Gender and Rhetoric in Plato’s Political Thought

This study explores the relation between Plato's Republic and Laws on the set of issues that the Laws marks out as fundamental to the comparison--the unity of the virtues, the role of women, and the place of the family. Plato aims to persuade men to abandon the views of the good life that Greek cities and their laws inculcate as the only life worth living for those who would be real men and not effeminate weaklings.