The Great Phyllis and Her Pupil, Aristotle
I remember reading in a feminist history that Aristotle’s philosophy ‘Master’ was not Plato but the Great Phyllis (actually a ‘Mistress’ in other words), a philosopher poet who punished Aristotle for his arrogance and hubris by making him carry her around in the streets of Athens piggyback (a common way of honouring and aiding elders — still done in San Francisco Chinatown by the strong, youthful grandchildren of tiny little aged Chinese ladies). This was in the fading days of matrifocal/matrilineal Greece, when women still had great status and honour as philosophers and poets, like Sappho.
He conceived of a great anger that came out in his later writings in the Platonic School as straight up misogyny, codified in his theories of paradigmatic masculinity and ‘defective’ femininity, with him glossing on Plato’s theories of the errant womb. In later centuries, the figure of Phyllis was demoted to that of a spoiled princess who took advantage of Aristotle’s besottedness to command him to carry her around on all fours, like a beast, in order to humiliate him. This apocryphal tale is the one we have inherited.
It was a favourite trope in medieval Church lore and classical humanism, as shown here in Hans Baldung Grien’s woodcut, ‘Aristotle and Phyllis,’ of 1513 (German), where Phyllis is portrayed as a harlot and seductress, wearing nothing but her court hat, humiliating the ‘Great Man’ by forcing him, also naked, to carry her around on his back before she would grant him her favours.
They are shown in the inverse of the ‘Enclosed Garden’ (a common metaphor for Mary and her closed, virginal womb) with a blasted tree and a lobed ‘polluted’ vessel (symbolizing the sexual lust-provoking feminine body) in an alcove on the rear wall. This signifies Phyllis’ corrupt feminine essence as a ‘polluted vessel’ and Daughter of Eve (as does the apple tree in leaf and fruit above their diorama, and the obvious vulva shape in the bark of the tree directly behind her), and her ‘polluted’ feminine blood, attributed to witches for use as a charm in their rituals, as an aphrodisiac or spell, to provoke lust in men, control them, and bring them to heel.
Phyllis is shown wielding a small whip over Aristotle’s buttocks, while reining him in with a bit in his mouth, like a 16th-century classical humanist’s notion of a 4th-century BC Greek dominatrix.
