The Last Days of Socrates

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. 

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.

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.