Aspasia and Pericles

This is often held up as one of history’s great love stories – Plutarch wrote that Pericles kissed Aspasia every single day. And that’s very sweet and romantic, but their high-profile relationship was central to a key period in Greek history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I feel
like I have to do a true confession on this one,
which is that I was thinking, well, it would be

(00:22):
a good valentine Ish thing since we're getting into that territory,
and I ended up with a couple. But it's not
very valentine E. You don't really have to do a
truth confession. I am currently researching a specifically Valentine episode,
so I understand. Yeah, yeah, but this one kind of
fell apart. Uh. We're gonna talk about classical athletes a

(00:42):
little bit, which was a male dominated world, but of
course there were women there. Uh. And the woman that
we're talking about today made waves because she wanted to
be treated as an equal of men, and in many
ways was. And additionally, she was in a long term
relationship with one of the most prominent men of the day.
Although the pair never married, their union was never formally recognized.

(01:03):
We'll talk about why. And this is an instance because
we're talking about events of the fifth century BC that
there is a lot of variation and interpretation in the
lives of Pericles, head of the Athenian city state, and
his mistress Aspasia, and the way they're characterized. And as
we go along, we're going to point out how various

(01:23):
different accounts relay their story in slightly different ways. And
this one, as I mentioned, I had this on my
list for a while. I went, oh, that would be
a good Valentine story, because it's often held up as
one of history's great love stories. Plutarch, for example, wrote
that Peracles kissed Aspasia every single day, once when he
went out for the day and again when he returned,

(01:44):
and that is very sweet and romantic. But their relationship
is really more important because it was central to a
key period in Greek history. And moreover, their entire story,
we should point out, is largely known only through unverifiable writings.
So we have to take things like the writings of Plutarch,
which happened several hundred years after Paracles and Spasia lived

(02:06):
with a little bit of a grain of salt, and
we have to think critically about their story. So to
get into that story, where we will start with Athens
in the middle of the fifth century BC. Athens was
coming off of fifty years of conflicts and the Greco
Persian Wars, Greece had defeated the accaumanant Empire. We've talked
about that empire on the show before h Greece had

(02:27):
also driven the Persians back, and Athens evolved into a
really prosperous city state. In the period between the Greco
Persian Wars and the next major conflict, which was the
Peloponnesian Wars beginning in four thirty one BC, was known
as the Athenian Golden Age. Greek women for context in
this time period in this location were generally married off

(02:48):
when they were quite young, in their early teens, to
men who were usually much older than they were, and
at this point in Athens, women were generally excluded from
a lot of public life. They were not participles in
the popular sports or theater of the day, and they
had really very few rights. Among the rights they did
have for the fact that women could own property and

(03:09):
their financial dealings were protected under Athenian law, but they
had no involvement in politics, even though this is a
time often held up as a great democracy, and even
if a woman's finances were threatened illegally and she chose
to pursue that matter in court, she still had to
have a male guardian speak on her behalf during those proceedings.

(03:29):
So that is just a little bit of the setup
of the situation that we're walking into before we transition
over to the life of Paracles. Paracles was born into privilege.
His father, Xanthipis, was a war hero, his mother was
from a really powerful family, and in his adulthood Paracles
made a name for himself as a military leader, a politician,
and a patron of the arts. He was elected to

(03:52):
the military governmental leadership position of Strtigos through democratic vote
in four forty three BC, and as one of athens leaders,
Pericles made many contributions that would come to be part
of the historical identity of the city. So, during the
Greco Persian War that re referenced a moment ago, Athens
had burned and a lot of it had been destroyed,

(04:14):
and as part of ongoing remaking of the city, it
was Pericles who initiated the construction of such iconic structures
as the Temple too has seen a Nique, and the Parthenon.
He also subsidized the arts, enabling the poor of Athens
to attend theater, and he started paying citizens for civic service,
such as serving on juries. Aspasia was born in the

(04:35):
Ionian Greek settlement of Militius. Her father was Axiochus, and
in a move that was pretty unusual for his time,
he wanted his daughter to have an education. This has
also been cited as evidence that the family was a
wealthy one, because a poor family probably wouldn't have been
able to prioritize giving an education to a daughter, and

(04:55):
the source of that education then gets a little murkier.
This is one of those things that gets embellished or
fleshed out a little bit differently in different histories. So
according to some accounts, Aspasia's mother and the enslaved people
in their household were responsible for this education, so it
was not a formal education in a school with a
structured curriculum, but other versions do suggest a slightly more

(05:17):
formal education process. But by all accounts, Aspasia got a
very well rounded education, far more than the average Greek woman.
The next important part of a Spasia story is that
she traveled away from her home in Militus to Athens.
If she had been traveling alone, as some of the
writings indicate, this would have been a really unusual move.

(05:38):
Even young men wouldn't normally have done such a thing.
But it's also possible that she traveled with her newly
married sister and brother in law. Her sister's husband was
named Alcibiat's the Second, and this could be her connection
to Pericles because he was known to that family and
a Spasist time in Athens began sometime in the four

(05:59):
forties BC, and it was in Athens that a Spasia
would become famous, though not always in the most flattering ways.
It wasn't long after she got to Athens that she
met Peracles, as we mentioned a moment ago. This meeting
might have been through her sister's husband or maybe at
a symposium, and Pericles was married with a family uh

(06:19):
that was an arranged marriage for sort of mutual social
and political benefit. He left his wife and two sons
around the same time as a Spasia came into his life,
but the timeline is not entirely clear in terms of
this being a cause and effect situation. Divorce was not
uncommon in Greece at the time. It did not have
the stigma that would later become attached to it in

(06:40):
many cultures, and both men and women were known to
marry more than once in their lifetime. Pericles and his
wife had been wet, as I said, through a beneficial arrangement,
but they didn't really have a particularly good relationship, so
it really shouldn't be portrayed as a Spasi is showing
up and becoming a home wrecker that tore apart a
happy family. The family also already had its own problems.

(07:02):
At least one of his sons was never very fond
of Pericles, and although Pericles did divorce his wife, he
didn't wind up marrying Aspasia, although the two of them
did live together as a couple. And we'll get into
y and a little bit. So of course, if this
sort of thing happened today, like if a prominent politician
moved in with his mistress, it would cause gossip, and
that same thing was true in Athens at the time.

(07:26):
Soon the couple was constantly talked about, but Aspasia was
the recipient of far more venomous attacks than Pericles. One
of the more common accusations was that Aspasia was a courtisan.
This particular avenue of gossip took on a bunch of
different lurid details. Some claimed that she was a high
class courtisan, and these were known as hatira. Other angles

(07:49):
on this rumor painted her as more of a basic
sex worker, but others claimed that she served Pericles by
bringing him young girls for his own pleasure. So for
the time Aspasia and Pericles became involved with one another,
these rumors were going around, and they persisted long after
she died. And coming up, we're going to talk about

(08:09):
the possibility that Aspasia was a courtisan and the information
that aligns there with that theory. But first we're going
to pause and have a little sponsor break. It is
possible that Aspasia was a hat era. Many aspects of
her story that are held up as evidence of what

(08:30):
an unusual woman she was for the time are actually
pretty commonly in line with these refined courtisan's. Women in
this line of work, when they're discussed by historians today,
are most commonly likened to geisha. They were cultured and
educated and sophisticated. Hato was engaged as a companion rather
than just a sex worker, although sexual relations were also

(08:53):
part of their work, but in a culture where men
didn't usually marry until later in life and when wives
were usually kept in a position where they were uneducated
and restricted to home life most of the time. Hatira
offered the opportunity to spend time with a woman who
was knowledgeable and could discuss the issues of the day.
As this was generally a job filled by women who

(09:14):
were not Athenian. They also had to pay taxes, and
they consequently lived outside of a lot of the restrictions
that the wives of the Athens city state lived with.
We should probably know that uh today's geisha are are
not generally described as sex workers, even though that comparison
is made with htira correct. There's also no conclusive evidence

(09:38):
one way or another as to whether Aspasia was a
hatira or not, or whether just people assumed that she
was because her behavior seemed to fall in line with
this line of work, and while this is a completely
legal and common vocation in Athens at the time, it
was still a way to demean her and in turn,
to demean Pericles. But perhaps even more are jarring to

(10:00):
the people of Athens than the idea that Pericles would
fall in love and live with a woman from Melitus
who may or may not have been a Cortisan and
perhaps leaving his family to do so, was that he
treated Aspasia as an equal. He consulted with her on
matters of state, and she mingled with the men of
power in Athens at the urging of her beloved. Eventually,

(10:22):
the playwright hermy Pus accused Aspasia of impiety. She was
initially suspected of questioning the existence of the gods, but
in the end her trial seemed to boil down to
the idea that Aspasia was turning the women of Athens
to licentious ways. The implication was that it was to
please Pericles. She was eventually cleared of these charges, but

(10:44):
only after Peracles himself appeared in court and made an
impassioned plea on her behalf. Yeah, this is tied to
that whole thing that she was bringing him young girls
for his sexual pleasure. That kind of ties into this
whole impiety charge. It's also really important to contextualize some
of the intent of these attacks on Aspasia, because really

(11:06):
it had more to do with her being a friend
and lover to Perracles than anything related to her actual
life or profession. To have power and democratic Athens was
not all that different from the American democracy in the
last two hundred years, So friends and allies were always
targets as much as a person in power. For example,
in addition to Aspasia, his close friend Fadius was also

(11:29):
the subject of criticism and derision. And in the case
of Fadius, who was overseer of many of the construction
works that we talked about Paracles initiating, he was accused
of embezzlement. It was actually a law that Paracles himself
sponsored that kept him from ever marrying Aspasia. And four
fifty one b c. A law known as the citizenship

(11:50):
law barred any son born to a non Athenian mother
from having citizenship in Athens. Before this law existed, a
child who was born to a man of Athens and
a woman from somewhere else could still be considered an
Athenian citizen. There are a couple of reasons that such
a law might have been enacted. One idea was that

(12:10):
the men of Athens would no longer marry wealthy foreigners
to form alliances and gain power. And the other is
at a time when Athens was experiencing a high level
of prosperity. Remember this is considered the Athenian Golden Age.
It would limit citizenship numbers to curtail losing that prosperity. So,
for example, not long after this law was enacted, the

(12:30):
King of Egypt gifted Athens with a load of grain
with the intent that it would be distributed equally among
Athenian citizens, and there were soon lawsuits challenging the validity
of various citizens status is as people were eager to
keep as much of that grain as possible for themselves.
So had Parically married Aspasia, any male child they had

(12:52):
wouldn't have been considered Athenian. This would have been politically disastrous.
It would have suggested that the very law that Pericles
sponsored was basically meaningless to him personally, and so marriage
was never on the table for him and Aspasia. But
there was also the benefit of Pericles having already fathered
two sons with his wife before he met Aspasia. Those

(13:16):
two sons existing took some of the pressure off of
the situation. So if his firstborn son had been the
child of this foreign woman, there would have been a
lot more controversy. But Aspasia and Pericles did have a
child together, a son who was also named Pericles, and
a moment we'll get into the place of prominence this
couple held in Athenian culture. At the time. First, we

(13:37):
will take one more quick break and hear from one
of our sponsors. While Pericles and Aspasia were together, their
home became sort of a social and intellectual nexus in
the city. Artists, philosophers, and military generals were all entertained
there regularly, and Aspasia was known as incre doably smart

(14:00):
and skilled at debate. She is, in fact, sometimes credited
with inventing the use of inductive reasoning into debate rhetoric,
and Plato even wrote of Aspasia teaching Socrates rhetoric. So Plato,
the famed student of Socrates, referenced this teaching in his
work Manexenus, which we are guessing is the way to
say that this writing is a Socratic dialogue in which

(14:24):
Socrates and Manxinus discuss a funeral speech that Pericles had given.
And we'll talk more about that speech in a moment.
So this dialogue plays out this way. Socrates says that
I should be able to speak is no great wonder, Manxenus,
considering that I have an excellent mistress in the art
of rhetoric, she who has made so many good speakers,

(14:46):
and one who was the best among all the Hellenes. Pericles,
the son of Xanthippus and the Manxinus response, and who
is she? I suppose that you mean Aspasia. There are, however,
two notes to make about this particular piece of writing.
One is that there's some debate about its authenticity too.
Even if it is authentic, it's also possible that this

(15:08):
is a bit of sexist mockery at the very idea
that a woman could teach a man to be an
eloquent speaker, and that these lines are written to be sarcastic.
So this is again part of that bigger problem. In
unraveling the lives of Pericles and Aspasia as a couple,
we mentioned that a lot of the writing is murky,
but also what we know about them are A lot

(15:30):
of what we know about them was written by playwrights
and poets who are largely composing comedies, often as critiques,
So everything in the in the record kind of has
to be backwards engineered and guessed at and put through
this filter of are they making a joke at their
expense or not? But the fact that they, and specifically
Aspasia were the focus of so much writing is a

(15:52):
pretty clear indicator of the importance and prominence of both
her as a woman and their relationship. Athens and Sparta,
once united against the Persians, eventually went to war with
one another, and this conflict between Greek city states was
attributed at least in part to Aspasia. But this blame
was not based on just one theory, as with all

(16:14):
the gossips surrounding whether Aspasia was a courtis in her
guilt among the gossipers was from a variety of different things.
One theory was that the war was really caused by
Spartan's kidnapping young women from a brothel that Aspasia was running,
and this theory is actually discussed in the play The
Accardians that was written by Aristophanes. In Pericles granted assistance

(16:38):
to Militus when it was at war with Samos, and
four forty one b c. Sparta had supported the Samos
and took this assistance to its enemy as an affront.
It's possible that Aspasia had influenced the move, asking Pericles
to interceed on her homeland's behalf, and that that had
provided a spark to the future conflict. And Plutarch wrote

(16:59):
of this episode quote and as these measures against the
Samians are thought to have been taken to please Aspasia.
This may be a fit point for inquiry about the woman,
what art or charming faculty she had that enabled her
to captivate as she did the greatest statesman and to
give the philosopher's occasion to speak so much about her,

(17:19):
and that too, not to her disparagement. Shortly after the
Peloponnesian War began, Athens experienced a plague, and because it
was a densely populated city, illness spread really quickly. This
is big enough deal that it was known as the
Great Plague of Athens. Nearly a quarter of the population
died in this outbreak, and Pericles was blamed for the plague.

(17:44):
It was believed by the enraged and dismayed an understandably
terrified people that overcrowding was the cause of this pestilence.
Athens was at this point so crowded because, in anticipating
a move on the Spartan's part to attack Attica, Pericles
had moved all the residents of the more rural spaces
into the city. And incidentally, Pericles was correct in this prediction,

(18:06):
but that also meant that while he felt like he
was protecting those people from the attack, their undefended homes
and Atticus were completely sacked by the Spartans, and all
property was destroyed, and this further incense the citizens of Athens.
During this time, Pericles gave his most famous speech, and
this was a funeral oration delivered after one of the

(18:28):
battles in this war. So there's a possibility that this
speech was actually written by a Spasia. These are the
final two paragraphs before Peracles disperses the mourners, turning to
the sons or brothers of the dead, I see an
arduous struggle before you. When a man is gone, all
are wont to praise him. And should your merit be
ever so transcendent, you will still find it difficult, not

(18:51):
merely to overtake, but even to approach their renown. The
living have envy to contend with, while those who are
no longer in our path honored with a goodwill into
which rivalry does not enter. On the other hand, if
I must say anything on the subject of female excellence
to those of you who will now be in widowhood,
it will be all comprised in this brief exhortation. Great

(19:15):
will be your glory in not falling short of your
natural character, and greatest will be hers who has least
talked of among the men, whether for good or for bad.
My task is now finished. I have performed it to
the best of my ability, and in word at least
the requirements of the law are now satisfied. If deeds
be in question, those who are here interred have received

(19:38):
their part of their honors already, and for the rest
their children will be brought up till manhood at the
public expense. The state thus offers a valuable prize as
the garland of victory in this race of valor for
the reward both of those who have fallen and their survivors.
And where the rewards for merit are greatest, there are
found the best citizens. So the speech did temporarily put

(20:03):
off public anger, but sentiment against Pericles swelled once again.
He was removed from office and fined, but eventually he
was reinstated. In four b c he was reelected as Strategos,
but that year would again turn tragic. Pericles himself was
not immune to the illness that had devastated the rest

(20:25):
of Athens. He became ill, and the illness dragged on
for months. There was also this secondary problem of a
dire matter of legacy that was taking a toll on
Pericles as he reckoned with his own end. His two
legitimate sons had also died in the plague, and he
was desperate to preserve his legacy, so much so that

(20:46):
he petitioned to have his son with Aspasia named as
his heir. Remember that son was not an Athenian citizen,
and that was a request which initially was neither honored
nor welcomed. When Peracles finally succumbed to his illness and
died in four to any nine b c. The future
of Athens and Aspasias place in it was fraught with uncertainty.
The people of Athens made a somewhat surprising move at

(21:09):
this point, though, due to the bleak situation before them,
with no leadership and a plague still running rampant, they
finally voted that the child of Pericles and Aspasia should
be recognized as an Athenian citizen. Uh This is another
one of those points that has relayed a little bit
differently in terms of timeline, depending on the account you're reading.

(21:30):
Some writings actually say that the citizenship was conferred on
Pericles the younger before his father died, whereas the version
that we just related say that it happened after the wards.
As the city state continued to try to regain its footing,
Aspasia moved on to another romantic interest. This was a
man named Lescles. This is also recounted in the writings

(21:51):
of Plutarch, and they referenced the writings of Ascones quote.
Ascones tells us also that Lecocles a sheep dealer, a
man of low birth and character. Her by keeping Aspasia
company after Pericles's death, came to be a chief man
in Athens. So once again that's another indicator that even
though Aspasia may have been the brunt of many jokes

(22:13):
and the target of a lot of attacks, she clearly
had some power because she was able to help this
man rise into power of his own. Pericles the Younger,
the son of Aspasia and Pericles, was elected general in
four or six b C. He died at a young
age in the Peloponnesian War. The end of Aspasi's life
is pretty unclear. Bisycles died in b C. And Aspasia

(22:37):
more or less vanishes from the historical record at that point,
so we really don't know if she was still alive
to mourn her son when he died. Yeah, she sometimes
cited as having died in four hundred or four d
one BC, and that is usually linked to writings about
the death of Socrates, which we know she was already
gone by uh, and that's how they use that as

(22:58):
a marker. But we really have no idea when she
passed away. But it is sort of a it's interesting.
It's one of those things, like I said, people always
hold her up as this amazing exception to all of
the rules of Athens, and in many ways she was.
But at the same time, there are aspects of her
story that actually fall in line with with those um

(23:19):
you know, sort of cultured cortisans that were part of
Athenian culture as well. So it you know, and there's
so much guesswork in their story because we just don't
know a lot of details, Like we don't know what
she was like as a person, if she was funny,
or if she was you know, dower, or if we
have no idea about any of this. Good at debate

(23:41):
is what we know and very beautiful by all accounts.
So it's there are many mysteries. Yeah, the staffs and
listener mail I do this is actually a postcard that came. Um,
we got it at the beginning of this year, but
it was sent to us at the end of last
year by our listener. Aila says, Hi, I'm Lila, I'm eleven,

(24:03):
and I love your podcast. My mom and I love
to listen to it in the car. Right now, we're
in Oslo, Norway to perform with La Petite Cirque at
the Nobel Peace Prize Concert. We got to visit the
Nobel Peace Center and learn all about its history. Uh.
This uh postcard that she sent is a photograph of
mother Teresa, and she would like to request an episode

(24:24):
about her. Um. We'll see if that makes it in
the rotation. But I just love that she took the
time while they were traveling to send us this lovely postcard.
So thank you, Lila, and thank you for listening. Uh.
If you would like to write to us, you can
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(24:45):
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(25:05):
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