The Historians' History of the World 03

This was the celebrated Aspasia, who had long attracted almost as much of the public attention at Athens as Pericles himself. She was a native of Miletus, which was early and long renowned as a school for the cultivation of female graces. She had come, it would seem, as an adventurer to Athens, and by the combined charms of her person, manners, and conversation, won the affections and the esteem of Pericles. Her station had freed her from the restraints which custom laid on the education of the Athenian matron: and she had enriched her mind with accomplishments which were rare even among the men. Her acquaintance with Pericles seems to have begun while he was still united to a lady of high birth, before the wife of the wealthy Hipponicus. We can hardly doubt that it was Aspasia who first disturbed this union, though it is said to have been dissolved by mutual consent. But after parting from his wife, who had borne him two sons, Pericles attached himself to Aspasia by the most intimate relation which the laws permitted him to contract with a foreign woman; and she acquired an ascendency over him, which soon became notorious, and furnished the comic poets with an inexhaustible fund of ridicule, and his enemies with a ground for serious charges. On the stage she was the Hera of the Athenian Zeus, the Omphale, or the Dejanira of an enslaved or a faithless Hercules. The Samian War was ascribed to her interposition on behalf of her birthplace; and rumours were set afloat which represented her as ministering to the vices of Pericles by the most odious and degrading of offices. There was perhaps as little foundation for this report, as for a similar one in which Phidias was implicated; though among all the imputations brought against Pericles this is that which it is the most difficult clearly to refute.

But we are inclined to believe that it may have arisen from the peculiar nature of Aspasia’s private circles, which, with a bold neglect of established usage, were composed not only of the most intelligent and accomplished men to be found at Athens, but also of matrons, who it is said were brought by their husbands, to listen to her conversation; which must have been highly instructive as well as brilliant, since Plato did not hesitate to describe her as the preceptress of Socrates, and to assert that she both formed the rhetoric of Pericles, and composed one of his most admired harangues. The innovation which drew women of free birth, and good condition, into her company for such a purpose, must, even where the truth was understood, have surprised and offended many; and it was liable to the grossest misconstruction. And if her female friends were sometimes seen watching the progress of the works of Phidias, it was easy, through his intimacy with Pericles, to connect this fact with a calumny of the same kind.

There was another rumour still more dangerous, which grew out of the character of the persons who were admitted to the society of Pericles and Aspasia. Athens had become a place of resort for learned and ingenious men of all pursuits. None were more welcome at the house of Pericles than such as were distinguished by philosophical studies, and especially by the profession of new speculative tenets. He himself was never weary of discussing such subjects; and Aspasia was undoubtedly able to bear her part in this, as well as in any other kind of conversation. The mere presence of Anaxagoras, Zeno, Protagoras, and other celebrated men, who were known to hold doctrines very remote from the religious conceptions of the vulgar, was sufficient to make a circle in which they were familiar pass for a school of impiety. Such were the materials out of which the comic poet Hermippus, laying aside the mask, framed a criminal prosecution against Aspasia. His indictment included two heads: an offence against religion, and that of corrupting Athenian women to gratify the passions of Pericles.

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