Plato five dialogues grube pdf

Five Dialogues

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PLATO

Five Dialogues

Second Edition

Euthyphro Apology Crito Meno Phaedo

Translated by G. M. A. GRUBE

Revised by JOHN M. COOPER

Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Indianapolis/Cambridge

Copyright © 2002 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

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For further information, please address: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. P.O. Box 44937 Indianapolis, IN 46244-0937

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Cover design by Listenberger & Associates

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Plato.

[Dialogues. English. Selections] Five Dialogues / Plato ; translated by G.M.A. Grube.—2nd ed. / revised

by John M. Cooper. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references. Contents: Euthyphro—Apology—Crito—Meno—Phaedo. ISBN 0-87220-633-5 (pbk.)—ISBN 0-87220-634-3 (cloth) 1. Philosophy, Ancient. I. Grube, G.M.A. (George Maximilian

Anthony) II. Title. B358.G7813 2002 184—dc21 2002022754

ISBN-13: 978-0-87220-634-2 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-87220-633-5 (pbk.)

e-ISBN: 978-1-60384-226-6 (Adobe e-book)

www.hackettpublishing.com

CONTENTS

Preface to the Second Edition vii

Introduction ix

Euthyphro 1

Apology 21

Crito 45

Meno 58

Phaedo 93

Suggestions for Further Reading 155

v

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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The translations of Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, and Phaedo presented here are taken from Hackett Publishing Company’s epoch- making Plato, Complete Works (third printing, 2001), prepared under my editorship. In the revised form in which George Grube’s distin- guished translations appear here, they present Plato’s wonderfully vivid and moving—as well as challenging—portrayal of Socrates, and of the philosophic life, in clear, contemporary, down-to-earth English that nonetheless preserves and accurately conveys the nuances of Plato’s and Socrates’ philosophical ideas. For this new edition I have added a number of new footnotes explaining various places and events in Athens, features of Greek mythology, and the like, to which Socrates and his interlocutors make reference. At a number of places I have introduced further revisions in the translations.

John M. Cooper

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INTRODUCTION

At the time of his trial and execution in 399 b.c., Socrates was seventy years of age. He had lived through the Periclean age when Athens was at the pinnacle of her imperial power and her cultural ascendancy, then through twenty-five years of war with Sparta and the final defeat of Athens in 404, the oligarchic revolution that followed, and, finally, the restoration of democracy. For most of this time he was a well-known character, expounding his philosophy of life in the streets of Athens to anyone who cared to listen. His “mission,” which he explains in the Apology, was to expose the ignorance of those who thought themselves wise and to try to convince his fellow citizens that every man is responsi- ble for his own moral attitudes. The early dialogues of Plato, of which Euthyphro is a good example, show him seeking to define ethical terms and asking awkward questions. There is no reason to suppose that these questions were restricted to the life of the individual. Indeed, if he questioned the basic principles of democracy and adopted towards it anything like the attitude Plato attributes to him, it is no wonder that the restored democracy should consider him to have a bad influence on the young.

With the development of democracy and in the intellectual ferment of the fifth century, a need was felt for higher education. To satisfy it, there arose a number of traveling teachers who were called the Sophists. All of them taught rhetoric, the art of public speaking, which was a powerful weapon, since all the important decisions were made by the assemblies of adult male citizens or in the courts with very large juries. It is not surprising that Socrates was often confused with these Sophists in the public mind, for both of them were apt to question established and inherited values. But their differences were vital: the Sophists professed to put men on the road to success, whereas Socrates disclaimed that he taught anything; his conversations aimed at discovering the truth, at acquiring that knowledge and understanding of life and its values that he thought were the very basis of the good life and of philosophy, to him a moral as well as an intellectual pursuit. Hence his celebrated paradox that virtue is knowledge and that when men do wrong, it is only because they do not know any better. We are often told that in this theory Socrates ignored the will, but that is in part a misconception. The aim is not to choose the right but to become the sort of person who cannot choose the wrong and who no longer has

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x INTRODUCTION

any choice in the matter. This is what he sometimes expresses as becoming like a god, for the gods, as he puts it in Euthyphro (10d), love the pious (and so, the right) because it is right; they cannot do otherwise and no longer have any choice at all, and they cannot be the cause of evil.

The translations in this volume give the full Platonic account of the drama of Socrates’ trial and death and provide vivid presentations of Socrates’ discussions with his friends and younger contemporaries on the nature of piety, the justice of obedience to state authority, the relation between philosophical knowledge and human virtue, and the wonders, as well as the demands, of the life devoted to philosophy. The references to the coming trial and its charges in Euthyphro are a kind of introduction to this drama. The Apology is Plato’s version of Socrates’ speech to the jury in his own defense. In Crito we find Socrates refusing to save his life by escaping into exile. Meno shows Socrates debating in his characteristic way with Meno on the nature and teachability of human virtue (goodness), and also examining Meno’s slave-boy on a question of geometry, in order to prove the preexistence of our souls and our ability to learn (“recollect”) truths by rigorously examining our own opinions. Phaedo gives an account of his discussion with his friends in prison on the last day of his life, mostly on the question of the immortality of the soul.

The influence of Socrates on his contemporaries can hardly be exaggerated, especially on Plato but not on Plato alone, for a number of authors wrote on Socrates in the early fourth century b.c. And his influence on later philosophers, largely through Plato, was also very great. This impact, on his contemporaries at least, was due not only to his theories but in large measure to his character and personality, that serenely self-confident personality that emerges so vividly from Plato’s writings, and in particular from his account of Socrates’ trial, imprison- ment, and execution.

NOTE: With few exceptions, this translation follows Burnet’s Oxford text.

G. M. A. Grube

EUTHYPHRO

Euthyphro is surprised to meet Socrates near the king-archon’s court, for Socrates is not the kind of man to have business with courts of justice. Socrates explains that he is under indictment by one Meletus for corrupting the young and for not believing in the gods in whom the city believes. After a brief discussion of this, Socrates inquires about Euthyphro’s business at court and is told that he is prosecuting his own father for the murder of a laborer who is himself a murderer. His family and friends believe his course of action to be impious, but Euthyphro explains that in this they are mistaken and reveal their ignorance of the nature of piety. This naturally leads Socrates to ask, What is piety? And the rest of the dialogue is devoted to a search for a definition of piety, illustrating the Socratic search for universal definitions of ethical terms, to which a number of early Platonic dialogues are devoted. As usual, no definition is found that satisfies Socrates.

The Greek term hosion means, in the first instance, the knowledge of the proper ritual in prayer and sacrifice and of course its performance (as Euthyphro himself defines it in 14b). But obviously Euthyphro uses it in the much wider sense of pious conduct generally (e.g., his own), and in that sense the word is practically equivalent to righteousness (the justice of the Republic), the transition being by way of conduct pleasing to the gods.

Besides being an excellent example of the early, so-called Socratic dialogues, Euthyphro contains several passages with important philosophical implications. These include those in which Socrates speaks of the one Form, presented by all the actions that we call pious (5d), as well as the one in which we are told that the gods love what is pious because it is pious; it is not pious because the gods love it (10d). Another passage clarifies the difference between genus and species (11e–12d).

G.M.A.G.

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2 PLATO

Euthyphro:1 What’s new, Socrates, to make you leave your usual2 haunts in the Lyceum and spend your time here by the king-archon’s court?2 Surely you are not prosecuting anyone before the king-archon as I am?

Socrates: The Athenians do not call this a prosecution but an indictment, Euthyphro.

Euthyphro: What is this you say? Someone must have indicted you,b for you are not going to tell me that you have indicted someone else.

Socrates: No indeed. Euthyphro: But someone else has indicted you? Socrates: Quite so. Euthyphro: Who is he? Socrates: I do not really know him myself, Euthyphro. He is appar-

ently young and unknown. They call him Meletus, I believe. He belongs to the Pitthean deme,3 if you know anyone from that deme called Meletus, with long hair, not much of a beard, and a rather aquiline nose.

Euthyphro: I don’t know him, Socrates. What charge does he bring against you?

1. We know nothing about Euthyphro except what we can gather from this dialogue. He is obviously a professional priest who considers himself an expert on ritual and on piety generally and, it seems, is generally so considered. One Euthyphro is mentioned in Plato’s Cratylus (396d) who is given to enthousi- asmos, inspiration or possession, but we cannot be sure that it is the same person. 2. The Lyceum was an outdoor gymnasium, just outside the walls of Athens, where teenage young men engaged in exercises and athletic competitions. Socrates and other intellectuals carried on discussions with them there and exhibited their skills. See the beginnings of Plato’s Euthydemus and Lysis, and the last paragraph of Symposium. The king-archon, one of the nine principal magistrates of Athens, had the responsibility to oversee religious rituals and purifications, and as such had oversight of legal cases involving alleged offenses against the Olympian gods, whose worship was a civic function—it was regarded as a serious offense to offend them. 3. A deme was, in effect, one of the constituent villages of Attica, the territory whose center was the city of Athens (though Athens itself was divided into demes, too). Athenian citizens had first of all to be enrolled and recognized as citizens in their demes.