“My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher.”
So, he became a philosopher.
Now Xanitippe did like him despite her verbally and physically abusing him, but doesn’t this quote prove Socrates didn’t like her back?
Prove? That sounds like the earliest “Take my wife, please” joke ever written down. MIT likes students who demonstrate they understand humour, even if they do not possess any of their own.
They should have taken the show on the road; the bit where she emptied the chamber pot over him was the side-splitting finale.
And the punchline: “Xanthippe’s thunder sometimes results in rain.”
She certainly had valid reason to dislike Socrates. He’s also the guy who argued that women got really intense and emotional during childbirth because that was the female equivalent of the male orgasm. If I tried that line on a woman, I’d consider myself to be getting off lightly if she just dumped a chamber pot on my head.
She was his meal ticket, so he damn well better have liked here. I think it is just a case of an old married couple having fun teasing each other.
I would like to see an eyewitness cite for this, meaning Plato or Xenophon only.
Here is a something else from Socrates which might provide a basis for feminine ire:
(from link):
In other words, philospophy is more painful that childbirth. Actually, not a few college students
who gave philosophy a try and then fled permanently from it might agree!
It’s from the Symposium. I’ll see if I can dig it up.
How so? She may (may) have come from a wealthier family, but Socrates had a paying job. He was a stonemason (though admittedly one who took a lot of of breaks for philosophy chat with the lads).
Anyway, if someone really is married to someone as their meal ticket, that often does lead to resentment and dislike.
He never quite got over Diotima.
Little known fact is that she worked for a living as a sophist to pay the family bills. (That is a joke.)
Big S lead a life of leisure harassing his fellow citizens verbally. That takes money. Notice the dialogues are all with rich people, not the cast of Monty Python pretending to be fellow stone masons. That took money.
Most male Athenian citizens led lives of comparative leisure. The had slaves to do the hard work. But as Athenian citizens went, Socrates was pretty poor and had to do manual (skilled) work for his living. The fact that rich young men liked to hang out and chat with him (mostly just hanging out on the street) during his breaks, or even perhaps sometimes as he chipped away at the stones, does no imply or even suggest that he was at their level of wealth himself. It does not take money. (The lads were actually being cheap, getting for free from Socrates what they would have had to pay for from a sophist.)
Incidentally, you do realize, do you, that Plato’s dialogues (and Xenophon’s too) are not documentary accounts of real events? They are at best fictionalized reconstructions of actual events, but probably mostly not even that. Socrates may have said something like some of the things that are attributed to him at some time or other, possibly sometimes even to the people he is presented as saying them to, and the dialogues may (perhaps) present his style of argumentation fairly honestly, but most of them almost certainly do not even accurately reflect his real philosophical views (but, rather, what Plato or Xenophon thought they ought to have been).
Cold, man, cold. GQ people are like elephants.
I’m sure that you are correct. Socrates taught Plato to be the most important philosophical writer of all time over the din of him chipping and moving stone. And Xenophon to be a great general, Alcibiades to be an an enormous asshole, etc. etc. etc. None of these famous students were a full time job, nor the many more obscure students. Show us the stones Socrates masoned if he spent so much time on them. Socrates was famous, even among his detractors, like his friendly detractor, Aristophanes for being a full-time, meddlesome blowhard. He spent about as much of his life being a stone mason as Newt Gingrich spent being a full time professor of history.
Now I’ve just put forth a lot of evidence that he spent his time teaching students who demonstrated their education by leaving works we still have today. And those things are perishable. Showeth me Socrates’ stones and I will consider him not a man of leisure.
Another philosopher said that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Doesn’t negate your point, however.
How many stonemasons have ever left evidence of their identity on their work?
Have any?
And BTW although Alcibiades was unprincipled and treacherous he was the greatest
Athenian military commander of the Peloponnesian War, I think undefeated as an admiral.
My point is that the evidence that exists suggests he spent his time yapping. And not while he was masoning stone as it would have been too noisy to yap and none of the depictions indicate him masoning. Also, only Athenian men who had slaves to do their work for them would have had leisure to yap.
There would be no point in sideline discussions of masonry, and rich people with slaves were not the only
5th century BC Athenians who had enough leisure time to take part in memorable intelligent conversation.
Time required to actually speak the lines passed down to us by Plato and others would be what? - 40 hours?
80 hours? Given that Athens then had over 20 days of official holidays and that holiday-related activity
usually would not have lasted all day and all night, I think it it reasonable to assume that there was plenty
of time for philosophy during Socrates’ lenghty mature adulthood for anyone interested, even if weekend policy
was not as good as ours.