War and citizenship, therefore politics and manliness: we ought to take this train of thought, however, not as a simple causation, but as the focal point of tightly woven, more intricate correlations. The male monopoly of politics seems pervasive in the classical world, but in order to be upheld and widely accepted by all social actors, including philosophers, poets, and women themselves, it must have been corroborated by thicker cultural circumstances.
First, the ancient Greeks came to conceptualize the notion of natural norms, but not that of universal human rights. The failure to think inclusively, as a matter of principle, set the stage for a selective limitation of individual entitlements. One cannot even begin to make a compelling argument in favor of women’s equality without the explicit, or even implicit, claim to the access of all human beings to freedom and parity - including the equally shared liberty to participate in ruling and being ruled. The actual existence of slavery, the exclusion of women from political activity, be it office or advice or vote, their legal minority: these positive facts, largely unchallenged in classical antiquity, presuppose and concur to ratify the idea that human beings insofar as they happen to be dissimilar, can also be held unequal. Aristotle argues that political equality ought to replicate a preexisting sameness, instead of being something a person has an unconditional claim to. This is at the antipodes of the logic of human rights. Equality, for us, must be recognized as applying to individuals, notwithstanding and against any previous difference.
The exclusionary nature of the liberty and equality of the ancient Greeks can be seen in the process of democratization in Athens. If we read Aristotle and Plutarch on the reforms of Solon, in 594, we can see how his famous cancellation of debts and the abolition of enslavement creates a new social status, that of the free citizen. All those born in the territory of Attica are now endowed with an inalienable condition of freedom, a right that is actually a privilege for the Athenians. Liberty is those citizens’ right, that is, but not a human right. They, as Athenians, become all equally invulnerable to bondage, and, as a consequence, masters of slaves imported from outside. This crucially relates to the status of women. With Solon, Athenian women became equally protected from enslavement, but they did not become equally entitled to political responsibility. There is no argument in favor of their political emancipation, as much as there is no argument in favor of a general abolition of slavery. Athens, the progressive polis, went as far as to enforce equal freedom for its native men only.
To ignore human rights creates a predictable, conventional, and rarely challenged legitimation of unfairness. Unchecked by transcultural rights, local norms will prevail in shaping social life. Women should raise children, stay at home, and care for the household, for instance. And Nature will come to support such mores. Feminine bodies are intended for procreation, they are weak and soft. Naturalistic justifications of inequality never encounter a serious limit in social habits, because habits can be easily adjusted to the reasons of Nature. Between nomos and phusis, gender asymmetry can only flourish. This brings us to the second order of circumstances, contributing to that lopsidedness. The forms of knowledge that offer arguments in matters of sex, such as medicine and philosophy, reinforced the assumption that bodies determine characters; that characters and bodies respond to the environment; that habits are natural and tend to remain stable.
The naturalistic essentialism of philosophy culminates in Aristotle’s conception of the political animal. From Plato’s narrative of the irruption of women in the world, caused by the occasional deilia of the first men, to Aristotle’s repeated claim that andreia is the basic virtue of a citizen, but all females are innately colder, thus wanting in thumos, therefore unable to fight, a persistent train of thought associates femininity with softness, immobility, and sensuality. The she-bear and the panther are exceptions; the spineless female squid shows the rule, together with the human female, always paradigmatic of extreme dimorphism. We have examined those associations. Let us now take the measure of their coherence, at the core of Aristotle’s theory of politics.
Nature is the foundation of sociability; nature commands the creation of selfsufficient communities, where individuals can attain happiness and a good life. In a polis a human being becomes a polites. A polites can be defined as someone who takes turns in ruling and being ruled: this rotation of charges, this alternation of passivity and activity, is the key to ‘‘citizenship.’’ Now, in a perfect politeia, citizens are well-educated rentiers who serve as soldiers in their youth, and take political responsibilities in their prime. Courage is their predominant virtue in war; practical intelligence, phronesis, in politics (Arist. Pol. 1329a1-25). Now courage, andreia, is built in their masculinity, in their being andres. It is, literally, manliness. Women cannot be manly. A female, Aristotle, insists, may show some bravery, but it would be of an inferior kind: courage cannot be the same in females and males (Arist. Pol. 1260a21-2), and a valorous woman would be the equivalent of a cowardly man (Arist. Pol. 1277b20-3). As for the prudence of a mature citizen, one in charge of deliberating ( bouleutikon) about matters of policy and justice, this quality too appears to be deficient in women: women are capable of deliberation ( bouleutikon), we have seen, but they lack authority. They are capable of making decisions, but not of carrying them out. They are not born to rule. They are made to hold all the time, aiei, without interruption, the same passive position: to be ruled by their husbands.13 They fall short of becoming part of the army, as much as they fail to meet the requirements of the deliberative class. They are citizens, but cannot rotate as the male politai do. In his essay on Aristotelian ‘‘naturalism’’ in this volume (chapter 25), Timothy Chappell argues that Aristotle anchors politics to phusis in a way that is much more nuanced than is usually claimed; ultimately justified in view of a specifically human end, happiness; and, as I also argue in ‘‘Political Animals: Pathetic Animals,’’ chapter 18 of this volume, in a constant interplay of nature and habituation. Gender, however, seems to be a particularly naturalistic domain, where both difference and inequality remain stable.
Before Aristotle, we can find a similar discourse in the Hippocratic Corpus. Unwar-likeness means indifference to the conquest of freedom, thus compliance before tyranny. Certain peoples present such a character, therefore are less endowed with andreia, manliness, which is, again, the basic virtue of hellenic politics. The most eloquent theorist of this gendered ethnography is the author of On Airs, Waters, and Places, (supposedly) Hippocrates:
And with regard to the pusillanimity and cowardice of the inhabitants, the principal reason the Asiatics are more unwarlike and of gentler disposition than the Europeans is the nature of the seasons, which do not undergo any great changes either to heat or cold, or the like; for there is neither excitement of the understanding nor any strong change of the body whereby the temper might be ruffled and they be roused to inconsiderate emotion and passion, rather than living as they do always in the state. It is changes of all kinds which arouse understanding of mankind, and do not allow them to get into a torpid condition. For these reasons, it appears to me, the Asiatic race is feeble.14
This ethnic profile is indeed heavily gendered, because these people lack manliness. This is the root of their patterns of behavior, consistently marked by softness, cowardice, and sensuality. As Hippocrates writes: ‘‘Manliness (andreia), endurance of suffering, laborious enterprise, and high spirit, could not be produced in such a state of things either among the native inhabitants or those from a different country, for there pleasure necessarily reigns’’ (Hippoc. Aer. 12).
Among the Europeans, but because of their mild environment, the nomadic inhabitants of Scythia are particularly moist, sagging, flabby, and fleshy, with feeble joints - therefore inclined to idleness. In their exceedingly even weather, one just cannot find the energy to pitch a spear. Fat and hairless, ‘‘their shapes resemble one another, the males being all alike, and so also with the women’’ (Hippoc. Aer. 19). However, they remedy this unfortunate condition by surgery: men cauterize their shoulders, in order to dry up, reinforce their joints and become able to ride and throw the javelin. Counteracting nature, the Scythians modify their bodies, naturally unfit for war, transforming themselves into very effective fighters (Hippoc. Aer. 20).
World History
