It was common talk that at the banquets, for which he forsook his home, he drank more than any one else present. The misguided man, moreover, seems to have had a devil, or demon, constantly instigating him to some singular deed or remark. No wonder Xanthippe’s beauty faded! No wonder that the being looked at askance at every meeting of the Society of Athenian Dames she attended resulted in her gradually isolating herself from social affairs! Confined to the narrow limits of her small home, soured by neglect, yet ever faithful to the satyr Socrates, who left home early and drank till the wee sma’ hours at night, it is evident that the trials she contended with were great. But, you say, she must, as a cultivated, ambitious woman, have greatly enjoyed and as greatly profited by the opportunities of converse, infrequent but priceless, with the great dialectician when he actually was in the bosom of his family. That is the very point at issue. Our contention is that Socrates’s conversation, if he conversed with his wife at all, was the very straw that broke the camel’s back. Imagine being kept awake every night, say from two to four by a husband, more or less the worse for wine, and obliged to converse with him in question and answer, and being constantly held down to rigid logical rules of expression! What woman could endure having to voice her complaints in logical phrase? How the war-horse of dialectics would snort in the excitement of battle at hearing the feminine argument “Because” advanced in answer to some impertinent question on his part.
It is undoubtedly true, and Plato incidentally corroborates it, that one day when Xanthippe was out of wood, and the week’s ironing was all waiting to be done, Socrates, in sheer laziness, and from no ascertainable motive but pure cussedness, stood still for twenty-four hours continuously. His apologist adds that he was entranced in thought, and a partial public has believed it. But tell me, oh twentieth century wife, what effect it would have had on your nerves and temper if your Thomas or Jack were to treat you so?
If he had only brought his friends home occasionally and brightened Xanthippe’s life somewhat in that way! Even the rough, uncouth Xenophon would have been better than nobody. But this garrulous Greek seems to have had no redeeming domestic features—unless we except what Xenophon records in his Memorabilia (II. 2) as to his admonishing his eldest son, Lamprocles, to be grateful to his mother, which was only decent in the old man, as we infer from the context that Xanthippe had furnished Lamprocles with liberal pocket-money.
We have a profound sympathy with Xanthippe. If she became a shrew, it was Socrates’s fault. But it does not appear that she ever failed in the great duties of womanhood. And it ill beseems either the man or his apologists to malign a hard-working, much-abused woman whose defects of temper were not congenital, but created and increased by this malicious maieutic philosopher himself.
Democritus at Belfast[[3]]
Tyndall, high perched on Speculation’s summit,
May drop his sounding line in Nature’s ocean,
But that great deep has depths beyond his plummet,
The springs of law and life, mind, matter, motion.
Democritus imagined that the soul