Hipparchia came from a well-off family in Maroneia and had no shortage of suitors: wealthy men, suitable matches, exactly what her parents had in mind for her.
She wanted Crates. He was from Thebes, had given away his entire fortune, lived on the street in Athens and owned a cloak and a bag. He was moreover ugly and hunchbacked, and that was no secret.
Her parents were desperate. They did what desperate parents do and asked the man himself to talk her out of it.
Crates tried. When talking did not work, he did something else: he took off everything he owned, set it down in front of her and said that this was the bridegroom and this his property, and that she should consider carefully, because becoming his wife meant living this way too.
She chose him.
She put on the plain cloak, went with him and lived with him on the street. She also appeared at dinner parties where women did not go, and that was held against her.
At one of those parties the philosopher Theodorus mocked her for not being at the loom, as a woman was supposed to be. She answered that she had spent her time better on her education than on wool.
She is one of the few women philosophers of antiquity whose name survives, and her brother Metrocles also studied under Crates. The school she entered taught Zeno of Citium, so she stood at the cradle of what became the Stoa.
On one side a family that knows exactly what is good for you. On the other a life almost nobody would choose for you.
The tempting sorting is that this is a love story. It is that too, but what is interesting lies in what Crates did rather than in what she felt.
What her parents thought, what the town would say and whether Crates would ever own anything: all outside her. What did lie with her was the choice, and accepting what the choice would cost.
Crates did something rare in the process. He did not persuade her in either direction but made the price visible. Choosing without knowing what it costs is not choosing but hoping, and most people who decide something large do it the second way.
Her answer to Theodorus shows she did not see it as a sacrifice. She was not defending a sacrifice but a choice: she had spent her time on something, and she thought she had spent it well.
The sources come from men who admired or ridiculed her, and she wrote nothing herself. What we have is a figure used by others to prove something, and that makes her hard to know.
And the choice itself is less pure than the story suggests. She exchanged the security of her family for dependence on one man, at a time when a woman could do little else. That she chose it makes it her choice; it does not yet make it freedom in the sense we mean.
Which choice are you postponing because others would not understand it? And which weighs more: their judgment, which is not yours, or your decision, which is?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions