Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being

Conclusion

Conclusion The invention of the new philosophical discourse in the fourth century B.C. meant not just the evolution of logical procedures for reasoning about the world. It involved the justification of a social order based on ideas of hierarchical difference, of the natural inferiority of women to men, of foreign slaves to citizens, of animals to slaves. The shift from analogical poetic discourse, and the abandonment of the artistic forms of the democratic polis-tragedy, old comedy, and monumental civic sculpture -were accompanied by a rupture in thinking about difference. Discourse in the fifth century centered on a definition of the Greek male citizen, the subject of polis culture. The thinkers and artists of the fifth century used a process of analogy to focus on their audience, the body of citizens who made up the city. Through a series of polarities, Greek/barbarian, male/female, human/animal, the culture centered on the Greek male human being who engaged in the civilizing institutions of marriage and its opposite, war. The institutions of war and marriage were explored in the myths of Centaurs and the Amazons, figures from the archaic past who were seen as enemies of culture, who violated the patterns of exchange exemplified by marriage. Their violation of culture brought about polemos, war between differing kinds, between the Greek male human being and his bestial, barbarian, female enemies . The articulation of their opposition in works of art clarified the role of the citizen warrior, who was at the center of the city's discourse, who was the subject of the logos. The narrative structure of the polis' art represented the citizen male in various attitudes in relation to the "other"- fixed in static opposition on early classical metopes, set at the boundaries of the Parthenon, 150 Conclusion 151 marking the limits of the city's ritual space, at last entering inside to invade the city's sacred territory. Tragic drama participated in speculation about difference, in the project of defining the city and its citizens. The "others"barbarian , Centaur, woman/barbarian/animal-were all represented in tragedy, shown in changing postures of resistance to the polis culture. Finally the contradictory position of women-as objects exchanged inside, as "others" outside-became visible at a moment when other polarities of definition were breaking down. Greeks were not a uniform kind of being, any more than barbarians , or women. At the end of the Peloponnesian War, the city could no longer sustain a definition of itself based on a series of polarities. Difference was recognized within the polis: stasis replaced po/emos. Difference in the fourth century was rationalized in terms of logical relationships which went beyond simple polarity and analogy . There was a new recognition of degrees of similarity and difference, and also of the necessity for grounding social relations more firmly, in this time of crisis, in supposedly natural attributes. Analogy was not abandoned, but the analogy of the master/slave relationship was given prominence and extrapolated to rationalize other relationships of subordination. The philosophers extended the master/slave relationship, analogically, to all forms of connection. They broadened that model of relation to include every level of organization. Thus while they operated analogically, in a manner similar to that of the fifth-century thinkers, their model involved subordination at all levels to a higher order. The master was superior to his slave, but subordinate in another way to nous. The rupture between a purely analogi~al and a hierarchical model occurred in large part because of the political and social crisis of the fourth century, because of the need to rationalize subordination in the face of a challenge. The unquestioned acceptance of slavery as a natural phenomenon, the dependence on the institution of slavery, led to a new discursive formation, a new way of understanding difference. The great chain of being was created to justify the relationship of mastery. The Greek male citizen had dominated culture in the fifth century as well; his prominence was justified in the fourth 152 CENTAURS AND AMAZONS century not in terms of absolute difference from other kinds, in terms of the dream of masculine self-sufficiency, but rather as a natural result of his proximity to the divine nous. The fact of his centrality, articulated in the fifth century, was overshadowed by a concern for the nature of hierarchy. The polis and its central actor had reached their limits, been defined...