SOCRATES: My art of midwifery is in general like that of midwives. The only difference is that my patients are men, not women. My concern is not with the body but with the soul that is in labour. The highest point of my art is the power to prove by every test whether the offspring of a young man’s thought is a false phantom or is something alive and real. I am so much like the midwife that I cannot myself give birth to wisdom. The common reproach is true, that, although I question others, I can bring nothing to light because there is no wisdom in me. This is because God constrains me to serve as a midwife, but has debarred me from giving birth.16
Socrates would have been under no illusions. He would have known what a bloody, churning, searing, dangerous, wonderful business it is, coming into this world. His mother must have come home tainted with the sweet-acrid smell of childbirth and stillbirths. She would also have come home polluted for at least five days, by her presence during the parturition. Childbirth was one of the many ways that women were thought to generate miasma, pollution, in the Ancient World.
And yet, despite knowing all of this, despite a childhood listening to rhapsodes (epic-poetry reciters) charm year in, year out around village camp fires with stories of demonic, intemperate, sex-crazed women – Helen, Klytemnestra, Medea, schemers who brought down the Age of Heroes – despite being nudged, sweaty-seated, faces red from the glowing embers, by his fellow boy-Athenians, the next-generation citizens; despite spending the majority of his waking hours at men-only gymnasia, or fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with only males, walking through the streets in which, during daylight hours, respectable women were conspicuous by their absence – despite all this, Socrates’ attitude to the female of the species appears unconventional and relatively welcoming.
For Diotima was not the only female character with whom Socrates had a rather unorthodox literary relationship – his conversations with Aspasia had (apparently) been more than a little unusual. Plato, who reports this in his dialogue Menexenus, is, one suspects, mildly uncomfortable with Socrates’ deference to Pericles’ fancy-woman. In the Dialogue, the two have had a memory contest to see who could recall more of a speech – Socrates his own words, and Aspasia Pericles’ famous funerary speech, which she was rumoured to have written.
SOCRATES: But I was listening only yesterday to Aspasia going through a funeral speech for these very people. For she had heard the report you mention, that the Athenians are going to select the speaker; and thereupon she rehearsed to me the speech in the form it should take, extemporising in part, while other parts of it she had previously prepared, as I imagine, at the time when she was composing the funeral oration which Pericles delivered; and from this she patched together sundry fragments.
MENEXENUS: Could you repeat from memory that speech of Aspasia?
SOCRATES: Yes, if I am not mistaken; for I learnt it, to be sure, from her as she went along …17
This is more than just a parlour game. Those with bardic memory at this stage of human development were the repository of all civilisation’s information. Wise men were wise because they had impressive recall. Homer’s epics, a touchstone for Ancient Greek life, were put onto the brain’s hard-drive and reproduced in public squares, on street corners, in private homes. A retentive mind was considered a great gift of the gods. It is fascinating that Aspasia is credited with such a gift.
Of course men had always been jealous of Aspasia; that interloper who benefited from Athenian nous, who wormed her way into the arms of their great Pericles and then ‘weakened his limbs’, as many Athenians saw it. That perfumed, jewel-spattered whore. A recent archaeological discovery suggests they might just have had some small justification. One of the heavy baubles dedicated up at the Parthenon to the goddess Athena – a gold tiara – is inscribed as the gift of Aspasia. Only an extremely wealthy person would have been able to afford such a fine offering.18 Even in a democracy men, and women, had ways of showing that they were, or had been, special.
In 438–436 BC the xenophobia directed at Aspasia came to a head. She was in court on charges of impiety – it could possibly have been her reported conversations with Socrates, and the other more radical philosophers of the day, that got her into such trouble.19 At the same time Pheidias was accused of embezzling public funds and Anaxagoras of denying the gods. Aspasia was – we are told by hostile sources – saved through the intervention of Pericles, who wept and moped around with more care for her fate than his own. She might have been saved from condemnation by the courts, but the parodying of this episode by Athenian playwrights suggests that Socrates’ association with Aspasia would not play out well for the philosopher.
What the characters of Diotima (and Aspasia) and Socrates do seem to have shared was a passionate belief in the potential of relationships. The Platonic Dialogues make it clear that relationships make our world better. Mutual commitment is wrapped in and gives birth to love. This love can bind marriages, cities, states, religions. Aphrodite does not just sponsor the poison-tipped arrows of Eros, but the lint-gauze of Harmonia. Heterosexual love can forge a path to virtue. And there is no doubt that when it came to real, human relationships Socrates could speak from experience. Because some time in the philosopher’s early to mid-thirties (Plato suggests thirty to thirty-five, and Aristotle recommends thirty-seven as the prime age to get hitched), he married.
Once a suitable partner had been selected for Sokrates Alopekethen, a series of customs, social and religious – unchanged for generations – would have been set in train. An Athenian wedding’s primary purpose was to legitimise the sexual union, the ‘gamos’, between a man and a woman. Groom and father of the bride-to-be sealed the pact with a firm handshake. Socrates and his ‘intended’ would have performed a series of pre-nuptial sacrifices, often with the accompaniment of marriage hymns and incense for Aphrodite. They would have purified themselves in the waters of the city – the sacred spring of Kallirrhoe or at the banks of Eridanos. Clean, rendered ‘extra’ fertile by the sacred waters, both man and girl-woman (most brides were fourteen or so) would have then doused themselves with perfume – myrrh was a favourite – both were garlanded and the bride was veiled.
After entering the bride’s family home, sweet with herbs and ribbons, a curious symposium would begin. Men down one side, women the other, wedding cakes made of sesame seeds were eaten, the sacrificed animals were roasted for the feast, there were bawdy songs (as with Greek weddings today, this whole process could last for three days) and then at last the bride’s father ‘presented’ his daughter to the groom. She would have lifted her veil, and now Socrates had a wife. The union was then witnessed by more citizens of Athens as the wedding procession wound its way, noisily, through the city’s back streets to Socrates’ family home.
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.
38
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 his brow.
But maybe this farcical situation, these pantomime gags told down time, held more than a kernel of truth. Athens at this time must have been reminiscent of Kabul 2002–10: ragged, war-torn, veiled women in the streets with no husbands, brothers or sons. Athenians were nothing if not pragmatic. The city needed repopulating. In fact the lack of a decree allowing for bigamy, rather than its presence, would have been odd.5 And we hear from Plato that Socrates was, at the end of his life, visited in jail by his three children: Lamprokles – a meirakion, a ‘young chap’; and Sophroniskos and Menexenos, paidia – small children. In terms of keeping Athens’ population stable, this was a bigamous arrangement that seems to have done the job. The age difference of Socrates’ offspring could indeed be explained by two wives. The mixed messages given out by the sources in antiquity about Socrates’ marital status could be because bigamy sits a little uneasily alongside many dreams of moral goodness. And we should remember that writers in the fifth century were typically bored by a man’s married affairs – which is why in all 100,000 words of Plato’s Dialogues, Xanthippe gets only two mentions.6
Still, Xanthippe (who must have been relatively high-born with a name like that, Xanthippe, Golden-Horsey; Pericles’ blue-blood father, for example, was called Xanthippos), it seems, was no pariah, she did have some friends. One of Socrates’ followers (and incidentally one of Plato’s rivals) was a man called Aeschines. Aeschines’ work was widely circulated up until the end of the second century AD, and then it fell out of favour. It was said that his own dialogues were in fact derived closely from Socrates’, which had been passed on to him by Xanthippe in gratitude for Aeschines’ friendship after the philosopher had been killed. Interestingly, Aeschines’ portrayal of Aspasia also seems to be an unusally sympathetic and subtle one.
Aspasia began a discussion with Xenophon himself. ‘I put a question to you, Xenophon,’ she says, ‘if your neighbour has a better horse than yours, would you prefer your own horse or his?’ ‘His,’ Xenophon replies. ‘Suppose he has a better farm than you have, which farm, I should like to know, would you prefer?’ ‘Beyond all doubt,’ Xenophon jumps in, ‘whichever is the best.’ ‘Suppose he has a better wife than you have, would you prefer his wife?’ Well, on this Xenophon was silent.7
It is almost certainly from Aeschines’ work that the Roman-period author Plutarch gets the notion that both Pericles and Socrates were drawn to Aspasia because she was both sophe, wise, and politike, canny, wised-up and astute. Our loss of Aeschines as an uncorrupted source for the fifth century is immensely frustrating. But reading between the lines the author does give us some useful clues to the temper of Socrates’ city and life. Aeschines’ close connection with Xanthippe suggests that she was more than just a nag.
Socrates, we are told, dealt with Xanthippe not atypically. He talks about ‘handling’ her as though she were a spirited horse. He appears happy to let her fend for herself, feeling no pressure to bring home household funds. Even with the scanty evidence available to us (his putative relationships with Diotima and Aspasia, the suggestion that he allows Xanthippe to berate him in public, his belief that women should have a concrete role in society), his heart, one feels, lies with the men around him.
And it is from his interaction with the man who stole Socrates’ heart, Alcibiades, that we learn both a great deal about the philosopher’s relationship to his city and how, towards the end of the fifth century BC, that city was beginning to fracture from within.
39
ALCIBIADES: VIOLET-CROWNED, PUNCH-DRUNK
Athens, 416 BC
If only wisdom were like water which always flows from a full cup into an empty one when we connect them with a piece of yarn – well, then I would consider it the greatest prize to have the chance to sit down next to you. I would soon be overflowing with your wonderful wisdom.
Plato, Symposium, 175d–e1
IT IS IN THE SYMPOSIUM THAT we meet again the other leading player in Socrates’ story – Alcibiades.
Alcibiades has burst into that immortalised dinner gathering on a hot night. He is more than a little drunk, his head is wreathed in violets (how could Socrates resist his violet-cream-perfumed golden locks – a heart-turning double-sweetness?). But he is beauty with a forked tongue.
SOCRATES: I beg you, Agathon … protect me from this man!2
So why did those pretty flowers ring Alcibiades’ head? In Athens, young men who worshipped Demeter and Dionysos wore just such a gentle, pungent crown. Was the aristrocrat preparing himself for a hard night of drinking? Centuries later Pliny would advise men to wreath themselves in violets to dispel the fug of wine-fumes or of a wine-fuelled headache. The plant – actually a purple gillyflower – still grows profusely in Athens today and is a favourite decoration at parties that involve serious boozing.
Or is Plato reminding us that Athens herself has an epithet, ‘violet-crowned’? He is perhaps giving us Alcibiades as Athens: beautiful, louche, supremely confident, sensuous, redolent, flawed, war-hungry – and visibly wilting.
Alcibiades is one of those enchanting, magnetic historical characters who always seem to take things just that bit too far. He clearly drove men and women to distraction. The only extant evidence we have for a woman initiating her own divorce in this period concerns Alcibiades’ wife Hipparete. She leaves Alcibiades in protest at the number of prostitutes he brings back to the house, and moves in with her brother Callias. The long-suffering woman goes to register the divorce with the Archon (on her own) and is seized shortly afterwards by Alcibiades and dragged – one presumes ignominiously – back to their old home.
Within a few months the pair are separated.
That brilliant, glowing, selfish party-animal Alcibiades illuminates the cracks in the ‘liberty and equality’ of the radica
l new state. His behaviour began to prove that Athenian democracy, deep down, was a sham and always had been. Whereas others in the city had, as the fifth century progressed, suggested something a little more egalitarian in their dress, Alcibiades seemed to delight in his deep-purple cloak, the colour of ‘congealed blood’. He might put up with democracy, but he refused to bury his aristocratic privileges and pretensions. This purple was so highly prized, a signifier of kings since prehistory, that it was banned by most cults in Attica. The cult par excellence, however, the Eleusinian Mysteries, prescribed that their sacred officials should wear the phoinikis – a purple wrap. When Andocides was cursed for his part in Alcibiades’ alleged profanation of the Eleusinian Mysteries, we’re told that the priests thunderclapped their purple cloaks at him.3
Like Athens, Alcibiades was an attention-seeker of monstrous proportions, loudly confident. In 416 he entered seven chariots at the Olympic games, and three came in poll positions, first, second and fourth. His victory ode was written by none other than Euripides himself:
Victory shines like a star, but yours eclipses all victories.4
Paintings of the conquering hero (commissioned by Alcibiades himself) and his horses were executed by the master-painter Aristophon for the Propylaia, at the entrance to the Acropolis: work so impressive that men started to whisper that Alcibiades styled himself ‘tyrant’. Again like Athena’s city itself, Alcibiades’ achievements were immense, his use of funds generated by the rosy economy of a material democracy inspiring. But such showy confidence sparked jealousy. Men disapproved of Alcibiades and other city-states were clearly starting to disapprove of flash, look-at-me Athens.
The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life Page 32