Question I am currently reading Theaetetus, for a course at university, and I am struck by the number of times Socrates discusses "God" (for example, 176c, where Socrates says "God" is utterly and perfectly righteous). Considering the fact that these dialogs were written centuries before the birth of Jesus, and the fact that the Greeks were almost certainly not Jewish, it seems odd that the translators should use a monotheistic god when translating Socrates' words. Did the Greeks actually have a serious concept of monotheism, and is this concept what is being referred to in the English translations of Theaetetus? Or is this "God" just a way for the translator to "whitewash" the ancient Greeks so as to make it easier for Christians (be it theistic Christians or non-Christians who grew up with Christian cultural heritage) to relate to the dialog? Does such a translation do justice to the original?

Accepted:
June 5, 2011

Comments

I'd been hoping one of our classicists would take a stab at this, but since none has…

The Jews were not the only people in the ancient world to develop monotheistic ideas, nor, for that matter, was Judaism clearly monotheistic (as opposed to henotheistic — taking Yahweh to be their god and the most powerful.) There's a strong abstract and unificatory streak in Greek thought that would make the development of monotheistic ideas unsurprising, whether most people accepted them or not.

But on the matter of translation, I fid it hard to imagine any of the classicists I know hedging their translations to make them acceptabe to wider Christian culture. On the contrary, if the usual translations were suspect, I'd expect this to be an active debate in the literature, and far as I know, it's not.