The Incomplete Feminism of Musonius Rufus, Platonist,

Stoic, and Roman

º

Martha C. Nussbaum

I

One of the most remarkable figures in Roman Stoicism, the Roman eques

Musonius Rufus has suffered from an odd combination of neglect and

unsubstantiated praise.1 Philosophical scholars have more or less totally ne- glected this Roman Stoic philosopher (c. c.e. 30–100), who taught Epicte- tus, who was exiled by Nero to the island of Gyaros for his alleged participa- tion in the conspiracy of Piso, and who is known to posterity from a group of short works, apparently public speeches, on ethical and practical topics (including the need for rulers to learn philosophy!).2 In late antiquity, Mu- sonius was regarded as a major figure, both as teacher and as moral exem- plar. Origen, for example, names Musonius and Socrates as the two exem- plars of the highest type of life in the pagan world; the pairing was apparently widespread.3 But our philosophical contemporaries have little time for the “Roman Socrates.” The comprehensive collection of texts by A. A. Long and David Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, includes neither any text from Musonius nor any mention of him, even in the section dealing with Stoic views on the political equality of women.4 The burgeoning recent scholarly literature on Hellenistic ethics has not yet, to my knowledge, devoted any extensive attention to the analysis of his arguments. Although his works were well translated by Cora Lutz in a 1947 article in Yale Classical Studies,5

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no anthology available to students includes selections from his work. And Lutz’s own introductory essay, though valuable, focuses on historical mat- ters and does not present any detailed analysis of Musonius’s arguments. On the other hand, Musonius has some avid fans who have praised him warmly for his views on women, but they have done little to indicate what in the text merits such praise. Most striking of these is the distinguished Marxist historian, the late G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, who included a treatment of the subordination of women in his remarkable magnum opus, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World.6 De Ste. Croix argues that women are an oppressed class in the technical Marxian sense, and that a work on class struggle in the ancient world ought therefore to include some discussion of efforts to free women from this class oppression. Musonius, he argues, was the ancient writer who made the most valuable proposals for women’s equal treatment, proposals that were unfortunately eclipsed by the more repressive views of his Christian successors, who in general taught the sub- ordination of women to men.7 If only the world had listened to Muso- nius rather than to Saint Paul, our world would have been a lot happier, and more just. This claim had, and has, a certain plausibility, despite the rhetorical excess with which it was expressed.8 But it does not take us far as analysis. De Ste. Croix made no effort to trace Musonius’s debt to earlier Stoicism (about which he showed little curiosity), to Plato (a philosopher whom he despised), or to Roman culture generally. Animus against the Christians so engrossed him that he had little interest in investigating ideas about women and marriage in other areas of the culture surrounding Mu- sonius. His praise thus serves more to pique the reader’s interest than to

provide any helpful analysis of Musonius’s views.

By far the most valuable analytical contribution so far has been the use- ful treatment of Musonius’s views on marriage and sexuality by Michel Fou- cault in volume 3 of his History of Sexuality.9 Foucault linked Musonius’s views helpfully with those of some related authors such as Epictetus and Plutarch and argued persuasively that Musonius forms part of a philosoph- ical and also a more general culture that was trying out new views about mar- ital companionship and women’s equality. But again, Foucault provides no precise account of the origins of different elements in Musonius’s work, something that we badly need if we are to assess his originality and the pre- cise nature of his proposals. Indeed, he tended to treat Musonius as an ex- ample of emerging popular thought, rather than as a thinker in a definite philosophical tradition. Furthermore, he confined his analysis to the writ- ings on sexuality, in keeping with his theme, and therefore did not discuss the texts relating to women’s education, where Musonius actually presents

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arguments for women’s equal treatment designed to convince interlocutors who disagree (something he does more rarely in the works on sexuality). Finally, in her fascinating book Roman Marriage, Susan Treggiari includes much material from Musonius in the course of assembling her picture of the evolution of companionate marriage at Rome.10 Through her valuable study of the ways in which husbands and wives referred to their mutual love in funerary inscriptions, combined with a scrutiny of legal texts and a variety of sources for popular thought, Treggiari has given the philosophical inter- preter of Musonius invaluable assistance in situating him within his culture, assistance of which I shall gladly avail myself. But again, her work does not carry us far as a study of Musonius, since she is not concerned to pursue his

philosophical antecedents, or to analyze his arguments.11

My aim in this chapter will be to begin to address this lack by providing close analyses of the arguments of two works of Musonius: Should Daugh- ters and Sons Get the Same Education? and That Women Too Should Do Philos- ophy. (I shall also discuss pertinent passages of several others works, which I have therefore translated along with the primary works in the appendix.) It is evident that Musonius is a Stoic. He speaks as a Stoic philosopher, and his writings are saturated with the ideas of the Stoic tradition. It is also evident that he owes a large debt to Plato’s Republic (and other Platonic works): 12 like many Stoics he views Plato as an important philosophical source, and he is prepared to borrow Plato’s arguments liberally in con- structing his own. Finally, it is also evident that Musonius is a Roman gentle- man. He addresses an audience of well-born Roman males in households with many slaves and servants, and he makes it clear that he is one of them. (Once he contrasts the Cynic philosopher Crates, who had no property and slept in the public stoas of Athens, with “[us] who set out from a household, and some of us have servants to wait on us.” 13 Throughout, he assumes a prosperous household with a staff of slaves.) Even his preference for the simple life of agricultural labor 14 corresponds to a common Roman fantasy, and there is no reason to suppose that Musonius ever lived out that fantasy. It is men such as himself, above all, whom he wishes to persuade about some matters concerning their daughters and wives. This gives his Stoicism strict practical limits and shapes the way in which he presents characteristic Stoic ideas. I shall ask exactly how these arguments work, how each of Musonius’s three identities figures in their structure, and what tensions we may discern among the claims of the different identities. Once this has been done, we can at least begin to ask what sort of feminist Musonius was, and how help- ful his proposals actually are.

One caveat before we begin. We are able to trace Musonius’s debt to

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Plato, and to general features of Stoic ethics. But we know all too little about Zeno’s Republic, the major work of Stoic political thought.15 And we know that we totally lack a number of Stoic works in which women were discussed: Cleanthes’ On the Fact that the Same Excellence [arete¯] Belongs to a Man and a Woman (D.L.7.175); a work of Chrysippus in which he defended that same thesis (see Philodemus de Fato col v.8–11); Seneca’s De Matrimonio, scanty fragments of which are preserved in Jerome; and, no doubt, other works that simply are lost to us.16 An additional complication is that some of these works may themselves have used Plato— so we cannot be sure that Muso- nius is going straight back to the source. So we must proceed as best we can, bearing in mind that not all our inferences will be good ones.

 

 

II

 

Should Daughters and Sons addresses an interlocutor who asks whether the same paideia should be given to both. Musonius begins his reply (A) with a famous Platonic example: male and female dogs have the same training, because they have the same functions (Republic 451B 4ff.). To Plato’s ex- ample Musonius adds that of horses. But he omits an important part of the Platonic argument, namely, the observation that dogs are not assigned dif- ferent functions “on the grounds that bearing and rearing the puppies in- capacitates them” (451D6–7). This was one of Plato’s most striking points: the fact of a difference in pregnancy and lactation does not entail a lifelong division of functions.17 As we shall later see, the omission fits well with Mu- sonius’s reluctance to challenge traditional spheres of activity and his in- terest in perpetuating a female form of life shaped around household man- agement and child care.

In the case of humans, however, Musonius continues, we somehow think that males should have a superior education. Musonius now argues

(B) that differential education could be justified only in two ways: we need to show either that it is not essential that men and women have the same excellences,18 or that it is possible to arrive at the same excellences through different types of education. He strongly suggests that neither ground will prove plausible (h o ¯ spe r ouch i deon).

The first task, then, is (C) to establish that the same functions and ex- cellences belong to both men and women. Here Musonius departs from Plato and conceives of the question in a thoroughly Stoic way. Plato, of course, considers people fitted by birth for a wide range of different func- tions. The education he proposes in mousike¯ and gymnastics is to be given

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only to the children of guardians, and a notorious problem is that this makes it virtually impossible for the ideal city to be the meritocracy it purports to be.19 But even among these guardian children, some will ultimately prove unsuitable for guardianship and migrate downward in the class hierarchy; on the other end, only a select few will ascend, through an arduous win- nowing process, to the status of philosopher-ruler. These will have an edu- cation in mathematics and dialectic that will not be given to anyone else. So when Plato speaks of similar excellences, he means that the highly diverse excellences that characterize different classes in the city are distributed across the two sexes, and that wherever talents are the same, the training should be the same. He does not mean that all people have the same talents and should therefore have the same education.

Not so Musonius. In Stoic fashion, he conceives of the excellences of a good human life as the same for all humans alike: they are the ethical ex- cellences, which Musonius standardly takes to be the usual four, courage, moderation, justice, and wisdom. He construes wisdom consistently, in Stoic fashion, as practical wisdom (phronein) and takes it to be concerned, above all, with moral choice. In this work Musonius does not discuss the innate equipment for these excellences; he assumes, in standard Stoic fash- ion, that it is innate in all human beings. Thus, he does not even consider the possibility that women have a different goal because they have differ- ent innate equipment. Elsewhere, however, he asserts that all human be- ings have the basic equipment for these excellences: “We are all by nature equipped to live blamelessly and well.” 20 He supports this claim by point- ing to the fact that lawgivers prescribe behavior for everyone, not just for certain special people.

His argument confronts, instead, the question whether the same menu of moral excellences befits both women and men.21 Practical understand- ing (phronein) he treats as obvious: “What after all would be the use of a foolish man or woman?” Justice requires a little more attention, but Mu- sonius argues that just as a man requires justice to be a good citizen, so a woman requires it to be a good household manager. He adds a point de- signed to persuade the reluctant male interlocutor: he does not, after all, want a wife who would behave unjustly like the murderous Eriphyle! Self- control (so¯phrosune¯) Musonius takes to be an obvious desideratum for fe- males, but, interestingly, less obvious for males. He points out, supporting his claim that it is important for males, that “the law decrees the same penalty for moicheuein as for moicheuesthai,” for male as for female adultery. As we shall see later, this is literally true but involves a big equivocation, since any intercourse outside marriage for a woman is defined as adulterous, but

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this is not true for a male. Musonius conceals the distance that separates his own view of proper male self-control (see section V) from legal reality. He adds the point that gluttony and drunkenness are vices in both sexes.

But the biggest problem (D) is clearly courage, andreia, which is always closely linked, as its name implies, to the idea of manliness. Interestingly, Musonius’s text shows us that this etymological link is still in force, for he shifts to the verb andrizesthai in the next sentence, as if the word is still heard as a part of its word family.22 So the question must be: what is it for a woman to behave “like a real man,” and why should we think this good for a woman? Musonius gives three answers, all of them interesting. First, a woman had better have the capacity not to “bend under either hardship or fear,” or she will not even have self-control, for she will not stand up to men who assail her virtue by threats. Second, she had better know how to fight defensively, if she is going to be able to defend her children from a possible attack: he points out that hens and many birds have this ability. Third, he points out that there is no reason to think that even armed fighting is off limits for women, since we all know about the victories of the Amazons. If “other women lack something of their ability, it is due to lack of practice, rather than because they lack some innate equipment.”

This fascinating paragraph offers something for everyone, drawing on a variety of traditions as it does so. The idea that courage can be displayed in resisting shameful things outside of the military context is common in Stoic authors and in Cicero: indeed, Cicero’s De Officiis, to take just one example, pries courage more or less completely loose from its military roots and makes it a general attitude of despising fortune and withstanding its blows. This argument about the connection between courage and wifely virtue is surely the one most pertinent to the concerns of the interlocutor. But just in case the interlocutor should object that courage is essentially a virtue con- cerned with fighting, Musonius is ready for him. The argument about de- fensive fighting on behalf of one’s young is highly practical— and indeed Roman history of the first century offers many examples of parents who ei- ther do or do not protect their children against attack. (Seneca reproves one such father as “a slave in soul more than in circumstance”; De Ira 3.14.) It is significant, and characteristic, that Musonius chooses to illustrate his claim from the world of hens and birds, rather than from the Neronian court, where such examples of courage on behalf of others (and of its absence) would not have been difficult to find.

But it might be objected that so far we have not been shown that women have the same courage, since the paradigm case of courage in the tradition

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involved armed combat. Here Musonius does find it necessary to address the question of equal capacities for the first time— since the interlocutor is likely to doubt whether women are capable of military excellence. His final argument therefore takes us straight into the world of Plato’s Republic, where women develop the same gymnastic and military skills as men. The idea is not foreign to the Stoic tradition: it seems plausible that Zeno’s Republic similarly integrated women into the military and defensive functions of the city.23 Citing the victories of the Amazons (an example that he apparently derives from Plato’s Laws 806B, where Plato uses it to support a fully equal physical education),24 Musonius says that this example shows that women can do extremely well in war; the fact that today’s women do not fight in the army shows only that they lack practice.

Musonius’s interest in armed fighting is more theoretical than practical: he is not proposing to reform the Roman army, and his example of the myth- ical Amazons lies further from reality than others he might have used. (He writes close to the time of Boudicca’s troublesome rebellion in Britain.) But he keeps things safely abstract, establishing only that there are no grounds for thinking that women differ in any respect, either with regard to the goal or with regard to their equipment for reaching it.

Throughout this passage, there is a conspicuous absence of metaphysi- cal and psychological analysis. Earlier philosophical discussions of female virtue were sometimes built on an analysis of the soul and its parts. Thus, Aristotle’s denial that women have the same virtues uses his analysis of the soul into ruling and ruled parts (Politics 1.13). The Greek Stoics’ assertion of similarity in virtue presumably made use of the Stoic one-part model of the soul. Musonius’s account draws the Roman interlocutor into no such contested waters. By separating the ethical argument from its metaphysical basis, Musonius presumably hopes to address a wider group of readers; he also follows a common Roman tendency to portray ethical arguments as self-sufficient.

Musonius now turns (E) to the other premise he needs to establish: if the functions are the same, the education should be the same. He does not think this very controversial; indeed, he assumes that the interlocutor will agree quickly that “in the case of every animal and plant, one must produce the excellence appropriate to it by applying the correct sort of concern.” He now gives two musical examples: if what we wanted to teach was aulos play- ing, surely we would not teach it differently to men and to women; it is the same with kithara playing. So too with the virtues: “if both need to become good, possessing the excellence that is appropriate to human beings, . . .

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won’t we then educate them both similarly, and teach the skill from which one becomes a good human being to both on an equal basis? Surely we are obliged to do it this way, and no other way.”

Musonius fails to consider a possible objection. For there are some cases where we do think it right to use different educational strategies to reach a single result. These are cases where we think that different starting points (whether biological or cultural) influence learning. Some children seem to grasp mathematical concepts quickly through visual strategies, oth- ers through abstract numerical and conceptual strategies. Good teachers approach children in ways that suit their learning style, which may have bi- ological dimensions. Sometimes, these differences are sex linked: to teach girls any athletic skill, a good teacher will need to know the differences be- tween female and male anatomy and how these influence functioning. (When Little League baseball authorities required a female catcher to wear an athletic supporter, claiming in Musonian fashion that what is good for one must be good for both, she came to practice wearing the protective cup on her arm, just to show how silly the rule was.) Again, a voice teacher who trained young male and female singers similarly would ruin many voices: careful attention to different developmental patterns and different periods of fragility is essential for good training. Finally, there are differences created by differential social placement: many educators now think special pro- grams important to encourage girls to go into math and science, because they believe that only such programs will overcome the cultural portrayal of these fields as male, giving girls a fully equal chance to see what they can do. In all these ways, education “on an equal basis” need not mean the same education. True equality can sometimes require differential treatment. Why does Musonius ignore these possibilities? In the case of innate dif- ferences, it is because he holds that there are no significant innate differ- ences with respect to the basic aptitude for learning morality. (He assumes that here, but argues for it in That Women Too and in the short work cited above.) As for different learning styles, distributed along general lines, we should bear in mind that all Stoic moral education is supposed to be re- sponsive to the particularity of each pupil; it is therefore plausible to sup- pose that any differences that individuals have along these lines will be picked up in that way, far more accurately than through any generalizations

about gender groups.

But what of different cultural impediments to virtue? Isn’t it plausible to suppose that, while males brought up at Rome have to struggle especially hard against anger and the desire to lord it over others, women may need to struggle against excessive timidity, or lack of self-esteem? But here again,

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Stoic education is one step ahead of the objector. If there is one thing that is the persistent focus of Stoic moral education, it is the need to counteract bad stereotypes of male and female excellence, especially as these are pre- sented in normative pictures of “proper” emotion. Men have to be taught that anger is not the mark of the real manly man; women have to be taught that erotic passion is not the mark of the real woman (witness Epictetus’s sermon to Medea); all have to be taught to avoid excessive attachments to worldly externals, such as honor, political position, money, and family, es- pecially as those are presented in normative paradigms tought by culture. The general Stoic position is that wherever culture has damaged the pupil, that is where education should focus; wherever there is disease, there med- ical treatment should be applied. So any gendered differences in moral im- pediment will already be taken account of in the very idea of a Stoic moral education; and Musonius plausibly thinks that this does not amount to a different education for the two sexes. That is simply what it is to “teach the skill from which one becomes a good human being to both on an equal ba- sis.” Stoicism, with its reliance on the medical analogy, has already inter- nalized the fact that sometimes truly equal treatment requires different con- crete strategies.

The interlocutor now objects (F) that it is implausible to imagine that all physical exercise will be the same. We might expect Musonius to return to the Amazons and the need for female practice in the martial arts. At this point in Plato’s argument in the Laws, the Athenian Stranger takes a very strong stand, insisting on vigorous lifelong bodily training and contrasting his own proposal with Spartan custom, which strikes him as half-hearted, since women learn physical skills of war in youth and never use them in adulthood (806BC). Musonius, however, takes a more pragmatic Roman tack. “No,” he says, “I would not require this.” The stronger bodies should do the heavier and outdoor work, the weaker bodies the lighter and indoor work. In general, these differences are distributed along lines of sex, but that will not always be the case. The capacities of the individual should be the touchstone. Some men may prove more suited for light work, some women for heavier “male” work. Musonius concludes by strongly reprov- ing the idea that there is any task that is by nature only for men, or only for women. “For all human tasks . . . belong to us in common, and are com- mon to both men and women.”

Why does Musonius pull up short here, rather than following Plato (and probably Zeno) in assigning outdoor physical tasks to women on a regular basis? The answer is obvious: he is making practical proposals for Roman daily life in upper-middle-class households. In theory he remains a

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strict Platonist, insisting that there is no task that is not by nature suited for both sexes. But since, with Plato, he grants that physical strength is generally distributed somewhat unequally, he can grant consistently with Platonism that the heavier tasks will generally be more suited to males. And if this is so, why not accept, for the most part, the traditional division of indoor and outdoor activities, rather than making women go outside for physical exer- cise? Plato would say: because otherwise we shall never know what the ca- pacities of each individual are. (Our own century’s experience with female athletics gives him strong support.) And in the Laws he adds, because if they ever really need to fight for their city they will otherwise be unable to do so (806AB). Musonius, less adventurous— and able to rely on the rather con- siderable skills of the Roman army at its zenith— rests content with a bold theoretical assertion and a conservative practical proposal.

Having made this sizable concession to custom, however, Musonius im- mediately returns to his central, and strictly egalitarian, theme (G): where teaching related to ethical excellence is concerned, everything is exactly the same for both, “inasmuch as we agree that the excellences are in no way more appropriate to one rather than the other.” Physical exercise can be dif- ferent, apparently, only because it is not seen by Musonius as having a bear- ing on the real goal. He therefore elaborates his central theme, emphasizing once again (H) the uniformity of moral education that should belong to boys and girls, “straight from infancy,” asserting that there are no group dif- ferences in the basic mode of moral learning. He runs through the four ex- cellences again, giving a sense of the sort of thing one must learn to acquire them. (Clearly, he is speaking of the education of young children, not the more sophisticated education in arguments discussed in That Women Too.) Once again, Musonius concedes that there may be small differences of expertise (I): a man may know some specialized piece of “technical” knowl- edge that a woman does not know, and vice versa. About “the really im- portant things,” however, they must know exactly the same. The art that su- pervises this education? It is, of course, philosophy (J), and both men and women need to learn it. Musonius hastens to add that this does not mean women must learn a professional competence in logic and so forth, but men do not need to either. The important thing is that both should acquire “excellence of character and nobility of life,” and philosophy provides this. In short, Musonius takes a radical Platonic (and perhaps Zenonian) idea of equal education and adapts it to Roman reality. His view is Platonic in that it looks to the capacities of the individual, rather than to customary gender divisions, as the touchstone for what education can be. It is Stoic in that it looks to the ethical excellences, and their basis in a capacity shared

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by all humans, as the touchstone for what education should be. (Logic and “sophistical cleverness” are dismissed as unnecessary for either sex, and mathematics does not even figure in the account.) It is Roman, finally, in its determination to integrate this education of character, without omitting anything truly essential, into a Roman way of life, to challenge contem- porary norms of superior male education without producing the laughter and hostility that Plato’s Socrates imagined greeting his proposals for the ideal city.

 

 

III

 

That Women Too begins, in a sense, where Should Daughters and Sons left off, with the topic of female philosophizing. But it tackles an issue that Should Daughters and Sons left for the most part unargued: the question of innate female capacities. Musonius begins (A) with an elaborate enumeration of the capacities that are distributed by the gods to male and female alike. First, the rational faculty (logos). Musonius imagines this not as a special- ized Platonic capacity for theoretical contemplation, but as a basic practi- cal faculty “that we use to communicate with one another and to reason about each thing, whether it is a good thing or not, and whether it is noble or shameful.” Why does he expect the interlocutor to accept the premise that women have “the same rational faculty as men”? We learn later that the interlocutor is a male, probably a husband, who wants a wife who is a good partner and companion; the suggestion is that such a man will recognize that his daily dealings with his wife presuppose her possession of such a communicative and choice-making capacity. To this similarity, Musonius adds similarity in faculties of sensing, and similarity in bodily parts. (In keeping with ancient tendencies to treat female and male genitals as func- tional equivalents, he asserts that there is no part that one has that the other does not have.) 25 Finally, Musonius finds in both sexes the desire for ethi- cal excellence and a natural orientation toward it (oikeio¯sis phusei). He sup- ports this claim by pointing to the fact that women “no less than men are pleased by noble and just actions, and reject the opposite.” The interlocutor is expected to accept this— logically enough, since he is depicted as some- one who has high ethical expectations for his wife’s conduct.

This account of human faculties is clearly Stoic, rather than Platonic or derivative from popular Roman thought. It focuses on the faculties of the person Stoics consider most important for ethical development, and it uses the characteristic Stoic terms logos and oikeio¯sis to make these origins clear.

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Special theoretical talents, such as those discussed in Plato’s account of the natural equipment of his philosopher rulers, are altogether ignored.26

Now Musonius abruptly concludes, (B) “Since this is the way things are, why on earth would it be appropriate for men to inquire and examine how one should live well—which is what it is to do philosophy— and women not?” Strictly speaking, the conclusion here is only that if it is appropriate for men to do philosophy, then it is appropriate for women to do so. But since Musonius plainly thinks that it is appropriate for men to do philoso- phy, the rhetoric of his question strongly suggests that it is appropriate for women as well. How does this argument work?

Apparently, Musonius assumes that the characteristics just discussed are all relevant to doing philosophy, and that they are the only characteristics relevant to doing philosophy. Beginning from these assumptions, he ap- pears to be reasoning as follows. Suppose (as has already been argued) (1) A and B are similarly situated with reference to the basic skills to be developed in a pursuit P. Then (2) if P is appropriate to A it is also appropriate to B. But in fact (3) a philosophical development of these skills is appropriate for men. And so, by modus ponens we get, as our conclusion, (4) that it is ap- propriate to women also.

The conditional premise 2 is the controversial one. The problem is that the basic equipment named by Musonius is basic equipment for hundreds of pursuits, not all of which can be cultivated simultaneously. So both men and women have to opt for some of the pursuits for which they are basi- cally qualified, and to reject others. The fact that they have the basic equip- ment thus does not settle what they will do. We may wonder why Muso- nius is so confident about what men should do. But even if we grant him that premise, and grant him, as well, the very general idea that similar cases should be treated similarly, we may yet wonder whether there is not some as yet undisclosed dissimilarity between men and women that would dictate a different choice among the available activities in their case. For example, it might be the case that one cannot pursue both philosophy and household management (as the irate interlocutor will later object). In that case, given that women have the basic equipment for both, we will simply have to de- cide which is more important for them to pursue. In short, before Musonius can really earn his conclusion, he will have to say a good deal more about how philosophy fits in with the other pursuits of life. In particular, it would be helpful for him to establish two points: (a) that philosophy is extremely important for all human beings, so that there is a strong prima facie case for pursuing it if one can, and (b) that philosophy is not at odds with the other important uses a woman should make of her basic equipment.

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This Musonius now undertakes to do. In the next section of the work, he argues for the central importance of philosophy in producing all the ex- cellences that are most important for a woman’s life as well as a man’s.

He begins (C) with a rhetorical question: “Is it because it is appropriate for men to be good, and women not?” He thus suggests an argument of the following form: (1) Human beings cannot be good without philosophy.

(2) It is appropriate for all human beings to be good, both male and fe- male. (3) So, it is appropriate for all human beings, both male and female, to pursue philosophy.

The rest of this section of the work (D) is taken up with establishing the first premise with regard to women, since 2 in some form is taken for granted. But establishing 1 turns out to require a fuller account of what it is for a woman to be good, and therefore a detour through the subject matter of Should Daughters and Sons. Musonius is concerned to ward off the pos- sible objection that a different menu of excellences belongs to women, and therefore, possibly, a different training. So he goes, one by one, through each of the four ethical excellences, arguing in each case (a) that it is an ap- propriate excellence for a female, and (b) that philosophy is the art that will secure to her its possession.

Like the first section of the work, this section is thoroughly Stoic. Phi- losophy is not abstract speculation or theoretical contemplation. It is un- derstood in a Stoic practical way (and in a way that, even among Stoic con- ceptions, downplays the importance of logic and study of nature): it is the systematic art of life (episte¯me¯ peri bio¯n); its subject matter is arguments about what is worth enduring for the sake of what, what is to be despised and what chosen, and so forth. In familiar Stoic fashion, Musonius invokes the ex- ample of Socrates to back his idea. He argues that a systematic understand- ing of ethical arguments gives a firmness and consistency in ethical conduct that one can get in no other way. One reason for this is that philosophy, so imagined, leads to a modification of the passions: the philosophically trained woman will not be quarrelsome, or fearful, or “wiped out by pain,” or prone to unfair grasping.

Since this discussion closely parallels the discussion in Should Daughters and Sons, it is not necessary to analyze it at length, but the discussion of courage requires comment. In Should Daughters and Sons, Musonius had os- cillated between a Platonic idea of warlike women and a more conservative Roman idea of women who use courage to stand up to the travails of a typ- ical woman’s life. In That Women Too, the former conception is completely absent, and the latter holds the scene alone. The motif of standing up to the threats of the powerful is repeated, and given great rhetorical emphasis,

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especially in the phrase “or, by Zeus, because he is a tyrant.” (Here one might see a reference to contemporary events in the Neronian court, were Muso- nius’s whole style of presentation not so remote and abstract.) The woman who resists the tyrant is now characterized in Stoic fashion as having self- esteem (mega phronein) and being an autonomous agent (autourkige¯n). But lest the reader start thinking about fearsome Amazons who might upset the balance of power in the household, Musonius hastens to add that all this autonomy and self-esteem are put to work in the courageous acts of “nurs- ing her children from her own breast and serving her husband with her own hands”— not to mention doing a slave’s work without shrinking! The reluctant husband is cajoled with the question, “Would such a woman not be a great help to the man who married her, an adornment to her relatives, a good example to all those who know her?”

Why is That Women Too even less bold than Should Daughters and Sons in pursuing the Platonic (and perhaps Zenonian) vision of women’s strength? One obvious point is that it speaks to husbands about their wives, rather than to fathers about their daughters. Roman women would be married at around sixteen, and philosophy is standardly not pursued until that age or later: so we have shifted to a new form of life and a new interlocutor. It is a truth of experience that fathers can frequently countenance in their daugh- ters a strength and independence that would strike them as deeply threat- ening were it to be found in the wives by their sides. The idea that marriage rests on subordination and obedience frequently coexists, in our own time, with a strong interest in nurturing the talents of daughters. Was this at all the case at Rome? One might suppose not, since the asymmetry of power between father and child is far more marked legally than the asymmetry between husband and wife — even, in some respects, after the woman’s marriage. And yet marriage is exogamous, so a strong daughter is ultimately someone else’s problem. And it is striking that in the case of daughters Mu- sonius is not afraid to mention warlike exercises (if only to reassure the reader that he is not actually going to require them); in the case of wives, at every point he is at pains to emphasize the function of philosophy in re- inforcing the status quo and producing wifely good behavior.

Some people (husbands?) now object: philosophizing women will be- come “stubborn and bold. They will abandon their housework and come into the company of men and busy themselves with arguments and fine logical distinctions and the dissection of inferences, when they should be at home doing the spinning” (E). (Perhaps these objectors are thinking of stories told about Hipparchia, who went around with her husband Crates to dinner parties and had fun jousting with visiting sophists, including one

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Theodorus the Atheist, who was so angry at his own inability to detect the fallacy in her argument that he ripped off her cloak.) 27

Musonius’s answer (F) is interesting. In one way he reassures the inter- locutors: he himself does not approve of women who leave their practical tasks to focus on arguments. But at the same time it involves a stern sym- metry: men should not leave their practical tasks either for the sake of argu- ments. A good Stoic, Musonius reminds the interlocutors that philosophi- cal argument should be understood as a contribution to life.28 In classic Stoic fashion, he deploys a medical analogy: “Just as a medical argument is no use, unless it contributes to the healing of a human body, so if a phi- losopher has or teaches an argument, it is no use, unless it contributes to the excellence of the human soul.” 29 In other words, you must hold your- self to the same standard to which you hold a wife: each in his or her own sphere must pursue appointed practical duties, viewing philosophical ar- gument as a way of leading a better practical life, not as a way of showing off intellectually.

After that rather challenging paragraph, however, Musonius returns to reassurance: how can philosophy possibly produce bold, heedless, and wan- ton behavior, when its content is that proper shame is the greatest good, that prudence is great, that wantonness is the greatest evil? The work, apparently incomplete, breaks off at this point.

Like Should Daughters and Sons, this work is a strange combination of boldness and reticence. In its context, it has real force: for so far as we can see, women at Rome generally did not go to study with the philosophers, and Musonius means to encourage real intellectual study in the philosophical schools (albeit at Rome, not by going away to Athens). His reference to women who “go to study with the philosophers” means more than just learning some phrases.30 (Cicero’s mediocre son Marcus went off to Athens, but the estimable Tullia would appear not to have had such formal train- ing.) 31 So one plausible way of looking at the text is that it is urging a quite radical educational step and sugarcoating it with reassurances to the hus- band. On the other hand, the strong egalitarianism of Should Daughters and Sons —watered down with respect to sports, but not with respect to virtue— seems to have become a bit more loose jointed in this work, where we do hear of a single set of basic capacities and a single set of excellences, but where examples of conduct are always chosen to depict a woman who will fulfill traditional norms of the good wife and mother.

One further point should be observed about both works: they are con- siderably more optimistic than are most Stoic works about the likelihood that virtue will actually be produced by training. Seneca and Cicero are far

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more guarded, and it was typical, after the first generations of the school, to deny that any fully virtuous person had existed since the original founders. Musonius’s optimism is functional for his feminism, for the husband is re- assured that if he allows the wife to study philosophy, she actually will have the excellences mentioned, and will not just be flopping around in a law- less condition. But it also seems to be sincere: throughout his works Muso- nius proceeds as if there were a reliable method one can select to produce excellence, and as if there really were many excellent people in the world.

 

 

IV

 

I have suggested that Musonius is more cautious in dealing with husbands than with fathers. Elsewhere, however, he shows us that his conception of marriage is not a simply traditional one. By his time in Rome there is a well- developed ideal of companionate marriage.32 As Treggiari argues, basing her argument on funerary inscriptions as well as on texts, the idea that mar- riage is based on male domination had become very much muted by the time of Cicero, and ideals of partnership and lifelong friendship and affec- tion were increasingly the norm. Nonetheless, even in this cultural climate, Musonius’s conception of marriage is striking. He asserts that the goal of marriage is a partnership, and he illustrates the structure of this partnership with the image of two oxen pulling behind a yoke, and with the even more intimate image of “breathing together” sumpnein. These images suggest a much greater symmetry and equality than the word koino¯nia by itself im- plies. Furthermore, this partnership is not simply for the sake of reproduc- tion: that, Musonius observes, one could achieve without marriage, as we see in the case of animal mating. The goal is a complete sharing of life, “whether in health or in sickness and in every circumstance.” The partners are to com- pete with one another, to see who can offer this care more completely— an idea that looks far more symmetrical than the idea in That Women Too, where the wife is waiting on her husband in a somewhat unilateral way. The observation that marriage will fall apart if one partner “looks elsewhere in his mind,” pursuing his own interests to the neglect of the partnership, is in one way an accurate observation about Roman divorce; but it also contains a high expectation of mutual concern in marriage that seems to go even be- yond the Roman norm.

The extent to which Musonius does go beyond norms of his time be- comes clear from On Sexual Intercourse. Not only is he prepared to criticize all forms of intercourse undertaken for pleasure alone— even when nobody

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is wronged—he is especially eager to attack the sexual double standard, which was still dominant in Roman culture and law (see below).33 It is gen- erally thought blameless for a man, married or unmarried, to have inter- course with a hetaira; and it is thought especially unremarkable, and an instance of a master’s clear entitlement, that he should be able to have intercourse with his own slave. Musonius assails both of these common practices, pointing out that it would be regarded as intolerable if a woman (whether married or unmarried) were to have sex with her own male slave. Men, he says, have sex with their slaves only out of appetitive lack of con- trol (akrasia). Nobody will deny this. (In other words, nobody will say that it is love or overwhelming passion). But then there is a contradiction that needs sorting out. On the one hand, men claim to be suitable to have au- thority over women— so they claim to be more capable of control. On the other hand, they claim latitude for akrasia that they do not allow to women, by representing themselves as in the grip of strong appetites. Well, if they are really creatures who cannot control their own powerful appetites, then they will have to forfeit their claim to control. If, on the other hand, they are capable of controlling their appetites, they had better do so.

Finally, in Whether Marriage Is an Impediment, Musonius gives us an ac- count of the function of the biological difference between the sexes. It is a thoroughly symmetrical account. Musonius spurns traditions (for example, the Aristotelian tradition) that associate biological dimorphism with the distinction of ruling and being ruled. Nor does he portray the female as in any sense biologically lacking (in keeping with the thesis of That Women Too, that each sex has all the parts that the other has). He says, instead, that the goal of dimorphism is simply difference itself, and that difference itself exists in order to create a basis for longing, and that longing in turn exists for the sake of creating association and partnership. In other words, the function of sexual dimorphism is to create lasting couples who will be held together for life, both for the sake of one another and for the sake of chil- dren. The role of these observations in the argument is to underline the conclusion of That Women Too: the right way to pursue philosophy is in the context of this kind of partnership.

These three works in many ways depart from Greek Stoic traditions re- garding marriage and sexuality, as we shall see. They are less clearly Stoic than their fellows, as is signaled by the fact that Pythagoras comes in for praise alongside Socrates and Crates. Nonetheless, the basic spirit of sym- metry and equal dignity that animates them is Stoic, as well as the strong emphasis on control over desire and pleasure. There are traces of Plato to be seen in Whether Marriage Is an Impediment: the reference to the de¯miourgos

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who made our species is probably a reference to the Timaeus, and the idea of cutting our kind into two, making two types of genitals, harks back to Ar- istophanes’ myth in the Symposium— although it is used for a notably dif- ferent purpose, in which homosexual relations, much disliked by Musonius, do not figure at all. Instead of three original “wholes,” whose cut pieces produce male-male, female-female, and male-female couples, we now have a single original whole, and an account of sexual attraction that is based on genital difference. This is another departure from original Greek Stoicism in the direction of Roman norms and values, for Zeno’s preferred couples were male-male, and his account of sexual attraction, steeped in the tra- ditions of Greek pederasty, focused on youthful bloom rather than genital difference.34

These works are, then, both Stoic and Roman. They employ Stoic ideas of universal capacity for excellence, gender symmetry, and self-mastery to develop further the contemporary ideal of companionate marriage as a part- nership in reproduction, practical affairs, excellence, and affection.

 

 

V

 

How shall we assess the feminism of Musonius? In some respects, clearly, he is in advance of Roman customs of the day, a pioneer, even in an era of companionate marriage, in his insistence that males and females should be treated on an equal basis with respect to education and cultivation of the innate capacities central to humanity. His conception of education, Pla- tonic in its thoroughgoing dedication to the development of the faculties of the individual, is Stoic in its nonelitism about the capacities that suit the person for the pursuit of philosophy and the highest good. This makes it more hospitable than Plato’s actual view to the development of intellectual and moral capacities in women as a class. And he puts these ideas to work in developing a conception of marriage that involves a thoroughgoing part- nership and sharing (the image of the two oxen pulling equally in the yoke), and a thoroughgoing symmetry of moral duties, even with regard to sexual monogamy. In these respects Musonius draws on views already current in his culture, but moves considerably beyond them.

These achievements should not be belittled. And yet there are aspects of Musonius’s feminism that should be questioned by anyone with an inter- est in women’s complete equality.

1. Separate spheres. Musonius does indeed advocate equal education for males and females, including philosophical education. And yet he imag-

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ines this education being used by each in the traditionally separate spheres of Roman male and female life. The husband is imagined as a “good citi- zen”; the wife as a “good household manager.” He uses justice in political life, she in managing the servants. He uses courage in fighting, or standing up to tyrants, she in nursing her children from her own breast— and, in an extraordinary example, in serving her husband with her own two hands! Musonius does mention that she had better be prepared to stand up to tyrants if they make a shameful sexual proposition. And she should even know skills of defensive fighting, in order to defend herself and her chil- dren from assault. Further, Musonius does cite the Amazons as proof that women can excel in traditionally male warfare if they get enough practice. But for the most part his wife is indoors arranging the household, and he makes no attempt to move her into the larger world of political and mili- tary affairs. He makes it clear that males and females have all the same ethi- cal excellences, so presumably he thinks there is no natural barrier to full cit- izenship for women; but he does not criticize the conventions that confine them to the domestic sphere. Doesn’t this show that Musonius’s feminism is only skin deep? Surely he seems to lack in the commitment to radical so- cial change that animated the Greek Stoics, whose women were fully equal citizens in their unisex clothing, and Plato, whose Socrates criticizes Glau- con’s sexist language in order to remind him that women are expected to be among the very rulers of the city? 35

Yes and no. We must point out, first of all, that Musonius, unlike Greek Stoics, is talking about real-life women and making practical suggestions for actual lives, rather than doing ideal political theory. His chance of achieving large-scale political change in Nero’s Rome is zero, and so he should not be unduly penalized for proposing only what seems feasible. He emphasizes women’s fitness for all the virtues frequently enough that we can conclude that he thinks them in principle fit for citizenship; if he does not defend the proposals of the Greek Stoics, it is likely to be on pragmatic grounds.

Still, the very point of doing ideal political theory is to describe a goal clearly for those who would like to pursue social justice. Isn’t it a failure in Musonius that he does not even indicate clearly that full citizenship would in principle be appropriate for women?

Here we arrive at an interesting feature of Musonius’s ethical theory. It is that he apparently believes that the all-important thing is having and ex- ercising the virtues; the sphere of life in which one does this is relatively unimportant. In That Women Too, he treats the women’s household duties as parallel to the man’s worldly duties—both are “deeds” for the sake of which arguments should be undertaken, alternative spheres in which virtues can

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be cultivated, the same virtues for both alike. In this way of thinking, we have not really set up separate spheres for men and for women. With respect to “the really important things,” they have the same and do the same. It is only in the rather trivial matter of location and context that their lives differ.

In putting things this way, Musonius is refusing a route to social differ- entiation that the Stoicism of Panaetius and Cicero made available, for he does not allude to the well-known account of the four personae, according to which individual temperament, social role, and circumstance can all in- fluence what choice is right for someone to make. This theory was used by Roman Stoics such as Cicero and Epictetus to argue that a different de- portment is appropriate for men and for women.36 Musonius conspicu- ously does not say this. He says that the really important things are to be the same, only they will take place inside a different social context—which, strictly speaking, should, being external to virtue, be indifferent so far as virtue is concerned. To alter one of his examples, it is as if we thought mu- sical functioning the main thing in life, and we had two groups that our society has traditionally treated differently, teaching one group to play the kithara and the other the aulos. If the really important thing is musicality, and the context for the exercise of musicality is secondary, why would it be important to upset this traditional assignment of functions?

To this a modern feminist will reply that the male and female spheres are simply not like playing the kithara and playing the aulos. Those two instruments are social equals; neither is hierarchically ranked above the other.37 Not so with citizenship and domestic life. As Musonius himself says, one is the sphere of the “rulers”; the other the sphere of the “ruled.” One sphere is valued as that of wisdom and power; the other devalued as subordinate and obedient to power. Musonius may think differently, em- phasizing the symmetry of the spheres, but that does not change social real- ity. And when one occupies, not by choice, a sphere that is socially marked as subordinate, surely that has an adverse impact on the very sense of dig- nity and self-esteem that Musonius himself values as a part of virtue.

Here we encounter a limitation that Musonius shares with many other Stoics: the failure to understand the extent to which human dignity and self- respect require support from the social world. When Seneca speaks about slavery, he enjoins masters to recognize and respect the equal human dig- nity of their slaves, acknowledging that virtue is the one important thing, and that this is available to human beings in any walk of life (Ep. Mor. 47). Does he, however, call for the abolition of the institution of slavery, as an insult to human dignity? By no means. He only asks masters to treat their slaves decently, not to use them as unwilling sexual tools, not to beat them,

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and so on. His Stoic sense of the irrelevance of externals for virtue, together with his unwillingness to challenge entrenched structures of power, pulls him away from any more radical proposal. Musonius is in some matters more radical, closer to the Cynic strand in original Greek Stoicism. And yet here he too fails to acknowledge the extent to which female virtue may be undermined by the very fact of social hierarchy. In this sense, Musonius’s Stoicism and his Romanness go all too well together, insulating him from the thought of profound social upheaval.

2. Continued male domination. Worse still, Musonius at times seems actively to collude in the hierarchy between male and female. In some areas, of course, he does ask men to give up traditional prerogatives and to adopt a symmetrical moral role: his repudiation of the sexual double standard is a salient example. Nonetheless, symmetry is not complete. The entire struc- ture of his text implies male control over women. Musonius addresses his proposals on the education of daughters to fathers, it appears, not mothers; and the interlocutor in That Women Too is also male, a husband who needs to be talked into letting his wife do some studying. Musonius never ques- tions the fact of male authority over women, and he tacitly supports it when he gives these characters gentle persuasion, rather than telling them they have no right to give orders to the woman one way or another. Many of his appeals further reinforce the idea of male authority: for example, he argues that one great advantage of education in courage is that the wife will serve her husband with her very own hands, and that education in other virtues will make them less threatening to men— more prudent, less extravagant, less tempted by sexual transgression. Of course, Musonius demands many of these same virtues of men also, but it is no small part of his rhetoric to appeal to a male’s sense of power and to urge that philosophy reinforces, rather than threatens, that power.

In On Sexual Intercourse he goes one step further and appears to justify the overall superiority of men to women (proestanai), calling men “the stronger in judgment” and women “weaker in judgment,” men “the rulers,” women “the ruled.” It seems likely that Musonius has put this language in the mouth of the interlocutor — the idea being that if he thinks men are su- perior to women, he surely should not concede that men are less able to control their sexual appetites. But the bottom line is that men will forfeit their claim to control if they concede they cannot control themselves, and Musonius is at least silent about the warrant behind this claim. It would have been good of him to have said, “This whole idea that men are supe- rior and control women is a bad idea, quite apart from the fact that men do not appear to be very good at controlling their own sexual appetites. For

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remember, we are conceiving of marriage as a partnership of equals, like two oxen pulling together behind a yoke. And we have also argued that women, far from being ‘inferior in judgment,’ are fully capable of all the vir- tues.” But he does not say this. To the extent that he does not, he at least col- ludes in the maintenance of hierarchies of power whose moral basis his own arguments call into question.

3. Laws and institutions. Musonius rarely mentions laws and institu- tions governing the sexes, and never in order to suggest that they ought to be changed. And yet laws of property, inheritance, personal autonomy, and marital autonomy were not exactly equal in first-century-c.e. Rome. Let us review a few of these inequalities, focusing on marriage law.

Women appear to have gained the right of marital consent by Muso- nius’s time, and this shift marks a distinct erosion of paternal authority. She may make her own engagement, and Augustan law forbids the father to prevent such a marriage; indeed, he may be forced to give her a dowry.38 Nonetheless, the elaborate customs of matchmaking and chaperonage, and the restrictions on female mobility, distinctly limit the extent to which choice is really choice.39 Clearly, sexual freedom enjoyed by women prior to marriage remains highly asymmetrical. Sexual intercourse by an unmar- ried girl is always a crime, while young men enjoy considerable sexual free- dom, provided they select slaves or prostitutes.

Within marriage, asymmetry continues. A husband who takes his wife in adultery, prior to the first century c.e., may or may not have been legally entitled to kill wife and lover; this is unclear. But he can be expected to be acquitted of murder if he does.40 Under the new first-century law, the Lex Iulia De Adulteriis (introduced by Augustus, ostensibly to stem the tide of moral decline), he apparently could kill the lover with complete impunity only if the lover belonged to certain lower classes, including prostitutes, gladiators, and those who fight wild animals in the arena.41 And he could not kill the wife, although the crime was still likely to be treated with rela- tive leniency.42 The father’s rights are more explicitly established: prior to the first century the power of life and death that a paterfamilias holds over his family extends to the killing of an adulterous daughter. This right is ex- plicitly reasserted in the Lex Iulia.43 Although killings appear to have been uncommon, there are many references in comedy to violence against the male adulterer and some, at least, to violence against women.44

Even if the wronged husband does not have resort to violence, he and his wife still have unequal legal privileges. Adultery on the part of the wife is always automatic grounds for divorce.45 Indeed, a man who takes his wife in the act of adultery and does not divorce her is liable to a harsh criminal

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penalty for “pandering” [lenocinium], although he can try to defend himself by saying that he did not know, or did not believe it, or did not really take them in the act.46 Once a woman has been condemned for adultery, it is a crime “as if adultery” [pro adulterio] for any other man to marry her; and a condemned adulteress may not give evidence in court.47

For males, by contrast, the big worry is the reaction of other males if his partner in adultery is another man’s wife or unmarried daughter. A married man who visits a prostitute, or who has sex with a woman of slave status, is not called adulter and is not considered to be committing any offense. Even the repressive Lex Iulia defines adultery in a way that exempts such husbands.48 Obviously a wife is not entitled to kill husband or lover in cases of adultery. More striking, under the Lex Iulia she may not even bring a legal prosecution for adultery.49 Although penalties for males convicted of adul- tery appear symmetrical to those for females — involving on both sides con- fiscation of property and relegation to an island— the definition of adultery is itself highly asymmetrical, so these penalties also are asymmetrical.

My account so far suggests that Augustus simply codified and extended earlier laws and customs. But reality is more complex, since the earlier cus- toms were not strictly enforced and allowed much latitude for personal ne- gotiation and gradual social change. The Augustan laws, with their elabo- rate codification of private morality and the severe enforcement that went with it, dramatically expanded the domain of state interference with private life. Although under the republic there had been some public control of sex- ual morality, Cicero is speaking for general sentiment when he prescribes the norm that the state should keep out of the homes of its citizens.50 Treg- giari argues with much plausibility that it was this attitude of public restraint that created the climate within which marriage was gradually redefined as a symmetrical partnership no longer resting on women’s subordination. It was this very freedom of the female that inspired the reaction that led to Augustan repression. Augustus’s claim that he was simply reintroduc- ing ancient customs, while in some details accurate, was simply false, a construction of an imaginary past in order to justify an expanded role for government.51

As Treggiari notes, these Augustan laws were much admired and emu- lated during the 1920s and 1930s by a rather unsavory group of modern students of antiquity, including Mussolini and Hitler. Admirers included, as well, some conservative British scholars who similarly favored more state regulation of private life. Hugh Last praises the Lex Iulia as “an outstanding piece of legislation, . . . a notable advance in the conception of the proper functions of the State;” P. E. Corbett asserts that the law “would . . . provide

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a very necessary check up on the growing independence and recklessness of women.” 52 Such views have not disappeared; indeed, it would not be sur- prising to hear the Lex Iulia praised in the United States as a model for the public crusade against adultery, in a time of moral decline.

Here, then, is a place where we would expect any philosopher truly interested in the dignity and equality of women to go to work. Musonius might have taken two distinct positions on the Lex Iulia, compatibly with his interest in women’s dignity. He might have insisted, with Cicero, that the state should as a rule stay out of the private affairs of citizens, defending this claim both on grounds of liberty and on grounds of usefulness, as the best way to promote the evolution toward full female equality that he fa- vors. Or he might have approved of public interference with private mo- rality but argued that laws should be far more symmetrical and more pro- tective of women’s equality and dignity. To some extent, even a Ciceronian Musonius would have had to concern himself with legal reform, since on some matters, such as the nature of the marriage contract, the grounds for divorce, and homicide law, the public sphere would plausibly remain in- volved even in the more liberal regime envisaged by Cicero.

Musonius, of course, makes neither type of argument. He avoids the is- sue of law completely. This is understandable, since another trip to the is- land of Gyaros was no doubt not an appetizing prospect. And indeed, one might say that, if he really did participate in the conspiracy against Nero for which he was exiled, he approached the issues in the only possible way, and at great personal risk, by seeking to overthrow Nero in favor of a more ac- ceptable ruler. So Musonius should not be blamed for these gaps in his ar- gument. But for anyone interested in him as a feminist, they remain gaps nonetheless. Especially in an era in which we see increasing support for in- creased state action to stem the tide of private sexual lawlessness, and a sim- ilar nostalgia for a semifictional past in which marriage was a blameless part- nership till death, we should note that increased state interference at Rome did indeed have the effect of providing “a check up on the growing inde- pendence . . . of women”— and was, in large measure, inspired by this very purpose. Feminists may forgive Musonius for his silence, but they should not emulate his example.

4. Dignity and rights. Musonius argues that women should do philos- ophy, that daughters should have the same education as sons. But what is the force of this should? Throughout the two works on education, the pri- mary emphasis is on the teleology of ethical excellence: women should have this because we all agree that it is a good thing for women to have the ex- cellences, and this education is necessary for excellence. Women’s ethical

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excellence is presented as a good for her, as well as a good thing for men (though for rhetorical purposes the accent is frequently on the latter issue). One problem with Musonius’s arguments is that he focuses so intently on what is good for men, but we can regard this as necessitated by his rhetori- cal purpose. What I now want to argue is that there is an ethical problem, too, in his focus (less emphatic, but still clear) on what is good for women. It is clear that without the necessary equipment for the excellences women lack something that is valuable for them, something that is neces- sary and appropriate for their full development as human beings. To with- hold equal education is in that sense to wrong women. But the idea that never comes through quite clearly in the text is that of women’s dignity, and their potential for virtue, as aspects of humanity that exert a claim against the male-dominated world that they should be respected. We get the sense that women are worse off by not being educated, but not that they have a right to be treated well. Musonius elaborately shows that the world will be better with equal treatment of women; he never quite says, look, they just are equals in fundamental respects and have the right, therefore, to be treated

as equals.

I am not making, here, the old familiar argument that there is no no- tion of rights in ancient Greek thought. That was always an oversimple idea, true of some concrete notions of rights (as immunity from government in- terference, for example), but by and large untrue. There are many ways in which Greek philosophy contains the notion of an urgent claim grounded not in contingent social relations, but in the nature of the person, that gives rise to corresponding moral duties. In Stoic philosophy especially, we often encounter arguments based on an idea of the dignity of humanity, the idea that just because someone is human and a sharer in reason, a person has a right not to be treated in certain ways. This mode of argument, for example, underlies Cicero’s theory of war in the De Officiis, giving substance to his ar- guments about proper treatment even of the enemy; it also underlies his ex- tremely strict prohibitions against force and fraud, arguments that directly influenced Kant’s notion of the universal obligation to treat humanity as an end.53 What I am saying is that there is no such argument in Musonius, no sense that we violate the humanity of women, or fail to treat them as their dignity requires, when we fail to give them an equal education.

Indeed, we notice this absence throughout Musonius’s writing. Why is it bad for a man to visit a hetaira, granting that he is not wronging any other man by depriving him of his hope of legitimate children (the only sort of wrong the interlocutor can envisage)? Musonius might have replied: be- cause he shows disrespect to his wife, who has a claim to fidelity. Instead

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he answers: because he harms himself. The case is a little unclear, since the man’s marital status has not been established. But the very fact that the ques- tion of a possible wife is not raised is extremely striking (especially in light of the fact that it is always salient whether the woman in question has a husband to be insulted). Again, why is it bad for a man to sleep with his household slaves? Because he is carrying on like a pig and indulging him- self — not because the female slave has a claim not to be used as a sexual tool. Seneca, in letter 47, inspires indignation at the thought of a (male) slave who is made to serve at table dressed like a woman with his beard plucked out, and thus to spend his life “divided between serving his master’s drunk- enness and his lust.” The rhetoric of the argument clearly implies that the slave, who has been repeatedly called a human being, has a claim not to be treated in a way that violates his human dignity. Again, physical cruelty to slaves is ruled out on the grounds that such behavior “abuses them, treat- ing them not even as human beings, but as beasts of burden” [ne tamquam hominibus quidem sed tamquam iumentis].54 It is this type of appeal to the dig- nity of the person that I find lacking in Musonius, whose appeals for con- tinence are always justified by reference to the virtue of the powerful.

5. Sex and marriage. Musonius’s boldest feminist claim is also, in the detail of its justification, his most questionable. The idea that the sexual double standard should end is, of course, in some ways enormously ap- pealing, and it is perhaps the most original aspect of his view. It cannot be found in Plato or the Greek Stoics, since they did away with the whole in- stitution of marriage as conventionally understood. And it cannot really be found in his surrounding society either, given its great tolerance of relations between males and prostitutes or slaves. But the grounds Musonius gives for his conclusion need scrutiny. As I have said, he does not rest his case on the idea that sexual relations outside marriage are a wrong to the offended wife as much as to the offended husband. Instead, he rests it on the far more sweeping claim that sexual relations undertaken only for pleasure harm the self. This claim is to be carefully distinguished from the Christian claim that sexual relations are inherently sinful and are only to some degree redeemed by marriage. As de Ste. Croix, Foucault, and Treggiari all argue, this attitude is absent from first-century Roman culture, just as it is from the Greek cul- ture that preceded it.55 Musonius’s operative category is the familiar Greek category of akrasia: the fault of the person who has sex outside marriage is a lack of proper self-control over his bodily pleasures. But the area in which pleasure is considered nonakratic has shrunk dramatically. Musonius does not clearly state the view that sexual relations are legitimate only for repro- ductive purposes. The crucial text is ambiguous: he says that appropriate

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sexual relations those that are “in marriage and aimed at the the reproduc- tion of children” [ta en gamo¯i kai epi genesei paido¯n sunteloumena], leaving it somewhat unclear whether a sexual act has to satisfy both of those condi- tions in order to be appropriate.56 He clearly states that relations undertaken for the sake of “bare pleasure” [psile¯n he¯done¯n] are inappropriate, even in- side marriage; but this leaves sexual acts undertaken to express the other as- pects of marriage, such as friendship and partnership. And we do know that Musonius thinks reproduction an insufficient goal for marriage, if it is pur- sued without those other ends (On the Goal). We have no clear basis, then, for a firm conclusion about his attitude toward loving and friendly sexual acts that are not potentially reproductive, but the standing Roman concep- tion of marriage as a partnership until death would have made it peculiar to deny the legitimacy of sexual relations between aging spouses, or even spouses one of whom has proven to be infertile. Even where abortion and contraception are concerned, Musonius’s central concern is for population growth and the good of the city; and his main worry in the area of infanti- cide is that older children will encourage it in order to augment their in- heritance.57 So it seems plausible that Musonius’s view is not precisely that sex should be limited to the reproductive; nonetheless, it is clear that sex- ual pleasure should never be pursued as an end in itself, and that the occa- sions for legitimate sexual activity are confined to marriage.

In some ways, in its actual historical context, this appears to be a re- markably feminist position, since it is in this way that Musonius argues against the sexual double standard. But it has the effect of maintaining in place a set of prohibitions against sexual expression that, in the real Roman world, were above all applied against women and used to confine them. The close linking of sex to reproduction, moreover, tends to perpetuate the con- finement of women to a primarily domestic and maternal function, some- thing that Musonius finds unproblematic but that we might not.

Not so his illustrious predecessors. Plato clearly believes that freeing women for guardianship and rule requires taking the burden of child rear- ing out of their hands. Guardian women will have numerous pregnancies, but the children will be taken away almost immediately to be reared by wet nurses and brought up in the public child care program. As for sexual rela- tions, the eugenic purposes of the ideal city 58 impose tight limits on non- reproductive heterosexual sex for both sexes. But in book 7 we encounter reference to permissible indulgence of all the appetites “up to the point of health and well-being” (558D–559C, mentioning sexual intercourse after eating and drinking). This makes it plausible to suppose that some form of nonpassionate sexual release, perhaps with prostitutes, would be permitted,

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presumably to male and female on an equal basis so long as reproduction could be carefully controlled; and no restrictions on female same-sex rela- tions are mentioned in the work, despite their presence in the roughly con- temporaneous Symposium.

The Greek Cynics, like Plato, connected the equality of women with an overthrowing of sexual conventions. Diogenes’ view that intercourse should be free, based only on persuasion and consent,59 created an equality of sex- ual initiative and pleasure between male and female, separating sexuality from child rearing in the sense that the sexual couple would not have spe- cial responsibility for rearing any resulting children. Crates and Hipparchia did, of course, marry, but Musonius carefully omits the more scandalous aspects of their union when he cites Crates as an example of the married phi- losopher. In the full story, the fact of marriage is probably a result of Hip- parchia’s good birth and her need to get out of her parents’ control somehow, but the marriage itself had a very unconventional character. In Musonius we hear nothing of the unisex clothing (D.L. 6.97), nothing of the infa- mous public lovemaking, nothing of how Hipparchia was not embarrassed when an angry sophist who had just lost an argument with her ripped off her cloak (D.L. 6.97). And Musonius carefully fails to comment on the fact that, despite all the famous lovemaking, and the longevity of the pair, there is no clear evidence of children.60

The Greek Stoics appear to have followed the Cynics’ lead, at least in ac- counts of the ideal city, recommending that women be in common (D.L. 7.33), and “that men and women wear the same clothing and keep no part of the body entirely covered” (7.33). This last proposal presumably echoes the choice of Hipparchia and Crates, but it also goes straight back to the Republic, where Socrates made the injunction that women should exercise stripped 61 an extremely important part of the educational program of the ideal city — one that would inspire laughter when first presented, but one whose rationale would become clear over time. That rationale (inspired, in turn, by actual Spartan customs regarding women) 62 would seem to be to dispel the sense of distance and shame that men typically have before women’s bodies, getting men used to seeing them as useful vehicles for civic and warlike action. Sexual relations in the ideal city seem to have fol- lowed the Cynic program: intercourse by decision, parental affection for all children, and by this radical strategy the removal of jealousy arising from adultery.63 Zeno was certainly more interested in male-male sexual relations than in women; and Stoic definitions of ero¯s focus on that rela- tionship.64 But the best guess is that his Republic offered women freedom to pursue sexual relations without a focus on marriage or reproduction; ap-

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parently the “removal of jealousy” was seen as an essential prop for wom- en’s equality, the plausible thought being that the seclusion of women and other impediments to women’s mobility and political functioning are in- spired by anxiety about paternity, and that women cannot enjoy equality unless their sexuality ceases to inspire that type of anxious scrutiny. Fur- thermore, Zeno offered all women full military and civic equality, support- ing that by a common scheme of child care. Even today, traditional mar- riage and child rearing make it difficult for women to enjoy full equality, even when they are wealthy and certainly if they are not so wealthy. At that time, even for wealthy women, the absence of reliable contraception and the early age of marriage would have made equality within traditional mar- riage yet more difficult.

In this line of illustrious feminists, Musonius is a sexual reactionary. He does not attempt to do away with the anxious scrutiny of female sexuality: indeed, he encourages it, telling his husbands that philosophy will con- tribute to female chastity. Nor does he at all attempt to do away with the traditional division of labor in child care: again, he encourages it, telling his husbands that philosophy will make women better at doing their own breast-feeding. Unisex clothing is nowhere to be seen: Musonius’s frugal and shame-motivated wives will hardly disport themselves in the manner of Hipparchia. The end to the sexual double standard in this context seems less like a radical challenge to male prerogative than like a bandage over the wound caused to women by Musonius’s profound assault on the Cynic and Stoic tradition of real equality and sexual freedom. No doubt there are some good things that such a solution brings with it: Musonius’s conception of mutual loyalty and genuine partnership in marriage is a highly attractive one. But even someone who is sympathetic to Musonius’s defense of mo- nogamous partnerships has reason to be bothered by his defense of the in- stitution of marriage as traditionally practiced. Crates and Hipparchia got to marital loyalty by mutual persuasion in a context of (philosophically constructed) social freedom. Musonius gets to loyalty by leaving repressive conventions largely unchallenged.

6. The voices of women. When one reads Musonius, one reads a lot about women. But after a while, the reader begins to notice that women them- selves are more or less totally absent. The interlocutors in Musonius’s works are always male: husbands who need to be persuaded to educate their wives, patresfamilias who need to hear that their daughters deserve the same edu- cation as sons. We get no sense that Musonius is teaching women, or ad- dressing any of his arguments directly to them.

Women figure in the text, too, in a highly abstract and remote fashion.

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In Should Daughters and Sons, the only women named are the Amazons and the murderous Eriphyle— despite the fact that Roman life provided a rich range of cases of female excellence, from the noble matronae of legend to more recent examples —Agrippina accompanying the remains of her hus- band Germanicus, the wife of Stoic Thrasea Paetus, joining him in death on behalf of republican liberty, even that remarkable other Agrippina, who resourcefully eluded her son Nero’s murder plots again and again, once by a long swim in inhospitable waters. Tacitus and Livy tell us far more about female excellence than Musonius does, since they put real women on the page.65

In That Women Too, it is even more damaging that no concrete woman is named. One excellent way of arguing that women can do philosophy would have been to point out that they have done so, and a wealth of ex- amples lay ready to hand: Aspasia the learned hetaira; the two hetairai who apparently studied in Plato’s Academy; 66 the famous Hipparchia, who even gets her own chapter in Diogenes Laertius; the five daughters of Diodorus Cronus, all of whom are said to have studied dialectic; 67 women recorded in the evidence about Epicurus’s school; 68 neo-Pythagorean women of Mu- sonius’s own day; 69 female pupils of the Greek and Roman Stoics. Muso- nius, unlike Seneca, is not a philosopher who uses concrete examples much; but his omissions here are nonetheless striking. Particularly glaring is the absence of Hipparchia, since Musonius discusses Crates and his marriage ex- tensively, along with those of Socrates and Pythagoras, in arguing that mar- riage is no impediment to the philosopher. Why didn’t he even name the famous philosopher-bride, or mention that marriage was no impediment to her either? This issue seems to be connected to the issue about interests and rights, for women are always treated as beings who have a good that we are trying to promote, not as active subjects who have claims, and voices, and demands.

For this absence of female images and voices, we must hold Musonius himself to blame— or at least the tradition that reports his work. It is not a characteristic of Roman authors to omit female agency; indeed, Roman women emerge from historical, rhetorical, poetic, and philosophical texts as an extraordinary group. We know that the Greek Stoics were often rather abstract: Cicero criticizes them for just this, finding it a philosophical defect. But still, Chrysippus is said to have copied the whole of Euripides’ Medea in one of his works, and Epictetus, another relatively abstract philosopher, speaks about Medea’s heroic strength in a very interesting way. Plato is ab- stract about women only because he is so absorbed in giving vivid descrip-

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tions of male-male love and so relatively uninterested in and contemptu- ous of marriage; this certainly is not Musonius’s excuse, since he exalts mar- riage and criticizes male-male relations. And even Plato gives us Diotima, and Aspasia, and the example of Alcestis’s devotion. Musonius has no ex- cuse, then, for his lack of curiosity about women, real and mythical. All we can say on his behalf is that this remoteness from the surrounding social context is a common characteristic of writers of the Second Sophistic, within which group we might plausibly place him, and for these writers the difficulty of addressing the actual political context is surely among the dis- incentives to concrete engagement with the Rome of their time or recent times. Even this, however, by no means excuses his silence about historical and mythical exempla.

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Musonius Rufus remains a remarkable character. Viewed in the most gen- erous light, he combines the radical Stoic commitment to sex equality with an appreciation of the possibilities of marriage that he derives from a Ro- man culture in which mutually loving companionate unions had become an accepted goal, and to a large extent a reality. Viewed in the least gener- ous light, he compromises the original Stoic dedication to sex equality by his acceptance of Roman traditions of patriarchy and female purity. Both assessments say something true about Musonius, and about the goals of feminism. If one plausible feminist goal is to make it possible for men and women to be fully equal in education and in self-command, to enjoy full civic and legal equality, and to love each other on terms of autonomous choice and full equality, Musonius has indeed mapped out a part of the route to that goal—but only a part. And in giving us that part he has re- jected Platonic, Cynic, and Stoic ideas that seem in their own way essential for the full articulation of the goal.

Perhaps this just shows us what we should have known already: how hard it is to combine full equality of the sexes with companionate marriage and the rearing of children in nuclear families. It is not too surprising that none of these philosophers thinks it can be done. Most modern femi-  nists remain skeptical about the combination too, whether they choose the path of Musonius or the path of Hipparchia. But if the combination can be worked out, Musonius’s ideas about equal education, the equal develop- ment of practical reason, and the equal sharing of marital love and re- sponsibility are some of the ideas that will help us do it— so long as we are careful not to forget just how incomplete they are.

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Appendix

Texts by Musonius Rufus

Translations by Martha C. Nussbaum

 

Should Daughters Get the Same Education as Sons? (Complete Text)

Once when the question was put to him, whether sons and daughters should get the same education [paideian], he said: (A) Trainers of horses and dogs make no distinction in their training between the male and the fe- male. For female dogs are taught to hunt just as males are, and one can see no difference in the training of female horses, if what is wanted is for them to do a horse’s work well, and the training of male horses. In the case of hu- mans, however, it seems to be thought necessary to provide males with something superior in their education and upbringing by comparison to females, as if (B) it were not essential that the same excellences should be- long to both men and women alike, or as if it were possible to arrive at the same excellences not through the same, but through different, education.

(C) And yet that there is not one set of excellences for a woman and an- other for a man is easy to grasp. In the first place, a man must have under- standing [phronein], and so too must a woman. What after all would be the use of a foolish man or woman? Then it is essential no less for the one than for the other to live justly. For the man who is unjust would not be a good citizen, and the woman who is unjust would not be a good manager of the household. If she is unjust she will do wrong to her husband, as they say Eriphyle did. Again, it is a good thing for a woman to be self-controlled [s o ¯ phronein], but it is good as well for a man. For the law decrees the same penalty  for  male  as  for  female  adultery  [to  moicheuein  to¯i  moicheuesthai]. Gluttony, drunkenness, and other related vices, which are vices of excess and bring disgrace in a big way upon those are in their grip, show that self- control is most necessary for every human being, female and male alike. For the only escape from wantonness is through self-control; there is no other. (D) Perhaps someone may say that courage [andreian] is an excel- lence appropriate to men only. That is not so. For the best woman must also be courageous [andrizesthai] and free from cowardice, so that she will not bend under either hardship or fear. If not, how will she even have self- control, if someone can force her to put up with some shameful act by terri- fying her or making her endure hardships? But furthermore, it is necessary

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for women to be able to fight defensively [amuntiko¯s echein], unless indeed, by Zeus, they are to appear more cowardly than hens and other female birds, which fight with creatures much larger than themselves in defense of their chicks. How then should women not need courage? That women partake in the skill of armed fighting the race of the Amazons proved, when they de- feated many other tribes in war. If, therefore, other women lack something of their ability, it is due to lack of practice, rather than because they lack some innate equipment.

(E) If, then, the same excellences befit men and women, the same up- bringing and education must be appropriate for both. For in the case of every animal and plant, one must produce the excellence appropriate to it by applying the correct sort of concern. Surely if men and women needed in a similar way to be able to play the aulos, and this was necessary for the life of both of them, then we would teach both the skill of aulos playing on an equal basis, and if both had to learn to play the kithara [lacuna]. And if both need to become good, possessing the excellence that is appropriate to human beings, and to be similarly capable of practical reasoning [phronein] and self-control and of sharing in courage and justice, one no less than the other, won’t we then educate them both similarly, and teach the skill from which one becomes a good human being to both on an equal basis [ep’ison]? Surely we are obliged to do it this way, and no other way.

(F) “Come now,” I suppose someone will say, “Do you expect that men should learn spinning the same as women, and that women should pursue physical exercise the same as men?” No, I would not require this. But I do say that, since in the human species the male body is stronger and the fe- male body weaker, tasks should be assigned that are suited to the capacities of each — the heavier tasks to the physically stronger and the lighter to the weaker. Thus, spinning and indoor work would generally be more fitting for women than for men, while exercise and outdoor work would be suited to men. Sometimes, however, some men might plausibly undertake the lighter jobs and what is considered women’s work, and again women might per- form heavier jobs that seem more to be suited for men, whenever condi- tions of body or need or circumstance warrant. For all human tasks, I think, belong to us in common, and are common to both men and women, and none is necessarily appointed for one rather than the other, but some are more convenient for the capacities of one, some for the other, and for this reason some are called men’s work and some women’s work.

(G) But whatever things have reference to excellence, these one would correctly say are equally appropriate to the capacities of both, inasmuch as we agree that the excellences are in no way more appropriate to one rather

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than the other. (H) Hence, I think it is plausible that whatever has reference to excellence should be taught to male and female alike; and furthermore that straight from infancy they should be taught that this is good and that bad, and that it is the same for both alike; and that this is helpful, this harmful, that one must do this and must not do that. From this education practical wisdom [phrone¯sis] develops in those who learn, in boys and girls [korais kai korois] alike, and one group is no different from the other. Then again, we must produce proper shame toward everything disgraceful [ai- schron]. When this is present, it is necessary that both men and women will be self-controlled. And indeed, the person who is correctly educated, who- ever it is, whether male or female, must become accustomed to endure hard- ship, and not to fear death, and not to be brought low by any misfortune. Through such training a person will be courageous. A little while ago it was demonstrated that women too should partake in courage. Then again, to avoid unfair grasping, to honor equality of condition [isote¯ta], and to want to do good and not to do harm to human beings, being a human being oneself, this is an especially fine teaching and makes those who learn it just. Why should a male be especially suited to learn this? If, by Zeus, it is fitting that women should be just, then they both need to learn these things, inas- much as they are the most pertinent and the most important.

(I) If it happens that a man will know some detail about some particu- lar technical matter that a woman doesn’t know, or, again, that she will knows something that he does not know, this does not yet suggest any dif- ference in the education of the two. But about the really important things let one not know something and the other not, but let them both know the same things. (J) If you ask me what knowledge supervises this education, I shall reply that just as without philosophy no man would be properly edu- cated, so too no woman would be. I don’t mean that women should pos- sess professional competence in logic and sophistical cleverness of a high degree if they are going to pursue philosophy as women. I do not admire this sort of thing much in men either. But they should acquire excellence of character and nobility of life; and philosophy, and nothing else, is training in nobility.

 

That Women Too Should Do Philosophy (Complete Text)

When someone asked him whether women too should do philosophy, this is how he began to argue that they should. He said: (A) Women have received from the gods the same rational faculty [logon] as men, the faculty that we use to communicate with one another and to reason about each

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thing, whether it is a good thing or not, and whether it is noble or shame- ful. Similarly, the female has the same faculties of sense perception as the male: sight, hearing, smelling, and the rest. Similarly, each has the same bodily parts, and neither has any part that the other doesn’t have. Further- more, a desire [orexis] for ethical excellence and a natural orientation toward it [oikeio¯sis phusei] belong not only to men, but also to women. For women no less than men are pleased by noble and just actions, and reject the op- posite. (B) Since this is the way things are, why on earth would it be ap- propriate [prose¯koi] for men to inquire and examine how one should live well—which is what it is to do philosophy— and women not?

(C) Is it because it is appropriate for men to be good, and women not?

(D) Let us now examine one by one each of the qualities that befit [pros e ¯ - kont o ¯ n] a woman who is going to be good. For it emerges that each of these accrues to her especially through the practice of philosophy. In the first place, a woman must be a good household manager and a careful accountant of what is advantageous to the household, and a director of the household staff. I claim that these qualities are especially likely to belong to a woman who pursues philosophy. For, as is obvious, each of these is a part of life, and philosophy is nothing other than systematic understanding of how to conduct one’s life, and the philosopher, as Socrates used to say, spends his whole life investigating “What is bad and good in the dwelling places.” But a woman should certainly also be self-controlled [s o ¯ phrona]: she must not have illicit sexual relations, and must be free of all uncontrol [akrasias] with respect to other pleasures, not being a slave to appetites, or a lover of quar- reling, or extravagant, or vain. Those are the acts of a self-controlled person, and in addition I would add: to control one’s temper, not to be wiped out by pain, to be stronger than any suffering. But philosophical argument pro- vides all this. For someone who studies those teachings and practices them will, I think, become most orderly [kosmi o ¯ tatos], whether male or female. Well then, so much for that issue. As for justice, would not the woman who pursues philosophy be just, and a blameless partner in life, a good fellow agent of agreements, a concerned nurturer of her husband and children, and entirely free of greed [philokerdeias] and unfair grasping [pleonexias]? And who would be like this more than the woman trained in philosophy? For she of necessity, if she has really pursued philosophy, would consider doing wrong worse than being wronged, insofar as it is more shameful, and being cheated better than unfair grasping, and would also love her children more than her life. What woman would be more just than one like this? And indeed, as for courage, certainly it is to be expected that the educated woman will be more courageous than the uneducated, and one who has

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studied philosophy more than one who has not; and she will not submit to anything shameful out of fear of death or unwillingness to endure suf- fering, and she will not be intimidated by anyone because he is well born or powerful or rich or, by Zeus, because he is a tyrant. For in fact she has schooled herself to have self-esteem [mega phronein] and to think that death is not an evil, and life not a good, and similarly not to shun hardship or to pursue freedom from hardship at all costs. So it is plausible that such a woman would be autonomous [autourgike¯n] and capable of enduring diffi- culty, for example, nursing her children from her own breast and serving her husband with her own hands, and to do, without shrinking, things that many think suited to slaves. Would such a woman not be a great help to the man who married her, an adornment to her relatives, a good example to all those who know her?

(E) Yes, but by Zeus, some people will say, it is inevitable that women who study with the philosophers will be, for the most part, stubborn and bold. They will abandon their housework and come into the company of men and busy themselves with arguments and fine logical distinctions and the dissection of inferences, when they should be at home doing the spin- ning. (F) For my part, however, I would not think it right that either phi- losophizing women or philosophizing men should leave their appointed practical duties to deal only in arguments. But whatever arguments [logous] they undertake, I say that these should be undertaken for the sake of deeds [erga]. For just as a medical argument is no use, unless it contributes to the healing of a human body, so if a philosopher has or teaches an argument, it is no use, unless it contributes to the excellence of the human soul. (G) Above all, one should consider whether the argument that we think phi- losophizing women should follow can possibly make them bold when it teaches that proper shame [aid o ¯] is the greatest good, whether the argument teaching the greatest prudence produces heedless living, whether the argu- ment showing that wantonness is the greatest evil doesn’t teach self-control [s o ¯ phronein], whether the argument that says household management is an excellence doesn’t spur them on to manage the household. Philosophical ar- gument also calls women to love and [lacuna] to act for herself [autourgein].

 

What Is the Goal of Marriage? (Complete Text)

The goal of marriage is a partnership [koino¯nian] of living and having children. Husband and wife, he used to say, should come together in order to live together with one another, and also to reproduce, and also to regard all things in common between them, and nothing private [idion] to one or

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to the other, not even the body itself. The birth of a human being that re- sults from such a yoking is a great thing. But this is not yet enough for mar- riage, inasmuch as quite apart from marriage it could result from any other sexual mating, just as when animals mate with one another. But in mar- riage there must be in every respect a merger of life and a mutual caring be- tween husband and wife, whether in health or in sickness and in every cir- cumstance. It was aiming at this, as well as at begetting children, that each of them entered marriage. Where this mutual care is complete, and both partners provide it to one another completely, competing with one another for victory in this achievement, the marriage is appropriate and one to be emulated. For this sort of partnership is a fine thing. But where each looks only to his own interest neglecting the other, or, by Zeus, when one is like this, and lives in the same house with the other, but looks elsewhere in his mind, and is not willing to pull together with his yoke-mate and to breathe together, then their partnership will be bound to fall apart, and though they are living together, things will go badly with them. Eventually they separate entirely or they stay together in a state worse than loneliness.

 

On Sexual Intercourse (Extract)

[Musonius criticizes all forms of intercourse undertaken for pleasure alone, even when no issue of marriage is concerned] “By Zeus,” someone says, “it’s not like when an adulterer wrongs [adikei] the husband of the ru- ined [diephtharmene¯s] woman, it’s not like that when someone has inter- course with a hetaira: he doesn’t wrong anyone or deprive anyone of a hope of children.” [Musonius replies that, nonetheless, the person makes himself worse, being overtaken by pleasure and delighting in sex the way pigs do.] And such a person, not least of all, is the man who is intimate with his own female slave, which some people think is especially blameless, given that every master has full authority to use his slave in any way he wants. To this, my reply is simple. If someone thinks it is not shameful or out of place for a master to be intimate with his own slave, especially if she happens to be a widow, then let him consider what he would think if the mistress of the house were to be intimate with a male slave. For wouldn’t he think this un- bearable, not only if a woman who has a lawful husband had relations with a slave, but also if an unmarried woman did this? And yet surely he will not judge that men are inferior to women, or less capable of disciplining their own appetites— the stronger in judgment inferior to the weaker, and the rulers to the ruled. For it is fitting that men should be much stronger than women, if indeed they deem it right that they should have superiority over

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[prosestanai] women. If, however, they are revealed to be less self-controlled [lacuna] and worse. Why do we even need to argue that it is a case of akra- sia and nothing else, when a master is intimate with a female slave? Every- one knows this.

 

Whether Marriage Is an Impediment to Doing Philosophy (Extract)

When someone said to him that marriage and life with a wife seemed to be an impediment to doing philosophy, Musonius said that it wasn’t an impediment to Pythagoras, or to Socrates, or to Crates, each of whom lived with a wife. And yet one could not find better philosophers than these. In- deed, Crates married despite the fact that he was utterly without an estate or goods or property. Then, since he didn’t have a residence of his own, he spent his days and nights with his wife in the public stoas of Athens. And do we, who set out from a household, and some of us have servants to wait on us, nonetheless dare to assert that marriage is an impediment to phi- losophy? In fact, the philosopher is surely a teacher and leader of all human beings with regard to what is fitting for a human being by nature. And if there is anything that is in accordance with nature, marriage clearly is. For what purpose, after all, did the craftsman of the human species in the be- ginning cut our kind into two, and then make two types of genitals, the one female and the other male, and then make in each a strong desire [epithumian ischuran] for the other, for association [homilias] and partnership [koino¯nias], and mix into both a strong longing [pothon ischuron] for one another, in the male for the female and in the female for the male? Isn’t it clear that he wanted them to be together [suneinai] and to live together and to devise to- gether [summe¯chanasthai] things for one another’s livelihood, and to engage together in the reproduction and rearing of children, so that our species will be eternal?

 

 

Notes

I would like to thank Simon Goldhill, Miriam Griffin, Stephen Halliwell, David Halperin, Christopher Jones, Robert Kaster, Richard Saller, Malcolm Schofield, and David Sedley for their helpful comments on a previous draft. I am also grateful to Gretchen Reydam-Schils for showing me a draft of an unpublished work on marriage. I wish to dedicate this chapter to the memory of G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, a great scholar whose work was animated equally by a love of the truth and a passion for justice, prominently including justice for women. When I was a young scholar in Oxford in 1973, he warmly encouraged my work. He died in 2000 at the age of ninety.

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1. Musonius’s surviving texts and fragments (largely preserved through citation in Stobaeus) are edited by O. Hense, Musonius Rufus, Reliquiae (Leipzig: Teubner, 1905).

2. It is likely, though not certain, that Musonius taught in Greek, and we simply do not know whether he wrote treatises. As to the date of his lectures, we hear most about Musonius during the reign of Nero, but there is little in the text itself to help us. The only indication is a reference to “kings in Syria” (Hense 32.5– 6). If that means the Commagenian dynasty, it should refer to a time before 72 or 73 (Prosopographia Imperii Romani, 2d ed., 1.149). The end of the kingdom of Emesa is less securely dated; Fergus Millar (The Roman Near East, 31 b.c. – a.d. 37 [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993], 84) puts it tentatively in the 70s. On the other hand, Dio of Prusa and Pliny (see Ep. 3.11.5) could not have heard him before about 80. So it is possible that the surviving lectures represent work developed over a period of time.

3. See Cora Lutz, “Musonius Rufus: The Roman Socrates,” Yale Classical Studies 10 (1947): 3–147, at 3– 4, discussing evidence from Philostratus and Julian as well. The phrase “the Roman Socrates” was used of Musonius by R. Hirzel, Der Dialog (Leipzig: Teubner, 1895) 2 : 239.

4. A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

5. All the translations from Musonius in this chapter are my own— not because I do not admire the Lutz translation, but because I want to draw attention to certain

philosophical terms and therefore to provide an extremely literal and inelegant version. Also useful is the French translation by A. J. Festugière, Deux Prédicateurs de l’antiquité: Télès et Musonius (Paris: J. Vrin, 1978), with some introductory remarks and notes.

6. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1981). Women are discussed on pp. 98–111; Musonius on p.110.

7. As readers of de Ste. Croix know, his animus toward the upper classes is ex- ceeded only by his animus toward Christianity. He used to remark frequently that the three most evil influences on our civilization were Plato, Saint Paul, and Augustine — Saint Paul being the worst.

8. De Ste. Croix focuses in particular on the law of marriage at Rome and the rights it allowed to women, showing that Christians repeatedly sought the abolition of divorce by consent, a tendency that he calls “disastrous, . . . productive of much un- necessary suffering” (The Class Struggle, 108). Musonius is held to be in advance even of Roman culture, Rome in general in advance of Christian proposals.

9. Michel Foucault, Le Souci de Soi, vol. 3 of Histoire de la sexualité (Paris: Galli- mard, 1984); English translation by R. Hurley as The Care of the Self, vol. 3 of The His- tory of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon, 1985), chap. 5, pp. 173–216. The only rival is

A. C. Van Geytenbeek, Musonius Rufus and Greek Diatribe, original 1948, rev. ed., trans.

B. L. Hijmans, Jr. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1962), a rather detailed treatment that certainly devotes much more attention than does Foucault to Musonius’s links with Platonism and earlier Stoicism and that makes a valuable contribution by comparing the works on women to later neo-Pythagorean works by Phintys and Periktione. But Van Geyten- beek does not have very many ideas about what is going on, and his treatment of earlier Stoic views on sex equality is highly idiosyncratic: relying on the premise that women as a class have a “rich emotional life,” he concludes quickly that any school that urges the extirpation of passion cannot possibly believe in the equality of the sexes (57). But

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of course the Stoics hold that the passions are socially taught false judgments, for women as much as for men. Nor does the monograph attempt in any way to link Mu- sonius to his Roman social context. Far more interesting and provocative is Simon Goldhill’s treatment of Musonius in Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 133– 43; but Gold- hill’s focus is primarily on Musonius’s relationship to contemporary nonphilosophical texts on sex and love, and he says little either about the structure of Musonius’s argu- ments or about their philosophical antecedents.

10. Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Discussion of Musonius is found pri- marily on pp. 221–23.

11. Other recent works that make some contribution to issues surrounding Muso- nius include C. E. Manning, “Seneca and the Stoics on the Equality of the Sexes,” Mne- mosyne, 4th ser., 26 (1973): 170–77; Daniel Babut, “Les Stoïciens et l’amour,” Revue des études grecques 76 (1963): 55– 63; and Marcel Benabou, “Pratique matrimoniale et re- présentation philosophique: Le Crépuscule des stratégies,” Annales ESC, November– December. 1987, pp. 1255– 66.

12. An important source for the subsequent tradition is Meno 72A, apparently the referent of Aristotle’s critique of Socrates when he argues, in Politics 1.13, that Socrates was wrong to hold that male and female have the same excellence (1260a20–24).

13. “Whether Marriage Is an Impediment to Doing Philosophy”; see the appendix.

14. See “What Is the Appropriate Livelihood for a Philosopher?” in Hense 57– 63.

15. For an excellent attempt to recover what we do know, see M. Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

16. The Socratic Antisthenes is also said to have held the view that male and fe- male have the same arete¯ (D.L. 6.12). Diodorus Cronus was said to have had five daughters who all learned dialectic (see discussion in n. 67 below).

17. The most thorough and convincing treatment of Plato’s arguments on women in Republic 5 is in Stephen Halliwell, Plato: Republic 5 (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1993), 9–16.

18. Both in my discussion and in my translation, I use “excellence” for aret e ¯ , in light of the fact that Musonius, like Plato, uses it to designate outstanding characteris- tics generally (e.g., of plants and animals), not only ethical qualities; occasionally I add the word “ethical” before “excellence,” where it is clear that Musonius is speaking of the canonical human virtues, and where failure to spell that out might be misleading.

19. See G. F. Hourani, “The Education of the Third Class in Plato’s Republic,” Clas- sical Quarterly 43 (1949): 58– 60; see also T. H. Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 329–31.

20. Hense, 6, a work called simply “By Musonius.”

21. On Musonius’s account of the moral excellences, Van Geytenbeek’s discussion in Musonius Rufus and Greek Diatribe, 26ff., is helpful: he observes that in general Muso- nius places less stress on the intellectual aspects of the excellences than did Chrysippus. My own sense is that this is a difference of emphasis only: Musonius still insists that philosophy is the only art that will deliver the right result, so he is clearly thinking of excellence as requiring knowledge of what is to be chosen.

the incomplete feminism of musonius rufus

 

22. Compare Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2, which treats the courage to surmount physical pain as a male trait, associated with war, athletics, and the public life in gen- eral; 2.43 reminds us that virtus derives from vir. He offers only two examples of female courage: the ability of old women to go without food (40), and the military fortitude of Spartan women (36). (An exception to the generally negative portrayal of women in Tusculan Disputations is 1.27–28, where Cicero includes women among the heroes who have gone to heaven.) The failure to treat female courage more fully is especially strik- ing in light of the death of Tullia, apparently from complications of childbirth, only several months before the composition of the work. Given his evident love for her

and grief at her death, might Cicero not have seen in her endurance of pain a dis- tinguished example of courage? (For discussion of Cicero’s views, I am grateful to Gretchen Reydams-Schils.)

Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity, has a valuable discussion of this passage, pp. 137– 42. He emphasizes the boldness of the choice of andrizesthai, noting that in texts of the pe- riod it can even denote playing the male role in sexual intercourse. The “virile woman” is a figure of fear, he shows, in much of Greek literature; in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus Socrates’ remark on the manly (andrik e ¯) quality of Ischomachus’s wife is sometimes read as approving. but Goldhill argues against this reading with reference to the scan- dalous career of the real-life original. Goldhill concludes that “Musonius’ bold expres- sion that a ‘woman should be manly,’ then, goes beyond other Greek writings.” (He offers no more than a passing glance at Plato and says nothing about the Greek Stoa, however.)

23. See Schofield’s general argument (in The Stoic Idea) that all functions were open to both sexes, and that the society was organized along military and erotic lines in a way reminiscent of Spartan norms.

24. Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity, pointing to the standard negative evaluation of the Amazons (but apparently not aware of their appearance in the Laws), calls Mu- sonius’s claim culturally “counterintuitive,” and says that “Musonius strains against the boundaries of convention and tradition.” This he does indeed, but with Plato on his side.

25. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

26. One might wonder about “gods”in the plural, but Stoic texts often use the plu- ral, despite the official focus on Zeus.

27. D.L. 6.97. Hipparchia’s sophism: “Any action that would not be called wrong if done by Theodorus, would not be called wrong if done by Hipparchia. Theodorus does no wrong when he strikes himself. So: Hipparchia does no wrong if she strikes Theodorus.”

28. For Stoic attitudes toward logical distinctions, see Jonathan Barnes’s Logic and the Imperial Stoa (Leiden: Brill, 1997); see also my Therapy of Desire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), chap. 9.

29. For Stoic and other uses of this analogy, see Nussbaum, Therapy, chap. 9. The analogy is so common in Stoicism that Cicero protests that he is “tired” of the Stoics’ excessive use of such analogies (Tusc. 4.23).

30. See tas prosiousas tois philosophois gunaikas, in That Women Too, sec. E. This is the standard way of talking about enrolling oneself as a pupil of someone.

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31. Tullia was married by age sixteen, and her father took little interest in her further education. As Ernst Badian nicely puts the matter in his article in the new Ox- ford Classical Dictionary, “Cicero, though sincerely attached to her, had taken little ac- count of her happiness, but was overwhelmed by her death. He proposed to build a shrine for her, ultimately had to abandon the project, and turned to philosophy for consolation.”

32. See Treggiari, Roman Marriage, passim, and see also the subtle treatment in Reydams-Schils (ms.), who correctly argues that Musonius makes the affectional aspect of marriage to some extent independent of the reproductive.

33. For a history of the marital double standard in this period, see Benabou, “Pra- tique matrimoniale.”

34. See Schofield, Th e Stoi c Idea ; and Nussbaum, “Er o ¯ s and the Wise: The Stoic Re- sponse to a Cultural Dilemma,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 13 (1995): 231– 67.

35. Republic 540C: Glaucon has referred to the rulers using the masculine (also the unmarked) form of the accusative present participle, archontas. Kai archousas ge, replies Socrates, apparently convinced that the failure to use the feminine form may give rise to the false impression that only males are to be included.

36. See Manning, “Seneca and the Stoics,” citing Cicero De Officiis 1.130 and Epic- tetus Disc. 1.16.11–14.

37. There are complexities here too, given the complex associations of the aulos with extreme emotionality; but let us assume for the sake of argument that they are equal.

38. Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 146– 47.

39. See ibid., chap. 4, passim. See chap. 2 for extensive discussion of the elaborate rules of marriage-eligibility, and the procedures for signifying “marital intent.”

40. See the review of the evidence in Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 264–75. Caesar praises the strict customs of the Gauls, whose men have power of life and death over their wives as well as their children, implying that husbands at Rome have no such of- ficial power (BGall. 1.58.4).

41. Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 284. 42. Ibid., 284.

43. See ibid., 282– 83. The father has to catch the daughter in the act, and to kill daughter and lover in one “immediate and uninterrupted act.” If he kills only one of them, or kills one and merely wounds the other, he can be tried for murder; and he must kill with his own hand.

44. Ibid., 275.

45. If the marriage continues, however, the wife apparently cannot be prosecuted for adultery by a third party —Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 286; continuation of the mar- riage is taken as a sign that the marriage ought not to be disturbed.

46. Ibid., 288– 89.

47. Ibid., 289–90.

48. See ibid., 277ff.

49. Ibid., 285.

50. See ibid., 293.

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51. Ibid., passim, but on Augustus 292–93; Treggiari approvingly cites Leo Ra- ditsa’s judgment that “the whole conception of the Roman past upon which he sought to erect the moral and spiritual basis of the New State was in a large measure imaginary or spurious.”

52. H. Last, Cambridge Ancient History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 10.447; P. E. Corbett, The Roman Law of Marriage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), quoted by Treggiari, Roman Marriage, p. 291.

53. For further discussion of this parallel, see my “Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitan- ism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 5 (1997): 1–25.

54. One should not deny that Seneca adds other less dignity-based considerations. Part of his argument, like Musonius’s, appeals to the moral damage done to the slave owner by overindulgence; and part appeals to considerations of safety, claiming that well-treated slaves are less likely to rebel and kill their owners.

55. Foucault, History of Sexuality, vols. 2 and 3, passim; Treggiari, Roman Marriage,

esp. 316; de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle, 103–10.

56. Van Geytenbeek, Musonius Rufus, 71, without argument, takes it that it is clear that all nonreproductive acts are inappropriate and remarks on the unparalleled strin- gency of that position.

57. Should One Raise All the Children Who Are Born? Hense 77– 81.

58. The best treatment of these schemes, and the problems understanding them presents, is in Halliwell, Plato: Republic 5.

59. D.L. 6.72: “He [Diogenes the Cynic] said that women should be in common, and he recognized no institution of marriage, believing that a man who persuades should have intercourse with [suneinai] a woman who is persuaded. And he thought that in this way children too should be in common.”

60. Diogenes cites a verse of Menander’s Twin Sisters that alludes to a daughter of Crates, and a month-long trial marriage that he allegedly arranged for her. But this can easily be interpreted as scandal and hyperbole, since allowing such a breach of conven- tions regarding virginity, as a father, would be about the most shocking thing a Cynic could have done.

61. Halliwell, Plato: Republic 5, argues plausibly that gumnos need not mean com- pletely nude, but would be compatible with a loincloth and perhaps also a breastband.

62. See ibid.

63. D.L. 7.131. Note that Diogenes Laertius presents the Stoics as holding that “a man who meets a woman can have intercourse with the woman he meets” [ton entu- chont a t e ¯ i entuchous e ¯ i chr e ¯ sthai], removing the Cynic emphasis on persuasion. Whether this has any significance is unclear. Another text relating to Zeno and Chrysippus holds that the sage will marry and have children (7.121); the conflict between the two texts has generated a large scholarly literature, well summarized in Schofield, The Stoic Idea, appendix D. With Schofield, I think that the grounds for ascribing this view to Zeno’s Republic are weak; either it is a later view only loosely connected with Zeno, or it may possibly reflect a view of the way a Stoic will live under nonideal conditions.

64. See Nussbaum, “Ero¯ s and the Wise,” discussing evidence from Sextus and other sources.

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65. See also the wide-ranging discussions of Roman portrayals of women in Eva Cantarella, Passato Prossimo: Donne romane da Tacita a Sulpicia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1996).

66. See D.L. 3.46: Axiothea (who dressed like a man) and Lastheneia are named. A recent papyrus discovery has confirmed Diogenes’ report: see discussion in Mary Lef- kowitz, Women in Greek Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

67. See Socraticorum Reliquiae, ed. Gabriele Giannantoni (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1983), 1 : 76. Clement of Alexandria (Strom. 4.19.121,5) says, “The daughters of Dio- dorus Cronus were all trained in dialectic, as Philo the dialectician says in his Menexe- nus. Their names were Menexena, Argeia, Theognis, Artemisia, and Pantakleia.” Hieron- ymus (Adv. Iovinian. 1.42) adds that the five were “renowned for their chastity” [insignis pudicitiae], and that Philo wrote a full history about them.

68. See my Therapy, chap. 4, for this evidence.

69. Fragments are attributed to Theano (On Piety), Phintys (On Moderation of Women), Perictione (On Harmony of Women and On Wisdom), and, possibly, Aesara (On Human Nature). See Holger Thesleff, ed., The Pythagorean Texts of the Hellenistic Pe- riod (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1965); and for a good comprehensive summary, ranging over all the schools, see Victoria Lynn Harper, “Women in Philosophy,” Oxford Classical Dic- tionary, 3d ed. (1996), pp. 1625–26.

Chapter Twelve

Eros and Aphrodisia

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