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PlatoEuthyphro
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The King’s Porch
The King’s Porch was a court of law located in the Agora (commercial and assembly place) in Athens. It was the judicial seat of the King Archon, a magistrate in charge of overseeing religious law. The King’s Porch is the place where both Euthyphro and Socrates are to carry out their suits and where they meet at the beginning of the dialogue. The setting symbolizes the weight of religious law that affects both men. Euthyphro is prosecuting someone (his father) for violating ethical norms, and Socrates hopes to defend himself from the charge of impiety toward the city’s gods. The setting is particularly ominous in hindsight, as we know that Socrates will eventually be convicted in the court and forced to commit suicide.
Zeus
Zeus, the king of the gods in the Greek religion, is cited several times in the dialogue. First, Euthyphro uses the example of Zeus to justify his own actions in prosecuting his father. Zeus imprisoned his father, Kronos the Titan, for unjustly swallowing his other children, yet Zeus is revered as the “best and most just of the gods” (14). Later, Socrates cites Zeus and several other gods in light of their disagreement about questions of right and wrong, wondering whether Euthyphro’s action might be approved by Zeus and disapproved by Uranus, for example. Like Athena’s Robe, Zeus is employed as a symbol of the official religion that ruled the minds and determined the ethical norms of the Greek people.
Athena’s Robe
This was a robe specially woven every four years for the Panathenaea, a major religious festival in honor of the goddess Athena. The richly embroidered robe was ceremonially placed on the statue of Athena in the Acropolis alongside animal sacrifices in her honor and musical, poetic and athletic contests. In time, the robe came to symbolize the city of Athens itself.
Socrates mentions the robe in connection with the discussion about the gods and their dissentions and disagreements; one of the scenes depicted on the robe is a civil war between the gods and giants. For the purposes of Plato’s dialogue, the robe symbolizes the official religion of ancient Greece and Socrates’s skepticism about the truth of many of the myths that it propounded.
The Divine Sign
In both “Euthyphro” and the Apology, mention is made of a “divine sign” or “divine or supernatural experience” (58) to which Socrates has special access. In the Apology, Socrates describes it as an inner voice that he has heard since childhood and that dissuades him from taking courses of action that would be harmful to him. For example, it was on the prompting of the divine sign that Socrates declined to enter public life, with its inherent dangers, and remained a philosopher instead. In “Euthyphro,” the eponymous character suggests that Socrates’s belief in the divine sign (daimonion in Greek) is the source of the charge that he is introducing new gods. Euthyphro considers Socrates’s belief in the divine sign as akin to his own prophetic activity. The divine sign motif demonstrates that Socrates is deeply religious, even if he is skeptical of certain myths about the Greek gods.
Related Titles
By Plato
