Peter: where it all begins

The yellowed pages
are falling apart
after 43 years on
my bookshelves

Recently, a K-pop song by Lisa was extremely popular. Is it still? Harry Potter has endured for a quarter of a century: that’s doing well in a society where new hits always threaten to push out last week’s favourite. Perhaps Harry Potter will still be read next century. Perhaps. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, arguably the greatest novel in English, remains a favourite after 200 years: it will surely still be loved next century. I’m sure. In the West, no classic can beat the longevity of Homer’s Iliad, recently turned into the film Troy starring muscled up Brad Pitt and Eric Banna. But from the same culture that brought us the definitive epic war of Greece against Troy, there is a masterpiece of an altogether different nature. Exemplifying both compelling style to tell a story that teaches important historical lessons and rigorous argument to explore foundational moral questions still relevant today, everyone should read Plato's Euthyphro. 

Almost all the famous names of classical Greek antiquity come to us in bits and pieces, often only fragments of famous masterpieces. An exception is the philosopher Plato, whose entire body of work exists today as it was written 2,400 years ago. This must, at least in part, be thanks to Plato’s recognized power as a stylist. As soon as they were published, teachers such as his student Aristotle used Plato as an example of the best style for holding the reader’s interest, powerfully expressing the most complex concepts, and creating literary beauty. I never learned ancient Greek well enough to read Plato in the original with any ease, but when I studied it as an eager second-year student at Sydney University in the late 1970s, my own teachers used excerpts from Plato to demonstrate the grammar of his language. Fortunately for myself and others who can’t read his Greek, there are a range of excellent translations into English that convey some idea of Plato’s smooth, lucid style as a writer. His Euthyphro is a dialogue probably written around 390 BC, that begins with 70-year-old Socrates being greeted by smart young Euthyphro, after whom the dialogue is named, in front of the law courts, to their parting an hour or so later, by which time Euthyphro is eager to escape, having been made to look quite foolish by Socrates. 

I studied Greek because so much in philosophy, which has held my attention for more than 40 years, began in ancient Greece. But in reading Plato, we do not get only philosophy; he also tells us of life in his time, when the foundations of the modern Western world were being created. His account of the life and death of Socrates remains our most reliable guide to the life of his teacher. When I first read Euthyphro, the historical details, awful as they were, fascinated me. Who would have thought that the slimy politicians of democratic Athens would use the same tricks still in use 2,400 years later by equally slimy politicians in Australia, in Thailand, and in the United States among other nations that call themselves democracies and claim to value reason and justice over populist emotion or repressive law and order? 

It horrified to learn that Socrates was at the law court because he had been accused of corrupting the young people and not believing in the traditional religion and gods of Athens. It’s too much like politicians in my own country then and today, where conservative politicians and religious leaders ally against progress, often using the excuse of protecting children from corruption. To summarize the sad story of the killing by law of Socrates that Plato begins in Euthyphro, he is brought to trial in a following dialogue, found guilty by the jury and sentenced to death. In the next dialogue, Crito, Plato has Socrates explain why he must not use corrupt means, bribing the prison officer, to escape the unjust verdict of the court of law, but will accept the death voted for by the citizens of democratic Athens. In Phaedo, he drinks the poison decreed by law, and chats about philosophy with his friends as it takes effect, killing by rule of law, one of Athens’ most famous citizens, and concluding the story of the death of Socrates that begins in Euthyphro.  

However, setting the scene for the execution of Socrates is only background for Plato’s more serious purpose in Euthyphro, which is an investigation of what justice and the morally good are. To learn such things was why I had changed from a science degree to a humanities degree. I wanted to know about ethics with the same confidence we had for Pythagoras’s theorem for right angled triangles that a2+b2=c2. What could be more important than establishing morality on such solid foundations? Shouldn’t we all want that? Plato and Euthyphro fail to solve the problem of what moral right definitively is. We do learn, however, to reason logically, to look for flaws in thinking, to spot bad arguments, and to honestly admit when we can't prove an idea.  These all seem to me valuable lessons for everyone to learn. One of Euthyphro’s most famous points is where Socrates proves, using an almost mathematical argument, that ethics cannot be merely what some god or gods have dictated or love. Rebutting the fake claim by religion that it is a source of moral understanding seems to me enough to make Euthyphro required reading to correct the same false belief still common today, and still used for the same dishonest purposes of violating human rights. 

Were everyone to read Plato’s ancient dialogue between the aged philosopher and silly young Euthyphro, they would learn that politics and society are still arguing about the same issues today that were controversial then. They would encounter a powerful style of writing to honestly and logically explore important issues in society. They would gain a solid basis for moral development. And they would gain insights into the society that became the Western world, whose institutions tracing back to ancient Athens, where Socrates argued on the streets and in the local gymnasium, is fast becoming the global culture common to every developed nation. Those things, surely, are worth an hour or so of everyone’s reading time.

This is version 3. Version 1 was 1,478 words, which was seriously over the word limit. Version 2 was much better at 1,172 words, but still too long.

If you would like to see those earlier drafts for comparison, they are in the Google Doc I wrote in.

You can also see my planning, which is a pdf print of the OneNote page I worked in.