The Problem of Women Philosophers in Ancient Greece

Abstract

Moore’s romantic presentation of Greek women philosophers as ‘those few congenial maids’ encapsulates more vividly than perhaps he realised some of the most prevalent of the ancient Greek images of the woman philosopher that I shall examine in this chapter. Firstly these women are ‘few’, exceptions to the rule of antiquity. Secondly, and typical of the influential attitude of that time towards the women of Greek literature, Moore depicts them as charming, gentle, sensual. Their appeal is physical rather than intellectual; they are effectively mere appendages to their male mentors. In this chapter I wish to explore these images of intellectual women and to place them in their literary and philosophical context. I shall demonstrate how the theories of the male philosophers accommodate the possibility of female philosophers, while the number of actual cases of women who philosophised is remarkably small. Furthermore, I shall draw attention to major methodological difficulties involved in the study of the literary sources for the lives of these women. A pattern will develop that informs these sources, a pattern of women philosophers as anomalies whose departure from recognised social behaviour requires special explanation. These explanations often resort to the familiar conceptual link between women and the world of the senses, the physical, rather than that of the rational, the intellectual. I shall confine my discussion to between the sixth century BC and the first century AD, thus avoiding Hypatia. The sources for Hypatia are late and bound up with the complexities involved in the study of any Christian literature of the period. As such she deserves to be studied separately. Nor shall I discuss the complex and already well-documented case of Aspasia. Instead, I shall turn my attention to ‘forgotten’ women.¹

Oh! There I met those few congenial maids

Whom love hath warm’d, in philosophic shades;

There still Leontium, on her sage’s breast,

Found lore and love, was tutor’d and caress’d;

And there the clasp of Pythia’s gentle arms

Repaid the zeal which deified her charms.

The Attic Master, in Aspasia’s eyes,

Forgot the yoke of less endearing ties,

While fair Theano, innocently fair,

Wreath’d playfully her Samian’s flowing hair,

Whose soul now fix’d, its transmigrations past,

Found in those arms a resting-place at last;

And smiling own’d, whate’er his dreamy thought

In mystic numbers long had vainly sought,

The One that’s form’d of Two whom love hath bound,

Is the best number gods or men e’er found.

Thomas Moore, The Grecian Girl’s Dream of the Blessed Islands