Magnesia: An Ancient Haven of Equality ?

Owen Leroux

300021627

POL4376A

Professor Mohamad Ghossein

April 13th 2021

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The philosophers of ancient Greece were amongst the first scholars to leave

behind writings on many socio-political topics of discourse that we tend to take for

granted or ignore today, and some of their stances on certain issues, while respected from

an academic point of view, can be considered socially backwards by modern thinkers.

Plato is one of those scholars, perhaps the most known apart from Socrates and Aristotle.

Plato is renowned for being one of the earliest political philosophers, some of the ideas he

laid out in The Republic and Laws are still used, albeit in modified form, by governments

today, and his teachings are widely disseminated in universities and often used as a point

of reference in scholarly works. However, one area in which Plato followed the lead of

his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, was in the attitudes he had towards

women. Modern scholars, especially feminist and liberal ones, see his views as

backwards and his position of not allowing women to take active part in the economic

process have been criticized as sexist. However, if one more closely examines his works,

and specifically the portion of Laws wherein he describes his “idealized” Greek polity of

Magnesia, a fairly strong argument could be made that Plato was not as sexist as certain

of his contemporaries and did allow women to have an important role in society, although

as previously noted, not a economic one.

This paper will attempt to support that claim, directly using Plato’s writings as

well as that of contemporaries such as Aristotle and reaction pieces written by modern

scholars. A broad research question for this paper would be: What societal role were

women in fact allocated in the idealized state of Magnesia? and a thesis statement

constructed in response could be Plato believed, unlike certain other philosophers, that

women had an important if sometimes secondary role to play in society if not economics,
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and although modern thinkers could truthfully describe him as sexist by modern

standards, he was in fact quite progressive and understanding for his time.

To begin with, and indeed to try and demonstrate this paper’s main thesis

statement right off the bat, the works of Plato himself will be directly examined in an

attempt to find out exactly what the great thinker had to say about women directly. Plato’s

most renowned writings such as the Laws and The Republic, concern themselves with

idealized polities, Greek city-states as Plato thought they should be. The Republic

concerns itself with an idealized system of government for the city of Athens, while The

Laws establish an entirely fictional city-state, named Magnesia, that Plato considered to

be some sort of Utopia. He describes it as a blend of an authoritarian society with some

democratic institutions1, where public participation in electoral and political processes is

encouraged, but at the same time tightly supervised and controlled by a class of elite

citizens that Plato describes as “Guardians of the Laws”2 , an educated and wealthy

upper-class to act as sorts of shepherds for their less educated or more destitute brethren.

Right off the bat, it is made clear in The Laws that women who, seeing how

Magnesia is an idealized city-state, form a near-equal proportion of the population had

more of a public presence than in other Greek polities of the time period. In Greek

city-states such as Athens, Crete, and especially Sparta, women were, while revered for

their ability to bear children, excluded not only from political processes but from public

life as a whole, literally being forced to stay inside and under their husband or father’s

control barring certain special events. In Magnesia, when one reads The Laws, it becomes

obvious women would not have been an unseen lower class; Plato explicitly writes that

1
Plato. The Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. p.218.
2
Plato. The Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. p.204.
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they would be allowed to serve in the military and host common meals with other

women3. These are two undeniably public activities, and ones usually heavily restricted

to Greek men serving on the front lines, as it was throughout most ancient societies, was

seen as a masculine pursuit, while the right to meet with others was indicative of high

social status. Women’s access to these roles in Magnesia is explained by the fact that,

unlike in city-states like Athens where women, while not enslaved, were not really

defined as legal persons under the law, Magnesia, in Plato’s mind and writings, would

grant women full citizenship under the city’s Law4 .

The granting of something as basic as citizenship may not seem particularly

progressive to a modern audience, but when one considers the historical context of

ancient Greece, where most of the inhabitants of any given city-state would not actually

posses citizen status – women, slaves, free non-citizens, and foreigners far outnumbered

them. This was due to elitist criteria that awarded citizenship only to free males who

owned property. As such, when comparing his views to the official line in his native

Athens, Plato already comes across as far more tolerant to women. And the granting of

citizenship status was not the only improvement in women’s rights that he would have

theoretically implemented in Magnesia. He goes even further and indicates, at multiple

occasions throughout the text, that women would in fact be allowed to hold political

office in Magnesia, by virtue of their rights as full citizens5 . Elected positions being

limited to citizens was the norm throughout most of Ancient Greece, but as already

mentioned, women were almost universally excluded from that class. It was furthermore

thought they lacked certain qualities such as intelligence or leadership, making them a

3
Plato. The Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. p.237
4
Plato. The Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. p.237
5
Plato. The Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. p.277
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liability as officeholders. It is therefore amazingly progressive that Plato, who was born

and raised in such a repressive climate - and who, as will be elaborated in more detail

later in this paper, associated with thinkers who did have misogynistic beliefs, would

think nothing of allowing them to access political office. And this was not restricted to

lower offices, either women of suitable education and status were to be included amongst

the higher ‘Guardian’ class and would have a say in important decisions6 .

It is true that Plato, in The Laws, does mention that women, despite being

citizens, would be barred from owning private property and have limited participation in

the economic side of things7, but this was not a blanket ban owing merely to gender

prejudice. Plato thought that private property as a whole should be limited and most of it

held in trust by the upper classes, which, coincidentally, included women, who as

members of the military and political system were ‘Guardians’.This meant that while

women could not on their own make purchases, or own land or a house, those women

who did achieve political office would have some degree of control over all property in

Magnesia, even it they couldn’t acquire it by themselves. Furthermore, this economic

limit would not have prevented Magnesian women from accessing a very rare commodity

for their gender in Ancient Greece: Education, which would be freely given to all citizens

regardless of socioeconomic status8. This was in sharp contrast to Athens, where women

received only the barest religious education and the sciences and philosophy were

reserved for men.

After reviewing the multiple examples above, it does become quite clear that,

although there were still some relatively slight restrictions imposed on women in Plato’s

6
Plato. The Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. p.218
7
Plato. The Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. p.358
8
Plato. The Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. p.267
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idealized city-state of Magnesia, he was indeed quite progressive for both his time and

the sociopolitical climate he lived in. The biggest difference from other Greek city-states

in this case being the granting of full citizenship to women, which, in a kind of snowball

effect, resulted in them being given access to political office, community activities (even

typically male-restricted ones like military service), and a standard of education that was

ahead of the reality in most Greek city-states. Even the limit on property rights had

loopholes owing to women’s access to political power, and appeared to be relatively

inconsequential.

Moving on, now that the role of women in Plato’s idealized society of Magnesia

has been demonstrated and, hopefully, shown to not be as discriminatory as might be

assumed in popular thinking, it also becomes necessary to compare him to certain of his

contemporaries. This is done in order to see if Plato’s concepts of woman in society are

an outlier, or if the overall attitude at the time resembled his. Many philosophers left their

thoughts on women and their place in society, but perhaps one of the most important

ones, apart from Plato, would be his student, another one of the great Socratic

philosophers: Aristotle.

Contrary to his mentor’s opinion that women had an important role, if a

non-economic one, in any functional or idealized society, Aristotle’s thoughts on the

matter more resembled medieval or Victorian-era repressive attitudes towards women in

society. A famous quote of his is often paraphrased as describing women being like

“Males with mutilated souls”9, implying that they were somehow incomplete as humans

9
“Aristotle” Goodreads.com,2021,
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/376502-the-female-is-as-it-were-a-mutilated-male-and
(On the Generation of Animals/Book II)
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and not of equal standing with, or deserving of the same rights, as men. This was far from

an uncommon perspective in Ancient Greece, previous paragraphs have described the

backwards social attitudes directed at women in overall society, but it was also among

philosophers’ circles that such views prevailed. This view of Aristotle’s was not brought

about by hatred of women as a gender but rather as a sort of misguided compassion. In

his rhetoric, he mentions that society cannot be happy unless women are also happy, but

that they are as a whole more compassionate, irrational, and misguided than men10,

thereby justifying their exclusion from civil society both for their own good and on the

grounds that their intemperance would lead to civil unrest.

Aristotle therefore believed in a justified political domination of society by men,

not by right of pure biological gender but because he believed men possessed far more

virtue, intelligence, and strength of character than women, and that such traits were

indispensable in a good political leader. In his Nicomachean ethics, Aristotle wrote that

such a political framework should also be transplanted even in private homes with full

primacy of the man over the woman, although he justifies this by stating that the sexes

“are complementary to each other” in a household, and that female subservience is

needed to make it run smoothly11. He came up with the paradigm of the good wife to

reinforce this idea, writing in his economics that the ideal woman should strive to earn

the devotion, trust, and loyalty of her husband in order for him to remain morally pure

and not to stray into infidelity, putting the onus of this on the woman and not on the

man’s own virtue12. He does, however, state that a husband must also demonstrate his

10
Aristotle, Rhetoric. New York: Cosimo Inc., 2010. p.18
11
Edith Hall “Citizens but Second Class: Women in Aristotle’s Politics” in Patriarchal Moments:
Reading Patriarchal Texts, ed. Cesare Cuttica, ed. Gaby Mahlberg, (London: Bloomsbury,2016),
p.41
12
Scott Meikle, Aristotle’s Economic Thoughts New York:Clarendon Press, 1995. p.44
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aptitudes as a protector and provider to inspire said loyalty, but this also reinforces a

repressive gender norm, because the man remains the active participant and the woman

merely a recipient, Aristotle summed this up in a quote often paraphrased like this :

“Men’s business is to get, while women’s business is to keep”13 .

Aristotle was by no means alone amongst Greece’s great thinkers in believing in a

second class role for women. Taking a more analytical approach, this paper suggests that

Aristotle’s opinion of the inclusion of women in idealized community life was a

particular quirk of Plato’s. The prevailing attitude remained one of exclusion and

restriction of civil rights, usually with some philosophical justification. The famous

Athenian lawmaker Solon, for example, was a pioneer in civil law and codified several

institutions relating to marriage. Most of these gave power and prominence to the

husband and not the wife. For example, although a husband was forbidden to be

unfaithful, he could freely divorce his wife anytime he wished, while she did not have

that recourse14. Furthermore, he defined the institution of marriage as a process in which

a woman is “given by her father or brother or grandfather”15 to another man, and not an

institution of mutual choice. This does demonstrate that even a thinker who was widely

praised for having liberalized Athenian law and provided for civil rights had an attitude

which relegated women to little more than property or a social commodity to be shared

by men.

13
Aristotle, Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. p.127
14
Susan Lape, "Solon and the Institution of the "Democratic" Family Form." The Classical
Journal 98, no. 2 (2002): 117-39. Accessed April 13, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3298017.
p.121
15
Susan Lape, "Solon and the Institution of the "Democratic" Family Form." The Classical
Journal 98, no. 2 (2002): 117-39. Accessed April 13, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3298017.
p.122
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After comparing Plato to his contemporaries such as Aristotle and Solon, it does

become clear that although by no means completely inclusive, Plato certainly had a far

more nuanced and even positive at times, opinion of women, and their capabilities, than

many of his fellows even ones he had direct contact and a mentor-student relationship

with. Where others concerned themselves mostly with imagined masculine virtue or with

the potential for chaos should women be granted power or greater access to civil society,

Plato recognized their intelligence and worth as citizens. He clearly was an outlier in this

regard because, as was previously mentioned, even other thinkers would have probably

remarked on the peculiarity of his views towards women. It is uncertain why exactly his

views diverged so much from the majority and from his learned contemporaries, but it

does seem that his greater overall focus on society rather than the individual led Plato to a

better understanding of social interaction and civil rights. He certainly was not

completely free of prejudices, but he overall seemed to not make any judgements on

women as individually flawed beings or as a social group overall. In short, a very far cry

from his student Aristotle.

However, an objective examination of Plato’s values and attitudes towards women

and therefore, a judgement on whether or not he was sexist or prejudiced would be

incomplete if the work of modern scholars on the issue, who have had over a millennium

since Plato’s time to examine gender constructs and similar concepts in society, was to be

ignored. Therefore, this paper shall now take a look at a few articles and other pieces of

scholarly work, published in modern times, that analyze Plato’s social ideology through

the lens of gender equality studies and human rights.

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The first piece that will be reviewed in order to examine the modern perspective

on Plato’s gender ideals was written by scholar David Cohen and published in the Revue

Internationale des Droits de L’Antiquité, titled “The Legal Status and Political role of

Women in Plato’s Laws''. For a modern piece, it presents a relatively optimistic appraisal

of Plato’s thoughts on women in society. It claims that, contrasted to the “semi-total

exclusion from political life”16 that women faced in Ancient Greece, that Plato’s model

for Magnesia was one of the more forward-thinking of the time. Cohen furthermore states

that Plato considered it “folly” that men and women not be trained to equal standards in

both physical and mental fields, and that his thinking could have been seen as

revolutionary by contemporaries17. He also states, however, that Plato’s thoughts were

never actually put into practice in Athens, and that his ideas could be considered mildly

liberalizing today at best, because they were more focused on the good of the state then

individual rights and freedoms.

Another piece written in modern times that concerns itself with a gender analysis

of Plato’s Laws, and one that does present a contrary opinion, was written by feminist

scholar Susan Okin in 1977. Entitled “Philosopher Queens and Private Lives: Plato on

women and the family”, it argues that while Plato’s overall attitude could be considered

as more tolerant and less misogynistic than his contemporaries, in fact the policies he

imagines in Laws would actually result in more traditional roles being enforced in

Magnesia when compared to his Republic. This is because, Okin states, the one

restriction that would be imposed in Plato’s vision, the ban on private property would

16
David Cohen, “The Legal Status and Political Role of Women in Plato’s Laws.” Revue
Internationale des Droits de l’Antiquité, 34 (1987): p.29
17
David Cohen, “The Legal Status and Political Role of Women in Plato’s Laws.” Revue
Internationale des Droits de l’Antiquité, 34 (1987): p.35
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force women to act more as caregivers and maternal figures than economically

independent individuals18. The piece does not directly criticize Plato, allowing that his

wishes for women to access education and political power were progressive, but does

state that the vision put forth in Laws is incomplete and does not hold up to modern

standards of equality and inclusivity19 .

A third and final piece written by modern scholars on the topic of gender issues in

Plato’s Laws is a chapter in the book “The City and the Stage: Performance, Genre, and

Gender in Plato’s Laws”. The book, by Marcus Folch, refers in general to topics of

gender dynamics and literary genre in Plato’s writings, but the chapter in question refers

to the position of women in Magnesia. Folch takes a position in between the two

previously discussed sources, he recognizes that Plato’s overall philosophy of Gender

was quite progressive, in Folch’s words, “A radical transformation and reformation”20 of

women’s roles in society. However, he follows up by saying that there was a disconnect

between Plato’s philosophy and a practical implementation, pointing out the difficulties

of setting up such an idealized city-state and breaking through ingrained cultural

prejudice and pre-existing laws. Folch also points out, like Okin did, the limit on private

property, stating that it meant Plato’s ideas for women were limited to an ethical and

partially political reformation, and not an economic or social one21. He remains favorable

18
Susan M. Okin, “Philosopher Queens and Private Lives: Plato on Women and the Family.”
Philosophy & Public Affairs 6 (1977): p.353
19
Susan M. Okin, “Philosopher Queens and Private Lives: Plato on Women and the Family.”
Philosophy & Public Affairs 6 (1977): p.362
20
Marcus Folch, The City and the Stage: Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato’s Laws.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. p.253
21
Marcus Folch, The City and the Stage: Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato’s Laws.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. p.261
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to Plato’s views, but argues that as thought experiments they cannot be held as true

reform.

All in all, it does seem clear that modern gender scholars have mixed views on the

theories Plato put forth in his Laws: while universally recognizing him as more

progressive than his contemporaries, he is also often criticized for the impracticality of

his vision and the still-existing limits he placed on women, especially in the area of

property rights. So it cannot be said that he would be considered a true reformer in

modern times, but he is still recognized for being the most forward-thinking of his

colleagues.

Over the course of the preceding paragraphs, arguments were put forward in order

to demonstrate that, unlike many of his fellow contemporary philosophers in Ancient

Greece, Aristotle and Solon, just to name a few, Plato was not in fact sexist for the

standards of his time, but rather a relatively progressive individual. Drawing from some

of his most known works, namely and mainly The Laws, this paper attempted to

demonstrate that instead of being globally prejudiced towards women, Plato did in fact

provide them with a role in society and this even in his completely idealized city-state of

Magnesia, where they were allowed political participation and a fully visible role in

communal life. Of course, such ancient standards do not necessarily hold up to modern

scrutiny, and it was also demonstrated that being progressive for his time does not mean

that a modernized and liberalized society would consider him much of a reformer. Works

from a few different scholars in the field of feminist studies were introduced in order to

highlight the difference with modern times, which is always important to do when

analyzing the works of a scholar from a bygone era. It was demonstrated that Plato’s
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visions were ahead of their time, but still lacked substance and included a few key

limiting factors.

Still, when one takes an “all-in-all” look at the scenarios laid down by Plato in

Laws, it becomes clear that he was a far cry from his student, Aristotle, who described

women as being men with wounded souls. Perhaps socio-political realities of the time

meant Plato could not envision a more completely and truly egalitarian world, or that he

had no other writings or examples to base himself off to properly depict what we would

today call a ‘modern’ or ‘empowered’ woman. Despite this, he still managed to remain

not only respectful, but relatively forward-thinking and inclusive. It does remain

important, as always when studying thinkers of the past, to put them in perspective, and

while they should not be impervious to criticism based on modern values, it is also

important to remember that such values did not exist or existed only in altered form

during their time, and in the case of Plato, his positive contributions to academics and

philosophy certainly seems to outweigh his occasionally backwards-thinking attitude on

some social subjects.

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Bibliography

Aristotle, Rhetoric. New York: Cosimo Inc., 2010.

Aristotle, Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Cohen, David. “The Legal Status and Political Role of Women in Plato’s Laws.” Revue
Internationale des Droits de l’Antiquité, 34 (1987): 27-40.

Folch, Marcus, The City and the Stage: Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato’s Laws.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Hall, Edith. “Citizens but Second Class: Women in Aristotle’s Politics” in Patriarchal
Moments: Reading Patriarchal Texts, ed. Cesare Cuttica, ed. Gaby Mahlberg, (London:
Bloomsbury,2016), 35-42.

Lape, Susan. "Solon and the Institution of the "Democratic" Family Form." The Classical
Journal 98, no. 2 (2002): 117-39. Accessed April 13, 2021.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3298017.

Okin, Susan M. “Philosopher Queens and Private Lives: Plato on Women and the
Family.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 6 (1977): 345-369.

Plato, The Laws, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Rabieh, Linda R. “Gender, Education, and Enlightened Politics in Plato’s Laws.”

American Political Science Review 114, no. 3 (2020): 911–22.
doi:10.1017/S0003055420000271.

Scott Meikle, Aristotle’s Economic Thoughts New York:Clarendon Press