Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Defense of EuthyphroM. J. EdwardsEuthyphro's theology has rarely been held in high esteem by readers of the dialogue to which Plato gave his name.1 He is generally disparaged as the exponent of a banal religiosity, derived without reflection from the same Athenian public which was soon to condemn the more rational and heartfelt piety of Socrates. Even where he is least conventional, he has only the most mechanical conception of divine justice and could never have arrived at that equation of the sacred with the ethical which is the central thesis of his interlocutor. Such is the common account, which I believe to be unfair: just as Laches is no less a general because he cannot say what courage is, and Glaucon and Adeimantus are both just men although they cannot define that virtue,2 so Euthyphro is chosen here because he is a true prophet, not a false one. He sees further than the ordinary Athenian, being at one with Socrates in his presumption of perfect equity in the dealings of the gods with humankind.IOne reason for supposing that the "outlook of the conventional Athenian" 3 is the chief target of this dialogue is that the homicide which gave rise to Euthyphro's lawsuit had been treated with extreme conventionality by his father. The latter's thrall had died because, having killed a fellow laborer, he was bound, thrown into a pit, and left untended while his master sent to the Exegete to ask "what he should do" (4c). Since Euthyphro professes, in his profession as a diviner, to see pollution where it is invisible to others, it is frequently [End Page 213] assumed that he has set himself up as a rival to the Exegete in the management of "ritual." This word tends to attach itself to "pollution" automatically, but if it has any function it will mean that the pollution is incurred by an offense against cultic law or can be purged by a cultic act. Nothing is said in the dialogue, however, to show that Euthyphro is more concerned with ritual than the ordinary citizen: when he does allude to such practices it is near the end, at the point where he accepts that the task of piety is to make the right sacrifices to the gods.4 But this is only one of the perilous claims that are forced upon him by his wily interlocutor; if we are to take it as his own opinion, we shall have to extend this rule to every victim of Socratic irony.Protagoras, the most conventional moralist in the dialogues, would thus become a calculating hedonist, and the honest Polemarchus would be convicted of believing that the just man is as likely to cheat his friends as to pay his debts.5 The analogies admit of some extension. Polemarchus and Protagoras, like Euthyphro, are worsted in their own dialogues but praised with apparent sincerity in others.6 Each begins with admirable premises but falls into the same trap of defining virtue as an art : since prowess in an art does not depend on the moral character of the artist, the conclusions are unacceptable.7 It required an Aristotle to see the fallacy, pointing out that virtue is not a but a disposition (, Eth. Nic. 1106); Euthyphro should not be called naive because he goes astray where even Plato may have missed the road.Kahn, while he does not dissolve the spell that binds the word "ritual" to "pollution," has plausibly associated Euthyphro with the Papyrus of Derveni, which is certainly the work of a prophet rather than a priest.8 Noting the variety of rituals and the offense that they have given to philosophers, the author of that document maintains that one must seek the encoded meaning in traditions, and in the longest portion of the surviving text he undertakes to show that etymology can divine [End Page 214] the moral and scientific truths behind the scandalous veneer of an Orphic poem. The only Platonic dialogue that takes this method seriously, Cratylus, is also the only one that tells us more of Euthyphro. By this account, he is not a primitive ritualist...