Our earliest sources on the historical Sokrates–Platon and Xenophon–tell us surprisingly little about Sokrates’s marriage. Sokrates’s wife Xanthippe briefly appears in one scene in Platon’s dialogue Phaidon, where she runs up to Sokrates and cries on his shoulder just before he is about to drink the cup of hemlock that will kill him. Sokrates orders Kriton to send someone to take her home so that she will not be there when he is forced to commit suicide. She is never mentioned ever again in any of Platon’s other dialogues.
Xenophon mentions Xanthippe in his Memorabilia, where he presents this amusing conversation between Sokrates and his son Lamprokles:
Sokrates: “Which, think you,” asked Socrates, “is the harder to bear, a wild beast’s brutality or a mother’s?”
Lamprokles: “I should say a mother’s, when she is like mine.”
Sokrates, however, speaks up for his wife, defending her, pointing out that, even when she is nagging, she does all things out of love:
Sokrates: “And why should you be annoyed? You know well that there is no malice in what your mother says to you; on the contrary, she wishes you to be blessed above all other beings — unless, indeed, you suppose that your mother is maliciously set against you?”
Lamprokles: “Oh no, I don’t think that.”
In Xenophon’s Symposium, however, Antisthenes complains about how Xanthippe is argumentative and impossible to get along with, describing her as “a wife who is the hardest to get along with of all the women there are—yes, or all that ever were, I suspect, or ever will be.” Sokrates replies that Xanthippe’s disagreeableness was precisely the reason why he married her:
“I observe that men who wish to become expert horsemen do not get the most docile horses but rather those that are high-mettled, believing that if they can manage this kind, they will easily handle any other. My course is similar. Mankind at large is what I wish to deal and associate with; and so I have got her, well assured that if I can endure her, I shall have no difficulty in my relations with all the rest of human kind.”
Later writers seized upon the image of Xanthippe as a jealous shrew and began to portray her as cruel and abusive towards her husband. Ailianos tells a story in his Miscellaneous History that Alkibiades once sent Sokrates a cake as a gift. Xanthippe mistook the cake for a lover’s present and stomped it into the ground. When Sokrates came home and saw the trampled cake, he remarked to her, “Then you won’t get any of it, either.”
In his Life of Sokrates, Diogenes Laertios went further than any other writer in portraying Xanthippe as an abusive wife. One famous story, told by both Diogenes Laertios and the earlier historian Ploutarchos, claims that Sokrates once had a fierce argument with Xanthippe, after which she dumped a chamber pot over her head. Sokrates commented that he should have known to expect a shower after a storm.
These anecdotes are doubtlessly apocryphal. They are not reported in any of the earliest sources and do not appear until very late. Furthermore, they stand starkly at odds with Platon’s portrayal of Xanthippe as a loving and devoted wife. Even Xenophon’s portrayal of Xanthippe as nagging and irritating clearly distinguishes her as well-intentioned.
Unfortunately, the trouble for poor Sokrates does end here! Diogenes Laertios tells us that Sokrates actually had two wives, not just one, saying that, due to the shortage of men after the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians were forced to temporarily legalize polygyny and Sokrates actually married a second wife, a woman named Myrto.
Although Diogenes Laertios does not in any way portray Myrto as a shrew, she naturally picked up the reputation of being such from the stories about Xanthippe. The Dutch painter Reyer van Blommendael in his painting Socrates, Xanthippe, Myrto, and Alcibiades, probably painted in around 1655, Myrto is shown as Xanthippe’s accomplice in the famous chamber pot-dousing episode (although in this painting, the chamber pot has been transformed into a pitcher of water), while the handsome youth Alcibiades looks on.
Myrto is mentioned by the earlier writer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia, but Ploutarchos only says that Sokrates took her under his care and provided her with a place to live, since she had been living in absolute poverty and did not have anywhere to eat or sleep. He never mentions anything about her having ever been Sokrates’s wife.
Furthermore, the writer Athenaios of Naukratis, writing at around the same time as Diogenes Laertios, mentions Myrto, but comments that the story about Sokrates’s having held multiple wives had been refuted by the earlier writer Panaitios.
Ultimately, Myrto was largely forgotten about in later centuries, while Xanthippe was immortalized as the archetypal shrew. In the Early Modern Period, she was so notorious that William Shakespeare mentions her in his play The Taming of the Shrew, commenting that the character Katharina is “As old as Sibyl and as curst and shrewd As Socrates’ Xanthippe, or a worse.” Shakespeare did not need to explain the allusion because Xanthippe was already familiar to his audience.
Modern writers have made attempts to rescue Xanthippe from two thousand years of tales relating her abusiveness. Unfortunately, she has still yet to shrug off her shrewish reputation.
