Hey Kids, More Euthyphro!

_”but this bit’s gotten a bit long”_

Well, I certainly couldn’t have seen _that_ coming!

As far as his standing to prosecute goes, might it not be relevant that Euthyphro identifies the dead servant as “a dependent of mine”? If Euthyphro’s father mistreated a man who was legally bound to Euthyphro, not the father, than wouldn’t Euthyphro have some sort of claim here?

John,

On the anachronism point, let me make my second suggestion clearer. I am suggesting that Plato and his intended readers simply weren’t overly concerned about historical timeline literalism, and were accustomed to the use of intentional anachronism for dramatic and literary purposes, and would painlessly make a willing suspension of awareness of anachronism in reading dialogues, seeing plays, etc. Those readers who were historically well-enough informed to know that the murder on Naxos would have to have occurred five or more years before Socrates’s trial wouldn’t say. “My gosh, why did Euthyphro wait five years!” They would say, “Oh, I get it. We’re supposed to make believe these events happened around the same time, so that Plato can stage an interesting fictive dialogue between Socrates and Euthyphro on piety, the treatment of the old by the young, the credibility of self-styled religious experts, etc.”

On the question of Euthyphro’s standing to prosecute, you’ll have to help me with the meaning of the Greek terms and the legal categories they denote. But I was assuming that when Euthyphro says the murdered man was one of Euthyphro’s “dependents”, that implies that the man was more than a hired hand, but something more like a serf. In this case, wouldn’t Euthyphro have an obligation, or at least a right, to prosecute?

I’m writing an (illustrated!) introductory Plato text – three dialogues with commentary (translations by Belle W.)

Illustrations by Zoë, I hope?

“but this bit’s gotten a bit long”

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

Is this about the Champions League Final?

It’s actually kind of … short.

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

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.

Probably a bit late to comment, and I doubt this is an original thought, but I find myself wondering whether the significance of Plato’s choice of particular impiety conundrum here might have something to do with the then-current notion that Socrates was at the heart of an intensely disruptive inter-generational conflict? (See, of course, Aristophanes’ Clouds, and Socrates’ prosecution for teaching new gods/corrupting the youth.)

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 see now that the Gagarin book I mentioned (Writing Greek Law) is already searchable on amazon, though it’s not out until next month. Page 209 makes much more clearly than I did the point I was trying to make in 23.3.

Yes, that’s a good point. I suppose it stands to reason that given the heightened procedural complexities in homicide law, procedural questions would be more important/salient and receive some greater scrutiny. But I wouldn’t go as far as MacDowell does, in, say, his self-described “conjectures” on the character of the Areopagos. There’s really no actual evidence for them, other than a handful of self-serving comments in the orators telling the Areopagites how clever they are. And I don’t think there’s reason to believe, as he implies in the discussion of prodikasiai, that the archon basileus had any substantive gatekeeping function (the only attested example of an archon stopping a murder prosecution involved a matter of timing having nothing to do with the case’s merits). The ephetai are murkier still, if they even continued to exist in the fourth century (not nearly as certain as M. makes it out to be).

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).