Note 98 — Chapter XXXVII · REPUBLIC — REMARKS ON THE PLATONIC COMMONWEALTH.

See this remarkable argument — Republic, v. pp. 453-456 — γυναῖκες μέντοι πολλαὶ πολλῶν ἀνδρῶν βελτίους εἰς πολλά· τὸ δὲ ὅλον ἔχει ὡς σὺ λέγεις. Οὐδὲν ἄρα ἐστὶν ἐπιτήδευμα τῶν πόλιν διοικούντων γυναικὸς διότι γυνή, οὔδ’ ἀνδρὸς διότι ἀνήρ, ἀλλ’ ὁμοίως διεσπαρμέναι αἱ φύσεις ἐν ἀμφοῖν τοῖν ζώοιν, καὶ πάντων μὲν μετέχει γυνὴ ἐπιτηδευμάτων κατὰ φύσιν, πάντων δὲ ἀνήρ· ἐπὶ πᾶσι δὲ ἀσθενέστερον γυνὴ ἀνδρός (p. 455 D). It would appear (from p. 455 C) that those who maintained the special fitness of women for certain occupations and their special unfitness for others, cited, as examples of occupations in which women surpassed men, weaving and cookery. But Plato denies this emphatically as a matter of fact; pronouncing that women were inferior to men (i.e. the best women to the best men) in weaving and cookery no less than in other things. We should have been glad to know what facts were present to his mind as bearing out such an assertion, and what observations were open to him of weaving as performed by males. In Greece, weaving was the occupation of women very generally, whether exclusively or not we can hardly say; in Phœnicia, during the Homeric times, the finest robes are woven by Sidonian women (Iliad vi. 289): in Egypt, on the contrary, it was habitually performed by men, and Herodotus enumerates this as one of the points in which the Egyptians differed from other countries (Herodot. ii. 35; Soph. Œd. Kol. 340, with the Scholia, and the curious citation contained therein from the Βαρβαρικὰ of Nymphodorus). The process of weaving was also conducted in a different manner by the Egyptians. Whether Plato had seen finer webs in Egypt than in Greece we cannot say.