Ancient Athenian Law Bleg, Special Cleruchy Edition

Re Eurthyphro’s relationship with his father, is the scenario set-up intended to be read that closely? Euthyphro’s a priest because Socrates needs a not-too-sharp religious interlocutor to demolish.

Not completely on topic: this seems to be a case where religion / philosophy produce a sort of proto-order in the absence of a legalistic state order. Law in Athens was somewhat weakly developed, and Greek international law still more so. In Socrates and Plato religion was developed in a philosophical, rational direction, but it still performed religious functions and intended to replace traditionalist Homeric (Pythagorean, etc.) religion. And at the same time, religion performed what we’d call political or legal functions (as it does in Islam, and in China if you call Confucianism a religion).

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.)

Again I’d recommend looking at the Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law- lots of good articles, but perhaps more important a very large bibliography of books and articles, many of which touch on these subjects. Why not consult the experts?

Interesting points about E’s father’s intentions. I suppose one answer is that throwing the guy in a ditch for a week or two wouldn’t in itself make death by exposure inevitable (depending on time of year, I guess, which I don’t think we know), as long as food and water were provided. Perhaps E’s father provided some, but in the event not enough, or the conditions were otherwise borderline? I can’t imagine there’s any way to know. But it certainly seems that keeping the guy alive could not have been a priority, and the whole scenario is just plain weird.

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.

The Spartans at some period executed some people by throwing them (alive) into a pit (_Keadas_ in Pausanias, Kaiadas in Thucydides). Euthyphro’s father might be taken to have seen the ditch as the nearest equivalent on Naxos. There’s often a Sparta vs. Athens subtext in Plato.

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.