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By Root 1828 0

employed in the wool-working business.5 And in the Republic, the character of Socrates discusses the value of giving women the same education as men, and access to all functions and professions.6 While Plato opines in his Laws that women are ‘accustomed to an underground and shadowy existence,’ and again Xenophon writes that they are ‘brought up under the most cramping restrictions, raised from childhood to see and hear as little as possible, and to ask only the fewest possible questions’,7 perhaps Socrates, who was happy to stare right through convention, realised that raising 50-plus per cent of the population as etiolated creatures was a waste.

And when, during the Symposium (Xenophon’s this time, not Plato’s) Socrates is watching a slave-girl performing complicated circus tricks for the amusement of the assembled company (juggling, contorting, diving through crossed swords), he chips in:

SOCRATES: A woman’s nature is not at all inferior to a man’s – except in that it lacks understanding [reasoning, effectiveness] and strength. So if any of you has a wife, let him confidently set about teaching her whatever he would like to have her know.8

Although of course, with a distance of 2,400 years and given the provocative, sexually charged circumstances, it is difficult to tell whether or not Xenophon gives the philosopher this line with an ironic smile.

Socrates first and then Plato (even to some extent Aristotle) may well have watched all the precise, well-handled busyness of women in society – doing those important jobs listed by Aristophanes – and thought ‘What a waste!’ These are creatures that could be even more productive … there are other ways they can add to society.

Listen to further conversations in Plato’s Republic:

Many women, it is true, are better than many men in many things.9

If, then, we are to use the women for the same things as the men, we must also teach them the same things.10

Socrates was, above all, fascinated by the business of being human. And in the human genus, he happily includes both women and men. He was, as a result, humane; Xenophon has Socrates comment as he visits the prostitute Theodote:

… There are many attractive servant girls, and they show absolutely no sign of neglect …11

Take off those rose-tinted glasses: the philosopher is no campaigner for a classical-age, sexual revolution, he also refers to women as horses, as slaves. No proto-feminist here; but Socrates does have the courage to look beyond the orthodox. And the significant women who crop up in the literary accounts of his life far outnumber those who appear alongside other ‘great men’ of this period. His name is also linked to that of real, historical women – and not just in a sexual or moral scandal (which is how women typically make their way into the historical record), but as an inspiration; witness this antique inscription on the tombstone of a young woman:

She was the splendour of Greece, and possessed the beauty of Helen, the virtue of Thirma, the pen of Aristippus, the soul of Socrates and the tongue of Homer.12

Socrates and wives, midwives and war-widows

Socrates’ mother, we are told, became a midwife.13 Socrates may have been conceived in a city showered with talents, but he was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Phaenarete was a ‘well-built woman’,14 with a stocky set suited to her physically demanding job. Between the ages of eighteen and thirty, while the philosopher lived at home (the standard arrangement in Athens at this time), Socrates would have watched his mother preparing for and practising her difficult, essential business. Not a precious upbringing; he might have seen Phaenarete preparing herbs – pharmaka – drugs, useful little things. Pennyroyal to catalyse contractions; cardamom concoctions to fumigate the womb through a long reed; pomegranate pessaries. He would have heard what happened when births went wrong and child, or mother, or both, died. He would have known that some Athenian parents chose to expose their newborn to the elements if she was a girl-child.

In the National