SYMHC Classics: Aspasia and Pericles

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Valentine's Day is coming up this week, and while we don't do an episode on that theme every year, we realize that we have an episode publishing on February fourteenth, but we did not do anything remotely related. So so to give you a little bit in acknowledgement of the holiday, we thought we would bring one of history's love stories out of the archive for today's Saturday Classic. It is Aspasia and Pericles. It's from February. It is, of course about more than just their relationship, and having spent way too many hours playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey since doing this episode, every single proper name in here now sounds weird to me. So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio. 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 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 true confession. I am currently researching a specifically Valentine episode, so I understand, yeah, yeah, but this one kind of fell apart. Uh. We're going to talk about classical athletes a 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. 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 athene in 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 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 Pericles kissed Aspasia every single day, once when he went out for the day and again when he returned, 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 Pericles and Spasia lived with a little bit of a grain of salt, and we have to think critically about their story. So it again to 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 Acumenant Empire. We've talked about that empire on the show before. Uh Greece had 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 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 participants 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 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. 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 Paraclets. Peracles was born into privilege. His father, Xanthipis, was a war hero, his mother was from a really powerful family, and in his adulthood, Peracles made a name for himself as a military leader, a politician, and a patron of the arts. He was elected to the military governmental leadership position of Strtigos through democratic vote in four forty three b C. And as one of athens leaders, Paracles made many contributions that would come to be part of the historical identity of the city. So during the Greco Persian War that we referenced a moment ago, Athens had burned and a lot of it had been destroyed, and as part of ongoing remaking of the city, it was Pericles who initiated the construction of such iconic structures as the Temple to a 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 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 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 of Spasia'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 sugge us to slightly more 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's 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. 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 Is the second, and this could be her connection to Pericles because he was known to that family and Aspasiast time in Athens began sometime in the four forties BC, and it was in Athens that Aspasia would become famous, though not always in the most flattering ways. It wasn't long after she got to Athens that she met Pericles. 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 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 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. 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 a Spasia, 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. 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 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 from 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 the possibility that Aspasia was a courtisan. And the information that aligns there with that theory. But first we're going to pause, have a little sponsor break. It is possible that Aspasia was a hazira. Many aspects of her story that are held up as evidence of what an unusual woman she was for the time are actually pretty commonly in line with these refined courtisans. 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. Hatira was engaged as a companion rather than just a sex worker, although sexual relations were also 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 general a job filled by women who 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 utira correct. There's also no conclusive evidence 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 jarring to 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, the playwright Hermy Poos 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 only after Pericles 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 it had more to do with her being a friend and lover to Pracles than anything related to her actual life or profession. Shim 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 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 Pericles initiating, he was accused of embezzlement. It was actually a law that Peracles himself sponsored that kept him from ever marrying Aspasia, and for fifty one b c. A law known as the Citizenship 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 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 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 great as possible for themselves. So had Paricles married Aspasia, any male child they had 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 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. In a moment, we'll get into the place of prominence this couple held in Athenian culture at the time. First, we 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 incredibly smart 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 Menexenus, which we are guessing is the way to say that this writing is a Socratic dialogue in which 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, Manxinus, considering that I have an excellent mistress in the art of rhetoric, she who has made so many good speakers, and one who was the best among all the Hellenes, Pericles, the son of Xanthippus, And the Manexinus responds, 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 to even if it is authentic. It's also possible that this is a bit of sexist my cockery 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 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 in guests 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 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 the gossips surrounding whether Aspasia was a court is 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. Pericles granted assistance to Militus when it was at war with Samos, and fourty 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 are 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 fiddlehood, it will be all comprised in this brief exhortation. Great 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 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 off public anger, but sentiment against Pericles swelled once again. He was removed from office and mind, 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 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 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 The future of Athens and Aspasias place in it was fraught with uncertainty. The people of Athens made a somewhat surprising move at this point, though, due to the bleak situation with 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. 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 words. 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 of Plutarch, and they referenced the writings of Ascones quote. Ascones tells us also that Leccles, a sheep dealer, a man of low birth and character, 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 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 E, but he died at a young age in the Peloponnesian War. The end of Aspasia's life is pretty unclear. Bisycles died in b C and Aspasia more or less banishes from the historical record at that point, so we really don't know if she was still alive. Two 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 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, you know, sort of cultured cortisons 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, dour, or if we have no idea about any of this. Good at debate is what we know and very beautiful by all accounts. So it's there are many mysteries. Did fay so much for joining us on this Saturday? Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at I Heart ray Deo dot com. Our old house stuff works. Email at us no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.