It will still, in other words, largely be up to the individual bringing the prosecution to decide what course to take, guidance for that choice will be limited, and whether the chosen course is correct or not will be answered by a non-professional jury weighing competing accounts of the facts and the law, not by a jurist focusing specifically and serially on the relevant technical questions. Whether, e.g., the murder here is intentional or unintentional would probably be a question of law decided by a judge in a modern Anglo-American court, with a ‘right’ answer discoverable in doctrine and precedent. In Athens, E. will have to pick one or the other (possibly w/ the archon basileus playing some role), and then do his best to convince the jury—much more softly constrained by technicalities (which is not to say those technicalities won’t play a role in the ultimate outcome). And of course there’s no concept of judicial precedent at all. So even though, e.g., Dem. 54 hypothesizes that a blow, intended merely to harm, that turns out fatal justifies a charge of intentional homicide, this is only of limited predictive value. It tells us that such an approach is within the latitude available, but it does not tell us that it’s the only one available.

I think part of what’s going on is that MacDowell implicitly sees the Athenian dikasterion as a decadent mechanism for enforcing the rule of law. Certainly a common view, going back at least to the Ath. Pol., and understandable from a modern perspective. So the Areopagos, for M., being smaller and (in his view, though I don’t share it) marginally professionalized, is better at the judicial function, part of which is focusing on technicalities. I don’t think—or I don’t think there’s much evidence to suggest—that the Athenians shared this view or acted accordingly, at least not in terms of one court or another’s greater ability to apply the law (maybe they would have conceded that the Areopagos is generically ‘wiser’, or something like that).

I wasn’t actually suggesting that he could be prosecuted, just that it might be a bit unseemly. A weak argument, I admit.

As to the second point: I agree that it is quite impossible to try to deduce what must have actually happened in Euthyphro’s case. But I don’t venture an opinion about that in the paper.

I’ll check out the Gagarin. It sounds interesting and relevant.

Only specific thing I’d say is probably at odds with the evidence (though not demonstrably wrong) is the suggestion that that Plato would not have made up this story for fear of exposure to a slander prosecution seems remote. What evidence we have suggests that Athenian slander law at the time was relatively narrow and unlikely to be implicated here.

More generally, I’m just not sure that the fourth century Athenian legal system is quite this susceptible to the kinds of technical, doctrinal arguments you try to apply to it. Such constraints exist, but work much differently than analogous constraints in a modern system with professional jurists, and trying to figure out exactly what Euthyphro could or could not do here doctrinally—and from that, deduce what he thus must have been doing in fact—is awfully difficult, and not just because of the limited state of our evidence. Michael Gagarin’s got a book coming out I think this summer that’s very useful on this, some of the ideas have appeared in article form but I don’t have references on hand (maybe his piece in the MacDowell festschrift that came out a few years ago?).

I don’t know, but after the thing-which-is-carried, there’s always a being-carried thing, and soon we’re comparing everything to flutes and horses and no good will come of it.

This is excellent, John. I’d known enough of the story to gesture at it when teaching the Euthyphro, but the piece really brings out how exceptional Euthyphro’s actions were. Students tend to come into it thinking that it’s more like a case of confessing what your father did to the police and civic authorities.

Is it long because Holbo willed it long? Or did Holbo will it long because it is long?

Illustrations by Zoë, I hope?