The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [144]
Like the other newly-weds of his day, the philosopher would have been showered by his mother with a hail-storm of nuts, figs, dates, coins to ensure the prosperity and fertility of his union. Like them too he may have trooped over to the Sanctuary of Aphrodite Ourania to deposit one silver drachma in the stone wedding-themed slot machine recently identified and now on display in the new Acropolis Museum – a payment to ensure Aphrodite’s blessing for the nuptials. And on his wedding night Socrates’ way would be torch-lit to bed by his mother, his new wife’s new mother-in-law.20
Remembering his years in the company of beautiful boys, in particular Alcibiades, all golden hair, gym-hardened muscles, a knowing light in their eyes, it can be easy to forget that Socrates had a wife. But he did, Xanthippe, a woman who has come down to us in the literature of antiquity as a termagant, a nagging shrew.
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XANTHIPPE
District of Alopeke, Socrates and Xanthippe c.420 BC
Socrates is said to have had an exceeding antipathy towards almost all women, either because he had a natural disinclination to their society, or because he had had two wives at the same time (since that was permitted by a decree passed by the Athenians) and they made wedlock hateful to him.
Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, 15.20.61
WAR WAS PLAYING ITS STATISTICAL GAME in Athens. Almost a decade into the Peloponnesian conflict and the male Athenian population was horribly reduced; plague and battle had killed one-third, maybe as many as one-half of the men in the city-state. Over the last eight years the city had come to resemble Sparta more closely than it could have liked. In Sparta the city streets were filled with women; all men between the ages of seven and thirty were away training in their military camp. And now Athena’s city had a new, similar imparity – because so many men had been hacked down by Spartan swords.
And so some of Athens’ women had multiple partners. Aspasia is one example. Although we hear little of her fate after Pericles’ death we know that she quickly became the consort of a sheep-dealer. Not only were there re-marriages, but bigamy was both legal and becoming increasingly popular. Different women were allowed to bear more than one man’s child. Looked at another way, well-bred women were allowed to be both a wife and a mistress at the same time. Some sources would have us believe that Socrates also married bigamously.2
Socrates and Euripides are amongst a number of fifth-century Athenian men who, it was reported, were allowed by the circumstances of the war to become bigamists. There are two possibilities here. One is that the stories of Socrates’ bigamy took hold because they conveniently emphasise his oddness, his eccentricity. (Useful too for a quick bit of misogyny. Xanthippe is shrewish because, tediously, she not only has a poor eccentric for a husband, but also has to host an even younger model – a girl called Myrto – in her household.) The other is that the stories were true.
Socrates’ two young women were said to squabble furiously (Socrates was in his late forties by this time, Xanthippe probably only just twenty), and when Socrates guffaws at their backbiting, they ‘would pull him apart … saying he was a most foul man with snub nostrils, receding brow, hairy shoulders and bandy legs.’3 In one episode that has given great delight to cartoonists and engravers down the centuries, Xanthippe, raging after one argument with her maddening philosopher spouse, pours the contents of a bedpan over Socrates’ head; ‘I always knew that rain would follow thunder,’4 sighs the philosopher, resignedly mopping