On his way to answer the charge that will kill him, Socrates meets a man who is sure he knows exactly what the gods want.
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The first scene of Socrates' last days. He has come to the porch of the King Archon in Athens to hear the formal charge of impiety, and there he runs into Euthyphro, a religious expert who is prosecuting his own father for murder. Socrates asks him the obvious question: what is piety? This dialogue is being pressed now and can't be read here yet. Support it and it opens first on the Socrates shelf.
The conversation is set in 399 BC, a few weeks before the trial. Plato wrote it some years later, after Socrates was dead, which gives every confident thing Euthyphro says a second meaning. The father's crime was letting a labourer die. The man had killed a slave in a drunken quarrel, and the father tied him up, threw him in a ditch and sent to Athens to ask the religious authorities what to do. By the time the answer came, the man was dead.
Euthyphro's name means something like straight-thinker, and he spends the dialogue going in circles. Socrates' sharpest question, whether the gods love a thing because it is holy or it is holy because they love it, still starts arguments in philosophy classes. In Greek the whole puzzle rests on one word, hosion, and on the difference between the active and passive of the verb to love, and reading word by word you can see both forms side by side.
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