The Case for Xanthippe Summary (Opt. English Class 12)

The Case for Xanthippe

- Robert Graves

Brief and Simple Summary:

"The Case for Xanthippe" is an argumentative essay written by Robert Graves. In the essay, he talks about reason and rationality, women and poets, Xanthippe, the wife of Socrates, science and religion, intuition, village life and technology.

In the essay, the essayist differentiates between reasonable and rationality. According to him, reasonable has warm and sweet meaning, and rationality has cold and inhuman meaning. So, poets use intuition in their writings, but they are reasonable. Poetry, painting, composition of music, etc. cannot give taste if we use reason in them.

In the essay, he talks about philosophy and says that it is antipoetic because it doesn't care and value an individual’s uniqueness. Thus, poets distrust philosophy.

According to the writer, women and poets are natural friends because they share intuition. But Greek women opposed this philosophy because they took it as a threat. Like other women, Socrates’ wife Xanthippe was against him because she scolded and nagged her husband publicly for failing to fulfil his familial responsibility, and he was all the time philosophizing with others. In fact, she didn’t understand her husband’s spiritual greatness. Her husband’s homosexual leanings, his absent-minded behaviour, his idleness and his love of proving everyone wrong made his wife Xanthippe angry at him. Moreover, she was aware that her husband’s theories would bring family into public disgrace.

The writer also talks about science and religion and. According to him, religion dominated science in the past, but there is silent agreement between them now because even the priests give blessing to scientific technology now.

In the essay, the writer also talks about urban and village life. He says that villagers are happier than city dwellers because village life is full of natural things, but urbanization is increasing along with artificiality and intuition for humanity has been perished.

Nowadays, there is loss of intuition in every field because the development of technology has made people’s mind immature and impractical.