Eleutheria
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Greek word ἐλευθερία, commonly transliterated in English as eleutheria or phonetically spelled eleftheria, is an ancient and modern Greek term for, and personification of, liberty. Eleftheria personified had a brief career on coins of Alexandria.
I.F. Stone, who taught himself Greek in his old age, wrote a book, The Trial of Socrates, pointing out that Socrates and Plato do not value 'eleftheria', freedom, instead were Sparta-lovers, wanting a monarch, an oligarchy, instead of a democracy, a republic. The French philosopher Michel Foucault, in lectures given at Berkeley and Boulder, made the same argument for Socrates' failure to invoke 'parrhesia', freedom of speech, the obligation to speak the truth for the common good at personal risk, in his own defense at his trial, preferring to die in obedience to law as above men. Athenians held that they democratically shaped law, seeing Socrates' stance as treason.
In Ancient Greece, Eleftheria was also an epithet for the goddess Artemis, and as such she was worshipped in Myra of Lycia.
See also
- Eleutheria (play), a posthumously published play by Samuel Beckett.
