Yet this clearly idealised picture of Socrates is not the whole story, and it gives us no indication of the genesis of his ideas. Plato’s pupil Aristotle and other Ancient writers provide us with correctives to the Platonic Socrates. For instance, Aristotle’s followers Aristoxenus and Clearchus of Soli preserve biographical snippets that they might have known from their teacher. From them we learn that Socrates in his teens was intimate with a distinguished older philosopher, Archelaus; that he married more than once, the first time to an aristocratic woman called Myrto, with whom he had two sons; and that he had an affair with Aspasia of Miletus, the clever and influential woman who was later to become the partner of Pericles, a leading citizen of Athens.
The legend of Myrto is quite interesting. (The legend gets a nice mention in the dialogue Halcyon, which I've discussed, although it doesn't provide much more than a mention.) I find D'Angour's claim about Myrto as first wife quite odd; for one thing, my understanding is that the Myrto legend usually takes Myrto to be Socrates's second wife, not his first, although Diogenes Laertius does say there was some diversity of opinion on this. Here is Diogenes' passage:
Aristotle says that he married two wives: his first wife was Xanthippe, by whom he had a son, Lamprocles; his second wife was Myrto, the daughter of Aristides the Just, whom he took without a dowry. By her he had Sophroniscus and Menexenus. Others make Myrto his first wife; while some writers, including Satyrus and Hieronymus of Rhodes, affirm that they were both his wives at the same time. For they say that the Athenians were short of men and, wishing to increase the population, passed a decree permitting a citizen to marry one Athenian woman and have children by another; and that Socrates accordingly did so.
Plutarch has the same, and notes the dubiousness of the legend:
But Demetrius the Phalerian, Hieronymus the Rhodian, Aristoxenus the musician, and Aristotle (if the Treatise of Nobility is to be reckoned among the genuine pieces of Aristotle) say that Myrto, Aristides's granddaughter, lived with Socrates the philosopher, who indeed had another wife, but took her into his house, being a widow, by reason of her indigence and want of the necessaries of life. But Panaetius sufficiently confutes this in his book concerning Socrates.
We don't have Aristotle's On Good Birth, and Plutarch may be right to doubt that it is his; Demetrius Phalerus seems to have a reputation for a being a very uncritical source of information. Aristoxenus's Life of Socrates, which we only have in quotations and in quotations of quotations, has historically been regarded as a doubtful source; he's generally been thought to be actively hostile to Socrates. There have been attempts recently to argue that he might well be a better source than he has usually been regarded.* At the very least, given what we know of Aristoxenus's philosophical positions (he held that the soul was a kind of vibration of the body), he seems to have an interest in trying to characterize or explain Socrates's life in terms of his temperament and physical characteristics, and to select those stories and rumors available to him that would be conducive to this. We don't know whether he had any more rigorous connection to the stories he relates, or was taking any special care to make sure his sources were at least plausible. Plutarch certainly has a low opinion of him. But Hieronymus is also a Peripatetic, so it seems like the legend is an idea that grew up within the Lyceum. This contrasts with (say) Panaetius, who was a Stoic, opposing the whole idea. It's unsurprising, though, given the the Stoic conception of Socrates and the fact that Aristoxenus repeatedly emphasizes that Socrates had vehement passions, including sexual ones, that a Stoic would do so. One wonders, actually, if (however the legend started) many of the mentions of the legend that we have might be due to some argument between Peripatetics and Stoics about which we don't have full information.
Bigamy would have been unusual, but there are sources that suggest that at the time, due to the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians were worried about their dwindling male population and passed a decree that if a man who was already legally married to one woman took a concubine, the children would be regarded by law as legitimate. We are not very sure if this was really passed, or if we have only garbled information. Debra Nails suggests (People of Plato, p. 210) that it's probably more plausible that Socrates became Myrto's guardian -- Athenian women were perpetual minors and so could not reside in the city without a legal guardian, which became something of an issue given the many deaths of men in the war.
[It's perhaps worth noting with regard to D'Angour's broader argument, with which I am not otherwise concerned here, that most of the sources he mentions were either writing actively hostile criticism of Socrates -- e.g., to denigrate the ethics of philosophers -- or have often been read as doing so for one reason or another. I know next to nothing about Clearchus of Soli, beyond the mention of him by Josephus, so perhaps he's an exception.]
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* Alessandro Stavru gives what I think is probably the most sympathetic interpretation that can still be regarded as having a reasonable basis: Aristoxenus on Socrates.
