The Republic is not thought of as a Platonic dialogue associated with hunting, any more than it is considered among the dialogues concerned with eros, that ever-fascinating quality of soul; yet when one begins to look around, hunting has an intriguing place and a role in the evening’s narrative, one that goes far beyond merely being the symbol of the partnership of the male and female guardians in Book V. The troops of hunters who join the newly feverish city in speech in Book II, join alongside the first women who are explicitly mentioned in that inventive construction, the courtesans and the nurses (373a–c); also, the definition of justice is introduced in Book IV as the result of a kind of playful hunt (432b), while even the Good itself is spoken of as the object of pursuit (505d). The dramatic occasion for the evening’s conversation is the visit to the festival of the Thracian hunting goddess Bendis; in fact, hunting and women quite frequently show up together in the course of the conversation—Atalanta, the famous huntress and athlete whom Xenophon calls “the greatest match (γάμων) of her age,” makes a cameo in the Myth of Er.1 Now, hunting is well-known as a Platonic image of desire-driven, erotic philosophy; in the previous chapter, I discussed how despite the favored role played by the thumos in the dialogue, hunting nevertheless is a reminder of what Socrates calls “true erotic philosophy” (499b) in the Republic. In what follows, I will argue that the hunt represents a vital aspect of Socrates’ overall project for philosophy in the work as a whole, as well as a key trope in his thoughts about the women’s law.
With the opening moments of the dialogue christened by the raucous festival of the hunting goddess Bendis in the port town of Piraeus, women appear more often than not in the Republic in their notoriously intemperate guise. The common Greek report, contrary to the received wisdom of our last few centuries, was that the female sex was rather more properly intemperate, the polite Greek way of saying rather more lustful, than the male, of which state of affairs Socrates’ emendations to Homer make frequent reference. The problem with all this is, that women’s over-wild passions make them only dubiously tamable as citizens; Socrates’ initial attempts at lawgiving reflect this, for women are absent from the first version of the city in speech, the “most necessary” version, and arrive as part of the luxuries and accommodations in the second, more “feverish” incarnation. But while the feverish city receives Socratic medicine for temperance, courage, and justice, women receive no special law, despite continual reference to their intemperance. Now, when Socrates is rounding off the laws for this version, he does briefly let drop that women will be held in common as the things of friends are (423e), a trivial remark as Adeimantus later notes (449c); for to be held in common by others precisely does not solve the problem of the untamed inner constitution of women themselves.
When a question about this business of “in common” arises, Socrates remarks he will have to start the conversation again, from the beginning, and well might he have to; his reply sets up women in the guardian class and rewrites the guardians as the pursuers of philosophy. The notion of justice, law, and education as the taming, gentling force to men’s savagery and wildness is a frequent contrast in the Republic; by demanding that the best of the women be educated and come to have areté, Socrates likewise attempts to tame the previously untamed genos of women—an attempt not previously made by Greek law, with any real success.2 Socrates’ lawgiving certainly possesses ambition. But the trouble is, the hallmark of women’s inclusion in Socratic areté is their partnership in the common hunt, an activity that only becomes part of the guardians’ education when female guardians come on the scene, and is a sign of Socrates’ plans for the guardians’ new education in philosophy. To tame as hunters is only ambiguously to tame; rather, it is a sign of eros redirected. In his image of men and women hunting together, Socrates figures guardians who will pursue the truth and the Good; rather than being some appendage to the argument, women and their desires are what make sense of the turn to philosophy in Book V.
BENDIS, THE INTEMPERATE ARTEMIS
The Thracian goddess Bendis is the motive force for Socrates and Glaucon’s visit to the Piraeus in early summer; as such, she may be fairly called the patroness of the dialogue. This should be a familiar Platonic construction: there is often some tantalizing mythological reference at the beginning of a work in this way; the Theages, for instance, is conducted in the portico of Zeus the Savior, where Theages admits his desire to be a god, while the Phaedo opens with the tribute Athens pays to the Minotaur of the famous labyrinth, where Socrates produces a maze of speeches about the soul. Likewise, considering that Atalanta, herself a follower of Bendis’ Grecian counterpart Artemis, is seen to choose the life of an athletic man in the Myth of Er (620b), which forms the tail end of the evening, it seems that lady huntresses bookend the work; the lady hunting guardians in the central Book V complete the trio. Bendis, however, has historically been a less obvious patron to the Republic’s readers, and so she has been unjustly left out of most previous deliberations about the work as whole, perhaps because her special attributes as an erotic huntress seem outwardly so at odds with our own dialogue’s more political content. Much has been made of the newness of her festival, which indeed is significant, but this has been stressed at the expense of her specific mythological character, and what that character opens up for us in Plato’s dramatic representation.
Who was Bendis? She was one of the most important deities worshipped by Thrace, a nation considered by the Athenians to be rather rural, as well as rather lusty; Herodotus reports that they let their young women couple with whom they will.3 Plato provides us with a representative example of lusty Thracian women in the Republic, Book X: in the Myth of Er, Orpheus wishes to be a swan, out his hatred of the female genos; traditionally, the death of Orpheus was brought about by the women of Thrace who were angry that his music had drawn their men away from them.4 The Athenians were in general fascinated with the Thracians; they were also quite interested in securing the Thracians’ political alliance; Thrace was, in fact, the most well-known of foreign nations to the Athenians, a sort of Other and Same at once, not unlike, perhaps, Britain’s sense of colonial India as other and yet one’s own.5 In the Thracian-and-Athenian cult of Bendis in Athens, the huntress Bendis was worshipped as of the moon; she is pictured in Thracian and Attic religious art wearing a fox skin cap and carrying two spears, accompanied by dogs or deer.6 The Greeks, in their practice of analogizing between their own deities and foreign ones, known as interpretatio Graeca, considered her as a kind of Artemis; this is how Herodotus describes Bendis, remarking that the Thracians worshipped only Ares, Dionysius, and Artemis.7 The Athenians constructed Bendis’ new temple on the same hill as that of Artemis Mounichia; Artemis’ priestesses considered her as part of their spiritual purview, and Athens granted its legal and moral support.8
Bendis, however, is different from Artemis in certain key respects; for one, she was certainly not chaste. In Athenian iconography, a free Thracian woman was a symbol of a wild, warlike, lusty female, while Artemis was the standard-bearer for the maidenhood of young girls.9 The Athenians, of course, in their cheerful pantheism, saw no holy contradiction with these two ladies sharing a hill. Indeed, the properly Greek Artemis used to resemble Bendis’ earthier aspect; she is one of the oldest of the gods the Greeks worshipped in the classical period. Walter Burkert has this to say: “Artemis . . . is honored in a very ancient way where the hunter hangs the horns and skin of his prey on a tree or else on special, club-shaped pillars. Without doubt, customs of this kind, as well as the very idea of a Mistress of the Animals, go back to the Paleolithic.”10 By contrast, Artemis’ virginity was of much more recent introduction.11 In any case, both Artemis and Bendis were said to be keepers of the wild beasts, and in charge of the judicious destruction of the beasts by hunters; they are both by nature not town dwellers, who rather live in the wild, the privacy of the ἐρήμος (lonely, isolated) forest. As Homer has it, “Artemis of the wilderness, lady of wild beasts . . . Zeus has made you a lion among women . . . you hunt down the ravening beasts in the mountains and deer of the wilds.”12 It’s possible that part of Bendis’ appeal to the Athenians would be her resonance with the earlier, lustier, and fertile version of the goddess they were used to worshipping; Artemis’ temple at Brauron, to where some Athenian girls made pilgrimages to mark the end of girlhood, has a connection with the wilder worship of the Piraeus’ Artemis Mounichia.13 Instead of representing something wholly foreign, Bendis offers something of nostalgia for the wild that the urbane Athenians might feel the lack of.
It’s this sort of goddess whom Socrates goes to see, as seen in the famous opening line of the Republic: “I went down yesterday into the Piraeus with Glaucon son of Ariston to offer prayers to the goddess (Κατέβην χθὲς εἰς Πειραιᾶ μετὰ Γλαύκωνος τοῦ Ἀρίστωνος προσευξόμενός τε τῇ θεῷ, 327a).” The prayers to Bendis are a central motive for Socrates’ presence: they are the first reason he gives; this detail is separated from his downward action only by the presence of Glaucon’s name. It’s only after speaking of his prayers that he mentions his interest in viewing the Thracian and Athenian processions. Furthermore only after he and Glaucon have both prayed and beheld (προσευξάμενοι δὲ καὶ θεωρήσαντες, 327b), do they depart from the town. Although it has been argued otherwise elsewhere, I take this to mean that Socrates’ homage to Bendis is at least as strong as his desire to behold the novelty of the worship.14 I also suspect that too much weight has been given to Athens’ first Bendidea as novelty, and therefore as a sign of moral or political decay. The Greeks’ notions of what was sacred were deeply rooted in their polytheism, which gives honor to many different kinds of divinity. As Robert Garland describes in Introducing New Gods, the nature of that polytheism, whether as expressed in a democratic constitution or not, was such that aspects of gods and goddesses were constantly going in and out of favor; the entrance of a new deity or cult, or the neglect of an old one, was an ordinary occurrence in the life of a city; indeed, perhaps the danger is for what Garland describes as “the heavy burden of choice [polytheism] imposes upon its subscribers” to be what appears decadent to the monotheistic observer.15 Furthermore, Bendis was already known to Athens before the first Athenian Bendidea; the reader witnesses only her official introduction in the Republic, the civic benediction of an already-felt presence.16 It’s not the addition alone, therefore, that can be a sign of decay; it’s the specific character of what is newly being honored that would make the change be for better or worse. While, as Garland points out, changes in religious practices are always a feast for political rhetoric, a truly problematic religious novelty for the Athenians, for instance, would be if they were to stop giving the most honor to Athena and give it to Poseidon instead; indeed, the rise of Athena’s worship tells the real tale of religious innovation in Athens.17 This being said, there’s still something potentially decadent about the urbane, citified among the Athenians being excited to worship the wilder, tantalizingly more erotic Bendis: for us, it would be the sort of willful worship of the chthonic by the hopelessly citified that is a particularly tired form of romanticism; but this is not democratic Athens’ problem. In any case, such a festival dedicated to erotic hunting might well be one at which we discover Socrates, the friend of eros, in prayer; it also makes sense that his erotic and spirited young friend, Glaucon, who hunts, might be willing to accompany him.
Garland describes the introduction of a new deity as “a moment of supreme tension and drama in the life of the community.”18 It is this kind of highly charged focus on the goddess’ attributes and prerogatives as differently arranged and desirable that sets the dramatic atmosphere at the beginning of the Republic; it’s the atmosphere of a wild hunt, where horse races with torches will take place as the evening grows wilder. While it has been well established that Polemarchus’ playful use of force drags Socrates off to Cephalus’ house, we can now add this contrast: Socrates is forced away from a celebration of the hunt that takes place outside of Athens proper, in order to participate in the neighborly, civic duty of paying a visit to Cephalus.19 When, half an hour later, Socrates revolts from the etiquette of conversation, doing the business of philosophy almost rudely, and asks his compulsory host what justice really is, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that the wilder activities of the earlier evening may have contributed to his rebellious mood. Indeed, it’s worth noting that Socrates’ revolt here is an instance of what I spoke of in chapter 1, the impatience often evinced by lovers of philosophy at the plodding of the obtuse; or in Cephalus’ specific case, at the sharp contrast between the urbane satisfaction of the arms dealer Cephalus with his comfortable old age despite his lingering dread of the future, and the poverty of his notions of justice, which center in paying off the gods (331b); the atmosphere of rather lawless revelry gives Socrates a cover for pushing the conversation past the bounds of politeness.
In any case, the contrast of wildness to tame, city to forest and mountain, first introduced by Socrates’ attendance at the festival of Bendis, remains in force throughout the dialogue; it marks the contrast between the dogs who are tame with their friends and harsh to their enemies (375c); music tames while too much gymnastics leaves one too savage (ἄγριον, 410d). In a crude sense, it stands as the contrast between injustice and justice; and the question of how to educate men who are tame never departs.
The earliest and most obvious representative of the wild, in the form of the wild beast, is of course Thrasymachus, whose dramatic interruption occurs only another half hour into the evening. Thrasymachus is more than merely spirited, if Glaucon is our representative of spirit; Thrasymachus is properly wild: “twisting himself up like a wild beast (qhrίon), he hurled himself upon us as if to tear us apart” (336b). Thrasymachus gleefully attempts to sport with all the careful civic pieties about justice with his bold account of justice as the advantage of the stronger; his wildness is an assertion of the strength of the law of the jungle: that the laws of cities are nothing but the law of the jungle. Thrasymachus’ account willfully considers civic strength as merely wild. He is contemptuous of those who are merely sheep (343b–c), and accuses Socrates of needing the services of a nursemaid (343a), that profession which wild animals need none of. Unfortunately for his account and for his wish for repute (338a), Thrasymachus is capable of blushing (350d); he couldn’t sustain his wildness. Socrates exploits his hidden appreciation of skill and even excellence, and so can effect something that has the appearance of taming.20 Socrates describes the change as the taming or gentling of Thrasymachus, and claims he has stopped being savage (354a); Glaucon offers more suspicion of the change, describing Thrasymachus’ putative taming as if Socrates had charmed a snake (358b). In fact, Thrasymachus is not gentled until he participates by voting in the request for Socrates to say more about women and children in Book V; only then is he a member of the dialogic city.21
The action of Socrates in Book I is more like a victory than a true taming.22 Socrates hasn’t said enough to make Thrasymachus ready to leave the house, but he has pinned him in a corner. Recall that Artemis is the goddess in charge of wild beasts: her choice decides when to kill them, or when to spare them; in truth, Socrates has run Thrasymachus to earth, though he spares his life. Thrasymachus marks the irony of Socrates’ description of the action with his final sarcastic remark of Book I: “let this have been your hearth welcome at the Bendidea” (354a); it’s ironic that at Bendis’ wild festival, Socrates celebrates by pretending to tame Thrasymachus; he’s done the opposite of what is expected, and what he claims to have done he has not. Indeed, Socrates evinces his own strength by this action; not all of the arguments he uses fight fair.23
But Thrasymachus is not the only wild beast to make an appearance; in many ways, the question of what to do about wildness is the question of the Republic. Wildness is one of Socrates’ ways of speaking about the problem of injustice; not that wildness is injustice, but it represents something like the state of man without education. Socrates is always trying to find the education that will make his guardians gentle or tame; his guardian dogs in Book II succeed partially because they will only be savage to strangers, and not to the citizens; music will be a primary agent of their gentling (410d). Socrates’ concern over the dangers of eros is connected with the difficulties of wildness; in the prelude to his discussion of the perfectly unjust tyrant in Book IX, he speaks of the “terrible, wild (ἄγριον), lawless form of desires present in each person (572b).” Indeed, the difficulty involved in taming Thrasymachus reminds us that the possibility of taming men at all is an open Platonic question; Socrates is in general more sanguine than the Eleatic Stranger, who questions whether man can be said to be the tame animal at all (Sophist 222b). But wildness as a force has its different inflections; the problem of wildness runs deeper than its manifestation as injustice. The wildness of the beasts that the hunt pursues is more radical a quality than what rebels, outlaws, or invading foreigners possess; the truly wild do not pay the city the compliment of organized attack. One thinks of Gilgamesh’s companion Enkidu, who ran with the beasts until specifically tempted by beer and a lady courtesan to finally try out for the first time the ancient city of Babylon.24 Such wildness is indifferent to civic concerns; and the problem is that this remains always a human possibility, even for humans who dwell within the city. Thrasymachus, by contrast, blushed in part because he was not indifferent to men’s opinion; Socrates’ image of him as wild beast is putting it a little strong. In Republic I, where wild Thrasymachus manifests his capacity for shame and Socrates displays his overmastering strength, the problem of wildness is particularly vexed; to gain the status of a dog with philosophic qualities, in this light, is rather a favorable working position.
COURTESANS, HUNTERS, AND THE PURIFICATION OF THE FEVERED CITY
All in all it seems that the patroness of the dialogue Bendis has a natural connection to Book I, both symbolically and narratively; nor does the connection stop there. Not much narrative time passes between Socrates’ prayers at the hunting festival, and his inclusion of hunters in the feverish version of the city; in Book II, Socrates is bringing the hunters back, not introducing them out of context for the first time. Now, in order to see the force of the presence of hunters in the second version of the city in speech, some backstory is required. After the theatrics of Book I, Glaucon and Adeimantus famously insist Socrates has not at all proved the superiority of justice to injustice, as he claimed; they demand that he truly persuade them of this, by showing what justice is in and of itself, without regard for reward or punishment. They help the argument along by making speeches in praise of the life of injustice, the better to set the problem for Socrates to solve; Glaucon in particular is concerned that our native pleonexia, our innate desire for more, will lead to injustice. It is in response to these concerns that Socrates sets out to construct a city in speech, wherein justice will appear the more clearly on the large scale.
But when Socrates first sets out to construct a city in speech, he begins by constructing a comically limited “most necessary” city, consisting of “four or five men (ἀνδρῶν, 369d)”; he plays up the poverty of such a city, waxing poetic about the idyllic simplicity of the feast of nuts and berries that his agriculture-based menfolk will dine on, seated on the ground heaped well with rushes, in pleasant fellowship with one another.25 Glaucon does what Socrates has set him up for: he revolts from this sort of living, calling it a city fit only for pigs; he demands they construct a city more recognizable to those of us who are used to the fruits of civilization, with couches and tables to eat at like people do. While Socrates points out that such a city will be full of indigestion, “feverish” with its new luxuries, he nevertheless commends Glaucon for his interruption, noting that here after all, injustice and justice itself will be easier to spot. In his discussion of this crucial transition, Carl Page writes that only in such a city does our eros look possible to satisfy or even possible: “The fevered city is manifestly a more adequate portrayal of the phenomena of civilized political life, because it acknowledges the forces of spirit, imagination, and erotic desire.”26 In Glaucon’s revealing image, it is pigs that live the life of necessity: beasts who are neither fully wild nor fully human; a city of pigs, in this light, looks all too tame: the men there were simply gentle animals, equally without savagery or urbanity, eating vegetables both wild and cultivated (372d). It would be tempting to consider man’s movement from the natural realm to the civilized realm as a strict, even progression from black to white, but Plato paints a more complicated picture: cities in their fevered flourishing display more of man’s original wildness than the relative poverty of purely agricultural life; cities with couches and relishes appear as an attempt to give life to our desire without end as much as they give the form of gentleness to it.27
In the previous chapter, I discussed Socrates’ qualifier to his list of the new professions that will form the next incarnation of the city in speech, things that are in the city beyond the necessary, and the oddity and yet the sense of including hunting on this list. In the feverish city, hunting is practiced for its own sake as the free rehearsal of the pursuit of desire; this is what makes it such an excellent image of philosophy. Socrates pointedly includes hunting in the list of professions that will form the city that Glaucon the hunter finds satisfying to his pleonexia: Socrates seeks to satisfy his companion at the hunting festival with the promise of hunting in the beautiful city. Hunters were absent from the city of piggish men because there were no real men to hunt animals: hunting as an activity reifies the separation of the purportedly tame citizens from the wild animals outside.28 On this logic, hunting is a symbol of civilization as such, and the living tension between wildness and tameness that a city embodies.
Hunting does not come back into the dialogic city without Socrates first bringing in loose women, the hetaeras or courtesans; these arrive a few lines before the hunters do, at 373a. Nurses and nursemaids, and those who craft women’s adornment arrive after the hunters, at 373b. It’s striking that hunting and women make an appearance in Book II as part of the same action; this is precisely the same conjunction that Socrates makes when in Book V he draws women into the guardian class and has them hunt along with the men: in both cases women and hunting arrive in the same breath. Why do women first come into the dialogue as members of the fevered city, and why do they do so only as courtesans and nurses? And why is their presence coordinated with the presence of hunting?
That women aren’t present in the city of pigs is yet another humorous deficiency of the most necessary city, for it lacks what’s necessary for its posterity. In the founding of the fevered city, Socrates makes the presence of women felt explicitly in the conversation for the first time. While Socrates’ action in Book V is to draw the women into a public role in the city, in Book II he settles for something easier. Not departing from custom, Socrates places women in certain well-established professions of theirs, highlighting two in particular, nurses and prostitutes; in other words, those women who give other women some relief from the necessary tasks of child-raising, and those women who cultivate the eros of men. While the presence of women in the fevered city at all reminds one of the city’s dependence on desire, the courtesans represent an appreciation of eros as such in the city that was lacking before. Courtesans, Socrates’ polite term for this large genos made up of women of quite various status, the courtesans themselves being paradigmatically foreigners, operate outside of the civic order and its reliance on sexual desire as a vehicle for child-making. Like hunting, an activity that in its imitation of a natural activity rises to an expression of freedom when conscious, courtesans represent a certain freedom of eros; something more like desire for its own sake. The significance of nurses, who were either free or enslaved foreigners or hired natives is initially more obscure, but consider: nurses deal with the results of eros, but at a remove; they allow the child-bearing consequences of eros to be softened, though sometimes at the expense of the nurses’ own eros.29 In a sense, not only courtesans, but nurses as well allow greater freedom for eros. Again, there are no virgins or matrons mentioned at this point, just as there is still silence on the question of marriage; no women whose eros is commanded by the marriage laws of the city. At this point in the dialogue, women’s eros remains entirely outside the official law.
In Book II, both women and hunting stand connected with eros, and both make a contrast to tame, orderly life within the city. Hunters must hunt outside of the city, and courtesans and nurses, hired or otherwise enchained privately by men or women, care for eros or its consequences without proper civic regulation. Both of these aspects are united in the character of Bendis, the huntress known for the freedom of her favors.30 Nor are nurses removed from this conjunction: Athenians favored Thracian women as wet nurses, identifiable in paintings as such by their native dress and their tattoos.31 Despite the urbanity of the feverish city, Socrates is associating its luxuries and comforts with Thrace. Socrates has not brought in just any women into the fevered city, but he has brought in Bendidean women, whose eros is wild and fertile as the Thracian goddess is wild—as wild, indeed, as eros itself. But crucially, the Thracian element dramatizes what is the case for all women under Greek nomos, from courtesans to housewives, from foreigners to natives, from the free to the enchained: all live unregulated in a kind of artificial wilderness, in lawless privacy in the city, outside of the regulating force of the public eye of thumotic recognition. John Gould dramatizes this strange state in these terms: “[the law] defines the woman as incapable of a self-determined act, as almost in law an un-person, outside the limits of those who constitute society’s responsible and representative agents . . . . women stand ‘outside’ society, yet are essential to it.”32 For Socrates, this is true of every woman in Athens; and as the Athenian Stranger opines, it applies to the laws of Sparta and Crete as well (805d). Women’s presence is felt and ritualized, but somehow unratified; they do not inhabit the polity as public citizens, even the citizen wives.
Now, in the course of the conversation, Socrates does not allow the feverish city to run its course for very long. With the help of Adeimantus and Glaucon, Socrates immediately sets out to cure the fevered city of its ills with strong medicine: the cure is described as a purification (399e). Once Glaucon has agreed to the figure of the rulers of dogs that guard, Socrates asks if they ought to consider how these rulers will be educated. Glaucon does not respond to this question: instead, his brother Adeimantus does. Although Adeimantus’ character is not exhaustively described by the adjective “austere,” it’s not unreasonable that he has this reputation among the commentators.33 He doesn’t seem to have the same outward erotic commitments that Glaucon does; while another important preoccupation of his is a concern over the purity and the existence of the gods (366a–b).34 This is the sort of person who becomes Socrates’ first partner in the purification (399e): the musical education of the guardians is the first long regulatory subject, and the stories and poems about the gods will be changed to reflect the virtues desired for the guardians (395c). Nurses will have to watch their words, and be persuaded by the lawgiver to tell only good stories (377c, 381e); even Glaucon at this point is willing to blame men who wish for Corinthian mistresses at the expense of their health (404d). By this purge, the rowdy qualities of the fevered city will be quieted: the instruments of the sunlit, orderly Apollo are to be preferred to Marsyas the lascivious satyr (399e). All of this purgative medicine prepares the way for the eventual disclosure of the internal justice of the soul, unveiled in Book IV from 441c to 444a, where the desires are to be under the eye of the thumos at the behest of reason; this fundamental structure of the soul and city is made possible by the abstraction from eros, and its tacit devaluation by the pressing civic concerns of healing the city.35 The true health of the soul, as Socrates puts it at this point in the dialogue, is justice (444d), and justice is likewise the true cure to the city’s fever. At this point in the dialogue, eros and the quasi-philosophical rule of reason are completely at odds.36
Despite all this curative work, however, this deep problem remains: women remain uncured, because they are not recipients of the medicinal education, in any class: they remain part of all classes and so classless, and thus untouched by any external justice, let alone the internal kind. The guardians, all men at this point, are specifically abjured by Socrates not to imitate a woman: “either a young woman or an older one, or one who’s giving her husband a tongue-lashing; or one who’s wrangling with the gods and making much of herself because she imagines herself to be happy; or one who’s caught up in misfortune, clinging to her sorrow and her lamentation. And as for one who’s sick or in love (ἐρῶσαν) or in labor, we’ll be far from needing them.” (395d–e). As I noted in chapter 2, Adeimantus is less friendly to women’s putative vices or virtues than his brother; he is also seen blaming nagging women as a tribe in Book VIII (549e), and so it makes sense that his medicine includes this contrast: his idea of virtue is the opposite of a woman in misfortune, childbirth, or in love. Of course, the money-making and the auxiliary classes won’t have such medicinal education either, but need only to be kept in check by the guardians. But the guardians will have to consort with some women in order to perpetuate their class, and if merely the poetry they see and hear will be a problem, so much the more the human beings with whom they consult on matters of eros: and here the pervasiveness of the political problem that women pose starts to become recognizable.
I argued in chapter 1, following the Athenian Stranger’s remarks in the Laws, that to leave the women unregulated by the law is a grave oversight of the lawgiver.37 The Stranger goes on to say that women are not merely half of the problem, but twice as much a problem as men, because the disorder of their passions—one might say, their native injustice—is greater than men’s (781b). Not only is the eros that men have for women a political problem, but the eros of women themselves poses a still greater problem: and it’s the latter, we should note, that the law specifically leaves untouched. Childbirth, it should be noted, does not solve the problem of women’s eros; it’s merely a visible sign of the problem. Now, Socrates has plenty of laws to regulate men’s eros: he even recommends in Book III that men’s tendency to commit outrages (ἁπαργάς) against women, one of the Greek ways of speaking of rape, should not make a part of the stories of the heroes who have the respect of the polis—quite a change from ordinary Greek storytelling (391d). But Socrates has no corresponding regulation for women’s eros at this point, beyond shunning it as a model for men. Indeed, women, along with children, slaves, and free people, are Socrates’ example for the intemperate element in the city in speech (431c).
Now, the popular notion, au courant in the present day, that women are the less erotic genos than men—and readers of the Republic ought to note the danger involved in battling for such titles—would entail that women don’t pose much of a danger in this regard, despite the Athenian Stranger’s warning. But if one consults the history of this notion, one discovers that it is of relatively recent origin; women had the dubious honor of being known as the more dangerously erotic sex until the late 19th century, when the balance was shifted to the male genos.38 Most importantly for our purposes, the received wisdom among the Hellenes was on the side of the ladies, to Hera’s chagrin.39 Indeed, as I will discuss in chapter 6, the Athenian Stranger goes so far as to claim that women are wily (ἐπίκλοπος) and secretive—that is, they share the qualities that Socrates contends that Eros possesses in the Symposium.40 Although it would be a mistake to fall into the Enlightenment view, and take women’s hiddenness from the public eye as a sign of their absence from and relative unimportance to the life of the community, nevertheless the fact remains that women, customarily, in the eyes of male citizens, are strange, wild creatures. Again John Gould helpfully dramatizes: women “are not part of, do not belong easily in, the male ordered world of the ‘civilized’ community. . . . their ‘wildness’ will out.”41 Whatever the final truth of the matter, Plato makes use of the trope of women’s wildness, familiar to his original audience, and draws our attention to it as a force to be reckoned with politically.
I should note that in the context of Republic scholarship, this is the opposite of what is often argued about women’s eros and its relation to the city in speech; my consideration of Bendis and the hunt offers to clear up an important oversight in the usual interpretation of the significance of women in this book. The usual notion seems to be that since homosexual love is not tied to the bearing of children or the civic enterprise of marriage, it’s free of the city, and a sign, therefore, of eros properly speaking.42 Women’s eros—both eros for women and the eros of women themselves—is the more fundamentally civic, since it is more directly connected with the generation of children; as such, it is less likely to transform into eros for philosophy, if at all.43 Women, on this interpretation, are a Platonic symbol of domesticity and eros in chains.44 But as I have argued, to begin with such domestic women are left to the side in the Republic; instead we start with courtesans and nurses, and women who participate in the erotic activity of the hunt. Indeed, one of the few direct references to eros in the work is to the eros of women, when Adeimantus agrees not to imitate women in eros (395e). In the Republic, women are the example of what is problematically strong about eros—not as symbols of what eros desires, but as the troublesome possessors of eros of their own; and when the gaze lands on women within more respectable civic institutions, even there their eros is troublingly not satisfied. Indeed, as Pausanias describes it, pederasty is the very thing that ensures the proper passage of received wisdom to the next generation (Symposium 184d–e), and as such is the true flowering of civilization. This is not to say that Pausanias has the right idea about pederasty; rather to point out that the possibility of the tame, or even temptation toward it, is present in both sorts of eros—and neither goes without its share of the wild. At any rate, if women’s eros were tamed by civic life, marriage and child-rearing, and flowed along well with the city’s laws, then women would not be all that much of a problem in the first place, and would require no special law above breeding arrangements: but this is not how the women’s law is dramatized in the Platonic corpus.
To say therefore, as Socrates does in Book IV, that at some later date the laws for women will be written on the principle that the things of friends are in common (423e), precisely side-steps the political problem that the passions of women present. If women are in common as possessions, this law continues to pretend that only the eros of men will be at issue: the eros of women will be regulated by friendship of men, and as things or possessions, they will not present any troubling passions, being things. As the reader will recall, Adeimantus agrees to this initially, but at Polemarchus’ request, he reignites this troubling question at the start of Book V. Now, Adeimantus and Polemarchus are the opposed pair of attendees at Bendis’s festival to the pairing of Socrates and Glaucon; Adeimantus and Polemarchus are more worried than Glaucon about the thorough regulation of eros, and as such, it’s appropriate that they request more information on the women’s law; they are concerned, perhaps, that things will get too wild if women are to be given the scope of commonality. Likewise, it’s appropriate that the greater friends to eros be the ones to discuss the women and their lawlessness.
There’s one more crucial reference to hunting before the hunting guardians of Book V; in Book IV, the discovery of the definition of justice itself is dramatized by Socrates as a hunt. Considering Socrates’ constant attention the problem of men’s wildness, there is poetic justice in Socrates’ imagery of a chase for justice, which once again places the hunt right at the center of the evening’s concerns. Indeed, it’s one of the most dramatic moments in the book; Socrates makes it a moment of high suspense. But its limitations run parallel to the obvious limitations of the laws for women in the earlier books, and serve to dramatize the necessity of Socrates’ insistence on a beginning from the ground up. Here’s the scenario, once Socrates and Glaucon agree that only the form of justice remains:
‘So Glaucon, right now we need to be circling down and surrounding the covert like huntsmen (kunhgέtaj), bringing the mind to bear, lest Justice get away from us somewhere and become obscured, passing beyond the edge of sight.
Because it’s clear it’s in there somewhere! So look, and look with a bold heart—in case you see anything before I do’ [. . . ]
‘Follow,’ I said, ‘after praying with me.’
‘These things I will do,’ he said, ‘but just you lead the way.’
‘And truly,’ I declared, ‘the place is hard to walk around in, and deeply dark.’ ‘Anyway it’s shaded all right, and hard to search around in.’
‘Yes, but all the same, one has to keep going.’
‘Yes, one must go on,’ he said.
And I, looking down, declared “IOU, IOU, GLAUCON! We’ve hazarded upon its step, and I believe it won’t run away altogether quite!
‘Good tidings of great joy!’ said he.
‘But in truth, how dense we were in our condition,’ I said.
‘How so?’
‘All this time, you blessed one, it appears that right from the beginning, the thing was tumbling about at our feet, and we weren’t seeing it, but we were being utterly ridiculous (καταγελαστότατοι), just like people who seek for what they already have in their hands.’ (432b–d)
Socrates narrates a strange pastoral interlude; he places himself with elaborate imagery in a shady, rural covert; he and Glaucon are the hunters for, ironically, the wild beast justice. As in Books II and V, Glaucon is Socrates’ partner when hunting is at issue. They even make a hunting prayer: such is traditionally made to Artemis, or as Xenophon recommends, to Apollo and Artemis of the Wilderness (τῷ Ἀπόλλωνι καὶ τῇ Ἀρτέμιδι τῇ Ἀγροτέρᾳ); Xenophon opens his book On Hunting with an invocation of both siblings, and closes it with an appeal to the goddess alone.45 Just as he did at the beginning of the Republic, Socrates is once more making a prayer to a hunting goddess with Glaucon, though it’s fitting that his prayer be to a goddess more temperate than Bendis. I noted earlier that Apollo was a kind of model for the proper musical education of the guardians; not many of the Greek gods are mentioned by Socrates past the purge of Books II and III, but Apollo’s oracle is to be consulted at key moments in the city in speech, both before and after the Third Wave (427c, 461e, 540c). It turns out that Apollo’s sister Artemis is also considered worthy of prayer in the purged city.
The hunt that Socrates and Glaucon engage in, however, is far too spirited for its own good. Socrates engages in some over-acting as he goes through the motions of the hunt, bewailing the denseness of the brush without breaking character. His sudden iou, iou! (a tragic or joyous cry, depending) is amusingly like the baying of the hounds; combined with Glaucon’s enthusiastic response, the noise they’re making marks them as less experienced, over-spirited puppies, acting in such a way as to scare the quarry away. Xenophon describes this phenomenon: “[some hounds] will drive ahead, eagerly following false lines and getting wildly excited over anything that turns up, well knowing that they are playing the fool.”46 Indeed, Socrates is comically failing to follow his advice to the good philosophic hunter in the Lysis, which I discussed in the previous chapter, wherein he remarks “for what kind of hunter, do you think, would he be, if while on the hunt he scared away the prey and made it harder to catch? (Lysis 206a)” Socrates leads Glaucon on something of a wild-goose chase.
It makes sense, therefore, that the definitions that Socrates and Glaucon gain remain merely civic-oriented approximations: the courage that they discover is the courage of a citizen, and the justice is the justice of a soul as a city.47 Indeed, they’re only hunting in an image of the forest; they are still very much within the limits of the city in speech, and their definitions are correspondingly political. As Socrates himself reminds us in Book VI, his definitions in Book IV were hardly sufficient, and a longer path would be needed to get at the real ones, the definition of justice included (504b). The hunt in Book IV is focused on the victorious discovery of what was already embedded into the laws Socrates and the brothers built, namely, minding one’s own business. It ought to make sense, therefore, that the hunting we see in Book IV is not the kind of erotic hunting that Socrates praises elsewhere: it has to be inadequately erotic, because eros has no real place in the city in speech, yet. Indeed, at this point in the dialogue, Bendis’ attributes are severed: women still possess all the wild, lawless passion that the justice of the guardians stands in contrast to, and the hunt is an unsuccessfully thumotic exercise.
THE HUNT FOR THE GOOD
What changes between the thumotic, comedic hunt for justice in Book IV, and Socrates’ addition of hunting to the main duties of the guardians, that heralds the rule of philosophy in the city in speech? If Polemarchus had never asked his question about women and children in common, Socrates would have moved on from this moment to his discussion of the degenerate regimes, and this would be the last place where hunting surfaced; the book would lack the rule of philosophy, and the description of its highest reaches in the realm of the forms. But the question was asked, and Socrates says that the argument will have to start again as if from the beginning (450a). On the most basic level, the change is the introduction of women: women as a subject for conversation, and women as rulers and learners in the guardian class. In the context of what I’ve described about Socrates’ actions in the Waves, the large-scale dramatic change is that women have been drawn into the argument and into the city, and will hunt alongside the men: in fact, Bendis’ attributes that were severed before are now reunited. Women are the pretext for the change, but their problematically wild eros is the subtext that has been taken up by Socrates into the argument and the character of the guardian class. Although the hunt in Book IV is comedic, the hunt in the First Wave is a serious part of that often humorous section. Whatever makes Socrates decide, as soon as he hears the question about women and children, to give philosophy the rule outright in the city in speech, it’s marked by the addition of the erotic hunt to the duties of the guardians, and the presence of the previously unregulated erotic genos.
It’s appropriate, then, to add this element to Socrates’ action with respect to women in Book V: he has not just drawn them into the city, but, in a sense, he has tamed them. He brings women out of their private, lawless, wild state into the realm of the laws of the city. Indeed, the very conjunction of Socrates’ image of women with dogs that guard is a radical one; dogs, after all, are the paradigmatically tamable and domesticable animal: Socrates’ image contains the strange implication that women can be tamed at all, the inversion of Helen’s self-shaming term “dog-eyes” (Odyssey 4.145). Once women are in the guardian class, their eros receives regulation at the hands of the laws: men and women alike will not couple with whomever they please, but with the best (459a). Likewise, their shared education will be founded on the principles of the internal justice of the soul; they too are to be cured of their distemper through the rule of reason. They will possess virtue instead of cloaks (457a), the virtue that Socrates described only a little earlier at Book IV as “a certain health, beauty, and good condition of the soul” (444e). Though Socrates pretends that the question of women poses no special problem in Book II, when given a second chance by Polemarchus’ question, he uses the opportunity to resurrect the question of law for women, and his plans for the genos are grander than any other lawgiver—Lycurgus, Aristotle, and the Athenian Stranger—combined.
But the genos of women is not simply added to the existing class of guardians as described in Books II–IV, with the justice of the soul detailed therein. The guardians in Book V are not as domestic as the guardians in the previous books: they will not only guard, but hunt. This will give their activities and their character an element of wildness, an element of eros, that they did not previously possess. As I argued above, the hunt is where humans distance themselves from merely animal life, by playfully enacting animal activity qua free human activity done for its own sake. Hunting embodies the tension between wild and tame in its essence; it is a wild thing done as civilized, and as such is the unstable tension between this opposing pair. When Socrates first speaks of the male and female hunters, he describes them with the words for male and female animals (qÁluj and ¥rshn). This usage takes on an additional shade of meaning in the light of the common hunt: even as just rulers of a just regime, they still possess something of the wild animal; the guardians are characterized by Socrates as possessing something of the instability of beasts.48 Together the men and women take the field in war (466e), and they take their children with them mounted on horses (467e); this is the guardian class at its most Thracian.49
Though Socrates has, in a sense, tamed the women by bringing them and their wild eros into the guardian class, he does not intend that they should be fully tame, nor their male companions either; after all, eros can only be checked or redirected, not finally tamed. Instead, the male and female guardians will study philosophy, that non-domestic enterprise; as Strauss reminds the reader, “the Republic could unqualifiedly abstract from eros only if it could abstract from philosophy.”50 Instead of simply restraining eros as he did in Books II–IV, in Book V, Socrates is redirecting it. Socrates makes a decision not only to do the business of philosophy by constructing a city in speech with reason presumably in charge of its construction, but to publicly appoint philosophy as the official ruler. Even though philosophy may suffer in the public eye, philosophy has to be present in the city in speech in some public, official way in order to truly test its capacity to rule. To be present in some authentic sense, it has to possess something of eros, even if this eros is publicly hidden. It appears that part of the key to this hidden incorporation of eros is represented by the presence of erotic hunting, and by the entrance of women into the guardian class. Once women themselves take part in the hunt, the guardians are properly hunters; once the guardians are hunters, then philosophy can come on the scene to rule, and pursue the unknown rather than merely bark at it. The soul now tamed qua hunter has the “purity to behold and to stretch itself out toward perceiving what it doesn’t know” (572a). In a sense, women make the dramatic difference between the thumotic hunt and something more like desire for wisdom; not present as some abstract feminine ideal, but as embodied citizens, and citizen hunters.51
But if the guardians are hunters, what is it that they hunt? Recall that Glaucon characterized pleonexia as the pursuit or hunt (διώκειν) for more, since that’s what humans pursue “as good” (359c). But in Book VII, Socrates reshapes this basic principle: he claims that all souls pursue the Good itself, and that a guardian in ignorance of this highest source is not worth much as a ruler (505e–506a). In some sense, the quarry of the guardians is the Good; they are supposed to turn their powers to the sight of that which is beyond Being as hunters; they are supposed to reshape and redirect their natural desire for more into a pursuit of the Good. Nor is this pursuit merely a quality of derivatively thumotic philosophy; Socrates speaks of the pursuit of or hunt for the truth in Book VI, in the context of his discussion of “true erotic philosophy (490a).” Socrates describes the yearning of the search like this: “and neither would the edge of his eros be blunted, nor would he leave off from it, until he lays a hand on the nature of each thing in itself” (490b). The obverse pursuit is also relevant: Socrates warns us not to pursue injustice as Thrasymachus counsels (586d), or allow desire to gain the upper hand and pursue pleasures alien to those of reason’s (587a). The philosophy of the guardians as represented in Book VII is not unlike the activity of hunting; it’s not without some direction or goal, and the goal is yearned for as quarry, albeit an elusive one. Again, Strauss is helpful: “the education of the warriors is supposed to culminate in the eros of the beautiful; that eros points to philosophic eros, the eros peculiar to the philosophers (501d2), which becomes the quest for knowledge of the idea of the good, an idea higher than the idea of justice.”52 Fortunately for us as readers, Socrates can’t fully abstract from philosophy; and as long as philosophy is present in some guise, something of eros remains; Socrates’ invocation of the hunt at the beginning of his trio of proposals which lead to the instatement of philosophers as kings is a reminder of this phenomenon.
Now, there’s danger in the pursuit of hunting as an image in this way. Socrates gives many full-blown images of philosophy’s activity in the Republic, of which the most famous, the Cave and the Divided Line, are remote from questions of hunting. Indeed, he eventually describes the grasping the Good itself by the hand (532b), and of course, as a sight most removed from bodily things as possible (508d); most significantly, this vision is something the soul must be drawn or led or turned to by an outside hand (515e, 521d). I will discuss the nature of the philosophy of the guardians in chapter 8, for it exists in tension with the eros for the truth that Socrates describes philosophers outside of the city in speech as possessing (501d). But nevertheless, the parallelism remains, that the hunting guardians will turn their attention to that which all souls hunt for: and only they will grasp it by hand. Something like the following might express the contrast between the image of pursuit of the Good, and the later images of philosophy’s own peculiar activity: while our orientation toward the Good as a thing pursued is more like a natural relation, since it is shared by all, philosophy as seen in the Republic requires something more than simply the cultivation of a natural affinity; it requires the athleticism of the education Socrates recommends for its complete flowering. Consider Socrates’ contention that arithmetic, of all things, is good for the guardians to learn because it actively helps the dual activities of war and philosophy; it must be practiced “for the sake of war and of ease in redirecting the soul itself from becoming to truth and being” (525c). But even with all this athleticism, Socrates’ plans for the guardians are supposed to help them achieve what Socrates was unable to do in Book IV: seek the forms outside of the confines of merely civic definitions and merely civic truth. Consider how Aesara, a Pythagorean femme philosophe active around 3rd and 4th century BC, consciously plays with the Republic’s imagery of philosophical activity as hunting in her own writing: “by following the tracks within himself whoever seeks will make a discovery: law is in him and justice, which is the orderly arrangement of the soul.”53 It’s striking to witness Aesara choosing to retain the imagery of the hunt: for her it leads directly to an ordered soul, via the practice of philosophy; the very thing Socrates is hoping to recommend to his guardiennes.
One can playfully rewrite the arc of the Republic in terms of its hunting narrative: it begins with the hunting festival of Bendis, moves to the taming of Thrasymachus, to the hunters in the fevered city, to the thumotic hunt for justice, to the guardians who will hunt together, and the climax is the claim that all hunt for the Good, and the appropriation of this orientation by philosophy proper. Notably, once the reader departs the height of Book VII, eros, the hunt, and women are once again disparate elements apart from one another; eros is a tyrant again (572a), the hunt is merely the pastime of the timocratic man (549a), and while three lady fates, Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos, weave the spindle of the world, they are robed (617c) and the maiden Lachesis exhorts men to virtue through the remove of a herald (617e).54 The huntress Atalanta chooses the life and honors of an athletic man in some ordinary city (620b), and some men even choose the lives of beasts as preferable to humans (620a–c). In some way, at the end of the Republic the reader is back where they started.
In the light of the whole, the hunt for the Good in Book VI stands out as the crux of the hunting narrative; something changes from the wild hunting festival at the beginning of the book, to the point where the hunt merges with philosophy. Again, Strauss notes this transition: “the education of the warriors is supposed to culminate in the eros of the beautiful; that eros points to philosophic eros, the eros peculiar to the philosophers (501d2), which becomes the quest for knowledge of the idea of the good, an idea higher than the idea of justice.”55 A change in the eros of the guardians has taken place; and rather than a Freudian scenario where we all possess animal desires that are merely cloaked as higher, it’s something like a real transformation; the power and the force inchoate in the animal or wild state becomes directed, articulated, and changed into the higher, born again, by the redirecting, periagogic force of education. The taming of women that Socrates accomplishes runs parallel to this transformation: women’s own eros is transformed.
In the First Wave, Socrates makes a law not for the feminine as such, but for human women, and for the best of them to be educated in philosophy and to rule in the city as philosophers. Socrates proposes to take women and their eros into the guardian class, but he does not leave them without a new object for their desire: they will now desire to know, and seek to grasp the Good itself. Again, women are not merely the objects of the eros of others, but a place has been made for the active use of their own eros; because instead of being the hunted thing, they themselves will hunt. This is a far grander proposal than other lawgivers aspire to, because Socrates’ law for women is concerned with more than the political—no less, indeed, than with the hunt for the forms themselves.
1.On Hunting, I. 7.
2.In the Oresteia, Athena’s divine intervention is required to transform the furies into goddesses of the hearth; for more on the inadequacy of this transformation, see chapter 9.
3.Histories V.6.
4.See Beth Cohen, “Man-killers and their victims: inversions of the heroic ideal in classical art” in Not The Classical Ideal: Athens and the Construction of the Other in Greek Art, ed. Beth Cohen (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 364–389.
5.See Despoina Tsiafakis on the Athenian romanticization of the Thracians in “The Allure and Repulsion of Thracians in the Art of Classical Athens,” in Not the Classical Ideal, 364–389. For questions of alliance, see Robert Garland’s Introducing New Gods: The Politics of Athenian Religion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 112. Tsiafakis points out the faithful, hag-like Thracian slave-nurse was the flip side to the free Thracian women depicted killing Orpheus for seducing their men (373).
6.See Aleksandur Fol and Ivan Marazov, Thrace and the Thracians (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), 22–4; and Burkert, Greek Religion, 149. As Janouchova notes, the Piraeus cult draws out the moon/life-cycle element very strongly, with its kinship with the fertile element in Artemis Mounichia (103), though Bendis remains both war-like and linked to the Great Mother as well.
7.Herodotus Histories V. 7.
8.Garland, Introducing New Gods, 113; and also Janouchova, 97.
9.Tsiafakis, 373.
10.Burkert, Greek Religion, 149.
11.Ibid.
12.Homer Iliad XXI.470, 483ff. Trans. Richard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
13.See Petra Janouchova, “The Cult of Bendis in Athens and Thrace,” Graeco-Latina Brunesia, no. 18:1 (2013), 102; and Burkett, 152.
14.Contra Rosen, PRS, 20.
15.Garland, 1–22.
16.Tsiafakis, 386.
17.Garland, 106–9; Burkert, 139.
18.Garland, 22.
19.See Page, “Polemarchus,” 246.
20.Rosen, PRS, 44–45, 58–9; Contra Strauss (CM, 74, 78, 84–5).
21.Strauss, CM,116; contra Rosen, PRS, 38.
22.Strauss, CM, 84.
23.Rosen, PRS, 50–51; Strauss, CM, 84.
24.Gilgamesh, Tablet I, lines 180–220.
25.The verb συνόντες does not always imply sexual togetherness (a more active “mixing” is required), but one could imagine the pleasant being-togetherness the male inhabitants of the city of pigs as a sort of man-party à la the Symposium.
26.Page, “Unnamed Fifth,” 8. Page’s reading takes into account the totality and range of human desires, rather than artificially separating off one city as masculine and the other as feminine as Marina McCoy does (“The City of Sows and Sexual Differentiation in Plato’s Republic,” in Plato’s Animals, ed. Jeremy Bell and Michael Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 149–160. See note 1 in chapter 1 for a discussion of her interpretation.
27.Page, “Unnamed Fifth,” 9.
28.This view is partially anticipated in the work of the anthropologist Tim Ingold in “Hunting, sacrifice, and the domestication of animals,” in The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations, ed. T. Ingold (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1987), 243–76; see also The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, ed. Tim Ingold (London: Routledge, 2000).
29.See Lesley Beaumont in Childhood in Ancient Athens: Iconography and Social History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 56; and Davidson, 87.
30.Fol and Marazov, Thrace and the Thracians, 22–24. Her worship was in part an orgiastic celebration of fertility; see also Janouchova, 103.
31.Beaumont, 57; see also ibid., 230n32.
32.“Law, Custom and Myth: Aspects of the Social Position of Women in Classical Athens,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 100, Centenary Issue (1980): 44–5, 46). For the Athenian Stranger’s plan to convert women into citizens, see Laws 81c. When the Athenian speaks of his sense of the inadequacy of all Greek law for women, he considers Spartan and Cretan law to share the same basic problem (805d).
33.Strauss, CM, 110–11.
34.Ibid., 90.
35.Ibid., 112.
36.Ibid., 128.
37.Laws 780e–781a.
38.See John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America for an overview of the shifting paradigms, particularly “Crusades for Sexual Order” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 202–221. David Halperin, citing Mark Golden, notes that women often were portrayed on vase paintings as taking active pleasure in sex, in marked contrast to young boys (“Why is Diotima a Woman?” 134).
39.For Hera’s anger at the judgment of Tiresias, see Pseudo-Apollodorus Bibliotheca, III.6.7. For a collection of the gossip of the age on the subject, see Sue Blundell, Women in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1998), 100–103.
40.Laws 781a; Symposium 206b. See also Benardete, Plato’s Laws, 230–31.
41.John Gould, “Women in Classical Athens,” 57; see also Burkert, GR, 230.
42.Rosen: “…pederasty is in the Platonic dialogues a sign of the detachment of eros from politics, as is most obvious in the massive fact that it cannot lead to sexual reproduction” (PRS, 210).
43.Rosen: “…the first [element in the symbolic significance of pederasty] being the rejection of childbearing…. Philosophy makes young women unsuited for preparing to assume the management of a house and the rearing of children. This is precisely why Socrates’ proposals concerning women were so revolutionary. The ostensibly greater philosophic capacity of boys makes more the transformation of bodily eros into love of the soul, and thence of the Ideas” (PRS, 211).
44.Bloom: “Women have a more powerful attachment to the home and the children than do men” (IE, 383). Both Nichols and Saxonhouse argue for the strong connection between the female and eros, but because it stems from the ability to give birth, such eros would be subject to Bloom and Rosen’s criticism (Nichols, review of Women in Western Political Thought, 246–7; and Saxonhouse, “Philosopher and the Female,” 76–77, “Comedy in Callipolis,” 900).
45.On Hunting I.1, XIII.18, VI.13. Philostratus the Elder records in the Imagines: “…and the hunters as they advance will hymn Artemis Agrotera . . . after a prayer the hunters continue the hunt” (Philostratus the Elder Imagines i.28; trans. Arthur Fairbanks, Loeb Classical Library 256 [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931], 113).
46.On Hunting iii. 3–7.
47.430c; Strauss, CM, 108–9.
48.Contra Saxonhouse, who sees this usage as implying Hobbesian bestiality, rather than simply what is wild (“Comedy in Callipolis,” 898); see Ch. 2, 82n53.
49.Levy notes that the maleness of the accompanying officials are stressed (17), but this hardly contradicts the strongly explicit statement a few lines above that men and women will march together (ὄτι κοινῇ στρατεύσονται) to war. Ι would consider this to be a passage where rhetoric requires women’s presence to not be insisted on once stated initially, given the discomfort Socrates notes that people have with the notion of women riding horses (452c), yet his insistence that they will have to.
50.Strauss, CM, 112.
51.Contra Rosen, PRS, 167; Bloom, IE, 384; and Benardete, SSS, 114.
52.Strauss, CM, 112.
53.Vicki Lynn Harper notes that the whole of Aesara’s fragment is full of imagery from the Republic in “The Neopythagorean Women as Philosophers,” in Pythagorean Women: Their History and Writings, Sarah B. Pomeroy ed. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2012), 117. Harper points out that instead of reasoning from city to soul, Aesara begins with soul and reasons to city, recommending introspection first; likewise, tantalizingly, she uses the image of an ordered household to reflect the order of the soul (ibid., 118).
54.Claudia Baracchi sees a connection between Bendis and the three Fates, on account of Bendis’ night festival and the Fates as the offspring of unaided Night (Myth, Life, and War, 192, 210n15).
55.Strauss, CM, 112.