Plato’s Women: Extending the Socratic Insight

One doesn’t have to labor to find expressions of the ubiquitous negative attitude ancient Greek male authors expressed about women. This view, however, was not shared by the Socratics, as this volume shows. Among the Socratics, Plato, especially in the Republic, gives extraordinary expression to the Socratic recognition of the moral, political, and intellectual capacities of women – so much so that one contemporary scholar has gone so far as to claim that “the Re­public proposes a revolutionary project for fourth century BC Athens” (Brisson 2012). Plato’s “revolution” has captured the attention of a great many scholars, many of whom have tried to answer the question, “Why?” Why did Plato so radi­cally cut against the ingrained prejudice and argue, as he does in Republic V, that “men and women are by nature the same with respect to guarding the city” (456a)? In this paper, we take up the question that has prompted so many schol­arly proposals. After a brief summary of Plato’s argument for his “revolutionary” proposal, we turn to the arguments some scholars have offered for supposing that Plato’s thoughts about women were entailed by some other philosophical or political commitment. We explain why we do not find such explanations entirely adequate. We then make our own proposal: Plato’s evaluation of the capacities of women to do what would be required of the guardians of the kallipolis was, at least to some degree, informed and motivated by what he regarded as actual ex­amples of especially talented and capable women.