Introduction

Scholars have noted that the Stoics, like many of the Hellenistic philosophical schools, held nascent or protofeminist views, and that their commitment to such views may even represent the first wave of feminism. Recently, this has prompted scholars to explore whether and to what extent Stoic philosophy is compatible with feminist philosophy and feminist thought more broadly. Consequently, some philosophers have contended that the Stoic philosophical programme is compatible with (or even amenable to) contemporary feminist ethical theories to such an extent that we can posit a ‘feminist Stoicism’. Even beyond the confines of academia, Stoicism (and Neo-Stoic philosophy) remains relatively popular, in part because of the philosophy's egalitarian and universalistic positions, especially regarding gender and class.

This paper intends to further explore the compatibility between Stoic and feminist philosophy. Scholars have previously examined this topic by focusing primarily on Stoic ethics and Stoic political theory. However, the question of whether Stoic and feminist philosophy are compatible in other areas has been given little attention. My aim is to offer a preliminary analysis of how compatible Stoic epistemology is with some prominent and central views within feminist epistemology. While some scholars have been optimistic about a feminist Stoicism, I will argue that some of the fundamental commitments of Stoic epistemological theory pose significant challenges to the viability of a fully satisfactory feminist Stoicism.

A note on methodology: given that neither Stoic nor feminist philosophy represent static philosophical doctrines, with both undergoing revisions and shifts in emphasis over time, my approach in this paper is to concentrate on some of those epistemological commitments that appear to be essential or foundational to each philosophical programme. That is, I examine those commitments without which Stoic and feminist epistemology would cease to be recognisable as themselves. I believe this approach has two benefits. First, by demonstrating that there is philosophical tension in the central tenets of each epistemological theory, we may more clearly see the depth and significance of the incompatibility.

Male late antique Christian authors frequently used female characters as a means to further their own ideological ends.1 This essay explores how early Christian novels exploited rape culture, or the socially normalised sexual violence that is symptomatic of toxic masculinity, as a vehicle for depicting ideal Christian women and, by association, the ideal Christian community.2 Our analysis begins with Thecla, the apostle Paul's fictional female counterpart in the second-century Acts of Paul and Thecla (hereafter APT). As itinerant preacher and wonder-worker, Thecla rivals Paul, but it is her ability to resist sexual assault that marks her as his superior. One of the most popular female saints in late antiquity, Thecla and her story captured the imaginations of subsequent authors who used Thecla as a model for other female protagonists. The fourth-century Acts of Cyprian and Justina (hereafter ACJ), for example, uses Thecla as a prototype for Justina. Like Thecla, who singlehandedly overpowers her attacker, Alexander, Justina defends herself against her assailant, Aglaidas, in the ACJ. Aglaidas then hires the magician Cyprian to seduce her with erotic magic, and Justina's ability to resist the demons Cyprian summons leads not only to Cyprian's conversion, but to the conversion of all of Syrian Antioch. In the ensuing centuries, Christian authors, such as Cyril of Scythopolis and Palladius, continued to depict women falling victim to sexual assault and erotic magic. Unlike Thecla and Justina, these later female characters became increasingly passive, portrayed instead as victims requiring the protection of male church leaders.

As late antique Christianity evolved from a counter-cultural movement into a religion of empire and dominance, its use of sexual assault as a figurative representation of its relationship with the wider Mediterranean society evolved as well. By depicting sexual assault as perpetrated by individuals hostile to Christianity, the APT and ACJ relieve early Christian communities of any responsibility for toxic masculinity by projecting it onto their ideological rivals.

Ovid's account of Iphis and Ianthe from Book Nine of the Metamorphoses tells of miraculous transformation and escape from near death. Iphis, born a girl to a father who considers raising a girl a burden and promises to condemn a girl born to him to death, is only saved by the miraculous intervention of the goddess Isis, who guides Iphis's mother, Telethusa, to raise the child secretly as a boy. The secret is threatened, however, by Iphis's betrothal to the young woman Ianthe. Iphis longs for her but fears the coming marriage and what it will reveal in the private spaces of marital intimacy. It is only when Isis once again intervenes that the story turns. While leaving Isis's temple, where Telethusa has made a final desperate plea, Iphis transforms (9.786–91):

The modern stereotype of the ancient Roman man, particularly the Roman military man, is of a powerful but controlled figure, capable of exacting both violence and restraint. Virtus, literally ‘manliness’, implies courage, control over others such as slaves or provincials, and also self-control. Roman historiography is replete with anxieties surrounding a decline in virtus via mechanisms such as foreign, particularly Eastern, luxuries. In such scenarios, surrounded by exotic foods, clothes and jewels, moralists see manliness as compromised by a lack of self-restraint: masculinity is here not so much toxic, as merged into unmanliness or femininity. But is it possible to experience the opposite problem: to have too much manliness? This chapter considers Roman narratives of wild northern barbarians, the Germani, who live frugally, indulge in no luxuries and are extremely courageous; and it explores their potential as both role models and cautionary tales of masculinity gone too far.

MASCULINITY AND ETHNOGRAPHY

Roman representations of Germanic peoples tend towards the extreme. The Germani are huge, extraordinarily strong and ‘fiercer than wild beasts’, with preternatural toughness that involves wearing scanty animal skins and bathing in the cold water of rivers. They lack discipline: libido (‘desire’, ‘wilfulness’) is a word frequently applied to them, but not in a sexual sense, implying instead that they are ungovernable in civic and military scenarios. Their attitude towards war makes no sense to the Roman observer: Julius Caesar claims that they wage it for practice or for fun and to create desolation, rather than to build empire. In the only exclusively ethnographic work of ancient Rome, Tacitus gives us Germani who are both squalid barbarians and admirably unconquerable.

The antiquarian Aulus Gellius preserves an account by the Roman Platonist L. Calvenus Taurus, in which he describes how Plutarch acts as a slaveowner when one of his slaves challenges his authority and his conduct as a philosopher. The slave's challenge prompts Plutarch to oversee a cruel beating of the slave. What interests Taurus as a Platonist is whether or not Plutarch is angry as he administers this punishment: the story concludes with Plutarch listing certain physical attributes to prove that he is not angry, but instead serenely detached. Because this story depicts Plutarch as detached both from the pain that he causes to others and from his own emotions, his conduct appears to be an example of what psychologist Terry Kupers terms toxic masculinity. Indeed, Plutarch fits a number of Kupers’ required attributes, such as disregard for others’ pain, the need to dominate, and a casual attitude towards the use of violence.

However, Kupers also insists that anger is fundamental to toxic masculinity, writing that the code followed by many toxically masculine men requires that they never display emotions other than anger. Kupers, who provided one of the initial academic definitions of toxic masculinity, was exploring masculinity in the American prison system. Kupers argues that toxic masculinity is a tactic for prisoners, for when these men become enraged at the slightest disrespect from other prisoners or prison staff, they signal the cost of disrespecting them. Similarly, Plutarch signals both to the beaten slave and the slaves beating him the costs of disrespecting their owner.

After reviewing Kupers’ definition of toxic masculinity, I use the term to argue that readers can understand Plutarch as angry in this passage, despite the evidence he provides. As a Platonist, Taurus is interested in the question of whether or not Plutarch's anger has overridden his control of his senses. Kupers’ definition of toxic masculinity decentres the physical attributes that Plutarch himself offers as evidence of his tranquillity and instead focuses on the cruelty that he calmly administers against the slave.

Eleven twenty-four a.m., on a Sunday, in St Louis, Missouri. KTVI-TV, Fox channel 2, has just uploaded an interview on its website. The star: Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for the state's United States Senate race, challenger to incumbent Senator Claire McCaskill. It is August 19th, 2012. Akin does not yet realise it, but his Senate bid is now over.

Why? During the interview, Akin had been asked about his position on abortion rights, to which he is firmly opposed, even to exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape and incest. The key phrase in his response will become (in)famous in the weeks to come: ‘It seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, it's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.’ After the interview has gone live, Twitter erupts in outrage, McCaskill quickly releases a statement condemning Akin's remarks, Akin claims he misspoke but does not actually change his position, and the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, issues not one but two statements denouncing what Akin said.

Akin went down to defeat that November. McCaskill coasted to re-election in a race that the demographics and political climate suggested she should have lost – as, in fact, she subsequently did during her next re-election campaign, in 2018, to a less toxic Republican opponent, Josh Hawley, now famous for supporting the January 6, 2021 insurrection. The 2018 campaign was haunted by the spectre of Akin: dozens of news stories contrasted McCaskill's newer challenger with Akin and warned that one Akin-like moment could upend Republican hopes of taking McCaskill's seat once more.

Akin's words are now a classic example of a ‘Kinsley gaffe’. Gaffes occur when politicians unintentionally say something that causes them political problems. A Kinsley gaffe is a particular subspecies: when politicians slip up and say what they actually think.

Introduction

I believe that when we do history, we write from where we currently sit whether we want to or not. Necessarily, then, we find ourselves executing a careful dance to show good enough faith with the past and to ask questions of it that may be anachronistic to a degree but which matter in the present moment. Questions asked about how people in the past lived and made sense of their milieux are framed by our present hopes and fears for the future. And so, I have come to write on medieval Byzantium and this term ‘toxic masculinity’. And I write with hope for the future and anxiety for it, for while the Byzantine evidence shows a partially favourable picture of male homosociality, there is also what we can with justice call toxic masculinity lodged in the durable structures of the medieval empire, structures which have current analogues. Toxic masculinity addresses two different but connected areas. It designates harm to men themselves when they try to live up to and embody the ideals of masculinity. It also speaks of how the behaviour of men harms others. In other words, it points to how a man harms himself in his pursuit of manhood and how his practices of masculinity harm others too.

The goal of this chapter is twofold. In the first place, I mean to serve the interests of history and elucidate the Byzantine past. I consider the manifold discourse around the tenth-century emperor Nikephoros II Phokas, who, from the moment of his assassination, inspired evaluations that ran at cross purposes. In the second place, I am interested in how our notion of toxic masculinity sheds light on dynamics in both the life of Nikephoros and the Byzantine perspectives on him. In his life, a predatory masculinity in the arena of war coexisted with a strong impulse towards religious asceticism pursued in a single-sex setting, and toxicities obvious and not so obvious were present in both.

Gendered violence associated with ‘toxic masculinity’ is common in the sources and topics which we often teach to students encountering Classics for the first time. Drawing upon our experience as teachers of first-year cohorts, this chapter considers our responsibility as primary conduits for such material. We employ a definition of toxic masculinity provided by Harris O’Malley writing for the Good Men Project: ‘a narrow and repressive description of manhood, designating manhood as defined by violence, sex, status and aggression’. Our case studies are drawn from a first-year Roman civilisation course taught at the University of Tasmania. We discuss how toxic masculinity pertains to three key topics that students encounter during this course: the rape of Lucretia, Catullus’ erotic poetry, and Julius Caesar and the decline of the Republic. We offer reflections on our students’ responses to these topics, and we consider how teachers might use the concept of toxic masculinity to facilitate student engagement with them. Especially in the wake of 2017's #MeToo movement, we suggest that our students’ increasing familiarity with discourse about entitled and violent masculine cultures provides an opportunity for first-year Classics teaching, because it prompts teachers and students to consider the ways in which cultural gender norms and expectations can play a powerful role in shaping a society and its history.

For many students worldwide, a first-year university course will be their first (and perhaps only) academic exposure to the ancient Greeks or Romans. We teach these courses with the hope that students will be inspired to pursue further study in Classics, and perhaps become Classics majors. It is therefore crucial to present material in a compelling and accessible way. But we must also be aware of how ancient sources resonate differently with new generations of students and refine our approaches accordingly.

I suspect that I am unlikely to shock anyone by suggesting that Cato the Elder, that stodgy and Stoic censor, held traditional Roman values in high regard. Consider, as an example, this fragment from a speech quoted by Festus:

Still from the beginning I held my entire youth apart in frugality and in hardness and in industriousness by working the fields, the Sabine rocks, and by digging up and sowing its flinty soil.

ego iam a principio in parsimonia atque in duritia atque industria omnem adulescentiam meam abstinui agro colendo, saxis Sabinis, silicibus repastinandis atque conserendis. (Festus p. 350 L. = ORF (4) no. 8, 128)

These few lines capture not only what we think we know about Cato, but more specifically the image of himself that Cato has chosen to project: that of a man who from his earliest years chose a life of self-discipline and self-denial, a path of labour, ennobled by his efforts in the most traditional of Roman pursuits, working the land.

Emma Dench has used this passage as an illustration of Cato's self-fashioning as a novus homo, or ‘new man’. It is, perhaps, not surprising that Cato the Elder as an outsider felt the need to embody an overt and excessive Romanitas (Roman-ness), especially in terms of how he exercised personal self-control (disciplina) as a feature of his masculinity, enabling his commanding performance in all these various male-coded pursuits. Yet, even as this represented a meaningful form of self-fashioning for Cato himself and a compelling persona in political wrangling, this portrait of disciplina does not earn universal acclaim. Anyone even slightly familiar with Cato's biography recalls that ancient perceptions of his behaviour – his harshness, his plain clothing and food, his cold self-containment – veer between admiration and disdain.

Marcus Aurelius, of course, had philosophical rather than scholarly reasons to reflect on death, but I’ve attempted to heed his call to not be careless, impatient, or contemptuous with respect to the mortuary record. To me, dying and the dead are woven deeply into the fabric of life and have much to teach about life in the past. Accordingly, this book has focused on mortuary behaviour with the conviction that it can tell us about Macedonian society; I can only hope you agree.

In the introduction, I laid out a series of goals. An overarching aim was to reconstruct Macedonian society based on the mortuary record. More targeted goals were moving away from narrow studies to look at the broader picture, syn¬thesising available data and interrogating historical narratives and expanding on them, particularly by using an intersectional framework to study women, chil¬dren, and the middling classes. We can now return to these goals and evaluate what this book has accomplished and identify some future directions.