Introduction

Late antiquity provided the setting for a quiet revolution in embryology at the hands of the Neoplatonists. The early embryological theory of the Hippocratics had achieved some degree of balance between the roles of the sexes by positing that the male and the female make equal contributions to reproduction: each can produce both strong (androgenetic) and weak (gynecogenetic) seeds. ¹ This balance (such as it was) was surrendered by subsequent embryologists. Notably, the two dominant theories in the subsequent period leading up to the rise of Neoplatonism both regarded the female contribution to reproduction as decidedly inferior to that of the male. In the Aristotelian tradition the female had notoriously been assigned the role of the material cause. ² Whereas the male is the sole provider of a true seed, which is the active bearer of the offspring’s form, the female’s colder constitution frustrates the natural production of seed, rendering her ‘infertile.’ ³ In lieu of a true seed, she contributes menstrual fluid, an imperfect concoction of blood that must be acted on by the efficient and formal principle in the male seed if it is to be transformed into a viable human offspring. ⁴ And despite a long tradition of opinion to the contrary, ⁵ Galen’s innovations do not ultimately succeed in completely overturning Aristotle’s view of the female. ⁶ To be sure, Galen argues at length against Aristotle’s contention that the female does not provide a seed of her own, ⁷ but Galen continues to maintain that the female constitution is fundamentally colder than that of the male, ⁸ and that as a result the female seed is moister and colder ⁹ and the female’s reproductive parts are incomplete, ¹⁰ all of which leads him to conclude, at least on occasion, that the male seed must be counted as the true active cause of reproduction. ¹¹ In Neoplatonic embryology, by contrast, we witness a return to a more balanced etiology. In fact, the female acquires a much more active causal role than Aristotle, Galen or even the Hippocratic authors envisioned. Far from merely supplying matter, many Neoplatonists identify the female rather than the male as the immediate active cause of reproduction.