Female Nature and Social Structure
We have so far concentrated on the issue of the relationship between Plato’s treatment of women in his ideal and second-best cities, and some of the other important characteristics of the two societies—most notably property and the family system. Now we turn, rather, to an analysis of how Plato argues about women. Does he apply to the case of women the same arguments and logical standards that he applies when discussing the nature of men? More significantly still, does he allow his conclusions about the nature and potential of women to be carried through to their full implications? Finally, what bearing do the answers to these questions have on the very different roles that are prescribed for women in the Republic and the Laws?
The concept of “nature” in Plato is very important and by no means simple. Physis is a much used word in the dialogues, together with the many adjective and verb forms of the root, and an understanding of the complexity of its meaning is crucial for a proper appreciation of Plato’s thought about the relative importance of innate characteristics and environmental factors in the formation of human personality and abilities.
Plato says in the Phaedrus that the determination of the nature of anything is no simple matter. He stresses that we cannot “reflect about the nature of anything” without considering carefully how it acts and can act on other things and they in turn on it. To pursue the inquiry without doing so, he says, would be like the progress of a blind man.1 This means that superficial appearances are most unlikely to indicate accurately the true nature of things; we must look closely at the environment in which they act and are acted upon, before we can presume to know anything about their natures. As we shall see, however, Plato himself, in talking about the nature of women, does not always follow his own advice.
The question of whether innate characteristics or environmental factors were of predominant importance in forming the mature human being was one that concerned the classical Greeks, and the tradition that formed the context of Plato’s thought seems to have laid great stress on the innate, as opposed to the effects of nurture, in explaining how persons become what they become. It is fairly evident, for example, that the great stress of the influential poet, Theognis, was on the immutability of the innate, and the consequent impotence of education to produce intellectual achievement and good character.2 It appears, however, that, more than most commentators have acknowledged, Plato strongly opposed this prevailing emphasis. The Republic and the Laws, at least as much as they are about politics, are about education in the very broadest possible sense of the word.3
One of the problems involved in discovering where Plato stands with regard to the relative weights of innate characteristics and environmental influence is that he does not always use the word physis and its derivatives to mean what is innate. This usage is by no means peculiar to Plato. The Greek word referred both to the “constitution, structure, essence” of a thing, and also to its development, or, as we may say, the way it grows. It had both a static and a dynamic sense.4 Since our tendency, however, is to phrase the question as that of “nature” versus “nurture,” which we regard as mutually exclusive words, Plato’s different use of “nature” can be misleading. Sometimes, very clearly, Plato’s “nature” or “natural” does imply innateness, as, for example, when he argues that “in natural ability the two limbs are almost equally balanced; but we ourselves by habitually using them in a wrong way have made them different.”5 However, in some passages, it is clear that what Plato calls “nature” includes elements that are by no means innate, but have been developed by training and habit. In the Laws, for example, while not making horsemanship compulsory for girls, he says, “But if, as a result of earlier training which has grown into a habit, their nature allows, and does not forbid, girls or maidens to take part, let them do so without blame.”6 Again, in a significant passage in the Republic about how the institutions of the ideal state will make it “roll on like a circle in its growth,” Socrates says, “For sound rearing and education, when they are preserved, produce good natures; and sound natures, in their turn receiving such an education, grow up still better than those before them….”7 If, as these passages clearly imply, the “nature” of a person is “produced” at least in part by his or her environment, we cannot assume that everything Plato says about the natural, or the nature of an individual, is intended to refer to innate qualities. Thus when, for example, he bases his extreme division of labor on the premise that “each of us is naturally not quite like anyone else, but rather differs in his nature,”8 there is nothing in the context—indeed nothing but the presumption that, for Plato, a person’s nature was completely innate—to suggest that he considered the difference between a physician and a carpenter to be wholly, or even predominantly innate. It is clearly a case of overinterpretation for physis to be translated as “nature … from birth,” as Shorey does at Republic 485a.
Certainly, Plato did not ignore the existence of inherited, innate characteristics, or deny their importance. In discussing the involuntariness of moral failure, he says that “all of us who are bad become bad from two causes which are entirely beyond our control,” i.e. “an ill disposition of the body and bad education.”9 Again in the Phaedrus, the juxtaposition of innate qualities with education is clear. Discussing how one becomes a good rhetorician, Socrates says, “Undoubtedly—it is the same as with anything else. If you have an innate capacity for rhetoric, you will become a famous rhetorician, provided you also acquire knowledge and practice, but if you lack any of these three you will be correspondingly unfinished.”10 The inborn capacity is necessary, therefore, but by no means sufficient, to produce a person competent in any art or skill. The inborn germ must be cultivated if it is to flourish. Finally, in the Laws, it is, we are told, because of inadequacies in their “birth, rearing and training”11 that the citizens are adjudged incapable of holding property in common.
But this so far is fairly trivial. Few thinkers have denied totally the importance of either innate or environmental factors. The important thing is to assess where the greater emphasis lies, and there is much evidence in the dialogues that Plato attributed the greater weight to the influence of education and environment. It is undeniable that he places very strong emphasis on the importance of early childhood experience. “Don’t you know,” Socrates asks,
that the beginning is the most important part of every work and that this is especially so with anything young and tender? For at that age it’s most plastic, and each thing assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wishes to give to it.12
This is why the utmost care must be taken over the stories told to the young guardians and, in the Laws, to all the young citizens, and the games they are to play, for it is these very things which “shape their souls.” What a young child “takes into his opinions at that age has a tendency to become hard to eradicate and unchangeable.”13 Since “the starting point of a man’s education sets the course of what follows too,” the young guardians are not permitted to do anything, even in play, that is inappropriate to their status and future function, and the craftsmen, likewise, are to concentrate on learning their crafts from the earliest possible age.14 Later, Socrates warns of the strong effects on personality of excessive concentration on the physical side of education and insufficient on the aesthetic, or the reverse. The former imbalance will overdevelop the spirited part of the individual’s nature, to the point of savagery, whereas the latter will overdevelop the tame and orderly part of the natural disposition, with the result that the personality will be excessively soft. Clearly the message is that environment and training can make some parts of the original potential wither away, at the expense of others which become unhealthily predominant.15
The guardians are originally chosen, we are told, for that rare combination of abilities—the capacity to be gentle to their own but fierce toward enemies.16 However, the detailed and extensive education they are given testifies to the fact that Plato does not consider that even individuals with such special qualities can be expected to develop in the right way without meticulous attention being paid to them. Moreover, when Socrates considers, later, the great difficulty of the tasks and requirements he is imposing on his ruling class, he asserts that they will in fact find them slight, so long as “the one great—or, rather than great, sufficient—thing” is preserved. This great, sufficient thing, however, is not, as some Plato scholars’ emphases would tend to make us believe, the innate qualities of this elite band, but instead, “their education and rearing.” It is “if by being well-educated they become sensible men” that they will recognize the rationality of all the social arrangements that are proposed for them.17
The allegory of the cave confirms the hypothesis that Plato believed nurture to be the far more weighty factor determining the level of human achievement. The whole allegory, after all, is put forward to show the vast gulf between the abilities of the educated and the uneducated to perceive reality. It is not the contrasting picture of two different types of person, distinct from birth, but rather “an image of our nature in its education and want of education.”18 Compared with what they might learn to perceive, men in their present, uneducated condition are as if hidden underground, with nothing but shadows to give them impressions of the world outside.
In the Laws, the predominant stress on education, which includes anything from drinking parties to legislation on all sorts of matters, seems to be even greater than before, in proportion as Plato’s faith in human innate capacities seems to have declined. The citizens of the second-best city are, we are told, but “puppets for the most part,” and as Glenn Morrow has said, “Plato’s legislator eventually stakes all his chances upon his educational program”19 The Athenian asserts in Book I that “well-educated men will prove good men”; the post of director of education is said to be the highest and most important in the state; even foetal environment is added to the periods of early childhood that had been held in the Republic to have such crucial repercussions for subsequent development; and it is stressed that never, even if the population should decline severely, should people whose education has been bad be introduced into the city.20 It is in the Laws, above all, that Plato reveals that the entire social and legal structure of his proposed society is designed to be educative. For despite the fact that man is considered “a tame creature,” Plato warns that “if his training be deficient or bad, he turns out the wildest of all earth’s creatures.”21
The myth of metals has not infrequently been looked to by those who have sought to demonstrate Plato’s primary emphasis on innate factors as determinative of human character and abilities.22 What does not seem to have been recognized by such scholars, however, is that the myth of metals is explicitly said to be a lie. Granted, it is not an ordinary lie, a “true” or “real” lie of the type hated by all gods and men, which leads to “ignorance in the soul of the man who has been lied to.” It is, rather, an example of the lie “in speeches,” which is “not quite an unadulterated lie” and which is not reprehensible, since it can be “useful to human beings as a form of remedy”23 It is, we are told, quite appropriate for the rulers alone to tell this kind of lie, for the benefit of the city as a whole. Given this, the tendency to treat the two “noble lies” that appear at the end of Book III merely as metaphors, used to simplify the truth and make it more graphic, seems to be quite unjustified. Moreover, the basic falsehood involved in both the myths that are told the citizens about their origins is that the differences among the members of the different social classes are wholly innate. So as to rationalize and preserve the hierarchy that is so important for the stability and welfare of his ideal city, Plato proposes that his citizens should forget their rearing and education—which have been so patently discriminatory—should consider them as mere dreams, and believe instead that they were fashioned by a god who made them out of distinctly different quality materials—some of gold, some of silver, and some of iron and bronze. Thus the vast differences among the adult citizens, which are in truth the result both of their innate temperaments and of the vastly different educations they have undergone, are all to be attributed to the former. Thus false propaganda is used to suppress the undesirable urge for advancement. It is the same “noble lie” that has been told to women throughout world history.
Given Plato’s predominant stress on nurture, the argument he employs in Book V of the Republic to demonstrate that the male and female guardians have the same natures, and should therefore be assigned the same tasks, is extremely strange. Up to this point, he has very strongly emphasized the importance of both total environment and specific training for the development of abilities of all kinds. It would seem, then, that the obvious line for him to take would be to assert that, because of the great differences between the contemporary rearing and education of the two sexes, one could make no good estimate of what women’s capacities might turn out to be, once they were given exactly the same rearing as men. Since a person’s nature could be warped in a number of ways by the formation of different types of habits, and the overemphasis on, or neglect of, various aspects of the original potential, there could be no way of knowing how women’s innate abilities compared to those of men, so long as the almost total neglect of female education persisted. If men, as currently educated, could be compared to properly educated men, as cave-dwellers could be compared to those who perceive the real world, then women, confined as they were in contemporary Athens, might analogously be represented as spending their lives inside coffins, without even the benefit of enough light to throw tantalizing shadows on the walls. The contrast between the women of the society in which Plato lived and women as they might be was surely a far greater contrast than that between his fellow Athenian men and those he planned for the ideal city. Again, if the young male guardians could be seriously damaged, as we are told, by hearing of the weaknesses and follies of the male heroes of their ancestral poetry and drama, what kind of self-image could one possibly expect in a girl whose heritage was the view of her sex that prevailed in the same literature?24 Although Plato asserts that a person who is kept in ignorance will have no option but to believe what other people tell him about himself, he does not apply this truth about self-image to the brain-washing to which Greek women had been subjected from Hesiod to Pericles.25
Instead, faced with the monumental task of demonstrating to his skeptical audience that women should be trained to fulfill the same elevated civic functions as men, Plato almost entirely fails to apply his own environmentalism. There is but a single, brief reference to his belief that it is not possible “to use any animal for the same things if you don’t assign it the same rearing and education.”26 Apart from this, the argument he uses is designed to show that there is nothing which women, as a class, do better than men as a class, even in that sphere of things traditionally reserved for women. There is, therefore, nothing which is properly designated as women’s role. Next, however, it is claimed that neither is there any role which belongs particularly to men as a class. Rather, as was indicated when the idea of the division of labor was first introduced, it is persons rather than classes of persons that have natures suited to different arts, and the generalization that men tend to be better than women at all things does not preclude that “many women are better than many men at many things.”27
Plato claims to have demonstrated, by means of the above argument, that, the traditional sex roles being far from either rational or natural,
there is no practice of a city’s governors which belongs to woman because she’s woman, or to man because he’s man; but the natures are scattered alike among both animals; and woman participates according to nature in all practices, and man in all, but in all of them woman is weaker than man.28
Thus, via a rather convoluted route, he has demonstrated to his skeptical listeners something which could certainly have benefited from appeal to his own theory of the central importance of education in the broadest sense, in determining the level of capability reached by different persons. Why does he not make use of the significant fact that women’s potential was unknown, and their current abilities distorted and cramped by their position in society? Perhaps, given Socrates’ extreme hesitation in introducing his outrageous proposals about women, it may be that he chose the less radical line of attack, although it was also the less convincing.29 As Christine Pierce has pointed out, “Plato’s argument may … be construed as an attempt to grant as much as any misogynist could desire, and still show the logical implication to be equal opportunity for both sexes.”30 Perhaps, then, in spite of his own beliefs, Plato decided to have Socrates take the line of least resistance, in order to get women accepted into the guardian class on the same terms as men.
It is quite possible, however, that the reason Plato uses the weaker mode of argument in the Republic is that he was not yet convinced that women, if given the same rearing and education as men, could do just as well, except where sheer physical strength was concerned. In the Laws, however, he is much more forthright on the subject. Not only does he believe the old tales he has heard, but he says:
I know now of my own observation, that there are practically countless myriads of women called Sauromatides, in the district of Pontus, upon whom equally with men is imposed the duty of handling bows and other weapons, as well as horses, and who practice it equally…. Since this state of things can exist, I affirm that the practice which at present prevails in our districts is a most irrational one—namely, that men and women should not all follow the same pursuits with one accord and with all their might.31
It certainly seems that Plato’s faith in the potential abilities of the female sex had been strengthened since he had put into Socrates’ mouth the contorted arguments of Book V of the Republic.
Not surprisingly, then, it is in the Laws that we find the part of the argument that seemed to be so conspicuously missing from Plato’s claims for women in the Republic. Here, in the form of an elaborate metaphor, Plato’s stress on the necessity of education and training for the development of innate potential is applied to the question of the differences between the sexes. Having just described the boys’ early military training, and prescribed that “the girls also, if they agree to it, must share in the lessons, and especially such as relate to the use of arms,” the Athenian asserts that “the view now prevalent regarding these matters … is based on almost universal ignorance.”32 When he is asked what view he means, however, though he has not up to this time said a word about the use of hands and feet, he embarks on a lengthy discussion of the mistaken belief that one hand is naturally, and not just as a result of more use and better training, much stronger and more capable than the other, and then proceeds to extol the virtues of ambidexterity. Glenn Morrow, who probably knows the Laws as well as anyone, considers that there is no doubt at all as to what Plato is really talking about. He says:
The analogy is so apt and obvious—i.e. a state that neglects the training of its women is like a man who trains only his right arm—that Plato evidently feels the discussion of the less controversial matter is the best way of preparing the reader for the acceptance of the more difficult proposal.33
And indeed, a reader who accepts Plato’s hypothesis that righthandedness is simply the result of a one-sided socialization process, and that “in natural ability the two limbs are almost equally balanced,” would be hard put to deny that much of the difference between the performances of the two sexes might be due to the fact that males were educated and trained, whereas females were confined and left untaught. At the very least, the consequence of accepting the validity of the argument about the two hands must be the admission that the vastly different rearings given the two sexes rendered it impossible to know what their respective innate potentials were.
There are several convincing reasons for us to believe that Morrow is right, and that what is apparently a discussion about the use of the limbs is in fact a discussion about the use of men and women. First, as Morrow notes, not only has Plato not mentioned the issue of ambidexterity before; he does not mention it again, either, throughout all his detailed regulations about athletics and military training. Though in all probability he was in favor of it, it certainly was not as important an issue for him as the training of women, which is stressed a number of times.
Second, it is the importance of both hands being trained for military purposes that is stressed, whereas in some other contexts it is considered to be of little import that the left hand plays a minor role.34 As Plato says in the metaphorical passage, “It ought to be considered the correct thing that the man who possesses two sets of limbs, fit both for offensive and defensive action, should, so far as possible, suffer neither of these to go unpractised or untaught.” This statement is closely echoed in a passage a little further on, but this time the subject is the neglect by the state of one of the sexes.35 It is in the sphere of warfare, where strength and numbers are so crucial, that no resources should be allowed to be wasted. In certain other activities, those “of trifling importance,” Plato regarded the division of labor between both hands and sexes to be of slight importance.36
Third, the Greeks’ understanding of the symbolism of Plato’s metaphor would have made it much clearer to them than it is to us. For in the Pythagorean table of opposites, familiar to them, the female was identified with the left, as well as with all sorts of other “sinister” qualities, such as badness and darkness, while the male was identified with the right, as with goodness, light, and other admired qualities.37
Fourth, there are several points in the discussion of the use of the hands where the subject at issue sounds much more like persons than limbs. “There is a vast difference here,” the Athenian says, “between the taught and the untaught, the trained and the untrained warrior.”38 Again, at the end of the passage, the real subject is linked to the analogous one, as we are told that the aim of the children’s education is “that all the boys and girls may be sound of hand and foot, and may in no wise, if possible, get their natures warped by their habits.”39
Finally, Plato had good reason to be more cautious in the Laws about expressing openly his now even more radical beliefs about the potential capabilities of women. Quite apart from the fact that the subjects of discussion are no longer just women, but are also wives, the second-best city is billed, not as “a pattern … in heaven” but as a more modest proposal, far more likely to be realizable.40 However, although he is aware that many of his proposals will be “abhorrent to many,”41 Plato’s Athenian stranger states his intention to “omit no detail of perfect beauty and truth” and only thereafter to decide “how far their proposals are expedient and how much of the legislation is impracticable.”42 Since, because of the family system, as we have seen, a great proportion of the reasoned conclusions about women and their role turn out to be impracticable, it is not surprising that Plato chose to disguise somewhat his most radical statement of them in all their “perfect beauty and truth.” There is, indeed, a great deal of attention paid in the Laws to the dangers of all forms of innovation,43 and innovation in the sphere of sexual roles and types was in all probability one of the most hazardous kinds one might propose. It was one thing to say outrageous things about women in the Republic, and even here Plato’s sensitivity to ridicule had been great. It would have been another thing to say even more revolutionary things about women and their potential in the Laws, an altogether more conservative, traditional, and down-to-earth document, except by introducing them in the form of a metaphor which must have seemed altogether more credible and less offensive to the audience.
By the time he wrote the Laws, then, Plato had come to acknowledge that female human nature was not fairly represented by the women of his own society. Little, indeed, was known about it, though one could derive some impression of what women were capable of achieving from the example of the female warriors who in other societies held their own with the men in battle. However, as we have seen, the statements of general principle about women, in the Laws, are far more radical than the actual details of the society as it is drawn up. Women in fact play a role not at all equal to that of men. Moreover, in the course of the work, Plato makes several pronouncements about the “nature” of women which seem grossly inconsistent with his argument that the nature of a thing—whether it be a woman or a left hand—is unknowable as long as that thing is the recipient of discriminatory training and treatment in general. Thus, for example, in order to explain the necessity of subjecting women to the discipline of public dining, he asserts that women are “by nature” at least twice as bad as men.44 No allowance at all is made, in this condemnation of women as doubly predisposed to evil, for Plato’s own doctrine that moral failure is due to bad training and a wrong environment as well as to temperamental deficiencies—that, as he himself had said, it should be blamed on “the educators rather than the educated.”45 No reference is made to the fact that the education of women and the conditions of their daily lives were far less likely to render them filled with civic virtue and public spirit than were the parallel influences on men.
The most significant passage of all, however, relating to the nature of the female sex, occurs during the discussion of what music is suitable for the two sexes.46 We must keep in mind, here, that “music” connotes the entire aesthetic, as opposed to the physical, aspect of the Greek education, and that, as we saw above, it was regarded by Plato as being of enormous importance for the formation of character.47 The location in the dialogue of the passage we are about to examine is very significant. It falls between, on the one hand, a warning about the perils of innovation, especially in children’s games, dances, and songs, because of the drastic repercussions that such apparently trivial changes can have, and, on the other hand, the clearest statement in the dialogue of Plato’s radical proposals about the equal education and use of women. What the Athenian stranger proposes is that the words and music assigned to the boys and girls must be defined by “the natural differences of the two sexes.” What very soon becomes apparent, however, is that it is not nature, but the legislator, who must “clearly declare wherein the feminine type consists.” His regulation in the matter, moreover, is worded in the following manner: “Now we may affirm that what is noble and of a manly tendency is masculine, while that which inclines rather to decorum and sedateness is to be regarded rather as feminine both in law and in discourse.” Such a pronouncement certainly seems at first to be hard to reconcile with the conclusion of Republic v—that the male and female guardians have “the same nature.” We must, however, take note of the essential fact that the sentence quoted above is not a description of the natural differences between the sexes, but, rather, a prescription about what are “to be regarded” as the natural differences between the sexes, for the purposes of that particular society. It is a ruling about how the two sexes must come to think about themselves and about each other48
It is essential to realize, moreover, that Plato’s prescriptive use of “nature” and “natural” is by no means confined to this passage. Plato’s apparently contradictory conclusions about the nature of women in his two societies become far more intelligible when we appreciate that he tends to use “natural” and “according to nature” much more as a sanction with which to underline and enforce decisions he has already made by other means, than as a standard by which to make decisions in the first place. This point is most clearly demonstrated by analysis of his use of the other animals—free from the taint of human convention or nomos—as an example to hold up before man.
The use of animals as examples of what is natural and therefore good, in comparison with man’s often corrupted patterns of behavior, was certainly popular with the classical Greeks. Homer, as one of his most recent editors has affirmed, “has no superiority complex in relation to the animals, and admires the qualities even of wasps and flies.”49 Again, one of the main themes of Aristophanes’ The Birds is that of how happy and orderly the life of birds is, in comparison to that of men, with all their complex and depraved institutions and customs. Plato, too, makes use of this currently popular mode of persuasion, but, as H. D. Rankin has aptly said, “Plato does not consistently employ a naturalistic basis of comparison between man and other animals in his social thinking; ‘animal analogy’ is more like an auxiliary support for theories already formed.”50 Thus, in the Republic, the guardians are said to be chosen according to criteria applicable to dogs; those with that philosophical nature which combines gentleness with fierceness in the right proportions make the best rulers just as they make the best guard dogs. Later, when Socrates introduces his proposal for the training and use of the female guardians, he refers to the absence of distinct sex roles among these same dogs, in order to persuade his audience of the unnaturalness of such distinction in the human sphere as well. Again, it is the way noble animals are bred that is held up as the example to be followed if the best guardians are to be produced. But, clearly, if such criteria were applied consistently to either of Plato’s two social constructs—the Laws, and especially the Republic—each would fail miserably. For both are incredibly complex artefacts, constructed of conventions arrived at as the best for distinctively human society, via the merciless tests of rational argument. For every institution for which the behavior of animals can be appealed to for support, there are countless proposals which have no conceivable parallel in the animal world. The example of what the animals do is used very selectively indeed.
The area of sexual taboos is another one in which the appeal to the natural behavior of animals is striking, especially in the Laws. The mating of male with male or of female with female is asserted to be contrary not only to man’s human nature, but even to his animal nature, since this type of sexual behavior is quite unknown among animals.51 The practices of birds and many other animals are raised as an example of the “dictates of nature,” on which the citizens should base their sexual standard—that of totally faithful monogamy throughout their lives.52 What Plato does not mention is that, as he must have known, just as many animals mate “promiscuously” as mate “monogamously,” and many practice incest habitually. Those animals which can serve as examples to press a point are appealed to; the others are quietly ignored.
Plato was well aware of the disparities, made famous by Herodotus’ striking findings about funeral rites, amongst the practices that different societies regard as natural, and therefore sacred.53 The line between nomos and physis becomes blurred as the strength and age of conventional taboos increase to the point where any behavior that violates them comes to be regarded as contrary to nature. Plato was clearly well aware of this cultural relativism. At the very place where he argues the unnaturalness of homosexual intercourse, he acknowledges to his Spartan and Cretan listeners that he is “probably … using an argument neither convincing nor in any way consonant with your States.”54 It is almost impossible, he recognizes, to persuade people that one of their customary practices is against the laws of nature. On the other hand, on the subject of public communal dining, the Athenian points out that whereas most peoples would regard such a practice as impossible for either sex, the Spartans, while considering it quite normal for men, regard the same practice as “non-natural” if applied to women.55 Again, in the Republic, Plato reminds Glaucon, who finds the idea of women exercising naked in public quite ludicrous, that it is not long since the Greeks regarded the sight of naked men as not just ridiculous, but shameful, and that many of the barbarians still think this way. Indeed, “compared to what is habitual,” he says, “many of the things now being said would look ridiculous if they were to be done as is said.”56
Thus, Plato frequently exposes what is regarded as natural and necessary as nothing more than alterable convention. However, while he clearly saw that even those customs which were supposedly sanctioned by “the dictates of nature” were in fact variable from one culture to another, and were thus in fact matters of nomos rather than, as claimed, physis, Plato was very much aware of the strength of such taboos, and of their consequent use to the legislator. Incest was a prime example. Plato remarks in the Laws that most people never think of committing incest, since they have heard it so frequently condemned as severely shameful and unforgivable,57 and he proposes that the same weapon of universally held public opinion should be utilized against other kinds of sexual irregularity, such as homosexuality and extramarital intercourse, which the legislator has concluded are antagonistic to the welfare and virtue of the people. The same kind of sanction is used to support the guardians’ mating system. Although the system has clearly been constructed for basically utilitarian, eugenic reasons, it is to be regarded by all the citizens as “sacred in the highest possible degree.”58
It is apparent from the total context of the Platonic dialogues that the rational, not the natural, is their author’s central standard. Nevertheless, Plato is quite ready to use the powerful sanction of nature, in cases where it is applicable, in order to add weight to the conclusions he has reached by means of rational argument. What is “natural” is, in fact, what the philosophic ruler, judging what customs and institutions are best for the city, tells its citizens is natural. The application of this use of the natural to the subject of women is not only interesting within the context of Plato’s political philosophy, but also important because of the continued use of very similar reasoning, though far less consciously, by others since Plato who have written on the same subject.
Plato knew from his own observation that there is no such fixed quality as female human nature. He must have looked at the Athenian and the Spartan women, and seen two considerably different kinds of female nature; he knew in addition that Amazons and Sarmatian women presented types in even sharper contrast to that with which his audience was accustomed. As his Athenian stranger remarks in criticism of the supposedly trained Spartan women, the Sarmatian women “would seem like men beside them.”59 Thus female nature is in fact what different societies have made of it. Not only was Plato well aware of this; the very different natures bestowed upon women in his own two social constructs must be seen as his continuation of this traditional treatment of the female sex.
In the Republic, because the abolition of property and the family for the guardian class entails the abolition of woman’s traditional sphere, the natural difference between the sexes is reduced to that of their roles in procreation. Since the nature of the women of this class is declared to be the same as that of the men, the radical proposal follows that their educations and life styles are to be identical, accordingly. Plato has prescribed an androgynous character for all the guardians; both male and female are to be courageous and gentle, and both, because of their education and continued fellowship, will equally hold precious the good of the entire community. For the purposes of this society, therefore, the abolition of traditional sex roles is declared to be far more in accordance with nature than is the conventional adherence to them. In the Laws, by contrast, the reinstatement of property requires monogamy and private households, which restores women to their role of “private wives” and all that this entails. Although his general statements about women’s potential, therefore, are considerably stronger here than in the Republic, Plato cannot, because of the economic and social structure he has prescribed, carry out to any significant extent the revolutionizing of woman’s role that would seem to follow logically from such beliefs. In this society, the “nature” of woman must be different from the nature of man. She must be pure and respectable, as befits a private wife who is to ensure the legitimacy of the property owner’s heir, while he is to retain the noble and courageous qualities which are far closer to those of the ideal guardian type. In addition, the women, who because of their prescribed role within the private household will be less inclined to civic virtue than the men, must be especially well disciplined because of this supposedly “natural” moral inferiority of the female sex. The society’s needs dictate that a supposedly “natural” evil in women—which is presumably due to the fact that she is oriented toward the private sphere—be transformed into a supposedly “natural” feminine purity.
It has become clear, then, that Plato does not apply consistently to women the same arguments he applies when discussing the nature of men. In the Republic, in spite of revolutionary proposals regarding the female guardians, he fails to bring into play his beliefs in the power of socialization and education, thereby making his unique argument about women’s potential less forceful than it might have been. In the Laws, on the other hand, having come to the radical conclusions about women’s undeveloped capacities that he expresses in the form of the ambidexterity metaphor, he fails to follow through on these conclusions. The reason is clearly the reinstatement of the family and therefore of the role of wife—the transformation of women back into the appendages and the private property of men. The striking difference between the roles of women in the Republic and the Laws, then, is not because Plato changed his beliefs about the nature and capacities of women. To the contrary, his convictions appear to have changed in exactly the opposite way. The difference is due to the fact that private property and the family were abolished in the earlier dialogue and were reinstated in the latter. When woman is once again perceived as the privately owned appendage of a man, when the family and its needs define her function, the socialization and regulation prescribed for her must ensure that her “nature” is formed and preserved in accordance with this role.