Euthyphro: Some notes on our meeting...

Rembrandt'sVirgin and Child with cat and snake

We discussed Euthyphro in specific, bigger and wilder contexts. These notes record some but by no means all of the points mentioned. They do not reflect the order of discussion. Omissions and other comments can be posted in the Comments Box.


(1) As we can see from Rembrandt's picture of the Virgin and Child with a cat and snake, people and animals have their own ideas about how they should interpret their experience. So why should we regard our perspective as the 'Members Only' door to the truth about the world? This is even more true when one thinks of the differences between one historical era, like Socrates' Athens, and our own world today. This is a text from a world with very different cultural assumptions from our own. 


(2) One aspect of those cultural differences was the fifth century intellectual ferment. The Greek world at that time was in disorder, at least in the sense that the world was changing and things were being seen with fresh eyes. This debate covered every aspect of our life in society - about the nature of justice, how we should treat others and educate the young to the best forms of political organisation. These debates were often expressed in terms of the contrast between law or custom or if you like traditional attitudes and practices on the one hand and on the other the natural order as something separate from human values and institutions. For the Greeks this was the contrast between nomos (law, custom, etc) and physis (nature). The word physis is the etymological origin of our word 'physics' and 'physician'. This contrast had been borne in upon the Greeks by their increasing contrasts with the non-Greek world. Other peoples did things differently, so while 'nature' was the same everywhere, people nevertheless held very different ideas about how one should live, that's to say, about what was important in life. This awareness prompted reflections that sought to enquire into the most 'natural' or 'best' way of living, a kind of rational inquiry into the basis of customs, justice and morality. There was a desire to overcome the relativism that seemed endemic as regards people's values.


(3) Herodotus' early story about the Persian ruler Darius: 'During his reign, Darius summoned the Hellenes at his court and asked them how much money they would accept for eating the bodies of their dead fathers. They answered they would not do that for any amount of money. Later Darius summoned some Indians called Kallatiai, who do eat their dead parents. In the presence of the Hellenes, with an interpreter to inform them of what was said, he asked the Indians how much money they would accept to burn the bodies of their dead fathers. They responded with an outcry, ordering him to shut his mouth least he offend the gods. Well then, that is how people think, and so it seems to me that Pindar was right when he said in his poetry that custom is the king of all'. (Histories, 3.38, Robert Strassler's Landmark edition).

It's hard to know what to think when it comes to values.

(4) A general point was made about Socrates' commitment to dialectic and rational discussion - the elenchos. From a slightly wider perspective this might be seen as an intensification of the personal life. What had once been the preserve of custom was now the personal responsibility of each citizen. His concern for the truth might be seen as a recognition of his own need to sort out the confusion in his own mind. This might also - a little more fancifully perhaps - be seen as parallel to the rising importance of the Mystery cults such as the Eleusinian Mysteries with their emphasis on the ultimate salvation of the individual' soul. 


(5) Whatever quibbles might be raised about the argument Socrates puts forward about the nature of piety is basically sound and significant. That argument said in effect: Is the holy or what is religiously acceptable what it is because it is loved by the gods, or is it loved just because it is what it is in itself? The effect of this argument is - it was suggested - to take talk about piety and the nature of religious belief and practice out of its normal comfort zone of discourse and to look at it in a new, more detached and secular manner. Logic and rational examination was all that was needed. One did not need, indeed should not take religious language simply on its own terms. One had to break out of this way of talking. It is not difficult to see that this approach might well upset traditionalists in the city, who knew that something was afoot even if they did not know exactly what it was the Socrates was doing. Socrates was himself a deeply religious man. He should not be seen as some sort of early liberal, an agnostic or atheist.


(6) When Socrates says at 14e, 'I prefer nothing, unless it is true', we should probably understand this as a commitment to an ongoing search to sort things out intellectually and that in turn as part of his search for the best way to live. The argument ends up by coming full circle in a contradiction. No conclusion is reached about the nature of the holy or the pious, but some progress has been made simply by opening up the discussion in this way. Euthyphro leaves in dismay and disarray. His claim to expertise has been shown to be an empty claim. We as readers might be tempted to laugh at his discomfiture, but perhaps Plato means us to see that we are really in the same boat as Euthyphro and know nothing for sure or clearly about this issue. The search should go on, but without the Euthyphro's certainties or our self-satisfaction. It is easy to agree with this, but it was also agreed early on that meeting up with Socrates would probably have been a pretty rough experience.

Aporia - being at a loss - isn't always fun!

We will meet next on 16 November to talk about Plato's Apology. To post comments you may need to sign up as members.

Evidences of the Divine

'But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground....'

'Two of the most influential books of the nineteenth century, still in print, were William Paley's A View of the Evidences of Christianity, of 1794, and his Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, of 1802. The first question posed above could be reformulated anachronistically as an attempt to establish what Sophocles' or Pindar's "Evidences" might have looked like. In a sense there is a single, simple answer to that question, and one evidence that easily outweighs all others, even if the Greeks did not formulate the matter in quite this way. When Nicomarchus was charged in 399 with impiety for altering the traditional sacrificial calendar of Athens, the prosecutor argued: 'Our ancestors, who only made the sacrifices prescribed in Solon's code, bequeathed to us a city which was the greatest and happiest in all Greece; and so we ought to make the same sacrifices as them if for no other reason, for the good luck that they brought." In the past, when sacrifices were performed more regularly, the weather too was more regular, says Isocrates. Every dedication set up by a Greek in fulfillment of a vow is testimony that the prayer accompanying the vow has been fulfilled. The greatest evidence then for the existence of the gods is that piety works: the reward for worshipping the gods is ways hallowed by tradition is prosperity. The converse is that impiety leads to disaster; and, the piety-prosperity nexus is not often used as a proof of the existence of the gods, the afflictions of the wicked are indeed a much-cited evidence. "Father Zeus, you gods still exist on high Olympus, if the suitors have really paid the penalty for their reckless insolence", says Laertes in the Odyssey; "The gods exist," delightedly exclaims the chef in Menander's Dyskolos when his enemy, whom he regards as impious, falls down a well. We seem to catch here the tones of excited colloquial speech.

'When fair weather and flourishing crops are seen as a reward of piety, the argument rests implicitly on the assumption that the natural environment is under divine control. Here then potentially is another evidence: if every shower of rain comes from Zeus - and "Zeus" or "god" "is raining" was used more or less interchangeably in Greek with an impersonal "it is raining" - then direct contact with divine power is an everyday experience. It surely will not have felt like that, even for the pious: rain for them was rain, part of normality, as it is for us, not an epiphany. But when rain declined to fall, it could be prayed for; thunderbolts were embodiments of "Zeus who descends," storms could be caused by human pollution, winds could be summoned or averted by sacrifice, an untimely earthquake or eclipse could cause a general to be replaced, military activity to be abandoned or delayed. According to the messenger in Aeschyllus' Persai, when an unseasonable storm froze the Strymon in the face of the retreating Persian army; "people who hitherto paid no regard to the gods (θεοὺς δέ τις / τὸ πρὶν νομιζων οὐδαμοῦ)" then turned to prayers; though ascribed to Persians, the psychology is also perfectly Greek.

'This was the level at which pre-Socratic philosophy, with the premise of a rule-bound natural order, came into conflict with popular religious assumptions; and, for those educated in the philosophical schools, storms and eclipses ceased necessarily to convey any message about the divine. (But there was always the possibility of a both and / or "double determination" explanation, whereby god worked through the natural order.) Even for the less educated, such messages were only intermittently audible; this was the religion of crisis situations. Nature was a great mechanism for the transmission of communications from, and about, the divine, but the mechanism was only recognized as operating occasionally. The vaguer proposition, however, that piety is the soil in which good crops grow was a permanent if unemphatic presumption. 

Germanicus

'The "rewards of piety" argument is in principle empirical: the gods' concern for humanity is confirmed by their differential treatment of the good and the bad. The pragmatism of this approach leads to the theoretical possibility of abusing the gods when they maltreat the good just as one praises them when they punish the bad.  Complaints and even threats against unjust gods are raised by characters in literature, but there are no early Greek parallels for the popular response to the tragic early death of the Roman prince Germanicus, when temples were stoned. Perhaps our sources have censored such incidents; more probably there was a tendency in such circumstances to seek out ritual omissions and so exculpate the gods. The Rewards of Piety is in reality a pseudoempirical argument, deriving its force from selective vision, inertia, and traditionalism. Yet psychologically it doubtless remained for most Greeks the most potent of all evidences.

'Can others be found? Paley's second book, the Natural Theology is a presentation of the argument from design. It begins with a famous comparison:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there: I might possibly answer, that for anything I know to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch came to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might always have been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch, as well as for the stone? Why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, viz., that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose... The inference we think inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker.

'And exactly the same reasoning applies to the universe as a whole. The ancients had no watches, but from a certain point they certainly had the argument from design: its origins are uncertain, but the phenomenon of providential design is alluded to in several passages in the late fifth century, and the reverse argument (because the world is providentially designed, therefore a provident designer exists) is fully worked out by Socrates in two passages in Xenophon's Memorabilia. Thenceforth, "intelligent design" is taken for granted by all philosophers from Plato onward except the Epicureans, who struggle hard to argue against it, and perhaps the Cynics; it forms the core of the Stoic case in Cicero's De natura deorum, where a quite close anticipation of the modern image of a "monkey on a typewriter producing the works of Shakespeare" can be found ("If an enormous number of letter were thrown on the ground, could they ever form themselves into the Annals of Ennius?) In the early mythological cosmologies, however, the world is not made, but simply happens, and though in passing allusions the gods may be said to have "made" this or that, there is no elaborated concept of a creator god. One of the central arguments of David Hume's The Natural History of Religion is that natural man is not alert to those features of the universe that seem to bespeak designedness; philosophical reflection is required to create such an awareness. The caution is certainly applicable to the Greek case. We cannot allow the argument any wide diffusion before the fourth century.'

The above paragraphs are taken from Robert Parker's excellent book On Greek Religion, Cornell, 2011, pages 2-6. Robert Parker is also the author of an earlier now classic text, Miasma, which is a study of the concept of pollution in ancient Greek religion. It seemed to me worthwhile making this lengthy quotation because it draws attention to what he sees as the fundamental drive behind the phenomena that we see as examples of piety. If you do not agree with him, you would I think be hard pressed to come up with a n alternative explanation.

The Argument of 10a1-11b1

ὁ γὰρ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῷ

'..the unexamined life is not worth living..'
- but how do you examine a life?

These remarks quoted below are taken verbatim from the Bristol Classical Press edition of Euthyphro by Chris Emlyn-Jones, where they appear as Appendix 2.

“The argument of Plato’s Socrates in this passage takes the form of what became known (in Aristotelian logic) as an ἐπαγωγή (epagogē): an argument by induction – a ‘leading on’ from particular examples to a general conclusion. The cumulative effect of numerous examples taken from everyday activities leads to the general conclusion, Socrates claims (at 10a5-c4), that, in any given case, an activity is causally prior to the state which results from the activity; just as the state of being carried is a result of the activity of carrying, so that state of being loved is the result of loving. It follows, Socrates claims, that this relationship is not reciprocal, i.e., the activity cannot depend upon the state.  

So, what the gods love is in a state of being loved because it is loved by them; it is not the case that they love it because it is in a state of being loved. But the holy does not behave in the same way; in this case, the state of holiness does not depend on the activity of the gods’ love. So the terms ‘loved by the gods’ and ‘holy’ are not logically parallel and so not interchangeable. ‘Holy’ has to be defined in another way not specified in the dialogue as a whole.

 The argument can be seen schematically as follows:

STATE                                                                                    ACTIVITY
that which is carried ---------------    (because)      → → →        carrying

that which is led        ---------------     (because)      → → →        leading

that which is seen      ---------------   (because)      → → →         seeing

that which is loved     ---------------   (because)      → → →         loving 
HOLY                        ←←←             (because)     ---------------    loving

The argument of Plato’s Socrates at this point has generated a great deal of interest, in two main directions:

(1) Theological. If Socrates’ argument is correct, it has major implications for monotheistic religion. Theologians and philosophers, from Saint Thomas Aquinas and Leibniz to Anthony Flew, have debated the issue of whether it is meaningful to describe something as good simply because it is God’s will (or pleasing to God), or whether it is necessary for an adequate account of a moral judgement to refer to a standard of goodness and badness which is, in logic at least, independent of God’s will. This question has long been known as the Euthyphro problem. For a concise statement of the problem, see Flew, A., A Western Philosophy (London, 1971, ch.1).

(2) Philosophical. The intricacies of the argument have also preoccupied contemporary philosophers. Two chief objections to Socrates’ line of argument are paramount:

     (i) Socrates assumes throughout that the relationship between state and activity is causal. It is however possible to detect an ambiguity in Plato’s use of διότι (10b1, etc), ‘because’. It can indicate a causal relationship, but it may simply indicate that state and activity are merely different aspects of, or ways of describing, the same thing. Indeed, as Guthrie points out (1105n2), the distinction between state ad activity is sometimes quite hard to maintain in Greek, since, for example, φερόμενόν ὲστι (it is in a state of being carried) is often used, in later Plato, indistinguishably from φέρεται (it is carried).It has also been noted that the ἐπαγογή represets a gradual slide from verbs which represet physical activity, e.g. carrying, where the causal connection seems plausible, towards loving, where it seems much less so.

     (ii) We have already noted that Euthyphro’s agreement to Socrates’ suggestion that the holy is loved by all the gods because it is holy, and not for any other reason, is strictly speaking unnecessary; it is not forced by the ἔλεγχος, since it would not contradict previous admissions for Euthyphro to assert that the holy is holy because it is loved by all the gods, i.e., theior love defines it. And of course, this step would seriously damage Socrates’ argument.

     So why does Euthyphro agree to this step? Two answers suggest themselves: firstly, in terms of the dramatric structure of this part of the dialogue, Plato makes the admission plausibly ‘in character’ for Euthyphro; the latter is anxious to invest ‘the holy’ with as much authority as he can and conceding that the gods love the holy because it is holy would superficially seem to be a good move for him. So, being quite unjustifiably self-assured and none too bright, he grabs Socrates’ tempting suggestion in 10d4 withoutr pausing to consider what it implies. Secondly, we need to look at the posiition of this argumet in the dialogue as awhole. It is impossible to know whether Plato was himself aware of the logical weakness revealed at 10d4-5. However the argument does serve to introduce the valuable οὐσία/πάθος distinction in 11a7-8 and the section as awhole effectively concludes the first pre-Interlude part of the dialogue, which is devoted to a criticism of a defintion of ‘holiness’ in terms of prefereces of the gods. After the Interlude, the argument changes direction, concentrating on trying to define holiness as ahuman activity relating to the gods.”

Note on how to read the table:

You might read the table in bold above like this:  Something or someone who is being carried is in that state of being carried because someone is engaged in carrying them. Similarly, someone who is being led is in that state because they are being led. Someone or something which is seen is in that state or condition because someone is looking at them. And hence, someone or something which is loved is in that state or condition because someis loving them. Socrates then claims that it's not like that when you get to thinking about what is holy: someone or something that is holy is not holy because someone loves what is holy but because there is something in that person or object or condition that independent;ly of our activities makes it holy.


Note on Greek words: 

(i)      οὐσία means the being or essential nature of something in contrast here to πάθος which refers to inessential attributes.

(ii)     ἐπαγογή means literally a briging in or on to something, an attack or invasion, but in Logic it means bringing as number of particular examples so as to support a universal conclusion. We usually call this today, the argument from induction.

(iii)    φέρω is the basic form of the verb which means to bear or carry something. It is in fact etymologically the same word as our word ‘bear’, if you go back three or so thousand years.

Plato's Irony

Socrates talking to the young Xenophon

Commentators usually talk about Socrates' irony or even the Socratic method. Socrates does adopt an ironical attitude to his interlocutors, such as Euthyphro. To some extent it is the characters he invents who invite this attitude towards themselves. They usually have one thing in common: they assume that they know something or are experts in some area or other, like Euthyphro on piety, or the generals Nicias and Laches on courage, or Charmides and Crito who later show themselves to be overreaching tyrants who discuss temperance or self-control (sophrosune). These people are not just ignorant for they claim to know about these topics. This stance brings down on them the innocent but insistent questions that ultimately reveal their ignorance. If Plato's dialogues were nothing more but pictures of the dialectical rout of the overweening and arrogant, then they would be little better than intellectual Punch and Judy shows, satisfying demonstrations of presumptio brought low, but there is something more than that going on in these dialogues. Perhaps the best way to bring this out is by quoting at some length from Alexander Nehemas' book The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucauld.(UCP, 1998) which makes this point much better than anyone else could:

"Given how silly, how slow, and how self-confident Euthyphro is, it is only to be expected that he would miss the main points Socrates has been trying to make throughout their conversation. For Socrates has claimed that an action as disputable as Euthyphro's own cannot be undertaken without a secure understanding of the ature of piety: if you tell me that it is just to steal from the poor and to give to the rich , you had better have a clear conceptio of what you think justice is and a number of good reasons to support it; Euthyphro's action falls into a similar category. But Socrates makes it perfectly clear that Euthyphro, despite his grand claims, has no idea regarding what piety is and no idea that he lacks all knowledge concerning it. Most important, he suggests that in remaining unaware of his ignorance, Euthyphro exhibits the lack of self-knowledge that Socrates considers the most serious human failing. And it is precisely such truths about himself that Euthyphro's personality is designed to prevent him from being able to see. His self-assurance is a form of blindness, of self-deception.

Let me tell you about piety...

"Plato has prepared the ground perfectly for the dialogue's completely negative end. At the beginning, Euthyphro took great pains to engage Socrates in conversation. He was eager to 'teach' him what piety is and also to tell him all sorts of shocking stories about the gods which only he knew. He was therefore ready to enagage in what would have been a traditional epideixis - a formal exhibition of one's talents and abilities, often associated with orators and sophists (cf. G.447b8; Pr.317e3ff). And yet, at the end of the work, after yet another failed effort to say what piety is and confronted with Socrates' invitation to begin again at the beginning, he suddenly remembers a pressing appointment: 'Some other time, Socrates,' he says, as he has clearly already started on his way; 'just ow I need to hurry to get somewhere, and I am already late' (15e3-4). The excuse is transparently lame, but the character who makes it has been drawn appropriately: this self-satisfied, overconfident man has just had enough of Socrates and his tricks. He may have lost the argument, but this means nothing to him: he departs undaunted and unchanged. 

"Given Euthyphro's character, it is natural for us, as the dialogue's imaginary audience, to believe that he could have missed Socrates' point so completely. How could he have seen it, given how dull, how ignorant, and how self-satisfied he is? Euthyphro's personality explains why Socrates fails to have any effect on him. And that in turn explains why Plato chose to compose his dialogue around him. Despite all Socrates' efforts, Euthyphros's supreme self-confidence allows him to remain quite unshaken in his conviction that his legal action is correct and that no one can match his knowledge of the gods' desires.
"But we know better. We can see through this self-deception. We look on as Euthyphro, blind in his self-assurance, misses Socrates' point again and again, and we manage to avoid the traps into which he falls. We realise, as generations of Plato's readers have realised, that self-delusion of the kind Euthyphro manifests is Socrates' greatest enemy. Detecting self-deception in others is not such a difficult things to do, after all; as Lionel trilling remarked, the 'deception we understand and most willingly give our attention to is that which a person works upon himself.' And we are not like this grotesquely silly, conceited, and inane man: how could we be like this gross caricature, whose only reason for being is simply to misunderstand what Socrates believes? But we understad; we are on Socrates' side; we know better.

"And knowing better, what do we do? Mostly, we read this little dialogue and then we close the book, in a gesture that is an exact replica of Euthyphro's sudden remembering of the appointment that ends his conversation with Socrates. We too go about our usual business, just as he proposes to do. ASnd our usual business does not usually center on becoming conscious of and fighting against the self-delusion that characterizes Euthyphro and that, as we turn away from the dialogue, we demonstyarte to be ruling our own lives as well whcih is really the aim of this whole mechanism. Socrates' irony is directed at Euthyphro only as a means; its real goal is the reader."

Seeing Euthyphro discomfited we too leave feeling rather smug.

Philosophy as a way of life
This raises a question about the status of the elenchus, that is to say about the tough logical argument that is usually taken to be the kernel of the dialogue. People often take this as the 'real' message of the dialogue and treat everything else as just frippery, like lace on the back of a sofa. I hope that enough has been said to suggest that this would be a serious misreading of Plato's Euthypthro. Plato has Socrates knock Euthyphro about a bit, in terms of argumentation that is, and since Euthyphro is such a prig we don't really mind his being beaten up a little. 'Serves him right', we are tempted to say, but our reaction is part of Plato's elephant trap with us, the readers, as the elephants; for behind Socrates' irony is Plato's irony who leads us into the temptation that we are most likely to fall victim to, that of not seeing ourselves with the same hard-edged clarity as we see others, like Euthyphro. We see ourselves as different from him, ironically because we are rather like him. 

Here are two more paragraphs from Nehamas' book that talk about this aspect of things: "The close study of Plato's texts is mostly a logical exercise; its apparent dryness may disappoint those who expect more of philosophy. But when it comes to justice, wisdom, courage, or temperance - when it comes to the virtues that were Socrates' central concern - our beliefs about them are central to our whole life, to who we are. To examine the logical consistency of those beliefs, when undertaken correctly, is to examine and mold the shape of the self. It is personal, hard exercise, a whole mode of life ... The logical examination of belief is a part - but only a part - of the examined life.

"The dialogues ask their readers, as Socrates asks Euthyphro, to make their life harmonize with their views. Is there, as Plato's Socrates seems to think, a consistent set of beliefs in accordance with which a life can be lived? Can we have the harmony he is after? I am not sure. And even if we can, I am almost certain that there isn't a single set of beliefs that supports a single mode of life that is good for everyone. But that is not the issue that faces us here. That issue in (Michael) Frede's words... is that 'to know.. is not just a matter of having an argument, however good it might be, for a thesis. Knowledge also involves that the rest of one's beliefs, and hence at least in some cases, one's whole life, be in line with one's argument ... In this way, knowledge, or at least a certain kind of knowledge Plato is interested in, is a highly personal kind of achievement.' Philosophy is not here only a matter of reading books: it is a whole way of life, even if, as I believe, it does not dictate a single manner of living that all should follow."

Questions
(1) What do you think? Do you agree with Frede and Nehamas or with Socrates and Plato?
(2) In the Euthyphro, does Socrates already know what piety is? Is he just pretending that he does not know so that his interlocutors will endeavour to discover it for themselves? Or is his ignorance genuine?
(3) If he already knows the answer as regards the nature of piety, then isn't his irony simply a pedagogic method, a way of reaching dumb and unmotivated students? His irony is on this reading simply a kind of didacticism, a way of teaching something that is already known.
(4) If his ignorance is genuine, then what is his irony all about? What is its relation to the evidently exemplary life he led?
(5) What is irony? What is the meaning of this word we use so easily and unthinkingly? 

Plato and Greek Religion

An early Corthinian painting showing a sacrifice

We can't understand a dialogue like Plato's Euthyphro without some knowledge of the world in which the Greeks lived. We feel ourselves to be in some sense the intellectual heirs of the Greeks, but theirs was a world vastly different from our own and we really need to struggle to understand just how different it was in basic assumptions from the world we inhabit today. The following quotations from Michael L. Morgan's article on Plato and Greek Religion published in the Cambridge Companion to Plato provide a very helpful outline:

"Religion permeated life in classical Athens and in classical Greece generally. It is hardly surprising, then, that religious vocabulary - mention of gods, festivals, beliefs, and rites – also pervades Plato’s dialogues. These dialogues reveal a man struggling to understand human life and how it ought to be lived, a man engaged in deep reflection about rational inquiry, the human roles in society and the cosmos, and man’s relationship to the divine. Religion, as rite, conception, motif and vocabulary, is integral to his thinking. By showing how this is so we can illuminate Plato’s thinking from the religious side, as it were, and thereby exhibit Plato’s relationship to Greek religion and piety.

The long jump at the Olympic Games

"It is hard to exaggerate the prominence of religion in Greek life. Greek religion was pluralistic and heterogeneous; there was a host of divinities with overlapping roles and features. A dozen gods formed the conventional core of this pantheon (Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Hermes, Demeter, Dionysus, Hephaestus, Ares); broadly conceived as Zeus’ family, these, and lesser divinities such as the goat-footed god Pan, are the Olympians, so-called after Olympus, site of Zeus’ palace. They and other gods, such as Hades and Persephone, were themselves varied and multiple, each present at dozens of places in various guises, serving a variety of purposes and roles. Zeus, for example, manifest as a thunderbolt, was the strongest of the gods and the father of gods and men. But in fact there were many Zeuses present in many places and with many specifications – for example, “Zeus of the city”, “Zeus of the stranger”, “Zeus of boundaries”, and “Zeus of the mountain tops”. Greek polytheism, then, incorporated a plurality of gods, each with many domains and roles. At the local level, there was centralisation and continuity, for the family, the phratry [a subdivision of the tribe, of which there were originally four in Athens], the deme [the local community of which each Athenian was a citizen], and the polis. And there was some weak unity at the international level, through the celebration of certain Panhellenic festivals like the Great Panathenaea, held every four years, and the Olympic games, and through the international use of oracles, Delphi, and the sanctuaries of Zeus at Dodona and Ammon. Moreover, Homer and Hesiod were universally honoured to some degree by all Greeks..... In classical Greece everything – politics, ethics, science, painting, music, dance, drama, agriculture - had a religious character.

Herms like this one lined Athenian streets

"Each of the twelve months was filled with festivals of varying degrees of significance, from the monthly festival celebrating the new month to deme and phratry festivals and general Athenian festivals. Perhaps as many as half of the days of the Athenian year involved festivals and processions, sacrifices, dancing, hymns, and competitions. It is clear that festivals and new moons shaped the calendar and that the Greeks lived from festival to festival. Each month was named after a festival, some minor and some major. The month of Thargelion, for example, was named after the Thargelia, a celebration of Apollo that included the creation of a scapegoat [pharmakos] and the offering of a pot of boiled grain here Sacrifice was the central feature of Greek religious life. Oxen, sheep, goats and pigs were the most common victims of such acts of ritual slaughter and communal consumption, acts that were conducted constantly, some for the polis as a whole, some for the deme or the phratry, and some for the family. Gifts were continually being offered to the gods, solidarity of the community was thereby secured and the proper relationship between gods and men Oracles too were consulted for advice and counsel, and acts of divination were performed by priests, local diviners, and less dignified pedlars of prophecy. Temples, with their sacred trees and boundary stones, sacrificial altars, statues and cult images, were numerous; herms [small stone representations of Hermes placed outside Athenian homes] were everywhere. In any given year the average Athenian would participate in hundreds of religious acts and inhabit thousands of regions of religious space. In a sense, his entire world of time and space was a religious one, a complex, variegated symbiosis of land and architecture in which divinity was pervasive. His life and writings of his literary tradition expressed this sense of divine presence, of divinity that was both ubiquitously intimate and yet awesome and separate.

We need to keep two other things in mind. One is what Michael Morgan calls the Delphic theology:  "Amid all this pluralism, however, with its world of separated, powerful, and immortal deities, we can distinguish a common theological posture, one succinctly framed by the slogans associated with the Pythia, the oracle at Delphi: nothing too much, and know thyself. What these maxims meant was that human beings should recognise their limitations with respect to the gods: The gods are immortal, perfect in knowledge and exceedingly powerful; human beings are mortal and limited in power and knowledge. Human beings should not want more than they as human beings should; they should not overestimate their knowledge or capabilities, nor should they confuse who they are and who the gods are. Underlying the world of polis religion, then, was this theological attitude of separation between the divine and the human, of discontinuity, of human limits and hence of the temptation to illicit self-esteem and pride [hubris]...

Initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries

"Contrasted with this posture was the [newer, more recently introduced] attitude of those committed to the alternative religious styles that involved ecstatic rites and salvation-oriented cults. Unlike traditional Athenian piety, this attitude assumed that there was continuity between the human and the divine – for example, that both were immortal, and that the gap between them could be bridged by the divine possession of human beings [as in shamanism] or by the human attainment of the status of  divinity or by both. In short, the Orphic-Bacchic-Pythagorean-Eleusinian world assumes that relief from our physical world and its distress could be achieved by human beings becoming as completely divine as they could possibly be. There is an element in human life, the soul or psyche, that has a quasi-divine nature; it is immortal. And that element, through ecstatic ritual performance or perhaps through a life of ecstatic practice, could grow stronger and aid in the attainment of salvation."

This picture of Greek religion should help us to guard against some of the more obvious forms of misreading of the dialogue. We can now see that Euthyphro is not as some sort of weird peripheral figure - though he is himself personally weird -  but a natural and inevitable part of the Greek scene, a sort of expert on sacrifices, oaths and such matters. This picture should also help to guard against our interpreting the meeting between Socrates ad Euthyphro as some sort of confrontation between a reactionary priest and an almost-modern free-thinking liberal. It was not like that at all: Socrates shares Euthyphro’s sense of a life lived in the shadow of divine presence. What they struggle to understand and make clear is how this sense of the holy - of what it means to have a sense of the strangeness and unaccountability of the world - should shape our lives.