The Lie of Genos Gunaikōn : Maternity, Nurturing, and Philosophy in Plato’s Noble Lie

In one of the Republic ’s great aporias, Socrates establishes his truth-loving city by way of deception. The “noble lie” aims to persuade citizens that they were nurtured in and born from the earth, where a god mixed metals into their souls indicating their capacities to rule. What do the lie’s multiple visions of maternity and nurturing—and the role of the conventionally “feminine” act of deception in imparting them—reveal about kallipolis and Platonic political philosophy? This article contends that, despite its resonances with Athens’s patriarchal autochthony myth, the noble lie radically challenges the dominant Athenian vision of maternity and nurturing as passive acts of a constitutively apolitical genos gunaikōn (“race of women”). Reading the lie’s figures of the earth ( gē ) and the “land” ( chōra ) alongside Plato’s Timaeus , Menexenus , and Statesman uncovers a conception of maternity and nurturing as partially self-organizing political acts that disrupt paternal lines of nobility. The noble lie ennobles the polis by prompting its addressees to conceive of “nobility” as a function of politics rather than patriarchal inheritance. The lie demonstrates how Plato’s political philosophy is feminist in the limited, yet decisive sense that it entails a deployment of the “feminine” that reveals genos gunaikōn itself to be a lie.