The Equality of Women in the Republic

The Straussian reading of Plato depends upon knowing irony when you see it. Infamously, Straussians view the doctrine of the equality of women as presented in the Republic as a case of irony: it is a joke, they say, among gentlemen. Strauss finds it impossible to believe that Plato, given his historical context and the sociology of ancient Greece, was being serious.

Once again I find this a case where my reading of Plato resolves questions that others find confounding. To spell it out, my reading of Plato goes like this (in brief):

I suppose that Plato was a loyal, noble-born son of Athens, a patriot, and, as such, a dedicated devotee of the traditional religious cultus of the polis. He lives, however, in a turbulent age when the authority of traditional religion is waning and the traditional gods are being undermined by new thinking and increasing cosmopolitanism. 

I suppose that Plato saw in Socrates someone who was attempting to understand the traditional polis religion (Athenian religion) through the lens of new thinking; not to undermine it, but to defend it. (This is what is lampooned in Aristophanes' The Clouds.) The Platonic enterprise is an extension of this Socratic one; Plato wants to revivify the Athenian religion and explain its profundity in a new mode of understanding.

The wider background to the tumult of this period is the collision of Hellenic and Persian civilizations. The crisis in Athenian polis religion is signalled in Aristophanes' Clouds as an illicit change to the lunar calendar. 

The specific cultus to which Plato is referring is that of the gods of the Acropolis and Athene herself. Plato's philosophia is the religion of Athene recast. Plato's Republic is an idealised (antedeluvian) Athens. Plato's cosmology is a recasting of the foundation myths of the city. Plato's metaphysics is an explanation of the theology of Athene. In Plato, the philosophical path is a means of becoming "earthborn" like the golden souls of ancient Athens. What we find in Plato are the ancient (esoteric) teachings of the Acropolis. 

Plato looked to several sources beyond Athens for the revivification of the traditional polis religion, with three chief ones: 

1. Egypt, and the parallel traditions of the sister city, Sais, (a Solonic heritage), 

2. the young polities of Magna Grecia (Pythagoreans, Parmenides, Timaeus of Locri) where the religious and cultic foundations of polities were being newly enacted. 

3. Persia, in the application of Persian sexigesimal mathematics to Attican mythology.

We could also mention Orphism in this context. But all of this was in the service of his city and his goddess. 

I therefore see the figure of Athene, and the other deities of the Acropolis, shining in the background of all the Platonic dialogues. I think the works of Plato need to be read in this context.

But we also need to bear in mind that Plato's enterprise - an Athenian Reformation - is a delicate and dangerous undertaking, as Socrates discovered. In Plato, much is concealed. When I read Plato I do so as a detective, hunting for the hints and clues and symbols and allusions he has left for readers who would have known the polity religion well. 

Therefore: if the Republic is an idealised Athens, then the citizens of the Republic are idealised Athenians who are perfections of Athenian values. These are the values of the goddess Athene. Philosophy. Defensive warfare. And - the subject of this post - female equality. Athene, indeed, is as great as Zeus to Athenians. She is the most masculine of the goddesses. She embodies the equal female.  It is not surprising then that this is what we find in the Republic. It is not a joke. Nor is it even a radically new idea, in some respects. It is an extrapolation of ideas inherent in the theology of Athene. Note that the equality of women in the Republic is mentioned pertaining to military service, and again in the Timaeus and then explicitly in the Critias:

the figure and the image of the goddess, whom they of old set up in armor, according to the custom of their time, when exercises of war were common to woman and man alike. (110B)

The source of this "radical" idea of female equality is the "goddess" herself, namely Athene. It is a distinctly Athenian concept.

So much else in Plato can be explained in exactly this way. I simply read Plato in relation to the religion of the polis of which he (and Socrates) was a citizen. Then begins the tension between the local and the universal.






- Harper