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Brauron, north of Athens
Women so beautiful it hurt your eyes to see them.
Herodotus, The Histories [adapted], 5.18
AND WHAT OF THE OTHER FEMALE citizens: the girls, the maidens, the widows of Athens?
Every four years, Socrates would have seen, walking through the Agora and along the Sacred Way, diminutive lines of temporary exiles. Their destination was Brauron, a two-day hike east of Athens; for many this must have seemed a long road, because the majority of these pilgrims were young children. Eight-, nine-, ten-year-old girls from good families were regularly sent out to this religious sanctuary from Athena’s city, to live for three, four, five years, as ‘wild animals’.
Little Bears, arktoi, they were called. Dedicated to the virgin huntress goddess Artemis, they wore animal skins and headdresses, and on occasion saffron-yellow dresses. Vase fragments from the site show naked maidens running away from pursuing bears – a rite the girls themselves possibly endured with real wild beasts. Sometimes the girls raced in short chitons, sometimes naked. Plato approved: in his ideal city-state, as in Sparta, young women were encouraged to compete nude in foot-racing and athletics.1 The purpose of the exercise at Brauron was to run the animal out of the child. Their time in this religious boarding school appeased the coiled, virgin goddess Artemis – the chaste huntress whose arrows could strike women down in childbirth. The Little Bears’ days were filled with dances. They learned the jobs a good Athenian wife would be expected to accomplish – in their sanctuary-home you can still see the dormitories where (one imagines, worn out) they slept.
What remains of the temple complex is peaceful now. Today the only sound of water is the leak of pipes, and the ghost of a stream, irrigating nearby fields. In its heyday, in the mid–fifth century BC, as recent excavations have shown, a monumental fountain, 60 feet long, was installed here to channel the sacred water. Lichen-covered rocks are a protection and a backdrop, a reminder of the primeval wash of this sanctuary’s devotion. But we should also remember that in some ways this sacred zone would have resembled an outpost of the rag-trade; when women died in childbirth their clothes were dedicated here; draped, hung and stored around the sanctuary; a limp gift to pitiless Artemis, to whom, probably just a few years from now, the girls would be calling out during the dreadful pangs of labour.2 Votaries still come here to pray for help in childbirth from a distant relative of those goddesses, the Virgin Mary, in the pretty little Byzantine church on the edge of the site.
During the Peloponnesian War Brauron’s satellite sanctuary up on the Acropolis was extended. Athens had a gimlet-eye focused on Brauron in political terms – useful strategic territory, but as the Athenian population was effectively being thinned out by the dragging conflict, it was also essential that the girls – the reproductive future of the community – were kept secure. In Brauron itself, the youngsters, it was hoped, would chasten the beast within them and learn to appreciate the grinding reality of being an Athenian wife. Subdued, de-spirited, around the age of twelve the youngsters would then be dressed in modest clothes and marched back to Athens to find a husband.
Socrates – in a straightforwardly pragmatic way – seemed to think the female of the species could be used in society a little more imaginatively.3
SOCRATES: Is there anyone to whom you commit more affairs of importance than to your wife?
CRITOBULUS: No.
SOCRATES: Is there anyone to whom you talk less?
CRITOBULUS: Few or none, I confess.
SOCRATES: And you married her when she was a mere child and had seen and heard almost nothing?4
During the city’s difficult war-days the philosopher suggested that a group of women, relatives of one of his friends, become gainfully employed in the wool-working business.5 And in the Republic, the character of Socrates discusses the value of giving women the same education as men, and access to all functions and professions.6 While Plato opines in his Laws that women are ‘accustomed to an underground and shadowy existence,’ and again Xenophon writes that they are ‘brought up under the most cramping restrictions, raised from childhood to see and hear as little as possible, and to ask only the fewest possible questions’,7 perhaps Socrates, who was happy to stare right through convention, realised that raising 50-plus per cent of the population as etiolated creatures was a waste.
And when, during the Symposium (Xenophon’s this time, not Plato’s) Socrates is watching a slave-girl performing complicated circus tricks for the amusement of the assembled company (juggling, contorting, diving through crossed swords), he chips in:
SOCRATES: A woman’s nature is not at all inferior to a man’s – except in that it lacks understanding [reasoning, effectiveness] and strength. So if any of you has a wife, let him confidently set about teaching her whatever he would like to have her know.8
Although of course, with a distance of 2,400 years and given the provocative, sexually charged circumstances, it is difficult to tell whether or not Xenophon gives the philosopher this line with an ironic smile.
Socrates first and then Plato (even to some extent Aristotle) may well have watched all the precise, well-handled busyness of women in society – doing those important jobs listed by Aristophanes – and thought ‘What a waste!’ These are creatures that could be even more productive … there are other ways they can add to society.
Listen to further conversations in Plato’s Republic:
Many women, it is true, are better than many men in many things.9
If, then, we are to use the women for the same things as the men, we must also teach them the same things.10
Socrates was, above all, fascinated by the business of being human. And in the human genus, he happily includes both women and men. He was, as a result, humane; Xenophon has Socrates comment as he visits the prostitute Theodote:
… There are many attractive servant girls, and they show absolutely no sign of neglect …11
Take off those rose-tinted glasses: the philosopher is no campaigner for a classical-age, sexual revolution, he also refers to women as horses, as slaves. No proto-feminist here; but Socrates does have the courage to look beyond the orthodox. And the significant women who crop up in the literary accounts of his life far outnumber those who appear alongside other ‘great men’ of this period. His name is also linked to that of real, historical women – and not just in a sexual or moral scandal (which is how women typically make their way into the historical record), but as an inspiration; witness this antique inscription on the tombstone of a young woman:
She was the splendour of Greece, and possessed the beauty of Helen, the virtue of Thirma, the pen of Aristippus, the soul of Socrates and the tongue of Homer.12
Socrates and wives, midwives and war-widows
Socrates’ mother, we are told, became a midwife.13 Socrates may have been conceived in a city showered with talents, but he was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Phaenarete was a ‘well-built woman’,14 with a stocky set suited to her physically demanding job. Between the ages of eighteen and thirty, while the philosopher lived at home (the standard arrangement in Athens at this time), Socrates would have watched his mother preparing for and practising her difficult, essential business. Not a precious upbringing; he might have seen Phaenarete preparing herbs – pharmaka – drugs, useful little things. Pennyroyal to catalyse contractions; cardamom concoctions to fumigate the womb through a long reed; pomegranate pessaries. He would have heard what happened when births went wrong and child, or mother, or both, died. He would have known that some Athenian parents chose to expose their newborn to the elements if she was a girl-child.
In the National Archaeological Museum in Athens there is a useful cabinet that gathers together images of women who gave birth, or helped. These are often crude objects, social records rather than aspirational objets d’art. Many are still unpublished by scholars: this is an aspect of Greek history that early collectors had little interest in celebrating. In one particularly rough group of figures two headscarved women, one woman cradled in the other’s lap, sit while a baby appears from beneath the full skirts. They are not gorgeous things, but as terracotta mementoes they work. They remind us what a lusty, messy business giving birth really is.
But nonetheless, the midwife (maia in Greek) ensured that a community survived. At the point of birth the midwife and her companions howled with joy to the heavens. If the child was a boy an olive-wreath would be pinned to the doorway; if a girl, a tuft of wool – a prophecy of the woven goods that, as an Athenian female, she would spend much of her life producing. Many babies died in classical antiquity, between 10 and 30 per cent, and others were exposed to die: also the midwife’s job.
If you take what he says at face value, Socrates’ family background (stonemason father, midwife mother) – at the coal-face of civilisation, knocking out citizens, knocking up monuments to house them – had an enormous impact.15
SOCRATES: My art of midwifery is in general like that of midwives. The only difference is that my patients are men, not women. My concern is not with the body but with the soul that is in labour. The highest point of my art is the power to prove by every test whether the offspring of a young man’s thought is a false phantom or is something alive and real. I am so much like the midwife that I cannot myself give birth to wisdom. The common reproach is true, that, although I question others, I can bring nothing to light because there is no wisdom in me. This is because God constrains me to serve as a midwife, but has debarred me from giving birth.16
Socrates would have been under no illusions. He would have known what a bloody, churning, searing, dangerous, wonderful business it is, coming into this world. His mother must have come home tainted with the sweet-acrid smell of childbirth and stillbirths. She would also have come home polluted for at least five days, by her presence during the parturition. Childbirth was one of the many ways that women were thought to generate miasma, pollution, in the Ancient World.
And yet, despite knowing all of this, despite a childhood listening to rhapsodes (epic-poetry reciters) charm year in, year out around village camp fires with stories of demonic, intemperate, sex-crazed women – Helen, Klytemnestra, Medea, schemers who brought down the Age of Heroes – despite being nudged, sweaty-seated, faces red from the glowing embers, by his fellow boy-Athenians, the next-generation citizens; despite spending the majority of his waking hours at men-only gymnasia, or fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with only males, walking through the streets in which, during daylight hours, respectable women were conspicuous by their absence – despite all this, Socrates’ attitude to the female of the species appears unconventional and relatively welcoming.
For Diotima was not the only female character with whom Socrates had a rather unorthodox literary relationship – his conversations with Aspasia had (apparently) been more than a little unusual. Plato, who reports this in his dialogue Menexenus, is, one suspects, mildly uncomfortable with Socrates’ deference to Pericles’ fancy-woman. In the Dialogue, the two have had a memory contest to see who could recall more of a speech – Socrates his own words, and Aspasia Pericles’ famous funerary speech, which she was rumoured to have written.
SOCRATES: But I was listening only yesterday to Aspasia going through a funeral speech for these very people. For she had heard the report you mention, that the Athenians are going to select the speaker; and thereupon she rehearsed to me the speech in the form it should take, extemporising in part, while other parts of it she had previously prepared, as I imagine, at the time when she was composing the funeral oration which Pericles delivered; and from this she patched together sundry fragments.
MENEXENUS: Could you repeat from memory that speech of Aspasia?
SOCRATES: Yes, if I am not mistaken; for I learnt it, to be sure, from her as she went along …17
This is more than just a parlour game. Those with bardic memory at this stage of human development were the repository of all civilisation’s information. Wise men were wise because they had impressive recall. Homer’s epics, a touchstone for Ancient Greek life, were put onto the brain’s hard-drive and reproduced in public squares, on street corners, in private homes. A retentive mind was considered a great gift of the gods. It is fascinating that Aspasia is credited with such a gift.
Of course men had always been jealous of Aspasia; that interloper who benefited from Athenian nous, who wormed her way into the arms of their great Pericles and then ‘weakened his limbs’, as many Athenians saw it. That perfumed, jewel-spattered whore. A recent archaeological discovery suggests they might just have had some small justification. One of the heavy baubles dedicated up at the Parthenon to the goddess Athena – a gold tiara – is inscribed as the gift of Aspasia. Only an extremely wealthy person would have been able to afford such a fine offering.18 Even in a democracy men, and women, had ways of showing that they were, or had been, special.
In 438–436 BC the xenophobia directed at Aspasia came to a head. She was in court on charges of impiety – it could possibly have been her reported conversations with Socrates, and the other more radical philosophers of the day, that got her into such trouble.19At the same time Pheidias was accused of embezzling public funds and Anaxagoras of denying the gods. Aspasia was – we are told by hostile sources – saved through the intervention of Pericles, who wept and moped around with more care for her fate than his own. She might have been saved from condemnation by the courts, but the parodying of this episode by Athenian playwrights suggests that Socrates’ association with Aspasia would not play out well for the philosopher.
What the characters of Diotima (and Aspasia) and Socrates do seem to have shared was a passionate belief in the potential of relationships. The Platonic Dialogues make it clear that relationships make our world better. Mutual commitment is wrapped in and gives birth to love. This love can bind marriages, cities, states, religions. Aphrodite does not just sponsor the poison-tipped arrows of Eros, but the lint-gauze of Harmonia. Heterosexual love can forge a path to virtue. And there is no doubt that when it came to real, human relationships Socrates could speak from experience. Because some time in the philosopher’s early to mid-thirties (Plato suggests thirty to thirty-five, and Aristotle recommends thirty-seven as the prime age to get hitched), he married.
Once a suitable partner had been selected for Sokrates Alopekethen, a series of customs, social and religious – unchanged for generations – would have been set in train. An Athenian wedding’s primary purpose was to legitimise the sexual union, the ‘gamos’, between a man and a woman. Groom and father of the bride-to-be sealed the pact with a firm handshake. Socrates and his ‘intended’ would have performed a series of pre-nuptial sacrifices, often with the accompaniment of marriage hymns and incense for Aphrodite. They would have purified themselves in the waters of the city – the sacred spring of Kallirrhoe or at the banks of Eridanos. Clean, rendered ‘extra’ fertile by the sacred waters, both man and girl-woman (most brides were fourteen or so) would have then doused themselves with perfume – myrrh was a favourite – both were garlanded and the bride was veiled.
After entering the bride’s family home, sweet with herbs and ribbons, a curious symposium would begin. Men down one side, women the other, wedding cakes made of sesame seeds were eaten, the sacrificed animals were roasted for the feast, there were bawdy songs (as with Greek weddings today, this whole process could last for three days) and then at last the bride’s father ‘presented’ his daughter to the groom. She would have lifted her veil, and now Socrates had a wife. The union was then witnessed by more citizens of Athens as the wedding procession wound its way, noisily, through the city’s back streets to Socrates’ family home.
Like the other newly-weds of his day, the philosopher would have been showered by his mother with a hail-storm of nuts, figs, dates, coins to ensure the prosperity and fertility of his union. Like them too he may have trooped over to the Sanctuary of Aphrodite Ourania to deposit one silver drachma in the stone wedding-themed slot machine recently identified and now on display in the new Acropolis Museum – a payment to ensure Aphrodite’s blessing for the nuptials. And on his wedding night Socrates’ way would be torch-lit to bed by his mother, his new wife’s new mother-in-law.20
Remembering his years in the company of beautiful boys, in particular Alcibiades, all golden hair, gym-hardened muscles, a knowing light in their eyes, it can be easy to forget that Socrates had a wife. But he did, Xanthippe, a woman who has come down to us in the literature of antiquity as a termagant, a nagging shrew.