Warrior Women in Ibn Rushd’s Commentary on Plato’s Republic: Mythico-Barbarian Geography in the Case for Female Guardians, an Unsolved Passage

Abstract

In his commentary on Plato’s Republic, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) discusses the case for female guardians. Besides following Socrates’s argument for female warriors, which cites the efficiency of female guard dogs, Ibn Rushd introduces an additional argument: that the female capacity for warfare is evident from the inhabitants of certain regions. Unfortunately, the precise formulation of the regions or groups he intends to mention is obscure in the existing manuscripts. Rosenthal...