Women and Men, Exercising Naked, Together
Among Socrates’ many strange laws for his best city in the Republic, one of the strangest is his insistence in the First Wave that the women exercise naked along with the men, as part of their common education as guardians. Historically speaking, it’s been one of details that has stuck most in the throats of its readers, prompting even the 20th-century reader H. Gauss to insist, against all textual evidence, that Socrates argued for separate Frauengymnasia, where the women would exercise privately unclothed.1 Many dialogic readers have taken common naked exercise to be the ironic linchpin of the First Wave, and there are certainly reasons to consider it as a crucial element of the passage—as long as it’s placed in the context of the other forces at work, such as the narrative arc of Glaucon’s aporia, and Socrates’ proposal that female guardians be clothed in robes of virtue alone. But since this passage in particular has tempted even readers who lack the hermeneutic excuse of irony to distort the text past recognition, special care is required to determine just what is so funny about both sexes exercising naked together—except, well, just about everything about it.
One crucial thing is the recovery of just how often young women did go about naked and train as athletes under Greek customs; as well as an expansion of our view of women in the classical Greek world beyond the habits of honored wives and virtuous daughters, to include all womankind therein. Also necessary is a consideration of the inevitable distortion that has plagued scholarship on these issues, where each polity’s laws and its hopes for women under them, changes its notions about just went on among the honored Greeks, who so often stand as a sort of rhetorical trump card in these sorts of disputations.
I have found it dialectically necessary, however, to take seriously the strongest version of the argument about the ultimate absurdity of women’s participation in such exercise, where such ridicule is supposed to dramatize the impossibility that the private sex would become fully public. We’re certainly justified asking whether Plato wishes to ridicule women themselves, even women’s bodies, in this moment. Considering this will allow me to speak to one of the common 20th-century accusations against Socrates, his so-called misogyny. In the end, this argument of absurdity fails because it treats privacy as univocal, and so fails to think through the question of what naked exercise would mean to women in different political positions, from priestesses to prostitutes and in between. Whether we as readers are tempted to believe that Plato is making light of the female genos from hasty zealous ire or from the hopes of hidden sympathy, this mistaking misses equally the full range of the political problem of, and the depth of Plato’s concern for women in all their different and manifold relations to being present, public, or private, as women at all.
THE PEDAGOGY OF NAKED GYMNASTIC
Socrates’ first full argument in the First Wave goes like this: since men and women will share all the tasks of the guardians in common, they should be educated in common; since education comprises music and gymnastic, music and gymnastic will now be given to women too. Sensing slight hesitation from Glaucon (“likely, from what you say,” 452a), Socrates pauses in the forward motion of his argument, and concedes that what they are speaking of might well sound laughable, when compared to the current habits (ethos), if they were to put their words into practice. He claims to put forward the strongest objection possible, with the strategy that, as many have noted, if he can show this strongest objection to be unfounded, the plan will seem reasonable, and the argument can continue. “What,” Socrates says, “is the funniest thing you see among them? Or isn’t it clear it’s the women, naked (gumnὰς), exercising in the palaestra, together with the men?” First of all, to the Hellene ear the practice of athletic exercise is simply understood to be done unclothed; in fact the word “gymnastic” literally means “the skill of naked exercise.” Therefore, to include women in gymnastic would not unexpectedly include nakedness for them as well. But Socrates makes it clear, with his extra repetition of the adjective gymnas, that everyone will be naked, and in the same place at the same time.
But even these customary associations don’t make naked exercise, together, a necessary educational maxim. Even though “gymnastic” is also a Greek way of talking about education as a whole, it still doesn’t have to entail common nakedness, considering Socrates’ pedagogic inventiveness. Indeed, Socrates is about to radically reshape the education for all the guardians, though to be sure, athletic prowess in war for both sexes remains central to his concerns (537a). Practically speaking, Socrates could have constructed a common enough education with naked exercise in separate places, if the nakedness was crucial, and have the sexes come together for war games in various outfits, such as the races the Athenian Stranger proposes for his youths, where some wear the armor of a hoplite, others the gear of an archer (Laws 833b). Indeed, the Athenian Stranger, who is strongly in favor of exercise for both sexes, has common exercise cease at the age of six, after which each sex exercises on its own (794c). Nakedness, then, by this logic, is a practical detail of curriculum, and as such, the specific practice could have been left out.2 But why then would Socrates add to his argument, which will be difficult enough, what is at the least a rhetorical weakness? After all, Socrates has been attempting to tame desires by education; why add such a temptation? Now, more than a few readers respond to this passage by asking, why can’t we just save Socrates’ argument for common education by throwing out this tiny detail, which at the least raises immediate erotic concerns? But first of all, this is not the only time Socrates brings it up; nakedness for women is part of his final conclusion at the end of the wave (457a). Furthermore, since logographic necessity is, after all, our gold standard for writing, we can hardly alter away any troubling detail that Plato puts in; this is missing the point. Common naked exercise is more than a curricular detail for Socrates; and it’s not negotiable.
On the other hand, it’s important to keep co-ed palaestras in the context of the wider question of the women’s law. Plato’s two Athenian lawgivers, Socrates and the Athenian Stranger, attempt to enact laws that fundamentally alter the place of women in political life. Socrates speaks of a shared hunt for the men and women, and he insists on common exercise; the Athenian Stranger, by contrast, wishes to promote the use of common tables for women, where like the Spartan men, all the women in his projected polity will eat together in the public square, open to the sight of all (Laws 781a). In both of these memorable specifications, some kind of contrast between what was private and what will now be public is at work. Each of these images dramatizes a certain aspect of the overall problem with the action of the argument that each lawgiver proposes, wherein he must draw those who live out of sight, into the sight of all. And so, while Socrates’ image dramatizes the problem in a rather more racy fashion, it doesn’t stand for the whole problem of the women’s law exclusively in Plato’s thinking. The problem is more general than the particularities of Socrates’ image might suggest; and the particularities of the image very much shape the immediate problem at hand. While the Athenian Stranger is ultimately concerned about the reaction of the women themselves, Socrates is focused on the problematic reaction of the onlookers; he includes himself and Glaucon as the primary onlookers as they gaze at this strange sight; in an important sense, the question of what is laughable is tied up with what is laughable to men as they look at men and women exercising. Furthermore, while the Athenian Stranger presents the reaction of the women as potentially deal-breaking, Socrates easily persuades Glaucon that the onlookers will get used to it.
In the argument of the First Wave, the question of nakedness is dismissed as ostensibly a matter of habit and custom; customs change, and this one will too; therefore common naked exercise is ultimately not a problem. Socrates has chosen well his means of drawing out Glaucon’s hesitation: Glaucon immediately relaxes, responding to the image with a “By Zeus! That would be amusing, at least as things stand now, it would seem (452b).” Glaucon’s caveat “at least as things stand now” shows he is already responding to what Socrates will draw out further, that just as naked exercise for men once seemed strange but now seems perfectly reasonable and indeed better, so too will objections to the practice as common to both sexes fade as the laughter of the eye departs in favor of what reason reveals as good (452d). Glaucon is perfectly willing to agree that custom changes, and that custom can change about nakedness, agreeing strongly to all of Socrates’ exhortations to reason, even the notion that the only standard for the beautiful is the good. This ready agreement stands in sharp contrast to the drama that is about to unfold over the question of women’s natures; again, the sticking point for Glaucon is not common education, but similarity in nature and the concurrent possibility that some women will be stronger than men. And so, even when it’s a question of education conceived as naked exercise, Glaucon is perfectly ready to admit women into the palaestra, just as he is later ready to bargain for kisses from either sex (458c).
Why would Glaucon be so ready to make this change in the customary law? Some readers of Plato assume that such a change would appear beyond the pale for Plato’s audience, which requires them to find some reason to explain away Glaucon’s acquiescence. But the fact is, exercise for the young of the female sex was a not an extraordinary occurrence in Ancient Greece. Far from being merely the projection of Platonic lawgivers, the practice was not infrequent in both religious and secular contexts. The Athenian female youths had a form of naked exercise through their worship of the goddess Artemis. In Athens, before their marriage, certain girls participated in rituals to Artemis Mounichia, this being the temple near the Piraeus where Bendis was to take up a spot, and/or to Artemis of Brauron, a more distant and rural locale. Important parts of Brauron’s cultic event were naked races and naked dancing; this ritual marked their last tribute to their youth and virginity.3 Although the rites were not necessarily compulsory for all citizen women, the sisters and mothers of the Athenians present certainly could have participated. The city of Athens celebrated the Brauronia every fourth year; Aristophanes invokes the festival twice (Peace 872–6, Lysistrata 636ff).4
A still closer precedent for what Socrates recommends comes from Spartan custom. In daily life, gymnastic was a part of the education of Spartan girls; they were noted athletes, and old and young alike were known to exercise in the nude; they also appeared in public for choral dances.5 In fact, the Athenian Stranger speaks approvingly of these specific customs and recommends the implementation of many—his only quarrel is that the Spartans don’t have the women exercise enough, and he considers it a particularly large oversight that they are not trained specifically for warfare.6 Since so many of the new practices Socrates has recommended over the course of the Republic have some similarity to Spartan customs, it’s reasonable that the recommendation of yet another practice with Spartan precedent would not be much of a scandal.7 Furthermore, in the classical period, maidens from Sparta and possibly elsewhere would compete in races at a portion of the Olympics dedicated to Hera, “with their hair let down, with skirts just above the knees, and the right shoulder bare to the breast”; there are bronze statuettes of girls both in this costume as well as girls simply naked while exercising.8
The real difference between Greek customs and the city in speech, is that Socrates is changing what, for his audience, was ordinarily a private and/or religious practice into a public, political one practiced throughout life. Women would be doing what they already did in isolated moments, but now for specifically civic purposes in the company of men. These considerations help make sense of the fact that while Socrates does describe the scene of common exercise as “the most laughable” (γελοιότατον) aspect of his plan for education, he does not raise the scenario to the rank of “most absurd” (καταγελαστότατόν), a term he reserves for other, more fully ridiculous moments in the evening’s conversation. The cave dwellers find the man returning from above to be an object of derision (518b), the ultimate fate of the unjust man is to be utterly ridiculous (613d); in the First Wave, it is the triumph of men over women in weaving that is most absurd of all (455c). This explains why Socrates can move so easily and quickly through his education argument, in sharp contrast to the later contentiousness surrounding female human nature: common naked exercise is funny, but not utterly ridiculous.
DID WOMEN EXERCISE NAKED IN GREECE IN THE 19TH CENTURY?
Now, why have such practices for women been often downplayed by commentators on this passage, allowing Socrates’ attempts to shift custom in this direction to be painted as outrageous? Socrates’ insistence that women participate in war gets the most ridicule, yet this is the very thing his more moderate counterpart, the Athenian Stranger, recommends—a practice which is the more reasonable if gymnastic for women is not unheard of. A locus classicus for this narrow vision can be found in Benjamin Jowett, the influential English translator of Plato in the 19th century:
The Greeks had noble conceptions of womanhood in the goddesses Athene and Artemis, and in the heroines Antigone and Andromache. But these ideals had no counterpart in actual life . . . . She took no part in military or political matters; nor is there any instance in the later ages of Greece of a woman becoming famous in literature. “Hers is the greatest glory who has the least renown among men,” is the historian’s conception of feminine excellence.9
Jowett is making the classic mistake of insisting that public political presence is the only presence within the city that counts or holds influence. Likewise, he forgets to mention, perhaps from misplaced delicacy, the women whose infamy we might as well call fame, as for example the courtesan Phryne, tried for impiety in Athens in the 4th century BC for introducing new gods, roughly fifty years after Socrates.10 Part of the problem lies in the artificiality of the modern distinction between “culture” and politics, which does not do much to explain the rich fabric of Greek nomos; this split likewise contributes to a tendency to ignore the religious practices central to it. For Jowett, lack of public political presence is no place at all; and this is partially why, I’d wager, exercise at the Heraian games or the activities at Brauron can seem irrelevant to politics. But it is not a few virtuously, suspiciously silent aristocratic women who constitute all women—the genos likewise includes the priestesses, virginal or otherwise, and all the courtesans, from the bridge-women (gephuris) to the big-spenders (megalomisthoi) in possession of their own houses, not to mention the day laborers or the extra-household weavers, an industry largely peopled by women in Athens.11 Socrates visits a courtesan, Theodote, in her own home, in the conversation Xenophon recounts (Memorabilia 3.11.4). The irony of Jowett’s invocation of Pericles is that he forgets that Pericles himself was entangled with a talkative woman with all too much influence on political matters, his mistress Aspasia. In the Menexenus, Socrates doubles down on this irony, claiming that Aspasia herself wrote the speech containing Pericles’ bon mot on women’s virtue (236b). Aspasia’s pedagogic success is the more noteworthy, considering Pericles’ failure, as Socrates points out in the Meno, to educate his legitimate sons at all well (94b). Nor, it must be noted, is Plato’s Socrates alone in his appreciation of Aspasia; Xenophon’s Socrates likewise speaks of Aspasia’s knowledge, while Aeschines’ Socrates recommends her as a teacher to others; her words and deeds were a notorious part of classical Athens’ milieu, specifically associated with Socrates.12 In any case, make no mistake, the conversation of the Republic is peppered throughout by allusions to all the different sorts of women that make up the genos inside and outside notoriety, from the orphaned virgin (495c) to the nagging wife (549d), to the woman in love or in childbirth (395e). Plato’s observant eye provides ready material for Socratic poeticizing; Socrates has a very clear sense of the presence of women who, whether quiet or loud, nevertheless cut a figure.
The history of the scholarly debates over the place of women in Greece is a fascinating one. For instance, take the issue of whether Athenian women were expected to spend most of their lives indoors in imitation of those in so-called oriental seclusion—or not. There exists the odd phenomenon, that when we listen to the words of men in classical Athens, we can trick ourselves into thinking that women in Greece lived a tightly controlled life indoors. But not only does this come from only taking into account a small fraction of the population, not to mention ignoring archeological, economic, and cultic evidence, it also requires the reader to take the admonitions of such kingly sources as Creon and Pericles, both highly interested in the perpetuation of the tale of women’s indoor virtue for their own political ends, as straightforward, factual reporting.13 Once we take the character and telos of such remarks in context, it becomes clear that political rhetoric toward silence and remaining indoors becomes necessary precisely when there is a real danger of the opposite: Antigone heeds Creon’s advice not for a moment. It requires wealth and position to be able to afford separate women’s quarters, as well as servants or slaves to run all the any number of minor errands, while streetwalkers of many varieties wander about. Aristotle points out that it’s impossible to keep the women of the poor from going out to work.14 Likewise, numerous religious festivals, several held for women exclusive of men, require women’s presence outside the house.15 Indeed, a common lament of cuckolded husbands in Menander is that their wife met someone when out at a festival; Aristophanes’ women are inventive in their excuses for having been out.16 None of this is to say that there’s not a real tension between indoor and outdoor, private and public; but the tension is dynamic, and the religious calendar full of prescheduled transgressions. The fact is, that no matter what laws we live under, there is a real temptation to distort the fragments we do possess on all these matters. And to be sure, this is no less a problem for our current polity, since our own eagerness to find something like our own freedoms among the Greeks is likewise a temptation toward distortion.17 The underlying human problem is, even the physical presence of another human being is not enough for us to consider them as present in the political sense: even to catch the eye remains fraught with the possibility of not seeing, whether from eros or absorption in one’s own power. Public space is possible when we regard each other with mutual respect with our very eyes: and this is a matter, as Plato implies, of seeing. And so the task is not only to initially reimagine, but to continually hold in our sight the scene in the Piraeus that Socrates and his interlocutors have walked inside away from, as peopled with women enough.18
THE PRESENCE AND ABSENCE OF WOMEN’S BODIES
But even after taking into account Greek customs in the rich sense, while reminding ourselves that no polity examines the Greeks free from their own concerns, neither the precedents for women’s exercise nor the presence of a rich world of women obviate the dialogic fact that Socrates does in fact describe women and men exercising naked together as funny. Socrates frames his description as an invitation for Glaucon to view the sight of both together, exhorting him to direct his gaze in a specific direction.
‘What is the funniest thing you see among them? Or isn’t it clear it’s the women, naked, exercising in the palaestra (γυμνὰς τὰς γυναῖκας ἐν ταῖς παλαῖστραις γυμναζομένας) together with the men, not only the young ones, but also the older ones right there, like the old men in gymnasiums, though they’re shriveled and not a pleasant sight, who love to exercise still?’ (452a10–b3)
The interesting thing about this image is what is absent from it. Socrates first names adult men and women; he mentions the presence of young women, but does not allow the gaze to linger there, immediately shifting the attention first to older women, and from there to older men. Now, the upshot of the argument is that ugly old women would be funny to view (one is reminded of the opening scene of The Color of Pomegranates); but Socrates reserves the unambiguously visual descriptors of “wrinkled and unpleasant to look at” for the category into which he himself falls; and indeed, for the kind of ugliness that the men present would either possess or fear. The scenario Socrates describes is reminiscent of the beginning of the Lysis, where Socrates in his age has come to see the beauty of the youth at the palaestra (203b–204a). Such a wrinkled state, while it may inspire pity on the part of some, certainly arouses disgust from others; consider the suitors’ reaction to Odysseus when he arrives at his palace under Athena’s disguise of an old vagrant: “It is my thought that he can give us illumination from his bald head, which has no hair, not even a little.”19 Socrates’ later example of eristical bald men (454c) likewise plays into this sense of potential loss of beauty. By playing on the fears rather than the desires of his audience, Socrates allows the beautiful bodies of the young, the ones he is specifically making laws for, to remain hidden in plain sight. This redirection to the ugly cloaks the temptation present in such a scenario to focus on the beauty of the naked young, as Dikaios Logos does in Aristophanes’s Clouds.20 Now, this could well have been an image about the male gaze turned toward the bodies of young women; instead, Socrates subverts this moment by directing the gaze of the young man toward the inevitable problems of male age. He does this because while youth can find age amusing, the bodies of the young are not funny, but desirable. The only way his argument can remain a joke, is by hiding young women’s bodies; there is something of gallantry, perhaps, in this cloaking. And so, while I have certainly heard it argued that Socrates finds it so, I can’t see in this moment a disgust for the female body as such engaged in exercise.
The most obviously funny thing about common naked exercise is, the erotic complications that would inevitably arise from the sights of beautiful bodies. Naked exercise is not without practical difficulties for either sex at any age, this too being full of humorous possibilities; but the more interestingly comic situation, perhaps, is on the order of soul.21 Anyone might fall in love with anyone else at any moment, this being the perennial stuff of comedic action—and directly opposed to Socrates’ plans to mate the best with the best. Now, some have argued that common naked exercise would lead to the opposite result, as in the case of communes devoted to naked living, or even naked beaches in Europe or Russia; they worry that without clothes, the conditions necessary for eros between the sexes will depart.22 There is something potentially boring about all ages naked together, even animalistic, if human animals completely immune to eros as such can be found—but a gymnasium is a different community than a beach or a commune. Striving together for bodily excellence in the presence of excellent others is just the kind of thing that draws one’s notice to the presence of beauty or to shame at its lack in oneself; and so puts one in mind of eros. After all, the presence of eros among members of the same sex who exercise naked together is well documented. Xenophon notes the sight of nearly naked male athletes at the Olympics was a common source of homosexual attraction, while the Athenian Stranger condemns the entire practice as too much of a temptation for any sex (Laws 636a).23 Naked exercise poses an erotic problem for all humans—and so for the lawgiver.
Now, this is not a problem Socrates simply passes over: toward the beginning of the Second Wave, he declares that when the guardians “are mingled together in the gyms and in the rest of their upbringing, they’ll be led, I suppose, by inborn necessity toward mixing together in sex” (458d). This is not a wholly foreign idea: Pausanias notes that maidens, whether or not they competed, were encouraged to attend the Olympics, so that the mutual attraction between themselves and the athletes could be taken advantage of for matrimonial purposes.24 But Socrates proposes stronger medicine: such attraction will be an explicitly encouraged everyday occurrence, and he gambles that the medicinal lies of his rigged lottery, where the rulers will secretly match up the breeding pairs under the illusion of random chance, will be enough to keep the best mingling with the best (459c–d). It’s amusing that the very misdirection of the image ultimately draws our attention back to the problem; we can’t look at wrinkled old men forever. It’s funny that the very power of the soul Socrates has been willing to demote for much of the evening’s conversation, is now blithely taken up into his plans—in such an alarmingly precarious way. What’s most funny of all is that Socrates is clearly underestimating the power he as lawgiver will have over the eros he allows to foment. Just as in his image of old men haunting the palaestras, it is ultimately Socrates himself that raises the biggest laugh.
How does Socrates ostensibly propose to deal with the repercussions of this change? To have no other plan for softening or controlling the effects of common naked exercise, other than a specious lottery, would be perilous in the extreme. At the very end of the First Wave, he casually shares his plan: after having obtained agreement that the women will now share in all the duties of the guardians and be educated alongside the men, he concludes: “It’s clear then that the women guardians must strip, seeing that they will be clothed in virtue instead of cloaks” (ἐπείπερ άρετὴν ἀντὶ ἱματίων ἀμφιέσονται, 457a). Although Socrates spoke earlier as if the change in custom would need no further provision once everyone became accustomed to it, his reference to nakedness again shows otherwise; indeed, he speaks of these robes in a way that makes them potentially emblematic of the whole question of law for women. I see in this moment the real linchpin of the passage, since it is the culmination of the earlier question of naked exercise, the thing that is supposed to make the whole plan possible. Wearing virtue instead of cloaks or robes is Socrates’ specific plan for how the women will exist in public once they no longer possess the privacy he has carefully pushed under the rug. In one sense, it can be spoken of as his solution to the problem, since he represents it as such: the women will just do this, wear virtue, and all will be well. On the other hand, surely invisible robes as a solution ought to sound questionable, as soon as the reader considers them for a moment. The tension inherent in this solution will prove crucial to thinking through the underlying problem, and requires its own separate consideration later on. But it does raise this question: if women will be clothed in virtue, in a sense they still have some sort of clothing. This tugs the reader back to the question of privacy I began with: overall, the action of Socrates’ argument is to pull women out of the private into the public eye. Is this meant to be the funny part?
Let’s consider the most extreme argument connected with the customary privacy of women that has been made: that this shift from private practice to public one goes against women’s nature as lovers of the private, and Socrates therefore introduces this shift as a way of showing the impossibility and undesirability of his city in speech, and probably of the rule and education of women as well. Women could not step into the public because of a sense of appropriate shame; when unclothed they feel the natural shame that is an expression of their peculiar nature; women are too attached to the domestic and therefore the customary city, making them unsuited to reside as guardians in the best city in speech.25 Socrates’ rebuttals of our temptation to laugh at common naked exercise are therefore weak because they are ironic, and he means not to counsel us against laughter as he appears to, but rather to incite us to laugh all the more. The First Wave is a reminder that the city in speech is against nature, and a sign of this is that it’s funny.
Now, this argument could stand, even if it is not the bodies of women themselves which are meant to be funny, but their private state in general. But given the earlier discussion of the necessity of expanding our view of women to include all the varieties of political positions possible for them in Greek nomos, in all its messy detail, the solecism of this argument should be obvious: so-called domesticity is simply but one of the many options possible for all the women that live out of the public eye, but one of the species of privacy among the broader genus; while the bridge-woman may retain a fondness for her bridge, the shameless courtesan hunts where she pleases. Most of the population of Greek women were not attached to a private home in the way a law-abiding Athenian aristocrat was exhorted to be; privacy or the non-public realm has as many inflections as there are footholds for women in the community.
The second problem with this argument is that it takes “the private” to be filled out by the Greek expression τό ἴδιον alone, without considering the other way the Greek language and Socrates himself speak of life lived outside of the public realm of citizens.26 The phrase τό ἴδιον, or “one’s own,” speaks to what is private to one’s self, whether this is one’s own estate, family, or body, the accoutrements of political animals expressed through the notion of possession. Socrates frequently voices his concern for the competing force of the private as to idion (373e, 443a), looking for a justice that will be useful both in common and in private (333d). But also crucial to Socrates’ argument in the Republic is the entirely cityless, propertyless version of privacy, named by the word ἐρεμία, variously translated as “isolation,” “loneliness,” “desolation.” This quality bespeaks the realm outside the city’s walls as typified by the mountain or forest, peopled with wild beasts; it is also associated with the desires of the tyrant (604a). As I discussed in chapter 4, women are customarily seen as private or wild in this latter sense, no less than as partial participants in the former. It is this latter quality that Socrates names in Book VI, when he unites the characters of philosophy and the orphaned parthenos (495e); and so it’s this quality of privacy that is particularly germane to the First Wave. The irony of the attempt to show that women qua domestic are a dangerous drag on the abilities of the lawmaker, and as such can’t qualify as guardians, is that this argument only sees a fraction of the political problem women represent in the Republic, once privacy is no longer taken as univocal. By this logic, Socrates’ inclusion of women in the guardian class, who bear this very quality, is not funny so much as it is terrifying.
But still, the argument can be made: even given the fact that women customarily inhabit not only domestic privacy, but anti-domestic privacy as well, is there still some hilarity in the private sex leaving the private? To be sure, other aspects of the women’s law, such as the hope that no mother would recognize her child, famously ridiculed by Aristotle in the Politics, are funny enough.27 In the First Wave, Socrates speaks of his wish to prevent the comedians from minding their own business (452c) in order to stave off laughter at common naked exercise; but such an act of injustice merely highlights the fact that comic poets too must be given their due. Certain modes of laughter are of themselves serious and even thoughtful, as long as we take care to notice just what we’re laughing at; though I will note in passing, that in the god-fearing polity the Athenian Stranger describes, where the comic poets are put under no restraint, citizenship, some share in governance, and education are granted to women.28 This implies that these measures of themselves are not what is laughable about women’s entrance into the public. But to speak to the seriousness of the comic poets, consider the following distinction: Henry Fielding, novelist, jurist, and admirer of Aristophanes, considers that the presentation of the monstrous or the unnatural, one might say, is the absurd; while the hilarious or the funny, in the attempt to affect or put on that which is beyond nature, reveals nature after all—at least according to someone who is himself a comic poet.29 Fielding’s examples of the latter are when “ugliness aims at the applause of beauty, or lameness endeavors to display ability.”30
One possibility, then, is that it is women themselves who are being laughed at, and that there is something humorously unfit in their entrance into the public, because of some difference or deficiency on their part. Now, to laugh in this way at the expense of the genos of women is a real human possibility, and one possible even for those famed for a kind of expansive benevolence toward humanity in general, as in the case of Dr. Johnson and his bon mot: “Sir, a women preaching is like a dog’s walking on its hind legs. It is not well done; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”31 Where comes this sense of woman as deficient or even crippled in some way? Johnson’s joke depends on our willingness to regard the female human being as belonging to an entirely different species; I would suggest that this is a case where the otherness of the female genos is being read as deficient—on account of being not-man.
ORPHIC MISOGYNY, SOCRATIC MISANDRY
Now, when irony comes on the scene, anything looks possible; and to be sure, it’s well to consider all human possibilities. Does Socrates have this sense in common with Dr. Johnson? It is certainly the case that in the Republic, Socrates speaks contemptuously of breeding in general (586b), and treats his guardian breeders rather callously—but in the Symposium, while it is certainly argued that the offsprings of the mind are to be preferred, Socrates paints himself as an admirer of birth in general, who keenly teaches what his teacher Diotima pronounces, that there is something divine about all human engendering and bringing to birth (206c). In the Republic itself, Socrates makes a point of giving us a definite example of someone who bears true hatred for the female genos (μίσει τοῦ γυναικείου γένους), in the case of Orpheus in the Myth of Er, who wishes to be a swan rather than be born again of a human woman (620a); in this example there is that same sense of the sex as different in kind, and as different in kind, hated as unfit. But it seems less likely that Phaenarete the midwife’s son, who ascribes his knowledge of the erotic art to the mythical priestess Diotima, and his knowledge of rhetoric to our friend Aspasia, a quite real harlot, feels precisely the same as Orpheus. I will note that Socrates reports that both his male teachers, the linguistically inclined Prodicus and the musician Connus, fail to teach him anything (Meno 96d; Euthydemus 272c). In the character of Orpheus, by contrast, Socrates takes care to present us with a true “misogynist”; though indeed I would question the utility of naming him as such, since the term is too often used to elide crucial differences among the various reactions of men to women.32 On the other hand, to wish to escape the human race, on account of the female genos, is a noteworthy sort of hatred to be sure.
Now, many readers make a point of contrasting Socrates’ plans for women in the First Wave, with his allusions not too much later to the “womanish” stripping of corpses foolishly practiced by the Greeks against each other (469d). And whether such readers deplore or indeed approve Socrates’ usage, they find that it undercuts his action toward women as a whole.33 But the use of the purported vices of the other sex for what is after all a rhetorical telos, is not the same as thoroughgoing hatred of the race of women. In fact, Socrates also uses “manfully” and “eristically” in the same breath in the First Wave to ridicule all wrongheaded practitioners of dialectic (454b), but no one would argue from this that he hates the genos of men.34 Socrates’ image of common naked exercise is not an attempt to portray women as “Ugliness aiming at the applause of Beauty,” in Fielding’s apt phrase; but rather, Socrates uses ugliness to hide the problems associated with Beauty—which is indeed amusing. Again, what Socrates ultimately paints as deficient or ugly in his description of naked exercise is his very own self—whereas his action as a whole is to secure a place for women in the most treasured class of the city. Likewise, as I argued in chapter 2, Socrates’ capitulation to Glaucon on the matter of the relative strength of men is precisely that, a rhetorically necessary capitulation, in sharp contrast to what Socrates says on other occasions (Timaeus 18c, Meno 72d–73c), and is a deliberate act aimed at preserving his initial plan to make men and women guardians share in the common act of hunting together and guarding. Finally, Socrates is not alone in recognizing the need to manage the rhetorical introduction of his actions with respect to women; consider what the Athenian Stranger says about the reason he initially introduced his plan for common tables for women as one posing great practical difficulty: the great strength of disbelief (Laws 839d) stands in the way of understanding that it is possible, even though it is relatively easy to see that it is quite feasible (Ibid., 842d); he finds the same sort of gradually more explicit approach necessary for women’s participation in gymnastic and warfare (Laws 794d, 796c, 804e, 829e.)35
The presence of women in the Platonic corpus is a strange mixture of presence and absence. Unlike Xenophon, who has his Socrates converse with—and successfully shame—an Athenian courtesan, Plato does not present us with a scene where Socrates speaks with a living, present human woman. So much so indeed, that Plato’s Socrates speaks of his determination to examine in speech both men and women—once he has arrived in Hades (Apology 41c). But women’s presence in the corpus is not merely mythic, as the reference to Aspasia in the Menexenus reminds us. Again, Socrates’ own vision of the variables within the genos of women is purposefully broad and highly specific, with Diotima’s holy prophecies and Aspasia’s courtesanly advice standing at satisfyingly opposed extremes. It is the public silence of women that speaks most; in Plato, women do not receive Socratic refutation; Socrates is the midwife to men; but the student of women. In some sense, two of the genos already know, and are thus qualified as teachers in a way Socrates is not. Of course, some readers certainly wish to interpret away Socrates’ crediting his knowledge of erotics and rhetoric to women as a trivial or ironic detail; but this strikes me as an absurdity on the level of H. Gauss’ interpolation of Frauengymnasia.36 Socrates’s strange plans in the Republic do indeed speak volumes on the oddity of women’s position in the human community, and the strangeness of what Socrates himself in the service of the kingship of philosophy is willing to attempt; but they aren’t a denunciation of the sex—any more than they are a sort of childish piracy of women’s prerogatives.37 Knowledge is not a trivial matter to Socrates, or for that matter, to Plato. It sits at the heart of Socrates’ way of being in the world, and though he publicly claims to know nothing, as any first-time reader can tell you, in quite an irritating way he clearly knows all too much. In the Greek world, one’s teacher is one’s lineage; in the Republic, Socrates absolutely insists that the lineage of this beloved vision of truth itself (though not without a side-helping of useful falsehoods) inform the pedagogy of female students; indeed, he stands as a sort of daimonic mediator between his teachers and the students he envisions—while making sure that their education be oriented primarily towards the virtues not of respectable Athenian wives, but of the foreign nurses and courtesans.
Though Socrates is famous for his irony, his relationship with those who make jokes of all varieties is infamously strained. Twice, in the First Wave, Socrates alludes to this tension between himself and the comic poets; first he remarks that they must not mind their own business but rather in this case be serious (σπουδάζειν), which, as it is often remarked, implies that he is proposing injustice toward this class, since to mind one’s own business is justice (433b).38 Socrates’ war with the comic poets is serious; after all, they are in some sense responsible for his indictment, as he remarks in the Apology (18d); he is willing, perhaps, to do injustice to those who do injustice to him. Such warfare is also reflected in his final remark, at the end of the Wave, where he mendaciously misquotes Pindar (457b). This poet’s original caveat was, to not to pick the fruits of wisdom before they are ripe, implying that wisdom in the hands of the philosophers is capable of being half-baked. But in Socrates’ version, it is laughter itself that is not ripe, and in his version, it is the comic poets who miss the mark. I would like to suggest that such a quarrel is not something that ought to be settled once and for all; should we side with the comic poets and conclude that Socrates’ proposals, and philosophy itself, are in fact laughable after all, we are simply siding with Socrates’ accusers, and against his express argument that philosophy has something legitimate to say for itself. To conclude that Socrates’ Waves are simply laughable is to let the comic poet have the last laugh.39 On the other hand, when philosophy makes its native desire to rule explicit, and when Socrates himself enacts his dialogic revenge on the assembled company, that is indeed funny; it’s funny that Socrates is claiming he actually after all ought to be not put to death—but to be in charge of the state. It’s quite funny that Socrates of all people is claiming that we ought to do injustice to anyone, even if they happen to be pesky comedians. The comic poet claims there is a limit to what philosophy can do, and the philosopher says that the business of comic poets ought to have its limits as well; the dialectic between them might lead to something like better wisdom.
At the end of the First Wave, in contrast to his earlier misdirection, Socrates speaks directly to the problem of the temptation specifically male onlookers have, to laugh at women. Socrates remarks that “the man (ἀνὴρ) who laughs at naked women engaged in exercise for the sake of the best . . . has no idea, it seems, what he’s laughing at or what he’s doing (457b).” Socrates neatly describes the basic temptation of readers—and specifically, readers among the male genos—who come to his remarks about female exercise, that they would be in ignorance about just what they are laughing at, or what they reveal about themselves when they do. Indeed, Socrates’ construction of the disputatious opponent (“the person who contradicts this sort of thing,” 455b) is the conjuring of the true opponent to his proposals: the manly man, attached to his own genos, willing and in the habit of saying whatever it takes to defeat a proposal to which he has a strong thumotic reaction—a character many women, I imagine, would find recognizable—who nevertheless displays his ignorance rather than his cleverness in his false use of logos. Such ignorance requires Socratic education; Socrates is not lying when he demands that the comic poets think twice before they ridicule what is good. But reader take warning: Socrates also makes it clear on another occasion that the jokes between genê run both ways. In the Theaetetus, he tells the story of the time that Thales, who while out for a walk and gazing at the stars, fell into a hole; a “gracefully witty” Thracian servant girl (Θρ´ττά τις ἐμμελὴς καὶ χαρίεσσα) standing nearby bursts into laughter (174a). Socrates returns to the laughter of Thracian girls twice more in his oration against all those who find the philosopher foolish (174c, 175d); their specific laughter seems to be on his mind. In both the Theaetetus and the Republic, Socrates makes a point of attempting to school our laughter on behalf of the better practice of philosophy; and if we as readers attempt to side with the comic poets instead of Plato, we’re missing the point, not to mention the complexity of the joke.
NOTES
1.Bluestone, 44.
2.As Drew Hyland argues in “Plato’s Three Waves and the Question of Utopia,” 94.
3.Burkert, 263; and Janouchova, 99. Paula Perlman argues for a connection to the Athenian Stranger’s plans for female exercises and the rites at Brauron in “Plato’s Laws and the Bears of Brauron,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 24 no. 2 (1983): 115–24.
4.See Dillon, Girls and Women in Classical Greek Religion (London: Routledge, 2002), 94; and also by the same author, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1997), 201.
5.Sarah B. Pomeroy, Spartan Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 12, 25–8.
6.Laws 806b. Note that the Athenian Stranger recommends naked dance for youths of both sexes, the better for marriage purposes (Laws 772a); girls will participate in naked races until puberty, after which they will continue to race clothed until marriage or the age of twenty (Laws 833c); the Stranger’s provisions are given relative respectability by his insistence on their status as religious practice.
7.Commentators Halliwell and Adam both find the Spartan connection for exercising women to be perfectly reasonable, and to lend authority to the whole (Halliwell, 10–12; and Adam, 280).
8.See Dillon on the Heraian games, Girls and Women, 131–2, 220ff; the quoted description is Pausanius’ (5.16.3). See also Thomas Scanlon’s extensive discussion of both Brauron and the Heraean games in Eros and Greek Athletics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chs. 4–6; he presents tables of extant naked female exercisers in bronze, as well as the full range of Spartan female athletic activity (136–8); and Pomeroy, Spartan Women, 164.
9.(The Dialogues of Plato, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892), 159. See also Marilyn Katz, “Did the Women of Ancient Athens Attend the Theater in the Eighteenth Century?” Classical Philology Vol. 93, no. 2 (1998): 105–124), whose excellent title I am playing on. See David Cohen’s “Seclusion, Separation, and the Status of Women in Classical Athens,” Greece & Rome, Vol. 36, no. 1 (1989): 3–15; see also “Adultery, women, and control” in Law, Sexuality, and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 133–162.
10.See Edith Eidinow, Envy, Poison, and Death: Women on Trial in Classical Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 23ff.
11.Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes, 104.
12.Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 3.14; this particular fragment of Aeschines’ dialogue Aspasia is preserved in Cicero’s De inventione, I.51–53.
13.For extremely fine-tuned phenomenological considerations on the ways men and women interacted with space in the Greek oikos, see Lisa C. Nevett’s House and Society in the Ancient Greek World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
14.Politics 1300a, 1323a. See Pomeroy, Goddess, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, 79–80.
15.Burkert discusses several festivals that were an occasion where women would meet together in public: the Skira, one of the preludes to the Panathenaia, Athen’s new year (GR, 230); at the Thesmophoria, a festival of Demeter special to women (244); and at the Haloa, a festival of winter (265). Likewise, larger festivals or cults required the presence of both men and women, such as the Eleusinian mysteries (285).
16.John Gould, “Women in Classical Athens,” 57.
17.James Davidson’s advice is helpful, that we must keep attempting to regard the Greeks as neither wholly Other or too easily recognizable, see Courtesans and Fishcakes (London: Harper Perennial, 1999), xv–xxvi.
18.In satisfying contrast, Mary K. Lefkowitz has a nice sense of the inadequacy of 20th-century theoretic structures, no less than 20th-century customs, when applied to Greek myth (see “Preface to Second Edition” in Women in Greek Myth (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007), ix–xiii). But I will note that the position eloquently expressed by Jowett remains a perennial temptation: scholars with as disparate inclinations as David Halperin and Marina McCoy express a similar disbelief in the reality of women as people with self-hood in the ancient world (Halperin, 146; McCoy, 150–55). But this is perhaps the most self-obviating sort of Othering of women of all: to imagine that because Athenian women lived under customs we find strange or repellent and restrictive that they lacked a nous of their own, or desires to match. As de Tocqueville notes, Americans are apt to forget the distinction between equality of conditions and freedom, which a human being may possess under regimes other than democracy (Democracy in America, Vol. 2, Part 2, ch. 1). This is the sort of reasoning that most of all stands in the way of a formation of what Irigaray would call female genealogy (JTN, 15–22); it’s part of why, I would suggest, there’s been very little interest in the women authors in the Pythagorean, Neoplatonic, and Stoic communities of the ancient world; and yet they possess the very sort of exchange of written ideas between women and men that Irigaray feels the lack of (JTN, 54).
19.Homer Odyssey, xviii.354–5.
20.Aristophanes Clouds 978.
21.I have heard it claimed that the bouncing of breasts on old women would be humorous, though in all fairness, I don’t think this would be more humorous than analogous bouncing for males; certainly there is precedent for the humor of the latter in Attic comedies. Jacob Howland, following Bloom in his contempt for the sex that young men are forced to have with ugly old women in the Ecclesiazusae (“Response to Hall,” 324), insists on the putative presence here of ugly old women as animalistic (The Republic: The Odyssey of Philosophy (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993), 113.
22.Respectively, Paul Ludwig, Eros and Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 307; and Peter Nasmyth, Georgia: In the Mountains of Poetry (Oxford: Routledge, 2006), 86.
23.Xenophon Symposium 1.2–10.
24.See Thomas F. Scanlon’s discussion of the various sources and corroborations of Pausanius’ account in Eros and Greek Athletics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 98–120.
25.“As a political proposal, the public nakedness of men and women is nonsense. Shame is an essential component of the erotic relations between men and women. . . . [Women] are involved with the private things which are likely to oppose the city . . . this a city without homes, and the women will have more to overcome if they are to accept it, for their natures lead them to love private things most” (IE, 382). Bloom concludes that Socrates’ plans are “absurd conceits” which “have never existed in reality or the thoughts of serious men” (IE, 380). Steven Berg likewise considers shame as a natural condition “dictated” by the “hiddenness” or privacy of women, and required for the flourishing of the “natural” goods of a spouse and children of one’s own (“The ‘Woman Drama,’” 68).
26.Bloom is among the most thoughtful on what the loss of the private would mean, but this elision is the crux of his failure to account for womankind (IE, 380-4); Strauss makes this elision as well (CM, 114–5); likewise Saxonhouse (“The Philosopher and the Female,” 78).
27.Politics II.3, 1262a15.
28.See Strauss, Plato’s Laws, 2, 57, 167. Page has it that “Aristophanic laughter is meant to be taken seriously” in “Truth and Lies,” 28n25; see also Nichols, Socrates and the Political Community, 29–33. For the Athenian Stranger and the citizen-esque role he describes, see Laws 814c.
29.See the “Author’s Preface” to Joseph Andrews (New York: Rinehart & Co., Inc., 1959), xx–xxi. My choice to use Fielding’s poetics on laughter at the natural, instead of Socrates’ intriguing but pointedly incomplete description of laughter at lack of self-knowledge in the Philebus, is pace Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes, 5; I’m suspicious of the definition as it arrives in the midst of Socrates’ rather eristical battle against pleasure (Philebus 12a, 66e).
30.Joseph Andrews, xxii–xxiii.
31.James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1946), ch. XV, 169.
32.Danielle Allen has a useful compilation of various words in Greek that make use of the prefix “mis-” in Why Plato Wrote (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 158–60. Socrates, for instance, does not share Euripides’ familiar quandary, wherein he garners the reputation of being a μisogÚνης on account of his tragedies, but remain a φιλογÚνης “on the couch,” as Athenaeus reports (Deinosophists 13.5.35).
33.Natalie Harris Bluestone Women and the Ideal Society, 127n2; likewise Rosen (PRS, 196); and Leon Harold Craig in The War Lover (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 11.
34.Michael Kochin argues that Socrates’ so-called “sexist language” has a very pointed rhetorical goal: Socrates, speaking to a room full of men, “turns male prejudice against itself” (GRPT, 40–41).
35.The Stranger begins by hinting that even young women would benefit by the exercise of working with heavy arms (794d), in passing implies both sexes go to war (796c), eventually asserts that he can say “without any fear” that women can participate in gymnastic and horse-matters (804e), and finally presents his strongest declaration yet that participation in warfare will be absolutely equal as a supreme good to the state (829e). Additionally, it’s worth noting that in the passage 839cd, the Stranger compares his need to practice rhetorical care for women’s common tables, to the reaction of a young and violent man (ἀνήρ, 839b), who, standing by, will denounce the practice of only having sex with women one expects to bear one’s children, as foolish and impossible (ἀνόητα and ἀδὐνατα); it’s not hard to picture the Stranger having the same sort of bystander in mind when he exercises care with his plan for the tables of women. On the other hand, Socrates himself exercises less initial caution with his youthful audience, than the Stranger does with his aged one; but this may well be a matter of temperament.
36.Abraham Melamed notes that Plato’s opinions of women as philosopher-queens inculcated a more favorable opinion of the genos in medieval Jewish thought, through the descriptions and support of Muslim writers (The Philosopher-King in Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Political Thought (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003), 204n14). See also Melamed’s discussion of how Maimonides hints esoterically at the capacity of women to be prophets and so the highest sort of human intellectual potential, as well leaving open the possibility that women may study metaphysics in “Maimonides on Women,” 99–134; Melamed sees Platonic influence here as well.
37.I must admit I find David Halperin’s reading of Diotima’s wisdom as a sort of male siphoning-off of female wisdom to be peculiarly contrarian (“Why is Diotima a Woman,” 146–8); I’ll note that Allan Bloom shares his views, the real difference being that Bloom strongly approves the practice (IE, 383–4). The strange party trick of the end of Halperin’s influential essay, wherein he denounces his statement of his opinions as merely more male erasure of women’s experience and as such to be dismissed into meaninglessness, is almost too tempting an offer to refuse. Irigaray, whom Halperin quotes briefly, makes this argument better, though hardly anyone could put the shortcomings of her account in the context of her strengths better than Andrea Nye in “Irigaray and Diotima at Plato’s Symposium” (in Feminist Interpretations of Plato, ed. Nancy Tuana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994)), 197–215.
38.Bloom, IE, 381.
39.Bloom remarks on the danger of this (IE, 380–81).