Malina Buturović (Princeton University)
A Political Asklepios: Justice, Heredity, and Reproductive Control in Plutarch’s De Sera
In an infamous passage in Republic III drawing out an extensive analogy between justice and medicine (and judges and doctors, in particular), Plato observes that Asklepios used to refuse treatment to bodies in need of constant care, because their offspring would require similar care (408d-e). Moments later, continuing the analogy between medicine and justice, he makes a similar point about souls and the differing treatment they must receive at the hands of justice: “as many as are ill-natured and impious with respect to soul, they will kill” (401a). In his dialogue De Sera Numinis Vindicta, Plutarch turns to a similar set of questions, clearly and deliberately echoing Plato’s discussion (Hilton; Hirzel; Helmig; Frazier). But he makes precisely the opposite point, first regarding bodies (561f) and then regarding souls: “if it is worth to care for and protect the body that is the offspring of a hurt body, is it fitting to allow a family resemblance of wickedness to be born and sprout up in a new character?” (561f). In Plato’s articulation, heredity vitiates the possibility of cure; in Plutarch’s articulation, it is precisely “undesirable” “heredity” (bodily and ethical) that entitles human beings to “cure.” On the face of it, Plutarch’s position sounds at least more palatable than Plato’s eugenics. But Plutarch’s vision of “cure” and heredity swiftly turns out to be equally politically motivated. Like Plato, he places “reproductive control” at the heart of his account of justice, envisioning reproduction as a crucial site of human vulnerability to punishment and reward. On closer inspection, both texts reflect a partially overlapping biopolitics of chronic illness, reproductive control, and cure (Flemming; Okajangas).
Rather than an outright departure from Plato’s vision, therefore, I suggest that Plutarch’s arguments reflect a careful reworking of Plato’s eschatology and penology, in dialogue with newly prominent Peripatetic “sciences of heredity,” including physiognomy, the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, and embryology. These “sciences of heredity” have differing fates in the Hellenistic world, but explode in popularity in the aftermath of the publication of the Andronican editions (Lennox; Meeusen); they play a significant, if understudied, role in Plutarch’s work. In Hellenistic and Imperial Peripatetic thought, heredity is the domain of the eikos: probability, likelihood, and possible manipulation (Lehoux). The Peripatetic “sciences of heredity” theorize possibilities of intervention, manipulation, and categorization in connection with animal and human heredity. Plutarch’s approach to heredity reflects precisely this interest in intervention and manipulation: a doctor, Plutarch tells us, can act on the “seeds of disease” at risk of being passed from parent to child in the brief interval of time when they are still malleable (akrosphale). Whereas the problem of reproductive control in Plato consists fundamentally in regulation of who reproduces and when, therefore, Plutarch imagines a much more wide-ranging set of possible interventions in and manipulations of heredity. In tracing out Plutarch’s engagement of Plato’s biopolitical “history of medicine” in Republic III, this paper signals the deep entanglement of “ethical” and “biological” perspectives on heredity, reproductive control, and illness within the tradition of Platonist thought.