'm going to do it anyway. (Ha, ha!) Here is a passage from Mill's On Liberty that might be thought to apply, at least loosely, to the sit com in which Socrates and Euthyphro find themselves cast:

In the present age—which has been described as ‘destitute of faith [sorry, Euthyphro], but terrified at scepticism [sorry, Socrates]’,—in which people feel sure, not so much that their opinions are true, as that they should not know what to do without them—the claims of an opinion to be protected from public attack are rested not so much on its truth, as on its importance to society. There are, it is alleged, certain beliefs, so useful, not to say indispensable to well-being, that it is as much the duty of governments to uphold those beliefs, as to protect any other of the interests of society.

This passage could be cited to annoy Anytus in "The Meno". I'm thinking of this bit in particular. Anytus attacks the sophists and (for once) Socrates defends them, largely because he sees that Anytus' alternative to having clever folk running around, publically attacking received notions, is to assume that the difficult questions have simple, obvious answers, which all upright citizens - good men and true - know already.

Putting the point a bit differently (or maybe it's a different point): Euthyphro himself is sort of Athens writ small (even though the Athenians laugh at him.) If he were truly traditional in his religious notions and attitudes and attachments, he would know better than to argue with a guy like Socrates. If Socrates bothered him on the street, he would just keep walking. He wouldn't be concerned about being able to provide rational explanations and justifications for his actions. On the other hand, if Euthyphro were truly rational, he wouldn't bother trying to cobble his explanations and justifications out of a bunch of hand-me-down stories about what Zeus may or may not have done. So Euthyphro is sort of half-traditional, half-rational. He's got a split philosophical personality - just like the city he lives in - and Socrates just loves to dig a knife blade in where he can see a split between two halves of one mind; he gets the scalpel in there and does mind surgery until it really hurts.

So the character of Euthyphro is, under the dramatic supervision of Plato, a reproach to Athens in two senses: he is a reproach because the fact that someone who makes such a fuss about religion is ignored shows the Athenians are not seriously religious. (Hence not serious in their attack on Socrates.) He is a reproach because he shows what a mess you get in if you try to stay serious about religion, while sort of half-way making your way to a rational view of things.

A Bit About Athenian Law & Justice
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A son, Euthyphro, is preparing to prosecute his own father for murder. Most peculiar. But please step back and notice that it is hardly less peculiar, by our lights today, for a private citizen to prosecute any murder case. Prosecutor is surely a public office, is it not? Not in Athens.

Some legal history. In 620 BC, an Athenian named Draco - about whom little is known - enacted a number of legal reforms. Our word 'draconian' derives from the fact that a later writer described Draco's laws as 'written in blood, not ink', but we actually know almost as little about the laws as about the man.

One thing that is known for sure is that Draco moved to make the state, instead of families and kin, the judicial agent in cases of murder and wrongful death. Also, he is credited with encoding the legal distinction between murder (killing with what lawyers today call mens rea: wicked intent) and other sorts of deaths: manslaughter, culpable but unintentional killing, legitimate self-defense, so forth.

You can probably imagine how it worked before, and you would be right. You kill one of ours; we kill one of yours. And no one stops to ask whether a given individual incident was an accident, or justified, or anything complicated like that. These were the stark rules by which even aristocratic families lived - good and decent folk. So if you have ever seen a movie about common street gangs, you know how good and decent Athenians pursued justice, before Draco. (Have you seen Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet? Works that way there, too. Pillars of society brawling in the streets because one of theirs killed one of ours.)

There were complications, to be sure: sanctuaries around Greece where a wanted man could hide out, in safety, while he and his kin negotiated blood payment of some sort to get him off the hook. But street gangs have been known to designate areas as 'neutral ground', for negotiation purposes.

The pre-Draconian situation highlights the vital importance of family and clan. If you have no family, it is effectively possible to kill you with legal impunity. Again, if you have ever seen a movie about street gangs, you know that any stranger who wanders into town, and finds himself caught like a poor fly in angry webs of blood, is likely to be dangerously exposed. (In the movies, the stranger is likely to have the compensating advantage of being really good with a gun/sword/kung-fu. But life isn't always like the movies.)

In Greek society, one compensating moral/theological consideration was this: Zeus was (at least sometimes) thought to watch over strangers and wanderers in particular. So if you stab that stranger for his cash, counting on the fact that he's got no family to come after you, Zeus may come after you. He's like an impersonal policeman in that respect. This is surely why Euthyphro finds it most natural to always be asking, WWZD? What would Zeus do? He is trying to articulate an order of justice that is impersonal, not defined in terms of ties of family and blood and so forth. Of course, the paradox is: Zeus is the head of Euthyphro's family. So in attacking an ethics of family and blood, Euthyphro is relying on ... an ethics of family and blood. (He's only right if he's wrong. Think about it. Maybe you'll decide I'm wrong and he's right.)

But getting back to our legal history, before Draco there wasn't much legal sanction corresponding to Zeus' love of strangers and other loner-types. Those without families were out of luck (without kung-fu.) And, actually, Draco didn't really change that because, until the next set of legal reforms went through, only the kin and clan of the victim could bring suit with the state against those responsible for a wrongful death. So strangers are still out of luck. There is now a state judge to hear such a case, but no one to prosecute on behalf of the victim.

Then, in 594 BC (or so), along came Solon. He was most concerned to sort out various problems with property law in Athens. I won't tell you about all that, fascinating though it is (really, I'm not kidding.) But he also established trial by jury; and he made it the case that any male citizen could bring suit against any criminal. For the first time, prosecution is not the exclusive legal prerogative of victims (if still alive) or family/clan members (if not).

Between Solon's day and Socrates', at least one more stage of directly relevant legal reforms was enacted. In 508 BC a ruler named Cleisthenes did his best to break up the four main Athenian clans - known as phylai [hence our biological classification phylum]. What he did was extremely complicated, but basically he replaced the ancient clans with ten new, completely artificial units, which were almost anti-clans, because they were intentionally built out of human bits that would not naturally fit together: not geographically contiguous, having no natural connections and loyalties through occupation, family, religion, ethnicity, whatever.

The point, of course, was to break down powerful families as rivals to the power of the state. (If you must have large families, make them totally unappealing, as rival loci of loyalty.) I mention this development as a sign of how things were running by 508 BC: towards the state, away from the family as the salient political unit. (It's not that Athenians stopped caring about their families, obviously.)

Skipping ahead to Socrates' and (Euthyphro's) day: to try one's father for murder would be an astonishing thing, then as now. (Today it would never happen: if you are a public prosecutor, and your father is accused of murder, you surely won't get handed that case.) But it would have been much more astonishing, then than now. Euthyphro is prosecuting his own father in the context of a system that only in the quite recent past emerged out of an 'eye-for-an-eye' model of justice-as-family-vengeance. To be acting as prosecutor against your own blood, when fairly recently, it was legally impossible for anyone who wasn't of the same blood as the victim to prosecute .. well, you get the point. Quite a reversal, in rather a short period of time. All this is very much in the background in the "Euthyphro". Make of it what you will.

The Complexity of the Case
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If your only tool is the Hammer of Thor, every problem starts to look like a nail.

The case against Euthyphro's father - with associated family feuding thrown in - borders on soap-opera-grade complexity. Sometimes this is thought to be a distracting irrelevance, hence a minor literary failing on Plato's part. (After all, it isn't as though the rest of the dialogue is about all these legal and familial intricacies. Why bring them up?)

It seems to me, to the contrary, that a substantive and really quite central point is hereby made. Namely: it isn't an open-and-shut case. And: Euthyphro is really just too straightforward for his own good. Life isn't straight. It takes twists and turns. Euthyphro's simple stock of myths and edifying tales of Zeus aren't much help when it comes to sifting, say, evidence and extenuating circumstances in a complex criminal case.

How not? Well, Zeus hates murder. But Euthyphro's father is not guilty of murder, surely, because he did not intend the victim's death. At most he's guilty of something like negligent manslaughter/ wrongful death. (I'm using our modern terms.) Further mitigating factors: the father has no personal, selfish interest which has involved him in this affair. He was acting impersonally. The whole thing is basically a bungled citizen's arrest, in an era when there weren't any police. (Today bungling a citizen's arrest is more blameworthy, since you could have called the police, nine times out of ten.) And the victim himself is, apparently, a murderer, which seems a relevant consideration. He was sure to be put to death for what he did. The father just hurried the process. Of course, this assumes Euthyphro's narration of the facts is accurate - which is yet another issue to be considered.

It really isn't clear, then, that by Athenian lights, the father deserves worse than a slap on the wrist and a stern lecture from the basileus about taking better care of prisoners next time around. Given that, it is rather self-important - and disproportionate - for Euthyphro to go around loudly comparing what he is doing to what Zeus did to his father, when his father started murdering his own children. (And see next note.)

Getting back to the first point, it is only in the very recent past (see previous note) that Athenian law even acknowledged the moral difference between intentional (wicked) and unintentional (potentially justified, or semi-pardonable) killings. Euthyphro is trying to be very advanced in his theorizing about justice. He is very proud of taking such a detached, impersonal position. But his detachment isn't really very sophisticated. And unsophisticated detachment is potentially dangerous. You cut the ties of custom and family - which were, no doubt, worth something - without replacing them with anything that obviously worth anything.

This point - Euthyphro is oblivious to complexity - is no doubt related to his difficulties in the Assembly. Athens is a large city with a complex economy, political and social structure, with complex civic needs. If someone stands up to speak to the question of whether there should be a 5% tax on oil to pay for the dredging of the harbor; or a 4% tax on oil and pottery to pay for dredging, plus a new harbor wall; and if what that person has to contribute are old stories about does and does not anger Poseidon, god of the sea - well, you can see why people might not find this very helpful.

The Confucius Connection
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There is a famous passage from Confucius' Analects, in which a case astonishingly like Euthyphro's is considered, and a different answer is arrived at.

The Governor of She said to Confucius, 'In our village there is a man nicknamed 'Straight Body'. When his father stole a sheep, he gave evidence against him.' Confucius answered, 'In our village those who are straight are quite different. Fathers cover up for their sons, and sons cover up for their fathers. Straightness is to be found in such behaviour.' [Analects, 13:18, D.C. Lau translation]

It is a very striking coincidence that Plato would tell a story about Euthyphro ['straight guy'] prosecuting his father; and a mere century or so earlier, Confucius told a similar story about 'Straight Body', who did the same.

You could write a book, comparing and contrasting Plato and Confucius on filial piety. (Probably at least 10 people have.) If I find the time, I'll compose a longer note about the fact that, although Plato and Confucius may seem to be in agreement, i.e. disapproving of what these 'straight' fellows are doing, in a sense they couldn't disagree more about what is wrong here. In the meantime, here's a general puzzle: under what circumstances, and to what degree, would you side with the authorities against a parent whom you believed guilty of a crime?

Obviously the severity of the crime matters. (But why is that? And to what degree?) And think about the different sorts of assistance you might render, or not. Euthyphro actively prosecutes his own father. No one asked him to. Straight Body apparently gives evidence - presumably when asked or ordered. That is, he found himself in court and he didn't lie on the stand. This is less than what Euthyphro does. I think there are probably a broad range of cases in which one might be willing to turn a passive, blind eye. (If your dad stole a DVD player, say, would you actually go to the trouble of alerting the authorities? Would that be the right thing to do to your family?) And then there are cases of actively covering-up, which Confucius seems to suggest is OK at least under some conditions. Actually helping your dad to hide the DVD player, when the cops knock on the door, is rather different than failing to walk down to the police station to tell them about it. But why should the difference make a difference?

What would you actually do, in a range of cases, and why?

Arrogant
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Isn't he?

That's a question. It's up to you to decide. (Really. Why should you take my word for it.) In my comments above, I have been rather hard on Euthyphro. In fairness - and to get you into the spirit of the game - let me quote you a passage from I. F. Stone's book, The Trial of Socrates. Stone isn't a scholar; he is - or was - a rather well-known American journalist. His book is pretty good, I think. Hee writes:

Nowhere in the long, intricate and sometimes tedious dialogue does Socrates ever utter one word of pity for the poor landless laborer. His rights are never mentioned. Was it "pious" or just to leave him exposed to cold and hunger while "the lord of the manor" decided in his own good time what to do with him? Had he no right to a day in court? The laborer might have shown that the quarrel in which he killed the landowner's slave was accidental. All these pleas were known to Athenian homicide law. And now that the laborer had died of hunger and exposure did not justice require the trial of Euthyphro's father to determine whether his own conduct constituted homicide. (p. 147-8)

Does that seem right to you? Stone goes on to portray Euthyphro, basically, as a moral hero, for having the clarity of vision to see that he is obliged to treat his father as not morally different than anyone else, and the courage to ignore his complaining relatives.