Classical definition of effeminacy

Malakia (μαλακία, "softness", "weakliness") is an ancient Greek word that, in relation to men, has sometimes been translated as "effeminacy".

The contrary characteristic in men was karteria (καρτερία, "patient endurance", "perseverance").

The standard Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott gives as English equivalents of the Greek word μαλακία:

The following are citations of the use by Greek writers of the adjective μαλακός ("soft").

The Socrates character in Plato's Republic observed that "exclusive devotion to gymnastic" produces "a temper of hardness and ferocity" and that "exclusive devotion to music" produces a temper "of softness and effeminacy" The word that Jowett here translates as "effeminacy" is not μαλακία (malakia), which he renders as "softness", but ἡμερότης (hemerotes). Paul Shorey's translation of the latter word in the Loeb Classical Library is "gentleness". Some contributors to blogs and Internet forums paraphrase this passage as "too much music effeminizes the man" and present it as if the word malakia were used in the original text.

In other passages in Plato's Republic too, the words malakia or malakos are not translated as "effeminacy" or effeminate. Thus the reason given for not familiarizing the guardians with poetry that pictured an afterlife of terrors was "lest the habit for such thrills make them more sensitive and soft than we would have them." The word translated as "soft" is malakoteroi, an image of softened metal that Plato used also of the effect of certain kinds of music: "when a man abandons himself to music to play upon him and pour into his soul as it were through the funnel of his ears those sweet, soft, and dirge-like airs of which we were just now speaking ... the first result is that the principle of high spirit, if he had it, is softened like iron and is made useful instead of useless and brittle. But when he continues the practice without remission and is spellbound, the effect begins to be that he melts and liquefies till he completely dissolves away his spirit, cuts out as it were the very sinews of his soul and makes of himself a 'feeble warrior'."

Aristotle writes that, "of the dispositions described above, the deliberate avoidance of pain is rather a kind of softness (malakia); the deliberate pursuit of pleasure is profligacy in the strict sense."; "One who is deficient in resistance to pains that most men withstand with success, is soft (malakos) or luxurious, for luxury is a kind of softness (malakia); such a man lets his cloak trail on the ground to escape the fatigue and trouble of lifting it, or feigns sickness, not seeing that to counterfeit misery is to be miserable." and "People too fond of amusement are thought to be profligate, but really they are soft (malakos); for amusement is rest, and therefore a slackening of effort, and addiction to amusement is a form of excessive slackness."

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