Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-01T01:01:28.288Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Plato's Mother and other Terrible Women

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Peter Walcot
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the eighth and ninth books of the Republic Plato describes the four inferior or corrupt types of government – timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny – and the four related types of human personality – the timocratic, oligarchic, democratic, and tyrannical man (544dff.). Closest to the ideal, and first therefore in sequence of decline, is the timocratic state, the term timocracy being employed not in the Aristotelian sense of a polity demanding a property qualification of its ruling class but with ‘the peculiar meaning of government by the principle of honour (τιμ). The timocratic state, it is claimed (545cff.), develops when its members no longer live in harmony but come into conflict as the guardians join brides and bridegrooms ‘inopportunely’ (παρ καιρν, 546d), so that their offspring are neither well-born nor blessed by fortune. The result is a form of government which retains some of the features of its good predecessor, anticipates some of the features of its worse successor, and also boasts some features unique to itself, such as a preference for the ‘spirited’, men better suited for war than for peace. Above all else such a state will be distinguished by a cultivation of competition and a passion for honour: διαϕανστατον δ’ ναὐστν τι μνον… ϕιλονκαι κα ϕιλοτμαι (548c).

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , April 1987 , pp. 12 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud XXII (1932–1936), London, 1964, p. 133Google Scholar.

2. Barker, Ernest, Greek Political Theory (London, 1918), p. 251Google Scholar.

3. Andersson, Torsten J., Polis and Psyche, a Motif in Plato's Republic, Studia Graeca et Latina Gothoburgensia XXX (Göteborg, 1971), p. 161Google Scholar.

4. See Sommerstein's, A. H. note on verse 64 in The Comedies of Aristophanes vol. 3, Clouds (Warminster, 1982)Google Scholar.

5. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U., Platon 1. Leben und Werke (Berlin, 1919), p. 429Google Scholar.

6. See Davies, J. K., Athenian Propertied Families (Oxford, 1971), pp. 329ffGoogle Scholar.

7. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud XI (1910), London, 1957, pp. 57ffGoogle Scholar.

8. Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece (Ithaca and London, 1978), p. 314 n. 28Google Scholar; cf. Wender, Dorothea in Peradotto, J. and Sullivan, J. P. (edd.),Women in the Ancient World: the Arethusa Papers (Albany, 1984), pp. 213–28Google Scholar.

9. See MacDowell's, D. M. note on verse 98 in his Aristophanes, Wasps (Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar.

10. I am in agreement with Dover, K. J. when he argues ‘that there is no overt homosexuality in Homer’, Greek Homosexuality (London, 1978), pp. 196ffGoogle Scholar.

11. See, most recently, Knox, B. M. W. in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, 1 Greek Literature (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 325ffGoogle Scholar.

12. Cf. Roberts, Patrick, The Psychology of Tragic Drama (London and Boston, 1975), pp. 164–5Google Scholar.

13. For Coisyra, see Shear, T. Leslie Jr, Phoenix 17 (1963), 99ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. The Nature of History (London, 1970), p. 109Google Scholar.

15. The article by Clark, L. Pierce, M. D., Psychoanalytic Review 10 (1923), 56–69Google Scholar was the third in a series ‘Unconscious Motives underlying the Personalities of Great Statesmen and their Relation to Epoch-Making Events’.

16. Ibid., 67.

17. Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Empire (London, 1947), p. 3Google Scholar.

18. Ibid., pp. 7 and 8; cf., twenty years on, Milne, R. D., Alexander the Great (London, 1968), p. 20Google Scholar: ‘one hesitates to indulge in the technical jargon of modern psychology, but there are many indications in Alexander's life of the notorious Oedipus complex.’

19. Volume II Sources and Studies (Cambridge, 1948), pp. 319–26.

20. Ibid., p. 325.

21. Badien, E., CW 65 (1971), 45Google Scholar.

22. Alexander the Great (Omega edition, 1975), p. 58Google Scholar; cf. also Hammond, N. G. L., Alexander the Great (London, 1981), p. 265Google Scholar.

23. But compare Fox, Lane, The Search for Alexander (London, 1980), p. 67Google Scholar, who is content merely to remark that the friendship between Alexander and Hephaestion ‘was exceptionally deep and close’.

24. Alexander the Great, p. 57.

25. Alexander of Macedon (Penguin, 1974), p. 56Google Scholar.

26. First published in the States in 1974 by The Psychohistory Press and then in London two years later.

27. deMause, (ed.), A Bibliography of Psychohistory (New York and London, 1975), p. viiiGoogle Scholar.

28. Cf. Hamilton, J. R., G&R 12 (1965), 117–24Google Scholar.

29. Shrinking History: on Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory (New York and Oxford, 1980), p. 156Google Scholar.

30. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (1978), 599–626CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. On the historical background see Clarke, M. L., The Noblest Roman (London, 1981), pp. 9ff.Google Scholar, a book which also serves as a sober corrective.

32. The Roman Revolution (Oxford, paperback edition 1960), p. 58Google Scholar; cf. Syme, , Sallust (Cambridge, 1964), p. 61Google Scholar.

33. Op. cit., 620.

34. Op. cit., 611.

35. Op. cit., 613.

36. Op. cit., 612.

37. Huzar, Eleanor Goltz, Mark Antony, a Biography (London, Sydney, Dover, N. H., 1986), p. 21Google Scholar.

38. See Clark, Gillian, G & R 28 (1981), 205Google Scholar and Hallett, Judith P., Fathers and Daughters in Roman Society (Princeton, 1984), p. 249Google Scholar.

39. The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951), p. 47Google Scholar.

40. The Hibbert Journal 26 (1927–1928), 461Google Scholar.

41. Ibid., 465–6.

42. St. Augustine (London, 1933), p. 27Google Scholar.

43. Ibid., pp. 28 and 34.

44. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Assoc. 6 (1957), 470–1Google Scholar.

45. Ibid., 474.

46. Ibid., 478–9.

47. Dittes, James E., Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 5 (1965–1966), 133CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48. Campbell, J. K., Honour, Family and Patronage (Oxford, 1964), p. 168Google Scholar.

49. This paper was delivered as the 1986/87 Presidential Address of the Cardiff branch of the Classical Association.