The Curious History of Phyllis on Aristotle

The cover story on the latest edition of Distillations, the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s excellent magazine, traces the history of truth serums and related efforts to compel people to tell a truth they might want to keep secret. The section on hypnosis, “the first modern method for coaxing out buried truths,” includes these images.

The top image is lithograph poster from ca. 1900. It shows a hypnotist doing what hypnotists did best: making people behave in strange and unusual ways. Among the strange behaviors the one that jumps out as most remarkable is the centuries old visual trope of a young woman riding an old man. This is clearly an example of Phyllis on Aristotle.

The story of Phyllis on Aristotle dates back to the 13th century in German and French versions, but is much better known from John Herold’s Latin version from the 14th century.[1] Herold was a Dominican who compiled a number of exempla that could be used in sermons. According to this version, Aristotle had warned his student, Alexander the Great, to avoid intimate affairs with his wife, Phyllis. Alexander should, instead, concentrate on philosophy. Phyllis was understandably upset that her husband was shunning her and particularly angry at Aristotle for encouraging him to do so. To exact revenge, Phyllis started flirting with the old philosopher until finally seducing him and humiliating him by riding him like a horse while Alexander hid and watched. The story is short and worth reading:

Once upon a time, Aristotle taught Alexander that he should restrain himself from frequently approaching his wife, who was very beautiful, lest he should impede his spirit from seeking the general good. Alexander acquiesced to him. The queen, when she perceived this and was upset, began to draw Aristotle to love her. Many times she crossed paths with him alone, with bare feet and disheveled hair, so that she might entice him.

At last, being enticed, he began to solicit her carnally. She says,

“This I will certainly not do, unless I see a sign of love, lest you be testing me. Therefore, come to my chamber crawling on hand and foot, in order to carry me like a horse. Then I’ll know that you aren’t deluding me.”

When he had consented to that condition, she secretly told the matter to Alexander, who lying in wait apprehended him carrying the queen. When Alexander wished to kill Aristotle, in order to excuse himself, Aristotle says,

“If thus it happened to me, an old man most wise, that I was deceived by a woman, you can see that I taught you well, that it could happen to you, a young man.”

Hearing that, the king spared him, and made progress in Aristotle’s teachings.[2]

The point of this exemplum seems to have been to warn men of the threatening power of women. If even the wise and most learned Aristotle could be reduced to a rude animal by lust and the wiles of a woman, how much more would lesser men suffer. Initially the story probably reinforced other exempla that illustrated similar ideas, e.g., Adam and Eve, Samson and Delilah.

In the late 15th and early 16th centuries fear of powerful women and their ability to overturn accepted social and cultural norms breathed new life and significance into the story. At the same time a market for mass produced images was emerging throughout Europe.[3] Artists quickly adapted the story and produced countless drawings, woodcuts, engravings, and paintings of Phyllis on Aristotle, making it one of the most common and recognizable visual expressions of the power of women topos. These images reinforced a constellation of anxieties and fears that also contributed to witchcraft accusations and persecutions across Europe.

In the early part of the century German artists seemed to corner the market on Phyllis riding Aristotle. In 1530 Lucas Cranach the Elder painted a colorful version of the story, showing an opulently dressed but otherwise somewhat restrained Phyllis riding Aristotle somewhere out in the country. Unlike most of these depictions, Cranach’s Phyllis is not holding a riding crop or a set of reigns, grasping instead Aristotle’s beard.

Subduing Aristotle was, apparently, not sufficiently degrading (or perhaps titillating). Soon artists were depicting Phyllis naked. In 1513 Hans Baldung Grien produced another version of the story, this time a woodcut showing a naked Phyllis holding in one hand a riding whip suggestively behind Aristotle and in the other the reigns that were attached to the bit in the philosopher’s mouth. In this version Phyllis rides Aristotle around inside a walled garden.

By the middle of the century a naked Phyllis was common, still brandishing a riding crop and holding the reigns, the bit firmly in Aristotle’s mouth.

In the context of profound social and cultural changes of the 16th and early 17th centuries, and not least the problem of witchcraft, we can see these images as expressions of male anxiety and fear. But they enjoyed a curious history that seems to have outlived their obvious relevance. Three hundred years later the story of Phyllis on Aristotle enjoyed a revival of sorts.

Throughout the 19th century the tradition of Phyllis on Aristotle resurfaces in a number of diverse places. In the earliest years of the century, Père Enfantin included a brief description of a kind of parlor game where one penalty required a young man to get down on hands and knees and to walk around the circle of players carrying a young woman on his back. Each man she passed kissed her.[4]

Towards the end of the century, the French playwright Pierre Wolff wrote a play titled Le Cheval d’Aristote. And then, bringing us back to where we started, at the end of the century the story of Phyllis on Aristotle found a place in the hypnotism movements in the U.S.

Around the turn of the 20th century the Donaldson Lithography Company produced a set of posters that hypnotists or theaters could use to advertise their shows.[5] The hypnotist dressed in his fine suit stood to one side and made people do all sorts of extraordinary things. Two of these posters use the Phyllis on Aristotle story to reflect the powers of the hypnotist to invert or overturn social and cultural norms. In one the young woman has subdued an older man. In the other, the young woman rides a man who bucks in an effort to throw her off.[6]

We can easily explain the enduring relevance of the Phyllis on Aristotle motif as just the perennial male anxiety about powerful women. There is, no doubt, considerable truth to that explanation, but it doesn’t help us understand why this particular story of women upending society and more specifically this particular visual trope remained popular. Whatever the reason, the ever youthful and attractive Phyllis was still riding around on Aristotle more than 400 years after overcoming the old philosopher.