Xanthippe

Xanthippe (Greek Ξανθίππη ) was the wife of the philosopher Socrates, who has become known as the epitome of the shrewish wife in the European literature. Your name is often used literally and then stands for a bad-tempered, quarrelsome woman, often related to the partnership relationship.

Source location

To this day, preserved and is known as the source the work of Xenophon, which conveys the image of quarrelsome and incompatible wife. Xanthippe is mentioned briefly in Plato's Apology. In recent decades, attempts have been made sporadically to undergo the role of Xanthippe a revaluation. It was generally trying to justify the behavior of the shrew of a victim out. According to this new interpretation of Socrates has at least contributed to by various failure like the neglect of his family and of his bourgeois profession the bad temper of his wife.

Marriage with Socrates

Xanthippe was married to Socrates, and had three sons with him: Lamprokles, who was a teenager when Socrates died by the cup of poison, and Sophroniscus and Menexenos, both at the time still children. According to some sources came Sophroniscus and Menexenos from the compound of Socrates with Myrto, an impoverished widow, whom he had taken into his household. Socrates had inherited from his parents a small fortune and estate in the suburb Alopeke that him and his family allowed a modest but independent living. Xenophon has the bad temper of Xanthippe described several times impressively:

"If you are of this opinion, Socrates, Antisthenes said, how is it that you do not do the test on your Xanthippe, but you behilfst with a woman living under all, yes, my Bedünkens, among all who formerly lived and future will live, which is intolerable. This happens for the same cause, replied Socrates, why those who want to be good riders, not the gentlest and lenksamsten horses, but rather buy wild and unruly; because they think that if they vermöchten to keep this in check, it will be their easy to cope with all the others. Just so ego also made ​​because I wanted to deal with the art of the people to make my main business: I was thinking about this woman, because I was sure if I could endure it, I would be able to find me easily in all other people. "

Friedrich Nietzsche has this led to the little advantageous characterization:

" Socrates was a woman, as he needed them, - but he also would not have wanted if he had known her well enough so far would be the heroism of this free spirit is not gone. In fact, Xanthippe drove him in his peculiar profession more and more into it, by House and Home unhäuslich and scary made ​​him, they taught him in the streets and to live wherever they could talk and be idle, making him becoming the largest Athenian Alley dialectician from: the last had to compare himself with a meddlesome brake, which is the beautiful horses Athens set of a god on the neck, so as not to let it come to rest. "

Trivia and anecdotal

Socrates said, after him scolding shrew had poured over the chamber pot: " You see, when my wife thunders, she also donates rain " These fictitious anecdote cultured allegedly bipolar relationship of the shrewish wife to her have her husband as well as the German theologian and philosopher Eduard Zeller. He wrote in 1875 in his book, lectures and essays historical content of a post In defense of Xanthippe: "Could not Xanthippe Socrates the man had, so us her name would hardly have been preserved; and not finge this name with the unfortunate X, so we were reading difficult in the fibulae: Xanthippe was a wicked woman, The quarrel she was a pastime. "