Summary
Socrates meets Euthyphro at the porch of the King Archon, the Athenian official responsible for important religious cases. Euthyphro is surprised to see Socrates there because Socrates is more often found discussing philosophy in the Lyceum than participating in legal proceedings.
Socrates explains that Meletus has brought an indictment against him. Meletus claims to understand how the young are corrupted and accuses Socrates of inventing new divine beings while failing to recognise the established gods. Socrates remarks ironically that Meletus must be a wise and public-spirited young man if he really possesses such knowledge.
Euthyphro believes the charge is connected with Socrates’ divine sign and predicts that the prosecution will fail. He boasts that he too speaks about divine matters and makes accurate predictions, although people laugh at him as if he were mad.
Socrates asks why Euthyphro has come to court. Euthyphro says that he is prosecuting his own father for murder. Socrates assumes the victim must have been a close relative and the circumstances especially serious, because accusing one’s father would require exceptional knowledge of justice and religion.
The victim was a dependent labourer on the family’s farm at Naxos. While drunk, the labourer killed one of the household’s enslaved servants. Euthyphro’s father bound him and threw him into a ditch, then sent a messenger to Athens to ask a religious authority what should be done. Before advice returned, the bound man died from exposure, hunger and neglect.
Euthyphro’s relatives insist that the father did not intentionally kill the man and that prosecuting a parent is itself impious. Euthyphro replies that their view reveals ignorance. Pollution from unlawful killing must be removed regardless of whether the accused is a stranger or a member of one’s family.
Socrates treats Euthyphro’s confidence as evidence that he must know the exact nature of piety and impiety. Because Socrates is about to face an impiety charge, he asks to become Euthyphro’s pupil. If challenged by Meletus, Socrates could say that he has learned from an acknowledged expert.
Euthyphro agrees to explain. Socrates asks for the common form by which all pious actions are pious and all impious actions are impious. Euthyphro’s first answer is that piety consists in prosecuting anyone guilty of murder, sacrilege or a similar offence, even when the accused is one’s father. Failing to prosecute is impious.
As support, Euthyphro refers to stories about Zeus punishing Cronus and Cronus punishing Uranus. Socrates questions whether the traditional accounts of conflict among the gods should be accepted. More importantly, Euthyphro has supplied an example rather than the requested general definition.
Euthyphro then says that what is dear to the gods is pious and what is hateful to them is impious. Socrates asks about the causes of disagreement. People quarrel most seriously when they disagree about justice and injustice, good and evil, honour and dishonour.
The gods in traditional stories also disagree and fight about such matters. If different gods judge the same action differently, one god may love it while another hates it. The action would then be both god-loved and god-hated, making it pious and impious under Euthyphro’s definition.
Euthyphro argues that all gods would agree that a murderer should be punished. Socrates distinguishes the general principle from the disputed facts. No one argues that an admitted wrongdoer should escape consequences; disputes concern who acted wrongly, what happened and whether the action was justified. Euthyphro has not shown that all gods agree about his father’s case.
He revises the definition: piety is what all the gods love, impiety is what all hate, and anything neither unanimously loved nor hated is intermediate. Socrates accepts the proposal for examination.
Socrates asks whether the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious, or is pious because it is loved. He develops the distinction through examples. A thing is carried because someone carries it; it is seen because someone sees it; and it is loved because someone loves it. Being loved is a condition that happens to a thing.
Euthyphro agrees that the gods love the pious because it is pious. Its piety must therefore explain why it is loved. By contrast, the god-loved is god-loved because the gods love it. Divine love and piety cannot be identical, because each stands in a different explanatory relationship to the other.
Euthyphro becomes frustrated and says their definitions seem to move around like the works of Daedalus. Socrates jokingly suggests that, as a supposed descendant of Daedalus, he might be blamed for making arguments move, although it is Euthyphro’s answers that refuse to remain fixed.
Socrates next asks whether everything pious is just. Euthyphro agrees. They consider whether piety is all of justice or one part of it. Euthyphro describes it as the part concerned with attending to the gods, while the remainder of justice concerns human beings.
Socrates asks what kind of attention is meant. Care of horses, dogs and cattle benefits and improves those animals. If piety is care of the gods in the same sense, it would imply that human actions improve the gods. Euthyphro rejects that implication.
He says that piety is the kind of service slaves provide to masters. Socrates asks what goal the gods achieve with human assistance, just as doctors produce health, shipbuilders produce ships and builders produce houses. Euthyphro replies vaguely that the gods accomplish many excellent works but cannot identify the particular result of pious service.
Euthyphro changes direction and says that someone who understands how to speak and act pleasingly through prayer and sacrifice is pious. Such practices preserve private households and cities; actions that displease the gods are impious and destructive.
Socrates reformulates prayer as asking from the gods and sacrifice as giving to them. Piety would then be knowledge of requesting what human beings need and supplying what the gods need from people. Euthyphro accepts the idea of an exchange but denies that the gods genuinely benefit from human gifts.
Human offerings instead provide honour, reverence and what is pleasing to the gods. Socrates points out that the argument has returned to the claim that piety is what the gods find dear or pleasing. Yet divine approval was already shown not to explain what piety itself is.
Socrates asks Euthyphro to begin again and disclose the nature of piety, since a person willing to prosecute his father must possess certain knowledge. Euthyphro says he has another appointment and leaves.
Socrates closes with irony. He had hoped that Euthyphro would teach him enough to refute Meletus’ accusation and live a better life. The dialogue ends without a definition, leaving readers to continue the inquiry and to reconsider the confidence with which religious and moral judgements are asserted.