Banca de DEFESA: HELENA ARAUJO FRANZON

Uma banca de DEFESA de MESTRADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
DISCENTE : HELENA ARAUJO FRANZON
DATA : 26/05/2026
HORA: 09:00
LOCAL: On-line
TÍTULO:

Outlaws: gender, citizenship, and political participation of women in Plato’s Laws.

PALAVRAS-CHAVES:

Plato, Laws, women, τιμαί, gender.

PÁGINAS: 96
RESUMO:

This dissertation investigates the political, civic, and social perspectives of women in Plato’s Laws. It challenges the long-standing historiographical narrative that consigns ancient women to the margins of civic life and views Plato’s later work as a conservative retreat, and the primary objective is to demonstrate that the Laws articulates a robust, although functionally differentiated, model of female citizenship. By placing Plato’s normative proposals into dialogue with the historical realities of classical Greece, the research seeks to reassess the categories through which political belonging is understood. The methodological framework adopts a theoretical approach to gender, utilising it as an analytical category to deconstruct post-suffragist biases and the narrow Aristotelian paradigm that equates citizenship exclusively with assembly voting and magistracies. Drawing on the concept of τιμαί (timai: honours, prerogatives, and ritual functions), the study redefines citizenship as a composite status of graded practices. This framework illustrates how historical Athenian women exercised substantive civic agency through religious cults, funerary rites, and property transmission. The investigation also relies on a direct textual analysis of the Laws, acting in dialogue with contemporary classical scholarship. The dissertation thus argues that the Laws represent a sophisticated recalibration of Platonic psychology and ethics. By replacing the rigid tripartite soul of the Republic with a unified model animated by the “golden cord” of reason, Plato removes structural barriers to virtue, making it accessible to the entire citizen body, irrespective of sex. Because the city’s happiness depends entirely on the virtue of all its inhabitants, the inclusion of women in Magnesia's educational and civic structures is a philosophical necessity rather than a mere instrumental measure. To achieve this, Plato applies Arithmetic Equality to the soul, mandating equal education, military training, and participation in choral performances (χορεία) and common meals (συσσίτια) for women. Simultaneously, he employs Geometric Equality to accommodate the biological realities of reproduction and domestic stewardship, resulting in proportional but vital civic duties. Magnesian women hold authoritative positions, such as the “ruling women” who supervise marriages, possessing the right to admonish male citizens to enforce state interests. Ultimately, the research concludes that women in Magnesia are not peripheral figures, but fully integrated citizens who are shaped by the laws, and their citizenship is shared in its moral foundations and educational programmes, even if it remains asymmetrical in certain external expressions. By rendering women explicitly and systemically essential to the maintenance, ethical formation, and continuity of the polis, Plato’s Laws offers a profoundly complex and vital articulation of female political belonging in antiquity.

MEMBROS DA BANCA:
Externa à Instituição - CINZIA ARRUZZA
Interno - ***.525.391-** - DELFIM FERREIRA LEÃO - UC
Interno - 3235243 - EDUARDO WOLF PEREIRA
Presidente - 1535405 - GABRIELE CORNELLI