Hera, Artemis, and the Political Problem of Privacy
Among the many ironies in Socrates’ insistence that the most necessary city consists alone in four or five necessarily childless men, is his tacit reassignment of the trade of weaving to an anér—and out of the hands of women. Not merely the provenance of the respectable wife, weaving was also a female profession in its own right, peopled both by free and enslaved women. It was not considered a thoroughly desirable trade; there’s a Hellenistic epigram that describes the decision of a lady weaver to leave her profession in search of a better:
To Athena she said,
“I shall apply myself to Aphrodite’s work,
and vote like Paris against you.”1
In the Greek world of custom, law, and myth, the religious calendar and its rituals make up at least half the whole. And while there are certainly rituals and goddesses associated with the narrative arc of women’s life, as articulated by stages of embodiment from virgin to wife to mother, in another sense the goddesses represent not so much stages, as alternatives. The curious character of Athena, untouchable maiden and master of the war cry at once, attests to this. Athena hardly represents an inevitable moment in the life of any given woman, but rather a special sort of mantle, a way of being, and specifically a female one. The priestess of Athena Polias in Athens was one of the most important religious figures in the city; as Burkert records, not herself a virgin but an older woman with the busiest years of family life behind her, she wanders the streets wearing the aegis.2 The epigram of the dissatisfied weaver shows the reasoning process of one woman, as she chooses a new profession, and how she frames her deliberation as turning from one goddess and her proper work, to quite a different goddess and thus to quite a different profession.
For both Socrates and the Athenian Stranger, the life that women live as private non-citizens, though shaped and given a definite pattern by ritual, poses a peculiar political problem, because it remains unregulated by the city proper, which lacks civic-minded laws for women. Both set out to solve the problem of women’s untamed state by taking up elements of other customs and religious rituals, practiced in private by women alone among themselves, and turning them into a common practice for both sexes side by side. For Socrates, this is naked gymnastic; for the Athenian Stranger, it is taking the practice of eating together, which Athenian women would do at the Thesmophoria (where alarmingly, the women got together to eat cakes in the shape of male genitalia), and changing it into an everyday occurrence, open to the sight of all.3 In both plans, there is the common thread of public meeting and public sight, which will both mark and in some sense effect the new law. But while Socrates is perfectly sanguine about the specifics of his outlandish measure, the Stranger voices his worries that the genos of women will resist entrance to the public most strenuously. He fears that the women will not wish to leave behind their “robed and shady” life, and the lawgiver may be overpowered by their wishes in the end (Laws 781c).
What would it mean for women, as woven into the fabric of Greek nomos and religion, to step into the public and be seen? Why is there a reluctance to leave—what good things reside in a life lived in shade? What problems does their residence there pose, such that the canny lawgiver would risk attempting to tame them? The question takes on the more interest, when it becomes fully understood just how many alternatives there are to a life lived in privacy in this way. Socrates’ descriptions of the feverish city, rife with purveyors of Aphrodite’s work no less than of Athena’s, show his awareness of the problem in all its variability. These questions have to be asked in the light of all the alternatives available to the human women Plato’s characters and readers happen to come across in daily life; about not merely the absolute silence of the virgin goddess of the hearth, Hestia, but of the talkative and wily pair of friends, Hera and Athena, as well as Apollo’s harsh twin sister, the single-minded Artemis. It would be simple-minded to assume that since women lacked share in government, they were not a strong presence and force in the polity; and it’s the presence of this absence, hidden in plain sight, that needs to be recovered.
But for us, in this day and age, to play at recovering the logic of the epigrammatist is a tricky thing. What is striking is the anonymous lady’s lack of either sentiment or Angst as she makes her choice, an equanimity which we might find difficult to maintain. The French feminist Luce Irigaray notes that there is a strange absence of concerns specific to women in public discourse and indeed, in Western liberal democratic law itself; the problem is as varied as lack of paid leave for parents, the prudent advice that counsels one to hide one’s pregnancy, or even plans for pregnancy, from a potential employer, and the persistence and the depth of the human troubles surrounding the problem of rape.4 Our modern laws, which necessarily speak of all human beings as equivalent, lack—if I may speak Platonically—a women’s law; and one immediate practical result is a real difficulty in articulating one’s presence in and out of the civic world embodied as something other than as a man. If like myself, the reader feels the presence of this absence, then part of the charm of the Greek world must be for us, not only a Heideggerian return to the origin in the service of understanding the limitation of our modern selves, but a help for recovering the presence, deeply private as it is, of something like an articulated self qua woman. Consider, for instance, the immediately recognizable squabbles, delights, and intrepidity of the two friends, Praxinoa and Gorgo, who make their way through a crowd to see the Adonia in Alexandria, in the fifteenth Idyll of the 3rd-century BC author Theocritus. A stranger tries to shush their enthusiasm (and their Doric vowels), and Praxinoa responds indignantly “Buy your slaves before you order them about, pray”; upon which Gorgo shushes Praxinoa, telling her to be quiet because the singer, a young girl from Argos, is about to start.5 The specificity, amount, and richness of religious activity available to women—from dedications, sacrifices, establishing shrines, priestesshoods, male-excluding festivals—renders the assumption that women in classical Greece would not have such a sense of self, as naive at best.6 It’s out of the material of this world that Plato represents Socrates’ strange attempt to fashion the women’s law.
Now, a turn to the Greeks in this way might well expect to be met with equal parts of boredom and disdain; as Nietzsche remarks, “nearly every age and stage has at some time or other sought with profound irritation to free itself from the Greeks.”7 It’s easy enough, to be sure, to feel such irritation with justice, when the classical age is presented as a more or less nightmarish attempt at hagiography, quickly devolving into a cartoonish pastiche of our all-too-lesser angels.8 Yet equally tempting is the notion that the pagan world is, as Kierkegaard puts it, enshrouded by darkness, in contrast to the better light of our wisdom, godly or ungodly alike.9 While seemingly everyone in the last hundred years has had an opinion about Diotima, speculation based on a few sentences from Plato and Aristotle on the role of women in these authors has nevertheless proved remarkably sterile ground for the 20th century. Plato’s work requires an attention to the richness of the world he writes about, no less than respect for the wholeness of each of his individual works, that it has not always received.10 But fortunately for us, Plato as author is not offering his world as something for us to slavishly imitate, but as a way to open up questions about any world where women cut a figure; taken as such, the possibility is not unreasonable that his works may possess for us the regenerative properties Kierkegaard insists the Greek world at large possesses.11
The plans of Plato’s lawgivers to tame the women through the means of public sight take place against religious muthos and even taboo concerning the sight of a goddess naked; indeed, some of the most popular stories and iconography are records of punishment for such transgression. Of the six Greek Olympian goddesses, there are well-known stories about two being caught sight of while naked, Aphrodite and Artemis; while the remaining four goddesses, Hera, Demeter, Hestia, and Athena, escape detection.12 Now, while the reader might expect Socrates to express particular fondness for Athena, this is left for another of Plato’s leading men, the Athenian Stranger, who waxes rather gustily about his fondness for the goddess of his native town.13 Socrates, by contrast, is known for swearing with the women’s oath “by Hera!” and likening himself to a midwife after the pattern of Artemis. In the Republic itself, except for the virgin deities in the Myth of Er, Apollo is the only god who visibly makes the cut past the trimming of Homer in Books II–III; though indeed, the hunting prayer that Socrates alludes to in Book IV is made to Apollo and his sister Artemis in the same breath. In what follows, I will spend my time with the goddesses that make the most of a figure in the dialogues, Hera and Artemis. Each offers a different, dialectically opposed alternative to life lived in private, based on how each views their relationship to eros: Hera’s use of cunning and Zeus’ attraction to her to obtain political sway, and Artemis’ desire to eschew bodily lust forever, in favor of the erotic attractions of the hunt. Each choice with respect to eros poses a different political problem for the lawgiver; Hera represents the problem that women will become the power behind the throne without any balancing concern for the public good, while Artemis’s hatred of eros opens up the question of rape as a political problem.
One final set of caveats: in what follows, despite my primary concern with the lives of the individual women living within these customs and rituals, my discussion of individual goddesses might seem to represent the common mistake of taking these characters as archetypes of some sort, and so run the risk of missing the relation between divine image and living human. Now, to claim that these distinct figures represented separate ideals or even natures, would be as potentially tempting but as ultimately metaphysically inelegant as Jung’s own imperfect attempt at a human pantheon. Rather, each figure—by means of the concrete, specific, and absolutely permeating rituals that give shape to the everyday of daily life—provides a different way of being in the world, which in turn provides a way of articulating and unfolding the self, the very sort of unfolding the anonymous weaver gave voice to. Now, by this I mean something importantly different from the notion of gender as performative; this practice is not some artificial standard we’re locked into signaling to one another, with no center other than an abstract self. On the other hand, it would not be precise to speak of this as properly female human nature either; it’s worth recalling Strauss’ adage, that it takes philosophers to first distinguish nature as separate from and potentially opposed to custom—while what the Greek female divinities represent is something more like a polymorphous phenomenology.14 While the felt presence of nature is always part of the interest of Greek muthos, one of the strengths of its muthos is that such nature is allowed to present itself in as many forms and faces as the teller finds necessary. Greek religion is a practice, not a doctrine; and as such is peculiarly suited to this kind of phenomenological self-accounting. And so, while to speak of the Greek goddesses is to adopt a kind of strategic essentialism—to call on an ethos as a kind of shorthand where variety and exception are assumed, even to the point of perfect hermaphroditism—it’s just this sort of strategic essentialism that allows the contrast to be usefully dialectical, as long as the reader in all charity keeps in mind all the variations of temperament and embodiment possible to the human organism.
Shade, σκοτεινός, is an evocative Platonic motif which does a variety of work throughout the corpus: the imagery is of a forested, dappled shade, where beasts reside and humans go hunting; it’s the word Socrates uses to describe the grove in which he and Glaucon hunt for justice in Book IV (432c). In addition to being the place where women reside according to the Athenian Stranger (781c), it is also the shade of Non-Being into which the sophist escapes (Sophist 254a); Socrates often uses it to mean the obscurity of thought (Critias 109e), or a place where thought has trouble penetrating (Alciabiades 134e). It is often remarked that while Jane Austen marks herself as the master of representing women’s inner life, she shows a certain delicate reticence with respect to the inwardness of men; and while her menfolk are always vividly recognizable, she does not hazard to imitate what remains private to them. I see a corresponding, converse reticence in Plato about the sex opposite to him: women’s residence in the shade is difficult to peer into, and it is not easily pierced by the light of the sun.
Such dappled shade might well sound appealing; until one realizes just what is supposed to go on there. It is the privacy of isolation, loneliness, and wildness, “ἐρεμία”; the sort of isolation that Socrates ascribes to the orphaned parthenos who helps us pity the plight of philosophy under customary laws in Book VI; it is also the isolation the tyrant and the housewife possess, where alone in solitude, the tyrant finds it easier to give reign to his worst desires (604a). It is the paradox that even being kept within the walls of a house, one’s privacy can take on this wild quality; even surrounded by the walls of the city, the race of women inhabit a sort of wilderness, untouched by the sight of the public eye. This isolation underlies all the different characters that women take on in the city; the courtesan is more obviously part of this feverish realm than others, perhaps, but Socrates carefully notes the virgin and the matron inhabit it as well. Such wildness is a kind of freedom, through a kind of slavery, if you will, that puts women both below and above the law: as Emma says of Jane Fairfax, one may almost say of them that the world’s law is not their own.15 This is the locus of the political problem that women represent: for what does it mean for a city, when half of its inhabitants are allowed to live in a half-lit, non-civic realm?
Where Socrates merely hints, the Athenian Stranger is quite explicit about the dangers this state of affairs lets grow up in the city:
The female sex, that very genos among we humans which, owing to its lack of public face (ἀσθενές), is in other respects extremely secretive and wily (λαθραιότερον μᾶλλον καὶ ἐπικλοπώτερον), has been abandoned to their disorder, the lawgiver withdrawing from the field (781a).
The souls of the women are left disordered, without the tempering effects of justice in the soul. Like the tyrant, their desires run unchecked; and the very wildness of their position allows the qualities of secrecy and wiliness to grow and tangle. Now, wiliness is a quality well-known in Greek circles; such is the cunning and planning Athena is mistress of cunning (ἐpίklwpoj).16 The Athenian Stranger is explicitly linking the qualities Athena displays with the entire genos. Tellingly, while Aristotle does refer to the deceptive and wily (ψευδέστερον and εὐαπατητότερον) character of female animals in his History of Animals (IX.1, 608b12), he is for the most part silent about these qualities in the political context, ostensibly offering quite a different view of women’s nature in Book I of his Politics. But in the aftermath of his discussion of the Republic in Politics II, he notes the problem with leaving half the human beings in a city unruled by law, speaking with some asperity: “But what difference does it make whether the women rule, or the rulers are ruled by women?”17 And here the political problem thickens, because it is not merely that women live is isolation, or even that their desires are wild; but that they use their position of hiddenness to rule others, and to get what they want.
Sparta, as Aristotle notes and deplores, was managed by its women in its heyday; the warlike men were swayed too easily by the women’s use of eros against their relatively intemperate selves.18 Indeed, when Diotima speaks of Eros personified as a hunter in the Symposium, Eros is cunning in and of itself (203d). In short, there is a recognizable art or knack that women possess with respect to eros, which as a trope, plays out across Greek storytelling in a fascinating way.19 Consider Homer’s version of Hera: not only her use of Aphrodite’s charms to entice Zeus to lie down with her, and forget the battle (Iliad XIV.190–223), but also the matchmaking art she uses to obtain Sleep’s help against his better judgment, by offering him marriage with the nymph he has always desired (Iliad XIV.263–279).20 In Book III of the Republic, Socrates recommends excising the former passage from Homer, on the grounds that the intemperate lust of Zeus ought not to be represented (390b); it is a crucial sign of the weakness of the proposed laws at that point, that Socrates makes no poetic recommendation that would curtail the activities of Hera. To be sure, Socrates is concerned that the story of Aphrodite and Ares being caught together in bed be removed (390c); but this still does not address the underlying problem. While Hera is represented as canny about her use of eros, and poor Aphrodite is not, it is crucial that Aphrodite is not spoken of as particularly ashamed to be visible, even in this absurd circumstance; rather the men standing nearby speak of their willingness to undergo the laughter of the gods to join her.
Bodily strength and public face are not required for the exercise of this strength. Nor does eros have to be present for the cunning of those in private to be wielded sharply; the simple hiddenness of the position gives insight and force. Athena’s use of wiliness to exploit the hidden weaknesses of others is well documented. She uses her knowledge to trick men into hubris, persuading Pandaros to shoot at Menelaeus and break the truce (Iliad IV.86–104); worse yet, she fools them into trusting too much, as she does to Hector, to trick him into being finally killed by Achilles (Iliad XXII.225–247). This vision of the hidden weaknesses of others is what a life in privacy makes possible: it is easier to see the vices of others and discover how to master them when they don’t see you. I take it that this is the force of Socrates’ claim that Thrasymachus the wild beast would have rendered him speechless, but that he caught sight of Thrasymachus first (336d). The force of the public eye on us distorts what we are able to keep our heads and see, and correspondingly distorts what can be said and known. I mentioned earlier that Socrates claims to have learned the erotic and the rhetorical arts from women; the mythology surrounding women’s cunning and erotic machinations makes that claim all too plausible. That he would have learned the erotic art from a respectable priestess is Socrates’ own peculiar twist on the subject; his penchant for swearing “by Hera!” is in this light particularly evocative.21
These considerations show the peculiar irony of the interpretive move that, in the attempt to understand what Socrates’ attempt to draw women into the public eye would mean for women, tries to claim some problematic natural shame properly keeps all women uniformly in decorous shade.22 Aristotle’s biological reasoning again fits perfectly with the mythology surrounding women: he describes the female as the more shameless sex of the two in History of Animals (VII.17, 608b13). Whatever the truth of this account, it certainly shows the anachronistic perverseness of the 20th-century trope of women’s natural shame as the source of their love for the private. According to the Athenian Stranger, it is precisely the private state that allows women’s shameless cunning to perpetuate itself. The Stranger is perfectly clear what women’s reaction to the proposal they join the public sphere: rather than cower back into the shade, they resist with Homeric shouts (βοῆς, 781d) and bid fair to “overpower the lawgiver by far” (781d). The contrast is perfect: not despite their lack of public face (ἀσθενές is deceptively translated as “weakness”) but because of it, they possess a strength potentially stronger than the lawgiver himself.
DOMESTICITY AND LOVE OF ONE’S OWN
In Aeschylus’ trilogy the Oresteia, the goddess Athena, as judge and lawgiver, sets out to solve the problem of the Furies, strange monstrous woman creatures, who with their preference for maternal revenge are causing ruptures in the peace of the land. Athena rules openly against them, not allowing them their revenge against the matricide Orestes; but nevertheless provides a solution to their restless harsh desires: she gives them a home in Athens, and the way Aeschylus tells it, they rejoice at the gift and settle down in their new guise as Eumenides. But given that the goddess is herself childless, motherless, and a collaborator with the male genos to boot, it might be expected that such a solution is not without its problems, if we recast her action as a potential lawgiving solution for all womankind. Given that women are cunning, wily, and essentially erotic in this tyrannical way, could turning their force toward the home stop their restlessness?
The hearth is indeed one option for womankind among the relatively civilized Olympians; the goddess Hestia embodies this pause in restlessness by her perfect silence on the larger stage. But domesticity remains but one option; and Hestia herself remains a virgin in her guardianship of the home fire. Whereas, human women who marry into the hearth, necessarily retain their eros, and domesticity can’t satisfy the pleonexia of women—indeed, it rests for no human. In Socrates’ discussion of the degenerate regimes, he links the downfall of true aristocracy to a mother’s restless desires. The trouble starts when the guardians allow themselves to own private property. The father of the nascent timocratic man is a decent fellow who stays out of politics; the son is egged on by his mother to discontent; she is frustrated with her husband’s lack of power, money, and honor (549c–d). Socrates likens her complaints to “songs that women like to sing on that theme” to which Adeimantus responds “yes, and just like them (549d).” Recall, of course, that Adeimantus himself is not free of the desire for money, estate; he is the one who starts the objection that the property-less guardians don’t look so very happy (419a); Glaucon himself in his speech in praise of the unjust man notes he can marry who he pleases (362b). Toward the end of the evening Socrates does not neglect to promise that the just man will have overflowing funds and marry at will (613d). Adeimantus’ complaint and desire represent well the sort of haggling husbands and wives sometimes take on with respect to their shared fortune, each blaming the other for their want. Nevertheless, it’s telling that the pleonexia of women incites the change from one regime to another in this instance; not only is the marriage number crucial for the city’s safety (546b), but the desires of women themselves are a political problem, and they can’t be contained by being tied to the hearth; in fact, such tying seems to make the restlessness rather more severe, as Socrates illustrates by comparing the restlessness of the tyrant indoors to the housewife’s (604a). It’s an open secret that women, despite their ostensible domesticity, possess pleonexia enough. While children can become the official vehicle for such striving, such aggrandizement hardly disguises the underlying desire of the woman herself to have some sway politically, however remote her official position. Of course, such sway can be turned merely to gratify the lust after wealth or finery, as in the story Socrates tells in Book IX of Eriphyle, who betrays her husband for a necklace (590a).
All this being said, it is certainly possible for humans to rest their desire in domesticity, to locate happiness in the hearth, as in the immortal poetics of Jane Austen. Such domesticity is a gentler, more tenuous state; it requires graciousness to take up the hearth, the family, with a good will. This is why deTocqueville speaks of such women with peculiar awe and gratitude—the more so as this graciousness is rare enough.23 Hera, for instance, is known for her lack of such graciousness; she is full of the complaints Adeimantus complains about, Zeus himself lamenting, “Dear lady, I never escape you, you are always full of suspicion.”24 Indeed, it requires a different sort of Queen of Heaven to make this possibility more fully realized, as well as an entirely different sort of poetry; not to mention a parthenos who takes up the pen herself.
The truth is, in the Greek muthos, the institutions of marriage, priestess-hood, prostitution, and nurses as constituting the ways of being a woman in the world, are ultimately doubled-edged swords for the city. Each political position is supposed to lead to tame ladies who are for others; but each role also provides a position from which larger civic concerns, for which they are not directly held responsible or given a public stake in, may be bent to their more or less serious desires. Such power may be wielded, on occasion, in real concern for the good of others, whether on behalf of ancestral family, children, or even city; but because women do not properly have something of their own in all public right, they are the more willing to abandon the city’s desires in favor their own.
Nor are the political problems associated with eremia limited to women alone. Indeed, it’s important not to romanticize the position of women in the city at the expense of recognizing the parallel roles of the similarly lawless metics, slaves, and visiting foreigners. Slaves and the poor also exist in a kind of isolation and hiddenness within the city; therefore it should be expected that some of the qualities of cunning and wiliness, associated with political privacy, are also a possession of these humans as well. Socrates notes that it is not merely the complaints of the mother, but the goading of servants and slaves that bring about the timocratic son’s revolt from his father (549e).25 Indeed, when the Athenian Stranger discusses women’s possession of secrecy and cunning, he is careful not to pin himself down on whether they possess it by nature or by custom; he speaks of nature at work in one breath, then of custom’s force in another.26 To be sure, however, the laws of the city already have traditional structures to deal with the competing claims of metic, foreigner, slave, and citizen; all of which make the absence of women’s law more pressing. The political problem of women encompasses more, if only by the numbers, and is, perhaps, the more difficult because of being hidden in plain sight. Women, collected as political genos across all other lines, have perhaps less desperation than the poor as a body, and yet more hope than slaves as a body; since they begin from a more foundational, eros-laden position, they have more chances to undermine those in political power, albeit poor, foreign, enslaved, or not; they are correspondingly more dangerous; there’s no need for full-scale revolution to gain some measure of power.27
Now, alongside this discussion of women’s privacy viewed as eremia, is another sense in Greek of what is private, which is named by the phrase to idion, one’s own, what is peculiar to one’s self. Indeed, it’s extremely common for readers of the Republic who are trying to think through the privacy of women to conflate these two senses, to overlook eremia completely, while assigning love of one’s own paradigmatically to women. The way the account runs is, women are supposed to be the paramount example of love of one’s own through their too-strong attachment to their children; in fact a consideration of women’s love in this way is supposed to reveal the depth of the political problem of ownness. And make no mistake, Socrates certainly views love of one’s own as a profound problem for the human community; part of the benefit of justice in itself is supposed to work both for the public realm, as well as among one’s private affairs (333d); the just man will neither betray comrades in private, nor the state in public (443a). But just what is one’s own? When Socrates outlaws private property for the guardians in Book IV, he names it as what is what is private to one’s self, what is one’s own; the guardians will only own privately what is barely necessary (416d). To idion is one’s own in the sense that it is a possession, things that are yours and not the city’s; indeed, the reason why to idion is a good in tension with the common good of the city in the first place is, private property depends on the city’s blessing for its continuing to be held as such.
Consider Socrates’ contention that the guardians will have nothing private but the body at 464e: I take it that the point is, most humans customarily consider a larger realm, extended to property and family posterity, honor, and connection, as properly their own. This is precisely why women as such initially pose such a problem: when Socrates remarks that women will be held in common in Book IV, the point is that usually they are supposed to make up part of the to idion of some other human being who is not their own self; and the only change Socrates initially makes is that now they will be held in common, explicitly as possessions (ktῆsij), possessed by all in the manner that friends share out possessions (424a). Women participate in to idion as the private property of another, as the one’s own of another. Nor can the argument be saved by rewriting “one’s own” as the body: for the body of a women is not properly her own in the same sense as for a man, because the law does not protect it as hers, and in many circumstances she is at the mercy of the strength of others.28 Indeed, the very act of childbirth is the divorcing of what was briefly one’s body out in the world as an independent body in its own right, that can never properly be one’s own again. Women are the more dangerous precisely because nothing is properly their own in the sense of to idion; they have less reason to follow the law because they less stake or interest in retaining what they can’t possess or hold public stake in. To take revenge by means of erotic trickery, using one’s body as a chess piece in the game, can be an attempt to reclaim some self-articulated presence by means of what others view as rightfully theirs.
But the question remains, do mothers see their children as their property, and therefore their own in this sense? Mary Nichols considers Diotima’s praise of birth in the Symposium, to reflect this dangerously tilted reasoning: “Presumably, it is because of her role in procreation that a woman understands and feels more surely than a man the human need to have something of one’s own.”29 Now, Diotima certainly speaks lovingly of birth, and that which comes forth from it, but when she speaks of eros as that which desires to have the good forever, she does not use the phrase to idion to describe such having. Rather, she employs the dative of possession, “being in existence to or for one’s self always”; regardless of the name the grammarians choose to pin on it, it’s at the least a different kind of relationship. Indeed, while Diotima speaks of the reverence or honor (208b) that parents have for their children, she does not speak much of love for offspring in general, except to note the relation between offspring of the nous is much steadier (209c). Diotima is primarily a lover of the image of birth itself.
Aristotle is helpful in parsing this phenomenological difference: he notes that parents love their children as another self (ὡς ἑαυτούς, NE 1161b27); there is something in the love that notes the other as a self, and not as an object. Aristotle notes that mother loves the child more because she knows better it is of herself (ἁυτῶν, NE 1168a25); but for something to be of one’s self, is to see the coming forth and the absence. The trouble with children is that the farther they get from the divorcing moment of birth, the more obvious it is that they are a self in their own right. The mourning of the loss of what was once united can attempt to be satisfied by insisting that children are one’s property; but this is not particularly satisfying, and it is crucially a second layer of attachment over the original relationship. Of course, a paradigmatic problem for the city is the tension between the need for soldiers and the desire of the mother to retain the life of the son, but consider the precise motive. Aristotle speaks of the love mothers have for the mere existence of their children, even when they have given the child up (Nic. Eth. 1159a27ff.). The mother is not concerned primarily that children satisfy her immediate, self-ful desire to witness herself living on; she takes delight in their mere prospering from afar, and this is why mothers are a model for the friendship of arete. War threatens not the children as the property or posterity of the mother, but their very existence, their life or death. The relation between mother and child stands in tension with the city indeed, but their love for children is by contrast the model the friendship that for Aristotle makes the city most of all hang together (Nic. Eth. VIII.9). In the end, the deeper, broader political problem associated with women is that, humanly, women want things for their own selves; and that the isolated privacy they inhabit lends itself particularly well for the prosecution of desires without check.
In sum, women have no need a ring of Gyges; in a sense, they already possess that perfect invisibility or privacy, which according to Glaucon, would lead to perfect injustice (359c–360c). Thrasymachus considers the laws to be nothing but a sham, built around the advantage of the rulers; the admiration he shows for the powerful ones who recognize this and act accordingly, might as well also be applied to these shameless ones. It becomes understandable, then, why the state of privacy would be loveable, since what human being would not be tempted to enjoy power and the free play of their desire? In short, women have tyranny available to them, without the ordinary safeguards a city puts up against such grasping of power. We are too used, perhaps, to consider the only goods to be public ones, and the only power worth having, or satisfying in itself, to be full outright public power; but the truth is, the customary state of women is, in certain lights, choiceworthy—and sometimes, too choiceworthy for the city’s good. The familiar problem, perhaps, is that women want some good on behalf of someone else, husband, child, family; but the deeper problem is that women want.
But what of the remaining Olympian goddess, the virgin huntress Artemis? A recovery of her character is particularly difficult because of the remoteness of her character from a more Christian hagiography of maidenhood; once considered, however, she is one of the most humanly recognizable alternatives in the phenomenology of women’s inner lives. She, like Aphrodite, is one of the goddesses who was caught sight of naked; and so her story is of particular interest to the lawgiver. Likewise, Artemis is particularly relevant to the action of the Republic, in that the evening’s conversation in praise of justice and virtue takes place as a sequel to and alternative for the festival of the lusty huntress from Thrace, Bendis, whose temple was the neighbor of Artemis’ in the Piraeus.30 Furthermore, the character of Artemis should be especially interesting to readers of Plato, since as I noted earlier, Socrates identifies his art of midwifery as an action parallel to Artemis’. But to think on Artemis is to attempt to peer even deeper into the shade surrounding women’s lives; in her persona as Mistress of the Animals, she inhabits the mountains and forests, the wildest places farthest from the city. In fact, she is supposed to inhabit the very sort of wild solitude I’ve been discussing as peculiarly linked to women by Plato. Her worship was particularly linked to the time of life of maidenhood, and some Athenian girls took part in her rituals at the temple site of Brauron, located outside of Athens; among the rituals they took part in to mark the occasion of the end of their maidenhood involved dancing and racing naked; there are also hints that the young women there “played the bear” in service to the goddess.31 She, like her brother Apollo, was particularly associated with the education of the young; the hunting prayer that Socrates makes in Book IV, takes on a special significance by this association.
Consider how Socrates describes her in the Cratylus, by means of playful etymology:
. . . Artemis appears to get her name from her healthy (ἀρτεμὲς) and ordered (κόσμιον) nature, and her love (ἐπιθυμίαν) of virginity; in like manner he who named the goddess named her a wise judge of virtue (ἀρετῆς ἵσοτρα), or also too probably, as she hates the ploughing (ἄροτον μισησάσης) of man in woman; either for any or all of these reasons did he assign this name to the goddess. (406b)
Just like the passage from the Laws describing women’s life in the shade, there’s no doubt that this is another thematically cross-reference in the Platonic dialogues to the First Wave of the Republic. Socrates sounds like he is describing a woman who is the opposite of what the Athenian Stranger imagined: while the Stranger specifically said the nature of women is disordered (781a), Socrates identifies one who is ordered, and healthy rather than sick; this resonates with Socrates’ description of justice as health of the soul in Republic IV (444e). Likewise, Socrates describes a person who is contemptuous of fleshly desires in a way not unlike his own stance in the Republic (389e, 403a).32 Finally, the reference to virtue is quite striking: there’s a strong connection between Artemis’ role as a judge of virtue, and Socrates’ provision of robes of virtue for women in the First Wave.
As Socrates hints, Artemis maintains a very different relationship with eros than the other goddesses discussed above. The Hellenistic poet Callimachus relates that when Artemis was born, she grasped Zeus’ knees in supplication and begged to always keep her virginity, that she might be given the bow and arrow for hunting, and whatever city Zeus pleases, since she will stay largely on the mountain, for “seldom is it that Artemis goes down to the town.”33 The exchange detailed here is a powerful one: instead of being caught up in marriage and childbirth, Artemis departs the city and its genealogy in favor of the wild, taking up the hunt instead. Such an exchange explains why, despite Artemis’ hatred for mere lust, she remains nevertheless a profoundly erotic figure; as Burkert notes, her circle of followers is at a particularly high risk for rape.34 In fact, Artemis represents in a very vivid way the real transformation or sublation of human desire into divine eros; rather than some pidgin Freudian repression, it is the very kind of transformation Socrates makes use of when he personifies Eros as a wondrous hunter (Symposium 203d). The question, therefore, is particularly pressing: what happens when Artemis’s privacy is transgressed against, when she is seen naked? The classic story is located around the transgression of a hunting companion, Actaeon, who was subsequently changed into a deer and torn to death by his own hunting dogs.
Now, the myth of Actaeon’s punishment is an old one, with a reference in The Catalogue of Women, the archaic work attributed to Hesiod. Indeed, Artemis is one of the oldest of the gods, and the dedication of hunting trophies to her go back to the Paleolithic.35 And although Homer doesn’t draw out her character very much (Hera makes short work of Artemis in the Battle of the Gods in Iliad 21, sending her back in tears to her deer), the story of Artemis and Actaeon was frequently the choice of poetic elaboration in the classical period—most of which is unfortunately not extant; only a few fragments of Aeschylus’ play Toxotides, or Archer maidens, remains. But Lamar Ronald Lacy’s reasonable reconstruction, based on extant literary sources as well as the iconography of the scene, goes like this: Actaeon happened upon the goddess bathing at a spring sacred to her; but unlike Aphrodite who departed smiling away, Artemis reacted with harsh revenge for her former companion.36
Just what is the locus of Artemis’ anger? One option is that Artemis would simply feel shame at being seen; and this avenue is the more worth considering, since as I noted before, it’s this sort of logic that some readers of the Republic use to explain the impossibility of Socrates’ plans for common naked exercise. Likewise, given the importance of Artemis to Socrates’ thinking, it’s of vital importance to investigate the question in this specific way; rather than, for instance, looking to Herodotus’ story about the Lydian queen who was seen naked by Gyges, since after all it is a story that demonstrates that regimes change when custom is breached, the very change Socrates is already trying to effect.37 Now, fortunately for us, there is a poet that makes the story of Actaeon about Artemis’ shame, the Roman poet Ovid. The story of Actaeon’s transformation finds a natural place in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; in that work, however, Ovid begins the story with Actaeon’s complete acquittal. It was merely chance, Ovid says, that Actaeon saw Artemis naked at all, and a mistake should not receive severe punishment.38 For Ovid, the injustice and the blame lie with Artemis, the one seen, and not with those standing round. Artemis’s words—or rather Diana’s—words to Actaeon locate her sense of the nature of the crime:
Go tell it, if your tongue can tell the tale,
your bold eyes saw me stripped of all my robes.39
Diana’s anger is focused on two points: Actaeon’s eyes and Actaeon’s tongue. She fears his eyes, which make her body a public thing to behold, and his tongue, which would complete the offense by making the sight a public tale. Diana makes this boast just before Actaeon has been changed into a deer: no longer in the human realm, Actaeon will no longer speak to others of what he has seen.
The problem with Ovid’s account, for our purposes, is that it depends on the concern of Diana for her public reputation in the cities of men; but the Greek Artemis paradigmatically does not care about this, since she rejects civic things for wild ones. Artemis does not sit in Zeus’ court; she can’t be embarrassed in the way Hera is, when Zeus outfaces her in a quarrel (Iliad I.531–600). Only a person with some stake in the public things would worry that tales of his private embarrassment would be carried to a mocking public, because there he has something to lose; while even a Roman goddess of the wild might be somewhat civilized, Artemis is not. Finally, Ovid’s version still doesn’t fully make sense of the crime: it only explains why Actaeon has been changed into an animal without speech; but not why he is the prey of his dogs as a deer. Ovid presents, perhaps, something like the reaction of a virtuous Roman matron, fully rooted in the community, but we are trying to uncover a different psychology from this.
If Artemis had simply wanted to destroy Actaeon, her friend until that moment, there are countless ways to do it. Yet she chooses to make the hunter the hunted: this is a striking reversal. Lacy finds the common Greek thread of the story to be some attempt on Actaeon’s part to pursue the goddess with eros, possibly in the hopes of becoming her consort in a sort of theogamia, marriage between gods.40 It’s this attempt to pursue Artemis erotically that makes sense of the punishment: the one who was shameless enough to pursue the hunting goddess will now himself be pursued. Actaeon attempted to make Artemis his prey: he is punished for his erotic hubris by becoming nothing more than the prey himself.41 The manner of the punishment of Artemis’ former hunting companion is extremely harsh, as perhaps could be expected, given her attitude toward bodily lust; Callimachus warns that those who seek to woo (μνᾶσαθαι) Artemis come to a bad end (Hymns III, 264). Love of humans distracts from the single-minded hunt; unlike her brother Apollo, there are no tales of young men or women pursued by Artemis. Likewise, Artemis is attempting to live as wild, without any of the interpersonal ties of the city: all her eros is directed to the hunt, and to be presented with eros directed toward her is as surprising as it is threatening. Again, to employ Socrates’s logic, Artemis hates the ploughing of men into women (Cratylus 406b), and to someone with this hatred, any eros directed toward them is incapable of beauty: it appears ugly. Actaeon lacks the proper fear, reverence, and shame (αἰδώς) he should have when witnessing the divine form, which is apt to drive even pious humans into madness; Artemis herself, a goddess without blemish, responds with white-hot righteous indignation, that her purity would be met with an eros she could only consider to be ugly.
It makes sense that Hera and Athena, who possess a certain mastery of the erotic art, would remain in control of who sees them, where, and under what circumstances; likewise, it stands to reason that Aphrodite, who lives by eros and is therefore without complete mastery over it, would not always be capable of remaining hidden.42 But Artemis’ character possesses a strange tension: because her life is oriented toward the hunt, possessing eros only as transformed and directed by this pursuit, her eros is in danger of forgetting its own origin; because of her unfamiliarity with it, she does not respect or even anticipate its power. And so unlike Hera and Athena, she is caught sight of, with disastrous results. This likewise explains the irony that despite Artemis’ views on eros and her strict rules for her companions, her followers are nevertheless continually being pursued by those who would outrage them. The goddess herself acts as avenger against either the companion who seeks to depart from maidenhood, or against the offender who carries them off; Pindar describes Artemis’ revenge against Tityos’ attempted rape of Leto: “Tityos by Artemis was hunted down with darts from her unconquerable quiver suddenly sped . . . so that a man may learn to touch only those loves that are within his power.”43 Indeed, Atalanta, the huntress, athlete, and companion of Artemis that Socrates writes into his final Myth of Er, is one of the rare successes of Artemis’ circle, in that her eventual fall from divine grace came from her husband’s failure to thank Aphrodite, rather than Artemis’ revenge. In fact, no less than Hera’s wiles, or Aphrodite’s charms, or Athena’s cunning, Artemis’ relation to eros poses a problem for the lawgiver.
THE POLITICAL PROBLEM OF UNCONCERN FOR THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Artemis’ willful ignorance of eros is perhaps even less familiar to us than Hera’s conscious use of it; but as the goddess to whom the parthenoi in Athens devoted rituals ranging from the naked rites of Brauron to prayers to escape death in childbirth, her character is a visible way of being in the world no less than queenly Hera. Problems for the city and for civic life arise when human women reason with and act on the logic of Artemis within the importantly different space of the political realm, and in despite of it. On the mountain, Artemis is the master of the beasts; but among the city, she is not; and human women remain at the mercy of the strength of other humans within the human-made walls. Physical strength creates an imbalance in the polity, not only among men, who are continually tempted to test each other in contests of strength more or less literally; but it also creates an imbalance among men and women, made sharper because direct contests of strength are not a tenable solution to that difference. Ingenuity can’t always overwhelm strength; sometimes strength is stronger, as when Hera simply has to sit down when Zeus tells her to—or otherwise he will throw her off the mountain.44 When eros is added to this natural imbalance of strength, the lawgiver’s predicament is complete: in short, the obverse political problem to women’s overweening mastery of eros is the political problem of rape. Part of the city’s most necessary work is to partially correct this imbalance of strength by sacred law; to have some measure of protection from strength at least in certain contexts is one of the cornerstones of women’s participation, not merely in cities, but in the project of civilization. A sign of this is that while the customary stories of the hero Theseus include his several rapes, the later heroes of the Trojan war go to fight on behalf of the rape of Helen, be she unwilling or willing regardless.45
Now, let me be clear: we come to the question of rape with some different concerns from those of the Greek world; a sign of this difference is that there is no word that denotes “rape” as our word does in English.46 Rather than an invocation of our au courant concerns with autonomy and consent, the older concern speaks to the tension between the political and the pre-political. An act of hubris, dishonor (ἀτιμία), force (βίv, βι£ζειν), defilement (ἀισχύνειν), or seizure (ἁρπαγή), is not only a problem because of the transgression of the political pacts of marriage and alliance; worse than this, something of the wild beast announces itself when such hubris is displayed; men appear as something more and less than tame. The frequency with which such stories were told, whether of Theseus, Heracles, Apollo, or Zeus himself, reminds us how deeply this potential for transgression runs, both in the heroic and the divine. The problem is, that the presence of the wild or the pre-political, as displayed in stories of erotic hubris, reminds us that civilization itself stands on not entirely trustworthy grounds: for as I argued earlier, the city becomes a recognizably human city when eros allows humans to assert their independence from the merely necessary; in short, one of the sources of a city is also a potential source of its destruction. This is part of why Socrates, as a careful lawgiver, has to disparage eros the tyrant, eros the wild beast, in the Republic; Socrates is very explicit that in his best city, the stories about Theseus and Perithous will no longer include rape (ἁπαργάς, 391d).
Now, Socrates is full of plans for the sexual mixing (μῖξιν) of his male and female guardians; his ostensible concern is that the offsprings follow his plans to breed the best with the best (458d); accordingly, should “a man in his prime lay hold (ἅπτηται) of a woman in her prime without being paired by the ruler (461b),” the offspring will be just as much a bastard as if it comes from cross-generational incest or from those outside the age requirements. But the Athenian Stranger is more explicit about the dangers of the partnership of men and women that he too is making plans for:
When, in the course of the argument, I arrived at education, I saw young men and women consorting together (ὁμιλοῦντας) in friendship with one another (φιλοφρόνως ἀλλήλοις). A fear came over me, of the reasonable sort, as I reflected on the problem of how someone will manage a city like this . . . how in this city will they ever avoid the desires that cast many down in the depths, the desires that reason, endeavoring to become law, orders them to keep apart from? . . . With regard to the erotic love (τῶν ἐρώτον) of women for men and men for women, whence ten thousands of things have happened to human beings, in private and to whole cities, in what way could one guard against them? (835d–836b)
The Athenian Stranger᾽s sense of the “ten thousands” of kinds of problems eros is capable of bringing upon humans is sufficiently broad; the nice reversal of “of women for men and men for women,” shows likewise that the problem goes in both directions. Likewise, his contrast of “in private (ἰδίᾳ) and to whole cities” nicely hints at the range of the problems I’ve been discussing, all the way from carrying off someone in private to the seduction of rulers. Now, when women and men are educated together, as both Socrates and the Stranger plan to do, the problem will be even worse than it already is. Erotic love will sweep them into the depths (ἔσχατα), or, that is, to the extreme—to the extreme of human nature that appears as a beast more bestial than other animals. In striking contrast to Socrates, the Stranger’s concern is not merely that a breeding program will be interrupted, but that the internal rule of reason will be subverted in both sexes, and what he calls the friendship between the sexes will be put in danger.47
For Socrates’ part, however, he does register his sense of the danger of parthenoi in particular from the ravages of suitors—that is, when he is describing the plight of philosophy under customary laws as like an orphaned maiden (495b). Without friends to help her, unworthy suitors come in beside her, hang blame on her, and dishonor her (ᾔσχυνάν), that is, dishonor her in the sense of defilement.48 Without the kind of care Socrates wishes to give her in his best city, she gives birth to bastards (496a). Later in Book VII, Socrates again returns to this theme, noting that those who lay hands on (ἅπτεσθαι) lady philosophy now are themselves illegitimately born, and this is the reason why she has fallen into dishonor (ἀτιμία, 535c). The implication is clear: lady philosophy stands in danger of rape, and Socrates’ edifice of laws is meant to offer the parthenos something other than the “false and alien” life she lives now, rather more full of “those who consort (ὁμολούντον) with her worthily” (496b).
Now, while Socrates is certainly more tender of the maiden who embodies Philosophy than the women he plans to conscript as guardians, it’s worth noting that he seeks to obtain the reader’s sympathy for philosophy by means of their potential sympathy for the plight of the maiden in danger of defilement.49 And while Socrates’ blithe plans for his specious lottery certainly promise disaster, no less than they announce his own hubris with respect to eros, the complexity of his images of philosophy as a maiden are remarkable for their narrative accuracy. The details of the extended metaphor are quite filled out, and all specific to the precarious position of the virgin he wishes to portray; he uses more than just one way of referring to rape that the language possesses. Though unacknowledged as a problem directly by him, the language he uses marks it as problem in general—for women. On the Athenian Stranger’s part, just as he is more forthright on the danger, he likewise makes an explicit law against rape to protect the friendship of his men and women: while Athenian citizens of Plato’s day could choose to prosecute a rapist such that a variety of penalties was possible, ranging from death to a fine, the Stranger proposes a law as harsh as it gets: for those who offer violence with respect to matters of Aphrodite (βιάζεταί τις . . . περὶ τὰ ἀφροδίσια), whether to woman or boy, they will be slain, either by the outraged person themselves, or by father, brother, or son (874c).50 Death is the very penalty, I will note in passing, that de Tocqueville approves in America, as the necessary accompaniment to the freedom unmarried girls are given.51 From all of these considerations, I would argue this much: that Plato, who as an author certainly has respect for the holiness of eros, likewise has a care as an author for violent transgression, whatever his various main characters say under given circumstances; if we also consider that in both the Stranger’s and Socrates’ polities, the women will be trained in warfare, they will not be left without resources. Socrates is the less worried, perhaps, because unlike the Athenian Stranger, who claims that the greatest eros is that for procreation (Laws 783a), for Socrates eros has a higher and stronger iteration, the very sort he offers his guardians, male and female alike.52
But even when the city customarily guarantees women a certain protection from the eros of others, the imbalance of strength and the ever-renewing presence of eros remain of necessity a perennial source of tension, and the political problem of rape is not solved by law, let alone by philosophical pursuit; it is merely mitigated. Likewise, the problem has to be considered in the light of the different sorts of reactions to eros I sketched above; where of the women living out of the sight of the laws in shady, isolated privacy, some women manage to remain unseen—and others do not. For the women who learn the knack of working with the eros of others, in a manner that affords them some political strength of their own, they at least possess resources, if not final safety. But some women reason with the logic of Artemis, as is one right and proper way of being in the world for women, as those who live without a care for human eros; almost in a world of their own, in solitude; and they believe themselves accordingly to be unseen. It’s on the one hand a youthful way of being, though it can continue past the time of youth, and even past the advent of ta aphrodisia; the recovery of this character is just the sort of recovery Irigaray is looking for, when she counsels women to inhabit for a time a world without erotic concerns.53 But the basic contradiction remains, that despite an Artemisian belief that they wholly inhabit the solitude of the shade, human women inhabit the human realm of the polity, even if they do so unacknowledged by the official public eye; and cover them how you will, they will be seen. In the Greek world, stories of a chance encounter with a woman walking home from a festival, leading to either marriage, adultery, or rape, are almost too frequent a trope.54 We likewise know the too-familiar story, where the man says, “she was asking for it,” but the woman knows not that of which he speaks.55 Not all stories of rape go like this, but enough of them do; when we understand how often a different logic than that of Hera or Aphrodite is at work, this particular story becomes humanly explicable. Artemis’ follower Daphne, who in her attempt to escape Apollo at all costs, was willing to depart the human realm and become a tree, is likewise explicable on these grounds. There is irony in the temptation on the offender’s part to throw out the epithets of Aphrodite at the lady, when it is not Aphrodite they address. Here lies a fundamentally different understanding of eros among two different human beings; and the result is an outrage. To be sure, the Artemisian state is hardly the efficient cause of the interaction; but it is a part of this particular story, a piece in the puzzle of human misery.
As with the other inflection of privacy I considered above, shame as lack is not at work here, but a lack of shame, the source of which is a certain ignorance, or rather, a native love of the freedom of wildness of youth; in French, the word for this is farouche. Yet there is a kind of public space made up of beauty seen and beauty pursued, whether or not the laws acknowledge women’s presence in public space; and the Artemisian unawareness of this space compounds the human problem. The human version of Artemis’ logic is to believe that there is a holiness, a natural being-above-reproach to the privacy that women customarily inhabit; they feel secure in its possession, a place hollowed out from the seemingly petty concerns of the greater world. For instance, this sense of self-sufficiency can express itself in carelessness toward clothes, or rather, in the amount or variety of clothes not being fully important, the only standard being their own specific sense of the beautiful. It should be obvious to everyone, such lovers of holy privacy imagine, that their actions have no public side, that they are remote, and their intentions are purely removed. The sight of others leaves them untouched—only an assault of their privacy leads them to an initial awareness that some do not recognize that holiness. And so, when they are troubled by the eros of men, the surprise is real, if not justified, perhaps, by a better knowledge of human nature. Such humans don’t realize they inhabit of necessity public space, which they inevitably do even if they don’t possess public standing; their attention is focused elsewhere. Of course, women’s presence in public usually provokes comment without respect to subtleties in dress; yet dress remains a way of potentially being legible, despite the continual possibility of willful misreading; the Artemisian problem is to be in ignorance of the presence of language.56 Ultimately, as I’ll discuss in the next chapter, Socrates’ robes of virtue suggest that something more than clothes is required; since after all, a complete covering, as seen in the case of the burka, is no less ineffective.57 Artemis’ followers, however, are nevertheless continually threatened with outrages; it is perhaps ultimately unsurprising that Artemis in her wild purity is a profoundly erotic figure: transformed eros is beautiful. Women who have this reaction to privacy present a danger to the polity no less than the masters of eros; nor any less danger despite the fact that, being human, they can’t shoot down whatever offender they please, though the wish is fair enough. Under customary laws, Socrates’ orphaned parthenos is in trouble deep.
One final observation: Plato figures the race of women, as a whole, as inhabiting the specifically Artemisian solitude of the forest, in the shade. This suggests a common root to the problem that women customarily pose to the polity, and the common source may be named in this way: the unwillingness women often evince, to recognize the necessity for, or the nature of, the public itself. This is not at all an unwillingness to look to the common good, and still less an unwillingness to be on the watch for the good of another.58 This is the deepest formulation of the danger posed by living in private, the most profound political problem of all that women’s political position represents: the danger of an entire genos in the city underestimating the goods of the public city as public, the public space created by the recognition of one pair of eyes to another, with mutual respect in each. Whether this underestimation takes the form of the secret tyrant, or the wandering farouche, the problem is no less pressing.
Both of Plato’s lawgivers see the problems for the polity that ensue when the women remain lawless in the shade, unregulated by the laws of the city; whether women use eros to master others, or themselves fall victim to it, both of these ways of living put the eros of women into tension with the city’s aims, and make manifest the deep problems with a lack of women’s law, despite the articulation provided by religious ritual and myth—an articulation that any lawgiver would do well to take into account. Under these customary laws, both men at the hands of women, and women at the hands of men, stand to lose. Both of Plato’s lawgivers aim to bring women out of the shade, and into the properly civic public eye, in order to solve these problems; their several attempts reflect their lawgiving priorities, and their successes and failures are measured by the scope they give for all the desires of all the women involved.
NOTES
1.Davidson, 87. Davidson notes that those who report the epigrams of women no doubt put something of their own in, no less than Plato did for Socrates; but this does not mean Socrates as living was any less wise, or the women any less witty (ibid.).
2.GR, 97–8. Also Dillon, Girls and Women, 84–89.
3.GR, 244.
4.Irigaray, Je, tu, nous: towards a culture of difference (trans. Alison Martin. New York: Routledge, 1993), 81–92; I will note that to my eye, Irigaray is a helpfully phenomenological thinker rather than a closet “essentialist” (see Virpi Lehtinen, Luce Irigaray’s Phenomenology of Feminine Being (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014)). Of course, Irigaray herself would no doubt find much to quarrel with my way of attempting to recover something womanly from the Greeks, yet she herself is continually drawn to at least attempt a revision; for a recent look at the variety of her interest, see Elena Tzelepis, and Athena Athanasiou, eds., Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and ‘the Greeks’ (New York: SUNY Press, 2010). Elizabeth Weed in “The Question of Reading Irigary” provides a good discussion of the Anglo-American tradition’s troubles with Irigaray, and yet the good to be had from her project of continuing to “argue that sexual difference has yet to be thought in Western Civilization, much as Heidegger claimed the need to rethink the relation of Being and beings” (Ibid., 16); my own contribution is the argument that, contra Irigaray, Plato can give us real help with the scope of the question, once we notice the aporetic element in his thought. Paul Allen Miller argues in Diotima at the Barricades: French Feminists Read Plato that Plato has already provided a regenerative force among the French feminists, and continues to do so at large (Oxford: Oxford university press, 2016), 267–278.
5.The Greek Bucolic Poets, J.M Edmonds, trans., Loeb Classical Library Volume 28 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1912), 189. Idyll 15 is considered to be genuinely by Theocritus (see Theocritus: A Selection, Richard L. Hunter, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3n13. I will note that it seems to me to be an impossibly 19th-century Hegelian-progressive view to attribute an inner life to women in the Hellenistic period, but refuse it to those in the Classical.
6.Dillon, Girls and Women, 163. For the festivals, see Burkert, GR, 230–265.
7.The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 93.
8.See Donna Zuckerberg’s response to attempts to use the classics to make the case for, among other things, neo-Nazism, in “How to be a good classicist under a bad emperor,” Eidolon, November 21, 2016; https://eidolon.pub/how-to-be-a-good-classicist-under-a-bad-emperor-6b848df6e54a#.7kzrj6xv5; Accessed January 15, 2017.
9.Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 55.
10.For instance, Julie Kristeva’s discussion of Diotima is certainly intriguing, but the alien poetics she brings to the text do as much to obscure as to reveal (Tales of Love, 71–82); likewise Irigaray, though she does more justice to the text of the Symposium than she does to the Republic (“Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium, Diotima’s Speech,” in Feminist Interpretations of Plato, 181–96); both don’t do enough with the way the dramatic arc of the dialogue itself undercuts Socrates’ attempt to claim a true and final knowledge of erotics.
11.Fear and Trembling, 55.
12.While Apollodorus reports that Pherecydes of Athens, the 5th century mythographer, has a story about Athena being seen naked by Tiresias, as far as I can tell there doesn’t seem to be the sort of poetic interest in it that Actaeon’s story received; likewise, while Actaeon is a popular subject of iconography, the Tiresias story is absent and Athena remains clothed (see A.C. Villing, The Iconography of Athena in Attic Vase-painting from 440–370 BC, MPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1992). The story surfaces in the Hellenistic poet Callimachus’ Hymn to Athena; Fontini Hadjittofi argues that Callimachus adopts the story in order to re-write his hymn modeled off Homer’s Hymn to Aphrodite, thus portraying a more erotic Athena, in order to please the Ptolemaic court in Alexandria (“Callimachus’ Sexy Athena,” Materi ali e discussioni per l’a nalisi dei testi classici, no. 60 (2008), 9–37. It’s worth noting that Athens in the Classical period had stricter laws about women in public even than other cities at the time, such as Sparta or Corinth (Dillon, Girls and Women, 130).
13.The Stranger speaks of her as δέσποινα, Mistress, at Laws 796c.
14.Strauss, Natural Right, 81ff.
15.Emma, the virtuous and occasionally officious parthenos, has to say of her working counterpart: “If a woman can ever be excused for thinking only of herself, it is in a situation like Jane Fairfax’s—of such, one may almost say, that ‘the world is not theirs, nor the world’s law’” (Emma, vol. III, ch. 10). Emma is paraphrasing Romeo’s speech Romeo and Juliet V.1, where Romeo shames a foreign and thus potentially lawless apothecary into giving him poison.
16.Hom. Od. XIII.287–95.
17.Politics II.9, 1269b30.
18.Politics II.6, 1269b20.
19.Consider Ronna Burger’s characterization of this phenomenon in “In the Court of an Oriental Despot: The Book of Esther” (public lecture, Tulane University Judeo-Christian Studies, New Orleans, March 12, 2014); likewise Bloom: “Men need women and can easily be controlled by them” (IE, 383).
20.Homer also has Agamemnon decry Hera’s mastery of language (Il. XXIX.95–133). Seemee Ali notes that for Homer there is a special connection between Hera and the nous, specifically used to deliberate over actions that aim at the good of the community as a whole (“Seeing Hera in the Iliad,” Center for Hellenic Studies Research Bulletin 3, no. 2 (2015), http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:AliS.Seeing_Hera_in_the_Iliad.2015; Accessed January 15, 2017).
21.In an excellent example of finite irony, David Johnson opines that Socrates’ appropriation of an oath from the opposite sex denotes irony, and irony signals that the opposite is meant in Socrates and Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 47. By contrast, Ali notes that there is something peculiarly interior about Hera’s divinely thoughtful activity (“Seeing Hera in the Iliad”); I share her sense that the Greek goddesses represent something recognizable to those interested in the interiority of women’s lives.
22.Bloom claims that Socrates “fabricates” a false tale about the nature of women in order to represent them as potentially without shame (IE, 383); likewise Stephen Berg argues that shame “dictates” the conventional hiddenness of women, and since the hiddenness of women is necessary for “a spouse and children of one’s own,” therefore, although shame appears to be conventional, “shame is a condition of the actual existence of those natural goods,” i.e., a spouse and child (“The ‘Woman Drama,’” 68).
23.Democracy in America, vol. II. p. 3. ch. 10.
24.Hom. Il. I.561.
25.Burger notes the necessity of the collusion between Esther and Mordecai (“The Book of Esther,” March 12, 2014).
26.For custom, see Laws 781c; for nature, 781a. It’s important to note that later the Athenian Stranger declares he only pretended to fear for the nature of women, in fear at the strength of custom: “It was in this sense, in view of the dead weight of incredulity, that I spoke of the great difficulty of establishing either practice [of common tables] as a permanent law” (839d).
27.Roselli points out that the number of citizens in Athens around the time of the Peloponnesian War was roughly 40,000–60,000, while a conservative estimate of the total population was around 300,000; he notes that citizens were by far in the minority, surrounded by those without nearly as much interest in keeping the city as it was (Theater of the People, 13); such a situation is reminiscent of the danger of the tyrant, should he and his household be transported to the wilderness (Republic 578e).
28.Pace Strauss: “that which by nature is private or one’s own is the body and only the body” (CM, 114–5). Kochin notices the oddity of claiming that Socrates is simply “abstracting from the body” (Gender and Rhetoric, 82), but misses the distinction between the two sorts of privacy (ibid., 111); he does however note that the concern for legitimate offspring, to see children as one’s posterity, is strongly linked to concerns of Greek men (ibid., 103).
29.Nichols, review of Women in Western Political Thought, 246–7.
30.Garland, 111.
31.Burkert, GR, 151. Again, Burkert considers the evidence for the girls “playing the bear” at Brauron to be a reasonable extension of customary activities devoted to Artemis (GR, Ibid.); likewise also Dillon (Women and Girls, 21, 221).
32.Halperin notes that the Athenian betrothal ceremony contains the line “I give you this woman for the plowing of legitimate children” (“Why is Diotima a Woman?” 141); Socrates unites Artemis’ contempt for marriage and for sex in the agricultural image.
33.Callimachus Hymns iii. 6–19; the translation is by A.W. Mair and G.R. Mair (Loeb Classical Library 129 (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1921), 59).
34.GR, 150.
35.Ibid., 149.
36.Lamar Ronald Lacy, “Aktaion and a Lost ‘Bath of Artemis,’” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 110 (1990): 26–42.
37.In Herodotus Histories I.8–12, it is Gyges, rejecting the Lydian king Candaules’ initial proposal that he see the queen naked, who speaks of “when seen naked woman puts aside the shame (αἰδώς) that is hers.” When seen, Herodotus describes the queen as feeling shame (αἰσχύνω, related to αἰσχρος), remarking that “since among the Lydians and most of the foreign peoples it is felt as a great shame (αἰσχύνην) that even a man be seen naked.” This passage is a locus classicus for those that would argue that for Greek women shame is not customary, but natural; from whence they argue that all women feel similarly. This story requires a full-scale interpretation in its own right, but I will point out that the queen’s response to being seen is a prime example of the shameless sort of political actions I’ve been describing: offering Gyges either his death or the death of her own husband, she ensures the transfer of power to someone more under her own thumb. Likewise, I will note that in the case of the goddesses’ aidos in Odyssey VIII.324 that leads them to remain away from the spectacle of Aphrodite and Ares in bed, Aphrodite herself departs for her ritual bath named as “laughter-loving” (VIII.362), and Hephaestus describes her as “shameless” (VIII.319). The other goddesses’ restraint stands in contrast to the weakness of the declared intemperance of Hermes (pace Zukert, 407n215).
38.Metamorphoses III.138.
39.Metamorphoses III.192, trans. Frank Justus Miller, Loeb Classical Library 42 (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1984), 137.
40.Lacy, 42; Callimachus Hymns iii.260–70; Diodorus Siculus Bibliothek iv.81.4. Diodorus, a Greek historian of 1st century BC, devoted scholarship similar to Callimachus’ to the αἰτίαι of myths.
41.Contra Judith Barringer, in The Hunt in Ancient Greece (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 126.
42.Hestia’s presence at the hearth requires that no one sees or hears her, at all; Burkert also notes her vow of virginity (170).
43.Pindar Pythian Odes 4.4; translated by Geoffrey F. Conway in Odes of Pindar (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972).
44.Hom. Il. I.565–7.
45.Homer is careful to leave the question of Helen’s willingness up for interpretation: she gracefully attributes guilt to herself (Il. III.173–6) while talking to Priam, but castigates Aphrodite for her beguilement (Il. III.399–405); Nestor politely speaks of her being carried off (Il. II.356); Hector prefers to assign blame to his brother (Il. III.47).
46.Edward M. Harris discusses the differences over a broad range of instances from literature to myth to court cases, since while Athenian law did not consider consent at issue, they nevertheless had laws against outrages (“Did rape exist in classical Athens? Further reflections on the laws about sexual violence,” Dike 7 (2004): 41–83).
47.When Socrates speaks of ten thousands of evils in the Republic, he is describing the ten thousands of oppositions that come about in the soul from conflicting opinion (603d); his stronger interest in the division of soul, rather than the problems of bodily desire, is clear. Kochin argues from these parallel passages that the partnership of men and women is rather obviated, since communal activity could only take place in “strict segregation” (104); but it’s worth noting that even in the “second best” city of the Laws, which is more careful about the limitations of human beings, the Stranger believes this can be ameliorated by law (Laws, 839c–d).
48.For the use of ἀισχύνω in this sense of shaming by having intercourse with, see Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1226; Euripides, Electra 44, and Aristotle Politics 1311b7.
49.Harris notes that certainly “poets and artists” had sympathy for the plight and feelings of the woman dishonored against her will, Athenian law did not take this into account when sentencing (“Did Rape Exist,” 78). Plato’s lawgivers are merely taking the recognition of the plight into their lawgiving.
50.See Harris, “Did the Athenians Regard Seduction as a Worse Crime than Rape?” The Classical Quarterly 40, no. 2 (1990): 370–77.
51.Democracy in America, Vol. II, Part III, 12.
52.Elena Blair registers her skepticism of Kochin’s argument, as she finds no evidence that such segregation is ever argued for; she likewise notes that this is a pattern in Kochin’s work (PDW, 161, 164, 171, 179, 181). See also Zuckert, 100–103.
53.JTN, 75–81.
54.Consider this Hellenistic story from the 1st century AD, where the trope has become soap-operatic: “A public festival of Aphrodite took place, and almost all the women went to her temple. Callirhoe had never been out in public before, but her father wanted her to do reverence to the goddess, and her mother took her. Just at that time Chaereas was walking home from the gymnasium; he was as radiant as a star, the flush of exercise blooming on his bright countenance like gold on silver. Now, chance would have it that at the corner of a narrow street the two walked straight into each other; the god had contrived the meeting so that each should see the other. At once they were both smitten with love . . . . beauty had met nobility.” Chariton, Chaereas and Callirhoe, trans. B.P. Reardon, in Collected Ancient Greek Novels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 22.
55.See for example, Carmel v. Slate, 26 S.W.3d 726 (Tex.App. 2000): “She told the jury Appellant had called K.M. a tramp and said that K.M. ‘deserved what she got, that . . . she was asking for it,’ and ‘had been teasing him for a long time.’”
56.My account of Artemis’ logic is only a fraction of what would be required to speak thoughtfully about this profoundly vexed problem as it stands in current American discourse and political life; though women’s beauty (or even simply their presence as women) can act as the final cause in these matters, the trouble is women can hardly fundamentally alter their inevitable effect on other people, any more than Aristotle’s final cause of the cosmos could hope to have providential effect; for a man to blame his action on a woman’s appearance or presence or even sobriety, is no less a misunderstanding of causality, than it is the logos of a self-indulgent, craven coward. The irony in all this is that locking the women away or covering them completely with a dust sheet is a demonstrably worse solution than having women in public, which is why Plato is pointing out the need for a different approach to the law.
57.The statistics on self-reported sexual assault in polities that employ the burka shows an even higher percentage than similar American polls; see Diya Nijhowne and Lauren Oates, “A national report on domestic abuse in Afghanistan,” from section15.ca, July 4, 2008, accessed April 12, 2015, http://section15.ca/features/news/2008/07/04/afghan_women/.
58.This is not, I will note, in human women an unwillingness to look to the common good, and still less an unwillingness to be on the watch for the good of another; but rather a difficulty in viewing that which is public, and so a persistent sense of its unreality.