Socrates’ Proposal of Robes of Virtue
Although Socrates is firm that the eyebrow-raising plan for women and men’s naked exercise makes a part of the common education of the guardians in the Republic, he is not without further plans to fine-tune the potential awkwardness of this arrangement. At the end of the First Wave, having obtained final agreement that the women will now be educated and share all in common with the men, Socrates concludes:
It’s clear then that the women guardians must strip, seeing that they will be clothed in virtue instead of cloaks . . . . (ἐπείπερ ἀρετὴν ἀντὶ ἱματίων ἀμφιέσονται, 457a)
This passage has received remarkably little attention from those who write about women in Plato, considering the amount of attention paid to the question of naked exercise. But it forms a natural extension and conclusion to that argument: standing at the end of the First Wave as a kind of coda and parting shot, it is Socrates’ acknowledgement and solution to the problems he admits he raised, by insisting that men and women exercise naked together and indeed, share all in common. It is a solution specific to women: singled out, they must necessarily strip, and the garb of virtue will stand in for their ordinary clothes; with this, all will be well. In this blithe insistence, I see the real humor of the passage: Socrates has plenty of reasons why naked exercise will not be particularly funny under the laws of his polity, but here he leaves himself open to riposte. For, as the canny reader will note immediately, invisible robes of virtue are just that—invisible; and Socrates raises as many or more problems with his solution, as he seeks to address.
In what follows, I will argue that Socrates’ robes of virtue are his solution, peculiar to his own lawgiving concerns, to the political problems of women he raised in the earlier books of the Republic, their intemperate virtueless state, their lack of official regulation by the law, and their lack of public standing in the human community. Such robes speak also to the concerns of women themselves, the real difficulty of being a woman in public, and so subject to the gaze of others—and specifically, subject to the gaze of men. Socrates’ image shows his awareness, and Plato’s awareness, of problems recognizable to any woman who has spent time in public, whether under the laws of Western liberal democracy or any other; and though it is novel thing to say, I will argue this awareness manifests a certain care toward women as a genos on the part of Plato, beyond what we in the immediate aftermath of the 20th century have generally recognized. Socrates’ offer to solve women’s own problems in the customary polity is a calculated appeal to the desires of women themselves; likewise, not least in Plato’s authorial concern with the women’s law is that it is bound up in his expectation of women readers and his hope to draw them into his dialogic cosmos.
SOCRATES’ ACTION IN COMPETITION WITH OTHER LAWGIVERS
In the Platonic corpus, Socrates has his plans for common exercise for both sexes together, while the Athenian Stranger has his notion to extend common tables to women in addition to men: these represent competing plans for the women’s law, for while each lawgiver intends to draw the women into the public eye and let the public gaze be a practical schooling force for the amelioration of the genos, the way they go about it is quite different. Each has a different goal for the women’s law: while the Stranger is attempting to write all the women into the polity as citizens and magistrates, Socrates’ plans are for a philosophic education that would qualify the best of the genos for governorship as philosopher-queens. But while the Stranger spends time worrying over the difficulties of his far more practical plan, fearing that the women themselves will resist this change above all, Socrates blithely speaks of the full accomplishment of his rather extraordinary plans for women. He is even more confident in this, perhaps, than in his insistence that the guardians will be persuaded to turn their minds back to civic affairs once they’ve tasted philosophy. Indeed, when he speaks of women’s common participation in all the activities of the guardian class, his main concern is the reluctance of those witnessing this novel participation—that is, he only speaks of the reluctance of men. Socrates seems to assume the women will assent willingly to his proposal. The question is, whether this is mere insouciance on Socrates’ part—or a sign that he has an ace up his sleeve.
Now, readers often take Socrates’ plans for women in the Republic to be offered on his part, whether women (or anyone else) likes them or not. Much is made of the notion that women appear to be “desexed” in some way in Book V; but as I argued earlier, women merely join in the full range of human qualities Socrates insisted upon earlier for his musical and athletic, warlike and graceful students.1 Indeed, the Stranger, with his lawgiving preference for stressing the differences of women as a key strategy for their inclusion in the citizenry cannot guarantee as much range for the individual soul as Socrates immediately sets out to do.2 The problem is not that women can’t see themselves in the Republic as women; but rather, can they see themselves there as erotic beings, or as having purview for their desires, the very desires Socrates frets over? Is there a way in which Socrates’ provisions for women are a desideratum for women themselves? Considering that Socrates is a master of the erotic art, we should take seriously his implicit claim that he has won over the women he intends to win, in a way that his Platonic counterpart can’t quite do.
To consider Socrates’ rhetorical problem with respect to women, in light of the laws he proposes for them, draws in moments from several different lines of my argument. Socrates’ action in its most basic form is to pull women into the public, ruling place of the city; but the “from whence” of his action has proved to be as important as the “to whither.” Women begin in the Republic’s conversation by being ignored completely as a political force; when they first make an appearance, they are represented by the outliers of their sex, the courtesans and the nurses; this mimics their customary place outside of the bounds of public life, where by long-standing arrangement they reside in a kind of private wilderness in the midst of the publicly civilized city, at once above and below the notice of the law. Socrates initially uses the genos as a foil for what the male guardians ought not to do; as the customarily more passionate sex of the two, they are his examples of intemperance, cowardice, and above all, as souls ruled by their eros (395e). As I discussed in the previous chapter, because of their position and their passions, women in the Greek world are a political problem, whether they make use of their private position to influence public affairs in secret, or by rejecting the bodily forms of eros, choose to live in a private world of their own. In both cases, the genos is let to live without the slightest regard for the good of public things; and so without regard for a fundamental aspect of civic life. Socrates’ woman-problem, therefore, is particularly difficult: for the good of the city, women require a law that would tame their wildness and redirect their activity toward the good of the public whole—a wildness bound up with the very quality of soul that bids fair to be untamable.
For the guardians before the revolutions of Book V, the problem of eros is solved by the tripartite structure of the soul, where reason rules with spirit’s enforcing help, and the desires take the lowest place, eros without precedence among thirst and hunger. This balance is, as Socrates describes it in Book IV, the internal justice of the soul, the soul’s health and the soul’s reigning virtue (444e). Now, the irony of Socrates’ plans for women in Book IV is that such virtue is not proscribed to them. They are to be held in common as the things of friends are, that is, as common property; since property lacks inwardness, there is no need for internal regulation of it; but since the real problem of women is their inwardness, the problem remains in full force. Without a law that would regulate women’s own passions, there is no adequate women’s law. For the problem was always this: what to do of women and their eros?
It is crucial to the dramatic turn in Book V, therefore, that Socrates speaks of women’s possession of virtue at the close of the First Wave. Women—that is, the best of the women—will now undergo an education that will address and fine-tune the inward qualities of the soul. Before this moment, women appear in public on the condition of their assumed vice; women now appear in public on the strength of their virtue. Now, it hardly needs to be said, the virtue that Socrates has in mind is specifically not chastity, which would rather interfere with his breeding programs, or with the license he allows both men and women outside of child-producing prime; temperance, certainly, but not customary temperance. And while virtue of the soul does undergo transmogrification past its initial introduction in Book IV, it’s certainly a goal that sticks around, in and out of the specific plans for the guardians: areté names the peak of excellence of the true-born lover of true philosophy in Book VI (498e), and finally names the excellence not of the body but of the soul’s understanding (ἡ ἀρετή δὲ τοῦ φρονῆσαι), which may be turned by education toward the sight of the good (518d–e). This is the payoff of Socrates’ insistence that his women will be educated; women’s virtue will be not chaste but Socratic in nature. In the previous chapter, I discussed the many cross-references between Socrates’ description of justice as the internal health and virtue of the soul, and his description of the goddess Artemis in the Cratylus; it’s worth recalling that Socrates’ plans for women have roots in both the customary, as well as in Socratic reasoning. Socrates’ plans to tame the genos of women look more plausible in the light of this partial model. Now, it’s worth noting that some lawgivers recommend internal virtue to women without the corresponding offer of rule—a highly unstable state of affairs.3 Aristotle’s solution, to imply that women’s virtue is different in kind and so properly remains without the rulership, is more politically consistent, if frustrating to the lover of virtue (Politics I.13, 126012–22). Socrates’ own solution, though not without its difficulties, allows excellence to take its rightful place; for the helmsman with knowledge of the stars to steer, as it were.
But if women are as wild as Greek custom makes out, how on earth will they be brought to be lovers of virtue—and of Socratic virtue to boot? If Socrates is not to be made a liar, he will have to find a way to make their public place as guardians appealing to the women, in order for his action to be accomplished without the fate the Stranger fears for any lawgiver who attempts to change the state of women: to be overpowered by far by women themselves (781c). But Socrates did more than proscribe virtue to women; he offered virtue as a robe. What is appealing about such a proposition? And is what Socrates offers appealing enough to the previously untamed sex, that they would willingly accede to his offer?
To be in public, in the imagery of Plato’s main characters, is a question of seeing and being seen. In Socrates’ image of naked exercise, the question of where our eyes are directed—that is, the question of gaze—is fraught. He raises the problem of what it would mean for us to gaze at the beautiful young female form; but deflects the gaze off onto the wrinkled old form of men. Socrates, both as lawgiver and as benevolent ruler of the conversation, is in charge of where the gaze lands and under what circumstances, both for the citizens and for the reader; even as he raises the question of whether the sight will cause the onlooker to reject the prospect, he is chary of the power the gaze has for the witnessed one, and rescues the youth from the power of ridicule by continuing to hide them in speech. His robes of virtue are a continuation of this question of onlooker and witnessed: excellence is figured as a cloak that will surround women (ἀμφιέσονται) and serve as a shield that neutralizes gaze itself. For gaze will take place but no longer matter: for excellence itself is what will be seen.
Why should virtue possess this power to cloak? Paul Shorey, in his translation of this passage, points out that Socrates’ robes of virtue are akin to what Rousseau’s phrase, “couvertes de l’honnêteté publique” (clothed with public decency); but in Socrates’ image the virtue in question is in possession of the bearer.4 Consider Homer’s pair of images where he speaks of the sight of two maidens, comparing the sight of Nausikaa to the sight of Artemis, for though he is speaking of a different excellence than Socrates, the phenomenon is the same:
And even as Artemis, the archer, roves over the mountains, along the ridges of lofty Taygetus or Erymanthus, joying in the pursuit of boars and swift deer, and with her sport the wood-nymphs, the daughters of Zeus who bears the aegis, and Leto is glad at heart—high above them all Artemis holds her head and brows, and easily may she be known, though all are fair—so amid her handmaidens shone the maid unwed.5
Amid all the beauty present, Artemis is nevertheless seen, and recognized as herself, the archer par excellence. Likewise Nausikaa, the daughter of Areté, shines; virtue encircles one not in shadow but in light. The sight of Odysseus discomposes Nausikaa’s handmaidens, but she remains to question him, elegantly proud. Such virtue is not skin-deep, for consider the image: the robes of virtue aren’t actually cloth, but something more than cloth; something arising out from within the skin to wrap all around. The comparison to Artemis is the more just, considering Socrates’ insistence on her dedication to virtue; Socrates is not introducing a completely new balance of forces among womankind, but reshaping certain elements already present for his specific purposes. Robes of virtue, as an image, is a perfect acknowledgement of the inwardness of women, as having outward presence that commands respect; in Socrates’ polity it is philosophic areté which demands it.
In the previous chapter, I separated off two aspects of women’s relation to eros, either to wield it as a power or to seek distance from it by the pursuit of higher loves; I pointed out that human women are perennially tempted by both of these moments, by the desire for civic mastery or escape from the civic entirely. Socrates takes care to register his awareness of both the feverish courtesans and the friendless parthenoi; in order to draw the women into the city to rule and be educated, Socrates has to deal with both of these paradigmatic temperaments and their relationship to their eros and to the eros of others. His task is the more difficult, as his plans involve human women, who possess all these elements in a shifting mix; but his offer of rule and education by means of robes of virtue speaks to both of these moments. Although the customarily private life of women has plenty to recommend it, in that it contains many avenues for eros, it nevertheless remains full of tension, and not least among its problems is that it remains bounded by the eros of others. Even a private life, even the expectation of living largely indoors, can’t keep women from being seen, and so pursued. Part of the genius of Socrates’ arrangement is that it provides a way to remain hidden, or hidden in plain sight, with a cloak or hiding place in virtue itself. Women will be both private and public at once: they will have the safety of the private sphere, and the goods of public citizenship. Socrates’ cloaks of virtue are the sort of cloak-weaving the Eleatic Stranger recommends to the true statesman, the defense against suffering that is a covering (Statesman 279c-e), Socrates’ action is statesman-like.
Hidden from the eyes of eros by the shining of their virtue, they no longer need fear the outrages of the eros of others, even as the beauty of the body is allowed to be a witness for itself. Some of the dangers of the natural imbalance in strength between men and women can well be ameliorated, when women walk in public protected by their own virtue. While the power of such virtue depends in part on the polity’s recognition and respect for it, areté has a way of speaking for itself—as for example, Socrates’ manner in the retreat from Delium (Symposium 221a). And though on Socrates’ plan, the women will have to teach their eros something like restraint, they will not lose the political benefit of the private sphere which they enjoyed: they will still be able to rule, and in addition, receive public honor for the work. Human women—no less than human men—desire to rule and not rule; they waver between the charms of private and public life, the sweetness of lawlessness and the fruits of law. Socrates’ offer of rule and education, by means of robes of virtue, speaks to this internal duality, and offers human beings of the female genos the chance to satisfy both aspects of their desire, to be private in the midst of the city and yet to rule as well.
If Socrates can offer women the best part of the goods that they possessed in the private, while offering the best goods of a life lived in the public eye—namely, public rule and the best, most careful education, and recognition of excellence—then he has made an appeal to the female genos indeed. While the First Wave is sometimes described as the relatively toothless opportunity to take advantage of whatever skill set one has by nature, Socrates is offering much more than that. Far from demanding women enter a sexless state, Socrates presents a specific solution to the problems that plague women as women in the customary polity, not by becoming men, but by recognition of their excellence. Socrates’ robes of virtue wrap women’s concerns up into Socratic ones; concerns specific to women become translated into care for Socratic education. Socrates speaks again and again of the testing of the guardians, of how they will be sorted out to find the best; this is what lovers of excellence love well. By means of robes of virtue, Socrates offers the best of the women—or rather, women who wish to prove themselves best—erotic and spirited satisfaction: robes of virtue are a masterful offer by the master of the erotic art.
THE APPEAL OF PHILOSOPHY
But Socrates’ plan for the best of the women is more than just rule and generic education; he intends to give them the philosophical education described in Books VI–VII, and should they prove themselves among the best in philosophy and war, they will rule as philosopher-queens. This is a much more narrow political arrangement than bringing women under the law for the good of the polity, as the Athenian Stranger does. Each has a different plan to end the miseries of mankind; in the Stranger’s city it is divine law that is the ultimate authority, while Socrates gives out that only philosophers could finally bring about this desirable state. The sort of ruler favored by the lawgiver makes a crucial difference for the women’s law. Although in the Stranger’s city, the entire race of women will have education and some share in the offices, judgeships, and religious authority, they will not participate in the Nocturnal Council, ultimately the highest governing authority, which stands in the place of ultimate philosophic authority.6 But Socrates, who always interests himself in the business of philosophy (Phaedo 61c), plans to seek out only the best of the women—that is, those who are best at philosophy—and hand to the worthy the highest political position possible: “and ruling women, Glaucon: for nothing I’ve said about the men applies any less to them, as many as are born with natures ready to the task” (540c). Now, Aristotle’s polity, where the landed gentleman rules, comes off the worst of the trio in terms of women’s desires; for while Aristotle is quite explicit about the dangers of women to the polity (Politics 1269b12ff), as well as the real potential good of their education (1260b12), he presents no explicit plans to combat these customary problems, noting merely in gnomic fashion that in the best polity, all must be given the one and the same education (1337a20ff); without making women explicitly part of this, the reader finds it easy enough to leave them out, and as readers of Plato can’t help but note, a mere passing recommendation of exercise for women (1335b1ff) is laughably insufficient. Both of Plato’s lawgivers judge it good to do better than this; but the difference between the two is striking: divine law guarantees women as a class a public place and a measure of participation in government without question, good things but within a limit and a measure; but when philosophy rules, some few women with the possession of the qualities every reader of the Republic is tempted by the argument to desire for themselves, have the best the polity can offer without stint, should they exercise themselves worthily for the goal. To those who are not unmoved by Socrates’ daydreams about the education that would lead one to a sight of the truth itself, Socrates’ plans for women present a real temptation—particularly to women themselves who prefer the vision of the Good itself, to civic goods within measure. Socrates speaks with more confidence of women’s wish to participate in his polity: he recognizes the value of what he has to offer. If what makes the difference between the laws from Kallipolis to Magnesia is the place and role of philosophy, one can reason to this: Socrates’ plans in the First Wave constitute a real appeal to women, because he offers them philosophy. Because the Stranger can’t offer the study of philosophy to the race of women, his solution is simply less satisfying than Socrates’, even if it should prove the better and more practical notion of the two.7
The peculiar position of philosophy in the Republic’s city in speech speaks to both the desire to rule and the desire to leave the city behind. Women, as members of the guardian class, stand to satisfy both desires: they have the chance at the highest political authority, but also the civically ratified geis to hunt for that which is knowable. If women’s desire began as in a wild and lawless state, as philosopher-queens they still have an arena for such lawless desire in philosophy imagined as hunting. In a sense, the women of the guardian class skip over the temptations of a solely political life, or a life lived for the goods of associations with others; if they began with a tendency to undervalue the goods of or the necessity for the public, then it is not much of a stretch, after all, to take up an activity that claims objects of higher merit than even the things of the city itself. Nor is it a trivial circumstance, to add to the proof of the appeal, that philosophic rigor promises to uncover the untruthfulness in the customary position of women; an example of this is that Socrates calls for the use of dialectic in the First Wave, in order to argue for the true difference between men and women (454a). This appeal, crucially, is made on behalf of truth and not nature or even justice; the customary position of women is sometimes comfortable enough, but for the promise of final truth. Such rigor also instructs the polity, albeit once philosophy itself does not raise a laugh, that they are not to laugh at women’s education or their rule. Philosophy as ruler offers more honor to women than the city would on purely civic terms.
Indeed, if philosophy alone will tame our souls, or for that matter, offer us the most complete satisfaction of its desires possible, then only philosophy truly offers the hope of harmonizing these competing desires. And after all, since women already have opportunities for rule from the private state, a mere offer of magistracies is not particularly tempting. In short, only something that could promise the full satisfaction of eros could take the place of the tyrannical bent in the lawless passions of women; only philosophy promises such full erotic satisfaction, as a real alternative to the appeal of private tyranny. This is the sort of thing Socrates hints at, when he claims that the true philosophic natures, ruined by their upbringing, would be capable of the greatest injustice (491e); should women be capable of as much injustice as Plato’s characters maintain, philosophy is a natural second sailing for the sex. Now, I will note that Socrates is not the only one to recognize the possibility of the adoption of virtue for women, from the Roman notion of pudicitia, a sort of modest stalwartness, to Kierkegaard’s observation of women’s peculiar excellence in the Christian virtues; indeed, the story goes that once women pick up the cause of virtue, they are as fierce in its defense, and as harsh and unforgiving in its enforcement even among their own, as the previous rumors of their wildness described the harshness of their injustice to be. But Socrates’ recommendation of excellence in philosophy, at any rate, requires this single-mindedness from the very beginning; for him, this quality can only add to the charm of the guardians who pursue in all athleticism and grace all studies that can serve to lift them out of anything that falls short of Being—Artemis’ divine purity reimagined as the purity of truth itself.
Now, reader take warning—Plato presents Socrates’ plans as a sort of hyperbolic challenge: if and only if men are willing to regard the virtue of women as true virtue, not laughable but admirable, even when they are naked, only then will the miseries of humankind be solved. Such miseries peculiar to the interaction of men and women, including the ever-present dangers of rape and violence, are, as I detailed in the previous chapter, very much on Plato’s mind; all such dangers take on a deeper hue when the political partnership of men and women is proposed, as the Athenian Stranger makes all too clear. The Athenian Stranger is worried that eros will threaten the very friendship between the sexes (Laws 835d). The human ability to feel eros but restrain it, out of respect and interest in the minds and the speeches of others, is all too thinly stretched when the sexes are in political competition with each other. Aristotle is wrong to consider that Socrates’ guardians would not need temperance in their affairs (1263b10); but they will require more virtue than that. Socrates pins his own hopes on philosophic virtue: and in that light, such virtue sounds indeed, all too philosophic.
Part of the trouble is that it’s not everyone to whom philosophy would have this appeal, among human men and women alike; as I will discuss in the next chapter, Socrates’ proposal that philosophy should rule does not bid fair to thoroughly put an end to human misery, and indeed threatens to add to the stated troubles. As a human political solution, it remains partial; since after all, it only solves the problems of women in the human polity among the women who choose to take up philosophy, and it depends on the practice of such philosophy on the part of men as well. But while 20th-century readers bemoan this circumstance as a flaw, it is the rather a key and saving feature of the work. The greater bent of the Republic, as with all Plato’s dialogues, is to be a book that presents a dialogic city to its readers, in which all readers are invited to participate. As a book that anyone may pick up and read, the reader is invited to rewrite their own heart and follow the laws of this best polity and no other, as Socrates puts it at the end of Book VII, no matter what human polity they inhabit—and this goes for women readers as well. Now, we live in a time where the Republic’s dialogic appeal is hardly allowed to take root, particularly with respect to women; to many, it appears dissatisfying at the very first glance, because its laws for women do not resemble our own. But if the reader allows themself to look past the 20th century and its prepossessions, women themselves have found the Republic a fascinating document enough. Consider the case of Julia Ward Howe, Boston suffragette and author of the lyrics to “the Battle Hymn of the Republic,” who in 1887 was asked to give a speech on Plato’s Republic to a women’s suffrage annual meeting. Mrs. Howe found aspects of the women’s law alarming, particularly the provision for the exposure of babies born outside of the marriage lottery; but on the question of women’s weakness, the crucial sticking point for 20th-century readership, she sees the practical upshot of Socrates’ action: “He calls woman a lesser man,” she says, “but even from that standpoint demands that she shall be made stronger instead of weaker.”8 She quarrels with the way he delineates difference, but to her, the practical elevation of qualified individuals makes all the difference. Her final report to the crowd is this: that the fact that the “women of the state equally with its men, shall be trained to high offices of public guardianship” is “the foremost and most sacred promise” of the book.9 Nor is Mrs. Howe an isolated example: likewise consider the case of Adela Adam, wife of Republic commentator James Adam; after his death she wrote her own book on Plato; she is the first to speak in English of “philosopher-queens.”10 Then there is Ellen Francis Mason, who did the translations for several popular editions of Plato in America in the 19th century, published anonymously. For a 17th-century example, Margaret Cavendish’s Natures Picture contains the brief dialogue Heavens Library, where in a council of the gods the Republic is to be thrown out of the library “because it was so strict it could never be put in use”; a neat ironical reflection upon Socrates’ own attempts to divest the city of the poets, rather a compliment than otherwise: Plato remains Jove’s philosopher-in-chief.11
There are likewise ancient examples: besides the familiar ancient gossip of Plato’s two female students at the Academy, Axiothea and Lasthenia, reported in Diogenes Laertius and elsewhere, there is the fact that Diogenes addresses his book to a female φιλοπλάτων, a lover of Plato, who eagerly (φιλοτίμως) seeks out the words of Plato in preference to all others; no doubt the story of Plato’s female students is at the least a special compliment to her.12 And even the story as gossip is meant to be plausible: Plato put his name to the book that said women should learn philosophy, and so would be the sort of person to let this outlandish matriculation take place. The later story that Themistius, the 4th-century commentator on Aristotle, reports—that Axiothea, a native of the Spartan-ruled town Phlius, read the Republic and traveled to Athens to become Plato’s student—falls under this category as well.13 But there are more specific reports: Porphyry in his Life of Plotinus remarks that this Neoplatonist had a house full of young men and maidens keen for philosophy; Dominic O’Meara notes that certainly women were important members of Plotinus’ school.14 Indeed, there’s a pattern of women across time and space being more immediately involved and even interested in the works of Plato; more than in, say, Aristotle, whose reputation concerning the sex gave rise to the popular Northern Renaissance artistic motif wherein Alexander’s wife revenges herself upon the philosopher by tricking him into letting her ride upon his back.15
When these Platonic examples are placed alongside the phenomenon I noted before, the tendency of male scholars to employ suggesto falsi or suppresso veri, that is, to consciously mistranslate or explain away the First Wave, the women’s reaction is the more striking. This passage has led members of the male genos to turn directly away from the text in order to absorb the book, as in the case of 15th-century Italian humanist educator Guarino’s marginalia, which summarizes the provisions of the First Wave as “from civil duties women would abstain.”16 Whereas, as seen in the case of Julia Ward Howe, the difficulties are directly acknowledged while the text itself remains a trusted friend. Beside this history, our 20th-century preoccupation with the so-called limitations of women in Plato seems somewhat childish; we’ve been missing what the book is supposed to do. To women readers across time and space, the simple presence of women in the best polity is electrifying. And I will note, it immediately opens the door to further dialectic on these subjects, such as the idea Giulia Turamini proposed in her 1664 lecture, “Concerning the Excellence of Women Over Men,” wherein she cites Plato’s “inclusion of women in government” as evidence for her case.17 Likewise, in Castiglione’s discussion of the Republic in Book of the Courtier, one of the speakers is accused of flattering the ladies present by repeating Plato’s views on women; the women in the room beg the first speaker to continue his subject.18 While Socrates dramatizes his rhetorical capitulation to Glaucon over the question of which sex gets to triumph in the end while hinting of the dangers of eristic, as a book, the action of the action of the argument, if you will, remains well in place.
Plato is an author who, more than most and perhaps more than all, has a consciousness of and forethought for the fate of a book in the world once it has left its author’s hands and cannot answer its detractors; as we learn in the Phaedrus, Socrates considers the problems of authorship practically insurmountable (Phaedrus 275e), but Plato by his choice to publish does not. Such a careful author simply must have considered the possibility of female readership—and the possibility of unfavorable reaction no less than favorable; as Socrates notes, there are those women who are philosophic by nature, and others who quite frankly bear it hatred (456a).19 Indeed, for someone who wrote no less than two books that purport to alter the women’s law, to not consider the possibility of such readership is at the least deeply imprudent; it need hardly be said that while literacy was not universal, there were readers enough—particularly among the courtesans themselves, as well as other more respectable female readers, such as the wife of Isomachus in Xenophon’s Oikonomicus who keeps the accounts.20 Women were already present in the Pythagorean community before Plato began to write; well might he understand that there was an audience awaiting him. It has been argued more than once that the Republic was intended as propaedeutic rhetoric to concerns highly specific to men, and the taming of their attitudes toward warfare; but the genius of Plato is that the book can speak to more than one genos at a time.21 In a letter from the later lady Pythagorean Theano II to her friend Rhodope, also a lady philosophe: “Are you dispirited? I am dispirited. Are you distressed because I have not yet sent you Plato’s book, the one entitled ‘Ideas or Parmenides’? But I myself am distressed, because no one has yet met with me to discuss Kleon [the Pythagorean].”22 Plato book’s aren’t didactic, disembodied treatises on the abstract nature of things, but artfully represented aporetic conversations between human, all too human beings, that are meant to give birth to lively conversation, and to the desire to read more.
Again, women have a strange presence and absence in Plato’s dialogues; but while Socrates merely reports the sayings of women to men, Plato as an author reports the sayings of Socrates to all human beings. In Plato’s writings, women take a place in the cosmos, in the ordered whole made up of all of his writings, so strangely and pointedly and intriguingly at-cross-purposes. The First Wave is perhaps the loudest remark; if only because so few people bring themselves to read the Laws; but it’s hardly an isolated instance of presence, even with all its absences. In Plato’s cosmos, for those who are willing to listen for silence as well as for talk, for private concerns as well as public, there is a world to be found that is recognizable to and loveable by women themselves—no less than for the reader who considers the nature of the sex an open question—wherein they can see themselves because Plato wrote them in to the best polity, as key figures therein. Socrates speaks to the concerns of women with his robes of virtue; Plato as an author speaks to the concerns of women as human beings. Socrates’ robes of virtue are at once a political solution to a political problem, and a profound rhetorical gift, a tantalizing and delicate mark of respect for inwardness and care for its protection; robes of virtue are a desirable accession that allow women to see their own concerns written into the daimonic mind of Plato’s favorite leading man.
To be attracted by the idea of philosophic virtue, one need not be a hand-picked guardian oneself in an impossibly beautiful polity, or be present at the Symposium to become friends with philosophic eros. The genius of Plato’s book is that it’s set up to be compelling to women readers across time and space, no matter what the women’s law is under their regime, and no matter what the best solution to the women’s law happens to be. Socrates’ heavenly polity in the soul offers the hope and promise for individual human women to follow its laws and no other, by themselves—whether or not other human women wish to follow them there. Plato’s Republic is one of the profound liberators of human women our reading selves have ever seen, because it proposes to liberate all human beings by means of justice in the soul.
NOTES
1.Rosen, PRS, 186; Nichols, review of Women in Political Thought, 246–7; Saxonhouse, “Philosopher and Female,” 75.
2.As Kochin notes, this is a crucial flaw in the Stranger’s plan (Gender and Rhetoric, 121). For women as citizens, see Laws 814c.
3.In the novel He Knew He Was Right, Anthony Trollope notes the tension in the arrangements of Victoria’s England, where the husband is supposed to be “lord and master” despite his own lack of virtue, and his wife’s possession of a virtue at least equal to if not superior to his own.
4.Lettre à d’Alembert sur les Spectacles. Quoted in Republic I, trans. and ed. Paul Shorey, Loeb Classical Library 237 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930), 451).
5.Od. VI.109.
6.See Kochin, GRPT, 89; but also see Adela Adam’s consideration of possible loopholes, even including the Nocturnal Council (Plato: Moral and Political Ideals,127–30). Elena Blair also sees a loophole present for Nocturnal Council among other offices: for a complete list see PDW, 163–65; 169–72. Loopholes in a law to which one is explicitly “enslaved” (Laws 715d, 762d) are quite suggestive. I will note that Aristotle does recommend exercise for both men and women–but this plunges him into the same troubles of Sparta which he has already described as insufficient (Politics 1335b12).
7.The Athenian Stranger, for whom eros is at its strongest and greatest when turned to procreation (Laws 783a), for all that he speaks of the disordered condition of women, seems to miss the rhetorical and civic need to give women’s eros a higher calling; he worries over the strength of “lawless love” (840e).
8.Mrs. Howe’s excellent reading of the Republic may be found in Julia Ward Howe and the woman suffrage movement (Boston: The Colonial Press, 1913), 48–92.
9.Howe, 89.
10.While her professed interest in justice is quite utilitarian, A. Adam speaks of “the fair images of philosopher-kings . . . [which] represent also philosopher-queens” in Plato: Moral and Political Ideals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 126; see also Bluestone (Woman and the Ideal Society, 72).
11.“As for the Philosophers, the first shall be Plato, and his Works shall be all kept, but his Commonwealth; and that shall be put out, by reason it was so strict it could never be put in use, nor come into practice”; (“Heavens Library” in Natures Picture (Ann Arbor, MI and Oxford, UK: Text Creation Partnership, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A53048.0001.001, Accessed December 15, 2016), 710. See also Emma L. E. Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, genre, exile (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 83. Cavendish herself is very fond of the notion of so-called Platonic love; in The Blazing World, the characters of the Empress and the Duchess are friends in speech, namely, “such was their Platonic friendship, as these two loving souls did often meet and rejoice in each other’s conversation” (The Blazing World and Other Writings, Kate Lilley, ed. (New York: Penguin, 1994), 202).
12.Lives of the Eminent Philosophers III.46; the other direct address is at Lives X.29. See Pamela Gordon’s discussion of Diogenes’ connections and motivations, as well as the addressee of his book, in Epicurus in Lycia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 49–53.
13.Alice Swift Riginos discusses Diogenes’ various sources, including Themistius, Dicaearchus, and the Index Herculanesis in Platonica: The Anecdotes concerning the Life and Writings of Plato (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1976), 184. Mary R. Lefkowitz discusses the additional papyrus fragment from Oxyrhynchus, a large regional capitol in Hellenistic times, which mentions Plato’s female students in Women in Greek Myth (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007), 185n27.
14.Life of Plotinus 9.1–11. Dominic J. O’Meara discusses the use Neoplatonists made of Republic V to argue for women’s inclusion in Neoplatonic communities in Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 83ff. Elena Blair is likewise impressed with the sheer number of “intellectual women”; she collects a list of Stoic and Cynic women, as well as men with reading daughters (PDW, 53–4).
15.As in Henri d’Andeli’s 13th-century Lai d’Aristote.
16.Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 11. Again, the necessity that the Athenian Stranger himself speaks to, of initially stressing the great difficulty of enacting common tables for women out of caution of the great strength of disbelief of his audience of men, despite his own ultimate belief in its feasibility (Laws 839c), speaks volumes.
17.George W. McClure, Parlour Games and the Public Life of Women in Renaissance Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 139–42.
18.Book of the Courtier, (London: Everyman’s Library, 1948), 195.
19.Virginia Woolf, while discussing her intriguing sense of the nature of consciousness, has this to say of philosophy: “How to justify this instinct or belief I do not know, for words of philosophy, if one has not been educated at a university, are apt to play one false” (Room of One’s Own, 108).
20.Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 9.10. Davidson notes that courtesans were famous for their obscene puns on lines from tragedy (Courtesans and Fishcakes, 93). While Laura McClure makes the fair point that Athenaeus is hardly a historical reference for the classical period, in the modern sense, she admits that there were, if only a handful in a conservative estimate, such ladies (Courtesans at Table (New York: Routledge, 2003)). I would note that even if a woman is being paid for her favors, it does not do well to silence her voice by considering her literacy obviated by her profession, in the name of putting an end to “fetishization.” The Athenian Stranger notes that “the educated among the women” will prefer the genre of tragedy to all other genres (Laws 658c); such readers might note the signs of tragedy present in the work others would miss.
21.Kochin, Gender and Rhetoric, 82, 134; and the ever-charming Leon Harold Craig in The War Lover (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 21.
22.Sarah B. Pomeroy, Pythagorean Women: Their History and Writings (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2012), 70, 93.