Expert: Maria - 10/27/2006

Question
I was wondering if you'd be able to help me out or point me in the direction where I could get "The unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates, translated into ancient Greek!
Thanks for the help!
matt

Answer
Hello,

the ancient Greek phrase spoken by Socrates to the jury in the court of Athens in  399 BC after he had been unfairly found guilty of heresy and sedition, and condemned to death by poisoning, sounds exactly as follows:

“Ho dè anexétastos bíos ou biôtòs anthrôpô”.
(See  Plato’s Apology, 38 a ).

In fact:
-The unexamined  = HO DE  ANEXETASTOS
-life = BIOS
-is not = OU
-worth living = BIOTOS ANTHROPO

Best regards,
Maria
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1)Plato's Apology reports  the speech that Socrates gave in his own defence

2)Please note that unfortunately the system does not allow  the use of Greek alphabet & diacritic marks and then I  had to use the Latin transliteration of each Greek letter.
Anyway I can write the name of each Greek letter so that you can see these letters of Greek alphabet at these sites:
http://www.ibiblio.org/koine/greek/lessons/alphabet.html
http://www.dur.ac.uk/stat.web/greek.htm

So, here are the Greek letter of  “Ho de anexetastos bios ou biotos anthropo”

-Ho (omicron with the rough breathing. See below)

-de (delta-epsilon with a grave accent)

-anexétastos (alpha-nu-epsilon-xi-epsilon with the acute accent-tau-alpha-sigma-tau-omicron-sigma, using the one that looks like an ‘s’)

- bíos (beta-iota with the acute accent-omicron-sigma using the one that looks like an ‘s’)

-ou  (omicron-upsilon with the smooth breathing. See below)

-biotos (beta-iota-omega-tau-omicron with the grave accent- sigma, using the one that looks like an ‘s’

-anthropo(alpha with the smooth breathing -nu-theta-rho-omega with the acute accent-pi-omega with the iota subscript. See below)


- The “smooth breathing" is  the mark which indicates the absence of initial aspiration. It is written as an opening half moon on top of or to the left of an initial vowel or diphthong.  It looks like a comma.

- The “rough breathing" is the mark of an initial aspiration. It is written as an opening half moon on top of or to the left of an initial vowel, diphthong  and rho. It looks like a reversed comma.

-The "iota subscript" is a very small iota, placed below the first vowel of the improper diphthong, i.e. below a long vowel [alpha;eta;omega ].The  subscript iota  is not pronounced and then it makes no difference in pronunciation.