en men and women, as we would say--but over the friendships
between men only, while the feelings toward women are always inspired
by the common goddess of sensual love. In Plato's _Symposium_ (181)
this point is made clear by Pausanias:

"The Love who is the offspring of the common Aphrodite
is essentially common, and has no discrimination, being
such as the meaner sort of men feel, and is apt to be
of women as well as of youths, and is of the body
rather than of the soul.... But the offspring of the
heavenly Aphrodite is derived from a mother in whose
birth the female has no part,--she is from the male
only; this is that love which is of youths, and the
goddess being older, there is nothing of wantonness in
her."

PLATONIC LOVE OF WOMEN

In thus excluding women from the sphere of pure, super-sensual
romantic love, Plato shows himself a Greek to the marrow. In the Greek
view, to be a woman was to be inferior to man from every point of
view--even personal beauty. Plato's writings abound in passages which
reveal his lofty contempt for women. In the _Laws_ (VI., 781) he
declares that "women are accustomed to creep into dark places, and
when dragged out into the light they will exert their utmost powers of
resistance, and be far too much for the legislator." While unfolding,
in _Timaeus_ (91), his theory of the creation of man, he says
gallantly that "of the men who came into the world, those who were
cowards or led unrighteous lives may with reason be supposed to have
changed into the nature of women in the second generation;" and on
another page (42) he puts the same idea even more insultingly by
writing that the man

"who lived well during his appointed time was to return
and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a
blessed existence. But if he failed in attaining this,
at the second birth he would pass into a woman, and if,
when in that state of being, he did not desist from
evil, he would continually be changed into some brute
who resembled him in the evil nature which he had
acquired."

In other words, in Plato's mind a woman ranks half-way between a man
and a brute. "Woman's nature," he says, "is inferior to that of men in
capacity for virtue" (_Laws_, VI., 781); and his idea of ennobling a
woman consists in making her resemble a man, giving her the same
education, the same training in athletics and warlike