Social-status, Legislation, and Pollution in Plato’s Euthyphro
p. 113-131
Texte intégral
Introduction
1One of the central insights of Robert Parker’s Miasma is the notion that pollution is “not so much a rationalization… as a vehicle through which social disruption is expressed”.1 In this paper, I explore the complex and intriguing ways in which a narrative of social disruption is played out in the opening paragraphs of Plato’s Euthyphro and consider the insight it has to offer into the delineation of the spheres of operation of purification and legal action. In his recent study of ‘dirty bodies’ in the classical city-state, Robin Osborne seeks to re-evaluate the relationship between laws and pollution-beliefs in the Classical world.2 Seeing both as key mechanisms through which the community regulates itself, he explores their “complementary, [but] not identical” roles: for Osborne, pollution-beliefs target “types of behaviour, which formal law cannot reach”.3 As Osborne emphasises, the Athenian legal system famously lacked a public prosecutor, requiring individual citizens to bring cases to court. Inter alia, Osborne suggests that pollution-beliefs were useful in situations where there was no injured citizen party available to prosecute but the offence was insufficiently dire to require a graphē.4 In Plato’s Euthyphro, however, we are presented with an Athenian citizen—Euthyphro—who is ready and willing to prosecute and sees himself as adversely affected by the crime he seeks to redress. And yet, the text impels us to ask whether legal action was indeed the appropriate response. Given that a prosecutor is available here, what is it that makes legal action problematic?5 What insights can Euthyphro’s problematic case offer into purification and legal action as complementary but non-identical responses to social disruption?
2Plato’s Euthyphro, in which the protagonist prosecutes his father for the murder of a pelatēs, constructs in its opening paragraphs a pointedly complex, ambiguous, and non-straightforward case of homicide. The most striking feature of the case—as the reactions of both Socrates and Euthyphro’s relatives attest—is, of course, that the accused and the prosecutor are father and son.6 Beyond this relationship, however, the complexities and ambiguities of the homicide case itself, which will be my primary focus in Section 1, have to do principally with the victim’s social status and place within the oikos and with the unclear manner of his death. Through these complexities and ambiguities, the text raises questions about the proper relation and interaction between oikos and polis in a difficult scenario such as this and about the suitability (or otherwise) of legal action, as distinguished from purification, as a response to it. Given the mechanics of the Athenian legal system, Euthyphro’s recourse to the courts sets him up in direct opposition to his father, each vying for the approval of the wider community as represented by the dikasts. By contrast, I will argue, pollution is very often held to affect the oikos as a whole and, therefore, renders it a unified and circumscribed group, distinguished from the wider community around it; a unity that purification, unlike legislation, preserves. In pursuing legal action, Euthyphro disrupts the proper relations not only between son and father, but also between household and city. In these ways, the Euthyphro puts us in a position, not only to question whether legal action was appropriate in this case, but also to ask why it might be inappropriate and why in classical Athens we might delineate distinct spheres of operation for purification and legal action.
3Before we begin, a brief word should be said about how the complexities of the homicide suit relate to the broader concerns of the dialogue itself. In the course of their conversation, Socrates and Euthyphro repeatedly refer back to Euthyphro’s case against his father.7 Their references serve to remind us that this philosophical inquiry stemmed not from idle curiosity but from this very particular, practical and enormously consequential affair. Equally they underscore that Euthyphro’s case is not simply a foil to generate a philosophical question which subsequently loses sight of its real-world implications and the urgently practical matters at stake. Euthyphro’s family and Socrates’ life are on the line.
4As so often in Plato, dramatic characterisation is indissociable from the philosophical project. Euthyphro is unshakeably confident in the rectitude of his legal action despite his relationship to the defendant and the complexities of the homicide case. This confidence contributes to Euthyphro’s thematically central depiction as epistemically hybristic, even though, as we shall see, his conduct is not as straightforwardly indefensible and outrageous a response as is generally presumed to what are indeed difficult and intractable social and legal challenges. Indeed, the marked complexity of the legal case (which includes but is not limited to the clash between father and son) also underscores the intrinsic difficulty of deciding on a course of action—as one must—precisely when it is not clear what the right answer is. Even if Euthyphro was ultimately wrong to prosecute his father, at least one question which the text forces us to ask, given the complexities of the case, is: what should he have done? One might have thought that, simply because prosecuting one’s father is at least prima facie impious, Euthyphro’s own course of action is clearly wrong. Plato, however, does not leave it at that. The responses of Euthyphro, of his relatives and of Socrates show that they take other factors also to be pertinent and worthy of consideration, factors which show the difficulty inherent in negotiating messy, real-life situations of this nature. Socrates is concerned to ascertain the nature of Euthyphro’s relationship to the victim, Euthyphro’s relatives question whether his father’s actions constituted murder at all and underscore the victim’s character and social status, whereas for Euthyphro himself the question is whether the killing was performed justly or not and what actions he must take given his association with the killer. Plato pointedly confronts us with a case which is significantly more complex and messy than simply that of a son prosecuting his father. These complexities, therefore, warrant our attention.
1. The curious case of the pelatēs on Naxos
1.1. Questions of action and intention
5What, then, makes Euthyphro’s intended law-suit so difficult? Let us look, briefly, at the facts of the case. A pelatēs working for Euthyphro on Naxos, got drunk, became angry at a household slave and killed him. Euthyphro’s father, on discovering the murder, bound the man’s hands and feet and left him in a ditch while he awaited the return of a messenger sent to ask the advice of the Athenian exegetes on what best to do (4c-d). The pelatēs died before the answer arrived. Socrates expresses alarm at Euthyphro’s decision to prosecute his own father (4a, a concern echoed by Euthyphro’s relatives at 4e) and enquires as to who the murder victim was. Euthyphro breezily ignores Socrates’ alarm and is unimpressed by his interest in whether the victim was a stranger or a relation (ἀλλότριος or οἰκεῖος).8 For him, the only relevant question is whether a murder was committed ἐν δίκῃ or not (4b). It is far from obvious, however, what the phrase ἐν δίκῃ entails and whether Euthyphro is correct to suggest that this is the only pertinent consideration, quite aside from the striking fact that the accused is his own father (a consideration that could have been thought to override, by itself, other religious and legal considerations).
6To take the case of the first murder (the one committed by the pelatēs), other observers might, in a legal context, deem relevant to the death of the slave his and his murderer’s status and the disposition of the pelatēs—drunk and angered—when the crime was committed. Parallels for both sorts of consideration may be readily supplied. In his Against Meidias, Demosthenes recalls a lawsuit in which drunkenness was held up by the defendant as an excuse for his behaviour. To show the seriousness of the offence for which he is prosecuting Meidias (wrongdoing at a festival), Demosthenes reminds the jurors of the case of Ctesicles as a partial precedent. Ctesicles, we are told, “was carrying a whip in the procession and, being drunk, struck his old enemy with it”. Demosthenes explains the Assembly’s unanimous rejection of his defence:
It was thought that he struck him out of hybris, not drink (ὕβρει καὶ οὐκ οἴνῳ), and that he seized the excuse of the procession and his drunkenness (τὴν ἐπὶ τῆς πομπῆς καὶ τοῦ μεθύειν πρόφασιν λαβών) to commit the offence of treating freemen like slaves (Against Meidias, 180).
7Demosthenes’ Assembly-men, then, are not outraged at the suggestion that drunkenness and a festival atmosphere might in principle lead to a reduction in one’s culpability but at the defendant’s use of this as a prophasis for an act which was, in fact, motivated by hybris and prior enmity. Indeed, earlier in the same speech, where it better suits his case, Demosthenes seems happy to credit drunkenness as a valid (if partial) excuse for poor behaviour. He recounts here another instance of assault, committed by one Polyzelus against a prohedros. Demosthenes contrasts this case with Meidias’ offence on the grounds that Polyzelus was “drunk, in love, and unaware of his own actions because of the darkness and the night” (Against Meidias, 38). Meidias, by contrast, has no such excuses and does not deserve comparable leniency (συγγνώμην). A similar interest in, though a divergent attitude towards, the implications of drunkenness for the evaluation and prosecution of crimes is found in Aristotle’s suggestion that Pittacus hiked the fines levied against those who committed offences when under the influence of alcohol. He is said to have “looked towards, not leniency (συγγνώμην)—the idea that drunk people should have more of it—, but expediency” (Politics, 2.1274b).9 That Aristotle points out this feature as a peculiarity of Pittacus’ lawcode implies that this lawmaker’s disinclination to show greater leniency to drunken offenders was not the norm in other Greek poleis.10
8Returning to Demosthenes’ Against Meidias, 38, and the excuses of Polyzelus, we find anger cited as a further exculpatory factor: anger (ὀργῇ), alongside rashness (προπετείᾳ), explain the lapse in judgment which resulted in his wrongdoing. The law on justifiable homicide, preserved in Demosthenes’ Against Aristocrates and famously manipulated in Lysias’ On the murder of Eratosthenes, strikingly illustrates how a certain special status could be afforded to acts performed in anger — in ‘hot blood.’ The relevant clause reads:
If a man kills another… [caught] on top of his wife, or mother, or sister, or daughter, or concubine kept for the procreation of legitimate children, he shall not go into exile as a manslayer on that account.11
9This text does not corroborate Euphiletus’ suggestion in Lysias that the law actively encouraged the execution of an adulterer. It does, however, reflect a concern to recognise the anger attendant on finding the female members of one’s oikos in such a situation and a wish to curb the anticipated objections of the murdered man’s kin.12 Plato’s own discussion of homicide in anger provides an interesting point of comparison. For his Athenian Stranger, murders committed in anger fall “somewhere in between” (μεταξὺ… που) the categories of voluntary and involuntary killing, and are difficult to classify (χαλεποὶ διορίζειν οἱ τῷ θυμῷ πραχθέντες φόνοι).13 The reference in the Euthyphro to the fact that the pelatēs was drunk and angry therefore activates a nexus of difficulties of classification and adjudication, which Plato himself recognises elsewhere and of which the ever-confident Euthyphro arguably fails to take account.
10We can already see, then, in the case of the pelatēs’ murder of the slave, the potential for a single act to generate different stories—different stories which necessitate different responses—especially given the highly abbreviated nature of Euthyphro’s report. That Euthyphro’s father chose to seek advice on how best to proceed from the exegetes suggests he himself did not view the case—or the response it necessitated—as straightforward.14 Already, then, doubts may reasonably be raised about the appropriateness of Euthyphro’s black-and-white approach to evaluating wrongdoing. The circumstances surrounding the death of the pelatēs are more complex still.15 Through Euthyphro’s account (4d), we again see how a single event can generate competing evaluations. Plato does not construct a straightforward scenario. The contrasting perspectives of Euthyphro and his father are highlighted in Euthyphro’s description: for Euthyphro he is principally a bound man (τοῦ δεδεμένου), for Euthyphro’s father a man-slayer (ἀνδροφόνου). Euthyphro emphasizes his father’s active and passive role in the man’s death. His neglect of the pelatēs left abandoned in the ditch is stressed with the pleonastic phrase ὠλιγώρει τε καὶ ἠμέλει. For Euthyphro, even if his father showed sufficient religious anxiety to send to the exegetes, his concern did not extend to the man himself. His death itself is attributed to hunger, cold, and his bonds (ὑπὸ γὰρ λιμοῦ καὶ ῥίγους καὶ τῶν δεσμῶν ἀποθνῄσκει). Euthyphro’s father and relatives, by contrast, deny altogether that he even killed the man (οὔτε ἀποκτείναντι), presumably on the grounds that he neither dealt a death-blow himself nor had someone else do it for him. On these grounds, we may be reminded of Creon’s attempt at a kind of mechanical avoidance of guilt for Antigone’s death.16
11Antigone is to be entombed alive in a cave with just enough food to avoid the miasma of her death afflicting the polis.17 Yet, within the Antigone, Creon’s strategy for avoiding guilt is open to doubt. His plan is introduced by the chorus’ unequivocal questions: “Do you then intend to kill (κατακτεῖναι νοεῖς) the both of them?” and, when Creon responds that Ismene is to be spared, “By what manner of death (μόρῳ) do you plan to kill (βουλεύει κτανεῖν) her [Antigone]?” (770-772). The verbs of intention coupled with the active infinitives place strong emphasis on Creon’s agency in both the planning and execution of the act. A messenger reports that Eurydice too placed the blame firmly on Creon’s shoulders: “you were denounced as responsible for this death and that one by this dead-woman here” (1312-1313). Creon’s heartfelt admission of guilt at the close of the play— “I have murdered you, son, unwillingly, and you too (σέ τ᾿ αὖ τάνδ’)—the misery!” (1340-1341)—may recall this accusation and so point towards an admission of responsibility for Antigone’s death,18 even if here the feminine pronoun τάνδ’ itself refers to the newly-deceased Eurydice.19 The play on Athenian legal concerns is tangible here both in Creon’s insistence, during the course of his confession, that the murder was involuntary (οὐχ ἑκὼν) and in his despairing assertion that “all is crooked in [his] hands” (1344-1345). These remarks bring us back to the duality of intention and action and, relatedly—through the contrasting appeal to Creon’s (lack of) intention and to what lies in his hands—to the question of direct and indirect culpability, which both have their role to play in Athenian homicide legislation and which feature prominently in Euthyphro’s own account of events. The Aristotelian Athenian Constitution tells us that cases of involuntary homicide and of premeditated homicide (τῶν δ᾿ ἀκουσίων καὶ βουλεύσεως) are to be tried at the Palladion (57), while Andocides, in his speech On the Mysteries, refers to a law laying down that “whoever plans a homicide (βουλεύσαντα) is to be liable to the same penalty as one who commits it with his own hand (τὸν τῇ χειρὶ ἐργασάμενον)” (94).20 Euthyphro’s father (unlike Creon) would no doubt contend that he was merely holding the pelatēs until he reached a decision on the best course of action to take and that he did not intend his death.21 By adducing to him the attitude that even if the pelatēs died it would not matter (καὶ οὐδὲν ὂν πρᾶγμα εἰ καὶ ἀποθάνοι, 4d), however, Euthyphro underlines his challenge of this conception of intention and complicates the issue of what constitutes unwillingness in a case of homicide. Euthyphro thus implies that his father not only made no provision for the pelatēs as far as food and shelter were concerned (so ὠλιγώρει τε καὶ ἠμέλει, 4d) but that his active lack of concern as to whether or not the captive might die was what made his actions possible.22
12Despite all these factors—Creon’s attempts to avoid guilt for Antigone’s death, the fact that each of the victims died by their own hands, the fact that Creon never intended for his wife or son to die and that he had a change of heart concerning his niece’s death-sentence—the close of the Antigone calls starkly into question Creon’s avoidance of divine displeasure, even after he has taken steps to reverse his previous decision and allow for Polyneices’ burial.23 Creon requests to be led out of the way (ἄγοιτ᾿ ἂν… ἐκποδών, 1339) and is left with no one to turn to or rely upon (οὐδ᾿ ἔχω ὅπᾳ πρὸς πότερα κλιθῶ, 1341-1342). We are reminded of his own plan to lead Antigone to a deserted path unvisited by men to be entombed (773-774). The chorus’ coda that we must “in no way act impiously towards the gods” (χρὴ δὲ τά γ᾿ εἰς θεοὺς μηδὲν ἀσεπτεῖν, 1349-1350) only underscores the impression that Creon has failed in this respect, a failure which the close of the play encourages us to relate in part to his treatment of Antigone.24 If Creon’s avoidance of guilt is open to doubt, might the same be said of Euthyphro’s father who left no token rations for the bound and exposed pelatēs? Euthyphro’s relatives perhaps recognise this potential ambiguity when they add (in Euthyphro’s paraphrase25):
εἰ ὅτι μάλιστα ἀπέκτεινεν, ἀνδροφόνου γε ὄντος τοῦ ἀποθανόντος, οὐ δεῖν φροντίζειν ὑπὲρ τοῦ τοιούτου.
Even if he did kill him, since the dead man was a murderer, [Euthyphro] ought not to trouble himself on behalf of such a man (4d).26
13Certainly, Euthyphro’s relatives might here be describing an alternative, counterfactual scenario in which Euthyphro’s father killed the pelatēs. The conditional clause here, however, allows for the alternative possibility that Euthyphro’s father actually did, in some sense, kill the pelatēs. The adverb μάλιστα here allows, I think, for the sense “even if, on the most extreme interpretation (μάλιστα), we count this as killing”, and so suggests some willingness on the speakers’ part to recognise the admissibility of Euthyphro’s (in their eyes) pedantic position. The derogatory phrase “on behalf of such a man” here encapsulates not just the pelatēs’ actions (i.e. his killing of the slave) but also his social status, bringing us to a second key complication which Euthyphro’s case raises.
1.2. Questions of status and of relationships
14To begin, as does Socrates (4a), with the striking connection between the prosecutor and the accused, the correct relationship between father and son is, of course, one of the central concerns of this dialogue. The ways in which Euthyphro addresses this relationship—all-important in a patriarchal society—are significant for our purposes. For Euthyphro’s relatives, it is impious (ἀνόσιον) for a son to prosecute his father for homicide (4d-e). Euthyphro, by contrast, conceiving injustice as unholy and action taken to remedy it as the opposite, believes it is for his father’s as well as his own benefit that he remove the pollution which affects them by prosecuting him for his wrong behaviour (4c).27 Euthyphro thus, in the first instance at least, does not deny filial obligation28 but reaches a surprising conclusion about how best it is to be expressed. Furthermore, whereas, as I will go on to explore (Section 2), legal action and purification proffered two importantly different (though not incompatible) mechanisms for dealing with homicide, Euthyphro himself conflates them when he asserts that prosecution is the proper remedy for pollution. This conflation on Euthyphro’s part is an important point to which we will return below.
15To justify his claims about why he is right to undertake prosecution in this instance, Euthyphro turns to the gods for proof that it is right to act against injustice even where the perpetrator is one’s own father (5d-6a).29 Just like his father, Cronus has acted οὐκ ἐν δίκῃ in consuming his children—Euthyphro makes no allowance for the divergent nature of their crimes—and Zeus who punishes him is “best and most just of the gods” (6a). Even aside from the possibility that different codes of behaviour and of evaluation obtain in the cases of gods and men, a possibility which Euthyphro explicitly rejects at the close of this passage, the analogy is imperfect. By eating his own children, it might be objected, Cronus has himself called into question the father-child relationship which Zeus breaches for the sake of justice, making no pretence to act on his father’s behalf.30 Indeed, as Euthyphro’s account reminds us, this is not Cronus’ only dysfunctional father-son relationship: before his punishment at Zeus’ hands, he had castrated his own father Uranus (6a).
16This is the first and most striking indication we get that Euthyphro—as a result both of his own inflexibility and the genuinely complex and messy situation that confronts him—has trouble successfully grasping and negotiating normative relationships. We will see this played out in relation to the oikos more broadly as well as the city.
17If we return to our homicides, the relative status of both victims, their alleged murderers and those who take action on their behalf provoke further questions. Several of our ancient sources alert us to the possibility of homicide prosecutions being brought on behalf of a slave, chief among them the Aristotelian Athenian Constitution, which includes under the jurisdiction of the court at the Palladion the murder of slaves, metics and foreigners (57.3).31 Antiphon, discussing the laws surrounding homicide, tells us that it is possible for a master, if he sees fit, to prosecute on behalf of his slave (ὑπὲρ τοῦ δούλου) and Isocrates recalls a duplicitous attempt to bring such a suit.32 Most relevant for our interests is a passage in Pseudo-Demosthenes’ Against Evergus and Mnesibulus, where we are told that the laws (later equated with Draco’s laws on homicide) bid that prosecution fall to those who were either members of the same genos as the victim or were the victim’s master: the law does not envisage a prosecution by anyone else (it is not ἐν τῷ νόμῳ).33
18Euthyphro’s father, then, theoretically had grounds for action on behalf of the dead domestic slave,34 but what of Euthyphro on behalf of the pelatēs? The status of a pelatēs is somewhat murky.35 Plutarch, amongst others, assimilates the pelatēs to a Roman cliens, a free dependent who could in various situations rely on the support of his patron. The Greek term, though, does not seem to have been concretely defined to the extent that its Roman equivalent was.36 In the Aristotelian Athenian Constitution, in the context of pre-Solonian Attica (2.2), the pelatai are characterised along with the hektemeroi as poor men who slaved (ἐδούλευον) for the rich. Plato in the Euthyphro glosses the term with ἀνδρὸς θητός (15d) and the verb θητεύω (9a). The pelatēs, then, cannot be straightforwardly classified as either slave or free man. The Against Evergus and Mnesibulus also deals with the murder of a figure of ambiguous social status: it is the ex-nurse of the trierarch who has been killed. Though no longer his slave but a freedwoman, she has pointedly rejoined his household following the death of her husband.37
19Scholars have debated what lies behind the trierarch’s account of the exegetes’ paraphrase of the Attic homicide law: should we take the assertion that it is not ‘in the law’ (ἐν τῷ νόμῳ) for the trierarch to prosecute his ex-nurse’s killer to mean that prosecution by anyone other than the victim’s relatives or the master of a slave was positively forbidden, or did the law simply not envisage or prescribe prosecution by anyone other than these parties?38 Given that both the exegetai in this passage and Plato’s Euthyphro (our chief evidence) seem to envisage at least the possibility that such awkward cases might be brought to court, and given the relative flexibility of Athenian law, I incline to believe that there was some procedural flexibility here too. Thus I follow Gagarin, among others, in the view that, in the fourth century, the trierarch’s case and that of Euthyphro were not self-evidently illegal and non-permissible,39 whatever the social opprobrium they might provoke: the trierarch is cautioned by the exēgētai to take ritual rather than legal action,40 since proceeding against his ex-nurse’s murderers in a court of law on the word of his wife and children will leave him appearing χείρων or facing the ill-will of his fellow citizens (ἐὰν δὲ ἕλῃς, φθονήσει).41 For the trierarch to go out of his way to bring a legal charge against a fellow citizen when the law does not actively call for or encourage such action, on the word of non-citizen witnesses and on behalf of someone of non-citizen status (whose relationship to the trierarch is not one of legal possession but ongoing attachment) is, then, cast as an affront to the wider citizen body.
20Whatever the exact (or inexact) legal rules in place in contemporary Athens, I suggest, then, that Plato chooses a case centred around a pelatēs, not to render Euthyphro’s case obviously and immediately defunct, but as a deliberately ambiguous figure. The pelatēs’ status is further complicated by Euthyphro’s description of him. He employs the possessive ἐμός and states that he worked on Naxos παρ᾿ ἡμῖν (4c).42 This language complicates the earlier separation of the world into ἀλλότριος/ οἰκεῖος—those who belong to one’s own oikos43 and those who belong to another— since the pelatēs is not self-evidently either.44 As Stowers notes, we must be cautious in privileging the nuclear family over other social relations, particularly in a society where there was often “no distinction between work and home”.45 In some sense, Euthyphro clearly feels himself related to the man, owing a certain responsibility to him, in a way not obviously accommodated by any strict legal status.
21If membership in the oikos community is problematised in the Euthyphro (does the pelatês belong to Euthyphro’s oikos?), so too is membership in the wider polis community.46 Euthyphro and his father have recently returned to Athens from farmland on Naxos where they were likely cleruchs.47 Although Athenian citizens by law, the community with whom they lived and, importantly, worshipped in the years prior to and immediately after the events Euthyphro describes was not straightforwardly Athenian.48 Following the loss of the cleruchies in 404 BC, Euthyphro’s community on Naxos ceased to exist independently. Euthyphro’s ‘otherness’ in respect to the Athenian community is emphasised in the opening stages of the dialogue; he is unfamiliar with Meletus,49 and with the fact of Socrates’ indictment.50 Indeed, with his opening lines, Socrates contrasts Euthyphro and the Ἀθηναῖοι, as he purports to explain to him Athenian legal terminology (2a).51 Euthyphro too, in his purported knowledge of matters divine, sets himself apart from the hoi polloi, who mock his predictions in the assembly and think him mad.52 Nevertheless, as an Athenian citizen, it is to the Athenian courts that Euthyphro now turns. Similarly, it was Athenian exēgētai whose advice his father sought. Yet the fact that the pelatēs expired before the messenger made the round trip from Naxos to Athens serves to emphasise the family’s tenuous connections to the polis and civic-life. The dialogue thus portrays as problematic Euthyphro’s relationship both with his oikos and with his city. These problematic relationships will be significant when we come to consider how Euthyphro’s course of action effectively conflates legal action and purification and the negative repercussions which stem from his decision.
22Socrates’ retelling of Euthyphro’s narrative at 9a-b helpfully encapsulates the difficulties and ambiguities we have been discussing. After challenging Euthyphro to demonstrate that the gods unanimously deem the killing of the pelatēs unjust, Socrates further challenges him to demonstrate that the gods agree “that it is right on account of such a man for a son to proceed against his father and accuse him of murder”. Was the pelatēs’ killing a wrongdoing? Who and what exactly is the pelatēs ( “on account of such a man”)? How does the familial relation between prosecutor and accused affect the equation? Finally, is legal action ( “to proceed against and accuse”) the right course of action here? Socrates formulates his query in general terms and not just with a view to Euthyphro’s specific case: is it right in this sort of situation for any son to take such legal action against his father on behalf of such a man? Thus, for Socrates, Euthyphro’s case leads to further reflection on what makes a dikē, or indeed a graphē, comply with justice, a question played with throughout the dialogue. At the beginning of their conversation, Socrates puns on the two senses of dikē by contrasting the graphē brought against him by Meletus, with dikē – justice/a private suit (2a).53 Again, Euthyphro goes on to characterise Meletus’ suit as a way of wronging Socrates (ἀδικεῖν, 3a).
2. Revisiting Euthyphro’s decision
23These complications and difficulties put us in a position to ask why Euthyphro’s decision to opt for legal action over purification may be inappropriate. Returning to Pseudo-Demosthenes’ Against Evergus and Mnesibulus, we saw that the trierarch was advised by the exegetes not to undertake legal proceedings on behalf of his nurse since it would gain him the ill-will of his fellow citizens. In neither case are we told that the suit would be laughed out of court but rather that each would be met with a strong emotional reaction from the fellow citizens of the would-be prosecutors. In pseudo-Demosthenes the relative statuses of the offenders and victim render legal action inappropriate; purification and other ritual action is recommended instead. Such action allows the trierarch to avoid, we can assume, the ire of his contemporaries. The ongoing relationship between the trierarch and his ex-nurse is emphasised. She is fiercely loyal in her defence of her ex-master’s property and, subsequent to her husband’s death, once again an established member of the trierarch’s oikos, instituted as a member of the household (οἰκουρόν [56]; see also: καὶ ὡς εἶχον αὐτὴν ἐν τῇ οἰκίᾳ [68]) since his wife wishes it and he cannot bear to see her in want (55-56, 68).54 The law, then, does not encourage the trierarch to take legal action on behalf of his ex-slave and is not interested in accounting for his relationship with her—their relationship operates at the level of the oikos, not the polis. Ritual purification, however, recognizes the significance of his relationship with her and allows the trierarch to respond to and address her murder in a manner which is internal to the oikos and which circumscribes it from the city at large. The straightforwardly legal then might not be the only or the best way to define the community of the oikos.
24Another way in which one might evaluate one’s relationship with dependents and the question of who did and did not belong within the boundaries of one’s household is along religious lines. Euthyphro characterises his father as someone with whom he shares a hearth (συνέστιός, 4b).55 As such, Euthyphro maintains that by associating with him he shares too in his father’s pollution:
ἴσον γὰρ τὸ μίασμα γίγνεται ἐὰν συνῇς τῷ τοιούτῳ συνειδὼς καὶ μὴ ἀφοσιοῖς σεαυτόν τε καὶ ἐκεῖνον τῇ δίκῃ ἐπεξιών.
The pollution is the same if you knowingly keep company with such a man and do not purify yourself and him by prosecuting him (4c).56
25That the religious community of an oikos might be felt to extend beyond the family is indicated by a number of rites in which both free and slave were included.57 So, returning to the centrality of the hearth as a marker of association, slaves might be introduced to the family hearth on purchase.58 Faraone has recently suggested that some curse tablets may have been directed against one household, broadly conceived, by another. In one example, which comes (helpfully for our purposes) from fourth-century Athens, “a group of workers, related by marriage, blood or (in the case of slaves) by circumstance, who ply the same or related trades probably in or adjacent to the home”, are bound by the curse’s anonymous author.59 Here, again, we find membership in an oikos being conceived, through a religious prism, in a broader (in this case, economic) fashion than the strictly nuclear family. Though not related to Euthyphro through blood or strict ownership, it is not hard to imagine the pelatēs falling under a similarly broad definition of belonging.
26In the context of homicide, the religious personhood of the socially inferior came prominently into play. Isocrates, for instance, observes that, outside Sparta, it is polluting to kill even the basest of slaves.60 Where the slave is your own, the implications of his homicide may be more keenly felt. Antiphon states that “if a man kills someone who is in his power and who has no one to exact revenge on his behalf, fearing observed custom and the divine, he will purify himself and keep away from those places prescribed by law” (On the Choreutes, 4). A religious and social obligation is thus owed to those “in your power” (τινὰ ὧν αὐτὸς κρατεῖ), a somewhat ambiguous turn of phrase.61 Euthyphro’s pelatēs was indeed in his family’s power. We might compare the powerful divine protection afforded guests, suppliants and strangers, all of whom are in some sense placed at another man’s mercy.62 This is not, of course, to suggest that pollution-beliefs were blind to questions of status. Robert Parker has well highlighted the variations in the intensity of pollution, which we encounter in our sources, depending on the status of the deceased and the manner of their death.63 When Creon reminds Antigone that Polyneices was, in addition to an enemy of the state, her brother Eteocles’ killer, he suggests that Eteocles would not thank her for the honour she does Polyneices. Antigone retorts that even this would not lead Eteocles to wish Polyneices left unburied: “It was his brother, not his slave who died!” (Sophocles, Antigone, 512-517). Thus, to recognise a slave as a member of a religious community or their death as polluting need not by that token place them on a par with one’s own father.
27Purification, I suggest, unlike legal action, would allow Euthyphro to meet his religious responsibility to the pelatēs within the boundaries of the household, without disrupting that household and his relationship with his father by addressing the problem in the civic sphere. In prosecuting his father, Euthyphro no longer addresses the issue as a household problem between father and son, but converts their relationship to that between two Athenian citizens with a dispute.
28Returning to On the Choreutes, we saw that Antiphon mentions both purification and keeping away from those places prescribed by law.64 Antiphon thus associates with pollution-beliefs a temporary isolation from public and religious places and gatherings. In his recent treatment of ‘dirty bodies, ’ with which we began, Osborne argues for a further function of pollution-beliefs and purification: to render the invisible visible and to alert the community at large to significant events like birth and death in the household.65 In regards to birth and death this interpretation is, I think, open to question. Where publicising an event is desirable, alternative avenues are often available—we might point to the ekphora in the case of unproblematic deaths and the prorrhēsis in the case of homicide. In the case of birth, the provision for introducing a child to the wider community at their first Choēs, coupled with high levels of infant mortality, may well indicate a desire to delay public visibility in the first instance. By contrast, pollution and purification (in contrast to legislation) can often serve not to publicise but precisely to contain and address certain problematic or critical events (such as birth or death) within the confines of the smaller group,66 as isolated from the wider community, and to re-emphasise that group’s independent solidarity by means of their shared status as polluted. Pollution draws boundaries, which Euthyphro here disrupts, through his decision to pursue legal rather than ritual action.
29In his famous funerary speech, Thucydides has Pericles praise Athens with the words: “We are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law” (2.37). Here, the city chooses not to intervene in the private affairs of the oikos and makes a virtue out of not doing so.67 In the Laws, the Athenian Stranger expects that introducing legislation concerning citizens’ conduct in their private lives will open Magnesia’s lawgivers to controversy and even wide-spread derision (780a). By dragging his father’s killing of the pelatēs into the civic legal sphere, Euthyphro both fails to observe, and disrupts, this delicate dynamic between private and public life. By bringing civic actions to play in intra-familial affairs, Euthyphro uses the law in a highly problematic manner, contradicting the democratic affirmation of the privacy and circumscribed nature of the oikos and using law for the destruction rather than renewal of the stability of civic life, by threatening the unity of individual oikoi.68
30Euthyphro’s decision not to delineate the respective spheres of purification and legal action is reflected not only in what he does but also in how he speaks. Rather than recognising any distinction between legislation and purification as responses to pollution, Euthyphro conflates them throughout the dialogue. For Euthyphro, the miasma of homicide responds only to the question of justice and must be purified by pursuing a dikē.69 His first attempt at a definition of piety is prosecution of homicides and temple-robbers and when he offers a μέγα… τεκμήριον of the law it is the myths of the gods, not the statutes of the lawgivers, to which he turns (5e). Socrates in turn responds to Euthyphro’s attitude on this point by adopting a manner of speaking which echoes Euthyphro’s own. In summarising Euthyphro’s situation, he envisions a theology proven in the law court, requesting a τεκμήριον of the gods’ hatred for the actions of Euthyphro’s father and an ἐνδείξις of their approval for Euthyphro’s own (9a-b).
Conclusions
31My suggestion in this paper is not that pollution-beliefs and law have neat and tidy spheres of operation in classical Athens. In many cases and many ways, pollution and purification of course have myriad applications outside the oikos. My more limited purpose in this paper was to argue that, as religious historians, we can find in certain aspects of the Euthyphro an overlooked perspective from which to consider some significant ways in which legal action and purification can differ as reactions to guilt and responsibility. It allows us to consider certain important reasons why Euthyphro’s decision to pursue legal action in his particular case may be problematic and why purification might have offered a different and better course of action, especially with respect to the loaded nature of the relation between oikos and polis. As a final remark, and with a view to the place of these concerns in the context of the philosophical work as a whole, Euthyphro’s decision to pursue legal action in this pointedly ambiguous and difficult case is, I think, emblematic of his marked and misplaced epistemic hybris, which is a central theme of the dialogue and so much of Plato’s work. Plato succeeds in dramatising the difficulty of reaching firm conclusions concerning the dilemmas and uncertainties which a case of this sort raises by demonstrating both the complexities of the law and the complexities with which the law fails to cope. Plato’s philosophical investigation highlights the difficulty in saying with confidence what we even mean by the terms ‘justice’ and ‘piety’. For Socrates, Euthyphro’s decision to prosecute implies the pretension to secure knowledge of such terms and to a clear-cut understanding of where guilt and responsibility lie and how to address them, a pretension shared, we are to assume, by Socrates’ own accuser Meletus.70 By contrast, we have seen how purification—whether or not Plato would ever have himself prescribed this route71— offered a more flexible way of expiating guilt and meeting religious responsibility, without requiring one to pronounce on these difficult questions in such an unalterably public, antagonistic and potentially harmful manner.
Notes de bas de page
1 Parker (1996) [1983], p. 121.
2 Osborne (2011), p. 158-184.
3 Osborne (2011), p. 180, 172.
4 Osborne (2011), p. 176.
5 Beyond homicide, Osborne (2011), p. 177, drawing on Parker (1996) [1983], notes that “there were many other areas of life where regulation might be desired but the formal apparatus of law was either not possible or not appropriate”. The discussion of the Euthyphro that follows discloses some of the reasons why this might be the case. For discussion of Osborne’s approach, see also Parker in this volume.
6 For a focus on Euthyphro’s filial relation to the accused see Euthphr. 4a, 4d-e, 5b, 8b, 9a, 15d. I return to this relationship below.
7 5d-e, 6d, 8b, 9a-b, 15d.
8 For discussion of Euthyphro’s apparent championing of impartial justice see e.g. Tulin (1996), p. 81.
9 Cf. D.L. 1.76. Aristotle also points here to Plato’s ‘law on drunkenness’ (that symposiarchs are to be sober) as a peculiarity of his code. Cf. D.L. 1.57 for a Solonian prohibition against drunk magistrates and Dem., Against Zenothemis, 27 for excessive drinking resulting in mania as further grounds for punishment. For leniency, cf. Lys. Against Simon, 43.
10 So Alwine (2010), p. 172.
11 Dem. Against Aristocrates 53 (transl. Gagarin [2003]). Gagarin believes the law’s archaic language indicates an early date and quite possibly inclusion in Draco’s seventh-century code. See also Kapparis (1995), p. 105 and, for further discussion (and cautious optimism) concerning the authenticity of the document, Canevaro (2013), p. 42-43 and 64-70.
12 Harris (1990), p. 370-371.
13 Pl. Lg. 867a-867b. Plato distinguishes murders committed in hot blood, which resemble more closely but are not identical to involuntary homicide, and murders committed by those who nurse their anger and build up to their revenge, which are closer to voluntary homicide. Anger recurs throughout the Euthyphro. It characterises the Athenians and Euthyphro’s father and relatives as well as the pelatēs. For the role of anger (and particularly orgē) in Athenian legal discourse see Allen (2000), p. 50-62, 68.
14 We are not told what motivated Euthyphro’s father’s uncertainty—whether it was the circumstances of the slave’s death along lines such as those outlined above, or anxiety over his own religious (and legal?) obligations, whether in respect to the dead slave or to the bound and/or now-dead pelatēs. Although Euthyphro’s father could be said to show here a greater appreciation than his son of the complexities inherent in responding to an illegal and polluting act and the need for circumspection (cf. Mcpherran [2002], p. 115 n. 18; Diamond [2012], p. 526; Rosivach [2017], p. 235 who restricts the matter of enquiry to the manner of purification required), by leaving the man bound and without food and thinking it no matter if he should die, he has, on some of these issues at least, pre-judged the case. See the text and n. 40 below for further discussion.
15 See, from a different perspective, Diamond (2012), p. 525 for details “which either suggest his father’s innocence, or at the very least introduce ambiguities into the question of the father’s guilt”.
16 See Parker (1996) [1983], p. 111, 316.
17 S. Ant. 773-776. Cf. 887-889 where the choice is said to be Antigone’s whether to die or live entombed in the cave and where Creon again insists that he is ‘pure in respect of this girl.’
18 So Parker (1996) [1983], p. 111.
19 So e.g. Jebb (1891), ad loc.
20 Cf. e.g. Antiphon, Against the Stepmother for Poisoning, 5, for a murder allegedly plotted but not carried out by the culprit’s own hand in the context of another case involving complex family loyalties and the breakdown of an oikos and Dem. Against Conon, 25, for a man banished for homicide, though he laid no hand on the victim himself, because he urged the man who dealt the fatal blow to keep on striking.
21 See Diamond (2012), p. 525, 529. Cf. Socrates’ claim (Pl. Euthphr. 11d) that if he is indeed a Daedalus, tying arguments into knots, as Euthyphro contends, his skill is involuntary (ἄκων εἰμὶ σοφός).
22 Cf. Euthyphro’s emphasis on the pollution which results from knowingly associating with a polluted individual (Euthphr. 4c, see further below). For a similar anxiety, and attempts to get around it, in certain Cnidian curse tablets see Faraone (2011a), p. 36-37. See e.g. DT 212 for the worry that the curse’s author may unknowingly eat or drink with the curse’s object and so suffer the curse’s effects herself.
23 See Parker (1996) [1983], p. 316. For the burial of Polyneices see 1196ff.
24 We may see here another echo of Creon’s earlier description of Antigone’s imminent fate: at S. Ant. 777-780, he passes judgment on Antigone’s own sebas—namely her reverence for Hades alone of the gods and for the dead who dwell with him. The folly of Creon (1339) resides in part in his over-confidence in his own ability to distinguish what constitutes appropriate behaviour in the eyes of the gods, which is reminiscent of Euthyphro in Plato’s dialogue.
25 The multiple layers of voice in this section of the dialogue constitute a further complicating factor: that we are dealing with Plato’s account of Euthyphro and Socrates’ conversation and, within this framework, with Euthyphro’s report of events and of his father’s and relatives’ views, makes it harder still for the reader to respond with confidence to the case and the questions and dilemmas which it raises. The silence of the principal actors—the pelatēs, slave and, to some extent, Euthyphro’s father—and Euthyphro’s failure to report on what action the exegetes advised, only exacerbates these difficulties. Cf. Socrates’ reflection on divergences of opinion amongst the gods (Euthphr. 7b-8b) and the difficulty of acquiring sure knowledge about them.
26 Euthyphro’s relatives thus seek to press the same lack of thought for the pelatēs (οὐ δεῖν φροντίζειν) on Euthyphro as his father displayed prior to the man’s death. For Euthyphro’s own alleged neglect of Socrates at the close of the dialogue (Euthphr. 15e), see Diamond (2012), p. 530.
27 We might compare the literary trope whereby family members show themselves willing to take on and share in a parent’s pollution as an expression of loyalty. See Parker (1996) [1983], p. 318.
28 This way of characterizing his behavior—as a way to benefit his father (and, given their close relationship, himself)—is not emphasized by Euthyphro elsewhere in the dialogue. The notion that punishment should be for the good of the offender is itself a prominent one in Plato’s work. See e.g. Saunders (1991), and Allen (2000), p. 245-281, for discussion of this principle in the Gorgias, Republic and Laws.
29 Cf. Pl. Grg. 480a-b.
30 Further evidence for a strained father-son relationship is found in the fact that Euthyphro’s father sent to Athens rather than asking his own son (a self-proclaimed religious expert) for advice about the first murder (see Rosen [1968], p. 106) and in the fact that Euthyphro refers to the pelatēs with a possessive in the singular, while the household slave belongs to them both. Two adult Athenian citizens, both Euthyphro and his father lived in a society which stressed the autonomy and self-governance of its citizens. There is, then, the potential for some conflict within the oikos, where values of filial piety might sit uneasily with this kind of autonomy.
31 See Grace (1973), for a discussion of this feature of Athenian law and the suggestion that this innovation postdates Draco.
32 Antiphon, On the murder of Herodes, 48; Isoc., Against Callimachus, 52: the slave girl is later produced alive in court as counter evidence to this charge (54).
33 Ps.-Dem. Against Evergus and Mnesibulus, 70: οὐδὲ γὰρ ἐν τῷ νόμῳ ἔστι σοι: οὐ γάρ ἐστιν ἐν γένει σοι ἡ ἄνθρωπος, οὐδὲ θεράπαινα, ἐξ ὧν σὺ λέγεις: οἱ δὲ νόμοι τούτων κελεύουσιν τὴν δίωξιν εἶναι. See further below.
34 Whether this action could include corporal punishment taken into his own hands without repercussion is questionable and may be behind Euthyphro’s father’s appeal to the exegetes for advice, see n. 14 above. In Antiphon’s Against the Stepmother for Poisoning (20) we are told of a pallakē, who was handed over to the executioner for her (unwitting) role in the murder of two men without any formal trial having taken place. She is said to have deserved her punishment (τὰ ἐπίχειρα ὧν ἀξία ἦν), while in the same breath she is exonerated of responsibility for the crime (οὐδὲν αἰτία οὖσα). For her servile status see Carey (1988), p. 241-242, contra Bushala (1968). The complexities of this case (see further n. 20 above) would render it an excellent subject for rhetorical training. Of course, this need not mean that the speech was in fact such an exercise. For an interesting discussion of what is at stake in this case, see GAGArin (2010), p. 146-152. The speech contrasts with our case in involving the death of two free men and, if Carey is correct, in the less-ambiguous status of the pallakē. We might compare Plato’s provision (Lg. 868b-c) that a slave who kills his own master in anger may be dealt with in whatever way the deceased’s kin wish without their incurring pollution, provided that he is in no way left alive. Elsewhere, by contrast, Antiphon (On the Murder of Herodes, 48) indicates that even a slave who has killed his own master may not be put to death summarily but must be handed over to a magistrate. Though Plato’s provision may not derive from historical practice, the two statements in Antiphon are not easily reconciled and it is possible that Athenian law may have contained no clear provision on this point. For the additional complexities inherent in the case of the pelatēs, whose status and relationship to Euthyphro and his father are up for debate, see the discussion below.
35 Cf. Kidd (1990), p. 221; Rosivach (2017), p. 236 with n.21.
36 Plu. Rom. 13.5; Mor. 323b. Cf. D.H. 1.83.3, for pelatai, alongside hetairai and therapeiai, constituting the retinue of the deposed king Numitor.
37 For her current standing in relation to the trierarch see further below.
38 For discussion see e.g. Macdowell (1963), p. 13-20; Evjen (1971); Panagiotou (1974), p. 431-434; Gagarin (1979), p. 304, 307-312; Kidd (1990), p. 215-221 (see p. 219-221 for the suggestion that the pelatēs’ status may have allowed for prosecution on the grounds of a master-slave relationship); Tulin (1996), p. 21-54 with Gagarin (1997b); Rosivach (2017), p. 234-235. As several scholars have highlighted, the trierarch’s testimony should be treated with caution here. It is his intention to paint his opponents as thoroughly villainous, while depicting himself as the victim and his own behaviour as thoroughly lawful and beyond reproach. See e.g. GAGArin (1979), p. 308, Tulin (1996), p. 27 and, for a more recent critique of past readings of this passage, MArtin (2009), p. 277-280.
39 See GAGArin (1979), p. 312-313; (1997). Cf. Mcpherran (2002), p. 109.
40 The limitations of our evidence make it difficult to talk with certainty about the perceived scope of the exēgētai’s advice. See Rosivach (2017), p. 233-236, 238-241 for a recent comprehensive discussion of the evidence. Rosivach (2017), p. 235 n.19, reasonably affirms that they were not ‘legal consultants’ and yet here in Ps.-Demosthenes we do find the exēgētai giving at least ‘paralegal’ counsel—they appear happy to pronounce on questions of law when they assert that a particular course of action is not available ἐν τῷ νόμῳ… σοι, as well as offering the trierarch religious advice and interpretation of τὰ νόμιμα. Whether or not such paralegal advice could have been expected alongside exegesis on proper ritual action we cannot say. Cf. Bloch (1953), p. 409.
41 Ps.-Dem. Against Evergus and Mnesibulus, 70.
42 Rosivach (2017), p. 236, downplays the possessive on the grounds that Euthyphro does not pursue the point and did not aid the bound man but the narrative is condensed and many of the details as well as Euthyphro’s rhetorical moves are elliptical (cf. n. 28 above). Why does Euthyphro say ‘my pelatēs’? The possessive is striking and invites us to examine its significance. To cite McCabe (2015), p. 7, “Plato writes nothing in vain”.
43 Parker (2005a), p. 10, notes the extension of the term oikeios beyond blood relatives to include also close friends who shared sacrifices at the home. See Faraone (2008) for more extensive discussion of the locative force of oikeios in the context of ritual action, drawing a contrast between ‘oikic’ and ‘gentilic’ cult.
44 Bodel – Olyan (2008), p. 2, in their introduction to an edited volume on household and family religion in antiquity, offer the following gloss of households: “[they] can be clarified as either simple, consisting exclusively of biological kin, or complex, comprising household dependents (principally but not only domestic slaves) as well as blood relatives—in short, all who live within the house (or, more accurately in certain contexts, all who fall within the power of the head of the family).” The pelatēs, I suggest, might be thought to fall into the ambiguous space alluded to in the two sets of parentheses included in this loose definition.
45 Stowers (2008), p. 6 and 10.
46 For play on the relationship between family and wider community, we might compare Plato’s use of familial language in the early Socratic dialogues. At Euthphr. 2d, Socrates states that Meletus is accusing him ὥσπερ πρὸς μητέρα πρὸς τὴν πόλιν, while Socrates, in the Apology, likens himself to a father or a brother in his attentions to his fellow citizens (31b). In the Republic, Plato saw fit to transform this metaphor into a political strategy, abolishing the family to encourage feelings of filial piety and parental affection between all members of the older and younger strata of society. Interestingly, Aristotle (Pol. 2.1262a 25-32), in critiquing this policy, alludes to the fact that it will lead to an increase in pollution, since unholy deeds like parricide and fratricide will occur more frequently if men are ignorant of their familial relations and will not be correctly purified.
47 Jones (1957), p. 176, denies their status as cleruchs, but his suggestion that Euthyphro’s family were clearly sufficiently well-off to have purchased their land privately is no more compelling than the cleruch-interpretation and lacks the advantage of explaining the family’s recent return to Attica.
48 Parker (1994), p. 343-346, points to evidence suggesting that in some cases, cleruchic religion could be quite distinct from its Athenian counterpart. He notes both that cleruchs quite often made collective dedications in Athenian temples and that they regularly respected the gods whose territories they came to live in as new-comers (p. 341-342). See Furley (1985), p. 202, for criticism of Burnet’s (1924), p. 24, somewhat over-dramatic assessment of the foreign influences to which Euthyphro may have been exposed while away from Athens.
49 Although this could also be a dramatic ploy on Plato’s part intended to further the impression of Meletus as an unknown entity, a presumptuous upstart in no position to be prosecuting his elder Socrates.
50 Contrast Furley (1985), p. 205, who claims that because Socrates’ case was still in its early stages it would not yet have been public knowledge.
51 See Rosen (1968), p. 107.
52 We might contrast the portrayal of Socrates in the Euthyphro and other early dialogues as in some way alien to the Athenian community. In the very first lines of the dialogue (2a), Euthyphro asks what new or strange thing (τί νεώτερον) has brought Socrates to this part of town and, in the Apology, Socrates refers to himself as a ξένως to the court room (17d). Cf. Versényi (1982), p. 26 n. 2.
53 See Rosen (1968), p. 109.
54 Stowers (2008), p. 6, points to the importance in evaluating the relationship of individuals brought into proximity with one another, the relationships those individuals have with other people and places. That the trierarch’s nurse and, potentially, Euthyphro’s pelatēs have no such external ties is clearly significant in the way that their connection to these citizen-oikoi is to be viewed. That these relationships were not thereby elevated to the level of relationships between members of the nuclear family does not render them insignificant or uninteresting.
55 Euthyphro also stresses the significance of sharing a table with a polluted man. See Furley (1985), p. 206, who points to the parallel concern expressed in the aition for the Choēs festival, namely a desire to avoid drinking together with the polluted Orestes. See also n. 22 above.
56 For the connection of the family hearth to purity and its centrality to family cult, see further Boedeker (2008), p. 234, 237 and 247 n. 50.
57 See Faraone (2008), p. 213-216, for discussion of several oikos-rites which involved slaves as well as family-members, including, for example, the rite of ‘driving out Boulimos’ performed at the household hearth (as well as at the public hearth by the archon) and involving in a central way one of the household slaves (see Plu. Mor. 693e-694a).
58 A. Ag. 1037, cf. Dem. Against Stephanus I, 74 and Ar. Pl. 768-9 for the καταχύσματα used to introduce newly purchased slaves to the home. Cf. Theopompus Comicus, fr. 14 for the same ritual practised over a bride.
59 Faraone (2008), p. 220-221, on DTA 87 and, also, 69.
60 Isoc. Panathenaicus 181: ἃ τοῖς ἄλλοις Ἕλλησιν οὐδὲ τοὺς πονηροτάτους τῶν οἰκετῶν ὅσιόν ἐστι μιαιφονεῖν.
61 See Morrow (1937), p. 210, for discussion of how far a slave’s status and treatment was dependent on custom or legal rights. Unlike in the case of the murder of a citizen, the chances of a family or individual facing prosecution (under a graphē asebeias), or being shunned socially, for failing to prosecute on behalf of a slave would presumably have been fairly slim. See Gagarin (1979), p. 306 n. 21.
62 Parker (1996) [1983], p. 274, discusses plagues stemming from the “massacre of particularly defenceless victims”, citing Hdt. 1.167, to which we may add the pollution stemming from the Cylonian affair, instrumental to the climate which produced Draco’s homicide laws. See Humphreys (1992), p. 20.
63 See e.g. Parker (1996) [1983], p. 41-42 and 274 with n. 80.
64 Variously said to include the agora, frontier markets, games, sacrifices, libations and mixing bowls. See Dem. Against Aristocrates 37; Against Leptines 157-158.
65 Osborne (2011), p. 177. Cf. Arnaoutoglou (1993), p. 121, for pollution-beliefs (in the context of homicide procedure) as a tool for the city-authorities.
66 Cf. Boedeker (2008), p. 243, for the broader, compatible view that “household religious practices took care of crucial matters that would be dangerously polluting for civic sanctuaries; they absorbed and dissipated the pollution of birth and death”.
67 Cf. Cohen (1991), p. 229.
68 See Pl. Euthphr. 14b, where piety is said to “preserve individual oikoi and the polis-community, impiety to overturn and destroy everything”.
69 See now Rosivach (2017), p. 238-239, who also notes the novelty of trying to dispel personal pollution via legal action. My interest here has been in the significance of Euthyphro’s conflation of purification and legal action and the broader issues on which it invites reflection. Euthyphro is perhaps less radical in holding that, were the homicide just, pollution would not result, cf. Andoc. On the Mysteries 95-98, Lyc. Against Leocrates 125.
70 For a recent, detailed discussion of the parallels between Meletus and Euthyphro and, especially, between Socrates and Euthyphro’s father, see Diamond (2012). Cf. e.g. Tulin (1996), p. 99; Heidel (1900), p. 166; McPherran (2002), p. 111, 117-118. Beyond the obvious parallels of youth and over-confidence, it is interesting to note that at 3a, Socrates reports Meletus’ figurative claim that through his prosecution of Socrates he is purifying (ἐκκαθαίρει) the field of its weeds. For Euthyphro’s arrogance see Pl. Euthphr. 4b, 4e-5c, 6c.
71 See McPherran (2002), p. 125 for the suggestion that Socrates’ elenchus itself serves as a kind of purification for Euthyphro’s “pollution of hybris”.
Auteur
hrw28@cam.ac.uk
Lecturer in Classics (Ancient History) at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Murray Edwards College. She is preparing a study entitled Law and Religion in the Archaic and Classical Greek Poleis.
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