COMMENTARIES OF XANTHIPPE
"The hardest to get along with of all the women there are.” - Xenophon
Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
I was wild. A child of a successful family but Arte[lacuna]nd I believed I was destined for greatness. It didn’t matter I was a girl. I was golden. My hair shone as I skipped through the dappled light of the olive orchards. The games we played between the agapanthus, busy bees, throwing stones down the wells, watching our images break into pieces. I can almost taste Ifestia’s thyme-scented honey, we stole from the store room, my brothers and me, sweet, dark and sticky, we laughed on the way home and laughed at being scolded. Every childhood seems propitious compared to…later. All the while I dreamed. By the gods, I was destined.
Wisdom begins in wonder.
I questioned the gods: why him. He was much older and was thought to be honourable, yet our family had a higher standing in the city, and wealth. In the end, my parents tired of me. I was too full of stinging words, too unbecoming, with my wide mouth and knots in my hair. I yearned for more and they did not understand why. But it was the stories. At night, nurse whispered of Penelope, Andromeda, Atalanta. She smoothed my blanket with bent fingers while weaving dreams of golden apples and Goddesses, and best of all, Amazons. Or, as my husband would say, ideas. My cousins were content with gossip around the well but I wanted to learn. With my brother’s help I learned to read and write. The irony of it, marrying a man who decried reading as an attack on memory. A traditionalist, an old traditionalist. Myrto, our neighbour, said is there any other kind? I laughed until I cried.
As to marriage or celibacy let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.
Our neighbours watch when I take out the broken pots. He has plenty of sayings, as he frowns, but no one listens to mine: the man of the household is the least interesting thing about me. It’s not what he thinks, nor his friends. Gods know I lose my patience with him and my voice sounds shrill to my ears.
I’m proud. I married beneath me, my cousins say, and I my flick my golden hair at them and wink, and say he’s old. Am I a bad wife or a good liar? I dare not ask if he regrets marrying me. I hear his lectures: from the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.
By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.
I cried at the ceremony, as the daffodils wilted in my clenched fists. Golden flowers of the dead to match my hair. It was a mistake; his mother’s pursed lips told me, and I’ve been wrong in her black eyes ever since. Then, I was taught the consolation of the wife was the greatness of her husband. I am still waiting. Daffodil bulbs die when I plant them. Bees no longer visit.
My husband looks at me with his mother’s eyes as if I’m one of his stone mason’s tools: useful once, but no longer. I stand as still as rock as he tells me I’m a lesson, with his crooked smile. Then he turns away to accost another citizen in the vegetable market. His tools go unused.
An honest man is always a child.
He rarely agrees they’re our children. They’re called silly and dull but they’re safe that way. I learned what wild gets. As for their father, he is in enough trouble. His friends say I’m the nag when it’s him. It’s why I challenge him. I learn because I can read and our boys tell me their stories. This white gleaming city is loud and busy: the omphalos, but it’s small so news travels like fire. I listen for small things when my husband questions big things. He says he’s a thinker, but he reasons like a mason. He cuts people and thoughts down to size. Important people are blocks to chip away at to see the shape of the truth in the stone. He does it to me. Thus, he makes enemies. He persists, chipping away at my feelings so I wish I was stone. But he forgets: I’m his student too so we wear each other down.
Unlike their father, our boys are beautiful and bored enough to avoid his mistakes, which I’m sure got Myrto and his mother thinking. My sons may not be attentive, but they’ve learned to lie like men. My husband could never lie.
Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
He dotes on his mother. Even in her old age her strength is evident in her sure midwife’s hands. She indulges her son, and as much as he once thought me beautiful, desired even, I could never compare to his hallowed mother with her knowing eyes, straight back and severe brow. All I can think of is, could she see? See him? Was her love that blind?
It was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
I’ve hidden this behind the figs but I might move it into the works his students leave. He won’t look at it. He stores no faith in literacy. For a stone mason, it doesn’t stop him from having students who sit with him on the steps in the city centre. Or they’re here, talking with mouths full of goat’s cheese.
I say to myself, if my husband refuses to understand me, it’s because I’m a poet, like the famed Lady. I sung to my boys in their cribs. My husband is tone deaf.
Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.
My husband’s sentimental and Myrto’s not clever, but she warps things. She was never anything to him, just needy. He’s getting old and Myrto’s one skill is to make him forget.
Myrto was a harpy. When her husband died, my husband helped her. He hasn’t any idea about household expenses. He thinks he can help because he told me he spoke on the nature of wealth at his symposia. I stifled my laughter with my fist. But when I think about their friendship, I realised why I hate him: he welcomes her opinions. And I do hate him. Myrto is ancient and tough and has called me a fool to my face, but it is him. He might have admired my curves, as he tutted at my dresses, but he has never seen my mind. He thinks I’m fire and water - rage or tears. I am. But I am more.
If only I were one of his curly-headed students.
If only I was the spindly Myrto.
He’s famed for seeing into the truth of things but he can’t see how the harpy bends it to get her way so he’s always helping her. Then Myrto has the gall to quote him to me in her bitter lisp, pointing her bony finger: The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbour. I was so angry I screamed.
Why can he not trust me? He is a friend to her. Could he ever be a friend to me?
Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.
I needed a disciplinarian and I was married off to one. Despite his questions, he never questioned how a household was run. It was meant to be this way. This is how the bed is made; how the house is cleaned. This is how his mother swaddled her sons, supervised the bread making, and stored the figs. There was no other way. My long hair hid the bruises.
I blame his mother, and the war. His military experience was acting without question, one man part of a whole. My brothers were the same after training, full of camaraderie and rough arrogance, although they’ve never seen the battles my husband had. I weep to see my sons - re-enacting, with hand-fashioned javelins, their father’s stories. They’re at that age. Lamprocles throws his chalk-dusty sandals into the corner by the door like his father, who remains a hero, if only for being a warrior once.
The eldest, named for my father, is eager and critical, everything done hurriedly, from scoffing grapes each morning to when he gets home. He sprints to grow up. I ran without a care once too. Oh, Gods, make me an Amazon. I am cursed: my eldest trains to fight and men will cut his golden locks.
I’m shut out of their games.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
I am making this record, one who has led a domestic life, a life of birth, children, cooking, and cleaning and can agree with my husband that my life should be examined. I have a mind too. Yet, my husband will have the last word. His students will see that they are his legacy, not me or his sons, although I believe he loves them. He said the way to gain a good reputation is to endeavour to be what you desire to appear. I’m not harsh or stupid, but I see how his students see me, especially that upstart Antisthenes. No one will take up my legacy.
True wisdom comes to each of us when we realise how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.
When he was a boy, my grandfather met a foreigner, who told him, when asked why he’d travelled so far, that unhappiness is the space between what you have and what you desire. My grandfather never forgot, and told me the same. I’ve kept the thought with me. I never told my husband so it was never subject to the ruin of his logic.
There is a chasm in me like I’m staring again into those wells of my childhood, my reflection broken up into pieces sinking so deep the Underworld was swallowing me whole. It was thus in his dark cell, surrounded by his students.
At the precipice of widowhood, there was no advice nor consolation. No entreaty I made changed his mind, even as I held up his children. That stung: my husband’s stubborn refusal to live for his sons, even when critici[lacunae]ito for abandoning us. After the thunder comes the rain indeed.
Alone, and weary, there are yet times this chasm is so small my youngest son’s crooked smile leaps across it. That is all I know or can think to want to know.
These fragments were discovered between leaves of a manuscript copy of Plato’s Phaedo in the 1820s, upon which they were roundly denounced as a fraud or an absurd attempt at historical revisionism and then ignored. Recently, the fragments, currently in the hands of a Roman museum, have undergone reappraisal. Most of the text is in Mediaeval Latin, but some argue for evidence of translation firstly via Arabic sources, while others see Greek sources, of a similar sort to Plato’s. While the provenance remains doubtful, a growing cohort of academics consider the text genuine, even as others suggest the language is too modern. Of those who affirm the fragments authentic, some speculate the Socratic aphorisms are later interpolations (hence the italicisation in this translation). Furthermore, the search continues for fragments or evidence of fraud. Questions too, remain as to the order of the extant fragments. If it is authentic, the text is remarkably intact and one may guess at possible names, there a mention of Crito, an associate of both Socrates and Plato. Increasingly, this document demands a redetermination of Athenian history and philosophy. For the interim, academics have reluctantly accepted the popular attribution of the Commentaries of Xanthippe, wife of Socrates.
Rebecca Dempsey’s recent work is featured in Ligeia Magazine, Ink Pantry, and Elsewhere Journal. Rebecca lives in Melbourne, Australia, and can be found at WritingBec.com.