using the G.M.A. Grube translation (Plato, Five Dialogues, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, Hackett Publishing Company, 1981, pp. 6-22)
The Euthyphro, Εὐθύφρων, is one of the short dialogues by which Plato commemorated Socrates's technique and manner in questioning people. The structure of the dialogue, which is typical for Plato's Socratic dialogues, is reflected in the following table of contents. Note the difference between the three standard questions of Socrates and the many proposed answers, with occasional digressions, in response to the third one. The identifying numbers given for the text are not the page numbers of the Hackett edition but the numbers and letters in the margin, which are standard for all editions of Plato.
After the death of Socrates in 399, Plato had travelled a bit, and then, on returning to Athens, founded a school in a grove of trees, which may also have had an athletic field, just outside the Dipylon Gate of Athens. The grove had been named after an Olympic athlete, Akadêmos, and was consequently was known as the Akadémeia, Ἀκαδήμεια. This became the name of Plato's school, the Academy, spawning modern words like, indeed, "academy," "academic," etc. The school was founded perhaps in 387. It was finally closed in 529 AD, when the Roman Emperor Justinian did so as part of his campaign to stamp out paganism. That would add up to 915 years, a pretty good run, longer than most of the universities of Europe -- though the al-Azhar University in Cairo, associated with the al-Azhar Mosque, was founded in 970 AD by the Fatimid Caliph al-Mu'izz, so it is now 1028 years old. However, there appears to be an hiatus in the history of the Academy. In 86 BC, Athens had adhered to the cause of Mithridates VI, the King of Pontus, and the Roman general Sulla took and sacked the city, destroying, according to Plutarch, even the groves round about, including the Academy. The Scholarch of the Academy, Philo of Larissa, had fled to Rome when the War began in 88 BC and never returned. Philo's student, Antiochus of Ascalon, did afterwards return to Athens and began teaching, but not at the site of the Academy. Cicero studied under him at Athens and reported that the site of the Academy was vacant. But at some point, the Academy seems to have been revived, perhaps not until Athens became the focus of Neoplatonism in the 5th century. In modern Athens there is an old monastery in the area where the Academy would have been -- it may be on the actual site.Aristotle was Plato's best student at the Academy and was even known as the "mind of the Academy." When Plato died in 347, Aristotle thought he would become the head of the School. Instead, the office went to one of Plato's nephews. Aristotle was a little put out by this and left. After visiting a friend, who was then executed by the Persians, and marrying his daughter, Aristotle went home to Macedonia in 345, where his father, a court physician, got him a job as tutor to the son of the King. The King was Philip II, and the son would turn out to be Alexander the Great. Just what Aristotle taught Alexander, or what they had to say to each other at all, was recorded by neither of them and remains one of the tantalizing unknowns of history. When Alexander went off to conquer Persia, Aristotle then returned to Athens to found his own school in the Lyceum. This became one of the established schools of the Hellenistic Period, though it does not seem to have lasted beyond the Hellenistic age. Although members of the Academy were simply "Academics," members of the Lyceum were called "Peripatetics," which meant, and still means, those who "walk around," which evidently is the way that Aristotle lectured.
or just an 
, which means a judge's table, rather the way "bench" can be used to mean a court in English. In turn, 
means "public" or "official"; and itself can be (in Japanese) a kôan or puzzle question used in Zen Buddhism.
, required by Confucius (cf. Analects, XIII:18). This is why the issue of the Euthyphro becomes piety.
She didn't like this too much, and so she equipped the eldest son, Kronos, with a scythe (a long pole with a wicked blade for harvesting grain -- it must have been very crowded in her womb!). When Ouranos next approached Gaia for sex, Kronos cut off his genitals [1]. Thus Kronos became king of the gods [2]. But there was then a ominous prophecy: Kronos would be overthrown by his son just like his father. Kronos dealt with this by eating his children as his wife Rhea gave birth to them. Rhea tired of this and saved her youngest son, Zeus, by wrapping a stone in swaddling clothes and giving that to Kronos. One wonders about the diet of the Titans when Kronos eats a stone, clothes and all, and doesn't notice it isn't a baby! Rhea then raised Zeus in a cave on Crete. He grew up and married his cousin Metis, who then suggested giving Kronos something that would make him throw up the other children. They did, and he did; and, after growing up, evidently unharmed, in their father's stomach, Zeus's siblings joined with him in overthrowing Kronos and those Titans that sided with him. They were then imprisoned in Tartarus, the deepest part of the Underworld. Zeus's brother Hades (or Pluto) took the Underworld to rule, and Poseidon the Sea, while Zeus himself ruled all from Mt. Olympus -- the highest point in Greece at (9,570 ft). (but not as tall as Baldy, Mt. San Antonio, which is visible from the city of Los Angeles on a clear day, at 10,064 ft.). Only one problem remained: a prophecy that Zeus would be overthrown by a son of Metis as his father and grandfather had been! Taking measures one step further, Zeus actually devoured the pregnant Metis! Although the goddess Athena, the patroness of the city of Athens, then sprang from his forehead, this took care of the prophecy -- Athena was rather like a son, born in armor, but she wasn't. No prophecy then applied to the sons of Zeus's new wife, his sister Hera.
Ἆρά γε, ὦ Εὐθύφρον, τοῦτ᾽ ἔστιν, οὗ ἕνεκα τὴν γραφὴν φεύγω, ὅτι τὰ τοιαῦτα ἐπειδάν τις περὶ τῶν θεῶν λέγῃ, δυσχερῶς πως ἀποδέχομαι; δι᾽ ἃ δή, ώς ἔοικε, φήσει τίς με ἐξαμαρτάνειν.Indeed, Euthyphro, this is the reason why I am a defendant in the case, because I find it hard to accept things like that being said about the gods, and it is likely to be the reason why I shall be told I do wrong.
This is Socrates breaking with the fifth characteristic of mytho-poeic thought. He is willing to suspend his disbelief, having become a student of Euthyphro, but he still expresses his astonishment.
6c. "Representations of which the robe of the goddess is adorned..." The "goddess," of course, is Athena. A great statue of Athena Parthenos, Ἀθήνη Παρθένος, Athena "the Virgin," was contained in the Parthenon, Παρθένον (see discussion of the word "Parthenos" here). We know roughly what the statue looked like, in ivory and gold, because of three small Roman copies. We might not have known, however, that the statue had a robe if not for a reference like this. The robe was cleaned (or replaced) every four years and then carried back up to the Acropolis in a great procession, as part of the Panathenaia, Παναθήναια, festival. Not only the robe, however, was adorned with mythological scenes. The Parthenon itself was decorated with sculpted figures and reliefs, done by the great sculptor Phidias, Φειδίας. An inner continuous relief, the frieze, depicted the Panathenaia itself. When the Greeks converted to Christianity, the Parthenon became a church, dedicated, as we might imagine, to the Virgin Mary, called the Atheniotissa. There were stories that the sancturary, or the marble, of the building glowed with a supernational light, and it became an object of pilgrimage. When the Turks arrived in 1456, they turned the church into a mosque but also, unfortunately, later used it to store gunpowder.
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| The Elgin Marbles in the British Museum, 1970 |
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| Pedimental Sculpture, British Museum, 2005 | Pedimental Sculpture, British Museum, 1970 |
Then let us again examine that, Euthyphro, if it is a sound statement [εἰ καλῶς λέγεται -- if said well, καλῶς], or do we let it pass, and if one of us, or someone else, merely says that something is so, do we accept that it is so? Or should we examine [ἢ σκεπτέον] what the speaker means [τί λέγει ὁ λέγων -- what the speaker says]?
Euthyphro is given an extraordinary chance to bail out. He could just tell Socrates, "Just accept what I say and stop asking these questions!" This is always a typical move of those claiming authority, to shut off debate and questioning. Euthyphro, however, is naively honest and supposes that he can handle whatever Socrates will throw at him. Eventually he will run away, but he will never admit to Socrates that he cannot answer his questions.
Now we come to what is historically the most significant question in the Euthyphro. Socrates wonders whether the love of the gods is even relevant to the meaning of piety, so he asks: "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?" This is a question about causality. On the one side are the gods, in the act of loving. On the other side is piety. Is piety caused by the loving of the gods, or is the love of the gods itself caused by the nature of piety. In the former case, the pious is whatever the gods love, for whatever reason. Indeed, the gods must love things arbitrarily, for no reasons; for if the gods love something for some good reason, then the nature of the thing makes it worthy of love and the gods must merely recognize the objective value of the thing. This is a question that becomes of increasing theological importance in the future. That is because it can be generalized into a question about the relation of all value (which I shall conveniently call "the Good") to a monotheistic God, who will later be supposed, by Judaism, Christianity, and Islâm, to be the Omnipotent Creator of All Things. 
If God is the Creator of absolutely everything, then He would be the Creator of all standards of value also. The Good would be posited by His own free, arbitrary, and omnipotent act of Will; and so it would be whatever he wanted it to be. However, this makes it senseless to praise God as being Good or to think of Him as in any way distinguished by His goodness. Whatever He thinks, wants, or does, it is simply good by definition, regardless of what it is. This is, at least, disappointing. On the other hand, if God recognizes what is good and wants to do it because it is good, this posits the nature of value independent of Him, so that he must, and wishes to, conform Himself to it. This makes it sensible to praise and revere God's goodness, but it also means that God is no longer the Creator of everything: standards of value stand above and beyond Him, outside of his control and creativity. This is actually what Plato thought (the Forms preëxist the creative action of God, and provide the standard for it, in the Timaeus), and it does sound rather like Zoroastrianism, but it is, as a compromise and limitation of Omnipotence, disturbing for the monotheistic religions. Consequently, the history of religion and philosophy shows the emphasis going indifferent ways. Emphasis on the omnipotence and Will of God is best represented in modern philosophy by the great Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who does not actually believe in an arbitrary Will of God, but who certainly does not believe in a God who does things for a good and rational reason. 
In turn, the best modern representative of God's goodness and rationality is the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, who famously believed that this was the "best of all possible worlds" because a benevolent and omnipotent God could not and would not have created a world otherwise. Similarly, historical religions have gone in different directions. As Greek philosophy, in the form of Plato and Aristotle, tended to systematize the goodness and rationality of God, the greatest systematization of the Will and Omnipotence of God may be found in Islâm, where,
Allâhu yafʿalu mâ yashâʾu.
God does what He wishes.
[al-Qurʾân, Surah 3:40, or 3:35]
Or, as translated by Ahmed Ali, "Have the believers not learnt that if God had so willed He could have guided all mankind?" [Al-Qurʾân, Princeton University Press, 1988, p. 215, Surah 13:31]. If this sounds harsh ("way harsh," as Alicia Silverstone says in Clueless), something very similar may be found in the Old Testament, where God tells Moses, "When you go back to Egypt, see that you do before Pharaoh all the miracles which I have put in your power; but I will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go" [Exodus, 4:21]. This is no favor to Pharaoh, nor to the Egyptians, all of whose first born are eventually killed.
While Islâm is mostly prepared to pursue God's Omnipotence to its logical extreme, the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity are somewhat more tangled up in trying to preserve God's goodness and rationality. Thus, even in Genesis we get: "God saw that it was good" [Hebrew, וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים כִּי־ טוֺב, Wayyarĕ ʾĔlôhîm kî tôbh], καὶ εἶδεν ὁ Θεός, ὅτι καλόν (Genesis 1:10, 1:12, 1:18, 1:21, 1:25); and "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). If whatever God does is good by definition, then it would not be necessary for God to "see" that His work was good. Logically, however, Judaism and Christianity cannot have it both ways, unless the principle of logical contradiction does not apply to the Transcendent. This possibility was considered by the Mediaeval philosopher William of Ockham, by Buddhism, and in the essay "Religious Value and the Antinomies of Transcendence" in these pages. So, obviously, this question that Socrates asks in the Euthyphro is significant far beyond his concerns for a definition of piety.
Daedalus was famous as an architect as well as a sculptor and did his most impressive work for King Minos, Μίνως, of Crete. His greatest works were all the result of an act of impiety by Minos, who had requested a bull from Poseidon to sacrifice to him but then, when Poseidon provided the bull, decided to keep it instead. The revenge of Poseidon took a very odd form. He caused the Queen, Pasiphaë, Πασιφάη, to conceive an unnatural carnal desire for the bull! Since the bull wasn't interested, she got Daedalus to build a model of a cow that would attract the bull but that she could hide in and use to have intercourse. This worked, and Pasiphaë actually conceived a child by the bull. This turned out to be a ferocious monster, with the body of a man but the head of a bull: the Minotaur, Μινώταυρος (ironically, the "bull of Minos"). Minos then asked Daedalus to build a prison for the beast. Daedalus built a great maze, known as the "Labyrinth," Λαβύρινθος, Labýrinthos.
This appears to have been the real name of a real place. In 1900 Sir Arthur Evans discovered a great palace at Knossos, Κνωσός, on Crete -- so large that it would have seemed maze-like to unsophisticated visitors from the mainland. This was part of the great pre-Greek "Minoan" civilization in the Aegean. Their language, written in an undeciphered hieroglyphic form and in the syllabic Linear A, has been tentatively identified with Luvian, an Indo-European language spoken in Asia Minor [cf. David Abulafia, The Great Sea, A Human History of the Mediterranean, Oxford, 2011, p.27].
A version of the script, Linear B, was used to write the Greek of the Mycenaeans, who inherited and perpetuated much of Minoan culture. A derivative syllabary continued to be used to write Greek on Cyprus.
After it was unearthed, the civilization of Crete was soon identified with one known to the Egyptians. Traders from
, who appear in Egyptian tombs, wear costume that then was found in images at Knossos and other Aegaean sites. So the identification with the Egyptian references was certain. More intriguing is that the Egyptian word apparently also occurs in Hebrew, as
, Caphtôr.
In the Book of Amos, 9:7, God says that he brought "the Philistines from Caphtor" [The Interlinear NIV Hebrew-English Old Testament, John R. Kohlenberger III, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1987, p.521]. If the Philistines indeed came from Crete, this confirms the growing understanding that the Philistines were in fact Mycenaean Greeks, some of whom were even accepted into Israel as the Tribe of Dan, who then get their name from the Homeric Δαναοί, Danaoí, i.e. Greeks.
A great volcanic explosion on the island of Thera, perhaps around 1500 BC, which sent ash as far away as Egypt, damaged some of the centers of the civilization; but it is less clear why the Cretan sites, like Knossos,
were burned and abandoned later, around 1450.
Inthos is a suffix that does not occur in Greek words proper. It is found in pre-Greek place names -- like the name of the city of Corinth, Κόρινθος (Doric Ϙόρινθος, with the "Q" otherwise lost in Greek).
Λάβρυς, Lábrys, is known from the non-Greek languages of Asia Minor, like Lydian, as the word for a double-bladed axe -- just the kind of axe often pictured in the palace at Knossos,
in fact frequently as a kind of stamp or graffito on blocks in the walls -- which also tends to support the identification of the language of Linear A with those languages. Λαβύρινθος, Labyrinthos thus may simply mean "the place of the double-bladed axe." What the palace was was confusedly remembered, like Troy, long after the real place was buried and lost.
The actual Greek word for a douple bladed axe was πέλεκυς, pélekys. This name became fatefully attached to the Varangian Guard, which after 989 AD was the elite corps and Life Guard of the Mediaeval Roman Emperors, and who thus, armed with axes, were called the πελεκοφόροι, pelekophóroi, the "axe bearers." By those days, however, the πέλεκυς simply meant a battle-axe, not necessarily a double-bladed one; and the images we see of the Guardsmen show them with impressive axes, with handles up to six feet long, but only single bladed -- the kind of axe previously called ἡμιπέλεκκον, hēmipélekkon, i.e. "half-axe" (compare ἡμίονος, hēmíonos, "mule," literally "half-ass," whose equivalent in English means something else).
The destruction of Mycenaean civilization in the Aegean, the Doric invasion which reached across to Crete itself and Rhodes, the appearance of a derivative of Linear B in Cyprus, and the descent of Greeks in Palestine were all part of a vast movement of peoples at that time that erased old Empires, such as the Hittites and Mitanni, and troubled the Egyptians with several waves of invasion by the "Sea Peoples" and then the Libyans. One of the last great moments of Egyptian military might was when Ramesses III of the XX Dynasty (early 12th century BC) repulsed these invasions. This era, which ushered in the Greek Dark Ages, troubled or annihilated all these old Empires, and apparently involved a vast Völkerwanderung of migrating peoples, begins to look like the later, more famous, and better documented Dark Ages of the 4th and later centuries AD, when the Huns bounced across Central Asia and Germans overran the Western Roman Empire.
Now it is beginning to look like there was a similar natural cause for both sets of events, a climatic cooling of the proposed "Bond Cycle," 1,470 ± 500 years, named after geologist Gerard Clark Bond (1940–2005). The cooling that subsequently would occur in the Little Ice Age, beginning in the 14th century, which also affected Ming Dynasty China, however, does not seem to fit with the periodicity of this cycle. What does, on the other hand, are the events at the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt. We know from Egyptian records that bad things were happening in the First Intermediate Period. The references are vague enough that they don't give us much of a picture of exactly what was going on; but from the geological record it looks like the Faiyum, a vast lake in a depression fed by the Nile, dried up, so the element of climate change is evident. We are given no weather information for the Greek Dark Ages by ancient sources, but we are, by the historian Procopius, for the cooling of the 6th century AD. It would be remarkable if the distruptions of the First Intermediate Period, the Greek Dark Ages, and the Mediaeval Dark Ages can all be linked by comparable forms of climate change.
In the Labyrinth the Minotaur needed feeding. Minos required that Athens send seven youths and seven maidens every year to feed it (not unlike the sacrifice to the Capitol demanded in The Hunger Games books by Suzanne Collins -- although neither the books nor the 2012 movie draw any parallel with the tribute to the Minotaur). To end this, Theseus, the son of the King of Athens, volunteered to go and kill the beast. Once there, he befriended Ariadne, daughter of Minos. She agreed to help him and provided a ball of thread so that, paying it out behind him, if he killed the Minotaur, he could find his way back out. He did kill the Minotaur, and then he and Ariadne fled back to Athens. Some versions of the story are that he abandoned her on the way (to be found by the god Dionysus), but the Odyssey itself says that she was slain by the goddess Artemis on the island of Dia. In any case, on his way home Theseus forgot an agreement with his father to hoist white sails if he had survived. When the King saw the ordinary black sails instead, he committed suicide out of grief. Theseus thus returned to become King of Athens. Later the Athenians kept a ship on display that they claimed was Theseus's ship. During the Hellenistic Period it was realized that the replacement of rotting planks had, over time, resulted in every bit of wood in the ship being replaced -- so philosophers began arguing whether it was really still the same ship!
What Daedalus was the most famous for, however, was what happened when Minos became angry with him for all the aforementioned goings-on and he fled from Crete with his son Icarus, Ἴκαρος. Daedalus made wings for the two of them, with feathers set in wax. This worked, but then Icarus was so exhilarated with flying that he flew higher and higher. Today we would fear hypoxemia (lack of oxygen) from this, but what happened to the mythic Icarus was that he flew too close to the sun, the wax melted in his wings, the feathers fell out, and he fell to is death. Icarus falling from the sky is still one of the most striking images from Greek mythology.
What is also curious is that a form of illustration that would be suggested by it was not implemented until the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707-1783 -- note that Euler in German is pronounced like "oiler" in English) began using overlapping circles to represent relations in meaning. These became known as "Euler's Circles," although largely replaced in logic today by Venn Diagrams (from the 19th century English logician, John Venn). With Euler's Circles, we can literally show that "fear covers a larger area than shame." We can also show that number covers a larger area than odd (number), and so, as Euthyphro agrees, justice covers a larger area than piety.
Euthyphro comes up with the differentia: Piety is the part of justice concerned with the "care of" the gods, while the remaining part of justice concerns the "care of men." Socrates says that Euthyphro seems to him "to put that very well," but he still needs "a bit of information." Knowing Socrates, this requirement for "a bit of information" can be ominous indeed.
One of the accounts of the origin of Aphrodite is that she was born from the foam as Ouranos's genitals fell into the sea off Cyprus -- tourists are still shown the spot (otherwise, Aphrodite is one of Zeus's many bastards -- becoming the mother of many illegitimate children herself).
Kronos was later regarded as the god of Time because of a pun on his name, which resembles the Greek word for "time," χρόνος, khrónos. We still see Kronos as "Father Time" every New Year's, usually with a baby to represent the new year, and also usually still equipped with his scythe! Perhaps this should remind us of Bhagavad Gita 11:32,
"I am all-powerful Time which destroys all things." The scythe may not just be for genitals.
Comments on the Euthyphro; Note 1
Comments on the Euthyphro; Note 2
