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Aspasia is one of the most enigmatic figures of ancient Greece: a foreign woman in Athens who lured the city’s leader, mingled with the sharpest minds of this society, and was both celebrated and savagely mocked by her fellow Athenians. Aspasia of Miletus, the partner and companion of the great Athenian statesman Pericles, has indeed been a woman of many faces.
For centuries, archaeologists, historians, and their fellow classicists have wrestled with a crucial question: Was she merely the beautiful consort of Athens’ most powerful leader, or was she a significant intellectual personality, worthy of being remembered in her own right?
Was Aspasia a philosopher who shaped the Golden Age of ancient Greece from behind the scenes? The answer to these questions is a complicated one, buried under thousands of years and an Athenian society defined by political machinations and outright misogyny.
Imagine ancient Athens in the 5th century BC, particularly the city-state of Athens, with the Acropolis shining under Pericles’ extensive public building program. Democracy (for men, it should be noted) was flourishing as a revolutionary new system of governance, and philosophers like Socrates were wandering the city’s Agora, questioning everything and provoking the authorities.
This was an age of incredible intellectual richness, but let’s be clear: Greece, particularly Athens in the 5th century BC, was overwhelmingly a man’s world. Respectable Athenian women were mostly confined to their homes, living lives dictated by fathers and husbands.
However, Aspasia was different. This fascinating personality was not Athenian by birth. She came from Miletus, an important Ionian Greek city on the Western coast of Anatolia, known for its intellectual traditions and vibrant public life.
Aspasia arrived in Athens as a metic—a resident who was a foreigner and, therefore, had limited rights. This status, while reducing her political rights to the bare minimum (for example, she couldn’t legally marry an Athenian citizen like Pericles), paradoxically might have offered her more freedom than native Athenian women enjoyed.
The metic Aspasia wasn’t bound by the same strict conventions that native Athenian women were. This allowed her to engage publicly in ways few others could.
Even her detractors consistently acknowledge her extraordinary intelligence, wit, and skill in conversation and rhetoric, attributes rare for other women in ancient Athens. These characteristics were central to the male-dominated ancient Greek world. This peculiar situation created a public profile for a woman who stood out, gaining fame and popularity in her own right.
The relationship between Aspasia and Pericles was scandalous for a society that was misogynistic in principle.
Pericles was the political personality who became the architect of Athenian power. Beyond his political power, nonetheless, he was a man who divorced his Athenian wife to live with Aspasia, a metic. This was no small thing for a society like Athens. While they couldn’t formally marry under Athenian law due to her foreign birth, their personal and political bond was deep, committed, and lasted until the very death of Pericles during the Plague of Athens.
Plutarch, writing centuries after the lives of Pericles and Aspasia, informs us that Pericles kissed Aspasia every day when leaving for and returning from the Agora—a rather public display for the usually reserved statesman and devoted leader.
But their connection wasn’t just romantic; gossip spread across Athens that Aspasia was always behind the most important political decisions of Pericles, effectively making Athens a city-state run by a woman, something unthinkable for the time.
Comic playwrights like Aristophanes used this golden opportunity for comedy by utilizing satire (or slander), often portraying Aspasia and her relationship to Pericles as a curse, her being the reason for the Peloponnesian War. She was publicly accused of influencing Pericles in a dispute involving her purported hometown, leading Athens into a costly war.
Aspasia was therefore perceived as a powerful figure despite her gender, a woman whose proximity to Pericles made her a target and a subject of intense public interest.
Was Aspasia a philosopher?
So, beyond the political machinations and societal gossip, what about the philosophical influence that Aspasia had over Pericles and Athens? Here, the evidence gets even more intriguing, though still frustratingly indirect, leaving plenty of room for disagreements.
Several ancient sources, including Xenophon and Plato, depict Socrates engaging with Aspasia himself, sometimes even seeking her wisdom. If this were true, it means that Aspasia was a person whose intellectual capabilities were universally admired, despite the gossip.
Plato’s dialogue Menexenus gets even more intriguing: Socrates claims that a brilliant funeral speech he delivered was composed by Aspasia and had nothing to do with him. Now, hold on. Is Plato being serious, ironic, or using Aspasia as a way to critique Athenian rhetoric, since a woman orator was something not worthy of admiration in those years? Scholars are still debating what we should make of it. But the very fact that Plato, one of history’s greatest philosophers, would attribute such a significant piece of rhetoric to Aspasia suggests that her reputation was widespread, causing anything from pure admiration to proper scandal.
Some accounts even suggest that Aspasia ran a kind of salon, a meeting place for Athens’ leading philosophers and thinkers, where she not only participated in their philosophical debates but perhaps even led discussions on pressing topics about philosophy and rhetoric.
Could she have been teaching the very skills that made Athenian orators famous? While we lack writings from Aspasia herself—a common fate for women in antiquity—the sheer volume of information from multiple ancient sources about her intellect makes it safe to say that Aspasia was far more than just a beautiful partner to an influential leader. She was part of the Athenian intelligentsia of the 5th century BC.
So, why is this debate about a woman who lived 2,500 years ago still happening?
The struggle to understand Aspasia’s true role in the Athenian Golden Age provides us with a vital lesson about the role of women in history. We get all our information from sources written predominantly by men, often colored by their own misogynistic biases and societal expectations that want women submissive and relegated to the role of companions, rather than personalities of their right.
Was Aspasia celebrated despite being a woman, or was her influence downplayed because she was one? This question about this important ancient Greek figure remains significant and extends beyond her, affecting many other female figures in our shared human history.
