Athens
Socrates, the great Greek philosopher widely considered to be the father of the Western philosophical tradition, really did have a wife. Her name was Xanthippe, and she was 35 years younger than her famous husband. Socrates was born in 470 BCE; Xanthippe in 435 BCE. She has come down in history as a terrible shrew, and is even mentioned by Petruchio in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, who refers to Kate “as Socrates’ Xanthippe or . . . worse.”
But few people have ever told Xanthippe’s side of the story. What would her memoir be like were she to tell us herself? What was it like being married to a man so much older than she was and seen by many as something of a public nuisance? What was it like living in Athens during the nearly endless Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE), in which Athens suffered terribly? Mostly, what was it like being an intelligent, able young woman in an era when women were not considered citizens and couldn’t participate in most civic affairs? What would it be like to live with the irony that your city, Athens, is named after the goddess of wisdom, Athena, but you are not considered worthy to have a role in government? Now, Xanthippe tells her own side of things.
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“I put my head down in my hands. “Very well, father,” I said meekly. ‘Very well. I will meet this old crank here in the courtyard tomorrow. It is true you have been patient with me. I know you do not want an ‘old maid’ living in your home!” Then I began to cry. I rarely cry, if you must know. But that day I did. I felt my whole life closing in about me. I longed for a world in which women could choose freely whom they were to marry, or whether they were to marry at all. I longed for it. But I knew it was never to be. It is like being in a trap with no way out. And I felt doubly bad because most women just accepted it!
But I was not most women, and I knew that I was doomed to have to bear up under a whole system that I could not abide.
The next morning I was sitting in the courtyard as I had promised when this bug-eyed, barefooted old man stepped in. I knew he had been talking to my father. I looked up at him. I tried hard not to be absolutely disgusted. He was much older than I was, and none too clean. This was, indeed, the crank who held forth in the Agora with whomever might come by to argue with him. He had a reputation for being a pretty good rhetorician, but he was also considered a subject of jokes and derision.
“Hello,” he said, “You must be Xanthippe.”
“I am,” I said. “And you must be Socrates.”’
— Excerpt from Chapter Two: The Dialogue of Marital Possibilities