led Achilles to give his life for the purpose of avenging the death of his friend Patroclus.[306] What chiefly distinguishes the higher love from the lower is, in the opinion of the pupils of Socrates, purity; and this kind of love does not exist, in their opinion, between men and women.  In discussing this higher kind of love both Plato and Xenophon consistently and persistently ignore women, and not only do they ignore them, but they deliberately distinguish between two goddesses of love, one of whom, the celestial, presides—­not over refined love between men and women, as we would say—­but over the friendships between men only, while the feelings toward women are always inspired by the common goddess of sensual love.  In Plato’s Symposium (181) this point is made clear by Pausanias: 

“The Love who is the offspring of the common Aphrodite is essentially common, and has no discrimination, being such as the meaner sort of men feel, and is apt to be of women as well as of youths, and is of the body rather than of the soul....  But the offspring of the heavenly Aphrodite is derived from a mother in whose birth the female has no part,—­she is from the male only; this is that love which is of youths, and the goddess being older, there is nothing of wantonness in her.”

PLATONIC LOVE OF WOMEN

In thus excluding women from the sphere of pure, super-sensual romantic love, Plato shows himself a Greek to the marrow.  In the Greek view, to be a woman was to be inferior to man from every point of view—­even personal beauty.  Plato’s writings abound in passages which reveal his lofty contempt for women.  In the Laws (VI., 781) he declares that “women are accustomed to creep into dark places, and when dragged out into the light they will exert their utmost powers of resistance, and be far too much for the legislator.”  While unfolding, in Timaeus (91), his theory of the creation of man, he says gallantly that “of the men who came into the world, those who were cowards or led unrighteous lives may with reason be supposed to have changed into the nature of women in the second generation;” and on another page (42) he puts the same idea even more insultingly by writing that the man

“who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed existence.  But if he failed in attaining this, at the second birth he would pass into a woman, and if, when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil, he would continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in the evil nature which he had acquired.”

In other words, in Plato’s mind a woman ranks half-way between a man and a brute.  “Woman’s nature,” he says, “is inferior to that of men in capacity for virtue” (Laws, VI., 781); and his idea of ennobling a woman consists in making her resemble a man, giving her the same education, the same training in athletics and warlike exercises, in wrestling naked with each other, even though the old and ugly would be laughed at (Republic, Bk.  V.).  Fathers, sons, mothers, daughters, will, in his ideal republic, go to war together.