who is aspasia of miletus?

Answer 1

Aspasia, Ancient Philosopher and Teacher of Athens
Ostracism
According to Madeleine Henry's work on Aspasia of Miletus, Prisoner of History, an Alcibiades was ostracized from Athens in 460 B.C. This Alcibiades was the grandfather of the far more famous Alcibiades notorious for his behavior during the Peloponnesian War. Once ostracized, Athenians went into exile. Alcibiades (grandpère) may have spent his exile in Miletus, in Ionia (modern Asia Minor), where he met and married the older daughter of Axiochus of Miletus. Ten years later, at the expiration of his sentence of exile, Alcibiades, his wife, and two sons returned to Athens, along with his young, orphaned sister-in-law, Aspasia.
Female Metics and Citizens
During Alcibiades' exile, Athens passed the Periclean Citizenship Law (451/450 B.C.). According to this new law, no children born to a citizen (by definition, a male) with a foreign born (metic) wife could be Athenian citizens. Her children would be considered illegitimate, making her no better than a concubine. The law wasn't retroactive, so Alcibiades' sons from a marriage made before 451 B.C. were counted as legitimate even though their mother was a metic, but since Aspasia, also a metic in Athens, had not been grandfathered into a pre-Citizenship Law marriage, her marriage prospects were suddenly limited.

Career Choices for Women in Ancient Athens
What choices for relationships did Aspasia of Miletus have? To be a concubine? A prostitute? A madam? Aspasia was accused of all of these. But she was thwarted in the normal aspirations and expectations [see Jill Kleinman article] for aristocratic women like herself whose primary responsibility was to produce legitimate offspring. Since Aspasia could not produce legitimate children, there was no reason for any Athenian male citizen [Brian Arkins, 1994. "Sexuality in Fifth-Century Athens," Classics Ireland Volume 1] to marry her. Thus, any sexual relationship Aspasia entered into could be viewed as improper. That she chose to enter into a relationship with the Athenian leader Pericles put her, too, in a position of power, but also a position particularly vulnerable to criticism.

Critics of Aspasia

"Even Aspasia, who belonged to the Socratic circle, imported large numbers of beautiful women, and Greece came to be filled with her prostitutes, as the witty Aristophanes notes in passing, when he says of the Peloponnesian War that Pericles fanned its terrible flame because of his love for Aspasia and the serving-maids who had been stolen from her by Megarians...."
Athenaeus - Deipnosophists

Aspasia, some say, was courted and caressed by Pericles upon account of her knowledge and skill in politics. Socrates himself would sometimes go to visit her, and some of his acquaintance with him; and those who frequented her company would carry their wives with them to listen to her. Her occupation was anything but creditable, her house being a home for young courtesans. Aeschines tells us, also, that Lysicles, 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. And in Plato's Menexenus, though we do not take the introduction as quite serious, still thus much seems to be historical, that she had the repute of being resorted to by many of the Athenians for instruction in the art of speaking.

Aspasia in Greek Comedy

More of this Feature
• Aspasia of Miletus and Her Status As Metic
• Aspasia of Miletus and the Greek Philosophers





Related Resources
• Aristophanes and Greek Old Comedy
• Plutarch's Life of Pericles





Aspasia Book
• Prisoner of History, by Madeleine Henry





Elsewhere on the Web
• (http://www.pbs.org/empires/thegreeks/characters/aspasia_p2.html) Aspasia of Miletus from PBS
• (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/classes/JKp.html) The Representation of Prostitutes Versus Respectable Women on Ancient Greek Vases, by Jill Kleinman
• (http://www.ucd.ie/~classics/94/Arkins94.html) Sexuality in Fifth-Century Athens, by Brian Arkins







Besides Plutarch, who reports on the rumors about Aspasia of Miletus in his "Life of Pericles," we hear of Aspasia mainly through allusions and fragments of comedy and philosophy. Through comedy we meet with Aspasia in connection with personification of traditionally feminine but despised traits.

From the Acharnians by Aristophanes, we see this picture of Aspasia:

It was men of ours--I do not say our polis;
remember that, I do not say our polis--
but some badly-minded troublemaking creeps,
some worthless counterfeit foreign currency,
who started denouncing shirts from Megara
and if they spotted a cucumber or a bunny
or piglets, cloves of garlic, lumps of salt,
it was Megarian, grabbed, sold off that very day.
Now that was merely local; small potatoes.
But then some young crapshooters got to drinking
and went to Megara and stole the whore Simaétha.
And then the Megarians, garlic-stung with passion,
got even by stealing two whores from Aspasia.
From this the origin of the war broke forth
on all the Greeks: from three girls good at blow-jobs.
And then in wrath Olympian Pericles
did lighten and thunder and turn Greece upside-down,
establishing laws that read like drinking-songs....
Aristophanes - Acharnians

It was even a comic poet who brought Aspasia to trial:
"About the same time, Aspasia was indicted of impiety, upon the complaint of Hermippus the comedian, who also laid further to her charge that she received into her house freeborn women for the uses of Pericles."
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Aspasia of Miletus (fifth century BCE): wife of the Athenian leader Pericles.
Aspasia was born in Miletus and must have belonged to a wealthy family, because her parents could afford an education for their daughter. In the early 440's, the family settled in Athens, where they were metics, i.e. non-Athenians living in the city. These people had to pay an additional tax and did not receive full political rights. An Athenian man could not have a full marriage with a metic; their children could not receive full citizen rights. Of course, these relations were not illegal either.

Aspasia was the metic wife of the Athenian politician Pericles, and gave birth to his son-without-full-rights, who was also called Pericles. In the later 430's, when the politicial opponents of the elder Pericles (a/o Hagnon) tried to accuse him of impiety, Aspasia was also mentioned as someone acting impiously, but she was not convicted. After the death of her husband in 429, Aspasia lived together with his friend Lysicles, but her second marriage was ill-fated: her husband was killed in action during a campaign in Caria in 428/427.

This is all we know. Although the philosopher Aeschines, a pupil of Socrates, wrote a dialogue that was titled Aspasia (now lost), no author has ever written about Aspasia herself - if she is mentioned, it's because she was the wife of Pericles. She is in fact a historical unperson.

Still, she is mentioned several times. In Athenian comedies, she is called a harlot and a brothel keeper and is supposed to have had great influence on her husband's policy. The playwright Duris presented her as responsible for the Athenian attack on Samos in 440, and in 425, Aristophanes parodied the prologue of Herodotus's Histories, and suggested that the Archidamian War broke out because a group of Megarians had taken away two girls from Aspasia's brothel (quote).

Compared to the way Aristophanes portrayed Cleon, Euripides, and Socrates, the comedian is kind towards Aspasia. But that does not make these remarks reliable biographical information. They were meant to strike at Pericles, who, it is suggested, shared his wife with other men, something that was considered to be a stain on his honor. And a man without honor, it was believed, could not command an army or lead the city.

The remarks also tell something about the Athenian contempt for a metic woman who seems to have played a role in the cultural life of her adopted hometown. "Seems": although several sources portray Aspasia as a woman of great intellectual powers who "taught Pericles how to speak" (and was, therefore, a philosopher and an orator in her own right), this is again parody. Any Greek politician was believed to have learned the tricks of the trade from someone else; making Pericles the pupil of a woman was again a form of mud-slinging.

On the other hand, it is possible that the fact that Aristophanes did not go to great lengths to damage the reputation of Aspasia, is evidence that she was a respected lady. But this is just a hypothesis.

So we are left with a rather disappointing conclusion: nothing is certain about Aspasia. She was the wife of Pericles, and that is all we know.

Answer 2

Aspasia of Miletus

Bust of Aspasia (Archaeological
Museum, Izmir) Aspasia of Miletus (fifth century BCE): wife of the Athenian leader Pericles.
Aspasia was born in Miletus and must have belonged to a wealthy family, because her parents could afford an education for their daughter. In the early 440's, the family settled in Athens, where they were metics, i.e. non-Athenians living in the city. These people had to pay an additional tax and did not receive full political rights. An Athenian man could not have a full marriage with a metic; their children could not receive full citizen rights. Of course, these relations were not illegal either.

Aspasia was the metic wife of the Athenian politician Pericles, and gave birth to his son-without-full-rights, who was also called Pericles. In the later 430's, when the politicial opponents of the elder Pericles (a/o Hagnon) tried to accuse him of impiety, Aspasia was also mentioned as someone acting impiously, but she was not convicted. After the death of her husband in 429, Aspasia lived together with his friend Lysicles, but her second marriage was ill-fated: her husband was killed in action during a campaign in Caria in 428/427.

This is all we know. Although the philosopher Aeschines, a pupil of Socrates, wrote a dialogue that was titled Aspasia (now lost), no author has ever written about Aspasia herself - if she is mentioned, it's because she was the wife of Pericles. She is in fact a historical unperson.

Still, she is mentioned several times. In Athenian comedies, she is called a harlot and a brothel keeper and is supposed to have had great influence on her husband's policy. The playwright Duris presented her as responsible for the Athenian attack on Samos in 440, and in 425, Aristophanes parodied the prologue of Herodotus's Histories, and suggested that the Archidamian War broke out because a group of Megarians had taken away two girls from Aspasia's brothel (quote).

Compared to the way Aristophanes portrayed Cleon, Euripides, and Socrates, the comedian is kind towards Aspasia. But that does not make these remarks reliable biographical information. They were meant to strike at Pericles, who, it is suggested, shared his wife with other men, something that was considered to be a stain on his honor. And a man without honor, it was believed, could not command an army or lead the city.

The remarks also tell something about the Athenian contempt for a metic woman who seems to have played a role in the cultural life of her adopted hometown. "Seems": although several sources portray Aspasia as a woman of great intellectual powers who "taught Pericles how to speak" (and was, therefore, a philosopher and an orator in her own right), this is again parody. Any Greek politician was believed to have learned the tricks of the trade from someone else; making Pericles the pupil of a woman was again a form of mud-slinging.

On the other hand, it is possible that the fact that Aristophanes did not go to great lengths to damage the reputation of Aspasia, is evidence that she was a respected lady. But this is just a hypothesis.

So we are left with a rather disappointing conclusion: nothing is certain about Aspasia. She was the wife of Pericles, and that is all we know.
Jona Lendering © 2005
Latest revision: 31 March 2006

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Answer 3

A contributor to learning in Athens, Aspasia of Miletus (c. 470 BC-410 BC) boldly surpassed the limited expectations for women by establishing a renowned girl's school and a popular salon. She lived free of female seclusion and conducted herself like a male intellectual while expounding on current events, philosophy, and rhetoric. Her fans included the philosopher Socrates and his followers, the teacher Plato, the orator Cicero, the historian Xenophon, the writer Athenaeus, and the statesman and general Pericles, her adoring common-law husband.