Born to go hungry. Female physiology, ethics and dietetics from presocratics to late antiquity

The negative perception of woman’s body2, even before the misogynistic exegetical attempt of reductio ad marem, is already present within the general reflection that the presocratics dedicate to the φύσις in an effort to place the sense of female body in a complete and coherent view. As a matter of fact, starting from the logic of hot-cold and right-left oppositional pairs, that characterizes a wide and cross-cultural background, the model proposed in the pre-Hippocratic reflection leads to the religious, cultural and professional association of the Asclepiads of Cos, that transmits it to the long lasting tradition of the Hippocratism. Due to this solid conceptual scaffolding, the male interpretation of the female body, in the Greek wisdom speculation, allows to build around the more or less active role assigned to the woman in embryogenesis, an anthropopoietic model that links the origin of mankind to gender dietetic3. If it is true, indeed, that conception, sexual identity and the transmission of hereditary traits are, in one way or another, influenced by the nature of the hosting οἴκησις and that the factors that govern this conditioning seem to be the same that the presocratics identified for the origin of mankind, in the same way it is necessarily true that feeding, in its nutraceutic value4, follows and tempers female physiology, which is cold and moist5 since the anthropogenetic model.