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PlatoThe Last Days of Socrates
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | BCEA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaIndex of Terms
Arete
Arete is the Platonic sense translates as “excellence” or “virtue.” In Homer, arete can mean “valor” in the sense of benefitting one’s friends and harming one’s enemies. Socrates draws on Homer several times to provide an example for and connect to hero ritual context, but his definition of arete diverges from the traditional Homeric one, another instance of Socrates reshaping traditional knowledge, which may have been a source of anxiety for conformist Athenian society.
Daimonion
Socrates uses the word daimonion to refer to the divine voice that has guided him since he was young and whose judgments he trusts implicitly. The word can have multiple meanings that leave it open to interpretation. It can refer to divinities or, more generally, to a superhuman force, something between gods and humans, namely heroes.
Dikaios
As with arete and psuche, the meaning of dikaios has evolved over time. Earlier, it could refer to one who observed proper customs. In Plato, it tends to mean just, correct, and possibly balanced. Socrates’s sense of justice seems consistent with the notion of balance. To behave justly involves neutralizing the self-absorption of the body’s desires and balancing the relations among gods and humans.
Dialegesthai
Plato’s word for “conversation” is dialegesthai, a compound meaning “talk through.” The dialogues in The Last Days of Socrates follow this format, a back and forth between Socrates and his friends. The effectively ritualized process of dialogue lends a formal structure to what Socrates calls conversations, inviting comparison to sacred rituals related to gods and heroes that were an integral part of life in ancient Athens.
Eusebeia/Hosion
Plato uses two terms for piety in Euthyphro: eusebeia, which means pious in more general terms, and hosion, which can refer specifically to what is permissible under divine law. Plato may be highlighting the double meanings embedded in Socrates and Euthyphro’s conversation. Socrates faces charges that he is not correctly honoring the city’s gods, but he is also concerned with the fundamental question of how to be pious.
Philosophia
The English word philosophy is a compound of two Greek words, philo (love) and sophia (wisdom). The Greek word philo encompasses a network of meanings. Often it is translated as “friend” or “love”; in Greek, it can refer to “near and dear ones,” people who belong to each other and who are responsible for each other. To Plato, a philosopher could be one who is near and dear to wisdom and who is responsible for it. This aligns with Socrates’s self-presentation as one who sees the quest for wisdom as his divine calling.
Psuche
The meanings of psuche evolve over time in the ancient Greek world and across the works of Plato. In Homer, the word psuche refers to the breath of life that animates the body when one is alive and conveys a person’s identity into the afterlife. Plato’s conception in the works contained in The Last Days of Socrates do not overtly contradict Homer’s representation but also do not frame the soul as the conveyor of human identity. Though its exact nature is not specified, the soul is the opposite of the body, the part of who we are that remains eternal and unchanging, the part that is, then, immortal.
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