XI.—Plato
Plato differs from most of the Socratic Circle in that he is, above all things, a visionary and a theorist. He is essentially a masculine genius (with him we hear nothing of wife and children), and he lacks that grip of reality which the natural feminist, Euripides, instinctively possesses. He regarded the condition of society in his native city with a mixture of dislike and contempt, and he saw that the main cause of this condition was the indifference to women and children which the ordinary Athenian prided himself on displaying. In his feminism and his educational reforms, Plato is deeply influenced by Spartan teaching, but the main structure is his own work, based not on any actual experience, but on ideal theory. In this idealism lies both the strength and weakness of his feminist doctrine. He refuses to allow himself to be influenced, as Aristotle after him was influenced, by the actual state of inferiority to which Athenian women had been reduced; but in forming a society which should be the opposite of the degenerate Athens of his day, he is inclined to disregard some of the invincible facts of human nature.
Plato’s feminist doctrines are most clearly stated in the fifth book of the Republic and the sixth, seventh, and eighth books of the Laws. These works are accessible to English readers (or, rather, their rough substance is accessible, for we can never reproduce the delicate music of Plato’s prose, and his subtle irony evaporates in English) in Jowett’s translation, and in the excellent version of the Republic by Davies and Vaughan. But it may be convenient to give a brief summary of his argument.
In the fifth book of the Republic the ideal State is being discussed, and the rule κοινὰ τὰ τῶν φίλων (‘among friends everything is common property’) has been laid down. It has, moreover, been made applicable to wives and children, for Plato at first hardly escapes from the fallacy that a man’s wife is as much a piece of property as a dog or a table. The organization of the communistic régime in detail then comes up for consideration, but it is unanimously resolved that the question of community of women is of vital importance and must be explained at once. The philosopher accordingly, with some pretended reluctance, begins with a prayer to Nemesis—‘I am on a slippery road, and fear lest missing my footing I drag my friends down with me’—and thus approaches his subject:
‘The aim of our theory was, I believe, to make our men, as it were, guardians of a flock?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let us keep on the same track and give corresponding rules for the propagation of the species, and for rearing the young; and let us observe whether we find them suitable or not.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Thus. Do we think that the females of watch-dogs ought to guard the flock along with the males, and hunt with them, and share in all their other duties; or that the females ought to stay at home, because they are disabled by having to breed and rear the cubs, while the males are to labour and be charged with all the care of the flocks?’
‘We expect them to share in whatever is to be done; only we treat the females as the weaker, and the males as the stronger.’