1 The play on the Greek word recalls Shakespeare's “If you do take a thief . . . let him show himself what he is and steal out of your company,”Much Ado, III. iii.
2 The qualified assent here marks the speaker's perception that something is wrong. But often it expresses modesty or is a mere mannerism. Cf. 399 D, 401 D, 409 C, 410 A, 553 E, etc.
3 Plato playfully follows the fashion of tracing all modern wisdom to Homer. Cf. Theaetetus 152 E.
4 “A snapper-up of unconsidered trifles” (Winter's Tale, IV. iii. 26), whom Homer celebrates (Hom. Od. 19.395). The naivete of Homer's “amoral” standpoint (Cf. Odyssey xiii. 290 ff.) tickles Plato's sense of humor, and he amuses himself by showing that the popular rule “help friends and harm enemies” is on the same ethical plane. So in the Euthyphro, popular piety is gravely reduced to a kind of καπηλεία or retail trade in prayer and blessings. Cf. also Dio Chrys.Or. xi. 315 R., and modern laments over the “Decay of Lying.”
5 For humorous bewildermentof Socrates' interlocutors cf. Xenophon Memorabilia iv. 2. 19, Lysis 216 C, Alc. I. 127 D, Meno 80, Euthyphro 11 B, Symposium 201 B, Theaetetus 149 A, 169 C.
6 The antithesis of “seeming” and “being” is a common category of early Greek and Platonic thought. Cf. 361 A-B, 365 C, Aeschylus Agamemnon 788, and the fragments of Parmenides. This discussion of the true φίλος recalls the manner of the Lysis; cf. Aristotle Topics i. 8. 5.
7 Or, “that is an immoral conclusion.”
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.