Eleutheria (ἐλευθερία, pronounced [elefθe'ria]) is an ancient and modern Greek term for, and personification of, liberty. Eleutheria 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 'eleutheria', freedom, instead were Sparta-lovers, wanting a monarch, an oligarchy, instead of a democracy, a republic. 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, Eleutheria was also an epithet for the goddess Artemis, and as such she was worhipped in Myra of Lycia.

Other meanings

• Eleutheria (Hydrozoa) is a genus of hydrozoans.
• Eleutheria (play) is a posthumously published play by Samuel Beckett.
• Eleutheria is the title of a volume of Oscar Wilde's shorter poems published in 1881, its title inspired by one of its poems, the "Sonnet to Liberty" that includes the lines:

Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes

See nothing save their own unlovely woe...

• "Eleutheria" is the title of a song by Jason Webley on the 1999 release Against the Night. The song concerns removing oneself from society at large.
• "Eleutheria" is also a song by Lenny Kravitz on the 1993 album Are You Gonna Go My Way.
• Eleutheria was a student co-operative at Michigan State University

See also

• Eleuthera, an island in the Bahamas
• Eleutherion, an ancient Byzantine port near Istanbul, Turkey

External links

• Bahamian fragments