Renderings of the Daimonion Across Editions
The Greek term το δαιμόνιον (to daimonion) is a neuter adjective used as a noun—literally “the daimonic thing.” Translators have rendered it in strikingly different ways.
Direct Translations of the Term
- The divine thing
- The divine sign
- The divine and daimonic thing — Thomas G. West (1984)
- Something divine and spiritual — Harold North Fowler, Loeb (1914)
- Something divine and miraculous — David Horan, Platonic Foundation translation
- A personal guardian spirit — Chris Emlyn-Jones (scholarly gloss, 1990)
Jowett’s Six Renderings (1871)
- An oracle
- A sign
- The divinity
- A voice
- The divine faculty
- The internal oracle
Transliteration & Foreign-Language Titles
- The daimonion — bare transliteration, common in modern scholarship
- Genius — Latin tradition, from Plutarch’s De genio Socratis
- The god of Socrates — Apuleius, De deo Socratis
- Dämon — German scholarship
- Daimôn-ish / weird — the archaic English sense of “uncanny, fated,” suggested by one Notre Dame reviewer
Glosses on Its Operation
- A sort of voice (phonē tis)
- A sign (sēmeion)
- A signal
- An inward monitor
Sources: Jowett (Lexundria; MIT Internet Classics Archive); Fowler (Perseus Digital Library); West, Plato’s Apology of Socrates (1984); Horan (platonicfoundation.org); reviews of Socrates’ Divine Sign: Religion, Practice, and Value in Socratic Philosophy (Apeiron 38.2, 2005) at Bryn Mawr Classical Review and Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews; Emlyn-Jones, “Socrates, Plato, and Piety” (Greece & Rome, 1990).