Politics and Beauty

In her essay, "Political Women: Ancient Comedies and Modern Discourse," Arlene Saxonhouse writes about the need for difference--difference between the public and private spheres (indicated in the past through the difference between men and women). One of the Aristophanic comedies she discusses, Ecclesiazusae, also shows beauty and ugliness as a dichotomy that an elimination of difference would downplay or eliminate. She writes:

"The equation of the ugly and the beautiful is the final expression of the boundaries that were overcome during the previous action of the play. It poses for us a world in which dichotomies are subject to question: the dichotomy between male and female, between public and private, and now between ugly and beautiful. ... This final scene, though, forces us to question whether we can live in such a boundary-free, indeed evaluation-free world; whether, on the contrary, we do make divisions, see differences, and indeed require those differences as the basis of our lives in the community insofar as we are individuals able to make choices. ... The abandonment of all natural delight in the beautiful (and therewith the good) is the more weighty consequence of the law attempting to obscure distinctions between the attractive and the repulsive."