Chapter 4 On the Equality in Virtue of Women and Men in Late Antique Platonism: Proclus, Julian and Philip the Philosopher
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Abstract
Plato’s claim that women’s capacities for virtue are equal to those of men is taken up by various Platonist philosophers in Late Antiquity. Proclus’ discussion of this claim in Essays VIII and IX of his commentary on the Republic has already been examined by scholars. In this paper I come back to Proclus’ Essay VIII in order to point to the metaphysical account he gives of the subsidiary nature of female in relation to male souls. I also discuss a second example of interpretation of Plato’s claim, to be found in Julian the Emperor’s Praise of the Empress Eusebia, where Julian presents Eusebia as superior in virtue to her husband Constantius II, a true philosopher-queen. A third example is provided by Philip the Philosopher’s interpretation of Heliodorus’ novel, the Aethiopica. This interpretation, I argue, first presents the men and women protagonists of the novel as exemplifying various virtues on the level of ‘ethical virtue,’ but then leads us up the scale of virtues to the love and contemplation of a transcendent Intellect, an ascent which is no longer a story of men or women, but that of the soul’s return to its homeland.