The Rise of Athens by Anthony Everitt

Author:Anthony Everitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

“Dog-eyed” was a cruel parody of Hera’s usual Homeric epithet, “ox-eyed.” Aspasia was reported to be the madam of a brothel on the side, and procured freeborn Athenian women for Pericles (sex outside marriage with a freeborn Athenian woman was illegal and taboo).

However, there is another possibility. We know that Aspasia’s father in Miletus was called Axiochus, a rare Greek personal name. There happens to have been another Axiochus in a branch of the Alcmaeonid family. He was the son of a man called Alcibiades. It seems likely that this Alcibiades, who was ostracized in 460, spent some or all of his exile in Miletus where (we may suppose) he married into Aspasia’s family. In fact, he must have wed a daughter of Axiochus and a sister of our Aspasia. A son, we can reconstruct, was born of the union, who was named Axiochus in honor of the infant’s Milesian grandfather, as was the Greek custom.

Now a gene-proud Alcmaeonid was highly unlikely to wed a prostitute, even a high-class one. So we must assume that Aspasia was a Milesian aristocrat, or at worst belonged to a respectable family. From Pericles’ point of view she was a family friend and all the stories about her disreputable sexuality were libels put about by his enemies or were inventions of the Athenian stage.

Whatever her origin, there was something bold and out of the ordinary about Aspasia. Being a foreigner, she was free from the social restrictions placed on Athenian women and was able to lead something like a public life. She was intelligent and Plutarch pointed to the “great art and power this woman had, that allowed her to manage as she pleased the foremost statesmen of the age and even gave philosophers a theme for lengthy and high-minded debates.”

This is nothing less than the truth. Socrates knew her well and apparently recommended a wealthy friend of his to send his son to study politics under Aspasia’s guidance (perhaps here we have the twisted origin of the brothel-keeping libel). Plato has the philosopher credit her with writing Pericles’ speeches for him:

Yesterday I heard Aspasia composing a funeral oration for the fallen. For she had been told, as you were saying, that the Athenians were going to choose a speaker, and she repeated to me the sort of speech which he should deliver, partly improvising and partly from previous thought, putting together fragments of the funeral oration which Pericles spoke, but which, as I believe, she composed.

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