In Like a Captive Bird: Gender and Virtue in Plutarch, Lunette Warren demonstrates how, for Plutarch, gender and virtue are inextricable. Warren examines this intertwinement over the course of an Introduction (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 (“Therapeutic Principles”), Chapter 3 (”Tension and Resolution”), Chapter 4 (“A Virtuous Ideal”), Chapter 5 (“A Queer Ontology”), Chapter 6 (“Parallel Lives”), and a Conclusion. Warren states their aim as follows: “to remain true to the source, to say something about the way Plutarch viewed the world and the people in it, and perhaps thereby to say something about the internalization of structures of power and domination along gendered lines” (p.10). In their preface, Warren explains how their book has developed not only from their doctoral work but also from a personal interest in finding acknowledgements of queerness in Plutarch’s works, ranging from Advice to the Bride and Groom, Virtues of Women, The Creation of the Soul—all to no avail. In short, Warren seeks to deconstruct Plutarch’s attitudes to, and treatment of, women and marriage in the Moralia and Parallel Lives.
In the Introduction, Warren meticulously shows us the lay of the land in current Plutarch studies, with a focus on Plutarch’s attitudes towards gender and virtue. According to Warren, a previous lack of attention to Plutarch’s views on the moral education of women accounts for the variation in contemporary views of Plutarch’s attitudes on the topic. After a chapter outline and an introduction to Plutarch’s psychagogic program, Warren points out that this sort of moral education addressed to both men and women cannot work unless it reaches its intended audience. For this reason, they make a case for Plutarch’s implied female audience and the latter’s involvement in educational pursuits. Hereafter, Warren provides an overview of the texts considered (including but not limited to On Isis and Osiris, Advice to the Bride and Groom, Virtues of Women, The Creation of the Soul in the Timaeus, On Love, Virtues of Women, Sayings of Spartan Women, as well as the Lives) and the book’s theoretical framework (pointing out previous scholarship’s overreliance on Foucault, Warren includes feminist theorists such as Butler, Irigaray, and Sedgwick, whilst questioning just how helpful Plutarch himself is to feminist theory). Warren stresses the importance of difference and intersectionality, as well as the “matrix of domination”—the latter is particularly complex in Plutarch’s works. Thus, Warren seeks to fill the gap in previous scholarship by combining their study of gender and virtue in Plutarch with the additional theoretical framework of the psychagogic program, whilst keeping in mind theories of power structures and intersectionality.
Warren devotes much of Chapter 2 (“Therapeutic Principles”) to determining what psychagogy is and what it is not. They start with an overview of the difference between pedagogy and psychagogy on the one hand, and between practical, popular, personal, eclectic philosophy and psychagogy on the other. Warren argues that Plutarch’s approach leans closest to the psychagogic practice (“the art of leading the soul to virtue,” 28); its appeal lies in its malleability for its intended audience, especially applicable for the conjugal focus in Plutarch’s ethics. Warren builds further on the much-studied area of Plutarch’s use of exemplarity in moral education and devotes a large portion of the chapter to the relationship between the presence and absence of speech (telling markers of difference in Plutarch) and the latter’s relation to an individual’s moral condition (specifically, Plutarch’s examples of parrhēsia, here defined as “‘frank speech’ or truth telling,” 45). Throughout the chapter, hierarchy and asymmetry in gender, difference, and the asymmetrical relationship between the philosopher/teacher/husband and their subordinated pupil/wife are guiding threads, as Warren concludes that “as a therapeutic practice of self-formation, psychagogy is therefore ultimately concerned with relationships of power and in particular the internalization of the matrix of domination” (p.65).
In Chapter 3, “Tension and Resolution,” Warren focuses on Plutarch’s perspective on the contradictions that arise from “the real and the idealized notions of womanhood” (67). Warren provides a lengthy and insightful overview of the nature and history of “reproductive difference” (especially within the domestic and conjugal sphere). Specifically, Warren illustrates how Plutarch engages with and differs from Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories of the binary oppositionality between the male and female. Overall, though, Warren regards Plutarch’s medical views as traditionalist and posits that Plutarch links reproductive biology for a large part to social identity; in other words, reproductive difference determines who receives power and dominion over whom. This question of “subordination through natural difference” then informs the gendered virtue that Warren ascribes to Plutarch, particularly in his depictions of women engaged in public activities ranging from the cultural to the religious to the economical. Plutarch does not apply the same set of rules to all of the women in his works: therein, a woman’s treatment and license to act depends on her social status, lineage, wealth, and ethnicity or even her level of self-control.
In Chapter 4, “A Virtuous Ideal,” Warren starts by considering Plutarch’s modes of moralism that previous scholarship has identified, the different approaches towards moralism that his works take, and the importance of metaphysics in Plutarch’s moral philosophy. This is, once again, where psychagogy comes in. Here, Warren points out how knowledge (and access thereof) is a significant and liberating tool that will enable pupils of psychagogy to transform their soul. For the case of the “conjugal self,” the husband’s guidance and knowledge will be the main components towards a wife’s moral progress. For Plutarch, the mirror becomes an important symbol to illustrate how the wives in his works should reflect and complement their husbands—an image that poignantly summarizes Plutarch’s main views on gender and virtue. Warren suggests that Plutarchan gender ideas and ideals transcend strictly sexual difference: examples include Plutarch’s “link between beauty, conjugality, and virtue” (137) or the multiple juxtapositions between andreia (with its own tensions between masculinity and manliness) and malakia (softness), applied to heteronormative and pederastic relationships. Warren concludes that Plutarch’s women are subordinated to restrictive and paradoxical demands, when it comes to masculinity and virtue. For their conjugal, domestic, and reproductive duties, their virtue needs to be feminine, whereas they are better served with performing a masculine type of virtue in the rare instances that they enter the political sphere, even though their actions ultimately remain restricted to the private sphere.
In their preface, Warren states that Chapter 5, “A Queer Ontology,” is their personal favourite: this is indeed the chapter that they make the most their own and that is the most independent from previous scholarship. Investigating Plutarch’s views of the “origin of evil” with a focus on The Creation of the Soul and On Isis, Warren argues for a more sophisticated view of Plutarch’s metaphysics of gender. Plutarch believes in a three-pronged system, instead of the traditional gender binary— “he is unique among the Middle Platonists for attempting a unitary interpretation of Plato’s work and the interpretations thereof” (167). Warren sets up Plato’s dualistic cosmogony to pivot to Plutarch’s metaphysics; while Plutarch remains ever the traditionalist when he espouses ideals of women’s subordination and harmony with their husbands and men in general, he still seeks to “rehabilitate the feminine by creating a third type” (168). Warren bases this reading on Plutarch’s exploration of a non-binary gender in On Isis, which functions as an allegorical, gendered interpretation of the Egyptian myth of Isis (variously identified as the feminine, the mother/nurse, Matter, the Corporal), Osiris (the masculine, father and creator, Reason and Intellect), and Typhon (who becomes the third type: the in-between, the non-corporeal, non-erasable destructive element, the “abject other,” originator of difference and the disorderly). Warren argues that Plutarch creates expectations for virtue that ultimately hinge on the restrictions of a strict cisheteroconjugality, which is validated against, for Plutarch, illegitimate queer identities. Warren applies this metaphysical theory to The Life of Antony, in which they see similarities with On Isis because of Cleopatra’s presence, which causes a “triadic struggle for power” (210) and the emasculation of the soul, reminiscent of the myth of Typhon in On Isis.
In Chapter 6, “Parallel Lives,” Warren directs their gaze to the Parallel Lives, the work’s status as a philosophical and moralizing work, and the frequency of female characters found therein. Warren rightly comments on the relatively limited airtime that the Lives’ women receive in handbooks and companions on Plutarch, and on the even scarcer interest in the queer presences in Plutarch. While Warren starts by considering textual appearances of concepts such as malakia and andreia in the Lives, they then take a more thematic approach: women commonly appear as framing devices in the Lives’ prologues (especially mothers and their influences on the statesmen), in the epilogues and afterlives of the subjects, and in digressions. Warren stresses the importance of synkrisis, not only in the Lives in general, but also in terms of conjugality and parallelism between respective Greek and Roman Lives. The Life of Artaxerxes becomes the focus of this chapter. This unparalleled Life, the only extant Life to feature a Persian, is fertile ground for considering gender and ethnicity, as well as the presence of deviant women and eunuchs both in this Life and in others such as the Alexander and Antony. Warren concludes that “the biographies are … not just about the virtue or vice of great men, but about the entire underlying ethics of domination and submission that regulates and reifies existing social structures” (265). While the conclusion may strike some as somewhat hurried, Warren returns to the inextricable performativity of gender and virtue and the vice of being “different” in Plutarch’s works (272).
In Like a Captive Bird, Warren impressively demonstrates their encyclopedic knowledge of Plutarch’s works, with which they engage closely and deeply. Additionally, their assertive command of Plutarch’s philosophy as well as contemporary gender and sexuality theories enrich the work. Warren’s preface comes with a disclaimer: Like a Captive Bird, stemming from their doctoral project, is a “loosely woven tapestry for the reader to unravel” (ix). As a result, while this web-like structure may pose an interesting challenge for anyone who is familiar with Plutarch, readers on their first foray into Plutarch’s time, works, and philosophy, and/or gender studies would have profited from a more organized whole. Additional contextualization of Plutarch’s works and time (and especially the latter’s implications for how he may have formed his attitudes about gender and virtue) would have been welcome in the Introduction. Understandably, Warren had to make certain decisions in the interest of space and time. But shortening the multiple theoretical overviews (especially concerning Plato and Aristotle; sometimes Galen) and the numerous and at times repetitive returns to psychagogy could have been an acceptable compromise. Overall, however, Warren strikes a fine balance between engaging with the state of recent Plutarch studies, specific textual examples, and larger scale conclusions on Plutarch’s view of gender and ethics, most poignantly in his philosophical works. The print version of the book is well-edited and of good quality, and the book’s open access availability is an additional merit. In short, in Like a Captive Bird, Warren combines academic and personal interests in Plutarch in fascinating ways and offers a valuable synthesis of Plutarch’s views on gender and virtue, furthering this important conversation.