Here follows an abbreviated list of those to whom I owe thanks, gratitude, and unpayable debts, whether as teachers, readers, writers, editors, students, child-minders, those with good counsel, and/or saving graces:

At the beginning of the 15th century, no one in Catholic Europe was reading Plato’s Republic—because no one had a copy, let alone one in a language they could read. Though the works of Aristotle had long been a commonplace, all that was obtainable of Plato’s books, whole and entire, was an imperfect...

What are the circumstances that lead to the discussion of women, from 451c to 457c, the section known as the First Wave, at the beginning of Book V of the Republic? Why do women make a figure in the argument all of a sudden? Women, ladies, the female sex as a topic of conversation, fill up less than half a book of the Republic’s ten; though to be sure, this is one...

The...

In the First Wave, Socrates initially described the partnership between his male and female guardians as a common hunt (συνθερεύειν, 451d). Although Glaucon’s objections derailed the conversation off into another direction, Socrates returns to the image in the Second Wave, again making the common hunt the activity...

The Republic is not thought of as a Platonic dialogue associated with hunting, any more than it is considered among the dialogues concerned with eros, that ever-fascinating quality of soul; yet...

Among Socrates’ many strange laws for his best city in the Republic, one of the strangest is his insistence in the First Wave that the women exercise naked along with the men, as part of their common...

Among the many ironies in Socrates’ insistence that the most necessary city consists alone in four or five necessarily childless men, is his tacit reassignment of the trade of weaving to an anér—and out of the hands of women. Not merely the provenance of the respectable wife, weaving was also a female profession in its own right, peopled both by free and enslaved women....

Although Socrates is firm that the eyebrow-raising plan for women and men’s naked exercise makes a part of the common education of the guardians in the Republic, he is not without further plans to fine-tune the potential awkwardness of this arrangement. At the end of the First Wave, having obtained final agreement that the women will now be educated and share all in common with the...

To many readers of the Republic, nothing is more infuriating than the suggestion that Socrates “didn’t really mean it” or that he is “just kidding” about the just city; and indeed, there could hardly be a more trivializing approach. On this account, Socrates is reduced to a kind of low humorist, a two-bit stand-up comedian of the spirit,...

The Greek language happily possesses more than a few words and phrases that announce a subtle difference in the diction of its thought: the mere existence of the word “kalos” for...

What, after all, is the reason to read Plato’s Republic, if one is interested in the Woman Question? One thing is clear: one has to be interested in the question as a living question; one...

Adam, Adela, 147, 150n6, 150n10, 181, 190n17, 200n5

Mary Townsend received her PhD from Tulane University in 2015, MA from the Catholic University of America in 2010, and BA in liberal arts from St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD. She is presently a visiting assistant professor at Loyola University, and has also taught in Tulane’s honors program and at Bard Early College in New Orleans. Her...