When Socrates returned home from Amphipolis, he returned to Athens for good. In 421 Athens and Sparta concluded the Peace of Nicias, according to which the map of Greece would revert to its previous state. Each side would return the places it had captured during the war, and the former enemies would exchange prisoners, which allowed Sparta to recover her citizens captured at Sphacteria. After ten years of indecisive war, the major players were content not to lose any ground. Some of Sparta’s allies, in particular the Corinthians and the Boeotians, were miffed. But peace broke out anyway.
In 421 Socrates was forty-eight years old. By the time hostilities began again, he would be over-aged for active duty. He would never be called up for military service in the field again, and he was free to devote most of his time to his peculiar mission. Athenian citizens were subject to military call-ups until the age of sixty. But men in their fifties (and in their forties as well, in times when there was not a manpower shortage) were assigned to home guard duty, manning the forts and garrisons of Attica, and the walls of Athens. They were not sent out on campaigns abroad, and hence had at most part-time assignments.[1]
Though there are many details about Socrates’ family we do not know, we are told that he had a half-brother, Patrocles, apparently his only (surviving?) sibling. Patrocles was also the son of Phaenarete, Socrates’ mother, but not of Sophroniscus; his father was Chaeredemus.[2] We hear about a notable citizen of Athens, Patrocles of Alopece, Socrates’ borough, who may be Socrates’ half-brother. We learn that this Patrocles became king archon in 403 BC and defended himself in a trial. (We shall meet him later, ch. 21*.) He was considerably younger than Socrates, which would imply that Socrates’ mother was widowed and later remarried. If she remarried when Socrates was of age, Socrates would have been responsible for arranging the match.[3]
A few years after the Peace of Nicias, Socrates married a wife. He was old to be starting a family even by Athenian standards. It was customary in Greece, and also considered ideal, for a man to marry at between thirty to thirty-five years of age, taking a teenage bride.[4] Marriages were arranged by family heads to promote the economic and political welfare of the family; romantic love played little if any role. The groom had to be financially secure, while the bride had to be old enough to bear children. Marriages were not thought of as a union between equals; the man was the head of the household, and it was appropriate for him to be superior in age as well as authority. In Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, Socrates instructs his friend Critobulus on running a household. Critobulus married his wife when she was a “mere child”; Socrates recounts to him a conversation with a friend Ischomachus, who married his wife when she was only fourteen years old and trained her to manage the household properly.[5]
The fact that Socrates was older when he wed, and also less concerned with financial and political alliances, may have left him free to make his own match. His wife was Xanthippe, a woman with a distinguished name. Pericles’ father was Xanthippus (“yellow horse”), sporting an aristocratic name that proclaimed the family as one of those proud lines that owned the ultimate status symbol, horses. Horses were expensive to buy and expensive to maintain; they lifted the rider above the heads of the common people and gave him access to the elite cavalry. They were, in short, an object of conspicuous consumption. The fact that Xanthippe married a horseless man suggests that her branch of a noble family had fallen on hard times. Xanthippe was, however, a strong-willed woman. There are stories of losing her temper with her husband and pouring water over him or tearing the shirt off his back in the marketplace. Socrates never strikes back but suffers her outbursts and likens her to a spirited mare. “If I can put up with her,” he explains, “I can easily get along with anyone.”[6] Indeed, he may have found Xanthippe’s strong personality an attraction rather than a demerit.
At the time of Socrates’ death in 399, the couple had three sons, one a youth and two young boys.[7] This indicates that their oldest was born around 415 or after and the others a number of years later. Thus Socrates may have gotten married about 416. On the other hand, they may have been married a few years before they had children. Or, given the high infant mortality at the time, they may have lost some children before they had a son who survived into maturity. Is it possible that Socrates also had some daughters, who in the misogynist culture of Athens, were not mentioned by any source? In any case, the ages of their children suggest that Xanthippe was twenty-five to thirty-five years younger than Socrates.
[1].van Wees 2004: 241-243.
[2].Plato Euthydemus 297e.
[3].Isocrates Against Callimachus 5-8; see Nails 2002, s.v. Patrocles.
[4].Hesiod Works and Days 695-698; Solon fr. 27.8-9 West; Plato Republic 460e; Laws 785b; Aristotle Politics 1335a28-29; Garland 1990:210-213.
[5].Xenophon Oeconomicus 3.13; 7.3 ff.
[6].Xenophon Symposium 2.10; Diogenes Laertius 2.36-37.
[7].Plato Apology 34d.