The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy

The Routledge Handbook of Women
and Ancient Greek Philosophy
The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy is an essential reference source
for cutting-edge scholarship on women, gender, and philosophy in Greek antiquity. The volume
features original research that crosses disciplines, offering readers an accessible guide to new methods,
new sources, and new questions in the study of ancient Greek philosophy and its multiple afterlives.
Comprising 40 chapters from a diverse international group of experts, the Handbook considers
questions about women and gender in sources from Greek antiquity spanning the period from 7th c.
BCE to 2nd c. BCE, and in receptions of Greek antiquity from the Roman Imperial period, through
the European Renaissance to the current day. Chapters are organized into five major sections:
1 Early Greek antiquity – including Sappho, Presocratic philosophy, Sophists, and Greek tragedy –
700s–400s BCE
2 Classical Greek antiquity – including Aeschines, Plato, and Xenophon – 400s–300s BCE
3 Late Classical Greek to Hellenistic antiquity – including Cyrenaics, Cynics, the Hippocratic
corpus, and Aristotle – 300s–200s BCE
4 Late Greek antiquity to Roman Imperial period – including Pythagorean women, Stoics,
Pyrrhonian Skeptics, and late Platonists – 200s BCE to 700s CE
5 Later receptions – including Shakespeare, the European Renaissance, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B.
DuBois, Jane Harrison, Sarah Kofman, and Toni Morrison
The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy is a vital resource for students
and scholars in philosophy, Classics, and gender studies who want to gain a deeper understanding
of philosophy’s rich past and explore sources and questions beyond the traditional canon. The
volume is a valuable resource, as well, for students and scholars from history, humanities, literature,
political science, religious studies, rhetorical studies, theatre, and LGBTQ and sexuality studies.
Sara Brill is Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University in Fairfield, CT, USA. She works on the
psychology, politics, and ethics of Plato and Aristotle, as well as broader questions of embodiment,
life, and power as points of intersection between ancient Greek philosophy and contemporary critical
theory. She is the author of Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life (Oxford UP, 2020) and Plato on
the Limits of Human Life (Indiana UP, 2013), and co-editor of Antiquities Beyond Humanism (with
Emanuela Bianchi and Brooke Holmes; Oxford UP, 2019).
Catherine McKeen is a philosopher whose work engages questions about women, gender, and
community in Plato’s political philosophy. She teaches at Bennington College in Bennington, VT, USA.
THE ROUTLEDGE
HANDBOOK OF WOMEN
AND ANCIENT GREEK
PHILOSOPHY
Edited by Sara Brill and Catherine McKeen

Designed cover image: Ancient loom weights from the Archaeological
Museum of Kerameikos in Athens, Greece. Photo by Giovanni Dall’Orto,
WikiCommons.
First published 2024
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2024 selection and editorial matter, Taylor & Francis; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Sara Brill and Catherine McKeen to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
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or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
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registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
ISBN: 978-0-367-49871-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-62698-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-04785-8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
CONTENTS
List of contributors ix
Acknowledgmentxv
1 Introduction 1
Sara Brill and Catherine McKeen
PART I
700–400s BCE 15
2 The Way Up and Down: Liminal Agency in the Homeric Hymns

and Presocratic Philosophy 17
Jessica Elbert Decker
3 Sappho of Lesbos and the Time of Erosophy 29

Chelsea C. Harry
4 Sex, Family, and Chthonic Justice: On the Cosmology of the Choephoroi44

Kalliopi Nikolopoulou
5 Euripides on Epistemic Injustice? Interpreting the Fragments

of Melanippe Sophe and Desmotis 58
Dorota Dutsch
6 On Not-Believing: A Gorgianic Reading of the Tragic Cassandra 74

Maria Cecília de Miranda Nogueira Coelho
7 The Correctness of Grammatical Gender in the Sophistic Tradition 89

Chloe Balla
v
Contents
PART II
400s–300s BCE 101
8 Eis gynaikos andra: Aeschines on Women, Eros, and Politics 103

Francesca Pentassuglio
9 “By Zeus,” Said Theodote: Women As Interlocutors and Performers

in Xenophon’s Philosophical Writings 118
Carol Atack
10 Women in Xenophon’s Socratic Works 135

David M. Johnson
11 Socrates’ Laughing Bodies: Women and Comedy in Plato’s Phaedo151

Sonja Tanner
12 Plato’s Argument for the Inclusion of Women in the Guardian Class:

Prospects and Problems 165
Emily Hulme
13 Women, Spirit, and Authority in Plato and Aristotle 181

Patricia Marechal
14 Plato on Women and the Private Family 202

Rachel Singpurwalla
15 Plato’s Scientific Feminism: Collection and Division

in Republic V’s “First Wave”217
John Proios and Rachana Kamtekar
16 Weaving Politics in Plato’s Statesman 235

Jill Frank and Sarah B. K. Greenberg
17 Socratic Midwifery 253

Marina Berzins McCoy
18 Divine Names and the Mystery of Diotima 267

Danielle A. Layne
19 Sex Difference and What It Means to Be Human in Timaeus 284

Jill Gordon
vi
Contents
PART III
300s–200s BCE 301
20 Cyrenaics on Philosophical Education and Gender 303

Katharine R. O’Reilly
21 Wives or Philosophers? Hipparchia and the Cynic Criticism

of Gendered Economics 318
Malin Grahn-Wilder
22 Diagnosing Aristotle’s Sexism 335

Charlotte Witt
23 Women in Ancient Medical Texts as Sources of Knowledge in Aristotle 345

Mariska Leunissen
24 Aristotle’s Hylomorphism Reconsidered Through Aristotle’s Account

of Generation 360
Adriel M. Trott
25 The Role of Females in Aristotle’s Teleology of Reproduction 374

Ana Laura Edelhoff
26 Aristotle on Women’s Virtues 388

Sophia Connell
27 What Is Wrong with Women: Aristotle’s Paradigm of Gender

and Its Anomalies 406
Giulia Sissa
PART IV
200s BCE–700s CE 421
28 Pythagorean Women: An Example of Female Philosophical Protreptics 423

Caterina Pellò
29 Women in the Household and Public Sphere: Two Contrasting

Stoic Views 435
Jula Wildberger
30 Pyrrhonian Skepticism on Gender and Virtue 449

Christiana Olfert
vii
Contents
31 The Reception of Diotima in Later Platonism: Clea, Sosipatra

and Asclepigeneia 461
Crystal Addey
32 The Place of Women in the Neoplatonic Schools 482

Alexandra Michalewski
33 The School of Hypatia and the Problem of the Gendered Soul 495
Aistė Čelkytė
PART V
Later Receptions 509
34 The Worth of Women: The Reception of Ancient Debates

in the Renaissance 511
Marguerite Deslauriers
35 Philosopher Queens and a Female Prospero(a): Plato’s Republic

and Shakespeare’s Tempest526
Arlene W. Saxonhouse
36 “Possessed, Magical, and Dangerous to Handle”: Jane Harrison,

Nietzsche, and the Maenad Chorus 540
Laura McClure
37 Women’s Work: Exploring a Tradition of Inquiry with W. E. B.

Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Aristotle 554
Harriet Fertik
38 Sarah Kofman: Socratic Lover 569

Paul Allen Miller
39 Decolonial Ruminations on a Classic: Medea, Sethe and La Llorona 583

Andrés Fabián Henao Castro
40 Eros, the Elusive? A Dialogue on Plato’s Symposium, Diotima

and Women in Ancient Philosophy 599
Mariana Ortega and Danielle A. Layne
Further Reading 611

Catherine McKeen
Index641
viii
CONTRIBUTORS
Ana Laura Edelhoff is a teaching fellow at the University of Konstanz. She has recently pub-
lished a book on ‘Aristotle on Ontological Priority in the Categories’ (Cambridge University
Press, 2020).
Crystal Addey is Lecturer in the Department of Classics at University College Cork, Ireland.
She is the author of Divination and Theurgy in Neoplatonism: Oracles of the Gods (2014)
and the editor of Divination and Knowledge in Greco-Roman Antiquity (2021).
Carol Atack is Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge,
UK; her research is focused on classical Greek political thought. Her publications include The
Discourse of Kingship in Classical Greece (Routledge, 2020), and the introduction and notes
to a new translation by Martin Hammond of Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Apology, pub-
lished as Memories of Socrates (Oxford UP, 2023).
Chloe Balla is Associate Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Crete, Greece.
Her research focuses on the Sophists, the Hippocratic Corpus, and Plato’s dialogues. She has
published a Modern Greek translation of Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians (Athens
2015) and is co-editor of Plato’s Academy: Its Workings and Its History (Cambridge UP,
2020). She has been Junior Fellow of the Center for Hellenic Studies and Fellow at the Seeger
Center for Hellenic Studies and at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies.
Aistė Čelkytė is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Leiden University, Netherlands. She is the
author of The Stoic Theory of Beauty (2020).
Maria Cecília de Miranda Nogueira Coelho is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Uni-
versidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. She has served as president of the Sociedade Bra-
sileira de Retórica (2010–2012) and the Latin American Association of Rhetoric (2015–2018)
and as the representative for Latin America at the International Society for Socratic Stud-
ies (2018–2022) and is currently the honorary president of the Brazilian Society for Classi-
cal Studies (2022–2023). She has a background in mathematics and philosophy; her areas
of expertise include the sophistic movement, rhetoric and tragedy (especially Euripides), the
ix
Contributors
reception of classical rhetoric in the speeches of the Jesuit Father Antonio Vieira, and the re-
ception of Greek tragedy in cinema.
Sophia Connell is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College London, UK. Her re-
search includes ancient Greek philosophy and women in the history of philosophy. She is the
author of Aristotle on Female Animals (Cambridge UP, 2016) and the editor of The Cam-
bridge Companion to Aristotle’s Biology (Cambridge UP, 2021).
Jessica Elbert Decker is Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, San
Marcos, USA, and has published numerous articles on Presocratic philosophy and feminist
interpretations of ancient texts. She is co-editor of Otherwise than the Binary: New Feminist
Readings of Ancient Greek Philosophy and Culture (SUNY Press).
Marguerite Deslauriers is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, Canada. Her most re-
cent book is Aristotle on Sexual Difference: Metaphysics, Politics, Biology (Oxford UP, 2022).
She works on ancient philosophy and the history of feminist philosophy.
Dorota Dutsch is Professor of Classics at UC Santa Barbara and the author of two mono-
graphs, Feminine Discourse in Roman Comedy (Oxford UP, 2008) and Pythagorean Women
Philosophers (Oxford UP, 2020) as well as numerous articles on ancient drama and intellec-
tual history.
Ana Laura Edelhoff is Teaching Fellow at the University of Konstanz, Germany. She authored
Aristotle on Ontological Priority in the Categories (Cambridge UP, 2020).
Harriet Fertik is Assistant Professor of Classics at The Ohio State University, USA. She is the
author of The Ruler’s House: Contesting Power and Privacy in Julio-Claudian Rome (Johns
Hopkins UP, 2019) and of articles on ancient Greek and Roman political thought and its re-
ception. She co-edited a special issue of the International Journal of the Classical Tradition on
W. E. B. Du Bois’ classicism (2019).
Jill Frank is the President White Professor of History and Political Science, Professor of Gov-
ernment and Classics at Cornell University, USA, and author of Poetic Justice: Rereading
Plato’s Republic (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and A Democracy of Distinction: Aristo-
tle and the Work of Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2005); she explores the capacities of
ancient Greek texts to defamiliarize politics in radically democratic directions.
Jill Gordon is the NEH/Class of 1940 Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Professor
of Philosophy at Colby College, USA. She is the author of two monographs, Turning To-
ward Philosophy: Literary Device and Dramatic Structure in Plato’s Dialogues (1999) and
Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death (2012) and the editor of one
collected volume, Hearing, Sound, and the Auditory in Ancient Greece (2022). In addition
to many journal articles in ancient Greek philosophy, she publishes in social and political
philosophy.
Malin Grahn-Wilder is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She is

the author of Gender and Sexuality in Stoic Philosophy (2018) and principal investigator of
the research project Origins of Racializing Thought, funded by the Kone Foundation.
x
Contributors
Sarah B. K. Greenberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at Cornell Uni-

versity, USA. Her research engages questions of authority and dissent, command, and (dis)
obedience primarily in Jewish political thought (biblical, rabbinic, and modern).
Chelsea C. Harry is Professor of Philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University, USA.

She is the author of Chronos in Aristotle’s Physics: On the Nature of Time (Springer, 2015)
and co-editor of Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Presocratic Natural Philosophy in
Later Classical Thought (Brill, 2021) and Exploring the Contributions by Women in the His-
tory of Philosophy, Science, and Literature Throughout Time (Springer, 2023).
Andrés Fabián Henao Castro is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
Massachusetts Boston, USA. He is the author of The Militant Intellect: Critical Theory’s Con-
ceptual Personae (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) and Antigone in the Americas: Democracy,
Sexuality and Death in the Settler Colonial Present (SUNY Press 2021). His research has also
been published in Settler Colonial Studies, Differences, Critical Philosophy of Race, Theoria,
Theory & Event, Representation, Theatre Survey, Contemporary Political Theory, and Hy-
patia, among others.
Emily Hulme is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney,

Australia. She has published previously on the argument for the inclusion of women in the
guardian class in “First Wave Feminism: Craftswomen in Plato’s Republic” (Apeiron, 2022).
She is working on a book on techne in Plato.
David M. Johnson is Professor of Classics at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA.

He is the author of a number of articles on Xenophon’s Socrates and of Xenophon’s Socratic
Works (Routledge 2021).
Rachana Kamtekar is Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Cornell University, USA. She
is the author of Plato’s Moral Psychology: Intellectualism, Divided Soul and the Desire for
Good (OUP 2017) and of articles on many topics in ancient philosophy. Her current research
focuses on ancient views of causation and agency.
Danielle A. Layne is Professor of Philosophy and Director of MA in Philosophy at Gonzaga

University, USA. She is the author of Plotinus: Ennead I.5, “On Whether Well Being Increases
With Time”: Translation, with an Introduction and Commentary (Parmenides Publishing
2021) and co-editor of Otherwise than the Binary: New Feminist Readings of Ancient Greek
Philosophy and Culture (SUNY Press 2022).
Mariska Leunissen works in ancient philosophy and has special interests in Aristotelian natu-
ral philosophy, philosophy of science, and early medical gynecology. She received her PhD in
2007 from Leiden University, Netherlands. She is the author of Explanation and Teleology
in Aristotle’s Science of Nature (CUP 2010) and From Natural Character to Moral Virtue
in Aristotle (OUP 2017), and she is currently working on a book on Aristotle’s gynecology,
tentatively titled Facts, Evidence, and Early Medicine in Aristotle’s Natural Scientific Study of
Women. Her papers have appeared in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Journal of the
History of Philosophy, Phronesis, Apeiron, and several edited volumes. She currently serves
on the Board of Directors for the Journal of the History of Philosophy and is the co-editor
of Apeiron. During the 2022–2023 academic year, she held the Robert F. and Margaret S.
xi
Contributors
Goheen Fellowship and William C. and Ida Friday Fellowship at the National Humanities
Center.
Patricia Marechal is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San

Diego, USA. Her research focuses on ancient theories of the soul in Classical Greek and Hel-
lenistic philosophy and medicine. She has published articles on Plato and Aristotle’s moral
psychology and ethics and on Galen’s psychological writings.
Laura McClure is Halls-Bascom Professor of Classical Literature Studies at the University of

Wisconsin-Madison, USA. A biography of the Greek hetera Phryne is forthcoming from Ox-
ford University Press. Her current project explores women’s receptions of the Greek chorus in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Marina McCoy is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College, USA, with interests in ancient
Greek philosophy and rhetoric, vulnerability, and the imagination. She is the author of Image
and Argument in Plato’s Republic (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020) and Wounded Heroes: Vulner-
ability as a Virtue in Ancient Greek Literature and Philosophy (Oxford UP, 2013).
Alexandra Michalewski is Research Fellow at the CNRS (Centre Léon Robin, Paris-Sorbonne),
France. As a specialist of Plotinus and the ancient Platonic tradition, she has focused on meta-
physical and cosmological issues with a monography on the causality of the intelligible Forms
(La puissance de l’intelligible, Leuven, Leuven University Press, 2014). She has also authored
to on Plotinian ethics including, recently, “Plotinus on Music, Rhythm and Harmony,” in
F. Pelosi and F.M. Petrucci (eds), Music and Philosophy in the Roman Empire, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2021; “Women and Philosophy in Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus,”
in Z. McConaughey, I. Chouinard (eds), Women’s Perspectives on Ancient and Medieval Phi-
losophy, Springer, Cham, Suisse, 2021).
Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature
at the University of South Carolina, USA, and Distinguished Guest Professor of English at
Ewha Womans University, South Korea. He is the author of nine books on theory, poetry,
and philosophy. He has edited 15 volumes of essays and published numerous articles. His
tenth book, Foucault’s Late Lectures on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth, was recently
published by Bloomsbury.
Kalliopi Nikolopoulou is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University at

Buffalo, USA. She has published Tragically Speaking (University of Nebraska Press, 2013) and
articles on tragedy and philosophy, Romanticism, and modern European literature. She has
recently completed a book manuscript titled Hunting for Justice: The Cosmology of Dikē in
Aeschylus’ Oresteia.
Christiana Olfert is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Tufts University, USA.
She works on Aristotle’s notion of practical truth (Aristotle on Practical Truth, OUP 2017)
and various topics in Ancient Skepticism.
Katharine R. O’Reilly is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Toronto Metropolitan Univer-

sity, Canada. Her research areas include moral psychology in the Ancient Greek and Roman
xii
Contributors
traditions, and ancient women philosophers. She is the co-editor (with Caterina Pellò) of An-
cient Women Philosophers: Recovered Ideas and New Perspectives (CUP, 2023).
Mariana Ortega is Associate Professor of Philosophy; Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Stud-
ies; and Latino/a Studies at Penn State University, USA. She works on Latina/x Feminisms,
Phenomenology, Critical Philosophy of Race, and Aesthetics. She is the author of In-Between:
Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self (SUNY, 2016) and co-editor with
Andrea Pitts and José Medina of Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms,
Transformation and Resistance (Oxford UP 2020) and with Linda Martín-Alcoff of Con-
structing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader (SUNY, 2009).
Caterina Pellò is Ambizione Research Fellow at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She
works on women in the history of philosophy with special focus on ancient Greek philosophy.
In 2022, her book Pythagorean Women was published by Cambridge University Press. She
co-edited Ancient Women Philosophers (2023, CUP) with Katharine O’Reilly.
Francesca Pentassuglio is Associate Professor of the History of Ancient Philosophy at the

University of Messina, Italy. Her research focuses on Socratic philosophy, Ancient Ethics,
and the reception of Socrates in late Platonism. She is the author of Eschine di Sfetto. Tutte le
testimonianze (2017) and Senofonte. Apologia di Socrate (2021), as well as of several articles
on Socrates and the Socratics.
John Proios is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, USA. He is

the author of “Plato on Natural Kinds: the Promethean Method of the Philebus” (2022,
Apeiron) and other articles in ancient philosophy. His current research focuses on Plato’s
later epistemology of liberation and a collaborative project on ancient Greek philosophy
of race.
Arlene W. Saxonhouse is Caroline Robbins Collegiate Professor of Political Science, Emerita,

at the University of Michigan, USA. She is the author of Women in the History of Political
Thought: Ancient Greece to Machiavelli; Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in
Ancient Greek Thought; Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists;
Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens (2006), and co-editor of Thomas Hobbes,
Three Discourses: A Critical Modern Edition of Newly Identified Work of the Young Hobbes
(1997) as well as numerous articles on ancient and early modern political thought with a focus
on gender and democratic theory. She has been Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study
of Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and at the Center for Human Values at Princeton and was
elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994.
Rachel Singpurwalla is Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. Her current re-
search focuses on Plato’s notions of friendship, virtue, beauty, and happiness and the relations
among these. She has published numerous articles on Plato’s moral psychology, ethics, and
politics.
Giulia Sissa is Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Classics and Political Science
at UCLA, USA. Her publications include Eros tiranno. Sessualità e sensualità nel mondo
antico (Bari, Laterza, 2004), translated into English as Sex and Sensuality in the Ancient
xiii
Contributors
World (Yale UP, 2008), and into French as Sexe et sensualité. La culture érotique des An-
ciens (Paris, Odile Jacob, 2011); Utopia 1516–-2016. More’s Eccentric Essay and Its Ac-
tivist Aftermath, co-edited with Han van Ruler (Amsterdam University Press, 2017); La
Jalousie. Une passion inavouable (Paris, Odile Jacob, 2015), translated into Italian as La
gelosia. Una passione inconfessabile (Bari, Laterza, and English as Jealousy. A forbidden
passion (Polity Press, 2017), and Le Pouvoir des femmes. Un défi pour la démocratie (Paris,
Odile Jacob, 2021).
Sonja Tanner is Professor of Philosophy, specializing in Ancient Greek Philosophy, and the
Director of Classics at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Her current research
focuses on aspects of theater at work in Plato’s dialogues.
Adriel M. Trott is Professor of Philosophy and Andrew T. and Anne Ford Chair in the Liberal
Arts at Wabash College in Indiana. She is the author of Aristotle on the Nature of Commu-
nity (CUP, 2013) and Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation
(Edinburgh, 2019).
Jula Wildberger is Professor Emerita of Classics at the American University of Paris, France.
She has published extensively on Stoicism and Epicureanism and, more recently, Stoic social
and political philosophy She is the author of The Stoics and the State (Nomos, 2018) and co-
editor of Seneca Philosophus (DeGruyter, 2014).
Charlotte Witt is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire, USA. She is
the author of Substance and Essence in Aristotle and Ways of Being in Aristotle’s Metaphys-
ics, both published by Cornell UP. Her scholarship on feminist history of philosophy has been
widely published, including in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in Feminist Reflec-
tions on the History of Philosophy, co-edited with Lilli Alanen, in Methodological Reflections
on Women’s Contribution and Influence in the History of Philosophy, ed. Sigridur Thorgeirs-
dottir and Ruth Hagengruber, and in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy, ed. Kim
Q. Hall and Ásta.
xiv
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
A volume like this incurs far more debts than can be repaid, but we would like at least to
acknowledge some of these. From our very first conversations about the size and scope of the
volume, we felt ourselves indebted to the work of generations of scholars who labored to bring
the study of gender to Greco-Roman antiquity, often under adverse circumstances, and whose
work we hope to have honored both in letter and in spirit.
Work on the volume began in earnest with an online summer workshop in June 2021,
where several invited contributors presented early drafts of their chapters. This workshop was
made possible by institutional support from the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at
Fairfield University, Richard Greenwald, and benefited from the expert technical assistance
of Debbie Whalley. We are truly grateful for their support. We would also like to express our
gratitude to our editor, Andrew Beck, and the entire team at Routledge press for their commit-
ment to seeing this project through to fruition.
We emerged from the summer workshop with a strong sense for the community produced
by this shared intellectual labor and an aspiration to foster it throughout the publication pro-
cess. Our ability to do so was supported by our own families, and we thank them for their
humor, understanding, and goodwill throughout this process.
Lastly, but most importantly, we would like to thank our amazing contributors, whose
unwavering support and dedication spanned a global pandemic and the many changes of life
experience that accompanied it, and whose wonderful work it is our honor to include.
xv
1
INTRODUCTION
1 Guiding Questions
Euripides’s staging of the fatal entanglement of Phaedra, the unwilling lover, and Hippoly-
tus, the unwilling beloved, invites its audience to consider the epistemic agency of women.1
Phaedra’s efforts to master the love by which she has been afflicted, to cure her ‘disease,’ and
to save herself and her family from the dishonor she desperately hopes to avoid hinge upon
her self-understanding. Her late-night ponderings of human folly become especially relevant
as she considers how she might bear her own misfortune, and her careful calculation of her
options hinges upon her awareness that she is a woman:
I knew that this disease was a disgrace,

No less than the act, and I knew well
That I was a woman—an object of contempt to all.
(405–407)2
The hatred of women is, in fact, a preoccupation of the play, whose titular character an-
nounces his eternal (aei) misos of gyne three times in five lines (664–668). He is also spec-
tacularly undone, pulled apart by his beloved horses in requital for his rejection of Aphrodite
and the sexual and familial norms associated with this goddess, in favor of Artemis, whose
‘consolation’ inscribes mourning for him in the very institution he had hoped to avoid: young
girls on their wedding night will cut their hair in his honor. And here too Phaedra’s status as
a knower proves instrumental. What Phaedra’s self-knowledge offers her, eventually, is the
realization that her ‘disease’ cannot be cured, it can only be ‘shared.’
The range of women’s knowledge was a question for Aeschylus as well, whose Clytemnestra
bristles at the suggestion that her confidence in asserting the Acheaen route of Troy and im-
manent return of Agamemnon is based on rumor or fantasy at the same time as she feigns
loyalty to her hated husband (580–610). Sophocles too repeatedly presents his audience with a
tension between women’s knowledge and capacity to act, with, for instance, an Electra whose
commitment and careful planning to avenge her father appears to her sister as out of step with
the prudence needed to heed her status, and thus who asks her: ‘Do you not see? You are a
woman, no man’ (997).3
1
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-1
It is in this context that we should read the construction of Aspasia in Plato’s Menexenus, a
character who asserts the authority of skilled speech as master and teacher of political oratory,
presented to us by an author born around the time that Euripides’s Hippolytus Stephanopho-
rus won the city Dionysia. Aspasia’s epistemic status is rendered multiply ambiguous by her
position as a metic widow, and her dubious command of a suspect technē. Socrates’ claims
about Aspasia’s expertise are also met with evident suspicion by his interlocutor, Menexenus,
who is willing, nonetheless, to hear her funeral composition, at least as voiced by Socrates.
Following the recitation, Menexenus concludes:
By Zeus, Socrates, Aspasia is really wonderful according to your account, if she can
compose a speech such as this, despite being a woman.
(249d)4
Socrates invites him to hear more such speeches directly from Aspasia herself, but Menexenus
demurs. Menexenus expresses gratitude for the speech, but with the pointed qualification
that he is grateful ‘for her or him, whoever it was that spoke it to you’ (249e, our italics). His
skepticism about Aspasia’s credibility and epistemic authority will not be overcome, and he
refuses to ratify Aspasia as a knower. Here, in the Menexenus, Plato poses women’s status as
epistemic agents as a question. Is Aspasia to be trusted as an authority, despite the fact that
she is a woman? Or does her gender serve to permanently mark her as unworthy of full epis-
temic standing? We note that Aristotle too queried the kind and extent of women’s knowledge,
positing the epistemic privilege of the mother regarding her children alongside suspicion of
women’s capacity to rule, based, in part, on the infamous limitation he places on the authority
of her rational capacities.
These examples provide a window into debates and concerns about women’s epistemic
agency in Greek antiquity. It is this query—what we can gather about the treatment of women
as knowers from ancient Greek literary and philosophic texts—that forms the guiding ques-
tion of this volume. To ask this question now is to observe its location in three nested time
frames: that of the composition of the texts; that of the manuscript tradition; and that of the
contemporary reception of these texts. We thus need to ask:
– How were women treated as thinkers and knowers in their own time? Adequate engage-
ment with this question should take into account issues of epistemic agency and credibility,
the contexts in which women’s credibility was taken as established, and the contexts in
which it was denied. We must also be attentive to the contexts and spaces where philoso-
phy emerged in Greek antiquity, spaces which often provide the settings for philosophical
works themselves—e.g., the symposium, the wrestling school (palaestra), and the gymna-
sium. These spaces were reserved for men and had strong masculine associations. When
women entered these spaces, if at all, they did so as servants and service providers, not as
full participants. Even so, our source material provides traces of women’s participation in
Greek intellectual and philosophical life.
– How were women treated as epistemic agents in the tradition of textual transmission?
Here again we encounter a situation in which women were systematically excluded or mar-
ginalized from historical narratives about the development of Western philosophy in Greek
and Roman antiquity. Not only have women’s contributions to this development generally
been overlooked but also source material that attests to women’s participation in philo-
sophical life is scattered, fragmentary, and often cannot be attributed directly to female
historical figures. The weight of sexist prejudice in previous ages has excluded material that
2
Introduction
attested to women’s intellectual involvement. If any women wrote philosophical works,

these texts have been lost to us. The task, however, is not hopeless. Scholars of Greek an-
tiquity are familiar with the challenges of working with imperfect sources and fragmentary
evidence. And here, too, we find motivation for recuperative and recovery projects: to con-
tinue to write women out of the historical narrative would be to proceed as if philosophy
were an unproblematically gender-neutral enterprise. To proceed in this way would be to
operate under a distorting misconception.
– How is contemporary reception of ancient texts influenced by contemporary gender con-
ditions in the academy and beyond? Philosophy is still grappling with hostility to women
scholars, and with oppressive structures that shape how women’s experiences, perspectives,
and contributions are understood as incorporated in philosophical discourse. While pro-
gress toward greater parity in the discipline has been significant, gross inequities remain,
as reported in multiple sources.5 This is especially so for women of color, as the work of
Anita Allen, Kristie Dotson, Kathyrn Sophia Belle, Mariana Ortega, Anika Maaza Mann,
Donna-Dale Marcano, and Michele Moody-Adams and others has documented.6 In the
context of US political culture more broadly, the posing of women as a question has seen
significant traction in both liberating and oppressive forms, and here too women of color
have borne an unequal amount of the oppressive character of some of this inquiry: to take
just one particularly clear example, the senators who asked Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
to define ‘woman’ during the confirmation hearing for her nomination to the Supreme
Court were not doing so out of academic interest but out of an effort to distract from her
considerable expertise and qualifications. That this question would appear a useful tool
to do so attests to the importance and complexity of theorizing gender in the context of
multiple forms of gender oppression. While this problem is global in scale, we see signifi-
cant examples in the US and UK, with heightened violence against trans-gender and gender
non-binary people, increased efforts to codify that hostility in law and support for those
efforts both within and without the academy in the so-called gender-critical movement, a
movement that implicates certain strands of feminism as well, particularly the pernicious
trope of protecting ‘authentic’ women and its use to deny the reality of trans lived experi-
ence in favor of entrenching a narrow, restrictive, fantasized gender binary.7 There is work
for philosophers and scholars of the ancient Greco-Roman world to do to denounce and
critique these efforts.
2 Current State of Scholarship

The historian Judith Bennett writes: ‘As we know from our very first explorations into
women’s history, what is muted is soon obscured, and what is obscured is eventually forgot-
ten.’8 Research over more than 50 years into the lives of women and other marginalized people
in Mediterranean antiquity has done much to reverse the course of this forgetting, providing
us with valuable detail about the conditions of the lives of women in the Greek-speaking
world, including the political conditions under which women were ‘muted,’ denied substan-
tive rights, were unable to own property in their own name, received little education, and were
generally subjected to conditions of economic and political subordination.9 This research also
documents how the category of ‘woman’ oscillated between invisibility and hypervisibility,
between its marginalization in Greek societies that constructed male excellence as a normative
ideal, and its idealization/demonization in portraits of female characters on tragic and comic
stages, images of motherhood on the Parthenon, poetic traditions of both praise and blame,
and in ritual and cultic festival.
3
The story, then, of ancient Greek ‘exceptionalism,’ whether it is treated as miraculous or

not, as a period of political innovation and intellectual ferment, or as the crucible of ‘Western’
philosophy, tells a fragmented and misleading story, a point that has been made forcefully
from multiple sources.10 Telling the full story demands that we attend to the social-political
conditions that shaped the development of something called ‘philosophy’ done by people
indicated by the neologism ‘philosopher’ in Greek antiquity. We should mark the movement
of philosophos from a derogatory term to a term designating a practitioner of a celebrated
discipline in later traditions.11 We should also mark the relation of philosophia to other forms
and movements of thought that queried nature (human and otherwise), knowledge, action,
virtue, etc., in other places—scholarship that is part of the promise of comparative classics,
and of undertaking the history of philosophy as a global practice.12
Within the context of this volume, we cannot undertake a sincere investigation into the
question of women’s involvement with philosophy in Greek antiquity without also consider-
ing how gendered social forces contributed to the historical formation of the ‘Western’ branch
of philosophy. Moreover, attending to these conditions invites us to investigate the ways that
women created livable lives under oppressive circumstances, and how they carved out posi-
tions of status and standing in social life and in philosophy’s development. So, this volume
undertakes to investigate the myriad ways that women were implicated in Greek intellectual
and philosophical life, whether represented as characters in Greek drama or in philosophical
texts, alluded to through philosophical questions bearing on gender, as historical individuals
participating in philosophical movements, and as women regarded as thinkers in their own
right. Discovery of these traces in the historical record leads us to excavation and exploration
and unfolds a richer understanding of a significant phase in philosophy’s past.
We are aided in these efforts by feminist work over the past five decades, and the develop-
ment of conceptual tools better suited to a nuanced view of history and philosophy. Miranda
Fricker’s work on hermeneutic and testimonial justice, for example, invites us to consider how
‘the social experiences of the oppressed are not properly integrated into collective understand-
ings of the social world… [while] a more democratic, egalitarian world and collective under-
standings would look differently, less distorted.’13 Kristie Dotson’s work highlights the ethical
responsibilities that audiences (and we would add, readers) have to rectify epistemic wrongs.14
In attending to the historical construction of racialized identity categories emerging from the
transatlantic slave trade and in its long wake, scholars of epistemologies of ignorance also call
for active resistance to the cultivated forms of unknowing that allow redacted and fragmented
accounts to pass as the complete and final story, a call crucially relevant to other historicizing
efforts.15 We acknowledge our debt to this scholarship.
We propose that the eclipsing and excluding of women from scholarship in the history
of philosophy is, among many other things, an ongoing instance of epistemic injustice. In
investigating philosophy’s past, then, we should be attentive to how epistemic privilege and
epistemic disadvantage shaped contemporaneous collective understandings of Greek social-
cultural worlds, and thus how these forces continue to limit our own understanding of antiq-
uity. We should test methods that have the potential to redress the long-standing epistemic
injustices which have been inscribed into the history of philosophy. In our excavations and
explorations, we also can make use of the rich resources afforded by feminist history and his-
toriography, critical scholarship in Classical Studies, queer theory, gender studies, subaltern
studies, and feminist philosophy more broadly. Since Joan Scott’s ground-breaking argument
for gender as a category of historical analysis,16 we have seen the growth of scholarship on
gender in every genre of ancient Greek text.17 We acknowledge our debt to this scholarship
as well.
4
Introduction
We note that historical narratives about philosophy and the philosophical canon are
products of both choice and contingency. Contingency shapes the canon in the first instance
through historical accidents that determined which texts survive and which do not. In addi-
tion, the philosophical canon was formed in response to the concerns of certain specific times
and places and is shaped as well by local biases, prejudices, and blind spots. Historical nar-
ratives about philosophy’s development in Greek antiquity have, over time, coalesced around
certain familiar figures, texts, and ideas. Thinkers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are
cast as central figures in these narratives, while other thinkers, such as Diogenes of Sinope,
Xenophon, and Epicurus, are cast as more minor players. Women, as we’ve noted, barely
enter the stage. These traditional historical narratives trace not only the emergence of ideas
and philosophical theories in their historical context but also lines of influence among the
narrative’s key figures and views. Narratives which center on individual authors may give
insufficient weight to the contributions of antiquity’s philosophical ‘schools,’ intellectual com-
munities engaged in a common way of life. If we only continue to authorize authors who have
already been canonized and authorized, then, we are left with an artificially impoverished
view of philosophy and Greek antiquity. Moreover, while the gravity of the center is power-
ful, hegemonic discourses are also inherently contested and unstable and are never entirely
successful in exercising mastery over a complicated social reality. To paraphrase Bat-Ami Bar
On: critical readings of ancient Greek philosophy begin from a recognition that ‘a text can be
originating and hegemonic, but not in a way that determines every possible element or aspect
of that text.’18 Surviving texts and source material encode dominant social meanings, but also
bear the traces of inconsistencies, anomalies, and complications which open up space for fruit-
ful counter-readings.
To apply the insights of feminist epistemology to the history of Greek thought, then, we
should endeavor, as bell hooks has it, to ‘think from the margins,’ to take as central the ex-
periences of those who occupy less privileged and powerful social positions. 19 Among the
marginalized lives that enter the frame when we take this stance are the lives of women. And
since these women were no more a homogeneous group in Greek antiquity than women are
now, we will want to further investigate along the intersectional dimensions of citizen/immi-
grant, elite/non-elite, and free/enslaved. To do this, we need to lay emphasis on the plurality
in hooks’ call, i.e., that there are many margins, and to bring nuance and precision to our un-
derstanding of the relations between them, which would include acknowledging that whatever
relative autonomy and social standing elite women procured for themselves in Greek antiquity
was likely purchased through the labor of their household slaves and servants.
If we seriously consider epistemic injustice as matter for the history of philosophy, ques-
tions naturally arise about how to rectify such injustice. What methods are best suited to
advance epistemic justice in our study of women and ancient Greek philosophy? This ques-
tion, in turn, verges on a whole host of questions concerning textual interpretation: how do
we handle fragmentary evidence? How do we deal with sources about, but not written by,
the thinker in question? How do we position texts that were products of collective intellectual
effort, rather than authored by single identifiable individuals? How do we treat texts that, so
far as we can gather, were not written for wide dissemination? How do we handle the many
questions of authorship and capture the historical dynamism of thinking to take account of
the life that ideas take on in their development within an intellectual milieu and in their influ-
ence beyond this context?
These questions are especially pressing for a history of philosophy which, in its earliest
Greek form, was conceived of precisely as a way of life as well as a theoretical enterprise.
What kinds of access did women have to the spaces where philosophy was being done during
5
Greek antiquity? How did women engage philosophy, culture, and intellectual life inside and
outside of masculine-coded spaces? Who qualifies as a recognized thinker and knower? Who
is authorized to speak on behalf of rationality? How do we write the history of ways of life
for those who were denied access to the resources, paths, and recognition that fostered these
forms of living? How do we capture the subterranean routes, the acts of revolution both large
and small, by which women entered into these ways of life? Thus, Saidiya Hartman poses this
challenge for historians of the past:
Every historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is
forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on
what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity
and authority of historical actor.20
3 A Handbook on Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy

We begin this volume with the conviction that epistemic justice should be a serious concern
for contemporary readers of ancient Greek philosophy. Further, in grappling with the archive
of ancient Greek depictions of women and philosophy, we take a lesson from Hartman and
recognize the value of methodological pluralism in navigating this archive. Thus, we have
understood our role as editors as supporting scholarship across current academic disciplinary
boundaries, work which is experimental, expansive, and multivocal. We have endeavored to
include work that engages with texts squarely located in the Northern European and North
American philosophical canon, as well as source material located beyond that established
canon. In Greek antiquity, as at other historical moments, what activities counted as ‘philoso-
phy’ and ‘philosophical’ was very much in dispute. Thus, we believe that pluralism as a strat-
egy for this volume does justice to the complicated meanings of ‘philosophy’ in the context of
Greek antiquity and allows for new ways of understanding philosophy’s unfolding over time.
In light of these considerations, we suggest that one read this as a volume that sits uneasily
with its title, a volume that acknowledges the contested nature of its terms—‘women,’ ‘ancient
Greek philosophy,’ and ‘handbook:’
– ‘women’—We wish to be committed and rigorous in avoiding assuming too quickly what
‘women,’ ‘the female,’ ‘femininity,’ etc., means for the thinkers and texts under consid-
eration, so to take for granted neither the terms of embodiment, e.g., what constitutes an
‘organ,’ what bodies signified, and what sexual difference meant, nor the terms of social
identity and status, such as ‘wife,’ ‘companion,’ ‘mother,’ ‘nurse,’ and ‘nurturer.’ We are in-
terested in the many and complex ways in which those designated as ‘wives,’ ‘companions,’
‘mothers,’ and the like interacted with the structural impediments to their full participation
in intellectual life. We also hope to discern the sliding of terms to designate ‘woman,’ ‘girl,’
‘bride,’ ‘wife,’ e.g., gynē, korē, etc., with adjectives and adverbs that indicate womanly or
womanish, e.g., gynis, gynaikeios, in a derogative sense, that is, when ‘woman’ is used as an
insult, not only for what it tells us about this category but also for what we can learn about
ancient Greek formulations of normative and non-normative gender, and responses to gen-
der non-binarism.21 We are thus particularly interested in creating space for work that que-
ries deeply and seriously the lenses through which bodies were seen and represented and the
manners in which social identity was enacted, policed, and managed in Greek antiquity and
for work that aims to discern the varieties of ways in which gendered individuals lived with,
6
Introduction
against, in spite of and/or for the terms of social legibility by which one was determined to
be seeable or invisible and addressed or dismissed.
– ‘ancient Greek philosophy’—We believe that it is important to locate the ‘lovers of wis-
dom’ in the context of ancient Greek intellectual life, to take a nuanced approach to the
complex and contingent communities of thinkers who were defined by and defined them-
selves in frictive engagement with other intellectual traditions and practices. We are par-
ticularly interested in who could or could not participate in intellectual labor and what and
whose activities underwrote intellectual labor. We also have an aspiration for community,
for sumphilosophein—notable in Aristotle, both for its appearance at all and for its infre-
quency (EN 1172a5 and EE 1245a22) in our own work, an aspiration to avoid narrow ter-
ritorializing and importing disciplinary boundaries that are anachronistic, or are stifling to
good thinking, or both. We aim to be acutely cognizant of and attentive to how the politics
of disciplinary authority is linked to forms of structural power, now and in antiquity.
– ‘handbook’—Our aspiration is less for comprehensiveness than for providing a snapshot
of the current state of research. We hope, in this way, to offer the reader tools to determine
for herself what methods are called for in investigating philosophy in Greek antiquity and
its many after lives. This has meant surveying the state of scholarly conversation around
gender in Plato and Aristotle, certainly, but also looking to depictions of women as know-
ers in tragic and medical registers, in the testaments to the lives of philosophers, and in the
reception of these texts and genres by later thinkers.
4 Overview of This Volume—Chapter Summaries

The 40 chapters that comprise this volume cover material which spans the 700s BCE to the
Hellenistic period in the context of the Greek-speaking Mediterranean, as well as the reception
of this material, from late Greek and Roman antiquity to the present day.
The first section treats material from the periods from the 7th c. to 4th c. BCE, including
Homeric hymns, the poetry of Sappho, the fragments of the presocratic philosophers, ancient
Greek tragedy, and the sophistic tradition. Jessica Decker considers the theme of liminality in
the Homeric Hymns and the works of Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Parmenides. Chelsea C.
Harry illuminates the philosophizing at work in Sappho’s erotic poetry. Kalliopi Nikolopou-
lou, Dorota Dutsch, and Maria Cecília Coelho mine the resources of Greek tragedy for views
about sex, gender, family, and justice. Nikolopoulou proposes an account of chthonic justice
in Aeschylus’ Choephoroi. Dutsch considers how epistemic justice and knowledge of natural
philosophy interact in several fragments from Euripides. Coelho proposes a reading of the
tragic Cassandra that brings out elements from the sophist Gorgias’ teachings. Chloe Balla
closes this section with a study of grammatical gender in the sophistic tradition.
The next section engages with work by Aeschines, Xenophon, and Plato, opening with
Francesca Pentassuglio’s consideration of women and eros in Aeschines’ Aspasia. Carol Atack
and David Johnson turn our attention to Xenophon with a focus on women’s role as inter-
locutors and performers in Xenophon’s philosophical writings (Atack) as well as a general
assessment of women’s status and role in Xenophon’s Socratic works (Johnson). The sub-
sequent chapters in this section offer work in conversation with several of Plato’s dialogues.
Sonja Tanner argues for the necessity of comedy in understanding the role of women (or lack
thereof) in Plato’s Phaedo. Emily Hulme offers an overview and assessment of the state of
debate concerning Plato’s well-known and puzzling argument for the inclusion of women
in the guardian class in Republic 5. Patricia Marechal takes Republic 5 as a springboard for
7
considering the relation between Plato and Aristotle on the question of women’s moral agency
with respect to the propensity for dispiritedness both thinkers attribute to women as a kind.
Rachel Singpurwalla turns our attention to the cultural impediments to women’s virtue, as
Plato sees them, locating his comments about women’s weakness within the context of his
critique of the private family. John Proios and Rachana Kamtekar argue that the questions of
women’s nature and political status as they are set out in the Republic should be viewed in the
context of the scientific method of collection and division, as developed in Platonic dialogues
such as the Statesman and Sophist. The next chapters examine gender and gendered figures in
Plato’s works beyond the Republic. Jill Frank and Sarah Greenberg interrogate the use Plato
makes of weaving to elucidate the work of politics in the Statesman; Marina Berzins McCoy
highlights the use of the midwife as metaphor in Plato’s Theaetetus; Danielle A. Layne brings
new light to the question of Diotima’s identity in Plato’s Symposium; and Jill Gordon inter-
rogates puzzles that emerge from the account of sexual difference and what it means to be
human in the Timaeus.
Section 3 turns to Aristotle and his intellectual milieu. This section opens with Katharine R.
O’Reilly’s study of education and gender in the thought of the Cyrenaics, in which she argues
that the Cyrenaics make use of their Socratic legacy to self-consciously subvert gender expec-
tations and explores the means of philosophical expression available to women members of
the school. Malin Grahn-Wilder’s next chapter focuses on Hipparchia, a self-professed female
Cynic, as posing a challenge to traditional Greek gender norms and the division of social life
into the private and public spheres.
The next several chapters focus on Aristotle’s work as it is relevant to gender, including
Aristotle’s engagement with the Hippocratic corpus, his intervention in debates surrounding
reproduction, and the relationship between his ethical and zoological theorizing. Charlotte
Witt sets the stage with a survey of the state of scholarly conversation regarding Aristotle on
the question of sex and gender. In her chapter, Mariska Leunissen analyzes Aristotle’s methods
for identifying evidence regarding female sexual pleasure, conception, pregnancy, and moth-
erhood, and especially Aristotle’s treatment of (expert) women as sources of knowledge in
early medical texts. Ana Laura Edelhoff re-examines women’s subordinate role in Aristotle’s
teleological account of reproduction. Adriel M. Trott advances a novel reading of the relation
between form and matter in Aristotle’s account of generation. Sophia Connell argues that
Aristotle’s ethical and political writings do not support a view of women as naturally ethically
inferior, noting women’s essential role in securing flourishing communities, while recognizing
Aristotle’s confinement of women’s virtues to the private household. This section concludes
with Giulia Sissa’s exploration and analysis of the anomalies attendant upon Aristotle’s para-
digm of gender.
The chapters of section 4 consider the question of women and gender in late Greek antiq-
uity to Roman antiquity, in the philosophical traditions of Pythagoreanism (Caterina Pellò),
Stoicism (Jula Wildberger), later Platonism (Crystal Addey, Alexandra Michalewski, and Aistė
Čelkytė), and Skepticism (Christiana Olfert). Caterina Pellò’s chapter examines the writings
of the ‘Pythagorean women,’ letters and treatises that were attributed to a group of women
intellectuals affiliated with Pythagorean communities in Greece and southern Italy, arguing
that these texts provide an early example of protreptics specifically directed at women. Jula
Wildberger turns our attention to the contrast between Zeno and Musonius on the ques-
tion of women’s social and domestic roles and highlights embodiments of ‘female courage’
among women of the Roman Stoic senatorial opposition in 1st c. CE. Christiana Olfert fo-
cuses on Sextus Empiricus’s contribution to the question of women’s virtue in his Outlines
8
Introduction
of Pyrrhonism. In their chapters on later Platonism, Crystal Addey traces the significance of
Diotima for female intellectuals in the later Platonic traditions; Aistė Čelkytė documents the
way in which questions about the gendered soul are taken up in Hypatia’s school; and Alexan-
dra Michalewski explores how a gender-neutral conception of virtue in Neoplatonic thought
is linked to evidence about historical women and their influence in the Neoplatonic schools.
The volume’s final section attends to receptions of Greek philosophical texts from the
European Renaissance to the present day. In her chapter, Arlene Saxonhouse considers a con-
temporary staging of Shakespeare’s Tempest with the character of Prospero cast as a woman,
a staging which Saxonhouse argues, highlights the tensions inherent in Plato’s Republic 5
proposals for philosopher queens. Marguerite Deslauriers traces the reception of Aristotle’s
work by Renaissance writers engaged with the querelle des femmes. Laura McClure illumi-
nates the engagement Jane Ellen Harrison (b. 1850–d. 1928), one of the first recognized pro-
fessional classicists, makes with Friedrich Nietzsche’s ruminations on the Greek ritual chorus,
emphasizing Harrison’s shift of focus to the Maenads (the female followers of Dionysius).
Harriet Fertik explores W. E. B. Du Bois’ 1920 ‘The Servant in the House’ in light of Anna
Julia Cooper’s monumental A Voice from the South (1893), and how these works challenge
Aristotelian conceptions of work, family, and politics. In his chapter, Paul Allen Miller tracks
the elusive, plural, and unstable figure of Socrates in the work of Sarah Kofman (b. 1934–d.
1994). Andrés Fabián Henao Castro reads the infanticidal mother Medea through a deco-
lonial lens, in connection with the indigenous Mexican figure of La Llorona and the char-
acter Sethe from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, to examine how maternal agency is constrained
and asserted within colonial power structures. This section, and the volume, concludes with
a dialogue between philosopher Mariana Ortega and Danielle A. Layne (as an unnamed
companion) on Plato’s Symposium as an invitation to reimagine women’s engagement with
ancient Greek philosophy.
5 Aspirations
Our hope is that this volume will be useful to students and scholars interested in the philo-
sophical exploration—broadly conceived—of gender in the ancient Greek world and its re-
ception. We have been reminded throughout the publication process of what it means to do
this work and why it is important that it be done. Early on in the formation of this volume,
we found ourselves contemplating the fate of Theodote, who appears as a character in Xeno-
phon’s Memorabilia and seems rather unique, a woman conversing with Socrates about a
variety of matters from a position of relative stability and independence. With the resources
available to use now, we cannot affirm with confidence that Theodote existed as a historical
person, and if so, just how unusual Xenophon’s presentation of her conversation with Socrates
would have been. We thus have also encouraged our authors to consider including, where ap-
propriate, reference to their own experience in engaging with these texts, not only to deepen
the historical record of the material and intellectual conditions of producing this kind of schol-
arship but also to support future Theodotes with tools for inquiry and examples of their use.
Our aspirations, as editors, can be summarized in a few guiding principles:
1 To promote efforts to excavate primary and secondary source evidence that speaks to the
perspectives of marginalized people and that aids in the reconstruction of marginalized
social positions in order to illuminate aspects of the historical context that might otherwise
be obscured, elided, or suppressed. This licenses a shift in perspective from a singular focus
9
on individual authors, toward a deeper consideration of the social context for inquiry and
knowledge production in Greek antiquity and collective epistemic projects.
2 To acknowledge and demonstrate how dominant understandings of Greek social worlds by
those who were authorized to speak and write reflected advantage and privilege. That is,
we aim to be sensitive to the manner in which social-political privilege translates into social
recognition and authorization and to resist the temptation to uncritically fall into what
Uma Narayan has termed ‘situational ignorance.’22
3 To insist on pluralism over disciplinary narrowness as a fruitful strategy in scholarship concern-
ing women and their relationship to philosophy in Greek antiquity. As we have understood
this charge, this pluralism is broad and applies to the source materials which are objects of
study or provocations for further thought, to the genres for which philosophical investigation
is relevant, and to the methods which are used in pursuing a deepened understanding of the
philosophical past and in making sense of the significance of Greek antiquity for readers now.
The result is a collection of chapters with multiple strands of overlapping interests, aims, and
methodological tools, including reparatory and recuperative readings; oppositional and criti-
cal counter-readings; chapters that expand our sources and push genre boundaries as well as
chapters that propose new strategies for reading ‘ancient’ ‘Greek’ ‘philosophy.’
Notes
1 A contested category in multiple historical contexts in its own right, to which we draw attention and
discuss below.
2 τὸ δ’ ἔργον ᾔδη τὴν νόσον τε δυσκλεᾶ,
γυνή τε πρὸς τοῖσδ’ οὖσ’ ἐγίγνωσκον καλῶς,
μίσημα πᾶσιν.
Svarlien trans.
3 Οὐκ εἰσορᾷς; γυνὴ μὲν οὐδ’ ἀνὴρ ἔφυς
4 Based on translation from R. G. Bury (1952) Menexenus, London: W. Heinemann, with emendation
by C. McKeen.
5 See, e.g., the blog ‘What it’s Like to be a Woman in Philosophy,’ news outlet coverage of several
relatively recent scandals, and the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of
Women. See also Alcoff (2003) and Narayan (1997).
6 Allen et al. (1998), Ortega (2006), Dotson (2012), Belle publishing as Gines (2011).
7 See in particular the evidence and approach offered in Bassi and LaFleur (2022); see also the Lemkin
Institute’s ‘Statement on the Genocidal Nature of the Gender Critical Movement’s Ideology and
Practice,’ released on November 29, 2022: https://www.lemkininstitute.com/statements-new-page/
statement-on-the-genocidal-nature-of-the-gender-critical-movement%E2%80%99s-ideology-and-
practice
8 Bennett (1989).
9 Pomeroy (1975) was a watershed text, with ongoing discussion and influence, see e.g., Ancona and
Tsouvala (2021), Blundell (1995), Fantham et al. (1995), Foley (1993), and Lefkowitz and Fant
(2005). For an example of the variety of approaches to the questions Pomoroy opened, see e.g., Bi-
anchi, Brill, and Holmes (2019), duBois (1988), Dean-Jones (1994), Dillon (2002), Holmes (2009),
Lardinois and McClure (2001), Kraemer (2010), Maclachlan (2012), Masterson, Rabinowitz, and
Robson (2015), Holmes (2012), Wyke (1999), and Zajko and Leonard (2006). Noteworthy also is
the founding of the Women’s Classical Caucus of the American Philological Association in 1971 and
the Society for Women in Philosophy in 1972.
10 For recent critical discussion of the ‘Greek miracle’ see Kennedy (2017) and Hanink (2017). See also
response by Pearcy (2017) and reassessments in Netz (2020) and Lloyd (2021).
11 On the historical emergence of philosophia and the genre of philosophical writing, see Blondell
(2002), Cantor (2022), Moore (2020), Morgan (2000), Nightingale (1995), and Partenie (2009). On
the contest between philosophy and sophistry, see Cassin (1995), Jarratt (1990), and McCoy (2008).
10
Introduction
12 See, for instance, Baggini (2018), Lloyd (2021), as well as the six volumes of Peter Adamson’s A
History of Philosophy Without any Gaps.
13 See Fricker (1999) and Fricker (2011). For further development of the concept of epistemic injustice,
see Alcoff and Potter (1993), Bailey (2018), Chae (2018), Fricker and Jenkins (2017), Hall (2017),
Holroyd and Puddifoot (2020), Kidd, Pohlhaus, and Medina (2017), Pohlhaus (2012), Pohlhaus
(2020), Toole (2019); and the sources cited in note 14. For an excellent introduction to the appli-
cation of feminist epistemology to the study of gender in the ancient Greco-Roman world, see the
Introduction to Bowen, Gilbert, and Nally (Eds.) Believing Ancient Women, 2023, and for feminist
theory and the classics, see the chapters collected in Rabinowitz and Richlin (1993).
14 Dotson (2011). For further research on testimonial and hermeneutic injustice, see also Davis (2018),
Jenkins (2017), Mason (2011).
15 See e.g., Mills (1999) (reissued with new introduction in 2022), and work collected in Sullivan and
Tuana (2007). See also Alcoff (2010), Alcoff and Potter (1993), Code (2014), Collins (2000), Dotson
(2011), Dotson (2014), Jones (2001), Jones (2012), Medina (2012), Medina (2023), Mills (2007),
Mohanty (1984), Narayan (1997), Narayan (2004), Pohlhaus (2012), Pohlhaus (2020), Spivak
(1988), and Tanesini (2021).
16 Scott (1986). Scott’s call for applying a gendered lens to historical study has been fruitfully troubled
by work by queer theorists, e.g., Judith Butler who queries the stability and regulative import of nor-
mative gender ascriptions.
17 Extensive bibliographies for each several genres can be found in the chapters of this volume, as well
as collected in the Further Readings section at the end of this volume. We offer just a few examples
here. See, for instance: Tragedy: canonical work by Helene Foley (Foley 1993, Foley 2001, and Foley
2014), Tina Chanter (Chanter 2011), and Froma Zeitlin (e.g. (Zeitlin 1996), comedy: e.g., Robson
(2016) and sources discussed in James (2015); Ancient Greek medical literature: ground-breaking
work by Helen King (e.g. King 2002 and King 2020); Philosophy: Bar On (1993), Bianchi (2014),
Freeland (1998), Tuana (1994), Waithe (1987), and Ward (1996). The past decade has seen burgeon-
ing interest in efforts to rethink and reconstitute historical narratives in early modern philosophy
at several institutions and programs, e.g., The Center for New Narratives at Columbia University,
Project Vox at Duke University, The Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy project
at Simon Fraser University, The Feminist History of Philosophy project, administered by Sandrine
Bergès at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, and The Center for the History of Women Philosophers
and Scientists at Paderborn, Germany. These projects are also an inspiration for this volume.
18 Bar On (1993).
19 hooks (1984) and hooks (1989).
20 Hartman (2019, xiii).
21 See work on the history of sexuality in Foucault (1990a), Foucault (1990b), Foucault (1998), and
Foucault (2022) and responses (e.g., Larmour, Miller, and Platter 1998, Halperin 1990, and Sissa’s re-
framing from sexuality to sensuality, e.g., Sissa 2008) as well as recent studies, in particular, Bianchi,
Brill, and Holmes (2019), Decker, Layne and Vilhauer (2022), Masterson, Rabinowitz, and Robson
(2015) and Miller (2021).
22 Narayan (2004), see also Narayan (1997).
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14
PART I
700–400s BCE
2
THE WAY UP AND DOWN
Liminal Agency in the Homeric Hymns
and Presocratic Philosophy
In DK 60, Heraclitus says: ‘the way up and down is one and the same.’1 This fragment is
a succinct example of his emphasis on the coincidence of opposites and has been read as
referring philosophically to life and death, or to mortality and immortality, or to gods and
mortals, but the literal meaning is that the road you take up is the same road you take down:
it all depends on where you begin.2 In terms of linear movement, we can envision a road that
can be traversed north to south or south to north; in terms of circular movement, we might
imagine a looping spiral. The word with the most ambiguity here is hodos (ὁδὸς), which
means a road, a way, a route, or a path. This exploration will be taking a route that is made
entirely of ambiguous bridges—between worlds, between opposites, and between identities.
In what follows I hope to offer an overview of places where liminality appears across the
major Homeric Hymns and the Presocratic texts of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles;
this emphasis on liminality and what I am calling ‘liminal agency’ suggests fruitful ways of
thinking these canonical texts that are not bound to binary logic and oppressive models of
rationality and mastery. I use the name ‘liminal agency’ to refer to ambiguity with respect
to borders and identities, as well as the ability to shift between different places, positions, or
powers fluidly and at will.
The agency that I hope to showcase in these texts appears most often as divine and is
deeply associated with the awareness that Ancient Greek culture named metis, which is of-
ten translated as ‘cunning resourcefulness.’3 In the first section, liminal agency will appear
as the ambiguous movement of the seed as it is played out and dramatized by the divinities
in the narrative of the Hymn to Demeter, then I will contextualize Heraclitus’ philosophical
stance on opposites, particularly life and death as the ‘way up and down,’ and emphasize the
necessity of motile thinking for liminal agency to function. The second section takes up the
problem of translation from divine to mortal language in Parmenides’ poem and the Hymn to
Apollo: the liminal agency in this case is the appearance of ‘amphilogia’ or ‘double speak’—a
perilous phenomenon to mortals but the natural way of gods, according to these texts. The
goddess of Parmenides’ poem and the oracle at Delphi engage in double speak, a device where
the speaker may say multiple things at once by exploiting semantic and syntactic ambiguity;
in reading the Hymn to Apollo, it becomes apparent that this double nature is the character
of the god reflected in his works, as his areas of timai or honor are the bow, the lyre, and the
oracle—all instruments that create tension, like Apollo himself in Zeus’ pantheon. The third
17 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-3

section explores the liminal agency of Hermes and Aphrodite in their movements and methods:
both divinities with exceptional metis, skilled in binding and in double speak; their agency is
border-crossing, liminal, covert, and deeply subversive.
1 The Ambiguous Motion of the Seed: Heraclitus’ Opposites

and the Hymn to Demeter
Before turning to Heraclitus’ text, I would like to emphasize some thematic parallels that occur
in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the rituals associated with Demeter in order to mark
their resonance with Heraclitus’ thinking of opposites and to highlight the cultural import
of these themes. ‘The way up and down’ ambiguation occurs in a significant ritual context
as ‘[t]he first day of the Thesmophoria proper was called the anodos (way up) or sometimes
kathodos (way down)’ (Foley 1994: 72). The Eleusinian Mysteries, like the Thesmophoria,
was associated with the fertility of human beings, plants, and animals; but unlike the Thesmo-
phoria (celebrated solely by women), the Mysteries were celebrated by both men and women
and the rituals were a closely guarded secret. Just as the way up and the way down are am-
biguated in the Thesmophoria, the Eleusinian Mysteries contain an interesting ambiguity:
‘a leading feature… was the ‘death’ of the spirit of the corn, which could be identified with
various points in the cycle of the crops, reaping, threshing, grinding, or sometimes the sowing
of the seed’ (Richardson 1974: 13). Richardson discusses the ambiguity in understanding the
‘death’ of the corn and/or the rape of Persephone as being (1) associated with the harvest and/
or (2) associated with sowing the seed; he notes that Plutarch offers a ‘double interpretation’
where the rape of Persephone is associated with both harvest and sowing (1974: 13). The am-
biguous nature of the ascent and descent is crucial in conjuring up some glimpse of the ancient
significance of these rituals—the goddesses Persephone and Hekate in their movements to and
fro between the world of the gods and the underworld, as well as Demeter’s actions while
among mortals, enact the mysterious movement of the seed as it seems to die then come to life
again. Which happens first depends on where you start, since the paradigm is cyclic: in this
way, the ascent and descent are strangely intertwined and paradoxical. I suggest that we con-
sider this as a moving drama of the seed that is both alive and dead, in a Heraclitean fashion.
To make this plain, a succinct structuring of the action is in order: the fertile maiden Persephone
appears in a meadow attended by nymphs, picking flowers, and then is snatched away to the under-
world (the ‘first hiding of the seed’) where we do not hear from her again until her return to Dem-
eter. Persephone’s fertility in the world of the dead is mirrored by the fruitful Demeter’s disguise as
an old and barren crone when she hides herself among mortals during her grief (‘the second hiding
of the seed’). Demeter’s attempts at immortality are dashed when Demophoon is thrown to the
floor because of Metaneira’s shock at seeing her child placed in the fire, but Persephone succeeds
in her cyclic immortality—perhaps complicit in Hades’ scheme with the pomegranate seed (‘the
third and magically binding hiding of the seed’).4 But, as we shall see, the cosmic complicity grows
deeper. The narrative of the Hymn to Demeter demonstrates how opposites are bound together in
multiple worlds: the world of the gods, the world of mortals, and the underworld.
When Hades gives Persephone the pomegranate seed to eat, the Greek phrasing is
mysterious—the phrase at line 373 ‘amphi e nomecac’ has been translated in multiple ways: in
Homer, it means ‘to distribute’ or ‘handle,’ or ‘wield’; Hermann reads ‘dividing it in two’; Ilgen
has ‘turning it over in his mind’; Matthiae takes it as ‘peering round him.’5 Richardson argues
for similarities with magical practices, as circling is generally a theme in magical binding, par-
ticularly in erotic magic.6 There is also ambiguity about what is being bound here: the sexual
nature of Hades placing the seed in Persephone’s mouth cannot be ignored and is certainly a
18
The Way Up and Down
sign of some consummation of their marriage. However, this is an unusual marriage—maidens

were frequently carried away by Hermes, as the unconvincingly mortal-disguised Aphrodite
claims to Anchises that Hermes had snatched her up and brought her to him (Anchises believes
none of this and recognizes her as a goddess on sight) but this likely story is deliberately not
used here. Hermes does not abduct Persephone; in fact, Hades’ eruption with his mares and
chariot from beneath the earth is unprecedented and constitutes a kind of singularity or mira-
cle in the traditions regarding the underworld: none of the divinities besides Hermes and Hek-
ate are able to traverse this border between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
And yet, here Hades appears as the ground opens up beneath Persephone—this impossible
event is marked in the text by the infamous phrase containing ‘thauma edesthai’ in line 10,
with reference to the narcissus as ‘a wonder to behold.’ I call this phrase infamous because it
appears in moments of rupture, just like Hades with his mare-drawn chariot riding out of the
split earth: it is used to describe Pandora at line 581 of Hesiod’s Theogony once her weap-
onized gifts from the gods have been completed, and it appears in the Hymn to Aphrodite at
line 90 when Aphrodite has completed arraying herself for the seduction of Anchises, like a
warrior preparing for battle. Empedocles cleverly invokes this phrase when he describes the
perfect mixture that Aphrodite, Queen of Mixis, has created.7 This theme will be taken up in
the third section of this chapter but is first signaled here in the hypnotic narcissus: thauma
edesthai is a kind of magical password that means dangerous, seductive power is being used,
a power so overwhelmingly beautiful and enchanting that it defies any reaction but paralysis.
Indeed, the narcissus is a ‘snare’ for Persephone, as Pandora is a ‘dolon’ or trap for men, and
Aphrodite is the eternal honeypot that starts the Trojan War, through her mortal avatar, Helen.
While this abduction moment in the Hymn to Demeter is certainly a rupture, it is simulta-
neously a binding. Clay argues that the effect of Zeus’ design is to ‘create a bridge and alliance
between the upper and the hitherto inaccessible lower world’ (Clay 1989: 213). This cosmic
binding is not done only by Zeus, but with the complicity of both Hades and Gaia: a trinary
magical formula for creating something new: movement between the worlds.8 This trinary
formula is also recognizable in the figure of Hekate, who escorts Persephone as psychopomp-
ous and may also be familiar to lovers of Plato who see khora as a liminal, daemonic agency.9
Without Hekate, this ‘third’ and in-between kind of agency, Zeus’ cosmos would not be able
to link the worlds together: of immortals, of mortals, and the underworld.10 This function of
‘linking’ is expressed in the epithet shared by Hekate and Plato’s khora: ‘kourotrophos,’ which
means ‘nurse of the young’ or in Plato, ‘nurse of becoming.’ This linking is, then, necessary for
new life to flourish and produce difference. To complete the cosmic picture of the Hymn: the
Moon and the Sun bear witness to this event, as Hekate (often associated with the moon) and
Helios are the only divinities that Demeter addresses in her search for Persephone.
From these sites in the hymn, a pattern becomes visible: opposites are bound together. The
way in which opposites are bound is through motion: liminal agency that is able to shift easily
between them, always a strange third to the binary—in the Hymn to Demeter, the world of the
living and the dead become linked (Zeus’ design, according to Clay), mortals gain a link to im-
mortality (Demeter’s instructions to them on the mysteries), and the ambiguous pomegranate
seed links death to life with the marriage of the Host to Many and the flower-faced Maiden.11
The various rituals celebrated in honor of Demeter are testament to the significance of this
theme in Ancient Greek culture and thought—opposites are not understood as separate, but
seen as a paradoxical unity. The ambiguity of the ‘way up and down’ in the ascent and descent
of the goddesses in the hymn is excellent demonstration of Heraclitus’ meaning in DK 60:
‘the way up and down is one and the same.’ Even those mortals who are not initiated into
the mysteries may glean Heraclitus’ meaning when he chastises Hesiod, that ‘teacher of most’
19
because ‘he did not recognize day and night: they are one.’12 As Kahn explains, this paradox
of night and day is deceptive, because ‘the natural unit of time, constant throughout the year,
is not the day but what the Greeks later called the nychthemeron, the day-and-night interval
of twenty-four hours’ (1979: 109). Dawn and dusk are opposites, but these liminal times bind
the day and night together into the unity of the nychthemeron. Heraclitus is a cyclical thinker:
opposites never stay in place; they create tension or bind. DK 51 is perhaps the best fragment
to demonstrate this: ‘They do not comprehend how a thing agrees while differing from itself:
it is a harmony turning backwards on itself like that of the bow or the lyre.’13 Knowing, for
Heraclitus, is motile and in the present tense. As Dilcher has suggested: ‘it should not be as-
sumed that the Heraclitean logos either proceeds from or aims at a standpoint of insights that
can be taken as knowledge in any usual sense’ (2013: 275). Knowing is an ongoing activity
that requires effort, rather than a possession like ‘knowledge.’
Without tension in the strings, bows will not shoot and lyres will not make music: their iden-
tity is their capacity to move and cannot be captured in anything so stagnant as a word though
a song or flying arrow can carry their nature. Heraclitus’ understanding of identity is dynamic,
and his philosophical exploration of names expresses this paradox.14 DK 67 can serve as em-
blematic of this theme: ‘the god: day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger. It alters,
as when mingled with perfumes it gets named according to the pleasure of each one.’15 This
striking statement seems to contrast the idiosyncratic subjectivity of the private (‘idios’) world
that Heraclitus describes as human experience with the unity that is obvious from the divine per-
spective that encompasses both poles. In what we would now call a metaphor (but what would
be more properly considered a ‘sign’ in Heraclitus’ time), we can see how the changing ‘flavor of
the week’ example suggested in DK 67 is a precise image of how things can appear opposite or
identical to one another, relative to the state of the observer.16 While the unity is given, the ‘pri-
vate’ (‘idios’) perspective does not automatically perceive unity but must make an effort to do
so—as Baracchi has suggested, ‘what is common is less a matter of graspable determinacy than
an undertaking.’17 While the kosmos is ordered, in fact, the word ‘kosmos’ means ‘beautiful
order,’ this order ‘may remain essentially unintelligible to us’ as DK 124 says: ‘Kosmos is a heap
of random sweepings.’18 Attention to what is present is perhaps the most difficult and necessary
kind of perception, since as DK 17 says, ‘most [human beings] do not think things in the way
they encounter them nor do they recognize what they experience, but imagine to themselves.’19
Motion is the most crucial element in understanding Heraclitus: the stirring of the kykeon,
the other and other waters of the river, the tension of the bow and lyre, and the ever-increasing
logos of psyche that is too deep to ever entirely traverse—these movements signify Heraclitus’
philosophical ‘argument,’ which is essentially pointing to our awareness of the constantly
shifting nature of ourselves and everything around us as we attempt to codify this experience
into language. Or, more pointedly, Heraclitus begins by suggesting our unawareness of this
process in his programmatic first fragment:
Although this logos is forever (aiei) mortals forever fail to comprehend both before hear-
ing it and once they have heard. Although all things happen in accordance with this logos,
human beings are like the untested when they test such words and works as I set forth,
distinguishing each thing according to (its) nature (kata physin) and telling how it is.
But other human beings are oblivious (lanthanei) of what they do awake just as what
they do asleep escapes (epilanthanontai) them.20
The state of human beings described by Heraclitus in DK 1 is grim indeed: human beings are so
immersed in forgetting (as the repetitions of words cognate with lethe indicate in the last line)
20
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that they cannot even distinguish waking from sleeping. The impossible hope that we cannot
hope to expect lies in memory, the antidote to oblivion and forgetting—and perhaps not coin-
cidentally, an instrument necessary to understand the teachings of Heraclitus as his teaching is
scattered into many fragments that all, paradoxically, speak the same logos.21 Heraclitus’ use
of the term logos is complicated, because he is certainly invoking speech and referring to his
own fragments but he also points beyond his words to something that his words embody or
perform—a logos that ‘all things happen in accordance with’ that is aiei or ‘immortal.’ Even
when the fragments are all rounded up, they do not remain static, but are constantly moving:
they continually play off of one another through a device that Kahn dubbed ‘resonance.’22
Heraclitus’ fragments exhibit a precise craft in their mnemonic devices, using multiple po-
etic tricks like assonance, consonance, repetition, alliteration, plays on words, and puns—the
fragments are designed like burrs that naturally stick to the surface of memory. In reading
Heraclitus, resonance provides a method: when fragments with similar themes, concepts, and
especially words are read alongside one another, their meanings are enriched.
Following Heraclitus’ logic, which states that all things happen in accordance with logos,
then the dim state of human alienation must also happen according to logos. If language is
a pharmaka, then it is the poison and the remedy at once. Rather than invoking Ananke or
‘Necessity,’ Heraclitus tends to suggest this aspect of his teaching by invoking the figure of Jus-
tice, who appears in four fragments explicitly and is often a cosmic agent—a role represented
in other fragments by Zeus/Zenos, War, fire, or divine entities (the sun, Furies) and startlingly,
the child in DK 52. The most emblematic of these Justice fragments is DK 28b: ‘Justice will
catch up with those who invent lies and those who swear to them.’ To emphasize the contrast
with this traditional understanding of Justice as punishing liars and wrongdoers, see DK 52s
divine agency of the child: ‘Aion is a child at play, moving pieces in a game. Kingship belongs
to the child.’23 The cosmic processes of justice that are in play, like the everliving fire that is
kindled and extinguished according to measure in DK 30, happen kata physin (‘according
to nature’) just as a child’s actions are not governed by anything but the whims of play and
circumstance.24 In Heraclitus’ kosmos, there is justice to the movement of life; it is in this way
that what we might call ‘cosmic justice’ happens kata physin (according to nature).25 Even a
child could grasp it!
Thus, the mediating entities in Heraclitus’ kosmos are agents with seemingly opposite
character: the innocent and natural movements of the child correspond kata physin with the
punishing might of Justice that will katalepsetai (‘catch up with’) wrongdoers. This verb kata-
lepsetai means to seize or arrest or apprehend, all ambiguous terms with multiple registers.
Reading DK 10 in resonance with DK 28b, this verb appears in another cognate word: ‘Syllap-
sies: wholes and not wholes convergent divergent consonant dissonant from all things one and
from one thing all.’ This fragment shares structural form with DK 67, where theos precedes
a list of contraries; here syllapsies means ‘seizings’ or as Kahn has it, ‘graspings’ (1979: 282).
When the divine is set before the contraries in DK 10, they are portioned out according to the
idiosyncratic pleasures of ‘each one’; similarly, these seizings of DK 10 are attempts to seize
and arrest something moving, and thus unable to capture them without slippage. The third
fragment that contains katalepsetai is DK 66: ‘fire coming on will judge (krinei) and katalepse-
tai all things’ presents this cosmic agency of justice as fire, a natural process, kata physin: this
is what makes it akin to the movements of the child. The kosmos itself is kata physin since
‘no man or god has made’ it and DK 30 names it aiei (‘immortal’) like the logos of DK 1. The
liminality between opposites in this cosmic register is striking, and it reappears in the proem
of Parmenides’ poem, once again in the context of Justice—but most intriguingly, with clear
associations to the liminal divinity Hekate.26
21
2 Keys Turn Both Ways: Double Speak in Parmenides

and the Oracle of Apollo
In Heraclitus, fire has agency and it is also simultaneously a kind of moving currency; DK
90 says: ‘all things are requital (antamoibe) for fire and fire for all things, as goods for gold
and gold for goods.’27 The agency of fire, or its currents maybe, is antamoibe for all things—
exchangeable, going both ways. A similar image of Justice appears in the proem to Parmenides
poem, as the keys that she holds are called kleidas amoibous: keys that turn both ways. As
Parmenides describes his strange journey to the gates of Night and Day in the proem, there is
a mixing of verb tenses and many repetitions of words for ‘carry’ and ‘send’ but no real sense
of time; this device of changing tenses deliberately has been noted by Marciano, who argues
that this tense-confusion, along with other devices in the proem, induces a state like lucid
dreaming.28
In Jenny Strauss Clay’s reading of the Homeric Hymns, she identifies this same device of
tense-changing and argues that this is because the actions of the divinities do not happen in lin-
ear time: ‘their actions, prerogatives, and epiphanies can be called timeless—not in the sense that
they are beyond or outside time, but insofar as their unique manifestations are indistinguishable
from their eternal ones’ (1989: 27). Thus, the shifting tenses in the proem to Parmenides poem
have precedent in the Homeric Hymns, and both describe the actions of divinities.
Marciano has demonstrated how this language of the proem conjures up a lucid dreaming-
like state, where place and time do not match up. Indeed, this moment before the doors is
perilous: is the kouros alive or dead, dreaming or waking? Snatching up time and space sud-
denly is enough to make any messenger lose his bearings! Hence, the repetition, incantatory in
effect: carry, send, path…. carry, send. Throughout this early proem, opposites are apparent:
there is light, then dark, and the veils un/cover the faces of the Heliades Kourai, Daughters of
the Sun. The flashing of bright and dark is striking and repetitive: prolipousai doomata Nuk-
tos eis phaos or ‘leaving the House of Night for the light.’ But the most significant repetition
for this reading of liminal agency occurs in the echoes of all the words in the proem meaning
‘both’: the wheels amphoteroothen ‘on both sides,’ the threshold amphis ‘above and below’ or
‘surround,’ the keys ‘amoibous’ ‘that turn both ways,’ and the doors amoibadon ‘swinging in
their sockets’—all of this in the first 20 lines of text.
The kind of awareness that can see the keys turn both ways, the door swings both ways,
and resist the compulsive desire to snatch one over the other (as twin-headed mortals are wont
to do) requires metis and a moving agency that is never unseated because it has no seat. The
proem to Parmenides’ poem, as Marciano has persuasively demonstrated, does not give the
listener (or reader, in our day) anywhere to land. Tenses move, action is seemingly blurry and
dreamlike, and then certain detailed sensations and images occur that indicate entry into an-
other world: a divine world where opposites are united, as the various echoes of words mean-
ing ‘both’ suggest. The discourse, or logos, that follows takes two roads: what philosophers
now call the ‘way of truth’ and the ‘way of doxa’ and there has been much controversy as to
how these ways are to be received. The ‘logical’ thing to do, was, seemingly, to discard the
‘way of doxa’ and cling to the ‘way of truth’: but that is not logic; that is falling right into the
binary trap that has been set. Unfortunately, much of the ‘way of doxa’ has been lost. With
our tattered bits, we can at least reconstruct an interesting mirror-play between ‘the way of
truth’ and ‘way of doxa’ for twin-headed mortals.29
The goddess’ welcome is concise: she takes his right hand in hers and immediately says: wel-
come, you’re not dead: you are to be a messenger. The reassurance that he is not dead (moira
kake or ‘bad fate’ is a euphemism for death) and on to business is alarming but indicates that
22
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the kouros is certainly not within the usual mortal confines.30 With her welcome, the goddess
makes a clear statement of her purpose:
What is needed is that you should learn all things, both the unshaken heart of persuasive
truth and the opinions of mortals, in which nothing can truthfully be trusted at all. But
even so, this too you will learn: how beliefs based on appearances ought to be believable
as they travel all through all there is.31
The goddess will go on to characterize mortals as ‘twin heads’ (dikranoi), suggesting that
binary thinking is a deep-seated mortal habit of thought, and Parmenides’ poem suggests fur-
ther that divine intervention is needed to unseat it.32 The kind of thinking needed here is not
conscious mortal logic, which sets opposites against each other through a kind of twin-headed
seeing double, but the immortal logic that can bind opposition and see all as one, though it
may paradoxically appear as multiplicity. For example, the goddess has explained in the ‘way
of truth’ portion of the poem that ‘it’ (the unnamed subject, that ‘is’) has been ‘bound by
Fate to be whole and unmoving’ and then she says: ‘its name shall be everything: every single
name that mortals have invented, convinced they are all true, birth and death, existence, non-
existence, change of place, alteration of bright color’ (DK 8.38–39). This statement presents
a problem for mortal language, since, taken literally, ‘its name’ would include every single
word and create an impossible situation in which every word mortals utter means ‘is’ or at
least refers to ‘is.’
After dropping this logical bomb, the goddess likens ‘it’ to a sphere, emphasizing the fact
that her speech about the truth is binding in its circularity. The kouros, in hearing her speak
these words in the place beyond the gates of Night and Day, has been bound: given a kind of
antidote against mortal binary habit.33 Only with this antidote in place can the kouros hear
the goddess’ speech of the doxa, since it will describe mortal opinion or seeming, and not be
persuaded by it. It is in this magic moment that she switches modes entirely by saying: ‘here
shall I close my trustworthy speech and thought about the truth. Henceforward learn the
opinions of mortals, giving ear to the deceptive ordering of my words’ (DK 8.51–52).34 Now
that the tricky and ambiguous problem of translation between mortal and immortal language
has been breached, a short detour needs to be taken with the god Apollo before diving into
the perilous doxa.35
The agency of Apollo is sudden and abrupt in the Hymn in his honor and he can arrive,
unexpected, with his perilous bow and cause the impossible to happen: this is precisely what
he does in the first scene of the Hymn to Apollo, where his armed presence could signal a new
era through the elimination of his father (as was traditional), but instead he calmly sits down
to drink with the assembled gods who had jumped up in a flurry of worry upon seeing him.36
Apollo has a double character: he is a twin (with Artemis) and he is god of sun and light and
clarity and loves the musical lyre but, on the darker side, he is the god who brings plagues
and the destruction wrought by mortals who fail to ‘know themselves’ and fail to interpret
the oracle without hubris. Apollo also has a mysterious epithet, that is usually translated as
‘far-shooter’: hekatos. Invoking Hekate, this epithet could be an indication of Apollo’s ability
to act from any distance, as though he inhabits space as all of the gods inhabit time: the gods
exist in a timeless eternity, and Apollo demonstrates that space has a similar quantum aspect.
Whatever the meaning of the epithet, the bowstring exhibits tension, as does the lyre that
Apollo carries. Heraclitus hints at this tension in the language of the oracle: ‘the Lord whose
oracle is at Delphi neither declares nor conceals but gives a sign.’ The tension in language is
clear in the famous riddling nature of the ambiguous oracle, and the tension in the oracle’s
23
ability to bring either healing or destruction is also a visible sign of Apollo’s nature. In com-
municating the will of Zeus to mortals, the oracle at Delphi is one of Apollo’s areas of timai
(honor), and this communication from divine to mortal requires translation. The ambiguous
language of the oracle is an example of the phenomenon named by Hesiod in Theogony as
‘double speak’ (amphilogia), since the words carry multiple meanings simultaneously and are
inherently deceptive.37 Perhaps the most famous example of double speak in Ancient Greek
texts is Odysseus’ trick in telling the Cyclops that his name is ‘no one.’ The ability to use
double speak seems to be primarily a divine skill that depends on metis; in the case of mortal
Odysseus, he is being aided by Athena, the daughter of Metis herself.
In reading the doxa of Parmenides’ poem, Mourelatos has suggested that we take the god-
dess’ deceptive stance in the doxa as a case of double speak: ‘if we think of her words as
something that mortals actually say, or might say, or subscribe to, this takes on the dimension
of Socratic or Sophoclean irony’ (1970: 228).38 The goddess shifts so dramatically after her
monologue about ‘the truth,’ when she then warns the listener that she will begin to speak de-
ceptively (the shift between the ‘way of truth’ and doxa section of the poem, as they have been
identified in scholarship), that Kingsley has argued the identity of the goddess switches from
Persephone, queen of the Underworld, to Aphrodite, that deceptive queen of the mortal world
of mixture.39 In speaking the doxa, the goddess again warns the kouros by telling him that the
order of mortals is a diakosmos, a battle formation.40 Ecofeminist thinkers would certainly
find laughter, trademark of Aphrodite, in considering the mortal habit of binary thinking as
‘antagonistic dualism’—precisely the battle-formation mindset that needs persuasion (peitho)
and metis to conquer, keeping with the Ancient Greek motif of the weaker overpowering the
stronger.41
3 Hermaphroditic Mixture
Aphrodite has been tragically misunderstood. The Trojan War is evidence of her subversive
ability to cause mixis: an ancient Greek term used to describe both the sweaty mingling of
bodies in sex and the sweaty mingling of warriors in battle and her effects are pervasive
and cosmic, as Cyrino has argued: ‘the extent of Aphrodite’s power to inspire erotic mixis
“mingling” for both gods and humans and even to mingle bodies across the ever-permeable
boundaries between immortals and mortals, is abundantly illustrated in the mythological nar-
rative of the Theogony’ (2010: 34). While the presentations of Aphrodite call her laughter-
loving and emphasize her charming qualities, it is wise to keep in mind, as Empedocles warns
his student, that she is a powerful and inescapably persuasive force: ‘and you, gaze on her with
your understanding and do not sit with stunned eyes. For she is deemed even by mortals to
be inborn in [their] joints’ (DK 17.21).42 The Hymn to Aphrodite has traditionally been read
without attention to Aphrodite’s sly use of double speak and frequent invocations of Hermes,
transforming a narrative that demonstrate Aphrodite’s powers and prerogatives into a patri-
archal cautionary tale about the promiscuous daughter punished by her daddy Zeus. If this
somewhat Freudian fantasy version of the hymn’s narrative were true, it would mean that the
Hymn to Aphrodite deviates from the formula of all the major Homeric hymns suggested by
Clay: ‘the goal of each poem is to characterize and to convey fully the essence of its chosen
divinity both in speech and in action’ (2006: 17). When the hymn is read in the proper con-
text, it follows the formula and is consistent with the other three hymns (to Apollo, Demeter,
and Hermes).43
In the Hymn to Aphrodite, we are given access to her secret methods of action, if we ap-
proach the text with some metis: after her impregnating experience with Anchises, she has
24
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devised new ways of operating, having ‘been shown the way’ by Hermes.44 The hymn begins
with a statement about the pervasiveness of Aphrodite’s power: of all beings, including the
gods, mortals animals of the land and sea, only three remain immune to her charms: Athena,
Artemis, and Hestia, the virgin goddesses with different prerogatives. Zeus has a problem
with crafty Aphrodite since ‘she even led astray the mind of Zeus … even his intricate mind
she deceived when she liked, and easily coupled him with mortal women’ (36–38). The text
repeats Aphrodite’s works here, using the repetition-for-emphasis aspect of double speak that
will appear in Aphrodite’s speeches throughout the hymn: she tricked Zeus, and in case you
didn’t hear it the first time, she really led him astray.45 This should be some consolation to us
mortals in reading the hymn, for so long as Aphrodite’s punishment by her father for being so
promiscuous, especially by blending the mortals and immortals together.
Aphrodite uses double speak throughout the hymn and frequently invokes Hermes, but if
it wasn’t obvious enough, she comes upon Anchises as he is playing a lyre very loudly: the in-
strument that Hermes invents as his first action in the Hymn to Hermes. If the loudness of the
lyre is significant, we can see contrast between Aphrodite’s former method of boasting among
the gods compared to the sneaky and Hermes-inspired double speak that we see Aphrodite
use in the hymn: hermaphroditic methods are disguise, double speak, and binding. Aphrodite,
like Hermes, demonstrates that peitho (persuasion) is more powerful than force in overcoming
Zeus’ challenge to her powers by adopting new and devious strategies. Just as Hermes uses
metis and double speak in the Hymn to Hermes to exonerate himself from stealing Apollo’s
cows (he doesn’t even know what a cow is, and he’s just a baby!), the weaker overcomes the
stronger through metis and persuasion (peitho). The seductive power that Aphrodite wields
is not force, but persuasion so powerful that it is compulsive. While this seductive power is
coded consistently throughout Greek myth as feminine, it is also craftily mixed in all four
major Homeric Hymns with that ambiguous master of metis, the binder of Apollo, swift mes-
senger and psychopompous, and (alleged) snatcher of maidens: Hermes.
The liminal agency of both of these divinities is radical: Aphrodite creates illicit mixtures,
not just blending male and female, but mixing mortal and immortal together into hybrid rogue
creatures that challenge the reign of Zeus by ambiguating that border between mortal and
immortal. Hermes is the last of the gods to be added to the pantheon, and his prerogative, as
Clay has insightfully suggested, is to initiate motion into the Olympian cosmos:
We observe that the fully articulated Olympian system of divisions and boundaries re-
mains static and lifeless unless it acquires the possibility of movement between its spheres
and limits. Introduced only after that hierarchical configuration of the cosmos has been
achieved and its boundaries defined, Hermes embodies that principle of motion.
(2006: 98)
Hermes is identified with motion because his identity is also dynamic and fluid, he is not even
sure that he is a god and tests himself with mortal meats, in the Hymn to Hermes; he crosses
limits, moves through keyholes, tricks Apollo, and makes Zeus laugh. This kind of agency
and motion is necessary to the cosmos and yet paradoxically also creates a tension through its
subversive nature: hermaphroditic battle plans do not intend the violent overthrow of Zeus
through force but work subversively within the limits to shift, disguise, trick, and compel
using the weapons of persuasive speech and metis. Rather than producing the blood of war,
this kind of erotic assault produces tears, in double form of laughter or grief. This liminal and
motile agency that both Aphrodite and Hermes carry leaves cosmic echoes in its trail; however,
we tell the tales of the words and works of these divinities.
25
Notes
1 DK 6o: ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή, Kahn’s translation (1979).
2 DK 62: ‘Immortals mortal mortals immortal living the others’ death dead in the others’ life’ (my
translation).
3 See Vernant and Detienne’s comprehensive work on Metis: Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture
and Society (1991) where they carefully document all of the places in culture and thought where metis
is invoked.
4 We may read a contrast here between the mortal and immortal realms—the seed trick with Hades
and Persephone succeeds, while the seed trick that Demeter attempts with mortal Demophoon fails,
though it succeeds in producing the Mysteries, which are (allegedly) as close to immortality as mor-
tals can get.
5 These translations are described in Richardson (1974: 266–277).
6 For circular as binding, see Marciano (2008); also Winkler (1990). Foley (1994) similarly translates:
‘stealthily passing it around her’ and says about her translation: ‘I chose to adopt the possibility that
Hades is performing a magical rite to bind Persephone to himself,’ 56.
7 Empedocles, in DK 35, describes the ‘soothing assault of blameless Love’ (line 13) and the manner in
which Love (identified frequently throughout the fragments with Aphrodite) makes immortal things
mortal through mixing them: ‘and as things blended with each other ten thousand swarms and tribes
of mortals streamed into being, fitted together in all sorts of shapes and forms, thauma edesthai’ (lines
16–17, all lines Kingsley’s translation). Mixis refers to the sweaty mingling of bodies, whether in war
or in sex; see Cyrino’s discussion of mixis in the context of Aphrodite (2010: 32–35). Discussed be-
low, Discussed below, Section 3 ‘Hermaphroditic Mixture.’
8 Gaia grew the narcissus ‘as a snare for the flower-faced maiden in order to gratify by Zeus’ design the
Host-to-Many,’ Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 8–9.
9 For a reading of khora as liminal agency, see Elbert Decker (2017) ‘Borderland Spaces of the Third
Kind: Erotic Agency in Plato and Octavia Butler.’
10 See Clay’s analysis in ‘Hecate of the Theogony’ for a thorough textual argument regarding Hekate’s
role in linking the world of the Titans with Zeus’ Pantheon and creating essential continuity between
these reigns.
11 I call the pomegranate seed ‘ambiguous’ here because it is a symbol that can stand in for Persephone’s
agency: does she eat the seed willingly, or unwillingly?
12 DK 57, Kahn’s translation.
13 My translation.
14 Fragments where he explicitly brings name and naming into question: DK 32 the name Zenos, DK
48 the name of the bios, DK 23 the name of Justice; implicitly: DK 50, DK 30, DK 10, DK 15, DK 9,
DK 61, DK 97, DK 90, etc.
15 Kahn’s translation, however I have omitted the ‘and’ he includes between each pairing.
16 On the theme of subjective or relative perception in Heraclitus: DK 2, DK 89, DK 17, DK 107, DK
56, DK 129, DK 12, DK 78, DK 82–3, DK 79, DK 70, DK 61, DK 13, DK 9, DK 10, etc.
17 Baracchi, 286.
18 Baracchi, 286. Kahn’s translation of DK 124.
19 As Kahn points out, the last phrase of DK 17 reads literally ‘seem to themselves,’ emphasizing the
private condition of these perceivers. My translation.
20 DK 1, my translation.
21 ‘Impossible hope that we cannot hope to expect’ reads DK 18 ‘He who does not expect will not find
out the unexpected because it is pathless and impossible to discover’ alongside DK 27 ‘what awaits
men at death they neither expect/hope (elpis) or even imagine.’ Orphic and Pythagorean traditions
reflect this theme of memory and immortality, as do Sappho’s surviving songs, and as Plato’s Sympo-
sium does later.
22 Kahn describes linguistic density (where one word or phrase contains multiple meanings, similar to
Freud’s concept of ‘condensation’) and resonance as two primary devices of Heraclitus’ language;
the phenomena of resonance includes repetition of words, themes, and images and ‘these diverse
phenomena of resonance, taken together with explicit statements of identity and connection (such as
“war is shared and conflict is justice”) will serve to link together all the major themes of Heraclitus’
discourse into a single network of connected thoughts, thus articulating his general claim that “all
things are one”’ (90, italics in original).
26
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23 Kahn’s translation (1979).

24 DK 30: Kosmos the same for all no man nor god has made but it ever was and is and will be fire
everliving, kindled in measures and in measures extinguished. Kahn’s translation.
25 Life is invoked as a kind of agent in DK 30 where fire is ‘everliving’ (aeizoon) and in DK 32 ‘Zenos’
is the name that the one wise alone is willing and unwilling to be spoken of; this use of ‘Zenos’ as
a name plays on the genitive form of Zeus and the verb zen, to live. For discussion of the relation
between life, movement, and psyche in Heraclitus, see Elbert Decker (2015) ‘Everliving Fire: The
Synaptic Motion of Life in Heraclitus.’
26 I am not suggesting that the divinity at the gates in Parmenides’ proem is Hekate, in fact, the figure
is named Justice; the ambiguity arises when the actions and placement of the figure match Hekate:
the epithet ‘keyholder’ kleidouchos, her placement at a crossroads, and particularly a crossroads that
may be in a chthonic realm, and the Daughters of the Sun using magical speech to get her to open the
door (see Marciano 2008 for magical speech).
27 Kahn’s translation, 1979.
28 Marciano suggests that the radical indeterminacy of Parmenides’ proem with regard to time, space,
and context creates a state much like lucid dreaming (as Kingsley 2003 has argued, Parmenides was
an iatromantis, ‘healer-messenger,’ practicing incubation in the tradition of Asclepius). According to
Marciano, ‘the sequence of present and past tenses creates a disorientation that dissolves the dimen-
sion of time,’ 32.
29 Mourelatos’ excellent study, The Route of Parmenides, creates this mirror-play between the way of
truth and the doxa very skillfully, see 248–249 for his table of ‘Similarities-with-a-Difference Between
“Doxa” and “Truth.”’
30 μοῖρα κακὴ as ‘hard fate.’
31 Kingsley’s translation (2003).
32 The suggestion that divine intervention is needed is implicit in the kouros’ journey, where he is pas-
sively carried to the abode of a goddess by ‘Rightness’ and ‘Justice’ (DK 1.27); in the Doxa portion
of the poem, the goddess also tells him that her speaking of the doxa (‘the whole arrangement as it
seems to mortals’) to him means that ‘no mortal will ride on past you (paralassei) in knowledge’—he
will have an edge due to this divine intervention.
33 For a detailed account of binding in the aletheia portion of the poem, see Elbert Decker ‘The Essential
Role of the Doxa in Parmenides’ Teaching,’ forthcoming in Inquiries Into Being: Essays on Parme-
nides, edited by Colin C. Smith, SUNY Press.
34 Burnet’s translation
35 Parmenides as iatromantis suggests that the agency of Apollo is already at work in Parmenides’ text,
delivered to him by a goddess in a place ‘far beyond the beaten tracks of mortals’ (DK 1.27–28),
presumably in an incubatory state, see Marciano (2008).
36 See Clay’s analysis of this scene and discussion of the rumor that Apollo will be atasthalos: ‘no single
English term can convey the full range of this Greek word, “overbearing,” “violent,” “reckless,” or
“lawless” offer only partial trnslations of this highly charged term. In Homer, it is frequently linked
with a form of hybris,’ 36.
37 Mourelatos discusses this term in Hesiod (Theogony 229) and applies it to the goddess’ speech in the
doxa (2008: 227).
38 For a reading of double speak in early poetic texts, including Sophocles, see Elbert Decker (2021).
39 Kingsley (2003: 214–220).
40 Parmenides poem DK 8.60; Mourelatos discusses the meaning of this term (2008: 230–231).
41 The theme of the weaker overpowering the stronger is evident in the Hymn to Hermes, where Hermes
uses metis and persuasion to overcome the more powerful Apollo; in the Hymn to Aphrodite, Aphro-
dite uses similar tactics to outmaneuver the more powerful Zeus, see Elbert Decker (2022) for discus-
sion of this theme in the four major Homeric Hymns.
42 Inwood’s translation (2001).
43 See Elbert Decker, ‘The Most Beautiful Thing on the Black Earth: Sappho’s Alliance with Aphrodite’
(2019), also ‘The Roots of Life and Death in the Homeric Hymns and Presocratic Philosophy’ (2022,
SUNY Press).
44 Aphrodite says: ‘after showing me the way and pointing you out, the mighty Argus-slayer went off to
rejoin the families of the immortals, while I have come to you, forced by Necessity,’ 128–130.
45 See Elbert Decker (2021) for double speak as repetition in the Hymn to Aphrodite and then deliber-
ately taken up by Empedocles in his ‘double tale’ that he tells us he must say twice.
27
Works Cited
Baracchi, C. (2015) “The Πόλεμος That Gathers All: Heraclitus on War,” Research in Phenomenology,
Vol. 45: 267–287.
Clay, J.S. (1984) “The Hecate of the Theogony,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1,
27–38.
——— (1989) The Politics of Olympus: Form and Meaning in the Major Homeric Hymns, Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Cyrino, M.S. (2010) Aphrodite, New York: Routledge.
Elbert Decker, J. (2015) “Everliving Fire: The Synaptic Motion of Life in Heraclitus,” Epoche: A Journal
for the History of Philosophy, Vol. 19, No. 2, 173–180 [As Jessica Elbert Mayock].
——— (2017) “Borderland Spaces of the Third Kind: Erotic Agency in Plato and Octavia Butler,” in Bor-
derlands and Liminal Subjects: Transgressing the Limits in Philosophy and Literature (eds. J. Elbert
Decker and D. Winchock). London: Palgrave, 187–211.
——— (2019) “The Most Beautiful Thing on the Black Earth: Sappho’s Alliance with Aphrodite,”
in Looking at Beauty To Kalon in Western Greece, Fonte Aretusa 2018 Symposium Proceedings,
Parnassos Press.
——— (2021) “I Will Tell a Double Tale: Double Speak in the Ancient Greek Poetic Tradition,” Epoche:
A Journal for the History of Philosophy, Vol. 25, No. 2: 237–248.
——— (2022) “The Roots of Life and Death in the Homeric Hymns and Presocratic Philosophy,” in
Otherwise Than The Binary: New Feminist Readings in Ancient Philosophy and Culture (eds. Elbert
Decker and Vilhauer Layne). New York: SUNY Press, 87–120.
——— (forthcoming) “The Essential Role of the Doxa in Parmenides’ Teaching,” forthcoming in Inquir-
ies Into Being: Essays on Parmenides (ed. Colin C. Smith). New York: SUNY Press.
Dilcher, R. (2013). “How Not to Conceive Heraclitean Harmony,” in Doctrine and Doxography: Stud-
ies on Heraclitus and Pythagoras (eds. David Sider and Dirk Obbink), 263–280. Berlin: De Gruyter.
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Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Kahn, C. (1979) The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kingsley, P. (1995) Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic: Empedocles and the Pythagorean Tradition,
——— (2003) Reality, Inverness: Golden Sufi Press.
Marciano, L.G. (2008) “Images and Experience: At the Roots of Parmenides’ Aletheia,” Ancient Phi-
losophy Vol. 28: 21–48.
Miller, M. (2006) “Ambiguity and Transport: Reflections on the Proem to Parmenides’ Poem,” Oxford
Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Vol. 30: 1–47.
Mourelatos, A.P.D. (1970) The Route of Parmenides, New Haven: Yale University Press.
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Lloyd), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Winkler, J.J. (1990) The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece,
28
3
SAPPHO OF LESBOS AND
THE TIME OF EROSOPHY
Chelsea C. Harry
1 Introduction
Sappho of Lesbos is best known as an early Greek lyric poet and songstress, especially for
her homoerotic verse. As André Lardionois notes, even in antiquity it was the erotic content
of Sappho’s poems and songs that were best known (Lardionois and Rayor 2014: 5).1 Given
the bawdy reputation her work has often garnered, Sappho is not typically recognized as a
thinker, let alone as a “philosopher.” Take, for example, Jenkins’s view that Sappho “…does
not preach or argue or deal in complex or difficult ideas” (1998: iv). As David Robinson
explains, despite being recognized in antiquity for her extraordinary poetic talent, sometimes
described as “the poetess,”—a distinction that placed her in the same company as Homer,
“the poet,”—she is not typically known even for her unique abilities in composing songs and
poems (Robinson 1963: 4–5, 8). In short, the subject of much of her verse eclipsed the bril-
liant way she wrote about it, resulting in her general obscurity today.2 And if Sappho’s poetic
legacy has been occluded by history, it is unsurprising that her standing as an original thinker
has been likewise mostly overlooked.
Counter to these general trends, however, Aristotle cited her views on death in the Rhetoric
(1398b). In the twentieth century, Robinson ended his thorough study of Sappho’s work and
influence with the conclusion that it constitutes a “great and noble literature,” even remarking
on her unquestionable “genius”—stating it so plainly as to compare Sappho’s extant verse to a
fragment of sculpture where the artist’s talent is clear regardless that only a piece of the origi-
nal creation remains (Robinson 1963: 237). Even further, Page duBois has stated her desire to
“make a scene” in order to establish Sappho’s rightful place in the history of Western civiliza-
tion. According to duBois, Sappho offers an alternative to the Platonic champion of rational
and ideal truth over quotidian human experience and corporeality.
Standpoint theory in philosophical feminism, the position that there is not a single objec-
tive lens by which to judge the merit of ideas, even in science,3 together with a renewed in-
terest among some philosophers to uncover and bring to light lesser-known figures from the
history of ideas,4 suggests that there might be more for philosophers to say about Sappho.
In this chapter, I take up part of this project, arguing that the incommensurability of ideas
surrounding Sappho’s life and work reflects a fundamental incompleteness inherent in the
subject matter of her songs, in the way she expresses herself, and, ultimately, in the way she
29 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-4

Chelsea C. Harry
understands beings in time. In so doing, I aim to show not only, pace classical scholars Page
duBois and Mary Barnard, that Sappho’s particular way of thinking about and expressing
this content places her among the earliest great thinkers in Western philosophical history, but
also that her songs are philosophical, even if duBois is correct that they are not philosophical
in the Platonic sense. To this end, using analysis from feminist philosopher Nina Belmonte,
I position Sappho as an “erosopher,” before exploring the unique temporal paradigm that,
having benefited from the work of classicist Eva Stehle, I suggest mirrors the structure of
Sapphic love and desire.
Despite some scholars extolling Sappho’s remarkable staying power over the past 2,700
years, even if we aren’t always cognizant of it,5 others have criticized how little we know defin-
itively about who she was and the life she lived. In his foreword to Mary Barnard’s celebrated
1994 translation of Sappho’s fragments, Dudley Fitts put it this way: “We have heard a great
deal about Sappho, and we know almost nothing” (Barnard 1994: xvi), fitting with duBois’
claim that Sappho is only a name, that it is impossible to know more (1995: x). While not a lot
is known definitively about Sappho’s life, the tenth-century Suda, an encyclopedia compiled
from ancient Greek sources, tells us basic biographical information; though, its content is not
without debate.6 According to the Suda, Sappho lived in Lesbos, but was originally from Eres-
sos, and flourished during the 42nd Olympiad (612–608 BCE). Her family consisted of her
father, Simon, mother, Cleis, daughter, also Cleis, and husband, Keryklos. It is believed that
she was a teacher, and the Suda names her pupils: Anagora of Miletos, Gongyla of Kolophon,
and Eunika of Salamis. In addition, it names her female companions, with whom she was said
to have had a “shameful friendship”: Atthis, Telesippa, and Megara. It also tells us that she
was the author of nine books of lyric songs as well as epigrams, elegiacs, iambics, and solo
songs and that she invented the plectrum.
As Mary Barnard explains, Mitylene, the capital of the island of Lesbos, and Sappho’s
home, was a bustling and cosmopolitan city in the sixth and seventh centuries BCE (Barnard
2019: 93). It joins other ancient cities at this time in Asia Minor that became places where not
only trade but also new ideas and traditions, flourished. Three other such coastal towns, Mile-
tus, Ephesus, and Samos were, after all, the respective homes of the early Ionian philosophers
(Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes), Heraclitus, and Pythagoras. Given the context of
Sappho’s life—when she was born and where she came of age—it is not altogether surprising
that she was able to become an original thinker and creative.
The reality of this context of Sappho’s life and work means that we must be careful to treat
Sappho as we have learned to treat the rest of the earliest Greek thinkers—the so-called Preso-
cratics.7 Not unlike the Presocratics, only a fraction of Sappho’s work survives today,8 and we
rely on surviving fragments,9 together with testimonia about her work from later thinkers, to
construct impressions of, and ideas about, her and work. We must also realize that most of
what she wrote, which could be upwards of eight papyrus scrolls, is completely lost. In fact,
there is likely only one complete Sapphic song extant. Not unlike the Presocratic philosopher
Heraclitus, who wrote aphoristically, or an epic poet like Homer who wrote in meter, it is also
important to keep in mind that Sappho’s poetry was written to be sung to music. Like Heracli-
tus and Homer, she used certain words because they were playing a double role—one, in terms
of meaning and communication and, another, in terms of syllabic fit for a certain melody or
tone. Unfortunately, her music is no longer extant. The end result is a challenging combination
of factors that make reading and translating Sappho incredibly complex.
Matching admonishments from scholars dubious about Sappho’s biography, scholars
working on the reception of Sappho’s work caution us against thinking that there is a clear or
even a single way to understand her lyrics. For some, interpretations of Sappho are little more
30
Sappho of Lesbos and the Time of Erosophy
than fictions, even fantasies. Ellen Greene put it bluntly: “each generation invents its own Sap-
pho” (Greene 1996: 3). While some translators prefer to render Sappho’s songs as literal as
possible, others work to best interpret the meanings she might have intended. Still some work
to reproduce the lyricism that was present in the original Greek, written in Aeolic dialect. On
account of these differences, together with the inherent difficulties in reading incomplete texts,
the following discussion relies on the work of a chorus of translators: Mary Barnard (2019;
originally 1958), David A. Campbell (1982), Stanley Lombardo (2016), and Anne Carson
(2002), all of whom bring their own standpoints to the interpretation and translation of Sap-
pho’s ideas.10 In order to read Sappho anew, one needs to be aware of various competing reali-
ties and still be open to considering Sappho’s lyrics on their own terms, in whatever limited
capacity is possible.
2 Sappho, Erosophy, and Time

Sappho doesn’t just write about erotic subjects, she writes erotically. Occupied with the pre-
cariousness of being human and of understanding what it means to be a being living for a finite
time, she expresses herself in lyric phenomenological descriptions of her body, of desire and
yearning, and most of all, of a fundamental incompleteness she experiences as a person who
cannot ever fully assimilate herself with another, not even with her own past self. It is from this
particular way of thinking and writing about human mortality, as humans qua lack, that one
likewise finds a complementary temporal structure emerge in Sappho’s lyrics. In the so-called
Tithonus poem, Sappho writes about aging, combining her emotional and bodily experiences
with a universal statement about the fate of being mortal:
My heart is heavy, and my knees will not carry me,

though once they were light as fawn’s in the dance.
I lament this constantly, but what can be done?
There is no way for a human not to grow old.
(Lombardo 2016: 28–29)11
Sappho reflects on her present physical condition, contrasting it with her past, expressing her
current emotional state in the face of this reality, and then, according to Lombardo’s transla-
tion, concludes something about the inevitability of aging for all humans. Her lament is erotic
because she expresses what is no longer, what can never be, and what is not-yet. In the present
moment, she is all of these, fundamentally unfulfilled because she is alive and yet cognizant of
the impossibility of having what she really wants in this life—eternal youth. Sappho’s particu-
lar erotic interpretation of life makes her a kind of philosopher.
Following Anne Carson, Nina Belmonte explains desire as integral to a philosophical dis-
position. She presents the later Platonic version of philosophy as having eschewed desire for
wisdom in favor of the acquisition of it. Belmonte asks: “perhaps it is the longing and not
the possession that makes one a lover of wisdom?” (Belmonte 2017: 1). Responding to her
own question, Belmonte recounts a well-known link between desire and philosophy in Plato’s
Republic, Phaedrus, and Symposium before drawing a provocative conclusion: that all phi-
losophers are principally erosophers (ibid.). As Belmonte explains, Plato and Plato’s Socrates
replace the erosopher’s desire with assimilation. What was once a lack is now fulfilled, and so
as the difference that existed between the desirer and that which was desired has now become
likeness, the erosopher becomes a philosopher, or a friend of the wisdom for which she used
to long.
31
Chelsea C. Harry
Belmonte’s work explores “a reinterpretation of philosophia that doesn’t so much critique

the tradition as reimagine it from within, calling into question its claims to a proprietary rela-
tionship to knowledge grounded in imagery of identity, ideality and subsumption.” Instead, in
step with Carson and Jan Zwicky’s rediscovery of, “a love of wisdom that dwells in difference
and desire as the mode of its true calling,” Belmonte names this alternate practice Erosophia.
“Eros,” she writes, “can bind together only what remains separate” (Belmonte 2017: 3). Such
a reimagining of philosophy from within, emphasizing an enduring relationship between dis-
parate entities, viz., not only two different individuals but also our past, present, and future
selves, signifies both the subject of so much of Sapphic poetry and the incommensurability
between Sappho’s original and longstanding contribution to the very tradition that does not
consider her part of itself.
Implied in erosophia is an awareness of the impossibility of acquiring, fully knowing, or
consuming that which is itself autonomous, open-ended and perennially changing. It operates
in the chasm between what was and what is not-yet, holding these together in the dynamic
and iterative present.12 In a fragment from the Orations, Maximus of Tyre illustrates Sappho’s
view of love as a way to hold together that which must by its nature remain distinct: “Diotima
says that Love (Ἔρως) flourishes when he has abundance but dies when he is in need: Sappho
combined these ideas and called Love bitter-sweet (130. 2) and pain-giver” (Campbell 1982:
174–175). In fragment 26, Sappho notes that “For those whom I treat well harm me most of
all” (Campbell 1982: 74–75). Sappho is remarkably forthright about the structure of eros,
using her emotional experience of the structure to buoy her description, rather than to detract
from it. Instead of defining eros too narrowly, dependent on a specific moment in time, Sap-
pho’s depicts it holistically as never x, nor y, but as inherently unfinished and insatiable. Times
of unity are sweet; times apart are bitter. As Sappho’s love for others increases, so does the
pain at their separation. Sappho’s ability to hold all of this together as reality, despite how it
feels, illustrates her commitment to the truth of her experience and to what appears to her to
be the truth about beings in time.
Carson explains eros in terms of this dynamism, pointing to its shape and temporal
structure:
As a movement impelled by lack, eros is also a temporal deferral of the not-yet, the still-
not-yet. The pull of desire is like the trajectory of consciousness trapped in the ‘double-
bind’ of a now that is always also toward a future that will be repetition. The experience
of eros is a sustained going out of oneself only to come back to a lack: a suspension in
a strange-loop. Deute is the Greek word that spears time and again in ancient erotic
poetry: de—now, aute—once again.
(Belmonte 2017: 4; op cit. Carson 2005: 118)
Desire is marked by a “double-bind” and a “strange-loop” that, for Belmonte, demonstrates

Carson’s aim to expose the erotic nature of thinking, which Belmonte clarifies as, “the con-
tinued reach for something other, something not to be possessed” (Belmonte 2017: 5). Desire
of an autonomous being, like desire for certain kinds of wisdom or knowing, is always still
futural, even in the present, in its refusal to be had.
For Belmonte, both Carson and Jan Zwicky highlight the importance of language to the
expression of eros. Zwicky advocates “lyric philosophy,” which foregoes typical rules of logic
and argumentation in favor of “metaphor, music, aphorism, poetry, and forms of artistic
expression” (Belmonte 2017: 6). Zwicky seeks to expose a world of interconnectedness and
meaning, where individual beings remain independent of each other while at the same time
32
inextricably related. This ontology, where according to Zwicky the world’s internal structure
to itself is a metaphor, reveals a paradox. Belmonte explains, “‘X is Y’ is metaphorical only
when X is not Y”; and, quoting Zwicky: “‘The metaphor tells two truths at once: ‘not two’
it says, while remembering ‘not one’” (Belmonte ibid.; op cit. Zwicky 2012: 16). Erosophia
works through this paradox, which is always already a truth about the world and our indi-
vidual place in the context of others, and creates meaning through its lens. As Belmonte con-
cludes, it is not only truer to our own experience in the world but also representative of the
hope of the pursuit; “the delight of the not-me, not-yet” (Belmonte 2017: 15).
Sappho’s songs reveal this “not me, not-yet” both in their erotic structure, as brilliant
whisps of a phenomenology of desire told through lyrics and because they place Sappho’s
felt reality at the fore. This felt reality, the fact of her desire, results not because of a rational
decision, but because of her experience as an embodied being in a context with others. Per
Belmonte, “erotic experience is not a decision; it is an invasion” (Belmonte 2017: 3). As we
see in Sappho’s fragment 31, eros is sensual and uninvited, dependent on the ontology Zwicky
describes:
He seems to me equal to gods that man

whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing—oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears
and cold sweat holds me shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me.
(Carson 62–63)
Sappho watches as a man sits with the object of her desire. This event, even in its banality,
alights Sappho’s emotions, causing Sappho’s heart to beat fast and strongly, almost as if it
were to beat right out of her chest. In the experience of the not-yet of the other, Sappho’s body
is invaded by desire.
In Carson’s translation, Sappho’s desire for this beloved is overflowing, incalculable, and
indescribable, except for how she can express the way it feels in her body. In fact, the mere
sight of her beloved renders Sappho incapable of speech. The underlying cause of Sappho’s
loss of speech—the heart in her chest on wings; the fire racing under skin—is likewise the
cause of other involuntary physiological loss. Sappho can no longer see, her ears have been
reduced to hear a drumming, she profusely perspires, and her color changes; in short, she says
that she feels as if she were dying. While this poem has been referred to often as the “jealousy”
poem, this is a leap from the fragment extant to us. Sappho is describing an uncomfortable
physiological experience, provoked by the experience of seeing her beloved talk to someone
else. She expresses not jealousy but a phenomenology of desire, or eros. The man talking to
Sappho’s beloved provides a mere point of contrast: here he is sitting opposite her, engaged
33
Chelsea C. Harry
in conversation, while Sappho’s desire is so strong that she can’t even glance at her beloved
without experiencing dramatic physiological alterations.
Erosophy is structurally different than traditional western philosophical practice. First, it
is neither self-directed nor initiated with intention. It is not a search for a wisdom that can be
mapped out or controlled. Rather, it begins with whatever inescapable existential position in
which one finds herself. Second, it is uncomfortable in the way purely rational explorations
are not uncomfortable. The latter can cause pain because they end up fruitless, because they
threaten to challenge us beyond our intellectual capacity, or because they are frustrating,
seemingly unending, or perennial. Erosophy too exposes us to the perennial, but eros never
presents us with an illusion of control. Instead, it begins with an experience out of our control.
We can choose to avoid the unpleasant effects it has us, burying it all with rationalizations or
coping mechanisms, or we can open ourselves up to the unknown. This does not mean one
gives up one’s mind; it means one uses one’s mind in concert with her body and emotions to
reach new depths of truth about love and, ultimately, life.13
Erosophy rejoins what much of western philosophy has pulled apart: the body and mind.
First, the experience of desire is felt in both the body and mind. Second, the clear separate-
ness of bodies that will never be fully unified is a metaphor for any desire that will never be
fulfilled, and for a kind of knowing that will never be complete. Fragments 47 and 48 vividly
describe Sappho’s experiences with eros as affecting both the heart and mind in the analogi-
cal sense that they are neither entirely separate from each other, nor the same thing—neither
one nor two. Fragment 47 is preserved in Maximus of Tyre’s, Orations, “Love shook my
heart like a wind falling on oaks on a mountain” (Campbell 1982: 91–92). The word being
translated as “heart” here is the Greek φρένας. It was common in early Greek literature for
φρένας to mean both “mind” and “heart.” For example, whereas in Homer’s Illiad we see
the term contrasted with νόωι in book i, “heart” vs. “mind” (i, 362) in the Odyssey we see
it contrasted with θῦμος, “mind” vs. “heart” (xxiii, 14–15). In Aeschylus’s Choephoroi, it is
used to describe a speech “from the heart” (107), and in Agamemnon, it is paired with φίλως
to describe something not done carelessly or superficially (805). Later, in Plato’s Timaeus (70a)
and in Aristotle’s zoological works (PA 672b11 and HA 496b11, 506a6), the term designates
a part of the body: the midriff. Indeed, Liddell and Scott provide these references and more for
the four main uses of the term ἡ φρήν and its cognates: (1) Midriff; (2) Heart; (3) Mind; and
(4) Will/Purpose. In Anne Carson’s translation of fragment 47, she chooses to render the term
as simply “mind.” But, we notice that Sappho does not use the term θῦμος, often translated
“heart” in other fragments, nor a cognate of νόος, the more standard term to mean a think-
ing mind. Sappho intentionally uses φρένας to convey the relationship of the heart and mind,
which she finds inextricable even in their separateness.
Sappho mentions her heart in relation to eros again in fragment 48. This time, Sappho
expresses her body’s reaction to the return of her beloved: “You came, and I was longing for
you; you cooled my heart (φρένα) which was burning with desire” (Campbell 1982: 93–94).
The arrival of whomever she desired cools Sappho’s heart mind. It was her heart that hereto-
fore burned with desire, not a mind set on fire and dismantled. Sappho’s erosophy allows her
still to be a philosopher. This point of view stands in contrast to Plato, or Socrates’, position
in the Symposium, where similar descriptions of desire are put forth but then subsequently
overcome.14
In Lewis Gordon’s recent call to decolonize philosophy from its assumption of non-
relationality and toward a “teleological suspension of the Philosophical,” for the philosopher
to embrace humility and hope instead of taking itself too seriously, he clarifies it as “a call
against epistemic closure not only at methodological and disciplinary levels but also with
34
regard to content” (Gordon 2019: 34). When wisdom and truth become relational, phenom-
enology and experiences become pressing to the enterprise of knowing. In erosophy, our desire
for another is simultaneously another’s desire for us—a bidirectional longing and felt need
that will never be fulfilled. Stuck in the eternal not-yet, we realize the impossibility of closure
and find our way back to ourselves. As Belmonte explains it, erosophy is a return to the self,
to the one that is not-yet two, but also not-yet one.15 This is to say that in the double process
of desire, which entails both moving outside the self and never fully getting inside of another,
the only possible ending is an un-ending, forever in-process.
Love can be a practice of knowing that is not monodirectional, and thus not linear. Lov-
ing and desiring is constituted by a relationship through which and by which a chasm will
always exist between the lover and the beloved. Returning to Belmonte’s point: this is likewise
true about types of perennial striving for wisdom, and to Gordon’s point that decolonizing
philosophy requires suspending the philosophical. In each of these, the projected telos or end
is not-yet arrived. The alternative is a continual process of uncovering knowing, truth, and
wisdom about ourselves, others, the world, and what it means to be human.
According to classicist Eva Stehle, however, not all love is shaped, nor timed, this way. She
emphasizes the novelty of Sappho’s poetry despite that Sappho was writing in the context of a
longstanding tradition of love-poetry. The first particularity of Sappho’s poetry, Stehle notes,
is seen in her depiction of a woman as the desiring subject. The second particularity is that
Sappho depicts this woman desiring and loving another woman. As Stehle points out, whereas
it was likely not culturally acceptable in Sappho’s time to depict a woman pursuing a man as
her object of desire, it would have been acceptable in her time to depict lesbian love, which
was likely practiced at least by girls before marriage (Stehle 1981: 45–46). According to Ste-
hle, who is clear that she is analyzing Sappho’s imaginative depictions of love and desire for
another woman and not commenting on what might have been true about Sappho’s romantic
or sexual life, Sappho’s lyric poetry “is fundamentally different because she explores what a
woman might desire and might offer erotically and how these interact” (ibid.: 46). Just as
Stehle, in the late twentieth century, admits that we don’t know what was true for Sappho’s
actual romantic or sexual life, we can likewise establish now that we don’t know whether
Sappho intended to represent loving, desiring, and living for all women, or even for all women
loving other women. What we can say, slightly revising Stehle’s conclusion above, is that
Sappho’s lyric poetry presents an alternate perspective of the structure of desire, including
what someone might offer erotically—either to another lover or to themselves in understand-
ing the structure of their life.
In Donna Haraway’s 1988 foundational article on standpoint theory, she calls for “…
hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing” (Haraway 1988: 585).
Sappho’s contribution to the history of ideas does not need to speak for all women, or even
for all queer women, to establish a stark contrast to other representations of the erotic, in phi-
losophy and in poetry. As Page duBois argues, “[Sappho’s] poetic project seems to include the
establishing of an individual form of identity, a figuring of human energy that now seems com-
monplace to us…” (duBois 1995: 7), reminding us that while this alternative position might
not seem original today, it offered one of the first accounts of the erotic qua open-endedness
and lack of fulfillment written from an individual’s human experience. This view of humanity
gave rise to a view of temporality that still challenges the predominant view of time as chrono-
logical. In short, Sappho was calling into question traditional views of what it means to live
and love in a time before philosophy proper existed.
This is to say that Sappho offered early Greek thought an alternative illustration of love,
desire, and wisdom, whether we would want to consider this “female” or not, juxtaposing
35
Chelsea C. Harry
a telic version of desire that is linear and sated with what we could call a kairotic version of
desire—unending in its pursuit of that which it cannot have. The inability to obtain the object
of desire has nothing to do with the ability of either lover for seduction, however. Rather, it
epitomizes the radical otherness of both lovers, at once both subjects and objects of desire and
at once both capable of an ongoing process of self-knowing.
Stehle illustrates this difference when she contrasts Sappho’s style with that of Sappho’s
male contemporaries. A male lyric poet in Sappho’s time writes of eros as it applies to a pas-
sive object of desire and to Eros itself as desire that will be extinguished once love is made
between lover and beloved. Love here is a conquest and the object of desire is something to
obtain, rather than to be experienced continuously, and thus known. “The man is helpless,”
writes Stehle:
Prostrate, stricken by the power of Eros or Aphrodite, but toward the particular boy
or girl who attracts him the man is confident and prepared to seduce. For Eros or Aph-
rodite is the universal, eternal sexual longing which can never be mastered, while the
individual provoking it is only a temporary focus of the longing, the prey or prize which
loses its allure once the man has captured it.
(ibid.)
Examining a poem by Ibycus, which refers to the narrator as a “prize-winning horse,” vis-à-vis
his object of desire and to Eros as the one who is once again responsible for the narrator’s cur-
rent entanglement with the “inescapable nets of Aphrodite” (6 P; op cit. ibid.), Stehle evinces
this contrast. An object of desire is used temporarily to sate an uncontrollable universal need.
What is more, this object must be passive, unaware, capable of being seduced, and inno-
cent. Poems by Archilocus and Anacreon allow Stehle to demonstrate this second character-
istic of early Greek male lyric poetry. Using a horse metaphor again, Anacreon asks a young
girl, to whom he refers to as “Thracian filly,”: “Know, then, neatly could I throw on the bridle
and holding reins steer you around the course… for you have an adroit experienced rider”
(72 P, op cit. Stehle 1981: 48), and, in another poem speaks again of his beloved’s youth and
innocence: “Oh child, virgin-glancing, I seek you, but you do not hear, not knowing that you
are the charioteer of my soul” (15 P, Stehle 1981: 49). This leads Stehle to conclude: “This
pattern of longing for the ever uncapturable essence of Eros and excitement at discovering
its momentary embodiment in a vulnerable, innocent figure, is the poetic rhythm of the male
lyric poets” (Stehle 1981: 49). The image Stehle—of the male seducer taking an easy conquest
to quell desire momentarily—offers up a well-known temporal trope, regardless of the actual
gender of the seducer. Here, time is finite, linear, and chronological with a clear beginning and
end. The time of desire here is prefigured by the very fact that the lover’s desire for the beloved
is only temporary, occurring over a finite stretch of time.
However, whereas telic, thus linear, desire is temporalized by finite stretches of time, the
“ever uncapturable essence of Eros” cannot be in time in this way. Rather, the ongoing, un-
ending goddess is temporalized by eternity. We could think of this as analogous to the distinc-
tion Aristotle makes between infinite time and time taken in the Physics; the former, a time
of the heaven, while the latter is that which results from the perception and counting of short
finite alterations.16 Stehle helps us to see that in the contrast between Eros and telic sexual
conquests, we likewise adopt a conception of time that is dual in nature—on the one hand,
infinite, and on the other hand, finite. Sexual desire continues over the course of one’s life, and
also, it is temporarily sated over and over by particular sexual conquests. Eros here is unidirec-
tional and chronological, beginning in the present and extending to the point where the object
36
of desire is had and eros is temporarily vanquished. These conquests are thus teleologically
structured and each termination—apropos of the French saying “little death”—represents the
lover’s own end in climax.
Sappho’s lyric poetry comes from an alternate perspective,17 expressing “romantic longing,
fulfillment, and struggle with the mystery of sexuality, with truth to her emotional and bodily
sense of them” (Stehle 1981: 50). Looking to Sappho’s fragment 1, likely the one extant song
we have from Sappho, Stehle contrasts it to what she found in the male pattern:
Dapple-throned Aphrodite,
eternal daughter of God,
snare-knitter! Don’t, I beg you,
cow my heart with grief! Come,

as once when you heard my far-
off cry and, listening, stepped
from your father’s house to your

gold car, to yoke the pair whose
beautiful thick-feathered wings
oaring down mid-air from heaven

carried you to light swiftly
on dark earth; then, blissful one,
smiling your immortal smile

you asked, What ailed me now that
made me call you again? What
was it that my distracted

heart most wanted? ‘Whom has
persuasion to bring round now
‘to your love? Who, Sappho, is

unfair to you? For, let her
run, she will soon run after;
‘if she won’t accept gifts, she

will one day give them; as if
she won’t love you—she soon will
‘love, although unwillingly….’

If ever—come now! Relieve
this intolerable pain!
what my heart most hopes will

happen, make happen; you yourself
join forces on my side!
(Barnard 2019: 38)
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Chelsea C. Harry
Sappho asks for Aphrodite’s help in allaying her grief; she loves someone who isn’t returning
her love. Unrequited love wouldn’t be a feature found in male lyric love poetry, since love was
a conquest contingent on an innocent unassuming victim. Sappho’s lover cannot be seduced
into love. Like Sappho herself, she has agency. In fact, it is the very decision of the beloved not
to return Sappho’s affections that causes Sappho to long for her in this moment, a longing so
well depicted by Barnard’s translation. Sappho’s hope here comes from a desire to enter into
a reciprocal relationship with her beloved. Her longing will only be eased if she can not only
love but also be loved.
Sappho here calls for Aphrodite’s help, disclosing a kinship rather than conflict, and re-
quests not that desire be quelled, but that the object of her desire feel desire, too. Unlike the
predator/prey relationship depicted by the male lyric poets, Sappho wants a beloved who is
also a lover, which is to say—as Stehle does—that they “must be equals” (Stehle 1981: 51).
This equality becomes a mutuality in the desire each woman has for the other. They under-
stand each other, offers Stehle, because they understand themselves. Taking Stehle’s claim one
step further, putting it together with Belmonte’s and Carson’s insights, through the mutual
love of another, one comes to know. Such a love is not a vanquishing, as we saw it in the other
lyric poets, but an iterative process of discovery ongoing in times of mutual presence but also
in each other’s absence. The very nature of this kind of eros allows for longing and satiety to
exist alongside each other; neither one wins. Rather than holding two seemingly complemen-
tary temporal structures alongside each other, it brings them together in such a way that ex-
poses their incommensurability, the impossibility of their jointure in their iterative relatedness.
The ongoing dialectic between them then has the power to reveal truths to each lover—about
the self, others, and about the very reality of finite existence.
The temporal structure of Sappho’s lyric love poetry emerges from this alternative model
of desire; it is circuitous, bidirectional and unending. But this is not to say it never progresses.
Rather, instead of behaving in the aforementioned Aristotelian paradigm, it recalls first an
Hegelian dialectical structure, the continual climb of the aufheben, or sublation of tension
that then finds itself in a higher evolution of the same, and ultimately a Platonic (from the
Timaeus) or Schellingian one, an endless productivity of the tension of opposites, neither of
which threaten the other’s existence. Like Hegel’s concept, Sappho depicts eros as dialectical,
but unlike Hegel’s model, Absolute Knowing will not occur. Instead, Sappho’s eros behaves
without a telos, beginning from an equal partnership that survives in a state of infinite re-
iteration. It preserves the two lovers in their mutual engagement—pace Belmonte—no longer
two but not-yet one.
Sappho’s cry for the unified lover/beloved relationship is her impossible wish for Aris-
tophanes’ two halves that find each other again. Sappho is well aware that the pangs of
desire—the bitter in the sweet—will never cease, that calling on Aphrodite in this moment is
merely an effort to engage in the only possible human response to the nature of mortality and
phenomenology of desire. The desire Sappho expresses is not for a telic satiation of sexual
urges, but for the ongoing dialectic that strives to reconcile two into one. Kathryn Caliva
explains that Sappho uses a Homerically inspired historiola here in order “to create a bridge
between mythic and contemporary time and then to collapse those time distinctions in order
to bring about a change in the present through analogy with the past” (Caliva 2019). She
beckons the goddess of love to help her, ostensibly with her present longing, but metaphori-
cally with the very condition of her own humanity that prevents absolute satiation, or by anal-
ogy, absolute knowing. She is a mortal calling an immortal, or a finite being living under finite
conditions, calling an eternal being living in eternal conditions, for help with the very problem
that defines her mortality: that all will be left unfinished until the moment of her own death.
38
According to classicist Emily Wilson, it is not just the gender of the lover at issue for inter-
pretation here; there is also the gender of the beloved to consider. Wilson critiques Carson’s
translation of fragment 31, arguing that eliminating the gender of Sappho’s beloved is prob-
lematic for accurately grasping the meaning of Sappho’s poem. For Wilson, that Sappho’s
beloved is female—like her—is essential to grasping the esteem with which Sappho describes
her desire for another female. Sappho’s songs speak for females who desire and love each
other in a way just as serious and profound as heterosexual love is taken to be. On Stehle’s
reading, however, the profundity is not necessarily comparative or equal, but altogether dif-
ferent ontologically. Not unlike the stereotypical depiction of a female orgasm, Sapphic desire
is continual, stalking, and unsated. Whereas, as duBois has pointed out, the philosophical
canon begun with Plato ultimately sublimates desire for philosophy and “privileges idealism
and transcendence” (duBois 1995: 87), Sappho remains interminably material, corporeal, and
feeling. Sappho’s desire is not overcome, and as such it takes on a temporal dimension dis-
tinct from the temporality of a desire sated by conquest, which is to say by the first and only
encounter between lover and beloved. As Sappho’s desire is interminable, so is her process
of knowing: but whereas she desperately wants the lover she no longer has, and to know the
truth that comes from being with this other, she is singing about a different kind of wisdom
she acquires actively in her desire.
Fragment 16 gives us a further sense for the sophisticated temporality at play in Sappho’s
songs, at once literal and metaphorical, and ultimately for the wisdom she possesses about
time as a result of her experiences with desire. In fragment 16, Sappho mourns the loss of her
beloved Anactoria by way of a comparison with Helen:
Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful
thing on the black earth, but I say it is whatsoever a person loves (ἔραται). It is perfectly
easy to make this understood by everyone: for she who far surpassed mankind in beauty,
Helen, left her most noble husband and went sailing off to Troy with no thought at all
for her child or dear parents, but (love, φίλων) led her astray … lightly … (and she?)
has reminded me now (νῦν) of Anactoria who is not here; I would rather see her lovely
walk and the bright sparkle of her face than the Lydians’ chariots and armed infantry…
impossible to happen … mankind … but to pray to share … unexpectedly.
(Campbell 1982: 66–67)
Sappho begins the song with a conclusion: whatever one desires is for that person the most
beautiful thing on earth.18 She then provides evidence, starting a story about the objectively
beautiful Helen, which immediately reminds her of Anactoria—her own beloved who is to her,
by analogy,19 and in accordance with her opening statement, the most beautiful thing to her. In
the moment now, Sappho is thus reminded of her loss—Anactoria is not here, the temporal-
ity of which Campbell emphasizes well. She is not here, now.20 The universal in the present
reminds her of her past, and of the consequences of the past in the present. What once was is
no longer, and therefore, Sappho currently lacks what is most beautiful to her.
The temporality present in this song, however, is also a metaphor for the very temporality of
eros and, indeed, of erosophy. The one we desire can never be fully our own, and—likewise—
we will never be fully theirs. There is always already a fundamental sense of loss in love—of
a time that is no longer and of a time still yet to come. Instead of mourning the impossible
resolution of desire, i.e., that one cannot become two, and two cannot become one, the lover
talks about time by way of her memory and futural projection. In kairos, these disparate parts
of time stand connected as one, interminable, in the moment, now. Sappho hopes that her lack
39
Chelsea C. Harry
will be fulfilled in the future, that one day she and her lover will be together again. But, while
she leaves the possibility open, she acknowledges the impossibility of Anactoria’s return. This
is not an acknowledgment that Anactoria can never return, but an acknowledgment that Sap-
pho’s desire for her will never see an end. Sappho plays with time as a metaphor even while she
discusses her temporal experience of longing. Despite what she knows to be the interminable
nature of her desire for Anactoria, she continues to pray that she will be with her once more.
The temporalization of her desire as kairos, rather than chronos, illustrates the time of Sap-
phic desire as dialectical, unending activity that holds together the body—in its feelings and
expressions—with the mind—in its memories and projections, all as inextricable unities that
nevertheless remain their own. The temporality of Sappho’s depictions of eros mirrors her
experience of desiring others: not-yet two and no longer one.
3 Conclusion
A willingness to think about Sappho as a philosopher means holding together irresolvable
controversies and a history of a poetic legacy occluded by its controversial subject matter.
duBois asks, “What would a Sapphic philosophy be?” before answering that philosophy in
classical Athens was something that happened in the city, a place whence women were ex-
cluded (duBois 1995: 83). Belmonte helps us reimagine philosophy, considering a love of
wisdom that invades us, unplanned and even painful, ultimately arousing awareness of the
impossibility of fulfillment and the kind of knowing that results from perennial separateness
that nevertheless strives to be together—not-yet two and no longer one. Sappho’s continual
engagement not only with that which she no longer has and currently lacks but also with the
phenomenology of her body under the conditions of desire, allows her to develop a temporal
paradigm that mirrors the structure of desire. Stehle helps us envision Sappho’s erotic poetry
not only as particularly skillful and original in her time but also as a presentation of philo-
sophical concepts like being and time that propose an alternative to the traditional binaries of
the finite and infinite, male and female, past and present, and lover and beloved. It’s not the
erotic content of Sappho’s poetry, but her erotic expressions of love, mortality, and the pos-
sibilities for knowing that provide an ontological framework based on unceasing dialectical
tension for a complex notion of nonlinear time.21
Notes
1 David Robinson goes as far as to say that, “The name Sappho… lives in most of the minds that know
it to-day as hardly more than the hazy nucleus of a ragged fringe suggestive of erotic thoughts or of
sexual perversion” before offering an alternative view that Sappho was “a great and pure poetess
with marvelous expressions of beauty, grace, and power at her command…” (Robinson 1963: 3).
2 Indeed, my students consistently report never having heard of her.
3 I would like to thank Mariska Leunissen for the suggestion that I reference standpoint theory here.
4 For example, Ruth Edith Hagengruber, Mary Ellen Waithe, and Gianni Paganini, editors of the
Springer book series Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences. See also Buxton and Whiting
(2020).
5 For details on the historic reception of Sappho’s work, name, and reputation, see Schlesier (2016) and
Reynolds (2001, especially pages 15–20). According to Reynolds,
…even people who have never read a line of the Classics will recognize Sappho, because the
phrases and images that she first used have become so widely popular, so familiar and apparently
instinctive that they are used by almost everyone who wishes to speak about the beauty of nature,
the pain of love, or the evanescence of a changing world.
(Reynolds 2001: 15)
40
6 Much of the information even in the Suda is considered dubious by scholars; see especially William-
son (1995: 1–4).
7 In fact, see Clark 2005 that Sappho is included as a “Presocratic” in a reference collection of ancient
Greek philosophers.
8 Margaret Reynolds challenges the widely held view that most of Sappho’s works were destroyed by
barbarians at the library of Alexandria and rather describes a waning interest in copying her Aeolic
dialect, which eventually amounted to the loss of most of her work when parchment replaced papyrus
(Reynolds 2001: 18).
9 Specifically, between 130 and 209 fragments of Sapphic verse exist; although, as the editor of Songs
of Sappho explains, only 124 of these contain sufficient poetry and/or meaning to interest the general
reader (1966: 5).
10 This is not the first time a work has relied on various translations of Sappho in order to represent
her work in the fullest light possible. For example, the 1966 collection of The Songs of Sappho
reprints translations by J.M. Edmonds, David M. Robinson, Edwin M. Cox, and Henry T. Whar-
ton. While the translations I consult and cite in this paper include Robinson’s, I have updated and
modernized the list to include translations done by women scholars—Carson and Barnard. Another
example of a scholar looking at translations across times and perspectives is Prins in Greene (1996:
36–67).
11 The Tithonus poem is part of the “New Sappho,” referring to poems found at the University of Co-
logne in 2004 and attributed to Sappho (West 2005). These poems were not assigned fragment num-
bers; rather, they are simply called “The New Sappho” (McEvilley 2008: 543). For further discussion
of temporality in The New Sappho, see Harry (2023).
12 See Jessica Decker’s chapter in this volume on the significance of opposition in Ancient Greek culture,
specifically that opposites were not understood as separate entities, but as paradoxical unities. Ulti-
mately, thinking opposition in this way replaces binary thinking with multiplicity and difference.
13 See also Hyland 1968 on the differences between philia and eros in Plato. Hyland argues, for exam-
ple, that eros is still partially rational in Plato.
14 See 251a-e as well as duBois (1995: 86–87).
15 Apropos of this, in Abandon Me: Memoirs, Melissa Febos, muses: “How alike is the longing for love
and the longing for our hidden selves. If Jung is right, then there is no difference at all” (Febos 2017:
234–235).
16 At Aristotle’s Physics iv, 218a1 is a disjunction: “and time, whether infinite (ho apeiros chronos) or
time taken (ho aie lambanamenos chronos).” I take this to mean that Aristotle’ is differentiating two
different senses of time, one eternal and the other a creation between finite beings and the changes
they undergo as natural beings. See Harry (2015).
17 Stehle explains this to be a female perspective borne out of a woman’s biology and psychology, po-
tentially because of the context in which she was writing in 1981. While it is outside the purview of
this paper to debate the origin of gender, to deconstruct gender essentialism, and even to speculate on
the origin or potential universality of Sappho’s style of lyric poetry, I believe Stehle’s contrast between
Sapphic eros and eros as it was depicted by the other male lyric poets of her time is significant to the
understanding of Sappho as a philosopher.
18 See duBois 1995: 83 that contra Plato “Sappho seeks a definition, gathering and collecting details, us-
ing an inductive or synthetic method of definition rather than imagining divine origin for her good.”
19 See also Sappho fragment 23 for a comparison of Helen’s beauty (LCL 142: 72–73) and fragment 62
for a contrast between beauty present now and beauty present in the past (LCL 142: 102–103).
20 See Gribble 2021 for a deft analysis of ‘deictic’ signals (‘I’, ‘you’, ‘this’, ‘here’, ‘now’) in Sappho’s
work, exploring the double roles they play both in setting a scene for a particular performance of the
song but also expressing and creating a certain cognitive world with their use.
21 I would like to thank volume editors, Justin Habash, and Ken Alba for helpful suggestions for this
chapter’s improvement.
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Williamson, M. (1995) Sappho’s Immortal Daughters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wilson, E. (2004) “Tongue Breaks.” London Review of Books, 26(1).
Zwicky, J. (2012) Lyric Philosophy. 2nd Ed. Kentville: Gaspereau Press.
Further Reading
1 Belmonte, N. (2017) “Erosophia. Or: The Love/Lack of Wisdom.” PhænEx, 12(1) (spring/summer),
1–17.
2 Green, E., ed. (1996) Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission. Berkeley: University Califor-
nia Press.
3 Stehle Stigers, E. (1981) “Sappho’s Private World.” In Reflections of Women in Antiquity, ed. Helene
P. Foley. New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 45–62.
43
4
SEX, FAMILY, AND CHTHONIC
JUSTICE
On the Cosmology of the Choephoroi
The Oresteia has long been considered a milestone in the literature of law. It has also been
noted for the cosmological articulation of its politics—namely, its proposal that law and jus-
tice are not reducible to civic determinations but express a deeper accord between human
beings and a larger world, which is non-immanent to them, and which I also summarily call
“nature.” Sex, family, and the axis between earth and sky, which are all assigned a role in the
deliverance of Dikē (justice), manifest as imprints of the cosmos on the human being, guid-
ing and orienting it: above and below toward gods and heroes, and laterally toward other
mortals via procreation and family. Yet, these orientations are at stake as the political edifice
antagonizes them, attempting to replace them with a thoroughly immanent, anthropocentric
order that now also repudiates human-ness as an anachronistic obstacle to the forward march
of the technic. Likewise, the import of ancient literature might be at stake as something that
will either become entirely unreadable (if it is not already so), or perhaps as the only possible
language left that speaks the human as human, as being “of the earth,” such as it is presented
in the chthonic backdrop of the Choephoroi.
By way of a caesura, then, this essay shifts away from the immanent, technical side of poli-
tics to reintroduce its cosmological infrastructure, as the latter obtains in Aeschylus’ language
of justice, family, and sexuality. In attempting this shift, the essay engages a source that might
initially appear oblique: Walter Burkert’s Homo Necans, an anthropology of Greek ritual.
Burkert proposes the prehistoric activity of hunting as the bedrock of sacrificial religion and
“primal scene” of culture. Fueled by natural necessity, predation first offered the site where the
human being had to grow in patience and discipline under adverse conditions, thus exercising
the endurance required for the long-term projects that would come to comprise organized cul-
ture. The sexualization of this scene—in the human animal, the division of labor sends males
to hunt—is a reality largely foreign, and even inadmissible, to our present cultural context.
Yet, despite the unease Burkert’s “naturalism” may provoke, it proves rather suitable for the
interpretation of tragedy in that, like tragedy, it discloses necessity’s circumvention of and
indifference to human projects, self-definitions, and desires. This is all the more pertinent for
Aeschylus, who most rigorously of all the major tragedians relied on the notion of necessity
(Ananke) as cosmic constraint to human craft. In short, the naturalist anthropology of the
hunt translates the originary tableau of ontological exposure: necessity’s setting of the hu-
man into danger, which results in the emergence of seriousness as the cornerstone of culture.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-5 44

Sex, Family, and Chthonic Justice
This is the same exposure that defines the horizon of tragedy, raising it to a “serious act.”
Thematically speaking, the recourse to Burkert is further justified by the plot of the Oresteia,
which consists in the Furies’ actual hunt.
Spoken by a returning Orestes, the first words of the Choephoroi1 appeal to Hermes Chtho-
nios and set its incantatory tone against the background of a father’s (and a hero’s) cult.
The god travels along the axis mundi2 from the heavenly Fates residing near Zeus to the
underworld Furies chasing after blood-stained mortals, and Electra’s prayer to him draws
this itinerary: “Almighty herald of the world above, the world/below” (ln. 124). To his role
of messenger, we must add another function. Hermes is, as Burkert points out (165), a divine
exception: the first homicide among the gods, one who is eventually acquitted, and whose
crime forms the template for sacrificial killing, according to the Homeric Hymn dedicated to
him. Not only does his exoneration anticipate Orestes’ own, but also his victim—Argos—by
lending his name to Orestes’ native city, reveals an ancient bond between the polis as a legal
entity and the earth’s chthonic aspect, thus also anticipating the necessity of the Eumenides’
continuous existence underneath Athens. Two separate but interrelated remarks by Burkert
illumine this relationship between chthonic earth and the polis. The first addresses the mythi-
cal significance of the shared name between Argos the guard and Argos the city; the second
involves his historical observation about the paramount importance of religion qua tradition
for the survival of a culture. Both of them hinge on the constitutive priority of the chthonic
over the political, and in parallel, of religion and family over civic life. To draw out more fully
the theoretical corollaries of these remarks, however, we must be acquainted with the mythic
and cultic details Burkert engages, particularly around the semantics of Argos.
Among several end-of-the-year rituals, termed “rituals of dissolution,” Burkert discusses a
Buphonia-rite at Argos, the aetion of which he finds in the myth of Hermes Argeiophontes,
also called βουφόνος (ox-slayer) (166). Ox-slaying falls under such end-of-the-year rituals,
and at Argos, the cult of Hermes would prepare for the new-year festival honoring Hera, the
cow-eyed goddess behind Hermes’ murder of Argos who guarded the cow/Io, Hera’s mortal
rival and double. Burkert cites evidence that identifies Argos the cowherd with a bull: having
killed a bull that ravaged the area, Argos wore the bullskin—a hunting motif, in which the
hunter becomes his victim by wearing its hide (166). In the dissolution ritual, the slaying of
the ox/cowherd marks both the year’s end and a new beginning with the release of the cattle
that now, unguarded, can roam free only to be caught for next year’s hecatombs to Hera, thus
encompassing a seasonal cycle of release and return to death (166–167). Hermes stands trial
but is acquitted at the end of a narrative that unfolds from a hunted animal (the slain bull) to
a sacrificial victim (Argos-as-bull killed by the god) to a tribunal, where the first murderer is a
hunter/sacrificer while his victim is precisely what this word first meant: sacrificial quarry. The
myth conjoins three distinct spaces—the pastures, the altar, and the court; and just as the altar
is located between wild nature and civic institution, so Burkert discerns a parallel intermediary
figure who condenses the mythic roles of slayer/sacrificer (Hermes) and hunter/guard/victim
(Argos) in the civic function of military defense. This is the figure of the warrior-hero, featur-
ing in the adjacent ritual of the Argive ephebes who carry a shield made of oxhide during the
Heraia. In the tradition of the hunter Argos who became the slain bull/cowherd, the Argive
youth become the city’s guardians, keeping vigil over it even after death.
We should recall that Agamemnon, whose posthumous protection Electra also seeks, was
such a “bull” killed by its “cow,” in Cassandra’s prophecy (Ag., ln. 1125–1126). The city’s
identity proceeds from these heroes whose memory was lavished in a funeral cult. The hero as
a dead man—namely, as ancestor and protector—bestows coherence, consistency, and conti-
nuity to the city, and it is in this context that we may gauge Apollo’s strange, and otherwise
45
objectionable, argument in the Eumenides, which assigns parentage only to the father (Eu.,
ln. 659). To this effect, it is important to keep in mind the ancients’ polar view of sexuality,
which, on the one hand, suppresses the feminine but, on the other hand, allows for unex-
pected reversals and compensatory relations between rival sexual attributes. Thus, Hera/cow/
Clytemnestra/mother kills Argos/bull/Agamemnon/hero at the same time as the very word
“hero,” deriving from hora (hour), refers him back to Hera as goddess of seasonality and
source of his glory.3
The earliest forms of religion consisted in ancestral worship, observes Burkert (xxii), and
insofar as religion played a foundational and preservative role within culture, it follows that
family left an indelible mark on political life. Here is the primary reason why I think ancestral
cult shaped so strongly the early religious feeling, and by extension, civic identity: in the con-
text of the family, one experiences most intimately and absorbingly the generational pattern—
namely, existence as a problem of time. Because family endures the recurring cosmic cycles of
change most directly and concretely, it reveals exemplarily the ontological premises on which
the city too rests, but which the city antagonizes in its technical aspect. The slain hero-ancestor,
whom Agamemnon presently embodies, is thus part of a civic-foundational myth because he
is first and foremost part of a cosmology: his life and, most importantly, his sacrificial death
provide the interface between the natural macrocosm and the civic microcosm, showing how
the cycles of the former are reflected and, at times, refracted in the latter. This is what Burkert
outlines in the following passage, which, though specific to Argos, contains his greater insight
about culture deriving its legitimacy from religion. The shared name of Argos between the
animal/guard and the city thus denotes the sharing between the cosmos and the human polis:
In a way, then, the power and order of Argos the city are embodied in Argos the neat-
herd, lord of the herd and lord of the land, whose name itself is the name of the land.
In the myth, Argos is Zeus’ opponent, but it has long been seen that he is nonetheless
closely identified with Zeus. Just as Argos is called panoptes, the one who sees all, so
Zeus, the omniscient sky-god, is invoked as Zeus Panoptes… In the countless, star-
like eyes of Argos, poets saw an image of the universe—just as Zeus himself was the
universe. Moreover, this two-faced quality of Argos recalls the myths of double beings
who had to be killed and cut up so that our world could come into existence. Indeed, in
the context of the city Argos, the mythical Argos was virtually the embodiment of the
cosmos, the all-embracing order. This order, so as to endure, had to be secured with a
death; it was dissolved for the sake of being reestablished. Argos died in the unspeakable
sacrifice of the bull so that the youthful warriors might carry the sacred shield on their
shoulders, thus carrying the city’s order on into the future.
(167–168, my emphasis)
Accordingly, cosmological categories appear prominently at the start of the Choephoroi. Just
as in the opening scene of Agamemnon the guard understood his predicament in terms of
the constellations above, here Orestes frames his return in terms of the surrounding nature,
albeit turning his gaze downward. He speaks neither of his house nor of the Argive throne,
but of “this land” (γῆν τήνδε) (ln. 3). Soon after, the chorus of women mourners and Electra
will alternately describe it as all-nurturing and ever-drenched by the blood of the murdered,
as Gaia/Gē (Γῆ) and as netherworld (χθών).4 His first offering, a lock of hair, goes to the river
Inachus. The land, its river, the father’s tomb, and the bodily offering are the elements of the
first order, before any mention of his political role as an Argive prince. Even the mention of
might (κράτη) in the first verse does not refer to political power, but to the powers of Hermes
46
Chthonios, which are delegated to him by his father, Zeus; alternatively, the term may refer
to the power of Orestes’ ancestors, however not so much as kings but as ancestors—that is,
as the dead. Paternal power registers first not as political power but as sacrificial deposit and
generational pledge.
This talismanic function of the dead father is not an ordinary anthropological contingency
that can be easily disposed of as a phantasmatic metaphysics without grave consequences in
its absence.5 The chthonic father expresses through a sexualized dynamic something essential
to human experience: the early struggle for survival, which recognized in the imperiled ex-
istence of the hunter/father/hero a living defender and a dead guarantor of the community.
Electra points to this sheltering function when describing Agamemnon’s tomb as a sanctuary
for suppliants and fugitives (ln. 336–338). That Agamemnon failed at his fatherliness vis à
vis Iphigenia can certainly be interpreted as a flaw sufficient to debunk the idea of paternal
protection as myth. Yet to afford such critical demythologization, and furthermore, to do so
without the urgency of proposing another metaphysical structure in its stead, one must also
tacitly assume that there is either no such thing as an existential threat, or that the threat is
negligible enough as to obviate the need for protection. One must assume, in other words, that
existence can take place without hazard, without tragedy. On the contrary, I submit that the
tale of Agamemnon’s failure is not meant to destabilize the talisman but to corroborate all the
more the demands and the losses that necessarily endanger any attempt at sovereign existence,
including—most intensely, of course—the existence of the king. For clarity’s sake, by the term
“sovereign existence,” I mean primarily the very human (and very tragic) desire to overcome
nature as inexorable necessity and attain freedom, and only secondarily, the conventionally
political connotations it has accrued. Whereas the hitherto predominant association of sov-
ereignty to paternity has now been problematized for obvious reasons, this problematization
occurred not without the concomitant erasure of the particularly gruesome fate to which the
male warrior/hunter was exposed.
Beyond the various textual accounts of war in antiquity, this terrifying fate is most vividly
illustrated through the symbolism of ritual practice itself. In the sexualization of sacrifice, Burk-
ert notes that the maiden victim belonged to the preliminaries,6 but as the literary and material
evidence indicates, the larger animal offerings reserved for some of the most notable festivals
were male due to their association with prowess and phallic fertility—chief among them the
bull, to which Agamemnon was already compared. Because of their powerful physique, their
deaths were not only the most spectacular but also the most dreadful, as was at times the brutal
treatment of their reproductive organs.7 Poignantly, excessive brutality and sexual aggression
are noted during sacrifices intended to secure alliances between families, guilds, or larger po-
litical organizations: “The closer the bond, the more gruesome the ritual. Those who swear an
oath must touch the blood from the accompanying sacrifice and even step on the testicles of the
castrated victim” (Burkert 1983: 36). In other words, the physical and symbolic castration of
the male animal was literally an overkill just as in actual life, the warrior/hunter was exposed
to an overdetermined deathliness and dismemberment. Agamemnon does not feature promi-
nently as an iconic figure of dismemberment in the tragic repertory—at least not as Pentheus
does—yet a passing detail by the chorus suffices to point to this overkill: posthumously, he was
mangled (ἐμασχαλίσθη), “a savage custom,” explains Herbert Weir Smyth in a note to his trans-
lation, “by which the extremities of the murdered man were cut off, then hung about his neck
and tied together under the arm-pits.” One reason for this practice, continues Smyth, “was to
disable the spirit of the dead from taking vengeance on the murderer” (201).
This sexual drama, in which the father stands as defender and guarantor through his sacri-
fice, is rehearsed in Electra’s first prayer to Agamemnon, where she expressly binds the notion
47
of justice (Dikē) to that of the earth (Gē) (ln. 126–128). The ancestors are said to “watch
over” her father’s house in accord with ancient belief that grants the power of vigilance to
the dead. Earth’s split description as birthing and all-nurturing but also consuming of its own
surplus as return is illustrated dramatically in Electra’s pouring of the libations; it is also ech-
oed in the prayer’s split from a benediction asking for paternal protection to a malediction
wishing for the father’s avenger. Opaque like the dark ritual it introduces, the prayer addresses
the spirits at once as guardians of the living and as dependent on the living for exacting the
justice due that, nevertheless, only those dead can provoke into rising. Hence, Electra wishes
for the favor of all the gods, but most specifically of Earth and victorious Justice (Γῇ καὶ Δίκῃ
νικηφόρῳ) (ln. 148). Hence also, her final entreaty stresses the offspring’s redemptive role in
ensuring the patrilineage and lifting this inter-generational curse:
Hear one more cry, father, from me. It is my last.

Your nestlings huddle suppliant at your tomb: look forth
and pity them, female with the male strain alike.
Do not wipe out this seed of the Pelopidae.
So, though you died, you shall not yet be dead, for when
a man dies, children are the voice of his salvation
afterward. Like corks upon the net, these hold
the drenched and flaxen meshes, and they will not drown.
Hear us then. Our complaints are for your sake, and if
you honor this our argument, you save yourself.
(ln. 500–509)
While the image of the nestlings recalls the avian omens of Agamemnon, the children’s
erstwhile powerlessness is now reconfigured. A kind of phylogenetic immortality joins the lan-
guage of salvation (σωτήριοι, σῴζοντες, σῴζῃ) through one’s offspring, which really means the
securing of heritage: the individual father will not be resurrected, but the family and adjacent
community may endure. In anticipating Apollo’s generational argument in the Eumenides, the
exclusive patrilineality of which has proved a hermeneutical scandal, it is instructive to note
that Electra’s above-quoted plea firmly directs its promises of salvation to a dead man: “παῖδες
γὰρ ἀνδρὶ κληδόνες σωτήριοι” (children are the voice of his salvation) (ln. 505). Given that
ἀνδρὶ>anēr designates not just any “man,” but a hero or man of civic stature,8 I submit that
the funeral cult of the hero-father in the Choephoroi sets the background against which to un-
derstand the otherwise counter-intuitive claim of the exclusive patrilineality in the Eumenides.
Electra’s lines contain effectively the reverse formulation of this argument in the Eumenides, in
that the children’s “resurrectional” promise is directed by way of existential reciprocation to
him who made possible not only their birth but also their continued survival. Indeed, Apollo’s
insistence on the father as the only true parent relies on the hermeneutic of the Choephoroi’s
cosmological framing of paternal sacrifice as guarantee of familial and civic continuity.
Approached from the perspective of biological reproduction alone, the Apollonian argu-
ment sounds hyperbolic at best; yet, despite the legitimate objections it has raised, it is not
devoid of logic either. As mentioned above, its overdetermination of the father draws on
and illumines the quasi-biological need for protection that was typically the task of the early
hunter, and later, of the warrior. Nevertheless, while propped on naturalistic necessity, the
narrative of paternal generation reaches a logic beyond mere bio-logic: its focus on the father’s
vigilance and defense recasts parentage from simple birthing—notwithstanding Apollo’s em-
phasis on the seed’s active role in reproduction—to the duty of guardianship, a duty associated
48
with another type of activity, that of the warrior’s. Apollo was, after all, the god who fur-
nished the heroic prototype. That (military) defense was a matter not only of tribal kinship
but also of the whole city is a good reason why the Oresteia—a play about the restoration of
a family and of a throne—privileges paternal generation qua guardianship. Furthermore, this
sexualized notion of guardianship—which, nevertheless, does not belong exclusively to the
male but splits into two different domains under the purview of each sex—reveals something
of the co-participation of both men and women in the chthonic: while the chthonic world is
chiefly cared for and guarded by women, it is populated by heroes who, in turn, guard the city.
If we bracket momentarily the objectionable aspect of Apollo’s remark and read it in light of
the chthonic logic of the Choephoroi, it may well elucidate something of the complexity of the
male participation in the chthonic. This participation is evoked in the very image of the seed,
which introduces quite saliently an experience from nature that ties life and death together:
buried under earth during winter, the seed sprouts in spring, exemplifying the miraculous
appearance of life. There is also a subtler inference here about Agamemnon’s fatherhood in
relation to chthonic liminality: through the emphasis on the seed, both buried and emergent,
Agamemnon’s tragic fatherhood is rehabilitated in his being dead, for only as a dead hero does
he become a civic talisman, even though he failed as a private father.
Let me return, however, to the Choephoroi’s theme of chthonic justice as it develops through
the tension between hate-filled retaliation and generative promise. Besides their conceptual
coupling in Electra’s prayer, earth and justice are paired linguistically via the alliterative sound
of χθών (netherworld) and ἔχθος/ἐχθρὸν (hate, enmity), especially in the play’s first half. Hate
is frequently used in lieu of justice, or at the very least names both the motive and prerogative
of justice (ln. 101, 123, 240, 309, 460–461).9 Significantly, it is the chorus of foreign women
slaves who encourage Electra in this hate-driven justice, siding with the dead king and wishing
punishment for his wife, whom they view as a tyrannical usurper. In one such passage, they
overtly identify the justice of reprisal with hatred:
Almighty Destinies, by the will / of Zeus let these things / be done, in the turning of
Justice. / For the word of hatred spoken, let hate / be a word fulfilled. The spirit of Right /
cries out aloud and extracts atonement due.
(ln. 306–311)
Though it is tempting to interpret the chorus’ patriarchal loyalties solely as an ideological

blind spot or outright misogyny on Aeschylus’ part,10 the women’s take on the “Lemnian
crime” (ln. 631–636) allows for a more complex identification—psychologically, morally,
and formally, in terms of the internal correspondences of the trilogy. Above all, their refer-
ence to this crime serves to reinforce the connection between hate and justice that grounds
the play. The Lemnian crime is a tale of revenge following the spousal betrayal of some wives
who were punished by Aphrodite with a foul odor for neglecting her worship. Rejected by
their husbands in favor of Thracian captives, the women of Lemnos killed those husbands
and their concubines—an act mirrored in Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon and Cassan-
dra, though the Aeschylean chorus laments only the destruction of the men without mention
of their imported mistresses. For this omission, the chorus can be expectedly charged with
misogyny. Still, their citation of the myth also omits another detail whose absence actually
mitigates the women’s crime, but which, I suspect, was responsible for why this legend became
a cautionary tale by the classical era. This detail hinges on the gender dynamic but goes well
beyond it: along with their husbands, the Lemnian women were said to have killed all local
males, including infant boys, an act that proves crucial for reflecting on the extremity of hate
49
that motivates justice.11 To focus on misogyny alone, then, is also to obfuscate the moral scan-
dal of the indiscriminate nature of justice that makes this story particularly repugnant and an
example-to-be-avoided by the time of Aeschylus.
On the one hand, such a myth showcases the intimate connection between sexuality and
death; on the other hand, it amplifies the chasm separating the life-principle of Aphrodite from
the hatred that fuels the justice-principle and that punishes not only the perpetrators, but even
those associated with the crime by chance, and who become culpable simply by sharing the
offenders’ sex. In the tale of the Lemnian crime, the slave women of the Choephoroi find a
traditional framework within which to contemplate their own conundrum about what counts
as the greater evil of their fate: honoring a foreign master who has at least protected them
after captivity, or serving a scorned and wrathful woman who has relegated her own daughter
to the status of an enslaved exile in her own home? Interestingly, the lesson the chorus draws
does not involve the moral validity behind the justice-claim itself—namely, whether the Lem-
nian women were justified in seeking revenge. Even though it is self-evident why the chorus’
disinterest would be construed as misogyny, such interpretations gloss over the most sinister
implications of this tale: the dangerous extremities to which the self-righteousness of justice
can lead, and which, in the post-Aeschylean renderings of the myth appear as gendercide, but
in the Aeschylean chorus escalate to a genocide instigated by the gods against the Lemnian
race now accursed for the crimes of its women. All new horrors (τὰ δεινὰ) are henceforth meas-
ured against this one, concludes the chorus, confirming what appears as a distinct moral topos
also in Herodotus.12 The myth of Lemnian justice as a coordinated mass action against a class
of people exposes the horror that lurks potentially behind any claim of justice, most notably
claims that promote the social urgency of justice with little concern for individuals involved.
Even though the chorus women sense the annihilative impulse of chthonic justice, they
remain bound to its implementation not only for the sake of the slain king’s memory but
also, paradoxically, for the future of his children as well. Through this paradox, Aeschylus
both complicates the predictable ideological criticisms and manages to interlace formally the
themes of the trilogy by balancing out the various viewpoints. For instance, if in Agamemnon
he painted a sympathetic portrait of a scorned Clytemnestra in her jealousy against Cassandra,
now through the slave women’s account of the Lemnian crime, he redirects the rage against
the same woman-despot who also kills indiscriminately. I should clarify here this sympathetic
depiction of Clytemnestra, which too presents a stumbling block to current ethico-political
sensibilities, but which serves to show in its dialectical relation to the Lemnians how both
individual- and group-driven justice rely on hate. Whether some obligation of feminist soli-
darity should have prevented Clytemnestra from revenging herself on Cassandra, and led her
to punish only Agamemnon for both women’s sufferings, is beside the point for a poet who
chooses to describe humanity in terms of its nature—namely, as a comportment with a degree
of spontaneity that cannot always be tailored to fit ever-changing civic norms. From such a
perspective, the political desideratum to unconditionally legitimize the sexuality of all enslaved
mistresses while vilifying the lawful wife (despoina) looks morally obfuscatory, let alone psy-
chologically obtuse, in dismissing the harm done to the wife for the sake of civic morality.13
Contra this technicized morality that suppresses the logic of the emotions, the natural
feeling of jealousy arising from sexual and familial betrayal is corroborated between Aeschy-
lus’ two plays: in their “proto-feminist” delivery of “social justice,” the homicidal Lemnian
women engage in the same behavior that Clytemnestra, the rogue tyrant, exhibits against
Cassandra. Both types of avengers kill bystanders with relatively distant degrees of proximity
and complicity to the initial crime. Hence, the formal philosophical point about the hatred
that incites justice runs deeper than the contingent power differentials embedded in particular
50
crime scenes. The point remains that the demand for justice, which by definition assumes a
basic power differential, that of the wrongdoer over the harmed above and before all else, is
constitutively linked to hate. Hate is an inaugural sentiment for justice.14 Interestingly, our
culture’s respect for the virtue of righteous indignation as motive for justice tends to divorce
anger from hatred, considering the latter irrational.15 In contrast, Aeschylus’ account reveals
that it is from the realm of hatred that righteousness (dikē) emerges. Here are the verses ex-
pressly drawing the vector from anger (θυμὸς) to hatred (στύγος) in the chorus’ demand for
justice: “πάροιθεν δὲ πρῴρας / δριμὺς ἄηται κραδίας / θυμὸς ἔγκοτον στύγος” (Long since against
the heart’s / stem a bitter wind has blown / thin anger and burdened hatred) (ln. 390–392).
That dikē is inextricable from hate in this play can also be gleaned from its association
with Ares, the “most hateful” (ἔχθιστος)16 god of war, whom the chorus imagines as the future
alastor (ln. 159–163). Speaking as the alastor, Orestes later fulfills the chorus’ wish in one
of the most “Aeschylean” of verses, in terms of its trenchant syntactic condensation: “Ἄρης
Ἄρει ξυμβαλεῖ, Δίκᾳ Δίκα” (Ares will collide with Ares; Right will collide with Right) (ln.
461).17 Nominative to dative shows the action of same-against-same, while the comma joins
paratactically Ares to Right, in a link that exposes two disconcerting aspects of justice. First,
the proximity between claims of Right and war—notably, not even “just war,” but war as
senseless killing, of which Ares is the embodiment. Secondly, the syntax of Dikē against Dikē
suggests that in juridical antagonism, both justice claims pose as equivalents, opening a space
of indistinction similar to that of lawless warfare of Ares against Ares.
Next to war, Dikē also resembles the hunt, and as such, the play continues the thematic of
beasts and entrapment opened up in Agamemnon. The canine imagery of Agamemnon now
gives way to lupine similes, as Electra compares her and her brother’s temper to that of a wolf
(ln. 421). Wolves and dogs belong to the same family, but they represent opposite qualities
as beasts. Burkert elaborates on their antagonism (83–93, 109–116), indicating that the ini-
tiation of young men as hunters consisted in a time of exile from peaceful society when they
joined feral groups to train “in the ways of the wolf” (89). The wolf simile, however, also
foreshadows the arrival of Apollo in the next instalment of the trilogy, with whom this animal
is connected in myth and cult, particularly at Argos, where the god was worshipped as Lykeios
(wolf-like) (Burkert 1983: 108).18 The Oresteia indeed plays upon this doubling of wolf and
dog: wolf-like Orestes summons his father’s Furies, yet he will end up prey to the same canine
deities he himself awakens as a matricide. Orestes is keenly aware of the double hunt when
he counters his mother’s warning that he will be chased by her curses: “How shall I escape
my father’s curse, if I fail here?” (ln. 925). The hero is caught between two claims of justice
that are equally legitimate and yet at odds with one another. His words expose the aporetic,
yet constitutive, moment in which every justice turns upon an injustice. With this devastat-
ing question, Orestes enters for a long while the realm of justice as indistinction—that is, the
realm of justice as pure principle without law and limits, or perhaps of justice as a terrifying
ideality beholden to a single law, according to which every drop of blood demands more blood
still, ad infinitum (ln. 400–403).
The metaphor of predation as significative of the quest for justice is most fully visible in the
dream of Clytemnestra (ln. 527–533), and whose interpretation by Orestes coincides shortly
with its fulfilment. Since this excerpt is rather well known and commented upon, I limit my
remarks to the ways in which its “zoology” ties in with the cosmology of the chthonic hero
cult, the latter being a civic vestige of early hunting ritual. The dream depicts Clytemnestra’s
birthing of a snake, which she suckled as it bit her nipple, drawing blood along with milk.
Orestes interprets it as the prophecy of his coming for his father’s revenge (ln. 540–550). Near
the end of the play, and while reflecting on the matricide, Orestes identifies with his mother to
51
whom he ascribes a snakelike nature as well: a sea-serpent or a viper (ln. 994). Let me under-
line the distinctly chthonic/civic character of the serpentine imagery that the Choephoroi adds
to the bestiary of dogs, eagles, hares, and spiders of the preceding play. Numerous myths of
autochthony are populated with snakes whose crawling movement associates them quite obvi-
ously with the earth: the dragon Cadmus had to slay, and from whose sown teeth the Thebans
were born; Athens’ legendary kings—Cecrops, Erectheus/Erichthonius—who were depicted
as snakes to denote their autochthony;19 the Delphic python Apollo killed to claim the “navel
of the earth” as his own. In this play too, the chthonic Erinyes approaching are imagined by
Orestes as Gorgon-like creatures entwined with snakes (ln. 1050).
Pertinent to my discussion of the Choephoroi’s hero-cult is Jane Ellen Harrison’s remark
that, “all over Greece the dead hero was worshipped in snake form” (20), namely, as part
of the chthonic world. Similarly, Burkert divided Greek sacred space into Olympian and
chthonic, the former dedicated to the gods and the latter to local heroes. An etymological de-
tail corroborates this cosmology, in which the hero combines the past’s “deep time” through
his chthonic dwelling with the future of the city-world through his talismanic abilities: the
Greek δράκων for “serpent” derives from δέρκομαι, which means “to see clearly,” and more-
over, “to guard,” “to keep vigil.” Hence, dragons protecting sacred treasures is a favorite
mythical motif. We thus return to the earlier remark that the dead hero, represented now as
snake, keeps vigil over the city. Snakelike Orestes comes to worship at his father’s tomb, and
through Clytemnestra’s dream enthrones himself as the guardian of his father’s legacy, and
future Argive hero. That the Pythian god is appealed to increasingly in the play’s second half
reinforces the hero’s relation to the serpent. The axis mundi is travelled from the depths of the
earth to the heavenly heights: from Orestes’ entreaties to Hermes and Gaia to send his father
as watcher (ἐποπτεῦσαι) of his battle to his plea to Helios and Apollo to survey his revenge (ln.
984–989). Aeschylus foregrounds this chthonic-uranian verticality through the repetition of
epopteia, the all-seeing capacity that links the vigilant dead of chthonic justice to solar light as
judicial transparency. Recall that Argos, too, was the all-seeing Panoptes.
Up to this point, I have focused on the hate-filled aspects of justice, which claim a good
portion of the play. However, as noted earlier, the appeal to Gē serves at times generative and
redemptive purposes. Shortly before the avenging deeds, the chorus declares the programmatic
function of the siblings’ justice that would both expiate old murders and seal the family feud.
Birth (tokos) now stops the vendetta from recycling itself: “Let the old murder in / the house
breed no more” (ln. 805). After all, the goddess of the hunt is also protectress of the young,
“the orphaned children of the eagle-father” (ln. 247). It is again the chorus women who, in
urging Agamemnon’s children to summon his spirit, move between the annihilative and the
generative, even pleasurable, aspects of chthonic justice. Below, I focus on passages from Or-
estes’ and Electra’s versions of justice, and their interchange with the chorus, while attending
to the distinct tropes to which each sibling resorts, reflecting their respective gender positions
within the family.
In an early invocation to Agamemnon (ln. 345–355), Orestes languishes for the noble
death in battle of which his father was deprived. He wishes that Agamemnon had died
in Troy, reinforcing the masculine ideal of the “beautiful death” that secures immortality
through legend. Electra, on the other hand, presents a different dream of completion (ln.
363–371). She cares not for the heroic death but for the implementation of the poetic justice
of retaliation: murderous kin must be slain by other kin. In her attachment to the family
feud, Electra, Clytemnestra’s most vocal critic, shares much of her mother’s chthonic sense
of justice. Contrary to Orestes’ nostalgia for kleos, Electra sees the dikē of the blood feud as
the proper legacy of her hero-father. Heroic worth in her model does not stop at the aristeia
52
in battle, but in the dead man’s meriting of intrafamilial revenge. Orestes soon joins Electra’s
view, praying for the Erinys to strengthen him in his task. I direct the reader to Orestes’ juxta-
position of the noun “τοκεῦσι,” which highlights Agamemnon’s role as begetter, and the verb
“τελεῖται,” which signifies the end as both purpose and termination (ln. 385). It is as sire that
Agamemnon merits the commission of the terrible deed as expression of filial duty, but the
delivery of this justice signals simultaneously the closure of the vendetta, which constitutes
the higher purpose of the trilogy.
The chorus—similarly enthralled by the possibility of the blood feud but resigned at the
murderers’ impunity—dismisses Electra’s wish as fantastical, comparing it to the utopia of
Hyperborea (ln. 373). The comparison aligns two unlikely worlds: the nether powers of re-
venge with a legendary and felicitous people residing beyond the north wind, beyond human
hubris and misery, a people closest to the immortals. Yet, this paradoxical alignment encodes
something tangible: the pleasure that accompanies the hate of Dikē, which the chorus har-
bors, but whose absence the chorus disappointedly registers in deeming Electra’s wish for it
an illusion. Though noble death may confer glorious reputation, it happens arbitrarily and
impersonally in the battlefield, thus lacking the ingredient of pleasure germane to the pre-
meditation of revenge. In the family scenario of Dikē, pleasure is ever more intensified because
of the deferred temporality of the Erinys—the “ὑστερόποινον ἄταν” that Orestes mentions
(ln. 383)—and the sense of personal agency of the victim, or his/her proxies, in facing the per-
petrator. If, in war, the youth of the fallen warrior and the arbitrary happenstance of his death
invested his loss with aesthetic meaning through epic song, in Dikē, it is the ripeness of time
and the overdetermined intention of the avenger that invest the victim with moral meaning,
and the avenger with the equally moral “glee” of vindication.
Despite its reference to Hyperborea as illusion, the chorus concludes with a redemptive line,
asserting that the day champions the children who succeed in raising the chthonic powers.
Still, theirs is the bloody justice that will put an end to the blood cycle. Juxtaposed to the logic
of the hunt/judicial pursuit and to the life-demand for vindication that summons the Fury,20
the Hyperborean interlude thematizes the opposite life-demand, which interrupts the hunt and
lets the young be harbingers of the future. Through the Hyperborean citation, Electra’s call for
justice becomes obliquely a pointer not only to the glee of destruction but also to a sense of
longevity and continuity—even a cosmic resurrection—in that the children revive and guaran-
tee the family line. Some verses later (ln. 500–509), obliqueness turns to explicitness: almost
taunting her father’s spirit to come to her aid for its own sake, Electra openly designates the
offspring as the saviors of patrilineal legacy. Agamemnon’s assistance is required not only for
his children’s future but also for their rescuing of the line of Pelops,21 and eventually, for lend-
ing a sort of immortality to Agamemnon himself (ln. 503–504). Orestes’ heroic ideal of the
“beautiful death” in Troy is recast in Electra’s demand for familial revenge, where the children
act as heroic proxies in the name of the dead and defenseless father. Justice (Dikē) spells the
feminine counterpoint to masculine warfare (Ares), but its Furies participate in the same activ-
ity Burkert considers to be war’s origin: the hunt.
Hermes and Apollo, Gē and Helios, Hades and Hyperborea, serpent-mothers and eagle-
fathers are cosmological signs of the vertical axis along which Dikē travels, sent from the
high seat of Zeus but as a chthonic force that knows only blood. In a stroke of genius, the
playwright projects the axis mundi in Dikē’s very name, the name of a girl, which he explains
through a portmanteau: Dika, writes Aeschylus, is formed by the blending of Di(os) and
K(or)a (ln. 949), which means “the daughter of Zeus,” who inspires wrath and destroys her
enemies. Kore refers to any young maiden but is the name primarily reserved for the under-
world maiden, Persephone, daughter of earth-bound Demeter by heavenly Zeus. In addition
53
to thematizing the axial cosmology between the high Zeus and the chthonic Kore, “Dios
Kora” is an overdetermined name in the Argive cycle: both acoustically and semantically, it
invokes the Dioscuri—the mortal–immortal male twins of Zeus and Leda—who were siblings
to Clytemnestra and Helen, themselves another such twin pair.22 However, whereas Castor
and Pollux are known for their love, the sisters are divided by enmity and envy. The mortal–
immortal axis unites just as it divides. Chthonic in nature but Olympian in service, Dikē con-
figures within herself this twinship of cosmos and civic institution that through the coupling
of Zeus and the swan plagues and redeems the House of Agamemnon.
Concluding this inquiry into the cosmological determination of the political, a few remarks
on the current political critique of the chthonic are opportune. Notably, such critique does not
address chthonicity’s rather scandalous disclosure of hatred’s constitutive relation to justice;
rather, it focuses on another presumably negative facet of earthliness—autochthony. For in-
stance, myths of autochthony have been interpreted as dangerous ideologemes constructed in
order to exclude foreigners or women from civic claims. Loraux’s Children of Athena is argu-
ably the most prominent classicist source to tackle this, but others have followed suit. Given
the widespread acceptance of the merits of such critique, I wish to also register its limitations:
its occlusion of the rich semiotic of the underworld/χθών in relation to ancestral time and to a
universality that projects itself through the local—namely, the universality of the shared feel-
ing of mortality as well as the notion that death itself is the way to the universal, to which the
cult of the dead attests.23 Thus, I bracket, at least for the moment, the implicit and politically
damaging identification of the chthonic with civic boundaries, stressing instead that the an-
cient city—if not also modern forms of political identity—is chthonic in its temporality prior
to its geographical borders with other cities, nations, or empires. The land as circumscribed
space is claimed, respected, and defended because it is, before all else, the resting place of the
family dead. Sophocles illustrates this well: by the time Polyneices is killed, he is considered an
enemy of the city, effectively a non-citizen, but his political status does not prevent Antigone
from fulfilling her chthonic obligation of burying him in Thebes. He is of Thebes even as he is
against Thebes because “Thebes” is not merely an enclosed territory but a figure of time, the
history of the dead brother’s accursed genealogy as well as of his own future legacy no matter
how tainted. The claim to chthonicity manifests, above all, as the claim to a space where one’s
dead—one’s past, ancestry, and diachrony—are being hosted. A polis based on the chthonic
principle has “deep time” just as does the cosmos.
It is within this heritage-based mindset that gestures of carrying one’s dead with the earth
that covered them can make sense. Though still a hypothesis among archaeologists, evidence
suggests that the bluestones of Stonehenge were carried by Neolithic inhabitants of Britain
when they migrated from Wales to the distant area of the Salisbury plain because beneath
them were buried ancestral remains:
[I]t seems that Stonehenge stage one was built—partly or wholly—by Neolithic migrants
from Wales, who brought their monument or monuments as a physical manifestation
of their ancestral identities to be re-created in similar form on Salisbury Plain . . . Blue-
stones were brought to the land of sarsen stones and installed at a sacred axis mundi
(world axis or world centre), where the sky and the earth were envisioned in cosmic
harmony, and where people of different cultural and regional origins might gather for
collective monument-building and feasting.24
The axis mundi, exceedingly present in the solstitial function of these henges, traverses the
human world first and foremost through its dead. Likewise, in the Choephoroi, Hermes
54
travels from heaven to earth, and his pompē—his function as a conduit of the dead—is part
of this axial cosmology. The family dead mark the deep time of the cosmological space that
opens within human society and that Burkert had recognized in the narrative of the neatherd’s
sacrifice and its significance for the city of Argos.
Notes
1 Translations are from the Chicago edition, unless otherwise noted. For the original, I use the Loeb.
2 On the axis mundi, see Jan Kott (13–14), who details it in the context of Prometheus Bound.
3 For this etymology, and for Heracles as prototypical hero of Hera, see Gregory Nagy, pp. 32, 44.
4 See ln. 43, 66–67, 127–28, 164, 377, 399, 489, 585, 722.
5 In Lacanian psychoanalysis (Seminar III: The Psychoses), this appears as the problematic of
“foreclosure”—the hole in the symbolic introduced by the lack of access to the father and resulting
in psychosis.
6 See Burkert, pp. 5, 54, 107, 152, 162. Maiden victims are symbolized through female animals, with
no evidence for human sacrifice in the Mycenaean times.
7 On the simultaneous castration and death-blow of a he-goat to Dionysus, and on the phallic symbol-
ism of the bleeding tail of the October Horse, see Burkert, pp. 68–69.
8 For the Homeric distinction between anēr as hero and anthrōpos as ordinary mortal, see Seth
Benardete, p. 18.
9 Aeschylus also uses στύγος for “hate”; for its relation to anger and the demand for justice, see ln. 392.
For the Erinyes as στυγεροί, see Jane Ellen Harrison, p. 15.
10 For an analysis of misogyny, see Zeitlin (1984).
11 Apollodorus, Library 1.9.17 tells that the women, except Hypsipyle, also murdered their fathers;
Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 1.618 mentions the killing of all males. Both accounts postdate
Aeschylus, but they recount already existing versions of the myth. Aeschylus is attributed with a play
about Hypsipyle (see Aeschylus, Loeb edition, p. 377).
12 Herodotus, The Histories 6.139; for more on this, and for a good compilation of scholarly sources on
the Lemnian crime, see Richard P. Martin.
13 For such a power-based argument, see Gaca (2018). Aeschylus’ fidelity to the natural emotions agrees
with Aristotle’s hierarchical relation between nature and artifice in tragic imitation. It is the formal
requirement of the Poetics that tragedy be lifelike and present its plot with naturalness. The imposi-
tion of civic morality in this case—namely, that Clytemnestra should replace her jealousy with sisterly
solidarity—would clash against the tragic background, disrupting the spontaneous accord Aristotle
saw between the logic of the emotions and that of the moral order. At their most essential level, both
these logics maintain that a person wronged is a person wronged, just as an offender is an offender,
in excess of any other social markers they may possess at the time of the offence. On Aristotle’s struc-
tural coherence of the emotions with reason, see Else (1957), pp. 374–375.
14 Apropos Aristotle and the emotions, the philosopher linked anger to justice: anger is “a longing, ac-
companied by pain, for a real or apparent revenge for a real or apparent slight, affecting a man him-
self or one of his friends, when such a slight is undeserved”; and immediately after, “anger is always
accompanied by a certain pleasure, due to the hope of revenge to come” (Rhetoric 2.2, 1378a31–33).
In Politics 5.10, he distinguishes between anger and hatred: “Hatred is more reasonable, for anger is
accompanied by pain, which is an impediment to reason, whereas hatred is painless.” See also Kostan
(2007), p. 42. Distinctions between these cognate feelings are useful, but Aeschylus blurs them.
15 Contra Aristotle, as noted above.
16 Homer, Iliad 5.890.
17 My translation, which preserves the name of Ares in conjunction with justice, a link to which the
chorus returns (ln. 935–938). Ἄρης (Ares) and ἀρά (curse) sound significantly close.
18 See also Burkert, p. 116, 120–121.
19 On these kings and snake iconography, see Burkert (1983) on the Arrhephoria, pp. 150–154; on the
snake and the chthonic substratum of the Olympians, see Harrison (1991) on the Diasia, pp. 12–23.
20 Otto (1954) describes the Fury not as a moral precept, but as a cosmic demand for payment at the
experience of loss (24–25).
21 See Burkert (1983), pp. 93–103. The location of the sanctuary to Pelops opposite the temple of Olym-
pia is used paradigmatically by Burkert to denote this low-high axis of Greek sacred space.
55
22 Though called Zeus’ sons, they are half-brothers, one born of the mortal Tyndareus. Similarly,
Clytemnestra is a daughter of Tyndareus, while Helen is of Zeus.
23 On death as vehicle to objective—thus, universal—individuality, see Hegel (1977), p. 271. J. N.
Findlay’s summary remark from his annotations to §451 of the Phenomenology is especially perti-
nent: “the Family exists to promote the cult of the dead” (“Analysis of the Text,” Phenomenology
of Spirit, 553). Admittedly, for Hegel, the localized pagan mode of universality is to be surpassed by
the rational universality of modern state morality, while tragedy is a step in the realization of this
dialectic by which the work of freedom supersedes nature as necessity. Since I do not read tragedy
“historically,” I submit that its cosmological figurations of sex, family, or death cannot be supplanted
by political immanence for the simple reason that the decisive ontological constraint tragedy recur-
rently sets up against the human being is nature; and it does so in a metaphysical, non-historical
manner. One can historicize tragedy and its choice of constraint, but one can also legitimately argue
that tragedy itself does not reveal its premises as historical contingencies.
24 See Pearson, et al. (2021).
Works Cited
Aeschylus (1926) Aeschylus II: Agamemnon, The Libation-Bearers, Eumenides, Fragments (trans. H. W.
Smyth), Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Aeschylus (1953) “The Oresteia: Agamemnon, Choephoroi, Eumenides” (trans. R. Lattimore), in D.
Grene and R. Lattimore (eds.) Aeschylus: The Complete Greek Tragedies, Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1–171.
Apollodorus (1921) The Library (trans. J. G. Frazer), Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Apollodorus Rhodius (1990) Argonautica (trans. and ed. R. C. Seaton), Loeb Classical Library, C ambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Aristotle (1885) The Politics of Aristotle (trans. B. Jowett), Oxford: Clarendon.
Aristotle (1995) “Poetics” (trans. S. Halliwell), in S. Halliwell (ed.) Aristotle: Poetics; Longinus: On the
Sublime; Demetrius: On Style, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
28–141.
Aristotle (2105) Rhetoric (trans. W. R. Roberts, ed. W. D. Ross), New York: Cosimo/Mockingbird.
Benardete, S. (2000) The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy, Chicago, IL:
The University of Chicago Press.
Burkert, W. (1983) Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth
(trans. P. Bing), Berkeley: University of California Press.
Else, G. F. (1957) Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gaca, K. L. (2018) “Minding the Mistress: The Household Power Struggle to Control Female Slave
Sexuality in the Ancient Mediterranean,” 149th Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies,
Boston, January 6, 2018. Available at: https://classicalstudies.org/minding-mistress-household-power-
struggle-control-female-slave-sexuality-ancient-mediterranean (Accessed: 17 May 2023).
Harrison, J. E. (1991) Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1977) The Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A. V. Millner), with “Analysis of the text and
Foreword” by J. N. Findlay, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Herodotus (1922) Histories: The Persian Wars (Books V–VII) (trans. A. D. Godley), Loeb Classical
Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Homer (1988) The Iliad (trans. A. T. Murray), Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Konstan, D. (2007) The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Greek Literature,
Toronto: The University of Toronto Press.
Kott, J. (1970) The Eating of the Gods: An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy (trans. B. Taborski and E. J.
Caerwinski), New York: Random House.
Lacan, J. (1993) Seminar III: The Psychoses (trans. R. Grigg, ed. J-A. Miller), New York: Norton.
Loraux, N. (1994) The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division Between
the Sexes (trans. C. Levine), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Martin, R. P. (1987) “The Fire on the Mountain: ‘Lysistrata’ and the Lemnian Women,” Classical
Antiquity 6.1: 77–105.
56
Nagy, G. (2013) The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press.
Otto, W. (1954) The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion (trans. M. Hadas),
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57
5
EURIPIDES ON EPISTEMIC
INJUSTICE? INTERPRETING THE
FRAGMENTS OF MELANIPPE
SOPHE AND DESMOTIS
Dorota Dutsch
1 Introduction
Epistemic injustice, wrongs that hurt people in their capacity as knowers, is one of the key
concepts in the rapidly expanding field of inquiry situated at the confluence of ethics and
epistemology.1 The field has been outlined by the British philosopher Miranda Fricker. Her
book, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, “explores the idea that there is a
distinctly epistemic kind of injustice,” which occurs in everyday epistemic practice (2007: 1).
Unequal distribution of epistemic authority is a long-standing concern of postcolonial and
feminist scholars. It has informed, for example, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988) iconic
question “Can the subaltern speak?” and Patricia Hill Collins’ analysis of the intersections of
knowledge, identity, and power (1990).2 Fricker’s analysis is nonetheless groundbreaking in
its clarity and precision. She describes two kinds of injustice: testimonial, in which a person
is “wronged in their capacity as giver of knowledge,” and hermeneutical, in which a person is
“wronged in their capacity as subject of social understanding” (2007: 7). Framing her work
in terms of virtue epistemology, she further posits two corresponding corrective virtues of
epistemic and hermeneutical justice that can help right the wrongs.3 Most of Fricker’s semi-
nal book is dedicated to testimonial injustice (and justice)4; she presents injustice in terms of
“economy of credibility,” calling attention to instances of “credibility deficit,” in which the
speaker is misjudged by the hearer due to pervasive identity prejudice (Chapter 2). In her
account, in such situations, the speaker suffers an injustice, that is, an ethical wrong, which
affects her specifically in her capacity as knower, and thus constitutes an epistemic wrong.5
“Testimonial injustice” of this kind typically occurs in verbal interactions, including fictional
ones represented in literary texts.6 Literary texts from the past record both routine and innova-
tive deliberations, offering insights into past epistemic cultures (cf. below, Section 2.5).
This chapter draws on the framework proposed by Fricker and further insights into testi-
monial injustice offered by the American philosopher Kristie Dotson (2011)7 to offer a read-
ing of two fragmentary tragedies by Euripides, Melanippe Sophe and Melanippe Desmotis.
As I hope to show, the scripts evince concern for epistemic harm, and one female speaker at
least makes the case for acknowledging women as knowers and trusting their testimonies.
Interestingly, her case is based on the premise that women should receive fair treatment. The
fragments thus offer a useful supplement to the best-known argument from this period for
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-6 58

Euripides on Epistemic Injustice?
recognizing women as knowers found in Book Five of Plato’s Republic. There, Socrates argues
that, since some women have considerable intellectual abilities, the ideal state should use their
potential, employing such women along with men as guardians of the ideal polis.8 As Julia
Annas observed almost half a century ago, Plato’s utilitarian argument would utterly fail the
modern feminist agenda: he pays no attention to the interests and wishes of the individual
citizens of his ideal city, women or men.9 The feminist concern with epistemic injustice due
to identity prejudice lies outside Plato’s proposal for the ideal state and his understanding of
justice. Such concerns need not have been, however, completely alien to the ethical culture of
classical Athens.
The text I propose to examine is both fragmentary and less central to philosophical history
than Plato, but it features a mythical scenario singularly germane to the inquiry into epis-
temic fairness. Melanippe, the heroine of the two tragedies, appeared on the Athenian stage in
Melanippe Sophe (ca. 420 BCE) and Melanippe Desmotis (before 412), decades before Plato
forcibly employed selected women as philosopher-guardians in his ideal polis.10 Only about
170 lines remain from both plays.11 However, the hypothesis of the Sophe, Hyginus’ account
of the myth drawing on the plot of the Desmotis, and the lively reception of both tragedies in
later writers allow us to reconstruct their plots (see below, Sections 2.1 and 3.1). In the Sophe,
the sage Melanippe, raped by Poseidon, gives birth to twin boys. An excerpt of the Prologue,
in which she presents her story, has been preserved (see below, Section 2.2). Afraid of her fa-
ther, Melanippe does not immediately admit that the children are hers and attempts instead to
protect them by means of philosophical argumentation, part of which has been preserved in
Section 2.3. When she tells her story, Melanippe’s fear proves justified; her father rejects her
testimony and blames her for the rape she suffered (Section 2.4). In the Desmotis, the sage is in
chains. At one point, a female speaker (probably Melanippe) offers an impassioned critique of
prejudice against women, of which we have substantial fragments (Sections 3.2 and 3.3). This
chapter connects the critique of misogyny in the Desmotis to Melanippe’s portrayal as a bril-
liant intellectual whose testimony is unfairly rejected in the Sophe. As I hope to demonstrate,
both tragedies engage with the view that women suffer ethical-epistemic wrongs as a result of
male prejudice. That women need to be acknowledged as knowers in the name of fair treat-
ment is a very different argument than the one in the Republic, whose premise is utilitarian
(women are a resource to be used).
For each tragedy, I reconstruct the context (Sections 2.1 and 3.1) before analyzing the frag-
ments (Sections 2.2, 2.4, 3.2, and 3.3).
2 Melanippe Sophe
2.1 The Context

According to the hypothesis, Melanippe, the daughter of Hippo and Aeolus, gives birth to
twins “by Poseidon” at a time when her father is away.12 Anticipating his return, she hides
the babies in a cowshed, where some cowherds find them suckled by a cow and guarded by a
bull. The cowherds then reason (absurdly) that young creatures nurtured by a cow and a bull
must be calves with human appearance, and so—monsters (terata). Informed of this prodigy,
king Aeolus, on the advice of his father Hellen, orders that the monsters be burned alive.13
This glaring error of judgment characterizes the cowherds and the patriarchs as ludicrously
incompetent thinkers. The threat they pose is, nonetheless, serious: Melanippe is instructed to
prepare the babies for the auto-da-fé. She is too frightened, however, to admit that the children
are hers. Instead, she demonstrates by rational argumentation that they cannot be monsters.14
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According to the text that circulated as Ars Rhetorica by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Mela-
nippe “peruses all philosophical arguments that prodigies don’t exist” and suggests that “a
girl having been raped and afraid of her father could have exposed the babies,” as is indeed
the case.15 What happens when Melanippe tells her story may be conjectured from Diodorus
Siculus’ version of the myth: “But Aeolus, not believing that she had sex with Poseidon and
blaming her for the rape, gave her away to a foreigner from Metapontum, who happened
to be staying in Aeolis, instructing him to take her with him” (4.67.4).16 It appears that the
tragedy included a debate on whether and how Melanippe’s transgression should be punished,
thematizing the question of justice. Melanippe swears “by holy aither, the dwelling of Zeus”
(Fr. 487) but is not believed. The chorus (Fr. 486) praises “the golden countenance of justice”
as the most marvelous thing to behold. It is possible that Hippo, wearing a horse’s costume
(Pollux 4.141), appears on stage and spirits her daughter away (Fr. 488). Hyginus’ summary
of the myth (Fab.186) finds Melanippe in a new location (probably Metapontum), blinded
and in chains. The remaining fragments of the Sophe come largely from the prologue (22 lines)
and Melanippe’s speech in defense of her children (ca. 7 lines). Apparently, before Melanippe’s
testimony is rejected, Euripides goes to great lengths to assert her epistemic competence, estab-
lishing her credentials as her brilliant mother’s pupil.
2.2 The Prologue

In the prologue Melanippe subtly juxtaposes her paternal and maternal lineages and tells the
story of how Zeus silenced her mother Hippo, thus foreshadowing her own fate. The crush-
ing power and prestige of her paternal ancestry is illustrated by a catalogue of names and
domains: Zeus was the father of Hellen, Hellen of Aeolus, her father, who now rules over the
vast territory of Aeolis, while his kin Ion rules in Athens (1–11). The heroine distances herself
discreetly from this exalted pedigree, signaling that her own story begins with her mother:
But I must begin my story

†my own name† and to the point from which I have begun.
They call <me> Melanippe. Chiron’s daughter
bore me to Aeolus. To her then Zeus
gave a plumage of tawny horsehair,
because she sang prophetic hymns to mortals,
telling them of cures and remedies against their hardships.
She was banished in a thick squall of mist
leaving behind the place dedicated to the Muses and Corycian mountain,
The thespiode is now called Hippo by people,
on account of the transformation of her body.
This is how it is with my mother.
And she [Melanippe] also says that she has given birth to twin boys after intercourse
with Poseidon.
(Fr. 480)17
Melanippe’s mother Hippo was a brilliant seer and healer. Her skills were recognized both
by those who consulted her and by the divine father figure, Zeus, who nonetheless inter-
venes to silence her. Perhaps her transgression, not unlike that of Prometheus, was to share
her knowledge too generously with humans. Zeus, then, recognizes Hippo’s predictions and
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remedies as efficacious but disdains her understanding of how to use her knowledge. Perhaps
her truth-telling threatens the established order of things, especially because her knowledge is
contiguous to religious ritual. Her title, thespiodos, suggests an expert in translating signs and
prophetic utterances into understandable language.18 Since both Hippo and her father Chiron
were celebrated as seers and healers, their animal and part-animal shapes cannot be reduced to
a trite association with the animal world as a space of unreason. Instead, we might think of the
animal features as emblematic of their position as astute interpreters of natural p henomena—
making them transparent to human understanding. For allegedly abusing this position, Hippo
is transformed into an animal and exiled from the place of the Muses, from which she might
legitimately communicate her knowledge. Zeus’ silencing of Hippo is thus analogous to Apol-
lo’s invalidation of Cassandra’s prophetic gift. Like Cassandra, Hippo becomes a knower who
cannot share her knowledge. Her silencing prefigures the fate of her daughter, who will also
be unable to communicate the truth of her experience to her father. Perhaps the knowledge of
her mother’s fate also allows Melanippe to conclude that truth-telling is not always advisable,
explaining her initial reluctance to speak. Unfortunately, the rest of the prologue is lost, and
we don’t know how Melanippe justified her initial reluctance to tell the truth.
2.3 The Defense Speech

Melanippe’s speech (Fr. 482–485) was influential in antiquity. Plato refers to it in the Sym-
posium (177a3); Aristophanes parodies it in the Lysistrata (1124–1127). Several ancient au-
thorities, the earliest of whom was Diodorus Siculus (1.7), compared her argumentation to the
philosophy of Anaxagoras. I will turn to him in order to suggest what kind of arguments she
might have offered. The fragments evince a great deal of epistemic self-trust (Frs. 482–483).19
Melanippe claims to be an accomplished thinker, praises her mother’s intellectual achieve-
ments, and cites Hippo’s cosmogony as the basis for her sophisticated discussion of prodigies.
Melanippe’s confident assessment of her own competence is known from Aristophanes’
parody. When Lysistrata presents her credentials to the Spartan envoys, she asserts: “ἐγὼ γυνὴ
μέν εἰμι, νοῦς δ’ ἔνεστί μοι. / αὐτὴ δ’ ἐμαυτῆς οὐ κακῶς γνώμης ἔχω” (I am a woman but there is
intelligence within me,/And I myself am quite well supplied with my own judgment) (Ar. Lys.
1124–1125).
In the Ravenna codex 429 of Aristophanes,20 there is a scholion: “a line from Euripides’
Melanippe Sophe.”21 It is placed in the right margin precisely between lines 1124 and 1125,
so it is impossible to tell which of the two lines the scholiast meant. Either of the two might
come from Euripides.22 The reference to nous in 1124 is reminiscent of Anaxagoras’ theory
that intelligence is inherent in all beings, but the claim that, despite being a woman the speaker
has some intelligence, is relatively modest; line 1125 expresses self-trust and self-reliance more
provocatively, almost inviting parody.23 My own inclination is to read 1125 as coming from
Euripides—against most recent editors.
Aristophanes’ Lysistrata compensated for her boldness by making a clever nod to the au-
thority of her male elders24. Melanippe, as the fragment attested by Clemens of Alexandria
implies, apparently offered a tribute to her mother: “ἣ πρῶτα μὲν τὰ θεῖα προυμαντεύσατο /
χρησμοῖσι σαφέσιν ἀστέρων ἐπ’ ἀντολαῖς” (She first foretold divine intentions/in clear predic-
tions based on the risings of the stars) (Fr. 483).
This reference to Hippo’s ability to foresee divine intentions, based on observation of the
movement of stars, underscores that her predictions were a matter of knowledge and skill.
Such interest in astronomical observations parallels the achievements of philosophers of na-
ture, Anaxagoras (DK59A1) and Thales (DK 11A1, A5). As the putative inventor of the art,
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Hippo would also occupy the position of the first teacher, followed by many disciples. Clem-
ens, in fact, makes the point that Hippo taught natural philosophy to her partner Aeolus.25
Perhaps, then, Melanippe appealed to a knowledge that her father shared in and her argument
should have been intelligible and persuasive.
The cosmogony that would have been part of this creed, known from Diodorus Siculus
(1.7), presents the male and female as two equivalent forces in the cosmos. Melanippe’s expla-
nation of Hippo’s teaching does the same26:
And this is not my account, but from my mother

that the sky and the earth were once of one shape,
and after they were separated from each other into two
they engender all and have brought to light
trees, birds, beasts, and those that the salty sea sustains,
and humankind.
(Fr. 484)27
The three phases of creation evoke some elements of Anaxagoras’ theory—with significant
differences. (1) Both accounts begin with an original undifferentiated unity, from which (2)
macroscopic entities emerged through a process of separation. These entities, however, are
different: while Anaxagoras seems to have suggested aer and aither, Melanippe names gaia
(earth) and ouranos (sky).28 (3) Finally, animals come into existence, but they do so in dif-
ferent ways. While Melanippe’s gaia and ouranos produce other life-forms,29 in Anaxagoras’
theory, the animals first arise (from water) and then begin to reproduce from one another.30
Sexuality and gender would, then, have been secondary considerations to Anaxagoras. In con-
trast, Hippo’s cosmogony highlights gender in the choice of ouranos and gaia, which evokes
Hesiod’s account in the Theogony. There, Gaia emerged first from chaos and produced Oura-
nos, who became her mate.31 Gaia then gives birth, “having shared his bed” (133), enacting
the expected gender dynamic. Hippo’s ouranos and gaia emerge at the same time and are not
necessarily an anthropomorphic couple who share a bed. The verb Euripides uses to describe
their production of life forms, tiktousi, “they engender/produce,” does not necessarily imply
so. (Another example of Euripides’ use of tiktousi is in the abstract phrase “obstacles en-
gender good reputation”32). The brief fragment emphasizes the initial unity (morphe mia) of
the macroscopic entities and symmetrical creative capacity, implying that what distinguishes
them now is their form and not their substance.33 It would require a dangerous leap of faith
to transfer this gender dynamic from the schematic cosmogony to human nature, but if we
were to do so, the symmetrical gaia and ouranos would offer a strikingly egalitarian model for
configuring human creativity and intellectual abilities. Presented by Melanippe and authorized
by Hippo, this account demonstrates how well female knowers use conceptual tools. The rest
of the speech would make Melanippe’s mastery even more evident.
We can only speculate how she moved from her mother’s cosmogony to the argument that
the babies in the cowshed cannot be prodigies.34 An Anaxagorean reasoning might be con-
structed along the following lines: all creatures differ in the proportions and arrangement of
their shared components, most importantly, the life-giving nous.35 These differences are mani-
fest in their appearance and behavior,36 such as a propensity to appropriate animal products,
for example, taking milk from cows.37 Since the babies in the shed look and act like human
beings, even taking milk from a cow in the absence of a human mother, they must be human.
Melanippe’s task would have been more difficult, as this granddaughter of a centaur would
62
have to had to reconcile the glaring contrast between her own pedigree and the argument
against the existence of prodigies.38 One possibility for approaching this paradox may be
foreshadowed in Melanippe’s discussion of her mother’s interpretive ability as both a matter
of wonder (Fr. 480) and a work of intellect (Fr. 483). Perhaps the speech made a distinction
between true wonders and superstition. Such a distinction was, according to Plutarch, inher-
ent in the teachings of Anaxagoras.
According to a tradition going back to Hellenistic historians, Anaxagoras’ unorthodox
views on religion brought on him accusations of impiety and led to a trial against him ca.
437/438 BCE, which may have also implicated Pericles’ partner Aspasia of Miletus.39 Several
testimonies attribute to the philosopher a nearly obsessive interest in explaining various phe-
nomena, especially what is observable in the sky: the light emanating from the Milky Way,
the formation of comets, the eclipses, and the solstice.40 In one anecdote (perhaps apocryphal)
reported by Plutarch in the Life of Pericles (6), Anaxagoras dissects the head of a one-horned
ram (so, a teras), in order to prove that the anomaly was due to a natural cause. According to
Plutarch (ibid.), Anaxagoras imparted such understanding of natural phenomena to Pericles,41
thus teaching him to reject superstition and adopt instead the kind of “true and unshaken pi-
ety that is attended by good hopes.”42 Melanippe’s argument could also have rejected supersti-
tion in order to advocate for the kind of piety that allowed for the existence of wonders. Such
a view was indeed represented in one of the two tragedies. A fragment of uncertain context
(Fr. 506) distinguishes between a simplistic understanding of divine justice and dutiful respect
for it. The speaker ridicules a naïve vision, in which Zeus, like an overworked court clerk, is
expected to study human complaints inscribed on clay tablets, give the verdict in each case,
and oversee its execution. Instead of this vision of supernatural labor, the speaker proposes
that “justice is somewhere here, close by, if you want to see her.” The speech, then, would have
contributed to its heroine’s characterization as a brilliant intellectual with expertise in natural
philosophy. Judging by their assumption that young creatures found in a cowshed must neces-
sarily be calves, the patriarchs’ reasoning would have been far less subtle. Next to Melanippe’s
sophisticated argumentation, their cognitive limitations would have been striking.
2.4 Punish Her!

We don’t know precisely under what circumstances the rape story was told on stage. Nor
do we have a direct citation of Aeolus’ response. Maybe Melanippe’s speech failed to per-
suade her father, and she had no other choice but to give her testimony. Maybe someone else
(a nurse?) revealed that the children were hers. We know for certain only that Melanippe
swore that her tale was true (Fr. 487) and that her father didn’t believe her. However, one frag-
ment (Fr. 497), cited by Stobaeus as coming from one of Euripides’ Melanippe plays, offers a
sample of the kind of reasoning that could have led Aeolus to assume that his daughter had to
be punished. The speaker argues that any woman who has transgressed must be “destroyed;”
his premise is that, in the collective of women, vice spreads like a contagious illness:
Punish her! It is because of such cases that women (literally “women’s matters”)
are infected. Some men, when they catch a criminal,
do not destroy her for the sake of children or on account of kinship.
Then her wrongdoing stealthily seeps and spreads into many women.
As a result, all virtue reaches extinction.
(Fr. 497)43
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Much as the assumption that all young creatures found in a cowshed are calves, this reason-
ing does not allow for distinctions or exceptions. Most strikingly, the speaker seems unable
to think of women as individual and rational human beings. Women are regarded as a collec-
tive entity in which disease spreads by contagion, perhaps on the model of a basket of fruit,
in which mold can spread easily from one fruit to all. Men must watch this collective care-
fully, swiftly eliminating any sign of rot. It is wrong to make an exception for an “infected”
woman as a member of one’s family. By implication, it is wrong to trust or care for a woman
one knows; any regard for her account of the circumstances of her “crime” is, of course,
out of question. In this reasoning, a victim of rape can easily become a criminal and must be
“destroyed.”
2.5 Epistemic Injustice in Melanippe Sophe

Looking at the events in Melanippe Sophe through the lens of epistemic justice, we could
conclude that the patriarchs fail to accord Melanippe’s testimony the credibility she deserves
and thus commit testimonial injustice. The situation is, however, more complex, and I propose
to consider two questions that complicate it: (1) Melanippe’s responsibility for not telling the
truth initially and (2) our right to judge the ethical positions of distant historical others.
One might argue that Melanippe herself has undermined her credibility by her initial at-
tempt to hide the truth of her motherhood; in this case, she would bear some responsibility
for the men’s mistrust. Is Melanippe partially to blame for her fate? Kristie Dotson (2011)
has proposed a framework that can help us explore this question. Dotson draws on Black
feminist epistemology to offer further insight into the mechanisms of testimonial silencing.
She insists on the audience’s responsibility for the success of any testimony and identifies
two consequences of epistemic oppression. One largely overlaps with Fricker’s understand-
ing of testimonial injustice; it occurs in verbal interactions when the hearer, due to igno-
rance, fails to recognize the speaker as knower (Dotson 2011: 243), effectively “quieting”
her. Melanippe’s father and grandfather would then be fully responsible for “testimonial
quieting” when they refuse to believe her story.44 Dotson further observes that speakers
from marginalized groups often anticipate their interlocutors’ ignorance and themselves
censor their own speech, making sure that their testimony “contains only content for which
[their] audience demonstrates epistemic competence” (2011: 244); she calls this phenom-
enon “testimonial smothering.” On Dotson’s terms, then, Melanippe withholding her tes-
timony in anticipation of being silenced would represent “smothering.” This is a plausible
approach, as the telling of Hippo’s story does in fact situate Melanippe’s initial silence
against at least one instance of punishment inflicted on a woman for telling the truth. Per-
haps for this reason, she speaks in generic terms about the possibility that a frightened girl
might have abandoned her children. On Dotson’s account, we might, then, consider both
Melanippe’s initial self-censure and her subsequent quieting as forms of epistemic oppres-
sion that pertains specifically to her experience of rape and motherhood and blame her
father’s past behaviors and Zeus’ punishment of Hippo for the heroine’s reluctance to tell
the truth.
This brings me to my second question: given the historical contingencies, is it fair to ap-
ply Dotson’s (or Fricker’s) criteria to behaviors represented in a text from the fifth century
BCE? Arguably, the fictional elders enact judgments that are standard in their epistemic
culture. Can we blame them? Fricker’s position on this issue depends on a useful distinc-
tion between routine and exceptional behaviors (2007: 105–108). While it may be unfair
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to blame historical others for making judgments that were routine in their epistemic cul-
ture, it is vital to contrast such routine judgments with other deliberations contemporary
to them that make “exceptionally imaginative moral judgments” (2007: 106). Only such
comparisons will produce a nuanced range of attitudes toward historically and morally
distant others. As it happens, imaginative deliberations seem to have animated the plot of
the Sophe. Euripides imagined a woman intellectual with all the hermeneutical advantages
one can conceive of. A pupil of a respected seer, confident in her abilities, she has the lat-
est interpretive resources at her disposal: an understanding of the natural world and an
enlightened view of piety. Melanippe deployed her interpretive skills despite excruciating
circumstances: a victim of rape, terrified of her father, the character is nonetheless capa-
ble of rational argumentation—to no avail. When she finally gives her pivotal testimony,
all her accomplishments prove insufficient to make her story credible to the patriarchs.
They are apparently unable to recognize her as trustworthy, precisely when she speaks
of her own experience, as though such experiences simply lie outside their understanding
of reality. Given the prominence of rape in Greek myth, the men’s ignorance would be
inconceivable—unless, that is, the tragedy pointedly draws attention to their ignorance of
the victims’ versions of such stories.
Fricker and other thinkers (e.g., Medina 2012, 2017) consider the occlusion of marginal-
ized experiences from shared conceptual resources as a form of hermeneutical injustice.45 This
occlusion makes it impossible for Melanippe to tell her story and be heard. The Euripidean
plot draws attention not only to the heroine’s plight but also to the grotesque and destruc-
tive effects of the patriarchs’ ignorance. The men almost put to death their own descendants,
Aeolus (named after Melanippe’s father) and Boeotus, suspecting that they may be monsters.
The Sophe thus arguably dramatizes a failure of human understanding and justice. Perhaps the
text suggested at some point that the protagonists could count on divine justice to correct their
failures. The gods, however, as Fr. 506 implies, are busy, and human beings should endeavor
to do the justice that is within their reach. The fragments of Melanippe Desmotis include ad-
vice on how to reach for it.
3 The Argument Against Misogyny in Melanippe Desmotis
3.1 The Context

We know less about the plot of the slightly better-preserved tragedy (ca. 90 lines) taking place
several years after the action of the Sophe, in another location, most likely in Metapontum.
But Hyginus’ account of the myth (Fab. 186) gives an outline of the dramatic events.46 The
twins (Boeotus and Aeolus) are brought up as sons by the royal couple; in the absence of the
king, the queen and her brothers plot against them; the plot fails, and the sons eventually
recognize Melanippe as their mother and free her from her chains. One crucial scene features
a debate on misogyny, including two speeches: one expressing blame (psogos) and the other,
a tribute to women in the tradition of hyperbolic rhetorical praise (epainos). The praise was
echoed in Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazousai and cited in various anthologies, including Stobaeus’
and another one preserved on a second-century CE papyrus (P.Berol. 9772).47 Iamblichus,
writing his life of Pythagoras, must have had such an excerpt in front of him, as he appropri-
ates some of its arguments for Pythagoras’ address to women (VP 50). We are not sure who
delivers the defense of women, but the speaker is female, and Melanippe is the most plausible
candidate.
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3.2 On Prejudice
The fragment preserved by Stobaeus (Fr. 493) brings to focus the harm that prejudice inflicts
on women:
It is most painful that womankind is hated:

women who have slipped bring shame
to those who have not, and corrupt women share their bad reputation
with those who are not corrupt. When it comes to marriage
they seem to men not to understand anything soundly.48
The speaker of Fr. 497 (Section 2.4 above) argues that, if one “criminal” is not annihilated,
all women become criminals, since vice spreads easily in “women’s matters.” The speaker of
Fr. 493, perhaps Melanippe herself, claims that it is not the transgression but the indiscriminate
censure that spreads without any regard for distinctions. She admits that censure and blame
originate with the mistakes made by some women, but the blame then spreads to all women,
including those who don’t deserve it. The responsibility for the indiscriminate censure lies with
men. They draw the erroneous conclusion that, since some women make mistakes, all women
share their disposition, and as a result “seem to men” to lack understanding of marriage and
sex. But the lack is only an appearance caused by the men’s own lack of understanding.
Prejudice, it turns out, harms women specifically as knowers even in matters in which they
do have expertise. The speaker thus comes close to describing a mechanism analogous to what
Dotson calls “testimonial quieting”: based on negative stereotyping, men fail to identify women
as knowers (2011: 242–243). It would be fitting for the words to come from Melanippe, as she
would be describing her own fate in the Sophe: Aeolus didn’t trust his own daughter, however
brilliant and eloquent, to give truthful testimony concerning her own sexual ethics.
3.3 The Praise of Women

In the excerpt preserved in the Berlin Papyrus (Fr. 494), Melanippe develops the argument for
treating women as rational individuals in some detail49:
In vain does men’s censure send its futile

missiles against women and slander us.
We are in fact better, and I will demonstrate this.
… contracts unwitnessed.
… women not reneging.
(5)
difficulties among themselves

brings censure
a woman will drive away
they manage the households and what comes from overseas
they preserve inside, in the absence.
(10)
of a woman no house is tidy or prosperous.

And with things divine (them I consider foremost)
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we have the greatest share. In the house of Phoebus

women announce the mind of Loxias,
and around the holy foundations of Dodona.
(15)
by the sacred oak it is the female kind that brings

the mind of Zeus to those Greeks who seek it.
And the sacred rites enacted for the Moirae
and the nameless goddesses have not been established
as open for men. All of them flourish in women’s care.
(20)
Such is justice for/of women in the eyes of gods.

How is it then that women must have
a bad reputation? Will empty slander by men
not end, men who think unfairly
to slander all women equally if one is found.
(25)
to be bad? I make a distinction in my account:

there is nothing worse than a bad woman
and nothing can surpass a good one
in goodness, for they have different natures.50
Structurally, the praise falls into three sections: a brief introduction and the thesis that women
are capable of excellence (1–3); a demonstration of the thesis (4–22); and a conclusion includ-
ing a call to correct the unfair judgment of women. Melanippe rejects the arguments against
women (psogos) as slander and counters them with an attention-grabbing claim: women are
better than men. The argument meant to corroborate this claim surveys women’s typical be-
havior and responsibilities in ways that showcase their virtues, each of which arguably repre-
sents a kind of knowledge. At the same time, the speaker indicates who benefits from women’s
knowledge, thus suggesting who should recognize their competence. The section on women’s
qualities as community members is incomplete, but it seems to illustrate the virtue of justice.
Women are reliable and trustworthy, and thus know how to settle conflicts—mostly among
themselves, thus benefitting each other (5–7). This section possibly included a reference to
women being capable of fair criticism of one another (8–9). Women’s responsibilities at home,
keeping, managing, and distributing what is acquired, represent practical intelligence; without
women’s intelligence, it is impossible for any household to prosper (10–12). Since the city
consists of households, women’s intelligence is indispensable to their city’s prosperity.
Women’s understanding of worship receives the greatest attention. Through their participa-
tion in religious practices, women benefit not merely specific cities but the entire Greek world
(13–22). Notably, in two out of the three cults mentioned, women act as translators and inter-
preters, roles analogous to the one that Melanippe in the Sophe attributes to her mother. To be
sure, listing the ways in which women benefit their friends, families, and cities may be viewed as
utilitarian. However, Melanippe presents the benefits in terms that suggest that they impose some
obligations on women’s families, cities, and all of the Greek world. This is most transparent in
the language of “share” (meros) and “what is just” (dike) that convey women’s contributions to
worship, suggesting perhaps divine recognition for women as a model for human recognition.
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The concept of a just share or fair treatment for women is by no means simple or obvious, and
Euripides’ Greek performs complicated acrobatics around it. A closer translation would read: fe-
male matters among the gods (τἀν θεοῖς θήλεια) in this fashion partake of justice (ταύτῃ ἔχει δίκης).
The construction is strikingly similar to the one in Lysistrata 1125, possibly a quotation of a line
spoken by Melanippe in the Sophe, referring to an adequate supply of reason (gnome) (see Sec-
tion 2.3).51 One speaker claims for herself, the other for women in general, a share of a precious
resource, intelligence, and divine recognition. What women lack is, as Melanippe stresses in the
opening lines of Fr. 495, recognition by men (women already treat each other fairly). She revisits
the subject in her conclusion, requesting that men put an end to slander and prejudice (23–27).
In her final rhetorical flourish, she claims that women can be both the worst and the best, bring-
ing home the message that it is impossible to offer a generalizing moral judgment on all women.
Instead, women deserve to be judged as individuals on their own merits (just like men).
The speech thus presents, in the guise of extravagant praise of women, a rebuttal of routine
male assessments of women’s moral and cognitive competence.52 It might perhaps be consid-
ered an attempt on Euripides’ part to draw the attention of his audiences to the obscuring of
women’s point of view and experience from the collective understanding of reality, redress-
ing what we would term hermeneutical injustice. Aristophanes’ parody of Melanippe’s lofty
claims about women’s virtues (Ecc. 441–454) confirms that the praise indeed conveyed excep-
tional and provocative deliberations of the sort that may allow us to develop a more nuanced
understanding of the ethical culture of Classical Athens.
4 Conclusion
Why should we attend to these fragments? Melanippe is not the only clever and articulate
Euripidean heroine to suffer rape, a father’s cruelty, or enslavement; Creusa in the Ion, Iphi-
genia in Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris share some of her predicaments and appear
in well-preserved tragedies. As the protagonist of two tragedies that engage with the questions
of injustice and prejudice toward women, Melanippe is, however, unique. The titles of the
two tragedies stress both her reputation for knowledge (Sophe) and the repression she suffers
(Desmotis). Her lines were received as explicitly philosophical by ancient readers. Ancient
reception of both tragedies speaks to their iconic status in the Greek intellectual tradition. We
might note that it is the arguments against epistemic injustice that have this status, and so have
been preserved by later authors, while the arguments presented by the patriarchs justifying her
punishment have been forgotten and lost.
Apparently, Melanippe’s speech was not only influential but also effective. Reconstructing
the ideas that the tragedies engage with is a painstaking process, and its results are necessarily
approximate. Nonetheless, I hope to have shown that it is useful to look at the remains of the
two plays through the lens of epistemic injustice and that ancient Greek attitudes included a
concern for prejudice as a cause of ethical-epistemic harm. The scripts feature both implicit
critique of testimonial silencing (Section 2.5) and explicit discussion of prejudice (Sections 3.2
and 3.3), and a call for fairness (Section 3.3). Thus, they provide some evidence for both rou-
tine and innovative ethical-epistemic deliberations against which we may read other Classical
texts, including Plato’s utilitarian argument in the Republic.
5 A Coda
It matters—in and of itself—that the protagonist of two Euripidean tragedies is a fictional
woman philosopher. However, due diligence requires that we note a potentially significant
68
coincidence: Euripides’ Melanippe, a woman familiar with Anaxagoras’ thought, may have a
parallel in the perception that Pericles’ partner Aspasia of Miletus was familiar with Anaxago-
ras’ philosophy. Plutarch in his Life of Pericles (30) reports that Aspasia was tried for impiety
along with Anaxagoras (ca. 437/438 BCE). Literary representations of Aspasia’s contributions
to fifth-century intellectual debates include two Socratic dialogues that present her as an ex-
pert: a teacher of rhetoric in Plato’s Menexenus and a teacher of ethics, as applied to relation-
ships, in Aeschines’ (now fragmentary) Aspasia. That the historical Aspasia and her reputation
as an intellectual informed Euripides’ portrayal of Melanippe is a tantalizing possibility.
Notes
1 So Fricker (2007); Pohlhaus Jr. (2017) includes political philosophy as a third crucial domain; cf. also
Fricker’s assessment of the changes in the field she helped define (2017).
2 Especially, Collins (1990: 221–238). Further, many feminist epistemologists have focused on epis-
temic practice and interaction, as opposed to the abstract model of the ideal knower operating in
social void. See especially Code, arguing for a model of an engaged epistemic agent (1991) and on the
ethical dimensions of social interaction (1995), and Alcoff (2001) on the effect of social positionality
on credibility assignments.
3 Fricker frames her account in terms of virtue epistemology; on testimonial justice, see 86–128, on
hermeneutical, 169–175; see also Fricker (2003).
4 Only the last (Chapter 7) is dedicated to the hermeneutical injustice (and justice). The generic defini-
tion of hermeneutical injustice is “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experi-
ence obscured from collective understanding owning to hermeneutical marginalization” (2007: 158).
I discuss the relevance of this concept to Melanippe Sophe in Section 2.5.
5 See especially (2007: 43–58).
6 See Chapter 1; Fricker’s signature cases come from literary texts: Anthony Minghella’s The Talented
Mister Ripley and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird.
7 On Dotson, see below Section 2.5.
8 Plato’s focus is on use (452e: χρῆσθαι, χρησόμεθα); marriages need to benefit the polis (485e), and it is
necessary that women shoulder some of the burden (455).
9 Annas (1976) identifies two more ways in which Plato’s argument would ‘fail’ a modern feminist
agenda: (1) Plato does not fully explain how women being both similar and different would affect the
distribution of their tasks and (2) he states that women in general are physically and intellectually
weaker than men and cannot surpass men in any human pursuit. The concept of human rights, which
is a crucial premise for the feminist agenda, is largely modern, although some intellectual historians
argue for the influence of Christianity and Roman law (Donahue 2010); Finnis, in his monumen-
tal study of the concept of “what is right,” traces the broader concept back to Aristotle’s dikaion;
cf. Finnis (2011: 165, 394).
10 On the dating of Mel. S. and Mel. D., see Cropp and Fick (1985); cf. Van Looy (2002: 349–350).
11 Unless otherwise indicated, I cite Kannicht’s 2004 edition: Fr. 480–487 (ca. 36 lines) from Sophe;
Fr. 489–496 (ca. 90 lines) from Desmotis; Fr. 497–514 (ca. 43 lines) from either of the two plays.
12 The hypothesis is preserved on a papyrus (P.Oxy. 2455); it simply refers to her children “by Poseidon”;
Ars Rhetorica (9.11) is more explicit: παρθένος φθαρεῖσα (damaged maiden).
13 Fragments of Ennius’ translation of Melanippe (Jocelyn) also show Hellen advocating that the babies
are prodigies (Fr. 3: monstrum) and must be burned (Fr. 2: pueros cremitari iube).
14 It was likely this reluctance, revealing both insufficient dedication to her offspring and epistemic
self-confidence, that earned Melanippe Aristophanes’ jab comparing her to Phaedra (Arist. Thesm.
564–568); cf. Austin and Olsen 2008 ad loc.
15 The Ars refers to the content of Sophe twice (8.10 and 9.11) as an example of schematismos, a liter-
ary device in which a stretch of discourse has, in addition to its ostensible function, another one that
is less obvious. The character of Melanippe represents a double schematismos: (1) Euripides presents
his own philosophical views, following Anaxagoras, as Melanippe’s and (2) Melanippe pretends to
give advice to her father, while really arguing her own case (8.11).
16 Diodorus (Bibliotheca 4.67.4) calls the wife of Aeolus ‘Melanippe’ (rather than ‘Hippo/Hippe’); their
daughter raped by Poseidon is called ‘Arne’, but his motivation is transferable to Euripides’ version
of the myth.
69
Dorota Dutsch
17 All translations are mine, unless indicated otherwise. Fr. 480:

… ἀλλ᾽ ἀνοιστέος λόγος
†ὄνομά τε τοὐμὸν† κεῖς ὃθενπερ ἠρξάμην.
καλοῦσι Μελανίππην <με>, Χείρονος δέ με
ἔτικτε θυγάτηρ Αἰόλῳ· κείνην μὲν οὖν
ξανθῇ κατεπτέρωσεν ἱππείᾳ τριχὶ
Ζεύς, οὕνεχ᾿ ὕμνους ᾖδε χρησμῳδοὺς βροτοῖς
ἄκη πόνων φράζουσα καὶ λυτήρια.
πυκνῇ θυέλλῃ δ᾿ αἰθέρος διώκεται
Μουσεῖον ἐκλιποῦσα Κωρύκιόν τ᾿ ὄρος
νύμφη δὲ θεσπιῳδὸς ἀνθρώπων ὕπο
Ἱππὼ κέκληται σώματος δι᾿ ἀλλαγάς.
μητρὸς μὲν ὧδε τῆς ἐμῆς ἔχει πέρι.
εἶτα λέγει καὶ ὃτι Ποσειδῶνι μιγεῖσα τέτοκε τοὺς διδύμους παῖδας.
18 Theonoe in the Helen (832) is also called θεσπιῳδὸς; a trifold distinction, prophetes, thespiodos, and
grammateus, existed for example, in the oracle of Apollo Clarios near Colophon; see Nissinen (2017:
124).
19 On the importance of self-trust in dealing with epistemic injustice, see El Kassar (2021); Dotson
(2014).
20 On the codex, see Orsini (2011).
21 Schol. Ar. Lys. 1125: ὁ στίχος ἐκ σοφῆς Μελανίππης Εὐριπίδου (a line from Euripides’ Melanippe
Sophe). While the editors of the scholia (most recently, Holwerda 1996) concur that the annota-
tion points to Lys. 1125, editors of Euripides’ fragmentary plays (Collard, Cropp, and Lee 1995;
Van Looy 2002; Kannicht 2004) print the preceding line, Lys. 1124. I have consulted a digital copy
of the codex in order to ascertain the precise placement of the scholion, but this proved distinctly
unhelpful.
22 Kannicht, following Wilamowitz, prints 1124 as Fr. 482.
23 My references henceforth are to Anaxagoras (59) testimonies (A) and fragments (B) in Diels and
Kranz. On nous see especially B11 and B12. There is no extant comment by Anaxagoras on human
gender and nous, but he would certainly agree that nous, being present in all living creatures, is pre-
sent in women.
24 Lys. 1126–1127: τοὺς δ’ ἐκ πατρός τε καὶ γεραιτέρων λόγους/πολλοὺς ἀκούσασ’ οὐ μεμούσωμαι κακῶς
(having listened to many conversations of my father and elders, I am well educated).
25 Clemens Strom. 1.16.73.5.
26 Cropp (Collard, Cropp, and Lee 1995 ad loc.) emphasizes “the association of cosmological with
magical/healing knowledge”; Dillon (2004: 58–61) conversely analyzes Melanippe’s views as
philosophical.
27 Fr. 484:
κοὐκ ἐμὸς ὁ μῦθος, ἀλλ’ ἐμῆς μητρὸς πάρα,
ὡς οὐρανός τε γαῖά τ’ ἦν μορφὴ μία
ἐπεὶ δ’ ἐχωρίσθησαν ἀλλήλων δίχα,
τίκτουσι πάντα κἀνέδωκαν εἰς φάος,
δένδρη, πετεινά, θῆρας, οὕς θ’ ἅλμη τρέφει (5)
γένος τε θνητῶν.
28 The verb that Euripides uses, ἐχωρίσθησαν (they have been separated), also appears in Anaxagoras’
description of the process in B6, χωρισθῆναι (to have been separated).
29 (1) Οn the unity, see B1: ὁμοῦ πάντα χρήματα ἦν (all things were together); this process was put in
motion by the νοῦς (B12 and B13); (2) Anaxagoras suggests that two entities aer and the aither were
dominant in the state of unity (B1); he refers to them being separated (B2); according to Simplicius
(179), from the first and simplest entities/elements, becoming increasingly dense, earth was com-
pounded (B16); and (3) bodies came to exist through a process of compounding (συμπαγῆναι) as well
(B4).
30 On the emergence of animals and sexual reproduction, see A1.9 and A42.12.
31 While Hesiod’s sequence might suggest primacy of the female entity, it also implies that femaleness,
being closer to the undifferentiated chaos, is the more primitive form.
32 Fr. 238: ἀλλ’ οἱ πόνοι τίκτουσι τὴν εὐδοξίαν.
70
33 If this reasoning is correct, her position resonates with Anaxagoras’ well-known tenet that there are
all things in all things (B6).
34 As observed by Lloyd (1979: 51–52); see also Parker discussing Herodotus’ representation of thau-
mata and terata (2011: 9–10).
35 See B4a on animals and humans as compounds with a soul.
36 On things being distinct, and their appearance being determined by the dominant ingredients, see
B12.16.
37 See B13.22 on human beings using their intelligence to appropriate animal products.
38 This may contribute to Aristotle’s singling out Melanippe’s speech as inappropriate to her character
(Poet. 1454a30).
39 It is possible that the account of not only Aspasia’s but also Anaxagoras’ trial in Hellenistic historians
ultimately drew on comedy, as recently discussed by Filonik (2013: 26–36). Plutarch names the comic
poet Hermippus as Aspasia’s accuser. However, the historicity of Socrates’ trial shows that court tri-
als of philosophers did take place, sometimes in conjunction with trial by comedy. Mansfeld (1980:
22–27) traces the story back to Douris of Samos, in the fourth-third century BCE, and before him to
Theophrastus.
40 Cf. DK A 11 and 12.
41 DK A15 and A16; cf. also Plato Phaed. 96a6–8.
42 Plut. Per. 6.1–2: τὴν ἀσφαλῆ μετ’ ἐλπίδων ἀγαθῶν εὐσέβειαν.
43 Fr. 497:
τείσασθε τήνδε· καὶ γὰρ ἐντεῦθεν νοσεῖ
τὰ τῶν γυναικῶν· οἳ μὲν ἢ παίδων πέρι
ἢ συγγενείας εἵνεκ’ οὐκ ἀπώλεσαν
κακὴν λαβόντες· εἶτα τοῦτο τἄδικον
πολλαῖς ὑπερρύηκε καὶ χωρεῖ πρόσω, (5)
ὥστ’ ἐξίτηλος ἁρετὴ καθίσταται.
44 She refers to Hill Collins’ work on how oppression affects marginalized knowers; Collins 1990, esp.
Chapter 11.
45 Fricker (2007) argues that hermeneutical gaps affect marginalized groups in two ways: (1) they are
deprived of the access to conceptual tools that could help them make sense of their experience and
(2) their experiences are excluded from or not fully included in the collective understanding of real-
ity. Unlike instances of testimonial injustice, for which we may assign individual responsibility, she
considers hermeneutical marginalization a structural phenomenon (2007: 156–158). Several schol-
ars have argued that responsibility for ignorance can be assigned; Pohlhaus Jr. (2012) proposed the
term “willful hermeneutical ignorance”; Medina (2012), “shared hermeneutical responsibility.”
46 Hyginus draws on Desmotis among other sources in his account of the myth (Fab. 186).
47 See Butrica 2001.
48 Fr. 493;
ἄλγιστόν ἐστι θῆλυ μισηθὲν γένος
αἱ γὰρ σφαλεῖσαι ταῖσιν οὐκ ἐσφαλμέναις
αἶσχος γυναιξὶ καὶ κεκοίνωνται ψόγον
ταῖς οὐ κακαῖσιν αἱ κακαί· τὰ δ’ εἰς γάμους
οὐδὲν δοκοῦσιν ὑγιὲς ἀνδράσιν φρονεῖν.
(5)
49 The line numbers in Kannicht’s edition reflect the cola of the papyrus (beginning with col. III line 5);
in order to facilitate references in the discussion below, I have inserted sequential numbers.
50 Fr. 494:
μάτην ἄρ᾿ εἰς γυναῖκας ἐξ ἀνδρῶν ψόγος
ψάλλει κενὸν τόξευμα καὶ λέγει κακῶς.
αἱ δ᾿ εἰσ᾿ ἀμείνους ἀρσένων. δείξω δ᾿ ἐγώ.
] ξυμβόλαι᾿ ἀμάρτυρα
]..καὶ οὐκ ἀρνούμεναι
(5)
με[ ]χο[ ] ἀλλήλας πόνους,]
κη[ ]δε[ ]θ[..] αἰσχύνην φέρει
71
Dorota Dutsch
…]αν.[… …]το[..]ωτος ἐκβαλεῖ γυνή.

νέμουσι δ᾿ οἴκους καὶ τὰ ναυστολούμενα
ἔσω δόμων σώιζουσιν, οὐδ᾿ ἐρημίαι
(10)
γυναικὸς οἶκος εὐπινὴς οὐδ᾿ ὄλβιος.
τὰ δ᾿ ἐν θεοῖς αὖ· (πρῶτα γὰρ κρίνω τάδε),
μέρος μέγιστον ἔχομεν· ἐν Φοίβου τε γὰρ
δόμοις προφητεύουσι Λοξίου φρένα
γυναῖκες, ἀμφὶ δ᾿ ἁγνὰ Δωδώνης βάθρα
(15)
φηγῷ παρ᾿ ἱερᾷ θῆλυ τὰς Διὸς φρένας
γένος πορεύει τοῖς θέλουσιν Ἑλλάδος.
ἃ δ᾿ εἴς τε Μοίρας τάς τ᾿ ἀνωνύμους θεὰς
ἱερὰ τελεῖται, ταῦτ᾿ ἐν ἀνδράσιν μὲν οὐ
ὅσια καθέστηκ᾿, ἐν γυναιξὶ δ᾿ αὔξεται
(20)
ἅπαντα. ταύτῃ τἀν θεοῖς ἔχει δίκης
θήλεια. πῶς οὖν χρὴ γυναικεῖον γένος
κακῶς ἀκούειν; οὐχὶ παύσεται ψόγος
μάταιος ἀνδρῶν, οἵ τ᾿ ἄγαν ἡγούμενοι
ψέγειν γυναῖκας, εἰ μί᾿ εὑρέθη κακή
(25)
πάσας ὁμοίως; διοριῶ [δ’ ἐ]γὼ λόγωι
τῆς μὲν κακῆς κάκιον οὐδὲν γίγνεται
γυναικός, ἐσθλῆς δ᾿ οὐδὲν εἰς ὑπερβολὴν
πέφυκ᾿ ἄμεινον· διαφέρουσι δ᾿ αἱ φύσεις …
51 On the construction of ἔχω modified by an adverb and a genitive, see LSJ ad voc. B II.2.b; Euripides
deploys it also in E. Hipp. 462, E. Hel. 313 and 857.
52 Other fragments of the two tragedies criticize prejudicial judgments of the enslaved. The messenger,
who appears in the Desmotis to give the news of the brothers’ victory, asserts that the virtues of brav-
ery and justice must be judged independently of whether someone is free or enslaved (Fr. 495 41–43).
A speaker in one of the two tragedies (Fr. 511) claims that enslaved people can be morally superior to
citizens.
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6
ON NOT-BELIEVING
A Gorgianic Reading of the Tragic Cassandra
In this chapter, I discuss the portrayal of the Trojan princess Cassandra in Aeschylus’
Agamemnon and Euripides’ Trojan Women. My reading of this character here is informed by
Gorgias’ Treatise on Not-being or On Nature (henceforth the Treatise). As Emily Pillinger ob-
served in her careful analysis of this character in Greek and Roman literature, “she is generally
found on the periphery of the narrative, rather than at its centre” (Pillinger 2019: 2). While the
same is true of most women in Antiquity, historical or mythical, Cassandra is an extreme case.
In Greek literature, her life is shaped by sexual assault or harassment from three male figures,
the god Apollo and the heroes Oileian Ajax and Agamemnon. Her combination of vulnerabil-
ity as a young enslaved woman and powerful prophetic knowledge has important implications
not only for the characters around her in the dramas and the spectators attending the ancient
theater but also for everyone with respect to women and the credibility of their voices.1
Gorgias, on the other hand, is both a historical figure and a character in the homonymous
dialogue by Plato. His speech and self-presentation in Plato’s authoritative voice can be dif-
ficult to interpret because of the many inconsistencies between Plato’s idea of Gorgias and
Gorgias’ thought in the works of his that survive. Thus, it is unclear whether Gorgias is best
considered a philosopher, sophist, and/or rhetorician.2 The problems of interpretation are
compounded by the fact that the Treatise is also an indirect text in two versions, consisting
of either anonymous evidence or a representation of the text by Sextus Empiricus. Until re-
cently, and especially before 1980, most Hellenists read the Treatise as a parody of the Eleatic
philosophy of Parmenides and Zeno, with a derogatory perspective similar to that in Gorgias’
Encomium of Helen. The latter text is widely seen as a mere rhetorical exercise, a defense of
the beautiful but seemingly indefensible figure who, persuaded or forced by one of Cassandra’s
brothers, became the casus belli of the paradigmatic mythical conflict between Greeks and
non-Greeks.
New approaches to the sophistic movement and the history of ancient rhetoric and oratory,
however, have led to a reevaluation of Gorgias’s works. In the intricate modern and contem-
porary reception of Greek drama and philosophy, influenced by the readings of, in particular,
Friedrich Nietzsche and August and Friedrich Schlegel, the works of Euripides are also being
reevaluated in light of these new approaches, which draw on developments in the fields of
rhetoric, the philosophy of language, and gender studies. Thus, complex characters such as
Cassandra and Helen and their decisions and actions deserve special attention regarding their
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-7 74

On Not-Believing
significance for philosophy and as representations of women in the context of evolving ap-
proaches to crucial ethical and epistemological problems.
I present here a comparison (but not a strict parallel) between some of Gorgias’ argu-
ments in the Treatise (mainly in the second and third parts of the text) and Cassandra’s in the
tragedies by Aeschylus and Euripides. I interpret her figure as a tragic performance of what
Gorgias proposes in the Treatise regarding the epistemological difficulty or even impossibility
of transmitting knowledge and information by means of λόγος (used here in many of its mean-
ings: word, discourse, argument, speech, etc.). My aim is not to demonstrate the influence of
Aeschylus or Euripides on Gorgias (or vice versa, in the latter case3) but rather to investigate
the philosophical dimension of Cassandra’s tragic persona by conceiving of it as a perfor-
mance (avant la lettre) and/or mythical narrative of the same devastating, anti-metaphysical
approach to the world that Gorgias presents in his Treatise. That text is known, as alluded
to earlier, from a summary by the anonymous author of De Melissus, Xenophanes, Gorgias
(MXG) included in the Aristotelian corpus and another summary in Sextus Empiricus’s so-
called Adversus Mathematicos or, more precisely, Against the Logicians. Scholars tend to cite
the latter, so it serves as my reference for this chapter.
Here, then, I compare some of the argumentation relating to epistemological issues about
belief and truth in the Treatise with Cassandra’s statements in Euripides and Aeschylus. It is
important to note at the outset a crucial aspect of the arrangement of Sextus’ work for the
reevaluation of Gorgias’ work and ideas. Sextus refers to Gorgias only in the first book of
Against the Logicians (referred to as Adversus Mathematicos vii)4 and (en passant) in his
Outlines of Pyrrhonism, while there is no reference to Gorgias in Against the Rhetoricians,
despite the fact that this latter text begins with a discussion of Plato’s Gorgias and a ref-
erence to beauty as one of the instruments of persuasion as exemplified by Helen. Five of
Sextus’s 11 works focus on “dogmatics” or “philosophers” and six on the “mathematicians”
(or “logicians” or “professors”). It is important to point out that Gorgias’ text is presented in
the first two books of Against the Logicians, which, together with the two books of Against
the Physicists and the one-book Against the Ethicists, make up the treatise Against the Dog-
matics. The other treatise, Adversus Mathematicos, consists of six books dealing with, in turn,
grammarians, rhetoricians, geometers, mathematicians, astrologers, and musicians. Scholars
interested in the history of philosophy and rhetoric have been intrigued by Sextus’ failure,
when dealing exhaustively with rhetoric as the art of persuasion in Adversus Rhetoricians, to
mention Gorgias while speaking of him elsewhere.5
This seeming anomaly is striking and significant because it reveals a perspective on Gorgias
as something other than a rhetorician, as he is usually viewed6 because of Plato’s charac-
terization of him in the Gorgias. On the other hand, Gorgias was not listed in the canonical
group of ten Attic orators, again, despite the influential portrait of him in Plato´s Gorgias as a
representative practitioner of the techne rhetorike. As Worthington well observed, the canon
of orators, “established at some date between the third century BC and the second century
AD, has had a dominating effect on the survival of the orators whose works we have today”
(Worthington 1994: 244).7 Therefore, the status of Gorgias’ voice as a philosopher, logician,
sophist, rhetor, and/or orator has remained indistinct.
A more careful consideration of where and how Sextus talks about Gorgias is necessary to
explore the concept of belief that is central to Cassandra’s rhetoric in the plays of Aeschylus
and Euripides. Against the Logicians begins with a discussion of the meaning of philosophy
(I, 2) that identifies logic, physics, and ethics as its main branches (I, 16). The discussion later
turns to the existence of criteria for truth (I, 27–28) and the meanings of “criterion” (I, 28–37)
and “truth” (I, 38–46). These questions, together with a proof theory, belong to the domain
75
of what was then conceptualized as the field of logic (and is now conceptualized as episte-
mology). Sextus, then, considers philosophers who have studied logical problems, including,
in this order, Xenophanes, Protagoras, and Gorgias.8 Curiously, even scholars who defend
Gorgias as a profound thinker—whether for his criticism of ontology, his contributions to
the development of rhetoric, or his study of language as an autonomous subject—when at-
tempting to interpret the concept of truth, always arrive, implicitly or explicitly, at one of two
conclusions: either
1 truth does exist and is relative to an individual or group (Dupprél 1948: 68; Guthrie 1971;
Adrados 1981: 46; Kerferd 1981; Mourelatos 1983) or
2 it is pointless to speak about truth because everything is true, so “truth” is an empty term
(Cassin 1980; Bett 1989; Paes 1992).
Taking these conclusions in turn, the most common characterization of Gorgias has been as
a relativist, thus indicating a relationship between him and Protagoras. A likely inspiration
for this type of characterization is a comment by Sextus immediately before his account of
Gorgias’s Treatise and soon after his discussion of Protagoras. Speaking about Dionysidoros
and Euthydemus, he says, “For they too consider both being and truth to be relative things”
(πρός τι, A.L., I, 64; cf. AL, I, 60). The second conclusion, supported by, in particular, Barbara
Cassin, is a consequence of the argumentation in the first part of the Treatise that, if being does
not exist, every predicate attributed to it is true, for no being can be presented as a counterex-
ample to any predicate attributed to the being (Cassin 1980). By my interpretation, only this
first part of the Treatise is consistent with the interpretations of Cassin and Richard Bett. At-
tention is due, though, to the other two parts of the Treatise as well. Bett’s important argument
thus puzzles me when he affirms that, based on the Treatise, all sentences can be considered
false (Bett 1989: 151–152). This assertion, by Bett’s interpretation, indicates enhanced power
of persuasion on the part of those skilled in rhetorical techniques. I am also puzzled by Bett’s
claim that it is possible to infer, from the second and third parts of the Treatise, a skeptical
position.
Even considering Sextus’ claim that Gorgias used a different argument to deny the existence
of criteria for truth than Protagoras did, it seems to me that his listing of these figures one
after the other implies greater conceptual proximity than the evidence justifies. Jaap Mansfield
is a curious example of the argument for such proximity (Mansfeld 1983: 250); he suggests
regarding the extent to which the arguments in the two versions of the Treatise can be attrib-
uted to Gorgias that an echo of the “man is the measure of all things” doctrine is detectable
in the third part of Gorgias’ Treatise and that the most interesting implications of Gorgias’
arguments relate to public and private knowledge and their consequences for the issue of
“consensus.” Nevertheless, Mansfeld adds that “it is very safe, however, to assume that he
[Gorgias] is hardly original and that his arguments would be much less interesting if more of
Protagoras had survived” (Mansfield 1985: 258). Thus, for instance, the man-measure thesis9
seems incompatible with the arguments put forward in the Treatise, on which basis Bett argues
forcefully that there is no reason to infer from either version of the Treatise that Gorgias was
a relativist. I cite Mansfield as an example of how individuals’ beliefs, such as a foundational-
ist or metaphysical perspective on the world and the ways in which individuals know it, have
influenced—and, sometimes, biased—the evaluation and interpretation of Gorgias’ thought
(and translation of his texts). A detailed discussion is beyond the scope of my arguments here.
These considerations bring the discussion to the other conclusion about truth, namely that it
is an empty term. Proceeding from the assumption that the anti-foundationalist philosophical
76
On Not-Believing
perspective in the Treatise and Gorgias’ other important works, the Encomium of Helen and
Apology of Palamedes, is unified and consistent, my first objection to the second conclusion
is that the word “truth” (ἀλήθεια) appears in both texts and does, indeed, seem to mean
something. Indeed, this simple fact seems to me sufficient to call the second conclusion about
truth into question.10 When interpreting these texts, Kerferd claims, it cannot be assumed that
Protagoras and Gorgias share the same conception of truth, for the former, by introducing the
concept of deceit (ἀπάτη), necessarily accepted that there exists “that which actually is true”
(Kerferd 1981: 79, 81). I have argued11 that it is possible to accept the idea of truth without
accepting the existence of an objective reality independent of human beings in part because of
my determination to find meaning in the word “truth” as Gorgias uses it in the Encomium of
Helen (1, 2) and Defense of Palamedes (35). At the same time, truth is more restrictive than
beliefs about the world (Encomium of Helen, 11) and, even if it exists, from the perspective
of this second conclusion, truth cannot be achieved or transmitted. Cassandra’s experience, by
my interpretation, exemplifies this difficulty or impossibility.
It is common practice to evaluate Gorgias’ rhetoric using Plato’s criteria. Coulter’s study
of the relationship between Plato’s Apology and Gorgias’s Palamedes (Coulter 1979: 33, 68,
criticizing Calogero 1957) shows in his vocabulary prejudice in his comment on Plato. Thus,
Coulter uses the word “immoral” (ibid.: 299, 300) when describing the consequences of Gor-
gias’ rhetoric and the word “amoral” (idem: 289) to describe how those who slandered So-
crates pictured him (a man who made “the weaker argument stronger” Apol. 19c), when, on
the contrary, as Coulter stresses, he is a man who, like Palamedes, should be praised by the
high moral level of his speech. Methodologically, it is a strange evaluation, because Gorgias’
practice is evaluated badly due to his portrayal in Gorgias, but, at the same time, the fact that
he authored Palamedes` defense does not require a positive evaluation of him as a rhetor.12
Buxton is one of the few to have taken a different approach, affirming that
Here is a measure of the difference between Plato and Gorgias: for Plato, the rhetoric of
the sophist-orator can be without absurdity said to be alogos, irrational; for Gorgias, the
power of peitho is the power of logos and neither is to be judged by any higher criterion
of truth.
(Buxton 1982: 82)
Following Buxton’s lead, I assume that Gorgias was an anti-foundationalist (more precisely,
an anti-realist) in the sense that, for a realist, the truth or falsehood of a proposition depends
on whether it corresponds or not, respectively, to a reality independent of human beings.13
For realists, the demonstration of a proposition only reveals the truth already inherent within
it by reason of its corresponding with reality (this revelatory task is, of course, important, but
it should not be confused with the truth that belongs to the proposition). For intuitionists, the
demonstration itself both establishes and reveals the truth of a proposition. Thus, Dummett
argued that constructivists “do not deny that there are mathematical propositions but hold
that they relate to our mental operations; their truth, therefore, cannot outstrip our ability to
prove them” (Dummett 1991: 5). Many scholars regard the pars construens of the Treatise to
be much less effective than the pars destruens.
Lastly, before (and in anticipation of) my argument about Cassandra, I acknowledge that
my interpretation of Gorgias’ Treatise (much like my interpretation of Cassandra’s retelling of
the “facts” in the Trojan Women) bears the influence of intuitionism, a contemporary trend in
the philosophy of mathematics proposed by Luitzen Brouwer at the beginning of the twentieth
century. Specifically, part of the motivation for my attempt to establish an analogy between
77
the argumentation of Gorgias and Cassandra is the similarity between the reception of the
intuitionists by philosophers of mathematics and the reception of Gorgias’ ideas since Plato.14
As is well known, among scholars, intuitionists have challenged non-intuitionist mathemati-
cians (mainly realists or Platonists; see Maddy 1990; Dummett 1991; Tieszen 1994), rejecting
a great many mathematical achievements by rejecting their opponents’ dogmatic aspirations.
In the same sense, Gorgias’ ideas regarding the limitations on the possibility of knowledge
have vexed philosophers to such an extent that he was (and still is) regarded as a nihilist
and unserious thinker—or, euphemistically, as a mere rhetorician. However, Gorgias’ and the
intuitionists’ conceptions of truth share a particularly interesting similarity that Bett termed
“modern epistemological skepticism” (Bett 1989: 150).15
I draw attention, then, to two apparently contradictory assertions in Gorgias’s writings.
1 He states in the Treatise that “even if anything exists, it is always unknowable and incon-
ceivable to humans” (77–82), while language is incapable of communicating the exterior
objects (83–87).16
2 He states in the Encomium of Helen that the power of λόγος—which is connected to
ἀλήθεια at the outset—is not to reveal reality but to construct it, even if the result of this act
of construction—a speech—is unable to persuade others, as is the case with the speeches of
Cassandra and Palamedes.17
The assertion that that which exists is unknowable (77–82) indicates that what people think
has a certain quality that allows them to think in a certain way. The preceding arguments
(67–76) lead to the conclusion that nothing is—neither being nor non-being—and Gorgias
now seems to assume that, if anything were what it is, thinking about it would be impossible.
Sextus here uses the verb “to be” in the subjunctive (ᾖ) and the particle κἂν to convey the
idea of possibility and uncertainty, therefore pointing to the potential that something exists.
According to the hypothesis that reality is, the fact that it is not possible to think about what
is also excludes the possibility of conceiving of it and, therefore, of knowing the reality that
exists. A thought is not classified as something that is because, if thoughts were things that
existed, all thoughts would have to exist. To be sure, it is possible to think of a person who
flies or a chariot that glides across the sea, but such thoughts include the recognition that these
things do not exist, and, if thought permits the opposite of what it is, it cannot be something
that is in the sense that is true. Gorgias emphasizes that a way of conceiving things has its own
modus operandi: just as it is proper for visible things to be seen and audible things to be heard,
in like manner, people do not discount things that are audible if they are not visible or visible
things if they are inaudible. Rather, it is necessary to conceive of each thing in the appropriate
way. In other words, reflection on thought, to be valid, must take into account the fact that
thought is not being.
Sextus begins the third part of his account of Gorgias’s Treatise (83–87) with the argu-
ment that external beings are commonly (κοινῶς) perceptible through the senses (αἰσθητά),
and he later describes that which comes to the senses from the outside (ἔξωθεν) as perceptible
(αἰσθητῶν). New arguments follow that support this third thesis, including the argument that
being, if it did exist, would be perceptible to the senses (αἰσθητῶν) and, therefore, external to
human experience. So, once people grasp what is perceptible through the senses, they can then
express it fully through discourse, which they externalize by means of an organ distinct from
the organs with which they perceive external things. Thus, the discourse would neither be nor
would correspond to what it is, and it could not demonstrate the things that are. Speech is the
means by which people reveal things to others, but, because it reveals nothing that is alien to
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On Not-Believing
its own nature, speech cannot express what it is itself. For Gorgias, a speech would not reveal
(in a Parmenidean sense18) the truth of propositions, which is compatible with the impos-
sibility of words to communicate—in an essentialist or foundational sense—exterior things.
However, Gorgias implies that this incapacity is not a limitation in the context of a construc-
tivist understanding of language when good arguments (λογισμόν, EH 2) serve to construct
a persuasive discourse. In this way, then, Gorgias’ seemingly irreconcilable assertions about
language can, in fact, be reconciled.
Few scholars have explored the connections among mathematics, logic or the philosophy of
language, and Greek literature and philosophy. An exception is the work of Gardies on “dem-
onstration” (Gardies 1997: 269–289). Gardies sees an evolution in the concept beginning
with the tragic ἀγώνες and reaching its acme with Euclid but also a great difference between
forensic speeches (with Gorgias’ Palamedes serving as an example), on the one hand, and the
mathematical reductio ad absurdum (with a comparison of the structure of Gorgias’ Treatise
and parts of Euclid’s books serving as an example) and mathematical theorems, on the other
hand, in that the validity of the latter need not be based on rhetorical devices. Nevertheless,
his approach points to an inter- or pre-disciplinary perspective for new research.
The reading of some points may raise relevant questions of a logical nature. While avoiding
an in-depth technical discussion here, I consider it important for my overall argument, given
some of the points presented above, to keep in mind that classical logic (not to be confused
with Aristotelian logic) is one among many forms of logic. For instance, I referred above to
intuitionistic logic, in which the principle of the excluded middle is not universally valid. There
are also forms of logic in which the principle of non-contradiction is not universally valid and
in which the domain of an interpretation of a language can be the empty set. This plurality of
logics can be helpful for understanding (1) and (2) above, the “power of logos” to “construct
reality” (which is directly related to intuitionistic logic) and why “the recognition that these
things do not exist” does not conflict with Russell’s theory (an important theory to bear in
mind here) of descriptions, for these issues belong to different logical realms.19
More recent approaches to Gorgias have become increasingly sophisticated, as I noted ear-
lier, following Consigny (2001: 35–49, especially in a chapter titled “Beyond Subjectivism and
Empiricism”) and Graham (2010).20 The latter well compared Gorgias’ position in the Trea-
tise (mainly in the third part, regarding a “behavioral connection between subjects”) to that
of W. V. Quine.21 Acknowledging the risk of an anachronistic reading, Graham affirmed in his
edition and translation of the Presocratic philosophers that “dismissing Gorgias as a thinker
would be hasty. His argument is not obviously self-refuting, and his position is not obviously
untenable” (Graham 2010: 784–785).
These considerations bring me to the Agamemnon and Trojan Women, in which the connec-
tion between subjects for the purpose of understanding and acting in the world is particularly
striking because it is personified in a character—Cassandra—whose presence is so poignant
and defiant. As Pillinger pointed out, this character “illustrates not just the communication
(or miscommunication) of information from one realm to another, but also the difficulty in
identifying at what point such communication (or communicative breakdown) takes place”
(Pillinger 2019: 5). The remainder of this paper is devoted explicating Cassandra’s communi-
cation strategies. I begin by drawing attention to a few key aspects of her story.
To be sure, Cassandra is not a particularly well-developed figure in Greek mythology, be-
ing represented mainly in her roles as a daughter, slave, or object of sexual desire, as I noted
earlier. She appears in Homer before she does onstage, and, significantly, neither the Iliad
nor Odyssey refer to her as a prophet. In the Iliad, the emphasis is on her beauty as the bride
promised to Othryoneus (13.366), and she is also shown grieving Hector’s death, being the
79
first to see her father approaching with her brother’s body (24.699). In the Odyssey, her death
along with that of Agamemnon is reported, including her “pitiable voice” (11.421). In lyric
poetry, Alcaeus refers to her as a virginal girl and addresses the pain that she experiences at the
(P. XI, v. 33 μάντιν … κόραν).

hands of Ajax (fr. 298 ἄμφοιν παρθενικά ἔλων), and Pindar clearly identifies her as a prophet
After Greek tragedy, Roman poets refer to Cassandra in passing in connection to well-
known heroes. Virgil (Aen. 10.67–68) describes Cassandra’s madness as the force that pro-
pelled Aeneas on his journey. Ovid presents her in the Metamorphoses, without naming
her, as a priestess of Phoebus dragged by the hair (13.410) and as a victim of rape by Ajax
(14.468–469). He gives her more attention in the Heroides, having Paris name her (16.121)
and describe her as a “truthful prophet” (vera . . . vates, 125), but her brother only believes her
after the conflagration that she predicts has arrived, thus confirming that the gift of prophecy
from Apollo—the compensation for his rape of her—is also a curse. Having surveyed ancient
authors’ representations of Cassandra, I return now to the tragic representation of this non-
Greek woman by Aeschylus and Euripides as someone who is not understood despite speaking
fluent Greek (as Clytemnestra says at Agam. 1050–1054, she is not like a bird or a barbarian
and so can be persuaded by words22). I approach the Cassandras of the two tragedians as a
kind of intertextual comparative dialogue.
To provide context for Aeschylus’ representation of Cassandra as a prophet in the first play
of the Oresteia, I draw attention to a key ritual associated with prophecy. Scholarly recon-
structions of the religious activity at Delphi indicate that the priestess known as the Pythia
descended to an area about a meter below ground level and sat on a tripod at the edge of a well
to inhale the vapors rising from it (e.g., Zaidman and Pantel 2008: 127). Worshipers submit-
ted questions verbally to the priestess who, inspired by Apollo, then communicated relevant
prophecies to the priests of the temple, who in turn delivered them to the worshipers. Though
Aeschylus does not refer to Cassandra explicitly as the god’s priestess, he does make clear her
direct link to Apollo’s prophetic powers by describing her as bearing the sacred “scepter and
necklace,” having her say that “Apollo, god-prophet, gave me his strength” (Ag. 1375), and
having her describes herself as wearing “prophetic clothing” (χρηστηρίαν ἐσθῆτ᾽, 1270). I note
here Seth Schein’s (1982: 12) perceptive observation regarding Cassandra’s role in the play:
it is difficult to believe that Aeschylus would have inserted so long and unexpected a
scene in his play, just at the point when the audience would expect Agamemnon to be
murdered. […] Cassandra frequently rivets our attention more than any other character;
on stage her scene can be the most gripping and affecting part of the play.
The scene is the more interesting because of Cassandra’s status: she is, as alluded to earlier,
said explicitly to speak Greek (Ag. 1254), but she is nevertheless, as Andrea Doyle (2008) em-
phasizes, “a foreign woman, a slave, and a concubine.”23 This status gives a distinct cast to the
reception of her discourse, and even her suffering, presenting her in a fundamentally different
light from that in her scene in Euripides’ Trojan Women.
Euripides places Cassandra among members of her family—specifically, her mother and
sister-in-law—in which context her discourse may seem more persuasive, as her relatives are a
more charitable audience than the Greeks, sharing the same values and, in this case, the same
travails. Cassandra’s lines in Trojan Women seem to me aligned with this discursive construc-
tion of another perspective on reality. In some sense, her rhetoric is even more like Gorgias’ than
that of Pericles in Thucydides (2. 35–46) in his funeral famous oration persuading the relatives
of fallen soldiers that should feel honored and glad to have produced citizens to defend Athens
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On Not-Believing
and also that it is important to generate more citizens to fight and die for the same cause.24 Cas-
sandra’s movements and voice make her (re)construction of reality evident from the first: “Nim-
bly lift the foot; lead the dance on high with cries of joy, as if to greet my father’s happy fate” she
says (325–326), and, when she asks Hecuba, “O mother, crown my head with victor’s wreaths;
rejoice in my royal match; lead me and, if you find me unwilling at all, thrust me there by force”
(354–355), Euripides presents a boldly (ir)rational perspective that has defied interpretation,
at least any simple interpretation, since antiquity. Thus, Goff affirmed that “Kassandra’s scene
thus asks quite aggressively where the stage ends and the spectator begins” (Goff 2009: 54).
Returning to Aeschylus, though the chorus in the Agamemnon recognizes Cassandra’s
supernatural knowledge when she recounts Atreus’ past crimes (ἐκεῖνα), it nevertheless re-
jects her prophecy regarding the future (ταῦτα), declaring “Of your glory as divine we are
aware, but we seek no prophets” (ἦ μὴν κλέος σοῦ μαντικὸν πεπυσμένοι / ἦμεν προφήτας δ’
οὔτινας ματεύομεν) 1098–1099 and “Of these predictions I am ignorant; those I recognized,
for the whole country proclaims [them]” (τούτων ἄιδρίς εἰμι τῶν μαντευμάτων. / ἐκεῖνα δ’
ἔγνων· πᾶσα γὰρ πόλις βοᾷ, 1105–1106). By the gift of Apollo, Cassandra sees the prophesied
future (1107–1111), but the members of the chorus cannot understand the murderous ges-
ture by the king’s wife, being deaf to such riddles (αἰνιγμάτων, 1112) and “dark oracles”
(ἐπαργέμοισι θεσφάτοις, 1113). However, she sees and announces the vision, crying “Look,
look!” (ἰδοὺ ἰδού, 1125) and describing the crime to be perpetrated in a direct address (σοι
λέγω, 1128–1129) and plain speech: “I say that you will see the death of Agamemnon”
(Ἀγαμέμνονός σέ φημ’ ἐπόψεσθαι μόρον, Ag. 1246). Still, the chorus does not believe. The
curse of Apollo falls on everyone who uses language, even when it seems clear, making the
Trojan War-era figure of Cassandra a “Gorgian” character.
In the Trojan Women, the impossibility of communication is especially striking because
Cassandra appears among characters who are sympathetic to her. In this respect, Euripides’
play25 is a good example of the relationship between epistemological and moral anti-realists
in fifth-century Greek thought. In Cassandra’s scene in The Trojan Women, it is clear that she
knows what can be understood as the truth about (future) events but, again, no one believes
her—that is, none can grasp the meaning of her words. I draw attention in this context to two
other Euripidean characters, Theonoe and Hippolytus. Theonoe’s scene in Helen (998–1031)
involves a situation similar to that which Cassandra faces. She is a prophet who knows “the
truth” about the events in the play, but she is compelled to lie—specifically, to her brother
Theoclymenus—to pursue what she considers the proper course of action. This is an intriguing
detail, especially given that her name indicates that she has access to the designs of the gods
(Helen 10–15).26 Thus, it seems to me that this framing of the scene is indicative of Euripides’
commitment to an understanding of being similar to that of Gorgias, namely that, even if be-
ing exists, it cannot be understood, though it remains possible to talk about truth.
Accordingly, I draw particular attention to the moment in the Trojan Women when He-
cuba asks the herald Talthybius about the fates of various women, starting with Cassandra,
and learns that she, the god’s favorite, has been chosen by Agamemnon, in whom she aroused
great desire. Hecuba’s response is significant: she asks Talthybius to confirm that he is speak-
ing of “the virgin of Apollo, to whom the golden-haired one gives the privilege of a life with-
out a marriage bed” (ἦ τὰν τοῦ Φοίβου παρθένον, ᾇ γέρας ὁ χρυσοκόμας ἔδωκ᾽ ἄλεκτρον ζόαν,
252–253). Then, having received this news, Hecuba tells Cassandra to cast aside the “sacred
apparel” (ἱεροὺς στολμούς, 258) that symbolizes her status as a priestess of Apollo. However,
when Cassandra appears carrying a torch and urges her mother to join her in the rites of Hy-
menaeus, Hecuba calls her a “maenad” (μαινάς, 307), a sentiment that the chorus echoes by
describing her as possessed by Dionysus (βακχεύουσαν, 342).
81
Aware, of course, of the disastrous future that is approaching, Cassandra exhorts her
mother to celebrate her status as a captive and concubine as if her pending nuptials are auspi-
cious. The queen laments the shame of the union to which her daughter will be subjected, but
Cassandra claims that it is in accordance with Apollo’s will, and she reveals that Agamem-
non’s desire to possess her will bring ruin to him and his house, showing herself to be, in fact,
an avenger of the Trojans (Tr. 354–369). Here, I quote in full her argument, having cited the
first lines earlier.
O mother, crown my head with victor’s wreaths; rejoice in my royal match; lead me
and if you find me unwilling at all, thrust me there by force; for if Loxias is indeed a
prophet, Agamemnon, that famous king of the Achaeans, will find in me a bride more
vexatious than Helen. For I will slay him and lay waste his home [360] to avenge my
father’s and my brothers’ deaths. But let that go; I will not tell of that axe which shall
sever my neck and the necks of others, or of the conflict ending in a mother’s death,
which my marriage shall cause, nor of the overthrow of Atreus’ house. But I, for all my
frenzy, will so far rise above my frantic fit, that I will prove this city happier far than
those Achaeans, who for the sake of one woman and one passion have lost a countless
army in hunting Helen.
(Tr. 354–369)27
Cassandra now describes herself as being under the influence of Dionysus (βακχευμάτων, 367)
while making her predictions about the future—which, again, no one believes—and access-
ing past events to explain that the affront of her forced marriage to Agamemnon will provide
the justification for the murder of them both (371–372). She takes on the role of an orator,
praising the city and referring to its lasting kleos (386, 402). Cassandra invites Hecuba and
the chorus to rejoice in the justice that her prophecies promise, but her speech only succeeds
in mortifying the queen, and the Trojans see in Cassandra a disturbed mind. Talthybius like-
wise declares that Apollo has damaged her mind (ἐξεβάκχευεν, 408) and questions Agamem-
non’s desire for her (414–416). Nevertheless, she believes herself to be the bearer of the truth:
“Where then are Apollo’s words, so clear to me in their interpretation” (ποῦ δ᾽ Ἀπόλλωνος
λόγοι, οἵ φασιν αὐτὴν εἰς ἔμ᾽ ἡρμηνευμένοι, 428–430).
Euripides goes on to depict the moment when Cassandra, aware of her destiny, strips her-
self of the sacred accessories that symbolize her relationship with Apollo (451–455). However,
the only impact of her prophecies on the Trojan women is to elicit pity. Though she is seen
as a maiden consecrated to the god, as Hecuba and Talthybius attest, her condition causes
her interlocutors to attribute her prediction of Agamemnon’s murder to Dionysus rather
than to Apollo and discredit it (361–362) along with her predictions of the death of Hecuba
(426–430) and Odysseus’ wanderings and eventual return to Ithaca (430–445). Several of the
characters describe Cassandra using words that reinforce this sense that her mental health
is compromised, beginning with Poseidon at the beginning of the play, who refers to her as
“frantic” (ἣν δὲ παρθένον μεθῆκ᾽ Ἀπόλλων δρομάδα Κασάνδραν ἄναξ, 42), followed by Hecuba
(169–172, 306–307, 348–350), who knows that a vengeful Apollo has deprived her daughter
of the ability to persuade her interlocutors and, therefore, is unable to communicate her pre-
dictions effectively. The members of the audience, by contrast, know that her predictions are
accurate. Perhaps Cassandra’s bold claim that the Trojans are more blessed than the Achaeans
(365–366) because “the most beautiful glory” belongs to the city and to the Trojans (386)
sounded no more strange, and perhaps even less so, to the Athenian audiences than Pericles’
funeral oration did.
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On Not-Believing
Gregory (1991: 160) well observed that the tragedy is about logos “as alternative to ac-
tion.” Language has the power that Gorgias ascribes to it because it is not a mere reflection of
reality; rather, it serves to explain, (re)construct, and control narratives (in particular related
to war). Regarding the Trojan Women (which features a much more pessimistic conclusion
than the Oresteia), it is important to remember that it is one of a trilogy of plays relating to
the fall of Troy, along with the lost Alexander and Palamedes. With this trilogy, Euripides
invited members of the audience to consider other texts such as Gorgias’ that deal with these
characters and subjects.28
I hope to have shown, then, that the tragic Cassandras of Aeschylus and Euripides drama-
tized on stage the philosophical problem regarding truth and reality posed by Gorgias in his
Treatise. In so doing, I hope further to have communicated to readers of this text about texts
in which, paradoxically, these Cassandras in effect challenge Gorgias’ assertions about truth
in the third part of the Treatise. After a performance of Aeschylus’ trilogy by Aeschylus by
members of the University of Cambridge, a review in The Times described Cassandra as “the
most tragic figure in all drama, unique in pathos and unparalleled in the horror of her fate”
(apud Prins 2005: 178). For Prins, in her chapter, she says that “the naked cry of Cassandra
embodies language cut down to reveal its nakedness – not the revelation of truth, but the truth
of its own opacity” (2005: 183). This description applies equally well to Euripides’ Cassandra
in The Trojan Women. Even if she affirms that the Trojans should be happy, the audience (and
readers) can feel the gap between Cassandra’s words and the facts to which they refer, and this
philosophical (epistemic) conclusion is a tragic recognition of the human condition.29
Notes
1 The subject is recurrent in Euripides, at least if “Apollo’s invalidation of Cassandra’s prophetic gift”
is similar to “Zeus’ silencing of Hippo,” Melanippe’s mother and “a brilliant seer and healer,” as
pointed by Dorota Dutsch in her chapter in this volume, “Euripides on “Women’s Rights?” Natural
Philosophy and Epistemic Justice in the Fragments of Melanippē Sophē and Desmōtis,” which in-
cludes a perspicuous analysis of the fragments of these lost tragedies, and she reaches a conclusion
consistent with mine regarding the pessimistic Euripidean (and Gorgianic) view of the impossibility
of communication, even when the truth is affirmed: “The Sophē thus arguably dramatized a failure of
human understanding and justice.”
2 For a recent discussion, see Consigny (2001), Graham (2010), and Reames (2017).
3 See especially Romilly (1975) and Croally (1994). On the influence of Aeschylus on Euripides,
regarding Cassandra, see Pillinger (2019).
4 See Sextus Empiricus (1987) On Non-being or Nature, Book 7 (65-87).
5 On the influence of Gorgias’ works on rhetoric but not philosophy, see especially Kennedy (1980: 30–31),
Nestle (1944: 135), Guthrie (1971: 50), and Dodds (7–10). Isocrates and Plato argue that Gorgias is
not really a philosopher, and he does not appear on Aristotle’s list of Reames (2018).
6 Despite the fundamental research by Schiappa (1999) on Plato’s shaping of the word in his dia-
logue and resignification of it; see also Consigny (2001), Reames (2017), Reames (2018) and Kraus
(2023).
7 On the canon, see Worthington (1994).
8 However, he next (I, 88ss) says that, actually, “the physicists seem to have been the first to introduce
the inquiry regarding the criterion, for, when they had condemned sensation as being in many cases
untrustworthy, they set up reason as the judge of the truth in existing things.”
9 This thesis is traditionally considered a form of relativism; nevertheless, it is debated whether Pro-
tagoras is a representative sophist; see Bett (1989) and Fine (1988). On Protagoras and Gorgias, see
Spatharas (2001b: 134; 286).
10 In the Encomium to Helen, notably, are two related pairs, truth-speech and beautiful-body (1), but
they are interchangeable, and the sensations (mainly vision and hearing) become fundamental to de-
fining what is true. In the Defense of Palamedes, the titular character claims (34) that speech cannot
transmit the truth or facts.
83
11 Coelho (2010).
12 On the silence about Palamedes Apology in the history of philosophy, see Coelho (2013a).
13 Far from common sense, these arguments are more easily accepted than Gorgias’. For a keen discus-
sion of the ways in which anti-realist conceptions are refuted, see the second and third of William
James’s Conferences on Pragmatism (James 2004).
14 See, for instance, Kerferd (1986). On the criticism of rhetoric as a servant of philosophy, see Kerferd
(1981: 78) and Cassin (1985: 435–448); on relativism and rhetoric, see Bett (1989: 154).
15 I also note that the modernity of Gorgias reinforces my interpretation, consistent with comments
like that like Chloe Balla in her chapter in this volume, “The Correctness of the Grammatical Gen-
der in the Sophistic Tradition,” that Gorgias is “anticipating formulations of modern philosophy of
language.”
16 21–125 MXG, 980a20–b20. On Palamedes (36), see Coelho (2010). For the connections among
Gorgias, Euripides, and Plato regarding beliefs and the consequences of believing false evidence, see
Coelho (2013b).
17 Encomium of Helen (8–15).
18 I follow here the hegemonic reading of Parmenides’ poem, but I am conscious of other hermeneutic
possibilities such as the one suggested in this volume by Jessica Elbert Decker in her chapter “The
Way Up and Down: Liminal Agency in the Homeric Hymns and Pre-Socratic Philosophy” wherein
the binary trap of the discourse, or logos, takes two roads, the “way of truth” and the “way of doxa.”
19 See, for instance, Priest (2008).
20 In my 1997 master’s thesis (which includes translations of the two versions of the Treatise with com-
mentary and interpretation) and in Coelho (2010). See also Spatharas (2001a).
21 See Quine (2007): 100–103, 374 (note 8).
22 On the sympathetic portrayal of Clytemnestra by Aeschylus (“scorned in her jealousy against
Cassandra”) compared with the women of Lemnos, see Kalliopi Nikolopoulou’s chapter in this vol-
ume, “Sex, Family, and Chthonic Justice: On the Cosmology of the Choephoroi,” which includes a
discussion of some important aspects of ritual and prophecy in the trilogy.
23 As Doyle (2008): 57 argued, “Through use of bridal imagery and language one may read bridal
overtones into the scene of Cassandra’s arrival and may also be forgiven for confusing, at first, the
identity of her spouse. Cassandra is not just a prophet and unwilling bride of Apollo; she is also a
foreign woman, a slave and a concubine—the war trophy of Agamemnon.”
24 On the analysis of Pericles’ epitaph, see Loraux (1994), whose book remains one of the best studies
of the political value of epitaphs and epideictic discourse (including Gorgias’ fragmentary discourse).
On Cassandra’s epitaph, see Werner (2002).
25 The parallelism between the two plays (and even discussions of influence) is, as I observed earlier, very
frequent.
26 Christa Wolf’s (2007) reading of Cassandra, as knowing that Helen is not in Troy but agreeing to
accept this apate for the sake of her father, reminds me (see Coelho 2013b) of Theonoe’s situation in
Euripides’ Helen.
27 μῆτερ, πύκαζε κρᾶτ᾽ ἐμὸν νικηφόρον,
καὶ χαῖρε τοῖς ἐμοῖσι βασιλικοῖς γάμοις:
355 καὶ πέμπε, κἂν μὴ τἀμά σοι πρόθυμά γ᾽ ᾖ,
ὤθει βιαίως: εἰ γὰρ ἔστι Λοξίας,
Ἑλένης γαμεῖ με δυσχερέστερον γάμον
ὁ τῶν Ἀχαιῶν κλεινὸς Ἀγαμέμνων ἄναξ.
κτενῶ γὰρ αὐτόν, κἀντιπορθήσω δόμους
360 ποινὰς ἀδελφῶν καὶ πατρὸς λαβοῦσ᾽ ἐμοῦ ...
ἀλλ᾽ ἄττ᾽ ἐάσω: πέλεκυν οὐχ ὑμνήσομεν,
ὃς ἐς τράχηλον τὸν ἐμὸν εἶσι χἁτέρων:
μητροκτόνους τ᾽ ἀγῶνας, οὓς οὑμοὶ γάμοι
θήσουσιν, οἴκων τ᾽ Ἀτρέως ἀνάστασιν.
365 πόλιν δὲ δείξω τήνδε μακαριωτέραν
ἢ τοὺς Ἀχαιούς, ἔνθεος μέν, ἀλλ᾽ ὅμως
τοσόνδε γ᾽ ἔξω στήσομαι βακχευμάτων:
οἳ διὰ μίαν γυναῖκα καὶ μίαν Κύπριν,
θηρῶντες Ἑλένην, μυρίους ἀπώλεσαν.
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On Not-Believing
28 It is also important to recall the abundant negative criticism of the works of Gorgias and Euripides
as superficial, deceptive, and inherently feminine. I mention here two examples from the previous
century. First, Dodds, in the introduction to his edition of Plato’s Gorgias, dismissed the Encomium
of Helen and its author, following J. D, Denniston, with the withering barb that “starting with the
initial advantage of having nothing in particular to say, he was able to concentrate all his energy
upon saying it” (Dodds 1959: 9). Second, Kitto claimed to perceive a similar emptiness in Euripides’
Helen, asserting that the playwright here was “free to attend entirely to his ‘form’ . . . it is when
the poet has nothing in particular to say that he must be most elegant and attractive” (Kitto 1961:
315). I suggest that this negative assessment of the two authors—based on a kind of ad hominem
attack, or perhaps better, given the subject of the works found so unworthy, ad feminam attack—is
no coincidence.
29 I thank Jim Marks for reviewing an earlier version of this paper and polishing my English signifi-
cantly. I offer my heartfelt gratitude to Catherine McKeen and Sara Brill for their invitation, kind
support, and insightful comments on my text.
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7
THE CORRECTNESS OF
GRAMMATICAL GENDER IN
THE SOPHISTIC TRADITION
Chloe Balla
If the limits of one’s language mean the limits of one’s world, then enriching one’s language
can affect the perception of the world. Dominant in the so-called linguistic turn in philoso-
phy, this idea is part of a familiar discourse about the ways in which language reflects but
also shapes social values, including those concerning gender. Recently, LGBTQ theorists have
introduced rules and conventions in an effort to eliminate traditional distinctions between
“men” and “women,” which are gradually being adjusted to accommodate transgender,
bigender, or non-binary gender identities. But the idea that language can and indeed should
be adjusted to map the world more accurately can be traced to the writings of some of
the fifth-century BCE professional intellectuals whom historians of philosophy describe as
sophists. Among the subjects these figures—to whom, following the norm, I will refer as
the Sophists1—professed to teach was orthoepeia, “correctness of language,” which aimed
at precision of expression and cultivation of style and which formed part of a training in
argumentation. In what follows, I propose to show how the study of orthoepeia among the
sophists fostered an interest in the proper use of grammatical gender. In addition, I argue
that, by reworking and combining certain sophistic ideas, and by adjusting them to the needs
of his comedy, Aristophanes can be credited with the earliest formulation of a problem that
any program of correction of language needs to face, insofar as it apparently violates the
“natural” development of linguistic usage, imposing on the members of the community the
authority of an “expert.”
In the first section of my paper, I discuss the emergence of the interest in grammatical
gender in the fragments of Protagoras and I show how Aristophanes’ satire may have been
responsible for the earliest formulation of the idea of adjusting grammatical to biological or
social gender. In the second section, I connect Protagoras’ interest in gender to his professional
activity as a Sophist, drawing a parallel between his role and authority and the role and au-
thority that our contemporaries (unfavorably described as guardians of grammar or partisans
of “political correctness”) assume when they introduce grammatical rules that are expected to
eliminate sexual discrimination. I then go on to explain how Protagoras’ program of language
correction ties in with his professional practice, but also why—despite some puzzling evidence
from Aristophanes’ Clouds that points to the opposite conclusion—such practice may, at least
in principle, pave the way for a revision of stereotypes concerning gender.
89 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-8

Chloe Balla
1 Protagoras on Gender: A Survey of the Evidence

In the course of his discussion on the proper use of the Greek language (ἑλληνίζειν: 3.5
1407a17), Aristotle says that:
[...] Protagoras distinguished the genders of nouns: masculine, feminine, and neuter
(σκεύη).
(Rhet. 3.5 1407b7–8=LM D23)
Aristotle’s text implies that Protagoras introduced the distinction of noun genders and that he
used it to underscore the importance of congruence between nouns or pronouns and the cor-
responding participles. We may compare this interest to that of a modern teacher who teaches
a foreign language stressing cases where the ending of a certain word may mislead us as to the
gender, or to that of a modern teacher or parent correcting a child who is getting grammatical
gender wrong.
But other evidence suggests that Protagoras’ interest in grammatical gender went beyond the
question of congruence and further involved some radical ideas about correcting or revising the
gender of particular nouns. Thus, again according to Aristotle (though in a different treatise from
the one cited above), Protagoras argued that the term mênis (which means wrath) and pêlex
(which means helmet) are, in fact, not feminine but rather masculine nouns.2 What motivated
Protagoras’ correction? Answering the above question with any certainty would require more
texts or examples than those the extant sources allow us to trace. What complicates the problem
even further is that those sources do not contain any explanation of the theoretical presupposi-
tions or the more general agenda underlying the practice of correction. On the other hand, the
fact that at least an important part of the Sophists’ professional activity was oriented toward
practice (which could take the form of a dialectical exercise or an epideixis, i.e. a performance)
may give us a clue about the framework within which Protagoras’ interest in gender developed.
One of the practices for which Protagoras was distinguished was the critical analysis of
earlier poetry. The most famous example of such practice is his effort to reveal the incon-
gruities of Simonides’ poem in Plato’s Protagoras (LM D31 (< A25) Plat. Prot. 338e–339a).
A similar interest can be traced in Protagoras’ correction of the gender of nouns; the most
striking case is the word mênis, which is of course the first word of Homer’s Iliad; by ques-
tioning its grammar Protagoras would be therefore challenging the most emblematic author
of Greek poetry (Fehling 1965: 214). It seems likely that Protagoras’ criticism of the gender of
mênis was part of a more complete analysis of the first verse of the Iliad. For, in his Poetics too,
Aristotle attributes to Protagoras a correction of the second word of the poem, the verb ἄδω,
to sing. According to that source, Protagoras suggested that Homer should not command the
Muse (ἐντολή), since his aim was rather to utter a prayer (εὐχωλή: (D. L. 9.53–4 = DK 80 A 1 =
Radermacher B III 10 = Protagoras LM D17).
It seems, however, that Protagoras’ correction of what we would describe as the mood of
the verb—we should bear in mind that Protagoras was not aware of the categories of “mood”
and “verb”—was not confined to his criticism of Homer, but was rather part of a larger lin-
guistic project (Huitink and Willi 2021). According to Diogenes Laertius, Protagoras
was the first to divide speech (or language: λόγος) into four kinds – prayer, question,
answer, command (others say into seven: narration, question, answer, command, report,
prayer, calling) – which he even named ‘foundations of speech’ (πυθμένας λόγων).
LM D17 (< A1) D.L. 9.53–54
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Grammatical Gender in the Sophistic Tradition
The fact that Protagoras described those kinds as foundations of speech quite generally indi-
cates his commitment to an understanding of language that would go beyond a mere competi-
tion with ancient poetry—which was then implemented in the kind of criticism of Homer that
we traced to Aristotle’s comments. The study of those foundations tied in with an education
in the art of speech (τέχνη λόγων: Lee 2023) which reflected a more general appreciation of
the efficacy of language. The clearest expression of this appreciation occurs in Gorgias’ Helen,
where speech (λόγος) is likened to a “great potentate [δυνάστης μέγας] that by means of an
extremely tiny and entirely invisible body performs the most divine deeds.” Anticipating for-
mulations of modern philosophy of language, and in line with an interest that marks other
early practitioners of rhetoric, Gorgias also claims (and presumably advertises to prospective
students) an ability to do things with words: “to stop fear, to remove grief, to instill joy, and
to increase pity” (82B11, 8 D.-K. = 32D24, 8 L.-M.).
In support of the idea that Protagoras’ interest in language went beyond the mere ap-
plication of grammatical rules, we may also consider the account of language in the “Great
Speech” that is attributed to him in Protagoras. Protagoras explicitly refers to a τέχνη, a skill
or art that enabled humans “to articulate speech and words” (Protagoras 322a5–6: φωνὴν
καὶ ὀνόματα=LM D40=DK C1); given the ensuing account of the nature of political art, we
may conclude that Protagoras reflected on the nature of human language, considering it as a
skill that humans possess by nature, which can nonetheless be improved through training by
an expert, like Protagoras himself. On the other hand, Protagoras’ use of the terms (speech)
and ὀνόματα (words) suggests that he is here thinking of language as a rather basic skill that
enhances communication within the human community but also marks the human species
as different from any other animal (Beresford 2013). Assuming that the order in which the
various characteristics and skills that differentiate humans from other animals is not just ran-
dom, we should further notice that Protagoras mentions the articulation of language after the
development of religion but before the human ability to create houses and clothes and the
invention of agriculture. Thus, (assuming that Protagoras’ “Great Speech” is not a Platonic
fabrication), it seems likely that as well as what we may describe as an interest in grammar,
Protagoras had developed an interest in the role language played as a distinctive characteristic
of human nature.
Regardless of Protagoras’ de facto contribution to the study of the formal characteristics
of language, we should not fail to notice that at least some of his linguistic remarks concern
questions that lie at the interface between the categories we describe as grammar and seman-
tics.3 This idea can be better justified in connection with his interest in verb mood. For in
choosing to pray, to assert a statement, to answer a question, or to give a command, a speaker
not only observes formal rules but also determines the linguistic expressions that will better
match her intentions, allowing her to communicate them effectively to an audience or to con-
verse with an interlocutor. This raises the question of gender, a category that, as we have seen,
played some role in Protagoras’ agenda concerning language, but was certainly not included
in his “foundations of speech.” As we have already seen, Aristotle’s Rhetoric suggests that
Protagoras’ interest in the distinction among genders was related to language instruction, as
it aimed to cultivate awareness of the different rules that speakers need to observe.4 But what
about semantics? The evidence concerning the cases of mênis and pêlex scarcely allows us to
attribute to Protagoras some interest of adjusting the grammatical gender to the connotations
of masculinity or femininity that the referents were supposed to carry. And even if the term
he uses to describe “neuter” literally denotes inanimate things (σκεύη) (Rhet. 3.5 1407b7–8;
cited above), he may have been aware that, with the exception of proper names, noun gender
is arbitrary, completely unrelated to the meaning of the word, or to its possible feminine or
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masculine connotations. On the other hand, the fact that in the case of certain animals (a point
to which we will come back shortly) or personifications of Earth (Gaia: F) or Sky (Ouranos:
M) grammatical gender matched or (in the case of mythology) defined sex may have led a
Sophist like Protagoras to reflect on the relationship between grammar and semantics.5 Un-
fortunately, however, the οnly evidence suggesting that Protagoras’ interest in noun gender
may have gone beyond questions of style (including his criticism of earlier poetry) comes from
Aristophanes, whose comic style and purposes prevent us from reaching any safe conclusions
about the accuracy of the ideas he is presenting. Nevertheless, as we shall see, Aristophanes’
play lends us insight into the practice of orthoepeia and raises some further questions about
the theoretical background but also the implications of Protagoras’ interest in gender.
The relevant evidence comes in an episode of the Clouds in which Socrates, who is pre-
sented in the play as an ordinary Sophist, urges Strepsiades to learn which of the quadrupeds
are properly male or masculine.6 The fact that Socrates’ question makes no use of a vocabulary
denoting names or naming suggests that Aristophanes wishes to blur the limits of grammar
and reality and uses the study of noun gender as a crucial (and certainly amusing) test case.
The absence from Socrates’ formulation of any reference to the generic term gender, γένος—
which may denote either the gender of the signifier or the sex of its referent—suggests that the
author intends to show how students of orthoepeia can capture reality more accurately, and
hence, in connection to the study of gender, which is the example Aristophanes uses, to detect
(and also challenge) masculinity.
That is why later in the discussion, Socrates puts his finger on cases of men whose proper
names, especially when uttered in the vocative—i.e., the case one uses to address someone—
come closer to their bearers’ “true” feminine identity. The example he uses is that of a man
who fled the army and hence presumably failed to exercise the most distinctively masculine
virtue, namely andreia or courage (the Greek word belongs to the same family of words as
aner, man, and can be more literally translated as “manliness”). Catering to social values that
the members of his audience would readily endorse, and clearly inspired by the program of
sophistic orthoepeia, Aristophanes adds a new twist and floats the idea—presumably with
the intention to prompt laughter from the audience—that proper names should be adjusted
or corrected in order to reveal the actual gender of their bearers (which did not necessarily
coincide with their biological sex).
In the absence of any independent evidence suggesting that Protagoras’ interest in gram-
matical gender reflected a broader concern with the relation between sex and gender (which
formed the background of Aristophanes’ The Clouds) we may conclude that Socrates’ lesson
to Strepsiades is a mere byproduct of Attic comedy, fostering current ideas about the prior-
ity of the male over the female.7 But the level of linguistic sophistication that the lesson of
orthoepeia Aristophanes attributes to Socrates betrays deserves attention. Let us then take a
closer look at the examples Aristophanes presents and see what kind of linguistic interests in
connection to gender they may evidence but also to what extent such interests may be taken
as allusions to ideas that his audience would likely associate with sophistic views in general or
with Protagoras more specifically.
In line with the demands of the genre but also with a typically sophistic pedagogical approach
that Socrates possibly shared with Protagoras, and prompted by his teacher’s question (which of
the quadrupeds are properly male or masculine), the student first presents his view on a subject,
which the teacher will then try to refute. Thus Strepsiades, who credulously asserts that he cer-
tainly knows the answer (660: οἶδ᾿ ἔγωγε), lists the following examples (661): κριός (ram), τράγος
(billygoat), ταῦρος (bull), κύων (dog), and ἀλεκτρυών (foul). The first three of these examples,
κριός (ram), τράγος (billygoat), and ταῦρος (bull), refer exclusively to male animals. By having
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Strepsiades cite the particular list of examples, Aristophanes exploits the ambiguity of the ques-
tion (since it remains unclear whether by asking which ones correctly are masculine/male or femi-
nine/female Socrates wants to test Strepsiades’ skills in language or in zoology), thereby suggesting
that at least in some cases the grammatical gender of an animal-denoting noun captures its sex.
Strepsiades’ answer would have been very satisfactory, had he stopped at his first three examples,
which are those of masculine nouns that unambiguously refer to male animals. But Strepsiades
goes on to add two more examples, which are the ones that, in line with the refutational style of
sophistic teaching,8 trigger Socrates’ objections. Unlike the previous examples, the next two cases
of masculine nouns that Strepsiades proposes, κύων (dog) and ἀλεκτρυών (foul), can apply to ani-
mals of both sexes. But they also belong to a different, and as it turns out potentially “trickier”,
declension than the previous ones, which is also the declension of mênis and pêlex (the nouns
whose gender Protagoras had wished to correct). Just as in the case of mênis and pêlex and un-
like second declension nouns like κριός, τράγος, and ταῦρος, where the ending of the name often
rather straightforwardly indicates their gender, the nouns κύων and ἀλεκτρυών belong to the third
declension, in which the gender is often triggered only through agreement with the participle or
adjective.9 Using the example of ἀλεκτρυών, Socrates attacks Strepsiades for failing to use a form
that would avoid the ambiguity and properly distinguish a cock from a hen. In order to avoid am-
biguity and to achieve precision, Socrates goes on to introduce the neologism ἀλεκτρύαινα, a noun
that, thanks to its ending, which is typically the ending of a feminine noun, removes the ambiguity
that was detected in the case of ἀλεκτρυών.
The sophisticated list of names of animals that exemplify the problems of agreement be-
tween sex and gender may be a product of Aristophanes’ inventiveness,10 but also of his tal-
ent to weave together trends and ideas that his contemporaries were likely to associate with
particular individuals who were the target of his satire. In the case of the orthoepeia lesson, it
is possible that Aristophanes’ satire targets besides Protagoras (Corradi 2017) also Socrates’
teacher Archelaus of Athens (Betegh 2013, 2016), who is credited with the introduction of
the contrast between physis (nature) and nomos (law or convention). Although the earliest
evidence for the application of this antithesis in the study of language is Plato’s Cratylus (and
thus postdates The Clouds), we can think of Aristophanes as the earliest author who not only
betrays familiarity but also can almost weave together two otherwise independent and pre-
viously unrelated trends of thought: orthoepeia, or correctness of words, and the antithesis
between nature and convention. It is at least tempting to think that the application of the latter
distinction to the case of language (albeit in an implicit way) is what allows Aristophanes to
introduce, or maybe toy with, the idea of a program of correction that allows grammarians to
match grammatical to biological or even—as Aristophanes’ satire suggests—social gender. But
the fact that none of our sources on orthoepeia explicitly discuss the correspondence between
grammatical gender and sex suggests that that question never became a serious subject of
linguistic theorizing; nobody found it striking that the stereotypically cunning fox carries the
connotations of femininity or that the stereotypically imperious eagle carried the connotations
of masculinity.
Setting aside our reservations regarding the accuracy of Aristophanes’ testimony concern-
ing gender and sex as evidence for the currency of similar ideas in sophistic thought, and
assuming that the gist of Socrates’ parody of orthoepeia is to cater to then-current social
representations concerning sexual identities, in Section 2 I shall use the orthoepeia lesson
of The Clouds as a case that sheds light on (but also raises some questions with regard to)
Protagoras’ profession. For the latter, I rely on Plato’s Theaetetus, bearing in mind—just as
in the case of Aristophanes The Clouds—that the source may be seriously mediated by the
author’s agenda.
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2 Correction in Practice and the Limits of Truth

In the Theaetetus, Plato attributes to Protagoras a comparison of his practice to that of a doc-
tor or a farmer who replaces bad sensations with good thus making the body or the plant feel
healthy. By the same token says Protagoras,
Clever and competent orators make good things seem to be just to cities instead of bad
ones. For whatever seems [or: is decreed to be, dokein] just and fine to each city also is
that for it, so long as it thinks that it is [or: adopts this law, nomizein]; but the clever man
(sophos), whenever things are bad for them [i.e. the citizens], exchanges for them other
things that are and appear to be good to them.
(Theaetetus 167c=LM D38 > A21a)
Applying the above account to the case of orthoepeia (noting, however, the fact that Plato’s
account makes no reference to language instruction), we may think of professional teachers of
language and argumentation as agents who were able to theorize linguistic usage, spot possi-
ble inconsistencies or common grammatical errors, and determine the rules that are supposed
to govern it.11 That account is consistent with Aristotle’s evidence of Protagoras’ interest in
orthoepeia.
Let us, however, for a moment, and for the sake of the argument, imagine that Protagoras’
interests went further and that they involved the kind of program that Aristophanes attributes
to Socrates, a program, in other words, that would educate the students by showing them how
language can best match reality, or at least, their representations of reality. So let us imagine
that Protagoras’ correction of words did imply adjustment of grammatical gender to biologi-
cal or social gender, or to its connotations (as some interpreters in fact consider to be the case
with regard to Protagoras’ remarks on the Homeric mênis and pêlêx). It is tempting to see
such a program as a forerunner of contemporary movements advocating the introduction
of gender-neutral pronouns, and by doing so, to raise the question of the role and authority
of grammarians or the intellectual elite (here represented by Protagoras) in establishing new
rules for language. So combining Plato’s account of Protagoras’ practice with the evidence
concerning the Sophist’s interest in the correction of noun gender, it seems plausible that the
authority the Sophist assumes is not restricted to describing and standardizing grammatical
rules. In addition, Protagoras may be concerned to prescribe such rules in order to adjust that
usage so that it either more closely adheres to socially represented norms (as in the case of the
coward Amynias) or more closely reflects objective reality. A third option is to further a social
or political goal, which can be traced in the claim to “make good things seem to be just to
cities instead of bad ones,” which Plato attributes to Protagoras.12
But what kind of standard could possibly determine the validity of Protagoras’ correction?
Here, it is instructive to consider at least one possible difference between, on the one hand,
contemporary revisionist movements which aim to adjust language in a way that will establish
justice and fairness, by giving to every human being the opportunity to express in language
their sexual identities, or even “ameliorative projects,” through which contemporary philoso-
phers like Sally Haslanger aim to revise ordinary concepts in order to eliminate misconceptions
(Haslanger 2000, 2012; Cappelen 2018) and, on the other hand, the sophistic “correction” of
linguistic usage, which, based on the evidence of Aristophanes, seems to aim at the opposite
result: to observe and reproduce established values (from our point of view possibly miscon-
ceptions) in order to expose more effectively the deviance of certain individuals who fail to
comply with the latter. That, at least, is the upshot of Aristophanes’ lesson of orthoepeia.
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Now regardless of the rather unlikely connection of the above argument to Protagoras’ ideas,
it is instructive to consider Aristophanes’ account in the light of the Protagorean homo men-
sura thesis, according to which “man [or rather human beings, since the word Protagoras uses
is ἄνθρωπος, a human being] is the measure of all things” (161c = LM R7; cf. D5). Following
a current scholarly trend, I am downplaying the epistemological implications of Protagoras’
dictum,13 and I am focusing instead on the role it likely played in his practice of argumenta-
tion. It is thus conceivable that Protagoras’ remarks on correction of gender took into account
some standard of proper social value (dictating the superiority of the male over the female,
as in the case of mênis and pêlêx), and that adjusting that standard of proper social value to
grammar (and thus correcting the noun gender to match the feminine or masculine connota-
tions of its referent, which could in principle change, according “to what seemed fine to the
city”) was part of the Sophist’s practice of correction, a practice that presumably allowed his
students to win an argument, which, as we shall see, was a hallmark of Protagoras’ profession.
So rather than dwelling on the question of whether Protagoras’ language correction pro-
gram favored and promoted conservative norms about gender (a possibly anachronistic ques-
tion to which no certain answer can be given), let us see how flexibility and inventiveness
in argumentation which could involve reflection on gender rules or stereotypes, was an im-
portant asset of the practice of correction. In this regard, it is important to realize that, for
Protagoras, correction of names was not a matter of determining the truth but rather of ad-
justing a speech or an argument to the contingencies of any given situation (Bonazzi 2023: xx;
cf. Rademaker 2013). Besides preserving the consistency of Protagoras’ program, the above
construal of correction allows us, as we shall see, to make better sense of the function of
Socrates’ lesson in the economy of Aristophanes’ play and also to appreciate its relevance to
the training in argumentation, which is the core of the education Strepsiades hopes to receive
at the “Thinkery,” the school in which the character Pheidippides brings his son in order to
learn from Socrates the art of argumentation. To illustrate this teaching Aristophanes presents
a contest between two personified Logoi or Arguments, the Strong and the Weak. In fact,
the lesson on correctness of gender that we considered above is described as a preliminary to
the training in antilogia or debate, for which Protagoras was famous (The Clouds, 658–91 =
Dram. T19c L.-M.).
The construal of Weak Logos as unjust may well have been a product of Aristophanes’
satire (Corradi 2013). Protagoras’ actual teaching most likely concerned the practice of tech-
niques that enabled the student to overthrow the argument of his opponent. So part of his art
consisted in being able to overthrow an argument that at first appeared to be the stronger one
with a carefully crafted argument which at first, at least, appeared to be weaker. Committed
to the view that for any given thesis it was possible to “argue equally well in one direction or
in another” (in utramque partem disputari posse: LM D27), a professional like Protagoras, or
like Socrates in Aristophanes’ Thinkery, could occasionally argue in favor of a counterintui-
tive or even unjust thesis. Coming back to Protagoras’ interest in gender, we may consider how
the ability to challenge traditional (but possibly also ill-founded) grammatical rules was part
of a sophist’s professional armory. We may thus think of Strepsiades’ refutation in The Clouds
as a typical case of sophistic strategy and further connect it to the more general and distinc-
tively Protagorean practice of antilogia, which is displayed in the agon logon, the competition
between the Stronger and the Weaker Argument. The fact that Socrates presents his lesson of
orthoepeia as a preamble, or even a prerequisite for Strepsiades’ training in argumentation, is
a possible sign of the close connection between what Aristophanes presents as distinct stages
of that training. Combining the teaching of argumentation with Socrates’ lesson about gen-
der, we can imagine Protagoras turning the weaker argument regarding the gender of mênis
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(i.e. presenting it as masculine) in order to refute an interlocutor who is endorsing the stronger
argument (i.e. presenting the same word as feminine, in accordance with its celebrated use in
the first line of the Iliad).14
Let us then go back to Aristophanes’ treatment of the effeminate Amynias and see how it
succeeds in weaving together three distinct but possibly also interconnected trends of Pro-
tagorean thought. As we have seen, Socrates teaches Strepsiades that Amynias’ real sexual
identity is in fact captured not by the nominative, “Amynias”, but by the vocative of his name,
“Amynia”—which (here we can think of a name like “Maria”) could apply both to a female
and a male person or could retain the ambiguity that Aristophanes and his audience consid-
ered as a constituent characteristic of the sexual identity of the particular individual. So the
first of the Protagorean or more generally sophistic trends that Aristophanes’ text alludes to
is the spirit of epideictic playfulness that marks sophistic practice quite generally. The second
trend, which is more peculiar to Protagoras, is the interest in the study of language, which
involves formal, grammatical rules and also raises the question of gender. The third trend,
which is also peculiar to Protagoras—at least to the extent that we can trust Plato’s testimony
in the Theaetetus—is the Sophist’s commitment to instill to the audience ideas or values that
fit their perspective in the most appropriate (and hence, correct and effective from the point of
view of a rhetorical situation) way. In the case of gender, it seems that experimentation with
different accounts that could more aptly fit the needs of a given situation could lead to the
implementation of radical ideas.
A good example of a radical idea that could facilitate the Sophist’s argumentative prac-
tice (if only to intimidate the opponent), which we have already considered, is the change of
the grammatical gender that shapes Socrates’ teaching of orthoepeia in The Clouds; another,
which is related not to language but solely to gender, is the idea that women should be given
the power to rule. What I have in mind here is not—or not primarily—Aristophanes’ playful
phantasies of bringing women “on top” (Zeitlin (1981), but the “second wave” of Plato’s
Republic, that is the measure concerning the inclusion of women in the class of guardians and
philosophers (see the contribution by Hulme in the present volume). The part of Socrates’
argument that is relevant to our discussion is not so much the actual content of the measure
but rather the way that measure is introduced, namely as a conclusion of an argument de-
veloped in the course of an antilogia (453e–454a). It seems likely that the framework within
which Plato’s Socrates introduces his radical idea concerning the equality of the inclusion of
women in the rulers’ class is that of an on-going discussion among followers of the Protago-
rean debate. In support of this connection, we may recall a fragment in which the Peripatetic
philosopher Aristoxenus accuses Plato of having copied most of his Republic from Protagoras’
Opposing Arguments (El Murr 2020).15 Combined with the evidence concerning the practice
of orthoepeia but also with the reference to the power of antilogia in Plato’s Republic, Aristox-
enus’ comment allows us to think of Protagoras as an intellectual who was at least prepared to
discuss—if only in an experimental way—socially embedded stereotypes about gender.
On the other hand, the absence from the Cratylus, the dialogue in which Plato addresses
the question of the nature of language, of any reference to the question of noun gender, most
likely suggests that at least Plato was not aware of—let alone interested in—any serious
argument regarding the connection between gender and sex. And even if Plato had taken
took the remarks on the names of animals that Aristophanes attributes to Socrates as al-
lusions to Protagoras’ linguistic observations—and despite their potential relevance to the
nomos-physis antithesis, which forms the background of the Cratylus—he would have prob-
ably dismissed them as irrelevant to the problem he wished to tackle, which is the relation
between language and reality and hence also between language and knowledge. From Plato’s
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perspective, Protagoras probably failed even to address the problem of that relation, since he
was unable to provide an account either of knowledge or of reality.16 What Plato’s perspec-
tive downplays, however, is the importance of what we describe as the social construction
of reality, on which intellectuals like Protagoras were more likely to reflect. Such reflection,
and the typically sophistic spirit of freshness, open-endedness, playfulness, paradox, and ex-
perimentation, that it involved (Gagarin 2002: 17–18), could give rise to radical ideas, like
the equality of women and men that forms the backbone of the “second wave” in Plato’s
Republic. The downside of Protagoras’ approach is that, based on the views of the audience
under consideration, it can be adjusted to different or even contradictory ideas—thus, in the
case of noun gender it can be used to foster male supremacy (as in exposing Amynias’ deviant
sexual identity) or equality among genders (as in the case of Socrates’ measure concerning the
inclusion of women in the ruling class). Going one step further, we may think of Protagoras as
a technocrat who corrects the rules of language according to different and possibly conflict-
ing values and tastes which could be dictated by the mob’s preferences or by some political
authority.17 Such a conception would be in line with Plato’s criticism in the Gorgias, which
presents rhetoric as a “knack” catering to the tastes of the audience (which, in democracy,
coincides with the sovereign body). But Plato’s analogy of the doctor or the farmer in the The-
aetetus points to a different suggestion. There, the sophos, the wise or the clever man, takes
into account what seems just and fine to the city and exchanges bad things with good things.
On the other hand, to the extent that the Protagorean sophos aims at correction rather than
truth (Bonazzi 2023), and confining ourselves to the question of gender, it is likely that the
outcome of argumentation will not be in line with our ideal of (say), eliminating discrimina-
tion, but rather with the ideal of patriarchy (reflected in Aristophanes’ sentence: “which of
the quadrupeds are properly male”). And yet, if only in an implicit way, and regardless of his
real motivation, Protagoras turns out to be the earliest author who either introduces ideas
about the connection between grammatical gender and social reality or at least influences
others to think about it.18
Notes
1 For a reassessment of the role of this group, including the question of the legitimacy of distinguishing
them from philosophers see, most recently, Billings and Moore (2023: 1–30).
2 “It is possible not only to commit one [i.e. a solecism], but also to seem to commit one although one
does not do so, and also to commit one without seeming to do so, as Protagoras used to say, since
‘wrath’ [mênis, feminine in Greek] and ‘helmet’ [pêlêx, feminine in Greek] are [scil. in reality] mas-
culine: for someone who says ‘accursed’ [feminine, scil. wrath: cf. Iliad 1.1–2] commits a solecism
according to him, but does not seem to other people to do so, whereas if he says ‘accursed’ [mascu-
line] he seems to commit a solecism but in fact does not do so.” Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations
14, 173b17–25=80A28=LMD24 (A28). Unless otherwise indicated, translations of Protagoras’ frag-
ments are by Laks and Most.
3 In support of this view see also Corbeill (2015: 17–19).
4 But is it also possible that Aristotle adjusts Protagoras’ remarks to the subject of the Rhetoric, so that,
after the reference to Protagoras’ distinction among the nouns (LM D23 cited above), he introduces
an example to show how awareness of that distinction allows us to understand, and presumably
better observe, noun congruence: “ὡς Πρωταγόρας τὰ γένη τῶν ὀνομάτων διῄρει, ἄρρενα καὶ θήλεα καὶ
σκεύη: δεῖ γὰρ ἀποδιδόναι καὶ ταῦτα ὀρθῶς: “ἡ δ᾽ ἐλθοῦσα καὶ διαλεχθεῖσα ᾤχετο.”
5 Discussing Hesiod’s Theogony, where the feminine/female Gaia or Earth has intercourse with the
masculine/male Ouranos or Sky, Sedley (2007: 3) points out that Chaos, the very first deity, which is
associated with our notions of space or matter “has the rare privilege of being grammatically neuter.”
Likewise, observations on the “correctness” of matching sex and gender in the case of proper names
could form the basis of Protagoras’ reflection on the principles or structure that underlies linguistic
usage.
97
Chloe Balla
6 ἄρρενα: the Greek language does not differentiate between masculine and male, feminine and female,
respectively; just as the word γένος could be used to describe both sex and gender, so also the words
that signify female and male were the very same words that signified the feminine and the masculine.
7 It is tempting to connect Aristophanes’ preoccupation with the correct attribution of male/masculine
gender with the fact that both of Protagoras’ extant corrections of gender concern cases in which a
noun that had been wrongly regarded as feminine acquires is changed into masculine.
8 “Refutation” often translates the term elenchos, which is typically used to describe the method that
Plato attributes to Socrates. But the audience of Aristophanes’ The Clouds would likely associate
refutation with the practice of antilogic (most typically associated with Protagoras, and possibly bear-
ing derogatory connotations; cf. the use of the adjective antilogikos in 1173).
9 See further Janse (2020).
10 The examples Strepsiades proposes anticipate (and betray some insight about) distinctions that later
grammarians would consider as a serious object of study. Writing in the second century BCE, the
grammarian Dionysius Thrax, mentions, without naming, people who add to the three genders
(which he for the first time describes using the terminology that became canonical in Greek and
Roman grammatical thought) two additional genders, κοινόν τε καὶ ἐπίκοινον, “common and epicene”
(GG 1.125; cited by Janse 2020: 26). Like ἀλεκτρυών and κύων in Aristophanes, these two additional
genders differ from feminine and masculine in that they are used to refer to both male and female
animals. To distinguish the gender to which they refer, common nouns can use agreement with the
participle or adjective that qualifies them. By contrast, in the case of epicene nouns, like ὁ ἀετός (ea-
gle: a grammatically masculine noun that refers to both male and female members of the species),
ἡ χελιδών (swallow: a grammatically feminine noun that refers to both male and female members of
the species), or ἡ ἀλώπηξ (fox: a grammatically feminine noun that refers to both male and female
members of the species), the gender of the pronoun, participle or adjective obligatorily agrees with
that of the noun (regardless of the sex of the referent). In connection to Aristophanes’ inventiveness,
especially with regard to questions of gender, we may further consider, as well as his Lysistrata and
Assemblywomen, the speech Plato attributes to him in Symposium 189c–193d.
11 Turning this argument on its head, a few centuries after Protagoras, Sextus Empiricus invokes the case
of nouns whose gender varies, depending on the usage of different geographical groups of people,
in order to argue that the use of grammar is not a matter of expertise, but rather of linguistic usage.
Against the Grammarians §§ 145–151, on which see further Bett (2018).
12 In this regard, and going back to the Myth of Prometheus, we may further wonder whether the mean-
ing of art or τέχνη in the sentence that describes the distinctively human ability to articulate speech and
words should be construed—along the lines of the parallel case of acquiring the art of politics in the same
myth—as ambiguous between (a) a skill which marks all human beings and (b) a skill that, on the basis
of its more demanding practice, Sophists like Protagoras gradually developed and continued to possess.
Protagoras’ work on Orthoepeia was probably the text in which the latter kind of skill was displayed.
13 See, among others, Lee (2008).
14 For a reconstruction of the discussion of solecism in Sophistical Refutations that sheds light on a
possible connection between Protagoras’ interest in the use of gender (Socrates’ lesson of orthoepeia)
and his practice of argumentation (the practice of “Unjust Argumentation”), see further Huitink and
Willi (2021): 71–73.
15 D.L. 3.37=R1a LM=B5 DK; D.L. 3.57=R1b LM=B5 DK cites Favorinus’ Miscellaneous History as
the source of the same idea.
16 An important benefit of Plato’s perspective is that it relies on and exploits the significant theoreti-
cal distinction between nomos (law, or convention) and physis (nature). Although scholars often
read this contrast into Protagoras’ speech in Plato’s work that bears his name (see most recently
Bett 2023), the language of nomos-physis is absent not only from the particular speech but from all
other extant evidence that preserves the thought of that particular Sophist. In fact, and pace Broadie
(2003), who points to the debt of the arguments on orthoepeia to the nomos-physis distinction, it
seems to me that that distinction plays no role, and it is never, at least explicitly, invoked in any of
the fragments of either Prodicus or Protagoras (the two Sophists known to have developed an interest
in orthoepeia). It is tempting to think that this distinction—significantly present in the background
of Aristophanes’ Clouds: see Betegh (2016)—is a catalyst that allows Plato in his Cratylus to develop
some further philosophical implications of the orthoepeia doctrine.
17 According to Roman Jakobson (1959: 234) “in the first years of the Russian Revolution there were
fanatical visionaries who argued in Soviet periodicals for a radical revision of traditional language
and particularly for the weeding-out of such misleading expressions as ‘sunrise’ or ‘sunset’”.
98
18 For valuable comments on various drafts of this chapter, I would like to thank the editors and the
audience of the “Virtual Workshop in Women and Ancient Philosophy.” in which it was originally
presented, as well as my friends and colleagues: Mauro Bonazzi, Luuk Huitink, Eleni Kaklamanou,
Gary Ostertag, Kalliopi Papamanoli, Fenrnanda Pio, and Maria Poulopoulou.
References
Beresford, A. (2013) “Fangs, Feathers & Fairness: Protagoras on the Origins of Right and Wrong,” in
J. van Ophuijsen, M. van Raalte and P. Stork (eds.) Protagoras of Abdera: The Man, His Measure,
Leiden/Boston: Brill, 139–162.
Betegh, G. (2013) “Socrate et Archélaos dans les Nuées,” in A. Laks and R. Saetta Cottone (eds.) Comé-
die et philosophie, Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 87–106.
Betegh, G. (2016) “Archelaus on Cosmogony and the Origins of Social Institutions,” in V. Caston (ed.)
Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 51, 1–40.
Bett, R. (2018) Against Those in the Disciplines, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bett, R. (2023) “Nature and Norms,” in J. Billings and Ch. Moore (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to
the Sophists, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 157–178.
Billings, J. and C. Moore, eds. (2023) “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists,
Bonazzi, M. (2023) “The Turn to Language,” in J. Billings and Ch. Moore (eds.) The Cambridge Com-
panion to the Sophists, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 179–199.
Broadie, S. (2003) “The Sophists and Socrates,” in D. Sedley (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Greek
and Roman Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 73–97.
Cappelen, Herman. (2018) Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
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in J. van Ophuijsen, M. van Raalte and P. Stork (eds.) Protagoras of Abdera: The Man, His Measure,
Leiden/Boston: Brill, 69–86.
Corradi, M. (2017) “Protagorean Socrates, Socratic Protagoras: a Narrative Strategy from Aristophanes
to Plato,” in A. Stavru and C. Moore (éd.), Socrates and the Socratic Dialogue. Leiden-New York:
Brill, 2017: 84–104.
Corbeill, A. (2015) Sexing the World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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5.453b–454c),” The Classical Quarterly 70.1: 85–100.
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ὀρθοέπεια. 2. φύσις und θέσις,” RhM 108: 212–229.
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TX: University of Texas Press.
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34.1: 31– 55.
Haslanger, Sally. (2012) Resisting Reality, New York: Oxford University Press.
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Journal 67: 66–92.
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Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 232–239.
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KERIA (LJUBLJANA. TISKANA IZD.) 22.2: 25–55.
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ion to the Sophists, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 277–305.
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van Raalte and P. Stork (eds.) Protagoras of Abdera: The Man, His Measure, Leiden: Brill, 87–111.
Sedley, D. (2007) Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity, Berkeley: University of California Press.
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(ed.) Reflections on Women in Antiquity, London: Routledge, 169–217.
99
PART II
400s–300s BCE
8
EIS GYNAIKOS ANDRA
Aeschines on Women, Eros, and Politics
1 Introduction
In a relevant testimony on the Aspasia – one of the best-preserved Socratic dialogues by Ae-
schines of Sphettus – Maximus of Tyre refers that Socrates not only regularly visited Aspasia
himself but also exhorted others to send her their sons: “you encourage Callias to send his son
to Milesian Aspasia’s, a man to an establishment run by a woman (eis gynaikos andra); and
you yourself, at your advanced age, go to her as a pupil” (Oration 38.4).1
The immediate context of this passage, along with some other key testimonies on the dia-
logue, can provide a good introduction to the content of the Aeschinean work and to the main
subject of this chapter. The author mentions Aspasia, whose teachings Socrates recommended
to Callias for his son Hipponicus, within a list of experts to whom Socrates used to turn. Tell-
ingly, the name of the Milesian is immediately followed by that of Diotima, sought out by
Socrates for her “expertise in love (ta erotika).”2
The emphasis on Socrates’ being instructed by a woman can be connected to a passage
from Lucian’s The Dance (25), which also stresses Aspasia’s status by reporting that Socrates
“did not disdain to listen to serious discourse from Aspasia, a courtesan (par’ hetairas gynai-
kos).”3 Theodoret of Cyrus emphasizes the same point: Socrates did not consider it unworthy
of a philosopher to learn something helpful “from women” (para gynaikon), so he was not
ashamed of choosing Diotima as his teacher and continued to associate with Aspasia (Cure
of the Greek Maladies, 1.17).4 Socrates’ familiarity with Aspasia, to which all these passages
seem to allude, is further confirmed by Plutarch:
Socrates sometimes came to see her with his disciples, and his intimate friends brought
their wives to her to hear her discourse, although she presided over a business that was
anything but honest or even reputable, since she kept a house of young courtesans.
(Life of Pericles, 24.3)5
Plutarch’s account – to which we shall return for other fundamental references to the Aspasia –
converges with a series of sources which, taken together, attest that Aeschines’ Socrates held
103 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-10

Aspasia’s teachings in the highest regard.6 As far as the content of the work is concerned,
these sources seem consistent with the dialogical context outlined in Maximus of Tyre’s
passage: Callias, as a rich man, is determined to provide his son with a good education and
seeks advice from Socrates, who suggests he turn to Aspasia. A first question can thus be
raised as to what Socrates sought to learn by visiting Aspasia with his pupils and closest
friends, who in turn brought their wives to hear her. Moreover, this is apparently at odds
with an information provided by Athenaeus (The Learned Banqueters, 5.220b), namely that
in Aeschines’ Aspasia malevolent judgment was passed on all women from Ionia, defined
“generally as grasping adulteresses (moichadas kai kerdaleas).”7 A further problem, then,
is how to reconcile and interpret these testimonies, so as to combine them as far as possible
into a unified picture.
These questions lead us to the core of the Aeschinean dialogue and at the same time of the
analysis proposed in the present chapter, which aims to investigate Aspasia’s role in this work
and, through her, the close relationship between the spheres of eros and politics and some
female figures. Indeed, our understanding of Aeschines’ portrayal of Aspasia can be con-
siderably enriched by turning to the two female characters with whom this Socratic author
compares and contrasts her: Thargelia of Miletus and the queen Rhodogyne, both presented
as Doppelgänger of Aspasia and both, in turn, variously associated with eros. Moreover, the
originality of Aeschines’ depiction of the Milesian can be better appreciated by considering
other competing portrayals. The contrasting representations of Aspasia provided in com-
edies,8 in other Socratic works,9 and in historical biographies10 would require a separate study
and will only be touched upon in this paper. Nonetheless, a closer examination can be re-
served to a scholium to Plato’s Menexenus (235e) which, along with a reference to Aeschines’
Aspasia, provides an overview of the opinions of some comic poets on the Milesian woman,
though a collection of names by which they used to call her in their comedies. Besides offering
some evidence of negative views about Aspasia – to which also the above-mentioned passage
by Plutarch attests – the scholium is of particular interest for the mention of other parallel
female figures.
The first section of this chapter will be devoted to the comparisons drawn by Eupolis
and Cratinus between Aspasia and the figures of Omphale, Helen, and Hera. These paral-
lels will be read in light of other ancient sources concerning the three women and particu-
larly of Plutarch’s Life of Pericles, who also refers to Aspasia’s depiction in comedies as a
“New Omphale” and Hera, but in addition mentions the Milesian’s portrayal as a “new
Deianeira” (24.6).
The resulting picture will be contrasted in Section 2 with Aeschines’ dialogue, on which
the analysis will mostly be focused, again by paying special attention to the scanty and frag-
mentary testimonies hinting at the characters of Thargelia and Rhodogyne. Interestingly, a
more careful consideration of Aspasia’s set of “doubles” helps to shed light not only on the
relationship between women and eros but also on the political component which in most
cases seems to be involved in such a relationship. Indeed, most of these figures are related to
political power, either as actual sovereigns or queens (Thargelia, Rhodogyne, and Omphale),
or on account of their influence on politics in a broader sense (Helen and Aspasia herself). In
the concluding Section 3, some final considerations will be proposed concerning this threefold
(and varying) relationship – between women and eros, women and politics, and eros and
politics – in light of the central theme of the Aspasia and of a hypothetical reconstruction of
the dialogue.
104
2 Aspasia’s Doppelgänger in Comedy: Omphale, Helen, Hera, and Deianeira

The above-mentioned scholium to Plato’s Menexenus provides a brief account of Aspasia’s
bios11 and, after dwelling on the woman’s relationship with Pericles and Lysicles, makes ex-
plicit reference to Aeschines’ Aspasia:
Aspasia: daughter of Axiochus, from Miletus, wife of Pericles, had experience of phi-
losophizing with Socrates, as Diodorus says in his treatise On Monuments. After Peri-
cles’ death she married again, to Lysicles the sheep dealer, and had a son from him called
Poristes; she made Lysicles a very clever speaker, as she had also trained Pericles in public
oratory, as Aeschines the Socratic says in his dialogue, and Plato, and similarly Callias in
his Men in Fetters. Cratinus calls her a “tyrant” in his Cheirones.
(Scholium to Plato, Menexenus 235e)12
Besides the interesting reference to Aspasia’s philosophizing with Socrates (para Sokratei pep-
hilosophekyia), which agrees with the sources tackled in Section 1, the scholiast’s emphasis
on the Milesian’s expertise in rhetoric is noteworthy. This prominence of the techne rhetorike
is in line with Aspasia’s characterization in the Menexenus, where Socrates himself presents
her as his “instructor” (didaskalos) in the art of rhetoric and Pericles – as is well-known – is
included among the “many fine orators” she has turned out (235c).13 In addition, the scholium
reports that Aspasia not only made Pericles into an effective political orator but also succeeded
in the same task with the sheep-merchant Lysicles. Most importantly, the scholiast mentions
among the sources of this information Aeschines’ Aspasia, which therefore must also have
addressed the issue of the Milesian’s expertise in rhetoric. Unlike Callias’ play, in which the
depiction of Aspasia’s influence on Pericles serves a disparaging purpose (related, as we will
see, to the figure of the woman-tyrant), Aeschines must have presented Aspasia’s rhetorical
skills seriously. By connecting this information with Socrates’ initial advice to Callias, one
might argue that Lysicles’ political career14 offers even stronger evidence of Aspasia’s expertise
as a teacher of rhetoric: while Pericles’ political success might be said to depend on his natural
gifts and previous education, Aspasia’s influence on Lysicles – a man of humble origins and of
no talent – is undeniable and more impressive.15
Equally relevant for our purposes is the following reference to Cratinus’ Cheirones, where
Aspasia was called a “tyrant” (tyrannos). Through an allusion to Aspasia’s despotic traits,
it introduces a series of judgments by the comic poets: Eupolis called her “Omphale” in the
Philoi16 and “Helen” in the Prospaltioi, while Cratinus also referred to her as “Hera”, perhaps
due to the fact – the scholiast adds – that he designated Pericles by the name of Olympius.17
The information at our disposal on these lost comedies, combined with what we know from
other sources about the female figures mentioned there, sheds some light on the meaning and
the implications of such comparisons.
Cratinus’ Cheirones has been considered “paradigmatic of the Old Comedy’s critique of
women vis-à-vis political power” (Henry 1995: 21). The centaurs of the chorus, followers
of Chiron, provided a parodic genealogy of Pericles and Aspasia: in their criticism of the
Alcmaeonids’ regime, the tyrant Zeus-Pericles and his concubine Hera-Aspasia represented
the apex of the ethical and political decay of Athens.18 At some point in the comedy, presum-
ably in the parabasis,19 a sort of parodic theogony was presented, in which Stasis (civic strife)
and Chronos presbygenes (elderborn Time) are said to give birth to “a very great tyrant”,
105
a monster in the form of Pericles.20 Next, Katapygosyne (shameless Lust) generates Hera-
Aspasia, referred to as a “dog-eyed concubine” (pallaken kynopida).21 The use of the Homeric
epithet kynopis is noteworthy, as in Homer it usually describes the gaze of famous women,
both human and divine, denoting their shamelessness: in this acceptation, it is applied to the
adulteresses Clytemnestra (Odyssey, 11.424), Helen (Iliad, 3.180; Odyssey, 4.145), and Aph-
rodite (Odyssey, 8.319), as well as to Hera herself (Iliad, 18.394).22 Aspasia’s association with
Hera, therefore, was evidently not a complimentary one. In all likelihood, it is connected to
the fact that the goddess, Zeus’ sister and third wife, was often portrayed as prone to alter her
husband’s decisions and even to conspire against him.
One may read the comparison with Helen, drawn by Eupolis in his first play, in much the
same terms. Although the meaning of this association is not explicit, it arguably emphasizes
the aspect of Aspasia’s dominance over men, especially considering the portrait of Helen pro-
vided by Euripides in The Trojan Women (967–968). As Plutarch’s account will make clearer,
moreover, both women were alleged to have started wars.
Even more telling is the mention of Omphale, the mythological queen of Lydia who domi-
nated Heracles, and by whose name Eupolis calls Aspasia in the Philoi. Despite the difficulties
of integrating this reference into the rest of the play,23 the intent underlying this association
can easily be grasped by considering the negative connotations which the figure of Omphale
bears in several sources.
The motif of Heracles in the service of Omphale was quite well known on the Attic stage.
Sophocles presents Heracles as her servant in The Women of Trachis (288–254),24 where she
is called “barbarian” (252). Hermippus, Plato (the comic poet), and Eubulus inform us of
the deeds performed by Heracles while serving Omphale, particularly of his victory over the
Cercopes.25 In a satiric drama entitled Omphale, probably composed shortly after the Samian
war,26 Ion of Chius may have attacked Pericles and Aspasia through the Heracles-Omphale
relationship, thereby insisting on the reversal of established gender roles.27 Finally, Heracles is
described as a servant of Omphale in a fragment from a mime preserved in an Oxyrhynchus
papyrus (3700, first century BC),28 whose portrayal of the Lydian queen has been connected
(Jarcho 1987: 33–34) to that of Aspasia in Aristophanes’ Acharnians (524–529), where the
Milesian was depicted as a procuress exerting an enormous influence on Pericles, similar to
that of Omphale on Heracles. Aspasia’s depiction as a “new Omphale”, therefore, most prob-
ably alluded to the “intrusion” into politics of this tyrannos woman,29 who like the mythologi-
cal queen was originally from Asia Minor.
This is the appellation reported by Plutarch, who also attests to the comic poets’ overall
negative judgment about Aspasia: “in the comedies she is styled now the New Omphale, new
Deianeira, and now Hera” (Life of Pericles, 24.6). Immediately afterwards, he quotes the
verses from Cratinus’ Cheirones referred to above, on the generation of the dog-eyed Hera-
Aspasia from Katapygosyne.30
What stands out is the mention of a third woman, besides Omphale and Hera, namely
Deianeira, the mythical princess of Calydon whose very name means “man-destroyer.” In-
deed, the daughter of King Oeneus and Queen Althaea was known in antiquity for having
unwittingly killed her husband Heracles with the poisoned Shirt of Nessus, a story told in
Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis31 and later taken up by Ovid in his Heroides (epistle 9,
Deianira to Heracles). In a later and less sympathetic rendering of the story, reported in the
tragedy Heracles on Oeta,32 Deianeira is depicted as a vindictive woman who kills Heracles
out of spite. Therefore, although the Aspasia-Deianeira parallel is not attested in the surviv-
ing sources on Attic comedy, it seems to emphasize traits akin to those of the other women
who are compared to her. Deianeira, who was also famous in poetry for her warlike attitude
106
toward men,33 could serve – like Helen, Hera, and Omphale – as a “double” of Aspasia, ac-
cused of having been the cause of two wars.34
This becomes clearer when looking at the broader context of Plutarch’s account and the
specific section of his Life of Pericles in which the bios of Aspasia is placed. Plutarch intro-
duces the figure of the Milesian woman after reporting the events which took place in Euboea
in 446 (23.2) and mentioning the decree put to the vote by Pericles for the expedition to Samos
(24.1). In this regard, he alludes to the widespread opinion that Pericles set out against the Sa-
mians to gratify Aspasia, thereby acknowledging the tradition according to which the woman
was behind the Samian war. This provides Plutarch with a fitting context “to raise the query
what great art or power (tina techne he dynamin) this woman had” to dominate the foremost
politicians of her time and to give philosophers “occasion to discuss her in exalted terms and
at great length” (24.1). At this point, Plutarch inserts a long excursus on Aspasia – in which he
includes information about other Ionian women – precisely to investigate the question of what
dynamis and what techne the woman possessed to exert such influence over politicians and
philosophers.35 Most importantly for our purposes, one of these Ionian women is Thargelia of
Miletus, who according to other sources was also featured in Aeschines’ Aspasia.
3 Aspasia’s Doppelgänger in Aeschines: Thargelia and Rhodogyne

After some essential information about the origins of Aspasia (“a Milesian by birth, daugh-
ter of one Axiochus”), Plutarch dwells on the woman’s relations with the most powerful
politicians:
They say that it was in emulation of Thargelia, an Ionian woman of ancient times, that
she made her onslaughts upon the most influential men (tois dynatotatois andrasi). This
Thargelia came to be a great beauty (eidos euprepes) and was endowed with grace of
manners as well as clever wits. Inasmuch as she lived on terms of intimacy with number-
less Greeks, and attached all her consorts to the king of Persia, she stealthily sowed the
seeds of Persian sympathy in the cities of Greece by means of these lovers of hers, who
were men of the greatest power and influence. And so Aspasia, as some say, was held in
high favour by Pericles because of her rare political wisdom.
(24.2–3)36
Not much is known about the figure of Thargelia, whose historicity is disputed. Nonetheless,
useful information to reconstruct the account of her story in Aeschines’ Aspasia can be found
in some lexicographical sources.
The Suda (s.v.) reports that Thargelia, born in Miletus as the daughter of Agesagoras,37
ruled the Thessalians (basileusasa Thettalon) for 30 years. A testimony from the anonymous
treatise De mulieribus (11) clarifies how the woman came to power: “they say that she came
to Thessaly when Antiochus was king of the Thessalians, married him and, after his death,
ruled Thessaly for thirty years.”38
We are thus informed that Thargelia married Antiochus, tagos of Thessaly,39 and that she
reigned over the Thessalians for three decades after his death. By combining the informa-
tion provided by the lexica with that found in Plutarch, we get a portrait of Thargelia which
can help explain the reasons for her association with Aspasia. Thargelia resorts to eros (and
beauty) in order to accomplish political objectives: through her consorts, she spreads medis-
mos in Greece.40 Hence, she represents a good example which Socrates can use to show Cal-
lias that eros may serve as a means to attain political goals (Ehlers 1966: 56).41 Confirmation
107
about Thargelia’s political aspirations can be found in Hesychius (s.v.),42 whose portrayal of
the woman closely resembles Plutarch’s account: she is described as “beautiful in appearance”
(euprepes de ten opsin) and “wise” (sophe), to the point of leading cities and kings and mar-
rying many of the most illustrious men.43
Finally, it is worth mentioning a passage from Philostratus’ letter to Julia Domna, espe-
cially because this is the source which explicitly traces the “discourse about Thargelia” back
to Aeschines’ Aspasia. The rhetor reports that “Aspasia of Miletus is said to have sharpened
Pericles’ tongue in imitation of that of Gorgias” and that Aeschines himself “did not hesitate
in the discourse about Thargelia to imitate Gorgias.” As an example of Aeschines’ use of
Gorgianic figures,44 Philostratus quotes four short cola rich in alliterations: “Thargelia of Mi-
letus went to Thessaly and lived with the Thessalian Antiochus, king of all the Thessalians”
(Epistle 73).45
These converging accounts are of the utmost importance for interpreting the figure of
Thargelia in Aeschines’ dialogue, and particularly her association with Aspasia. When Aspasia
is said to have emulated the Milesian Thargelia, the comparison may also refer to the fact that
her use of eros did not have exclusively negative effects (in contrast to what Antisthenes states
in relation to Pericles in his Aspasia)46; rather, it could also result in political achievements.
The introduction of the Thargelias logos in the dialogue may be connected to the testimony
by Athenaeus mentioned in Section 1, according to which in Aeschines’ Aspasia a derisive
opinion was expressed about all women from Ionia (The Learned Banqueters, 5.220a–b).
As both the Ionian women named in the dialogue seem to contradict this opinion – at least
according to Aeschines’ presentation – we may argue that the speech on Thargelia served to
persuade Socrates’ interlocutor that not all women from Ionia were adulterous and opportun-
istic, the two Milesians Aspasia and Thargelia representing an exception. We may thus argue
that Thargelia was introduced into the dialogue for the twofold purpose of dismissing the
charges against the women from Ionia and of serving as Aspasia’s model. As suggested by Bar-
bara Ehlers (Ehlers 1966: 58–60), Aeschines may have conducted the transition between the
two figures in a more effective way by presenting Thargelia’s story within a speech delivered
by Aspasia and then recited by Socrates,47 on the model of the epitaph in Plato’s Menexenus.
Moreover, the delivery of this rhetorically sophisticated logos may have offered Callias further
proof of its author’s skills in the art of speech, and thus of the qualities that could make Aspa-
sia a valuable teacher for his son.
Yet, the sources attest to a third female figure featured in Aeschines’ dialogue. Once again,
she is a woman-sovereign: Rhodogyne, the queen of the Persians who, according to the testi-
mony of De mulieribus 8, “made their kingdom great, as the philosopher Aeschines says.”48
The anecdote that follows emphasizes this woman’s exceptionality: once, having heard that
one of the conquered peoples was rebelling, the “brave and fearsome” Rhodogyne stopped
styling her hair, leaving the braid unfinished until the rebellious population was brought back
to order. For this reason, she was portrayed in a golden image with half her hair braided and
the other half left loose.
Philostratus (Imagines, 2.5) reports another version of this episode, which agrees with Ae-
schines’ account in its essential outline. The rhetor mentions the queen’s victory over the
Armenians and refers to the same story, by emphasizing that Rhodogyne led the battle and
did not linger, allowing herself time to fasten up the right side of her hair, so that “the part of
her hair that is fastened up is arranged with a modesty that tempers her high spirit, while that
which hangs loose gives her vigour and the look of a bacchant.”49
The episode, which stresses Rhodogyne’s courage and military prowess, is generally con-
sidered a fictional story. More important than its historical reliability, for our purposes, is the
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fact that in Rhodogyne’s case too a clear reference to eros is made, as suggested by Philostra-
tus’ observation “I do not think she loves to be loved” (ou gar moi dokei eran tou erasthai).
Rhodogyne earned her reputation through political and military action: the non-involvement
in eros which distinguishes her from both Thargelia and Aspasia corresponds to the emphasis
on a different sphere, related on the one hand to political power and on the other hand to the
religious field, as is shown by the allusion to libations and Bacchants. Arguably, Rhodogyne
represents a woman type in Aeschines, some features of which remind us of the tradition
about the Assyro-Babylonian queen Semiramis portayed by Ctesias.50 The fact that Polyaenus
describes the two women one after the other (Stratagems, 8.26–27) shows that ancient authors
generally assumed them to be similar. According to this version of Semiramis’ story, the queen
heard about the Siraces’ revolt while she was bathing and, without waiting to have her hair
arranged, she immediately set off to subdue the rebellious people (8.26). This motif is closely
reminiscent of the story told by Philostratus.51 Moreover, according to Diodorus Siculus’ ac-
count (Library of History, 2.13.4), after having come to power Semiramis too displays a nega-
tive attitude, if not toward eros itself, certainly toward marriage.52
All this considered, Rhodogyne’s story was arguably put forward to exemplify a woman in-
different to eros and exceptionally endowed with andreia. Precisely for her (different) attitude
to the erotic sphere, she may have been contrasted with the figure of Aspasia and may have
introduced the issue of eros into the conversation per oppositionem.
As regards the possible place of this episode within the Aspasia,53 the most convincing hy-
pothesis seems to be that Socrates evoked Rhodogyne’s story in support of his thesis that one
can “learn something helpful also from women” – presumably a relevant theme in Aeschines’
dialogue – and thus to justify the recommendation of Aspasia as a teacher for Hipponicus.54
To this end, Socrates may have mentioned the military achievements and the outstanding de-
votion of the Persian queen, whose conduct showed how a woman could reveal exceptional
leadership qualities. In order to connect the section on Rhodogyne to the other parts of the
work, it may be supposed that at this point Aeschines put forward the objection to which
Athenaeus alludes: while Socrates’ assumption may be true for Persian queens, it cannot hold
in relation to Ionian women, who are indistinctly “grasping adulteresses” (see Ehlers 1966:
51). Socrates may then have introduced his second example, the hetaira Thargelia, who ruled
over the Thessalians for 30 years. Both Rhodogyne and Thargelia operate in the field of poli-
tics and wield political power (or influence). Despite this common trait, however, Thargelia
was not born a ruling queen. This might explain not only the information about her marriage
to Antiochus but also Plutarch’s reference to her association with “the most influential men”
as the basis for her political ascent. While on the one hand this distances Thargelia from the
exceptionality of Rhodogyne’s model, on the other hand, it brings her closer to Aspasia. The
example of Thargelia may have been used to set the ground for a subsequent discussion about
Aspasia, another Milesian who exerted a decisive political influence (albeit indirectly), and
who did not hesitate to resort to eros for this purpose.
Before drawing some conclusions about the dialogue’s (possible) structure and lines of ar-
gument, other testimonies can briefly be considered to further clarify the content of Aeschines’
Aspasia’s expertise and teaching. This allows us both to offer a fuller answer to the questions
raised in Section 1 – what Socrates sought to learn by visiting the Milesian and why he recom-
mended her to others as a teacher – and to dig a little deeper into the relationship between
Aspasia and eros.
Unlike Diotima in Plato’s Symposium (201d), Aeschines’ Aspasia is not explicitly presented
as an expert on erotic matters.55 Nonetheless, a number of indirect references suggest a sig-
nificant connection between Aspasia’s activity and the sphere of eros. Some hints are external
109
to the dialogue: one is the concomitant mention of Aspasia and Diotima as Socrates’ teachers
in some sources56 and another is the later tradition about Aspasia as Socrates’ erotodidaska-
los.57 More pertinent to the present study, however, are some testimonies on the dialogue that
clearly seem to point in this direction. Some of them have already been touched upon: the
cases of Pericles and Lysicles exemplify – to different degrees – the results of Aspasia’s political
skills and, in both examples, eros is involved (at an interpersonal level).58
This picture is considerably enriched by the fundamental account provided by Cicero in
De inventione (1.31.51–53),59 where Aspasia is presented as a proponent of Socratic eros.60 In
brief, in the framework of a conversation with Xenophon and his wife revolving around the
idea that the search for a better husband or wife is vain unless both partners aim to be aristoi,
Aspasia is portrayed as mediating between the two spouses. The Milesian thus applies to con-
jugal relationships that Sokratikos eros which had the power to foster moral improvement in
others and which was illustrated in an exemplary fashion in Aeschines’ Alcibiades.61 Insofar as
she is not personally involved in the erotic relationship (unlike Socrates in his interaction with
Alcibiades), Aspasia engenders a desire for self-improvement by appealing to the love which
others have for one another. Moreover, by extending this pedagogical eros outside the sphere
of male homoerotic relationships (unlike Socrates), she proves to be an expert on the subject of
marital aristeia. This is further confirmed by Xenophon, who refers to Aspasia as an expert in
the art of matchmaking (Memorabilia, 2.6.36) and in the education of women within marital
relationships (Oeconomicus, 3.4).62
If, then, we read Plutarch’s remarks in Life of Pericles 24.3 in light of Xenophon’s and
Cicero’s testimonies, we may argue that it was because of Aspasia’s expertise as a mediator
in marital relationships that Socrates introduced her to his friends and their wives. Moreover,
insofar as it illustrates another kind of relationship between eros and Aspasia’s educational
skills, the example of Xenophon and his wife emphasizes the value of Aspasia’s teachings even
outside of a strictly personal erotic relationship. All this certainly played a central role in the
overall economy of the dialogue, with regard to which some concluding remarks can now be
made.
4 Concluding Remarks
Aeschines’ Aspasia presumably began with a scene in which the wealthy Callias turned to
Socrates for advice on the education of his son Hipponicus and the philosopher answered by
recommending that the young man spend time with Aspasia.63 It is likely that such a proposal
aroused Callias’ astonishment or criticism,64 which finds an echo in Maximus of Tyre’s remark
eis gynaikos andra. The same words suggest that Socrates did not limit himself to justifying
the proposal of Aspasia as a teacher but presented a more general argument65: in response to
Callias, Socrates may have introduced a set of examples to support his thesis that it is possible
to learn something valid from a woman.
To this end, Rhodogyne was arguably introduced first, on account of her military achieve-
ments, absolute commitment to political affairs, and exceptional leadership skills. While this
example would have been relevant to Callias, who was most likely interested in helping his
son acquire political arete (Ehlers 1966: 39, 56), the wealthy Athenian may have objected
that such qualities could not be attributed to Ionian women, all of whom were “grasping
adulteresses,” let alone to an hetaira like Aspasia. In order to counter this remark, Socrates
may have introduced the figure of Thargelia: this woman, who was also a Milesian, had been
able to rule over the Thessalians for 30 years and had used the power derived from eros for
this purpose. By mentioning a second woman who had succeeded in politics despite being an
110
hetaira – indeed, a woman who had achieved this precisely thanks to her status – Socrates
may have further undermined Callia’s initial resistance. At this point, Socrates must have
turned the conversation back to Aspasia, highlighting the qualities that made her an excellent
teacher of politics and rhetoric and thus presenting her as an expert in these fields. Evidence
of this was provided by Pericles, to whose political success Aspasia had contributed through
her oratory teachings. But an even more eloquent example was Lysicles, whom Aspasia had
transformed into “a very clever speaker,” even in the absence of the kind of talent shown by
Pericles. Moreover, Lysicles’ case was the one closest to Callias’ situation: as a testimony by
Dio Chrysostom suggests (Oration 55.22), in the dialogue Socrates probably reported a con-
versation with Lysicles in which the latter turned to him for instruction regarding ta politika.66
Ultimately, both examples justify Socrates’ initial advice: Aspasia is not only aware of the
skills which a good politician must possess but is also able to teach them.
A further criticism launched against the Milesian was probably related to her portrayal as
a procuress or panderer (proagogos), mainly conveyed by comedy.67 The response to this ac-
cusation may have constituted the transition to the second part of the dialogue and the leading
motif of all its subsequent developments, through which Socrates showed in what higher sense
Aspasia interpreted those ill-famed technai.68 In this section, Socrates may have claimed that
he himself associated with Aspasia and that he also took his friends and their wives to her.
In the same context, in order to present the Milesian as an expert even in matters such as the
education of women and mediation between spouses, the philosopher probably introduced the
conversation between Aspasia, Xenophon, and his wife reported by Cicero, by which the topic
of eros-arete was brought again to the center of the discussion.
In this way, Aeschines also developed a sort of apology of Aspasia, responding to the
many accusations circulating about her. These were reflected not only in Antisthenes’ Aspasia
but also in the plays of the comic poets, whose allusions to Aspasia were “invariably sexual,
sexualized and sexualizing” (Henry 1995: 19). Furthermore, the female figures with which she
was associated – Omphale, Helen, Hera, and Deianeira – emphasized her tyrannical traits and
her power over men, mainly with reference to her relationship with Pericles and hence to her
closeness to the elite’s inner circle.
Through an association with women other than those of Comedy, it is not Aspasia’s power
that Aeschines questions, nor her use of eros, but her opportunistic aims and the detrimental
effects of her actions. In doing so, he also outlines different kinds of relationship between
women, eros, and politics. By comparing Aspasia to Thargelia, Aeschines may have intended
to show that, through love, these women pursued lofty objectives (of a political, intellectual,
or moral nature). Unlike Rhodogyne and Semiramis, Thargelia was originally an hetaira, not
a queen: she had actively gained her political position. Perhaps because of this, while Rhodo-
gyne represents the exceptional figure of a female sovereign indifferent to love, with Thargelia
Aeschines provides the example of an eros put to the service of a political project, thereby
paving the way for the figure of Aspasia, whose eros serves both political goals, through the
teaching of rhetoric (Pericles and Lysicles), and specifically moral purposes (Xenophon and
his wife).
As a result, not only is “the political word eroticized” (Henry 1995: 54) but also – c onversely –
the erotic sphere is politicized. Revealingly, these women had in common an exceptional sta-
tus, both socially (being queens or hetairai) and politically (being foreigners and thus non-
citizens),69 which made them poorly representative of the average Athenian woman.70 Taking
this liminality into due consideration, one cannot help but notice that, through different female
“doubles”, Aeschines also presents an entirely different image of Aspasia, as much more than
just “another Milesian courtesan turned queen.”71
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Notes
1 Transl. Trapp 1997. This testimony corresponds to text VI A 66 in the collection Socratis et Socrati-
corum Reliquiae (Giannantoni 1990, henceforth SSR) and to text 102 in the edition Eschine di Sfetto.
Tutte le testimonianze (Pentassuglio 2017, henceforth P.). On Maximus of Tyre’s passage see Natorp
1892: 489–490.
2 On the figure of Diotima as a teacher, the problem of her historicity, and her legacy, see Crystal Ad-
dey’s chapter in this volume.
3 Transl. Harmon 1936. See VI A 62 SSR (= 94 P.).
4 See VI A 62 SSR (= 103 P.). Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 4.19.121–122 (Ἀσπασία τῆς
Μιλησίας […] Σωκράτης μὲν ἀπέλαυσεν εἰς φιλοσοφίαν).
5 See VI A 66 SSR (= 99 P.). All the translations from Plutarch’s Vita Periclis are by Perrin 1916.
6 What is also telling in this regard is Lucian’s allusion to Aspasia in his Essays on Portaiture, 17:
dealing with the portrait of “wisdom and understanding”, Lucian reports that the Socratic Aeschines
and Socrates himself proposed Aspasia as a model for understanding, because of her “experience in
affairs, shrewdness in statecraft, quick-wittedness, and penetration” (VI A 60 SSR = 91 P.; transl.
Harmon 1925).
7 See VI A 61 SSR (= 92 P.).
8 On Aspasia in Old Comedy see, among others, Ehlers 1966: 26–30; Henry 1995: 19–28; Cataldi
2011: 26–51; Diamantakou-Agathou 2020: 241–242.
9 An important term of comparison is obviously represented by Antisthenes’ Aspasia, on which only
two testimonies are preserved, both by Athenaeus (The Learned Banqueters, 5.220d, 13.589e) and
both stressing the woman’s negative influence on Pericles (as already noted by Natorp 1892: 493;
Susemihl 1900: 149); see below, note 46. As regards the dialogue’s chronology, both Brancacci 1990:
37; Dittmar 1912: 16 place the composition of the work around 387 BCE. The latter carries out a
comparative reading of Aeschines’ and Antisthenes’ works (1–17) and argues for the priority of the
Aeschinean dialogue (55). By contrast, Ehlers 1966: 30–34 interprets Aeschines’ Aspasia also as a
reply to Antisthenes (see also Kahn 1992: 589–590, 1994: 104–105, 1996: 29).
10 On Aspasia in Greek history, with special regard to Plutarch’s account in Chapters 24 and 32 of Life
of Pericles, see Bicknell 1982; Henry 1995: 9–17; Cataldi 2011: esp. 11–26.
11 The most detailed account of Aspasia’s bios is contained in Chapter 24 of Plutarch’s Life of Peri-
cles (see Section 2). A short biographical account can also be found in Harpocration’s Lexicon (s.v.
Aspasia).
12 Transl. Boys-Stones and Rowe 2013. See VI A 66 SSR (= 100 P.).
13 The literature on Aspasia in Plato’s Menexenus is quite extensive; for two recent contributions see
Robitzsch 2017 and Adamson 2020. On the political implications and the gender-related aspects of
Plato’s depiction of Aspasia see Long 2003 and Jarratt and Ong 1995, who place the Aspasia of the
Menexenus “at the intersection of the axes of gender and colonialism” (18).
14 On Lysicles’ career in politics see Thucidides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 3.19.1.
15 This hypothesis has been put forward by Ehlers 1966: 73–75, esp. 73–74, followed by Kahn 1994:
98–99, 1996: 25–26. According to Plutarch’s account, “Aeschines says that Lysicles the sheep-dealer,
a man of low birth and nature, came to be the first man at Athens by living with Aspasia after the
death of Pericles” (Life of Pericles, 24.3–4 = VI A 66 SSR = 99 P.).
16 I am following here the lectio of Hermann 1875 (Κρατῖνος δὲ τύραννον αὐτὴν καλεῖ Χείρωσιν, Ὀμφάλην
Εὔπολις Φίλοις), but the reconstruction of the Greek text has been the subject of various conjectures.
The meaning of this passage changes sensibly by adopting the version of the text proposed by Allen,
Burnet, and Parker 1938 (Κρατῖνος δὲ † Ὀμφάλῃ τύραννον αὐτὴν καλεῖ, † χείρων Εὔπολις Φίλοις), as it
would read “Cratinus calls her ‘tyrant’ in his Omphale, while Eupolis is harsher in the Philoi” (my
translation). Both versions are possible, but the former has the advantage of agreeing with Plutarch’s
testimony.
17 De Martino 2010: 450 highlights that Aspasia’s mythical doubles in Comedy (Helen, Omphale, Deia-
neira, and Hera) are always symmetrical to those of Pericles (Paris, Heracles, and Zeus).
18 See frr. 256 and 257 K.-A.
19 See Schwarze 1971: 59; Henry 1995: 20; Cataldi 2011: 40.
20 Fr. 258 K.-A. On the epithet here used for Pericles (“head-gathered”), which recalls the Homeric
epithet “cloud-gatherer” commonly used for Zeus, see Henry 1995: 20–21. On Cratinus’ mocking
theogony and its role in the parodic portayal of Pericles, see Cataldi 2011: 40–47.
112
21 Fr. 259 K.-A. Whether or not Aspasia’s status was actually that of a pallake has been a matter of
scholarly debate: see already Becq de Fouquières 1872: 20–23; Krauss 1911: 89; Ehlers 1966: 79,
90–93; Montuori 1981: 93–94; Laurenti 1988: 48–49, Dueso 1994: 9–12; Henry 1995: 14–15, 21,
41–42, 138–139, note 9; Cataldi 2011: 18–22.
22 The epithet also associated Hera-Aspasia with Pandora: see Hesiod, Works and Days, 82–83; The-
ogony, 589 and 592.
23 On this see Schwarze 1971: 123; Henry 1995: 23. The testimony of the scholium corresponds to fr.
294 K.-A.
24 See verses 69–70: “As for the past year, they say that he was long a slave to a Lydian woman” (transl.
Lloyd-Jones 1994).
25 See frr. 36–41 K.-A., Kock: 88–90; and K.-A.: 52–53 respectively. The theme of Heracles as the hus-
band of Omphale was also brought to the stage between the fifth and fourth centuries by Archippus
(frr. 8–13 K.-A.), Nicochares (fr. 7 K.-A.), and Antiphanes (frr. 174–175 K.-A.), as well as by Cratinus
the Younger in a play entitled Omphale (frr. 4–5 K.-A.).
26 See Webster 1936: 267, who considers Ion’s Omphale to be prior to Sophocles’ Trachiniae.
27 See TrGF 19 F, 17a–33a. On this hypothesis see Cataldi 2011: 27–29. A satirical drama by the same
title was also composed by Archaeus of Eretria (TrGF 20 F 32–35).
28 Ἡρακλέα νικήφορον Ὀμφάλης θῆλυν λάτριν. On this fragment see Jarcho 1987.
29 As Henry 1995: 10 notes, “comedy provides the only fifth-century evidence that she influenced Peri-
cles’ political policies.”
30 Fr. 259 K.-A. Next, Plutarch reports some verses from Eupolis’ Demoi (fr. 100 K.-A.) attesting to
the tradition (apparently endorsed by the author: dokei de) according to which Pericles had had an
illegitimate son by Aspasia.
31 On the figure of Deianeira in Sophocles’ tragedy, and on the parallel with the characters of Penelope
and Clytemnestra, see Sissa 2008: 109–110.
32 This tragedy has been attributed to Seneca, but the work’s authorship has been questioned by many
scholars (for a recent introduction see Bartsch, Braund and Konstan 2017: 105–114).
33 See Cataldi 2011: 32, who (besides Sophocles) mentions Hesiod and Bacchylides.
34 On Aspasia as the cause of the Peloponnesian war, with special regard to Aristophanes’ Acharnians,
see Diamantakou-Agathou 2020: esp. 244–251.
35 Accordingly, the information about Aspasia’s life directly connected with the history of Athens and
Pericles is omitted in this section, and finds a place in the account of the politician’s life. For the same
reason, Plutarch’s bios is particularly detailed concerning philosophers’ opinions, which are reported
more accurately compared to the scholium to Plato’s Menexenus.
36 See VI A 64 SSR (= 97 P.).
37 Cf. Etymologicum Magnum, s.v. Thargelia.
38 My translation. The Greek text reads: ταύτην φασὶν Ἀντιόχου βασιλεύοντος τῶν Θετταλῶν ἀφικομένην
εἰς Θετταλίαν γήμασθαι Ἀντιόχῳ καὶ ἀποθανόντος ἐκείνου βασιλεῦσαι Θετταλίας ἔτη λ’.
39 Aeschines is the only source to mention Antiochus (who died before 480 BC), besides Simonides (fr.
34 Bergk). On this figure see Dittmar 1912: 30; for a reconstruction of the historical events in which
Antiochus was involved, see Ehlers 1966: 53–54.
40 On the (possible) accusation of medism against Aspasia see Montuori 1981: 108; Cataldi 2011: 17.
41 See also Ehlers 1966: 2, note 3. By contrast, Natorp 1892: 495–496 interprets the Thargelia example
negatively and takes it as an explanation of the interlocutor’s objection against Ionian women.
42 Diels includes Hesychius’ entry among the fragments of Hippias of Elis (86B 4, 331, no. 6 D.-K.),
who seems to have been the first to mention Thargelia in his Synagoge. In this work, Hippias pre-
sents her as one of the famous women of Milesian origin, saying that she married 14 men, being
beautiful in appearance and wise (οὗσα τὸ εἷδος πάνυ καλὴ καὶ σοφή; cf. Athenaeus, The Learned
Banqueters, 13.608f). There is a marked similarity between the two testimonies; for this reason,
Natorp 1892: 495, note 6 holds that Hippias is Hesychius’ source. However, this correlation turns
out to be less certain if we consider the other Θαργηλία entry by Hesychius, referring to the Athenian
festival by this name. Here, the words στρατηγεῖν πόλεις καὶ δυνάστας suggest – according to Dittmar
1912: 30–31, note 109 – that the entry represents a shorter account of the Aeschinean portait of
Thargelia.
43 Cf. Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 2.13.12. Precisely for her sophia, Thargelia has been con-
sidered an “archetype” for Aspasia: see De Martino 2010: 454, who also notes that wisdom (along
113
with beauty and her role as a teacher) is one of the features Aspasia shares with Sappho (451–457),
and that sophia is explicitly associated with a woman for the first time in Sappho, fr. 56 V. (453).
44 On Aeschines’ Gorgianism see Diogenes Laertius, 2.63. Dittmar 1912: 253–254 collected a set of
expressions, scattered throughout Aeschines’ dialogues, which can be traced back to the Gorgianic
style. See also Hermann 1850: 6.
45 Transl. Penella 1979: 162. See VI A 65 SSR (= 98 P.).
46 Particularly telling in this regard is Athenaeus’ testimony: “Antisthenes the Socratic says that [Peri-
cles] was in love with Aspasia, and kissed the woman twice daily, when he left the house and when
he came back in” (The Learned Banqueters, 13.589e; transl. Boys-Stones and Rowe 2013). By
combining it with Plutarch’s parallel passage, where it is stated that “the affection which Pericles
had for Aspasia seems to have been rather of an amatory sort (mallon erotike)” (Life of Pericles,
24.5), it emerges that Antisthenes made Aspasia the embodiment of pleasure. Through Aspasia, he
condemned sensual eros, and particularly the lack of self-restraint of which Pericles was a victim
because of it.
47 On this hypothesis see already Hermann 1850: 18, Dittmar 1912: 26, Kahn 1994: 97, 1996: 25.
48 My translation. See fr. 95 P. The anonymous treatise De mulieribus contains a set of reports about
γυναῖκες ἐν πολεμικοῖς συνεταὶ καὶ ἀνδρεῖαι and, in chapters 8 and 11, includes two bioi drawn from
Aeschines’ Aspasia.
49 Transl. Fairbanks 1931. See VI A 63 SSR (= 96 P.).
50 See Ehlers 1966: 48–50, who reconstructs the literary tradition of this woman-type (including To-
myris, Atossa, and Artemisia: see note 50, p. 48). Rhodogyne and Semiramis are grouped together
under the man-hating “Amazon-type” characterized by a hostility to Aphrodite. By contrast, Dittmar
1912: 28–29 connects Semiramis with Thargelia, for both were hetairai (on this different tradition see
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 2.20.3–4).
51 The motif was probably transferred from Rhodogyne to Semiramis: see Dittmar 1912: 43, note 140
and Ehlers 1966: 48, note 51, who highlights that Dio Chrysostom (Oration 64) mentions Ῥοδογούνη
πολεμική and Σεμίραμις βασιλική – one after the other – as examples of ἔνδοξοι γυναῖκες.
52 As a sovereign, Semiramis was unwilling to contract a lawful marriage, “being afraid that she might
be deprived of her supreme position”, so “choosing out the most handsome of the soldiers she con-
sorted with them and then made away with all who had lain with her” (Library of History, 2.13.4;
transl. Oldfather 1933).
53 The attribution of the story to Aeschines’ Aspasia is already assumed by Hermann 1850: 18, fol-
lowed by Natorp 1892: 491–492; Dittmar 1912: 45. The publication of Ctesias’ Persica, from which
the novella about Rhodogyne was presumably drawn, has been considered the terminus post quem
in the chronology of Aeschines’ work (Treves 1937: 468–469). The precise dating of the Persica is
unknown, but Ctesias’ historical account ended with the year 398 (Diodorus Siculus, Library of His-
tory, 14.46.6); the work was therefore probably published during that decade.
54 This hypothesis was originally formulated by Ehlers 1966: 44 ff. and was later re-proposed by Kahn
1994: 96 (see also Kahn 1996: 24).
55 On this issue see Dittmar 1912: 51; Ehlers 1966: 97; Döring 1984: 24, 2001: 31; Kahn 1994: 96.
56 This is the case with Maximus of Tyre, Oration 38.4 and Theodoret of Cyrus, Cure of the Greek
Maladies, 1.17, both mentioned in Section 1. On the association between Aspasia, Thargelia and
Diotima, see Lucian, The Eunuch, 7. On the thesis that Diotima may stand for the historical figure
of Aspasia, see Crystal Addey’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 31). Patricia Marechal mentions
Diotima and Aspasia as individual women whom Plato recognizes as naturally inclined towards
pursuits such as philosophy and rulership (see note 18, p. 196 in this volume). On the same point see
Hulme’s contribution, (Chapter 12).
57 See Synesius (Dio, 15.1–2: Σωκράτης Ἀσπασίᾳ προσεφοίτα κατὰ χάριν τοῦ τὰ ἐρωτικὰ παιδευθῆναι) and
Herodicus apud Athenaeus (The Learned Banqueters, 5.219d: Σωκράτης ἐρωτοδιδάσκαλον ἔχων τὴν
Μιλησίαν).
58 Besides the scholium to Plato’s Menexenus, see Philostratus, Epistle 73 (VI A 65 SSR = 98 P.), Plu-
tarch, Life of Pericles 24.4 (VI A 66 SSR = 99 P.) and 32.1–3 (VI A 67 SSR = 105 P.) on Pericles;
Harpocration, s.v. Aspasia (= 89 P.) on Lysicles.
59 VI A 70 SSR (= 108 P.). Ehlers 1966: 85 argues that, for this very reason, Lysicles’ example must have
been more persuasive for Callias.
60 For a closer study of this aspect and a more detailed discussion of the relevant testimonies, I shall refer
to Pentassuglio 2020. On this issue see also Campos Daroca 2013.
114
61 It may be argued (with Kahn 1994: 101–102; cf. Kahn 1992: 586, 1996: 27) that, while questioning
Xenophon and his wife, Aspasia applies (and generalizes) the principle that Socrates expounds at the
end of the Alcibiades, namely: making others better “through love”; see Aelius Aristides, To Plato: in
Defense of Oratory, 1.74 (VI A 53 SSR = 82 P.).
62 For the two testimonies by Xenophon see VI A 71 SSR (= 111 P.) and VI A 72 SSR (= 112 P.). On
Xenophon’s depiction of Aspasia see Johnson in this volume, Chapter 10, especially: 145–147).
63 According to Ehlers 1966: 35–36, Maximus of Tyre’s passage preserves the opening scene of the dia-
logue. Several scholars have compared this scene to the incipit of Plato’s Laches: see already Natorp
1892: 490–491 and Dittmar 1912: 33. Ehlers 1966: 35, note 3 also refers to Laches, 180d and 200d,
and Theaetetus, 150e ff.
64 This is first argued by Natorp 1892: 491; see also Kahn 1996: 24.
65 See Ehlers 1966: 42, 45.
66 VI A 68 SSR (= 106 P.). See Dittmar 1912: 23–24.
67 At this point Socrates may have mentioned the episode of Aspasia’ trial: according to Plutarch (Life
of Pericles, 32.1) the comic Hermippus brought Aspasia to court on a charge of asebeia and of pimp-
ing free women for Pericles (see VI A 67 SSR = 105 P.). Scholars do not agree about the historicity
of these charges, and as to whether the trial actually took place: see Montuori 1981: 87–109; Henry
1995: 15–16, 24.
68 Cf. Xenophon, Symposium, 4.56.
69 On the depiction of other foreigner and non-citizen women in Xenophon’s writings (the enslaved
dancer in the Symposium, the hetaira Theodote in the Memorabilia, the non-Greek queen Pantheia in
the Cyropaedia), see Carol Atack’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 9).
70 Ehlers 1966: 45–47 rightly emphasizes the exceptional nature of the figure of Rhodogyne, as com-
pared for example to the wife of Ischomachus described in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus (on which see
Johnson’s essay in this volume, (Chapter 10: 138-141), and recognizes the same Ausnahmenatur in
Thargelia and Rhodogyne.
71 Kahn 1994: 97 (see also Kahn 1996: 25). Henry 1995: 41 goes so far as to state that “for the first and
perhaps only time in classical antiquity, the thought of ‘Aspasia’ stands on its own” and that “in fact,
Aeschines may be said to have attempted to create a female subject.”
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Becq de Fouquières, L. (1872) Aspasie de Milet: étude historique et morale, Paris: Didier.
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De Martino, F. (2010) “Aspasia e la scuola delle mogli,” in S. Giombini and F. Marcacci (eds.) Il quinto
secolo. Studi di filosofia antica in onore di Livio Rossetti, Perugia: Acquaplano, 449–466.
Diamantakou-Agathou, K. (2020) “From Aspasia to Lysistrata: Literary Versions and Intertextual Diffu-
sions of the Feminine Other in Classical Athens,” Λογεῖον 10: 238–260.
Dittmar, H. (1912) Aischines von Sphettos. Studien zur Literaturgeschichte der Sokratiker, Berlin:
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Döring, K. (1984) “Der Sokrates des Aischines von Sphettos und die Frage nach dem historischen
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Dueso, J. S. (1994) Aspasia de Mileto: Testimonios y Discursos (textos y documentos), Barcelona: Edito-
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Ehlers, B. (1966) Eine vorplatonische Deutung des sokratischen Eros: Der Dialog Aspasia des
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Fairbanks, A., ed. (1931) Philostratus the Elder, Philostratus the Younger, Callistratus. Philostratus the
Elder, Imagines. Philostratus the Younger, Imagines. Callistratus, Descriptions (Loeb Classical Li-
brary 256), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Giannantoni, G., ed. (1990) Socratis et Socraticorum reliquiae, collegit, disposuit, apparatibus notisque
instruxit G. Giannantoni, Naples: Bibliopolis.
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dam: J. C. Gieben, 87–109.
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Perrin, B., ed. (1916) Plutarch. Lives, Volume III: Pericles and Fabius Maximus. Nicias and Crassus
(Loeb Classical Library 65), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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116
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Further reading
Comprehensive presentations of the historical figure of Aspasia are D. Jouanna, Aspasie de Milet, égérie
de Périclès: histoire d’une femme, histoire d’un mythe (Paris: Fayard, 2005) and N. Loraux, “Aspasie,
l’étrangère, l’intellectuelle,” (in N. Loraux, ed., La Grèce au féminin, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2003,
133–166). A recent contribution on Aeschines which also includes a discussion on the role of eros in
the Aspasia is C. Mársico, Shock, Erotics, Plagiarism, and Fraud: Aspects of Aeschines of Sphettus’
Philosophy (in C. Moore, A. Stavru, eds., Socrates and the Socratic Dialogue, Leiden-Boston: Brill,
2018, 202–220). A concise presentation of the figure of Aspasia in the Socratic circle can be found
in Chapter 6 of A. D’Angour, Socrates in Love. The Making of a Philosopher (London: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2019), despite a controversial interpretation of the Socrates-Aspasia relationship in light
of Plato’s Symposium.
117
9
“BY ZEUS,” SAID THEODOTE
Women As Interlocutors and Performers
in Xenophon’s Philosophical Writings
Carol Atack
The works of Xenophon, the Athenian adventurer whose writings offer an alternative account
of Socrates as well as insights into the Greek experience of other cultures, are also unusual
in that they contain women characters with ethical agency. In settings ranging from an Athe-
nian home to a Persian palace, Xenophon shows women engaging in dialogue and asserting
a distinctive perspective that comments on their own position in society. These encounters
have been read through feminist gaze theory (Goldhill 1998; Harman 2008), deploying Laura
Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze (Mulvey 1989). But a reliance on gaze theory underplays
both the agency of these women, and their situated knowledge as women, distinctive from that
of Xenophon’s idealised male figures (Hartsock 1983; Haraway 1988).
In using women to represent ethical positions and virtue itself, Xenophon both draws on
and contests Greek literary heritage, and the depiction of women in genres ranging from epic
and tragedy to historiography. He presents the situations of women in terms of philosophical
problems, and women themselves speak and act in exploring and resolving them. Xenophon’s
use of women is consistent with his use of a wider range of characters than Plato as interlocu-
tors for Socrates and as participants in philosophical reflection on the pursuit of virtue and
communal existence. However, a focus on male leadership in readings of his philosophy, and
also the belief that it is impossible for there to be a positive depiction of a woman in an ancient
text, has led many scholars to disregard the role of women in Xenophon’s philosophical writ-
ing, or to insist that their presence denotes irony.
Some strands of Xenophon scholarship, such as that of the Straussian commentators who
have done much work to rehabilitate his reputation as a thinker, present him as a realist po-
litical philosopher rather than an ethicist, and his depiction of women as critical or ironic;
others, such as social and cultural historians, recognize his depiction of domestic life with-
out necessarily exploring its philosophical dimensions.1 This chapter aims to explore how
Xenophon uses women as active participants in dialogue and in narratives of philosophi-
cal importance. It focuses on two specific instances, the meeting between Socrates and the
courtesan (hetaira) Theodote (Memorabilia 3.11) and the story of the captive Asian queen
Pantheia, threaded through the central sections of the Cyropaedia. In doing so, it draws
on work establishing Xenophon as a thinker unusually sensitive to the position of women
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-11 118

“By Zeus,” Said Theodote
of different statuses in Athenian society, including Sarah Pomeroy’s foundational work on

the Oeconomicus, and to the position of women in other, non-Greek, societies, including
Emily Baragwanath’s analysis of women in Xenophon’s historical writing (Pomeroy 1994;
Baragwanath 2002). It shows how these meetings and conversations develop key topics of
fourth-century ethical thought, and themes of friendship (philia) and reciprocity, and desire
and self-discipline.2
Xenophon incorporates his presentation of women into an ethical system in which moral
qualities are visible in the bodies and behavior of those who bear them and identified and
evaluated through the concept of kalokagathia (Bourriot 1995). In Greek thought, such dis-
tinctions separate free from enslaved (Aristotle Politics 1.5, 1254b27–39), the elite from the
labouring classes (Aristotle Politics 3.5, 1277b33-9) and Greeks from non-Greeks (Hippo-
crates Airs, Waters, Places); some differences play across and collapse gender boundaries.3
In using these structures, Xenophon reflects another aspect of ancient ethical thought,
its strong aesthetic component, particularly notable in Aristotle’s thought (Milliken 2006;
Kraut 2013). Plato associates the recognition of human physical beauty with the recogni-
tion and development of moral qualities in both the one gazing and the one gazed upon,
although his examples emphatically involve male bodies (Pl. Phdr. 255a–e; Nightingale
2004: 157–166). He and other Greek thinkers identify the good which is the object of
moral inquiry as to kalon, implying both a normative and an aesthetic component, although
his engagement with kalokagathia, the quality which is attributed to individuals who are
kalos in both senses, in the context of Athenian society is a critical one (Pl. Grg. 470e;
515a–518c). Xenophon’s distinctive move is to position his women characters within this
normative system, when he might have been expected to position them outside it. The pri-
mary function of this system is the critical evaluation of male citizens by each other, and he
evaluates their individual performances and self-presentations. Thus, while women such as
Theodote and Pantheia provide spectacle conducive to the ethical and philosophical reflec-
tions of their (male) viewers, they also view events for themselves, take decisions and act
and, in the case of Pantheia, evaluate their actions with reference to established normative
frameworks. In both cases, however, aspects of their identity permit them to be treated in
the same framework as elite male characters rather than as representatives of subaltern or
non-elite perspectives.4
1 Socrates and Women

The presence of women both in the room and as active participants in events and conver-
sations is a notable feature of Xenophon’s Socratic writings, distinct from Plato’s in which
women’s absence and exclusion are strongly marked by the dismissal of women, both citizen
family (Phaedo 59e–60a) and non-citizen entertainer (Symposium 176e4–10) from the scene.5
However, evidence from the fragmentary works of other Socratics suggests that female char-
acters, especially those linked to men in Socratic circles, were featured in their dialogues as
speakers. Aeschines of Sphettus in his Aspasia represents Aspasia, non-citizen partner but not
wife of Pericles as Socrates’ teacher (Plutarch Pericles 24.4–5 = SSR vi A 66), and as giving
advice to Xenophon and his wife (Cic. De Inventione 1.31.51–53 = SSR vi A 70; Johnson
2021: 254–255).6
Male speakers also describe women, not restricted to historical personages but including
personified virtues as in the story of the young Heracles’ encounter with Virtue and Vice at
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Carol Atack
the crossroads (Xen. Mem. 2.1.21–34), which Xenophon’s Socrates attributes to Prodicus the
sophist.7 This dialogue and the fable it contains play a key programmatic role in the structure
of the Memorabilia and its discussion of what makes a man a good citizen (Gray 1998). The
two female figures embody the ethical qualities they represent, even before they make the case
for their respective ways of life:
There appeared two women of great stature coming towards him. One was fine-looking,
with the mark of good breeding (eleutherion phusei), and her attractions were a clear
complexion, modestly lowered eyes, and a sober bearing (schēma sōphrosunēi): and
she was dressed in white. The other had been fed to corpulence and fleshiness; she was
tricked out with cosmetic enhancement to make her complexion look whiter and pinker
than it was, and artificial means to exaggerate her height; she kept her eyes wide open,
and was dressed in diaphanous clothing for the maximum exposure of her charms. She
was constantly checking her appearance, and looking to see whether anyone else was
looking at her: and often she would glance at her own shadow.
(Xen. Mem. 2.1.22)8
But the description goes beyond describing physical embodiment to assess the chosen self-
presentation of the two female figures. The bodies of Virtue and Vice reflect the choice of life
they represent, applicable across genders. Vice is fleshy, even flabby, reflecting a lack of physi-
cal discipline and self-restraint, a repeated theme in Xenophon’s work applied to both male
and female bodies, such as the othered and feminized bodies of the non-Greek captives of the
Spartan king Agesilaus (Hell. 3.4.19), who offer a negative exemplar to his troops.
Vice’s appearance is also unnatural and altered: she has dressed herself in immodest cloth-
ing (‘like an expensive prostitute’, according to Strauss 1972: 36) and applied make-up to
improve her appearance, producing a spectacle dependent on artifice as well as nature. Xeno-
phon returns to this topic in the Athenian gentleman Ischomachus’ reported conversation with
his wife (Oec. 10.2–9, Pomeroy 1994: 304–306; Glazebrook 2009). The failure of appearance
to match reality evokes contemporary metaphysical concerns as well as suggesting non-elite
status, associated with deception and artificiality.
Virtue, on the other hand, appears simply as she is, and her qualities are identified as natu-
ral; they match the qualities associated with kalokagathia in men, in a culture in which frank
openness is conducive to freedom. As Simon Goldhill notes, Xenophon’s characters partici-
pate in the performative democratic culture of Athens by presenting themselves, speaking and
acting in ways which can be evaluated against a range of norms (Goldhill 1998: 106–109).
The figures of Virtue and Vice provide a framework against which the performances and
self-presentation of characters in the work as a whole can be assessed, such as Socrates and
Aristippus in the frame dialogue (Dorion 2008). But Xenophon, in presenting a female figure
as a paradigm of virtuous appearance, departs from the conventional Greek perspective in
which the female in the form of the first woman, Pandora, is a “beautiful evil” (Hesiod The-
ogony 585). He offers the possibility that a woman can exhibit virtue in her physical presence
and actions.
Virtue and Vice are embodied abstractions, but other Xenophontic women are entirely hu-
man, such as the erotic dancers at the symposium held at the house of the wealthy Athenian
Callias (Symposium). In contrast with Plato’s Symposium (Pl. Smp. 176e4–10), this party
permits the hired, most likely of enslaved status, entertainers to perform and to arouse desire
in the audience; the conclusion, in which the desire aroused in the guests takes the form of ea-
gerness to return home to their wives, suggests that Xenophon may intend a heteronormative
120
recasting of Plato’s erotic dialogic world (Smp. 9.7). Watching them provokes conversation
among the guests, including a comment from Socrates on the girl dancer-gymnast’s skill:
Next the other girl began to play the flute, and the boy stood by and handed hoops over
to the girl dancer until she had twelve. She caught them as she danced, and threw them
up into the air whirring, as she had worked out the height she needed to throw them to
catch them in time with the music.
Socrates said: In many and varied ways it’s clear from what the girl is doing that
women are really no lesser in nature than men, though they lack judgement (gnōmē) and
strength. And so if any of you has a wife, let him have more confidence in teaching her
to use her understanding in whatever way he likes.
(Xen. Symp. 2.8-9)9
Xenophon describes how the girl’s ability to throw and catch hoops in time with the music
requires both practice and skill, in calculating how high to throw the hoop each time. It is
relatable to the masculine skill of a soldier working out how to aim a spear or arrow at a mov-
ing target. Although Socrates asserts that women have less mental and physical capability than
men, the example of the dancer shows that women do have an appreciable capacity to learn
and act on their learning. However, although her judgment that the young Critobulus is more
handsome than Socrates is reported (Smp. 5.9), she does not get to speak but wordlessly casts
a ballot in a mockery of democratic decision-making.
One significant woman character, the unnamed wife of Ischomachus, is reported indirectly
through Socrates’ account of his conversation with her husband, in which Ischomachus in turn
reports both his own conversations with his wife and her own reports of other conversations.10
This wife does more than simply listen to her husband’s lecture on her duties; she confirms that
it fits with the moral teaching she has herself received from her mother, before her marriage:
In reply to this, Socrates, my wife answered, “What should I be able to do to help you?
What ability (dunamis) have I got? Everything depends on you. My mother told me that
my task (ergon) is to practice self-control (sōphronein).”
(Xen. Oec. 7-14)11
This reported conversation shows women engaging in discussion of their duties and responsi-
bilities using the same language as men; Ischomachus goes on to agree that self-control is vital
for both men and women. It suggests that actions in the female sphere, such as the duties of
household management, can be considered using the same conceptual framework as the more
public-facing activities of men. However, the unnamed wife rejects the possibility that she can
act independently of her husband, although Ischomachus also reports her judging his behavior
(Oec. 11.25).
2 Theodote: A Woman As Viewed Object Speaks

Xenophon’s Symposium used the example of a women performer, whose skill, training and
enticing performance gave rise to a philosophical discussion among those watching her. The
act of viewing introduces another episode in the Memorabilia, one in which a woman char-
acter herself makes a “highly instructive” (Goldhill 1998: 105) contribution. Xenophon’s
account of Socrates’ encounter with the beautiful hetaira Theodote begins as a potentially
paradoxical exploration of the experience of viewing the beautiful but takes a different turn
121
Carol Atack
when she enters the conversation. Past commentators have struggled with the idea of Socrates
engaging in discussion with a sex worker, but detailed explorations by Michel Narcy (Narcy
2004) and Louis-André Dorion (Dorion and Bandini 2000–2011: 2.378–389) have laid out
the philosophical significance of the discussion, in which Socrates embarks on a “spiritual
seduction” as a “loving, philosophic teacher” (Pangle 2018: 156). Theodote’s status as a non-
citizen (the usual status of hetairai), like that of the Symposium’s enslaved dancer, makes her
a permissible object of male conversation, which would not be the case if she were the wife
or daughter of a citizen. Xenophon rigorously observes the guidance Thucydides places in the
mouth of the statesman Pericles that women should aim not to be the subject of conversation
(Thuc. 2.45.2), although he leaves open the possibility that female excellence can be observed
and serve as an exemplum. Unlike citizen women, non-citizen (metic) women were subject
to fewer social restrictions; the overlap between metic women and sex workers meant that
any metic woman might be labelled a courtesan, as Pericles’ partner Aspasia was by comic
playwrights (Henry 1995; Kennedy 2014).12 While non-citizen women participated in Athens’
labor market in various ways, the literary tradition often associates them with sex work, albeit
in an idealized form (Kennedy 2014, 2015). However, in the case of Aspasia, who was from
an aristocratic family of Miletus, the association was also with the teaching of rhetoric, an
occupation of high-status visiting teachers such as Gorgias; Plato depicts her as such in his
Menexenus. Xenophon’s depiction of Theodote in turn reflects the complex and ambiguous
status of elite male non-citizens as well as that of women like Aspasia.
Socrates and his companions go to see Theodote at her luxurious home, while her picture
is being painted, so that they can understand how her beauty escapes the confines of language:
At one time there was a beautiful woman in Athens called Theodote, the sort of woman
who could be persuaded to keep a man company. One of the group with Socrates had
mentioned her name and said that the beauty of this woman was beyond description
(kreitton…logou) – artists, he said, visited her to paint her picture, and she let them
see as much of herself as was decent. “We had better go and take a look at her,” said
Socrates: “if something is beyond description just hearing about it won’t tell us what we
want to know.”
(Xen. Mem. 3.11.1)
While Strauss (Strauss 1972: 86) suggests that the absence of a description means that Theo-
dote cannot be compared with Virtue and Vice, Xenophon leaves open the question of whether
Theodote’s natural beauty or artful self-presentation can easily be aligned with either quality.
Her beauty is problematic, given her ambiguous status as an elite metic. Reading the dialogue
with Plato’s thought in mind, the question of how the sight of beauty in the person of a hetaira
might contribute to the moral advancement of the individual is sharpened. The association of
beauty with moral excellence is central to Xenophon’s ethics, applied to both men and women;
the masculine ideal is the figure of the kaloskagathos, the man who combines nobility of ap-
pearance and nobility of character, someone like Ischomachus, whose qualities are demon-
strated through the performance of his personal and civic obligations (Oec. 6.12, 11.14–18).
Theodote’s beauty is, however, ambiguous – the dialogue’s set-dressing of her luxurious home
(3.11.4) links her to the negative associations of female appearance, those of Vice, even though
her extreme beauty is also suggestive of Virtue.
Xenophon exploits the erotic possibilities of this setting, in a subtle transformation of
Plato’s Socratic erotics.13 These, at the level of dramatic interactions between characters in
the dialogue, tend to involve homoerotic flirtations which play with the Athenian practice of
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pederastic relationships between young men at different stages on their journey to full adult-
hood (Pl. Lysis, Charmides, Phaedrus).14 Xenophon, on the other hand, is ambivalent about
pederasty, treating both pursuit and relationship as evidence of lack of self-control (Lac. Pol.
2.12–14, Ages. 5.4–6), and contrasting it and the sympotic world with marriage (Smp. 9.7).
He shows Socrates advising his students, including Xenophon himself, against the practice
(Mem. 1.3.8–15). The character of Theodote therefore enables Xenophon to engage with the
dialogic context of Socratic erotics, deftly and delicately, as well as with the philosophical
concerns of erotic dialogue, in which the possibility of learning from looking is an established
theme (Goldhill 1998). As many commentators have noted, Xenophon intends a comparison
between the hetaira and her pursuit of lovers, and Socrates’ pursuit of students, a point made
explicit in earlier discussions of the nature of Socrates’ teaching and friendship (Mem. 1.6.13,
2.6.35–36).15
This chapter follows one in which Socrates has spoken with crafts workers including the
painter Parrhasius (Mem. 3.10.1–5), with whom he discussed the possibility of representation
of the character (ēthos) of the soul through the depiction of postures and movement. Gol-
dhill identifies this conversation as “an important introduction” to the conversation with and
about Theodote (Goldhill 1998: 109). Parrhasius and Socrates had agreed that the representa-
tion of character was possible through art, but if Theodote’s beauty transcends the capacity
of words to describe it, Socrates might struggle to treat it philosophically. Xenophon does not
attempt to describe Theodote’s beauty, leaving its character ambiguous.
However, Xenophon does not linger on this point but gives Socrates a question which
transforms the discussion from one of aesthetics (and, as noted above, potentially an ethical
one) to a more practical one of justice, equity and benefit (Pangle 2018: 155, following Strauss
1972: 87). Theodote’s status as a hetaira, dependent on monetizing her relationships through
generating attraction, sharpens this question too; metics were unable to own landed property,
the traditional basis of acceptable wealth. The question is a double one: what the woman in
the picture might gain from being depicted, as the object of the gaze, and what the gazing men
might gain:
When the painter had finished, Socrates said, “Gentlemen, should we be more grateful
(charin echein) to Theodote for letting us see her beauty, or she to us for being the spec-
tators? Could it be that if she has more to gain from the display of her beauty, she ought
to thank us, and if we have more to gain from the sight of it, we should thank her?”
When someone said that this was a fair point, Socrates continued, “Well now: she
has already gained our appreciation, and when we spread the word more widely she will
benefit yet more. As for us, we are already longing to touch what we have seen, we will
go away in a state of some excitement, and when we are gone we will yearn for her. It’s
reasonable to conclude that the direction of service rendered is from us to her.”
(Xen. Mem. 3.11.2-3)
Socrates argues that, in communicating the excitement they feel on looking at Theodote, and
their continuing desire for her, they will effectively advertise her services to potential cus-
tomers. He characterizes this as an exchange of charis (Goldhill 1998: 115; Azoulay 2004:
372–374). This, for Xenophon, is the principal currency of civic interaction between citizens
as friends (Azoulay 2004). But, as Aristotle’s characterization of political friendships between
citizens as an engine of civic reciprocity suggests (NE 8.3–4, EE 7.10), there is a tension be-
tween the ethical and the useful, and the possibility of most friendships contributing to moral
development is slight.
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This question remains unanswered. Xenophon changes track, subverting expectations of

Socratic dialogue, where an elenchus exploring the definition of charis might be expected, by
depicting Theodote interrupting the male conversation and speaking about herself:
At this Theodote said, “By Zeus! If that is so, I ought to be grateful to you (charin
echein) for coming to look at me!”
(Xen. Mem. 3.11.3-4)
The oath with which Theodote interrupts the conversation, “By Zeus,” is a masculine one; it
marks her interruption and introduces the slippages and comparisons between gender roles
which her conversation with Socrates features. Socrates responds with the matching women’s
oath, “By Hera,” before moving in on the topic of acquiring friends, a theme of the previous
book of the Memorabilia:
“By Hera, Theodote,” said Socrates, “it’s a fine thing to have a flock of friends – a much
better investment than a herd of sheep or goats or cattle! But do you leave it to chance
(tuchēi) whether some friend will settle on you like a fly, or do you have some scheme
(mēchanai) of your own to attract them?”
“And how could I come up with a scheme for that?” she asked.
“Oh, it would be much more specific to you than what the spiders do,” said Socrates.
“You know how they hunt for their livelihood – they weave fine webs and feed on what-
ever falls into them.”
“Are you advising me that I too should weave some sort of trap?” she said.
“Oh no, you mustn’t think it’s going to be that simple to hunt friends, the most valu-
able prey there is! Don’t you see that even those who hunt low-value hares use a variety
of techniques?”
(Xen. Mem. 3.11.5–7)
As the discussion continues, it becomes clear that Xenophon is using Theodote’s activities as
a hetaira, who depends upon gifts from male clients, as a parallel for Socrates’ activities as
a philosopher. Both rely on their personal appeal to an overlapping group of “friends,” the
young male citizen elite of Athens who patronize both educators and sex workers; but both do
so as part of an economy of gift exchange, differentiating Socrates from ordinary sophists and
Theodote from pornai or prostitutes who simply exchange money for sex.16 Socrates’ initial
question asks Theodote to explain her strategy for attracting customers, but she claims not to
have one; this might, as Goldhill suggests, invoke “the standard negative portrayal of women
as tricksy seductresses” (Goldhill 1998: 119). But in Xenophon’s analysis, unlike male hunt-
ers, Theodote lacks a technē and acts in a less rational way. Socrates likens her to a spider,
who must wait for the chance arrival of prey in her web – produced through weaving, the ar-
chetypal feminine skill. This comparison to some extent dehumanizes her, suggesting that she
is animal and even monstrous in her lack of capacity to reason. This perhaps motivates Leo
Strauss’s claim that Socrates’ visit to Theodote is a descent from the encounters with Athenian
artisans in the previous chapter (Strauss 1972: 85).
The use of hunting imagery is significant; both Plato and Xenophon use hunting as an
analogy for the Socratic pursuit of knowledge, the erotic pursuit of lovers and sophists’ pur-
suit of students. Socrates himself is a lover hunting friends, in a homoerotic discussion be-
tween Socrates and the youthful Critoboulus (Mem. 2.6.28–36), which is itself linked to the
discussion with Theodote.17 Socrates develops the hunting theme, suggesting that Theodote
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needs to partner with someone who can supply the skills she lacks, turning her hunting into
something more like the leisure hunting of hares, featured in Xenophon’s hunting manual the
Cynegeticus:
“So what technique like that could I use to hunt friends?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you,” he said. “You can do it if you substitute for the dogs someone who can
track down and find (heurēsei) for you men of wealth and good taste, and when he’s
found them can devise a means (mēchanēsetai) of driving them into your nets.”
“Nets?” she said. “What sort of nets do I have?”
Well one is obvious – and a very effective catch-all it is – your body! But in your body
you have a soul, and that is how you know (katamanthaneis) what looks will charm and
what words will delight…
(Xen. Mem. 3.11.9-10)
Socrates here restores some agency to Theodote, in admitting that she has a soul which she can
use to devise ways of being charming, and if she is ignorant, as Pangle suggests (Pangle 2018:
155), Socrates attempts to remedy this. As Goldhill noted, female agency in hunting is rarely
positively valued. Theodote does not feel encouraged to hunt on her own; she asks Socrates to
perform this role and become her “fellow hunter,” although Socrates deflects this request back
to her own need for persuasion:
And Theodote said, “Why then, Socrates, haven’t you been my partner all along in the
hunt for friends?”
“I’ll certainly join you,” he said, “if you can persuade me.”
“And how could I persuade you?” she asked.
“You’ll work that out for yourself (zētēseis),” he said, “and find a way (mēchanēsei)
if you want some help from me.”
“Come and see me often, then,” she said.
“Well, Theodote,” said Socrates, with a playful dig at his own inactivity, “it’s not that
easy for me to find the time. There’s a lot of private and public business that keeps me
fully occupied, and there are girlfriends who won’t let me leave them day or night – I’m
teaching them about love potions and spells.”
(Xen. Mem. 3.11.15–16)
Socrates’ teasing response to Theodote’s request has been treated as a dismissal, but returns
more agency to her; it suggests that she can engage in the intellectual activities of exploration
and of devising plans. But, as the conversation turns again, these claims might apply as much
to Socrates’ and his followers’ mutual pursuit of each other and of knowledge, as to Theo-
dote’s pursuit of male customers. If Theodote wants to learn from Socrates, she will have to
compete for his attention with his other “girlfriends,” who may be the students Socrates goes
on to list, or who may be the abstract concepts and virtues they seek in their conversations
(Goldhill 1998: 120–121; Dorion and Bandini 2000–2011: 2.388–389).
Theodote’s intervention in the conversation that takes place around her positions her as
an ethical subject who can determine her actions and make choices in the pursuit of her well-
being. Socrates first suggests limits to her capacity to plan and act, representing her as more
akin to an animal, a spider creating a web, than to a skilled human, who might use strategy
and equipment to secure the capture of prey. This assessment of a woman’s capability is
consistent with that of other Greek thinkers, such as Aristotle. But Xenophon is unusual in
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permitting the woman to speak for herself and to identify the limits of her capability, and
Socrates suggests that Theodote can participate in the competition for his attention and use
skill to do so. The wit and liveliness with which Theodote participates in the conversation, and
particularly her well-timed initial remark, suggest that Xenophon grants her a greater capacity
to reason than the standard ancient Greek appraisal of women permits.
3 Pantheia and the Virtues of Friendship

Another of Xenophon’s women characters displays an even greater capacity to participate in
philosophical conversation. She also provides further occasion for the exploration of the roles
of the gaze and of friendship in social interaction, albeit in an exoticized, non-Greek and non-
democratic context, that of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, his fictionalized account of the rise to
power of the sixth-century ruler Cyrus the Great of Persia.18 The captured queen Pantheia is
first introduced, although not named, as an object of the male gaze (Cyr. 4.6.11). Like Theo-
dote, she goes on to intervene in her own narrative, deciding on action and calculating risk as
she negotiates her relationship with Cyrus and his courtiers.
Xenophon narrates Pantheia’s experience as a captive and her continuing devotion to
her husband Abradatas through multiple short episodes, interleaved within the Cyropae-
dia’s overall narrative. It is often treated as a love story, a precursor to the Greek novels of
the Hellenistic and imperial periods (Madreiter 2020); elements of the story recur in those
works.19 Other analyses are critical of Pantheia (Nadon 2001: 152–160) or treat her as the
embodiment of Cyrus’ unequal relationship with his friends and supporters, a “luminous
figure” who “represents the perfection of the rewards that Cyrus has all along promised the
most meritorious of his followers” (Newell 1983: 901–903). These scholars acknowledge
that this story is an exemplary narrative, from which readers should take ethical lessons, but
downplay Pantheia’s agency within it; in response, this reading aims to reclaim Pantheia as
an ethical actor.
The story of Pantheia and Abradatas explores the problems of friendship when it involves
unequal participants, one of whom, Cyrus, operates at a grander scale than that available to
others; while Pantheia as a captive is an extreme case, similar questions arise for Cyrus’ long-
term friends as he rises to power over them and others. Pantheia’s exchange with Cyrus is hard
to fit into the matrix of Aristotle’s account of friendship, as it has elements of all three types of
friendship, political, utility and virtue; perhaps Pantheia’s aspirations to a high form of virtue
friendship are shown to fail, as she recognizes both the unequal exchange she has made, and
the utility and benefit which Cyrus has received. Thus, the story of Pantheia revolves around
her own philia with Cyrus as well as the contrast between the proper eros she shares with her
husband, and the improper eros of Araspas.
Xenophon uses oriental elements within his setting to present Pantheia in a courtly con-
text, which offers an imagined Greek version of other cultures, within which the Asian queen
Pantheia is already an exoticized other. Pantheia’s status outside the Athenian context per-
mits her, unlike the Athenian citizen women whom Xenophon depicts indirectly, to exercise
agency in responding to her situation. She is not the first woman of high status to speak in
the Cyropaedia; early in the work Cyrus’ mother Mandane makes explicit the problem of
Cyrus’ dual heritage between his fathers’ Persian culture and her own Median culture. She
expresses concern about Cyrus’ exposure to incompatible political cultures and the impact
that his experience of the luxurious court of his grandfather, king of the Medes, will have
on his understanding of justice (Cyr. 1.3.15–18). Xenophon’s account of Cyrus differs in
important respects from that of Herodotus (Hdt. 1.108–214; Gray 2011: 144–157; Pownall
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2020), but the presentation of royal women as commentators on political and ethical matters
is a feature of Herodotus’ presentation of the palace cultures of the non-Greek east (Azoulay
2007; Baragwanath 2016).20 Mandane’s concern addresses a key theme of the work, the
political and conceptual differences encountered on Cyrus’ journey from his boyhood in the
Sparta-like republic of Persia to his adulthood as monarch of a vast empire of subjugated
peoples (Danzig 2009).
The first episodes explore challenges to the virtue of self-control men experience when
encountering Pantheia’s beauty; the later episodes permit her greater agency in negotiating
her relationship with Cyrus and in evaluating his treatment of her and Abradatas in terms of
friendship and reciprocity. Tim Whitmarsh has suggested that Pantheia can even be seen as an
analogue for Cyrus himself (Whitmarsh 2018: 78); they share many qualities, although Xeno-
phon does not draw out the details of Pantheia and Cyrus’ exchanges of charis. Their encoun-
ter offers a case study which can be read through Aristotle’s analysis of the different types of
friendship (Nicomachean Ethics 8.2–4), a productive way of reading the themes of reciprocity
and charis in the story. Pantheia, unlike Cyrus’ companions, the Persian elite notionally equal
in honor to him (homotimoi), experiences and voices a more negative interpretation of the
consequences of friendship with a man of supreme power.21
Pantheia first appears in the narrative as a piece of the spoils of war, awaiting distribution
like a piece of property, an object of reciprocal exchange rather than a participant in it (Cyr.
4.6.11). Her situation would be familiar to Xenophon’s ancient readers; it parallels that of
Hector’s wife Andromache, who fears for her future once her husband is killed, yet still sends
him out to battle (Iliad 6.406–465, 24.723–745). Cyrus has asked his friend Araspas to pro-
tect Pantheia as a high-status hostage rather than as an enslaved sexual companion, the nor-
mal outcome for captured women. As Araspas reports back, their conversation turns on the
risk of the gaze to the viewer, the potential for disturbance to their enkrateia or self-mastery
over desires:
When he received his orders, Araspas asked in reply: “Have you seen the woman, Cyrus,
whom you are ordering me to guard?.”
“By Zeus,” said Cyrus, “I have not.”
“But I saw her when we picked her out for you,” he said. “For sure, when we entered
her tent, at first we did not tell her apart; for she was sitting upon the ground, and all her
attendants were sitting around her. And she was wearing the same clothing as her slaves
(doulais); but since we wished to know which one was the mistress, we looked around at
all of them, and she quickly appeared completely different from the others, even though
she was sitting there veiled and looking at the ground.
When we ordered her to stand up, all her attendants stood up with her, and then she
was distinguishable first for her stature (megethei), then for her nobility (aretēi) and her
good posture (euschēmosunēi), even though she stood there in humble clothing. Her
tears were plain to see, some falling down her dress, others on to her feet.
(Xen. Cyr. 5.1.4-5)22
Although Pantheia remains silent, she takes steps to avoid being the object of the subjugating
gaze, covering herself. Yet, she cannot escape her visible difference from her enslaved retinue,
captured with her, because of her innate physical qualities – her height – and also through
her performed identity, her good posture (euschēmosunē) and her visible tears. As Socrates’
conversation with Parrhasius showed (Mem. 3.10.1–5), moral qualities should be visible in
their bearers; Pantheia’s height, beauty and posture mark out her excellence (as well as her
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non-enslaved status) just as they would in a man. Xenophon uses them to present her as a
reflection of Cyrus himself, also distinguished by his height and beauty (Cyr. 8.3.13). Cyrus’
own excellence, and his manipulation of its visible instantiation, will be pointed out when he
assumes the role of king after his final victory over the Babylonians and presents himself to his
subjects in royal dress for the first time (Cyr. 7.5.36, 8.3.13–14; Atack 2018).
The conversation turns to the risks of seeing such beauty, consequences which are not
straightforwardly beneficial to the beautiful object:
“And you must know, Cyrus,” said [Araspas], “that it seemed to me, and to all the oth-
ers who saw her, that there had never before been a mortal woman of that sort born or
begotten in Asia. But,” he added, “be sure you see (theasai) her.”
And Cyrus replied “No, by Zeus, and I am even less likely to, if she is as you say she
is.”
“Why?” the young man asked.
“Because,” said he, “if, now that you have told me that she is beautiful (kalē), I am
persuaded to go and look at her (theasomenos), when I have no leisure time, I am afraid
that she herself will much more quickly persuade (anapeisēi) me to return to gaze at
her. And as a result I might sit there looking at her, and neglect the things I should be
doing.”
(Xen. Cyr. 5.1.7-8)
The verb used for seeing here, theasthai, is associated with religious spectacle and contempla-
tion (Nightingale 2004). The question of viewing Pantheia opens up a discussion between
Cyrus and Araspas about responsibility, control of desires and free choice (ethelousion, 5.1.10,
12) in pursuing those desires. Even though Pantheia is a powerless captive, her beauty might
distract them from their duties and waste their leisure time, necessary for the maintenance of
status. Xenophon contrasts the virtuous Cyrus’ self-control, his enkrateia and sōphrosunē,
with Araspas’ lack of it; (Moore 2023: 157–184) after seeing Pantheia, he moves from looking
to desiring, and when Pantheia rejects his unwanted advances (apephēse, 6.1.32), to harass-
ment and rape threats (sunousias, bian 6.1.33; Gray 2011: 216–217; Gera 1993: 224–231).
Cyrus, on the other hand, benefits from not looking at Pantheia, because he both demonstrates
his superior self-control and, as Newell suggests, his control over the most desirable spoils of
war (Newell 1983: 902–903).
However, Newell and others treating Pantheia as an object fail to account for her actions.
Xenophon shows Pantheia transitioning from object of the gaze to active manager of her dif-
ficult situation. She abandons her initial reluctance to seek Cyrus’ help in restraining Araspas
and begins to manage her relationships more actively, particularly that with Cyrus. Xenophon
marks this significant transition by using her name for the first time (6.1.41; Tatum 1989:
164–165, 175).
As punishment, Cyrus sends Araspas on a spying mission to the enemy camp, and Pantheia
in gratitude contributes to this by sending a coded message to Abradatas encouraging him to
defect to Cyrus’ camp (6.1.45–7). When Abradatas arrives, Pantheia tells him of Cyrus’ good
qualities, speaking the same moral language as Xenophon’s male characters: she lists Cyrus’
piety (hosiotēta) and moderation (sōphrosunēn, 6.1.47), which contrast with the bad qualities
another character identified in Araspas, impiety (asebeian), injustice (adikian) and lack of self-
control (akrateian, 6.1.35). Pantheia also engages further in the reciprocal economy of charis,
in response to Cyrus’ support (Azoulay 2004: 361). Abradatas asks how he can repay Cyrus’
pity towards his wife, and Pantheia urges him to be the same (homoios) to Cyrus as Cyrus has
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been to him. Abradatas offers to be “friend (philon), servant and ally” to Cyrus (6.1.48), and
this new relationship of friendship will be significant for the final episode in the story.
The final part of Pantheia’s story offers “a new dynamic” (Whitmarsh 2018: 80), exploring
the consequence of the obligation she feels towards Cyrus for his consideration in protecting
her from sexual abuse, which has resulted in a formal relationship of philia between Cyrus
and Abradatas in which Pantheia is also involved. Abradatas is now required to go into battle
on behalf of Cyrus, and she dresses Abradatas in fine armour, which emphasizes his physical
qualities and makes him the object of the gaze:
“And even though Abradatas had been well worth looking at (axiotheatos) before, when
he was fitted out with this armor he looked most handsome and noble (kallistos kai
eleutheriōtatos), just as he was by nature.”
(Xen. Cyr. 6.4.4)
As Deborah Gera and others have noted, this arming scene likens Abradatas as a heroic figure
specifically to Homer’s Achilles (Gera 1993: 235–236; Gray 2011: 136–141). It also demon-
strates Pantheia making a material sacrifice, exchanging her jewelry for the golden armor and
purple clothing she gives her husband (6.4.2–3). But the scene also incorporates Abradatas
into Xenophon’s aesthetic ethics, in which appearance demonstrates moral qualities. Despite
these qualities being innate in him, requiring no adornment, the golden armor usefully ac-
centuates them.
As she bids farewell to her husband, Pantheia begins to express her intentions and the rea-
soning behind them. She explains the consequences of her love for and loyalty to her husband,
speaking freely to him in private as Ischomachus’ wife does to her husband (Cyr. 6.4.5–6, cf.
Oec. 11.24–25); if Abradatas dies in battle, she will take her own life, a choice she regards
as the most noble of fates (kallistōn). She closes this speech with a summary of their debt to
Cyrus, and the need to repay the charis which he has shown to her:
And I think we owe much gratitude (megalēn… charin) to Cyrus, because, when I was
his prisoner-of-war and had been picked out for him, he did not think it right to take
possession of me either as his slave or as a freewoman under a dishonorable name, but
took me and protected me for you as if I were the wife of a brother.
In addition to this, when Araspas, who was guarding me, disobeyed him, I promised
him that, if he let me send a message to you, you would come to him, as a far better and
truer man (pistoteran kai ameinona) than Araspas.
(Xen. Cyr. 6.4.7-8)
It is rare for a woman to express the workings of a moral calculus, at least in a prose text
rather than the non-historical epic or tragic settings on which Xenophon draws for this story.23
Pantheia’s speech offers a clear and simple statement of the calculations involved in engaging
in friendship with a powerful leader; she reciprocates Cyrus’ protection of her by giving him
her husband’s support. Abradatas acknowledges his place in this relationship, as husband and
friend in turn (6.4.9). But the end of the departure scene reminds readers of the power of Pan-
theia’s beauty; despite the handsome appearance of Abradatas in his golden armor, nobody
looks at him till Pantheia enters her carriage and becomes invisible to the crowd (6.4.11).
Pantheia will follow through with her plan to die when her husband does, as Abradatas is
indeed killed in battle (7.1.32, 7.3.3) and she reassembles his mutilated body, with further ech-
oes of myth and tragedy (Tatum 1989: 184). Her final conversation with Cyrus demonstrates
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her critical response to this situation and her belated recognition of Cyrus’ manipulation of
her actions. After a gruesome scene in which the extent of the injuries to Abradatas is made
clear, Pantheia makes a short speech taking the blame for her husband’s death:
And I know that his suffering came about largely through me, but perhaps no less also
through you. For I, in great foolishness, told him to do this, so that he might become a
worthy friend to you; he himself, I know, did not think of what might happen, but of
what he might do to please you. And so he has died a perfect death, while I who gave
him these orders sit alongside him, still living.
(Xen. Cyr. 7.3.10)
This short speech is one of the only occasions in the Cyropaedia in which Cyrus is directly
criticized by a character themselves identified as good; his uncle Cyaxares, whose criticisms
(Cyr. 5.5) of Cyrus’ deceptive practices have been followed by many of the “dark” readings
of the work, is portrayed negatively by Xenophon.24 Pantheia blames herself, but also Cyrus,
for the consequences of the transactional relationship which has resulted in the death of her
husband (Due 1989: 82–83). She had failed to calculate the potential costs of reciprocating
Cyrus’ pity, with a return gift, the life of her husband, which turned out to be greater and
impossible to replicate. Pantheia’s loss fits with Cyrus’ own account of his use of gift-giving
to ensure the loyalty of his subordinates (Cyr. 8.2.19–23, 28), that they should have greater
philia for him than for anyone else. As Vincent Azoulay has shown, the Cyropaedia marks a
historical transition from philia as reciprocity between equals to philanthropia exercised by
mighty benefactors towards their inferiors (Azoulay 2018). Neither Araspas nor Pantheia can
equal Cyrus, whatever they offer him.
While Tatum argued that everyone in Pantheia’s story “says and does the conventional
thing” (Tatum 1989: 186), Xenophon presents Pantheia both as a possession which dem-
onstrates Cyrus’ domination over his friends (in Newell’s analysis), and, both through her
physical response to her situation and her words and actions as she attempts to take control
of her situation, as an ethical agent able to determine and act in support of her own interests.
4 Conclusion
Xenophon uses women characters to illustrate ethical qualities throughout his works. The
performance of femininity can take both positive and negative forms, as it does in Heracles’
encounter with Virtue and Vice. But not all women are easily categorized; Theodote’s beauty
and self-presentation are ambiguous, Ischomachus’ wife disclaims the capacity for judging
that her husband suggests she has and Pantheia is simultaneously object and agent in complex
reciprocal exchanges which demonstrate the limits of friendship.
Perhaps traditionally, as is also seen in both poetic genres of epic and tragedy, and in
historiographic accounts of non-Greek palace cultures, the elite women of royal courts par-
ticipate more actively in argument about moral matters. Cyrus’ mother understands the cul-
tural conflict which risks her son failing to develop a correct understanding of justice, while
Pantheia’s story shows difficulties with the transactional nature of exchanges of loyalty and
friendship. But Xenophon exploits the greater freedom available to women in non-Athenian
settings, and to non-citizen women in Athens, to incorporate women into exchanges of eros
and philia. In doing so, he may echo other Socratics whose work is lost, while challenging
Plato’s presentation of Socrates, in which women play a lesser role both as agents and objects
of desire.
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Notes
1 Strauss (1972); Pangle (2018); Sebell (2021). See also Gray (2011); Johnson (2021). On Xenophon’s
representation of Socratic thought, see Pangle (1994); Dorion (2013); Atack (2020: 97–106). Key
feminist readings of Xenophon include Murnaghan (1988); Pomeroy (1994); Glazebrook (2009).
2 On the political philosophy of friendship in Greek thought see Price (1997); Pangle (2003); Stern-
Gillet (2014), and on friendship and reciprocity Schofield (1998); Azoulay (2004).
3 On the depiction of the enslaved, see Wrenhaven (2012). For Xenophon’s historical accounts of en-
slavement, see Tamiolaki (2010).
4 See Arlene Saxonhouse’s chapter on “Philosopher Queens” (Chapter 35) for another instance of sta-
tus trumping gender divides.
5 See chapters on Plato. Irigaray (1988) offers a strong critique of Plato’s exclusion of women.
6 References are to Giannantoni (1990).
7 This dialogue has its own huge literature, spanning both the fable and its context in Socrates’ inter-
locutor Aristippus’ rejection of active citizenship: Strauss (1972: 32–39); Dorion and Bandini (2000–
2011: 2.148–154); Sansone (2004); Johnson (2009); Pangle (2018).
8 Translations from the Memorabilia are by Martin Hammond (forthcoming, Oxford)
9 Translation adapted from Marchant and Todd (1923)
10 David Johnson sets out a more negative assessment of Xenophon’s depiction of Ischomachus’ wife in
his chapter (Chapter 10) and in Johnson (2021).
11 Translation adapted from Pomeroy (1994).
12 Barbara Ehlers (1966: 107) suggested that Theodote is intended to represent Aspasia, but Madeleine
Henry points out that Aspasia (Pl. Menex. 235e; Xen. Mem. 2.6.36), unlike Theodote, is educated
and an educator (Henry 1995: 49–50). Kasimis (2018) foregrounds Aspasia’s status as key to inter-
preting Plato’s Menexenus.
13 On Socratic erotics, see Kahn (1994); Gordon (2012); on Xenophon’s engagement with erotic dia-
logue, see O’Connor (1994).
14 It is far from clear that the pederasty of philosophical dialogue reflects the historical practice of Athe-
nians, although there is much scholarly dispute on the topic; see Fisher (2001).
15 On the links between Xenophon’s discussion of friendship and that of Plato in the Lysis, see Tamio-
laki (2018).
16 Although the distinction may have been ideological rather than based on actual historical practice:
Glazebrook (2015); Cohen (2016: 26–38).
17 On hunting, see Schnapp (1997). On connections between Xenophon’s thought on friendship and
Plato’s, see note 15.
18 For historical sources on Cyrus and the world of Achaemenid Persia, see Briant (2002). On the
generic affiliations of the Cyropaedia, see Stadter (1991); Gray (2011); Pownall (2020); Madreiter
(2020).
19 Later authors summarized and retold Pantheia’s story: Philostratus mentions a version in Lives of the
Sophists, Olearius page 524, and Philostratus the Elder Imagines 2.9 describes Pantheia’s death scene.
20 There are parallels between Pantheia’s story and that of Candaules’ wife and Gyges (Herodotus
1.7–12; Tatum 1989: 170–172). In Herodotus’ “Logos of Cyrus” Cyrus has a fateful encounter with
a foreign queen, Tomyris the Scythian ruler who defeats and beheads him (Hdt. 1.214).
21 On Xenophon’s Cyrus as a model for Aristotle’s pambasileus (total monarch), see Atack (2020:
187–191).
22 Cyropaedia translations are my own, with Miller (1914); Ambler (2001).
23 One might compare the Persian queen mother Atossa’s critique of her son Xerxes’ invasion of Greece
(Aesch. Persians).
24 See Nadon (2001), Newell (1983), and in response Gray (2011).
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10
WOMEN IN XENOPHON’S
SOCRATIC WORKS
David M. Johnson
1 Xenophon, the True Radical

The most famous example of a proto-feminist Socratic argument is the case made by Plato’s
Socrates that women guardians should be educated as their male counterparts are and be
eligible to serve as philosopher-rulers (Republic 5.451b8–457c3).1 The second most famous
example in a Socratic work comes in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, where the wealthy farmer
Ischomachus argues that his wife plays a role every bit as important of his in the running of
their household (Oeconomicus 7). But the two arguments come in radically different contexts
and make use of fundamentally different strategies.
The discussion of women’s nature in the Republic comes as part of an argument that would
eliminate the conventional family, as least for the ruling class of Kallipolis.2 Ischomachus’ dis-
cussion of the natures of men and women, on the other hand, comes as part of a work which
appears designed to dignify conventional family life, particularly the family understood as an
economic unit. Neither Plato nor Xenophon addresses the status of women as an independ-
ent question, then, but as a strand in a larger argument. Plato’s Socrates imagines a ruling
class whose members do not form separate households; Ischomachus locates women’s role,
and their positive contribution, within the household. The works also differ in their degree
of connection to the real world. Plato’s Republic has Socrates construct a city in speech so
far from any real-world city that even its possibility is a point of contention, while Ischoma-
chus presents his account of women’s nature as part of an actual conversation with his wife.
The Republic’s account of women will appear ridiculous in the light of contemporary norms
(Republic 5.452a7–452e2), while Ischomachus argues that his account of women’s nature is
reinforced by nomos (Oeconomicus 7.30–31). It should therefore come as no surprise that
even if both works have been taken to be progressive about women in some sense, they are
progressive in very different ways.
In the Republic, Socrates argues that women’s nature is fundamentally similar to that of
men. In a sexist culture in which men are assumed to be the standard for human excellence,
this is a potentially radical argument. The Republic argument would open up a far wider range
of roles to women, but it would do so in the decidedly hypothetical context of a city in speech
135 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-12

David M. Johnson
in which we cannot speak of opportunities for anyone but rather eugenic determination of the
most fitting role for each. And, as we shall see, the Republic’s argument relies on the assump-
tion of women’s general inferiority to men.
In the Oeconomicus, Ischomachus’ major thesis is that while women’s nature differs from
that of men, their distinct contribution to the household is every bit as important as that of
men. He also makes striking claims about capacities shared by men and women. Those shared
capacities could break open the conventional gender roles that Ischomachus remains commit-
ted to. They would also call into question the sort of inferiority that the Republic attributes to
women. But in practice these shared capacities do not lead Ischomachus to suggest any change
to the traditional roles played by women and men. Thus, despite all their apparent radicalism,
neither the argument of the Republic nor that of Ischomachus in the Oeconomicus would do
much to widen the range of opportunities available for real women.
I will argue here that Xenophon elsewhere in his Socratic works recognizes that women
have the capability to engage successfully in a wider range of activities than that imagined by
Ischomachus, and without the assumption of inferiority that is central to the argument of the
Republic. To keep this chapter within reasonable bounds, I will consider only Xenophon’s
Socratic works.3 And to avoid this becoming a paper more about Plato than about Xenophon,
I will restrict my analysis of Plato’s views on gender to the Republic argument and will assume
that Plato and the character Socrates in that dialogue fully endorse the proposed city in speech,
at least as a positive thought experiment. Xenophon receives more charitable treatment, as I
will distance his views on women from those of Ischomachus.4
2 Similar and Not Equal: Plato’s Republic

In Plato’s Republic Socrates bases his proposal that women guardians share the same educa-
tion as male guardians on the natural similarity of male and female souls. But he also, notori-
ously, says that women are inferior to men overall (5.451d10–11, 455d3–e1, 456a10–11).
This inferiority is not just a stray bit of residual misogynism that we can readily elide from
the text. It plays a necessary part in the gendered logic of the argument, the key part of which
(5.455a9–e2) can be summarized as follows.
1 Women perform worse than men do in almost every activity.5

2 Yet a lot of women are better than a lot of men in many areas.
3 So the range of activities women are capable of undertaking is as great as that of men.
4 Therefore, women can serve in the guardian class, where they should be educated as the
men are, and the best among them will be candidates to be philosopher-rulers.
Women therefore have no special sphere (#1), save for childbearing. But while they generally
fall short of men, there are many counterexamples in many different areas (#2). Hence, by the
principle of the separation of labor that is so central to the Republic, it makes sense to assign
women to the same variety of tasks that men undertake (#4).
Socrates defines what it means to have a good nature for a given task as follows:
Is this what you meant when you were saying that one person had a good nature in one
respect, while another had a bad nature? The one would learn something about it eas-
ily, the other with difficulty? And the one would discover much of what he learned after
only a little instruction, while the other could get much instruction and practice but not
136
Women in Xenophon’s Socratic Works
preserve what he learned? And the bodily features of one would assist his thinking, while
they would get in the way in the case of the other?
(Plato Resp. 5.454c1-5)
There are thus three factors here: the ability to learn, including the ability to learn for one-
self; the ability to retain what one has learned; and whether one’s “bodily features” (τὰ τοῦ
σώματος) help or hinder one’s thinking. As Patricia Marechal argues persuasively elsewhere
in this volume, women’s purported inferiority lies not in their less powerful physiques (which
could hardly explain why they are worse at every sort of activity) or in their intellect itself but
in their lesser ability to ensure that their rationality masters the spirited and desiderative as-
pects of their souls. This, I would maintain, is what the final part of the passage above alludes
to. Women’s “bodily features” get in the way of their intellects. Xenophon would call the trait
women are thought to lack in the Republic enkrateia (self-mastery), the psychic strength that
allows one to make the best use of one’s intellect. This in turn helps explain why women’s
inferiority is described as weakness. But Xenophon’s Ischomachus, as we shall see, argues that
women have the same access to enkrateia that men do.
The silver lining of the Republic argument is that because Plato’s Socrates attributes wom-
en’s shortcomings to their inability to master their spirit and desires, he does not need to argue
that women are intellectually inferior in order to salvage male superiority. Women’s similar-
ity to men justifies providing them with the same sort of education, affording at least some
women access to a far wider range of opportunities. Plato thus recognizes that conventional
social roles result in the waste of much female potential, as there are women whose best role
in society would be to serve as guardians or even rulers. Most women guardians may be
most valuable as breeders of male guardians,6 but, in exceptional cases, they may be rulers
themselves.
3 Ischomachus May Not Be Xenophon

I suspect it is fair to say that Sarah Pomeroy’s verdict in her 1994 commentary on the Oeco-
nomicus remains the most common view today: Ischomachus, who expresses Xenophon’s
own views, is quite enlightened or even radical about the status of women, given the attitudes
of his day. I’m going to argue on the other side of both of those claims. I contend that Xeno-
phon considered Ischomachus’ teaching to be quite limited and that what Xenophon says
about women elsewhere shows that he believed that women had a wider range of capabilities
than Ischomachus imagined.
There are two general reasons to doubt that Ischomachus is Xenophon’s mouthpiece. One
is the complex structure of the Oeconomicus, in which Ischomachus’ conversation with his
wife is embedded within various narrative layers: Ischomachus recounts the conversation to
Socrates who reports it to his young, spendthrift, and boy-crazy protegee Critobulus, in the
presence of Xenophon’s narrator, who relates the story to us. Ischomachus has at least two
motives to play up his wife’s role: he wanted to persuade her that her work for the household
is valuable, and he wants to show Socrates how well he has educated his wife. Socrates has
a motive to emphasize the importance of educating one’s wife to Critobulus, as one of Crito-
bulus’ many failings is his inattention to his wife (Oec. 3.12–13). The positive account of the
importance of the wife’s role to the household is thus dramatically overdetermined.
And there is much more to the Oeconomicus than the conversation between Ischoma-
chus and his wife. The first third of the Oeconomicus (1–6) consists of a frame conversation
137
David M. Johnson
between Socrates and Critobulus; that conversation begins with an account of oikonomia
(“household management,” Oec. 1.1–16) that is quite distinct from what will be offered by
Ischomachus. Socrates argues that oikonomia is a form of knowledge that allows one to man-
age one’s property well. But only things one knows how to use count as property. Thus,
money isn’t property if one does not know how to use it, and enemies count as property for
those able to benefit from them. The argument highlights the importance of knowledge and
suggests a radically new understanding of what counts as wealth. Critobulus, however, isn’t
willing and able to accept Socrates’ radical argument, resulting in Socrates’ need to introduce
Ischomachus as a pinch-hitter. And Ischomachus, for his part, has an entirely conventional
understanding of property and explicitly argues that his mode of making money, farming, is
incredibly easy to understand (Oec. 15.4–21.1). For Ischomachus, property is conventional
and knowledge is easy. Ischomachus himself recognizes that his way of life is quite distinct
from that of Socrates (Oec. 11). There are thus plenty of reasons internal to the dialogue that
suggest we should be cautious in assuming that Ischomachus, Socrates, and Xenophon are all
delivering the same message.7
The second reason to question Xenophon’s commitment to Ischomachus is our external
historical evidence for Ischomachus and for the infamous later career of his wife.8 Ischoma-
chus himself was rather poorer than people had thought when he died, and he was thought
to have lost money to parasites. He also, it appears, became something of a Socratic himself,
as it was his account of Socrates that led the future Socratic Aristippus to seek out Socrates.
We learn that Ischomachus’ wife was named Chrysilla and that she went on (presumably
after the death of Ischomachus) to become the mother-in-law, lover, and wife of Callias, the
wealthy host of Plato’s Protagoras and Xenophon’s Symposium. We are told that Chrysilla’s
affair with her son-in-law led her daughter (by Ischomachus) to attempt suicide; and it ap-
pears that her sons (by Ischomachus) saw their estate mishandled by Callias. This is not the
place to rehearse the evidence, which is lacunose, as ancient biographical evidence tends to
be, and much of which comes in the form of misogynistic character assassination from a
clearly hostile source (Andocides On the Mysteries) aimed at a woman who had no chance to
speak for herself. But the point remains that Chrysilla’s scandalous relationship with Callias,
a prominent figure in the Socratic circle, could not have been unknown Xenophon’s read-
ers, who would have been aware of a disconnect between the seemingly idyllic portrayal of
Ischomachus and his wife in the Oeconomicus and the scandals that later affected his wife,
their daughter, and their sons.9
4 Separate but Equal: Ischomachus on Women’s Place (Oeconomicus 7)

Chapter 7 of the Oeconomicus is only part of what Ischomachus reports of his education of his
wife but is the most abstract and hence most philosophical, so will be the center of my analysis
here.10 Socrates seeks out Ischomachus as an exemplar of kalokagathia, the combination of
what is noble (kalon) and good (agathon) that was embodied by the better sort of aristocrat
but is also the goal of Socratic education, in Xenophon’s eyes.11 Socrates’ conversation with
Ischomachus begins with the observation that Ischomachus is unusually unoccupied and in an
unusual place, the Agora. Socrates, who is himself often found engaged in conversation (rather
than business) in and around the Agora, says that he was not sure just what Ischomachus
did to be called kalokagathos, but he knew it wasn’t in the Agora and wasn’t indoors (Oec.
7.1–2). Ischomachus explains that he can leave domestic work in the hands of his wife, who is
quite competent to manage things there. Socrates follows up by asking whether Ischomachus
educated his wife himself (Oec. 7.3–4), a suspiciously appropriate question for his later use
138
of this conversation as a means of helping out Critobulus, a husband who fails to talk to his
wife. At any rate, the spatial division of male and female roles is baked into the conversation
very early on, and it will mark the fundamental distinction between male and female natural
capacities and roles as Ischomachus understands them.
Ischomachus had to educate his wife, as her prior education consisted solely of basic les-
sons in weaving and in self-mastery (enkrateia)—though he grants that the latter is a most
important lesson for men and women alike. Before starting the education of his wife, he
sacrificed and prayed with her for the gods’ assistance for his teaching and her learning and
found her eager to do all she could to improve herself. He chose her and her parents chose
him because they believed each was well suited to be a partner in a relationship designed to
produce and educate children and manage an estate (oikos; Oec. 7.6–12).
And one should not calculate which of us has contributed more in quantity, but be sure
of this, that whichever one of us proves to be the better partner makes the more valuable
contribution.
(Xen. Oec. 7.13)
So the wife need not worry that her husband’s property is larger than her dowry or that he
will continue bring in more income than she will: her role in their partnership can still be the
most valuable contribution to the household. We are certainly a long way from the traditional
misogynistic understanding of women as necessary burdens on the household, a view familiar
to us from Hesiod and Semonides.
Ischomachus’ wife is unsure how she is to add anything, given she was taught by her
mother that her only task was to be sophron (“disciplined”).12 Ischomachus reassures her that
his father taught him the same thing and adds that sophron men and women alike aim to en-
sure that their goods are in the best possible condition and to secure as many additional goods
as they can, by noble and just means (Oec. 7.14–15). Thus, while Ischomachus told Socrates
that his bride came to him “very well educated regarding her stomach” (Oec. 7.6), presumably
meaning that she was in control of her appetites, he suggests here that she needed to gain, and
was capable of gaining, a broader understanding of sophrosyne as a trait that would aid her
in improving and augmenting their estate through honorable means.
His wife now asks just how she is to increase their estate, and Ischomachus embarks on
an account of the natures and roles of men and women. His account falls into four parts: an
account of the divine arrangement of natures and roles (Oec. 7.18–29); an account of how hu-
man nomos reinforces this account (Oec. 7.30–31); the queen bee as an analogy for the wife’s
management of the home (Oec. 7.32–36); and the pleasures and honor the wife will enjoy in
her role as mistress of the house (Oec. 7.37–43).
The gods13 have given men and women a mutually beneficial partnership to produce chil-
dren who will preserve the species and support the couple in old age. But human beings differ
from animals because they have need of shelter, so couples need both someone to do work out-
side, particularly agricultural work, and work inside, including childcare, baking, and wool
working. The gods gave men bodies and souls better able to bear cold, heat, journeys, and
military campaigns. Women are left to do the indoor work because they are lacking in these
respects. As they will care for newborns inside, however, the gods gave them a greater affec-
tion for them; and because they are assigned the task of protecting what is brought into the
home, the gods, recognizing that fear does not make one a worse guardian, gave women the
greater share of that. But because those performing outdoor work would need to ward off
wrongdoers, the gods gave men more boldness (Oec. 7.18–25).
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This part of Ischomachus’ account of female and male natures can hardly be said to be
radical. Women are assigned indoor work because they are incapable of outdoor work. Their
concern for newborns is presumably tied to their biology, and their fearfulness—not normally
a positive quality—does not make them better guardians: it merely does not make them worse
ones. And they will have need of men, with their boldness, to ward off wrongdoers in any
event. One is left wondering just how fearful women were to protect the household, given the
need for bold male defenders. Perhaps women’s fear would lead them to worry about waste
or theft by household slaves, whom women or least their husbands could punish without any
fear that the slaves might fight back.
But Ischomachus now adds areas in which women can rival men. Both men and women
must give and take from the common store, so the gods provide each with equal access to
memory and diligence (epimeleia), so much so that it’s unclear which gender has more of ei-
ther of these. So too the gods allow either partner to better the other in self-mastery (enkrateia)
and thus benefit more from that trait. These are vital traits for Xenophon, so these points are
significant, and significant evidence of a positive evaluation of women’s potential. Ischoma-
chus does not speak of equal actual capabilities but of equal potential; hence, he thinks of a
sort of contest, hopefully an amicable one, between partners, to see which can best the other
in memory, diligence, and self-mastery. This explains how he can, immediately after speaking
of equal potential, return to the idea of different natures.
And because the nature of each is not equally well suited in all respects, on this account
they need each other more and the partnership turns out to be beneficial to the couple,
as where one falls short the other is capable.
(Xen. Oec. 7.28)
Ischomachus is apparently thinking of two different sorts of natural differences. Some are
driven by gender, others by individual differences. He is thus claiming that men and women
are better off in couples not only because men are better than women at outdoor work and
women better at care for newborns but also because an individual partner, regardless of their
gender, may be able to compensate for their partner’s shortcomings in areas where gender dif-
ferences are not determinative (including memory, diligence, and self-mastery). Ischomachus
thus urges his wife to rival him where she can, not worry about areas where his nature is su-
perior, and take advantage of her own natural endowment as a woman—her natural fondness
for newborn children and even her fearfulness.
We may note that Ischomachus’ talk of rivalry and competition suggests that a level play-
ing field would be required for that competition to be on equal terms. Hence, Ischomachus’
argument that women can rival men in memory, diligence, and self-mastery is compatible with
a world in which conditions prevent most women from successfully rivaling the men in their
lives in these regards. Ischomachus, however, presents himself as a husband who is open to
and indeed encourages this sort of rivalry.
Ischomachus now briefly discusses how nomos confirms this divine arrangement of natural
gender roles (Oec. 7.30–31). Here, Ischomachus speaks only of different roles, not of shared
capacities. The distinct roles are not only beneficial but also honorable (kalon) for each gen-
der, and it is shameful for either men or women to depart from their assigned roles. Indeed,
if a man neglects his manly role, or takes on tasks that belong to women, he will probably
not escape the gods and will probably pay a price. Ischomachus’ failure to imagine women
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intruding on male roles is probably due to his belief that women are simply incapable of many
male tasks, while men could do women’s work (save perhaps for the care of newborns that
seemingly requires a greater degree of affection for them).
Ischomachus’ picture of world beneficently ordered by the gods resembles the arguments of
Socrates himself makes in Memorabilia 1.4 and 4.3—the first examples of the argument from
design. And principle that certain acts are punished by the gods bears more than a passing re-
semblance to Socrates’ claim (Mem. 4.4.19–25) that those who violate unwritten, divine laws
are always punished for doing so. But Ischomachus’ diffidence about divine punishment is
noteworthy. The question is whether Ischomachus’ diffidence merely marks his lack of certain
knowledge of genuine divine norms, or rather reflects the fact that these gender norms, despite
his belief to the contrary, are not the same sort of norms as those outlined in Memorabilia 4.4.
I will suggest that Ischomachus’ diffidence is well grounded: conventional gender norms may
in fact not reflect divine and natural ones.14
Ischomachus now returns to the analogy with the queen bee which he had introduced ear-
lier in this passage (Oec. 7.17; 7.32–38). The queen bee’s role, which is also established by the
gods, allows Ischomachus to emphasize the leadership role played by a wife in her household.
This involves not only supervision of the slaves who work indoors but also at least some su-
pervision of the slaves she dispatches to work outdoors. As the queen bee is so beloved by her
flock that they all follow her if she abandons the hive, so too the good wife, by caring for sick
slaves, a task Ischomachus’ wife eagerly embraces despite his expressed concern she may find
it thankless, will win their thanks and loyalty. Ischomachus’ surprise at his wife’s embrace of
this side of his duties may suggest a male blind spot, and a womanly gift for healing15; but it
could also simply be a pedagogical ploy meant to elicit a positive response from his wife. It is
certainly a basic principle of Xenophontic leadership that good leaders have willing followers
(Gray 2011: 15–18).
Ischomachus’ wife still expresses some diffidence about her leadership role, noting how
useless her role as protector of the household goods would be if he did not bring such goods
into the house for her to keep safe. But he replies that his own contribution of goods would
be worthless if they ended up lost like water from a leaky jar. He then turns to the final major
point of his first lesson to his wife: the pleasure she can find in her duties in the home, and the
honor these duties will bring her. She will take pleasure from improving their slaves, including
those with their own supervisory capacities. The greatest pleasure she could find, however,
would be if she made her husband her servant by proving herself better than him. She does
not have to fear that her status in the household will diminish as she ages but can trust that so
long as she improves as a partner to him and their children and as guardian of their home, her
honor in the home will grow. Fine and noble things, Ischomachus concludes, are not the result
of youthful beauty, but come through the virtues (Oec. 7.39–43).
Ischomachus clearly aims to present a very positive view of his wife’s capabilities. Where
her capabilities as a woman differ from his as a man, he emphasizes their value to their house-
hold. And where they share common capabilities, he urges her to rival and even surpass him
and even make herself his master. While he is the teacher and his wife the student, he does not
speak, in Chapter 7 or elsewhere in the Oeconomicus, of himself as the master of the home (cf.
Pangle 2020: 57–58). He does, however, have access to a public role outside the house, while
his wife’s role remains limit to the household, even if she can rival him in important qualities
and be a leader in her own right. Does Xenophon or his Socrates recognize that women can,
and should, play a wider role in society?
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5 Self, Household, City

There are some general reasons to expect that Xenophon had a broader view of women’s capa-
bility. As saw above, there are reasons external and internal to the Oeconomicus to think that
we should not regard Ischomachus as Xenophon’s mouthpiece. And even if take a fairly benign
view of Ischomachus’ role in that dialogue, the limit on women’s role may have been deter-
mined in large part by the centrality of the oikos in a work that is, after all, about oikonomia.
But the single most important reason to doubt that Xenophon’s Socrates would restrict
women’s role to the home is his belief that the same traits enable one to succeed as an indi-
vidual (particularly in one’s relationship with one’s body), as the head of a household, with
one’s friends, and as a leader in public life (Mem. 1.2.48, 3.6.2, 3.12.4, 4.5.10). Xenophon
does not, as Aristotle would do, distinguish between rule over slaves, the household, and the
city (Politics 1.1.1252a7–16). Ischomachus’ wife is certainly to rule over slaves, including
male ones, it would appear. Why should these skills not be transferable, given that Xenophon
sees no difference in kind between rule of oneself, one’s slaves, one’s household, and one’s city?
Ischomachus’ wife could, after all, rule him, at least in a manner of speaking.
And the traits that women share with men are foundational to leadership. Consider one
passage in which Socrates argues for the importance of enkrateia (self-mastery).
Consider also learning anything noble and good and concerning oneself (ἐπιμεληθῆναι)
with anything of that sort, the means through which one manages one’s body and ad-
ministers one’s household well and becomes useful to one’s friends and city and masters
one’s enemies—things which produce not only advantage but the greatest pleasures. The
enkratic benefit from doing these things, while those lacking in self-mastery have no
share in them.
(Xen. Mem. 4.5.10)
Enkrateia, we will recall, is one of the traits that women and men can both acquire in equal
measure (Oec. 7.26). Ischomachus’ wife in fact came into her marriage with something like
enkrateia (Oec. 7.6, 7.14). Now the passage above does not show that enkrateia is sufficient to
allow one to succeed in the household, with friends, within the city and against one’s enemies,
only that it is necessary if one is to acquire and apply the necessary knowledge. Enkrateia is,
however, an absolutely central trait in the ethics of Xenophon’s Socrates, who deems it “the
foundation of virtue” (Mem. 1.5.4; cf. 1.2.1–8; 1.3.5–14; 1.5; 2.1; 4.5).16 We saw above that
the argument of the Republic denied women equal access to enkrateia; we understand now
how important this distinction between Xenophon and the Republic.
The other traits Ischomachus says women have equal access to are also of fundamental
importance. He noted that women can rival men in memory, a key trait for learning (Mem.
4.1.2); the potential loss of memory is one reason Socrates concludes that death would be
preferable to old age (Xenophon, Apology 6). Compare the good nature’s ability to preserve
what one learns in Republic 5.454b, quoted above. Women also rival men in epimeleia, an-
other vital trait for Xenophon, which can be variously translated as “effort,” “diligence,”
“concern,” or “attentiveness.” Ischomachus himself will argue that successful farmers and
generals differ from unsuccessful ones primarily in epimeleia rather than in know-how (Oec.
20.2–26).17 Socrates makes a similar point early in the Oeconomicus (3.18), though he adds a
more cognitive element by saying that in all the areas he’s observed, it’s those who “diligently
exert their judgment” (τοὺς δὲ γνώμῃ συντεταμένῃ ἐπιμελουμένους) who succeed in making a
profit. So saying that women can rival men in memory, epimeleia, and enkrateia is saying a
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great deal and suggests that women should be capable of taking on a wider range of roles than
Ischomachus imagines in Oeoconomicus 7.
6 From the Dancing Girl to Xanthippe

And we can find some positive evidence for women playing such roles in Xenophon, even if we
restrict ourselves to the Socratic works. Consider these rather puzzling remarks by Socrates af-
ter seeing the performances of a slave girl in Xenophon’s Symposium.18 She impresses Socrates
twice. On the first occasion, he is impressed by her juggling technique.
And Socrates said, “In many ways, gentlemen, including in what this girl is doing, it is
clear that woman’s nature really is no worse than that of man, though it lacks judgment
and strength. So if any of you has a wife, let him take heart and teach her anything he’d
find helpful to have her know.
(Xen. Smp. 2.9)
The passage is odd enough to have inspired various emendations. For how can woman’s nature
be no worse than that of man yet lack judgment and strength? The best explanation known
to me is that judgment (gnome) and strength (ischus) are here acquired qualities that women’s
nature can lack until they are properly educated.19 The slave girl shows both mental and physi-
cal capability through her juggling and, a bit later, jumping through ring surrounded with
swords. Nature here reflects potential, with judgment and strength being qualities women are
capable of gaining. And women can improve in many areas, not just juggling—at least (as far
as this passage goes) in any area where their knowledge would be valuable to their husbands.
Antisthenes, however, asks Socrates why he doesn’t teach his own wife, Xanthippe, whom
Antisthenes describes as the most difficult of women. Socrates doesn’t exactly rise to Xanthip-
pe’s defense here. Instead, he remarks that he follows the same logic as horsemen who acquire
the most spirited horses, believing that if they can deal with them they can deal with any.
So too I myself, as I want to deal with human beings and associate with them, acquired
this woman in the certainty that if I put up with her, I will have an easy time associating
with everyone else in the world.
And this remark certainly did not appear to be wide of the mark.
(Xen. Smp. 2.10)
Xenophon’s coy remark is a warning that we are dealing with a decidedly jocular passage in
an author comfortable with casual sexism. But Socrates also believes that dealing with his
difficult wife has helped him learn how to deal with other people. Xanthippe, for all of her
harshness, must thus have a good deal in common with the other people Socrates deals with—
people who will generally have been men.20
The slave girl now performs her dangerous gymnastic feat, jumping through the ring sur-
rounded with swords, frightening the audience, but managing the task boldly and without
suffering a scratch.
And Socrates called to Antisthenes and said this: “No one watching this, I think, will
be able to deny that courage (andreia) is teachable, given that she here, though she is a
woman, goes at these swords so daringly.”
(Xen. Smp. 2.12)
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If we can take Socrates at his word, he believes that women are capable not only of learning
how to juggle but also of mastering manly courage (andreia). Here, we see a clear distinc-
tion from Ischomachus’ teaching in the Oeconomicus, where women’s fearful nature consigns
them to work within the home.
If there is a consistent doctrine amidst all of this banter, it is that women have the same
capabilities that men do, though they are generally less well developed. Like Ischomachus,
who suggests that his wife has equal access to sophrosyne, memory, epimeleia, and enkrateia,
Socrates suggests that women have more natural capacity than they are generally allowed
to show. Socrates goes beyond Ischomachus, however, in adding courage to the traits that
women may acquire, and in suggesting that women’s apparent lack of bodily strength can also
be overcome by training.
7 Theodote and Socrates

Socrates’ most substantive conversation with a woman in Xenophon’s Socratic works is his
conversation with the glamorous hetaira, Theodote, in Memorabilia 3.11. The passage has
been much analyzed, so I will be brief here, but one thing that emerges from any informed
reading is that Theodote, the beautiful hetaira, and Socrates, the ugly philosopher, have a great
deal in common.21 One of Socrates’ followers was struck by her beauty, saying that it went
beyond words. Socrates says that they had better go see her themselves, if no report will do
her justice, and he and some of his companions rush over to pay her a visit. Once there, how-
ever, it quickly enough emerges that Socrates’ words can explain Theodote’s appeal, or at least
much of it, for her appeal lies not only in her body, though that is appealing enough,22 but
also in her soul and her use of language. Theodote herself claims not to understand the various
techniques Socrates says that she employs to acquire and retain her friends. But her feigned
ignorance is only another example of her coy expertise: she also feigns a degree of reluctance
in providing her friends with the variety of charis they most desire (Mem. 3.11.14). “Friends”
(philoi) is indeed a euphemism, but it is not only a euphemism, as Theodote’s techniques are
essentially those of Socratic friendship, and at the end of the interchange Socrates is referring
to his own followers as his philai, young men attracted to him by his own sorts of love charms.
By the end of the conversation, Theodote is no longer poses any threat of distracting Socrates’
companions from their ugly mentor but asks Socrates for his assistance in her own pursuit
of friends. She apparently will not able to lure Socrates to visit her but hopes he will receive
her. He agrees, but only if he is not engaged inside with one of his closer friends. We are left
to imagine the gorgeous hetaira sitting despondently outside Socrates’ humble home while he
chats inside with one of his male friends, a comic reversal of the paraklausithuron.
So Socrates wins, as always. But to win he must play the same game. He is a better se-
ducer than Theodote. But passage is really more about philia than eros; Xenophon is far
more interested in the former than the later and tends to treat the latter as a category of the
former.23 We may compare the lengthy account of Socratic friendship in Memorabilia 2.6,
where a conversation about friendship keeps switching back and forth from eros and philia
in ways disconcerting to a reader expecting them to remain separate, or Symposium 8, where
Socrates’ speech on the proper sort of eros between men turns out to be a speech about philia.
Or consider Xenophon having Socrates boast of his ability as a pimp, where his skill lies in
arranging friendships (Smp. 4.56–63). Friendship is undoubtedly a vital topic for Xenophon’s
Socrates, and the subject of a series of conversations in the Memorabilia (2.4–10). As we saw
above, the ability to successfully engage with friends is the same ability that allows one to
have a successful relationship with oneself, one’s household, and the city. Thus, if Theodote
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understands friendship well enough to joust with Socrates on the topic, she demonstrates that
women can master the fundamental tool in human relations as they are understood by Xeno-
phon’s Socrates.
One could, of course, object that Theodote is a special case and that her friendly behavior
as a hetaira is only analogous to the sort of friendship that men can have with each other. This
brings us to another exceptional woman who, however, may show that the exceptions have
the potential to provide us with a better rule.
8 Aspasia in Xenophon and Aeschines

One curious feature of the Oeconomicus comes in its unkept promises and incomplete reca-
pitulations. One of these is Socrates’ promise to introduce Critobulus to someone Socrates
says knows rather more about wives than he does: Aspasia. Critobulus, after being reminded
that he fails to converse with his wife, despite the importance of a wife to the success of a
household, asks Socrates for help.
But what about those who you say have good wives, Socrates? Did they train them
themselves?
There’s nothing like looking into it. And I will introduce (συστήσω) you to Aspasia,
who will explain all of this to you more knowledgeably than I can. I think that a wife
who is a good partner in a household carries just as much weight as her husband when
it comes to improving it. Possessions come into the household through the activity of
the husband, for the most part, while most expenditures are determined by the wife.
And when these things are done well, households increase, while if they are done badly,
households grow smaller.
(Xen. Oec. 3.14-15)
Socrates does not fulfill this promise to introduce Aspasia. We could write this off as sloppy
composition, or imagine that Socrates is to introduce Aspasia offstage, as Pomeroy suggests
(1994: 232–233). But it seems rather more likely that Xenophon wants us to wonder what
Aspasia would have taught Critobulus. In his next comments in the Oeconomicus (3.15),
Socrates goes on to dispenses to Critobulus, in nuce, precisely the teaching that Ischomachus
gave his wife, a teaching Socrates had already heard before he reported that conversation
to Critobulus, of course. We might assume that Ischomachus provided Socrates with all the
teaching he needed. But Socrates has just told us that Aspasia will explain these things more
knowledgeably than he can. Presumably, she would say something different, then—not neces-
sarily contradicting what Socrates reports Ischomachus saying, but enlarging on or improving
on it in some way.
And Xenophon does mention Aspasia elsewhere—in a conversation with the same Cri-
tobulus, at Memorabilia 2.6.36. This passage cannot fulfill Socrates’ promise to introduce
Aspasia as a marriage expert in the Oeconomicus, as he there promises an introduction, not
just a citation, and what he says in the Memorabilia has nothing to do with marriage. Socrates
cites Aspasia as saying that when good matchmakers praise those they are matching, they tell
the truth; matchmakers who lie end up alienating the would-be partners from each other and
from the matchmakers themselves. He thus politely and indirectly declines Critobulus’ request
that he lie to help Critobulus win friends. While the point about truth-telling is the only point
that Aspasia is explicitly credited only within the Memorabilia, it seems fair to credit her with
agreeing to, if not inspiring, Socrates’ larger argument to Critobulus in Memorabilia 2.6: the
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best way to win good friends is to make oneself the sort of person others would want to be-
friend, something that requires both that one care for one’s friend as for oneself and that one
become a good person oneself.
As evidence that Aspasia shared that belief, we can cite the marriage counseling Aspasia
provides in Aeschines’ Aspasia.24 The recipients of this advice are none other than Xenophon
himself and his wife (SSR VIA.70). In the passage from Aeschines, Aspasia first questions Xen-
ophon’s wife, asking her whether she would prefer her own clothing or jewelry to her neigh-
bor’s, if the neighbor’s were better. The wife says she would prefer that of her neighbor. Well,
what if her neighbor had a better husband? Here, the wife can only blush. Xenophon fares
no better (despite having the advantage of going second in the exchange): he would prefer his
neighbor’s horse or farm, if they were better, but will not answer the question about his wife.
After this Aspasia said, Since each of you didn’t answer the only question I wanted to
hear the answer to, I will say myself what each of you is thinking. You, madam, want to
have the best husband and you, Xenophon, really want to have the most worthy wife.
Therefore, unless you two bring it about that there is no better man nor more worthy
woman in the world, you will both still completely lack what you consider to be the best
of things: that one of you be married to the best woman and the other wedded to the
best of men.
(SSR VIA.70.19–26)
A striking thing about the passage is its reciprocity: while the wife is interested in jewelry and
clothing and the husband cares for horses and farms, each is in precisely the same position as
far as their relationship goes: each needs to become the best that she or he can be. As far as
this passage is concerned, the best woman could well differ from being the best man, but the
same onus for self-improvement is on both.
Aeschines’ dialogue was probably written early in the 380s (Kahn 1994: 103–105), and
thus before Xenophon completed his Socratic works. The fairly extensive fragments of the
dialogue allow us to reconstruct the broad outlines of its plot. Socrates is asked to provide a
suggestion for a teacher for Callias’ son, Hipponicus. This is the same Callias who hosts the
dinner party of Xenophon’s Symposium and the gathering of sophists in Plato’s Protagoras.
He will also end up being the second of husband of Ischomachus’ wife: we are dealing with a
dense web of interrelated figures. In the Aspasia, Socrates suggests Aspasia as tutor and must
defend his unconventional choice. He does so first by discussing two semi-legendary women
who ably managed affairs of state, the Persian queen Rhodogyne and the Milesian Thargelia,
a Milesian hetaira who turned her many lovers toward the Persian cause. He then discusses
Aspasia’s positive influence on the great Athenian Pericles and the minor Athenian politician
Lysicles (who was presumably included because Aspasia raised him up from nothing, whereas
Pericles was already an established leader by the time she met him). Aeschines has Socrates
argue that it was these men’s love for Aspasia that led them to improve themselves, make
themselves worth of her, and achieve their success in Athenian politics.
Given that Xenophon himself features in this key passage from the Aspasia, and Critobulus
features in Xenophon’s one explicit reference to Aspasia in his works, it certainly seems plau-
sible enough that Xenophon expected readers to think of Aeschines’ Aspasia as they read the
Oeconomicus.25 And in some ways this Aspasian teaching is in keeping with that offered by
Ischomachus (Henry 1995: 53). The clearest is the similarity between Aspasia’s point about
honesty in matchmaking (Mem. 2.6.36) and Ischomachus’ rejection of makeup in Oeconomi-
cus 10: spouses can’t expect to fool one another with makeup.
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But there are differences as well. The fundamental one is that while Ischomachus says a
great deal about how his wife can improve herself, and speaks of a possible rivalry between
the two of them, he gives little hint of any awareness that he needs to improve himself. He sev-
eral times notes that his wife may be able to surpass him, but while this nicely emphasizes her
potential, he treats himself as a static target. He does not take advantage of the opportunity
to suggest that his own self-improvement could be a model for her efforts to improve herself.
Thus, the remarkable reciprocity of the exchange between Xenophon and his wife is lacking.
Of course, Ischomachus is educating his wife, not submitting to marriage counseling of the
sort that Xenophon and his wife underwent. But in the Socratic/Aspasian understanding of
love, self-improvement is the engine that drives relationships. As Socrates puts it in the context
of romantic friendships between men:
And the greatest good for one who desires to make the boy he loves into a good friend
is that it is necessary for him to practice virtue himself.
(Xen. Smp. 8.29)
The absence of self-improvement on Ischomachus’ part is all the more striking given that in
Memorabilia 2.6 the teaching on friendship culminated precisely in a call for Critobulus to
improve himself.
Just as important for our purposes is the absence of any reference to the larger horizons
encompassed by Aspasia’s teaching, which allowed her to educate statesmen like Pericles and
Lysicles in the Aspasia. Socrates’ teaching on eros is similarly broad: in the Symposium, Cal-
lias’ love for the beautiful and noble young Autolycus is supposed to inspire him to pursue
a virtuous life in the public arena. Ischomachus’ teaching thus does not replace or expand
on that of Aspasia. It is more limited. While Socrates taught Critobulus about friendship
by showing that he needed to improve himself in order to secure good friends (Mem. 2.6),
Ischomachus teaches Critobulus about marriage by teaching him how to improve his wife.
Ischomachus’ teaching is valuable as far as it goes, but it does not go nearly far enough, and
in so doing it also undervalues the potential of women—and with it the potential for men to
improve themselves to be worthy of the women they love.
9 Conclusion
The Republic and Oeconomicus seem to leave us with a choice between the two distinct takes
on the nature of women, each with positive elements but disappointing in its own way. In the
Republic, women may be capable, despite their general natural inferiority, of a wider range of
roles, but only in hypothesis; in the Oeconomicus women’s real-world roles are fully as impor-
tant as those of men, but their natures limit them to roles within the household.
A wider reading of Xenophon’s Socratic works provides the foundation for a more positive
Socratic view of the nature and role of women. The very qualities of intellect and character
that women share with men in Ischomachus’ account provide a basis for a larger role for
women and undermine their assumed inferiority in the Republic. Women can also be, as the
dancing girl of Xenophon’s Symposium shows, be courageous. Theodote and Aspasia are not
merely cultivated courtesans, but experts in philia, an area of special interest to Xenophon’s
Socrates. We thus see the elements of a Socratic understanding in which women are not only
similar but also equal to men in traits central to human life. Whether Xenophon himself fully
recognized where this argument could take him I cannot say. It is entirely possible that he was
hindered by at least some of the same constraints that left Ischomachus with his limited ideas
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David M. Johnson
about women’s place. But the foundations for a more positive view of women in Xenophon’s
Socratic works do at least reveal one way that ancient philosophy could go beyond the impov-
erished view of women current in Xenophon’s day, views we are still contending with today.
Notes
1 On this passage see the essays by Emily Hulme (Chapter 12) and Patricia Marechal (Chapter 13) in
this volume.
2 Taylor 2012 is particularly clear on how context drives the argument about women’s potential in the
Republic.
3 For efforts to survey women’s portrayal across the works of Xenophon see Oost 1977/1978; Car-
tledge 1993; Lee 2004; Baragwanath 2010, 2015, 2019.
4 I thus treat Xenophon with something akin to “feminist charity,” and look for the most positive view
of women I can discover in his Socratic works. This charity is founded on the recognition that we
should not assume that Xenophon was prey to some putatively eternal version of sexism, or some
pre-existing notion of what an ancient Greek, or ancient Greek gentleman like Xenophon, would
have espoused (notions likely to be anachronistic in any event). A heightened commitment to this
sort of charity—something I developed thanks to the summer conference on this project organized by
our editors—will sometimes distinguish my argument here from those in Johnson 2021 and Johnson
2023. Whether Plato deserves similar charity I must leave to others to say.
5 Even in cooking and weaving, as shown by Hulme (2022): 17–18.
6 So Gardiner 2000; contrast Harry and Polanksy 2016: 267n12. McKeen 2006: 538–539 rejects
breeding as an occupation as it is not a techne; she goes on to argue, however, that women guardians
will play far lesser roles than their male counterparts.
7 For recent takes on the Oeconomicus that emphasize the distance between Socrates and Ischomachus,
see Too 2022: 61–78 Danzig 2010: 239–263; Johnson 2020: 231–278; Pangle 2020: 7–119; For read-
ings that tend to assimilate the two, see Dorion 2013: 317–345; Hobden 2017; Dorion 2018.
8 For more detailed accounts of this evidence see Johnson 2023; Pomeroy 1994: 259–264.
9 Or so I maintain in Johnson 2023, rejecting the argument of Hobden 2017: 168–173.
10 For an acute and rather different close reading of this passage see Pangle 2020: 51–59.
11 Cf. Memorabilia 1.2.17, 1.2.48, 1.6.44, 2.2.17, 4.2.23, 4.7.1, 4.8.11.
12 More common translations include “moderate,” “temperate,” and “self-controlled.” For “disci-
plined” see Moore and Raymond 2019: xxvi–xxvii; for more on sophrosyne in Xenophon see Moore
2018: 501–507.
13 Xenophon speaks more commonly of a singular god than the gods in the plural, but this distinction
is probably not particularly relevant in the Greek and would be awkward in English, so I stick to the
plural.
14 One of the questions raised by Memorabilia 4.4 is precisely whether human conventions can conflict
with divine ones; on this issue see Johnson 2003, 2012; Dorion 2013: 51–92.
15 As has been suggested to me by Emily Baragwanath.
16 Dorion 2013 includes multiple studies on the importance of enkrateia in Xenophon.
17 For more on epimeleia in Xenophon see Sandridge 2012: 51–57.
18 On this passage see also Carol Attack’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 9).
19 For this and other responses to the passage, see Huss 1999: 137–138.
20 In his conversation with his son in Memorabilia 2.2, Socrates does not deny that Xanthippe is harsh
but notes her benevolence by explaining the extraordinary nature of mothers’ love for their unborn and
newly born offspring—love which results in them risking their lives for children who may never do them
anything in return. He thus glosses Ischomachus’ remark about women’s greater care for newborns.
21 For more on this passage, see Carol Attack in this volume (Chapter 9); a noteworthy recent reading
is that of Tazuko Van Berkel 2020: 330–405.
22 At 3.11.3 Socrates includes himself, seriously or not, when saying that his group has been titillated by
the sight of Theodote posing for a painter in as revealing a way as is consistent with propriety.
23 As demonstrated by Van Berkel 2020: 330–405.
24 For more on Aeschines, see Francesca Pentassuglio’s contribution in this volume (Chapter 8).
25 As was suggested at least as early as 1893 by Wilamowitz 1893: 99n35; cf. Dittmar 1912: 34–41;
Ehlers 1966: 106.
148
Bibliography
Baragwanath, E. (2010) “Xenophon’s Foreign Wives,” 41–71 in Vivienne J. Gray, ed. Oxford Readings
in Classical Studies: Xenophon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baragwanath, E. (2015) “Panthea’s Sisters: Negotiating East-West Polarities through Gender in Xeno-
phon,” Classical World 109: 165–178.
Baragwanath, E. (2019) “Heroes and Homemakers in Xenophon,” 108–129 in Thomas Biggs and Jes-
sica Blum, eds. The Epic Journey in Greek and Roman Literature. (Yale Classical Studies 39). Cam-
Cartledge, P. (1993) “Xenophon’s Women: A Touch of the Other,” 5–14 in H. D. Jocelyn, ed. Tria Lus-
tra: Essays and Notes Presented to John Pinsent. Liverpool Classical Papers, 3. Liverpool: Liverpool
Classical Monthly.
Danzig, G. (2010) Apologizing for Socrates: How Plato and Xenophon Created our Socrates. Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books.
Davidson, J. (1998) Courtesans & Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. New: St.
Martin’s.
Dittmar, H. (1912) Aischines von Sphettos: Studien zur Literaturgeschichte der Sokratiker. Berlin:
Weidmann.
Dorion, L.-A. (2013) L’autre Socrate: Études sur les écrits socratiques de Xénophon. Paris: Les Belles
Lettres.
Dorion, L.-A. (2018) “Fundamental Parallels Between Socrates’ and Ischomachus’ Positions in the Oeco-
nomicus,” 521–543 in Stavru and Moore 2018.
Ehlers, B. (1966) Eine vorplatonische Deutung des sokratischen Eros: der Dialog Asapasia des Sokratik-
ers Aischines. Munich: Beck.
Gardner, C. (2000) “The Remnants of the Family: The Role of Women and Eugenics in Republic V,”
History of Philosophy Quarterly 17.3: 217–235.
Gray, V. J. (2011) Xenophon’s Mirror of Princes: Reading the Reflections. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Henry, M. M. (1995) Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition. Oxford:
Hobden, F. (2017) “Xenophon’s Oeconomicus,” 152–173 in Michael Flower, ed. The Cambridge Com-
panion to Xenophon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hulme, E. (2022) “First Wave Feminism: Craftswomen in Plato’s Republic,” Apeiron 55(4): 485–507.
Huss, B. (1999) Xenophons Symposion: Ein Kommentar. Leipzig: Teubner.
Johnson, D. M. (2003) “Xenophon’s Socrates on Law and Justice,” Ancient Philosophy 23: 255–281.
Johnson, D. M. (2021) Xenophon’s Socratic Works. Abingdon: Routledge.
Johnson, D. M. (2023) “History and the Oeconomicus,” in Claudia Marsico, ed. Xenophon the Philoso-
pher. Bern: Peter Lang, 189–209.
Kahn, C. H. (1994) “Aeschines on Socratic Eros,” 87–106 in Vander Waerdt, ed. The Socratic Move-
ment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell.
Lee, W. I. J. (2004) “For There Were Many hetairai in the Army: Women in Xenophon’s Anabasis.” The
Ancient World 35.2: 145–165
McKeen, C. (2006) “Why Women Must Guard and Rule in Plato’s Kallipolis,” Pacific Philosophical
Quarterly 87: 527–548.
Moore, C. M. (2018) “Xenophon’s Socratic Education in Memorabilia Book 4,” 500–520 in Stavru and
Moore 2018.
Oost, S. I. (1977/1978) “Xenophon’s Attitude Toward Women,” CW 71.4: 225–236.
Pangle, T. (2020) Socrates Founding Political Philosophy in Xenophon’s Economist, Symposium, and
Apology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Pomeroy, S. (1994) Xenophon: Oeconomicus. A Social and Historical Commentary. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Sandridge, N. B. (2012) Loving Humanity, Learning, and Being Honored: The Foundations of Leader-
ship in Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
Stavru, A. and C. Moore, eds. (2018) Socrates and the Socratic Dialogue. Leiden: Brill.
Taylor, C. C. W. (2012) “The Role of Women in Plato’s Republic,” 75–87 in R. Kamtekar, ed. Virtue and
Happiness: Essays in Honour of Julia Annas (Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary
Volume). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Too, Y. L. (2022) Xenophon’s Other Voice: Irony as Social Criticism in the 4th Century BCE. London:
Bloomsbury.
van Berkel, T. (2020) The Economics of Friendship: Conceptions of Reciprocity in Ancient Greece.
Leiden: Brill.
Wilamowitz-Moellendrof, von, U. (1893) Aristoteles und Athen. Vol. 2. Berlin: Weidmann.
Further Reading
Emily Baragwanath’s forthcoming book on women in Xenophon will be the best place to investigate
Xenophon’s depiction of women across his works, with her articles being a valuable downpayment
(2010, 2015, 2019). Johnson 2021 attempts to introduce Xenophon’s Socratic works; see also the
essays gathered in Dorion 2013 and in Stavru and Moore 2018.
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11
SOCRATES’ LAUGHING BODIES
Women and Comedy in Plato’s Phaedo
Sonja Tanner
‘In the Company of Men’: Xanthippe, Comedy, and Fear in Plato’s Phaedo.
Feminism and comedy are stereotypically pitted against one another. Might feminism stand to
gain something from comedy, and what if we have neglected such conjunctions, as we have in
philosophy generally, since Greek antiquity? I answer affirmatively herein, arguing not only
that comic moments exist in Platonic dialogues like the Phaedo but also that they temper the
tragic emotions evoked in it and offer an alternate interpretation for what is generally taken to
be an instance of Socratic misogyny. On this reading, the Phaedo turns out to hinge less on the
banishment of women and strong emotions and more on emotional care for the fear of death.
It may be surprising that the Phaedo, of all dialogues, would be risible. What could be more
gloomy than the setting of the Phaedo, when Socrates spends his last day with friends, while
awaiting an unjust and brutal execution? It may also be surprising that the Phaedo would
be of interest to anyone seeking to shake up notions of gender discrimination in antiquity.
After all, the Phaedo appears to support that oldest of misogynistic saws—the notion that
women are naturally more emotional than men, and thus in some sense, deficient. With their
young son on her lap, Xanthippe, Socrates’s wife, says “the sort of thing that women usually
say,” for which she is expelled from the dialogue: “Socrates, this is the last time your friends
will talk to you and you to them” (Phaedo 60a). Socrates responds by asking Crito to have
someone show her home (Phaedo 60a–b).1 The very philosopher who more typically includes
women into dialogue, here explicitly and seemingly callously expels one from it.2
This strange passage has not escaped notice. Saxonhouse and Spelman mention the frame
of the Phaedo as demonstrative of Platonic misogyny. Saxonhouse writes that, in “… Platonic
dialogues, women usually appear as an inferior form of human being (Phaedo 60a; Timaeus
90e).”3 Spelman contends that, for Plato, “It is women who get hysterical at the thought of
death; obviously, their emotions have overpowered their reason, and they can’t control them-
selves (Phaedo 60a, 112d; Apology 356).”4 Cavarero writes of this passage in Phaedo:
Xanthippe, his wife, has been hastily thrown out. This is no place for women. Socrates
does not want any women in the cell when he comes close to accomplishing that ‘living
for death’ announced by philosophy… Women… scream and yell in the face of death.5
151 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-13

Sonja Tanner
Aristotle will later state explicitly that “the female is… a mutilated male.”6 Mercer calls this
“hierarchical difference,” or the view that female bodies are somehow imperfect compared to
males.7 From this alleged, natural imperfection, a natural, moral inferiority is said to follow.
But is the dismissal of Xanthippe necessarily an example of such hierarchical difference?
We might begin by noting that Xanthippe’s exclusion and return frames the dialogue. If
her presence is so insignificant, why is it even included? Why not simply begin the dialogue
“in the company of men”? Michèle Le Doeuff describes women in philosophy, akin to Xan-
thippe, as “summoned…in an illusory guise, as a purely negative otherness, as an atrophy
which, by contrast, guarantees a philosophical completeness.”8 Elizabeth Grosz deems these
“patriarchal commitments,” and as “Plato’s most serious problems’, namely his “privileging
of reasoned, philosophical methods of argument, his notion of truth and rigour, reason, virtue,
and knowledge—equivalents for Plato—are based on the expulsion of those characteristics
associated with femininity.”9 Like Xanthippe, “Women and femininity are associated with
the qualities that reason, truth and knowledge, validity, virtue, etc., must expel. Implicitly and
explicitly, women are disqualified from philosophical activities.”10 This is what Grosz calls
“philosophical misogyny.”11 For Le Doeuff,
Philosophy values precision, accuracy, clarity, and objectivity and regards metaphor, im-
agery, and allusion a merely decorative and dispensable device for individual expression.
While philosophy abounds with image and metaphors, it deceives itself about its own
purity and freedom from them: ‘Philosophical discourse is registered—it posits itself as
philosophical—by distancing itself from the myth, the fable, the poetic, and all that is
image-making. The thoughtform is the only form appropriate to philosophy’.12
Thus, the project of feminist philosophy for scholars such as Le Doeuff, Grosz, and Cixous is
a revolt against this discursive style and a focus on poetics, rhythmics and sensory elements.”13
Le Doeuff seeks a philosophy that can accept its open-endedness and conceptual limits, “phi-
losophy as an ‘unfinished play’ with its final act yet to be written.”14 Philosophy must recog-
nize its relations to other discourses.
I wish to ask whether the attribution of such “patriarchal commitments” and “philosophi-
cal misogyny” to Plato is accurate and whether Platonic dialogues might not present a model
for the sort of open-ended, mythical, fabular, multi-generic, and poetic philosophy that these
scholars seek. I begin with what seems like a most flagrant example: Xanthippe’s dismissal
from the Phaedo. Drew Hyland notes how “out of character” Socrates’ dismissal of Xan-
thippe is:
Socrates’ regular habit is to introduce women into previously all-male gatherings. In

the Symposium he introduces Diotima, in the Menexenus, Aspasia, in the Theaetetus,
his mother, Phaenarete, from whom he learns his midwife’s calling, in the Republic, the
insistence that the Philosopher-rulers will include women as well as men.15
Hyland critiques the doctrinal reading of Plato by Irigaray and to a lesser extent Cavarero,
attributing such doctrines to “Platonism” instead of “Plato.” If Hyland is right, the issue may
lie in Platonic reception, rather than in Plato’s alleged “philosophical misogyny.”
Paying attention not only to the poetry, imagery, sensory details, and intertexuality in Pla-
tonic dialogues but also the sorts of poetry drawn from, this paper contends that a different
picture emerges offering an alternative explanation for Xanthippe’s dismissal and painting
a different picture of philosophy, as construed by Socrates on his final day. For Cavarero,
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Socrates’ Laughing Bodies: Women and Comedy in Plato’s Phaedo
“phallogocentrism rests on a death-based world-view. One of the things at stake in feminism

is how to reconnect thought and life in a positive manner.”16 Recognizing comedy within
Platonic dialogues, I shall argue, is one way to reconnect life and thought positively and thus
temper the reading of the Phaedo as indicative of Plato’s misogyny.17 Comedy inserts an am-
biguity into the dialogues that draws on an extensive, existing literature and provides a joie
de vivre too often thought missing in philosophy. Turning to the passage cited, we will see
instead that a comic reading offers an alternate description of this incident: Xanthippe may be
dismissed so as to prevent the dialogue from becoming overwhelmed by its inherently tragic
dimensions, and so as to emphasize Socrates’ comical persona, a persona which affords him a
distinct capacity to care for his friends.18 It is this persona that allows Socrates to emotionally
comfort his friends when the logos fails to do so. In order to understand this, one can look at
Xanthippe’s dismissal in light of the work of Aristophanes.
1 Comedy, Fables, and the “Art of Philosophy”

The scene in the Phaedo is likened to a courtroom. When Simmias admonishes Socrates for
“bearing leaving us so lightly,” Socrates says,
…‘I think you mean that I must make a defense against this, as if I were in court.’ ‘You
certainly must’, said Simmias. ‘Come then, he said, let me try to make my defense to you
more convincing than it was to the jury.’
(Phaedo 63a–c)
In a passage from Aristophanes’ Wasps echoed by Socrates in his own trial (Apology 34b7–
35b3), Philocleon outlines the oldest tricks used in the courts:
Oh! what tricks to secure acquittal! Ah!…Some groan over their poverty and exaggerate
it. Others tell us anecdotes or some comic story from Aesop. Others, again, cut jokes;
they fancy I shall be appeased if I laugh. If we are not even then won over, why, then
they drag forward their young children by the hand … and then the father…beseeches
me not to condemn him out of pity for them… Then we relax the heat of our wrath a
little for him.19
Socrates employs several of Philocleon’s courtroom “tricks” but avoids another. By dismissing
his wife and child at the outset, Socrates shows us that he is not up to tricking his companions
into rendering a more generous judgment of him.20 But Socrates uses Aesopian fables, puns on
harmony at Phaedo 92c and 95a,21 and cuts jokes to ease the emotions of his interlocutors,
even if not to secure his acquittal. If these ploys were already cliché in Aristophanes’ day, they
were even more well-worn in Plato’s.
Socrates appears to tell fables at several points. After being released from his shackles,
Socrates rubs his leg, and tells an Aesopian fable regarding the two-headedness of pain and
pleasure (Phaedo 60b–d). In response, Cebes asks Socrates “what induced you to write poetry
after you came to prison, you who had never composed any poetry before, putting the fables
of Aesop into verse?” (Phaedo 60c–d). Socrates tells him a dream told him to practice “the art
of philosophy” (Phaedo 61a). At 83d–e, Socrates returns to this regarding the soul’s attempted
move to realm of Hades. Finally, Socrates’ famous last words about owing a cock to Asclepius
have been read as a fable, however brief.22 Kurke points out that fabular formulations are used
elsewhere:
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Sonja Tanner
“Socrates’ mention of Aesop … provokes Cebes, one of his visitors, to ‘take it up and say’
(ὑπολαβὼν…ἒφη), ‘O Socrates, you did well to remind me” (Phaedo 60c9–d2).23 The phrase
“ὑπολαβὼν ἒφη is a veritable formula of Aesopic fable, easily recognizable as such in a context
that contains other marked Aesopic elements.”24 What is this ‘art of philosophy’ and what role
do Aesop and fables play in it?
Plato invites comparison of Socrates to Aesop explicitly in the Phaedo.25 Hideously ugly,
lowly,26 barefoot, and snub-nosed, Aesop earns his freedom by way of his intelligence, but
ultimately, is wrongly executed as a φαρμακόν.27 Like Aesop, Socrates is a scapegoat, sacrificed
for the city’s ills. Rothwell writes that, “In the more serious genres no Greek of the respect-
able classes tells a complete animal fable; instead, fables were relegated more to comedy and
iambos than to epic and tragedy.”28 Aristophanes’ Wasps illuminates Aesop and the use of
fables further, offering more fables than any other comic piece.29 Bdelycleon, the aristocrat,
bans telling fables “in the company of men (ἐν ἀνδράσιν)” and urges telling respectable stories
instead.30 Instead, “Bdelycleon recommends fables for the special purpose of soothing hurt
feelings…”31 Telling fables is the mark of the lowly and disadvantaged, and not the dignified.
Fables are antithetical to the heroic and aristocratic world of epic, are the expression of the
lowly or downtrodden, and serve the purpose of emotional balm.32 Rothwell writes that “it
was consciously un-aristocratic for kaloi te kagathoi to tell a fable.”33 Socrates appears to use
fable-telling to underscore his own underdog or lowly status and, upon expelling Xanthippe,
he does so “in the company of men.”34 Why would he do so?
2 Socrates’s Comic Role

Socrates tells fables to the men in his cell to underscore that he is not the sort of respectable
aristocrat who could be a tragic hero. He plays a comic role instead. Not only is Xanthippe
expelled to underscore Socrates’ oddity, but also she is expelled as a dramatic enactment
of the censuring of excessive expressions of grief by women in theater or drama.35 In the
Republic, Socrates bans “good men to imitate women—since they are men—either a young
woman or an older one … or one who’s caught in the grip of misfortune, mourning and
wailing” (Republic III.395d–e). Plato is applying Socrates’ own critique of drama and epic
to his dialogue because it is a form of drama or theater. It is not the expression of emotion
that Socrates bans, but rather its dramatic and excessive expression. But it is also the ritual
significance of the emotion she expresses that results in her expulsion. Women in ancient
Greece were largely responsible for funerary rituals and, as Edith Hall suggests, for singing
the funeral lament.36 Xanthippe represents tragedy and tragic grief, and she is expelled for
factually stating an expression of tragic pity and fear.37 This view sees Socrates’ pending death
as misfortune, and it also undermines his plan to soothe his companions’ emotions. If the
Phaedo was meant for recitation or performance, then Xanthippe’s dismissal may constitute
a performance of this ban.38
It is an odd setting for comedy, but laughter may be warranted precisely because of its
setting. Halliwell connects the dialogue’s risibility to the fear of death, writing “Laughter,
though subordinate to the details of the argument, is part of the Phaedo’s answer to the fear
of death.”39 There are a number of risible moments in the Phaedo, with no less than nine
mentions of laughter and two mentions of smiles. In one such instance, Cebes laughs and says
“perhaps there is a child in us who has these fears; try to persuade him not to fear death like a
bogey.” Socrates responds by noting a conciliatory power: “You should… sing a charm over
him every day until you have charmed away his fears.” He adds that “You must also search
among yourselves” for such a charmer (Phaedo 77e–78a).
154
One way of charming away fears, or ameliorating tragic emotions, is to argue convincingly
that death is not the end of life. In this, Socrates fails.40 When the logos on the soul’s immortality
fails to persuade Crito, Socrates does something he does nowhere else in the Platonic dialogues:
he laughs (Phaedo 115c6). Gadamer writes, “As convincing as the discussion might have been,
the conclusion is drawn that the proofs are not sufficient and that one must continue to test
their premises insofar as it is humanly possible.”41 Rational accounts fall short, and instead,
One must, as it were, keep ‘singing’ these future prospects to oneself (ἐπᾴδειν ἑαυτῷ).
This brings us back to the splendid metaphor of the child in us, whose fears of death are
never quite to be allayed by rational arguments, however convincing.42
Fear of death (and thus Socrates’ courage in facing it) thus remains unallayed. Where Socrates’
strategy may prove to be inadequate in assuaging the fear of death is that the arguments them-
selves fall short of convincing. Indeed, this insufficiency even provokes Socrates’ sole instance
of actual laughter.
Socrates laughs when he fails to persuade using logos. Vlastos indicates a seemingly mi-
sogynistic comment from Socrates in the Republic, where he describes people who desecrate
corpses as believing that the body of one’s enemy is one’s real enemy. Socrates tells us that it is
“…small-minded and womanish to regard the body as your enemy”43 (Republic 469d). Yet in
the Phaedo Crito asks “…how shall we bury you?,” to which Socrates responds
In any way you like… if you can catch me and I do not escape you. And laughing quietly,
looking at us, he said: ‘I do not convince Crito that I am this Socrates talking to you
here…but he thinks that I am the thing which he will soon be looking at as a corpse, and
so he asks how he shall bury me.’
(Phaedo 115c–d)
Crito makes the same error that Socrates describes as “womanish” and though it evinces a
laugh from Socrates, such conflation is not exclusive to women.
But another way of disbursing fear lies in pathos. As Morgan writes, Socrates “…seems
to have spoken only as a consolation (παραμυθούμενος, Phaedo 115d5–6).”44 The verb
παραμυθέομαι means to address with soothing or cheering words, to exhort, encourage, or
advise, to console, or appease. Konrad Gaiser emphasizes the “magical, incantatory nature of
philosophy’s effect on Socrates’ interlocutors.”45 In the Charmides, Socrates treats Charmides’
headache with a chant (ἐπῳδή, Charmides 156d–157c). Evrigenis writes, “If the argument
fails to appeal to their reason, then perhaps it may act as the charm that Simmias was looking
for, to allay his childish fear.”46 Aristotle describes singing as emotional salve in the Politics:
Some men are indeed moved to the point of being possessed by [strong feelings]; and
when so possessed, they are observed to be restored as if by cure or catharsis after listen-
ing to sacred songs which dispel the frenzy of their souls.47
Socrates does sing such a song to alleviate his audience’s fear of death. Possibly alluding to
Aristophanes’ singing of the swan-frogs,48 Socrates’ “swan song” serves as an ode, or as Tar-
rant puts it, Socrates’ myth of spirits is “a lyrical meditation on the general theme, a passage
comparable to a choric ode.”49
The cure for excessive emotion is soothing songs and comedy, but not of the sort that
Xanthippe would sing. The Athenian in the Laws critiques tragic choruses for “work[ing] up
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Sonja Tanner
the emotions of their audience to a tremendous pitch and the prize is awarded to the chorus
which succeeds best in making the community burst into tears…” Hence, he and Clinias agree
that one of the rules of singing (ᾠδή) should be to avoid this (Laws 800c–d). Citing the Re-
public, Tarrant writes, “Tragic drama gives the rein to τὸ ἐλεεινόν, the sense of pathos (Phaedo
606a–b). Comedy indulges unworthy direction of the sense of humour, always ready to betray
us (Phaedo 606c).”50 Drama and epic can over-excite emotions.51 The combination of tragic
and comic within a dialogue serves to balance these out.52 Halliwell writes that “The dialogue
makes laughter play its part in conveying a Socratic defiance, an emotional transcendence, of
death.”53 How does comedy lessen extreme emotions?
Woodruff describes a paradox of comedy: “as theater, it depends on engaging emotions in
the audience for what it shows on stage; but, as comedy, it aims at laughter or at a response
with a similar effect, disengaging its audience emotionally from what it presents.”54 Comedy in
the Phaedo, in other words, acts as emotional care for the interlocutors, those characters in the
frame, and for us as readers.55 It engages our emotions while also distancing us from the tragedy,
or more specifically, the tragic emotions evoked in the dialogue. Jansen writes, “Just as Socrates
the “philosopher poet” utilizes myth to train the companions’ emotions, Plato utilizes drama to
train readers’ emotions and thereby improve their souls.”56 To Nightingale, “…Plato is not cor-
recting or parodying comedy but rather harnessing its ‘voice of criticism.’”57 Plato also harnesses
comedy’s emotional levity against the excesses of tragedy. Blank argues that, “The intended effect
of Plato’s arguments is essentially, though by no means exclusively, emotional…”58 Alcibiades’
description of Socrates in the Symposium echoes this: “when I hear him, I find my heart leaping
and my tears (δάκρυον) gushing forth at the sound of his speech…” (Symposium 215d–e). In-
deed, interlocutors comment repeatedly on the emotional impact Socrates has on them: “Simmias
laughed and said: ‘By Zeus, Socrates, you made me laugh, though I was in no laughing mood just
now’” (Phaedo 64a–b). Phaedo remarks at “how well [Socrates] healed our distress” (Phaedo
89a). In the Phaedo, “high poetic hymn to Apollo and low prose Aesopic fable substitute for
tragedy and comedy, respectively….”59 As he does when compared to Herakles (Phaedo 89c), So-
crates shirks the status of a tragic or epic hero, opting instead for a lowly, fable-telling, comic role.
3 Comedy as Emotional Care

Socrates is not rejecting emotion, as is clear from his reaction to the prison guard. When the
prison guard weeps as he leaves the poison, Socrates exclaims “How pleasant the man is!…
And how genuinely he now weeps (δακρύω) for me” (Phaedo 116d). Socrates here praises the
expression of piteous emotion, but there is a difference. As Jansen points out, the object of
grief for the guard who has spent time with Socrates “is not death per se but rather the loss
of a companion of the highest caliber” and, unlike Apollodorus, his grief manifests itself in
“quiet and controlled sadness.”60 Xanthippe’s expression is a tragic one, for the object of her
grief is Socrates’ imminent death.
When Socrates drinks the hemlock, the emotional composure most companions had shown
gives way. Phaedo says that
Most of us had been able to hold back our tears reasonably well up till then, but when
we saw him drinking it and after he drank it, we could hold them back no longer; my
own tears came in floods against my will.
(Phaedo 117c–d)
156
Most dramatically, “Apollodorus had not ceased from weeping (δάκρυον) before, and at this
moment his noisy tears and anger made everybody present break down, except Socrates”
(Phaedo 117d–e). Socrates objects to the piteous outburst:
What is this, he said, ‘you strange fellows (θαυμάσιοι). It is mainly for this reason that
I sent the women away, to avoid such unseemliness (πλημμελοῖεν), for I am told one
should die in good omened silence. So keep quiet and control yourselves.’ ‘His words
made us ashamed, and we checked our tears.’
(Phaedo 117d–e)
The verb πλημμελέω means to make a false note in music but can also be understood meta-
phorically as in to err or make a mistake. Xanthippe’s note is not part of the song Socrates
wants to sing.
Their tears dramatically underscore how unconvincing the arguments on the immortality of
the soul have been on the interlocutors. Konstan writes, “There existed in classical antiquity
a hard line on grieving for the dead, according to which death is not an evil and hence not a
reason for sorrow.”61 Even if true, Socrates’ interlocutors do not appear to heed this hard line,
and break out in uncontrollable grief. Evrigenis points out the inconsistency in their emotional
response: “That his friends reacted in the way that one would expect from women means that
Socrates’ last and most elaborate charm against the fear of death failed to convince them.”62
And yet, Apollodorus seems to have been weeping loudly throughout. He was allowed to stay,
but Xanthippe was not.
The Phaedo illustrates two different sorts of pity. As I argue elsewhere, Xanthippe ap-
pears to feel genuine, tragic pity for Socrates.63 Halliwell distinguishes tragic from ordi-
nary fear “by virtue of being focused on the experience of others.”64 Similarly, Xanthippe’s
pity is for Socrates, and for his loss of philosophical conversations. Socrates’s interlocu-
tors feel pity for themselves, as spectators do.65 Phaedo and others describe pity for them-
selves: “I had no feeling of pity, such as would seem natural in my sorrow, nor indeed of
pleasure”(Phaedo 59a1–3) and, later, “I was weeping for myself, not for him—for my
misfortune in being deprived of such a comrade” (Phaedo 117c8–d1).66 Why are various
kinds of pity displayed?
The Republic offers a potential answer. Listening to Homer or any tragic poetry evokes
lamentations in us, and
We suffer (συμπάσχοντες) along with the hero in all seriousness… but when personal
sorrow comes to one of us… we pride ourselves if we are able to keep quiet and bear
up, taking this to be the part of a man and what we then praised to be that of a woman.
(Republic 605c–e)
Socrates appears to be distinguishing responses to epic or tragic poetry from how we respond
to personal grief, and possibly aligning these by gender. Sympathizing with the hero is some-
how feminine, and bearing up in one’s personal sorrow is masculine. This appears to bring us
back to square one, with a misogynistic equation of emotional expression with the feminine.
There is another factor at play, however, that provides an alternate explanation. Inasmuch as
women are associated with epic, tragedy, and resulting sympathies, Xanthippe’s expulsion is
also a symbolic bracketing of epic and tragedy.
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Sonja Tanner
4 Dialogues as Theater
We tend to think of the dialogues in the way they exist for us today—as written texts to be
read silently to oneself, but this is not indicated by a number of ancient sources.67 Diogenes
Laertius attests, “Favorinus says somewhere that it was only him [sc. Aristotle] who remained
in his seat when Plato was reading out his dialogue On Soul [i.e. Phaedo], whereas everybody
else had got up and left.”68 Ignoring the main claim about Aristotle, what is interesting for our
purposes is the testimony that dialogues were recited, if not always, at least regularly enough
that this is casually mentioned in a statement about something else.69
The drama and even theatricality of the dialogues have been noted. Halliwell claims that,
amongst the dialogues, the Phaedo comes closest to “philosophical tragedy.”70 Arieti deems
these dramas and notes the tragic qualities of the Phaedo.71 Nussbaum acknowledges the
theatricality of the dialogues but suggests it to be of a new sort: “what we find in the middle-
period dialogues… is theater; but theater purged and purified of theater’s characteristic appeal
to powerful emotion, a pure crystalline theater of the intellect.”72 I wish to show Nussbaum
right on the theatrical claim, but wrong on its characterization: Plato’s theater is not purged
of emotion, even if its excessive displays are. Indeed, if I am right, there is nothing very pure
or crystalline about Platonic theater, and this will be shown to have an impact upon how we
understand women in classical antiquity.73
In ring composition form, the Phaedo effectively begins and ends with the dismissal and re-
turn of Xanthippe and her children, creating a prologue and epilogue.74 Tragedy or epic would
rely on maintaining the narrative illusion throughout, but comedy is not so bound. Indeed,
comedy characteristically breeches the narrative, whether by way of parabasis or allusions to
itself as drama, the latter of which is metatheatrical.75 Whether comic or not, such ruptures of
dramatic illusion prompt the audience to recognize the illusion perpetrated by the drama itself.
Such addresses of the audience and allusions to drama can both be found in the Phaedo.76
5 Conclusions
At several points in the dialogue, a larger audience is addressed.77 If the Phaedo was read or
somehow performed, the audience in question is none other than ourselves, for ancient audi-
ences and we are, in Echecrates’ words, those “who were not present but hear of it now.”78
Like a chorus leader, Echecrates guides us through the multi-generic dialogue. Like a comic
hero, Socrates reaches out directly to address us, and to comfort us for what is about to hap-
pen to him. Xanthippe is expelled for stating a tragic fact and because Socrates can play the
comic lead more effectively and offensively if he does so “in the company of men.” Socrates
takes over the lamentations for Xanthippe, replacing what evokes pity and fear with what
comforts and calms such emotions.79
Socrates uses comedy to curb the emotional excesses of tragedy. Socrates and Plato tend
to emotions more intensively than generally thought. Nussbaum goes too far in claiming that
the Platonic elenchus avoids emotion and “…teaches by appeal to intellect alone.”80 Plato
positions himself and the dialogues via their theatrical composition: “By creating his own type
of theatre, he claimed for himself the role of the educator of his community traditionally at-
tributed to Homer and the tragedians.”81 Indeed, the very form of Platonic dialogues suggests
ancient comedy for Nightingale, who observes a crucial “point of convergence between Old
Comedy and the Platonic dialogue: the ‘mixed’ or multi-generic form.”82 Perhaps the sugges-
tion here is that, like the fabular monster that is pain and pleasure, comedy and tragedy are
158
ultimately more united, and perhaps, the same is true of gender, in a dialogue in which men do
and say things declared to be “womanish.”83
Socrates replaces Xanthippe’s emotional provocation with a different form of emotional
care. Recognizing the emotional care for which Socrates uses comedy and fable shows both that
he acknowledges the importance of emotions and that he plays a role traditionally relegated to
women: that of providing such care. If this is right, then scholars have misread the Phaedo as
exhibiting “philosophical misogyny” in content and in form, replete as the dialogue turns out
to be with poetic and fabular elements. The “art of philosophy” as Socrates practices it turns
out to be something much closer to what LeDoeuff and Grosz advocate, an art that draws from
and incorporates myth, image-making, and the fabular, amongst other poetic forms.
The turn to comedy in contemporary scholarship broadens the realm of scholarship in gen-
der. Recognizing comedy in philosophy gives us a bigger picture of women’s roles in antiquity
not restricted to the upper classes, a focus Socrates is at pains to emphasize in the Phaedo. Xan-
thippe is no semi-divine Medea, nor is she a princess Antigone. Indeed comic texts are a main
source of information about the lives of ordinary Athenians, the poorer classes, and slaves.
Comedy enjoys a world free of many conventions, one that allows women to seize political
power in as patriarchal a society as classical Athens. Even if this becomes comic fodder precisely
because of its apparent impossibility, comedy still can suggest revolutionary ideas. Recogniz-
ing comedy in the dialogues muddies any clear-cut interpretation of Plato’s purported stance
on women, but perhaps the questions raised by the text are ultimately more important than
whatever intentions lie behind them. While Socrates may not actually be advocating for full
gender equality in Book V of the Republic, borrowing a comic convention from Aristophanes’
Ecclesiazusae nonetheless allows him and his audience to consider such equality as a question.
In this sense, ancient comedy provides fecund material for studies of gender, and more scholars
(feminist and otherwise) ought to take it “seriously.” Understood in this way, the Phaedo and
other Platonic dialogues may well be the sort of open-ended plays with acts yet to be written
that Grosz seeks. Philosophy and feminism may have something to gain from comedy after all.
Notes
1 See Tanner (2007). In this paper, I argue that Xanthippe’s dismissal is a function of Socrates’ refusal
to appeal to the jurors’ pity, and a direct reflection of the passage in the Apology in which Socrates
describes such appeals in the courts (Apology 34b7–35b3). But these passages have a precedent in
Aristophanes, and this complicates their meaning considerably, as I attempt to address here.
2 See for instance Marina Berzins McCoy’s “Socratic Midwifery,” (Chapter 17) Arlene Saxonhouse’s
“Philosopher Queens and a Female Prospero(a),” (Chapter 35) and Danielle Layne’s piece in this
volume (Chapter 18).
3 Saxonhouse in Tuana (1994), 75.
4 Spelman in Tuana (1994), 97.
5 Cavarero (1995), 29.
6 Aristotle Generation of Animals, 737a27–29.
7 Mercer (2018), 185. See also Jill Gordon’s “Sexual Differentiation and What it Means to be Human
in Timaeus” for the Timaeus’s account of originary men whose viciousness led them to be regenerated
as women in this volume (Chapter 19).
8 Le Doeuff (1977), 6.
9 Grosz (1990), 154.
10 Grosz (1990), 156.
11 Grosz (1990), 156.
12 Le Doeuff (1980), 9, as quoted by Grosz (1990), 163.
13 Grosz (1990), 165.
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Sonja Tanner
14 Grosz (1990), 165.

15 Hyland 2004, 7.
16 Cavarero (1995), xviii.
17 This in no way ascribes feminism to Plato. Indeed, if I am right, such ascriptions become more dif-
ficult to make, including ascriptions of misogyny.
18 According to Saxonhouse, “Xanthippe is there to mark a transition and to mark an interior frame for
the dialogue between Socrates and his companions.” Saxonhouse (1998), 116.
19 Aristophanes Wasps 564–575.
20 I argue as much in Tanner (2007).
21 Brock (1990), 44.
22 Griffith (2017).
23 Kurke (2011), 251.
24 Kurke (2011), 253.
25 Kurke (2006), 13.
26 For more on Socrates’ lowly status, see Zafiropoulos (2015), 199. Xenophon claims that everything
Socrates owned was worth no more than five minae (Xenophon Oec. 2.3, as cited by Nails [2002],
264). Whether or not his poverty was voluntary does not nullify the comparisons with Aesop. For
a more extensive discussion of the comparisons and distinctions between Socrates and Aesop, see
Kurke (2011), 325–360, and Zafiropoulos (2015), 196–204.
27 See Kurke (2011), 325–360.
28 Rothwell (1995), 237.
29 Rothwell (1995), 239.
30 Rothwell (1995), 248–249. The fuller passage from Wasps reads: “You ignorant knave!... Are you
going to talk about mice and ferrets in the company of men? (ὦ σκαιὲ κἀπαίδευτε…μῦς καὶ γαλᾶς
μέλλεις λέγειν ἐν ἀνδάσιν;)” (Aristophanes Wasps 1183–1185) Aristotle, on the other hand, recom-
mends such use of fables: “Fables are suitable for addresses to popular assemblies; and they have one
advantage—they are comparatively easy to invent, whereas it is hard to find parallels among actual
past events. You will in fact frame them just as you frame illustrative parallels: all you require is the
power of thinking out your analogy, a power developed by intellectual training.” Aristotle Rhetoric
1394a3–6.
31 Rothwell (1995), 250.
32 Rothwell (1995), 235. Rothwell cites as an exception the exchange of fables between Menelaus and
Teucer in Sophocles’ Ajax (1142–1162), but as Kurke notes about this “the low-class fabular sniping
of the characters vividly illustrates how mean and sordid the world has become after the death of the
play’s heroic protagonist.” Kurke (2011), 240n.14. The exception may, thus, prove the rule.
33 Rothwell (1995), 250–251.
34 Rothwell claims that the incorporation of fables occurs for three reasons: first, when among aris-
tocratic men, fable-telling is used to “coarsen their speech”; second, fable-tellers of higher status
condescend to their audience, or; third, fable-tellers employ fables to underscore their own underdog
status. Rothwell (1995), 248.
35 Zeitlin stresses the association of the Dionysian and the feminine in Greek theater, writing that “mad-
ness, the irrational, and the emotional aspects of life are associated in the culture more with women
than with men.” Zeitlin (1996), 343–344.
36 Hall (1999), 113.
37 Death and funerary rituals were amongst few arenas dominated by women. Ancient Greek women
“were responsible for washing, anointing and dressing corpses… But the main burden of mourning
also seems to have fallen on females, whose grief was expressed both in ritual gestures and in the per-
formance of funerary laments, a type of song associated particularly with women.” Blundell (1995),
72. Ostentatious displays of grief and lamentation were legally circumscribed by Solon. See Blundell
(1995), 162. As Xanthippe is led away, she engages in “lamenting and beating her breast,” (Phaedo
60b), or the sort of lamentation and laceration that would have been part of her role.
38 Yet, if performed, her inclusion in the frame of the dialogue would still force men to imitate a woman
mourning. For more on women’s exclusion from classical theater and men playing women’s roles in
it, see Case (1985) and Zeitlin (1996).
39 Halliwell (2008), 279–280.
40 While illustrating how Socrates’s argument falls short may take this paper too far afield, it is enough
to note both his interlocutors’ continuing doubts and his own qualifications. Simmias professes having
160
“private misgivings” about Socrates’s argument for the immortality of the soul (Phaedo 107b1). So-
crates’s response includes a lengthy myth which he begins with “…if the soul is immortal…” (107c1).
41 Gadamer (1980), 36.
42 Gadamer (1980), 36.
43 Vlastos in Tuana (1994), 16.
44 Morgan (2000), 201.
45 Blank (1993), 432 n11.
46 Evrigenis (2007), 397. Evrigenis writes, “As if to confirm this image of children listening to a fairy
tale or lullaby, Phaedo tells Echecrates that after Socrates left the room his friends felt that a great
misfortune had befallen them, as though they were all losing their father.”
47 Aristotle Politics 1342a7–10.
48 Charon tells Dionysus that he will soon hear the “marvelous songs of the frog-swans” (βατράχων
κύκνων θαυμαστά) (Aristophanes Frogs, 206). Other possible connections include Herakles in each
and the phrase regarding εἶς μακάρων δή τινας εύδαιμονίας (Phaedo 115d4), comparable to the lan-
guage of Dionysus’ “partying with the blest” (ἐς Μακάρων εὐωχίαν, Aristophanes Frogs 85). The
Frogs’ makes reference to Socrates when its Chorus accuses Socrates of “engaging in idle amusement”
(Aristophanes Frogs 1498)
49 Tarrant (1955), 88.
50 Tarrant (1955), 84.
51 Tarrant (1955), 84.
52 In this sense, far from anything like a binary opposition, the paradigm of weaving might be a more
useful metaphor for how tragic and comic elements coexist in the dialogue. See Jill Frank and Sarah
B. Greenberg’s “Weaving Politics” (Chapter 16).
53 Halliwell (2008), 283.
54 Woodruff (1997), 320.
55 Comedy is inherently ambivalent, and can serve more positive roles, as I suggest here, but comedy can
also reinforce power differentials, whether of gender, race, class, sexuality, age, and other categories.
Jokes, suggesting feminists to be lacking in humor could be an instance of this. For more on ethnic
humor, see Critchley (2002), 65–78.
56 Jansen (2013), 345–346.
57 Such writing reappropriates female characters to perform a sort of “conceptual pickpocketing” to
counter the “symbolic poverty and theoretical absence” women have been relinquished to in Western
philosophy. Nightingale (1995), 190.
58 Blank (1993), 428.
59 Kurke (2011), 19.
60 Jansen (2013), 348.
61 Konstan (2006), 253.
62 Evrigenis (2007), 400.
63 Tanner (2007), 51–53.
64 Halliwell, as quoted by Konstan (2006), 155.
65 Konstan distinguishes types of fear in Aristotle: “Aristotle restricts such sympathy to the pain or
pleasure we share with dear ones. Characters on stage are not our intimates. There is thus, I think, no
basis in Aristotle’s account of the tragic emotions for vicarious fear of ‘fearing for’ others. Spectators
fear for themselves, because they realize that they are equally liable to misfortune.” Konstan (2006),
155.
66 Tanner (2007).
67 This is controversial amongst the few scholars who currently address this. Blondell, for instance,
ultimately argues that the dialogues are not proper dramas. Blondell (2002), 14–37. Arieti argues to
the contrary. Arieti (1991).
68 Diogenes Laertius, Lives 3.37, as quoted by Charalabopoulos (2012), 144.
69 At four minutes per Stephanus page, the Phaedo is estimated to take four hours to be read aloud. Tar-
rant (1955), 85. Not only may the dialogues have been feasibly read aloud, their ancient reception
treats them as pieces of theater. Charalabopoulos attests, “…there was throughout antiquity a tradi-
tion of interpreting the Platonic dialogue as a piece of dramatic performance literature.” Charalabo-
poulos (2012), 256. Athenaeus claims Platonic dialogues to have served as Roman dinner theater. See
Charalabopoulos (2012), especially 1–23, and 178–206. A second century Oxyrhynchos papyrus tes-
tifies that “the Cratylus used to be sung [προήιδετο] as a prelude” to the tetralogy of the Theaetetus,
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Sonja Tanner
Sophist, and Statesman. The very arrangement into tetralogies and trilogies, as done by Thrasyllus, is
consistent with theatrical pieces. Visual evidence for this exists as well. Charalabopoulos describes floor
mosaics from the House of Menander, a late Roman villa in Mytilene excavated in the 1960s.69 Laden
with theatrical imagery, the triclinium and peristyle illustrate scenes from Menander’s comedies. Mosaic
busts of Menander and Thaleia, muse of Comedy, oversee the rest. Among these is a mosaic of Socrates
with Cebes and Simmias in a scene from “the only known text that brings together all three charac-
ters”—the Phaedo.69 Considering the dialogues as theatrical affects how we understand their meaning.
70 Halliwell (1984), 50–58, as quoted by Nightingale (1995), 69n.24.
71 Arieti (1991).
72 Nussbaum (2001), 133.
73 If the dialogues were composed for recitation or even dramatization before an audience, how we
interpret the Phaedo shifts to emphasize dimensions beyond rational claims to include and even
emphasize their emotional reception. Charalabopoulos writes that, in seeking “a full appreciation of
[the dialogues’] meaning, one may not leave out elements usually associated with the experiences of
‘theatre-goers’, as, for instance the emotional response...” Charalabopoulos (2012), 257. The solitary
reader and the theater-goer register different aspects of the text. Woodruff claims that the ancient
Greek theatrical tradition “aims mainly at the sharing of emotion.” Woodruff (2013), 146. The aim
of tragic plot design is to “engage the audience in understanding a scene and feeling the emotions ap-
propriate to that scene.” Woodruff (2013), 150. The tragic chorus is effectively an emotional guide,
modeling what the playwright aims to have the audience feel. Woodruff (2013), 147. Theater thus
brings about a sense of belonging to a community through shared emotions, as attending a sporting
event might do for us today.
74 Socrates makes multiple references to theater in the Phaedo. As if defending himself against stock
allegations from the comedians, Socrates says, “…not even a comic poet could say (εἰ κωμῳδοποιὸς
εἴη) that I am babbling (ἀδολεσχέω) and discussing things that do not concern me…” (Phaedo 70c)
Socrates says “…a man should repeat this (ἐπαείδω) to himself as if it were an incantation, which is
why I have been prolonging my tale” (μῦθον, 114d). Clearly alluding to the theater, Socrates apolo-
gizes for applying the word εἱμαρμένη to himself, saying that “…my fated day calls me now, as a
tragic character might say (φαίη ἂν ἀνὴρ τραγικός)...” (115a, my emphasis)
75 Metatheatre has been defined as theater that is explicitly self-aware. Charalabopoulos defines
metatheatre to include the Platonic dialogue, calling it “the evocation of theatrical discourse in the
framework of dialogic text and its impact on/significance for the generic identity of the dialogue.”
Charalabopoulos (2012), 152.
76 While many Platonic dialogues feature two or three characters, the Phaedo involves a “stage crowd.”
Tarrant (1955), 86. Fifteen companions are present at Socrates’ last day: “the exact number of a
tragic chorus, surround the dying Socrates and lament.” Jansen (2013), 333. Curiously, at several
points, characters refer to an audience beyond those we expect. Echecrates refers twice to a big audi-
ence of listeners ἀκουσόμενοι (58d5–8) and ἀκοὐουσιν (102a8). Jansen (2013), 333. Socrates’ famous
last words are “Ω Κρίτων, ἔφη, τῷ Άσκληπιῷ ὀφείλομεν ἀλεκτρυόνα. ἀλλὰ ἀπόδοτε καὶ μὴ ἀμελήσητε”
(118a3-4). Madison points out how strange and potentially comical the latter clause appears, particu-
larly in its redundancy (“do x and don’t forget to do x”). Madison also compares this passage to one
from Aristophanes’ Frogs, in which Aristophanes has Euripides ridicule Aeschylus for just this sort of
turn of phrase (“I have come back to this land and returned”), involving an imperative and a negated
subjunctive (ἧκω…καὶ κατέρχομαι, Frogs 1152–1165). Madison (2002), 435. Both verbs in the latter
clause, ἀπόδοτε and ἀμελήσητε occur in the second person plural, an odd number since Socrates ap-
pears to be speaking directly to Crito. Madison (2002), 432. Griffith questions whether ὀφείλομεν in
the first clause is “a ‘rhetorical plural’ either of majesty or modesty or a genuine plural…” Griffith
(2017), 91. References to a larger audience occur elsewhere.
77 Phaedo’s narration of events is interrupted twice by Echecrates, to whom the story is told, and how he
does so is illuminating. At 88c-e, Echecrates bursts into the frame of the dialogue, emotionally moved
by what is happening: “By the gods, Phaedo, you have my sympathy…” Socrates notes elsewhere that
“tragic drama is said to cause spectators to ‘sympathize with’ (συμπάσχω) the tragic hero” (Republic
605d) Jansen (2013), 350. Such sympathy is precisely what Echecrates cites here (συγγνώμην, 88c8).
Jansen writes, “Drama tends to elicit participatory responses on the part of the audience.” Jansen
(2013), 350. We are guided in how to do so by Echecrates. Echecrates again interrupts at 102a, to
agree with Socrates and admire his “wonderful” (θαυμαστός) presentation. Phaedo reports that all
those present thought so, to which Echecrates says “And so do we who were not present but hear of
162
it now (καὶ γὰρ ἡμῖν τοῖς ἀποῦσι, νῦν δὲ ἀκούουσιν).” It should be noted that ἀκούουσιν is third person
plural. Jansen (2013), 350. Since Phaedo was present, who are these other listeners?
78 For Aristotle, tragic drama accomplishes its emotional effect whether it is performed or privately
read: “…tragedy may produce its effect even without movement or action in just the same way as epic
poetry; for from the mere reading of a play its quality may be seen.” Poetics 1462a11–17.
79 Just as Socrates takes over Xanthippe’s (gendered) role of washing the corpse, Socrates takes over the
role of providing emotional care for his interlocutors’ and our grief at his pending death. Whether
Socrates can be said to “appropriate” or “usurp” Xanthippe’s place as the singer of the dirge, the
lamenter, or the one leading sepulchral rituals attributes too much negativity to this. While good
arguments have been made on Socrates’ appropriation of the otherwise-feminine roles of midwife
(Theaetetus) and priestess (Symposium), it is also possible to view these as highlighting their impor-
tance. For more on the limitations on claims of “appropriation”, see Swearingen (1992).
80 Nussbaum (2001), 133.
81 Charalabopoulos (2012), 256.
82 Nightingale (1995), 191.
83 Socrates suggests as much at Symposium 223d. The denial of simple binaries appears a direct affront
to Pythagoreans such as Simmias and Cebes.
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12
PLATO’S ARGUMENT FOR
THE INCLUSION OF WOMEN
IN THE GUARDIAN CLASS
Prospects and Problems
Emily Hulme
One could be forgiven for assuming a passage as celebrated as Plato’s argument for the inclusion
of women in the guardian class in the Republic would be well-understood—or at least that its
basic structure would be non-controversial.1 Yet, the record shows that the interpretation of this
famous, groundbreaking, and problematic text is anything but straightforward.
In fact, one striking feature of the scholarship on this argument is how drastically the inter-
pretation has changed over the last 120 years or so, from the commentator Bernard Bosanquet
writing in 1895, regarding the suggestion made that women will have to participate in war-
fare, “the lessons of chivalry and romance have made [this notion] inconceivable to civilised
man” (183, at 457a) and, over half of a century later, Leo Strauss contending that the “just
city is against nature because the equality of the sexes and absolute communism are against
nature” (1964: 127) to a new wave of critical interpretations offered by feminist philosophers.
This change, I think, without question is due to changes in women’s status in modern society.2
This argument is, in fact, an excellent example of what we might think of as the three
layers one must always keep in mind in ancient philosophy: (i) the philological layer, i.e.,
establishing the text; (ii) the argumentative layer, i.e., establishing the form of the argument;
and (iii) the social/historical layer, i.e., establishing what assumptions the author and original
audience may have made—and which ones we may be making.3 Indeed, this argument has in-
teresting problems on all three layers: there is a crucial variant manuscript reading that has yet
to be definitively resolved;4 there is major dispute over several important points in the argument
reconstruction; and, as already alluded to, shifting assumptions about women’s place in our
culture—and for that matter, ancient Greek culture—have played significant roles in the recep-
tion of this argument. In particular, this is a case where Emily Wilson’s injunction to take care to
not layer contemporary misogynist beliefs on top of substantially different ancient ones, under
the illusion that one is being faithful to the original, is quite applicable (Wilson 2018b: 89).5
This chapter will first present a basic reconstruction of the argument and then address eight
of the major live questions:
1 Is the idea that women could take on the same jobs as men an exercise in speculative imagi-
nation, or the result of Plato’s real-world observation?
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Emily Hulme
2 When Socrates and Glaucon agree that men are “superior” to women, do they mean this in
both a mental and physical sense, or solely the latter?
3 Are women in the Kallipolis going to be involved on equal footing with men in all trades,
or is this argument restricted to the trade of guardianship?
4 What is the relationship between the first wave (inclusion of women in the guardian class)
and the second wave (abolition of the nuclear family)?
5 In light of Plato’s hostile attitude towards women elsewhere in the Republic, and in other
dialogues, how do we square his positive statements about women’s potential here?
6 Is this passage meant sincerely?
7 Was Plato a feminist?
8 Has the reception of this passage—especially, the prevalence of the no answer to question
6—suffered because of systematic misogynist bias?
The Argument
In book five, our interlocutors find themselves having completed their original task: the ideal
city has been described, and we have seen what the different cardinal virtues—including, most
importantly, justice—looks like in the city and soul.6 Moreover, a response has been given to
Glaucon’s original challenge in book two: to the question of why justice is worth pursuing for
its own sake, we have seen the reply that, when we understand justice as “a sort of health, a
fine and good state of the soul” (4.444d12–e1) it becomes clear that it is indeed valuable for
its own sake—no one would choose a life without it. Of course, the original challenge held
that justice was in the class of things valuable both for their own sake and for the sake of their
consequences. Thus, we see in book nine a return to the idea of how justice is valuable for its
consequences.
The plan at the beginning of book five is then to turn from the justice to injustice, in the
form of the degenerate cities. The interlocutors get derailed, however: Polemarchus, with more
candor than boldness, suggests that Adeimantus pull Socrates back to explaining an earlier re-
mark about the social arrangements in the ideal city (449b).7 For Socrates, in passing, had ear-
lier claimed women and children would be held in common (4.423e7–424a3)—quite against
the norms of contemporary Athens—and we can imagine at least Polemarchus, and perhaps
all the rest, may have held their tongues but perhaps have not quite put this provocative claim
totally out of their minds since then. Indeed, the full group—Polemarchus, Adeimantus, Glau-
con, and Thrasymachus—all explicitly endorse the plan to return to this topic (5.449b–450a).
What follows, then, is what is conventionally known as the “three waves”—each tackling
a difficult problem, and each longer than the previous one. The first wave concerns the role of
women in the Kallipolis (451c–457c); the second, the “common ownership” of women and
children (457d–471c); and the third, the origins of the Kallipolis, via philosophers becoming
rulers, or vice versa (5.471c–8.543c). Our focus shall be on the first of these.
Two important ideas from earlier in the Republic must be kept in view in this argument:
(1) the principle of specialization and (2) the analogy between guardians and guard dogs. The
principle of specialization holds that the city will best fulfill the varied needs (for food, shelter,
etc.) of its inhabitants if the members of the city specialize in individual crafts in accordance
with their natural abilities (2.370c4–6). The city is organized around the idea that the city
will thrive if each person is not attempting to make his own shoes, grow his own crops, and
weave his own blanket—rather, a shoemaker, a farmer, and a weaver would be able to each
make more than enough for themselves, and cooperatively share or exchange the fruits of
their labor. Given the time to specialize in their particular craft, and given their own unevenly
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Inclusion of Women in the Guardian Class
distributed natural abilities, the quality and quantity of goods produced will be higher if
those who are really skilled weavers are given time to focus on their trade and those who are
really skilled shoemakers are given time to focus on their trade, and so on. The guardians
are themselves practitioners of a specialized craft within this system: just as a weaver needs
education, support, and time away from other responsibilities to become an excellent master
craftsman, so too the guardian is the product of an educational system that will identify those
naturally gifted for leadership in the ideal city and give them the time they need to develop
their abilities (2.374a–d). The principle of specialization is key to the organization of the city:
it is called the prōtos logos (“first principle”) at 3.395b9 and is, in book four, identified with
justice (4.433a1–b4).
In addition, in the initial discussion of the craft of guardianship (2.374e–376c), we in fact
learn that the guardians have a special personality type: they are kind and gentle towards those
they know, and hostile and aggressive towards outsiders. In this respect, they are like guard
dogs, who are fiercely loyal to their family, exuding gentleness towards their friends while re-
maining hostile to newcomers. This is the second important idea from earlier in the Republic
to keep in view, and both of these ideas are explicitly alluded to in the first wave.
As I see it, this argument proceeds in three stages:
1 Via analogy with guard dogs, the interlocutors agree women should have the same jobs as
men (451c–452e).
2 The question of viability: the misogynist critic contends women differ from men by nature;
clarification of what “nature” means shows this need not imply they should have different
jobs. Natural capacities are distributed similarly among men and women; so there should
be female philosopher-rulers; and these women should be educated in the same way as the
male philosopher-rulers (452e–456c).
3 The question of optimality: the best city is a city composed of the best possible women and
men, and philosopher-kings and -queens are exactly that (456c–457b).
Taking each in turn: Socrates reintroduces the analogy with guard dogs, and asks rhetorically
if we segregate them by gender (451d).8 Do the male guard dogs patrol the grounds, while
the female guard dogs remain in the doghouse prepping the chow? Of course not, and so the
interlocutors agree the women in the ideal city should be put in the role of guardians.9 An
immediate consequence drawn from this is that they will need the same education; gymnastic
exercise, in the etymological sense, being a core part of this education means that women and
men will be exercising alongside one another naked.10 Socrates himself brings out that this
aspect of the plan might invite ridicule—but the eventual success of the plan will quiet the
skeptics. Thus, the role of women in the city is quite quickly decided: in just a Stephanus page
and a half, we find out that, contrary to norms in Athens (where women could not participate
in the discussion in the Assembly of a routine appointment for an architect for a new foun-
tain, let alone serve as an elected general), women will be rulers alongside the men. Reading
the room, one might find it suspicious that the four men who moments ago could not let go
of the idea that women and children would be held in common are suddenly now quite easily
persuaded by this analogy to uproot the patriarchy. Has their recent candor been replaced by
a disingenuous politeness?11
Whatever the case may be, the argument does not end there: they will assess whether it is
possible and optimal for this proposal to go forward (stages two and three above). In order
to show this, they will run the argument against a more skeptical interlocutor; the present
company having already agreed women in the ideal city should take on the same roles as men,
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an external and imaginary devil’s advocate is brought in to put pressure on the argument.
Socrates himself voices the concerns of this advocate for sex segregation.
On the question of possibility (stage two): the devil’s advocate, whom I call the misogynist
critic above, points out the interlocutors hardly need him—for they’ve already managed to
contradict themselves! At this point, the principle of specialization returns:
1 Each person should perform the role for which they are naturally suited (principle of
specialization).
2 Men differ from women by nature (assumption—conceded by all parties to the discussion).
3 Men and women should perform different roles (inference, supposedly drawn from 1 to 2).
This serious challenge provokes a discussion of what we actually mean by “naturally suited.”
Not every natural difference will, it turns out, impact the kind of role an individual is meant
to perform. Socrates illustrates this by way of an argumentum ad absurdum (454c1–5): are we
to think that men who can grow hair and those who are bald are meant to take on different
jobs? Will we have bald men making shoes, and ban those with beautiful tresses from staking
a claim to the shoemaker’s last? Of course not—and, so the thought goes, women and men
may well differ by nature without differing in a way that matters to their jobs. More particu-
larly, “being naturally suited” will end up being a matter of mainly (but not only) cognitive
criteria: ability to learn the particular trade quickly, for example. And the interlocutors think
some women will meet this criteria, even if—as they state in a variety of ways throughout the
argument—women are “weaker” than men.12
Finally, we turn to the question of optimality (stage three). Here, Socrates argues that the
best citizens are produced by the education given to guardians: surely the men who have been
educated as guardians are better than the men educated as cobblers, and the same logic will
hold for the women (456d–e). And the best possible thing for a state is to produce the best men
and women—presumably assuming a state must have men and women, and perhaps assuming
the maximum number of the best sort would be a good thing. Thus, the plan to educate the
women as guardians will produce a better result than a plan to exclude them.
1 Is the Idea that Women Could Take on the Same Jobs as Men an Exercise in
Speculative Imagination, or the Result of Plato’s Real-World Observation?
Throughout this argument, we see references to women’s abilities in different fields: one wom-
an’s natural gifts might be in athletics or music, while another has talents in medicine (455e–
456a; see also 454d). Yet of course women were not given the same opportunities as men in
ancient Athens to participate in medicine, music, or athletics. So, while the point may be obvi-
ous to us, what evidence would Plato be drawing on to make these claims?
Some have argued Plato here is charitably assuming that women would have these abilities,
in spite of the fact he would have no evidence of women working in these fields. For, as the
argument goes, women in ancient Athens hardly participate in public life at all: see, for exam-
ple, Taylor 2012, who claims “the life of an Athenian woman was almost totally private; with
a few exceptions, e.g. in the case of priestesses, she had virtually no civic functions, her activ-
ity being restricted to the care of the household” (78). Coming from the assumption women
would not participate in the workforce or Athenian public life more broadly, then, scholars
have assumed Plato would have been imagining women’s possibilities, perhaps in conjunction
with the ideas of tragic playwrights; Vlastos, for example, cites Clytemnestra, Medea, Anti-
gone, and Alcestis (1995: 139).13
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Yet, while women were certainly not given the same opportunities as men in ancient Athens,
the picture of them as completely removed from public life is simply not correct. Women did,
in fact, work in ancient Athens, in a range of professions, from retail trade to woolworking to
music to, in fact, medicine. One key source for this is epigraphic material, that is, inscriptions,
including dedications to Athena, the Athenian manumission inscriptions, tombstones, and
curse tablets. Examples include a well-known tombstone for a doctor/midwife by the name of
Phanostratē, described in greater detail below.14 Of course, it might be objected that women
of the elite social class that is the main audience of the Republic did not work in these trades;
but the same is true for men of that class. Working women may well have been marginalized,
but we would do well to not marginalize them further into non-existence.
Turning to the three domains noted above: music and athletics make up core parts of elite
Greek education, that is, the kind of education men who were not training in a trade to be-
come practicing professionals would receive (part of the innovation of the Republic is in mak-
ing their vocation in life—politics—a bona fide trade itself). For men, virtuosic skill in those
fields could range from amateur to professional performances: in the case of music, composing
an excellent hymn, or performing as a paid rhapsode; in the case of athletics, winning at the
Olympics, or training the winner at the Olympics as a paid paidotribēs. Women participated
in music and athletics in the same way, even if their opportunities in each case were broadly
more limited. In the case of music, it would be otiose to seek a better example than Sappho
(heralded as the “tenth muse” in the sixteenth epigram attributed to Plato); and, of course,
women worked as professional entertainers—think only of the flute-girl dismissed at the be-
ginning of the Symposium (176e6–8). In the case of athletics, famously women in Sparta were
given athletic training (Xen. Const. Lac. 1.4), and there were well-known competitions for
female athletes in honor of Hera at Olympia.15
Finally, turning to medicine, we should consider the case of Phanostratē, a female physician
practicing in Athens in the fourth century. She is known from her tombstone, on which she
is remembered as a respected “physician and midwife” (IG II2 6873). The latter characteriza-
tion should also draw our attention to a huge group of female medical practitioners in the
ancient world: the midwives, a group which included Socrates’ own mother, Phaenarete. Thus,
perhaps the character Socrates thinks there are women with a gift for medicine not because
he is extrapolating from the mythological Medea’s pharmacological talents, but because he is
remembering the historical Phaenarete’s career.16
2 When Socrates and Glaucon Agree that Men Are Superior to Women, do
they Mean This in Both a Mental and Physical Sense, or Solely the Latter?17
The first reference to women’s supposed weakness relative to men occurs in what was called the
first stage of the argument—that is, in the argument via analogy with dogs. There, when Socrates
asks if we give female and male dogs different tasks, Glaucon replies that they do everything
together, “except we treat the females as weaker and the males as stronger” (451d10–11).18
This sort of language recurs later: in the argument against the misogynist critic, men are said
to “surpass” women in all trades (455d3), and they are said to have the same nature in respect
of guardianship, except one is weaker and the other stronger (456a10–11). In the conclusion,
women are held to be assigned the same role as men, except given lighter duties because of
their weakness (457a6–10).
What is the nature of women’s supposed weakness? Does he mean physically weaker, or
also less cognitively fit? A number of commentators have insisted he simply means physically
weaker.19 Yet, it is worth noting the context of his claim that men surpass women: having just
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shown that not every difference—as noted above, the example used is having hair and being
bald—is relevant to one’s job, the notion of being “naturally gifted in relation to a particular
[trade]” (455b5) is elaborated as being a person who learns easily, learns independently, and
has a body that “adequately serves their mind” (455b5–c1).20 Having laid out these three cri-
teria, he asks if in these ways (tauta, 455c6) men always surpass women, and the answer is yes.
While perhaps the language of weakness and strength, as well as the notion that women will
be given lighter duties than men, suggests a physical interpretation, in my view this context
requires us to see Plato as also claiming women are cognitively inferior to men.
In addition, it is worth seeing how strong a distinction between men’s and women’s abili-
ties is implied by the claim that women should be assigned lighter duties. One may well claim
women are generally weaker than men, but nevertheless each individual should be assigned
tasks that suit them—not least because, while women in general might be weaker, it would
be pre-emptive to assume any given particular woman is weaker than all (or any) men on the
basis of her gender alone. Yet either Plato assumed that, in fact, all guardian women were
weaker than all guardian men, or his claim at 457a9–10 that they should as a class be assigned
lighter duties is undermotivated.21
Taking all of this in view, we might turn a common background question, which is how
many men versus women will be in the guardian class—and, if women are so much “weaker,”
in whatever sense, than men, how will any of them qualify? Will we be looking at something
like an affirmative action system? The basic answer, I think, is no; and, I think the key con-
sideration here to take in view is that the supply of spots available in the guardian class is not
smaller than the number of humans able to make it through the rigors of the guardian edu-
cation (4.445d; 6.491b). (I suspect I was misled by my own experience with elite education,
where “seats in the classroom” are a limited and sought-after resource, from seeing this for a
long time.) The first point Socrates is trying to establish is merely the possibility of educating
women in this system—in other words, he is asking for women to be allowed to even sit the
exams, so to speak. The point about optimality, which is the last stage of the argument, then
could be seen to add to this the idea that it would be good for as many women as possible to
get this education—because, again, there is no shortage in available positions in the guardian
class. Thus, I suggest that Socrates’ reasoning is that getting a greater number of guardian-
educated people—whether they are men or women—is the best.22 So, given that women might
be able to quality as guardians, we certainly should let them do so. He may well expect the
women to be the bottom of the guardian class—but we see nothing like a proposal to adjust
standards for them, or to prize them for any distinctive contribution. Rather, I think the idea is
simply that the requisite talent to be a guardian is so rare that we cannot afford to be throwing
out the women—even if they are weaker candidates.
3 Are Women in the Kallipolis Going to be Involved on Equal Footing with Men
in All Trades, or Is This Argument Restricted to the Trade of Guardianship?
It is worth remembering the target of this argument is not a demonstration that women are
equal to men, but that (some) women are fit to be guardians—and a consequence of that is
that it will be necessary for the state to educate them so as to fulfill their potential. Hence,
the interlocutors frequently mention that the guardians are in view: the important analogy
between human guardians and guard dogs assumes this, and the conclusion to the argument
against the misogynist critic concerns the guardians (456b7–9): “we have come around, then,
to what we said before, and we are agreed that it is not against nature to assign musical and
physical training to the female guardians.”
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Nevertheless, we get glimpses of a potentially larger claim: we’re investigating
Whether the female human does have the natural ability to share in all the tasks of the
male sex, or in none at all, or in some but not others; and, in particular, whether this
holds in the case of warfare.
(Rep. 452e5-453a4)
This question is apparently answered at 455d9–e4: “women can share by nature in

every pursuit, and men in every one…[s]o shall we assign all of them to men and none to
women?,” to which Glaucon responds “how could we?” If there were three options offered at
452e–453a—women and men share in all pursuits, some, or none—we are getting the conclu-
sion that they can share in all of them. The interlocutors go on to list some of these—music
and medicine—before proceeding to the target field, namely, guardianship. Although some
have thought this argument only concerns the trade of guardianship in the ideal city, it would
seem the conclusion at 455d–e extends to all classes.23
It is worth taking note of how strong this conclusion is, and asking how this squares with
the claim about women’s weakness discussed previously. Indeed, a hostile interlocutor might
pick up on exactly that apparent concession to his side and attempt to conclude that therefore
there are roles that women should be excluded from—even if weakness is only meant physi-
cally, perhaps there are jobs that have such high physical demands no woman would be able
to complete them. Perhaps he could point to jobs like being a certain kind of elite athlete,24 a
stoneworker, or a member of an elite military squadron. Considering Socrates’ potential re-
plies to each may throw more light on how he is thinking about roles and physical capacities.
To the athlete case, the solution may be as simple as pointing out that this is not a job in
ancient Greece and that full-fledged jobs never have requirements as simple as “carry 80lbs.
of lead” or “run 100m. in under 10s.” They require a complex set of skills, and when we take
that into account, it is not obvious that physical strength at some specific level is actually a
sine qua non—rather it will always be one part of a larger profile of a candidate’s broader
strengths and weaknesses.
Building on this line of thinking (no pun intended), we can consider stoneworkers: it is true
that physical strength plays a role in being able to craft certain kinds of works, but again this
is potentially offset by other assets (at a physical level, things like fine-motor skills and poten-
tially extra agile small hands).
Finally, turning to a modern parallel, with the notion of elite military squadrons having
inherent requirements women could not meet: until recently, it was held that physical weak-
ness would effectively disbar women from being able to complete strenuous Marine Corps
boot camps. Yet, it appears that little by little each officer training course or GI boot camp
which was held for years to be “simply” out of reach for women actually can be completed
by women—indeed, in the most recent barrier broken, female marines passed the crucible at
Camp Pendleton in 2021. This grueling course offered no handicaps to the female recruits,
who in point of fact secured the highest scores on both the drills and physical tests.
Socrates’ vision allowed for what we might think of as avant la lettre reasonable accom-
modations—women soldiers are to be assigned lighter tasks (457a9–10), having in view
discrepancies in physical strength, but also that physical strength is hardly the only thing
that matters to being a qualified guardian, and therefore, it would be foolish to treat it as
a necessary condition. Perhaps the female marines have shown further reasons it would be
foolish to bar women from the job of being a guardian: it is not even clear that, at the highest
level, gender is a suitable heuristic for physical strength that might be usefully employed by
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would-be city managers as a tool to accurately discriminate between those who can serve in
physically demanding roles and those who cannot.
One might wonder about another kind of difference, namely, differences in life experi-
ence. In the Theaetetus at 149b10–c2, we get the suggestion that midwives are only drawn
from a certain subset of the population: women who have already had children themselves.
We might connect this with a modern parallel: an oft-cited reason for the lack of female
coaches in male sports is that female candidates cannot have had the experience of playing
in the competitive environment of men’s basketball, men’s soccer, or so on (Malady 2012).
To put it in a tongue in cheek way: perhaps the bald men can be shoemakers, but not hair
stylists. But the resources sketched in the previous paragraph are enough to show how easy
this is to challenge: any given role requires more than just one sort of experience or ability,
but rather a range of competences, and it’s perfectly plausible to imagine that a bald man
with a great sense of style and finesse with his scissors would outcompete any candidate
with beautiful tresses and great skill at doing their own hair, but no ability to see the vision
for other people’s locks.
4 What Is the Relationship Between the First Wave (Inclusion of Women in

the Guardian Class) and the Second Wave (Abolition of the Nuclear Family)?
In the narrative of the dialogue, these two waves are explicitly linked: we first raise the ques-
tion about women in connection with the idea of “common ownership of women and chil-
dren” (κοινωνίαν γυναικῶν τε καὶ παίδων, 449d4, Emlyn Jones and Preddy trans.), which was
alluded to in book four (4.423e7–424a3). At that earlier juncture, the interlocutors did not
press Socrates on what he means; but they bring him back to this question in book five, which
leads, in fact, first to the discussion of women as guardians and then the discussion of the
“common ownership of women and children.” No doubt in the narrative, then, the question
about female guardians arises out of the idea that nuclear families will be abolished in the ideal
state.25 But what about the philosophical relationship between the two? A range of options
have been mooted: Okin 1977, for example, argued Plato was forced by the elimination of the
nuclear family to reconsider women’s potential roles; Annas 1976 argued that the two propos-
als were quite separate, with considerations of unity and eugenic aims motivating the second
wave quite independently of the reasons motivating the first wave; and Gardner 2000 argued
that, contrary to Okin, the first wave is not in fact conceptually posterior to the second wave,
and that, contrary to Annas, the waves are indeed connected by a single aim (in her telling,
that aim is based on eugenic concerns).26
Perhaps it is worth stating that requiring women to serve as guardians does require a re-
think of the family (since women would not have the requisite time to specialize as guardians
if they are expected to also serve as traditional homemakers), whereas the abolition of the
nuclear family does not require women to serve as guardians. Independent of the thought that
women have the right natural talents to serve as guardians, one would think it was perfectly
plausible to hold that the nuclear family should be abolished (on the grounds private property
is to be eliminated) and women would live in any number of other formats (as independent
craftspeople, or in small or large groups separate from men).27 At any rate, as Bluestone brings
out, it would seem quite contrary to the notion of justice posited in the Republic to have basi-
cally unqualified women serving as guardians (1987: 42).
Indeed, turning to the definition of justice, we can see that this itself suggests a re-examination
of women’s roles. For in book four, we read the following: justice is “the principle embodied
in child, woman, slave, free, artisan, ruler, and ruled, that each performed his one task as one
172
man and was not a versatile busybody” (433d2–4).28 The explicit application of this princi-
ple to women suggests a reason, independent of the abolition of the nuclear family, for the
re-consideration of women’s role: the prōtos logos itself, which while formulated in terms of
andres in book two, is here explicitly held to obtain for women as well.
I suggest Xenophon’s Memorabilia 2.7 could serve as an interesting comparandum (indeed,
foil) for the thinking here. In Mem. 2.7, we meet a man in financial distress: Aristarchus has
inherited the care of a number of freeborn women, and his resources are being drained in
maintaining them. Socrates challenges him to see that these women are, in effect, artisans,
capable of making useful things—specifically bread and woven garments. Thus, the suggestion
is to put them to work—which Aristarchus does, setting them at woolworking, and setting
himself up as their guard and caretaker, likened to a watchdog (2.7.14).
Plato goes quite beyond this in imagining in an ideal society what women’s potential would
look like. While Xenophon has freeborn women working in traditionally feminine crafts,
Plato holds that women should pursue whichever crafts they are naturally suited for—which
goes far beyond weaving and cooking. While the pursuit of craftwork by women need not
spell the end of the nuclear family—it does for neither Aristarchus’ family in Xenophon,
nor for historical women like Socrates’ mother—the pursuit of an all-encompassing craft like
guardianship we might well imagine does not leave time for domestic duties. After all, Plato
draws attention to some of the perceived obligations of traditional motherhood that require
a sizeable investment of time, and presumably do not, in his view, contribute to the guard-
ian’s further development as a leader (460d). In brief, these simply get in the way of the full
application of the principle of specialization for women: they must be, as it is formulated in
2.370c5–6, “at leisure from other occupations,”29 which for homemakers would include care
of children, cooking, cleaning, and the like.
Thus, I suggest we might look at the first wave as an investigation of what women’s roles
should look like in light of the principle of specialization—something foreshadowed by the
remark at 433d2–4. The result of that discussion is that women will serve as guardians. This
then shapes the exact orientation of what this society without nuclear families will look like—
that it will have the communal rearing pens, for example, in order to take the burden off of
guardian women for raising guardian children. But the fact the Kallipolis will not have nuclear
families is itself independently motivated as well, by eugenicist aims as well as the overarch-
ing interest in creating unity through the abolition of public property. Thus, these two waves
nicely dovetail, drawing on independent reasons yet mutually supporting one another.
5 In Light of Plato’s Hostile Attitude Towards Women Elsewhere

in the Republic, and in Other Dialogues, How Do We Square His
Positive Statements about Women’s Potential Here?
Plato does not offer a consistently positive evaluation of women. In the Timaeus, for ex-
ample, the punishment for men who live unjustly is reincarnation as women (42b2–c1); in
the Phaedo, Socrates’ wife Xanthippe is portrayed unsympathetically (60a–b) and crying in
general is classed as a womanly and inappropriate way to behave (117d–e). Within the Re-
public, too, the portrayal of women is not universally positive: in the discussion of Homer and
tragedy, poets are criticized for inducing their listeners to approve of womanly (rather than
manly) conduct (10.605c9–e6), and there is a distinctly misogynistic flavor to the depiction
of the greedy and nagging mother of the timocratic man (8.549c–e).30 On the other hand, the
depiction of Diotima in the Symposium—to whom the account of love and theory of Forms
endorsed in that dialogue by Socrates is attributed—as well as Aspasia in the Menexenus
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provide context for the more positive evaluation of women’s philosophical abilities that we
see in the fifth book of the Republic.31
What sort of reconciliation might we effect? One popular strategy has been to emphasize
how the negative statements pertain to women in actual existing societies, while the positive
statements are meant to capture women’s ideal potential.32 Women have the natural capacity
to equal men, in other words, but have not flourished to their full abilities in the shoddy condi-
tions of ancient Athens or other societies.33
But we would do well to keep in mind that even in Republic 5 women are not said to be
equal to men—rather, the argument is that they should not be removed from consideration
from any job. In light of the interpretation of the “weakness” claims offered above (in Sec-
tion 2), we therefore have another interpretation available to us: Plato consistently construes
women as weaker than men and, in some places, states this in a delicate and qualified way (as
in Republic 5), and in other places, he states this in a more blatantly misogynist fashion, and
without argument.
6 Is This Passage Meant Sincerely?

This is not the only text to indicate that there was interest in the status and possible politi-
cal role of women in classical Athens.34 In rhetoric, we have Gorgias posing the question of
whether the virtue of men and women was the same or different—a question taken up by So-
crates in Plato’s Meno and still current in Aristotle (Politics 1.13).35 In tragedy, Medea’s first
speech in her eponymous play sets out her particular situation in the context of the broader
mistreatment of women in Greek culture; the Antigone shows its heroine calling the politi-
cal establishment, represented by her male relative Creon, to task for violating divine justice.
Many have seen Plato as especially engaging with the works of Aristophanes, who in the Lysis-
trata, Ecclesiazousae, and Thesmophorozousae saw women doing political work—attending
the Assembly, voting, intervening in war, and more—themselves. As a comic poet, part of the
humor is women taking on these roles; but, as always, one has to take care to understand
at whose expense, exactly, these jokes were made. Male audience members? Their wives?
Would-be revolutionaries? Conservative reactionaries? All of the above?
The Ecclesiazousae is a particularly important intertext: in this play, women infiltrate
the Athenian Assembly and vote to change power over from the men to themselves, on the
grounds that they are quite a bit less duplicitous in their dealings than men (441–453).36 They
institute revolutionary change: property will be made communal and sexual relationships will
no longer be exclusive (588–710). As a consequence of the latter, individual children will
no longer be recognized by parents as their own—rather, each generation will recognize the
younger generation in general as their children, and all their elders as their parents. Of course,
this is strongly reminiscent of the ideal city. Chronologically, this play likely predates the
Republic.37 Therefore, one can and should read the proposals of the Republic as somehow in
conversation with Aristophanes’ play.
Yet the nature of that relationship—or, in other words, what Plato’s point is in invoking this
play—is unclear. Some—most importantly, Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom—have thought this
proposal was not meant seriously; the invocation of a comic plot would make sense, therefore,
because the notion of women ruling was comical.38 But, as George Klosko has pointed out,
just because Plato is reacting to Aristophanes’ comical depiction of the Athenian democracy
does not mean Plato himself is writing satire.39 Independent of further reasons to read this
dialogue insincerely, a tongue-in-cheek reading of this passage is not particularly persuasive;
Aristotle thought it was meant seriously (Politics 2.1–4), and so should we.
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7 Was Plato a Feminist?

Gregory Vlastos famously posed this question as the title of his article considering Plato’s
views on women.40 His conclusion was that Plato transcended societal prejudice and personal
feeling to elevate the role of women and advanced a feminist proposal in book five of the
Republic. In support of that, he offers as a definition of feminism: “equality in the rights of
persons shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex.” Inasmuch as women who are
qualified to be guardians in the ideal city are not by sex barred from that role, Plato’s proposal
is, on that definition, feminist.
Of course, others have not been so positive in evaluating the book five proposal. Julia
Annas drew important attention to the issue that Plato is, of course, not at all interested in
individual rights—a topic central to modern feminism. Taylor, more recently, concluded that
[H]is attitude is that of the modern male conservative, who accepts that there should be
no barriers to women’s education, professional advancement, etc., while complacently
expecting that in fact only the exceptional woman will have the ability to climb to the
top of her particular tree.
(Taylor 2012: 84-85)
—noting, of course, the claims about women’s weakness discussed in Section 2. Importantly,
at stake here is as much the definition of feminism as Plato’s thought, and to some degree the
provocative question invites us to think through what sorts of feminism this texts makes con-
tact with, and where its blindspots lie.
A minimal change to Vlastos’s proposed definition would have us at least turn our gaze
from rights to educational opportunities. It is true that, if it even makes sense to think about
something like the “right to take up the job of being a ruler,” women are not disbarred from
this in the society described in the Republic. But a society could do that and still have a seri-
ous “pipeline” problem. One can accomplish the same thing—no women rulers—by either
banning them from being rulers or banning them from getting the training to be rulers, and
then facetiously telling them “it’s not your sex—it’s that you aren’t qualified.” Sometimes the
two forms of discrimination work in tandem, in a sort of viciously illogical cycle: as docu-
mented in Barbara McManus’s biography of Grace Macurdy, a female Hellenist in the early
twentieth century, when a huge number of women were qualified and competitive applicants
for training in classical archaeology, there was a move to restrict their access to this training
on grounds that discrimination on the job market meant they wouldn’t be able to find posts
after they finished (!).41 We can note that the ideal city of the Republic would not have this
issue: the argument in book five clearly provides not only for qualified women to be afforded
the same opportunities to rule as men but also for girls to be trained in the same way as boys
from the start.
On the other side of the coin, we should note two major places where this dialogue falls far
short of being a feminist text: (i) the claims that women are weaker than men in all fields (and
this being understood, as argued in Section 2, to be a claim about women’s cognitive abilities,
not just physical abilities) and (ii) sexist comments made in passing (for example, 10.605c9–e6,
as mentioned in Section 5).
Finally, moving from the realm of theory to historical politics: we might wonder about
Plato’s feminism beyond the pages of this dialogue, particularly in reference to any educational
or political activity in Athens or abroad. Plato was said to have had two female students,
Lastheneia of Mantinea and Axiothea of Phlius, at the Academy (Diogenes Laertius 3.46).
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But, while Plato was said to have tried to apply the insights of the Republic in his work in
Syracuse, and Aristotle (for example) clearly thinks of the institutions concerning women
and children as central to that text (Politics 2.1–4), no source that I know of claims he took
particular interest in political reforms to, for example, change the role of women in society in
Syracuse or Athens.
8 Has the Reception of this Passage—Especially, the Prevalence of the No Answer

to Question 6—Suffered Because of Systematic Misogynist Bias?
The interpretation of arguments in the history of philosophy is informed by the assumptions
of the interpreter themself. This is most obvious in the cases where we might take for granted
what they did not, and vice versa. As social changes—particularly with respect to the career
opportunities and political roles of women—have taken place over the last 200 years, so too
have the interpretations of this passage changed. More particularly, we might think the recep-
tion of this passage has suffered not simply from different, but incorrect, assumptions about
women’s potential in two different ways: marginalization and misconstrual.
The Republic is now the most widely taught philosophical text in English-language univer-
sities (Baltzly, Finamore and Miles 2018: 1)—but we should not forget that it has not always
been so popular. For example, the Timaeus and Parmenides were judged more important by
ancient writers (Baltzly, Finamore and Miles 2018: 1–2). The radical proposals about wom-
en’s role attracted attention and condemnation by some authors—one might especially recall
Aristotle beginning his critique of the Republic in book two of the Politics with discussion
of the abolition of the private household, while Leonardo Bruni, an important Renaissance
humanist, declined to translate the Republic on grounds that the views expressed about the
community of women were liable to give offense to contemporary audiences (Bluestone 1988:
41–42). Others simply did not touch on this passage: Natalie Bluestone documents a surpris-
ing number of scholars, such as Karl Popper, whose broad interpretations one might think
requires engagement with these ideas, yet who pass over it in silence (1988: 47).
The reception of this passage has also suffered in another way: namely, critics have mis-
construed important elements of the argument due to their own blinkered views of women’s
potential. Again, Bluestone documents the key figures, citing for example A. E. Taylor’s mis-
reading of this passage. As she puts it, “[i]t is striking that scholars whose interpretations
make the Platonic text vital and comprehensible in many respects, are so much less careful
when dealing with matters of female equality” (1988: 54).
We might think of this as opening up onto a broader question: what does the principle of
charity look like in the history of philosophy? In this argument, as seen in Section 1 above, the
background assumptions throw important light on the construal of the argument. Yet which
assumptions should we help ourselves to: those the philosopher’s audience might have found
acceptable, or those we find reasonable? (And, without a doubt, the idea that either “the
philosopher’s audience” or “we” are an undifferentiated monolith is untenable.) Arguably, to
make the text “vital and comprehensible,” to quote Bluestone again, requires consideration
of both.
No doubt, therefore, the reception of this passage has been affected by the intellectual cli-
mate of its readers over the years and what they thought was possible for women in politics
and philosophy. By way of conclusion, I may put the idea a different way, focusing less on the
possible distortions that we current readers bring to the text, and more on what opportunities
that come with reading this argument in the twenty-first century and beyond: what contempo-
rary ideas or questions does this text still resonate with? If we always read in light of our own
176
assumptions, how might we actively interrogate those assumptions with this text in hand? In
other words, how might it productively challenge us today? I highlight two possibilities.
First, we might emphasize how this argument does rebut one still common misogynist
fallacy. It is still all too often claimed that women differ from men in some general way and
this explains differences in what roles they take up. For instance, in the infamous memo cir-
culated by James Damore in 2017 at Google, he pointed to broad psychological differences
(“women generally…have a stronger interest in people rather than things”) as justification for
the gender gap in certain fields. But, as the argumentum ad absurdum concerning bald and
long-haired men making shoes shows, one might well acknowledge differences between men
and women, and absolutely nothing necessarily follows with respect to how they should be
distributed into different careers.
Second, we might cast an eye at how important the principle of specialization is in this
argument. Professionals—especially, but not only, the philosopher-rulers—are meant to have
enough time to pursue their trade at leisure from all other responsibilities. We might connect
this in any number of directions—to the evergreen problem of how caregivers with little state
support are meant to focus on their career, to the question of if it really is for the best to insist
on the idea that solitary focus on a career is a good thing for individuals, families, and the com-
munity. Perhaps there is more to be done in providing for the conditions for individuals to spe-
cialize in their work, free from requirements to multitask just to stay afloat. But perhaps there
is also more to be interrogated about the idea the role of work in our communities, period.
Notes
1 I would like to thank the editors, Sara Brill and Catherine McKeen, for their work organizing this
volume and the workshop on women and ancient Greek philosophy; I would particularly like to
thank as well the participants in that workshop. Over the course of working on projects related to
Plato’s argument in Republic V, I have had the opportunity to benefit from many interlocutors, in-
cluding audiences at Columbia, the University of Houston, Louisiana State University, the University
of Oklahoma, and the University of Virginia. I would also like to thank Kathryn MacKay for reading
a draft of this paper and Jeremy Reid for countless conversations about points of interpretation, as
well as the occasional foray into the niceties of Greek and English grammar.
2 On the argument for the inclusion of women in the guardian class, see especially the chapters by Ra-
chana Kamtekar and John Proios, Rachel Singpurwalla, and Patricia Marechal in this (Chapters 15,
14, and 13). On the reception of Plato in recent centuries, and its intersections with different political
movements, see esp. Lane 2001; focusing on the argument for the inclusion of women, see Bluestone
1987, 1988.
3 For an example of an intervention at the third level (on my schema), see the chapter by Frank and
Greenberg in this volume (Chapter 16).
4 The issue is at 454d2. This chapter will focus on the argumentative and social/historical layers; for
details on the manuscript issue see Slings 2005: 82–85. Another important issue at the level of the
grammar of the text is the interpretation of hēttōmenon at 455d2. On both issues, see Hulme 2022.
5 See also Wilson 2018a.
6 References to the Republic are from book five unless otherwise indicated. Translations are from
Reeve 2004 except where otherwise indicated. Line numbers correspond to the Slings OCT edition.
7 See Blair 2012: 70–71 for an overview of different scholars’ reactions to the place of book five in the
overall argument of the Republic.
8 Townsend notes that Xenophon, in On Hunting, gives as suggested names for hunting dogs both
male and female versions of Guard (Phroura and Phulax, 7.5; see Townsend 2017: 29).
9 We might highlight that this is only to hold for women in the ideal city. The exact language used at
451c–d should be noted: for humans (anthrōpoi, 451c3) raised in the ideal city (not, that is, for men
raised in such a city, as some translations would misleadingly suggest), this is the right way of doing
things. The use of anthrōpoi here is in contrast to the use of andres in the formulation of “four or five
men” as the bare minimum for a city (2.369d11–e1).
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Emily Hulme
10 See Townsend for discussion of what’s at stake in this passage in insisting men and women exercise
naked together (Townsend 2017: 89–108, esp. 89–93).
11 Halliwell 1998: 140, at 451c8, says the argument from analogy is “implicitly hypothetical,” which
seems to me to be confirmed by the language in the following argument, e.g., we are said to need to
examine “if they [the proposals] are possible or not” (εἰ δυνατὰ ἢ οὔ, 452e4). See also Blair 2012: 98.
12 As McKeen notes, the strategy here is—for modern readers—counterintuitive: the interlocutors claim
that men are better than women in every trade, therefore no trade (including guardianship) is specifi-
cally for men or women (McKeen 2006: 534–535).
13 See also Santas 2010; Harry and Polanksy 2016: 268.
14 See further Hulme 2022; Brock 1994.
15 See further Miller 2004.
16 On women in science (including medicine) in ancient Greece, see Connell 2021. Proclus also thinks
that this conclusion comes from observation (as he puts it, apo tōn pragmatōn, In Rem. 1. 248.23–24
Kroll), although he has a different group of women in mind: he says Socrates established that men
and women should have the same education from observation that “some women live [in accord-
ance with] the virtue of men” (In Rem. 1.248.24–25 Kroll; Baltzly, Finamore, and Miles trans.)—
something which Timaeus also knew, he says, from knowledge of the lives of Pythagorean women
(248.21–27 Kroll). See also the discussion in essay nine about Diotima, Theoxena, and Berenice
(255.13–24 Kroll). See too the references in Proclus to observations of women in warfare (and men
in conventionally feminine crafts): 253.14–26 Kroll (cf. 241.40–242.7 Kroll).
17 On this question, see especially Patricia Marechal’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 13).
18 My trans.
19 See, e.g., Santas 2010: 112–113; Harry and Polansky 2016: 269–270, with n. 16. On the other hand,
Annas 1976: 309–311; Taylor 2012: 84 think the interlocutors have physical and cognitive differ-
ences in view.
20 My translations.
21 On this, see Calvert 1975: 237.
22 Presumably, the logic is not an unqualified “if some are good, more are better”—a city full of guard-
ians and no producers would present a new challenge. Rather, I take it that the thought must be that,
as some kind of natural limitation of humankind, only a few people will have enough talent to make
it through the gauntlet of this exhausting educational program.
23 For the view that all women will be on equal footing in all trades, see, e.g., Santas 2010: 118 n. 8;
for the view that this argument is restricted to guardianship, see, e.g., Annas 1976: 315; Okin 1977:
359–360. For a studied suspension of judgment, see Smith 1983: 467 n. 1. See also Blair 2012: 90–91.
24 On athletic achievements and gender, viewed in particular through the lens of the often incorrect
assumptions made about the effects of testosterone, see esp. Jordan-Young and Karkazis 2019. One
example is particularly illuminating in light of the discussion above about the complex relationship
between qualification for a specific role and biology: they interviewed a rower with a small frame and
testosterone levels below normal who had the willpower to train so hard that she endured stress frac-
tures from the forces she was putting on her own body as pulled. She won Olympic gold twice (170).
25 One may note, on the other hand, that the second wave is said to “follow” (hepetai, 457c7) the previ-
ous discussion.
26 See also the discussion of the scholarship on this topic in Bluestone 1987: 102–108; Blair 2012:
91–93.
27 But see McKeen 2006: 537–540, for an alternative approach to why some arrangements—for exam-
ple, assigning all women to the productive class—may not have been considered acceptable.
28 Shorey trans.
29 Shorey trans.
30 There is, in addition, what is aptly called by Halliwell 1998: 140 (following Clark 1989: 8) the
“casual androcentrism” of the text—e.g., statements that refer to the community of wives, when it
should be the community of wives and husbands.
31 See Wender 1973: 80–82 for further examples. It may be noted that much of her discussion of sexual-
ity is dated and uses homophobic assumptions.
32 See Vlastos 1995: 137–138; Levin 1996: 24–26; Harry and Polansky 2016.
33 Blair 2012: 3–8 lists the range of approaches to Plato’s (putatively) contradictory statements on
women and equality. Ultimately, she thinks the contradiction is superficial: one might separate out
178
the genuinely philosophical Platonic views from the views that are expressed for dramatic/rhetorical
purposes.
34 See Blair 2012: 39–55 for discussion of this topic in the circle around Socrates.
35 See esp. Scott 2010.
36 While this act is novel and revolutionary from the standpoint of Athenian government, women nev-
ertheless are characterized as conservative (214–228): men depart from the ancestral ways, while
women “celebrate the Thesmophoria, as they always have; they bake cookies as they always have;
they drive their husbands nuts as they always have” (Henderson trans., punctuation modified). In the
context of Platonic political philosophy, we might connect this with both the conservatism—not just
in politics, but in social life and culture, too—in the Laws, as well as the claim made in the Critias that
women serving in the military in the Kallipolis is actually a return to ancestral custom (the evidence
for the latter including the conventional depiction of Athena in armor, 110b5–c2).
37 See further Platter 2013, esp. 160–164; and, on the relationship between the play and Republic five
in general, see Halliwell 1998: 224–225 as well as Adam 1902: 345–355.
38 See esp. Bluestone 1987: 41–50, 154–162 on these sorts of interpretations.
39 See Klosko 1986, esp. 282–286.
40 See Vlastos 1995, originally published as “Was Plato a Feminist?” Times Literary Supplement 4, 485
(March 17, 1989), 276, 288–289.
41 See McManus 2017: 173: the chair of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Edward
Capps of Princeton, wanted to put a quota in place for women, on the grounds that “[t]here is a
dearth of men archaeologists and a superfluity of women. The latter can’t get jobs; we can supply the
institutions that are on the watch for able men.”
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Platter, C. (2013) “Plato’s Aristophanes.” In Ancient Comedy and Reception: Essays in Honor of
Jeffrey Henderson, edited by S. D. Olson, 132–166. Berlin; Boston, MA: De Gruyter. https://doi.
org/10.1515/9781614511250.132
Santas, G. (2010) “The Equality of Women.” In Understanding Plato’s Republic, 107–119. Malden,
MA: Blackwell.
Scott, D. (2010) “One Virtue or Many? Aristotle’s Politics 1.13 and the Meno.” Bulletin of the Institute
of Classical Studies supplement no. 107: 101–122.
Smith, N. D. (1983) “Plato and Aristotle on the Nature of Women.” Journal of the History of Philosophy
21 (4): 467–478.
Taylor, C. C. W. (2012) “The Role of Women in Plato’s Republic.” In Virtue and Happiness: Essays in
Honor of Julia Annas, edited by Rachana Kamtekar, 75–87. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://
doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199646043.003.0005.
Townsend, M. (2017) The Woman Question in Plato’s Republic. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Vlastos, G. (1995) “Was Plato a Feminist?” In Studies in Greek Philosophy, edited by Daniel W. Gra-
ham, 2: 133–143. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wender, D. (1973) “Plato: Misogynist, Paedophile, and Feminist.” Arethusa 6 (1): 75–90.
Wilson, E. (2018a) “A Doggish Translation.” New York Review of Books, January 18, 2018.
———. (2018b) “Translator’s Note.” In The Odyssey, 81–91. New York: Norton.
Suggested Further Reading

The literature on this topic is voluminous—the organization of the chapter around individual questions
ought to provide initial suggestions for bibliography on those questions. Otherwise, I’ll highlight two
key texts: J. Annas, “Plato’s Republic and Feminism,” Philosophy 51 (197): 307–321 (1976), remains
essential reading for the overall topic and serves as a good starting point for the last 50 years of
scholarship; and D. Baltzly, J. F. Finamore, and G. Miles, Proclus: Commentary on Plato’s Republic,
Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), provides a translation and introduction to an
important ancient commentary which treats this topic.
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13
WOMEN, SPIRIT,
AND AUTHORITY IN PLATO
AND ARISTOTLE
Patricia Marechal
1 Introduction
It is often said that Plato and Aristotle strongly disagreed on their views about women.1
Indeed, a cursory glance at Republic V suggests that Plato thought women were just as natu-
rally suited as men to defend, manage, and rule the city. In contrast, several remarks in Aristo-
tle’s Politics I leave a sour taste in one’s mouth: Aristotle appears to have thought that women
were by nature unsuited to ruling, and so should be ruled by men. Some interpreters have ar-
gued that Plato and Aristotle’s disagreement on this issue springs from their different views on
the nature of women.2 Since this reading has influenced our assessment of Plato and Aristotle,
as well as our understanding of some of their philosophical theses, it is worth revisiting their
views on women’s nature.
As is well known, book V of the Republic examines whether women and men should be
assigned the same or different tasks in kallipolis. Specifically, Socrates and his interlocutors
want to determine whether women could, and should, participate in tasks related to guarding
the city.3 Socrates’ conclusion seems clear enough: “a woman and a man have the same nature
with regards to guarding the city” (456a10). Yet, throughout the argument, Socrates claims
that women are weaker and men stronger in everything they do (451e1, 456a11, 457a10)
and that there is no human activity in which the male sex is not superior (455c5, 455d2). In
fact, every time Socrates suggests that capacities relevant to guarding the city are similarly dis-
tributed between the sexes, he qualifies his statements by adding that women are, in general,
weaker than men. These claims, we may think, point to a conclusion different from the one
drawn by Socrates. If women tend to be weaker than men, why should we entrust them with
the important tasks of protecting and ruling the city?
In this essay, I will focus on the details of Socrates’ argument at Republic 451d–457b, with
a special emphasis on the remarks concerning women’s weakness.4 Whatever else we think of
this argument, we need to acknowledge that Socrates thinks women are generally weaker than
men in everything they do, and that this weakness explains why on the whole men outperform
women in all pursuits. In Section 2, I will defend the view that Plato thinks women are weak in
that they have a psychological propensity to get easily dispirited, which makes them less effec-
tive in implementing and executing their rational decisions. Thus, claims about women’s weak-
ness qualify the scope and significance of the conclusion of Socrates’ argument. In Section 3,
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Patricia Marechal
I will offer an interpretation of Aristotle’s claim that, although women possess a deliberative
capacity, this capacity is not “authoritative” (akuron) in them (Pol. I.11, 1260a12).5 This
claim, I shall argue, means that women have a propensity to be easily dispirited, thus fail-
ing to stick to their practical resolutions. By the end of this essay, I hope to have shown that
there is more continuity between Plato and Aristotle’s views on the nature of women than has
previously been acknowledged. I will also suggest a reason why despite sharing certain views
about the nature of women, these philosophers assign them different roles in the city. Along
the way, I will argue that the interpretation defended in this paper expands our understanding
of the nature and role of spirit (thumos) in these authors and gives us an insight into a kind of
moral-psychological success (and its corresponding failing) that Plato and Aristotle consider
central to both personal and political agency.
2 Plato on Women’s Weakness

The discussion about women in Republic V starts with a question: “does the female human
have the natural capacity to share in all the tasks of the male sex, in none at all, or in some
but not others?” (452e5–453a3). If we think that women have a natural ability to partake
in the same tasks as men, they would in principle be entitled to defend, manage, and rule the
city. This in turn has direct consequences for the educational program of kallipolis. If men and
women both have suitable natures to be guardians, they should receive the same kind of train-
ing and education. In the following discussion, Socrates intends to show that it is indeed “pos-
sible” (dunata) for women to perform tasks related to guarding the city (452e4; cf. 456c5–8).
Socrates, I will argue, tackles two different kinds of gender segregationist views. The first
kind argues that, since women are naturally suited to bearing children, this is what they are
made to do, and they should therefore only be assigned roles related to their reproductive
function. This view rests on alleged biological—more specifically, reproductive—differences
between women and men. The second kind of gender segregationist argues that women do not
have the necessary psychological and physical dispositions to be adequate guardians. Accord-
ing to this person, women are ill-equipped to perform public roles successfully. This argument
relies on prejudices about the talents of women, which may or may not be grounded in bio-
logical differences owing to their reproductive function. Socrates disagrees with both views.
He argues that some women can be naturally endowed with the qualities necessary to become
a guardian and that we should assign to such women tasks that suit their nature. However, he
also argues that, on the whole, women are outperformed by men in everything because they
are naturally weaker than men. Thus, even those women who make it to the guardian class
should be assigned easier tasks.
As said, Socrates and his interlocutors want to determine whether women should be guard-
ians. The answer to this question, Socrates says, may appear to have been settled in discus-
sions in previous books. The interlocutors had hitherto agreed on a principle of specialization,
according to which different natures should be assigned different tasks (453b2–5; 453e2).
Socrates takes for granted that women and men have some natural differences. As he says,
“the female bears (tiktein) the offspring while the male begets (ocheuein) it” (453b7; 453e3).
Therefore, one may think, per the principle of specialization, women and men should be as-
signed different tasks according to their nature. Specifically, women should be assigned do-
mestic and childrearing chores. But Socrates advises us to proceed with care. Not every natural
difference is relevant when trying to determine which tasks we should assign to whom. Being
bald or having hair, for example, is a natural difference, yet everyone would agree that this
is not relevant to, say, being a doctor, an engineer, or a teacher.6 Socrates concludes that we
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should find a criterion to identify relevant natural differences. His proposal is a sensible one:
a natural difference is relevant with respect to a specific task or pursuit. Having a sense of
humor is relevant to writing good jokes, but not to running a marathon. Being tall is relevant
to playing basketball, but not to writing poems. We need to identify a particular task first,
and only then can we ask whether some natural difference is relevant for its performance. As
Socrates says, we must “not consider every kind of difference and sameness in nature,” but
rather “attend only to the kind of difference and sameness related to the pursuits themselves”
(454c7–d1).
Socrates goes on to make a further, but related claim: we can only determine whether two
individuals (or groups) have the same or different natures (understood as having the same or
different natural dispositions) relative to a given activity. This idea relies on a general point
about dispositions. Indeed, in this same book, Socrates gives us a criterion for individuating
and distinguishing capacities7:
In the case of a capacity, I can see only what it deals with and what it does, and it is on
that basis that I come to call each the capacity it is: those assigned to deal with the same
things and that do the same, I call the same; those that deal with different things and do
different things, I call different.
(Rep. 477d1–5; emphasis added)8
There is much to discuss in these lines, but the important point for our purposes is that dis-
positions are individuated in virtue of what they are for.9 Because natural dispositions are
individuated in virtue of their corresponding activities, men and women may have different
natural dispositions with respect to some activities, but the same dispositions regarding others.
For example, “a male and female whose souls are suited for medicine have the same nature”
relative to healing (454d1–2), while a male suited for carpentry has a different nature in
comparison with a male suited for medicine (454d3–4). As mentioned, Socrates assumes that
there is a natural difference between women and men. For him, “the female bears (tiktein)
the offspring while the male begets (ocheuein) it” (453b7; 453e3).10 Given the criterion stated
above, this distinction only shows that men and women have a different nature in relation to
reproduction, but this is irrelevant when it comes to determining whether men and women
have the same or different natures for guarding the city. Indeed,
If [male and female humans] are shown to differ in this respect alone—i.e., that the
female bears the offspring while the male begets—we will say it has not yet been demon-
strated that a woman is different from a man with regards to what we are talking about
[i.e. performing managerial tasks], and we will continue to believe our guardians and
their women should have the same pursuits.
(454d9–e4)11
The burden of proof, then, falls to the camp of the supporter of gender inequality. Indeed, So-
crates says, they need “to show [men and women] are different from each other with regards
to” the tasks of protecting, managing, and ruling the city (454d8–9). While a disposition to
bear children shows a natural suitability for carrying children, it does not (at least not by itself)
show that someone is not naturally suited for tasks unrelated to reproduction. Indeed, the
fact that men are suited for fathering children does not restrict them to this reproductive role.
It is worth noting here an asymmetry between ascribing and denying natural capabil-
ities. If someone plays the piano competently, it is safe to attribute to them a natural
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suitability for playing the piano. In contrast, if someone has never played the piano, we
cannot conclude that they are naturally unsuited to do so. Part of Socrates’ point is that
from observing (as most Athenians would have done) that most women were exclusively
devoted to bearing and rearing children, and to domestic chores related to motherhood, it
cannot be ruled out that they have a natural disposition for other tasks they did not have
a chance to practice. Then, it is perfectly possible for women to be endowed with other
abilities, including those relevant to adequately managing the city. Of course, arguments
in favor of the possibility of something say nothing about its actuality and, although So-
crates established that we cannot infer that women are unsuited to rule from their natural
disposition to bear children, he has not yet shown that women have a natural disposition
to guard and rule the city.
So, Socrates does not stop there. He goes on to consider “another” (allos) opponent
(455a6), who does not point to the reproductive differences between men and women, yet
still insists that women are naturally ill-suited to protecting and ruling the city. These people,
“after reflection,” conclude that “it would not be difficult to show this” by considering a set
of criteria that determine natural suitability for crafts or pursuits (455a5–7). Socrates spells
out these criteria as follows:
Come on, then, we will say to him, give us an answer: “Is this what you meant by one
person being fit for something and another unfit for some pursuit: [1] that the one learns
it easily, the other with difficulty; [2] that the one, after a little instruction, can discover
a lot for himself in the subject being studied, whereas the other, even if he gets a lot of
instruction and attention, does not even retain what he was taught; [3] that the bodily
things of the one adequately serve his thought, while those of the other oppose his? Are
there any other factors than these, by which you distinguish a person who is naturally
well suited for each pursuit from one who is not?”
(455b4–c1)12
According to the first two criteria, someone is naturally suited for a given pursuit if they can
learn it with adequate ease and build upon what they have learned by applying their knowl-
edge in novel situations. These criteria refer to an agent’s intellectual suitability for a task. The
third criterion, in contrast, refers to the fittingness of one’s body, broadly understood, for per-
forming that task: the issue is whether one’s “bodily things” go against “thought” (dianoia)
or serve it. Presumably, “thought” here refers to judgments relevant to the craft in question.
After stating these criteria, Socrates immediately asks:
Do you know of anything that is practiced by human beings in which the class (genos)
of men does not surpass that of women in all these respects?
(455c5–7; emphasis added)13
Socrates’ question appears to be rhetorical. He even suggests that crafts in which women are
thought to excel, like cooking or weaving, may be done better by some men.14 And Glaucon
agrees. “As a whole” (455d5), it is as Socrates says: the male sex “is superior (krateitai)”
than the female sex “in pretty much everything” (455d4). However, he adds, “there are many
women that are better (beltious) than many men in many things” (455d4–5). Indeed, Socrates’
remarks were about the “class” of women and the “class” of men. Thus, he left the possibility
open that some women may outperform some men in specific domains. Socrates immediately
agrees with Glaucon. And we may even think that he led Glaucon to this insight by calling
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his attention to tasks like cooking and weaving. These crafts provide particularly helpful data
because, unlike other tasks, they were for the most part the responsibility of women. Even
if someone thought some men were the best chefs, they probably would agree many women
outperform many men in these chores.15 So, even if the class of men is superior to the class
of women, there are some women who outperform some men in every domain.16 Socrates
concludes:
Therefore, my friend, there are no pursuits related to the management of the city which
belong to a woman because she is a woman, or to a man because he is a man; but the
natures are scattered similarly in both animals; and women participate in all pursuits ac-
cording to nature, and so do men, but in all of them women are weaker (asthenesteron)
than men.
(455d6–e1)17
According to Socrates, we cannot assign the tasks of defending and ruling the city on the
grounds that someone is a woman or a man. Experience shows that, aside from reproductive
differences, no other natural dispositions are exclusive to either sex. For all crafts and pursuits,
we observe that some women are adequately suited to learning, performing, and executing
them. In all domains, some women are better than some men, even if the best performers are
men and even if men are on average better than women. When it comes to protecting and rul-
ing the city, just like in every other domain, we should expect some women to be as good as,
or even better than, some men.18 It is even possible, Socrates remarks at the end of Book VII,
that there could be some women with the right natural dispositions to be trained to become
philosopher-queens (540c5–7).
So, according to Socrates, men and women should not be assigned tasks on account of their
being men or women, but because of their suitability for them as defined by the three criteria
listed above (455b4–c1). Yet, in the lines just quoted, while concluding that women and men
should not be assigned roles in the city on the basis of their sex, Socrates says women are
“weaker” (asthenesteron) than men in all pursuits. And when he reinstates the conclusion of
his argument a few lines later, he makes an even stronger claim:
A woman and a man have the same nature, then, relevant to guarding the city, except to
the extent that she is weaker (asthenestera), and he is stronger.
(456a10–11; emphasis added)19
In these lines, Socrates suggests that a woman is naturally suited to performing the same task
as a man to the extent that she is not weaker than him. The implication, as I take it, is that
if she is weaker, she should not be assigned the same task—not because she is a woman, but
because she is weaker. As women are, according to Socrates, on the whole, weaker than men
in everything, we should expect a great deal of women not to be assigned the same pursuits
as their male counterparts. Indeed, Socrates says that women who do make it to the guardian
classes will need to be assigned easier tasks than male guardians due to their weakness:
Then the female guardians must get naked, clothing themselves in virtue, rather than
with cloaks. They must share in warfare, and whatever else guarding the city involves,
and do nothing else. But within these areas, women must be assigned easier tasks than
men, because of the weakness (astheneia) of their sex.
(457a6–10; emphasis added)20
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These lines suggest that, within the guardian classes, women will generally not be as authori-
tative as men.21 The guardian class, then, will be stratified according to gender. Due to their
relative weakness, women guardians will be, at least for the most part, subordinated to their
male counterparts. Given that Socrates insists women are largely, even if not universally,
weaker than men in everything they do, and that they should be assigned the same tasks as
their male counterparts only insofar as they are not weaker for the task in question, we should
try to better understand the meaning of “weakness” (astheneia) in these passages. The scope
of Socrates’s conclusion seems to hinge on this.22
Unfortunately, Socrates is never explicit about the weakness that affects women. The LSJ
entry for the Greek term “asthenēs” lists three main uses.23 “Asthenēs” can refer to (1) physi-
cal weakness, (2) political weakness, and (3) psychological weakness. Accordingly, we find
different interpretations of Plato’s claims that reflect these different uses.
Most interpreters have argued that the term asthenēs in the argument from Republic V re-
fers to physical weakness.24 If this interpretation is correct, Plato would be making the rather
trivial claim that women are on average physically weaker than men. Now, even though physi-
cal strength is relevant for the tasks of protecting and defending the city, these are not the only
pursuits discussed in the argument. Socrates explicitly includes all sorts of tasks concerned
with administering and ruling the city (455ab1). And most of these managerial tasks do not
(at least, not directly) require, or depend on, physical strength. Governance requires intel-
lectual skills, like having good judgment, making good decisions, and commanding correctly
(428c11–d7). Socrates and Glaucon agree that women are weaker than men in all undertak-
ings and pursuits and that men, on the whole, outperform women in everything. As has been
noted, Socrates says that there is “nothing practiced by human beings at which the male sex
is not superior to the female” (455a4–5), and he agrees with Glaucon that “the one sex is su-
perior to the other in pretty much every area” (455d4). This includes pursuits where physical
strength is not relevant, such as being a doctor, a cobbler, a musician, or a philosopher, all of
which are mentioned by Socrates himself in the immediate context of these lines (455e–456a).
Socrates further insists that “for the purposes of all [pursuits] women are weaker than men”
(455d9), and, as seen, he concludes that female guardians should:
… Share in warfare and whatever else guarding the city involves, and do nothing else.
But within these areas, the women must be assigned easier tasks than the men, because
of the weakness of their sex.
(457a6–10; emphasis added)
The weakness of women, it seems, is not only a handicap for activities that require physical
strength, such as warfare, but also for tasks that do not require physical prowess, such as
those related to planning, administering, legislating, and ruling. This suggests that the relative
weakness Socrates imputes to women is not solely (or even mainly) physical, but something
that makes them, on the whole, worse than men at any kind of pursuit. In fact, we are meant
to think that the weakness of women explains why men generally “surpass” (455c5) and are
“superior” to (455d4) them in everything. We should, then, look for a different interpretation.
Some interpreters have argued that women are weaker than men in the sense that they, as a
matter of fact, lacked political power at Plato’s time.25 If this interpretation is correct, Socrates
would be merely saying that, conventionally and historically, women in Athens have not been
in a position to guard the city, and that they are not taken to have authority in these domains.
But this reading is also problematic. After all, as mentioned above, Socrates explicitly states
that his argument intends to show that it is “possible” (dunata) for women to perform tasks
186
related to the management of the city (452e4), a point he later repeats (456c5–8). If this is an
argument for the possibility of women’s participation in public life, the conditions that have
conventionally prevented them from doing so are irrelevant. Furthermore, Socrates acknowl-
edges throughout the discussion that women have not had the opportunity to take on the
roles that are owed to them, provided they have the relevant natural capabilities. This strongly
suggests that when he qualifies his claims by highlighting the weakness of women, he is not
referring to the limited opportunity and authority they, as a matter of fact, have in Athens at
the time.
This leaves us with the psychological reading of this term. A survey of the term asthenēs
and its cognates in the Republic reveals that, frequently, they refer to some form of psycho-
logical weakness.26 Plato often uses asthenēs to characterize the parts of the soul, and their
capacity to determine and influence character and behavior. The relevant background here
is the partition of the soul into appetitive, spirited, and rational parts introduced in Book IV
(436b–439c). Plato frequently says that spirit and reason can be, or become, weak. And he
talks, generally, about weak souls. But what does it mean to say that women are psychologi-
cally weak?27 Examining some of the passages in which Plato employs this term can help us
figure this out.
In Book III, Socrates describes the condition of the souls of people who have only received
musical, but not physical training, and says:
If from the start [these people] got a spiritless nature, [becoming a feeble guardian]
happens quickly. But if they have a spirited one, the spirit becomes weak (asthenē) and
unstable, quickly inflamed by little things and quickly extinguished.
(411b6–c1; emphasis added)28
In this passage, the adjective “weak” applies to the spirited part of the soul. Plato describes
someone’s spirit as weak (asthenē) as a result of bad training, which in turn determines their
unsuitability to be good guardians. A similar use of asthenēs is found in Book VIII:
[W]hy do you suppose mechanical and manual art bring reproach? Shall we say this
is because of any other reason that when the form of the best is by nature so weak
(asthenē) in a man that he is not capable of ruling the beasts in himself, but only of serv-
ing them, and is capable of learning only the things that flatter them?
(590c2–6; emphasis added)29
If the “form of the best” is weak in someone, she is incapable of commanding and control-
ling irrational tendencies. This agrees with Socrates’ description of vicious souls in Book IV,
in which the better parts fail to control irrational elements in us. In that context, Socrates
describes vice as a weakness:
Virtue, then, seems to be a sort of health, a fine and good state of the soul, whereas vice
seems to be a shameful disease and weakness (astheneia).
(444d13–e2; emphasis added)30
The idea here is that the better parts of the soul (presumably, reason and spirit) can be weak,
or become weaker when they are not properly trained, habituated, and educated. A soul in
which the best parts are weak is a vicious soul, which fails to be motivated to act as reason
prescribes.
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Another passage, this time from Book VI, is particularly helpful for our purposes. This pas-
sage, like the argument in Republic V, discusses people with a weak nature, quite generally. In
the context of discussing the education of the guardians, Socrates says:
“Won’t we say for souls too, Adeimantus,” I said, “that those with the best natures be-
come exceptionally bad when they get a bad education? Or do you think that an inferior
nature is the source of great injustices and unmixed evil? Don’t you think, rather, that
it is a vigorous nature corrupted by its upbringing, while a weak (asthenēs) nature will
never be the cause of great things, either good or bad?”
(491e1–7; emphasis added)31
In these lines, Socrates does not say that a specific part of the soul is weak, but instead talks
about a weak nature. And he does not refer here to having a strong or weak body, but to
the condition of someone’s soul, i.e. their character. The idea is that someone with a weak
nature is ineffectual: they cannot be the cause of great things, either good or bad.32 A strong
nature, in contrast, is successful at changing things and enacting decisions. These people are
actors in the world, while those with a weak nature lack the vigor and will to power. Plato
frequently remarks, as seen in the passage from Book III above, that this sort of executive
failure happens to dispirited people who tend to fail to act on their decisions and carry out
their plans. Indeed, in Book II, when describing the natural dispositions that make someone
suited to being an effective guardian, he says that a spirited nature is a sine qua non condi-
tion for this:
And they [i.e. the guardians] must be courageous, if they are going to fight well.
Of course.
And will any living thing, whether it is a horse, a dog, or anything else, willingly be
courageous if it is not spirited? Or haven’t you noticed just how invincible and unbeat-
able spirit is, so that its presence makes the whole soul fearless and unconquerable in
the face of anything?
I have noticed that.
(375a9–b5; emphasis added)33
A strong spirit makes the soul “unconquerable,” an expression that suggests that a spir-
ited character perseveres in a chosen path of action and sticks to their resolutions despite
challenges and adversities. This is, says Socrates, a natural quality that those who are to
be trained and educated as guardians must possess. A few lines later, he makes this clear:
“as far as their souls are concerned, [guardians] must be spirited” (375b7). And in Book
VIII, he describes spirited individuals as having a strong interest in ruling (548e3–549a8).
Interestingly, Adeimantus refers to cowardice as a kind of “astheneia” (366d2). And cow-
ardice is later identified with a failure of spirit (375a9–b7). Furthermore, in the beginning
of the argument about women’s suitability for guardianship, Socrates resorts to an analogy
with female watchdogs (451d–e) and, although he says that female dogs will guard the
household, he is clear that they are weaker than males (451e1). Socrates is drawing on the
guardian-dog analogy introduced in book II, where the key trait of a good watchdog was
thumos (375a9–b7).
188
Plato often remarks that spirit needs to come to the aid of reason to make our judgments
and decisions prevail. Often, the promise of pleasure or the desire to avoid pain can sweep us
off our feet. Spirit prevents this, and so it safeguards reasoned-out choices:
These two [the reasoning and spirited parts] … will govern the appetitive part, which
is the largest part in each person’s soul […] Then, wouldn’t these two parts also do the
finest job of guarding the whole soul and body against external enemies — the one by
planning, the other by fighting, following its leader, and carrying out the leader’s deci-
sions through its courage? […] And it is because of the spirited part, I suppose, that we
call a single individual courageous, namely, when it preserves through pains and pleas-
ures what is announced by rational accounts about what is to be feared and what isn’t.
(442a4–c3)34
Spirit’s job, then, is to “preserve” (διασῴζῃ) practical judgments. While reason deliberates and
decides what to do, the role of spirit is to motivate us to persevere and implement these deci-
sions. Thus, spirit aids in the execution of judgments made by the rational part of the soul.35
This involves successfully fighting off opposing motivations, which come both from appetites
that may tempt and entice us with the promise of bodily pleasures, but also from desires to
avoid the toil, effort, and pain one needs to go through in order to attain a chosen goal. One
of spirit’s main roles is to fight idleness. In this sense, as we have seen, a spiritless nature is not
a cause of great things, good or bad. As Socrates says, the spirited part of the soul is a natural
allied “fighter” of reason, which suggests that its role is to supply motivational support for the
judgments issued by the reasoning part (440a8–b4; 440b4–7).36 Again, the picture is one in
which reason issues judgments and decisions, and spirit motivates us to stick to them and carry
them out.
In a weak nature, spirit is not strong enough to supply the motivational support needed to
execute rational plans. If this is the sense of weakness at play in the argument of Republic V, we
find here a specific image of Plato’s position regarding women: men and women are endowed
with the same natural capacities to rule, but the exercise of those capacities is more likely to be
undermined in women than in men. This is the case because women tend to be more dispirited
than men, and so they often fail to carry out their decisions.37 When Plato says that women
are weaker than men in all pursuits, we should understand this as a generic, psychological
claim about women. Although women are similarly endowed with intellectual capacities for
planning, calculating, and deciding, they fail to enact and execute their plans and decisions
more often than men because their spirit is weaker.38 As a result, they both give in to passions
contrary to rational prescriptions, and they give up too quickly when a task requires effort.
The idea that women tend by nature to get dispirited more easily than men, and do not
stick to their rational decisions, is a common trope regarding women in Plato’s works. This
failure of spirit means that women are both more prone to giving in to passions, but also
to giving up before attaining their goals. In Book X of the Republic, for example, Socrates
complains that Homer and the tragedians represent heroes giving lamenting speeches and
criticizes the audience for “giving themselves up” to this sort of behavior. By contrast, if we
suffer a loss, “we pride ourselves if we are able to keep quiet and endure it in the belief that
this is what a man does, whereas what we praised before is what a woman does” (605d8–e1;
emphasis added).39 The idea here is, again, that being unable to restrain one’s passions is
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more characteristic of women than men. As we have seen, restraining passion requires the aid
of spirit. Socrates also suggests that we mostly find uncontrollable appetites and passions in
“children, women, and slaves” (431c1–2).40 Now, Plato also says it is womanish to give up too
quickly instead of persevering. For example, in the Laws, he argues that the fitting punishment
for a cowardly man who drops his shield in battle, representing a failure of spirit, would be
to transform him from man to woman (944e–d). Similarly, in the Timaeus, Socrates tells us
that a man who lives in a cowardly way is to be punished by being reborn as a woman (90e).
Human beings are reborn as creatures who are by nature analogous to one’s most obstinate
flaws from the former life. Women are, then, considered prone to failing to persevere and to
enact their plans. Tending to persevere and stick to one’s decisions is particularly important
for chores related to guarding the city. Protecting, managing, and ruling the city are no easy
tasks, and we should expect them to be filled with obstacles. So, sticking to one’s resolutions
and persevering is essential to these chores.
It is worth noting here that the relative weakness of women when compared to men is not
the result, at least not solely, of inadequate nurture and education. Even if, for Plato, nurture
and culture can either improve or worsen natural deficiencies, he is clear that women are by
nature weaker than men. This is made explicit on a passage in Laws VI:
[H]alf of humans—women, the half which in any case is inclined to be clandestine and
disingenuous, because of its weakness (astheneia)—has been left to its own devices be-
cause of the misguided indulgence of the lawmakers. Because we neglected this sex, we
gradually lost control of many things which would be much better today if they had
been regulated by law. Leaving women to do what they like is not just to lose half the
battle (as it may seem): a woman’s nature with regards to virtue is inferior to a man’s, so
she is proportionately a greater danger, perhaps even twice as great.
(781a2–b4; emphasis added)41
Women, at least most of them, start with a natural handicap compared to their male coun-
terparts. They are weaker than men, which makes them more prone to inappropriate and vi-
cious behavior. This is not simply the result of having received a deficient education or being
neglected by the laws. The natural dispositions of women are inferior to those of men, and so
the cost of neglecting women’s education and nurture in the city is much greater than that of
neglecting men’s. As seen, in the Republic, Plato is clear that suitability for a task is a result
of both having the right nature for it and receiving the right sort of education and training.42
Women’s natural inferiority will, then, impact their performance when compared to men, even
if education can make strides to overcome their handicaps. Of course, even if one has the right
natural disposition to rule and manage the city (which, as said, depends on having a strong
spirit) without the right education that channels and shapes those spirited tendencies in a cor-
rect manner and puts spirit in the right condition, one will not become a good guardian.43 It
is also important to highlight that the claim regarding women’s weakness is not absolute, but
rather a comparative remark. As such, Socrates is not saying that women lack spirit or the
spirited part of the soul, only that this part is, in general, naturally weaker in women com-
pared to men.44 Moreover, it is a generalization that admits of exceptions. Plato is not saying
that all women are more dispirited than all men.45 As Glaucon remarks and Socrates agrees,
many women are superior to many men.
Where does this leave us regarding the argument in Republic V? As seen, many women are
weaker than their male counterparts, where this involves a propensity to become dispirited,
thus giving in to passion or quickly giving up their resolutions so as to avoid pain, toil, and
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effort. For Plato, deficiencies of spirit are rooted in one’s bodily nature.46 In this sense, the
bodily dispositions of women tend to “oppose” their thought more than those of men when
it comes to guarding and ruling. This, as seen, was one of the criteria used to determine some-
one’s suitability for a given pursuit (455b4–c1). Again, Socrates is not saying that all women
are constitutively and chronically affected by this deficiency in spirit. His point is rather that
women are more prone to dispiritedness when compared to men. But many women will be
more spirited than many men, and when deciding who should get to be a part of the guardian
classes, we must attend to this fact. Indeed, as Socrates says, “there are no pursuits related to
the management of the city which belong to a woman because she is a woman, or to a man
because he is a man” (455d6–7). Instead, we should look for “a woman who is suited to
being a guardian,” by looking at whether they are naturally spirited, as “this is the sort of na-
ture we selected for our male guardians” (456a1–8). Since Socrates thinks women tend to get
more easily dispirited, it may be harder to fill the ranks of female guardians, even if women
will make it there. Indeed, the limitation of Plato’s position regarding women becomes clear
when, at the end of the argument, he claims that we will pick male guardians because they
are “the best of the citizens” (456d12–13) but we will pick female guardians because they
are “the best of the women” (456e1–2; emphasis added). While male guardians are the best
people tout court, when it comes to choosing women guardians, we should compare them
only with other women. The suggestion, I take it, is that if we measured men and women
against each other to decide who should be guardians, fewer women than men would raise to
the top. Furthermore, as we have seen, the women who make it to the guardian classes will
most likely not get to occupy the most important positions, and will instead be subordinated
to their male counterparts precisely because of their handicap in spirit. Yet, Socrates insists,
this is not because they are women, but rather because of the lack of strength of their spirit.
If this is correct, Plato’s position remains open to a familiar and entrenched form of sexism
all too commonly perceived by women of our own time, one that makes itself impermeable
to charges of bias or discrimination by insisting that a woman is not excluded from some job
or task because she is a woman, but rather for not being “good enough” for it.
3 Aristotle on Women’s Softness

All this notwithstanding, Plato’s views may strike us as enlightened when compared to Aristot-
le’s. For Aristotle, “the relation of male to female is that of natural superior to natural inferior,
and that of ruler to ruled” (1254b14–15). Thus, a man “rules his wife the way a statesman
does” (1259a37), but unlike other cases of political rule in which ruler and ruled take turns
to govern, Aristotle is clear that the male rules over the female “permanently” (1259b9). The
view that men should rule over women is grounded in, and justified by, natural differences in
their souls:
Most instances of ruling and being ruled are natural. For rule of free over slave, male
over female, man over child, is exercised in different ways, because, while the parts of
the soul are present in all of them, they are present in them in different ways. The slave
is completely without the deliberative capacity; the female has it, but it has no authority
(akuron); the child has it, but undeveloped.
(Pol. I.13, 1260a8–14; emphasis added)47
The claim that women’s deliberative capacity is not authoritative (akuron) has been inter-
preted in a number of ways. According to “interpersonal” interpretations, Aristotle is saying
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that women, as a matter of fact, do not have political authority over men.48 But Aristotle
clearly states that the differences between women’s and men’s suitability to rule are natural.
The lack of authority of women’s deliberative capacities is grounded in the way in which the
parts of the soul are present in them, which suggests that this is a statement about women’s
psychology. More importantly, the akuron-claim is supposed to justify the view that women
and men are, in general, not equally suited for governance. This reading leaves us with a
circular explanation for why women should not rule: they should not be given political
authority because they have not been given political authority.49 Normative versions of the
interpersonal interpretation attempt to answer these worries. Deslauriers 2003, 229, for ex-
ample, argues that the scope of women’s deliberative capacity is by nature restricted to mat-
ters related to the household. Now, since the household is subordinated to the city, which
is a man’s highest sphere of deliberation, women’s deliberations are naturally subordinate
to his deliberations. But the question still stands. We want an explanation of why the scope
of the deliberative capacity of women is restricted to the household. The akuron-claim is
supposed to be a justification of precisely why women’s deliberations are restricted to the
household.50
According to “intrapersonal” interpretations, Aristotle is describing what he takes to be a
natural difference between men and women.51 Within this family of interpretations, we can
distinguish two different readings. For some scholars, women’s deliberative capacities them-
selves are defective or inoperative.52 Specifically, women cannot grasp goals on their own, and
so they cannot deliberate adequately. But, as it has been noted, if women cannot deliberate
and determine the best course of action on their own, they would not be able to be virtuous
or flourish. Indeed, Aristotle says that good deliberation is necessary in order to be virtuous
and flourish (EN VI.13, 1144b31–3; Pol. VII.1, 1323b21–3).53 Yet, for Aristotle, women can
be ethically virtuous, even if their virtue is different to that of men (Pol. I. 12, 1260a18–20).54
Moreover, Aristotle says that men should delegate the organization of whole domains related
to the household to women (EN VIII.10.1160b32–5). This suggests that women can deliber-
ate correctly in these spheres and adequately grasp ends.55
A different version of the intrapersonal interpretation holds that women are constitution-
ally akratic. They deliberate well, but they chronically give in to passions.56 This interpretation
fits some remarks in Nicomachean Ethics VII, where Aristotle distinguishes between two spe-
cies of akrasia, and calls one of them “weakness” (astheneia) (1150b19). The weak akratēs
knows what is best and decides on it but fails to do what they think is good because of the
influence of passion. However, there are some problems with this reading, too. Aristotle says
that both men and women can resist irrational impulses through habit and reason. The fact
that women are more naturally disposed to weak akrasia does not mean that they inevitably
suffer from it. Akrasia can be cured.57 Moreover, it seems that Aristotle thinks women can
stick to their rational decisions in the household domains of which they are in charge, which
include practical and managerial roles—specifically, deciding how property should be stored
and distributed, managing servants, and educating children (Pol. III.4, 1277b24–5).58 If they
were constitutively akratic, Aristotle would not put them in charge of overseeing these impor-
tant tasks. This interpretation therefore cannot account for why women should have authority
over economic and managerial decisions and tasks pertaining to the household, yet not those
in the public arena.59
Aristotle may be following Plato’s lead here. He was certainly familiar with the discus-
sion of women’s suitability to rule in the Republic, and it is not a stretch to think that this
informed his own account in Politics I. Plato’s insistence on women’s weakness, understood as
a psychological tendency to be less spirited than men, may be the background against which
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we can understand the controversial claim that, while women can deliberate, this capacity is
not authoritative in them. For Aristotle, female citizens can think, calculate, plan, and make
decisions like men do, but they tend to be more dispirited than them. In fact, for Aristotle “all
females are less spirited (athumotera) than males” (HA VIII.1, 608a33; cf. 608b8–18), and so
are “softer” (malakōtera) than them (608a35). Since “ruling and being free invariably derive
from this capacity [i.e. spirit]” (Pol. VII.7, 1328a6–7), women are less suited for ruling. A flail-
ing spirit manifests in an inability or reluctance to go through the pain and effort of enacting
one’s decisions. In Nicomachean Ethics VII.7, Aristotle says that people lack self-control with
respect to pleasures but are “soft” (malakos) with respect to pains, and he contrasts softness
with endurance (karteria).60 He explicitly links softness with femininity and illustrates a soft
disposition as a lack of resolution and executive drive:
Someone who is deficient concerning the things that ordinary people both struggle
against and can do so successfully is soft and effeminate, since effeminacy is a sort of
softness. Such a person trails his cloak on the ground in order not to suffer the pain of
lifting it up.
(EN VII.7, 1150b1–4; emphasis added)61
The image of the person who trails his cloak on the ground to avoid the toil of lifting it up
highlights a disposition to give up acting when that would require effort. The failure is execu-
tive but springs from a psychological disposition. It is not hard to see how a disposition to
give up and abandon tasks when they require some effort would not only undermine personal
agency but also render someone an ineffective ruler. Aristotle himself goes on to suggest this:
[I]t is something to wonder at if someone does this [giving up] concerning things that
many can successfully struggle against, and if he gives up and cannot act against these—
unless it is because of his congenital nature or because of disease, as there is congenital
softness in Scythian kings or as female differs in relation to male in this regard.
(EN VII.7, 1150b12–16; emphasis added)62
Softness involves being prone to give up in situations where others would have persevered.
Aristotle thinks this is a constitutive handicap in women relative to men, and he associates this
deficit with political inefficiency, as the mention of Scythian kings suggests.
Aristotle’s claim, then, is that men should rule because they are psychologically better
suited to the task. If this is right, Politics I.13 does not argue that women lack the intellectual
and deliberative capacities to reach the right decisions through rational reflection. Neither are
women constitutionally and chronically akratic. Women tend to lack resolution to enact their
decisions and practical judgments in demanding situations, such as the political sphere, which
require a vigorous and strong will. Yet, even if women tend to get more easily dispirited than
men and they give up too quickly, they can oversee household chores and command servants
and children, for their spirit is strong enough to carry out these sorts of tasks, facing the ob-
stacles they involve without giving up. As in Plato, the difference in spirit between men and
women is a matter of degree (HA VIII.1, 588a22). And, as seen, Aristotle even acknowledges
that “there may be exceptions to the order of nature,” and some women may be fitter to rule
than some men (Pol. I.12, 1259a38–b5; emphasis added). Thus, women are not absolutely
unsuited to ruling; rather, men are fitter than them for the task. And there will even be excep-
tions to this generalization. Indeed, this is a natural fact, and, like most natural facts, it holds
always or for the most part.63
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Aristotle thus agrees with Plato that women are more prone to being dispirited compared
to men, and so they are less likely to enact their decisions.64 Given their spirited nature, Aris-
totle thinks men are natural leaders. Due to their relative dispiritedness, women should not be
assigned the task of ruling the city. The natural propensity of women to give up in situations
that demand toil and perseverance will result in men successfully imposing their will on them.
But what explains this external result is a psychological, and thus natural, difference between
women and men: less spirited people are less likely to succeed in implementing their practical
judgments because they give up too quickly. This is, for Aristotle, primarily because of the lack
of strength of their will.65 So, it is even good for women to be ruled, as otherwise their inaction
may hinder their flourishing and well-being (Pol. I.5, 1254a20–22).66
4 Conclusion
Plato and Aristotle agree that we should assign the task of governance to people who are natu-
rally suited for it. They also agree that women tend to be weaker or softer than men because
they tend to be more dispirited than them. But while Plato emphasizes that these natural dif-
ferences are compatible with many women having the right dispositions to defend and rule the
city, Aristotle thinks women should not, at least in the majority of cases, be allowed to occupy
public roles. Now, as it has been discussed, Plato says that even women who make it to the
guardian classes will most likely occupy less authoritative roles than guardian men, which im-
plies that within this class, they will be subordinated to their male counterparts. This, I think,
brings Plato closer to Aristotle’s idea that men rule and women are ruled.
Yet, the differences remain: Plato generally allows women to participate in defending and
performing public roles in the city, while Aristotle does not. What explains the difference
in their positions? I have argued, against some interpreters, that this difference is not due
to contrasting opinions about the nature of women.67 Indeed, both philosophers think that
women will be endowed with natural capacities to deliberate and judge correctly, and both
think that women will tend to adhere less to their resolutions compared to men on account
of having a weaker spirit. The difference is, importantly, a result of their diverging political
commitments. Plato’s city is divided into functional classes, where the traditional family is
abolished in the ruling class in order to promote civic unity and cohesion. This class must be
populated by both men and women for reasons of eugenics.68 Aristotle, in contrast, keeps the
organization of the nuclear family in place. There is no pressure to employ women in public
office when you can simply stick to the stronger leaders. Furthermore, Plato is deeply com-
mitted to the transformative power of the right sort of education, and he considers honing
women’s abilities as much as possible to be of the utmost importance for, as seen, they are
specially in need of vigilance. If we want a flourishing city, we must pay special attention to
the weaker half.
More generally, my interpretation helps us better understand the nature and role of spirit in
Plato and Aristotle, as well as the psychological dispositions that they associate with successful
personal and political agency. Scholars have focused disproportionately on akrasia, under-
stood as giving in to pleasures contrary to one’s considered judgments about what is best, but
these authors discuss other types of moral psychological failings, such as forms of weakness
and softness, which centrally involve a failure to carry out practical judgments and stick to
one’s resolutions due to lack of motivation and drive. Correspondingly, discussions of spirit
in Plato and Aristotle have focused on its role restraining appetites and passions contrary to
rational prescriptions, rather than on its executive role, which, as Plato says, makes someone
be “the cause of great things,” either good or bad.69 The discussion about women’s public role,
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thus, contributes to our understanding of Plato and Aristotle’s views on the skills required to
be a successful political leader and highlights that being spirited, understood as having enough
drive and a strong will so as to stick to one’s resolutions, is as essential to being a good ruler
as excellence in reasoning and deliberation. This picture of political agency and skill may give
us pause, yet, if I am right, it is central to these authors’ views, and we should take the time to
unpack the assumptions on which it rests, and the implications it carries.70
Notes
1 See, e.g., Smith 1983; Reeve 1988; Vlastos 1995; Karbowski 2014.
2 E.g. Smith 1983; Karbowski 2014.
3 The question is whether women can and should be members of the guardian class, which includes
both auxiliaries and rulers. The rulers are guardians with a natural talent to be trained as philoso-
phers. The central duties of the rulers involve governing the city by planning, legislating, and issuing
commands. The duties of the auxiliaries involve aiding the rulers by ensuring that their commands
are enforced and respected, thus maintaining internal order in the city and defending it from external
threats. Unless otherwise noted, I will refer to tasks corresponding to both rulers and auxiliaries as
the argument aims to establish whether women should guard the city, and this includes both sets of
tasks.
4 Interpreters disagree on how we should understand Plato’s views about women in the Republic, with
some saying he is not being serious, others that he only includes women in the guardian classes for the
sake of social efficiency, and yet others that he is a committed feminist. For the first view, see Strauss
1964; Bloom 1968, esp. 383; Saxonhouse 1976; Spelman 1994. For the second view, see Annas 1976.
For the third view, see Okin 1979 (who argues that Plato was a feminist in the modern sense of the
word, despite some failings and inadequacies), Vlastos 1995; Harry and Polansky 2016. I am not go-
ing to focus here on the question of whether Plato was a feminist (for this, see Hulme in this volume)
(Chapter 12), but rather on how to understand the details and scope of the argument concerning
women in Republic V, with a special emphasis on his claims about women’s weakness. However, my
analysis will have consequences for this debate.
5 After all, it is very likely that Aristotle’s remarks about women in Politics I have a background in the
arguments of Republic V. This point is noted by, among others, Smith 1983; Karbowski 2014.
6 Perhaps being hairless is relevant to being a hairdresser, but even in this case we may think that
having hair does not necessarily make a difference to someone’s ability to style other people’s hair.
Plato may, however, disagree on the basis that one needs first-personal experience of something to
be able to develop a craft to assist others with it. He may suggest this in his description of the craft
of midwifery in the Theaetetus: “She [i.e. nature] did not, it is true, entrust the duties of midwifery
to barren women, because human nature is too weak to acquire craft where it has no experience”
(149b10–c5).
7 Translations of the Republic are based on C.D.C Reeve’s 2004 translation. For the Greek, I have
consulted Slings’ edition.
8 δυνάμεως δ’ εἰς ἐκεῖνο μόνον βλέπω ἐφ’ ᾧ τε ἔστι καὶ ὃ ἀπεργάζεται, καὶ ταύτῃ ἑκάστην αὐτῶν δύναμιν
ἐκάλεσα, καὶ τὴν μὲν ἐπὶ τῷ αὐτῷ τεταγμένην καὶ τὸ αὐτὸ ἀπεργαζομένην τὴν αὐτὴν καλῶ, τὴν δὲ ἐπὶ ἑτέρῳ
καὶ ἕτερον ἀπεργαζομένην ἄλλην.
9 For a different discussion of this passage and its relation to the argument on women, see Kamtekar
and Proios in this volume (Chapter 15).
10 Socrates seems to assume the problematic view that binary gender differences are grounded in sexual
differences, specifically, reproductive differences.
11 ἐὰν δ’ αὐτῷ τούτῳ φαίνηται διαφέρειν, τῷ τὸ μὲν θῆλυ τίκτειν, τὸ δὲ ἄρρεν ὀχεύειν, οὐδέν τί πω φήσομεν
μᾶλλον ἀποδεδεῖχθαι ὡς πρὸς ὃ ἡμεῖς λέγομεν διαφέρει γυνὴ ἀνδρός, ἀλλ’ ἔτι οἰησόμεθα δεῖν τὰ αὐτὰ
ἐπιτηδεύειν τούς τε φύλακας ἡμῖν καὶ τὰς γυναῖκας αὐτῶν.
12 ἆρα οὕτως ἔλεγες τὸν μὲν εὐφυῆ πρός τι εἶναι, τὸν δὲ ἀφυῆ, ἐν ᾧ ὁ μὲν ῥᾳδίως τι μανθάνοι, ὁ δὲ χαλεπῶς; καὶ
ὁ μὲν ἀπὸ βραχείας μαθήσεως ἐπὶ πολὺ εὑρετικὸς εἴη οὗ ἔμαθεν, ὁ δὲ πολλῆς μαθήσεως τυχὼν καὶ μελέτης
μηδ' ἃ ἔμαθε σῴζοιτο; καὶ τῷ μὲν τὰ τοῦ σώματος ἱκανῶς ὑπηρετοῖ τῇ διανοίᾳ, τῷ δὲ ἐναντιοῖτο; ἆρ' ἄλλα
ἄττα ἐστὶν ἢ ταῦτα, οἷς τὸν εὐφυῆ πρὸς ἕκαστα καὶ τὸν μὴ ὡρίζου;
13 Οἶσθά τι οὖν ὑπὸ ἀνθρώπων μελετώμενον, ἐν ᾧ οὐ πάντα ταῦτα τὸ τῶν ἀνδρῶν γένος διαφερόντως ἔχει ἢ τὸ
τῶν γυναικῶν;
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14 I agree with McKeen 2006, 534 on this reading. Not everyone does. Fortenbaugh, for example,
thinks Socrates “recognizes female excellence in weaving and cooking” (1975, 3). But the question is
raised by Socrates precisely as a point of proof for the view that, in general, men outperform women
in everything. Indeed, the issue is that even in these stereotypically feminine tasks, males are the best.
15 A point made in Harry and Polansky 2016, 268: “Clearly Socrates prods Glaucon to think of such
tasks where many women definitely surpass nearly all men. Since women have been historically
restricted—except in, say, cooking and weaving—Glaucon quickly appreciates that were women
given more expanded opportunities many of them would surpass many men.”
16 I am leaving aside the question of whether this claim should be understood as stating that, on average,
most men are better than most women in any given pursuit (see, e.g., Grote 1865, 68; Calvert 1975,
236; Smith 1983, 603), or that the very best performers of any given task are men (see, e.g., Harry
and Polansky 2016, 267). The textual evidence for any interpretation is underdetermined, although
the second interpretation seems preferable as it coheres better with Glaucon and Socrates’ remarks.
For my purposes, what matters is that Socrates holds the class of men to be superior to the class of
women in every pursuit. For a detailed discussion of the options, see McKeen 2006.
17 Οὐδὲν ἄρα ἐστίν, ὦ φίλε, ἐπιτήδευμα τῶν πόλιν διοικούντων γυναικὸς διότι γυνή, οὐδ' ἀνδρὸς διότι ἀνήρ,
ἀλλ' ὁμοίως διεσπαρμέναι αἱ φύσεις ἐν ἀμφοῖν τοῖν ζῴοιν, καὶ πάντων μὲν μετέχει γυνὴ ἐπιτηδευμάτων κατὰ
φύσιν, πάντων δὲ ἀνήρ, ἐπὶ πᾶσι δὲ ἀσθενέστερον γυνὴ ἀνδρός.
18 Plato knew individual women who surpassed many men in philosophical and intellectual domains.
It is relevant here to mention not only Diotima and Aspasia, both examples of wise women in the
Symposium and the Menexenus, but also Plato’s female students, some of whose names survive, such
as Axiothea of Phlius and Lastheneia of Mantinea.
19 Καὶ γυναικὸς ἄρα καὶ ἀνδρὸς ἡ αὐτὴ φύσις εἰς φυλακὴν πόλεως, πλὴν ὅσα ἀσθενεστέρα, ἡ δὲ ἰσχυροτέρα
ἐστίν.
20 Ἀποδυτέον δὴ ταῖς τῶν φυλάκων γυναιξίν, ἐπείπερ ἀρετὴν ἀντὶ ἱματίων ἀμφιέσονται, καὶ κοινωνητέον
πολέμου τε καὶ τῆς ἄλλης φυλακῆς τῆς περὶ τὴν πόλιν, καὶ οὐκ ἄλλα πρακτέον· τούτων δ’ αὐτῶν τὰ
ἐλαφρότερα ταῖς γυναιξὶν ἢ τοῖς ἀνδράσι δοτέον διὰ τὴν τοῦ γένους ἀσθένειαν.
21 An objection can be raised against this reading. “Elaphrotera” can be used to denote something that
is merely light in weight, which would support a strictly physical interpretation of this passage. How-
ever, the term can also denote “lightness” in a figurative sense, and it can be adequately translated
as denoting “easiness” (my preferred translation). The fact that Plato is not referring just to warfare
here, but to whatever is involved in “guarding” (phulattein) the city—for Plato, arguably, the laws
“guard” the city (Laws 626a8–b)—suggests to me that he is thinking of easier tasks in all the domains
related to guarding the city. I am indebted to Joshua Wilburn for a helpful discussion of these lines.
22 I thus disagree with Proios and Kamtekar in this volume, who argue that “the comparative inferiority
of women in most occupations is supposed to be evidence that the capacities for work are distributed
alike” (emphasis added). In my view, Socrates’ claims regarding the comparative inferiority of women
qualify and limit the scope of the argument’s conclusion both in terms of how many women will show
the right sort of potential to be guardians, and when it comes to assigning chores and set hierarchies
within the guardian classes.
23 The LSJ also lists a sense of weakness as material poverty, but it is clear from the context that this is
not the sort of weakness that Socrates is referring to here since private property was generally abol-
ished for the guardian classes (Republic 462b–c).
24 Pomeroy 1995, 115; Reeve 2004, 144, n.13; Santas 2005; Harry and Polansky 2016, among others,
defend this interpretation.
25 Vlastos 1995 defends this position.
26 It is worth pointing out that these passages apply the term “weakness” to psychological features
without any disclaimers about usage. In contrast, when a cognate of this term is used in a clear physi-
cal sense, Socrates deems it necessary to clarify that he is discussing a weakness concerning “bodily”
things (371c7) and “bodies” that are weak (371c–d).
27 See McKeen 2006, esp. 541, for a defense of a psychological account of weakness. See also An-
nas 1976, esp. 308, for a defense of the view that the weakness of women is both physical and
psychological.
28 Καὶ ἐὰν μέν γε, ἦν δ' ἐγώ, ἐξ ἀρχῆς φύσει ἄθυμον λάβῃ, ταχὺ τοῦτο διεπράξατο· ἐὰν δὲ θυμοειδῆ, ἀσθενῆ
ποιήσας τὸν θυμὸν ὀξύρροπον ἀπηργάσατ, ἀπὸ σμικρῶν ταχὺ ἐρεθιζόμενόν τε καὶ κατασβεννύμενον.
29 Βαναυσία δὲ καὶ χειροτεχνία διὰ τί οἴει ὄνειδος φέρει; ἢ δι’ ἄλλο τι φήσομεν ἢ ὅταν τις ἀσθενὲς φύσει ἔχῃ τὸ
τοῦ
196
βελτίστου εἶδος, ὥστε μὴ ἂν δύνασθαι ἄρχειν τῶν ἐν αὑτῷ θρεμμάτων, ἀλλὰ θεραπεύειν ἐκεῖνα, καὶ τὰ
θωπεύματα αὐτῶν μόνον δύνηται μανθάνειν;
30 Ἀρετὴ μὲν ἄρα, ὡς ἔοικεν, ὑγίειά τέ τις ἂν εἴη καὶ κάλλος καὶ εὐεξία ψυχῆς, κακία δὲ νόσος τε καὶ αἶσχος καὶ
ἀσθένεια.
31 Οὐκοῦν, ἦν δ' ἐγώ, ὦ Ἀδείμαντε, καὶ τὰς ψυχὰς οὕτω φῶμεν τὰς εὐφυεστάτας κακῆς παιδαγωγίας τυχούσας
διαφερόντως κακὰς γίγνεσθαι; ἢ οἴει τὰ μεγάλα ἀδικήματα καὶ τὴν ἄκρατον πονηρίαν ἐκ φαύλης ἀλλ' οὐκ ἐκ
νεανικῆς φύσεως τροφῇ διολομένης γίγνεσθαι, ἀσθενῆ δὲ φύσιν μεγάλων οὔτε ἀγαθῶν οὔτε κακῶν αἰτίαν
ποτὲ ἔσεσθαι;
32 I read these lines as stating the precondition for being able to develop each of the virtues that charac-
terize a true philosopher upon receiving the right sort of training and education, which are discussed
in the immediate context of these lines. It seems that being vigorous, rather than weak, and so capable
of being the “cause of great things,” is a precondition for becoming truly and fully courageous, just,
temperate, and philosophical. After all, someone who is by nature prone to good reasoning, but lacks
the strength of will to apply themselves to the demanding intellectual training and studies required
to become a philosopher, will not develop their natural talents. I am indebted to Joshua Wilburn for
pressing me on this point.
33 Καὶ μὴν ἀνδρεῖόν γε, εἴπερ εὖ μαχεῖται.
Πῶς δ' οὔ;
Ἀνδρεῖος δὲ εἶναι ἆρα ἐθελήσει ὁ μὴ θυμοειδὴς εἴτε ἵππος εἴτε κύων ἢ ἄλλο ὁτιοῦν ζῷον; ἢ οὐκ ἐννενόηκας
ὡς ἄμαχόν τε καὶ ἀνίκητον θυμός, οὗ παρόντος ψυχὴ πᾶσα πρὸς πάντα ἄφοβός τέ ἐστι καὶ ἀήττητος;
Ἐννενόηκα.
34 Καὶ τούτω δὴ οὕτω … τοῦ ἐπιθυμητικοῦ—ὃ δὴ πλεῖστον τῆς ψυχῆς ἐν ἑκάστῳ ἐστὶ καὶ χρημάτων φύσει
ἀπληστότατον—… ἄρχειν … Ἆρ' οὖν, ἦν δ' ἐγώ, καὶ τοὺς ἔξωθεν πολεμίους τούτω ἂν κάλλιστα φυλαττοίτην
ὑπὲρ ἁπάσης τῆς ψυχῆς τε καὶ τοῦ σώματος, τὸ μὲν βουλευόμενον, τὸ δὲ προπολεμοῦν, ἑπόμενον [δὲ] τῷ
ἄρχοντι καὶ τῇ ἀνδρείᾳ ἐπιτελοῦν τὰ βουλευθέντα; … Καὶ ἀνδρεῖον δὴ οἶμαι τούτῳ τῷ μέρει καλοῦμεν ἕνα
ἕκαστον, ὅταν αὐτοῦ τὸ θυμοειδὲς διασῴζῃ διά τε λυπῶν καὶ ἡδονῶν τὸ ὑπὸ τῶν λόγων παραγγελθὲν δεινόν
τε καὶ μή. Translation by Wilburn with modifications (2015, 6).
35 One could object here that these lines refer exclusively to the domain of courage, and do not characterize
spirit as having a general executive role, as I argue here. However, we should note two points that sup-
port my interpretation. First, in 429b–430c, the characterization of “political” courage offers a model
for the definition of individual courage. Courage is said here to be “a kind of preservation” of the “sorts
of things to be feared … and about everything else (kai peri deinōn kai peri tōn allōn)” pertaining to the
musical and physical training received by the guardians. Now, the musical and physical training cov-
ered a wide range of behaviors and topics. The domain of “the fearful” seems, arguably, to have been
expanded: we should fear anything vicious and shameful. Since the definition of individual courage is
modeled on, and alludes to, this earlier account, the fact that “what is fearful” in this passage stands for
all those things learned through early education suggests that what thumos preserves in the individual
extends beyond the domain of the virtue of courage, strictly speaking. Second, 412d–414a discusses the
dangers of prospective guardians “abandoning” (as opposed to preserving) correct beliefs, which are
any beliefs relevant to the guardians believing that they must pursue what is advantageous to the city.
These claims further support expanding the domain of beliefs spirit should preserve to include all beliefs
related to the good of the city. I owe much help thinking through these issues to Joshua Wilburn.
36 A point emphasized in Singpurwalla 2013, for whom spirit includes “strength of will” (63), and
Wilburn 2015, esp. 7.
37 I thus agree with Annas 1976, 314, who suggests, without extensive elaboration, that the psychologi-
cal weakness of women involves a tendency to dispiritedness.
38 If I am right, Plato’s discussion of women’s weakness, understood as a tendency to get easily dispir-
ited, may challenge Socratic intellectualism. Weak characters deliberate and judge correctly, yet their
practical knowledge fails to guarantee that they act as they judge to be best. Someone who is easily
dispirited judges well but fails to stick to their practical resolutions due to their weak spirit. For
challenges to reading the Republic as supporting Socratic intellectualism, see Kamtekar 2017. I am
grateful to Sara Brill and Catherine McKeen for pointing out this aspect of my interpretation.
39 A point mentioned in Nielsen 2015, 577.
40 The suggestion that women are frequently overpowered by their passions is also implied in Socrates’
response to Xanthippe’s behavior in the Phaedo, where we are told that when Xanthippe saw that
Socrates’ friends visited him in prison “she cried out and said the sort of thing women usually say”
(60a). Later in the dialogue, Socrates asks his grieving friends not to act like women (117d–e).
197
Patricia Marechal
41 ὃ καὶ ἄλλως γένος ἡμῶν τῶν ἀνθρώπων λαθραιότερον μᾶλλον καὶ ἐπικλοπώτερον ἔφυ, τὸ θῆλυ, διὰ τὸ
ἀσθενές, οὐκ ὀρθῶς τοῦτο εἴξαντος τοῦ νομοθέτου δύστακτον ὂν ἀφείθη. διὰ δὲ τούτου μεθειμένου πολλὰ
ὑμῖν παρέρρει, πολὺ ἄμεινον ἂν ἔχοντα, εἰ νόμων ἔτυχεν, ἢ τὰ νῦν· οὐ γὰρ ἥμισυ μόνον ἐστίν, ὡς δόξειεν ἄν,
τὸ περὶ τὰς γυναῖκας ἀκοσμήτως περιορώμενον, ὅσῳ δὲ ἡ θήλεια ἡμῖν φύσις ἐστὶ πρὸς ἀρετὴν χείρων τῆς
τῶν ἀρρένων, τοσούτῳ διαφέρει πρὸς τὸ πλέον ἢ διπλάσιον εἶναι.
42 For a discussion of Plato’s views concerning the impact of inadequate education and of women’s posi-
tion in the household for ethical development, see Singpurwalla’s paper in this volume (Chapter 14).
43 I am indebted to Gabriel Richardson Lear for pointing out the importance of education for both
keeping a spirit strong, and for shaping it into the right condition, so that it can follow and agree with
reason’s prescriptions.
44 I thus agree with Wilburn 2022, 29.
45 Plato’s characterization of the mother of the timocratic man (549c–550) may arguably depict a
woman with a strong spirit, albeit corrupted and thwarted by inadequate nurture and education.
It is worth pointing out, whoever, that Socrates says in this passage that the words and deeds of the
mother inflame “the passionate and appetitive” part of his son’s soul, thereby suggesting that this
woman may be motivated by strong appetites concerning money, rather than by motives pertaining
to the spirited part of the soul. Indeed, the timocrat man is described as enjoying money and appeti-
tive pleasures (548a4–c1; 549a9–b5). In any case, even if we think Plato is describing here a woman
who is naturally high-spirited, this does not undermine my interpretation. The claim about women’s
weakness in Republic V is both a comparative claim and a generalization, and so it is compatible
with some women being naturally high-spirited. It is precisely these women that should be selected
to populate the guardian classes, provided that they receive the right education. I am indebted to
Ermioni Prokopaki, Gabriel Richardson Lear, and Rachel Singpurwalla for bringing this passage to
my attention, and for a fruitful discussion of these topics.
46 See Timaeus 69e3–70c.
47 δῆλον τοίνυν ὅτι τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον ἔχει καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν ἄλλων, ὥστε φύσει τὰ πλείω ἄρχοντα καὶ ἀρχόμενα.
ἄλλον γὰρ τρόπον τὸ ἐλεύθερον τοῦ δούλου ἄρχει καὶ τὸ ἄρρεν τοῦ θήλεος καὶ ἀνὴρ παιδός, καὶ πᾶσιν
ἐνυπάρχει μὲν τὰ μόρια τῆς ψυχῆς, ἀλλ' ἐνυπάρχει διαφερόντως. ὁ μὲν γὰρ δοῦλος ὅλως οὐκ ἔχει τὸ
βουλευτικόν, τὸ δὲ θῆλυ ἔχει μέν, ἀλλ' ἄκυρον, ὁ δὲ παῖς ἔχει μέν, ἀλλ' ἀτελές.
48 E.g. Swanson 1992, 56; Mulgan 1994, esp. 199.
49 A point noted in Riesbeck 2015, 143.
50 See Karbowski 2014, 444–445 for an objection along these lines.
51 Perhaps, for Aristotle, bodily differences that exist for the sake of sexual differentiation and reproduc-
tion result in women’s deliberative capacities not being authoritative. See Leunissen 2017, especially
chapter 6, for a defense of this view.
52 See Karbowski 2014, esp. 436, 457–458.
53 A point argued in Connell 2021, esp. 31–32.
54 For a discussion of women’s virtue in Aristotle and the defense of the view that women are fundamen-
tally as capable of virtue as men, see Connell in this volume.
55 A point noted in Saxonhouse 1985: 51; Levy 1990, 402; Swanson 1992: 56–57; Mulgan 1994,
187–198; Dodds 1996, 78–79; Riesbeck 2015, 140; Connell 2016, 36–37, 2021, 32.
56 Fortenbaugh 1977, 138–139; Sherman 1989, 154; Modrak 1994, 213; Nielsen 2015.
57 See, NE VII.8, 1150b29–35. Connell 2021, 24–25 also points this out.
58 Aristotle thinks women have proper tasks to fulfill in the household. “For straightaway the tasks are
divided, and husband and wife are different. They provide for each other, their particular talents be-
ing put towards what is common” (EN VIII.12, 1162a16–33; Connell’s translation). In Politics I.13,
1260a14–24, Aristotle says wives are “helpers” (hupēretai) of their husbands, the master-craftsmen
of the household. This suggests that men delegate to women (even if under their supervision) certain
tasks for the good of the household. In III.2, 1277b24–5, Aristotle assigns different tasks to men and
women in the household: the man procures, and the woman preserves (phulattein). Aristotle also says
that women will contribute to the education of children (VII.15, 1336a31). See Karbowski 2014, esp.
454, for an account of these feminine roles. See, also, Brill 2020 and Connell 2021 for a discussion of
women’s virtues, and their role in the household in Aristotle.
59 As argued in Karbowski 2014, 443–444.
60 Aristotle, then, unlike Plato, makes a clear and precise distinction between akrasia and what we could
call weakness of will. This foreshadows a distinction in contemporary philosophy of action, defended
by, for example, Holton 1999.
198
61 ὁ δ' ἐλλείπων πρὸς ἃ οἱ πολλοὶ καὶ ἀντιτείνουσι καὶ δύνανται, οὗτος μαλακὸς καὶ τρυφῶν· καὶ γὰρ ἡ τρυφὴ
μαλακία τίς ἐστιν· ὃς ἕλκει τὸ ἱμάτιον, ἵνα μὴ πονήσῃ τὴν ἀπὸ τοῦ αἴρειν λύπην.
62 Θαυμαστόν … εἴ τις πρὸς ἃς οἱ πολλοὶ δύνανται ἀντέχειν, τούτων ἡττᾶται καὶ μὴ δύναται ἀντιτείνειν, μὴ διὰ
φύσιν τοῦ γένους ἢ διὰ νόσον, οἷον ἐν τοῖς Σκυθῶν βασλεῦσιν ἡ μαλακία διὰ τὸ γένος, καὶ ὡς τὸ θῆλυ πρὸς
τὸ ἄρρεν διέστηκεν.
63 There is, however, a prima facie problem with this view. Aristotle famously says that ruling and being
ruled differ in kind, not in degree (Pol. I.13, 1259b36–38). Given this, the thought goes, the differences
between natural rulers and ruled, and their respective virtues, are not differences in degree but in kind.
One solution to this problem is that, for Aristotle, the differences between the sexes is a difference in
kind, which leads to differences in degree of different capabilities and dispositions. That is, the sexes
differ in their reproductive capacities and functions, but this difference, which is grounded in natural
facts about (for Aristotle) male and female anatomy and physiology, leads to differences in the degree
of thumos. The differences in spirit, in turn, justify the political superiority of men over women. I owe
this proposal and a fruitful discussion of this view to Zachary Brants, Subin Park, Mika Smith, and
Karina Ortiz Villa. Another possibility is to consider the differences in thumos as differences of “the
more and the less,” that is, differences in magnitude that determine differences in kind. For example,
different species of birds may be defined by differences in magnitude in the length, volume, and area
of their wings, beaks, etc. Although these differences are quantitative, they determine differences in
kind. See Lennox 1980 for a discussion of differences of “the more and the less” in Aristotle.
64 An interpretation that emphasizes women’s natural propensity to be easily dispirited as the reason
why women are less suitable as rulers is defended by Nielsen 2015; Connell 2021, esp. 35f.
65 I thus favor Nielsen’s intrapersonal interpretation of women’s dispiritedness (although I disagree
with the view that this means that they are constitutionally akratic), rather than the interpersonal
reading proposed in Connell 2021, who argues: “For Aristotle, women can deliberate and stick to
their resolutions. This means that their resolutions are not internally ineffective but externally so (…)
This has to do with their lack of spirit” (35); “[A] woman’s unauthoritative deliberative capacity is
in relation not to her internal mind but to the group situation – in which she cannot make it that her
own decision affects others’ actions” (43); “The spirited nature of men means that they have ultimate
control in the household and in the city. Women are most often unable to override their decisions.
Thus, a woman in such a world has to keep her own counsel and bide her time” (55); “[W]omen may
be inferior when it comes to the spirit required to dominate and rule in the city, due to bodily weak-
nesses” (59; emphasis added). But note that if the difference was only related to women’s bodies, their
being silenced, and their will overridden by men who, due to their strong spirit, subdue them, it is not
clear whether this would provide a justification for the rule of men or merely an explanation for the
brute fact that they actually subdue equally capable women. As Connell agrees, Aristotle’s Politics is
normative. Aristotle is trying to give a justification for why it is just to assign different tasks to men
and women. What ultimately provides the justification is that women, on account of their psychol-
ogy, are in themselves less good at enacting their decisions and persevering in their goals.
66 “For ruling and being ruled are not only necessary, they are also beneficial, and some things are dis-
tinguished right from birth, some suited to rule and others to being ruled.”
67 See Smith 1983; Karbowski 2014, who argue that Plato and Aristotle assign different roles to women
because they have different conceptions of women’s nature.
68 So, I agree with Annas 1976 that social efficiency contributes to explaining Plato’s gender inclusiv-
ism when it comes to ruling. I am also sympathetic to McKeen 2006, who argues that the inclusion
of women in the Guardian-Auxiliary class is beneficial, in part, in terms of civic unity for the city as
a whole, as well as for women soldiers themselves. On her view, assigning women to the guardian
classes aids them because it makes them more virtuous by combatting their natural weakness.
69 There are, of course, exceptions. Wilburn and Singpurwalla have done extensive work to expand our
understanding of spirit in Plato. See, e.g., Singpurwalla 2013; Wilburn 2022.
70 I am grateful to Sara Brill and Catherine McKeen for putting together this volume, and for their in-
sightful comments and suggestions. I am especially thankful to Rachel Singpurwala, Joshua Wilburn,
Mariska Leunissen, Sophia Connell, John Proios, Liz Asmis, Sam Rickless, David Brink, Krisanna
Scheiter, Agnes Callard, Gabriel Richardson Lear, Katja Vogt, Monte Johnson, and Zachary Brants,
who offered valuable help with this project, and to the members of the philosophy departments at
UCSD, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Union College, the University of Nevada,
Las Vegas, Boston University, and the students of a doctoral seminar on Aristotle’s Politics I taught
at UCSD in the Spring of 2023, for their helpful comments and suggestions.
199
Patricia Marechal
Works Cited
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Bloom, A. trans and commentary. (1968). Plato. The Republic. New York: Basic Books.
Brill, S. (2020). “Self-sacrifice as Wifely Virtue in Aristotle’s Political Theory.” In J. Forestal and M.
Philips eds., The Wives of Western Philosophy: Gender Politics in Intellectual Labor. New York:
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Calvert, B. (1975). “Plato and the Equality of Women.” Phoenix 29, 233–242.
Connell, S. M. (2016). Aristotle on Female Animals: A Study of the Generation of Animals. Cambridge:
Connell, S. M. (2021). Aristotle on Women: Physiology, Psychology, and Politics. Cambridge: Cam-
Deslauriers, D. (2003). “Aristotle on the Virtues of Slaves and Women.” Oxford Studies in Ancient
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Dodds, D. (1996). “Family Matters: Aristotle’s Appreciation of Women and the Plural Structure of Soci-
ety.” The American Political Science Review 90, 74–89.
Fortenbaugh, W. W. (1975). “On Plato’s Feminism in Republic V.” Apeiron 9, 1–4.
Fortenbaugh, W. (1977). “Aristotle on Slaves and Women.” In J. Barnes, M. Schofield, and R. Sorabji,
eds., Articles on Aristotle 2: Ethics and Politics. London: Duckworth, 135–139.
Grote, G. (1865). Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates. vol. 3. London: John Murray.
Harry, C. and Polansky, R. (2016). “Plato on Women’s Natural Ability: Revisiting Republic V and
Timaeus 41e3–44d2 and 86b1–92c3.” Apeiron 49(3), 261–280.
Holton, R. (1999). “Intention and Weakness of Will.” Journal of Philosophy 96, 241–262.
Kamtekar, R. (2017). Plato’s Moral Psychology: Intellectualism, the Divided Soul, and the Desire for
Good. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Karbowski, J. (2014). “Aristotle on the Deliberative Abilities of Women.” Apeiron 47(4), 435–460.
Lennox, J. (1980). “Aristotle on Genera, Species, and ‘The More and the Less.’” Journal of the History
of Biology 13(2), 321–46.
Leunissen, M. (2017). From Moral Virtue to Natural Character in Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Levin, S. B. (1996). “Women’s Nature and Role in the Ideal Polis: Republic V Revisited.” In J. K. Ward,
ed., Feminism and Ancient Philosophy. New York and London: Routledge, 13–30.
Levy, H. (1990). “Does Aristotle Exclude Women from Politics?” Review of Politics 52(3), 397–416.
McKeen, C. (2006). “Why Women Must Guard and Rule in Plato’s Kallipolis.” Pacific Philosophical
Quarterly 87, 527–548.
Modrak, D. (1994). “Aristotle: Women, Deliberation, and Nature.” In B.-A. Bar On, ed., Engendering
Origins: Critical Feminist Readings of Plato and Aristotle. Albany: SUNY Press, 207–222.
Mulgan, R. (1994). “Aristotle on the Political Role of Women.” History of Political Thought 15,
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Nielsen, K. (2015). “The Constitution of the Soul: Aristotle on Lack of Deliberative Authority.” Classi-
cal Quarterly 65(2), 572–586.
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Further Reading
An insightful article on Plato on women in the Republic is M. Sonna (2022), “La Comunidad de Mujeres
En República de Platón,” Estudos Feministas 30(1), 1–11.
Excellent recent work on thumos in Plato includes J. Wilburn (2022), The Political Soul Plato on
Thumos, Spirited Motivation, and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
For a helpful book on the lives of women in ancient Greece, see R. Blundell (1995), Women in Ancient
Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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14
PLATO ON WOMEN AND
THE PRIVATE FAMILY
Rachel Singpurwalla
1 Introduction
Plato’s attitude toward women in his major political works, the Republic and Laws, is complex.
In the Republic, Socrates argues that in his ideal city, Kallipolis, women will be rulers (451c–
457c); since rulers must be virtuous, Socrates must think that women can be virtuous. At the
same time, Socrates makes numerous disparaging comments about women throughout the
text, many of which imply that women as a kind lack virtue in so far as they fail to manage
the non-rational parts of their soul (e.g., 431b–c, 605c–d). This pattern continues in the Laws,
where the Athenian argues that in the city he is constructing, Magnesia, women will be eligi-
ble to hold public offices (e.g.,785a–b); again, since a requirement for holding public office is
virtue, he must think women can be virtuous. But the Athenian also claims that women are
inferior to men with respect to virtue (780e–781b).
In an attempt to reconcile these conflicting attitudes, some scholars, focusing on the tension
within the Republic, propose that when Plato is discussing the possibility of women holding
positions of rule, he is thinking of exceptional women as they could be given the right educa-
tion and environment, while his sexist comments are directed to women as they are.1 This pro-
posal often goes hand in hand with the claim that Plato thinks that women and men have the
same nature with respect to virtue, and so women’s inferiority is wholly the result of nurture.2
However, the issue of whether men and women have the same nature is vexed, for some pas-
sages imply that women are by nature inferior to men with respect to virtue, and, more specifi-
cally, have difficulty managing the non-rational parts of the soul. Perhaps the clearest example
is in the Timaeus, where Socrates claims that if a man masters his passions, he is just, but if
he is mastered by them, he is unjust and will be reincarnated as a woman (42a–c, 90e–91a).3
It is worth noting, however, that even if Plato thinks that women have some natural im-
pediment to virtue, he must not think it is great, since he thinks it can be largely overcome by
nurture. In the Laws, for example, the Athenian claims that if the legislator fails to create the
same regulations for women as he does for men then the city will only be about half as happy
as it could be (806c). Since virtue is required for happiness, this suggests that if attention is
given to women’s lives and environment, then they can be (almost) as virtuous as men.4 The
fact that Plato thinks that women can be almost as virtuous as men given the right environ-
ment points to culture as the primary culprit for women’s inferiority with respect to virtue.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-16 202

Plato on Women and the Private Family
In this chapter, then, I do not take a stand on whether Plato thinks that women have some
natural impediment to virtue, and I focus instead on the cultural contributions to women’s
problems with respect to virtue. Surprisingly, commentators who argue that women’s posi-
tion in society is the source of Plato’s critical comments have failed to identify which aspect
or aspects of women’s social position is the issue. Commentators often point to the fact that
women did not receive the ideal education that Plato outlines in the Republic. But men did
not receive that education either, and Plato does not subject men as a kind to the same kind of
criticism. I argue that a central problem is women’s role in the institution of the private family
and household. More specifically, I argue that Plato thinks the institution of the private family
and household is an impediment to the development of virtue. Since the private family and
household is the traditional domain of women, they will be particularly susceptible to its ill
effects. In short, individuals’ characters are shaped by the institutions they inhabit; the private
family and household is a character-shaping institution that is the primary domain for women,
and as a result their characters will be shaped for the worse.
In Section 2, I discuss Plato’s criticism of the institution of the private family and household
and I identify four features of the institution that make it an impediment to the attainment
of virtue. In Section 3, I argue that Plato criticizes women for having exactly the problems
that the institution of the private family and household tends to generate; and I argue that
Plato is aware that women’s position in the household is a significant source of their failure to
develop virtue. In the conclusion, I argue that focusing on Plato’s attitude toward the private
family raises a new puzzle about Plato’s attitudes toward women and suggest a possible line
of response.
2 What’s Wrong with the Private Family?

Plato is hostile to the private family. In the Republic, Socrates argues that in Kallipolis, the
rulers and auxiliaries will not have private families and households but will instead live as a
communal family (457c–466d). In the Laws, the Athenian allows the citizens of Magnesia
to have private families and households, but he explicitly claims that this is a second-best ar-
rangement (739a–740a), and, as we shall see, he takes several measures to weaken the institu-
tion. But what, exactly, is the problem with the private family? I argue that the institution of
the private family is an impediment to the development of virtue. In both the Republic and the
Laws, Plato defines virtue as the state where reason rules over the non-rational parts of the
soul (Rep. 441d–442b; Laws 653a–c, 863e–864a). In both texts, being ruled by reason in-
volves a commitment to the common good.5 Thus, the virtuous individual values the common
good over the satisfaction of their more selfish, often materialistic, non-rational desires. The
institution of the private family is associated with four features that make it an impediment to
developing virtue so understood.
2.1 The Private Family and Selfishness

The first feature of the institution of private family that makes it an impediment to virtue is
that it divides citizens into family members and non-family members and claims that individu-
als should have a special concern for family members; this leads the citizens to narrow their
circle of concern and potentially favor the interests of their family members over the common
good.
This is stated most clearly in Republic V, where Socrates argues that the private family
threatens the unity of the city (462a–b). Socrates argues that a city is unified when the citizens
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share pleasures and pains or rejoice at one another’s successes and grieve at their failures; in
other words, the city is unified when the citizens care about the welfare of their fellow citi-
zens (462b). He claims that this is achieved, at least in part, when the citizens see their fellow
citizens as “mine” or as belonging to them in some sense (462c). The private family threatens
civic unity since it encourages the citizens to see some of their fellow citizens (their family
members) as belonging to them, and others as not belonging to them, and this in turn leads to
private and potentially conflicting pleasures and pains among the citizens, which ultimately
dissolve the city. Socrates is particularly concerned with the guardians and so emphasizes that
they should not have private families.
He summarizes as follows:
So, as I say, doesn’t what was said earlier, as well as what is being said now [abolish-
ing private property and private families for the guardians], make them into even better
guardians and prevent them from tearing the city apart by applying the term “mine” not
to the same thing, but to different ones – with one person dragging into his own house
whatever he, apart from the others, can get his hands on, and another into a different
house to a different wife and children, who create private pleasures and pains at things
that are private? Instead of that, don’t our guardians share a single conviction about what
is their own, aim at the same goal, and, as far as possible, feel pleasure and pain in unison?
(Rep. 464c4–d6)6
This passage makes clear that good guardians believe that all the citizens are their own and
thereby aim at the same goal, namely, the common good and stresses that the institution of
the private family threatens this commitment.
In sum, the institution of the private family is associated with norms that license the thought
that family members are related to you in a special way and that this warrants giving them
special consideration. Thus, the institution of the private family compromises the guardians’
virtue in so far as it is likely to cause the guardians to lose their commitment to the common
good and favor the interests of their family.
2.2 The Private Family, Private Property, Materialism, and Intemperance

The second feature of the institution of the private family that makes it an impediment to vir-
tue is that it is linked to the institution of private property, and private property is an obstacle
to the development and maintenance of temperance, or reason’s rule over the appetites.
For Plato, the private family and private property go hand in hand. In Republic V, when
Socrates describes why the private family is problematic, he highlights the link between the
private family and private property. In the passage quoted above Socrates says that abolishing
the private family for the guardians will prevent them from tearing the city apart “…with one
person dragging into his own house whatever he, apart from the others, can get his hands on,
and another into a different house to a different wife and children…” (464c8–d2). In Republic
VIII, Socrates says that the downfall of the ideal city occurs when rulers distribute the land and
houses among themselves as private property (547b–c). As Susan Moller Okin notes, Socrates
simultaneously reintroduces the private family without noting this as an additional change in
the constitution.7
Why does Plato link the private family with private property? Okin argues that Plato
links the two because he sees women as property, so it is a natural step from owning private
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property to having a wife and a private family.8 But there are other possible explanations.
Perhaps owning private property creates the desire for an heir – someone related to you to
pass your property on to (so that you can, in a sense, hold onto it forever) – and having an
heir requires a private family and in turn a household so that men can seclude their wives
and thereby guarantee paternity. Alternatively, perhaps the desire for a private family comes
first and this requires a private household. Specifically, perhaps all people desire to reproduce
themselves and this in turn creates the desire to educate and influence one’s child in one’s own
values and way of life, and this requires a private household, a physical space to delimit the
boundaries between the public and the private, where parents have more influence over their
children.9
Whatever the reason for the connection between the private family and private property,
the link between the two is a problem, for Plato thinks the institution of private property
breeds materialism and acquisitiveness and ultimately intemperance. We see this clearly in
Republic III, where Socrates discusses the living quarters of the guardians. Socrates claims
that it is vitally important to ensure that the guardians are not led by intemperance, hunger, or
some other bad condition to do evil to their fellow citizens (415e–416a). Importantly, Socrates
claims that while education is a safeguard against this, it is not enough (416a–d). In addition,
the guardians must have living quarters that will ensure that they care for their fellow citizens:
specifically, they should not have private property that is beyond what is necessary or living
quarters or storerooms that are not open to all; instead, they should have the minimal provi-
sions that are required of “temperate and courageous men” (416d7–8). Socrates concludes
that “if they acquire private land, houses, and money themselves, they will be household man-
agers and farmers instead of guardians – hostile masters of the other citizens, instead of their
allies” (417a7–b2). Thus, Socrates thinks that private property is a threat to the guardians’
temperance and thus to their ability to value the welfare of their fellow citizens over their own
materialistic desires.
And indeed, in Republic VIII, Socrates describes how the acquisition of private house-
holds and property leads the honor-loving timocratic constitution to turn into a money-loving
and oligarchic one. Socrates claims that although the timocratic rulers value honor, they will
have an appetite for money, owning storehouses where they deposit their gold and silver and
private homes where they can spend their money however they wish (548a–b). Ultimately a
timocracy transforms to an oligarchy because of:
…The storehouse filled with gold we mentioned, which each possess…First, you see,
the timocrats find ways of spending their money; then they alter the laws to allow them
to do so, and then they and their women disobey the laws altogether…So, in the end,
victory-loving and honor-loving men become lovers of making money and money-lovers,
and they praise and admire the wealthy man and appoint him as ruler, and dishonor the
poor one.
(550d5–551a8)
So Plato thinks there is a clear step from owning private property to developing a strong desire
for money, gold, and silver, which threatens one’s ability to rule over these desires, or to value
other things more highly than money.
The culprit here is the appetitive part of the soul, which Socrates describes as the strongest
source of motivation in the soul and most insatiable for money (442a; 580e–581a). Plato seems
to think that our materialistic desires are so powerful that the only strategy for managing them
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is to refrain from indulging in certain desires in the first place. Thus, he argues that reason and
spirit should watch over the appetitive part so that:
...It does not get so filled with the so-called pleasures of the body that it becomes big
and strong, and no longer does its own job but attempts to enslave and rule over the
classes it is not fitted to rule, thereby overturning the whole life of anyone in whom
it occurs.
(442a7–b3)
2.3 The Private Family, Privacy, and Indulging in Non-Rational Desires

A third feature of the institution of the private family and household that makes it an impedi-
ment to the development of civic virtue is that it provides privacy, which affords the opportu-
nity to act on desires and emotions that one would be ashamed to act on in public; by acting
on these desires, one strengthens them and this can lead to an inability to manage them in
general, and thus to a degeneration of character.
We have already seen that Socrates criticizes timocracy because it allows for private house-
holds and property and this ownership strengthens our materialistic desires. But the private
household is not only problematic because owning private property itself breeds acquisitive-
ness and materialism. Socrates also describes as problematic the very privacy of the private
household, which allows people to act in ways they would not act in public. The timocrat,
for example, lives in a city that does not value money; but the privacy afforded by the private
household allows him to indulge in his acquisitive desires:
Such men will have an appetite for money just like those in oligarchies, passionately
adoring gold and silver in secret, owning storehouses and private treasuries where they
can deposit them and keep them hidden; and they will have walls around their houses,
real private nests, where they can spend lavishly on their women or on anyone else they
please…They will enjoy their pleasures in secret, running away from the law like boys
from their father, since they have not been educated by persuasion but by force.
(548a5–b7)
As we have seen, Socrates claims that repeatedly acting on these appetitive desires causes the
rulers to value money, thus moving their characters further from virtue or reason’s rule over
the appetites.
Socrates thinks that privacy allows for the satisfaction of all kinds of non-rational desires
which conflict with reason, not just those associated with money. In Republic X, he claims
that privacy provides a space for people to indulge in desires that they would not indulge in
public, such as excessive grief. During his critique of tragic poetry, Socrates describes how the
good person responds to the loss of a child. The good man grieves but is measured in the face
of pain. He says:
Do you think he will be more likely to fight and resist pain when he is seen by his equals,
or when he is just by himself in a solitary place…But when he is alone, I imagine, he will
venture to say many things he would be ashamed if someone else heard, and to do many
things he would not want anyone else to see him doing.
(604a2–604a8)
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Socrates repeats the same idea in the case of humor. He says:
You see, if there are jokes you would be ashamed to tell yourself, but that you very much
enjoy when you hear them imitated in comedy or even in private, and that you don’t hate
as something bad, aren’t you doing the same as with the things you pity? For the element
in you that wanted to tell the jokes, but which you held back by means of reason because
you were afraid of being reputed a buffoon, you now release; and having made it strong
in that way you have been led unawares into becoming a comedian in your own life.
(606c1–d1)
In sum, Socrates thinks that privacy affords one the opportunity to act on desires and emo-
tions that one would be ashamed to act on in public; by acting on these desires, you strengthen
them, and this can lead to an inability to manage these desires in general.
What is important to note here is that Plato sees the sense of shame, or the fear of being
seen failing to act in a way that one considers decent and honorable, as an important source
of moral motivation. But shame is less operative in the privacy of the household where one
is freed from the gaze of others. We can put this in terms of the tri-partite psychology of the
Republic: Socrates claims that spirit is the source of the love of honor and the fear of shame
(581a–b); as such, it pushes the person act in ways one considers decent and honorable. But
this motivation might be less active in the privacy of the home, thus providing a space for
people to indulge in irrational desires and thereby strengthen those desires.
2.4 The Private Family, Lawlessness, and Variable Pleasures and Pains
The fourth feature of the private family that makes it an impediment to the development of
virtue is that some actions typically taken within the private household are beyond the bounds
of legislation; as a result, people are not guided by reason and law in these domains, but in-
stead by their idiosyncratic pleasures and pains, thus leading to variety and inconsistency in
the character of the citizens and away from virtue.
In Laws VII, the Athenian discusses the very early upbringing of children and he is against
creating legislation in this area, even though he thinks early upbringing is of crucial impor-
tance for the development of virtue. He says:
In people’s private and domestic lives a great many things are done – trivial things, hid-
den from public view – which are prompted by the pains and pleasures and desires of
particular individuals, and which can easily run counter to the intentions of the lawgiver,
resulting in all kinds of variety and inconsistency in the character of the citizens. This,
for cities, is a bad thing. The triviality and frequency of this behavior makes it inappro-
priate and unbecoming for the person making laws to make them punishable offences,
and in any case it undermines the written laws if people get into the habit of breaking
the law through repeated petty infringements. So it is a pretty hopeless task to make laws
in this area…
(788a6–c2)10
Shortly thereafter, the Athenian repeats the idea that we should not create legislation with
penalties regarding how pregnant women should behave or how nurses should carry children,
even though these are important for the development of character. He says, “We would be a
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laughing-stock – not to mention the nurses refusing to obey; in terms of character, they are
women and slaves, after all” (790a6–8).
Why is Plato against creating legislation regarding some aspects of early upbringing? First,
he thinks it is unfitting to create laws with penalties prohibiting actions that people take fre-
quently and that do not cause obvious harm to others. Second, he thinks even if someone were
to create laws in this area, people would ignore them and this would undermine the force of
the law. It is not clear why Plato thinks people would ignore these laws, especially women
and slaves. Perhaps he thinks that since these actions often take place in the privacy of the
home people will ignore any laws they do not see as important since they are free from public
scrutiny. Or perhaps he thinks people are accustomed to being free from law with respect to
many actions that take place in the home, and so are not in the habit of being lawful in this
domain, and as a result will be less likely to take laws governing this domain as authoritative.
This tendency to ignore the law might be particularly true of women and slaves, whose lives
more often primarily take place in the private household.
Since certain actions in the domain of the private family and household are beyond the
bounds of legislation, citizens are likely to either do as they please or be guided by household
customs which are patterns of action that have been established within the home, often by
previous generations. But even this could be a problem, for if the household customs are out
of sync with the written laws, then citizens will eventually reject those laws. The Athenian says
of household customs:
If they are the right customs in the first place, and have become second nature, then they
envelope, and completely protect whatever written laws exist at that point; if they are
out of key, and get out of true, then they are like the timber supports which carpenters
put in; if those suddenly give way, in the middle of the building, they bring the whole
thing down with them, one part on top of another, the supports themselves together with
the fine structure that came after, once those original components have collapsed.
(793b7–c7)
In short, then, certain choices and actions within the private household are beyond the bounds
of legislation and thus people may not be guided by right reason and law in choosing their
actions. This leads to the growth of variable pleasures and pains, which in turn affects the
character of the citizens, and ultimately, the stability of the law-code.
So the institution of the private family has several features that are problematic for the de-
velopment of virtue: it gives citizens a special relationship and thus special concern to only a
few members of the community; it is associated with private property which leads to material-
ism and intemperance; it comes with a private space which leads people to indulge desires they
would not indulge in public and which in turn strengthens those desires; and it is beyond the
bounds of legislation, which allows people to act in accordance with their idiosyncratic pleas-
ures and pains, which, again, leads to a strengthening of the appetites and a variable character.
Socrates explores two solutions to the problem of the private family and household in
his major political works. In the Republic, he abolishes the private family and household
altogether, at least for the guardians (457c–466d). In the Laws, he thinks that abolishing the
private family and household is beyond the capabilities of humans (739a–740a), but he takes
numerous measures to weaken the institution of the private family and household and thereby
lessen its deleterious effects. These include taking the education of children out of private
hands and instead having a mandatory public education which stresses the common good on
the grounds that children “belong to the city more than they belong to their parents” (804d);
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putting limits on the acquisition of private households and property (737b–747e); instituting
public common meals so as to lessen the time spent in the privacy of the household (780a–
781d); and including in the law-code, which all citizens must read, “advice” about the correct
house-hold customs (788a–793d). All of these are designed to mitigate the specific problems
with the private family and household summarized above.
3 Women and the Private Family

Thus far I have argued that Plato identifies several features of the institution of the private
family and property that are an impediment to the development of virtue, or reason’s rule over
the non-rational appetites and emotions. My claim is that, given women’s traditional role in
the private home, they will be at a particular disadvantage when it comes to developing virtue.
How did Plato and his Athenian contemporaries conceive of women’s role in the institution
of the private family? In the Meno, Meno expresses a standard view. He says:
…A man’s virtue consists of being able to manage public affairs and in so doing to ben-
efit his friends and harm his enemies and to be careful that no harm comes to himself; if
you want the virtue of a woman, it is not difficult to describe: she must manage the home
well, preserve its possessions, and be submissive to her husband.
(Meno 71e1–6)11
In this passage, we see a clear contrast between men’s role in the public, and women’s role as
caretakers of the private realm.12
This idea is echoed in various passages in the Republic and Laws, where Plato emphasizes
women’s role in educating children and taking care of the families’ possessions. In the Repub-
lic, when he discusses how children are currently educated, he stresses that it is mothers and
nurses who tell the stories to children (377b–c). Also in the Republic, he stresses that women
are in charge of the family’s possessions; he says that abolishing the private family would
be a good thing, as it would free men of “…the need to make money necessary to feed the
household – the borrowings, the defaults, and all the things people have to do to provide an
income to hand over to their wives and slaves to spend on housekeeping” (465c4–8). And
in the Laws, he says “…we huddle all of our goods together, as the saying goes, within four
walls, and then hand over the dispensing of them to women …” (805e5–8).
Given women’s role as caretakers of the family and its possessions, it is unsurprising to
see Plato regularly depicting women as a kind failing to develop virtue. First, women’s role as
caretakers of the home will promote a strong interest in the welfare of the family, and their
isolation from the public realm will make it difficult to cultivate a concern for the common
good. Thus, in Republic VIII, Socrates describes the timocrat’s mother as encouraging her hus-
band to compete with other men in the public realm to bring goods into the household so that
she is not at a disadvantage among the other women (549c–d). Second, women’s role as care-
takers of the family’s possessions will promote a strong interest in money and material goods
and thus a strengthening of the appetites. Thus, Socrates again criticizes the timocrat’s mother
for being oriented toward money and thereby strengthening her son’s appetites (549c–550a).
Third, women’s role as caretakers of the private realm with its associated seclusion from the
public means that women have every opportunity to indulge their appetites and emotions
without fear of shame, thus strengthening those appetites and emotions. And so, Plato often
associates women with being unable to manage their emotions; in Republic X, for example,
he claims that quietly enduring a personal loss is what a man does, while indulging in grief is
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what a woman does (605c–e). And finally, the fact that some trivial actions that typically take
place within the private home are beyond the bounds of legislation allow women the freedom
to act as they please and this leads to lawlessness and variable pleasures and pains. Thus, in
Republic IV, Socrates claims “…pleasures, pains, and appetites that are numerous and multi-
farious are things one would especially find in children, women, household slaves, and in the
so-called free members of the masses – that is, the inferior people” (431b9–c4).
It is worth noting that women are doubly disadvantaged with respect to developing virtue.
For not only does their role in the institution of the private family directly encourage the
growth of the appetites, but also it prevents them from participating in institutions which
strengthen the spirited part of the soul, which has a special role to play in making the person
virtuous by enabling the individual to resist appetitive pleasures and pains. In the Republic,
Socrates tells the story of Leontius, whose spirit is angry with his shameful appetitive desire to
look at corpses and pushes him to resist (439e–440e). And he later characterizes the relation-
ship between reason and spirit as follows:
And wouldn’t these two elements [reason and spirit] also do the finest job of guarding
the whole soul and body against external enemies – the one by deliberating, the other by
fighting, following the ruler, and using its courage to carry out the things on which the
former had decided? I imagine, then, that we call each individual courageous because of
the latter part – that is, when the element of his that is spirited in kind preserves through
pains and pleasures the pronouncements of reason about what should inspire terror and
what should not.
(442b4–c2)
Thus, the spirited part of the soul, in its pursuit of acting courageously and honorably in
general, pushes the person to act in accordance with reason, despite appetitive temptations to
the contrary.13
But in the Republic, Socrates is clear that the spirited part of the soul is nurtured through
physical and military training (411e–412a). And in the Laws, Socrates contrasts the education
received in the home with an education that strengthens one’s ability to endure pleasures and
pains. In Laws III, while discussing how correct constitutions are a blend of monarchy and
democracy, the Athenian discusses the virtues of the Persian king, Cyrus, and the vices of his
sons. While Cyrus spent his life from his earliest youth facing the dangers of war, the women
brought up his children in the royal household, where they were indulged and prevented from
enduring any hardships. The Athenian refers to this as a “woman’s education” and contrasts
it with the traditional Persian education, which includes physical hardships and gives children
a preparation for war because of the ability to endure physical pains (694d–695b).
Since Plato contrasts life in the household with physical hardship and thinks the latter
leads to softness while the former leads to courage and the ability to withstand pleasures and
pains, and since women, whose role is to be caretakers of the home, have little opportunity
to strengthen and nurture the spirited part, it is, again, unsurprising to see Plato claiming that
women fail to manage their appetites. And in particular, it is unsurprising to see him regularly
associating women with cowardice (e.g. Republic 388a, Timaeus 90e, Laws 994e–d).14
It is clear, then, that Plato’s critique of the household has the resources to explain, at least
in large part, women’s deficiencies with respect to virtue. But does Plato see it this way? Does
he realize, that is, that women’s position in the household is at the least a significant source
of their problems with respect to virtue? I think he does. One piece of evidence is that one of
Socrates’ most damning depictions of women in the Republic, the timocrat’s mother, occurs
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immediately after the reintroduction of the private family, suggesting a link between the nega-
tive characteristics of women and their role in the private home (549c–550b).15
A second, stronger piece of evidence is that in the Laws, the Athenian advocates a public
life for women on the grounds that a private life – a life in the household – breeds vice. The
clearest instance of this is in the Athenian’s discussion of communal meals. The Athenian ad-
vocates communal meals, even after marriage, for both men and women. He says:
Anyone who thinks he can promulgate laws in cities dealing with the public and commu-
nal life of the citizens in the belief that there is no need for laws governing their private
lives…and that you can leave their private lives outside the scope of the law they will
be willing to lead their communal public lives in accordance with the laws – he’s not
thinking straight.
(789e10–780a7)
While he praises Sparta and Crete for advocating communal meals for men, he criticizes them
for not applying the same idea to women. He says,
So the sex which is in any case, in us humans, by its very nature more secretive and devi-
ous because of its weakness (dia to asthenes), has, through some misplaced indulgence
on the part of the lawgiver, been left completely unregulated. The consequence of this
omission was that you lost sight of a number of things which, had they been governed
by law, would be in a far better state than they are today. After all, it’s not just half the
battle lost, as you might think, if we sit back and allow women’s lives to go unregulated:
to whatever extent the female sex has a natural (physis) inferiority to the male when it
comes to human goodness, to that extent the danger is more than double. Better for the
city’s well-being, to remedy this, put it straight, and make joint regulations for all activi-
ties, for men and women alike.
(781a2–b3)
Thus women, like men, should participate in the public life of the city and in particular the
practice of communal meals, since the private realm is unregulated and so promotes vice.
Now thus far I have been arguing that Plato sees culture as the primary culprit when it
comes to women’s inferiority with respect to virtue. But the passage just quoted might ap-
pear to suggest that women’s nature is the bigger problem, since it claims that women are by
nature secretive and devious and inferior to men with respect to virtue. However, this passage
is deeply ambiguous.16 While the Athenian does say that women are secretive and devious
due to their weakness (asthenês), it is difficult to determine from the context what sense of
“weakness” he has in mind. He might think that women have some kind of psychological or
moral weakness that inclines them to being secretive and devious.17 But he might also think
that women are physically weaker than men, and thus must use devious means to exercise
their agency.18 Or he might think that women are politically weaker than men, and something
about this subordinate political position leads to secretiveness and deviousness.19 I think there
is reason to favor this latter reading, for women’s subordinate political position is associated
with being secluded in the home, and we have seen that Plato thinks that the privacy of the
home leads to secretiveness and deviousness; recall, for example, his description of the timo-
crat in the Republic, whose private household allows him to indulge his desire for money in
secret, “running away from the law like a boy from his father.” Moreover, the Athenian goes
on to claim that women are accustomed to a life of seclusion and obscurity and may have to
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be forced into the public realm, which further emphasizes that women’s secluded lives are the
problem (781c). And finally, a passage to which we now turn further confirms that it is the
private household, and not women’s nature, that is the primary problem.
In Laws VII, the Athenian returns to the argument that men and women should share in
everything. He says, “We shall still assert that, both in education and in other things, the fe-
male sex in our city must as far as possible be no less involved than the male sex” (805c8–d1).
The Athenians claims that if they did not assert this, they would have to come up with a
different set of rules for women. But what rules? The Athenian canvasses the alternatives on
offer and rejects them. The Thracians have the women work on the land, herd farm animals,
and generally work as servants; but then they might as well be slaves (805d–c). The Athenians
bring all their possessions under one roof and the women act as stewards and engage in do-
mestic labor such as weaving (805e). The Spartans have a compromise: they give women an
equal physical and musical education, but then the women, while freed from domestic labor,
are stewards of the home. But the Athenian argues that because the women are relegated to
the home and freed from military service, they, unlike the Amazons and Sarmatians, fail to
develop courage (806a–b). He continues:
[The lawgiver] must not concern himself only with the male sex, and allow the female
sex to enjoy an unregulated life of luxury and expense. That really would leave the city
with just about half of what it needs for a happy life, when it could have twice that
amount.
(806c1–6)
This passage as a whole associates the private household with cowardice, luxury and expense,
and claims that allowing women to spend their time in the household leaves the city with half
of the happiness it could have, strongly suggesting that women’s position in the household is
the primary source of any problems with respect to virtue.
What is also interesting to note here is that Plato does not think education is enough of
a safeguard against vice, for the Spartan women receive a (decent) education, but it is not
enough to sustain their virtue once they live their lives in the private household. Here, Plato is
echoing the claim made in Republic III that education is not enough of a safeguard against in-
temperance; instead, a public, communal lifestyle is required (415e–417b). Again, the thought
is that allowing women to live a life centered on the home leads to vice and the solution is to
have men and women share in the same public and communal way of life as much as possible.
He laments, however, and says:
Now, if we were looking for things to be exactly so, in the minutest detail, then it prob-
ably wouldn’t ever happen – certainly not while women and children and houses are in
private hands, and all arrangements of that kind, in our respective cities, are made on a
private basis.
(807b3–7)
These observations shed new light on the issue of the relationship between Plato’s proposals
regarding abolishing the family and his progressive proposals regarding women’s role in soci-
ety. Susan Moller Okin argues that there is a connection between Plato’s views on the family
and his ideas about women holding position of rule.20 She claims that Plato is first and fore-
most critical of the family and wants to dismantle it. This leads him to think about what new
role women should play in the city; he assesses women’s capabilities and comes to a relatively
212
positive assessment. So, in the Republic, when he abolishes the private family, he argues that
women can be guardians. In the Laws, however, Plato re-establishes the private family, and
as a result, according to Okin, women’s role in society is greatly diminished, even though
Plato’s estimation of women’s capabilities remains high. This is because the reintroduction of
the private family puts women back into their role as caretakers of the household, leaving less
freedom and time for public pursuits. Thus, on Okin’s view, Plato’s views on whether women
can have a significant role in public life in his ideal society rises and falls with the existence of
the private family.21
The passages we have been examining suggest, however, then the relationship between
Plato’s views on the family and his ideas about women’s public role in society is more com-
plex. While the extent to which women hold positions of rule in the Magnesia is controversial,
Okin is surely right that the re-introduction of the private family puts some limitations on
women, and in particular on what offices they can hold during their child-bearing years.22 At
the same time, the passages we have been examining suggest that the reintroduction of the
private family in the Laws gives Plato even more reason to give women an education and a
public role in society. That is, the fact that the society is built around the private family and
household, that women are influential within families (particularly when it comes to child-
rearing), and that there are certain vices associated with the private family and household,
pushes Plato to think even harder about how to prevent his citizens from being susceptible
to those vices, and this includes arguing for women’s education, participation in the military,
communal meals, and public roles and offices.
4 Conclusion
I began this chapter by noting that Plato has conflicting attitudes toward women: on the one
hand, he thinks they should hold positions of rule, but, on the other hand, he regularly criti-
cizes women as a kind for failing to develop virtue. I noted that some commentators resolve
this tension by claiming that Plato’s more progressive attitudes are about women as they could
be, while his more derogatory comments are about women as they are. The argument of my
chapter has gone some way toward vindicating this approach by identifying the problematic
aspects of women’s position in society and linking it to the vices he associates with them.
At the same time, focusing on Plato’s attitudes toward the household might reveal a new
problem in Plato’s attitudes toward women. I have focused on Plato’s critical attitudes to-
ward the private family. But Plato is not wholly critical of the institution of the family; there
are some aspects of the institution that he values. Specifically, he values the attitudes of care
and concern that people have toward their family members; he simply wishes those attitudes
would extend more widely. Thus, in Republic III, he claims that the citizens will be told a
“noble lie” which encourages them to think of one another as siblings and he hopes this will
motivate them to care more for the city (414c–415d). And in Republic V, while he abolishes
the private family (at least for the guardians), he does not get rid of the notion of family alto-
gether. Instead, he encourages the guardians to think of one another as family and he thinks
this will motivate them to care for one another (463b–465b).
But if the institution of the private family cultivates these valuable attitudes of care and
concern, and if the primary domain of women is the private family, then it seems that women
in particular would exemplify these attitudes of care and concern. This gives rise to a question:
if Plato criticizes women as a kind for having the sorts of negative traits that are cultivated
in the family, why do we not see him praising women as a kind for having the praiseworthy
attitudes that are cultivated in the family?23 Here is a charitable answer: if Plato’s aim is to
213
Rachel Singpurwalla
encourage men to develop traits like gentleness and care for others, he might think that prais-
ing women for having these traits, and thereby labeling them as “womanly,” is an ineffective
strategy for encouraging men to value and aspire to them, given the sexism of the time.24
Notes
1 This is defended by Smith 1983; Vlastos 1995; Levin 1996; Harry and Polansky 2016. There are
other ways of reconciling Plato’s conflicting attitudes. Some argue that Plato’s proposal that women
should rule is not meant to be taken seriously (Strauss 1964; Bloom 1968; Saxonhouse 1976; Spelman
1994). Others argue that Plato’s proposal that women should rule is meant to be taken seriously, but
that it is compatible with his disparaging remarks about women, since he thinks women should rule
for the sake of efficiency (Annas 1976) or civic unity (McKeen 2006) or eugenics (Gardner 2000) or
to professionalize childrearing (Fletcher 2021), and not because he thinks women are equal to men
with respect to virtue.
2 Smith 1983; Vlastos 1995; Levin 1996; Levin 2000; Harry and Polansky 2016 argue that Plato thinks
women and men have the same nature with respect to virtue in the Republic, but not the Laws.
3 Harry and Polansky 2016 argue for a way of interpreting these passages that does not imply that
women are by nature inferior to men.
4 There are other passages in the Laws that support the idea that with the proper training, women can
be (almost) as virtuous as men. For example, the Athenian claims that any city that leaves women
uneducated in horseback riding and gymnastics is only half of what it could be (804d–e), suggesting
that women are as capable as men with respect to strength and virtue. See also 794d–795b.
5 In Republic IV, Socrates says that musical and physical training result in the rule of reason over the
non-rational parts of the soul (441e–442b); in book III, Socrates claims the best preservers of their
musical and physical education are those that hold onto their belief that they should always do what
is best for the city (413e–414a). In the Laws, the Athenian claims that the name “law” is given to
reasoning that has become the common opinion of the city (645a), that laws aim at the common good
(715b), and that the good and virtuous person both knows and is a servant to the law (822e).
6 All translations of the Republic from Reeve 2004.
7 Okin 1977, 350.
8 Okin 1977, 349–350.
9 See also Kochin 2002, 103–104, who argues that all people desire to reproduce themselves, and this
gives rise to the desire for a private wife and a private household in which to seclude the wife in order
to guarantee that the child is one’s own.
10 All translation of the Laws from Griffith 2016 with some modifications.
11 Translation G.M.A. Grube.
12 Hulme 2022 argues that scholars have often over-stated the extent to which women’s lives were
restricted to the private realm and draws attention to evidence that women practiced a wide range
of trades. She notes, however, that less women than men practiced a trade and that women always
had to balance this with their role as caretakers of the private household. Thus, women spent more
time both in and concerned with the household than men. See also her contribution to this volume
(Chapter 12).
13 See Singpurwalla 2013; Wilburn 2015, 2021, 177–182; Kamtekar 2017 165–185 for fuller and
differing accounts of how and why spirit is the ally of reason.
14 See Marechal’s paper in this volume for an argument that Plato thinks that women are by nature
weaker than men in so far as they have a psychological propensity to get easily dispirited (Chapter
13). While the argument of my paper is not incompatible with her claim (since I do not deny that Plato
might think women have a natural impediment to virtue), I think culture plays a larger role in deter-
mining the extent to which women are able to develop virtue. More specifically, I think women’s role
in the private household negatively affects all aspects of women’s psychology: it prevents their reason
from developing a concern for the common good, strengthens their appetites, and weakens their spirit.
15 See Brill 2015 for an insightful discussion of the role of the private family in Socrates’ description of
civic and psychic degeneration in Republic VIII and IX.
16 See Bobonich 2002, 385–389; Samaras 2010, 188–191 for a detailed discussion of this passage.
17 Levin 2000, 84; McKeen 2006, 541–542 argue that this passage claims that women have a moral
weakness.
18 Samaras 2010, 189 claims that Plato has physical weakness in mind.
214
19 Kochin 2002, 110–111 argues that Plato is referring to political weakness in this passage.
20 Okin 1977.
21 See Jacobs 1978 and Bluestone 1987, 102-108 for objections to Okin's claim that in the Republic,
Plato is first and foremost interested in abolishing the family and his argument that women should
rule is dependent on this.
22 The Athenian is clear, for example, that women will only participate in the military after the age
of childbearing and that they are not eligible for public office until the age of 40 (785b). See Saun-
ders 1995 for a detailed discussion of Plato’s thoughts on the extent of women’s public roles in the
Laws.
23 See Kochin 2002 and Ironside and Wilburn (forthcoming) for arguments that Plato does want his
male citizens to cultivate virtues and traits typically associated with women. But neither argue that
Plato explicitly praises women for having these traits.
24 I am grateful to Sara Brill and Catherine McKeen for inviting me to contribute to this volume and for
their helpful comments on earlier drafts. I would also like to thank Emily Hulme, Rachana Kamtekar,
Patricia Marechal, John Proios, Clerk Shaw, and Josh Wilburn for their valuable comments, as well as
audience members at the Workshop on Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy 2021, and the Plato’s
Republic conference at the University of Barcelona 2023.
Bibliography
Annas, J. (1976) “Plato’s Republic and Feminism,” Philosophy 51: 307–351.
Bloom, A. Trans and commentary. (1968) Plato. The Republic, New York: Basic Books.
Bluestone, N. (1987) Women and the Ideal Society: Plato’s Republic and Modern Myths of Gender,
Amherst: The University of Massachussets Press.
Bobonich, C. (2002) Plato’s Utopia Recast: His Later Ethics and Politics, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Brill, S. (2015) “Political Pathology in Plato’s Republic,” Apeiron 49 (2): 127–161.
Fletcher, E. (2021) “Women and Childrearing in the Republic,” in Chouinard, I., McConaughey,
Z., Ramos, A.M. and Noel, R. (eds.) Women’s Perspectives in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy,
Switzerland: Springer 91–99.
Gardner, C. (2000) “The Remnants of the Family: The Role of Women and Eugenics in Plato’s Republic
V,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 17 (3): 217–235.
Harry, C. and Polansky, R. (2016) “Plato on Women’s Natural Ability: Revisiting Republic V and
Timaeus 41e3–42d2 and 681b–692c3,” Apeiron 49 (3): 261–280.
Hulme, E. 2022. “First Wave Feminism: Craftswomen in Plato’s Republic,” Apeiron 55 (4): 485–507.
Ironside, K and Wilburn, J. (forthcoming) “‘Feminizing’ the City: Plato on Women, Masculinity and
Thumos,” Hypatia.
Jacobs, W. (1978) “Plato on Female Emancipation and the Traditional Family,” Apeiron XII (1): 29–31.
Kochin, M. (2002) Gender and Rhetoric in Plato’s Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Levin, S.B. (1996) “Women’s Nature and Role in the Ideal Polis: Republic V Revisited,” in Ward, J.K.
(ed.) Feminism and Ancient Philosophy, New York and London: Routledge, 13–30.
Levin, S.B. (2000) “Plato on Women’s Nature: Reflections on the Laws,” Ancient Philosophy 21 (1):
81–97.
McKeen, C. (2006) “Why Women Must Guard and Rule in Plato’s Kallipolis,” Pacific Philosophical
Okin, S. M. (1977) “Philosopher Queens and Private Wives: Plato on Women and the Family,” Philoso-
phy and Public Affairs 6 (4): 345–369.
Okin, S. M. (1979) Women in Western Political Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Samaras, T. (2010) “Family and the Question of Women in the Laws,” in Bobonich, C. (ed.) Plato’s
Laws: A Critical Guide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 172–196.
Saunders, T. (1995) “Plato on Women in the Laws,” in Powell, A. (ed.) The Greek World, New York:
Routledge, 591–609.
Saxonhouse, A. (1976) “The Philosopher and the Female in the Political Thought of Plato,” Political
Theory 4: 195–212.
Singpurwalla, R. (2013) “Why Spirit Is the Natural Ally of Reason: Spirit, Reason, and the Fine in Plato’s
Republic,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 44: 41–65.
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Rachel Singpurwalla
Smith, N. (1983). “Plato and Aristotle on the Nature of Women,” Journal of the History of Philosophy
21 (4): 467–478.
Spelman. E. (1994) “Hairy Cobblers and Philosopher Queens,” in Bar-on, B.A. (ed.) Engendering Ori-
gins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle, Albany: The State University of New York
Press: 87–107.
Strauss, L. (1964) The City and Man, Chicago: Rand McNally.
Vlastos, G. (1989) “Was Plato a Feminist?” Times Literary Supplement 276: 288–289. Reprinted in N.
Tuana, ed. (1994) Feminist Interpretations of Plato, University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press.
Wender, D. (1973) “Plato: Misogynist, Paedophile, and Feminist,” Arethusa 6 (1): 75–90.
Wilburn, J. (2015) “Courage and the Spirited Part of the Soul in Plato’s Republic,” Philosophers’ Imprint
15: 1–21.
Wilburn, J. (2022) The Political Soul: Plato on Thumos, Spirited Motivation, and the City, Oxford:
Further Reading
For a sharp and influential argument regarding the relationship between Plato’s attitudes toward women
and the family in the Republic and Laws, see Susan Moller Okin, “Philosopher Queens and Private
Wives: Plato on Women and the Family.”
For a balanced discussion of Plato’s attitude toward the family in the Laws, and Plato’s attitude toward
women in both the Republic and the Laws, see Thanassis Samaras, “Family and the Question of
Women in the Laws.”
For a wide-ranging analysis of Plato’s attitude toward women and the family in the Republic and Laws
which highlights the rhetorical constraints given by Plato’s interlocutors, see Michael Kochin, Gender
and Rhetoric in Plato’s Political Thought.
216
15
PLATO’S SCIENTIFIC FEMINISM
Collection and Division in
Republic V’s “First Wave”
1 Introduction: Plato’s Feminism?

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that in the ideal city women and men in the guardian class
should receive the same education (451e–52a, 456d–57a) and do the same work (453b–56b);
indeed, Socrates emphasizes that the highest office in the ideal city, of philosopher-rulers, will
include philosopher-queens and not just philosopher-kings (540c).
Socrates’ conclusions might be thought to recognize equality as a value,1 but in this chap-
ter, we argue that the basis for assigning men and women the same work is a judgment of
sameness in nature: with respect to civic contribution, women’s nature is the same as men’s,
although on the whole inferior. Fundamentally, the judgment that women and men ought to
do the same work irrespective of sex is a method of collecting and dividing kinds according to
nature, so that the “ought” is scientific rather than moral.2
Our argument has implications for the contemporary debate about whether Plato’s propos-
als in Republic V are feminist.3 Building on Julia Annas’ point that such an assessment requires
attending to Plato’s reasons for advancing “proposals to treat the sexes equally” (Annas 1976:
313),4 we seek to answer three questions:
1 Why does Plato argue for equal treatment of men and women when his ideal city is built on
inequality5? The three classes—producers (farmers, cobblers, carpenters), military “auxil-
iaries,” and philosopher-rulers—are assigned to do distinct civic jobs of unequal worth, an
inequality reflected in citizens being told the “noble falsehood” that their souls are made of
either gold or inferior metals (414b–415c).
2 Indeed, in arguing that women should do the same jobs as men, Socrates says that even
though many women are better than many men at many things, on the whole, women are
worse than men at any job (455c–d).6 How does an argument for women’s general inferior-
ity support a proposal that women and men do the same jobs?
3 How can Plato both argue for equal treatment of women and use “womanly” as a term of
derogation (469d, 605e)?
Below, Section 2 introduces Socrates’ main argument for assigning men and women alike to
guarding and ruling the city, namely, that it is not against nature for women and men to do
217 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-17

the same jobs. Section 3 reviews Plato’s method of collection and division in the late dialogues
and gives an account of how this method distinguishes natures. Section 4 shows how the
method of collection and division illuminates the scientific basis for the Republic V argument.
Section 5 then demonstrates how women’s general inferiority in every civic task is supposed
to indicate that they should do the same jobs as men. Section 6 returns to our three questions
and concludes.
2 Republic V’s Answer to the “First Wave”

In the course of his argument that women and men do the same work in the ideal city, Socrates
entertains an objection: the ideal city is set up on the principle that work should be assigned
to citizens on the basis of their nature, but a woman is by nature different from a man. Isn’t it,
then, contrary to nature for women and men to do different work? (453b–c)
[S:] Then let’s say this on their behalf: ‘Socrates and Glaucon, there’s no need for others
to argue with you, for you yourselves, when you began to found your city, agreed that
each must do his own work in accordance with his nature.’
. . . Can you deny that a woman is by nature very different from a man?
[G:] Of course not.
[S:] And isn’t it appropriate to assign different work to each in accordance with its
nature?
[G:] Certainly.
[S:] How is it, then, that you aren’t mistaken and contradicting yourselves when you
say that men and women must do the same things, when their natures are so completely
separate and distinct?
(Rep. 453b2–c5, Grube-Reeve tr.)
Socrates’ answer is that if the only difference in nature between male and female guardians is
that the one begets and the other bears children, then their difference in nature is irrelevant
to the work assigned to them (454d). He illustrates his point with a memorable example:
suppose we said that the natures of bald and long-haired people are opposite, and then rea-
soned that since bald people are allowed to be cobblers, long-haired people should not be
(454c). The absurdity of this reasoning is manifest. What does hair-length have to do with
shoemaking?7
But it is not as if bodily features in general are irrelevant to the assignment of work. Indeed,
Socrates says that those who are naturally well suited for a job have not only minds well-suited
to that job but also bodies that serve their thought (presumably the thought their job involves)
(455b):
‘Come, now,’ we’ll say to him, ‘give us an answer: Is this what you meant by one person
being naturally well suited for something and another being naturally unsuited? That the
one learned it easily, the other with difficulty; that the one, after only a brief period of in-
struction, was able to find out things for himself, while the other, after much instruction,
couldn’t even remember what he’d learned; that the body of the one adequately served
his thought, while the body of the other opposed his. Are there any other things besides
these by which you distinguished those who are naturally well suited for anything from
those who are not?’
(Rep. 455b4–c2, Grube-Reeve tr., emphasis added)
218
Plato’s Scientific Feminism
According to Socrates, the body may help or hinder the intellectual capacities required for ef-
fective work, and so enters into considerations about whether a person is naturally suited for
a particular job. Hence what Socrates deems irrelevant to the work assigned across the sexes
is not the body, but the body qua reproductive, i.e., begetter vs. bearer of children. While the
specific difference in reproductive role between men and women is irrelevant to the assignment
of work, other bodily features are relevant: for example, strength, agility, speed, and so on
seem relevant to one’s suitedness to fighting in battle (cf. 453a).
Socrates’ claim that difference in reproductive role is irrelevant to civic work may reso-
nate with contemporary readers in light of our ideas about equality of opportunity, accord-
ing to which discrimination on the basis of task-irrelevant features is not permissible but
discrimination on the basis of task-relevant features is. But our reasoning is very different.
Our discussions recognize two independent values: equality of opportunity (valuable ulti-
mately or instrumentally) and efficiency in performing a task. These may compete, and task
relevance is considered a reasonable basis for departing from strict equality of opportunity,
but equality of opportunity can also constrain the pursuit of efficiency. By contrast, Socrates
recognizes only one standard for job assignment, namely, the principle that each should do
the work for which they are best suited by nature. At the start of the construction of the city,
he says,
We aren’t all born alike, but each of us differs somewhat in nature from the others, one
being suited to one task, another to another.
(370a8–b2, Grube-Reeve tr.)
Now, there is an ambiguity in the statement “X is suited by nature to Y.” It could mean:
i X can do Y better than others can do Y,

or
ii Y is the best of the jobs X can do.
The division of labor which is the basis for establishing the happiest city seems to require
(i) that each do the work they do better than others. The function argument in Republic I
(352d–54a) seems to shift from (i) to (ii): from the examples of the pruning knife that is better
than daggers etc. at pruning, and the eye that is uniquely suited to seeing, the argument moves
from the soul’s function of living to its virtue of justice being that which enables it to live well
and thereby be happy. But this means that the soul’s living justly (which should include doing
the work that it is naturally suited to do) is good for it, i.e., (ii) the best of the things it can do.
Further, within the agreed division of labor, two instances of doing the work one is suited to
seem to require (ii): first, Socrates says that when philosophers live under a constitution that
allows them to rule, they (qua philosophers, rather than qua rulers) will flourish and benefit
from their work:
Under a suitable one [i.e. constitution], his own growth will be fuller, and he’ll save the
community as well as himself.
(Rep. 497a4–5, Grube-Reeve tr.)
(This is despite the philosopher’s famous reluctance to rule.) Second, as we argue in Section 5,
(ii) is required for Socrates’ argument that even though women are on the whole inferior to
men at all the civic jobs, they have the same nature and ought to do the same work—rather
219
than all the jobs being given to the men (455d–e). But for now, let’s turn our attention to a
different matter, the expression “by nature.”
Socrates offers the following diagnosis of the objector’s mistake in the “first wave”:
Aren’t we in this ridiculous position because at that time we did not introduce every
form of difference and sameness in nature, but focused on the one form only of sameness
and difference (hoti tote pantôs tên autên kai heteran phusin etithemetha, all’ ekeinon
to eidos tês alloiôseôs te kai homoiôseôs monon) that was relevant to the particular oc-
cupations themselves? We meant, for example, that a male and female doctor have souls
of the same nature…But a doctor and a carpenter have different ones…Therefore, if the
male sex is seen to be different from the female with respect to a particular craft or other
occupation, we’ll say that the relevant one must be assigned to it.
(Rep. 454c7–d9, Grube-Reeve tr., slightly modified)
Socrates says that it’s because his own, earlier appeal to natural similarity and difference focused
only on similarity and difference with respect to occupations, rather than canvasing all the kinds
of natural similarity and difference, that the objector has alleged a contradiction. The objector
has taken one specific natural difference—with respect to reproductive role—to be grounds for
another—with respect to work.8 We do not usually relativize natures with respect to anything.
But according to Socrates, the objector would have to identify a specific natural difference be-
tween men and women “with respect to a particular craft or other occupation” (pros technên
tina ê allo epitêdeuma diapheron, 454d8) in order to assign men and women different work. So,
when Socrates says that although men and women differ by nature, a male and female doctor
have souls of the same nature whereas a doctor and a carpenter have souls of different natures
(454d1–3), he means, very specifically, that it’s the knowledge of medicine that makes a soul
a doctor’s soul, and in that respect the male and female doctor have exactly the same kind of
soul.9 He doesn’t deny that human beings differ by nature according to reproductive role, but
he insists that reproduction isn’t a craft or other occupation, and so isn’t the kind of thing with
respect to which a difference in nature could make a difference to the division of labor.
The key question, then, is what exactly Socrates means by “natural similarity and difference
with respect to a craft or other occupation.” For this, we propose turning to the method of
collection and division.
3 Collection and Division

Let’s start with the Eleatic Stranger’s criticism, in the Statesman, of the division of humankind
(t’anthrôpikon genos) into Greek and barbarian:
[It would be a mistake] if someone tried to divide humankind into two and made the
cut in the way that most people here carve things up, taking away the Greek [kind] as
one, separate from all the rest, and all the other kinds together, which are unlimited in
number, which don’t mix with one another, and don’t share the same language—calling
this collection by the single appellation ‘barbarian.' Because of this single appellation,
they expect it to be a single family or kind too.
(Statesman 262c10–c6, our tr.)
According to the Stranger, “the people here” (i.e., at least the people of Athens) are accus-
tomed to dividing “humankind” into Greek and barbarian. They think this is reasonable
220
because “barbarian” is a single name. But, as the Stranger emphasizes, they are mistaken.
He highlights that non-Greeks do not share ancestral or marriage connections, do not speak
a common language, and do not comprise a fixed population. The passage continues with a
second example and a positive recommendation:
Another example would be if someone thought that he was dividing number according
to two forms by cutting off the number ten-thousand from all the rest, separating it off
as a single form, and in positing a single name for all the rest supposed here too that
through getting the name this kind too came into existence, a second single one apart
from the other. I imagine the division would be finer, more according to forms (kat’ eidê)
and more into two, if one cut by means of odd and even, and the human kind in its turn
by means of male and female, splitting off Lydian or Phrygian and arranging them in
opposition to all the others whenever one is at a loss as to how to discover a part that is
also a kind among the things divided.
(Statesman 262c6–263a1, our tr.)
The Stranger’s methodological lesson has important implications for the discussion of wom-
en’s natures in Republic V. First, the Stranger highlights the value of not merely using names
to practice division but aiming to divide “according to forms.” Indeed, dividing according to
forms is one of the central goals the Stranger impresses on his interlocutor, Young Socrates:
We should not separate one small portion from many great ones, being apart from
forms. But let the part at the same time be a form...it is safer to go on dividing through
the middle, and one would obtain forms to a greater extent in this way.
(Statesman 262a9–b8, our tr.)10
Second, there is no doubt that the distinction between male and female is in some sense legitimate
(unlike the division of humankind into Greek and barbarian): dividing humankind into male and
female is finer, more “according to forms.” and more dichotomous than the distinction between
Greeks and barbarians, or between numbers larger and smaller than 10,000. Third, the Stranger
illustrates a critical attitude to certain social conventions: just as Socrates rejects the attitudes of
Greek men who find the proposal of women training nude preposterous (Republic 452a–e, 457a–b),
the Stranger is highly critical of how “the people here” separate humanity into Greeks and bar-
barians. Dividing humankind by male and female is preferable to singling out Lydian or Phrygian
(two ethnic groups in Asia minor and paradigmatic barbarians) from the normative perspective
of correct division.11 For these reasons, turning to Plato’s discussions of division in later dialogues
like the Statesman may help answer our questions about Socrates’ response to the first wave, since
here we find a more explicit articulation of what Plato thinks ought to distinguish a kind.
Quite generally, Plato’ Sophist, Statesman, Phaedrus, and Philebus develop the method of
collection and division as a tool for defining kinds. For example, according to Socrates in the
Phaedrus, the method consists in the power:
To lead into one form (idean), with a synoptic view, what is scattered every which way,
in order to make clearly defined whatever one could want to teach about…In turn, to
cut according to forms as far as possible, according to the joints there are by nature (to
palin kat’ eidê dunasthai diatemnein kat’ arthra ê pephuken), and to try not to break any
part, acting in the manner of a bad butcher.
(Phaedrus 265d3–e3, our tr.)
221
Socrates points to his definition of madness as an instance of “collection” and his division of
love into two kinds (desire for beauty and divine erôs), corresponding to the division of mad-
ness into two broad kinds (human illness and divine inspiration), as an example of natural
division (265b–266e). Elsewhere, Plato shows this “method” (methodos) or “path” (hodos)
as enabling the sort of inquiry that can overcome obstacles and eventually secure knowledge
(Philebus 16b–c, Statesman 258c–d, Sophist 218b–d, Phaedrus 265c–266c). For example, in
the Sophist, the Stranger uses it to seek knowledge of the “kind” (genos), sophist, through
an “illuminating account” of “whatever he is” (ti pot’ estin). After all, it is easy to agree on
what “name” (onoma) to call the kind, but without an “account” (logos), to use the name
for different “things” (pragma) (Sophist 218b6–d6). Indeed, the usefulness of collection and
division stems, in part, from how it corrects our naming practices, which are often misleading
(cf. Statesman 275e, Philebus 15d–16a). By applying the powers of collection and division,
inquirers can not only come to agreement as to what “name” to call the kind but also acquire
an “account” of its “work” (ergon) (221b1–2).12
We understand collection and division as a scientific method: it consists in the application
of epistemic norms for avoiding unproductive inquiry and ultimately arriving at knowledge
of a kind’s essence. It is for this reason that the metaphor Plato uses, carving a kind by the
“natural joints” (Phaedrus 265d–e, Statesman 287c), is often associated with the idea of a
natural kind and the project of science as such.13 However, as our examples show, collection
and division is often applied to social kinds, that is, kinds that draw their meaning and real-
ity from the shared linguistic, conceptual, and other shared practices of human beings. (The
Stranger’s first and paradigm-setting example of definition through division is, after all, a
kind of fishing: 218d–221c.) Yet, this awkwardness is part of our point: Plato is interested in
a method of natural kinds for inquiry into social reality. For this reason, Plato can explore
features of the method by critiquing existing ethnographic practices and, as we will argue,
a gendered division of labor. Moreover, the appearance of a tension reflects an ambiguity:
while we are accustomed to associating natural kinds with the natural sciences—for exam-
ple, the periodic table of elements is a familiar taxonomy of natural kinds—to call a kind
“natural” is more or less to say that it is has some privileged explanatory status in a theory.14
It is possible to hold that the social sciences study natural kinds in this sense.15 Although
Plato may be inclined to an ontological view of natural kinds—interpreting them not only
as a an explanatory feature of our reasonable theories but also as part of the structure of
reality—the same point applies. Collection and division is the methodological component of
a science that articulates the fundamental structure of reality in the specific domain to which
it is applied.16
Understanding the method as scientific is consistent, too, with its apparent failures: in the
Sophist, six successive divisions not only fail to define the sophist uniquely, but also they appear
to violate obvious norms, such as the exhaustivity of a single division (Sophist 221d–231e)17;
in the Statesman, the first series of divisions fails to isolate statecraft at all (Statesman 258b–
268d). Still, it is worth noting that the appearance of the sophist in six definitions reveals the
multiplicity of his art as an imitator (Sophist 232a–235b) and the puzzles regarding non-being
that must be solved in order to define this art (237a–242b), while the overlap between the
statesman and other human care-takers in the city reveals the uniquely interwoven nature of
statecraft with the other arts in the city (Statesman 275a–276d, 303e–306a, 308e–311c).18
Nonetheless, we grant that the method can be used rightly or wrongly, and only wish to
emphasize how it is used rightly. In-keeping with Plato’s other commitments vis-à-vis natural
science, we maintain that the method of collection and division produces directly successful
and therefore scientifically reputable definitions when it proceeds teleologically, in two ways.
222
First, good division sorts kinds according to their intrinsic ends. For example, the Stran-
ger’s definition of the kind, “weaving” divides crafts by referring to their specific ends (telê):
among the things we “make and acquire”, some are for the sake of doing, others for avoid-
ing having something done to us; among the latter, some are charms, others are defensive;
among the defensive, some are arms, others are protective; and so on. Eventually, the Stran-
ger identifies “the art of clothes-making” as a preventative craft that produces coverings
bound together internally by hair, with “weaving” taking up the “largest portion” of the art
(279c7–280a6). We understand this division as teleological because it distinguishes weaving
from other “similar in kind” (suggenês) crafts (280a8–b4) by identifying progressively more
specific ways that a craft aimed at covering can serve this end. Clothes-making produces a
covering aimed at the protection from hot and cold weather (cf. 279d4), whereas shield-
making produces a covering for the purpose of war (cf. 279d1). Thus, both make coverings,
but for different purposes.
Second, the Stranger offers an additional model of teleological division that operates within
the art of clothes-making to distinguish weaving from its “co-workers” or “cooperators”
(sunerga) (280a8–b4).19 As a general principle, there are two kinds of “causes” within the
domain of a single expertise: “contributory” or “co-causes” (sunaitia), and those that produce
the “thing itself” (281d8–e5). For example, the production of the warp and woof—tools used
in the weaving process—are contributory causes, since they enable the productive causes to
do their own work (282a). The productive causes are arts of separation (carding, washing,
and mending wool) and arts of combination, which include weaving as the intertwining of
warp and weft (283a). In this way, the Stranger uses division to provide an inventory of arts
within the art of clothes-making, insofar as each plays a distinctive causal role in the weaving
process.20
Collection and division works well at least when it proceeds as a teleological analysis. The
grounds for Stranger’s recommendation to divide humankind into male and female is famously
obscure, but in light of our interest in Republic V, it is worth highlighting that reproduction
can itself be construed as a causal process in which Plato understands male and female as caus-
ally differentiated roles (cf. Statesman 272d–e, 274a, Republic 454d–e). Indeed, the Stranger’s
lesson responds to a proposed division of expertise in herd-rearing animals (261e–262a), on
the assumption that human beings are such animals and statecraft is such an expertise. Along
with the Stranger’s emphasis on the lack of mixing (ameiktois) among non-Greeks (262d4, cf.
265d9–e11), the division into male and female arguably relies on this assumption by focusing
on humankind as an animal capable of reproduction. Moreover, our account is meant to be
inclusive, not exhaustive: there may be other, non-teleological ways for epistemically produc-
tive applications of the method to proceed.21
Many questions about collection and division remain, but we will make only the two fol-
lowing further observations to prepare for our interpretation of Republic V. First, the point of
using the method is to uncover complex relations of similarity and difference and to prevent
an inquirer from being misled such that they attribute difference where there is sameness, and
sameness where there is difference (cf. Sophist 253d–254a, Statesman 285a–b). Clarifying
these relations is an essential part of how the method carves reality “by nature” and gives it a
privileged place in the practice of dialectical philosophy.22
Second, the method articulates and is responsive to, a technical notion of difference in
kind. For any genuine difference between sub-kinds in a division, that difference is relative
or restricted to the shared domain of similarity to which both kinds belong.23 In the Phile-
bus, for example, Socrates gives the examples of color and colors, and shape and shapes, to
show how a kind can be unified and yet heterogenous (Philebus 12e–13a). In contemporary
223
philosophy, color and shape are paradigms of “determinables” whose sub-kinds are “de-
terminates,”24 which witness the principle we want to articulate: determinates, insofar as
they differ as determinates, differ with respect to their shared determinable. For example,
red and blue differ, essentially or as red and blue, in their hue, brightness, and saturation.
This is distinct from the way that red and blue might differ non-essentially, for instance,
in texture or shape: “rough patches of red” does not name a real sub-kind of red, because
what differentiates it is not relevant to its nature as the constellation of hue, brightness, and
saturation distinctive of the color red.25 Accordingly, we understand the difference between
reputable, natural sub-kinds in a division as restricted to the shared domain of similarity,
so that some differences can ground legitimate inferences about a kind’s definition, while
others cannot.
It will be useful, before returning to Republic V, to review an example that demon-
strates how the principles we have attributed to the method operate in tandem. At Philebus
17b–18d, Socrates describes how Theuth, the inventor of the art of writing, practiced collec-
tion and division on spoken sound in order to identify the letters of the Greek alphabet. We
reconstruct what Theuth did as follows:26 beginning with sound as an unorganized domain
with no principles for discerning identity, difference, and similarity (which Socrates describes
as “unlimited sound,” 18b6), Theuth compared strings of spoken sound (δα, τα, θα, κα)
and separated out an element common to them, i.e., α, and similarly for the other vowels,
which he collected together for the first time. The remaining non-vowels he divided and col-
lected into the voiced and the unvoiced, and then each of these, further, into the dental and
fricative, and those within the dental into the aspirated and unaspirated, and so on, until
he finally reached a sound that could no longer be distinguished according to a difference
within the dimensions relevant to spoken sound (e.g. τ, θ).27 Here is a figure to illustrate what
Theuth did:
Spoken sound e.g. δα, τα, θα, κα
vowel consonant
α voiced unvoiced
ε dental = δ dental fricave . . velars = κ
ι… labial. . . aspirated = θ
nasal. . . unaspirated = τ
Applying our key features to this case, we can recognize that (1) Theuth maps complex
relations of similarity and difference which had not previously been known, but which un-
derlie and enable the craft of literacy, through practicing (2) collection and division on the
basis of difference with respect to sameness, in that (e.g.) being unvoiced is a way of being a
an understanding of kinds as powers relative to a given end, in that being τ, θ, are powers to
consonant; being an unvoiced dental is a way of being an unvoiced consonant, etc., and (3)
produce precise spoken sounds.
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4 Natural Divisions in Republic V

Let’s return now to Republic V. In reply to the objection that assigning the same jobs of
guardianship to women and men, who have different natures, violates the principle of assign-
ing different jobs to different natures, Socrates complains about “the power of the craft of
disputation (tês antilogikês texnês)” (Republic 454a1–2):
They think they are not engaged in eristic but in dialectic, on account of not being able
to investigate what has been said by dividing according to forms. Rather, they search out
for the opposite of what is said according to the name itself, thereby conducting eristic,
not dialectic, with each other…We are [now] seeking to establish that distinct natures
should not acquire the same occupations in a very bold and eristic manner, according to
the name [only].
(Rep. 454a4–b6, our tr.)
While scholars have noted the significance of Socrates’ methodological remarks vis-à-vis dia-
lectic (cf. 511b–d, 532a–4d), for the purposes of illuminating his response to the sex segre-
gationist, we focus on his emphasis on dividing according to forms.28 Indeed, this contrast
between dividing “according to forms” and dividing “according to the name,” which distin-
guishes “dialectic” from “eristic,” anticipates the Stranger’s warning not to be misled by the
name, “barbarian,” in the practice of division. As a general principle, the later dialogues, we
have seen, are often concerned both with verbal ambiguity and the exploitation of this am-
biguity for deception (cf. Philebus 14d–e, 15d–16a, Sophist 251b–c, 259b–d). Similarly, the
objector in Republic V exploits verbal confusion—equivocation on the meaning of “different
by nature,” from a specific claim about reproductive difference to a general claim about dif-
ference with respect to all the occupations in the city—in order to accuse the legislators of the
city of contradiction. It is in this context that:
We might just as well…ask ourselves whether the natures of bald and long-haired men
are the same or opposite. And, when we agree that they are opposite, then, if the bald
ones are cobblers, we ought to forbid the long-haired ones to be cobblers, and if the
long-haired ones are cobblers, we ought to forbid this to the bald ones.
(Rep. 454c1–5, Grube-Reeve tr., modified)
By simply appealing to the name, “nature,” of which is predicated “different,” and applying
these to the examples of bald and hairy men, the objector can allege contradiction between
the proposal that these “different natures” get the “same jobs” and the principle according to
which “different natures” get “different jobs.” But this is a merely verbal dispute belonging to
eristic, not the division “according to forms” belonging to dialectic.
Instead, according to Socrates, there are many forms of natural difference and similarity, so
that we must keep track of which one we are following. In our view, Socrates’ core move turns
on a teleological conception of natural division, as we can see:
When we assigned different ways of life to different natures and the same ones to the same,
we didn’t at all examine the form of natural difference and sameness in relation to which
we were distinguishing them (eidos to tês heteras te kai tês autês phuseôs kai pros ti teinon
hôrizometha tote, hote ta epitêdeumata allê phusei alla, tê de autê ta auta apedidomenon).
(Rep. 454b6–9, our tr.)
225
We understand Socrates’ point that the form of sameness and difference in natures is relative
to something as a claim about the teleological character of correct division: legitimate divi-
sions identify kinds with a view to their end(s), so that the form demarcating each kind must
be understood in light of the end(s) governing the division. Thus, consistent with our interpre-
tation of the later dialogues on collection and division, not all similarities and differences are
relevant, given the epistemic norms conducive to knowledge.
This proposal may be supported by two passages preceding and succeeding Republic V’s
first wave. Looking back, Socrates’ approach to the allegation of contradiction is anticipated
by the famous argument for partitioning the soul (436b–441c). For example, he resolves the
apparent contradiction of a person both moving and resting by distinguishing between mov-
ing in respect of one part (the hands and head) and standing still in respect of another part
(the legs and torso) (436c–d). Just as he distinguishes the male and female kinds (genê) by
following the forms (eidê) of their natures, so he distinguishes the three forms (eidê) or kinds
(genê) in the soul in this way (e.g., 441c6, 439e2).29 What is most significant for our pur-
poses is that in the specific case in which Socrates is interested (psychic parts), each form is
distinguished relative to a natural end: it is the part it is because it has a natural (pephuken,
437e7–8) desire for a certain kind of object (437d–40a). Thus, the sameness and difference
of psychic parts depends on the sameness and difference with respect to natural desidera-
tive orientation. Looking ahead, this arguably anticipates Socrates’ more formal account of
powers (dunameis) as the same or different on the basis of the sameness or difference with
respect to what the power is “set over and does” (eph’ hô te esti kai ho apergazetai) (477d).30
This suggests that a teleological view of natural division is grounded, in part, in the fact that
such divisions attribute distinctive powers to each of the kinds produced by division.
Let’s turn now to how Socrates deploys this methodological framework to respond to his
objector. Socrates returns, as we saw above, to the specific form in relation to which they dis-
tinguished natural difference and sameness in the division of labor. That form, he says, is not
universal but “the one form only of sameness and difference that was relevant to the particular
occupations (epitêdeumata) themselves:”
We meant, for example, that a male and female doctor have souls of the same nature…
But a doctor and a carpenter have different ones …If the male sex (genos) is seen to be
different from the female with regard to a particular craft or occupation (pros technên
tina ê allo epitêdeuma diapheron), we’ll say that the relevant one must be assigned to it.
But if it’s apparent that they differ only in this respect (autô toutô), that the females bear
children while the males beget them (tô to men thêlu tiktein, to de arrein ocheuein), we’ll
say that there has been no kind of proof that women are different from men with respect
to what (pros ho) we’re talking about, and we’ll continue to believe that our guardians
and their wives must carry on the same occupation (epitêdeuein).
(Rep. 454b6–e4, Grube-Reeve tr., modified)
We understand Socrates as contrasting not only the respects in which natures differ, considered
abstractly, but also in relation to concrete ends.31 Thus, he contrasts differences relative to
the end of reproduction (i.e., bearing and begetting, distinctive powers contributing different
activities to a shared end) and those relative to the ends of crafts, which aim at the happiness
of the whole city. If male and female were different with respect to the end of a craft—as, for
instance, the ability to construct buildings differs from the ability to heal patients—then male
and female would differ in the relevant way. But since reproductive roles are not, as such,
226
contributors to ends of any craft, differing as reproducers cannot ground an assignment of

jobs. Thus, the argument for assigning women and men the same work hinges on a commit-
ment to the causal sameness of men and women with respect to the ends of crafts, such that
they are by nature of the same kind, as far as the division of labor goes.
We can see how teleological differentiation plays this role by observing the legislative end
guiding the discussion: what is the right way to acquire and use women and children? (451c).
It’s agreed that guardian wives should guard, hunt, and do everything else in common with
their husbands (451d), which requires them to have the same upbringing and education: mu-
sic, poetry, physical training, and warfare (451e–452a). The objection—that women differ
by nature from men, and different natures are suited to different jobs—appeals to the prin-
ciple of work-specialization, so that the relevant question is whether men and women differ
with respect to the crafts, i.e., the subject of the division of labor. Given that the only differ-
ence between men and women is their respective reproductive capacities, then, there are no
grounds for placing women, qua bearers of a distinctive reproductive capacity, in distinctive
roles in the division of labor. To be sure, reproduction is relevant to the happiness or unhap-
piness of the city, which is why mistakes about the marriage number lead to its downfall
(546b–47b) and why marriage partnerships are the subject of legislation (459d–61c, n.b., the
sex-differentiated ages for procreation for women and men) but the sex-differentiated contri-
butions of women and men to the city’s happiness are not a matter of difference in craft. If
there is a separate craft of reproduction, it belongs to the rulers, who determine when women
and men should marry, bear, and beget, but again, this craft is quite different from the powers
to bear and to beget.32
Does Socrates’ argument imply that, for example, women’s experience of bearing children
does not make them better suited than men are to midwifery—and conversely, that men’s lack
of experience of bearing does not make them worse? On the one hand, he recognizes that
experience contributes to competence—he says, for instance, that the best doctors have experi-
ence with a variety of illnesses in many different bodies including their own (by contrast with
a judge, whose instrument of judgment would be ruined by experiencing vices and associating
with vicious people, 408d–9b). On the other hand, a woman’s experiences of her own child-
bearing may not comprise a very large part of the experience that builds competence in mid-
wifery,33 and perhaps could be made up by apprenticing with an expert and listening to what
the pregnant say, just as Socrates’ barrenness of ideas does not detract from his midwifery of
others’ ideas in the Theaetetus (149a–51a). The irrelevance of reproductive difference to the
ends of the crafts, and the causal sameness of men and women with respect to those ends,
imply that being a woman or a mother is not, as such, a qualification for midwifery, or any
other civic occupation.
Let’s now return the passage we have been focusing on to its broader argumentative con-
text. Socrates’ reply to the objector is meant to establish that the proposal to distribute civic
jobs to women and men alike is possible, i.e., not contrary to nature, and not contrary to the
constitution established on the basis of the division of labor according to natural suitedness
for the various kinds of work. But the end or good for which natures were divided, and for
which the constitution based on the division of labor established, was to realize the goal for
the sake of which people found a city in the first place: because none of us is self-sufficient but
each of us needs many things, we call on each other as partners, each believing that giving and
taking in a community is better for ourselves (369b–c). Given that, it follows that women and
men should be given (apodotea) the same work, depending on what nature, relevant to work,
each possesses (455e–456b)—unless it is impossible.
227
5 The “Lighter Tasks”

In addition to distinguishing the forms of similarity and difference for the purposes of re-
production from the forms of similarity and difference for the purposes civic occupations,
Socrates argues for the work-relevant sameness of men and women’s natures on the basis of a
problematic sub-argument (the subject of our second question at the start of the paper):
[S:] Do you know of anything practiced by human beings in which the male sex isn’t
superior to the female in all these ways? Or must we make a long story of it by mention-
ing weaving, baking cakes, and cooking vegetables, in which the female sex is believed
to excel and in which it is most ridiculous of all for it to be inferior?
[G:] It’s true that one sex is much superior to the other in pretty well everything, al-
though many women are better than many men in many things. But on the whole it is
as you say.
[S:] Then there is no occupation concerned with the management of the city that belongs
to a woman because (dioti) she’s a woman or to a man because (dioti) he’s a man, but the
various natures (hai phuseis) are distributed in the same way in both creatures. Women
share by nature (kata phusin) in every occupation (epitêdeumatôn) just as men do, but
in all of them women are weaker than men.
(Rep. 455c4–e2, Grube-Reeve tr. slightly modified)
Although the capacities for work (i.e., natures) are distributed alike across women and men,
women are, on the whole (allowing for the natural variation that results in some women being
better than most men at some things), weaker than men in every statecraft-relevant work. Yet,
the comparative inferiority of women in most occupations is supposed to be evidence that the
capacities for work are distributed alike. How can this be?
In “Plato on Women’s Natural Ability: Revisiting Republic V and Timaeus 41e3–44d2 and
86b1–92c3,” Chelsea Harry and Ron Polansky argue that Socrates identifies physical strength
as the only genuine natural difference between men and women. Behind this, they argue, is
a theory of natural difference, according to which two entities differ by nature just in case
they differ in their ability to perform a function—for instance, pruning knives are different by
nature from eyes because of what each is capable, by nature, of doing (Harry and Polansky
2016: 265). Harry and Polansky argue that the claim about women being generally worse at
all the functions they share with men is only about physical strength, and not a universal judg-
ment about women’s capacities (267–272). We are meant to conclude that, with respect to the
three conditions of natural capacity—ready learning, retention, and a suitable body for mental
activity, which collectively make the difference between being “naturally suited” rather than
“naturally unsuited” (euphuê pros ti…aphuê) (455b4–c2)—women are the same as men, with
respect to, at least, the managerial functions of the state (271).
This, however, cannot be right. Difference in physical strength does not figure prominently
in Socrates’ argument, and in fact is overshadowed by difference in reproductive roles. So-
crates initially asks whether the wives of the guardians should remain indoors and manage
the household affairs, because their childbearing and rearing tasks make it impossible for
them to manage the state (451d); he reiterates the importance of reproduction in the objec-
tor’s argument again, when discussing the different forms of natural difference (454d–e). He
also emphasizes that the tasks associated with war are of central concern to the dispute over
women’s labor in the city (453a), which suggests that admitting women’s physical weakness
228
could undermine, rather than bolster, his argument that they be given the same jobs.34 Finally,
if the women workers of the city are physically weaker than men, then, as Harry and Polansky
argue, this would only affect a portion of the work to be done (i.e., the physically demanding
work, like blacksmithing or serving as a hoplite). Yet, Socrates’ repeated claim about women’s
weakness is presented as universal, such that in all the jobs involved with guarding the city,
the women guardians must be assigned the “lighter tasks,” “on account of the weakness
of the kind” (457a, cf. 451d). This suggests that while “weakness” may include differences
in physical strength, it also covers other axes of hierarchy, including intellectual and moral
inferiority.35
We propose that Socrates is reasoning as follows: when it comes to reproduction, men and
women clearly have specialized roles and distinct natures, each contributing something the
other cannot. When it comes to civic jobs, any differences would have to be due to either a
difference in natural specialization or to inferiority within a specialization. But since there’s
no civic work that women (on the whole) do as well as men (on the whole)—allowing for
variations among women and among men so that some women will be better than most men
at some things—the difference between them must be due to women’s (on the whole) inferi-
ority.36 But comparisons of better and worse are only possible given a common standard of
evaluation (cf. McKeen 2006: 534–536), which would be the virtue of a citizen or human be-
ing. Hence, men and women share the same nature as citizens, but they differ in that one is an
inferior sort of that nature. This “same nature, but inferior” verdict fits with the second-rate
status of women in the non-political context of the Timaeus, where men who fail to become
just and self-controlled during their lifetime are reborn as women (42a–c),37 and the use of
“womanly” as a term of derogation (our third question at the start of the paper). It is also
consistent with the Laws’ relegation of women to auxiliary roles in civic management (well-
documented in McKeen 2006).
6 Conclusion
In conclusion, in answer to the three questions with which we started, we have argued that:
1 Women and men do the same work insofar as they have the same natures with respect to
civic function—the powers to bear and beget are not subdivisions of the crafts by which
citizens perform their civic function and thereby contribute to the good of the city. his
sameness-across-sex with respect to civic function is consistent with great inequalities, in-
sofar as citizens’ natures differ with respect to civic work. There is no inconsistency because
Socrates has made no commitment to equality of any kind.
2 Women’s on-the-whole inferiority with respect to civic work shows their natures are not
different from men’s with respect to civic work: women don’t specialize in any craft or oc-
cupation relevant to the city (in the way that they specialize in bearing children).
3 Women’s inferiority is the basis for using “womanly” as a term of derogation.
In answer to the question of Plato’s “feminism,” we conclude: treating male and female guard-
ians equally in work is treating them the same because with respect to civic contribution their
power is the same in kind. It’s unscientific—that is, contrary to the principles of inquiry lead-
ing to knowledge—to treat men and women differently with respect to civic work. Insofar as
feminism is concerned with equality and women’s oppression,38 Plato’s recognition of women
as the same in nature and thus occupation falls short of a feminist position.
229
While it is in some ways remarkable that Plato departs from the conventional norms for
ancient Greek women—represented, for example, by the Greek men laughing at women train-
ing nude (452a–c)—and holds, as Vlastos puts it, “a radically opposite view of the place [of]
women” in his just society (Vlastos 1989/1994: 288/17), we do not think this is sufficient for
the argument we have considered here to be characterized as feminist. Of course, there is not
just one feminism, rather there are many feminisms.39 Our characterization of Plato’s argu-
ment may suggest an agreement with Vlastos (1989/1994: 289/23) that Republic V displays an
“imaginative impartiality.” (It does not, however, seem appropriate to the alleged observation
about the relative inferiority of most women discussed in Section 5.) Perhaps Plato’s argument
could be classified as a “scientific” feminism. But we think it is important to highlight how
much of the moral core of feminism Plato’s argument from nature misses by privileging same-
ness rather than equality.
Notes
1 E.g. “In the ideally best society outlined in Books IV to VII of the Republic the position of women
in the ruling elite, the so-called guardians, is unambiguously feminist” (Vlastos 1989/1994: 276/12,
emphasis added). By “equality as a value,” we mean to include equal opportunity irrespective of sex,
or equal consideration irrespective of sex, either as treatment owed to both sexes in recognition of
some valuable feature shared by both, or as necessary for the realization of some other fundamental
value, such as freedom or the development and exercise of core human capacities, to which both sexes
are equally entitled.
2 Our contrast between scientific and moral reasons should not be confused with a fact-value distinc-
tion. There is an important difference between endorsing a civic arrangement with respect to sex
because of a commitment to the value of equality and endorsing that civic arrangement because
of a commitment to men and women having the same nature. Our view contrasts with Vlastos’
(1989/1994: 288/21) claim that the “theory of social justice” in the Republic is what grounds the
equal assignment of jobs to men and women. To the contrary, we maintain that a scientific method—
collection and division—grounds the assignment.
3 See Hulme, this volume (Chapter 12).
4 These are different grounds than Annas, namely that “far from the modern liberal arguments that
women should have equal opportunities with men because otherwise they lead stunted and unhappy
lives and lack the means for self-development,” Plato advocates that women be allowed to do the
same work as men because they “represent a huge pool of untapped resources for the city.” Kamtekar
(2001) argues that Plato gives different reasons for assigning jobs to and educating the citizens. If
this is right, then Plato’s proposal that citizens with a guardian nature receive the same education
irrespective of sex may be on the independent basis that education develops guardians’ rational self-
government, i.e., their virtue, and thereby contributes to their happiness. And in this case, at least
some of Plato’s reasons for women and men to receive the same education would be closer to the
moral core of feminism.
5 One of Socrates’ criticisms of the democratic constitution is that it assigns equality to equals and
unequals alike (558b–c).
6 See Marechal, this volume, for an interpretation of this inferiority (Chapter 13).
7 For example, Spelman argues that Plato’s metaphysics, which sharply separates body and soul, led
him to see that “no facts about a person’s body entail facts about that person’s nature, or soul”
(Spelman 1994: 91). Rather, what’s relevant to the job one is suited to—cobbler or philosopher-
ruler?—are features of one’s soul, not one’s body. This can explain why Plato’s “inegalitarianism
[with respect to social class] and egalitarianism [with respect to gender] thus seem to go neatly to-
gether” (94). In answer to our first question: social class is determined by the work citizens are best
suited by nature to do. Nevertheless, according to Spelman, Plato also genders souls: a cowardly soul
is womanly, and a woman’s body is fitting for it (cf. Timaeus 42b–c, 76e, 91a). As a result, Plato uses
“woman” ambiguously, to refer to a person who has a woman’s body, and to refer to a soul that
ought to be in a woman’s body (Spelman 1994: 100–102). (This provides answers to our questions
(2) and (3).)
230
8 Bluestone (1994) identifies a similar conceptual move in sexist interpretations of the first wave in
Plato scholarship: a view that the “natural difference” between men and women has further, socially
significant consequences, yet, “commentators throughout the period under discussion have automati-
cally assumed that their readers would understand what they meant by natural” (119).
9 There are textual variants at 454d2, some of which leave out the soul. Our reconstruction does not
hinge on which text is chosen, though we assume the reading of Grube-Reeve for the purposes of this
chapter.
10 Here, we avoid certain interpretive issues, such as the Stranger’s technical use of “part” (meros), as
opposed to (part and) “form” (eidos), to demarcate unacceptable from acceptable sub-kinds in a
division. See, for example, Moravcsik (1973), Cohen (1973), Wedin (1987), and Muniz and Rude-
busch (2018), who offer competing interpretations. Nonetheless, we develop two conditions on what
makes a sub-kind legitimate: relevance to the features defining the shared kind, and causal profile in
a relevant productive process.
11 Social dimensions of the Stranger’s example are discussed in Miller (1980: 20–21) and Proios (2022a:
189–196, 2022b: 322). See McCoskey (2012) for general discussion of the “barbarian.”
12 A point of controversy is whether the method is extensional (organizing sets) or intensional (organ-
izing concepts) (see Moravcsik 1973 and Cohen 1973 for the canonical debate), but this passage sug-
gests a mixture: organizing the relations among concepts so as to organize sets of things to which the
concepts apply. Thus, we are inclined to follow the interpretation of Muniz and Rudebusch (2018)
that Platonic kinds are both extensional and intensional. Cf. the language of stamping kinds with
seals at Statesman 258c and Philebus 24e–25a.
13 See Proios (2022a) on this juxtaposition and Grams (2012) for another causal account of Platonic
natural kinds. Indeed, the desire to understand how the method of collection and division articulates
natural kinds arguably motivates much of the literature: e.g., see Moravcsik (1973), Wedin (1987),
and Muniz and Rudebusch (2018).
14 It would be controversial to assert that natural kinds are the “real” kinds, since one of the main
debates about natural kinds is between so-called “realists” and “anti-realists” (see Boyd 1991), but
something like this idea animates all parties: we want to know what the conditions of legitimacy are
for kinds. For example, although Spencer (2015) defends what Boyd would classify as an anti-realist
view of natural kinds, he argues for conditions under which kinds are “genuine.”
15 See Spencer 2015: 169–170.
16 For example, Philebus 16c–19a (especially 16c–17a, 17d–e, 18e–19a) emphasizes the scope of the
method as both a necessary and a sufficient condition for any kind of wisdom, including all the crafts.
Cf. also 26a–b, where climatological patterns are included along with objects of the method within
the same metaphysical analysis.
17 The issue is that the Stranger divides craft into productive and acquisitive for the first five divisions,
but identifies a third kind at the same level (discriminative or cleansing) for the six (226b–c). Cf. Rick-
less (2010) and Vlasits (2023).
18 On the methodological productively of ostensibly failed definitions, see Gill (2012: 144–149, 178–185,
182 n.16), Henry (2011), and Franklin (2011).
19 Cf. the contribution by Frank and Greenberg to this volume (Chapter 16). We depart from their
analysis in taking the Stranger’s discussion of weaving at face value. Generally, we have nothing to
say about the implications of weaving for the Stranger’s political philosophy, so these readings of the
weaving model are compatible (i.e., it is a good model of division but a problematic model of politics).
20 It may be tempting to read the relative explanatory demotion of co-causes below direct causes from
Plato’s reflections on natural science (Phaedo 98b–99b, Timaeus 46d) into the definitional project.
See Frank and Greenberg’s contribution to this volume on the externality and instrumental nature
of co-causes in the division of the city. Still, there is no indication that co-causes are less relevant to
definitions. The Stranger emphasizes that distinguishing by causes and co-causes contributes to an
understanding of one of the kinds in the taxonomy and perhaps the whole scheme, yet this is similar
to distinguishing on the basis of separating and combining arts. The point in both cases is that causal
criteria of some sort are the most explanatorily useful. The difference is that the former is a structural
principle that applies to all craft, while the latter is more specific (to weaving and whatever follows
its paradigm, cf. 285d–286b).
21 A particularly hard case for the teleological interpretation is the Sophist, where it is less clear that
teleological considerations resolve the problems with the first application of the method. For a recent
attempt to connect the Stranger’s account of true and false statement (i.e., what ostensibly resolves
231
the main problems) to teleological considerations see Peramatzis (2020). The Stranger also appeals
to an obviously teleological cosmology in the final and successful seventh definition-by-division of
the sophist (265b–266e). Another hard case is dividing number into odd and even, but see Philebus
56c–57e: Plato distinguishes normative and relative measurement; normative measurement may be
understood as a teleological practice whether it is practiced in arithmetic or carpentry (cf. Statesman
283c–285c).
22 While Plato is ambiguous enough to generate scholarly disagreement, there is clearly some sense in
which using collection and division constitutes philosophical “dialectic” (Sophist 253d–254a, States-
man 285d, Philebus 17a, 57e–59d). Cf. Gill (2012: Chapter 7) and Henry (2011).
23 Aristotle may have also thought this feature of division significant. In Posterior Analytics II.13, he
criticizes the view of division according to which definition involves knowing how kind differs from
all other kinds. Rather, one only needs to know how the kind differs from others within its genus
(97a5–25).
24 Colors serve as the paradigm for determinate-determinable relations in the groundbreaking work
of Johnson (1921), also developed in Yablo (1992), Wilson (2009) and Funkhouser (2006), among
others.
25 A similar thought likely motivates the Stranger’s critique of barbarian as a hypothetical sub-kind of
human being: whatever non-Greeks do have in common (e.g., speaking a language other than Greek),
is not relevant to their nature as human beings, i.e., is not a further determination of the distinctive
human power, form, or nature.
26 This account is indebted to Menn (1998).
27 It may be objected that Theuth could hardly have done this ex nihilo. That is probably right: in
inventing an art of writing, Theuth would have been improving on existing practices (representing
speech by signs for words, or syllables) just as other arts are precisifications of practices (e.g. rhetoric,
measurement of pleasure, etc.). But this does not mean he would have already needed to know the
letters—he would instead have discovered them (as children learning to read recognize letters from
syllables by comparing and contrasting, e.g. τα, θα, cf. Statesman 277e–78a). Further, the dimen-
sions of sameness and difference that are relevant to writing (as opposed to music), such as place-of-
production-in-mouth (but not pitch or volume) might be provided from this prior experience, but not
treated as precisely as in the art.
28 For the emphasis on dialectic, see El Murr (2020) and McCabe (2015: 101). Larsen (2021) develops
an analysis focused to a greater extent on division (which, as he notes, is suggested by Adam 1902:
note ad loc; see also El Murr 2020: 98).
29 Cf. Larsen (2021: 105) on this connection.
30 See Kamtekar (2009) on the connection between these two passages. Compare our use of the powers
argument with Marechal’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 13).
31 This is our main departure from Larsen (2021).
32 In the Statesman, the determination of marriages belongs to statecraft since it creates a “human
bond” to unite citizens of opposed natural dispositions (310b).
33 But see Leunissen, this volume on Aristotle on the role of experience in expertise (Chapter 23).
34 Cf. McKeen (2006).
35 Cf. Annas (1976); McKeen (2006); Marechal, this volume (Chapter 13).
36 Compare the case of a pruning knife versus a dagger discussed in Republic I. While each is a kind
of knife capable of cutting (i.e., they share a function at one level of specification), the difference in
quality of pruning with a dagger versus a pruning knife licenses the inference that only a pruning
knife’s function is to prune. But it is implicit that a dagger has some other function where the roles
would be reversed (i.e., where the dagger works better than the pruning knife at a kind of cutting).
The argument alleging women’s inferiority rules out a parallel instance—that is, while women are
worse than men (on the whole) at the civic arts, there are no separate activities within the division of
labor where they excel qua women, and so there is no “separate sphere” of labor which the principle
of specialization according to nature could warrant.
37 See Gordon, this volume (Chapter 19).
38 See, for example, Frye (1983: 1): “It is a fundamental claim of feminism that women are oppressed”;
and Haslanger (2012: 157): “what makes the discussion [of metaphysics] feminist is…its concern
with the ways in which our views about the mind and reality either sustain or challenge oppressive
patterns of thought and behavior.”
232
39 Cf. Vlastos’ (1989/1994: 276/11–12) attempt to construct a rough standard of “feminist” and An-
nas’ (1976: 321) contrast between Plato and Mill. See Lugones (2003) on the importance of resisting
the urge to universalize in feminist theory: part of the issue she raises is a false generality about the
aims of feminist theory and political coalition. Nonetheless, Lugones’ emphasis on feminist pluralism
reflects a fundamental concern with the actual oppression of women, which is what we do not find
in Plato’s argument regarding the division of labor (however, see footnote 2 above, on the distinction
between the assignment of jobs and the provision of education).
Bibliography
Adam, J. (1902), The Republic of Plato vol.1: Books I–V, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Annas, J. (1976), “Plato’s Republic and Feminism,” Philosophy, 51, 307–321.
Bluestone, Natalie Harris (1994), “Why Women Cannot Rule: Sexism in Plato Scholarship,” in Femi-
nist Interpretations of Plato, ed. Nancy Tuana, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
109–130.
Boyd, R. (1991), “Realism, Anti-Foundationalism, and the Enthusiasm for Natural Kinds,” Philosophical
Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 61:1/2, 127–148.
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Moravcsik, Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel Press, 181–191.
El Murr, D. (2020), “Eristic, Antiology, and the Equal Dispositions of Men and Women (Plato, Resp.
5.453b-454c),” Classical Quarterly, 70:1, 85–100.
Funkhouser, E. (2006), “The Determinable-Determinate Relation,” Noûs, 40:3, 548–569.
Franklin, L. (2011), “Dichotomy and Platonic Diairesis,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 28:1, 1–20.
Frye, M. (1983), “Oppression,” The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Marilyn Frye,
New York, The Crossing Press, 1–16.
Gill, M. L. (2012), Philosophos: Plato’s Missing Dialogue, New York: Oxford University Press.
Grams, L. (2012), “The Eleatic Visitor’s Method of Division,” Apeiron, 45, 130–146.
Harry, C. and Polansky, R. (2016), “Plato on Women’s Natural Ability: Revisiting Republic V and
Timaeus 41e3–44d2 and 86b1–92c3,” Apeiron, 49:3, 261–280.
Haslanger, S. (2012), “Feminism in Metaphysics: Negotiating the Natural,” in Resisting Reality: Social
Construction and Social Critique, ed. Sally Haslanger, New York: Oxford University Press, 139–157.
Henry, D. (2011), “A Sharp Eye for Kinds: Collection and Division in Plato’s Late Dialogues,” in Oxford
Studies in Ancient Philosophy, ed. Brad Inwood, XLI, Oxford University Press, 229–255.
Johnson, W.E. (1921), Logic: Part I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kamtekar, R. (2001), “Social Justice and Happiness in the Republic: Plato’s Two Principles,” History of
Political Thought, 22, 189–220.
Kamtekar, Rachana (2009), “The Powers of Plato’s Tripartite Psychology,” Proceedings of the Boston
Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 24:1, 127–162.
Larsen, J. K. (2021), “Seeing Double Divisions of eidê and division of labor in Plato’s Republic,” in Plato
Journal, 22, 101–113.
Lugones, M. (2003), “On the Logic of Pluralist Feminism,” in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coa-
lition against Multiple Oppression, ed. Maria Lugones, Lantham, Boulder, and New York: Rowman
& Littlefield Publishers, 65–76.
McCabe, M. M. (2015), “Is Dialectic as Dialectic Does?” in Platonic Conversations, ed. M.M. McCabe,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 100–124.
McCoskey, D. E. (2012), Race: Antiquity & Its Legacy, New York: Oxford University Press.
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Quarterly, 87, 527–548.
Menn, S. (1998), “Collecting the Letters,” Phronesis, 43, 291–305.
Miller, Mitchell (1980), The Philosopher in the Statesman, Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing.
Moravcsik, J. M.E. (1973), “Plato’s Method of Division,” in Patterns in Plato’s Thought, ed. Julius M.E.
Moravcsik, Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 158–180.
Muniz, F. and Rudebusch, G. (2018), “Dividing Plato’s Kinds,” Phronesis, 63:4, 392–407.
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phie, 102:3, 333–378.
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Proios, J. D. (2022a), “Plato on Natural Kinds: The Promethean Method of the Philebus,” Apeiron,
55:2, 305–327.
Proios, J. D. (2022b), “Division and Proto-Racialism in the Statesman,” Misreading Plato, ed. Matthew
Clemente, Bryan J. Cocchiara, and William J. Hendel, New York: Routledge Publishing, 188–201.
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Spelman, E. (1994), “Hairy Cobblers and Philosopher Queens,” Feminist Interpretations of Plato, ed.
Nancy Tuana, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 87–108.
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Practice, ed. C. Kendig, New York: Routledge Press, 157–172.
Vlasits, J. (2023), “The Puzzle of the Sophist,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 105(3), 359–387.
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Further Reading
An insightful recent article, to which readers may compare this chapter, is Jens Kristian Larsen, “See-
ing double: Divisions of eidê and division of labor in Plato’s Republic”, in Plato Journal, 22 (2021,
101–113).
An excellent paper on how collection and division reforms our ordinary speech and thought is Lee Frank-
lin, “Dichotomy and Platonic Diairesis”, in History of Philosophy Quarterly, 28:1 (2011, 1–20).
Illuminating contemporary work on natural kinds and feminism includes Sally Haslanger’s collection
of essays, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, New York: Oxford University
Press (2012).
234
16
WEAVING POLITICS IN PLATO’S
STATESMAN1
1 Introduction
In Plato’s Statesman, the Eleatic “xēnos,” usually translated as “visitor” or “stranger” and
the primary philosophic figure in the dialogue, more than once calls weaving a “paradeigma”
(279a, 305e) of statesmanship.2 From para, alongside of, and deiknynai, to show, a paradigm
is, in the words of one translation, “something shown alongside some other thing as an exam-
ple or a model by means of which the latter is made more vivid and clearer.”3
What the xenos seeks to vivify and clarify about statesmanship by placing weaving, huphantikē,
alongside it is that statesmanship or statecraft, like weaving, involves separating, combining, and
intertwining.4 As a science or knowledge, epistēmē (305c), of “kingly intertwinement, basiliken
sumploken” (306a) in the xenos’ phrase, statecraft, separated from and elevated over false con-
tenders (279a) and kin (304a–b), combines the citizenly temperaments of courage and modera-
tion (311b), creating “the most magnificent and best of all webs” to hold a city “together with
[its] weave” (311c). Producing a “common one by unanimity, homonoia, and friendship, philia”
(311b), the kingly interweaver rules by “exercising care for all the things throughout a city” (305e).
The xenos describes weaving as a “paradigm with the same business, pragmateia, as states-
manship,” namely, the art of care.5 He also explains, however, that weaving is “very small”
(279a) relative to statecraft. This is because, he says, it is “bodiless things” that are “most beau-
tiful and greatest” and, therefore, it is for their sake “that all that is now being said [about weav-
ing] is being said” (286a). Even as he puts weaving forward, then, the xenos seems at pains to
make plain that he offers it only in the service of the quest for statecraft, the knowledge of which
is itself being pursued for the sake of dialectics (285d).6 As if to underscore the instrumentality of
weaving as a mere means to the more important ends of political knowledge and statecraft, and,
even more so, of philosophical dialectics, the xenos declares: “no one in his right mind, nous,
would be willing to hunt down the account of weaving for the sake of weaving itself” (285d).
Scholarship on the Statesman tends similarly to focus on the knowledge and politics of
statecraft, as well as on the philosophical methods the xenos uses to define the statesman and
his craft. Leaving underinterrogated the account of weaving the xenos puts forward, and/or
amplifying his assessment of his “long-winded” (283c) speech about weaving as to be “toler-
ated irritatedly,”7 many scholars, also like the xenos, ignore the longstanding associations of
weaving with women in antiquity that are manifest across ancient texts.8
235 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-18

There are important exceptions. Addressing the xenos’ belittling of weaving, John Scheid
and Jesper Svenbro see the “two-pronged move” by which the paradigm is introduced and
then from which the xenos “immediately takes his distance” as indicating Plato’s “disdain” for
such unworthy activity.9 Stanley Rosen manifests a similar disdain, suggesting that weaving can
only ever be small relative to politics insofar as it is a “completely peaceful, home-centered, and
feminine art.”10 Ann Bergren, Ruby Blondell, and Ellen Harlizius-Klück, for their part, see the
xenos’ two-pronged move as part of a widespread simultaneous devaluation and appropriation
by “Platonic philosophy” of “the traditional structure and function of the female gender” to
(male) political and philosophical ends. For these latter scholars, the devaluation of weaving ex-
emplifies a denigration, through displacement “upwards,” of the embodied practice of weaving
and its (mostly women) practitioners.11 Melissa Lane sees this displacement in a more positive
light, that is, as potentially “reorganizing our cognitive map of expertise.” On Lane’s account,
weaving may be “intentionally neutered” in the dialogue so as to make “the conceptual role of
weaving much more important than any female associations it might have outside” the text.12
There are obviously significant differences across these interpretations. For our purposes,
however, they also share a key interpretative commitment: taking the xenos to represent
“Platonic philosophy,” they see the Statesman overall as endorsing the conclusions the xenos
and his interlocutor, young Socrates, reach about the practice and value of weaving and about
the kingly politics for which weaving becomes, in their hands, a paradigm.13 These interpreta-
tions also share the view, as do most other commentators, that the weaving paradigm models
the true statesman as an autocratic interweaver (305e–306a) who, “naked and alone” (304a),
is elevated over (304b) the arts with which his craft associates and/or contends, and who dis-
plays, as the knowledge proper to statecraft, the knowledge of command, epitaktein (305d).
We see things otherwise. Arguing that actual weaving does not underwrite but rather prob-
lematizes how the xenos presents separation, combination, and intertwining, we show that it also
and, accordingly, problematizes his and young Socrates’ account of statecraft. We demonstrate
that weaving separates without cutting, combines without subordinating, and intertwines not by
producing unanimity but by accommodating difference in unity.14 Theorizing the weaving knowl-
edge of statecraft as binding a polity’s constituent parts together in a complex co-relationality, we
understand that co-relationality to be organized less by the “giving of orders” than by “epitak-
tein” parsed as an “art of giving order,” “taxis.”15 This is an art that takes its measure from the
craft of weaving as it was practiced in the ancient world, largely (but not exclusively) by women.16
To explore the craft of weaving as it was practiced in the world in which the Statesman
was written and set, we draw on material culture and archaeological scholarship committed
to the idea that “investigation into ancient textile technology and the respective terminology
may enhance literary interpretation by providing more reliable reconstructions of the material
reality on which references to particular crafts … techniques, or tools are grounded.”17 Taking
our lead from scholars for whom the Statesman manifests a clear interest “in the genesis of the
textile,”18 we read the dialogue as making “the conceptual import” of weaving “not simply
illustrated, but generated by the particular principles of weaving technology at the root of the
‘literal’ element in the figure.”19 We note, as have other scholars, that weaving terms punctuate
the dialogue long before the xenos introduces weaving as a paradigm.20 We also notice that
they sometimes do so as key philosophic and political terms. For example, the term “kairos”
is not only central to the xenos’ philosophic account of “measure, metrion” (284e), and not
only the appropriate action to be taken by the knowledgeable statesman “regarding what’s
timely and also what’s untimely” (305d), but also the lower rod of the warp-weighted loom,
primarily used in the ancient Mediterranean. The loom’s kairos is visible in Figure 16.1: it is
the last bar that crosses the loom before the warp threads hang down to the weights.21
236
Weaving Politics
Figure 16.1 Terracotta lekythos (oil flask) c. 550–530 BCE Attributed to the Amasis Painter. On
view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 154 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/
search/253348.
Comparing what the xenos says in his “long-winded speech” (279a–283b) about weaving with
how weaving was practiced, we conclude, with scholars who treat the speech as a touchstone for
ancient weaving technology, that the xenos largely accurately describes the parts, practices, and
tools that comprise wool-working.22 We also demonstrate, however, that the xenos importantly
misdescribes how weavers and weaving do their work, and how the parts, practices, and tools of
wool-working cooperate, in short, how weavers and weaving separate, combine, and intertwine.
In this dialogue about political and philosophical division and collection (among other things),
we treat these misdescriptions as elements of the Statesman’s metacritical or poetic apparatus.23
We explore them in their own right and also for what they bring to light about the separating,
combining, and intertwining characteristic of the statecraft for which they are a paradigm.
We argue that the craft of weaving—by which weft thread(s) are passed through space
made between warp threads, with the vertical threads attached to the loom’s weights—turns
out not to affirm but instead to challenge the politics the xenos and young Socrates propose.
Rather than producing, from the top down, a “common one by unanimity” (311c), the weav-
ing paradigm, in our view, orients to a statecraft that unifies political parts into a social fab-
ric capable of self-preservation in difference. Rather than “dispensing with physical sensible
things as a distraction from true noetic objects,”24 as it is often read, the dialogue, we claim,
orients to a political-philosophical knowledge that co-relates perceptible and imperceptible,
bodies and minds, practice and cognition.25
On our interpretation, when Plato makes the xenos say that “no one in his right mind
would be willing to hunt down the account of weaving for the sake of weaving itself” (285d)
just after having him do precisely that in elaborate detail, the Statesman’s readers are being
invited to join the hunt. What comes to light when we do are the xenos’ misdescriptions of
weaving, which we explore in the next section. In the sections that follow, we unpack how
these ramify for the knowledge and statecraft he and young Socrates appear to endorse and
we suggest a contrasting politics exemplified by our duly revised account of weaving.26 On
our view, while the xenos and young Socrates may devalue and appropriate work largely as-
sociated with women to kingly political ends, the argument performed by the dialogue as a
whole, when it is not conflated with claims appearing in the mouths of its characters, does
otherwise.27 As we will see, referring statecraft to a paradigm of weaving that takes its measure
from how the craft was actually practiced alters fundamentally the knowledge and politics of
the Statesman, as well as its appreciation of the capacities of weaving’s practitioners for both.28
2 Weaving, Wool-Workers, Tools

In the Statesman, the xenos turns to weaving after taking up “once again the earlier argument”
(279a: 267e–268d, 275b, 276a) that “since thousands contend with the kingly kind of care
237
concerning cities, we must separate off all these and leave only that man behind” (279a). He does
so seemingly randomly—“if we don’t have any other thing at hand” (279b)—but then devotes
considerable space to separating “the art concerned with things woven out of wool” (279b) first
from other forms of protection (like potions, armaments, or shelters, 279c–d), and then from
other “kindred, sungenēs” (280b) crafts whose material is other than wool (280c–d). Dividing
“each thing by cutting parts from parts” (279b), he also separates weaving from other wool-
working crafts, for these, he says, take things apart (as in carding and combing), or twist (as in
spinning), whereas “the business of weaving is … some sort of intertwining” (281a). Referring to
these other wool-working arts as weaving’s causes, aitiai (281e), he also separates weaving from
its contributory or joint-causes, sunaitiai, which provide weaving with its tools (281e).
Other scholars have analyzed the failures of philosophical rigor when the xenos divides
weaving from other forms of protection and/or from other wool-working crafts.29 We are
interested in these, and also in the kind of separateness the xenos claims for weaving, and in
his depictions of how weaving combines and intertwines.30 If for the xenos and young Socrates
weaving is separated by being, in the xenos’ words, “stripped away” from its causes and joint-
causes and elevated as “the most beautiful and greatest” of the wool-working arts (281d), we
show, drawing on literary and material evidence, that the beauty and greatness of weaving rely
rather on a separation that entails, at the same time, a constitutive interdependence among
wool-workers, among weaving and its companion crafts, and between these crafts and their
tools and materials. Weaving may be conceptually and/or logically distinguishable from other
wool-working crafts but weaving, as practiced, cannot be “stripped away” from washing,
combing, brushing, and spinning, nor do these crafts stand in a relation of subordination to
or contention with weaving, as the xenos sometimes suggests (289c). Neither are the tools
of weaving “external” or merely “instrumental requisites” to their craft.31 Nor is weaving a
solitary practice. In all these ways, the xenos gets weaving wrong.
Instead, weaving’s material entanglements32 make it a communal practice in at least three
senses: two or more women often wove the same textile; women often worked their wool-working
crafts together; and weaving was economically, socially, and politically embedded.33 Against this
backdrop, we argue that the statecraft for which the actual craft of weaving is a paradigm looks
very different from the lone and purified king set apart from, elevated over, and commanding the
rest, as proposed by the xenos and young Socrates. Mindful of the fact that woven garments in an-
tiquity were “rarely cut,” and that even the remaining ends and threads of finished cloth were not
cut but woven into a textile’s borders as insurance against unraveling,34 we understand weaving
to orient, too, to a different political praxis and philosophical knowledge from the xenos’ cutting
modes of division, whether dichotomous or “limb by limb” (287c).35
We begin our argument with Figure 16.1, a lekythos from the sixth century BCE, which de-
picts the warp-weighted loom (center), as well as the other wool-working arts without which
weaving would not be possible: it shows the threads that have to have been spun, and that for
threads to be spun, wool has to have been washed, brushed, and combed.36
Referring to washing, brushing, combing, and spinning as “causes” of weaving and noting
that, like weaving, these arts “tend and craft” garments (281e), the xenos acknowledges the
constitutive relation of these other wool-working crafts to weaving. He also, however, places
weaving and its causes in contention (281b, 289c), purifies weaving of its causes (281d), and
elevates it over them (281c).
Scholars make sense of the xenos’ treatment of weaving’s causes as constitutive of and,
at the same time, strippable from and inferior to weaving by understanding the other wool-
working crafts, as does the xenos, as merely preparatory (282a) to weaving. Support for
this interpretation is sometimes gleaned from the “People’s Cloak” passage in Aristophanes’
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Weaving Politics
Lysistrata, in which Lysistrata describes culling, cleaning, combing, and collecting, but stops
short of referring to weaving itself.37 Preparatory, to be sure, these wool-working crafts are
not, thereby strippable from or subordinate to weaving, however. For when Lysistrata main-
tains that it is because Athenian women know how to “untangle” raw wool (569), vigorously
“wash dirty wool so’s to cleanse it” (574), and keep track of their “hanks of wool,” that they
are able to weave “a strong People’s Cloak” (586), she implies that these steps produce the
material of weaving and also a kind of knowing (to which we return below), without both of
which weaving would be rendered unable to do its work or attain its end.38
Lysistrata’s language suggests that weaving’s causes are, to borrow Aristotle’s terms (Physics
2.3; Metaphysics 5.2), not only “efficient,” but also “material” (weavings are made of cleaned
“raw” wool), “formal” (threads structure and organize), and “final” (for the sake of a “strong
People’s cloak”). Together with the lekythos’ depictions of co-operation across weaving and
its associated crafts, this complex causality establishes a co-responsibility for the finished,
woven fabric across and between the crafts, the crafters, and their tools. This embedded and
fundamental interdependence across weaving and its causes seems, sometimes, to be granted
by the xenos, at least in the case of spinning: when, for example, he comes up with for weav-
ing what he dubs the new names of “warp-thread making” (282e) and “woof-thread making”
(283a), these together are, in fact, nothing other than spinning, earlier (281b) and later (289c)
(mis)represented as weaving’s rival.
If weaving is misdescribed by the xenos as cleavable from and superior to the other wool-
working crafts, the tools of weaving are also misdescribed as, in Amber Carpenter’s gloss, “mere
instrumental contributors to a common end … skilled activities necessary for the shared end to
be pursued and accomplished, but unlike aitiai … not constitutive of any part of the process of
accomplishing that end.”39 Tools are misdescribed in purely instrumental terms, for, as Susan
T. Edmunds points out, the tools of weaving are “more a method or a process than a thing.”
The loom, in her words, “materializes temporarily in the process of weaving and is not neces-
sarily separable in thought from either process or product… .”40 This is because the loom holds
the warp threads such that the weft can pass through, with weights keeping the warp threads
taut, and weaving, in passing the weft through the warp threads, managing the needed tension.
Without the loom providing this tension, there would be no weaving. The loom’s relation to
weaving—also one of multivalent causality—is missed when the loom is treated as mere tool.
This is by no means to deny that the loom is an instrument of weaving, any more than
it was to deny that the other wool-working crafts are preparatory to weaving. It’s rather
to suggest that neither are merely external nor solely instrumental.41 This somewhat para-
doxical idea is reflected in Homeric poetry when, for example, Hector (Iliad 6.490–494) and
Telemachus (Odyssey 1.356–359, 21.351–354) bid Andromache and Penelope, respectively,
to weave and spin, by telling them to withdraw to their “loom and distaff.” In a synecdoche
that, as above, embeds efficient causality with material, formal, and final causality, the tools
here, as parts, stand in for the whole crafts.
Something similar is visible in the Statesman: while the word huphantikē most often ap-
pears in the dialogue’s passages about weaving (279b, 281c, 282d, 283a), Plato also some-
times has the xenos use the word kerkizein and its cognates (281e, 282c, 310e). Kerkizein is
from kerkis, or pin beater, the tool which both combines and separates, compacting the weft
threads on an upright loom by pushing down between each of the warp threads, one at a
time.42 Here, as in Homer, the activity of weaving is identified with one of its tools. This is a
kind of non-instrumental entanglement that extends, too, to the woodworking and stone ma-
sonry constituting the loom and its warp-weights, the raising and shearing of sheep that sup-
ply weaving’s wool, and the collection of vegetation and/or snails for its dyes.43 Embedded and
239
interdependent with its materials in all these ways, actual weaving refuses the externalizing,
instrumentalizing, and subordinating kind of separateness by which the xenos characterizes
its relation to its joint-causes.
Weaving refuses the xenos’ account of its separateness in another sense as well. For, as de-
picted in Figure 16.1, weaving was practiced not by a solitary woman but by women working
together, often on the same loom or fibers.44 The well-known examples of women weaving
together to create the peploi that cloaked Hera and Athena on ceremonial occasions bring this
clearly to light.45
Homeric poetry appears, at first glance, to tell a quite different story, with Helen (Il. 3.125–
127), Andromache (Il. 2.440–441) and Penelope (Od. 1.356–359, 2.93–100, 2.104, 15.517–
518, 19.136–137, 19.148–150, 21.351–354, 24.128–135, 24.139–150), and Hera (Il. 14.181,
214–19), Calypso (Od. 5.61–62), and Circe (Od. 10.220–225) all appearing alone at their looms.
A closer look at the mortal queen weavers (Helen, Andromache, Penelope) indicates, however,
that they, too, weave with other women. When, in the example just referenced, Telemachus com-
mands his mother to withdraw to her chamber to weave and spin, he adds that she should tell her
“handmaids [to] ply their tasks” (Od. 21.349–354, also 1.356–359), indicating that Penelope is
actually with handmaids who, at the very least, “ply,” which is to say, spin her thread. Hector
uses identical words with Andromache (Il. 6.491), signifying that she, too, works with other
women. While there is initially no reference to anyone at work with Helen (Il. 3.121–29), she
leaves her chamber attended by “two handmaids” (3.140–45), which indicates that, like Penel-
ope and Andromache, Helen, too, wove not alone but with, or in the presence of, other women.
Still, it is no accident that Helen, Andromache, and Penelope are often imagined as soli-
tary weavers, for, as comes out clearly in the case of the magnificent textiles gifted by Arete
to Odysseus at Alcinous’ court in an account that is unusually explicit about the work and
workers that made these textiles (Od. 7.104–106), the royal households’ ownership of the
materials and tools of weaving, and also of the wool-workers, almost always invisibilizes their
work, according full credit for the woven products instead to the queens alone. Nonetheless,
when Helen is depicted spinning gold from a silver bowl (Od. 4.130–135) and Andromache
as “weaving a purple web of double fold, and therein was broidering flowers of varied hue”
(Il. 22.440–441), it can safely be assumed that the queens had their threads washed, culled,
and combed for them. Indeed, according to Peter Acton, it “typically took 10 spinners to keep
a single loom fully supplied with yarn.”46
In underscoring the communal and embedded nature of weaving work, we do not deny
the hierarchy, subordination, or instrumentalization of wool-workers in the ancient world.47
Still, we want to stress that these social and political hierarchies were not, contra the xenos,
instantiated in the practice of the craft.48 Weaving and spinning were widely practiced in
ancient Greece, by women of all statuses, and many men.49 For high-status women weavers,
weaving was caught up in a web of duty, privilege, and obligation, and people of lower status,
some enslaved, would have done their washing, culling, combing, and spinning for them.50
Lower-status women would also have woven for them, as well as working all of these crafts,
including weaving, to meet their own textile needs. And, like Lysistrata and her comrades,
all weavers, including queens, knew the preparatory wool-working crafts as well. When the
queens are imagined as solo weavers, separated from their joint, communal, and embedded
work, this reflects, and also reinscribes, their status. Not unlike the wool-working crafts rela-
tive to weaving, “handmaidens” are co-responsible crafters, without whom the as-if solo ap-
pearances of queen weavers would be impossible.
In all these ways, weaving separates and combines differently from how the xenos proposes.
It also intertwines differently. Where for the xenos, the finished fabric is “smooth” (310e), an
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Weaving Politics
analogue for the “unanimity” (311c), understood as one opinion (311a), produced by the kingly
interweaver’s statecraft, in actual woven fabric, by contrast, threads remain distinct in the final
product, comprising an ordered whole that preserves the visibility of the threads and fabric, and
patterns.51 How do the xenos’ misdescriptions of weaving ramify for statecraft? We return to this
question after a more detailed exploration of the knowledge for which weaving is a paradigm.
3 Weaving Knowledge
When he introduces the paradigm of weaving, the xenos, as noted, describes weaving as “small”
relative to statecraft. He appears to mean this in two senses: that weaving is small in being “de-
rived from lesser things” (278e), which is to say, in the sense of having less “dignity,” honor, or
worth than statecraft;52 and also that weaving is small in the sense of being, in his words and in
the words of commentators, “small-scale and well-understood,”53 “familiar,” “relatively easy”
or “more trivial” than statecraft (286b).54 That weaving is familiar is certainly the case. As Eliza-
beth Barber has pointed out, “everyone undoubtedly knew how [weaving and spinning] worked,
whether ever performing the actions or not.”55 The ubiquity of the craft appears in Figure 16.2,
depicting, in its home scene, a mother, father, nurse, child, and loom. Indeed, the familiarity of
weaving is something we take Plato to rely on to bring the xenos’ mis-descriptions to light.
Figure 16.2
Hydria (water jar): Family Scene, 440–430 BCE Repository: Harvard Art Museums,
Department of Ancient and Byzantine Art and Numismatics, Arthur M. Sackler Museum,
Bequest of David M. Robinson, Beazley Archive Database #8184 http://harvardartmuse-
ums.org/collections/object/288891.
241
It is not at all clear, however, that weaving is well-understood, relatively easy, more trivial,
small-scale, or derived from lesser things. The xenos’ misdescriptions suggest at the very least
that weaving may not be well-understood by him. In describing weaving as small relative to
statecraft, moreover, he seems to deploy a mode of measure he will shortly deem inadequate
(283e–284c). What these diminutions in any case obscure is that weaving is a craft of preci-
sion, requiring foresight, judgment, and attention to detail. To make a textile, weavers must:
organize the warp and weft; count in a binary system of odd and even; and know “the techni-
cal and numerical relationship between yarn tension, weight of loom-weight and its effect on
the finished textile… .”56 Weavers consider: “yarn thickness” and “quality and length,” as
well as other “details like the twist direction of yarn, the distribution of colored threads, the
number of threads necessary to achieve certain patterns and complete pattern repetitions.”57
All of this requires that weavers hold numerous tasks and types of organization in their minds
and bodies at once,58 determining which tasks need to be done when, whether decisions about
tension or thread need to be remade over the course of a project, all with a view to the aesthet-
ics of the finished cloth as well as its durability, both of which depend on its end or purpose
as well as on its material.
Weavers need, moreover, to ensure that the cloth is even and balanced along the rows and
columns, particularly because, as noted, finished cloth was almost never cut to make garments
but was instead worn as made. In the language the xenos introduces in his revised account of
measure (283a–285c), weavers use judgment or discernment to determine the timely, the fit-
ting, and the needful in relation to their craft (284e). This cognitive complexity, manifest in
Figure 16.3, has led some scholars to posit weaving as the forerunner to mathematics rather
than the other way around.59 It is not uncommon for depictions of the warp-weighted loom
to remind one of the abacus, with ordered rows and columns counting out the progress of the
cloth.
Weaving’s complexity is evident not least in the many fabrics which served as story-telling
devices in antiquity: from the tapestry Helen weaves in the Iliad depicting dying Trojan heroes
(3.125–127); to the shroud for Odysseus’ father that Penelope daily wove and unraveled (Od.
19.148–150);60 to the tapestry Philomela wove for her sister, testifying to her rape by her sis-
ter’s husband, King Tereus, who had cut out her tongue to ensure her silence.61
If weaving is not “easy” in being cognitively complex, it is also not easy in that, as an
embodied praxis, it is impossible to learn simply by being told in words what to do or by be-
ing given a set of instructions. It is learned, instead, by watching and doing.62 Weaving is not
easy in a third sense: whether it is understood cooperatively with other wool-working arts, as
we showed in the last section, or on its own, weaving is taxing and time-consuming physical
work. For example, setting up spun threads on a loom “might take a week.”63
It is no less problematic to call weaving “small-scale,” “more trivial,” or less worthy than
statecraft. Hardly small-scale, the public weavings with which fifth- and fourth-century Athe-
nians would have been familiar were huge: the peplos of Athena, according to some scholars,
was the size of a ship’s sails.64 Neither are the weavings more trivial than statecraft: Penelope’s
weaving saved the house of Odysseus; Philomela’s brought down the kingship of Tereus; and,
by demonstrating that she is the weaver of cloth in Ion’s possession, Creusa reveals and con-
firms, in Euripides’ Ion (1417–1419), that she is indeed Ion’s mother, thereby securing his
place on the Athenian throne.65 That weaving is as worthy as statecraft is evident in the fig-
ures of Hera and Athena: Hera’s peplos was woven by women of different poleis in order to
bring peace;66 and Athena, patron goddess of the city and war, is the goddess of weaving and
wisdom as well.67
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Weaving Politics
Figure 16.3 Athenian Red-Figure Skyphos, Penelope Painter, c. 440–430 BCE Museo Archeologico
Nazionale, Chiusi, Italy.
It might be that the xenos and young Socrates devalue weaving and that commentators
side with them because, as Rosen puts it, weaving is “home-centered.” There is no disputing
that, in Athens, weaving was “a home-based business dominated by women making clothing
for their own households.”68 Skill in weaving was, indeed, indicative overall of skill in house-
hold management. And that is in part because, especially in larger households, proficiency
with cloth extended beyond its production to responsibility over its use, organization, and
maintenance. For example, Homer depicts Arete and Helen as “keeping at least some track of
the royal stores of cloth and clothing. Penelope and Hecuba are presented the same way.”69
Weaving’s association with the home appears across the literary sources. Homer’s weavers are
depicted weaving in their chambers. Bergren notes that when weaving and wool words ap-
pear during the near mutiny against the sex strike in Lysistrata (730), they refer to the women
wanting to return home to have sex.70
Weaving may be home-centered but, within the Statesman’s own terms, this gives no grounds
for its devaluation. When, for example, the xenos assimilates the knowledge of the statesman
to that of king and householder (258e–259c), the home appears no less worthy than the city.
Scholars sometimes comment on the weakness of the xenos’ arguments for this assimilation.71
We’re interested in these and also in the fact that when he describes the city that the statesman
will rule, thrice he uses versions of dioikeisis or diokeo (296e, 297b), “to manage”72 or, more
literally, to housekeep. We also note that the word the xenos uses for householder, oikonomos,
normally refers not to the male master of the home but to the woman householder or to a
male slave steward,73 which is to say, to whoever is responsible for the quotidian running of
243
the oikos, which “the limited rights of women did not disqualify them from managing… .”74
What if, then, by having the xenos group together statesman, king, and householder, Plato is
signaling less the assimilation of varieties of sovereign male power, as young Socrates seems to
assume, than that householding modes of knowing, exemplified in the knowledge characteris-
tic of weaving, matter critically for politics?75 We explore this possibility next and by way of
conclusion through the xenos’ application of the weaving paradigm to the statesman (287b).
4 Conclusions
The xenos brings the weaving paradigm to bear on politics by dividing the statesman and his
craft from their causes and joint-causes, just as he had earlier divided weaver and weaving
from theirs (281d–e). Starting with statecraft’s joint-causes, the “tools” without which “nei-
ther the city nor the statesman’s art would ever arise” (287d), the xenos renames some of these
“possessions” (287e), and divides them into seven kinds (287e–289b): “tool,” “container,”
“bearer,” “defense,” “plaything,” raw materials,” and “nourishment,” which list he directly
reorders (289a–b), moving raw materials to first place.76
Over the course of this division, the xenos announces no fewer than seven times in two
pages (287d, 288a, twice, 288b, 288e, 289a, 289c), that the work of the joint-causes is en-
tirely “removed and separated from a practice that is both kingly and statesmanly” (289c).77
He thus reflects onto statecraft two aspects of the weaving paradigm he presented: first, that,
like the joint-causes of weaving on his account, statecraft’s joint-causes are necessary to poli-
tics in a purely external and instrumental way; and secondly, and accordingly, that the tools
and possessions of statecraft may be easily cut away from it just as were weaving’s tools, in his
description, lopped off from weaving.
Turning from statecraft’s joint-causes to its causes, the xenos first divides from the states-
man the causes that contend with him, namely, “slaves and all servants” (289c), “those among
the free who willingly place themselves in service” (289e), ministers of the city, including her-
alds, public servants, diviners, priests (290b–e), and sophists (291a–c). Then, he partitions the
statesman off from the city’s generals, rhetors, and judges, causes that he describes as “more
akin, sungenēs, and nearer to the kingly kind” than the first set of “foreign” and “unfriendly”
causes (303d–e). In relation to contending and kin causes alike, the xenos brings to bear the
weaving paradigm in order to “show the [statesman] naked and alone by himself” (304a).
After isolating and insulating the statesman and his craft from the city’s causes and joint-
causes, as he had the weaver and weaving from its causes and joint-causes, the xenos returns
to a claim (259e–260b) he made at the start of the dialogue: “the science that’s genuinely
kingly must not itself act, but … must rule those that have the power to act; and the rest must
do what’s been prescribed” (305c–d). To which, young Socrates replies, “Correct” (305d),
endorsing that only “one must be in charge so as to rule all the others together” (304b).
Again, as in the xenos’ account of the weaver, the statesman’s separation from the city’s causes
and joint-causes entails his elevation over them in virtue of his discerning knowledge of com-
mand. The xenos and young Socrates refer to the “one who must be in charge” as an “in-
telligent king” (292d), though, as scholars rightly note, with his autocratic monopoly over
violence (293d–e) unconstrained by law (293e), nothing prevents the rule of the king from
being “authoritarian,” even “tyrannical.”78
Accepting the xenos’ treatment of weaving as the Statesman’s paradigm for statecraft,
scholars source the king’s autocratic rule to weaving and associate it with the dialogue as a
whole. We believe this is mistaken. In our view, weaving as it was actually practiced is the
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Weaving Politics
dialogue’s paradigm for statecraft. And if, as we have shown over the course of this chapter,
actual weaving does not set the weaver apart from and over her causes and joint-causes but
rather establishes their epistemic and practical co-responsibility and intertwinement, then a
politics modeled on actual weaving would do the same. We see such a politics coming to light
in the dialogue, despite the xenos’ announcements about statecraft’s complete separability
from its joint-causes, and despite young Socrates’ “declar[ations], phusomen” (304b, 305a)
that the xenos has successfully partitioned the statesman off from his kindred causes.
Or perhaps, rather, in view of them. For the xenos’ seven announcements and young So-
crates’ declarations are not only conspicuous but they are conspicuously not arguments. As
such, they invite questions about how secure the partitions they baldly assert truly are. Similar
questions are opened, too, by the xenos’ associations with the statesman elsewhere in this part
of the dialogue of the supposedly cut away kindred causes of judging and persuading, as when
he refers to the statesman’s rule as a judging science, kritikē (292b), and to the kingly states-
man as needing to persuade citizens (309b–d).79 In these passages, judging and persuading
appear, like spinning and carding relative to actual weaving, as co-responsible causal practices
of statecraft, rather than as removable from and/or subordinate to it.
Analogous questions arise about statecraft and its joint-causes: for example, after initially
being divided from statecraft as a mere “plaything” (288c), music reappears toward the end
of the dialogue as that through which the statesman himself will become “manifest” (304a–b);
and although play is initially described as unserious (288c), it reappears as the way citizenly
ethos will be tested (308d). In these passages, playthings, like the looms and pin-beaters of
actual weaving, appear as methods and processes of statecraft, parts constitutive of a whole
rather than mere external instrumentalities.
It is to be noted that as he completes his division of the city’s joint-causes, the xenos re-
marks on overlaps among them (289b–c). There are overlaps, too, among the city’s contend-
ing causes.80 These overlaps suggest a mode of division that, as in actual weaving, but unlike
in either bifurcatory or limb-from-limb diaereses, divides without cutting.81 They reflect a
constitutive embeddedness, interdependence, and intertwinement within and across the city’s
causes and joint-causes that is manifest as well between statecraft and its companion crafts,
and between statecraft and the tools and materials that non-instrumentally serve it. This is a
statecraft that does not rule over those with power to act without acting itself but, like actual
weaving, is guided in the management of its work by a discerning knowledge embodied in
practical activity with others. If and when such a statecraft resorts to violence, as it probably
will, that violence, by being embedded within and distributed across statecraft’s companion
causes and joint-causes, and their practitioners, will be more accountable and may be more
constrained than that of the autocratic statesman.82
Lane and Carpenter have recently separately advocated for understanding the intelligent
king’s statecraft as “service.”83 We agree, but, unlike Carpenter and Lane, we see statecraft’s
causes and joint-causes, too, as doing analogously constitutive and non-instrumental “service”
work. Manifest in the material and literary sources, although all too often invisibilized, the ser-
vice work of weaving’s causes and joint-causes orients to a distributed praxis of political weaving
(311b–c). Combining practice and knowledge coded as small, home-oriented, and female in a
politics of weaving, this is a statecraft that, like actual weaving, separates warp threads to pass
the weft through, not to cut but to make cloth, combines in a unity that does not efface but pre-
serves difference, and intertwines by arranging that difference in a harmonious order (309c), not
via command and obedience, or mastery and subordination, but by an ordering that unfolds, as
does (social) fabric, through the weaving process itself. This is a feminist practice of statecraft
245
not because it elevates a philosopher-queen or queens or is practiced only by women—there were

male weavers in the ancient world, too—but because it challenges, even as it depicts, the auto-
cratic male order and “instrumentalities and inequalities” such an order secures.84 This feminist
practice of statecraft we take to be the weaving politics endorsed by the dialogue as a whole.
Notes
1 The authors thank Sara Brill, Melissa Lane, Patchen Markell, and Catherine McKeen for their ques-
tions, prods, and comments; Denise Green for teaching us tablet weaving in spring 2021, with sup-
port from Annette Richards and Cornell’s Society for the Humanities; Marsha Taichman for assisting
with image permissions; Annetta Alexandridis and Kaja McGowan and their spring 2022 class Pro-
ducing Cloth Cultures; the spring 2018 Language and Politics seminar and summer 2021 Plato read-
ing group in Cornell’s Government Department; and participants in the June 2021 workshop on
Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy. Sarah would also like to thank her mother and grandmother
for teaching her and encouraging her from a young age in a variety of textile crafts.
2 Scholars generally use either “visitor” or “stranger” for xenos, sometimes lowercase, sometimes capi-
talized, to match their appreciations of the “very philosophical man” from Elea (Sophist 216a) and/
or his philosophical practice. We leave xenos untranslated to retain the equivocity of a nonAthenian
who may be a stranger/threat and/or a guest/friend to the politics/philosophy of the dialogue.
3 Plato (2012), 113. This is the translation we use. As Brann et al. indicate, paradeigma can be trans-
lated as “example or model.” A model offers a structure that is abstract and generalizable. An exam-
ple is concrete and particular. Scholars tend to treat the paradeigma of weaving as a model: see, e.g.,
Klein (1977), 163–166; Gill (2012), 188–189, and, following her, Bronstein (2021).
4 As Brann et al. note in Plato (2012), 108, words for separating, dividing, and cutting appear “over
one hundred” times in the dialogue and there are “over twenty different verbs used to express the
activity of division” alone, with diairein appearing “most of all” and others, including choridzein, di-
alambanein, and diakritikē (for “separating”) and temnein (for “cutting”) appearing less frequently.
“Combining” usually translates sunkritikē, and “intertwining” sometimes translates sumplekein and
sometimes huphanein (‘weaving’).
5 Sometimes therapeutikē (278e), sometimes epimeletikē (276b–c).
6 Bronstein (2021), 107, extends this instrumentality to the “method of paradeigma” itself, seeing it
as “subordinate to and in the service of, the method of division.” We seek, by contrast, to hold the
method of division accountable to the method of the (weaving) paradigm.
7 Owen (1973), 351. Kochin (1999), 83, refers to the “boring discussion of weaving”; Ionescu (2020),
293, to it being introduced “laboriously”; Santa Cruz (1995), 190, counts the Stateman’s account of
weaving as among the “longs, minutieux, même ennuyeux” passages of the dialogue.
8 Among others: Homer, Iliad and Odyssey; Euripides, Ion, Iphigenia at Tauris, Orestes, and Bacchae;
Aristophanes, Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae; Aeschylus, Libation Bearers and Eumenides. There were
also “[m]any male weavers” in antiquity (Acton (2014), 154, 170), references to whom appear in,
among other sources, the following dialogues of Plato: Lesser Hippias 368c; Phaedo 87b-c; Republic
374b. For discussion, see Barber (1991), 283–291; Thompson (1982).
9 Scheid and Svenbro (1996) 23.
10 Rosen (1995) 106, emphasis in original.
11 The quoted phrases appear in Bergren (2008), 252. See also Blondell (2005), 50, 67–69; Harlizius-
Klück and Fanfani (2016), 66. On this move elsewhere in Plato, see, e.g., Duvergès Blair (2012);
duBois (1994); Cavarero (1995).
12 (1998), 168–169. Lane, 168, also mentions, and rejects, the possibility that the xenos’ “neutering”
clears “room for expertise from the female domestic sphere to act in the polis” on the ground that
this would deny the oikos-polis boundary. We problematize this binary, arguing below that weaving’s
oikos expertise is needed for expertise in politics.
13 Miller (2004), by contrast, sees the xenos as a Socratic figure. Scodel (1987), 151, sees the xenos’
method as, for the most part, “subject to Platonic parody,” until the dialogue’s final sections when,
he claims, 151–167, that the criteria of divisions become Socratic and thereby “transformed so as to
accord with Platonic teachings” (151). On the dialogue’s kingliness as authoritarian and/or tyranni-
cal, see Marren (2021); McKeen [n.d.].
14 For a treatment of difference in unity in Aristotle, see Frank (2005), 4–12, 143–146.
246
Weaving Politics
15 On this double sense of “ordering” in the context of the Statesman’s analogy between the statesman
and architektōn (260a–b), see Lane (2020), 459, for whom, “the primary sense of the verb here is
clearly epitactic, that of ‘directing’ or ‘commanding,’” as it is for Márquez (2007). This chapter
explores the dialogue’s refusal of that “primary sense” in the case of weaving. Elsewhere, Jill Frank
argues for an analogous refusal in the case of the architektōn or master-builder as well.
16 For a discussion of women’s public and private craft activities in the ancient world in relation to
women’s equality in Republic 5, see Hulme in this (Chapter 12).
17 Harlizius-Klück and Fanfani, (2017). See also Barber (1991); Barber (1994); Edmunds (2020);
Wagner-Hasel (2002).
18 Harlizius-Klück and Fanfani (2016), 67.
19 Harlizius-Klück and Fanfani, (2017).
20 Blondell (2005), 51, 55–56, marks weaving terms at 267b, 278b–d. On how the drama of the dia-
logue “anticipates the description of weaving,” see Klein (1977), 165–166.
21 The heddle bars, by contrast, create space between the warp threads so that the weft can be passed
through. On the kairos in the sense of the timely, see Lane (1998), 2. On the kairos as the rod of a
loom, see Harlizius-Klück and Fanfani (2016), 71; Barber (1994), 271. On the loom’s kairos and the
political/philosophical kairos being “originally the same,” see Onians (1951), 346.
22 As noted by Cole Browning (1991), 206 n. 5; El Murr (2002), 70–73; O’Meara (2017), 91.
23 On the importance of attending to the metacritical or poetic apparatus in Plato’s dialogues, with a
specific focus on the Republic, see Frank (2018), especially 1–49.
24 Miller (2004), 4.
25 On “the vital aspect of corporeality in politics,” see also Sampson (2020), 488.
26 In other words, we take the Statesman as a whole to agree with Harlizius-Klück (2015), 276, that
“It is high time to get [the xenos’ disparagement of weaving] changed” (276).
27 On “disidentifying” the arguments of Plato’s dialogues from the arguments offered by their charac-
ters, including by their figures of philosophic authority, see Frank (2018), and the robust literatures
cited therein.
28 In making this argument, we take ourselves to be building on what Brown (1988), 599, calls “Plato’s
revaluation of conventional gender construction … undertaken … to relocate knowledge, knowing,
and philosophy to a sphere less soaked by masculinist political power than the one it currently inhab-
its.” See also Han (2023).
29 On the “remarkable failures in the rigor and even usefulness” of the weaving diaereses, see Dorter
(1994), 197–202. See also Scodel (1987), 116–126; Rosen (1995), 98–118.
30 For a different appreciation of the practice of collection and division with respect to weaving in the
Statesman, see Proios and Kamtekar in this volume (Chapter 15).
31 As Carpenter (2021), 136, defines “contributory” or “joint” causes.
32 On the constitutive relationship of craftsmen and their materials in the context of the Periclean build-
ing program, see Harris Cline (2018), 521–523.
33 On “the important economic and even managerial contributions of women to the household” and on
the significance of these roles for the city as a whole, see Bundrick (2008), 286, and our discussion below.
34 Harlizius-Klück and Fanfani (2016), 69; Barber (1994), 133–134, specifically on the advent of the
tunic as a common form of dress in antiquity.
35 On the contrast between cutting/dividing, generally characteristic of sacrifice, and the separating,
interlacing, and binding of weaving, see Scheid and Svenbro (1996), 10. On dividing as “a splitting,
a fracturing of the logical body, a process that resembles torture,” see duBois (1991), 113.
36 On the relationship between vase images and “reality,” see Bundrick (2008); and Williams (1983).
37 Lane (1998), 169, and, following Lane, Schofield (2006), 169–170.
38 Carpenter (2021), 141 also sees “preparatory activities” as “a constitutive part of the process of ac-
complishing that end for which they are preparatory.”
39 (2021), 141. See also Klein (1977), 178, on joint-causes having “nothing to do, of course, with the
work of the kingly art.”
40 Edmunds (2020), §11.
41 On non-instrumental use, see Frank (2005), Chapter 2.
42 On the kerkis, see Edmunds (2020), § 40-51; Harlizius-Klück and Fanfani (2016), 67; Barber (1991),
273–274; Crowfoot (1936–1937).
43 On textile dyeing in the ancient Mediterranean, see Barber (1994), 113–115, (1991), 223–243.
44 Barber (1994), 85–86. Barber (1991), 92, 105–106.
247
45 Scheid and Svenbro (1996), 9–34; O’Meara (2017), 88–90.

46 (2014), 152, footnote omitted.
47 See Barber (1991), 291–292; Barber (1994), 216. On communities or koinoniai across “mixed” asso-
ciations “of free Greeks, free Greek women, and what can be a combination of freedmen and slaves”
(470) that offer other modes of relationality than a binary instrumental one of master and slave (466),
see Vlassopoulos (2011).
48 Analogously, regarding the building of the Erechtheion, Vidal-Naquet (1986), 239, writes: “Those
who were united at the technical level find themselves separated at the political level.”
49 According to Acton (2014), 152, in classical Athens, women typically spun and wove, while “fulling
fell to men.”
50 The handmaids in Alcinous’ court, for example, were enslaved (Od. 7.103–105), as discussed by
Barber (1991), 291–292.
51 As Sampson (2020), 496, puts it, weaving “is an art that aims to create a non-homogenous unity of
unlike elements. The threads of the woof and the warp are usually, and of necessity, quite dissimi-
lar.” Weaving “indicates a way of incorporating different entities and joining diverse threads into a
cohesive unity, without reducing them to a form of sameness.” See also El Murr (2021), 249–255.
52 For “dignity,” see Scodel (1987), 114.
53 Schofield (2006), 169, for whom this is positive, a favorable contrast “in its unpretentiousness and
familiarity with the grandiose theological and cosmological framework of the myth.”
54 Bronstein (2021), 100, 105; Barney (2021), 124.
55 Barber (1994), 34.
56 Harlow and Nosch (2014), 6. On “the education of weavers,” see Edmunds (2020), § 62–68.
57 Harlizius-Klück and Fanfani (2016), 71.
58 On the simultaneously embodied and cognitive mathematical knowledge associated with the Quechua
weavers of the Andes, in an overall approach they, however, position against “Platonism,” see Urton
and Llanos (1997).
59 Harlizius-Klück and Fanfani (2016), 70–78; and Harlizius-Klück (2015).
60 According to Barber (1991), 358–359, the cloth Penelope weaves would have to have been some kind
of pattern weaving because otherwise the suitors would not have believed that it could take her over
three years to complete.
61 On Philomela, see Ovid, Metamorphoses and Aristophanes, Birds, lines 15 and 100–101, the lat-
ter referring to Sophocles, Tereus, a fragment. For discussion, see Joplin (2002); and Honig (2021),
66–70.
62 As Urton and Llanos (1997), 112–118, describe and to which we can attest based on our experiences
of learning to weave. Contra the xenos (286e), being able to put into words may not, then, be evi-
dence of greater difficulty.
63 Acton (2014), 151.
64 O’Meara (2017), 89: “At least this is one possible explanation for the practice that is found by the
end of the fifth century of transporting the robe in the procession by hanging it on the mast of a ship
moving on wheels up to the foot of the Acropolis. This curious arrangement would have had the
advantage of conveying a very considerable piece of weaving in such a way that it would be seen by
all those who watched the procession as it crossed the city.” [footnotes omitted.]
65 There is, too, the “most beautiful in its patterning, and biggest” garment that “shone like a star” (Il.
6.294–5) gifted to Athena by the women of Troy, that she refused but Paris acquired, along with Helen,
when he visited Menelaus’ home in Sparta. As what Blondell (2013), 78, calls “a metonym for …
Helen,” this weaving cannot be dissociated from the fall of Troy.
66 Scheid and Svenbro (1996), 10–12.
67 The shared etymologies across the parts of ships and weaving as well as in the language for other tools
of weaving, such as spathe or sword beater, also point to connections between weaving and statecraft,
specifically statecraft related to war: on this terminology, see Barber (1991), 274; Edmunds (2020), §
44–48; Bertolìn (2008). On a “parallel” between artisans and warriors in Plato insofar as, according to
an albeit “false” etymology, both, as demiourgoi, serve the people, see Vidal-Naquet (1986), 233, 229.
68 Acton (2014), 151, who notes, however, that this “conventional view” does not take sufficiently into
account that there were also “manufacture for sale” and other types of “business operation” associ-
ated with weaving.
69 Barber (1994), 226.
70 Bergren (2008), 16.
248
Weaving Politics
71 Cooper (1997), 73–78; Schofield (2006), 167, confirming.

72 See Schofield (2006), 166–173, who calls the politics of the kingly interweaver “management.”
73 Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, 9th Ed., s.v.
74 Acton (2014), 276, and 275 on “[f]emale management of household finances, including productive
investments and exchange of goods and coin with other parties.” See also, Oxford Classical Dic-
tionary, “household, Greek,” https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.3168 (Accessed
April 14, 2022). For a different view of the household in Plato and its associated ethics and politics
from the one we offer, see Singpurwalla in this (Chapter 14).
75 As offered by Lane (1998, 168–169). We do not, however, see this as an elimination of the “feminis-
ing of weaving.”
76 As he had done, too, in his division of weaving from its kindred arts (280b).
77 In these passages, as elsewhere, the xenos refers to “statesman” and “king” interchangeably. Contra,
Schofield, (2006), 168, for whom this interchangeability is unproblematic insofar as, following
Cooper (1997), 90–102, he takes the dialogue to offer a “thoroughly politicized conception of king-
ship,” we take the differences between statesman and king to be significant, though we cannot make
our case for this position here.
78 For “authoritarian,” see McKeen [on file with authors]; for “tyrannical,” see Marren (2021).
79 See also 296a–297b, where the xenos aligns the statesman’s practice of persuasion with force.
80 As Carpenter (2021), 139, notes, how the contending causes “should be grouped and divided,” is not
especially clear. This unclarity is manifest in the divided scholarship over where slaves and servants
belong in the division and over ambiguities in other groupings.
81 Or, as Patchen Markell has pointed out to us, “these overlaps could be acknowledged but dismissed
on the ground that the point was to make sure everything that wasn’t statecraft was being properly
cut off, in which case this would still be a mode of division that cuts, and which acknowledges the
violence done to the weave of reality by its cuts, but which dismisses that as inconsequential in light
of its diaeretic purpose.”
82 As in Lysistrata’s stretching, scourging, and carding (574–586), which she describes in the grammar
of “we.”
83 Lane (2021), 211, 214; Carpenter (2021), 149–150.
84 This phrase belongs to Honig (2021), 3–4, explaining her use of the term “feminist” to describe her
treatment of Euripides’ Bacchae.
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Urton, G., with the collaboration of Primitivo Nina Llanos. (1997) The Social Life of Numbers: A
Quechua Ontology of Numbers and Philosophy of Arithmetic, First University of Texas Press Ed.
University of Texas Press, Austin.
Vidal-Naquet, P. (1986) The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World,
A. Szegedy-Maszak (Trans.). The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.
Vlassopoulos, K. (2011) “Two Images of Ancient Slavery: the ‘Living Tool’ and the koinônia,” in M.
Simonis and A. Trefz (Eds.), Sklaverei und Zwangsarbeit zwischen Akzeptanz und Widerstand
Herausgegeben von Elisabeth Herrmann-Otto. Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim Zürich New York,
pp. 465–475.
Wagner-Hasel, B. (2002) “The Graces and Colour Weaving,” in: L. Llewellyn-Jones (Ed.), Women’s
Dress in the Ancient Greek World. Gerald Duckworth, London, pp. 17–32.
Williams, D. (1983) “Women on Athenian Vases: Problems of Interpretation,” in: A. Cameron
and A. Kuhrt (Eds.), Images of Women in Antiquity. Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI,
pp. 92–106.
Additional Works Consulted

Harlizius-Klück, E. (2014) “The Importance of Beginnings: Gender and Reproduction in Mathematics
and Weaving,” in: M. Harlow and M-L. Nosch (Eds.), Greek and Roman Textiles and Dress: An
Interdisciplinary Anthology, A. Oxbow Books, Oxford and Philadelphia, PA, pp. 46–59.
Hoffman, M. (1974) The Warp-Weighted Loom: Studies in the History and Technology of an Ancient
Implement. Robin and Russ Handweavers, Oslo.
McCoy, M. B. (2020) Image and Argument in Plato’s Republic. SUNY Press, New York.
Wagner-Hasel, B. (2020) The Fabric of Gifts: Culture and Politics of Giving and Exchange in Archaic
Greece, E. Theodorakopoulos (Trans.). Revised edition of Der Stoff der Gaben: Kultur und Politik
des Schenkens und Tauschens im archaischen Griechenland (Campus, Frankfurt & New York, 2000).
Ed. Zea Books, Lincoln, NE.
Further Reading
Harlow, M. and Nosch, M-L., eds. (2014) Greek and Roman Textiles and Dress: An Interdisciplinary
Anthology. Ancient Textiles Series 19. Oxbow Books, Oxford and Philadelphia, PA.
Sallis, J. (2017) Plato’s Statesman: Dialectic, Myth, and Politics. SUNY Series in Contemporary Conti-
nental Philosophy. State University of New York Press, Albany.
Vetter, L. P. (2005) “Women’s Work” as Political Art: Weaving and Dialectical Politics in Homer, Aris-
tophanes, and Plato. Lexington Books, Lanham, MD.
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17
SOCRATIC MIDWIFERY
1 Introduction
In the Theaetetus, Socrates compares himself to a midwife. Socrates’ use of this image points
to a form of philosophical knowledge with political effects, one that takes place outside of
the usual venues of male political life. The use of this feminine image also reveals a respect
for a technē practiced by women, one that is relational and oriented towards process rather
than product. Socrates practices a kind of therapeia for the souls of others when he questions
them. Socrates does not teach an epistemological system to Theaetetus but instead educates
him by helping him to understand what he does not know. Socrates says that he is in a state
of barrenness, like menopausal women who can no longer give birth. However, barrenness
is fruitful in its own way, when it comes to the ability of the midwife to assist others in their
labors. There is a political value in producing a gentler person who will be a better citizen
than those who possess unchecked intellectual arrogance. Socrates’ success with Theaetetus
as a midwife includes not only growing in knowledge, but also a kind of self-knowledge that
makes the soul gentler.
The process of giving birth can be described in different ways. How we name and talk
about the laborer and the child being birthed results in different conceptions as to the meaning
of the process. For example, if we understand birth as about the successful “production” of
a child, and overlook the activity and lived experience of the birthing mother, we will have a
different understanding of what it means to give birth than if we talk about her agency and
activity. Similarly, if we see the activity of a birthing woman as taking place in a network of
relationships that constitute part of her own activity, we will understand laboring and birthing
differently than if we consider the laboring woman in isolation. Likewise, how we talk about
philosophical “birth giving” matters. Is it about the production of a true or well justified idea?
Is it primarily about the actions of a lone, laboring philosopher or does it take place in a net-
work of relationships in which philosophical conversation is fundamental to labor?
A better understanding of the nature of ancient midwifery and the process of assisting
others in giving birth to physical children ought to inform how we comprehend Plato’s view
of philosophy as practiced by his character, Socrates. Socrates uses a feminine image of phi-
losophy that is (a) relational and (b) political, but located apart from typical male arenas of
politics. Philosophy is not the work of an independent thinker, working in isolation, but rather
253 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-19

exists in conversation. This conversation is also the work of politics, in its broader Aristotelian
sense: political action is that which conduces to the flourishing of the community as a whole,
and not only one person (Nic Ethics 1095b6–10). Socrates’ is political, insofar as he educates
and cultivates others’ souls by making them gentler and greater in self-knowledge.
As McLain has argued, North American and European concepts of childbirth and labor
today are largely informed by an industrial and post-industrial understanding of children as
“products” produced by parents.1 However, a product-oriented way of framing the process
of birth giving is quite different than the ways in which midwifery was practiced, both in the
ancient world and today. Midwifery places the greatest priority on the laboring activity of
the birth giver. While, of course, a midwife remains concerned for a good outcome for the
child, her primary focus is on encouraging the agency of the laboring woman, and ensuring
her well-being as a laborer. In the ancient context, the social status of women who were slaves
or from metic families further diminished their value; Athenian citizens were those born to
Athenian mothers, and so the value of birth giving would depend on her social status. The
ancient midwife’s focus was on the health of the mother as a whole;2 similarly, Socrates’ care
as midwife of souls takes a more holistic approach than only producing well tested ideas. For
Socrates, a good result of labor is for a philosopher to come to understand himself as a mix
of strength and limit. Socrates understands such self-knowledge to have significant positive
political effects, although his work occurs outside of the usual arena of political life. Socrates’
choice of the midwife image reflects how his own philosophical practice works outside of the
usual spaces of male political agency: the assembly, council, and courtrooms. Moreover, his
goals are more concerned with a relational approach to ideas embedded in the care of others’
souls; his use of this image to describe his relations to others emphasizes a feminine quality to
his philosophical approach.
2 Ancient Practices of Midwives in Their Social Context

Midwifery was not only about the delivery of children but also a whole complex set of social
practices that involved the midwife, mother, child, and community around the mother. Mid-
wives were a notable exception to the general rule that women’s lives were essentially private
and apolitical. Midwives had greater respect and socio-political authority than the average
women of their day; however, their roles functioned outside of the usual domains of male
political life. In Athens, masculine activity was associated not primarily with moneymaking
or the flourishing of the private household, but rather with contributions to political life, es-
pecially in its formal institutions. Women were entirely excluded from these formal political
roles and even from most spaces outside of the home. Midwives, however, formed an excep-
tion to some of these general norms.
Much evidence about midwifery in antiquity comes to us indirectly and so must be viewed
with a degree of caution. We do not have any handbook in classical Greece composed by
midwives themselves, although Hippocratic texts mention midwives. Metradora’s later hand-
book on women’s diseases in the 2nd to 4th c CE takes a Hippocratic approach, but does
not cover obstetrics. Plato’s Theaetetus describes midwifery practices, however, and I take
Plato’s descriptions of midwives as a reasonable indication of real midwives’ practices for
various reasons. First, Socrates’ statements in Theaetetus about his practice are harmonious
with these later texts—e.g., Soranus’ early 2nd c Gynecology. Second, as Sophia Connell has
argued, Plato’s account is also well supported by images found in funerary monuments—such
as a monument to Phanostratē—and Hippocratic texts that mention women doctors who are
present at birth (Connell, 2023). Finally, had Plato described midwifery in a way completely
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at odds with contemporary cultural practices, it would have undermined his use of this image
to describe philosophy.
Socrates mentions several components of midwifery: recognizing who is pregnant and who
is not (149c7–9); using drugs (pharmakia) and singing incantations (epaidousai) to relieve or
bring on labor pains (149c9–d3); causing the start of births or miscarriages (149d3); distin-
guishing true from false offspring (150b1–3); and, sometimes, matchmaking (promnauomia)
(150a1–4) (Hemmenway 1990: 327–329).3 Socrates presents midwifery as a whole set of so-
cial practices associated with the conception of a child, labor, and birthing, including practices
that preceded labor and delivery. The midwife’s practices also extended forward in time, after
the child’s birth, into the wider social world to which women and their children belonged.
A midwife commonly would discern whether the child was viable and only returned a healthy
infant to a mother. In this way, she was concerned with the movement of the child from the
mother’s body—an essentially private space—into the larger social and political world. In-
deed, she was a primary determinant of whether the child could be expected to successfully
negotiate that transition. Midwifery was also a political act. The midwife was the first to
determine the very possibility of the child’s being in relationship to others, both in the oikos
and in the polis.
Midwives are a significant exception to the more general rule that women were to be
ruled by men. Ordinarily, women’s agency was diminished in multiple ways; their lives were
understood as private and separated from the realm of politics, which was reserved for men.
Unmarried women were considered the property of their fathers, and once married, that of
their husbands.4 Also, as Carson has argued, female eros was often understood by men to
be dangerous and in need of “taming.” Xenophon, for example, notes that his wife when he
first married her was akin to a wild animal who needed to be confined in order to become
sufficiently civilized (Carson 1990: 143). This meant that procreation was controlled in part
through the physical isolation of women—women spent most of their time in the gynaikōnitis,
an apartment in the interior or upper part of a house set aside for women (Carson 1990: 156).
As Blundell shows, the Hippocratic author of On Virgins suggested that girls who had recently
experienced menarche and suffered from suicidal tendencies ought to be married off as soon as
possible as a cure (Blundell 1995: 99). Women were in a cultural bind: they “needed” sex with
men to stay in their appropriate biological state, but this very state was also presented as the
cause of their being immoderate and always at the edge of becoming uncivilized.5
Finally, men’s bodies were sometimes understood as offering the active principle of new life,
while treating the woman as a container. Parker argues that ancient Greek thinkers were not in
agreement on the matter, but many took for granted the primacy of male seed. Some thought
it possible that women could emit seed, like men, as Pythagoras, Democritus, and Epicurus
argued (Parker 2012: 115). But other thinkers, such as Aristotle, thought women’s bodies
simply provided menstrual fluid as a necessary material condition but not the causal agent for
life; for Aristotle, men’s semen contained the “form” of the whole future child (Gen Animals
724a16–20; 727b26–30).6 In this cultural context, men diminished women’s agency relative
to their own, even with respect to procreation.
Midwives are a significant exception to the more general rule that women were to be ruled
by men because, at least in their roles as healers, they possessed a distinctive status whose
work was respected as knowledge. The midwife had a social identity that existed outside of
the framework of daughter/wife/mother; that is, in her identity as a skilled midwife, she did
not only “exist” in relation to men. Women designated as a maia (midwife), or iatrine or iatre-
ousa (two feminine forms for the word for doctor) were understood to be particularly skilled
in the birthing process (Dasen 2011: 296; Connell 2023: 58; Mul 1.68, Loeb XI.150, 21–23).
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Indeed, as Dasen states, there is some evidence that men were often absent from the birthing
process (Dasen 2011: 296). If male doctors were present, they often deferred to the expertise
of midwives. Certainly, midwives were understood even by men as possessing a distinctive
body of knowledge that guided their actions. Connell in her work on women doctors notes
a fourth century funerary monument to Phanostratē, a midwife and doctor who was named
iatros in its masculine form and given high praise as a person who “caused pain to none”
(Parker 2012: 122; Connell, 2023).7 The midwife also was also understood as possessing
specialized medical knowledge. Connell notes that Plato’s Republic suggests that women
can be the rulers of a state if they have similar knowledge to men, and then offers the exam-
ple of women doctors as an example already known to his own audience (Rep. 454d1–2;
Connell, 2023).
The fragility and vulnerability of infants to death and disease was commonplace (Dasen
2011: 295–296). Children could easily die as the result of complications in pregnancy or child-
birth, as could birthing mothers. Even experiences that today we might consider as “normal”
parts of infancy could be dangerous—for example, infants could die from infections that de-
veloped when they were teething, or from intestinal maladies that an adult might more easily
survive (Dasen 2011: 294–295). The successful delivery of a child by the midwife and survival
of the mother was not any kind of guarantee of the longevity of the child’s life. A midwife
could practice her skill well and still not guarantee that the mother or child would be born
healthy. Midwifery was thus understood to be a body of knowledge but applied to a context
full of risks; the death of a child was not necessarily the failure of the midwife’s knowledge,
but rather part of the nature of childbearing itself.
The midwife’s specialty was not only social but also political, for the midwife often
formally designated the child as viable. Midwives would attend to the baby’s first needs
and assess whether the child would be able to survive. Dasen argues that the midwife was
central to key rites of passage that brought a newborn from womb to society. Newborns
were not automatically assumed to be part of the larger social world simply because they
had survived birth itself, especially in an age where exposure and infanticide were practiced.
However, the process of becoming recognized as part of the social world began with the
midwife. Dasen summarizes the multiple stages of such practices, most clearly described
later in the Roman Soranus’s Gynecology: a gesture of some kind was made to signal the
biological sex of the newborn, and the midwife then inspected the child’s health. Shortly
before cutting the umbilical cord, she lifted the child up into the air as a “decisive moment,
indicating the child’s viability” (Dasen 2011: 297–298). In this way, the midwife marked a
key moment at which the newborn went from being part of the mother, to being a member
of the larger social-political world. Moreover, a child was not fully accepted into Athens
until the ceremony of Amphidromia between five and ten days later (Dasen 2011: 303).
Ancient Greek sources give fewer details than does Soranus, but the Theaetetus expressly
mentions the inspection of the newborn: Socrates urges Theaetetus not to be like women
who cry and scream when the midwife takes away their offspring, if Socrates believes what
the young man says to be an eidolon and not the truth, for he is acting kindly in taking it
away (151c3–4).8
This work of the midwife after the delivery was, broadly speaking, a political act, though
perhaps not one always understood as such. She did not only mark the moment at which vi-
ability was named. Rather, her work after the birth itself was also an act of political recogni-
tion. Her words and actions decisively asserted that, based on her knowledge, the child was
worthy to join society. Likewise, the midwife had the authority to take away a child dead or
struggling for life and not to return him or her to the mother. Socrates states that the most
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beautiful of all the functions of a midwife is her ability to distinguish true from false offspring
(Theaet. 150b1–3). Socrates’ claim that he is a midwife thus is also a political identity, but one
located outside of the usual locations of male action.
3 Socratic Midwifery
Socrates’ naming of his own philosophical practice as midwifery might be understood as
praise of feminine modalities of knowledge, or we might read it as an act of appropriation.
I will suggest a third option, which is that Socrates names himself as a midwife in order to
connect his political practice to a form of politics that takes place alongside traditional male
politics. In doing so, he also criticizes the ordinary politics of his day as lacking in a kind of
knowledge of limit that was available to midwives.
We should note a few significant limits in how Socrates treats midwifery. First, Socrates
shifts the language of midwifery and birthing away from its biological context into an intel-
lectual one. Socrates’ own use of the metaphor omits the body. Midwifery is an embodied
practice, however. Numerous funerary monuments depict laboring women as being physi-
cally supported by others (Demand 1994: 123–124). Much of the midwife’s knowledge is
also embodied knowledge, that is, for example, knowing how to turn a fetus in the womb.
Second, in the drama of Plato’s Theaetetus, no women are present. Socrates may be a midwife
by metaphor but the absence of actual women is noticeable. Halperin has argued that Plato’s
use of Diotima as the “midwife” of ideas in the Symposium does not so much work to el-
evate women as it does to “colonize” women’s differences for male discourse. He argues that
women’s capacity to separate pleasure from procreative sexual acts is appropriated by men,
existing now in the realm of exclusively male intellectual and philosophical eros and logoi
(Halperin 1990: 288–289). Halperin’s position has some merit, especially in the absence of ac-
tual women from both the Theaetetus and Symposium. Socrates says of himself in comparison
to other midwives, “The difference is that I attend men and not women, and that I watch over
the labour of their souls, not of their bodies” (Theaet. 150b7–8).
While I acknowledge Halperin’s insights, Socrates also affirms the value of feminine knowl-
edge through his use of midwifery as an image of philosophy; moreover, by identifying with
midwives and their practices, he allies himself to those whose expertise resides outside of
the political realm of male agency and power. In his connection of the technē of midwives
to a hidden kind of contribution to political life, he not only reaffirms the value of feminine
knowledge. Socrates also identifies philosophy itself as a hidden and undervalued form of
knowledge, one which is political despite not being recognized as such. Socrates’ choice of a
feminine metaphor in a world in which feminine expertise was undervalued acts as a mecha-
nism of criticism of traditional notions of male success.
Socrates accompanies Theaetetus, not only in order to help him to develop his ideas about
knowledge but also to situate those ideas into a larger social and political context. Socrates’
actions parallel those of real-world midwives: he assesses Theaetetus’s ideas; he connects The-
aetetus’ thought to a wider world of Greek intellectual thought; and he assists Theaetetus
with negotiating the difficult experiences of labor when an idea cannot survive testing. Like
the midwife who is oriented to a birthing woman, Socrates focuses on the experience of his in-
terlocutor, including in its affective dimensions. It is not his own “child” that is being brought
forth, but another’s. Real world midwives did not only use their skills to bring the child into
the world but also encouraged and comforted the mother. Thus, the midwife’s activity is not
the kind of technē that exists as a solitary practice, but rather one that exercises its art rela-
tionally. Similarly, Socrates tests Theaetetus’ ideas but also encourages him at key moments.
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For example, he tells him, “have confidence in yourself” and encourages him to put his heart
into the inquiry, early on in their discussion (Theaet. 148c8–150d1).
Commentators on the passage on midwifery have varied in how they look at this metaphor.
Burnyeat focuses on the testing of ideas, arguing that Socrates’ major concern as a midwife is
“that of testing whether the thought-product he has delivered is genuine and true or a false
counterfeit, a ‘wind-egg’ with no life in it” (Burnyeat 1977: 8).9 His aim is to assess the prod-
uct, and also to help the proto-philosopher to grow further into autonomy. The Socratic mid-
wife encourages his interlocutor to produce ideas on his own, and also work out for himself
whether his ideas are true or false. For example, Socrates responds to Theaetetus:
Well, we have at last managed to bring this forth, whatever it turns out to be; and now
that it is born, we must in very truth perform the rite of running round with it in a
circle—the circle of our argument—and see whether it may not turn out to be after all
not worth rearing, but only a wind-egg.
(Theaet. 160e)
Burnyeat claims that such practice can also have helpful effects on the self-knowledge of the
interlocutor, who can grow in moderation from understanding the limits of his knowledge
(Burnyeat 1977: 12). Other commentators, such as Polansky, Blondell, and Sedley likewise
emphasize the testing of ideas (Polansky 1992; Blondell 2002; Sedley 2004). According to this
approach, self-development at both intellectual and moral levels can be intertwined. Burnyeat
argues that there are two “layers” of dialogue in the Theaetetus: the dialogue between its char-
acters and the dialogue between the reader and text (Burnyeat 1990). Sedley builds further on
the latter point, arguing that Plato’s aim is for the reader to give birth to the right answer to
the question, “what is knowledge?” by leading the reader closer but not fully to the answer
(Sedley 2004: 5). Socrates is also, for Sedley, the “midwife of Platonism” insofar as Socrates
voices the nascent beginnings of fully developed Platonic ideas but is as of yet not able to
articulate them, and is therefore, barren (Sedley 2004: 12). Along similar lines, Cornford sees
Socratic midwifery as a way of inducing recollection in the interlocutor, who undergoes an-
amnesis on account of Socrates’ questions (Cornford 1935: 27–28). Socrates as a midwife al-
lows Theaetetus to exercise his philosophical reasoning and so to grow into becoming a more
independent and capable reasoner. Socratic barrenness is what makes room for the autonomy
of the other to grow.
Although I think there are strengths to this overall approach, there is yet more to Socratic
practice. Many relational and political features of bodily midwifery are carried over in a
Socratic approach to philosophy. Socratic midwifery is fundamentally about a relationship,
between the midwife and the one who births, and a movement between knowing and not
knowing as a fruitful and dynamic process. Indeed, Socrates’ words in the Theaetetus sug-
gest that a sense of one’s own barrenness can be its own kind of fruitfulness. As I will argue
in the next section, finding oneself not to possess an idea may lead to a transformation in
self-understanding that also changes one’s attitude towards others. Socrates’ accompaniment
of Theaetetus encourages Theaetetus not only to develop ideas but also to grow in a kind of
self-knowledge with beneficial political consequences, as several commentators have argued
(Hemmenway 1990; Roochnik 2002; Giannopoulou 2013: 186–187; Bailey 2022).
Gordon argues that through matchmaking, Socrates cultivates Theaetetus’ philosophical
eros. In doing so, Socrates significantly develops Theatetetus’ ideas. Matchmaking is also char-
acteristically erotic for the partners being matched to one another, as Gordon has argued
(Gordon 2012: 136–137). At the same time, for the matchmaker there is also a necessary
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detachment from the matched pair allows for discerning a suitable match. When Socrates
proposes the ideas of figures such as Protagoras, Heraclitus, Homer, or others, these ideas arise
not from his own devotion to these figures or to their ideas, but rather from a sense of how
their exploration may help Theaetetus.
Gordon suggests that Socrates helps to move Theaetetus closer towards the recollection of
ideas: “The matchmaker serves as a kind of reminder to others, contributing to their recol-
lection, when he arranges erotic relations in which one partner can serve as the catalyst for
recollection of the other” (Gordon 2012: 137). But this recollection is not simply one where
the questions promote the other’s autonomous reasoning; rather, Socrates’ dialogical practice
remains inherently relational and encourages the interlocutor’s philosophical eros.10 Socrates
removes falsities from the souls of his interlocutors and acknowledges his own ignorance,
thereby exhibiting a wisdom different from orators, sophists, or scientists (Hemmenway 1990;
Giannopoulou 2013). Theaetetus’ wisdom, then, may be augmented by learning that under-
standing our own limits is itself a good. Learning of one’s own ignorance helps us to under-
stand that we are human, existing in a middle state between knowledge and ignorance. In
the Symposium, Socrates understands the human being as one who loves who gives birth
as a result of love (Symp. 205b8). But love (eros) is a product of poverty and plenty (Symp.
203c1–d5).
We see how Socrates helps Theaetetus to give birth by encouraging his initial idea and
developing it further: what is merely the germ of an idea that “knowledge is perception” is
given significantly more content by Socrates. Socrates attempts to give further delineation and
form, or one might even say a silhouette of features, to the quite basic claim that knowledge is
perception. For example, Socrates offers exemplars that illustrate what “knowledge as percep-
tion” could mean. First, we get the general principle: as something appears to me, so it is to
me, and as it appears to you, it is for you (Theaet. 152a6–8). Then he gives a clear, almost in-
controvertible example: if the wind feels cold to you, then it’s cold to you, and it feels warm to
me, then it is warm to me. Here, Socrates is helping Theaetetus to see what the theory “looks
like,” in terms of what it can explain. Thanks to this reference to an ordinary lived experience,
we can, as it were, see what this child of Theaetetus “looks like” in its features, more clearly
than if we stay only with his brief statement that it is perception.
When Socrates introduces Heraclitus, Empedocles and other thinkers, we also hear about
what the claim that knowledge is perception means for talking about being: “there is nothing
which in itself is just one thing: nothing which you could rightly call anything or any kind of
thing…the things of which we naturally say that they ‘are,’ are in the process of coming to be”
(Theaet. 152d4–6). Socrates takes up Theaetetus’ one brief statement, and gives us in a short
space of time a brief metaphysics that might support that theory of knowledge. This highly
compressed version of a theory, one that took longer to develop in its patrilineal heritage, now
has many more features made visible to Theaetetus. It is an instance of Socratic matchmaking,
in connecting Theaetetus’ ideas to a wider intellectual world. Like the child that the midwife
brings from the woman’s body into the social world, Socrates delivers Theaetetus of an idea
that is his “own” and connects it to the longer intellectual tradition. He thus assists Theaetetus
in a better understanding of how even the construction of an idea of “one’s own” is essentially
a relational practice.
But this not all. Socratic questioning also has other qualities of labor, such as risk, vulner-
ability, lack, and aporia, that become part of how the emergent philosopher grows. Socrates,
like a bodily midwife, possesses a skill that allows him to use logoi in order to support, en-
courage, and challenge Theaetetus in ways that help him to become a better birth-giver.11 To
be a philosophical laborer, however, involves not only the delivery of an idea. It also requires
259
the capacity to take risks, and it requires courage. In bodily labor, a woman must “give over
herself” to a somewhat uncontrolled process, rife with dangers and risks to herself and to her
child, and through the very process of labor, she may also emerge and understand herself as
more capable of endurance of struggle than she had realized beforehand. She may also learn
how to negotiate loss and limit. In Socrates’ own time, pregnancy was experienced for a sig-
nificant proportion of a woman’s childbearing years, and they often experienced miscarriages,
stillbirth, and the loss of children, along with the flourishing of other, healthy children. If we
overlook this element of the midwife’s care for women in the midst of diversely rewarding and
difficult emotional aspects of labor and motherhood, we will miss something significant about
how Socrates sees philosophy. Labor itself—as a process, not only as the “successful delivery”
of a child or an idea—shapes the laboring person as a person. Labor is formative of virtues
such as courage, endurance, and recognizing one’s human limits.
Socrates’ comparison to bodily midwifery admittedly breaks down in one key way: the
delivery of a stillborn child is far less desirable than the delivery of a healthy child, no matter
how much the laboring woman grows. Such loss is a cause of grief, often profoundly so; pre-
sumably we do not react as strongly to the loss of a seemingly promising idea. But as an image
and metaphor, it still functions to communicate the value of something else that Theaetetus
may gain if he gives birth to a “wind egg”: namely, to become more like the barren Socrates.
Next, I will consider the significance of this image of Socrates as a barren midwife with respect
to his own practice.
4 Socratic Midwifery, Barrenness, and Politics

Socrates’s own engagement with politics took place outside of the usual realm of politics.
Political institutions of the assembly or council (boulē), reserved exclusively for men, in many
ways marked the domain of genuine political activity. Socrates mostly acts apart from these
institutions—although he served on the council once with reluctance. He states that his own
defense is the first time that he has ever appeared in the courtroom in any capacity and that
he has not cultivated the practice of speaking persuasively (Apol. 17d1–18a3). He under-
stands his own wisdom to be a “human wisdom” of knowing what he does not know, the
only kind of wisdom worth having (Apol. 23a8–b2). Here, too, he expresses an idea akin to
barrenness, that is, not having positive ideas to offer to the city’s legislative or judicial institu-
tions. As Bailey argues, Socrates only disavows some sorts of knowledge: he denies that he
possesses theoretical knowledge of the kind that can be taught to others (Bailey 2022: 5–7).
Socrates nonetheless is political; he engages in politics through acting in a private capacity.
In the Apology, he states that his mission is to stir up the city like a gadfly, and that his care
is for the city, not only individuals (Apol. 30e1–5). The accompaniment of others is already
a political act.
In the Theaetetus, Socrates’ practice is similarly political. He makes clear the benefit of a
fruitless labor: it makes the soul gentler and improves the possibility of friendship and com-
munity with others. At the dialogue’s conclusion, he says:
And so, Theaetetus, if ever in the future you should attempt to conceive or should suc-
ceed in conceiving other theories, they will be better ones as the result of this enquiry.
And if you remain barren, your companions will find you gentler and less tiresome; you
will be modest and not think you know what you don’t know. This is all my art can
achieve—nothing more.
(Theaet. 210c1–4)
260
Socratic Midwifery
This is quite surprising: Socrates’ art is primarily about learning what one does not know, and
making others who discover this to be gentler and more modest. He uses the term hēmeros,
gentle, which could also be translated as “tame,” as in taming wild animals. Learning that we
do not know creates a more civilized, less harsh person. How might this work?
By learning one’s limits and accepting this as a normal and ordinary part of the human
condition, one can come also to treat others as “only” human, that is, as those who labor but
whose labor is not always successful. If I think it is reasonable that I can master something
fully, then the implicit judgment of another person who has not succeeded is that she has failed
to master. However, if I come to understanding that human beings are always in the position
of falling short of complete knowledge, then this self-understanding can also extend toward
my attitude toward others. To be modest rather than arrogant, and to recognize that human
limit and weakness is the norm can also lead me to be kinder and gentler to other people.
There is an ethical value in learning that one can come to know something about knowledge
and yet still not know it fully—as is the case with Theaetetus.12
As a counterexample to the future barren but modest Theaetetus, Socrates offers the exam-
ple of Meletus. Socrates speaks about gentleness and barrenness at the dialogue’s conclusion,
on his way to get Meletus’s indictment against him—a fact that Socrates explicitly mentions
(Theaet. 210d1–3). Meletus has accused Socrates of corrupting the youth of the city through
his questioning. But Socrates makes clear in the Apology that Meletus may really be bringing
him to the courtroom on account of how Socrates has questioned leading politicians of the
day, likely including Meletus himself (Apol. 21b9–22a8). Meletus is politically aggressive in
seeking out punishment for Socrates. He lacks moderation and gentleness because he assumes
that he knows what is just and unjust, and he assumes that he is correct that Socrates is a cor-
rupter and impious, when he does not know the aims or value of Socratic practice. But this
failure in Meletus is not only a failure to know Socrates; it is a failure to know himself. As
Giannopolou has argued, Meletus lacks the self-knowledge that might have made him more
moderate in his dealings with Socrates (Giannopoulou 2013: 186–187). Meletus expresses
complete confidence that he knows who corrupts (Socrates) and who educates (the laws and
traditions of Athens) (Apol. 24d2–e3). Socrates, in contrast, sometimes refrains from action
out of a sense of not knowing. For example, when the Thirty Tyrants told Socrates to bring
Leon from Salamis to them to be executed, he went home instead (Apol. 32c2–d4). When the
democracy wanted to try generals who failed to bring home dead bodies for burial as a group
and put them to death, he protested (Apol. 32b1–c1). In both instances, Socrates acted with
restraint grounded in his understanding of himself as only human in his capacity to know.13
Socrates’ philosophical questioning is political: it educates others not only about ideas but
also about their own humanity and the need for political restraint. Socrates even exercises
care for Meletus, albeit through pointed questioning, in his showing Meletus that he does not
know as much as he thinks that he does. Socrates’ wisdom is not that he possesses a body of
knowledge and can give a comprehensive theory of knowledge or of ethics that can withstand
all objections. But Socrates does not offer a complete theory of knowledge—the topic of the
dialogue—in the course of his conversation with Theaetetus. Rather, he engages deeply in the
different visions or paradigms of knowledge. He helps to develop and to move along those
theories, to enrich them, and to ask questions that allow Theaetetus to assess them. Socrates
understands many features of knowledge of which a good definition would have to take ac-
count, and so they do grow in understanding more of what a good epistemology requires. But
his wisdom is also to teach Theaetetus of his own limits, as a person and as a knower.
The “barrenness” of Socrates indirectly affirms Socrates’ political care for the affairs of the
city in a way that is akin to the older woman who cannot any longer give birth. Demand notes
261
that postmenopausal women usually had social permission in ancient Greece to be active and
to question men:
[A] degree of activity was tolerated for older women (especially mothers) who were
past the age of childbearing: they were free to move about in public and could in some
circumstances even confront men directly in the affairs of the oikos.
(Demand 127–128)
The image of the midwife first arises overtly when Theaetetus expresses worry that he will not
be able to answer Socrates’ questions adequately:
I assure you, Socrates, I often have tried to figure it out, when I heard about the ques-
tions that you asked. But I don’t have the capacity to persuade myself that I have a
strong enough answer, nor have I heard of anyone else who gives the kind of answer you
require, but I have not been released from caring about it (oud’ apallagēnai toū melein)”
(Theaet. 148e1–4). [Socrates replies], “You are experiencing labor pains, dear Theaete-
tus, because you are not empty, but pregnant (mē kenos, all’ egkumōn eina).
(Theaet. 148e6)
It is not when Theaetetus offers up specific ideas that Socrates diagnoses him as pregnant.
Rather, it is specifically when he experiences worry—that is, when Theaetetus experiences
something that is painful—that Socrates diagnoses the pregnancy. These worries are the
“pains of labor,” he says. But why are anxieties about the adequacy of one’s own ideas the
main sign of pregnancy? As Theaetetus presents it, he experiences a care for the truth along
with the sense of himself that he may not be worthy of attaining truth, and he experiences
it as care. It is care for the truth that makes Theaetetus “pregnant;” this attitude is not only
intellectual but also affective. He accepts the need to test an idea, and also has a deep-seated
desire to differentiate between knowledge and its absence. Such an anxiety also points towards
Theaetetus’ suspicion that, in his own humanity, he may not fully know. And yet Socrates
encourages him to seek.
Socrates himself emphasizes the formation of those who have spent time with him. He notes
that there are some interlocutors who have left him behind too early:
Then, after they have gone away, they have miscarried thenceforth on account of evil
companionship, and the offspring which they had brought forth through my assistance
they have reared so badly that they have lost it; they have considered lies and images of
more importance than the truth, and at last it was evident to themselves, as well as to
others, that they were ignorant.
(150e1–6)
These “miscarriages” are caused by attitudinal dispositions towards themselves and their
ideas. It is not merely that these interlocutors did not give birth to adequately defensible ideas;
they failed to see that an image is an image rather than the truth itself. In other words, these
“early departers” lack both the right ethical disposition towards the truth and the right dis-
position towards themselves. They prefer their own ideas even if those ideas are lies. Socrates
adds that amongst those who depart from him, some do return and can benefit from further
time with him—although they often find themselves in aporia on account of their association
with him (151a1–4). Socrates describes this aporia as better than mistaking images for truth.
262
Socratic Midwifery
Socrates’ use of the language of aporia here is especially intriguing in light of the image of
midwifery, for a poros is literally a “passage.” If birth is a movement of a child through the
passage of the birth canal, then being in aporia would seem to be just the opposite of what
one would need in order to be delivered. To be in aporia is like being a woman who is stuck in
the last stage of labor, unable to deliver and yet still striving. Indeed, philosophical aporia may
feel somewhat like such a struggle from the point of view of one trying to deliver an idea. Yet,
the struggle of labor is what makes it labor rather than something else, and it is in the laboring
that the character of the philosopher is made manifest and also grown further. Aporia, under-
stood as being stuck in a space where one does not know whether one can move forward, is
difficult, yet formative for the philosopher. She comes to understand that she is without means,
that she is in a middle state between simply not caring or not having any ideas, and yet not yet
in full possession of the truth. To stay with and remain in the discomfort of truth-seeking labor
is hard; yet it is in the laboring itself that philosophers come to be lovers of wisdom, rather
than only lovers of themselves or misologists who abandon all truth seeking. The philosopher
may come to understand himself and others as laborers, as those “on the way” but not yet
arrived. This attitude about oneself and one’s ideas also informs our political responses to
others, as human beings who are still “on the way.”
Theaetetus is unlike Meletus in his response to Socratic questioning. Theaetetus expresses
not anger at Socrates, but rather wonder: “Oh yes, Socrates, I wonder like mad (huperphuōs
hōs thaumadzō) what these things can mean” (155c7–8). Wonder is a mix of to understand
and a sense of something still being beyond oneself, and one’s capacities.14 It requires a sense
that the truth is not merely my own, but is beyond me, and there for all, and a sense of lack,
of not yet possessing. Both wonder in encountering that outside of me that I do not yet know,
and labor, in striving and working from within me to develop an idea that is not quite yet
“there,” are encounters with this in-between aspect of our humanness.
At the dialogue’s end, Socrates tells us that Theaetetus might be pregnant again in the fu-
ture, or even if he turns out to be barren, gentler in spirit (210c1–3). But such a willingness
to continue to labor takes a certain kind of philosophical courage, to continue to seek the
truth in the midst of human limits. An open question at the dialogue’s end might be: how will
Theaetetus turn out? Will Socrates’ midwifery have made any difference? If we return to the
dramatic frame that begins the dialogue, we can also see that Theaetetus did grow to be coura-
geous. Theaetetus was best known in posterity for being a gifted mathematician, but Plato as
author instead emphasizes Theaetetus’ courage and love for his fellow citizens. Eucleides says
that many people praised him for his courage in battle, and although he was badly wounded
and sick, he was also eager to go home (142b1–c5). Theaetetus is presented as a person who
was willing to risk his life for his city. He shows political care, and he is in body as vulnerable
as Socrates had earlier asked him to be in soul, out of love for the city.
As Gordon points out, this image of Theaetetus also points to a kind of embodied pres-
ence of these characters (Gordon 2012: 126–127). Midwifery may, in a way, return us to at
least an image of the embodiment of these characters—that is, to recollect these characters
also represent people who lived, created, and died, just as the prologue reminds us happened
to Theaetetus. As Demand shows, based on ample evidence from funerary monuments and
from Plutarch, Greek funerary stelae that commemorated the dead typically did not include
the name of the deceased except in two cases. Men, if they had died in battle, might have their
names inscribed, and women who died in childbirth. Demand interprets this fact to demon-
strate a genuine reverence for the courage required for childbirth (Demand 121–123). It is
striking that the dialogue includes within its drama the two kinds of people whose names were
remembered on funerary monuments: soldiers and birthing women.
263
The fact that the body of Theaetetus, and his courage in battle, are brought into relief during
a discussion of midwifery also suggests that the body was not entirely forgotten in the Platonic
presentation. In other words, if the root cause of the courage of the laboring woman and cour-
age in battle are, at bottom, a similar capacity to take risks and to advance despite them, then
perhaps Plato has given us a dialogue that puts together two kinds of courage, one prototypically
masculine and another prototypically feminine, in its presentation of philosophy. A written dia-
logue may not be able to present the body, but it can remind us that the body is always present.15
Notes
1 Kris McLain, “Diotima’s Knowledge and Theaetetus’s Labor” Ancient Philosophy Society Panel, 22
April 2022, Online, Pennsylvania State University.
2 As Helen King demonstrates, “gynecology” in Hippocratic texts was understood to include the dis-
eases of women in general, and not only reproductive health. King argues that midwives may well
have attended to women’s health more generally as their physicians (King 1998: 178–179).
3 This same term is used in Xenophon’s Symposium (Xen. Sym. 4.61).
4 As Halperin writes, at weddings, fathers would offer their daughters to their new husbands saying,
“I give you this woman for the ploughing of legitimate children” (Halperin 1990: 282).
5 For more on how Aristotle’s understanding of women’s virtues and the restriction to the oikos, see
Sophia Connell’s work “Aristotle on Women’s Virtues” in this volume (Chapter 26).
6 For a more extensive account of Aristotle’s view of reproduction, see Mariska Leunissen’s “Women in
Ancient Medical Texts as Sources of ‘Maternal’ Knowledge in Aristotle” in this volume (Chapter 23).
7 Connell also gives ample evidence that male doctors understood that their own knowledge of women’s
bodies and cycles depended upon the knowledge of women, as in the case of the Hippocratic On Fleshes,
in which the doctor states that he has been instructed by women on the signs of pregnancy, resulting in
his own knowledge (epistēmē) of such things (Connell 2023: 58, Hp. Carn. 19, Loeb VIII.158.4–5). A
recommendation in On the Diseases of Women states that a woman doctor (iatreousa) ought to remove
a dead fetus even when men are present (Connell 2023: 58, Hp. Mul. 1.68; Loeb XI. 150.21–23).
8 Aristotle also comments on the centrality of the midwife’s tying the umbilical cord to this element of
childbearing: “not only must [the midwife] be able to help over difficult births with her dexterity, but
she must also be quick-witted in dealing with contingencies, especially over the tying of the baby’s
navel cord (Aristot. Hist. An. 9 (7).10.587a10–11). This tying of the cord marks the end of the birth-
ing process and the separation of the child from the mother; in this way, it is clear that the midwife
played a central role in a cultural practice that denotes individuation.
9 All translations are from those by M.J. Levett in Burnyeat 1990.
10 Similarly, Futter argues that we ought not to understand male spiritual pregnancy as about a theory
of knowledge, but as about the birthing of “wisdom” in Theaetetus (Futter 2018).
11 As Blondell has argued, Theaetetus shares similarities with Socrates: his strong memory, care for
consistency, and even how his own experiences of aporia share something in common with Socratic
barrenness (Blondell 2002: 262–263).
12 Implicit in my argument is a larger understanding of Platonic epistemology as based around mod-
els of knowledge, none of which adequately completely capture the nature of the forms (McCoy
2020).
13 Bailey also notes the connection to Socratic wisdom in Plato’s Apology (Bailey 2022: 7–9) and sees
this as the goal of Socratic midwifery. I discovered Bailey’s article after this article was complete, and
our ideas were arrived at separately. My own work emphasizes connections to gender and feminist
scholarship as well as to the notion of wisdom.
14 For excellent accounts of Platonic wonder, see Roochnik 2002; Ewegen 2020.
15 Thanks to Anna Boessenkool and Carrie Pritt for research assistance, Jerónimo Ayesta López for edit-
ing work, and to Catherine McKeen and Sara Brill for their helpful editorial feedback.
Bibliography
Bailey, D. (2022) “Midwifery and Epistemic Virtue in the Theaetetus,” Epoché 27 (1): 1–18.
Blondell, R. (2002) The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues, New York: Cambridge University Press.
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Blundell, S. (1995) Women in Ancient Greece, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Burnyeat. M. (1977) “Socratic Midwifery, Platonic Inspiration,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical
Studies 14: 7–16.
Burnyeat, M. (1990) The Theaetetus of Plato, with a translation by M. J. Levett, Indianapolis, IN/Cam-
bridge, MA: Hackett Press.
Carson, A. (1990) “Putting Her in Her Place: Women, Dirt, and Desire,” in D. Halperin, J. Winkler, and
F. Zeitan (eds.) Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 135–169.
Connell, S. M. (2023) “Women’s Medical Knowledge in Antiquity: Beyond Midwifery,” in K. O’Reilly
and C. Pellò (eds.) Women Ancient Philosophers: Recovered Ideas and Perspectives, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press: 57–76. doi:10.1017/9781009028769.004
Connell, S. (2021) “Women in Science,” Oxford Classical Dictionary. https://oxfordre.com/classics/
view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.001.0001/acrefore-9780199381135-e-8584, accessed July
16, 2021.
Cornford, F. M. (ed.) (1935) Plato’s Theory of Knowledge: The Theaetetus and the Sophist, London:
Routledge and Paul Keegan.
Dasen, V. (2011) “Childbirth and Infancy in Greek and Roman Antiquity,” in Beryl Rawon (ed.) A
Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman World, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 291–314.
Demand, N. (1994) Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Classical Greece, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Ewegen, S. M. (2020) The Way of the Platonic Socrates, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Futter, D. B. (2018) “Spiritual Pregnancy in Plato’s Theaetetus,” Apeiron 51(4): 1–32.
Giannopoulou, Z. (2013) Plato’s “Theaetetus” as Second Apology, New York: Oxford University Press.
Gordon, J. (2012) Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Halperin, D. M. (1990) “Why Is Diotima a Woman? Platonis Erōs and the Figuration of Gender,” in D.
Halperin, J. J. Winkler, and F. Zeitan (eds.) Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience
in the Ancient Greek World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 257–308.
Halperin, D. M., J. J. Winkler, and Zeitlin, F. I. (eds.) (1990) Before Sexuality: The Construction of
Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi.
org/10.2307/j.ctv173f06d.
Hemmenway, S. (1990) “Philosophical Apology in the Theaetetus,” Interpretation: A Journal of Politi-
cal Philosophy 17 (3): 323–346.
Hippocrates. (1995) Places in Man. Glands. Fleshes. Prorrhetic 1–2. Physician. Use of Liquids. Ulcers.
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Hippocrates. (2012) Generation. Nature of the Child. Nature of Women. Barrenness. Diseases 4, edited
and translated by P. Potter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Libraries).
Howland, J. (1998) The Paradox of Political Philosophy: Socrates’s Philosophical Trial, Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield.
King, H. (1998) Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece, New York:
Routledge.
Martin-Seaver, M. (2018) “Murder and Midwifery: Metaphor in the Theaetetus,” Philosophy and Lit-
erature 42: 97–111.
McCoy, M. B. (2005) “Reason and Dialectic in the Argument against Protagoras in the Theaetetus,”
International Philosophical Quarterly 45 (1): 21–39.
McCoy, M. B. (2008) Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
McCoy, M. B. (2020) Image and Argument in Plato’s Republic, Albany: SUNY Press.
McDowell, J. trans. (1973) Plato’s Theaetetus, New York: Oxford University Press.
McLain, K. “Diotima’s Knowledge and Theaetetus’s Labor,” Ancient Philosophy Society Panel, 22 April
2022, Online, Pennsylvania State University.
Parker, H. (2012) “Women and Medicine,” in Sharon L. James and Sheila Dillon (eds.) A Companion to
Women in the Ancient World, London: Oxford: 107–124.
Petersen, L. H. and P. Salzman-Mitchell (eds.) (2012) Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and
Rome, Austin: University of Texas Press.
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Roochnik, D. (1990) The Tragedy of Reason: Toward a Platonic Conception of Logos, New York:
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Roochnik, D. (2002) “Self-Recognition in Plato’s Theaetetus,” Ancient Philosophy 22 (1): 37–51.
Sedley, D. (2004) The Midwife of Platonism: Text and Subtext in Plato’s Theaetetus, Oxford: Oxford
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Further Reading
On Socratic midwifery and matchmaking, see Jill Gordon (2012) Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic
Origins to Human Death, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Burnyeat’s (1977) “Socratic Midwifery, Platonic Inspiration,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical
Studies 14: 7–16 remains a foundational article on the development of an interlocutor’s ideas and
self-knowledge.
For a reading that emphasizes the centrality of self-knowledge in the dialogue, see David Roochnik
(2002) “Self-recognition in Plato’s Theaetetus,” Ancient Philosophy 22 (1): 37–51.
For a careful line by line commentary on the Theaetetus as a whole, see Ronald Polansky (1992) A Com-
mentary on Plato’s Theaetetus, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
Connell provides a comprehensive overview of women’s medicinal knowledge in “Women’s Medical
Knowledge in Antiquity: Beyond Midwifery,” in K. O’Reilly and C. Pellò (eds.) Women Ancient Phi-
losophers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
266
18
DIVINE NAMES AND THE
MYSTERY OF DIOTIMA
Danielle A. Layne
Well slave-boys (ὦ παῖδες), serve the rest of us. In all ways you serve up whatever you
want, whenever no one is set over you—I have never done this. But now, consider myself
and the rest of us subject to your invitation to dinner; so that we may commend you, serve!
(Plato, Symp. 175b)1
Hey, Agathon’s boy, fetch me the largest cup you possess. Never mind, it isn’t necessary.
Fetch me, slave-boy, that wine-cooler…
(Plato, Symp. 213e)
Ordering Agathon’s “hosting” slaves to fetch, like dogs, an oversized goblet, Alcibiades quickly
quaffs his cup (214a) and boldly changes the topic from praising Eros to Socrates. Mixing
eulogy with fault-finding (μέμφομαι 222a), Alcibiades emphasizes that, while seductive, the
philosopher deceives (ἐξᾰπᾰτάω 222b), a claim he substantiates by narrating an unbelievable
insult the philosopher made against him. But before he begins, Alcibiades makes a demand;
only the “initiated” can hear the offense while the “house-hold slaves and those other pro-
fane rural-folk,” must “secure a large gate over [their] ears (οἱ δὲ οἰκέται, καὶ εἴ τις ἄλλος ἐστὶν
βέβηλός τε καὶ ἄγροικος, πύλας πάνυ μεγάλας τοῖς ὠσὶν ἐπίθεσθε).” What the “low-lives,” the un-
usual hosts for Agathon’s symposium, are not allowed to hear is that the normally unwashed
and seemingly poor Socrates refused to serve the would-be tyrant’s desires.2 For this insult, Al-
cibiades recasts Socrates as a silenus, specifically Marsyus, who dared to court A pollo’s wrath
and, as such, the philosopher is roundly flayed, instead of praised, for his duplicity.
Poignantly, in the Symposium, Socrates is not the only character to be divinely recast, to be
given another title, as Apollodorus, Plato’s seemingly untrustworthy narrator, has a penchant
for name-play. His narration of the evening’s events is continuously peppered with puns and
unusual monikers, not least of which is the mysterious Μαντινικὴ Διοτίμα (201d2), where the
priestess’ name and reference to her city translates as “Zeus honored prophetess of victory.”
Indeed, it is the contention of this chapter that Apollodorus’ playful way with words, far from
stylistic window-dressing, has the potential to dramatically turn the tables on “fault-finding”
vainglorious men like Alcibiades. Apollodorus’ uncanny ability to wield tautologic speech
(ἴσα λέγειν οὑτωσὶ 185c4–5) allows our narrator the chance to recast the enslaved servants
267 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-20

Danielle A. Layne
(consistently referred to diminutively as boys/παῖδες) alongside other nameless or dismissed

characters, like the flute-girl, and therein, awards them their promised praise (175b). Most im-
portantly, though, he reveals the historical personage and cult of the mysterious, but no less dis-
missed, Diotima.3 The following will begin by focusing on those who truly host the party—not
Agathon, nor as Nye contended, Diotima.4 Rather, Apollodorus’ unnamed companions (like
the demeaned servants) act, despite their anonymity, as the efficient cause that sets the story
about “the dinner that brought together Agathon, Socrates and Alcibiades” (172b) into mo-
tion. This reading depicts a dramatically new image of Apollodorus, now recast as more than
a parrot who fails to truly lead the philosophical life. Rather, our narrator will evidence that
he, like a good dialectician, reads the room and, in response to the needs of his companions,
combines features of comedy and tragedy (223d), all while playfully hiding in his penchant for
name-play, the key to a serious enigma at the heart of his story: the divine eponym of Socrates’
infamous teacher of all things to erotica—the name which recasts the wise foreign priestess,
Diotima of Mantinea.
1 The Erotic Frame and the Pun of It All

To commence rather crudely, the comedy of the Symposium begins with an elaborate dick
joke.
I believe I am not unpracticed (ἀμελέτητος) about which you inquire. For by chance
yesterday I came up to town from my home in Phalerum and one such “notable” (τῶν
οὖν γνωρίμων τις) spotted me from behind and called from the distance, at once jokingly
summoning (παίζων ἅμα τῇ κλήσει), “Hey you, Phalerian (Ὦ Φαληρεύς),” he said, “yeah
you, Apollodorus (οὗτος Ἀπολλόδωρος), can’t you wait?”
(172a)
Passing momentarily over the first sentence, according to Eleanor Dickey (1996: 156, 176–177),
the summons of Apollodorus’ acquittance is strikingly informal and boorish. She argues that
employing οὗτος when referring to Apollodorus as well as the use of the demotic signifies
an unusually low-register for any Platonic dialogue and, overall, has insulting connotations.
Further, as David Sansone (2017: 479) notes, the at present unnamed individual turns out to
be Glaucon, famed for his loquaciousness and urbanity, so “this address is all the more strik-
ing.” Responding to James Cotter (1992: 133), who suggested that Φαληρεύς be emended to
read Φαληρίς so that Glaucon makes an obvious phallic reference, Sansone believes no textual
emendation is required. Φαληρεύς qua vocative similarity to Φἀλης already evokes “the famil-
iar circumstances of the annual phallic procession,” where such bawdy taunts were typical of
the atmosphere.5 Since processions of Phales included large statues of erect penises that were
associated with Dionysian festivals, the idea seems apt in light of Agathon’s dramatic victory
at one such festival. So, to translate, the opening lines present the first of many puns on names
as Glaucon mockingly calls Apollodorus a “divine dick” because that is what you do in a
carnival-like procession celebrating the tawdry bacchic God.
Now, such language would be appropriate during a crowded revelry dancing enthusiasti-
cally toward the city, but Glaucon and Apollodorus are not actually in the midst of such a
procession; for, at least beyond this possible pun, there is no suggestion of such distraction in
Apollodorus’ description of their ascent. Rather, Glaucon emphasizes “the road into town is
suitable for walking as well as for speaking and listening” (173b). Things seem rather quiet
and, so, how are we to explain the vulgarity beyond mere symbolism? This requires that we
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Divine Names and the Mystery of Diotima
ask in what other contexts were free, well-educated and urbane citizens allowed to rowdily de-
ride one another? The obvious answer is the private symposium, feasts where aristocratic men
were unencumbered from the constraints of civility and could relax and wag their tongues.
Moreover, scholars of Athenian culture like Sean Corner (2011: 66) have argued that sympo-
siums were but the “public brothel brought into the oikos,” and he further contends, private
symposiums mirrored the activities and spaces of public brothels, locations where men were
encouraged to indulge not only in sexual liaisons but also, as a kind of cathartic release, ir-
reverent and/or low register banter. Notably, both Apollodorus and Glaucon are walking
away from the port cities of Athens, areas known for brothels, sex stalls (oikema/oikemata),
prostitutes (pornai/meretrices) and, yes, even flute-girls at the docks.6 Further, the choice to
name the infamously promiscuous (Rep. 474–e) Glaucon as the undisclosed “nobleman,”
who, humorously, comes up from behind and feels unashamed to loudly use foul language
should remind audiences of Aristophanic comedy, wherein such obscenity and tawdry meet-
ing spaces were entirely apt. Indeed, the setting of Apollodorus and Glaucon’s encounter is
made clearer when Apollodorus names his primary source, Aristodemus the Small (σμικρός)7
or, as Xenophon refers to him, the Dwarf (μικρόν).8 Described by Aristophanes in a surviving
fragment of The Banqueters as so promiscuous and passive (καταπὐγον) that his ass (πρωκτος)
could be mistaken for the man,9 Aristodemus is not bare-foot, as many commentators have
supposed, because he emulates (by choice) Socrates’ style. Rather, Aristodemus, despite being
a citizen by birth, is impoverished and, as his reputed promiscuity and passivity imply, he does
what he must to survive.10 Like Phaedo, Socrates’ intimate who was rumored to have once
been an enslaved sex worker,11 Aristodemus, perhaps due to his physical stature, has been
relegated to a class of individuals associated with working in the streets or sleeping near bath
houses (known sites for sex work); indeed, the very location Socrates finds his favorite on his
way to Agathon’s.12
Further, Apollodorus’ descriptions of the value of philosophical discourse in contradistinc-
tion to the talk of others also hide some interesting references to the lives of his unnamed
companions (in the primary frame).
For me, whether I am advancing speeches concerning philosophy or listening to others,

I commonly find that I take an immense delight regardless of what I think their benefice
is for me; whereas the other sorts of speech—especially that of your wealthy money-
makers (ἄλλως τε καὶ τοὺς ὑμετέρους τοὺς τῶν πλουσίων καὶ χρηματιστικῶν)—I am not
only aggrieved myself but pity intimates like you (αὐτός τε ἄχθομαι ὑμᾶς τε τοὺς ἑταίρους
ἐλεῶ), who think you are doing something when you do nothing. Perhaps you think me
miserable, and I think your thought true. I, however, do not think it of you but I know
it well.
(173c)
Often this jeer is interpreted as directed toward Apollodorus’ companions, a clear sign of his
haughtiness and failure to truly emulate Socrates.13 Yet, the passage is more complex. Apollo-
dorus’ description is directed toward the company his friends keep, wealthy money-makers. In
contrast to those who enjoy philosophical speeches, his companions must also converse with
those who delight in their wealth. Apollodorus pities his intimates for having to sacrifice their
time with such braggarts. Keeping in mind (1) the possible setting as just outside a brothel
(making Glaucon’s dick joke acceptable), (2) the original narrator Aristodemus’ association
with sex work, and (3) Apollodorus’ companions (ἑταῖροι) are forced to spend time with af-
fluent windbags, is it possible that the unnamed ἑταῖροι are a bevy of prostitutes, male or a
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combination of male and female? Further, is it possible that they ask after the story of Socrates’
insult to Alcibiades because they themselves serviced one such money-bag, possibly Glaucon
himself, the day before? Recall that Apollodorus initially referred to Glaucon as “one such
‘notable’” (τῶν οὖν γνωρίμων τις), where the τις signifies the disdain for one in the class “no-
table” or, translated otherwise, the class of the “well-known/distinguished.” Said differently,
the ἑταῖροι have just asked Apollodorus about the story while referencing some contemptible
renowned figure of Athens. This would explain why Apollodorus does not name Glaucon
immediately but waits until he is deeper into his narration (172e) insofar as his companions
already know the identity of the so-called “notable.” Furthermore, recall that Glaucon said
he heard his unclear version of the story from someone (again also using τίς pejoratively)
who heard it from Phoenix, son of Phillip, showing that for Glaucon, only persons from dis-
tinguished classes deserve mention. Having witnessed Glaucon’s dismissiveness, Apollodorus
uses similar terms (τις) in reference to the so-called distinguished man at the opening, therein
questioning Glaucon’s celebrated status—a joke, or moment of Socratic irony, his companions
can share if one of them was the mere “someone” who supposedly told the unclear version.
Apollodorus’ friends ask after the story because the so-called distinguished, money-grubbing,
unphilosophical patron, Glaucon, insulted them for not rehearsing the affairs of Agathon’s
banquet to his satisfaction just the day before.
So, Apollodorus lambasts the unfortunate company his friends keep as “doing nothing” and
concludes that though they may think him an unhappy wretch (κακοδαίμονα), he knows his com-
panions are miserable. Unlike himself, a man with certain privileges (or philosophical talent)
allowing him to cease, as he describes, “running about at random (πρὸ τοῦ δὲ περιτρέχων ὅπῃ
τύχοιμι)” (173a) (another common euphemism in comedy for sex work or exploiting sex
workers), Apollodorus’ friends only have time to dabble in philosophy. Responding to Apol-
lodorus, one of the intimates retorts:
Always the same, Apollodorus, always insulting yourself and others as you think all,
starting with yourself but save Socrates, are sincerely miserable. How you came to be
called by the nickname (ἐπωνυμίαν) softy (μαλακὸς), I personally haven’t a clue (οὐκ οἶδα
ἔγωγε), for you are always like this, savage (ἀγριαίνεις) in your speeches with yourself
and others, save Socrates.
(173d)
Confused by the context of calling Apollodorus “soft,” textual emendations have often lead
translators to substitute τὸ μαλακὸς for τὸ μανικὸς14 but once the erotic frame is taken seri-
ously, we can now imagine Apollodorus lying in bed with his friend(s), sympathizing with
their plight, so that the nickname “softy” may gesture (1) to how other sex workers refer to
him and (2) to his companions poking fun at Apollodorus for his current state post/pre-coitus.
Imagining stage directions, the scene would resemble Aristophanic comedy as the friend co-
quettishly strokes Apollodorus’ flaccid ‘softness’ before teasingly contrasting it with his sav-
agery (ἀγριαίνεις) in other areas.
To this playful banter, Apollodorus responds affectionately, perhaps even insecurely: “My
dearest (Ὦ φίλτατε), so it is clear this notion about myself and others is a foolish madness?”
Often read as Apollodorus raving, the use of φίλτατε suggests intimacy and should guide how
the following question is translated.15 If read sincerely, φίλτατε results in a surprisingly tender
questioning of his own self-image, a rather Socratic moment where he wonders if he is on the
right track. Is he really made better by philosophical discourses? Are others really living the
unlivable life? Has he got this wrong? In fact, this may be, like his sobbing in the Phaedo, an
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instance of Apollodorus’ softness. Cleverly, the companion calms him, responding that it is
not worth it to contest these things now (173e). The unnamed companions side with Apol-
lodorus (173c); the life of listening to philosophical speeches, regardless of their usefulness, is
amusing or at least preferable to the chatter of the wealthy.
Returning to the opening line, “I believe I am not unpracticed in the subject you inquire
about.” Obviously, there are rich allusions here concerning the difference between knowledge
and opinion, memory and the oral transmission of ideas. Many have argued that this elaborate
frame and Apollodorus’ insistence that he does not remember all the speeches shows that he is
an untrustworthy narrator. Yet, if we shift our perspective, noticing the erotic context of the
primary frame, we can see why Apollodorus is not unpracticed. He is often asked about that
evening in such contexts. As Alcibiades’ own speech indicates (215d), what persons of the lower
class would not want to hear, repeatedly, the story of an evening wherein a bunch of well-known
distinguished men are made fools of when attempting to discuss the erotic? Recall that the pri-
mary source for the evening is Aristodemus, the impoverished dwarf associated with promiscu-
ity, who sat rather silently through the evening. Though he was silent, he did not box his ears,
as Alcibiades demanded of those he deemed low and profane. Rather outside the setting of Aga-
thon’s party, Aristodemus feels comfortable spinning the yarn to every Tom, Dick and Harry,
every Phoenix or Apollodorus who request his company. These persons, like Aristodemus, who
belong to the lower class, eagerly recite the story in venues described by Alcibiades, settings
where persons he considers “low-lives” learn of Socrates’ insult. In short, the scene Alcibiades
expressly fears and condemns during his praise of Socrates (215d), i.e. the lower class eagerly
recounting his insult, is the very setting of the primary frame. This setting accounts for Apol-
lodorus’ style geared toward an audience with a taste for low comedy and almost Aristophanic
vulgarity and wordplay.
The Phalerian pun, whether it plays with phallic humor or not, is explicitly referred to
as a joke (παίζων 172a). Far from an anomaly, puns on names and places repeatedly con-
tribute to the humor of both the frame and affairs of the evening. This penchant for puns is
clearly highlighted when Apollodorus makes an aside at the end of Pausanias’ speech, saying,
“Pausanias paused Παυσανίου δὲ παυσαμένου (185c4).” The alteration causes Apollodorus
to poke fun at his own sophistic habit, teasingly confessing to his companions the following:
“For the wise have taught me tautologic speech (διδάσκουσι γάρ με ἴσα λέγειν οὑτωσὶ οἱ σοφοί
c4–5).” This aside allows readers to hear Apollodorus’ sense of humor even when he speaks
for Eryximachus. Interestingly, Pierre Destrée has shown that this pun on Pausanias’ name is
repeated at least six times (185d2, d4, d6, d8, e2 and 188e4) during the doctor’s exchanges
with Aristophanes.16 The repetition of the Pausanian pun reflects Apollodorus’ compulsion
to keep the gag going. Further, Destrée notes the humor of Eryximachus’ own name, Belch-
fighter, purposefully employed during the hiccup episode at the doctor’s expense. Destrée also
points out, puns on Agathon’s name, both in Socrates’ invitation to Aristodemus (174b) and
Alcibiades’ demand, “lead me to Agathon/the Good” (212b), are clear attempts to alert read-
ers to sharpen their ears so that they heed the important double entendres elsewhere in the
dialogue. In agreement, the Pausanian pun alerts readers to Apollodorus unusual love of name
play and, given the erotic/comedic frame, an audience comfortable with low-register sex/body
humor, all repeatedly employed throughout the dialogue. Consider how Socrates continually
makes sexualized double entendres, some characteristically Socratic while others a bit more
lewd than his usual fare. During Socrates’ initial conversation with Aristodemus he puns that
he goes beautifully to the beautiful, followed up with an invitation to join the symposium by
mocking the cuckolded Menelaus for being a “soft spearman” (μαλθακὸν αἰχμητήν 174b), a
clear impotency joke, with “soft” drawing attention back to Apollodorus’ moniker, “softy.”
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Clearly, this is Apollodorus’ symposium and, as a consequence of the erotic setting, readers are
implicitly warned that they must brace themselves for an evening of crass and corny
amusement—whether it be sexual innuendo in Socrates’ and Agathon’s discussion of knowl-
edge transmission (175c–e) or Aristophanes’ playful banter with Eryximachus (185d–e,
188e–b) on the effectiveness of a tickle and noise to produce a sneeze (language associated
with sex in Attic comedy and Plato’s dialogues).17
Overall, Plato crafts Apollodorus’ rhetorical skill so that we see that “unpracticed” does
not mean memorized.18 Apollodorus shocks himself when he makes the Pausanian pun,
causing him to make the aside and then a series of similar and almost disruptive allit-
erations throughout Eryximachus’ and Aristophanes’ exchanges. He is caught up in his
own storytelling, enjoying what he is creating and bringing to bear before his beloved(s).
Yes, Apollodorus questioned Socrates about the details of the evening (173b) but asking
questions about details is different from reciting a speech verbatim or reading one out
loud (cf. Tht. or Phdr.). Rather, the emphasis on having the story “not unpracticed” re-
minds us of the theater of it all and, more importantly, of Apollodorus’ talent to seduce
an audience—people from all classes are eager to hear his version of the events. In point
of fact, if the erotic frame is accepted, the unique context revolves around Apollodorus’
disdain for the well-known members of the wealthy class and how one such braggart dis-
missed his companion’s attempt to tell the story. In the eyes of men like Glaucon, they are
nameless, a mere someone (τίς) and so, alongside sex jokes and puns, Apollodorus sees his
φίλτατε, taking the time to mention the flute-girls and the activity of the enslaved so that
his companions’ world is made somewhat visible. A simple gesture, but, in this way, his
companions are brought into the theater, highlighting how lowly and lecherous the so-
called “notable” money-grubbing class could be. Oddly, this frame may even suggest an
alternative reason for why Apollodorus’ Socrates dawdles on a neighbor’s porch and sends
Aristodemus ahead to greet Agathon alone (174e–c). Perhaps the philosopher had an idea,
but not a lofty one. Put otherwise, Apollodorus’ Socrates knows how frustrating it would be
for his short-statured lover, Aristodemus, the reputedly promiscuous and dirty sex worker,
to show up alone, expecting to join a party meant for more distinguished company. Keep in
mind, later in the evening Agathon tells his servants only to invite the source of the noise in
his courtyard on the condition that it is “someone suitable” (τις τῶν ἐπιτηδείων 212d) but
to turn away others. Clearly, Agathon has standards and, so, upon Aristodemus’ arrival,
the poet frantically and repeatedly orders the slaves to fetch Socrates, orders obstructed
by the embarrassing interloper (one that Agathon normally fails to see 174e), inciting the
prize-winning bon vivant further, thus invoking the Schadenfreude Apollodorus may have
thought his lovers would enjoy.
2 “Softy” Names the Oversights

We have been pointing out the comedy of the Symposium and Apollodorus’ playful toying
with the names of Agathon, Pausanias, Aristophanes and Eryximachus. Yet, Apollodorus is
no mere buffoon when it comes to his “tautological” way with words. He also has serious
aims insofar as our narrator consistently gestures toward the dangers associated with names.
Names can lose their meaning and scope or be twisted in ways that connote shame or re-
proach. Socrates’ criticism of his companions’ conception of proper eulogy (198b–d) and Di-
otima’s discussion of the wider scope of poesis and eros (205b) reflect the problems of names
and understanding their precise meaning, while Aristophanes’ myth of the androgyne reflects
the perversion of particular names. As Aristophanes argues:
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Firstly, there were three kinds of human beings, not as there is now, two, male and fe-
male, Rather there was a third kind, having in common a share of both sexes, though
only the name survives, the thing itself no longer appears. For the androgyne was one in
both form and name having in common both male and female; where now it no longer
exists except only insofar as a name of reproach (ἀνδρόγυνον γὰρ ἓν τότε μὲν ἦν καὶ εἶδος
καὶ ὄνομα ἐξ ἀμφοτέρων κοινὸν τοῦ τε ἄρρενος καὶ θήλεος, νῦν δὲ οὐκ ἔστιν ἀλλ’ ἢ ἐν ὀνείδει
ὄνομα κείμενον).
(189d–e)
While a remarkable passage for discussing issues of sex and gender, the theme of the com-
plete disappearance of a natural kind, the androgyne, underscores the gravity of Apollodorus’
wordplay. The androgyne exists only in name, erased from reality. Here, we may think again
of the ignored Aristodemus, who, once Socrates arrives, sits in silence. Sure, people reference
him, but he does not seem actively present. Why, like the androgyne, has he disappeared?
Aristodemus’ penchant for invisibility is first mentioned when Agathon either feigns having
looked for him or when he did look but “failed to see him” (174e). This failure seems odd,
particularly when Aristodemus’ short stature and appearance would make him hard to miss.
Like his servants, for Agathon, Aristodemus was a means to an end, useful (ἐπιτήδειος cf.
212d) only for fetching Socrates. Once Agathon’s desire for Socrates’ arrival is sated and
after Aristodemus bathes, Agathon assigns him a seat next to Eryximachus and forgets the
interloper altogether (175a). Nonetheless, Agathon has put Aristodemus in a marked position,
entailing that after Eryximachus’ speech we were to hear not the poet but Aristodemus. But
where is his speech?
While Aristodemus’ praise-speech could be one of the forgotten mentioned by Apollodorus
(177e–178a), this seems unlikely. Apollodorus explicitly says that those speeches were forgot-
ten by Aristodemus himself. Who forgets their own speech? Moreover, it cannot be one of
the speeches Apollodorus skipped as he clearly indicates just before Pausanias’ speech that
those occurred between Phaedrus and Pausanias (180c). From Pausanias’ speech onward,
Apollodorus gives no indication, with the exception of Aristophanes’ change of position, that
there are further lacunae. Some have argued that the omission results from Aristophanes dis-
ruption of the speaking order leading to an accidental oversight of Aristodemus. This is also
implausible. If Aristodemus sits between Aristophanes and Eryximachus, surely Aristophanes
knows it’s the interloper’s turn but instead of turning to his neighbor, he quickly emphasizes
the remaining two—Agathon and Socrates—another impossibility even if Aristodemus’ sat on
the other side of Eryximachus.19 In sum, it appears that the symposiasts overtly, rather than
accidentally, pass over “The Good People” (Aristo-demus) in favor of “The Good Appear-
ance” (Aristo-phanes).
Cleverly, Socrates, during his turn, begins by admonishing the previously employed meth-
ods as they failed to understand (μὴ γιγνώσκουσιν) the truth by tending only to appearances.
They made their subject seem beautiful and good, not caring if they were waxing untruthfully.
Socrates then describes their speeches as “σεμνός” (190a) which if translated earnestly means
“stately/august,” but sarcastically “haughty/pompous.” Contrastingly, Socrates emphasizes
that his depiction will be nothing but the truth, leading eventually to an image that should
remind the symposiasts of the man they overlooked.
First, [Eros] is always poor, far from being soft or beautiful as many believe; but, rather,
hard and rough, shoeless and homeless; always on the ground uncovered, sleeping in
public in doorways and roads. Possessing his mother’s nature, he dwells with need.
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In accord with his father he preys on all that is beautiful and good—brave, bold and
intense, a clever hunter (θηρευτὴς), always weaving (πλέκων) some artifice, desirous of
practical wisdom (φρονήσεως ἐπιθυμητὴς), resourceful, a philosopher his whole life; a
clever magician (γόης), druggist (φαρμακεὺς), and sophist (σοφιστής).
(203c–d)
Many commentators have noted the parallels between Eros and Socrates, Many commenta-
tors have noted the parallels between Eros and Socrates, but as O’Mahoney (2011: 150–151)
highlights, on this evening Socrates is unusually bathed and wearing fancy shoes marking that
“he only conditionally resemble(s) Eros” while Aristodemus does not have the advantage to
appear differently. He, like Eros, sleeps uncovered in doorways, shoeless, rough and hard; a
life requiring invention, artifice and bravery.20 Markedly, desirous of practical wisdom and
honest (see 174d for Aristodemus’ refusal to lie) Aristodemus embraces the erotic reality of
need and resource, remaining silent but porous, soaking up the events of the evening. If this
parallel is intentional, a rather interesting gesture to the opening frame becomes evident. Like
Apollodorus’ ἐπωνυμία, Socrates’ current favorite, his chief lover (ἐραστής 173b) has earned
his own appropriate moniker, Eros. In point of fact, Socrates alludes to this possible recasting
of Aristodemus in his closing words to Phaedrus.
On account of this [Love’s power] I say that all men should honor Love (πάντα ἄνδρα
τὸν Ἔρωτα τιμᾶν), as I myself honor the erotic arts with unique reverence, encourage
others likewise; both now and always I praise Love’s power and bravery (τὴν δύναμιν καὶ
ἀνδρείαν τοῦ Ἔρωτος) as far as I am able. So that this account, Phaedrus, consider, if you
will, as praise toward Love, or otherwise, if it pleases you to give it some other name,
name it (ὅτι καὶ ὅπῃ χαίρεις ὀνομάζων, τοῦτο ὀνόμαζε).
(212b–c)
Give Eros another name, Socrates dares. Embodied in Aristodemus’ very presence, Eros sits
before them but due to their ignorance and love of appearances, they fail to see.
Interestingly alongside Aristodemus, Apollodorus appears to sneak in eponyms for the
other overshadowed characters. The flute-girl and Poverty oddly mirror each other. Like Pov-
erty, she comes during “hours of good cheer” to “hang about the door” (203b), and, like most
in need, she develops resources to insure survival. Likely no stranger to devising strategies for
manipulating the wealthy, one wonders if Apollodorus’ flute-girl actually goes to pipe for the
women.21 Of course not. Said aristocratic women were heavily monitored and so they would
not have accepted the presence of a common flute-girl (whose job was to seduce her husband/
sons/brothers/father) for fear of their own virtue being questioned.22 Of course Apollodorus’
flute-girl does not follow orders. Rather, she would have taken to the streets, peddling door to
door until she found her evening fare. Put otherwise, is it a coincidence that Poverty finds Re-
source drunk and sleeping in the Garden of Zeus and that a flute-girl arrives with Alcibiades so
drunk he needs her support? One wonders if this is the very same dismissed flute-girl who, like
desperate Poverty, cleverly takes advantage of an inebriated resource in order to earn her even-
ing fare. As for the house-hold servants or the enslaved “hosts,” note that throughout Apollo-
dorus’ narration the men diminutively and overwhelmingly refer to them as children, παῖδες,23
with cognates of δοῦλ—used only by Pausanias to describe an enslaved lover (183a–184c) and
Diotima when disparaging the unfortunate folks bound to loving Beauty in one particular
body (210d). Contrariwise, Diotima never uses the term παῖς pejoratively. In fact, for Diotima
it is only through proper “boy” love (παιδεραστεῖν 211b) and pedagogy (210e) that individuals
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turn from bondage and toward the vast ocean of Beauty, a turn toward “plentiful philosophy”
and the birth of beautiful and magnificent discourses and thoughts. Children, both in body
and soul, are human attempts to bear absolute beauty/good and so, the enslaved hosts, the
παῖδες, take Agathon’s name, becoming the Good/Beauty persons can bear when they see in all
souls—beyond particular embodiments—their “bloom however small” (210c). Yet, Diotima
knows that most cannot do this as they are “deeply fixed on becoming a name (ὀνομαστοὶ),”
seeking fame rather than true beauty (208c). Overall, the flute-girl and Agathon’s servants,
alongside Aristodemus, know what it means to need, to lack the beautiful, but unlike the vain-
glorious symposiasts, the nameless and forgotten cannot cover up or pretend away such want
with pompous and pretty speeches. Rather, they exist between seeking and pursuing, strug-
gling for the good/beautiful life rather than digging themselves into pretense. Though Diotima
expresses fear that Socrates will not be initiated into this mystery (210a), Socrates’ way of life
and future company (many disenfranchised as well as several reputed sex workers) seems to
imply that he did learn this lesson on love. As Socrates is infamous for confessing, erotic mat-
ters are the one thing he knows and because of this Socrates beseeches the men, utilizing ἄνδρες
over ἀνθρώποι (the term Diotima prefers), to honor Love. Why? Because he, like Alcibiades,
flogs rather than praises their service to Eros, as throughout the evening he has witnessed them
continuously turn a blind-eye to the hosts of the party: the servants, the flute-girl and even the
small, meager and impoverished wretches like Aristodemus, “The Good People.”
3 Mysteries and Secret Names

So, Apollodorus’ penchant for name play may have significant consequences, particularly
insofar as Diotima seems to name the nameless in her own speech, giving them epithets like
Apollodorus’ own, “softy.” So, as Shakespeare would say: what is in a name, particularly the
infamous Μαντινικὴ Διοτίμα (212d)? Well, of course, there is the obvious pun “Zeus honored
prophet of victory” suggested in Diotima’s deme of Mantinea, the mythical region of Arca-
dia, famed for both siding with the Athenians during the battle bearing its name but, also,
the illustrious terrain of mountains and valley, rivers and marsh populated with daimonic
spirits like nymphs and satyrs. Yet, before we discuss this, we should take a moment and ask
whether Apollodorus’ Socrates is inviting in not just a woman but a specific woman, using,
as he did with Aristodemus, an eponym. Put otherwise, does the name Diotima refer to an
actual person, someone who, like the other dismissed and ignored individuals, would have
been excluded from this space? To answer this mystery, let us make sure to review what we
should already know about Diotima, seeing if more information about her life could reveal
her name.
First, Diotima is consistently associated with priestcraft. She is reported to have advised
Athens on certain sacrifices which prevented plague for ten years. Diotima appeals to the
language of purification, initiation, prophesy, and revelation, while also indicating a deep
knowledge of the daimonic.24 Identifying Diotima with priestcraft does not mean, however,
that she was some rare woman with power. As scholars like J.B. Connelly have meticulously
unearthed, there was a way for women to relate to the divine, on a priestly level, on an almost
daily basis. Moreover, unlike our contemporary associations, priestcraft was not necessarily
limited to chaste unmarried women or, for that matter, the privileged. There were priestly
roles for children, appointments for young women prior to but intent on marriage, alongside
functions for mature married women and mothers who could take on temporary positions
for festivals. Finally, there were women who donned the mantel of some select and highly
esteemed positions, often older and past child-bearing/rearing years who, due to virtue or
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privilege (or luck), were asked or elected to positions as priestesses, prophets, mystagogues, or
hierophants, permanent attendants to the gods they served. These women attended/managed
temples, processions, pannychis,25 and sometimes benefited economically while instructing/
developing/overseeing the sacred laws and rites of her cult.
From this, we can surmise that Diotima was plausibly an older woman who likely, due
to social expectations, had adult children. We can further infer that she held a tenured,
permanent position allowing her to ascend the rungs of her cult from initiation to the final
revelation, obtaining eventually, the wisdom/pedagogical skill Socrates repeatedly highlights.
Said acclaim for wisdom makes it likely that she held a role similar to a mystagogue or
hierophant, becoming one of the first paradigms of a philosopher priestess in antiquity, as
such a position would have necessitated years of study as she worked through the mysteries/
texts/symbolic intents of her cult.26 Though Diotima was once a good daughter, wife and/
or mother, her golden years were likely spent in prolonged, disciplined service via intense
training, contemplation and honing of her own pedagogical initiatory skills. In sum, by
clearly identifying Diotima with priestcraft, Socrates has brought “the women within” into
the andron, reminding the men of the women they seclude. Despite their present hiddenness,
whether young or old, the “women within” possess, or have the potential to possess, real
power in spiritual matters.
Next, Diotima is a foreign woman (ἡ ξένη). Socrates reiterates this several times while also
calling her a sophist (ὦ σοφωτάτη Διοτίμα 208b; σοφισταί 208c1, cf. Eros as σοφιστής 203d).
The use of this simple term suggests that she may have been a traveling priestess wandering
from city to city, sleeping like Eros in the open air (203c), before offering her services to vari-
ous cities, including but not limited to Athens. Importantly, as a traveling priestess, this would
mean she would be adept at the very skill Apollodorus seems to love, playing with names,
i.e. making gods and cultic practices translate from one world to another, doing the syncretic
work necessary for convincing each city that the spiritual matters for which she is devoted
are necessary for the thriving of the foreign city whose gates she approaches.27 Indeed, even
without the possible recasting of characters like Aristodemus, this syncretic adaptation of
divine names, i.e. Eros may signify a different title from her actual cultic devotion, may even
be a feature of Diotima’s lessons on love, a possibility strengthened by considering Socrates’
dare to Phaedrus.
To consider the possibility, we should turn to Arcadia, the region of Mantinea and its com-
mon cultural myths and mysteries. While agriculturally impoverished, Arcadia was infamous
for being the region of both hunters and shepherds and was the mythological birthplace and
home of the bawdy Pan (often associated with Marsyus), the half beast, half humanoid god,
whose lusty nature and devious spirit haunts liminal spaces with his piping (Borgeaud 1988).
Clearly a suggestive parallel to Eros, Pan’s presence is certainly invoked throughout the Sym-
posium, most explicitly in Alcibiades’ appeal to Marsyus but, strikingly, he is also the god to
whom Socrates and Phaedrus pray at the end of their own erotic intercession (Phdr. 279b–c).
The Aracadian Pan is associated with another cult of the region focused on Demeter and
her daughter, but not Persephone. Rather, this illegitimate daughter was an unnamed mysteri-
ous goddess referred to merely as Despoina (her true name a mystery reserved for initiates).28
The cult of Despoina was the Arcadian parallel to the Eleusinian Mysteries but dedicated to an
even darker, more impoverished Demeter. According to lore, Demeter wandered desperately in
search of her abducted daughter, Persephone. Yet, as she traversed the mountains and valleys
of Arcadia, she attracted the attention of Poseidon. Attempting to escape his unwanted pur-
suits, Demeter futilely transformed herself into a mare. Not fooled by her disguise, Poseidon
raped Demeter, resulting in a divine pregnancy. Grieving and righteously angry, the goddess
276
transforms into Demeter Erinys (Wrathful One) as well into Demeter Melaina (Black),29 with-
drawing into a cave, refusing to give birth to the product of her violation. Eventually with the
help of the always resourceful and clever Pan, Demeter was appeased and bore the unnamed
goddess, transforming once again into Demeter of Lousia (Bathing), purifying herself in the
nearby river. The two children born by this Demeter (sometimes depicted with a horse’s head)
were Anytus, the horse, and Despoina.
While the divine name of this Arcadian goddess was heavily guarded, remarkably, in this re-
gion, she was often associated/identified with the other popular goddess of the area, Artemis.30
Mistress of Animals (Potnia Theron), goddess of the wilds (Agrotera), who rejoices in “the
nursing young of every wild creature,”31 Artemis is not merely the goddess of the hunt but also
childbirth. She is Hegemone, Kourotrophos and, even, Savior of Mariners. Artemis, one who
runs with dogs and rejoices in having “many names,”32 is sometimes associated with Hecate
insofar as Iphigeneia (strong in birth), the sacrificial daughter of Agamemnon, was transformed
by Artemis into the illustrious key-bearing goddess associated with magic and ritual.33 More of-
ten, Artemis is depicted during childbirth with Eileithyia and Moira, where she carries a torch
in her role as Phosphoros (or Amphirpyron), symbolizing both her purgative power but her
activity of lighting the way in darkness (the time most often associated with hunting and labor).
To the Arcadian mind, she, like Pan, can be found in the liminal spaces, roaming borderlands
like rivers, mountain ranges with her faithful and loyal dogs as well as with her feminine
companions, most often nymphs. Artemis’ favorite—the tragic Kallisto—was seduced by Zeus
when he disguised himself as Artemis (reminding us of the often dismissed eroticism between
women). In many ways, the Arcadian Artemis is both masculine (hunter) and feminine (mid-
wife), whose object of desire is the exceedingly beautiful Kallisto.34 Tragically, Artemis’ beloved
is transformed, either by her own hands or by another jealous god, into a bear. This transfor-
mation forces Kallisto either to give birth to her son, Arkas, as a bear or, in other accounts, she
is killed by her son unwittingly and, in still other accounts, she gives birth to twins, Arkas, the
first good king of Arcadia and Pan, the shepherd of the wilds, that daimonic-like spirit who
assisted Demeter in giving birth to Despoina/Artemis.35 In all accounts of the Kallisto myth,
Artemis or Zeus is said to have secured the nymph and her child’s place in the heavens, a con-
stellation indicating her friendship with the gods. Finally, Kallisto’s mythological tomb rests
just outside of Mantinea where it is recorded that priestesses of Artemis, typically older women
who “were done with men,”36 i.e. married or widowed women past child-bearing, would ritu-
ally beg before festivals—“a good luck rite for women seeking successful childbirth.”37
Now, obviously, many of these images of Arcadian Artemis abound in Diotima’s speech,
from Poverty’s begging and consequent birth of Eros paralleling the priestly rite, to Diotima’s
emphasis that Eros is skilled in hunting/preying, (203c–d: ἐπίβουλός/θηρευτὴς). Eros, as hunter,
is depicted in similar terms as Artemis qua scheming and contriving, clever in entrapping that
which he needs, while Diotima repeatedly uses examples of animals to reference the fierceness
by which individuals will protect their children, ready to fight hard battles and to sacrifice
themselves so as to nurture their own offspring (207a–b). When Diotima discusses Eros’ role
in pregnancy and giving birth, Diotima culminates in naming three figures associated with Ar-
temis: “Beauty/ Καλλονή is Fate/Moira and Labor/Eiletheia for birth (Μοῖρα οὖν καὶ Εἰλείθυια ἡ
Καλλονή ἐστι τῇ γενέσει 206d).”38 Here, two divine eponyms typically associated with Artemis’
role as one who tends over childbirth and in the same breathe Artemis’ great love, Kallisto
(the nominal form of the superlative Καλλιστή). The seeming turn in Diotima’s account from
discussing the Good to the Beautiful takes on richer significance insofar as the practitioner of
proper erotic love becomes, like Artemis’ Kallisto, friends with the gods (θεοφιλεῖ). Moreover,
Eros stands—like Artemis’ first priestess, Hecate/Iphigenia (good birth)—in doorways and is
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explicitly described as a magician (γόης) and a druggist (φαρμακεὺς) who is, like Diotima, a
medium between mortals and the divine (202e–203a). Interestingly, even this association with
Iphigeneia, the legendary maiden sacrifice, unpacks Diotima’s advice to the Athenians regard-
ing the plague. The cult of Brauron, which came to be more pronounced during the Pelopon-
nesian wars, was established at Athens to appease Artemis who sent (in the mythical past) a
plague that was only abated on the condition of a maiden sacrifice, ritualistically enacted by
sending select young girls to serve the goddess as little bears for one year. Typically, the ages
of said girls were approximately, like Diotima’s sacrifices, ten years old.39 Overall, while it is
beyond the scope of this essay to definitively track all the references to the Arcadian Artemis,
possibly the unnamed secret goddess Despoina, the above suffices to claim that Diotima ap-
pears to be a Mantinean priestess of a cult devoted to the liminal matron of birth and the hunt,
Artemis, the lover of the exceedingly beautiful Kallisto.
So with the priestess’s possible cult revealed, the question of “Who is Diotima?” still trou-
bles us. In response Diotima might say, “Clearly, a child would know by now!” (204b) All
teasing aside, let’s reiterate Artemis’ role in the Greek pantheon as one who presides over
birth. She is, if you will, the patron saint for midwifery, the reported techne of Socrates’
mother. As he reports to Theaetetus:
Haven’t you heard that I am the son of a midwife, the very noble (μάλα γενναίας) and
dignified Phaenarete? And haven’t you heard that I practice the same craft? But see well,
you must not reveal (κατείπῃς) me to the others. This craft of mine, my companion, has
escaped notice for they do not know (οἱ δέ, ἅτε οὐκ εἰδότες). They only say of me, that I
am the strangest and that I make people perplexed. […] Consider all the things of mid-
wifery, and then my purpose is more easily understood. As you know, no one who is still
able to become pregnant or give birth (κυϊσκομένη τε καὶ τίκτουσα) practices midwifery
but only those no longer able to give birth. It is said that this is because Artemis, the one
of safe delivery, is unwed. For she did not give the art of midwifery to those who are
barren, for human nature is too weak to grasp that which they can’t experience. So she
commends those at the age no longer able to bear, honoring (τιμῶσα) those like herself.
Isn’t it both likely probable and necessary, midwives know better than others who is
pregnant and who is not? Midwives via drugs (φαρμάκια) and incantations (ἐπᾴδουσαι)
can arouse and soften (μαλθακωτέρας) labor at their will, assisting the suffering of la-
bor pains or if they think the child is stillborn, performing abortions (καὶ ἐὰν νέον ὂν
δόξῃ ἀμβλίσκειν, ἀμβλίσκουσιν). Also, have you noticed that they are clever matchmak-
ers (προμνήστριαί), most wise concerning which union of men and women produce the
best of children. Let me say that this is their greatest practical wisdom (φρονοῦσιν), more
than cutting the umbilical cord. Consider this. Is it not the same art which attends and
harvests in the fruits of the earth, will it know in what soils the seeds should be planted.
Is it otherwise, my friend, with wisdom, one harvesting the other attending. But because
of those who join men and women together unjustly and without skill, which they call
pimping, midwives, most revered, avoid association with matchmaking, fearing that in
this way they will bring on slander; but correct matchmaking belongs assuredly only to
the midwife. Well, then, much is the work of midwives, but less than my drama. For they
do not deliver women sometimes from phantoms and sometimes of truths (μὲν εἴδωλα
τίκτειν, ἔστι δ’ ὅτε ἀληθινά), difficult to distinguish. For I think if they could distinguish
between the true and the false, midwifery would the greatest and most beautiful work
(μέγιστόν τε καὶ κάλλιστον ἔργον).
(Theat. 149a–150b)
278
This passage should give us pause. Not only does Phaenarete’s craft make her an explicit devo-
tee of Artemis in the practice of assisting women in birth, but also she, like Diotima, is wise
in many other things (τε σοφὴ ἦν καὶ ἄλλα πολλά 201d), including medicine (φαρμακεὺς 203d)
and incantations/charms (like Artemis’ double Hecate; cf. Phd. 77e, 114d and Chrm. 155e,
157b for Socrates’ appeal to both charms/drugs). Further the skill of matchmaking is, like
Aristophanes’ androgyne, often confused with a vulgar practice, i.e. pimping/sex work, but
in reality is the highest part of her art. This matchmaking is a tending to seeds and harvesting
or bringing to bear, reminiscent of Socrates’ remarks concerning philosophical pedagogy in
the Phaedrus. Socrates even confesses that his association with his mother’s craft shouldn’t be
revealed, suggestively drawing a parallel to mystery practices but also the common reproach
such work would bring to her and by extension Socrates’ name.40 Furthermore, like Diotima
who urges initiates not to bear phantoms (τίκτειν οὐκ εἴδωλα) but true virtue (ἀρετὴν ἀληθῆ)
(212a: full text below), Socrates’ verbatim use of Diotima’s speech while discussing his moth-
er’s craft shows that he is recalling the lessons he learned from the priestess.
Diotima and Phaenarete, possibly two wise and noble women whose work in service of
Artemis and giving birth, would be most beautiful (κάλλιστον) if it could test, as Diotima
does with Socrates’ original conceptions of eros, the true from the false. Are we expected to
believe that this is an empty parallel, or is it entirely possible that Apollodorus’ Socrates has
not just symbolically included and recast the slaves, the flute-girl and the lowly Aristodemus in
Diotima’s speech but, in point of fact, has brought out from seclusion and given a new name
to a particularly noble (μάλα γενναίας) mother? At the close of Theaetetus Socrates not only
reminds Theaetetus of his craft of midwifery but also goes further than merely associating a
likeness to his mother’s skills. In fact, he identifies them as the same art received from the same
divine source, saying, “My mother and I were allotted this art of midwifery from God, she
for women and myself for the young, the noble and all the beautiful” (210c). While Socrates
emphasizes that Phaenarete directs her midwifery to women, is it not possible that Phaenarete,
under the eponym Diotima, makes an exception for her son, letting him into mysteries that
men are normally inclined to care less about? Recall that Socrates knows his association with
midwifery would surprise Theaetetus and how the philosopher asks the youth not to popu-
larize said association. Could this be a playful secret, perhaps a mystery, like the Arcadian
Despoina who has a hidden name, that Socrates only reveals to promising philosophers like
Theaetetus or Apollodorus? If this is the case, is it possible that Plato/Apollodorus/Socrates
hides her name before the profane men, deeming her, as Artemis was, Zeus-honored (Diotima)
or as the etymology of Zeus also indicates, the shining, as Artemis, the shining torch-bearer,
honors (τιμῶσα, Tht. 149b) ones like herself, those who no longer bear children but assist
others in delivery. Or further, consider the Cratylus where Socrates playfully suggests the
etymology of Zeus derives from two titles, Zena and Dia, so that “The god is correctly named
as through whom (δι’ὃν) all things have their gift of life (ζῆν)” (396a). Transferring this to
Diotima, her name means “honor” the one “through whom” we receive “life.” Perhaps, these
are just interesting coincidences.
Yet, to be sure, Apollo-dorus—literally, that clever and creative gift of Apollo, twin brother
of Artemis and mirror of Dionysus—finds a way with his uncanny gift for words to reveal the
mystery into which he has been initiated. Discussing the final stage of ascent and the vision of
the beautiful, Apollodorus’ Diotima describes the revelation (φαντασθήσεται 211a; θεωμένῳ
211d2; θεᾶσθαι 211d7; θεωμένου 212a) of true virtue, ἀρετὴν ἀληθῆ, a vision which leads
practitioners to become, like Kallisto, a friend to the divine (θεοφιλεῖ), seized (ἐφαπτομένῳ)
not by idols or phantoms (οὐκ εἴδωλα) but kindled by truth immortal (212a). Keeping in mind
that ἐφαπτομένῳ in the passive can translate to “kindle,” alongside the constant references
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to seeing the sight (βλέποντος; ὁρῶντι ᾧ ὁρατὸν 212a) of true virtue, bearing not phantoms
(τίκτειν οὐκ εἴδωλα ἀρετῆς), is it possible that Phaenarete (Phaenarete/Φαιν-αρέτη), revealer of
virtue, has been delivered over to the “father of the discourse” (178d), Phaedrus, the radiant,
the bright? Put otherwise, the shift in emphasis at the close of Diotima’s speech to a revelation
or sight of virtue (212a) rather than the pursuit of Beauty/Good as it had heretofore been, al-
lows Apollodorus to playfully name Phaenarete as the highest mystery embedded in Diotima’s
lessons on love. Ultimately, then, Diotima’s initiation of Socrates on proper boy-love or child
love (παιδεραστεῖν) may say something more about the relationship between the foreigner of
Mantinea and a philosopher of Athens while also advancing another criticism of the symposi-
asts. Diotima speaks to the love, a mystery, they have forgotten, the love of a mother for her
child. Diotima gestures to this while invoking the language of Artemis’ arrows, reminding her
dear Socrates (ὦ φίλε Σώκρατες 211a), “Don’t be amazed if everything honors its own offshoot
(μὴ οὖν θαύμαζε εἰ τὸ αὑτοῦ ἀποβλάστημα φύσει πᾶν τιμᾷ)?” (208b)
Of course, one could ask, would not Diotima/Phaenarete have to have been an Athenian
citizen for Socrates to have been a citizen? No. Socrates was born well before Pericles’ decree of
451 BC where both parents had to be citizens. But, despite her noble lineage, in Athens she is
still a widowed foreigner and one who works outside the home as a priestly traveling midwife,
a kind of matchmaker and druggist, partaking of a reputation and trade(s) the men would re-
proach. And so, Socrates conceals her name from the uninitiated/profane, from the truly savage
(ἄγροικος). By the dog (Socrates’ inexplicable catch phrase), this identification of Diotima with
Phaenarete, the midwife in service of Artemis, may not only unpack the Symposium’s obses-
sion with parental lineages, i.e. the constant gainsaying over Eros’ birth parents, and Socrates’
own spontaneous curiosity about said lineage when learning from Diotima (203a), but also
other curiosities throughout the dialogues, not least of which being the equality of men and
women in the guardian class of the Republic or why Socrates, despite being attached to Athens,
is so unusually disposed to outside customs and cults and the value of being in-between, both
citizen and outsider. In the end, it seems his mother may have taught him to be open to the
foreign,41 the feminine, the poor, to see all those who occupy liminal spaces, so that he learns
from all a renas (his only other professed teacher being another foreign woman associated with
sex work, Aspasia) the value of the erotic life. Transgressing the patriarchal taboo, Phaenarete/
Diotima, the wandering sophist priestess, inspires/initiates Socrates into the tradition of the
philosophical hunt, teaching him the art of giving birth to the beautiful in the beautiful and,
like any adept initiate, Socrates, and by extension Apollodorus, can reproduce the mysteries in
“semblance of the original” (208b). Unlike the men in the room who do not think or even see
the need for the wisdom of the priestly midwife, Socrates and Apollodorus see and care for all
kinds, recasting the seemingly low, small and/or weak, be it the “woman within” or the com-
mon sex worker, the enslaved or the flute-girl, seeing their power to light the torch and reveal
virtue. Phaenarete, mother and teacher to Socrates, her immortal child both in body and soul.
Notes
1 Translations of Plato’s Symposium are, for the most part, my own, but where needed Lamb (1925)
and Bernadete (2001) were consulted and adapted. For παῖς as adult slave see Golden (1985) and
Benitez (2016).
2 See Nightingale (1993).
3 See Nye (1989/1994) who argues against Irigaray’s (1984/1994) image of Diotima as a Platonic ap-
propriation. See footnote below as well.
280
4 Nye (1989/1994).
5 See Aristophanes’ Archanians (253–261); Sansone (2017: 481) and Henderson (1975: 15–16).
6 Phalerum was the original port city of Athens. For port cities and prostitution see Kapparis (2018:
272) and Halperin (1990: 91). Theopompus, FGrH 115 F290 = Demetrius, Eloc. 240, Aristophanes
Peace 165, Knights 772, Aeschines I. 40. For Greek prostitution see Davidson (1998), Cohen (2003),
(2006), and (2015), Kapparis (2011) and (2018), Glazebrook (2011) and Corner (2011).
7 Symp. 173b.
8 Mem. 4.2.
9 F242.
10 On dwarfs in ancient Greece see Dasen (1993). As sexualized, Aristotle HA 577b.
11 See Duáanic (1993) and Nails (2002: 231). Cf. DL 2.105.
12 Cf. Xenophon, Symp. 4.59 for Socrates as brothel matron. Also, Mem. 1.6.13. Consider also, Mem.
3.11.1 where Xenophon, in fact, clearly depicts Socrates as one who had no qualm visiting and
conversing with sex workers like the beautiful and charming Theodote or even Plato’s depiction of
Socrates as learning from Aspasia, Pericles’ consort, in the Menexenus.
13 e.g. Nightingale (1995: 118).
14 Skemp (1970).
15 As H. Tarrant pointed out to me, this vocative is found only three times in Plato (Crat. 434e and Hip.
Min. 370e) and according to Dickey (1996, 138) φίλτατε “is far more likely to be used between family
members or lovers” and expresses “genuine, deep, affection.”
16 See Destree (2015).
17 See Phdr. 253e and Phil. 46d7–47b7. See Dover (1978, 124n38), Davies (1982), Adams (2021),
O’Mahoney (2011).
18 Contra Halperin (1992: 112).
19 O’Mahoney (2011: 149).
20 While in agreement with O’Mahoney (2011) concerning Socrates’ deployment of Aristodemus’ like-
ness, the following draws radically different conclusions.
21 With the exception of ritual practice, the situation of most women in classical Athens (though also
prevalent throughout Greece) was one of seclusion.
22 Anderson (1994: 143n54): “Greek art never shows a respectable woman playing the aulos.”
23 For παῖς as slave see Golden (1985) and Benitez (2016).
24 See Evans (2006: 10).
25 For detailed accounts of the priestly duties of women see Connelly (2007) and Dontas (1983).
26 Garland (1984) and Connelly (2007).
27 Nye (2015: 79).
28 Jost (2003: 143–169) and Larson (1995) and (2007), Bremmer (2014) and Bernard (1962).
29 See Borgeaud (1988: 57–59), Larson (1995), Jost (2003: 143–169), Iles-Johnston (2013). See also
Zolotnikova (2017) and Jost (2003).
30 For Artemis’ connection to Despoina and Pan in Arcadia, see Borgeaud (1988) and Larson (1997).
For more generalized information on Artemis, see Larson (1995) and (2007). For the classical source
for Arcadian Artemis, Pausanius 8.37.4–5. See also Vernant (1991).
31 Aesch. Ag. 140–143
32 Callimachus Hymn to Artemis, Orphic Hymn to Artemis.
33 See Hesiod Catologue of Women frag. 71, Cypria frag. 1 and Pausanius 1.43.1. See also Borgeaud
(1988: 157) and Viscardi (2021).
34 Budin (2016: 39).
35 Ovid Met. 2.409–507, Apollodoros Library 3.8.2, and Pausanias 8.3.6–7.
36 Pausanius 8.5.11–12, 8.38.7.
37 Budin (2016: 110–111).
38 For the Eleusinian associations see Evans (2006: 14).
39 Iphigeneia in Tauris 1226–1229, Aristophanes Lysistrata 644–648. See also Simon (1983: 86) and
Faraone (2003).
40 See Kennedy (2014: 122–163) for how work outside the home, particularly manual labor would have
earned Phaenarete a reputation associated with foreigners and even sex-work.
41 For the foreign in Plato, see LeMoine (2020). Cf. Brown (1994).
281
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Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplement 2, 93–129.
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19
SEX DIFFERENCE AND WHAT
IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN IN
TIMAEUS
Jill Gordon
At the end of Timaeus, we get a brief account of a strange fact about the cosmos: the entire
first generation of humans in this cosmogony are men, and women emerge only in a second
generation—as punishment for those men of the first generation who were not virtuous.
After what must have been hours, dramatically speaking, during which Timaeus spun out
his lengthy tale, his likely story concludes by telling his audience that when those who were
born men (tōn genomenōn andrōn) live cowardly and unjust lives, they will be regenerated
as women (90e–91a). And at this precise time and for this reason (kai kat’ekeinon dē ton
chronon dia tauta), the gods create women, along with the bodily equipment both men
and women need for sexual reproduction, and the desire for procreative sex that each has
(91a–d), all of which did not exist in the first generation of “humans.”1 Timaeus also waves
away this astounding revelation as relatively unimportant, telling us before he has actually
revealed it that there is no need to speak at length about it (ho mē tis anangkē mēkunein,
90e). Timaeus claims that it is suitable (emmetroteros) to give only a brief account about
such things (90e), implying a parallel between its brevity and its relative unimportance, us-
ing a term that more literally means “in proportion” or “in due measure.” This account of
sexual differentiation in Timaeus’ cosmogony, especially in its bodily aspects (90e–91d),2
generates what we might call aporias, paradoxes, inconsistencies, or anomalies, in a variety
of guises, and they motivate a deeper look into their details and implications.3 I do not ar-
gue that these anomalies are small nuggets Plato leaves for the reader to puzzle over nor to
resolve, nor do I argue that they are intended to convey something about the character of his
narrator, Timaeus.4 And any claims that the strange account of women is myth, parable, or
part of a mere “likely story,” while perhaps true, do not bear on my argument. My aim here
is not to resolve these incoherencies surrounding sex difference or to explain them away,
but rather to draw them out as such, to put us in a position to think about what it means
for this specific text to have these specific incoherencies about sex difference. Regardless of
their source, their epistemic status, or their genre, the paradoxes and anomalies themselves
reveal a troubling exclusion of women at the heart of what this dialogue tells us it means to
be human.5
I begin with an account of the bodily configurations of men in the first and following gen-
erations. Focusing primarily on sexual organs, I identify in the first four sections here four
specific anomalies that result from Timaeus’ account, and I draw the curtain back on the utter
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-21 284

Sex Difference and What It Means to Be Human
strangeness of the first generation of humans. What Timaeus’ account goes on to say about
women’s bodies cannot be disentangled from the account of the “wandering” that governs
the empirical world. Wandering movement and the wandering cause, taken up in the fifth and
sixth sections, respectively, expand our understanding of sexual differentiation in this dia-
logue and reveal further anomalies in the first generation of “humans.” The discussion of the
wandering cause also helps us to distinguish two types of anomalies in Timaeus: those anoma-
lies that result from the ontological discontinuity between being and becoming, about which
many scholars have written, and the anomalies I lay out that emerge wholly within the order
of becoming, situated in Timaeus’ incoherent account of human sexual differentiation. These
latter anomalies emerge not from ontological discontinuity, I argue, but because of something
problematic in the account of humanity itself.
1 The First Anomaly

The original humans had a passageway (diexodon) for expelling drink (91a), clearly meaning
urination. One cannot remain agnostic about the fact that this passageway is indeed a penis
and not something else, since when the sexes are differentiated, the gods create the vent for
men’s seed or ejaculate “in that very part” (touth’ hēper, 91b) where urination occurred.6
Timaeus thus begins his account of the bodies in the second generation of humans with a focus
on the penis.
Timaeus refers simply to “seed” or sperma, but he gestures to an earlier part of his account
where the seed is first introduced.7 This earlier passage describes the creation of various parts
of the body by the lesser gods. There, Timaeus had finished talking about the formation of
the guts, and he turns to flesh and bones of all mortal creatures. Flesh and bone are rooted in
something even more primordial, the marrow, which is the “bond of life,” linking body and
soul in living, mortal creatures, and it is itself composed out of the original triangles, which
give rise to the elements, earth, air, fire, and water. Mixed in due proportion, these create
the universal seed-stuff (panspermian, 73c) out of which the marrow is formed in all mortal
creatures. This seed is referred to as divine (theion sperma, 73c), and it is part of that original
work of the Demiurge “at the beginning” (archas, 73c), before he hands off the task of com-
pleting mortal creatures to the lesser gods. Timaeus then explains that the “field” into which
the Demiurge plants this divine seed is made round, and is then called “brain” (egkephalon),
and the surrounding vessel is the head (kephalēn, 73d). Divine panspermian thus had a place
in the bodies of the original humans, but it was not yet vented. In the second generation of
humans, however, when their bodies are sexualized, it is provided an outlet or “vent”(ekroē)
for semen and sexual procreation. As Kalkavage sharply observes, “Sexual climax for the male
is literally the loss of his brains.”8
Although not stated explicitly here, one might infer that there were no erections until the
second generation of humans. The ejaculate of the second generation of men coincides with
the implantation of “an animate creature in us [men]” (zōon to men en hēmin, 91a),9 and the
males in the second generation therefore have a “lively desire for emission” (tēs ekroēs zōtikēn
epithumian, 91b) in the organ that previously only emitted urine. Ensoulment and enliven-
ment are connected to movement and the capacity to generate throughout Timaeus, and we
can interpret this to mean that the penis now has a life and a movement that stimulates sexual
desire that it did not have before. Ensoulment of the penis itself—having its own living crea-
ture inside—demarcates sexualized from pre-sexualized males. This would be an indication
that erections do in fact follow only in the second generation of humans, along with the new
capacity to generate.
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That each ensouled creature has an internal capacity to create or produce reflects a basic
logic of the dialogue and the cosmological patterns repeated in it: a kind of producing by
imitation of prior production, a copy made from model. With each iteration, what is created
or produced is something lesser than its model or what produced it.10 The Demiurge looks to
the paradigms or forms and creates the All (28a–b; 29a) and the lesser gods or celestial bod-
ies (41a–b). Then, the Demiurge, referred to as father, leaves to the lesser gods, now called
his sons, the task of imitating his capacity to create by creating mortal creatures of all kinds
(42d–e). Mortal creatures in turn have a generative capacity in sexual reproduction that imi-
tates but is inferior to the creative capacities of the Demiurge and the lesser gods. The logic
of the cosmos described in Timaeus is that each living creature with a soul is a being with
capacities to make or produce, but this raises puzzling questions about the first generation
of humans.
The first generation of humans have no erections, no emission of seed, and no women.
It would appear then that they do not have this generative capacity. Humans of the first
generation apparently need another soul, the ensoulment of the penis, in order to imitate the
pattern and logic of production immanent throughout the rest of the cosmos. In that regard,
the first generation of humans would be a unique exception to the logical order of the cosmos
established by the Demiurge, and they would not therefore imitate the divine order of the
cosmos.
One might explain this away by claiming that mortal creatures, because they must repro-
duce sexually, merely represent the discontinuity between immortal and mortal creatures in
the logic of the cosmos. But this does not tell the true story. The fact is not that these first
humans must reproduce sexually, it is that they indeed cannot. The first generation of humans,
bereft of seed and the movement necessary for sexual function, not to mention the lack of
women, disrupts or discontinues the logic of what precedes it in a much more radical way:
despite having a living soul and a body, they lack the capacity for generation. This exception
to the generative capacities of all living creatures in the cosmos is remarkable, and we can
consider this a first anomaly that seems to confound Timaeus’ account.
It is worth remarking, too, that the descriptions of the male body here leave out the possi-
bility of male erections caused by other male bodies. The first generation simply is not capable
of them, and once erections are possible in the second generation, Timaeus gives us no indica-
tion that they will be occasioned by anything but the desire for sexual procreation or begetting
(tou gennan erōn, 91b) with women.
2 The Second Anomaly

This newfound movement, this vital desire for emission, Timaeus tells us, is what makes male
genitals by nature unpersuadable and autocratic (apeithes te kai autokrates, 91b) in the second
generation. This means that one of two things must be true of the first generation of humans:
either male genitals needed no persuasion or control, or they did need such persuasion and
control but willingly submitted themselves to it. One might be quick to infer the former, rea-
soning that these first humans were closer to the divine, were virtuous and ruled by reason,
and so on, according to the hierarchical logic of the cosmos, but then we must face the ques-
tion of why any of them could have become cowardly or unjust and why there was ever any
need for punishment. That is to say, if we take this first horn of the dilemma, that the first gen-
eration of humans had no need for persuasion or control and therefore no punishment, then
there would be no sexual differentiation at all. If, on the other hand, they willingly submitted
to persuasion and control, we are left to wonder what sorts of activities they were engaged in
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and what went wrong to make them act unjustly or cowardly. Given that there was some kind
of vice among some of them, followed by sexual differentiation as a fate suitable to that vice,
we are left with another set of questions about what these men did to deserve the female bod-
ies they assume in the second generation, but Timaeus gives us no cause for the injustice and
cowardice that befalls some men of the first generation.11 We thus have another anomaly in the
form of a dilemma not resolvable in a coherent way. Neither horn of the dilemma provides a
coherent account of the move from the first generation to the second, that is, neither provides
a coherent account of sexualization and sex differentiation.
3 The Third Anomaly

To prepare the lesser gods for their crafting of humans, the Demiurge shows them “the nature
of the all” (tēn tou pantos phusin), the laws of destiny, and proclaims that “the first birth or-
dered for all would be one” (genesis prōtē men esoito tetagmenē mia pasin, 41e–42a). To be
created “one,” we can presume, means being the same or equal in some respect. Timaeus then
explains that the Demiurge does this “so that no one might be slighted by him” (hina mētis
elattoito hup’autou, 42a). The Demiurge is thus fair and just in his plans for creating the first
generation of humans, none being generated lesser than or inferior to (elattōn) another. Soon
after, however, Timaeus tells us that human nature is twofold (diplēs de ousēs tēs anthrōpinēs
phuseōs), and one part is superior to the other, the one called “man” (to kreitton toiouton eiē
genos ho kai epeita keklēsoito anēr, 42a).12 In the last claim epeita can be translated in two
ways, referring either to a part of humanity that will “later” be called man, or the part of hu-
manity that will “henceforth” be called man.13 Either interpretation of this sentence leads to
anomalies, which I take up in turn.
If we interpret Timaeus to say that the superior humans will later be called men, this makes
some sense because sexual differentiation has not yet happened and women do not yet exist.
The later passage makes emphatically clear that women are generated only at the specific time
(kat’ekeinon dē ton chronon, 91a) of the second incarnation, and they arise because of (dia),
and therefore only after, some men have completed unjust and cowardly lives. Timaeus also
tells us in the late passage at 91a, however, that the punishment will befall the cowardly and
unjust of those who were born or were generated as men (tōn genomenōn andrōn, 90e). We
are thus left with the paradox that some humans will later be called men, and yet they are also
originally generated as men.
One might explain away this paradox by assuming that the first generation were men in
some fashion, gendered but not sexed, for example, and that Timaeus construes this as a
stand-in for “human.” Even so, we must still wrestle with how human nature can already be
twofold (diplēs, 42a) before sexual differentiation. Nor can we explain this away by claiming
that the differences between men and women are not essential to some shared human nature,
since we also see that the essential difference between men and women is psychic and occurs
when each receives ensouled sexual organs.14 We are therefore left with the puzzle of a first
generation of creatures who will later be called men but who are already men, or perhaps who
both are and are not men in the first generation. Men seem to exist before the sexual differen-
tiation that creates men.
4 The Fourth Anomaly

In addition to this temporal paradox embedded in these passages (41e–42a), a deeper axi-
ological one emerges, specifically related to the greater or lesser ways to be a human—what
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the Demiurge supposedly wants to avoid in the first generation. We can best see this paradox
if we take Timaeus to be saying that the superior part of humanity will “henceforth” be called
men. On this view, one might argue that both parts of twofold humanity are present in the first
generation, and Timaeus is simply noting that from here on out we shall call the superior part
“men.” On this reading the passage tells us that there will indeed be those who are inferior,
namely women.15 Timaeus’ account still has problems, however.
The Demiurge generates all of the first humans as one, lest anyone be slighted by him. So
the Deimurge slights no one and yet he slights women. The only way to make sense of the
Demiurge’s justice without paradox is to understand that “all” (pasin) for whom the first birth
is ordered—who are equal in some respect, and among whom no one is lesser—are only men
(anēr). We can add to the anomalies this one, then: no human will be lesser among the first
generation, except that women will be lesser. We begin to get a strange feeling about the mean-
ing and inclusiveness of “humanity.” Despite gesturing toward some shared human nature (tēs
anthrōpinēs phuseōs, 42a), something else emerges in the account.
Those in the first generation who can master the sensations and affections that flow into
the body and soul live in justice and return after bodily death to their birth star (42a–b).
He who fails to live well, however, “would, in his second birth, take on a woman’s nature”
(42b–c). And if, in the form of a woman, he still did not refrain from evil, he would take on a
bestial nature, being changed each time (aei metabaloi) according to his way of life (kata tēn
homoiotēta tēs tou tropou geneseōs, 42c). This passage sharpens our picture of women in two
ways. First, it refers to women’s nature (gunaikos phusin, 42b), which implies characteristics
unique to women not shared by men and that mark out her womanhood. The late passage at
90e ff. indicates that her womb and its unique soul and movement make a woman a woman,
and this must be part of her nature, something I take up below. Second, there is a kind of im-
plicit parallel made in the passage at 42b–c between women and beasts, if only insofar as each
has a phusin that is not a man’s. Timaeus explicitly refers to both women’s nature (gunaikos
phusin, 42b) and a beastly nature (thēreion phusin, 42c) in the context of distinguishing both
of them from men. Both women and beasts, the text implies, have a nature that is inferior to
male human beings, those called anēr.
We have thus far then the following anomalies generated in the text: that no one is lesser,
but women are lesser; that men already exist and yet will come to be later on; that the first gen-
eration of humans are the only cosmological exception to ensouled creatures with the power
of generation inherent in all other living creatures in the cosmos; and that the first generation
of men either submitted to persuasion and rule or did not need persuasion nor rule, both of
which pose problems to the established order of the cosmos and especially sex difference.
These anomalies, remember, are not parts of the text I want to resolve or explain, but whose
presence I want consider in its own right.
It might be instructive at this point to pose a counter-factual thought experiment that helps
to elucidate my project: Could Plato have constructed a cosmology, even one that includes
fantastical fictions and mere likely muthoi, that made it unproblematically clear that both men
and women came into being at the same time, had the same souls, even if different bodies, and
because of their humanity were both capable of the highest and best movements in imitation
of their share in the divine? Certainly. But he did not. The text we have contains these puzzles.
We must look at them in light of Timaeus’ task: to provide an account of the generation of
the cosmos that culminates in an account of the nature of humanity (archomenon apo tēs tou
kosmou geneseōs, teleutain de eis anthrōpōn phusin, 27a). The presence of these anomalies
forces us to ask whether or to what extent the text shows that women’s nature coincides with
human nature.
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5 The Wandering Womb

Timaeus explains in the passage at the end of the dialogue what it means to have a woman’s
nature—of course, only briefly, since he has nearly reached the end of his account of “hu-
mans” and there is no need to speak at length about such things (90e). Women are, first of
all, corrupted or degenerate men, which is the cause (dia tauta, 91a and 91c) of their coming
to be as women. To become a woman entails inheriting a soul that has failed in practicing
courage and justice, being given a womb with yet another soul, and being given a sexual de-
sire or movement unique to women. Whereas the penis was the first focus when describing
sex-differentiated male bodies (91a), the focus when Timaeus speaks of woman is the “matrix
or what we call the womb” (mētrai te kai husterai legomenai, 91c).16 Parallel to the men of
the second generation, the first women have a sexual desire apparently aimed exclusively at
procreative activities with men (91c–d). Not much more is said about the bodily transforma-
tion needed for sexual differentiation. There is no mention of any outward physical change,
such as the removal of the organ that previously made urination possible for “humans” in
the first generation, nor the formation of the vulva, nor breasts. Given the extensive detail
that accompanies Timaeus’ accounts of the formation and diseases of the “human” body and
internal organs—arguably more than 27 pages (69d–86e)—this absence of a longer account
is remarkable, especially given the transformation that must take place for there to be sexual
differentiation in this second generation.
The womb is an indwelling animal that is desirous of childbearing or generation (zōon
epithumētikon enon tēs paidopoiias, 91c). This account of the womb as a living creature urges
a brief return to the logic or pattern of generation and animation in Timaeus that we looked
at in the first anomaly. The Demiurge creates first, in imitation of the forms, the entire cosmos
or the ensouled creature called the “All” (28a–31b), and within it, he creates the celestial bod-
ies, also ensouled, living beings (38b–39e). The celestial bodies or the lesser gods, in imitation
of the Demiurge, then create mortal beings (42e–43a). What we would expect as the next
iteration of this logic is the creation of humans by the lesser gods with a soul and the capacity
for generation, but we have to wait for that until the second generation of humans when the
genitals are themselves ensouled creatures within the mortal human, male or female, capable
of movement and generation. (In fact, we might argue that the penises on the bodies of the first
generation are not genitals at all, in the proper sense of the word.) That sexual differentiation
entails the making of yet another creature, ensouled and capable of movement and life, and
that this creature is not the human per se, but either a womb or a penis whose movement is
procreative, is another detail worth examining.
Whereas in the first anomaly I focused on the strangeness in the first generation of the in-
ability to generate, here I want to emphasize the need for an additional soul in order to be
capable of generation. That is to say, here I want to look at the anomaly in the pattern of
ensoulment itself. Before we saw that the first generation was incapable of imitating the “mak-
ing” that the Demiurge and lesser gods carry out; here we see that an extra ensoulment—an
additional creation of an entirely new living soul capable of motion and generation—is needed
in order to maintain the logic and cosmological patterns established in Timaeus. Because the
first generation of humans were themselves ensouled creatures, it is fair to wonder why the
first ensouled mortal creature needs yet another soul in order to embody a proper function of
the ordered world. This seems to be another anomaly in the cosmological pattern in which
ensoulment, alone and by itself, means having some type of generative movement.
Just as the ensoulment of the penis in the second generation causes movement that results
in erections, ejaculation, and generation, the living creature of the womb has a wandering
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motion that troubles the female body (91c). Whenever the indwelling animal in the woman
comes to be fruitless long beyond its due season (hotan akarpon para tēn hōran chronon po-
lun), the womb’s wandering movement is incited. In a fashion parallel to the unpersuadable
and autocratic penis in the second generation of men, the womb grows irritable (aganak-
toun) and wanders everywhere through the body (planōmenon pantēi kata ta sōma), blocking
breathing passages, throwing the woman into extreme frustrations (aporias tas eschatas), and
bringing all sorts of other diseases (nosous pantodapas allas parechai, 91c–d). This belief in
the wandering womb was not uncommon in the ancient Greek world.17 Timaeus borrows
from medical science of the time in order to cast the motion specific to women’s bodies in a
particular light, both with respect to time and irregularity.
We can begin with the “season” or time (chronon) that Timaeus names.18 To become “fruit-
less long beyond its due season” may refer to the woman’s menstruation cycle. On this reading,
Timaeus sees procreative sexual desire in women tied to the menstrual cycle and believes that
the desire for sex would come at the end of this cycle, just before each month’s menses, since
menstruation signaled a time of fertility.19 Timaeus, in this case, would be saying that women
will desire sex after a period of time during which no pregnancy has taken place and whose end
is marked by menstruation. This fruitless season might also, however, refer to a time between
pregnancies. If so, it implies that some time after giving birth, women will again become desir-
ous of having sex. Women’s sexual desire is presented as wholly procreative here, never aimed
at their own pleasure and never aimed at other women, and Timaeus shows utter disregard for
sexual desire that might arise at any time, presumably in the case of both men and women, but
especially here in the case of women. On either reading, Timaeus is clear that women’s sexual
desire is periodic, episodic, and attached to motion and time in a way that men’s sexual desire
is not. In fact, the passage signals that women’s bodies mark time, as I discuss below.
Regardless of what season or time in a woman’s reproductive life this part of the passage
refers to, the tumult and disease of the wandering womb will persist
until the desire of the one and the love of the other (mechriper an hekaterōn hē epithu-
mia kai ho erōs) bring the sexes together,20 and as if plucking the fruit from the trees,
they sow in the womb, as though in a field, animals invisible for their smallness and not
yet formed.
(Tim. 91c-d)
Implied here is that sexual intercourse that results in pregnancy will at least palliate, if not
cure, the wandering of the womb; it will stop periodically the breathing problems and the
extreme frustrations and disease in a woman who has gone too long in some particular state.
These physical distresses and accompanying diseases of women appear to happen repeatedly
during their child-bearing years, cyclically. There is the wandering movement, which is illness,
followed by the sexual desire to procreate; then there is intercourse, followed sometimes by
pregnancy and birth, which alleviate these symptoms; and then the ills begin again. We have
a picture then of woman as vacillating between a pathological, distressed mode of living and
then pregnancy, during which these symptoms presumably abate. Women vacillate between
pathology and pregnancy, interposed by sexual intercourse with a man.
The clear reference to wandering likens women’s wombs to the wandering planets in Timaeus’
cosmos. Before the Demiurge created the heavenly bodies, all was eternal (aiōnios, 37d), and
because it is impossible to attach the eternal (prosaptein ouk ēn dunaton, 37d), the Demiurge
creates in them a moving likeness (eikō…kinēton, 37d), as like to eternal nature as possible
(38b–c), in order to imitate the perfect (teleōi) and intelligible (noētōi) living creature (39d–e).
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The heavenly bodies thus do more than mark time; they bring time into existence (37e; 38b).
Night and day are the most intelligent cycles among them (phronimōtatēs, 39c), followed by
month and year. Planetary movement, by contrast, is wandering, having apparently irregular
patterns that humans have not figured out or “noeticized” (ouk ennenoēkotes anthrōpoi, 39c)
and that are “baffling in their multitude yet wondrously embroidered” (plēthei men amēchanōi
chrōmenas, pepoikilmenas de thaumastōs, 39c). Their very name means wanderers, and Timaeus
makes explicit note of the eponymous wanderings (tas planas) of these bodies (39d; 40b–c).21
While there is periodicity to women’s “cycles,” there is not necessarily regularity, just like
the planets as they appeared to the Greeks. The womb is also a wanderer, imitating the irregu-
lar and unintelligible or anoetic movement of the planets through its embodiment of irregular
time periods, whether that is menstruation, gestation, time between pregnancies, or some
other irregular time.22 The wandering womb that makes women women is thus conjoined to
the temporal as opposed to the eternal, to the irregular and unintelligible as opposed to the
regular and intelligible, and to disease as opposed to health.
6 The Wandering Cause

We must, of course, consider the wandering nature of women’s wombs in its connection to
the “form of the wandering cause” (to tēs planōmenēs eidos aitias, 48a), which is so central
to Timaeus’ cosmos.23 The wandering cause, also called anankhe or necessity, is considered
a secondary or auxiliary cause (sunaitia, 46c, d) because its domain is that which becomes,
whereas nous is the primary cause (aitia) of being.24 The ontological bifurcation and disconti-
nuity between being and becoming, introduced in the earliest part of Timaeus’ account (27d),
grounds the fundamental logic of paradigm and copy that pervades his entire cosmology, and
it comprises a range of other corresponding bifurcations, among them the immortal and mor-
tal, the eternal and the temporal, and the noetic and anoetic.25
Whereas noetic, divine creation instills being and soul with natural intelligence (tēs em-
phronos phuseōs) and instills self-movement in the celestial bodies, the material world of
necessity comprises empirical objects that can only be moved by and move other things (ho-
sai de hup’allōn men kinoumenōn, hetera d’ex anankhēs kinountōn gignontai, 46d–e). The
sense of necessity here refers not to some determinism or natural law in the material world,
but rather to movement that produces chance and irregularity (to tuchon atakton hekastote
exergazontai, 46e).26 In addition to chance and irregularity, the wandering cause is a kind of
“being led astray” and an inherent wrongness or error. The word can be “heard in the double
sense of wandering… and of erring,” both as an “indeterminacy resistant to the supervisory
governance by the paradigm” and “that which makes error in the usual sense possible.”27 The
wandering movement inherent to women’s wombs, clearly an echo of this fundamental cos-
mological cause, attributes an irregularity or errancy of movement to the living creature that
makes women women, a waywardness inherent in women’s wombs and their phusis. Since
the wandering cause directs the material world, women are thus expressly linked—insofar as
they are associated with wandering, chance, and error—to materiality and the visible world,
though, as we shall see, in a way that men of the first generation are not.
The visible, material world is especially significant to Timaeus’ cosmology because we are
sensate beings. Sensation requires body and soul together: there needs to be some means for
exchange between the sensing agent’s sense organs and the material world, and an exchange
between those sense organs and the soul. The lesser gods, in obedience to and in imitation of
the Demiurge (42e) and using the leftovers of the divine soul, create the first mortal beings—
“humans.” But there is trouble in their conjoining the immortal soul to mortal sensate body,28
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and this trouble helps to situate women’s wandering nature and the wandering womb in
Timaeus’ ontological hierarchy.
Borrowing earth, fire, water, and air, the lesser gods attempt the conjoining of divine soul to
mortal body not with the indissoluble bonds (tois alutois…desmois) by which they themselves
were created, but with tiny invisible rivets. They thus create an ensouled body, now a sensate
being, subject to inflow and outflow (eis epirruton sōma kai aporruton, 43a). But the typically
perfect, telic, circuits of the immortal soul now take on strange motion. Those first sensa-
tions disorient the soul and its circuitry, disrupting their perfect circular, telic movements. The
conjoined being thus confuses up and down, left and right, and Same and Other as these first
sensations wash over it (43d–44a). The sensing souls now move with violence or force (bia) in
irrational ways (alogōs) and are wandering (planōmena, 43a–b).29
This conjoined, sensate being is thus at first (kat’archas, 44a) unintelligent (anous, 44b), but
the circuits can be calmed by an increase in nutriment (trophēs, 44b). As time goes on, things
settle even more, and when each of the circles goes according to nature and addresses the Same
and Other correctly again, then the being becomes thoughtful (emphrona, 44b). Finally, good
upbringing and education (tis orthē trophē paideuseōs, 44b)30 make this being perfectly sound
and healthy (hugiēs, 44b), escaping the greatest disease (tēn megistēn apophugōn noson, 44c).
Without that education, it returns to Hades unintelligent (anoētos, 44c).
This means that the first generation of men do have a kind of irregular motion in them,
but it is expressly due to the divine that is joined to them, the meeting of the two ontological
modes in one body. For women, on the other hand, the wandering is not a combination of
divine soul and mortal body, but is due to the conjoining of another mortal soul, the creature
of the womb, whose inherent motion is wandering and irregular. The first conjoining and its
anoetic consequences eventually right themselves to rationality again, and to health, but the
later joining of the wandering soul to the female body introduces into woman essential wan-
dering or irregular motion and inherent disease (nosos) that are not righted by good educa-
tion, but are part of her very embodied and ensouled being.
While certainly the first generation of men—and all men—are materially created and their
movements are subject to the auxiliary causes of the empirical world, they are not described
as inherently wandering. In the hierarchical logic of Timaeus, wherein each iteration of newly
ensouled creature is somehow lesser than what preceded it, we must wonder if the first gen-
eration of men were more noetic, having movement in their souls that more ably imitated the
noetic design that preceded them. In any case, we are left again with an uncanny feeling about
the first generation of men. They both do and do not belong clearly alongside the errant mate-
rial world; they both do and do not belong to the divine noetic world. The cosmology makes
very clear, however, that women, appearing only in the second generation, inherently embody
wandering, anoetic motion, materiality, and disease. This deepens our questions about what
it is to be human and what it is to be a woman. Timaeus’ hierarchical cosmology, along with
these puzzles, compel us to wonder not only whether women are excluded from the “human,”
but also from any share in the divine.
7 The Source of the Anomalies

The introduction of the wandering cause coincides with the moment in which Timaeus must
begin his narrative again (48a–e), a “new beginning” that modifies the original dual ontol-
ogy of being and becoming to add a third thing, the place of becoming: the receptacle or
the chōra.31 At this very point, where Timaeus feels he must start anew to talk about the
physical world and the wandering cause, however, he has already begun his account of mortal,
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“human” creatures, their creation by the lesser gods from earth, air, fire and water—even
some parts of their physiognomy, such as the importance of the head and why they face in the
direction that they are able to move (44d–45b). Timaeus’ new beginning, aimed at explaining
the visible world, thus begins before he has announced its beginning.
Many scholars have explained that the anomalies arising in the dialogue are consequences
of the fundamental ontological discontinuity between being and becoming.32 Human logos
has limitations that prohibit it from fully or correctly capturing being, so any account is
bound to have discontinuities and irregularities. As Timaeus earlier explained, the demiurge
has looked to the forms as models, and they are eternal; the empirical world consists of mortal
and changeable copies of those models. The logoi that provide the accounts of models and
copies will thus also differ, and “just as being is to becoming, truth is to belief” (ho ti per pros
genesin ousia, touto pros pistin alētheia, 29c). Timaeus repeats cognates of eikos or likeness
to emphasize this ontological relationship (29c), and he labels his account a likely story, ton
eikota muthon (29d). John Sallis shows that there are additional temporal discontinuities that
empirical cause introduces into what he calls the “two-fold” aspect of the model-copy logic
that permeates the dialogue: “The discourse cannot but be twisted and made to sound” in dif-
ferent registers “as soon as it is directed to a kind of time before time, to a time when there is
not yet time,” and further that
The otherness of this beginning…can hardly not provoke suspicion that nothing here
will be simple or linear, that the discourse will be compelled—by necessity itself—to
engage in a more complex, if not aporetic, movement with respect to the beginning.33
Sarah Broadie also focuses on ontological anomalies, making connections to sexual reproduc-
tion of relevance to my thesis.34 She queries the discontinuity between divine causation and
mortal, biological reproduction: “[I]f divine demiurgy was necessary for the formation of any
mortal animals from inanimate materials, was it ever subsequently possible for mere mortal
animals to bring to formation from similar materials any offspring of their own?” There must
have been, she reasons, mortal “prototypes” that were divinely created from which later in-
dividuals of that type were sexually generated. She reasons that “the [human] race as a whole
connects with the divine through and only through the prototype […] with subsequent genera-
tions inheriting from it a formation originally divine.”35 Broadie’s work complements my own
insofar as it takes due notice of the utter “strangeness” of this first generation or what she is
calling here the human “prototype.” Like Sallis and other scholars, Broadie focuses on failed
attempts to connect “a natural order and a divine origin.”36
What I find most striking about her work is the explanatory need of a “prototype” of hu-
manity to resolve the philosophical problems in Timaeus: if Broadie is correct that this para-
dox of the human “prototype” occurs because in its first incarnation it must bear the stamp
of the divine while still being part of the natural order, and if we accept the evidence I have
evinced here that the first generation are men (in gender, if not sex), this then means that men
are the ones who bear the divine imprint—that men are the human prototype. I have broad
agreement with Broadie and Sallis, but even so, I want to pay attention to something different.
The anomalies I have outlined here do not arise because of any discontinuities introduced in
the dialogues’ many ontological dichotomies that follow the one between being and becoming:
models and copies, divine and natural, the eternal and the temporal, and so on. Rather, the
curious incoherencies that interest me arise because of Timaeus’ account of sexual differentia-
tion within the mortal creature called human. These paradoxes are therefore not attributable
to some curious onto-linguistic problem confronted by limited humans who are relegated only
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to becoming and who cannot capture or articulate being in logos. Nor do they reside in some
tension between the temporal and the eternal. Quite the contrary. These curiosities stem from
the text’s own internal failure to provide a coherent account of “humanity” and of sexual dif-
ferentiation in humans.37 There is nothing in the discontinuous ontology of being and becom-
ing that necessitates any of the anomalies in the text surrounding sexual differentiation, nor
does that ontology explain them. Timaeus and his listeners want to hear about the creation
of the cosmos and its first “human” creatures, and what Timaeus describes—the creation of
distinctly male creatures—presumably satisfies their expectations.
One source of anomaly arises from a clear assumption that to be human is, first and fore-
most, to be a male human, a man. It is clear that Timaeus is aware of the difference between
anthrōpos, meaning “human,” and anēr, meaning man or male person, because he tells us
that humanity is two-fold and the superior part of that two-fold humanity comprises men. So,
we can say definitively that Timaeus engages in the elision between human and man, as I’ve
shown clearly that what the lesser gods create is a male being, even if not yet sexualized. To
create a male being is, for Timaeus, to create humans and thus humanity. Furthermore, the
late passage in the dialogue in which sexual differentiation occurs makes it clear that to be a
human with a female body is a punishment for those first generation men who lack virtue.
The conclusion of Timaeus’ account of sexual differentiation brings all that I have argued
to a fine point. He wraps up his story of women, the womb, sexual desire, and pregnancy at
the end of the dialogue saying, “So that’s how women and the entire female sex were born…”
(gunaikes men oun kai ta thēlu pan houtō gegone, 91d). He emphasizes here that women were
born or generated only in a second generation and as punishment. That earlier description of
the lesser gods mixing earth, air, fire and water to make the first human and rivet the immortal
soul to its body (42e–43b) is decidedly not how or when the female sex was born. This explicit
claim at 91d solidifies our sense that the first generation of humans were indeed men.
Timaeus’ introductory remarks about sexual differentiation make this even clearer. Just
before the passage in which Timaeus introduces sexual differentiation, where he claims that
he need not spend too much time discussing what he’s going to talk about next, he says he will
now provide an account of the generation of “the rest of the animals” (ta gar alla zōa, 90e).38
He begins with women. Women are therefore clearly included in that category of “other ani-
mals.” Indeed, immediately after the brief description of women, Timaeus turns to birds.39
Realizing on some level what the implications are for the exclusion of women from the
category of human, scholars have worked hard to make sense of the text in some other way.
Two examples illustrate my point. Cornford observes that
The only mortal creatures whose making will be described in detail are human beings.
Timaeus’ task was at the outset defined as “ending with the birth of mankind.” Even
plants on which man is to feed are not mentioned till far on at 77a. The lower animals are
dealt with very briefly at the end (91d) and treated only as degraded forms suitable for
the reincarnation of men who have lived unwisely. The physical differences between men
and women are postponed to the same context (90e ff) because they are irrelevant to the
whole account of our common human nature which fills most of the remaining discourse.
Plato does not mean that men ever existed without women and the lower animals.40
Consistent with Cornford’s insistence here, Harry and Polansky argue that the difference be-
tween men and women in Timaeus is simply one of strength or size, interpreting kreitton—
what describes men in contrast to women in two-fold humanity—as “physically stronger,”
not generally “greater.”41 On this basis they hope to interpret the text as saying that the
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“differences between males and females may not be so fundamental for Plato” and that the
sexes are essentially equal.42 Twice they claim that souls are genderless in Plato, and therefore
the only differences between the sexes are those of physical size and strength.43 On this basis
they argue that there is no “devolution” from the first generation to the second, or rather from
men to women, but only from humans to non-human beasts.
Contrary to these interpretations, however, the late passages do not discuss only physical
differences between men and women, but implicitly and explicitly these passages show that
human psychic life is deeply implicated in sexual differentiation. First, women arise as a pun-
ishment for a corrupt soul or activity of the soul. Second, these authors do not address the fact
that an entirely new soul is introduced into the body at the moment of differentiation, each
essential to its sex (organ); what makes women women is indeed another soul, essentially dif-
ferent from men. Third, women and sexual differentiation are introduced after Timaeus tells
us he will now turn to an account of the other animals, and given the hierarchical logic of
creation in this dialogue, creatures who come before are superior in some fashion to creatures
who come after.44 Their arguments reveal that these scholars do see women’s erasure and de-
valuation here in the text. That they feel the need to make this argument explicitly indicates
that they are scratching at something in the text that itches. The need to explain and resolve
the anomalies and paradoxes, in a text that says otherwise, arises from their sensibility that
women are humans, too.
If one insists that the source of the paradoxes must be in the rupture between being and
becoming, this strengthens my point further. If the anomalies that arise in Timaeus’ account
of sexual differentiation are due to this ontological rupture, it must then be the case that the
residue of the divine is in men, that their origins lie closer to the divine, and that women are
firmly situated in materiality and becoming. And if “man” is a stand-in for “human” or is the
human prototype, that spark of the divine must be his alone.
When we notice the anomalies of sexual differentiation and the uncanniness of the first gen-
eration of “humans” that I have outlined in Timaeus’ cosmos, we notice a troubling ambiguity
lies at the roots of human’s place in the hierarchy of the cosmic order and in the remainder of
the divine in men. They are the mortal beings linked to the gods, striving for being, with the
residue of the noetic. The account of women lacks this uncanniness, and women as such are
not creatures caught in the in-between of divine and human, but rather are creatures caught
between human and beast, human and non-human animal. When it comes to sexual differ-
entiation in Timaeus, men just might be gods, and women might—just might—be human.45
Notes
1 It is a consistent Platonic trope that souls re-emerge into a new life, good or bad, that fits their actions
during the life they’re leaving. See for example, Phaedo, 113d–114c; Republic, 614e ff., especially
616a, where timorias is used to describe the fates of souls into their next bodies and lives suitable
to those souls’ previous actions. See Deslauriers 2022, 20. The word timōria, which means “punish-
ment,” does not appear in the text, but it is undoubtedly what becoming a woman is: the fitting
consequence for, or what is due to, someone who behaved badly in the first generation.
2 I do not intend to do deep theoretical work on sex and gender, or “woman,” for that matter. I aim to
build an understanding of “woman/women” or gunē /gunaikes from the ground up, as it were, start-
ing from the texts themselves and working within the conceptualizations reflected in and created by
those texts, and then analyzing and critiquing from that vantage point. In this instance, that approach
means looking first at the bodily descriptions attached to “man” and “woman.” I will focus here on
sexual differentiation as manifest in bodies, saving an account of this dialogue’s concern with bod-
ies in action, as well as the figurative representation of the female in Greek cosmologies, for a larger
project of which this is a beginning. In that work I look at the various activities associated with—or
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denied to—each sex, and then think through the implications of those for sexual differentiation and
cosmological order. I also explore feminist readings of Greek cosmologies and sexual differentiation.
Two works are particularly important as background to this project. First, Emma Bianchi’s The
Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos, Fordham University Press (2014).
Her chapter on the Timaeus as background for Aristotle’s work focuses primarily on the chōra and
its figurative representation of the female and the feminine, while less significant to my aim here to
look strictly at the bodily incarnation of women in Timaeus, is important to the larger project of
which this is a part. Bianchi’s introductory chapter—in which she discusses matter, order, hierarchy,
and teleology—is also an important frame for my own project. Second, Sara Brill’s essay, “Animality
and Sexual Difference in Timaeus,” in Bell and Nass, Plato’s Animals: Gadflies, Horses, Swans and
Other Philosophical Beasts, Indiana University Press (2015) provides crucial framing for the logic
and ontology of creation that underlies sexual differentiation in Timaeus.
3 For simplicity’s sake, I ask the reader to understand that I use “anomaly” in a loose way throughout
to refer to these varied incoherencies and unresolved aspects of the text. They sometimes refer to
outright contradictions, but include anomalies and merely strange implications.
4 Krell 1975, makes a clear separation between Plato and Timaeus’ views, making Timaeus out to be,
first, a committed Pythagorean and, second, an inept thinker.
5 In fact, as I shall argue below, scholars’ impulses to explain away the inferiority of women and their
exclusion from humanity in this text indicate that they see what the text is actually saying, and they
know exactly what is at stake for women if we take the text at face value. For one example of chock-
ing some of these anomalies up to mere parable or fiction, see for example, Taylor 1928, 262.
6 All translations are from Kalkavage 2021, unless otherwise noted.
7 He says, “…what in our previous account was called…,” referring to 73b ff.
8 Kalkavage 2001, 129, note 174.
9 The context makes it clear that “us” refers to “us men” because Timaeus completes that sentence
with “and another sort in women,” about which, more below.
10 As for kinds of producing, there is a distinction to be made between divine making and mortal gen-
eration, poiēsis and genēsis. Sallis 1999 discusses this in some depth (51–54). He notes that “surely to
be the maker is not the same as to be the father. Surely, it is not the same for the universe to be made
as for it to be fathered and born,” 52. Sallis does not go on, however, to consider any implications for
sexual differentiation in Timaeus. See also Broadie 2011 on prototypes.
11 A question whose answer I pursue in the larger project on sexual differentiation in Timaues.
12 Harry and Polansky 2016 focus on the meaning of kreitton as it pertains to sex differentiation.
I discuss their work in more detail below.
13 Kalkavage 2001, whom I quote above renders epeita as “later.” Bury 1989 and Brill 2015, for ex-
ample, render epeita as “hereafter,” and Cornford 1937 as “thereafter.” See entry in LSJ http://www.
perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=e%29%2Fpeita&la=greek&can=e%29%2Fpeita0&prior=kai\#l
exicon
14 Below I discuss scholarly arguments eager to resolve problems surrounding sex difference in Timaeus
and what they show us about what scholars actually see in the text and why that is significant. For the
time being, however, the important point here is that the text makes it clear that there is a difference
in psuchē and a difference in phusis between men and women in Timaeus.
15 Again, Harry and Polansky 2016 speak directly to this issue of “inferiority,” but as I note above and
will go on to argue further here, their attempt to demonstrate that women are only inferior in size and
strength ignores crucial aspects of the text that say otherwise.
16 Krell 1975 has an interesting discussion of these two terms, their etymologies and their cultural
significance.
17 Dean-Jones writes that many Hippocratic texts “describe the womb as moving around the body. Not
only in prolapse, but upwards as far as the heart, liver, lungs—and even the head.” Dean-Jones 1989,
177, note 3. See also Lefkowitz 1981, “The Wandering Womb,” in Heroines and Hysterics. I will take
up this issue below with respect to the “wandering cause” in Timaeus’ cosmos.
18 The English phrase “due season” for τὴν ὣραν χρόνον appears in translations by Kalkavage, Bury, and
Cornford, each presumably finding the translation before his own acceptable on this score. Its exact mean-
ing, however, especially with regard to female reproduction, is unclear. This same English phrase, “due
season,” appears in W. H. S. Jones’s translation of the Hippocratic text, On Ancient Medicine, Section
10, but there it is used to translate τοῦ καιροῦ. Elsewhere in the Hippocratic corpus, however, Jones also
translates τὴν ὣραν χρόνον as “due season”: Airs, Waters, Places, 1; and in Epidemics, 1.3.20, it is used
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twice simply to mean “time” in the phrase “at the same time.” Perseus Project, respectively [Accessed on
22 June 2021.]: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0249%3A
text%3Dvm%3Asection%3D12;
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0251%3Atext%3DAer.%
3Asection%3D1; http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0251%3
Atext%3DEpid.%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D3%3Asection%3D20
19 See, e.g., Lefkowitz 1981: “While medical treatises emphasised the negative effect of the womb on
women’s behavior, popular belief and formalized philosophy denied the womb its basic creative
powers. Again, the role of women’s organs in reproduction was not understood because they could
not be seen. It was assumed that conception took place at the beginning of the menstrual cycle, when
semen could be sustained in the menstrual fluid (the only visible product of the female reproductive
tract.),” 21.
20 As I have discussed elsewhere, Cornford’s and Kalkavage’s translations differ slightly with regard to
the phrase that refers to “each” (hekaterōn), followed by both epithumia and erōs. Cornford makes
a note to his translation that he sees in the text the implication that men have erōs and women have
epithumia, thus reflecting the superiority of men mentioned in the passage at 41e–42a. He supports
this reading by pointing out that epithumia is a feminine noun and erōs is masculine, and he reasons
that the two work together to reproduce, Cornford 1939, 357, note 2. Kalkavage, on the other hand,
keeps the ambiguity from the Greek text in his translation. See Gordon 2012, 49. I also argued there
that this is significant because the Timaeus does not conflate erōs and epithumia and the distinction
between them is central to several themes in the dialogue.
21 Cornford 1937 has a lengthy and detailed account of the Greek conceptions of the heavens and
various explanations for celestial movement and time-keeping. He provides a detailed account of
Timaeus’ views here, and he surveys contemporaneous views, as well, 97–135.
22 See Dean-Jones on the menstruation cycles of Greeks and their connection to the month or roughly
30-day period. Marina McCoy (2015) makes several points about women and temporality in her
insightful reading of the passage in Republic often referred to as the “city of pigs.” Several activities
that sustain the city but are not considered strictly political are marked as “feminine.” These activities
“share a peculiar relationship to the temporal: while many ‘political’ actions mark time in a way that
is then named as unrepeatable…Greek women’s activities mark time cyclically” (153). She goes on to
observe that Glaucon’s objections to this first city include that it does not rise to the political, “that is,
the world of men and honor among men…Rather Glaucon’s desires are for goods that transcend the
merely cyclical and atemporal. In war and politics men make a mark on human history, and so define
what comes to be understood as historical time. In ancient Athens, women mostly do not.”(155).
“The City of Sows and Sexual Differentiation,” in Plato’s Animals: Gadflies, Horses, Swans, and
other Philosophical Beasts. Edited by Jeremy Bell and Michael Naas. Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press. 149–160. 2015. McCoy’s insights here are especially relevant to sexual differentiation in hu-
man activities, which I take up in the larger project to which this contribution is related.
23 Kalkavage, 129, note 176 briefly mentions this connection between wandering wombs and wander-
ing causes.
24 Kalkavage translates sunaitia as “assistant cause.”
25 The young Socrates is presented with this confounding discontinuity in Parmenides, where it is
couched in the relationship, or the impossibility of a relationship, between forms and instantiations
of them, between the gods and humans, between immortal and mortal. The discontinuity threatens
the very possibility of knowledge and inquiry (134a–135c). See Gordon 2012, 86–124.
26 See Cornford 1937, 171–173. Earlier (160 ff.) Cornford lays out in detail Greek materialists’ vision
of causation and the natural world, not only shedding light on their work, but also illuminating the
manner in which necessity entails chance and spontaneity in the Greek context, contrary to a more
modern view in which there are laws of nature and nature “must” behave in accordance with them.
See Bianchi 2014 on this aspect of material existence, primarily in the work of Aristotle, but her
chapter on Timaeus, 85–113, is especially relevant here.
27 Sallis 1999, 93. See his full discussion of the term, 92–93.
28 The text uses both athanaton archēn (42e) and athanatou psuchēs (43a).
29 Several translators note the implied etymology here, that aisthēsis comes from aissō, meaning to dart
this way and that. Proclus 2017 is perhaps the first to make this connection (5.332) and later transla-
tors and commentators continue to note it. Bury 1989, 94, n. 2; Cornford 148, n. 3; Kalkavage, 74,
n. 56. Cornford mistakenly cites Book 3, instead of Book 5.
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30 It is worth noting who was and wasn’t educated in Athens. The term paideuseōs would not likely
refer to a woman.
31 This is a crucial moment in Timaeus’ cosmology. Virtually every commentator draws our attention to
this moment in the text. See for example: Taylor 1928, 303–304; Cornford 1937, 159–163; Gadamer
1980; Kalkavage 2001, 26–34; Morgan 2010. Sallis 1999 provides in its entirety a detailed medita-
tion on the theme of beginnings and the thematically central role of beginning in the Timaeus. See also
Gordon 2012, 30–46.
32 Taylor 1928, 297–299; Cornford 1937, 32, 177–178; Gadamer 1980, 170 ff.; Kalkavage 2001, 26–34;
Morgan 2010; Broadie 2011 Kalkavage emphasizes this juncture as central to the structure of the
whole dialogue: “The likely story thus remains three separate stories; a story of intellect, a story of
necessity, and a final story that refers to the first two without ever explaining their connection. This
is the most serious as well as most interesting incoherence of the entire account of the cosmos. By
presenting us with so blatant an incoherence, Plato causes us to wonder why the definitive dialogue
on the cosmos offers no single and continuous account of the world’s beginning,” 27. See Gordon
2012, 19–22, where I discuss this same issue but in a different context. Sayre 2003 argues that the
incoherence and difficulties surrounding the account of the chōra stem from Plato’s inability to give
such an account; Sayre’s approach, like mine, begins from several anomalies generated by the text
itself. Feminist interpretations of sexual differentiation in Timaeus are more aligned with my argu-
ment here. In speaking about the discontinuity in Timaeus’ logos or account, Brill 2015 says, “The
discursive specification is connected to the claim that logos resembles that of which it is a logos
(29b–c)…[W]e would have to observe that this is an account of perpetual beginnings, one that steps
out before itself and must circle around back on itself.” Then Brill immediately turns to the ontologi-
cal hierarchy embedded in the logos: “Timaeus’ praise of the cosmos proceeds by appropriating those
culturally specific terms of value and honorifics that convey superiority and nobility” (164). Bianchi
2014 looks to the chōra as a third kind between being and becoming, the potentiality that makes
becoming possible. She works through the figurative significance of the chōra as nurse, mother, and
“wax” or molding stuff (ekmageion), and its role in Timaeus’ cosmology, 85–113. In the larger work
of which this is a part, I move beyond bodily sexual differentiation to consider this powerful figura-
tion of empirical causation that is clearly marked as feminine in images of mother and nursemaid.
33 Sallis 1999, 195. Italics in original.
34 Broadie 2011. It’s difficult to do justice to the intricacy of her work here. In her chapter, “Divine
and Natural Causation,” she begins with three ways to look at the Timaeus with respect to whether
Plato intended the creation of the cosmos by the Demiurge to be at a particular point in time, or if
he took some scientific view of the cosmos, more akin to Aristotle, as eternal (“sempiternal,” in her
language). She is primarily interested here in sorting out what Plato’s commitments might have been
in this regard and whether we are to read the proto-historical accounts of creation literally. The
anomalies in the text provide an opportunity for her to examine what philosophical, pedagogical, and
rhetorical trade-offs Plato might have accepted in his cosmological account, and for what reasons.
The disjuncture in Timaeus’ account between divine creation of mortal creatures and the subsequent
mortal generation through sexual reproduction become the focal point of her work as the disjuncture
between the eternal and the temporal, and between divine creation and mortal procreation.
35 Broadie 2011, 266. This is an extremely compact account of her argument, though I hope my brevity
here is balanced by fidelity to her meaning and intent.
36 Broadie 2011, 260.
37 There is no space in this essay to take up one question that emerges from the critique I offer here:
do we attribute the inability to think of women as fully human to Plato the author or Timaeus the
character narrating this cosmology? Put briefly, I am working from the starting point that the text
contains certain anomalies revelatory of tension around the specific issue of sex differentiation. Those
anomalies are in the text regardless of whether we attribute them to Plato or Timaeus, and whether
they are there by intent or otherwise. Once in the text, they function in a manner that we can see
and analyze theoretically and historically. I address this issue in greater detail in the larger work
from which this piece comes. Ultimately, I take the position that the text scientizes, ontologizes, and
normalizes a kind of misogyny, along with other hierarchical social ontologies. In this, my work par-
allels Bianchi’s in important ways, although she writes primarily about Aristotle. She, too, looks to
the manner in which buried or invisibilized cultural notions of gender and sex inform ontology, and
she aims to excavate the anomalies created by them in constructive ways. Her introductory chapter
298
is especially insightful on this methodological point of locating and looking carefully at the aporias,
and I owe a great deal to her work. Bianchi 2014.
38 Brill 2015 argues several crucial points that are germane here, especially the significance of Timaeus’
cosmology as a zoogony and its bearing on sexual differentiation.
39 See also 39e–40a where Timaeus talks about the four forms (ideas) existing within the living creature
that is the cosmos: the heavenly bodies, those living creatures that fly, those that live in the waters,
and those that walk on land.
40 Cornford 1937, 141–142. In a view more consistent with my own, Strauss 1964, notes that in the
Timaeus, the first humans are sexless males, seeing clearly that they are indeed gendered, 111, note
42. Kalkavage 2001cites Strauss, p. 73, note 53. Though Kalkavage recognizes that women and men
have essential psychic differences introduced after the first generation, he does write as though “hu-
man” in the Timaeus before this passage includes women, 39–40. Cornford is emblematic of various
attempts to explain away or rationalize the text’s clear implication that women are inferior to men
and that the first generation of “humans” was indeed men. See also Taylor 1928, 635–636; Harry and
Polansky 2016 and my note 12 above. As for scholars who describe these passages as myth, humor, or
just a part of a merely “likely story”—these, too, turn our eyes away from what we see. By contrast,
see Krell 1975 who reads Timaeus’ account of women through a Pythagorean lens and sees women as
essentially different from and inferior to men, and Deslauriers 2022 who states plainly that Timaeus
indicates that women only come into existence in the second generation (19–20), and runs through
various interpretive strategies one might use make sense of whether Platonic texts are derogatory or
not toward women (55–56). Much of what Deslauriers says in her early chapters on precursors to
Aristotle undermines the arguments that appear in Harry and Polansky 2016, though she does not
refer to their work explicitly.
41 Harry and Polansky 2016.
42 Harry and Polansky 2016, 278.
43 Harry and Polansky 2016, 276, n. 28
44 Not to mention, as Cornford points out, even plants are discussed before the creation of women.
45 I owe a great deal to Ryan Drake and Holly Moore for rich philosophical conversations about this
work while it was in progress. It was shaped and enhanced in many ways by those conversations. The
editors of this volume, Sara Brill and Catherine McKeen, also offered invaluable feedback that im-
proved my work. I am also grateful to Eric Sanday and the scholars who participated in the workshop
he organized for several of us working on Timaeus to share and discuss our work: Claudia Baracchi,
Sara Brill, Michael Naas, and John Proios.
Works Cited
Bianchi, El. (2014) The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Universe. New York:
Brill, S. (2015) “Animality and Sexual Difference in the Timaeus.” In Jeremy Bell and Michael Naas
(eds.) Plato’s Animals: Gadflies, Horses, Swans, and other Philosophical Beasts. Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press. 161–175.
Broadie, S. (2011) Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cornford, F. M. (1937) Plato’s Cosmology. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merill Company.
Dean-Jones, L. (1989) “Menstrual Bleeding According to Hippocrates and Aristotle.” Transactions of
the American Philological Association 119: 177–191.
Deslauriers, M. (2022) Aristotle on Sexual Difference: Metaphysics, Biology, Politics. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1980) “Idea and Reality in Plato’s Timaeus.” In Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Herme-
neutical Studies on Plato. New Haven: Yale University Press, 156–193.
Gordon, J. (2012) Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Harry, C. and R. Polansky. (2016) “Plato on Women’s Natural Ability: Revisiting Republic V and
Timaeus 41e3–44d2 and 86b1–93c2.” Apeiron 49.3: 261–280.
Kalkavage, P. (2001) Plato’s Timaeus. Translation, Glossary, Appendices, and Introductory Essay. New-
buryport, MA: Focus Classical Library.
299
Jill Gordon
Krell, D.-F. (1975) “Female Parts in Timaeus.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 2.3:
400–421.
Lefkowitz, M. (1981) “The Wandering Womb.” In Mary Lefkowitz (ed.) Heroines and Hysterics. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan. 12–25.
McCoy, M. (2015) “The City of Sows and Sexual Differentiation.” In Jeremy Bell and Michael Naas
(eds.) Plato’s Animals: Gadflies, Horses, Swans, and other Philosophical Beasts. Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press. 149–160.
Morgan, K. A. (2010) “Narrative Orders in the Timaeus and Critias.” In Richard D. Mohr and B arbara
Sattler (eds.) One Book, The Whole Universe: Plato’s Timaeus Today. Las Vegas: Parmenides
ublishing 267–285.
P
Plato. (1989) Timaeus (trans. R. G. Bury). Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Proclus. (2017) Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus. Translated and with Introduction and Notes by Harold
Tarrant. Volume VI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [E-book]
Sallis, J. (1999) Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Sayre, K. (2003) “The Multilayered Incoherence of Timaeus’ Receptacle.” In Gretchen J. Reydams-Schils
(ed.) Plato’s Timaeus as Cultural Icon. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 60–79.
Strauss, L. (1964) The City and Man. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Taylor, A. E. (1928) A Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus. Oxford: Oxford: Oxford University Press.
For Further Reading

One examination of women, reproduction, and materiality from a psychoanalytic perspective is
Emanuela Bianchi’s, The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Universe.
(Fordham University Press, 2014)
An interesting study of reproduction in Plato and its political and mythic dimensions is Sara Brill’s
chapter, “Autochthony, Sexual Reproduction, and Political Life in the Statesman Myth,” in John
Sallis (ed) Plato’s Statesman: Dialectic, Myth, Politics.
(State University of New York Press, 2015), 33–50
Marguerite Delauriers’ study, Aristotle on Sex Difference (Oxford University Press, 2022), exam-
ines social, political, and biological works on this issue.
300
PART III
300s–200s BCE
20
CYRENAICS ON PHILOSOPHICAL
EDUCATION AND GENDER
1 Introduction
The original incarnation of the mainstream Cyrenaic school is unique in that it has at its core a
familial chain of philosophical succession involving father–daughter–son/grandson, and where
a woman, Arete, is at its center, and eventually heads the school.1 In O’Reilly (2023), I asked
why depictions of Arete do not make more of her independent philosophical contributions,
and instead focus on her role as daughter and mother to more prominent male members of
the school.2 Here, I flip that question on its head and ask what is it about the Cyrenaics which
licenses the inclusion of a woman in such a role. What does the case of Arete and her family
add to or change regarding our knowledge of Cyrenaic pedagogic practices and commitments,
especially as they relate to gender? Might we discover, via a focus on gender roles and educa-
tion, ways in which the Cyrenaics are radical in their attitudes and practices?
Here, in Section 2, I briefly establish the existing understanding of what it is to teach, learn
and live Cyrenaicism. I develop a view of Cyrenaic education which is not about transmission
of doctrine, but ‘educating’ someone to embrace a particular mode of life through experien-
tial learning. In Section 3, I develop the claim that the Socratic legacy of the Cyrenaics helps
explain the presence, role of and attitude to women in the school, and as teachers. I do so by
finding Socratic antecedents for conceptions of virtue and education into virtue which are not
gendered but gender sensitive, conceptions of education which are broad enough to accom-
modate alternatives to transmission such as a parental model, and a blurring of the distinction
between philosophical practice and philosophical theory which prompts a re-thinking of what
role gender plays in limiting, or shaping, the expression of one’s philosophical commitments.
I argue that women can express Cyrenaic commitments just as well as men, though their
mode of life may differ. There is a question whether gender, personality, pedagogic relations
or some other factor determines mode of life. A focus on women reveals a tension in how
we understand the sources of the expression of Cyrenaic commitments. It also helps identify
the ways in which gender may matter to Cyrenaic education, and pedagogies of habituation
more generally. My overall claim is that the role of women in the Cyrenaic school, and other
schools committed to lived philosophy, challenges and enriches our existing understanding of
who gets to learn and teach philosophy, what counts as education, and what counts as phi-
losophy, a philosophical commitment or a philosophical mode of life, in the Ancient Greek
303 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-23

context. It reveals that the Cyrenaics subverted traditional gender expectations in surprising
and philosophically informed ways.
2 Cyrenaic Education
In this section I want to briefly, and in outline, establish the existing understanding of what
it is to teach, learn and live Cyrenaicism, so that I might then contrast or add to this what is
garnered from the focus on the role of women, the female example we have, and attitudes to
gender. I confine my analysis to those elements of Cyrenaic education which are germane to
the discussion in Section 3. These include a general sense of the lived philosophy of Cyrenai-
cism, transmission through habituation, development through experience, the organization
of the school as involving close teacher–disciple relations, and the constraints imposed by the
passivity of their model of perception.
Lampe, following Long (2006) and Hadot (1995, for example) characterizes Cyrenaicism
as an intellectual, practical, and existential system which one ‘mentally inhabits’ (2015: 4).3
Like some of the other ancient schools, to be a Cyrenaic went well beyond adherence to core
doctrine. Indeed, one of the ways in which its Socratic roots may have influenced the school
(on which more below) is by establishing a mode of philosophical activity (including dialectic)
as taking precedence over commitment to most doctrine, thus licensing or even requiring a
more holistic conception of what it is to be an adherent of the movement.4
There is good evidence that Aristippus the Elder, the founder of the school, values educa-
tion and considers himself to offer valuable philosophical instruction to his followers. What
does this value consist in? Consider, first, two of the many anecdotes relevant to this subject.
Here is the first:
For when a man asked him what fee he should require for teaching (paideusis) his
child, [Aristippus] replied, ‘A thousand drachmas’; but when the other exclaimed,
‘Great Heavens! What an excessive demand! I can buy a slave (andrapodon) for a
thousand,’ Aristippus retorted, ‘Then you will have two slaves, your son and the one
you buy.’
(Plutarch, Mor. 4f)5
In this first text Aristippus is depicted implying that education is what prevents someone from
being slave-like. Lampe (2015: 57–58), in discussing this same passage (together with the
next), argues that the freedom Aristippus’ teachings bring suggests a kind of transformative
character of education:
Having a “free” character might involve not only the capacity to speak with sophistica-
tion but also the understanding and self-possession to merit the privileges accorded to
free males (as opposed to women or slaves) in the hierarchical world of Greek antiquity.
(Lampe 2015: 58)
I want to dwell on the question of what kind of freedom Aristippus envisages his teachings to
provide, drawing on the account in D.L. In the latter, we learn that Aristippus places value (in-
cluding monetary value) on a sense of being free to enjoy pleasures without forming needs (D.L.
II.66–68). He describes what he himself has gained from philosophy (and, presumably, can
provide for others who learn philosophy from him) as the ability to be tharrountos – confident
or courageous – in society, and to be adeōs – fearless (from Gnom. Vat. 743 n. 43 = SSR 108).
304
Cyrenaics on Philosophical Education and Gender
The uneducated are analogized to untamed horses (D.L. II.69), and to stones (D.L. II.72), and
we learn that they need to be humanized (anthropismou, D.L. II.70). The sense of freedom
education provides is, then, implicitly connected both to this humanization, and to a sense of
raising one’s social standing and lowering one’s sense of shame in some way which yields con-
fidence and fearlessness.6 The suggestion that philosophy can free one of the bonds of a horse
or stone-like existence, and help one feel at ease in any society (especially in D.L. II.68), sug-
gests a rather literal interpretation of the freedom claim: that philosophy can help us change
our behavior and attitude such that we fit in with and can socialize with a class that in fact
enjoys more freedom.
We learn from an anecdote about Aristippus’ meeting with Dionysius that one who is free
(eleutheros), and thereby holds the correct attitude, cannot be enslaved (D.L. II.82), which
echoes a certain Socratic attitude regarding the invulnerability of the wise man.7 This attitude
is cultivated, for a Cyrenaic, by resistance to empty opinion (D.L. II.91), since empty opinion
causes painful feelings such as envy, fear, and perhaps also shame. Nothing is honorable or
shameful (aiskhrós) by nature, only by convention and custom (D.L. II.93). Cyrenaic edu-
cation rids one of shame by freeing its students from superstitions, fears, and the bonds of
convention.
Now a second passage:
He [Aristippus] said that he did not take money from his friends for his own use, but to
teach them upon what objects their money should be spent.
(D.L. II.72)8
The second passage emphasizes the value Aristippus attributes to his teaching, and gives
an example of the type of lesson he provides – an experiential one, in part. He departs
from Socrates’ practice and attitude by shamelessly charging for his services, even from his
friends, in order that they follow him in attributing value to philosophy. This brings out
that Cyrenaic education is characteristically passed on in student–disciple chains, where the
disciples are also sometimes (or often) considered friends, or even relatives, and where ha-
bituation through practice is required.9 Aristippus’ fee-charging practiced is characterized
as an intentional teaching tool which facilitates an important attitudinal and axiological
change.
Both the idea of philosophy as providing freedom and social standing, and philosophy as
having value (including monetary value), are also reflected in a third passage from D.L.:
Diogenes, washing the dirt from his vegetables, saw him [Aristippus] passing and jeered
at him in these terms, ‘If you had learnt to make these your diet, you would not have
paid court to kings,’ to which his rejoinder was, ‘And if you knew how to associate
with men, you would not be washing vegetables.’ Being asked what he had gained from
philosophy, he replied, ‘The ability to feel at ease in any society.’ Being reproached for
his extravagance, he said, ‘If it were wrong to be extravagant, it would not be in vogue
at the festivals of the gods.’
Being once asked what advantage philosophers have, he replied, ‘Should all laws be
repealed, we shall go on living as we do now.’
(D.L. II.68)10
Aristippus describes the attitude and advantage his Cyrenaic training affords him: it has taught
him how to associate with men of higher classes, to feel at ease at any social level, and provides
305
a way of life which includes internal motivation for the practice, regardless of the behavior
of others around him. It seems his philosophical training also allows him to associate with
kings and indulge in the context of their extravagant courts, while remaining invulnerable to
a change of fortune, given the spurning of, or at least indifference to excess, which allows one
to rise above common opinion.11
We learn more about how despisal of or indifference to excess are taught by Aristippus in
the texts which describe or imagine his education of his daughter Arete. These significantly
add to our understanding of the mode and content of the teaching.12 I discuss them in Sec-
tion 3, below. For now, it is enough to observe that these teachings are transmitted through
experiential lessons. They are developed by habituation to practices and attitudes that form
a way of life which one is motivated to follow for reasons internal to the commitments of
this lifestyle. The teaching thus takes the form of a kind of facilitation of experience and
valuation. The lessons are taught by a teacher to a disciple who may be a friend or family
member.
Lastly, before moving on to a discussion of the aspects of Cyrenaic education which are
uniquely brought out by a focus on women and gender, I want to consider what restrictions
the commitments of Cyrenaic epistemology impose on their pedagogy. It is well known that
the Cyrenaic subscribe to an account of perception in which basic affections – pleasures and
pains – are passively received, and incorrigible, physical sensations.13 They introduce neolo-
gisms which emphasize their idea of being passively struck by basic sensibles, and it is this
passivity which allows for confidence in the truth of the perceptions: what is passively received
is, by definition, free from opinion, and therefore free from error. This adds another, principled
reason for their focus on experiential learning, in that it suggests that transmission of doctrine
without direct experience is considered corrigible, and would be a poor basis for the level of
intellectual and practical commitment required. Direct experience is the best, and perhaps
only basis of education.
We can now turn to the question of what the Cyrenaics’ Socratic roots might add to this
picture of their educational commitments and practices.
3 The Socratic Background and Influence

The Cyrenaics are a school eager to accentuate their Socratic roots.14 Like their fellow So-
cratics the Cynics, they were headed by disciples of Socrates (Aristippus the Cyrenaic and
Antisthenes the Cynic), and they each have prominent female members, namely Arete and
Hipparchia, respectively.15 I begin by asking if there is anything about being a Socratic school
which might contribute to our understanding of why the Cyrenaics are open to female mem-
bers, and which might help explain the ways in which education and gender are depicted in
our evidence of the Cyrenaics.
I contend that the Socratic background, as evidenced principally in Plato, influences Cyre-
naic views and practices on philosophical education and gender.16 I identify three particular as-
pects of Socrates’ practice which illuminate the Cyrenaic cases: a nuanced view of the relation
between gender, virtue and education; the provision of alternative models of philosophical
education, and a blurring of the distinction between philosophical practice and theory which
necessitates a revaluation of the role of gender in shaping the expression of one’s philosophical
commitments. In this section I will explain and problematize each of the three, while examin-
ing the evidence for their influence on the Cyrenaics.
306
3.1 Gender, Virtue and Education

There are a number of texts one could draw on for this point.17 I begin with the Meno.
Soc: Is it only in the case of virtue, do you think, Meno, that one can say there is one
kind belonging to a man, another to a woman, and so on with the rest, or is it just
the same, too, in the case of health and size and strength? Do you consider that there is
one health for a man, and another for a woman? Or, wherever we find health, is it of the
same character universally, in a man or in anyone else?
Meno: I think that health is the same, both in man and in woman.
(Plato, Meno 72d–e)18
In contrast to traditional Greek accounts of the virtues, which are decidedly gendered, here
Socrates solicits from Meno, and comes close to endorsing himself a conception of philosophi-
cal virtue which might be read as gender neutral.19 This comes in the context of a discussion
of whether virtue can be taught (didaskw) or is acquired by practice (askew, 70a). But is it
really gender-neutral?20
The passage suggests that virtue is the same in some sense, perhaps in character, in men
as in women, and provides analogies to health, size and strength. This does not preclude
differences in what that character amounts to in men and women. For instance, to draw on
the analogy to health, we might characterize health, in part, as ‘all organs functioning well’.
The same character applies to both men and women, but must accommodate difference,
too, e.g. that for men this might not include well-functioning ovaries. If this is the right way
to think about health and, by extension, about virtue, then we might think that virtue has
the same intension across genders, but different extensions.21 The Meno passage, then, may
not insist on gender neutrality, but rather universality and gender neutrality when it comes
to the intension of the character of virtue, and the accommodation of difference when it
comes to the extension of virtue in an individual. While not a gender-neutral view per se,
this line of reasoning suggests a willingness to subvert convention regarding the role and
importance of gender in matters of ethics and education. Might this more nuanced view
of the relation between gender and virtue have influenced the Cyrenaics’ attitude toward
women as teachers and practitioners of philosophy? Might it have motivated Aristippus the
Elder to educate his daughter Arete, and encourage her to lead the school and to educate
her son?
I see at least two pieces of evidence which suggest that Aristippus the Elder was inclined
toward the contravention of common attitudes to gender in 4th c. BCE Greece.22 The first is
his cross-dressing practice, about which he was said to have lacked shame. This is reported in
the following three fragments:
One day Dionysius over the wine commanded everybody to put on purple and dance.
Plato declined, quoting the line:
I could not stoop to put on women’s robes.
Aristippus, however, put on the dress and, as he was about to dance, was ready with
the repartee:
Even amid the Bacchic revelry.
True modesty will not be put to shame.
(D.L. II.78)23
307
This same anecdote is reported by Sextus, with added emphasis on gender:
And when, at the court of the Sicilian tyrant Dionysius, a dress of that kind was offered
to the philosophers Plato and Aristippus, Plato refused it, saying ‘Since I am male by
nature, I could never put on a woman’s dress,’ but Aristippus accepted it, saying, ‘Even
in the Bacchanalia a prudent woman will not be defiled.’ Thus, even in the case of these
wise men, this seemed shameful to one of them and not to the other.24
(Sextus, PH I: 204)25
Custom is also opposed to dogmatic opinion when with us it is the custom to pray to the
gods for good things, whereas Epicurus says that the divinity does not care about us; and
when Aristippus thinks it a matter of indifference whether one wears women’s clothing,
while we think this shameful.
(Sextus PH I: 155)26
The contrast between the shame of others and the indifference of Aristippus is made clear in
all three reports.27 In addition to the general shamelessness he cultivated (as discussed above),
Aristippus’ reply in the second report suggests that the reason for his lack of shame in this
case has to do with a view that clothing is irrelevant to how one ought to judge a person,
and this includes gendered expectations of dress. It also underlines that Aristippus is not
subject to defilement as a result of indulging in cross-dressing. What might be the nature of
the defilement that concerns him here? The nature of the indulgence could be that dancing
in purple robes is a type of pleasure, and it could involve obeying the command of Dionysus
despite the threat of shame. Either of these could be a sort of defilement. Aristippus’ im-
munity to the first is presumably a result of his Cyrenaic training, which keeps in check the
balance of indulging in pleasures without becoming dependent on any particular source of
pleasure.28 The third report compares Aristippus’ reported indifference to wearing women’s
clothing with Epicurus’ claims about the indifference of the gods to human affairs, both as
examples of custom sitting in opposition to opinion. The comparison to the Epicurean point
suggests a strong sense of indifference underlying Aristippus’ attitude, and his confidence that
what brings others shame will not defile him. To explain this, we can recall the confidence,
fearlessness and pleasure that freedom from shame and resistance to empty opinion provides
the Cyrenaics.
The second set of pieces of evidence for Aristippus’ contravention of common attitudes
to gender are those texts which describe his education of his daughter, Arete, paired with his
disinterest in educating his son.29 A set of anecdotes relayed by Diogenes provide evidence
for Aristippus’ disparaging attitude toward his son in contrast to his efforts to educate and
habituate his daughter:
He gave his daughter Arete the very best advice, training her up (sunaskeō) to despise
excess. He was asked by some one in what way his son would be the better for being
educated (paideutheis). He replied, ‘If nothing more than this, at all events, when in the
theatre he will not sit down like a stone upon a stone.’ When some one brought his son
as a pupil, he asked for a fee of 500 drachmae. The father objected, ‘For that sum I can
buy a slave.’ ‘Then do so,’ was the reply, ‘and you will have two.’
(D.L. II.72)30
308
A courtesan having told him that she was with child by him, he replied, ‘You are no more
sure of this than if, after running through coarse rushes, you were to say you had been
pricked by one in particular.’ Someone accused him of exposing his son (tὸn niὸn) as if it was
not his offspring. Whereupon he said ‘Phlegm, too, and vermin we know to be of our own
begetting, but for all that, because they are useless, we cast them as far from us as possible.’
(D.L. II.81)31
Aristippus’ choice of a daughter to succeed him, and to entrust with the philosophical educa-
tion of his grandson, Aristippus the Younger (on which more below) would certainly defy
convention. Even more so given we have evidence that he chose her as his student and suc-
cessor over his son.32 Arete’s role as educator was so striking at the time that her son carried
the nickname mêtrodidactos (mother-taught).33 The atypicality of this arrangement raises the
question what informs, motivates and justifies this unconventional attitude to women, and
specifically female heirs, as promising and legitimate students and teachers of philosophy.
My suggestion is that something like the gender-indexed view of virtue and paideia dis-
cussed above might inform the Cyrenaic attitude to education. This way of conceiving of who
can learn and who can teach might both serve the purpose of reinforcing the Cyrenaics as
inheritors of Socratic practices and attitudes, and license different pedagogies as appropriate
for different persons, in part dependent on their gender, without giving up on a shared and
universal conception of the aim of teaching and learning Cyrenaicism. In Section 3.3, I take
up in more detail how this might color our view of Arete and her circle.
3.2 Alternative Models of Philosophical Education

Our evidence of Socrates’ self-conception as a teacher of philosophy pulls in opposite direc-
tions. In the Apology we see Socrates denying that he teaches (paideuō, 19d–e; didaskō 33b),
and proclaiming that he is nobody’s teacher (didaskalos, 33a). If we lean on passages such as
these, we might think that a school eager to follow Socrates in practice would be reluctant to
straightforwardly characterize their key members as teachers. Yet Aristippus is said to have
sold his services as a sophist (D.L. II.65, where it is noted that Socrates, having been sent
some of his profits, returned these to Aristippus, annoyed), and his lineage is maintained by
Arete, noted as his disciple (diakouō, D.L. II.86), and her son, the metrodidaktos (D.L. II.83),
emphasizing his mother’s role as his teacher. On the face of it, the Cyrenaics do not share the
Socratic resistance to being thought of as teachers.
On the other hand, Socrates’ denial of paideia may be more nuanced.34 Here again (as
above, regarding virtue and gender), a close look at the Platonic evidence may yield an under-
standing of the Socratic position which is more informative of Cyrenaic practices. Consider,
first, Apology 33a–b, mentioned above:
But I was never any one’s teacher (didaskalos). If any one, whether young or old, wishes to
hear me speaking and pursuing my mission, I have never objected, nor do I converse only
when I am paid and not otherwise, but I offer myself alike to rich and poor; I ask questions,
and whoever wishes may answer and hear what I say. And whether any of them turns out
well or ill, I should not justly be held responsible, since I never promised or gave any in-
struction (mathēma) to any of them; but if any man says that he ever learned (mathein) or
heard anything privately from me, which all the others did not, be assured that he is lying.
(Plato, Apology 33a–b)35
309
Here Socrates’ denial seems particularly aimed at the conception of teaching as transmission
and as private, exclusive instruction. He does not deny that by overhearing or participating
in his public cross-examinations someone might unintentionally learn from the experience.
Rather, he denies (a) that he promises or intentionally provides some particular instruction or
item of teaching, (b) that he has disciples, and (c) that he is responsible for whether his hearers
should turn out well or badly. We might consider passages in which Socrates seems to embrace
the claim that he does or will teach, for instance:
Laches
What is it? Why, surely wisdom is distinct from courage.
Socrates
Well, Nicias denies that.
Laches
He does indeed, to be sure: that is where he just babbles.
Socrates
Then let us instruct (didaskomen) and not abuse him.
(Plato, Laches 195a3–7)36
How might we square these two seemingly contradictory sets of claims? One way to do so is
to consider whether Socrates’ denial that he teaches is aimed at only one or some conceptions
of teaching, while his embracing teaching in other contexts signals a willingness to engage in
a different form or forms of pedagogy. Consider possibilities of philosophical pedagogy as a
shared practice of care of the soul, asking questions, reproach and prompts to self-examination
as at Apology 29d–30b, or as care and cultivation of oneself (epimeleomai) by remembering
and following the path of past discussions with Socrates, as at Phaedo 115b–c. These exam-
ples (and others are available) suggest that Socrates may at once resist a role as transmitter
of doctrine but embrace a role as teacher of another kind, if philosophical pedagogy can be
conceived of more broadly, and include the elements of facilitation suggested above.
Consider, too, the description of the nature of the citizens of kallipolis as discovered and
developed by education and nurture, or rearing (ten paideian… kai trophen) at Republic 423e.
This comes, of course, in the context of an offer of principles of equality which we might
think are indifferent to gender.37 The consideration of this range of examples of pedagogical
practices endorsed by Socrates suggests that he provides to his followers a broad conception
of philosophical education which resists teaching as transmission while embracing teaching
as care, questioning, self-examination, self-cultivation and nurture. I suggest that it is this
broader, richer conception of what teaching and learning can look like which might influence,
and help us to understand, the Cyrenaic model(s). In particular, I propose that the Socratic
influence can license and encourage models of education which self-consciously embrace ex-
periential modes of learning, and activities like child-rearing and nurture, including parental
models of teaching.38
The presence of a father–daughter–son/grandson chain of philosophical teaching and learn-
ing at the heart of the early Cyrenaic school raises a cluster of questions regarding teaching
and philosophical lineage.39 We saw above (3.1) the way in which Aristippus’ education of his
daughter is described as a type of joint training or habituation (D.L. II.72), and I have argued
elsewhere that his relation to his daughter, in contrast to his attitude toward his son, is evidence
that Aristippus the Elder prioritized philosophical ability over heredity.40 Here, I want to focus
on the way Arete’s education of her son is depicted. Indeed, while I have suggested elsewhere
that the metrodidaktos moniker applied to Aristippus the Younger emphasizes gender (he is
310
not just parent-taught, but mother-taught), it is markedly odd, in this context, to be taught
by a parent at all. The much more usual arrangement is to be taught by a tutor or a slave.41 It
might be thought remarkable if a parent can successfully bring their child into a philosophical
way of life, given the evidence that even the best and most virtuous in Athenian society rou-
tinely fail to do so. The Cyrenaics might in part be motivated to emphasize this hereditary line
of succession, then, not just to establish the link with Socrates, and echo a broad conception
of philosophical education taken-up by him, but also as an aide to their reputation. The line
of Aristippus to Arete to the Metrodidactos is remarkable not just for having a woman at its
center, but for having parents who successfully educate their children. It may be perceived as
an advantage to Cyrenaicism that in this way they succeeded where others failed by establish-
ing successful parent–child educational arrangements.
What might the relation of Arete to her son reveal about this practice, especially in light of
the Socratic model? One aspect is a special advantage parents, but especially mothers have in
the early education of their offspring. This is implied in a comment made by Aelian about the
pedagogic relation between Arete and her son:
Many people sing the praises of the son of Arete, the sister42 of Aristippus, as being
taught by his mother. Aristotle says that he has with his own eyes seen the young of the
Nightingale being instructed by their mother how to sing.
(Aelian, De Natura Animalium 3.40)43
The passage this refers to is HA 536b15–20, in which Aristotle describes the observation of
mother nightingales giving singing lessons to their offspring as evidence that while voice is in-
nate, language is acquired by training. One of the things Aelian might be thought to highlight
with this analogy is the unique, early access mothers have to their offspring. If they continue
to educate them later in life, they achieve a continuity of care which could not be achieved by
most fathers or other teachers.
The importance of early childhood education is emphasized by both Plato and Aristotle.44
I have further suggested that the Socratic model embraces activities like practice, nurture, pa-
rental bond, and care as models or parts of successful philosophical education. In imagining
the relation between Arete and her son, the author of Epistle 27 describes her father charac-
terizing Arete as caring for (epimeleisthai) her son, ‘so that he may be worthy of us and of
philosophy’.45 So far I, too, have focused on the unique version of care or nurture that mothers
would generally be expected to provide their children in Arete’s time and place, and which
colors the descriptions of Arete and Aristippus the Younger, in order to support the claim that
the Socratic precedent makes room for valuing the unique role of mothers in early education.
But we should not assume that all habituation of a son by a mother–teacher is stereotypically
‘motherly’, and somehow inherently informal. There is evidence to consider regarding the
more formal education of the Younger, which I turn to now.
3.3 Philosophical Logoi and Philosophical Praxis

The received narrative about the mainstream Cyrenaic school and the family at its center is
that Aristippus the Elder enacted his commitments and taught his daughter Arete, she taught
her son the Metrodidact, and Aristippus the Younger in turn codified their doctrines in some
more formal way.46 Elsewhere I have suggested that despite a dearth of evidence for the influ-
ence of Arete on the formalization of the school, we might situate her between her father, com-
mitted to philosophy as a way of life and living as a type of performance artist, and her son the
311
codifier.47 By doing so we can speculate about her role as a kind of transmitter and translator
of the values of the school, supporting its shift from an emphasis on philosophical practice
to an emphasis on formal doctrine. That said, I now want to trouble that picture somewhat.
For if some of the value of this hereditary chain is to maintain the close Socratic connection
(which I have claimed), and this is something the Cyrenaics are interested in, then they would
presumably have to be quite careful about how far from Socratic commitments they stray. We
must therefore ask whether the Socratic model supports the kind of distinction between philo-
sophical praxis and logoi presumed by this narrative, and whether this is to be understood as a
shift in emphasis or something more fundamental.48 The third way in which I want to suggest
that their Socratic lineage might illuminate the Cyrenaic school’s views on gender and educa-
tion, then, is by informing and problematizing the perceived distinction between philosophical
logoi and praxis which marks the main shift which occurs in the first generations of the school.
When we think about Aristippus the Elder as figurehead and performance artist, the
Younger as Codifier, and Arete situated between the two, we are invited to think about what
that the move from performance to codification is, and whether that is the right way to think
of the development of the school in these three generations. The Socratic lineage gives us rea-
son to think that this shift should be resisted or differently understood. I do not need to reach
for new texts to make this point: we can capture the ambiguity I want to highlight by revisiting
passages from Section 3.2 above, such as Apology 29d–30b and Phaedo 115b–c, which I used
as evidence for the broader conception of philosophical pedagogy associated with Socrates.
These examples already break down the strict division between the practical and the intellec-
tual or formal, and even the domestic and the public, which might be relied on for understand-
ing the shift in question. Socrates urges his companions to care for themselves and remember
their discussions, and then gives a demonstration of the correct attitude to take toward death
given their conclusions regarding the soul by taking the hemlock without fear or distress. In
so doing he both resists a certain type of formalization (he does not pass on writings or codi-
fied doctrines, but rather the injunction to recall conversations, and to continue having them)
and ties the practical to the intellectual by giving a memorable demonstration of the effects of
philosophy on one’s way of death. His private life, and final moments with family and close
friends, are made public to serve this memorial purpose, without losing the sense that he is
friend and family first, before or even instead of role model.49 With these examples alone, the
Socratic precedent makes more urgent the task of clarifying whether we ought to understand
Aristippus or his grandson as straying from the Socratic legacy in their philosophical practice,
and what role Arete has in this supposed transition.50
In O’Reilly (2023) I discuss the Elder’s legacy as a performer of Cyrenaicism, and contrast
this with the reception of Arete as a writer, educator, school leader, and mother. I also discuss
evidence from Eusebius which describes Arete as teaching her son lógous philosophías, a term
which suggests formal, theoretical content, in addition to whatever lifestyle practices she brought
him up into.51 There I speculated that Arete’s gender may have contributed to the theoretical
shift in the school: that since women were unlikely to have had access to the symposia, brothels
and other spaces of public performance the Elder is described as frequenting, Arete’s only real
opportunity to philosophize may have been by teaching in more traditional, formal ways. Here,
I want to trouble that hypothesis – perhaps I was too quick to assume that gender acts as a barrier
to how one could express one’s philosophical commitments. We might think that this itself relies
on a gendered conception of what philosophical performance looks like, and what determines
this. The Cyrenaics are after pleasures, and they recognize that what pleases each of us might be
different.52 Differences in how one expresses one’s lived commitments, then, might come down
to differences in what each person finds pleasure in, rather than just what they have access to.
312
And there may be other factors involved, too: personality, geographical location, whether one is
married or a courtesan, the role of a husband or wife, etc. which play an important explanatory
role. Aristippus finds the pleasures he seeks in drinking, dancing, laying with courtesans, etc.
Who is to say, though, whether these same activities would please his heir, whatever their gen-
der? Epistle 27 raises the question whether Arete enjoys child-rearing (which might include early
education) or is bored of it. How she leads a good and pleasant life may not involve brothels and
feasts, and may instead involve, at certain points, more domestic pursuits. Child-rearing could be
a central part of it. Gender-sensitive conceptions of virtue inherited from Socrates could support
this flexibility. I raise this question of axiology and women’s roles not with a view to denying that
gender limits Arete’s manifestation of her Cyrenaicism – I still think it does – but rather to now
insist that her performance of her Cyrenaicism should not be imposed on her, and to add that
her gender may also open avenues for the expression of her commitments.
Arete is a figure who resists rigid classification, and it is important that we do not rush to
characterize her lifestyle as inhibited by her gender without first considering philosophy in a
domestic sphere, and generally in ancient Greek women’s lives, on its own terms.53 Attention
to the Socratic precedent for lived philosophy encourages this kind of re-thinking. We might
ask if there are other ways, apart from those demonstrated by Aristippus, of living Cyrenai-
cism, even within the constraints of the domestic sphere and/or without the same access to
public life, which might lead to a kind of formalization, but have a more nuanced explanation.
A possibility that arises from this re-consideration (paired with the idea of the unique role
of parents as teachers) is that this happens of necessity when one gender teaches another.54
Though Aristippus the Elder is known as a performer, the formalization process, such as it is,
began with his way of instructing his daughter, and naturally comes out for the first time in her
expression. It is, after all, not obvious that her son was constrained in the same ways as she
was, and yet his expression is more like hers than her father’s. We might wonder if the gender
difference between mother/teacher and son/pupil plays a role there, too. If so, this supports the
importance of Arete as much more than a conduit for her father’s teachings, and encourages
the idea that the Cyrenaics were self-conscious in making room in their philosophical practice
for this to be so. They seem to fashion themselves after Socrates in some of his more subver-
sive moments. The role women have in their school, paired with their deliberate subversion of
gender norms, enriches our picture of the Cyrenaics, and challenges our existing understand-
ing of who gets to learn and teach philosophy, what counts as education, and what counts as
philosophy, a philosophical commitment or a philosophical mode of life in the Ancient Greek
schools committed to lived philosophy.55
Abbreviations
Apol. = Plato, Apology
AM = Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos/Against the Mathematicians
D.L. = Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum/Lives of Eminent Philosophers
Ep. = Epistle
Eus. PE = Eusebius of Caesarea, Praeparatio Evangelica/Preparation for the Gospel
Geog. = Strabo, Geographica/Geography
Gnom. Vat. = Epicurus, Gnomologium vaticanum/Vatican Sayings
HA = Aristotle, Historia Animalium/History of Animals
Mor. = Plutarch, Moralia/Morals
PH = Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhōneioi hypotypōseis/Outlines of Pyrrhonism
Pol. = Aristotle, Politics
313
Phd. = Plato, Phaedo

Rep. = Plato, Republic
SSR = Gabriele Giannantoni, Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae
Tim. = Plato, Timaeus
Xen. Mem. = Xenophon, Memorabilia
Notes
1 I give a detailed analysis of the evidence about Arete and her role in the school in O’Reilly (2023).
2 I recommend reading these two pieces alongside each other, as the detailed analysis of the evidence in
that piece supports many of the substantial claims made here.
3 Lampe (2015: 4):
Ancient philosophical schools are not simply defined by their doctrines; they are defined by the
combination of systematized beliefs, formalized modes of inference, informal ways of speaking
and thinking (including patterns of imagery), intentional and affective attitudes, characteristic in-
terpersonal relationships, and the exercises by which members of the school attempt to unify all of
these components and channel them into personal transformation. It is this multifaceted breadth
that allows these philosophies to pervade their followers’ entire ways of being.
4 Bénatouïl and Ierodiakonou (2018) urge precision in identifying the Socratic mode of philosophical
inquiry and its later influence when they identify at least six senses of ‘dialectic’. For my purpose here,
I do not intend to commit the Cyrenaics to, e.g., question and answer as a mode of philosophical ac-
tivity. I want only to establish that in any of its possible senses, Socratic dialectic provides a precedent
for philosophical models which are more concerned, once some foundational points are accepted,
with commitment to certain defining activities and modes of life than with adherence to more specific
principles. Neither does this mean that Cyrenaics have no doctrinal commitments, or core beliefs
which are defining of membership in the school (or one of its strands). Lampe makes something like
this point about emphasis when he says (2015: 56):
Cyrenaic ethics does not stop with this establishment of foundations, of course. On these foun-
dations the Cyrenaics attempt to construct a theoretical edifice which organizes and justifies an
entire way of life devoted to enjoyment and the avoidance of pain and distress. This is the exis-
tential option for the sake of which they have undertaken the intellectual and practical exercise of
philosophizing. It requires a commitment to education and habituation, both of which aim at the
virtues of character and intellect necessary for obtaining pleasure and avoiding pain and distress.
5 Babbitt (trans.) (1927) with modifications.
6 There is an excellent discussion of different senses of freedom and slavishness in Greek thought in
Coope 2020, Chapter1: 7–22. While I am unsure that the Cyrenaic sense fits neatly into any one of
the four main categories Coope identifies, they draw on a number of them, including, for instance,
freedom as wish fulfilment (since Cyrenaic education provides the tools to identify one’s own good),
freedom as reason-guidedness (if we take the Cyrenaics as thoughtful and moderate hedonists, on
which see, e.g. O’Keefe 2002; Lampe 2015: 83–85; O’Reilly 2019), and freedom as what befits the
free (in the sense of being free from unnecessary shame, amongst other senses). See also Aristippus’
avoidance of slavery in Xen. Mem. II.1.1–34. Note that Hegesias seems to have disagreed with main-
stream Cyrenaics on the value of freedom when he says that freedom and slavery are indifferent to
pleasure (D.L. II.94).
7 Apol. 41d.
8 Hicks (trans.) (1925/1972); cf. Gnom. Vat. 743 n. 24 = SSR 4a.7.
9 D. L. II. 85–86.
10 Hicks (trans.) (1925/1972 with modifications).
11 Despisal of an attachment to excess, rather than of excess itself, seems to better capture the Cyrenaic
commitment, since Aristippus has no problem enjoying the pleasures of extravagance when they are pre-
sented to him. On habituation that leads to the confidence to rise above common opinion, see D.L. II.96.
12 E.g. D. L. II.72 and 86, Strabo, Geog. 17.3.22, and Ep. 27.2. See O’Reilly (2023) for discussion.
There is also a detailed engagement with some of these texts in Lampe (2015): 58–61.
314
13 Sextus AM Vii 191. See also Brunschwig (1999): 252 and (2001): 461–462.
14 D.L. II.47, II.65, II.74; Phd. 59c3–4; Xen. Mem. 2.1, 3.8; Sextus AM Vii 190.
15 For discussion of Hipparchia, see Grahn-Wilder (in this volume). One might think, too, of Diodorus
Cronus and his five daughters educated in dialectic (see fr. 101 Döring 1972).
16 This raises an immediate possible objection to assuming something like a ‘mouthpiece’ view of Plato’s
Socrates, which I do not wish to defend. Instead, I adopt a version of Boys-Stones’ (2013: viii, n.2)
strategy by thinking of the Socratic influence as including both the direct influence of the historic So-
crates on Aristippus the Elder, and the influence of the material written about him and the depictions
of him by his followers, including Plato. Cyrenaics from the first generation onwards are possible,
or indeed probably readers of Plato. It is reasonable to think that they draw on a textual, as well as
personal tradition for their information about Socrates. For a discussion of potential issues with this
approach, see Tsouna McKirahan (1994), Wolff (1997) and Long (1999).
17 The exchanges between Socrates and Diotima in the Symposium are another possibility. For a dis-
cussion of the philosophical purpose of Plato’s challenge to the social norms around gender and its
relevance to philosophy in the Symposium see Sheffield (2023).
18 Lamb (trans.) (1967).
19 See e.g. Horner (1975). Thanks to John Sellars on this point.
20 We might have additional reasons, outside of this passage, to be suspect of claims that Socrates would
defend gender-neutrality, given other comments he makes about women.
21 My thanks to Matthew Duncombe for discussion of a draft of this paper, and of this passage in
particular.
22 Cyrenaic views in contravention of early Greek views on the virtues in general is evidenced in D.L. II.
91–93.
23 Hicks (trans.) (1925/1972).
24 Suda, Athenaeus, Stobaeus, the Gnomologium Vaticanum, and Gregory of Nazianz (all reproduced
in SSR 4a.31–34) provide versions of the same anecdote.
25 Mates (trans.) (1996).
26 Mates (trans.) (1996).
27 Though I will not take this up here, the contrast in the second anecdote between Aristippus’ attitude
and Plato’s shame, and his comments on nature and gender, is striking, and surprising given the
subversive comments on gender conventions and the body in Rep. V (e.g. 452). For discussion see
Marechal, Hulme, Singpurwalla, and Kamtekar and Proios (all in this volume).
28 On which see Section 2.
29 I have discussed this in O’Reilly (2023).
30 Hicks (trans.) (1925/1972).
31 Ibid.
32 On which see O’Reilly (2023).
33 D.L. II. 83, 86; Strabo, Geog. 17.3.22, Eus. PE 14.18.32.
34 Thanks to M. M. McCabe and Fiona Leigh on this point.
35 Fowler (trans.) (1966).
36 Lamb (trans.) (1967, emphasis added).
37 On which see McCabe (2020). The same verb (trephō) is used at Rep. 451d when Glaucon asks
whether female dogs are incapable of work outside the home because of their puppy bearing and
nurturing, in the context of the dog analogy for female guardians.
38 Recalling, too, Phaedo 116a, where Socrates’ soon to be orphaned followers describe him as like
a father to them (hōsper patrὸs). Note that aspect b, the denial of having disciples, is not clearly
picked up by the Cyrenaics. Notwithstanding the emphasis on succession in historiography, Aristip-
pus the Elder, at least, is depicted as claiming multiple disciples, including Arete (for instance at D.L.
2.85. See also Strabo, Geog. 17.3.22, where Arete is described as having succeeded (diedéxato) her
father).
39 I have argued elsewhere that our historical sources emphasize Arete’s role in this philosophical lineage
in order, principally, to establish and emphasize the Socratic heritage of the school (O’Reilly, 2023).
40 O’Reilly (2023).
41 A running theme in Plato, for instance, is the failure of even virtuous and willing fathers to success-
fully educate their sons (e.g. Meno 94a–e), which invites reflection on alternatives.
42 For which understand ‘daughter’ (see O’Reilly 2023).
43 Scholfield (trans.) (1958).
315
44 See Plato, Laws 765e, 788ff., 793e–794d and 797a–d, Tim. 26b, Rep. II 377b, and Aristotle, Pol.
7.1336a–b, for instance.
45 Ep. 285.4.11, trans. Malherbe (1977/2006).
46 Eus. PE 14.18.31–32 = SSR 4b.5.
47 O’Reilly (2023).
48 My thanks to Jennifer Whiting on this point.
49 Boys-Stones’ (2013: 148) puts this well when he characterises Socrates as generally resistant to phi-
losophers as teachers, describing philosophy not as a pedagogic exercise, principally, but rather a
form of social intercourse practiced amongst friends, lovers, etc.
50 The other aspect of the Socratic legacy which makes this question urgent is captured in Phaedo 60a,
when Socrates sends Xanthippe away. This might be taken as evidence that he is not committed to
women being able to do philosophy. For while he admonishes both the men and women for crying,
he doesn’t send the men away, nor does he give Xanthippe the benefit of hearing the arguments which
might calm her. The women are there to wash him, not to converse with him. Gender and virtue are
all on the table in this passage. For discussion see Tanner (in this volume).
51 Eus. PE 14.18.32.3 = SSR 4b.5.
52 See e.g. D.L. II. 87 for the claim that all pleasures are equal, and II.86 where pleasures are defined
as smooth motions, whose causes are left open. The criterion for the good is whatever pleases each
person, and Cyrenaic lifestyles seem to allow for wide variation in the sources of pleasure.
53 For relevant discussions see Singpurwalla and Wilberger (both in this volume), and Twomey (2023).
54 My thanks to Ursula Coope on this point.
55 My thanks to Sophia Connell, Ursula Coope, Luca Dondoni, Matthew Duncombe, Margaret Hamp-
son, Fiona Leigh, M. M. McCabe, Caterina Pellò, Alesia Preite, Saloni de Souza, Daniel Vazquez,
Ellisif Wasmuth, Jennifer Whiting, and the editors of this volume for discussing the ideas in this paper
with me at various stages of its development. This chapter is dedicated to Colin Rushton.
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Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Long, A. A. (1999) “The Socratic Legacy,” in K. Algra, J. Barnes, J. Mansfeld and M. Schofield (eds.),
The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, 617–641, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. (2006) From Epicurus to Epictetus: Studies in Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy, Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press.
Malherbe, A. J. (ed.) (1977 repr. 2006) The Cynic Epistles: A Study Edition, Missoula, MT: Scholars
Press for the Society of Biblical Literature.
Marechal, P. (in this volume) “Women, Spirit, and Authority in Plato and Aristotle,” in S. Brill and C.
McKeen (eds.), Women & Ancient Greek Philosophy, New York: Routledge.
Mates, Benson. (1996) The Skeptic Way. Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Translated, with
Introduction and Commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McCabe, M. M. (2020) “Philosopher Queens? The Wrong Question at the Wrong Time,” Chapter 13,
in E. Vintiadis (ed.), Philosophy by Women: 22 Philosophers Reflect on Philosophy and Its Value,
O’Keefe, T. (2002) “The Cyrenaics on Pleasure, Happiness, and Future Concern,” Phronesis 47: 395–
416. https://doi.org/10.1163/156852802321016550
O’Reilly, K. R. (2023) “Arete of Cyrene and the Role of Women in Philosophical Lineage,” in K. R.
O’Reilly and C. Pellò (eds.), Ancient Women Philosophers: Recovered Ideas and New Perspectives,
96–113, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. (2019) “Cicero Reading the Cyrenaics on the Anticipation of Future Harms,” Epoché: A Journal
for the History of Philosophy 23:2 (Spring): 431–443.
Scholfield, A. F. (1958) Aelian’s De Natura Animalium, Loeb Classical Library, London: Heinemann.
Sheffield, F. C. C. (2023) “Beyond Gender: The Voice of Diotima,” in K. R. O’Reilly and C. Pellò
(eds.), Ancient Women Philosophers: Recovered Ideas and New Perspectives, 21–37, Cambridge:
Singpurwalla, R. (in this volume) “Plato on Women and the Private Family,” in S. Brill and C. McKeen
(eds.), Women & Ancient Greek Philosophy, New York: Routledge.
Tanner, S. (in this volume) ‘“In the Company of Men’: Xanthippe, Comedy, and Fear in Plato’s Phaedo,”
in S. Brill and C. McKeen (eds.), Women & Ancient Greek Philosophy, New York: Routledge.
Tsouna McKirahan, V. (1994) “The Socratic Origins of the Cynics and the Cyrenaics,” in P. A. Vander
Waerdt (ed.), The Socratic Movement, 367–391, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Twomey, R. (2023) “Pythagorean Women and the Domestic as a Philosophical Topic,” in K. R. O’Reilly
and C. Pellò (eds.), Ancient Women Philosophers: Recovered Ideas and New Perspectives, 134–151,
Wildberger, J. (in this volume) “Women in the Household and Public Sphere: Two Contrasting Stoic
Views,” in S. Brill and C. McKeen (eds.), Women & Ancient Greek Philosophy, New York: Routledge.
Wolff, F. (1997) “Etre Disciple de Socrate,” in G. Giannantoni and M. Narcy (eds.), Lezioni Socratiche,
29–79, Naples: Bibliopolis.
Further Reading
The classic collections of Cyrenaic textual evidence with commentary are G. Giannantoni, I Cirenaici:
Raccolta delle fonti antiche, traduzione e studio introduttivo (Florence: Pubblicazioni dell’Istituto
di filosofia dell’Università di Roma 5, 1958), E. Mannebach, Aristippi et Cyrenaicorum fragmenta
(Leiden-Köln: E. J. Brill, 1961), and G. Giannantoni, Socratis et Socraticorum reliquiae, vols. II and
IV (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1990).
An excellent, recent exploration of the evidence for Cyrenaic doctrine and lifestyles can be found in K.
Lampe, The Birth of Hedonism: The Cyrenaic Philosophers and Pleasure as a Way of Life (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
The key contemporary reconstruction of Cyrenaic epistemology is V. Tsouna, The Epistemology of the
Cyrenaic School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and an important article exploring
the Socratic roots of the school, by the same author, is V. Tsouna McKirahan, “The Socratic Origins
of the Cynics and the Cyrenaics,” in P. A. Vander Waerdt (ed.), The Socratic Movement (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1994).
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21
WIVES OR PHILOSOPHERS?
HIPPARCHIA AND THE CYNIC
CRITICISM OF GENDERED
ECONOMICS
Malin Grahn-Wilder
It could have been an ordinary marriage, and she could have been a traditional wife weaving
inside her husband’s house, but in that case, we would not know of Hipparchia of Maroneia
(c.350–280 BCE).1 It was her choice to practice philosophy and follow the Cynic lifestyle of
her husband Crates of Thebes (c.360–280 BCE) that made her one of the most famous Ancient
female philosophers.
This chapter analyzes Ancient Cynic philosophy, their doctrines and praxis, from the per-
spective of gender. My reading of Hipparchia highlights her as an audacious and in her own
time certainly exceptional woman who revolted not only against the traditional role of a wife
but also against the entire set of values and beliefs associated with Ancient economic thought
(oikonomia or oikonomikê tekhnê).2 As a result, her refusal to stay by the loom appears as
a choice to think beyond the way private property and division of labor were traditionally
understood (and indeed, still commonly are), and reach toward a philosophical way of life
guided by reason as well as our natural, animal needs.
I will first provide a compact overview of the most central aspects of Cynic philosophy
and show the relevance of gender for nearly all of them. Then, I will move on to discuss
Hipparchia as a philosopher who personifies the most important topics of Cynicism. I will
further demonstrate that Cynic criticism of cultural habits and norms extends not only to
rethinking but also to redoing traditional gender roles. This, I claim, is connected to their
renunciation of all property, including ownership over other humans such as one’s wife
or slaves. Indeed, I read Cynicism as an antithesis to oikonomia, or “anti-economics”,
oikonomia turned upside down. I conclude by showing that gender plays a pivotal role
in the process of rethinking economics, Ancient and modern alike, and that the Cynic
anti-economics touches a theme that still today is topical within the field of feminist eco-
nomics. This chapter demonstrates that the Cynic upheaval of the binary opposition be-
tween the private and public spheres of life has far-reaching consequences for the position
of women and their opportunities to be included both in economic life and in the search
for wisdom.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-24 318

Wives or Philosophers?
1 Toward Happiness, Through Fire: Main Elements of Cynic Philosophy

Cynicism is counted as one of the schools of philosophy that flourished during the Hellenistic
period and that came to characterize the philosophical climate of the era. When it comes to the
Cynics, the term “school” is dubiously misleading, as they did not create any coherent theo-
retical systems nor teach their doctrines in any particularly structured form. They certainly
did not establish school buildings or develop educational institutions. Yet, the Cynics were a
group of philosophers united by certain core beliefs and a dedication to their rather distinc-
tive lifestyle. They practiced and taught philosophy in their own peculiar way (indeed, their
style of philosophy can hardly be distinguished from its content), and thereby they deserve the
name of a philosophy school. During the Hellenistic period, philosophy was characterized by
a search of happiness (eudaimonia), and each of the rivaling schools claimed to provide a path
leading to this goal. The thinkers of this period commonly used a medical analogy to describe
philosophy: like a good doctor not only aims at theorizing about the nature of illnesses but
also at healing the patient, likewise a philosopher should help their listeners to reach toward
happiness. Philosophy was thus called therapeia, therapeutic activity leading to good life. Even
if the Cynics stand out among the Hellenistic schools in their provocative lifestyle, they, too,
shared this view of philosophy. Indeed, Cynicism was regularly called a shortcut to virtue.3
Antisthenes of Athens (c.445–c.365 BCE) is often named as the founder of the Cynic school
who importantly influenced its core content, whereas Diogenes of Sinope (c.404–c.323 BCE)
came to distinguish it with his lifestyle. Crates was a pupil of Diogenes, and the sources indi-
cate that Hipparchia, too, was directly influenced by him.4 Yet, none of the writings of these or
other Cynic thinkers from this period have remained to our days. Thus, the available sources
stem from other Ancient authors: bibliographers, doxographers and philosophers from rival-
ing schools such as the Stoics, and even satirists such as Lucian of Samosata (c.120–180 CE).
The most frequently quoted source is book VI in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and Opinions
of Eminent Philosophers which recounts anecdotal stories of Cynic philosophers, including
Hipparchia. Abraham Malherbe’s collection The Cynic Epistles is much less researched even
if it provides important insights into Ancient Cynicism. Even if the letters are spurious and
stem from a later period (most of them come from the Augustan age), they bear witness to the
Cynics’ renown and their influence on the Western philosophical tradition.5
The letters also highlight Hipparchia’s importance for the Cynic school. Notably, several
of Diogenes and Crates’ letters are dedicated to her. Even if the letters do not let us hear Hip-
parchia’s own voice or even attempt to reach her first-person point of view, it is remarkable
that the authors of these letters present her as a seemingly equal partner of philosophical cor-
respondence. For example, one of Diogenes’ letters urges Hipparchia to write him frequently,
indicating that the author of this letter wanted to underscore her literacy, engagement in
philosophical correspondence and capacity to comprehend and formulate philosophical argu-
ments (3).6
The lack of first-hand sources and the scarcity of source-material overall is a well-known
challenge for anyone writing on Cynic philosophy. Yet, the existing sources paint a rather
coherent picture of its central elements. Cynicism was first and foremost a lived and embodied
praxis: a comprehensive lifestyle rather than a theoretical system or a body of doctrines. The
sources reveal that this lifestyle built on a rather solid philosophical foundation. As I will next
demonstrate, gender provides an important perspective for receiving a full understanding of
nearly all the essential elements of Cynic philosophy.
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One fundamental building block of Cynicism is their juxtaposition between physis and
nomos. Physis, nature, refers to the way things happen in the world without artificial human
invention: rivers flow, flowers grow, and animals eat and copulate without cultural or political
guidance. Nomos, by contrast, refers to the human-made systems of cultural customs, political
laws, and social practices that, according to the Cynics, lead us astray on our path to hap-
piness. In all they do, the Cynics claim to follow nature, which means fulfilling their natural
needs while renouncing all those things that the surrounding culture projects as valuable, such
as money and reputation. The Cynics idealized the simplicity of animal life which is extraor-
dinary in its own right as Ancient philosophy typically builds on a hierarchic view of nature
where humans are unquestionably seen as superior to animals.7
The ideal of following nature is displayed in all aspects of Cynicism, including diet. De-
scriptions of Cynic lifestyle emphasize their preference for unpretentious food items such as
lupines and lentils. Some sources mention that they were vegetarians and preferred to drink
plain water. The Roman emperor and philosopher Julian (331–363 CE) later captured this by
writing: “It is not from barley-eaters that tyrants arise, said Diogenes, but from those who
dine on sumptuous fare” (Julian, Oration 9, 199a, transl. Hard; cf. DL 6.103–5). Nature
guides us to fulfill our hunger, not to feast on lavish dinners.
Another aspect of the Cynic criticism of nomos that proves to be highly significant for the
present investigation is their scorn of property and idealization of poverty. The Cynics reduced
their material belongings to the very minimum: items that were most necessary for survival.
According to a famous story, Diogenes gave up his cup after seeing a boy drink water from his
bare hands, thus realizing that he, too, could do with less (DL 6.72).
The Cynics were certainly no homeowners in the traditional sense: Diogenes famously lived
in a big storage-jar, and Crates and Hipparchia dwelled in the streets of Athens. The theme of
homelessness (or rather, “houselessness”) is obviously connected to their general renunciation
of property, but it also epitomizes another central topic in Cynic philosophy: cosmopolitan-
ism. Diogenes is told to have called himself kosmopolitês, a citizen of the entire cosmos rather
than of any contingent city or country (DL 6.63). The character Diogenes of Lucian’s play
Philosophies for Sale announces: “You see in me a citizen of the world (tou kosmou politên
horâs)” (8). Thus, the Cynic philosophers may not have houses, but wherever they go, they
are at home. The entire cosmos is their dwelling, and thus they do not need a material home to
call their own. This idea is condensed in the line uttered by the Cynic philosopher of Lucian’s
(probably spurious) play The Cynic: “Let the whole world be bed large enough for me, let me
call the universe my home; and may I always prefer the food that’s easiest to acquire” (15).8
Cosmopolitanism has far-reaching consequences for the position of gender. First, cosmopoli-
tanism questions the validity of the traditional concept of citizenship which the Ancient Greek
society limited to freeborn men. Cosmopolitanism treats all individuals, regardless of gen-
der or national origin, as equal citizens of cosmos. Second, calling the entire kosmos their
home, rather than a particular oikos, directly opposes Cynic philosophy to Ancient economic
thought. I will get back to this below.9
Poverty is further reflected in the representations of Cynic philosophers. Virtually all sources
on Cynicism depict them wearing rough cloaks. This garment appears to have been an emblem
of Cynicism, but the sources emphasize that one did not become a Cynic simply by wearing a
cloak: “For the cloak does not make a Cynic, but the Cynic the cloak” (Crates’ epistle 19:10;
cf. Julian, Oration 6., 201). The image of Cynicism is masculine, for sure, especially as the
beard is frequently mentioned as a physical sign of a philosopher and Heracles portrayed as
their role model. Indeed, the character Diogenes of Lucian’s play Philosophies for Sale boasts
that the rough cloak is his lion skin – in other words, Heracles’ uniform (8–12). Cynicism was
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regularly described as a manly undertaking, and the sources abound with hostile remarks on
femininity, especially effeminate men. For example, Diogenes allegedly compared beautiful
courtesans to poison, and a woman in a sedan chair to a beast in a cage, and frequently ridi-
culed self-adorning men (DL 6.51–66). These scornful comments express a negative attitude
against femininity, but I take them to be ultimately directed against unwanted characteristics
such vanity and extravagance rather than against actual women. The sources indicate that
the same ideals for self-presentation applied to male and female Cynics alike. Yet, these ideals
were unquestionably manly.10
Thus, we can see that the Cynics renounce all material goods: excessive meals, private homes,
fancy clothes, and all other forms of property. Yet, they proudly announce themselves wealthy:
the Cynic declares “to be rich without having an oboe” (Gnomologium Vaticanum 182).
The idealization of poverty and its presentation as prosperity is a reoccurring topic in Cynic
philosophy. This theme is prominent also in Xenophon’s Symposium, where the character of
Antisthenes is asked to deliver a speech to the thing that he is most proud of. He decides to
praise wealth, but his speech makes is clear that his conception of wealth amounts to owning
nothing. He declares: “In my view, wealth and poverty relate not so much to a man’s posses-
sions as to his soul” (Symp. 4:34).11 One of Crates’ letters connects material wealth to vicious
characteristics:
But as for us, we observe complete peace since we have been freed from every evil by
Diogenes of Sinope, and although we possess nothing, we have everything, but you,
though you have everything, really have nothing because of your rivalry, jealousy, fear,
and conceit.
(7:1–10)
Again, we can see how the scorn of property reflects the Cynic juxtaposition between physis
and nomos. Here the opposition is made between things of real value and the make-believe
values of the surrounding society: the rich person’s fortunes are worthless whereas the shabby
Cynics own nothing but possess everything they need for happiness. It is important to note,
however, that the Cynic critique is not directed only against private possessions but even more
importantly against those belief-systems that make us value property, want it, and guide our
lives in accordance with these wants and beliefs. As I will demonstrate, the set of values that
the Cynics reject are precisely those associated with Ancient economic thought, and these
values are inherently gendered.
One important consequence of the Cynic criticism of nomos is their explicit scorn of the
marriage conventions and sexual ethics of the Ancient Greek polis. The public lovemaking of
Hipparchia and Crates demonstrates this. In making love, the Cynic couple fulfills their natu-
ral sexual desires, just as animals would instinctively do. For them, there is nothing shameful
in sexual acts or desires, since according to the Cynics, shame is but a cultural invention that
is not rooted in nature. Likewise, Diogenes is famous for masturbating in public and an-
nouncing that he wished that he could also get rid of hunger by simply rubbing his stomach.
Diogenes Laertius reports of Diogenes: “It was his practice to do all things in public, including
those connected with Demeter and Aphrodite” (DL 6.69).12 In other words, the Cynics would
perform in public the actions associated both with the gods of agriculture and love. When the
Cynics live, eat, and fulfill their sexual needs in public, they question the very distinction be-
tween private and public spheres of life. What people generally do within the privacy of their
house, the Cynics do openly in the public space. Further, the opposition between private and
public relates not only to the actual living spaces but also more generally to gender roles and
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the division of labor. I will show below that the renunciation of this opposition is a central
theme in Hipparchia’s story and legacy.
Another element that stands out in Cynic philosophy is their dedication to outspoken-
ness, or more precisely the concept of parrhêsia which can also be translated as freedom or
truthfulness of speech. When Diogenes was asked to mention the most important thing in the
world, parrhêsia was precisely what he replied. Likewise, the Cynic philosopher of Lucian’s
satire declares, standing on the auction block and facing slavery, that he is “a prophet of truth
and plain speaking” (Lucian, Philosophies for Sale, 8.; DL 6.69; cf. Cicero, TD 5.92).13 This
outspokenness is related to yet another juxtaposition that the Cynics frequently present: that
between freedom and slavery. The sources present Diogenes as being manifestly indifferent in
being sold into slavery since he declares that he is free anyway (DL 6.29–31, 74–75). I will
show below that also this juxtaposition is relevant from the point of view of gender.
In sum, we can see that the Cynic lifestyle required full dedication, courage, and con-
stant practice, askêsis: there was hardly a way of being a half-way Cynic. One of Crates’
letters proclaims: “But if doing philosophy in this way is unpleasant, at least it is shorter.
As Diogenes used to say, one must proceed toward happiness (eudaimonian), even if it is
through fire” (6:15–20; cf. Epistle 21:25; DL 6.103–5). Cynic philosophy was closely as-
sociated to a life of hardship and endurance, which (in addition to the masculine looks,
beards, and cloaks) gave Cynicism a reputation of being a manly school of philosophy. Yet,
Hipparchia’s story illustrates that the goal, content, and style of philosophy were the same
for men and women.
2 From the Loom to the Agora: Hipparchia’s Philosophical Life

Diogenes Laertius’ biography of Hipparchia is brief – and yet, I claim, loaded with cues that
are fruitful for feminist analysis. The story starts by recounting how Hipparchia, apparently a
daughter of a well-off family, fell in love with the life (bios) and doctrines (logos) of the Cynic
Crates. She chose (eileto) Crates for his philosophical lifestyle, not paying attention to any of
her suitors regardless of their wealth (ploutou), noble birth (eugeneias), or beauty (kallous).
She demanded her parents marry her off to Crates, even threatening suicide.14 So, famously,
Hipparchia married Crates, dressed in garments similar to his, and they lived and made love
in public. The sources even introduce the term kynogamia, “dog-marriage”, to describe their
partnership.15
Hipparchia practiced philosophy alongside her husband and used her argumentative skills
to confront her opponents. Diogenes Laertius recounts an anecdote where Hipparchia deliv-
ers a witty piece of sophism to the Cyrenaic philosopher Theodorus (c.340–c.250 BCE), thus
expressing both her rhetoric and parrhesiastic skills:
Any action which would not be called wrong if done by Theodorus, would not be called
wrong if done by Hipparchia. Now Theodorus does no wrong when he strikes himself;
therefore neither does Hipparchia do wrong when she strikes Theodorus.
(DL 6.97)16
Upset with himself as he cannot meet the argument, Theodorus tried to strip off Hipparchia’s
cloak. As she did not respond in a “womanly fashion”, Theodorus asked: “Is this she who
abandoned her loom?”. Hipparchia then delivers the famous line: “It is me Theodorus, but do
you think that I have deliberated (beboulesthai) badly on myself, if instead of wasting further
time upon the loom I spent it in education (paideian)?” (DL 6.98).17 Possibly Hipparchia’s
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encounter with Theodorus extended beyond this controversy; at least the entry for Hipparchia
in the tenth-century Byzantine lexicon Suda mentions that she wrote philosophical texts to
Theodorus (Suid., s.v. ‘Ipparkhia, 517).
There are several significant remarks to be made of this brief biography. First, it is remark-
able that philosophical life was Hipparchia’s choice. It is equally noteworthy that she chose
Crates as her husband precisely because of his philosophy. This is extraordinary given that in
the Ancient Greek polis, girls were regularly married off when they were still teenagers.18 It is
safe to say that in the Ancient Greek society, women were generally not free to make a choice
between philosophical and married life – or, like Hipparchia, to find the two in one. The men-
tioning of her choosing both Crates and philosophy highlights her unconventional life story,
as well as her freedom to think for herself and dedication to Cynicism. Further, by choosing
Crates for his bios and logos, she scorns what could be considered traditional criteria for a
good spouse: money, birth, and looks.19
Hipparchia’s dedication to philosophical life is evident also in other sources. Diogenes be-
gins one of his letters to Hipparchia by writing:
I admire you for your eagerness (epithumias) in that, although you are a woman, you
yearned for philosophy and have become one of our school, which has struck even men
with awe for its austerity.
(95:3)
Similarly, Crates’ letters to Hipparchia emphasize that philosophy was her chosen path. He
repeatedly reminds her to stay truthful to the Cynic principles and not to give up something
she once has started (28–32). As the above quote indicates, some sources explicitly pay at-
tention to Hipparchia’s gender and contrast it with the presumed manliness of Cynicism:
the mentioned determination to move toward happiness even through fire. The tone of the
quotation indicates how exceptional some contemporaries might have held Hipparchia for
choosing not only philosophy but also precisely the demanding calling of the Cynics. Yet, the
letters openly express admiration for her and present her as an apparently equal member of
the Cynic school.
Further, other sources indicate that the Cynics generally held the view that women and
men have the same abilities to practice philosophy and thereby attain virtue and happiness.
According to Diogenes Laertius, already Antisthenes claimed that women have the same
predisposition toward virtue as men (DL 6.12). Indeed, Hipparchia’s story can be seen as a
personification of this view. One of Crates’ letters to Hipparchia alludes to the famous dog
analogy from Plato’s Republic which was used to defend the inclusion of women among the
guardians of the ideal state (Rep. 451d–e). Crates addresses Hipparchia: “For you are not by
nature inferior to us, for female dogs are not by nature inferior to male dogs” (29: 10–17). In
another letter to Hipparchia Crates declares:
Women are not by nature worse than men. The Amazons, at any rate, who have accom-
plished such great feats, have not fallen short of men in anything. So, if you remember
these deeds, do not leave them undone.
(28: 1–7)
The analogies to dogs and Amazons are used to emphasize similarities between men and
women in all areas relevant to philosophy. The reference to the Amazons highlights wom-
en’s courage (andreia) and accomplishments whereas Plato’s way of using the dog analogy
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presumes that if provided the same education, men and women would become equally wise
and virtuous, and thus capable of taking care of the most important tasks of the society.20
This discussion illustrates another important topic I wish to underscore in Hipparchia’s
story, namely, women’s rationality. One of Crates’ letters to Hipparchia expressly encourages
her to practice her reason:
Reason is a guide of the soul, a beautiful work, and the greatest good to men. Therefore,
seek how to acquire this for yourself. For then you will hold fast to a happy life along
with this possession. And seek wise men, even if you have to go to the ends of the earth.
(31)
Again, the letter addresses Hipparchia as a literate woman who participates in philosophical
correspondence. As mentioned, also the Suda refers to her literacy in recounting her writings
for the above-mentioned cloak-stripping philosopher Theodorus. Crate’s letter clearly pre-
sumes that its female recipient had the same possibilities as men to acquire rationality. Unlike
Plato, the Cynics assumed that rationality rises in us naturally, without the external guidance
of an extensive educational system or a strictly structured society. Rather, the Cynics seemed
to believe that people can achieve a correct understanding of nature by observing animals and
following the example of people (the “wise men”) who live according to the Cynic ideals.
These philosophical role models were mainly other Cynics, but as mentioned, they also ideal-
ized Heracles and common people leading simple lives such as the boy drinking water from
his cupped hands. With the exception of the Amazons, the role models are depicted as men
and thus also women practicing Cynicism would only have manly ideals to look up to. Yet,
the Cynics presumed that following nature requires reason, and they clearly accepted the view
that women, too, have all the necessary abilities to attain a correct understand of nature. Un-
like Plato, they did not assume that the seed for rationality is only present in a scanty minority,
but on the contrary that all human beings, regardless of gender, origin, or class-membership,
share this ability.21
Another significant point I wish to highlight in Hipparchia’s story concerns the loom. In
Diogenes Laertius, it is a mere mentioning that she abandons her loom but read against the
backdrop of the cultural traditions of the Ancient Greek society, this detail deserves our at-
tention. In Ancient sources, weaving and spinning are reoccurring examples of women’s work
and proper place.22 This is particularly true within the context of Ancient economic thought
which I analyze in the next subchapter. The sources on Cynic philosophy explicitly juxtapose
the work done (and the time spent) by the loom with philosophical life. For example, two of
Crates’ letters criticize Hipparchia for weaving him a tunic, claiming that it was inappropriate
for her as a Cynic to take up such undertakings. In one letter, Crates declares that she should
not weave for making the appearance of a loving spouse (or, perhaps even a traditional wife
of a Greek oikos?) in the eyes of others.
Now if I had married you for this reason, you would certainly be acting properly and
your zeal would be very apparent to me in this. But since I married you for the sake of
philosophy, for which you yourself have yearned, renounce such pursuits and try to be
of greater benefit to human life.
(30)
The other letter draws an equally explicit contrast between traditional female labor and
Hipparchia’s dedication to philosophy. The letter also touches the ever-important question
324
concerning the rationale and goal of marriage, making it clear that for the Cynics, marriage
not only unites the spouses with each other but also their lives with philosophy. Again, advis-
ing Hipparchia not to send him another tunic, Crates proclaims:
Therefore, give up doing this right now, if you really care, and do not pride yourself in
this kind of activity, but endeavor to do those things for which you wanted to marry me.
And leave the wool-spinning, which is of little benefit, to the other women, who aspired
to none of the things you do.
(32)
From today’s perspective it certainly seems overly optimistic to assume that “other women”
of the Ancient Greek society had a free choice concerning their aspirations and ways of life.
Women did generally not have the opportunity to choose between wool-spinning and phi-
losophy (or other career paths, for that matter). Yet, the bottom line is clear – it is practicing
philosophy, not wool-spinning that will lead Hipparchia toward the goals of happiness and
wisdom. The quoted passage is exceptional among Ancient sources in referring to a woman’s
aspirations for philosophy and alluding to the idea that the traditional female roles might have
stood in her way of following those aspirations.
Finally, I would like to draw attention to the fact that by preferring philosophy to weaving,
Hipparchia does not only abandon the traditional female role with its accompanying tasks
but also concretely the space reserved for women in the Ancient society. Women spent most
of their time within the gynaikon, women’s living quarters where the mothers took care of the
children and engaged in weaving and other female-work. By living, making love, and practic-
ing philosophy in the agora Hipparchia occupies the public space traditionally reserved for
citizens. Even if the Greek society restricted citizenship to freeborn men, her philosophical way
of life shows that the kosmos belongs to all individuals who are equally its citizens.
All the above points highlight the radical nature of Cynic philosophy, but they also demar-
cate it sharply from the values and practices of Ancient economic thought. The juxtapositions
between oikos and polis, fysis, and nomos, and private and public become even clearer when
we view its meaning within Ancient oikonomia.
3 Indoor and Outdoor Labor: Gender in Ancient Economics

In Aristotle’s definition, oikonomia is a skill that falls under political science which also en-
compasses philosophical inquiry of happiness (eudaimonia), rhetoric, and the art of warfare.
In Politics, he explains that economic thought consists of three aspects: the power of the
husband over his wife, the master’s power over his slaves, and the father’s power over his
children (Pol. 1259a37; cf. Econ. 1343b1–20) The Pseudo-Aristotelian treatise Economics de-
fines oikonomikê as a skill that is practiced over two separate categories of things: (1) human
beings, and (2) goods and chattel. The wife serves as the most important example of the first
category (Econ. 1343b1–20). In short, Ancient economic thought can be defined as the science
and skillset of the freeborn man to take care of his material property as well as wife, children,
slaves, and animals. The ideal is that the oikos is well-organized and productive.
Oikonomia builds on the idea of gendered division of labor, characterized by the binary
opposition between “indoor and outdoor work” where the latter does not simply refer to
physical labor in the fields but more generally to public life including politics, military respon-
sibilities, and handling money. This aspect of economic thought is clearly expressed in Xeno-
phon’s classic work Oeconomicus which approaches the topic through fictional dialogues
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between the characters of Socrates and his interlocutors Critobulos and Ischomachus. In this
work, oikonomia is defined both as a field of knowledge (epistêmê) and a skill (tekhnê) that
the freeborn man applies to his household (oikos). Oikos and wealth (khrêmata) are further
defined as those things among the man’s possessions that can produce profit, and oikonomia
thus refers to the skillset needed to manage them well (Oec. 1.1–4; 6.4).
As an example of successful household management, the character Socrates gives the us-
age of slave labor. In some households, he claims, slaves are chained, and yet they try to run
away whenever they can, whereas in a well-managed household, the slaves are allegedly happy
about fulfilling their duties (Oec. 3.4). Likewise, Socrates continues, is the case with wives:
“I can also show you that in their treatment of their wives, husbands differ widely, some
succeeding in winning their cooperation and thereby increasing their estates, others causing
wreckage” (Oec. 3.10–11). When Critobulos objects that the husband should not be blamed
for his wife’s vices, Socrates responds that it is also the shepherd or rider’s responsibility to
control their sheep and horses.
In the case of the wife, if she receives instructions in the right way from her husband and
yet does badly, perhaps she should bear the blame; but if the husband does not instruct
his wife in the right way of doing things and then finds her ignorant, shouldn’t he be the
one who bears the blame?
Socrates asks (Oec. 3.11–12)
Pointing out that the wife was a mere child when entering her husband’s household, Socrates
assigns the responsibility of her grooming to the man.
First and foremost, the wife should learn her role and its accompanying duties inside
the oikos. When Socrates interrogates Ischomachus, presented in the dialogue as a virtuous
man (kalos kagathos) and an exemplary husband, on how he has managed to create such
a well-maintained household, Ischomachus declares that division of labor is the key. He
claims that the gods created men and women’s bodies and even parts of their dispositions
differently, corresponding to their separate responsibilities in the oikos, and made men
naturally inclined to outdoor and women to indoor labor. Comparing the wife to the queen
bee, Ischomachus states that her duty is to stay inside the house and manage the indoor
slaves’ jobs such as wool-spinning and bread-baking. The man’s responsibility is to accu-
mulate wealth, and the woman’s to spend it wisely. When they work together, their joined
efforts make the oikos flourishing and profitable. Ischomachus emphasizes the apparently
equal importance of their separate roles; yet the man is the undisputed head of the house-
hold (Oec. 7.1–43).
The binary distinction between men and women’s duties transcends also the Aristotelian
discussions on economics. Like Xenophon, also the Pseudo-Aristotelian treatise Econom-
ics states that indoor jobs belong to women and outdoor labor to men and emphasizes the
separation and hierarchy between these spheres. The wife’s duty is to obey her husband, and
housekeeping is the only area where it is appropriate for her to have some special knowledge
that her husband does not have (Econ. III.1–3; III.1.18–20). The gendered division of labor
corresponds to the division between private and public. Aristotle expressly values the public
sphere with its political responsibilities and connections to economic and military life and
consequently dismisses the private sphere as less valuable. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
emphasizes the importance of repeated practice for acquiring the virtues: just like one does
not become a good lyre player without playing the instrument, one cannot become virtuous
without performing the corresponding actions (EN 1103b7–20). Yet, his examples of virtuous
326
action systematically stem from the male sphere of life, such as expressing the virtue of lib-
erality (eleutheriotêtos) through the right way of handling money or demonstrating courage
(andreia) in war (EN 1115a35; 1119b25). Since the Ancient Greek society generally denied
women’s access to these types of actions, women would not, on Aristotle’s terms, have been
able to practice the corresponding virtues, either. Thus, exclusion from the public sphere of
life consequently limits women’s possibilities to political, economic, and partly even ethical
agency.
4 Defacing the Currency: Cynicism as Anti-Economics

According to a famous story, Diogenes was found guilty of falsifying money by putting a new
stamp on the coinage, after which he left Athens (either by force or willingly) (DL 6.20–21; 56).
This anecdote neatly summarizes the Cynics relation to economics: the Cynics counterfeit the
old coins, thus symbolically turning around what traditionally was considered valuable and
replacing it with their own conception of worth. Indeed, I read Cynic philosophy as “anti-
economics”, or oikonomia turned upside down.
Above, we encountered the Cynics’ open scorn of material wealth. They give up the oikos
both as a piece of property and a dwelling-place. The images of Diogenes in his storage-jar or
Crates and Hipparchia in the streets of Athens are almost as far as one can get from the values
and ideals of oikonomia. As the Cynics renounce the entire concept of private ownership, they
step completely outside the world of economics, and this step has far-reaching consequences
for the role of gender. For one, it would not seem to make much sense to ask who is doing the
inside work within a storage-jar or debate the division of household duties between a couple
living in the streets.
Furthermore, the Cynics explicitly extended their criticism of ownership to the position
of humans, in other words those individuals that Ancient economic thought included in the
possessions of the freeborn man. This is true, first, of family remembers. In Lucian’s play, the
character Diogenes declares:
You will take no thought for marriage or children or homeland: all that will be sheer non-
sense to you, and you will leave the house of your fathers and make your home in a tomb
or a deserted tower, or storage-jar. Your knapsack will be filled with lupins and scrolls
written on both sides. Leading such life, you will be happier than the great king (…)
(Lucian, Philosophies for Sale, 9)23
I showed above how Hipparchia abandoned the traditional role of a wife with its accompany-
ing tasks. I claim that the Cynics, as indicated by the above quotation, would also reverse the
traditional ideals and expectations connected to the freeborn man: alongside their material
possessions and homes the Cynics would also relinquish their (male) duties as citizens and
heads of their households. At the outset, the above quote might sound hostile against all fam-
ily ties. The evidence does not suggest, however, that the Cynics would despise close human
bonds or cease to start families. In words echoing Plato’s Republic, Diogenes declared that
wives should be held in common (koinai) with a freedom to choose one’s sexual partner, as
long as this is based on mutual agreement (DL 6.72). A similar ideal reoccurs later in the early
Stoic social utopias.24
Thus, instead of suggesting that one should abandon one’s family and avoid any close hu-
man relations, the Cynics directed their criticism precisely against the institutional form of
marriage as it was understood and practiced in their contemporary society. Again, Hipparchia
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and Crates serve as a case in point: they lived in a partnership and had children, thus combin-
ing family with philosophical life.25
This aspect is highlighted also in the Stoic reception of Cynicism. Epictetus describes a
Cynic father caring for his wife and providing the children with writing equipment and send-
ing them to school. Epictetus’ point is to demonstrate that despite their demanding and ec-
centric lifestyle, the Cynic philosophers would be persons of virtue and thus fulfill their duties
toward other people – not because of a certain social role dictated by their status in the oikos,
but because caring for others is just what our sociable nature guides us to do. Family is thus
neither a social obligation nor a distraction from philosophy but a privileged place for daily
exercise of virtue (Epictetus, Disc. III.xxii.68–82). Admittedly, Epictetus provides a reading
of Cynicism that underscores the Stoic doctrines of human sociability and other-concern. Yet,
this idea seems to fit also the more orthodox Cynic understanding of nature: just like animals
take care of their offspring, so should we. Furthermore, even though the Cynics set happiness
as their goal, they did not discuss this only on the individual level. Their ultimate concern
was the wellbeing of the entire humankind. According to Epictetus, the Cynic would make
the entire mankind his children (Disc. III.xxii.77–82). Thus, the scope of Cynic ethics extends
beyond individual happiness and finally encompasses the whole kosmos.
However, the Cynics cease to view their spouses and offspring as extensions of private
property. As they do not own anything, the idea of owning another person would seem utterly
absurd. Further, marriage would not have any other external goal but practicing philosophy
and reaching toward happiness – perhaps apart from creating children and thereby new phi-
losophers. These objectives are distant to the goals of profit-making or management of the
estate’s wealth. The marriage of Hipparchia and Crates is remarkably different from the rela-
tionship between Ischomachus and his wife (whom Xenophon’s dialogue leaves anonymous).
Crates calls Hipparchia his koinônos, companion, and the sources even introduce the term
synkynizein, signifying to practice Cynicism together, which was used to describe this famous
couple’s shared philosophical activity. This is also how Epictetus recounts their story. He re-
fers to Hipparchia and Crates as an admittedly rare but still ideal case of companionship that
arouse out of erotic love (ex erôtos): for Crates, Hipparchia was another person like himself
(allê toiautê).26 For Epictetus, they demonstrate how philosophy and marriage indeed can
complete each other (which presumably would not be possible inside traditional marriage,
koinos gamos) (Epictetus Disc. III.xxii.68–82).27
Overturning the roles of husband and wife extends to the relations between masters and
slaves. As houseless beggars, the Cynics would obviously not own slaves. Likewise, after leav-
ing her place by the loom, there is no need for Hipparchia to teach the art of spinning to any
female slaves. Indeed, the Cynics put a new stamp on the whole concept of slavery. We already
encountered the image of Diogenes standing on the auction block and declaring his freedom
even in the face of slavery. The sources abound with Cynic philosophers’ contemptuous re-
marks on people who apparently have both wealth and power but are subjugated to their
desires. Finally, the slave-owner is enslaved to his greed, and the dog-like philosopher in the
street enjoys perfect freedom.
The image of the Cynic philosopher may be masculine in its roughness and beardedness,
but this is certainly very distant from the manliness of the head of the oikos with his undis-
puted power and privileges. Indeed, by their very way of life the Cynics criticize the widely
unquestioned position of men as those who can exercise power both in domestic, economic,
and political spheres of life, and who have the right to hold other humans as constituents of
their property.
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5 Conclusion: Women, Economics, and Hipparchia’s Legacy

By ceasing to see women or slaves as property, or freeborn men as owners, the Cynics touch
a theme that has become quintessential for feminist thinking. In recent years, researchers in
the field of feminist economics have argued that the concept of economics is inherently gen-
dered and that the economic agent, or homo economicus, is presumed to be a man. Feminist
economics pays particular attention to the public–private distinction, since this defines what
still today are considered male or female occupations and how they are valued. Jobs char-
acterized as typically female (such as works involving care and housekeeping) often amount
to smaller salaries than traditional male jobs. Further, feminist economic theorists point out
that throughout history, household duties such as cleaning, cooking, and childcare have been
understood as women’s natural undertakings that do not require any monetary compensation.
This unpaid work stays outside of economics as its value is not counted or compensated for in
terms of salary. Yet, this work is indispensable for economics as it needs to be done. As already
Xenophon pointed out, the indoor labor of wool-spinning and bread-baking is necessary for
the overall flourishing of the household, equally relevant to the men’s work outside the house.
Yet, Ancient economics made it clear that the household belongs to the man and the woman’s
work contributes to the accumulation of his wealth, not hers. Further, a feminist reader would
point out that the husband is free to take care of his work and public duties precisely because
he does not have to stay at home cooking, cleaning and taking care of children. Today, femi-
nist economic theorists have shown how the gendered public–private distinction has led to
economic marginalization of women on the global scale.28
Cynicism has often been criticized for not building on a systematic theoretical foundation.
Some scholars have even doubted whether it should be considered a philosophy at all, as the
anecdotes and stories highlight more the Cynics’ eccentric lifestyle than their philosophical
doctrines. Admittedly, the Cynics developed a performative and provocative style for deliver-
ing their philosophical message. Yet, as I have attempted to show, the philosophical content is
unquestionably there, and even today, it is interesting and thought-provoking.
We may not know much of Hipparchia, but the little we know leaves us with plenty. The
sources present Hipparchia as an audacious female thinker that was influential in her own
time and left her mark on the entire Western philosophical tradition through the marginal-
ized but vocal voice of the Cynics. The Stoics paid attention to her, and her legacy lives on
in contemporary feminist thinking. In this chapter, I have argued that one of her significant
philosophical achievements was to question the binary gender roles of the Ancient Greek
society and the entire juxtaposition between private and public spheres of life. By stepping to
the agora, she acclaims a space traditionally reserved to men. She exercises outspokenness,
parrhêsia, which was traditionally a citizen’s virtue. The Cynics questioned the entire concept
of local citizenship and laid foundations to cosmopolitanism, an ethical outlook viewing all
humans as equal citizens of the entire cosmos. Hipparchia personifies a female cosmopolitan
who uses her rational skills to practice philosophy and thereby reach toward a life of wisdom
and happiness, free from male-centered cultural roles or economic relations.
The epigram ascribed to Antipater of Sidon emphasizes the opposition between traditional
wifely role and the calling of a female philosopher:
I, Hipparchia, chose not the tasks of amply-robed woman, but the manly life of the
Cynics. Nor do tunics fastened with brooches and thick-soled slippers, and the hair-caul
wet with ointment please me, but rather the wallet and its fellow-traveller the staff and
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the course double mantle suited to them, and a bed strewn on the ground. I shall have a
greater name than that of Arcadian Atalanta by so much as wisdom is better than racing
over the mountains.
(Epigram 413)29
This text is exceptional in presenting the thoughts from Hipparchia’s own perspective. Using
her fictive voice, the epigram makes a far-reaching and stunningly accurate prediction: it is
precisely because of her wisdom that Hipparchia’s name is still repeated in the philosophical
conversation of today.
Notes
1 I would like to thank Sara Brill, Catherine McKeen and Martina Reuter for valuable comments and
great conversations on this text, and participants of the Women in Ancient Philosophy Virtual Sum-
mer Work Shop 30.06.2021 and Philosophy Research Seminar at the Tampere University 28.04.2022
for questions and comments on my presentation on the topic of this article.
2 In this chapter, I use the term “Ancient economic thought”, or briefly “Ancient economics” to cover
the meaning of term oikonomia. In Louis Baeck’s definition, “oikonomia referred to the material or-
ganization of the household and of the estate, and to supplementary discourses on the financial affairs
of the city-state administration” (Baeck 1997: 142). On a detailed scholarly discussion on the cultural
history and development of Ancient economic thought, see B.B. Price 1997.
3 On therapeia in Hellenistic philosophy, see Martha Nussbaum (1994), Pierre Hadot (1995), Michel
Foucault (2005).
4 Cf. Crates’ letter to Hipparchia (1).
5 On the origin of the Cynic letters, cf. Malherbe (1977: 1–5), Patricia Rosenmeyer (2004: 221–223).
According to Robert Dobbin, these letters “are faithful to the spirit of the original Cynics and help at-
test to the unbroken history of the movement centuries after its founders had died” (Dobbin 2012: 56).
When quoting the Cynic epistles, I rely on Benjamin Fiore’s translations on Diogenes’ letters and F.
Hock’s translations on Crates’ letters (in Malherbe 1977). For the sake of convenience, I refer to these
sources as “Crates’ and Diogenes’ letters”, acknowledging that the letters were originally not written
by them. On Cynic source materials and their reliability, cf. also John Moles (2000: 425–423).
6 Letters became an important genre of philosophical writing in the Hellenistic and Roman time. On
the epistolary tradition, cf. Rosenmeyer (2004).
7 Ancient hierarchic view of nature is often explicitly connected to a hierarchic view of gender. These
hierarchies play a central role in Aristotle’s discussion of nature and sexual dimorphism in Genera-
tion of Animals (cf. e.g., GA 730b30–35; 767b1–15, etc.). For an analysis on Aristotle’s biology with
a focus on gender, see Sophia Connell 2016. On gender in Aristotle, see also Connell’s and Mariska
Leunissen’s chapters in this volume.
8 Translation Dobbin.
9 The Stoic Epictetus describes the Cynic philosopher through privation: he is without home (aoikon),
hometown (apolis), possessions (aktêmon), slave (adoulos), etc. Yet he lacks nothing since he is free
(Epictetus, Disc. III.xxii.47–48).
10 The topic of unisex clothing continues in early Stoics social utopias where men and women would
wear similar garments. I discuss Ancient philosophers’ self-representation (paying particular atten-
tion to beards and clothes) in Grahn-Wilder (2018a: 101–122). Here I also take a closer look at the
leonine beauty ideal for men, expressed in the mentioning of the “lion skin”, and discuss the reoccur-
ring disdain of femininity in Ancient sources.
11 Translation Dobbin.
12 Translation Hard. For Sextus Empiricus, Hipparchia’s and Crates’ public lovemaking demonstrates
the relativity of cultural norms (Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 153). On an analysis of Cynic sexual ethics
and the importance of the public space, see Dutsch (2018).
13 Michel Foucault emphasizes parrhêsia in Cynic philosophical practice. According to him, parrhêsia
involves courage and risk-taking: one might have to speak against the political authorities, since
truth is more important than being flattered or even accepted by people in power. (Foucault 2010:
294–305, 341–348.)
330
14 On suicide, gender and Ancient philosophy (cf. Grahn 2014: 105–128).

15 Kynogamia appears e.g., in the Suda (Suid. s.v. Kratês, 2341). Liddle & Scott’s Greek–English lexicon
gives Crate’s. marriage as the only example of the usage of the term. On a detailed analysis of kynoga-
mia, see Dutsch (2018).
16 Translation Hicks. The Suda recounts the same story (Suid. s.v. Theodorus, 150). The entry for Hip-
parkhia mentions that she wrote philosophical texts for him (under iota, 517).
17 Hick’s translation slightly modified. In Euripides’ Bacchae, Agave renounces that she has left “her
shuttle at the loom and gone on to greater things” (1235–1236). Ancient philosophers frequently
debated whether it was appropriate to mix men’s and women’s works or for the men to work by the
loom. Xenophon absolutely rejected this idea. Later, Musonius Rufus defended women’s participa-
tion in philosophy, but specifically mentioned that he did not encourage men to do the spinning (Lec-
ture 4, in King 2011). The Stoic Hierocles, however, stated that a man who was completely confident
in his manliness would not let any “absurd suspicion” prevent him from participating in his wife’s
duties, even in wool-work (Stob. Anth. 4.8521, 3.150). Cf. Grahn-Wilder (2018a: 268–273).
18 On marriage in Greek Antiquity, see Cynthia Patterson 1991: 48–72.
19 Dennis Schutijser summarizes: “In Cynicism Bios and Logos are intricately linked” (2017: 38).
20 Musonius Rufus draws an analogy to the Amazons for supporting his argument that men and women
have the same virtues, including courage (Lecture 4, in King 2011; cf. Nussbaum 2002). On Plato’s
argument, see Emily Hulme’s chapter in this volume.
21 I elaborate more on the connection between gender and inborn abilities in Plato’s Republic in Grahn-
Wilder (2018b). As Cynicism is much more oriented towards the day-to-day praxis than any theo-
retical system-building, it is difficult to assess how exactly they understood rationality. According to
my reading, the Cynics held that men and women had the same inborn capacities to rationality, and
this capacity would be properly cultivated by the Cynic life style. The Stoics later developed a more
systematic and detailed theory of rationality and what it means to use it “in accordance with nature”
(cf. Grahn-Wilder 2018a: 75–94; on rationality, soul and gender in history of philosophy cf. also
Reuter, Grahn and Paakkinen 2014).
22 Jill Frank and Sarah B. Greenberg’s chapter in this volume provide a rich analysis of the complexity of
the actual weaving practices in the Ancient Greek polis. As they show, weaving demanded dexterity,
collective efforts and mastery of multiple techniques and forms of knowledge. I agree with them that
the value of this art, primarily practiced by women, should not be diminished. Thus, even if the focus
of my chapter is on references to wool-work in Ancient philosophical and economic discussions, it is
relevant to remember that the lived and embodied reality of these works was richer than what these
references reveal.
23 Kilburn’s translation slightly modified. Xenophon compares the happiness of a good household man-
ager to that of the King of Persia (Oec. 4.4–5).
24 Cf. Plato’s Republic 423e–424a; 457c; on the Stoic utopia cf. DL 7.32–34; 7.131. Dorota Dutsch
points out that unlike in Plato, the Cynic idea of women being common, koinai, presumes the free-
dom of choice from both partners, male and female alike (Dutsch 2018: 250).
25 Both Diogenes Laertius and the Suda mention (both under “Crates”) that the Cynic couple had a son
named Pasicles (DL 6.89; Suid. s.v. Kratês, 2341).
26 Aristotle defines friendship as “holding another person as another self” (EN IX: 1166a31).
27 I have argued that the Cynics criticize both private property and the gender roles of the Ancient Greek
society. The question remains, however, are these two criticisms related, and if they are, how. In other
words: does the rejection of binary gender roles follow from the Cynic refusal to own material prop-
erty? Or could the relation even go the other way around: that by refusing to take up the traditional
male and female roles, the Cynics will consequently scorn all profit-making and property-owning
associated with the oikos? Or are both just logical consequences of taking up the Cynic way of life,
without any particular link between these two aspects? The first alternative would be in line with the
famous proposal presented by Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the
State (1884) where he claims that women’s social and political oppression follows from their status
as wives and thereby tokens of the man’s private property. Thus, the logic would be that doing away
with private ownership would also emancipate women. Some scholars such as Susan Moller Okin
have read Plato’s Republic as advocating this view. According to her, Plato’s ideal state frees women
to partake in public duties alongside the men since the wives cease to be “subsections of property”
(1997: 349). However, already the Stoic Epictetus criticized reading the Republic as proposing lib-
eration to women and claims that the work just replaces one kind of marriage with another kind
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(Epictetus, Fragments 15; Stob. III, 6, 58). This criticism condenses the problem with the claim that
abandonment of private ownership would lead to women’s emancipation. We can easily imagine
and find historical examples of societies which are arranged along more or less collectivistic lines but
where women still remain subordinated to men. However, when it comes to the Cynics, it is worth
emphasizing that they were utterly uninterested in theorizing about any kinds of political structures,
and unlike in Plato, their proposal of common “ownership of women” is not linked to any view of
how the society should be reorganized (I elaborate more on this in Grahn-Wilder 2018a: 238–241).
The second reading does not seem to fit the Cynics either as their scorn of property follows directly
from their idealization of living in accordance with nature and acquiring a more animal-like state of
being. Thus, the third option seems most plausible: the Cynics’ doctrines and lifestyle lead them to
scorn both ownership and gender roles without dedicating themselves to any more cultivated view of
the exact relationship between the two. Their criticism of private ownership remains equally uncul-
tivated, however. The sources repeatedly mention that they were beggars – and thus depended on a
surrounding society with people who can have a surplus of e.g., bread. It is very difficult to imagine
a Cynic society, and the Cynic philosophers seem to have been utterly uninterested in this type of
thought-experiment.
The relationship between capitalism and women’s oppression has obviously been a subject of a vast
amount of theoretical debate ever since the second-wave feminists starting from the 1960s; on more
contemporary debates on this topic, cf. e.g., Banu Bargu and Chiara Bottici (2017).
28 Research shows how still today, in many Western countries, women who live with men undertake in
average twice the amount of unpaid work as their partners, and the amount increases if the couple
has children. The household duties are generally shared on a gendered basis, women undertaking
the traditional reproductive work such as cooking, cleaning and child-raring (Hewitson 2003: 266).
Kathy Weeks provides an intriguing contemporary analysis of work as a site of producing gendered
subjectivities and summarizes some central feminist strategies to address gender inequalities of work:
the first-wave feminists’ fight for inclusion of women in the waged labor, and the second-wave femi-
nists’ urge to revalue unwaged household labor. Weeks points out, however, that in addition to these
there remains a need of critical feminist assessment of the very discourses around work (2011: 10–13).
On feminist economic theory, cf. e.g., Günseli Berik and Ebru Kongar (2021), Elina Penttinen and
Anitta Kynsilehto (2017), Marianne Ferber and Julie Nelson (1993).
29 Translation W.R. Paton.
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22
DIAGNOSING ARISTOTLE’S
SEXISM
Charlotte Witt
I would never have suspected when I began studying Aristotle as an undergraduate and later
when I wrote my dissertation on Aristotle’s Metaphysics that there was much to be said about
his views on women, the female, or sexual difference. To be sure many of Aristotle’s statements
about women were sexist, but not a lot of scholarly attention was given to exploring how and
why and what difference understanding women or the female might make to the interpreta-
tions of his theories. And this was true even of Aristotle’s political or biological texts in which
being a man or being a woman and the female or the male are important theoretical categories
or principles. There was an unstated assumption that the remarks were isolated and reflections
of Aristotle’s patriarchal culture rather than deeply intertwined in his philosophical theories.
From a handful of commentators who note a sexist remark here or there, research on the
topic of women, the female or sexual difference in Aristotle has accelerated and produced a
flood of fascinating scholarship. Indeed, I cannot hope to do justice to the full range of inter-
pretations here and will rather dogmatically offer my own contributions against the backdrop
of alternative views. As it turns out, the project of diagnosing Aristotle’s sexism not only yields
a more detailed and complex understanding of Aristotle on women, the female, and sexual
difference, but it also enriches our understanding of Aristotle’s philosophical thought on other
topics.
I use the phrase “women, the female, and sexual difference” to capture the range of con-
cepts, theories and texts that are relevant to my topic, and not to indicate that Aristotle sys-
tematically distinguished—as we might—between sex as a natural category and gender as a
social one. The key texts for interpreting Aristotle’s views on women are from the Politics and
focus, as we might put it, on determining the appropriate social role of women in the house-
hold and in the polis. In contrast, Aristotle’s biological writing, and in particular, The Genera-
tion of Animals, are the central texts that explain his views on female animals, and how they
differ from male animals. However, what might look to contemporary readers as a distinction
between what is social and political, and what is natural and biological would not have looked
that way to Aristotle because he thought that the family (and the city) were natural habitats
(or biological niches) for humans.
What is the relationship between the texts discussing male and female animals, and those
defining the roles of men and women in the citizen family?1 How are the two discussions re-
lated to one another? It makes initial sense, especially to contemporary readers used to debates
335 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-25

Charlotte Witt
about gender roles that are based on putative sex differences, to think that they must be related
to one another in some way. There are several possibilities. Perhaps the most intuitively plausi-
ble idea for contemporary readers is that the biology of female animals lays the foundation for,
and perhaps even explains, the unequal and subordinate political status attributed by Aristotle
to women citizens in the family and in the polis (Mercer 2018; Deslauriers 2022). Alterna-
tively, we might think that the influence flows the other way and “that the microphysical facts
were to some extent posited to support (supposedly) natural political norms” (Reeve 2020:
33; cf. Merlau 2003). Finally, one might think (as I do) that neither text is conceptually foun-
dational for the other. What the biological texts say about female animals does not provide
the rationale for the political status of women, and the political status of women does not set
the terms of Aristotle’s discussion of female animals. One can, of course, put the two contexts
together and paint a general portrait of Aristotle on women and female animals; but to paint
that portrait is not to establish a direction of conceptual flow between them.
In Section 1, I consider several interpretations of Aristotle on the position of women
in the family or household. And I develop a reading of Aristotle’s description of women’s
deliberative powers as lacking in authority that complicates the standard approach, which
contrasts a non-justificatory interpretation (the conventional interpretation) with natural
and justificatory interpretations in terms of intrinsic, psychological features of women (the
psychological interpretation). I argue that the notion of authority cuts across these options
because it refers to a ruling position in a hierarchical structure that Aristotle considers to be
natural (the structural interpretation). The authority of the male over the female in the fam-
ily is natural because it is natural for complex entities or structures to divide into a ruler and
a ruled. (This view is, of course, compatible with the idea that Aristotle thought that males
were better than females along many vectors including deliberation.) I begin Section 2 by
surveying several recent interpretations of Aristotle’s descriptions of female animals in the
biology. Then, I place that scholarly debate in the context of Aristotle’s discussion of other
deformed animal kinds in the biology to suggest a new context for considering what Aristo-
tle means by describing female animals as deformed. Like the lobster or the seal, female ani-
mals realize their forms in a teleological process, but their forms are not perfectly, or fully,
realized. Aristotle’s teleological and normative conception of form provides a framework for
his explanation of deformed animal kinds, including female animals. But it also raises an
important question about the hierarchical orientation and normative aspect of Aristotelian
teleology. When we diagnose Aristotle’s sexism should we look beyond the immediate con-
text of his politics and biology to his teleology and normative view of nature? In Section 3 I
consider the implications of my interpretations in relation to Aristotle’s teleology, to evalu-
ate the idea recently articulated by Mercer: “The obstacles that women face arise from the
inferiority of their bodies, an inferiority that infects all aspects of their lives and that follows
neatly from Aristotle’s robust teleology and the normativity with which it imbues nature”
(2018: 192).
1 The Social Role of Women

Aristotle’s Politics contains a picture of the family or household as having a natural hierarchi-
cal structure:
It is clear, then, that the same holds in the other cases as well so that most instances of
ruling and being ruled are natural. For free rules slaves, male rules female, and man
rules child in different ways, because, while the parts of the soul are present in all these
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Diagnosing Aristotle’s Sexism
people, they are present in different ways. The deliberative part of the soul is entirely
missing from a slave; a woman has it, but it lacks authority [akuron]; a child has it but
it is incompletely developed.
(Pol. 1.13 1260a7–14)
This text contains many puzzles, some of them quite disturbing. For example, given the cen-
trality of deliberation in human life, it is hard to know how a human being, in this case an
enslaved person, could lack it entirely. Surely, means/ends deliberation would be required by
many tasks performed by an enslaved person. Another central question is how to interpret
the term “akuron” (translated above as “lacks authority”) when applied to women’s delibera-
tion or to the deliberative part of their souls. Aristotle thinks that in our practical agency we
deliberate about means, and not about ends. So, the question is why and in what respect are
women’s deliberations concerning how to achieve the household’s ends lacking authority in a
way that might justify or explain the domestic rule of males over females. The central question
is: What does Aristotle mean by characterizing women’s deliberation as akuron or lacking in
authority?
There are several possibilities. First, there are the psychological interpretations. Let’s begin
with the akrasia interpretation. Perhaps Aristotle means that women’s deliberation is not in-
ternally authoritative; perhaps women’s reasoning is too easily or too often overcome by their
emotions or desires. According to this interpretation women’s deliberations are not authori-
tative in that they do not determine what the agent does. On this view women’s deliberative
faculty is flawed not as a reasoning faculty but rather, as we might say today, as an executive
function. Lacking the ability to execute the fruits of deliberation for herself, a woman is also
unable to deliberate and execute decisions about others in the family or the city (Nielsen
2015). The akrasia interpretation is attractive in that women retain the distinctively human
function of practical reasoning, which is congruent with Aristotle’s statements that men and
women are members of the same species or kind. But if women are systematically and regu-
larly unable to execute their deliberative decisions then that would give Aristotle reason to
think that it would be better if men ruled women. As Nielsen says “This inequality … is not
conventional. It is an intrinsic psychological difference. As such it exists by nature” (Nielsen
2015: 573). The chief conceptual difficulty facing this line of interpretation is that if women
are systematically akratic it is difficult to see how they can also be capable of virtue—as Aris-
totle clearly thinks they can be and are.2 In addition, if women are systematically akratic, due
to their impaired deliberative capacity, it is difficult to see how they would count as members
of the human kind since Aristotle thinks that our human work or function just is practical
reasoning—including deliberation.
Deslauriers (2022) has developed an alternative psychological interpretation that considers
the deliberative functioning of women to lack authority because women have a lack of thu-
mos, or a defective spirited part of the soul. According to the thumos interpretation women
are insufficiently quick to anger due to their relatively cold blood. It is the lack of thumos
in women, and not anything about their reasoning capacity that causes their deliberation to
lack authority. Moreover, according to Deslauriers, the relative coldness of blood causes the
lesser thumos in females, and it is the lack of thumos that causes deliberation to be akuron in
women. It is a strength of this interpretation that Delauriers finds a connection between the
material conditions and causal role of female animals in the biology and the political subservi-
ence of women in the household due to a lack of thumos. However, this interpretation of aku-
ron picks out an intrinsic psychological feature of women and so does not capture the crucial
interpersonal and social aspect of the term as I will explain in a moment.
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Charlotte Witt
But first let’s consider a third option. Perhaps Aristotle meant that women’s deliberation
is not authoritative because it is not systematic and complete. This is the architectonic inter-
pretation (Karbowski 2012; Reeve 2020). Perhaps a man is like a master craftsman in the
household, having the appropriate virtues and rational capacities:
…A ruler must have virtue of character complete, since his task is unqualifiedly that of
a master craftsman, and reason is a master craftsman…temperance, courage, and justice
of a man are not the same as those of a woman, as Socrates supposed: the one courage
is that of a ruler, the other that of an assistant, and similarly in the case of the other
virtues too.
(Pol. 1.13 1260a14–24)
The master craftsman grasps the causes or explanations of phenomena and not just the facts
(Reeve 2020). Adherents of this interpretation point out that the term “akuron” when applied
to decrees means “invalid, unratified, obsolete”. But what makes a decree valid or invalid? Ac-
cording to Reeve (2020) a decree is valid if it derives from phronesis or an understanding that
grasps the good of the family and the state. So, a decree would be invalid if it does not derive
from an understanding of the political good. The architectonic interpretation emphasizes the
systematic character of knowledge, and the teleological relations among the components (e.g.
between the good of the family and the good of the city). But the architectonic interpretation
of akuron sets an implausibly high epistemic bar for deliberations about domestic decisions.
Most male household members would be akuron according to the architectonic interpretation
because most of them would lack a complete and systematic understanding of the political
good in their deliberations.
Finally, and in keeping with the legal context of the terminology, one might think that
“akuron” refers to women’s actual legal and political position in the citizen family and in
the polis in Aristotle’s social milieu. This is the conventional interpretation. The conventional
interpretation points to the fact that the deliberations and decisions of Athenian women were
under the legal control of a kurios, a father, husband, brother or son (Blundell 1995). “In
law an Athenian woman had no independent existence. She was always assumed to be incor-
porated into the oikos which was headed by her kyrios or male guardian” (Blundell: 114)3
Athenian women’s decisions were not authoritative (akuron) in the very literal sense that they
lived under the authority of a male family member or kurios. According to the conventional
interpretation, the term “akuron” does not refer to a psychological flaw or epistemic limita-
tion with women’s deliberations or women’s deliberative faculty, but rather refers to women’s
actual social and legal position in the hierarchical structure of the citizen family.
The conventional interpretation apparently runs into a serious problem. In the text we are
considering, Aristotle seems to be explaining or justifying the rule of men over women in a
manner parallel to the justification of the rule of men over enslaved persons or over children.
In these cases, the hierarchy is justified or explained by a lack or a shortcoming in the delibera-
tions or deliberative faculty of the individuals. It is for this reason a natural and good ordering
for the household that men rule. But the existence of the convention does not, by itself, justify
or explain why women’s deliberations are without authority in the family. The convention is
what needs explanation. According to this criticism Aristotle must be interpreted in a way that
fills an explanatory gap between convention and nature. Aristotle is not simply recording an
Athenian social convention.
However, the structural interpretation can fill the gap because it does not understand
Aristotle to be simply describing a convention about women in the citizen family in Athenian
338
culture. Rather, with the term akuron Aristotle is pointing to a structural feature of the
household, which he thinks is natural. More on this in a moment. Consider first that the no-
tion of authority is intrinsically social and interpersonal. There is no psychological feature or
property in isolation that secures authority or underwrites lack of authority. Authority refers
to a normative status within a practice. For example, an umpire in a baseball game has the
authority to make the call, and other participants in the game do not. And this is because
of the position the umpire occupies; it is not due to any personal characteristic. You might
think the umpire doesn’t see the ball very well; nonetheless the umpire’s call is authoritative
and yours is not. Within the game of baseball, players ought to follow the umpire’s calls
simply because they issue from the umpire and—for that reason—are authoritative. There is
no feature of the umpire that underwrites the authority. Like the players in a baseball game,
the women of the family or oikos ought to follow the male family member’s call because it
is authoritative. And the woman’s call is not authoritative—just like the coach, player, or
commentator—no matter how skilled at deliberation they might be. So, the structural in-
terpretation of what Aristotle means by women’s deliberation lacking authority isn’t simply
the idea that in fact women’s deliberation in the Athenian family wasn’t authoritative, and
women lived under the authority of a male relative. But rather, given the family’s hierarchi-
cal structure, there needs to be an authoritative voice concerning practical deliberations.
Similarly, given that there needs to be an authoritative voice in a baseball game, the umpire’s
decisions are final.
But even so, why would it be adult men’s deliberation that is authoritative in the household
rather than the deliberation of adult women? There seems to be a missing step in the structural
interpretation of akuron. Let’s consider the baseball umpire/analogy again. It turns out that
there have been no women umpires in major league baseball, and no women umpires at all
historically. Asking why men (rather than women) were authoritative in the household is like
asking (in the historical context) why men (rather than women) were umpires. The response,
obvious in that historical and social context, is that only men have the appropriate authority.
Is the baseball and referee analogy apt to explicate the family and the male’s deliberative
authority? The analogy is intended to illustrate how a practice can be organized in a hierarchi-
cal fashion with one decisive voice, whose authority is based on the position in the hierarchy
and not on any psychological characteristic had by the person with the authority or lacking
in the person without authority. Baseball is a good example of the way that authority works;
namely that authority is not a consequence of the authorities’ faculties and lack of authority is
not a matter of flawed faculties. Both are determined by their legal or rule-defined position in
a hierarchically ordered whole. One reason to think the comparison isn’t apt, however, is that
baseball is a social practice and not a natural phenomenon. But Aristotle clearly thinks the
household and the city are natural habitats for humans (Pol. 1252b 13–15; 1253a2–4). Surely
baseball (and the authoritative position of the referee) is not a natural institution for humans?
Is this disanalogy fatal to the structural interpretation?
It is not. In the Politics Aristotle says that it is natural that entities with parts are organized
in a hierarchical fashion; they are divided into ruler and subject. But notice that he includes
both living things and artifacts:
For all things which form a composite whole and which are made up of parts, whether
continuous or discrete, a distinction between the ruling and the subject element comes to
light. Such a duality exists in living creatures, originating from nature as a whole; even in
things which have no life there is a ruling principle, as in a musical mode.
(Politics 1254a 29–34)
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Charlotte Witt
Aristotle does not restrict the distinction between ruler and subject to natural composites.
This hierarchical structure is found in all things that are composite wholes. So, the fact that
baseball is a human invention and not natural does not rule out the baseball analogy as an
apt example of the structural character of authority. The conceptual pair, authority/lack of
authority, reflects a broad Aristotelian principle about the hierarchical ordering of parts, in
both natural and artificial beings.
The structural interpretation of akuron does not make any appeal to what Aristotle says
about female animals or sexual difference in the biology. It is a political reading of the notion
of authority which does not support or find support in Aristotle’s theory of animal reproduc-
tion. However, some scholars do look to Aristotle’s account of female animals in his biological
writing as a source for understanding the subordinate position of women in his political writ-
ing. What do we find there?
2 Female Animals in Aristotle’s Biology

How do female animals differ from male animals according to Aristotle? The most important
single text to consider when answering this question is the Generation of Animals, which is
focused on their respective roles in animal reproduction. Aristotle explains animal reproduc-
tion in terms of his four causes and often contrasts the functions of male and female animals in
those terms. The male is the efficient cause and the source of the form of the offspring because
the male is the source of its sensitive soul, while the female is the material cause and the source
of the matter of the offspring (Witt 1985).
However, Aristotle also differentiates the female and the male in more physiological, mate-
rial terms—the male concocts the residue from nourishment fully while the female does not;
the difference in degree of concoction is due to a difference in temperature. These two explana-
tions of sexual difference can be woven together as material base and function. The complete
concoction of the residue is what underlies the male’s role as efficient cause of the generation.
The lack of complete concoction of bodily residues underlies and explains the female’s func-
tion as material cause.4
The two positions taken together might give the appearance that the female animal is
both a lesser cause and a teleological failure because the female does not fully achieve the
end of complete concoction due to their lack of heat. However, some scholars emphasize
that Aristotle attributes important functions in reproduction to both males and females
(Connell 2016). For example, in Aristotle’s explanation of inherited resemblances the mo-
tions in the semen from the male, which explains resemblance to the male, is matched by
motions in the katamenia from the female to explain the resemblances to familial members
of the maternal line (Witt 1985; Gelber 2010). Hence, the female principle can function
to shape or form some aspects of an offspring. And some argue, in addition, that female
animals or offspring who resemble females are not failures of reproduction (Gelber 2018).
The interpretation that female animals are a teleological failure is further disputed on the
grounds that Aristotle also seems to think that females are both necessary and good (Connell
2016). However one adjudicates this controversy over the role of the female in reproduc-
tion, it complicates a simplistic description of the female (or female animals) as contributing
virtually nothing to reproduction.
But Aristotle also says that “the female is as it were a deformed male” (GA 737a 27–29)
and he explains what he means by mentioning both the lack of fully concocted residues in the
female katamenia and by mentioning that the female lacks “the principle of soul” which is
the efficient cause of the animal generation. We might think, then, that Aristotle’s language of
340
deformity in relation to female animals labels the two features we have identified that differen-
tiate the female from the male animal in reproduction. Perhaps Aristotle’s explanation of the
female role in animal reproduction also contains the key to understanding women’s delibera-
tion as akuron. Despite its initial plausibility, however, it turns out the there is no direct line
(or even indirect line) connecting Aristotle’s description of female animals in the Generation
of Animals to the lack of authority of women’s deliberation in the household. There seems to
be no theoretical connection between blood temperature, degree of concoction, reproductive
role, and degree of authority of deliberation.
As Marguerite Deslauriers puts it
It is not so much that there are discrepancies or inconsistencies between the two ac-
counts as that they do not seem to speak to each other. There is no obvious connection
between the claim in the Generation of Animals that the female is inferior and the claim
in the Politics that women should be subject to the authority of men.
(2022: 207)
Nonetheless, Deslauriers devises a complex and compelling interpretation of a connection be-

tween the temperature of female animals, and the lack of authority of women’s deliberations
in the household and the polis. The connection is via the psychological category of thumos. “It
is possible, then, to trace a path from a higher degree of heat in the body to a higher degree of
thumos, and from there to certain psychological and political differences between the sexes”
(246). However, it is difficult to see how a propensity to anger, grounded in one’s thumos and
caused by a hot bodily temperature, would explain the authority of deliberations undertaken
by men and lacking in deliberations undertaken by women. Authority is a political and inter-
personal notion that is grounded in the hierarchical structure of the family and polis. That an
individual is quick to anger might explain why others obey that individual’s orders; it does not
establish or ground that individual’s authority. It does not explain why members of the house-
hold ought to obey that individual’s authority. While there is much to admire in Delaurier’s
detailed and careful argument, it is not wholly successful in bridging the gap between the two
contexts that “do not seem to speak to one another”.
It is also important to note that female animals are not alone in being classed as deformed
by Aristotle. Indeed, we find three basic types of deformed animal kinds in the biology.5 In
some instances, Aristotle calls a kind or species like the mole and the lobster “deformed”
and the deformity is apparently connected to their parts and functioning (HA IV.8 532b4–
533a12; De Anima III.1 425a9–10; PA IV.8 684a32–b1). Another grouping of deformed ani-
mal kinds, called “terrestrial aquatics” either because they carry out some of their important
life activities on land and some in the water or because they have functional parts suited to
both terrains, are described as “warped” kinds (HA VIII.2.589b29–30). Terrestrial aquatics
include the sea turtle, the crocodile, the hippopotamus, the seal, the fresh-water tortoise, and
the frog. The seal is also called “deformed” independently of Aristotle’s discussion of terres-
trial aquatics (PA II.12 657a22–24; HA II.1 498a33). Finally, as we have seen, there is the fe-
male animal described as “like a deformed male” in the Generation of Animals using the very
same word as was used to characterize other deformed animal kinds (GA II.3 737a27–28). It
is worth pointing out at this juncture that deformed animal kinds of all three types are men-
tioned in all the central biological texts—the Parts of Animals, the Generation of Animals, the
History of Animals—and in De Anima. Rather than constituting the only class of exceptions
to the regular teleological processes of nature, female animals turn out to be just one exam-
ple. And, since the other deformed animal kinds cannot plausibly be explained by reference
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Charlotte Witt
to Aristotle’s sexism or the ideology of his patriarchal culture, we need to look elsewhere for
the conceptual frame that makes sense of deformed animal kinds. One obvious place to look
is Aristotle’s teleology.
3 Teleology and Normativity

Elsewhere, I have argued that the normative/functional interpretation best captures Aristotle’s
concept of a deformed kind.6 It comprises two conditions: (i) the kind does not fully or opti-
mally develop the functional parts that it ought to have (the mole) or (ii) it does not use the
organ or part for its proper function (the lobster). These two conditions are related because
they share the teleological assumption that the optimal state of development is the state in
which the part fulfills its natural or proper function. Aristotle’s discussion of deformed animal
kinds illuminates one important aspect of his notion of normal animal kinds that otherwise
might remain invisible. In the case of normal kinds, animals develop their parts optimally
most of the time, which suggests, misleadingly, that the notion of optimal development has an
intrinsic numerical or statistical component. In the case of deformed animal kinds, however,
we can observe that the notion of a part’s optimal development (and proper function) comes
apart from the idea of numerical regularity. And, the significant number of deformed animal
kinds, in which numerical regularity is divorced from normativity, supports the normative/
functional interpretation of animal kinds and the teleological understanding of animal kinds.
How does the normative and non-numerical concept of teleology fit with Aristotle’s state-
ments to the effect that while nature does not always achieve its goals, it does so for the most
part (Phys. 198b34–36, 199b15–18, b23–26; PA 663b28–29; GA 727b29, 777a19–21). It is
hard to square a strictly numerical reading of this statement (and others like it) with the signifi-
cant number of deformed kinds mentioned in Aristotle’s biology. Nielsen (2008) suggests that
we read the phrase in a normative sense as referring to features that contribute to the overall
good of the organism. Nielsen suggests further that we interpret nature along the same lines:
“Nature is the cause of feature F in an organism of type T only when F is beneficial for organ-
isms of type T” (2008: 397). Deformed animal kinds (including female animals) are natural
because, even if the feature or part is not optimal it can nonetheless be beneficial for the organ-
ism. The lobster’s claw is beneficial and good for the lobster (it helps with motion) even though
its optimal use is for grasping. Just as an adolescent child is both incompletely developed and
just as it should be, so too, a female animal has incompletely concocted residues and it is just
as it should be to engage in the activity of reproduction. Aristotle’s teleology and his normative
conception of nature are compatible with the existence of deformed animal kinds, including
female animals. Are they also the source of his sexism? Have we finally diagnosed Aristotle’s
sexism and found it embedded in the theoretical heart of his natural philosophy and ethics?
Some scholars think so (Okin 2013; Bianchi 2014). In a recent paper, Mercer grounds
Aristotle’s sexism in his teleology and in his normative conception of nature: “The obstacles that
women face arise from the inferiority of their bodies, an inferiority that infects all aspects of their
lives and that follows neatly from Aristotle’s robust teleology and the normativity with which it
imbues nature” (2018: 192). Mercer diagnoses Aristotle’s sexism as the joint product of his tele-
ological worldview and his normative conception of nature. Elsewhere Mercer explains that “for
teleologists like Aristotle and his many followers, the subordination of women was not just natu-
ral, but required for the sake of humanity (Mercer 2020: 82). Mercer’s diagnosis is brilliant in its
sweep, by anchoring Aristotle’s sexism both in the granular details of his theory of animal repro-
duction, and in the soaring architecture of his natural philosophy and metaphysics. If Mercer is
right, it is no longer possible to separate out the philosophical wheat from the ideological chaff.
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The connecting tissue between levels and texts is Mercer’s description of Aristotle’s views of
women’s bodies as inferior, and inferior in a manner that grounds their subordinate political
status. As we have seen recent scholarship on the role of female animals in reproduction both
supports (Leunissen 2017) and provides reasons to doubt (Connell 2016) Mercer’s description
of women as “contributing the bare minimum to procreation”. And recent scholarship is also
divided on whether there is any theoretical relationship between Aristotle’s characterization
of female animals and their role in reproduction and his views on the subordinated role of
women in the household. However, important though these debates undoubtedly are, they do
not address Mercer’s boldest claim that Aristotle’s sexism “follows neatly” from his teleology
and natural normativity.
What does this mean? Mercer’s diagnosis of the source of Aristotle’s sexism can be taken in
either of two ways. First, it might mean that Aristotle’s sexism is compatible with his teleology
and natural normativity. After all, this is the framework within which he expresses his sexist
views. One might think further that the sexism is very deeply embedded in his thought, and
perhaps even virtually inextricable from it. However, Mercer may mean something stronger,
namely that the sexism follows from Aristotle’s teleology and natural normativity. The stronger
claim is not established by any plausible interpretation of Aristotle’s explanation of animal
reproduction because all that teleology requires is that the process of animal reproduction is
goal directed. It specifies a type of causal explanation but not any details at the level of Aris-
totle’s description of male and female animals and how they differ. The same is true of natural
normativity. If you have a living organism, then you already have natural normativity in the
sense of activities and behaviors that are good for the organism. So, it is not at all clear how
Aristotle’s sexism follows from natural normativity without additional conceptual materials.
As we have seen the correct diagnosis of Aristotle’s sexism is contested and remains unset-
tled. Yet it is undeniable that his views on women, the female, and sexual difference had a
significant influence on later thinkers. As Mercer puts it: “It is difficult to exaggerate the influ-
ence that Aristotle’s views about women had on the history of philosophy and science” (2020:
83). Indeed, Mercer argues that Aristotle was very influential in a negative way up to—at
least—the twentieth century (2018). In contrast, Deslauriers argues that Aristotle’s thought
on the temperature differences between male and female animals provided resources for the
Renaissance philosopher Lucrezia Marinella, who argued for the superior virtues of women
using the framework of Aristotelian physiology (2017). It is safe to conclude that the extent
and the character of Aristotle’s influence on later thinkers has yet to be fully explored.7
Notes
1 Aristotle’s thinking about sex and gender is binary through and through. For a discussion of possible
influences see Deslauriers (2022)
2 I am omitting a discussion here of the kind of rule that men engage in relation to women.
3 “Until she was married a woman came under the guardianship of her father, or male next-of-kin. On
her marriage, her husband took over the role of kyrios: if she was subsequently divorced or widowed,
and she had no sons, she returned to her original guardian” (Blundell 1995: 114).
4 Leunissen (2016) has argued more broadly that for Aristotle the variable “blood mixture” of humans
underlies their capacity for virtue, not just in female animals and women, but also in certain males and
men. Virtue depends on geographical location because “blood mixture” is a function of location. And
virtue is limited to those with the appropriate “blood mixture”. It is worth noting that Leunissen’s
research complicates any simple story about blood, temperature and sexual difference.
5 The next two paragraphs are adapted from Witt (2012).
6 For an alternative interpretation of Aristotle and deformed animal kinds in the context of Aristo-
tle’s discussion of women in the Politics see Karbowski (2012) Karbowski develops “the population
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Charlotte Witt
problem” which arises for the cogency of Aristotle’s teleology if both women and natural slaves are
viewed as defective humans. But Karbowski is radically undercounting the problem since all female
animals, not just women are putatively candidates for counting as defective.
7 For related material in chapters from this volume, see: Sophia Connell “Aristotle on Women’s Virtue;
Ana Laura Edelhoff “The Role of Women in Aristotle’s Teleology of Reproduction”; Harriet Fertik
“Women’s Work: Exploring a Transhistorical Tradition of Inquiry with W.E.B Du Bois, Anna Julia
Cooper and Aristotle”; Adriel Trott “Aristotle’s Hylomorphism Reconsidered Through Aristotle’s Ac-
count of Generation”.
References
Bianchi, E. (2014) The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos. New York:
Blundell, S. (1995) Women in Ancient Greece. London: British Museum Press.
Connell, S. M. (2016) Aristotle on Female Animals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deslauriers, M. (2017) “Marinella and Her Interlocutors: Hot Blood, Hot Words, Hot Deeds.” Philo-
sophical Studies 174, no. 10: 2525–2537.
——— (2022) Aristotle on Sexual Difference: Metaphysics, Biology, Politics. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Gelber, J. (2010) “Form and Inheritance in Aristotle’s Embryology.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philoso-
phy XXXIX: 183–212.
——— (2018) “Females in Aristotle’s Embryology.” In Aristotle’s Generation of Animals: A Critical
Guide, A. Falcon and D. Lefebvre (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 171–187.
Karbowski, J. (2012). “Slaves, Women, and Aristotle’s Natural Teleology.” Ancient Philosophy 32:
323–350.
Leunissen, M. (2017) From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Mercer, C. (2018) “The Philosophical Roots of Western Misogyny.” Philosophical Topics 46, no. 2:
183–208.
———. (2020) “Empowering Philosophy.” Presidential Address Eastern Division Meeting, American
Philosophical Association.
Merlau, C. T. (2003) “Bodies, Genders, and Causation in Aristotle’s Biological and Political Theory.”
Ancient Philosophy 23: 135–151, Mathesis Publications.
Nielsen, K. M. (2008) “The Private Parts of Animals: Aristotle on the Teleology of Sexual Difference.”
Phronesis 53: 373–405.
———. (2015) “The Constitution of the Soul: Aristotle on Lack of Deliberative Authority.” Classical
Quarterly 65, no. 2: 572–586.
Okin, S. M. (2013) Women in Western Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Reeve, C. D. C. (2020) “Aristotle on Women: Diminished Deliberation and Divine Male Rule.” Revue
Roumaine de Philosophie 64: 1–36.
Witt, C. (1985) “Form, Reproduction, and Inherited Characteristics in Aristotle’s Generation of Ani-
mals.” Phronesis 30, no. 1: 46–57.
——— (2012) “Aristotle on Deformed Animal Kinds.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy XLIII:
83–106.
Further Reading
Brill, Sara. (2020) Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (An original
interpretation of Aristotle’s Politics in the context of his biological writing.)
Delauriers, Marguerite. (2022) Aristotle on Sexual Difference. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A new
and comprehensive interpretation of Aristotle’s views on sexual difference.)
Trott, Adriel. (2021) Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation. Edinburgh:
University of Edinburgh Press. (A new account of Aristotle’s biological works informed by Continen-
tal philosophy with a feminist orientation.)
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23
WOMEN IN ANCIENT MEDICAL
TEXTS AS SOURCES OF
KNOWLEDGE IN ARISTOTLE
Mariska Leunissen
1 Introduction: Aristotle’s Empirical Mistakes About Women

Scientific investigation for Aristotle consists broadly speaking of a two-step process. The first
step involves the collection and establishment of the facts (to hoti) of a given domain. Only
once those facts have been gathered and organized appropriately, Aristotle thinks that one can
proceed to the next – and arguably most important – step, that is, to investigating their causes
and to providing explanations or demonstrations (to dioti).1 In the natural sciences, Aristotle
is clear that the facts from which the explanations are discovered ought to be established by
reference to empirical evidence: for the ultimate criterion of truth in the natural sciences are
always those observations that carry authority, and such observations take precedence over
theory, which only deserves credence if it harmonizes with the observed facts.2 Furthermore,
Aristotle explains that observations are authoritative if they are made by someone who knows
what to look for, who has received the appropriate kind of training, and who observes for the
sake of knowledge.3 For Aristotle, then, the ability of the natural scientist to observe well and
to judge critically the available observational evidence is crucial for the achievement of his
ultimate goal of producing natural scientific knowledge.
Despite this emphasis on the importance of authoritative observations for the establishment
of facts and despite his outstanding track-record of making biological observations (which is
large in volume and often high in quality),4 Aristotle’s treatises also contain factual mistakes,
including several that would have been easily falsified by observation. Especially notorious
among these are Aristotle’s empirical mistakes about women. For instance, Aristotle claims
that “in the case of humans, sheep, goats, and pigs, males have more teeth than females; in the
case of other animals, observations have not been made” (HA II.3, 501b19–21),5 thus suggest-
ing that the lack of teeth in women has in fact been observed, or that “in extremely clear mir-
rors, when women look into them during their menstrual period, the mirror surface takes on a
sort of blood-red cloud” (Somn. 2, 459b23–460a3), adding that it is especially hard to remove
such stains from mirrors that are new.6 Both alleged facts are, of course, false, and though it
is unclear to what extent such mistakes went on to play a role in Aristotle’s overwhelmingly
negative theorizing about women,7 their presence is frustrating, giving his scientific acumen
in other areas.8
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Mariska Leunissen
Historically, scholars have attributed these kinds of empirical mistakes about women to
Aristotle’s intellectual laziness or even outright misogyny,9 or else tried to explain them away
as having been based on correct observation of flawed evidence.10 However, such interpreta-
tions mostly provide ad hoc accounts for individual mistakes, and more problematically, they
tend to treat women exclusively as objects of study for Aristotle and neglect to consider the
evidence women themselves could have brought to bear on the establishment of the relevant
facts.11 For Aristotle’s empirical mistakes about women seem especially puzzling given that,
unlike many other objects of natural science, women are neither remote (like the heavenly
bodies) nor exotic (like elephants). Moreover, they are endowed with speech, thereby allowing
natural scientists a special kind of access to their affections and bodily experiences. This is not
to suggest that Aristotle would have had easy access to women either as objects of study or
sources of knowledge: women’s lives, experiences, and bodies – presumably even those of his
own wife, partner, and daughter – were in many ways hidden from the male gaze in ancient
Athens, and shame – aidôs – would very likely have prevented them from discussing certain
topics with men, including those in their own household.12 However, the presence of these
mistakes raises the important methodological question of how exactly Aristotle collected his
facts about women and whether he ever relied on women themselves as sources and subjects
of knowledge concerning the facts involving their own bodies and experiences.13
Accordingly, this chapter examines Aristotle’s natural scientific investigation concerning
two phenomena where one would expect to find women’s own experiences and gendered
knowledge to play a crucial role in the establishment of the facts, namely women’s experience
of pleasure during sex and its importance for conception (discussed in Section 2) and women’s
alleged knowledge of conception and the duration of their pregnancies (Section 3). My goal is
to develop a new account of Aristotle’s empirical mistakes about women, but also to provide
some much-needed insight into his consideration of women as fellow humans with experiences
and knowledge that carry epistemic authority. I will argue that two methodological features
of these investigations made Aristotle especially liable to making empirical mistakes: first, the
agonistic context in which he establishes these facts about women, which makes some alleged
facts controversial and worth investigating, while rendering others insignificant or settled.
Second, his acceptance of medical authors as authorities on and representatives for women’s
own knowledge concerning their bodies and experiences. Of course, my discussion here does
not cover all of Aristotle’s gynecological investigations, and there are other methodological
features that contributed to his empirical successes and failures in the establishment of the
facts concerning women; these discussions, however, will have to wait until another occasion.
2 Women’s Pleasure During Sex and Its Role in Conception
2.1 Aristotle’s Physiological Account of Conception

Aristotle discusses conception as the chronological starting point of embryogenesis in his Gen-
eration of Animals (GA). After detailing the mechanism of the male orgasm during which his
seed is released (GA II.4, 737b27–738a6), he describes conception as a meeting inside the
female uterus that then results between the male semen, or specifically, the form-transmitting
motions carried by the semen, and the female menses, which have been collecting there after
the monthly purges (GA II.4, 739a6–13). This meeting starts off the process of embryological
development (GA II.4, 739b20–740b14). For once the male principle enters the female men-
ses, it starts to put them into form by concocting and “fixing” the purest part of those menses,
making them come together in a solid mass, while the liquid is separated off. This first mixture
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Women in Ancient Medical Texts
of the male and the female principle of reproduction constitutes an embryo. Once the fetal
heart comes to be, the embryo possesses its own source of motion, which then takes over the
rest of its development, while the mother continues to provide nourishment for the embryo’s
growth through the umbilical cord.
In his presentation of this theory of conception, Aristotle does not appear to draw from any
knowledge derived from women, nor, for that matter, from any empirical evidence, though he
does illustrate the process of conception and embryogenesis with the observable and presum-
ably familiar process of the coagulation of milk into cheese through the action of fig juice or
rennet on milk (GA II.4, 739b21–24).14 However, in the course of providing his own theories
here, Aristotle pauses his account in order to refute a competing theory of conception that
postulates that women ejaculate seed during their orgasm and thus that female sexual pleasure
is necessary for conception (GA II.4, 739a20–26):
That the moisture that accompanies sexual pleasure in females contributes nothing to
the embryo, has been said earlier. Mostly (malista) people believe this because just as
they happen in men, also women experience so-called wet dreams by night. But this does
not indicate anything. For it also happens in young men who are about to but not yet
emit semen and also in those who emit semen that is still infertile.
As part of his counterargument, which appears to be drawing from experiences derived from
women themselves, Aristotle accepts and presents as facts that (1) women experience sexual
pleasure and release moisture accompanying this pleasure and that (2) women have erotic
dreams and release arousal fluids because of the sexual pleasure experienced during those
dreams. However, Aristotle rejects the “significance” attributed to these facts as counting as
evidence for the view that this moisture must therefore contribute something to conception
and presents as counterevidence the fact that young men also experience these wet dreams, but
do not yet emit (fertile) semen15: whatever fluids women emit during erotic dreams need not
be “spermatic” in the strict sense. In what follows below, I will contextualize Aristotle’s two
assumptions concerning women’s experience of sexual pleasure within his own work and the
early medical tradition which I believe formed both his target and his source of facts.
2.2 The Significance of Women’s Sexual Pleasure

Concerning Aristotle’s understanding of the significance of women’s sexual pleasure, it is im-
portant to note that while the account of the male orgasm forms a proper part of Aristotle’s
own causal theory of conception, he only brings up female sexual pleasure here due to an
ongoing dispute with others about the role of her arousal fluids. He says he already refuted
this competing theory earlier, which presumably refers to his discussion of the nature and
causal role of the spermatic fluids involved in reproduction in GA I.17–20. Although Aris-
totle does not name his opponents in those earlier chapters, his targets are presumably the
so-called pangenesis theorist of reproduction, which include both natural philosophers such
as Empedocles and Anaxagoras, but also the medical authors traditionally associated with
the Hippocratic corpus.16 These thinkers are presented as sharing the view that both the male
and the female contribute seed to the production of offspring and that this seed is derived
from the whole of the bodies of both parents. Instead of refuting these thinkers individually,
Aristotle presents what he believes are four sets of their strongest and most credible pieces of
evidence (GA I.17, 721b13–722a1) and then tackles those catholically; as the first of these
“witnessing facts” Aristotle mentions “the intensity of the pleasure” (GA I.17, 721b15: hê
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Mariska Leunissen
sphodrotês tês hêdonês), which pertains uniquely to early medical theories of reproduction
as pleasure appears to play no role in conception in (Aristotle’s representation of) the natural
philosophers.
Specifically, Aristotle appears to be responding to the kind of early medical theory as pre-
sented in On Generation-On the Nature of the Child, with which he was likely familiar.17 This
text presents pleasure as playing an important role in providing phenomenological signs for
the underlying physiological process through which seed is drawn off from the whole body, as
is evidenced foremost in men: for there are vessels and cords that run from the whole body to
the penis, and as the penis is rubbed and warmed and filled during sex, a kind of tickling sen-
sation (knêsmos) befalls it, which leads to pleasure (hêdonê) and warmth in his whole body,
as moisture is heated and turned into foam throughout the body and drawn off and passed
through the penis (Hp. Genit.-Nat. Pue. 1, VII.470 Littré = 44.1–45.3 Joly). The presence of
pleasure in women – which is less intense but longer in duration than in men – is similarly
taken to indicate that seed is being drawn off from all parts of her body and is being ejaculated
during her orgasm. The author presents her case as analogous to that of men (Hp. Genit.-Nat.
Pue. 4, VII.474 Littré = 46.21–47.19 Joly): the rubbing of her vagina and the movement of her
uterus during sex similarly lead to a kind of tickling sensation (knêsmos) befalling her parts,
which then gives rise to pleasure (hêdonê) and warmth in the rest of their body, and upon her
orgasm (orgai), seed is released inside her uterus, though sometimes – when her uterus gapes
open too much – seed also appears externally.
Aristotle first offers a general refutation of this type of view (GA I.18, 723b34–724a3). He
explains that pangenesists take the intensity of sexual pleasure to provide a sign that all bodily
parts contribute toward the seed, for the more parts are affected, the more intense the feeling,
and given the high intensity of (orgasmic) pleasure, all parts must be affected. However, ac-
cording to Aristotle, the intensity of sexual pleasure is solely the result of the strong tickling
sensation (knêsmos) befalling the sexual organs (thereby preserving the originally medical
association between rubbing, the tickling sensation, and the arousal of pleasure),18 and that if
this pleasure were the result of seed being drawn off, one would expect to experience pleasure
in some parts sooner and in other parts later, rather than in all parts and at the same time at
the end of the sexual act.
The evidence allegedly stemming from women’s sexual pleasure is taken up in three sepa-
rate arguments in GA I.19–20. The first argument targets the early medical claim that female
pleasure is a sign of her contributing seed through the associated idea that her pleasure is also
a necessary precondition of conception,19 which requires the mixture of male and female seed
mix (Hp. Genit. Nat. Pue. 5, VII.476 Littré = 48.7–8 Joly). Aristotle, however, provides the
following competing empirical sign (GA I.19, 727b5–14):
A sign that the female does not emit such seed such as the male does, and that generation
is not from a mixture of both, as some say, is that often the female conceives without the
pleasure during intercourse occurring in her. And, again, that it occurs [in her] no less
[than in the male], and that – even though the male and the female managed to keep pace
[i.e., climaxed together]20 – there is no conception, unless there was present in a right
proportion the fluid of the so-called menses. Therefore, the female does not conceive
either when the latter is completely absent nor, for the most part, when it is present but
when her period is still flowing, but [she does conceive] after the purification.
In short, Aristotle argues that because women (a) often conceive without having experienced
pleasure and (b) experience pleasure (and even orgasm at the same time as their male partner)
348
but without conceiving there must be no necessary causal link between women’s sexual
pleasure and conception, which also undermines the idea that her pleasure provides evidence
for her discharging spermatic seed. Instead, Aristotle argues that it is the presence of an ap-
propriate volume of menses in her uterus during the sexual act that explains the occurrence
of conception, and he indeed concludes this investigation by stating that because of this, the
female does not contribute seed but menses to reproduction (GA I.20, 729a20–24). In this
case, then, Aristotle’s competition with the medical authors to provide the better theory of re-
production in fact prompts him to provide a more empirically accurate account of the role of
female pleasure in conception and also to consider the phenomenology of women’s pleasure,
which does not appear to be of interest to the early medical thinkers.21 And while he does not
identify his sources, the counterevidence he produces suggests some familiarity with reports
from women about when they experience pleasure and when they conceive.
Aristotle’s second argument challenges the claim that the fluid women release due to sexual
pleasure is spermatic and thus equivalent to male semen by denying that all women produce
this fluid (GA I.20, 727b34–728a4). For if the fluid is not present in all sexually reproducing
women, then it cannot be spermatic (since some women reproduce without it) and, as Aristo-
tle argues, “speaking generally, it is present in those who are fair-skinned and of a feminine
type, but it is not present in those with a dark skin and with a masculine appearance” (GA
I.20, 728a2–4). Aristotle presents this alleged fact as an empirical and cross-ethnographic
observation, even though it is, of course, false, and even though it contradicts his own more
nuanced statement of facts elsewhere (HA VII.2, 583a10–12): “women who are more white
discharge stuff associated with sexual pleasures more than those who are dark.” Interestingly,
though, similar ethnographic views about connections between women’s complexions and
their vaginal discharges seem to have circulated in medical circles (see, e.g., Hp. Nat. Mul. 1,
VII.312 Littré = 2.4–6 Bourbon [2008]). Here, then, the competition with the medical pangen-
esists seems to have driven Aristotle to overstate his case and to accept as true empirically false
evidence, which was itself perhaps borrowed from other medical treatises.
The third counterargument that Aristotle raises against the pangenesist use of female pleas-
ure as evidence for their theory involves a countersign pertaining to the location in which
women experience sexual pleasure (GA I.20, 728a31–34):
A sign that the female does not emit semen is also the fact that pleasure during inter-
course occurs by touch in the same area (kata ton auton topon) as in males; however, it
is not from there that this moisture is emitted.
In this passage, Aristotle argues that the fluid discharged by women when they experience
sexual pleasure cannot be spermatic (i.e., equivalent to male semen) because her fluid is not
discharged from her clitoris (i.e., the location that is equivalent to the male glans, where he
experiences his pleasure and from where he ejaculates his semen), but instead it flows from
her uterus and/or vaginal canal (assuming that he is thinking of her arousal fluids here). In this
third argument, then, Aristotle’s competition with the medical pangenesists may again have
led him to improve both on their knowledge of women’s sexual anatomy (there is no mention
of the clitoris in early medical texts associated with the Hippocratic Corpus)22 and his own as
recorded in his History of Animals, which includes no reports of women’s external genitalia.
However, even in this case, Aristotle’s source may well have been a medical treatise. For the
short and incomplete medical treatise On Sterility, which has been preserved to us as part of
Aristotle’s own collection of data on human reproduction in HA X,23 contains an elaborate
anatomical description of the clitoris, according to which this organ is shaped like a nose,
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Mariska Leunissen
with a small duct going outward for the release of pneuma (which produces pleasure) and a
large one going inward connecting it to the vaginal canal (HA X.5, 637a21–35). This medical
treatise also seems to have formed Aristotle’s main target in his consideration of the evidence
derived from women’s erotic dreams, so let me turn to this topic next.
2.3 The Significance of Women’s Erotic Dreams

Concerning Aristotle’s understanding of the significance of women’s erotic dreams in his ac-
count of conception in GA II.4, we should note that he there characterized the evidence from
women who experience erotic dreams and wake up “wet” (in the same way that men do) as
providing the main reason why pangenesists believe that women also ejaculate spermatic seed
(GA II.4, 739a22: malista).
However, the evidence from women’s erotic dreams plays no role in the medical theory of
Genit.-Nat. Pue., which I argued was one of Aristotle’s main competitors in the debate con-
cerning the female contribution to reproduction in GA I.17–22. For while this medical text
provides an explanation for why people experience erotic dreams immediately following the
account of male ejaculation, its author explicitly sets aside the topic and never uses it as evi-
dence for female ejaculation (Hp. Genit.-Nat. Pue. 1, VII.470–472 Littré = 45.3–10 Joly). In-
stead, Aristotle’s target here, I submit, is the medical view as presented in the above-mentioned
text of On Sterility. This treatise mentions women’s erotic dreams no less than five times24 and
invokes them explicitly as evidence for the claim that women too ejaculate spermatic seed, as
in the following passage (HA X.6, 637b24–30):
For women experience erotic dreams and there arise in them the same affections after
these dream-emissions as when they have intercourse with a man, namely relaxation
and incapacity. It is clear, then, that if they are seen to emit something during a wet
dream, that they then also contribute something, because after wet dreams the same area
becomes moist, and they need to give themselves the same treatment as when they had
intercourse with a man.
From the fact that women wake up wet after experiencing erotic dreams and need to give
themselves the same therapeia as after actual intercourse, the author infers that they must
therefore contribute their own seed, since the fluid present in this case did not originate from
men.
Of special interest is also this author’s final treatment of the topic, where he introduces the
following objection to his theory (HA X.7, 638a5–11):
But there is a possible objection, if [women] are telling the truth when they assert that,
whatever wet dream they have, they wake up dry. For clearly the uterus draws [it] up
from above. So, then: why does the female not reproduce by herself, if indeed [her
uterus] also draws up that of the male, when it has been mixed? Why does it not also
draw up her own, unmixed [seed], since it reaches the place outside? For they experience
this affection, namely remaining pregnant for many years. For they give birth to a so-
called mole, as happened to a certain woman…
In this passage, the author appears critical of the verbal reports by women – which he used
earlier as supporting evidence for his claims – that they wake up dry after wet dreams. How-
ever, the explanation for this according to this medical author is clear: the uterus draws up her
350
own seed by itself, just as it draws up seed deposited by the male mixed with that of her own.
This solution restores the veracity of women’s claims which had just been called into question,
but it creates a further puzzle: for if dryness after erotic dreams in women serves as evidence
for the uterus’ ability to draw up women’s unmixed seed (i.e., unmixed with male seed), why
would women not reproduce on their own? The author responds that in a sense, women in
fact do produce something on their own, as happens in molar-pregnancies (and wind-eggs
in birds), but they do not produce viable offspring.25 Interestingly, the discussion in GA II.4
seems to follow roughly the same argumentative structure of On Sterility, for Aristotle first ad-
dresses (and undermines) the significance of the evidence provided by women’s erotic dreams
for the claim that they ejaculate spermatic seed (in GA II.4, 739b20–26, quoted above) and
then tackles the puzzle created by the claim that women ejaculate outside of their uterus and
then draw their seed back up in the following passage (GA II.4, 739b16–20):
The reverse happens in [the theories of] those who claim that a woman also emits semen:
for if uteri emit [seed] outside of them it ends up being the case that they also draw it
back inside, if it is to be mixed with the seed of the male. And such a process would be
in vain, and nature does nothing in vain.
According to Aristotle’s own theory, men deposit their seed in the vaginal canal, where it is
drawn up by the uterus, while females produce their menses in the uterus, where it is needed to
produce embryos; a theory that claims that women ejaculate seed outside of their uterus and
then draw it back up violates Aristotle’s theory of natural teleology by introducing an extra,
unnecessary step into the process of reproduction.
2.4 Women’s Sexual Pleasure As Being “for the Better”

Unsurprisingly, Aristotle’s own, alternative account of the role of female pleasure during con-
ception is teleological in nature (GA II.4, 739a26–35):
Without the emission from the male during sex, then, and without the residue from
women – whether discharged externally or present sufficiently internally – it is impos-
sible to conceive. However, even when the pleasure that usually comes about in them
during such sexual intercourse does not occur, women conceive, as long as the place
happens to be in heat and the uterus has descended within. But, for the most part, it
[i.e., conception] does happen in that way, on account of the [uterine] mouth not being
closed when the discharge – which is usually accompanied by pleasure in men as well as
in women – occurs; and when this is so, this provides an easier passage (euodeitai mal-
lon) for the seed of the male.
In this passage, Aristotle differentiates between what is necessary for conception, namely the
presence of male seed and female menses, and the female uterus being hot and in the right
place, and what is for the better, namely female pleasure during sex, which is accompanied by
a discharge that opens up the cervix (presumably, through the pneuma that is being released
from it),26 and thereby facilitates the entrance of the male seed.27 So, while female pleasure is
not necessary for conception, Aristotle confirms that for the most part conception does in fact
happen when women experience pleasure during sex, thereby narrowly avoiding a complete
devaluation of women’s sexual pleasure while at the same time rejecting the kind of pangenesis
theory of reproduction as recorded in medical treatises available to him.
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From a methodological perspective, it is notable that in rejecting these medical theories, Ar-
istotle never questions the evidence allegedly provided by women about the “facts” concerning
sexual pleasure and erotic dreams. He also never challenges the claim that the uterus is capable
of drawing up fluids from the vaginal canal. As I will further elaborate below, perhaps these fac-
tual claims are too deeply anchored in the expert-reports that are allegedly derived from women
themselves. Rather, Aristotle’s strategy in these highly agonistic chapters is to reinterpret the
significance of these “facts” within his hylomorphic and teleological framework and thereby to
use the evidence presented in the medical texts from which he drew much of this Information
against those medical theories and as witnessing facts for his own theory: thus, the female con-
tributes to reproduction, but her contribution consists of her menses, not of spermatic seed; the
female discharges a fluid as result of pleasure during sex, whether with men or as experienced
in dreams, but this fluid is not spermatic and not necessary for conception (rather it is for the
better and opens up the cervix for male seed to enter more easily); the uterus is capable of draw-
ing up seed deposited in the vaginal canal, but what it draws up is the male seed only, while her
own contribution is produced by nature exactly where it is needed, namely inside of her uterus.
3 Women’s Knowledge of Conception and the Duration of Their Pregnancy
3.1 The Sign for Conception Available to Women

In two of the arguments discussed earlier, Aristotle makes much of the claim that women con-
ceive without experiencing sexual pleasure and experience such pleasure without conceiving –
a fact about which he is, of course, right. However, the claim also seems to presuppose that
women know (at least for the most part) when they conceive, and that they do so perhaps
shortly after having intercourse while recalling the lack or presence of pleasure. Aristotle
indeed – though wrongly so – believes that they do (HA VII.3, 583a14–15; 583a24–26):
There is a sign for conception available to women, namely when immediately after inter-
course the [vaginal] area has become dry. … When it [i.e., the semen] remains inside for
seven days, then clearly conception has happened: for the so called “effluxions”28 occur
during those days.
In this passage, Aristotle appears to treat this sign as one that is familiar to his audience: if the
vaginal canal is dry immediately after sex, that indicates that the uterus must have drawn up
the male seed deposited there, and if it remains inside the uterus during the next seven days,
that indicates that conception is in the works. Indeed, the claim turns out to reflect a common
ancient Greek belief that is especially well-attested in early medical gynecological texts, where
women – or at least the experienced ones – are regularly described as knowing when they con-
ceived after noticing the male seed not falling out or their vaginal canal being dry after inter-
course.29 Take the following example (Hp. Genit.-Nat. Pue. 5, VII.476 Littré = 48.1–10 Joly):
When a woman has intercourse … if she is planning to conceive, then it does not run
out, but the seed remains in her uterus … And if the woman is experienced in giving
birth (tokôn empeiros) and if she notices when the seed does not come out, but remains
inside of her, she will know on which day she has conceived.
Importantly, in a later passage, involving a prostitute in need of medical assistance for an

abortion after noticing that the seed did not fall out of her, this author characterizes this sign
352
as “something that women say to each other” (Hp. Genit.-Nat. Pue. 13, VII.490 Littré =
55.10–11 Joly): it is because the prostitute had learned “these things” from other women and
always paid attention, that she knew she was pregnant when the seed of her customer did not
run out of her. For context, it is important to note, though, that passages like these (and oth-
ers) in which male medical authors go out of their way to emphasize the epistemic authority
of the women-experts – such as midwives, prostitutes, and multigravida – from which they are
(allegedly) drawing their gynecological information mainly serve a rhetorical function, namely
that of magnifying their own appearance as (male) experts concerning gynaikeia, a domain
which belonged traditionally to women alone.30 However, I believe that Aristotle bought into
this rhetoric and that he considered many of the gynecological claims as presented by the
medical writers – and especially those they present as being derived from the verbal reports
of expert women themselves – as credible; he typically accepts such claims as facts, either
straightforwardly or only with modest adjustments.
Indeed, Aristotle’s seemingly straightforward acceptance of this “sign for conception
available to women” is quite problematic, not just because it is empirically mistaken but
also because it fits rather ill with his own theory of reproduction. For among those medi-
cal authors who endorse a pangenetic theory of reproduction, the belief that vaginal dry-
ness after intercourse indicates conception provides indirect support for their view, since
on their view male semen, mixed with female seed, indeed needs to be “sucked up” entirely
by the uterus (which acts “as a doctor’s cupping vessel”) so it can form an embryo there.31
For Aristotle, however, only the male principle – that is, the form-transmitting motions for
which the male semen is merely a vehicle – needs to enter the uterus and operate on the
menses present therein. On Aristotle’s own account there is no need for all semen to enter
the uterus to transmit these motions (some male animals, after all, reproduce without emit-
ting any seed: GA II.4, 738b4–26). And since semen makes no material contribution to
embryogenesis, there is also no need for it to remain inside of the uterus for conception to
occur. Elsewhere Aristotle indeed suggests that since male semen dissolves and evaporates,
“we should therefore not always search for it to come back out” (GA II.3, 737a10–16),
thereby perhaps providing his own, alternative account for the disappearance of seed after
intercourse that preserves the common folk belief about vaginal dryness after intercourse
indicating conception.
Moreover, Aristotle’s characterization of the sign as one available to women is unique in
the History of Animals, which mostly reports signs involving externally observable bodily
features of predominantly female animals, indicating, for instance, their sexual maturity and/
or their fertile window32 to keepers, breeders, and other – presumably male – experts.33 Even
if the sign itself is not an entirely private one (at least in the early medical treatises, digital
examinations of the vaginal canal and cervix are conducted by patients as well as their phy-
sicians),34 Aristotle marks it as belonging properly to the domain – and the authority – of
women themselves.
In what follows, Aristotle identifies several more signs and symptoms that are available
primarily to women and that indicate that they conceived, including a “sensation” (HA VII.3,
583a35: aisthêsis)35 near the flanks and groin in women who are lean, as well as feelings of
“heaviness over their whole body,” headaches, nausea and vomiting, mood-swings, hair-loss
and hair-growth in unexpected places, and flutters and kicks from the developing babies (HA
VII.4, 584a3–9). The intimacy – and empirical accuracy – of Aristotle’s descriptions in these
passages with the female experience of pregnancy is striking, even though, as I suspect, his
main source here may well have been early medical texts and the alleged testimonies of expert
women represented in them.36
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Mariska Leunissen
3.2 Women’s Beliefs about Eight-Month Infants and 11-Month Gestations

Because of the belief that (experienced) women know when they conceived their babies, the
ancients also thought that women generally knew how long they gestated those babies before
giving birth. Two associated beliefs are especially interesting in this context, first, the belief
that women’s gestational periods are variable, ranging from 7–11 (!) months, and, second,
that babies born during the eighth month of gestation always die. From our perspective, both
beliefs involve empirical mistakes, but they appear to have been common lore among women
in Antiquity, where they likely served an important social and cultural role: for the convention
of labeling a stillborn or weakly infant as an eight-month child perhaps provided both protec-
tion and comfort to the mother and midwife, who could have done nothing to save such an
infant, and a way to make sense of this terrible misfortune.37
Perhaps because of their central role in women’s circles, both beliefs are also regularly
reported by early medical writers, who incorporated them within their own numerological
and physiological systems and thereby rationalized and naturalized the superstition about
the eight-month child.38 For instance, one author argues that the seven-month infant is viable
because it has the appropriate numerical proportion to a seven-day period, which is crucial
to human life (a fact he claims to have verified empirically by observing a seven-day-old fetus,
with all the bodily parts already present, which was aborted by a prostitute who has “frequent
experience with these things” and who knew when she got pregnant), while the “one born at
eight months never survives,” presumably because it lacks such a proportionate relationship
to sevens (Hp. Carn. 19, VIII.610–612 Littré = 200.25–202.6 Joly). Another characterizes the
belief explicitly as something women know and that should not be distrusted (Hp. Sept.–Oct.
4, VII.440–442 Littré = 167.3–11 Joly):
You should not distrust (ouk apistein) women about childbirth, for they always say the
same things and they say what they know (haper an eideôsi). For they could not be per-
suaded by either fact or argument to believe anything else but what they know is going
on inside their own bodies. Although it is possible there may be some who wish to assert
something different, in fact [women] who possess judgement and who provide the most
winning words on this argument always will say and claim that they give birth in the
seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month, the tenth month, and the eleventh
month, and that of these [children], those born in the eighth month do not survive, but
that the others do survive.
Aristotle, in his own presentation of the facts concerning women’s pregnancies, follows the
early medical tradition in accepting the epistemic authority of women concerning their belief
about the variability of their gestational periods (HA VII.4, 584a33–584b1),39 though concern-
ing the belief about eight-month babies he adds the following nuance (HA VII.4, 584b6–14):
Regarding the eight-month ones, around Egypt and in certain places where the women
are good at birthing and carry many babies and deliver them with ease, and where the
ones that are born are capable of living, even if they are born with deformities, there
the eight-month ones live and are brought up, whereas in the places around Greece few
survive overall, and the majority die. And because of this assumption (tên hupolêpsin),
even if one survives, the [women] think that [the child] that was born is not an eight-
month one, but that the women had conceived it earlier but that this had escaped their
notice.
354
In this passage, Aristotle draws an ethnographic distinction between women around Egypt
and other places where the women are fertile, carry many babies, and have easy deliveries,
and women around Greece: among the former, the eight-month child is viable and survives,
even if born with deformities, while among the latter, the eight-month child for the most part
dies.40 However, the assumption that eight-month children always die among Greek women
is so strong, Aristotle suggests, that if these infants do survive, as he claims they do on occa-
sion,41 the women believe that they must have missed the actual date of conception and that
the child was a nine-month one. On Aristotle’s account, though, these women were correct
about their knowledge of the date of conception but wrong in their universal belief in the mor-
tality of eight-month children. In this way, Aristotle preserves both the epistemic authority of
women concerning conception and their belief about eight-month infants, while at the same
time marking it as a local phenomenon and one that holds not always but for the most part,
thereby (slightly) improving the conformity of the belief with (alleged) observational data and
the ethnic stereotype about Egyptian women.
Aristotle makes a similar move concerning the (perhaps even more surprising) claim that
some women report to have carried their pregnancies for 11 months (HA VII.4, 584b18–25):
In the same way it is thought to have escaped their notice also when babies appear to be
born later than the eleventh month; for in their case, too, the beginning of the conception
escaped the women’s notice. For often when windy materials (pneumatikôn) occurred
earlier in their uterus, and then later they have intercourse and conceive, they believe
that the former was the beginning of the conception, since it caused them similar signs.
Although Aristotle de facto rejects the claim by these women that they carried their pregnan-
cies for 11 months, he preserves the view that women generally know when they conceive:
the reason why these women did not notice the actual moment of conception is that certain
“windy materials” had entered and inflated their uterus at an earlier time, thereby producing
the same symptoms as occur during early pregnancy and masking the true timing of concep-
tion. The explanation Aristotle provides here for false pregnancies is a curious one and does
not fit easily within his own theory of the role of pneuma in the human body. However,
again, as it turns out, the belief that winds enter wombs and cause wind-pregnancies is a com-
mon one in Antiquity and one that is adopted and physiologically explained in early medical
texts.42 Indeed, I suspect that Aristotle’s rendition of the facts is based on the following medi-
cal account (Hp. Genit.-Nat. Pue. 30, VII.532–534 Littré = 79.4–25 Joly):
But any [women] who believe that the period [of gestation] is more than ten months —
for I have heard this said many times — have been misled in the way I am about to
explain: whenever the uterus takes breath (pneuma) into itself out of the cavity, which
blows wind (phusan) into it, and when it swells up — for this happens — women believe
that they conceived then… Then sometimes the menses break out spontaneously … and
the wind (phusa) exits… But women who are inexperienced with these arguments and
these facts, count their pregnancy from that moment, namely when their menses stopped
flowing out from them and their uterus became raised.
Setting aside the details of Aristotle’s adaptation (or simplification) of this medical explana-
tion, it is worth noting that his account is in fact more generous in its preservation of women’s
epistemic authority concerning conception than his source. For according to Aristotle, the
“windy materials” (whatever their source or nature may be) and true conception similarly
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inflate and raise the uterus, and it is not clear that more experience of either the relevant
“arguments or facts” would have enabled women to identify false pregnancies as is suggested
by the medical author.
4 Conclusion
Aristotle’s gynecological investigations are variegated and manifold, but, as I hope to have
shown in this chapter, there are certain methodological features involving the establishment
of facts that help explain some of his remarkable empirical mistakes about women as well as
some of his relative successes.
One such feature pertains to the agonistic context which frames certain gynecological in-
vestigations as highlighted in Section 2 above. For in contrast with Aristotle’s theory of scien-
tific methodology, which differentiates the fact-establishing phase from the explanation-giving
phase, his scientific practice is often heavily influenced by existing contemporary debates and
controversies about certain topics. This means that decisions about what exactly the facts of
the matter are – such as about the role of women’s sexual pleasure and the nature of her con-
tribution to generation – take place in the context of an agonistic dispute – here with medical
pangenesists – about what the best explanation is. Instead of starting with his own “theory-
independent” reconstruction of the facts, Aristotle starts in GA I.17 and GA II.4 with the
strongest evidence provided by his competitors and establishes his own rendition of the facts
at the same time as he defends his own (allegedly superior) explanation of embryogenesis. In
some cases, the high stakes of this dispute with medical experts drives Aristotle to provide
more careful and more empirically informed statements than those of his competition, but in
other cases, he overstates the evidence. Perhaps this also explains why his research is sloppier
in certain areas: some statements of facts never receive any further scrutiny, because nothing
hangs on their truth.
A second common feature pertains to Aristotle’s frequent reliance on those same medical
writers as sources for gynecological facts: while explicitly disputing their explanations, Aristo-
tle regularly (and silently) adopts their factual accounts, either straightforwardly or only with
slight modifications, but with his own reinterpretation of their significance. And, as I sug-
gested, Aristotle treats as reliable especially those accounts that his medical sources attribute
directly to verbal reports from “expert women,” which include several beliefs that from our
perspective constitute empirical mistakes but that turn out to have been common lore among
women in Antiquity. And, just like his medical sources, Aristotle is inclined to adopt and
rationalize such women’s lore when possible and explain them within his own teleological,
hylomorphic, and hierarchical theory of reproduction, and thereby to preserve the epistemic
authority of women concerning the phenomena related to pregnancy and childbirth.
In sum, for someone who does not know how many teeth women have, Aristotle displays
quite a sophisticated level of familiarity with female sexual anatomy as well as with women’s
unique experiences of pleasure and pain, even if that knowledge was acquired through the
study of early medical texts more than, perhaps, by examining and interviewing women him-
self. In any case, more remains to be said about Aristotle’s views about women and his treat-
ment of gendered knowledge.
Notes
1 APo II.1, 89b23–31; HA I.6, 491a7–13; PA II.1, 646a8–12; IA 1,704b8–11; and GA I.1, 715a1–16.
2 Cael. III.7, 306a5–17; APr I.30, 46a17–27; GC I.2, 316a5–10; and GA III.10, 760b27–33.
356
3 Lennox (2018: 249–251; 266–267).

4 See, e.g., Gotthelf (2012: 374–380) on Aristotle as a “brilliantly sensitive observer.”
5 All translations in this chapter are mine.
6 On Aristotle’s empirical mistakes about women and other female animals, see Mayhew (2004).
7 For Aristotle’s views on the biological imperfections and moral deficiencies of women, see Leunissen
(2017: 139–176).
8 Cf. Connell (2016: 49–50): “He [i.e., Aristotle] could have thought otherwise, and indeed much of
his closer empirical research ought to have indicated to him that the female in nature is the equal in
value to the male.”
9 See, e.g., Nussbaum (1998: 249): “Aristotle said stupid things without looking, despite his evident
genius for looking” and Keuls (1993: 145): “Among the instances of Aristotle’s misogyny parading
as science, the nadir is his statement that women have fewer teeth than men.”
10 See, e.g., Haarig and Kollesch (1977: 125) and Mayhew (2004: 85).
11 See, e.g., Russell (1950: 135–136), who suggests that “Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of
thinking that women have fewer teeth than men by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep
her mouth open while he counted,” thereby reducing “Mrs. Aristotle” (whose name was Pythias) to
an object of study, unable to report herself on the number of teeth present in her own mouth.
12 The Nurse in Euripides’ Hippolytus famously distinguishes between women’s affections that are
“unspeakable” and only shared among women and those sharable with male physicians (Eur. Hip.
293–296). On Aristotle’s presumed limited access to women, see Dean-Jones (1994: 36). Because not
all gynecological facts are accessible to male observers, Aristotle often relies on inferences from signs,
probabilistic reasoning, and other strategies for “making the invisible visible” in his natural scientific
study of women: see Leunissen (2022).
13 Cf. Dean-Jones (2011: 180) and Connell (2016: 85).
14 Cf. GA I.20, 729a11–14; GA II.3, 737a14–16; and GA IV.4, 771b21–27.
15 Cf. GA I.20, 728a11–14.
16 Aristotle rarely mentions medical authors by name and mostly treats them as a collective: see Bartoš
(2021: 46–47).
17 Bartoš (2021); Dean-Jones (1994: 19–20); and Van der Eijk (1999).
18 In GA. I.20, 728a9–14 Aristotle specifies that sexual pleasure is due to the release of pneuma.
19 Hanson (1990: 314–316) and Dean-Jones (1992: 83).
20 Cf. HA X.5, 636b15–17.
21 Cf. Dean-Jones (1992: 84).
22 Hanson (1990: 324n.72).
23 Dean-Jones (2011).
24 See HA X.2, 634b26–33; HA X.3, 635a32–5; HA X.5, 636b25–31; HA X.6, 637b24–30; and HA
X.7, 638a5–10 quoted below.
25 HA X.7, 638a18–638b14; cf. GA IV.7, 775b25–776a8.
26 See GA II.4, 737b27–738a6; GA II.4, 739b2–14; and GA III.1, 750b34–751a2.
27 For the teleological distinction between what is “necessary” and what is “for the better,” see Leunis-
sen (2010: 89–91).
28 On “effluxions” vs. miscarriages, see HA VII.3, 583b9–12 and Hp. Sept-Oct. 9, VII.446–450 Littré =
170.11–172.13 Joly.
29 On this sign, see Dean-Jones (1995: 46–47); Hanson (1987: 592, 597–599); Lonie (1981: 161). For
the distinction between experienced and inexperienced women in early medical texts, see Hanson
(1990: 309–310).
30 Craik (2015: 116); Hanson (1992: 34); King (1995: 206); Lonie (1981: 160–161).
31 Hanson (1990: 328) and (1992: 39).
32 See, e.g., HA V.14, 544b22–545a14 and HA VI.18, 572b32–573a3.
33 See HA VI.20, 574b14–18 and the many signs listed in HA IV.18–19, indicating when domesticated
animals are ready for breeding.
34 Dean-Jones (1995: 42–43 with n.8, and 50)
35 Cf. Dean-Jones (1995: 52) with Hp. VM 9, I.588–590 Littré = 128.12–13 Jouanna: “You will find no
[other] criterion…but the sensation of the body.”
36 I develop this argument further in Leunissen (forthcoming).
37 Hanson (1987: 600–602).
38 Hanson (1987: 591–592).
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Mariska Leunissen
39 Cf. Connell (2016: 85).

40 Aristotle explains this ethnographic distinction by reference to the fertility and abundance of food
available in the area around the Nile generally (Fr. 258 Rose, CMG VI.2, 2.99–100) and by reference
to differences in the way of lives between the women around Egypt, whose lives are characterized by
hard physical labor, and the women around Greece, whose lives are sedentary (HA VII.9, 586b35–
587a5 and GA IV.6, 775a28–b17).
41 Cf. also GA IV.3, 772b6–10.
42 Lonie (1981: 247).
References
Bartoš, H. (2021) “Aristotle’s Biology and Early Medicine,” in S. M. Connell (ed.) Cambridge Compan-
ion to Aristotle’s Biology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 46–63.
Bourbon, F. (2008) Hippocrate, Nat. Mul., CUF 12.1. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Connell, S. M. (2016) Aristotle on Female Animals: A Study of the Generation of Animals, Cambridge:
Craik, E. M. (2015) The Hippocratic Corpus, Content, and Context, London: Routledge.
Dean-Jones, L. A. (1992) “The Politics of Pleasure: Female Sexual Appetite in the Hippocratic Corpus,”
Helios 19: 72–91.
Dean-Jones, L. A. (1994) Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dean-Jones, L. A. (1995) “Autopsia, Historia, and What Women Know: The Authority of Women in
Hippocratic Gynaecology,” in D. Bates (ed.) Knowledge and Scholarly Medical Traditions: A Com-
parative Study, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 41–58.
Dean-Jones, L. A. (2011) “Clinical Gynecology and Aristotle’s Biology: The Composition of HA X,”
Apeiron 45.2: 180–199.
Gotthelf, A. (2012) Teleology, First Principles and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Biology, Oxford:
Haarig, G. and J. Kollesch. (1977) “Neue Tendenzen in der Forschung zur Geschichte der Antiken Medi-
zin und Wissenschaft,” Philologus 121.1: 114–136.
Hanson, A. E. (1987) “The Eight Months’ Child and the Etiquette of Birth: Obsit Omen!” Bulletin of
the History of Medicine 61.4: 589–602.
Hanson, A. E. (1990) “The Medical Writers’ Woman,” in F. I. Zeitlin, J. J. Winkler, and D. M. Halperin
(eds.) Before Sexuality, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 309–337.
Hanson, A. E. (1992) “Conception, Gestation, and the Origin of Female Nature in the ‘Corpus Hippo-
craticum,’” Helios 19.1–2: 31–71.
Joly, R. (1970) Hippocrate Genit., Nat. Pue., Morb. 4, Oct., CUF 11. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Joly, R. (1978) Hippocrate Loc. Hom., Gland., Fist., Haem., Vid. Ac., Carn., Dent., CUF 13. Paris: Les
Belles Lettres.
Jouanna, J. (1990) Hippocrate VM, CUF 2.1. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Keuls, E. C. (1993) The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens, Berkeley and Los Ange-
les: University of California Press.
King, Helen. (1995) “Medical Texts as a Source For Women’s History,” in A. Powell (ed.) The Greek
World, London: Routledge, 199–218.
Lennox, J. G. (2018) “Aristotle, Dissection, and Generation: Experience, Expertise, and the Practices of
Knowing,” in A. Falcon and D. Lefebvre (eds.) Aristotle’s Generation of Animals: A Critical Guide,
Leunissen, M. (2010) Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle’s Science of Nature, Cambridge: Cam-
Leunissen, M. (2017) From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Leunissen, M. (2022) “Aristotle’s Method for Establishing Facts Concerning the Female Menses in GA
I.19–22,” in S. Föllinger (ed.) Aristotle’s Generation of Animals, A Comprehensive Approach, Phi-
losophie der Antieke vol. 43, Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 123–145.
Leunissen, M. (forthcoming) Facts, Evidence, and Early Medicine in Aristotle’s Natural Scientific Study
of Women.
Littré, E. (1839–1861) Oeuvres Completes d’ Hippocrate, Paris: J. B. Baillière.
358
Lonie, I. M. (1981) The Hippocratic Treatises “On Generation,” “On the Nature of the Child,” “Dis-
eases IV,” Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Mayhew, R. (2004) The Female in Aristotle’s Biology: Reason or Rationalization, Chicago, IL: Univer-
Nussbaum, M. (1998) “Aristotle, Feminism, and Needs for Functioning,” in C. Freeland (ed.) Feminist
Interpretations of Aristotle, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 248–259.
Russell, B. (1950) Unpopular Essays, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.
Van der Eijk, P. J. (1999) “On Sterility (‘HA X’): A Medical Work by Aristotle?” The Classical Quarterly
49.2: 490–502.
Further Reading
For a comprehensive analysis of Aristotle’s biological understanding of female animals, see S. M. Connell
(2016) Aristotle on Female Animals: A Study of the Generation of Animals, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
For a succinct discussion of Aristotle’s views about women, see S. M. Connell (2021) Aristotle on Women
(Elements in Ancient Philosophy), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
For recent, wide-ranging discussion of Aristotle’s views about women, see M. Deslauriers (2022) Aristo-
tle on Sexual Difference, Metaphysics, Biology, Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
For an excellent discussion of the importance of the maternal bond in Aristotle’s politics, see S. Brill
(2020) Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
359
24
ARISTOTLE’S HYLOMORPHISM
RECONSIDERED THROUGH
ARISTOTLE’S ACCOUNT OF
GENERATION
Adriel M. Trott
1 Introduction: Aristotle’s Hylomorphic Substance and the Question

of Normativity
Aristotle’s theoretical project aims to understand being, or what-most-is. To reach this under-
standing, he has to determine what most counts as being and concludes that substance, ousia,
does because it exists independently, on its own, as it were (Metaphysics, VII.1, 1028a13–15).
In Physics II, Aristotle lists the four causes that we seek in order to know natural substances:
first, that out of which a thing comes to be which persists; second, “the form or the archetype,
ie. the definition of the essence,” third, the source of change or rest, which we call the mov-
ing or the efficient cause, and fourth, that for the sake of which a thing is done, or the final
cause (Physics, II.3, 194b23–32). Later in Physics II.7, Aristotle explains that the form, the
moving cause, and the final cause coincide in natural substances “for the what and that for
the sake of which are one, while the primary source of motion is the same in species as these”
(198a25–26). What we call Aristotle’s hylomorphism is the notion that natural substance is
constituted of formal and material causes.
Scholars debate whether Aristotle’s Metaphysics and his other theoretical texts concerned
with principles of what is consider hylomorphic natural substances – substances comprised
of matter, hylē, and form, morphē – primary substances at all (see Frede 1985: 25; Graham
1987: 279–280; Whiting 1991: 615 for the view that the Metaphysics is a break from Aristo-
tle’s earlier consideration of natural beings in the Categories and Kosman 2013 and Gill 2018
for the view that the Metaphysics are very much concerned with hylomorphic substances).
Given that Aristotle explicitly references natural substances as substances in Metaphysics
VII.2 (1028b26–31, 1029a34), throughout Metaphysics VIII, and in Physics II.1 (192b33),
I side with those who argue that Aristotle includes natural substances as primary substances
in what is considered his later theoretical work.
A simple way to think about form is shape, but that’s not quite right. Form is not simply
an arrangement of matter, but the force or power in a natural being that organizes it to be
what it is, what he elsewhere calls soul (Physics, II.1, 193a9–10, Kosman 1987: 368–370).
In De Anima II.1, Aristotle says, “Hence the soul must be substance in the sense of the
form of a natural body having life potentially within it” (412a20–1). Aristotle describes
the soul as what organizes the body and as the actuality of the body (412a29, 5). As soul
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-27 360

Aristotle’s Hylomorphism
in natural substance, form is an active ongoing project of making the substance be what it
is. In Physics II.1, Aristotle identifies the form with nature, rather than matter, “for a thing
is more properly said to be what it is when it exists in actuality than when it exists poten-
tially” (193b7–8). Afterall, form is the “definition of the essence.” For this reason, Aristotle
equates substance with essence, both in his list of four causes in his Metaphysics: “for the
‘why’ is referred finally to the formula, and the ultimate ‘why’ is a cause and principle”
(I.3, 983a28–9) and when he aims to determine the best way to understand substance in
that text (Metaphysics, VII.4 and 6). The form makes the substance what it is, “the char-
acteristic activity” (Liske 2003: 89), the formula that answers the question what it is for a
thing to be.
What does this make of matter? Matter seems to have a positive role to play: it is that “out
of which a thing comes to be and which persists” (Physics, II.3, 194b24). Here Aristotle refers
to his conception of a substratum, which enables him to explain how change is possible. Since
something cannot come to be from nothing, something must last through the change (Phys-
ics, I.7) – that something is matter. On the most basic level, this something seems to be the
elements with which the Pre-Socratics were concerned. The elements – fire, water, earth, and
air – had specific unique characteristics or power that contributed to what they were capa-
ble of forming. And yet, matter seems like a placeholder, some basic stuff that has no power
or identity of its own other than as what is capable of taking on the meaning, definition, or
organization the form brings. Matter is explicitly associated with potentiality, and existence
more associated with actuality, where the status of being is privileged over becoming (Physics,
II.1, 193b7–8). Insofar as matter has a role or a power, this power depends on how form has
construed it to be the proper matter for the form.
Aristotle explicitly associates the apparently asymmetrical relationship of form and matter
with gender in Generation of Animals. He writes that “what the male (to arren) contributes
to generation is the form and principle of movement (to te eidos kai tēn archēn tēs kinēsiōs),
while the female (to thēlu) contributes the body and the matter (to sōma kai tēn hylēn) (GA,
I.20, 729a10–12).” The male semen brings the form to the new fetation and the female menses
(katamenia) contributes the material (GA, II.1, 733b18–22, II.4, 738b20–1). In this process,
the residue from nutrition in both the male and female produces extra blood which male and
female separately work up into a further substance through a heating process of concoction
(GA, I.18, 725a11–12, II.4, 738a23–b4, IV.1, 765b9–20). The male can get hotter than the
female so the male’s residue becomes semen and the female’s residue becomes menses. When
they copulate, the semen encounters the menses and brings the form to the female’s material
to create the new being.
To the extent that Aristotle privileges form over matter in his ontological framework by
making form what most is – given that the project is to identify and know what most is – he
seems to explicitly subordinate matter, which is less fully being, perhaps only merely poten-
tially being. And by privileging form and associating it with the male, Aristotle seems to write
a gender hierarchy into his metaphysics. Form and thus the male is most what is and what
makes what most is be, while matter and thus the female is only potentially and thus depend-
ent on form to approach full existence.
In this chapter, I address feminist concerns that Aristotle’s hylomorphism is normative be-
cause it values form above matter by arguing that the working of form in generation depends
on material power. After articulating the craft model of nature where form masters matter
that serves the normative framework, I present a conception of nature in which seminal form
works in and through material elemental forces rather than imposing itself on them. I illustrate
how this works in Aristotle’s treatment of form in animal generation.
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2 Two Feminist Readings of Aristotle’s Hylomorphism

Scholars disagree over whether Aristotle is sexist for making the male form and female matter
and whether form itself is male and matter female, or if it is only that the male’s contribution
is form and the female animal’s matter (for the first debate, see Tress 1992, and more recently
Connell 2016, for the latter, see Deslauriers 1998). These debates consider whether Aristotle’s
theory of generation is sexist. This chapter addresses what I consider to be a more devastating
critique for Aristotle’s metaphysical project: the view that Aristotle’s gender problems do not
stop in the biology but rather pervade his metaphysical system. This critique holds that not
only does form take on characteristics associated with male and masculinity and matter those
associated with female and femininity, but also the hierarchy of male over female is traced in
the relationship of form to matter.
Charlotte Witt notes that while we assume theories about the basic structure of reality –
metaphysics – are value-free, feminists have argued that gender and the normative associa-
tions of gender appear in Aristotle’s hylomorphism as well as his theory of reproduction (Witt
1998: 118). Witt suggests that Aristotle’s theory of hylomorphism emphasizes the normative
structure of the natural world with which Aristotle associates the gender views of his society
(1998: 121). Witt does not maintain that reality is gendered, but that Aristotle’s functional
concept of form and teleological view of metaphysics, which value what achieves the end over
what is in the service of that end, are readily put in service of valuing and organizing social
and political life (121). Indeed, while men and women are both hylomorphic substances, the
functional concept of form does not merely call on form to describe substance, but names
form the cause that actualizes a substance and enables it to fulfill its function. Since a thing is
defined by its function and form achieves its function, form defines what it is. Within A ristotle’s
teleological framework, the end is the good of a thing, and thus to achieve the end is to most
achieve the good of a thing. As Witt puts it, “Normativity enters the realm of hylomorphism
once we realize that form and matter are related to one another teleologically” (128). Matter
exists for the sake of form, Aristotle explains in Metaphysics IX (8, 1050a15). The r ealization
of a form in nature is the realization of a good because the form is the end or good of a
being. The actuality is better than the potentiality (IX.9, 1051a4–15), and “soul is better
than body, and a thing which has soul in it is better than one which has not” (GA, II.1,
731b28–9). Even if, as Mariska Leunissen convincingly argues, material necessity plays a role
in Aristotle’s description of natural phenomena, it cannot achieve the regularity that teleology
secures (Leunissen 2010: 34–43). Witt concludes that Aristotle’s hylomorphism is normative
because form describes what an entity ought to do; it is an end and a good; and it is prior to
and better than matter (Witt 1998: 128). This normative structure finds its way into Aristotle’s
arguments about political life because Aristotle is ushering into his practical philosophy the
normative structure he finds in the natural world.
Emanuela Bianchi binds the normativity in Aristotle’s hylomorphism even more tightly to
gender inequality, arguing that Aristotle’s conception of matter reflects ancient Greek, Aristo-
telian and contemporary conceptions of the feminine, in a way that shows how we are heirs to
Aristotle’s metaphysical gender framework. Bianchi writes, “Matter…is the passive feminine
recipient of any given form” (2014: 27) in a way that reflects Simone de Beauvoir’s observa-
tions that woman is determined relative to man and man is determined solely with regards to
himself (Beauvoir 2012: 6). Aristotle equates matter with the substrate in Physics I.7 that per-
sists through natural change, which enables matter, as Bianchi puts it, “to admit privation and
thereby undergo change” and it is this capacity that makes change possible, though it cannot
exist on its own, without form (2014: 189). Bianchi concludes, “What is important here is that
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matter is not the opposite of form; rather it is the privation which matter encompasses, the ab-
sences which it is somehow able to incorporate, that stands in that place” (2014: 189). Bianchi
further notes that this sense of privation binds matter to form in the sense of form’s dunamis:
Understanding matter as dunamis shackles it necessarily to energeia as the realization

or actualization of a potential for a specific form, but it is as the site of privation that
matter provides the possibility of becoming anything at all, not merely becoming some
determinate thing…teleologically predetermined.
(2014: 189)
For Bianchi, matter as potential does not just depend on form to become the specific substance
that form actualizes, but to become anything! Matter’s potential cannot explain what comes
to be, only form’s can.
Aristotle’s Metaphysics describes form as the source of meaning-giving, the primary cause
(I.3, 983a26–29), the cause that defines the substance (VII.10, 1035a7–8, VII.11, 1037a34–
1037b2), the cause that is soul and thus is primary substance (VII.10, 1037a5), as activity,
what is prior in account and substance to potentiality or form (IX.8, 1049b4–10, see also
Physics, II.1, 192b21–2). In Physics I.9, Aristotle writes: “What desires the form is matter, as
the female desires the male and the ugly the beautiful…” (192a22–3). These passages highlight
the problem feminist critics of Aristotle’s metaphysics raise: Aristotle does not simply associate
male with form and female with matter, but his hylomorphism privileges form over matter and
thus either lends itself to support or reflects a gendered hierarchical schema in his biological
and practical works. This normative view of hylomorphism seems to make its way explicitly
into Aristotle’s account of male and female when in Generation of Animals Aristotle writes,
And as the proximate motive cause, to which belong the logos and the Form, is bet-
ter and more divine in its nature than the Matter, it is better also that the superior one
should be separate from the inferior one.
(GA, II.1, 732a4–7)
This schema is held responsible for our thinking about the world in terms that divide between
active and passive social positions, between ruling principles and ruled, and between those
more associated with mind and those more associated with body, binaries wherein the first
part is associated with male and the second with the female.
Sophia M. Connell rejects the view that Aristotle offers a rigid system that establishes mu-
tually exclusive hierarchical categories which serve to justify the political superiority of men
throughout history (2016: 20). Connell argues that Aristotle’s treatment of male and female is
not of a positive and privative binary, but rather complementary capacities; in fact, males can-
not do what females can (2016: 22–23). Moreover, Aristotle acknowledges hermaphroditic
animals that include the male and the female in the same body (2016: 24). Connell argues
that Aristotle does not ground his arguments about the place of women in political life in
biological arguments, and that the association of male with form and female with matter does
not do the work of associating men with reason and women with emotion or irrationality
because Aristotle does not think any individual substance such as the female animal could be
matter, nor that women lack autonomy (2016: 27–28). Connell makes a strong case, but her
focus is on what Aristotle’s system means for what he explicitly says about men and women in
ethical and political life. Witt and Bianchi’s concerns focus on how the normative structuring
of the theoretical framework justifies and underwrites ways of ordering the world that first
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associates men with formal capacities and women with material capacities and then privileges
the formal over the material. To the extent that Aristotle’s hylomorphism is understood to en-
tail this mutual exclusivity and to value the form over matter, it leaves itself open to the charge
of legitimating if not reflecting a hierarchically gendered world.
3 The Gendered Hierarchy Reading of Aristotle’s Hylomorphism

Witt argues that the chief normative aspects of Aristotle’s metaphysical framework are the
functional view of form and the teleological principle. Bianchi focuses on the conception of
matter as passive potentiality and privation of form and argues further that Aristotle’s cosmos
itself appears gendered (Bianchi 2014: 148–160). Form is superior and takes on characteristics
socially associated with men – giving shape to the world, being constant; matter is inferior
in ways socially associated with women – lacking self-control and hence in need of definition
and boundaries, lacking its own character, eager to be acted upon and activated by something
above and beyond it, errant. For both, form is prior ontologically and by definition, even if
natural form is always already enmattered.
Form is considered better than matter because it contributes more than matter does to the
natural substance being what it is and achieving its function, even if matter is always already
enformed in natural substance. The enmattering of form does not detract from form’s episte-
mological and ontological priority, that is, its priority in definition and in being. As Liske puts
its, “A fortiori, form is irreducible to matter not only epistemologically, but also ontologi-
cally,” and later, “Matter, being as such absolutely indeterminate, cannot explain anything at
all” (2003: 91, 97). The enforming of matter does not enhance its subservient and privative
role in relation to form (see Frede and Patzig as described by Whiting 1991: 628 for the view
that natural substance always includes matter in what it is).
This view can sustain various conceptions of form and of material, but ultimately, it re-
sults in leaving material without any distinct power of its own. Even if one does not hold the
conception of prime matter (though arguments continue to be made in its defense: Studtmann
2006, whose view of prime matter as extension, but not prime matter altogether in Aristotle,
is opposed by Krizan 2016), the notion that all matter is already enformed, that existing mat-
ter only comes to appear through the work of form, nonetheless supports this normative and
gendered view of metaphysics. Even the conception of matter as hypothetical necessity from
Physics II.9, where matter needs to be of a certain sort in order to be the material for a specific
substance, requires form to have already organized material to a certain degree in order for it
to appear as appropriate for a substance.
Whether one affirms the substantial being of hylomorphic beings or associates substance
fundamentally with form, whether species form or individual form, a view which seems to
make hylomorphic substance only derivatively substance, nature seems to follow an artifice
(technē) model.1 On Witt’s account, form shapes matter to its function, making matter de-
pendent on form to contribute to the function. Explicitly turning to Aristotle’s account of
generation, Bianchi argues that when Aristotle calls katamenia “protē hulē,” first matter (GA,
I.21, 729a32–3), he construes the female contribution as this metaphysical principle of prime
matter (2014: 56–57). Bianchi explicitly conceives of the scene of natural generation as akin to
a model of technē where male form exists separately from female matter and is imposed upon
it in order to form the new hylomorphic substance:
The principle of motion is supplied from outside, and then the potential, the dunamis
s ecreted in the machinery by technical wizardry, is activated or actualized as a result of
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an interaction between this archē and this dunamis…This matter, called protē hulē—
with the implication that it is devoid of all motion, all principle, all form (as far as that is
possible), and all logos—is now imagined to harbor extensive powers akin to those en-
crypted within the complex structure of automatic puppets: the result of great technical
skill and extensive labor. That protē hulē should contain the potential for the complex
chain of development leading to the generation and growth of all the parts of animals is
indeed miraculous, though perhaps all that is meant by such potential is that this matter
is “appropriate for” embryogenesis in a way that, say, wood is not.
(2014: 75)
Here Bianchi speaks explicitly to an external motion that activates a potential in the matter,
and the possibility that the potential consists only in being appropriate for this new being.
These conceptions view generation in terms of a separate form and prime matter, construing
Aristotle’s metaphysical framework to involve something like species or separate form that
acts on matter whose only ability to contribute to form follows from work form has already
done at a lower level to make it appropriate.
Aristotle routinely analogizes to craft, so this interpretation is understandable. As Mariska
Leunissen explains, “[I]n both processes [nature and craft], the efficient cause starts out as op-
erating from the outside, but in natural generation it ultimately becomes internal to the genera-
tive process as the animal’s soul” (2011: 30). Leunissen addresses the ways Aristotle describes
nature as a tinkering craftsperson, and not just a craftsperson who knows automatically what
to do (2011: 31) and interestingly describes this shift as accommodating the available mate-
rial in a way that recognizes the role of material in affecting shifts in form. Nonetheless, the
overall tendency to see natural generation as sharing with craft production an efficient cause
which operates externally, even when the eventual internalization is acknowledged, facilitates
the distinction between form and matter where form exists outside and distinct from matter
and causes new substance by shaping the matter, even if it has had to shift what that substance
will be because the ideal matter is not available.
Such a view entails a problem of how matter and form are unified, an essential characteris-
tic of substance (Kosman 2013). In objects of craft, the shape seems unified to the matter more
like the unity of an attribute to substance than of the substance itself, as Aristotle maintains
substance must be (Metaphysics, IV.1, 1003b32–3, VII.11, 1036b26–7, 1037b1–7) to the
extent that it comes from the outside, rather than emerging in a process that enables unity.
The artifice model brings over from the bronze statue, where the bronze can be distinguished
from the shape of the statue because statues can be found in other materials, the easy division
between form and matter in natural substance. While Witt rejects the view that natural sub-
stances and artifacts are “radically dissimilar” (2015: 107), I defend the dissimilarity by show-
ing explicitly how the craft analogy is a disanalogy for Aristotle (Trott 2014, 2019; see also
Koslicki 1997). Witt argues that the craft analogy is not simply a heuristic – why should we
think a bed could be more familiar than a goat? ((2015: 111–112). But Aristotle both makes
the case that differences in material produce different functions (again, see Koslicki 1997) and
explicitly speaks to how the division between form and matter is easier to determine in the
artifact than in the natural substance (Metaphysics, VII.11, 1036a31–1036b7).
The species form view – that form is the universal all members of a species share – most
clearly indicates an artifice model of natural substance: substance comes to be from species
form instantiating itself in material. Species form satisfies the requirement that what is know-
able be universal (Metaphysics, VII.15, 1040a2–7, XIII.10, 1087a10–13) insofar as only a
universal view of form that equates form with substance will permit substance to be knowable
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(Whiting 1991: 610; Scaltsas 1993: 125). The tode ti, the “this something” that substance is,
would then be the species form. But if species form is the tode ti to which Aristotle refers then
it would not fulfill the other criteria of substances that they be indivisible and separable. And
if it does, if species form itself is indivisible and separable, then it is not unified with material
and so fails to have the unity that characterizes natural substance.
One way to address how form and matter become unified – a necessary feature of natural
substance – while implying a separation the artifice model requires – is to argue that forms
are themselves material. This view gives more status to matter than the view that individual
form causes different material stuff because it elevates material’s role by making form matter
while still explaining how form individuates. If matter is a part of form, then form is sufficient
for the principle of individuation (Whiting 1986: 371–372). This case draws on Aristotle’s ac-
count of soul in De Anima 414a20–22 as not being without a body (Cohoe 2020). The mate-
rial body thus contributes to how forms can be one in movement and indivisible in place and
time. As Whiting develops this interpretation, individual forms of natural substances are es-
sentially enmattered. Such an interpretation strengthens the case for taking individual forms as
independent in the way required for them to be primary substances (Whiting 1991: 610, 621,
625). But notice how material is elevated by being associated with form – form is still valued
as what more is and matter achieves more value by being more closely associated with form.
Aristotle seems to explicitly say that form works on material in natural generation, specifi-
cally in animal generation where the form in semen acts directly on the menses to animate
the new fetation. Witt’s argument for functional form and for a teleological framework in
Aristotle shows how form can be construed as the efficient cause, the maker, that works on the
matter and makes the matter good by making potential actual. Bianchi argues that this model
involves form “mastering” the material, shaping it to become the product (2014: 204–209,
216–218).
4 View of Aristotle’s Metaphysical Framework that Does Not Support

that Hierarchy
To the extent that form is functional because it contributes most to the end and thus fulfills
the teleological framework and that Aristotle deems the end superior to what does not achieve
its end, Aristotle’s hylomorphism seems to structure the world normatively, so that the formal
principle is better than the material principle. Since Aristotle explicitly maps form to male and
matter to female, this account lends itself to supporting a gendered hierarchy and perhaps even
reflects a gendered hierarchy of the cosmos. If form does the work to achieve the function,
then material is both determined by form and functional only due to form. If matter not only
supports but also enables form’s power then this hierarchy that depends on a strict distinction
might not so easily stand. I argue in this section for a more thoroughgoing hylomorphism in
Aristotle wherein form works with material to fulfill its formal work. In the final section, I
illustrate this co-reliance and commingling of form with matter by showing how semen comes
to have power such that it depends on matter. I follow the view that form is always enmat-
tered, immanent to and causal of substance (Witt 1989), and that matter at its most basic level
of elemental powers has specific power and character that is not yet determined by form (see
GC, II.4, 331a26–b3, Trott 2019).
Aristotle distinguishes nature from art when he writes, “nature in the sense of a coming-to-
be proceeds towards nature. For it is not like doctoring, which leads not to the art of doctoring
but to health” (Physics, II.1, 193b13–14). Nature leads to nature and what it leads to in turn
is at work in bringing further nature to be. Nature is different from craft because nature is
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simultaneously the origin, the process of generation, and the goal; in artifice, the craftsperson
is separate and different from the created work, and the process of production is separate from
what is produced. While nature aims toward itself, artifice aims to something beyond itself,
outside of its generative activity. Because of this separation of the efficient cause of the artist
from the formal cause in the artifact, the maker can be seen to impose form from outside the
artifact onto it, in a mastering structure, which is why artifacts lack intrinsic ends. By intrinsic
ends, I mean not that they lack a proper end determined by need or use (contra Witt 2015),
which they clearly have, but that such an end comes from the artifact being made for a use
and being used by something outside of it; thus, it is not self-grounding and self-organizing. By
contrast, the essence of a natural being actively works on bringing itself to its end, in the sense
of its activity. In Metaphysics V.4, where Aristotle defines nature, he refers to all of these ways
of considering nature, which I would argue are each at work at once: the “genesis of growing
things,” that “from which its growth proceeds,” “the source from which the primary move-
ment in each natural object,” “the primary matter,” and “the substance of natural objects”
(Metaphysics, V.4, 1014b16–36). Aristotle’s reasons for why nature “in the primary and strict
sense is the substance of things which have in themselves, as such, a source of movement”
is that the matter is called nature because it can receive the movement and the “processes of
becoming and growing are called nature because they are movements proceeding from this”
and that “nature in this sense is the source of the movement of natural objects” (Metaphys-
ics, V.4, 1015a13–19). Aristotle’s focus on natural beings as those which have a source of
movement within themselves does not just mean locomotion, but the movement that moves a
natural being to fulfill its end (Trott 2019: 36–40). Such a conception of nature joins nature as
origin, process, and that which is formed, not as something separate from the forming, since
the natural form actively works on bringing itself into its end.
Marking the difference by whether the cause is external or internal alone construes natural
change as fundamentally the work of the efficient cause (Leunissen 2010: 22). The efficient
cause joins the matter to form in artifice, where the form of the efficient cause is distinct from
that which is created. In natural generation, where the form of the efficient cause is akin to the
form of the offspring, the efficient cause works less as an external shaper whose job is finished
when the shape is achieved, and more like the organizing principle that characterizes the for-
mal cause of the new being. In his extended case for what nature is in Physics II.1, Aristotle
defines things constituted by physis, nature, as that which “has within itself a principle of mo-
tion (archē kineseōs) and rest” (192b13–14). Aristotle responds to those who think of nature
in terms of “that immediate constituent of it which taken by itself is without arrangement,
e.g. the wood is the nature of the bed, and the bronze the nature of the statue” (193a10–12).
Aristotle uses examples of material of artifice to explain his opponent’s view, which leads to
the interpretation that what is rejected here is the role of matter. But in what follows, Aristotle
rejects the artifice view of what matter is. Antiphon argues that nature is matter, because if
you plant a bed and it could reproduce, the wood would generate, not the shape of the bed
(193a13–15). Like Aristotle, Antiphon defines nature in terms of that within it which has
the power to generate. Antiphon takes the artifact, in the form of the bed, to be the model of
nature. He views form as an incidental arrangement of material, and misses the underlying
insight of his analogy, which is that nature is what comes to be from within itself, rather than
as a result of a form imposed on it by someone akin to the bedmaker. In the bed, the form or
arrangement is incidentally unified with matter, such that if the bed was able to decompose its
form would disintegrate.
Against privileging the efficient cause as the chief way to understand nature, Aristotle’s cri-
tique of Antiphon illuminates the sense in which nature’s tendency to move to generate is from
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an active work of form from within the substance. Form is not just the arrangement of matter,
which the craftsperson arranges. The efficient cause of the natural substance has a form akin
to what it generates. This form works on actualizing the natural being to do the work of or-
ganizing itself, since form’s own work is to actualize a being in its proper activity or function
(see Austin 2020: 116). Aristotle concludes, “The form indeed is nature rather than the mat-
ter; for a thing is more properly said to be what it is when it exists in actuality than when it
exists potentially” (Physics, II.1, 193b6–8). The reason that the wood, not the bed, emerges, is
that the part of the bed that is natural – the wood – is what is capable of moving from within
itself to fulfill itself, by contrast to the bed, whose form in the mind of the bedmaker is separate
from the bed and not actively making the bed be a bed. The form of the bed does not work on
making the bed be a bed the way that the form of the human works on making the human a
human. This self-organizing work of form is the actualizing work that connects it to its end,
and not simply the moving cause that sets it in motion. When Aristotle speaks of the coinci-
dence of the formal, efficient, and final cause in natural beings in Physics II.7 (198a24–27),
he does so, I maintain, because the moving cause becomes the work of the form to fulfill the
natural substance in a way that is unique to natural substance. Natural substance’s internal
principle of self-organizing points to the unity of the natural substance that Aristotle affirms,
by contrast to materialists, who as Leunissen argues, don’t just reduce animals and plants to
their material elements but deny that more complex beings are substances at all (Leunissen
2010: 24). In my view, the focus on the efficient cause as the primary sense of nature does not
achieve the unity on which Aristotle insists against these materialist views (Broadie 1982: 37).
What is importantly rejected in Antiphon’s account is the view that form and matter are
related as they are in artificial objects, where the form is incidentally united to the material,
where both form and material are inert and the efficient cause is the source of the unity. The
Milesian view of substance as what most underlies in the sense of the material that remains
when all shape is removed is the conception of matter Aristotle describes in Metaphysics VII.3
as what most underlies. Aristotle is investigating the hypocheimenon, what underlies, as a can-
didate for substance, “For the primary underlying subject seems most of all to be substance”
(1029a1–2). But instead of presenting his own view, he is referring to “those who investigate
in this way” (1029a19, 26–27), when he refers to the view of matter as what exists when
“length, breadth, and depth are stripped away,” at which point “we see nothing left” except
what is given definition by length, breadth, and depth, which is to say, matter “for those who
investigate in this way.” Aristotle explains what he means by matter in this passage to be “that
which, intrinsically, is neither said to be a something, nor a quantity, nor anything else by
which being is given definition” (1029a20–1). Aristotle is not rejecting the view that matter is
substance because matter is what exists when length, breadth, and depth are stripped away,
but rather that substance is such an underlying subject (Gill 1989: 25–37).2 Substance is an
underlying subject, but not that kind. Substance turns out to be what underlies other ways in
which being is said because it is what is separable and a “this something” (1029a28). People
who think of matter as that kind of underlying thing are wrong to think that is what substance
is. No claim is made about whether they are right to think that is what matter is, though Ar-
istotle has distanced himself from them.
Whether Aristotle has a conception of prime matter remains open to debate (Scharle 2009;
Trott 2019). The focus on the efficient cause lends itself to a view of generation wherein a maker
shapes matter, which is more conducive to a conception of prime matter, if that means material
that has no relation to form. Daniel W. Graham distinguishes between the conception of matter
as some basic stuff, which Aristotle’s predecessors clearly had, and the conception of matter
as the metaphysical concept of a substratum, which was Aristotle’s innovation (1987: 154).
368
I suggest that Aristotle’s metaphysical concept of material as a substratum includes a sense of

the conception of matter as basic stuff that has a specific character in every instance. Aristotle
uses occasions of elemental change to describe the capacities of different materials in terms
of the material’s power itself. Having considered the possibility that all things come from
the same primary things or have the same starting point, Aristotle examines how different
materials have their own capacities – phlegm and bile, for example, in Metaphysics, VIII.4,
1044a15–32. Aristotle emphasizes the importance of the material being different for different
purposes, and that this difference is not due to the work of form to make the material into
some further organized being, but to some power of the elements (see also GC II.3).
The problem that the artifice model of nature confronts is that, in making the cause of the
unity of form and matter outside of and different from the entity’s form and matter, it struggles
to show how they are unified. If form and matter are wholly other than one another, how they
can be joined in such a way that makes the natural substance fully unified and independent
remains unclear. But if form itself is already integrated with matter then it can work on mat-
ter through its material power. Natural form joins the efficient cause to the actualizing and
organizing work of form, rather than just arranging matter in a way that remains external to
the natural being.
Insofar as functional form determines the natural substance and organizes it so that it can
achieve its function, form is responsible for the function of the natural being. Insofar as the
end and actuality of the natural substance is better and what brings it into its end is superior
than what is in the service of that end, form is normatively superior to matter. If, in elemental
change, some powerful sense of material exists even in the elemental forces of hot and dry
and cold and wet, not just because Aristotle describes the figure of semen in material ways,
but also because the natural account of generation requires it, then Aristotle’s view of matter
contributes to a sense of nature as an internal source of change, not merely as an internal ef-
ficient cause, but in the sense of the internalized organizing work that characterizes nature.
This sense of nature finds form and matter profoundly unified and this unity involves the work
of matter beyond mere potential for form. The view of nature I offer maintains that material
makes a contribution that is not reducible to a “role” as potential and that the particular work
of form in natural generation depends on material. Recall Aristotle’s assertion that motion is
in the movable in Physics III.3 (202a13). This view depends on a profound unity at the heart
of nature, by contrast to the incidental unity of artificial things.
5 Substance As a Möbius Strip: Difference and Interdependence

To illustrate that profound unity, this section looks at an aspect of Aristotle’s biology that has
often been construed to signal not only Aristotle’s association of form with male and matter
with female but also to exemplify the artifice model of nature wherein form is imposed on
matter. This section will show how Aristotle’s articulation of how the principles of form and
material work in generation point to the interdependence of these principles on one another
in such a way that recasts the metaphysical framework beyond a hierarchical opposition. In
generation, form works through material that constitutes the figure of form, which suggests
that form is dependent on that to which it would purport to be superior.
In Generation of Animals, Aristotle names two principles of generation, the male (to
arren), which contains the moving cause of generation, and the female (to thēlu), which con-
tains the matter (I.1, 716a5–8, I.20, 729a10–12, I.21, 730a26–7). The difference between
the male contribution, gonē, semen, “in and with which is emitted the principle of soul”
(II.3, 737a8–9), and the female contribution, katamenia, menses, is between levels of
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concoction (I.19, 726b5–11, 31–32, 727a3–4, I.20, 728a27–8). Concoction is a process of

heating through what Aristotle calls variously vital, proper, internal or natural heat (Trott
2019: 182, Meteor. IV.2). Aristotle says this heat comes through the sun, but also becomes
internalized in the stomach (GA, II.3, 737a3–5, PA, II.3, 650a5–8). Semen is distinguished
from menses in semen’s ability to internalize in another the capacity to internalize heat in
another (PA, II.3, 649b24–32, GA, II.4, 738a34–b1, IV.1, 766a19–23). Menses, like semen,
is concocted residue, but as blood it depends for heat on what is external to it while semen’s
heat is due to the internal heat of the animal (tēs entos thermotētos) (GA, II.2, 735b34); this
heat becomes internalized in semen (GA, II.3, 736b34–5). On the view that heat is the formal
principle that is imposed on the material principle of moisture in menses (Solmsen 1957), the
principles remain separated even in material. I argue that heat in semen is a material power,
and as such material underwrites the work of form.
Heat is one of the elemental powers, which Aristotle describes as playing a role in elemental
change wherein one elemental power – either heat or dryness, moisture or wetness, remains
the same while one changes (GC, II.4, 331a26–b2). In this cycle, each elemental power can
sometimes be the material through change and sometimes be the form that marks the new
element. Aristotle speaks to the specific work of heat in relation to pneuma or hot air in the
semen in GA II.2. He deduces that semen must be made of pneuma because of the way it acts
materially. It is thick and white when it leaves the animal, but when it cools it becomes fluid
and transparent like water (735a31–33). Unlike water, it is thickened by heat and it does not
freeze, so semen must be otherwise than water (735a32–37, 735b5–6). Earth would explain
why it thickens in heat (735b1–2), but if it were earthy it would solidify when it cools, but
it becomes watery instead (735b3). Aristotle considers other fluids that thicken besides those
composed of water and earthy substances, and alights on the possibility that semen is com-
posed of water and pneuma (735b10). Foam (735b11), oil (735b14–16), lead ore (735b19),
snow (735b21–2), and even water (735b25) are examples of fluids which are mixed with
pneuma and they seem to act similarly to semen when so mixed (735b11–26). Pneuma also
explains why oil floats because air is contained within it (735b26–8), and why it does not
freeze because air is mixed with it (735b28–31). Aristotle concludes, “These reasons explain
the behaviour of semen as well. It is coherent and white when it comes forth from within,
because it contains a good deal of hot pnuema owing to the internal heat of the animal”
(735b33–5). Aristotle explains that semen is pneuma – hot air – and water (736a1–3). Semen
in some animals can be earthier than others, but its character of being thick and white is due to
the pneuma (736a7–9); and the heat that makes it fertile is due to pneuma as well (736b33–5).
This heat in pneuma is akin to (but not actually from) the heat of the sun which does generate,
and “so does the heat of animals” (II.3, 737a1–4). He says that this heat of animals is in other
natural residue that has a principle of life in it that is not semen (737a5–6). Aristotle explains
that the body of the semen (tēs gonēs sōma) acts as the vehicle for the principle of soul (to tēs
psychikēs arches) (737a8–9). The body dissolves and evaporates so it is not detectable in the
female or a part of the new being, just as the fig juice evaporates when it has curdled the milk
(737a12–17).
Scholars defending a view of form as separate and distinct from material argue that the
heat in semen is not matter and that the pneuma which holds vital or natural heat is a spiritual
rather than material principle, and even then, for some scholars, not the source of form (Solm-
sen 1957: 119–123; Cohen 1989; Freudenthal 1999: 136–141; Connell 2016: 183, 197).
Even the extent to which material is at work in semen is, on this view, based on a more divine
material substance, like aether (Tress 1992; Bos 2018: 143). Aether is the element that Aris-
totle argues in De Caelo comprises the heavenly bodies, which Aristotle calls “divine” (I.3,
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270b1–25, II.3,286a11–12). True, Aristotle does write that the “soul capacity” of every kind
involves some “different body” (heterou sōmatos) from the elements which is more divine
(theioterou) (GA, II.3, 736b30–1). Aristotle nonetheless proceeds to discuss the hot pneuma
that he says is analogous to what is in the stars, yes, (737a1), but nonetheless is also in very
down-to-earth substances like oil and iron ore and snow.
If this material is divine, then foam, oil, lead ore, snow, and water would also be divine
substances insofar as pneuma seems to affect their characteristics. Scholars insist on denying
the materiality of vital heat because they view form as the contrary of matter. But Aristotle’s
account of generation points to the material capacities that enable semen to animate, and thus
the male and female principles to join. Heat in the moisture that comprises semen is worked
up to the point where it can heat the menses to the degree that it can internalize the heat and
the ability to produce the heat. When that internalization occurs, the fetation has been formed
(GA, II.4, 739a6–29, 739b21–740a4, Trott 2019, Chapter 5).
Aristotle considers the body of the semen in this passage just discussed at GA II.3, explain-
ing that the soul principle (to tēs psychikēs archēs) is in a way separable from the body and
in another way not separable (737a8–10). He proceeds to say that the body of the semen dis-
solves (to sōma tēs gonēs dialuetai) (737a12). On account of this dissolution of the sōma or
body of the semen, commentators argue that material has no role in the work of semen (Con-
nell 2018: 167–169, 183). But Aristotle’s point is that semen does not contribute matter, and
therefore semen cannot be found as a part (morion) in the set shape (tēs sustasēs morphēs) of
the new being that is formed. That the material of the semen cannot be found in the fetation
need not mean that semen does not work through its material, which seems to be the point of
Aristotle’s extended consideration of the composition of the sōma of the semen, which works
through its material power on the menses the way that fig juice or rennet curdles milk to make
cheese (737a13–16). The curdling agent is not part of the final product, but it nonetheless
works through its material power.
The fetation is formed when heat internalized in the semen becomes internalized in the feta-
tion itself so that it can produce its own heat, which is why the first distinct organ is the heart
which is the internal principle of heat in the body (GA, II.4, 740a2–4, Trott 2019: 154–159).
In Parts of Animals, Aristotle explains,
The heart then and the liver are essential constituents of every animal; the liver that it
may effect concoction, the heart that it may lodge the central source of heat. For some
part or other there must be which, like a hearth, shall hold the kindling fire; and this part
must be well protected, seeing that it is, as it were, the citadel of the body.
(PA, III.7, 670a23–7)
Animation seems to be the process of taking over the capacity to heat from within oneself
from the semen, which is the work of the heart and liver together.
In natural beings, the work of form comes from another with the same form. This other is
an enmattered being which generates another like itself who both takes on the continued work
of self-organizing and who is itself capable of producing another with this capacity. The form
of the parent shares an organizing power that enables the child to become independent natural
substance. This power is shared through an enmattered figure which does the animating heat-
internalizing work through material power. A unity emerges between parent and child in the
sense that nature begets nature and it begets nature that itself is concerned to actualize and be-
get nature. This unity involves a reciprocal intimacy between form and matter that the model
of artifice allows to leave separate. Matter does not merely depend on form in order for it to
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be manifested in the world; form depends on material powers at the most basic level of natural
generation in order for it to animate the new fetation in a structure that I suggest follows a
Möbius strip (Trott 2019). This account does not compromise the role of functional form or
teleology in Aristotle but shows how material is not to be subsidiary in the work of achieving
function insofar as its powers enable the functioning of form in generation to proceed.
Notes
1 On the view that substance is individual form, see Frede and Patzig (1988), vol. 1, 37, 40, 45–46,
for the view that if substance is not form, then substance exceeds what it is, see Scaltsas (1993); Gill
(2005), 239.
2 Reeve’s note on Metaphysics 1029a25 (693) holds that the last things being considered here as “fea-
tureless matter” is “a thought experiment” (Reeve 2016).
References
Aristotle and J. Barnes. (1984) The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation,
Aristotle, E. S. Forster and D. J. Furley. (1955) Aristotle: On Sophistical Refutations, On Coming-to-Be
and Passing Away, On the Cosmos, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Loeb Edition.
Aristotle and W. K. C. Guthrie. (1939) Aristotle: On the Heavens, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, Loeb Edition.
Aristotle and W. S. Hett. (1936) Aristotle: On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, Loeb Edition.
Aristotle and A. L. Peck. (1942) Aristotle: Generation of Animals, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, Loeb Edition.
Aristotle, A. L. Peck and E. S. Foster. (1937) Aristotle: Parts of Animals, Movements of Animals, Pro-
gression of Animals, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Loeb Edition.
Aristotle and C. D. C. Reeve. (2016) Metaphysics, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company.
Aristotle and W. D. Ross. (ed.) (1924) Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Vol I & II, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
——— (ed.) (1950) Aristotelis Physica, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Austin, C. J. (2020) “Contemporary Hylomorphisms: On the Matter of Form,” Ancient Philosophy
Today, 2: 113–144.
Bianchi, E. (2014) The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos, New York:
Bos, A. P. (2018) Aristotle on God’s Life-Generating Power and on Pneuma as Its Vehicle, Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press.
Broadie (Waterlow), S. (1982) Nature, Change, and Agency, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Cohoe, C. (2020) “Living Without a Soul: Why God and the Heavenly Movers Fall Outside of Aristotle’s
Psychology,” Phronesis 3: 281–323.
Cohen, S. (1989) “Aristotle on Heat, Cold, and Teleological Explanation,” Ancient Philosophy 9.2:
255–270.
Connell, S. M. (2016) Aristotle on the Female Animal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Beauvoir, S. (2012) The Second Sex (trans. C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevallier), New York: Vintage
Press.
Deslauriers, M. (1998) “Sex and Essence in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Biology,” in Cynthia Freeland
(ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Frede, M. (1985) “Substance in Aristotle’s Metaphysics,” in A. Gotthelf (ed.), Aristotle on Nature and
Living Things: Philosophical and Historical Studies Presented to David M. Balme on His 70th Birth-
day, Pittsburgh: Mathesis Publications.
Frede, M. and G. Patzig. (1988) “Sind Formen Allgemein oder Individuell?” in Frede and Patzig (eds
and trans.), Aristotle’s Metaphysics Z: Text, Übersetzung, und Kommentar, vol. 1, Munich: Verlag
C. H. Beck.
Freudenthal, G. (1999) Aristotle’s Theory of Material Substance, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gill, M. L. (1989) Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
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——— (2005) “Aristotle’s Metaphysics Reconsidered,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.3:
223–51.
——— (2018) “Critique of Aryeh Kosman, the Activity of Being: An Essay on Aristotle’s Ontology,”
European Journal of Philosophy, 26.2: 854–859.
Graham, D. (1987) Aristotle’s Two Systems, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Koslicki, K. (1997) “Four-Eights Hephaistos: Artifacts and Living Things in Aristotle,” History of Phi-
losophy Quarterly 14: 77–98.
Kosman, L. A. (1987) “Animals and Other Beings in Aristotle,” in Gotthelf and Lennox (eds.), Philo-
sophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——— (2013) The Activity of Being: An Essay on Aristotle’s Ontology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Krizan, M. (2016) “Prime Matter without Extension,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 54: 523–546.
Leunissen, M. (2010) Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle’s Science of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010.
——— (2011) “‘Crafting Natures’: Aristotle on Animal Design,” Philosophic Exchange 41: 28
Liske, M. (2003) “Aristotle’s Teleology and the Opposition of Matter and Form,” Diotima 31: 89–103.
Scaltsas, T. (1993) “Aristotle’s ‘Second Man’ Argument,” Phronesis 38: 117–136.
Scharle, M. (2009) “A Synchronic Justification for Aristotle’s Commitment to Prime Matter,” Phronesis
54: 326–345.
Solmsen, F. (1957) “The Vital Heat, the Inborn Pneuma and the Aether,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies
77.1: 119–123.
Studtmann, P. (2006) “Prime Matter and Extension in Aristotle,” Journal of Philosophical Research 31:
171–184.
Tress, D. M. (1992) “The Metaphysical Science of Aristotle’s Generation of Animals and Its Feminist
Critics,” Review of Metaphysics 46: 307–341.
Trott, A. M. (2014) Aristotle on the Nature of Community, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——— (2019) Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Whiting, J. E. (1986) “Form and Individuation in Aristotle,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 3.4:
359–377.
——— (1991) “Metasubstance: Critical Notice of Frede-Patzig and Furth,” The Philosophical Review
100.4: 607–639.
Witt, C. (1989) Substance and Essence in Aristotle: An Interpretation of Metaphysics VII–IX, Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
——— (1998) “Sex and Essence in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Biology,” in C. A. Freeland (ed.), Femi-
nist Interpretations of Aristotle, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
——— (2015) “In Defense of the Craft Analogy: Artifacts and Natural Teleology,” in M. Leunissen (ed.),
Aristotle’s Physics: A Critical Guide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Further Reading
Bianchi, Emanuela. (2014) The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos, New
York: Fordham University Press.
Connell, Sophia M. (2016) Aristotle on the Female Animal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deslauriers, Marguerite. (2022) Aristotle on Sexual Difference: Metaphysics, Biology, Politics, Oxford:
Trott, Adriel M. (2019) Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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25
THE ROLE OF FEMALES IN
ARISTOTLE’S TELEOLOGY OF
REPRODUCTION
Ana Laura Edelhoff
1 Aristotle on Natural Reproduction in the Generation of Animals

Aristotle has a complicated account of natural reproduction. In animals, male and female
are separated. As we are going to see, the reason why they are separated is sexist. Aristotle
considers the male principle to be an efficient and formal cause of generation while the female
principle is the material cause (GA 729a10–12; Connell 2016: 53).
The female animal provides the material out of which the new being is constituted and
nourishes the embryo.1
By contrast, the male role is not material, but formal. The male semen works ‘like a car-
penter’ on the female menstrual blood, with the female principle being a passive dunamis
(capacity, potentiality) and the male principle an active dunamis in the process of generation
(GA 729b9–19).2 For this reason, only the male parent is responsible for the essence (the
what-it-is) of the newly developing being. He is also primarily responsible for the structure of
how the new being is developing in the female animal or egg (since the structure of this process
is directly dependent on the essence of the new being) (GA II). Aristotle, thus, does explicitly
and implicitly privilege the male contribution over the female contribution in reproduction
(GA II 1, 732a1–12).
In the following, I will first introduce Aristotle’s account of conception, in which Aristotle
offers a complicated and in his eyes radically new account of the role of the female and
male parent in reproduction. After having discussed passages in which Aristotle explains
the female contribution in terms of the material cause. I explain how Aristotle’s understand-
ing of the female contribution in natural reproduction and her classification as a material
cause has an influence on how he sees her in the ontological hierarchy of beings as inferior
to the male’s position. While many have already stressed that Aristotle is sexist in his bio-
logical writings,3 I would like to contribute to the debate by highlighting a passage in GA II
(6, 742a17–742b18) and offering a new reading.
Many think that Aristotle is generally interested in explaining embryogenesis in the pas-
sage in question and that he is using here the four causes and considerations about priority as
explanatory tools. By contrast, I argue that Aristotle is at least partly, if not mainly, interested
in establishing hierarchies between the various kinds of cause. He does so in such a way that
one might even argue that his discussions on embryology do not primarily serve to give an
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-28 374

Aristotle’s Teleology of Reproduction
account of natural reproduction and the development of embryo but rather serve to establish
which cause is ontologically prior.
2 Aristotle on Conception
Aristotle’s theory of the roles of males and females in the process of generation is first pre-
sented in GA I 18, where he engages in a dialectic with medical authorities. In this debate,
Aristotle makes two key innovations: (1) he argues that males do not contribute any material
to the process of generation and (2) he argues that females only contribute menses and not
a white semen like males. According to Aristotle, menses is a more refined portion of their
blood.4
Female and male animals differ for Aristotle from the very first moment of conception: He
believes that the female animal is a colder mixture than the male animal and this difference in
temperature is also responsible for the difference in the formation of the heart, which, in turn,
is responsible for the formation of all other parts of the body (GA I 1–2; GA II 4, 740a15–21;
Connell 2021: 4).
The lower temperature of the female is, again, responsible for the lesser degree of heat of
the female seed. Had the female heart greater heating capacities, it could produce male semen
(GA I 20, 728a18–25; IV 1, 766a30–33; Connell 2021: 4). Menstrual blood is a form of seed,
but impure.5 Female semen is the heated residue of the process of digestion (GA 726a26–28;
Connell 2016: 100). The female animal is not hot enough to transform blood into (proper)
semen.6 Given its limited heating capacity, the female animal produces ‘menses’ a generative
residue that serves as the material out of which the new living being is developing.7
Hence, Aristotle defends a two-seed theory: He believes that the male contributes semen
and the female menses.8 They differ in that the female contribution is not emitted at the sexual
climax and in that it is more concocted than the male’s (GA 730a33–b4).
According to Aristotle, one and the same animal cannot have both female and male seed (GA
I 19, 727a26–30). His main argument is that each animal can only have one spermatic secre-
tion, and since the female already has menses, it is not possible for her to have semen as well.9
His theory is new in that the male semen is providing the principle of unity of the embryo.
Previous theories often argued that female and male contribution are on a par in that they
both provide the parts out of which the embryo is constituted. Aristotle criticises these theories
by arguing that they, in contrast to his own account, could not explain the unity of the embryo
as an organic whole (GA 722b4–5; Connell 2016: 98).
By introducing his theory of the four causes and his concepts of energeia (activity/actuality)
and dunamis (capacity/potentiality), Aristotle believes that he can avoid many of the problems
of his predecessors. In his view, the female semen is potentially all parts of the new living be-
ing. Its potentiality needs to be activated by the male semen:
But what does happen is just what one would expect, since what the male contributes to
generation is the form and the efficient cause (‘he arche kineseos’ ‘the source of change’),
while the female contributes the material. In fact, as in the coagulation of milk, the milk
being the material, the fig-juice or rennet is that which contains the curdling principle, so
acts the secretion of the male, being divided into the parts in the female.
(GA I 20, 729a9–12, transl. Platt)
Aristotle says in this passage that the male parent provides the form and efficient cause while
the female parent provides the material cause. The semen is compared to the fig juice or rennet
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Ana Laura Edelhoff
that contains a ‘curdling principle’ in the coagulation of milk – a principle that is causing the
milk to get thicker and receive a new form. In the same way, the semen contains a principle
that acts on the menses and forms it to a new living being. The female’s role is to provide the
necessary material for the growth and development of the embryo.
Interestingly, though, Aristotle claims in GA IV.3, in which he develops his theory of inher-
itance, that the female parent does contribute movements to the embryo, which are responsi-
ble for physical and character similarities to herself and her ancestors.10 However, he does not
believe that this causal efficacy by the female parent counts as efficient or formal causation.
This supports the view that the role of the female parent in Aristotle’s theory of reproduction
is more sophisticated than often assumed (especially when interpreters claim that the mother
provides only formless ‘stuff’ to reproduction11).
In sum, Aristotle’s view of female contribution in natural reproduction emphasises the
importance of the female’s material contribution, rather than her active role in fertilisation or
conception.
3 The Mother as the Material Cause in Natural Reproduction

Aristotle believes that the material contribution of the female animal to the offspring is two-
fold: (1) she provides the matter out of which the new being is constituted and (2) she nour-
ishes it in her womb with her blood or an equivalent (in the case of oviparous e.g. GA II 1,
733b24–734a1). In the following, let me explain how Aristotle conceives of these different
contributions in detail.
The embryo is a product of the male forming the menses and, hence, a product of both
male and female seed (GA 724b14–18, 731a1–4). How exactly male and female semen unify
in order to bring into life a new being is highly complicated.
As we have already seen, Aristotle believes that the male semen is transporting an imma-
terial principle that is able to connect with the female menses and structure it according to
its needs (the male semen, hence, is a tool of the father in order to ensoul the menses of the
mother).
In different works, Aristotle uses different analogies in order to explain how form and
matter relate to each other. One famous passage is the craft analogy from Physics II in which
Aristotle explains that the form is like the shape of a chair and matter is like its wood. It is
difficult and much discussed how the analogy works in the case of living beings. Presumably,
Aristotle wants to suggest that in the way in which the shape of a chair structures the material
and accounts for its being, the (natural) form structures the matter and accounts for its being.
However, the soul of a living organism (its form) is a much more complex being than the mere
three-dimensional mathematical form of a chair (and, of course, the mathematical form of the
chair is not just the essence of the chair, but is related to its essence). The same goes for its
matter: Blood, bones, sinews, and the like in its living functions are more complex than dead
wood. As Sophia Connell (2016: 123) argues, if Aristotle really thinks that the female con-
tribution in natural reproduction is nothing more than the wood of a chair, his theory would
undeniably be sexist. And, one might add, also the male contribution would then be seriously
impoverished.
Connell argues convincingly that it is important to note that the matter that the female
parent is providing for the original conception is already complex (as is the matter that the
mother provides for nourishment–more on this below). Aristotle stresses that the female
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matter cannot be of whatever kind but must be specific for being able to receive the soul
of the male semen (GA 733b32; Connell 2016: 153). As Connell (2016: 146) explains:
The female’s initial contribution has undergone a series of transformations in order to

make it the complex and appropriate material basis for many of the soul’s various needs.
In fact, the portion that goes to constitute the embryo’s initial body is not even ordinary
blood, but a more pure and concocted portion of the female’s menstrual flow.
(GA 744b13–14)
The status of this material contribution of the female is complicated. Aristotle highlights that
the male semen can only ensoul a material that is perfectly suited for receiving a soul. The
female menses has many capacities, yet these need to be activated by the male semen. For this
reason, Aristotle believes that the female and male principle stand in a relation of passive to
active so-called dunamis (capacity or potentiality).
In GA 738b20–36 by reflecting on what happens when animals of different types conceive,
Aristotle stresses that the offspring bear resemblances in their shape and bodily structure to their
mother. This strongly suggests that the body (sōma) and bulk that the female animal provides
is a more sophisticated product than raw material and which might even be to some degree es-
sentially independent from the forming principle of the male (if it were completely dependent, it
could not have the strong effect on the shape of the offspring) (Connell 2016: 154–155).
Another interesting way in which Aristotle describes the relation between female and male
parents in conception is the automatic puppet analogy:
As the parts are potentially present in the matter, when the principle/start of movement
(kinesis) is there, one thing follows after another as in the miraculous automatic puppets.
(GA 741b8–9; transl. Connell)
As Connell highlights, this analogy brings out the complexity of the female body which starts
to act and move in miraculous ways, when the male form sets the process of generation in
motion.
Apart from providing the material out of which the embryo gets constituted, Aristotle ex-
plains that the female parent provides the nourishment for the embryo:
Since the embryo is already potentially an animal but an imperfect one, it must obtain
its nourishment from elsewhere; accordingly it makes use of the uterus and the mother,
as a plant does of the earth, to get nourishment, until it is perfected to the point of being
now an animal potentially locomotive. So nature has first designed the two blood-vessels
from the heart, and from these smaller vessels branch off to the uterus, forming what
is called the umbilicus. For the umbilicus is a blood-vessel, consisting of one or more
vessels in different animals. Round these is a skin-like integument, because the weak-
ness of the vessels needs protection and shelter. The vessels join on to the uterus like the
roots of plants, and through them the embryo receives its nourishment. This is why the
animal remains in the uterus, not, as Democritus says, that the parts of the embryo may
be moulded in conformity with those of the mother. This is plain in the ovipara, for they
have their parts differentiated in the egg after separation from the matrix.
(GA II 4, 740a24–740b2, transl. Platt; my italics)
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In this passage, Aristotle criticises his predecessor Democritus for believing that the embryo
remains in the uterus of the female parent, because it is formed there in the likeness of the
mother. Aristotle thinks that the embryo remains in the uterus of the female parent, because the
embryo needs to be nourished by it. The female parent does so by means of the umbilicus – a
blood vessel that is surrounded by skin in order to be protected. Aristotle also explains that
during this nourishment in the womb, the embryo gets more and more perfected (presumably
by developing more and more capacities that are essential for the type of living being that is
developing). This process of nourishment in the uterus will find an end when the embryo has
developed a capacity for locomotion.
By comparing how the female animal nourishes the embryo to how a plant is nourished by
the soil, its uniqueness and complexity get clear. The female parent is not merely transporting
nutriment which it gets from the outside to the embryo (like the roots of a plant), rather she
prepares the food in a complicated internal purifying process for her child. By providing highly
specialised and adapted nourishment for the embryo, the female soul is responsible for its sur-
vival.12 As Sophia Connell (2016: 140) highlights, this is no trivial contribution. The mother
is refining the nourishment for the child, so that the child can take it in, grow, and develop.
In sum, Aristotle’s view of female contribution in natural reproduction is that females pro-
vide the material basis for the development of the embryo and nourish it with highly purified
and processed food (a purified version of her blood).
One final note on the mother as material rather than efficient or formal cause: Aristotle
does not consider the possibility that the mother contributes something to the essence of the
child together with the father, which is somewhat surprising (1) given that children bear physi-
cal resemblances and similarities of character to their mothers and (2) given that many of his
predecessors have argued that both female and male parent are responsible for the essential fea-
tures of the child (e.g. Empedocles who says the child is half from the mother and half from the
father and the pangenesis theorists, GA I). Here are some reasons why Aristotle might be reluc-
tant to believe that the female animal does provide essential features to her offspring: First, Ar-
istotle does raise several problems for defenders of this view. In the context of a polemic against
Empedocles and philosophers who defend a pangenesis, Aristotle stresses in GA I that if both
parents contribute essential features, all the parts of both parents will end up in the uterus. This
would have the effect that there would be two embryos, one from the father and one from the
mother. Second, there is a real challenge of how to explain how the essences of the male and
female parent could and would combine. Finally, and most importantly, if both parents would
serve as efficient and formal cause, there is the problem of causal overdetermination.
4 Is Aristotle’s Embryology Sexist?

After this overview of Aristotle’s understanding of the role of female and male parents in natu-
ral reproduction, let us turn to the question of whether or not his account is sexist. As I will
argue, there are several passages in the GA which very plausibly can be interpreted as being
sexist. Most importantly, though, I will argue that the original categorisation of the father as
the efficient and formal cause and the mother as the material cause which is sexist itself has far
greater consequences than is often appreciated since it settles the female parent as an ontologi-
cally posterior being in Aristotle’s grand metaphysical scheme.
That Aristotle held and defended sexist beliefs in his Politics is well known.13 Whether and
to what degree he held and argued for sexist beliefs in his biological works is less clear.14
In order to tackle this issue it is first of all important to clarify what is meant by ‘sexism’.
As Sophia Connell shows, it is helpful to distinguish various kinds of sexism and misogynist
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ideology. Ideology can mean ‘the conscious effort to enforce unfair power relations through
scientific theory’ (Connell 2016: 43) which ‘aim to further denigrate women’ (Connell 2016:
44). Or, on the other spectrum, one might understand ideology as ‘the propensity in a thinker
to accept and incorporate contemporary cultural and social norms’ (Connell 2016: 43). Of
course, depending on how one understands the notion ‘ideology’ one might find Aristotle to
a lesser or greater degree culpable of it (Connell 2016: 43). In order to spell out Aristotle’s
misogynist ideology Connell suggests bringing in Malcolm Schofield’s characterisation of a
‘broadly Marxist conception of ideology’, according to which an idealogy is:
i a widely held body of ideas systematically biased towards the real or imagined interests of
a particular sex or social group or class within society;
ii believed by adherents not because of rational considerations … but rather because of either
(a) social causation or (b) a desire to promote the interests indicated … (Schofield 1990: 1).
As Connell convincingly argues, (ii, a) arguably captures Aristotle’ position best. Presumably,
Aristotle held sexist views because of his upbringing or because of other forces outside his
direct control, and this might have been unconscious or unintended.
However, scholars disagree on this issue (see Morsink 1979; Tress 1992; Mayhew 2004 for
a defence of Aristotle against sexism).15 And even among scholars who agree that his positions
are sexist, there is disagreement as to what elements of his theory are sexist.
There are some passages in the GA that seem particularly problematic: Aristotle claims (1)
that the female is ‘disabled’ (πεπηρωμένον; GA II 3, 737a22–34); (2) that females are depar-
tures of a kind (GA IV 3, 767b6–8); and (3) that the ideal offspring of reproduction is a male
(GA IV 3, 768a21–8). Henry (2007) convincingly argues that when Aristotle is making these
claims he is not suggesting that females are imperfect members of the species and that he pro-
motes sexist beliefs in these passages. However, in his view Aristotle’s discussion of why the
sexes are divided is more problematic16: Since Aristotle believes that things that are by nature
are so, because it is better this way (since nature does nothing in vain), Aristotle also believes
that the division of the sexes is for the better.17 This belief is sexist because he thinks that it is
better for the ‘better one’ (in this case: the male) to be separated from the worse one (in this
case: the female). Here is his explanation:
That is why there is always a continuous generation (γένος) of humans, animals, and plants.
And since the principle of these are male and female, male and female will be present for
the sake of generation in each of the things that possess them. But the primary moving
cause is better and more divine in its nature than the matter, insofar as the definition and
the form belong to it, and it is better that the superior cause be kept separate from the
inferior one. It is on account of this that (in those species where this is possible) the male is
separated from the female. For the source of change, to which the male principle belongs, is
better and more divine in those things that come into being, while the female corresponds
to matter. However the male comes together and combines with the female in order to
perform the function of reproduction, for this is something common to both.
(GA II 1, 732a1–12; transl. Henry)
I follow Henry’s reconstruction of the argument18:
1 In those things that come into being, the efficient cause is superior to the material cause,
since the definition and form belong to it.
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2 Wherever possible, it is better (βέλτιον) to have the superior principle (τὸ κρεῖττον) separate
from the inferior principle (τὸ χείρονος).
3 The male principle is the efficient cause of generation, and the female is the material cause.
4 Therefore, the male principle is superior, the female principle inferior [from 1 and 3].
5 Therefore, it is better to have the male and female principles in separate bodies [from 2
and 4].19
As Aristotle typically does, he brings in hylomorphism and his theory of causation in order
to explain why the sexes are divided in animals.20 The question is why is the male principle
the efficient cause rather than the female principle? Henry convincingly argues that Aristotle
is just following gender stereotypes according to which the male animal is seen as superior to
the female principle.21 And for this reason Aristotle assigns to females the role of the inferior
material cause in reproduction.22 As we are going to see, this initial categorisation has further
influence on the status of female animals.
Already in this passage, Aristotle evaluates the female and male principle and their con-
tribution. He does not use the terminology of ‘priority’ and ‘posteriority’, but rather uses
terms such as ‘what is better’ (‘βέλτιον’), ‘the more divine’ (‘theioteron’), ‘what is superior’ (τὸ
κρεῖττον), and ‘what is inferior’ (τὸ χείρονος). It is difficult to determine what he exactly means
by these different terms and how they relate to each other. It is clear, though, that Aristotle
wishes to highlight a general superiority of the male over the female in this passage. In other
passages, Aristotle provides a complete theory of why the efficient cause is prior to the mate-
rial cause. These passages, together with the understanding of the female as material cause and
the male as formal and efficient cause, account for the ontological posteriority of the female
animal to the male animal in Aristotle’s metaphysical hierarchy.
5 Ontological Priority of the Male Animal Over the Female Animal

The categorisation of the female contribution as ‘matter’/material cause and the male contri-
bution as ‘form’/formal cause and efficient cause has a strong influence on their ontological
status and importance as a scientific object of study for Aristotle.
Aristotle believes that form is prior in various ways to matter. Most importantly for our
purposes, form is ontologically prior to matter.23 According to this privileged status in the
hierarchy of beings, form is also a more important and valuable object of scientific investiga-
tion for Aristotle. This explains why Aristotle’s research into the nature of form is much more
intense and developed than his research into the nature of matter.
Consequently, Aristotle dedicates much more time and effort to the study of the male con-
tribution to natural reproduction than to the female contribution. This asymmetric treatment
of female and male contribution is not in itself sexist, since it stems from Aristotle’s belief in
the priority of form over matter. Yet, as we have seen in the previous section, the original cat-
egorisation of the female contribution to natural reproduction as ‘matter’ and the male con-
tribution as ‘form’ is. But, unfortunately, due to the asymmetric treatment of form vs matter
in Aristotle’s scientific system, the consequences of the original sexism are disproportionally
worse for the female animal: The investigation into the nature of female animals and their
contribution to various phenomena is heavily downplayed and not given much attention.
The most important passage in which Aristotle gives an account of the priority of form over
matter is Metaphysics IX 8. The argument that he provides there can in fact be interpreted
as building on his discussions of priority in the biological works, since in Metaphysics IX 8
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1050a4–1050b6 Aristotle ‘merely’ adds the final step in the argument for the priority in es-
sence of energeia over dunamis by arguing that energeia is the telos of a teleological structured
process.24 He takes it that as soon as he has shown that, its priority in essence will be obvi-
ous.25 Strictly speaking, Aristotle discusses in this passage the priority of energeia (activity, ac-
tuality) over dunamis (capacity, potentiality). Note, though, that matter is treated analogously
to dunamis and form to energeia.26
For our purposes, it is important to note that matter is ontologically posterior to form. In
Metaph. IX 8 1050a4–1050b6 Aristotle argues for the ontological priority (what he calls ‘pri-
ority in substance’ or ‘priority in nature’) of energeia over dunamis in terms of an asymmetric
essential dependence, according to which A determines what B is, but B does not determine
what A is. Analogously, matter is ontologically posterior to form, since form determines the
nature of matter and not the other way round. The same is true for the relation between active
and passive dunamis:
This is because the passive dunamis is essentially dependent on the active dunamis (i.e. the
what the passive dunamis is, is explained in terms of what the active dunamis is and not the
other way round). In addition, the passive dunamis will be definitionally posterior to the ac-
tive dunamis, since the real definition requires the mentioning of the active dunamis and not
the other way round. Hence, the causal roles the male and female parent are assigned to have
direct consequences on how ‘important’ their being is in the metaphysical hierarchy of things.
An interesting case study in how Aristotle’s scientific belief in the priority of form over
matter influences the way in which he describes natural processes is GA II 6, 742a17–742b18.
In this passage, Aristotle describes in detail how the embryo develops in the utero after con-
ception. This passage can be read as being sexist: Rather than acknowledging the importance
of the female contribution in such a central passage on embryology, Aristotle does not men-
tion the female parent at all. He is only concerned with how and in what order the various
parts of the embryo get formed.27 However, if we take into account Aristotle’s metaphysical
commitments, the way in which he describes this process seems less problematic: Due to his
strong belief in the importance of form, Aristotle purely concentrates on explaining how it
is form that starts and structures the process of animal generation. The fact that Aristotle
highlights the relevance of form so much in this text is also due to the fact that in the GA in
general Aristotle aims to prove the importance of form.
In the context of the debate on the priority of form over matter, this passage is also inter-
esting for another reason. In this passage, Aristotle argues for the priority of final causes over
efficient causes and is thereby preparing his argument on the priority of energeia over dunamis
in Metaph. IX 8.28
For Aristotle’s complicated argument for the priority of energeia can only be understood on
the basis of earlier arguments that he develops in the Physics, Parts of Animals and the cited
passage from the GA: In Physics II 7–8 and Parts of Animals I, Empedocles argues that the
outcome of a natural process is determined by the process of generation.29 For example, Em-
pedocles might argue that human beings have teeth because of some material processes dur-
ing the generation of a human being. By contrast, Aristotle argues that those processes took
place for the sake of the production of teeth. According to Empedocles, the teeth are only an
accidental outcome of the material process. By contrast, Aristotle would argue that the mate-
rial processes ‘are what they are’ (by being structured in a specific way, etc.), because they are
caused by an efficient cause whose goal it is to produce teeth. The nature of the efficient cause
must be understood in terms of the telos that it aims to produce.30 It is not, as Empedocles
believes, a moving cause without a predetermined end.
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According to Aristotle, the problem with Empedocles’ view is that the efficient cause (and
its characteristic activities) could not be scientifically explained (since we cannot explain them
with reference to the goal).31 By contrast, in Aristotle’s theory, we can explain them, as Alan
Code puts it:
[T]he process of twisting and turning in the womb is not the result of chance, but is the
way that it is because it is caused by a pre-existing seed that had the capacity to produce
just that kind of change. The pre-existing seed had this capacity because it in turn was
produced by a male parent that, for instance, had a functional spine with vertebrae.32
The structure of these processes is analogous to the case of artistic production. In Metaphysics
VII 7 and Nicomachean Ethics III 3, we learn that in artistic production, the artisan starts his
work by grasping the goal of its artistic production, and from this starting point he ‘reasons
back’ step by step until he arrives at something that he can immediately produce.33
We learn from the case of artistic production that it is not the process of generation that
determines the outcome, but rather the end that determines the process of generation. Code
convincingly argues that the procedure is the same in natural generation. For here, too, the
process is explained by the goal. This shows that there is an asymmetry in the essential de-
pendence among final and efficient causes. Since the efficient cause has, by its own nature, an
active dunamis and this dunamis can only be understood by reference to the final cause, the
final cause makes the efficient cause what it is, but not the other way round.34
Applying the dependence to the case of natural generation, it reads as follows: The essential
operation of the seed (and, hence, what a human being is) can only be understood by refer-
ence to a fully mature human being. It is not the operation of the seed that determines the
outcome.35
As Alan Code explains, in Aristotle’s theory, (1) the connection between the generation and
its outcome is not accidental and (2) the process of generation (the features of this process) has
a scientific explanation (namely by reference to the end).36
In PA I Aristotle continues the investigation into the nature of efficient and final cause and
argues that the final cause is prior by being the ‘logos’ of the efficient cause (PA I 1, 639b9–
16).37 He claims that the final cause (the cause for the sake of which) is prior to the efficient
cause (the cause whence the beginning of motion comes). Because of the essential dependence
of the efficient on the final cause, the final cause is essentially and, hence, ontologically prior.38
The same discussions on the priority of the final cause over the efficient cause can be found
in the GA II 6, 742a17–742b18 where Aristotle explains the development of an animal by
inserting it into a debate on the priority of final over efficient causes. His main objective in this
passage is to show that the telos accounts for the existence of all parts of a living being.39 It is
the telos, then, that is ontologically prior.
It is with the parts as with other things; one naturally exists prior to another. But the
word ‘prior’ is used in more senses than one. For there is a difference between the end or
final cause and that which exists for the sake of it; the latter is prior in order of develop-
ment, the former is prior in essence. […]
Hence if there is anything of this sort which must exist in animals, containing the
principle and end of all their nature, this must be the first to come into being – first,
that is, considered as the moving power, but simultaneous with the whole embryo if
considered as a part of the end. Therefore all the organic parts whose nature is to bring
others into being must always themselves exist before them, for they are for the sake
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of something else, as the beginning for the sake of the end; all those parts which are
for the sake of something else but are not of the nature of beginnings must come into
being later.
So it is not easy to distinguish which of the parts are prior [sc. in essence], those which
are for the sake of another or that for the sake of which are the former. For the parts
which cause the movement, being prior to the end in order of development, come in to
cause confusion, and it is not easy to distinguish these as compared with the organic
parts. […]
(GA II 6, 742a17–742b5, transl. Platt)
In this passage Aristotle focuses on the development of parts in the early stages of the devel-
opment of an animal, especially on how the bodily parts develop in the womb of the female
animal or in the egg.40 He is particularly interested in the hierarchy among the various parts
(referring to some of the causes as ‘parts’ as well).
Aristotle clarifies that ‘prior’ is said in many ways. The relevant kinds of priority are ‘prior-
ity in the order of development’ (proteron tēi genesei) and ‘priority in substance’ (proteron tēi
ousia). He states that whereas the end (telos) or final cause (hou heneka) is prior in essence to
that which exists for the sake of it (toutou heneka), that which exists for the sake of the end
is prior in generation.
Aristotle focuses on the priority between the efficient and final cause, arguing for the onto-
logical priority (in this case, a priority in essence) of the final over the efficient cause.41 Aris-
totle applies the general theory that the final cause is prior in essence to the efficient cause to
the case of the development of an embryo and explains why one should think that the efficient
cause is posterior in essence to the final cause.
After some general observations on how the domain of things that are ‘for the sake of’
should be classified,42 Aristotle argues that even though the male semen (with its moving
power) must exist before the embryo starts existing, its natural activity (the actualisation of
its essential dunamis) essentially depends upon the telos: only once the semen meets the men-
strual blood and forms the embryo does it exist as an actual cause and as such exist simultane-
ously with the embryo. This suggests that neither semen (efficient cause) nor the telos (final
cause) can exist without the other, but the efficient cause is nonetheless essentially dependent
upon the final cause.43 Aristotle grants that it is difficult to determine the ontological depend-
encies in this case, but he is confident that he has established the ontological priority of the
final over the efficient cause.44
On the basis of his discussions as to why the final cause is superior to the efficient cause,
one can understand why he also takes the male principle, the efficient cause, to be prior to the
female principle, the material cause, namely by determining its essence.
6 A Reply to Trott
In her recent paper ‘Aristotle’s Hylomorphism Reconsidered Through Aristotle’s Account of
Generation’, Adriel Trott argues for a new – and less ‘sexist’ – reading of Aristotle’s account of
hylomorphism. She argues that some feminist readers have mistakenly claimed that a norma-
tive hierarchy follows from Aristotle’s hylomorphism according to which form – associated
with male – is privileged over matter – associated with female. According to Trott, a close
analysis of his account of generation shows there to be a mutual dependence between form
and matter. This, she argues, shows that neither form nor matter should be prioritised over
the other.45
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In my view, Trott’s reading is problematic. There are many necessary conditions and com-
ponents without which this process of generation could not take place. Aristotle is explicit on
this. For instance, Aristotle would accept that without menses or without the womb, the pro-
cess of reproduction could not take place. Nonetheless, he believes that among these necessary
components, there are some which are superior to others. In many passages, Aristotle shows
that necessary dependencies are not sufficient for priorities.46 Contemporary scholars agree
with him on this.47 In this chapter, I have discussed his theory of such causal priorities and
have argued that Aristotle believes that the male principle is ontologically prior to the female
principle in natural reproduction. For this reason I disagree with Trott’s account.
7 Conclusion
Aristotle’s view of the female contribution to natural reproduction is that females provide the
material basis for the development of the embryo and nourish it with highly purified and pro-
cessed food (a purified version of her blood). On this account, the contribution of the female
parent is inferior to the contribution of the male parent. Even though the menses that the mother
provides is necessary for the coming-into-being of a new being, she does not contribute to the es-
sence and the process of development of the embryo. Hence, she is ontologically posterior to the
father (understanding ontological priority in this context as a priority in essence). Aristotle even
claims that the sexes are divided so that the male principle is separated from the female principle.
I have argued here that Aristotle’s embryology is closely linked to and might not be under-
stood without metaphysical discussions about the ontological hierarchies between dunamis
(capacity) and energeia (actuality/activity) in his Metaphysics. For also in his account of the
generation of an animal in the Generation of Animals, Aristotle is deeply interested in showing
how the four causes (and especially the efficient and final cause) are at work (GA II 6, 742a16–
742b17). This is important and noteworthy since it explains, I take it, why he inserts various
abstract discussions on dependencies among the four causes in his discussions of embryology.
He does so in such a way that interesting insights into the role of the parents are sometimes only
mentioned as sidenotes to abstract discussions of the relationship among the different causes.
Notes
1 As Sophia Connell (2016) argues in a seminal study on female animals in Aristotle, the material con-
tribution is not trivial: It is not merely ‘stuff’ or inert matter, but rather a highly processed, complex
material that is perfectly suited for developing the embryo.
2 Connell (2016: 53). On the notions of active and passive dunamis see Beere (2009: 41–42).
3 The reasons for this are arguably sexist (following Henry (2007) and rejecting Mayhew (2004)), since
Aristotle only ascribes the principle of efficient causation to the male parent on ideological grounds.
4 In GA II Aristotle revisits several dilemmas that arise from his theory, particularly how the male can
direct development despite the fact that male seed evaporates and leaves no material.
5 Connell (2000: 421).
6 Connell (2000: 421). See Henry (2007: 256) on the meaning of ‘hot’ in this context. Cf. GA IV 1,
765b19–35.
7 See Connell (2021: 5) for a description of the effects of the lower temperature on the female physiol-
ogy. The idea that semen is from blood is not new, since it has already been defended by Empedocles.
8 See Connell for the problematic history of Aristotle as a ‘one-seed theorist’. Connell (2016: 93–95).
9 Connell (2000: 410).
10 See Henry (2006a) and (2006b) and Connell (2016: 292–324) for a detailed discussion of this issue.
11 For the view that matter is inert see, for instance, Sissa (1992: 70); Cavarero (1995: 70); as cited in
Connell (2016: 121).
12 Cf. GA 739b34–740a1; 740b9–11; 745b24–6, 753b28; 774b25–27.
384
13 See, for instance, Politics 1253b6–8 and 1259a37–b4 on the superiority of the male over the female.
14 In order to understand Aristotle’s discussion of the different contributions of the male and female
parent correctly, it is important to understand how male and female differ in his biology. On this
complicated issue see Connell (2016: 265–291) and (2021: 3–6).
15 See Connell (2016: 17–52) for a nuanced discussion of interpreting Aristotle’s sexist claims.
16 Aristotle formulates this question at the beginning of Book II (GA II.1, 731b18–731b23). See May-
hew (2004) for a different reading of this issue.
17 Note that Aristotle believes that in plants the sexes are united, so he must explain why they are sepa-
rated in humans. See GA I.23, 731a25–9.
18 For a different recent account of this passage see D. Lefebvre (2018).
19 Henry (2007: 265).
20 They are not divided in plants, as he himself explains (the only exceptions are fig and caprifig (GAI 1,
715b21–5)). But this is problematic for the explanation that he provides in the case of human beings.
For why should his argument not apply equally to plants? See also Henry (2007: 265–269) on this.
21 Henry (2007: 267) is citing GA I.1, 716a14–18 in order to support his view. Henry (2007: 268) ‘[…]
Aristotle’s explanation for why animals are divided into sexes depends on his unfounded (and philo-
sophically unmotivated) assumptions about the superior status of males of the species’.
22 See Mayhew for a non-sexist reading of this controversial passage: Mayhew thinks that since Aris-
totle believes that heat is the primary agent of change and males are hotter than females, it follows
from non-sexist assumptions that males are the efficient causes rather than females (Mayhew (2004:
38–39) as discussed in Henry (2007: 266)). As a consequence, Mayhew argues that the entire argu-
ment is not sexist.
23 See the discussion below.
24 In the passages from the PA and GA Aristotle argues the final cause is ontologically prior to all other
types of cause—an argument that we find only in these study on nature, but not in the Metaphysics. So I
suggest that we read the discussion in GA II 6, 742a16–742b17 as an important preliminary step for the
discussion in Metaphysics 1050a4–1050b6. In the Metaphysics passages on the priority of energeia, Ar-
istotle’s goal is not to give an account of why ‘having the form to a greater degree’ and ‘being the telos’
should be conceived of as criteria for ontological priority; rather he only wants to establish that energeia
rather than dunamis satisfies the criteria of ontological priority. Hence, the argument in the Metaphysics
builds on the biological works since it is here that he argues that ‘having the form to a greater degree’
and ‘being the telos’ are criteria for ontological priority. Following Alan Code’s detailed analysis of these
passages, I take it that Aristotle’s overall goal in these works (especially in the Parts of Animals and the
Generation of Animals) is to show that final causes are prior in essence to the efficient causes.
25 See Connell (2016: 55) who highlights the worry that the interpretation of the GA is too often im-
poverished by reading it purely in terms of the discussions of his more abstract and theoretical works,
such as the Metaphysics and the Analytics.
26 See Beere (2009: 155–168, 231–262), for an initial discussion of the relation between dunamis and
matter on the one side and energeia and form on the other.
27 Note that the heart is already a combination of the male and female contribution, but it is the male
contribution, the immaterial soul, that is primarily responsible for the growth and development of the
new living being, according to Aristotle.
28 The question which cause is prior is not trivial: For there is an evident problem with the claim that fi-
nal causes are prior in essence to efficient causes: in Physics II 7, Aristotle claims that formal, efficient,
and final causes often coincide (Code 1997: 135). Why then, one might ask, should the final cause be
ontologically prior to the efficient cause?
29 Code (1997: 136).
30 Code (1997: 136).
31 Code (1997: 134).
32 Code (1997: 138). This natural process is parallel to that of artistic production.
33 Cf. PA I 1, 640a13–19.
34 Cf. Code (1997: 136).
35 Note that from this asymmetric essential dependence, there follows an asymmetric dependence in
knowledge and account.
36 Note that the end product has various features; some are constitutive, and others are not (Code 1997:
139).
37 Cf. Code (1997: 135)
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Ana Laura Edelhoff
38 Aristotle does not explicitly state what kind of priority he is discussing, but a connected passage in
the Generation of Animals (II 6, 742a19–25) suggests that he is speaking here of ontological priority;
more precisely, he is speaking of ‘priority in essence’ or ‘priority in form and substance’ and not about
‘priority in definition’, what the term ‘logos’ might also suggest. Further support for the view that
he is concerned here with an ontological priority is given by the fact that it is not the definition (the
linguistic phrase that expresses the essence) that is the principle of generation, but the essence itself.
Cf. Code (1997: 135).
39 For a detailed reading of this passage see Quarantotto (2022).
40 This passage is part of a general discussion on the generation of animals. See Leunissen (2017) on the
argumentative structure of the GA.
41 Cf. PA 639b12–13.
42 GA II 6, 742a22–32: The class of beings that exist for the sake of an end admit the division into two
further subclasses: (a) the origin of movement (to gennētikon); and (b) that which is used by the end
(to organikon). Aristotle offers examples of the two different beings: (1) by ‘origin of movement’ he
means ‘that which can generate’. This must exist first (in time). His example is a teacher. (2) ‘That
which is used by the end’ is an instrument to what is generated. His examples are pipes. So there are
three different classes of beings involved in a process of generation.
43 GA II 6, 742a37–b6. Those parts which are for the sake of something else, and which are not mov-
ing powers, only come into being after the whole organism has already been created. They are, thus,
posterior to the whole organism.
44 GA II 6, 742b6–10: Aristotle sums up that it is difficult to determine the priority relations of parts
belonging to developing natural organisms, especially when it comes to classifying the moving power.
For it is hard to say whether or not the moving power is prior in substance to the end. In sum, he has
argued that the moving power is only prior in generation to the end; and the end is prior in substance
to the instruments it uses and to the moving cause.
45 Trott (in this volume).
46 GC 337b14–337b24.
47 Fine (1995: 269–270); Correia (2008: 1014).
Bibliography
Beere, J. (2009) Doing and Being: An Interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Cavarero, A. (1995) In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, trans. S. Anderlini-
D’Onofrio, Cambridge, MA: Polity. Originally published in Italian as Nonostante Platone: Figure
femminili nella filosofia antica, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1990.
Code, A. (1987) “Soul as Efficient Cause in Aristotle’s Embryology”, Philosophical Topics 15(2):
51–59.
——— (1997) “The Priority of Final Causes over Efficient Causes in Aristotle’s Parts of Animals”, in
W. Kullmann and S. Föllinger (eds.), Aristotelische Biologie, Stuttgart: Steiner, 127–143.
Connell, S. M. (2000) “Aristotle and Galen on Sex Difference and Reproduction: A New Approach to an
Ancient Rivalry”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 31(3): 405–427.
——— (2016) Aristotle on Female Animals: A Study of the Generation of Animals (Cambridge Classical
Studies), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——— (2021). Aristotle on Women: Physiology, Psychology, and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Correia, F. (2008) “Ontological Dependence”, Philosophy Compass 3(5): 1013–1032.
Fine, K. (1995) “Ontological Dependence”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95: 269–290.
Henry, D. M. (2006a) “Understanding Aristotle’s Reproductive Hylomorphism”, Apeiron 39(3):
257–287.
——— (2006b) “Aristotle on the Mechanisms of Inheritance”, Journal of the History of Biology 39(3):
425–455.
——— (2007) “How Sexist Is Aristotle’s Developmental Biology?” Phronesis 52(3): 251–269.
Lefebvre, D. (2018) “Aristotle’s Generation of Animals on the Separation of the Sexes”, in D. Sfendoni-
Mentzou (ed.), Aristotle - Contemporary Perspectives on His Thought: On the 2400th Anniversary
of Aristotle’s Birth, Berlin: De Gruyter, 75–94.
386
Leunissen, M. (2017) “Order and Method in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals”, in A. Falcon and
D. Lefebvre (eds.), Aristotle’s Generation of Animals: A Critical Guide, Cambridge: Cambridge
——— (in this volume) “Women in Ancient Medical Texts as Sources of Knowledge in Aristotle”, in
S. Brill and C. McKeen (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy,
New York: Routlegde.
Mayhew, R. (2004) The Female in Aristotle’s Biology, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Mercer, C. (2018) “The Philosophical Roots of Western Misogyny”, Philosophical Topics 46(2):
183–208.
Morsink, J. (1979) “Was Aristotle’s Biology Sexist?” Journal of the History of Biology 12: 83–112.
Quarantotto, D. (2022) “Aristotle on the Order of Embryonic Development and the Homonymy Prin-
ciple”, in S. Föllinger (ed.), Aristotle’s Generation of Animals: A Comprehensive Approach, Berlin:
De Gruyter, 233–267.
Schofield, M. (1990) “Ideology and Philosophy in Aristotle’s Theory of Slavery”, in G. Patzig (ed.),
Aristoteles’ ‘Politik’. Akten des XI Symposium Aristotelicum, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1–27.
Sissa, G. (1990) Greek Virginity, trans. A. Goldhammer, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tress, D. M. (1992) “The Metaphysical Science of Aristotle’s GA and His Feminist Critics”, Review of
Metaphysics 46: 307–341.
——— (2019) Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation, Edinburgh:
Trott, A. M. (in this volume), “Aristotle’s Hylomorphism Reconsidered Through Aristotle’s Account
of Generation”, in S. Brill and C. McKeen (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient
Greek Philosophy, New York: Routlegde.
Further Reading
Mariska Leunissen (2017) provides a thorough and detailed introduction to the generations of animals
(“Order and Method in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals”, in A. Falcon and D. Lefebvre (eds.),
Aristotle’s Generation of Animals: A Critical Guide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 56–74).
Sophia Connell’s work on Aristotle’s views on females gives a comprehensive and fascinating account of
Aristotle’s view on females. Her work offers the reader a nuanced view of Aristotle’s embryology by
situating Aristotle’s biological works in the broader context of his theoretical and practical philoso-
phy ((2016) Aristotle on Female Animals: A Study of the Generation of Animals (Cambridge Classical
Studies), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; (2021) Aristotle on Women (Cambridge Elements),
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Devin Henry’s work on sexism in Aristotle ((2007) “How Sexist is Aristotle’s Developmental Biology?”
Phronesis 52(3): 251–269; (2006) “Understanding Aristotle’s Reproductive Hylomorphism”, Apei-
ron 39(3): 257–287; (2006) “Aristotle on the Mechanisms of Inheritance”, Journal of the History of
Biology 39(3): 425–455) provides a nuanced and informative discussion of the literature and puts
forward original new readings.
Alan Code’s work on the relation between the four causes in Aristotle’s biology and its relation to the
metaphysical writings provides an excellent analysis of the complicated relationship between these
two fields of study ((1987) “Soul as Efficient Cause in Aristotle’s Embryology”, Philosophical Topics
15(2): 51–59; (1997) “The Priority of Final Causes over Efficient Causes in Aristotle’s Parts of Ani-
mals”, in W. Kullmann and S. Föllinger (eds.), Aristotelische Biologie, Stuttgart: Steiner, 127–143).
387
26
ARISTOTLE ON WOMEN’S
VIRTUES
Sophia Connell
Most University courses on philosophical ethics now include discussion of so-called ‘virtue
ethics’, much of it based, however loosely, upon Aristotle’s works. This ‘aretaic turn’ in con-
temporary philosophy was initiated by women, particularly Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa
Foot. And yet there are certain challenges with including women in Aristotle’s account of
living well. Three approaches in recent literature signal the need to more directly address
women’s virtues in his thought. The first takes Aristotelian virtue ethics to be gender neutral,
that is, for its tenets to hold whether the agent is male or female.1 However, when reading Ar-
istotle’s works, almost all the examples of virtue he uses are of men performing typically male
activities, such as active political or military roles.2 A second approach, taken by various femi-
nist commentators, is to reject virtue ethics completely as anti-feminist on the grounds that
the virtues are strictly male virtues. As Möller Okin puts it: ‘There is little doubt throughout
Aristotle’s ethics that…his account of the virtues takes the perspective of the free, educated,
and leisured male members of society’, a stance which ‘depend[s] upon the exclusion of free
women’ (Möller Okin 1998: 212). Virtue ethicists such as Alistair MacIntyre are accused of
using ‘falsely gender-neutral language’ to disguise the fact that the theory cannot apply to
women (ibid.: 218). The care and work of women which supports men in traditional societies
is thought not to count as virtue at all. For these thinkers, to include such qualities of character
as part of virtue theory is wrong-headed; caring virtues cannot simply be added but rather the
whole idea of virtue must be ‘radically and extensively revised’ if it is to survive at all (ibid.:
229–230).
Rather than confront the issue of women’s virtues, commentators who concentrate on Ar-
istotle’s philosophical ethics, and its contemporary significance opt either to assume that any
agent he mentions could be female or avoid the issue by writing explicitly as if he could only
mean men (e.g. Lear 1984: Chapter 5). Both responses are problematic; the first leads directly
to the feminist point that the virtues discussed do not allow us to think about the real chal-
lenges in women’s lives then or now. The second strategy makes his philosophy irrelevant to
today’s more inclusive projects in ethics.
The problem of women and virtue from the modern perspective and its analysis of Aris-
totle often focuses on caring aspects of women’s lives. On the one hand, it seems that if there
were such feminine virtues these would hardly benefit the individual and instead result in
women ‘neglecting ourselves for the sake of others’ (Conly 2001). Furthermore, a focus on
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-29 388

Aristotle on Women’s Virtues
care undermines agency (Calhoun 1999; Tessman 2005). And when it comes to considering
such virtues within an Aristotelian framework, feminist commentators see only a problem or
dilemma – Aristotle sees the importance of correct child-rearing but doesn’t notice that this
requires virtuous women in the home (Sherman 1989: 144–156; Möller Okin 221–222).3
There is a way to understand Aristotelian virtues as more expansive than these critiques allow.
Aristotelian ethics strikes readers from varying backgrounds and identities as important; it
did to Anscombe, a mother a seven, and to Foot, whose life in academia was marred by sexist
discrimination.4 I myself have felt an affinity with Aristotelian ethics but also a sense of aliena-
tion as a woman working on his philosophy. Indeed, I experienced this very acutely in his very
school. While attended an academic conference on Aristotle in Athens, on an afternoon off, I
entered an extensive area filled with trees and shrubs, a stray cat or two, and the foundations
of the Lyceum. I had never been so close to the object of my life’s work before; rather than
joy and recognition I intensely felt the spirit of Aristotle wishing me away. This experience
reminded me of the many people who ask how I can read and engage with work of such stark
and damaging misogyny. In this pondering on gender in Aristotle’s ethics, I strive to on the
one hand find resources for philosophical ethics applicable to the lives and experiences of all
people while also challenging those aspects of his ideas that ought to be rejected. Aristotle’s
sexism is unquestionable; however, this chapter will argue that the situation is complicated
and cannot be remedied by doing away with the Aristotelian tradition in ethics completely.
On the other hand, it is crucial to consider the context in which his views emerged and to
challenge the assumptions that led him to endorse the curtailment of women’s lives. A careful
reading of feminine virtues, even though confined to home and family, in his philosophical
ethics, reveals their fundamental similarity to proper virtue in his system. This means that it is
not wrong to talk of women having virtues, even for Aristotle; this allows for an expansion of
his theory into the caring attributes that everyone ought to cultivate no matter their gender. It
may be that he would not have approved this development but that’s all for the better.5
On the basis of Aristotle’s writings, this chapter will argue that the differences between
the virtues of men and those of women do not show ethical weaknesses in women. However,
there are ways that women, due to biology or politics or both, can never, for Aristotle, reach
the same level of virtuousness as their male peers. The two sexes operate in differently valued
realms – men run cities; women run households. While this limits women’s political involve-
ment, it does not render them incapable of virtue; on the contrary, the bad fortune of being
born a woman is mitigated by the central importance to the community of their characters.
For Aristotle, without virtuous women, the city would fail to flourish. There are still reasons
to disparage this attitude; given his views about political organization and the position of the
household, women’s virtues will find expression privately rather than publicly. He explicitly
values the public and political realm, the realm of men, above that of the home, even though
the former depends on the good functioning of the latter.
This chapter does not find an insolvable dilemma about women’s role as mothers of young
children for Aristotle. His own ethical framework supports a positive role for intelligent and
just women in terms of their role as nurturers in the home. From the contemporary perspec-
tive, this will seem hopelessly restrictive; but through Aristotle’s own eyes, there is a positive
role in terms of virtue, similar to male virtue, for citizen wives and mothers. Even so, it is work
for the modern researcher to find these positive accounts of women’s virtue in Aristotelian
texts; the most that we find is that he did not disallow these traits for women.
The view that women cannot have true virtues is best supported by passages coming from
Aristotle’s Politics. His ethical works, by contrast, do not so explicitly exclude women from
the capacity for virtue. While in his ethics, Aristotle indicates that virtue is a settled disposition
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to respond appropriately in situations that require good actions, he does not specify what
women’s virtues would be like. In the Politics, he is more explicit about the shortcoming of the
female condition and the correctness of the subordination of women to men, given their inca-
pacities, although this is expressed cryptically. Neither view is more representative of Aristotle
than the other. The tensions between them will not always be resolvable, but both ought to be
explored as aspects of Aristotle’s view.
Considering the context of these works is helpful in explaining their different content. The
sole rationale for female political infirmity occurs in the first book of the Politics and is noto-
riously difficult to make sense of. Within the rest of the work, when women are mentioned,
which is rarely, it is clear that their virtues and happiness are considered significant, although
men are championed as those with the most important virtues. Meanwhile, the Nicomachean
Ethics is obviously written with a male perspective in mind but there are many positive clues
about women’s goodness such as the need for virtuous friendship with a husband and as ex-
emplars of friendship through maternal love. It is not always wise to try to find consistency
across texts in such cases; instead, it is often useful to think in terms of ideas in tension. When
it comes to the role of women, the evidence from Greek antiquity is of disagreement rather
than settled orthodoxy and Aristotle’s works reflect this atmosphere of debate. While Aristotle
clearly thought the virtues of women to be important, he was much more focused on those of
men and gave less guidance about what he recommended for women.
This chapter aims to supplement our understand of Aristotle on women’s virtues, focusing
on their character virtues.6 Before detailing these, the objection that Aristotle thinks women
incapable of virtue because they are chronically akratic will be dealt with in the first section.
The next section sets out what Aristotle says about women’s virtues in his Politics where it
seems that only men have real virtues and that those of women are lesser. In his ethical works,
in contrast, Aristotle does not or, rather, should not support the view that men’s and women’s
virtues differ at a fundamental level. Virtue as broadly defined ought to cover all manifesta-
tions, including those in women; however, these virtues may well manifest to a different extent
given the limitations placed on women’s lives and their subordinated upbringing and physical
condition. Women’s virtues also differ due to the different objects and spheres they operate
within, which are of lesser value according to Aristotle. The third section of this chapter will
go through a number of moral virtues from Aristotelian ethics and attempt to flesh out what
these virtues would look like for women. The chapter closes (Section 4) by surveying difficul-
ties with this point of view.
1 Against Women as Chronically Akratic

In explaining different kinds of rule within the household in his Politics, Aristotle says
women’s deliberative capacity is akuros (Pol. I.13, 1260a12–13). The most influential in-
terpretation of this saying is an intrapersonal one, which is that women are not in control
of themselves, particularly their lower appetites (Fortenbaugh 1977; Modrak 1994; Nielsen
2015; Riesbeck 2015; Leunissen 2017). Other scholars argue for an interpersonal reading of
the phrase, which means that women’s deliberations do not have external authority (Saxon-
house 1985; Deslauriers 2003, 2009; Connell 2021). One of the strongest ways to support
the latter reading is to show that the former is insupportable. For Aristotle, akrasia is a moral
defect; the akratic is neither virtuous nor happy. If women were to be chronically akratic, then
it is difficult to understand why Aristotle professes concern for the virtue and happiness of
women (Pol. I.13, 1259b36–1260a1 1260b8–20; II.9, 1269b13–19; EN VII.7, 1162a22–8;
Rh. I.15, 1361a11–12). He also emphasizes the importance of education in virtue for all
390
citizens, including women (1361a7–11) – it is precisely neglect of women’s education which

leads to the problems he notes in Sparta (Pol. II.9, 1269b22–3; Plato Laws 781a). We ought
to keep in mind that the comments about women’s virtues in this context are wholly nega-
tive, given that he is attending to women’s character only in order to avoid potential political
disaster rather than as a positive encouragement to their flourishing.
When women are discussed in the ethical and political works, Aristotle is focused on
those he sees as the most influential in the city, citizen wives. These women are responsible
for running households, which entails difficult and complicated sets of tasks, such as care
for those who are ill, preparation and distribution of food, and managing expenses. It
would not make sense to leave such tasks in the hands of people who are completely unable
to control themselves (Saxonhouse 1985: 51; Levy 1990: 402, 405; Swanson 1992: 56–57;
Dodds 1996: 78–79; Scott 2010; Riesbeck 2015: 138). Another reason to resist this view
of female moral psychology is that it does not fit with Aristotle’s descriptions and explana-
tions of the phenomenon of akrasia. Akrasia is not something that is incurable; it cannot be
chronic. If a person were permanently unable to control their lower appetites, this would be
a case of pathological bestiality (e.g. EN VII.5, 1148b20–24)7 and there is no indication that
Aristotle views all women as bestial.8 Indeed, for Aristotle women look to be more likely
to act in a civilized manner than men, since they are less spirited, spirit being the basis for
wildness and impetuosity (HA XI.1, EN VII.7, 1150b19–29). Female animals, according
to Aristotle, are easier to handle and tame, indicating a tendency to be less wild (HA XI.1,
608a23–24).
2 Women’s Virtues as Different and Lesser Virtues

Having established that Aristotle thinks women can be virtuous in some sense at least, I turn
to his Politics, where it seems that although women have virtues, their virtues are different
from and not as good as those of men.
Clearly, then, moral virtue belongs to them all [that is, to rulers and subjects]; but the
temperance of a man and a woman, or the courage and justice of a man and of a woman,
are not, as Socrates maintained, the same; the courage of a man is as ruling, of a woman
is as assistant (huperētikē). And this holds of all other virtues.
(Pol. I.12, 1260a20–24)9
The context referred to is no doubt the discussion in Plato’s Meno; Aristotle agrees more with
the character of Gorgias than with Socrates (Pol. I.13, 1260a27–28). Gorgias posits that vir-
tue consists in performing a certain task well, so that the virtue of a woman is ‘ordering the
house well, preserving the things inside, and being obedient to her husband’ (Meno 71e8–9).10
The second idea we find in the Politics is that women’s virtues are lesser than men’s (I.12,
1260a16–19; III.4, 1277a20–b25). The thought that virtue exists on a scale is not necessarily
strange; one might think that bravely facing a dog is a bit less worthy than bravely facing an
axe-wielding murderer. However, this is better described as displaying one’s virtue more in
the situation that requires more fortitude; the virtuous disposition seems to be fundamentally
the same. Instead, what is claimed here is that the virtues possessed by one sex of person are
better than the same virtues possessed by the other sex of person. Aristotle does not provide
any explicit rationale for this idea.11 One possibility is that virtues exist on a scale in the sense
that the propensity to feel and act appropriately to situations that require a virtuous response
cover more instances in men than in women. Thus the idea is that men will be courageous in
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more fearful situations than women and have a broader range of virtue. Another idea comes
later on, when Aristotle explains that women’s virtues are somehow flavored by being ruled
over as opposed to the male virtues which are connected to ruling:
[F]or clearly a good man’s virtue, for example his justice, will not be one and the same
when he is under government and when he is free, but it will be of different kinds, one
fitting him to rule and one to be ruled, just as temperance and courage are different in
a man and in a woman (for a man would be thought a coward if he were only as brave
as a brave woman, and a woman a chatterer if she were only as modest as a good man).
(Pol. III.4, 1277b19–24)
Given these texts from the Politics, it is understandable why many commentators conclude
that for Aristotle women cannot have genuine virtues.12 While this viewpoint has its attrac-
tions, it sits awkwardly with the crucial role of women in the household, the oikos. Women are
not only household managers in this setting but work to hold together communities through
bonds of care and friendship, particularly concerning their immediate families.13
When we turn to the ethical works, the idea that the virtues of one sex are fundamentally
different from those of the other fits less clearly to the context of the well-run city and home.
Here the audience is young men; mention of women occurs only in the context of their role
as the wives and child-bearers they will encounter in their future roles in the polis.14 However,
the way that virtues are introduced is not as strictly role dependent, such as ‘cleaning the
house well’ or ‘riding a horse well’, but as general dispositions that preside over any and every
relevant activity. Like Socrates (and Plato), Aristotle seeks a common definition for all virtue
in his ethics, which he gives as:
Virtue is a state that decides [consisting] in a mean…which is defined by reference to

reason.
(EN 2.6.1106b36–1107a2)15
The idea that virtue differs with social role or function is incongruous with Aristotle’s ethics,16
where ‘the happy person lives well and does well’ (EN I.7, 1098a22). The good person com-
bines practical wisdom (phronêsis) with character virtues, always deciding correctly in each
situation they are faced with whatever their social role may be. In the context of the ethics, the
most important control is over internal desires and feeling, that is, self-control, whereas the
Politics pushed for the virtues of external rule.
The Politics goes so far as to propose at one point that only an actual political ruler can
have the virtue of phronêsis (Pol. III.4, 1277b25–6). Some are sure this means women cannot
have virtue, since phronêsis is required for moral virtue in Aristotle’s ethics. But if only those
who are rulers can be good, this is incredibly restrictive and excludes most men in most cities,
such as those in regimes that share power either successively or simultaneously. Aristotle can-
not mean for his theory of virtue to be so narrow. Indeed, in the same text, he later makes clear
that virtue does have a broader scope. For all those in a community who share in promoting
civic well-being, a common definition of virtue applies to them:
While the precise definition of each individual’s virtue applies exclusively to them, at the
same time, a common definition is applicable to them all.
(Pol. III.3, 1276b20–29)
392
Since good women for Aristotle promote civic well-being, they also can be virtuous in this com-
mon manner. Moreover, even though Aristotle indicates that the virtues of men and women
are different (Pol. I.12, 1260a20–24) he nowhere states that women’s virtues are not virtues.17
Women’s virtues can be understood as proper virtues; that is, not fundamentally different
from the virtues of men (Salkever 1990; Mulgan 1994: 198–199; Dodds 1996: 78; Scott 2010,
2020), although there may still be some sense in which they differ by degree or cover fewer or
restricted instances. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle suggests that the value of the virtue is related to
the subject or agent rather than objects or activities:
virtuous actions are nobler when they proceed from those who are naturally worthier,
for example, from a man rather than a woman.
(Rh. I.9, 1367a17–19)
This fits awkwardly with the Aristotelian idea that the worth of the subject is dependent on
whether they are virtuous. The Rhetoric concentrates on how to persuade audiences, tak-
ing into account the views of common people; the values espoused, such as this one, are
sometimes at odds with Aristotle’s own philosophical ethics. There are, however, clues in the
Rhetoric about the ranking of men’s and women’s capacities. Aristotle often uses a rhetori-
cal trope which associates an activity or capacity with the value of its relevant objects (Rh.
I.7, 1364b7–11). For example, theoretical activity concerning the stars is more valuable than
knowing about animals and plants (PA I.5, 644b23–645a10; Johnson, forthcoming). But epis-
temically, we are often better placed to understand or teach about those objects that are not
the noblest (Metaph. I.2, 982a8–10), as in the case of animals (PA I.5, 644b25–6). The same
sort of reasoning could be at work with respect to virtue: displaying virtues which deal with
more noble objects are the nobler virtues. Just as the noblest objects are not always the most
appropriate ones for us to study, so also one could argue that the most noble ethical objects
are not always the most appropriate. Being born a woman in Aristotle’s time debarred a per-
son from certain of the objects and domains of men. But women’s virtues are what is appro-
priate to them, what is attainable by them, and thus what is best given the circumstances they
find themselves in. This will mean, though, that these are lesser virtues and can in some sense
be compared and deemed less good or expansive then male virtues.
The idea of men’s virtues being better relates to the fact that the sphere in which they operate
is deemed of greater human significance, namely the broadest political influence in legislation,
policy, and the running of the constitution.18 It is important not to exaggerate this, however.
When Aristotle associates the oikos (household) with basic needs and the polis (city) with liv-
ing well (Pol. III.9, 1280a33), this is in the context of considering the most simple of human
communities consisting only of households, and not the households that are constitutive of the
polis. Without households, there is no polis: ‘the household’, Aristotle writes, ‘is more neces-
sary than the polis’ (I.12, 1162a20).19 Households that are part of cities are also for living well,
for example in the education of the young within them (Sherman 1989: 157–199; Trott 2014:
74–75; Connell 2019) and the mutual support in the friendship of husband and wife.20
The friendship of husband and wife also seems to be natural. For human beings natu-
rally tend to form couples more than to form cities, to the extent that the household is
prior to the city, and more necessary….human beings share a household not only for
child-bearing, but also for the benefits in their life. For from the start their functions are
divided, with different ones for the man and the woman; hence each supplies the other’s
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needs by contributing a special function to the common good. Hence their friendship
seems to include both utility and pleasure. And it may also be a friendship of virtue, if
they are decent.
(epieikes) (EN VIII.12, 1162a16–26)
In marital friendship, there must be if not an absolute sameness in virtues, an equivalence – the
virtues of wife and husband underpin their friendship since: ‘friendship consists in equality
and similarity, especially the similarity of those who are alike in virtue’. As Aristotle goes on to
explain, such friends help each other to be and remain good people (EN VIII.8, 1159b3–7).21
While much can be made of the superior role of men in the polis, it is the oikos where
values and affections are formed and maintained across generations (Scott 2020: 205). This
need for personal friendship is crucial to what humans are, for ‘human is a pairing and house-
holding animal’ primarily (EN VIII.1, 1155a17; VIII.6, 1158b11, EE VII.10, 1242a22). In
the same spirit, Aristotle rejects a social contract view of the development and sustenance of
human political communities.
It is clear that a State is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the
prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange. These are conditions without
which a State cannot exist; but all of them together do not constitute a State, which is
a community of families and aggregations of families in well-being, for the sake of a
perfect and self-sufficing life. Such a community can only be established among those
who live in the same place and intermarry. Hence there arise cities, family connexions,
brotherhoods, common sacrifices, amusements which draw people together. But these
are created by friendship, for to choose to live together is friendship. The end of the State
is the good life, and these are the means towards it.
(Pol. III.9, 1280b29–1281a1)
A polis is made up of both genders of person; in the context of this community, the virtues of
women are crucial and a concern for politics. ‘For just as man and wife are part of a house-
hold, it is clear that the polis also is divided nearly in half into its male and female population’
(Pol. II.9, 1269b9–10).
Women’s virtues are different from men’s because their role is to attend to tasks within the
oikos; their virtue will be to do these well. Allowing that in Aristotelian terms women can be
truly virtuous makes better sense of the emphasis he places on marital character friendship
and their role as maternal moral exemplars (Sherman 1989: 157–199). Yes, male and female
friendship in marriage involves the superiority of one party over the other (EN VIII.7) but this
is due to political power and not to character virtue; it makes sense on Aristotle’s own terms
for them to have comparable moral worth.
3 What Women’s Virtues Would Look Like

To test out the hypothesis that women’s virtues are fundamentally just like any others (Mulgan
1994: 198–9; Dodds 1996: 78; Scott 2010, 2020), I will consider a number of Aristotelian
virtues and how they could have been displayed by an ideal citizen woman. While the four
canonical virtues are the focus of Politics VII–VIII, that is, courage, temperance, justice and
wisdom (Pol. VII.1, 1323b31–35), those detailed in EN III–V are more various. Many of
these particular virtues paint a picture of the lives of Greek men, since they involve objects
and resources not available to women, such as property and free movement.22 It is necessary,
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therefore, to think creatively about how these virtues might apply to Greek women since Aris-
totle did not do so.23 There is more scope to fit the canonical virtues to ancient feminine roles
in the typical Greek city-state.24 This is the general flavor of Xenophon’s account of how to
train a young wife in household management; both husband and wife have temperance (so-
phrosunê), courage (andreia), and prudence (phronêsis) applied to different realms – external
and internal (Oec. 7.35–42).25 This is also something that certain Stoic thinkers expressed
later on.26 From the evidence of ethics, it isn’t correct to completely oppose Aristotle to these
positions; instead, his view can be seen to exist on the same continuum.27 Women’s virtues
have to do with domesticity and their given role in society; women require equivalent charac-
ter training to men in acquiring and preserving such dispositions.
Ancient Greek women of the elite citizen class, the primary concern of most philosophers,
would have had tasks such as managing servants, the economics of feeding people, nursing,
textiles, and care and early education of the young. There are also crises to consider: while
war is seemingly the province of men, it profoundly affects the lives of women as many Greek
tragedies attest. What happens if your city is defeated? What happens when the men are away
fighting? What happens if your child, husband, or father dies? These are phenomena that
many ancient Greek women would have had to face. Let’s consider now a number of virtues
from the Nicomachean Ethics and their potential application to such women.
3.1 Courage
In the Politics, Aristotle says that a man would be thought a coward if he were only as coura-
geous as a courageous woman (III.4, 1277b21–2). The typical arena for considering courage,
literally manliness (andreia), is the battlefield; it seems then, as detailed earlier, that in Aristo-
tle’s view, there exists a broader field of situations in which men can respond when they have
a courageous disposition. Men must risk life and limb in combat; ancient Greek women were
not required, and indeed not permitted, to fight in this manner. Typically, very few would have
received training in childhood, such as sparring and wrestling, to prepare them to consider
bodily aggression as part of their lives. Lacking habituation would presumably affect their ca-
pacity to develop the same scope as their brothers. They would also not have learned how to
handle weaponry. Given this, it is hardly surprising if faced with physical attack or taking up
a sword, a woman would have been fearful, and not displayed the ‘courage of a man’. Perhaps
Aristotle might even exonerate women for lacking the broader scope of this virtue given that
they could not bring about this training after the right age had passed. But in the sphere of
being a woman, there is scope for a courage that men do not and cannot display – that is, the
courage to persist in the goal of producing new life from one’s own body, through pregnancy,
miscarriage, stillbirth, live birth, and constant feeding. With extremely high rates of infant
mortality, the perseverance required would have been formidable. Without the possibility of
the sort of medical assistance that the present-day global North takes to be standard, any elite
status would make no difference whatsoever to these outcomes; rich and poor alike are killed
by these processes (Connell 2021: 29). As Euripides’ Medea famously remarks: ‘I would rather
stand three times in the battle line than bear one child’ (Euripides, Medea 251).
Perhaps, you think, women did not have a choice about whether to undergo these dan-
gers, and so cannot be counted as courageous.28 But the same logic can be applied to men in
societies that require ubiquitous training and commitment to combat; there is no choice for
them either. The choice comes in the way that individuals face these inevitable physical and
psychological challenges. This will broadly amount to a similar type of character trait – the
ability to ‘stand firm against what is painful’ (EN III.9, 1117a33). The frequency and horror
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of perinatal death in this society merit the application of Aristotle’s following statement to
these women: ‘Hence someone is called courageous to the fullest extent if [s]he is intrepid in
facing a fine death and the immediate dangers that bring death’. He was biased in following
up with ‘this is above all true of the dangers in war’ (EN III.6, 1115a29–36).
As for taking control of the inevitable challenges of the female condition, women tradition-
ally held the keys to knowledge around conception and childbirth; they were far from passive
in these endeavors (Connell 2023). The courage displayed in the childbed also includes a rec-
ognition of the noble, a key part of Aristotle’s description of the virtues (EN III.7, 1115b12–14).
He states that ‘death and wounds will be painful to the courageous person and they will
suffer these unwillingly. But they will endure them because it is noble (kalos) to do so’ (III.9,
1117b6–9). The noble goal is the production of a healthy citizen child. It is all-important to
produce new people; there can be no community without this work which counteracts the
killing that men achieve on the battlefield.
Another area of experience in which women will display courage is in the aftermath of war
and conquest. The noble goal here can be generally characterized in terms of the preservation
of the values held by a certain community, values that may be about to be lost or eradicated
through military defeat or the genocidal actions of invaders. Such scenarios occur frequently
in Greek tragedy. Iphigenia is a female character Aristotle refers to a number of times. Agam-
emnon feels he must sacrifice her, his virgin daughter, in order for the winds to take him and
his troops to join the invasion of Troy. Like many tragic heroines, Iphigenia is fully aware of
the significance of her role; she is not passive to her fate but decides on it as the best way for-
ward. Her life thus gains dignity in joining her will to fate. She also has the power to express
how ironic the situation is for her, how in endorsing the civilized standing of her own com-
munity, she acquiesces to a seemingly barbaric act. Her rationale for willingly giving her life
is that ‘Greeks shall not be ruled by barbarians’ but the act of taking the life of an innocent
young woman does not seem a civilized one at all.29
Another theme in tragedy is the vulnerability of women in the aftermath of wars, who can
expect abuse and were often required to submit to sex and to having children with the very
men who killed their own loved ones. Polyxena, virgin Trojan princess, chooses death over the
prospect of this outcome.30 For those who did not have the option of choosing to be murdered,
their ability to face pain is also significant. It may be thought that there is no dignity or nobility
in being a sex slave. And yet, courage is evident in such situations, manifesting itself in an abil-
ity to honor and remember the places they came from. For example, captive women will raise
their children with the values they grew up with, even if these children are not wholly from
their own culture.31 They will perhaps gain some standing in the new community through
cooperation or love and in this, they will need to suppress fear inspired by memories of vio-
lence.32 Whether choosing to continue joined to the enemy tribe or to die instead, the women
who face the aftermath of war have the courage to endure their fate. These inevitabilities are
depicted in many stories; these do not give us soft, weak or emotional women. The assump-
tion that this is the only or even the main Greek view of womankind is surely questionable.
For example, Nielsen writes:
In his discussion of bravery, Aristotle contrasts bravery with malakia [softness], arguing
that, while the brave person stands firm because that is fine and because anything else
is shameful, the coward dies for the sake of erotic passion or to avoid poverty or some-
thing painful…Women have a similar flaw.
(Nielsen 2015: 578)
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Staying strong during the process of giving birth (without anaesthesia) is not something that a
‘soft’ person does. If a woman dies giving birth, she knows the value of her efforts on behalf of
the community; she can hardly be said to have died in cowardice, that is, in pursuit of ‘erotic
passion’33 or so as ‘to avoid pain or poverty’. Given the enormous risks involved in bearing
children and being the ones left after war and conquest, the following seems applicable to
women in Greek societies:
Besides, it is true, as they say, that the virtuous person labors for their friends and for
their native country, and will die for them if they must; they will sacrifice money, honor
and contested goods in general, in achieving what is fine for themselves.
(EN XI.8, 1169a18–22)34
Although the people Aristotle discusses in the Nicomachean Ethics are men, this description
of the virtuous person could apply to the cases detailed here of the courage of both ordinary
and heroic Greek women. Certain caveats must be applied to these examples, however. First
of all, Aristotle never mentions this sort of idea. It is a theme in Greek tragedy, only the em-
phasis there is on passivity and suffering rather than agency for women. And given that their
courageousness only covers the sphere of child-bearing, child-rearing, and enduring rape and
violent assault, this severely limits their capabilities. Such virtuous responses are not entirely
active engagements and are not the sort of activities one would seek out in order to display
virtue according to Aristotle.
3.2 Justice
When it comes to justice (dikaia), the female variety may be different because it is employed
with respect to different objects than and within different parameters from male justice.35
Within the home, women have to share out food for the entire household, exercising propor-
tional justice. As a metaphor for the distribution of nourishment in embryological develop-
ment, Aristotle turns to the work of ‘a good housekeeper’.
Like a good housekeeper, nature is not accustomed to throw anything away if something
useful can be made out of it. In housekeeping, the best of the food available is reserved
for the freemen; the residue left over from this as well as the inferior food goes to the
servants, and the worst of all goes to the domestic animals. Hence then is an instance
of a mind (nous), external to them, acting so as to provide for their growth. In the same
way nature is at work within the creatures themselves that are being formed, and con-
structs flesh and bodily parts of the other sense-organs out of the purest of the material,
whereas out of the residues it constructs bones and sinews and hair, and also nails and
hoofs and all such things.
(GA II.6, 744b16–26)36
The procedure of meting out food requires careful consideration of the needs of individuals,
a case of sensitivity to the particulars which is a part of virtue according to Aristotle (EN II.9,
1109b20–23; IV.5, 1126a32–b4). Maintaining a healthy household through nutrition is tra-
ditionally the province of women just as judging how frequently to nurse children, especially
in the precarious first few months.37 One might object that the male heads of households
actually had ultimate control over the distribution of food but it seems highly unlikely that
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they had the time or inclination to become involved. The scope of just responses for women
looks narrower than that of men for Aristotle, given these instances occur mostly within the
household.38
3.3 Temperance
Temperance concerns moderation with respect to the pleasures of touch and taste (EN III.10,
1118b26). Since the objects are the same for men and women, why would Aristotle think
that temperance differs for them (Pol. III.4, 1277b18–19)?39 Although he never explicitly says
so, one possibility is that he considers temperance to require more effort for women due
to their different bodily conditions.40 Women, for Aristotle, have softer and more sensitive
skin and flesh (GA I.19, 727a15–18; VI.4, 764b28–33, HA IV.11, 538b9); thus they will feel
things more acutely. Aristotle describes the people who have intense desires and pleasures as
‘melancholics’.
[In] melancholic men…their constitution causes their body continual turmoil, and they
are always having intense desires. A pain is driven out by its contrary pleasure, indeed by
any pleasure at all that is strong enough; and this is why such people become intemper-
ate and base (akolastoi kai phauloi).
(EN VII.14, 1154b11–15)
Although Aristotle never says that women are constitutionally similar to melancholics he may
have thought this. That would mean that temperance is a harder task for them. However,
there is no indication that he thinks them incapable of it; indeed, female temperance will be
absolutely essential to the proper running of the oikos and polis. The ‘mean relative to us’
(EN II.6, 1106a27–1106b6) includes the natural bodily constitution we have; for women, this
might mean realizing that they are more prone to seek bodily pleasure, on average, than men
and thus to consciously guard against this propensity.
Some believe that Aristotle thought women to be especially sexually intemperate (Modrak
1994: 213; Mayhew 2004: 102–103). What little evidence there is for this comes from his
discussion of human reproduction in the Historia Animalium.
The females who are sexually active while young become more intemperate, and so do
the males if they are unguarded either in one direction or in both.41 For the channels
become dilated and make an easy passage for fluids in this part of the body; and at the
same time their old memory of the accompanying pleasure creates desire (epithumia) for
the intercourse that took place then.
(HA IX.1, 581b16–22)42
The passage does not state that ‘girls have a strong sex drive and, thus, must be watched more
carefully than boys’ (Mayhew 2004: 102). Contra Mayhew, the passage emphasizes that no
person, whether male or female, should begin to have sexual intercourse too young since this
sets the body up for an increase in sexual desire. Aristotle’s recommendation that girls marry at
18 (Pol. VII.1, 1335a27–28), a good four to five years later than the age his contemporaries fa-
vored (Hippocrates, Virg., VII.466–8 Littré, Xenophon Oec. 7.4–6), points to the importance
of cultivating internal self-control in women. If girls are more prone to the melancholic bodily
state than boys, then they will need to be more vigilant; this would presumably be part of their
education concerning this virtue. Again, knowledge of the relative mean would be required.
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3.4 Mildness
Mildness (proatês) is the virtue concerned with anger or temper (orgas) (EN IV.5, 1125b25–6).
Aristotle states that there is no common name for this condition and it is ‘inclined toward
the deficiency’ (1125b28, 1126a1–2), meaning that it is really a slowness to anger. Aristotle
urges that we focus on deficiency of temper even though there are tendencies in his society
to praise ‘people who get irritated as manly (andrôdeis) and fitted to command’ (1126b1–2).
Those considered manly, then, are not actually hitting the right mean; it is much better to be
‘deficient’ in manly temper, i.e. like a woman. Men are more likely to fly into a rage at every-
thing, given their more spirited natural temperament (Connell 2021: 12–18, 45–46; EN V.4,
1126a18–20).43 As is noted by many historians of anger, women in Aristotle’s world would
have had very little power to exact revenge, the typical response to angry emotions (Rh. II.2,
Harris 2002: Chapter 11). But in the EN Aristotle advocates that condition: ‘the mild per-
son is ready to pardon, not eager to exact a penalty’ (1126a2), arguably a feminized state of
mind.44 Thus, unlike temperance, mildness will be a virtue that women, on average, will find
easier than men to achieve.
3.4 Magnanimity
Although magnanimity concerns honor, the good person knows that ultimately it is being gener-
ous that is more noble and that honor is not worth anything on its own (EN 8.8.1159a25–6).45
This is close to the attitude of the ideal mother figure in the Nicomachean Ethics who is more
concerned with generous love than with being honored.
[Friendship] seems to be in the loving rather than in the being loved. A sign of this is
that mothers rejoice in loving. For some mothers give away their own children to be
nursed, and loving, they know them, but do not seek to be loved in return, should it not
be possible to have both. But it seems to be sufficient to then, if they see/know that [the
children] do well, and they love them even though those do not render [to the mother]
honor as a mother.
(EN 8.8.1159a28–33)
The theme of friendship (which in some ways parallels virtue – EN VIII.5, 1157b6–8) is an im-
portant one for Aristotle’s vision of the good life and the successful community (Pol. II.4, 1262b8;
Cf. EN VIII.1, 1155a23–25; VIII.9, 1159b25–35; Pol. III.10, 1280b34–1281a2). Friendship
holds together the polis; it creates unity and no State can work without it. Friendship requires
personal relationships, people who are ‘special’ (idion) to each other (Pol. II.4, 1262b24).
These relationships are maintained by ‘living together’ (suzên, EN VIII.7, 115720–24; IX.10,
1170b12–14, 1171a2–3), meaning constant discussion and care for the goals of friends. In a
close knit culture such as Aristotle’s, women are the ultimate social glue which is why mother
and child are the paradigm of the ideal friendship where love is unconditionally given.
4 Conclusion. Aristotle and the Limitations of Womanly Virtue

What does this interpretation tell us about Aristotle’s attitude toward women? On the positive
side, Aristotle’s vision for the good citizen and the good community must include positive dis-
positions in women, particularly in citizen women, who in their married relation will ideally
maintain a friendship of character with their husbands; thus will the married people support
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each other’s virtuous activities and be able to deliberate together about important matters
(Deslauriers 2015; Riesbeck 2015; Connell 2021). Without allowing for quite robust female
virtues, these advantages would be lost. Citizen wives will also be encouraged to become
mothers of citizens, both boys and girls. In this role, virtue will be crucial, for how will the
next generation be so if they are not raised and cared for by another virtuous human (Con-
nell 2019: 38–41)? And finally, indispensable for the continuity of human communities, is a
collective consciousness and continuation of culture and value. With their milder and more
affectionate nature, according to Aristotle, women are well placed to foster and maintain love
and friendship between and across generations; and it would certainly seem very difficult for
this to happen without those people being themselves good and recognizing the fine.
While traditional roles for women, particularly citizen women or wives, in the idealized
polis are essential we must also recognize the limitations this imposes on women. Sara Brill has
explained Aristotle’s tendency to suppress what women contribute to the good of humanity
and the polis. ‘Whatever agency the mother might win….is purchased by the sacrifice of her
social and political status as mother’ (Brill 2020: 253). Skills in nurture, virtue, and intelligence
are required in women, but this is never explained or highlighted and certainly not celebrated
in Aristotle’s works. Indeed, in the way that they are praised for their love, its public presence
is erased: women love even when the honor that is due to them as parent is not present (EN
8.8.1159a28–33). Women are not supposed to mind being invisible, while also being crucially
important to the good functioning of the human community. Thus, Aristotle’s ideal woman
is in a double bind, her virtue is not only to be good at a very many things through effort and
devotion to these tasks, and performing them from a virtuous disposition, but she must also
remain unrecognized. Her virtues are not her own to empower her.46
To become invisible is the fate of people limited in the scope of their deliberation, some-
thing that is not entirely natural but primarily cultural.47 Other female animals, unless they are
domesticated and imposed on by the will of human beings, are not inferior in their activities
and ways of life (bioi) to their male counterparts; some even surpass these (spiders, dogs, leop-
ard, female deer, etc., HA VIII.1, 608a28, 34; 5.611a15–17; 39.623a24). Human women are
cut off from the full range of opportunities allowed to men due to the way that human society
operates; this is something Aristotle endorses. The polis, the only arena for human success,
cannot operate without subservient women within the oikos.48 Both in terms of habituation
and in terms of the natural propensities to mildness and softness of temperament, girls and
women for Aristotle will not succeed in securing positions of authority and this means that
the expansiveness of their virtuous dispositions will be curtailed as well.49 However, there is a
way in which typical male virtues, championed by Aristotle, are not due to any superiority in
terms of effort, but rather to blind chance. It is due to chance that the mixture in conception
results in a male rather than a female child.50 The male child, because of physical strength
and spiritedness, will eventually be provided with more external and contingent resources to
achieve male virtues.51 Ancient Greek culture does not just allow for this domination of one
gender over the other but actively promotes it. In that setting, being born as a female child is
most unlucky.
On the one hand, we might think that men and women don’t so much have different
virtues, at least not in terms of the account in Aristotle’s ethics. Instead, they operate within
different spheres and encounter different objects which for him requires a proportionate re-
sponse. Men, in general, have a broader field in which to display their virtues, since they oc-
cupy both home and city. However, that analysis breaks down when we see that some objects
are the sole province of ancient women, such as food distribution, textiles and child-bearing
and rearing. These might, then, require just as much virtue; instead, it must be that Aristotle
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did not value such objects as much as he did those traditionally associated with men; such
thinking is still evident in societies around the world. When we look to his ethics, though, we
might try to build a theory which sees all objects on the same plain and values them in terms
of how a person responds to his or her circumstances with integrity and compassion.
Aristotle downplays the role of fortune in happiness and virtue – it is possible from that
vantage point, that women, while curtailed in material ways,52 can employ inner resources
to achieve virtue proper. Good people are those ‘least affected by fortune’ who will ‘bear
fortune most finely’ (EN I.10, 1100b13, 19; 32). On Aristotle’s own terms, if women have
what are fundamentally the same capacity for virtue as men do, then making women stick to
a ‘womanly’ sphere and barring them from any public decision making is unjustified (Scott
2020: 197; Connell 2021: 44–49).53 Their lack of political influence is circumstantial rather
than fundamental. Both men and women in Ancient Greek culture live in a society that allows
those with more strength to oppress those who are physically weaker and less spirited; it also
reinforces this behavior. While Aristotle accepted that women are naturally inferior, he had
no good grounds to do so on his own terms. He never gives any coherent account of anything
fundamentally morally wrong with women which would make them incapable of political
influence and even being able, under certain circumstances, to take over rule. Aristotle should
have known this. He certainly knew of women who were leaders and even founders of consti-
tutions in Egypt and Phoenicia (Pol. 2.11.1272b24–33). If the greatest benefactor is the one
who constructs a new constitution (Pol. 1.1.1253a30–3), then women who have achieved this
are as valued as any other political benefactor. Perhaps for him, these were the exceptions that
prove the rule.
Aristotle’s view ultimately rests on an idea of appropriateness. Given that they are born as
female, women shouldn’t try to do what men do.54 To say that their objects are less noble (as
in the Politics) or that their person is less noble (as in the Rhetoric) is empty of force when
they could never become men nor can they engage with the objects and in the fields that men
do. They must accept that those with more strength and spirit will not allow them to have
any power. Thus Aristotle’s philosophy undermines women’s political freedom but he never
has any good grounds on his own terms to do so. There is even less good reason to think that
women are incapable of philosophy. Since political leadership is not a prerequisite for the de-
velopment of theoretical understanding and indeed the two often do not go together, women’s
ability to think is never denied.55 But since they are consumed with domestic tasks and hidden
away, Aristotle thinks it very appropriate to deny them the chance to express and develop any
philosophical propensities.56
Notes
1 A prime example is Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire in which her female character, Nikidion, at
one point adopts Aristotelian ethics (Nussbaum 1994: 78–101).
2 Most recent books on Aristotelian ethics simply substitute feminine pronouns indifferently to the
examples used. For example, in her book on Aristotle on shame Jimenez writes: ‘if someone stands at
their post during a battle unaware that she is doing so, or if she does so at the wrong moment….her
goal will not contribute to her becoming courageous’ (2020: 27). While women can now be soldiers
in many countries, this was not commonplace for Aristotle and most of his contemporaries.
3 Against this reading see Connell (2021: 38–41).
4 For a gripping account of the lives of these women philosophers see Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman
(2022).
5 ‘If we were reading the Nicomachean Ethics alone, though, without knowledge of his other works,
would we conclude that Aristotle’s examples of the most important moral virtues apply to women as
much as to men? I think even under these conditions it would be impossible to do this. Why? …his
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discussion of the virtues is worded in terms of men, and many of his examples are explicitly from the
male point of view’ (Möller Okin 1998: 212).
6 For women’s intellectual virtues, particularly phronêsis and sophia, see Swanson (1992: 61–65);
Connell (2021: 55–59).
7 See Pearson (2018). Pearson translates thēriōdēs as ‘brutish’ rather than ‘bestial’.
8 See also Deslauriers (2022: 167–168).
9 Translation Jowett in Barnes (1984).
10 Translation Lamb (1952). Aristotle’s account of women’s virtues here is perplexing. As Stauffner
remarks: ‘this conclusion is beset with difficulties’ (2008: 937).
11 Aristotle never says anything as direct as Plato who proclaims women to be much less capable of
virtue: ‘a woman’s natural potential for virtue is inferior to a man’s, so she’s proportionately a greater
danger, perhaps even twice as great’ (Laws 781b2–3).
12 Leunissen (2017: 167) – ‘[women] will never be morally virtuous’; Kraut (1997); Sherman (1989:
153) – ‘their virtue remains essentially inferior’.
13 Deslauriers argues that in the context of the Politics, women must be virtuous in terms of being
‘natural subjects’ to the rule of men (Deslauriers 2022: 169). One complaint against Aristotle is that
for him women’s virtues wouldn’t allow for ‘autonomy’ but are in place to better the community
(Leunissen 2017: 165, 167). However, it would seem that men’s virtues are also for the sake of the
community (Pol. I.2, 1252b30–1253a1). The autonomy requirement is perhaps rather anachronistic.
14 Aristotle does not go into as much detail about the relevant virtues of wives and mothers as does, for
example, Xenophon (see Johnson’s chapter in this volume).
15 translation Irwin (1985).
16 Pace Browning Cole (1994: 128). The function hypothesis is expressed in terms of the ‘human’
(anthrōpos) (EN I.7).
17 See Leunissen’s account of the virtue of ‘assistants’ (2017: 152–154).
18 Deslauriers (2003: 228–229): ‘the tasks of running the city are better than the tasks of running the
household’. (Scott 2010; Riesbeck 2015: 149).
19 The polis (city) is prior to the individual (Pol. I.2, 1253a25–6) not to the oikos (household). See
Deslaurier (2022) on the important role of women in the household and how this underpins human
flourishing more generally.
20 Both polis and oikos aim at common human values (Salkever 1990: 175; Stauffner 2008: 930). Trott
(2014: 196) explains this well: ‘by casting the relationship between men and women as political in
the Politics, Aristotle draws the concerns of household and political rule closer together, positing both
equality and a concern for living well –the concern of political life – in the household’.
21 Such women are epieikeia – decent or good (EN VIII.12, 1162a23). See also women as spoudaioi at
Pol. I.12, 1260b17–18. (EN VIII.12, 1172a10–12. Swanson 1992: 52, 55).
22 It is a legitimate worry that Aristotle’s ‘discussions of liberality and magnificence are all about money,
to which most women of his time had little or no access’ (Möller Okin 1998: 215).
23 ‘Since he provides no examples, we are left wondering what virtues such as… “courage in a wife”
might be like’ (Ibid.: 216).
24 There was actually much variation and Aristotle had views about which customs were closer to being
correct. Treating wives like slaves and selling women were amongst the practices he disdained.
25 See paper by David Johnson in this volume.
26 See especially Musonius Rufus (Hemelrijk 1999: 61–62). See Chapter in this volume by Julia
Wildberger.
27 For a continuity between the view of Aristotle and Plato see Marechal in this volume.
28 This challenge was posed to me by Glenda Hall.
29 Aristotle Pol. I.2. For an astute analysis of this quotation see Stauffner 2008: 933. Aristotle discusses
the play at Poetics 16. For another perspective on female agency in such cases, see Loraux (1987).
30 Polyxena appears in Euripides’ Hecuba. Sophocles eponymous play is fragmentary.
31 In her book from the perspective of captive Trojan women, Pat Barker imagines such a scenario:
‘There they were: battle-hardened fighters every one, listing to a slave sing a Trojan lullaby to her
Greek baby. And suddenly I understood something…We’re going to survive – our songs, our stories’
(Barker 2018: 296).
32 A good example of this character is to be found in the case of Tecmessa, a former Trojan noble-
woman, later concubine to Ajax (Sophocles’ Ajax).
402
33 Women do not even need to feel any pleasure or desire in order to become pregnant as Aristotle
recognized (GA I.19, 727b6–7).
34 The masculine pronoun has been rendered gender neutral to convey the possibility of women agents.
35 I reject the recent view that women simply cannot be just due to an inherent lack of ‘spiritedness’
(Deslauriers 2022: 239–243). This argument elides the usefulness of feminine mildness in bonds of
affection as well as the exemplarity of mothers’ feelings in Aristotle’s ethics.
36 Translation Peck (1942).
37 Dean-Jones (1994: 222–223). GA IV.8 provides a scientific account of milk production but does not
mention how mother or wet-nurse actually proceeds to feed a child (HA IX.12). At Politics VII.15
Aristotle notes that young children must be fed on milk rather than wine; he leaves the detailed cal-
culations of how much and when to feed children to the women who care for them.
38 Another area to place under justice is sexual activity within marriage. For Aristotle, husbands and
wives owe each other completely equivalent sexual fidelity (Pol. VII.14, 1335b39–1336a2). This view
was unorthodox given the usual double standards of his contemporaries. For further discussion see
Kraut 1997: 156–157 and EN II.6, 1107a9–17 where Aristotle says that adultery with any woman is
for a man always wrong. Adultery was usually defined as sex with a woman who was someone else’s
wife or legitimate daughter and not sex with a prostitute or another available woman such as a slave.
This view is strikingly similar to the Stoic Musonius Rufus’ more than 4 centuries later (‘On Sexual
Intercourse’, for translation see Nussbaum 2002: 319–320).
39 For the argument that they are in fact the same in men and women for Aristotle see Salkever (1986).
40 For a fuller account see Connell (2021: 7, 15–19).
41 This seems to refer to sex with both girls and boys.
42 Pol. VII.14, 1335a23–25. There is a similar connection given between early sexual experience and
intemperance in the Hippocratic works for both sexes (man: Puer. 10; woman Virg. 1).
43 Female vice with respect to anger is more likely to be bitterness, a state induced by the inability to
exact revenge (EN V.5, 1126a20–7).
44 The angry responses of men are chronicled in Pol. V.8 as the most disruptive to communities.
45 See Swanson (1992: 61–62).
46 ‘The feeling of out-flowing personal power so characteristic of the caregiving woman is quite different
from the having of any actual power in the world. There is no doubt that this sense of personal effi-
cacy provides some compensation for the extra-domestic power women are typically denied’ (Bartky
1990: 116).
47 When agents live under conditions of systematic injustice, their opportunities to live well are blocked
(Tessman 2005; Norlock 2019). Thus do we, in the end, return to the feminist critique of Aristotelian
ethics that he ‘neglected the fact that it has been women – whether mothers or servants, and almost
always disadvantaged and subordinated both within the family and in society at large – who have
played a vastly greater role in the early care of children than have men’ (Möller Okin 1998: 223).
Historically the family has only rarely been a place in which women have had equal, just and happy
lives.
48 In response to the Rep. notion that dogs of different sexes perform the same tasks, Aristotle notes:
‘[non-human] animals do not have to manage a household’ (Pol. II.5, 1264b6). See an excellent ac-
count of why Aristotle thinks it necessary to subordinate women for the sake of the household in
Deslauriers (2022: Chapter 3).
49 On women as ‘softer’ in Plato and Aristotle see Marechal, this volume.
50 GA II.3, 737a26–7. Connell (2016: Chapter 8).
51 Although Aristotle prioritizes the goods of the soul over those of the body and external goods (Pol.
VII.1), he says that a good person’s life must be ‘furnished with sufficient means to taking part in
virtuous action’ (See also Pol. VII.11, 1331b21).
52 The goods of fortune or external goods include ‘friends, wealth and political power’ (EN I.8,
1098b31). Of these, the citizen wife lacks the latter most acutely.
53 Deslauriers notes a tension in Aristotle’s account and speculates that this reflects a current problem in
Greek societies whereby citizen women are both free and disenfranchised (2015: 52).
54 Appropriateness figures in the idea that there is a different honor due to father and mother (IX.2,
1165a24–7). In the Poetics, Aristotle states that ‘good character exists in every class of person’ and
that it is inappropriate for a women to be ‘courageous’ and ‘clever’ in the way that a man is because
women are ‘inferior’ (Poet. 15, 1454a16–31).
403
Sophia Connell
55 Political leadership as the highest of the practical sciences still falls below theoretical pursuits in
Aristotle’s estimation (Swanson 1992: 61–65; Connell 2021: 55–59).
56 Poet. 15, 1454a16–31; Mayhew (1999).
References
Barnes, J. (1984) Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 volumes, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Barker, P. (2018) Silence of the Girls, London: Doubleday.
Bartky, S. L. (1990). Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression, London
and New York: Routledge.
Brill, S. (2020) Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Browning Cole, E. (1994) “Women, Slaves, and ‘Love of Toil’ in Aristotle’s Moral Philosophy,” in Bat-
Ami Bar On (ed.) Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle, Albany:
Calhoun, C. (1999) “Moral Failure,” in C. Card (ed.) On Feminist Ethics and Politics, Lawrence: Uni-
versity of Kansas Press, 81–99.
Conly, S. (2001) “Why Feminists Should Oppose Feminist Virtue Ethics,” Philosophy Now 33: 12–14.
Connell, S. (2016) Aristotle on Female Animals: A Study of the Generation of Animals, Cambridge:
Connell, S. (2019) “Nurture and Parenting in Aristotelian Ethics’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
119.2: 179–200.
Connell, S. (2021) Aristotle on Women: Physiology, Psychology and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Connell, S. (2023) “Women’s Medical Knowledge in Antiquity: Beyond Midwifery,” in K. O’Reilly and
C. Pellò (eds.) Women Ancient Philosophers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 57–76.
Deslauriers, M. (2003) “The Virtues of Women and Slaves,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 25:
213–231.
Deslauriers, M. (2009) “Sexual Difference in Aristotle’s Politics and Biology,” Classical World 102:
215–230.
Deslauriers, M. (2015) “Political Rule Over Women in Politics I,” in T. Lockwood and T. Samaris (eds.)
Aristotle’s Politics: A Critical Guide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 46–63.
Deslauriers, M. (2022) Aristotle on Sexual Difference: Metaphysics, Biology, Politics. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Dodds, D. (1996) “Family Matters: Aristotle’s Appreciation of Women and the Plural Structure of Soci-
ety,” The American Political Science Review 90: 74–89.
Fortenbaugh, W. (1977) “Aristotle on Slaves and Women,” in J. Barnes et al. (eds.) Articles on Aristotle
2: Ethics and Politics, London: Duckworth, 135–139.
Harris, W. V. (2002) Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity, Cam-
Hemelrijk, E. (1999) Matrona Docta: Educated Women in the Roman Elite from Cornelia to Julia
Domna, London: Routledge.
Johnson, M. R. (forthcoming) ‘Rank-Ordering of Skills and Sciences in Aristotle’s Protreptic to Biol-
ogy,” in Sophia Connell (ed.) Aristotle’s Parts of Animals: A Critical Guide, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kraut, R. (1997) Aristotle Politics Books VII and VIII, Oxford: Clarendon.
Lamb, W. R. M. (1952) Plato’s Laches, Protagoras, Meno, Euthydemus, London: Heinemann.
Lear, J. (1984) Aristotle: The Desire to Understand, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leunissen, M. (2017) From Moral Virtue to Natural Character in Aristotle, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Levy, H. (1990) “Does Aristotle Exclude Women from Politics?” Review of Politics 52.3: 397–416.
Littré, E. (ed.) (1839–1861) Oeuvres complètes d’Hippocrates, 10 volumes. Paris: J. B. Baillière.
Loraux, N. (1987) Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, translated by A. Forster. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Mayhew, R. (1999) “’Behavior Unbecoming of Woman’: Aristotle’s Poetics 15 and Euripides’ Melanippe
the Wise,” Ancient Philosophy 19.1: 89–104.
Mayhew, R. (2004) The Female in Aristotle’s Biology: Reason and Rationalization, Chicago, IL: Chicago
University Press.
404
Modrak, D. (1994) “Aristotle: Women, Deliberation, and Nature,” in Bat-Ami Bar On (ed.) Engendering
Origins: Critical Feminist Readings of Plato and Aristotle, Albany: State University New York Press,
207–22.
Moller Okin, S. (1998) “Feminism, Moral Development, and the Virtues,” in R. Crisp (ed.) How Should
One Live? Essays on the Virtues, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 211–230.
Mulgan, R. (1994) “Aristotle on the Political Role of Women,” History of Political Thought 15: 179–202.
Nielsen, K. M. (2015) “The Constitution of the Soul: Aristotle on Lack of Deliberative Authority,” Clas-
sical Quarterly 65.2: 572–586.
Norlock, K. (2019) “Feminist Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edi-
tion), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/feminism-ethics/>.
North, H. (1977) “The Mare, The Vixen, and The Bee: ‘Sophrosune’ as the Virtue of Women in Antiq-
uity,” Illinois Classical Studies 1.2: 35–48.
Nussbaum, M. (1994) The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, NJ:
Nussbaum, M. (2002) “The Incomplete Feminism of Musonius Rufus, Platonist, Stoic, and Roman,”
in M. Nussbaum and J. Sihvola (eds.) The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in
Ancient Greece and Rome, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 288–326.
Pearson, G. (2018) “Aristotle on Psychopathology,” in Pavlos Kontos (ed.) Aristotle on Evil, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 122–149.
Riesbeck, D. (2015) “Aristotle on the Politics of Marriage: ‘Marital Rule’ in the Politics,” Classical
Quarterly 65.1: 134–152.
Salkever, S. (1990) Finding the Mean: A Study of Aristotle’s Politics, New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
Saxonhouse, A. (1985) Women in the History of Political Thought, New York: Praegar.
Scott, D. (2010) “One Virtue Too Many? Aristotle’s Politics 1.13 and the Meno,” in V. Harte, et al. (eds.)
Aristotle and the Stoics Reading Plato, London: Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 101–122.
Scott, D. (2020) Listening to Reason in Plato and Aristotle, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sherman, N. (1989) The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Stauffner, D. J. (2008) “Aristotle’s Account of the Subjection of Women,” Journal of Politics 70: 929–941.
Swanson, J. (1992) The Public and Private in Aristotle’s Political Philosophy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press.
Tessman, L. (2005) Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Trott, A. (2014) Aristotle on the Nature of Community, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Further Readings
An account of the positive nature of women for Aristotle as sustaining the all-important private sphere,
see:
Swanson, J. (1992) The Public and Private in Aristotle’s Political Philosophy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press.
This paper explains how to understand the position of women in Aristotle’s ethical philosophy by com-
paring this with his view of slaves:
Deslauriers, M. (2003) “The Virtues of Women and Slaves,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 25:
213–231.
For an excellent account of women’s virtues in marriage see:
Riesbeck, D. (2015) “Aristotle on the Politics of Marriage: ‘Marital Rule’ in the Politics,” Classical
Quarterly 65.1: 134–152.
For a classic reading of Aristotle’s idea that women’s deliberative faculty is akuros as interpersonal, see:
Saxonhouse, A. (1985) Women in the History of Political Thought, New York: Praegar.
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27
WHAT IS WRONG WITH WOMEN
Aristotle’s Paradigm of Gender and Its Anomalies
Giulia Sissa
Aristotle has created a powerful paradigm of the difference between women and men, females
and males, the importance of which goes far beyond ancient Greece. In this chapter, I will
present a synthesis of Aristotle’s interconnected arguments about gender, and I will offer an
example of their Christian reception. I will also bring to the fore a few anomalies that compli-
cate the Aristotelian paradigm.
1 What Is Wrong with Women

Female living beings are comparatively less able than males. Poorly equipped with natural
heat, females are unable to “concoct” the residue of digestion, thus transforming the blood
into seminal fluid. This thermal explanation of the difference between the sexes runs through
the Generation of Animals.1 In the Parts of Animals, we learn that heat is correlated with a
passion that makes a salient difference in the lives of females and males: θυμός. I will render
this word in English as either “spiritedness” or “ardour”.2 Now, passions are experienced in
the body.3 Getting angry, being bold, desiring and feeling attraction or aversion: this is impos-
sible without the body.4 More precisely, the passions of the soul, including ardour (θυμός)
and fear (φόβος), are “inseparable from the physical matter of the living beings” (ἀχώριστα τῆς
φυσικῆς ὕλης τῶν ζῴων). It is precisely in their natural materiality that we feel the passions.5
We are embodied, enfleshed, and emmattered. We live our bodies.
In the case of ὁ θυμός, its “inseparability” from the body depends upon the blood. Blood
can be more or less dense. A thick blood is full of fibres, which are highly ignitable. Fibres “be-
come like embers in the blood and cause it to boil in fits of ardour (γίνονται οἷον πυρίαι αἵματι
τῷ ζέσιν ποιοῦσιν τοῖς θυμοῖς).6 The flammability of the blood contributes to a character (ἦθος).
There are animals which have in their blood especially abundant and thick fibres; these
animals are of a more earthly nature and have a fiery and “ecstatic” character because
of ardour (θυμώδη τὸ ἦθος καὶ ἐκστατικὰ διὰ τὸν θυμόν). For “ardour produces heat”
(θερμότητος γὰρ ποιητικὸν ὁ θυμός).7
Reciprocally, the dynamic of φόβος mirrors that of θυμός. Animals “who have excessively
watery blood are more fearful. Fear provokes cold. Hence, those creatures whose hearts contain
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-30 406

What Is Wrong with Women
a predominantly watery mixture, are already on the way toward the passion (προωδοποίηται
οὖν τῷ πάθει). Water is solidified by cold.”8 And if you are cold, you cannot leap into action –
you turn to ice. In animals such as bulls and boars, the combustible material is there, ready
to take fire. In deer, whose blood is diluted, water as potential frost is also there. Stags are
prone to fright. Two salient points: firstly, the quality of the blood creates a dispositional state,
namely a proclivity to feel, not the feeling itself. Ebullient creatures are not constantly boiling.
Spiritedness is not incessant fight. Timidity is not perennial flight. As we learn in the Rhetoric,
the Nicomachean Ethics and On the Soul, passions are felt in response to actual situations,
and in variable intensities. In such circumstances as wars or offences, hotblooded animals
overheat. Coldblooded animals freeze and flee. Secondly, Aristotle describes a feedback loop:
flammability places a bull on the path to feel ardour, which in turn heats it up. Watered blood
prepares a deer to feel terror, which then chills its blood some more.
Across species, males behave like bulls, females like deer. In the History of Animals,
Aristotle offers a comparative overview of the character (ἦθος) and the “dispositional states”
(ἕξεις) of females and males.
In all kinds in which there are the female and the male, nature has established much
the same difference in the character of the females as compared with that of the males.
But it is most evident in the case of humans and of the animals that have some size and
of the viviparous quadrupeds. For the character of the females is softer, and quicker to
be tamed, and more receptive of handling, and readier to learn, for example the female
Laconian hounds are in fact cleverer than the males. The kind of hounds in Molossia is
no different from those elsewhere in respect of hunting, but in shepherding it is superior
by reason of size and of courage in facing wild animals. And those cross-bred from both,
that is from the hounds produced in Molossia and from the Laconians, are superior in
courage and love of work. All females are less spirited than the males, except the bear
and leopard: in these the female is held to be braver. But in the other kinds the females
are softer, more vicious, less simple, more impetuous, more attentive to the feeding of the
young, while the males on the contrary are more spirited, wilder, simpler, less cunning.
There are traces of these characters in virtually all animals, but they are all the more
evident in those that are more possessed of character and especially in man. For man’s
nature is the most complete, so that these dispositional states too are more evident in
humans. Hence a woman is more compassionate than a man and more given to tears,
but also more jealous and complaining and more apt to scold and fight. The female is
also more dispirited and despondent than the male, more shameless and lying, is readier
to deceive and has a longer memory; furthermore, she is more wakeful, more afraid of
action, and in general is less inclined to move than the male, and takes less nourishment.
The male on the other hand, as we have said, is a readier ally and is braver than the
female, since even among the cephalopods when the cuttlefish has been struck by the
trident the male comes to the female’s help, whereas the female runs away when the male
has been struck.9
ἐν πᾶσι δ᾿ ὅσοις ἐστὶ γένεσι τὸ θῆλυ καὶ τὸ ἄρρεν, σχεδὸν ἡ φύσις ὁμοίως διέστησε τὸ
ἦθος τῶν θηλειῶν πρὸς τὸ τῶν ἀρρένων. μάλιστα δὲ φανερὸν ἐπί τε τῶν ἀνθρώπων καὶ τῶν
μέγεθος ἐχόντων καὶ τῶν ζωοτόκων τετραπόδων. μαλακώτερον γὰρ τὸ ἦθός ἐστι τῶν θηλειῶν,
καὶ τιθασσεύεται θᾶττον, καὶ προσίεται τὰς χεῖρας μᾶλλον, καὶ μαθηματικώτερον, οἷον καὶ αἱ
Λάκαιναι κύνες αἱ θήλειαι εὐφυέστεραι τῶν ἀρρένων. τὸ δ᾿ ἐν τῇ Μολοττίᾳ γένος τῶν κυνῶν τὸ
μὲν θηρευτικὸν οὐδὲν διαφέρει πρὸς τὸ παρὰ τοῖς ἄλλοις, τὸ δ᾿ ἀκόλουθον τοῖς προβάτοις τῷ
μεγέθει καὶ τῇ ἀνδρείᾳ τῇ πρὸς τὰ θηρία. διαφέρουσι δ᾿ οἱ ἐξ ἀμφοῖν ἀνδρείᾳ καὶ φιλοπονίᾳ, οἵ
407
Giulia Sissa
τε ἐκ τῶν ἐν τῇ Μολοττίᾳ γιγνομένων κυνῶν καὶ ἐκ τῶν Λακωνικῶν. ἀθυμότερα δὲ τὰ θήλεα

πάντα τῶν ἀρρένων πλὴν ἄρκτος καὶ πάρδαλις· τούτων δ᾿ ἡ θήλεια δοκεῖ εἶναι ἀνδρειοτέρα. ἐν
δὲ τοῖς ἄλλοις γένεσι τὰ θήλεα μαλακώτερα καὶ κακουργότερα καὶ ἧττον ἁπλᾶ καὶ προπετέστερα
καὶ περὶ τὴν τῶν τέκνων τροφὴν φροντιστικώτερα, τὰ δ᾿ ἄρρενα ἐναντίως θυμωδέστερα καὶ
ἀγριώτερα καὶ ἁπλούστερα καὶ ἧττον ἐπίβουλα. τούτων δ᾿ ἴχνη μὲν τῶν ἠθῶν ἐστὶν ἐν πᾶσιν
ὡς εἰπεῖν, μᾶλλον δὲ φανερώτερα ἐν τοῖς ἔχουσι μᾶλλον ἦθος καὶ μάλιστα ἐν ἀνθρώπῳ·
τοῦτο γὰρ ἔχει τὴν φύσιν ἀποτετελεσμένην, ὥστε καὶ ταύτας τὰς ἕξεις εἶναι φανερωτέρας ἐν
αὐτοῖς. διόπερ γυνὴ ἀνδρὸς ἐλεημονέστερον καὶ ἀρίδακρυ μᾶλλον, ἔτι δὲ φθονερώτερον καὶ
μεμψιμοιρότερον καὶ φιλολοίδορον μᾶλλον καὶ πληκτικώτερον. ἔστι δὲ καὶ δύσθυμον μᾶλλον
τὸ θῆλυ τοῦ ἄρρενος καὶ δύσελπι, καὶ ἀναιδέστερον καὶ ψευδέστερον, εὐαπατητότερον δὲ καὶ
μνημονικώτερον, ἔτι δὲ ἀγρυπνότερον καὶ ὀκνηρότερον καὶ ὅλως ἀκινητότερον τὸ θῆλυ τοῦ
ἄρρενος, καὶ τροφῆς ἐλάττονός ἐστιν. βοηθητικώτερον δέ, ὥσπερ ἐλέχθη, καὶ ἀνδρειότερον
τὸ ἄρρεν τοῦ θήλεός ἐστιν, ἐπεὶ καὶ ἐν τοῖς μαλακίοις ὅταν τῷ τριόδοντι πληγῇ ἡ σηπία ὁ μὲν
ἄρρην βοηθεῖ τῇ θηλείᾳ, ἡ δὲ θήλεια φεύγει τοῦ ἄρρενος πληγέντος.
The History of Animals displays a ready-made sample of binary thinking. Almost all females
are predisposed to passions such as pity and fear, but they are less ardent, less valiant and less
hopeful. Θυμὸς and ἀνδρεία go together. Since we know from Generation of Animals, that they
are colder than males, we are not surprised. There are exceptions such as the she-bear and the
panther, but human beings set the rule. While abundant θυμὸς is a shared experience among
all males (and we are led to deduce that stags must be less cowards than does), human males
must be superlatively susceptible to fits of ardour. The polarity of woman and man is magni-
fied. Their dispositions are hyper-gendered.
Materialism is built into this account of characters, but it is not a univocal determinism. It
is rather a matter of potentiality, of possibility, of “being on the way” towards a passion. This
is because the taxonomic tableau of sexual difference hinges on the all-important notions of
“character” (ἦθος) and “dispositional state” (ἕξις). Human beings are such that their charac-
ters are heightened and “their dispositional states too are more evident” (ὥστε καὶ ταύτας τὰς
ἕξεις εἶναι φανερωτέρας).10 A brief detour via the Nicomachean Ethics will show that Aristotle
applies the same ethical notions to all living beings, human and nonhuman. “Dispositional
states are the states in which we are – well or badly – with respect to the passions” (ἕξεις δὲ
καθ᾽ ἃς πρὸς τὰ πάθη ἔχομεν εὖ ἢ κακῶς).11 Virtues and vices are indeed forms of ἕξις. We call
“virtues” dispositional states worthy of praise.12 For example, we are well-positioned with
respect to anger, if we are accustomed to feeling moderate and appropriate ire; we are “ill-
positioned”, “misplaced”, “ill-posed” with respect to this same passion if we tend to get angry
either too much or not enough.13 This positioning makes the virtue of gentleness. In general,
ethical virtue, that is to say the excellence of ἦθος, namely of “character”, is the ability to act
in the best possible way with regard to pleasures and pains; vice, on the other hand, is a poorly
calibrated way of behaving with regard to enjoyment and suffering.14 In Aristotle’s view of
“shared life”, dispositional states orient the behaviours of all living beings.15
Ethical virtues are inflected by gender. Courage is manliness (ἀνδρεία). This is the disposi-
tion to withstand fear.16 Fear is experienced as cold and chilling.17 Now, males have the hyletic
ammunitions to experience a hotter version of a passion that is conducive to warming up:
ardour, θυμὸς. Females, in turn, are not utterly deprived of θυμὸς but, being comparatively
ἀθυμότερα, they lack what it takes to go through equally strong feelings. To be alive, they must
enjoy some natural heat, but they do so in a tepid manner. No fibres. Less boiling. Less ardour.
They are bound to freeze. Which brings to bear on their entire existence. For ardour has ethical
effects: it contributes to the noble virtue of manly courage (ἀνδρεία). “Brave men act because
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of the beautiful, but their θυμὸς cooperates” (οἱ μὲν οὖν ἀνδρεῖοι διὰ τὸ καλὸν πράττουσιν, ὁ δὲ
θυμὸς συνεργεῖ αὐτοῖς).18 “Courageous men, therefore, are full of θυμὸς: for θυμὸς is superla-
tively impetuous in front of dangers” (ὅτι καὶ οἱ ἀνδρεῖοι θυμοειδεῖς: ἰτητικώτατον γὰρ ὁ θυμὸς
πρὸς τοὺς κινδύνους.19 “The most natural form of courage seems to be that which is inspired by
ardour, and when reinforced by deliberate choice and purpose it appears to be true courage”
(φυσικωτάτη δ᾿ ἔοικεν ἡ διὰ τὸν θυμὸν εἶναι, καὶ προσλαβοῦσα προαίρεσιν καὶ τὸ οὗ ἕνεκα ἀνδρεία
εἶναι).20 This synergy is crucial. Courage is neither a “coldblooded” decision to act for the sake
of “the beautiful”, nor a beastly instinct. Θυμὸς corroborates ἀνδρεία.
To conclude, women are not more passionate than men, quite the contrary. Women do not
have a monopoly on sentimentality or emotional sensitivity, far from it. It is males who, thanks
to their fibrous, more inflammable blood can be subjected more forcefully to surges of θυμὸς.21
It is men who are “emotional”, namely prone to exaggerate both in thoughtless audacity and in
a noble, sometimes necessary but potentially devastating passion – anger. It is males, the physi-
ologically more spirited living beings (θυμωδέστερα), in short, who are inclined to distinguish
themselves both in courage/virility, a passionate virtue, and in a passion as heroic as it can be
ruinous. Because of their coldness, females are naturally disposed to fear, a refrigerating emo-
tion. Except for the she-bear and the panther, they are less ardent and less spirited, ἀθυμότερα
δὲ τὰ θήλεα πάντα τῶν ἀρρένων πλὴν ἄρκτος καὶ πάρδαλις.22 Men are thrown into the world
embodied in a volcanic physiology, in a warrior’s body they must learn to live with. They must
take up the challenge of their natural heat. They must learn, so to speak, to play with fire and
to manage their hot flashes. Women are likewise challenged to live their own body. All human
beings must balance the facticity of their physique and the potential of the ethical virtues.
Variations in character across species and genders are compatible with those across ethnic
groups. Not all men reach the same level of spiritedness. External conditions matter. In Asia, a
mild climate makes people lukewarm, porous and soft; in the North, a glacial air hardens the
flesh, thereby provoking intense heat inside. As a result, “the peoples of Asia are intelligent
and technically gifted in their soul, but they are without θυμὸς, therefore they live being ruled
and enslaved” (τὰ δὲ περὶ τὴν Ἀσίαν διανοητικὰ μὲν καὶ τεχνικὰ τὴν ψυχήν, ἄθυμα δέ, διόπερ
ἀρχόμενα καὶ δουλεύοντα διατελεῖ). “Northern peoples are “full of θυμὸς, but lack intelligence
and technical skill” (θυμοῦ μέν ἐστι πλήρη, διανοίας δὲ ἐνδεέστερα καὶ τέχνης).23 The Kelts go
as far as to wage war against the waves of the ocean. They do so on account of ardour, διὰ
θυμόν.24 This comparative characterization hinges entirely on one powerful passion fuelled by
vital heat, which urges people not only to fight but also to command. “Ardour is a principle
of power and is indomitable” (καὶ τὸ ἄρχον δὲ καὶ τὸ ἐλεύθερον ἀπὸ τῆς δυνάμεως ταύτης ὑπάρχει
πᾶσιν – ἀρχικὸν γὰρ καὶ ἀήττητον ὁ θυμός).25 The Aristotelian author of the Problems asks
why people living in hot places are cowardly, while those living in cold ones are courageous.
“Those who are naturally hot are courageous”, he replies,
whereas those who have been cooled are cowardly (ἀνδρεῖοι δέ εἰσιν οἱ τὴν φύσιν θερμοί,
δειλοὶ δὲ οἱ κατεψυγμένοι). And it happens that those living in hot regions are cooled,
whereas those living in cold regions have been heated naturally.26
Belligerency, bravery, and imperiousness draw energy from the same physical source.
If we read these ethnic profiles together with the long ethological/ethical account of gen-
der, previously quoted from the History of Animals, we see Aristotle’s analogical and, liter-
ally, intersectional thinking: feeble heat/femininity/Asian ethnicity/submissiveness/cowardice/
διάνοια. Vital heat/ardour/manliness/Northern ethnicity/overbearingness/θυμὸς. The reason is
the same: individuals whose body is permeable, lax, and tepid are low in θυμὸς and vice versa.
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Now, is the attribution of low θυμὸς to deer, Asians, and females a matter of blame? Yes, of
course. To be lacking in internal heat, thereby wanting in ardour, makes people fearful, faint-
hearted, unable to fight, as well as submissive. Given the synergy of ardour and courage, this
condition inclines them to be craven. But the silver lining of low warmness is a superiority
in intelligence and technical skills. What is true for peoples is true for gender: all females are
clever, have good memory, learn easily and are mindful of their offspring.27 Which fits the logic
of Aristotle’s interconnected thoughts about life.
2 Practical Reason
Women are soft. Whereas the History of Animals attributes μαλακία to all females, the Nico-
machean Ethics extends such a property to a specifically human character and to a lifestyle.
How do people deal with pleasure and pain? In situations where most individuals would be
able to stand their ground (δύνανται ἀντέχειν), a soft man “is defeated and is unable to resist”
(ἡττᾶται καὶ μὴ δύναται ἀντιτείνειν). “A man who gives up before what the many succeed in do-
ing and resisting, that man is soft and enjoys luxury – since luxury is a form of softness” (ὁ δ᾽
ἐλλείπων πρὸς ἃ πολλοὶ καὶ ἀντιτείνουσι δύνανται, οὗτος μαλακὸς καὶ τρυφῶν : καὶ γὰρ ἡ τρυφὴ
μαλακία τίς ἐστιν). Soft people “once they have deliberated, do not stick to their deliberations”
(οἳ μὲν γὰρ βουλευσάμενοι οὐκ ἐμμένουσιν οἷς ἐβουλεύσαντο). But we are surprised when a man
is overcome by pleasures and pains which most men are able to bear, except when his inabil-
ity to resist is “due to the nature of the genus or disease” (διὰ φύσιν τοῦ γένους ἢ διὰ νόσον):
examples of the former are the softness of the royal family of Scythia and “the way in which
the female differs from the male” (ὡς τὸ θῆλυ πρὸς τὸ ἄρρεν διέστηκεν).28 We are not astonished
that women should be unable to bear the slightest pain, discomfort, or effort. It is logical. We
know already that they cannot be courageous, because they are unable to do what courageous
individuals can do, namely tolerate fear, which is a pain. We now learn that they are lax, yield-
ing, lazy, indolent and sluggish. But, once again, softness is not an “irrational”, intense and
tumultuous passion that would stand in opposition to male logos.29 That is not the problem.
As a property, softness corresponds to the ways in which a soft person behaves in particular
conditions. A μαλακὸς is someone who cannot be bothered to pick up his cloak.30 He cannot
suffer that minimal level of toil and pain. Neither can a woman, and naturally so. Lack of
perseverance, tenacity, and grit amounts to a peculiar feebleness of character. A Heideggerian
line of thought runs through this ethics: it is about care versus sloth.
This is the pathetic apparatus of gender. Men’s passions/women’s passions. Energetic deci-
siveness/indolent softness. Ability to stand firm/propensity to let go. Hot-blood/warm-blood.
Aristotle offers a truly phenomenological understanding of sexual difference, which is all
about how people live through their own body, their passions (which are inseparable from
living beings’ materiality) and their virtues (which are “dispositional states”, towards the
passions themselves). We have seen that Aristotle admits the intellectual power of women.
Relative coldness is both an advantage and a problem – the body is a challenge. It is up to us
to live our own physiology, as far as we can.
3 Τὸ βουλευτικόν
So, what else is wrong with women?
Scarce vital heat prevents them from converting blood into seminal fluid, causes the flux of
menstruations and makes bodies smaller and frailer in many ways. Human females are gener-
ally inferior, weaker, passive and subservient by nature. “The relation of male to female is by
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nature a relation of superior to inferior, ruler to ruled” (ἔτι δὲ τὸ ἄρρεν πρὸς τὸ θῆλυ φύσει τὸ
μὲν κρεῖττον τὸ δὲ χεῖρον, τὸ μὲν ἄρχον τὸ δ᾿ ἀρχόμενον).31 Other flaws diminish the potential
for enjoying goodness.32
We must suppose therefore that the same necessarily holds good of the moral virtues:
all must partake of them, but not in the same way, but in such measure as is proper to
each in relation to his own function. Hence it is manifest that all the persons mentioned
have a moral virtue of their own, and that the temperance of a woman and that of a man
are not the same, nor their courage and justice, as Socrates thought, but the one is the
courage of command, and the other that of subordination, and the case is similar with
the other virtues.33
Women are pusillanimous, to the point that a woman’s courage would be considered to be
cowardice for a man.34 Consistently, both in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Eth-
ics, Aristotle argues that the friendship of husband and wife is “aristocratic”, which is best
because this form of domestic government is not egalitarian but proportional to the unequal
value of the partners, for “to the superior and to the inferior it is just to give not the same, but
in proportion” (οὐ γὰρ ταὐτὸν δίκαιον τῷ ὑπερέχοντι καὶ ὑπερεχομένῳ ἀλλὰ τὸ ἀνάλογον).35 The
conjugal relationship is, by definition, one of superiority versus inferiority, therefore of asym-
metrical power – the husband rules, the wife is ruled.36 Women’s virtues are not merely sub-
standard; they are functional to serving, not to governing. Softness impairs women’s agency.
Their courage is minimal, which is understandable on account of their deficiency in θυμὸς. All
these disabilities compromise the capacity for practical reason. Women may well be clever but
cannot be good at making decisions about what to do.
This is essential to live a good life. In order to act, we deliberate, we judge, we ponder –
and then we make choices. This is a process. Now, when a deliberation should come to an
end, thereby lead to a course of action, a free man can rely on his “leading faculty which is
the choosing principle” (τὸ ἡγούμενον – τοῦτο γὰρ τὸ προαιρούμενον). This “hegemonic” abil-
ity, Aristotle points out, is best exemplified by a venerable monarchic figure, a Homeric king.
For everyone ceases to search how he will act as soon as he has brought the origin of the
action back to himself, to the leading part of himself, for this is what makes the choice.
This is clear from the ancient forms of government represented in Homer: kings used to
proclaim to the people the measures they had chosen to adopt. Since, then, the object of
choice, which we desire after deliberation, is something within our power, choice will be
a deliberate desire for the things in our power; for we first deliberate, then by judging we
desire according to our deliberation.37
To be sure, intelligence is an important part of the decision-making process, but διάνοια per
se “moves nothing”. To determine what to do and leap into action, we need an intentional
push.38 Hence the hybrid definition of choice as a “desire” that is, nonetheless, “deliberative”
(προαίρεσις ἂν εἴη βουλευτικὴ ὄρεξις). Cognition and wish must cooperate, in synergy. And
although a purposeful, volitional, energetic drive (ὄρεξις) is not literally “ardour” θυμὸς, the
metaphor of the Homeric king creates a semantic entanglement: the effort to end any delibera-
tion in our daily life becomes associated with the intense impetus conveyed by the word θυμὸς.
This is because θυμὸς is indeed the modus operandi of Homeric warriors, on the battlefield. It
is, once again, by alluding to these heroic figures – both troupes and princes – that Aristotle
makes clear what θυμὸς is, and how it corroborates courage.39 Homer provides Aristotle with
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exempla who fit beautifully the very logic of θυμὸς – a “logic of the concrete” (logique du con-
cret), in Claude Lévi-Strauss’ words – that distinguishes the lived bodies of females and males.
By modelling every single decision, even the most mundane, on a great warrior and com-
mander like Achilles, Aristotle makes explicit that, to get through ordinary life, all free people
need that kind of combative and imperious energy. The Homeric king, therefore, is not merely
a decorative simile: he is rather a vivid paradigm, dear to Aristotle and well known to his audi-
ence and readers; he is a piece of shared cultural memory that is meant to help us get the point.
To bring a decision-making process to an end (and therefore to fruition), we need a fuming
leader inside. And this is not a Socratic daimon and not even a charioteer in charge of our
winged soul, as in Plato’s suggestive comparisons, but an imperious, resolute, determined war
lord. Reasoning, once again, is not enough. At some point, τὸ ἡγούμενον must be unleashed.
Yes, I can!
Women cannot. The Homeric metaphor does not apply to women. Their “deliberative fac-
ulty” (τὸ βουλευτικόν), Aristotle claims in the Politics, is “devoid of authority” (ἄκυρον).40 The
meaning of this statement can only be understood in light of the Nicomachean Ethics.41 As we
have seen, a choice (προαίρεσις) is a “deliberative desire” (βουλευτικὴ ὄρεξις) that terminates a
cogitation. The metaphorical rendering of such a resolution – a Homeric king – magnifies pre-
cisely the authority needed to determine what to do. This image is both masculine and made
for men. Aristotle’s Homeric representation of the deliberative sequence is twice gendered.
Firstly, human beings need a king, not a queen. They must host in their soul a powerful man
who is able to announce to the people what he has decided. The sexually polarised universe
of the Iliad stands in the background of this allusion. Secondly, in Aristotle’s language, the
Homeric king is a “hegemonic” principle (τὸ ἡγούμενον) – and the male is “more hegemonic”
than the female. “By nature, the male is more inclined to command than the female“ (τό τε
γὰρ ἄρρεν φύσει τοῦ θήλεος ἡγεμονικώτερον).42 We call some people “manly because capable of
governing” (ἀνδρώδεις δυναμένους ἄρχειν).43 And where does this vocation to lead come from?
It depends upon the quintessentially masculine passion, namely ardour (θυμὸς). “Ardour is a
principle of power, and is indomitable” (ἀρχικὸν γὰρ καὶ ἀήττητον ὁ θυμός).44 As we have seen
in the Nicomachean Ethics, θυμὸς contributes synergically to courage when one is fighting. It
is also a penchant towards power. Whenever ardour is diminished, as in Asia, we observe cow-
ardice as well as submission. In the North, too much θυμὸς equals bravery and aggressiveness,
at the expense of politics. So, to make proper decisions we need a Homeric king who, first,
cogitates and, finally, gives orders. This manly man cumulates both valour and leadership.
Women are not merely physiologically and morphologically different from men. They lack
that go-and-get-it capability. They are able to deliberate, but with no authority, no teeth.
4 A Theatrical Ethics
Aristotle theorises both the taxonomic fact and the felt experience of sexual difference. The
body is lived in its limitations and its aptitudes. The lived body has an ethical life. We have fol-
lowed the thread of the masculine faculties to concoct a seminal fluid, to transmit an animal’s
form, to excel in all the virtues, to deliberate resolutely, to fight valiantly, and to rule regally.
All these possibilities are polarized onto over-heated and high-spirited males. Θυμὸς, because
of τὸ θέρμον, brings together all the aspects of masculinity. But this creates an interesting side-
effect: females are more intelligent than males. Two other paradoxes emerge.
All the ideas we have discussed, namely dispositional states, virtues, vices, characters, and
the ability to make choices, come to fruition in a normative work about fiction, the Poetics. We
ought to read the Poetics as Aristotle’s theatrical ethics. Characters, ἤθη, in the double meaning
412
of imaginary creatures and “ethical” personalities, are especially important. The characters
of a tragedy must be excellent (χρηστὰ). Why? Because they make choices (προαίρεσις). Their
words and actions “make evident” (ποιῇ φανερὸν) precisely their decisional activity and the de-
cisive outcomes of such an activity. The προαίρεσις of the characters (ἤθη) shows their worth –
which means that, in order to make good decisions, theatrical figures must be good. “Charac-
ter is of high quality (χρηστὸν) if the deliberate choice is of high quality”.45 Since drama is all
about choices, this ethical congruence is an absolute imperative for a playwright. Now, can
tragic women be good enough to make truly good decisions? The answer must be negative.
Firstly, the natural hierarchy of human value holds fast. “Good character exists in all kinds
of people”, Aristotle explains in the Poetics, but goodness is proportioned to that kind of per-
son. “A woman is of high quality (γυνή ἐστιν χρηστὴ) and a slave is good, even if the former
is something worse (χεῖρον), the latter absolutely despicable”.46 Women are worse than free
men. In the real world, a female may well be “great”, but, compared to a free man, she is still
a second-rate human being. We know from the Politics that a major flaw affects precisely her
deliberative faculty. We reckon from the Nicomachean Ethics that such a defect must impair
her “deliberative desire”, therefore her proficiency at finalizing choices. A woman is an ir-
resolute decider. On the stage, we must expect from a fictitious female that she mimics this
same disability – how could she be good at making good decisions? Secondly, the access of
women to the full-fledged experience of ethical virtues, literally the “excellence of character”
is impossible. We have learned from the Politics that women are stuck in subsidiary virtues,
suitable to their subordinate roles.47 A woman’s courage is a joke.48 Accordingly, playwrights
must abstain from inventing incongruously virtuous women. The Poetics urges the poets to
design female “characters” (ἤθη) who must be in tune with women’s real characters (ἤθη).
Mimesis must be ethically plausible. “It is possible for a character to be brave”, Aristotle
concedes, “but it is not ‘fitting’, ‘in tune’ (οὐχ ἁρμόττον) for a woman to be brave or formi-
dable in this way (οὕτως ἀνδρείαν ἢ δεινὴν εἶναι)”.49 We should balk at this claim for it makes
sense in Aristotle ethics but goes against the reality of ancient drama. The theatre is full of
intrepid, autonomous, formidable heroines. If classical playwrights had abided by the ethical
and aesthetical criteria Aristotle came to posit in the Poetics, then Antigone, Elektra, Aethra,
or Jocasta would have never seen the light.
The same Poetics theorizes pity and fear as the effect of tragedy upon the audience.50 But,
according to Aristotle himself, both these passions are characteristically feminine. Whereas
courage/manliness is the capacity to endure fear, faintheartedness is an intolerance to terror.
Courage “is a mean with regard to feelings of fear (φόβος) and confidence (θάρσος)”. “A cou-
rageous person not only fears rightly, but also is confident about the right things, in the right
way, and at the right time”.51 Being ἀθυμότερα, as the History of Animals explains, the female
is “more dispirited and hopeless than the male” (δύσθυμον μᾶλλον τὸ θῆλυ τοῦ ἄρρενος καὶ
δύσελπι), thereby far less courageous than the male.52 Which means that females are prone to
feel φόβος, with no confidence. The History of Animals attributes to women also a penchant
to pity. “Therefore, woman is more inclined to pity and more lachrymose than man” (διόπερ
γυνὴ ἀνδρὸς ἐλεημονέστερον καὶ ἀρίδακρυ μᾶλλον).53 In the Nicomachean Ethics, we learn that
“those who are of a manly nature (οἱ μὲν ἀνδρώδεις τὴν φύσιν) shrink from making their friends
share their pain”. A manly man “cannot bear the pain that his pain gives to them; and will
not suffer others to lament with him, because he is not given to lamentation himself (τὸ μηδ᾽
αὐτὸς εἶναι θρηνητικός)”. The same character is averse both to pity and to self-pity. In contrast,
“women and womanish men enjoy those who cry with them (τοῖς συστένουσι χαίρουσι)”.54 The
same character is given to weeping and enjoys being pitied. Men are obviously better in this
regard.
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To conclude on the Poetics, tragic ladies are utterly absurd. Women, whose very presence
in the audience remains a problem, seem to be ideally equipped to enjoy tragedy. Whereas the
Aristotelian script of gender aims at consistency, the theatre challenges such a coherence. Un-
intended consequences and unexpected side effects invite us to appreciate both the ambition
of Aristotle’s thought and its epistemological obstacles.
5 Because of Some Passions

Christian readers of Aristotle erase the nuances of this thought. They impose a crucial dis-
tortion on the argument that women’s deliberative faculty is without authority. They rather
challenge reason per se. Let us see how the great thirteenth-century theologian, commentator
on Aristotle and doctrinal reference for the Catholic Church even today, Thomas Aquinas,
comments on the Politics. Τὸ βουλευτικόν ἄκυρον becomes consilium invalidum. Deliberation
(consiliari) belongs to the rational part of the soul.
The slave has no free power to deliberate. But the woman, since she is free, has the
power to deliberate (habet potestatem consiliandi), but her deliberation is invalid (sed
consilium eius est invalidum). And rightly so, since, because of the softness of her nature
(propter mollitiem naturae), her reason does not adhere firmly to the decisions made,
but quickly moves away from them (cito) because of one or another passion (quia prop-
ter mollitiem naturae ratio eius non firmiter inhaeret consiliatis, sed cito ab eis remove-
tur propter passiones aliquas), e.g., concupiscence, anger, fear.55
Aquinas then goes on to discuss the “moral virtues“ (virtutes morales), namely courage, tem-
perance and justice. But he only pays attention to courage, which in Latin is strength, forti-
tudo. Women need to be “strong”, but they only need a minimum of fortitude so that they can
follow the directions of the one who leads them, in order to carry out his mandates (tantum
oportet quod habeant, quod sufficiant sequi directionem principantis implendo mandata ip-
sius). In the wake of Aristotle, Aquinas rejects Plato’s arguments that the same virtue belongs
to men and women.
On the contrary, the courage of men is to command, namely, that no fear should lead
them not to order what is to be done (sed fortitudo viri est ad principandum, ut scilicet
propter nullum timorem praetermittat ordinare quid faciendum sit), but in women and
in every subject it is proper that courage should be serviceable, so that these people,
because of fear, do not neglect the service which is theirs to perform (sed in muliere et in
quolibet subdito oportet quod sit fortitudo ministrativa, ut scilicet propter timorem non
praetermittat facere proprium ministerium). The same applies to courage in the com-
mander of the army and in the soldiers… And this clearly shows that these virtues differ
not according to the more and the less, but for a reason.56
Aquinas’ comment on consilium invalidum is of the utmost importance. On the one hand, it
confirms the argument of the Politics, as we have understood it; on the other hand, it adds
something new, which has consequences for the modern perception of the feminine in the
Christian world. At first glance, Aquinas repeats that women’s handicap is their inability to
stand their ground. Women’s deliberations are not successful. But this is because a woman’s
“reason does not hold firmly to the decisions made” (ratio eius non firmiter inhaeret consi-
liatis).57 Women give up, disengage, back away. This is almost exactly the point for Aristotle.
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Sensitive to the meaning of the Latin word invalidum, literally “invalid”, Aquinas understands
that we are talking about an impaired motricity, a kind of paralysis, a real disability. He also
understands the connection between deliberation, leadership, and courage (fortitudo), the vir-
tue of not being afraid to “give orders about what to do” (ordinare quid faciendum sit). A man
must have the strength to govern his household. This resonates with what Aristotle tells us
about the real agent that makes choices: it is the hegemonic principle in the soul. It is this prin-
ciple that is in charge of the decisive step: choosing and “announcing what he has decided”.58
“To order what has to be done” (ordinare qui faciendum sit) is the same speech act as that
of the Homeric kings: βασιλεῖς ἃ προέλοιντο ἀνήγγελλον τῷ δήμῳ. By emphasising that it takes
courage to lead and command, Aquinas follows suit. Male fortitude exists ad principiandum.
Men are imperious, because they are not afraid of – they have the courage to – rule in this way.
In this case, to maintain good order in their homes.
So far, we are following a rather close reading of Aristotle.
But Aquinas goes on to make female incapacity a matter of “reason” (ratio). It is reason that,
because of the softness of female nature, fails to hold fast to what has already been deliberated,
but quickly moves away from it. And this movement, Aquinas claims, takes place because of
“one or the other passion” (propter passiones aliquas). These are strong feelings, such as con-
cupiscence, terror or anger. They cloud a woman’s judgement, vitiate her reasoning, interrupt
her plans, utterly compromise the use of her reason. Woman is now frankly irrational. A chain
of causes and effects connect the body and the mind: softness determines the free course given
to the passions which, in turn, destabilise reason. Under the attacks of the passions, the whole
of reason is swept away from here to there. The virtues are also compromised.59
Aquinas’ master, Albertus Magnus, had given the same explanation on the same passage
in the Politics. All humans have a soul that is divided into rational and irrational parts, the
latter being divided, in turn, into desiring and irascible. Human beings naturally subject to a
ruler, namely the slave, the woman and the child, do possess a rational soul, but in different
ways. The slave, when he is a slave by nature, has no deliberative faculty at all (omnino non
habet consiliativum) and, therefore, by his own decision, can accomplish nothing perfect (ad
consilium proprium nihil perfectum facere potest). The child possesses this faculty, but in
an incomplete version, since it does not have stable conceptions about the same thing (quia
stabiles conceptiones circa idem non habet). As for the woman, she is equipped with the fac-
ulty of deliberation, but in her this faculty does not work, so to speak. The consiliativum of
women is “invalid” (mulier autem habet, sed invalidum). Therefore, “by her own decision, she
does nothing that is entirely complete” (et ideo nec ad consilium proprium aliquid perfectum
facit).60 She is able to decide by herself, but not to complete the execution. But, while in the
Politics, Aristotle leaves us wanting to know the reasons for the lack of authority of the delib-
erative faculty, Albertus Magnus insists that it is a question of “complexion”. “For the female
is soft on account of her complexion, whereas the male is constant by nature (Foemina enim
ex complexione mollis est, masculus autem ex natura constans).61 Now, complexion is an es-
sential concept in medieval medicine.62 It is a structured amalgam, so to speak, of anatomical
and physiological, moral and intellectual qualities.63
According to Albertus Magnus, woman is moist. Because of her wetness, this creature con-
ceives inconstant thoughts (inconstantes conceptos propter humiditatem), whereas constancy
is the characteristic of the man.64 Their respective complexions make the woman soft and hu-
mid, whereas the man constant.65 Now the issue with this virtue is not simply the duration of
an action, carried through to the end, but the faculty – that is, the power and capacity – of the
mind to “stand firm”, despite the strength of the passions (perseverantia enim non in continu-
atione usque in finem, sed in potentia mentis se tenentis in vi passionum).66
415
Giulia Sissa
The passions against the mind, and against reason. This is, now, the scenario, and this is
the problem. We could read Jean Buridan, Jean de Jandun, Agidius Romanus and other in-
fluential thinkers. With Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, they are the protagonist of
the “reception” of Aristotle and, more precisely, of the creation of the Aristotelian paradigm
of knowledge (at the core of which lay Natural Law) which remains strong until the end of
the eighteenth century. They all insist on consilium invalidum as a matter of reason, and not
merely of deliberative desire. They are responsible for the stereotype of the fundamentally ir-
rational woman who is not permitted to be ordered as a priest, who is not trusted in the army,
who must submit to “marital authority” at home, who must not vote, lead or anyway usurp
rights for which she is not naturally disposed – the woman about whom Victor Hugo could
write: Souvent femme varie. Bien fol est qui s’y fie!
Notes
1 See in particular Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 766 b;: “And the opposite of the male is the fe-
male, who is female by virtue of her inability to effect a concoction, and the coldness of her blood
supply. (ἐναντίον δὲ τῷ ἄρρενι τὸ θῆλυ- θῆλυ τῇ ἀπεψίᾳ καὶ τῇ ψυχρότητι τῆς αἱματικῆς τροφῆς. ἡ δὲ
φύσις ἐκάστῳ τῶν περιττωμάτων ἀποδίδωσι τὸ δεκτικὸν μόριον. τὸ δὲ σπέρμα περίτωμα, τοῦτο τοῖς μὲν
θερμοτέροις καὶ ἄρεσι τῶν ἐναίμων εὔογκον τῷ πλήθει, διὸ τὰ δεκτικὰ πόροι ταύτης τῆς περιττώσεώς εἰσι
τοῖς ἄρεσιν- τοῖς δὲ θήλεσι δι᾿ ἀπεψίαν πλῆθος αἱματικόν (ἀκατέργαστον γάρ) ὥστε καὶ μόριον δεκτικὸν
ἀναγκαῖον εἶναί τι, καὶ εἶναι τοῦτο ἀνόμοιον καὶ μέγεθος 25ἔχειν. διὸ τῆς ὑστέρας τοιαύτη ἡ φύσις ἐστίν.
τούτῳ δὲ τὸ θῆλυ διαφέρει τῷ μορίῳ τοῦ ἄρρενος). See 738 b 5–9.
2 On the classification of θυμός as a passion, more precisely as desire: G. Pearson, Aristotle on Desire
(Cambridge Classical Studies), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 111–139.
3 Aristotle, On the Soul, 403 b 17–20.
4 Ibid., 403 a 6–9.
5 Ibid., 403 b 17–19.
6 Aristotle, Parts of Animals, 650 b–51 a.
7 Ibid.
8 Aristotle, Parts of Animals, II 4, 650 b. See Problems, 30, 1, 22.
9 Aristotle, History of Animals, 9.1, 608 a–b.
10 Ibid., 9.1, 608 a 21–b 19.
11 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1105 b 4–6.
12 Ibid., 1103a.
13 Ibid., 1105b.
14 Ibid., 1104b (ὑπόκειται ἄρα ἡ ἀρετὴ εἶναι ἡ τοιαύτη περὶ ἡδονὰς καὶ λύπας τῶν βελτίστων πρακτική, ἡ δὲ
κακία τοὐναντίον).
15 On the continuity between human and nonhuman living beings, see Sara Brill, Aristotle and the Con-
cept of Shared Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, especially p. 8, 148–158.
16 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 3, 1115b 17–24.
17 On fear as a cause and an effect of cold, see Ps.-Aristotle, Problems, 11, 32 (τοῖς μὲν φοβουμένοις
καταψύχεται ὁ τόπος ὁ περὶ τὴν καρδίαν).
18 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 3, 1116 b 30–31.
19 Ibid., 1116 b.
20 Ibid., 1117 a 14–16.
21 Adriel M/ Trott. Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press. 2019. 159.
22 Aristotle, History of Animals, 9.1, 608 a 21–b 19.
23 Aristotle, Politics, 7, 1327 b 24–34.
24 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics,1115 b 26–28; Eudemian Ethics, 1229 b 29–31.
25 Aristotle, Politics, 7, 1328 a.
26 Ps.-Aristotle, Problems,14, 8. Ibid., 14, 15: “Why are those living in hot places wiser than those liv-
ing in cold ones? Is it for the same reason for which the old (are wiser) than the young? For those
(living in cold places) are much hotter, because their nature resists owing to the coldness of the place,
416
so that they’re a lot like drunken people, and are not inquisitive, but courageous and cheerful; but
those living in warm places are sober because they are cool. And everywhere those who feel fear at-
tempt to inquire more than those who are confident, and so they discover more. Or is it because this
race has lasted longer, while the others have been destroyed in the flood, so that the young are to the
old just as those living in cold places are to those in hot ones? 16. Why are those living in hot places
cowardly, whereas those living in cold ones are courageous? Is it because nature is the opposite in
places and in seasons, since, if they were the same, people would be quickly destroyed? Now those
who are naturally hot are courageous, while those who have been cooled are cowardly. Of course, it
happens that those living in hot regions are cooled (for as their bodies are porous, the heat escapes to
the outside), but those living in cold regions have been heated naturally, because the flesh is thickened
by the external cold, and when it has thickened the heat is collected within.
27 Aristotle, History of Animals, 9.1, 608 a 21–b 19.
28 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1150 b 5–16.
29 William W. Fortenbaugh, Aristotle’ s Practical Side. On his Psychology, Ethics, Politics and Rhetoric,
Leiden: Brill, 2006; Stephen R.L. Clark, “Aristotle’s Woman”. History of Political Thought, Vol. 3,
No. 2 (Summer 1982), pp. 177–191.
30 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1150b 1–6; “One who is deficient in resistance to pains that most
men withstand with success, is soft or luxurious (for Luxury is a kind of Softness): such a man lets
his cloak trail on the ground in order not to go through the pain of picking it up (οὗτος μαλακὸς καὶ
τρυφῶν (καὶ γὰρ ἡ τρυφὴ μαλακία τίς ἐστίν), ὃς ἕλκει τὸ ἱμάτιον ἵνα μὴ πονήσῃ τὴν ἀπὸ τοῦ αἴρειν λύπην)”.
31 Politics, 1254b 14–16. See also Ps-Aristotle, Problems, 29, 11: “Why is it more terrible to kill a
woman than a man? And yet the male is better by nature than the female (βέλτιον τὸ ἄρρεν τοῦ θήλεος
φύσει). Is it because she is weaker (ἢ διότι ἀσθενέστερον), so that she does less injustice? Or is it be-
cause it is not befitting a young man to use force against what is much weaker?”.
32 Eudemian Ethics, 1237 a: “And one who is a human being is well adapted to this and on the way to
it (for by nature things that are absolutely good are good to him), and similarly a man rather than a
woman and a gifted man rather than a dull one.
33 Aristotle, Politics, 1, 1260a (ὁμοίως τοίνυν ἀναγκαίως ἔχειν καὶ περὶ τὰς ἠθικὰς ἀρετὰς ὑποληπτέον, δεῖν
μὲν μετέχειν πάντας, ἀλλ᾿ οὐ τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον, ἀλλ᾿ ἑκάστῳ πρὸς τὸ ἔργον. ὥστε φανερὸν ὅτι ἐστὶν ἠθικὴ
ἀρετὴ τῶν εἰρημένων πάντων, καὶ οὐχ ἡ αὐτὴ σωφροσύνη γυναικὸς καὶ ἀνδρὸς οὐδ᾿ ἀνδρεία καὶ δικαιοσύνη,
καθάπερ ᾤετο Σωκράτης, ἀλλ᾿ ἡ μὲν ἀρχικὴ ἀνδρεία, ἡ δ᾿ ὑπηρετική, ὁμοίως δ᾿ ἔχει καὶ περὶ τὰς ἄλλας).
See Platon, Meno, 74 b.
34 Aristotle, Politics, 1277 b 17–31: “For it is clear that the virtue of a good man, for example his
justice, will not be the same when he is ruled and when he is free, but will be of different kinds, one
enabling him to rule and the other to be ruled, just as temperance and courage are different in a man
and in a woman (for a man would be considered a coward if he were as courageous as a courageous
woman, and a woman as a talker if she were as modest as a good man); for even the household duties
of a man and a woman are different – the former is concerned with getting and the latter with keep-
ing). Of the virtues, only practical wisdom is a virtue proper to the ruler; indeed, the other virtues
seem to be possessed by subjects as well as rulers, but wisdom is certainly not a virtue of the subject,
but only a right opinion: “the subject corresponds to the man who makes flutes, and the sovereign to
the piper who uses them” (καὶ ἀνδρὸς δὴ ἀγαθοῦ ἄμφω, καὶ εἰ ἕτερον εἶδος σωφροσύνης καὶ δικαιοσύνης
ἀρχικῆς- καὶ γὰρ ἀρχομένου μὲν ἐλευθέρου δῆλον ὅτι οὐ μία ἂν εἴη τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἀρετή, οἷον δικαιοσύνη,
ἀλλ᾿ εἴδη ἔχουσα καθ᾿ ἃ ἄρξει καὶ ἄρξεται, ὥσπερ ἀνδρὸς καὶ γυναικὸς σωφροσύνη καὶ ἀνδρεία (δόξαι γὰρ
ἂν εἶναι δειλὸς ἀνὴρ εἰ οὕτως ἀνδρεῖος εἴη ὥσπερ γυνὴ ἀνδρεία, καὶ γυνὴ λάλος εἰ οὕτω κοσμία εἴη ὥσπερ
ὁ ἀνὴρ ἀγαθός)- ἐπεὶ καὶ οἰκονομία ἑτέρα ἀνδρὸς γυναικός, τοῦ μὲν γὰρ κτᾶσθαι τῆς δὲ φυλάττειν ἔργον
ἐστίν). ἡ δὲ11 φρόνησις ἄρχοντος ἴδιος ἀρετὴ μόνη- τὰς γὰρ ἄλλας ἔοικεν ἀναγκαῖον εἶναι κοινὰς καὶ τῶν
καὶ τῶν ἀρχόντων, ἀρχομένου δέ γε οὐκ ἔστιν ἀρετὴ φρόνησις, ἀλλὰ δόξα ἀληθής- ὥσπερ αὐλοποιὸς γὰρ ὁ
ἀρχόμενος, ὁ δ᾿ ἄρχων αὐλητὴς χρώμενος.
35 Eudemian Ethics, 1230 b 30–40. Nicomachean Ethics, 8, 1158 b 12–1161 a 1.
36 Aristotle, Politics, 1259 b 1–11.
37 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1113 a 15–21 (Παύεται γὰρ ἕκαστος ζητῶν πῶς πράξει ὅταν εἰς αὑτὸν
ἀνάγαγῃ τὴν ἀρχήν, καὶ αὑτοῦ τὸ ἡγούμενον – τοῦτο γὰρ τὸ προαιρούμενον. δῆλον δὲ τοῦτο καὶ ἐκ τῶν
ἀρχαίων πολιτειῶν, ἃς Ὅμηρος ἐμιμεῖτο – οἱ γὰρ βασιλεῖς ἃ προέλοιντο ἀνήγγελλον τῷ δήμῳ. ὄντος δὴ τοῦ
προαιρετοῦ βουλευτοῦ ὀρεκτοῦ τῶν ἐφ᾿ἡμῖν, καὶ ἡ προαίρεσις ἂν εἴη βουλευτικὴ ὄρεξις τῶν ἐφ᾿ ἡμῖν – ἐκ
τοῦ βουλεύσασθαι γὰρ κρίναντες ὀρεγόμεθα κατὰ τὴν βούλευσιν).
417
Giulia Sissa
38 Charles Chamberlain, “The Meaning of Prohairesis in Aristotle’s Ethics.” Transactions of the Ameri-
can Philological Association (1974–2014), Vol. 114 (1984), pp. 147–157.
39 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1117b 23–32. See Mantzouranis, Kleanthis, “A Philosophical Recep-
tion of Homer: Homeric Courage in Aristotle’s Discussion of ἀνδρεία.” In Homeric Receptions Across
Generic and Cultural Contexts edited by Athanasios Efstathiou and Ioanna Karamanou. Berlin, Bos-
ton: De Gruyter, 2016, pp. 163–174. Andrei Zavalyi, Courage and Cowardice in Ancient Greece,
from Homer to Aristotle. New York: Springer, 2020, pp. 214–222.
40 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1260 a 13–15.
“For the slave has not got the deliberative part at all, and the female has it, but without full authority,
while the child has it, but in an undeveloped form (ὁ μὲν γὰρ δοῦλος ὅλως οὐκ ἔχει τὸ βουλευτικόν, τὸ
δὲ θῆλυ ἔχει μέν, ἀλλ᾿ ἄκυρον, ὁ δὲ παῖς ἔχει μέν, ἀλλ᾿ ἀτελές).”
41 I have argued along these lines in Giulia Sissa, “Bulls and Deer, Women and Warriors. Aristotle’s
Physics of Morals.” In Le Pouvoir des femmes, Paris: OUP, 2018, pp. 141–176; Giulia Sissa, Le
Pouvoir des femmes. Un défi pour la démocratie, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2021. While writing the 2018
paper, I had not read Karen Margrethe Nielsen, “The Constitution of the Soul: Aristotle on Lack
of Deliberative Authority.” The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 65, No. 2 (December 2015),
pp. 572–586, whose argument overlaps with mine on akuron as meaning lack of executive authority,
on the salience of the Homeric king, and on the relevance of History of Animals IX. Recently and
independently, Marguerite Deslauriers has offered a similar interpretation of this hyper-canonical,
and infinitely controversial, sentence in “Thumos in Aristotle’s Politics VII.7.” Polis, The Journal for
Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought, Vol. 36 (2019), pp. 57–76.
42 Aristotle, Politics, 1, 1259 a 38–b 10. “By nature, the male is more willing to command than the
female” (τό τε γὰρ ἄρρεν φύσει τοῦ θήλεος ἡγεμονικώτερον);
43 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1126 b 1–2. “Manly because capable of governing” (ἀνδρώδεις
δυναμένους ἄρχειν).
44 Aristotle, Politics, 7, 1328 a.
45 Ibid., 1454 a 17–19: “With regard to characters, one must aim at four things. First, that the char-
acters are of high quality. Characterisation occurs when speech or action make evident a deliberate
choice such as it is; and character is of high quality when the deliberate choice is of high quality (Περὶ
δὲ τὰ ἤθη τέτταρά ἐστιν ὧν δεῖ στοχάζεσθαι, ἓν μὲν καὶ πρῶτον, ὅπως χρηστὰ ᾖ. ἕξει δὲ ἦθος μὲν ἐὰν ὥσπερ
ἐλέχθη ποιῇ φανερὸν ὁ λόγος ἢ ἡ πρᾶξις προαίρεσίν τινα ἥ τις ἂν ᾖ, χρηστὸν δὲ ἐὰν χρηστήν.
46 Aristotle, Poetics, 1454 a 20–22: “Good character exists in all kinds of people: a woman is of high
quality and a slave is good, even if the former is something inferior, the latter absolutely despicable”
(ἔστιν δὲ ἐν ἑκάστῳ γένει· καὶ γὰρ γυνή ἐστιν χρηστὴ καὶ δοῦλος, καίτοι γε ἴσως τούτων τὸ μὲν χεῖρον, τὸ δὲ
ὅλως φαῦλόν ἐστιν. δεύτερον δὲ τὸ ἁρμόττοντα· ἔστιν γὰρ ἀνδρεῖον μὲν τὸ ἦθος, ἀλλ᾿ οὐχ ἁρμόττον γυναικὶ
οὕτως57ἀνδρείαν ἢ δεινὴν εἶναι).
47 Aristotle, Politics, 1260 a: “the one is the courage of command, and the other that of subordination,
and the case is similar with the other virtues” (ἡ μὲν ἀρχικὴ ἀνδρεία, ἡ δ᾿ ὑπηρετική, ὁμοίως δ᾿ ἔχει καὶ
περὶ τὰς ἄλλας).
48 Aristotle, Politics, 1277 b 17–31: “The virtue of a good man, for example his justice, will not be the
same when he is ruled and when he is free, but will be of different kinds, one enabling him to rule and
the other to be ruled, just as temperance and courage are different in a man and in a woman (for a
man would be considered a coward if he were as courageous as a courageous woman, and a woman
as a talker if she were as moderate as a good man) (οὐ μία ἂν εἴη τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἀρετή, οἷον δικαιοσύνη,
ἀλλ᾿ εἴδη ἔχουσα καθ᾿ ἃ ἄρξει καὶ ἄρξεται, ὥσπερ ἀνδρὸς καὶ γυναικὸς σωφροσύνη καὶ ἀνδρεία (δόξαι γὰρ
ἂν εἶναι δειλὸς ἀνὴρ εἰ οὕτως ἀνδρεῖος εἴη ὥσπερ γυνὴ ἀνδρεία, καὶ γυνὴ λάλος εἰ οὕτω κοσμία εἴη ὥσπερ
ὁ ἀνὴρ ἀγαθός).
49 Aristotle, Poetics, 1454 a Περὶ δὲ τὰ ἤθη τέτταρά ἐστιν ὧν δεῖ στοχάζεσθαι, ἓν μὲν καὶ πρῶτον, ὅπως
χρηστὰ ᾖ. ἕξει δὲ ἦθος μὲν ἐὰν ὥσπερ ἐλέχθη ποιῇ φανερὸν ὁ λόγος ἢ ἡ πρᾶξις προαίρεσίν τινα ἥ τις ἂν ᾖ,
χρηστὸν δὲ ἐὰν χρηστήν. ἔστιν δὲ ἐν ἑκάστῳ γένει· καὶ γὰρ γυνή20ἐστιν χρηστὴ καὶ δοῦλος, καίτοι γε ἴσως
τούτων τὸ μὲν χεῖρον, τὸ δὲ ὅλως φαῦλόν ἐστιν. δεύτερον δὲ τὸ ἁρμόττοντα· ἔστιν γὰρ ἀνδρεῖον μὲν τὸ ἦθος,
ἀλλ᾿ οὐχ ἁρμόττον γυναικὶ οὕτως57ἀνδρείαν ἢ δεινὴν εἶναι.
50 Aristotle, Poetics, 1453 a–b.
51 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1115 a 5; 1115 b 5–19. Howard J. Curzer, “Aristotle’s Account of
the Virtue of Courage in Nicomachean Ethics III.6–9.” The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy
Newsletter Vol. 183 (1996), pp. 1–15, 5.
418
52 Aristotle, History of Animals, 608 b 8.

53 See note 9 supra.
54 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1171 b.
55 For this work, the reference edition is Thomas Aquinas, Commentary to Aristotle’ s Politics, edited
and translated by Richard J. Regan, Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007, pp. 72–73 (1, 10, 7).
56 Ibid., pp. 72–73 (1, 10, 7).
57 Ibid., pp. 72–73 (1, 10, 7): quia propter mollitiem naturae ratio eius non firmiter inhaeret consiliatis,
sed cito ab eis removetur propter passiones aliquas.
58 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1113 a 15–21.
59 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II a. 156 “ It is owing to the impulse of passion that a man at
once follows his passion before his reason counsels him. Now the impulse of passion may arise either
from its quickness, as in bilious persons [Cf. I-II, 46, 5], or from its vehemence, as in the melancholic,
who on account of their earthy temperament are most vehemently aroused. Even so, on the other
hand, a man fails to stand to that which is counselled, because he holds to it in weakly fashion by
reason of the softness of his, as we have stated with regard to woman (ad temperament (propter mol-
litiem complexionis, ut de mulieribus dictum est). This is also the case with phlegmatic temperaments,
for the same reason as in women. And these results are due to the fact that the bodily temperament is
an occasional but not a sufficient cause of incontinence, as stated above”. Aquinas mentions complex-
ion on several occasions, notably in Summa Theologiae I, q. 91, a. 1 and 3, where he argues about the
“balance of complexion” (aequalitas complexionis) that characterises man, as created, in comparison
with other living beings; I–II, q. 31, a. 7, where he discusses the “evil complexion” (mala complexio)
which leads an individual to eat coal or earth, to copulate with males or beasts; q. 46, a. 5, where he
compares irascible and concupiscent complexions; q. 51, a. l, where the “nature” of an individual is
analysed in detail, between habit and temperament; q. 63, a. l, where he analyzes what belongs to a
man with respect to the particular temperament of his body. See also: Comm. in de Anima, 483–485;
De Veritate, q. 25, a. 6, ad 4. Quaesiones de Anima, q. 8. Aquinas was no doubt aware that Galen
had amply recognised the influence of the body on the passions of the soul, not only in Aristotle, par-
ticularly with regard to blood, but also in Plato, in a more dramatic way. It was in the Timaeus that
Galen had spotted the profile of the libidinous individual, whose body was with streams of semen,
thus excessively wet and even “flowing.”
60 Albertus Magnus, Commentary on the Politics (Paris, Borgnet, 1891), I, 9, p. 79 a.
61 Albertus Magnus, Commentary on the Ethics (Paris, Borgnet, 1891), VII, 1, 11, 490 b. Danielle
Jacquart, “La morphologie du corps féminin selon les médecins de la fin du Moyen Âge.” In Le
Corps féminin au moyen âge. Il corpo femminile nel medioevo, Galluzo, 2014, pp. 3–21. Matthew
Klemm and Aurélien Robert, “Virtuous Complexions: The Physiology of Virtues in Pietro d’Abano’s
Medical Anthropology,” Médiévales, 63 (2012), 59–74; Danielle Jacquart, “La complexion selon
Pietro d’Abano,” in Médecine, astrologie et magie entre Moyen Âge et Renaissance: autour de Pietro
d’Abano, ed. Jean-Patrice Boudet, Franck Collard and Nicolas Weill-Parot (Florence, 2013) 231–246;
Joël Chandelier and Aurélien Robert, “Nature humaine et complexion du corps chez les médecins
italiens de la fin du Moyen Âge,” Revue de synthèse, 134 (2013), 473–510; Elspeth Whitney, “What’s
Wrong with the Pardoner? Complexion Theory, the Phlegmatic Man, and Effeminacy.” The Chaucer
Review, Vol. 45 (2011), pp. 357–389. J. Kaye, “Balance in Medieval Medical Theory, Part 1.” A
History of Balance, 1250–1375: The Emergence of a New Model of Equilibrium and its Impact on
Thought, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 128–182.
62 Joël Chandelier and Aurélien Robert, « Nature humaine et complexion du corps chez les médecins
italiens de la fin, du moyen Âge. » Revue de synthèse Vol. 134, 6e série (2013), 4, pp. 473–510;
Joseph Ziegler, “The Biology of the Virtues in Medieval and Early Renaissance Theology and Physi-
ognomy.” In Korsett der Tugenden: Moral und Geschlecht im kulturhistorischen Kontext, edited by
A. Bettels and M. Gadebusch Bondio, Georg Olms, 2013, pp. 3–23; Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex
Difference in the Middle Ages, Medicine, Science and Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1993, pp. 170–174. Chiara Beneduce, “Complexio. Across Disciplines. Introduction to a Spe-
cial Issue, Early Science and Medicine, 28 (3–5), 2023, pp. 257–269.
63 Cristina Cerami, Génération et substance. Aristote et Averroès entre physique et métaphysique, De
Gruyter, Boston – Berlin, 2015, pp. 480–490.
64 Albertus Magnus, Commentary on the Politics, (Paris, Borgnet, 1891), I, 9, p. 75a: “Mulieris enim
secundum naturam est habere inconstantes conceptus, propter humiditatem. Viri autem, propter
419
Giulia Sissa
contrariam complexionem, est habere constantes.” Albertus Magnus, Commentary on the Ethics,
Paris, Borgnet, 1891, VII, 1, 11, 490 b: “Foemina enim ex complexione mollis est, masculus autem
ex natura constans.”
65 Albertus Magnus, Commentary on the Ethics, (Borgnet, 1891), VII, 1, 11, 489 a.
66 Albertus Magnus, Commentary on Ethics, (Paris, Borgnet, 1891), VII, 1, 8, 484 a: “Quemadmodum
enim mulieres dicuntur incontinentes: quia ex mollitie naturae habent quod passionibus ducuntur, et
non habent constantiam complexionis qua ad rationem ducere valeant passiones: et sic non ducunt
passiones, et ducuntur ab eis. Et similiter est quicumque hos habitus habent ex aegritudine. See also:
478a: the soft are incontinent.” See 469a on incontinence, compared with intemperance.
420
PART IV
200s BCE–700s CE
28
PYTHAGOREAN WOMEN
An Example of Female Philosophical Protreptics
Caterina Pellò
1 Introduction
This chapter focuses on the Pythagorean women. In the fifth-century BCE, Pythagoras was
known for educating women and including female disciples in his large following.1 Around
the first-century BCE, the Pythagorean women became the alleged authors of a series of letters
and treatises, most of which discuss female everyday life and virtues. While that of the fifth-
century Pythagorean women followers of Pythagoras’ is one of the earliest documented cases
of female participation in ancient Greek philosophy, no direct evidence has survived to shed
light on what these women thought and how they engaged with ancient Pythagoreanism.2
This changes in the Hellenistic and Imperial Age with the production and circulation of writ-
ings ascribed to Pythagorean authors, including six women: Theano, Myia, Melissa, Phintys,
Perictione, and Aesara. Should the texts be authentic, this would be the earliest and the only
surviving example of philosophical writings by women in ancient Greek.
The survival of texts immediately puts me in a privileged position compared to other schol-
ars in this volume. My challenge is not the lack of sources. Rather, the challenge is the nature
of the evidence. Specifically, scholars have raised two objections to the Hellenistic and Post-
Hellenistic Pythagorean literature: first, the texts are likely to be apocryphal – that is, they
might not have been written by the named authors. For this reason, I refer to this group of
writings as Pythagorean pseudepigrapha (see also Horky 2015: 21 n. 4). More importantly,
for this reason, scholars have raised doubts over the possibility of female authorship and
suggested that the texts might have been written by men under female pseudonyms. Second,
and more challenging, the texts may not be philosophical to begin with. I am only secondar-
ily concerned with the question of who wrote the pseudepigrapha. What is relevant for the
purpose of this chapter is that the texts are ascribed to women and, in most cases, addressed
to an audience of female readers. My plan is to investigate what the pseudepigrapha can
tell us about women’s ability to philosophize in Greek antiquity. I argue that the surviving
Pythagorean pseudepigraphic fragments, letters, and treatises establish women’s philosophi-
cal potential in two steps: on the one hand, they ascribe philosophical arguments to female
authors and, on the other hand, they picture philosophy as an activity to which women can
and should dedicate their life.
423 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-32

Caterina Pellò
The chapter is divided into two main sections. I first introduce three key elements: the
e vidence for women in Pythagoreanism, the debate over the authorship of the pseudepigrapha,
and the notion and features of philosophical protreptics. Next, I move on to the analysis of
four treatises – Phintys’ On Moderation, Perictione’s On Harmony and On Wisdom, and Ae-
sara’s On Nature – and show what makes them philosophical and protreptic.
2 The Evidence
Up until the time of Philolaus, Pythagoras and the fifth-century Pythagoreans left no written
works.3 The Pythagorean pseudepigrapha, in contrast, are written between the third-century
BCE and the second-century CE. The corpus is large and heterogeneous: it includes treatises,
sayings, poems, and letters about logic, epistemology, cosmology, metaphysics, ethics, and
political philosophy, written over the course of four centuries, in Alexandria and Rome, and
in various dialects. Notably, the texts have few Pythagorean elements: for example, there is
no mention of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls nor any number theory. Rather,
they repropose Platonic and Aristotelian theories, language, and arguments. This suggests
that the texts are apocryphal, written in the Hellenistic and Imperial Age under the pseudo-
nyms of fifth-century Pythagorean philosophers so as to merge Pythagoreanism with later
Greek philosophical traditions and portray Pythagoras as the forefather of Platonism and
Aristotelianism.
Most importantly for the purpose of this volume, some of the pseudepigrapha are ascribed
to women.4 The corpus includes ten letters and at least five treatises. In most letters, we find
woman-to-woman advice on family life from Pythagorean teachers to their younger female
pupils. Eight letters are ascribed to Theano, which allegedly was the name of Pythagoras’
wife.5 Of these, some are addressed to female interlocutors, such as Callisto, Eubule, Eurydice,
Nicostrate, and Timareta, and discuss domestic activities, whereas others are less gendered
and addressed to the doctor Euclides to enquire about his health, to Rhodope to lend her a
copy of Plato’s Parmenides, and to Timonides to put an end to their quarrel. The remaining
two letters are ascribed to Myia, Pythagoras’ daughter, who allegedly writes to Phillys about
childrearing, and Melissa urging Melissa against luxurious clothing. The treatises are divided
into two groups: the theoretical treatises, such as Theano’s On Piety, which challenges Aris-
totle’s interpretation of the Pythagorean theory that numbers are the principles of all things,
Aesara’s On Human Nature on the tripartition of the soul, and Perictione’s On Wisdom on
the relation between philosophy and the sciences, and the ethical treatises, such as Perictione’s
On the Harmony of Women and Phintys’ On the Moderation of Women, which answer the
question of what makes women virtuous.
3 The Authorship Issue

Thanks to Mary Ellen Waithe’s History of Women Philosophers (1987), twentieth-century
scholarship has seen a revival of academic interest in the Pythagorean women. Most Pythago-
rean women’s texts are about women. This led scholars to formulate two hypotheses concern-
ing their authorship. On the one hand, the fact that the texts target women and are about
topics traditionally associated with the female gender, such as the husband–wife relationship
and the education of children, has prompted the assumption that they were written from a
female perspective and by female authors (Pomeroy 2013). This does not preclude the pos-
sibility that the texts are apocryphal, as the writers could be first-century women using the
names of fifth-century Pythagorean women, like Theano. On the other hand, the fact that the
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texts teach women how to behave in their private lives and domestic roles has prompted the
assumption that they might have been written by male authors with the purpose of educat-
ing female pupils under the authority of famous female teachers of the past, like Pythagoras’
wife. Marguerite Deslauriers, for example, has recently, and persuasively, called attention to
the difficulties of retrieving reliable information about the Pythagorean women, establishing
the authorship of the writings, and assessing the philosophical value of their claims about
domestic life (2012).
It should be noted that at least two treatises, On Human Nature and On Wisdom, are not
specifically about women, but rather venture into discussions about the structure of the soul,
the world order, human wisdom, and natural sciences. This raises a different issue: especially
in those cases where the texts are not about women, scholars have questioned that they were
in fact written by women in the first place. Alternatively, the author of On Human Nature
has been identified as a Pythagorean man named Aresas, instead of a woman named Aesara
(Thesleff 1965: 48–50), and the surviving fragments of On Wisdom have been ascribed to
pseudo-Archytas, rather than Perictione (Huffman 2005: 591–598). We are then left in a
double bind: when the texts focus on women’s everyday life, they are not believed to be philo-
sophical; when they focus on the nature of the cosmos and reality, they are not believed to be
by women.
Overall, there is almost unanimous consensus among scholars that the Pythagorean women
and the pseudepigrapha deserve more and more thorough attention. The question is how to
approach them. An alternative way to approach the pseudepigrapha is by leaving aside the
question of the historicity of the Pythagorean women and the authenticity of their writings
and focusing on what the letters and treatises are about (Dutsch 2020). Following the latter
trend, I argue that there are at least three reasons to make the authorship issue less press-
ing. First, since these texts are written under pseudonyms, they can only give us very limited
information about the original author. What we can say is that they are ascribed to women.
Therefore, I leave the burden of proof to those arguing against female authorship. Second, as
mentioned above, some pseudepigrapha are not explicitly gendered, but rather cover a wider
variety of topics, ranging from the scope of philosophical enquiry to the theory of numbers
as first principles and the tripartition of the soul. To be successful, then, any argument for or
against female authorship should account for both ethical and theoretical texts. Third, the fact
that some of the pseudepigrapha are addressed to and targeted at women shows that, regard-
less of who the original authors were, women were at least part of the audience reading these
philosophical texts either directly or indirectly via their fathers and husbands. The network of
the Pythagorean pseudepigrapha includes women: for example, Theano, Myia, and Melissa
write to younger female addresses, and Perictione and Phintys write about women’s virtues
and teach women how to live. This, in turn, and at the very least, leaves open the possibility
that the authors too could be women.
4 Philosophical Protreptics
In Rhetoric 1.3, Aristotle defines the protreptic genre as a deliberative speech where the au-
dience is persuaded that the subject matter is just, honorable, lawful, useful, or attainable
(1358b9). Generally, the verb “protrepein” means “turning someone foreword.” A protreptic
speech is presented in such a way that the addressees are converted and encouraged to adopt
new values and embark on a new way of life. An alternative, and more precise, definition is
offered by Philo of Larissa (Stobaeus, Eclogues 2.7.2), according to whom the purpose of the
protreptic genre is twofold: first, showing that the subject matter is good and worth pursuing;
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and second, responding to the attacks of the opponents. This is compared to the work of the
physician, who both cures the body with the appropriate remedies, diet, and regimen, and re-
jects false counselors. Protreptic speeches are then both revisionist and hortatory: they criticize
and reject old traditions and propose new attitudes, views, and ways of living (Bensen Cain
2007: 32–56).
A particular form of protreptic discourse is philosophical protreptics. This is a plea for
philosophy and makes the more specific claim that what is useful and worth practicing and
instilling in the audience is philosophical activity and the philosophic lifestyle. It is a way to
market the discipline, advocate for the pursuit of wisdom, and promote philosophical educa-
tion. Philosophical protreptics can both be esoteric and exoteric: the aim can be to persuade
prospective students to join a specific school, encourage insiders to reach a higher level within
the same doctrine, or more generally prompt non-philosophers to devote themselves to phi-
losophy in the first place (Jordan 1986: 330).
There is consensus in the scholarship that the protreptic genre was not a fully fledged genre
in the fifth-century BCE.6 Works titled Protreptica become conventional in the fourth century
in the Peripatetic tradition (e.g., Theophrastus in Diogenes, Lives 5.49) and later in the Hel-
lenistic period (e.g., Aristippus in 2.85; Posidonius in 7.91; Cleanthes in 7.174–175). Finally,
in the third-century CE Iamblichus publishes an anthology of ancient protreptics. From these
sources, we gather that ancient protreptics have at least some recurring features. First, the
audience: protreptics are addressed to non-specialists who are to be introduced to the new
discipline and lifestyle. Second, the competitor: protreptics are targeted against traditional or
alternative lifestyles and those advocating such values. Third, the purpose: the goal of pro-
treptic writing is education and persuasion. This leads to the fourth feature: the argument.
Protreptics urge the audience toward a specific activity or study insofar as it is either good
in itself, or instrumental to happiness. As such, they may include explicit statements about
what goodness is, what makes one happy, and why, for example, philosophy leads to a good
and flourishing life. Yet protreptics may also be implicit and include allusions to the value of
pursuing wisdom.7 Finally, protreptics may propose examples of the lifestyle they promote or
offer the very author as the model the audience should follow.
I shall now move on to the pseudepigrapha and highlight which aspects of the texts may
function as protreptic. I propose to interpret the pseudepigrapha as one of the earliest cases of
philosophical protreptics targeted at women. The suggestion is not that the texts are hortatory
in genre, for they do not share all the recurring features characterizing ancient protreptics.
Rather, I argue that they can be read as having a protreptic function. Besides formulating
philosophical arguments, the pseudepigrapha also introduce their audience – not only men but
also women – to the study of philosophy.
5 Phintys on Whether Women Should Philosophize

In the introduction of On Moderation, the author named Phintys writes the following:
It is necessary for a woman to be completely good and orderly, for without virtue one
would never become such. For each virtue concerning each thing makes that which is re-
ceptive of it excellent. The virtue of the eyes makes the eyes excellent, that of the ears the
ears, and that of a horse the horse. Finally, men’s virtue makes men superior. And so, the
virtue of a woman makes women superior. The virtue that above all belongs to women is
moderation, for through this virtue she will be able to honor and love her own husband.
But many perhaps think that it is not fitting for a woman to philosophize, just as it is not
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fitting for her to ride a horse and speak in public. But I think that some things are proper
to men, others to women, others are common to men and women, others again are more
for men than women and others more for women than men. Proper to men is fighting,
political activity, and public speaking. Proper to women is staying at home and indoors,
welcoming and serving the husband. But I state that courage, justice, and intelligence are
common. For as the virtues of the body are appropriate for both men and women, so
too the virtues of the soul. And as health for the body is beneficial to both, so is health
for the soul. The virtues of the body are health, strength, good perception, and beauty.
Some are more suitable for men to exercise and possess, whereas others are more for
women. For courage and intelligence are more for men due to both the constitution of
their bodies and the capacity of their souls, but moderation is for women.
(Stobaeus, Eclogues 4.26.61)
On Moderation is divided into two parts: the functionalist definition of virtue as excellence,
and the classification of proper, common, and preferable virtues. First, Phintys proposes an
ergon, or function, argument, and defines aretē, virtue, as excellence: “Virtue is that which
makes what is receptive of it excellent.” The same argument is found in Plato’s Republic
(1.352d–353b) and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1.14.1098a7–17). This general claim is
supported with three analogies: the excellences of the eyes, the ears, horses, and finally men.
Phintys then applies this definition to the female gender and writes that women, too, are
called virtuous when performing their function at best. The specific function of a woman is
said to be loving her husband, which she does with moderation (sōphrsynē). At first reading,
therefore, Phintys buys into Meno’s belief that men and women have different virtues and,
specifically, the virtue that is most suitable for women is moderation, which Socrates skillfully
rejects (Plato, Meno 71a–73a). Yet the argument is refined in the second part of the treatise. In
reply to those who claim that women should not philosophize, Phintys proposes a tripartition
of things: those that are proper (idia) either to men, such as fighting and political activity, or
women, such as domestic life; those that are common (koina) to both sexes, such as virtue;
and those that are more (mallon) for either men or women. Common to both men and women
are the virtues of both body – namely, strength, health, beauty, and perception – and soul –
namely, justice (dikaiosynē), intelligence (phronēsis), and courage (andreia). Of these, Phintys
adds, some are more for one gender: for example, intelligence for men and moderation for
women. Thus, what initially appeared as a tripartition turns out to be a more complex clas-
sification of virtues and activities into categories and subcategories. Intelligence, for example,
is shared by men and women, despite being preferably male. This has two implications: first,
while moderation is introduced as preferably female, this virtue too is arguably common to
both genders. This, then, modifies the initial statement: moderation is not exclusively female.
Rather, it is more, or mostly for women on account of their traditional domestic role within
the family and inside the house. Second, and more importantly, since intelligence is said to
be common to both, despite being more for men, and the overall treatise is a reply to those
who believe that women are not fitted for philosophy, the argument seems to be that, unlike
horse riding, which is properly male, philosophizing is for both men and women. Although it
is preferable for men to do so, women too can practice philosophy.
The next treatise, Perictione’s On Harmony, reiterates the claim that phronēsis is for
women.8 The thesis is that women should acquire all virtues. The introduction is as follows:
We must think that the harmonious woman is full of both intelligence and moderation,
for the soul must be truly full of virtue so that she will be just, courageous, intelligent,
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beautified with self-sufficiency, and despising empty opinion. For from these good deeds
happen to both the woman for herself and her husband, as well as the children, the
house and often also the city, if such women were to govern either cities or people, as we
see in the case of monarchies.
(Stobaeus 4.28.19)
The question is what makes women harmonious. The answer is that a woman is harmonious
when she is full of both intelligence (phronēsis) and moderation (sōphrsynē). Being fully vir-
tuous, in turn, also makes her just, courageous, and self-restrained. Perictione adds that this
is beneficial to women, as well as their family – spouse and children – household, and city.
Therefore, Perictione makes two statements: first, women should develop all virtues. Modera-
tion is neither the only nor the most female virtue. Second, this is good for the woman herself.
Perictione explicitly writes that women are to be “full of intelligence.” This is supported with
some sort of proto-consequentialist argument, according to which virtue is good for women
and society. Notably, cities, individuals, and families are held together under the same stand-
ard of virtue.
These texts have at least three features remindful of philosophical protreptics. First, in
Phintys’ On Moderation, there is an explicit mention of the critical target. Specifically, the
competing view is the belief that philosophy is not for women. While there is no explicit argu-
ment that women should philosophize, for phronēsis is said to be more for men, the treatise
does state that this virtue is common to both sexes. This leads us to the second feature: like
Perictione’s On Harmony, On Moderation makes the case that women should, or can, display
intelligence. While the exhortation is implicit, both treatises are addressed to an audience
that includes female readers urging them to become fully virtuous. Notably, while in Phintys’
treatise there is no explicit argument that intelligence is good or instrumental to human flour-
ishing, Perictione clearly states that virtue, harmony, and intelligence are beneficial to women,
as well as their acquaintances. Finally, both treatises present their authors, Phintys and Peric-
tione, as models and examples of philosophizing women (Dutsch 2020: 167).
6 Aesara on the Superiority of the Intellect

While most of the Pythagorean women’s pseudepigrapha revolve around the question of how
women should behave and depict their authors as experts on female life and virtues, the next
text introduces the figure of the Pythagorean woman as a metaphysician. Following Plato’s
Republic, Aesara’s On Nature raises the question of what makes a community just. Specifi-
cally, Aesara takes the human soul to provide a model of law and justice for the cosmos, the
city, and the household.
It seems to me that the human nature is a model of law and justice for both the house-
hold and the city. For by following the tracks within themselves and striving, one would
find this; for within oneself are law and justice, which is the orderly arrangement of the
soul. For insofar as it is threefold, (the soul) is structured around three functions: (the
intellect) practices thinking and judgement, (the spirit) strength and impulse, and desire
love and friendliness. And these things have been arranged as such, all in relation with
each other, so that the strongest leads, the inferior is ruled, and the intermediate holds
the intermediate position and both rules and is ruled. The god crafted these things as
such according to reason in both modelling and finalizing the human body, envisioning
that the human alone and no other among mortal animals become a sign of both law
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and justice. A system of community could not be born out of one single thing, nor sev-
eral, if these are alike. For it is necessary that, since the activities are different, the parts
of the soul within us also be different, as in the case of the body sight, hearing, taste, and
smell are also different; for not all things have the same harmonious relation with all
things. Nor indeed could it be born out of any things which are many and dissimilar but
at random, but out of those which bring about a certain completion and organization
and fitting together of the entire system. […] For if things which are dissimilar – some
better, some worse, some in-between – take on an equal share of both power and honor,
it would be impossible for the community of the parts of the soul to be harmonized. And
if they take on unequal shares, but the worse parts, not the better, have the greater share,
much thoughtlessness and disorder would occur in the soul. And if the better have the
greater and the worse the lesser, but each of these not in the right proportion, it would be
impossible that concord and friendship and justice exist in the soul […]. For the intellect,
close inspector, wins by persuasion, while desire loves, and spirit, filled with passion and
boiling with hatred, becomes friend with desire. […] On account of these things, it also
seems to me that the best life for humans is when the pleasant has been mixed together
with the excellent and pleasure with virtue. The intellect can fit these things together,
becoming delightful through education and virtue.
(Stobaeus 1.49.27)
The treatise opens by stating that the human soul is a model of justice for both households
and cities. The traditional Platonic analogy between justice in the city and the soul is here
extended to include women and the family (oikos). Next, Aesara identifies justice with the
orderly arrangement of the whole and its parts. Such system should meet three conditions:
first, it should have parts (“The system of community could not come to be from one thing
only”); second, the parts need to be different (“Nor could it come from many things that
are alike”); and third, the parts should not be arranged at random, but harmoniously (“Nor
could it come from many dissimilar things at random, but from things that are in accordance
with the completion, organization, and fitting together of the whole system”). For things to
be in harmony different parts should have different shares of power and ability (dynamis)
and, specifically, superior parts should have the greater share. Thus, Aesara argues, a just
system becomes a well-arranged system and brings about a state of concord. Finally, the
argument goes back to the soul. Aesara distinguishes three parts based on their functions
(erga, what they do): intellect (nous) for thought (gnōmē) and practical wisdom (phronēsis);
spirit (thumos) for strength (alkē) and ability, or power (dynamis); and desire (epithumia) for
love (erōs) and friendship (philophrosynē). The intellect is superior and oversees the others:
it closely inspects, while spirit adds impulse and strength, and desire becomes their friend
and ally.
Overall, Aesara takes the family, the city, and the soul to abide by the same standard of
virtue and justice, according to which the superior part oversees the others. Notably, Aesara
analyses the human soul in general and without making any specific statements about women.
This leads us back to protreptics. Once again, in On Nature, there is no explicit exhortation
to philosophy. Yet there are features encouraging the readers to lead an intellectual life. For
example, the life where nous rules over spirit and desire is said to be “the best for humans.”
Since desire is an ally of nous and thumos, this life is said to be both pleasant and virtuous.
Again, the treatise is not gendered and does not target an audience of women. What makes it
an example of female philosophical protreptics is the fact that the arguments are ascribed to
a female metaphysician.9
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7 Perictione on What Wisdom Is

The last and perhaps more telling example in Perictione’s On Wisdom. This, too, makes no
gendered claims concerning women and female virtues.
The human is born constituted for the purpose of contemplating the reason of the nature
of the universe; and the function of wisdom is this very thing: to obtain and contemplate
the intelligence of the things that are. Then, geometry, too, as well as arithmetic and the
other theoretical activities (i.e., the sciences) engage with the things that are, but wisdom
engages with all kinds of things that are. For wisdom relates to all things that are, just as
sight relates to all things visible and hearing to all things hearable. Furthermore, as the
features of the things that are, some pertain universally to all, some to most of them, and
others in some way to each one thing. Thus, it belongs to wisdom to behold and con-
template what pertains universally to all things, whereas it belongs to natural science to
contemplate what pertains to most things, and to the science of something determinate
to contemplate the peculiar attributes of each thing. And therefore, wisdom retrieves the
principles of the things that are altogether, whereas physics retrieves the principles of
what comes to be by nature, and geometry, arithmetic, and music retrieve the principles
concerning quantity and the harmonious. Thus, whoever is able to resolve all kinds to
one and the same principle and from this compose and enumerate them again, this per-
son seems to be both wisest and truest. Moreover, this person has found a good lookout
point, from which one will be able to behold the god as well as all things that have been
placed in his column and order.
(Stobaeus 3.1.120)
In the introduction, human beings are said to be made for contemplation. The author comple-
ments this with an ergon argument, according to which the function of wisdom (sophia) is to
contemplate all that is. Like Aesara and Phintys, Perictione defines things based on what they
do, their function, or ergon. Like Aesara, Perictione places humans in a privileged position in
virtue of their ability to inspect the world around them. Perictione elaborates on what it means
for wisdom to be set over what is with the help of an argument by analogy between wisdom
and the bodily senses: wisdom pertains all that is, like sight and hearings pertain the visible
and the hearable, respectively. Similar analogies with sense organs are found in Aesara’s On
Nature and Phintys’ On Moderation. In the second part of the treatise, Perictione organizes
the sciences into three categories. First, the treatise distinguishes three groups of objects: those
which pertain to all things, those which pertain to most things, and those which pertain to
each thing in a particular way. Next, it distinguishes three groups of sciences: wisdom con-
templates what pertains to all things universally, natural sciences contemplate what pertains
to most things, determinate sciences contemplate what pertains to particular things, such as
those having a magnitude in the case of mathematics, and the harmonious in the case of mu-
sic. This passage recalls Aristotle’s own division of the different branches of learning in the
Metaphysics (6.1.1025b3–1026a32). Finally, wisdom is said to be what enables humans to
contemplate the divine.
Worth noting is that this is not the only surviving Pythagorean pseudepigraphic text ti-
tled On Wisdom. The version ascribed to Perictione is quoted in Stobaeus’ Eclogues in the
fifth-century CE. Another version is quoted in the fourth chapter of Iamblichus’ Protrepticus
in the third-century CE and ascribed to the fourth-century Pythagorean philosopher Archy-
tas of Tarentum (Horky 2015). Between the two texts, there is substantial overlap: with the
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exception of the tripartition of sciences, the fragments coincide almost verbatim. This has
led scholars to question the transmission and original attribution of the treatise. Together
with Giulia De Cesaris, I have discussed the authorship issue elsewhere (De Cesaris and Pellò
2023). For the purpose of this study, suffice it to notice that Iamblichus quotes On Wisdom as
an example of Pythagorean philosophical protreptics. Regardless of whether or not the trea-
tise was written with the explicit aim of being protreptic, it was conceived as such in antiquity.
There are elements of On Wisdom reminding Iamblichus of the protreptic genre. If so, the
same should hold true for the almost identical version of the treatise that Stobaeus ascribes to
Perictione. For example, the treatise argues for the supremacy of wisdom, defines wisdom as
the end and fulfillment of the human contemplative nature, and remarks that the wise person
comes close to the divine. On the one hand, again, this is not an explicit exhortation based
on the claim that wisdom makes humans happy. On the other hand, however, the treatise
makes the case that the life of wisdom is good and godlike. The version preserved by Stobaeus
goes further and contrasts wisdom with the sciences. In line with other protreptic writings,
Perictione’s On Wisdom rejects its competitors by showing that the scope of wisdom is wider
than those of other theoretical activities, such as physics, mathematics, geometry, and music.
On Wisdom is about intellectual activity tout court: the author generally describes the pursuit
of wisdom as the ultimate human goal and the best way of living and reaching what is true
and divine. Neither Pythagorean nor Platonic thought, but philosophy in general is presented
as the way to live life well. Yet the text may also be an esoteric exhortation prompting those
who already dedicate themselves to science, arithmetic, and harmonics to pursue the higher
study of first principles. Finally, once again, having a woman as the philosophical model and
the spokesperson for this protreptic content may extend the invitation to female readers. Per-
ictione is introduced as the sage mastering all sciences and theoretical activities and living a
life of wisdom.
8 Conclusion
We began with an impasse in the scholarship: either the pseudepigrapha are about women and
not philosophical or they are about philosophy and not by women. Most texts ascribed to the
Pythagorean women center on topics traditionally linked to the female gender, which has led
scholars to question the extent to which these topics would have been considered philosophi-
cal in antiquity, or whether they could have been written by women in the first place. I argue
that the pseudepigrapha paint the picture of the Pythagorean female philosopher in two steps:
by attributing to the Pythagorean women fully fledged arguments and theories about virtue,
the soul, and the cosmos, and by formulating protreptic, or quasi-protreptic, invitations to
pursue philosophy, which target not only men but also women.
I would like to draw attention on the emphasis on wisdom, intelligence, and the privi-
leged position humans occupy qua rational beings in these texts. Aesara takes nous, mind,
or intellect, to be the ordering and leading part of the human soul. This leads to the claim
that humans alone of all living beings have within themselves the criterion of justice that ap-
plies to the cosmos, the city, and the household. Perictione argues that women are to be full
of intelligence. Phintys acknowledges that women can be intelligent. Notably, the argument
that phronēsis is common to both men and women is in response to those who claim that it
is not appropriate for women to philosophize. In On Wisdom, Perictione also ranks humans
higher than any other animal in virtue of their ability to contemplate, think, and reason. Wis-
dom is the highest-ranked science, as its ergon is the contemplation of all kinds of things that
are. Thus, the wise person is assimilated to the god. For this reason, I propose to read these
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pseudepigrapha as having protreptic elements. Specifically, the pseudepigrapha would be the

only surviving example of philosophical protreptic ascribed to female authors. Phintys, Per-
ictione, and Aesara are portrayed as sages living a philosophical way of life – that is, the best
and highest form of life – and implicitly urging their readers to do the same.
The goal of philosophical protreptics is to encourage the audience to engage in and de-
vote themselves to philosophical practice. The intellectual way of life is pictured as a life
worth living, and wisdom and philosophy are presented as the way toward this final pur-
pose. The key question is who the pseudepigrapha are addressing and prompting to pursue
philosophy and, most importantly, whether the readership includes women. As previously
noted, whilst some scholars may challenge that these texts were in fact written by women,
no one seems to question that the treatises and especially the letters are addressed to a fe-
male audience. Deslauriers, for example, argues that the authors are likely to be men using
female pseudonyms to educate female pupils. Pomeroy, by contrast, believes that the texts
are written by women and for women – either directly in the letters, or indirectly in the
treatises. Either way, both scholars agree that the target is female. Moreover, Anette Huiz-
enga argues that the concise and easy-to-follow format of the Pythagorean pseudepigraphic
letters suggests that they were meant to be read aloud and ultimately addressed to women
(2013: 52–56). Unlike Phintys’ On Moderation and Perictione’s On Harmony, Aesara’s On
Nature and Perictione’s On Wisdom are not explicitly and exclusively about women. None-
theless, since the network of writers and intellectuals among whom the pseudepigrapha
circulated likely included women alongside men, Perictione and Aesara make their case for
philosophy as the highest form way of living well to male and female readers. Additionally,
having women voicing the exhortation to philosophy welcomes women in the audience.
Through the Pythagoreans, women enter a traditionally male discourse and gain a share in
philosophical practice. This makes the pseudepigrapha an example of ancient female philo-
sophical protreptics.
Related Topics
Patricia Marechal, “Women, Spirit, and Authority in Plato and Aristotle”; Rachel Singpur-
walla, “Plato on the Private Ideology of the Family”; Jill Gordon, “Paradox and Embodied
Sexual Differentiation in Timaeus”; Katharine O’Reilly, “Epicureans and Cyrenaics on Educa-
tion and Gender”; Malin Grahan-Wilder, “Wives or Philosophers?”; Sophia Connell, “Aris-
totle on Women’s Virtues”; Jula Wilberger, “Women in Stoicism”; Aiste Celkyte, “The School
of Hypatia and the Problem of the Gendered Soul.”
Notes
1 On Pythagoras lecturing women, see the report by the fourth-century biographer Dicaearchus, quoted
in Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras 18–19. For a list of the best-known female disciples of Pythagoras’,
see Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Way of Life 267 and the discussion in Zhmud (2012: 109–134).
For further evidence, see Dutsch (2020: 27–70).
2 For a list of the precepts that arguably regulated the Pythagorean way of life, see Diogenes Laertius’
Lives 8.34–35, Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras 41–42, and Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Way of
Life 82–86. That these applied to both men and women is suggested by the anecdote about the Py-
thagorean woman Timycha abiding by the Pythagorean vow of silence and ban against eating beans
(Iamblichus 189–194). Whether the same lifestyle was practiced by all Pythagoreans, men and women,
in various communities across Greece and Southern Italy, whether and how it applied to women’s
domestic roles in their everyday life, and whether the lifestyle also features in the Hellenistic revival of
Pythagoreanism cannot be known for certain.
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Pythagorean Women
3 Philolaus of Croton is reputed to be the first Pythagorean to leave a written record of his doctrines
and is the first Pythagorean from whom we have direct evidence (Diogenes Laertius, Lives 8.85). For a
discussion of Pythagorean secrecy, see Burkert (1972: 178–179) and Zhmud (2012: 150–165). For an
introduction to the pseudepigrapha, see Thesleff (1961).
4 The texts are collected by Thesleff (1965) and translated in English by Pomeroy (2013). In the chapter,
the translations of Phintys, Aesara, and Perictione are modified from Pellò (2020), De Cesaris and
Pellò (2023), and De Cesaris and Pellò (forthcoming), respectively.
5 See, for example, Diogenes Laertius, Lives 8.42–43, and Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras 4.
6 Scholars are divided into three groups: those who attempt to identify distinguishing traits of protreptic
writings (Slings 1995), those proposing broad definitions of protreptics as a genre generally aimed at
“choosing the best life” (Jordan 1986; Collins 2015), and those arguing that protreptics are too varied
in form and subject matter to be clustered under one definition (Alieva, Kotzé, van der Meeren 2018).
For examples of protreptics in the Presocratics, see Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui in Alieva, Kotzé, van
der Meeren (2018: 49–70). For Plato, see Collins (2015). For the latest edition of Aristotle’s Protrep-
ticus with references to Iamblichus’ Protrepticus, see Hutchinson and Johnson (2015).
7 The distinction between direct and indirect protreptics is made by Slings (1981: 60–61). For various
forms of protreptic utterances, see also Markovich (2022: 12–13).
8 Our sources identify Perictione as Plato’s Athenian mother and a descendant of Solon (Diogenes, Lives
3.1–2). Perictione, then, is an effective pseudonym for the pseudepigrapha, as it strategically bridges
the gap between Platonism and Pythagoreanism by creating a strong biological connection between
Plato and his allegedly Pythagorean mother.
9 As previously mentioned, whether the treatise is even ascribed to a woman is a contested. For an
overview of the debate and the likelihood that Aesara is a female name, see Migliorati (2020) and De
Cesaris and Pellò (forthcoming).
References
Alieve, O., Kotzé, A. and van der Meeren, S. (2018) When Wisdom Calls. Turnhout: Brepolis.
Bensen Cain, R. (2007) The Socratic Method. London: Continuum.
Burkert, W. (1972) Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University
Press.
Collins, J. H. (2015) Exhortations to Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.
De Cesaris, G. and Pellò, C. (2023) “Perictione, Mother of Metaphysics: A New Reading of On Wisdom,”
in K. R. O’Reilly and C. Pellò (eds.) Ancient Women Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 152–169.
De Cesaris, G. and Pellò, C. (forthcoming) “Aesara on Human Nature: The Tripartition of the Soul
evisited.” Journal of Hellenic Studies.
R
Deslauriers, M. (2012) “Women, Education, and Philosophy,” in S.L. James and S. Dillon (eds.) A Com-
panion to Women in the Ancient World. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 343–353.
Dutsch, D. (2020) Pythagorean Women Philosophers: Between Belief and Suspicion. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Horky, P. S. (2015) “Pseudo-Archytas’ Protreptics? On Wisdom in its Contexts,” in D. Nails and H.
T arrant (eds.) Second Sailing: Alternative Perspectives on Plato. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fen-
nica, 21–40.
Huizenga, A. B. (2013) Moral Education for Women in the Pastoral and Pythagorean Letters. Boston,
MA: Brill.
Huffman, C. A. (2005) Archytas of Tarentum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hutchinson, D. S., and Johnson, M. R. (2015) Protrepticus. http://www.protrepticus.info/. Last accessed:
2 June 2022.
Jordan, M. D. (1986) “Ancient Philosophic Protreptic and the Problem of Persuasive Genres,” Rhetorica
4: 309–333.
Markovich, D. (2022) Promoting a New Kind of Education. Leiden: Brill.
Migliorati, M. (2020) “Le donne della scuola pitagorica: L’analisi dell’anima in uno scritto di Esara di
Lucania,” in M. Bonelli (ed.) Filosofe, Maestre, e Imperatrici. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura,
79–104.
Pellò, C. (2020) “Phintys the Pythagorean: A Philosophical Approach,” Philosophia 49: 11–32.
433
Caterina Pellò
Pomeroy, S. B. (2013) Pythagorean Women: Their History and Writings. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins
University Press.
Slings, S. R. (1981) A Commentary on the Platonic Clitophon. Amsterdam: Academische Press.
Slings, S. R. (1995) “Protreptic in Ancient Theories of Philosophical Literature,” in J. G. J. Abbenes,
S. R. Slings, and I. Sluiter (eds.) Greek Literary Theory after Aristotle. Amsterdam: VU University
Press, 173–192.
Thesleff, H. (1961) An Introduction to the Pythagorean Writings of the Hellenistic Period. Åbo: Åbo
Akademi.
Thesleff, H. (1965) The Pythagorean Texts of the Hellenistic Period. Åbo: Åbo Akademi.
Waithe, M. E. (1987) Ancient Women Philosophers, 600 B.C–500 A.D. Dordrecht: Springer.
Zhmud, L. (2012) Pythagoras and the Early Pythagoreans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Further Readings
Centrone, B. (2014) “The Pseudo-Pythagorean Writings,” in C.A. Huffman (ed.) A History of Pythago-
reanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 315–340. [An introduction to the pseudepigrapha
and the Pseudo-Pythagorean philosophical system.]
Demand, N. H. (1982) “The Position of Women in Pythagoreanism,” in N.H. Demand (ed.) Thebes in
the Fifth Century: Heracles Resurgent. London: Routledge, 132–135. [An overview of the available
evidence for women in early Pythagorean communities.]
Macris, C. (2016) “Perictione,” “Phintys,” “Ptolemais,” “Sara/Aisara” in R. Goulet (ed.) Dictionnaire
des Philosophes Antiques. Paris: CNRS Editions, Vol. 5, 231–234 (Perictione), 580–582 (Phintys),
1717–1718 (Ptolemais), Vol. VII, 891–893 (Sara/Aisara).
Montepaone, C. (2011) Pitagoriche. Bari: EdiPuglia. [A collection and detailed textual analysis of the
evidence for the Pythagorean women and the writings ascribed to them.]
Rowett, C. (2014) “The Pythagorean Society and Politics,” in C.A. Huffman (ed.) A History of Pythago-
reanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 112–130. [An analysis and assessment of the role
of women in early Pythagorean communities.]
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29
WOMEN IN THE HOUSEHOLD
AND PUBLIC SPHERE
Two Contrasting Stoic Views
Jula Wildberger
If this paper were about female Stoic philosophers, it would be very short. There are none, at
least none we know about. Women appear as subjects of Stoic writings, mostly on marriage,1
and in Roman times also as dedicatees of consolations.2 From our sources we can glean the
names or at least the existence of mothers, wives, daughters, and other female relatives, most
of these again in Roman times. Zeno, who around 300 BC founded Stoicism, which would
become one of the dominant philosophical schools of the Hellenistic world and the Roman
Empire, lived with his student Persaeus and is portrayed as not particularly interested in female
prostitutes, sleeping with them only in order not to appear as a “woman hater” (Diogenes
Laertius 7.13). Zeno’s successor Cleanthes had no family we know of. The third head of the
school and most important theoretician of the school, Chrysippus, had a sister, whose sons he
invited to Athens. Diogenes (7.181, 185) also mentions an old woman that takes care of him,
but like the flute girls in Zeno’s biography, she is a comic character rather than a real person.
This limitation to traditional female roles of wife, prostitute, housekeeper, and mourning
mother is somewhat surprising, given that the same Stoics made the most sweeping claims about
the equality of women, “That the virtue of man and woman is the same”3 and, like Plato,
accorded them full citizen rights in their ideal Republics. This paradox and the u nderlying
antithesis of household and public sphere will provide the conceptual frame for this chapter.
By public sphere I mean the shared space of interactions beyond the confines of the house-
hold, which is also the sphere of political decision-making and leadership. The logic of the
patriarchic household requires the exclusion of women from the public sphere, or at least a
strict control of their public presence. Conversely, a rejection of the household (oikia) as the
institutional basis of the (city) state (Husson 2021: 9) implies the admission of women to the
public sphere.
Two Stoics will exemplify the range of positions that could be held within the school: Zeno
and the first-century “Roman Socrates” C. Musonius Rufus, who taught in Greek and can
be regarded as an early representative of the Second Sophistic.4 Whereas Zeno dissolves the
patriarchic household and admits women to the public sphere, literally exposing their naked
bodies to the public gaze, Musonius keeps women at home and conceives of female virtue as
a disposition to function well within the patriarchic household. However, the contrast is not
quite so clear-cut: on the one hand, we might ask to which degree there is still specifically
a public sphere for women to partake in if the household has been dissolved. On the other
435 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-33

Jula Wildberger
hand, wives assume a role in Musonius’ social circles that can very well be called public and
political.5 In what follows, I will explore such complications a little bit further.
1 Women in Zeno’s Republic

Let’s start with two testimonies for Zeno’s lost book on the ideal state, his Politeia. Much in-
formation about that work and especially the role it accords to women come from a debate in
the first-century BCE about what exactly Zeno wrote. Some Stoics seem to have been embar-
rassed by tenets reminiscent of Cynic disregard for traditional social norms, while opponents
gleefully excerpted precisely such outrageous material. One of them is a certain “Cassius the
Skeptic.” Having seen Zeno’s book himself or drawing on a report from autopsy, he listed
the following offensive passages, which Diogenes Laertius copied into his biography of Zeno.
Some, however, including those who follow Cassius the Skeptic, bring a number of
charges against Zeno. They say that, first, he states that traditional education is useless,
at the beginning of his Republic, that he says, second, that all who are not virtuous are
enemies, foes, slaves, and alien to one another, even parents toward children, siblings
toward siblings, and kin toward kin, while counting, again in the Republic, only the
virtuous as citizens, friends, kindred, or free, so that for the Stoics, parents and children
are enemies, since they are not wise. [Cassius also claims] that he maintains the doctrine
that women should be held in common, likewise in the Republic around line 200, and
that it is not necessary to build either shrines or courts or gymnasia in the cities; and that
on coinage he writes thus: “that he does not believe it to be necessary to produce coinage
either for exchange or for travel abroad;” and that he orders men and women to wear
the same clothing and that no body part be concealed.6
Another testimony stems from a doxographic collection of Stoic tenets about the c haracteristics
and life of the perfect person, the sage:
They are of the opinion that the women must be common among the sages, such that
each man uses each woman randomly, as Zeno says in his Politeia and Chrysippus in
his book About the Politeia, but also Diogenes the Cynic and Plato. And we will love
all children equally in the manner of fathers and the jealousy about adultery will be
extirpated.
(Diogenes Laertius 7.131)
1.1 Women in Common?

As the second quote illustrates, Zeno’s work had two important subtexts against which it was
read: the Republics of the Cynic Diogenes and Plato (Husson 2021). Especially the promi-
nence of the latter may have impaired the accuracy of our sources. We may wonder whether
Zeno himself used the same expression as Plato for describing the relation between the sexes,
that women should be “common” to all men,7 an expression that quickly became topical, e.g.
also in geographic writing. If Zeno used these words, he presented women in exactly the same
subjection to male power that we would expect in a patriarchic household and society. “Com-
mon women” (gunaikes koinai) are a shared possession, only now held collectively by all sages
together instead of one paterfamilias. The connotation of ownership is evident in Epictetus’
interpretation: He compares women to portions of food or seats in the theater. The food on
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the table is everyone’s until someone has taken their piece. The seats in the theater are free
for everyone until someone has sat down. Then the seat belongs to the one who has occupied
it.8 Gunaikes koinai are also public women, prostitutes or just sluts, freely available to every
man who wishes to have sex with them.9 Taken literally, this expression precludes a reading
according to which the discussed relations consist primarily in a union of minds (Asmis 1996)
or the idea that Zeno envisaged a socio-political ideal in which wise men and women are free
from institutional restrictions and make their own rational choices of partners and partnership
arrangements.10
We may also wonder whether the reason for women sharing is the same as that given in
the second source quoted above. This simplified version of Plato’s own explanation became
so stereotypical that it could characterize an inept Platonist in Lucian’s philosophical slapstick
comedy Symposium (39): Having women in common puts an end to jealousy – between men,
of course – and ensures that – men, of course – love all children in the city like fathers their
own offspring. The explanation also suggests a rather traditional role for women even in Ze-
no’s revolutionary Republic: to be fucked and knocked up. Men decide to share their women;
whether a woman wishes to be so shared, does not matter. She is expected to tolerate all these
different men “using” her. A woman is a body, a body without choice, a body whose suffering
from such disenfranchisement is not even seen.
Is this what Zeno himself thought too? Maybe not. One might wonder why a sage – and
women sharing is introduced as a practice necessary for sages – would ever become jealous
(Laurand 2014: 236), or why a sage – the pinnacle of philanthrōpia – would require extreme
promiscuity as an extra motivation to care for children in need of fatherly love. What is more,
the account in Diogenes Laertius 7.131 switches from reported speech to direct speech in the
first person plural. It spells out the consequences the practice would have for “us,” while the
tenet itself was about sages, which the Stoics thought they were not. There seems to be a rup-
ture in the train of thought such as could have occurred when this commonplace explanation
was added by the doxographer himself.
1.2 Women Practising Erōs to Produce Friendship and Freedom

A different picture emerges from two parallel sources for the inter-school polemic about Zeno’s
views on female sexuality in the Republic, collections of offensive passages made by the first-
century BCE Epicurean Philodemus and three examples from the second-century CE Skeptic
Sextus Empiricus. They confirm that Zeno encouraged promiscuous behavior. However, ac-
cording to Philodemus’ report, both Diogenes and Zeno expected not only men to share their
women but also women to seek out sexual partners actively, prescribing, among other things,
that the women should [approach (?)] the men and then invite them to engage in pro-
creation so that they [= the men] copulate with them; and if they cannot find [a man],
that they buy themselves [one] who will perform the service; to use everyone at random,
whether male or female; that married men should copulate with their own maids; that
married women should depart with whoever wants to and leave their husbands behind.
(On the Stoics 7, col. 18f. Dorandi)
According to Sextus, Zeno discussed the sexual pleasure of a woman (Iocasta) being gratified
by her son (Oedipus), while Chrysippus did not find fault with mothers having children with
their sons.11 In all these instances, matters of sexuality and procreation are considered also
from the woman’s perspective. Women appear as sexual agents in their own right. It is thus
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Jula Wildberger
possible that Zeno himself did not describe the relation between the sexes as men holding
women in common. His idea may have been rather that men and women enter into a variety
of sexual and familial relations.
Cassius the Skeptic provides some evidence for an alternative explanation for why Zeno
regarded female promiscuity as necessary in his ideal state. There are indications that Cassius
follows the sequence of topics in the book. He counts the first two items, the first (prōton)
being the rejection of the traditional curriculum in education (enkuklios paideia), the second
(deuteron) the claim that all fools are unfree and enemies of each other. In between the two
stands a phrase placing the first point, and with it also the second one, right at the beginning of
the Republic. The next item, freedom and friendship of all sages, is the thematic counterpart to
the second and thus likely to have followed closely on it. As a participle construction, it is also
bound syntactically to the first and second item. After this, the topics are no longer counted.
Instead, Cassius adds the exact position of the next tenet, that women are held in common: it
is 200 lines into the papyrus volume.12 Now, if we assume that the sharing of women came as
early as line 200 in the book, it is not unlikely that there was a thematic connection between
this topic and what preceded it. At the same time, we should expect some omission in between
because Cassius does no longer count the items and selects only what serves to discredit Zeno,
jumping from one scandalous passage to the next instead of rendering a complete train of
thought.
The missing link that forged the connection between sharing women and what precedes
could have been erōs. Erōs connects education, the question of friendship and enmity as well
as slavery and freedom, and the sharing of women. The connection between erōs and women
is evident: sharing women involves sexual intercourse, in other words, erotic practice, and
there is evidence that Zeno discussed the erotic love of sages for both young women and young
men.13 The connection between the other topics can be seen in a fragment in Athenaeus from
which we learn that Zeno
Took Eros to be the god of friendship and freedom, and the producer of concord, but
nothing else. Because of this he also said in the Republic that Eros is a god who helps
with the work of bringing about the safety of the city.
(13.12, 561c, SVF 1.61)
Erotic practice produces friendship and freedom, i.e. exactly those properties that fools lack
and sages have in the passages lambasted by Cassius: Lacking friendship, fools are enemies
to each other; being “slaves,” they lack freedom as well. Sages on the other hand are citizens
and friends of each other and also free. In Cassius’ summary, the combination of friendship
and freedom within one reported tenet is surprising. It is no longer surprising if we assume a
connection with Eros as the god fostering both of these essential civic properties.
And how does Eros achieve this? By motivating sages to give an extraordinary effort (Wild-
berger 2022) to make friends (epibolē philopoiias), as the erōs of sages was defined. This kind
of friendship (philia) is a relation only between sages, and so, when working hard to turn the
beloved into a friend, sages educate the beloved fool to become wise like themselves, and thus
also free fellow-citizens, with whom they can live in concord.14 The erotic relation between
sage and fool is a form of education and political integration, an idea for which Zeno could
draw on traditional social practice. Displaying their blossoming beauty, adolescent males be-
came publicly visible. Pederasty, a relation between a younger beloved and an older lover,
helped acculturate the younger into adult society, and the bonds thus forged continued as
lifelong friendships and alliances. It is thus not unlikely that Zeno introduced Eros in this early
438
part of his work as an explicit contrast to the education he rejects. In his ideal state, the young
are not sent to school but learn to be sages, friends, and free citizens from the sages who are
in love with them. What Sextus, Philodemus, and Cassius interpret as merely a call to unre-
strained sex of all with all, is rather an encouragement for young fools to attract wise lovers
so that they can become sages themselves and for wise citizens to court and educate as many
beloved fools as they can. The train of thought could have been something like the following:
We are looking for instruction about how a city can be maintained in a good condition.
Traditional education is useless since it fails to produce good persons.15
If citizens are not good persons, they will be enemies of each other and unfree.
Only good persons, the sages, are friends of each other and free.
It is Eros that produces sages and thus free people capable of friendship. Eros unites
the citizens in concord and thus assures the city’s safety.
Women too must participate in erōs.
1.3 Only Wise Women Can Live in Concord with Men

This reconstruction of the train of thought suggests a reason for the inclusion of women in
the city’s erotic practices, and this reason is again supported by Cassius’ excerpt. The danger
for the city that is averted by the practice of erōs is discord, the enmity of everyone against
everyone that plagues the fools. Erōs is the necessary condition for civic cohesion and for
there to be citizens at all. But why should women be included in this practice, given that they
did not have full citizen rights in a Greek polis? The reason, I would suggest, is the fact that
strife and enmity between fools does not stop at the level of citizenship. It continues into the
family and the household, and as Cassius’ excerpt informs us, this fact was made explicit
right at the beginning of Zeno’s Politeia too: Fools are not only enemies and (external) foes,
they are also alienated from each other (allotrioi), strangers to their own parents and chil-
dren and siblings and all their oikeioi, i.e. their relatives and those they live within the same
household. Being in constant discord, fools do not only fail to form a functioning citizen
body. Neither are they able to live together in a functioning family. Properly speaking, Zeno
does not dissolve the household. He finds it torn apart in foolish strife and wonders how it
can be reunited.
Now, as concerns women, two choices were available. One possibility was to ignore them
completely. This is always an option. Men have been thinking about a variety of social mat-
ters as if humankind consisted only of men. “Parent” would then mean “father” and “child”
would be “son” and “siblings” (adelphoi) exclusively “brothers.” Zeno preferred the other
option, to take account of the existence of women. If women are considered, there are again
two options: one is to regard them as some kind of animal, like pets or chattel. Zeno chose
the other option, to regard them as human beings. For him, women are human beings too
and thus full members of a human family and household. Once that choice has been made, it
follows that friendship and concord should not obtain only between brothers and fathers and
sons. Surely, Stoic wise men do not want to be surrounded by women that are indifferent to
them like strangers and hate them like enemies. Sisters and mothers and daughters must also
live in concord with their male relatives and wives with their husbands.
Nor was it an option to regard women as human but constitutionally inferior or immature
beings unable to ever develop into full sagehood and in need of male guidance. Having divided
humankind starkly into two separate kinds, constantly inimical and unfree fools and free sages
that are friends to each other, Zeno had to place women in one of the two categories. Either
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Jula Wildberger
they were fools or they were sages. If they were fools, no love and concord with them was
possible. So he had to postulate that women were capable of becoming sages just like men if
he wanted any form of friendship between men and women at all. The famous Stoic tenet that
women too are capable of virtue, or rather that the perfection of a fully matured female is not
different from that of the male of the species may thus have started with a desire for concord
within the family.
1.4 The Public Sphere Becomes a Cosmic Household

In order to maintain relationships of true friendship and love (philia), just like men women
too must shed their foolishness (or not be perverted at a young age). And unless one assumes
that women by some wondrous coincidence can attain that condition on their own, without
the strenuous help of sages, it is necessary that they must enter into the same relation of edu-
cational erōs and become the beloved of some sage enamored with their beautiful talent for
wisdom. Becoming the beloved of a sage requires public visibility and public access to young
women by erotically promiscuous male and female sages. Zeno’s measure for saving the family
thus propels women into the public sphere and dissolves the traditional patriarchic household.
This is true whether or not one assumes that sages in the Republic enter into a marriage rela-
tion and have children, as is also attested for that work.16 These would be men and women
who had been beloved young fools and grown into sages. Their relation would be one of
philia, not erōs. As sages they could be truly close to each other (oikeioi). In which way ever
Zeno might have imagined marriage in his Republic, it would be a different practice than the
erōsrelations between sages and beautiful young minds.
Erotic promiscuity of women loosens the household bonds, at least as traditionally con-
ceived in their patriarchic form, while the inclusion of women in these promiscuous practices
is necessary for there to be any loving, familial bond between men and women at all. As a
result, Zeno’s political community as a whole becomes both a family and a citizen body. As
Grahn-Wilder (2018: 243) notes in her critique of Schofield’s claim (1991: 43–44) that Zeno’s
Republic included women as full members of the traditionally “male club” of Greek polis life,
The Stoics do not seem to be particularly interested in the question of “political respon-
sibilities.” […] given that the society seems to have virtually no structures or institutions,
such responsibilities should be understood as ethical rather than strictly political.
In a turn contrary to that of Musonius’ politicization of the household, we observe a depoliti-

cization of the public sphere, and a transformation of the city state (polis) into a household,
a transformation that began early, maybe already with Zeno himself. The cosmic polis, at
least, came to be conceptualized as a common home (oikētērion) of gods and men under the
provident administration (dioikēsis) of a divine paterfamilias.17
2 Musonius Rufus
If the proposed reconstruction of Zeno’s reasoning is correct, Musonius begins to appear
somewhat closer to Zeno’s thought. Making the same choices as Zeno, to see women and
regard them as human beings, Musonius identifies the same problem and comes up with the
same solution: He too identifies a need for concord between men and women and wants to
attain that concord by educating not only men to be sages but women as well. The differences
between Zeno and Musonius are a consequence firstly of Musonius’ radical, even archaizing,
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social conservativism (or realism, as some would say) and, second, the removal of erōs from
education.
2.1 Equality in Virtue, but Submission Within the Household

as a Woman’s Proper Role
In his18 third Discourse, Musonius asserts the equality of men and women, their equal disposi-
tion toward virtue and ability to attain it, their equal senses and desires, and natural attach-
ment to what is good and just, claiming even that they have the same body parts (38, 32).19
But then he suddenly comes up with a concept of “what befits a woman if she is to be good”
(40, 8–9), i.e. a specifically female social role.
Consideration of social roles became increasingly important for Zeno’s successors. A no-
table example is the second-century BCE Stoic Panaetius’ theory of four roles or personae,
which has been preserved for us in Cicero’s De officiis. When discussing social relations (skhe-
seis), the Imperial Stoics Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, frame obligations in terms
of such roles. Which roles one might identify and how one would define them depends on
what the Stoic in question regards as “natural” for a human being, i.e. as innately valuable for
a person as something Nature “attached” them to (oikeion). Virtue is both acquired by and
expressed through perfect performance in one’s social roles.
In practice, however, these later Hellenistic and Roman Stoics describe roles closely aligned
with the stereotypes of their society and the prejudices of their class, and so also Musonius:
His virtuous woman will manage the household and rule over the servants. Her self-control
will enable her to “remain pure of unlawful sex”(40, 17–18), not to be quarrelsome, not to
demand luxuries or adornments, to decorate herself with freedom from passions instead. Her
justice will involve concord with her husband and care for her children, whom she will love
more than her own life. Her courage will enable her to work with her own hands and suffer
hardships (42, 6), and not to shirk tasks that others would say are for slaves, like breastfeeding
her own children and serving her husband (42, 7–8).
This curriculum implies both a natural limitation of female agency to the sphere of house-
hold and family20 and a natural submission to the master of the household, her husband.
Accordingly, Musonius concludes with a justification for educating women in philosophy in
which the wise woman becomes a thing referred to with abstract nouns (“advantage,” “orna-
ment,” “example”), an impersonal means to further the welfare of husband and clan and to
propagate such instrumentalization of womankind (42, 9–10): “Would not such a woman
be a great advantage to the man who married her, an ornament to her relatives, and a good
example for all women who know her?” (transl. Lutz, edited).
The implicit limitation to the household is made explicit in Musonius’ reply to the sole ob-
jection raised in the Discourse. An interlocutor is afraid that training in philosophy will encour-
age women to raise their voice among the men, i.e. to leave the household and enter the public
sphere, which for Musonius and his audience is the school and public philosophical debate.
But, by Zeus, some say that women who go to philosophers must, by necessity, be self-
willed generally and bold when, abandoning their households, they make themselves at
home21 in the midst of men, practice speeches, talk like sophists, and resolve syllogisms,
even though they ought to be sitting at home spinning.22
Not only does the objector assume that women should be kept from the public sphere. He
also indicates a reason for this: If women leave the household, they will become self-willed
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and bold. In other words, they will no longer submit to the domination of men. In the fourth
Discourse, Musonius claims that women should stay at home and not exercise because of
their “weaker” (46, 18) nature, but Musonius himself indicates that there are variations
in strength and fitness within the sexes, and as Grahn-Wilder (2018: 270–271) points out,
there are public activities that do not require “physical power or body size,” notably poli-
tics and government and, one might add, public philosophical discourse. Clearly the issue is
something else: The woman is limited to the household not only because that is her natural
habitat. She also is limited to the household to keep her in her social place, below her hus-
band (she is not supposed to be “bold”), and restrict her life choices (she is not supposed to
be “self-willed”).
This underscores the inconsistency in Musonius’ thought, which derives from his commit-
ment to traditional patriarchic norms when defining the roles that virtuous women will fulfill
in a perfect manner: If women only need to get out of the house to free themselves from male
hegemony, their submission is only conventional and not rooted in some natural superiority
or greater strength of men. If women are, as Musonius claims at the beginning of the third
Discourse, equal to men in every respect, why should they submit to men at all? Why would
their submission be a feature of their virtue of justice, the knowledge disposed to attribute to
each what is their due? Why would it be an expression of the “love of equality” (48, 9) they
are to learn in the moral curriculum set out for them in the fourth Discourse? Musonius,
however, does not address this inconsistency. Rather he assuages the fears of the objector with
two replies. Firstly, his claim that everyone should philosophize, whether man or woman,
comes under the proviso that the philosophers prioritizes completing “the tasks that befit
them” (42, 17), and in the case of women, as he has already shown, these tasks require their
continuous presence at home. Second, he affirms what is implicit in the pragmatic situation of
the speech addressed by a man to a male audience: it is the men who decide whether a woman
should philosophize or not, and it is the men who choose the curriculum. Women do not
have a voice of their own in the Discourses (Nussbaum 2002a: 311–312). Musonius’ lessons
will make women modest, not bold. His teachings will not “accustom them to live a more
impulsive life,” in which they would follow their own whims. Rather they will learn to make
themselves small, do reduce themselves with “utmost restraint” (42, 25–26).
2.2 Public Displays of Female Courage Within Musonius’ Elite Audience

There is one virtue that Musonius ascribes to women which involves agency beyond the
household: female courage. A virtuous woman defends her children bravely against attackers
(Discourse 4, 44.29–31) and does not give in to anyone. “She will not cower before anyone,
not because he is of noble birth, not because he is powerful or wealthy, not even, by Zeus, if
he is the tyrant” (Discourse 3, 42, 1–2). We might imagine here some outsider infringing on
her household like the predator that attacks the bird mother’s nest, or maybe some Tarquinius
preying on a Lucretia (Nussbaum 2002a: 301). However, the role of the faithful wife standing
up against power, proud and erect, was played out, both in life and in literature, among the
very circles of the Stoic-leaning elite in which Musonius had established himself as a highly re-
spected teacher of wisdom.23 Women whom Musonius knew personally embodied exactly the
invincible female courage before power and tyranny that he describes in the third Discourse,
and were praised for it in a range of genres.24 Yet another connection between Musonius and
these famous women is our most important witness for them, Pliny the Younger. He describes
himself as an admirer and student not only of the much older Musonius but also of Musonius’
students Euphrates and Artemidorus.25 Even though Pliny does not show much interest in
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Stoic ethical theory itself, he learned how to speak about moral matters from Musonius and
his Stoic successors.
One of the famous women celebrated by Pliny in his Letters is Clodia (?) Fannia (PIR2 F118),
the daughter of the Stoic-leaning senator P. Clodius Thrasea Paetus (PIR2 C 1187) and the
Younger Arria. Instead of choosing independence and safety for herself,26 she followed her
husband, the Stoic C. Helvidius Priscus (DPhA H39, PIR2 H59), into exile twice, once under
Nero (66 CE) after the death of her father in the wake of the Pisonian conspiracy and then
again in the reign of Vespasian. Helvidius’ conflict with the emperor led to his death in the
early 70s. Back in Rome, in 93, Fannia faced exile again for the charge of having encouraged
the senator Herennius Senecio to write a biography of her husband. Senecio was condemned
to death, together with the ex-consul Iunius Arulenus Rusticus, the latter for writing in praise
of her father Thrasea Paetus, of whom he had been a longstanding supporter and admirer.
Pliny describes the scene of her testimony at that trial (7.19.5f.).
Two times she followed her husband into exile; the third she was relegated herself be-
cause of her husband. For when Senecio was accused for having composed volumes on
Helvidius’ life, he defended himself by saying that Fannia had asked him to write them.
When [the prosecutor] Mettius Carus asked her menacingly, whether she had asked him
to, she answered: “Yes, I did.” Whether she had given him Helvidius’ journals for the
biography: “Yes, I did.” Whether her mother had known. “No, she did not.” In short,
throughout the trial she did not utter one word by which she would yield to her danger.
She even preserved those very books, although – out of necessity and the pervasive fear
during those times – they had been banished by a decree of the senate, while all her
property had been confiscated. She kept them and carried them with her, the cause of
her exile into exile.
Like her Stoic husband, Fannia does not cower before the tyrant and stands out all the more
since everyone else is yielding to “the pervasive fear of the times,” the senate by banishing
the books and condemning the biographers and Fannia herself and the biographer Senecio
by naming Fannia as the instigator of his “crime,” while Fannia herself refuses to accuse her
mother.
Still, she is an almost silent character. Not she but someone else writes her husband’s bio
graphy, and this is a consistent feature we find in accounts of women associated with the
so-called Stoic opposition and in others modeled on them.27 Like Musonius’ virtuous women,
they do not lecture about virtue but display it. Our sources mention philosophical studies
of their husbands, but we learn nothing about any such studies or theoretical views of their
wives. Even though the Arrias and Fannia feature in the Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques
(F5, A421, A422) as the only female representatives of the Stoic school and even if their be-
havior fits a Stoic mold of the type sketched out by Musonius, we have no idea whether they
had any philosophical thoughts themselves and, if so, what they were.
Complete submission and dedication to their husbands is the hallmark of all those exem-
plary women.28 In this, too, they embody the kind of female virtue Musonius has in mind.
It reins in their “manliness” and makes it acceptable.29 Like the virtuous wife in Musonius’
third Discourse, Fannia’s grandmother, the Elder Arria is willing to perform servile tasks if
only she is allowed to travel back to Rome on the same ship with her arrested husband. Re-
jected by the emperor’s soldiers, she follows on a small fishing boat, risking her life to accom-
pany him into the peril he brought onto himself by joining a defection from Emperor Claudius
(Pliny, Letters 3.16.7–9).30 What made Arria famous, however, was not so much servile
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obeisance, but rather another feature most frequently noted and praised in the tradition: a
wife’s willingness to throw away her life and livelihood in order to stay true to her husband
(Tacitus, Annals 15, 63–64, 71). Such women acquire the masculine public attribute glory
(gloria) and, like the virtuous women in Musonius’ Discourses, become exempla, models of
conduct to be followed by their high-minded successors. This is how Tacitus presents the Elder
Arria: When her daughter wishes to die with Thrasea Paetus, she intends to “follow the model
of her mother” (Annals 16.34). Pliny describes the suicide of a woman who killed herself to-
gether with her incurable husband, tying herself to him and drowning the two of them in Lake
Como, as not inferior to “that distinguished deed by Arria” (Letters 6.24.5).
2.3 Female Courage Becomes a Political Model for Men

It is precisely the example of the Elder Arria, however, which shows most clearly how selfless
devotion can flip the hierarchy between husband and wife (Malaspina 1996). The many
anecdotes that Pliny intimates to have heard about Arria from her granddaughter Fannia
(Letters 3.16) display a strong-willed woman bent on sharing the death of her husband, even
against the pleas of her son-in-law Thrasea and even if that meant literally smashing her head
against a wall (3.16.10–12). Not only was this her own will, but also what she expected
of other women, and her own daughter too (3.16.9–10). Arria does not obey, she sets the
standard herself. We can still picture the emblematic scene of Arria’s glorious death. Even
before her convicted husband, she took a blade and stabbed herself, then handed it to him
with the words: “Paetus, it does not hurt.” In contrast to her, Paetus appears colorless and
weak. He needs her protection and care. When he is seriously ill and their son dies from the
same disease, Arria hides the child’s death from him, even pretending to rejoice about the
son’s recovery, in order to protect her sick husband (Pliny, Letters 3.16.3–5). His role during
their joint death scene is not particularly glorious either. As Pliny frames it in that same letter,
Arria was “for her husband both solace and model of dying” (3.16.2). Cassius Dio (60.16.6)
even suggests that he needed her encouragement because he himself was hesitating cowardly.
The Elder Arria’s agency thus exceeds the frame of virtuous subordination. Who would know
the name of Paetus if it were not for her last address to him? She is an example for her daugh-
ter and other women, but her courageous defiance is also a model for the men of that time.
The Arrias and Fannia and other women of their ilk were truly political figures. They rep-
resent a certain model of senatorial agency under the principate: the rigorous maintenance
of moral integrity and personal loyalty even under intimidation by an oppressive regime.
While their husbands display the libertas of the conscientious Roman citizen and senator,
the wives represent the libertas of those remaining loyal to their dear ones until the bitter
end, the spirited rejection of complicity to crime. Hill (2004: 257) claims that the celebrated
suicides by women are “family-oriented deaths” and that celebrating them “supplants the
older, purely male and political, ethic of suicide.” Langlands (2014: 215) notes “that within
the exemplary framework articulated in Pliny’s Letters the difference between the sexes is
systematically played down at the level of abstract virtue (if not at the level of social role).”
She thus observes the same combination of equal virtue but starkly different social roles we
find in Musonius Rufus. For the elder statesman Pliny, however, associating himself specifi-
cally with women of the senatorial “opposition” and presenting women as role models also
for men like himself31 serves an important political function. Forging a personal connection
to them and praising them in his letters, he draws on their social prestige to increase his own
– and to position himself politically. Not a willing henchman of Domitian he!32 In his Let-
ters, the former consul designs for himself a public persona as a high-ranking imperial official
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under a new regime. Modeling his own agency on that of the women he presents to us with
such admiration, he can portray himself as a senator of similar moral integrity, as one who
was willing to take risks out of personal loyalty (see, e.g., 3.11 and 9.13), while avoiding any
hint of political o
pposition to the ruling power. Fannia and the Arrias do not theorize about
philosophy; nor do they have a political standpoint.33 What matters to them is their men,
while Pliny cares about his friends. Caring for the man, not the ideas that brought Helvidius
into conflict with the emperors Vespasian and Domitian, Pliny manages to dissociate himself
from a political agenda that would have been quite unwelcome under Trajan as well.34 Like a
faithful wife, he can thus attribute to himself bravery in the face of a tyrannical emperor – the
last of the previous dynasty – without in any way provoking the ire of the present one.
Conclusion
To sum up the results of our comparison, early as well as Roman Imperial Stoics posit the
equality of women and men but are unable to free themselves from the patriarchic paradigm.
In Zeno, for whom mental and moral equality also means social equality, we observe how
the entry of women into the public sphere coincides with the depolitization of that sphere and
the beginnings of a conception of politics in which the world state becomes a big patriarchic
household ruled and administrated by God. Musonius never espouses social equality of
women and designs for them a role of virtuous agency within the male-dominated household.
At the same time, he still agrees with the Stoic equality claim, and this claim takes on a life
of its own in his conception of female courage, to which we find parallels in the ways male
Roman authors conceptualized the courageous behavior of wives of contemporary Stoic men.
Women thus become public and political figures in their own right precisely because of their
deep connection to the household. Or, maybe, the reality of politics in Musonius’ time and the
kind of women he encountered made a mark on his thinking in spite of his prejudices and the
inconsistencies he was willing to countenance because of them.
Notes
1 An exception is Apollonius of Tyrus’ (first century BCE, DPhA A286) lost work on female philoso-
phers and other outstanding women. An important tool for researching female philosophers is the
Dictionnaire des Philosophes Antiques – abbreviated DPhA– edited by Richard Goulet, especially the
searchable online version. I am gateful to Lilly Woelke for valuable help in researching female Stoics
with this tool.
2 Atheneodorus Calvus of Tarsus (DPhA A497, first century BCE) to Augustus’ sister Octavia; L.
Annaeus Seneca (first century CE) to Marcia and his mother Helvia (Dialogi 6 and 12).
3 This is the title of a lost treatise by Cleanthes (Diogenes Laertius 7.175 = SVF 1.481).
4 On Musonius Rufus see Lutz (1947) and the comprehensive article by M.-O. Goulet-Cazé, DPhA
M198. He was a Roman knight of Etruscan origin but also taught in the Greek-speaking east of
the empire. He had many Greek students, some of whom became famous professional philosophers
themselves: Epictetus, the Syrian Stoics Euphrates and Artemidorus, Athenodotus, Timocrates of
Heracleia, and possibly also Dio Chrysostom. All transmitted texts presenting Musonius’ thought are
in Greek.
5 Laurand (2014: 15, 341–411) argues that the married couple, and thus the household itself, becomes
political in a way it had not been before; see also Torre (2000: 31–33). Reydams-Schils (2005:
146–166) reads Musonius’s Discourses on women and marriage as a reply to Plato’s Republic. Fol-
lowing (Asmis 1996: 83), she stresses that marriage for Musonius is a full union of minds.
6 Diogenes Laertius 7.32–33, translation based on Stephen White’s (2021), with significant changes.
Unless indicated otherwise, translations are my own. Recent discussions of marriage and sexuality in
Zeno’s Republic are Brisson (2021) and Renaut (2021).
7 Plato, Republic 457c–d, 543a; Laws 739c.
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8 Dissertations 2.4.8–10; compare Laurand (2014: 236–237).

9 Reydams-Schils (2005: 161); see, e.g., Philemon frg. 3 (Adelphoi 1) in Athenaeus 13.25, 569e;
Plutach, Comparatio Aristidis et Catonis 6.3, Sulla 2.4, De curiositate 519e; Lucian, Toxaris 37.
10 This is suggested, e.g., by Grahn-Wilder (2018: 237), even though she is aware of the possessive and
unilateral implications of the expression gunaikes koinai (244–246). See also Bees (2011), according
to whom Zeno regarded promiscuity and “free love” as natural, with the critique by Goulet-Gazé
(2017: 582–604).
11 Pyrrhonean Hypotheses 3.245–46, SVF 1.256, 3.745.
12 This is the reading of Dorandi. The manuscripts have a conjuction before the page number, which
would imply that the verse lines belong to the next entry in the list. However, one would expect the
exact position to be indicated together with the mention of the book (as before ἐν ἀρχῇ τῆς Πολιτείας
and as later in a parallel passage about Chrysippus at 7.188: ἐν τῷ τρίτῳ Περὶ δικαίου κατὰ τοὺς χιλίους
στίχους). The second reason is that the next section comprises three topics: temples, law courts, and
gymnasia. From parallel sources, we know that there were arguments at least for the first two tenets,
so that Cassius must be condensing a longer passage. This would require us to read “around line
200” in the sense of “beginning from line 200”, which is not impossible but improbable.
13 Schofield (1991: Chapter 2); Wildberger (2018, 109f). On Stoic erōs, see also Banateanu
(2001); Nussbaum (2002b); Laurand (2007); Gill (2013); Leontsini (2013); Grahn-Wilder (2018:
200–204); Renaut (2021).
14 For a different explanation, based on a concept of cosmic Eros attested in Cornutus, see Boys-Stones
(1998).
15 Compare Bresson (2021: 130).
16 Diogenes Laertius 7.121, SVF 1.270; see Laurand (2014: 228–234) on the contradictions between
this tenet and the testimonies discussed so far.
17 Wildberger (2018: Chapter 4.3).
18 Musonius, who lectured in Greek, did not produce any written work himself. We have excerpts from
a collection of speeches reported by some student of his bearing the ubiquitous Roman first name
Lucius.
19 Reydams-Schils (2005: 154). Citations are of page and line in Lutz’s edition.
20 Grahn-Wilder (2018: 268) notes how “the gendered division of labor corresponds to binary
opposition between oikos and polis, or private and public, illustrated through the images of ‘inside’
and ‘outside’ duties.”
21 LSJ s.v. ἀναστρέφω B.II (pass.): “dwell in a place.”
22 42,11–15; translation partly adapted from Lutz. Punctuation at the beginning of the sentence changed.
23 On this group, the so-called Stoic senatorial opposition, see, e.g., Malitz (1985, 1988); Carlon (2009:
21–22); Brunt (2013: Chapters 7 and 8). On Musonius’ personal connections, see M.-O. Goulet-
Cazé, DPhA M198.
24 A helpful synthesis of known cases is provided by Shelton (2013: Chapters 1 and 2).
25 Pliny, Letters 3.11; on Pliny’s connection to Euphrates, see 1.10; on Euphrates as a student of
Musonius, see Fronto. De eloquentia 1.4.20. On Pliny‘s representation of exemplary women, see in
particular Carlon (2003); Shelton (2013); Langlands (2014).
26 Sharing the exile of a husband, “not only provides evidence of love but moves the wife from the
possibility of independent action into her proper subordination” (Parker 1998: 170). Shelton (2013:
58–62) outlines the important support the wife of an exile could render her husband from home. Still,
she too remarks that “the banishment of a husband produced an inversion of conventional gender
roles and marriage relationships. Having a husband in exile forced a woman to emerge from the
private and sheltered sphere of home and family, considered the appropriate sphere for women, and
to make herself conspicuous in the sphere of public places, […].”
27 Langlands (2014: 234) remarks that the Elder Arria “has the most direct speech of any person in the
letters (3.16). ” However, this is within Pliny’s narration of her exemplary feats, as he learned them
from her daughter Fannia. In this case again, Fannia has provided a biographer the material to write
about a close family member. She needs him to make public those deeds of her grandmother that are
“greater” (maiora) but not so well known (clariora, 3.16.1, 13).
28 A particularly extreme case is the Stoic model wife Marcia of Lucan’s ultra-Stoic hero Cato, on whom
see Harich (1990).
29 Malaspina (1996: 319–321); Shelton (2013: 37). On the problem of female manliness, see also
Nussbaum (2002a: 288); on the masculinity of Stoic virtue itself and its application to women,
446
Grahn-Wilder (2018: Chapter 9), and with a view to Roman conceptions of virtus in particular,
Röttig (2021).
30 Malaspina (1996: 333) considers whether Arria might not have played a more active role, and this
is not at all unlikely. What matters here, however, is how she is represented: as focused solely on her
husband and not personally involved in any political conflict.
31 Letters 7.19.7, Langlands (2014: 221).
32 Carlon (2009: 18–67); Shelton (2013: 15–16); Geisthardt (2015: 189–191); Gibson (2020: 99–100).
33 See, e.g. Carlon (2009: 55); Shelton (2013: 87) on the fact that Pliny downplays the political
implications of Fannia’s interest in the biography of her husband Helvidius Priscus.
34 Compare Carlon (2009: 23, 20).
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in Nussbaum and Sihvola 2002, 283–326.
Nussbaum, M. C. (2002b) “Erōs and Ethical Norms: Philosophers Respond to a Cultural Dilemma,” in
Nussbaum and Sihvola 2002, 55–94.
Nussbaum, M. C. and J. Sihvola. (eds.) (2002) The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics
in Ancient Greece and Rome, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Parker, H. (1998) “Loyal Slaves and Loyal Wives: The Crisis of the Outsider-Within and Roman
Exemplary Literature,” in S. R. Joshel and S. Murnaghan (eds.) Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman
Culture, London: Routledge, 152–173.
Renaut, O. (2021) “La sexualité dans le trois Républiques,” in Husson and Lemaire 2021, 133–164.
Reydams-Schils, G. (2005) The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection, Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press.
Röttig, S. (2021) “Philosophische Überzeugung und römische Identität: Seneca über den Weisen und die
Tugend der pudicitia,” Gymnasium 128: 553–573.
Schofield, M. (1991) The Stoic Idea of the City, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shelton, J.-A. (2013) The Women of Pliny’s Letters, London: Routledge.
Torre, C. (2000) Il matrimonio del sapiens: Richerche sul De matrimonio di Seneca, Genova: Università
di Genova.
Wildberger, J. (2018) The Stoics and the State: Theory – Practice – Context, Baden Baden: Nomos.
Wildberger, J. (2022) “Liebe als wohlbegründetes Bestreben: Wesen und Funktion des Eros-Impulses eines
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Metzler, 181–197.
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30
PYRRHONIAN SKEPTICISM
ON GENDER AND VIRTUE
Christiana Olfert
Can women be virtuous? If so, which virtues can they have? These questions have been
discussed in Platonic dialogues, Aristotelian treatises, and Stoic writings.1 In Outlines of
Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus joins this discussion. Using examples of rich and respected
prostitutes (hetairai), Amazonian warrior women, and men who wear beautiful dresses, he
shows that there is “anomaly” in people’s views about how women’s virtues differ from men’s.
This “anomaly” is a characteristic Skeptical device consisting in opposing ideas or appear-
ances about some issue – in this case, about men’s and women’s virtues. According to Sextus,
unless we can definitively determine which side of the opposition has the truth, we will be led
to suspension of judgment.
Suspension of judgment about what, precisely? Sextus’ argument has a surprising target.
He says the dispute about men’s and women’s virtue will produce suspension of judgment
about another famous philosophical issue, namely, whether the life of virtue is good. But this
is puzzling. Typically, the Skeptics claim to produce suspension of judgment about an issue
by setting out opposing ideas about that very issue. So how would a dispute about women’s
virtues lead us to suspend judgment about the value of living virtuously?
In what follows, I hope to show that Sextus’ argument about women’s virtue is more co-
herent than it first appears. It is also a striking argument in several respects. It challenges
our preconceptions about Skeptical argumentative strategies in general. It identifies so-called
“dogmatic” views about women as a central weak point in the “dogmatists’” ethical theories.
And if we worry that suspending judgment about women’s virtue is an overly weak conclusion
to draw from Sextus’ own examples, he offers a reply: unless we are prepared to offer a deci-
sive account of what women and virtue really are, by nature, we must avoid dogmatic beliefs
about these matters and keep investigating.
1 Women in Pyrrhonism
Women don’t appear often in our sources on Pyrrhonian Skepticism. Perhaps their most fa-
mous reference is in an anecdote about Pyrrho himself. Pyrrho is said to have lived with his
sister Philista for most of his life, and apparently, he once abandoned his state of indifference
and tranquility (ataraxia) to become “enraged” about some matter related to her (DL IX.66).
When a witness to this incident accused Pyrrho of self-refutation, because he failed to be
449 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-34

Christiana Olfert
tranquil while professing tranquility, he supposedly replied with the mysterious remark that
“indifference is not appropriate when a female is involved.”2
Apart from this biographical detail, women appear in Pyrrhonian Skepticism primarily as
examples in arguments. In the works of Sextus Empiricus, they appear in illustrations of logi-
cal inferences,3 and in oppositions designed to lead us to suspension of judgment.
Suspension of judgment (epochê) is a central feature of Pyrrhonian Skepticism in general,
including Skeptical arguments which feature women.4 With their focus on suspending judg-
ment, the Skeptics distinguish themselves from the so-called “dogmatic” philosophers who
hold beliefs or “dogmas” (dogmata) about how things really are, as opposed to how they
seem or appear to be. The Skeptics, by contrast, say they suspend judgment about how things
really are and continue to investigate them.5 Sextus often uses what he calls “anomaly” to lead
a reader to suspension in roughly the following way. First, he identifies an established idea
or argument about a given topic, sometimes from dogmatic philosophy – for example, the
Stoic argument that there is divine providence in the world.6 Next, he creates an “opposition”
(antithesis) with that initial idea or argument by raising examples or arguments which seem
incompatible with it. These opposing examples or arguments suggest that some phenomenon
is more anomalous – more variable or relative, less universal or consistent – than the initial
established view would have it. For instance, against the Stoic argument that there is divine
Providence, the Skeptic might describe examples in which disasters befall good people while
bad people thrive and prosper, which suggests that there is no beneficent, divine hand guiding
the course of events. When these oppositions reach equipollence (isostheneia) – when both op-
posing ideas or arguments are plausible, and there is no decisive reason to believe one over the
other – then, Sextus says, our judgment about the initial idea or argument will be suspended.7
That is, we will be unable to determine where the truth lies or settle our judgment either for
or against the initial view: for instance, we will not form a belief about whether there really
is Providence in the world. Instead, our judgment will be suspended, and we can continue to
investigate the question. It is in the process of setting up oppositions in order to generate equi-
pollence and suspension that Sextus most often mentions women in his philosophical works.
Sextus’ most substantive discussion of women comes in Book III of the Outlines of Pyr-
rhonism. Books II and III of the Outlines offer Skeptical replies to the three main parts of
Stoic philosophy: logic (Book II), physics (the first part of Book III), and ethics (the second
part of Book III). In the second half of Book III, devoted to “the ethical part of philosophy”,
Sextus announces that he will investigate “the reality of good, bad, and indifferent things”,
and specifically the question “Is anything by nature good, bad, or indifferent?” (III.168, 179).
Sextus reports that the Dogmatists – he mentions Plato, the Peripatetics, the Epicureans, and
the Stoics – all hold that some things are “really” good or bad, or good or bad by nature.
These philosophers also hold specific views about what is really good or bad. Against these
views, Sextus launches a two-pronged Skeptical attack with the aim of inducing suspension
of judgment. First, against the view that some things are good or bad by nature, Sextus sets
up opposing arguments that nothing is really good or bad, hoping to show that we cannot
determine whether anything really is good or bad. Next, he turns to some specific dogmatic
views about what is really good or bad and argues against each of them. He considers the view
that what is really good is a certain kind of choice or thing chosen; that it is pleasure; that it
is a certain kind of expertise or virtue; more generally, that it is something in the soul; that it
is the life of virtue; and finally, that it is life itself (III.183–232). In each case, again, he tries to
induce suspension of judgment in his reader by showing that there are opposing views about
whether the thing in question is good, and indeed, that there are compelling reasons to think
it is not really good.
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Pyrrhonian Skepticism on Gender and Virtue
Women become a central topic in Sextus’ arguments about the life of virtue. There, he
discusses several aspects of what is supposedly virtuous and good, including what is shameful
and fine, what is courageous and cowardly, what is just and unjust, and what is pious and
impious. His strategy here, as elsewhere, is to problematize established opinions by showing
that the issue is more “anomalous” than we might assume. And he does so by raising examples
of how virtue norms and values apply differently to men and to women, and to expected male
and female roles, in different cultures and communities. In the case of shame, for example,
he says8:
Among us it is shameful and a matter of reproach for women to prostitute themselves;

but with many Egyptians it is glorious – at any rate, they say that the women who have
been with the most men wear amulets or ornaments, tokens of the esteem they enjoy;
and among some of them the girls collect their dowry before marriage from prostitution
and then marry.
(III.2001)
And also:
No male here would wear brightly-coloured full-length dress, although among the Per-
sians this, which among us is shameful, is thought highly becoming. When at the court
of Dionysius, tyrant of Sicily, a dress of this kind was offered to the philosophers Plato
and Aristippus, Plato returned it, saying ‘I was born a man and never could dress up in
women’s clothes.’ But Aristippus accepted it, remarking ‘Even in the Bacchic rites she
who is pure will not be made corrupt.’ Thus this was thought not shameful by one of
these wise men and shameful by the other.
(III–204)
In his discussion of courage, he notes the following:
The Amazons used to lame the male children they bore, to make them unable to do
anything manly, and they looked after warfare themselves; but among us the opposite
has been deemed fine.
(III.217)
And in matters related to piety and justice, he says:
The Mother of the Gods accepts effeminate men; and the goddess would not have made
this judgment if being unmanly were by nature bad. Thus there is much anomaly about
just and unjust things, and about how fine it is to be manly.
(III.217–218)
These passages discuss how some supposedly “manly” or “masculine” virtue-related norms
(according to the Greeks) apply to women in other cultures, and vice versa, how supposedly
“womanly” or “feminine” virtue-related norms (by Greek standards) apply to men in other
cultures and communities. These examples belong to the sort of argument we would expect
from a good Pyrrhonist. Sextus’ goal is not to show that any of these views about men’s and
women’s virtue is false. Rather, in characteristic Skeptical fashion, his examples set up an
opposition (an antithesis) between two incompatible views about gender and virtue: in each
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Christiana Olfert
example, there is one view about virtue held by “us”, on the one hand (presumably the Greeks
of Sextus’ time, or some subset of them, as well as some so-called “dogmatic” philosophers),
and a second, incompatible view about virtue held by another culture or community, and by
other philosophers. Clearly, each side of these oppositions finds their own view about gender
and virtue to be compelling and plausible. After all, people live according to these views. But
who is right? Unless we can determine decisively which view, if any, is true, Sextus says that
thinking carefully through these equipollent oppositions will lead us to the typical Skeptical
goal of suspension of judgment. But suspension of judgment about what, precisely?
2 Sextus’ Argument: A Puzzle About Structure and Strategy

Here we encounter a difficulty. Sextus’ stated aim in this section is not to suspend judgment
about the proper virtues of men and women. Rather, he says he is addressing “those who
say the life of virtue is by nature good”, and that through his examples, “we shall discover
much anomaly in what ought to be done and not done” (III.197–198). And after laying out
his examples, he concludes that “The Skeptics … seeing such anomaly in objects, suspend
judgment as to whether anything is by nature good or bad, or generally to be done” (III.235).
These are the stated aims of Sextus’ examples. But we might wonder: what is the connection
between differences in established views about men’s and women’s virtues, on the one hand,
and Sextus’ larger questions about whether anything at all, including the life of virtue, is good
or bad by nature?
Our questions about the aim and the procedure of Sextus’ argument can be further moti-
vated by a famous passage in Book I of the Outlines. In it, Sextus describes how the Skeptic
arrives at suspension of judgment:
It will be apposite here to say how suspension of judgment comes about for us. It comes
about – to put it rather generally – through the opposition of things. We oppose what
appears to what appears, or what is thought of to what is thought of, or crosswise. For
example … We oppose what is thought of to what is thought of when, against those who
seek to establish that there is Providence from the orderliness of the heavenly bodies, we
oppose the view that often the good do badly while the bad do well and conclude from
this that there is no Providence.
According to this passage, if Sextus aims to produce suspension of judgment about whether
virtue – or anything – is really good, or good by nature, he should set out an “opposition”
between obviously incompatible sides of this very issue. For instance, against the famous idea
that the life of virtue is really good, we’d expect Sextus to present examples and arguments
showing that the life of virtue is not really good (perhaps using the vivid examples in Plato’s
Republic II, showing that it’s not the real possession of virtue, but the appearance of virtue,
that’s good for us). But this is not the sort of opposition we find in the examples from Sextus
we just discussed. Instead, we find opposing views about whether women can be courageous
and warlike, for instance, and what counts as shameful conduct for men and women. So we
might wonder: how are these points supposed to lead us to suspension of judgment about
whether the life of virtue is really, by nature, good? Suppose there is indeed some dispute
about what it means to be virtuous for a woman (or a man). How does that dispute stand in
opposition to the dogmatic view that the life of virtue, whatever that is, is good? Even more
mysteriously, how does that dispute stand in opposition to the established view that some
things are good or bad by nature, more generally?
452
I hope to show that Sextus’ argument here is more coherent than it first appears. This is
because his examples of gendered virtue norms create oppositions, not about the question
whether the life of virtue is good by nature, but about presuppositions of that larger question.
We might think of these presuppositions as parts of the question “Is the life of virtue good
by nature?”, or as more fundamental questions whose answers are logically or conceptually
necessary for answering the larger question. Either way, I propose that Sextus’ strategy is to
engage in a Skeptical investigation of these presuppositions, and to try to induce suspension of
judgment about them. Then, because of the dependence of the target question on its presup-
positions, we will be led to suspension about the target question as well. In the argument we’re
considering, Sextus’ examples invite us to ask questions about which virtues and whose virtues
are assumed in the claim that the life of virtue is good; about what constitutes a life of virtue;
and about the notion of value or goodness at issue. But if we suspend judgment about these
matters, then, Sextus suggests, we will also suspend judgment about whether the life of virtue
is good by nature. If this is right, then Sextus is not being a bad skeptic in invoking examples
of men’s and women’s virtue to address the question of whether the life of virtue is good.
Rather, he is putting basic Skeptical tools to use in creative and productive ways.
To see this argumentative strategy at work, let’s consider the most obvious feature of Sextus’
examples: they focus on opposing views about the proper virtues of men and women. But if
there are opposing views about men’s and women’s virtues, this shows that the question “Is
the life of virtue good by nature?” is unclear. Before we can answer it, we need to know: what
counts as “virtue” in this claim, and who has which virtues? Sextus shows that people disagree
about this. He points out that culturally, “we” (the Greeks) hold one view about gender and
virtue, but other cultures take an opposing view. Amazon women (supposedly) courageously
go to war while the men stay home, but for the Greeks, the opposite division of labor is coura-
geous and fine. Egyptian hetairai are respected and not ashamed; among Greeks, prostitution
is shameful. Most Greek men are thought shameful and impious if they wear brightly colored
dresses or behave in “unmanly” ways; but among other cultures and groups, such things are
beautiful, noble, and pious for men. Sextus presents these opposing views about men’s and
women’s virtue both as general cultural facts and parts of philosophical theory, mentioning
Plato and Aristippus by name. And we can corroborate the fact that some dogmatic philoso-
phers did hold views about gender and/or sex differences in virtue.9
In light of this dispute about who has which virtues, we might wonder: which side of the
dispute has the truth?10 This question poses a further problem, according to Sextus:
It is impossible to be convinced either by all the positions set above (because of the
conflict) or by any one of them. For anyone who says that we should find this position
convincing but not that one has opposing him the arguments of those who take different
views and becomes a part of the dispute. And so he will himself need to be judged along
with the rest rather than being a judge of others. Since, then, there is no agreed standard
or proof (because of the undecidable dispute about them), he will end up in suspension
of judgment and hence be able to make no affirmation as to what is by nature good.
(III–182)
Here, Sextus seems to deploy the famous Skeptical strategy of opposing examples from the
Tenth Mode of the Ten Modes of Aenesidemus, possibly combined with the Mode of Dispute
from the Five Modes of Agrippa.11 As the examples show, there is dispute about who has
which virtues. But if we wish to determine which side has the truth, we must first establish
an uncontroversial criterion by which to make this determination. Without such a criterion,
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neither side in the dispute will be convinced that a candidate resolution is really, definitively
true. But as Sextus notes, disagreeing theorizers also often disagree about the criterion or
standard by which their view counts as the truth. And so, unless we want to arbitrarily stipu-
late a criterion, or run into a circular argument or infinite regress of justifying one criterion
by another, and that by another, and so on, we will be forced to suspend judgment about the
criterion.
But now our investigation stands as follows: we have a dispute about who has which vir-
tues, which is persuasive on both sides, and we cannot determine a standard or criterion for
resolving this dispute. In this situation, Sextus suggests, our judgment will be suspended and
we will make no determination about who has which virtues. However, if we are suspending
judgment about who has which virtues, it is also unclear what is referred to by “virtue” in the
question “Is the life of virtue good by nature?.” We might wonder: Which virtues, for which
people, are supposed to make life good? Without a clear answer to that question, we might
also be unable to answer the question “Is the life of virtue good by nature?.”
But the question of whether the life of virtue is good by nature is unclear in other ways as
well. We might also ask: What constitutes the life of virtue? Sextus’ examples raise this ques-
tion by discussing virtue in terms of characteristic actions and practices: for instance, engaging
in warfare, wearing dresses, or having sex with certain people. These actions and practices
form a way of life, so that according to some cultures, the life of virtue for women can involve
engaging in warfare and prostitution, for example, and the life of virtue for men can involve
wearing brightly colored dresses. But again, from Sextus’ perspective, “we” (the Greeks) dis-
pute that this is what constitutes the life of virtue. So with Sextus’ examples, it becomes a live
question what virtuous living really amounts to.
Or again, we might ask: What does it mean for something (like virtue) to be “good by
nature”? This is another question raised by Sextus’ examples, insofar as they bear on the rela-
tive value of men’s and women’s virtues. He recounts that for Egyptian women, prostitution
is not only not shameful but also actually gives them autonomy over the size of their marriage
dowry. And in the case of the Amazons, women can “take care of war themselves” while ap-
parently leaving their male children injured and weakened, implying that these women have
a great deal of power, and power over men, relative to Greek standards. These are examples
in which women’s virtues are not merely different from men’s; women’s virtues give their lives
value and power, and in some cases, even superior status and power over men. The idea that
lives of virtue are given a value ranking also shows up in Sextus’ example of “effeminate” or
“unmanly” men. There, Sextus notes that these men are especially valued and respected in
their own circles. But value and respect for these men, and the autonomy and power of female
prostitutes and warriors, would only be “in opposition to” usual Greek norms if the usual
Greek view is that women’s virtues and lives are subordinate to and less valuable than men’s.
In light of these comparative evaluations, we might wonder: what does it mean to say that
the life of virtue is “good by nature”, if some virtues and virtuous lives are better, and others
worse? Does what is good by nature admit of different levels or degrees of goodness? If so,
which level of goodness by nature applies to which ways of virtuous living, and to whom?
With these latter two disputes – about what constitutes the life of virtue, and in what
sense virtue is good – Sextus presents opposing views which are plausible on both sides, and
which we have no decisive, indisputable criterion for resolving. This, I propose, leads us to
suspend judgment about what really counts as virtuous living, and what the value of such a
life really is.
To sum up my proposal so far: by problematizing three sets of established views – views
about virtue, about the life of virtue, and about the value of such a life – Sextus’ examples
454
about gender and virtue are indeed designed to lead us to suspension of judgment about
whether the life of virtue is good by nature. The first step in Sextus’ argument is to use his
examples to evoke suspension of judgment about what counts as “virtue” and for whom;
about what constitutes a “life” of virtue; and about what sort of value we should attribute to
a virtuous life. Examples of how virtue norms apply differently to men and women in different
groups reveals opposing views about each of these three issues. But – and this is the crucial
second step in his argumentative design – how could we determine whether the life of virtue is
good by nature if we cannot determine what counts as virtue, what constitutes a life of virtue,
or what sort of value we should attribute to a virtuous life? Sextus’ suggestion, I propose,
is that we cannot make this determination either. If we care about whether it really is true
that virtue is good by nature, we will not be able to make a determination about this larger
question after having suspended judgment about its presuppositions. In fact, after working
through Sextus’ examples, it may no longer even be clear to us what it means to say that “the
life of virtue is good by nature.” And so, Sextus reaches the stated aim of his argument: we sus-
pend judgment and make no determination about whether the life of virtue is good by nature.
3 Pyrrhonian Lessons about Gender and Virtue

According to my reconstruction, Sextus’ argument about gender and virtue is significant in a
few respects.
First, this argument reveals something unexpected about Skeptical methodology. We usu-
ally think of a Skeptic’s arguments as setting up a straightforward opposition between pro
and con sides of some issue, which produces suspension of judgment about that very issue.12
In Sextus’ discussion of gender and virtue, however, we find something more subtle: he sets
up pro and con oppositions about one issue but ultimately aims to produce suspension about
a second (and third) issue which presupposes an answer to the first. His assumption in this
procedure seems to be that we can suspend judgment about an issue not only by finding equi-
pollent accounts of that issue but also by discovering opposing views about the terms in which
the issue is stated. Very roughly, asking ourselves to make a judgment, while at the same time
realizing that we aren’t clear about what we are judging, apparently leaves us in a kind of in-
tellectual suspense or standstill – the same kind of standstill we encounter when we encounter
competing persuasive accounts of the issue at hand. I hope to have shown that Sextus takes
this alternative approach to suspension of judgment in his discussion of gender and virtue,
which leads him to use a different and more complex argument structure than we typically
expect. In this way, Sextus’ discussion of gender and virtue is significant for how we think
about the strategy, norms, and methodology of skeptical investigation; for what suspension of
judgment is and how it is produced; and for how we understand the relationship between the
“general account” of Skepticism that Sextus claims to give in Book I of the Outlines, and the
“specific account” he gives in Books II and III.
Second and relatedly, Sextus’ argument about gender and virtue illustrates some surpris-
ing benefits of Skeptical investigation.13 When we encounter the question “Is the life of virtue
good by nature?”, we might not immediately consider how issues about gender and virtue
bear on it. We might not think to investigate in detail which virtues, for whom, in which lives,
and relative to which standards of value, this question is asking about. But by adopting the
Skeptical strategy and identifying and investigating these presuppositions of the larger ques-
tion, we might come to better understand the larger question itself: what the question relies
on, conceptually and logically; what sorts of everyday beliefs and practices might bear on it;
which other doctrinal or everyday disputes might be relevant to the question, and so on. And
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importantly for the Skeptic, when we develop new insights about a question’s core concepts,
its theoretical alternatives, its logical structure, and objections we had not considered before,
we do so without coming to hold any dogmatic views either about the question itself or about
its presuppositions. In fact, if Sextus is right, we can deepen our understanding of a question
even while ultimately suspending judgment about it – and we can use Skeptical argument
strategies to do so. Perhaps, then, Skeptical inquiry and suspension of judgment can be more
intellectually productive than we sometimes assume.
Sextus’ argument about gender and virtue also has a third implication. In his argument,
Sextus suggests that dogmatic thinkers’ views about gender and virtue are not mere side-issues
in their philosophical systems – especially in their ethics. On the one hand, dogmatic philoso-
phers argue that the life of virtue is good by nature. On the other hand, their views about
gender can affect what they think counts as ‘virtue,’ who they think can have virtue, and which
virtues they have; it affects what a life of virtue looks like in terms of its characteristic actions
and practices; and the sort of value they assign to different virtuous lives. And as Sextus points
out, if we wish to argue that the life of virtue is really good, that argument is surely affected
by what we mean by ‘virtue’; what counts as a life of virtue; and what sort of value we think
virtuous lives have. In a characteristically ad hominem way, then, Sextus makes the case that
the plausibility of core dogmatic ethical views depends on their own views about normative
differences between men and women. In this way, centering issues of gender and virtue in ethi-
cal discussions gives the Pyrrhonists a unique philosophical perspective.
As contemporary readers, however, we might be left with several questions about Sextus’
arguments. Here are two of them.
First, there is a methodological question. We might wonder: why do Sextus’ examples of
warlike Amazons and rich Egyptian prostitutes not function logically like counterexamples in
contemporary philosophy? In philosophy today, we typically use counterexamples to demon-
strate the falsity of a general proposition or theory. Why, then, does Sextus use his examples
only to suspend judgment, not to conclude that sexist dogmatic views are false?
Second and more broadly, we might wonder: what interest does Sextus’ argument have for
we who do not usually suspend judgment about whether women can be brave, or whether
their lives and virtues are inferior to men’s? Doesn’t suspending judgment about these matters
require us to take seriously sexist views about women’s virtue, in order to create the right sort
of equipollent oppositions between views about these matters? If Sextus requires that we find
sexist ideas compelling, and if he leads us to the apparently weak conclusion of suspending
judgment about what kind and quality of virtues women can have, we might find his argu-
ments about women’s virtues to be unworthy of serious philosophical attention.
Let’s begin with the methodological issue. When Sextus raises “anomalous” examples
about men’s and women’s virtue, why does he not treat these as counterexamples to the op-
posing, dogmatic theories he is arguing against?
Sextus might reply that rejecting dogmatic ethical theories as false, on the basis of supposed
counterexamples to their views about gender and virtue, would require us to take a stance on
what women, men, and virtue are really like. After all, he might say, we often distinguish be-
tween how things seem or appear to us at a given time, and how they really are, independently
from how they seem.14 Given this distinction between appearances and underlying reality, it
is not enough to judge a general claim or theory to be false if we merely find a plausible case
in which that claim or theory does not hold. It must also be the case that the general claim or
theory purports to be about how things really are (as opposed to how things merely appear
to be), and that the supposed counterexample is true of the underlying reality of things (as
opposed to being true of how things merely appear to be). After all, conflicting appearances
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or seemings about the same thing can be true together. The same bucket of water can feel
both hot and cold when one of our hands was already hot and the other already cold. After
reading Plato’s Republic, it might seem true to me that my soul has both rational and non-
rational parts; after reading some Stoic philosophy, it might seem true to me that my soul is
fully rational. None of these pairs of conflicting appearances are counterexamples for each
other, or prove the falsity of the other, and there is nothing very surprising about the pos-
sibility of conflicting appearances or seemings.15 The interesting question is which, if any, of
the conflicting appearances or seemings is really true, that is, which is true of the underlying
reality behind appearances. Given this distinction between how things merely appear or seem
and how things really are, a genuine counterexample – one which proves a claim or theory to
be false about how things really are in the world – would have to be a truth about how things
really are, which contradicts a general claim or theory about how things really are.
In the case of views about men’s and women’s virtues, then, a genuine counterexample
would have to reveal a truth about what sorts of virtues really belong to women and men.
To do this, Sextus’ examples would need to reveal the truth about what women and men and
their virtues are really like: for example, that women can really (not just apparently) be cou-
rageous, or that it really is appropriate, by nature, for men to wear dresses, and so on. But I
think Sextus is right to wonder whether his examples actually reveal such underlying truths.
These examples might prompt us to ask: What does the distinction between men and women
amount to, really? What is a woman, really? What are courage, justice, and shamefulness, re-
ally? Based on our answers to these questions, can someone who is really a woman really and
by nature be courageous, for example? Or is the case of the Amazons a mere “appearance”
of courageous women – a fictionalized one at that? While Sextus’ anomalous examples might
prompt us to investigate these questions, they don’t decide them. As such, they are not and are
not intended to be counterexamples that falsify dogmatic theoretical claims. Instead, they are
apparent cases that should spur our investigation into the reality of the matter, especially as we
look more closely at the presuppositions of our questions about women and virtue.
We are now ready to address the second, deeper question: What interest does Sextus’ argu-
ment about gender and virtue have for us today? If we don’t usually suspend judgment about
whether women can be courageous, or about the value of women’s virtues and lives more
generally, what can we learn from a Skeptical approach to these issues?
In response to these questions, we should keep in mind that the Skeptic’s general project is
anti-dogmatism, that is, to present the problems with so-called dogmatic belief and the advan-
tages of suspension of judgment.16 Sextus’ argument about gender and virtue is designed to
uproot dogmatic beliefs, held by his compatriots and some of his philosophical peers, about
what women and men are capable of in the domain of virtue. Suspension of judgment for
Sextus does not mean waffling about, say, whether or not women can be courageous. Rather,
it means we have divested ourselves of, for example, any sexist dogmatic views we might
hold. We suspend judgment, not as a compromise position, but as a removal of problematic
dogmatic beliefs that disturb our tranquility and forestall further inquiry.17
But there is also another way to motivate the Skeptical perspective, one that takes account
of what we have learned here about how a Skeptic suspends judgment. In one sense, we today
may not usually suspend judgment about whether women can be courageous, for example,
or about whether women’s virtues are inferior to men’s. Arguments which hold that women
cannot be courageous, or that their virtues are inferior to men’s, may not seem plausible or
compelling to us. And if so, we cannot use these views and arguments to set up equipollent
oppositions that would lead us to suspension of judgment. But as I have argued, Sextus shows
us that there are different ways of suspending judgment about a particular issue. You might
457
Christiana Olfert
achieve suspension by setting out an equipollent opposition about that very issue. But you
might also do so by investigating, and setting out equipollent oppositions about, presupposi-
tions of that issue. So we need not find it convincing that, for example, women cannot be cou-
rageous, or that their virtues are inferior to men’s, in order to be good Skeptics and suspend
judgment about whether these claims are true. Instead, we might ask: What is a woman? What
is courage? What is virtue more generally? Is virtue a good thing, and if so, in what sense?
In Socratic fashion, these questions might seem to ask about presuppositions to the question,
‘Can women be courageous?’ And if we suspend judgment about the former questions – if we
find competing, plausible accounts of womanhood or virtue or courage, for example – then ac-
cording to Sextus, we might also suspend judgment about whether women can be courageous.
As Sextus shows us, then, suspending judgment about women’s virtues does not require us to
take sexist views seriously. It does not always require that we find merit in “both sides” of an
issue. Suspension can instead result from finding plausible, competing accounts of presupposi-
tions of an issue: for example, about what women are (and for that matter, what men are);
what virtue is; or what it would mean to rank virtues and lives against each other. And the
latter questions are ones we, today, might still find to be live and unresolved.
4 Conclusion
Perhaps the Pyrrhonian Skeptics are not as revolutionary as we might have expected in their
arguments about virtue and the nature of women and men, femininity and masculinity. Given
their stated aim of investigating the underlying reality behind anomalous appearances, it
seems a missed philosophical opportunity that they did not, for instance, explicitly investigate
and suspend judgment about what women and men are really (if anything), or what the dis-
tinction between them really amounts to (if anything). Still, I hope to have shown that Sextus’
arguments about women and virtue reveal some important and underappreciated details of
Skeptical argumentative strategy. And perhaps, in the end, Skeptical non-dogmatism about
women and virtue is not a non-committal compromise between sexist and non-sexist views,
but a provocative philosophical perspective in its own right.
Notes
1 See e.g. Meno 71e–73d, Republic 451d–458d; Politics 1254b13–14, 1259b29–1260a30; Zeno
(DL VI.12), Cleanthes (DL VII.175), Seneca (Cons. Marc. 16.1), and Epictetus (D.3.22.68). For
discussion of women and their virtues in these materials, see the following in this volume: Connell
(2024); Fertik (2024); Grahn-Wilder (2024); Hulme (2024); Kamtekar (2024); Marechal (2024);
Singpurwalla (2024); Wildberger (2024).
2 See DL IX.66.
3 See e.g. Outlines II.10.
4 See e.g. Outlines I.8.
5 See e.g. Outlines I.1–4 and I.8–10, 12.
6 See e.g. Outlines I.31–32. For an instructive discussion of how these “oppositions” are set up, see
Morison (2019).
7 There is some controversy about what ‘equipollence’ means in Sextus. Sextus says it means “equality
with regard to being convincing or unconvincing: none of the conflicting accounts takes precedence
over any other as being more convincing” (I.10). At first – and to many scholars (e.g. Frede (1997):
“the arguments always end up balancing each other” (7); Vogt (2010), “equal strength”; Morrison
(2019), “equally convincing”; Striker, “equal force” (95)) – it sounds like Sextus is saying that two
opposing accounts are equipollent just in case they are exactly equally persuasive to a single person,
like equal weights on a scale of plausibility in a thinker’s mind. However, when we look more closely
at the cases in which Sextus uses the notion of equipollence – for instance, in his presentation of the
458
Ten Modes of inquiry, which are supposed to result in suspension of judgment – we find him saying
that objects and accounts are equally opposed when we cannot determine with certainty which one
is true because e.g. there is no indisputable criterion of truth for making this determination (Outlines
I.59; c.f. I.60–61, I.87–88, I.112–117; I.121–124; I.139–140). I will not here take a stand on any
particular interpretation of ‘equipollence’.
8 Translations of Sextus’s Outlines are slightly adapted from Annas and Barnes (2004).
9 See e.g. the view expressed by Meno in Plato’s Meno, 71e–72a; Aristotle, Politics 1277b119–29.
For discussion, see e.g. Connell (2024); Marechal (2024) in this volume, also Leunissen (2017),
Chapter 6.
10 Admittedly, this question is complicated by the fact that Sextus’s examples are not all equally realis-
tic. If the anecdote about Amazon women is fictional, for example, what effect does this have on the
plausibility of the view that women can be courageous warriors, for example? And in general, what
should we make of Sextus’s use of mythological and sometimes outlandish examples in setting up his
Skeptical oppositions?
This broader issue deserves its own treatment. For now, I would like to note that even if the Ama-
zon example describes only fictional, rather than real, people and values, it does not follow that the
point made by the example is not true. Even if no actual cultures, now or in the past, correspond to
Sextus’s examples of fierce women warriors, a fictional example might still illustrate how it could be
plausible to ascribe the virtue of courage to women. As such, these fictions might play a crucial role
in vividly persuading us of the truth of an ethical possibility we had not considered before. My tenta-
tive suggestion, then, is that fictional examples – even explicitly fictional ones – do not necessarily
undermine the strength or the plausibility of Sextus’s oppositions. These sorts of examples, insofar as
they might illustrate the plausibility of some idea, can play an important role in setting up the sort of
equipollence which could lead to suspension of judgment.
11 See Outlines I.31–163; I.164–165.
12 For a few examples of scholars who present Pyrrhonism this way, see e.g. Bett (2019): 110–120;
Burnyeat (1980): 24–25; Palmer (2000): 351–352, 365; Perin (2010): 20–23; Sienkiewicz (2019):
25–29; Striker (1980): 58.
13 For discussion of other benefits of Skeptical investigation, see Olfert (2015).
14 See e.g. Outlines of Pyrrhonism I.13, 20. The appearance/reality distinction is not one that Skeptics
insist on per se, but is one they often use in ad hominem fashion, adopted from the so-called Dogma-
tists and used against them in Skeptical arguments. On the notion of “appearances” in Pyrrhonian
Skepticism, see e.g. Annas and Barnes (1985): 23–24; Barney (1992); Striker (1983).
15 See e.g. Sextus’s examples of opposing appearances and accounts in Outlines I.31–33. In this para-
graph, I am using the appearance-reality distinction in a way that includes both (quasi) perceptual
and account-based appearances in the notion of “appearances.” See Morison (2019) for an explana-
tion of this way of thinking about Sextus’s oppositions.
16 See e.g. Outlines I.13–15, 18, 19–20, 22. There are very different accounts of dogmatic belief – the
sort of belief a Skeptic claims not to have – in the secondary literature. See e.g. Barnes (1997): 61–67;
Burnyeat (1997): 30–31; Frede (1997): 8–24; Perin (2006): 145–162. For a more general discussion
of anti-dogmatism as a motivation for Pyrrhonian Skepticism, see e.g. Sedley (1983).
17 Of course, the same inquiry would also aim to uproot any dogmatic beliefs we hold that e.g. women
really can be courageous, that their lives and virtues are equal to those of men, etc. However, it’s
significant that the audience of Sextus’s argument seems to be “us”: Sextus is explicitly addressing his
peers and compatriots, that is, “we” who hold that women can’t be courageous, that sexual prom-
iscuity in women is shameful, etc. Given that he is addressing “us” with his opposed examples, his
argument is, in the first instance, directed at uprooting these beliefs in his generally Greek audience.
Works Cited
Annas, J. and Barnes, J. (eds.) (1985). The Modes of Scepticism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Barnes, J. (1997). “The Beliefs of a Pyrrhonist,” in Burnyeat and Frede (eds.) The Original Sceptics: A
Controversy. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Barney, R. (1992). “Appearances and Impressions,” Phronesis 37.3: 283–313.
Bett, R. (2019). How to Be a Pyrrhonist. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Burnyeat, M. (1997). “Can the Sceptic Live His Scepticism?” in Burnyeat and Frede (eds.) The Original
Sceptics: A Controversy. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
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Connell. (2024). Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy, Brill and McKeen
(eds.). Philadelphia: Routledge.
Diogenes Laertius. (2015). “Lives of Pyrrho and Timon,” in Vogt (ed.) Pyrrhonian Skepticism in Dio-
genes Laertius. Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Fertik, Harriet. (2024). Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy, Brill and
McKeen (eds.). Philadelphia: Routledge.
Frede, M. (1997) “The Sceptic’s Beliefs,” in Burnyeat and Frede (eds.) The Original Sceptics: A Contro-
versy. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Grahn-Wilder, Malin. (2024). Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy, Brill and
Hulme, Emily. (2024). Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy, Brill and
Kamtekar, Rachana. (2024). Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy, Brill and
Leunissen, Mariska. (2017). From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Marechal. (2024). Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy, Brill and McKeen
(eds.). Philadelphia: Routledge.
Olfert, C. M. M. (2015) “Skeptical Investigation and Its Perks: Diog. Laert. 9.69–70 ad 79–889,” in Vogt
(ed.) Pyrrhonian Skepticism in Diogenes Laertius. Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Palmer, J. (2000). “Skeptical Investigation,” Ancient Philosophy 20: 351–375.
Perin, C. (2006). “Pyrrhonian Scepticism and the Search for the Truth,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Phi-
losophy 30: 337–360.
Perin, C. (2010). The Demands of Reason. New York: Oxford University Press.
Plato. (1997a). Meno in Cooper (ed.) Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Com-
pany, Inc.
Plato. (1997b). Republic in Cooper (ed.) Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Com-
pany, Inc.
Sedley, D. (1983). “The Motivation for Greek Skepticism,” in Burnyeat (ed.) The Skeptical Tradition.
Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Sextus Empiricus. (2004). Outlines of Scepticism, Annas and Barnes (eds.). New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Sienkiewicz, S. (2019). Five Modes of Scepticism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Singpurwalla, Rachel. (2024). Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy. Brill and
Striker, G. (1983). “The Ten Tropes of Aenesidemus,” in Burneat (ed.) The Skeptical Tradition. Los An-
geles: University of California Press.
Striker, G. (2001). “Scepticism as a Kind of Philosophy,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 83:
113–129.
Wildberger, Jula. (2024). Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy, Brill and
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31
THE RECEPTION OF DIOTIMA
IN LATER PLATONISM
Clea, Sosipatra and Asclepigeneia
Crystal Addey
1 Introduction: The Reception of Diotima

The enigmatic Diotima of Mantinea, who is presented as a philosopher, priestess, prophetess,
mystagogue (a leader or guide in initiation into the mysteries) and the teacher of Socrates,
appears only in Plato’s Symposium (201d–212a).1 In this work, she features indirectly in So-
crates’ report of her teaching and discourse which he presents when it is his turn to give a
speech on erōs. Much like the content of her speech itself, Diotima’s identity is shrouded in
mystery: partly because Diotima is only attested in this one source of evidence, many scholars
have doubted her historical existence; the current orthodox view is that Diotima is an imagi-
nary character invented by Plato. The question of whether Diotima was a “real” historical
woman or a fictitious character is (based on current evidence at least) inconclusive, yet the
balance of circumstantial evidence involved suggests that there are important reasons for hold-
ing that she was a historical figure who did indeed teach Socrates. However, whether or not
Diotima was a historical figure, her teaching (as set out in Socrates’ speech in the Symposium)
and role as a philosopher-priestess had an important legacy and influence on later iterations
of Platonism, including so-called “Middle Platonism” and Neoplatonism, and particularly on
later historical female philosophers within the Platonic tradition. This chapter will examine
the reception of Diotima in the life and philosophical activities of Clea of Delphi, a priestess
of Delphi and philosophical colleague and friend of the Middle Platonist philosopher Plutarch
of Chaeronea (c.45–120 CE). It will also explore Diotima’s influence on female theurgists and
Neoplatonist philosophers in late antiquity, focusing especially on Sosipatra of Pergamon
(early to mid-fourth century CE), who was associated with Iamblichus’ philosophic succes-
sors, and Asclepigeneia of Athens (late fourth century to early fifth century CE), a philosopher
and theurgist who was a member of the Athenian School of Neoplatonism. This study aims
to demonstrate that the portrayal of Diotima influenced modes of transmission of philosophi-
cal knowledge and ritual expertise within later Platonism in at least two senses: (1) inter-
generational transmission (primarily female to male, but also male to female, and female
to female) and (2) longer-term transmission of role-models and, more specifically, religio-
philosophical roles, with a focus on Diotima’s influence as a crucial role model, in her guise as
a philosopher-priestess, upon Clea, Sosipatra and Asclepigeneia. Recent scholarship has often
assessed ancient female philosophers as isolated anomalies and exceptions to the rule.2 Turning
461 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-35

Crystal Addey
the lens on the transmission of philosophical knowledge (and ritual expertise) facilitates the
consideration of ancient philosophical women as active agents and as part of a much wider
picture of female involvement in ancient philosophical practice; as such, this methodologi-
cal perspective facilitates the recognition of female agency within ancient philosophy.3 In a
broader sense then, this study aims to show an important trend evident within Platonism: the
important roles of Platonic philosopher-priestesses as female role models, teachers and ritual
experts, and their significant contributions to the development of the Platonic philosophical
tradition between the fourth-century BCE and the fifth century CE.
2 Diotima the Priestess

Since Diotima only appears in Plato’s Symposium, scholars have often treated her as fictitious;
this position has become orthodox, with many asserting her fictionality without justification
or argument (see, for example, Dickey 1996: 116). However, certain arguments have been
proposed to support this apparent fictionality, although none are particularly convincing.4
Others have proposed that Diotima may represent the historical figure Aspasia of Miletus,
who features in Plato’s Menexenus and is attested in numerous ancient works.5 Although the
arguments proposed for this identification are more convincing than those given to support
her fictionality, this theory seems somewhat reductive, since Plato names Aspasia explicitly in
the Menexenus: it is unclear why he would be alluding to her in a different guise in another
work and the burden of proof lies with those who would argue that Diotima is Aspasia in
disguise.6
One of the most common reasons given explicitly in support of Diotima’s fictionality –
and often assumed implicitly on the basis of social conditions and restrictions in classical
Athens – is that Plato could not have met this foreign woman, who is absent from the extant
historical record and is presented as knowing Socrates before Plato was born (cf. Nails 2015:
74).7 Yet the vast majority of Socrates’ interlocutors and the characters presented in Plato’s
dialogues were undoubtedly historical persons (Levin 1975: 224; Nails 2015: 74; Nye 2015:
2–3). Debra Nails (2015: 74) has pointed out that Plato often writes vivid accounts of others
he could only have known by reputation, such as Parmenides and Zeno. Furthermore, she
notes that arguments from silence are often used with great caution in classical studies, since
we have only a tiny portion of evidence from antiquity: “Yet the argument from silence is the
one most commonly employed to the conclusion that Diotima is not historical” (Nails 2002:
137). It seems prudent to be extremely cautious in using arguments from silence to argue
for the lack of historicity of specific ancient women, including Diotima, given that the pre-
dominant patriarchal culture of classical Athens often discouraged the commemoration and
memorialisation of women’s voices and actions.8 Furthermore, in relation to this, women’s
writings were not always considered worthy of preservation or transmission within Graeco-
Roman antiquity.9 Overall, the arguments proposed in support of Diotima’s fictionality are
circumstantial – indeed, any assessment of Diotima’s historicity or fictionality is inconclusive
(Levin 1975: 223), based on current available evidence. However, the circumstantial evidence
we have suggests that Diotima was a historical figure (Nails 2015: 73) and, in fact, a priestess.
Plato’s Socrates presents Diotima in a very specific manner as a priestess: he credits her
with ritual service to Athens and gives her a precise geographical location: Mantinea, in the
Arcadian interior of the Peloponnese (Symp. 201d5). In her important study of ancient Greek
priestesses, Joan Breton Connelly (2007: 197–221, 276) has demonstrated that priestesses
in classical and Hellenistic Greece played significant roles in public religious and civic mat-
ters, including speaking before Assemblies, interacting with legislative bodies, negotiating for
462
Reception of Diotima in Later Platonism
amendments to sacred laws, fixing their seals on official documents and, from the Hellenistic
period and maybe earlier, taking honoured places in the front rows of theatres. They led
public processions, made dedications in sanctuaries and performed rituals and initiated sac-
rifices (Connelly 2007: 276–278). Indeed, in the prologue of his speech, Socrates emphasises
Diotimas’s ritual expertise (201d3–7) as well as her teaching methods, particularly her use of
elenchus, in the form of questioning and answering (201e3–9), though we should also note
that her discourse also uses myth and monologue as well. Socrates reports that Diotima of-
fered ritual advice to the Athenians, exhorting them to offer specific expiatory sacrifices, and
thus procuring them a delay of ten years in the advent of the plague (201d3–7). This reflects
a long historical tradition of Athenians – and other Greek communities – seeking and receiv-
ing oracular advice from seers (both independent seers and those connected to institutional
oracular sanctuaries) regarding how to expiate or offset outbreaks of plague and disease.
Plato himself was very much aware of this tradition: in the Laws (I.642d3–e4), he mentions
Epimenides of Crete’s ritual sacrifices on behalf of the Athenians. Epimenides was a diviner
who received an oracle from Apollo and accordingly went to Athens and offered expiatory
sacrifices on behalf of the Athenians.10 In terms of Diotima’s historicity, the social conventions
of fifth-century Athens which would usually prohibit unsupervised contact between aristo-
cratic men and women who are not relatives would not apply to Socrates’ conversation with
Diotima if the latter was indeed a priestess, given that they could have had such a conversation
during a religious festival or at another religious occasion in Athens, possibly even when she
advised the Athenians about how to defer the plague (Levin 1975: 230–231). In fact, in Plato’s
Meno (81a10–b1), Socrates claims that he learnt many things “from priests and priestesses
who have studied so as to be able to give a reasoned account of their ministry.”11 He refers
to these priests and priestesses specifically as “wise men and women” (Meno 81a5–6: ἀνδρῶν
τε καὶ γυναικῶν σοφῶν), who discuss “divine matters” (θεῖα πράγματα), which accords closely
with his initial description of Diotima as a “wise woman” (σοφὴ) who is skilled concerning
Eros and “many other matters” (ἄλλα πολλά) (Symp. 201d5–6). In the Meno, Socrates specifi-
cally connects these priests and priestesses with the teaching that the soul of human beings is
immortal and that it dies and is born again – essentially, the theory of the transmigration of
souls (Meno 80b3–6). Although the latter theory is Pythagorean and Platonic, Plato’s words
in the Meno suggest that priests and priestesses did talk to Socrates and others about matters
relating to the divine, including the issue of immortality, which would naturally arise in any
such conversation given the presumed immortality of the gods.
Diotima is implicitly presented as a mantic – as a seer or prophetess, throughout So-
crates’ speech. This is primarily indicated by the pun on the name of her place of origin,
since Μαντινικῆς (the “Mantinean”) is so similar to the Greek term for “divination” (μάντικη)
(Symp. 201d5). Nancy Evans (2006: 8) notes that the term “Mantinike” not only appears to
contain the root mantis, which means “prophet” or “seer” but also contains what sounds
like the word for “victory” (nike); as a pun in Greek, Diotima Mantinike would sound like
“Diotima from Prophet-victory,” suggesting that Diotima is a prophetess. Furthermore, her
ritual service to Athens marks her explicitly as a seer (cf. Saxonhouse 1984: 20), since the lat-
ter were held to receive divinatory messages from the gods and pass these on to communities
in need. Third, Socrates makes a cryptic statement to Diotima, that “It needs some divina-
tion to understand what you mean” (Μαντείας … δεῖται ὅ τί ποτε λέγεις) (Symp. 206b11–12),
a phrase which suggests that Diotima’s teaching is divinatory (or at least analogous to the
divinatory mode of discourse) in some sense. Most importantly, Diotima herself comments on
the workings of divination (as well as other forms of ritual practice, such as sacrifice) when
she claims that daimones (semi-divine, intermediary beings) bring divinatory messages from
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Crystal Addey
the gods to humans (Symp. 202e13). If we consider what kind of priestess Diotima was, the
most obvious answer is that she was a priestess of Apollo. Indeed, it has been suggested that
the so-called “Mantinea stele,” a monument to a priestess of Apollo receiving heroic honours,
depicts Diotima of Mantinea (Robinson and Blegen 1935: 380), although this identification
is uncertain. The relief depicts a peplos-clad woman holding a liver, indicative of the reading
of omens, with her right arm raised (probably in prayer) and a palm tree in the background
symbolising Apollo.
As a priestess, Diotima’s discourse is infused with religious language, terminology and
themes. It has often been noted that her speech is structured in relation to the stages of initia-
tion in the mystery cult at Eleusis.12 It is possible that Diotima might have been a priestess
of the mystery cult at Eleusis (Nails 2015: 74) or a priestess of the Eleusinian Demeter in
Arcadia.13 It seems relevant that Pausanias (Description of Greece VIII.25.2–3) later reports
several sanctuaries dedicated to Eleusinian Demeter within Arcadia. Nancy Evans (2006: 2)
has explored the ways in which Diotima is like the goddess Demeter, as a sort of mystagogue
who initiates individuals into her mysteries and mediates information about the divine to
humans. It is important to note that Diotima’s speech is inclusive in terms of the religious and
ritual practices it alludes to. These practices include not only those relating to the mystery
cult at Eleusis but also civic, public religious practices such as sacrifice and divination which
feature prominently in the passage where she explains the roles of daimones (Symp. 202e8–
203a9); this passage would become a locus classicus for later Platonist philosophers, as will
be explored below.
Within Socrates’ report of Diotima’s speech, we see Diotima teaching Socrates about the
nature of Eros as a “great daimon” who, like other daimones, is “in-between” (Symp. 203e2–
3), that is to say, an intermediary being who mediates between gods and mortals. Thus, the
speech represents female to male inter-generational transmission of philosophical knowledge.
Nancy Evans (2006: 12) has emphasised that relation with other people constitutes yet an-
other type of divine mediation, as when the Athenians learned the god’s will about the plague
through Diotima; in this instance, Diotima understood the gods’s will through divination
and interprets her mantic experience to the Athenians. Diotima thus embodies the daimonic
through her ritual action. Further, Diotima defines the philosopher as the one who seeks wis-
dom and identifies Eros himself as a philosopher or “friend of wisdom” (Symp. 204b4). Thus,
the content of Diotima’s discourse presents the task of the philosopher as mediating between
the divine and human and Diotima herself takes on this role in her teaching of Socrates, which
has an initiatory quality. The religious and philosophical transmission from teacher to pupil,
exemplified here by Diotima and taken up by Platonic philosopher-priestesses within later
Platonism, is presented as “daimonic,” that is to say, as mimicking the mediating action of
Eros. In her magisterial work on the multiple roles and significance of ancient Greek priest-
esses, Joan Breton Connelly (2007: 220, cf. 276–278) examines the recurring depiction of
male philosophers receiving advice from priestesses, from the report that Pythagoras studied
philosophy under the Delphic priestess Themistoclea to Diotima to Clea, and concludes:
The recurring model that finds a philosopher seeking out the authority of a prophetess
may suggest that the influence of priestly women was quite real … these portraits of
priestly women, esteemed for their learning and wise counsel, suggest that female cult
agents played significant roles as teachers and advisors of men.
Within Diotima’s discourse, we see female to male inter-generational transmission in Diotima’s

teaching of Socrates. However, it is important to raise the issue of the geographical provenance
464
of one of Plato’s female students: Lastheneia of Mantinea (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the
Philosophers 3.46). While there is no explicit evidence of a connection between Diotima and
Lastheneia, it is intriguing that they are both said to be from Mantinea. As such, it is possible
that Diotima might have been the mother, grandmother or teacher of Lastheneia, although ob-
viously any such connection is speculative. However, we may have a case of female-to-female
philosophical transmission here.
To summarise, while Diotima’s historicity or fictionality is (at least currently) uncertain,
the weight of circumstantial evidence suggests that she was a historical figure – a priestess.
Even if she was fictitious, Plato attributes one of his most powerful and important speeches
to Diotima: his inclusion of a priestess as the teacher of Socrates within the Symposium might
suggest that he wants to convey the inter-related nature of philosophy and religion. However,
whether Diotima was a historical or fictitious figure, she had an important influence on later
(historical) Platonist female philosopher-priestesses.
3 Traces of Female Philosophical Transmission in the Historical Record

Before turning to examine Diotima’s influence on later female philosophers within the Platonic
tradition, it is important to consider that we have epigraphic evidence which demonstrates
traces of inter-generational female transmission between women who were philosophers and
priestesses.14 This evidence lends further weight to interpreting this inter-generational female-
to-female and female-to-male philosophical transmission within Platonism as a historical
phenomenon. For example, an inscription found on a statue in Sparta attests to a female
philosopher named Aurelia Oppia, a member of the Spartan aristocracy:
The city [honours] the most philosophical and modest Aurelia Oppia,
daughter of the most philosophical Aurelius,
Wife of the well-born Teisamenos, the general/magistrate (?)
And, as named [i.e. recorded] [on] the/altar of the city, now Penelope,
For the sake of all virtue and the worship of the goddesses,
The expenditure will be accepted from Marcus Aurelius Eutychianos …
(IG V.1.598, lines 1–13)15
A further inscription found on a statue dedicated to Aurelia Oppia’s daughter, which had
been erected in the temple of Artemis Orthia, describes the latter as, “the most pious and
most philosophical Herakleia, daughter of Teisamenos ” (τἠν σεμνοτάτην καὶ φιλοσοωτάτην ...
Ἡράκλειάαν Τεισαμενοῦ) and as a priestess of Artemis Orthia (IG V.1.599; cf. Martha 1879:
196–197). On this basis, it has been argued that Aurelia Oppia was also attached to the sanc-
tuary of Artemis Orthia as a priestess (Martha 1879: 196–197), since she is also praised for
her piety and worship of the goddesses and another inscription informs us that the sanctuary
of Artemis Orthia was dedicated to Artemis and other divinities connected with her.16 These
inscriptions attest to two philosophical generations of women philosophers in a family which
had at least three generations of philosophers. In this regard, it is interesting that although
Aurelia’s father was a philosopher (it was fairly common for female philosophers to have a
father who was a philosopher or to be influenced by their male relatives in this regard), her
husband seems to have been a general or magistrate (he is certainly not named as a philoso-
pher or described as “philosophical”) – yet their daughter Herakleia became a philosopher
and a priestess of Artemis Orthia. This may suggest that ancient upper-class women became
philosophers not only because of their association with a male mentor or family member who
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was a philosopher but also under the influence of their female mentors or relatives. Herakleia,
and possibly her mother Aurelia as well, was a priestess of Artemis as well as a philosopher,
which lends weight to the argument that philosopher-priestesses were a historical reality in
antiquity rather than merely a philosophical or literary trope invented by male philosophers
and writers.
4 Clea of Delphi
Clea was a priestess, mystagogue and philosopher at Delphi. As a priestess, Clea was the leader
of the Dionysian thyias or “sacred group” – the leader of a group of female devotees of Dionysus
at Delphi, and perhaps also a priestess at Delphi (Pomeroy 1999: 42). She was also definitely
active in the Isis cult, in which she had been initiated by her parents as a child (Plutarch, On
Isis and Osiris 364e2–6; 351e9–f2, 352c2–8; Stadter 1999: 173). Clea was a philosophical col-
league of Plutarch’s and is presented as the main philosophical interlocutor alongside Plutarch
himself in the latter’s philosophical dialogue On Isis and Osiris. Indeed, Plutarch dedicated
two of his works to her: On Isis and Osiris and Virtues in Women. Plutarch composed the
latter at the instigation of Clea, who acted as a catalyst for the production of this work. Clea
asked Plutarch to write this work to honour their mutual female friend Leontis who had died
recently (Plutarch, Virtues in Women 242e–243a). As such, Clea acts as a significant catalyst in
the explicit acknowledgement, memorialisation and commemoration of the moral qualities and
attainments of a range of women, including Leontis. Plutarch states that the work will examine
the topic that “man’s virtues and woman’s virtues were one and the same” (Virtues in Women,
243a). This work examines a widespread topos within the Platonic tradition, which ultimately
originated from Plato’s Meno: whether men and women both have the capacity for virtue and
whether they attain virtue in the same or different spheres of life and range of activities.
Within this work, Plutarch alludes to Clea’s literacy, education and philosophical skill:
he states that she is well-read and familiar with many books and literary works (Virtues in
Women 243d) and alludes to philosophical conversations with her (242e). Plutarch’s explicit
statements in this work and On Isis and Osiris and the literary and philosophical sophistica-
tion of the two treatises attest to Clea’s developed level of education and her philosophical
skill: Plutarch assumes Clea’s knowledge of the Isis cult and myth, and of key philosophi-
cal concepts (see, for example, On Isis and Osiris 351e6–f2, 354b13–c6, 354f9–13, 370d2–
371a5, 373e7–f5; Stadter 1999: 173).
Clea is the most well-attested historically of all the women examined in this chapter: as well
as featuring in the philosophical works mentioned above, she is also attested in epigraphic
evidence from Delphi, as both a priestess and a member of the local Delphic aristocracy;
like Plutarch, she belonged to the wealthy elite of central Greece (Stadter 1999: 173). Delphi
was a Panhellenic sanctuary from the classical period through to the late Roman imperial
period, famed throughout the Greek world and internationally for its well-respected oracle.
Given that Clea is attested in philosophical and epigraphic evidence, her historicity cannot be
doubted. However, there is some scholarly disagreement as to whether the Clea who features
in Plutarch’s philosophical works was the mother or mother-in-law of Plutarch’s philosophi-
cal student, Memmia Eurydice, or Eurydice’s daughter, Flavia Clea (since both have the same
name, following the usual Greek custom of the granddaughter being named after her grand-
mother).17 Whether Plutarch’s Clea is Eurydice’s mother or her daughter, Flavia Clea, we see
religio-philosophical transmission between generations of women within this local Delphic
family. Eurydice studied philosophy with Plutarch and her daughter, Flavia Clea, became a
priestess and a philosopher as well (see Figure 31.1 below).
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Figure 31.1 Clea’s Family Tree. Adapted from Sarah Pomeroy (ed.) (1999) Plutarch’s Advice to the
Bride and Groom and A Consolation to His Wife: English Translation, Commentary,
Interpretive Essays, and Bibliography, New York – Oxford: Oxford University Press,
43. Copyright © 1999 by Sarah B. Pomeroy. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor
through PLSclear.
It is especially in Plutarch’s On Isis and Osiris that we see the significant influence of Di-
otima upon Clea, who will join Plutarch in his search for knowledge of the gods, framed as the
greatest blessing that the gods can give (On Isis and Osiris 351c–d). This work explicitly cites
Diotima’s speech and her view of daimones as intermediaries between gods and mortals (On
Isis and Osiris 361c1–5) as part of a wider consideration of the nature of daimones (360d–
361d), and the myth of the birth of Eros from Poverty and Plenty (374c9–d10), in a manner
which suggests that Clea, as his interlocutor, is fully conversant with Diotima’s discourse in
the Symposium. Furthermore, Plutarch, in conversation with Clea, presents the gaining of
philosophical insight as a mystagogic and epoptic experience in a manner which draws on
Diotima’s characterisation of the philosophic ascent in the Symposium:
But the apperception of the conceptual, the pure and the simple, shining through the
soul like a flash of lightning, affords an opportunity to touch and see it but once. For
this reason Plato and Aristotle call this part of philosophy the epoptic or mystic part,
inasmuch as those who have passed beyond these conjectural and confused matters of
all sorts by means of Reason proceed by leaps and bound to that primary, simple and
immaterial principle…
(On Isis and Osiris 382d5–12)18
The presentation of philosophy as a mystogogic path draws explicitly on Diotima’s discourse

in the Symposium. In fact, the way in which Plutarch in conversation with Clea within this
work juxtaposes explanations of religious cult and customs alongside philosophical investi-
gation draws very much on the mode of religious-philosophical transmission exemplified by
Diotima in Plato’s Symposium.
5 Diotima’s Ascent to Beauty and the Development

of Theurgy in Late Antiquity
Before examining Diotima’s influence on female theurgists in Late Antiquity (Sosipatra and
Asclepigeneia specifically), it is worth considering the broad – yet significant – ways in which
Diotima’s persona and both the mystagogic form and content of her teaching (as set out in
Socrates’ speech) influenced the formation and development of theurgy within late antique
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Neoplatonism. Theurgy, which literally means “god work,” denotes a lifelong endeavour
consisting of a set of ritual practices, coupled or synthesised with Neoplatonist philosophy
and ethical cultivation of the virtues (Addey 2014: 24–26), It is important to note that the
Symposium was central to Iamblichus’ canon of Plato’s works, since the dialogue held the
penultimate place in the first cycle of dialogues within this canon (Anon. Proleg. 26.12–34),
and thus, it held an important place within the late Neoplatonist philosophical teaching cur-
riculum. As such, it would have been taught by Iamblichus to his students and by Plutarch of
Athens, Syrianus and Proclus within the Athenian School and by Olympiodorus and others in
the Alexandrian School (Anon. Proleg. 26.17–18).19 Thus, the female theurgists Sosipatra and
Asclepigeneia – associated with Iamblichus’ philosophic successors and the Athenian School
respectively – would almost certainly have been familiar with this work and the portrayal of
Diotima therein.
First, Diotima’s ascending ladder of erōs leading from beautiful bodies, to souls, to beauti-
ful laws and customs and thus to branches of knowledge, and onwards up to Beauty itself –
the Form of Beauty (Symp. 210a5–212a10), and her presentation of the stated aim of the
philosopher – to give birth to Beauty (206b9–10, 206c1–e5) – clearly influenced the stated
goals of theurgy as described by Neoplatonist philosophers in late antiquity. The main aim of
theurgy was the ascent of the human soul to the divine, intelligible realm and the gods (and
even, at least according to Iamblichus, union with the One, the ultimate god or source of real-
ity beyond Being itself), through a cumulative process of contact with the gods, divine assimi-
lation and, ultimately, mystical union, attained through a lifelong endeavour of regular ritual
practices, necessarily coupled with cultivation of the virtues and intellectual, philosophical
investigation and practice.20 A corresponding goal of theurgy was the expression of this divine
contact, assimilation and union with the gods, in embodied, mortal life, especially through the
provision of “care for humanity” or “fellow-feeling for others” (philanthropia), attained
through philosophical and ritual teaching and transmission, the provision of oracles by the
theurgist (who would also aspire to be a seer) and the cultivation of ethical treatment towards
others (human and non-human animals, as well as other natural entities) through the develop-
ment of virtue or excellence (Addey 2011: 322). Diotima’s framing of ascent had a profound
influence on theurgic iterations of the ascent of the soul (see Proclus, In Alc. 30.14–31.14,
quoting Symp. 202d–e, 52.10–53.2). For example, Proclus combined Diotima’s discourse,
especially the goal of “giving birth to Beauty,” with the ascent and divine procession outlined
in Socrates’ Palinode speech in the Phaedrus (253a) in order to show that the philosopher will
not only produce beautiful ideas and works but will also – by acting as an intermediary be-
tween divine and human – draw out the beauty in others and guide their ascent to Beauty itself
through the process of elenchus and teaching (Proclus, In Alc. 26.12–27.3). This influences the
formation of the corresponding goal of theurgy – to manifest the divine in mortal life by imi-
tating divine providence or goodness, and thus act as an intermediary between the divine and
human by providing “care for humanity” – a care for the other – through the transmission of
philosophical insight and ritual knowledge to the student, the initiate and the seeker of truth
(Proclus, In Alc. 26.10–27.7, 32.9–33.16, 53.7–10). Thus, Diotima’s mystagogic transmis-
sion affects theurgic iterations of the transmission of ritual and philosophical expertise, from
teacher to student. Furthermore, her teaching or discourse, especially her characterisation of
the ascent to Beauty itself, and the corresponding goal of giving birth to beauty in embodied
life, profoundly affected the double goals of theurgy.
Secondly, Diotima’s emphasis on Eros – and erōs as desire and longing for the beautiful
and, in a deeper sense, for Beauty itself – is mirrored in the Chaldean Oracles, which are
generally held to be synonymous with theurgy, since it is in this text that we find a cognate
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of the term “theurgy” first mentioned (Chald. Or. Fr. 153). Within the Chaldean Oracles,
erōs has an important role cosmologically (Chald. Or. Fr. 42) – as a cosmic principle – and
psychologically – as a central psychological element of the human soul which catalyses its
return to the intelligible realm (Chald. Or. Fr. 43 and 44). This will be explored further below,
when we examine Sosipatra and Asclepigeneia, since the Chaldean Oracles and the Chaldean
tradition in a broader sense were important for their own theurgic activities.
Third, Diotima’s characterisation of Eros as a “great daimön” (Δαίμων μέγας) and her sub-
sequent presentation of daimones – and the “daimonic” – as semi-divine beings who mediate
between divine and mortal, between gods and human beings, became a locus classicus for
later Platonist philosophers, especially for Neoplatonists in late antiquity, such as Iamblichus
and Proclus, who were developing and explicating theurgy. Within her discourse, Diotima
explains that daimones transport human prayers, sacrifices and offerings to the gods and bring
divinatory messages, exhortations and advice from the gods to mortals – in fact, the daimonic
is the intermediary which links humans to the gods. She claims that, “Through it [i.e. the
daimonic] are conveyed all divination and priestcraft concerning sacrifice and ritual and inca-
nations and all forms of divination….” (Symp. 202e11–203a2).21 In relation to the parallels
between Diotima’s ascent and the goals of theurgy, it is significant that Diotima refers here
to ἡ τῶν ἱερέων τέχνη (“priestcraft” or, literally, “the art of the priests and priestesses”), given
that late antique theurgists would frequently describe theurgy as the “sacred” or “priestly art”
(ἡ ἱερατικῆ τέχη, ἡ ἱερατικῆ, ἱερατικῆ θεουργία), seemingly drawing their terminology here di-
rectly from Diotima’s speech.22 Theurgists such as Iamblichus and Proclus very much framed
theurgy as the preservation, protection and codification of traditional (polytheistic) Mediter-
ranean religions at a time when the latter were increasingly becoming marginalised by the pro-
gressive Christianisation of the Roman Empire in the third and, especially, the fourth and fifth
centuries CE (Addey 2014: 277–280). In relation to this, advanced theurgists characterised
themselves – and were conceived – as “priests” and “priestesses” who acted as a mediating
link between the divine and human.23 Again, theurgist-philosophers draw here on Diotima’s
teaching that “Whoever has skills in these affairs is a daimonic man” (καὶ ὁ μὲν περὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα
σοφὸς δαιμόνιος ἀνήρ), a phrase which extends the term “daimonic” to spiritually advanced
human beings, an idea which is developed further by theurgists in their framing of advanced
theurgists as “divine,” or “holy” men and women in late antiquity (Iamblichus, De mysteriis
5.24 (235.11), 10.6 [290.8–11]). Furthermore, Diotima’s focus on ritual actions – especially
divination, but also sacrifice, prayers, invocations and ritual procedures in general – is fore-
grounded in theurgy which centralises the role of divination (and other ritual actions such as
prayers, invocations and sacrifice) in the ascent of the theurgist to the intelligible, divine realm
(see Addey 2014).
In relation to Diotima’s framing of the daimonic as the connection between divine and
human because, as she states, “God with human does not mingle” (Symp. 203a2–3), critics
might object that the analysis presented here of the influence of Diotima’s account of daimones
and the daimonic on theurgy is wide of the mark because Iamblichus challenges this picture
of the mode of interaction between gods and humans, castigating Porphyry for his proposed
categorisation and assignment of gods to aethereal bodies (and, by implication, the aethereal
realm) and humans to earthly bodies. In response to this proposed categorisation, Iamblichus
replies that:
And indeed, speaking generally, this doctrine constitutes the ruination of sacred ritual
and theurgical communion with the gods with humans, by banishing the presence of the
higher classes of being [i.e. the gods] outside the confines of the earth. For it amounts to
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nothing else than saying that the divine is set apart from the earthly realm, and that it
does not mingle with humanity, and that this realm is bereft of divinity….
(De mysteriis 1.8 [28.4–8])24
It has been noted that this is a curious paraphrase of Diotima’s teaching at Symposium
210a3–4 (Clarke, Dillon and Hershbell 2003: 35 n.52) which might suggest that Iamblichus
is challenging the Platonic principle set out by Diotima concerning the parameters of divine-
human interaction. Iamblichus certainly claims that the gods are not separate from the earthly
realm and that all earthly entities, when they are ready for or receptive to participation in the
divine, find the gods pre-existing in them prior to their own proper essence (De mysteriis 1.8
[28.11–29.3]). However, Iamblichus may not be challenging Diotima’s teaching as much as
we might think, given that Diotima had maintained the existence of the “daimonic man” (as
discussed above), which implies that humans too can become daimonic or embody the dai-
monic connection between gods and humans; this complicates any strict separation of gods
and humans. Furthermore, Iamblichus claims that daimones are the lowest or final expres-
sions of divine illumination, the creative powers of the gods in the furthest extremity of their
emanations (De mysteriis 4.1 [67.2–5]), suggesting that he does not seem them as strictly
separate or fully distinguished from the gods themselves. However, even if Iamblichus is di-
rectly challenging the Platonic principle expressed by Diotima, this very engagement with the
content of her teaching shows the enormous influence of the latter on late antique formula-
tions of theurgy.
Finally, the teaching methods and persona of Plato’s Diotima – especially her role as a
philosopher-priestess and a mystagogic teacher who leads her younger pupil Socrates, cast in
the role of initiate, to appreciate the ascent of the philosopher, engendered through erōs, to
Beauty itself – influences theurgic frameworks of transmission from teacher to student, often
framed as an initiatory transmission designed to draw out the innate philosophical insight
and ritual expertise of the initiate. It is significant that Iamblichus uses a well-known turn of
phrase in addressing Porphyry which had been used by Diotima when addressing her pupil
Socrates: “I will speak, and will in no way fall short in good will. You, on your part, try to
follow” (Iamblichus, De mysteriis 5.5 [206.1–2]).25 Here, Iamblichus responds to the ques-
tions posed by Porphyry regarding the ritual operation of sacrifices. Thus, Diotima’s com-
plementary roles as a philosopher, priestess, seer and mystagogue, had a profound effect on
Neoplatonic teaching methods and philosophical dialogue. The form of Diotima’s discourse
and the style of her teaching also influences the type of teaching and transmission practised
by theurgist-philosophers in late antiquity in this respect, most especially the type of teaching
attributed to Sosipatra of Pergamon and Asclepigeneia of Athens.
6 Sosipatra and Asclepigeneia in the Late Antique Lives

Sosipatra and Asclepigeneia share many similarities and points of contact: both were
connected with the Neoplatonic Schools of late antiquity and both are presented as advanced
and experienced theurgists.26 As such, both Sosipatra and Asclepigeneia are presented as
philosopher-priestesses; that is to say, they are depicted as teachers of philosophy, priestesses
and mystagogues. When we turn to analyse the roles and significance of these women, Di-
otima’s influence and legacy are crucial.
Both Sosipatra and Asclepigeneia are only attested by name in one ancient source (although
Asclepigeneia may be the unnamed Athenian woman mentioned by Damascius in a sur-
viving fragment of his Philosophical History, as discussed below): Eunapius’ Lives of the
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hilosophers and Sophists (Vitae Sophistarum [henceforth, VS]) and Marinus’ Proclus, or on
P
Happiness, respectively. In both cases, these sources are in the genre of late antique Lives, or
“biographical” sources. Since the Lives are often hagiographical, offering idealised and ex-
tremely selective portraits of the philosophers or figures represented therein and representing
a series of symbolic gestures devised to reveal the character of the biographical subject (rather
than historical information about them per se), some recent scholars have compared these
sources to literary works and consequently have doubted that we can ascertain from them
any historical information or data about the women depicted in these works (for a representa-
tive example, see Clark 1998). Yet it can be safely assumed that these women did exist, since
they are closely connected with male philosophers and figures who are attested in numerous
sources of evidence, or whose writings survive, and whose historical existence is not doubted.
Eunapius links Sosipatra closely to Iamblichus’ students and wider philosophical community:
she married Eustathius, one of Iamblichus’ pupils, and later would share students with Aede-
sius and act as joint Head of the School at Pergamon with the latter (Figure 31.2).
Ammonius Saccas
Plotinus
Longinus
Porphyry
Anatolius
Iamblichus Two Chaldeans
=
Sopater Aedesius Eustathius (married) Sosipatra
Antoninus and 2 brothers
Chrysanthius Eusebius Maximus
Eunapius Emperor Julian
Figure 31.2 Succession of Philosophers, Showing Sosipatra’s Place in the Iamblichean Philosophical

Lineage. Adapted from Richard Goulet (2014), Eunape De Sardes. Vie de philosophes et
sophists, Tome 1 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres), 136.
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Aedesius was considered to be the main philosophical successor of Iamblichus and his
established of the School of Pergamon is framed by Eunapius as a continuation of the School
of Iamblichus, albeit in a different location.27 Sosipatra is connected with Aedesius and Eus-
tathius, both of whom are historically attested in various sources. Eustathius, for example, is
also discussed in the work of Ammianus Marcellinus (17.5.15), who claims that he was sent
on a diplomatic mission (as ambassador) to the Persian court by the emperor Constantius in
358 CE.28 Sosipatra is also portrayed by Eunapius as a teacher of Maximus of Ephesus (who
was also Aedesius’ student), who is attested in various late antique sources of evidence.29 Had
Eunapius presented a fictional character so closely connected with the lives of prominent phi-
losophers and figures such as Maximus, Eustathius, Aedesius and Antoninus, it would surely
have strained acceptance of his narrative (Johnston 2012: 100 n. 8).
Furthermore, Eunapius himself was taught by Chrysanthius of Sardis, who had been a
pupil of Aedesius and Sosipatra, and, as such, he offers an “insider” account of these figures
(Watts 2017: 97). Edward Watts (2005) has argued convincingly that it is more useful and
productive to see Eunapius’ biographical work as a form of “oral history.” This methodologi-
cal approach might be extended to Marinus’ work too (including his depiction of Asclepige-
neia) given that he was a pupil of Proclus and a member of the Athenian School, who was
Proclus’ philosophic successor and became Head of the Athenian School following Proclus’
death. Meanwhile, Marinus presents Asclepigeneia as the daughter of Plutarch of Athens, who
was Head of the Athenian School in the late fourth and early fifth centuries CE, and as the
theurgic teacher of Proclus, who succeeded Plutarch of Athens and Syrianus as the Head of
the Athenian School.
7 Sosipatra of Pergamon
Sosipatra is the only woman who receives detailed treatment in Eunapius’ Lives of the Phi-
losophers and Sophists, but her biography is lengthy.30 Eunapius qualifies the inclusion of So-
sipatra in his catalogue of wise men, stating that the fame of this woman justifies his account
(VS 6.6.5–6). As such, Eunapius issues an implicit apology for his focus on Sosipatra, a move
which may reflect his own patriarchal assumptions about the capacities of women or that of
his (mostly male) readership. Despite Eunapius’ caveat about Sosipatra’s inclusion, he notes
that she was intellectually and spiritually gifted, surpassing many of the men around her, in-
cluding her husband Eustathius (VS 6.6.5.1–6.1, 6.7.5.1–3). Her dates of birth and death are
not mentioned by Eunapius and the chronology surrounding her life and that of her husband
Eustathius is complex (Penella 1990, 53–56) but she lived during the early and mid-fourth
century CE and was almost certainly active in the 330s and 340s CE (Penella 1990: 56). As
such, she was roughly contemporary with the Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician,
Hypatia of Alexandria (c.355/370–415 CE), although Eunapius never mentions the latter.31
Eunapius reports Sosipatra’s unusual education and training: she was taught by two “Chal-
dean” priests who turn up at her father’s house and subsequently educate her (VS 6.6.7.1–
6.7.2.1). When they leave, these “Chaldeans” entrust Sosipatra with ritual tools, garments
and books in a chest for safekeeping (VS 6.7.8.2–9.1): this demonstrates that they had trained
her in ritual practices.32 Furthermore, the books that they hand over to her may have been the
Chaldean Oracles themselves, which were a crucial to theurgy (Addey 2018a: 149). One of the
main functions of Eunapius’ account of Sosipatra is to portray her as a Chaldean initiate and,
thus, to link Iamblichus’ philosophical community to the Chaldean Oracles through his depic-
tion of this female theurgist and seer (Addey 2018a: 148). Given the influence of Diotima’s
discourse on the role of eros in the Chaldean Oracles, this connection is intriguing.
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Within Eunapius’ work, Sosipatra is depicted as a philosopher, a seer and a theurgist. As

both a seer and theurgist, she is characterised as a priestess-like figure, even though she didn’t
necessarily hold an official priesthood. In the way that she combines the roles of philosopher,
seer and theurgist, Sosipatra is clearly influenced by Diotima and her role as a philosopher-
priestess. She is attributed with extraordinary divinatory powers, which we might refer to as
“remote-viewing’ or psychic clairvoyance (Denzey-Lewis 2014: 276–277; Addey 2018a). She
is also unique among ancient female philosophers in the Platonic tradition in relation to her
role as Head (or joint Head with Aedesius) of a philosophical school – the Neoplatonic School
at Pergamon:
In her own home, Sosipatra held a chair of philosophy that rivalled his [that of Aede-
sius], and after attending the lectures of Aedesius, the students would go to hear hers;
and though there was none that did not greatly appreciate and admire the accurate
learning of Aedesius, they positively adored and revered the woman’s inspired teaching
(τὸν δὲ τῆς γυναικὸς ἐνθουσιασμὸν προσεκύνει καὶ ἐσεβάζετο).
(Eunapius, VS 6.9.1.1–6)33
The reference to ἐνθουσιασμὸν here is significant because it attests to Sosipatra’s divinatory

abilities, as well as to the inspired and theurgic nature of her philosophical teaching (Addey
2018a: 148). Sosipatra seems to combine philosophical erudition and teaching with divina-
tory skills, as we see when Eunapius describes an oracular vision that she had while teaching
her students:
… The theme under discussion and their inquiry was concerning the soul (τὸ ζήτημα
περὶ ψυχῆς). Several theories were propounded, and then Sosipatra began to speak, and
gradually by her proofs disposed of their arguments; then she fell to discoursing on the
descent of the soul, and what part of it is subject to punishment, what part immortal,
when in the midst of her bacchic and frenzied flow of speech (μεταξὺ τοῦ κορυβαντιασμοῦ
καὶ τῆς ἐκβακχεύσεως) she became silent, as though her voice had been cut off, and after
letting a short interval pass she cried aloud in their midst: “What is this? Behold my
kinsman Philometor riding in a carriage (ὁ συγγενὴς Φιλομήτωρ φερόμενος ἐπ’ ὀχήματος)!
The carriage (τό ὄχημα) has overturned in a rough place in the road and both his legs
are in danger! However, his servants have dragged him out unharmed, except that he
has received wounds on his hands and elbows, though even these are not dangerous. He
is being carried home on a stretcher, groaning loudly.” These were her words, and they
were the truth, for so it actually was. By this all were convinced that Sosipatra was omni-
present, and that, even as the philosophers assert concerning the gods, nothing happened
without her being there to see.
(Eunapius, VS 6.9.11–12)34
There is a close link in this passage between Sosipatra’s philosophical discourse on the descent
of the soul and her oracular vision. Neoplatonist philosophers considered that the descent of
the soul into the physical body occurred within the “vehicle of the soul” (ochema pneuma),
an intermediary entity held to connect the incorporeal soul to the corporeal body. Within
Neoplatonism, this descent of the soul into the physical body and the mortal realm was con-
sidered to represent a kind of inversion of the soul’s perfected state: this philosophical notion
is reflected in the overturning of Philometer’s carriage (τό ὄχημα). Thus, while Sosipatra is
speaking philosophically about the descent of the soul, she falls into an oracular state where
473
Crystal Addey
she sees the overturning of Philometer’s carriage; not only does her philosophical discourse
blend seamlessly with her oracular state, but also her oracular vision reflects her philosophical
teaching (Addey 2018a: 152–153). Sosipatra’s blending of philosophical teaching with divina-
tory, inspired insight recalls the divinatory aspects of Diotima’s persona and the mystagogic
focus of the latter’s philosophical teaching.
Eunapius’ account here of Sosipatra’s teaching on the nature and descent of the human
soul indicates that dialectic and dialogue were important aspects of her teaching methods,
partially reflecting Diotima’s use of philosophical elenchus in the latter’s teaching of Socrates
(Symp. 201e3–4; Addey 2018a: 155). Although Neoplatonist philosophers often produced
commentaries rather than philosophical dialogues, the use of philosophical elenchus, inherited
from Plato’s Socrates, was an important element of their teaching methods within the broader
context of their extensive use of dialogic questioning and answering within the classroom.35
For example, Eunapius (VS 5.3.4.1–3) relates that Iamblichus was waiting to have questions
put to him about philosophy during a public teaching session where he met the philosopher
Alypius, implying that philosophical questioning and dialogue were crucial aspects of his
teaching methods. Thus, it seems likely that Sosipatra – who was an indirect successor of
Iamblichus’ school – would have used elenchic questioning within her teaching practices, since
she taught alongside Aedesius, Iamblichus’ philosophic successor. In the passage above, which
constitutes the only explicit evidence we have about her teaching methods (VS 6.9.11–12),
Eunapius reports that Sosipatra responded to her students’ comments and questions about
different theories concerning the nature of the soul, using proofs to refute some of these theo-
ries. It is probable that Sosipatra was discussing Plato’s Republic X, especially the “Myth of
Er” with its focus on the descent of the soul (Marx 2021: 81), with her students; she may also
have discussed the arguments for the immortality of the soul set out in the Phaedo, given that
this was the third dialogue in Iamblichus’ curriculum. Sosipatra and the later Neoplatonist
philosopher Asclepigeneia (who will be discussed further below) taught an inner circle of stu-
dents within their homes in a domestic context (rather than in a public context) and focused
on noncanonical, advanced subjects such as theurgy and religious mysteries (Watts 2017:
98–101). However, this passage may suggest that Sosipatra also taught subjects that were part
of the standard Neoplatonist curriculum, since she is depicted here as teaching traditional
Platonic themes – the immortality and descent of the soul (cf. Marx 2021: 73, 85–89) – and
since Eunapius states that her teaching “rivalled” that of her philosophical colleague Aedesius
(VS 6.9.1.1–6).
Diotima’s inter-generational (female to male) transmission of philosophical teaching to So-
crates also influences Sosipatra’s philosophical teaching and transmission of ritual expertise
to her students. Eunapius suggests that Sosipatra taught her son Antoninus, who eventually
settled in Alexandria and became a seer who devoted himself to carrying out religious rites at
the temple of Serapis and successfully prophesied the destruction of this temple (VS 6.9.15.1–
17.8; cf. Watts 2017: 55). Although Eunapius presents Sosipatra’s teaching only in a brief
and allusive manner, it is exemplified in an episode where Sosipatra seems to train her student
Maximus of Ephesus in ritual expertise. Eunapius reports that Sosipatra developed feelings
for Philometer and suspects that he was performing love spells upon her; she thereupon asks
her student Maximus to perform a counteractive ritual. Sosipatra’s request to Maximus to
perform this ritual places the former in an educational role as a transmitter of ritual expertise.
After Maximus’ ritual, Sosipatra subsequently relates all the details of the ritual to Maximus
through her divinatory “remote-viewing” ability (VS 6.9.7.1–4). Eunapius’ later biography of
Maximus indicates that the latter had considerable ritual power but extremely bad timing and
possibly some lack of judgement in its deployment. This suggests that Sosipatra recognised the
474
young Maximus’ talent and theurgic potential – and thus asked him to perform the counter-
active ritual in her role as a ritual educator, as an attempt to teach him subtly about the ap-
propriate timing, ethics and contexts of theurgic ritual practice. When asking Maximus to
perform the ritual, Sosipatra exhorts him to demonstrate his piety (VS 6.9.5.3–4). After Sosi-
patra relates the full details of the timing and content of Maximus’ ceremony to him, Maximus
is amazed by her oracular accuracy. Sosipatra advises him: “The gods love you if you look to
them and do not direct your attention towards earthly and perishable riches,” (VS 6.9.7.6–8:
θεοί σε φιλοῦσιν, ἐὰν σὺ πρὸς ἐκείνους βλέπῃς καὶ μὴ ῥέπῃς ἐπὶ τὰ γήϊνα καὶ ἐπίκηρα χρήματα), a
typically Platonic protreptic exhortation relevant to theurgic ritual, since the latter involved
focusing attention on the divine, endurance and rejection of physical distractions, luxury and
desires for personal gain. Sosipatra’s words demonstrate her subtle guidance of Maximus’ rit-
ual expertise and knowledge, and her attempt to instil in him the necessary humility, caution
and focus on divine guidance needed by the successful theurgic ritual practitioner. As such,
Sosipatra’s teaching of Maximus – and her son Antoninus – reflects the influence of Diotima’s
mode of teaching Socrates as presented in the Symposium.
8 Asclepigeneia of Athens
Like her Neoplatonic predecessor Sosipatra, Asclepigeneia (often referred to as “Asclepigeneia
the Elder”) is only firmly attested in one source: Marinus’ Proclus, Or on Happiness.36 She is
the only female teacher mentioned by Marinus, who presents her as a teacher of Proclus when
describing the latter’s theurgic virtue and expertise:
For he made use of the conjunctions and supplications of the Chaldaeans, together with
their divine and ineffable revolutions. These he acquired for himself, and from Asclepi-
geneia, the daughter of Plutarch, he learned the invocations and the rest of the appara-
tus. For she alone preserved the rituals, and the whole process of theurgy, handed on to
her from the great Nestorius by her father.
(Marinus, Proclus, or on Happiness, 28.9–15)37
In this extraordinary passage, Asclepigeneia is presented as a crucial link in the transmission

of theurgic ritual and expertise within the Athenian School of Neoplatonism. She is presented
as Proclus’ teacher in theurgy, passing on her ritual expertise which she learned from her
father Plutarch of Athens (who had been the Head of the Athenian School prior to Syrianus,
Proclus’ predecessor) and which he in turn had learned from his own father (Asclepigeneia’s
grandfather), Nestorius, who had been a seer and a hierophant of the mystery cult at Eleusis.38
Thus, Asclepigeneia, who is a descendant of the priest Nestorius, is characterised as an expert
theurgist – a philosopher-priestess figure – within the Athenian School. It is possible that As-
clepigeneia may have been a priestess of Asclepius: her father, Plutarch of Athens, had a family
cult to Asclepius and their house (which Proclus lived in at the invitation of Plutarch) was next
to “the shrine of Asclepius celebrated by Sophocles” (Marinus, Proclus 29; Slaveva-Griffin
2016: 185). In any case, Asclepigeneia, like Sosipatra, must have been an extremely proficient
philosopher in order to have become a teacher of theurgy (Watts 2017: 100), since the prac-
tice of theurgy presupposes the study of philosophy both prior to and in tandem with ritual
practice (Addey 2018b: 428–429). Asclepigeneia’s transmission of invocations and ritual pro-
cedures to Proclus, which she had learnt from her own father, entails inter-generational female
to male transmission of ritual and philosophical expertise modelled on Diotima’s bestowal of
initiatory knowledge to Socrates in the Symposium.
475
Crystal Addey
In relation to this, we hear that Asclepigeneia taught Proclus how to use Chaldean ritual
techniques, invocations and instruments, the latter of which relate to theurgic ritual. As with
Sosipatra, Asclepigeneia’s link with the Chaldean tradition, including specific use of ritual
tools and invocations, is intriguing in relation to the influence of Diotima, given the influence
of Diotima’s discourse, specifically her characterisation of erōs as a psychological and cosmic
force, upon the Chaldean Oracles.
We also hear that Aslcepigeneia was the mother of Archiadias, whose daughter, Asclepige-
neia the Younger (named after her grandmother), married the wealthy archon Theagenes and
became the mother of the scholarch Hegias (Marinus, Proclus 29). Thus, Asclepigeneia was
firmly embedded within the Athenian School. When her grand-daughter, Asclepigeneia the
Younger, was seriously ill, Proclus helped to heal her by praying at the shrine of Asclepius in a
theurgic manner, thus using his ritual expertise learned from Asclepigeneia to assist in healing
her grand-daughter (Marinus, Proclus 29).
It is possible that Asclepigeneia may be the unnamed “Athenian women” mentioned in a
fragment of Damascius’ Philosophical History (Fr. 104B). Polymnia Athanassiadi (1999: 251
n.276) argues for the identification of this woman with Asclepigeneia the Elder, given that the
following extant fragment of Damascius’ work discuss Archiadas, Asclepigeneia’s son. On the
same basis, Fragments 104A and C of the same work may refer to her, given that they refer to
ritual activity, with Fr. 104C specifically stating that: “She prays to the god to give her truly
holy counsel, and advice on what to do.” Although Asclepigeneia is not named specifically in
these passages, if they do indeed refer to her they strengthen the attribution of considerable
ritual expertise to her.
9 Conclusion: Platonic Philosopher-Priestesses, Female

Agency and Philosophical Transmission
Diotima had a significant influence on the lives, religious-philosophical roles and intellectual
activities of female philosophers and theurgists in later Platonism. In her role as a philosopher-
priestess, she acted as an important role model for Clea, Sosipatra and Asclepigeneia. As such,
there are traces of longer-term, female-to-female transmission within the Platonic tradition.
Diotima also had a significant influence on inter-generational modes of religio-philosophical
transmission: this type of philosophical transmission relates to teacher–pupil relationships,
which within this context, can also be framed as initiand–initiate relationships. Thus, Di-
otima’s teaching and transmission of religious-philosophical expertise to Socrates is mirrored
in Sosipatra’s teaching of Maximus of Ephesus and Antoninus and in Asclepigeneia’s teaching
of Proclus.
The later female philosophers Clea of Delphi, Sosipatra of Pergamon and Asclepigeneia of
Athens were clearly influenced by Diotima in assuming the roles of philosopher and priestess
(or theurgist, a priestly figure). The influence on Clea of Delphi is especially important here,
since it shows that the significance of the philosopher-priestess both pre-dates and extends
beyond its influence on the formation and development of theurgy in late antiquity; the phe-
nomenon of the philosopher-priestess is important for earlier iterations of Platonism. The
philosopher-priestess, in the persona of Clea of Delphi, is thus attested in Middle Platonism
and is significant in a broader sense. This examination of the roles of the philosopher-priestess
as an active agent and transmitter of religio-philosophical knowledge has attempted to turn
the lens on female agency in order to illuminate the importance of female philosophers within
Platonism.
476
Notes
1 I would like to thank the editors of this volume, Sara Brill and Catherine McKeen, for their consistent
kindness, help and support and for the intellectually rich sense of community they have fostered dur-
ing the editorial process. I thank them - and Sophia Connell, Michael Griffin and Danielle Layne - for
reading and commenting on drafts of this chapter. I must also thank Les Belles Lettres for their kind
permission to re-print a revised version of the diagram showing the succession of philosophers (Figure
31.2), adapted from Goulet (2014: 136).
2 For a representative example, see Hawley 1994.
3 My utilisation of this methodological approach has been influenced by recent research on female
agency in antiquity, particularly as presented in the recent conference “Women in Ancient Cultures
2021: Disrupting the Patriarchy,” hosted by the Institute of Classical Studies, London, UK.
4 For a detailed analysis and refutation of the arguments used to support the case for Diotima’s fiction-
ality, see Nails 2015: 73–75. For further critique, see Nails 2002: 137–138; Nye 2015: x–xii; Addey
2018b: 412–414, 2022: 18–19. For arguments that Diotima is fictitious, see, for example, Nehamas
and Woodruff 1989: xii.
5 See Kranz 1926: 427; D’Angour 2019: 38–44, 187–203.
6 D’Angour 2019: 187–203, presents a detailed argument for this identification with Aspasia, but his
reasons for holding that Plato would disguise Aspasia’s identity (43, 198, 203) seem unconvincing
overall.
7 Levin 1975: 225, notes that among the citizens of “out-of-the way places’ such as Locris or Mantinea,
few of those who must have been famous in their generation escaped from subsequent oblivion.
Indeed, it seems important to note that a greater proportion of our historical evidence from the Clas-
sical Greek period derives from Athens.
8 For a detailed examination of the similarly complex methodological issues surrounding the historicity
and identity of Pythagorean women philosophers and the writings attributed to them, see Caterina
Pellò’s chapter in this volume.
9 For methodological reflections on the preservation and transmission of Platonist female philosophical
writings in antiquity, see Addey 2022: 28–34. On the methodological issues pertaining to philosophi-
cal texts and writings attributed to Pythagorean women, see Caterina Pello’s chapter in this volume.
10 Epimenides of Crete’s purification of Athens is also mentioned in Ps.-Aristotle, Constitution of Athens
1. Cf. also Levin 1975: 231–239 for a detailed account of Diotima’s ritual service in the context of the
evidence for Athenians taking such advice from diviners.
11 Οἱ μὲν λέγοντές εἰσι τῶν ἱερέων τε καὶ τῶν ἱερειῶν ὅσοις μεμέληκε περὶ ὧν μεταχειρίζονται λόγον οἵοις τ’
εἶναι διδόναι.
12 See Burkert 1987: 70; Riedwig 1987: 5–14, 17–22.
13 For the argument that Diotima was a priestess of Despoina in Arcadia, see Danielle Layne’s chapter
in this volume.
14 This point draws on the broader methodological issue raised by Connelly 2007: 275: the relevant
epigraphic and archaeological evidence bears witness to realities not recorded in literary texts that
have shaped our understanding of ancient women.
15 ἡ πόλις [τὴν φιλ]οσοφωτάτην καὶ σωφρο[νεστάτη]ν Αὐρηλίαν Όππίαν [… τοῦ] φιλοσοφωτάτου Αὐ[ρη]
λ[ίου ...] θυγατέρα, [γυναῖκα] δὲ τοῦ εὐγενεστάτου [Τε]ισαμενοῦ τοῦ στρατα[γ]οῦ (?) καὶ, ὡς χρηματίζε
[ι ἑστίαν πόλ]εως, νέαν Πηνελό[πει]αν, ἀρετῆς πάσ[ης ἕνεκα καὶ] τῆς περὶ τὰς θε[ὰς εὐσεβ]εί[ας],
προσδεξαμ[ένου τὸ ἀνάλωμα] Μ(άρκου) Αὐρ(ηλίου) Εὐτυχιανο[ῦ ...] ...
16 Cf. CIG 1444: τῆς θεοῦ Άρτέμιδ[ος] Ὀ[ρ]θείας κ[αὶ] τῶν συνκ[α]θειδρυμένων αύτῆ θ[ε]ῶν.
17 See Bowersock 1965: 287–288, for details of the debate regarding the identity of Plutarch’s addressee
in relation to the inscriptions attesting to Flavia Clea, the daughter of Memmia Eurydice.
18 Trans. Babbit 1936. ἡ δὲ τοῦ νοητοῦ καὶ εἰλικρινοῦς καὶ ἁπλοῦ νόησις ὥσπερ ἀστραπὴ διαλάμψασα τῆς
ψυχῆς ἅπαξ ποτὲ θιγεῖν καὶ προσιδεῖν παρέσχε. διὸ καὶ Πλάτων καὶ Ἀριστοτέλης ἐποπτικὸν τοῦτο τὸ μέρος
τῆς φιλοσοφίας καλοῦσιν, καθ’ ὅσον οἱ τὰ δοξαστὰ καὶ μικτὰ καὶ παντοδαπὰ ταῦτα παραμειψάμενοι τῷ λόγῳ
πρὸς τὸ πρῶτον ἐκεῖνο καὶ ἁπλοῦν καὶ ἄυλον ἐξάλλονται…
ἔχειν φιλοσοφίας νομίζουσι.
19 Cf. Westerink 1962 [2011]: xxxvii: “The detailed discussion of Iamblichus’ canon [i.e. in the Anony-
mous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy] which follows, also derives from Proclus’s prolegomena,
as shown above. Its importance is evident, for it is the only description of what was for more than
two centuries the standard curriculum in the Platonic schools.”
477
Crystal Addey
20 Iamblichus, De mysteriis 1.12 (42.9–13), 1.19 (59.7–11), 2.6 (81.10–12), 3.7 (114.8–10), 5.22
(230.12–231.2), 8.8 (271.10, 272.4–8), 10.5 (291.12–292.3), 10.6, 10.7 (293.9–10). Cf. Addey
2014: 25.
21 διὰ τούτου καὶ ἡ μαντικὴ πᾶσα χωρεῖ καὶ ἡ τῶν ἱερέων τέχνη τῶν τε περὶ τὰς θυσίας καὶ τὰς τελετὰς καὶ τὰς
ἐπῳδὰς καὶ τὴν μαντείαν πᾶσαν …
22 See Iamblichus, De mysteriis 5.18 (225.3–4), 5.20 (228.6), 5.22 (230.12) Cf. also 1.11 (37.5), 1.15
(46.5), 1.21 (65.2), 3.31 (176.4; 177.16; 178.12), 4.1 (181.8), 4.3 (185.1), 5.21 (230.2), 8.4 (267.7),
8.5 (268,7), 9,6 (281,1), 10,5 (291,3, 291,10).
23 Iamblichus, De mysteriis 1.1 (2.3–5), 4.1 (181.8).
24 Trans. Clarke, Dillon and Hershbell 2003. All quotations and translations of this work are drawn
from this edition. Ὅλως δὲ τῆς ἱερᾶς ἁγιστείας καὶ τῆς θεουργικῆς κοινωνίας θεῶν πρὸς ἀνθρώπους
ἀναίρεσίς ἐστιν αὕτη ἡ δόξα, τὴν τῶν κρειττόνων παρουσίαν ἔξω τῆς γῆς ἐξορίζουσα. Οὐδὲν γὰρ ἄλλο λέγει
ἢ ὅτι ἀπῴκισται τῶν περὶ γῆν τὰ θεῖα καὶ ὅτι ἀνθρώποις οὐ συμμίγνυται καὶ ὡς ἔρημος αὐτῶν ἐστιν ὁ τῇδε
τόπος·
25 ἐρῶ μὲν οὖν ἐγώ, καὶ προθυμίας οὐδὲν ἀπολείψω·πειρῶ δ’ ἕπεσθαι.
26 For a broader analysis of the roles of women in the Neoplatonic schools of late antiquity, see Alex-
andra Michalewski’s chapter in this volume.
27 Another student (and patron) of Iamblichus’ School – Sopater – was also considered a successor
of Iamblichus, with Aedesius becoming the main successor after Sopater’s death. See Penella 1990:
49–50, for a detailed discussion of this issue. As Penella (1990: 50) argues, Eunapius’ placement of
Aedesius’ adult career after the biography of Sopater and his discussion of Aedesius as the most re-
nowned of Sopater’s survivors is an oblique acknowledgement of the fact that at the time of the death
of Iamblichus, Sopater was regarded as the most senior or distinguished of Iamblichus’ pupils.
28 Eustathius also seems to be the recipient of a letter from Iamblichus: Letter 7: To Eustathius, On
Music = Stob. Anth. 2.31.117.
29 See, for example, Ammianus Marcellinus 22.7.3, 23.5.10–14, 23.3.23, 29.1.42.
30 For further analysis of Eunapius’ presentation of Sosipatra, see Alexandra Michalewski’s chapter in
this volume.
31 On Hypatia of Alexandria, see Dzielska 1995; Watts 2017; Addey 2022: 27–34, and see the chapters
by Aisté Čelkyté and Alexandra Michalewski in this volume.
32 For a detailed examination of Sosipatra’s ritual expertise and connections with the Chaldean tradi-
tion, see Addey 2018a: 148–154.
33 Eunapius, Vitae Sophistarum [henceforth, VS]: 6.9.1.1–6 (469), ed. Giangrande 1956. All citations
from Eunapius’ work are taken from this edition. Translations are those of Wright 1921 [2005], with
my own slight modifications: καὶ ἀντεκάθητό γε αὐτῷ φιλοσοφοῦσα κατὰ τὴν ἑαυτῆς οἰκίαν ἡ Σωσιπάτρα,
καί, μετὰ τὴν Αἰδεσίου συνουσίαν, παρ’ ἐκείνην φοιτῶντες, οὐκ ἔστιν ὅστις τὴν μὲν ἐν λόγοις ἀκρίβειαν
Αἰδεσίου <οὐ> περιηγάπα καὶ συνεθαύμαζεν, τὸν δὲ τῆς γυναικὸς ἐνθουσιασμὸν προσεκύνει καὶ ἐσεβάζετο.
Cf. Johnston 2012: 107.
34 ἡ μὲν πρόθεσις ἦν καὶ τὸ ζήτημα περὶ ψυχῆς· πολλῶν δὲ κινουμένων λόγων, ὡς ἤρξατο Σωσιπάτρα λέγειν, κατὰ
μικρὸν ταῖς ἀποδείξεσι διαλύουσα τὰ προβαλλόμενα, εἶτα εἰς τὸν περὶ καθόδου ψυχῆς καὶ τί τὸ κολαζόμενον
καὶ τί τὸ ἀθάνατον αὐτῆς ἐμπίπτουσα λόγον, μεταξὺ τοῦ κορυβαντιασμοῦ καὶ τῆς ἐκβακχεύσεως, ὥσπερ
ἀποκοπεῖσα τὴν φωνήν, ἐσιώπησεν, καὶ βραχὺν ἐλλιποῦσα χρόνον, “τί τοῦτο;” ἀνεβόησεν εἰς μέσους· “ὁ
συγγενὴς Φιλομήτωρ φερόμενος ἐπ’ ὀχήματος, τό τε ὄχημα κατά τινα δυσχωρίαν περιτέτραπται, κἀκεῖνος
κινδυνεύει περὶ τὼ σκέλη· ἀλλ’ ἐξῃρήκασί γε αὐτὸν οἱ θεράποντες ὑγιαίνοντα, πλὴν ὅσα περὶ τοῖς ἀγκῶσι
καὶ χερσὶ τραύματα εἴληφε, καὶ ταῦτά γε ἀκίνδυνα· ἐπὶ φορείου δὲ φέρεται ποτνιώμενος.” ταῦτα ἔλεγεν καὶ
εἶχεν οὕτως, καὶ πάντες ᾔδεσαν ὅτι πανταχοῦ εἴη Σωσιπάτρα, καὶ πᾶσι πάρεστι τοῖς γινομένοις, ὥσπερ οἱ
φιλόσοφοι περὶ τῶν θεῶν λέγουσιν.
35 See, for example, Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 13, where Porphyry mentions that he spent three days in
Plotinus’ classroom questioning the latter about the soul’s connection with the body.
36 On Asclepigeneia, see also Alexandra Michalewski’s chapter in this volume.
37 ταῖς γὰρ τῶν Χαλδαίων συστάσεσι καὶ ἐντυχίαις καὶ τοῖς θείοις καὶ ἀφθέγκτοις στροφάλοις ἐκέχρητο. καὶ
γὰρ ταῦτα παρειλήφει, καὶ τὰς ἐκφωνήσεις καὶ ἐκέχρητο. καὶ γὰρ ταῦτα παρειλήφει, καὶ τὰς ἐκφωνήσεις
καὶ τὴν ἄλλην χρῆσιν αὐτῶν μεμαθήκει παρὰ Ἀσκληπιγενείας τῆς Πλουτάρχου θυγατρός. παρ’ αὐτῇ γὰρ
καὶ μόνῃ ἐσώζετο ἀπὸ Νεστορίου τοῦ μεγάλου ὄργια καὶ ἡ σύμπασα θεουργικὴ ἀγωγὴ διὰ τοῦ πατρὸς αὐτῇ
παραδοθεῖσα.
Trans. Edwards 2000. All translations of this work are taken from this edition.
38 On Nestorius, see Marinus, Proclus, Or On Happiness, 12; Eunapius VS 475–476, 493; Zosimus
4.18; Clinton 1974: 43; Burkert 1987: 50, 85, 113–114; Addey 2014: 280; Watts 2017: 53–54.
478
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32
THE PLACE OF WOMEN
IN THE NEOPLATONIC SCHOOLS
1 Introduction
Plato’s texts exhibit a tension between a point of view that supports the equality of the sexes
(Republic, V, 452e–457a),1 and another more traditional perspective in Antiquity, according
to which women are weaker than men (Republic, V, 456a) – not only physically but also when
it comes to ethical pursuits.2 Furthermore, Plato goes so far as to say that the female condi-
tion is nothing but a degradation of the male one (Timaeus, 90e–91a). Plato’s position is thus
ambivalent, tending to make women both “similar and inferior” to men.3 However, despite its
attachment to a certain traditional vision of the alleged weakness of women, Plato’s account
is fundamentally innovative, insofar as it opposes the idea that women have their own specific
virtue. Since the Platonic soul is not gendered, and since men and women share the same vir-
tues, they would be able to perform the same tasks in the kallipolis.
This tension runs throughout the Neoplatonic tradition, from Plotinus until the last Diadochi
of the Athenian School. However, there are differences in how masculinity and f emininity are
related to the soul. According to Plotinus (205–270 a.d.) and Porphyry (234–310 a.d.), the
human soul is an absolutely genderless entity. They never mention the passages of the Timaeus
that associate the entry of the soul into a woman’s body with moral weakness. Theodore of
Asine (first half of the fourth century b.c.) even develops several arguments to support the Pla-
tonic notion of philosopher-queens. The equality of the sexes, expressed on the doctrinal level,
is also to be seen in the situation of women within philosophical circles. Even if the practice
of philosophy was restricted to certain privileged women, namely the wives or daughters of
philosophers, they were nevertheless considered intellectual partners in their own right.
With the development of the tradition of scholarly commentary on Plato’s dialogues, from
Iamblichus onwards (fourth century b.c.), Platonists faced the need to harmonise the differ-
ent views expressed in the various passages in the Platonic corpus. Thus, the solution Proclus
develops in order to reconcile the view that men and women have an equal capacity for virtue
with the view that women are inherently weak is the following: if human souls are all of the
“same species” (homoeidês),4 there are male and female souls. Both types of soul are consti-
tuted through the blending of Sameness and Difference, but not in the same proportion. In male
souls, Sameness prevails, whereas, in female souls, it is Difference, which makes women less
able to lead a truly virtuous life. As D. Baltzly points out, “Proclus even gives these sexed souls
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-36 482

Place of Women in Neoplatonic Schools
sexed ‘astral bodies’ that are prior to their incarnations in human bodies. The result is simply
a projection of patriarchal views to a cosmic level.”5 However, in order to stress that all souls
are of the same species, Proclus acknowledges exceptional cases: some women have male souls
and are able to rise up to the highest degrees of virtue. Indeed, from the fourth century b.c. on-
wards, Neoplatonic circles – and notably that of Iamblichus in Apamea – increasingly granted
a place to women within the philosophical schools. The exceptional women to whom Proclus
alludes were not only students of philosophy but also were themselves leading authorities,
teaching young people philosophy as well as theurgic mysteries. Indeed, at the end of pagan
Antiquity, women were not simply considered inferior companions, but they even occupied
teaching positions, as shown by the examples of Sosipatra, Asclepigenia and Hypatia, who
mastered a range of both scientific and philosophical skills and who played an influential role
in the political life of Alexandria.
2 Plotinus and His School

Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism – that is to say, of an interpretation of Plato accord-
ing to which all realities derive from the One beyond Being – occupies a particular position
in the history of Platonism. He introduced a way of interpreting Plato which would be taken
up again in a systematic form by later generations of Platonists, notably Iamblichus (floruit in
the first quarter of the fourth century a.d.), who established a scholarly reading order of the
dialogues. But Plotinus was not himself a commentator: in his treatises, which are mostly writ-
ten in a zetetic form aimed at elucidating a particular philosophical question, quotations from
Plato are freely chosen and used. Additionally, Plotinus does not explicitly address the place
of women in the city nor the education they should receive. In fact, he makes only a handful
of references to Plato’s political dialogues, and when he quotes the Republic, it is essentially
within the framework of analyses of Books VI and X focusing on metaphysical content. Politi-
cal issues are subsumed into the ethical doctrine, which aims at turning the soul away from
the preoccupations of the sensible world. Plotinus never alludes to Republic V, which deals
with the place of women in the kallipolis, nor does he quote those passages of the Timaeus
(42a–d; 90e–91a) where Plato indicates that the soul of a man who has lived an unvirtuous
life will animate a woman’s body in its next incarnation.6 The only mention of a similar case
is to be found at Enn. III.2 (47). 13, 9–15, where it is asserted that a man who has killed his
mother will be reborn as a woman to be killed by her son. However, the evocation of matri-
cide, which may echo Nero’s murder of Agrippina, aims more at exemplifying the retributive
activity of divine providence than at illustrating the downgrading of a man’s existence into
that of a woman.
As far as access to the contemplative life is concerned, women can partake in it just as well
as men, since souls are not gendered. In Plotinus’ treatises, there is no theoretical account of
the weakness of women. It is always the general term “anthrôpos”, regardless to the gender,
that is used when speaking about the soul, whether or not it is incarnated. More than fixed
components of the soul’s essence, maleness and femaleness are conceived of as acquired fea-
tures, depending on the direction in which the soul directs its contemplative activity. When
oriented towards the lower levels of reality, the soul becomes more feminine and less mascu-
line. This interpretation draws support from Enn. IV.4 (28). 31, where Plotinus indicates that
the gods are not involved when some individuals “become effeminate, womanish in their do-
ings and feelings and committing indecencies (ἄνανδροί τε ἄλλοι καὶ θήλεις τὰ ἔργα καὶ τὰ πάθη
καὶ τὰ αἰσχρὰ δρῶντες).”7 However, it is worth noting that this passage is the only place in the
Enneads where femaleness is connected to an-andreia and a lack of moral rectitude.8 Thus, in
483
this context, it sounds more like the revival of an old stereotype of the Greek language9 than
the expression of a real patriarchal view.
Although genderless, the Plotinian soul is always described through a network of meta-
phors linked to family hierarchies.10 For example, in Enn. VI.9 (9), the soul is compared to
a young girl who seeks to reach the divine intellect, which is compared to the father figure.
The male principle is superior to the female one, insofar as it produces it and leads it to its
perfection.11 Plotinus also relies on a set of allegorical interpretations of the relations between
the gods and the goddesses. Indeed, in Enn. III. 5 (50), the dianoetic soul is compared to
a powerful female goddess, Aphrodite, and the intellect to Zeus (εἰ κατὰ μὲν τὸν νοῦν τοὺς
ἄρρενας τάττομεν τῶν θεῶν).12 But this remark is immediately clarified in the next chapter. Zeus
expresses allegorically not only the demiurgic intellect but also the soul’s individual intellect,
which never totally leaves the intelligible world: this is why, according to the myth reported
by Diotima in the Symposium (201D), Aphrodite was born in the garden of Zeus. According
to the level of activity and the degree of contemplative power that it exercises, the soul can rise
through different ontological levels until it coincides with Zeus himself.13 Thus, there is a fluid-
ity in Plotinus’ conception of the gender identity of the soul, which is at the same time linked
to the female principle of Aphrodite and to the male principle of Zeus. Thus, in a way, if his
metaphysical system reproduces allegorically the hierarchical relations between the male and
female deities,14 Plotinus reworks them so that there is no fixed border between masculine and
feminine. Moreover, he never argues that women are weak or inferior, such that they should
receive a different education from men.
This equal capacity of women to live a philosophical life is perfectly illustrated by the place
that Plotinus gave them within his own school. The philosophical schools of Antiquity were
distinguished simultaneously from the public space of the city and from the domestic space of
the gynaeceum. As a result, for women they represented a special space, where they stood on
an equal footing with men. As I. Koch observes, the philosophical schools were
Entities which, in the exterior space of the city, were structured like a social interior,
like an oikos. The school’s interiority is not the women’s purely domestic interiority of
the oikos, without however having the structure of a civic assembly: the school has a
form that makes it partially escape the great gendered division of space which structures
ancient societies.15
Thus, if all philosophical schools opened a privileged space to women, it is worth noting
that in the case of Plotinus, this opportunity was enhanced by the tenets of his philosophical
doctrine.
His school in Rome was located in the villa of a rich widow, called Gemina. His courses
were open to all, including outsiders as well as advanced students.16Among Plotinus’ closest
disciples there were many women from the Roman elite, such as the two widows, Amphicleia
and Chione, who lived in his entourage and took part in the discussions at his seminars.
There were women, too, who were greatly devoted to philosophy. Gemina, in whose
house he lived, and her daughter Gemina, who had the same name as her mother, and
Amphicleia, who became the wife of Ariston, son of Iamblichus.17
This passage highlights that, quite often, the practice of philosophy was limited to wealthy
women, which is not surprising given the cost of education at the higher levels, but also that
the integration of women in the Neoplatonic schools was mostly a family affair: these women
484
were the daughters or wives of philosophers. After having attended the school of Plotinus,
Amphicleia married the son of Iamblichus – who, after having been the disciple of Porphyry,
left for Apamea in Syria to found his own school (around 305 b.c.). As we shall see, the place
of women within the philosophical schools was, to a large extent, determined by their family
connections. This tendency continues until the end of pagan Neoplatonism in the sixth century
a.d., as can be seen in the cases of Asclepigenia or Hypatia.
According to Plotinus, all human beings, whether male or female, can lead a philosophi-
cal life. It is precisely this claim that Porphyry (234–305 a.d.), who was one of the closest
disciples of Plotinus, as well as his editor, used as the basis for his Letter to Marcella. Indeed,
shortly after his marriage, Porphyry left on a trip and wrote to his wife Marcella to ask her
to continue practicing philosophy. He praises her for her “natural aptitude for the right phi-
losophy,”18 pointing to it as the chief reason why he married her, despite the fact that she was
widowed and already the mother of seven children (five girls and two boys). Porphyry consid-
ers these children his own and proposes to raise them all by teaching them the “right philoso-
phy.”19 These opening lines highlight that Porphyry makes absolutely no distinction between
boys and girls, offering them all the same philosophical education, together with their mother.
The whole letter is an exhortation encouraging Marcella to “practice philosophy” (§ 5) and
to “follow in the footsteps of Plato” (§ 11), in order to turn away from the sensible and come
nearer to the intelligible realm. Immediately after having stressed the equality of the sexes in
§ 33, Porphyry says the following:
Therefore, do not be overly concerned about whether your body is male and female
(μήτε οὖν εἰ ἄρρην εἶ μήτε εἰ θήλεια τὸ σῶμα πολυπραγμόνει); do not regard yourself as a
woman, Marcella, for I did not devote myself to you as such. Flee from every effeminate
element (θηλυνόμενον) of the soul as if you were clothed in a male body (ἄρρενος εἶχες
τὸ σῶμα).20
By ascending to the intelligible, one practices the virtues that bring one closer to masculinity.
Just as with Plotinus, there is masculinity or femininity in the soul, in the sense of an acquired
condition, depending on whether it has turned its attention towards the intelligible or the
sensible. Thus, the criterion that distinguishes between them is not essentially found in sexual
and biological differences or in the components of the soul, but rather in the way in which the
soul exercises its contemplative activity. From Porphyry’s Letter, we can assume that Marcella
is already familiar with Platonic philosophy and that he sees her as an equal whose soul can
be educated so as to be able to rise to the level of the divine.21 This may explain why he urges
her not to yield to the irrational faith of the Christians, “but to seek to identify herself with
the divinity represented by the Intellect.”22 Indeed, Porphyry, just as Plotinus, consider that
women should not be confined to the private sphere and claim that they are able to receive
exactly the same philosophical education as men.23
3 Theodore of Asine and the Philosopher-Queens

If Plotinus and Porphyry remain largely silent on the political role that women could play
in society, we find in Theodore of Asine a broad set of arguments in support of Plato’s
philosopher-queens. This Platonic exegete, who lived in the first half of the fourth century
a.d., was a disciple of Porphyry in Rome and then of Iamblichus in Syria. It is worth noting
that the members of Iamblichus’ philosophical circle were strongly inclined to acknowledge
the equality of sexes and even to place some exceptionally virtuous women above men. It is
485
indeed a feature of Pythagorean heritage that women can play an active role in the philo-
sophical schools, either as students or even as teachers.24 As we shall see, this was the case for
Sosipatra (first quarter of the fourth century), who founded her own philosophical school in
Pergamon. In the following generation, in the middle of the fourth century a.d., Julian – who
as a youth had studied with Priscus, himself a former disciple of Iamblichus – followed the
same path. Indeed, in his speech to Empress Eusebia (written around 356–357, after being
proclaimed Caesar in Gaul by his cousin, Emperor Constantius), he not only praises the politi-
cal capacities of this woman who served as co-ruler alongside her husband but also indicates
that she shares the same ethical virtues as Constantius.25
Returning to Theodore, it must be said that we know very little about him, and the only
fragments that have come down to us have been preserved by Proclus. Theodore produced
several commentaries on Plato which do not seem to have been composed on the model
of lemmatic commentaries, i.e. commentaries aiming at giving a line-by-line account of a
dialogue.26In the ninth essay in his Commentary on Plato’s Republic, Proclus reports five argu-
ments (which do not lack rhetorical power and even humour27) that Theodore had presented
in support of the Platonic philosopher-queens.28
The first argument concerns the nature of virtue: virtues must be shared to the same degree
by men and women, otherwise the city will not be perfect.29 The second argument, which is
anthropological, asserts that the differences between the sexes are cultural and have no natural
foundation, as shown by the example of the Amazons and the Lusitanian women, who are
formidable warriors.30 The third argument, which is theological, is based on an analogy31: if
it is absurd to contest that goddesses are as valorous as gods, then this is also true for human
beings. The fourth argument, which is physiological and teleological, claims that the bodily
organs of men and women are organised so as to be able to perform the same tasks.
If the organs out of which male and female are put together were constructed for the
same purpose in each sex – the eyes for seeing, the ears for hearing, the brain for percep-
tion [...] how can it be otherwise than that the parts of the soul be in common.32
Finally, the last argument alludes to a divine revelation made by an Egyptian priest, according
to which divine souls sometimes enter into female bodies. As soon as we accept that women
can possess a divine soul, nothing prevents them from being inspired and truly virtuous human
beings, as was the case, for example, with Socrates’ teacher, Diotima.33 This last argument may
have played a role in the literary tradition.34 As J. Dillon points out, the fact that a philosophi-
cal argument is used in a poetic work is rare enough to be noted. Indeed, in the poem The Fall
of Troy (ll. 403–476), Quintus of Smyrna, a fourth-century Greek writer, takes up the general
pattern of Theodore’s reasoning, alluding to the anthropological and teleological arguments,
and relying on the latter, from which he draws the opposite conclusion.35
The context is the following: faced with the threat posed by the Achaeans, the women of
Troy decided to take up arms to defend their city. Hippodameia, a young Trojan woman,
exhorts the community, arguing that the gods have given to men and women bodies which
have a similar structure, their organs being arranged for the same purpose. She then evokes
the example of the Amazons. But, in response to this plea, an older and wiser woman,
Theano, turns the fifth argument on its head. If the Amazons are gifted for war, it is not only
because they have always practiced but also because their leader, Penthesilea, is of divine
origin, born of Ares. In other words, it is the divine character of their leader that accounts
for the exceptional case of the Amazons, and thus, this conclusion cannot be transposed to
the Trojan women.
486
When Proclus reports Theodore’s analyses in the ninth essay, he is obliged to reconcile
them with the Platonic arguments in the Republic relating to the weaker nature of women.
On the physical level, even if women have the same organs as men (excluding the sex organs),
their constitution is more fragile.36 On the moral level too, women have a soul which is natu-
rally weaker than that of men, and they are thus more inclined to experience passions.37 In
order to overcome this difficulty, Proclus indicates that if all human souls are homoeidês,38
there are nevertheless degrees39 among things of the same kind. This is why, although both
men and women could be guardians in the kallipolis, men are more able than women to rule
the state.
4 Proclus: Female and Male Souls

As a commentator of Plato, Proclus has to find a way of putting in agreement the views ex-
pressed by Plato on women in the Timaeus and in the Republic. Thus, he is led to develop
a doctrine of the soul quite different from that of Plotinus and Porphyry.40 Indeed, while the
latter consider the soul to be absolutely genderless, Proclus claims that souls are sexed. He ad-
dresses this issue in his Timaeus commentary, when explaining the intermediate character of
the souls: if there is a distinction between male and female deities within the intelligible realm,
there must be intermediate sexed souls that account for the sexual differentiation within the
natural world. It is thus necessary that the souls, which are intermediate substances between
the gods and the animals, reproduce this difference.
Even among the souls themselves, are there not some of these of male appearance and
others of female type? Surely this too is necessary that it should belong among interme-
diate things too. […] From where could the progression of the two (sexes) as far as the
world of the senses come other than through the intermediate substance?41
This distribution reflects an order in which each type of soul depends on a leader god whom
it resembles: female souls thus draw their character from the goddess on which they depend.42
This doctrine is linked to a certain interpretation of the myth of the Phaedrus (252C3–253B8)
but “while Plato claims, in relation to this myth, only that each soul shares a certain kind of
life with its leader god, Proclus counts maleness and femaleness explicitly among the proper-
ties through which souls resemble their deities.”43
But it is not the connection of their souls with a female deity that explains why women
are more easily inclined to passions than men. Their ethical weakness is explained by the
composition of their souls. Indeed, maleness and femaleness correspond respectively to two
metaphysical principles, the Limit (or Sameness) and the Unlimited (or Difference).44 They
enter into the composition of individual souls, which are constituted by the mixture of Same-
ness and Difference.45 These components of the soul’s essence account for the specific motion
which constitutes the thinking activity, according to the circuit of the Same or to the circuit
of the Different: the former leads towards the contemplation of the Forms and the latter to
sense-perception. In female souls, therefore, it is the element of otherness that predominates.
Thus, as D. Baltzly points out, these two cognitive functions are deeply connected “to two
different roles in the administration of providence.”46 Whereas masculine divine principles
lead what is below them towards unity, female divinities exercise a providential activity that is
oriented downwards.47 In Proclus’ system, as in the Neoplatonic tradition as a whole, female
deities (as well as feminine metaphysical entities) are always principles of pluralisation and
multiplication.48 They must develop, through procession, the inner richness of the One, while
487
their masculine counterparts are associated with the power of stability and sameness, that is
to the unifying dynamics of reversion to the One.49
This does not mean that women cannot partake in virtue, but it entails that access to virtue
is more difficult for them than it is for men, since they are obliged to make an additional effort
to turn away from the sensible towards which they are more naturally inclined. This is why
Proclus pays so much attention to the education of women as a kind of counterbalance to the
original weakness of their souls, with the goal of enabling them to behave as virtuously as
men.50 However, it should be noted that even if the different composition of their souls helps
explain why certain souls are more suited than the other to achieve virtuous activities, it does
not always coincide with sexual differentiation in the biological sense. In fact, it may hap-
pen that a male soul enters a female body, and vice-versa. Indeed, our true gender lies not in
our physical body, but rather in our individual soul linked to its astral body.51 Moreover, the
descent of the soul into a female body is not necessarily an indication of punishment or deg-
radation for having led a vicious life in a previous incarnation. Some souls are associated with
a female body in their first descent, as is the case with exceptional women (such as Diotima),
who are able to go through life in such a way as to bring an end to the cycle of reincarnation.52
Through this reading of the last section of the Timaeus, Proclus finds a way to support the
Republic’s claim to the effect that there is a community of virtues between men and women.
Indeed, the assumption that women are always incapable of leading a philosophical life and
that men are more often suited to being virtuous, leads to the claim that virtue is not equally
shared by both men and women. Thus, in order to show that men and women are of the same
species, Proclus concedes some exceptional cases: not all women are doomed to be unable to
rule the state or to attain virtue.
The form of virtue that is in some women is such as to be capable of appearing in males,
with the result that women will preserve the same virtue as that found in men better than
some men do.53
To conclude, on the one hand, Proclus maintains that male and female souls are of the same
species, while on the other hand, he introduces a hierarchical order between them, insofar
as women who lead a philosophical life do not represent the general standard. Significantly,
Proclus reports the case of Diotima, who initiated the young Socrates into the philosophical
life. Diotima was both a priestess and a philosopher, and her approach to teaching Socrates
illustrate how learning philosophy is deeply connected to the initiation to the divine myster-
ies.54 Thus, in late Neoplatonism, Diotima’s legacy became significant, and notably served as
a model for the female theurgists.
5 Proclus and Exceptional Women

Proclus gives the example of Diotima, who was a female philosopher connected to the divine.
But this was also the case for Sosipatra, who lived in the fourth century a.d. and belonged
to the philosophical circle of Iamblichus. Her life and activity are known only through the
testimony of Eunapius of Sardis. Sosipatra came from a wealthy family, but, significantly,
Eunapius does not provide any further information about her family and lineage. Eunapius’
narrative choice may refer to the fact “that she will become the remarkable woman that she
does without the help of human tutelage or nurture.”55 This may explain why, quite mysteri-
ously, Eunapius relates that Sosipatra was educated at the age of five by two Chaldean priests
who revealed to her the mysteries of the Oracles and instructed her in the art of divination and
488
theurgic practices. With this anecdote, Eunapius suggests that Sosipatra was not only a divine
woman, who mastered different kinds of religious practices, but also that she was initiated to
the deeper philosophical doctrines.
When she reached adulthood, she decided to marry the rhetorician Eustathius, whom she
judged to be the only man worthy of her. Indeed, Eusthatius who was one of Iamblichus’ most
accomplished students, belonged to the pagan elite of the empire. With the death of her hus-
band, she settled in Pergamon near Aedesius, who was one of Iamblichus’ closest disciples. It
is in Pergamon that she began to teach philosophy. According to Eunapius, she held lectures
in philosophy in her own house that rivalled those of Aedesius.56 Students attended her classes
in great numbers and “they positively adored and revered the woman’s inspired teaching.”57
Sosipatra’s case illustrates that the influence of the teaching methods of Plotinus and Por-
phyry was perpetuated even in Iamblichean circles. Indeed, Sosipatra’s activity was not limited
to that of an inspired prophetess; she was also a true philosopher. Eunapius reports that in
one of her courses devoted to the descent of the soul into the body, she began by listening to
and then methodically refuting the arguments of her disciples one by one, before giving her
lecture. The discussion of a particular topic before the start of a seminar was characteristic of
Plotinus’ school in Rome.58 This anecdote is the only testimony concerning her teaching activ-
ity. According to H. Marx, it is very likely that she associated Plato’s teaching with that of the
Chaldean Oracles, which contain doctrinal elements related to the descent of the soul into the
body.59 The Chaldean Oracles, which present a set of religious and philosophical doctrines,
express the deep interconnection between religious rituals and philosophical training. This in-
tertwining is one of the most typical features of the post-Iamblichean Neoplatonism.60 Indeed,
while Plotinus and Porphyry both claim that the soul is always linked to the intelligible dur-
ing incarnation, this view is no longer supported by the commentators after Iamblichus. On
this account, the soul, which is fully descended, is not able to reach the highest levels of the
intelligible by itself and needs the help of both philosophy and theurgy. These two paths are
complementary and enable the incarnate soul to reach the divine realm. Notwithstanding the
content of her oral teaching, Sosipatra, like Hypatia after her, did not leave behind any written
works. This can probably be explained by social conventions, since, as G. Clark points out,
“women did not write for general circulation or contribute to debate.”61
It is also possible that Proclus, when he speaks of exceptional women, is thinking of Aidesia
who was her fellow student in the school of Athens. She was known for her great beauty, her
excellent education and her high degree of piety. She was first promised in marriage to Proclus,
but he could not accept the engagement, because the god Apollo had enjoined him to remain
single.62 Thus, she became the wife of Hermias, who attended with Proclus the courses of their
master Syrianus. After the death of her husband, with two toddlers under her care, she took
great heed that they receive the best philosophical training under Proclus. Her son Ammonius
later became the leader of the Neoplatonic school in Alexandria in the early sixth century a.d.
More directly, it is possible that Proclus has in mind the case of his own teacher. Born in
Constantinople into an influential family of lawyers, Proclus began his studies in Alexandria,
where he was taught rhetoric before going to Athens. There, he followed the teaching of
Plutarch, then that of Syrianus.63 In his circle, women occupied a particular position: after
Plutarch’s death, it was his own daughter, Asclepigenia, who initiated Proclus to the mysteries
of theurgy, the science inherited from the Chaldean Oracles. Surpassing philosophy, theurgy
allows the human soul to invoke divine powers.64
For he [Proclus] made use of the conjunctions and supplications of the Chaldeans, to-
gether with their divine and ineffable revolutions. These he acquired for himself, and
489
from Asclepigenia, the daughter of Plutarch, he learned the invocations and the rest of
the apparatus. For she alone preserved the rituals, and the whole process of theurgy,
handed on to her from the great Nestorius by her father.65
Asclepigenia, who was a philosopher and maybe also a priestess, taught ritual practices to
Proclus, and as M. Cambron-Goulet notes, “even though she was educated by her father in a
rather scholarly environment, the ritual and theurgical nature of her expertise is described by
Marinus in ways that allow comparison with Sosipatra.”66 Both practiced higher virtues that
leaned towards the highest levels on the scale of being. Indeed, on the Neoplatonic scale, the
theurgic virtues lie beyond even the theoretical virtues.67 Both develop an activity that attests
to the interconnection between the philosophical and religious realms, as well as to the im-
portance of female-to-male intergenerational transmission within the Neoplatonic tradition.
Whereas Sosipatra was known to have initiated her son Antoninus into divinatory science,
Marinus reports that Asclepigenia, who inherited her science from her grandfather Nestorius,
taught the young Proclus. She was also the grandmother of another inspired woman, Asclepi-
genia (Asclepigenia the Younger), the daughter of her son Archiadias.
6 The Case of Hypatia

However, despite the dominance of a generally sexist framework, it appears that, from the
fourth century a.d. onwards, the Neoplatonic women philosophers were considered lead-
ing authorities in their fields of expertise. The case of Asclepigenia in Athens, who inherited
from her father the charge of preserving the rituals, echoes that of Hypatia in Alexandria68:
Whereas Asclepigenia mastered theurgic practices, Hypatia was an authority in mathematics,
astronomy and philosophy. The case of Hypatia is all the more interesting, because in contrast
to women who followed the path of the priestess-philosopher, like Diotima, she does not place
great emphasis on the practice of theurgy or divination. Thus, it seems that Hypatia stood out
of the influence of the Iamblichean legacy, which was perpetuated within the School of Ath-
ens, and was more familiar with the philosophical trend initiated by Plotinus.
Hypatia was born around 355 c.e.69 in Alexandria, which was one of the most prominent
centres of intellectual and scientific scholarship in the late Roman period. As the daughter
of Theon, the famous mathematician of the Museion, she had prepared since childhood for
an intellectual career. Her training thus differed substantially from the traditional education
that most Alexandrian upper-class daughters received. Her father taught her mathematics and
astronomy, and she became a renowned scholar, famous for having commented, among other
things, Ptolemy’s Almagest, the treatise that established the geocentric model of the universe.
But her field of competence extended to philosophy, which she did not associate with theur-
gic and divinatory practices. She was the head of a pagan philosophical circle composed of
zealous students, but she also gave courses to a broader audience, including Christians like
Synesius, who she taught at her home.70 According to her contemporary, Socrates of Con-
stantinople, “she took over the doctrine (diatribè) of Plato from Plotinus.”71 This remark,
when juxtaposed with Damascius’ claim that “she was endowed with a nobler nature than
her father ” and was “devoted to philosophy”,72 may allude to her specific conception of
the relationship between mathematics and philosophy. Previously, Alexandrian scholars had
tended to subordinate the study of philosophy to that of mathematics.73 It seems that Hypatia
undertook to shift the balance between them, teaching the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle in
such a way as to reveal their deep agreement – and perhaps also their compatibility with Chris-
tian dogma. This renewed focus on Platonic doctrine contributed to reorienting Alexandrian
490
intellectual life and paved the way for the teaching methods of Hierocles and of Ammonius,
son of Hermias.
Hypatia even played a role in Egyptian political life as an adviser on current affairs to the
prefect Orestes, with whom she was close. It was perhaps the disagreements between Orestes
and the Christians that led them, under the leadership of Cyril, bishop of St Mark, to be hos-
tile towards her. But the exact cause of Hypatia’s death (in 415 c.e.), lynched by a Christian
mob when she was an old and widely esteemed woman, is a matter of debate. According to
M. Dzielska,74 it is possible that Cyril, directly or indirectly, was responsible for her public
assassination, since he was frustrated by the leadership that Orestes exercised among the Alex-
andrian elite and jealous of the moral and political influence of Hypatia on the ruling classes.
The philosophical schools in Antiquity offered a privileged space for women – distinct from
the public space of the agora and of the private space of domestic life – where they stood on
an equal footing with men. In the case of the Neoplatonic schools, this equality is grounded
in the tenets of Plato’s philosophy, which urges that the traditional boundaries between male
and female tasks in the city be broken down. From the third to fifth century a.d., one can see
an evolution within the Neoplatonic tradition: on the one hand, Plotinus and his disciples de-
fended a theory of the genderlessness of the soul, where masculinity and femininity appear as
acquired features resulting from the orientation of the activity of the soul; on the other hand,
commentators like Proclus tended to fix the difference between the sexes within the souls
themselves, with the female soul being less able to practice virtue than the male one, thus pro-
jecting a patriarchal pattern onto the metaphysical plane. Despite this evolution and despite
the fact that the practice of philosophy was restricted to certain privileged women (namely
daughters or widows of philosophers), one can see that women played an active role within
the schools. Thus, whereas the Athenian Diadochi, under the influence of Iamblichus, praised
the innate connection of certain women with the divine, in Alexandria the situation was quite
different, as is shown by the case of Hypatia, who combined her philosophical engagement
with scientific scholarship, as well as the teaching of astronomy and mathematics.
Notes
1 However, Plato’s view that men and women could both perform the civil tasks in the kallipolis equally
is matter of debate. Indeed, Plato’s motivation for promoting gender inclusivism when it comes to rul-
ing was assessed in diverse ways in the secondary literature. If the hypothesis that Plato was a feminist
is no longer prominently defended, other interpretations remain open. Thus, C. McKeen (2006) has
shown that allowing women to become guardians does not imply that they are assigned the same du-
ties as men. In other words, while opening the public space to women, Plato would not grant them
the same power or responsibilities as their male counterparts. In the same vein, E. Hulme argues that
Plato’s concern for female education lies beyond the question of differences in gender. Her paper in
this volume argues that Plato’s aim is to optimise resources: “The best possible thing for a state is to
produce the best men and women—presumably assuming a state must have men and women, and
perhaps assuming the maximum number of the best sort would be a good thing. Thus, the plan to
educate the women as guardians will produce a better result than a plan to exclude them.”
2 On this point, see P. Marechal’s chapter in this volume.
3 E. Helmer (2021).
4 Procl. in Remp., I, 236, 10–11.
5 D. Baltzly (2013), 404.
6 On this, see J. Wilberding (2022), 45–46.
7 Plot., Enn. IV. 4 (8).31. 53–54. Transl. A.H. Armstrong.
8 It seems to me that J. Schultz (2021), 202–203, exaggerates in saying, solely on the basis of this quo-
tation, that “Plotinus connects becoming vicious with becoming effeminate.”
9 I. Sluiter and R. Rosen (2003).
10 G. Sissa (2000), 195.
491
11 Plot., Enn. VI. 9 (9).9. 34–39.

12 Plot., Enn. III.5 (50).8.17–19
13 Plot., Enn. III.5 (50).9. 30–35
14 L. Irigaray (1985), 168, claims that Plotinus develops a deeply patriarchal system which supports the
superiority of masculine principles over their feminine counterparts. For a more nuanced reading,
see D. Layne (2022), who opposes Irigaray’s view. Concerning the equivalence between matter and a
feminine principle, see P. Vassilopoulou (2003), 139–141. She calls attention to the fact that Plotinian
embryological theory assigns the female seed an active role in the formation of the embryo. In opposi-
tion to Aristotelian doctrine, Plotinus and subsequent Neoplatonists claimed that the mother is not
only the receptacle of the male seed, but also actively contributes to producing the living being.
15 I. Koch (2017), 78.
16 Porphyry, VP, 13.
17 Porphyry, VP, 9, 1–5. Transl. A.H. Armstrong.
18 Porphyry, Ad Marc., 1, 3.
19 Porphyry, Ad Marc., 1, 6–8.
20 Porphyry. Ad Marc., 33, 8–11.
21 C. Addey (2018), 424.
22 L. Brisson (2022), 77.
23 It should also be noted that Marcella is the widow of one of Porphyry’s friends. We have seen that the
women who frequented Plotinus’ school were essentially widows. As H. Whittaker (2001), 162–164
has indicated, at this stage of the history of the Roman Empire, when Christianity was on the rise,
widows began to organise themselves into communities of women living in the new faith. By high-
lighting the “feminist” dimension of their doctrine, it can be assumed that the Neoplatonists were
also developing a strategy for keeping women in the fold of paganism.
24 H. Marx (2021), 78–79.
25 Julian, Ad Eusebiam 8, 114b. See D. O’Meara (2022), 85–86.
26 For a study of Theodore’s arguments (which may be only partially reported by Proclus), cf. D.
O’Meara (2003), 84–85. On the mode of composition of Theodore’s commentaries, cf. D. Baltzly
(2013). According to him, this could partly explain the fact that Theodore adopts a more radical
position than Proclus, insofar as he does not feel constrained to harmonise different Platonic passages
with each other.
27 J. Dillon (1995), 32.
28 Procl, In Remp., I, 253,1–255, 25.
29 Procl. in Remp., I, 253, 2–14.
30 Procl. in Remp., I, 253, 14–26.
31 Procl, In Remp., I, 253, 26–254, 10.
32 Procl. In Remp., I, 254, 11–18.
33 Procl. In Remp., I, 254, 29–255, 24.
34 J. Dillon (1995), 33.
35 See J. Dillon (1995) (2022).
36 Procl. In Remp., I, 245, 25–246, 3.
37 Procl. In Remp., I, 248, 8–10.
38 Procl. In Remp., I, 236, 10–11.
39 Procl. In Remp., I, 256, 6–10.
40 On this see J. Schultz (2019).
41 Procl., In Tim., III, 283.11–16. Transl. H. Tarrant.
42 Procl., In Tim., III, 293.2–5.
43 J. Schultz (2019).
44 Procl., Th. Plat., IV, 30. On this, see D. Layne (2022).
45 Procl, In Tim., II 258, 11–14.
46 D. Baltzly (2022), 113.
47 Procl, In Tim., II, 242, 17–19.
48 See e.g. Procl, In Tim., I, 220, 4–10; II, 242, 11–14.
49 Whereas D. Baltzly (2013) claims that the Proclean gendered theology projects male superiority onto
the ontological plane, D. Layne (2022) defends a more nuanced reading, stressing the fundamental
complementarity of male and female principles. While the male principles are associated with the
notion of remaining in unity, the female ones are generative powers which express the necessary
overflow of life proceeding from the One.
492
50 Procl. In Remp., I, 247, 5–15.

51 Procl, In Tim., IIII, 284, 1–12; 293, 19–24. On this, see S. Fortier (2018), 320–321.
52 Procl, In Tim., IIII, 281, 21–30.
53 Procl, In Remp., I, 248, 14–16. Transl. D. Baltzly.
54 For an in-depth analysis of this issue, see C. Addey’s chapter in this volume.
55 S. Iles Johnston (2014), 101.
56 On the exceptional case of Sosipatra, who was co-ruler of the philosophical school of Pergamon,
together with Aedesius, cf. H. Marx (2021), 73–89.
57 Eunapius, Lives, VI, 80.
58 On the links between the teaching of Sosipatra and that of Plotinus, cf. R. Chiaradonna (2019), 76–78.
59 H. Marx (2021), 87–89.
60 On this point, see A. Michalewski (2017).
61 G. Clark (1993), 133–134.
62 Damascius, The Philosophical History, 56. Transl. P. Athanassiadi.
63 Marinus, The Life of Proclus, 28.
64 See M. Whaite (1987), 201–202.
65 Marinus, Life of Proclus, 28. Transl. M. Edwards.
66 M. Cambron-Goulet-F.J. Côté-Rémy (2021), 191.
67 Marinus, Life of Proclus, 28
68 M. E Whaite (1987), 8–9.
69 On the dates of Hypatia, see M Dzielska (1995).
70 This is how M. Dzielska (1995), 56–57, understands Damascius’ formulation (The Philosophical
History, 43), according to which she “publicly” (dèmôsià) interpreted the works of Plato and Aris-
totle. It is very unlikely that this sentence indicates that Hypatia held a public chair in Alexandria. É.
Évrard (1977) understood Hypatia to have given public lectures in the street, which seems unbecom-
ing of a person of her rank.
71 Socr. Hist. eccl., 7.15.4–5. See S. Gerz (2020), 137.
72 Damascius, The Philosophical History, 43A.
73 See E. J. Watts (2017), 34–35.
74 M. Dzielska (1995), 83–100. According to M. Haase (2020), who provides an in-depth analysis of
Socrates’ testimony, Hypatia’s murder could be seen as the result of an ad hoc decision on the con-
spirators’ part.
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33
THE SCHOOL OF HYPATIA
AND THE PROBLEM
OF THE GENDERED SOUL
Aistė Čelkytė
It would be hardly an exaggeration to say that Hypatia is the most famous woman philosopher
in antiquity and one of the more widely recognizable ancient philosophers in general. As the
notoriety of her death turned the person into a legend, Hypatia became a stand-in figure in
various, and often conflicting, discourses and narratives. For example, in the fierce argument
between John Toland and Thomas Lewis in the eighteenth century, the former extolled Hy-
patia in order to criticize the church clergy, while the latter, in his attempt to refute Toland’s
criticisms of the church, chose to do so by attacking the figure of Hypatia.1 The represen-
tations of Hypatia as a philosopher are just as variegated as the representations of her as
a historical figure. By some she is lauded as a trailblazer and one of the most outstanding
philosophers and/or mathematicians of her day, by others as someone hopelessly behind the
contemporary innovations.2 The reason for such diversity of readings is simply the lack of
direct extant sources: hardly any actual works of Hypatia survive. Some of her mathemati-
cal writing is extant,3 but no sources ascribe to her directly any specific philosophical views.
Often, the main source for conjecturing Hypatia’s views are anecdotes, but, as Edward Watts
points out, these come from late sources, both temporally and culturally removed from Hy-
patia’s lifetime.4 A feasible reconstruction of Hypatia’s views requires evidence from her im-
mediate environment. In this chapter, I argue that the lack of evidence is not quite so dire
and I explore the methods by which the views that circulated within Hypatia’s school can be
reconstructed.5 These methods are illustrated by the case study, the problem of the gendered
soul, which shows what the reconstruction of these views might look like.
1 Methodology
Hypatia is not the only philosopher from antiquity whose views are not extant. The same is
true of, for example, Socrates and Pyrrho; neither of whom wrote any treatises. Many others
have only fragmentary evidence, sometimes no more than a few lines of text. Yet Socrates’
thought is studied extensively and Pyrrho, although a significantly less prominent figure, also
has several works dedicated to the study of his thought and contribution to philosophy.6 Al-
though neither Socrates nor Pyrrho wrote any treatises themselves, their thought is studied via
the works of their pupils. Hypatia had a large and thriving school, and there is no reason why
her thought could not be studied through the works of her pupils too.
495 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-37

Aistė Čelkytė
One might object that the views circulating in the school are not necessarily identical to
the views of the head of the school. While the distinction between the head of the school and
the pupils can be pertinent in some cases, this is not always so and this potential pitfall can be
taken into account quite easily. The ground for such an optimistic view is the possible scope
of disagreements. While the members of the same school can and often do disagree on certain
points, the degree of their differences is quite small compared to the differences with other
schools. For example, while the Stoic Cleanthes and Chrysippus had slightly different takes
on the post-mortal existence of the soul, they both agreed that the soul survives the separa-
tion of body,7 unlike their rivals the Epicureans.8 Even in more significant divergences, certain
unifying features of the school remain; for example, although Aristo of Chios had a radical
interpretation of the central Stoic tenet concerning the so-called indifferents,9 the divergence
from mainstream Stoicism was a matter of how to interpret this tenet, not a subscription to
an entirely different view.10 Thus, as long as the focus of the study is the key commitments
and central tenets, the differences between individual members can be acknowledged without
threatening the viability of the project in general. The current chapter is dedicated to one such
general commitment and, as I will argue in more detail below, the philosophical problem will
concern both Hypatia herself and her pupils equally, thus allowing us to look for a unified
position of the school as a whole.
In addition to the sources that come directly from the school, I will also make use of sup-
porting sources. In order to differentiate the significance and the reliability of the sources,
I will use a fourfold division of the sources denoted as follows:
Type A: sources from the school;

Type B: philosophical tradition and affiliation of Hypatia’s school11;
Type C: the philosophical rivals, both historic and roughly contemporary; and
Type D: corroborating sources.
This division represents the connection with the school (and, thus, the reliability) of the
sources in a descending way. Type A sources come from the school and therefore are directly
representative of the views of the school. Types B and C represent the background against
which the views of Hypatia’s school ought to be understood. There is, however, a significant
different between the two categories: while the Type B sources allow us to contextualize the
views coming from the school (primarily by determining what influenced them and how these
views differ from the tradition), Type C sources not only supply information about the polemi-
cal context but could also be potential sources of new fragments.
Polemical sources have proved to be some of the richest sources for reconstructing the
views of Hellenistic schools (for example, the Stoics), and they could be equally informative
with respect to Hypatia’s school. Polemical sources have to be handled with care and the pos-
sible critical (mis)representations have to be taken into account, but these problems can be
addressed by analysing Type C sources against the background of the A-type sources, thus
ensuring that the readings can be corroborated by the texts coming from the school itself.
Finally, the Type D sources are corroborating sources, primarily anecdotes and the accounts
of the views of the school coming from significantly later sources. These texts are often quite
far removed from the school itself but can nonetheless be useful for making comparisons or
as corroborating evidence.
When combined together, all these types of sources present a multi-faceted and reliable
reconstruction of the views of the school. In this chapter, I will use this methodology to re-
construct the view concerning the gendered soul. When citing sources, the letter in brackets
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School of Hypatia and Problem of the Gendered Soul
denotes the type of source, while the number is used simply to distinguish between different
passages of the same type.
2 The Case Study: The Problem of the Gendered Soul

The problem, which, for the sake of this chapter, I call the problem of the gendered soul,
is a well-known issue in Platonism post-Plato. It arises from a seeming inconsistency in the
dialogues. In the Meno (73A) and the Republic (451C–457B), gender is said to be irrelevant
to virtue.12 In the Timaeus, meanwhile, people are said to be born women owing to moral
failures in their previous lives (42B–C).13 This inconsistency naturally leads to the question
of whether there is any connection between the gender and the moral standing of the soul or
not; in other words, whether the souls are gendered.14 ‘Gendering’ is not meant in the sense
that souls themselves are assigned female or male properties; instead, it can be understood as a
moral indexing of the soul. Souls that exhibited one set of properties are indexed as ‘male’ and
are matched with a male body, while souls that exhibit the other set of properties are indexed
as ‘female’ and are matched with a respective body.
The inconsistency in the dialogues, which raises the problem of the gendered soul, is dis-
cussed extensively in the Platonist tradition. The Neoplatonists took different positions on this
matter. For example, Dirk Baltzly showed how Theodore of Asine and Proclus adopted the
opposite positions in regard to this problem.15 A very similar debate also took place outside
Platonism: nearly the same disagreement emerges in the different stances adopted by the Peri-
patetics and the Stoics.16 This debate was, of course, not entirely divorced from Plato and the
influence of Platonic texts.17 Nevertheless, it is worth noting that these schools approach the
issue as a philosophical problem in general, not as a matter of interpreting Platonic dialogues,
like later Platonists do. At the same time, later Platonists might have been influenced by the
way in which the Peripatos and the Stoa approached this problem,18 and therefore, it is worth
taking into account this layer of the tradition as well.
Thus, the problem of the gendered soul is a fairly substantial matter of contention by the
time Hypatia’s school was active, not only because of the disagreement in the Platonic texts
but also owing to the attendant tradition that developed post-Plato. The problem acquires a
greater urgency when considered by the school whose head was a woman. The claims in the
Timaeus are especially problematic. It would have been difficult for Hypatia to assume author-
ity and teach, if she maintained that being born as a woman is a result of moral failures in a
previous life. More pertinently for the purposes of this chapter, the very same problem must
have arisen for her pupils. If they subscribed to the view that there is a causal link between
moral failure and being in a female body, why would they study under the female philoso-
pher? This particular issue, therefore, is a fairly straightforward case of the unified commit-
ment, that is, the stance that we can reasonably expect to be adopted by all the members of
the school with no significant divergences.
Before delving into the sources, it is important to address one final methodological is-
sue. Given the problems springing from claims made in the Timaeus for the members of the
school, it might seem only natural to assume that they would adopt the position of the Re-
public and the Meno instead. However, it would be poor scholarly practice to start with the
conclusion that seems fitting rather than suspending expectations and seeing what conclusion
is revealed by the evidence. It is worth bearing in mind that what someone in Hypatia’s posi-
tion might have found acceptable/unacceptable regarding gender can be very different from
what a contemporary person might think. Furthermore, the school could have reconciled the
Timaen views with the fact that the head of the school was a woman by arguing that she is an
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Aistė Čelkytė
exception, a female with a male mind. For this reason, it is best to avoid starting with any as-
sumptions that pose a risk of imposing bias onto this already complex material. This concern
is especially pertinent in the case of Hypatia who has been used by various writers as a mouth-
piece or a symbol for a wide variety of ideas and ideologies, as noted in the introduction. It is
perhaps time to try and find the actual views of Hypatia and her school, whatever they may be.
Finally, the late antique philosophical traditions are notorious for syncretizing and find-
ing reconciliation between even fundamentally different positions.19 It would be reasonable
not to assume that this school eschewed the position of one dialogue in favour of another.
The ultimate position might very well be a combination of elements from both the Republic/
the Meno and the Timaen view. In the remainder of the chapter, I present a discussion of the
central pieces of evidence, organized in accordance with the scheme explained above, and sug-
gest some possible reading of the material pertinent to the question of how the members of
Hypatia’s school tackled the problem of the gendered soul.
3 The Reconstruction
The key starting point to reconstructing how Hypatia’s school tackled the problem of the
gendered soul is the account of the process by means of which the souls are assigned to bod-
ies. There is nothing resembling the myth of Er in the fragments from Hypatia’s school, but
Synesius of Cyrene, probably the most prolific of Hypatia’s pupils, supplies us with some
pertinent information in his writings. He makes consistent claims about the generation of
humans as ensouled bodies in several different works within his corpus, which suggests that
his claims are underpinned by a single established theory. A section of Hymn 9 shows the
process of emanation by means of which the human souls come to inhabit the material realm
as follows:
(A1) ὁ καταιβάτας ἐς ὕλαν νόος ἄφθιτος, τοκήων θεοκοιράνων ἀπορρώξ, ὀλίγα μέν, ἀλλ’
ἐκείνων. ὅλος οὗτος εἷς τε πάντῃ, ὅλος εἰς ὅλον δεδυκώς, κύτος οὐρανῶν ἑλίσσει· τὸ δ’ ὅλον
τοῦτο φυλάσσων νενεμημέναισι μορφαῖς μεμερισμένος παρέστη, ὁ μὲν ἀστέρων διφρείαις,
ὁ δ’ ἐς ἀγγέλων χορείας· ὁ δὲ καὶ ῥέποντι δεσμῷ χθονίαν εὕρετο μορφάν· ἀπὸ δ’ ἐστάθη
τοκήων, δνοφερὰν ἤρυσε λάθαν, ἀλαωποῖσι μερίμναις χθόνα θαυμάσας ἀτερπῆ, θεὸς ἐς θνητὰ
δεδορκώς. Ἔνι μάν, ἔνι τι φέγγος κεκαλυμμέναισι γλήναις· ἔνι καὶ δεῦρο πεσόντων ἀναγώγιός
τις ἀλκά, ὅτε κυμάτων φυγόντες βιοτησίων, ἀκηδεῖς ἁγίας ἔστειλαν οἴμους πρὸς ἀνάκτορον
τοκῆος.
The undecaying Mind, descending to matter, broken off from the divinely ruling
begetters, is small but a part of them. This one whole universal mind, this whole dif-
fused into the whole, turns the vault of the heavens, and keeping guard upon this very
whole is ever present, parted into shapes diverse. The one is the convoying of stars,
another turns to the dances of angels, yet another has found an earthly form by a bond
descending; severed from its parentage, it has drunk dark oblivion and wondered, in
its blind tormenting cares, at the joyless earth, a god looking at mortal things. There
is still some light in its veiled eyes, there is some courage even in those who have fallen
here below, that summons them above, what time that, fleeing from out of the waves of
mortal life, they enter free from the case on the sacred paths that lead to the palace of
their begetter.20
Individual minds are offshoots of the universal mind that end up taking an earthly form as a
part of the process of generation. Divine generation produces different forms, including the
498
earthly ones. The purpose of this generation is explained in a number of claims that describe
human souls as handmaidens/servants/hirelings, as follows:
(A2.a.) σὺ γὰρ ἐν κόσμῳκατέθου ψυχάν, διὰ δὲ ψυχᾶς ἐν σώματι νοῦν ἔσπειρας, ἄναξ. Τὰν
σὰν κούραν ἐλέαιρε, μάκαρ. Κατέβαν ἀπὸ σοῦ χθονὶ θητεῦσαι, ἀντὶ δὲ θήσσας γενόμαν δούλα·
ὕλα με μάγοις ἐπέδησε τέχναις.
For you placed down the soul in the cosmos, and through soul sowed mind in the
body, Lord. Take pity on thine handmaiden, Blessed One. I descended from you to be a
servant of earth, but instead of living as a hireling, I became a bondslave. Matter fettered
me with magic arts.21
And as follows:
(A2.b.) θῆσσα γὰρ κατιοῦσα τὸν πρῶτον βίον ἐθελοντὴς ἀντὶ τοῦ θητεῦσαι δουλεύει·
For, descending into the first life voluntarily as a maid of service, this soul, instead of
serving, becomes enslaved.22
The association of some forms of the mind with matter is a part of the cosmic generation plan;
the souls, then, are servants because they enable the presence of the mind in the matter. To
put it simply, the souls potentially make the material world better by acting as ‘agents’ of the
divine mind.
The descent of the souls has not only cosmological but also ethical consequences. Having
descended to the earth with this purpose, the souls can become enslaved by the matter and
lead a life of misery, unless they remember their purpose and turn their focus towards lofty
matters. In some instances, Synesius laments the misery of his own and others, describing the
matter as ensnaring, but also regularly noting that turning one’s gaze away from the matter
and towards the divine leads out of this misery,23 with philosophy as the main guide.24
These claims paint human fate as a uniform challenge. There is one passage, however,
which addresses the fact that humans are born into different material circumstances, regard-
less of the seeming similarity of their ontological status from the cosmological perspective. In
On Providence, Synesius writes that specific circumstances in which humans find themselves
are like wearing a mask in a theatre as follows:
(A3) ἅπας γὰρ βίος ἀρετῆς ὕλη. Καθάπερ ἐπὶ σκηνῆς ὁρῶμεν τοὺς τῆς τραγῳδίας ὑποκριτάς·
ὅστις καλῶς ἐξήσκησε τὴν φωνήν, ὁμοίως ὑποκρινεῖται τόν τε Κρέοντα καὶ τὸν Τήλεφον,
καὶ οὐδὲν θἀλουργῆ τῶν ῥακίων διοίσει πρὸς τὸ μέγα καὶ καλὸν ἐμβοῆσαι καὶ καταλαβεῖν
ἠχοῖ τοῦ μέλους τὸ θέατρον· ἀλλὰ καὶ τὴν θεράπαιναν καὶ τὴν δέσποιναν μετὰ τῆς αὐτῆς
ἐπιδείξεται μουσικῆς, καὶ ὅ τι ἂν περιθῆται προσωπεῖον, τὸ καλῶς αὐτὸν ὁ χορηγὸς τοῦ
δράματος ἀπαιτεῖ· οὕτως ἡμῖν θεὸς καὶ τύχη περιτίθησιν ὥσπερ προσωπεῖα τοὺς βίους ἐν
τῷ μεγάλῳ τοῦ κόσμου δράματι, καὶ οὐδέν τι μᾶλλον ἕτερος ἑτέρου βίος βελτίων ἢ χείρων,
χρῆται δὲ ὡς ἕκαστος δύναται. Δύναται δὲ ὁ σπουδαῖος ἁπανταχοῦ καλῶς διαγίνεσθαι, κἂν
τὸν πτωχὸν κἂν τὸν μόναρχον ὑποκρίνηται· διοίσεται δὲ οὐδὲν περὶ τοῦ προσωπείου. ἐπεὶ καὶ
ὁ τραγῳδὸς γελοῖος ἂν γένοιτο, τὸ μὲν φεύγων, τὸ δὲ αἱρούμενος· καὶ γὰρ ἐν τῷ τῆς γραὸς
εὐδοκιμῶν, στεφανοῦταί τε καὶ κηρύττεται, καὶ ἐν τῷ τοῦ βασιλέως ἀσχημονῶν, κλώζεται
καὶ συρίττεται, ἔστι δὲ ὅπῃ καὶ λίθοις βάλλεται. βίος γὰρ οὐδεὶς οἰκεῖος ἡμῶν, ἀλλοτρίους
δὲ ἔξωθεν περικείμεθα· ἡμεῖς δὲ τὸ χρώμενον ἔνδοθεν ἀμείνους καὶ χείρους αὐτοὶ ποιοῦντές
τε καὶ δεικνύντες, ἀγωνισταὶ ζώντων δραμάτων. ταῦτ’ ἄρα ὥσπερ ἐσθῆτας ἔστιν αὐτοὺς
ἀμφιέσασθαι καὶ μεταμφιέσασθαι.
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For every life is material for virtue; just as with the tragic actors whom we see on the
stage, whosoever has trained his voice well, will likewise take the parts of Creon and
Telephus, and in no way the purple of the robes will make a difference to the greatness
and the nobility of his declamation or to his success in bringing down the house by the
sound of his strains. He will portray the handmaiden and her mistress alike with the
same learnedness, and whatever mask he puts on, the manager of the theatre demands
of him that he use it aright. In a like manner God and Fortune bestow upon us lives,
as it were masks in the great drama of the universe, and no better or worse is one life
than another; but each man makes such use of it as best he may. The earnest man can
everywhere succeed in life, whether he act the pauper or king. As to the mask, it makes
no difference. Indeed the tragic actor who shirked from one mask and preferred another
would become ridiculous. Even in the role of the old woman, if he shines in his art, he
is crowned and heralded abroad, while if he disgraces himself in the role of a king, he is
hooted and hissed, and on occasion is even stoned. For no life is properly our own, but
are we are dressed externally with the lives of others, and we, the better and the worse of
us when we act and reveal the inner voice, are actors of living drama. These lives, then,
we have only to put on and take off, as garments.25
The very same motif is found in Epictetus (B1).26 Although Epictetus’ point is didactic/advi-
sory in nature, and Synesius’ point is descriptive, they both arrive at the same striking point:
material circumstances are like garments, any soul can use any social status, circumstance or
gender.
Synesius and Epictetus are separated by around 300 years, and it is likely that the mask
motif is not a result of Synesius’ reading the texts of Epictetus in isolation. The Stoic views of
freedom and personal responsibility played an important role in shaping the views on Ploti-
nus, the only philosopher who is named as an influence on the school of Hypatia in the extant
sources. Socrates Scholasticus27 gives the following brief biography of Hypatia:
(D1) Ἦν τις γυνὴ ἐν τῇ Ἀλεξανδρείᾳ τοὔνομα Ὑπατία. Αὕτη Θέωνος μὲν τοῦ φιλοσόφου
θυγάτηρ ἦν, ἐπὶ τοσοῦτο δὲ προὔβη παιδείας, ὡς ὑπερακοντίσαι τοὺς κατ’ αὐτὴν φιλοσόφους,
τὴν δὲ Πλατωνικὴν ἀπὸ Πλωτίνου καταγομένην διατριβὴν διαδέξασθαι καὶ πάντα τὰ φιλόσοφα
μαθήματα τοῖς βουλομένοις ἐκτίθεσθαι.
There was a woman in Alexandria by the name of Hypatia. She was the daughter of
Theon the philosopher, and she exceeded in her learning so much as to outdo the phi-
losophers of her time. She succeeded in leading the Platonic school of thought descended
from Plotinus, and she delivered all the philosophical teaching to those who wishes to
hear them.28
As Ursula Coope has recently shown, Plotinus adapted the Stoic views to his own metaphys-
ics, maintaining that only the undescended soul, the ever-contemplating part of us, is properly
free. Those who do not cultivate this part of themselves are subjected to the domination of the
bodily desires.29 There is a remarkable resemblance between the Plotinian account and the key
claims in Synesius’ passage.
This point complements the passages of Synesius discussing the uniform task of all the
souls descending to the material world. The soul assignments, just by themselves, do not
carry moral significance. It seems only natural to draw the conclusion, in line with Epictetus’
point, that regardless of whether a person is born a man or a woman, one ought to practice
virtue the best one can in the given circumstances. Material circumstances of the existence
500
have no impact on the person as a moral agent. It is worth noting that it could be true that
souls bear full moral responsibility for their actions once born into a body, while at the same
time maintaining that the body is predetermined by the actions of the previous lifetime. But
the argument is at pains to portray these role assignments as arbitrary (καὶ οὐδέν τι μᾶλλον
ἕτερος ἑτέρου βίος βελτίων ἢ χείρων). It is neither a punishment/reward nor is it predetermined
by moral factors in any other way. Ultimately, the passage shows that the practice of virtue is
entirely divorced from the material circumstances.
The evidence in Synesius suggests that the life in the realm of becoming starts, from the
moral point of view, as a tabula rasa. The actions and dispositions of the person determine
the kind of life a person will have posthumously. To some extent, this account seems to
be a reverse of the Platonic picture: whereas in the Timaeus, life in the material world is a
consequence of prenatal choices and dispositions, in Synesius, the life in the material world is
antecedent. It is the actions a person takes during this life that determine the kind of existence
the soul will have post-mortem.
4 The Christian Concern

One possible concern about Synesius’ report is the Christian influence. He was a Christian and
his writing might be shaped more by religious beliefs (and the philosophical views consistent
with those beliefs) rather than his philosophical affiliations with Hypatia’s school. I would
argue that this is not a significant concern for two reasons. First, Hypatia had many Chris-
tian students30; so we know that the school’s curriculum must have been compatible enough
with Christianity. The compatibility between Platonism and Christianity, especially in the late
antique period, was not unusual.31 Synesius’ passages discussed so far show how such conflu-
ence is possible. His account of the ascent of the virtuous soul could easily be a reading of the
Timaeus, glossing over the claims about the gender and previous lives in general. After all,
the Timaeus contains the claim that the kind of life one leads results in posthumous conse-
quences: while unjust souls are reincarnated, the virtuous ones return to their respective stars
(42B–C). Reincarnation is a potential problem for a Christian text, but Synesius’ claims about
the entrapment of matter could very well be an adaptation and reinterpretation of this notion.
Whether the souls are reincarnated or trapped by matter, the result is that they are forced to
stay in the material realm.
Second, it is also worth noting that Synesius’ passages discussed so far show clearly recog-
nizable Platonist motifs, including such highly philosophical notions as emanation (A2.a). Syn-
esius was evidently comfortable enough with such views; if he had been intent on ‘editing’ out
anything not Christian, we surely would not find any references to such concepts as emanation.
Ultimately, in the ancient debate concerning the question of whether virtues are gendered,
regardless of whether we frame it as a conflict in the Platonic dialogues or as a debate between
the Stoics and the Peripatetics, the texts coming from Hypatia’s school side with the former.
There seems to be a strong focus on the nature of the human as a variegated being, both in the
body and in the soul, with a strong encouragement to focus on the most lofty part of the soul,
the mind, which has connection to the higher levels of the cosmos. The circumstances in which
humans find themselves are like theatre masks, a motif clearly originating from Stoic philoso-
phy. It is perhaps not surprising to find that a school led by a woman sided with the part of
the tradition that advocated for an egalitarian understanding of moral agency. At the same
time, it is not the case that the school eschewed gendered language altogether. Some A-type
passages employ the gendered language. These texts are helpful in adding more nuance to our
understanding of the general stance of the school.
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5 The Gendered Language

Although the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ do not occur very frequently in Synesius’ texts, the
occasions on which they are used deserve a closer look. In the allegorical treatise De Regno,
a short passage invokes a number of philosophical motives, comparing the human being with
the multi-headed hydra as follows:
(A4) καὶ ἐσμὲν ὕδρας, οἶμαι, θηρίον ἀτοπώτερον καὶ μᾶλλόν τι πολυκέφαλον. οὐ γὰρ ταὐτῷ
δήπου νοοῦμεν καὶ ὀρεγόμεθα καὶ λυπούμεθα, οὐδὲ ταὐτῷ καὶ θυμούμεθα, οὐδὲ ὅθεν ἡδόμεθα
καὶ φοβούμεθα. ἀλλ’ ὁρᾷς ὡς ἔνι μὲν ἄρρεν ἐν τούτοις, ἔνι δὲ θῆλυ, καὶ θαρραλέον τε καὶ
δειλόν, ἔνι δὲ τὰ παντοδαπῶς ἀντικείμενα, ἔνι δέ τις ἡ μέση διὰ πάντων φύσις, ἣν νοῦν
καλοῦμεν, ὃν ἀξιῶ βασιλεύειν ἐν τῇ τοῦ βασιλέως ψυχῇ τὴν ὀχλοκρατίαν τε καὶ δημοκρατίαν
τῶν παθῶν καταλύσαντα.
I think we are a beast stranger than the hydra and even more multi-headed. For, of
course, we do not think and yearn and feel pain with the same part, nor do we feel anger
with the same part, nor do we feel pleasure and fear from the same source. But you will
see that there is a male element in them on the one hand, and the female element on the
other, and also bravery and cowardice, and there are opposites of all sorts, and there is
some medial nature in all, which we call mind.32
The claim is motivated by pointing out that humans have different parts for different purposes.
The various parts are represented by their respective activities. The text looks like a long list
of the variety of activities/affections, but the negation at the beginning of each clause divides
these parts responsible for the activities into three categories: the parts with which we think
(νοοῦμεν), desire (ὀρεγόμεθα) or suffer distress (λυπούμεθα); the parts with which we feel anger
(θυμούμεθα); and the parts with which (ὅθεν) we feel pleasure (ἡδόμεθα) and fear (φοβούμεθα).
Thus divided, the activities reflect the Platonic33 tripartition of the souls into the desidera-
tive, the spirited and the rational. The passage vaguely alludes to the organs in which these
souls are located. It is worth noting that although Plato does mention regions of the seat of
the soul, the later tradition, especially such writers as Galen of Pergamum,34 interpreted these
passages as referring to specific organs. The medical interpretation of Plato extolled by Galen
became increasingly influential after the death of the latter, and it gradually grew to be ubiq-
uitous in late antiquity, including the texts of the Neoplatonists.35
More pertinently to the purposes of this chapter, the passage also presents the further
division of all the organs into male and female aspects, bravery and cowardice and many op-
posites of every sort (τὰ παντοδαπῶς ἀντικείμενα). This sentence can be read in two different
ways, with different consequences for how the gender is understood. First, it would be pos-
sible to read the two pairs as being parallel: male–female corresponds to bravery–cowardice.
According to this reading, the text leans into the long tradition associating femininity with
the lack of courage.36 Such a reading is possible, especially given that it is a prominent motif
in the existing tradition, however, the comment at the end of the sentence about the opposites
of every sort suggests an alternative reading. This comment puts an emphasis on the contrast
between the properties rather than on the parallelism between the contrasting pairs. The male
and the female are just contrasting properties, inherent in the parts of a single human being.37
The pairs of opposites seem to be a reference to the so-called Pythagorean pairs, noted in
Aristotle’s Metaphysics.38 Aristotle’s list also has male and female as one of the pairs, as well as
motion and rest, square and oblong, good and evil. In the context of Synesius’ work, the motif
is properly identified as Neopythagorean, rather than Pythagorean, as the former tradition
502
became a prominent strand of Platonism from the first-century CE onwards.39 It is also an

important motif in Plotinus. In Ennead 2, for example, the mind is said to find the duality of
the composite body as follows:
(B2) οὐδέποτε γὰρ ἄνευ μορφῆς, ἀλλ’ ἀεὶ ὅλον σῶμα, σύνθετον μὴν ὅμως. Καὶ νοῦς εὑρίσκει
τὸ διττόν.
For neither is sensible matter ever without a shape; rather, there is always a whole
body – and, surely, a composite one no less. Intellect finds out the duality of the com-
posite body.40
Synesius’ passage (A4) makes a strikingly similar point: the mind running through the indi-
vidual unifies the opposing elements, also described as male and female. The similarities and
the potential differences between the broader metaphysical commitments manifest in these
passages deserve a detailed analysis which is outside the scope of the current chapter. For
current purposes, it suffices to note that the Plotinian background, especially the dyad and its
role in variegating matter with form,41 is pertinent for unpacking the claims in passage (A4).
Gender is thus used as an ontological binary: one of the many binaries that form the varie-
gated nature of the material world. This reading is corroborated by the way the binary is used
in the passages addressing theological matters. In his Hymns, Synesius uses gendered language
more than once to refer to the divine creator. For example, by stating the following: (A5) ‘You
are the Father, and you are the Mother, you are the Male, and you are the Female, and you are
Voice, and you are Silence, the nature of the fruitful nature’ (σὺ πατήρ, σὺ δ’ ἐσσὶ μάτηρ, σὺ μὲν
ἄρρην, σὺ δὲ θῆλυς, σὺ δὲ φωνά, σὺ δὲ σιγά, φύσεως φύσις γονοῦσσα).42 These descriptions can be
read on a number of levels. From a theological point of view, they show God as the sole source
of all creation. From a metaphysical point of view, the descriptions invoke the Neoplatonist
account of the generation of plurality from the unity and, less directly, the derivation of the
Infinite Dyad from the One.43 God or the One is the sole source all the variegated forms in
existence, underscored by the fact that it is the source of the opposites. Both the theological
and metaphysical perspectives go hand in hand.44
All in all, the passages with gendered language point towards the gender, and especially the
gender binary, being used for the sake of denoting variegation. It is especially striking that this
variegation takes place not only at the cosmic level but also at the level of a single human be-
ing, as stated in (A4). There is also no suggestion of adopting the ‘exceptional female’ stance,
in the sense of making Hypatia an exception to the rule that women’s bodies generally are
indications of moral failings. Such an argument might have been made in non-extant sources,
but it is worth noting that it would not be consistent with the approach to gender that we
find in the sources discussed here. All the evidence seems to point towards the gender being
treated as an accidental, rather than an essential feature. The accessibility to virtue and the
responsibility for moral development is clearly placed in every individual’s power, regardless
of their gender or other material circumstances. In the context of Platonic dialogues, this con-
clusion aligns the stance the school of Hypatia with the Republic and the Meno rather than
the Timaeus; in the context of the Greek philosophical tradition, with the Stoics rather than
the Peripatetics.
6 The Polemics
This stance puts the school at odds with those Neoplatonists who ended up on the other
side of the debate, e.g. Proclus.45 Neither Hypatia nor her school are mentioned directly by
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Aistė Čelkytė
the rival Athenian Neoplatonists, although we can speculate about some indirect references.
The main clue is the Stoicising motifs which play a fairly prominent role in the Type A pas-
sages discussed so far. While discussing the problem of the gendered soul in his commentary
on Plato’s Republic, Proclus describes the positions in the debate as follows: those in Peripatos
claim that women and men share the form but differ in virtue, and those in the Stoa claim that
women and men share virtues but differ in form as follows:
(C1) …τῶν μὲν ἀπὸ τῆς στοᾶς κατ’ εἶδος διαφέρειν οἰομένων τὸ θῆλυ καὶ τὸ ἄρρεν, ἀμφοῖν
δὲ ὅμως εἶναι τὴν αὐτὴν ἀρετήν, τῶν δὲ ἐκ τοῦ περιπάτου κατ’ εἶδος μὲν εἶναι τὰ αὐτά, τὰς δὲ
ἀρετὰς αὐτῶν εἶναι μὴ τὰς αὐτάς·
The Stoics maintain that the female and the male differ by form, but the virtue is the
same in both equally; meanwhile the Peripatetics maintain that they are the same by
form, but their virtues are not the same.46
It has been pointed out by Dirk Baltzly that the description of the Stoic position is odd: it
is certainly true that the Stoics maintain that all the virtues are the same, but the second
half of the claim cannot be corroborated. It is presumably this discrepancy with the other
reports of the Stoic view that led von Armin to omit this passage from his collection of the
Stoic fragments. Baltzly himself suggests that ‘Proclus just wants a label for an opponent, and
finding that the Stoics satisfy half the bill, he assigns them the whole of it’.47
The Stoicising motifs found in the views of Hypatia’s school raise the possibility that the
opponent in question could be a member or members of this school. Such a reading requires
evidence from Hypatia’s school for the two-partite claim recorded by Proclus: first, that both
genders have the same virtues and, second, that the two genders have different ‘forms’. The
first part of the claim can be supported by the evidence discussed so far; the position adopted
by Hypatia’s school maintains that external circumstances are divorced from a person’s moral
standing per se. In the case of the second part of the claim, some evidence can be found in the
terminology in the Type A passages.
The term used by Proclus, eidos, refers to forms immanent in matter.48 Synesius uses this
word by way of a standard terminology too, for example, when writing in (A2) the follow-
ing: ‘Thus what was postulated by us will be demonstrated: that the soul holds the forms of
things that come into being’ (οὕτως ἂν ἀποδεδειγμένον εἴη τὸ ὑφ’ ἡμῶν ἀξιούμενον, ὅτι τὰ εἴδη
τῶν γινομένων ἔχει ψυχή·).49 As shown in the discussion of the pairs of opposites, the male and
the female are one of the contraries produced by the One. They are, thus, the forms. As eidos
is the form manifest in matter, then the same is true of the eidē of male and female.
The key point concerning this kind of forms, as emphasized in the Hymns, is that both are
derived from the One and ought to strive to come back to the One. Metaphysically speaking,
gender as it is manifest in the material realm is the result of the variegation of matter into
opposites; the important point here is that there is a variegation not what kind of variegation it
is. Thus, there is also notable parallelism between the cosmological and individual levels in Syn-
esius’ texts. The Mind running through the body unifies both the female and male parts (A4),
just as the Mind also produces and then unifies the diverse elements of the cosmos as a whole.
Conclusion
Being born a certain gender is neither a prize nor a punishment, and thinking of birth in this
way is a misunderstanding of its purpose altogether. People are born in order to render a
service, to make the material realm more intelligent. It is true that they are born in different
504
forms, and it might be true that the female form comes with a propensity for certain proper-
ties, such as cowardice. At the same time, the mask imagery clearly paints a picture of such
material circumstances being of marginal significance. Furthermore, the variegation of matter
assigns both gender properties to every individual. Therefore, all humans are at least to some
degree female in this sense.
The emerging picture does not so much erase the difference between the male and the
female, with the attending cultural expectations, as shifts the focus towards the difference
between the life of the body and the life of the mind. The latter is equally pertinent to both
genders, and if there are differences between the two, they are of small significance, at least as
far as advancement, both ethical and ontological, is concerned. The adoption of the Stoicising
tradition is thus very fitting to the woman-led school for the purposes of self-representation.
At the same time, this need not viewed as a calculated decision. The Stoic position was a
prominent part of the tradition in the discourse of the genders, and members of Hypatia’s
school were simply anchoring themselves in this tradition. If anything, this shows that there
were ways for women philosophers to fit into and navigate ancient philosophical traditions
which were often openly misogynist.
More importantly, the case of the gendered soul shows how the views that circulated in
the school of Hypatia can be reconstructed and examined by using the proposed methodol-
ogy. Thus, we can not only conclude that women philosophers found ways of anchoring
themselves into the existing philosophical traditions in antiquity, but also that their views are
not always as obscure as might seem at first sight. In the case of Hypatia’s school especially,
recovering what is lost is a matter of willingness.
Notes
1 For the extensive discussion of this and other cases of the appropriation of the figure of Hypatia, see
Watts (2017: 135–137); see also Rist (1965: 214–215).
2 Rist (1965: 218–219), for example, argues that Hypatia’s teachings must be primarily associated with
Middle Platonism which was very much behind the current philosophical innovations.
3 See Cameron (2016) for the seminal discussion.
4 See the discussion in Watts (2017).
5 Whether these views can be attributed to Hypatia herself or not is a matter of discussion outside the
scope of this paper; at the same time, even the case study of moderate length presented in this paper
shows that the views from Hypatia’s school, her most immediate philosophical environment, can
certainly be reconstructed.
6 The most recent is the revised edition of Decleva Caizzi’s Pirroniana (2020). A lot of significant work
has also been done studying the thought of schools and/or traditions on the basis of fragmentary
evidence, e.g. Long and Sedley on the Hellenistic schools (1987); Boys-Stones on Middle Platonism
(2018).
7 See Čelkytė (2020).
8 Lucretius 3.417–462=LS 14F.
9 Sextus Empiricus M 11.64–67=SVF 1.361=LS 58F. See also Bénatouïl (2019); Brennan (2005:
142–143, 214–215).
10 For example, by making out pleasure to be the good, like the Epicureans (e.g. Cicero Fin. 1.29–32=LS
21A).
11 For the sake of brevity, the texts in this category are not cited in full, but the references are provided
in the appropriate section.
12 See Scaltsas (1992) for the argument that this is consistently the Socratic position. For Plato’s inclu-
sion of women to the guardian class in the Republic, see also the entries of Jill Gordon and Emily
Hulme in this volume.
13 See Schultz (2018).
14 For a discussion of how this problem can be solved within the Platonic dialogues, see Harry and
Polansky (2016).
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Aistė Čelkytė
15 Baltzly (2013). For further discussions of Proclus position, see Schultz (2018); Layne (2021).
16 Aristotle’s works present a hierarchy of gender, both biologically (GA 1.20 (728a17–20); 2.3
(737a28); for a study, see Connell (2016)) and politically (Pol. 2.5 (1264b2–3)). The latter is signifi-
cant because it entails a commitment to gendered virtues (Pol. 2.5 (1277b21–24)). Although see also
Sophia Connell’s entry for this volume, Aristotle on Women’s Virtues, for a reading which presents
these claims as descriptive rather than normative. The Stoics, by contrast, are known for denying that
gender is relevant for virtue. The most elaborate source for this is the work of Musonius Rufus’ frag-
ments; see the discussion in Nussbaum (2002). It is worth noting that Dutsch (2020) shows that the
Neopythagorean writings were often Stoicising; for example, the pseudepigraphic letters of Theano
(pp. 100–101, 134, 139) or the economic treatise of Bryson (p. 150), although on some occasions, the
elements of both traditions are combined (p. 150).
17 The Stoic ethics especially are strongly influenced by Socrates, as mediated through the Platonic texts,
see Schofield (2013).
18 Although critical of the Stoics, the Middle Platonists also appropriated some very distinctly Stoic no-
tions, see Bonazzi and Helmig (2007: 9–10).
19 In Platonism, starting with the so-called Middle Platonists (Boys-Stones (2018: 50–57)); this period is
also known for attempting to reconcile polemical traditions, see Karamanolis (2006).
20 Hymn 9.81–197 (Dell’Era). Translations are mine, unless indicated otherwise. This one and other
translations of Synesius are after Fitzgerald.
21 Hymn 1.564–576 (Dell’Era).
22 Insom. 8 (Terzaghi), cf. De regno 10.40–45 (Terzaghi).
23 Hymns 3.40–51; 2.290–295 and 9.108–116 (Dell’Era). For the sake of this paper, I only use se-
lect passages from the hymn corpus, and therefore all the references are to the standard editions.
However, Baldi (2011) showed that the current structure of the corpus is partly imposed by late
Byzantine editors, and hymns were organised differently in the original manuscript.
24 Prov. 1.9 (Terzaghi).
25 De Prov. 1.13 (Terzaghi).
26 Epictetus Dis. 1.29.41; Ench. 17.1.
27 For the reliability of this account, see Watts (2017: 45–46). Baldi’s (2011) careful philological recon-
struction of Synesius’ hymn corpus also finds Plotinian undertones of various claims.
28 Socrates Scholasticus HE 7.15.1.
29 Coope (2020).
30 See the extensive discussion in Dzielska (1995).
31 See, for example, Edwards (2011); Mansfeld (1996); Runia (2011).
32 Synesius De regno 10.10–15 (Terzaghi).
33 Although see also Philolaus fr. 13 (Huffman) for an early Pythagorean partition which makes the
brain the origin of the human, the heart the origin of the animal, and the navel the origin of the plant;
the partition also involves the reproductive system, common to all. As Huffman (2009: 24) points
out, this is not a notion of a comprehensive soul, but, given the possible Neopythagorean connection
to Hypatia’s school that are discussed below, the Pythagorean background is also informative. It is
worth noting, furthermore, that reading this passage against the Pythagorean background is not an
alternative to reading it against the Platonist background. The two traditions were interlinked in some
important ways, see O’Meara (1989, esp. Chapter1); Horky (2013); Huffman (2013); Palmer (2014).
34 In Plato Timaeus 70D-E, the physiological domain of the appetitive soul is located between the mid-
riff and the navel. In Book 6 of his On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, for example, Galen
presents an elaborate argument for locating the desiderative soul in the liver, see Tieleman (2003:
57–58).
35 Slaveva-Griffin (forthcoming) on Proclus.
36 Δειλία, the word used by Synesius here, is made an essential attribute of female in all the animals in
Ps. Aristotle’s Physiognomics 809b; cf. Alexander Prob. 4.151. Although it is not just Aristotelian
association, see, for example Sophocles fr. 140 (Claverhouse Jebb, Headlam, and Pearson).
37 To some extent, the readings could be combined; the reader might be expected to spot the motif as-
sociating femininity and the lack of courage, given its literary and cultural prominence. However,
the key point of the second reading, that is, the significance of the duality, is still the key point of the
passage, given the comment about the opposites of every kind.
38 986a22, cf. 985b23.
39 The seminal study is O’Meara (1989); see also Dillon (1977: 341).
506
40 Plotinus En. 2.4.5, tr. (Gerson et al).

41 En. 2.4.11; 2.4.4; 2.4.9.
42 Hymn 5.63-66 (Dell’Era), see also Hymn 1.186 (Dell’Era).
43 En. 2.4.15.
44 This point reinforces the argument made above concerning the compatibility between Christianity
and Platonist commitments of Hypatia’s school. Such a stance would suit not just Synesius alone, but
also the school as whole which, as mentioned above, included both Christian and pagan members.
45 For detailed discussions of Proclus’ stance, see note 15.
46 Proclus in Remp. 252.19–31, see also Proclus in Remp. 237.5.13.
47 Baltzly (2013: n. 8).
48 See A2; cf. Plato Parm. 135A.
49 Insom. 4 (Terzaghi); cf. Plato Parm. 135A.
Bibliography
Baldi, I. (2011) Gli Inni di Sinesio di Cirene. Berlin/Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter.
Baltzly, D. (2013) “Proclus and Theodore of Asine on Female Philosopher-Rulers: Patriarchy, Metem-
psychosis, and Women in the Neoplatonic Commentary Tradition,” Ancient Philosophy 33: 403–424.
Bénatouïl, T. (2019) “Épictète et la doctrine des indifférents et du telos d’Ariston à Panétius,” Elenchos
40(1): 99–121.
Bonazzi, M. and C. Helmig. (2007) “Introduction,” in M. Bonazzi and C. Helmig (eds.) Platonic
Stoicism—Stoic Platonism the Dialogue Between Platonism and Stoicism in Antiquity. Leuven:

Leuven University Press.
Boys-Stones, G. (2018) Platonist Philosophy 80 BC to AD 250. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brennan, T. (2005) The Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties, and Fate. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cameron, A. (2016) Wandering Poets and Other Essays on Late Greek Literature and Philosophy.
Čelkytė, A. (2020) “The Soul and Personal Identity in Early Stoicism: Two Theories?” Apeiron 53(4):
463–486.
Claverhouse Jebb, R., W. Headlam and A. Pearson. (2010). The Fragments of Sophocles. Cambridge:
Connell, S. (2016) Aristotle on Female Animals. A Study of the Generation of Animals. Cambridge:
Coope, U. (2020) Freedom and Responsibility in Neoplatonist Thought. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Decleva Caizzi, F. (2020) Pirroniana. Milano: LED.
Dell’Era, A. (1968) Sinesio di Cirene. Inni, Rome: Tumminelli.
Dillon, J. M. (1977) The Middle Platonists: A Study of Platonism, 80 B.C. to A.D. 220. London:
Duckworth.
Dutsch, D. (2020) Pythagorean Women Philosophers: Between Belief and Suspicion. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Dzielska, M. and F. Lyra. (1995) Hypatia of Alexandria. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Edwards, M. (2011) “Christians and the Parmenides,” in J. Turner and K. Corrigan (eds.) Plato’s
“Parmenides” and its Heritage. Vol. 2. Leiden: Brill.
Fitzgerald, A. (1930) Synesius. Essays and Hymns, Including the Address to the Emperor Arcadius and
the Political Speeches. London: Oxford.
Gerson, L. P. (ed., tr.), G. Boys-Stones, J. Dillon, J. Wilberding, A. Smith and R. A. H. King (trans.)
(2017) Plotinus: The Enneads. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harry, C. and R. Polansky. (2016) “Plato on Women’s Natural Ability: Revisiting Republic V and
Timaeus 41e3–44d2 and 86b1–92c3,” Apeiron 49(3): 261–280.
Horky, P. (2013) Plato and Pythagoreanism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Huffman, C. (1993) Philolaus of Croton: Pythagorean and Presocratic: A Commentary on the Fragments
and Testimonia with Interpretive Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Huffman, C. (2009) “The Pythagorean Conception of the Soul from Pythagoras to Philolaus,” in D.
Frede and B. Reis (eds.) Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Huffman, C. (2013) “Plato and the Pythagoreans,” in G. Cornelli, R. McKirahan and C. Macris (eds.)
On Pythagoreanism. Berlin: De Gruyter.
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Karamanolis, G. (2006) Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to
Porphyry. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Layne, D. (2021) “Feminine Power in Proclus’s Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus,” Hypatia 36(1):
120–144.
Long, A. and D. Sedley. (1987) The Hellenistic Philosophers. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Mansfeld, J. (1996) “Philosophy in the Service of Scripture: Philo’s Exegetical Strategies,” in J. Dillon
and A. A. Long (eds.) The Question of ‘Eclecticism’: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Nussbaum, Martha C. (2002) “The Incomplete Feminism of Musonius Rufus, Platonist, Stoic, and
Roman,” in M. C. Nussbaum and J. Sihvola (eds.) The Sleep of Reason. Erotic Experience and Sexual
Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
O’Meara, D. (1989) Pythagoras Revived: Mathematics and Philosophy in Late Antiquity. Oxford.
Palmer, J. (2014) “The Pythagoreans and Plato,” in C. Huffman (ed.) A History of Pythagoreanism.
Rist, J. M. (1965) “Hypatia,” Phoenix 19: 214–225.
Runia, D. T. (2011) “Early Alexandrian Theology and Plato’s Parmenides,” in J. Dillon and A. A. Long
(eds.) The Question of ‘Eclecticism’: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy. Berkeley: University of
C alifornia Press.
Scaltsas, P. W. (1992) “Virtue Without Gender in Socrates,” Hypatia 7(3): 126–137.
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the Stoics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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for the History of Philosophy 27(5): 1–19.
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Further Reading
For a seminal discussion on the sources on Hypatia, see Cameron, A. (2016) Wandering Poets and Other
Essays on Late Greek Literature and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
A recent and extensive historical discussion of the school of Hypatia is Watts, E. (2017) Hypatia: The
Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
A recent discussion of Hypatia’s philosophical affiliation is Gertz, S. (2020) ‘“A Mere Geometer’?
Hypatia in the Context of Alexandrian Neoplatonism,” in D. LaValle Norman and A. Petkas (eds.)
Hypatia of Alexandria: Her Context and Legacy. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
A brief discussion of the use of scientific instruments within the school in Čelkytė, A. (2023) “Hypatia,”
in H. Wills, S. Harrison, E. Jones, R. Martin, and F. Lawrence-Mackey (eds.) Women in the History
of Science: A Sourcebook. London: University College London Press.
508
PART V
Later Receptions
34
THE WORTH OF WOMEN
The Reception of Ancient Debates
in the Renaissance
1 Introduction to the Questions

This chapter considers the influence of ancient texts on the debate about the worth of women
in the late Renaissance in Italy.1 The sixteenth century was a particularly rich moment in the
debate, with a proliferation of manuscript and printed texts, written by both men and women,
circulating among an educated public.2 Several features of the historical context may explain
the liveliness of the debate in that period. First, there was an increase in the production of liter-
ature in the vernacular in northern Italy; at the same time, there was an increase in the number
of women whose work was published (Cox 2008: 38–41; for a list of Italian (and French) au-
thors in the period, see Weisner 2000: 207; for a list of Italian women writers active from 1580
to 1635 see Cox 2011: 253–270). Second, on the evidence of dedications to women, which
“reflect contemporary confidence in women’s ability to enter the world of vernacular learning
and literature,” there was interest among women as readers for a variety of forms of literature,
including works on social or moral subjects (Richardson 1999: 147–148). Third, in the courts
of northern Italy it was not uncommon for women to hold some political power, particularly
in the absence of their husbands, and such women were often dedicatees of feminist works
(and perhaps commissioners of such works), whether out of disinterested intellectual inquiry
or with the aim of justifying their political role (for examples of such women, their power and
their influence, see Manca 2000: 13–20; Kolsky 2005: 148–170; Cox 2009: 66–67, 88–90;
James and Kent 2009: 85–115; James 2011: 145–163). Fourth, in cultural terms, displays of
rhetorical skill were highly valued, and contending arguments for and against the worth of
women were fertile ground for such displays.
Both misogynist and feminist contributions to the querelle drew on authorities of various
kinds: literary, scriptural, and philosophical. Of the philosophical, many ancient authors are
cited, most prominent among them Plato and Aristotle. In this chapter, I first sketch the range
of arguments from Plato and Aristotle that feminist authors of the Renaissance drew on to
make the case for the worth of women (in Section 2) and then consider three in more detail (in
Sections 3, 4, and 5). In conclusion, I offer some reflections on the ways in which the reception
of Plato and Aristotle in the Renaissance have influenced contemporary interpretations of the
arguments, and the merits, of these philosophers.
511 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-39

2 An Overview of the Reception of Plato and Aristotle

Two claims in Aristotle’s metaphysics exerted an important influence on the debate about
the worth of women. The first was the notion of an essential form that was the same in every
member of a kind. In living things this form was the soul; and in human beings that soul was
distinguished by the possession of reason (on the different faculties of the soul, see DA II 3;
on reason as the distinguishing feature of human souls see EN I 7 1097b22–1098a5). Renais-
sance feminists drew in almost every case on some version of this set of claims, to argue that
women resembled men in essence, i.e. in the possession of reason. The second metaphysical
claim was that to explain physical change we need a distinction between action and pas-
sion, or activity and passivity (see GC I 7 323b1–324a9; Meteor. 4. 1 378b10–14; Met. 9.1
1046a19–28). We will see that this distinction, as it manifested in Aristotle’s account of the
generation of animals, established the terms for a question about the capacities and worth of
women in the renaissance debate.
In Aristotle’s natural philosophy, the theory of causality in the Physics provided a causal
framework for the debate about a number of questions, in particular the origins of the sexes
(on the four causes see Phys. II 3 194b24–195a4). Aristotelian causes were often interpreted in
light of the accounts of the creation of man and woman in Genesis; e.g. God was described as
an efficient cause, and the merits of women were attributed in part to the superiority of their
material cause (see, e.g. Goggio 1487: fol. 20r–23r; Marinella 1999: 52). Aristotle’s biologi-
cal works also exerted an important influence, in particular through the claim that male and
female are characterized fundamentally by a difference in the temperature of the their bodies.
Misogynist writers held the purported coldness of women responsible for many of the failings
they attributed to women: intellectual debility, moral inconstancy, and ungovernable emo-
tions among them. In response, feminist authors argued that while Aristotle was correct about
the coldness of women he, and his misogynist interpreters, were wrong about the effect of that
coldness, which the feminists argued was in fact a detachment from the passions – especially
sexual desire (see Section 4 below). A second biological claim concerned Aristotle’s assertion
of the passivity of the female in the process of generation (GA I 20 729a24–31). Misogynist
authors believed that passivity extended beyond the biological realm into the moral and politi-
cal, while feminist authors disputed Aristotle’s claim of female passivity, arguing on the basis
of his own account of generation that the female should be understood to act at least as much
as the male in the production of progeny (e.g. Goggio 1487: fol. 20v–24v; Strozzi 1501: fol.
23r–v; Domenichi 1551: fol. 44r).
The biological questions set the groundwork for a debate about the psychology of men and
women, and in particular the relation of reason to desire as faculties of the soul. In the misogy-
nist literature women were commonly accused of weakness of will in all its forms: lascivious-
ness, generally excessive desires, inconstancy, and cowardice. Feminist authors in response
argued that women were more inclined than men to pursue the good rather than pleasure,
better able to subjugate desire and emotion to reason, and more selfless and courageous in
enduring pain and hardship. These arguments played out against the backdrop of divisions
of the soul first formulated by Plato and Aristotle, and an understanding that the complexion
or physical character of the body (as represented in Aristotelian biology and Galenic medical
sources) disposed persons to be more or less temperate, i.e. determined their moral character,
particularly with respect to the relation of reason and desire.
Aristotle’s discussion of tyranny in his Politics was central to feminist arguments against
women’s subjugation by men. In both the republics and the courts of northern Italy, tyranny
was viewed not only as unjust but also as bad government. Feminists appropriated Aristotle’s
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description of tyranny and its evils to draw a parallel between tyrannical rule in political
communities and the rule of men over women in the household (see Section 5 below). This
argument depended on showing that women were not inferior to men with respect to reason
and moral judgment, and hence that the subjection of women was as unjust as the subjection
of any free people to another. Some feminists extended this argument to suggest that women
in fact were more well suited to rule over men than men were to rule over women, thereby
justifying the political power of certain women.
The influence of Plato was felt in two of these areas. First, with respect to metaphysics,
many feminist authors invoked the Socratic proposals from Republic 5 to educate and employ
women along with men in the Kallipolis as evidence that women have the same rational capac-
ity and capacity for political participation as men. Those proposals were introduced with an
argument to the effect that while there may be differences between men and women, there is
no evidence that those differences have any bearing on a person’s capacity for reason or civic
activity. They were supplemented by allusions to the claim in the Meno that the virtues of men
and women are identical (Meno 71e–73c). That argument allowed feminist authors to contest
assumptions that the differences between men and women were sufficient, without explana-
tion, to relegate women to subordinate roles.
Second, with respect to desire and its relation to reason, the discussion in Republic 9 was
influential in feminist characterizations of men as intemperate and self-interested. Moreover,
that discussion, linking as it does the tyrant with uncontrolled passions, provided a context
for feminists to connect the moral failings of men, flowing (as the feminists saw it) from their
warm physical complexions, with the tyrannical ambitions of men. All this highlighted the
injustice of the control men exercised over women, their movements, their persons, and their
property.
Feminist authors drew on Plato for a third kind of argument, not found in Aristotle’s work,
that focused on beauty. Ficino’s translation of, and commentary on, Plato’s Symposium, in-
spired arguments from the purported beauty of women to their moral superiority (see Plato
1997, Symp. 206c–212b; Ficino 2000: 191–192; Firenzuola 1992: 10–11). These arguments
depended on (i) received notions of women as more beautiful than men, (ii) a conception of
beauty as the object of desire and (iii)an understanding of love as an intrinsic human desire to
possess the good forever, in which beauty comes to be associated with the divine and a beauti-
ful body to be an effect of a beautiful soul (Eisenbichler and Murray 1992: xxv–xxvi).
3 Metaphysics
In what might seem to be the most fundamental philosophical claim establishing the equality
of the sexes, the identity of species essence in the two sexes, both Aristotle and Plato were
invoked as authorities. There are two passages in Aristotle’s works that were often referenced
in support of that claim. The first is found in the Categories:
Substance, it seems, does not admit of a more and a less. I do not mean that one sub-
stance is more a substance than another (we have said that it is), but that any given
substance is not called more, or less, that which it is. For example, if this substance is a
person (ἄνθρωπος), it will not be more a person or less a person either than itself or than
another person. For one person is not more a person than another, as one pale thing is
more pale than another and one beautiful thing more beautiful than another. Again, a
thing is called more or less, such-and-such than itself; for example, the body that is pale
is called more pale now than before, and the one that is hot is called more, or less, hot.
513
Substance, however, is not spoken of thus. For a man is not called more a man now than
before, nor is anything else that is a substance. Thus substance does not admit of a more
and a less.
(Aristotle, Categories, 5 3b33–4a9; trans. Ackrill in Aristotle 1984a)
Aristotle’s point is that the essence of an animal kind is not something that admits of degrees:
one person cannot be more a person than another, nor one owl more an owl than another.
While he does not in this passage specifically address sex, many Renaissance commentators
clearly took the point to apply to any individual in a species, of either sex. And in the Meta-
physics, there is a passage that confirms that the male and female of a species will have the
same essential form:
One might raise the question, why woman does not differ from man in species, female
and male being contrary, and their difference being a contrariety, and why a female and
a male animal are not different in species, though this difference belongs to animal in
virtue of its own nature, and not as whiteness or blackness does; both female and male
belong to it qua animal…And male and female are indeed modifications peculiar to
animal, not however in virtue of its substance but in the matter, i.e. the body. This is
why the same seed becomes female or male by being acted on in a certain way. We have
stated, then what it is to be other in species, and why some things differ in species and
others do not.
Aristotle, Metaphysics X.9 1058a29–1058b25 (trans. Ross in Aristotle 1984a)
In this argument, Aristotle clearly assumes that the sexes are not different in species or essen-
tial form. At the same time, he acknowledges that sexual differences do not seem to be acci-
dental features, but rather to belong to animals in virtue of their nature. As a result, one might
suppose that sex is an essential difference, one that distinguishes sub-species. Aristotle denies
this, saying that sex belongs to the matter (which is to the say the body) of the animal, and
not to its substance or essence. The implication of this is that the essential form of male and
female persons is identical, and since that essential form is characterized by a capacity for rea-
son, Renaissance feminists concluded on the authority of Aristotle that women and men are
essentially the same, and in particular have the same rational capacities.
Perhaps the first attempt to draw on Aristotle’s claim that the sexes have the same essential
form, a rational soul, as support for feminist claims, is Christine de Pizan’s in The Book of the
City of Ladies. She says:
There are, however, some who are foolish enough to maintain that when God made man
in His image, this means His physical body. Yet this is not the case, for at that time God
had not yet adopted a human form, so it has to be understood to mean the soul, which
is immaterial intellect and which will resemble God until the end of time. He endowed
both male and female with this soul, which He made equally noble and virtuous in the
two sexes.
(I. 9, Brown-Grant, trans. in Pizan 1999: 22–23)
Pizan is here combining the Christian account of the creation of human beings in Genesis with
the Aristotelian notion of the essential form of a living being as its soul, and the essential form
of human beings as a rational soul (distinguished from other animal souls by its possession of
intellect). In saying that “this soul” (i.e. the rational soul) is “equally noble and equally virtuous
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in the two sexes” Pizan is not only asserting that the sexes are the same with respect to their
essential form but also drawing out the implication that they are as a result equal in dignity and
capacity. Many followed Pizan in this combination of Christian and Aristotelian reflections on
the essential sameness of the rational soul in men and women, and the implication that women
thus resemble God as much as do men, since that resemblance is found in the intellect.
An influential statement of this sameness of essential form is found in Castiglione’s d
ialogue
Il Cortegiano, when the character Il Magnifico (Iuliano de’ Medici), clearly paraphrasing
Aristotle’s categories, says
…The substance of anything whatever cannot be said to admit of the more or the less
[la sustanzia in qualsivoglia cosa non po in sé ricevere il più o il meno]. For just as no
stone can be more perfectly a stone than another with respect to the essence of stone, nor
one piece of wood more perfectly wood than another, so too one person [omo] cannot
be more perfectly a person than another, and consequently the male will not be more
perfect than the female with respect to their formal substance, because one and the other
are included under the species ‘man’ and that in which the one [sex] differs from the
other is an accidental and not an essential feature.
(Castiglione 1981: III. 12, 156–157 (trans. from Castiglione 2002, 214, modified))
Many feminist authors (and some misogynist authors) took up these assertions of the same-
ness of the rational soul, some emphasizing as Pizan does the point that the rational soul is
the element in our make-up that makes us similar to God (e.g. Strozzi, fol. 11r), others em-
phasizing as Castiglione does the point that whatever differences exist between the sexes they
are non-essential differences. For example, Lodovico Domenichi has the character Francesco
Grasso, in his dialogue, La nobiltà delle donne, quote this passage from Castiglione, without
acknowledgement (fol. 15r–v).
The suggestion that sexual differences are non-essential is found also in Plato’s Republic.
Socrates argues that women of the guardian class should be educated and employed in the
same tasks as men. The question arises because Socrates points out to his interlocutors that
in saying that different ways of life should be assigned to different natures (ἄλλην φύσιν), they
had not specified the kind of natural differences that should determine the way of life, so that
even if it were granted that the natures of men and women were somehow different, it was not
clear that they were different in a way that should require them to lead different lives (Republic
5 454b–e). Socrates illustrates his claim that not every difference will constitute a reason to
assign people to different tasks with a vivid example:
…We might just as well, it seems, ask ourselves whether the natures of bald and long-
haired men are the same or opposite. And, when the we agree that they are opposite,
then, if the bald ones are cobblers, we ought to forbid the long-haired ones to be cob-
blers, and if the long-haired ones are cobblers, we ought to forbid this to the bald ones.
(Rep. 5 454c1–5, trans. Grube and Reeve in Plato 1997)
We ought, he says, to focus on the kind of differences that are relevant to the way of life itself;
and the difference of male and female is not a difference that is relevant to the way of life:
“we meant, for example, that a male and female doctor have souls of the same nature” (Rep.
5 454d1–3). If male and female have souls that are the same, and their differences are only in
reproductive function (i.e. are what Aristotle would call accidental features of the body), then
there is no reason to assign them different tasks in the political community or to educate them
515
differently. Like Aristotle, then, Plato asserts the sameness of the soul in the sexes, while allow-
ing that there are differences in their bodies. Like Aristotle, he also suggests that those differ-
ences are irrelevant – but while Aristotle suggested they were irrelevant as features that might
divide a species into sub-species, Plato makes the more practical point that they are irrelevant as
features that might justify distinguishing between the political tasks, and roles, of the sexes. The
idea that women are entitled to be educated because they share in reason is also found among
the Renaissance authors, by whom Plato is often invoked as a champion of women (Equicola
1501: 4 (equality of rational soul); Antonio Montecatini In polytica progymnasmata 1587:
469–473 (identity of virtues), cited in Maclean 1980: 52; Tasso 1997: 54; Marinella 1999: 79).
While the sameness of the rational soul in men and women was a fundamental tenet of
Renaissance feminist arguments, and the proponents of such arguments were both inspired
and supported by the claims of Aristotle and Plato, sameness of the rational soul was not
universally agreed to establish, in itself, the equality of the sexes. Two examples will illustrate
this point. First, Torquato Tasso argued that the sameness of the rational soul did not imply
that women are just like men and that the differences in the bodies of the sexes affected their
capacities (Tasso 1997: 55–62), while also asserting that a certain elite class of women might
avoid these effects. Second, Lucrezia Marinella argued that although the rational soul was the
same in kind in every individual human being, it might differ in its nobility; in her view the
soul of women was superior to that of men (Marinella 1999: 53, 55).
4 Biology
We have seen that while it was widely agreed that men and women had the same rational
souls, some of those defending the worth of women nonetheless thought that was not suf-
ficient to establish the equal worth of the sexes. Since misogynists often made arguments for
the inferiority of women on the basis of bodily differences between the sexes, feminist authors
countered with arguments intended to show that women’s bodies affected the operations of
their souls in ways that made them equal or superior to men. The arguments of both mi-
sogynists and feminists about the body drew in particular on Aristotle’s theory of physiologi-
cal differences in temperature in the sexes. Aristotle’s views on the relation between sex, the
temperature of the body, and the concoction and character of the blood are complex. Most
Renaissance authors, misogynist and feminist, accepted, however that Aristotle believed the
bodies of female animals, including women, to be colder than the bodies of males of the same
species. He says as much, in a passage that identifies the coldness of females as a kind of de-
fect: “females (τὰ θήλεα) are weaker and colder in their nature; and we should look upon the
female state (τὴν θηλύτητα φυσικήν) as being as it were a deformity (ὥσπερ ἀναπηρίαν)…” (GA
4.6 775a14–16; trans. Peck in Aristotle 1942). The question of interpretation was whether
the defect was limited to a physiological incapacity to concoct blood into semen, or extended
to intellectual or moral defects. Aristotle implies in at least one passage that the relative heat
of male bodies makes them more courageous and more intelligent, and Renaissance authors
engaged in the debate about women attributed to Aristotle the view that the colder bodies of
women made them worse:
But those with hot, thin, and pure blood are best; for such animals are at once in a good
state relative to both courage and intelligence. It is for this reason too that the upper
parts differ in this way compared with the lower parts, and again the male compared
with the female, and the right side of the body with the left.
(PA II. 2 648a9–13; trans. Lennox modified in Aristotle 2001)
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Misogynists tended to focus on the suggestion here that colder blood would render a person
less intelligent in some way, and hence that females were less intelligent than men. Among
Renaissance feminists we find two responses to this idea. The first was to dispute the empiri-
cal fact by pointing out that it was not universally agreed. Consider this passage from Mario
Equicola’s De mulieribus:
There is nothing that natural scientists affirm as certain for us: we know, in fact, that
there are disputes and varied opinions about this kind of physical phenomenon. We
know that many [natural philosophers] are inclined to doubt which animals (or organs)
are hot and which are cold. And indeed some conclude that aquatic animals are warmer
than land animals by arguing that the cold [of the water] is counter-acted by the heat
natural to them. Parmenides, as Aristotle reports, is the originator [of the claim] that
women are hotter than men [mulieres esse viris calidiores auctor est], and this same
claim was accepted by certain others. If, then, the hot and the cold admit so much uncer-
tainty and disagreement, what ought we to believe about other phenomena? …And for
that reason the wise, in truth, judge that it is very foolish to make claims about natural
phenomena, which, nonetheless, are ‘knowable’ by a person through conjecture…
(Equicola 1501: 28)
What is especially interesting in this passage is Equicola’s use of Aristotle’s own acknowledge-
ment of the divergence of opinion on the question of the relative temperature of the sexes to
undermine Aristotle’s authority on this point.
The second feminist response to claims of women’s inferiority based on their physiology
was to grant the claim that women are colder than men, but to dispute the implication that
they were as a result less intelligent. Authors often used Aristotle’s own views to dispute the
implication. For example, Galeazzo Flavio Capra (also called Capella) argued in his treatise
Della eccellenza e dignità delle donne that practical wisdom (prudenza) is impeded by anger
and that a hotter body leads to eruptions of anger. Since men are hotter they are more prone to
angry outbursts and hence are less, not more, practically wise than women. He absolves men
of personal responsibility for this defect, however, asserting that
This [the irascibility of men] is not due to a moral failing, but rather to a defect of na-
ture: men, having a hotter constitution, are sometimes disturbed with less reason and
have outbursts caused by a small degree of anger.
Together with the already stated virtues comes practical wisdom [la prudenza], which
no one will deny is [found] in all women, or at least in a large number. This is because
everyone knows that nothing is more contrary to practical wisdom than sudden erup-
tions of anger [li subiti avenimenti de l’ira]. These occur in men a thousand times for
every occurrence in a woman. This is not due to a moral failing [in men], but rather to
a defect of nature: men, having a hotter constitution, are sometimes disturbed with less
cause and have outbursts caused by a small degree of anger. And by contrast women, be-
ing of a colder constitution, are less subject to these violent perturbations and all their ac-
tions are performed more quietly and thoughtfully [più quietamente e consigliatamente].
(Capra 1988: 75)
In another example, later in the sixteenth century, in Domenichi’s La nobiltà delle donne a mi-
sogynist and several defenders of women discuss the question. Early in the dialogue Francesco
Grasso makes the point simply: the hotter temperature of men makes them morally variable
517
and superficial; whereas women derive from their colder nature a set of positive traits: “calm,
seriousness, and firmer impressions” (Domenichi 1551: fol. 18v). There is an interesting mix
here of the moral and the intellectual. The “firmer impressions” are impression on the intellect,
and the calm and seriousness of women is contrasted with the moral impulsiveness and lack
of stability exhibited by men. The defenders of women in this dialogue, however, seem, like
Capra, to concede the fundamental point that men’s hotter temperature makes them by nature
more capable of practical wisdom; it is only because that temperature also makes them less
stable emotionally and morally that men turn out to have less practical wisdom than women.
This point is elaborated later in the dialogue, when Lucio Cotta explains the moral un-
reliability and superficiality of men in terms of their excessive and destructive appetites. He
introduces the idea that the “spirits,” which mediate between the body and the soul, are more
capable of understanding in men because the hotter temperature of men’s bodies produces
spirits that are hotter and drier, which are better (quicker, in the sense of quicker to grasp in
matters of the intellect). That should mean that men are more practically wise than women –
but since the heat of their bodies also leads to more, and more frenetic, appetites, and those
appetites interfere with the operations of the intellect, the quickness of men is blunted by their
appetitive excesses. Women then turn out to be more practically wise in virtue of being colder
despite the “imperfection” of their spirits.
LV…since in that [hot] temperature the quickness and fervor of the appetites [la pron-
tezza & ardor de gli appetiti] do more damage than the quality of the spirits does good,
I should earnestly say the contrary [to those arguing for the superiority of men]. That is,
the phlegmatic [i.e. cold and wet] constitution is directly opposed to this: it, as everyone
agrees, contains in itself few and very weak appetites, although, as a counterweight, it
has also less perfect spirits. And since in the hot constitution we observe more harm
from the quickness of the appetites than usefulness in the perfection of its spirits, simi-
larly in the other cold [constitution] the small number of appetites will not damage the
slowness of the spirits.
(Domenichi 1551: fol. 61r)
Lucrezia Marinalla extended the argument as made by Domenichi’s characters. Consider this
passage:
Some others say, as did the good Aristotle, that women are less hot than men, and there-
fore are more imperfect, and less noble, than them: what unimpeachable and all-powerful
reason! I believe now that Aristotle did not consider with a mature mind the operations of
heat, what it means to be more or less hot, and what good and ill effects derive from this
[heat]. If he had considered properly how many very bad actions [men’s] heat (which is
greater than women’s) produces, he would not have said a word about it. But the naughty
fellow went along blindly, and so committed a thousand errors. There is no doubt, as Plu-
tarch wrote, that heat is an instrument of the soul; but it can be good, or [it can be] ill-suited
to its tasks, as one must seek in it a sort of compromise between too much and too little.
Too little and inadequate [heat], as in old men, is the least capable of action. Too much
and excessive [heat] makes people hasty and wild [precipitose, & sfrenate]. Therefore not
every [quantity] of heat is good and acts to serve the tasks of the soul, as Marsilio Ficino
says. But [it is] good in a certain amount and in a suitable proportion, as that of woman.
Therefore Aristotle’s reasoning that men are nobler than Women because hotter is invalid.
(Marinella 1601: 119; trans. my own (see also Marinella 1999: 130))
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The Worth of Women
Marinella captures Aristotle’s view accurately and does not contest the empirical claim. She dis-
putes, however, the suggestion that heat is unqualifiedly good for the conduct of the tasks of the
soul – without questioning whether this is Aristotle’s position. Marinella elaborates this point
in another passage, again acknowledging that there is a consensus among learned men that the
male sex is superior because it is hotter, but arguing that, on the contrary, the temperature of
men’s bodies makes them worse. The combination of dryness and heat that characterizes the
male complexion “produces an infinite number of ill effects (such as more passionate appe-
tites and uncontrolled desires) that a moderate heat does not provoke” (Marinella 135–136).
There is perhaps some support for this view to be found in Aristotle’s claims about thumos
or spiritedness. He associates higher degrees of thumos with the male (History of Animals 9.
1 608a19–b18), and with hotter bodies (at Parts of Animals 2. 4 650b33–651a5 Aristotle as-
serts that thumos produces heat), and claims that it leads to a kind of impulsiveness or disposi-
tion to precipitate action (thumotic animals are described as abandoning their senses (ἐκστῶσι)
(EE 3. 1 1229a26–8) or as “excitable” (ἐκστατικοί) and prone to reckless or impulsive action
(PA 2. 4 651a1–5)). At Nicomachean Ethics 7. 6 1149a24–31 Arisotle says:
…One’s thumos in such cases seems to hear what reason says, but to mishear it, like
hasty servants who run out of the room before they have heard everything being said to
them and then fail to carry out the instruction, and as dogs bark just at a sound, before
discovering if it’s a friend who’s there; just so a hot and quick nature means that thumos
hears—but does not hear the order, before rushing to take vengeance.
Since the complexion (the physical character) of men is precisely hot and dry while that of
women is cold and wet, it follows that men have stronger and more unrestrained physical
desires:
The nature of men is hot and dry, as they say, and the female, as the most wise and fa-
mous doctor says, is cold and wet because of the quantity and abundance of the blood.
It is not necessary that I prove that a hot and dry complexion contains excessive heat,
and that it exceeds a temperate degree, since it is known by everyone that heat combined
with dryness is extreme, and surpasses a moderate temperature.
(Marinella 1601: 135–136, trans. my own)
Particularly interesting in Marinella’s argument is the way that she employs the view that heat
produces excessive, uncontrolled appetites not only to show that such appetites are intrinsi-
cally bad but also to suggest that they are such as to interfere with the operations of the intel-
lect: “a hot and dry nature is harmful, bringing sensual desires to the intellect, which often
remains vanquished and conquered” (Marinella 1601: 136). Given, what we know about the
effects of heat she asks: “who will ever dare to say that the heat of the male is temperate, and
suited for all the operations of the soul, whether speculative, practical or moral [atto à tutte le
operationi dell’anima speculative, pratiche, & morali]?” (Marinella 1601: 135) implying that
the heat of the body affects not only the moral operations of the soul but also the intellectual
functions, both theoretical and practical. This second feminist response to the suggestion that
the Aristotelian assessment of women’s bodies as colder makes them morally or intellectually
defective, is then, that on the contrary, the physiology of women makes them both morally
and intellectually better than men. Women are less prone to incontinence, and better able to
preserve and act on the judgments of their rational faculties because they are less distracted
and perverted by appetites.
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To summarize, then, renaissance authors (both misogynist and feminist) accepted Aristotle’s
claim that the physiology of male and female bodies differs fundamentally in temperature: fe-
males are colder than males. Feminist authors distinguish themselves, however, in arguing that
the greater heat of male bodies produces in men excessive non-rational desires (both appetitive
and spirited), which impede the function of the rational faculty, and what should be its desire
for the good.
The emphasis in the works of Renaissance feminist authors on the deleterious effects of sen-
sual desires has another source in the Platonic view of the divisions of the soul and the desires
that emerge from the lowest of those divisions. Each part has a corresponding pleasure: reason
takes pleasure in learning; the spirited part (with which one grows angry) takes pleasure in
honor, victory, revenge, and anger itself; and the sensitive part finds pleasure in food, drink,
and sex. What Marinella and her contemporaries call “sensual pleasures” (desideri sensuali)
are then those of the lowest part of the soul, the part that allows us to have sensation, that we
share with animals, and that is not only distinct from reason but also often in conflict with
reason. Plato associates this part not only with the pleasures of the body but also with a desire
for money, as the instrument that allows one to obtain those pleasures:
Socrates: Three parts [in the city and in the soul] have also, it appears to me, three kinds
of pleasure, one peculiar to each…One part, we say, is that with which a man learns,
one is that with which he feels anger [τὸ δὲ θυμοῦται]. But the third part, owing to its
manifold forms, we could not easily designate by any one distinctive name, but gave it
the name of its chief and strongest element; for we called it the appetitive part because
of the intensity of its appetites concerned with food and drink and love and their accom-
paniments, and likewise the money-loving part, because money is the chief instrument
for the gratification of such desires.
(Rep. IX 580d)
On the Socratic account, while everyone will experience desires for honor and for sensual
pleasures, those in whom those desires are more pronounced or excessive are tyrannical in
temperament. This association, of sensual desires with tyranny, is explained by the distance
between sensual desire and reason, and the identification of reason with the law. Socrates
believes that when the appetitive part of the soul satisfies its desires by pursuing sensual pleas-
ures, the soul, and thus the person, moves away from reason. Because law is (or should be)
an expression of reason, there is a parallel between the private person who indulges excessive
sensual desires in opposition to the judgments of their rational soul and the tyrant who in-
dulges his sensual desires and greed in opposition to the law. This is why Socrates associates
the satisfaction of non-rational desires with the tyrannical temperament:
And is not that furthest removed from reason which is furthest from law and order?…
And was it not made plain that the furthest removed are the erotic and tyrannical ap-
petites?…Then the tyrant’s place, I think, will be fixed at the furthest remove from true
and proper pleasure..
(Rep. IX 587a–b)
We will see in the next section that this notion of the tyrant as someone who is governed by
his sensual desires, at the expense of reason, is employed by the feminist authors of the Renais-
sance to demonstrate the illegitimacy of the rule of men over women.
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5 Politics
What was at stake for many feminist authors in discussing the sameness (or difference) of the
souls, and the differences in the bodies, of men and women, was the moral agency and the
political capacities of men and women. That is, they were aiming not only to establish that
women were, in principle, the equals (or the betters) of men but also that women were capa-
ble of political action. Focusing on the political, we see that many feminists were arguing not
only that women might participate in politics but also that they might govern. For example,
Christine de Pizan says:
…In reply to those who think that women are lacking in the ability to govern wisely or
to establish good customs, I’ll give you examples from history of several worthy ladies
who mastered these arts. To give you a better idea of what I’m saying, I’ll even cite you
a few women from your own time who were widowed and whose competence in organ-
izing and managing their households after their husbands’ deaths attests to the fact that
an intelligent woman can succeed in any domain.
(Pizan 1999: 30)
To show that women were capable of governance was first a question of establishing that
they had the same capacity for reason that men do and that nothing in the character of their
physiology (their complexion) prevented them from exercising that reason. We have already
seen those arguments. Feminist arguments also aimed to show that the power exercised over
women by men was unjust, and unnatural, drawing on Arisotle’s conception of tyranny and
the Socratic proposals for equal education and employment of the guardian class. If women
were as able as men, or even better able, to govern, then their exclusion from political rule was
both unjust to them, and damaging to the political community.
The injustice of male dominance was often described as a form of tyranny. For example,
Agrippa in 1529 said:
…Since the excessive tyranny of men prevails over divine right and natural laws, the
freedom that was once accorded to women is in our day obstructed by unjust laws, sup-
pressed by custom and usage, reduced to nothing by education.
(Agrippa 1996: 94)
He is making two points here: (1) that women have by divine right and natural law the same
freedom that men enjoy and (2) that men’s power over women is therefore a kind of tyranny.
Assuming that he has a Platonic conception of tyranny, he is accusing men of asserting power
over women as a way of satisfying their sensual desires, rather than as a matter of divine or
natural right, and in fact in contravention of natural law. Equicola, too, said that liberty is
“equally innate” in women as well as men and that God did not intend men to dominate
women (Equicola 2004: 10). Later in the century, making a similar point, Moderata Fonte in
the dialogue On the Worth of Women has the character Corinna remark that men “set them-
selves up as tyrants over us, arrogantly usurping that dominion over women that they claim is
their right, but which is more properly ours” (Fonte 1997: 59).
Marinella draws on Aristotle explicitly in La Nobiltà, in a chapter entitled “On tyranni-
cal men and those who usurp state power,” in which she aims to show that men as a sex are
disposed to be tyrannical. She does so first by claiming that it is characteristic of the tyrant to
pursue his own advantage and to satisfy his own will, regardless of the law:
521
Of all the worst men in the world, I believe none are as bad as the tyrant: since he is not
governed by any law. As we can read in Aristotle’s Politics [IV. 10]: whereas other rulers
act to ensure that which is honest and just, the tyrant’s aim is his own advantage which
governs his reason. The law which governs his actions is whatever pleases him, in other
words his will made law, which is always horrible… For this reason, the tyrant is always
unjust, avaricious, and cruel, considering only his own good, and not that of his people;
and he thirsts for bloodshed because of his paranoia.
(Marinella 1601: 128)
The passage she is referring to is this:
There is also a third kind of tyranny, the one that is most particularly held to be tyranny,
being a sort of counterpart to absolute kingship. Any monarchy must necessarily be a
tyranny of this sort if it rules in unchallenged fashion over persons who are all similar
or better, and with a view to its own advantage [πρὸς τὸ σφέτερον αὐτῆς συμφέρον] and
not that of the ruled.
(Politics IV 10 1295a17–22; trans. Lord in Aristotle 1984b)
Marinella uses Aristotle’s definition here of “a third kind of tyranny” to characterize the tyrant
in two ways that are significant as she claims that men exercise tyranny over women. First, the
tyrant is someone who rules in his own interests, where those interests correspond not to rea-
son and the law, but rather to his own “will.” This is the mark of an illegitimate form of gov-
ernance, since all legitimate constitutions on Aristotle’s account are distinguished by rule that
is in the interests of those who are ruled (Pol. III 6 1079a17–22). Second, the tyrant rules over
those who are similar to him, or even better than him. The point is again Aristotelian, found in
the same passage in Politics IV quoted above. A legitimate monarch is one who is better than
those over whom he rules; his authority derives from that moral superiority. Any monarch
who is not superior in some way to those over whom he rules holds illegitimate authority.
Marinella is clear not only that all men are disposed to be tyrannical but also that the rela-
tion between men and women is tyrannical; she says that “…the female sex, more delicate
than the virile sex, and also less robust since it is not accustomed to physical hardships, is
tyrannized and controlled by insolent and unjust men. However, if women – as I hope – shall
wake from this long and oppressive sleep, these ungrateful and arrogant men will become
gentle and humble” (Marinella, Nobility, 1601, 120). She treats the power that men exercise
over women explicitly as tyrannical throughout La Nobiltà, with all the implications that term
carries, as suggested by the accounts of Plato and Aristotle: that the power is aimed at satisfy-
ing the non-rational desires of men, that a man follows his whims rather than any principle or
law, and the women over whom he exercises power are his equals or superiors.
We see then, the way that Plato’s view and Aristotle’s are combined in Renaissance feminist
arguments against the exclusion of women from political power: men are hotter than women;
as a result they have excessive sensual desires; those desires make them tyrannical as rulers;
and so the rule of men over women is, like tyrannical rule in the larger political context, unjust.
6 Effects on Contemporary Reception

In conclusion I would like to indicate three ways in which the reception of the works of Plato
and Aristotle in the popular pro-woman works of the Renaissance have had an influence on
more recent interpretations of these ancient authors.
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The Worth of Women
First, we have become familiar with the idea that Plato was a proto-feminist who em-
braced the idea that women should be educated like men, whereas Aristotle was a misogy-
nist who believed that females were defective and that women were to be subjected to the
governance of men. There are grains of truth in these characterizations: Plato does have
Socrates propose in Republic 5 that the women of the guardian class should undertake the
same tasks, and be educated in the same disciplines, as men; Aristotle does say that the
female is “as it were” a defective male. At the same time, as unqualified claims they are
misleading. Plato makes other remarks that it is hard to construe as anything other than
misogynist, for example in the Timaeus, where he says that men who live lives of cowardice
or injustice are reborn as women (90e), implying that being a woman is a punishment and
a lesser form of being; and some have argued that the proposals in Republic 5 cannot be
described as feminist because they do not aim to gain justice for women (e.g. Annas 1976:
747). And Aristotle, in contrast with Plato, argues for the importance of the female in the
context of sexual reproduction and the ineliminability of women in social and political
life (Deslauriers 2021). Moreover, as we have seen, feminist authors routinely appealed
to Aristotle as an authoritative and sympathetic source for the view that the rational soul,
and hence the essential form, of men and women is the same. But it is nonetheless true that
Aristotle is in the Renaissance works often depicted as woman-hating for trivial personal
reasons, while Plato is represented as a disinterested champion of women. Plato as hero and
Aristotle as anti-hero in feminist accounts of the history of philosophy remain and are due in
part to the ways in which Plato and Aristotle were invoked in the Renaissance debate about
the worth of women.
Second, many continue to assume that the social role Aristotle assigns to women in the
household is a function of some defect of their psychology, which is in turn a function of
their physiological defect, their cold temperature. We have seen some of the ways in which
a cold complexion was believed to be able to affect the moral and intellectual capacities
of women, and contemporary commentators often sketch a similar path – from a colder
temperature, to infirm sensory impressions and unreliable judgments (Leunissen 2017:
153–154), or from a colder temperature to a certain softness of character which makes
women unable to impose their will (Nielsen 2015: 577–578). Since Aristotle is not explicit
about these connections, the Renaissance attempts to explain political capacity or incapac-
ity through physiological differences stand as the first attempts to wed these two strands of
his thought.
Third, the Renaissance authors attribute to Aristotle and to his misogynist followers the
view that what is wrong with women is an inability to contain, or control, their emotions
or their desires. This continues to influence our interpretations, particularly insofar as com-
mentators construe Aristotle’s view about the status of the deliberative faculty of women as
lacking in authority to be a reference to incontinence.
Notes
1 This debate, often called the querelle des femmes, began with Christine de Pisan’s Book of the City of
Ladies, a response to an influential misogynist poem, Le Roman de la Rose. The temporal parameters
of the debate are a matter of controversy (see Pellegrin, 2013: 70–73), but the sixteenth century is
widely regarded as a high point. Significant pro-woman contributions were written in a number of
vernacular languages – French, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch – as well as Latin. For an overview of the
querelle see Kelly (1982: 4–28).
2 At the same time, the reception of ancient texts in the universities was burgeoning. For an overview of
the availability of ancient works in the Renaissance, see Grafton (1988: 767–791) and Schmitt (1988:
792–804).
523
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35
PHILOSOPHER QUEENS
AND A FEMALE PROSPERO(A)
Plato’s Republic and Shakespeare’s Tempest
1 Introduction
Book 5 of Plato’s Republic famously introduces the argument for including women among the
philosopher-rulers in the city Socrates and his companions found in speech as they search for
the nature of justice. Adeimantus at the beginning of Book 5 challenges Socrates to explain a
casual remark he had made at the end of Book 3 that “no one will possess any private prop-
erty except what’s entirely necessary…[and]…no one will have any house or storeroom into
which everyone who wishes cannot come” (416d5–7).1 Adeimantus restates that comment as
being about the “begetting of children – how they’ll be begotten and, once born, how they’ll
be reared – and that community of women and children” (449d2–4), leading Socrates to de-
fend a series of shocking proposals including the inclusion of women among the warriors and
rulers in the city. And then having argued that women “have the same nature with respect to
guarding the city, except insofar as the one is weaker and the other stronger” (456a10–11)
and thereby escaping, as he puts it, “one wave” (457b7), he faces the bigger wave of justifying
the “woman’s law” (457b8) whereby
All these women [who have been shown to be equal to men in ways relevant to rule]
are to belong to all these men in common…and the children…will be in common, and
neither will a parent know [its] offspring, nor a child [its] parent.
(457c10–d3)
The conventional family structure of the female remaining in the private realm is to be demol-
ished so that the female, relieved of the burdens of childrearing, can engage in the military and
wartime activities alongside the men.2 This he must explain would not only be “beneficial,”
but also “the greatest good” (457d6–8).3
All this is prefatory to the highest, most threatening third wave concerning the possibility
of such a city leading Socrates to propose the absurd notion that cities will be saved only when
philosophers rule. Given that some of the women of the Callipolis are the equal of the men
and insofar as the private family has been dissolved among the guardians,4 those philosopher-
rulers can be both male and female, i.e., there can be philosopher queens as well as philoso-
pher kings. Later, at the end of Book 7, Socrates does not let Glaucon forget that women are
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-40 526

Philosopher Queens and a Female Prospero(a)
included among the rulers. When Glaucon praises Socrates for being just like a sculptor who
has “produced ruling men who are wholly fair,” Socrates corrects him “And ruling women,
too, Glaucon.” Socrates had just completed describing the education these rulers will have;
Glaucon must not “suppose that what I have said applies any more to men than to women”
(540c3–5).
Both the male and the female rulers, however, as we learn in the parable of the cave, resist
ruling. They long to remain contemplating the form of the Good to which their education
leads them. They – male and female –nevertheless must be compelled, dragged back down into
the world of shadows, of opinions, of politics, even death (516d4–7), away from divine con-
templation, the world of light and truth that they find at the end of their educational journey.
“Who else,” Socrates asks,
Will you compel to go to the guarding of the city than those who are most prudent in
those things through which a city is best governed, and who have other honors and a
better life than the political life?
(521b7–9)
Ruling “not as though it were a thing that is fine, but one that is necessary,” those so compelled
will eventually be allowed to retreat to the Isles of the Blessed (540a5–b5), leaving behind the
drudgery of politics, but only after they have educated the next generation of philosophers.
William Shakespeare’s final play, “The Tempest,” recalls Plato’s Republic in several re-
spects. At the center of the play is Prospero, a man who like Socrates’ philosopher-rulers
would prefer to remain cloistered with his books rather than engage in the drudgery of rule for
which his wisdom and virtue would supposedly suit him. However, having preferred to spend
his time with his books rather than rule, he has found himself deposed by his brother, placed
with his young daughter on a raft that is cast onto the seas, and after landing on a magical
island rules there with his magical powers there instead of in Milan. The inhabitants of the
island replicate the tripartite soul of Socrates’ Callipolis with Prospero (logos) ruling over the
spirit Ariel (thumos) and the bestial Caliban (epithumia); the fourth and only other inhabitant
is Prospero’s daughter Miranda who as the outlier I will suggest, matures to become the dis-
ruptor of the regime that Prospero has instituted on the island. Unlike Socrates’ ruling philoso-
phers who are compelled to rule and who eagerly await release so that they can spend their
remaining years on the Islands of the Blessed, Prospero deploys an elaborate scheme that will
allow him to return to Milan and to the rule that he had previously disdained. No unidentified
actors like those in the parable of the cave in the Republic force him (along with his daughter)
to return to Milan. Rather, he carefully orchestrates a series of events that ensure his return
to Milan “where/Every third thought shall be my grave” (V.1.313–14).5 He does not long for
the Isles of the Blessed as Socrates’ philosophers do. He has already spent 12 years on such an
island and is ready to abandon it for the sake of his daughter. Subplots in the play reveal the
ugly politics to which he is to return, with his magical charms “all o’erthrown,” and where
“what strength I have’s my own” (V.Epilogue.1–2). Why does he do this? And – a question
that occurred to me as I watched a new production of “The Tempest” with a female Prospera
in the lead role6 – does that decision have anything to do with Prospero’s gender and status
as a father? And, more important for this essay, does Prospero’s effort to return to Milan and
the political world he had left 12 years prior offer any insight into the practices proposed by
Socrates’ proposals in Book 5 of the Republic?
Treating gender as irrelevant as Socrates does with his philosopher-rulers in the Republic,
the production of the “The Tempest” with a female Prospera tried to make gender irrelevant
527
by transforming the father into a mother. Already by the end of the seventeenth century women
performed male roles in Shakespeare’s plays, but turning a male character into a female char-
acter is relatively new. With Prospera as the lead character, the plot appears unchanged. The
director did have to engage in some linguistic gymnastics in order to achieve this transforma-
tion so that “father” becomes “mother,” “lord” becomes “queen,” “sir” becomes “ma’am,”
“master” “mistress” and so forth, all to fit into the poetic meter of the spoken lines. But does
the directorial decision to transform the protagonist in “The Tempest” from a father into a
mother change the story? Does making gender irrelevant in Shakespeare’s play offer insight
into how we are to read and evaluate the construction of Callipolis as a city of gender equal-
ity (or neutrality) among its rulers, a city ruled by philosopher queens as well as philosopher
kings? Can gender be so easily switched in Shakespeare’s play? I will argue that the emergence
of Prospera on the Shakespearean stage illustrates that Socrates’ assimilation of male and
female matters precisely because of the different nature of the connections of mothers and
fathers with their children, connections that Socrates tries to eliminate in Callipolis, but that
Shakespeare emphasizes, indeed places at the center of his play and are lost when Prospero be-
comes Prospera. A Prospera where all are ignorant of their offspring could appear in Callipolis
without effect; I suggest she cannot in “The Tempest.” Does the need to know who is one’s
child push Shakespeare’s protagonist back into politics whereas sharing in the ignorance of
who is one’s own leads to the resistance and compulsion that pervade the parable of the cave?
Although we cannot know that Shakespeare read the Republic, the strong resonances be-
tween the two works allow us to compare them.7 I juxtapose them as a way of investigating
possible issues that Socrates avoids with his plan for blurring the differences between male and
female, between father and mother. A discussion of “The Tempest” serves as a counterpoint to
the Republic’s construction of a genderless class.
2 The Tempest
The play begins with a violent storm conjured up by Prospero magical manipulation of na-
ture. As the winds blow and the sea rises, the shipmaster and the boatswain struggle with the
sails, and in an inversion of the traditional hierarchical order the boatswain tells the nobles
on board: “Keep your cabins: you do assist the storm” (I.1.12–13). Those who hold the tra-
ditional reins of power are sent below while those who know how to steer the ship remain
above on the ship’s deck. “What care these roarers for the name of king?” the boatswain
asks, before again ordering the nobles “to cabin! Silence! Trouble us not!” (I.1.15–16). When
Gonzalo, a counselor to the royalty on the ship, admonishes the boatswain to “remember
whom thou hast aboard” (I.1.17), the boatswain mockingly responds, “if you can command
these elements to silence and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more.
Use your authority!” (I.1.19–21). To keep the ship afloat the traditional authorities must be
silenced and the skilled boatswain knowing how to tame nature demands: “… out of our way,
I say!” (I.1.24). The magic wielded by Prospero that had brought on the storm, nevertheless,
overwhelms the ship and it sinks.
The play thus begins recalling the parable of the boat and the stargazer from Book 6 of
the Republic (488a1–489a1). For sure, Shakespeare’s portrayal is far more dramatic, but the
story is the same: Who should guide the ship, the one who knows the stars and the winds or
the one with authority (however that may have been attained)? In Plato’s dialogue and on
Shakespeare’s stage, it is the one with knowledge, the one who has studied the natural world
and perfected the arts by which to control it. The philosopher, the star gazer, and the Prospero
of 12 years prior to the setting of the play all want to abandon any call to political power
528
despite having the knowledge to guide the city or the ship. The boatswain in fearing for his
life and mistrusting those in positions of authority is ready and eager to rule. The consequence
of not doing so for the boatswain is certain death; he fears death as the philosopher does not.
Those philosophers inhabiting the parable of the cave in the Republic, headed down into the
darkness of political life judge ruling there as worse than death and would rather be “on the
soil, a serf to another man, to a portionless man” (517d6–7).8
3 One’s Own: Marriages and Children

Once Socrates has shown that men and women are no different insofar as having the natures
to be guardians or auxiliaries “except insofar as the one is weaker and the other stronger”
(456a11),9 he concludes that “The women guardians must strip, since they’ll clothe themselves
in virtue instead of robes” (457a6–7). In Book 3 Socrates had prescribed an education in po-
etry that is to excise the passions from the guardians, creating the circumstances that would
enable both sexes “mixed together in gymnastic exercise” (458d1–2) to refrain from thoughts
of and the desire for sexual mingling. But, when he turns to the consideration of the family
and procreation, he recognizes the need for such mingling and admits that he will need to rely
on a residual “inner natural necessity to sexual mingling with one another,” a necessity that
Glaucon then calls “not geometrical but erotic” (458d5).
That necessity, though, must be carefully monitored not only to provide the best children
for the city, but also, he insists, to ensure that the parents have no knowledge of who engen-
dered and who bore those children. He must carefully manipulate the marriages as well so that
the best women breed with the best men: “There is a need for the best men to have intercourse
as often as possible with the best women…if the flock is going to be of the most eminent qual-
ity” (459d6–e1). This is in addition to the proposal that
All these women are to belong to all these men in common, and no woman is to live
privately with any man. And the children, in their turn will be in common, and neither
will a parent know [its] own offspring, nor a child [its] parent.
(457c10–d5)
The first task – breeding the best with the best – he accomplishes by suggesting “our rulers
will have to use a throng of lies and deceptions for the benefit of the ruled” (459c8–d1); these
lies will entail the “subtle lots [that] must be fabricated so that the ordinary man will blame
chance rather than the rulers for each union” and
Along with other prizes and rewards, the privilege of more abundant intercourse with
the women must be given to those of the young who are good in war or elsewhere, so
that under this pretext the most children will be sown by such men.
(460a8–b5)
The second condition – the ignorance of parents as to the identity of their children – entails
taking the “the offspring of the good and bring[ing] them into the pen to certain nurses” and
“supervis[ing] the nursing…inventing every device so that none [of the nursing mothers] will
recognize her own” (460c1–d1). An elaborate (and ultimately unmanageable) scheme must
also be instituted to prevent incest (461d2–e3), all in the interest of what is “the greatest
good” and “what binds [Callipolis] together and makes it one” (462b1–2). Thus Socrates
organizes procreation, the begetting, and the raising of children in the city of Callipolis. And
529
thus Socrates founds a city that will be the “best governed” because, as he says, it is one “in
which most say ‘my own’ and ‘not my own’ about the same thing, and in the same way,” one
“which is most like a single human being” (462c7–8).
All of Prospero’s attention and plotting in “The Tempest” is centered on marriage and
procreation, the second wave of Socrates’ trilogy of challenges in Book 5, but unlike Socrates
Prospero is intent on securing the knowledge of who and what is one’s own, not obscuring
it. When at the beginning of Shakespeare’s play Prospero conjures up the storm that leads to
the action on stage, it is with a view to arranging the marriage of the “best” (his daughter)
with the “best” (the young Ferdinand, son of the King of Naples). His schemes are to ensure
the knowledge that Socrates says must be hidden from parents. This difference becomes key
to the gender implications of the transforming Prospero to Prospera, a father into a mother.
Like the rulers of Callipolis, Prospero deceives, manipulates, even lies to effect the marriage
that joins the best with the best, and in doing so points to the conditions – female chastity and
fidelity enforced by custom, laws, and tradition – that will ensure that the father knows who
is his child. The mother does not need laws and religion to grant her knowledge that she has
through the nature of her body. In Socrates’ city, in Callipolis, the “woman’s law” (457b7)
is instituted precisely to deny her the knowledge that nature has given to her but not to the
man, that makes her share equally male ignorance. She yields the epistemological certainty
that belongs to the female alone.
4 Prospero and Miranda

In the calm that follows the storm generated by Prospero we meet Miranda. Miranda – she
whose name means “wonder” – at this point in the play is moved by pity, not wonder; later
it will be love (lust). Having seen the storm-tossed ship, she pities all the souls that likely
perished when the ship sank. But Prospero reassures her: “No more amazement…/There’s
no harm done” (I.2.14–15). Repeating twice the phrase “No harm,” Prospero reveals that
he engineered the storm and tells her: “I have done nothing but in care of thee ––/of thee, my
dear one, thee, my daughter –– ” (I.2.16–17).10 The storm that begins the play – and all that
follows – are the consequence of his “care” for his daughter.
This care now entails Prospero teaching Miranda about her past and so, in the quiet after
the storm, he tells her for the first time of their mutual history, “of what thou art, naught
knowing/Of whence I am” (I.2.18–19). Miranda, in all her innocence, admits that she never
wondered about her (or his) origins: “More to know/ Did never meddle with my thoughts”
(I.2.21–22). But now, Prospero tells her, “’Tis time/I should inform thee farther/…The hour’s
now come;/The very minute bids thee ope thine ear/Obey, and be attentive” (I.2.22–38).11 He
will recount details of their arrival on the island when: “thou was not/Out three years old”
(I.2.40–41). It is now “Twelve year since, Miranda, twelve year since;” twice he repeats the
number of years (I.2.53). We can calculate: Miranda is almost 15. She has reached the age of
puberty, of fertility.
Twelve years ago, Prospero reports, her father was the “Duke of Milan and/ A prince of
power” (I.2.54–55), but foul play unseated him. Miranda’s reaction (characteristically) is to
pity her father: “O, my heart bleeds” (I.2.63), she laments, as Prospero proceeds with the story
and explains how he…
the prime duke, being so reputed

In dignity, and for the liberal arts
Without parallel. Those being all my study,
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The government I cast upon my brother

And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And rapt in secret studies. Thy false uncle –
(I.2.72–77)
Prospero stops in mid-sentence to admonish his daughter: “Dost thou attend me?” (I.2.78).
Miranda has lost interest in her father’s earlier elevated status and his tale of perfidy. Having –
for the moment – aroused Miranda, Prospero continues that while he was “rapt in secret stud-
ies,” his brother Antonio to whom he had delegated the governance of Milan
Being once perfected how to grant suits,

How to deny them, who t’advance, and who
To trash for overtopping….set all hearts i’ th’ state
To what tune pleased his ear, that now he was
The ivy which had hid my princely trunk
And sucked my verdure out on’t”
(I.2.79–87)
Neither a story of political intrigue nor such a vivid image can keep Miranda attentive and
Prospero must once again admonish her: “I pray thee mark me” (I.2.88), before he continues:
Antonio had learned how to manipulate the human passions, how to be the political man in
pursuit of power, while Prospero, he himself admits, “neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated/
To closeness and the bettering of my mind” (I.2.89–90), trusted unwisely his brother who
took upon himself “th’ outward face of royalty/With all prerogative. Hence his ambition
growing––” (I.2.104–105). Yet again, just as the story of Antonio’s usurpation is reaching
a crescendo, Prospero must stop to ask his daughter: “Dost thou hear?” To which Miranda
replies: “Your tale, sire, would cure deafness” (I.2.106).
Political intrigue does not intrigue the wonder-less Miranda, but Prospero intent on explain-
ing all to her proceeds. Antonio’s ambition for political power was satisfied since for Prospero
“poor man, my library/Was dukedom large enough” (I.2.109–110). While Prospero enjoyed
the dukedom of his books, Antonio gained control of the city and subjects Milan to the King
of Naples. Finally, Miranda is aroused: “O the heavens” (I.2.116) she exclaims and as Pros-
pero continues with their story, Miranda now listens. The King of Naples to whom Antonio
had become beholden demanded Prospero’s removal. As Prospero recalls the departure of “me
and thy crying self,” Miranda’s compassion resurfaces: “Alack, for pity,” and not remember-
ing how she cried then “Will cry it o’er again” (I.2.132–133), but he urges her “Hear a little,
further,/And then I’ll bring thee to the present business/Which now’s upon’s (I.2.135–137).
What makes the telling of the story so necessary at this particular moment? Why must he
keep prodding Miranda to attend to his tale? Before when she had asked about her past, he
had “left [her] to bootless inquisition,” concluding, ‘Stay: not yet’” (I.2.35–36), but now that
she is 15, of an age for marriage, the hour has come and when she asks: “Wherefore did they
not/That hour destroy us?” (I.2.138–139), he explains: His friend and counselor, old Gonzalo,
to save Prospero’s life and that of the baby, put them with water, food, “Rich garments, linens,
stuffs, and necessaries” (I.2.164) on a raft which was set upon the waves. On that raft were
Prospero’s books, Gonzalo “Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me/From mine own
library with volumes that / I prize above my dukedom” (I.2.166–168). These are the volumes
he will cast aside at the conclusion of the play once the scheme devised “for care of thee” has
been fully executed.
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When at last Prospero’s tale turns to their life on the island where he has been not only her
father but also her most attentive “schoolmaster” (I.2.172), a thankful Miranda does not yet
see the connection between this long and (for her) somewhat tedious story and the tempest
that stirred her pity: “And now I pray you, sir,/For still ’tis beating in my mind, your reason/
For raising this sea-storm” (I.2.175–177). Prospero explains that “bountiful Fortune” has
brought his enemies nearby providing the opportunity for him to “find my zenith.” If he fails
to take advantage of their proximity, though, “my fortunes/Will ever after droop” (I.2.178–
184). Without revealing the full reason for conjuring up the storm, he has said enough, and
he silences her: “Here cease more questions” (I.2.184). With his magical powers he puts her
to sleep. Enter Ferdinand.
5 Ferdinand and Miranda

When Prospero and his daughter landed on the magical island, the only other inhabitants
were the invisible spirit Ariel, who had been imprisoned in a tree by the long dead witch
Sycorax, and Sycorax’ child, the brutish Caliban. Caliban initially “loved” Prospero (I.2.336)
and showed him the island’s “fresh spring, brine pits, barren place and fertile” (I.2.338),
and Miranda (characteristically again) pitied Caliban and taught him to speak and tell time
(I.2.353–357). All that changed, as Prospero explains when Caliban complains about the tasks
he is forced to perform: “I have used thee/Filth as thou art, with humane care, and lodged
thee/In mine own cell till thou didst seek to violate/The honor of my child” (I.2.345–348).
Miranda who had once taught him language, after the attempted rape, now refers to him as
“villain” (I.2.309), an “Abhorrèd slave” (I.2.350), a creature whom “I do not love to look
on” (I.2.309), and one who is “Deservedly confined into this rock/Who hadst deserved more
than a prison” (I.2.360–361). Caliban, however, reminded of his attempted rape of Miranda
relishes the thought that had he not been stopped from violating Miranda “I had peopled else/
This isle with Calibans” (I.2.348–349). Bestial creature though he may be, Caliban fantasizes
about his own offspring, about the children he might call his own, offspring who might resem-
ble his own form. Apart from confirming that Miranda is now ready to bear offspring, we see
in Caliban that human desire for one’s own, a desire Prospero feels as well, but is exorcized
from the souls of the guardians raised in Socrates’ Callipolis.
Prospero foils Caliban’s fantasy of populating the island with little Calibans via Miranda
and, focused on the “care” of his daughter, Prospero plots that she bear the children of Fer-
dinand, son of the King of Naples, who had accompanied his father on his voyage to Tunis,
and who along with the others the boat has been shipwrecked and washed up on Prospero’s
island. The proximity of the ship loaded with the associates of the King of Naples offers the
chance for Miranda and Ferdinand to encounter one another and for that “erotic necessity”
to flourish. The play and Prospero’s plan will end with them all abandoning the island, leav-
ing Caliban and Ariel behind, as they return on the salvaged ship to Naples where they will
celebrate the marriage Ferdinand and Miranda. Before that marriage can take place, though,
there must be certainty that the child Miranda bears will be the fruit of that marriage.
When Prospero recounts the story of how he and Miranda had arrived at their magical
island, he begins the tale by telling her that her father was the Duke of Milan. Looking at the
man who has raised her far from Milan, Miranda asks in a moment of shock: “Sir, Are you not
my father?” Prospero assures her: “Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and/She said thou wast
my daughter, and thy father” (I.2.55–57). This is more than a sly joke with a knowing wink
to the audience. It captures male insecurities about the child that a wife may bear, insecuri-
ties to which Prospero alludes when he affirms the virtue of his wife. The young Ferdinand is
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hounded by the same concerns. When Miranda wakes from the slumber into which her father
has put her, she stares in amazement at Ferdinand who has suddenly appeared before her ask-
ing her father, “What is’t?,” … “a spirit?”; she then marvels at its “brave form,” and finally
concludes that “’tis a spirit” (I.2.408–410). She is she drawn to this wondrous new creature:
“A thing divine” (I.2.417), she proclaims him to be. Ferdinand too marvels upon seeing Mi-
randa for the first time, thinking initially that she must be a goddess, but when he actually
addresses her, he immediately asks: “My prime request,/Which I do last pronounce, is (O you
wonder!)/If you be maid or no?” Miranda assures him: “No wonder, sir,/But certainly a maid”
(I.2.424–426). Erotic tension (necessity) is alive and well on Prospero’s island. No reformu-
lated poetry or gymnastic training has excised sexual desire. Prospero needs no help here
from residual necessities. Within a few short lines, Ferdinand next affirms that he will make
Miranda the Queen of Naples, “if a virgin/And thy affection not gone forth” (I.2.446–447).12
Ferdinand’s first words to Miranda, his “prime request,” alludes to her virginity and even
in this moment of utter infatuation when he is so eager to make her his queen, he qualifies his
desires with worries about her chastity, whether the child she may bear would be his own.
Such anxieties do not trouble Socrates’ rulers, male or female. No child is “their own.” In
Prospero’s world, in Italy, only the males have such anxieties. The equal opportunity to rule
in Callipolis entails an equality of ignorance for mother and father. In the world inhabited
by Prospero and Ferdinand, where the woman bearing the child knows that the child she
has nurtured inside her body for nine months is hers, the father depends on the speech of the
mother as well as the laws and customs that govern the structure of family life. In Callipolis,
the structure of family life makes the female experience the same ignorance as the male.
Before the child – known or unknown – can be born, there must (of course) be the erotic
encounter that generates it. Socrates had relied on that residual erotic necessity to surface once
the matches of the best with the best are made (but not before lest they disrupt the gymnas-
tic exercises of the warriors). Prospero’s scheme faces no such challenge. The first encounter
between the young Ferdinand and 15-year-old Miranda is filled with erotic desire, delighting
Prospero who in the first of several asides that confirm his intentions tells the audience: “It
goes on, I see/As my soul prompts it” (I.2.418–419). As Ferdinand and Miranda gaze in won-
der at each other Prospero remarks with pleasure in yet another aside: “At the first sight/They
have changed eyes” (I.2.439–40). Even so, Prospero schemes further. He must create impedi-
ments to their blooming passions. “But this swift business/I must uneasy make, lest too light
winning/Make the prize light” (I.2.449–450). He turns severe and accuses Ferdinand of being
a spy, ignoring Miranda’s insistence that “nothing ill can dwell in such a temple” (I.2.460) and
her plea that Prospero “Make not too rash a trial of him, for/He’s gentle” (I.2.466–467). In
response to her pleas that he have pity, Prospero affects anger threating to “hate” her should
she serve as “An advocate for an imposter” (I.2.475–476). His plotting all works and by Act
III the two are exchanging over-the-top expressions of affection and wonder. Ferdinand, after
admitting “bondage” to a number of other women, tells Miranda: “But you, O you/So perfect
and so peerless, are created/Of every creature’s best” (III.1.46–48). It all culminates, as Mi-
randa asks outright: “Do you love me?” (III.1.67) and Ferdinand emphatically responds that
he does: “I/Beyond all limit of what else i’ th’ world,/Do love, prize, honor you” (III.1.72–74).
The talk between Ferdinand and Miranda at this point turns suggestively to sex and mar-
riage as she proclaims that she “dare not offer/What I desire to give, and much less take/What
I shall die to want” (III.1.77–78) and warns that if Ferdinand will not marry her, “I’ll die your
maid” (III.2.84). Of course, Ferdinand is eager to accept: “Ay, with heart as willing/As bond-
age e’er of freedom. Here’s my hand” (III.2.88–89). In the wings, Prospero gloats: his plan
proceeds apace, so much so that he can observe his child and note in another aside: “Poor
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worm, thou are infected!” (III.1.31) and “Heavens rain grace/On that which breeds between
‘em” (III.2.75–76). What “breeds” between them will, of course, be Miranda’s and Ferdinand’s
children and Prospero’s descendants. While he fosters their erotic desires, though, he also in-
sists on managing those desires, refusing them free reign to act on their desires. He is prepared
to offer Ferdinand Miranda as “thine own acquisition/Worthily purchased” (IV.1.13), but this
“acquisition” does not come without a severe warning: “If thou dost break her virgin-knot be-
fore/All sanctimonious ceremonies may/With full and holy rite be ministered,” then the union
will not “grow; but barren hate,/Sour-eyed disdain, and discord shall bestrew/The union of
your bed with weeds so loathly/That you shall hate it both” (IV.1.15–22). In return Ferdinand
promises that “The most opportune place, the strong’st suggestion/…shall never melt/Mine
honor into lust, to take away/The edge of that day’s celebration” (IV.1.26–29). Still, Prospero
is emphatic: “do not give dalliance/Too much rein: the strongest oaths are straw/To th’ fire i’
th’ blood. Be more abstemious/Or else good night your vow” (IV.1.51–54).
The language is clear: no sex before marriage on Prospero’s island, just as in Socrates’
Callipolis. The passions are restrained by custom, carefully monitored and channeled. In the
Republic Socrates emphatically affirms to Glaucon, “to have irregular intercourse with one
another…isn’t holy in a city of happy individuals nor will the rulers allow it” (458d9–e1).
Therefore the rulers will declare the arranged marriages sacred and ensure that there is no
promiscuous sex; all is to be carefully planned so as to match the best with best. Both Pros-
pero and Socrates carefully orchestrate the mating process, but while Socrates arranges the
marriages in part to ensure that both parents lack the knowledge of who their children are,
Prospero’s scheme is constituted to ensure that the father (and grandfather) has the knowledge
that the mother naturally has irrespective of laws of chastity and fidelity. It is to counter this
natural knowledge that Socrates institutes his laws preventing his women who are to share in
the rule with the males as philosopher queens from knowing their own children; it is to com-
pensate for the inequality of such knowledge that nature denies the male that Prospero and
Ferdinand insist on chastity.
6 Prospero’s Pageant and Gonzalo’s Dream

Before Ferdinand and Miranda leave the island for Naples where their marriage will be sanc-
tified, before the young lovers can consummate their love, Prospero conjures up for them a
majestic pageant that highlights the fertility of nature. Iris, the messenger goddess, calls forth
the goddess Ceres that “most bounteous lady, thy rich leas/Of wheat, rye, barley, fetches, oats
and peas” (IV.1.60–61), who is to bestow upon the young lovers “A contract of true love”
(IV.1.84). And when Juno arrives in her chariot, she asks Ceres and Iris to join her “To bless
this twain, that they may prosperous be/And honored in their issue” (IV.1.104–105). Ceres
continues with her talk of a bounteous fertile nature, of “Vines with clust’ring bunches grow-
ing/Plants with goodly burden bowing/….Scarcity and wants shall shun you” (IV.1.112–116).
The pageant produced by Prospero is all about a bounteous nature that shall through the
marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda give birth to the offspring to perpetuate his line, but it is
a bounty that nature by itself could not provide were he to remain on the island. There is that
“contract of true love” bestowed by Ceres, the contract that brings the political world to the
relations of love, that gives the male the knowledge he does not have in a natural world. Pros-
pero perceives that nature alone does not secure the bounty it provides; there must be art (poli-
tics) as well. Even on Prospero’s island Caliban must split the logs. The pageant is a fantasy.
Ferdinand marvels at this fantasy, this “most majestic vision” and wonders whether what
he sees are “spirits” (IV.1.118–19). Prospero explains: “Spirits which by mine art/I have from
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their confines called to enact/My present fancies” (IV.1.120–122). These spirits brought forth
by his art reveal his “fancies”: fertility, birth, generation. Such fancies led him to orchestrate
the events that will bring him back to Milan with his daughter betrothed to young Ferdinand.
Ferdinand, though, enchanted by the visions Prospero has called forth, exclaims: “Let me live
here ever!/So rare a wondered father and a wise/Makes this place paradise” (IV.1.122–124).
Yet, insofar as the island is a paradise, the human species cannot stay on it and the spirits that
Prospero has conjured up “Are melted into air, into thin air” (IV.1.150). And like the spirits
that melt into thin air, we too “are such stuff/ As dreams are made on, and our little life/is
rounded with a sleep” (IV.1. 156–158). The procreation of the body through the marriage of
the young lovers is Prospero’s resistance to such insubstantiality.
Ferdinand is not the only one to imagine the perfection of living on Prospero’s island. Gon-
zalo, the old counselor at the court of Milan who had saved Prospero and his daughter from
certain death, as he surveys the island upon which he has landed along with the others ship-
wrecked souls, has his own fantasies: “Had I plantation of this isle” (II.1.138) and “were king
on’t, what would I do?” (II.1.140). In his utopian dream Gonzalo imagines there would be
No name of magistrate;/ Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,/And use of ser-
vice, none; contract, succession…./No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil/ No occupa-
tion; all men idle, all;/ And women too, but innocent and pure;/ No sovereignty.
(II.1.143–151)
Sebastian, brother of the King of Naples, a man immersed in the ugly practices of politics,
ready to kill his brother in order to acquire power for himself, sees the tension in Gonzalo’s
fantasy. Gonzalo imagines an island with no sovereignty, and “Yet he would be king on’t”
(II.1.156). The King of Naples concurs: “The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the
beginning” (II.1.152). As those around him mock his fantasy of kingship joined with no
sovereignty, Gonzalo continues to visualize a world in which nature would provide “without
sweat or endeavor” (II.1.155), bringing forth on its own “all foison, all abundance,/To feed
my innocent people” (II.1.158–159). No art or crafts – or magic – required. Following up
on this imagined nature-produced abundance, Sebastian continues his mocking commentary:
“No marrying ’mong his subjects?” to which Antonio adds; “None, man, all idle – whores
and knaves” (II.1.160–161). Gonzalo ignores their mocking and continues to imagine himself
governing with such perfection as to “excel the golden age” (II.1.163). After listening to Gon-
zalo dream, the King of Naples speaks dismissively to the old man: “Prithee no more. Thou
dost talk nothing to me” (II.1.166). Indeed, to the ruler who does not inhabit the utopian
dream of Gonzalo’s imagination, this fantasy of an abundance produced by an untilled nature
where there might be no marrying is worthless. Even Callipolis – the city and regime that “are
not in every way prayers” (540d2) – must have “marrying.” Even there the fields need to be
tilled and babies must be born. Thus Callipolis has its workers of bronze and the marriages
of Book 5.
Gonzalo’s dream evokes scorn and mockery from his companions. Socrates’ proposals for
constructing his just city – he anticipates – will likewise earn scorn and mockery from those
who hear of them (452a10–d1), but he persists in his pursuit of the just city, ready to face the
huge wave of “laughter and ill repute” (473c6–8) that threatens to drown him when he makes
his most outlandish proposal, that the philosophers must rule in the cities if there is ever to
be an end to the ills in the life of cities. The King and the Duke and their associates of “The
Tempest,” the political men who have washed ashore onto Prospero’s island, play the role of
those who will mock Socrates and continue to laugh at this imaginary regime. But, we must
535
note, so too does Prospero as he looks to the care of his daughter. Though gentle and wel-
coming to his old friend and savior, he does not share Gonzalo’s dreams of a regime without
marrying. Indeed, all he has done in the play is precisely to ensure a marriage sanctified and
legitimate, one that produces offspring that she and her husband will know as their own. The
return to Italy sets the young couple into the framework of custom and laws that will ensure
the knowledge that Socrates’ rulers will lack over the generations and will lead (we need to
remember) to incest. The convoluted efforts to prevent incest suggest on a most basic level the
challenge that ignorance concerning one’s offspring poses. Gonzalo’s island with no marrying
can avoid that concern. Prospero caring for his own daughter cannot.
7 The Philosophers’ Children

While Prospero must return to Milan in order to care as he promises for his daughter, So-
crates in the passages that follow the founding of Callipolis offers his rulers an alternative to
the children that they will not know when ruling in Callipolis. That alternative comes at the
conclusion of the education the philosophers receive as they prepare for their role as kings
and queens in the cities they will save. Once they have reached the pinnacle of their education,
seeing with their mind’s eye the Good by which all is seen and by which all grows, they – both
male and female who have shared a common education – will give birth:
It is the nature of the real lover of learning to strive for what is;…he goes forward and
does not lose the keenness of his passionate love (erôtos) before he grasps the nature it-
self of each thing which is…And once near it and coupled with what really is (migeis tôi
onti), having begotten intelligence and truth, he knows he lives truly, is nourished and
so ceases from his labor pains (ôdinos), but not before.
(490a8–b7)
Socrates provides his philosopher-rulers with these noetic children, spawned when the philo-
sophic souls “couple [migeis]” not with each other, but with what is, with “being [toi onti]”
itself. Such generation resulting from coupling with the Good escapes the gender constraints
that control the marriage arrangements and the accompanying lies and deceit practiced in
the city. In Callipolis there are male and female, the male who by nature is ignorant of who
is his child, the female yielding the epistemological privileges of maternity by the arrange-
ments that separate her from the child who emerges from her body. In the birthing of noetic
children, male and female are equal. When initially arguing for the equal potential of male
and female for the task of ruling in Callipolis, Socrates had admitted (almost as an aside) “the
female bears and the males mount” (454d10–e1),13 dismissing that difference as irrelevant.
When the philosopher kings and queens reach the end of their educational program, gender
is indeed irrelevant, as male and female give birth in identical fashion to their noetic children.
Both endure the labor pains that confirm their parentage. Male and female both mount and
both bear.
Prospero envisions no such noetic children. The pageant of fertility conjured up by Pros-
pero’s magic faded as quickly as it appeared. It was a fantasy, something that only appears
but is not. In an inversion of Socrates’ imagery, what is real for Prospero exists in the cities of
Italy with all their political intrigue and marriage laws. The apparent perfection of his island
as an Isle of the Blessed is only a dream that disappears with the wave of a wand. Prospero’s
care for his daughter entails the “marrying,” the mounting and the bearing, that Gonzalo
scorns and Socrates’ philosophers escape. The noetic children Socrates offers his philosophers
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are not fantasies, but to found his city, Socrates must take (drag, force) his philosophers away
from those children born without regard to gender and engage those philosophers-parents in
a world of male and female bodies where gender does matter. In that context he does all he
can to efface differences between the two sexes, to replicate the births they experienced where
gender was indeed irrelevant. There Prospero can become Prospera without effect.
But when Prospero becomes Prospera in Shakespeare’s play, we are left to wonder why
Prospera would conjure up the tempest and engineer the elaborate project that leads to the
abandonment of the enchanted island. As mother to Miranda, she does not need the laws of
the city to know who is her child; she knows that Miranda does not need them either. No
sly joke about her wife’s virtue would escape her lips. The return to Milan gives the male the
knowledge she has – so long as she does not live as a queen in Callipolis. To return elevates
the male to her equal in terms of parental knowledge rather than allowing her to be the one
with that special knowledge. What need has she of the laws of legitimacy in cities where
the ugly life of political intrigue plays out and where siblings plot the overthrow of their
siblings? Throughout the play Prospero’s servant, the sexless, bodiless spirit Ariel anticipates
with great longing the freedom that will be his/hers once the tasks of the day are completed.
As the play concludes Prospero grants Ariel that freedom. The freedom Ariel so anticipates
and for which she/he fulfills all Prospero’s commands can be his/hers since she/he is not
constrained by the body. Prospero is constrained by his male body – as is Ferdinand; the
complete freedom Ariel will enjoy cannot be theirs. Prospera has bodily constraints as does
Prospero, but she has the advantage of the knowledge that Prospero would lack without the
laws of the political community, without relying on the truthfulness of his wife. Unafflicted
by the anxieties of parental uncertainty, would Prospera devise such an elaborate scheme to
return to Milan?
It is too much to suggest that Shakespeare has rewritten the Republic, but the notable
points of contact from the initial dialogue during the storm to the tripartite hierarchy of the
parts of the soul captured by the inhabitants of Prospero’s island offer a chance to reflect on
how the play can serve as a commentary on Socrates’ proposals. At the center of Shakespeare’s
play is the plot to marry Miranda to Ferdinand and return to Milan; at the center of Socrates’
three waves in Book 5 is the “woman’s law” that prescribes the community of wives and chil-
dren and the mutual ignorance of all as to who is parent to whom. Prospero uses his magic
and deception to ensure the birth of children known by the father to be his own. Socrates’
goal is to deprive both parents that knowledge. A female Prospera would not be haunted as
Prospero and Ferdinand are by the questions of paternity, by an insistence the male share the
knowledge the female has. The centrality of that concern in Shakespeare’s play posed by the
question of what might drive Prospera – a philosopher queen – to return to Milan suggests
the value of addressing that issue more seriously than it has been as a resource for examining
the philosophers’ resistance to returning to the cave and politics. Philosophers, both male and
female, may have their noetic children, but compulsion will be necessary to bring the philoso-
pher kings and queens down into the cave where neither will know their own.
Notes
1 I rely on Bloom’s translation of The Republic (Plato 1968), with modifications throughout to avoid
using the male pronoun where the Greek does not require it. See Sophia M. Connell, this volume, for
how Aristotle by focusing on the different realms of male and female virtues maintains the centrality
of the private family in contrast to Plato
2 It is important to note that Socrates explicitly rejects the private family where one has one’s own
mother, father, siblings. Instead, mothers, fathers and siblings are shared and attachments such as
537
love and filial piety attend to all who are parents, not just those who are one’s own. See Aristophanes’
Ecclesiazusae for a comic take on this shared family and Aristotle who affirms, with regard to the
expansive use of “mine” in Socrates’ Callipolis, that “It is better, indeed, to have a cousin of one’s
own than a son in the sense indicated” [Politics 2.3 1262a13–14, trans. Lord (2013)].
3 See chapter by Emily Hulme, this volume, for a full reconstruction of the argument.
4 Hulme, this volume, Section 3, treats the nature of the relationship between these two aspects of
Callipolis.
5 Citations are to the Norton Critical Edition of “The Tempest” (Hulme and Sherman editors, 2019).
6 The 2019 production of “The Tempest” at the Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare Festival starring the
late Martha Henry as Prospera.
7 See Ingram (Ingram 1966: 12) for the exhortation to see the Republic and “The Tempest” as “com-
mentaries upon one another”; Ben Johnson famously wrote that Shakespeare knew “small Latin
and less Greek” and there has ensued among scholars ever since efforts to assess the degree to which
Shakespeare draws on Plato for the philosophic content of his plays. Noted on occasion is how the
description of Falstaff’s death in Henry V recalls Plato’s description of Socrates in the Phaedo, sug-
gesting a close reading of Plato’s dialogue (Platt 1979; Rowe 2010: 175). But see as well Kaytor
(2018) for broad reflections on the Platonic themes found in Shakespeare’s works and Kaytor (2012)
where before considering Plato’s influence specifically on Timon of Athens, he writes that the key to
interpreting the play is “understanding Shakespeare’s uncanny ability to transform Platonic wisdom
into a dramatic narrative” (137). Craig (2003) summarizes his book on King Lear and Macbeth thus:
“An obvious implication of my analyses of the plays addressed in this book is that Shakespeare was
an assiduous student of philosophical texts and problems, especially Plato’s texts and problems, and
most especially those having to do with the relation between philosophy and political power.” Parker
(2004) looks to Plato’s Republic with a view to Shakespeare’s Roman plays. and Rowe (2010) after
highlighting several close verbal resonances in a variety of Shakespeare’s plays suggests the influence
of Plato and Socrates by showing how Iago exercises the elenctic method in his manipulation of
Othello.
8 As Bloom 1968: 465n2 notes this passage is drawn from the speech of Achilles in Hades.
9 See Hulme, this volume, Section 2, for a fuller analysis of this passage.
10 Italics added.
11 Italics added.
12 Italics added
13 On the significance of sexual differentiation between male and female in Plato’s Timaeus see Jill Gor-
don, this volume. For an entirely different take on sexual differentiation in relation to sexual repro-
duction in Aristotle’s writings see Andriel M. Trott, this volume and Mariska Leunissen, this volume.
References
Craig, L. H. (2003) Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King
Lear, Toronto, University of Toronto Press.
Ingram, W. (1966) “The Tempest and Plato’s Republic,” The CEA Critic 28.4: 11–12.
Kaytor, D. (2012) “Shakespeare’s Political Philosophy: A Debt to Plato in Timon of Athens,” Philosophy
and Literature 36.1: 136–152.
Kaytor, D. (2018) “On the Kinship of Shakespeare and Plato,” in The Routledge Companion to Shake-
speare and Philosophy, eds. Craig Bourne and Emily Chaddick Bourne. London, Routledge, 102–117.
Lord, Carnes. (2013) Aristotle’s Politics, 2nd edition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Parker, B. (2004) Plato’s Republic and Shakespeare’s Rome: A Political Study of the Roman Works,
Newark, University of Delaware Press.
Plato. (1968) The Republic of Plato (trans. A. Bloom), New York: Basic Books.
Platt, M. (1979) “Falstaff in the Valley of the Shadow of Death,” Interpretation 8.1: 5–29.
Rowe, M. W. (2010) “Iago’s Elenchus: Shakespeare, Othello, and the Platonic Inheritance,” in A Com-
panion to the Philosophy of Literature, ed. Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost, Oxford, Blackwell,
174–192.
Shakespeare, W. (2019) The Tempest, ed. P. Hulme and W. Sherman, New York, W.W. Norton &
Company.
538
Further Reading
Bloom’s essay accompanying his translation of the Republic explores in detail the status of the family
within the construction of Callipolis and the philosophical argument of the dialogue. Bloom, A.
(1968) “An Interpretive Essay,” in The Republic of Plato, New York: Basic Books.
For an argument about the significance of the organization of the family for the proposal of philosopher
queens see Okin’s chapter on the Republic in her Women in Western Political Thought, Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1979.
In Saxonhouse (1982) “Family, Polity, and Unity: Aristotle on Plato’s Community of Wives and Chil-
dren,” Polity 15.2: 202–219, I discuss Aristotle’s critique of Socrates’ suggestions for the transfor-
mation of the family with attention to his proposals for preventing parents from knowing who their
children are.
539
36
“POSSESSED, MAGICAL, AND
DANGEROUS TO HANDLE”
Jane Harrison, Nietzsche, and the
Maenad Chorus
Laura McClure
The genesis of Greek tragedy now tells us with great clarity and definiteness how the tragic
work of art of the Greeks was truly born from the spirit of music; we believe that, with this
thought, we have done justice for the first time to the original and quite astonishing signifi-
cance of the chorus
(Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy §17, 2; trans. Guess and Spiers 1991).
Great though the tragedies in themselves are, they owe their peculiar, their incommunicable
beauty largely to this element of the chorus which seemed at first so strange
(Harrison 1913: 122).
1 Introduction
Like the essay of Paul Allen Miller on Sarah Kofman in this volume, this chapter explores
another female reception of Greek philosophy, but as refracted through the prism of Ni-
etzche’s Birth of Tragedy. Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928), research fellow and lecturer in
Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, was, in Mary Beard’s words, “the first woman
in England to become an academic, in the fully professional sense – an ambitious, full-time,
salaried, university researcher and lecturer” (3 September 2010, The Guardian). In 1909,
she wrote to her friend and colleague, Gilbert Murray, “I have been re-reading Die Geburt
die Tragödie. Have you read the book at all lately, it is real genius, and if you hate the Ger-
man there is a French translation.”1 Although scholars such as Robert Ackerman have rightly
emphasized Harrison’s wide and deep engagement with comparative anthropology and other
contemporary intellectual trends, including the work of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Émil
Durkheim (1858–1917), and J. G. Frazer (1854–1941), the impress of Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche (1844–1900) and his Birth of Tragedy in the formulation of her theories has not
been fully appreciated, particularly given the extensive engagement of both thinkers with the
question of the chorus.2 Indeed, Albert Henrichs singles out Harrison as “the scholar who
filled in the blank spaces” of Nietzsche’s vision of the classical past, while more recently Adam
Lecznar explores how her reading of the Birth of Tragedy powerfully shaped the image of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-41 540

Jane Harrison, Nietzsche, and the Maenad Chorus
Greece encountered by modernist writers such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf
(Lecznar 2020: 44).
Although these scholars have rightly observed the importance of Nietzsche to Harrison’s
theories of Greek religion, they have nonetheless overlooked how she uses him as a means
of advancing her own feminist agenda through a reading of his gaps in her two most impor-
tant works, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and Themis: A Study of the
Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912; 2nd ed. 1927). By feminist, I mean two things: first,
the attempt to recover through her research vestiges of female religious agency in ancient
Greece that allowed women to resist patriarchal oppression, and, concomitantly, to establish
herself as a scholar on her own terms in the almost exclusively male domain of British clas-
sical studies.
Although Harrison borrowed many of her ideas of chthonic religion and Dionysiac cho-
rality from Nietszche, she shifted the focus away from his male followers, the satyrs, to his
female worshipers, the Maenads, to support her argument that early Greek religion reflected
a matrilineal social structure that projected a female, Great Mother deity to which men were
subordinated. In this chapter, I will argue that Harrison found in female Dionysiac chorality,
particularly as depicted in Euripides’ Bacchae, a compelling model for female agency and
resistance.3
2 Nietzsche and the Birth of the Chorus

Before turning to Harrison, it is necessary to consider in brief compass the main theories of
the Birth of Tragedy relevant to her work, namely, the importance of the chorus as a form
of collective group worship and the recognition of an underlying creative maternal power
identified with nature. In this work, Nietzsche seeks to strip away the illusion of classi-
cal restraint and enlightenment advanced by German Romanticism, beginning with Johann
Joachim Winckelmann’s theories of Greek art (1717–1768), to reveal the dark, chthonic
forces swirling beneath the surface of Greek civilization and the chorus is central to his revi-
sion. Indeed, he formulates a theory of the chorus far more comprehensive than any previous
philosopher, poet, or composer in his first philosophical treatise. To recap the main points of
Nietzsche’s argument: Greek tragedy is the product of two competing creative forces found
in nature and represented by the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo represents illusion, the
principle of individuation, and the art of sculpture, corresponding in drama to the tragic
hero (Geuss and Speirs 1999: 14–15).4 Dionysus, in contrast, is associated with intoxication,
the obliteration of the self through collective ecstasy, and the art of music, a role assumed
in the Greek theater by the chorus. The union of these two impulses in turn produces “the
sublime and exalted art of Attic tragedy … as the common goal of both drives whose myste-
rious marriage, after a long preceding struggle, was crowned with such a child” (Geuss and
Speirs 1999: 28).
This framework enables Nietzsche to treat the chorus in its metaphysical aspect as a com-
ponent of Dionysiac worship rather than as a formal component of drama, as had previous
thinkers, such as Georg Hegel, A. W. Schlegel, and Friedrich Schiller, whom he discusses in
Section 7. The ritual chorus of Dionysus comprises the archetypal or primitive form of trag-
edy in which the shared metaphysical and religious experience of the group was primary and
which predates the invention of a stage, the presence of actors and spectators, and even dra-
matic action. Echoing Aristotle, Nietzsche argues that “the evidence tells us most decisively
that tragedy arose from the tragic chorus and was originally chorus and nothing but chorus,”
541
Laura McClure
that is to say, the only reality was the chorus.5 He imagines this chorus as a lowly group of
goat men, the satyrs, symbols of the sexual omnipotence of nature (Geuss and Speirs 1999:
41). Although rude and uncultivated, these eternal nature spirits have access to and impart
Dionysiac wisdom as the “highest … expression of nature.” By sharing in the god’s suffering,
they become wise and “proclaim the truth from the heart of the world” (Geuss and Speirs
1999: 45). They are thus older, more original, and therefore more integral to the dramatic
action than the individualized heroes (Silk and Stern 1981: 353). Whereas Homeric epic inter-
poses the “shining fantasy” of the Olympian gods to distract us from the horrors of existence
(Geuss and Speirs 1999: 23), tragedy forces its audience to look beneath the surface and to
confront the fundamental truth of mortality:
Dionysiac art, too, wants to convince us of the eternal lust and delight of existence; but
we are to seek this delight, not in appearances, but behind them. We are to recognize
that everything which comes into being must be prepared for painful destruction; we are
forced to gaze into the terrors of individual existence.…
(Geuss and Speirs 1999: 80)
The satyr chorus offers the spectators a form of metaphysical solace, an ecstatic union with
the god that consoles them with the knowledge that “life flows on indestructibly beneath the
turmoil of appearances.”6
What is patently missing from Nietzsche’s discussion, as Charles Segal observes, is “a
consideration of the feminine,” especially given the preponderance of female characters and
choruses in Greek tragedy and religion (Segal 1997: 158). It focuses almost exclusively
on the male choral attendants of Dionysus and rarely mentions his female followers, the
Maenads, and never in connection with the ecstatic oneness induced by the god’s presence,
despite their prominence in Euripides’ Bacchae. As Henrichs asserts, “the Maenads and their
wild behavior in Greek myth had no place in Nietzsche’s conception of the Dionysian.”7
Indeed, Euripides’ Bacchae is only given a single page, despite its subject matter, the return
of Dionysus to Thebes to punish those who refuse to worship him (Geuss and Speirs 1999:
60). Of course, any reference to the play would have undermined his central argument that
attributes the decline of tragedy to Euripides’ non-Dionysiac art (Macintosh 2007: 152).
At the same time, a female presence often paradoxically surfaces in the maternal imagery
that recurs throughout.8 Indeed, the title itself, Birth of Tragedy, suggests a maternal origin
of the genre, which Nietzsche repeatedly associates with the chorus and with the natural
world more generally. The choral parts of tragedy are described as the “the womb” (Mut-
terschooss) that gives rise to the dialogue and episodes (Geuss and Speirs 1999: 44) and the
drama is later said to be “born of the womb (Geburtsschoosse) of music, in the mysterious
twilight of the Dionysiac” (Geuss and Speirs 1999: 61). By breaking down the boundaries
of the self, Dionysus fuses the individual to a primal collective oneness and “the path to the
Mothers of Being (den Müttern des Sein’s), to the innermost core of things, is laid open.”9
Tragedy as the Dionysiac art is the “primal mother (Urmutter), eternally creative beneath
the surface of incessantly changing appearances, eternally forcing life into existence” (Geuss
and Speirs 1999: 80). According to Kelly Oliver, Nietzsche often appropriates maternal
imagery to express the creative potential of the male philosophical enterprise (Oliver 1995:
105, 141–142). Here I am arguing that in addition to adapting Nietzsche’s conception of
the pivotal role of the chorus to Greek religious experience, Harrison also borrowed his
concept of the primacy of a creative maternal power that is prior to and generative of Greek
civilization.
542
3 A Disciple of Nietzsche
Although Harrison’s 1909 letter to Murray documents her fascination with Nietzsche’s Birth
of Tragedy shortly before she embarked on the writing of Themis, she actually encountered
his thought much earlier, through his friend and fellow classicist, Erwin Rohde (1845–1898),
and his two-volume work, Psyche (1890–1894), which she reviewed for The Classical Review
in 1890 and 1894 respectively. Rohde legitimized the idea of Dionysus as a form of collective
ecstasy in the field of classics in the second volume, conceptualizing him as a non-Greek, Thra-
cian god whose frenzied rites break down inhibition and incite violence in his worshipers.10 In
her review of the second volume, however, Harrison immediately homes in on the god’s female
followers: after quoting part of the parodos from Euripides’ Bacchae in which the bacchants
describe the blessed state induced by Dionysiac ecstasy (E. Ba. 72–75), she remarks, “To some
their souls were more than their social status, and of these were honourable women not a few”
(Harrison 1894: 165). These ‘honorable’ women she identifies as the Bacchae, “goddesses
themselves, one with the god … inspired Sibylls of a new and higher religion” (Harrison 1894:
166). These words suggest that Harrison was already beginning to find possibilities for female
religious agency and even an escape from sexual subordination and oppression through these
new ideas about Dionysiac religion.
Harrison directly acknowledges her debt to Nietzsche in both Prolegomena and Themis.11
In the earliest reference, Harrison cites with approval the philosopher’s definition of Dionysus
as the god of “limitless excess,” in contrast to Apollo, “The individual, with all his limits
and measure, became submerged here in the self-oblivion of the Dionysiac condition and
forgot the statutes of Apollo.”12 In Themis, she again incorporates lengthy quotes from the
Birth of Tragedy in two footnotes, first to support her distinction between the intellectualized
Olympians and the mystery-god, Dionysus (Harrison 1912: 476 nn. 1–2; cf. Geuss and Speirs
1999: 80 and 49). Then in the introduction to the second edition published in 1927, Harrison
describes herself as a “disciple … of Nietzsche” because of her “intemperate antipathy” to-
ward the Olympian deities (Harrison 1927: viii). In “The Pillar and the Maiden” (1905), she
defends this affinity for chthonic deities in the opening paragraph:
My friends .… tax me with some lack of reverence for the Olympian gods; for Apollo,
for Athena, nay even for Father Zeus himself. My interest, I am told, is unduly focused
on ghosts, bogies, fetiches, pillar-cults. I pray to them and to such like the attention prop-
erly due to the reverend Olympians. Worse still, in matters of ritual I prefer savage dis-
orders, Dionysian orgies, the tearing of wild bulls, to the ordered and stately ceremonial
of Panathenaic processions. In a word, my heart, it would seem, is not in the right place.
(Harrison 1905: 65)
The Olympians, in Harrison’s view, were patriarchal latecomers to Greek religion, especially
Zeus, whom she calls a pretender, an “archpatriarchal bourgeois” and “tiresome parvenu.”13
Apollo does not fare much better: he is not only a parvenu but also a “woman-hater” (Har-
rison 1903: 394). Indeed, they are secular fictions generated by Homeric epic far removed
from genuine objects of worship, much as Nietzsche described them. Rigidly fixed and anthro-
pomorphic in form, the Olympians do not endure because they have been severed from their
roots, like a “bouquet of cut-flowers whose bloom is brief” (Harrison 1912: xx–xxi).
In contrast, the chthonic deities that dwell beneath the surface continually reassert them-
selves as a persistent and ineradicable force of nature, much as Nietzsche envisioned Dionysus
and his satyr chorus (Harrison 1912: xi). Harrison’s stated intention is thus to explore what
543
Laura McClure
lives behind and beneath the rational surface of things, “to burrow deep into the lower stra-
tum of thought, into those chthonic cults” that underlie the Olympian gods and “from which
sprang all their brilliant blossoming” (Harrison 1912: vii). This impulse lies beneath and su-
persedes the Olympian order as an enduring, creative cycle of decay, death, and rebirth incar-
nated by the Great Mother goddess and her son, whom Harrison identifies as Dionysus. But
instead of focusing on the male satyr chorus found in Birth of Tragedy, Harrison pivots to his
thiasos or group of female followers, drawing heavily on her reading of Euripides’ Bacchae.
Dionysus is thus to be understood only in “his relation to his mother and the Maenads,” or,
rather, to the Maenads as nurses and mothers, who anticipate and project him as the vestigial
remains of a matrilinear social order (Harrison 1912: xxi–xxii).
4 Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion

Let us turn now to this formulation as first set forth in her early writings, a series of articles
published in Journal of Hellenic Studies in the early 1890s, particularly “Delphika” (1899)
and the series of lectures that preceded it, and Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion
(1903). This period marks the beginning of her collaboration with Euripides’ scholar Gil-
bert Murray and heralded the formation of the Cambridge Ritualists, a loosely knit group
of anthropologically minded classicists including Murray, Francis Cornford, and A. B. Cook
(1868–1952), with Harrison at its helm.14 With Prolegomena Harrison brought to bear her
formidable training in art and archaeology to demonstrate the inadequacy of a strictly literary
approach to the study of Greek myth. She further intended the book to challenge the prevail-
ing orthodoxy of the Greeks as paragons of reason and exemplars of “everlasting calm” and
“beauty at perfect rest,” in the words of John Ruskin (1819–1900), while advancing her own
theory that ritual precedes the myth that explains it.15 As with Nietzsche, reconceptualizing
the chorus is central to this project.
Prolegomena explores two different religious systems and how they intersect in poetry
and ritual, one involving the chorus or proto-choral entities associated with the dead, what
Harrison called Keres, and the other solitary, stand-alone gods. Or, as she explains, the
book explores how the “primitive and barbarous, even repulsive” rites of the lower stratum
intersect with the organized pantheon of Olympians, particularly Dionysus (Harrison 1903:
291). This focus on proto-choral, feminine entities reflects Harrison’s increasing conviction
of a universal cultural evolution from a primitive matriarchal order, as set forth in a series of
public lectures given in March, 1898, in which she views the mother as the head of the family
and “the Earth goddess—Mother Earth—the centre of worship” (Englishwoman’s Review
15 April 1898, 123). Even as the matriarchal order declined, it nonetheless continually reas-
serted itself over and against the patriarchal sun-god Apollo through “the many forms and
phases of the worship of Gaia, the Earth goddess, whose worship is associated with the
creative and productive phenomena of Nature, fraught with mysterious glimpses into the
unknown” (Englishwoman’s Review 15 April 1898, 123). Although her argument clearly
draws on Nietzsche’s antithesis of Apollo and Dionysus, its more original insight resides in
her recognition that the invisible processes of nature beneath and behind human civilization,
represented in Birth of Tragedy by Dionysus’ satyrs, is in fact inextricably bound up with
a matrilinear order. In another set of lectures, Harrison identifies Themis as the original
matriarchal deity at Delphi, the embodiment of social norms and customs and the source
of the oracle prior to the advent of Apollo (Robinson 2002: 123). Harrison then introduces
a chorus of companions to the goddess, a retinue of daughters in keeping with traditional
choral morphology, consisting of ancestral ghosts that Harrison identifies with the Erinyes
544
Figure 36.1 Drawing of a Figure From an Unidentified vase Originally Published in Die Erinyen: ein
Beitrag zur Religionn und Kunst der Griechen by Adolf Rosenberg (1874) and reprinted in
Harrison 1899: 220, Figure 6.
as “spirits of fertility or sterility … daughters of mother earth.”16 She goes on to link the
chorus of Erinyes to that of the Maenads by way of a delicately drawn female figure from an
unidentified Attic vase painting who grasps a snake in each hand as an emblem of chthonic
power (Figure 36.1).17 Harrison concludes that the Erinyes and the Maenads represent a
variation of the same fundamental idea: they are female attendants of the earth, primordial
in nature, and plural or choral in form.
5 The Babe Bromios

The archetype of the mother goddess as the product of a matrilinear social structure prior to
and generative of the Olympian system, her worship by a chorus of daughters, and her persis-
tent recurrence throughout later Greek religion, furnishes the broad framework of Prolegom-
ena to the Study of Greek Religion. In brief compass, the book traces a genealogy of Greek
religion, from its origins in rituals connected to the primordial, often malignant, chthonic
Keres, grammatically gendered as feminine, to the “vague shifting outlines” of ghosts or sprites
that later “crystalized into clear shapes as goddesses and gods” (Harrison 1903: 162). Here
the Keres are imagined as a sort of evil choral adjunct to the primordial earth goddess: they
are “little fluttering insect-like diseases” associated with old age and death (Harrison 1903:
170–173). This idea is subsequently expanded to include a host of feminine chthonic demons
dangerous to men that assume multiple forms in Greek myth and reflect the morphology of
the archaic Greek chorus: they are female, usually maidens, plural in number, often triadic,
and share the same parentage and geographical origins, such as the Harpies, the Gorgons, and
the Sirens. From the worship of these chthonic, female choral entities, the female Olympians
545
Laura McClure
emerged, assuming first the guise of Erinyes who gradually were transformed from malevolent
spirits into the benevolent Eumenides, as portrayed in Aeschylus’ same name play.
Just when Harrison returns full circle in the second part of her book to the chthonic festi-
vals as examples of the two distinct religious systems simultaneously at work—the primordial
chthonic stratum of worship, largely identified with female entities as adjuncts of the Mother
Goddess, and a later Olympian supersession—she begins anew, introducing Dionysus as an
alien, immigrant god, in accordance with Rohde’s view (Harrison 1903: 358). Gesturing to
Nietzsche, she asserts that the god presages “a ‘return to nature,’ a breaking of bonds and limi-
tations and crystallizations, and desire for the life rather of the emotions than of the reason,
a recrudescence it may be of animal passions” (Harrison 1903: 444). Unlike the Olympians,
however, he is a choral god, always accompanied by an entourage, whether of satyrs or of
Maenads. His choral aspect, in Harrison’s view, identifies Dionysus with the communal rituals
of the group, the form of worship that predates the Olympian system and continues to project
him well past the pre-Hellenic period.
In a reversal of Nietzsche’s view, however, Harrison asserts that the Maenads are closer to
the earth than the satyrs and thus better able to serve as a conduit for the Dionysiac ecstasy
of nature:
The rude Satyrs have but one way of worshipping their god, they fall upon the wine-
cup; the Maenads, worshipping the god of life, bend in ritual ecstasy to touch the earth,
mother of life.
(Harrison 1903: 429)
In contrast to the immoderate satyrs who only temporarily access the deity through drink,
the Maenads in their rituals to Dionysus instead maintain perpetual contact with a far greater
power, Mother Earth. They are more ‘real’ than the satyrs because they are not given mythi-
cal animal characteristics, like horse’s ears and tails. Whether called Bacchae, Thyiades, or
Maenads, they are all women possessed by the spirit of Dionysus. Although they were origi-
nally actual female worshipers, they later became his mythological attendants (Harrison 1903:
395). “Possessed, magical, and dangerous to handle,” the Bacchae leave their homes to com-
mune with nature in the form of wild beasts in the mountains.
The shift to Maenads follows the arc of her source material and her heavy reliance on
Euripides’ Bacchae, a play that Gilbert Murray had been translating at their first acquaint-
ance and the subject of many of their subsequent conversations, and a play almost completely
ignored by Nietzsche in Birth of Tragedy, as we have seen. It is also a play about female
Dionysiac chorality, with its repeated references to the chorus and choral dancing, denoted
by the terms χορός and χορεύω, and its representation of two choruses of women, the exter-
nal dramatic chorus of Dionysus’ female companions who have followed him en masse from
Asia to Thebes, and the internal group of Theban women who have abandoned their homes
to participate in choruses in his honor on the mountain (χορῶν, E. Ba. 63; cf. 680). More im-
portantly, the play’s chorus reiterates the story of Dionysus’ birth, stressing his status as the
son of a (human) mother, a move crucial to Harrison’s argument: the Maenads are not just
the frenzied female worshipers of Dionysus, they are also his nurses and mothers. The insight
draws on Homer, where they are called the “nurses of maddened Dionysus” (τιθήνας, Hom. Il.
6. 132), and in her favorite strophe of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, in which the god roves
the sacred precinct of the Eumenides with his nurses in tow, the Thyiades (θείαις … τιθήναις,
S. OC 668–680). The Thyiades are synonymous with Maenads or Bacchae, derived from the
eponymous nymph, Thyia, who was considered the first priestess of Dionysus at Delphi.18 In
546
the guise of Thyiades, his followers worshiped and tended to not a full-grown god, but rather
to a sleeping babe, since, according to Plutarch, they “awakened the ‘god of the liknon,’” a
term that means both winnowing fan and cradle, thereby symbolically enacting his second
birth (Θυιάδες ἐγείρωσι τὸν Λικνίτην, Plut. Mor. 365a).
By means of this rhetorical move, Dionysus becomes ‘the babe Bromios’, as she calls him, a
manifestation of an earlier, matrilinear religion of Mother and Son that sanctions ties of blood
over marriage and continually re-emerges through all periods of Greek civilization in the form
of collective choral activity:
It is at once a cardinal point and a primary note in the mythology of Dionysus that he
is the son of his mother… . If we are to have the relation of parent and child mirrored
in mythology, assuredly the closest relation is not that even of mother and daughter but
of mother and son.
In addition to the cult of Dionysus in the cradle, the Thyiades are also associated with the cult
of the mother who bore him, Semele, established at Delphi (Plut. Mor. 293d), proving, again,
that the god is “essentially the son of his mother” and bears only “slight and artificial” con-
nection to his father (Harrison 1903: 402). Indeed, the sign of his ongoing connection with the
primordial female deity is the Maenadic chorus that accompanies him:
Dionysus … bears to the end, as no other god does, the stamp of his matriarchal origin.
He can never rid himself of the throng of worshipping women, he is always the nursling
of the Maenad. Moreover, the instruments of his cult are always not his but his mother’s.
Although we can trace the contours of Nietzsche’s thought in Prolegomena, namely, the con-
ception of Dionysus as a choral god whose group worship supersedes tragic individualism
by tapping into the unchanging and eternal truths beneath existence, Harrison rewrites this
theory from a feminist perspective. Dionysus originates in a collective and generative female
group consciousness that operates in opposition to male heroic individualism, rationality, and
temporality. Like Nietzsche, Harrison pursued the “earlier, darker forms” of pre-Olympian
religion, but found there instead a female religious imperative advanced by female ritual ac-
tivities, the quasi-choral chthonic entities, and the Great Mother goddess they projected.
6 Themis: The Social Fact of the Mother

According to Albert Henrichs, in Themis Harrison had returned “to the Nietzschean concept
of submergence of the individual in the Dionysiac collective of the satyr chorus” (Henrichs
1984: 231). I argue instead that the book builds upon and expands her previous emphasis on
female religious agency in the form of Maenadic chorality and a primordial maternal deity
identified with a pre-Hellenic matrilinear order. The argument in Themis is at times opaque
and often barely glimpsed through the “windings of the labyrinth,” as Harrison herself ad-
mits.19 Her stated purpose is a study of group-thinking and its object “the analysis of the
Eniautos-Daimon or Year Daimon, who lies behind each and every primitive god” (Harrison
1912: vii). Acknowledging that the compound nowhere exists in the ancient Greek language,
Harrison defends her coinage as “sheer necessity,” because Frazer’s terms ‘Tree-Spirit’, ‘Corn-
Spirit’, and ‘Vegetation Spirit’ do not adequately capture the cyclical aspect of the god.20 The
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Laura McClure
Greek term ἐνιαυτός for Harrison suggests not simply a span of time as a synonym of ἔτος
(‘year’) but rather a cyclic process of waxing and waning, “the whole world-process of decay,
death, renewal” (Harrison 1912: xvii). It is probably not a coincidence, given that Harrison
always had the maternal origins of culture in mind, that ἐνιαυτός in early Greek epic can des-
ignate the cyclical nature of human gestation, specifically, “the completion of a woman’s time
for being delivered.”21 The word is used in Hesiod of the pregnancy of Alcmene that produced
the hero Heracles and his brother, “and soon, as the years revolved, we were born, your father
and I” (ἐπιπλομένων ἐνιαυτῶν, Hes. Sc. 87; Thuc. 3.68). Harrison deploys the term ἐνιαυτός
broadly to refer to human fertility and the renewal of the year in rites associated with contests,
namely, the Olympian games and Attic drama, the subjects of Cornford’s and Murray’s con-
tributions to Themis, “the ritual of the Eniautos-Daimon, who was at once the representation
of the life of the group and the life of nature, issued in agonistic festivals and in the drama”
(Harrison 1912: xix).
Harrison furnishes two theoretical ‘clues’ to guide her reader through the labyrinth, Henri
Bergson’s concept of durée, that life is one, indivisible, and yet ceaselessly changing, and Dur-
kheim’s theory of the origins of religion in collective emotion. These two principles help to
explain why the mystery god or Eniautos-Daimon, e.g., Dionysus, is always accompanied by
a thiasos or chorus:
The mystery-god arises out of these instincts, emotions, and desires, which attend and
express life; but these emotions, desires, instincts, insofar as they are religious, are at the
outset rather of a group than an individual consciousness . … [T]he form taken by the
divinity reflects the social structure of the group to which the divinity belongs.
(Harrison 1912: xi)
As argued in Prolegomena, the mystery god is always connected to a matrilinear, pre-Hellenic

religion, manifested in ancient Greece by Dionysus and his female worshipers, that originates
in and channels group emotion and unity as “the impulse of life through all things, perennial,
indivisible” (Harrison 1912: 476). As a corollary, the form taken by the divinity reflects the
social structure of the group, with the result that Dionysus is the son of the mother “because
he issues from a matrilinear group” (Harrison 1912: xiii).
Harrison bases her theory on an inscription of a fragmentary choral hymn unearthed from
a temple of Zeus at Palaikastro, Crete, known as the Palaikastro Hymn of the Kouretes,
first published by Gilbert Murray in 1909. The hymn embodies “group-thinking, or rather
group-emotion towards life” and as such promises to shed light on the essence of ancient
mystery religions (Harrison 1912: x). With its opening invocation, “Hail, greatest Kouros,”
the hymn celebrates Zeus in his capacity as infant (παῖδα), son (Κρόνειε), and youth (κοῦρος).
Guided by Arnold van Gennep’s Les rites de passage (1909), she argues that the chorus of
the hymn consists of male youths, the Kouretes, who are engaged in an initiation rite associ-
ated with the matrilinear group. It should be noted that already in Prolegomena Harrison
analogizes these Kouretes as the caretakers of the infant Zeus to the female companions of
Dionysus, “they are in fact the male correlatives of the Maenads as Nurses” (Harrison 1903:
499). What is remarkable about the hymn, in Harrison’s view, is not only that it focuses on
the god’s infancy and birth but also that it situates Zeus, normally a solitary god, within a
choral context:
Nowhere save in this Hymn do we hear of Zeus with attendant daimones. He always
stands alone, aloof, approached with awe, utterly delimited from his worshippers. …
548
The Hymn brings us face to face with the fact that Zeus once had a thiasos, once when
he was a young man, a Kouros. When he grew up to be the Father, it seems, he lost his
thiasos and has gone about unattended ever since.
(Harrison 1912: 12)
Zeus as the ‘greatest kouros’ is thus not the omnipotent Homeric ‘father of gods and men,’ but
rather the projection of the chorus, that is, he is a variant of the group-daimon or Eniautos-
Daimon (Ackerman 1991: 125). This daimon is not an anthropomorphic deity but rather a
“potency, directly connected to life on earth,” to nature, and therefore older than and prior to
Zeus the Olympian (Harrison 1912: 228). Through their choral song and dance, the Kouretes
enact a group ritual, what Harrison calls a dromenon, that is, a thing done collectively, which
brings about a ‘New Birth’ (Harrison 1912: x). As the infant in matrilinear religion belongs
to the mother, the son must undergo this second, initiatory birth in order to separate from his
mother and enter the thiasos of adult males (Harrison 1912: 36–38). Since Harrison identified
the chorus not simply with Dionysus but rather with a primordial female deity, she therefore
finds in the hymn of the Kouretes further evidence of “the magical rite of the Mother and the
Son, the induction of the Year-Spirit who long preceded the worship of the Father” (Harrison
1925: 72).
The idea of a ‘New Birth’ is closely bound up with the myth of the double birth of Dionysus
already discussed at length in Prolegomena. Born first from the womb of his mother and then
reborn again from the thigh of his father, Dionysus is both of woman born and yet divinely
created, a story reiterated by the Maenad chorus of Euripides’ Bacchae. For this reason, the
ritual of the Kouros and that of the choral dithyramb performed in honor of Dionysus are,
in Harrison’s mind, one and the same, “The Cretan cult of the Kouretes and the Thracian
religion of Dionysos are substantially one” (Harrison 1912: 30). Both initiation rituals enact
the rite of a second or new birth, “the cardinal doctrine of the Baccchae” (Harrison 1912: 38),
in which the infant is taken from his mother and “his soul is congregationalized” into the life
of the group.22 The purpose is to purge the boy of the maternal aspect before introducing him
into the company of men:
The birth from the male womb is to rid the child from the infection of his mother—to
turn him from a woman-thing into a man-thing. Woman to primitive man is a thing
at once weak and magical, to be oppressed yet feared. She is charged with powers of
childbearing denied to man, powers only half understood, forces of attraction, but also
of danger and repulsion, forces that all over the world seem to fill him with dim terror.
(Harrison 1912: 36)
Harrison identifies this process with a stage in human civilization in which matriarchy disap-
pears and is replaced by a patriarchal order wherein the child becomes the property of the
father, thereby weakening the tie between mother and son. Patriarchal religions reflect this
shift in their idealization of father–son bond and the desire to appropriate the female capac-
ity for childbirth as exemplified in Greek myth by the birth of Athena from Zeus’ head and
Dionysus’ second birth from Zeus (Harrison 1912: 41). In Harrison’s view, the patriarchal
Olympians were originally spirits inextricably bound to their choruses but then gradually
became detached and withered away, “cut off from the very source of their life and being,
the emotion of the thiasos” (Harrison 1912: 48). As clearly defined, individualized personae
rather than vague spirits, the Olympians are endowed with immortality, having broken free
of the cycle of death and rebirth associated with the Eniautos-Daimon (Konaris 2016: 501).
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Laura McClure
Dionysus, however, differs in that he is always accompanied by his thiasos or chorus, suggest-
ing, in Harrison’s view, that he continued to function as the projection of collective emotion
and a vanished matrilinear order (Harrison 1912: 447; Konaris 2016: 501). Olympian gods
lost their religious significance and became objects of art, while Dionysus remained the object
of ‘genuine’ religious devotion.
7 The Maenads as Mothers

At this point in her discussion of Dionysus, however, Harrison addresses an inconsistency.
Just as the Kouros is the projection of his chorus, the Kouretes, so, Dionysus is his thiasos
incarnate. But the thiasos of Dionysus, the Bacchos, consists not of youths but rather of female
worshipers, the Bacchae. How can a thiasos of women project a male god? To answer this
question, she brings back into the argument the choruses of Maenads from Euripides’ Bac-
chae. In her view, they can and do project the male god as they passionately proclaim “dogmas
of their most holy religion—the religion of the Mother and Child” (Harrison 1912: 39). The
Maenadic chorus of Euripides’ Bacchae immediately invokes in its first song the maternal
origins of Dionysus, his Theban birthplace, and his mother Semele. Further, they sing of Crete
and the Kouretes and of Mother Rhea and the infant Zeus, thereby indirectly linking the two
cults (E. Ba. 120–130). They also insist that the ritual gear of Dionysus, the drums and flutes
of his worship, are the original property of the Great Mother (E. Ba. 130; Harrison 1912:
39). To align Dionysiac religion again with that of Mother and Son, Harrison re-introduces
an argument proposed in Prolegomena: the Maenads are indeed the nurses or mothers of the
infant Dionysus and as such they embody the maternal principle inherent in nature. Indeed,
the chorus of Theban women, the “wild white maids,” as Murray renders them, are mothers
endowed with the magical power of making the whole earth blossom, “Oh burst in bloom of
wreathing bryony,/Berrries and leaves and flowers” (Harrison 1912: 40; E. Ba. 107). Through
the rituals of these mountain mothers “the whole of creation moves and stirs and lives” (Har-
rison 1912: 40). The association of Dionysus with the chorus and his relation to his mother
and the Maenads thus reflect the earlier matriarchal stage of civilization in which the worship
of the Mother and Son predominated (Harrison 1912: 49).
Themis: A Study in the Social Origins of Greek Religion builds on and expands many of
the arguments set forth in Prolegomena to reinforce the theory of the matriarchal roots of
Greek religion, but reframes them around the concept of the Eniautos-Daimon. It culminates,
however, not with Dionysus and mystery religion, but rather with the goddess Themis. We
may recall that Harrison first outlined in the late 1890s a theory of Themis as the matriarchal
deity who presided over Delphi prior to the advent of Apollo in various public lectures and
in her published essay, “Delphika.” In the final pages of Themis, the goddess is described as
the ‘social imperative’ that brings and binds humans together and the “source and well-spring
of religion” (Harrison 1912: 485). This power derives almost exclusively from her generative
capacity qua mother, specifically as the mother of a male child who is a potential member of
the male community:
In primitive matrilinear societies woman is the great social force or rather central focus,
not as woman, or at least not as sex, but as mother, the mother of tribesmen to be. This
social fact finds its projection in the first of divine figures, in Kourotrophos—‘Rearer of
Sons.’ The male child nursed by the mother is potentially a kouros, hence her great value
and his.
550
Not only does Themis sanction the vital function of female reproduction for society, but she is
also the starting point or building block of human social interaction since the mother is “the
supreme social fact” (Harrison 1912: 494). Beyond the family, she engenders civic institutions
such the public assembly and other social networks that form the polis, affirming that the very
foundation of Greek civilization “originates in the mother, in the female concept of union and
collectivity” (Harrison 1912: 485). With this statement, Harrison reverses Nietzsche’s origi-
nal argument that places male sexuality and creative power as foundational to civilization.
Themis, not Dionysus, is the original choral god, her power rooted in female rather than male
collectivity, that is to say, the daughters of earth, her retinue. By reformulating the Greek cho-
rus as an instrument of female power that gave rise to Themis and thus to human civilization,
Harrison reimagined the Hellenic past from a feminist perspective and recovered possibilities
for female agency and resistance scarcely imaginable in her own age.
Notes
1 Unpublished letter in the Jane Harrison Collection at the Newnham College Library, quoted by Ack-
erman (1991): 101; Lecznar (2020): 39 n. 20.
2 Henrichs (1984): 229–232; Peacock (1988): 186; Ackerman (19910: 98–101; Passman (1993): 194–
195; Robinson (2002): 220 n. 1; Griffith (2007): 76–77. Schlesier (1991) is curiously silent on the
topic, despite mentioning Nietzsche several times.
3 On the fin-de-siècle enthusiasm for maenads and their association with the ‘New Woman,’ see Prins
(1999): 46; for maenads and Dionysiac revels in fin-de-siècle painting, see Louis (2005): 351. Most
recently, Honig (2021) posits a feminist theory of resistance through a reading of Euripides’ Bacchae
and the maenadic chorus.
4 Although absent in Wincklemann, this antithesis would have been familiar to readers, for which see
Arnott (1984): 138–40; Turner (2016): 244.
5 Geuss and Speirs (1999): 36; cf. 44. On the origins of tragedy in the chorus, cf. Arist. Poet. 1449a11
and from some satyric element, cf. Arist. Poet. 1149a20; Arnott (1984): 141, 148 n. 12.
6 Geuss and Speirs (1999): 85, cf. 39; see Arnott (1984): 138; Henrichs (1984): 223; Silk (1998): 198.
7 Henrichs (1984): 229. There are only three references to maenads in Birth of Tragedy, none of which
are central to the argument: “asleep on a high alpine meadow in the mid-day sun” (Geuss and Speirs
1999: 30; E. Ba. 677ff.); “the architecture of the stage seems like a radiant cloud formation seen from
on high by the Bacchae as they roam excitedly through the mountains” (Geuss and Speirs 1999: 42);
Socrates as a new Orpheus “fated to be torn apart by the maenads of the Athenian court of justice”
(Geuss and Speirs 1999: 64). The absence of female archetypes in this account of the chorus has also
been noted by Carpentier (1998: 4).
8 For an examination of Nietzsche’s maternal metaphors and their application to Isadora Duncan’s
dance, see LaMothe (2003, 2016: 107–150).
9 Geuss and Speirs (1999: 76 n. 128). A reference to the second part of Goethe’s Faust, in which the
hero wishes to summon Helen of Troy from the dead. To accomplish this, he must descend to ‘the
mothers’ as the mythical sources of the power to bring things to life (Faust II, 6212–93).
10 This idea was subsequently debunked by the discovery of linear B tablets containing the name of
Dionysus; see Henrichs (1984: 225).
11 Harrison (1903): 445 n. 4 and (1927): viii and 476 nn. 1–2; Harrison (1913): 201.
12 Geuss and Speirs (1999): 27; see Harrison (1903): 445–446 n. 4, “Das Individuum, mit allen seinen
Grenzen und Maassen, ging hier in der Selbstvergessenheit der dionysischen Zustände unter und ver-
gass die apollinischen Satzungen.”
13 For “pretender,” see Harrison (1912): 100; Schlesier (1991): 216 n. 103; for “archpatriarchal bour-
geois,” see Harrison (1900: 108, 1903: 285); the last is from an unpublished letter to Gilbert Murray
quoted in Robinson (2002): 137.
14 Ackerman (1991): xxvi; Carpentier (1994): 13.
15 Harrison (1903): 1, 29 (quoting Ruskin); Stewart (1959): 23. Contra Carpentier (1994): 12–13, who
argues that the theory of rituals preceding myths can be found throughout J. G. Frazer’s works; Har-
rison’s contribution is the discovery of the link between ritual and art.
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Laura McClure
16 Harrison (1899): 212; cf. Hes. Theog. 184; at A. Eum. 416 they are “daughters of night” (νυκτὸς
τέκνα).
17 The vase containing this image is uncertain. Harrison cites Adolf Rosenberg’s Die Erinyen (1874),
where it ornaments the title page without attribution.
18 On the various names for Dionysus’ female followers, cf. S. Ant. 1151; on Thyia as first priestess of
Dionysus, cf. Paus. 6.4.
19 Harrison (1912): 10; Ackerman (1991): 123; Robinson (2002): 230.
20 On the concept of the Enaiautos-Daimon, see Konaris (2016): 501.
21 This definition is found in the eighth edition of the standard Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexi-
con (1897), with which Harrison would have been familiar; the most recent edition defines ἐνιαυτός
as “anniversary,” or “any long period of time,” omitting any reference to pregnancy and gestation.
22 The phrase, one of Harrison’s favorites, is Verrall’s translation of θιασεύεται ψυχάν (E. Ba. 75); see
Harrison (1915): 65; Ackerman (1991): 125 n. 9; Robinson (2002): 257 n. 50.
Bibliography
Ackerman, R. 1991. The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists. London
and New York: Routledge.
Arnott, W. 1984. “Nietzsche’s View of Greek Tragedy.” Arethusa 17: 135–149.
Carpentier, M. 1998. Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on
Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach.
Geuss, Raymond and Ronald Speirs. (eds.) 1999. Nietzsche The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings.
Griffith, M. 2007. “Gilbert Murray on Greek Literature: The Great/Greek Man’s Burden.” In C. Stray
(ed.), Gilbert Murray Reassessed: Hellenism, Theater, and International Politics. Oxford: Oxford
Harrison, J. E. 1890a. Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, with Mrs. A. W. Verrall’s transla-
tion of the ‘Attica’ of Pausanias, Book I. London and New York: Macmillan.
———. 1890b. “Rohde’s Psyche.” The Classical Review 4.8: 376–377.
———. 1894a. Greek Vase Paintings, with D. S. MacColl. London: T. F. Unwin.
———. 1894b. “Rohde’s Psyche, Part II.” The Classical Review 8.4: 165–166.
———. 1899. “Delphika.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 19: 205–251.
———. 1900. “Pandora’s Box.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 20: 99–114.
———. 1903. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1909. “The Kouretes and Zeus Kouros: A Study in Pre-Historic Sociology.” The Annual of the
British School at Athens 15: 308–338.
———. 1912. 1927. Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
———. 1913. Ancient Art and Ritual. Home University Library. London: Williams and Norgate.
———. 1915. Alpha and Omega. London: Sidgewick and Jackson.
———. 1925. Reminiscences of a Student's Life. London: Hogarth Press.
———. 1927. Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Henrichs, A. 1984. “Loss of Self, Suffering, Violence: The Modern View of Dionysus from Nietzsche to
Girard.” Harvard Studies Classical Philology 88: 205–240.
Honig, B. 2021. A Feminist Theory of Refusal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Konaris, M. 2016. Greek Gods in Modern Scholarship: Interpretation and Belief in Nineteenth and
Early Twentieth Century Germany and Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
LaMothe, K. 2003. “Giving Birth to a Dancing Star: Reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s Maternal Rhetoric
via Isadora Duncan’s Dance.” Soundings 86: 351–373.
———. 2006. Nietzsche’s Dancers: Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and the Revaluation of Christian
Values. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Lecznar, A. 2020. Dionysus after Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Literature and
Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lloyd-Jones, H. 1982. Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Cen-
turies. London: Duckworth.
552
———. 1996. “Jane Ellen Harrison 1850–1928.” In E. Shils and C. Blacker (eds.), Cambridge Women:
Twelve Portraits. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 29–72.
Louis, M. 2005. “Gods and Mysteries: The Revival of Paganism and the Remaking of Mythography
through the Nineteenth Century.” Victorian Studies 47: 329–361.
Macintosh, F. 2007. “From the Court to the National: The Theatrical Legacy of Gilbert Murray’s Bac-
chae.” In C. Stray (ed.), Gilbert Murray Reassessed: Hellenism, Theater, and International Politics.
Mcginty, P. 1978. Interpretation and Dionysos: Method in the Study of a God. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Oliver, Kelly. 1995. Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy’s Relation to the “Feminine.” London and New
York: Routledge.
Passman, T. 1993. “Out of the Closet and into the Field: Matriculture, the Lesbian Perspective, and
Feminist Classics.” In N. Rabinowitz and A. Richlin (eds.), Feminist Theory and the Classics. London
and New York: Routledge, 181–208.
Peacock, S. 1988. Jane Ellen Harrison: The Mask and the Self. Yale: Yale University Press.
Prins, Y. 1999. “Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters.” In R. Dellamora (ed.), Victorian Sexual Dissi-
dence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 43–81.
Robinson, A. 2002. The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schlesier, R. 1991. “Prolegomena to Jane Harrison‘s Interpretation of Ancient Greek Religion.” In
W. Calder (ed.), The Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered. Supplement 2, Illinois Classical Studies.
Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 185–226.
Segal, C. 1997. Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides’ Bacchae. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Silk, M. 1999. “‘Das Urproblem der Tragödie’: Notions of the Chorus in the Nineteenth Century.” In
P. Riemer and B. Zimmerman (eds.), Der Chor im antiken und modernen Drama. Berlin: Springer-
Verlag, 195–226.
Silk, M. and J. Stern. 1981. Nietzsche on Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stewart, J. 1959. Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait from Letters. London: The Merlin Press.
Turner, F. 2016. European Intellectual History from Rousseau to Nietzsche. Yale: Yale University Press.
Further Reading
Mary Beard offers a very readable and provocative account of Harrison’s life and work in The Invention
of Jane Harrison (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2002). A more detailed and comprehensive
biography is found in The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison by Annabel Robinson (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002). The main reference work dealing with Nietzsche and Greek tragedy
is the volume by Silk, M. S., and Stern, J. P.. Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981). On the influence of Nietzsche on modernist writing, see most recently Lecznar, Adam.
Dionysus after Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Literature and Thought (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
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37
WOMEN’S WORK
Exploring a Tradition of Inquiry with W. E. B. Du
Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Aristotle
Harriet Fertik
1 Introduction
This essay is about the relationship between politics and work, especially work associated
with domestic space.1 I focus on how W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) and Anna Julia Cooper
(1858–1964) understand this relationship, and the ways their thinking makes it possible to
re-read and revise Aristotle’s approach to these issues in the Politics.2 Du Bois and Cooper
were both prominent African American thinkers and activists in the late-nineteenth and early-
twentieth centuries, and both studied and wrote about the Greek and Latin texts which were
foundational to education in their era.3 I read Aristotle’s discussions of women and the en-
slaved in the first book of the Politics, a fourth century BCE text, together with the essay
“The Servant in the House” from Du Bois’ Darkwater, published in 1920, and Cooper’s 1893
collection A Voice from the South. The texts of Du Bois and Cooper that I discuss here do
not mention Aristotle by name, but they do deploy and develop concepts that are essential to
Aristotle’s arguments in the Politics, especially metaphors for enslavement and the connec-
tions between domestic and political relationships.4 Aristotle defines human beings as “politi-
cal animals” who properly live in community with one another (Politics 1.2.1253a1–4), but
he identifies women and the enslaved as the subordinate members of the associations that are
foundational to the life of the household and therefore of the polity. By affirming the value of
domestic work and domestic workers, Du Bois and Cooper suggest new possibilities and new
requirements for what it means to participate in politics.
In grouping these thinkers together, I am guided by Toni Morrison’s provocative arguments
in “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.”
As she considers the American literary canon, she rejects the question “‘Why am I, an Afro-
American, absent from it?’” As Morrison (1989: 11–12) notes, this
Is not a particularly interesting query anyway. The spectacularly interesting question is

‘What intellectual feats had to be performed by the author or his critic to erase me from
a society seething with my presence, and what effect has that performance had on the
work?’5
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-42 554

Women’s Work
Morrison’s attention to the exertions necessary to “erase [her]” guides us to two key issues for
my argument. First, marginalized figures, both when they appear in Aristotle’s text and when
they do not, support the life of the polis as Aristotle understands it and his ability to develop
his ideas and expound them in writing.6 Second, it takes a lot of work to make Aristotle our
guide to understanding the divisions of labor that sustain politics, and Classicists need to
recognize the work we are doing when we choose to examine these issues with Aristotle. As
Shelley Haley (1993: 24) observed, “the classics family has kept its Brown, Black, and biracial
ancestors, sisters, and brothers marginalized and invisible.” There are questions that emerge
from reading Aristotle’s Politics that are best answered in dialogue with the work of Du Bois
and Cooper, and to try to do without these thinkers is to erase them from a conversation that
is (to use Morrison’s phrase) “seething with [their] presence.”
I begin with Du Bois’ personal narrative of doing “menial” service, and I build on this ac-
count to elucidate two challenges to Aristotle: first, to Aristotelian metaphors that dehuman-
ize domestic workers, and second, to Aristotle’s notion of a democratic polity that subjugates
others to do its necessary work. Next, I discuss Anna Julia Cooper’s assessment of the distinct
forms of knowledge that domestic work and those closely associated with it have to offer the
political community. I consider how Du Bois and Cooper make it possible to reinvent an Aris-
totelian approach to politics, but I also show what happens when a Classicist puts Du Bois and
Cooper first in her analysis of basic questions of political philosophy.7 We have to be mindful,
as Morrison warns, that “finding or imposing Western influences in/on Afro-American litera-
ture has value, but when its sole purpose is to place value only where that influence is located it
is pernicious” (Morrison 1989: 10). The perniciousness that Morrison describes is a constant
challenge in the field of Black Classicisms, which considers how peoples from across Africa
and the African diaspora have studied, interpreted, made use of, and remade the literature, art,
thought, and cultures of antiquity.8 Du Bois and Cooper have something to say to and about
Aristotle, and it is valuable to figure out what that something is, but that something is not the
reason, or the sole reason, that their work has value.9 Furthermore, if we explore the ways
that Du Bois and Cooper can help us to re-read Aristotle’s Politics, we must also ask how, or
if, Aristotle can contribute to our understanding of Du Bois’ and Cooper’s work.
2 The Servant’s Son

Du Bois acknowledges his mother and his mother’s work early in “The Servant in the House,”
the fifth chapter of Darkwater.
He begins the piece by recounting a hostile encounter he endured after giving a public talk
“on the disfranchisement of my people in society, politics, and industry.” A member of the
audience, presumably a white woman (although not explicitly identified in this way in the es-
say), comes up to Du Bois following the event (Du Bois 1920: 109):
She… spitefully shook a finger in my face. “Why—won’t—Negroes—work!” she panted.

“I have given money for years to Hampton and Tuskegee and yet I can’t get decent serv-
ants… They all want to be lawyers and doctors and” (she spat the word in venom)
“ladies!”
“God forbid!” I answered solemnly, and then being of gentle birth, and unminded to
strike a defenseless female of uncertain years, I ran; I ran home and wrote a chapter in
my book and this is it.
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“The Servant in the House” responds both to the woman’s accusations and to her equation
of “work” with the work of the servants she seeks to employ. She would probably see a
contradiction between Du Bois’ characterization of himself as “being of gentle birth” and his
proclamation, in the next section of essay, that “I speak and speak bitterly as a servant and
a servant’s son” (Du Bois 1920: 109). This juxtaposition signals Du Bois’ efforts, later in the
essay, to challenge the devaluation of specific types of labor, but he also admits to his own
hesitation to perform domestic work. He explains, “my mother’s folk … during my childhood,
sat poised on that thin edge between the farmer and the menial” (Du Bois 1920: 110). As Du
Bois describes it, members of his family
Slowly… dribbled off,—a waiter here, a cook there, help for a few weeks in Mrs. Blank’s
kitchen…. Instinctively I hated such work from my birth. I loathed it and shrank from
it… for I knew in my heart that thither lay Hell.
(Du Bois 1920: 110)
Du Bois distinguishes “menial” service, which he associates with his mother and with the do-
mestic sphere, from farming, factory work, and “‘chores’ that left me my own man” such as
selling newspapers and tea. While Du Bois counters the charge that his people “won’t work,”
or that they seek out activities and occupations that are beyond their capacities, he also assents
to the hierarchy of work implicit in the white woman’s attack and to a gendered hierarchy of
types of labor.10
Du Bois explains that his personal experience of serving is limited to a summer in the 1880s,
when he had recently graduated from Fisk University and was about to begin a new course of
study with a scholarship at Harvard. He needed money to tide him over, and one of his Fisk
classmates offered him a job waiting tables at a hotel in Minnesota (Du Bois 1920: 110–111).
His narrative of his experiences offers a counterpoint to Aristotle’s definition of the enslaved
person, which depends on dehumanizing comparisons between the enslaved and the tool and
the enslaved and the domesticated animal. Describing the summer at the hotel, he notes, “our
work was easy, but insipid. We stood about and watched overdressed people gorge. For the
most part we were treated like furniture and were supposed to act the wooden part” (Du Bois
1920: 112). Du Bois here seems to give voice to Aristotle’s characterization of the enslaved
person as “a kind of animate piece of property” (κτῆμά τι ἔμψυχον, Politics 1.4.1253b32).11 Du
Bois, however, speaks from the perspective of the person compelled to work: he was “treated
like furniture,” rather than like a human being, and “supposed to act the wooden part.” For
Aristotle, the basic necessities of life depend on the bodies both of enslaved people and of
domesticated animals (Politics 1.5.1254b25–26). Du Bois (1920: 112) presents the people
whom he served as pigs, but refuses to take on the part of an animal himself: “I noticed one
fat hog, feeding at a heavily gilded trough, who could not find his waiter. He beckoned me...
Dogs recognized the gesture. I did not… something froze within me.” As Du Bois tells the
story, he found himself expected to embody roles familiar from longstanding ideas of serving
and slavery, but refuses to perform them.
In a close analysis of Aristotle’s Greek, Emily Greenwood (2022: 345) observes that
the indefinite pronoun, ti, when Aristotle defines the enslaved person as κτῆμά τι ἔμψυχον
(“a kind of animate piece of property”), “signals that Aristotle’s logic cannot completely
ignore the difference between human life and inanimate objects and alerts us to the opera-
tion of metaphor in this statement.” Aristotle uses “the metaphor… to smuggle in the error
of mistaking a human being for a piece of property and a tool” (Greenwood 2022: 348).12
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Du Bois’ language brings the error and the horror of this metaphor to life, but his text also
shows how widely this metaphor has spread in ideas about labor and the value of human
beings. He claims,
I did not mind the actual work or the kind of work, but it was the dishonesty and decep-
tion, the flattery and cajolery, the unnatural assumption that worker and diner had no
common humanity. It was uncanny. It was inherently and fundamentally wrong.
(Du Bois 1920: 112)
The assertion that he “did not mind” the work may seem to contradict his earlier expres-
sions of horror at menial tasks, but here he emphasizes that his aversion to this kind of work
is closely connected to the burden of “[acting] the wooden part” while he performs it: he is
forced both to deceive the diners about who he is and to endure their assumption that he can-
not be like them.
Du Bois appreciates that the work domestic servants perform has lasting implications for
their social and political status. Near the conclusion of the essay, he insists,
We believe that at the bottom of organized human life there are necessary duties and
services which no real human being ought to be compelled to do. We push below this
mudsill the derelicts and half-men, whom we hate and despise, and seek to build above
it—Democracy.
(Du Bois 1920: 120)13
Du Bois’ observation about the “necessary duties and services” that are essential to, but also
distinct from, participation in a democratic society recalls Aristotle’s argument that people
with sufficient means have stewards to deal with their household business, which leaves them
free to engage in philosophy or politics (Politics 1.7.1255b35–37). Aristotle is acutely aware
of the need for domestic work to sustain the kinds of activities that he deems most valuable,
but, in his view, citizens and philosophers ideally set themselves apart from both that necessary
work and the workers necessary to perform it. Du Bois, however, wants his readers to face up
to their role in concealing the conditions that make political life possible: with his insistent use
of the first person (“we believe… we push below this mudsill… we hate and despise…”), he
implicates himself in the exploitation of others that sustains US-American democracy and he
claims responsibility for the attitudes that enable this exploitation.
Du Bois’ characterization of the American political system accords with Aristotle’s idea
of the koinonia, or association, of which the polis, or city-state, is the highest form. At the
beginning of the Politics, Aristotle identifies two fundamental types of koinonia: (1) the
association of male and female, which is required for reproduction and (2) the associa-
tion of the natural ruler and the natural subordinate, whom Aristotle identifies with the
despotes (master) and doulos (enslaved), which is required for obtaining the basic necessi-
ties of life (Politics 1.2.1252a24–31). These two forms of association are the basis of the
household and, ultimately, the basis of the polis, which is formed from multiple house-
holds. Any composite entity, as Aristotle later argues, consists of a ruling component and
a subordinate component, such as the soul/body, human/animal, male/female, and master/
enslaved (Politics 1.4.1254a20–1.5.1254b20).14 While Aristotle insists that “the female and
the slave are distinguished by nature” (φύσει μὲν οὖν διώρισται τὸ θῆλυ καὶ τὸ δοῦλον, Politics
1.2.1252a35–b1) because each serves a different purpose, they nevertheless both occupy
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the subordinate position in a koinonia which is essential to the formation of the household
and of the political community.15 The gendered hierarchy of labor that Du Bois presents in
“The Servant in the House” has an extensive history. His attack on the notion of “Democ-
racy” built on top of “derelicts and half-men” implicates not only his contemporaries but
also an ancient effort to subordinate those whose work is essential to communal life, and
to find ways of concealing both their work and how essential it is. Later in the Politics, in
his discussion of types of labor that are ill-suited to developing the virtue appropriate to a
citizen, Aristotle asserts that “not all the persons indispensable for the existence of a state
are to be considered citizens” (ὡς οὐ πάντας θετέον πολίτας ὧν ἄνευ οὐκ ἂν εἴη πόλις, Politics
3.5.1278a3). Although Du Bois agrees that “menial” service and participation in politics
can be at odds with one another, from his perspective this is a problem for achieving real
democracy that needs to be solved.
Du Bois calls the servants whose labor is essential to American society, but who are
excluded from the privileges of membership in that society, “half-men,” a label that re-
calls Aristotle’s description of the rational capacity of slaves and of women. According to
Aristotle, “a slave by nature is capable of belonging to another (and on account of this
does belong to another) and shares in reason so far as to perceive it but not to possess it”
(Politics 1.5.1254b20–23).16 Aristotle later describes a spectrum of access to reason for dif-
ferent types of human beings: the slave lacks the deliberative part of the soul (to bouleu-
tikon), while this part exists in women but “without authority” (akuron) over other parts
(1.13.1260a12–13).17 Among the many scholars who have attempted to respond to or ac-
count for failures of Aristotle’s theory of the “natural slave,” Paul Millett sees “Aristotle as
providing masters with a series of ‘get-out clauses’” for the logical inconsistencies inherent
in the project of subordinating and enslaving other human beings (Millett 2007: 199). That
is, Aristotle teaches enslavers how to reassure themselves that those they enslave are “half-
men,” regardless of any evidence to the contrary that they might encounter.18 As Millett
(2007: 204) suggests, this project motivates Aristotle’s specific interest in slaves associated
with the household, where their proximity to the master might most frequently challenge his
belief in their subhumanity.
Du Bois examines this same nexus of problems but from the perspective of the subordinate
element of the koinonia, rather than the ruling element. His account of his experience as a
servant undermines the idea of “half-men” by offering clear evidence of his own humanity,
and he demands recognition and equality for those whose work is deemed “less than.” If Aris-
totle writes his account of slavery in the Politics for elite male property-owners, Du Bois writes
his analysis of domestic service and democracy for Black women like his mother. I will discuss
Du Bois’ limitations in speaking to and for this audience below, but for now I want to focus
on how Du Bois’ mother falls into the group whom Aristotle would identify as “indispensable
for the existence of a state” but not “to be considered citizens.”
Despite his antipathy to performing domestic service, Du Bois writes at length in “The
Servant in the House” about the value of caretaking and home-making, and about the esteem
that these kinds of activities deserve (Du Bois 1920: 117–118):
What is greater than Personal Service! Surely no social service, no wholesale helping of
masses of men can exist which does not find its effectiveness and beauty in the personal
aid of man to man. It is the purest and holiest of duties…. In the world today what
calls for more of love, sympathy, learning, sacrifice, and long-suffering than the care
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of children, the preparation of food, the cleansing and ordering of the home, personal
attendance and companionship, the care of bodies and their raiment—what greater,
more intimate, more holy Services are there than these?
Du Bois explicitly links efforts to serve society as a whole with the tasks of caring for indi-
vidual human beings and with work that is closely associated with the domestic space, espe-
cially caring for children, cooking, and cleaning. He also notes the intimacy that these types of
service, “the personal aid of man to man,” can foster. While Aristotle described the enslaved
person as a “part” of the master, or “wholly his” (ὅλως ἐκείνου, Politics 1.4.1254a13), Du
Bois emphasizes the dependence and vulnerability of those who rely on servants for the most
important tasks.
Nevertheless, Du Bois recognizes the disdain that the kinds of work he praises here typi-
cally receive. He speaks on behalf of a community that has failed to honor service and servants
(Du Bois 1920: 118):
We are degrading these services and loathing them and scoffing at them and spitting
upon them, first, by turning them over to the lowest and least competent and worst
trained classes in the world, and then by yelling like spoiled children if our babies are
neglected, our biscuits sodden, our homes dirty, and our baths unpoured.
I read the first-person plural that Du Bois employs here not just in the context of the disrespect
of domestic work and workers among his contemporaries, but with attention to a longer his-
tory of “degrading,” “loathing,” and “scoffing.” Aristotle associates specific areas of knowl-
edge with the enslaver and with the enslaved. The slave’s science (episteme doulike) focuses on
everyday domestic tasks (Aristotle claims that a Syracusan teacher used to instruct slaves in
this work, for a fee), and covers areas like cooking and “other such types of serving” (τἆλλα
τὰ τοιαῦτα γένη τῆς διακονίας, Politics 1.7.1255b27).19 The master’s science is knowing “how
to direct the tasks which the slave must know how to perform” (ἃ γὰρ τὸν δοῦλον ἐπίστασθαι
δεῖ ποιεῖν, ἐκεῖνον δεῖ ταῦτα ἐπίστασθαι ἐπιτάττειν, Politics 1.7.1255b34–35), but this art, too, is
among the most inferior pursuits, one which (if possible) a master would assign to an overseer,
almost certainly enslaved himself, so that he could concentrate his time and energy on philoso-
phy or politics (Politics 1.7.1255b35–37, discussed above).20 Aristotle recognizes the necessity
of the work done by the enslaved: the koinonia of ruler and ruled, as he notes from the outset of
the Politics, is fundamental to securing the needs required for the pursuit of the good life. Nev-
ertheless, undertaking this work, as he sees it, is suitable only for those who cannot escape it.
While Aristotle speaks only briefly about the types of work and expertise encompassed by
the “slave science,” Du Bois seeks to elevate this kind of science. He explains that
The unit which we seek to make the center of society,—the Home—is deprived of the
help of scientific invention and suggestion. It is only slowly and by the utmost effort that
some small foothold has been gained for the vacuum cleaner, the washing-machine, the
power tool, and the chemical reagent.
(Du Bois 1920: 119)
Scientific inquiry, according to Du Bois, can serve and relieve the people who perform
domestic labor, most notably Black women like his mother (Armstrong 2012: 84–90).
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Domestic service has not benefited from technological advancement, not only because the
most marginalized members of US-American society are compelled to perform these tasks but
also because their exploitation is socially desirable.21 As Du Bois argues,
In our frantic effort to preserve the last vestiges of slavery and mediaevalism we not only
set our faces against such improvements, but we seek to use education and the power of
the state to train the servants who do not naturally appear.
(Du Bois 1920: 119)
To appreciate the significance of these efforts to preserve “the last vestiges of slavery,” we
should recall that, according to Aristotle, the household (oikia) in its most complete form con-
sists of both enslaved and free people (Politics 1.3.1253b4). The head of the household that
Aristotle imagines is a spouse, a father, and an enslaver: he is the dominant partner in each of
the koinoniai of his household, and the koinonia of multiple households, each with its own
master, is foundational to the polis, which is the highest form of the koinonia.22 As Du Bois
sees it, enfranchised citizens of the United States preserve a form of slavery in order to main-
tain their own standing and ability to participate in politics. Yet while Aristotle developed the
idea of the “natural slave,” Du Bois asks how his contemporaries produce people to subordi-
nate for their labor when such servants “do not naturally appear” (emphasis mine). His an-
swer is that the least valued form of labor, or domestic service, the province of Black women,
is forcibly kept apart from the kinds of scientific progress that have improved other types of
work, especially industrial production, and elevated those who do it (Du Bois 1920: 117).
In “The Servant in the House,” Du Bois takes aim at his own earlier theory of the “Talented
Tenth,” most familiar from his 1903 collection The Souls of Black Folk, which argued that
educating a leadership class was the key to social and political progress for Black Americans.
In the 1920 essay, he critiques “a Theory of Exclusiveness, a feeling that the world progresses
by a process of excluding from the benefits of culture the majority of men,” and mocks “the
modern democrat” for being “willing to allot two able-bodied men and two fine horses to the
task of helping one wizened beldam to take the morning air” (Du Bois 1920: 120). This strik-
ing image, of freedom literally upheld by the bodies of others, uses the figures of “able-bodied
men,” but Du Bois returns in the very next paragraph to the domestic tasks he associates
elsewhere in the essay with the bodies of women. He raises a series of pointed questions (Du
Bois 1920: 120–121):
Is menial service permanent or necessary? Can we not transfer cooking from the home
to the scientific laboratory, along with the laundry? Cannot machinery, in the hands of
self-respecting and well-paid artisans, do our cleaning, sewing, moving, and decorating?
Cannot the training of children become an even greater profession than the attending of
the sick?... In fine, can we not, black and white, rich and poor, look forward to a world
of Service without Servants?”
Du Bois demands a broader world of possibilities than “menial service” for himself, for his
mother, and for all human beings. The way to make this service less “menial,” or to keep
the people who do it from being demeaned, is in part to develop the technologies that will
make possible “a world of Service without Servants.” While some workers, such as children’s
caretakers, can be elevated, others should be made obsolete. Yet Du Bois’ technological so-
lution, as Tim Armstrong points out, basically re-affirms the Aristotelian valuation of mind
over body, and of intellectual over physical labor (Armstrong 2012: 90). In his preference
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for industrial employment over domestic service, he also places types of work traditionally
associated with men in a space that is closer to freedom than those types of work that are
traditionally associated with women. Anna Julia Cooper’s view of the political knowledge of
the “weak,” which she identifies closely with women, opens another approach to including
women, especially Black women, in politics.
3 The “Slave’s Science” and Political Science

When Aristotle compares the enslaved person to a tool, he argues that “if every tool could per-
form its own work when ordered, or by perceiving what to do in advance… master-craftsmen
would have no need of subordinates and masters no need of the enslaved” (Pol. 1.4.1253b33–
1254a1). Daedalus’ statues and Hephaestus’ tripods are remarkable because they require no
human intermediary or operator to perform their work. For Aristotle, it is the role of the mas-
ter to know when to perform a given type of work and what type of work is appropriate on a
given occasion: the subordinate and the enslaved are intermediaries, who respond to the judg-
ment and directions of another and translate them for the inanimate tools they use. Du Bois
associates labor-saving technologies with the scientific research of the future, rather than with
the world of gods and heroes, but like Aristotle he is interested in the ways that human work-
ers are, or could become, unneeded. Developing the appropriate “machinery” will transform
the domestic tasks that workers like his mother perform; it will limit the need for workers to
accomplish these necessary tasks at all. Rather than focusing on ways to restrict the scope of
domestic work or the demand for domestic workers, Anna Julia Cooper offers an expansive
account of the types of knowledge that these workers acquire, and she attends to the political
potential of centering and heeding this knowledge.
Despite his attention to the exclusion and marginalization of Black women in “The Servant
in the House” and other writings, Du Bois routinely failed to acknowledge the contributions
of Black women, including Anna Julia Cooper, among his contemporaries and peers.23 One
problem in the study of Du Bois’ work, as Paul C. Taylor argues, is that his central place in
African American letters, which Du Bois himself often emphasized, can distract his readers
from considering his relationships to other thinkers or from engaging closely with his thought
(Taylor 2021).24 This problem is easily amplified in the study of Du Bois’ engagement with
the Classics, the intellectual project of studying texts that have historically been treated as
“foundational.” Reading Du Bois together with Aristotle, however, can also help to make us
more sensitive to who is considered “central” in traditions of social and political thought and
to who is not. Being mindful of Cooper’s participation in the conversation is one way to ad-
dress concerns about the “centrality” of thinkers like Du Bois and Aristotle, not just because
of the neglect Cooper’s work has suffered in comparison with Du Bois’, but because of how
she theorizes the specific contributions of marginalized people, especially Black women, to
political life and thought.25 Cooper has been recognized as a forerunner to feminist standpoint
theory, Black feminist epistemology, and intersectional approaches to epistemic justice, and
her account of women’s work opens up possibilities for revising and repairing ancient analyses
of politics and the kinds of work that belong to it.26
“Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race,” which Cooper
delivered to “the convocation of colored clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church at Wash-
ington, D. C.” in 1886, and published as the first chapter in A Voice from the South in 1893,
articulates the importance of domestic space in the polity, one of the issues that Du Bois later
explored in “The Servant in the House.” Cooper (1893: 13) asks her audience, “Now let us
see on what basis this hope for our country primarily and fundamentally rests. Can anyone
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doubt that it is chiefly on the homelife and on the influence of good women in those homes?”
She later explains how “hope for our country” might be derived from homes and the people
in them:
The atmosphere of homes is no rarer and purer and sweeter than are the mothers in
those homes… The nation is the aggregate of its homes. As the whole is sum of all its
parts, so the character of the parts will determine the characteristics of the whole.
(Cooper 1893: 29)
She builds up the nation from its parts: mothers, homes, nation. We can read Cooper’s for-
mulation of home and nation in the context of an Aristotelian tradition of thought about
the house and the polis. In Politics 1.1–1.2, Aristotle considers the constituent parts of the
polis: he begins with the association of male/female and ruler/ruled, which are the basis of the
household, and builds from the house to the village (the union of multiple houses), and then
to the city-state.
In addition to the Aristotelian background, however, Cooper’s attention to domestic space
must be considered in the context of her own “politics of radical relationality,” as Carol
Wayne White puts it, according to which “the fate of each individual (or the one) is inex-
tricably connected to all (or the many)” (White 2021: 193). When Aristotle breaks down a
composite whole into its constituent parts, he identifies the ruling element and the subordinate
element (Politics 1.4.1254a20–1.5.1254b20). Cooper, by contrast, looks for ways to ensure
the equality of each part of the whole.27 Her aim is not simply to strengthen or elevate the sub-
ordinate parts of a whole, but to learn from and to honor the special insights that the “weak”
might offer to the strong. In “Woman vs. the Indian,” another essay in A Voice from the South,
she argues (Cooper 1893: 117):
Woman should not, even by inference, or for the sake of argument, seem to disparage
what is weak. For woman’s cause is the cause of the weak; and when all the weak shall
have received their due consideration… all the strong will have learned at last to deal
justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly; and our fair land will have been taught the
secret of universal courtesy which is after all nothing but the art, the science, and the
religion of regarding one’s neighbor as one’s self, and to do for him as we would, were
conditions swapped, that he do for us.
The Biblical influences on Cooper’s thought and language in this passage are evident, but her
account of “woman’s cause” and “regarding one’s neighbor as one’s self” also provides an il-
luminating point of comparison to Aristotle’s ideas of marriage and household rule. Aristotle
divides household management into three parts: the rule of the master over the enslaved, of the
father over children, and of the husband over the wife (Politics 1.12.1259a37–39). He considers
it a general principle that men are superior to women, but he considers the rule of the husband
a form of “constitutional rule,” in which citizens take turns ruling and being ruled because they
are assumed to be equal by nature; the one who rules is distinguished by titles or other signs of
respect (Politics 1.12.1259b1–10).28 He explains later that good citizens must know how and
be able both to rule and be ruled, and that the “excellence of the citizen” is to understand the
relationship of ruler and ruled “from both sides” (Politics 3.4.1277b13–16). If, as Cooper has it,
“woman’s cause is the cause of the weak,” then women have essential access to the “excellence
of the citizen” as Aristotle defines it, insofar as they know, and play a key role in communicat-
ing, what it means to be ruled. When Aristotle considers different types of relations between
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ruler and ruled, weak and strong, it is the modes of ruling that he finds to be most crucial; for
Cooper, it is the experience of being ruled, the perspective of the weak, that is most salient for
understanding and for assessing the nature of the political community as a whole.29 She explains:
Not by pointing to sun-bathed mountain tops do we prove that Phoebus warms the
valleys. We must point to homes, average homes, homes of the rank and file of horny
handed toiling men and women… lighted and cheered by the good, the beautiful, and
the true.
(Cooper 1893: 31)
Given Cooper’s interest in “the cause of the weak,” it is unsurprising that she considers “re-
garding one’s neighbor as oneself” as an “art” and a “science.” That is, the “cause of the
weak” requires work and workers to advance it, and the workers best suited to this cause are
those who are experts in “regarding one’s neighbor as oneself,” which for Cooper is a crucial
area of study. It is only by taking due consideration of the “weak” that the “strong will…
learn” how to live, and that her “fair land” can be “taught the secret of universal courtesy.”
I read Cooper’s account of the “art” and “science” of “regarding one’s neighbor as one’s self”
as a useful corrective to Aristotle’s idea of the “slave’s science” (discussed above). Aristotle de-
fines the “slave’s science” as the study of the specific tasks that enslaved people are compelled
to perform (Politics 1.7.1255b22–27): he identifies cooking and household work as part of
the “slave’s science,” but his account of this field is vague, and his limited remarks reflect his
general attitude toward the low value of this type of knowledge (Angier 2016: 441–442).
For Aristotle, the kinds of things that the enslaved do and know are outside the realm of
philosophical inquiry, even as those who are enslaved sustain the material conditions that the
philosopher depends on. Cooper offers a very different account of the sphere of knowledge
associated with those who labor for others. Her version of the “slave’s science,” I argue, is the
practice of “regarding one’s neighbor as oneself”: this is the work she identifies most closely
with the most subjugated members of her society.
In her essay on “Womanhood,” she reflects on the critical and singular work of Black
women, including those who (like herself) were formerly enslaved or descended from slaves.
She observes:
With all the wrongs and neglects of her past, with all the weakness, the debasement…
of her present, the black woman of to-day stands mute and wondering at the Herculean
task devolving upon her. But the cycles wait for her. No other hand can move the lever.
She must be loosed from her bands and set to work” (emphasis mine).
(Cooper 1893: 28)
Her discussion of the “cause of the weak” in “Woman vs. the Indian” builds on this associa-
tion between the experience of historical and present injustices and the capacity to contribute
to social progress. For Cooper, the “weak” are those who American society must look to as
teachers of the “secret of universal courtesy”: they are experts in the science of “regarding
one’s neighbor as oneself” that she identifies as fundamental to communal wellbeing. While
Du Bois believed that science could free his mother, and those like her, from the domestic
tasks that degraded them in the eyes of others, Cooper sees in those women a crucial source of
learning for political life. This is not to say that she believes their suffering is necessary, or that
their lives cannot or should not be improved, but rather that she centers their role as sources
of learning, rather than as the beneficiaries of it.
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What I have called Cooper’s version of the “slave’s science” is specifically the “the art,
the science, and the religion” (as Cooper puts it) of doing for our neighbor “as we would,
were conditions swapped, that he do for us.” Understood in these terms, the “slave’s science”
becomes a key form of the political art or political capacity (politike dunamis) that Aristotle
discusses in Book 3 of the Politics. He explains that the end (telos) of all arts and sciences is a
good, and the good in politics is the common interest (Politics 3.12.1282b14–18). As Cooper
sees it, the perspective of the most marginalized is essential to determining and achieving what
is in the common interest. She explains,
The philosophic mind sees that its own ‘rights’ are the rights of humanity… and the rec-
ognition it seeks is not through the robber and wild beast adjustment of the survival of
the bullies but through the universal application ultimately of the Golden Rule.
(Cooper 1893: 118)
While the Christian elements of Cooper’s thinking are paramount here, she and Aristotle are
in agreement that human beings belong in community, a project that sets the human being
apart from the “wild beast.” For Aristotle, a human being is a political animal (πολιτικὸν ζῷον,
Politics 1.2.1253a4). We are not supposed to live in isolation, but to be parts of a whole:
someone who cannot take part in associations with others (ὁ δὲ μὴ δυνάμενος κοινωνεῖν) is ei-
ther a god or a wild animal (Politics 1.2.1253a2–29). The most complete form of association
in Aristotle’s reckoning is the polis, but the polis develops out of the household, which in turn
is based on the relationships between male and female, parent and child, free and enslaved. It
is these relationships that make it possible to form the units that allow human beings to live in
community with others, and thus to live in accordance with nature.
The domestic relationships that interest Aristotle, however, include ruling and subject mem-
bers, and each of these has different horizons of possibility for participating in political life.
Cooper offers an alternative ideal of domestic life and of the political wisdom of each person
in it. In “What Are We Worth?,” one of the final essays in A Voice from the South, she empha-
sizes the relationships that join members of the household and she treats those relationships as
the basis of each person’s most valuable contributions to the whole world (Cooper 1893: 266):
We owe it to the world to give out at least as much as we have taken in, but if we aim to
be accounted a positive value we must leave it a little richer than we found it... The life
that serves to develop another, the mother who toils to educate her boy, the father who
invests his stored-up capital in education, giving to the world the energies and useful-
ness of his children trained into a well disciplined manhood and womanhood has paid
his debt in the very richest coin… the most precious payment we can make for what we
have received.
Cooper makes the mother’s “toil,” as well the father’s work that is rooted in family life, the
“most precious” way of repaying and enriching the world. Nearly three decades later, Du Bois
made a similar claim, when he argued that the “wholesale helping of masses of men” could
only “find its effectiveness and beauty in the personal aid of man to man” (Du Bois 1920:
117). No longer a place where the elite male citizen obtains the necessities of life so that he
can participate in politics, the domestic space for Cooper and Du Bois becomes a space where
everyone must learn to cultivate the relationships required to build a democratic and equal
society.
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4 Conclusion
It is no surprise that Cooper and Du Bois put figures at the center of their analysis of political
life who are at the margins of Aristotle’s. Du Bois and Cooper offer illuminating insights into
the challenges endured by those who are dehumanized in their world, in Aristotle’s, and in
ours: their attention to domestic workers, and especially to women domestic workers, should
serve to remind us of the importance of these same figures in ancient political life and thought,
and of the necessity of recognizing and looking out for their contributions even when Aristo-
tle, and thinkers like him, might want to distract us from noticing it.
Reading Aristotle together with Du Bois and Cooper opens up new perspectives on key
issues in his Politics, from the metaphor of the enslaved as a “kind of animate piece of prop-
erty,” to the structure of the associations essential to life in the house and the state, to the
“science” of domestic work and of politics. It also serves to establish all three thinkers as
participants in a tradition of inquiry into how political communities are formed and sustained
and the processes through which people are recognized within or excluded from those com-
munities. Both Du Bois and Cooper emphasize that political life, living in a community that
consists of many different people and many different parts, must be a work in progress, both
as a matter of actual practice and as a topic of intellectual investigation, including for them-
selves. To attend to the points of contact between Aristotle’s, Du Bois’, and Cooper’s political
thought offers a powerful reminder of the extent of the obstacles to an inclusive politics that
they inherited and that we carry with us.
Notes
1 I am grateful to the editors, for their thoughtful suggestions that improved my argument and my
understanding, and to Sarah Derbew and Jackie Murray, for taking the time to read an earlier draft
and to give me pointed and helpful comments.
2 See Gates (1988: 23–29) on “revising” as a principle of African-American literature; see also Rankine
(2019) and Fertik and Hanses (2019) on revising and Du Bois’s classicism.
3 Useful introductions to Du Bois’ and Cooper’s fascinating biographies can be found in Gooding-
Williams (2020) and Gines (Belle) (2015), along with further references, but I share Belle’s con-
cern that focusing on the biographies of thinkers can take precedence over deep engagement with
their ideas: she notes especially how this problem affects scholarly treatment of Black women
thinkers.
4 Hairston (2013: 121–191) examines the deep classical learning that Cooper and Du Bois drew on.
Horn and Neschke-Hentschke (2008: 1–2) define the Aristotelian tradition to include thinkers and
texts who grapple with key problems in the Aristotelian corpus. Emily Greenwood’s and Lorna Hard-
wick’s work on “fuzzy” or “fragile” connections in classical reception studies is especially useful
here: see Fertik and Hanses (2019: 4–5) on the application of these ideas to Du Bois’ work. Aristotle
does appear in one of the most famous passages Du Bois ever wrote, in The Souls of Black Folk, in
which he communes with eminent writers and thinkers of the past “across the color line… I summon
Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously, with no scorn nor conde-
scension” (Du Bois 1909: 109). In an undated manuscript on education, likely a talk she delivered as
president of Frelinghuysen University in the 1930s, Cooper observes that “teachers from Aristotle to
the present have sifted and analyzed the various branches of learning to get at their relative worth as
educative factors” (Lemert and Bhan 1998: 252).
5 Greenwood (2022: 340) quotes this same question from Morrison when she asks how (rather than
why) Aristotle wrote Politics 1.4, on the enslaved person as a “kind of” living tool. I am grateful
to Emily Greenwood and Yujhán Claros for their stimulating conversation, at the 2021 Annual
Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies, on “Unspeakable Things Unspoken:” this discussion
first prompted me to think about the power of this text for the study of classical receptions. In this
volume, Henao-Castro’s reading of Morrison’s Beloved (which attends to the different colonial power
565
Harriet Fertik
structures that shape exile and motherhood in this novel vis-à-vis Euripides’ Medea) offers further
insights into the importance of Morrison’s work for grappling with the politics of classical reception
studies.
6 Greenwood (2022: 340) speculates that Aristotle could have relied on enslaved scribes to commit his
thoughts on slavery to writing. Dressler (2016) discusses the dependency of elite Roman thinkers on
women and develops a method for reading this dependency in Latin texts.
7 For reflections on the challenges of reading Plato through women of color theorizing, see Ortega
et al. in this volume.
8 Rankine (2006: 22–34) and Greenwood (2009) offer essential introductions to the field.
9 On themes from Aristotle’s Politics in Du Bois’ work, see Gooding-Williams (2009: 27–28), Arm-
strong (2012: 70–99), Hairston (2013: 177–178), and Fertik (2019).
10 Compare White (2021: 195) on Cooper’s thinking about Black women’s domestic labor, both paid
and unpaid.
11 All translations adapted from Rackham’s Loeb edition (Aristotle 1944). For other instances of this
metaphor in the Aristotelian corpus, see Angier (2012: 53).
12 See also Millett (2007: 189) on how “Aristotle’s difficulties reflect the tensions and intellectual eva-
sions inherent in the institution of chattel slavery; for which reason the perceived problems admit of
no real resolution.” Vlassopoulos (2011) explains how the “living tool” metaphor distracts scholars
from discovering the agency of enslaved people in the ancient historical record.
13 As Jackie Murray pointed out to me, Du Bois is referring to the “mud-sill theory” promoted by
defenders of slavery in the mid-nineteenth century, such as James Henry Hammond, Senator from
South Carolina.
14 See Millett (2007: 184) on how Aristotle depends on analogies to establish the category of “natural
slave.”
15 On women in Aristotle’s Politics, see especially Connell, Marechal, and Witt in this volume. Samaras
(2016) offers a useful analysis of Aristotle’s reasoning for the subordination of women in political
life; Levy (1990) argues that Aristotle allows for women to participate in politics. Connell (2021)
discusses the treatment of women across the Aristotelian corpus.
16 ἔστι γὰρ φύσει δοῦλος ὁ δυνάμενος ἄλλου εἶναι (διὸ καὶ ἄλλου ἐστίν), καὶ ὁ κοινωνῶν λόγου τοσοῦτον ὅσον
αἰσθάνεσθαι ἀλλὰ μὴ ἔχειν.
17 Connell, Marechal, and Witt in this volume offer useful analyses of this passage and different schol-
arly approaches to it.
18 Greenwood (2022: 339–340) reviews the range of scholarly “apologetics” for and critiques of this
passage.
19 Among the arts appropriate to the enslaved, Aristotle distinguishes between the more servile and the
more worthy ones, but offers no details as to what these might be.
20 Angier (2016: 436–437) discusses the hierarchy of types of work in Aristotle, with contemplation on
the top and the work of the enslaved on the bottom.
21 See Balfour (2011: 97–114) on the role of Black women in Du Bois’ theorizing about citizenship.
22 See Millett (2007: 181–182) on these koinoniai and the relationship between citizen and master of the
house.
23 For Du Bois’ relationships with Black women intellectuals and public figures of his day, see Cooper
(2017: 33–56). See also Taylor (2021: 239, 251–252) and James (2007). Moody-Turner (2015) docu-
ments Du Bois’ refusal to publish Cooper’s work when he was editor of The Crisis and Cooper’s
efforts to create alternative pathways for publication.
24 As Taylor (2021: 235) puts it, “when an object, text, practice, or figure becomes sufficiently central
to a way of going on, close examination and critical scrutiny may seem unnecessary.”
25 This is a rich area of scholarship on Cooper: see May (2009) and Johnson (2009), with further refer-
ences in Gines (Belle) (2015). Bailey (2009) provides valuable context for aspects of Cooper’s thought
that have been criticized as “elitist.”
26 Gines (Belle) (2015) discusses the philosophical traditions that must recognize Cooper as an ancestor.
On Black feminist epistemology, see Hill Collins (2000: 251–272) and Dotson (2015). On epistemic
justice and Greek philosophy and literature, see the introduction to this volume as well as Dutsch’s
chapter. I have learned much from Dressler (2016: 9–17, 249–255) about reparative readings of an-
cient philosophy.
27 White (2021: 210) explains Cooper’s ideal of America: “if any part was held back, then the whole
was diminished.”
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Women’s Work
28 On how “marital rule” can be a form of political rule for Aristotle, see Riesbeck (2015).
29 Du Bois discusses the political wisdom of the “ruled” in “Of the Ruling of Men,” the essay that fol-
lows “The Servant in the House” in Darkwater; see also Fertik (2019).
Bibliography
Angier, T. (2012) Technē in Aristotle’s Ethics: Crafting the Moral Life, London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
———. (2016) “Aristotle on Work,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 70.278.4: 435–449.
Aristotle. (1944) Politics (trans. H. Rackham), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Armstrong, T. (2012) The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology and Pain in American Literature, Cam-
Bailey, C. (2009) “Anna Julia Cooper: ‘Dedicated in the Name of My Slave Mother to the Education of
Colored Working People,’” Hypatia 19.2: 56–73.
Balfour, L. (2011) Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois, New York:
Connell, S. M. (2021) Aristotle on Women: Physiology, Psychology, and Politics, Cambridge: Cam-
Cooper, A. J. (1893) A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, Urbana, IL: Project Guten-
berg. Retrieved June 17, 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61741.
Cooper, B. (2017) Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, Urbana: University
of Illinois Press.
Dotson, K. (2015) “Inheriting Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Epistemology,” Ethnic and Racial
Studies 38.13: 2322–2328.
Dressler, A. (2016) Personification and the Feminine in Roman Philosophy, New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1909) The Souls of Black Folk, Chicago, IL: A. C. McClurg and Co.
———. (1920) Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe.
Fertik, H. (2019) “Hell to Pay: Aristotle and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Vision of Democracy in ‘Of the Ruling
of Men,’” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 26.1: 72–85.
Fertik, H. and Hanses, M. (2019) “Above the Veil: Revisiting the Classicism of W. E. B. Du Bois,” Inter-
national Journal of the Classical Tradition 26.1: 1–9.
Gates, H. L., Jr. (1988) The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, Oxford:
Gines, K. T. (Belle, K. S.) (2015) “Anna Julia Cooper,” in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy. Retrieved June 17, 2022, from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/
anna-julia-cooper.
Gooding-Williams, R. (2009) In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. (2020) “W. E. B. Du Bois,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Retrieved June 17, 2022, from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/dubois.
Greenwood, E. (2009) “Re-Rooting the Classical Tradition: New Directions in Black Classicism,” Clas-
sical Receptions Journal 1.1: 87–103.
———. (2022) “Reconstructing Classical Philology: Reading Aristotle Politics 1.4 after Toni Morrison,”
American Journal of Philology 143.2: 335–357.
Hairston, E. A. (2013) The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization, and the African American Reclama-
tion of the West, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Haley, S. P. (1993) “Black Feminist Thought and Classics: Re-membering, Re-claiming, Re-empowering,”
in N. Sorkin Rabinowitz and A. Richlin (eds.), Feminist Theory and the Classics, New York: Rout-
ledge. 23–43.
Hill Collins, P. (2000) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empow-
erment, New York: Routledge.
Horn, C. and Neschke-Hentschke, A. (eds.) (2008) Politischer Aristotelismus: Die Rezeption der aristo-
telischen Politik von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler.
James, J. (2007) “Profeminism and Gender Elites: W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells-
Barnett,” in S. Gillman and A. E. Weinbaum (eds.), Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and
W. E. B. Du Bois, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 69–95.
567
Harriet Fertik
Johnson, K. A. (2009) “‘In Service for the Common Good:’ Anna Julia Cooper and Adult Education,”
African American Review 43.1: 45–56.
Lemert, C. and Bhan, E. (eds.) (1998) The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper, Including A Voice from the South
and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Levy, H. L. (1990) “Does Aristotle Exclude Women from Politics?” The Review of Politics 52.3: 397–416.
May, V. M. (2009) “Thinking from the Margins, Acting at the Intersections: Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice
from the South,” Hypatia 19.2: 74–91.
Millett, P. (2007) “Aristotle and Slavery in Athens,” Greece and Rome 54.2: 178–209.
Moody-Turner, S. (2015) “‘Dear Doctor Du Bois’: Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Gender
Politics of Black Publishing,” Melus 40.3: 47–68.
Morrison, T. (1989) “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Litera-
ture,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28.1: 1–34.
Rankine, P. (2006) Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature, Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press.
———. (2019) “Afterlife: Du Bois, Classical Humanism, and the Matter of Black Lives,” International
Journal of the Classical Tradition 26.1: 86–96.
Riesbeck, D. J. (2015) “Aristotle on the Politics of Marriage: ‘Marital Rule’ in the Politics,” Classical
Quarterly 65.1: 134–152.
Samaras, T. (2016) “Aristotle on Gender in Politics I,” History of Political Thought 37.4: 595–605.
Taylor, P. C. (2021) “W. E. B. Du Bois: Afro-modernism, Expressivism, and the Curse of Centrality,” in
M. L. Rogers and J. Turner (eds.), African American Political Thought: A Collected History, Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press. 235–359.
Vlassopoulos, K. (2011) “Two Images of Ancient Slavery: The ‘Living Tool’ and the ‘Koinonia,’” in
E. Herrmann-Otto (ed.), Sklaverei und Zwangsarbeit zwischen Akzeptanz und Widerstand, Zurich:
Hildesheim. 467–477.
White, C. W. (2021) “Anna Julia Cooper: Radical Relationality and the Ethics of Interdependence,” in
M. L. Rogers and J. Turner (eds.), African American Political Thought: A Collected History, Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press. 192–211.
Further Reading
A foundational essay on Black feminist approaches to Classics is Shelley P. Haley (1993) “Black Feminist
Thought and Classics: Re-membering, Re-claiming, Re-empowering,” in Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz
and Amy Richlin (eds.), Feminist Theory and the Classics, New York: Routledge. 23–43. On epis-
temic injustice and the study of antiquity, see Dan-el Padilla Peralta (2020) “Epistemicide: The Roman
Case,” Classica - Revista Brasileira de Estudos Clássicos 33.2: 151–186. On the promise and chal-
lenges of more inclusive approaches to classics and classical philology, see Emily Greenwood (2022)
“Introduction: Classical Philology, Otherhow,” American Journal of Philology 143.2: 187–197.
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38
SARAH KOFMAN
Socratic Lover
Paul Allen Miller
The more Socrates tunneled under existence, the more deeply and inevitably each single
remark had to gravitate toward an ironic totality, a spiritual condition that was infinitely
bottomless, invisible, and indivisible. Xenophon had no intimation whatever of this secret.
Allow me to illustrate what I mean by a picture. There is a work that represents Napoleon’s
grave. Two tall trees shade the grave. There is nothing else to see in the work, and the un-
sophisticated observer sees nothing else. Between the two trees there is an empty space; as
the eye follows the outline, suddenly Napoleon himself emerges from nothing, and now it is
impossible to have him disappear again.
(Kierkegaard 1989: 19)
The life of Socrates is a sublime pause in the course of history, remarkable in its silence that
will only be interrupted by the numerous noisy schools that will each claim him for them-
selves as their source. Socrates is comparable to a majestic river flowing underground, which
splashes up to the surface boiling with new strength.
(Kofman 1989: 278)1
One of Sarah Kofman’s favorite stories, to which she refers several times, comes from Freud’s
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.2 It is exemplary not only of the structure of
jokes but also of the relation of desire to self-conscious thought. Freud tells the anecdote early
in his book, and Kofman focuses on it in Pourquoi rit-on:
Two not particularly scrupulous businessmen had succeeded, by dint of a series of highly
risky enterprises, in amassing a large fortune, and they were making efforts to push their
way into good society. One method, which struck them as a likely one, was to have
their portraits painted by the most celebrated and highly paid artist in the city, whose
pictures had an immense reputation. The precious canvases were shown for the first time
at a large evening party, and the two hosts themselves led the most influential connois-
seur and art critic up to the wall upon which the portraits were hanging side by side, to
569 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-43

Paul Allen Miller
extract his judgment on them. He studied the works for a long time, and then shaking
his head, as though there was something he had missed, pointed to the gap between the
pictures and asked quietly: “but where’s the Saviour?”
(Freud 1960: 87)
The story in Kofman is doubly, even triply ironic in its reference to Christ on the cross flanked
by two thieves. The first level of irony is that the critic, by asserting the savior is missing, calls
to mind the presence of the thieves and thus labels these pushy arrivistes “scoundrels.” The
second level is that Freud, the Viennese Jewish intellectual whose treatment of Witz, a rhetori-
cal structure in which the articulated allows the communication of the unspoken (and often
unspeakable), chooses as one of his prime illustrations an “American anecdote” about the
missing savior. The structure that Freud outlines is almost a textbook example of Quintilian’s
definition of irony (I.O. 6.2.15–16), in which what has been said is not what is understood
(“intellectum”). “Where’s the savior?” not only proclaims the absence of the messiah, the
failure of our redemption, the futility of our desire for a moment of completion, but it also
through the evocation of this absent presence says, “you’re a pretender, a shyster,” an alazōn
in terms of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the opposite of Socrates, the eirōn” (4.7.2–7, 14,
17; cf. Lane 2006: 78–79). It is, as Kofman observes, no wonder (and yet wonderfully symp-
tomatic) that upon completing his manuscript Freud burned his collection of Jewish jokes:
the thing had been said, the gap had been filled with a presence creating a new absence, a
new metonymy of desire, the said creating a new unsaid (Kofman 1986a: 193–194). Where
is the savior?
The third level of irony is in Kofman’s work itself. For Kofman, the Jewish intellectual
whose father died in the camps, who had two mothers during and after the war, one French
and Catholic, the other Jewish and Polish, Freud’s great insight was the recognition of the
gap, the hole, the lack at the heart of the Witz that made the phantom presence appear,
like Napoleon’s image in the painting described by Kierkegaard, and like the image of
Socrates, the ultimate ironist whose essential absence Xenophon’s portrait limns (Kofman
1986a: 91–91; Oliver 1999: 186–188; Miller 2016: Chapter 4). There in the glimmer of
space between the paintings of the pushy businessmen, between the trees over Napoleon’s
grave, between the lines of Xenophon’s portrait of Socrates, materializes, briefly, the im-
age of our desire, the image of what we lack, of what would complete us if it were present,
and whose presence must therefore remain fleeting or unspeakable. For Freud, Witz is the
Janus bifrons, the two-faced Roman god who faces both forward and back, the image of
the simultaneity of presence and absence, of what Socrates in Diotima’s speech in the Sym-
posium labels the “in-between,” the metaxu, the space of Eros’s daimonic essence. It is no
accident that Kofman will use this same epithet, bifrons, to refer to Hegel’s Socrates in her
1989 book, Socrate(s), which will be the focus of this essay, and that Nietzsche, another of
Kofman’s phantom saviors, will himself identify with Janus in the figure of the philologist,
the one who reads slowly, always looking before and behind in search of a fleeting meaning
whose absence the letter’s presence signifies (Kofman 1986a: 43–44, cf. 128–131; Oliver
1999: 183). Like Freud, we burn too the archive of our past identity and move on to the
next encounter, the next absence indexed by presence, the next beautiful boy in Diotima’s
speech. We move up the ladder of love, awaiting the riotous arrival of Alcibiades, garlanded
with flowers, leaning on flute girls.
It is not simply Socrates and the savior, but woman for Kofman, Penelope Deutscher notes,
who manifests as a Janus figure. Woman is the good mother and the bad, the virgin and the
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Sarah Kofman: Socratic Lover
whore, the presence who denotes an absence, a lack at the center that figures the object of our
desires both philosophical and sexual. As Kofman argues, Socrates, the great subterranean
spring of Western philosophy, through his irony comes to figure in the texts of Hegel, Kierkeg-
aard, and Nietzsche as the woman (no longer the boy) who is desired but never possessed, as
a figure who embodies the interstices in which the savior might appear, a figure for that excess
of materiality that ironizes the philosophical dream of totality and stability even as it propels
its desire forward (Kofman 1989: 317, 324; Deutscher 1999: 164, 294n7; Deutscher and Oli-
ver: 4–5). In that capacity, woman is both in Freud’s and in Kofman’s texts closely identified
with the Jew, forever castrated, forever incomplete, forever signaling messianic desire and its
necessary, subversive, lack (Kofman 1986a: 52, 192–193). As she writes of Hegel’s reading of
Socrates, “because he has from on high disdained irony, has put himself forward as offering
lessons and morality, has addressed himself to her in a most unseemly tone, Hegel revealed his
weak point, his impotence to grasp this (the) woman who has caused him so many cares and
left him in aporia” (Kofman 1989: 194).
Socrate(s) published in 1989 is the story of these stories. The parenthetical s added to
the French title is an acknowledgement of the plurality of Socrateses produced first by the
portraits of Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes, and then by their great nineteenth-century
receptions in Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. At the same time, the parentheses figure the
paintings in Freud’s American anecdote and the trees over Napoleon’s grave through which
the phantom image of our “s for savior” emerges in its plurality, in its instability, and in
the irony that sparks our continued desire. Lest we miss the point, Kofman draws the par-
allel directly between Kierkegaard’s image of the painting of Napoleon’s tomb and Freud’s
famous joke:
In any case, the image of the painting suggests that it is the empty space, the nothingness,
which hides the essential: perhaps, as Freud indicates in his American anecdote, because
it allows each person’s phantasm to outline there, to make visible to the art critic the
Christ where there is only the plenitude of a wall, transformed into an empty and lacu-
nose space by this very phantasm; and for Kierkegaard, there where Xenophon seizes
only the shadows (the plenitude of discourse) the void that is outlined in the hollow,
from there Kierkegaard makes leap forth the irony that … has always already hollowed
out this void, which it can then refill in circular fashion—fill with its lack.
(1989: 213)
The Socrates we love, the Socrates who is our savior, is always the Socrates who exists in the
space between his portraits, and of course this “Socrates-Savior” is himself another “fiction”
who inspires the next set of portraits (Kofman 1989: 28). What still today fascinates us and
enchants us in Socrates, gazes at us, is the inability to place (l’atopie) this Janus bifrons (Kof-
man 1989: 317).
In what follows, I examine first the reading Kofman herself offers of Socrates in Plato’s
Symposium, before turning to her portraits of Hegel’s, Kierkegaard’s, and Nietzsche’s read-
ings. In each of these, there is a moment of constitutive excess that simultaneously figures a
lack. From that lack will emerge the possibility of the savior in the form of a recuperative
and reparative successor reading until we arrive back at Koffman’s reading itself, which is
at once a return to the original and a new articulation, a moment of return that is yet a fur-
ther displacement, another step the ladder of love climbs to an original, infinitely receding
source.
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Paul Allen Miller
1
If, in the end, the problem of Socrates has made so much ink flow, is it not because
behind the “case” of this out-of-place and atypical monster, his interpreters are trying,
for well or for ill, to “settle” their own “cases,” to manage their own readings in such a
fashion as to make sure that all their assurances, their internal equilibria and that of their
“systems,” does not collapse with Socrates—even if they seem not to be systematic—lest
they find themselves endangered by excess?
(Kofman 1989: 325)
While Socrate(s) was the culmination of Kofman’s interest in Socrates and Plato (Miller 2016:
Chapter 4), she had throughout her career at the Sorbonne been known as a great and innova-
tive teacher of Plato (Naas 2008: 51). Within that teaching, the Symposium occupied a special
place as the “primordial dialogue for whoever wants to fashion for themselves a conception
of the life of Socrates” (Kofman 1989: 222). This is not because the dialogue presents a simple
or unvarnished picture of the sage, but because it stages the very parentheses through which
Socrates (s) as savior (s) must always emerge. The Symposium is a self-conscious fictionaliza-
tion of Socrates, with at least three separate internal narrators Aristodemus, Apollodorus,
and, Alcibiades, not counting Plato himself (Kofman 1989: 25–26). The dialogue begins with
an unnamed interlocutor asking Apollodorus to recount what he knows of a gathering at
Agathon’s house years before. Apollodorus then recounts a story that he had heard from
Aristodemus. Each of them claims to pass on, to the best of their ability, a faithful recounting
of events, an accurate transmission of knowledge or wisdom (sophia), and in so far as they
are faithful in this transmission they are, Kofman notes, traitors. They become purveyors of
a static image of Socrates rather than lovers (philoi) of wisdom (sophia). This image is pre-
cisely the kind of story of a story, the recounting of pre-existing philosophemes that Plato
condemns in the Seventh Letter (341a–342a; Miller 2022). It is not the recognition of the gap
or lack that solicits Eros, as recounted by Diotima within Socrates’ great speech, the daimonic
space between (metaxu), through which the image of our true desire can emerge—to kalon,
to agathon, Socrates’ inner beauty as Alcibiades imagines and wishes to possess it, the savior
(Kofman 1989: 32–33).
A true portrait of Socrates can, in fact, never be faithful. It can never be a completely ad-
equate image of his philosophical life without being unfaithful because Socrates in our texts
(and he exists in no other way) is always constituted by a certain excess: his ugliness, his irony,
a certain excess of the signifier over the signified, a writing that cannot be reduced to the ide-
ality of its transcendental meaning. And yet, that excess must always also figure as a lack, as
a moment that cannot be captured within the conceptual frame, a literal je ne sais quoi that
forces us to think again and so permits us to imagine a moment of radical emergence (cf de
Man 1983: 209). When Agathon asks Socrates to lie beside him so that he can benefit from
his knowledge, Socrates replies that knowledge is not something that is transferred from one
vessel to another (176c–e). It is not a set of contents. If precise signifiers were tied to precise
meanings, if we always said and could say exactly what we mean, then that would not be the
case. We would contain knowledge, and we would ex-press it. It could be received and then
retransmitted, just like the stories of Apollodorus and Aristodemus. We would not need the
Symposium at all, but a simple summary of its contents, a reduction of its rhetorical “orna-
ments” and fictionality. But, as Diotima reminds us, only the gods possess sophia, a knowl-
edge adequate to the world, and even this cannot be directly communicated in its plenitude,
but only through the intermediary of a daimōn, Eros, who is constituted not in the fullness of
572
being, but by penia or lack (202a–204a). In the myth of Eros’s birth recounted by Diotima, his
parents are Poros (“way” or “means,” the opposite of aporia) and Penia. It is this intermedi-
ate quality that explains his (and thus Socrates’) atopic nature (Kofman 1983: 63–64; Naas
2008: 58). In fact, were it not for this lack, were it not for our imperfection, there could be no
communication at all (Colebrook 2002: 77): in a world of plenitude or perfection there can
be neither seeking nor receiving.
Our speech, then, our dialogue is always deficient to the extent it is in excess and beyond
the world of being in its fullness, a kind of supplement. It always ironizes itself by meaning
more (other) and less than (not exactly) what we mean (Kofman 1989: 36–37). Socratic irony
occupies this interstitial space, the space of the division between the signifier and the signified,
between the simulacrum and its antecedent, a space whose loss would mean the death of phi-
losophy, the end of the desire (erōs) that beckons us not only to lie beside Agathon but also to
possess to agathon, a desire to become immortal, and hence unmoving, saved (Kofman 1989:
13–16; Naas 2008: 61).
This possession of the hidden fullness of Socrates’ being is exactly what Alcibiades seeks. In
his drunken speech at the end of the dialogue, he declines to praise Eros and praises Socrates
instead. He compares Socrates to a Silenus figure, a vessel used to store precious medicines,
scents, and substances, which on the outside had a portrait of the famously ugly companion
and sometimes tutor of Dionysus. Alcibiades says Socrates too, both in his external appear-
ance and in his ironic, self-deprecating speech masks, covers in excess, the precious objects
he contains within. Like Agathon, Alcibiades too had tried to possess them, to make them an
object of communication or exchange. As a comely adolescent, he sought to seduce Socrates
and exchange his favors for Socrates’ wisdom. But when the moment came, and Socrates lay
on the young man’s couch with all chaperones shoed away:
I slipped underneath the cloak and put my arms around this extraordinary man … But
in spite of all my efforts, this hopelessly arrogant, this unbelievably insolent man—he
turned me down! … My night with Socrates went no further than if I had spent it with
my own father or older brother.
(219c–d; Nehamas and Woodruff 1997: 501)
Socrates did not penetrate Alcibiades with wisdom but rather made him aware of his own
desire, his constitutive lack. As, Kofman observes, Alcibiades won only the knowledge that “if
one translates Plato into Lacanian jargon, the law of desire is castration” (1989: 38–39). Al-
cibiades seeks not the penis, but the phallus, the image of a fullness in which desire is satisfied,
the figure of the divine agalma that Socrates is supposed to contain within, a plenitude beyond
the pleasure principle (Kofman 1989: 41). The beauty of the agalma is not contiguous with
Socrates’ ugliness, but separated from it by an internal space or gap. Thus, Kofman observes,
Under the effect of this cleavage, it is dissociated from the ugliness, placed behind it, pure,
extraordinary beauty, opposed to a pure ugliness, pure deceptive appearance, thought as
a supplementary ruse invented by Socrates in order to better trap and fascinate.
(1989: 46)
Socrates represents both what Alcibiades has lost and what is beyond himself, what Alcibi-
ades must reconcile within himself to be himself, to care for himself, and what would require
a transformation of himself through the recognition of his lack, his desire: a desire he can
neither embrace without ceasing to be who he has become, the drunken antithesis of the
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philosopher, propped by twin flute girls, nor can he abandon (Kofman 1989: 39–43). “I had
no idea what to do, no purpose in life; ah, no one else has ever known the real meaning of
slavery!” (219e; Nehamas and Woodruff 1997: 501).
Alcibiades must become pregnant, not with the wisdom of Socrates, but with himself.
The pregnant soul is precisely one that is aware of its own constitutive emptiness and in the
recognition of that lack it becomes, like Eros’s mother, Penia, and is thus able to give birth to
the image of desire, the appearance of the poros that materializes in the space defined by that
emptiness (Kofman 1983: 57, 59–60). In the myth itself, Poros is the child of Metis, “clever
resourcefulness, cunning.” This kinship grants to “philosophy” Kofman wrote some years
earlier, “the same soterological finality as tekhnē: the ability to invent poroi to allow us to
escape from aporia, from all sorts of difficult situations, those with no exit” (Kofman 1983:
16). Philosophia allows us to make our way and give birth to ourselves, if we will recognize
our lack, if we will recognize that sophia is not in our possession. Such Kofman observes was
the ultimate dream of Plato, the one we see flicker across his texts, to inseminate Socrates and
give birth to himself, to fill the void left by the Socratic dialectic through a moment of fullness
that overflows its own limits (1989: 242). Socrates is a divine mother whose divinity is hidden
by his ugliness, his fertility by his sterility—we are his children (Kofman 1989: 47).
2
[To] point out what, in the life and death of Socrates, could escape the dialectic; to read
therefore the text of Hegel between the lines in order to ask as much about what he does
not say as what he does, his omissions, his lapses, truly his contradictions.
(Kofman 1989: 74)
Hegel would have equally perceived that [Socrates’] philosophy is not speculative, that
Socrates is essentially the founder of ethics, a point of view that could seem incompatible
with the point of view of the ironist. In reality, there is nothing to it since, according to
Hegel, the ethical position of Socrates would consist in learning to universalize subjectiv-
ity, that is to say, in becoming conscious of its infinite and infinitely negative freedom.
(Kofman 1989: 189)
In the history of modern philosophy, Kofman observes, there is no Socrates more impor-
tant after Plato’s than Hegel’s, without which Kierkegaard’s and Nietzsche’s are unimaginable
(Kofman 1989: 61). Unlike Kofman’s own, Hegel’s is not grounded in the Symposium, but
rather he moves between the ironist of Plato’s Apology, the practical moralist of Xenophon
(Memorabilia), and the incipient ethical philosopher of Aristotle (Metaphysics 1). The nega-
tive ironic moment is always recuperated by a positive sublimation. Hegel’s Socrates shakes
his interlocutor’s faith in his own understanding and in conventional morality to awaken him
to the universal. Hegel also opposes Socrates to the Romantic irony of Schlegel and Fichte,
whom he saw as antithetical to his own speculative enterprise (Kofman 1989: 116–118, 139;
cf. Colebrook 2002: 132–133; Rush 2016: 158–161).
For Hegel, Socrates represents the appearance of consciousness as self-consciousness: the
thinking subject as both conscious of thinking and exterior to its community, a negation in rela-
tion to the dialectical progress of universal spirit. Socrates is unconscious of his significance in this
process. He does not conceptualize himself as a threshold between the Pre-Socratics and the later
history of philosophy (Kofman 1989: 62). But for Hegel, “In Socrates, the subjectivity of think-
ing has become conscious in a more determined, more profound manner” (Hegel 1971: 273).3
574
Consciousness has become the object of thought for Socrates in a way that it was not in Thales
or Anaxagoras. Even so, it is not yet speculative philosophy. It is not consciousness determining
itself at the level of the universal. It remains the activity of an individual. As Kofman observes,
Socrates’ function in Hegel’s dialectic, like Eros in the Symposium, “is that of a metaxu, an
intermediary.” He is no longer Anaxagoras and not yet Plato. He oscillates between excess and
lack (Kofman 1989: 68).
From his place within the Hegelian dialectic, which, Kofman mischievously reminds us,
is the second moment of the first moment of the first moment of Spirit, Socrates, like the
sophists, wields thought as an object of consciousness and then takes that consciousness of
thought itself as an object of reflection. Socrates is both sublimated into Hegel’s larger dia-
lectic of history and remains irreducibly individual (Kofman 1989: 67, 77–78). “Subjectivity,
infinite freedom of self-consciousness saw the light of day with Socrates” (Hegel 1971: 274).
For Hegel’s Socrates, truth has to be mediated by thought. It must be posited. Yet, truth’s
primary character is not to be posited at all, to have no exteriority. The act of positing truth
is a contradiction because it denies truth’s untroubled self-sufficiency (Kofman 1989: 80–81).
Socratic reflection serves as a negative moment in relation to traditional Greek thought pre-
cisely because it undermines its seemingly self-evident truths. His ironic questioning is exter-
nal, destructive. As such, for Hegel, his execution is necessary and just, even as the Socratic
moment represents a necessary step in the progress of universal reason (Kofman 1989: 132).
Hegel’s great labor, as Kofman reads him, is to suppress the exteriority of Socratic dialogue in
favor of its “content”: a rejection of the lessons of Agathon and Alcibiades from the Symposium.
The true aim of the maieutic for Hegel is not the destruction of false conceptions, what Socrates
labels “wind eggs” in the Theatetus (150a–151e) but the birthing, via deduction, of the universal
from the particular, which necessitates the suppression of the particular per se (Kofman 1989:
127). Within his recounting of Socrates’ life, special attention is paid to Alcibiades’ story in
the Symposium (220c–d) of Socrates at Potidea being plunged into a profound internal revery
that caused him to remain motionless throughout the day and night. Hegel see this trancelike
condition as an external manifestation of the internal work undertaken by Socrates’ spirit to
separate itself from corporality. In the person of Socrates, because this separation was a new
phenomenon, the work of the interiorization of spirit manifests itself as a kind of pathology.
Only through exercise and habit is the freedom of spirit to determine itself ultimately effected.
Philosophy, as in the Phaedo, becomes for Hegel an apprenticeship for the spirit’s autonomy
from the body (64a5–6), which comes to be seen as a supplement, a material irony, the assertion
of an individual (and hence feminized) difference (Hegel 1977: 288). Only when spirit is recon-
ciled with the material from which it divides itself, as the self-determining spirit of the universal
through history, will there be a final adequation, a masculine eradication of excess, a filling of
the lack that produces solidity and rest (Hegel 1971: 279–280; Kofman 1989: 97, 100–104).
In the end for Hegel, therefore, Socrates, while representing a necessary step in the dialectic
of spirit and an outstanding individual, had to die. This is why he was a tragic figure, meriting
our pity and admiration like Antigone (Hegel 1971: 278). For Hegel the trial of Socrates and
his execution stages the conflict between the infinite freedom of consciousness and the reason
of the community or the state, which if allowed to stand without sublimation and reconcilia-
tion would produce a void of infinite negativity and irony, in the same manner as Schlegel and
the German Romantics. Socrates merited death because he died for a justice higher than his
own, that of the state or absolute Spirit. As Kofman sums up this portion of Hegel’s argument,
“and if this death of a highly moral figure interests and moves us—‘us,’ not housewives, but
true ‘men’ worthy of the name, it is that in the end this death elevates us and reconciles us with
our selves” (Kofman 1989: 84–85).
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For Hegel, the infinite subjectivity of Socrates, the interiorization of a morality that said
custom was not merely to be followed but must be freely accepted and assented to, was
concretized in the figure of his daimōn. This is not Eros, the daimōn of the Symposium, the
intermediary between gods and men, between the plenitude of sophia and all-too-human lack,
but that of Xenophon, a prophetic power that advised Socrates on what he should or should
not do and through which he gave advice to others (Memorabilia 1.1.4). Socrates is accused
of introducing new gods and corrupting the youth, turning them away from the traditional
beliefs of their fathers and forefathers. This is seen, Hegel notes, not only in the accounts of the
trial of Socrates but also in Aristophanes’ Clouds. What Socrates introduces according to He-
gel, and what is made visible in the figure of the daimōn, is the opposition between individual
conscience and the traditions of a people or state, the power of a self-determining conscience
to accept or reject a given determination. “The moment of decision by the self begins to be
seen in Socrates; this was still among the Greeks an unconscious determination. In Socrates,
this spirit that decides transfers itself into the subjective consciousness of man” (Hegel 1971:
315). As Hegel observes, again following Xenophon, this moment of decision, whose separa-
tion from the universal is figured by the daimōn, is what makes possible the hubris of a Critias
or an Alcibiades, who posed actual dangers to the community, not by following the concrete
advice of Socrates but by assuming the moment of decision within themselves. For Hegel then,
Kofman argues, Socrates’ death was just and rational because, by moving the judgment of
truth into the interiority of consciousness, Socrates entered into conflict with the universality
of the community, a conflict that could only be resolved through his execution. What Socrates’
death announces for Hegel is the necessary subordination of the ironizing individual to the
community and the community’s consequent interiorization of the self-conscious moment of
its own determination as manifest in the mature philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, which on
Hegel’s reading transcends the ironic stance of the self-conscious individual but also presup-
poses it (Kofman 1989: 15–59).
Thus, for Hegel too Socrates becomes a salvific figure, conjured from the portraits of Xeno-
phon and Plato. The arrival of Socratic self-consciousness is the coming of a redemptive power
that must initially appear as a corruption (Kofman 1989: 95–96). If Christ died for the sins
of the world, Socrates pays the cost for the universal principle of philosophy as emancipated
thought: subjective freedom, the law of conscience and knowledge (Kofman 1989: 84).
There remains, however, Kofman observes, a curious contradiction in Hegel’s treatment of
Socrates. With his emphasis on Socrates’ cataleptic fits, his daimōn, and his trial and execu-
tion, Hegel asserts the impossibility of separating the life of Socrates from his philosophy, yet
he reduces that life to the figure of a specific moment in the dialectic of Spirit (Kofman 1989:
74). Hegel, she observes, seeks to put Socrates to death a second time, fixing his place once and
for all. His grand narrative seeks to contain the ironic force of his personality (Kofman 1989:
61) and rigorously distinguish between a negative, nondialectical Romantic irony and Socrates’
tragic sublimation. Hegel reproaches the Romantics with conflating the limited negativity of So-
cratic subjectivity, which he views as compatible with Homeric serenity, with an infinite irony
that leaves no remainder (Kofman 1989: 119–121). The tragedy of Socrates’ death can only be
retained if the self-consciousness of his subjectivity and infinite freedom is dialectically coun-
tered by the still unconscious spirit of traditional Greek morality (Kofman 1989: 79, 83–84).
If on a certain level Socrates’ self-creation implies the “murder of the father,” the questioning
of all traditional authority and hence the corrupting of the youth, it also assumes the sensible
material continuity of the mother, of the family, of Antigone’s oikos (Kofman 1989: 113).
576
In the end, one can only stand in wonder at the synthesis Hegel achieves. There is a reason
this section is the longest in Kofman’s book. Once these lectures are read, they are impossible
to ignore, and yet, as in all such totalizing narratives, there is a suffocating quality, as if the
work of Geist has sucked all the oxygen from the realm of spirit. If this just-so story is in fact
so, why continue to think about and through Socrates at all? The savior has come. The space
between the portraits is filled. Thought can come to an end. The question we must pose, the
question on which the possibility of our authentic thought depends, is: is it possible to think
Socrates and his death outside Hegel’s dialectic? This is the challenge that Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche take up, the challenge of saving us from this salvific narrative and returning us to
the space of emergence (Kofman 1989: 175).
3
It’s in the lacunas of the conceptions of Xenophon and those of Plato—lacunas from
lack, and lacunas from excess—that [Kierkegaard] can make emerge and impose his
own, as the only “real” and necessary one, on the condition that his already has been
able to make the lacunas of the others be perceived as such. For Nietzsche and Hegel,
equipped with completely different fantasies, do not perceive them, or do not see them
in the same spots in their texts.
(Kofman 1989: 213)
Socrates’ existence is irony.

Kierkegaard’s dissertation, The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, was
in many ways a long debate with Hegel (Kofman 1989: 179). Kierkegaard faults Hegel for
conflating his sources and for combining the Socrates of Xenophon with that of Plato. For
him, Xenophon’s text is like the trees that grow over Napoleon’s grave, recording the positive
statements of Socrates, while leaving a lacuna at their center from which the actual image
emerges. The lacuna identified by Kierkegaard is Socratic irony, a gap Hegel attempts to fill by
deploying a type of philological naiveté with regard to his sources and by allowing the ironic
moment to become a moral one (Kofman 1989: 187–188, 209, 212).
Kierkegaard, of course, makes his own selection. Following Schleiemacher, he makes a
distinction between the early “Socratic” dialogues of Plato and later “constructive” ones like
the Republic, Timaeus, Critias, and Laws. In the constructive dialogues, Kierkegaard con-
tends, Socrates no longer plays himself but has become a ghostly presence haunting Plato’s
inauguration of speculative reason, a memoralized Socrates who lives on (Kierkegaard 1989:
53; Kofman 1989: 217–218, 248). Kierkegaard banishes the constructive dialogues. His read-
ing focuses on a dialectical movement dominated by “the negative without restriction” and
thus concentrates on the shorter dialogues that end in aporia (Kierkegaard 1989: 54; Kofman
1989: 229, 231).
Prominent among them is the Protagoras, in which, Kierkegaard observes, the aporetic is
a manifestation of Socrates’ irony. The Protagoras poses the question: “is virtue teachable?”
The eponymous sophist argues in the affirmative and Socrates in the negative. As the dialogue
progresses, however, they find themselves switching positions, since Socrates contends that the
virtues are forms of knowledge, and hence should be teachable, while Protagoras argues that
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they cannot be reduced to the epistemic and thus contends virtue cannot, in fact, be taught
(361b–d; Kierkegaard 1989: 61). As Kierkegaard observes:
The ironic consists in this, that Socrates tricks Protagoras out of every concrete virtue,
and when he is to lead it back to unity he completely volatizes it. The sophistical is that
by which he is able to do this. Thus we simultaneously have the irony carried by a so-
phistical dialectic and a sophistical dialectic resting in irony.
Thus, far from possessing what Alcibiades and Socrates’ other lovers seek to possess, the
agalma he hides beneath his ugliness, the phallus, the power of fulfillment, Socrates at the
end of the Protagoras is both castrated and castrating, forever instituting the gap of desire,
forever saying something more and other than what he means (Kofman 1989: 205, 229–230,
272–273). The aporetics of his irony like that of the sophists themselves awakens reflection
by “separating itself in its motely multiplicity from substantial morality” without offering the
comfort of a Hegelian resolution or sublimation (Kierkegaard 1989: 201–202).
In Kierkegaard’s reading of the Symposium, he abstracts Socrates from Diotima, identifying
the latter with Plato at the begining of his constructive phase. The purely Socratic portions of
the dialogue are to be found, he contends, in Socrates’ identification of Eros with lack, as if
the genealogy of the daimōn were solely from Penia without Poros (Kofman 1989: 222–225,
266–267). Eros, he writes, “appears not as love of this or that or for this or that, but as love
for something it does not have, that is as desire, longing” (Kierkegaard 1989: 45). Socratic
love is pure lack without determinative content. For this reason, it can be passed on neither
to Agathon nor Alcibiades: there is no concept at the heart of Socrates for Kierkegaard, no
agalma the lover can possess in plenitude, only the negation of false or partial images, the
continuous hollowing out of a space of emergence that denies the positivity of Hegel’s labor
of the dialectic (Kofman 1989: 225–228).
Kofman observes that Kierkegaard’s thesis is written at a moment of crisis for the Dan-
ish philosopher, when he breaks off his engagement with Regine Olsen, a moment of self-
castration and negativity that will not only ensure the lack of the phallus but also, like the
Socratic moment itself, become the source, if not the very possibility, of reflection (Kofman
1989: 194). It is not without irony, Kofman notes, that Kierkegaard’s thesis opens with a
comparison of the modern systematic philosopher to a knight errant who seeks to grasp the
phenomenon “which as such is always foeminini generis.” If the philosopher’s conception is
to be legitimate, if it is not to be aborted as a Socratic wind egg, it must both embrace the
phenomenon and leave it “inviolate” (Kierkegaard 1989: 9; cf. Kofman 1989: 203). The space
of thought emerges only in the separation of the amorous philosopher from the object of his
conception, an ironic space that speaks as much to nonidentity as it does the correspondence
of truth: a space that Socrates’ refusal of Alcibiades defines as surely as Kierkegaard’s rupture
with Regine (Kofman 1989: 204). The irony of Socrates in its sustained negativity beckons
with possibilities of fulfillments unimagined. He is the seducer who offers an idea with one
hand and takes it away with the other, who leaves the beloved ever unfulfilled, transformed
from the object of desire to its subject (Kofman 1989: 212, 226–227). “The ironist is the vam-
pire who has sucked the blood of the lover and while doing so fanned him cool, lulled him to
sleep, and tormented him with troubled dreams” (Kierkegaard 1989: 48–49).
We are far from Hegel. For Kierkegaard, Socrates is no longer a figure of the progress
of Spirit, but a real individual existence. His irony cannot be reduced to a “moment” (Kof-
man 1989: 277). Kierkegaard does not so much oppose Hegel as sidestep him, insisting on
578
the irreducibility of Socrates the ironist, even as he grants Hegel’s contention that Socrates
stands as the beginning of philosophical ethics (Kofman 1989: 181, 190). He both grants that
Socrates negates any singular point of view and denies that this negation can be subsumed
and contained in a narrative of progress (Colebrook 2002: 160–161). Rather Socrates is the
founder of philosophical ethics precisely insofar as he is an ironist. For the ironist lifts the au-
ditor out of the immediacy of existence. Irony is the negation of the continuity of phenomenal-
ity, introducing a cut or a caesura that turns auditors inward, causing them to recognize their
lack, their own radical negativity (Kierkegaard 1989: 48, 188, 212). Irony’s “relation to the
world is a continuous nonrelation to the world” (Kierkegaard 1989: 221). In this Kierkegaard
goes beyond the Romantics Hegel sought to combat. For Kierkegaard, irony does not merely
intimate the presence of the soul, rather the soul itself is ironic. It is qua soul a constant condi-
tion of separation and nonrelation (Colebrook 2002: 168). Thus, Socrates is both inseparable
from his epoch and irreducible to it. He is an infinite, uncontainable beginning. His positivity
exists only in potentia as an infinite openness. Kierkegaard thus repeats Hegel and displaces
him (Kofman 1989: 278, 282, 285).
Even so, Kierkegaard too has his salvific moment of emergence in which ironic negativity
is contained: no longer on the level of Spirit, but on that of the ethical and religious subject
(Kofman 1989: 197). For Kierkegaard, irony is but the first step toward ethics and religion.
His thesis functions as a provisional poros, a “way” beyond his initial impasse, both personal
and philosophical (Kofman 1989: 202). Socratic irony represents the negativity necessary to
clear the way for Christian positivity, a profound skepticism that opens the space for salvific
grace beyond the law, beyond reason (Kofman 1989: 281, 283; Colebrook 2002: 245). Like
the thieves in Freud’s anecdote, Socrates and the sophists come to function in Kierkegaard’s
mature thought as the forerunners who announce the savior, visible only in the space defined
by their negativity, by their movement beyond the phenomenal (Kofman 1989: 279).
4
Where for Hegel Socrates is a moment within a moment, the birth of thought as self-conscious
subjectivity, which must be destroyed and then incorporated within the life of Spirit, and
where for Kierkegaard Socratic self-consciousness is the ironic soul in its separation from the
realm of phenomenality, a permanent and pure desire, for Nietzsche the figure of Socrates
catalyzes a struggle within himself. For Hegel Socrates’ death is a necessity. For Nietzsche it is
the site of an insoluble problem: how are we to make sense of the end of the Phaedo, where So-
crates tells Crito they must sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, the god of healing. Nietzsche exclaims
in the Gay Science, “this ridiculous and terrible last word means for those who have ears: ‘O
Crito, life is a disease!’” (Nietzsche 1974: 272). The problem for Nietzsche is not where is
Socrates located in the progress of spirit, but how is it possible for a living being to want death
(Kofman 1989: 19). Socratic irony is both the beginning of western philosophy and a practice
of death, the power of the intellect turned against life, against joyous play within the world
of appearances. With Socrates is inaugurated a split between life and thought, one that Hegel
redeems, Kierkegaard celebrates (Kofman 1989: 301; cf. Kofman 1990: 110–111; Kofman
1986b: 20), and Nietzsche struggles to contain. It is at once the inauguration of philosophy
and its decadence, the triumph of mastery, and the revanche of the ugly and the weak (Kof-
man 1989: 305).
Socrates is for Nietzsche the last of the pure philosophers, where Plato is the first synthetic
or hybrid, combining Socratic, Heraclitean, and Pythagorean elements. Within this schema,
Heraclitus serves as the prophet of truth, Pythagoras the philosopher of religion, and Socrates
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the conqueror of passions. He represents the moment of rupture between appearance and
reality, between the phenomenal and the essential. He is both the end and the beginning of
philosophy, a liminal figure as he is in Hegel (Kofman 1989: 298). Yet, for Nietzsche, Socrates
is also the ideologue who corrupted Plato: showing him an inverted world in which what we
say is not what we mean, what we see is not what is real, what we experience is a dream,
and life a form of death (Kofman 1989: 306). He is the cunning plebeian who recognizes that
while reason may divide the world and allow us to isolate and identify our passions, it offers
no more mastery of them than do unconscious faith and tradition.
Socrates was not simply a dialectician who triumphed over others in argument, but through
his irony he also laughed at himself. For Nietzsche’s Socrates, the Delphic injunction to know
thyself is less about the imposition of reason than the recognition of its limits in the face of
our riotous Dionysiac impulses (Nietzsche 1966: 103–104, § 191; Kofman 1989: 306–308).
As he writes in The Birth of Tragedy,
What were we to say of the end (or, worse of the beginning) of all inquiry? Might it be
that the “inquiring mind” was simply the human mind terrified by pessimism and trying
to escape from it, a clever bulwark erected against the truth? … Had this perhaps been
your secret, great Socrates? Most secretive of ironists, had this been your deepest irony?
(Nietzsche 1956: 4–5)
For Nietzsche, then, reason and dialectic represent the defensive arm of Socrates, a way of
achieving hegemony over the self and others that masks the passions that drive it. These instru-
ments of thought represent the power of the impotent to resist their barbarian overlords, the
surreptitious and self-alienating power of the Christian and the Jew, but also that of the near-
sighted, sickly Nietzsche, or of Sarah Kofman the French Jew kept by a Catholic during the war
(Kofman 1989: 313; Nietzsche 1994: 25, § 11). As Kofman acutely observes, Socrates functions
as Nietzsche’s double (Kofman 1989: 58), whose reduction to a one-sided negative image repre-
sents the philosopher cum philologist’s attempt to expel what he could least tolerate in himself:
the feeble, the decadent, the carnivalized, and the grotesque. Nietzsche’s Socrates is liberated
both from the Hegelian march of system and from Kierkegaard’s desperate leap into religios-
ity. He turns his irony against himself. He laughs at himself, tearing himself from the world
of appearance and phenomenality, and casting himself into the abyss, into the inner space out
from which beauty can emerge, but which, in itself, is lack, negativity, desire (Kofman 1989:
316–318). Socrates in his ugliness, in his irony, in his troublesome insistence, and ultimately
even in his death, is always in excess, always too much, always overflowing the categories in
which we try to contain him and thereby always exposing the lack that lurks in our hearts.
5
By identifying with “Socrates,” but also by rejecting one of his aspects, and each one the
opposite aspect, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have they not at the same time “grasped”
and “missed” in the best manner possible what is “proper” to Socrates? Both reveal, in
any case, not only what is awkward in this character who resists … every classification,
every determination and category, every system, but above all what is vitally dangerous.
(Kofman 1989: 323)
Kofman’s Socrate(s) is a high-wire act. She seeks to make Socrates dangerous again. He is,
as Kierkegaard acknowledged, a type of vampire, and every time we think we have driven a
580
stake through his heart, he rises again, haunting, seductive, monstrous. Nonetheless, this book
though translated into English has had little effect on scholarship (1998). It too is a kind of
monster. It does not fit into any distinct category. It is a study of Socrates, but an idiosyncratic
one that, while focusing on nineteenth-century reception, includes its own reading of the Sym-
posium. Moreover, its argument is precisely that there is no Socrates outside of his receptions
and that each of these receptions is both a return to the ancient sources and an attempt to limn
the void, to see what glimmers within.
Socrates is at once too much with us, almost omnipresent, and impossible to capture. That
is his uncanny power. His glimmering quality is not a function of the fragmentary nature of
the evidence (few ancient figures are better attested) nor of the partiality of our sources (hardly
more partial than for other ancient figures). It is rather a function of Socrates himself: the
excessive figure who must be contained, the revenant who must be put to death, the biting fly
who goads us from our slumbers (Apology 30e). He is the ironist, the teacher who instructs
because he knows he knows nothing (Apology 23b): the teacher of no man (33a–b). He can-
not but be the glimmer that emerges from absence, the philosopher who is birthed by himself,
exposed, and re-emerges to haunt us. Kofman captures this quality brilliantly and in doing
so defies categorization, demanding that we return to the texts—Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Ni-
etzsche; Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes—and to Kofman herself, asking with a cunning
smile and a knowing laugh, “where is the savior?”
Notes
1 All translations are my own unless otherwise specified.
2 Sarah Kofman, the youngest daughter of Rabbi Bereck Kofman was born in Paris (1934). The author
of more than 25 books on Nietzsche, Freud, Socrates, Plato, Derrida, Nerval, Comte, and others, Kof-
man committed suicide 60 years later on Nietzsche’s 150th birthday, shortly after the publication of
her riveting autobiographical text, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994). Just before her death, she became
the holder of a chair in philosophy at the Sorbonne.
3 I cite from the French edition used by Kofman.
Works Cited
Colebrook, Claire. 2002. Irony in the Work of Philosophy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
de Man, Paul. 1983. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 187–228.
Deutscher, Penelope. 1999. “Complicated Fidelity: Kofman’s Freud (Reading The Childhood of Art with
The Enigma of Woman).” In Engimas: Essays on Sarah Kofman. Eds. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly
Oliver. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 159–173.
Deutscher, Penelope and Kelly Oliver. 1999. “Introduction: Sarah Kofman’s Skirts.” In Enigmas: Essays
on Sarah Kofman. Eds. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1–22.
Freud, Sigmund. 1960. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Trans James Strachey. New York:
Norton.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1971. Leçons sur l’histoire de la philosophie. Paris: Vrin.
———. 1977. Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kierkegaard, Søren. 1989. The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates. Ed. and Trans.
Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kofman, Sarah. 1983. Comment s’en sortir? Paris: Galilée.
———. 1986a. Pourquoi rit-on? Freud et le mot d’esprit. Paris: Galilée.
———. 1986b. Nietzsche et la scène philosophique. Paris: Galilée.
———. 1989. Socrate(s). Paris: Galilée.
———. 1990. Séductions: De Sartre à Héraclite. Paris: Galilée.
———. 1994. Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. Paris: Galilée.
581
Paul Allen Miller
———. 1998. Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press.
Lane, Melissa. 2006. “The Evolution of Eirōneia in Classical Greek Texts: Why Socratic Eirōneia Is Not
Socratic Irony.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 31: 49–83.
Miller, Paul Allen. 2016. Diotima at the Barricades: French Feminists Read Plato. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
———. 2022. “Plato’s Seventh Letter or How to Fashion a Subject of Resistance.” In The Politics of
Form in Greek Literature. Ed. Phiroze Vasunia. London: Bloomsbury. 125–144.
Naas, Michael. 2008. “Fire Walls: Sarah Kofman’s Pyrotechnics.” In Sarah Kofman’s Corpus. Ed. Tina
Chanter and Pleshette de Armitt. Albany: SUNY Press. 49–74.
Nehamas, Alexander and Paul Woodruff, trans. 1997. “Symposium.” In Plato: Complete Works. Ed.
John M. Cooper. Assoc. Ed. D. S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis: Hackett. 457–505.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1956. “The Birth of Tragedy.” In The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Mor-
als. Trans Francis Golffing. New York: Doubleday & Company. 1–46.
———. 1966. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
———. 1974. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
———. 1994. On the Genealogy of Morals. Ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson. Trans. Carole Diethe. Cambridge:
Oliver, Kelly. 1999. “Sarah Kofman’s Queasy Stomach and the Riddle of the Paternal Law.” In Engimas:
Essays on Sarah Kofman. Ed. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
174–188.
Rush, Fred. 2016. Irony and Idealism: Rereading Schlegel, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Further Reading
Chanter, Tina and Pleshette de Armitt, Eds. 2008. Sarah Kofman’s Corpus. Albany: SUNY Press.
Deutscher, Penelope and Kelly Oliver, Eds. 1999. Engimas: Essays on Sarah Kofman. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Kofman, Sarah. 1985. The Enigma of Woman in Freud’s Writings. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cor-
nell University Press.
———. 1996. Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
———. 1998. Camera Obscura: Of Ideology. Trans. Will Straw. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
———. 2007. Selected Writings. Ed. Thomas Albrecht with Georgia Albert and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg.
With and introduction by Jacques Derrida. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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39
DECOLONIAL RUMINATIONS
ON A CLASSIC
Medea, Sethe and La Llorona1
Medea, the most irredeemable mother of them all

(Jacqueline Rose)
Decolonization is not a metaphor

(Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang)
1 What Does it Mean to Decolonially Ruminate on a Classic?

There are two predominant understandings of decolonial theory. First, one that identifies
decolonial theory with the series of influential texts produced by the Coloniality/Modernity
Working Group, after their meetings at SUNY-Binghamton during 1999 and 2000. Inspired
by Aníbal Quijano’s concept of “the coloniality of power,” and Maria Lugones’ feminist re-
working of that concept in what she called the “modern/colonial gender system,” this group
took as its object of study not colonialism per se but the “long-standing patterns of power
that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective rela-
tions, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations”
(Maldonado-Torres 2007: 243).2 Decolonial theory, one could argue, was this Group’s crea-
tive response to the challenges posed by Anne McClintock to the pitfalls of “postcoloni-
alism,” which paradoxically recentered European time as proper history while seeking to
decenter it (everything else being either pre- or post-) and rendered secondary colonial rela-
tions that could by no means be understood as “post.” As McClintock argues, for indigenous
peoples in the US, and Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories, among other cases,
“there might be nothing ‘post’ about colonialism at all” (McClintock 1992: 88). “De,” rather
than “post,” offered a more suitable approach to confront colonialism’s striated yet enduring
power relations.
The second understanding of decolonial theory, the one that I embrace here, thinks of
this field as a much broader space of inquiry in which various theoretical frameworks con-
verge to critique colonial capitalism from unique perspectives: postcolonial theory, indigenous
criticism, Black feminist intersectionality, queer of color critique, settler colonial critique, the
Black radical tradition, Afropessimism, Chicanx/Latinx studies, and decolonial theory itself,
583 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-44

as understood above. Long-standing patterns of power well beyond the strict limits of colonial
administration is, after all, precisely what foundational postcolonial theorist, Frantz Fanon,
already had in mind when writing The Wretched of the Earth (1961)—and each of these
theoretical frameworks claims Fanon as a foundational thinker. I also highlight Fanon because
I share his understanding of decolonial theory as a way of “stretching” Marxism to give us
a phenomenologically richer understanding of power when one links together the critique
of capitalism and that of colonialism (Fanon 2005: 5). Various decolonial (in the expanded
sense) traditions name this “stretching” in different ways: subalternity is postcolonial theory’s
way of naming that stretching; the coloniality of power is decolonial theory’s; the differentia-
tion between a logic of elimination and a logic of exclusion is settler colonial critique’s; racial
capitalism is the Black Radical Tradition’s; the matrix of domination is intersectionality’s;
anti-blackness is Afropessimism’s, and so on.3 To decolonially ruminate on a classic, then, is
to reinterpret that text according to the sets of questions and perspectives resulting from the
meeting point of these various fields.
Although I have somehow smoothed the differences between postcolonial theory and de-
colonial theory I would nonetheless like to retain one. If only because postcolonial theory has
influenced the reception of the classics in ways decolonial theory has not yet done (see for
instance Goff 2005; Hardwick and Gillespie 2007). To scholars of classics, postcolonial theory
has offered what Jameson would call a “master code,” allowing Martin Bernal (1987), for
instance, to investigate the Afro-Asiatic roots of Greek myths. By contrast, decolonial theory
has focused on a political reinterpretation of modernity, analyzing the ways that the European
Conquest of the Americas and the Middle Passage became not only ground-breaking events
but also ongoing processes of colonial re-elaboration of power. This is the insight that allows,
for example, Enrique Dussel to reinterpret the Cartesian cogito as the cultural manifestation
of the otherwise historically disavowed ego conquiro that inaugurates the liberal self of mo-
dernity (Dussel 1994: 21). This is also the master code that allows Saidiya Hartman to rein-
terpret liberal humanism as able to give slavery an afterlife post-abolition (Hartman 1997: 5).
But there is not, to the best of my knowledge, an interpretative tradition of the classics that
uses decolonial theory’s way of troubling “the human,” so central to the classics, as their
master code.4 This explains why I turn to Friedrich Nietzsche’s (2006: 9) metaphor of rumina-
tion, a reading practice that, in the absence of a tradition, names a more experimental if not
altogether speculative practice of reading. Indicating an interminable process of ingestion, di-
gestion, regurgitation, and reingestion of the classical text potentially ad infinitum, rumination
captures the challenging engagement with a multiplicity of texts (inclusive of adaptations) and
interpretative frameworks involved in the effort to decolonially interpret the classics.
Texts never arrive to us unmediated but, as Fredric Jameson argues, “always-already-read;
we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations” (Jameson 1981: 9).
Classical texts are unique, however, in that perhaps no other text rivals them in the layers
of interpretation that they have accumulated—and accumulated precisely because of racial
capitalism. To put it differently, because the Conquest of the Americas and the trans-Atlantic
slave trade made European cultural production into the globally dominant interpretative
framework to analyze all other cultural production—all of us non-Europeans had to become
familiar with their myths—the classics have accumulated more layers. And, as Jameson ar-
gues, when a theorist (decolonial or otherwise) engages a text, like that of Euripides’ Medea in
this chapter, it is not the text itself, but the layered interpretations through which we confront
it, that are the actual object of such rumination.5
To put it differently, you never just read a text by means of another one that will simply
function as its master code. You never, let’s say, read Euripides’s Medea through the lenses
584
Decolonial Ruminations on a Classic
of Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (1987). When you try to do that, you
always simultaneously read the various interpretative frameworks in which the second text
has intervened, frameworks that have already mediated, too, your engagement with the first as
well (Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, etc.). So that when you read Medea’s presum-
ably irredeemable infanticide through the lenses of Spillers’ analysis of slavery as capable of
(un)gendering the flesh of the captive, you start to notice how radically different their subject-
positionalities are. Medea’s forced choice, historically constrained because of the impending
statelessness that she faces as a consequence of Jason’s betrayal, is unlike the forced “choices”
that Black and Indigenous mothers were confronted with. That is the case because racial
capitalism coerced them to sexually reproduce neither future citizens for the polis nor refugees
either, but commodities for their captors. To decolonially ruminate on Medea is to politicize
those differences.
I, however, have intentionally avoided titling this contribution “decolonizing the classics”
in recognition of Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang’s (2012) challenge to the problematic ways that
the metaphorical rendering of decolonization domesticates what is most unsettling about a
political drive to repatriate Indigenous land and life. And I would like to think of “decoloniza-
tion is not a metaphor” as a directive for rumination to call critical attention to, rather than
away from, colonialism’s differentiated power effects. I trace these effects in what follows by
ruminating on the different colonial conditions constraining the infanticides of Euripides’ Me-
dea (431 BC), Toni Morrison’s Sethe (1988), and Cherríe Moraga’s Mexican Medea (2000).
2 Medea, Sethe and La Llorona

Euripides’ Medea takes us to a mythical Corinth, several years after the Argonautic expedi-
tion, where Medea and Jason secure refugium after the series of murders that first forced
Medea out of her native city of Colchis, and then forced her and Jason out of his native
city of Iolcus, in Thessaly. The play orbits around Medea’s revenge, after Jason decides to
marry the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth, in violation of his oaths to Medea. Jason’s
marriage changes his political status in the city, moving him from a refugee just like Medea
to future sovereign. Such move compromises Medea’s and their children’s status, poten-
tially dispossessing her of her motherhood. That this is a political, and not just a domestic
struggle, Medea makes clear since the very beginning, when she secures the sympathy of the
chorus of Corinthian women in a speech that emphasizes the politically salient differences
in their condition:
In any case your story’s not at all the same as mine:

you have your city here, your father’s house,
delight in life, and company of friends,
while I am citiless, deserted,
subjected to humiliation by my husband.
(252–256)
Creon arrives to order Medea’s immediate exile, anticipating the violence of her wrath. Play-
ing with gender, as she will continuously do, she secures one day from him. This is enough
time for her not only to enact her revenge against Jason—which includes killing his new fiancé,
the sovereign, and the children they had together—but also to secure new refuge for herself in
Athens.6 This happens after Aegeus, King of Athens, arrives and signs another binding oath
with her, in which he offers her asylum in exchange for assistance in reproductive labor, and
585
only if she arrives in Athens on her own—warding off war with Corinth in that way. Aegeus
swears never to drive her away if she delivers on her promise to help him reproduce an heir.
At the end, Medea does waver on her decision to kill her sons, but eventually decides to do
so to, as she claims, avoid “someone else’s crueler hand to slaughter them” (1239). The play
concludes with Medea’s refusal to give the corpses of their children back to Jason, where her
enemies could still “triumph over them by ripping up their graves” (1381). She takes them
instead to the shrine of Hera in the winged chariot lent to her by her grandfather, the sun, and
eventually brings herself safely all the way to Athens.7
Medea is not the only woman to have killed their children in revenge. As the Chorus says:
I’ve heard of only one woman past, who killed the nurslings of her own nest.
And that was Ino, sent mad by the gods,
when Hera drove her wandering away from home.
She leapt down into the salty waves,
wickedly drowning her clutch of babes.
She pressed her steps from land into the sea,
and died herself, along with her two sons.
(1282–1285)
This means that what distinguishes Medea is not so much that she kills her children, but that
she does it out of a rational, rather than irrational (sent mad by the gods) political calcula-
tion.8 She rationally avoids the harm that she knows otherwise awaits her children because
of her actions (potentially slaughtered by a hand crueler than hers). More importantly, she
survives their killing. Or, as Margaret Reynolds puts it, Medea “gets away with it” (cited in
Rose 2018: 70). Medea is not terrifying to readers simply because she kills her children, but
because she gives us a political justification for her act, and because instead of stepping into
the sea and dying along with them, she jumps instead into a divine chariot and flies away to
survive them in Athens.
Thus, it comes as a surprise to us, non-classicists, to learn that what distinguishes Medea
from the otherwise rich pantheon of powerful proto-feminist agencies recorded in the ancient
Greek archive could have been Euripides’ invention. Poets and historians writing before Eu-
ripides have Medea’s children either killed by the Corinthians in revenge for her acts (as she
fears in Euripides’ version), or by Creon’s relatives when Medea abandons them in Hera’s tem-
ple (Taplin 2013: 70). This explains why Christa Wolf’s Medea: A Modern Retelling (1998)
can be characterized as “the true feminist text” (Rose 2018: 70). In Wolf’s version, Medea is
not only framed by Creon and others for his own murder of Glauce’s sister, which he performs
to keep the succession of his rule in his line rather than hers, but she is also framed for the
murder of her brother, Absyrtus, resulting in her forced exile from her native city. By thus
modifying the story Wolf’s version calls attention to Euripides’ interpretative choice and ap-
propriates for herself the power to rework the myth so that Euripides’ own appears as one,
rather than the version of the myth, and a rather problematic one when placed next to hers.
In Wolf’s version, Medea is not only the scapegoat of her father but also that of Creon and,
by extension, that of Euripides and a broad philosophical archive complicit with accepting his
version of the myth as the version of the myth.
But is there a way of retaining Euripides’ version while refusing, at the same time, the sim-
ple condemnation of Medea that makes her infanticide irredeemable? Here, I would like to
praise my favorite interpretation of the play, Demetra Kasimis’ “Medea the Refugee” (2020).
Influenced by Black feminist intersectionality Kasimis (2020: 22n54) underlines the ways in
586
which Medea’s political status in Corinth as a phugas (refugee) has been problematically over-
looked in the scholarship, arguing that her revenge is not simply a jealous response to Jason’s
infidelity. Rather, Kasimis argues, Medea’s revenge is a political response to “the additional
deprivileging effects of structural gender inequality that the loss of two oikoi implies for her”
(Kasimis 2020: 10). Given that she can neither return to her native oikos nor to Jason’s, Me-
dea becomes de facto stateless after Creon’s decreed exile.
What I like the most from Kasimis’ reading is that her political contextualization of the
story of Medea as the story of a refugee allows us to see the binding oaths that she made with
Jason differently. As Kasimis argues, Medea “never received her father’s permission to wed be-
cause she arrogated this authority to herself” (Kasimis 2020: 15). This means that in dissolv-
ing their marriage, Jason “enacts a political logic that Medea has repeatedly disavowed (…)
[f]or the bonds of kin that mandate and reflect women’s subordination to men in this tragedy
are realized through hierarchical marriage rites that Medea and Jason never carried out”
(Kasimis 2020: 16). Or, as Mastronarde argues, that “Medea, unlike Jason, assimilates their
marriage to a partnership of equals” (Mastronarde 2010: 257). To put it differently, the oaths
that bind Medea to Jason can be understood as the pre-figuration of a utopic oikos that has no
political reality in the ancient world. More importantly, it is a political creation that depends,
largely, on their shared condition as equal phugas, arguably unavailable if they were living as
unequal citizens. To overlook Medea’s status as a refugee is to efface colonialism’s structuring
power, the one that explains why Medea knows her children would be slaughtered by others
in crueler ways. In violating their oath, and changing his status, Jason is thus violating some-
thing more fundamental: her political capacity to invent new and more egalitarian worlds
within the inegalitarian ones in which they are otherwise forced to live as unequal.
As a member of the Colchis’ polis, first, and a Corinthian phugas, second, Medea is an
agent with the recognized capacity to make binding oaths (first to Jason and then to Aegeus).
Her oaths are vulnerable, but they are also positively sanctioned by the divine (hence Helios’
decision to lend her his chariot). This means that Medea’s flight, and the actions that she un-
dertakes to “get away with it,” also rested on her not being a slave. To put it differently, slaves
are homeless in radically different ways to the ways in which the stateless are (Arendt 2004:
341). Confined to the oikos of their captors, slaves are forced to exist entirely outside of the
social world of the home, forced to exist as socially dead (Patterson 1982). Thus confined,
the enslaved are more radically expropriated from their political capacity to inaugurate new
worlds through the binding force of their own oaths with others. As a slave, Medea could not
use oaths to build a different kind of world with Jason as refugees in Corinth, nor escape her
own acts by fleeing to Athens.
Only by overlooking these material differences was the real story of Margaret Garner in
the settler colonial US framed as the modern Medea. Although such framing has a longer
history, Kevin Wetmore Jr. claims that it philosophically crystalizes with Jean-Paul Sartre’s
“Black Orpheus” (1948). According to Wetmore Jr. the “Black Orpheus” frame insists on
a simple analogy, explaining what is uncritically assumed as the particular and unfamiliar
(Black) through what is as uncritically taken as the familiar and universal (ancient Greek) by
virtue of questionable equivalences. And it is precisely the Margaret Garner/“Modern Me-
dea” analogy—as Garner was represented by Kentucky painter, Thomas Satterwhite Noble in
Harper’s Weekly, and from then onwards—Wetmore Jr. adds, that “may be the first American
use of Greek tragedy to frame African American experience in the ‘Black Orpheus’ mode, i.e.,
explaining an historic event in terms of Greek tragic metaphor” (Wetmore Jr. 2010: 136). Toni
Morrison’s Beloved, inspired by Garner’s story, would be subjected to the same problematic
analogy, despite Morrison’s rightful rejections of the analogy (Plasa 1998: 36).
587
Margaret Garner was a 20-year old Black enslaved mother of four who fled the plantation
in which she was confined in Kentucky with her family, only to be tracked down by her cap-
tor, Archibald Gains, to a cabin in Storrs Township across the Ohio River. Having secured a
warrant and the assistance of the US Marshals, the Fugitive Slave Act allowed Gains to reclaim
her and her children as his property, leading Garner to kill her two-year-old daughter Mary,
and attempt to kill her other children to liberate them from re-enslavement, before the slave
catchers broke in. This is the event that inspires Toni Morrison’s Beloved, who invents Sethe,
as Darieck Scott argues, not to give us an “‘accurate’ account of Margaret Garner’s history
but to mine that history for various possible meanings that, heretofore largely hidden from
histories and absent from popular consciousness, seem available only in metaphor” (Scott
2010: 130–131).9
Morrison confronts us with the radical homelessness and hiddenness of slavery and its
aftermath from the very beginning of the novel, by placing us not in a named polis, like
Corinth in Medea’s case, but in a house identified only by numbers: “124.”10 A number, rather
than a name, not only distinguishes Sethe’s homelessness, as the captive, from Medea’s, as
the refugee, but also distinguishes their subject-positions within two very different colonial
orders (ancient and modern, imperial and settler). Spillers insists upon this difference, when
she emphasizes that captives were “neither female [like Medea] nor male [like Jason], as both
subjects are taken into ‘account’ as quantities” (Spillers 1987: 72). The enslaved were dispos-
sessed not only of their names but also of their capacity to name, as it was their captors who
named them not to fold them into the social world of their enslavers but to repeat, symboli-
cally, other more horrifying “hieroglyphic markings” of their flesh like taking them into ac-
count as quantities (Spillers 1987: 67).
Published in 1987, Beloved begins in 1873 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Morrison historically situ-
ates the story in the aftermath of the American Civil War (19861–1865), inspired by the case
of Margaret Garner. Beloved is the name of the ghost of Sethe’s eldest daughter, the one that
Sethe killed to free her from re-enslavement, after Schoolteacher, the master of Sweet Home
plantation, comes to re-enslave them all, supported by the Fugitive Slave Act. When Sethe
returns from prison to 124, Beloved has become a rather powerful ghost haunting the house.
Her haunting is so strong that both of Sethe’s sons, Howard and Buglar, end up running away
from home at age 13—Buglar after “merely looking in a mirror shattered it,” Howard after
“two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake” (Morrison 1988: 3). Only Denver, Sethe’s other
daughter, and Baby Suggs, her mother-in-law, remain. But they are not the only ones to leave
124. Paul D, an old friend of the family, known to them because he was also enslaved in Sweet
Home—the plantation in which Sethe, her husband, Halle, Baby Suggs, and several others
were enslaved—arrives only to wrongly believe to have conjured the spirit of Beloved away.
But when the family returns to 124 Beloved awaits them, having now materialized and having
acquired full human form. And Beloved will eventually force Paul D out of 124 as well, after
she starts an intimate relationship with him, troubling the one he was trying to build with
Sethe.
Sharing the unspeakable pain of Sweet Home, only to Paul D will Sethe try to explain the
act that haunts her, her family, and the US settler colonial order. But Paul D, unable to confront
his own shame mirrored in hers, refuses to accept her explanation of the act. To her political
claim about the success of her infanticide, given that her children “ain’t at Sweet Home,” that
“Schoolteacher ain’t got em,” Paul D replies with the de-humanizing words that will immedi-
ately end everything between them: “You got two feet, Sethe, not four” (Morrison 1988: 173).
Her act animalizes her in Paul D’s eyes, when it was precisely Schoolteacher’s lesson to his pu-
pils, training them on how to differentiate her human from her animal “characteristics,” that
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jumpstarted her fugue (Morrison 1988: 202). Paul D confirmed her worst fears, that perhaps
not even Beloved will understand the liberating politics of her act. Thus, only to Beloved she
will tell all of this. For above all, Sethe was afraid that Beloved might leave before she could
make her realize:
that worse than [her death]—far worse—was what Baby Suggs died of, what Ella knew,
what Stamp saw and what made Paul D tremble. That anybody white could take your
whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty
you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore.
(162)
The difficulty of understanding Sethe’s act explains Morrison’s decision to begin the story
long after Sethe’s murder of Beloved, unlike Euripides’ Medea. This is the gesture that allows
Morrison to stretch time and thus to decolonially connect the otherwise disavowed history of
slavery, misunderstood as an already superseded past, with the present history of the prison
industrial complex, as the materialization of slavery’s most horrifying yet enduring aftermath.
For, as Elys Weinbaum argues, Morrison strategically places an ice pick in Sethe’s hands, as
the weapon she uses when she “misrecognizes” abolitionist Edwin Bodwin for the School-
teacher and tries to kill him when he comes to offer Denver work. The ice pick is the same
weapon that Morrison’s contemporary, Joan Little, used to resist her continuous subjection to
the (un)gendering violence of slavery’s aftermath in the 1980s, when the novel was published
(Weinbaum 2019: 104–106). Little was a 20-year-old Black woman incarcerated in Washing-
ton, North Carolina, for stabbing her 62-year-old white male jailer, Clarence Alligood, who
entered her cell to rape her. Placing Little’s ice pick in Sethe’s hand, however, Morrison’s novel
ends not in the criminalization and future confinement of Sethe but rather in the beginnings of
her partial liberation from the haunting of 124. A liberation that depends, largely, on Denver’s
own fugitive acts, Ella’s complicity with Sethe, and their political ability to secure the help of
30 neighboring women to come to Sethe’s rescue. Only then, and by means of that collective
action, can the infanticide that once ostracized her from her community and her own kin, be
politically reinterpreted. Collective action allows this act to be understood in an insurgent
continuum with Black women’s active murder of their abusers, abortions, fugitive acts, and
decisions to mother the children that other enslaved women were dispossessed of, among
a broad range of strategies best understood as a “gendered general strike against slavery”
(Weinbaum 2019: 67–80).
Like Garner’s real story and, by extension, that of Beloved, the story of La Llorona has
also been framed by the tragedy of Medea. According to Domino Renee Perez, “numerous
folkloric and literary studies emphasize the similarities between La Llorona and the Medea of
ancient Greek mythology,” some even stating that “‘La Llorona was a syncretic image con-
nected both to Spanish medieval notions of animas en pena, spirits in purgatory expiating
their sins, and to the Medea myth’” (cited in Perez 2008: 99–100). Unlike Medea and Sethe,
however, people still encounter La Llorona predominantly through an oral rather than written
tradition. Perez, for instance, opens her extraordinary mapping of La Llorona’s archive—from
folktale to popular culture—by recollecting her own first exposure to the story when she was
only seven years old in Yorktown, Texas and listened, while concealed behind a pecan tree,
her cousins and uncles shared “terrifying stories about a woman in white who tried to seduce
them to their deaths with her pitiful cries” (Perez 2008: ix). And to many La Llorona remains a
bedtime story about a mother who killed her children in grief and was thus condemned to end-
lessly search for them, haunting unfaithful men with her cries and driving them to madness, as
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her way of continuing to enact her revenge. Common to many Latin American communities,
especially in Mexico and Guatemala, La Llorona is often reduced to these elements.
Like Wolf’s Medea, Chicanx/Latinx feminist writers began to challenge this version of the
myth and to offer a more radical interpretation of La Llorona as a powerful figure of resist-
ance against patriarchy—precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial—whose genealogy affiliated
her not with a European myth but with an Indigenous legend.11 Thus, in Gloria Anzaldúa’s
influential Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) and more so in Anzaldúa’s (2009a, 2009b) subse-
quent work, La Llorona appears alongside Aztec goddesses like Coatlicue and her daughter
Coyolxauhqui. According to the legend, Coyolxauhqui was killed by her prematurely born
brother, Huitzilopochtli—the Aztec god of war—who sprang from Coatlicue’s womb precisely
to stop the murder of his mother by her sister by killing her first.12 Like Anzaldúa’s new Mes-
tiza, Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2000) insists on connecting
La Llorona to the Aztecs, but also on keeping alive the link to the feminist rewriting of the
classic text by means of mestizaje (Moraga 2000: 297). Thus, Moraga includes an excerpt
from Wolf’s Medea as epigraph to her own play and names the heroine of her own play Medea.
Taking advantage of decolonial theory’s liberation from the colonial constrains of lin-
ear temporality, Moraga’s play takes place in “the near future of a fictional past—one only
dreamed in the Chicana imagination,” one that makes of Phoenix, Arizona, the new border
separating “Gringolandia (white Amerika) [from] Aztlán (Chicano Country)” after a partially
successful decolonial war (Moraga 2000: 288). The play itself travels back and forth in time
between an incarcerated Medea in a prison psychiatric ward and the representation of the
events leading to her incarceration. Helios has no chariot for the Mexican Medea to escape,
as he hadn’t one for Sethe; rather both the Mexican Medea and Sethe (and Joan Little) are
confined to the prison industrial complex as punishment for their supposed crimes of fighting
the sexual and gender violence of settler colonialism dispossession.
In Moraga’s version, Medea is a freedom fighter and known leader of the Revolution that
led to the decolonization of Aztlán. This is what happened, the play tells us, after the Zapatis-
tas defeated the Mexican state and Pan-indigenismo tore America apart. But Medea is also an
ostracized lesbian, exiled from Aztlán because of her queerness, sacrificed to establish the new
Chicano nation on compulsive heteronormativity. Inspired by Wolf’s rewriting, in Moraga’s
version it is not Jasón (Spanish-sounding rendition of the Greek), but Medea who violates their
wedding oaths. Because of that, she lives in exile in Phoenix, the land Jasón calls a “wasteland of
counter-revolutionary degenerates” (Moraga 2000: 339). For seven years she, along with their
son, Chac-Mool, and her lover, Luna, have been forced to live in exile. But the conditions of her
exile are about to change. Her pending official divorce from Jasón comes with his additional
request for custody of Chac-Mool. A Minister of Culture in Aztlán, Jasón needs Chac-Mool’s
indigeneity to advance politically, as Jasón is not Indigenous and needs him as his supplemental
blood-quantum (Moraga 2000: 341). The coloniality of power, in the form of blood-quantum
as criteria for the distribution of political membership, survives the anti-colonial revolution.
The approaching threat of radical homelessness leads to the first appearance of La Llorona,
who enters the play in Scene Six of Act I, but Chac-Mool is not afraid of her haunting cries.
In fact, he never was. He still feels, as he once did in Aztlán, when he heard her for the first
time, that all that La Llorona was trying to do was to tell him “her side of the story,” and he
“felt like [he] was the only one that heard it” (Moraga 2000: 316). La Llorona, this critical
Latinx tradition suggests, mourns the death of the Indigenous children that she was forced
to kill to free them from the more horrifying fate of being enslaved to the Spanish colonizers,
whose violence also imposed compulsive heteropatriarchy while destroying Indigenous forms
of political self-determination. Chac-Mool, the only male cast in the play, as all the other
590
characters in the play are played by women, is in the middle of everything. Medea cannot lose
him so she ends up driving Luna away as the sacrifice that she must make to return to Aztlán
with Chac-Mool, to avoid losing him not only to Jasón but also, by extension, to Aztlán’s
heteronormativity ideology. But Aztlán refuses to allow Medea to return without a public
disavowal of her queerness, who must not only give up on who she is but also take active part
in the criminalization of queer people like her. To this, Medea will never concede.
Chac-Mool, however, wants out. Chac-Mool wants to be in Aztlán, a desire Medea culti-
vated when she repeated, “like a prayer,” says Chac-Mool, that Aztlán was won with Yaqui
blood (Moraga 2000: 351). In choosing his native land, he is also tragically choosing Medea’s
enemies over her, and with Luna gone Medea is about to be utterly alone. So, she makes her
final choice. She will side with Coyolxauhqui, the rebel Aztec daughter, against her mother-
(land), Coatlicue, the one who birthed the God of War (Huitzilopotchli). She gives Chac-Mool
the poisoned drink. It is then that La Llorona reappears one last time, to echo Medea’s lament
with the softness of her own cry. In the end, by the hand of Chac-Mool, the sole one to hear
and understand La Llorona’s cry, she is taken back “home,” as Chac-Mool calls it, by means
of the very same herbs she used to take his life first. So, the Mexican Medea does not flee to
another city, aided by Helios, after she survives her irredeemable act. Rather, the mestiza Me-
dea dies in confinement, while resting in Chac-Mool’s arms like an inverted pietá.13
Aztlán’s postcolonial Chicano future remains tethered to the modern/colonial gender sys-
tem that Eurocentered capitalism inaugurated, one that refuses to include what Mariana
Ortega would characterize as Medea’s “multiplicitous self,” a selfhood characterized by
“being-between-worlds, being-in-worlds, and becoming with” (Ortega 2016: 3, emphasis in
the original). As Ortega argues,
the crucial difference between the accounts of selves described by Latina feminist phe-
nomenologists and those of existential phenomenologists such as Heidegger, Sartre, and
Merleau-Ponty [is that] the selves described by Latina feminist phenomenologists do not
find themselves ‘in-the-world’ with the ease that traditional existential phenomenolo-
gists describe.
(Ortega 2016: 59)
The material conditions governing marginalized people’s “dwelling” in the world constantly
expose them to the vulnerability of their homes, the one that even the ancient refugee Medea,
against all odds and at an extreme cost to herself, feels that she can secure no longer with only
one day to figure it all out.
3 Toward a Decolonially Ruminated Tragic Medea

This rumination on the modern mestiza Medea gives us a valuable perspective into the poli-
tics of the ancient refugee. Decolonial rumination, after all, is an interpretative act of time-
travelling in both directions. With Ortega (2016: 63), one could argue that what happens to
the ancient Medea is that she is moving from a “thin sense of not being-at-ease” into a thick
one. Her not-being-at-ease is thin because of the frequent ruptures of everyday norms that are
otherwise transparent to others—think of Medea’s claim to need to be a “prophet” (239–240)
because she is a stranger not only to Jason (she is from Colchis, he is from Iolcus) but also to
Corinthians, hence ease at home neither in the oikos nor in the polis. Her not-being-at-ease
is becoming thick because of her impending exile and consequent statelessness, as she cannot
return to her native city either (Ortega 2016: 63, emphasis in the original).
591
Medea’s tragic choice, then, can best be understood in Ortega’s philosophical vocabulary
as confronting her not so much with the loss of her home but with the more radical loss of
her “hometactics.” This is a neologism coined by Ortega on the basis of Michel de Certeau’s
conceptualization of “tactics” for the politicization of everyday life, as “practices that allow
for a sense of familiarity with and a particular sense of ‘belonging’ to a place, space, group or
world while avoiding the restrictive, exclusive elements that a notion of belonging might carry
with it” (Ortega 2016: 194). Medea has already given up on everything “homely,” and she
has given it up not for a “home” but for the political validation of her “hometactics.” What
Medea has tried to protect, above all, is her capacity to produce non-restrictive “belonging”
in concertation with others, via the binding force of her oaths. The last tactic available to her,
then, under conditions that have gotten as thick as they can, is for her to kill her children so
that her “hometactics” can survive even the annihilation of her own home.
It is this, I would argue, that makes Medea into the tragic heroine of the story. Colonial
thickness (impending statelessness) forces Medea to make a choice that is ethical, in that it rests
beyond good and evil. This is what happens when the ancient moral code—helping friends,
harming enemies—proves unable to inform her decisions as Medea’s friends have never ceased
to become her enemies both within her natal and conjugal oikos and polis. What she must
protect, then, beyond the stability of the friend/enemy distinction, is her inaugural capacity to
make friends, the political force of her oaths, her “hometactics.” And her act is tragic in that
she must wreck her own home precisely to insist on the political validity of her “hometactics.”
Medea’s is a forced ethical choice in the strict Lacanian sense, in that she can only stay true
to her Cause—that is, to the political promise of her binding oaths and their capacity to inau-
gurate a more egalitarian world in a world plagued by gender inequality and institutionalized
patriarchal violence (“hometactics”)—by betraying that Cause itself—that is, by killing her
children. Lacan (1997) developed his conceptualization of a forced choice during his 1959–
1960 seminar on Antigone, devoted to the ethics of psychoanalysis and well summarized with
his own version of the categorical imperative: “ne pas céder sur son désir” (not to give up
on your desire). However, as Alenka Zupančič (2012) has demonstrated, Lacan revised his
theory the following year during his seminar on transference, when commenting on Paul Clau-
del’s heroine, Sygne de Coûfontaine, from “The Hostage.” As Zupančič argues, Antigone and
Sygne de Coûfontaine differ on their ethical ways of not giving up on their desires, a difference
so great as to suggest two different ethics: one ancient, the other modern. Desire here stands
not for the moral good but for that which is incommensurable and unintelligible according
to the current version of the moral order. This is a desire that can only be reached when the
subject oversteps the limits of the symbolic order, when the subject has already been declared
dead to that order (the “splendor” of being in between two deaths that Lacan associates with
Antigone). Only then and there can the subject become ethical, that is, autonomous, and give
to itself a law that is unsupported by the current version of the symbolic order. This is pre-
cisely what Antigone does, according to Lacan, when she emphasizes Polyneices’ singularity
(“I will only do it for my brother”) rather than the false universality of the moral order (“the
god of dead requires the burial rites for all”) as her law. Antigone keeps Polyneices’ dead body
for herself, the body in whose desecration Creon has entrusted the political stability of the
friend/enemy distinction that Polyneices and Eteocles’ mutual fratricide compromised. But, as
Zupančič argues, if Antigone realizes her desire in the act of keeping Polyneices for herself,
“having” the body in some way, Sygne de Coûfontaine “realizes herself in the ‘not-having’”
(Zupančič 2012: 259). Coûfontaine’s is a case of modern ethics because in her ethical deci-
sion to marry her sworn enemy, Turelure, she takes the forced nature of her ethical choice a
bit further. Turelure is the Jacobin that she thoroughly despises as he ordered the execution of
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her parents in the presence of their children, but she must marry him and pass him the title of
her land to defend the revolutionary Cause. The realization of her desire depends, in this case,
on the subject’s decision to assume with enjoyment what that subject finds most horrifying.
Or, as Zupančič puts it, Antigone’s ethics confronts us with ancient political tyranny, whereas
Coûfontaine’s ethics confront us with modern political terror. But, as Bonnie Honig (2013:
151–188) has shown, these differences are historically more malleable and Ismene, if one pays
attention to her sotto voce exchanges with Antigone, can be shown to represent an ancient
form of modern ethics a la Sygne de Coûfontaine. Here I would like to extend that argument
to Medea and thus to properly contextualize tyranny and terror in colonial power structures.
The oikos that Medea invents with Jason has no place in the symbolic order of Greek antiq-
uity. Autonomy precedes her tragic choice and, here, stands for the incommensurable and un-
intelligible desire that is otherwise impossible to signify in this play. Medea trusts in their love,
to give to their oaths all the foundation that they otherwise lack in patriarchal civic recognition
(the sole available one). But Jason still betrays her. However, she has been keeping count of all
that she has done to produce that world, one in which he would no longer be her master but her
equal. In that political accounting she includes her saving of his life and that of all the Greeks
aboard the Argo; her killing of the serpent keeping sleepless watch over the Golden Fleece; her
willingness to go and live with Jason first in Thessaly, and then in Corinth; her killing not only
of Pelias, but also her betrayal of her father too, becoming a traitor to her own home; and even
her decision to undergo birth-labor twice. And Jason still betrayed his oath to her.
What, then, can she expect of Aegeus’s oath? Why would the Athenian king fare different,
when all patriarchal kings, including her father, Pelias, Creon and even Jason, have proven
her that her oaths would not bind them? Only because he cannot have a child and she can
give him one? If that was the case, having given Jason two should have been enough to keep
him from dishonoring his. No, the Athenian king can always wait for her to deliver on her
promise and, like Jason, then keep short on his while reaping the benefits. She knows that “for
a man—oh no—if ever he is irked with those he has at home, he goes elsewhere to get relief
and ease his state of mind,” while women “are obliged to keep [their] eyes on just one person”
(244–249). King Aegeus is no different, and love has proven flawed in securing a foundation
for the equalizing force of her binding oaths. All that men know is death, all that they respect
is war, and she has proven herself multiple times a stronger warrior than them. So, she trusts
death to secure what love failed to keep, her “hometactics.” Knowing her willing to sacrifice
her own because of Jason’s violation of her oaths, and still able to escape her act relatively
unpunished in a divine chariot, Aegeus will think twice about violating his. All that she has
left to give, after having already given up everything that she had to secure her autonomy,
is the very thing for which she gave it all up: the concrete proof of her power to inaugurate
worlds, her children.
Antigone’s autonomy is splendorous, Medea’s is terrifying. The former, who dies, might
be an ethically more digestible figure after all. The heroism of her agency might be ethically
celebrated because it ends her life, which might explain, too, why Ismene’s own heroic agency,
who does survive the play, remained rather banalized (except for Honig). Like Ismene, Medea
is terrifying not because she kills her children but because she remains. Yes, she will assist
Aegeus in producing the child Medus, but she will also continue to live in Athens. And who
is this Medea that survives in Athens? Who is this Medea that remains, that we all, inheritors
of this tradition, are force to reckon with? She is a warrior who took down not one but three
royal households (her own Colchis, Jason’s Thessaly, and Creon’s Corinth) by her own hand.
There is arguably no rival to Medea when it comes to taking down patriarchies, as she will
stop not even at her own. Those are the radical politics of her tragic act.
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4 Conclusion
What most radically distinguishes the stories of Medea, Sethe, and La Llorona are the colonial
power structures that both constrain and yet partially explain their alienating experiences of
maternal dispossession and the liberating politics of their infanticides. Euripides has Jason
compromising Medea’s status and thus the political nature of her motherhood. As a refugee in
Corinth, unable to return to her native city and about to be deported (anachronism intended
as central part of the rumination reading), Medea’s situation is desperate. Medea has already
given up everything for her Cause (native oikos and polis), the Cause being the more egalitar-
ian world inaugurated by her oath with Jason precisely because that oath was not supported
by any earthly patriarchal authority other than their mutually binding acts of equal consent.
The children are the materialization of that Cause in an ancient patriarchal world that only
valorized women politically because of their reproductive power (i.e., the Festival of the Thes-
mophoria). To preserve her Cause, her “hometactics,” she must give up on the Cause itself, on
her own home. She is forced to kill her own children.
Invented as her way of making us confront the otherwise repressed history of slavery,
which continues to live in the cultural epistemologies that underpin contemporary social and
political institutions like the prison industrial complex (slavery’s aftermath), Morrison reinter-
prets Sethe within a broader history of enslaved women’s revolt against the sexual and repro-
ductive exploitation that dispossesses them differently of their motherhood. This difference is
well captured by Joy James (2016) with the concept of the “captive maternal,” which applies
to Sethe and the Indigenous Llorona in ways in which it does not in the case of Medea. That
is so, because in the cases of Sethe and La Llorona all their choices can be said to be forced.
To put this differently, one cannot properly distinguish one choice as forced, and thus qualify
one action as ethical, driving Western ethics to its limits.
Unlike Medea, who is an ancient refugee surviving in an imperial Athens, Sethe occupies
the original position of the alien in the US settler colonial capitalist context. This is the posi-
tion resulting from white settler’s interest in eliminating Indigenous peoples to appropriate
their land and thus to reclaim nativism to the territory for themselves, needing to replace their
labor force with an alien one (Wolfe 2006). The first modern labor force that was used to ef-
fectuate that replacement in the Americas was enslaved African labor, coerced to migrate into
Indigenous people’s occupied territories to work for white settlers, and thus subjected instead
to a logic of exclusion that would forever keep them in unassimilable abjection. Hence, the
“one-drop” rule that in the US relegates blackness to a de-humanized status of perpetual in-
feriority and, in the language of Jackson (2020: 11), instrumentalize the “plasticization” of
Black matter to produce white subjecthood.
Reinterpreted as a way of reclaiming a multiplicitous self, capable of troubling the other-
wise homogenous myth of the postcolonially unified Chicano nation, Moraga border-crosses
an Indigenous Llorona (via the connecting Aztec myth of Coatlicue) with a feminist Greek
tragic Medea (via Wolf’s rewriting) in the mestiza figure of the queer Mexican Medea. La
Llorona, then, occupies the position of the native in the settler colonial capitalist structure
governing the US–Mexico border. This is the position that the settler order subjects instead
to a logic of elimination that instrumentalizes mestizaje (the blood quantum) as a biopolitical
strategy to assimilate Indigenous peoples “out of existence” (Day 2016: 25).
A structural logic of exclusion and one of elimination force Sethe and La Llorona, re-
spectively, to speak long after the act that links them to Medea—their infanticide—unlike
Euripides’ Medea, who speaks prior to it. Politically suspended between life and death, that
is, subjected to the afterlives of slavery’s social death, haunting is structural to the experience
594
of both Sethe and La Llorona, in ways in which it is not for Medea. That it is Beloved, as a
ghost who eventually becomes pregnant, that haunts Sethe, Denver, and Paul D. in 124, but
it is La Llorona who does the haunting in Phoenix and Aztlán, speaks to the differences be-
tween the positionalities of the native and the alien within a settler colonial capitalist structure
that was not there in ancient Athens. But haunting is structural to Sethe and La Llorona in
ways in which it is not for Medea, who only experiences social death as an unrealized if an-
ticipated event (her impending statelessness), rather than as a structural condition of radical
dispossession.
Helios is coming to rescue neither Sethe nor La Llorona, as he comes to Medea’s aid. An
ancient refugee, Medea can rely on the divine justice of the god as her last resource to enforce
her claims. Sethe’s fugitivity and La Llorona’s decolonization rest instead on the insurgent col-
lective action of Black, Indigenous, and brown women against settler colonial capitalism and
its selective ways of distributing political membership.
Questions
1 How might the decolonial rumination of other ancient tragedies call attention to the gender
and racial-differentiated forms of domination set in motion by ancient and modern coloni-
alisms, rather than drive our attention away from them?
2 How can decolonial rumination recenter, rather than marginalize, Indigenous peoples’ the-
oretical frameworks and histories when engaging ancient texts, like Greek tragedy?
3 What could a decolonial rumination of Antigone, Clytemnestra, or the Bacchae, among
many others, offers us?
Notes
1 Earlier drafts of this chapter were discussed at the Graduate Student Political Theory Workshop
(Northwestern University), on February 18, 2022, and at the “Past and Future Genders” Interna-
tional Workshop at the American Academy in Berlin, on June 27–29, 2022. Many thanks to all the
participants in both spaces, especially to Usdin Martínez, Sam McChesney, Ely Orrego-Torres, Dem-
etra Kasimis, Moira Fradinger and above all to Charlotte Mencke. Thanks, finally, to Sara Brill and
Catherine McKeen for their helpful comments and to Ashley Bohrer.
2 See Lugones 2007; Quijano 2000.
3 For feminist interventions in the fields just mentioned see Collins 2000; Day 2016; Douglass 2018;
Moten 2003; Spivak 1999; Wynter 2003.
4 Decentering “the human” was a rather refreshing contribution from those gathered together at the
“Posthuman Antiquities” conference in New York University on November 14–15 2014, resulting in
the publication of Bianchi et al. 2019.
5 I use Medea when referring to the play, and Medea when referring to the character in the play. All
citations from Euripides’ Medea are from Oliver Taplin’s translation. The numbers refer to the lines
in the Greek original, see Euripides 2013.
6 Medea’s skill at playing with gender is most obvious in the scene in which she shares with us her
plans to deceive Jason precisely by playing into the figure of the docile wife: “And when he’s here,
I’ll reassure him with smooth words and tell him I agree” (776–777). For all that they fear her, the
norms that govern their assumptions about her agency makes them vulnerable to her. Creon cannot
conceive, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that Medea would use the last day that she has left
to enact her revenge rather than arrange for her exile, any more than Jason can question the otherwise
surprising change in her position about his new marriage and violation of their oaths. They are all
so convinced of the attributes they have of her gender as essentializing, that she can instrumentalize
their confidence on those traits for her own ends, performing strategic essentialism at its best. See
Spivak 1988. For further discussion on the embodiment of sexual difference in Greek antiquity see
595
Jill Gordon’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 19). For an analysis of women as performers in Greek
antiquity see Carol Atack and Caterina Pellò in this volume (Chapter 9 and Chapter 28).
7 The literature on Medea is vast. Foley 1989 remains one of my favorite entries, for a longer and up-
dated list of references see Kelly 2020.
8 Whether Medea kills her children out of passion or out of reason is a central debate in the secondary
literature, see for instance Burnett 1973; Foley 1989; McDermott 1989. I am, however, less interested
on that debate, which often renders secondary the political contextualization of Medea’s act. It is that
contextualization, and its connection to political concerns central to the global south that interests
me, as does Fradinger (2020: 1119), who rightly argues that Medea has been “received” but not yet
“cannibalized” in Argentina. My use of decolonial rumination is indebted to Fradinger and I hope
this chapter offers one possible if theoretical cannibalization of her story for the Americas. For other
methodological resonances on comparative readings see Harriet Fertik’s chapter in this volume.
9 The secondary literature on Morrison’s Beloved is equally vast. On the philosophical implications of
Beloved see the excellent meditation on the politics of nihilism in Warren 2018. For a post-humanist
analysis that engages race and animality in Beloved, while decentering Sethe and Beloved to focus
on Paul D instead, see the excellent first chapter of Jackson 2020. For a more detailed analysis of the
ethical nature of Sethe’s “choice” see Phelan 1998.
10 As Morrison explains: “Beginning Beloved with numerals rather than spelled out numbers, it was
my intention to give the house an identity separate from the street or even the city (…) not with
nouns or ‘proper’ names—with numbers instead because numbers have no adjectives, no posture of
coziness or grandeur or the haughty yearning of arrivistes and estate builders for the parallel beauti-
fication of the nation they left behind, laying claim to instead history and legend.” (Morrison 1989:
31–32).
11 For other excellent versions of La Llorona indebted to this tradition, see Luis Alfaro’s play, “Mojada”
(2015) and Jayro Bustamante’s film, La Llorona (2019). Thanks to Armando García for pointing me
in this direction.
12 Anzaldúa’s reclamation of the Aztec goddess is not without shortcomings. Saldaña-Portillo has criti-
cized not only her romanticization of the Indigenous past but the concomitant erasure of the Indig-
enous present, while Cristina Beltrán has insisted on the persisting hierarchies at work in Anzaldúa’s
embrace of the new Mestiza (Beltrán 2004; Saldaña-Portillo 2001). For an engagement with these
criticisms see Ortega 2016: 17–46.
13 For a broader analysis of the role that La Llorona plays in “The Hungry Woman” see Padilla 2014.
For a powerful meditation on the failure of “Queer Aztlán” in Moraga’s play and the problems with
the reception of her play in the US see Ybarra 2008. For an excellent reading that contextualizes the
play within the Chicano Movement see Billotte 2015.
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Further Reading
A book providing an overview of ways of staging European Classical texts in various contexts in Latin
America is Andújar, R. and Nikoloutsos, K. (eds.) (2020) Greeks and Romans on the Latin American
Stage, New York: Bloomsbury.
A book that engages Euripides from the perspective of queer theory and its intersections with decolonial
theory, broadly understood, is Olsen, S. and Telò, M. (eds.) (2022) Queer Euripides: Re-Readings in
Greek Tragedy, New York: Bloomsbury.
598
40
EROS, THE ELUSIVE?
A Dialogue on Plato’s Symposium, Diotima and
Women in Ancient Philosophy
I long and seek after. (73)

you burn me (77)
their hearts grew cold, they let their wings down (85)
as long as you want (95)
Eros shook my mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees (99)
I would not think to touch the sky with two arms (109)
Sinful (141)
Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
ME: L et’s walk. I am not barefoot like Socrates but I have things to say. I have been
thinking a lot about love lately, about love as embodied in artistic creations. I also
feel it deep inside me, in my flesh and bones. I have been shaken and burnt by it –
that longing, that seeking…. But is our conversation bound to fail? I have become
disillusioned with what philosophers have to say about love, if they do dare say
anything about it. They think it is so far away from our beloved reason that they
turn it into it. Is there a will to love as Nietzsche says there is a will to truth and
to power? When philosophers do discuss love, they do it so as to elevate them-
selves through its dissection, as if it were possible to display it in full form for us.
I like to court the ineffable too, but to be awed by it, not to explain it away. So I
read the Symposium after so many years with uneasiness, with expectations of
disappointment, yet, also with openness and curiosity, ready to learn from it and
from you.
My companion seemed out of breath, sweating a bit from the heat or the pace –
I did not know.
ME: Are you okay?
599 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-45

HETAIRA: Yes. Yes. Keep going. I will get used to it.

Hesitant, I continued.
ME: I do still smile when I read Aristophanes’ words and think of the round beings
with four arms, legs, and two faces, running around being fast and powerful
(188c–193d). Aristophanes is not afraid of myth, but I follow Barthes on this
one – myths are powerful and controlling. But Aristophanes’ myth offers a seduc-
tive alternative, the alternative of a third kind. I like the idea of there being a third
kind of being, but not as a moment of Hegelian synthesis, but as a moment of
rupture of binaries and dichotomies, as an invitation to the otherwise. I should
not be surprised by this. I live in in-betweenness in so many ways. But, in the end,
Aristophanes gives in to the myth of unity, a wholeness so powerful that divine
punishment was separation. Is the craving and pursuit for such unification and
fusion, love (191d)?
HETAIRA: While absolutely seductive, I agree with you that there is something problematic
about his image. Not only does it suggest that eros is futile – the human condition
is one of radical brokenness and there is no hope that we will be healed of our
aloneness… sex is but a momentary reprieve – but it also makes the erotic rela-
tionship narcissistic. One’s half is not really different insofar as they are just me,
my other half – they are merely my mirror, my complement. This would suggest
that the beloved has nothing in themselves to offer.
ME: But Aristophanes is right, though, in that we have failed to perceive the power
of love (189c). Where do we find it? Certainly not in Socrates’ false humility.
I keep thinking of the flute-girl, so easily dismissed by Eryximachus. What was her
name, her view on love? What about those “slave-boys” serving all these hung-
over men who think they are so wise and Socrates who boasts of his own igno-
rance while seeming to know it all? To learn about this most important god, Eros,
and about love itself from this group of vainglorious men who devalue women
and service people, now strikes me as laughable. But whom am I kidding? I have
spent so much of my life reading poets who write the most beautiful, moving
words and are the vilest people; philosophers whose thought is moving but who
are racist, sexist, and narcissists; feminists who call for solidarity and coalitions
across differences but belittle women of color and their work or treat us as if we
were that flute-girl, in the sense that we bring to them seductive theories that yield
the pleasure of their being recognized as inclusive, but we can be kicked out of the
room in the blink of an eye.
But Eros does shake my mind and I want to explore the subject relationally.
You have spent so much of your life reading Plato. What about your love for his
works?
HETAIRA: Honestly, my identity as a philosopher has been radically informed by his con-
ception of the erotic found in dialogues like the Symposium. Specifically, I find
a compelling model for philosophy as that which exposes, reproduces, and her-
alds the enigma of what it means to exist between knowing and not-knowing,
reason and madness, strength and weakness, and so on. Overall, I am drawn to
Plato’s portrait of the soul as that which is paradoxically broken and confused,
incomplete but, contrary to Aristophanes’ portrait, also capable of becoming a
living testimony to the creative, erotic connections that we bear on a quotid-
ian basis despite, and perhaps sometimes, because of our incompleteness, our
struggle. Indeed, this conception of the philosophical life is perhaps why I also
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Dialogue on Plato’s Symposium and Women in Ancient Philosophy
gravitate toward scholars like yourself, as I see a certain kinship between it and
your philosophical worldview. Perhaps, I am wrong in this but when it comes to
the Symposium at least, I, too, always come back to the relevance of the flute-girl,
a craft associated in antiquity with sex work. Her dismissal has always intuitively
seemed to me like the missing puzzle piece. Lately, I have been toying with the
possibility that the second flute-girl – the one who leads and supports the drunken
Alcibiades (212c–d) – is the same dismissed flute-girl who has coyly found a way
to flout Eryximachus’ orders. Like Eros’ mother, Poverty, who devised a scheme
to steal from Plenty, does the flute-girl have a gift for what Lugones calls “tacti-
cal strategic intending” (2003, 219), finding a way to recoup her evening fare? If
read this way, can this flute-girl highlight the power of the erotic as an ability/
resource for survival? Am I mad in seeing a certain parallel between her (and other
characters in the text) and what Lugones calls “streetwalker theorists”? And what
of the constant references to the slaves and the sudden appearance of Diotima,
an explicitly foreign priestess? Can other theories like Gloria Anzaldúa’s mestiza
consciousness, Audre Lorde’s erotic, or your own theories of the in-between, un-
lock these mysteries? Something in me says, yes. But I am hesitant, aware of the
problems, the possible appropriations that may ensue. I wonder, then, how you
might respond to reading Plato through the lenses of women of color theorizing?
ME: Curious. Plato and Lugones together. I welcome opportunities to do philosophy
in this way, as it opens the realm of interpretative possibilities that can help us
not only shake up canonical interpretations but also understand the tremendous
contributions that women of color stand to make to the so-called “love of wis-
dom,” a definition of philosophy that to this day makes me laugh, as I find so
much that is unwise in our discipline. It can also be another way of becoming-
with, an opportunity of being with others who are different so as to understand
ourselves differently and to engage in coalitional, resistant projects (Ortega 2016,
168) but in this case, an intellectual-becoming-with. But I do wish to be cautious
here. It is important to be mindful of the context within which such exercises of
“readings against the grain and intellectual becoming-with” take place, and the
reasons for engaging in them – most importantly, we need to be very aware of the
major differences between approaches, whether ethico-political, metaphysical, or
existential. After all, the words of women of color continue to be placed on one
side of the extremes between invisibility and appropriation. A loving, yet critical
approach, to our practices of reading against the grain and reading together with
women of color is thus necessary so as not to fall into “loving, knowing igno-
rance” (Ortega 2006).
HETAIRA: Yes – a kind of mindful world-traveling which does not slip into “historical am-
nesia”? (Ortega 2006, 70)
ME: Yes, what I call critical world-traveling (Ortega 2016, 131). Your question of
“tactical strategic intending” interests me. Lugones offers a theory of active sub-
jectivity as the alternative to the individual agency so respected by the lover of
purity. So, this active subjectivity, no longer understood as carrying out inten-
tional acts performed by an “I,” has an attenuated sense of agency. That is, its
actions do not arise from individual intentions but rather from within relational
experiences with others. Not only that. They take place in movement among these
collectivities in particular spaces, liminal spaces that allow for the possibility of
understanding from the perspective of the ground (the world of the tactician)
601
and from above (the world of the strategist). Think of this active subjectivity
walking through the city, through alleyways and unmapped passages, meeting
those with whom she will develop resistant intentions and forming hangouts,
those spaces that defy the private/public split so as to defy logics of domination
(Lugones 2003, 221). There we find the active-subject-street-walker, as Lugones
puts it, defamiliarizing common sense, the furniture of the universe (221). It is in
those hangouts where the active subject co-creates resistant plural intentions. Is
Socrates a street walker theorist? Or is it Eros itself that needs to be considered as
the street-walking theorist?
HETAIRA: Arguably both, but what do you think?
ME: Well, Socrates’ peripatetic style is certainly one that we can consider in light of
Lugones’s conception of street-walking theorizing. Socrates embodies an impor-
tant quality of the street-walker theorist, a critical attitude to common-sensical
understanding of the world as well as to normative understandings of major no-
tions such as love. A question arises though. Does the character Socrates street-
walk in the dialogues, forging plural intentions with others? In the context of the
Symposium, is Agathon’s house a hangout?
HETAIRA: Personally, I don’t think so. Rather Agathon’s home is the site of agency, the
celebration of the autonomous and oppressive power the men lavishly enjoy over
others. This is why I think Plato cleverly contrasts the main frame of Agathon’s
home with two scenes of walking, be it Apollodorus and Glaucon or Socrates and
Aristodemus. Even Socrates’ meeting with Diotima (as well as the primary frame
with Apollodorus and his companions) is in a kind of “no place.” I think Plato
is setting the stage to highlight the differences, even problems, between the aris-
tocratic men lounging, rather arrogantly, as they wax poetic and, so, he exposes
their ridiculousness, their hideous tendency to see the others as those who merely
serve their desires.
ME: Plato may be setting the stage to display the hideousness and ignorance of Agathon
and his friends, using Socrates to do so, but how is the real power of those un-
named and dismissed in the dialogue being shown here? While we find normative
as well as possibly resistant views within this space – it preserves tensions between
meanings and people as Lugones says a hangout does to allow for “complex com-
munication” or an exchange that captures tension, opacity, and difference among
the speakers (Lugones 2006) – are the flute-girl and the servers those with whom
Socrates is forging collective intentions? Yes, she and the servers are there, but
she is immediately dismissed and the servers only acknowledged for their labor. Is
Plato, by way of Socrates, pointing to the existence of these marginalized beings
and to their unfair exclusion? Perhaps. Yet, I would think that the street-walker
theorist that Lugones envisions would do more than Socrates does in the dialogue.
He doesn’t say anything about them! And wouldn’t Plato himself do more by pre-
cisely making his beloved Socrates a character that does more as well?
Introducing Diotima, a foreign woman raises further questions for me. Am I
supposed to say that it is so good that Socrates can learn from a foreigner and a
woman, become a student himself, and be really convinced of his humility? As I
mentioned, I doubt that the flute-girl could be seen by him as being capable of
teaching him something – if so, perhaps the way not to be in the world. We could
simply say that this is just a matter of his time and culture. But why bring the
“woman question” into this context? All these Platonic dialogues display a series
602
of what seem to be privileged men enamored with each other or with young,
beautiful boys, and especially with Socrates – going about their day getting drunk,
giving eulogies to the gods – narcissism and arrogance cloaked in pretense of hu-
mility and wisdom-seeking. Could Socrates really be ready to learn from a flute-
girl? So if it is not the gender questions, it is a question of class. Are we running
against an interpretative limit here?
My companion smiled rather coyly.
HETAIRA: I hope so. I have always regarded limits as invitations but, to the point, I think
you are right, Socrates submits to Diotima but the esteemed priestess is not the
seemingly low flute-girl and that is a fact of the text that we must acknowledge.
However, as priestess, her mystagogic practice appears to do the work of creating
“hangouts” or spaces of “complex communication” that possibly defy the logic
of purity. If her cult was anything like the Eleusinian mysteries (Evans 2006), she
would have initiated women from all classes both citizen and foreign. Her speech
itself plays with images mixed with sensuality, corporeality, torturous activity of
giving birth, describing Eros as kind of magician and pharmacist (203d–e) clever
in speech while Diotima, herself, embodies said numinous virtue, purifying the
Athenians, initiating men like Socrates into a new myth of Eros, born of Poverty
rather than the illustrious Aphrodite. So I guess I am wondering if there is a par-
allel between Anzaldúa’s poet-shaman who possesses a certain sight, recognizes
the illnesses of a culture, and offers rites of passage or realities by advancing
new mythologies, new images arising from the play of the unconscious, a play
that isn’t an attempt to resurrect the old gods but to see them anew? For me, Di-
otima’ activities and presence seem to invoke a power that is akin to Anzaldúa’s
shaman.
ME: It is interesting to consider Diotima’s practice as shamanic. In Anzaldúa the writer
is a type of shaman that provides a connection between different realities. Since
she considers ideas as images that run like animals in her imagination, Anzaldúa,
the shaman-poet-writer, is able to transform herself, to shift, and to let herself be
guided by them so as to discover new approaches to problems (Anzaldúa 2015,
38). Through the creative act, the writer or artist becomes aware of these image-
animals, gets in touch with the unconscious as well as with the spirit of those
who have come before her, and rereads and rewrites reality. Such a practice is
spiritual – it constitutes art as a spiritual discipline, writing as “making soul,” as
Anzaldúa says (41). This is a vision of a material-spiritual that connects us to all
that exists, human and non-human. So I can see how the “magic” of Diotima can
be understood in terms of a recognition of this material spirituality and the power
of Eros as an intermediary between different realities.
HETAIRA: Eros is explicitly a daimon (202e) – that power which connects the material and
immaterial, a spirit, perhaps, like Anzaldúa’s principle of interconnectedness, that
incandescent something which “transcends the categories and concepts that gov-
ern our perception of material reality” (Anzaldúa 2002, 504).
ME: Ahh… Eros, the daimon. Not as elusive as we might have thought. I welcome this
way of thinking about love, as a type of intermediary between worlds, between
ways of being-in-worlds. I am also interested in the possibility of everyone being
able to partake of love in the sense of it being a practice that moves us to feel and
to think otherwise – not to take the world for granted. Is this what Socrates was
ultimately getting to?
603
HETAIRA: My knee-jerk reaction is – absolutely! But also, and despite my arguments, I do

not pretend to think I can know this definitively. If I did, I would be falling into
the trap of attempting to arrest a dialogue, a creative work of art, so as to suf-
focate it, murder its power to inspire readers to see themselves (as well as not to
see themselves) in the text. Don’t get me wrong, I do think there are better and
worse interpretations of Plato, i.e. dualistic approaches fail to see nuance while
most analytic theorists pass over the importance of the spiritual, otherworldly
Plato, etc. Yet, Plato desired to write in such a way that unlike most philosophical
works that resemble a tombstone, gesturing to something dead, his work resem-
bled a “living organism” (Phdr. 246b). For me, this means that like most living
entities the dialogues will frustrate attempts to reify them – even my own argu-
ments. I know this runs counter to the needs of academic philosophers to get Plato
“right,” to fix his work into a neat dualistic framework but both the dogmatizing
hermeneutic and the hermeneutics of suspicion where Plato is obviously problem-
atic, neglect the lived nature of the text which must put up with, even love, the
contradictory and complementary spirit existing within the dialogues.
ME: Interesting. When Anzaldúa talks about writing, she says that the work mani-
fests the same needs as a person, that it needs to be bathed and fed (Anzaldúa
1987, 67). She also reminds us that the work is alive, and, in her case, this work
represents her very self – her Coatlicue blocks or moments of dread and inability
to move forward, her sustos, arrebatos, woundedness as well as transformations –
she thus needs to treat it tenderly and with intimacy. She is discussing the sensu-
ousness of the act of writing, but I can see that we, as readers, also have to bathe,
feed, and dress the work. I see you taking care of Plato’s dialogues in this way.
Reading them against the grain, as María Lugones would say.
HETAIRA: Well, that’s humbling but, yes, like Anzaldúa’s understanding of mestiza con-
sciousness, I believe Plato invites us to shift to and from different and competing
points of view, to hold contradictory opinions alongside one another, seeing the
value and import of both as well as the need to undercut what seemed obvi-
ous from another vantage point. (Anzaldúa 2002, 569) Put differently, alongside
offering rationalizing arguments for a world of Form, Plato also, and perhaps,
paradoxically concedes to the Nietzschean demand to say “yes” to Becoming
and the mad tragic comedy of being human, to the life of the soul which moves
between – to being the kind of being like Socrates or Plato or Diotima, or anyone
for that matter, who is and can be seen in their multiplicity, their contradiction,
their struggle for or against the identities imposed upon them by others.
ME: Nietzsche does say that Socrates is so close to him that he is constantly fighting
him (Nietzsche 1979, 127). So through the figure of Socrates, Plato may be reveal-
ing a more complex, ambiguous, and multiplicitous notion of love, a love that is
not merely one and that can be definitely known. Here, I can think of Diotima’s
speech itself and consider whether what we learn from Diotima can help us think
of eros itself as street-walking. I am thinking of eros as a practice and a way of
being-in-worlds. This practice indeed allows for that openness that you mention –
and the risk one takes of falling into the abyss when falling in love. What I mean
is that there is risk because there is no fixed notion of what love is and there is
no possibility of completely possessing the beloved. The one that loves, then,
always walks near the abyss. As Diotima says, we need to see the lover. And,
yes, her view allows for the acknowledgement of the beauty of those bodies that
604
Anzaldúa calls los atravesados, those who are marginalized, forgotten, oppressed,
unwanted, invisibilized. Diotima also reminds us that love is always in want,
and neither wise nor ignorant but in-between these (204a). In a sense, there are
possibilities of conceiving of love as a practice sharing characteristics with street-
walking theorizing. I can see the possibility of forging tactical-strategic intentions
here. Yet, does Diotima (or Socrates or Plato), think that these atravesados can
reproduce not just biologically but intellectually so as to be closer to immortality?
That is, can they create works teaching virtue that stand the test of time? If Di-
otima is teaching us that they can, that they can engage not only in philosophical
discourses such as Socrates’ but also in a poetics embodying and calling for love,
then I would be tempted to say that Eros is like street-walking theorizing. Yet, the
emphasis on the ever-existent and immortal (208b) and essential beauty (211e)
makes me take a step back.
My companion seems to be overly enthusiastic, excitedly putting her hands to her
mouth.
ME: Something wrong again?
HETAIRA: Oh…oh… sorry, keep going. I am just eager to talk about that, but I can wait.
I smile and continue.
ME: See, before we turn in that direction, let me contextualize. I am reminded of
Anzaldúa’s “The Cannibal’s Canción,” a poem in which she says that “It is our
custom to consume the person we love… heart and liver taste best” (Anzaldúa
1987, 143). These men in the Symposium want to consume young, intelligent
boys. Socrates sees himself above that kind of consumption. Are we supposed to
pretend he did not think of touching those young bodies with his two arms? No.
We are supposed to understand that he touched them through the arms of the
mind, holding them in the path to virtue. And that he himself became the student,
the good listener, the one ready to give up his faulty reasoning the moment that a
sage more knowledgeable than him could show him the way – a woman at that?
Not the flute-girl, of course. But, really, I just wanted to bring in cannibal love so
as to invite us to think of the multiplicity and finitude of love, of different loves. Is
Diotima seeing the multiplicity of love too, but ultimately yielding to that one im-
mortal love, Love, from which all other loves flow? Tell me, how is it supposed to
work? What is this one eternal, unchanging Love that she mentions in her discus-
sion of what one reaches at the top of the ladder? I understand and sense love as
embodied differently, in different directions and movements – impure loves. I thus
welcome how you bring in the power of multiplicity in a text that has become
canonized and is thus sedimented in firm layers that not even strong winds and
erosion could change. If you are right, you are offering seismic interpretations.
HETAIRA: Interpretations that could be wrong (impure), I have no doubt. Yet, I like to re-
mind myself of what you call Socrates’ false humility. Is it false? He admits in the
Phaedrus, a dialogue devoted to the importance of erotic madness, that he does
not know whether he is a monster or a simpler, more divine creature (229e.). Is it
possible that Socrates realizes the tensions, divisions, and incommensurabilities
existing within himself, ourselves? Is he sincerely aware of his own deficiency?
Diotima argues that it is only when one recognizes deficiency, one’s need where
desire is born (204a); a desire (compared to the anxiety, suffering, and pains of
labor) that is never satisfied with any one birth (creative intellectual endeavor),
any one erotic relation but is always expanding from particular bodies, to poetic
605
works of art, to laws, and finally to the mystagogic vision of the Beautiful. Yet,
for the mortal creature, even this final vision is incomplete. As Diotima says, we
must care for our erotic offspring because like the body which undergoes cease-
less change (207e–a), we are tasked to “leave behind a new life in place of the old
[…],” replacing what is “antiquated with something fresh.” For Diotima this con-
stant reproduction is “how mortal things partake of the immortal” (207c–208b)
and, so, Eros is everlasting and immortal not because it is a Form, but because
it is the ever-present transformative power of the soul. Of course, there is a real
threat existing from within the text to narrow the power of the erotic so that it is
identical to the singular pursuit of “objective reason,” but it is a threat that sacri-
fices the mystagogic vision of the Beautiful for something more digestible and less
bewildering.
ME: If not a threat, a desire–perhaps the desire of the lover of purity. It is important
to understand that these are carnal desires too, although they are explained away
by philosophers as instances of pure rationality. That is, the idea of an unchang-
ing, untethered form of Love may be seductive. Lugones would say that the lover
of purity would indeed fall in love with Love. What purer entity than a Platonic
form? Lugones, though, discloses the lover of purity that sees himself as pure in
so far as he is a privileged, disembodied, vantage point, that doesn’t need to par-
ticipate in history or even recognize his own racialization (Lugones 2003, 128); he
is the ideal observer. What is fascinating is that this lover follows a logic of purity
that hides both his own embodiment and the construction of unity he must effect
to give sense to the world. Could we think, instead, of loving impurity? I don’t
mean giving up on virtues or excellences as a life of happiness calls for, but a life
that calls for what Lugones calls a “loving perception” (Lugones 2003, 77). Love,
then, is not disembodied but fleshly, thoroughly embodied, hence the emphasis
on perception. There is no ultimate goal in which Love as such or the essence of
beauty is found. The sense of multiplicity that Anzaldúa and Lugones highlight is
radical. Diotima’s speech embodies multiplicity. That is, I can see the text opening
itself up to different interpretations, to calling for an unchanging immortality in
the traditional sense that Platonic forms have been understood, to highlighting the
multiplicity and finitude of mortals in their attempt to reach something beyond,
to the tense yet creative co-existence of the one and the many. Reading this text,
then, itself becomes an exercise in creative multiplicity, the same way that, as
Anzaldúa says, writing is an assemblage (Anzaldúa 1987, 66), a constant bone-
carving, pulling of flesh that transforms one’s soul (75).
HETAIRA: I love that idea. Arguably, Diotima’s Eros is a way of perceiving, a transformative
vision whereby we are invited to see the beautiful before us, beckoning us to assist
one another in giving birth to our own inimitable and, to some, impure take on
the Beautiful, knowing that it is imperfect but perfect for the moment – but, yes,
Anzaldúa and Lugones are doing something new and profound, something from
their own cultures and for their own survival. Yet, something compels me to see
them together precisely because of the transformative multiplicity demanded of
the erotic philosophical life. See, I am in basic agreement with theorists like San-
doval, Lorde, and hooks who argue for new methodologies or as you describe in
your own work, a philosophy which defines itself not by what we exclude but
by what we include. (Ortega 2016, 21; see also Anzaldúa and Keating 2002, 3)
As hooks desires, we need theory that empowers rather than arrests change, a
606
form of engaged erotic pedagogy that constitutes the possibility of healing, of

igniting a lived and revolutionary practice (hooks 1994). This form of pedagogy,
or methodology, I believe, requires as Lugones demands “an openness to being a
fool,” which flouts demands that we get things “right,” that eases into the joy of
making and sustaining wonderment, curiosity – delighting in the ambiguity and
the necessary tensions that are part of the beauty of the ones who stand before
us – their erotic power to infinitely and ceaselessly create and play, to come into
contact with each other’s worlds. (Lugones 1987, 17)
ME: You are touched by her work! Yet, we should be careful not to think of Lugones’s
world-traveling just in terms of its playfulness. Yes, it is playful – it is good to be
willing to be a fool, to be wrong, to try new things, not to take things too seriously,
to welcome surprise – but it is also quite painful. Doing philosophy against the grain
is, for me, a matter of survival in the midst of the severity, whiteness, and practices of
invisibilizing and undermining the work of people of color. It is a way of putting my-
self on a map in which I am not supposed to be a destination. As I have said before,
it is my hometactic (Ortega 2016, 201–210). I do welcome playfulness, though, and
can see how it would enhance our philosophical practices. After all we are mostly
an overly serious, arrogant, self-possessed, dogmatic bunch. But I do think that the
level of playfulness we bring into philosophy, the level in which playfulness trickles
into our teaching to transgress varies depending on our situatedness and privilege.
HETAIRA: Like the difference between the flute-girl and Diotima, world-traveling requires
us to acknowledge differing and competing oppressions. For me, this is why we
must find ways to recognize the lived nature of philosophy, the need to bathe,
as you say of Anzaldúa or, to use Platonic language, care for the texts. To my
mind, we need methodologies that allow both an acknowledgement of difference,
privileges, violence, etc., alongside pathways that invite us not to “know” with
certainty what Plato (or any other author) intended, as if such a complete retrieval
(consumption) of the past/personage were possible. Rather, we need methodolo-
gies that inspire our students to play with the past, not for the static and dead
knowledge lying dormant waiting to be retrieved, but for the life that can inspire
them to turn toward the ever constructive and destructive fire of their own erotic
soul. Such methodologies would foster oddity, multiplicity, metamorphosis, heed-
ing the divine, spiritual resource from within so that in their future endeavors they
refuse, as Audre Lorde demands, “to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the
conventionally expected, nor the merely safe […]” (Lorde 1984, 57).
ME: I agree that we are in need of these methodologies, although some writings lend
themselves more to this type of work than others. Seeing with many eyes, we find
the need to reorient important works and to create something that ultimately goes
beyond them, a type of transfiguration, a calling in which the word needs to be
connected to our present needs and desire for justice. One of the most interesting,
exciting, and important practices that we can do as thinkers is transforming the
work–giving it a new life, bathing it, and dressing it anew. Your reading of Plato
is very Anzaldúan in this way, which is so surprising given traditional readings of
his work. Not simply because you are discussing liminality and this notion is key
in her work, but because you talk about being in that state in which matter gives
in to spirit, listens to it, gets carried away by it.
For Anzaldúa, it is about being open to register the calls of her unconscious, the
spirits of her ancestors, spirit itself, the images, which lovingly she describes as
607
animals, animals that let her forge the skeletons of her powerful cuentos and
autohistoria-teorías, which also allow her to, as she says, carve her own face.
What a way to state the power of art. I imagine her slowly chiseling her skull,
slowly, methodically, sometimes frantically, carving pieces of bone that will let
her form the structure that will take her muscles, sinews, and skin, leaving the
opening for the eyes and for that mouth, through which she says pass el viento,
el fuego, los mares y la Tierra (Anzaldúa 1987, 74). In the process of writing she
contends with the Coatlicue states, those moments of terror and fear that leave
her paralyzed, afraid to cross over to the other side of the border, meaning to
other ways of being and sensing. So she sees her writings as “blood sacrifices,” her
tongue and ear lobes pierced with cactus needles (75). These blood sacrifices are
part of the path to what she calls “conocimiento,” a creative journey that leads
her to feel and understand things otherwise and to commute with all things exist-
ing, human and non-human. It is an arduous path of both pain and joy, guided by
what she calls the Coyouxauhqui imperative, the call to arrange those fragments
of herself that have been scattered by colonization, sexism, heteropatriarchy, rac-
ism, and ableism. While she says she needs to make herself whole again and to
find a center (almost as a giving in to purity), she knows that, ultimately, the
process of self-making, of living-with, is never finished, thus holding the longing
for wholeness together with her fragmentation and woundedness. Seeing the reso-
nances between her view and Plato’s work, or interpretations of his work, despite
differences in their methodologies, aims, and philosophical reception, is itself part
of our own carving philosophical bones.
HETAIRA: I am reminded of Plotinus, a late imperial Platonist, who believed that the project
of our lives is to sculpt our inner statues, statues which – and I don’t know if
Plotinus would agree – are carved by a kind of Daedalus, so that they are ani-
mated, living works of art. But this is my odd vision of Plato and the tradition.
I get that it is not the norm and that your experience with Plato has run counter
to this. Nevertheless, I am happy that there can be moments of contact, moments
of carving bones.
ME: See, I first read Plato’s Republic in high school and while I fell for it to some
extent, I was absolutely gripped by Camus. Somehow my heart grew cold, as
Sappho would say. I needed to keep my wings up and keep flying, looking toward
that which I could not understand or even imagine. It was such an interesting,
although not unusual, experience of being torn between the calmer, more me-
thodical analysis of the Republic and the existential woundedness and fire that
seeps out of Camus’s texts. It seems to be the story of my life. A certain need
for clarity and control came from it in the midst of being seized by shattering
questions raised by the absurd. But this was a different Plato than I was taught,
very different from the one you have opened the doors for me.
HETAIRA: Well, my Plato is only possible or recognizable because of philosophers
like yourself. So, thanks for opening those doors and for taking the time to, dare
I say, play with all of this. It has been a real honor. Can I ask you one more
question – perhaps, a selfish one?
ME: Yes.
HETAIRA: To preface, when I – a stranger to you before this project – wrote with the mad
desire to work together on the Symposium so as to examine it through women
of color theorizing, works which seek to unearth and transform our present-day
608
social conditions, I was afraid. Why? Well, because of something you mentioned
at the beginning of our walk together – the historical background of women in
my position using and appropriating women of color for their own ends. The
fear of reproducing that problem dogged me. Yet, for good or for ilk, my dai-
mon urged forward with the curious hope that such powerful worldviews could
disrupt “business as usual” in my own field, challenge practitioners “to carve
philosophical bone,” or “to reanimate statues” – therein offering individuals from
all backgrounds the opportunity to envision the worlds of the past as ready and
willing to dialogue with the present. So, walking away from this collaboration,
what has resonated with you?
ME: I was surprised by your invitation to collaborate, but I saw it as an opening for
complex communication. When discussing complex communication, Lugones
calls for a type of coalitional conversation that is manifold, multi-voiced, and
creative, that recognizes opacity and tension, disrupts oppressor logics, and, as
she says, “cements relational identities” (Lugones, 84). There is no longing for
resolution. I feel the pull and push of such communication in our conversation,
especially in terms of what Lugones takes as its key characteristic, the difficult but
invaluable disposition to understand the “peculiarities of each other’s resistant
ways of living” (84). And so, through different paths, desires, and loves, we still
walk together in resistance.
Bibliography
Anzaldúa, G. (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.
Anzaldúa, G. (2002) “Now Let Us Shift… the Path of Concimiento… Inner Work, Public Acts,” This
Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. Anzaldúa, G. and Keating, A. (eds.), New
York: Routledge. pp. 540–578.
Anzaldúa, G. (2015) Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality.
Keating, Analouise (ed.), Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Anzaldúa, G. and Keating, A. (eds.). (2002) This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for
Transformation. Routledge.
Carson, A. (2002) If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho. New York: Vintage Books.
Evans, N. (2006) “Diotima and Demeter as Mystagogues in Plato’s Symposium,” Hypatia, 21.2: 1–27.
hooks, bell. (1994) Teaching to Transgress. New York: Routledge.
Lamb, W. R. M. (1925) (trans./ed.). Plato: Lysis, Symposium and Gorgias. Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press.
Lorde, A. (1984) Sister Outsider. Crossing Press.
Lugones, M. (1987) “Playfulness, ‘World-Traveling’ and Loving Perception” Hypatia 2.2: 3–19
Lugones, M. (2003) Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions. New
York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Lugones, M. (2006) “On Complex Communication,” Hypatia, 21.3: Special Issue: Feminist Epistemolo-
gies of Ignorance 75–85.
Nietzsche, F. (1979) “The Struggle Between Science and Wisdom,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections
from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the 1870’s. (trans.) D. Breazeale. London: Humanities Press.
Ortega, M. (2006) “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Color,”
Hypatia, 21:3 Special Issue: Special Issue: Feminist Epistemologies of Ignorance, pp. 56–74.
Ortega, M. (2016) In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. Albany, NY:
SUNY Press.
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FURTHER READING
Catherine McKeen
The following list collects material relevant to the study of women and their relation to
philosophy in Greek antiquity. The list thus includes dramatic and literary, medical, and phil-
osophical sources that concern women and gender, and other sources that provide evidence
for women’s involvement in ancient Greek philosophical movements. Also included is a selec-
tion of scholarly work relevant to women and philosophy in Greek antiquity. While this list
cannot hope to be comprehensive, we hope that it will give a sense of the breadth of sources
and scholarly work on women/gender in Greek antiquity, and that it will inspire further work.
Textual Editions, and Translations
Textual Editions
Aeschines
Hermann, K. 1850. De Aeschinis Socratici reliquiis. Göttingen: Universitätsschriften.
Krauss, H. 1911. Aeschinis Socratici Reliquiae. Lipsiae: Teubner.
Pentassuglio, F. 2017. Eschine di Sfetto: Tutte le testimonianze. Belgium: Brepolis.
Aeschylus
Murray, G. 1955. Aeschyli tragoediae. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Smyth, H. 1922. Aeschylus. Vols. I–II. Fragments. London: W. Heinemann.
Sommerstein, A. 2009. Aeschylus. Vols. I–III. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Aristophanes
Austin, C. and Olson, D. 2004. Aristophanes: Thesmophoriazusae. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hall, F. W. and Geldart, W. M. 1945. Aristophanes: Comoediae. Oxford: Clarendon.
Henderson, J. 1998. Aristophanes. Vols. I–IV. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Holwerda, D. 1996. Scholia in Aristophanis Lysistratam II.4. Groningen: Egbert Forsten.
Aristippus
Mannebach, E. 1961. Aristippi et Cyrenaicorum fragmenta. Leiden-Köln: Brill. Bywater, I. (1959) Aris-
totelis Ethica Nicomachea. Oxford: Clarendon.
611
Catherine McKeen
Aristotle
Forster, E. and Furley, D. 1955. Aristotle: On Sophistical Refutations. On Coming-to-be and Passing-
away. On the Cosmos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Freese, J. and Striker, G. 2020. Aristotle: The Art of Rhetoric. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Hett, W. 1964. Aristotle: On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On Breath. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Jowett, B. 1885. The Politics of Aristotle. Oxford: Clarendon.
Kraut, R. 1997. Aristotle: Politics Books VII and VIII. Oxford: Clarendon.
Lennox, J. 2001. Aristotle: On the Parts of Animals. Vols. I–IV. Oxford: Clarendon.
Peck, A. L. 1942. Aristotle: On the Generation of Animals. London: W. Heinemann.
Peck, A. L. 1965–1970. Aristotle: Historia Animalium. London: W. Heinemann.
Rackham, H. 1932. Aristotle: Politics. London: W. Heinemann.
Ross, W. D. 1924. Aristotle: Metaphysics. Vols. 1–5. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ross, W. D. 1962. Aristotelis: Politica. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tredennick, H. 1933–1935. Aristotle: The Metaphysics, Oeconomica, and Magna Moralia. London: W.
Heinemann.
Diogenes Laertius
Diogenis Laertii Vitae philosophorum Authors Diògenes Laerci H S Long (Ed.lit.) University of Oxford
(Ed.) Print Book 1966-1st ed., reprint. Oxonii [Oxford]: Typographeo Clarendoniano, 1966-
Early Greek Philosophers

Laks, A. and Most, G. 2016. Early Greek Philosophy. Vol. I–IX. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Euripides
Collard, C., Cropp, M. and Lee, K. 2004. Euripides: Selected Fragmentary Plays. Vols. 1 and 2. Warmin-
ster: Aris & Phillips.
Kannicht, R. (2004) Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, vol. 5.1, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Hippocrates and Hippocratics

Bourbon, F. 2008. Hippocrate: Nature de la femme. Paris: Belles Lettres.
Littré, E. 1839–1861. Oeuvres complètes d’Hippocrate. Paris: J. B. Baillière.
Potter, P. 1923. Hippocrates: Ancient Medicine. Airs, Waters, Places. Epidemics 1 and 3. The Oath.
Precepts. Nutriment. Vols. I–XI. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Homer
Murray, A. 1919. Homer: The Odyssey. London: W. Heinemann.
Murray, A. 1924. Homer: The Illiad. Vols. I and II. London: W. Heinemann.
Lucian
Harmon, A. 1936. Lucian. The Passing of Peregrinus. The Runaways. Toxaris or Friendship. The Dance.
Lexiphanes. The Eunuch. Astrology. The Mistaken Critic. The Parliament of the Gods. The Tyran-
nicide. Disowned. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Harmon, A., Kilburn, K. and MacLeod, M. 1959–1972. Lucian in Eight Volumes. London: W.
Heinemann.
612
Further Reading
Plato
Burnet, J. 1903. Platonis Opera. Oxford: Clarendon.
Duke, E., et al. 1995. Platonis Opera. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Emlyn-Jones, C. and Preddy, W. 2022. Plato: Lysis. Symposium. Phaedrus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Fowler, H., et al. 1914. Plato: Republic. London: W. Heinemann.
Fowler, H. 1966. Plato: Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus. London: W. Heinemann.
Lamb, W. 1914–1929. Plato. Vols. I–XII. London: W. Heinemann.
Lamb, W. 1925. Plato: Lysis. Symposium. Gorgias. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Slings, S. 2003. Plato: Republic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Plutarch
Babbitt, F., et al. 1927. Plutarch: Moralia. Vols. I–XV. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nachstädt, W. 1935. Plutarchi moralia. Leipzig: Teubner.
Pythagoreans
Montepaone, C. 2011. Pitagoriche scritti femminili di età ellenistica. Bari: EdiPuglia.
Thesleff, H. 1965. The Pythagorean Texts of the Hellenistic Period. Turku: Abo Akademi.
Socratics
Giannantoni, G. 1990. Socratis et Socraticorum reliquiae. Naples: Bibliopolis.
Sophists
Laks, A. and Most, G. 2016. Early Greek Philosophy. Vol. VIII–IX. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
Sophocles
Claverhouse J., Headlam, W. and Pearson, A. 2010. The Fragments of Sophocles. Cambridge: Cam-
Lloyd-Jones, H. 1994. Sophocles. Vols. I–III. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Stobaeus
Hense, O. and Wachsmuth, C. 1884–1894. Ioannis Stobaeus: Anthologium. Weidman: Berolini.
The Suda
Adler, A. 1928–1938. Lexicographi graeci: Suidae Lexicon. Stuttgart: Teubner.
Xenophon
Marchant, E. and Todd, O. eds. 1923. Xenophon: Memorabilia, Oeconomicus, Symposium, Apology.
London: W. Heinemann.
Other Writers
Athanassiadi, P. 1999. Damascius: The Philosophical History. Athens, GA: Apamea Association.
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Catherine McKeen
DuBois, P. 1917. The Greek Anthology. Volume III: Book 9: The Declamatory Epigrams. Paton,
W., trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Frazer, J. 1921. Apollodorus: The Library. London: W. Heinemann.
Kannicht, R. and Snell, B. 2004. Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Vols. 1–6. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht.
Laks, A. and Most, G. 2016. Early Greek Philosophy. Vols. I–IX. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Paton, W. 1916. The Greek Anthology. Vol. I. London: W. Heinemann.
Paton, W. 1917–1927. The Greek Anthology: Sepulchral Epigrams. Vol. II. London: W. Heinemann.
Seaton, R. C. 1961. Apollonius Rhodius: Argonautica. London: W. Heinemann.
Translations and Commentaries
General Collections
Long, A. and Sedley, D. 1987. The Hellenistic Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plant, I. M., ed. 2004. Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome: An Anthology. Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press.
Aeschines
Dittmar, H. 1912. Aischines von Sphettos: Studien zur Literaturgeschichte der Sokratiker. Berlin:
Weidmann.
Aristotle
Barnes, J. 2014. Aristotle: Complete Works. Vols. 1 and 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Everson, S. 1988. Aristotle: The Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Halliwell, S. 1987. The Poetics of Aristotle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Pakaluk, M. 1998 Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics VIII–IX. Oxford: Clarendon.
Shields, C. 2016. Aristotle: De Anima. Oxford: Clarendon.
Taylor, C. C. W. 2006. Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics II–IV. Oxford: Clarendon.
Dobbin, R., ed. 2012. The Cynic Philosophers from Diogenes to Julian. New York: Penguin.
Hard, R. 2012. Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and Anecdotes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Malherbe, A. 1977. The Cynic Epistles: A Study Edition. Sources for Biblical Literature. Missoula:
Scholars Press.
Cyrenaics
Giannantoni, G. 1958. I Cirenaici: raccolta delle fonti antiche, traduzione e studio introduttivo. Firenze:
Sansoni.
Diogenes Laertius
Dorandi, T. 2017. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hicks, R. 1925. Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers. London: W. Heinemann.
White, S. 2021. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yonge, C. 1853. Diogenes Laertius: The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. London: H. Bohn.
Greek drama
Aldington, et al. 1938. The Complete Greek Drama. New York: Random House.
Blondell, R. 1999. Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides. New York: Routledge.
Grene, D. and Lattimore, R., eds. 1959. The Complete Greek Tragedies. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
614
Further Reading
Halliwell, S. 2008. Aristophanes: Birds, Lysistrata, Assembly-women, Wealth. Oxford: Clarendon.

Henderson, J. 2010. Three Plays by Aristophanes: Staging Women. New York: Routledge.
Roche, P. Murray, et al. 1943. Fifteen Greek Plays. New York: Doubleday.
Wolf, C. 1998. Medea: A Modern Retelling, New York: Doubleday.
Greek Lyric
Campbell, D. 1982. Greek Lyric, Volume I: Sappho and Alcaeus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Hippocrates and Other Medical Writers

Littré, E. 1839–1861. Oeuvres Completes d’ Hippocrate. Paris: J. B. Baillière.
Lonie, M. 1981. The Hippocratic Treatises. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Homer
Wilson, E. (trans.) 2023. Homer: The Illiad. New York: W. W. Norton.
Wilson, E. (trans.) 2018. Homer: The Odyssey. New York: W. W. Norton.
Neoplatonists
Baltzly, D., Finamore, J. F. and Miles, G., eds. 2018–2022. Proclus: Commentary on Plato’s Republic.
Vols 1–2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gerson, L., et al. 2018. Plotinus: The Enneads. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tarrant, H. 2017. Proclus: Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Westerink, L. and O’Neill, W. 2011. Proclus: Commentary on the First Alcibiades. Westbury: P
rometheus
Trust.
Plato
Bernadete, S. 2001. Plato’s Symposium. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Bloom, A. 1991. The Republic of Plato. New York: Basic Books.
Brann, E., Kalkavage, P. and Salem, E. 2012. Plato: Statesman. Newburyport: Focus.
Burnyeat, Myles. 1990. The Theaetetus of Plato. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Cooper, J. 1997. Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Hamilton, E. 1987. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kalkavage, P. 2001. Plato’s Timaeus. Newburyport: Focus
McDowell, J. 1973. Plato’s Theaetetus. New York: Oxford University Press.
Klein, J. 1977. Plato’s Trilogy: The Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Reeve, C. D. C. 2004. Plato’s Republic. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Sachs, J. 2007. Republic. Indianapolis, IN: Focus.
Plutarch
Perrin, B. 1916. Plutarch: Lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pomeroy, S. 1999. Plutarch’s Advice to the Bride and Groom and A Consolation to His Wife. Oxford:
Pythagoreans
Meunier, M. 1932. Femmes pythagoriciennes. Fragments de lettres de Théano, Périctionê, Phintys,
Melissa et Myia. Paris: L’Artisan du Livre.
Zhmud, L. 2012. Pythagoras and the Early Pythagoreans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
615
Catherine McKeen
Sappho
———. 1966. The Songs of Sappho in English Translation by Many Poets. New York: Peter Pauper.
Barnard, M. 1958. Sappho: A New Translation. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Carson, A. 2002. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. New York: Alfred Knopf.
Groden, S. 1966. The Poems of Sappho. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.
Lardionois, A. and Rayor, D. 2014. Sappho: New Translation of the Complete Works. Cambridge:
Lombardo, S. 2016. Sappho Complete Poems and Fragments. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Skeptics
Annas, J. and Barnes, J. 1985. The Modes of Scepticism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Annas, J. and Barnes, J. 1994. Sextus Empiricus: Outlines of Skepticism. New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Bett, R. 2018. Against Those in the Disciplines. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mates, B. 1996. Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Socratics
Boys-Stones, G. and Rowe, C. 2013. The Circle of Socrates: Readings in the First-Generation Socratics.
Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Diogenes the Cynic and CynicismDobbin, R., ed. 2012. The Cynic Philosophers from Diogenes to Julian.
New York: Penguin.
Hard, R. 2012. Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and Anecdotes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Xenophon
Ambler, W. 2001. Xenophon: The Education of Cyrus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Bartlett, R. 1996. Xenophon: The Shorter Socratic Writings. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Dorion, L.-A. and Bandini, M. 2000–2011. Xénophon: Mémorables. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Huss, Bernhard. 1999. Xenophons Symposion: Ein Kommentar. Leipzig: Teubner.
Johnson, D. M. 2021. Xenophon’s Socratic Works. Abingdon: Routledge.
Marchant, E. and Todd, O. 2013. Xenophon: Memorabilia. Oeconomicus. Symposium. Apology. Cam-
Miller, W., ed. 1914. Xenophon: Cyropaedia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pomeroy, S. 1994. Xenophon Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary. Oxford:
Clarendon.
Strauss, L. 1970. Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Zeno
Bees, R. 2011. Zenons Politeia. Leiden: Brill.
Other writers
Bartsch, S., Braund, S. and Konstan, D. 2017. Lucius Annaeus Seneca: The Complete Tragedies. Vol. 2.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Godley, A. 1922. Herodotus: Histories. London: W. Heinemann.
Kern, O. 1913. Inscriptiones Graecae. Bonn: Marcus & Weber.
Schofield, A. 1958. Aelian’s De Natura Animalium. London: W. Heinemann.
Temkin, O. 1991. Soranus of Ephesus: Gynaecology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
616
Further Reading
Scholarly Works
Book-Length Monographs
Addey, C. 2014. Divination and Theurgy in Neoplatonism: Oracles of the Gods. Burlington: Ashgate.
Bergren, A. 2008. Weaving Truth: Essays on Language and the Female in Greek Thought. Hellenic Stud-
ies Series 19. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
Bianchi, E. 2014. The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos. New York:
Blair Duvergès, E. 2012. Plato’s Dialectic on Woman: Equal, Therefore Inferior. New York: Routledge.
Bluestone, N. 1987. Women and the Ideal Society: Plato’s Republic and Modern Myths of Gender. Am-
herst: The University of Massachusetts Press.
Brill, S. 2020. Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Burck, E. 1969. Die Frau in der griechisch-romanischen Antike. Munich: Tusculum Scriften.
Cavarero, A. 1995. In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy. New York: Routledge.
Connell, S. 2016. Aristotle on Female Animals: A Study of the Generation of Animals. Cambridge:
Connell, S. 2021. Aristotle on Women: Physiology, Psychology, and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
D’Angour, A. 2019. Socrates in Love. The Making of a Philosopher. London: Bloomsbury.
Dean-Jones, L. 1994. Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Deslauriers, M. 2022. Aristotle on Sexual Difference: Metaphysics, Biology, Politics. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
duBois, P. 1988. Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women. Chicago, IL:
duBois, P. 1991. Torture and Truth. New York: Routledge.
duBois, P. 1996. Sappho Is Burning. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Dutsch, D. 2020. Pythagorean Women Philosophers: Between Belief and Suspicion. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Foley, H. 2001. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Frank, J. 2005. A Democracy of Distinction: Aristotle and the Work of Politics. Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press.
Frank, J. 2018. Poetic Justice: Rereading Plato’s Republic. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Gera, D. 1997. Warrior Women: the Anonymous Tractatus de Mulieribus. Leiden: Brill.
Goff, B., ed. 2005. Classics and Colonialism. London: Duckworth.
Gordon, J. 2012. Plato’s Erotic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Han, I. 2023. Plato and The Metaphysical Feminine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Holmes, B. 2009. Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy. London: I. B. Tauris.
Huizenga, A. 2013. Moral Education for Women in the Pastoral and Pythagorean Letters. Boston, MA:
Brill.
Keuls, E. 1993. The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
King, Helen. 1998. Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece. New York: Rout-
ledge. Kochin, M. 2002. Gender and Rhetoric in Plato’s Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kofman, S. 1998. Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher. Porter, C., trans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Le Doeuff, M. 2007. Hipparchia’s Choice. New York: Columbia University Press.
Le Moine, R. 2020. Plato’s Caves: The Liberating Sting of Cultural Diversity. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Leunissen, M. 2017. From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Loraux, N. 1994. The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division Between
the Sexes. Levine, C., trans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Markovits, E. 2017. Future Freedoms: Intergenerational Justice, Democratic Theory, and Greek Tragedy.
617
Catherine McKeen
McClees, H. 1920. A Study of Women in Attic Inscriptions. New York: Columbia University Press.
McClure, L. 1999. Spoken Like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama. Princeton, NJ:
Miller, P. A. 2016. Diotima at the Barricades: French Feminists Read Plato. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Nightingale, A. 1995. Genres in Conflict: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Nightingale, A. 2004. Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Nussbaum, M. 1986. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy.
Nye, A. 2015. Socrates and Diotima. Sexuality, Religion, and the Nature of Divinity. New York: Pal-
grave Macmillan.
Pellò, C. 2022. Pythagorean Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Paoli, U. E. 1953. La donna greca nell’antchita. Florence: Le Monnier.
Pomeroy, S., ed. 2013. Pythagorean Women. Their History and Writings. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins
University Press.
Saxonhouse, A. 1992. Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought.
Sissa, G. 2000. L’âme est un corps de femme. Paris: Odile Jacob.
Sissa, G. 2008. Sex and Sensuality in the Ancient World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Tress, D. 2019. Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation. Edinburgh:
Trott, A. 2014. Aristotle on the Nature of Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trott, A. 2019. Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation. Edinburgh:
Tuana, N. 1992. Woman and the History of Philosophy. New York: Paragon House.
Vetter, L. 2005. “Women’s Work” as Political Art: Weaving and Dialectical Politics in Homer,
Aristophanes, and Plato. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.Witt, C. 2004. Form, Normativity and
Gender in Aristotle A Feminist Perspective. Dordrecht: Springer.
Wright, F. A. 1923. Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle. London: Routledge.
Zeitlin, F. 1996. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago, IL:
Sourcebooks
Goodwater, L. 1975. Women in Antiquity: An Annotated Bibliography. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press.
Kennedy, R. F. 2013. Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology of Primary Sources in
Translation. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Kersey, E. and Shrag, C., eds. 1989. Women Philosophers: A Bio-Critical Source Book. New York:
Greenwood Press.
Kraemer, R. 2004. Womens’ Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
MacLachlan, B., ed. 2012. Women in Ancient Greece: A Sourcebook. New York: Bloomsbury.
Natoli, B., Pitts, A. and Hallett, J. 2022. Ancient Women Writers of Greece and Rome. New York: Routledge.
Waithe, M. 1987. A History of Women Philosophers: 600 BC to 500 AD. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Collections and Anthologies

Adamson, P. 2014. Classical Philosophy: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Vol. 1. Oxford:
Bar On, B., ed. 1994. Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle. Albany:
Bianchi, E., Brill, S. and Holmes, B., eds. 2019. Antiquities Beyond Humanism. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
618
Further Reading
Blondell, R. and Ormand, K. 2015. Ancient Sex: New Essays. Columbus: The Ohio State University
Press.
Chouinard, I., McConaughey, Z., Ramos, A. and Noel, R., eds. 2021. Women’s Perspectives on Ancient
and Medieval Philosophy. Cham: Springer.
Decker, J., Layne, D. and Vilhauer, M., eds. 2022. Otherwise than the Binary: New Feminist Readings in
Ancient Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State of New York Press.
Fantham, E., Foley, H., Boymel Kampen, N., Pomeroy, S. and Shapiro, H., eds. 1995. Women in the
Classical World: Image and Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fisher, K. and Langlands, R., eds. 2015. Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Forestal, J. and Philips, M., eds. 2021. The Wives of Western Philosophy. New York: Routledge.
Freeland, C., ed. 1998. Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle. University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press.
Harry, C. and Vlahakis, eds. 2023. Exploring Contributions by Women in the History of Philosophy and
Science through Time. Cham: Springer.
Höfele, A. and Kellner, B., eds. 2020. Natur - Geschlecht - Politik: Denkmuster und Repräsentationsformen
vom Alten Testament bis in die Neuzeit. Paderborn: Verlag.
Lardinois, A. and McClure, L., eds. 2001. Making Silence Speak: Women’s Voices in Greek Literature
and Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Natoli, B. A., Pitts, A. and Hallett, J. P. 2022. Ancient Women Writers of Greece and Rome. New York:
Routledge.
O’Reilly, K. and C. Pellò, C., eds. 2023. Ancient Women Philosophers: Recovered Ideas and New Per-
spectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peradotto, J. and Sullivan, J., eds. 1984. Women in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers. Albany:
State of New York Press.
Pomeroy, S., ed. 1991. Women’s History and Ancient History. Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press.
Rabinowitz, N. and Richlin, A., eds. 1993. Feminist Theory and the Classics. New York: Routledge.
Schultz, J. and Wilberding, J., eds. 2022. Women and the Female in Neoplatonism. Leiden: Brill.
Tuana, N., ed. 1994 Feminist Interpretations of Plato. University Park: The Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity Press.
Ward, J. K., ed. 1996. Feminism and Ancient Philosophy. New York: Routledge.
Wyke, M., ed. 1999. Parchments of Gender: Deciphering the Body of Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Zajko, V. and Leonard, M., eds. 2008. Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought.
Topics
Social, Political, and Economic Context

Ancona, R. and Tsouvala, G., eds. 2021. New Directions in the Study of Women in the Greco-Roman
World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Blundell, S. 1995. Women in Ancient Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bremen, R. 1996. The Limits of Participation: Women and Civic Life in the Greek East in the Hellenistic
and Roman Periods. Amsterdam: Gieben.
Brulé, P. 2003. Women of Ancient Greece. Nevill, A., trans. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Cameron, A. and Kuhrt, A., eds. 2017. Images of Women in Antiquity. New York: Routledge.
Clark, G. 1989. Women in the Ancient World, Greece & Rome. New Surveys in the Classics 21. Oxford:
Gomme, A. W. 1925. “The Position of Women in Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C.” Clas-
sical Philology 20: 1–25.
Hawley, R. and Levick, B., eds. 1995. Women in Antiquity: New Assessments. New York: Routledge.
James, S. and Dillon, S., eds. 2012. A Companion to Women in the Ancient World. Hoboken, NJ:
Wiley-Blackwell.
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Lefkowitz, M. and Fant, M., eds. 2005. Women’s Life in Greece and Rome. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins Press.
Leipoldt, J. 1955. Die Frau in der antiken Welt und im Urchristentum. Leipzig: Kohler and Ameland.
Miller, S. 2004. “Women and Athletics.” In Ancient Greek Athletics. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press 150–160.
Pomeroy, S. 1975. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. New York:
Schocken.
Price, B., ed. 1997. Ancient Economic Thought. London: Routledge.
Seltman, C. 1955. “The Status of Women in Athens.” Greece & Rome 23: 119–124.
Seltman, C. 1956. Women in Antiquity. London: Thames and Hudson.
Vidal-Naquet, P. 1986. The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World.
A. Szegedy-Maszak, A., trans. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Vivante, B. 2007. Daughters of Gaia: Women in the Ancient Mediterranean World. Westport: Praeger.
Aeschines
Ehlers, B. 1966. Eine vorplatonische Deutung des sokratischen Eros: der Dialog Aspasia des Sokratikers
Aischines. Munich: Beck.
Kahn, C. 1994. “Aeschines on Socratic Eros.” In Van Der Waerdt, P., ed. The Socratic Movement. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Natorp, P. 1892. “Aischines’ Aspasia.” Philologus 51: 489–500.
Pentassuglio, F. 2020. “Paideutikos eros: Aspasia as an ‘alter Socrates’.” Revista Archai 30: 1–22.
Susemihl, F. 1900. “Die Aspasia des Antisthenes.” Philologus 59: 148–151.
Aristotle – Biology
Bartoš, H. 2021. “Aristotle’s Biology and Early Medicine.” In Connell, S., ed. Cambridge Companion to
Aristotle’s Biology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Code, A. 1987. “Soul as Efficient Cause in Aristotle’s Embryology.” Philosophical Topics 15: 51–59.
Coles, S. 1995. “Biomedical Models of Reproduction in the Fifth Century BC and Aristotle’s Generation
of Animals.” Phronesis 40: 45–88.
Dean-Jones, L. 2011. “Clinical Gynecology and Aristotle’s Biology: the Composition of HA X.” Apeiron
45: 180–199.
Deslauriers, M. 1998. “Sex and Essence in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Biology.” In Freeland 1998.
Deslauriers, M. 2009. “Sexual Difference in Aristotle’s Politics and Biology.” Classical World 102:
215–230.
Falcon, A. and Lefebvre, D., eds. 2019. Aristotle’s Generation of Animals: A Critical Guide. Cambridge:
Henry, D. M. 2007. “How Sexist is Aristotle’s Developmental Biology?” Phronesis 523: 251–269.
Lefebvre, D. 2018. “Aristotle’s Generation of Animals on the Separation of the Sexes.” In Sfendoni-
Mentzou, D., ed. Aristotle - Contemporary Perspectives on His Thought. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Leunissen, M. 2010. Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle’s Science of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Leunissen, M. 2022. “Aristotle’s Method for Establishing Facts concerning the Female Menses in GA
I.19–22.” In Föllinger, S., ed. Aristotle’s Generation of Animals: A Comprehensive Approach. Phi-
losophie der Antieke 43: 123–145.
Mayhew, R. 2004. The Female in Aristotle’s Biology: Reason and Rationalization. Chicago, IL: Chicago
University Press.
Morsink, J. 1979. “Was Aristotle’s Biology Sexist?” Journal of the History of Biology 12: 83–112.
Tress, D. M. 1992. “The Metaphysical Science of Aristotle’s GA and His Feminist Critics.” Review of
Metaphysics 46: 307–341.
Witt, C. 1985. “Form, Reproduction, and Inherited Characteristics in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals.”
Phronesis 30: 46–57.
Witt, C. 1998. “Sex and Essence in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Biology.” In Freeland 1998.
Witt, C. 2017. “Aristotle on Female Animals: A Study of the Generation of Animals.” Journal of the
History of Philosophy 551: 157–158.
620
Further Reading
Aristotle – Ethics and Politics

Coelho, M. C. 1992. “Medéia-o silêncio ético de Aristóteles.” Classica-Revista Brasileira de Estudos
Clássicos. Suppl. 1: 63–67.
Cole, E. 1994 “Women, Slaves, and Love of Toil in Aristotle’s Moral Philosophy.” In Bar On.
Deslauriers, M. 2015. “Political Rule Over Women in Politics I.” In Lockwood, T. and Samaras, T., eds.
Aristotle’s Politics: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fortenbaugh, W. 1977. “Aristotle on Slaves and Women.” In Barnes, J. et al., eds. Articles on Aristotle
2. London: Duckworth.
Hoe, L. 2010. “Aristotle on Character, Women, and Natural Slaves.” Philosophia 38: 155–177.
Karbowski, J. 2012. “Slaves, Women, and Aristotle’s Natural Teleology.” Ancient Philosophy 32:
323–350.
Karbowski, J. 2014. “Aristotle on the Deliberative Abilities of Women.” Apeiron 474: 435–460.
Levy, H. 1990. “Does Aristotle Exclude Women from Politics?” Review of Politics 52: 397–416.
Modrak, D. 1994. “Aristotle: Women, Deliberation, and Nature.” In Bar On 1994.
Mulgan, R. 1994. “Aristotle on the Political Role of Women.” History of Political Thought 15: 179–202.
Reeve, C. D. C. 2020. “Aristotle on Women: Diminished Deliberation and Divine Male Rule.” Revue
Roumaine de Philosophie 64: 1–36.
Riesbeck, D. 2015. “Aristotle on the Politics of Marriage: Marital Rule’ in the Politics.” Classical Quar-
terly 65: 134–152.
Samaras, T. 2016. “Aristotle on Gender in Politics I.” History of Political Thought 37.4: 595–605.
Stauffner, D. 2008. “Aristotle’s Account of the Subjection of Women.” Journal of Politics 70: 929–941.
Swanson, J. 1992. The Public and Private in Aristotle’s Political Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press.
Aristotle – Other Works

Bianchi, E. 2007. “Aristotelian Dunamis and Sexual Difference. Metaphysics Theta.” Philosophy Today
51: 89–97.
Mayhew, R. 1999. ‘“Behavior Unbecoming of Woman’: Aristotle’s Poetics 15 and Euripides’ Melanippe
the Wise.” Ancient Philosophy 19: 89–104.
Nielsen, K. M. 2015. “The Constitution of the Soul: Aristotle on Lack of Deliberative Authority.” The
Classical Quarterly 65: 572–588.
Nussbaum, M. 1998. “Aristotle, Feminism, and Needs for Functioning.” In Freeland 1998.
Black Classicisms
Fertik, H. and Hanses, M. 2019. “Above the Veil: Revisiting the Classicism of W. E. B. Du Bois.” Inter-
national Journal of the Classical Tradition 261: 1–9.
Greenwood, E. 2009. “Re-Rooting the Classical Tradition: New Directions in Black Classicism.” Clas-
sical Receptions Journal 1: 87–103.
Hairston, E. 2013. The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization, and the African American Reclamation of
the West. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Haley, S. 1993. “Black Feminist Thought and Classics: Re-membering, Re-claiming, Re-empowering.”
In Rabinowitz and Richlin 1993.
Moyer, I., Lecznar, A. and Morse, H., eds. 2020. Classicisms in the Black Atlantic. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Rankine, P. 2006. Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature. Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press.
Rankine, P. 2019. “Afterlife: Du Bois, Classical Humanism, and the Matter of Black Lives.” Interna-
tional Journal of the Classical Tradition 26: 86–96.
Cyrenaics and Epicureans

Arenson, K. 2023. “Ancient Women Epicureans and their Anti-Hedonist Critics.” In O’Reilly and Pellò
2023.
621
Catherine McKeen
Lampe, K. 2015. The Birth of Hedonism: The Cyrenaic Philosophers and Pleasure as a Way of Life.
Tsouna, V. 1994. “The Socratic Origins of the Cynics and the Cyrenaics.” In Vander Waerdt, P., ed. The
Socratic Movement. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Education
Deslauriers, M. 2012. “Women, Education, and Philosophy.” In James and Dillon 2012.
Pentassuglio, F. 2016. “Proagogeia, mastropeia, promnestria: mayéutica y paideia erótica en los diálogos
Socráticos.” Revista Archai 18: 151–170.
Epistemic Justice
Alcoff, L. M. and Potter, E., eds. 1993. Feminist Epistemologies. New York: Routledge.
Bailey, A. 2018. “On Anger, Silence, and Epistemic Injustice.” Philosophy Suppl. 84: 93–115.
Bowen, M., Gilbert, M. and Nally, G. 2023. Believing Ancient Women: Feminist Epistemologies for
Greece and Rome. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.
Chae, Y. 2018. “White People Explain Classics to Us: Epistemic Injustice in the Everyday Experiences of
Racial Minorities.” Eidolon: February 5, 2018.
Collins, P. 2000. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge.
Dotson, K. 2011. “Tracking Epistemic Violence: Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia 26.2: 236 –257.
Dotson, K. 2014. “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression.” Social Epistemology 28: 115–138.
Fricker, M. 2011. Epistemic Injustice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fricker, M. 2017. “Evolving Concepts of Epistemic Injustice.” In Kidd, Medina, Pohlhaus 2017.
Fricker, M. and Jenkins, K. 2017. “Epistemic Injustice, Ignorance, and Trans Experiences.” In Garry, A.,
ed. The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy. New York: Routledge.
Hall, K. 2017. “Queer Epistemology and Epistemic Injustice.” In Kidd, Medina, Pohlhaus 2017.
Jones, K. 2002. “The Politics of Credibility.” In Antony, L. and Witt, C., eds. A Mind of One’s Own:
Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Kidd, J., Medina, J. and Pohlhaus, Jr., G., eds. 2017. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice.
London: Routledge.
Medina, J. 2012. The Epistemology of Resistance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Medina, J. 2023. The Epistemology of Protest. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mills, C. 2007. “White Ignorance.” In Sullivan, S. and Tuana, N., eds. Race and Epistemologies of Igno-
rance. Albany: State of New York University Press.
Pohlhaus, G. 2012. “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Towards a Theory of Willful Herme-
neutical Ignorance.” Hypatia 27: 715–735.
Pohlhaus, G. 2020. “Epistemic Agency Under Oppression.” Philosophical Papers 49: 233–251.
Eros
Baracchi, C. 2019. “In Light of Eros.” In Bianchi, Brill and Holmes 2019.
Belmonte, N. 2017. “Erosophia. Or: the Love/Lack of Wisdom.” Phoenix 12: 1–17.
Boys-Stones, G. 1998. “Eros in Government: Zeno and the Virtuous City.” Classical Quarterly 48:
168–174.
Hyland, D. A. 1968. “Ερως, ᾿Επιθυμία, and Φιλία in Plato.” Phronesis 131: 32–46.
Laurand, V. 2007. “L’érôs pédagogique chez Platon et les stoïciens.” In Bonazzi and Helmig, eds. Pla-
tonic Stoicism-Stoic Platonism. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Leontsini, E. 2013. “Sex and the City: Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno of Kition on Erôs and Philia.” In Sand-
ers et al. 2013.
Sanders, E., Thumiger, C. and Lowe, N. 2013. Erôs in Ancient Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Saxonhouse, A. 1984. “Eros and the Female in Greek Political Thought: An Interpretation of Plato’s
Symposium.” Political Theory 12: 5–27.
Schnapp, A. 1997. Le Chasseur et la Cité: Chasse et Érotique en Grèce Ancienne. Paris: A. Michel.
Wildberger, J. 2022. “Liebe als wohlbegründetes Bestreben: Wesen und Funktion des Eros-Impulses eines
stoischen Weisen.” In Al-Taher, S., Jansche, V. and Martena, L., eds. Was Liebe vermag. Heidelberg:
Metzler.
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Further Reading
Ethics and Virtue

Arruzza, C. 2023. “Wearing Virtue: Plato’s Republic V, 449a–457b and the Socratic Debate on Women’s
Nature.” Archai 33: 1–24.
Brill, S. 2021. “Self-sacrifice as Wifely Virtue in Aristotle’s Political Theory.” In Forestal and Philips
2021.
Carlon, J. 2009. Pliny’s Women: Constructing Virtue and Creating Identity in the Roman World. Cam-
Deslauriers, M. 2003. “Aristotle on the Virtues of Slaves and Women.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Phi-
losophy 25: 213–231.
Grahn-Wilder, M. 2018. ”Roots of Character and Flowers of Virtue: Childhood in Plato’s Republic.” In
Aasgaard, R., Horn, C., and Cojocaru, O., eds. Childhood in History: Perceptions of Children in the
Ancient and Medieval Worlds. New York: Routledge.
Henry, D. and Nielsen, K., eds. 2015. Bridging the Gap between Aristotle’s Science and Ethics. Cam-
Langlands, R. 2014. “Pliny’s ‘Role Models of Both Sexes’: Gender and Exemplarity in the Letters.” Eu-
gesta, Journal of Gender Studies in Antiquity 4: 214–237.
McCoy, M. 2013. Wounded Heroes: Vulnerability and A Virtue in Ancient Greek Literature and Phi-
losophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
North, H. 1977. “The Mare, the Vixen, and the Bee: ‘Sophrosune’ as the Virtue of Women in Antiquity.”
Illinois Classical Studies 1: 35–48.
O’ Meara, D. 2022. “On the Equality of Virtue of Women and Men in Late Antique Platonism.” In
Schultz and Wilberding 2022.
Salkever, S. 1986. “Women, Soldiers, Citizens: Plato & Aristotle on the Politics of Virility.” Polity 19:
232–253.
Scaltsas, P. 1992. “Virtue without Gender in Socrates.” Hypatia 7: 126–137.
Sherman, N. 1989. The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Sluiter, I. and Rosen, R., eds., 2003. Andreia: Studies in Manliness and Courage in Classical Antiquity.
Leiden-Boston, MA: Brill.
The Feminine
Diamantakou-Agathou, K. 2020. “From Aspasia to Lysistrata: Literary Versions and Intertextual Diffu-
sions of the Feminine Other in Classical Athens.” Logeion 10: 238–260.
Dressler, A. 2016. Personification and the Feminine in Roman Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Han, I. 2023. Plato and The Metaphysical Feminine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Loraux, N. 1995. The Experience of Tiresias: The Feminine and The Greek Man. Wissing, P., trans.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Warren, L. “The Feminine, the Origin of Evil and the Motion of Matter in Plutarch’s De Animae Pro-
creatione.” Filosofskoe antikovedenie i klassičeskaâ tradiciâ 15: 374–393.
Feminism and Feminist Theory

Anzaldúa, G. 2012. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute
Books.
Anzaldúa, G. and Keating, A., eds. 2002. This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transforma-
tion. New York: Routledge.
Bartky, S. 1990. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. London:
Routledge.
De Beauvoir, S. 2012. The Second Sex. Borde, C. and S. Malovany-Chevallier, S., trans. New York:
Vintage Press.
Frye, M. 1983. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Boston, MA: The Crossing Press.
Haslanger, S. 2012. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
623
Catherine McKeen
Honig, B. 2021. A Feminist Theory of Refusal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
hooks, b. 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston, MA: South End Press.
Irigaray, L. 1985. Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Keating, A., ed. 2009. The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lorde, A. 1984. Sister Outsider. Boston, MA: Crossing Press.
Lugones, M. 1987. “Playfulness, ‘World-Traveling,’ and Loving Perception.” Hypatia. 2.2: 3-19.
Lugones, M. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions. Lan-
ham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Mohanty, C. 2003. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Moraga, C. 1983. Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios. Boston, MA: South End
Press.
Narayan, U. 1997. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism. New York:
Routledge.
Ortega, M. 2006 “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Color.” Hypatia
21.3: 56–74.
Ortega, M. 2016. In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Spivak, G. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Nelson, C. and L. Grossberg, L. eds. Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Spivak, G. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cam-
Feminist History of Philosophy

Bennett, J. 1989. “Feminism and History.” Gender & History 1: 251–272.
Bennett, J. 2006. History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press.
Bennett, J. 2008. “Forgetting the Past.” Gender & History 20: 669–677.
Clark, E. 1998. “The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of the Feminist Historian after the ‘Linguistic Turn.’”
Church History 67: 1–31.
Hawley, R. 1994. “The Problem of Women Philosophers in Ancient Greece.” In Archer, L.,
Fischler, S. and Wyke, M., eds. Women in Ancient Societies: An Illusion of the Night. New York:
Routledge.
Kelly, J. 1982. “Early Feminist Theory and the ‘Querelle des Femmes’, 1400–1789.” Signs 8: 4–28.
King, H. 1995. “Medical Texts as a Source for Women’s History.” In Powell, A., ed. The Greek World.
London: Routledge.
Okin, S. 1979. Women in Western Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
O’Neill, E. and Lascano, M., eds. 2019. Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation
of Women’s Philosophical Thought. Dordrecht: Springer.
O’Reilly, K. 2021. “Women Philosophers in Antiquity.” In Chouinard et al. 2021.
Pellegrin, M. -F. 2013. “La ‘Querelle des femmes’ est-elle une querelle? Philosophie et pseudo-linéarité
dans l’histoire du féminisme.” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 35: 69–79.
Pomeroy, S., ed. 1991. Women’s History and Ancient History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press.
Scott, J. W. 1986. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” The American Historical Review
91.5: 1053–1075.
Scott, J. W. 1999. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press.
Shapiro, L. 2016. “Revisiting the Early Modern Philosophical Canon.” Journal of the American Philo-
sophical Association 2: 365–383.
Shapiro, L. 2023. “How to Change a Philosophical Canon.” In Lapointe, S. and Reck, E., eds. Histori-
ography and the Formation of Philosophical Canons. New York: Routledge.
Thorgeirsdottir, S. and Hagengruber, R. 2020. Methodological Reflections on Women’s Contribution
and Influence in the History of Philosophy. Cham: Springer.
Waithe, M. E. 1989. “On Not Teaching the History of Philosophy.” Hypatia 4: 132–138.
Wider, K. 1986. “Women Philosophers in the Ancient Greek World: Donning the Mantle.” Hypatia 1:
21–62.
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Further Reading
Witt, C. 1996. “Working on the Margins: Feminist Theory and Philosophy.” Metaphilosophy 271.2:
226–229.
Witt, C. 2006. “Feminist Interpretations of the Philosophical Canon.” Signs 312: 537–552.
Witt, C. 2019. “Feminist History of Philosophy.” In O’Neill and Lascano 2019.
Foucault and Foucauldian Readings of Greek Antiquity

Detel, W. 2005. Foucault and Classical Antiquity: Power, Ethics, and Knowledge. Cambridge: Cam-
Foucault, M. 1990–1998. The History of Sexuality. Vols. 1–3. Hurley, R., trans. New York: Vintage.
Greene, E. 1996. “Sappho, Foucault, and Women’s Erotics.” Arethusa 29: 1–14.
Larmour, D., Miller, P. A. and Platter, C., eds. 1998. Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiq-
uity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Miller, P. A. 2021. Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth. London: Bloomsbury.
Gender
Dyer, J. and Surtees, J. 2020. Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Gilhuly, K. 2008. The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Ancient Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Winkler, J. 1990. The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece.
Friendship, Love, and Philia

Azoulay, V. 2018. “Xénophon et la redéfinition de la philia.” In Crubellier, M., Jaulin, A. and Pellegrin,
P., eds. Philia et dikè: aspects du lien social et politique en Grèce ancienne. Paris: Classiques Garnier.
Berkel, T. 2020. The Economics of Friendship: Conceptions of Reciprocity in Ancient Greece. Leiden:
Brill.
D’Angour, D. 2019. Socrates in Love. The Making of a Philosopher. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Tamiolaki, E.-M. 2018. “Xenophon’s Conception of Friendship in Memorabilia 2.6 with reference to
Plato’s Lysis.” In Danzig, G., Johnson, D. M. and Morrison, D., eds. Plato and Xenophon: Compara-
tive Studies. Leiden: Brill.
Ward, J. 1996. “Aristotle on Philia: The Beginning of a Feminist Ideal of Friendship?” In Ward 1996.
Greek Drama
Bosher, K., Macintosh, F., McConnell, J. and Rankine, P. eds. 2015. The Oxford Handbook of Greek
Drama in the Americas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Case, S. 1985. “Classic Drag: The Greek Creation of Female Parts.” Theatre Journal 37: 317–327.
Castro. A. F. H. 2021. Antigone in the Americas: Democracy, Sexuality, and Death in the Settler Colo-
nial Present. Albany: State of New York Press.
Chanter, T. 2011. Whose Antigone? Albany: State University of New York Press.
Foley, H., ed. 1981. Reflections of Women in Antiquity. New York: Gordon and Breach.
Foley, H. 2014. “Performing Gender in Greek Old and New Comedy.” In Revermann, M., ed. The Cam-
bridge Companion to Greek Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Henderson, J. 1975. The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Martin, R. 1987. “The Fire on the Mountain: ‘Lysistrata’ and the Lemnian Women.” Classical Antiquity
6: 77–105.
Mastronarde, D. 2010. The Art of Euripides: Dramatic Technique and Social Context. Cambridge:
Riemer, P. and Zimmermann, B., eds. 1999. Der Chor im antiken und modernen Drama. Stuttgart:
Metzler.
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Catherine McKeen
Robson, J. 2016. “Aristophanes, Gender, and Sexuality.” In Walsh, P., ed. Companion to the Reception
of Aristophanes. New York: Brill.
Söderbäck, F., ed. 2010. Feminist Readings of Antigone. Albany: State of New York Press.
Zeitlin, F. 1981. “Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae.” In Foley 1981.
Zeitlin, F. 1984. “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia.” In Peradotto
and Sullivan 1984.
Homeric Hymns
Clay, J. 1989. The Politics of Olympus: Form and Meaning in the Major Homeric Hymns. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Decker, J. 2022. “The Roots of Life and Death in the Homeric Hymns and Presocratic Philosophy.”
In Decker, Layne, Vilhauer 2022.
Foley, H. 1994. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays.
Immigrant Women
Kasimis, D. 2018. The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy. Cambridge: Cam-
Kennedy, R. 2014. Immigrant Women in Athens: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical
City. London: Routledge.
Language
Bergren, A. 1983. “Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought.” Arethusa 16: 69–95.
Bergren, A. 2008. Weaving Truth: Essays on Language and the Female in Greek Thought. Hellenic Stud-
ies Series. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Decker, J. 2021. “I Will Tell a Double Tale: Double Speak in the Ancient Greek Poetic Tradition.”
Epoche 25: 237–248.
Lyric Poetry
Grene, E. 2005. Women Poets in Ancient Greece and Rome. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Rayor, D. 1991. Sappho’s Lyre: Archaic Lyric and Women Poets of Ancient Greece. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Marriage and Family

Arenson, K. 2016. “Epicureans on Marriage as Sexual Therapy.” Polis 2: 291–311.
Brisson, L. 2022. “La critique du mariage et de la famille dans les Républiques de Platon, Diogène le cyn-
ique et Zénon de Citium.” In Husson, S. and Lemaire, J., eds. Les trois Républiques: Platon, Diogène
de Sinope et Zénon de Citium. Paris: Vrin.
Connell, S. 2019. “Nurture and Parenting in Aristotelian Ethics.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
119: 179–200.
De Martino, F. 2010. “Aspasia e la scuola delle mogli.” In Giombini, S. and Marcacci, R. F., eds. Il
quinto secolo. Studi di filosofia antica in onore di Livio Rossetti. Perugia: Acquaplano.
Fletcher, E. 2021. “Women and Childrearing in the Republic.” In Chouinard et al. 2021.
Gardner, C. 2000. “The Remnants of the Family: The Role of Women and Eugenics in Plato’s
Republic V.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 17: 217–235.
Jacobs, W. 1978. “Plato on Female Emancipation and the Traditional Family.” Apeiron 12: 29–31.
Patterson, C. 1991. ”Marriage and the Married Woman in Athenian Law.” In Pomeroy, S., ed. Women’s
History and Ancient History. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Rawson, B., ed. 2010. A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman World. Hoboken, NJ:
Wiley-Blackwell.
626
Further Reading
Samaras, T. 2010. “Family and the Question of Women in the Laws.” In Bobonich, C. ed. Plato’s Laws:
A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Maternity
Dasen, V. 2010. “Childbirth and Infancy in Greek and Roman Antiquity.” In Rawson 2010.
Demand, N. 1994. Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Classical Greece. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
duBois, P. 1994. “The Platonic Appropriation of Reproduction.” In Tuana 1994.
Hanson, A. 1987. “The Eight Months’ Child and the Etiquette of Birth: Obsit Omen!” Bulletin of the
History of Medicine 61: 589–602.
King, H. 2018. “Women and Doctors in Ancient Greece.” In Hopwood, N., Flemming, R. and Kassell,
L., eds. Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leunissen, M. 2023. “Aristotle’s Animalization of the Mothers and Motherly Love.” Epoché 28.1: 87–97.
Petersen, L. and Salzman-Mitchell, P., eds. 2012. Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and
Rome. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Medicine and Medical Writers

Connell, S. 2000. “Aristotle and Galen on Sex Difference and Reproduction: A New Approach to an
Ancient Rivalry.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 313: 405–427.
Connell, S. 2023. “Women’s Medical knowledge in Classical Antiquity: Beyond Midwifery.” In O’Reilly
and Pellò 2023.Craik, E. 2015. The Hippocratic Corpus, Content, and Context. London: Routledge.
Dean-Jones, L. 1989. “Menstrual Bleeding According to Hippocrates and Aristotle.” Transactions of the
American Philological Association 119: 177–191.
Dean-Jones, L. 1992. “The Politics of Pleasure: Female Sexual Appetite in the Hippocratic Corpus.”
Helios 19: 72–91.
Dean-Jones, L. 1995. “Autopsia, Historia, and What Women Know: The Authority of Women in Hippo-
cratic Gynaecology.” In Bates, D., ed. Knowledge and Scholarly Medical Traditions: A Comparative
Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hanson, A. 1990. “The Medical Writers’ Woman.” In Zeitlin, Winkler, and Halperin 1990.
Hanson, A. 1992. “Conception, Gestation, and the Origin of Female Nature in the ‘Corpus Hippocrati-
cum.’” Helios 19: 31–71.
Hong, Y. 2012. “Collaboration and Conflict: Discourses of Maternity in Hippocratic Gynecology and
Embryology.” In Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell, eds. Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece
and Rome. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Lefkowitz, M. 1981. “The Wandering Womb.” In Lefkowitz, M., ed. Heroines and Hysterics. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Parker, H. 2012. “Women and Medicine.” In James, S. and Dillon, S., eds. A Companion to Women in
the Ancient World. London: Oxford University Press.
Midwifery
Bailey, D. 2002. “Midwifery and Epistemic Virtue in the Theaetetus.” Epoché 27: 1–18.
Giannopoulou, Z. 2007. “Socratic Midwifery: A Second Apology?” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philoso-
phy 33: 55–87.
Martin-Seaver, M. 2018. “Murder and Midwifery: Metaphor in the Theaetetus.” Philosophy and Lit-
erature 42: 97–111.
Tarrant, H. 1988. “Midwifery and the Clouds.” The Classical Quarterly 38: 116–122.
Tomin, J. 1987. “Socratic Midwifery.” The Classical Quarterly 37: 97–102.
Wengert, R. 1988. “The Paradox of the Midwife.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 5: 3–10.
Misogyny and Sexism

Katz, M. 1992. “‘The Status of Women’ in Ancient Greece.” History and Theory 31: 70–97.
627
Catherine McKeen
Mercer, C. 2018. “The Philosophical Roots of Western Misogyny.” Philosophical Topics 462: 183–208.
Wender, D. 1973. “Plato: Misogynist, Paedophile, and Feminist.” Arethusa 6: 75–90.
Neoplatonism
Baldi, I. 2011. Gli Inni di Sinesio di Cirene. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Baltzly, D. 2013. “Proclus and Theodore of Asine on Female Philosopher-Rulers.” Ancient Philosophy
33: 403–424.
Baltzly, D. 2022. “The Myth of Er and Female Guardian in Proclus’ Republic.” In Schultz and Wilberd-
ing 2022.
Brisson, L. 2022. “Marcella and Porphyry.” In J. Schultz and Wilberding 2022.
Edwards, M. 2000. Neoplatonic Saints: The Lives of Plotinus and Proclus by their Students. Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press.
Layne, D. 2021. “Feminine Power in Proclus’s Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus.” Hypatia 36: 120–144.
Layne, D. 2022. “Divine Mothers: Plotinus’ Erotic Productive Cause.” In Decker, Layne, Vilhauer 2022.
Michalewski, A. 2014. La puissance de l’intelligible. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Michalewski, A. 2021. “Women and Philosophy in Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus.” In Chouinard et al.
2021.
Schultz, J. 2018. “Conceptualizing the ‘Female’ Soul – A Study in Plato and Proclus.” British Journal for
the History of Philosophy 27: 1–19.
Schultz, J. 2021. “Women and Philosophy in Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus.” In McConaughey, Z., Choui-
nard, I., eds., Women’s Perspectives on Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. Cham: Springer.
Whittaker, H. 2001. “The Purpose of Porphyry’s Letter to Marcella.” Symbolae Osloenses 76: 150–168.
Wilberding, J. 2022. “Women in Plotinus.” In Schultz and Wilberding 2022.
Vassilopoulou, P. 2003. “From a Feminist Perspective: Plotinus on Teaching and Learning Philosophy.”
Women: A Cultural Review 14: 130–143.
Philosophical Schools
Afonasin, E. and Afonasina, A. 2014. “The Houses of Philosophical Schools in Athens.” Schole 8.1:
9–23.
Plato – Republic
Annas, J. 1976. “Plato’s Republic and Feminism.” Philosophy 51: 307–321.
Arruzza, C. 2023. “Wearing Virtue: Plato’s Republic V, 449a-457b and the Socratic Debate on Women’s
Nature.” Archai 33: 1–24.
Bluestone, N. 1988. “Why Women Cannot Rule: Sexism in Plato Scholarship.” Philosophy of the Social
Sciences 18: 41–60.
Brill, S. 2015. “Political Pathology in Plato’s Republic.” Apeiron 49: 127–161.
Brisson, L. 2011. “Women in Plato’s Republic.” Trends in the Sciences 1: 36–45.
Brown, W. 1988. “Supposing Truth Were a Woman: Plato’s Subversion of Masculine Discourse.” Politi-
cal Theory 16: 594–616.
Calvert, B. 1975. “Plato and the Equality of Women.” Phoenix 29: 233–242.
El Murr, D. 2020. “Eristic, Antilogy and the Equal Disposition of Men and Women in Plato, Resp.
5.453b–454c.” The Classical Quarterly 70: 85–100.
Ernoult, N. 2005. “Une utopie platonicienne: la communauté des femmes et des enfants.” Clio 22:
211–217.
Fletcher, E. 2021. “Women and Childrearing in the Republic.” In Chouinard et al. 2021.
Gardner, C. 2000. “The Remnants of the Family: The Role of Women and Eugenics in Plato’s Republic
V.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 17: 217–235.
Fortenbaugh, W. W. 1975. “On Plato’s Feminism in Republic V.” Apeiron 9: 1–4.
Harry, C. and Polansky, R. 2016. “Plato on Women’s Natural Ability: Revisiting Republic V and Timaeus
41e3–44d2 and 86b1–92c3.” Apeiron 49: 261–280.
Helmer, E. 2021. “Semblables inférieures: quels lieux pour les femmes dans la cité juste de Platon?” Plato
Journal: 21: 97–109.
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Further Reading
Hulme, E. 2022. “First Wave Feminism: Craftswomen in Plato’s Republic.” Apeiron 55: 485–507.
Ironside, K. and Wilburn, J. forthcoming. ““Feminizing” the City: Plato on Women, Masculinity and
Thumos.” Hypatia.
Levin, S. 1996. “Women’s Nature and Role in the Ideal Polis: Republic V Revisited.” In Ward 1996:
13–30.
McCabe, M. M. 2020. “Philosopher Queens? The Wrong Question at the Wrong Time.” In Vintiadis, E.,
ed. Philosophy by Women. New York: Routledge.
McCoy, Marina. 2015. “The City of Sows and Sexual Differentiation.” In Bell, J. and Naas, M., eds.
Plato’s Animals: Gadflies, Horses, Swans, and other Philosophical Beasts. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana
University Press.
McKeen, C. 2006. “Why Women Must Guard and Rule in Plato’s Kallipolis.” Pacific Philosophical
Okin, S. M. 1977. “Philosopher Queens and Private Wives: Plato on Women and the Family.” Philoso-
phy and Public Affairs 6: 345–369.
Pomeroy, S. 1974. “Feminism in Book V of Plato’s Republic. Apeiron 8.1: 33–35.
Santas, G. 2005. “Justice, Law, and Women in Plato’s Republic.” Philosophical Inquiry 27: 25–37.
Saxonhouse, A. 1976. “The Philosopher and the Female in the Political Thought of Plato.” Political
Theory 4: 195–212.
Smith, N. D. 1983. “Plato and Aristotle on the Nature of Women.” Journal of the History of Philosophy
21: 467–478.
Taylor, C. C. W. 2012. “The Role of Women in Plato’s Republic.” In Kamtekar, R., ed. Virtue and Happi-
ness: Essays in Honour of Julia Annas. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, suppl. Oxford: Oxford
University Press: 75-87.
Townsend, M. 2017. The Woman Question in Plato’s Republic. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Vlastos, G. 1995. “Was Plato a Feminist?” In Studies in Greek Philosophy. vol. 2, Graham, D., ed.
Princeton: Princeton University Press: 133–143.
Wender, D. 1973. “Plato: Misogynist, Paedophile, and Feminist.” Arethusa 6.1: 75–90.
Zoller, C. 2021. “Plato and Equality for Women across Social Class.” Revista de Filosofia Antiga 15:
35–52.
Plato – Symposium
Broadie, S. 2011. Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Evans, N. 2006. “Diotima and Demeter as Mystagogues in Plato’s Symposium.” Hypatia 21: 1–27.
Halperin, David M. 1990. “Why Is Diotima a Woman? Platonis Erōs and the Figuration of Gender.” In
Halperin 1990.
Irigaray, L. 1994. “Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium, Diotima’s Speech.” In Tuana
1994.
McLain, K. 2022. Diotima’s Knowledge and Theaetetus’s Labor. State College: Ancient Philosophy So-
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Nails, D. 2015. “Bad Luck to Take a Woman Abroad.” In Nails, D. and Tarrant, H., eds. Second Sailing:
Alternative Perspectives on Plato. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica.
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Reeve, C. D. C. 1992. “Telling the Truth About Love: Plato’s Symposium.” Boston Area Colloquium in
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Sheffield, F. 2023. “Beyond Gender: The Voice of Diotima.” In O’Reilly and Pellò 2023.
Plato – Timaeus
Bianchi, E. 2006. “Receptacle/Chora: Figuring the Errant Feminine in Plato’s Timaeus.” Hypatia 21:
124–146.
Brill, S. 2015. “Animality and Sexual Difference in the Timaeus.” In Bell and Naas 2015.
Broadie, Sarah. 2011. Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
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Plato – Other Works

Baracchi, C. 2006. “The ‘Inconceivable Happiness’ of Men and Women: Visions of Another World in
Plato’s Apology of Socrates.” Comparative Literature Studies 43: 269–284.
Blondell, R. 2005. “From Fleece to Fabric: Weaving Culture in Plato’s Statesman.” Oxford Studies in
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Brill, S. 2013. Plato on the Limits of Human Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Brill, S. 2015. “Autochthony, Sexual Reproduction, and Political Life in the Statesman Myth.” In Sallis,
J., ed. Plato’s Statesman: Dialectic, Myth, Politics. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Charalabopoulos, N. 2012. Platonic Drama and its Ancient Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
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Cole, E. 1991. “Weaving and Practical Politics in Plato’s Statesman.” Southern Journal of Philosophy
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Lane, M. 2021. “Statecraft as a Ruling, Caring, and Weaving Dunamis.” In Dimas, P., Lane, M., Sauvé,
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Marren, M. 2021. “State Violence and Weaving: Implications of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata for Plato’s
Statesman.” Journal of Ancient Philosophy 15: 18–34.
Miller, P. A. 2022. “Plato’s Seventh Letter or How to Fashion a Subject of Resistance.” In Vasunia, P., ed.
The Politics of Form in Greek Literature. London: Bloomsbury.
Nails, D. 2002. The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics. Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett
Sampson, K. 2020. “The Art of Politics as Weaving in Plato’s Statesman.” Polis 37: 485–500.
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Politics and Justice

Arendt, H. 2004. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books.
Fertik, H. 2019. “Hell to Pay: Aristotle and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Vision of Democracy in ‘of the Ruling of
Men.’” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 26: 72–85.
Saxonhouse, A. 1985. Women in the History of Political Thought. New York: Praegar.
Wildberger, J. 2018. The Stoics and the State. Baden Baden: Nomos.
Pythagoreans and Pythagoreanism

Demand, N. 1982. “The Position of Women in Pythagoreanism.” In Demand, N., ed. Thebes in the Fifth
Century: Heracles Resurgent. London: Routledge.
Harper, V. 2013. “The Neopythagorean Women as Philosophers.” In Pomeroy 2013.
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Lucania.” In M., ed. Filosofe, Maestre, e Imperatrici. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.
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In O’Reilly and Pellò 2023.
Race and Ethnicity

Benjamin, I. 2006. The Invention of Race in Classical Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Bernal, M. 1987. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. New Brunswick, NJ:
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Derbew, S. 2022. Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fabre-Serris, J., Keith, A. and Klein, F., eds. 2022. Identities, Ethnicities and Gender in Antiquity. Berlin:
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Hall, J. 1997. Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hartman, S. 2008. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12: 1–14.
Kennedy, R. 2017. “We Condone It by Our Silence: Confronting Classics’ Complicity in White Su-
premacy.” Eidolon: May 11, 2017.
Lape, S. 2010. Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
McCoskey, D. 2012. Race: Antiquity and its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McCoskey, D. 2023. A Cultural History of Race in Antiquity. London: Bloomsbury.
Proios, J. 2022. “Division and Proto-Racialism in the Statesman.” In Clemente, M., Cocchiara, B. and
Hendel, W., eds. misReading Plato. New York: Routledge.
Religion
Bernard, D. 1962. “Demeter, Erinys, Artemis.” Hermes 90: 129–148.
Bremmer, J. 2014. Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Connelly, J. 2007. Portrait of a Priestess. Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Denzey, N. 2014. “Living Images of the Divine: Female Theurgists in Late Antiquity.” In Stratton and
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Evans, P., ed. 2018. Prophets and Profits: Ancient Divination and its Reception. London: Routledge.
Faraone, C. 2003. “Playing the Bear and Fawn for Artemis: Female Initiation or Substitute Sacrifice?”
In Dodds, D. and Faraone, C., eds. Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives: New Critical
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Harrison, J. E. 1908. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Rüpke, J. and Spickermann, W., eds. 2012. Reflections on Religious Individuality: Greco-Roman and
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Stratton, K. and Kalleres, D., eds. 2014. Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World.
Rhetoric
Jarratt, S. and Ong, R. 1995. “Aspasia: Rhetoric, Gender, and Colonial Ideology.” In Lunsford, A.,
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Sex and Sexuality

Arthur-Katz, M. 1989. “Sexuality and the Body in Ancient Greece.” Mètis 4: 155–179.
Blundell, R. and Ormand, K., eds. 2015. Ancient Sex: New Essays. Columbus: The Ohio State University
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Halperin, D., Winkler, J. and Zeitlin, F., eds. 1990. Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experi-
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Sissa, G. 1990. Greek Virginity. Goldhammer, A., trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Sissa, G. 2014. “Phusis and Sensuality: Knowing the Body in Greek Erotic Culture.” In Hubbard, T., ed.
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Sex Work
Cohen, E. 2003. “Athenian Prostitution.” In Bakewell, G. and Sickinger, J., eds., Gestures: Essays
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Cohen, E. 2015. Athenian Prostitution: The Business of Sex. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Davidson, J. 1998. Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. Chicago, IL:
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Glazebrook, A. and Henry, M. 2011. Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean, 800 BCE–200
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Goldman, M. 2015. “Associating the Aulêtris: Flute Girls and Prostitutes in the Classical Greek Sympo-
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Slavery
Benitez, R. 2016. “Boy? What Boy?” Ancient Philosophy 36: 107–114.
Castro. A. F. H. 2017. “Slavery in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: Alain Badiou, Jaques Ranciére, and the
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Golden, M. 1985. “‘Pais, ‘Child,’ and ‘Slave.’” L’antiquité classique 54: 91–104.
Hartman, S. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century Amer-
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Patterson, O. 1982. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
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Vlassopoulos, K. 2011. “Two Images of Ancient Slavery: The ‘Living Tool’ and the ‘Koinonia’.” In
Herrmann-Otto, E., ed. 2011. Sklaverei und Zwangsarbeit zwischen Akzeptanz und Widerstand.
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Bristol Classical Press.
Socratics
Brancacci, A. 1990. Oikeios logos. La filosofia del linguaggio in Antistene. Naples: Bibliopoli.
Sophists
Billings, J. and Moore, C., eds. 2023. The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists. Cambridge: Cam-
Bourriot, F. 1995. Kalos kagathos, kalokagathia: d’un terme de propagande de sophistes à une notion
sociale et philosophique: étude d’histoire athénienne. Hildesheim: G. Olms.
Kerford. G. B. (1981). The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McCoy, M. 2008. Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists. Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Stoics and Stoicism

Asmis, E. 1996. “The Stoics on Women.” In Ward 1996.
Banateanu, A. 2001. La théorie stoïcienne de l’amitié: Essai de reconstruction. Fribourg: Cerf/Editions
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Brennan, T. 2005. The Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties, and Fate. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Čelkytė, A. 2020. “The Soul and Personal Identity in Early Stoicism: Two Theories?” Apeiron 53:
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Grahn, M. 2014. “Free Philosophers and Tragic Women: Stoic Perspectives on Suicide.” In Honkasalo,
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Nussbaum, M. 2002. “The Incomplete Feminism of Musonius Rufus, Platonist, Stoic, and Roman.” In
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Women in Philosophy
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Weaving
Acton, P. 2014. Poiesis: Manufacturing in Ancient Athens. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Harlizius-Klück, E. 2014. “The Importance of Beginnings: Gender and Reproduction in Mathematics
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Work
Angier, T. 2010. Technē in Aristotle’s Ethics. London: Continuum.
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Xenophon
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Pomeroy, S. 1994. Xenophon: Oeconomicus. A Social and Historical Commentary. Oxford:
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Aspasia
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Hypatia
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Phintys
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Press.
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Metzler.
Twentieth Century
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Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf. New York: Routledge.
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Hadas, M. 1936. “Observations on Athenian Women.” Classical Weekly 39: 97–100.
Kofman, S. 1990. Séductions: De Sartre à Héraclite. Paris: Galilée.
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Contemporary Receptions
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Methuen.
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Philosophy and Literature. London: Palgrave.
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Wilson, E. 2018b. “Translator’s Note.” In The Odyssey. New York: Norton.
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Catherine McKeen
La Llorona
Anzaldúa, G. 2009a. “The Postmodern Llorona.” In Keating, A., ed. The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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in Cherríe L. Moraga,” Comparative American Studies 12: 205–217.
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of Texas Press.
640
INDEX
Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes.
Aelian 311 Aristippus the Elder

Aedesius 471–474, 489 daughter (Arete) 309, 310
Aesara 423, 424, 425, 428–432, 433n9 founder of Cyraneic school 304–313
Aeschines 7, 69, 103–105, 107–111, 119, in Plato 138, 304–313, 451, 453
114n53, 145–147 in Xenophon 120, 131n7
Aeschylus 1, 7, 34, 44, 49–53, 74, 75, 80, 81, 83, Aristippus the Younger 310, 311
162n76, 246n8, 546 Aristodemus 269, 271–276, 279, 572, 602
Agamemnon 74–75, 80–81, 83 Aristophanes 38, 61, 65, 68, 89, 92–93, 94, 106,
Cheophoroi 7, 34, 44–55, 84n22 153, 159n1, 174, 238, 246n8, 269, 279, 571,
Agamemnon 1, 34, 45–54, 74, 79–82, 277, 396 576, 581, 600
Agathon 267–273, 275, 572, 573, 575, 578, 602 Archarnians 106, 113n33
Agesagoras 107 Banqueters 269
Ajax 74, 80, 402n32 Birds 248n61
Alcibiades 110, 156, 267, 268, 270, 271, 274–276, Clouds 89, 92–97, 98n7, 98n8, 98n10, 98n16,
570, 572–576, 578, 601 576
Amynias 94, 96, 97 Ecclesiazousai 65, 159, 538n2
Anacreon 36 Frogs 155, 160n48
Andromache 127, 239, 240 Lysistrata 61, 68, 69, 69n14, 239
Annas, J. 59, 172, 175, 217 in Plato’s Symposium 38, 271–273, 279, 600
Antiochus 107–109 Wasps 153, 154, 160n19, 161n30, 162n76
Antipater of Sidon 329 Aristotle 142, 152, 158
Antigone 54, 159, 168, 174, 413, 575, 576, 592, De Anima 366, 407
593, 595 animal reproduction, theory of 340–343,
Antisthenes 108, 111, 143, 306, 319, 321, 323 374–384, 538n13, 557
Anzaldúa, G. 590, 601, 603–607 Categories 360, 513
Aphrodite (god) 1, 18, 19, 24, 25, 26n7, 36, 37, on conception and reproduction 8, 346–347,
38, 49, 50, 106, 321, 484, 603 352–355, 375–376, 512
Apollo (god) 17, 22–25, 45, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, deformed kind, concept of 342, 343n6
61, 74, 80–82, 156, 267, 463, 464, 489, 541, education 311
543, 544, 550 embryology 378–380
Apollodorus 156, 157, 267–276, 279, 280, 572, essence 513–516
602 Generation of Animals 335, 340–341, 346,
Aquinas, Thomas 414–416 361, 363, 369, 374–375, 384, 386n38,
Archilocus 36 386n40, 406, 408; dunamis (capacity/
Argos 45, 46, 52 potentiality) 377
641
Index
History of Animals 341, 349, 353, 407–410, 362–364, 369, 374, 378, 380, 385n14,
413 385n24, 389, 485, 488, 512, 516–520
human beings as “political animals” 554 Aristotelian 330n7, 340–342, 369, 512
hylomorphism 360–366, 383 concern for newborns 140
Metaphysics 239, 335, 360–363, 366–369, of female animals 336–337, 340–342
380–381, 502 gender 94
midwifery 264n8, 311 reproduction 48, 293
natural slavery, theory of 558 Black classicisms 555
Nicomachean Ethics 192–193, 326, 382, 390, body 80, 91, 94, 97, 120, 129, 142, 144, 155,
395, 397, 399, 407–408, 410–413, 427, 170, 184, 188–189, 219, 263, 264, 275, 280,
519, 570 289, 315n27, 341, 371, 375, 406, 426–428,
oikonomia 325 441, 442, 482–483, 503–504, 512–519, 537,
Parts of Animals 341, 371, 381, 406 557, 575, 592, 606
passivity of female 512 and emotions 34, 406–410, 419n59
Physics 36, 41n16, 239, 360–362, 364, eros and 31–33, 40, 274, 606
366–369, 376, 381, 512 ethical life 412
Poetics 55n13, 90, 412–414 female 292, 294, 348–355, 377, 395, 406–410,
political life 123, 555 410–415, 427–428, 437, 441–442, 482–483,
Politics 155, 174, 176, 181, 195n5, 335, 339, 485, 488, 497, 514
389, 395, 415, 512, 522, 554–555, 557, male 485, 497, 517–519, 537
562, 564 maternal 255, 257, 259, 530, 533, 536
Posterior Analytics 232n23 and mind 34, 170, 184, 218–219, 228, 230n7,
Rhetoric 29, 91, 97n4, 393, 407, 425 360, 415, 503–504, 560
scientific methodology, theory of 356 phenomenological descriptions 31
sexism 8, 335–343 physical 442, 473, 514
Sophistical Refutations 97n2, 98n14 pleasures of 206, 520
teleological framework 342–343, 344n6, 351, and soul 275, 280, 285, 286, 288, 291,
362 360–366, 370–371, 473–473, 478n35,
virtues 8, 125, 181, 182, 191–194, 198n54, 482–483, 489, 499, 501, 518, 557
255, 264n5, 336–340, 343, 388–401 in Plato’s Timaeus 284–295
on women 345–346 and virtues 395–397, 398–399, 406–410,
Artemis (god) 1, 23, 25, 277–280, 465, 466, 549 419n59, 427–428
Arulenus Rusticus, Iunius 443
Asclepigeneia of Athens 461, 467, 468, 469, 470, Callias 103–105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 120, 138,
472, 475, 476, 478n36 146, 147
Asclepigeneia the Younger 476 Carson, A. 31–34, 38, 39, 255, 599
Asclepius 153, 475, 476, 579 Cassandra 7, 45, 49, 50, 61, 74, 75, 77–83
Aspasia of Miletus 2, 7, 63, 69, 71n39, 103–109, Cassius Dio 444
111, 112n6, 112n8, 112n10, 112n11, 112n15, chorus 540–551
112n17, 113n21, 113n30, 113n40, 114n46, in Aeschylus Choephoroi 49–52
115n67, 116, 119, 122, 145–147, 196n13, in Agamemnon 46–47, 81
280, 281n12, 462, 477n6 birth of 541–542
in Aeshines’ Aspasia 69, 103–105, 107–109, centaurs of 105
111, 114n48, 114n53, 119, 146 demand for justice 51
in Old Comedy 105, 106, 113n30, 113n34, Dionysus 548–550
in Plato’s Menexenus 2, 104, 105, 112n13, of Erinyes 545
122, 131n12, 152, 173, 462 Greek 9, 540, 545, 551
in Xenophon’s works 115n62, 145–147 maenadic 547, 549, 550–551, 551n3
Athena (god) 24, 25, 54, 104, 108, 109, 169, patriarchal loyalties 49
240, 242, 248n65, 438, 543, 549 satyr 543–544, 547
Aurelius, Marcus 441, 465 tragic 155–156, 162n73, 162n76
autochthony 52–54 of women 46, 50, 52, 546
Chrysanthius 471, 472
barbarian 41n8, 80, 106, 220, 221, 225, 231n10, Chrysippus 435–437, 496
232n25, 396, 580 chthonic 27n26, 44–55, 55n19, 541–547
biology/biological 41n17, 48, 92–94, 140, Cicero 110, 111, 322, 441
178n24, 182, 257, 293, 335–343, 345, 357n6, Circe 240
642
Index
Clea of Delphi 461, 464, 466–467, 476 Durkheim, Émil 540, 548
family tree 467
Clea Flavia 466 education 3, 95, 104, 105, 110, 111, 136–139,
Cleanthes 426, 435, 445n2, 496 167–169, 175, 178n16, 178n22, 182, 188,
Clytemnestra 1, 46, 49–52, 54, 106, 168 190, 194, 197n32, 197n35, 198n42, 198n45,
Cooper, Anna Julia 9, 554–555, 561–566 198n58, 202, 203, 205, 208, 210, 212, 213,
Creon 585–587, 592, 593 214n5, 217, 227, 230n4, 233n39, 248n56,
culture 6, 17, 19, 44–46, 59, 68, 135, 165, 174, 292, 303, 304–313, 314n4, 314n6, 319, 322,
400–401 324, 390, 391, 393, 395, 398, 424, 426, 429,
Athens 59, 68, 269, 335, 342, 338–339, 462 436, 438, 439, 440, 466, 483–485, 488, 489,
Median 126 490, 491n1, 521, 527, 529, 536, 554, 560,
material 236 564, 565n4
Persian 126 Eileithyia 277
Cynicism 318–319, 320, 323, 324, 327–328 Empedocles 7, 17, 19, 24, 259, 347, 378,
Crates the Cynic 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 381–382, 382
324, 328, 330n4, 330n5, 330n12, 331n25 enkrateia 127, 128, 137, 139, 140, 142, 144,
Cyrenaicism 8, 303–313, 314n4, 314n6, 314n11, 148n16
315n16, 315n22, 316n52, 322 Epictetus 328, 330n9, 331n27, 436, 441, 445n4,
500
decolonialism 583–585, 589, 591–593 Epicureanism 308, 432, 437, 450, 496, 505n10
Deianeira 104–106, 111 Epicurus 5, 225, 308
Delphic oracle 17, 22–24, 24, 52, 80, 544, 546, epistemic justice 3–6, 10, 11n13, 58–59, 64–68,
547, 580 284
priestess 461, 464, 466, 476 epistemology 58, 64, 261, 264n12
Demeter 17–21, 24, 26n4, 53, 276, 277, 321, 464 erōs 32, 273–274, 429
Democritus 255, 377, 378 in Aeschines’ Aspasia 7, 109–111
desire 5, 29–31, 31–32, 36, 39, 38–40, 79, of Araspas 126
82, 110, 127, 203, 205, 206–207, 267, 273, in connection with hunting/preying 277
285–286, 289–290, 294, 321, 363, 398, cultic devotion 276
411–413, 416, 468, 500, 512–513, 519–522, desire 33, 468, 573
532, 533–534, 573, 606; see also eros in Diotima’s speech 272, 468–469, 575, 606
deliberative 411–413, 416 friendship and freedom 437–439
epimuthia 398, 429 as great daimon 464, 469, 572, 603
subjects and objects of 36–37, 130, 226, 277, and philia 130, 144, 440
513, 578 philosophical 257–259
Deslauriers, M. 9, 192, 337, 341, 343, 425, 432, and politics 104, 107, 111
523 Sappho’s experiences 33–34, 36–40
Dio Chrysostom 111 Socratic 110, 578
Diodorus Siculus 60–62, 109 speech on 461
Diogenes Laertius 5, 90, 158, 305, 308, 319, 321, street‑walking 604–605
322, 323, 324, 435, 436, 437 and women 104, 109, 255, 437–439
Dionysius of Sicily 307, 308, 451 erosophy 31–40
Dionysus (god) 55n7, 81, 82, 279, 308, 466, ethics 59, 66, 68, 307, 321, 388, 389, 393, 424,
541–544, 546–551 450, 456, 475, 579, 592, 593
Diotima of Mantinea 9, 268, 275, 462–465 Aristotelian 389–390, 392, 400 (see also under
in late antiquity, significance 465–466 Aristotle)
Mantinea stele 464 Cynic 328
in Plato’s Symposium 8, 109, 152, 173, 257, Cyrenaic 314n4
272, 277–280, 280, 467–469, 484, 570–572, Xenophon’s 122, 129, 142
578, 604–606 Eubule 424
reception of 461–462 eudaimonia (happiness, flourishing) 192, 194,
religious‑philosophical expertise 275–280, 202, 212, 226, 227, 230n4, 254, 260, 319,
476, 603 322, 324, 325, 326, 329, 389, 390, 391, 392,
as teacher 110, 275–276, 280, 474 401, 402n19, 403n47, 411, 426, 428, 534,
Domna, Julia 108 559, 606
duBois, P. 29, 30, 35, 39, 40 Eunapius 470–474, 488, 489
Du Bois, W. E. B. 9, 554–561, 563–565 Eupolis 104–106
643
Index
Euripides and education 303, 306, 307–309, 312

Bacchae 541–544, 546, 549–550 grammatical 89–94, 90–92, 93–97 (see also
Cassandra, portrayal of 75, 80, 82, 83 feminine, grammatical gender)
on Gorgias 75, 81 hierarchical reading of Aristotle’s
Hippolytus Stephanophorus 2 hylomorphism 364–366
Ion 242 inequality 151, 183, 362, 587, 592
Medea 395, 584–586, 589, 594, 595n5 knowledge 346, 356
Melanippe Sophe and Melanippe Desmotis 58, language 502–503
60–63, 65–69; epistemic injustice in 64–65 non‑binary 3, 6, 89
Trojan Women 74, 106 polis 394
Eurydice 424, 466 Protagoras on 89, 90–93
roles 106, 124, 136, 140, 303, 318, 321, 327,
family 7, 9, 45–46, 135, 194, 254, 428, 439, 329, 336
441–442, 526, 533, 555 and sexuality 62, 92, 93, 96, 273;
in Aristotle 192–193, 198n58, 335–340, social 89, 93, 94, 394
389–391, 393–395, 397–398, 402n18, trans‑gender 3, 89
403n48 violence 589–590
Athenian 239, 332n28, 335–336, 338, 339, and virtue 307, 309, 451–452, 455–458 (see
341, 428, 439, 441 also under specific authors)
Cynics, and 325–329, 444 generation 46, 48–49, 284–289, 294, 364–367,
and civic life 45–46 369, 382, 498, 535, 536
and death 54–55 animal 340–341, 361, 366, 381, 512
in Greek drama 44, 49 Aristotle (see under author, specific works)
in Plato 166, 168–169, 172–173, 176, 188, of cosmos 288, 499
194, 202–213, 228, 244 divine 498–499
in Xenophon 135–136, 137–142 in Hypatia’s school 498–501
Fannia 443–445 in Plato’s Timaeus 284–290, 291–295, 312,
Fanon, F. 584 369
feminine 25, 46, 53, 124, 153, 157, 173, 196n14, of women, in Plato’s Timaeus 284–287,
217, 229, 230, 230n4, 232n38, 236, 253–255, 289–290, 292, 294, 369
257, 264, 277, 280, 296n2, 297n22, 298n32, Gorgias 7, 76, 78, 108, 122
349, 362, 413, 414, 451, 483–484, 487, Helen 91
492n14, 542, 544, 545 Palamedes 77, 79
grammatical gender 90, 92, 93–96, 97n2, and Plato 77
97n4, 98n6, 98n7, 98n10 and Protagoras 76, 77
virtues 388, 389, 395, 403n35 Treatise on Not‑being or on Nature 74–79
feminist methodologies 2–7, 118, 152, 165, Greek tragic drama 7, 68, 75, 80, 396, 397,
175, 195n4, 217, 229, 230, 230n1, 232n38, 540, 541, 587; see also Aeschylus; Euripides;
233n39, 245, 246, 249n84, 296n2, 298n32, Sophocles
318, 322, 329, 332n27, 335–343, 345–346, Grosz, Elizabeth 152, 159
361–363, 383, 388–389, 403n47, 491n1,
494n23, 511–517, 519, 520–523, 547, Hadot, P. 304
551, 551n3, 561, 566n26, 583, 585, 586, Hecuba 81, 82, 243
590–591, 594, 595n3; see also epistemic Hegel, Georg 541
justice; epistemology Heidegger, Martin 591
Ficino, M. 513, 518 Helen 19, 39, 54, 74, 75, 77, 78, 81, 82, 104,
Foucault, M. 11n12, 330n3, 330n13 240, 242, 243
friendship 30, 119, 123, 126, 127, 130, 131n2, Hera 45, 46, 104–107, 111, 169, 240, 242, 586
144, 145, 147, 235, 260, 277, 331n26, 390, Heracles 106, 119, 130, 320, 324, 548
392, 393–394, 399, 400, 411, 429, 437–440; Heraclitus 7, 17–23, 30, 259, 579
see also philia Herakleia 465, 466
Freud, Sigmund 569–571 hermaphroditic mixture 24–25
Hermes 18, 19, 24, 25, 45, 46, 52–54
Gadamer, Hans‑Georg 155 Herodotus 50, 126–127, 127
gender 4, 6, 89, 94, 98n7, 141, 306–307, 424, Hesiod 19, 24, 62, 139, 548
427 Hestia 25
in ancient economics 325–327 Hesychius 108
644
Index
hetaira, hetairai 103, 109, 110, 111, 114, 115, of weaving 241–244
118, 121–123, 144–146, 449, 453, 599–609 women’s 352–356
Hipparchia of Maroneia 306, 315n15, 318–330 in Xenophon 118, 124–125, 138, 141, 142,
and Crates 320–324 143
and Cynic school 319 Kofman, Sarah 540, 569–581, 581n2
legacy 329–330
Hippocrates 8, 254–255, 347 Lacan, J. 592
Hippolytus 1, 2, 81 La Llorona 9, 585–591, 594, 595, 596n11,
Homer 18, 29, 30, 79, 90, 91, 106, 112n20, 157, 596n13
158, 173, 189, 239, 243, 259, 411, 542, 546, language 17–18, 20, 21, 23–24, 26n22, 32, 44,
549, 576 48, 61, 67, 74–76, 78–79, 83, 84n15, 89, 121,
Homeric king 411, 412, 415, 418n41 128, 144, 170, 220–221, 232n25, 239, 241,
Homeric hymns 17, 22, 24, 25, 27n41, 45 248n67, 257, 262, 269, 275, 311, 388, 464,
human nature 62, 91, 278, 287–288, 294, 428, 501–503, 532, 562
501 gendered 501, 502–503
hylomorphism 360–372, 380, 383 Sophistic 89–97
Hypatia of Alexandria 9, 472, 483, 485, Lévi‑Strauss, Claude 412
489–491, 492, 495–498, 500, 501, 503–505, Loraux, N. 54
505n1 Lorde, A. 601, 606, 607
and gendered soul 497–498 Lucian 103, 319, 320, 322, 327, 437
school 9, 495–498, 500–501, 503–505 Lugones, M. 583, 601, 602, 604, 606, 607, 609
as philosopher 472, 483, 485 Lysicles 105, 110, 111, 146, 147
Iamblichus 65, 426, 430, 431, 461, 468–472, maenads 9, 81, 541–542, 544–550, 551n3,
474, 482–486, 488, 489, 491 551n7
Irigaray, L. 152 Magnus, Albertus 415, 416
Ischomachus 120–122, 129, 130, 135–147, 326, Marcella 485, 492n23
328 Marinella, Lucrezia 343, 516, 518–522
Ismene 593 marriage 19, 35, 66, 69n8, 81–82, 109, 114n52,
121, 123, 142, 145, 146, 147, 211, 221, 227,
Julian 320 232n32, 275, 318, 321, 322, 325, 327–328,
justice 7, 21, 44, 46–47, 49–50, 51–52, 94, 331n15, 331n27, 394, 403n38, 435, 440,
172–173, 230n2, 523, 561 445n5, 446n26, 451, 454, 485, 489, 529–536,
cosmic 21, 428 541, 547, 562, 587, 595n6
divine 63, 65, 174, 595 material and visual culture 162n69, 236, 239,
justice 427 240, 242, 244
and law 428–429 epigraphic 169, 465, 548
and virtues 397–398, 442 funerary inscriptions 254, 256, 257, 263, 464,
465
kalokagathia (fine and good, noble) 119, 120, maternity, mothers 2, 3, 6, 30, 46, 51, 52, 53,
122, 138 60, 61–64, 65, 67, 80, 81, 82, 121, 126, 139,
katamenia (menstrual fluids) 340, 361, 364, 369 148n20, 152, 169, 173, 184, 198n45, 209,
Kierkegaard, Søren 570, 571, 574, 577–581 210, 227, 240–242, 253–256, 264n8, 273, 275,
knowledge 1, 2, 4, 6–8, 10, 96–97, 276, 280, 298n32, 303, 309, 311–313, 325,
in Aristotle 264n7, 345–346, 349, 352–356, 347, 354, 384, 389, 399, 400, 402n14, 403n35,
396, 398, 559, 563 403n37, 403n54, 435–439, 442–444, 451, 483,
in Anna Julia Cooper 555, 561 492n14, 503, 528–530, 532, 533, 534, 537,
in Cynicism 326 537n2, 541–549, 550–551, 555, 556, 558–564,
in Euripides 58, 61, 62, 67, 68; in Aeschylus 566n5, 570, 574, 576, 585, 588–591, 594
and Euripides 74–78, 81 and chora 259–261
in Gorgias 75–76, 78, 83 as material cause, Aristotle’s biology 376–378
in Plato 152, 184, 197n38, 220, 222, 226, 229, Socrates’ mother, Phaenarete 278–280
235, 237, 238, 244, 253–254, 255–256, Marxism 379, 584, 585
264, 536, 537, 572, 573, 576, 577 Maximus of Ephesus 472, 474, 475, 476
in Presocratics 20 Maximus of Tyre 32, 34, 103, 104, 110
Sappho and 32, 35 Medea 9, 159, 168, 169, 174, 395, 566n5,
in Shakespeare’s Tempest 528–530, 534, 537 595n6, 596n8
645
Index
and Morrison’s Beloved and La Llorona in Renaissance querelle des femmes discussions
583–595 514–519
medical, medicine 7, 8, 11n17, 168, 169, 171, in Shakespeare’s Tempest 534, 535
178n16, 183, 220, 256, 279, 290, 296n18, in Skepticism 449–450, 452–458
297n19, 319, 345–356, 375, 415, 502, 512 and slavery 557, 558, 562, 564
Galen 419n59, 502, 506n34, 512 in Stoicism 331n21, 441, 442
Hippocratic texts 8, 254, 255, 264n2, 296n18, Neoplatonism 461–476, 483–491, 492n14,
347, 349, 403n42 492n23, 497, 502, 503–504
Metaneira 18 Nestorius 475, 478n38, 490
Metis 24, 574 Nietzsche, Friedrich 9, 74, 540–544, 546, 547,
midwifery 8, 152, 163n79, 169, 195n6, 227, 551, 570, 571, 574, 577, 579–581, 584, 599,
253–264, 264n8, 277, 278, 279, 280, 354, 604
404 Nussbaum, Martha 158, 162n72, 163n80,
and Aristotle 253–264 330n3, 331n20, 357n9, 401n1, 442, 446n13,
Phanostrate 169 446n29, 506n16
in Plato’s Theaetetus 227, 257–260, 279
misogyny 49–50, 65–68, 136, 138–139, 151–153, Odysseus 24, 82, 240, 242
155, 157, 159, 165–170, 173, 174, 176–177, Okin, Susan Moller 172, 204, 212, 213, 388
298n37, 346, 37–379, 389, 505, 511–512, Omphale 104–107, 111, 112n16
515, 517, 520, 523 Orestes 45–47, 51–53, 491
Moira 277
Moraga, C. 585, 590, 594 Panaetius 441
Morrison, T. 9, 554, 555, 585, 587, 588, 589, Pantheia 118, 119, 126–130
594 Parmenides 7, 21–24, 74, 462, 517
Myia 423–425 Penelope 239, 240, 242, 243, 465, 570
Pericles 63, 69, 80, 82, 105–108, 110, 111, 119,
nature 7, 8, 20–21, 44–46, 47, 49, 50, 55n13, 67, 122, 146, 147, 280
93, 120, 121, 129, 135, 139, 140, 211, 320, Peripetetic philosophers 96, 426, 450, 497, 501,
321, 325 503, 504
in Aristotle 191–194, 330n7, 336–343, 351–352, Perictione 423–425, 427, 428, 430–432
361–365, 366–369, 371, 379–383, 557, 558, Persephone 18, 19, 24, 53, 276
562, 564 Phaedra 1, 69n14
in Aquinas 415, 419n59 Phaenarete 152, 169, 278–280
in Cynicism 320–324, 328, philia (affection, affiliation) 41n13, 119, 126,
and gender 6–7, 120, 121, 129, 135–136, 139, 129, 130, 144, 147, 147, 235, 438, 440; see
140, 142, 143–144, 147, 165, 167–171, also friendship
181, 182–191, 191–194, 197n32, 199n65, Philostratus 108, 109
202–203, 211–213, 217–229, 230n2, Phintys 423–428, 430–432
230n7, 232n25, 287–292, 320–324, 328, de Pizan, Christine 514, 515, 521
330n7, 336–343, 351–352, 361–365, Plato
366–369, 371, 379–383, 415, 449–450, Apology 77, 260–261, 309–310, 312, 574
452–458, 474, 487, 526, 529 Charmides 155
in Harrison, J. E. 541, 542, 544, 546, 548, Cratylus 93
550 Critias 577
Hypatia on 501, 503 Diotima 461, 470
human 62, 91, 225–227, 278, 287–288, 294, education 311, 110, 111, 136–139, 167–169,
428, 501 175, 178n16, 178n22, 182, 188, 190, 194,
kata physin 20–21, 228 197n32, 197n35, 198n42, 198n45, 198n58,
of matter 380–381 202, 203, 205, 208, 210, 212, 213, 214n5,
in Neoplatonism 474, 487 217, 227, 230n4, 233n39, 248n56, 292
nomos/physis 93, 96, 98n16, 135, 139, 140, Gorgias 75, 85n28, 97
211, 320, 321, 325 Laws 155, 190, 202, 203, 207–213, 214n4,
in Plato 165, 167–171, 182–191, 193, 229, 463, 577
197n32, 199n65, 202–203, 211–213, Menexenus 2, 69, 104, 105, 108, 112n13,
217–229, 230n2, 230n7, 232n25, 287–292, 114n58, 152, 173, 462
526, 529 Meno 174, 209, 307, 391, 463, 466, 497, 498,
in Pythagoreanism 428–429, 431 503
646
Index
midwifery 254–255 in Renaissance querelle des femmes discussions

Parmenides 176, 424 511–513, 515–516, 521–523
Phaedo 7, 151–159, 162n73, 173, 197n40, in Shakespeare’s Tempest 528, 531, 534–537
269–271, 310, 312, 474, 575, 579 Socrates 260
Phaedrus 31, 221, 273, 274, 276, 279, 280, in sophistic thinkers 91, 94, 97, 98n12
468, 487, 605 in Stoicism 435–438, 440, 442, 444–445
Philebus 221, 223–224 in W. E. B. DuBois 554, 555–560
on private family 202–214 and weaving 235–246
Protagoras 90, 94, 96–97, 138, 146 and women 104, 106, 110–111
real‑world observation 168–169 Polyaenus 109
Republic: argument 166–168, 427; attitudes Pomeroy, Sarah B. 10n19, 119, 120, 137, 145,
towards women 173–176; first wave of 424, 432, 467
170–173; Republic II 452; Republic III 205, Popper, Karl 176
212; Republic IV 210; Republic V 7–9, 59, Porphyry 469, 470, 482, 485, 487, 489
159; Republic VIII 204, 205, 209; Republic Poseidon 59, 60, 82, 276
IX 513; Republic X 206, 209, 474; pregnancy 8, 256, 260, 262, 276–277, 290, 294,
second wave of 96–97, 172–173; Socrates 353, 355, 548
135–137, 154–155, 202–203, 207, 210, and delivery, laboring 253–264
280; women as guardians 165–177, Priscus, C. Helvidius 443, 486
181–182, 186, 188, 189–190, 192, 203– private family
204, 217–220, 225–227, 483, 513, 523 lawlessness, and variable pleasures and pains
Sophist 8, 221–222, 231n21 207–209
Statesman 8, 220–223, 235–239, 243, 244, materialism and intemperance 205–206
245 in non‑rational desires 206–207
Symposium 8–9, 26n21, 31, 34, 61, 98n10, private property 204–205
109, 120–122, 138, 143, 144, 146, 147, and selfishness 203–204
152, 156, 169, 173, 257, 259, 267, 268, and women 209–213
272, 276, 280, 321, 437, 461–462, 465, Proclus 178n16, 468, 469, 472, 475, 476, 482,
467–468, 470, 475, 484, 513, 570–572, 483, 486–491, 497, 503, 504
574–576, 578, 581, 599–603, 605, 608 Protagoras 76, 77, 89–97, 259, 577, 578
Theaetetus 8, 93–94, 96–97, 152, 172, 227, interest in orthoepeia 94
253–254, 256–264, 278, 279 protos logos (first principle) 167
Timaeus 8, 34, 124, 173, 176, 190, 202, 228, psychoanalytic 585, 592
229, 284–295, 482, 483, 487–488, 497, psychology 192, 207, 391, 512, 523
501, 503, 523, 538n13, 577; on women 8, Pythagoras 30, 65, 255, 423–425, 464, 579
181–195, 202–214 Pythagoreanism 8, 423–433, 463, 477n8, 477n9,
Plotinus 471, 482, 483–485, 487, 489, 490, 491, 486, 502, 506n33, 579
492n14, 492n23, 500, 503, 608 Pythagorean women 8, 423–433, 463, 477n8,
Plutarch 18, 63, 69, 103, 104, 106–110, 263, 477n9, 486
461, 466–468, 472, 475, 489, 490, 518, 547 Pythia 80
politics, political 3, 4, 7–10
in Aeschines 103–111 religion 44–46, 61, 63, 67, 80, 91, 109, 128,
in Aeschylus 44–47, 50, 54 461–467, 469, 474, 476, 489, 490, 501,
in Aristotle 182, 191–193, 194–195, 199n62, 541–543, 544–550, 562–564, 579–580
335–341, 362–363, 388–391, 393–395, Renaissance, European 9
400, 401, 412, 413–415, 554, 557–560 worth of women 511–523
in Anna Julia Cooper 561–565 reproduction
in Cynicism 320, 325, 388–391, 393–395, animal 340–343
400, 401, 402n20 biological 48, 293
decolonial theory, and 584, 585, 588–591, end of 226
594–595 female principle of 347–350
Medea and 586–588, 591–594, 596n8 hierarchical theory 356
in Neoplatonism 483, 485, 486 hylomorphic theory 356
in Plato 159, 169, 174–176, 179n36, 182, natural 374–378, 380
194–195, 211, 229, 231n19, 235–246, sexual 286, 293, 523
253–258, 260, 261, 263, 297n22, 527, 529 teleological account of 8, 356
in Pythagoreanism 424, 427 Republic V
647
Index
argument 166–168, 427 sex work 122, 124, 269–270, 279–280

first wave of 170–173 Shakespeare, William 9, 275, 527, 528, 530, 537
second wave of 96–97, 172–173 male roles in 528
on women 7–9, 59, 159, 173–176 play 530, 537
women as guardians 165–177, 181–182, 186, portrayal 528
188, 189–190, 192, 203–204, 217–220, stage 528
225–227, 483, 513, 523 Tempest 9, 527
rhetoric 60, 65, 68, 69, 74, 75–80, 83n5, 91, 96, Skepticism 2, 8
97, 105, 108, 111, 122, 174, 232n27, 272, modern epistemological skepticism 78
322, 325, 393, 489, 511, 572 Pyrrhonian 449–458
Rhodogyne 104, 107–111, 114n50, 114n53, slavery 4, 5, 6, 50, 119, 142, 172, 190–191,
115n70, 146 314n6, 322, 328, 329–338, 438, 554–565,
rights 3, 175, 244, 416, 435, 439, 564 584–585, 588–595
Rufus Musonius 8, 331n17, 331n20, 403n38, Cooper’s “slave’s science” 561–565
435, 436, 440–445, 445n4 enslaved people, slaves 49, 50, 72n52, 79,
80, 84n23, 120, 122, 127, 128, 131n3,
Sappho of Lesbos 7, 29–30, 31, 33, 169, 608 140, 141, 142, 143, 159, 190–191, 208,
body 33 209, 210, 212, 240, 244, 248n47, 254,
desire 33–34 267–272, 274, 275, 279, 280, 304, 305,
erōs 33–34, 36–40 311, 318, 322, 325, 326, 328, 329, 336,
as erosopher 30 337, 338, 344n6, 396, 402n24, 413, 415,
Tithonus poem 31, 41n11 438, 441, 499, 532, 554–565, 565n5,
Sartre, Jean‑Paul 587, 591 566n6, 566n12, 584–585, 587, 589–595
Schlegel, Friedrich 74, 541, 574, 575 Socrates 135, 137, 462, 474
Semiramis 109, 111, 114n50, 114n52 comedy as emotional care 153–154, 156–157
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 441 comic role 154–156
Senecio, Herennius 443 Cyrenaics 306–313
sex 44, 49 desire for 267, 273
biological 92, 256 dialogues as theater 158
defined 92 Diotima 110, 275, 280
differentiation 284, 287–289 erōs 110, 578
female 228, 294, 522 ethics 574
and gender 92–93, 96, 273 fables and art of philosophy 153–154
Greek tragedy 7 Kofman 9, 569–581
male 171, 181, 182, 184, 186, 212, 220, 519 midwifery 253, 257–260, 263
virtue and 392 misogyny 151
work 122, 124, 269–270, 279–280 philosophy 257, 260
sexism 143, 191, 214, 335–336 Plato 135, 137, 462, 474
female animals in Aristotle’s biology 340–342 politics 260
social role of women 336–340 Republic (Plato) 135–137, 154–155, 202–203,
teleology and normativity 342–343 207, 210, 280
Sextus Empiricus 8, 74, 75, 76, 78, 98n11, 308, and Theodote 144–145
437, 439, 449–458, 458n7, 459n10, 459n15, and women 119–121
459n17 Sophists 74, 75, 77, 222, 244, 259, 471
Adversus Mathematicos 75 orthoepeia 92
sexual identities 94, 96, 97 practice of correction 94–95
sexuality 11n21, 18, 35–40, 44–46, 47, 49, 50, professional activity 90
62, 66, 79, 111, 174, 271–272, 290–291, 321, Protagoras 92, 146
327, 347–349, 351–353, 356, 398, 403n38, tradition 7, 89–97
412–413, 437–439, 512, 533, 542, 551 Sophocles 1, 54, 106, 475, 546
sexual difference 6, 8, 335 Sosipatra of Pergamon 461, 470, 472–474, 476,
anomalies 285–288, 292–295 467–476, 468–469, 470–472, 471, 476, 483,
female animals or 30 486, 488–489, 488–490
in Timaeus 284–295 soul
wandering cause 291–292 and body 275, 280, 285, 286, 288, 291, 360,
wandering womb 289–291 362, 370–371, 489, 499, 501, 518, 557
648
Index
gender 495–498 in guardian class 165–177

generation 289 hostile attitude towards 173–174
human 482 justice 397–398, 523
Stobaeus 63, 65, 66, 430, 431 knowledge (see under knowledge)
Stoicism 8, 319, 327, 328, 329, 395, 403n38, labor 228, 255, 257, 259–261, 262–263
435–445, 450, 457, 496, 497, 500, 501, nature 6–7, 135–136, 140, 143–144, 147, 169,
503–505, 506n16 181–182, 190, 194, 211–212, 217–218,
Stoicism and women 435–445, 497–501 228, 288, 415
Strauss, Leo 122, 124, 165, 174 in Neoplatonic schools 482–491
and politics 104, 106, 110–111
teleology position in family 336 (see under family)
Aristotelian 336, 342–343, 351, 362, 372 public sphere 440 (see under family, politics)
of reproduction 374–384 in Pyrrhonian Skepticism 449–452
Thales 61, 575 Pythagorean 423–432
Thargelia 104, 107–111, 146 sexual pleasure, significance of 347–351
Theano 423–425, 486 social role of 336–340
Theodore of Asine 482, 485, 486, 487, 492n9 and Socrates 119–121
Theodoret 103 virtues 8, 125, 181, 182, 191–194, 198n54,
Theodote 9, 118 255, 264n5, 336–340, 343, 388–401;
and Socrates 144–145 courage 395–397; magnanimity 399;
woman as viewed object 121–126 mildness 399; temperance 398
Theonoe 81 wise women 439–440
therapeia 319, 330n3, 350 worth of 511–523
Thucydides 80, 122 in Zeno’s Republic 436–440
tragedy work 30, 140, 218, 220, 227–228, 554–565,
Euripides 68, 75 584–585; see also slavery
family 7 civic 229
gender 7–9 division of labor 44, 219–220, 222, 226, 227,
Greek 7, 80, 396, 397, 540, 541, 587 318, 322, 453, 555
justice 7 domestic labor 212, 556, 559–560
sex 7 and gender 44, 63, 219–220. 222, 226, 227,
tyrant, tyrannical 50, 105, 106, 111, 112n16, 244, 228, 318, 322, 325–327, 329, 453, 555,
246n13, 267, 308, 320, 442–445, 512–513, 558, 559–560
520, 521, 522, 593 service 245
sex 601
virtue 388, 392, 486
of body 427 Xanthippe 143–144, 151–159, 173
Cynicism 319 Xenophanes 76
and gender 307, 309, 451–452, 455–458 Xenophon 5, 7, 111, 118–130, 135–148, 569–571,
and justice 397–398, 442 574, 576, 577
women’s 8, 125, 181, 182, 191–194, 198n54, Aspasia in 145–147
255, 264n5, 336–340, 343, 388–401 ethics 122, 129, 142
Vlastos, Gregory 155, 168, 175, 230 Memorabilia 9, 120, 122, 129, 142, 173
Oeconomicus 137–141, 325–326
weaving 96, 124, 173, 184–185, 212, 223, 235–246 self, household, city 142–143
wool‑workers, tools 237–241, 237 Symposium 121, 143–144, 321
women true radical 135–136
chorus of 46, 50, 52, 546 Theodote in 118, 121–126, 144–145
in common 436–437
and culture 6, 165 Zeno of Citium 8, 21, 74, 435–441, 445, 462
Cynicism 324 Zeus (god) 2, 17, 19, 21, 24, 25, 45–47, 49, 53,
empirical mistakes 345–346 54, 60, 61, 63, 64, 67, 105, 106, 124, 127,
erōs and 104, 109, 255, 437–439 128, 156, 267, 274, 275, 277, 279, 441, 442,
and gender 306, 424, 427 484, 543, 548–550
649

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The Routledge Handbook of Women

and Ancient Greek Philosophy

Edited by Sara Brill and Catherine McKeen

ISBN: 978-0-367-49871-9 (hbk)

2 The Way Up and Down: Liminal Agency in the Homeric Hymns

3 Sappho of Lesbos and the Time of Erosophy 29

4 Sex, Family, and Chthonic Justice: On the Cosmology of the Choephoroi44

5 Euripides on Epistemic Injustice? Interpreting the Fragments

6 On Not-Believing: A Gorgianic Reading of the Tragic Cassandra 74

7 The Correctness of Grammatical Gender in the Sophistic Tradition 89

8 Eis gynaikos andra: Aeschines on Women, Eros, and Politics 103

9 “By Zeus,” Said Theodote: Women As Interlocutors and Performers

10 Women in Xenophon’s Socratic Works 135

11 Socrates’ Laughing Bodies: Women and Comedy in Plato’s Phaedo151

12 Plato’s Argument for the Inclusion of Women in the Guardian Class:

13 Women, Spirit, and Authority in Plato and Aristotle 181

14 Plato on Women and the Private Family 202

15 Plato’s Scientific Feminism: Collection and Division

16 Weaving Politics in Plato’s Statesman 235

17 Socratic Midwifery 253

18 Divine Names and the Mystery of Diotima 267

19 Sex Difference and What It Means to Be Human in Timaeus 284

20 Cyrenaics on Philosophical Education and Gender 303

21 Wives or Philosophers? Hipparchia and the Cynic Criticism

22 Diagnosing Aristotle’s Sexism 335

23 Women in Ancient Medical Texts as Sources of Knowledge in Aristotle 345

24 Aristotle’s Hylomorphism Reconsidered Through Aristotle’s Account

25 The Role of Females in Aristotle’s Teleology of Reproduction 374

26 Aristotle on Women’s Virtues 388

27 What Is Wrong with Women: Aristotle’s Paradigm of Gender

28 Pythagorean Women: An Example of Female Philosophical Protreptics 423

29 Women in the Household and Public Sphere: Two Contrasting

30 Pyrrhonian Skepticism on Gender and Virtue 449

31 The Reception of Diotima in Later Platonism: Clea, Sosipatra

32 The Place of Women in the Neoplatonic Schools 482

34 The Worth of Women: The Reception of Ancient Debates

35 Philosopher Queens and a Female Prospero(a): Plato’s Republic

36 “Possessed, Magical, and Dangerous to Handle”: Jane Harrison,

37 Women’s Work: Exploring a Tradition of Inquiry with W. E. B.

38 Sarah Kofman: Socratic Lover 569

39 Decolonial Ruminations on a Classic: Medea, Sethe and La Llorona 583

40 Eros, the Elusive? A Dialogue on Plato’s Symposium, Diotima

Further Reading 611

Malin Grahn-Wilder is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She is

Sarah B. K. Greenberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at Cornell Uni-

Chelsea C. Harry is Professor of Philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University, USA.

Emily Hulme is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney,

David M. Johnson is Professor of Classics at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA.

Danielle A. Layne is Professor of Philosophy and Director of MA in Philosophy at Gonzaga

Patricia Marechal is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San

Laura McClure is Halls-Bascom Professor of Classical Literature Studies at the University of

Kalliopi Nikolopoulou is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University at

Katharine R. O’Reilly is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Toronto Metropolitan Univer-

Francesca Pentassuglio is Associate Professor of the History of Ancient Philosophy at the

John Proios is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, USA. He is

Arlene W. Saxonhouse is Caroline Robbins Collegiate Professor of Political Science, Emerita,

I knew that this disease was a disgrace,

attested to women’s intellectual involvement. If any women wrote philosophical works,

2 Current State of Scholarship

The story, then, of ancient Greek ‘exceptionalism,’ whether it is treated as miraculous or

3 A Handbook on Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy

4 Overview of This Volume—Chapter Summaries

Jessica Elbert Decker

17 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-3

3 Sappho of Lesbos and the Time of Erosophy 29

4 Sex, Family, and Chthonic Justice: On the Cosmology of the Choephoroi44

6 On Not-Believing: A Gorgianic Reading of the Tragic Cassandra 74

7 The Correctness of Grammatical Gender in the Sophistic Tradition 89

8 Eis gynaikos andra: Aeschines on Women, Eros, and Politics 103

10 Women in Xenophon’s Socratic Works 135

11 Socrates’ Laughing Bodies: Women and Comedy in Plato’s Phaedo151

13 Women, Spirit, and Authority in Plato and Aristotle 181

14 Plato on Women and the Private Family 202

16 Weaving Politics in Plato’s Statesman 235

17 Socratic Midwifery 253

18 Divine Names and the Mystery of Diotima 267

19 Sex Difference and What It Means to Be Human in Timaeus 284

20 Cyrenaics on Philosophical Education and Gender 303

22 Diagnosing Aristotle’s Sexism 335

23 Women in Ancient Medical Texts as Sources of Knowledge in Aristotle 345

25 The Role of Females in Aristotle’s Teleology of Reproduction 374

26 Aristotle on Women’s Virtues 388

28 Pythagorean Women: An Example of Female Philosophical Protreptics 423

30 Pyrrhonian Skepticism on Gender and Virtue 449

32 The Place of Women in the Neoplatonic Schools 482

38 Sarah Kofman: Socratic Lover 569

39 Decolonial Ruminations on a Classic: Medea, Sethe and La Llorona 583

Further Reading 611

17 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-3

29 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-4

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-5 44

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-6 58

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-7 74

89 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-8

103 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-10

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-11 118

135 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047858-12