No arse-rigged woman must deceive your wits with her wily twitterings when she pokes into your granary; he who believes a woman, believes cheaters.
(Hesiod, Op. 373–75)
A woman’s good at finding new resources,
And once in power could never be deceived:
They’re too familiar with deceit themselves!
(Aristophanes, Eccl. 236–38)
That part [genos] of our human race [hēmōn tōn anthrōpōn] which was in any case secretive and cunning because of its weakness—I mean, the female [to thēlu]—was, due to the reticence of the legislator, incorrectly left badly regulated.
(Plato, Leg. 781a)
In one of the Republic’s great aporias, Socrates proposes founding his philosophical city with what ancient Greek poets, playwrights, and philosophers consider to be the characteristically feminine activity of deception. A “single noble lie [gennaion pseudos]” will aim to persuade citizens that they were nurtured in and born from the earth and that a god mixed different metals into their souls indicating their capacities to rule (Rep. 414b–415d).Footnote 1 Feminist scholarship shows that autochthony tales constitute powerful representations of the place of women and sexual reproduction in public life (duBois Reference duBois1988; Loraux Reference Loraux1993, 16–17, 57; Reference Loraux2000, 1–27; Saxonhouse Reference Saxonhouse and Peter Euben1986, 258–59). The gennaion pseudos epitomizes this insight: in addition to imagining the earth (gē) and later the land (chōra) as citizens’ mother (mētēr) and nurturer (trophos), the lie prescribes a strict regulation of births and rearing (Rep. 414d–e). What are the sexual politics of the noble lie?Footnote 2 How do those deceived by the gennaion pseudos envision the nature of maternity and nurturing and the relation between women and men? What do these visions—and the necessity of the “feminine” device of deception to impart them—reveal about the practice of philosophy Socrates seeks to introduce into the life of the city? Through an investigation of the noble lie’s distinct maternal and nurturing figures of the earth (gē) and the land (chōra), this essay finds that the lie ennobles the polis by prompting its addressees to conceive of nobility as a product of politics rather than patriarchal inheritance.
At first glance, the gennaion pseudos might appear to trace an unremittingly patriarchal logic consistent with what many feminist philosophers identify as a broader erasure of women and the feminine in Plato (Cavarero Reference Cavarero1995; duBois Reference duBois1988; Irigaray Reference Irigaray1992; Saxonhouse Reference Saxonhouse1976). Indeed, Socrates addresses the lie exclusively to men. He twice refers to its audience as brothers (adelphoi) (Rep. 414e, 415a), and Glaucon notes that their sons (hueis) will hear the lie next (415d). Republic V’s admission of female guardians notwithstanding, there is no reference to women hearing the pseudos.Footnote 3 Meanwhile, the lie’s lone female figure—the maternal and nurturing earth—contributes to the city’s philosophical founding only as its constitutive other. In terms recalling Luce Irigaray’s account of Plato’s cave as womb (Irigaray Reference Irigaray1992; see also Keum Reference Keum2020, 40–52; Rowett Reference Rowett2016, 68–69, 73–78), Socrates depicts the earth as the dark, shadowy den against which citizens define their upward and outward journey and who in turn passively benefits from their political and martial ventures:
When they were entirely completed, the earth [gē], their mother [mētēr], sent them up, so that now, just as if the land [chōras] in which they live were mother and nurturer [mētros kai trophou], they must deliberate on its behalf, defend it if anyone attacks it, and regard the other citizens as their earthborn brothers [adelphōn gēgenōn]. (Rep. 414e)
The noble lie appears to consider the feminine only in terms of a pre-philosophical maternity and nurturing over which the city’s rulers establish their political authority. As Irigaray puts it, the Republic narrates the “[e]clipse of the mother, of the place (of) becoming, whose non-representation or even disavowal upholds the absolute being attributed to the father” (Irigaray Reference Irigaray1992, 307). Socrates’s deception, it seems, amounts to yet another Platonic appropriation of the powers of the feminine on behalf of an essentially masculine philosophical and political project.Footnote 4
On this reading, the lie complements Athens’s own autochthony myth, the tale of how Athenians repeat their founder Erichthonios/Erechtheus’s birth from the earth (Blok Reference Blok, Dill and Walde2009; Ogden Reference Ogden1996, 166–70; Rosivach Reference Rosivach1987). According to Nicole Loraux, the Athenian myth expresses the male fantasy of a wholly paternal descent—a desire fueled by the oikos’s status as the transmission point for citizenship and property (Loraux Reference Loraux1993, 17, 120; Reference Loraux2000, 24; see also Blundell Reference Blundell1995, 43–44, 65–77, 119–20; Ogden Reference Ogden1996, 100–106). The imperative to establish and protect hereditary lines yields a regime that subjects Athenian women to public silence, physical segregation and seclusion, and constant surveillance (Blundell Reference Blundell1995, 113–49; Ogden Reference Ogden1996, 136–50; Pomeroy Reference Pomeroy1995, 57–92). These policies find key ideological support in the poetry of Hesiod, who sees women as forming a distinct genos. The genos gunaikōn, or “race of women,” descends from Pandora, that “likeness of a modest maiden” whose creation Zeus orders as revenge against Prometheus (Theog. 565–602; Op. 57–105). The genos gunaikōn is a deceptive, promiscuous, financially ruinous “bane” which men must nonetheless bear to avoid growing old and dying without progeny (Theog. 600–607; Op. 373–75). Crucially, Hesiod does not identify a complementary “race of men” (genos andrōn); set against the genos gunaikōn there is only the “human race” (genos anthrōpōn) (Theog. 50; Op. 109). Loraux explains that men in Athens elude the category of genos due to how their identity as citizens trumps all other affiliations: “[i]t is as if the words genos and phylon [tribe] are out of place when applied to andres—citizens, that is—since andres think of themselves as belonging only to the political category of the whole, the polis and the dēmos” (Loraux Reference Loraux1993, 87–88). In the official Athenian imaginary, women form a “closed circuit” unto themselves, an ethically deficient “supplement” needed to reproduce an essentially masculine citizenry (74, 77).Footnote 5
This essay proposes that, with the noble lie, Plato accomplishes something much more interesting and innovative than a philosophical reinscription of Athenian autochthony ideology. I set out from two insights. First, the genos gunaikōn is, like all governing logics, riven with fissures of its own making. The ambiguous position of women with respect to the genos anthrōpōn grants them privileged access to both the divine and the bestial which the Athenian polis exploits in its religious and ritual life (Blundell Reference Blundell1995, 23, 160–69; Goff Reference Goff2004; Pomeroy Reference Pomeroy1995, 75–78). Even if the primary ideological effect of such “exceptional” moments of female visibility and self-organization is to bolster the “rule” of patriarchy (Goff Reference Goff2004, 4–6, 15–17), the public presence of women’s creative agency in ritual practice opens conceptual space for imagining alternatives to patriarchal construals of citizenship. Second, as many commentators show, the philosophical power of Plato’s dialogues consists in how they invite and sometimes even perform critical counter-readings of their own central claims (Cavarero Reference Cavarero1995, 9, 50; Frank Reference Frank2018, 7–17; Naddaff Reference Naddaff2002, 3–4; Seery Reference Seery1988, 243–47). Plato’s texts are consequently well positioned to grasp and dramatize the dialectics of patriarchal power and women’s citizenship in classical Athens. Plato is valuable to feminist philosophy less for his programmatic arguments (as this essay’s epigraph indicates, his characters often echo traditional Hesiodic views) and more for how his dialogues’ capacity to undermine their own patriarchal logics models a practice of dialectical thought and radical action in the patriarchal polis.
Indeed, I submit that the noble lie’s ostensibly conventional sexual politics subverts itself at a key juncture: namely, its shift from identifying gē, or the earth, as its addressees’ mother and nurturer to describing chōra as occupying these roles for subsequent generations (Rep. 414d–e). Although most translators render chōra here as “land,” chōra is a famously polyvalent word,Footnote 6 and its precise meaning is an important theme in Plato’s cosmogonies and autochthony myths in the Timaeus, Menexenus, and Statesman. These dialogues yield an image of chōra as a semi-autonomous force which, by virtue of coinciding with and exceeding the bounds of both the earth (gē) and the polis, gives place to the difference between them. The noble lie’s shift from gē to chōra enacts a radical reimagination of maternity and nurturing from passive acts of reception which belong to a constitutively apolitical genos to partially self-organizing acts of generation which involve the whole political community and undermine the principle of patrilineal descent. Far from reinscribing patriarchy, the gennaion pseudos reveals the genos gunaikōn itself to be a pseudos. By this I do not mean that the “race of women” is empirically inaccurate (the concept did structure classical Greek society and politics), but that it is philosophically false and falsifying—that is, it conceals the truth about women, maternity, and nurturing in the polis and consequently frustrates the pursuit of the truth in general. I conclude that the gennaion pseudos ennobles the polis—it makes the city philosophical—by prompting its addressees to conceive of nobility as a function of politics rather than patriarchal inheritance.
The essay proceeds in five sections. The first introduces the noble lie’s two maternal and nurturing figures: gē (the earth) and chōra (the “land”). The second section elucidates the stakes of this double maternity by examining a similar shift from gē to chōra in the Timaeus. According to Timaeus, chōra is the partially self-organizing mother and nurturer who makes possible the creation of the universe (including the maternal earth (gē)) but only in such a way that disrupts the nobility of this divine production. The third section mobilizes this conception of chōra against traditional readings of the noble lie’s myth of the metals as a call to discern and defend a natural order of nobility. Having the “land” (chōra) as mother and nurturer means living in a community that responds to the uncertainty of human reproduction through collective, creative, and contingent—i.e., political—practices of classifying and reclassifying natures. The fourth section examines how the gennaion pseudos’s notions of earth (gē) and land/country (chōra) differ from those of the Athenian autochthony myth as Socrates (via Aspasia) recounts it in the Menexenus. While the Athenian myth secures the reproduction of a noble dēmos by tying human women to the maternity and nurturing of the earth (gē), the noble lie leaves the social position of women unspecified. The fifth section determines the meaning of this silence by investigating how Republic V’s plans for arranged marriages and collective childrearing recreate the idyll of choric maternity and nurturing detailed in the Statesman’s myth of Cronus. The noble lie makes no place for human women because it refuses the idea that women form a distinct genos whose social and political presence could be circumscribed and then imagined away.
The noble lie represents Plato’s most creative, audacious, and rigorous effort to grapple with the challenge of establishing the rule of philosophy in a polis that does not value the truth. Reclaiming the conventionally “feminine” act of deception, Socrates builds a community that treats nobility as a quality which is continuously founded and refounded politically. With the gennaion pseudos, Socrates shows that political philosophy must be feminist in the limited, yet decisive sense that it rejects the logic of genos gunaikōn and in doing so scrutinizes all notions of genos (such as masculinity and femininity) which structure both the polis and philosophy itself.
1. Double maternity: gē and chōra
The first part of the gennaion pseudos is commonly called the “myth of the earthborn.” This name works well enough, though it can obscure how the lie actually identifies two mothers (mēteres) and nurturers (trophoi) for the citizens of kallipolis: the earth, gē, and the “land,” chōra. Socrates says he will try to persuade the lie’s addressees that, while they were dreaming,
they themselves were at that time down inside the earth [gēs] being formed and nurtured [plattomenoi kai trephomenoi] and that their weapons and the rest of their equipment were also manufactured there. When they were entirely completed, the earth [gē], their mother [mētēr] sent them up, so that now [nun], just as if [hōs peri] the land [chōras] in which they live were mother and nurturer [mētros kai trophou], they must deliberate on its behalf, defend it if anyone attacks it, and regard the other citizens as their earthborn brothers [adelphōn gēgenōn]. (Rep. 414d–e)
After nurturing citizens as children, the earth (gē) gives birth to them as adults. The “land” (chōra) in which these adult sons come to live assumes the role of mother and nurturer for the next generation (whose natures form the focus of the lie’s second half). The gennaion pseudos thus doubles maternity and nurturing: it assigns these roles first to gē and then to chōra. In doing so, it restores the “normal” temporality between them (i.e., maternity precedes nurturing).
Gē is a cosmological concept in ancient Greece: it is the earth in its physical, elemental existence (Diggle Reference Diggle2021, 1.305; LSJ 1.347). Gē is Hesiod’s Gaia, the spontaneously generated god who exists alongside the primordial beings of Chaos, Tartaros, and Eros and whose parthenogenetic power Zeus appropriates to establish his rule (Theog. 116–20, 885–900, 924–26). Republic X’s account of the divine craftsman highlights how humans participate in the larger drama of the cosmos by virtue of their physical placement and dependence on gē:
this same handicraftsman is able to make not only every manufactured item, but he also makes all the plants that grow from the earth [gēs], and produces all the animals, including himself; and, in addition, he produces earth [gēn] and sky and gods and everything in the sky, and everything in Hades beneath the earth [gēs]. (Rep. 596c)
Although gē sometimes refers to discrete geographic regions (e.g., Socrates prohibits guardians from “ravaging Greek land [gēs Hellēnikēs]” (470a)), its primary sense is that of the earth in its elemental plenitude.
Chōra, meanwhile, is a particular land or place—one which is territorially bounded and internally structured. The verb chōrizō means to separate, divide, or distinguish (Diggle Reference Diggle2021, 2.1514; LSJ 2.2016), and the noun chōra indicates an ordered space. In Republic II, Socrates uses chōra when considering the territorial limits of the feverish city:
And the land [chōra], I take it, that used to be adequate to feed [trephein] the population we had then will now be small and inadequate. … Won’t we have to seize some of our neighbors’ land [chōras] … ? (Rep. 373d)
Chōra can also mean physical position, status, or vocation. Insofar as chōra refers to a specific type of place, it is the landed, noble estates of the countryside (Diggle Reference Diggle2021, 2.1514; LSJ 2.2015). These are traditional, hierarchical spaces, in contrast to the more open, market-oriented, and democratic locales of the polis (Gernet Reference Gernet1981, 286–87; Vernant Reference Vernant1982, 38–68). While gē may occasionally be employed in a way which resembles chōra—i.e., to refer to a given land or country—chōra never denotes the earth as a primordial, life-hosting body.
The noble lie’s parallels with the image of the cave makes its casting of the earth (gē) as nurturer and mother unsurprising. What is curious, however, is how Socrates directs the earthborn sons to treat the “land” (chōra) in which they then come to live as mother and nurturer (Rep. 414e). The shift from gē to chōra is a major inflection point in the pseudos, marking the turn from its myth of the earthborn—a tale about citizens’ earthly, pre-philosophical origins—to the myth of the metals—a story about their duty to guard a particular community’s territory, decision-making, and class hierarchy. Socrates’s call for the earthborn sons to behave “now, just as if [nun hōs peri]” the land (chōra) were mother and nurturer suggests he recognizes this as a pivotal, even perilous moment in the pseudos (414e). Having known only the earth (gē) as nurturer and mother, the citizens must now see and treat a very different entity—the “land” (chōra)—as if it occupies these roles. In Republic V, Socrates will identify the polis as citizens’ mother and nurturer (470d), indicating that the lie’s shift from gē to chōra is part of a broader movement in the dialogue from conceiving of maternity and nurturing in cosmological, philosophical terms to territorial, political ones. How do the maternity and nurturing of gē and chōra differ from one another? What does it mean for a politicized entity like the “land” (chōra) to be mother and nurturer?
As it turns out, Plato’s Timaeus also distinguishes between gē and chōra while classifying both as mothers and nurturers. Its cosmogony can thus illuminate the stakes of the noble lie’s transition from gē to chōra. While the addressees of the lie of course would not have been readers of the Timaeus, this dialogue signals one effect that the philosophical juxtaposition of gē and chōra may have had on Greek audiences: namely, to expand and twist the conventional meaning of chōra and hence of maternity and nurturing. We will see that the Republic’s account of the political challenges raised by treating the “land” (chōra) as mother and nurturer suggests that the noble lie’s move from gē to chōra may entail a similar conceptual transfiguration.
2. From chōra to gē: the ig/nobling mother
The core principle governing Timaeus’s cosmogony is that sensible beings constitute images (eikones) of intelligible things (Ti. 29a–b). Earth (gē), along with fire, water, and air, is a primary body out of which the creator god produces all other sensible things (31b–32c). However, earth (gē) stands somewhat apart: it is a god in its own right and cannot be transformed into another primary body (40b–c, 56d). “The first and oldest of the gods born within the heaven,” gē serves as “our nurturer [trophon],” the root source of human nourishment and care (40b–c).
Timaeus interrupts his cosmogony with a fundamental question: how did the primary bodies like earth (gē) come to exist in the first place? (48b). That is, how do we account for the site and material of creation itself? Timaeus proposes a third term to explain the generative encounter between intelligible thing and sensible copy (48e–49a). “[T]he receptacle [hupodochēn] and, as it were, the nurse [tithēnēn] of all becoming” is that which receives the impression of an intelligible model and from which a corresponding sensible being emerges (49a). The receptacle
is by nature a matrix [ekmageion] for everything, which is moved and refigured by the things which enter it, and because of those things it appears different at different times. And the things which pass in and out of it are images of the eternal beings, which are imprinted from them in a wondrous way that is hard to describe. (50c)
Emanuela Bianchi traces how ekmageion can denote an impress or mold; the recipient of an impression or mold; or a napkin or cloth which erases impressions (Bianchi Reference Bianchi2006, 127–28; Diggle Reference Diggle2021, 1.451; LSJ 1.513). Holding these disparate meanings together, we can say that the receptacle is that which makes or receives impressions which are immediately wiped away, perhaps by its own agency (Bianchi Reference Bianchi2006, 128). Timaeus accordingly claims that the receptacle assumes no determinate shape of its own:
if an imprint is to present the full variety of appearances, the material on which it is to be stamped will not have been properly prepared unless it is devoid of all the characters which it is to receive from elsewhere. (Ti. 50d)
As the condition of possibility of creation, the receptacle must itself elude all description.
However, Timaeus violates this proscription against describing the receptacle, and he does so in a way that highlights the sexual-political stakes of his cosmogony. In addition to referring to the receptacle as ekmageion and the “nurse [tithēnēn]” of creation (49a), Timaeus calls it creation’s “mother [mētēr]” (50d, 51a) and the universe’s “nurturer and nurse [trophon kai tithēnēn]” (88d). Trophos and tithēnē can both be translated as “nurse,” but tithēnē refers exclusively to a wet nurse, while trophos designates a nurturer in the more holistic sense of one who nourishes, cares for, and raises an offspring (Diggle Reference Diggle2021, 2.1379, 2.1398; LSJ 2.1828). Bianchi also notes how “receptacle” [hupodochē] strongly evokes the maternal womb: “[s]aid of a woman, hupodechomai means to become pregnant, to have received the male seed, providing the fertile ground for reproduction, genesis” (Bianchi Reference Bianchi2006, 131). For Timaeus, then, cosmic creation is thinkable only by way of a feminine figure in the context of reproduction:
we must reflect on three kinds [genē]: that which comes to be, that in which it comes to be, and that from which, by being made in its likeness, what comes to be is born. Indeed, we should liken the recipient [dechomenon] to the mother [mētri], that from which to the father [patri], and what they produce between them to their offspring [ekgonōi]. (Ti. 50c–d)
Timaeus’s cosmogony reflects and reinscribes the patrilineal logic governing Athenian social and political life more generally: a formless, obscure woman (the mother–receptacle) serves as the necessary, albeit suspiciously inscrutable supplement who facilitates an exchange between two generations of men (father–creator and son–created thing).Footnote 7 By characterizing the receptacle as the mētēr, tithēnē, and trophos of creation, Timaeus places it in a structurally analogous position to genos gunaikōn vis-a-vis the polis.
There is, however, an additional term Timaeus uses for the receptacle, and that is chōra. After distinguishing between intelligible and sensible things, Timaeus states that “a third kind [genos] is that of chōra which is eternal and indestructible, which provides a seat for everything that comes to be” (52a–b). He repeats his tripartite, patrilineal account of creation, now putting chōra in the place of hupodochē: “[t]here are and were also before heaven came into being three distinct items: being, chōra and becoming” (52d). Timaeus’s recasting of the receptacle as chōra is highly curious. First, as Bianchi explains, hupodochē and chōra are not cognates, and there is no obvious reason why Timaeus would use the terms together (Bianchi Reference Bianchi2006, 130). Second, the sense chōra takes in the Timaeus—the characterless flux in and through which creation unfolds—is at odds with its conventional meaning as an ordered space or determinate position. John Sallis insists that we attune ourselves to “the interruption that the Timaeus produces in the word” (Sallis Reference Sallis2020, 116). Rather than denoting a specific place or position, chōra is the power of receptivity which in turn gives place to things (Bianchi Reference Bianchi2006, 132; Derrida Reference Derrida1995, 99). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari might say that Timaeus’s chōra expresses how processes of reterritorialization always unfold through movements of deterritorialization (and vice versa) (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari2011, 10).
Indeed, Timaeus depicts chōra as exhibiting the agentic capacities hinted at by ekmageion. Chōra contains all that will become earth (gē), fire, water, and air in a restless, lurching, indeterminate mixture that itself shakes erratically (Ti. 52d–e). Comparing these febrile motions to women’s work of cleaning grain, Timaeus claims they achieve a preliminary sifting and sorting of being:
at that time were the four kinds [genē] shaken by the receptacle [dexamenēs], which itself being moved acted as a kind of shaking implement. It separated the kinds most unlike each other furthest away from each other and pushed those most like each other towards the same place, with the result that they came to occupy different regions [chōran] even before they were arranged into an ordered universe. (53a)
By virtue of chōra’s shaking, the constitutively amorphous flux begins to separate and order itself (57c). The creator god enters the picture only at this point. Finding “traces” of earth (gē), fire, water, and air, he completes their creation by impressing forms on them. Timaeus concludes:
[b]efore that time they were all without proportion or measure; fire, water, earth [gēn] and air bore some traces [ichnē] of their proper nature, but were entirely in the state to be expected of anything from which god is absent. Such being their nature when god set about ordering the universe, his first step was to shape them completely according to forms and numbers. (53a–b; see also 69b–c)
To the question “where do the primary bodies originate?” Timaeus’s answer is: “in the shaking of and in the receptacle/chōra.” The creator-father does not work ex nihilo but instead completes a generative process begun by and in the maternal, nurturing receptacle/chōra. Chōra effects what Bianchi calls “a sort of proto-ordering of the world of Becoming, and provides the motion and change that is the condition of possibility of the life of the cosmos” (Bianchi Reference Bianchi2006, 135).
Timaeus opened by noting that all speech (logos) resembles that which it explains (Ti. 29b). If speech about intelligible things is stable and reliable, and speech about sensible things (i.e., images (eikones) of intelligible things) is merely likely (eikos) (29b–c), then speech about the “difficult and obscure” receptacle/chōra falls victim to dreamlike confusion and lacks the legitimacy—or nobility—with which a link to intelligible beings would endow it (52b). Timaeus asserts that his “bastard discourse [logismōi nothōi]” on chōra accounts for the role of necessity (anankē) in the universe’s origin (47e–48b, 52b). Necessity is the “wandering cause [planōmenēs aitias],” the force of errancy or even chance that eludes the creator god’s rational production (Ti. 48a; Sallis Reference Sallis2020, 92–93, 131). Timaeus notes how a woman’s vacant womb is similarly “wandering”. If
the so-called “matrix” [mētrai] or “womb” [husterai] in women … is left fruitless [akarpon] long beyond the normal time, it causes extreme unrest, wanders [planōmenon] in the body in every direction, blocks the channels of the breath and causes in consequence acute distress and disorders of all kinds. (Ti. 91c)
As the wandering cause of necessity, we might say that the maternal and nurturing chōra is also “fruitless”—not because it fails to give birth, but because it does not reliably reproduce the father’s line. Chōra at once constitutes the paternal line and makes it wander off course; it constitutes this line as wandering. (Or, it reterritorializes only by deterritorializing.) The earth (gē) which nourishes humanity is the product of this partially self-organizing choric agency.
To the Athenian view that maternity and nurturing are properly the work of a docile, receptive genos that transmits nobility from father to son, Timaeus’s receptacle/chōra counters with a vision of these roles as active and self-organizing. Choric agency is neither the wholly autonomous productivity of Hesiod’s Gaia/Gē nor the ethical violation of the male nomos for which Hesiod castigates human women. Exceeding the logic of genos gunaikōn, the agency of the choric mother/nurturer is distinctly ig/nobling: it disrupts the paternal lines of nobility it simultaneously establishes. To what extent does the maternal and nurturing “land” (chōra) of the gennaion pseudos exercise a similarly ig/nobling agency?
3. From gē to chōra: the myth of the metals
Both conservative and liberal readers of the noble lie interpret its myth of the metals as a call for the polis to discern and defend a natural order of rank among humans (Bloom Reference Bloom1991, 365–69; Popper Reference Popper1963, 139–41; Schofield Reference Schofield2006, 288–91; Strauss Reference Strauss1964, 102–103). However, as some commentators have recently argued, this myth may not be so straightforward and may even amount to a critique of ideas that there exists a hierarchy of human natures prior to and apart from political life (Andrew Reference Andrew1989; Arruzza Reference Arruzza, Karfík and Song2013, 285–87; Kasimis Reference Kasimis2016; Keum Reference Keum2020, 43–47; Markovits Reference Markovits2008, 137–51; Tarnopolsky Reference Tarnopolsky2022, 483–86). My sympathies lie with this second line of interpretation, though for a reason which has mostly escaped critical attention: namely, how the lie’s treatment of maternity and nurturing undermines the concept of nobility as a natural—i.e., pre-political—order of rank.
According to the gennaion pseudos, when the god formed citizens in the earth (gē), he mixed metals into their souls indicating their fitness for different stations (we might say chōrai) in the polis. The lie’s addressees are to believe that
they themselves were at that time down inside the earth [gēs] being formed and nurtured [plattomenoi kai trephomenoi] … [W]hen the god was forming [plattōn] you, he mixed gold into those of you who are capable of ruling, which is why they are the most honorable; silver into the auxiliaries; and iron and bronze into the farmers and other craftsmen. (Rep. 414d–415a)
Socrates’s use of plassō to describe the subterranean shaping of citizens is highly evocative. Plassō means to mold or sculpt, as one would clay or wax (Diggle Reference Diggle2021, 2.1138; LSJ 2.1412). Timaeus employed the word in relation to the receptacle, likening the latter to gold which is continuously remolded into different forms (Ti. 50a). Plassō carries connotations of deceptiveness, as in to “fabricate” or “forge” (Diggle Reference Diggle2021, 2.1138; LSJ 2.1412; Ti. 26e). Hesiod uses plassō to characterize Hephaestus’s sculpting of Pandora, that “likeness of a modest maiden” from whom the genos gunaikōn descends and inherits its artificiality and deceptiveness (Theog. 565–602; Op. 57–105, 373–75).
Does Socrates suggest that the god’s forming of humans with different natural capacities to rule is a fleeting moment within a larger, ceaselessly mutating flux? Is the divine shaping itself a deceptive fabrication (or fabrication of a deception)? Are the lie’s addressees to recognize their souls as embodying the same artificiality as Hesiod’s primordial woman? Are the earthborn sons really even men? With a paternal god molding an offspring (the earthborn son) within a maternal site of creation (the earth (gē)), the lie’s first half resembles Timaeus’s tripartite familial model, and its ability to secure a patrilineal order of nobility may prove to be just as tenuous.
Socrates describes how the earth (gē) gives birth to sons who go on to govern and defend the land/country (chōra) in which they live. The problem presented by life in the chōra is the management of reproduction, particularly the transmission of traits in a way that preserves the order of nobility established (perhaps loosely or deceptively) within the earth (gē) (Loraux Reference Loraux1993, 87; Reference Loraux2000, 3–4). Instead of directly forming citizens by mixing metals into souls, the god now steps back and merely urges the sons to attend to the metallic variations that result from their shared ancestry. Socrates explains:
For the most part, you will produce children like yourselves; but, because you are all related, a silver child will occasionally be born to a golden parent, a golden child to a silver parent, and so on. Therefore, the first and greatest command from the god to the rulers is that there is nothing they must guard better or watch more carefully than the mixture of metals in the souls of their offspring. (Rep. 415a–b)
The source of future trait variation is not the sexual mixing of men and women, but the differences in natures between the sons themselves. Socrates’s idea is that because the sons share gē as their mother (i.e., “because you are all related”), each son bears traces of all the others’ natures within himself, and these traces of difference find expression in his progeny. Human women remain unmentioned, and it is the “land” (chōra) that now occupies the role of mother and enables this trait variation to materialize. By depicting human reproduction as a new problem of autochthony, the noble lie appears to reinscribe the erasure of women Loraux associates with democratic Athens and feminist critics attribute to Plato’s philosophy as a whole.
However, Socrates’s emphasis on the unreliability of lineage and the inscrutability of the metals indicates that the effects of the “land” (chōra) serving as mother and nurturer may not be so straightforwardly patriarchal. While the earthborn sons (i.e., the addressees of the pseudos) are ready to accept that a god mixed metals into their souls, they struggle to imagine such metallic mixtures becoming visible and intelligible in those of their progeny. Believing a story that explains one’s own nature as the result of a divine act from the distant past is far easier than bearing the weight of such a myth for one’s child in the present. The earthborn sons hence find themselves in essentially the same predicament as Timaeus: namely, how to account for the possibility of a form-giving creation? Timaeus’s solution was to have the chōra conduct a sifting and sorting prior to the intervention of the paternal god: “[i]t separated the kinds [genē] most unlike each other furthest away from each other and pushed those most like each other towards the same place” (Ti. 53a). Socrates’s educational program (established in Republic II–III) stages a similar preliminary organization of genē. Having the “land” (chōra) as nurturer means being subject to a paideic sifting and sorting through which one’s nature becomes discernible as such. Immediately before introducing the lie, Socrates argues that
we must subject our young people to fears and then plunge them once again into pleasures, so as to test them much more thoroughly than people test gold in a fire. … And anyone who is tested as a child, youth, and adult, and always emerges as being without impurities should be established as a ruler of the city. (Rep. 413d–414a)
Republic VI confirms that one’s “golden” capacity to rule discloses itself through a number of trials: “anyone who always came through pure—like gold tested in a fire—was to be made ruler and receive gifts and prizes” (503a). Republic V allows a person’s true metal to be discovered by means of a heroic death: “[a]nd if any of those who died while on campaign has had a particularly distinguished death, won’t we, in the first place, declare [phēsomen] that he belongs to the golden race [chrusou genous]?” (468e). Conversely, cowardly conduct can result in relegation to the ranks of craftsman and farmer—i.e., iron and bronze (415b–c, 468a).
In the last quotation, Socrates claims they will declare whoever dies a “distinguished death” to belong to the golden genos. A “distinguished death” presupposes a public practice of distinguishing between deaths. One’s nature is not a brute fact but the effect of determinate speech acts which themselves reflect a set of thoroughly conventional, indeed political decisions. As Demetra Kasimis demonstrates, what rulers find (or “declare”) by way of the city’s educational program is inevitably a function of what that program searches for, of the particular trials and tests it constructs:
the hierarchy physis [nature] is called on to secure is the political work of the ruling class. A member’s classification in the Callipolis may appear to be dictated by inborn skills and virtues, but it is the effect of a series of acts—mythmaking, membership performance, judgment—that gives rise to the belief in the inner, determining core. (Kasimis Reference Kasimis2016, 352, brackets added; see also Keum Reference Keum2020, 45–46)
The “traces” of a child’s nature that manifest themselves through education are neither divine codes to decipher nor floating signifiers from which anything at all can be read; they are rather incipient tendencies which gain intelligibility through the institutional sifting and sorting process that identifies, interprets, and evaluates them. Declaring a child’s metal—their genos—is the culmination of a collective, contingent, and, depending on the situation, deliberative or agonistic practice of rendering signs meaningful. It is, in brief, a matter of participating in politics.
Timaeus had presented chōra as the “wandering cause,” the force of errancy that both constitutes and disrupts the passage from father to son (Ti. 48a). The noble lie’s maternal and nurturing “land” (chōra) exerts similar ig/nobling effects. As mother, the “land” (chōra) allows the relatedness of the earthborn sons (established by gē) to render uncertain the transmission of natures (e.g., the nobility of the golden genos) between generations. And as nurturer, it organizes a political process (i.e., metal-assigning education) that invests these natures with a provisional order. By continuously re-founding the hierarchy of genē, the maternal and nurturing “land” (chōra) erodes the idea of nobility (gennaiotēs) as a natural—i.e., pre-political—order of rank. If in the Timaeus, the nurturing earth (gē) emerges from chōra, in the noble lie, the earth (gē) comes first, only for the nobility it purports to ground to be undermined, thrown back into the chōra as it were. When Socrates insists that the earthborn sons must “now, just as if the land [chōras] in which they live were mother and nurturer … deliberate on its behalf, defend it if anyone attacks it” (Rep. 414e), he charges them with preserving kallipolis’s distinctly political character—i.e., its status as a community where genos is irreducible to heredity.Footnote 8 It is precisely as this site of politics that the “land” (chōra) nourishes and sustains the citizens of kallipolis.
The noble lie, in sum, joins in what Sallis identified as “the interruption that the Timaeus produces in the word [chōra]” (Sallis Reference Sallis2020, 116). In the gennaion pseudos, chōra neither denotes the traditional “outside” to the polis (e.g., the earth (gē) or a noble country estate), nor is it reducible to the polis itself. The maternal and nurturing chōra is at once (1) the political articulation of non- or pre-political land and (2) the movement of exteriority by which a polis politicizes its boundaries and hierarchies anew. What is the critical force of this vision of maternity and nurturing as choric?
4. From chōra to gē (again): the Menexenus
Plato’s Menexenus helps here. In this dialogue, Socrates recites a version of the Athenian autochthony myth he heard as part of a funeral oration delivered by Aspasia, the teacher of rhetoric and mistress of Pericles. Opening with a mocking tribute of the charming, sorcerous effects of funeral speeches, Socrates says that the praise given to dead heroes
is so beautiful that although they speak things both true and untrue of each man, the extreme beauty and diversity of their words bewitches our souls. For in every way, they eulogize the city and those who died in battle and all our forebears, and even us who are still alive, until finally, Menexenus, I feel myself ennobled [gennaiōs] by them. I every time stand and listen, charmed, believing I have become bigger, better born [gennaioteros], and better-looking on the spot. (Mnx. 234c–235b)
If Athenian funeral orations make one feel ennobled, Socrates’s parodic discourse leaves little doubt this is a decidedly spurious nobility—one which may in fact be ignobling. How does the noble lie’s autochthony myth differ from the ignobling Athenian one Socrates tells in his parodic speech?Footnote 9
We can start by noting that both the gennaion pseudos and the Menexenus’s autochthony myth restrict chthonic origins to men and identify the earth (gē) and the “land” (chōra) as citizens’ mother and nurturer. However, the two stories deploy the concepts of gē and chōra in different ways which reflect distinct political objectives. The Athenian myth opens with chōra, not gē. Athenians imagine the “good men [andras agathous]” who have fallen in war as born from a specific land or country (chōra):
First, then, their nobility of birth [eugeneias]. Their progenitors were not foreigners, nor are these their offspring settlers in this land, descended from strangers who came to our country [chōrai] from abroad. These men were autochthonous, sprung from the land itself [autochthonas],Footnote 10 living and dwelling in their true fatherland [patridi], nurtured [trephomenous] by no stepmother [mētruias], as others are, but by their mother [mētros], the land [chōras] wherein they dwell. And now in death they lie in the place [topois] proper to them, received back [hupodexamenēs] again by the mother who bore and nurtured [tekousēs kai threpsasēs] them. (Mnx. 237a–c)
Socrates’s use of chōra instead of gē indicates how this autochthony myth concerns first and foremost a concrete political relation: that of male citizens to Athens. Athenians see themselves as a uniquely and enviably pure ethnic community due to how they are born from and nurtured by the land (chōra) in which they dwell. In the gennaion pseudos, meanwhile, the citizens’ initial birth is from the earth (gē), which Socrates presents not as a source of indigeneity—and thus ethnic and political nobility—but of cosmic formation and awakening. Beginning with gē and not chōra, the lie addresses primarily philosophical rather than political beings.
The Athenian myth’s second half redescribes citizens’ mother and nurturer as the earth (gē). What began as a story about one’s relation to their land/country (chōra) morphs into a tale about their relation to the earth (gē):
Our country [chōra] is rightly to be praised because in that season in which all the earth [gē] gave forth every sort of animal, wild and tame, our country [chōra or gē]Footnote 11 remained free and pure of all that is wild, but chose among the animals and gave birth to humanity [anthrōpon], who surpasses all others in understanding and alone acknowledges justice and the gods. It is a great proof that this account is true that this earth [gē] gave birth to the forefathers of these our dead and of ourselves: for all that gives birth has the resources to nurture [trophēn] what it has borne. With these resources a woman [gunē] is clearly a true mother [tekousa alēthōs], but a false one if she is without fountains of nourishment [trophēs] for what is born. Likewise does our earth [gē], our mother [mētēr], provide sufficient proof that she has given birth to humans [anthrōpous]. For she alone at that time first bore human nourishment [trophēn anthrōpeian], fruit of wheat and barley, by which humankind [to anthrōpeion genos] is best nourished [trephetai]. (Mnx. 237d–238a)
Socrates’s shift from chōra to gē coincides with a change in the subject born from anēr (man) to anthrōpos (humankind). If this latter shift suggests a possible rupture within Athens’s strictly patriarchal construal of citizenship, the language and logic of genos gunaikōn quickly reasserts itself as Socrates turns to the Athenian earthborn’s warrior training, political activities, and military exploits (238b–249d). The larger shift from chōra to gē highlights how the unique connection between Athenians and their land/country (chōra) hinges ultimately on the latter’s physical qualities as earth (gē). Athenians are born from the land (chōra) precisely because the Attic earth (gē) has, through its provision of plentiful resources (“fruit of wheat and barley”), proven to be their mother and nurturer. If the nobility of the Athenian dēmos had at first been a function of the historical contingency (or, more likely, outright fabrication) of their indigeneity (Blok Reference Blok, Dill and Walde2009, 263–64; Loraux Reference Loraux2000, 59–64), the oration’s turn to gē invests this nobility with natural, even cosmological necessity (Saxonhouse Reference Saxonhouse1992, 112).
The contrast with the gennaion pseudos is stark. In the lie, an initially natural and cosmological condition (birth from the earth (gē)) is followed by a historical, territorially bounded existence (the inhabitation of a “land” (chōra)). The philosophical sons enter a concrete political community. As we have seen, once the “land” (chōra) becomes mother and nurturer, the future of a son’s noble inheritance from the earth (gē) becomes uncertain. Nobility is not what classical Athens imagines it to be—i.e., a hereditary matter of determining lineages (Ogden Reference Ogden1996, 83–135)—but a political question of identifying, interpreting, and judging natures. The passage from “land” (chōra) to earth (gē) in the Menexenus naturalizes and secures a hereditary order of nobility: that of the Athenian dēmos.Footnote 12 The reverse movement in the noble lie politicizes and destabilizes such orders. Sara Monoson proposes that the Menexenus amounts to an effort by Plato to contest the Periclean conception of citizenship as a relation between lover (citizen) and beloved (city) in favor of one modeled on a single noble family (Monoson Reference Monoson2000, 189–202). But reading the parodic funeral oration alongside the gennaion pseudos shows that it may be Athens’s familial model of democratic nobility—one premised on the patrilineal transmission of natures via the oikos—which Plato subjects to philosophical scrutiny.
Having established the maternal and nurturing earth’s (gē’s) cosmological permanence and exteriority to the polis, Socrates can now safely address the elephant in the room: how to account for the reality of human procreation and the necessity of women therein. The logic of the Athenian myth leaves really only one possible solution: human women imitate the earth (gē). To his narrative of how the nourishment of the earth (gē) proves that Athenians were born from the land (chōra), Socrates adds: “[s]uch proofs as these are more readily to be accepted in behalf of earth [gēs] than of woman [gunaikos], for in conception and birth [gennēsei], earth does not imitate woman [ou gē gunaika memimētai], but woman earth [alla gunē gēn]” (Mnx. 238a). Once the figure of gē has been stabilized into the passive mother and nurturer in and through which the noble dēmos reproduces itself, human women can slide into this role without difficulty. While the Menexenus’s funeral oration distinguishes itself from other Greek autochthony myths by actually acknowledging the existence of human women, it does so only after figuring their imitative model—the earth (gē)—in terms consistent with the logic of genos gunaikōn.
Some interpret the absence of a male progenitor in the Menexenus as indicating the generative power Plato ascribes to the feminine earth (gē), and by extension, human women. For Arlene Saxonhouse, “the earth as mother is emphasized so that the city’s unity originates from the reproductive female, not from the speech of such men as Pericles” (Saxonhouse Reference Saxonhouse1992, 113; cf. Loraux Reference Loraux2000, 83–94). This reading contributes to a tradition of feminist classical scholarship that sees the autonomy of the maternal earth (Gē/Gaia) as the basis for emancipatory challenges to the patriarchal polis (Cavarero Reference Cavarero1995, 57–90; duBois Reference duBois1988). In light of the Menexenus’s participation in the larger Platonic play between the earth (gē) and the “land” (chōra), I hold that rather than yielding an alternative, distinctively feminine source of political unity to that advanced by Pericles, the Athenian myth’s passage from chōra to gē highlights how the Periclean polis deploys the figure of a self-sufficient earth (gē) to secure its patriarchal institutions. By positioning the locus of feminine autonomy outside the polis, the myth confirms and fortifies the polis as a space of women’s subjection. In my view, the immanent ig/nobling of the maternal and nurturing “land” (chōra) makes it a much more promising oppositional figure.
Unlike the Menexenus, the gennaion pseudos says nothing about the maternal and nurturing activities of human women. This is the case, I argue, because the logic of the lie excludes the possibility of such claims. In the pseudos, the earth (gē) nurtures before giving birth to adults, making it unavailable as a paradigm for human women. (And Socrates is clear that the nurturing of gē stands in for the education provided by the whole city, not the care of individual women.) Meanwhile, women cannot imitate the “land” (chōra) because, according to our Timaeus-inflected reading, the “land” (chōra) cannot serve as the model for anything. Its maternity and nurturing eludes embodiment by a specific genos precisely because it is the political process—the force of errancy—whereby genē emerge historically in the first place. Rather than repeating the familiar Athenian or Platonic erasures of women and sexual reproduction, the noble lie’s silence around human women evinces a refusal of the logic of genos gunaikōn.
5. Between gē and kallipolis: the Statesman and Republic V
If the noble lie rejects conventional Athenian construals of maternity and nurturing, what is the status of human women in the polis which regards the “land” (chōra) as mother and nurturer? Reading Republic V’s proposals for arranged marriages and collective childrearing in light of one final Platonic autochthony tale—the Statesman’s myth of Cronus—illuminates the relation between the sexes in the city ennobled by the gennaion pseudos.
In his discourse on the king and statesman, the Eleatic Visitor tells a version of Hesiod’s myth of the age of Cronus (Op. 109–26). In this golden era, god directly stewards the universe and tends to humans as shepherd to a flock, providing them with an effortless, peaceful, abundant existence (Plt. 269c, 271c–272b). Humans and other creatures begin their lives at old age and grow younger (270d–e). This reversal of time frees humanity from the burdens of reproduction, for which the earth (gē) assumes responsibility. The Visitor recounts how
there was no such thing at that time as parental procreation. It was the earth-born race [gēgenes genos], whose existence once upon a time we hear of in our stories, which was born: that was the time when they began to rise up again out of the earth [gēs]. … [I]t’s in keeping with the idea of old people turning into children that people would reform in the earth [gēi] where they were lying after their death and would come back to life from there, in conformity with the reversal undergone by all natural cycles. (271a–b)
The earth (gē) gives birth not to infants in need of nurture, but to humans in their final, completed forms (271b). The earth (gē) receives human souls which fall to it as “seeds” to be incarnated a preordained number of times (272d–e). In terms recalling the partially self-organizing chōra of the Timaeus and gennaion pseudos, the Visitor tells how “creatures … develop inside the earth [gēi] as a result of various elements coming together and combining” (274a). Aside from determining the number of each soul’s incarnations, god exerts no influence in humans’ earthborn formation. He tends to creatures he has no part in assembling.
Born from the earth (gē) and then cared for by god, humans in the Age of Cronus have no need for marriage and children. The Visitor explains that
[w]ith god as their herdsman, there was no political constitutions [politeiai], nor acquisition of wives [gunaikōn] and children (because everyone just came back to life out of the earth [gēs], with no memory of their past lives). (271e–272a)
When god relinquishes control over the universe, time resumes its forward movement (272e). Humans start their lives as infants, die in old age, and care for themselves in the meantime (273e). In this Age of Zeus, humans take responsibility for their own reproduction:
the process of pregnancy [kuēseōs], birth [gennēseōs] and child-rearing [trophēs] conformed of necessity to the general pattern. The point is that creatures could no longer develop inside the earth [gēi] as a result of various elements coming together and combining, so it was ordained that all the constituent parts of the universe should do their best to propagate [phuein] and give birth [gennan] and maintain [trephein] their offspring by themselves …. (274a–b)
If in the Age of Cronus there was no need to “acquire” women because the earth (gē) assembled and bore humans, the Age of Zeus affords no such luxury. The human race must reproduce itself through sexual activity, the sine qua non of which is the body of a woman. As the Visitor indicates, the need to manage human sexual reproduction is directly linked with the institution of political order. The conditions for imagining genos gunaikōn are now in place.
The Republic confirms that what it means to have a politeia is to have established laws and norms regulating sexual relations and the bearing and raising of children (Rep. 449d). Socrates presents these issues as central to the dialogue, warning his interlocutors that they are stirring up “a swarm of arguments” (450a) about the very basis of the constitution and worrying about what would happen if “I fail to secure the truth, just where it is most important to do so” (451a). He proposes two main measures. First, the city should arrange the guardians’ mating to maximize the number of high-quality offspring: “the best men should mate with the best women in as many cases as possible, while the opposite should hold of the worst men and women” (459d).Footnote 13 Second, children should be cared for collectively. At birth, a child’s nurture (tittheuō and trephō) becomes the responsibility of the whole city, greatly reducing the burden on mothers (460d). Notably, at least some nurturing offices will be held by men (460b). Sharing women and children has the effect of extending kinship bonds across the guardian class, preventing loyalty to the oikos from trumping devotion to the city (463c–464e).
By administering births and nurturing in a way that minimizes strain on citizens and the risk of strife, Socrates aims to reproduce the idyllic conditions of the Age of Cronus within the space of the polis (Saxonhouse Reference Saxonhouse1992, 131).Footnote 14 The arranged mating of partners takes the place of the “various elements coming together and combining” in the maternal earth (gē), and the city’s nurturing offices care for the children who result. Like the Statesman’s earth (gē), the maternal “land” (chōra) facilitates the passage between generations by its own disruptive, ig/nobling agency. Its arranged pairings are themselves a function of earlier political determinations of genos and thus do not reliably reproduce noble lines. (Hence Socrates’s instruction that officials examine newborns and secretly expose “those of inferior parents, or any deformed offspring of the others” (Rep. 460c, italics added; see also 423c–d).) The unpredictability of human reproduction in turn necessitates the continued use of an educational apparatus to identify, interpret, and judge differences among children. If the gennaion pseudos extended the Timaeus’s interruption of the “pre-philosophical” meaning of chōra to uncover its politicizing logic, Republic V sketches the polis that enacts the ig/nobling logic of choric maternity and nurturing. The citizens’ mother and nurturer is neither the earth (gē) which pre-exists and envelops the polis from without, nor is it the polis itself; it is rather the “land” (chōra), that force of errancy whose wanderings among phusis and nomos shape and reshape the bounds between them.
Chōra’s continuous production and displacement of genē undermines the belief that the essence of maternity and nurturing is the passive transmission of nobility and that a specific genos (woman) can embody this apolitical supplementarity. The gennaion pseudos makes no place for human women not because it effaces their presence in public life but because it refuses the idea that women form a distinct genos whose social and political presence could be circumscribed and then imagined away altogether. That women are members of, not adjuncts to, kallipolis is evinced by Socrates’s argument that women can and should serve as guardians (451d–457c) and by the use of genos to describe both women and men (454d, 455c–d).Footnote 15 The lie’s silence around women allows the ig/nobling—i.e., political—force of the maternal and nurturing chōra to disrupt the patrilineal logic of genos gunaikōn. The polis which regards the “land” (chōra) as mother and nurturer is, in sum, one wherein the genos gunaikōn has been dissolved. The gennaion pseudos subjects the Hesiodic paradigm to a radical transfiguration: rather than genos gunaikōn being the source of deception in human life, an act of deception exposes this genos itself to be deceptive.
However, the result of this operation should not be misconstrued (or celebrated) as a simple gender egalitarianism. After all, Socrates frequently affirms elements of the Hesiodic ethical critique of women, and he dismisses the democratic idea of legal equality and freedom between women and men (Rep. 395d–e, 431b–c, 469d, 557c, 563b, 605d–e; Saxonhouse Reference Saxonhouse1976). Navigating this dissonance requires distinguishing between differences of valuation within a political community and criteria of belonging as such. Precisely because women do not form a distinct genos beyond the bounds of the polis, Socrates’s misogynistic statements are, like any value claims, subject to political contestation and revision; they can, as it were, be thrown back into the chōra. Stella Sandford shows that the categories of “man” and “woman” in Plato are best understood not as foundational differences in nature (as the modern natural-biological discourse of “sex” posits), but as a set of socially and politically determined—and hence contingent—behavioral characteristics (Sandford Reference Sandford2010, 32–33). One of the noble lie’s accomplishments is that, by abolishing the constitutive exclusion of women on the basis of maternity and nurturing, it empowers political challenges to and revisions of all notions of genos, including, but not limited to, “men” and “women.” (For the same reason, what the actual experience of conceiving, carrying, and delivering children looks like in kallipolis moves from being a question of how to preserve the patriarchal oikos to a more open-ended and at least potentially liberatory question of how to produce and reproduce the just city.)
Plato’s political philosophy in the Republic is feminist in the limited, albeit decisive sense that it brings the polis to a love for the truth through a deployment of the “feminine” that weakens the grounds of all notions of masculinity and femininity. The very real deficiencies of Plato’s feminism highlight the magnitude of the political-philosophical challenge—the intractability of ideas of genos—to which the noble lie responds. With proposals like women guardians, Socrates gestures toward but only haltingly pursues the more ambitious critique of sex and gender that his gennaion pseudos authorizes and encourages.
6. The deceptive roots of kallipolis
The core theoretical puzzle of the gennaion pseudos is the proposition that only a deception can make the polis philosophical. Our investigation of the sexual politics of the noble lie suggests one way to comprehend and navigate this aporia on its own terms.Footnote 16 We have seen that the doubled maternity and nurturing of the earth (gē) and the “land” (chōra) means that nobility in kallipolis is never a function of heredity but is continuously founded and refounded politically. The rule of philosophy hinges, in other words, on the dissolution of the genos gunaikōn. We can interpret the noble lie itself as a practice of this ig/nobling philosophy. Just as nobility is established only ignobly (i.e., by the choric mother and nurturer) and thus as ignoble (i.e., as wandering), kallipolis is established as truth-loving only by a pseudos and thus as deceptive, false, distorted. The necessity of the lie indicates that, for Socrates, a community becomes philosophical not by embodying the truth as a pure, eternal standard, but by striving for it in a manner that is inexorably marred and threatened by untruth. Jon Hesk holds that “[t]he Platonic philosopher may be the new ‘master of truth’, but he has to dispense lies from his pharmacy to realise that regime of truth” (Hesk Reference Hesk2000, 162). The sexual politics of the gennaion pseudos demonstrates that a regime of truth is not simply realized by the philosopher’s lie; such a community is directed against this same deceptiveness that constitutes and haunts it. The noble lie institutes a political order whose guiding distinction between truth and pseudos rests on their deeper, ineliminable entanglement.
Wendy Brown contends that, despite Plato’s repudiation of Athenian masculine political culture, he too readily accepts philosophy as an oppositional “feminine” other. “[T]here is,” Brown writes, “a respect in which Socrates and Plato end up reinforcing Athenian constructions of politics as irredeemably male and corrupt while glorifying philosophy as female, powerless and pure” (Brown Reference Brown1988, 613). I submit that the gennaion pseudos is the site where Socrates grapples most directly and boldly with the philosophical requirements of overcoming this prevailing patriarchal dichotomy. With the lie, Socrates reclaims the “feminine” act of deception from the Hesiodic and Athenian logic of genos gunaikōn and imagines it anew in the politicizing terms of the maternal and nurturing chōra. This is not the appropriation of a feminine power by and for a masculine political-philosophical project, but rather a subversive deployment of “femininity” that challenges the grounds of the categories of masculinity and femininity which structure both the polis and the operation of (Platonic) philosophy itself. The gennaion pseudos consequently does not merely reveal the genos gunaikōn to be a pseudos; its very performance presumes and makes it so. Only a choric deception—i.e., one that proceeds ig/nobly—can loosen political and philosophical attachments to ideas of nobility which, being patriarchal, are fundamentally false. It is this philosophically ennobling power of ignobility that the gennaion pseudos at once crystallizes for Plato’s readers, cultivates in Socrates’s addressees, and itself embodies.
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to the editor and three anonymous reviewers at Hypatia for their generous and incisive feedback. Great thanks also go to Ayla Amon, Sam Chambers, Iona Gitt-Henderson, Claire McKinney, Samuel Stevens, Michiel Van Veldhuizen, and the participants at the Johns Hopkins University Political Science seminar.
Patrick T. Giamario is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is a political theorist with research and teaching interests in critical theory, the history of political thought, and aesthetic philosophy. Patrick is the author of Laughter as politics: Critical theory in an age of hilarity (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and is currently working on a book on Plato’s noble lie and the democratic possibilities of deception.
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