Chapter 3 Marcella and Porphyry
In: Women and the Female in NeoplatonismSearch for other papers by Luc Brisson in
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Abstract
It may be assumed that, like Plato’s Seventh Letter, the Letter to Marcella by Porphyry was an open letter. Even if it begins as a letter of consolation for his wife, it is above all an exhortation to the philosophical life, addressed to a woman. Women’s access to higher education and to philosophy was already justified by Plato in the Republic and the Laws, where human beings are no longer defined by their body but by their soul. This doctrinal point was taken up and extended to late Pythagoreanism by Platonists, including Numenius, who, reacting against the New Academy, made Socrates, and therefore Plato, disciples of Pythagoras. Porphyry was immersed in this ideological context of Pythagoreanized Platonism.