Tuomela, Liisa
(Helsingin yliopisto, 2014)
The aim of this intellectual historical study is to examine the views of the later Stoics Seneca the Younger, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, Hierocles and Marcus Aurelius on the sameness of the virtues of man and woman, a question which gives a very non-anachronistic perspective on sameness, otherness, equality and inequality in Greek and Roman thinking. Other authors and material discussing women s virtues are used as an ideological background and context.
The basis of the study consists of two thoughts found in Stoicism since its beginning: that the individual virtues are common to all human beings and that virtue as such is natural and possible to all. It is obvious that these two thoughts can be found also in the later Stoics, discussed most intentionally and consistently by Musonius who also most unambiguously equates woman with human being . Thus, even bravery is not a masculine but a human virtue, and the sameness of man and woman does not mean that a woman becomes "masculine", but their sameness is based on their common (rational) humanhood. Equality resulting from sameness is especially in Musonius not only theoretical but also practical in a wider sense and on a larger scale than usual, above all in the division of tasks, whereas Seneca, advocating many traditional ideals, constructs the gender of women mostly very conservatively and even reacts negatively to contemporary changes in women s social/societal roles and spheres. He also refers to women s emotional "weakness", but does not see it as specific only to women and seems to be convinced that women, too, can overcome it and be (at least in principle) equal in virtue - emphasising thus, after all, the fundamental sameness rather than otherness of women.
The views of the later Stoics provide a rather exceptional and ungendered perspective on individual virtues, capacity for virtue and philosophical education, as well as on sameness, otherness, equality and inequality, and what is "masculine", "feminine" or "human". Thus, their views are also an important contribution to discussions of who a "full" human being is, in an era when a "human being" was in the first place a (free) man.