I discovered a word on Futility Closet the other day: Xantippish. Looking it up led me to Xanthippe, Socrates wife and apparently an ill-tempered one:
In Xenophon’s Symposium, she is described by Antisthenes as “the most difficult, harshest, painful, ill-tempered” wife; this characterisation of Xanthippe has influenced all subsequent portrayals of her.
Saxonhouse, Arlene (2018). “Xanthippe: Shrew or Muse”. Hypatia. 33 (4). JSTOR 45153718.
Unfortunately, because all scholars are men and they’re never questioned, that characterisation has stuck and been embellished. Seeing as Medusa had the same treatment, I’m always skeptical of depictions of women from Ancient Greek history. But it appears that I wasn’t alone as poet and critic Robert Graves suggested in an essay that the stereotype was based on the old ideology that men acted with their head and women acted with their hearts and so rationality and the patriarchy won that round:
[…] Sweet reasonableness was wanting in Socrates: ‘So long as I breathe,’ he declared, ‘I will never stop philosophizing!’ His homosexual leanings, his absent-minded behaviour, his idleness, and his love of proving everyone wrong, would have endeared him to no wife of mettle. Yet Xanthippe is still pilloried as a shrew who could not understand her husband’s spiritual greatness; and Socrates is still regarded as a saint because he patiently bore with her reproaches.
Let me break a lance for Xanthippe. Her intuitions were sound. She foresaw that his metaphysical theories would bring the family into public disgrace and endanger the equipoise of the world she knew. Whenever the rational male intellect asserts itself at the expense of simple faith, natural feeling and sweet reasonableness, there follows a decline in the status of women who then figure in statistics merely as child-bearers and sexual conveniences to men; and a decline in the status of poets who cannot be given any effective social recognition; also an immediate increase in wars, crime, mental ill-health and physical excess.
Graves, R. (1960). The Case for Xanthippe. The Kenyon Review, 22(4), 597–605. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4334072
So to Xanthippe, I saw she was perhaps long-suffering and doing her best with a possibly frustrating man who had gay affairs. I’d probably do more than pour a jug of water over his head.