Which is a roundabout way of asking – why are you asking this question?

Jim, Athens too practiced execution by precipitation into “the pit.” But I’ve always thought that what Euthyphro’s father does is quite different: he threw the offending workman into a taphos, a trench, presumably not to kill him by the fall but to keep him in place. The death strikes me as akin to the practice of exposure of infants, where the parents are not subject to miasma since, technically, they didn’t kill the infant, wild beasts (or whatever) did.

As to the business of the consultation with the religious advisors in Athens, and the failure to consult Euthyphro instead: the advisor in question is actually a state official, an exegetes. We don’t know a tremendous amount about the exegetai (I think this passage in Euthyphro is their first attestation), but they appear to have been consulted on matters that might have sacred law implications, and though there’s no reason to suggest their answers had the force of law, they must have been considered fairly authoritative. And by virtue of being city officials were presumably worth consulting even if your son considered himself an expert. (The exegetai come up in other atypical cases, such as the Demosthenes speech [47, I think?] in which the speaker discusses the possibility of prosecuting the murder of a former slave, where they advise on available legal procedure.) So, although I don’t think the consultation precludes seeing a snub to Euthyphro, I don’t think it entails it.

And the question of pollution/purification requirements when a slave is killed might well have been a difficult one. There are reasons to doubt the centrality of miasma to Athenian homicide law, and one of those reasons is that, as far as the evidence indicates, there was no fixed penalty in Athenian law for the murder of a slave (or an alien), in contrast to the fixed penalty of death for murder of a citizen. So pollution might not have been a simple binary question, and official advice on this pretty odd set of facts would probably have been a good idea.

I said above that he was probably thinking ‘when the messenger gets back, we’ll kill him then.’ But it would be equally plausible, say, to enforce exile by throwing the guy on some boat and paying the captain to not let him go until they got to Thrace, or wherever. In murder trials, the defendent was traditionally given an option of self-exile at an early stage in the trial. So exile would be an orthodox solution, in its way. Maybe dad just hadn’t worked out cost-effective solution he liked yet, and the guy up and died on him. In religious terms, the point is to get the guy away from you.

Another vote for Belle’s suggestion about cleansing the farm.

Other cases where religious law provides a partial order in the absence of a state (or in a violent multi-state system) include early Iceland, Tibet during much of its history, medieval Europe, and lawless areas like the Balkans or the Atlas mountains in N. Africa.

For us philosophy, religion, law, and literature are four different things, but in early Athens Hoer was taken as a religious, legal, and philosophical authority and could be authoritative in dispute resolution—in China the “Book of Songs” had a similiar authority. (Havelock, “Preface to Plato”). Even to the extent that law became differentiated in Athens, civil law, criminal law, policy debate, and “constitutional law” could all be mushed together.

Analysis is intrinsically a good thing, but not if you lose awareness of the interrelationships. Government and churches can be analyzed as economic entities, finance and churches has political power, and so on. (Literature and religion seem to be dwindling in our world; it’s hard to remember that poets used to be important people.)

It also seems like an interesting question whether Plato’s audience would assume that the dad was seeking advice about possible legal courses of action, or was instead just taking the law into his own hands and seeking possible religious advice. And if he was taking the law in his own hands: would it have been understandable that this is something someone might do – given the distance to Athens, complexity of an actual trial, so forth?