The Nexus Archive
Socratic Texts · Dialogue
Euthyphro
by Plato · The Architect of Ideals · Classical Greece, c. 428-348 BC
Featuring Socrates
- Intermediate
- ~30 min read
- 3 chapter guides
- Public domain
Start reading · Read the At the King's Porch guide free
Before the text
Editor's Prelude
Certainty at the Courthouse
Two men meet at the porch of Athens’ King Archon, the official responsible for religious cases. Socrates faces Meletus’s accusation; Euthyphro has come to prosecute his own father for a laborer’s death. A family’s loyalty and a city’s authority meet a claim to know exactly what the gods require.
Euthyphro regards his confidence as a qualification to act. Socrates treats it as an invitation to ask what makes an action pious at all. That question matters because a familiar example or an inherited story may not settle a disputed case. His playful offer to become Euthyphro’s pupil carries the pressure of his own approaching trial.
Plato gives the inquiry the pace of a conversation: agreement comes quickly, its consequences less comfortably. Praise, teasing and impatience shape what each man is willing to say. The stakes remain close to the courthouse, where a confident judgment can expose another person to punishment.
The opening pages
At the King's Porch
PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Socrates, Euthyphro.
SCENE: The Porch of the King Archon.
EUTHYPHRO: Why have you left the Lyceum, Socrates? and what are you doing in the Porch of the King Archon? Surely you cannot be concerned in a suit before the King, like myself?
SOCRATES: Not in a suit, Euthyphro; impeachment is the word which the Athenians use.
EUTHYPHRO: What! I suppose that some one has been prosecuting you, for I cannot believe that you are the prosecutor of another.
SOCRATES: Certainly not.
EUTHYPHRO: Then some one else has been prosecuting you?
SOCRATES: Yes.
EUTHYPHRO: And who is he?
SOCRATES: A young man who is little known, Euthyphro; and I hardly know him: his name is Meletus, and he is of the deme of Pitthis. Perhaps you may remember his appearance; he has a beak, and long straight hair, and a beard which is ill grown.
EUTHYPHRO: No, I do not remember him, Socrates. But what is the charge which he brings against you?
SOCRATES: What is the charge? Well, a very serious charge, which shows a good deal of character in the young man, and for which he is certainly not to be despised. He says he knows how the youth are corrupted and who are their corruptors. I fancy that he must be a wise man, and seeing that I am the reverse of a wise man, he has found me out, and is going to accuse me of corrupting his young friends. And of this our mother the state is to be the judge. Of all our political men he is the only one who seems to me to begin in the right way, with the cultivation of virtue in youth; like a good husbandman, he makes the young shoots his first care, and clears away us who are the destroyers of them. This is only the first step; he will afterwards attend to the elder branches; and if he goes on as he has begun, he will be a very great public benefactor.
EUTHYPHRO: I hope that he may; but I rather fear, Socrates, that the opposite will turn out to be the truth. My opinion is that in attacking you he is simply aiming a blow at the foundation of the state. But in what way does he say that you corrupt the young?
SOCRATES: He brings a wonderful accusation against me, which at first hearing excites surprise: he says that I am a poet or maker of gods, and that I invent new gods and deny the existence of old ones; this is the ground of his indictment.
Chapter guides · 3
At the King's Porch
An Example Is Not a Definition
Euthyphro's prosecution supplies a dramatic case of piety, but Socrates asks for the standard that makes every pious act pious.
Two religious cases meet
Socrates faces prosecution for impiety; Euthyphro is prosecuting his father because he believes failure to act would itself be impious. Euthyphro's confidence makes him an apparently ideal teacher, and Socrates' request for instruction turns the encounter into an ironic rehearsal for his own trial.
The first answer gives an action
Euthyphro points to what he is doing and invokes stories of Zeus punishing Cronos. Socrates asks for something more general: not one pious action, but the feature shared by every pious action. A definition must become a standard by which both familiar and disputed cases can be measured.
A standard still to be supplied
The dead laborer had killed a servant before Euthyphro’s father bound and neglected him. Euthyphro insists that family ties do not decide whether the ensuing death was just. Socrates has not settled that case: he wants the common nature of piety by which such an action could be judged. The passage stops as Euthyphro agrees to supply it.
What the Gods Love
Approval and Essence Come Apart
Agreement among the gods repairs one problem, but it opens the dialogue's most famous question.
Disagreement defeats the first formula
If the gods quarrel about just and unjust acts, the same act may be loved by some and hated by others. It would then be both pious and impious. Socrates proposes narrowing the definition to what all the gods love, and Euthyphro accepts. Agreement about punishing wrongdoers still does not establish who has done wrong in the particular case.
Socrates asks about the direction of explanation
Is the pious loved because it is pious, or pious because it is loved? Something's being carried, seen, or loved describes what happens to it; it does not yet explain the character that made it eligible for that response. Universal divine love may therefore be an attribute of piety without giving its essence.
Arguments that will not stand still
Euthyphro says the arguments move away from him; Socrates answers with the image of Daedalus’s moving statues. The exchange makes their failed attempt to establish a fixed standard felt as frustration. Socrates then secures agreement that whatever is pious is just.
Service, Exchange, and Return
The Definition Returns to Its Beginning
Attention becomes service, service becomes prayer and sacrifice, and exchange circles back to pleasing the gods.
Questions readers ask
- How long does it take to read Euthyphro?
- About 30 min in total.
- How difficult is Euthyphro?
- Intermediate. A short dialogue; about 30 minutes of reading.
- Which translation is this?
- The Benjamin Jowett translation from the Greek. The text follows Euthyphro, Benjamin Jowett translation.
- Can I read Euthyphro for free?
- Yes. Euthyphro is free to read with a Nexus account.
- How many chapter guides are there?
- 3 chapter guides, written by the Nexus editors. Two open in full here; the rest show their opening line.
About Socrates
Socrates spent his life questioning citizens in the public spaces of Athens. He wrote nothing himself; what survives comes mainly through Plato and other students. Convicted of impiety and corrupting the young, he refused escape and died by drinking hemlock.
“What do you mean by that?”
Socrates makes thinking dangerous. He shows that a civilization can be powerful, cultured, and still unable to answer basic questions about justice, virtue, and the good life.
Source text: public domain. Chapter guides: original Nexus writing. Euthyphro is part of The Nexus Archive, guided Quests through the great works.