Xanthippe

Xanthippe was an ancient Athenian who married Socrates, likely around 30 years her senior, and became the mother of their son Lamprocles — possibly also of two others, Sophroniscus and Menexenus. She lived through the 5th and 4th centuries BCE in a city that left almost no record of her beyond her husband's shadow. At Xenophon's Symposium, Antisthenes delivered the line that would define her forever: the most difficult, harsh, and ill-tempered of wives. Every portrayal since has echoed that single characterisation, a reputation built on one man's complaint at a dinner table, preserved because…