Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Life can be adjusted to its simplest forms. From his fortieth to his fiftieth year, Socrates worked every other Thursday; then he retired from active life, and Xantippe took in plain sewing. Socrates was surely not a good provider, but if he had provided more for his family, he would have provided less for the world.
He was a man of universal genius a painter, sculptor, engraver, mathematician, and engineer. He was to Germany what Leonardo da Vinci was to Italy. His house is wonderfully preserved. You see his entrance hall, his exhibition room, his bedroom, his studio, and the opening into which his wife that veritable Xantippe thrust the food that was to sustain him during his solitary hours of labour.
"I am not aware that Socrates thought it necessary to acquaint the worthy Xantippe with the reasons for his conduct," remarked Mr. Everidge suavely. "The feminine mind is too much disposed to jump to hasty conclusions to prove of any assistance in deciding matters of importance.
But Xantippe and the boy still slumbered, though the woman's form shook convulsively at times, for she sobbed in her sleep. Gregorio looked at the two for a minute and then raised himself with an oath. The woman's heavy breathing irritated him, for, after all, he argued, it was her duty as well as his to sacrifice herself for the lad.
After first looking at his wife critically and with a satisfied smile, he touched her on the shoulder to wake her. "I am going out for work," he said, as Xantippe opened her eyes. "All right." "Good-bye." But Xantippe answered not. She turned her face to the wall wearily as Gregorio left her.
As soon as Xantippe saw us, she wept aloud and said such things as women usually do on such occasions, as, "Socrates, your friends will now converse with you for the last time, and you with them." But Socrates, looking toward Crito, said, "Crito, let some one take her home." Upon which some of Crito's attendants led her away, wailing and beating herself.
So it will go on, day in, day out. Not only we ourselves, but our son too must die. We must save him." "Yes," said Xantippe, quietly, repeating her husband's words as she kissed the forehead of her child, "we must save him." "There is only one way." "Only one way," repeated Xantippe, dreamily.
Most women have a goodly grain of ambition for themselves, and if their husbands have genius, their business is not to prove it, but to show that they themselves are not wholly commonplace. Not so Xantippe she was quite willing to be misunderstood that her husband might live. What the world calls a happy marriage is not wholly good ease is bought with a price.
He had most probably at that moment Xantippe in his eye. You remember how pleasantly Addison, in the Spectator, tells the story of a colony of women, who, disgusted with their wrongs, had separated themselves from the men, and set up a government of their own.
His critics went so far as to say, "Old Phelps is a fraud." They would have said the same of Socrates. Xantippe, who never appreciated the world in which Socrates lived, thought he was lazy. Probably Socrates could cook no better than Old Phelps, and no doubt went "gumming" about Athens with very little care of what was in the pot for dinner.
Word Of The Day