work; but there is not the slightest indication either in Xenophon or Plato that he continued to practise this art, or any other art, in after life. He had therefore no profession; and, as he made no money by his philosophy, we must believe that he had been left some small competence by his father, or some relation, on which he was content to live. That he was extremely poor we know, both from Xenophon and from his own account of himself before the jury at his trial. We know also that his habits of life were remarkably plain and frugal, that he required little money, and coveted none. That he was in a position to have made money if he had chosen there can be no doubt; but he expressly states that he had relinquished all projects for increasing his income, in order that he might devote himself without distraction to the great work of his life. However, with his philosophical notions about mere external grandeur, he seems to have been rich enough to live comfortably with a wife and family. This wife was the noted Xanthippe, not always the most pleasant companion, and, perhaps not altogether {6} without reason, from her point of view, at variance with a husband who showed such utter indifference to worldly aggrandizement and domestic display; but for this touch of sharpness in the temper only, as he argued, the better fitted to be the wife of a philosopher, or to make a philosopher of her husband; for, as men who wish to learn to ride do not choose the meekest and most docile beast that they can find, but the most spirited, so the husband who wishes to rule a wife well should have such an one as it is not easy but difficult to control. This character of the philosopher’s wife rests on the authority of Xenophon; Plato nowhere alludes to it; and whatever her temper might have been, Socrates certainly did not consider it so bad as to justify his sons in withholding from her the usual love and reverence due from children to their parents; for “you may be sure,” he said, “if she is a little cross sometimes, it is for your good; and there is a reason in her objurgations which a wise son ought to acknowledge.”