Page - 30 - in Austrian Law Journal, Volume 1/2017

ALJ 1/2017 Leo Peppe 30 argument looking first to the public sphere, then to the private sphere and finally to that of the animal world. Notable in this regard is that for Plato, the evil would lie in the fact that women might obtain freedom and equal rights compared to men. Suffice it to note that Cicero summa- rizes Plato’s text and changes his generic “women” to uxores, wives: for Cicero, women are wives and the city order is subverted when wives demand legal equality with their husbands. By con- trast, the state is well ordered when the woman/wife is in an unequal legal condition, whereby the feminine sphere is essentially limited to that of the family. Plato’s mention of liberty alongside legal equality (thus denying the right to both) vanishes in Cicero: faced with both legal spheres mentioned by Plato, Cicero opts for equal rights alone. Women are absolutely precluded from participating in the political dimension. But perhaps the thought process underlying Cicero’s translation is yet more subtle and revealing: the Roman woman is already free and has her own social, civic and judicial spaces, albeit inferior to those of her husband. Such equality would cause upheaval in the res publica. For a woman, participation in the governing of the state – above all participation in popular assemblies, communio comitiorum – is unthinkable. At the same time, when we read Cicero, it becomes easier to understand why in Rome civis, a word that already represents a concept with a sufficient level of free “fellow citizenship”, was sufficient for all. Athenian society, however, felt the need to differentiate even on a linguistic level between male and female citizens with two pairs of words that are both connected to the city: on the one hand, the masculine astòs and feminine astè and, on the other, masculine politès and feminine polìtis. The easiest explanation in this respect is that for the female citizen, only astè is used, whilst for the male political protagonist, the word is politès. In actuality, however, things are not so simple: it is merely a cliché to state that the feminine polìtis is extremely rare and late. The word is also found in inscriptions and is common in the language of trials. Sophocles and Euripides use it, as does Plato himself who fears the political liberty of women as one of the principal hor- rors of popular democracy. In particular, when in his utopia he writes29 that the best way to en- sure women’s participation in the polis is to make them participate in military activities, then – and this is the only instance in the whole Platonic corpus – Plato uses the feminine polìtis. Furthermore, this word is used many times in Aristotle’s Politics, at the beginning of the third book,30 where he discusses citizenship: before Pericles’s law of 451 BCE, the Athenian citizen had to be born from a polìtis, but after 451 – from a polìtis and a politès, whereby the plural politai is used for the couple, husband and wife. Perhaps Aristotle had to declare that the true citizen was only the man: this statement reflected Athenian society, in which women were unusually subor- dinate. On the other hand, he also stretched this reality in an ideological sense in order to allow men to preserve a pre-eminence that language seemed to rule out. All this took place in a society καὶ τἆλλα πάντα οὕτω (563d) μεστὰ ἐλευθερίας γίγνεται.”; “’By all means,’ he said. ‘And the climax of popular liberty, my friend,’ I said, ‘is attained in such a city when the purchased slaves, male and female, are no less free than the own- ers who paid for them. And I almost forgot to mention the spirit of freedom and equal rights in the relation of men to women and women to men.’ ‘Shall we not, then,’ said he, ‘in Aeschylean phrase, say whatever rises to our lips?’ ‘Certain- ly,’ I said, ‘so I will. Without experience of it no one would believe how much freer the very beasts subject to men are in such a city than elsewhere. The dogs literally verify the adage and ‘like their mistresses become.’ And likewise the horses and asses are wont to hold on their way with the utmost freedom and dignity, bumping into everyone who meets them and who does not step aside. And so all things everywhere are just bursting with the spirit of liberty.’” 29 PLAT. leges 7.814C. 30 ARISTOT. pol. spec. 1275B 22–34.