The Death of Socrates. Romano Guardini

       EUTHYPHRO

PROLOGUE

SOCRATES’S CASE

      The first four sections of the dialogue depict the situation:

      EUTHYPHRO. What in the world are you doing here at the archon’s porch, Socrates? Why have you left your haunts in the Lyceum? You surely cannot have an action before him, as I have.

      SOCRATES. Nay, the Athenians, Euthyphro, call it a prosecution, not an action.

      EUTH. What? Do you mean that someone is prosecuting you? I cannot believe that you are prosecuting anyone yourself.

      SOCR. Certainly I am not.

      EUTH. Then is someone prosecuting you?

      SOCR. Yes.

      EUTH. Who is he?

      SOCR. I scarcely know him myself, Euthyphro; I think he must be some unknown young man. His name, however, is Meletus, and his deme Pitthis, if you can call to mind any Meletus of that deme,—a hook-nosed man with long hair, and rather a scanty beard.

      EUTH. I don’t know him, Socrates. But tell me, what is he prosecuting you for?

      SOCR. What for? Not on trivial grounds, I think. It is no small thing for so young a man to have formed an opinion on such an important matter. For he, he says, knows how the young are corrupted, and who are their corruptors. He must be a wise man, who, observing my ignorance, is going to accuse me to the city, as his mother, of corrupting his friends. I think that he is the only man who begins at the right point in his political reforms: I mean whose first care is to make the young men as perfect as possible, just as a good farmer will take care of his young plants first, and, after he has done that, of the others. And so Meletus, I suppose, is first clearing us off, who, as he says, corrupt the young men as they grow up; and then, when he has done that, of course he will turn his attention to the older men, and so become a very great public benefactor. Indeed, that is only what you would expect, when he goes to work in this way.

      Two remarkable men have met, quite by accident and at a dubious place: namely in Athens, before the office building of the Second Archon, who still retains the title of Basileus from the time of the kings, and whose duty it is to hear indictments concerned with political crimes. One of these men is Socrates, the somewhat eccentric philosopher who is well known in the city; the other is Euthyphro, a priest and a person of no great consequence. From the very first words of the dialogue we hear that Socrates is accused; it is the first stage of the case which was tried before the supreme court in the year 399 B.C. and ended with his condemnation.

      Socrates’s character comes out at once in the first words: bantering and yet with deep inward concern, ironical and serious. At the same time the prosecutor is sketched. He is an unknown young man, of somewhat sorry appearance; a poet, as we shall hear later, without much substance, but with all the more arrogance, clever and with an eye to his own advantage.

      To Euthyphro’s question, what, according to Meletus, are Socrates’s pernicious teachings, the latter replies:

      In a way which sounds strange at first, my friend. He says that I am a maker of gods; and so he is prosecuting me, he says, for inventing new gods, and for not believing in the old ones.

      Euthyphro rejoins:

      I understand, Socrates. It is because you say that you always have a divine sign. So he is prosecuting you for introducing novelties into religion; and he is going into court knowing that such matters are easily misrepresented to the multitude, and consequently meaning to slander you there. Why, they laugh even me to scorn, as if I were out of my mind, when I talk about divine things in the assembly, and tell them what is going to happen: and yet I have never foretold anything which has not come true. But they are jealous of all people like us.

      Socrates, then, is accused of undermining the traditional piety. But the accusation is at once set in a strange light, both by the personality of the accuser and by the proximity into which the other speaker, Euthyphro, puts his own case with that of Socrates. For the man’s very first words give the impression that he is not a first-rate character. From all these doubts, however, emerges, right from the beginning of the dialogue, that striking phenomenon which marks the religious figure of Socrates and will later, in the Apology, play so pathetic a rôle—his Daimonion. It appears that Socrates himself has never made a secret of it. It is such common knowledge among his acquaintances that even Euthyphro, who is evidently not of the inner circle, can see in it the occasion for the indictment. For whenever Socrates is about to do something that is not right—and, as will appear, this criterion of rightness extends from the foreground of the practical to the furthest depths of the existential—something warns him; often, as he says, in the middle of a sentence, so that he has to pause. He has always taken this voice very seriously. It certainly does not stand for the voice of reason or conscience, as a rationalistic interpretation would have it. Rather it is quite plainly a question of some warning coming from without and bearing a numinous character. This alone explains how Socrates’s talk of his “daemonic sign” could be misinterpreted as a new religious message, endangering the traditional beliefs.

EUTHYPHRO’S CASE

      EUTH. Well, Socrates, I dare say that nothing will come of it. Very likely you will be successful in your trial, and I think that I shall be in mine.

      Socrates replies with a question:

       And what is this suit of yours, Euthyphro? Are you suing, or being sued?

      EUTH. I am suing.

      SOCR. Whom?

      EUTH. A man whom I am thought a maniac to be suing.

SOCR. What? Has he wings to fly away with?¹

      EUTH. He is far enough from flying; he is a very old man.

      SOCR. Who is he?

      EUTH. He is my father.

      SOCR. Your father, my good sir?

      EUTH. He is indeed.

      SOCR. What are you prosecuting him for? What is the charge?

      EUTH. It is a charge of murder, Socrates.

      Socrates is taken aback.

      Good heavens, Euthyphro! Surely the multitude are ignorant of what makes right. I take it that it is not everyone who could rightly do what you are doing; only a man who was already well advanced in wisdom.

      EUTH. That is quite true, Socrates.

      SOCR. Was the man whom your father killed a relative of yours? Nay, of course he was: you would never have prosecuted your father for the murder of a stranger?

      EUTH. You amuse me, Socrates. What difference does it make whether the murdered man was a relative or a stranger? The only question that you have to ask is, did the slayer slay justly or not? If justly, you must let him alone; if unjustly, you must indict him for murder, even though he share your hearth and sit at your table. The pollution is the same, if you associate with such