PRISONER OF HISTORY
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PRISONER OF HISTORY Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition
Madeleine M. Henry
New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1995
Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bombay Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1995 by Madeleine M. Henry Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016-43 14 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Henry, Madeleine Mary. 1949Prisoner of history : Aspasia of Miletus and her biographical tradition / Madeleine M. Henry. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-508712-7 1. Aspasia. 2. Pericles, 499-429 B.C. 3. Mistresses—Greece—Athens—Biography. 4. Women in politics—Greece—Athens—Biography. 5. Greece—History— Athenian supremacy, 479-431 B.C. I. Title. DF228.A8H46 1995 938'.504'092—dc20 [B] 94-1250
98765432 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Contents
Introduction, 3 1. Aspasia in Greek History, 9 2. The Story Told by Comedy, 19 3. Aspasia and the Socratic Tradition, 29 4. The Sargasso Sea: Aspasia and the Discourse on Prostitutes in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique Periods, 57 5. Aspasia in the Postclassical West, 83 Afterword, 127 Notes, 131 Bibliography, 177 Index, 195
Acknowledgments
People and institutions have helped Aspasia and me on our journey. Iowa State University gave me a job, several research grants, and a faculty improvement leave, during which much of the work was done. Colleagues in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and in the Classical Studies and Women's Studies Programs offered moral and practical support, and friends in Classical Studies in the United States, Canada, and England sustained me. This work owes more than I can ever say to the sisterhood I have found in the Women's Classical Caucus and to Jim Ruebel's encouragement and collegiality. Special thanks to my friends Achilles Avraamides, John Cunnally, Marie Lathers, Deepa Majumdar, Frank Mariner, Suzanne Mills, Brian LeMay, David Roochnik, and Linda Rutland Gillison, to Jeff Rusten and Philip Stadter, who read the manuscript for Oxford University Press, and to OUP's copyeditor, Lisa Tippett.
PRISONER OF HISTORY
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Introduction
Aspasia of Miletus, a key figure in the intellectual history of fifthcentury Athens, is without question the most important woman of that era. Aspasia left no written works of her own, was lampooned in comedy, and was an important figure in Greek philosophical dialogue—all things she shares with Socrates, a better known and more revered icon, and whose teacher she is said to have been. Aspasia's reputation as teacher has repeatedly been connected with her sexual reputation as a courtesan and the mistress of the statesman Pericles. The historical possibilities for her life and the ebb and surge of her biographical tradition have never before been seriously and comprehensively examined; they are the subject of my study. It is time to remember Aspasia's place in the history of women and of feminist epistemology. During her own lifetime, Aspasia was a notorious woman, one of the few who apparently contradicted the statement, attributed to Pericles, that it is better for women not to be mentioned.1 She has been mentioned in comedy, philosophy, historiography, and art. She has been identified as Pericles' political advisor, as an original "liberated woman," as a philosopher, and as a prototype of the grand horizontal. I hope here to suggest ways in which ancient sources and modern interpreters have constructed her life, and how the possibilities that existed for her life have been misunderstood. Biographical anecdotes that arose in antiquity about Aspasia are wildly colorful, almost completely unverifiable, and still alive and well in the twentieth century. It is arduous but necessary to investigate that tradition from its inception during her own lifetime until the present. The 3
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continued fascination exerted by classical Athens, so near to us and yet so far from us, demands a full treatment of the bios of its most famous woman. 2 Feminist scholarship must be used together with traditional philological methods if we are to see in what ways Aspasia's bios began and has continued to grow, and in what ways it has done her wrong. In Writing a Woman's Life, Carolyn Heilbrun states that women in the West have historically been deprived of the narratives, texts, plots, or examples with which to assume power over their lives. This assertion of the political power of narrative presumes that the forms, structures, and contents of biography, autobiography, and historiography have heretofore supplied insufficient, inaccurate, defective narratives—ones that at best cannot tell the truth of women's lives and at worst create perniciously misleading and stifling narrative plots.3 Furthermore, the very formation of canonical features for biography and biographical tradition has been until recently a process engaged in for the most part by male scholars about male subjects: Aspasia's biographical tradition, although rich, diverges remarkably in its manifestations from those features traditionally considered canonical.4 The paucity of evidence, together with the problems involved in studying the lack of symmetry between men's and women's lives in classical antiquity, has tended to prevent us from considering either that women can legitimately be seen as creative participants in Western intellectual tradition or that they are the proper objects of scholarly inquiry. A standard study of Greek biography categorically, if unintentionally, denies Aspasia a biography: "An account of the life of a man from birth to death is what I call biography."5 This definition of biography merely embellishes the declaration of the great classicist Ulrich von WilamowitzMoellendorff, who declared that Aspasia's life and intellect—and questions about either—have no place in history; we have not come very far.6 The persistence of Aspasia's bios and, in fact, its expansion in the last two centuries suggest that we desperately need to understand both what Aspasia may have been and what she has come to represent. The task is formidable for several reasons. First, the period during which Aspasia lived is one for which there is much conjecture and little good contemporary evidence. At times, it seems that the amount of scholarship produced on a given historical question is inversely proportional to the amount and quality of evidence available. Those who study the lives and biographical traditions of men such as Pericles, Themistocles, or Plato, and of Aspasia face like obstacles, for in each instance it
Introduction
5
is necessary to sift, order, and evaluate evidence of a bewildering quantity, quality, kind, and date (not to mention datability). In order to establish the life events for the greatest figures of classical Athenian history within even a tentative chronology, historians leap perilously among the ice floes of contemporary inscriptions, forward to Plutarch and back to fourth-century revisionist historiographers, only to advance again to papyrus fragments and Byzantine lexica. Over this set of problems lies the "problem" of Aspasia's gender. The male writers of Greco-Roman antiquity perceived, identified, evaluated, and described their female and male subjects very differently. The first consequence of this fact is that far less information has been recorded about women relative to the amount we have about men. Male historians generally did not mention women at all. For example, warfare, a favorite topic of historiographers, affected women in grave ways, but its effect on them is recorded only very indirectly in any sources.7 Even a woman warrior such as Artemisia, who by male standards played an important role in the Persian Wars, is described differently by Herodotus than are Persian men.8 To discern and analyze the gross and fine asymmetries between women's and men's material lives and between their presumed moral and intellectual capacities—and the representation of these in discourse across time and space—is an essential part of feminist critical practice and must supplement traditional philological methods. To classify and evaluate the numerous biographical anecdotes related of Aspasia in exactly the same manner as has been done, for example, for those of Plato, would be a mistake even if it were possible. Because women and men led asymmetrical lives in fifth-century Athens, evidence itself is not "the same" evidence, but different inasmuch as it is informed by a differently gendered relationship for the female object of the male writer's scrutiny. Because of Aspasia's longstanding reputation as teacher, companion to Pericles, and member of an intellectual elite, it has been customary to place her, and then leave her, among other members, all men, of that alleged coterie—Anaxagoras, Phidias, and the scientists and sophists.9 But it is also necessary in the most fundamental sense to consider the ways in which her biographical tradition portrays her as a woman. For example, Aspasia and Pericles are often criticized in comedy and sometimes are mentioned together; it would be erroneous in the extreme, however, to imagine that each is criticized for analogous reasons. It is imperative rather to compare her with other members of the gender class
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"woman" and weigh her representation as a concubine, prostitute, and mother in Old Comedy against the representation of other such women in that genre. This having been done, Aspasia can be seen to participate in a discourse in which men do not. Note that Old Comedy does not celebrate any women thinkers, and that the charge of effeminacy, with strong negative connotations, is leveled against poets. Autonomous "femaleness" and femininity are not revered in Old Comedy. It is likewise perilous to situate Aspasia with Socrates just by denning each as a radical outsider teacher. Like Socrates, Aspasia was criticized in comedy, enjoyed a reputation as a sophistic philosopher, and was an important figure in fourth-century philosophical dialogue. Yet history has largely considered only Plato and other men to be philosophers; women philosophers are footnotes, freaks, groupies, and martyrs—anything and everything but philosophers. It is necessary to explore Aspasia's singular place in the Socratic dialogues and to ask why and with what effect Plato makes Aspasia the only woman outside of Diotima who speaks in any of his works.10 To free Aspasia from the prison of history, we must try to shed any prior notions about what a biography—the writing of a life, the writing of a woman's life—is or must be. First, I suggest the range of historical possibilities for Aspasia's life; these differ substantially from the descriptions and references found in Attic comedy, the only sources contemporary with that life. After identifying the characteristics of her biographical tradition in its first centuries, before Plutarch distilled it into the form that would influence its major reappearances after the end of Greco-Roman antiquity, I trace the evolution of her bios from late antiquity to the present. Next to Sappho's and Cleopatra's, Aspasia's is the longest and richest female biographical tradition to come down to us from the Greco-Roman past. That past has had much to do with current constructions of gender roles and the ways in which women participate, or do not, in intellectual discourse in the West. It is entirely possible that the sexualization of Aspasia's intellect, a key facet of her bios, has negatively affected the development of feminist consciousness. The process of retrieving and reinterpreting the varied aspects of her biographical tradition may help us retrieve earlier moments in the development of feminist consciousness. Perhaps no one will be entirely sympathetic to my treatment of this subject; any topic that is manifested over such a long expanse of time
Introduction
1
and moves among such disparate texts is bound to be unevenly developed by its first investigator. I hope that the reader's dissatisfaction will be born of the recognition that Aspasia and her bios are important and worth much further study. I consider it a positive consequence to have provoked such dissatisfaction.
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1 Aspasia in Greek History
Our ignorance of Aspasia's life course is emblematic of our ignorance of the lives of all women in fifth-century Hellas. This only seems so shocking and our curiosity so keenly and urgently justified because Aspasia's reputation has thrown her into high relief. In fact, however, we are even more ignorant of other women—nameless persons whose lives may have been quite similar to hers. To ask questions about Aspasia's life is to ask questions about half of humanity. One may assume that her early life began typically, that is to say, inauspiciously, and that we must seek its broadest outlines not in the atypical but in the normative bounds. It would be necessary to do this even should it ever become demonstrable that every scurrilous anecdote about Aspasia had a factual basis. We must learn to forget Aspasia's reputation. It is treacherous but obligatory to begin with the most concentrated and connected account of Aspasia's life, that found in chapters 24 and 32 of Plutarch's Life of Pericles. Feminist historians have problematized the authority of male biographers, and classicists painstakingly have dissected out the layers of sources in this imperial author's discussion of Pericles and his associates nearly seven hundred years after the fact. Within Plutarch's brief account, we find scraps of information that may have originated during Aspasia's own lifetime. According to Plutarch, Aspasia came from Miletus, a wealthy city on the coast of Asia Minor, and her father's name was Axiochus.' She had a union with Pericles some time after his divorce from his wife, and she is usually assumed to have given birth to the bastard, Pericles junior. Aspasia is also said to have "married" the Athenian politician Lysides 9
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and to have borne him a son.2 Fifth-century comedy calls her both a concubine and a whore; Plutarch reports that she modeled herself on Thargelia, the Ionian courtesan who attempted to capture the affections of the most powerful men of the day and to influence them politically, but there is no conclusive contemporary evidence. Comedy provides the only fifth-century evidence that she influenced Pericles' political policies.3 In fact, no fifth-century evidence exists for any substantial part of Aspasia's life. It is possible to map only the barest possibilities for that life: to ascertain the approximate date of her birth, her places of residence, the duration and nature of her sexual relationships, the number and birth dates of her children, and the date of her death, are all hazardous endeavors. Additionally, and most importantly, there is no good evidence for her inner or intellectual life. Against the colorful reportage may be set something less sensational, something more documentary. An early fourth-century B.C. Attic gravestone bears the names of persons who were probably Aspasia's collateral descendants. As Oswyn Murray said of ancient historians, "When we do come across evidence, we refuse to believe it, or deny that it is history."4 The possibilities created by the names of the dead allow the hypothesis, suggested by Peter J. Bicknell, that Aspasia was born any time after 470 B.C., that she came to Athens around 450 B.C. as a fatherless refugee of marriageable or nearly marriageable age, and that she was related by her sister's marriage to the Athenian Alcibiades, grandfather of the notorious Alcibiades.5 The elder Alcibiades, ostracized from Athens in 460, may have spent his exile in Miletus. Bicknell proposes that there he met a daughter of Axiochus and by her had two sons, Axiochus (born ca. 458 B.C.) and Aspasios (born ca. 456 B.C.). Aspasia would have been the younger sister of this Milesian wife. Miletus' history was turbulent in the archaic and classical periods. By the 460s, it was a member of the Delian League, a defensive alliance wherein Athens came to assume an increasingly dominant position and to which allied cities contributed ships or tribute in return for protection against Persians and pirates. Around 457/6 there was stasis (factional unrest) in Miletus, possibly caused by oligarchic revolutionaries who did not want to pay tribute, and the city temporarily defected from the league. The oligarchs, hitherto supported by Athens, exiled their opponents to the surrounding communities of Leros and Teichioussa, and others that continued to pay tribute. In the summer of 452, Athens retook Miletus, banned the oligarchs, and reinstated their opponents. It
Aspasia in Greek History
11
is impossible to know what part Axiochus or Alcibiades played in all this, but it is tempting to conjecture that Axiochus was dead and/or his household in disarray by the time Alcibiades' ostracism expired in 450 and he returned to Athens, accompanied by his wife, children, and young sister-in-law.6 The inscription on the grave stele allows the following reconstruction: Alcibiades' son Axiochus is the grandfather of the Aischines named on the stele as the father of the Aspasios commemorated on the stone. Both Axiochoi are identified as demesmen of Skambonidai, and on the stele are mentioned not only Axiochus' wife Eukleia, but also their children, Aischines, Sostrate, and Aspasia. Because sons were commonly named for grandfathers, and because the names Axiochus and Aspasios are themselves rare—in fact, unattested in Attica before the early fourth century—Bicknell's suggestion is plausible. The association within one family of the names Axiochus and Aspasios, of which Aspasia is the feminine form, is also significant. Furthermore, the stele was found in Athens' port city, Piraeus, which was home to many families of foreign origin. Although she may now be tentatively identified as the dependent relation of an Athenian aristocrat, Aspasia was also and unquestionably a resident alien, a metic. If she did in fact arrive in Athens in 450, she would have come at a time when the status of non-Athenian women had recently been radically circumscribed. The question of her status as a metic must now be taken up. The attempt to intelligently assess what it may have meant to be an aristocratic female metic in mid-fifth-century Athens, however difficult it is to make this assessment, will in turn help identify the biases present both in contemporary comic remarks on Aspasia 's life and also in later sources. These sources, because they viewed the fifth century through the lens of subsequent historical and literary developments, have provided their own additional distortions. Recent studies of the ideology of metic status conclude that the concept of the metic was bound up with the concept of citizen; to discuss citizenship is to discuss both its content and its extent. The content and nature of Attic citizenship were not static; they were constantly evolving. Pericles' famous law on citizenship, passed in 451/450, is landmark evidence of this dynamic process. The law seems to have restricted citizenship to persons who had two Athenian parents; but the terminology of the law, the definitions of those terms, the reason(s) that brought the law into being, precisely how citizenship was defined before
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and after the passage of the law, and other restrictions on citizenship, remain somewhat unclear. Nor is it yet entirely clear how the category citizen applied to women versus men; as Cynthia Patterson has shown, major differences obtained for female citizens versus male citizens.7 Pericles' citizenship law was probably passed in response to a substantial and ' 'unnatural" increase in the population of Attica in the years following the Persian Wars of 490-479. This increase was caused by the heavy enrollment into denies and phratries of resident aliens—metics. In his treatise on the subject, David Whitehead translates the term literally as "home-changers."8 Before 490, there is ample evidence that aristocrats, for whom the most evidence survives, commonly married "out"; the illustrious Themistocles, Cleisthenes, Cimon, and Miltiades all had foreign mothers. Before Pericles' law, marriages with such women were probably considered fully valid, and any offspring were given full citizenship rights. Certainly these men's mixed parentage hardly compromised their ability to have political careers, although Pericles is said to have reproached Cimon's sons for having a foreign mother.9 A substantial metic population was assimilating into the Attic body politic by mid-century. The Athens to which Aspasia removed was a city that formerly had been hospitable to metics and in which, until shortly before she arrived, she would have had every expectation of living out a normal woman's life—that is, of marrying and of bearing her husband legitimate sons, sons with political prospects like those of Themistocles and Cimon. It is even possible that Alcibiades and his extended family returned to Athens without knowing that the law had passed; this law, which Patterson has demonstrated was not retroactive, would not have affected Alcibiades' two sons, Aspasios and Axiochus. The Peiraeus grave stele identifies Aspasios, son of Aischines, as a demesman; therefore, he was a citizen.10 Our few sources for the study of the extent and content of metic status in the mid-fifth century are almost completely silent on the subject of women metics.'' Nevertheless, it can be said with confidence that metic status was in general characterized by many liabilities: metics were subject to special taxes, they could not participate politically or own land in Attica, and they were excluded from membership in deme and phratry. And, although the citizenship law of 451/450 fell into abeyance during the Peloponnesian War, it was reenacted in 403/402, a clear indication that the division Athens made between citizen and metic was considered important and worth maintaining. A final proof of the impor-
Aspasia in Greek History
13
tance of boundary maintenance between citizenship and metic status is the fact that enslavement was the penalty for those who falsely represented themselves as citizens.12 The questions of how Pericles and Aspasia met, and how and why they had an apparently lengthy liaison, are vexing ones. If, as is generally assumed, Aspasia was the mother of the bastard, Pericles junior, the union must have commenced before 440, the latest possible birth date for the younger Pericles. If so, this child would have been a little boy in the early years after the passage of his father's citizenship law, and he would have been considered to be of marriageable age by around 420. No ancient sources confirm that Pericles junior was the son of Pericles and Aspasia; it has merely been traditional to assume (as did Demeas regarding Chrysis and the baby in Menander's comedy Samia) that she was the child's mother.13 Pericles had two legitimate sons; therefore, union with a metic woman cannot have been motivated solely by the desire for offspring. Despite the later romantic tradition that has made Pericles absolutely besotted with Aspasia, practical considerations may well have played some part in his liaison with her. It is commonly believed that Pericles made political capital off his ex-wife's remarriage, a practice not uncommon for a man of his class; it is not unreasonable to suspect that his association with Aspasia brought with it some political advantage as well.14 But the tradition does speak of Pericles' love for Aspasia, and the question of its nature haunts us still. If, as the tradition suggests, she was highly intelligent, the love of a powerful and wealthy man could have protected and nurtured her, allowing her to develop her mind in ways not open to other women who lacked either her wisdom or the materially and emotionally supportive environment provided by such a love. In discussing the importance of a supportive environment for the intellectual development of both sexes, Gerda Lerner points out that highly intelligent women have benefited from nurturant and mutually respectful relationships with spouses or partners. But, as she states, "such heterosexual, mutually supportive relationships, while they do occur, are rare in the historical record."15 Because law now deprived Aspasia of the ability to enter a fully valid Athenian marriage, one must ask what kind of union, in the legal exterior sense, she and Pericles had. Metic women seem to have been subject to kyrieia (guardianship) just as citizen women were; presumably Aspasia's kyrios (guardian) would have tried to marry her to another
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metic or possibly place her in pallakia (concubinage) with an actual citizen. Raphael Sealey has recently suggested that pallakia was being institutionalized in the fifth century, and that citizens too poor to provide a dowry as well as well-born metics placed their daughters in a quasimarital "pallakia with stipulations," a status created with "a fully explicit contract." This situation, it is hypothesized, would have guaranteed the bride some security and recourse, though her children would not have been considered legitimate. Even if this were the case, Patterson has shown that a pallake (concubine) was severely disadvantaged by convention and the law. Furthermore, because the citizenship law's negative impact would not have been felt immediately by large numbers of families after its passage, it seems rather unlikely that fathers at this point in time would have hatched an entirely formed concept and practice for pallakia with stipulations and impossible to know under what precise circumstances Aspasia came to be Pericles' sexual property, beloved or otherwise. It was, as David Schaps observed, inevitable for women to wed, and if Aspasia were a dependent relation, it would have been even more in her guardian's interest to get her off his hands at the earliest possible age.16 The tightening of requirements for citizenship was accompanied by the constriction of definitions of legitimacy and the kinds of partnerships that could produce legitimate offspring; the nature of the parents' partnership, as well as their own civic status or lack thereof, determined the status of their children. It is possible that children born of any union other than one between two citizens could be termed nothoi (bastards), though it is most likely that the term was mainly applied to the issue of unions between persons who were not equal.17 Pericles' citizenship law had as an inevitable consequence the elevation of the status of engyetic (formal dowered) marriage between two citizens and a concomitant decline in the status of concubinage, secondary and servile as this had always been. And, because the primary purpose of heterosexual cohabitation was to produce legitimate heirs, the status of nothoi must also have declined in the course of the fifth century.18 S. C. Humphreys maintains that nothoi with foreign mothers were at an even greater disadvantage than were those with two domestic parents; she offers as an example the mixed fortunes of Pericles junior's coeval, Antisthenes the Socratic, another nothos with a foreign mother. Sons of foreign women might also lack the benefits customarily available from avuncular relationships.19 Despite the disadvantages of pallakia for both the woman
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and her offspring, Aspasia's best option as a metic in Athens after 451/450 could have been to become thepallake of a well-born Athenian, and this in fact seems to have been her fate. Cratinus' definition of Aspasia as a pallake in his comedy Cheirons (discussed in the next chapter) probably reflects her true status. The prospects for any children whom Aspasia might have borne to Pericles were indeed mixed. No daughters are attested for either party. This silence is itself unremarkable, inasmuch as daughters tended to be mentioned only with regard to their parentage, husbands, or children. If, in fact, Aspasia ever bore a daughter, she might have been exposed or removed in some other manner; if she lived to adulthood, she might have been consigned quietly to pallakia or married to another metic.20 Evidence suggests, but does not prove, that Pericles junior was Aspasia's son or at least the son of a free woman. Perhaps the increasingly negative remarks found in comedy about Pericles junior reflect a diminishing status for all nothoi in the late fifth century, as well as the disappearance of protection upon the death of his father; perhaps they are purely personal attacks indicating the son's perceived failure to measure up to his illustrious parent. His unhappy fate as one of the generals condemned and executed after the battle of Arginusae surely was not affected by his parentage. (Comedy is discussed in the next chapter; the comic tag Nothippos probably reflects the inferior status of this group.)21 So much for the possibilities of offspring of Aspasia. I turn now to Aspasia's years with Pericles, the terminus for which relationship has traditionally been set with the latter's death in 429. References made by comic writers to their relationship are impossible to put into an exact sequence, but they do suggest a period of some eleven to thirteen years—that is, from the Samian War to 430 B.C.—in which she was publicly recognized as Pericles' mate. Later tradition has dwelt on Aspasia's intellectual acumen, her political influence upon Pericles, and his love for her, but no evidence established as contemporary illuminates these possibilities. Plutarch mentions one more specific incident regarding Aspasia's life. The comic poet Hermippus supposedly prosecuted her on the charge of asebeia (impiety). Scholarly opinion is divided as to whether the suit actually took place or whether, like Philocleon's prosecution of the cheese-pilfering dog Labes in Aristophanes' Wasps, it was a purely imaginary trial, conducted on the comic stage and later insinuated into the historical record. The exact nature of the prosecution and the precise
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meaning of asebeia are also hotly debated. It is most likely that if Aspasia was literally tried in court, it was in order to discredit Pericles. Belief is based on the notion that Aspasia's influence upon Pericles and/ or others was, or was perceived to be, of an actionable nature, and that Pericles was attached enough to Aspasia to defend her, as Plutarch reports, with a singular display of public weeping. As an analysis of comedy will show, this trial was most probably a dramatic fantasy.22 The rapidity with which Aspasia apparently entered a union with Lysicles after Pericles' death invites several explanations. First, her relationship with Pericles may have terminated some time before his death; the alliance with Lysicles might have been far from hasty. Pericles could have tired of her, for comedy reports other sexual interests besides Aspasia.23 Widows, and presumably relict concubines, were "remarried" as soon as possible; thus, if Aspasia's union with Pericles lasted until the latter's death, her subsequent union with Lysicles might have been entirely proper.24 It is also possible that the continued presence of Pericles' "relict" was a liability to his remaining family, particularly in the gloomy days of plague-ridden Athens. Thucydides tersely and movingly tells of the plague's effects on the city's social fabric, and Xenophon shows how quickly and devastatingly female dependents in an aristocratic household could become a financial liability during hard times (see Thuc. 2.47-2.54; Xen. Mem. 2.7; Dem. 57.45). Pericles lost most of his relatives to the plague (Plut. Per. 36); presumably, the surviving females would have been more dependent than ever before. The orators paint a portrait of close and affectionate relations between Athenian mothers and their sons, but this may reflect ideals rather than realities. Aspasia and Pericles junior were no ordinary dyad: the mother may have been an embarrassment to her son, so recently and extraordinarily franchised. As a nothos, Pericles junior was exempted from the legal requirement of supporting his parents in their old age. A son whose irregular parentage would dog him most of his life and who was only adopted after his legitimate stepbrothers had died might have found it politic to settle his mother elsewhere.25 Perhaps there was a positive side to Aspasia's alleged union in middle age with the sheepdealer Lysicles. He was a prominent politician and she might have been able to enhance his political fortunes. How this union came about, if it did, is open to question. There is some evidence that a lone woman could occasionally act on her own behalf, as Me-
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nander says, "heautes kyria" ("as her own kyrios"; Men. Pk. 497); Aspasia may have chosen Lysicles herself. If the citizenship law was in effect at the time of this union, it cannot be entirely correct to term her union with Lysicles a marriage, as late commentators describe it. In any event, Lysicles' death in 428 cuts off our possibility for knowing anything about this union,26 if it was in fact historical. A portrait herm found in Italy in 1777 and inscribed at the base ACIIACIA may have been copied from her grave (Figure 1.1). A rather solemn female head with the melon coiffure is depicted on this 1.7meter-high monument. Although there is no ancient testimony for portraits of Aspasia, the eyes and hair can be traced to fifth-century types, as Gisela Richter argues in making her case for the statue's authenticity. More puzzling to Richter is the fact that Aspasia was rendered as a "simple, expressionless woman" who nonetheless had "a certain beauty." Indeed, no physical description of Aspasia has survived, and she may have been quite ordinary in appearance. Richter, assuming (as had Wilamowitz) that Aspasia "geistig etwas mehr bedeutete," suggests that "Aspasia's extraordinary attraction lay in her animated expression, which the sculptor of the herm was not able to convey." If the herm was copied from an actual grave stele, however, this alone could explain the solemnity of the head's expression, for late fifth-century funerary art depicted the deceased with serene solemnity. Additionally, those who set up her monument may have been attempting to counter such labels as the Cratinan pallaken kynopida (dog-eyed concubine) and the Eupolidean/wrae (whore; literally, "buyable woman"). A "simple, expressionless woman" would have been the family grave's quiet answer to such insults. The possibility that her kin needed to make such a visual statement underscores again the impropriety of naming Aspasia a "female Socrates"; his portraiture is rich in Silenus and sage types. The pensive and virginal maiden of the stele denies the literary reputation of the woman to whom Socrates brought people for instruction, who kept a brothel, instigated wars, and taught rhetoric to Socrates and Pericles. In her study of the Severe Style, Ridgway provides a different interpretation, defining it as a classicizing portrait of a type called "Aspasia/Sosandra." The original, of which many copies besides this herm are known, was Calamis the Elder's fifth-century statue of Aphrodite Sosandra, dedicated by Callias on the Acropolis.27 Although Diodorus of Athens may have seen her grave and noted it in his treatise on funeral monuments, we do not know when or where Aspasia died.28
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Figure 1.1. Marble portrait herm, Aspasia. Vatican Museums inv. 272. Courtesy Vatican Museums.
2 The Story Told by Comedy
Attic comedy, a genre full of commentary about politics, provides the only known contemporary evidence for Aspasia's life. Old Comedy, as this earliest attested phase of Greek comedy is known, is paramount to Aspasia's biographical tradition: though frequently surreal and fantastic, it was nonetheless treated as a historical source by later ancient historians such as Duris and Plutarch. Comedy is also the premier nexus of discourses on sexuality, power, and intellect in the fifth century, discourses to which Aspasia is crucial. Unfortunately, only eleven of Aristophanes' plays have survived intact, and the fragmentary remains of the rest of Old Comedy are exceedingly difficult to date. To correlate undated and/or undatable fragments by their references to the supposed life events of public figures is nearly impossible, for oftentimes these references constitute the only surviving mention of said event. It is easier, therefore, to discuss the treatment of Aspasia in Old Comedy on a playwright-by-playwright basis, beginning with the best-known authors and those whose references to Aspasia are the most significant. Although Attic comedy made Aspasia a public figure, it treats her very differently than it does men. For example, Aspasia, unlike many Athenian men (Solon, Miltiades, Pericles, Socrates et al.) was apparently never put on stage in propria persona. Furthermore, comic allusions to Aspasia are invariably sexual, sexualized, and sexualizing; well-known males receive a broader spectrum of comment than she does. Pericles' sexual integrity was attacked by the poets, but so were his oratorical skills, physical appearance, and political views. The latter attributes could be mentioned without reference to his sexuality.1 19
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Cratinus Cratinus can be considered the founder of political comedy as we know it. His work, rife with topicality and inventive invective, set the tone for subsequent comic treatments of both Pericles and Aspasia. Aristophanes, Cratinus' rival and younger contemporary, was probably more in his elder's debt than we can know. 2 Cratinus is known to have attacked Aspasia in only one play, the Cheirons (frags. 246-268 K-A). The dating of the comedy is problematic; it has been assigned both to the very late 440s—when Pericles became the most powerful man in Athens after the ostracism in 443 of Thucydides, son of Melesias—as well as to around 430, near the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. In either case, this golden age nostalgia drama invidiously contrasts the corrupt life of the time of its writing with the sweet simplicity of the past, and reflects anxieties about Pericles' power and hostility to Aspasia. The violent language Cratinus uses of Aspasia and Pericles certainly represents a strong reaction to some aspect of Pericles' regime.3 Golden age comedies were characterized either by a total absence of women or by a purely subordinate position for them as providers of sexual gratification. The Cheirons is full of epic language and parodies of that language.4 Solon was brought back from the dead as a reminder of the "happy" past and pointed out the populace's moral failures; interestingly, fourthcentury comedy would credit Solon with having founded statesubsidized brothels.5 Salient to the present discussion are Cheirons frag. 258 and 259 K-A, considered on the grounds of meter and sense to be part of theparabasis, that part of the comedy wherein the chorus often spoke the poet's mind and delivered advice to the city. Thus, the lines are attributable to a group, not to a character, and need not have referred to any event or events within the play. Perhaps neither Pericles nor Aspasia appeared on stage in this play, because their mention here was probably part of the chorus' recitation of events that had brought Athens to her present parlous condition.6 Stasis and elderborn Time, mating with one another birthed a very great tyrant whom the gods call "head-gatherer." (258 K-A) Shameless Lust bears him Hera-Aspasia, a dog-eyed concubine (259 K-A)
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Long-standing instability in the state, that is, Chronos (time) and Stasis (civic strife), have bred a monster in the form of Pericles, who is parodied by reference to his large head (cf. the common Homeric epithet "Cloud-Gatherer," used for Zeus). The abuse of Pericles, both anatomical and political, is combined neatly in his identification as the despotic offspring of abstract personifications. Stasis, the feminine abstraction identified as Pericles' mother, is semantically associated in fifth-century historiography and tragedy with women and anandreia (unmanliness).7 The gods deflate Pericles with an undignified mock-epic epithet. Next, katapygosyne ("shameless lust") bore him the dog-eyed concubine Hera-Aspasia. Aspasia is given an actual Homeric tag, but it is not a complimentary one, for it associates her with both the shrewish Hera and the ruinous Pandora. Hephaestus calls his mother "dog-eyed" (//. 18.396); Hesiod's Pandora has a dog's mind and a thief's character (Works and Days 67). Katapygosyne, which really cannot be translated, is a highly abusive word probably coined by Cratinus; it refers not only to the general notion of shameless lust but also to "pathic" practice; Aspasia seems to be the first and only female to be associated with the noun abstract of the word, an association that makes her even more monstrous.8 By identifying Aspasia as apallake, Cratinus suggests not only that she lacks the right to rule with her "Zeus," but also that she is unable to properly transmit his legacy. I believe that the reference pointedly marks the actual type of "marriage" Aspasia had with Pericles and comments on its legally and socially inferior nature; concubinage was, as has been shown, a union whose issue could not claim a place in the polis or the family.9 The Cheirons is paradigmatic of Old Comedy's critique of women vis-a-vis political power. According to this critique, women could not govern the polis; their attempts to do so, especially as would be seen in Arisophanes' Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae, must always be considered an inversion and mockery of the norm; the possibility of their doing so, even when represented as fantasy, indicates a severe crisis in the polis. The importance to this theme of politicians' association with women of ill repute cannot be stressed enough; Aristophanes would make "loose women" the symbols of destruction, death, and intellectual and literary corruption. Cheirons frag. 258-259 K-A demonstrates that there was no natural place for women in the state, that they were believed to serve their lovers rather than the state, and that they could neither inherit nor transmit their lovers' political capital.10
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It would be wonderful to have other Cratinan invective against Aspasia, but nothing conclusive survives. His mythological burlesque Dionysalexandros may revile Pericles, who is likened to both Paris and Dionysus, for having started a war. All that can be said is that the play shows that a politician's irregular sexual behavior has political consequences. If Pericles was Paris, Aspasia might have been seen as Helen— sexually alluring and the cause of a great war. The report that Eupolis, Cratinus' younger contemporary, and occasional plagiarist, called Aspasia "Helen" (Prospaltians 267 K-A) may mean that Eupolis copied or modified a Cratinan epithet.11 Cratinus' Nemesis alludes not only to the Trojan War and to Helen, but also to Pericles' dominance in Athens (118 K-A, assuming that the mention of Zeus refers to Pericles), and it is generally thought that Pericles appeared on stage as a character. The fact that Leda is told to incubate her egg (115 K-A) opens the possibility that Aspasia was also put on stage. The Nemesis may implicate Pericles in the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. But ever since Kaibel, the difficulties of locating Aspasia within the plot have been abundantly apparent. Nemesis herself has been seen as Aspasia and Helen as Pericles junior; the egg has been seen as the Megarian decree or even as the war itself. It can only be said that the political result of bad politics was probably represented comedically as a monstrous birth.12 Without more fragments, it is impossible to say more about this play. If indeed the Nemesis likens Pericles to Zeus, some common threads can be seen in that play and the Cheirons and Dionysalexandros: Cratinus represents Pericles as a man whose irregular domestic life produces "unnatural" results—either tyranny and a concubine co-tyrant (as in the Cheirons), a war (as in the Dionysalexandros), or an improperly engendered egg that may represent war or its prelude (as in the Nemesis). In Cheirons and Dionysalexandros, the playwright stresses the political consequence of the statesman's irregular behavior; in Cheirons and Nemesis, the political result of bad politics is itself represented as a monstrous birth.13
Eupolis Eupolis, a younger contemporary of Aristophanes and Cratinus, mentions Aspasia by name in three comedies and probably alludes to her in a fourth.14 Aspasia is mentioned in his first play, the wartime Prospal-
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23
tians, as "Helen." But all that can be said of this is that Helen and Aspasia were both accused of sexual impropriety and were alleged to have started wars.15 The plot of the Philoi, which was produced just a few years later at the 424/423 B.C. Dionysia, is also obscure, nor can the one fragment, in which Aspasia is called Omphale tyrannon or Omphaletyrannon, be integrated with the rest of the play. Omphale sexually dominated Heracles, whose earlier cultural image as harddrinking beast master and womanizer was now being sanitized and assimilated to an icon of temperate masculine virtue.16 The play also seems to have had pederastic and sympotic themes, and reviled Rhodia, wife of the Athenian Lykon.17 The Marikas has attracted much critical attention though little is known of its plot. Produced at the festival of the Lenaia in 421, it vanquished the first version of Aristophanes' Clouds. In the second, surviving version of the Clouds, Aristophanes accuses Eupolis of having plagiarized parts of the Marikas play from his own Knights (Clouds 553-555). In the Marikas, the politician Hyperbolus was satirized as the barbarian slave whose name gives the play its title; the chorus was a double one. That there was considerable topical humor is evident from the mentions of the Spartans, Cleon, and Nicias.18 All the more frustrating, then, is the poor preservation of fragment 192, in which "the bastard," Aspasia, and Paralus are all mentioned in the space of three lines (lines 166-169).19 Little can be gained from this except to note that Paralus, and probably Pericles' other legitimate son, Xanthippus, are both named along with Pericles junior, who is perhaps called Aspasia's bastard here. The mention of all of Pericles' sons and identification of one of them as a bastard borne by Aspasia is the third time Aspasia is insulted by name in the comic fragments.20 She was probably singled out for the sake of criticizing the nothos, Pericles junior; at the time of the Marikas' composition, Paralus and Xanthippus would have been dead nearly a decade and the nothos would have been about twenty years old. Why any of them is remarked on here cannot be ascertained, but the comic poets commonly insulted politicians by referring unflatteringly to their mothers. Although Eupolis' exploitation of the mother-son relationship is not unique, he may have been the first to mention Aspasia's motherhood on the stage.21 Eupolis' last play, the Demes (411 B.C.), is, like Aristophanes' more famous Frogs, a catabatic quest for civic salvation. In it Solon, Mil-
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tiades, Aristides, and Pericles are brought back from the dead in order to advise the city, although it is difficult to say more than this about the plot. Aspasia and Pericles junior are mentioned, and Pericles' plaintive query, "And is my nothos alive?" (110 K-A) shows that Pericles himself was a speaking character. The mention here of the bastard and of Pericles' head elsewhere in the Demes (115 K-A) were very old jokes by now; probably these threadbare jests facilitated the recognition of Pericles, who had now been dead for more than fifteen years. The reply to Pericles' question—that the nothos was indeed alive but ashamed of having a porne for a mother (110 K-A)—suggests that after Pericles' death, Aspasia was mentioned with increasing harshness. In the earlier Prospaltians and Philoi, Eupolis had referred to her in mythological travesty and also made references to her sexual allure; he identified her as the mother of a bastard in his mid-career play, Marikas, and called her an outright whore in a play from his later years, Demes, which last reference is the final certain one to her in Old Comedy. The label was resoundingly negative and referred only to her inferior sexual status. The general view of Pericles in this play was probably positive, judging from its fulsome praise of his oratory.22
Hermippus Hermippus was less important in his own day and to posterity than were Cratinus, Eupolis, and Aristophanes, but he merits special attention in the development of Aspasia's bios; according to Plutarch, it was he who prosecuted Aspasia for asebeia (Plut. Per. 32.1).23 He also is said to have accused Aspasia of ensnaring free women for Pericles to dally with (Plut. Per. 32.1), a charge also leveled, without a named accuser, against Phidias (Plut. Per. 13.14). Again, the questions of the historicity of these charges, of whether or not Hermippus prosecuted Aspasia in a fantasy trial on stage or in his actual right as a citizen, cannot be decided conclusively. Certainly a good many accusations against Pericles are those of sexual and political impropriety; accusations of sexual excess, in which Pericles' associates were said to have pimped citizen women for him, may have inspired Aristophanes, and later, Eupolis, to call Aspasia a whore and to imply that she kept other women. These allegations attributed to Pericles a personal behavior somewhat counter to the purpose and spirit of his own citizenship law, and if true, intimated that
The Story Told by Comedy
25
in the matter of sexual appetite, Pericles, like other popular politicians late and soon, felt himself above or beyond the law. Hermippus' dialogue could be markedly abusive: in the Artopolides (Breadsellers), someone addresses a woman as ' 'O sapra, kaipasiporne, kai kapraina'' ("O decayed one, and all-whore, and she-goat").24
Aristophanes Aristophanes (457/445-385 B.C.) offers especially rich ground for an investigation of Aspasia's bios, even though he mentioned Aspasia only once in his extant oeuvre (Acharnians, produced at the Lenaia in 425 B.C.). Because eleven of his plays do survive whole, it is possible to discuss Aristophanes' thematic and symbolic uses and definitions of women and gender, to speculate upon the poet's views concerning the relationship of women to the state, and lastly, to discuss his use of female characters as part of the opsis (visual aspect) of Old Comedy. In the reference to Aspasia and in references to other women, we are able also to see the contexts in which real females, as particularities, were used dramatically. Thus the Acharnians, in which the protagonist, Dikaeopolis, concludes a private peace with the Spartans and vanquishes those who would continue to make war, is vital for helping us see in what ways the comic Aspasia, mentioned elsewhere in fragments bereft of a context, might have functioned in those other plays.25 Aristophanes' Acharnians contains a significant reference to Aspasia. Dikaeopolis tells the chorus and audience about the causes of the war: Men from our side—I'm not saying the polis—remember this, I'm not saying the polis, but worthless pipsqueaks, phonies, dishonorable counterfeits, halfbreeds, began to denounce Megara's little cloaks. And if anybody saw a gourd or a hare or a piglet or a garlic or some rocksalt— these were "Megarian" and sold off that same day! Still, this was a minor matter, and not unexpected. But, then some young drunks went to Megara and stole the whore Simaitha. Well, the Megarians were driven crazy by this insult and stole in return two whores from Aspasia. From this began the Great War in all Hellas—from three cock-sucking sluts. (Ach. 516-539)
This little passage has given rise to the immense problem of whether or not the theft was historical. In addition the literary problem of this passage's relationship to the beginning of Herodotus' History, which it
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probably parodies, is not insignificant. Opinions range from Walter Ameling's and Donald Kagan's views that the reference to Aspasia's whores is pure fantasy and a comic topos to a nearly literal "if there's smoke" view. David Sansone's well-argued position that the passage indeed parodies Hdt. 1.1-4 need not vitiate more literal interpretations. Douglas MacDowell suggests that Pericles did have nonpolitical reasons, perhaps even connected with Aspasia, for enacting the Megarian embargo. He argues cogently for a political interpretation of the play that identifies Dikaeopolis' aims with the audience's own and that makes a serious bid for peace, but fails to convincingly show what the nature of Pericles' and/or Aspasia's animus against the Megarians might have been.26 This is no place to settle the problems regarding the Megarian decree. One can but observe that Aspasia's alleged responsibility for the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War sounds suspiciously like the charge attributed to Duris that she was responsible for the Samian War.27 I believe that the accusation is fictional and groundless. Cratinus had already given Aspasia a vicious genealogy, making her a monstrous, illegitimate, shameless, and tyrannical partner for Pericles; he had also associated her with Paris/Pericles, a warmonger, and had identified her with the temptresses Omphale and Helen. Hermippus had called her a procuress and impious. Thus, she had already been attacked—with Pericles—as an abuser of power and in ways that impugned her sexuality and in language that was also couched in parody. Therefore, in a period when it was popular to parody Herodotus, it would have been easy for Aristophanes to weave into his tale of the abduction of women the additional insult that Aspasia was a fellatrix and a procuress. Aristophanes' definition of the activities that led up to the outbreak of war as the deeds of laikastriai (fellatrices) was an extremely coarse and insulting one.28 Aspasia is implicitly a whore and explicitly a fellatrix, a laikastria. Placed finally and emphatically in the period, the word laikastriai situated Aspasia, and by association, Pericles, in disreputable company. As a way of describing her putative association with Athenian politics, it was an insult as grave as any hurled at other public figures in comedy. For Aspasia to be mentioned as a pimp, a fellatrix, and precipitator of a disastrous war was humorous only in the bleakest possible sense. Once she is defined as the keeper of whores, Aspasia is a woman near the center of government who controls men's access to women and whose displeasure could bring on war; at the end of the play,
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order is restored, and Dikaeopolis revels with two whores (Ach. lines 1199 to the end).29 Similarly, Aristophanes' Peace (421) represents Peace both metaphorically as the resumption of men's unlimited access to food and sexual relations, and concretely as a lovely and penetrable virgin. In that play, wherein women are never a threat and seem to be present only to be penetrated by males, Aristophanes again mentioned Pericles, the beginning of the war, and the Megarian decree, but he did not mention Aspasia.30 Aristophanes' abuse of Aspasia in the Acharnians accords with his abuse elsewhere of the female sexual partners of other male politicians. It is possible to compare the treatment Aspasia is given in the first extant play with that of other women associated with politicians in other, complete Aristophanic plays, and to speculate on the function that other references performed in plays now fragmentary fulfilled. Paphlagon, in the Knights (424 B.C.), prays to Athena to confirm that he—after Lysicles and the prostitutes Kynna and Salabaccho—has been the "best man'' and has given the greatest benefit to the demos (Kn. 763-766; note that Kynna and Salabaccho are masculinized here). Lysicles, supposedly Aspasia's mate after the death of Pericles, is here also associated with whores. But the parabasis of Wasps (422 B.C.) and its nearverbatim repetition in Peace, demonstrate the most compelling association of politicians with prostitutes. The chorus defend Aristophanes to the audience: Nor, when he began to produce plays, did he attack men, but rather, with the anger of Heracles, he beset the greatest targets: immediately he screwed up his courage against the jagged-toothed Cleon, from whose eyes beams the looks of Kynna the whore, and whose head is encircled with the tongues of one hundred sycophants, deadly torrents of voice, the stench of a seal, the unwashed testicles of a Lamia, and the asshole of a camel. (1029-1035)
The playwright has attacked not ordinary men (1029) but the greatest of them, the jagged-toothed monster (teras), Cleon. Particularly odd here is the assignment of testicles to the traditionally female monster, Lamia, but here, as in other comic slurs, bad politics is rendered visible as an ugly, misshapen hybrid. Aristophanes' monster elaborately recapitulates Cratinus' genealogy for the "headgatherer" and his tyrannous concubine. Further evidence for this comedic association can be found in the earlier statement by the poet Callias (in his Pedetai) that Aspasia
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Prisoner of History
taught Pericles how to speak. That statement is the antecedent for Aristophanes' claims that Cleon sees with Kynna's eyes: just so, Pericles speaks with Aspasia's tongue.31 That politicians and prostitutes are interchangeable is also implicit in a statement in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousae (411 B.C.), wherein the chorus declares that Cleophon is no worse than Salabaccho (line 805). The image of Aspasia concocted by comedy retains its potency. So great has been its power that it may now seem heterodox to claim that Aspasia, perhaps a mere war refugee placed in concubinage with an important politician, was unable to avoid colliding with Greek comedy's misogynist scenario and being recast as a pome and procuress. This scenario could not have told the truth about her even if it wanted to. The absence of good historical evidence to the contrary leaves this investigator with the indelible impression, exaggerated as I suspect it to be, of a prostitute near the inner circle of power. The power of comedy to construct Aspasia can be seen in the next stage of her bios, when philosophical dialogue, indebted to both tragedy and comedy, further developed the image of an erotically alluring and intellectually formidable woman among men.
3 Aspasia and the Socratic Tradition
The decline of Athens after the end of the Peloponnesian War would see the demise of tragedy as a viable art form and the movement of comedy from its major bases of surrealism and sexualized political invective to a greater focus on domestic drama and mythological travesty. The nascent form of philosophical dialogue adopted motifs from both tragedy and comedy in its use of historical and mythological characters to articulate and argue its own generic points of view. Many such dialogues were set in the heyday of Athens' greatness; therefore, some of the same individuals who were historical actors and comic butts in the fifth century reappeared as participants in philosophical discourse. The Socratic dialogues of the fourth century, the next locus of Aspasia's bios, took up the comic claim that Pericles spoke with Aspasia's tongue. The function of female characters in Greek drama has been thoroughly, though certainly not definitively, discussed by many scholars; but study of the function of female characters in philosophical discourse and the intersection of these characters with philosophical definitions of femaleness and femininity is rather new terrain. In the fourth century, Aspasia's biographical tradition becomes centrally entwined with these dialogic discussions of politics, sexuality, and gender, and it may be central to them. These conversations have a particularly Athenian cast, however, in that philosophical discourse almost exclusively represents male discussants engaged in an examination of the good life as lived in a community dominated by men. Perhaps philosophical discourse's long neglect of feminist concerns is due both to philosophy's self-validating claim to objectivity, which functions as a 29
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protective bubble, and also to the Western philosophical establishment's traditional restriction to men of its practice, teaching, and self-analysis.1 These new dimensions of Aspasia's biographical tradition maintain the earlier concerns found in comedy and the historical record about the relationship of gender and sexuality to citizenship, civic participation, and moral health. The contribution that philosophical discourse makes to Aspasia's bios elevates these concerns only to dismiss them. In comedy, Aspasia had been used to discredit the historical actor Pericles; in some of the Socratica (in particular, Plato's Menexenus) Aspasia remains a site for the reinscription of Athenian history. It can even be said that she is a phallic woman.2 The use of Aspasia's name, the creation of a persona or personae for her in this very masculinist discourse, and the representations of her speech all require special attention. Aspasia does not appear in any dialogue as a character in her own right, although two dialogues bore her name. The important exception, however, is Plato's Menexenus. It is made up almost entirely of a speech recited by Socrates but which Aspasia allegedly taught him. It is necessary to ask what kind of personae were constructed for Aspasia and what functions the personae performed in each dialogue, and to ascertain the metaphorical dimensions of the speech "she" was given. The language of sexual reproduction and of feminine and masculine social roles looms large in these dialogues. Because the Socratic contributors to Aspasia's bios were reacting largely to ideas first put forth in Old Comedy, it is possible to discuss their treatment of her thematically, rather than chronologically; the latter approach is, in any case, not totally possible.3 The contributions of philosophical dialogue to Aspasia's biographical tradition can be schematized into two components: a negative developmental strand, represented by Antisthenes and Plato, and a positive one, with Aeschines of Sphettos and Xenophon as its representatives. The negative aspects of the tradition resemble the invective already seen in comedy.
Antisthenes Antisthenes (fl. ca. 445 B.C.-360 B.C.), a fascinating and curious figure, was the only follower of Socrates who did not become part of the Socratic diaspora. In the turmoil that followed the end of the Peloponne-
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sian War, it was probably "unimportance rather than acceptability" that helped him avoid Socrates' fate.4 Like Pericles junior, he was a nothos with a foreign mother. If nothoi did form a sociocultural subset, then Antisthenes and Pericles junior probably knew each other. Disfranchised from birth by the law of 451/450 B.C., Antisthenes may have become an Athenian citizen through his own efforts and those of Callias.5 H. D. Rankin recently speculated that "we may ask whether Antisthenes' ridicule of Pericles and Alcibiades was not to some extent nourished by his annoyance at the privileges granted to their family in the matter of citizenship." Rankin saw personal jealousy as the motivation for Antisthenes' "ferocious attacks" against Xanthippus and Paralus in his Aspasia. Rankin believes an additional factor in this dislike of Pericles and his family was Socrates' own anti-Periclean bent as evidenced in Plato's Gorgias and Protagoras.6 This somewhat tenuous evidence for Antisthenes' thought can be bolstered by such sayings attributed to Antisthenes as the claim that one should esteem an honest man above a kinsman (D.L. 6.12) and that nobility belongs to the virtuous (D.L. 6.10-11). Antisthenes composed ten volumes of works. Some are apparently philosophical dialogues titled with the names of historical personages; the Aspasia and the Cyrus, or, On Kingship are the only known works in volume 5. He is considered to be a founder of the Cynics, perhaps because of his presence at the Kynosarges gymnasium (a meeting place for nothoi) and also because of his bitter outlook.7 Apparently devoted to robust hardihood, Antisthenes disregarded feminine beauty and luxury. He was particularly interested in the pursuit of arete (virtue), which he stated was the same for women and men.8 Antisthenes made light of the Athenian claim to autochthony, a predominant theme of Plato's Menexenus, by stating that locusts and snails could also be called children of Attic soil and that he himself wouldn't have behaved so courageously at the battle of Tanagra had his parents both been Athenian (D.L. 6.1).9 Unfortunately, we lack any record of Antisthenean attacks on Pericles junior, whose extraordinary enfranchisement would have created an obvious target. In his Aspasia, however, Antisthenes roundly abuses other members of Pericles' family. The date of the Aspasia is not known, but it is generally thought to have preceded Aeschines' dialogue of the same name.10 Little can be said about the focus of the dialogue and to what extent Aspasia's own character was discussed, although it is
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universally accepted that she was unfavorably represented—as Ehlers puts it, to Antisthenes, Aspasia was the very embodiment of pleasure, of hedone. All of the fragments relevant to Aspasia refer to her sexuality and/or relationship with Pericles.11 The fragments show a definite continuity with comedic invective. Xanthippus and Paralus are both accused of' 'homosexuality of a squalid kind," as Rankin says; one son is accused of living with a male prostitute of the lowest sort; the other, of a long-term liaison with the vulgarian Euphemus (frag. 34 Caizzi = Ath. 5.220d). If Halperin is correct to claim that the "democratic body" was figured as the body of a male citizen, then this species of insult is peculiarly appropriate. It attacks the sexuality and thereby the integrity of Pericles' male kin. Pericles is also here accused of having had sexual relations with Cimon's sister, Elpinike. Furthermore, Antisthenes attacked Alcibiades in his book on Cyrus (frag. 29a Caizzi = Ath. 5.220c) for having had intercourse, Persian fashion, with his mother and sister.12 Other remnants of Antisthenes' thought suggest how and/or why he treated Aspasia so unfavorably. As Rankin says, much of the evidence for Antisthenes' thought is gleaned from "interesting traces in the surviving fragments." He extolled autarkeia (self-sufficiency), and Pericles' excessive love for Aspasia would have demonstrated the statesman's failure to practice this prized virtue. Antisthenes was no moral relativist (frags. 22, 23, 72, 73 Caizzi) and thus may have opposed the inherently relativistic view, attributed to Aspasia by Aeschines and Xenophon, that erotic experience with another person could lead one to arete. Additionally, Antisthenes might have been unable to accept active female subjectivity of the kind that Aeschines and Xenophon would positively attribute to Aspasia and with which comedy had negatively endowed her. In his Choice of Heracles, in a manner similar to Prodicus', he represented the feminized abstractions Arete and Kakia (virtue and vice) as the objects of man's quests. There was no female subject.13
Plato Plato (427-347 B.C.) has dominated the other Socratics, and the fact that his Menexenus is the only one of three ancient dialogues concerned with Aspasia to survive in its entirety has skewed our understanding of her position in philosophical dialogue in ways that are difficult to appreciate
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and describe. That Aspasia is the only provably historical woman to be accorded a speech in his entire corpus is significant and should be considered carefully; with the voice Plato gives her, Aspasia discredits her claims to advise the polis. His position on "the woman question" is far from settled, sometimes being claimed as a protofeminist position and at other times considered as wholly masculinist. If Plato knew Aspasia personally, it was when he was in his youth and she was in her middle or old age.14 His Menexenus, an early dialogue set in 386 B.C., features Socrates and the young Menexenus, who is evidently from a family of politicians (Menex. 234a4-234b2).15 In the opening frame (234al-236d3), the pair meet, and Menexenus tells the older man that the Boule has decided to choose a speaker to deliver an epitaphios, an oration performed in honor of the Athenian war dead (234b4—7). When Menexenus doubts that anyone could compose such a speech on short notice, Socrates remarks that Aspasia has recently recited to him just such a speech (235c6236cl). Of course, the younger man is gratefully willing to hear what she taught him, and Socrates recites the sample oration (236d4249c8).16 Aspasia's speech consists of both the epitaphios proper and a speech within a speech (246dl-248d6) wherein she tells the audience what the war dead advise their survivors to do and to feel. A second conversational interchange (249dl-e7) between Socrates and Menexenus provides the closing frame; the latter expresses gratitude and amazement, and Socrates promises to impart other political speeches (politikoi logof) that Aspasia has also recited to him. The Menexenus has been called a spurious dialogue, a genuine work of Plato that was an ironic joke, an exhortation to philosophy, and a completely serious praise of Athens—a true epitaphios—played straight.17 The present consensus is that although a genuine work of Plato, the Menexenus is nevertheless an ironic critique of the epitaphios and its objects of praise; but the target(s) of the critique and the manner(s) in which Plato effects the critique are much debated. In her brilliant study of the funeral oration, Nicole Loraux names the Menexenus as an important expression of Plato's political thought and as a pastiche more real than the speeches it mocks; the pastiche is both the most powerful of the political orations and an exorcism thereof—a kind of pharmakon. In parodying such epitaphian topoi as autochthony, the definition of who is an Athenian, and the transcendence of parenthood by the city, Plato exposes the hollowness of the epitaphian ideality.18
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Despite her careful and brilliant explication, Loraux, like other commentators, stops short of considering the most significant question: Why is Aspasia made the author of the speech? In containing Aspasia within Socrates, Loraux not only fails to deal with Aspasia herself, but also replicates the Platonic strategies she so illuminatingly dissects: "Against the funeral oration, Plato sets up Socrates . . . " We may compare Bloedow's discussion of "Aspasia, who is of course identifiable with Perikles . . ."'9 Clearly, substitution, interchange, and interchangeability are important thematic and compositional facets of this dialogue. But we must take the observation further. If Plato sets up Aspasia to substitute for someone or something, what does this mean? How does he do this and what are its implications, particularly the implications of the fact that such a lengthy speech is attributed to the woman? It is necessary to analyze the importance of the fact that Aspasia is the speaker. What does it mean for this particular woman to author, and through Socrates to deliver, that particular politikos logos that articulates Athens' selfimage? Besides examining the essential question of how Aspasia functions in this dialogue, we must also pay careful attention to the relationship between certain themes in Old Comedy and certain themes of this epitaphios.20 The Menexenus displays many affinities with comedy and history. Ostensibly historical and "about history," it, as an epitaphios, shares some elements with comedy, in that the performance of the funeral oration occurred during a festival, or perhaps better, an antifestival.21 Making Aspasia author of this speech helped Plato underscore his critique of epitaphian topoi; he exploits not only her actual status as a foreigner, but also her location within Old comedy as a whore and a monstrous producer of the illegitimate. It is important to note that the comedic definition of Aspasia as a porne had rendered her an interchangeable commodity, a particular characteristic that highlights the general theme of interchangeability so important in the Menexenus.22 The term porne, which comedy had applied to Aspasia and to her alleged employees or slaves, literally made her a "buyable woman"; the prostitute, unlike a legitimate wife, was owed no obligation and could be interchanged with other women. Nor could she produce legitimate children. In view of Plato's disapproving presentation of the epitaphios as made up of words or mythologems that are interchangeable in respect to who speaks them (236c5-7, 249dl2-e2), about whom or what they are spoken (235d3-6), and the occasions on which they are spoken (e.g.,
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Aspasia as synkollosa, "gluing together"; see 236b6), Plato's use of Aspasia as speaker, Aspasia who had been defined in the earlier public discourse of comedy as ultimately interchangeable and commodified, is a brilliant reversal that itself proves the interchangeability of one epitaphios with another and thus the genre's ultimate absurdity. The sign is proliferated until its literal meaning is lost; until it becomes utterly arbitrary.23 For an occasion that celebrates andreia (manly courage), Plato supplies the words of a woman, not a man; of a foreigner, not a citizen; of a whore, not a wife; of the parent of a bastard, not a citizen; of Aspasia. Surely the references to Aspasia's interchangeability with other speakers, which are made both before and after Socrates recites her speech (236c5-7, 249dl2-e2), emphasize that the choice of speaker ultimately does not matter. Surely Menexenus' declaration that Socrates makes Aspasia makaria (blessed) if she, a woman, can compose such speeches suggests that ability to give a politikos logos need not be accompanied by the manly courage so lauded in the epitaphios.24 Aspasia herself has made many of the nobles into speakers, and Pericles is but one of them (235e3-7). To call Pericles but one of the speakers instructed by Aspasia damages prior eulogizing of his singular oratorical skill. This tutelage is well known to Menexenus (235e8) even though Socrates has not yet named Aspasia (235e4, "there being a teacher"). Aspasia made speakers of many men. The fact that one is named, and that this one is a man with whom she had a sexual relationship, delicately suggests that she had sexual relationships with the others as well and that they all speak with words she taught them. The propensity of politicians to speak with the mouths of whores and to see with their eyes is a well-known charge of comedy; one need only recall the association of Cleon with Kynna (Wasps 1015-1035 and Peace 739759), and Callias' statement, in the Pedetai, that Aspasia taught Pericles to speak (*21 K-A). Significantly, a scholion to Menexenus 235e is the sole source for this last citation. Plato alludes to Aspasia's comic reputation as a whore in several comments, which include Menexenus' ambiguous "I've met her many times and know what she's like" (249d8-9). He knows what she's like, but what she's like is not specified—it does not need to be.25 We know everything, and nothing, about Aspasia. The implication of this "not telling" is that the male audience does not need to be told. Aspasia is her reputation, and her reputation is what men say it is. The real woman is
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encapsulated within her reputation just as the dead are enclosed within their own reputations (doxa) and fame (eukleia) (247a6-7). Aspasia herself had alluded to future encounters with the youth of Athens as "whenever I encounter any of you " (246b7-cl); the verb for encounter, entynchanein, is a euphemism for sexual intercourse.26 She also refers to her past encounters with their progonoi (forefathers) in the context of reporting what these fathers would like said (246c2-4); she has heard them speak (246c4-6), and having associated with the fathers, knows what would please them. This all suggests scenarios wherein the fathers have conversed with Aspasia—conversations that she will communicate to their descendants. Socrates speaks for her; if Menexenus doesn't give him away, he will recite additional politikoi logoi that Aspasia taught him (249e3-5). What binds these men, then, is the ideality that they share through association with a foreign woman who is, by means of both the conversational aspect and the delicately submerged sexual aspect, "known" to them all. Thus, thepolitikos logos has a sexual tinge, and Athenian men are united with one another and with this logos by means of their association with a foreign woman. Aspasia and the speech she delivers unite the citizens of Athens across generations. Loraux discusses the importance to this epitaphios of the silenced but everpresent Other, which she identifies as the noncitizens. The presence of the foreign Other at the recitation of the epitaphios (Menex. 235b2-8) was "necessary to the city only so that the latter could admire itself in others' eyes.'' The late fifth and early fourth centuries witnessed zealous enforcement of the citizenship law, and the political climate of the early fourth century was therefore likely to have engendered scrutiny of the civic status of those connected with the production of the epitaphios.27 Another important source of civic anxiety and concern was boundary maintenance between citizen and noncitizen. A conservative trend after 403/402 is evidenced in legislation which required the legitimacy of war orphans for the purpose of allotting state subsidies and additionally demanded that public figures be legitimate. The reenactment of Pericles' citizenship law in 403/402 disfranchised some men and precluded the naturalization of others.28 Loraux posits that "the most general propensity of an ideological discourse is to conceal the internal divisions of a society . . ." and finds it significant that metics and slaves were ignored. To note merely that all women except Amazons were excluded, however, again avoids the question of why Aspasia, a metic and the mother of a bastard, authors this discourse.29
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It seems more to the point to observe that women not only make up an essential component of the Other, but that the Other is here in fact, figured as a woman who speaks in order to define the civic Self. A real woman is erased and a constructed woman, "known" to us all but not described, speaks in her place. The Other's presence at such a central point in the composition and delivery of the epitaphios is a way of making absence present and presence, that is, relevance and validity, absent.30 Paradoxically, the quintessential outsider, Aspasia, delivers consolation and hope to the insiders. The epitaphios situates the listener in the Nesoi Makaron, the Isles of the Blessed (235c4), by letting Aspasia traverse the boundaries between the living and the dead and between insider and outsider; she takes her audience with her into "no place." Socrates puts it contrariwise when he states that these speakers can make you believe anything (especially at 234cl-235c5), as does Menexenus when he remarks that Aspasia is makaria (blessed) if she can deliver such a speech.31 That both Aspasia and Socrates must have been dead at the date of this dialogue is, of course, one of its often-noted paradoxes and one that cloaks the speech in falsity and hollowness. Socrates' confession that he feels he has been in the Islands of the Blessed when he has listened to an epitaphios (235c4), and the likelihood that Aspasia as well as he was dead at the dramatic date of the dialogue, additionally contribute to this sense of absence and "dead-ness." He describes his prospective recitation of Aspasia's speech with the verb ekpherein (236c4), a word that can mean to deliver or publish, but whose older and more literal meaning is to carry out, as of a corpse (cf. ekphora).32 To listen to this praise of the dead and to adhere to the precepts of the politikos logos requires the listener to deny the actual bodily death of the warriors. Plato's Socrates denies death by brilliantly evoking a trance, a deathlike state, in which his instructress claims that the dead achieve a new birth. Plato additionally brings about this trance by making Aspasia herself metonymize motherhood within earth and women within men, and by making her contain men themselves within the polis.33 Therefore, far from agreeing with Loraux that in the Menexenus the polis "seems to transcend the distinction between male and female," I believe that Plato reconstructs human parenthood by deemphasizing human motherhood.34 To make his case for autochthony and to deemphasize human motherhood, Plato uses a constructed woman, an Aspasia who equals her reputation, a woman whose own motherhood was,
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according to public discourse, problematic for herself, her child, and the state. The Menexenus makes death the central fact of the warriors' existence. The dead are particularly praised because they are autochthones, born of a true mother (Earth) and living in their own land (237b2-c4). They were not migrants, nor were they reared by a metruia (a stepmother), but by their own mother, who has once more received them. This carefully worded "logic" defines the mother as the one who has received the dead and shares with Aeschylus' definition of parenthood in the Eumenides the suppression of human women's real roles.35 Motherhood is the particular property of ge (Earth), as seen in the use of the participle tekouses (having borne, 237c2), and it is most just to praise this mother (237c3). The part of ge that makes up Attica differs from the rest of Earth. The rest of Earth, "the whole earth," produced monsters—a process Aspasia describes in words not used exclusively or particularly of human parturition: he pasa ge anedidou kai ephye ("the whole earth gave forth and grew," 237d3—4). In contrast, she says of the Athenian portion of Earth, he hemetera . . . egennesen ("our [part of Earth] bore," 237d5-6); the verb (egennesen) immediately evokes the birth of human beings. That Earth nourished our ancestors and the ancestors' ancestors proves that she bore us (237el-5). This sentence and the next would seem to characterize the earth as female and maternal. Earth bears and, like a woman, provides suitable nourishment (237e3). Yet Plato unsexes Earth, even as he calls her "mother," by subsuming the planet in the category of "things that bring forth" through the use of the neuter participle to tekon (that which bears, 237e2-3).36 But the next part of Aspasia's speech is truly extraordinary. In its maternity, Earth is not like a human mother, but rather the other way around: ou gar ge gynaika memimetai kuesei kai gennesei, alia gyne gen ("For Earth does not imitate a woman in respect to conception and birth, but rather woman imitates Earth") (238a4-5). This speech act metonymizes women's abilities within Earth's ability. Aspasia's next claim, that humans, having been endowed by their uniqueness with the tools of learning, enjoy a special nourishment, again denies the physicality of human existence: "government is the nourishment of humans" (238cl). Other poleis, like other parts of Earth mentioned earlier, have populations of diverse origins, a heterogeneity that predisposes them to
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having anomalous constitutions (particularly tyrannies and oligarchies, 238e3^4). This statement is truly ironic because at the end of the Peloponnesian War it was Athens that was beset by tyranny, oligarchy, and stasis. Athenians differ from other people because they are the children of one mother, and all are brothers (238e5-239al). There has been a unity of government since the beginning, and this is due to the citizens' equal birth (238el). Next, Aspasia gives a brief account of some aspects of Athens' mythical-historical past. She privileges the Marathonomachoi, the men who fought at Marathon, by stating that these men are not just the fathers of Athenians' bodies but also of their freedom (240d7-e3). This double paternity of the Marathonomachoi renders bodies and freedom parallel, just as Aspasia had made government and human sustenance parallel. She makes the men and their corporeal legacy of sons no longer wholly literal, just as she makes the spiritual legacy of freedom no longer wholly metaphorical. After reducing the Sicilian disaster to mere misfortune (edystychesan, "they suffered misfortune," 243a5), Aspasia declares that the Athenians were defeated only by themselves and that the ensuing stasis was mild because the Athenians are related to each other (243d7-244b3); this statement is acceptable because of Athens' superiority. As Loraux remarks, civil war becomes a fraternity.37 In a reprise of the language used to describe the wreck of the Sicilian campaign, Aspasia says the internal disarray at the end of the Peloponnesian War was caused not by echthra (enmity) but by dystychia (misfortune, 244a7-bl). Plato repeatedly injects sexually charged language into situations that are not necessarily sexual. In contrast to other poleis with inhabitants who were meixobarbaroi (245d4—5) Athens' status as homophylon ("one race," 244a2) allows its people to mix with each other again (synemeixan, 243e5). More use of this language also occurs when Athens is praised to a fault for being too kind (244el-245c6); the Athenians are too kind because they are "not mixed with barbarians" (amigeis barbaron, 245dl-2) and "we dwell unmixed with barbarians" (ou meixobarbaroi oikoumen, 245d4-5).38 Any pretense on the part of this speech and its speaker to render an objective account of the last one hundred years of Athenian history, including any claim to having analyzed the etiology of key events, is vitiated by the collapsing of categories in this account. Aspasia is herself
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a collapsed category, who both suppresses the more unpleasant facts of Athens' military defeats and stasis and was herself accused in comedy of having helped to cause war.39 In her speech within a speech, Aspasia reports the exhortations of the dead ancestors, particularly stressing the importance of eukleia and doxa, together with that of arete (247a4-b7); it is unmitigated sophistry to ally virtue with its mere reputation. And, in a supremely anti-Socratic move, the war dead, speaking through Aspasia, declare that the life of one who has shamed his forebears—not the unexamined life—is abioton ("not worth living," 246d6). The fallen warriors encourage their own fathers and mothers to bear the loss lightly (247c5-7; cf. 248b4-6); fathers are fit parents if they manfully bear the loss of their sons (247d7e5). Care for the departed warriors' wives and young children is entrusted to surviving children (248c5-dl); care of the fathers and sons of the dead, however, is entrusted to the polis (248d2-5). In a renewed erasure of women from the process of human reproduction, it is now the city that shall rear the war orphans and that will be both a son and heir to the dead, as well as a guardian to the elders, always caring for them (249a3-c3). The polis now occupies all the important roles, those of guardian, son, heir, and father (esp. at249b3-c3). This "second birth," out of the polis, is a theme developed pointedly by Plato in the Laws (11.926d8ff). Only by dying in war can the male citizen be valorized and reborn.40 And Plato, who makes Aspasia speak through Socrates, constructed a world that consists only of Athenian men and the city. Plato's Aspasia is a free-floating phallic signifier who anticipates the construction of Diotima as a kind of Robot-Maria in the perfect male world of his Symposium. Diotima's speech, with its affirmation that males alone matter, is only credible in a thought-world awash in the autochtonous fantasy established here in the Menexenus. The character of Diotima is not a stand-in for the historical Aspasia; rather, Plato constructed both females in order to validate what Katz calls the "dream of a world without women."41
Aeschines of Sphettos Aeschines of Sphettos (fl. 4th c. B.C.), Plato's contemporary, seems to have been the first ancient writer to create an Aspasia in whom eras and
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the search for arete are fused, and the first to have mentioned her in a positive light. To reconstruct his lost dialogue, Aspasia, from its refractions into various facets by later sources is a literary-historical problem of great magnitude. Aeschines' own bios (D.L. 2.60-64) is interesting and suggests conflict, real or imaginary, between himself and Plato. According to tradition, Plato resented and snubbed Aeschines, who, like Plato, had spent time at the Syracusan court (D.L. 2.60-62). It was additionally claimed that Xanthippe presented Socratic dialogues to Aeschines as a token of gratitude after Socrates' death, and that Aeschines passed these off as his own. This tradition of friendship between the great man's widow and his disciple makes Aeschines' relationship to Socrates and his family the opposite of Plato's portrayal of a Socrates emotionally estranged, and with good reason, from the doltish Xanthippe. Not altogether popular in his own day, Aeschines was the target of a hostile speech by Lysias, who called him a swindler, a deadbeat, and an adulterer who corrupted the wife of the perfume-seller Hermaeus.42 Although Aeschines has been overshadowed by Plato, his work enjoyed a time of high regard from the first century B.C. through the second century A.D., from which most citations of his Aspasia come. The dialogue, perhaps written as a reaction to Antisthenes' negative portrayal, has been persuasively reconstructed by Ehlers. As in the other Socratica in which her speech is reported, Aspasia herself does not appear; here, as in the Menexenus, she is quoted by Socrates. For the first and perhaps the only time in classical antiquity, the thought of "Aspasia" stands on its own—her speech is reported by a man, to be sure, but it is reported for its own sake and not primarily to attack or support a man. In fact, Aeschines may be said to have attempted to create a female subject.43 Aeschines' portrait of Aspasia seems to have differed radically from that seen in comedy, which had concentrated on her relationship with Pericles and on her motherhood. He may have transformed these negative treatments in a positive manner, making Aspasia independent of, if not actually in charge of, her lover(s). Ehlers believes that Aspasia was a hetaira (courtesan) in real life and was so represented in this dialogue, but that Aeschines muted the negative aspects of this status. I am not certain that it is possible for Aspasia to have been vividly or explicitly represented as a hetaira. If, as seems the case, Aeschines' dialogue purported that the wives of respectable men associated with
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her, it is unlikely that Aspasia could have been represented as a courtesan.44 The Aspasia was composed between 393 and 384 B.C., but its dramatic date is between 420 and 410 B.C. In the dialogue, Socrates converses with the wealthy Callias, who has asked him to recommend a teacher for his son. Socrates recommends Aspasia, for she had taught him. Aeschines' departure from standard characterizations is evident in his treatments of both Aspasia and Callias. In comedy and in Plato's work, Callias' character exemplifies the sad fact that expensive instruction does not necessarily bring wisdom; here, however, Aeschines apparently presents Callias' quest for instruction for his son without irony. It must also be noted that the dramatic date of the dialogue makes Aspasia not an attractive young woman but an older one, whose erotic life was presumably over.45 At first, Socrates' recommendation would have seemed ironic, and Callias probably asks Socrates for Aspasia's qualifications. Socrates may have begun by citing other women who taught men or behaved in "masculine" ways. Rhodogyne, queen of Persia, was Amazonian and adept at politics. Nothing, not even her beauty—which Philostratus would later contrast with her bellicosity— got in the way of Rhodogyne's political duties. Ehlers states that Rhodogyne, representing a "negative Haltung zum Eros," was contrasted with Aspasia. The Ionian courtesan Thargelia was cited as another exceptional woman; Thargelia had evidently earned political influence over her male lover(s) by giving wise counsel. Both Rhodogyne and Thargelia functioned in the political realm but with important differences: Rhodogyne was motivated by love of her own land and by her inherited position, whereas Thargelia had moved from Ionia to Macedon as an independent agent. It is significant that although all three women were exceptional, none was a copy of the other; neither Rhodogyne nor Thargelia was directly compared with Aspasia, nor did the dialogue aim to demonstrate "the intellectual and moral capacities of women as a gender.' '46 Aspasia was the next exceptional woman to be named. It is quite possible that Aeschines presented Aspasia as a medial figure between the Amazonian Rhodogyne and the hypersexual Thargelia. Nowhere in any fragments ever assigned to this dialogue did Aeschines clearly indicate that Aspasia was a hetaira. Her valence is more that of the partner and wise woman than the enchantress. In diaeretic fashion, Socrates cited as examples two men who had profited from her teaching—their eminence would have flattered Callias. Far from being the focus of this
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section of the dialogue, Pericles is used here as an example of Aspasia's skill as teacher. The story of Pericles' loss of composure at her trial may have indicated his political dependence on her as well as his devotion to her. Plut. Per. 24.5, possibly derived from Aeschines, suggests that both Pericles and Socrates were drawn to Aspasia because she was sophe (wise) and politike (politically astute). Ehlers believes that Aeschines recounted specific instances of Aspasia's actual influence over Pericles. One such example would have been her teaching of rhetoric to Pericles: he was clearly a star pupil.47 Oddly, Aspasia's relationship with Lysicles would have been more important to this dialogue than was her relationship with Pericles. Lysicles, an important Athenian politician of the 420s, is connected with Aspasia here for the first time in the datable testimonia; he was mentioned in this dialogue as even better evidence than Pericles of Aspasia's expertise. If she could make a success out of a mediocre man, then she was truly gifted.48 This dialogue probably did not mention that Aspasia bore Lysicles a son named Poristes ("provider/supplier"); the name is extraordinary, and Aspasia was probably too old to have borne Lysicles a child if their liaison began only after Pericles' death. It is likely that the word poristes was used of Aspasia herself in the dialogue and that something like tes rhetorikes ("of rhetorical skill") fell out of the text.49 After Aspasia's skill as a teacher of rhetoric was established, it remained to establish her usefulness as a teacher for Callias' son. Ehlers, who believes that Aspasia began her adult life as an actual hetaira, also seems to believe that Callias meant his son to receive both erotic and rhetorical instruction. The image of an older man sending his son to a woman for both is unprecedented; nonetheless, if we deny or cast doubt upon the possibility that Aspasia really was a hetaira, then we must explain what other kind of instruction she might provide a young man. It need not be necessary to assume that Aspasia's role was that of involved erotic pedagogue; in fact, nothing in her bios says she ever loved any man. The example of Xenophon and his wife, instructed by Aspasia, seems to have been adduced to show Aspasia's skill as a rhetorician, not as a lover. In fact, Cicero and Quintilian, who preserved this fragment, each cited it as an example of particularly fine argumentation. But it is clear that Aeschines' Aspasia here connects eros and arete. For example, as in Aeschines of Sphettos' dialogue, Socrates shows that Aspasia spoke with Xenophon's wife and Xenophon himself:
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Prisoner of History "Tell me, please, wife of Xenophon, if your neighbor had a better piece of gold jewelry than you, would you prefer hers or your own?" "Hers," said the wife. "So—if she should have a dress or other feminine ornament more expensive than what you have, would you prefer hers or yours?" "Hers, naturally," said the wife. "So now: what if that woman had a better husband than you? Would you prefer hers or your own?" Here the woman blushed. Aspasia, however, began to interrogate Xenophon himself, (frag. 31 Dittmar = Cic. Inv. Rhet. 1.31.51 ff.)
This dialectical strategy, which we have come to call Socratic, moves the discussants up along a set of not-quite-parallel alternatives—from choosing the best property to selecting the best spouse—and is basic to Greek thought; to ask whether one prefers the better or the worse alternative forces the respondent to declare that one wants the better. Aspasia interrogates not only the wife, but the husband as well. She eventually reminds both that in order to have the best spouse, one must be the best spouse.50 The rest of the conversation must have taken place between Xenophon and Aspasia, because the wife aporetically blushes and falls silent (cf. PL Euthydemus 275-277). In it, Aspasia declares that each partner in a marriage should become the best person possible so that each spouse's wish to have the best possible partner might be fulfilled. Significantly, virtue is sought in reference to another human being; eros is the locus of mutual commitment. Moreover, a woman and a man are together considered worthy of this joint pursuit. Each is one another's love object at the same time that they are themselves acting subjects. That Aspasia's bios speaks of Pericles' devotion to Aspasia and never the reverse problematizes Ehlers' contentions that Aspasia knew of eros' power through direct experience and that this experience was the foundation of her work and her success. Aspasia's advice to the wife of Xenophon does not "transcend" anything, nor does it suggest that one should or can run through a variety of mates in the search for an appropriate partner: her advice is contextually limited and must be followed over a long span of time. Because of the contextual limits of her prescription, one might label Aeschines' Aspasia as a relativist. The erotic path to virtue that Aspasia recommends is not abstract, theoretical, or sublimated, as it would be in Plato's Symposium; instead, it is specific and paved with earthly experience. Moreover, both women and men are
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granted an equal stake and responsibility in this partnership. Each is the subject of her or his own quest, even while functioning as the object of the other's. The humble materiality of the oikos and its mortal constitutors and continuants is starkly contrasted to the glittering wordplay that excises mortality and materiality in Plato's Menexenus. This fragment may represent a particular moment in the history of consciousness, namely, an early attempt to create a female subject.51 It is most significant that Aeschines set his dialogue in a time when Aspasia would have been an older woman, perhaps a graus (crone); she could have been figured as one who is liminally or symbolically/ anagogically erotic, rather than as participatively or actively so. This liminal eroticism is also a chief ingredient in Plato's representation of Socrates. The fact of Aspasia's old age balances whatever emphasis Aeschines might have placed on her erotic history. She is a crosser of boundaries, a woman who has had marriage-like relationships, but not marriages, with leaders of the polis and who advises husbands and wives to seek and to be the best possible spouse. It is entirely possible to consider the wisewoman as a credible instructress for the young man without making her carry an active erotic charge; for example, she might have been showing the son how to choose and educate a wife (see the discussion of Xenophon's Oeconomicus, in the next section). Aspasia shows the path to others; her participation as a sort of philosophic sex therapist (as twentieth-century sexology would have her be), is not required. Aeschines might well have identified Aspasia as apromnestris ("matchmaker") in this dialogue and meant it in a literal sense. That function of matchmaker resembles those functions Plato's and Xenophon's Socrates assigns himself—which he would describe literally and metaphorically as pander, fellow hunter, matchmaker, and midwife.52
Xenophon Xenophon (ca. 430-356 B.C.) carries significant portions of Aspasia's bios in his Socratica, the Memorabilia and the Oeconomicus; the two passages in which she is mentioned are both thought to have derived from Aeschines' Aspasia. Scholars devoted to the Quellenforschung of Aeschines' dialogue have not paid much attention to Xenophon's own use of Aspasia.53 Several other sections of the Memorabilia, of the Oeconomicus, and
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of Xenophon's Symposium touch upon Aspasia's biographical tradition. As is conventional, Aspasia neither appears as a character nor speaks directly. But Socrates presents her as an authority and as a friend whom he has frequently visited; she is evidently truthful, intelligent, and trustworthy. Socrates' offer, in the Oeconomicus, to introduce Aspasia to Critoboulus so that she might tell him about the proper training of spouses is comparable to the situation in Plato's Menexenus, where Socrates also promises to take his interlocutor to hear Aspasia, and to the situation in Aeschines' Aspasia, where Socrates recommends that Callias engage Aspasia to teach his son. In the Oeconomicus and the Memorabilia, Xenophon evokes a woman whose life and thought were neither dependent on nor mediated by her sexual relationship with Pericles. She is presented as an authority on male-female relationships, but Xenophon's Aspasia is neither power hungry nor exclusively sexual. Whereas Plato presents Aspasia ironically as an analyst and practitioner of a bankrupt rhetoric, a rhetoric that creates a temporary illusion, a seeming death, a meaningless logos void of ergon, Xenophon makes Aspasia's ability to detect truth and falsehood in the reports of matchmakers a positive thing. Moreover, her reputed ability to educate spouses, taken with her advice that marriages be made honestly, shows her to be interested in helping create ethical and lasting partnerships. Unlike the temporary illusion produced by residence in epitaphian ou-topia, the deceit or openness of the matchmaker and the suitability of a spouse will be endured for many years by husband and wife alike; as Aspasia says, deceived parties will hate both each other and the matchmaker (Mem. 2.6.36). Aspasia, like the Muses, knows lies and truth: Xenophon's Aspasia knows, speaks, and advocates the private truth proper to courtship and marriage, not the glittering public lies of the epitaphios. Nevertheless, Xenophon's Aspasia scarcely transcends her position as secondary to the interests and requirements of men's discourse; Xenophon merely deploys "Aspasian" ideas in a new way, showing us a Socrates who appropriates attributes of the woman and of femininity to his own ends.
The Memorabilia The Memorabilia, or more properly, the Apomnemoneumata, recollects brief conversations between Socrates and various persons. The reference
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to Aspasia as one who understands the duties of the matchmaker is found in its second book, wherein Socrates and the young Critoboulus converse about the proper way to estimate the quality of worthwhile philoi ("friends," or male lovers). A close reading of this section shows how Aspasia, whose bios had never before associated her with male courtship, comes to be cited as a helpful authority in that endeavor.54 At the beginning of this discussion (Mem. 2.6.1), the language is nonsexual. One should carefully consider the prior behavior of a prospective "friend"; his treatment of his old friends can be compared with his treatment of his animals says Socrates (2.6.7). The pursuit of friends can be likened to a hunt (2.6.8; the term is qualified by Socrates at 2.6.9-10). An element of enchantment, resembling the Sirens' song to Odysseus, enters the search (2.6.11); the image of beautiful women is used at this point to exemplify the dangers of sexual allure. When Critoboulus asks if Socrates knows any other spells, the latter replies, "No, but I've heard that Pericles knew many, and using them on the city made it love him" (2.6.13). The politician's relationship to the city is described as lover-like, Pericles' charming language is assimilated into the charm of courtship, and male courtship imagery describes other pursuits.55 Next, Socrates, expatiates on how "noble friendship" helps the man of public life (2.6.21-27); the language is not yet sexually charged, but suddenly Socrates slips seamlessly into the theme of erotic pursuit (2.6.28-29). He once again mentions the Sirens' song as an inducement to erotic friendship, and men, transsexed, are now the Sirens (2.6.31). The feminized city, which consists of autochthonous men, "feels" a human emotion. The kind of friends Critoboulus wishes to attract is once more made clear; they are lovers, and the pursuit of lovers is again a hunt (2.6.2728; cf. 2.6.8-10). The usual terminology of erastesi'eromenos (active lover/passive beloved) is absent here, although sexual intimacy is clearly the object (e.g., see 2.6.6) and Xenophon straightforwardly employs the literal terminology in the Symposium. Socrates now offers to assist Critoboulus by informing any would-be friend that Critoboulus admires him, naming himself an adept at the hunt, a syntheros (' 'fellow hunter," 2.6.36; cf. Ar. Plut. 157). He is a third party who will help Critoboulus in courting.56 The possible means of winning a friend have now been established: these consist of charms, spells, honest praise, and the help of a fellow
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hunter. It is at this point that Critoboulus suggests that Socrates need not scruple in his reports to prospective lovers. Of course, Socrates declines to lie about something so important; Aspasia, who recommends veracity to matchmakers, is associated here with an open and truthful logos, one whose original audience was heterosexual: CRITOBOULUS: "Why then . . . do you tell me this,
as if it weren't in your power to say whatever you want about me?" SOCRATES: "Not at all, as I once heard Aspasia say; for she said that the best matchmakers are skilled at bringing people into a marriage alliance when the good things they say are true, and that she did not want to praise lying matchmakers. For the deceived parties hate both each other and the matchmaker. I am convinced that this is correct . . . " (Mem. 2.6.36).57
Previously, Xenophon's Socrates had carefully blurred the boundary between heterosexual and homosexual pursuits, so that by the time Aspasia's advice is slipped in, its original context is lost and it appears to be perfectly appropriate to the occasion. Although the Platonic Socrates calls himself a midwife of ideas and arrogates to himself the role of matchmaker, the Xenophontic Socrates does not go so far here as to appropriate a role culturally defined as feminine. He nonetheless makes two significant analogies: one between the processes of men-only courtship and heterosexual courtship, and the other between the roles of fellow hunter and matchmaker. Socrates' reiteration of Aspasia's advice makes this clear: "Now, Critoboulus, how then do you think I'll be more helpful to you—by praising you falsely, or by persuading you to try to be a good man?" (2.6.S7).58 The episode closes on a sexually neutral note (2.6.37-39), but some of the same elements of sexual pursuit resonate markedly in the Theodote episode in the third book. For that reason, and because Theodote has sometimes (and wrongly) been assumed to be a substitute for Aspasia, it is necessary to discuss this section. "Once upon a time in Athens there was a beautiful woman whose name was Theodote" (3.11.1). Clearly a courtesan, and perhaps the daughter of one, Theodote readily associates with anyone who persuades her (3.11.1-4). The language used to describe the situation is sexually neutral, but the content is explicit, as was not the case in Mem. 2.6, discussed previously. Theodote has allowed her portrait to be
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painted, and Socrates leads a group to view her indescribable beauty. Because she earns her considerable living from any friend who wishes to treat her well (3.11.4), it behooves Theodote to become an expert at the "hunt." Socrates duly advises her to devise a means to "hunt" "friends" (philous theraseiri), that is, paying lovers, likening her body to the hunting nets and suggesting that someone act as her hound (3.11.7-10). Her body is only a means for Theodote to achieve her end; it is an end for the lovers, however. Thus, she is both subject and object of the erotic quest, and by helping her hunt, Socrates becomes Theodote's co-subject. He urges the honest pursuit of honest lovers, and advises Theodote to use titillation judiciously (3.11.10-14). Socrates' advice to pursue lovers honestly echoes his earlier repetition of Aspasia's opinion that matchmakers must be honest. But, in a strategy similar to that which he employed in Mem. 2.6.36, Socrates here too redirects that "Aspasian" advice to his own ends, and it is not merely by omitting Aspasia's name and the marital context. Convinced, Theodote asks Socrates if he will be her synthemtes ton philon, her "fellow hunter of friends" (3.11.15). This request, if granted, would make Socrates' relationship with Theodote parallel to his relationship to Critoboulus. They banter—he will come to her if she persuades him, but she must discover how to persuade him (3.11.15). Socrates finally evades the issue by saying that friends of both sexes flock to him and take up much of his free time. The women come in order to learn philters and spells; the men flock to him because Socrates lures them with philters, spells, and magical devices (3.11.16-17). The section ends as Socrates promises to receive Theodote in the absence of a philotera (a "woman more loved," or "a dearer friend" 3.11.18). Thus, in the Memorabilia, Socrates speaks with words of seduction and magic of both male and female followers, as he adapts Aspasia's advice to the contexts of both homosexual and heterosexual courtship.59 Not only is Aspasia not mentioned in the Theodote passage, she could have had no part in it. Ehlers rightly sees that the themes of Socrates' conversation with Theodote correspond in many ways to those of his earlier conversation with Critoboulus, but I disagree with her analysis of what this correspondence is. Ehlers believes that Theodote represents Aspasia and that such a substitution spared Aspasia the negative connotations of being represented as the hetaira that Ehlers thinks she actually was. According to this logic, Xenophon wanted to portray Socrates as having learned of eras' power from Aspasia but without naming her as a
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hetaira and thereby reinforcing that role's many negative connotations. If the real Aspasia had been Socrates' teacher, how can "Theodote/ Aspasia" be Socrates' pupil? Theodote simply cannot be Aspasia in disguise, for the roles of pupil and teacher are reversed here. Aeschines' Aspasia is a master teacher who uses no helpers of any kind, whereas Theodote is cast in the role of someone who needs Socrates' help. Theodote stands, then, in the same relation to Socrates as had Critoboulus in 2.6—she needs lovers and she needs help to find them.60 I suggest a different line of thought: Aeschines' Aspasia had observed that heterosexual eros could be a path to arete and had demonstrated that within marriage such a possibility was manifested in each spouse's wish and attempt to be the other's best possible mate. Xenophon uses this advice, initially generated by Aeschines' Aspasia, by citing Aspasia's remark about honest matchmaking in his Memorabilia. He first uses that remark explicitly to make Socrates advocate honesty in homoerotic courtship and then uses it implicitly to make Socrates encourage the hetaira to pursue clients honestly. In each context. Xenophon's Socrates also employs the concept of fellow hunter, a concept somewhat analogous to that of matchmaker, and thereby creates for himself a role as co-subject (but significantly, not as co-object).61
The Oeconomicus The implications of "Aspasia's" advice for marital partners reach fullest exposition in Oeconomicus. This famous discussion between Socrates and Critoboulus about household management and husbandry contains Xenophon's second reference to Aspasia and further extends the notion of honest marital courtship. Socrates lengthily recounts a conversation he once had with the exemplary Ischomachus (Oec. 7-21), whom he offers to Critoboulus as an example of one who has learned what is worth learning about having a good marriage. Aspasia's ideas seem to have borne fruit for Ischomachus and his wife. Critoboulus and Socrates discuss the trainability of animals and humans; if a sheep fares poorly, the shepherd is blamed; if ahorse, the rider; if a wife, the husband (3.11; cf. Mem. 2.6.7 on a man's relations with his animals). It is particularly important to have a good wife; to her a man entrusts his most serious business, even though men take mere ignorant girls as wives (3.12-14). Critoboulus asks and Socrates answers obliquely (3.14):
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CRITOBOULUS: "What then of the husbands who have, as you say, good wives? Did the husbands themselves educate their wives?" SOCRATES: "There's nothing like close examination. I'll introduce you to Aspasia, who will explain everything to you more knowledgeably than I can."
Socrates does not say that Aspasia will show him how to train a wife, but rather that she will "explain everything." This implies not only that the procedure is more than just an indoctrination of the woman by the man, but also that he, Socrates, has listened to her and therefore knows what it is she will explain. In other words, Socrates' remark implies the existence of a prior context, a wider scenario. Ischomachus establishes that complementary gender roles are essential (7.3-4). In response to Socrates' question about how the wife was trained (7.4—7) Ischomachus states that he first prayed that he might really teach and his wife really learn what was best for them both and that his wife prayed as well for the same thing (7.7-8). Ischomachus told his wife that he and her parents chose her as his mate in the belief that their partnership would be the best; this recalls Aspasia's statement to Xenophon's own wife that spouses should try to be the best for one another. Each partner brings to the union the desire to be the best possible partner, the potential to bear children, and property (7.11-13). Property is to be held in common, and the better partner is the one who has made the better contribution (7.13). This evokes the conversation reported between Aspasia and Xenophon and his wife, but here more detail and examples are given. Each partner should act in order that the property be as sound as possible and that it grow by fair and just means (7.15); the wife's role in this endeavor is to have children (7.17-19) and to take care of the house and its attendant work (7.20-22), things women are better equipped to do (7.22). But in other ways, namely, mneme (memory) and epimeleia (care), both are equals, as well as in respect to to enkrates de einai (self-control, 7.26-27). The lack of completely symmetrical capabilities between the sexes (7.28) makes each the more useful to the other. The groom concurs with his bride's insight that servants who are well cared for will repay that care with greater loyalty (7.37-38). That each partner should/ought to try to be as good as possible is again stressed; the pleasantest thing of all is for the wife to be better than the husband and to
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make him her servant (7.42). Together, the pair arrange their household belongings in orderly fashion (8-9), and the wife acts as a magistrate (9.14).62 Just as Aspasia had earlier prescribed mutual honesty in courtship and marriage (Mem. 2.6.26), Ischomachus identifies particular mental and moral qualities as the equal province of both sexes. The main part of Ischomachus' argument to his wife recommends that partners in a marriage be honest—they must not conceal, boast, or exaggerate (see especially 10.3). Ischomachus calls cosmetics a form of deceit; a mark of his wife's merit is her willingness to give up cosmetics at her husband's request (10.1-9).63 Ischomachus is clearly an elaborated illustration of the kind of marital happiness that comes about when partners are honest with each other. He is the ideal husband of the marriage Aspasia sketches in her advice to Xenophon and his wife. Xenophon's Socrates uses the Aeschinean Aspasia 's advice on marital courtship in two dialogues: he plays the role of honest matchmaker (cum fellow hunter) in the Memorabilia and discusses a successful marriage that seems to have been brought about and continued according to "Aspasian" principles in the Oeconomicus. The "Aspasian" concept of matchmaking is likened to hunting and hunting to procuring in the Memorabilia; as I will discuss next, in the Symposium, Socrates uses the image of procurer to describe his own role as a liminal, erotic facilitator of male love. Possibly, Socrates found the matchmaker image and took it from "Aspasia" as a way of redefining and refining his own role. Socrates' use of the literal and metaphoric functions of mastropos (pimp), syntheros (fellow hunter), andpromnestris (matchmaker) in Xenophon, and of midwife in Plato, indicates a progressive refinement of Socrates' apparent self-concept (or the development of same by his biographical tradition).64 Socrates' tendency to attribute words to Aspasia, to speak "her" words in dialogue, must also be part of this process. Before I leave the Socratica behind, it is necessary to take a look at Xenophon's Symposium.
The Symposium Xenophon's Symposium presents an earthier and more robust Socrates than does Plato's homonymous dialogue. Even here, however, Socrates is becoming a liminally erotic figure. He participates in other men's courtships by assuming the role of advisor; he is married but not mar-
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ried, loved but not in love.65 Xenophon's humorous representation of Socrates makes the philosopher evasive rather than lofty. Socrates advises Lycon that his son Autolycus should seek out the most suitable man to show him a life of virtue. When asked by the general company how one might find such a teacher, Socrates uses the arrival of a dancing girl to demur (2.6-8). Her proficiency as a dancer leads Socrates to observe that women's nature is not inferior to men's (except in gnome, intelligence, and ischys, strength), and that men can teach their wives whatever they wish them to know (2.8-9), a comment that anticipates the more sophisticated treatment of marital relations present in the Oeconomicus. Socrates next evades the question as to why he does not teach Xanthippe (2.9-10). His own relationship with his wife is stunningly unlike that of Ischomachus and his wife (see especially Symp. 2.9-10).66 It can even be said that Socrates' relation to Xanthippe as he himself describes it is almost as far as one can get from the pictures of the ideal marriage in the Memorabilia and Oeconomicus. Socrates' refusal to follow his own advice—that men can teach their wives anything—maintains his superiority or transcendent nature even as it exposes him. Socrates sets the course of the evening's conversation by calling on each person to disclose what he thinks is his most valuable knowledge (3.3). Socrates claims pride in his knowledge of mastropeia (procuring, 3.10). Despite the group's ridicule, Socrates claims that he could earn considerable money by pursuing such a techne (skill). The topic of Socrates qua procurer is left behind as other symposiasts declare pride in jesting, or in the father-son relationship, or in the goodness and power of friends (3.11-3.14). Next, each man attempts to prove that his source of pride is worthy of that pride. At last, Socrates explains his pride in his adoxos techne, his disreputable skill (4.56). Beginning with a functionbased definition, he establishes that the function of an excellent procurer is to make whoever employs him, man or woman, attractive to all comers (4.57). By establishing the individual's power to convey multiple impressions, Socrates shows that the external aspects of attractiveness are multivalenced and malleable. Arguing on the "more is better" principle, Socrates next obtains the group's agreement that the better procurer is one who can make a person attractive not just to one person, but to many—in fact, to the whole polls (4.58-60). The advantages of this activity are quite plain: ' 'For the man who is able to recognize those who can benefit one another and who is able to make them desirous of
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one another, that man, I think, could also make cities be friendly and could arrange appropriate marriages; he would be a very valuable friend and ally to acquire, for both states and private parties" (4.64). As was the case in comedy and as would be the case in the Memorabilia, the political world is eroticized. Subsequently, Socrates directs the conversation to a discussion of eros. Antisthenes calls him a "procurer of yourself," mastropos sautou (8.5). Socrates wittily dismisses him (8.6) and moves to a discussion of the right sort of love objects (8.6-8.8). His remark that mutual admiration spurs lovers on to ever greater virtue (8.17-18) resonates with the Aeschinean Aspasia's doctrine of eros as a path to arete. The element of commitment is important: Socrates notes that a man who is only physically in love is like someone who has rented a farm, but one who loves spiritually is like one who owns the farm (8.25). Socrates additionally demonstrates to Callias that one who wishes to benefit his beloved must practice virtue: "But the greatest good that comes to him who wishes to have a friend in his lover, is that he himself needs to practice arete habitually" (8.27). This statement recalls the Aeschinean Aspasia's dictum that husband and wife must be the best for each other. At dialogue's end, the married members of the party set off for home in order to enjoy their own wives. The married Socrates, however, is not among this number; he joins others on a walk (9.7). Socrates' liminality is maintained. Married but not married, using the lowly language of pimping in the service of "noble friendship," he remains with his male companions.
Conclusion Even though the chronological problems of the Socratica are knotty, it is nonetheless possible to identify among them thematic relationships relevant to the development of Aspasia's bios. The figure of the mastropos as Xenophon's sympotic Socrates uses it is first on a metaphorical continuum of pimp to fellow hunter to matchmaker; Socrates refines the figure of mastropos into that of the syntheros and yet further, by using Aeschines' contribution to Aspasia's biographical tradition, into that of the promnestris. It would remain for Plato to carry the idea on, to show Socrates not only as a matchmaker for men who love other men, but also as a midwife for men who birth ideas. One must neither consider this as
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a logical and linear progression of ideas nor use this set of metaphors in order to set the various dialogues into a chronological order. But it is important to reestablish "Aspasian" discourse as a missing link in both the history of female subjectivity and the discourse on erotic pedagogy, a discourse largely attributed only to Socrates. The figure of the mastropos is vivid and crude. It acknowledges the malleability of the lover-employer from subject into object, as the mastropos re-presents that employer in the most favorable, but not necessarily the most truthful, light. It is the literal image of a disreputable skill (adoxos techne), and it is multivalent, for one can even pimp oneself, as Xenophon's sympotic Antisthenes avers. The figure of syntheros, as found in the Memorabilia, is far more complex; it is a metaphor. Discussion of the "hunt" mixes metaphor and literality, for one can describe the reports disseminated to the beloved in literal terms or one can discuss the lover's blandishments metaphorically as "hounds" and "nets." The notion of mutuality is more prominent and that of malleability is less prominent; the roles of hunter and fellow hunter are presented as the shared pursuit of an end that only one will enjoy. Yet despite its wondrous complexity, the metaphor of syntheros is sterile and unsatisfying: a successful hunt kills or paralyzes the quarry, nourishing the hunter but not creating anything new. The image of the promnestris is the most idealized. Aeschines' Aspasia spoke literally of actual promnestreis, for she was discussing an actual female social role. This role, discussed substantively and positively in the Oeconomicus, becomes metaphorical when applied to homoerotic courtship in the Memorabilia. The role of promnestris is both productive even as it is played on the borderland; the matchmaker, usually a crone, played a vital part in perpetuating a productive and tranquil household. The role of the matchmaker, as used metaphorically by Xenophon's Socrates of male love in the Memorabilia, overcomes the barrenness of the role of syntheros and transcends the playful naughtiness of the mastropos without relinquishing the latter's liminality. The use by Xenophon's Socrates of the image of promnestris in the Memorabilia, and the concomitant elision of the matchmaker's duties into the process of male courtship, anticipates the Platonic Socrates' conflation of the image of matchmaker with that of midwife in his discussion of the birth of ideas in the Theaetetus (150a). The appropriation of "Aspasian" language during this process supports duBois' contention that a philosophical language was developing in the fourth
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century that arrogated women's experiences and occupations to the philosophical search for a masculine source for the good. It is possible that some aspects of this language began with '' Aspasia." If so, it is less correct to call Aspasia a "female Socrates" and to speak of Aeschines' dialogue as a "pre-Platonic" discourse on eros than it is to call the Socrates of Plato's Symposium a "male Aspasia" and to speak of his Symposium a s ' 'post-'Aspasian'." It is Plato who takes from women the capacity for intellectual and biological creativity. For a moment, philosophical discourse allowed a woman to advocate that women and men, connected by eros, search together for the good. But that incredible moment was not to last, and the dominant portrait of Aspasia that antiquity would hand the West was that of Pericles' "intellectual girlfriend."67
4 The Sargasso Sea: Aspasia and the Discourse on Prostitutes in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique Periods
Although Aspasia's bios would surface spectacularly in Plutarch's Life of Pericles, it is not possible to limn her biographical tradition clearly from the mid-fourth century B.C. onward. Aspasia is mentioned but cursorily in a few complete texts, and we cannot hope to fully understand how she was treated in the many fragmentary works that mention her. Cicero and Quintilian took her seriously as a logician, and Plutarch thought it worth reporting elements of her life relevant to Pericles. For others, Aspasia not only dominated Pericles, but was also the lovelorn Socrates' "agony aunt." There is much here for the student of high culture to disdain, but the persistence of treatments of Aspasia along the entire continuum of texts, patchy though these be, testifies to her power as an icon in this period of cultural ferment, fusion, and eclecticism. With few exceptions, most citations of Aspasia float in a Sargasso Sea of protoprosopography, subhistory, and subbiography; most of these anecdotes are found in the works of Greek, not Roman, authors. The interest many of these works display in exceptional women (mostly prostitutes), suggests the development of a "protopornography," or a discourse on prostitutes, that is remarkably consistent across texts and through the centuries. It would be improper to try to classify and discuss 57
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these works genetically; we must speak more of general themes than of genres, schools, or locales. Precisely because Aspasia was becoming important as a cultural icon, treatments of her do appear in diverse texts; these texts mostly share the assumption that she was a hetaira.1 Extensive literary treatment of prostitutes began in the fourth century B.C., which has been called the ancient world's "golden age of the hetaira." Pornography—"writing about prostitutes"—in the strictest sense had itself begun during Aspasia's own lifetime, but there is no evidence that anyone wrote treatises on prostitutes in the fourth century.2 Aspasia, never typical, fits uneasily into the developing discourse on prostitutes; this discourse uses sensational and historical or quasihistorical anecdotes about individual women. Anecdotes of this sort, which had made their first appearances in comedy, now appear in historiography, miscellany, prosopography, poetry, and philosophical dialogue.
The Discourse on Prostitutes in Greek Literature: Genesis and Characteristics Two of the earliest contributors to the discourse on prostitutes were the brothers Lynceus and Duris of Samos. In addition to an unknown number of comedies, Deipnetikai Epistolai ("Dinner Letters"), Opsonitike Techne ("The Caterer's Art"), and a treatise on Menander, Lynceus wrote an Apomnemoneumata (or Apophthegmata, "Memorabilia"), which contained quasi-historical anecdotes about his contemporaries and predecessors; some of these were witty prostitutes. Aspasia does not appear in any surviving fragments of Lynceus, but it is important to note that he was interested in the literary treatments of historical prostitutes, scholarship on comedy, comedy itself, and historical anecdote; all of these are locales within which Aspasia's biographical tradition develops in the postclassical period. Duris was probably the first to allege that Aspasia was implicated in Athens' involvement in the conflict between Samos and Miletus.3 Lynceus was a source for Machon of Sicyon, who worked at Alexandria in the mid-third century B.C. He displayed a similar range of interests, particularly in his use of witty prostitutes who philosophize and banter in his Chreiai ("Bright Sayings"; see esp. frags. 12 and 15 Gow), a work composed in metrical form, perhaps in order to help
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would-be symposium raconteurs memorize desired stories.4 Matro of Pitane, a parodist of the fourth century B.C., also contributed to the discourse on prostitutes in his bizarre Homeric cento Deipnon Attikon ("Attic Dinner'') by giving food a feminized sexuality and by representing prostitutes and their customers prominently in the poem. Prostitutes thus were entering discourses they never had before. Duris inserted anecdotes about Aspasia into historiography, his brother composed (pseudo)historical memoirs in which prostitutes participated as characters, and Matro pornographized Homer.5 The interest in prostitutes is seen across a cultural continuum. The second-century author Hegesander of Delphi wrote a Hypomnemata ("Commentaries"), and perhaps a treatise, on the malice of Plato; the former work concerned kings, parasites, courtesans, philosophers, and other types, and may have been divided into books according to topic. He mentions prostitutes in fragments of chreiai he attributes to the prostitute Metaneira, when he states that Sophocles lived with a hetaira in his old age and made her his kleronomos (heiress), and in information about a religious festival. Hegesander wrote prostitutes into all sorts of texts; his work discussed prostitutes' wit, their rapacious readiness to attach themselves to wealthy old men, and a religious festival with the name of Hetairideia.6 Nor did philosophical discourse after Plato abandon its interest in Aspasia. A polemic by Heraclides Ponticus, Peri Hedones ("On Pleasure"), was written in a comedic style and may have been composed in dialogue form; unfortunately, no hint as to speakers or identities is preserved. Possibly Heraclides, who was a pupil of Plato and was later associated with Aristotle, discussed the dichotomy, Prodicus-wise, between pleasure and duty, himself opposing pleasure. Fragment 55 states an opinion of pleasure and luxury that other fragments refute: namely, the ability to live luxuriously is a mark of peoples at the height of their power. Most of the fragments demonstrate the madness that characterizes extremes of pleasure and luxury; the Samians lost their city after living in excessive luxury (frag. 57); Callias, who lived off his inheritance of Persian gold, died with only an elderly foreign woman by his side (frag. 58). In addition, love of comfort is found in tandem with fear of danger (frag. 60) and extreme love of comfort can lead to madness and self-mutilation (frag. 61). Pericles dismissed his wife from his house, opting for a life of pleasure, and lived with the Megarian [sic] courtesan Aspasia, on whom he squandered much of his property (frag.
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59 = Ath. 12.533d). The dependence of such comment on comedy is obvious.7 Pericles' relationship with Aspasia is made antithetical to his married life; the explicit opposition of mistress to wife had heretofore been absent and is found here in an anecdote whose erroneous assertion about Aspasia's background probably comes from Aristophanes' Acharnians. Aspasia is warmonger and dominatrix, instrument and symbol of Pericles' and Athens' tryphe (excessive luxury); she becomes part of a moralizing tale about a man who leaves his wife for a prostitute. Interestingly, Aspasia and the foreign graidion (little old lady) who attended Callias' deathbed are the only women mentioned in the remains of this treatise; both the notorious courtesan and the anonymous crone represent the social isolation and bad end to which each man comes. The Peripatetic Clearchus of Soli emulated Aristotle's learnedness, but his sensationalism sets him apart from the Stagirite. Although his reputation languishes today, he was admired and used by other ancient writers. Clearchus' Erotika, a work of two or more books, treats aphrodisia (sexual relations) of various types, the deeper meanings of courtship rituals, and the excesses to which lovers' passions drive them. It also mentions literary accounts of love affairs. The category of lovers' excesses is pertinent to this discussion; Clearchus mentioned Cleisophus of Selymbria, who tailed to copulate with a statue but succeeded with a scrap of meat (frag. 26); animals who fall in love with human beings (frags. 27 and 28); Gyges, who erected a monument to his dead mistress (frag. 29); Pericles, who threw all Hellas into turmoil for Aspasia's sake (frag. 30); and Eriphanis, the lovelorn poet who was even joined in mourning by animals (frag. 32).8 To situate Pericles and Aspasia in this company of freaks exceeds even Heraclides, but both authors' anecdotes participate in an identical economy, traceable to fifth-century comedy. In the work by Heraclides, Pericles' relationship with Aspasia reveals the politician's lack of control as an individual and family man and his enslavement to pleasure in the forms of a beautiful woman and expenditure of money. Clearchus made the cause more specific and its effect more wide-ranging: because of an erotic passion, Pericles throws into turmoil not just his household and his property (ousia, in Heraclides), but all of Greece. Aspasia becomes a perverse example of the personal as political. The end of the fourth century saw the beginnings of literary and historical scholarship on comedy, which is the other main locus besides philosophical dialogue of Aspasia's bios. In addition to the famous lost
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second book of Aristotle's Poetics and Lynceus' treatise on Menander, the fourth century also saw the appearance of Theophrastus' Peri Komoidias (' 'On Comedy"), as well as his famous Peri Charakteron (' 'On Characters"). The fact that exceptional women, usually prostitutes, are found in many different genres is not insignificant. The scholar Satyrus, whose works have received mixed reviews across the ages, exemplifies some of the tendencies that contributed to the nascent discourse on prostitutes.9 In his Peri Charakteron ("On Characters'') Satyrus decried prodigals who enjoy courtesans rather than the wholesome company of male friends (FHG frag. 20); association with courtesans is equated with reckless disregard for one's financial future, a sentiment as old as Alcaeus and as new as New Comedy. A second and more significant passage from Satyrus' Bioi has the courtesan Glykera telling a philosopher that it doesn't matter whether one is corrupted by him or her: "Stilpo, we're both equally guilty. For people say you corrupt those who meet you by teaching them no-account eristic sophistics—and they say I do the same thing teaching them erotics! So, it doesn't matter to men who are ruined and doing badly whether they live with a philosopher or a hetaira" (FHG 3.164, frag. 19 = Ath. 13.584a4-9). Equally pernicious are a philosopher's time and a prostitute's, a philosopher's conversation and a prostitute's. The affinities between Satyrus, comic invective, and the earlier construction of Aspasia's speech in the Menexenus are obvious. It is also important to note the scandalous anecdotes contributed by Idomeneus of Lampsacus to the discourse on prostitutes. Named by Plutarch in his Pericles and elsewhere—only to be discredited—and not mentioning Aspasia in any fragment yet identified, Idomeneus nonetheless contributed with his story that Themistocles yoked prostitutes to a chariot and drove them; this anecdote resembles a passage in Matro's DeipnonAttikon, which describes a man entering a symposium driving a chariot drawn by prostitutes. Possibly Idomeneus wrote about Aspasia in his Peri ton Sokratikon ("On the Socratics"), but no fragments survive.10
The (Pseudo)Scholarly Discourse on Prostitutes In the third century B.C., the center of scholarship gravitated from Athens to Alexandria. The first datable evidence of treatises specifically devoted to prostitutes comes in the works attributed to Aristophanes of
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Byzantium (ca. 275-180 B.C.), a prodigious and prolific scholar who studied with Machon and became head of the Mouseion (Library) in Alexandria around 194 B.C. Several titles suggest that Aristophanes took a particular interest in drama: Peri Komoidias ("On Comedy"), Lexis Komike ("Comic Diction"), PeriProsopon ("On Masks"); and a work that may be more prosopographical than literary, Peri ton Athenesin Hetairidon ("On Athenian Courtesans"). This treatise apparently contained information about 135 hetairai, but only its title remains (Ath. 13.567a). Aspasia may have been mentioned therein.11 The several Peri Hetairon treatises, of which Aristophanes' is the first, may have been a subset of those more general works known as Komoidoumenoi, "Persons Mentioned in Comedy." Whatever the true nature of the "On Courtesans" treatise, Aristophanes was followed in the endeavor by his pupil Callistratus in a work mentioned only once in the available sources: " 'Alexander razed , but Phryne put it back up,' as Callistratus recounts in his Peri Hetairon" (FGrH frag. 1 = Ath. 13.591d3-6). The fragment's content and tone can be compared with Old Comedy's likening of politicians' activities to those of prostitutes. The fragment concerning Phryne is found in a section of Athenaeus which also has sources taken from various comic playwrights and scholars of comedy.12 Aristarchus, Aristophanes' more famous pupil, succeeded him as head of the Library and produced a student of his own, Ammonius grammaticus, who also wrote both a Komoidoumenoi and a Peri Hetairon. In the infamous thirteenth book of Athenaeus, in which prostitutes are discussed, the symposiast Cynulcus chides Myrtilus for carrying around Peri Hetairon treatises and hanging about wineshops with prostitutes the day long (FGrH frag. 350 Tl = Ath. 13.567a).13 Another of Aristarchus' pupils, Apollodorus of Athens, left Alexandria for Pergamum around 146 and moved to Athens around 133. In addition to historiographical, philological, and sympotic works, he also wrote a Peri Hetairon treatise that apparently surpassed Aristophanes of Byzantium's list of 135 hetairai in its length. Apollodorus claimed that Aristophanes had omitted a number of women. This claim suggests that in the late Hellenistic age such treatises had a well-established place in the scholarly world; they were known as a separate kind of treatise and were subject to legitimate correction by "authorities," just as were other works on tamer subjects. The surviving fragments of Apollodorus' Peri Hetairon list prostitutes' names, nicknames, parentage, and chil-
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dren, and attempt to identify individual women who bore the same name.14 Two more authors of Peri Hetairon treatises in Greek are attested; both display the preoccupations already discussed. Antiphanes the Younger, Apollodorus' approximate contemporary in the second century B.C., wrote a Peri Hetairon treatise whose few fragments also recount nicknames and family histories. Gorgias of Athens, a grammarian of the late first or early second century A.D. , is also credited with such a treatise, which apparently contained information about prostitutes' relations with politicians. Gorgias' approximate coeval, the Roman Suetonius, is credited with a treatise on prostitutes, but nothing is known of its contents or manner of treatment.15 It is possible that the Peri Hetairon treatises began as, and remained, a specialized outgrowth of the Komoidoumenoi treatises, that is, a form of prosopography. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that although historical prostitutes were mentioned in factual texts such as the orators, in quasi-factual texts such as the Socratica and memorabilia, and in purely fictional texts such as the plays of New Comedy, they are constructed in similar ways across these discourses. That very phenomenon argues for a nascent pornography. It is necessary to resist an essentialist discussion of "the prostitute in" various cultural productions, as if she simply exists in the manner in which these texts describe her; from the fourth century B.C. on, the world of Greek thought was constructing ' 'the prostitute.'' The nature of that stereotype, as it developed, has been much obscured by the loss of the texts where the development was taking place, and it has been additionally obscured by scholars' inability to see its existence. Prostitutes are everywhere and nowhere in these protopornographic texts. For example, the tale that the orator Hypereides saved the hetaira Phryne in court sounds suspiciously like a doublet of the story that Aspasia was saved by Pericles; each story, however, is enrolled as historical evidence to verify the other.16 By the time of Plutarch's Life of Pericles, the discourse on prostitutes was attaining a certain generic quality, though it was visible across various genres and most visible in the existence of a separate set of treatises about whores. The meager remains of this pornography suggest that its authors tended to mesh their construction of fictitious prostitutes with reportage about historical women and that they were interested in prostitutes' nicknames, witticisms, idiosyncrasies, families, and sexual partners. There is a tendency to show prostitutes' domination over their
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"clients," but there also exists an underside that shows the women's essential helplessness. Aspasia does not much participate in this discourse; however, given the lack of sources, I cannot claim that she doesn't appear at all. 17
Lipstick Traces: Debased Socratic Erotics in the Hellenistic Period The erotic Socrates and his Milesian teacher continue on in Hellenistic literature. In his Leontion, three campy books of elegy named for and dedicated to his mistress, Hermesianax of Colophon concocted a puerile assertion that Socrates loved Aspasia. The Leontion recounts great loves of the literary and mythical past. A lengthy fragment of the third book, preserved in Athenaeus, tells of the pangs of desire and devotion experienced by Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, Homer, Mimnermus, and others, for Argiope, Antiope, and other women. Leontion is assured that not even philosophers escape the madness of eros. After mentioning Pythagoras' love for Theano, Socrates' love for Aspasia, and Aristippus' love for Lais, the fragment breaks off: "And how powerfully did the angry Cypris heat up Socrates, the man Apollo had declared to be outstanding in wisdom! From his deep soul, he executed lighter labours when he frequented Aspasia's house; nor did he find his way, though he had discovered numerous paths of logic" (frag. 7 CA, lines 90-94 = Ath. 13.599a6-b3). Hermesianax has turned the high respect for Aspasia exhibited by Aeschines' and Xenophon's Socrates into an adolescent crush.18 At about the same time, Herodicus of Babylon ("the Cratetean"), who was fiercely funny and vehemently anti-Platonic, invented a piece of advice Aspasia supposedly gave to Socrates about winning the love of Alcibiades. A contemporary of Ammonius grammaticus, Herodicus wrote not only the Pros ton Philosokraten ("Against the Socratophile"), but also a Komoidoumenoi and a Symmikta Hypomnemata. Herodicus apparently suggested that Plato exaggerated Socrates' martial valor, that his chronology was faulty, and that he concealed Socrates' love for Alcibiades.19 The relevant passage from the Pros ton Philosokraten is found in the Deipnosophistae in a passage wherein the host, Larensis, vilifies Plato, Socrates, and others. Larensis quotes Herodicus as citing a poem that
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Socrates' teacher, Aspasia, presents to him; cognizant of the philosopher's passion, she urges him to press his suit. Herodicus also calls Aspasia Socrates' erotodidaskalos (teacher of erotics; Dueling frag. 4 = Ath. 5.219d5). Duering believes that Herodicus himself authored the poem ascribed to Aspasia. Ouk clothes me ("you haven't escaped my notice")—line 1 of the poem—suggests that Socrates has been trying to keep his passion for Alcibiades secret but that Aspasia has found him out, which suggestion contradicts Plato's image of the detached philosopher in the Symposium. Aspasia calls Socrates' and Alcibiades' emotions pathos and Socrates' desire paidika (lines 1, 3, 8); both men's feelings are called philia (line 9). These are conventional and almost homely words to describe emotional and sexual longing, rather than lofty words evoking the search for the good. The Cratetean implodes Plato's sublimative and sublime Socrates by making Aspasia invoke the earthier, nontranscendent erotic Socrates of Xenophon and by using language that recalls the imagery of the hunt (cf. chapter 3): the word thereuetai (frag. 4 Duering = Ath. 5.219d7) and the Hellenistic adjective tithason ("tractable," relating to the domestication of the wild—line 3 of the poem = Ath. 5.219e6), are associated with the complex of words related to the hunt (found in Xen. Mem. and Symp.). Socrates has burst into tears in front of Aspasia, who calls him "dear Socrates" (line 11), a form of address that clearly challenges the image of the highly controlled Platonic Socrates who marries a difficult woman just to prove he can meet the challenge.20 As had been the case in "serious" Socratic dialogues, here Socrates reports speech attributed to Aspasia. Aspasia herself does not speak but speaks through Herodicus/Socrates and invalidates a man. Herodicus' outburst may reflect hostility both to the growth of philosophical schools in the Hellenistic period and to women's participation (albeit limited) therein. His practice of discrediting Socrates through the philosopher Plato also recalls the earlier practice of discrediting politicians by associating them with whores; his treatment also resonates with more contemporary treatments such as those of Hermesianax, who had shown the philosophers Socrates, Pythagoras, and Aristippus to be in erotic thrall to women. Hellenistic literati, like men of the classical period, still continued to discredit other men by alleging that they were advised by whores; the most lasting stigma, however, affected not the men, but any woman who pretended to participate in the life of the mind.
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The Wise Woman Aspasia does not fit into just one category of the class "woman" in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Although her biographical tradition occasionally enrolls her in the pornographic discourse on prostitutes, it more frequently sets her apart. This reflex, which pulls her into or pushes her out of the company of whores, has confined until the present. In the surviving "serious" literature of the early Roman period, the habit of extracting Aspasia from the company of hetairai and relocating her in the company of wise women begins with Didymus. He, Cicero, and Quintilian all treated her with reverence, the Greek as a wise woman and the Romans as an exponent of rhetorical logic; these were the parts of her tradition Christian writers invoked on the few occasions Aspasia appeared in postpagan works. Curiously, Aspasia did not much interest Roman writers, perhaps because there were many powerful and sexually alluring Roman women and perhaps because Athens and her empire did not particularly fascinate the Romans. Of all the Imperial writers, Lucian the satirist concentrated most mockingly on the scurrilous elements of her tradition; but only Plutarch attempted to account for the contradictions in her bios. His willingness to remain in a state of aporia about Aspasia was in fact remarkable. The polymath Didymus Chalcenteros (" Brass Guts," from his ability to work hard), whose copious syntheses of earlier scholarship have been variously evaluated, wrote a Lexis Komike ("Comic Diction") and a Symposiaka or Symmeikta ("Sympotic Matters'V'Miscellanea"). The latter work contained a long passage on exceptional women from myth and history, including a sanitized Aspasia. (Didymus speculated elsewhere whether Sappho was a whore.) These discussions are interesting because they bring to the fore and make problematical the sexuality of women thought to be intellectually formidable: Aspasia's sexuality, like that of other women philosophers, is noticeably downplayed, whereas Sappho's is turned into a question mark. Didymus mentioned, but did not discuss, Aspasia's reputation in comedy; he set that reputation conspicuously apart from those accomplishments that he considers worth delineating: "And (as for) Aspasia the Milesian, concerning whom the comic poets also have recounted many things: Socrates derived an enjoyment of philosophy from her, and Pericles rhetoric" (frag. 7 Schmidt). The other women noted in this fragment, namely, Theano the Pythagorean and Arete, wife of Aristippus, are outstanding in respect to their intellect, love of family, and/or feminine virtue.21
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Two Roman rhetorical works cited the Aeschinean Aspasia's famous conversation with Xenophon and his wife as a good example of inductio. Cicero defined inductio as the practice of getting one's interlocutor to agree with undisputed facts and then getting the interlocutor to assent to a doubtful proposition that resembles the earlier one. Quintilian stated that inductio was to arrive at a conclusion from the given problem's resemblance to points raised previously.22 Cicero notes that this kind of argumentation was favored by Socrates and also points out the strategic nature of the device: Hoc modo sermonis plurimum Socrates usus est propterea quod nihil ipse afferre ad persuadendum volebat, sed ex eo quod sibi ille dederat quicum disputabat, aliquid conficere malebat, quod ille ex eo quod iam concessisset necessario approbate deberet: "Socrates made great use of this style of conversation, because he didn't want to do any persuading himself. He preferred instead to make a result from the material that the interlocutor had given him, which result the interlocutor had necessarily to approve as following from what he had already conceded." (Inv. Rhet. 1.31.53)
Not unexpectedly, Cicero submerges the content of the original discussion—marital conduct—and the gender of the primary discussant, Aspasia, in favor of highlighting the rhetorical method and motive. It is interesting to note, however, that Cicero also attributed to Socrates the predominant usage of this method, ascribing to him a motive that touches on his liminality (as discussed earlier in chapter 3). Aspasia, her advice, and her own liminality are downplayed, whereas Socrates' use of this method and his own liminality are emphasized. Quintilian follows Cicero in highlighting Socrates' use of the method even as he disparages Cicero's separation of collatio ("comparison") from exemplum ("example," Inst. 5.11.2-3). Quintilian quotes less of the passage than did Cicero; he provides only Aspasia's conversation with the wife, omitting her discussion with the husband. Aspasia thus is not shown advising both sexes, but only another woman.23
Plutarch's Life of Pericles Plutarch (ca. 50-120 A.D.) is perhaps the most important single source in antiquity for Aspasia's biographical tradition. His importance as a biographer and source of social history are unquestioned; his work has pro-
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roundly influenced the structure and content of biography in the West and its perceived relation to history. Plutarch's remarks about Aspasia both distill the most salient features of earlier treatments and, by virtue of their own preservation within his privileged corpus of biographical and moralizing writings, have become the source upon which most modern treatments depend. His willingness to take Aspasia seriously as a historical actor is remarkable. It is necessary to study Plutarch's two chapters on Aspasia in his Life of Pericles within the environment of Plutarch's own aims, oeuvre, and methods rather than to extract and treat them as a freestanding paradigm for the ambitious courtesan of later European cultural history. Current views of Plutarch consider that his purpose in writing the Lives was moral rather than historical, in that it aimed to show philosophy in action to his educated audience, and that Plutarch himself believed philosophical training the sine qua non for a life of action. Plutarch's Pericles can be considered a good example of philosophy in action. Plutarch was interested in the morally suasive power of biography and history and disparaged kakoethia (malignity) in such writing, most vividly expressing his views in the famous work best known by its Latin title De malignitate Herodoti ("On the Malignity of Herodotus"—De mal. Hdt.). His critique of Herodotus lists several ways in which a historical narrative can be malicious: if a narrative uses harsh or unkind words when these are avoidable: if the writer includes irrelevant failures and omits good deeds; if the writer presents the less plausible of conflicting reports; and if the writer attributes a discreditable motive when the facts are not in dispute, for example, that Pericles started the Peloponnesian war because of Aspasia or Phidias or that Thebe assassinated Alexander out of emotion rather than hatred of tyranny. I can add to these criteria Plutarch's observation elsewhere that events could also be distorted by contemporary observers for personal reasons (Per. 13.16), an important consideration when looking at his account of slanders against Aspasia.24 The fact that Plutarch devoted as much space as he did to Aspasia and provided so much information about her suggests that he considered her important for her own sake as well as for her association with charges that Pericles was tyrannical and had begun two wars for base motives. It is necessary, however, to look at what Plutarch said about her in the context of his entire Life of Pericles.25 Plutarch introduces Pericles as a subject whose study demonstrates the value of contemplating the actions
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of good men; he includes those qualities shared by Pericles and his parallel biographand Fabius Maximus (1-2.5). Pericles' lineage and physical appearance are mentioned, as well as his teachers—Damon, who trained him for political contests in the same manner as an athlete was trained, and Zeno, who was skilled in cross-examination. Pericles derived his greatest benefit from Anaxagoras, and Plutarch summarizes his teaching in this work, providing as examples Pericles' calm charity to an abusive citizen and Anaxagoras' own dispassionate analysis of the significance of the one-horned ram (3-6). (Plutarch points out later that Pericles did not learn thrift from Anaxagoras, 16.7) The narration of Pericles' unfolding political career proceeds despite the lack of strict chronology and the absence of evidence for a prior biographical tradition; Plutarch fades in and out from general to highly specific statements, and acknowledges the dearth of primary evidence other than decrees (7-8).26 In addition to Aspasia, Elpinike is mentioned—she is reported to have had political dealings with Pericles, possibly engineering the recall of her brother Cimon and on another occasion entreating Pericles not to prosecute Cimon severely (10.5-6). Elpinike is sexualized by the report that Pericles gently rebuked her for attempting to charm him, but the allegation that Elpinike had obtained Cimon's recall by having sex with Pericles (Ath. 13.589e8-f2) is not repeated here. Thucydides, the son of Melesias, is Pericles' next political rival (1114), and Pericles' building program, a means by which he enabled the demos to enjoy Athens' wealth, occasions the mention of Phidias. Pericles' enemies assail the building program, likening it to a falsely preening woman (hosper alazona gynaika, 12.2). Pericles himself does not respond in kind to this sexually charged language; instead, he dryly explains his policy on the building and its expenditures (12.3-4). Phidias' position of responsibility and close friendship with Pericles are given as the reasons he was slandered; in fact, he is actually accused of having pimped free women for Pericles: " brought Phidias envy and Pericles slander, from the rumor that Phidias pimped free Athenian women for Pericles when they came to see his work in progress" (13.15).27 In the earlier part of this entire description, Pericles' enemies had characterized the city as a preening impostor woman; here, the chief beautifier of the city pimps for the head of state. The comic poets take up the tale (13.15), making the slander more specific by charging that Pericles had corrupted the wife of another strategos (elected general)
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and that one Pyrilampus had given peacocks to several other female conquests of Pericles. The most damning charge Plutarch reports is that of Stesimbrotus, who accuses Pericles of corrupting his own daughterin-law. That Plutarch disbelieves these charges is apparent in the words he uses to report them: phthonon, blasphemian (envy and slander, 13.15, 13.16); the accusers are men of riotous and improvident ways (satyrikous tois biois), and Stesimbrotus' story is a dreadful and abominable impiety (deinon asebema kai mysodes). Thus, Plutarch deflects charges of Pericles' sexual impropriety by accusing the accusers of equal or worse misbehavior. Once Pericles has consolidated his rule, a string of adulatory metaphors describes how he governs—he is the city's doctor and teacher, and favors using a rein and a rudder to guide the people (14—16). His fiscal honesty is emphasized, as well as his immediate family's resentment of his household economies (15.3,16.4—5), a trait that Anaxagoras bears with somewhat more humor (16.8-9). Plutarch stresses the grandeur of Pericles' vision (17.4, on the Congress decree; cf. 21.1), as well as his reluctance to waste Athenian lives in connection with the revolt of Euboea and the Spartan invasion (18, 21-23). Prudence, foresight, and the conservation of Athenian lives are the hallmarks of Pericles' policy, things to which his deathbed utterance will allude. The expedition to Samos and Aspasia's putative role in it occasion Plutarch's discussion of Aspasia, managed in a brief transition (24.1-2). Plutarch's first and longest discussion of her (24.2-11; 25.1) bears careful reading. In it, Plutarch assembles much reportage but endorses almost none of it. The only things in the bios that he seemed to believe were her birthplace and her father's name: "It is agreed (homologeitai) that she was a Milesian and the daughter of Axiochus" (24.3). He immediately balances this assertion by not agreeing that Aspasia arrived in Athens as a new Thargelia: "But they say" (phasi d' . . . , 24.3). It is surprising that some modern historiographers are so certain about Aspasia's life because Plutarch, the source most often followed, expressed anything but certainty about it. His first words to describe his aim are highly tentative: entauth' an eie kairos diaporesai malista peri tes anthropou ("Perhaps it would be timely to raise the question about this individual here," 24.2). As Philip Stadter aptly translates, diaporesai means "to raise the question about"; the verb indicates doubt and questioning. Plutarch was willing enough to report what others said
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about her, but he specifically located this reportage within the web of conjecture. Even when reporting what others have written about Aspasia, Plutarch casts doubt upon the information, allowing only "this much of historia'' (24.7) in the Menexenus' report, namely, that Aspasia had the reputation of discussing rhetoric with many Athenians. As for her supposed maternity, Plutarch notes that "Apparently (dokei) Pericles had a bastard by her," specifying that Eupolis made (pepoiekeri) Pericles the character ask about his bastard (24.10). He also reports as conjectural both her alleged role in the beginning of the Samian War (dokei, 24.2) and her emulation of Thargelia (24.3). Likewise disclaimed are the statements that Pericles kissed her when he came and went ("as they say," has phasi, 24.9) and that Pericles sought her because she was wise and politic (sophe kai politike, 24.5, reported with "they say," legousi).2S Use of the phrase "they say" also appears to disclaim the report that Socrates and company visited Aspasia, even though her occupation was not at all nice. Plutarch's conclusion to this chapter, with its brief remarks upon the concubine of Cyrus, sometimes called "Aspasia II" (24.11-12), forms a logical if somewhat unexpected end. He had introduced Aspasia of Miletus with the pointedly neutral he anthropos ("this individual") and noted that it would be apanthropon ("misanthropic") not to mention her namesake. The fame and character of the Milesian ("Aspasia I"), who allegedly held men in thrall (echeirosato) and occasioned philosophers neither a bad nor a short logos (24.2), explain why Cyrus renamed his favorite concubine for her. The life of Thargelia, the Milesian's supposed model, also comes into play. For Thargelia, "they say" (phasi d', 24.3), turned Hellenes to the Persian cause; Aspasia I, the object of Pericles' erotic love, reportedly urged him to make war on her homeland's enemy, and finally, Aspasia II gained influence at the Persian court due to the fortunes of war.29 But despite (or perhaps because of) all these data and all these sources, Aspasia remains a mystery. First, Plutarch qualifies most of the information. She is not described physically, although the early mention of Thargelia's beauty (24.4) may suggest that Aspasia too was lovely.30 Plutarch neither answers all the questions his account raised, nor explicitly solves its inconsistencies. He twice mentions the hostile tradition that Aspasia was the alleged instigator of the Samian War (24.1-2,
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25.1); Plutarch, however, consistently defends Pericles' prosecution of the war and squelches Duris' stories about its atrocities (28.2-3), noting that neither Ephorus nor Thucydides recounts these details and concluding that Samos, a grave threat to Athens, carne close to wresting naval supremacy from her (28.8). I find Plutarch's failure to refute the specific charges against Aspasia to be telling: he believed that they were so ridiculous as to require no response and furthermore subtly suggested that Samos needed to be dealt with firmly. In another work, Plutarch mentions this very charge against Aspasia as the kind of statement characteristic of a writer who was dysmenes and kakoethes (De mat. Hdt. 855F-856A). Evidence of careful source criticism can be seen in Plutarch's use of qualifiers such as "on the one hand some say." Stadter believes that "Plutarch clearly accepts the notion that Aspasia supported herself by running a brothel." Because Plutarch's reference to her occupation occurs within a clause that begins "and some say, on the one hand, that . . . ," it does not follow that Plutarch himself believed Aspasia kept a brothel. In fact, Plutarch concedes belief in only one aspect of Aspasia's personality, namely, that Pericles was erotically devoted to her. The evidence for this is that after Pericles' amicable divorce, he "cherished extraordinarily" (esterxe diapherontos, 24.89).31 The next mention of Aspasia comes after Plutarch has provided more information about Pericles' life. After concluding his account of the Samian War and recounting Elpinike's rebuke to Pericles, Plutarch goes on to a discussion of the onset of the Peloponnesian War (29-32). Despite diplomatic efforts to rescind the Megarian decree—a move that Plutarch believed could have helped avoid the war (29.7-8), tensions mounted. Megara denied responsibility for an Athenian messenger's death, blaming Pericles and Aspasia in what Plutarch calls "notorious and vulgar little verses" (periboetois, demodesi, 30.4). These verses are, in fact, the famous lines from Aristophanes' Acharnians. Again, Plutarch's opinion is noncommittal, and he notes "ten men oun archen hopos eschen ou radian gnonai" ("but as far as how it began, it isn't easy to know," 31.1). Plutarch then discusses the persecution of Pericles' associates. The account of Phidias' trial and imprisonment (31.25) precedes and dwarfs the account of the persecutions of Aspasia and Anaxagoras (32). Just as Phidias earlier had been accused of pimping free women for Pericles, so too is Aspasia now accused (32.1). After a
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brief mention of Aspasia's prosecution, Plutarch continues with discussion of Anaxagoras and of Pericles' expenditures (32.2—4) before returning to her acquittal, a decision reached, "as Aeschines says," by Pericles' crying and begging (32.5); the language used resembles that found in the report that Aspasia had begged for war against Samos (24.1-2), a report that Plutarch disqualified. Plutarch completes this portion of the Life by noting to d'alethes addon ("the truth is unclear," 32.6) in regard to Pericles' protection of Phidias and the civic wrath he had incurred. Plutarch opened and concluded this part of the Life with expressions of skepticism.32 A "ring" can be seen, enclosed in doubt: 31.1 "it is not easy to know" 31.2-5 Phidias 32.1-2 Aspasia, Anaxagoras 32.3-4 trial proceedings 32.5 Aspasia, Anaxagoras 32.6 Phidias; "the truth is unclear" The next section contains an account of ineffective Spartan attempts to revive interest in the legend of the curse upon the Alcmaeonids and an account of the Spartan invasion (33.1-6). Of all the comic choruses that attacked Pericles, Plutarch singles out Hermippus' verses, which called Pericles "king of the satyrs" (33.7-8, discussed in chapter 2). As the Life of Pericles continues, the plague malignly robs Pericles of the opportunity for success; the leader is further savaged by the demos, who attack him as one attacks a father or doctor (34.4-5). The final expedition's aim is to heal (iasthai, 35.1), but Pericles is stripped of his strategia and fined (35.4). Nor can Pericles find peace at home. Xanthippus ridicules Pericles (36.4), and Stesimbrotus is reported to have alleged that Xanthippus himself spread slander about Pericles and his daughter-in-law (36.6). Xanthippus dies of the plague unreconciled with his father, and Pericles loses his sister and many other relatives and friends (36.6-7). Plutarch declares that Pericles retained his composure until his son Paralus was laid out, only then bursting into violent tears, a thing that he had never done before (36.9). The assertion that Pericles wept like this but once may have been another way of undermining the veracity of the account of Pericles' tears at Aspasia's trial. When recalled to his strategia, Pericles returns without enthusiasm (37.1), but nonetheless has the presence of mind to ask for a personal
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exemption to the law about nothoi, lest his own name and family die out. The nothos is enrolled in the phratry, and Pericles gives him his own name (37.5). Curiously, the man who best led Athens is portrayed as an outsider; estranged from his family, he entrusts his household accounts to a slave (16.6). Not content to remain with his legitimate wife and rarely in attendance at family functions, he has a deep friendship (philia) with Phidias (13.14) and an erotic love (erotike agapesis) for a foreign woman whom he cherishes extraordinarily (24.7-8).33 Uncritical readings of these sections of Plutarch's Life of Pericles have helped define Aspasia as the planful courtesan who starts wars and holds a great statesman in thrall. I believe that Plutarch considered Aspasia's nature to have been unknowable—that even though such a characterization had been suggested by earlier (unreliable) sources, her nature was by now indefinable. The effect of Plutarch's mention of so many of these sources, even though he seems to have done so only to discount or cast doubt upon them, nonetheless makes Aspasia the archetype of the sexually alluring and politically influential courtesan. The importance of such a construction cannot be stressed enough. To continue to construct Aspasia as a powerful prostitute, and to not read the ancient sources critically and historicize them as necessary, is to nativize two beliefs: first, that an intellectual woman's importance and influence are ultimately traceable to her manipulation of her own sexuality, and second, that intellectual women do not act autonomously, but rather upon and through men. As we shall see, uncritical readings of Plutarch, whose works were influential in the European Renaissance, helped foster the image of Aspasia that is still favored.
The End of the Pagan Tradition Thanks to Plutarch, we have an integrated summation of views about Aspasia. Other Greek intellectuals also mentioned her, but they refracted the wholistic Plutarchan view, using bits and pieces of her bios for purposes ranging from edification and rhetorical persuasion to sheer amusement. Yet, the presence of Aspasia across various discourses in the high and late Empire attests to her ability to function as a revenant of Socrates, Pericles, and the heyday of Athens.34 The sophist Maximus of Tyre (ca. 125-185) claimed to be a follower of Plato and, in his orations, eulogized Socrates. In a passage derivative
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of the Socratica, Maximus identifies Socrates as foremost of the philosophers who exhorted in common talk rather then enigmatically:' 'We hear you <, Socrates,> many times affirming that you honor episteme more than anything, and recommending one teacher to one youth, and another to another—for example, even exhorting Callias to send his son to Aspasia the Milesian: a man to a woman! You yourself, an elderly man, frequent her company. Nor does she suffice as your teacher, but you glean for yourself erotics from Diotima, music from Konnos, poetics from Euenos, farming from Ischomachus, and geometry from Theodorus" (Oral. 38.4.b-d; cf. 24.4). This scrap is important because it indicates the syncretistic practice of sophists such as Maximus; he cobbled together his Socrates from portrayals in Plato, Aeschines, and Xenophon. Nor did Maximus care particularly about Aspasia, Diotima, or any woman's intellectual capabilities; they, and male teachers, are mentioned as purveyors of knowledge and skill to Socrates and his followers.35 Lucian of Samosata, Maximus of Tyre's more famous contemporary, used Aspasia with great facility in several of his satirical and epideictic works. In some respects, Lucian reprised all the previous treatments of Aspasia, but because he presents Aspasia both seriously and, as was more often the case, humorously, it is impossible to speculate on his actual view of her. In his Imagines, a woman's portrait is planned and discussed in a dialogue between Lykinos and Polystratos. They decide that earlier women shall be models for this portrait: Aspasia, Theano the Pythagorean, Sappho, and Diotima reflect the subject's intellect. Polystratos additionally invokes the virtuous Theano, wife of Antenor; Arete and her daughter, Nausicaa; and Penelope: Next, her wisdom and understanding (sophia and synesis) must be represented. We shall need many examples there, mostly ancient ones, and one Ionic like herself. Aeschines the friend of Socrates and Socrates himself represented her, both of them exceedingly true craftsmen because they worked with eros. That example is the famous Aspasia of Miletus, with whom the most wonderful Olympian <sc. Pericles> lived. Putting before us no mean image of understanding, let us bring to bear as much as she had of experience in affairs, acumen in politics, and quickness of wit, and with accurate measurement transfer it all to our own portrait. (Imagines 17)
This praise of Aspasia and other women recalls Didymus' list of exemplary women; like that list, it does not sexualize her.36
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Lucian, however, was equally capable of exploiting the more risque aspects of Aspasia's biographical tradition. In his satirical work Okypous ("Swiftfoot"), he made the title character the son of Podaleirius and Astasia ("Gout" and "Inability to Stand"), names that resemble Pericles' and Aspasia's and that may parodize Cratinan coinage. He represented Aspasia as a hetaira in The Dream or The Cock, wherein the cock discusses his prior incarnations as both Pythagoras and Aspasia: as Aspasia, he lived with Pericles, bore children, spun yarn, and "was a woman, hetaira-fashion" (The Dream 19); the cock was later incarnated as the cynic Crates. The straight man, Micyllus, exclaims, "By the Dioskouroi, what an unlikelihood—from a courtesan to a philosopher!" (The Dream 20). The underside of this joke, of course, is the by now familiar notion that philosophy and prostitution are similar practices. In The Eunuch, a eunuch tries to demonstrate that his kind should not be excluded from the practice of philosophy; he suggests that if Aspasia, Thargelia, Diotima, and the eunuch Favorinus have participated in philosophy, he also should be permitted to engage in it (Eun. 7). The passage exploits Aspasia's reputation as a women philosopher even while it renders "the female philosopher" categorically abnormal; the dialogue humorously reveals philosophy's masculinist bias. A mixed acknowledgment of Aspasia's possible influence upon Socrates is given in The Dance, wherein one character notes in the same sentence that the philosopher did not spurn the opportunity to learn even insignificant things (ta mikra, 25) from flute girls but also listened to serious matters from Aspasia; she is described with Herodotus' periphrastic euphemism, "hetaira gyne" ("companion female"), someone from whom Socrates could learn "something serious" ("spoudaion ti").37 Fictional and embellished historical letters also used Aspasia. Alciphron's Letters of Courtesans present fictional and historical courtesans' correspondence; letter 7 suggests the general association of philosophers with prostitutes. Thais complains to Euthydemus that he has no time for her now that he has taken up philosophy (letter 7.1-2). She compares herself to philosophers by reminding the youth that his own teacher is mad for her, and that sophists do not differ from hetairai (7.2, 7.4), particularly in their shared love of gain (to labein, 7.4). The hetaira, however, is the better in that she does not incite her students to meddle in politics (7.6); as Thais says, "We don't teach young men any worse than they do. Decide, if you like, between Aspasia the hetaira and Socrates the sophist, and consider which of them did a better job
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. You will see that Pericles was her pupil and Critias his!" (7.6-7) This second- or third-century remark derives from comedy and Socratica. Similarly derivative of the classical period, the sophist Philostratus' Seventy-third Letter to Julia Domna, the learned Roman empress, remarks on the classical sophists' influence and includes Aspasia in their number. He claimed that Plato himself emulated the literary forms of the sophists and that numerous Greeks emulated Gorgias. These include Critias, Thucydides, Aeschines of Sphettos, and Aspasia the Milesian, who "is said to have sharpened Pericles' tongue to imitate Gorgias." The final pagan writer of this time to mention Aspasia is a senator from Constantinople, Themistius, a pagan apologist and ideologue. One of the last great sophists, Themistius mentioned Aspasia in his twentysixth Oration, wherein he defended himself against those who criticized him for openly discussing philosophy. Themistius averred that philosophy, like other arts, should be permitted an open forum and that Plato and Socrates thought philosophy could improve men. In an attempt to show that philosophy should be practiced as a living art, Themistius claimed that one should not praise only Aspasia, Pericles, and those of Anaxagoras' generation. Thus, Aspasia and Pericles are associated together as representatives of a classical past, a past whose best traditions should not be allowed to fossilize.38 Aspasia's sexuality functions as a liability in this derivative pagan literature; when she is praised, her sexual reputation is rarely mentioned. Christian writers also briefly made use of her; in the end, however, they seemed to be unable to overlook Aspasia's allegedly illicit sexual behavior—or possibly her sex itself—and, as will be shown in the next section, she disappeared from the literature.
The Christian Point of View By the middle of the second century, Christianity constituted what George Kennedy calls "a serious intellectual influence of international dimensions," creatively transforming pagan classical tradition.39 Perhaps because Aspasia's dubious sexual reputation was so inextricably bound up with her intellectual one, early Christian writers did not incorporate her into their views of the classical past; when she was mentioned, her reputed sexual life was excised. Clement, Synesius, and
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Theodoret all sanitized her; Tertullian and Salvianus, obsessed with whores, did not mention her at all. Clement of Alexandria, born in Athens around 150 to pagan parents, subsequently converted, obtained an education at Alexandria, and succeeded his teacher, Pantaenus, as head of the catechistic school there. He fled Alexandria during Lucius Septimius Severus' persecutions of 202 and died about ten years later. Clement referred once to Aspasia in his Stromateis ("Miscellanies"), a work heavily indebted to Didymus that attempts to demonstrate Christianity's superiority to paganism. In it, Clement discusses the virtues of women such as Judith, Esther, Susanna, and Moses' sister, Miriam (Strom. 118.1-119.3); he then recounted exemplary women of the pagan world by inserting a passage from Didymus' Symposiaka (discussed in an earlier section of this chapter), which detailed the loyalty and virtue of Greek women, including Aspasia. Of Aspasia, Clement observes only that she came from Miletus and that Socrates and Pericles learned philosophy and rhetoric, respectively, from her (122.3). Clement went on to discuss Sarah, and noted that Hebrew princesses and Nausicaa both virtuously performed homely tasks (Strom. 123.1). Thus, Aspasia became one of many chaste and exemplary women in a context that did not mention her sexual reputation. This type of material is interesting because it prefigures the discussion of "women worthies" in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and the pictorial tradition of representing heroic women in Renaissance and later art.40 The Christian neo-Platonist Synesius of Cyrene, a pupil of Hypatia, the female philosopher, defended "Aspasian" erotics in a limited sense. In his Dion, which attacked the decline of humanism, Synesius notes that Socrates assigned an epitaphios to Aspasia, whose company he frequented for the sake of learning ta erotika. Synesius observes that if one considered Aspasia's and Socrates' erotics, one would understand the relationship of that erotics to philosophy. Punning on aspasios' meaning of "pleasing" or "welcoming," Synesius notes that the cognizant individual would recognize philosophy as a good, and welcome and praise it (Dion 59A). Concerned with the Greek world's lapse into barbarism, Synesius enlists Socrates and, briefly, Aspasia in his cause. Aware of Aspasia's reputation, Synesius nonetheless does not specifically refer to it in this treatise.41 Like Clement of Alexandria, to whom he was indebted, Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus in Syria, contrasted paganism invidiously to Chris-
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tianity. His Hellenikon Therapeutike Pathematon ("Cure for Greek Maladies") contrasted the two religious systems, and in it he mentioned Aspasia once. After stating that the greatest Greek philosophers, such as Pherecydes, Pythagoras, Thales, Solon, and Plato learned from the East and Egypt, sparing no effort to find enlightenment in all possible quarters (1.12-16), Theodoret remarks that Socrates, that best of philosophers, did not consider it unworthy to learn something from women, for he did not blush to call himself the student of Diotima, and frequented Aspasia as well (1.17). Theodoret goes on to say that the Greeks learned much from the barbarians; as does Lucian in The Dance, he identifies Aspasia as a somewhat unsuitable but not entirely unworthy source of knowledge.42 Two churchmen who did not mention Aspasia nonetheless suggest through indirection why Aspasia—neither a martyr nor a penitent Magdalene—was too problematic to be useful to any Christian argument that pagan evidence might bolster. Tertullian, active in Carthage in the late second century, interpreted Christian teachings in a highly ascetic manner and was an extreme advocate of female modesty. Preoccupied with the dangers of sexual depravity, Tertullian was distressed that Carthaginians let matrons and whores dress alike (Apol. 6.3), and he noted that Cato and Socrates shared their wives with others: leno est philosophus et censor ("The philosopher and the censor are each a pimp," Apol. 39.13). Tertullian also stated that Socrates should be considered a whoremaster for having suggested that wives be held in common. The only woman identified as a prostitute who is praised by Tertullian in his fulminous Apologeticum was Leaina, mistress of the tyrannicides, in a chapter that decried the fact that pagan martyrs mostly died in ways that glorified only the individual (Apol. 50.8).43 Salvianus, bishop of Marseilles in the later fifth century, was a close follower of Tertullian and reflected the elder churchman in his statements that Socrates and other ancients pimped their own wives (de Gubernitate Dei, "On God's Governance," 7.101-103); of Socrates, Salvianus says lupanar fecit e mundo ("he made a brothel of the world," 7.103).44 Lexicographers and encyclopedists from the second through tenth centuries A.D. preserved scraps of information that add little to the picture of Aspasia's biographical tradition sketched by earlier sources; one constant in this information is her connection with Pericles. Most probably because her dubious sexual reputation was an integral part of her biographical tradition, because Socrates—her supposed pupil—was
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himself problematic for some Christians, and simply because she was a woman, Aspasia was not able to take a place among pagans adopted by Christian writers as positive exempla. Aspasia and her bios faded out of both Western and Byzantine sources.45
A Pictorial Tradition? The attempt to find a pictorial tradition for Aspasia parallel to her appearance in literary texts in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique periods is unsatisfying. Some representations have been identified as being of Aspasia; the correctness of these identifications, impossible to prove, is almost less important than the fact that they seek to locate Aspasia with Socrates in symposiac or festive contexts. The Vatican portrait herm discussed in chapter 1, may date from the Roman period.46 Two terra-cotta reliefs survive, one Hellenistic and one Roman. On them are a seated woman (on the left), holding a wreath, a winged figure (in the center), and a man facing the woman (on the right). These reliefs, apparently molded from the same original, were manufactured as ornaments. The earlier relief, dated to the third to second centuries B.C. , was originally part of the handle attachment of two silvered terra-cotta pails and is now in the Museo Nazionale in Naples. Various identities have been suggested: Diotima or Aspasia or Aphrodite have been put forth for the woman, the winged figure is agreed to be Eros, and the male has been identified either as Socrates or more generally as a teacher. The second relief, dated to the Roman period, was discovered in Pompeii in 1882 on a bronze relief attached to a chest; it too is now housed at the Museo Nazionale in Naples. Karl Schefold identifies the seated female as a hetaira.47 A Roman sarcophagus—discovered in the eighteenth century and now located in the Louvre—has on it a woman and Socrates conversing under an archway. The woman has been identified as Aspasia or a Muse; because Socrates is readily recognizable, art historians have been eager to name his female companion as well.48 Bone carvings that were used as furniture ornaments are also said to have portrayed Aspasia. A pair of Alexandrian carvings of the third to fourth centuries A.D., now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, shows a Silenus-type Socrates and a woman (Aspasia?) holding a wreath in her right hand. It has been sug-
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gested that there were statuary pairs of Socrates and Aspasia in basilicas and libraries during the Roman period; other than the works noted here, which are only tentatively identified, there is no evidence. Again, the persistent tendency to locate Aspasia in men's company can be seen.49 In the Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique periods, written texts persistently grouped Aspasia with a man, be it Pericles or Socrates, or both. Art historians have continued to situate Aspasia with men as well. It would be left to the modern period to give Aspasia an individual identity of the complexity approaching that which she possessed in Aeschines' lost dialogue.
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5 Aspasia in the Postclassical West
The Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque Periods The Greek East and the Latin West both figured women as sinful vessels. As Greek sources and the knowledge of Greek disappeared from the West, most information about Aspasia was lost. The Middle Ages, which has recently been identified as the time when feminist consciousness first germinated, saw women speaking and thinking in a Christian context, whether as mystics inspired by God, or as authorized to speak and think through their own motherhood. The Christian environment of that time would appear to have been an unpromising one for the development of Aspasia's bios.' Aspasia enters the modern period with Heloise's laudatory reference in her first letter to Peter Abelard. Heloise's tragic affair with Abelard has been greatly romanticized; the existence and afterlife of the lovers' correspondence has invested their relationship with a larger-than-life dimension fueled more by her passionate declarations than by Peter's chilly, reasoned replies. Heloise (ca. 1100-1164) is the first woman known to have considered Aspasia as an authority and example for the way she wanted to live her own life.2 Heloise's first letter to Abelard responds to his Historia Calamitatum, a melodramatic autobiographical piece in which he tells of his education, his pride in his erudition, and his affair with Heloise and its unhappy outcome. Berating his lust not only for Heloise but also for whores (Hist. Cal. pp. 70-71, lines 252-279 Monfrin), Abelard spoke 83
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of regret and chastened pride, and frequently referred to Scripture. In contrast, Heloise's salutation reidentifies her without shame. "To her master, nay father; to her husband, nay brother; his handmaid, nay daughter; his spouse, nay sister; to Abelard, Heloise" (p. Ill, lines 2-4 Monfrin). She refers less frequently in this first letter to Christian or scriptural authority than to Greco-Roman texts, and thereby locates herself in an otherworld, or perhaps between the two worlds. In declaring her unbounded love for Abelard, Heloise states that God knows she would follow him to the Vulcania loca (" Vulcanian places,' ' p . 117, line 247 Monfrin), a locale far off the Christian map. Heloise also avoids placement within conventional categories for women by boldly claiming membership in the category of concubine or whore: ' 'And if the name of 'wife' seems holier and more valid, to me the word 'friendship' has always been a sweeter thing—or, if you weren't ashamed, the name of 'concubine' or even 'whore' (scorti)" (p. 114, lines 147-151 Monfrin). Heloise uses a pagan woman's authority to try to persuade Abelard that their love is good: As the inductio peformed by the philosopher (philosophe) Aspasia with Xenophon and his wife in the work of Aeschines Socraticus plainly convinces us. When the aforesaid philosopher <sc., Aspasia> had advanced this argument for their reconciliation, she ended it in this way: "For when you have cultivated this [idea], that there is not a better man nor a happier woman in all the land, then you will always desire that which you think the best; you to be the husband of the best possible wife, and she to be wedded to the most excellent husband." This opinion is surely blessed, and more than philosophical, for it speaks wisdom itself rather than of philosophy, (p. 11, lines 167-178 Monfrin)3 Heloise's statements that the label of Abelard's meretrix would be dearer and more dignified than even that of Augustus' empress (p. 114, lines 157-161 Monfrin), as well as her numerous arguments against the belief that mere marriage guarantees love, show a continued identification with the pagan. Additionally, this refusal to endorse indicates a thoughtful adoption of the "Aspasian" ideals that entail mutual commitment rather than belief in the promise that some particular emotional status will be granted with the assumption of a social role. Heloise's citation of Aspasia as an authority also suggests that for Heloise there existed at least the possibility of a woman-centered consciousness. Whereas pagan and Christian writers gave short shrift to Aspasia's participation in either side of the great debate over the value of pagan
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culture, Heloise unregenerately claimed not only pagan values, but also a woman's values alongside other, more orthodox classical authorities. In his own letters, Abelard suffocated these values under a Christian blanket. Heloise probably knew of Aeschines' Aspasia only through Cicero's De Inventione Rhetorica, which was canonical in medieval Europe, and Cicero did not name Aspasia as a courtesan. Therefore, Heloise's admiration for Aspasian thought and her embrace of the title "concubine or even whore" are not necessarily connected. Although the chaste and queenly Philosophia of Boethius had attacked his interest in secular literature by calling the Muses of such works poisonous and sterile, theatrical little harlots, Heloise not only praised the role of the meretrix but also asserted that Aspasia's advice transcended philosophy.4 Peggy Kamuf perceptively interprets Heloise's refusal to "convert" to the nunlike status of Christ's bride, and her attempt to remain Abelard's lover, as important moments in the history of consciousness; she calls Heloise's insistence on the erotic an attempt to destabilize the hierarchical and sublimated oppositions that Abelard had forced upon her.5 Heloise's adoption of Aspasia as a model, and her comment that Aspasia transcends philosophy, are additional components of this moment and deserve more emphasis. In fact, Heloise persistently identifies herself as an outsider in the world Abelard and others would have had her inhabit, claiming the right to seek wisdom in her own way and to her own ends, but not as a penitent Magdalene. Abelard's reply to this first letter ignores most of what she said, asserting that he hadn't written because he didn't think she really needed him (65 Moncrieff), thus denying the existence, let alone the legitimacy, of Heloise's desire. References to the husband and wife relationship abound (68-69 Moncrieff); such references effectively obliterate his lover's claims by ignoring her remarkable salutation and her claim to the title of meretrix. Abelard overloads his letter with the very definition Heloise had refused. Furthermore, his first letter is rife with scriptural references, in contrast to Heloise's many references to pagan sources. Heloise's second letter laments her lot and that of her sister nuns, as well as Abelard's mutilation. Blaming marriage for their misfortunes, she declares that in fornication they were happy (78 Moncrieff). But here she begins to capitulate to him by fighting on his ground; the numerous pagan authorities of her first letter yield here to Christian references. The "honorary Christian," Seneca, is her only pagan
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citation. Nonetheless, Heloise reasserts her desire for Abelard and states that she desired to please him rather than God (82 Moncrieff). This desire to please an individual mortal rather than an unseen transcendent Being is a logical extension of Aspasia's highly contextual and personal advice.6 Abelard's insistence in his second letter to Heloise that she sublimate her desire by accepting her state as the bride of Christ, referring all to Heaven and denying earthly pleasures, can be read as a refusal of Aspasia's message, as can his claim that his castration is the greater punishment (103-104 Moncrieff). According to this calculus, women are inferior to men because they cannot suffer as greatly as men can; Aspasia's message, however, implies equal capabilities between the sexes. In her third and final letter, Heloise directs her attention away from their relationship and asks for a discussion of the origin of nuns and for a rule that would suit women (109-110 Moncrieff). One may surmise that Heloise abandoned trying to convince Abelard of anything and accepted her new role. This was not without having suggested that, on the most basic of levels, men do not understand women (112 Moncrieff). Heloise notes that Benedict's prescription for monks' clothing would not suit nuns, who menstruate and therefore need different garments. Unable to realize her ambition to be Abelard's meretrix, Heloise was forced to adopt the role of a bride of Christ. It proved impossible for her to live an "Aspasian" life with him because the participation of both parties was required; furthermore, the Aspasian path is empirical and earthly, not contemplative or sublimated, as Peter had demanded. Heloise's thwarted desire is poignant because she aspired to be something that her model would neither have sought nor gloried in. Furthermore, the nun's burning passion for the charismatic and unavailable Abelard finds no counterpart in the fuller biographical tradition, unknown to Heloise, which made Pericles the devoted if not besotted lover of an ambitious courtesan. Heloise's devotion to Peter survives in what Michele Le Doeuff calls the "Heloise complex."7 Thus, Heloise made a flawed and unsuccessful attempt to own and name her sexual desires. This assertion preceded the traditional beginnings of modern Western feminism; the historian Joan Kelly has located these beginnings in the life and work of Christine de Pizan (ca. 1363-ca. 1431). Kelly points out the radical force of Pizan's assertion, in The Book of the City of Ladies, that valid self-knowledge is possible for
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women without men's intervention. The general, theoretical, and historically based defense of women begun by Pizan would be supplemented by experientially based definitions and defenses of and by women, which oftentimes took the form of catalogues of virtuous women from throughout Western history. As most of these rehabilitative lists were based on biblical and Roman sources, Aspasia appeared relatively late, after Plutarch's Lives became available in Latin and vernacular languages. Cicero's and Quintilian's mentions of her did not record any display of virtue suitable for inclusion in such catalogues. Once Plutarch was available in translation, Aspasia entered, in the company of Pericles, naturally.8 The catalogue was a Greco-Roman form much used by medieval and Renaissance writers, but it was only one of the many ways in which the Renaissance brought to life historical persons of the ancient world. Another interesting manifestation of the age's love of the classical was the collection, display, and publication of antique coins—a visual analogue to the literary catalogue. This phenomenon helped feed into another, namely, the publication of the immensely popular "medallion books," which provided engravings of actual coins or, in many cases, imaginary coin-type portraits of exemplary historical figures, and was enriched with brief biographical sketches. Aspasia appeared in at least three such books, complete with imaginary portrait and brief biographical sketch. The immensely popular Promptuarium Iconum of Guillaume Rouille, first published in Lyon in 1553 and subsequently translated from Latin into French, Italian, and Spanish, was a kind of illustrated "Who's Who'' of the most renowned individuals from the beginning of the world until the time of the work's publication. Rouille placed Aspasia next to Pericles; he gave Plutarch's Pericles as his sole source for Aspasia, whom he discussed in seven lines. Rouille noted her amatory alliance with Pericles and Pericles' singular love and affection for her. He also reported the allegation that she persuaded Pericles to go to war against Samos and stated that Pericles formed his liaison with Aspasia after an amicable divorce from his wife. Pericles, described in eighteen lines, is also given a portrait. Rouille cited Plutarch, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Erasmus as his sources for Pericles. The two lovers face each other on the page; Aspasia is not seen outside of the company of Pericles (Figure 5.1). Everything that is said about Aspasia in the biographical
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Figure 5.1. Woodcuts of imaginary coin portraits of Aspasia and Pericles. Guillaume de Rouille, Promptuarium Inconum (Lyons: Rouille, 1553) vol. 1, p. 119.
sketch concerns her relationship to Pericles; she, however, is not mentioned at all in the sketch about him. Rouille indeed used Plutarch but in a highly selective manner.9 Just a century later, angry because such catalogue authors as Boccaccio had omitted many examples of women's intellect, the Venetian feminist Arcangela Tarabotti composed a passionate tract, La semplicitd ingannata, o tirannia paterna (1654), which filled many gaps in the conventional lists. She asked why they did not mention Aspasia, the teacher of Pericles, and noted other women commonly omitted from the lists.10 Tarabotti's near-contemporary, the French savant Gilles de Menage (1613-1692), published the influential Historia Mulierum Philosopharum (History of Women Philosophers). This work possibly was inspired by Menage's acquaintance with the salons of such intellectual women as Madame de Scudery and his friendship with an editor and translator of the classics, Anne Lefebvre Dacier, whom he addressed as "feminarum doctissima" in the book's dedication to her. It may also have been modeled on work of the ancient biographer of the philosophers, Diogenes Laertius, about whom Menage had already written. His history of women philosophers was first published in Latin in 1690 in Lyons but did not appear in French until an abridgement was issued in 1758. In this work, Menage defined women as philosophers if they were called a philosopher, learned, or wise by an ancient source; if they were the relative, friend, or disciple of some known philosopher; or if they had done something that could be called philosophical. By using these
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criteria, Menage assembled sixty-five women philosophers from antiquity to his own day.11 Aspasia appeared in his first chapter on philosophers of no definite sect, in the company of some eighteen other women, including Diotima, Julia Domna, St. Catherine, AnnaComnena, and Heloise. Menage carefully assembled the major sources. He states as fact that the Milesian's father was Axiochus, that she taught rhetoric to Pericles and rhetoric and philosophy to Socrates, and that she was the mistress of Pericles and later his wife. He evidently believed that Pericles married her after she was captured by the Athenians and that the marriage provoked the Samian and the Peloponnesian wars; all other information is qualified. He also relates that Aspasia was depicted in the medallion books of Bellorio and Canini. The original gem was in the possession of a lady called Felicia Rondanina. This antique jasper stone is described as being labelled Aspasou (possibly, as Menage pointed out, an incorrect genitive form for the formation Aspaso); Menage described the engraving as of a beautiful long-haired woman, armed with a helmet and shield. And indeed, Canini's portrait of Aspasia is just so. On the lady's helmet is painted a four-horse chariot, and above the chariot, Pegasus and the Sphinx, a fantastic iconography that cannot possibly have come from classical antiquity (Figure 5.2). Interestingly, however, Aspasia's martial reputation, as seen on the stone, comprised a large part of what Menage endorsed in his own presentation of the information about her.12
The Eighteenth Century Her presence in medallion books, in Tarabotti's defense of women, and in the influential Historia Mulierum Philosopharum would have made Aspasia known (if not well known) to literate Europeans interested in women's history. Dictionaries and encyclopedias also mentioned her; these were heavily dependent on Plutarch, with "spice" from Athenaeus. Jean Leconte de Bievre, following Plutarch's mention of the two Aspasias, published his credulous Histoire des deuxAspasies in 1736.13 The "other" Aspasia is, of course, Cyrus' mistress of the same name. Leconte did nothing to unite his treatment of these women except to note in his introduction that important women deserve treatment equal to men's at the hands of historians. The work is essentially bipartite, with ninety-two pages devoted to the Milesian and forty-seven to the other
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Figure 5.2. Engraved gemstone portrait of Aspasia. Giovanni Angelo Canini. Iconografia doe Desegni d'Imagini de Famosissimi Monarchi, Regi, Filosofi, Poeti ed Ordtori dell'Antichita (Rome: Lazari, 1669) p. 121.
Aspasia; each section has a separate contents and an index. Credulous of Plutarch, Leconte considered Aspasia to have imitated Thargelia—a femme galante—to have gotten an Ionian education in rhetoric and science, and to have had an ability to teach, expressed as 'Tart de bien dire, de gagner les coeurs, de persuader, de gouverner les esprits." Pericles was said to have fallen in love with his teacher in a way that resonated with other romanticized pairs such as Heloise and Abelard: "Rarement une belle femme orne 1'esprit par ses instructions, sans
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toucher le coeur par ses graces . . . 1'Amour se joignit aux Muses pour former leur union." Leconte states as fact not only that Pericles married Aspasia, but also that Pericles junior was the pair's natural child. The next known representation of Aspasia was the amazing feminist vision rendered by the young portraitist, Marie-Genevieve Bouliar. In the frightening and heady years of the French Revolution in which women themselves participated and during which laws were passed on their behalf, Bouliar (1763-1825) painted Aspasie, her only surviving classical subject painting, in 1794. Exhibited at the Salon of 1795, it garnered a Prix d'Encouragement. Born in Paris, Bouliar was educated by Joseph Siffred Duplessis (1725-1802), one of the period's most celebrated portraitists, whose unconventional positioning of his subjects suggested their individuality. Bouliar exhibited at the Salons from 1791 until 1817, with interruptions from 1802 to 1808 and 1808 to 1817. Her father may have been the Parisian engraver Jacques Bouliard, who also exhibited at the Salon of 1791. If this is so, Bouliar's early life followed the pattern often seen among female artists: the artistic gift was manifested and nurtured by the family, particularly by the father. The few known facts of her life suggest a pattern counter to the norm of marriage and motherhood: Bouliar, who seems never to have married and to have died at the home of friends, had a productive span of more than two dozen years and apparently made most of her living as a portraitist.14 Bouliar, like many other female artists, was primarily a portraitist. Her Aspasie, although a departure from her usual fare of living subjects, was also a portrait. This was fitting, inasmuch as Aspasia' reported life events did not lend themselves to scenes of vivid emotion or violent action as did those of other popular classical and/or biblical subjects. Nor was Aspasia a known or popular female subject, as she did not belong to the categories of femmes fortes or of Weibermacht. For the female artist, moreover, any depiction of Aspasia, given her troubling sexual reputation, would have been problematic. Bouliar's choice of this subject, therefore, even in an age that had many female classical subjects, is important and suggests that the artist felt strongly about it. In her study of the Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Garrard notes the attraction of heroic women subjects for women painters in her observation that Gentileschi needed "to identify personally with her characters in order to bring them to life." Many heroic women subjects, as well as the women who painted them, were outsiders; Aspasia was a
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quintessential outsider. It is impossible to know Bouliar's self-concept and whether she thought of herself as an outsider, let alone what of herself she put into the Aspasie, but the painter seems to have had a deep sympathy for her subject and to have given much thought to the representation of her.15 The Aspasie, the first known representation of Aspasia by a woman artist, was called "the masterpiece of her small surviving oeuvre" by art historian Linda Sutherland Harris (Figure 5.3). The painting was exhib-
Figure 5.3. Oil painting, Aspasie. Marie-Genevieve Bouliar, 1795. Courtesy Musee d'Arras (France).
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ited at the Musee Napoleon (Louvre), decorated Fontainbleau from 1837 to 1875, and in 1876 was given by the state to the museum at Arras, its present home. In it, Aspasia is shown seated in a dimly lit, arched interior that contains a table with flowers at her left and a bust of Pericles in the background. She rests her left hand on the table and in that hand holds an unwrapped scroll lettered in Greek. In her right hand she holds a mirror into which she gazes. Her legs are open and the feet, not seen because the painting terminates in the middle of her calves, would have been crossed at the ankles. Aspasia wears a heavy overdrape and a diaphanous undertunic, which has slipped off her right shoulder and bares the right breast. The woman is brightly illuminated, as are the surface of the table, the scroll, the flowers, and the back of the mirror, from a light source in front of her.16 Francoise Maison's 1972 Arras catalogue entry identifies the importance of Plutarch's Pericles to contemporary understanding of Aspasia's milieu, and, in its analysis of the painting, notes iconographic correspondences with other French paintings. The Harris and Nochlin catalogue commentary also reads the painting with Plutarch. The bared breast is considered to be a reference to Aspasia's erotic nature, a nature, moreover, that called into question her intellectualism. Nochlin and Harris consider her solitude a momentary one in which she perhaps awaits Pericles or Socrates; they suggest that the portrait constitutes "a gentle plea, couched in the most respectable of artistic language, for the equality of women."17 It is possible to grant Aspasia more subjectivity than this by reading the painting in concert with developments in European feminism, as well as with iconographic conventions and with Plutarch himself. First, I note her gaze into the mirror. Harris, following tradition, called this pose a reference to Aspasia's putative erotic beauty; tradition might indeed class this painting among the numerous Venuses at the toilette. But Aspasia is hardly at her toilette: cosmetics are absent, and in her other hand she holds a Greek text rather than a comb or hair ornament. Nor does she look at the viewer, as do many of the pornographic pictures of women who primp or invite the voyeur's gaze in the most unlikely situations. One can recall the advice of Christine de Pizan's divine instructress: look in the mirror to find yourself, and don't listen to men.18 It is at least as likely that Bouliar chose to show Aspasia looking into the mirror in order to better know herself in accord with the Greek
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maxim, gnothi sauton ("know thyself")- The iconography of the mirror as a mirror of the soul was well established by Bouliar's day, and Socrates was painted holding up a mirror to his students. Garrard notes that women artists in particular used the mirror as a symbol of selfknowledge. Who better to hold up a mirror than Socrates' own teacher? The image suggests that Aspasia is practicing a technique that she would later pass on to Socrates. Her response to her image is one of thoughtful engagement; she does not smile coquettishly or narcissistically. In her left hand Aspasia holds a Greek text, which indicates produced knowledge—the eternal textual' 'product,'' and in her right hand the mirror— the path to self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is a dynamic process that occurs only at those moments when we seek it. Aspasia holds the scroll but looks in the mirror; this suggests that the self-knowledge that is produced by introspection is primary and that the textual product is incidental. Like Socrates, Aspasia left no written work.19 Aspasia's clothing and the positioning of her body are also noteworthy. It is true that bared breasts can signify the erotic, but one bared breast is Amazonian, suggestive of the self-sufficient and forceful woman. One recalls Plutarch's reports that Aspasia urged Pericles to practice an aggressive foreign policy, and that seventeenth-century medallion portraits emphasized the Minerval aspect of Aspasia. Additionally, tradition has it that Pericles defended his beloved by begging and weeping. No ancient source says that Aspasia loved Pericles or anyone else. Bouliar's Aspasia, self-confident and at ease, does not appear to be eagerly awaiting a male visitor. Her relaxed lower limbs suggest a state of comfort. Aspasia sits as men do, with her legs casually apart and with no attention drawn to her genital area. In the background is the bust of Pericles, not Pericles himself or any suggestion of his literal presence in her life. Bouliar placed his image in the dark, as she positioned the living Aspasia in the light. The bust, like the globe, functions as furniture, indicating, perhaps, Aspasia's interests and concerns (or the bios' reportage of these). Certainly Pericles' statue does not have the function of a guardian angel. In fact, Bouliar avoided representing the dominatrix suggested by ancient comedy, the elegant saloniere her own day imagined Aspasia to have been, or the winsome creature that Victorian novels would produce. Aspasia does not exist here in relation to some Other. She is not the signifier or phallic woman but is herself the significant, shown in the dynamic process of fulfilling Pizan's instructor's advice. Bouliar, like Christine de Pizan and Arte-
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misia Gentileschi, transformed those intellectual and allegorical traditions that had rendered the female "signifier rather than the significant."20 Bouliar also alluded to the negative aspects of Aspasia's bios. The cut or potted flowers on the table and the garland draped over the back of her chair give an ambivalent cast. Do these flowers, removed from their natural environment to be cut and shaped, suggest that Aspasia's life was also fashioned by desires not her own, that it was cultivated rather than allowed to proceed freely—that it was in a sense unnatural? If the painting has not been cut down, Bouliar has literally cut off Aspasia's feet, thereby immobilizing her in a darkened room. By showing Aspasia as a young woman, did Bouliar imply that her mature years would have been less happy? The cut flowers and the single figure, apparently content to be alone, might also suggest an unrealized potential, which sometimes occurs when a talented individual lacks true peers, becoming what Mary Daly calls "a cognitive minority of one."21
Aspasia on the Continent, in England, and in the New World in the Nineteenth Century Three years after Bouliar's Aspasie was exhibited, Nicholas-Andre Monsiau located her once again in the company of men in his 1798 painting Aspasie s'entretenant avec Alciblades et Socrate. He engulfed her with men in his Aspasie s'entretenant avec les hommes les plus illustres d'Athenes, which he created for the Salon of 1806 (Figure 5.4). The painting illustrated the then-popular notion that Aspasia held salons. This work, now at the Musee de Chambery, depicts Aspasia holding court with ten men and is a counterpart to Monsiau's 1802 Salon offering, Moliere lisant son Tartufe chez Ninon de I'Enclos. Monsiau's contemporary, the intellectual saloniere Madame de Stael, claimed as fact the notion that Aspasia held salons. Later nineteenthcentury cultural historians elaborated on this notion. Louis Aime Victor Becq de Fouquieres (1831-1887) ably surveyed the ancient sources, including the portrait herm and possibly the Renaissance engraved gem; he provided a highly laudatory view of Aspasia. He believed that Aspasia never was a prostitute and that her reputation as one was a hostile development of comedy. Becq de Fouquieres was well acquainted with European studies of Aspasia and other learned woman. He treated Peri-
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Figure 5.4. Oil painting, Aspasie s'entretenant avec les hommes les plus illustres d'Athenes. Nicolas-Andre Monsiau, 1806. Musee de Chambery inv. D.83.1.1 Courtesy Musee de Chambery (depot du Louvre).
cles' and Aspasia's union as a kind of precursor to the modern egalitarian marriage. Becq de Fouquieres considered this union to be as close to legal marriage as the citizenship law allowed, and he suggested that Aspasia, the first saloniere in history, exercised a moral influence over the women brought to her salon. In Becq de Fouquieres' view, the kernel of Aspasia's message appears to have been that women should have freedom of choice in love.22 Even as Becq de Fouquieres was giving this positive interpretation, however, Jean-Leon Gerome had been pornographizing Aspasia. His important 1861 Salon painting Socrates Seeking Alcibiades in the House of Aspasia shows her just before or after fellating Alcibiades. Although the influence of Plutarch seems to have dominated narratives about Aspasia in prose and on canvas, a significant Continental extension of her bios was developed along Platonic lines in the work of the great Italian poet and essayist, Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837). Leopardi's classical education, the pain of his unrequited loves, and the emotional damage wrought by his own physical deformities and debilitating illnesses informed his "Aspasia cycle" of five poems, com-
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posed in Naples between 1831 and 1835. So named because Aspasia is the addressee of the last poem and the poetic referent in the first four to Leopardi's beloved, Fanny Targioni-Tozzetti, the cycle is a RomanticPlatonic meditation on love and death.23 The poems begin with Leopardi's first-person meditation on the twin natures of love and death in Amore e morte. Death is love's companion and twin, a beautiful maiden who nullifies the sad; love, on the other hand, empowers us to act. But even as we fall in love, we see that death will be our release from love. This first poem ends with a prayer that fate give the bold either love or death. The persona asks for death, which is more constant than love. The poem's classical superscription, Menander's "Whom the gods love die young," anticipates this wish. The next poem, Consalvo, is a narration of the death of Consalvo, who lies alone, wishing for just a kiss from his unreciprocating but beloved Elvira. She obliges; once kissed, the transfigured man can die happy. Elvira's momentary gift of earthly love effects Consalvo's liberation, which is identified with death. Here, the lover's wish of the first poem is fulfilled, but at one remove, because the story is told in the third person, not by a first-person narrator. Leopardi returned to first-person narration in // pensiero dominante, investing love, "the dominating thought," with all that is restful and productive. This thought evokes for the traveler verdant fields beside which all else is valueless, sterile, and banal. Because of this thought, the persona can laugh at death and transcend his own time, this eta superba. In naming the dominating thought as the only passion that dwells in the human heart, Leopardi evokes Plato's Symposium and its privileging of eros; moreover, in asserting that the thought makes one forget the truth, Leopardi acknowledges that humans become enraptured by the love object's mere physical beauty. His only real description of the dominant thought identifies it as a dream, a divine error. Like Plato, Leopardi revealed the illusory nature of that which humans hold most dear. At the poem's end, Leopardi conflates the love object with the dominating thought; thus, in mingling the human and divine, the real and ideal, he shows the point at which the lover ignorantly and passionately confounds the two. The mood of A se stesso is gloomy. Rather than addressing an idea, talking about personified abstractions, or narrating a moment in another lover's progress, Leopardi appears to be speaking frankly to himself. In this poem, Leopardi acknowledges that the illusion he thought eternal was dead and advises himself to scorn everything, including the brute
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power that amuses itself with our woe. The only possibility is to survive with dignity. The final poem, Aspasia, an address to his lost beloved, magnificently synthesizes the themes of the first four poems. Leopardi twice addressed his lost love as Aspasia (lines 2 and 63). The richest in classical allusions of the cycle, Aspasia also locates the title character in the past, in the land of the dead. Leopardi, having triumphed over his passion, produced his text to show that the mortal woman who inspired him has literally died and that, on the other hand, his illusion has lived on. (Note that in Consalvo the mortal woman lives, the lover dies, and the idea is left hanging.) He acknowledged her divine beauty: her form was angelic, she transfigured his world, she represented nature and the fecundity of motherhood. Aspasia reveals unknown Elysiums—even Heaven, the ultimate transcendence, is multiplied. Here, Leopardi acknowledged that the lover's mind begets the idea of eros, and that even as he embraces the mortal woman, he really embraces the idea, whose divine form he first apprehended in Fanny/Aspasia. Because the mortal is a mere avenue to this idea. Leopardi can think about Fanny/Aspasia now. She comes and goes in his thoughts come cara larva, like a beloved ghost. Thus, we can read the Aspasia cycle not only with the Symposium, but also with the Menexenus, where a dead woman inspires the living. Leopardi transcended his human disappointment by rewriting the narrative of his unrequited love. He kept the joy of having loved but also gained freedom from servitude. He took revenge and comfort in being able to lie smiling at the sea and stars. The real woman is dead, and here, even more than in the fourth poem, the lover can truly speak a se stesso, to himself. Fittingly, the poet called the mortal avenue to these insights "Aspasia," who became through Plato's Menexenus a floating signifier and, through later ages' conflation with Diotima, an erotic guide. By figuring the seeker of this enlightened solitude as a man and the avenue to it as a woman, Leopardi achieved for Aspasia a universal/ archetypal status as das Ewigweibliche, a status she would occupy in several nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels. Victorian classicism purified Aspasia, making her consort to the great man and desexing her; historiography, painting, and the novel all produced similar views. Growing interest in "the woman question" in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century also occasioned references to and treatments of Aspasia. Walter Savage Landor (1775— 1864), whose work is little read today, spent much of his later life in
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Italy. The conservative Landor had popular success with his epistolary novel, Pericles and Aspasia, which he was inspired to write at the beginning of 1835 and which first appeared in 1836. He considered his sources to be Bayle, Menage, Thucydides, and Plutarch, being happy to let little more impede his own creative view of fifth-century Athens.24 This novel, the first full fictional treatment of Aspasia's relationship with Pericles, is made up of 237 numbered letters between Pericles and Aspasia, and other real or invented personages. Aspasia's correspondence with her fictional friend, Cleone (who conveniently resides in faroff Miletus and is thus unable to be an on-hand companion or ally) provides the narrative structure.25 Aspasia somehow makes her way from Miletus to Athens and primly lodges with a widowed kinswoman (letters 1,2). On her first day there, she dons male attire and attends a performance at the festival of Dionysus; overcome with excitement, she faints and is succored by attendants of Pericles (letters 4-6). Like some Victorian swain, Pericles soon visits her and asks permission to call (letter 10). Love follows soon after (letters 11, 13, 14, 15). The particulars of the relationship are not clear. That they have married is not manifest until letter 162, when Aspasia, telling Cleone of her trial for impiety, states that at the trial Pericles referred to her as his wife. Not until letter 185 is a reference made to their child, when Aspasia writes to Cleone of Pericles' desire that "our son" grow up in Athens; removed to Thessaly, she takes comfort in "little Pericles" (letter 192). Anachronistically, Pericles informs Aspasia that he had revoked the "odious" citizenship law (letter 198), thus allowing Pericles junior to continue on with the family, well before the deaths of Xanthippus and Paralus (narrated in letter 234).26 The marriage most often referred to is Pericles' marriage to power; Aspasia timidly protests this time-consuming commitment, but to no avail (letters 105,106). Like Abelard before him, Pericles often declines to answer his lover's requests (e.g., letters 61 and 63; 163 and 164; 173, 174, 185; in letter 111 he even refuses to give Aspasia copies of his speeches). But she does not seem to mind this apparent neglect, assuring him that "I shall love you even more than I do, if you will love yourself more than me" (letter 70). Landor takes away from Aspasia most claims made for her independence of thought or her influence on Pericles. Aspasia denies that she has retouched any of Pericles' orations (letter 50), and Anaxagoras
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praises Aspasia for having taken Pericles' advice to read history rather than philosophy (letter 134). Aspasia even recounts Pericles' severe criticism of her own summary of Roman history (letter 137). As for Aspasia's reputed eloquence, she does mount her own defence at the trial, but Pericles finishes the job for her (letters 161, 162). Thus the rescued one can say, "I was forgotten . . . the danger, the insult, seemed his" (letter 163). Moreover, many of Aspasia's letters to Cleone simply transcribe Pericles' own opinions and speeches; her letters become a vehicle for replicating his ideas, not her own. When Cleone asks Aspasia for a panegyric on women poets, Aspasia declines and asks Pericles his opinion (letters 36, 37). Nor does she seem to have any part in the Samian War, remarking to Cleone after its end that it is enough that her Pericles is safe at home: "Not a word has he spoken, not a question have I asked him about the odious war of Samos" (letter 120). This Victorian writer inverted the ancient formula by which Pericles spoke with Aspasia's tongue instead of making her speak with his. The Aspasia who emerges admires restraint, disapproves of Sappho's passions, and lauds Euripides' and Sophocles' self-control (letter 48). She does not attempt to advise Pericles about foreign policy, though she states that war is barbaric (letter 112). Landor dispelled rumors that she was a madam by having her recount her efforts to win honest suitors for two Milesian girls, which sincere and innocuous effort is twisted by Dracontides into the malicious rumor that she pimped for Pericles (letters 55-59). Obedient to Pericles, she entertains an elderly woman at his request (letter 102); he permits her to go visiting, tells her how to behave (letters 23, 24), and advises her to change the air (letter 31). She writes a little; Landor ascribed to her a comic epigram (letter 78), a poem to her nurse and a piece on youth and age (letter 107), and a paean to Miletus (letter 140), all of which are transcribed in letters to Cleone. So far as we can tell, Pericles knows nothing of these productions. Aspasia's masterpiece is three fragments of a tragedy about the house of Atreus (letters 225, 227, 229). Cleone urges her to complete the play (letter 228) but Aspasia is diffident: "Tragedy is quite above me" she pleads (letter 225), adding in her last installment that she dislikes any manual activity, be it sewing or writing (letter 229)—this Aspasia doesn't know the difference between the two.27 Lander's Aspasia is a perfect "angel in the house," a docile wife and mother, a reflector of Pericles' glory whose life is not worth narrating after Pericles' death. The novel ends when Aspasia, removed from the
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dangers of war, is informed by Alcibiades of Pericles' and Cleone's deaths (letters 236 and 237, respectively). Eliza Lynn Linton, the formidable antifeminist novelist and essayist, was in her twenties when her second historical novel, Amymone: A Romance of the Days of Pericles, appeared in 1848. Dedicated to her father and praised lavishly by Savage Landor, the novel launched Linton on a long and successful career. In her preface, Linton announced that in Aspasia's character she tried "to embody what I believe to be the practical truths of human life'' (p. v); "I have but clothed in Grecian form the spirit of modern England; speaking, under local names, of questions which interest universal man" (pp. v, vi). This genteel and philosophical purpose is effected in about 1,200 pages of rotten-ripe ecphraseis, poison, torture, disguise, and treachery that surpassed the penny dreadfuls of that time.28 The tale told is of the beautiful and treacherous me tic Amymone, recently disfranchised by Pericles' citizenship law, which Linton obviously considered to have been retroactive. Married to a handsome but weak-willed metic, Methion, Amymone schemes and claws her way into the inner circle of Athenian high society by forging a new will in which Methion's pros tales (citizen sponsor), Crethon, leaves everything to Methion, whereupon Crethon is murdered. Cleon waits in the wings to blackmail her into committing even worse acts while he simultaneously works to discredit Pericles and his friends. Rather than show compassion for Amymone's plight as a metic, Linton dwells instead on Amymone's failure to accept her status, and on her fierce, ungovernable passions, her ability to sexually dominate men, and her unwomanly ability to resort to violence. Amymone visits a witch, horridly loathes the husband who must be her master (1.240), and is described as a Clytemnestran wife (1.304 and 3.17). When finally trapped, after having "laboured ceaselessly to obtain an influence counter to Aspasia's, which should destroy and annul her work" (2.68), and after having attended the Olympian games disguised as a Phrygian boy (3.193), Amymone, and her husband, stand trial for their crimes. He cravenly is willing to live on as a public slave (3.348), but Amymone murders her own child in the courtroom and then kills herself on the last page of the novel (3.348). Aspasia, whose arrival and presence in Athens is never explained, lives with Pericles in wedded harmony (1.56); their household, simple and unadorned, is "the very Erechtheion of the social life of Athens"
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(1.48). At home, the married pair assure one another of their mutual devotion (1.58-64). Aspasia would be Pericles' slave, his helot (1.62). In an early scene, Aspasia and Pericles talk of their love for one another, but Pericles then speaks alone of philosophy with Socrates (1.48-70). Pericles is the center of a formidable intellectual circle: "And that beautiful Ionian woman sat among them, like the queen of all" (1.75). Aspasia and Pericles ("that republican monarch" 1.87) alike dream of a day when the people shall rule supreme and, as Aspasia says to herself, "And then, men will understand other than conventional virtues . . . then I, Aspasia, now named Hetaira, because endowed with an Hetaira's education, shall be called virtuous, and beyond my age. . . . To live a matron's seeming, and to play a harlot's games, Athens winks at that! To love in pure, chaste wedlock of soul, but to despise the formal customs, that is to be an Hetaira, abandoned, shameless, and undone" (1.91). Linton noted that whereas hetairai are self-confident, educated, and friends to men, wives are mere housekeepers (1.113). Aspasia and Amymone are contrasted with each other in several encounters, the most notable of which (1.77-105) shows that Aspasia was branded with the name of courtesan, because she had learnt those arts of education which had hitherto been reserved for this class; because she had endeavoured to rescue philosophy, learning, and art, from the purposes of seduction, to which alone they were applied; because she strove to establish the truth of an equal law between the sexes; an equal though a diverse; and threw off many of the conventional restraints of her time; because she did all this, the chaste matrons of the violet city shrieked out against her; and men, more narrow, mean, and bigoted, repeated the slanderous lie, till after ages caught the echo, and Aspasia's name lies still deep-stained with a calumnious infamy. (2.79) Aspasia tells Amymone that love is the most necessary part of a marriage (2.88-89). This conversation, which Amymone reports to Hermippus, becomes the basis for his accusation of impiety, despite Aspasia's own declaration to another woman: "Loving, chaste, obedient, and true, all this let womanhood remain; but with these virtues let her have a wider education and a higher moral position" (2.103). In accord with Aspasia's wish that womanhood remain obedient, she avers to Pericles that "an Attic birth could not have given me more than my present greatest privilege,—the privilege of loving thee" (2.254), and severs her innocent friendship with a young girl because the girl's suitor disapproves (3.98-130).
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Amidst increasing public censure of Aspasia, Lysicles becomes her ally at a Dionysiac festival during which Hermippus publicly calls her a hetaira (2.130-132), a nice touch that allowed Linton to forecast Lysicles' supposed protection of her after the death of Pericles. Hermippus' formal charge of impiety will not come for another half-dozen years, in the mid-430s B.C. (3.274), as part of a concerted campaign against Pericles by assorted demagogues. Amymone is allowed to testify against Aspasia in Linton's fantastic version of the trial (3.277). But Pericles' celebrated tears finally sway the crowd (3.282-283). The fact that the novel ends with the death of Amymone, soon after Aspasia's acquittal on the impiety charge, shows the extent to which Linton was eager to figure the ambitious woman as an evil foil. The dark, Medea-like Amymone (3.331) takes the fall for ambitious women. Because Aspasia seemingly achieves her own security with love, beauty, brains, and luck, she has no cause to worry. Linton never showed Aspasia in any genuine predicament or seriously dissatisfied with her lot or those of other women, and even foreshadowed the protection she would receive from Lysicles after Pericles' death. She conveniently made Xanthippus and Paralus exceedingly unlikable sons. Linton took the tradition of a colorful, scandalous, unconventional female genius and, like Savage Landor, domesticated her into "the angel in the house." Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912), a major interpreter of the Victorian vision of the ancient world, also protected Aspasia by positioning her chastely in men's space as a reflector and admirer of men's projects in his 1868 painting, Phidias and the Frieze of the Parthenon (Figure 5.5). Alma-Tadema's strain of classicism is characterized by his fusion of classicizing idealism with the minuteness of detail typical of genre painting; additionally, he displayed a strong interest in ecphrasis or, as Richard Jenkyns calls it, a "pull toward literary or anecdotal content."29 The painting synthesizes certain aspects of Plutarch's descriptions of Pericles' associates and the Parthenon project. Noted figures of the day pay homage to Art, a projection back into antiquity of the homage paid in London by Britons when the Elgin Marbles were first displayed. A heroic Phidias shows the Parthenon frieze, in progress, to Pericles, Aspasia, and three other men. All but one man (possibly Alcibiades, who eyes another man) gaze reverently at the sculptures. Aspasia is somewhat concealed from view. She is heavily robed; one may glimpse
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Figure 5.5. Oil painting, Phidias and the Frieze of the Parthenon, Athens. Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1868. City Museum of Birmingham inv. 118.23. Courtesy of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
her black and white spotted underdress, and she wears a saffron outer dress, a possible reference to her reputation as a courtesan. But her hair is mostly covered and suggests a matron's coiffure.30 Heavy and dark, this Aspasia hardly recalls Landor's sprightly woman or Linton's queenly one, and she certainly is totally unlike Bouliar's version. This may be the only one of Alma-Tadema's classical subject paintings in which he gave a woman a positive rendition "in a position of power and authority," as Joseph Kestner puts it, and made Aspasia "the virtuous mistress of Pericles." Certainly, Aspasia is more positively portrayed than is Alma-Tadema's scheming Julia Domna in the 1907 Caracalla and Geta, and she is more reverently attentive to the display of men's labor than either the lolling Lesbia in his 1865 At Lesbia's or the indolent woman who is sharply contrasted to rapt male listeners in his 1885 A Reading from Homer. Alma-Tadema often showed women in pairs, or as Kestner puts it, as "dangerous doubles," "anti-intellectuals," and "in a state of idleness and torpor." According to tradition, Aspasia, had no female peers; here, Alma-Tadema did not
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emphasize her singularity as had Bouliar. Instead, he enveloped her and her reaction to Phidias' workmanship in a man's space. Ultimately, Alma-Tadema's Aspasia fulfills the aim of Linton's Aspasia, that is, to give women the intellectual training to make them fit companions for men. In like fashion his Sappho, in the 1881 Sappho and Alcaeus, is subordinated, along with her "school," to Alcaeus; she and her girls are Alcaeus' audience, not his peers. Eliza Lynn Linton, who had made Amymone a frightening monster, would continue to inveigh against "wild women" even as Alma-Tadema showed tamed, exemplary women on some canvases and dangerous sensual ones elsewhere.31 At around the same time, an American writer, C. Holland, published Aspasia, an obscure quasi-autobiographical novel that made interesting use of parts of Aspasia's identity. It may be the first treatment of Aspasia in the New World and the first fictional treatment that made Aspasia the sole narrator.32 Aspasia Horton, the devout protagonist, decides her life's destiny at the age of 12: "I then and there resolved that I would be a woman in the broadest sense of the term" (p. 7). She begins to realize her destiny at a young ladies' seminary, where she uses her prodigious memory to learn Latin, Greek, and geology, and also debates her teachers and fellows about Christian theology. She is outstandingly rational: although Aspasia meets her future husband, Morgan Goodspeed, during adolescence, she resolves to heed her late mother and not marry until having completed her education (p. 74). Aspasia is far more reasonable than her romantic and impetuous suitor (pp. 76-77). After the vicissitudes of earning a poor living for herself and her children while Morgan grapples with the evils of drink, Aspasia at length has the satisfaction of seeing her husband repent, sober up, and prosper. After his edifying death, the wealthy widow can "bestow my charities with a liberal hand" (p. 186). She feeds and houses the poor and distributes religious reading materials. Aspasia Horton Goodspeed attempts to synthesize and live the precepts of Jesus Christ and the Greek philosophers, among whom she sees no great difference (p. 41). At the end of the book, she fuses the moral teachings of Greek philosophy and the Presbyterian catechism (chapter 17, p. 187 ff.) For this latter-day Aspasia, particular obligations grow from our natures, one of which is that we must live out the implications of the fact that "there is no such thing as sex in souls or spirits" (pp. 189-190). Holland focused on the spiritual and intellectual development of the heroine and her use of those strengths to overcome all obstacles. Her
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"Aspasia" is a seminary-educated, Christian lady bountiful who survives adversity to find material and spiritual wealth. From the Milesian's bios, Holland took her learning, her rhetorical skill, and the probability that she outlived her mate, and rewarded this literary creation more handsomely than her namesake ever was. Aspasia Goodspeed is never insulted publicly, she has a proper marriage, and as we read the memoirs of her late middle age, we are given the satisfaction of knowing what happens to her. Holland's transformation of Aspasia into a positive role model for contemporary American women was undoubtedly not embraced by all nineteenth-century proponents of women's education. Margaret Fuller's contemporary, Caroline Dall, could refer contemptuously to Ischomachus as running off to "the saloon of Aspasia." Nonetheless, the protagonist's unusual determination to prosecute her life's course, and her contention that education was woman's right, harmonizes with the tenets of nineteenth-century American feminism.33 Aspasia Horton Goodspeed, a rather tame protofeminist, was no match for the most glamorous fictional Aspasia of the century. The Austrian classicist Rupert Hammerling (pseudonym Robert Hamerling, 1830-1889), whose historical novels and poetry are today mostly forgotten, wrote a blockbuster Aspasia in 1876. This lavish and lengthy work was in print for about 50 years and inspired a play and musical composition. Hamerling's sympathetic portrait of Aspasia credited her with far more subjectivity and activism than had any prior construction of her biographical tradition, even as it omitted some inconvenient details that did not mesh with his idealizing project.34 Hamerling created an imperial fantasy in his violet Athens, a place where the common man discourses learnedly in the agora about the most complex political and philosophical issues. Aspasia is singular; she is no ordinary woman but a queen bee with no real understanding of the problems of women as a gender class. As Euripides says, Aspasia is a woman but women are not Aspasias (2.60). Not only is Aspasia singular among women, she is represented as almost divine, for Phidias' and Pericles' first glimpse of her is treated as a kind of epiphany: "There are looks, words, which fall like the kindling lightning into a human soul. Pericles had been touched by such a word, such a glance . . . the might of the glance darted through him with a sweet fire, from whose glow he emerged more transformed than he was aware!" (1.32). Pericles, Aspasia, Sophocles, and the latter's mistress are "as gay as Olym-
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plan gods" (1.171); Socrates, whose philosophical progress will be directed by his pure love for Aspasia, first hears the voice of his daimon when first he beholds Aspasia (1.184); and, according to this work, Sophocles writes the eros chorus of Antigone for Aspasia (1.162). Most significantly for our understanding of Aspasia, Hamerling has made her a meteoric register of the Zeitgeist. The rise and decline of her love affair with Pericles coincides with the acme and decay of Athenian brilliance; she inspires the building program and even awakens Socrates' daimon. Pericles admits that she has composed most of his speeches (2.40). Hamerling's Aspasia is orphaned in Miletus and reared by a philosophical old gentleman. After her benefactor's death, she moves to Attica. Misunderstood by the Megarians, she is "rescued" by the subsequently lecherous Hipponicus, and eventually finds refuge with a friend of her mother (1.123). Her only actual lover is Pericles. Aspasia's basic philosophy, as she expounds it at the Athenian equivalent of a gallery showing, is simple: beauty is the highest good and now is the time to beautify Athens (1.31-32; cf. 1.37 and 2, chap. 7). Beauty is superior to mere goodness, Aspasia tells Socrates; Socrates recognizes this and wishes he were handsome rather than wise (1.156). "Only in the garb of beauty will wisdom conquer all hearts," says Aspasia (2.22). Another indication of Aspasia's exceptional nature is the fact that Hamerling dresses her in men's clothing so that she can move about Athens as a Spartan youth (1.109 et passim), a necessity Pericles permits her (1.111) but from which he vows to free her (1.337). Aspasia thinks women should be permitted to act on the stage (1.222-223, 226), and Sophocles lets her play Eurydice in the Antigone (1.217-244), an action that discomfits Pericles. Aspasia is incensed at the treatment of Athenian women but also blames them for not knowing how to please men and keep their love (1.138-139). In an extraordinary scene, Aspasia, in men's attire, calls on Pericles' unlettered wife (here named Telesippe) and her "masculine" companion Elpinike. Ironically, these unbeautiful women penetrate her disguise more quickly than do the men with whom she more frequently associates (1.135).35 Elpinike and Telesippe, however, plot against Aspasia, as do Diopeithes and Lampon, the representatives of superstition (1.87-116; 2.28-52). In a stunning moment, Aspasia declares warfare against prejudice and on behalf of women (2.26-27) and
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asks women at the Thesmophoria to unite in support of women's rights that they might exert equal power in the world. Elpinike's faction defeats this bold move (2.52-78, esp. pp. 76-78). Eventually, Pericles divorces Telesippe, whose grief at the termination of her marriage and the loss of her sons Hamerling deprecates (2.36). Not long after the outbreak of the Samian War, and after a burst of passionate love letters, Aspasia joins Pericles in Ionia, where they wed (1.301-323; 2.25-26). Their marriage is to be a new sort, based on mutual love and honesty, for Aspasia had told Pericles that if she could, she would be neither hetaira nor wife (1.324—325). Despite persistent rumors that Aspasia is a second Thargelia, she seems more interested in Pericles' heart and women's rights than in exercising political power by sexually dominating her lover (2.40-41). In addition to her failed attempt to galvanize women at the Thesmophoria, Aspasia founds a short-lived school for young ladies, which is attended by her two orphaned nieces and an Arcadian girl: She did not wish to train hetaerae, but champions and allies, adapted by their intellect and beauty to gain influence as she herself had done. The school she established should keep alive what she transmitted, and diffuse it to wider circles. . . . Her pupils, like their mistress might obtain for husbands powerful and influential men, who would strengthen Pericles' authority and oppose the efforts of his enemies. (2.182-183; see also 2.28-78 and 200-201, and esp. chap. 7, pp. 200-201)
Like Landor before him, Hammerling rewrote the Megarian crisis; now its impetus is the abduction of Aspasia's nieces, performed in retaliation for Alcibiades' prankish abduction of a Megarian maiden (2.171-201, chap. 7). This slight incident provokes the high-level Megarian crisis of Greek history and occasions Hermippus' prosecution of Aspasia for impiety. In its call for a reinstatement of the death penalty (2.216-217), Hermippus' charge prefigures the charge against Socrates. Pericles defends Aspasia as her husband and sponsor; his tears, and his claim that she is responsible for his good deeds and that to condemn her is to condemn him (2.232-233), win her acquittal by a wide margin. Hamerling tries hard to construct a historically plausible moment of androgynous possibility wherein Pericles can defend Aspasia as a double of his own self and Aspasia, having invalidated the categories of both hetaira and wife, can have a new kind of marriage. He even allows
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Aspasia to signal the end of the relationship with Pericles—first, in her acknowledgment that perhaps one day they will cease to love (2.286287) and later, in her actual dismissal of Pericles: ' 'You are no longer a Greek" she tells the gloomy and embittered man (2.296). In addition, Socrates asserts that thought is both masculine and feminine (1.202). Some parts of the historical tradition do fall away. Aspasia, inspiration of others, leaves behind nothing, not even the earthly product of a child: Hamerling omitted the nothos, thereby extricating Aspasia from the inconvenient category of human mother and Pericles from the humiliating necessity of begging for the bastard's enfranchisement. This authorial liberty also freed Hamerling from having to narrate the deaths of Paralus and Xanthippus, losses that deprived the historical Pericles of his legal heirs and necessitated his extraordinary plea for his third son. Rather than creating texts, Aspasia is herself a text, a Grecian urn of constant truth and beauty that men can read. As Socrates says, "You, Aspasia, do not require words to express your opinion; I read it in your looks" (2.24). Men can also translate what they see in her to stone, for Hamerling made her Alcamenes' model for Aphrodite (vol. 1, chap. 1) and suggested she was Phidias' model for the Lemnian Pallas (vol. 2, chap. 3). Like Plato's floating signifier, Hamerling's Aspasia—both Aphrodite and Athena—is, for Socrates, "embodied Hellas" (2.328). The story really ends with the death of Pericles and with Aspasia's recollections of happier times as she watches over his corpse (2.326328). The rest of Aspasia's life is not worth the telling or perhaps can't be told; this is to be expected once Hamerling has defined Aspasia not as a mortal historical actor, but as a register of Athens' joy and gaiety.36 A new Hellenic era begins with the birth of Plato, who is born just as Pericles dies: "With the sweetest eloquence he will preach the bitterest doctrines" (2.333). Hamerling's vivid and immensely successful novel set off shock waves in both popular and academic circles. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiographers of fifth-century Athens who idealized Greek men idealized Aspasia as well; moreover, they did so in ways consonant with contemporary fictional and artistic portrayals. It is difficult to specify the direction of influence; although Landor used ancient and modern historiographical sources in composing his novel, and Gertrude Atherton appended a copious list of sources and advisors to her 1927 novel The Immortal Marriage, it is impossible to say that the worldviews that made this or that portrait of Aspasia palat-
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able to consumers of popular novels also did not work their influence on academics. By the late nineteenth century, a fulsome portrait of Aspasia had been drawn in England and Germany, the strongholds of classical studies at the time. German and British historiographers tended to emphasize Aspasia's political influence; they defended her dubious sexual reputation by stressing her Ionian education. The French portraits differed, tending to stress her free deployment of sexual desire. George Grote (1794-1871) follows Plutarch's account in his discussion of Aspasia in his massive History of Greece, which began to appear in 1846. In volume 5 of the 1870 edition, Aspasia is noted in chapter 48, "From the Blockade of Potidaea Down to the End of the First Year of the Peloponnesian War." She is named as one of Pericles' associates who is used in order to persecute him and is identified as his mistress, although Grote finds it unlikely that she kept a brothel. Likened to Theodote, Aspasia is said to have belonged to a class of women who were more interesting to Athenian men than were their secluded and ignorant wives; this sketch is in perfect harmony with the works of Plutarch, Linton, and Hamerling. As for her reputed involvement in military and intellectual matters, Grote does not endorse the reports of her involvement in the Samian War or those of her involvement in the Megarian embargo, writing the latter off as a slur of comedy. He is more credulous of the story of her trial, and Pericles' defense of her, and gives her credit for being able to hold her own intellectually with others in Pericles' "circle." It is interesting that this man, often characterized as a radical and who himself had a tempestuous affair with a much younger woman, interpreted the bios of Aspasia with comparative restraint.37 William Watkiss Lloyd (1813-1893), a popular historian whose views were heavily influenced by Grote, devotes an expansive chapter to her in his The Age of Pericles. Selective in his choice of "facts," Lloyd was convinced that Aspasia was at the center of a circle of intellectuals; he claimed that the Menexenus preserves a memory of her actual rhetorical skills and suggested that she anticipated both Socratic dialectical methods and Platonic interest in eros. Lloyd dignifies Aspasia and her union with Pericles, noting how anomalous it was for Pericles to plead for her in the trial (which he believed to have been historical), an event he called a cruel "persecution of an accomplished woman." He accepts that Aspasia was a hetaira although "she occupied the place of a wife so far as possible." Pericles and Aspasia were thought by Lloyd to
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have come together because Aspasia's (undescribed) upbringing made her more interesting than ordinary Athenian women, a clear echo of Landor, Grote, and Linton. Lloyd believed that Pericles' allegedly reserved mien should be ascribed to his regard for this wife-like creature and to the unhappy fact that they could not socialize normally (2.150); this is reminiscent of romantic portrayals of morganatic marriages among Europeans in the late nineteenth century. Lloyd ignores comedy's treatments of Aspasia.38 Evelyn Abbott (1843-1901), the author of the popular Pericles and the Golden Age of Athens, saw both Pericles and Aspasia as problematic individuals: Pericles destroyed Athenian democracy but sincerely desired that the demos "share in all the pleasure which art and literature should give"; Aspasia is both a hetaira and the head of an intellectual circle, and attacks on her are seen as evidence for "the destmction of Athenian domestic life"; Aspasia and other hetairai (unnamed) are "adventuresses." Abbott's intellectual Aspasia threatens the private realm; Pericles threatens the public realm. This is somewhat akin to Hamerling's linkage of Athens' greatness and decline to the love affair of Aspasia and Pericles. Abbott does not comment on the sedate portrait herm of her, which was reproduced in at least one edition, along with other busts, maps, and realia.39 Ernst Curtius (1814-1896) idealized all things Hellenic, and his description of Aspasia makes Grote's sound almost prurient. Like Abbott, Curtius did not deign to comment on salacious innuendo: "Hers was a lofty and richly endowed nature, with a perfect sense of all that is beautiful, and hers a harmonious and felicitous developement . . . : It was a real marriage, which only lacked the civil sanction because she was a foreigner." Thus, we meet her as a participant in a spiritual marriage, if not a legal one, a concept unknown to the period in which Aspasia lived.40 Perhaps the most positive academic view of Aspasia's life and role in Athens was that of Ivo Bruns in Frauenemancipation in Athen. Bruns understood the importance in philosophical literature of the "woman question," and in his histoire de la question deemed Euripides no misogynist. This opinion sets him squarely against Christ and Wilamowitz. Euripides is thought to have had genuine sympathy for women's oppression and Aristophanes to have acknowledged both the importance of the "woman question" and the grievous effects of war upon women. Bruns went so far as to say that the plays are evidence for
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aFrauenbewegung ("women's movement") in the last third of the fifth century, a movement supported neither by men (Nur die Frauenfechtenfuer ihre Sache, p. 19) nor by the Athenian hausfrau, but instead by hetairai, foreign women with a better education than that available to legitimately born Attic women. In Euripides' and Aristophanes' portraits of strong women, Bruns saw incontrovertible similarities to the Socratic tradition's portrait of Aspasia, and he decided that the playwrights drew their portraits from actual Fuehrerinnen der Frauenbewegung. Intrigued with the composite portrait of the emancipated hetaira handed down by ancient literature, he decided that Aspasia, or women like her, were the real models for dramatic portrayals of strong female leaders into whose mouths their creators put some expression of women's plight. The passages that Bruns found most compelling for the ultimate dependence of both the Socratica and drama upon real women are the fragment of Aeschines' Aspasia preserved by Cicero and Xenophon's Oeconomicm 3.14 (Socrates' report of Aspasia's advice to Critoboulus). Bruns acknowledged the derivative nature of fourth-century discourse. The element common to the literary portrayals of Aspasia and to Praxagora and Lysistrata is that of a rhetorically instructed woman teaching other women.41 Bruns clearly perceives important ideas: a women's movement must arise out of a sense of shared oppression and sisterhood; the inception of such a movement is most likely to take place among outsiders or the oppressed class, albeit the upper strata of that class—in this case, learned women who were at least somewhat financially independent of men; and education, which leads to a changed consciousness, is crucial.42 Bruns whipped a sugary confection out of scant evidence, however, and his eagerness to see Aspasia as an early feminist allowed him to take at positive face value the Platonic fantasy of the Menexenus. His discussion of the Oeconomicus is unconfused with political analysis and makes the dialogue a treatise on strictly domestic practice and a critique of the traditional Athenian housewife, a shy, half-wild creature who must be enculturated and domesticated by her spouse, a task often neglected. Bruns notes the conservatism in the Oeconomicus' prescription that women be educated: it was not so that they could perform a larger role in society, but rather so they could better fulfill their smaller role at home. Bruns rightly saw the treatise as advocating reform, not change, of the status quo. This status quo enjoins neither parents nor women, but rather husbands, to improve the education of their wives.43
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Bruns and Hamerling's romanticized views were opposed by the fulminations of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848-1931), a giant of classical scholarship whose skeptical views of what we might know of Aspasia were first seen in his Aristoteles und Athen (1893). In this work, he relegates her to footnotes, declining to suppose that the Milesian had been the "Aspasia Axiochou" whose name Diodorus of Athens might have seen on a gravestone, averring instead that the Milesian had been a hetaira. In a searing denunciation of gauzy German philhellenism, Wilamowitz declared that those who could not find their heroes manly or write history without feminine perfume should read Hamerling instead of Thucydides. Wilamowitz did not leave unanswered Bruns' challenge to his views in the brief but evidently galling Frauenemancipation in Athen; he faulted Brans' trust in Xenophon as a historical source, noting that Xenophon could not possibly have known Aspasia, and stated that Aeschines fictionalized many of the events of his dialogue.44 Wilamowitz believed it possible that Aspasia was legitimated along with her nothos, but felt, inexplicably, that this would have made her less likely to have lived with Lysicles. He concludes that: "Ob sie Bildung oder Bildungstrieb besass, kann heute niemand sagen; fuer die Geschichte ist es einerlei" ("No one today can say whether or not Aspasia possessed Bildung or thirsted for it; but for History, the question is immaterial"). Nearly twenty years later, Wilamowitz had mellowed slightly; he still assumed that Aspasia was a hetaira who became a concubine and the mother of the nothos but suggested that she gave Pericles a ' ' something more''—something neither a well-born Athenian woman nor a Milesian could have given him: "DaB Aspasia geistig mehr bedeutete, werden wir glauben, obwohl die Angriffe der Komiker und die Erfindungen der Novellisten geringe Gewaehr bieten."45
The Twentieth Century Wilamowitz's later view, considerably less jaundiced than his early pronouncement that the question of her intellect or intellectual curiosity was neither an answerable nor a proper one, still connected Aspasia inextricably to her sexuality and strictly confined her importance as a historical actor to her relationship with a man. The twentieth century has
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seen attempts both to free Aspasia from her relationships with men and to focus more pruriently upon her sexuality. Elza Rozenberga (1865-1943), one of Latvia's foremost literary figures, a feminist, and a patriot, did not enter the scholarly and artistic arena to argue for a particular view of the historical Aspasia, instead adopting for herself the pseudonym "Aspazija" and attempting to live her life as she believed the Milesian had. Aspazija worked for political freedom and women's rights with her husband, Janis Rainis (a pseudonym of Janis Plieksans). She may have been the first woman since Heloise to adopt Aspasia as a symbol for what she herself hoped to do and/or be. Born into a family of landowners, Rozenberga was educated until the age of sixteen; her father was an alcoholic whose wife spoke of leaving were it not for the daughter. Her biographer, Astrida Stahnke, portrayed her as dominated by a mother who wished better things for her daughter than she had achieved herself; gradually, Rozenberga became aware of sex and class oppression. Rozenberga's mother is credited with seeing that her daughter got an education, despite the opposition of her male relatives. Forced into marriage in 1885 with a man who squandered the marriage portion within two years, Rozenberga and her now-destitute family were then deserted by him. During this period, she adopted the name of Aspazija, which she apparently first used in her signature to a nationalistic poem published in 1887.46 It fits with Aspazija's own romantic self-concept, as revealed in her autobiographical writings, that she should have adopted this pseudonym. Aspazija was drawn to Aspasia by reading Hamerling's novel; as Stahnke stated, "Aspasia had been a fighter for women's rights and had freely mixed with men in high government places. She had been beautiful and fascinating. Elza must have caught a glimpse of her [sc., Aspasia's] grandeur and complexity and so absorbed her personality and values that she took on the woman's name with all its varied implications." Roberts Jansons, one of Aspazija's tutors, apparently gave her the book and called her the "Latvian Aspasia." He and his brother taught her the techniques of writing drama; under their influence, she wrote her play The Avengeress, which won a competition in 1888. Noteworthy for its anti-German stance and its creation of a strong female protagonist, it made Aspazija a celebrity. At this time, Aspazija also came to recognize the hypocrisy of law and the validity of love as the force that binds, a recognition Stahnke ascribed to Aspazija's prior
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subjection to a forced marriage and its attendant miseries. After being betrayed by a lover she took when her marriage ended, Aspazija wrote the play Zaudetas tiesibas ("The Lost Rights"), in which the protagonist is forced into prostitution but keeps a pure heart. This play, which has been compared with Ibsen's A Doll's House, henceforth identified Aspazija "as the champion of women's rights."47 Aspazija's nationalism, feminism, and promotion of education occurred during Latvia's move to independence, and she later identified her own poetry as a lodestar in this movement: "Wherever a nation moves toward some goal, her poetry, like a bright morning star guides her on the way." Thus, Aspazija made her own artistic growth an emblem of her nation's growth in a way like that with which Hamerling made Aspasia's and Pericles' love affair parallel to the acme of Athenian cultural brilliance. Stahnke represented Aspazija's own career as stifled by her care for her neurotic and depressive second husband, Rainis, whom she met in 1894 and who believed her to be a heroine, an Athena.48 After marrying Rainis in 1898, she spent part of his political exile with him in Russia and part in Latvia, where it was easier for her to find work as a translator; during this period, she translated Hamerling's novel. They returned to Latvia in 1903, only to be exiled again from 1906 to 1920, during which time both of them were often ill and Apaszija's output diminished. After Latvia became independent, Aspazija and Rainis returned home; they were both lionized and their writings continued to be popular and esteemed. Aspazija, a deputy in the national government and a driving force in the Latvian feminist movement, asked for benefits to unmarried mothers and promoted the education of women. After being defeated for a seat in Parliament in 1922, she returned to her writing. During the second flowering of her writing, Aspazija produced her most hopeful and most political drama, Aspasia, which premiered in 1923. Based on situations created by Hamerling, the drama details Aspasia's arrival in Athens and her free love for Pericles. She is condemned as a harlot, but Pericles casts his lot with her; a vote approves their union, which inaugurates a Golden Age of morality based on love between equal partners. The second phase of Aspazija's productivity, which lasted until her death in 1943, saw the publication of "seven volumes of poetry, five dramas, five volumes of autobiography, a novel, and many articles." Aspazija's last years were marred by periods of poverty and illness and the loss of Latvia's brief
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independence. She died on November 5, 1943. She is now being reclaimed as an important Latvian literary figure.49 What Landor, Hamerling, and others had begun was continued by popular novelists in the twentieth century. With the twentieth-century emphasis on women's rights and the popularization of Freudianism and sexology, dominant trends in this century's novelistic contribution to Aspasia's bios have been to provide more explicit sexual language and to tend to see Aspasia as a sexually liberated woman. There has also been an interest in writing about Aspasia's childhood, her inner life, and her life after Pericles.50 Far from defending Aspasia against the accusation of being a courtesan, Berthe Le Barillier continued the French tradition of lauding Aspasia for freely choosing her sexual partners; in this pre-World War I popular history, Aspasia is placed in the company of Phryne.51 In Old Saws and Modem Instances, another popularizer of high culture, W. L. Courtney (1850-1928), presented an essay on "Sappho and Aspasia," in which he perceptively identified many of the prejudices in both women's bioi but also read Plutarch too credulously and built Aspasia into a woman who "made the house of Pericles the meetingplace for man and women, as we should say, of the higher culture . . . Aspasia's home was a salon, in the best sense of the word." In such a schema, Pericles must be a courtly intellectual, and his plea for the adoption of Pericles junior a sign of the high respect he held for the son's mother.52 But because Aspasia had been constructed as both a sexual partner and an intellectual, she could be put to use in male sexological literature as a kind of sex therapist or as an agency through which sex therapy could work. In a 1932 book that prefigures the work of Masters and Johnson, R. E. Money-Kyrle (1898-1980), a popularizer of Freud, declared, "Little is known of Aspasia, except that she was intelligent and much maligned. . . . I will assume, regardless of historical exactitude, that she was amiable, and that, in short, a society composed of Aspasias, however promiscuous, would be more Utopian than one composed of Bishops, however pure." The little book is a plea for the recognition "that both individual health and social progress, under present-day conditions, require a sacrifice on the part of our morality," an acknowledgement of men's Oedipal drives, and the recognition that "some of the things that we want to do but which we now think wicked, will be found not to be wicked, but to be on the contrary healthy, useful,
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and desirable. In this way frustrations will be removed and sources of aggressiveness abolished." It is suggested that "a relaxation of our sexual taboos" will help save humanity. Although the details are never specified, it is clear that intercourse at will with intelligent, "amiable" women will help man clear his clogged moral passageways. Aspasia has been essentialized.53 This tendency to see Aspasia as a refined "happy hooker" is pronounced in major recent novels about her. Classicist Peter Green, in Achilles His Armour, made Aspasia a seductive mother figure and tutor to Alcibiades. She is the woman for whom Pericles had divorced his wife, and a shrewd advisor as well, counseling Pericles about the Samian War and writing his epitaphioi. Aspasia makes and unmakes men, thereby leaving her not altogether beneficent mark on Greek history. A dark succubus, she violently seduces the protagonist Alcibiades, who is barely an ephebe; after achieving orgasm, "Her face returned to its normal lazy expression." This seduction is prefigured by her transformation of Pericles; as she tells the 17-year-old Alcibiades: "Till he took me he was incomplete." Green left Aspasia's origins unclear but hinted that she was a Milesian prostitute. She owns an autograph copy of Sappho's poems but instead of writing her own poetry, produces speeches for Pericles. This Aspasia has no interest in conversing with the wives of Athens.54 Aspasia blames herself for turning Alcibiades from his conservative and upright temperament to a worldview that admits ambivalence: "Sometimes I feel I'm to blame. . . . All your life now you'll have divided loyalties, doubts, hesitations." Aspasia also blames herself for the estrangement of Pericles from his legitimate sons and the scandal about Pericles and Xanthippus' wife: "I feel myself to blame over this. . . . You have not had the leisure to care for your son. . . . But I—I who was proud enough to be your equal—I should not have forgotten. . . . Sometimes I feel as weak a woman as any Athenian wife." Pericles casts Alcibiades, not Aspasia, out of his house when informed by Nicias of their love affair. Although she distinguishes herself by helping vast numbers of plague-stricken city dwellers, Aspasia believes herself to be at fault for the plague: "Because I feel responsible for what's happening. . . ,"55 Lysicles is a watchful predator, speculating that he will have access to Aspasia once the ailing Pericles is out of the way; he is cheered on by Cleon, ever the villain of the piece. Aspasia tends the slowly convalesc-
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ing man, knowing that "whether Athens won or lost the world it stood for was gone forever. . . . She had a violent nostalgia for the home she had nearly forgotten, the voices of her own countrymen. . . . 'It is too late,' she said calmly: 'I shall live and die in Athens now. I have made my choice.'" Alcibiades begs her to leave Athens after Pericles dies. Instead she stays, is courted by Lysides, perhaps helps him politically, and retires to a suburb. Green had no further use for Aspasia as a living character, but her sexual poisoning of Alcibiades works its way through his and Athens' future. The first of Alcibiades' many violent sexual encounters with his bride, Hipparete, described from the point of view of the young girl, is revolting, sickening, and agonizing. He comes to fear her honest love for him. Alcibiades beats Hipparete after having foiled her attempt to divorce him; only then do they have a fulfilling erotic encounter. The ghost of Aspasia has been exorcised temporarily. After Hipparete's death in childbirth, Alcibiades finds transient happiness in the arms of the Spartan queen, Timaea, in a doublet of the episodes with Aspasia: ' 'it was as if she was burning the flesh away from his bones. . . . As time went on he poured out all his doubts and fears, exposing himself the more mercilessly as his own sense of degradation grew deeper.'' Timaea dresses up and applies cosmetics for him, which deeds awaken a "twenty-year-old memory." She knows that he had desired her because she was a shadow out of his past, she looked like or reminded him of Aspasia. Aspasia, then, looms like a vampire over Alcibiades and Athens. And the hetaira Timandra, who accompanies him on his final flight and survives him, looks curiously like Aspasia.56 Madelon Dimont's 1972 novel, Darling Pericles, specifically made Aspasia a would-be courtesan, snatched up by Pericles but having guiltfree affairs with Euripides and others. This interesting personality configuration is ascribed to Aspasia's unusual upbringing by a gynophilic father; he compels his wives and concubines to expose all male infants. Aspasia's mother is conveniently dead. In search of adventure, the young woman travels to Athens with thoughts of becoming an elegant courtesan. Luckily, her first sexual experience is painless, blissful, and highly remunerative. Shortly thereafter she meets and captivates Pericles, with whom she lives a life that is bohemian on her part and austere on his. Aspasia is not particularly interested in intellectual matters, but her pointed questions inspire men to work out the problems she has raised. After Pericles' death, and while pregnant with Ly sides' child, Aspasia writes her memoirs. This is portrayed as something she
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does to occupy her time while mourning the only true love she ever had.57 For extravagant elaboration, only Taylor Caldwell's Glory and the Lightning approaches Hamerling's work of the last century. In this book, Aspasia's mother, herself apparently a concubine or courtesan, gives the infant Aspasia to Thargelia (namesake of the great Thargelia) rather than comply with her lover's command to expose the infant. Aspasia's mother has decided to give her child to be brought up as a courtesan: "Would it not indeed be better for Aspasia to be trained as an accomplished courtesan, courted and honored and loved and gifted by eminent men, than to be an imprisoned wife in dreary quarters . . . ?" Aspasia grows up to fulfil her mother's notion that women rule men from the bedroom. Despite Thargelia's best attempts to make Aspasia into a sex toy, the girl quickly displays independence of thought and an early awareness of women's plight; her tutors discover that she has the "mind of a man." Aspasia's mind develops along skeptical Ionian lines, as she learns from and then surpasses her sage instructors in medicine, law, rhetoric, and art. Caldwell's Aspasia, like Dimont's, has a blissful and orgasmic first intercourse.58 Discovering that Aspasia had taken her own lover away, Thargelia dismisses her. Branded as a transgressor, Aspasia leaves Miletus as the concubine of Ali Taliph, who abuses and thrills her at the same time. She comes to see that Persian women are badly treated and that Greek women have a better lot; when she protests her master's purchase of little girls as gifts for a rich merchant, he beats her and then they have intercourse of an "anguished sweetness." Aspasia has become a masochist, a Sadeian woman who finds delight in emotional and physical pain. She saves Ali Taliph's life in Damascus, for which he grants her her freedom.59 Meanwhile, back in Athens, Pericles yearns for such a woman as Aspasia even before meeting her: "If I do find such a woman—which is impossible, of course—she will mean more to me than my life," he states. After divorcing his crude, ugly wife, Pericles does meet his an/ma-projection in Aspasia, who now keeps a school for young ladies. Each is instantaneously attracted to the other. Soon the two have lived together several years, and Aspasia is figured as a superwoman who, unlike Hamerling's creation, embraces the twin roles of wife and mistress: "She combined the delicious arts of a courtesan, with all the rapture and ecstasy and beguilements of that condition, with the tenderness
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and devotion and solicitude of a beloved wife. But careful, as always, having been sedulously taught by Thargelia, never to bore him, never to engage in tedious conversation of complaint, and never give herself totally to any human creature." Aspasia is aware of the inequities of Athenian law but prefers to be seen as Pericles' mistress rather than to risk the political hazards attendant upon repeal of the citizenship law.60 Aspasia attempts to bring together the youths of Athens with the maidens of her school so that honest courtship between equals can develop, but this is misinterpreted by Athens' elders, and rumors grow. Despite her precarious situation, Aspasia remains idealistic, lecturing that "The true purpose of education . . . is to enlarge the soul, to widen the mind, to stimulate wonder." Her confidante is a physician, Helena, who also advises Pericles. Helena delivers Aspasia's son; after the birth, Aspasia lives "almost always" in Pericles' house. Caldwell's Aspasia is less involved in Athenian politics than are her other manifestations in fiction, and prefers instead to work for equality between the sexes in love relationships by holding her school. Aspasia is arrested and imprisoned before the impiety trial, and Helena is killed by a mob after visiting the now-graying beauty—perhaps a prefiguration on Caldwell's part of the death of Hypatia. The reasons for the imprisonment are the accusation by Glaucon's (invented) daughter that she had been raped in Aspasia's school, slanders by a disaffected former teacher in the school, and the accusation of impiety. Pericles' plea for Aspasia makes her a symbol of Athenian free thought: "She is a symbol to you . . . of what awaits us if our enemies prevail. They sought her death, not because she has done any wrong, but because she is innocent and fearless and will not bend before tyranny and lies."61 The novel ends with a three-page Prologue. In it, the reader is told of Pericles' death in Aspasia's arms and of her subsequent retirement from her school and devotion to her son's education. Caldwell does not pursue Aspasia's life after Pericles except to note that "Her only dim consolation . . . was when she looked up at the white and glory of the acropolis at sunset. . . . It was the crown of Athens and it seemed to her that it was deathless and that men would always remember what stood there and bow their heads in wonder and reverence." Contrary to the statement in the epitaphios Thucydides attributes to Pericles, which claimed that the city was not walls, but men, Aspasia finds that the buildings are the city and that a city is reconstituted in the minds of men by the sight of its buildings. Aspasia looks forward on the novel's last
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page to joining Pericles "and all the others who had made Athens glorious."62 Twentieth-century novels by women tend to render Aspasia both as an explicitly willing sexual partner and an objectified love object for men. Dimont and Caldwell emphasize that a woman could not fairly achieve status or security without a mate in male-dominated ancient Greece. Dimont downplays the hazards of a woman's life at this time—as the dustjacket for the novel says, Aspasia was a "courtesan, sexy bluestocking mistress and only love of the great Athenian statesman, Pericles. . . . He ruled Athens at its most glorious. And she ruled him." On the other hand, Caldwell paints an unglamorized picture of prostitution and men's use of females as sexual fodder, at the same time showing Aspasia taking pleasure occasionally in being sexually used, and abused, by her Persian lover. Like Hamerling, Caldwell ascribes great learnedness to the Milesian but directs this learnedness almost exclusively to Aspasia's work on behalf of her students. And Caldwell, like Savage Landor and Linton, gives Aspasia a woman friend; other novelists make her more or less bereft of close female companionship. Green also shows sadomasochism in Aspasia's sexual relationships, but she is the one inflicting the pain and deforming the psyche of her partner, Alcibiades. Twentieth-century historiographers and novelists for the most part have continued to elaborate the Plutarchan scenario. Pericles' life and the Golden Age of Athens are the backdrop; except for Gore Vidal's brief mention of Aspasia's old age in his novel Creation, there is no interest in writing about Aspasia's own life post-Pericles.6S
Picturing Aspasia Aspasia makes her sole appearance in twentieth-century visual art in Judy Chicago's controversial and radical work, The Dinner Party (Figure 5.6). A collaborative project that ultimately involved several hundred persons from the time Chicago first envisioned it in the early 1970s until its first exhibition in 1979, this sculpture consists of three dinner tables, placed so as to form an equilateral triangle, set with oversized individual plates, silverware, goblets, and embroidered cloths and runners for thirty-nine female guests, divine and human. "These guests . . . have all been transformed in The Dinner Party into symbolic
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Figure 5.6. Table, The Dinner Party. Mixed media. Judy Chicago, 1979. Photo by Donald Woodman. Courtesy of Through the Flower Foundation.
images—images that stand for the whole range of women's achievements and yet also embody women's containment. . . . The images on the plates are not literal, but rather a blending of historical facts, iconographical sources, symbolic meanings, and imagination." The table stands on a "Heritage Floor" painted with the names of "999 Women of Achievement," and the floor itself also makes a statement about women's condition. In this work, Chicago invited into history Western women who have been neglected or ignored by the male consciousness, or who, when they have entered history, have been deprived of the company of other women.64 Aspasia's plate (Figure 5.7) is set at the first table, which begins "with pre-history and ends with the point in time when Greco-Roman culture was diminishing." Hers is the eleventh plate on the table, between Sappho's and Boudicca's. The imaginative, idealizing, and synthetic nature of Chicago's vivid description of Aspasia makes the Milesian a fit forerunner of American feminists who espoused "free love"
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and intellectual and political liberty; moreover, she is far less selfish than Dimont's contemporaneous, brainy Cosmo girl. Chicago's creation also harmonizes with previous literary catalogues of women and with medallion books, but this time we see the catalogue in a nonanthropomorphic form.65 But the actual place setting suggests a less sanguine story. For Aspasia, Chicago chose earth tones, hues less vivid than Sappho's. The poet's palette is floral and Aegean blue, and a Doric temple—a holy place—is worked on her runner: the "burst of color . . . stands for the last burst of unimpeded female creativity." The vase motifs on Aspasia's runner and the runner's drapery and jeweled brooch-like clasp identify Aspasia as a Greek (Figure 5.8). It is far more somberly rendered, however, than Sappho's naturalistic setting. Aspasia is enclosed visually: the drapery of her runner is pinned and held in place, and there are more emblems of mediation here than on Sappho's place setting. Aspasia's setting has motifs from vases (themselves constructed objects
Figure 5.7. Aspasia's plate, The Dinner Party. Porcelain. Judy Chicago, 1979. Photo by Donald Woodman. Courtesy of Through the Flower Foundation.
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Figure 5.8. Aspasia's place setting, The Dinner Party. Mixed media. Judy Chicago, 1979. Photo by Donald Woodman. Courtesy of Through the Flower Foundation.
that contain food and drink) and drapery, which evokes body-concealing clothing, but there is no entire garment, no complete vase. The impression is one of containment and fracture. Chicago's Aspasia, who appears not quite two centuries after the democratic revolutions in France and the United States, is a granddaughter of Bouliar's enclosed and immobilized Aspasia. This most recent representation of Aspasia refuses to portray her life
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in conventional narrative form. In its way, it asserts our right to aporia (perplexity) about what that life might have been like. By representing the thirty-nine women symbolically and even reductively, Chicago asserts that in some sense we are unable to write conventional narratives about many women of the past. We may never know the truth about Aspasia, but our greatest insights may come from deciding what is false.
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Afterword
"You've taken away our image of Aspasia and have shown it to be a construct!" exclaimed a classicist after hearing me speak on this topic. ' 'What have you given us back?'' The fear of a vacuum is very real. As Michele Le Doeuff said of de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, many women fear de Beauvoir's book "not because it calls on us to give up a happiness we have but because it does not promise the happiness we lack."1 Now that the prisoner has been freed from her historical tradition, can we ever know who was in the cell? Who was, who is that Other? I think we can do no better than distinguish what is provable from what is not and what is knowable from what is not. This having been done, we can say remarkably little about Aspasia of Miletus. One bricolage we might use in order to form a substantive, positive image of Aspasia would claim, on the sheer weight of the tradition, that if Aspasia was not a madam, a politician, a philosopher, or a saloniere, at least she acted or spoke so memorably that men of her day and later reacted strongly to her; their reaction formation is what survives. This, however, is not to talk about her but again, as always, about men. Did her identification as an intelligent and powerful whore immediately make Aspasia into a floating signifier, so that she and her sexualized intellect are always already simply and simplistically Everywoman and No Woman in patriarchy? It is easy, but not enough, to say that like so many gifted women, Aspasia and her achievements were overshadowed, appropriated, and misunderstood by the men she knew and by masculinist developments of her bios. It is a longer task, but still not satisfying, to say that the West has needed, wanted, and created 127
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varying Aspasias since 440 B.C. When we need Aspasia to be a chaste muse and teacher, she is there; when we need a grand horizontal, she is there; when we need a protofeminist, she is there also. Recent essays refigure Aspasia in the history of rhetoric and the sophistic movement.2 Her status as the only female from classical Greece to have enjoyed a substantial bios has overloaded the mortal historical actor with a burden she is unable to bear. Because we continue to define classical Athens as a time and place of immense importance in world civilization and because we cannot help but continue to redefine classical Athens in our own image, we continue to redefine Aspasia. The present study had been no exception. Aspasia, perforce, has had to be whatever men and women of later ages perceived her to be, has had in some way to contribute to our understanding of the position of women as sexual and intellectual beings in antiquity. Because her intellect, political acumen, and sexuality were inextricably connected from almost the very start, and have contined to define her, it is the task of all successive contributors to her bios to integrate their understanding of her intellect and sexuality. I believe we must resist the impulse, however understandable, to fill in the many blanks at the same time as we remain open to the possibilities for her life. If it is not possible to precisely know her life course, perhaps it is not desirable to try. Perhaps it is more possible and more desirable to see how "Aspasia's" thought, as presented by Aeschines the Socratic, her first positive bios-grapher, may contribute to the history of consciousness, particularly of feminist consciousness. In order to map the dimensions of the aporia in which I hope we now find ourselves, we must return to that moment, created—or recorded— by Aeschines and reflected in Xenophon, in which a woman was allowed to teach. Let us situate ourselves in that moment, focus on the implications of the sayings attributed to her in these "positive" Socratica, and so begin to place Aspasia in the history of feminist epistemology. In order to do this, we must pursue the imaginary plane, the implied scenario for "Aspasia's" advice.3 Matchmakers bring together suitable partners on the basis of true reports, which the couple then test over time. In order to imagine this process, we must acknowledge the existence and interaction of a whole community—parents and kin of the prospective bride and groom, people who must know the affianced pair and be able to identify and communi-
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cate what about them would make them good for each other. Nor is this community static, for it moves through space and time, continuing even as its individual members are born, age, and die. The couple who come together because of the community and for its sake must learn how to be one another's best for the rest of their lives. To choose an "Aspasian" path is to choose community, to choose self-knowledge for one's own benefit and that of another, and to choose to see oneself as a relational self acting reciprocally in a world full of other subjects. This was the Aspasian path that Heloise vainly encouraged Abelard to follow and the path that Bouliar painted when she gave us an Aspasia who looks straight at us and invites us to know her. An Aspasian world acknowledges the subjectivity and humanity of one's partner and that partner's ability to enrich our life. Her path makes marriage a way to virtue and wisdom. Socrates was said to have chosen Xanthippe in order to practice virtue by living with a "difficult woman." On what basis did Xanthippe choose him? Did she choose him at all? When only Socrates tells the story of his marriage, or when other men tell it for the sake of illuminating the great man, we can never know Xanthippe, who has been reduced to nothing but a foil. A world that takes seriously Aspasia's advice makes possible a meaningful life for the woman and makes possible an authentic Xanthippe.4 Aspasia and Xanthippe need to be restored to the world. The fact that philosophy is figured as a masculine enterprise has kept Aspasia out of the history of philosophy, or worse, has made her a beautiful interloper. Even those who write histories of women philosophers have placed more emphasis on Aspasia's sexuality cum intellect than on the content and implications of what Aspasia supposedly said. Le Doeuff herself, who made great strides in helping us see the masculine dimensions of the philosophical enterprise, never mentions Aspasia.5 The female philosophers of Greco-Roman antiquity are, almost without exception, dutiful daughters (Cleobulina, Hypatia); mothers who teach their sons (Didymus in his catalog); or "groupies" such as Theano (wife of Pythagoras), Leontion (pupil and mistress of Epicurus), and Hipparchia (wife or mate of Crates). Each of these women, descended from or allied to an intellectual man, is, in her way, a forerunner of Heloise. Hipparchia came to know about Cynicism from her brother. Nor need this be seen as a wholly negative phenomenon, for we can be grateful that at particular times and places men allowed and encouraged the women in their lives
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to develop intellectually; this pattern would be part of the slow movement towards a feminist consciousness in the West.6 Interestingly, however, Aspasia has no known male mentor. She is no one's student and seems to have come intellectually out of nowhere. She is no Metis to Zeus, no Heloise to Abelard, no de Beauvoir to Sartre. This peculiar autochthony, hardly the one Plato makes her preach, has demanded and received various fanciful explanations from those who have woven her bios. She is said to have imitated Thargelia or to have learned from "her countrymen" Anaxagoras or Hippodamas, or in the more recent fictions of European and American novelists, to have been educated by an imaginary father or uncle; Taylor Caldwell makes a concubine mother and a madam Aspasia's mentors. Aspasia's bios searches obsessively, only to find an originator, a someone else who made Aspasia who she was. But here, Le Doeuff's notion of polygenesis allows us "to rid ourselves of the blinding mode of the master-disciple relationship."7 It is hopeless to try to write Aspasia back into the history of philosophy in its traditional masculine sense, for Aspasia categorically cannot have been a philosopher. Female, feminine, Ionian, sometimes orientalized, her main achievement will merely be to have freely chosen her own sexual partners, as Becq de Fouquieres observed over a century ago. Here the paradox enters. To write Aspasia back into the history of philosophy is to transform philosophy. If we write Aspasia, female subjectivity, and intersubjectivity back into philosophy, we also write back in the woman, variously described as a Thracian girl and a crone, who reprimanded Thales for looking at the stars at the expense of looking at his own immediate surroundings.8 And that is the danger.
Notes
Introduction 1. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 2.45.2. 2. By bios, I mean the complex made up of both Aspasia's material life to the extent that this can be recovered and her biographical tradition, or Nachleben. 3. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life (New York: Norton, 1988), especially pp. 43^7. 4. For recent discussions of what is canonical in ancient biography, see Joseph Geiger, "Cornelius Nepos and Ancient Political Biography," Historia Einzelschriften41 (1985): 10-65; and George Pesely, "Hagnon," Athenaeum 6f> n. s. fascicolo 1-2 (1989): 191-209. 5. Arnaldo Momigliano, The Development of Greek Biography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 11. 6. See chapter 5 for further discussion. 7. See Thomas J. Wiedemann, "Elachiston . . . en tois arsesi kleos: Thucydides, Women, and the Limits of Rational Analysis," Greece & Rome 30 (1983): 163-170; and John Evans, War, Women, and Children in Ancient Rome (New York: Routledge, 1991). This tendency to ignore the effects of war on women continues; see Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975). Coverage of the recent Persian Gulf war and of the Balkans crisis, however, vividly brought women's plight in war to the forefront. 8. Rosaria Munson, "Artemisia in Herodotus," Classical Antiquity 1 (April 1988): 91-106. 9. See Philip Stadter, "Pericles Among the Intellectuals," Illinois Classical Studies 16 (1991): 111-124. He seriously challenges the idea that such a circle directed by Pericles existed. 131
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10. For information on women philosophers in ancient Greece and Rome, see Jane Snyder, The Women and the Lyre: Women Writers in Classical Greece and Rome (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989).
Chapter 1 1. For a list and discussion of ancient sources for Aspasia of Miletus, see RE 2.2 (1896/1958): columns 1716-1721. (These sources will be discussed in the first four chapters.) Reports that she was born in Megara seem to derive from a misunderstanding of the notorious passage in Aristophanes' Acharnians; reports that she was a Carian prisoner of war may represent a confusion with the homonymous mistress of the younger Cyrus. 2. Milesian origin and name of father: Plut. Per 24.2 and Diodorus of Athens in schol. PL Menex. 235e = Diodorus of Athens, FGrH frag. 40. Megarian origin: Heraclid. Pont. frag. 59 Wehrli in Ath. 12.533d and Clem. Al. Strom. 124, p. 264, 22.s. Carian prisoner of war: schol. Aristid. 3.468 Bind. Confusion with Cyrus' mistress, Aspasia: Plut. Per. 24.11-12; see J. K. Davies, Athenian Propertied Families 600-300 B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 458. Union with Pericles: Cratinus Cheirons 258-259K-A. Bastard named Pericles junior: Plut. Per. 24.6, 37.5; schol. PI. Menex. 235e; Souda, s.v. Aspasia. (Souda, s.v. Perikles, states that Xanthippus and Paralus were Aspasia's children.) Union with Lysicles: schol. PI. Menex. 235e; Plut. Per. 24.6; schol. Ar. Knights 1329. Son named Poristes born to Aspasia and Lysicles: schol. Ar. Frogs 1305; schol. Thuc. 8.48.6. 3. For implications that she was a whore, see Ar. Ach. 516-539; reputed to have modeled self on Thargelia, see Plut. Per. 24.3. 4. OswynMurray, "The Greek Symposion in History," Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 6, 1981, p. 1307. 5. Peter J. Bicknell, "Axiochus Alkibiadou, Aspasia and Aspasios," Acta Classica 51 (1982): 240-250, analyzes the gravestone (IG II 2, 7394). The implications of his conclusions for Aspasia of Miletus do not disagree with the views expressed by Charles W. Fornara and Loren J. Samons II, Athens from Cleisthenes to Pericles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 162165. There are, of course, numerous other possibilities. 6. For the Delian League, see Russell Meiggs, The Athenian Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972 [reprinted with corrections 1973]). For the Greek city-states, see Raphael Sealey, A History of the Greek City States 700-338 B.C. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). For relations between Athens and Miletus, see Marcel Pierart, "Athenes et Milet, I. Tribus et demes Milesiens," Museum Helveticum 40 (1983): 1-18; and "Athenes et Milet, II. L'organisation du territoire," Museum Helveticum 42 (1985): 276-299. For a chro-
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nology of Miletus' problems in the 450s, see Hans-Joachim Gehrke, "Zur GeschichteMilets in der Mitte des 5. Jahrhunderts v. Chr.," Historia 29 (1980): 17-31. 7. For metics, see David Whitehead, The Ideology of the Athenian Metic, Cambridge Philological Society vol. 4, supp. (1977); and Raphael Sealey, "How Citizenship and the City Began in Athens," American Journal of Ancient History 8 (1983): 97-129. For discussions of citizenship, see Cynthia B. Patterson, Pericles' Citizenship Law of 451-450 B.C. (New York: Arno Press, 1981), whose views I largely adopt; see also Mogens Herman Hansen, "Demographic Reflections on the Number of Athenian Citizens 451-309 B.C.," American Journal of Ancient History 1 (1982): 172-189. For dissymmetry between citizenship for men and for women and the terms used to describe these, see Whitehead,Ideology, 60-61, andCynthiaB. Patterson, "//mAtt/faz;: The Other Athenians," Helios 13 (Fall 1986): 49-68. 8. For this explanation, see Patterson, Pericles Citizenship Law, followed by Hansen, "Demographic Reflections." A citizen was one who had been enrolled by his kinsmen into his phratry (kin-group) and deme (locality). 9. For Themistocles: see Plut. Them.\.\-2\ Frank Frost, Plutarch's Themistocles: A Historical Commentary (Princeton; N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980) 60-64; and Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, ed. Felix Jacoby, Part 3B (supp.), 328F119 (Leiden: J. J. Brill, 1954-1969). For Cleisthenes: see Hdt. 5.69. For Cimon: see Hdt. 6.39 and Plut. dm. 4 and 16. For Miltiades: see Hdt. 6.39-40. S. C. Humphreys, "The Nothoi of Kynosarges," Journal of Hellenic Studies 94 (1974): 88-95, has suggested that the motivation behind the citizenship law was to prevent aristocrats from contracting "dynastic" marriages. 10. Metics were commonly identified not by deme, but by their place of residence: "oikonen " ("dwellingin "). Thus, Aspasios' identification is that of an Athenian citizen. For a discussion of the identification of metics, see Whitehead, Ideology, 72 ff. 11. Whitehead, Ideology, 26 n. 102. 12. For membership in deme and phratry as the minimal requirements for citizenship, see Patterson, Pericles' Citizenship Law; for the lapse of Pericles' law, see Ronald S. Stroud, "Greek Inscriptions: Theozotides and the Athenian Orphans," Hesperia 40 (1971): 280-301; for the penalty for attempting to pass as a citizen, see Whitehead, Ideology, 75, citing Dem. 25.57. 13. Pericles' marriage, which Plutarch states had ended amicably, is discussed by Davies, Propertied Families, 262-263, 457, and also by Fornara and Samons, Athens from Cleisthenes to Pericles, 162-165. The main contemporary evidence that Aspasia was Pericles junior's mother is Eup. 110 K-A, discussed in chap. 2. Among those who have assumed that Aspasia was the mother of Pericles junior are W. Robert Connor, The New Politicians of Fifth-Century
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Athens (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 48 n. 25; Davies, Propertied Families, 458; and Humphreys, "Nothoi of Kynosarges," 93. Only Patterson, Pericles' Citizenship Law, observed that Aspasia's maternity is not an absolutely known fact. The chronology of Pericles junior's life is discussed by J. M. Carter, "Eighteen Years Old?" Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 14 (1967): 51-57. 14. For discussion of the historiographical problems surrounding Pericles' marriage and of the advantage derived by Pericles from his ex-wife's marriage, see Davies, Propertied Families, 262-263, 457, following J. C. Beloch, Griechische Geschichte, vol. 2, pt. 2, p. 35, (Strassburg: K. J. Truebner, 19121927); and Fornara and Samons, Athens from Cleisthenes to Pericles; they consider Pericles' 'union' with Aspasia to have been a marriage and that it could only have been politically disadvantageous. 15. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to 1870 (New York; Oxford, 1993), 222, so describes the relationship between the humanist Olimpia Morata (1526-1555) and her husband. 16. For women's legal and economic rights, see David Schaps, Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1979); and Sealey, "How Citizenship and the City Began." For the phrase "fully explicit contract," see Raphael Sealey, "On Lawful Concubinage," Classical Antiquity 3 (April 1984): 111-133. For a discussion of the negative status of concubinage, see Cynthia B. Patterson, "Those Athenian Bastards," Classical Antiquity 9 (April 1990): 40-73. 17. The classic discussion of marriage and concubinage in the fifth century is that of Hans Julius Wolff, "Marriage Law and Family Organization in Ancient Athens," Traditio 2 (1944): 43-95, esp. 85-91. See also Douglas M. MacDowell, "Bastards as Athenian Citizens," Classical Quarterly, n.s., 26 (1976): 88-91; and P. J. Rhodes,' 'Bastards as Athenian Citizens,'' Classical Quarterly, n.s., 28 (1978): 89-92. 18. For the label nothos: MacDowell, "Bastards as Athenian Citizens," 89, maintains that this label attached to children born to two citizens who had not married. See A. R. W. Harrison, The Law of Athens, vol. 1, The Family and Property (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 61-68; and Patterson, Those Athenian Bastards, for full discussion of the category nothoi. 19. Wolff, "Marriage Law," 85-91 discusses the decline in status for nothoi; his theory is adopted by Sealey, "Lawful Concubinage," 129. For discussion of the avuncular connection, see Jan Bremmer, "The Importance of the Maternal Uncle and Grandfather in Archaic and Classical Greece and Early Byzantium," ZeitschriftfuerPapyrologie undEpigraphik 50 (1983): 173-186, esp. n. 7, citing Gernet, Droit et Societe dans la Grece ancienne (Paris, 1955), pp. 19-28. It is impossible to know the relationship between Pericles junior and his uncle, the elder Alcibiades; interestingly, Bremmer notes that some sources name Pericles
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senior as the avunculus of the younger Alcibiades, presumably reflecting what was later perceived to have been a close relationship between the two (Bremmer, 181-182, n. 44, on PI. Ale. 1.122a). 20. For infant exposure and gender-specific exposure, see Cynthia B. Patterson, "Not Worth the Rearing: The Causes of Infant Exposure in Ancient Greece," Transactions of the American Philological Association 115 (1985): 103-123. (Thanks to Philip Stadter for suggesting that a daughter might have been married to another metic.) 21. Davies, Propertied Families, 458-459 points out that it is easier to understand the success of Pericles' extraordinary plea that his son be naturalized had the mother (who Davies assumes was Aspasia) been a free woman. When Euryptolemos, Pericles junior's kinsman, spoke regarding the trial of the generals at Arginusae, he made it clear that the needs of the polls outweighed any personal feelings he might entertain for his kinsman (see Xen. Hell. 1.7.16-33; at Hell. 1.7.16 and 1.7.23, Euryptolemos refers to Pericles junior as anangkaios and prosekon, respectively). For Euryptolemos' possible motives, see Martin Ostwald, From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of Law: Law, Society and Politics in Fifth-Century Athens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 442-445. 22. The trial's historicity is denied by Kenneth J. Dover, "The Freedom of the Intellectual in Greek Society," in The Greeks and their Legacy: Collected Papers (New York: Blackwell, 1988), 135-138. See the succinct remarks by F. E. Adcock in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 5, Athens 478—401, ed. J. B. Bury, S. A. Cook, and F. E. Adcock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), 478; as well as remarks on the same subject in the second edition of vol. 5, The Fifth Century B. C., ed. D. M. Lewis etal. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 368 (M. Ostwald) and 398 (D. M. Lewis). See also Guy Donnay, "La date du proces de Phidias," L'antiquite classique 37 (1968): 19-36; Jacoby, FGrH III.6. suppl. ii, 167.29; Mary Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 110; and Pesely, "Hagnon." The following scholars give some acceptance to the event: Ostwald, Popular Sovereignty, 194-196, dates the trial with Mansfeld (v. inf.) to about 438-436 B.C.; Arnold W. Gomme, A. Andrews, and K. J. Dover, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 184—189, onThuc. 2.65.4; Mario Montuori, "Aspasia of Miletus," inSocrates, An Approach (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1988), 201-226, defines the nature of Aspasia's asebeia as Medism in an uncritical literal reading of the sources. 23. See Telecleides, Hesiods 18 K-A, for the mention of Pericles' interest in Telesilla of Corinth; see also Plut. Per. 13.15 and Stadter, Commentary, ad loc. Hermippus' salutation to Pericles, "Hail, king of the satyrs" (in his Moirai 47 K-A) may or may not suggest lasciviousness, according to Joachim Schwarze,
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Die Beurteilung des Perikles durch die attische Komoedie und ihre historische und historiographische Bedeutung (Zetemata 51. Munich: Beck, 1971), 105. 24. On the remarriage of widows, see Schaps, Economic Rights, 41-42 et pass. For Lysicles, see my discussion in chap. 3. 25. Discussion of this exemption is found in Patterson, "Those Athenian Bastards." Philip Stadter observes that once legitimized, Pericles junior would have had to support his mother. For discussion of mother and son relations, see Virginia Hunter, "Women's Authority in Classical Athens: The Example of Kleoboule and Her Son (Dem. 27-29)," Echos du monde classique 33, n.s., 8 (1989): 39^18. For the position of widows, see Jan Bremmer, "The Old Women of Ancient Greece," in Sexual Asymmetry: Studies in Ancient Society, ed. Josine Blok and Peter Mason (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1987), 191-216, esp. 196-197; and 0ivind Andersen, "The Widows, the City, and Thucydides (II.45.2)," Symbolae Osloenses 42 (1987): 33^9. For discussion of the late comic mention of Pericles junior's parentage, see chap. 2 of this book; for his enfranchisement, see Plut. Per. 37. 26. For metic women's capacity to act independently of a kyrios, see Douglas M. MacDowell, The Law in Classical Athens (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), 84; see also Hunter, "Women's Authority," for discussion of Kleobule's efforts on behalf of herself and her son. For the importance of Lysicles as a prostates tou demou (leader), see Ostwald, Popular Sovereignty, 201 n. 11, and discussion. Lysicles' probable wealth is noted by Connor, New Politicians, 153, 106 n. 28. For discussion of the possibility that the "record" of Aspasia's marriage to Lysicles, and the birth of their child, Poristes, forms an apocryphal doublet of her relationship with Pericles, see chap. 3 of this book. 27. The herm is now in the Vatican Museum, Salle delle Muse, inv. 272. For a description and discussion, see Georg Lippold, Die Skulpturen des Vaticanischen Museums, vol. 3 (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1936), 8284, and pi. 14 and 15. For further discussion and bibliography, see Karl Schefold, Die Bildnisse der antiken Dichter, Redner, und Denker (Basel: Benno Schwabe, 1943); and Gisela Richter, The Portraits of the Greeks, 3 vols. (London: Phaidon, 1965). Richter's discussion of Aspasia is in vol. 1, 154—155, pi. 875-876. At vol. 1, 41, Richter suggests a fifth-century original; quotations of Richter's views on the style and on the historical Aspasia are found on p. 155. Schefold, p. 193, calls the style classicizing rather than classical. For discussion of this herm and other copies, see Brunilde S. Ridgway, The Severe Style in Greek Sculpture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), 65-68 et pass.; see also Brunilde S. Ridgway, Fifth Century Styles in Greek Sculpture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), pass. For the statue, see Paus. 1.23.1. For general discussion of the portraiture of Socrates, see Schefold, Die Bildnisse; and Reinhard Kekule von Stradonitz, "Die Bildnisse des
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Sokrates," in Abhandlungen der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophische-historische Klasse (Berlin, 1908), 1-58. 28. For the possibility that Diodorus of Athens may have seen Aspasia's grave and recorded it in a treatise on Attic gravestones, see Jacoby, FGrH 372 (Diod. Periegetes frags. 34, 35, 40).
Chapter 2 1. Unless I note otherwise, I refer to the fragments as they are edited in Poetae Comici Graeci, ed. Rudolf Kassel and Colin Austin (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1983-). Fragments from this edition are referred to as "K-A," and fragments from Kock's edition are given as "K." For a survey of what we know about Greek comedy, see Kenneth Dover, "Comedy," in Ancient Greek Literature, ed. K. J. Dover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 74—87. For the pornographic representation of women in Old Comedy, see Bella Zweig, "The Mute Nude Female Characters in Aristophanes' Plays," in Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, ed. Amy S. Richlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 74-89. For the visual representation of women, see Laura M. Stone, Costume in Aristophanic Comedy (Salem, N.H.: Ayer Company, 1984). For Aristophanic comedy, the only kind we have that is complete, see Kenneth Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972). For discussion of using comedy as a historical source, see G. E. M. de Ste Croix, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972), app. 29, 355-376. For obscene metaphors, see Jeffrey Henderson, The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). For Pericles' sexuality, see chap. 1, n. 23 and chap. 4, this book. For comic comment on his oratory and other political attributes, see Schwarze, Die Beurteilung. Particularly important fragments (in addition to those discussed here) include the following: the tag of "new Peisistratids" was assigned to Pericles and his ilk, as reported by Plut. Per. 16.1 = fr. adesp. 60K; cf. Per. 8.4, = 10K; for his looks, see Crat. Cheirons 258 K-A, and Nemesis 118 K-A. The idea that Euripides' Medea was developed with conscious sympathy for Aspasia's plight is not supportable; see H. Konishi, "Euripides' Medea and Aspasia," Liverpool Classical Monthly 11 (April 1986): 50-52, and John Wilkins, "Aspasia in Medea?," Liverpool Classical Monthly 12 (January 1987): 8-10. 2. For testimonia and the fragments of Cratinus, see PCG, vol. 4 (testimonia, 112-121). He flourished from ca. 450 to 422 B.C., wrote at least twenty-seven plays, and won nine victories. For critical appreciation of Cratinus, see Walter Ameling, "Komoedie und Politik zwischen Kratinos und Aristophanes: Das Beispiel Perikles," Quaderni Catanesi di studi classici et medievali 3 (1981):
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383-^24, esp. 390-410; Dover, Aristophanic Comedy, 210-224 et pass.; E. W. Handley, "Aristophanes' Rivals," Proceedings of the Classical Association (London) 79 (1982): 23-25; and Ralph Rosen, Old Comedy and the lambographic Tradition (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988). 3. For views on the date of Cheirons: near 443 B.C., see Schwarze, Die Beurteilung, 60-61; close to 430 B.C. See Harold Mattingly, "Poets and Politicians in Fifth-Century Greece," in Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean in Ancient History and Prehistory, ed. K. H. Kinzl (New York: Walter de Gruyer, 1971), 241. Other plays that may satirize Aspasia and/or Pericles but cannot be certainly claimed to do so are the Thrattai, Nemesis, Ploutoi, Drapetides, and Dionysalexandros; see Schwarze and K-A ad loc. 4. See especially 255, 256, 258, 259, 264 K-A; for discussion see J. Th. M. F. Pieters, "Eschyle et la Comedie," in Miscellanea tragica in honorem J. C. Kamerbeek, ed. J. M. Bremer, S. L. Radt, and C. J. Ruijgh (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1976), 249-269. 5. For discussion of the fragment of Philemon's Adelphoi, the play that attributed this innovation to Solon, see Madeleine Henry, "The Edible Woman: Athenaeus's Concept of the Pornographic," in Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, ed. Richlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 261-263. 6. For parabaseis, see Thomas Hubbard, Aristophanes and the Intertextual Parabasis (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991). For discussion of 258 and 259 K-A, see Theodor Bergk, Commentationum de reliquiis comoediae Atticae antiquae libri duo, 2 vols. (Leipzig: F. Koehler, 1838); and Schwarze, Die Beurteilung; FCG; and PCG ad loc. As for the lack of necessity for these lines to correspond to other events or characters in the play, compare the random abuses of Cleon, Kynna, and Salabaccho, and Ariphrades and unnamed whores, made by the chorus in Aristophanes' Knights and Wasps, discussed below. 7. For a discussion of stasis as a gendered concept, see Nicole Loraux, "La cite, 1'historien, les femmes," Pallas 32 (1985): 7-39, esp. 16-39. 8. Bergk, Commentationum, vol. 1, 238, took "him" (hoi at line 1 of 259 K-A) to refer back to Chronos, indicating that Aspasia and Pericles shared the same father. This would place Aspasia and Pericles on the same genealogical level, so to speak. Although grammatically possible, his interpretation is less attractive than making the referent of the reflexive particle hoi the "very great tyrant." This reading removes the incestuous association between Pericles and Aspasia—which is intrusive and unnecessary—and adds the dimensions that Aspasia's father was unknown and that her mother, Katapygosyne, mates indiscriminately. For discussion of katapygosyne and related words, see J. Henderson, Maculate Muse 213 et pass. 9. The fact that Aspasia is named in comedy has been considered evidence that she was an actual prostitute, on the grounds that respectable women were
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not named in public discourse. For discussion of the problems associated with women being named in Greek literature, see Alan H. Sommerstein, ' 'The Naming of Women in Greek and Roman Comedy," Quaderni di storia 11 (1980): 393^408; he follows and affirms arguments on the subject made by David Schaps, "The Woman Least Mentioned: Etiquette and Women's Names," Classical Quarterly 27 (1977): 323-330. But, as Sommerstein's own compilation of sources shows, women were mentioned in both Old and New Comedy if they were or were "believed by the speaker to be, a slave, a freedwoman, a hetaira, or . . . someone's concubine" (396; see also 406-407). Thus, if the general rule of "no mention of respectable women" holds true, Aspasia could have been mentioned in the sources solely because she was not a gyne gamete, a wedded wife. Sommerstein points out that, in apparent violation of the "rule," Xenophon allowed Socrates' wife, Xanthippe, to be mentioned (408-^M)9); he notes that Xanthippe, although certainly a gyne gamete, was exceptional and notorious. I merely claim here that we are not required to believe Aspasia was a whore because a comic poet says she was, or even because she was mentioned in comedy. It absolutely does not follow that, just because a label was given to someone by a comic poet—be that label whore, pederast, bribe-taker, or drinker of bathwater—that the charge was true. Aspasia was not called aporne (whore) in the comic sources until late in the fifth century, when it is entirely possible that she was dead. The case of another woman close to a powerful man may help strengthen the skepticism I wish to inject into the common belief that Aspasia was a whore: Cimon's sister, Elpinike, was named and insulted by Eupolis in his Poleis (221 K-A, from Plut. Cim. 15.3; cited as 208K in Sommerstein, ' 'Naming of Women," 399). She probably was dead by the time the Poleis was produced in the late 420s. In other words, I believe that Aspasia's reputation as a whore is a "factoid," impossible to prove or disprove, but certainly a part of her bios to be looked upon with great suspicion. 10. For perceptive analyses of the comic critique of women and the state, see Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ed., Aristophane: Les femmes et la cite. Les cahiers de Fontenay 17 (December 1985). For discussion of the association of prostitutes with destruction and corruption, see Madeleine Henry, Menander's Courtesans and the Greek Comic Tradition (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1985), esp. 28-31. For the possibilities of costuming and staging feminized representations of abstract personifications, see L. Stone, Costume; and Zweig,' 'Mute Nude Female Characters,' ' For the metaphoric function of sexualities and sexual relations in literature, see Mark Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 11. For testimonia, summary of arguments about dating, and fragments of the Dionysalexandros, see i K-A and fragments 9-51 K-A. Mattingly, "Poets and Politicians," would date the work to 440-439 B.C.; others, to 430^29 B.C. The papyrus hypothesis (i K-A, = POxy 663) states that Pericles is here reviled as a
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warmonger (lines 44-48), which statement has inspired largely fruitless speculation about Pericles' role. Ariane Tatti, "Le Dionysalexandros de Cratinos," Metis 1 (1986): 325-332, esp. 327, recounts scholarly efforts to reconcile the goddess' gifts with the policies and personality of Pericles. E. W. Handley, "POxy 2806: A Fragment of Cratinus?" Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 29 (1982): 109-117, and pi. 6 and 7, offers new reasons to assign POxy 2806 to this play by suggesting allusions to Pericles in both it and POxy 663. 12. Fragments 114—127 K-A. The play has been variously dated: to 431 B.C. by K-A at vol. 4, p. 179, regarding testimonia i and ii, and at vol. 4, p. 182 regarding 118 K~A, and more generally to the last few years of Pericles' life by Mattingly, "Poets and Politicians," 241. Schwarze, Die Beurteilung, 33, 3740, lists these possible interpretations: Nemesis is Aspasia, Helen is Pericles junior, and the Egg is the Megarian decree. Ameling, "Komoedie und Politik," 405-406, offers the interpretation that the Egg is war. 13. For the three other Cratinan plays that satirize Pericles but for which there is no evidence that Aspasia was also mentioned, see the fragments of the Drapetides, Thrattai, and Ploutoi. 14. For testimonia and fragments of Eupolis, see K-A vol. 5. Eupolis' first production was the Prospaltians in 429 B.C.; he appears to have died in 411 B.C. He produced at least nineteen comedies and won at least three victories. 15. For the war theme, see 260 K-A. Aspasia is called Helen at 267 K-A = schol. PI. Menex. 235e. 16. Sanitization of Heracles is most evident in Prodicus' Choice of Heracles = Xen. Mem. 1.21-23. 17. For discussion on the lack of integration of 267 K-A with the rest of the play, see Schwarze, Die Beurteilung, 123. For pederastic and sympotic themes, see Peter Reuter, "Fragmente der Poleis und Baptai des Eupolis" (Ph.D. diss., Martin Luther Universitaet, 1979), 17 n. 78. For general discussion of Rhodia in comedy, see Sommerstein, ' 'Naming of Women''; for the satirization of Rhodia in the Philoi, see 295 K-A.; cf. references to her in Eup. Autolycus 53, 58 K-A, and in Poleis 232 K-A. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff contends that in Philoi 286 K-A a personified Demos visited a procuress, but this seems fanciful, and no connection with Aspasia can be made at this time. "Observationes criticae in comoedias Graecas selectas,'' (Ph.D. diss., Berlin, 1870), 50, quoted K-A ad loc. 18. For fragments of the Marikas, see 192-217 K-A. For the politician Hyperbolus as Marikas, see 192 K-A, lines 149-150; Albio Cassio, "Old Persian Marika-, Eupolis Marikas and Aristophanes Knights," Classical Quarterly 35 (1985): 38^2; and J. D. Morgan, "MAPIKA2," Classical Quarterly, n.s., 2 (1986): 529-531 and 208 K-A. For the divided chorus, see 192 K-A, lines 29 and 120. For the Spartans, see 192 K-A, line 122. For Cleon, see 192 K-A, line 135. For Nicias, see 193 K-A.
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19. K-A (vol. 3, 413) have analyzed lines 166 and 170 of frag. 192 as iambic trimeters, a common dialogue meter. 20. The famous passage in Ar. Ach. will be discussed presently. 21. Hyperbolus' mother was also insulted in the Marikas (209 K-A) and may have appeared on stage. The comic poet Hermippus (v. infra) also reviles Hyperbolus' mother (in the Artopolides, produced in 420 or 419 B.C. See K-A vol. 5, 565; the evidence of 8-10 K-A is not conclusive). Aristophanes makes her a butt in his Clouds (lines 551-552) and Thesmophoriazousae (line 840). The Aristophanic plays mentioned her in the parabasis; M. Whittaker, "The Comic Fragments in Their Relation to the Structure of Old Attic Comedy," Classical Quarterly 29 (1935): 185, suggests that Marikas 209 K-A, wherein Hyperbolus' mother is mentioned, is also a choral passage. For older women in comedy, see Jeffrey Henderson, "Older Women in Attic Old Comedy," Transactions of the American Philological Association 117 (1987): 105-129. 22. Testimonia, fragments (99-146), and arguments about date are found in K-A, vol. 5. For the date of the Demes (412 B.C.), see K-A, vol. 5, 343, following Geissler; for the catabatic plot, see K-A, testimonia i. ii, vi; for other remarks on plot, see K-A, vol. 5, 343. On Eupolis' fondness for old jokes, see Ameling, "Komoedie und Politik," 423; cf. Ar. Clouds 553-556, and Plut. Cim. 15; that reference to Cimon and Elpinike having sex = Poleis, 221 K-A (produced 422 B.C.). For praise of Pericles' oratory, see 102 K-A; cf. Jean Claude Carriere, Le carnaval et la politique: Une introduction a la Comedie Grecque suivie d'un choix defragments, Annales litteraires de 1'Universite de Besancon, vol. 26 (Paris: Centre de Recherches d'Histoire Ancienne, 1979), 240, 241. 23. For Hermippus, see K-A, vol. 5, 561-604. For Plutarch's use of Hermippus in his Life of Pericles, see also Stadter, ad loc. 24. This insult to a woman in the Artopolides is frag. 9 K-A; Bergk, Commentationum, 314, thinks this was Hyperbolus' mother. Hermippus may also have invented the name Nothippus (see his Moirai 46 K-A), a mock-aristocratic name whose first part is the root of nothos, and has the aristocratic termination -ippus (cf. Pericles' son's name, Xanthippus). 25. In addition to previously cited references, see the following for discussions of women in Aristophanic comedy: Paul D. Epstein, "The Marriage of Peisthetairos to Basileia in the Birds of Aristophanes," Dionysius 5 (December 1981): 5-28; S. C. Humphreys, The Family, Women, and Death: Comparative Studies (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1983), and Anthropology and the Greeks (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Helene P. Foley, "The 'Female Intruder' Reconsidered: Women in Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae," Classical Philology 77 (1982): 1-21. Some commentators miss the point; for example, Epstein, in his otherwise admirable essay on subjectivity and objectivity in Aristophanes' Birds, fails utterly to see the importance of gender
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in Peisthetairos' interactions with Iris and Basileia, both of whom Peisthetairos deals with by penetration, real or threatened. Kenneth McLeish, in The Theatre of Aristophanes (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), sees but does not understand the function of "putting women in their place" in the dynamics of Aristophanic bawdy. I have not been able to see, Aristophanes and Women by Lauren Taaffe (London: Routledge 1994). 26. For a summary of earlier scholarship on the historical problems of this passage, see Schwarze, Die Beurteilung, 136, including the important contributions of H. Mueller-Struebing, J. van Leeuwen, and Friedrich Jacoby; recent contributions to the questions have been made by Douglas M. MacDowell, "The Nature of Aristophanes' Akharnians," Greece & Rome 30 (October 1983): 143-162; and David Sansone, "The Date of Herodotus' Publication," Illinois Classical Studies 10 (1985): 1—9. For views that Aspasia's role in the outbreak of the war is pure fantasy and a comic topos, see Donald Kagan, The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969), 255-256, and Ameling, "Komoedie und Politik," 411. The Megarian decree to which the passage refers is itself the subject of much controversy; to try to interpret the Acharnians passage in light of it is to aim for a moving target. For a summary of views on this decree, see Ste. Croix, Origins of the Peloponnesian War, 241 ff. 27. As for Aspasia as Helen, consider Ann Bergren's remark that all women are Helens. For Duris' allegation, see Plut. Per. 24.2 and Stadter ad loc. Also see FGrH 76, F65 (Duris of Samos); Ste. Croix, Origins of the Peloponnesian War, 234 ff.; and Robert B. Kebric, In the Shadow ofMacedon: Duris of Samos, Historia Einzelschrift, vol. 29 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1977). 28. For another comic parody of Herodotus, see B. Welsh, "The Chorus of Aristophanes' Babylonians," Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 24 (1983): 137-150. For analysis of laikastriai and related words, see H. D. Jocelyn, "A Greek Indecency and Its Students: AAIKAZEIN," Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, 206, n.s., 26 (1980): 12-66. For the view that this scene makes whores both responsible for the war and emblematic of the state to which war reduces decent people, see Henry, Menander's Courtesans, 18-19, and Eva C. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 354. 29. For whores as Aristophanic symbols of destruction, death, and intellectual and political corruption, see Henry, Menander's Courtesans, 13-31. For the edenic aspect of Golden Age comedy, which is partly characterized by men's unlimited access to food and pretty women, see Henry, "The Edible Woman," 250-268. 30. For comment on this play, see Henry, Menander's Courtesans, 21-22 and Zweig, "Mute Nude Female Characters." It is difficult to know why Aristophanes turned aside from mentioning Aspasia in the Peace; perhaps he men-
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tioned her in the Acharnians mainly in the course of parodying Herodotus. In the Peace, he basically assigned a different main cause to the war. 31. Aristophanes repeated the Wasps passage with slight variations in the parabasis of the Peace, produced in 421 B.C. (lines 748-760). For Callias (fl. ca. 446-430 B.C.), see K-A, vol. 4, 38-53. For additional comment on Callias' obscure Pedetai ("Men in Fetters") *21 K-A = schol. PI. Menex. 235e, see the next chapter. Schwarze's literalist objection to Callias' statement (namely, that Pericles surely knew how to speak by the time he met Aspasia!) completely misses the point (Die Beurteilung, 92). The fact that important men— Melanthius, Socrates, Euripides, Acestor, and Lampon—were mocked in the Pedetai provides Barbara Ehlers, Eine vorplatonische Deutung des sokratischen Eros: der Dialog Aspasia des Sokratikers Aischines (Munich: Beck, 1966), 2930, with backhanded evidence of Aspasia's actual importance as Pericles' mentor.
Chapter 3 1. The exclusion of women from early Greek theological/philosophical speculation is discussed by Marilyn B. (Arthur) Katz, "Dream of a World Without Women: Poetics and the Circles of Order in the Theogony Prooemium," Arethusa 16 (1983): 97-116. With the exception of Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, scholars have ignored Aspasia's important role in fourth-century and later Greco-Roman philosophical discourse; Ehlers herself did not consider the general function of women characters in Socratic discourse. See the article by Ann L. T. Bergren, "Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought," Arethusa 16 (1983):69-95. Although it is not her main purpose, Snyder, Woman and the Lyre, more successfully discusses women's contributions to Greek science and philosophy than do Mary Ellen Waith, A History of Women Philosophers. Vol. 1: 600 B.c.-SOO A.D. (Boston and Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987); or Margaret Alic, Hypatia's Heritage: A History of Women in Science from Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), in their general historical surveys. Feminist scholarship has begun to deal with the absence or presence of actual women in philosophy and science in the medieval, Renaissance, and modern periods, as well as with the metaphorization of gender by these pursuits. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Ruth Bleier, ed., Feminist Approaches to Science (Elmsford, New York: Pergamon, 1986). Michele Le Doeuff, Hipparchia's Choice: an Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc. trans. Trista Selous (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); originally published as L'etude et
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le Rouet n.p.: Les Editions du Seuil, 1989). On p. 166 Lc Docuff claims that "the specific property of philosophical thought is regarded as being that it entirely understands itself." 2. For a view of Aspasia as phallic signifier, see H. D. Rankin, Antisthenes Sokratikos (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1986), 8: ". . . Aspasia is represented as Pericles'intellectual superior . . . ." Xanthippe, wife of Socrates, could also be considered a phallic signifier; see Leonard Woodbury, "Socrates and the Daughter of Aristides," Phoenix 27 (1973): 7-25, esp. 7 n. 1. Note the observation by Bergren, "Language and the Female," 78: ". . . woman is Helen." For a rewriting of Xanthippe's and other women's reputations, see Teri Marsh, "The (Other) Maiden's Tale," in Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, ed. Amy S. Richlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 269-284. 3. For an attempt to chronologize some of the imagery discussed in this chapter, see Woodbury, "Socrates and the Daughter of Aristides." 4. For his biographical tradition in antiquity, the best source is D.L. 1.15; 6.1-19. For the fragments, see Antisthenis Fragmenta, ed. Fernanda Caizzi (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Cisalpino, 1966; and Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae, ed. Gabriele Giannantoni, vol. 2 (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1990). For the best recent account of his philosophy, see Rankin, Antisthenes Sokratikos. Rankin, p. 6, sees unimportance as Antisthenes' salvation; at p. 119, he notes that Antisthenes was the only Socratic who did not become part of the diaspora. 5. For Antisthenes' Thracian mother, see D.L. 6.1; for his enfranchisement, see Sayre, cited in Rankin, Antisthenes Sokratikos, 5. 6. For the view that Socrates was anti-Periclean, and that Antisthenes was jealous of Pericles junior, see Rankin, Antisthenes Sokratikos, 8-9. Quotations in this paragraph are from pp. 8 and 9, respectively. Stadter, "Pericles Among the Intellectuals," used Plato's treatment of Pericles' relationship with his sons as evidence that Pericles was not an "intellectual." 7. For ancient traditions about his work, see D.L. 6.15; vol. 10 contained seven dialogues, of which one was titled "Menexenos" or "On Rule." 8. On Antisthenes' hardihood: the remark ho ponos agathon ("toil is a good thing") is attributed to him (D.L. 6.2); for the remark on women: see D.L. 6.3; on luxury: see D.L. 6.9. For Antisthenes' views on arete, see Rankin, Antisthenes Sokratikos, chap. 5, 101-134, for discussion. For Antisthenes' view that arete is the same for both sexes: see D.L. 6.12. 9. For discussion of which battle was meant, see Rankin, Antisthenes Sokratikos, 3, and Thuc. 4.89-90 and commentary. 10. Caizzi assigns only two fragments to the Aspasia (C34, 35, from Ath. 5.220d and 13.589e, respectively). For more discussion, see Aeschines von Sphettos: Studien zur Literaturgeschichte der Sokratiker, ed. Heinrich Dittmar, Philologische Untersuchungen 21 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1912; reprint, New York:
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Arno Press, 1976), 299-300. D.L. refers to the dialogue at 6.16 in the list of Antisthenes' works. 11. For a plausible reconstruction of Antisthenes' dialogue, Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, 30-33. Ehlers, who discusses the unfavorable representation of Aspasia by Antisthenes, notes the fragments' references to Aspasia's relationship with Pericles. Her use of Plut. Per. 24 implies she accepts this as Antisthenean. Ehlers also suggests that Heraclides Ponticus (in Ath. 12.533cd) derived some of the material in his Peri Hedones ("On Pleasure") from Antisthenes' dialogue (see Aeschines von Sphettos, 17 nn. 56-57). For Heraclides Ponticus, see chap. 4 of this book; H. B. Gottschalk, Heraclides of Pontus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), and Die Schule des Aristoteles: Texts und Kommentar, 2d ed. (Basel: Schwabe, 1969). 12. Frag. 34Caizzi = Ath. 5.220d-eandfrag. 35 Caizzi = Ath. 13.589eare not analyzed by David Halperin in his otherwise comprehensive discussion of the relationship between citizenship and the male body, ' 'The Democratic Body: Prostitution and Citizenship in Classical Athens," in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. (New York: Routledge, 1990), 88-112. For Pericles and Elpinike: see Ath. 13.589e; Plut. Per. 32. 13. For the necessity to glean Antisthenes' thought: see Rankin, Antisthenes Sokratikos, 29; for his view of autarkeia, ibid., Ill; for the lack of a female subject, ibid., 104-105. It would be far afield here but worthwhile to discuss the ways in which Antisthenes, like other philosophers, used kinship metaphors to discuss virtue, logic, and semantics (see ibid., 30 ff., on oikeios/allotrios logos): do these sentiments express a deeply felt dependence on kinship as the primary metaphor (as proposed by M. Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty) or do they attempt to redefine kinship by wresting its meaning and importance from traditional blood ties? 14. For recent positive and negative analyses, respectively, of Plato's views on women in the Republic, see Natalie Harris Bluestone, Plato's Republic and Modern Myths of Gender (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), and Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). For a negative analysis of his general view of women, see Page DuBois, Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), chap. 8. I consider Diotima, the famous priestess/instructress of the Symposium, to be ahistorical, or at least of dubious historicity. 15. For debates on the authenticity of the dialogue, see Gerard Ledger, Recounting Plato: A Computer Analysis of Plato's Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 163-164; see also 17, this chapter. For the date of composition, see Ledger, Re-counting Plato, 210-212. Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, 95, 123, and 126, believed Plato composed the dialogue after Aeschines' Aspasia. Menexenus himself has been variously identified as both a grandson of Pericles,
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Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, trans. Alan Sheridan fCambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986], 462 n. 250; originally published as L'invention d'Athenes: Histoire de I'oraison funebre dans le ' 'cite classique'' [n.p.: Mouton, 1981], based on a suggestion by Vidal-Naquet and following Davies, Propertied Families, 11811, pp. 456-457, and Lysis 207b8-cl); and as a son of Socrates (D.L. 2.26 gave Menexenus as the name of one of Socrates' sons). For the ages, see Ap. 34d and Phd. 116b. 16. For additional discussion of the Menexenus as parody of official polis tradition, see Rosalind Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens, Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture 18 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chap. 4; unfortunately, she ignores Aspasia and, in fact, simply attributes the entire speech to Socrates (217-218). 17. For a history of arguments on the authenticity of the Menexenus, see Edmund Bloedow, "Aspasia and the 'Mystery' of the Menexenos," Wiener Studien, n. F. 9 (1975): 32-48, with references to the work of Newiger (1964); and Loraux, Invention of Athens, 460 n. 225; at p. 94, Loraux calls it genuine but ironic. For references to the dialogue's reputation in antiquity as a genuine encomium, see Loraux, Invention of Athens, 326 n. 419, 410 n. 35, 465 n. 293. Also cf. Cic. Oral. 151; the Menexenus was repeatedly recited in antiquity. During its period of fame as a sincere praise of Athenian democracy, the dialogue formed part of the classical curriculum in Europe in the late nineteenth century, as the profusion of school texts and dissertations suggests. Loraux, 5 and 343 n. 27, cites some references to nonironic readings of the dialogue; the process of nonironic readings began in the Hellenistic period. To her listing should be added that of Ivo Bruns, Frauenemancipation in Athen: Ein Beitrag zur attischen Kulturgeschichte des fuenften und vierten Jahrhunderts (Kiel: Schmidt and Klavnig, 1900), see chap. 5 below for further discussion. 18. For the view that the Menexenus is more real than the real epitaphioi, see Loraux, Invention of Athens, 141; for the view that it is the most powerful of the epitaphioi, see ibid., 241 (in a seeming echo of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On the Style of Demosthenes 1027). For a view of it as exorcism of political oration, see Loraux, ibid., 312. For the view that the Timaeus, Critias, and Cratylus are additional ' 'responses'' by Plato to issues he raised in the Menexenus, see ibid., 296-304. On irony as "the trope of choice in transitional historical periods," see Naomi Schor, "Fetishism and its Ironies," Nineteenth-Century French Studies 17 (Fall-Winter 1988-1989): 89-97, quote on 95. 19. Loraux, Invention of Athens, 312, identified Socrates as the one who attacked the funeral oration; she also claims (p. 317), in a further replication of the Platonic strategy of substitution, that Plato made Socrates confront Pericles in both the Symposium and the Menexenus. That Socrates did this is not entirely certain, but he clearly did so, if at all, by attacking substitutes for Pericles. Bloedow, "Aspasia," 32, identifies Aspasia with Pericles. In a similar elision
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of women characters into other characters, David Halperin, "Why Is Diotima a Woman?" 113-151, in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), 122, claims that ". . . Plato seems to be less interested in her [Aspasia] than in her relations with Pericles"; and (p. 124) that ". . . Diotima may be a stand-in for Aeschines' Aspasia." 20. I do not claim that mine is the only way to look at the dialogue, but I do claim that it is an important way and one that has been sadly neglected. In the following discussion I will not write at length about such topics as those Loraux, Bloedow, and others so amply treated (e.g., the Menexenus' violent distortions of historical events and chronology); on these, see Loraux, Invention of Athens, 314 et pass., which distortions also form part of the Platonic critique. The Menexenus' commentary on the "woman in power" theme of comedy and comedy's critique of certain epitaphian topoi are briefly alluded to by Loraux, 308-309, 323; Loraux refers to Plato's particular debt to Aristophanes on p. 311. 21. On the literary meaning of placing prostitutes in such settings, see Charles Bernheimer, Figures of III Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 40. 22. The Menexenus' critique of interchangeability is briefly mentioned by Loraux, Invention of Athens, 314, 461 n. 237. 23. Cf. Aristophanes' similarly disparaging use of synkollan at Clouds 446 and Wasps 1041; contrast PI. Ti. 43a2; Aesch. Supp. 310, Libation Bearers 542; Soph. frag. 867. Loraux' observation that in this oration the polis assumes every important role (re: 236d6-7, 249b7-c3) also supports my view that the polis and she who praises it are overdetermined (Invention of Athens, 25). 24. Aspasia as "blessed" (249d3-5), see Loraux, Invention of Athens, 312, on the ironic meanings of makarios in Plato; the definition of the epitaphios as but one logos among other logoi (Menex. 249d4—5) effectively denied the genre's uniqueness. 25. This way of mentioning an individual is not the conversational norm; one should contrast the manner in which Aspasia was first mentioned with the method used in Ap. 20e8-21a3. There, Socrates mentioned Chaerephon and then gave an example of how he behaved and what kind of person he was; no example of Aspasia's character or behavior is given here. Thomas, Oral Tradition, ch. 1 and 4, notes that in the fourth century, testimony was commonly given in the form used in Plato's Apology. 26. Aspasia uses the same verb to describe this encounter as Menexenus had used when he stated, "I have met her many times." The verb entynchanein has the general meaning of chance encounter, but it was also a euphemism for sexual intercourse; Plut. Sol. 20.3 uses the verb in this sense in an apparent quotation of Solonian law. 27. For further discussion of the epitaphios and the Other, see Loraux, Invention of Athens, 79-83; the quotation is from p. 81. On the subordinate and
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colorful aspects of the Other, also see Loraux, 82, on 237M—5. Interestingly, Lysias, author of another celebrated epitaphios, was a metic; Gorgias was also not an Athenian. 28. For a discussion of concern with legitimacy after 403/402 B.C., see Stroud, '' Greek Inscriptions.'' 29. For ideology's concealment of internal divisions, see Loraux, Invention of Athens, 330; exclusion of metics and slaves and mention of Amazons, see ibid., 330-331 and n. 18. 30. On the importance of concentrating on "what is not said," see Loraux, ibid.; 220 n. 3, with reference to the work of Georges Duby. On the use of the Other to constitute the self in fourth-century discourse, see Madeleine Henry, "Ethos, Mythos, Praxis: Women in Greek Comedy," Helios 13 (Fall 1986): 141-150, esp. 144-148. 31. For other ironic uses of the terminology of blessedness/spellbinding in Gorgias and Plato, see Loraux, Invention of Athens, 264—266. 32. Cf. the fact that in Ar. Frogs, Euripides and his whorish muse are discovered in the underworld and remain there. For discussion, see Henry, Menander's Courtesans, 24—25. Cf. also the Youth's abuse of the old lady in Ar. EccL, esp. lines 884, 903-905, and 926. 33. " 'But that was what/made everything possible,' said Oedipus.": Muriel Rukeyser, "Myth," in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 1788. 34. For the view that the polis transcends gender, see Loraux, Invention of Athens, 284; see also 450 n. 110. Bernheimer, Figures of III Repute, observes that narrative often makes gender into an arbitrary sign, free to be reconstructed by the male author and actors, and also stresses the importance of using prostitutes for this purpose in narrative. 35. See Patterson, "Hai Attikai," for a different view of classical Greek men's valuations of women. 36. For discussion of the problematic relationship between referent and descriptor in late fifth- and early fourth-century discourse, see Madeleine Henry, "The Derveni Commentator as Literary Critic," Transactions of the American Philological Association 116 (1986): 149-164. 37. The remark on civil war as a fraternity is taken from Loraux, Invention of Athens, 199. 38. The root verb mignymi (and its compound symmignymi), also means sexual intercourse; entynchanein, discussed previously, was again used when the ghosts reminded the living to take particular care of the survivors (248e5-6). The use of sexual language to describe the relationship of individuals to the state is, of course, hardly unique to this dialogue; see the discussion of Xenophon later in this chapter. 39. For discussion of women as connected with stasis, see Loraux, "La
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Cite.'' Just a few years before the dramatic date of the Menexenus, Aristophanes made women responsible for destabilizing the state in his comedy Ecclesiazousae. In that play, women don men's garb and vote out the all-male government. As the heroine's husband remarks of this revolution, "it's the only thing that hasn't happened to the polls yet" (lines 455-456). Cf. Eccl. 230 ff. and Lys. 589-600 on the real fate of women during and after wars. 40. For another view of this part of the speech, see Leslie Dean-Jones, "The Dog It Was Who Died" (unpublished paper, Classical Association of the Midwest and South, Columbia, Missouri, April 1990). Loraux, Invention of Athens, 27, cites Plato's continued interest in the "second birth" in Laws 926d8-9. 41. In the Menexenus, Plato showed that he knew such a world could not really exist and demonstrated this with abundant irony. The Symposium, however, permitted the character of Aristophanes to articulate the dialogue's only true acknowledgment that women do exist and have a sexual nature that has some positive and autonomous purpose. 42. Aeschines of Sphettos wrote both forensic speeches and seven or more philosophical dialogues (the Alcibiades, Aspasia, Axiochus, Callias, Miltiades, Rhinon, and Telauges). The authenticity of his dialogues was challenged in antiquity by Idomeneus, Menedemus of Eretria, and others (D.L. 2.60-63; Ath. 3.611de is the source of the anecdote of Xanthippe's presentation of dialogues to Aeschines.) For the hostile speech by Lysias, see Ath. 13.611 and Heinrich Krauss, Aeschinis Socratici Reliquiae (Leipzig: Teubner, 1911), 11. 43. I follow Barbara Ehlers' 1966 reconstruction of the Aspasia except where noted. For Aeschines' reputation during the Empire, see Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, 1. For the view that the Aspasia of Aeschines was a reaction to Antisthenes' Aspasia, see ibid., 73 n. 136. On pp. 60-61, Ehlers suggests that Aspasia does not appear but is quoted; she does this by analogy to both the prologue of the Menexenus and the Agathon scene in Ar. Thesm. 44. For discussion of other comic treatments of Aspasia, see Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, 26-30, 64-65. For the view that Aeschines positively transformed comic treatments, see ibid., 93. For the belief that Aspasia was an actual hetaira, see pp. 90-93. That Aspasia conversed with respectable women according to this dialogue, see frag. 30 Dittmar = Plut. Per. 24.5; vid. Stadter ad loc., and frag. 31 Dittmar = Cic. Inv. Rhet. 1.31.51 ff. For further discussion of these fragments, see chap. 4 of this book. 45. For the dramatic date and the date of composition, see Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, 94 n. 212, and 95, respectively. For the identification of speakers, see p. 2, where Ehlers credits K. Fr. Hermann as being the first to see that dialogue took place between Socrates and Callias and that Aspasia was praised. For Aeschines' departure from comic and dialogic characterizations: cf. ibid., 39 n. 24 and Eup. Kolakes 157, 174 K-A. For the insight that Callias
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sends his son to Aspasia for instruction, see frag. 17 Dittmar = Max. Tyr. 38.4; for more discussion of this fragment, see chap. 4 of this book. 46. For remarks on the qualifications of Aspasia, see Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, 40-42. For the Amazonian Rhodogyne, see ibid., 44—50 on frag. 18 Dittmar. The "negative Haltung zum Eros" is discussed by Ehlers on p. 50. For the view that Thargelia was a more appropriate example, see ibid., 51-55; for a comparison of Thargelia and Rhodogyne, pp. 55-57. For denial of claims that Rhodogyne and Thargelia were seen as direct ancestresses of Aspasia, see pp. 44-63 et pass.; she follows the conclusion, but not the reasoning, of Ulrich von Wilarnowitz-Moellendorff, "Lesefruechte," Hermes 35 (1900): 552. Dittmar, Aischines von Sphettos, 50 claims that an important theme of the dialogue was to demonstrate "die Frau in ihrer intellektuellen und moralischen Leistungsfaehigkeit und in ihren Beziehungen zum Mann." 47. For the view that Pericles was cited as an example of Aspasia's skill, see Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, 68: "Er dient hier als Beleg fuer Aspasias Tuechtigkeit . . . ." On the historicity of Aspasia's trial and Pericles'plea for her, see ibid., 70, and chapter 1 of this book. For the view that Plut. Per. 24.5 was derived from Aeschines, see Ehlers, p. 65 (confirmed by verbal echoes in Lucian Imagines 17.2, q.v. inf. chap. 4). For the view that Aeschines knew actual examples of Aspasia's influence over Pericles, see ibid., 64. 48. For Lysicles and Aspasia, see Plut. Per. 24.6, and additional testimonia in Krauss, Aeschinis Socratici Reliquiai, items VII, IX, X, and pp. 45-47. For discussion, see Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, 72-85. For the view that Lysicles was more important to Aeschines' Aspasia than was Pericles, see ibid., 3334; for the view that the Lysicles episode was an exaggerated doublet of the Pericles episode, see p. 79. For Lysicles, see chap. 1 of this book. 49. For discussion of Poristes as Aspasia's and Lysicles' son, see Aischines von Sphettos, 3-4 n. 10, 23 n. 89. For the suggestion that Poristes is a metaphoric epithet, rather than the name of a real child, see Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, 82-83. To her citations at p. 82 n. 174 and 175, should be added Thuc. 8.48.6. 50. For additional examples connecting Aspasia, eros, and arete, see Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, 85, and 94 nn. 210, 211. For Aspasia's argumentation, see ibid., 87. Frag. 31 Dittmar was preserved in Cicero's youthful Inv. Rhet. 1.31.51 and cited later by Quintilian (5.11.27-29). Quintilian, whom Ehlers does not discuss, notes the quotation as a particular example of induction; other examples cited by Quintilian in this section are drawn from Cicero and Livy. 51. For the continuation of the conversation after the wife's aporia, see Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, 87-88. For the contention that Aspasia knew the power of eros through experience and made this the foundation of her work, see ibid., 89. For the significance of the fact that arete is to be sought in
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connection with another human being, see p. 88. For eros as the site of mutual commitment, cf. frag. 33 Dittmar = Xen Mem. 2.6.36, and Xen Symp. 8.11 ff. and 8.27; see also Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, 116. For the contrast between the experiential and sublimated erotic paths to virtue recommended by Aeschines' Aspasia and Socrates in Plato's Symposium, respectively, see Ehlers, p. 92. 52. For the suggestion that Aeschines identified Aspasia as a promnestris, see Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, 104, who does not pursue the implications of such an appellation. Ehlers muddies the issue by calling Aspasia a Kupplerin, a word that has the connotation of both matchmaker and pander; a literal union of such concepts is impossible in Greek. This inappropriate label stems, I think, from Ehlers' erroneous notion that Aspasia really was a hetaira. 53. For general information on the life and chronology of Xenophon, see J. K. Anderson, Xenophon (New York: Scribner, 1974, 9-19, 192-198. Important to this discussion of the development of Aspasia's biographical tradition and of biographical modes in Hellenistic memoirs is the fact that the Greek title of the Memorabilia ("Things Worth Remembering") was actually Apomnemoneumata ("Memoirs"). This is the first known work with such a title, according to Momigliano, Greek Biography, 53. See chap. 4, this book, for more discussion of such treatises. The general chronology of Xenophon's works is disputed, and no absolute date for either the Memorabilia or the Oeconomicus has been agreed on. In fact, as Philip Stadter has pointed out, the Memorabilia itself may have been written piecemeal. On p. 174, Anderson suggested that the Oeconomicus is "a continuation of something else, presumably the Memorabilia." If the Memorabilia was composed first, and if Mem. 3.5 refers to "the situation after the battle of Leuctra" (ibid., 175 n. 1), both it and the Oeconomicus would have been finished after 371 B.C., when Xenophon was expelled from Scillus. Xenophon could have begun the earlier dialogue about twenty-five years after Socrates was executed in 399 B.C. (ibid., 20-21). Aspasia is mentioned at Xen. Mem. 2.6.36 and Oec. 3.14. For the plausible but unprovable view that Mem. 2.6.28-39 derives from Aeschines, see Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, 101-103; she also believes that Aeschines called Aspasia a promnestris. 54. For recent discussion of the erotics of male friendship in antiquity, see David Halperin, "Heroes and their Pals," in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), 75-87. 55. Enchantment is injected into the "hunt" in the forms of epoidas and philtra (spells and charms; 2.6.10). For discussion of 2.6.13, see John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (New York: Routledge, 1990), 16-11. The relationship between oratory and the erotic is connected by the metaphor of the bee sting; the charm of homosexual eros had been remarked earlier in Mem. 1.3.8-13, where a boy's
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kiss is compared to a scorpion's sting. Comedy likened Pericles' oratory to a bee sting; of all the orators, only his speech stuck in the hearer (Eup. Demes 102 KA). Kentron, the word used in this passsage for bee sting, is a common comic metaphor for the phallus; see Henderson, Maculate Muse, 122, for other references. 56. For Socrates' offer to warn prospective lovers, see 2.6.33. Cf. the use of the words kateipein and agasai regarding the relationships among Menexenus, Socrates, and Aspasia, discussed above. 57. Philip Stadter has remarked that erotics might not normally have been thought important in a marriage but grants that Xenophon himself seemed to think the erotic was a normal and expected part of marriage (cf. Cyr. 3.1.41 and Symp. 9.7). 58. For discussion of Plato's Socrates as midwife and matchmaker, see DuBois, Sowing the Body, chap. 8; for the fuller implications of these issues, see Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979). See, however, Halperin, One Hundred Years, 118-119, for a very different interpretation of this imagery. The implications of Aspasia's statement that the truth will out during a marriage are developed more fully in the Oeconomicus (q.v. inf.). 59. The use of the spells and philters terminology in this passage echoes the report of Pericles' sexualized discourse, discussed previously. Philip Stadter avers that the "woman more loved" was Philosophia. If this is the case, Xenophon had Socrates play yet again on the association of philosophy with prostitution. 60. For the view that Theodote equals Aspasia, see Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, 107. 61. Socrates had used an image like that of fellow hunter, the image of mastropos (pander) in the slightly earlier Symposium (q.v. inf.). Interestingly, Pericles junior makes an appearance in the Memorabilia between the Critoboulus and Theodote episodes (in Mem. 3.5); not only Pericles and Aspasia, but also their nothos, participate in post-fifth-century discourse. Here, shortly after becoming a general in 411 B.C. , Pericles junior converses with Socrates on the subject of how Athens might regain her old prominence. Pericles senior is briefly alluded to, but Socrates advises the son to use methods inverse to his father's alleged ways of winning the people's loyalty. He does not encourage Pericles junior to study the spells and philters of oratory, but rather to study strategy (3.5.22). Honesty of the sort advised by the Aeschinean Aspasia, rather than the father's ways of enchantment, is clearly recommended. In this conversation, which Xenophon claimed to have witnessed, Socrates advocates a public and honest competence; the erga of his illustrious father and the logos that reminds Athens of her true birthright of virtue should be synthesized with the son's own expertise in order to restore the city-state's greatness.
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62. On the wife as a magistrate: Socrates calls the wife's attention to their mutual self-interest evidence of a "masculine intellect" (10.1). 63. On the use of cosmetics: cf. the "Choice of Heracles" at Mem. 2.1.22. The wife clearly represents arete, not pleasure, to her spouse. On deception: note the repeated mention of words for deceit and deception: Hai d'apatai, exapatan (10.3); exapaton, 10.5; Aspasia used this language of deceived marital partners in her observation that deceived parties hate each other and the matchmaker (Mem. 2.6.36). 64. This development has been analyzed recently by DuBois, Sowing the Body, 167-188 (Part 3: "The Woman of Philosophy"). 65. The date of Xenophon's Symposium has been placed at about 380 B.C., but its dramatic date is the summer of 421 B.C. Todd (the Loeb Library translator of Xen. Symp. and Xen. Ap.), thought that it might have been written as " . . . a corrective to the loftier but less realistic picture . . . ," provided by Plato's Symposium (p. 376). PI. Symp. has been variously dated: to around 385 B.C. by Todd; to a general date of 384-379 B.C. by Kenneth Dover, ed., Plato: Symposium (Cambridge University Press, 1980), 10; and near 385 B.C. by Ledger, Re-counting Plato, 217-218, 224, following Dodds, Plato, Gorgias (Oxford 1959). However, on p. 83, Ledger puts it as "close to" 380 B.C. 66. See I. F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 192-193, for an interesting perspective on Socrates and Xanthippe. 67. For discussion of the philosophical search for a masculine source for the good, see DuBois, Sowing the Body, chap. 8. For Aspasia as a "female Socrates" and Aeschines' Aspasia as "pre-Platonic," see Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, pass., but esp. 91 n. 200, where she names Aspasia a "weiblichen Sokrates." Aspasia was called Pericles' "intellectual girlfriend" by I. F. Stone, Trial of Socrates, 134. Chapter 4 1. The "Sargasso Sea" of textual fragments is best seen in Athenaeus" Deipnosophistae ("Sophists at Dinner"). This extended symposium dialogue of the late second or early third century A.D. preserves many quotations of these lost discourses. For recent discussion of Athenaeus, see Barry Baldwin, "Athenaeus and His Work," Acta Classica 19 (1976): 21-42, and "The Minor Characters in Athenaeus," Acta Classica 20 (1977): 37-48; see also Henry, "Edible Woman," where I also discuss the pornographic aspects of many anecdotes mentioned or treated in this chapter. For the genesis of the pornographic in classical antiquity, see Amy S. Richlin, ed., Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pass. For
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problems inherent in assuming that a certain intellectual stance accompanied geographic locale, see Stephanie West, "Satyrus: Peripatetic or Alexandrian?" Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 15 (1974): 279-287. I doubt that Athenaeus was necessarily more interested than other men in writing about prostitutes because his native city of Naucratis was a center of prostitution. 2. "Pornography," in the most literal sense of writing about or otherwise representing prostitutes, had of course begun before the fourth century; the rhetorical handbook of fifth-century Sophist Hippias of Elis mentioned Thargelia as a topos and may have been used by Aeschines (see Stadter, p. 235). Herodotus mentioned the prostitute Rhodopis/Doricha (2.134-135); and the pornographic aspects of Old Comedy have been analyzed recently by Zweig, "Mute Nude Female Characters." For the golden age of the hetaira in the fourth century, see Paul McKechnie, Outsiders in the Greek Cities in the Fourth Century B.C. (London: Routledge, 1989), 153. For general remarks on prostitute characters in comedy, see Henry, Menander's Courtesans, pass.; by the close of the fifth century, prostitutes had been characterized as scheming, destructive, or drunken; associated with corrupt politicians and/or inferior writers; and represented faceless, nameless gratification. The image softened in the fourth century. 3. Lynceus: for general information, see RE 13.2 (1927/1962), 2472-2473; see K-A 5.616-17 for testimonia and fragments of his plays; see also Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed. Theodor Kock, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1880-1888), 3.274-275. For Lynceus' and Duris' lives and circumstances, see Kebric, Shadow ofMacedon. For prostitutes in Lynceus' Apomnemoneumata, see, for example, the anecdote about Gnathaena and Diphilus (Ath. 13.583f); or the mention of how Gnome services all the guests at a symposium (Ath.6.245d). For Duris on Aspasia and Samos, v. inf. on Plutarch's Life of Pericles and Stadter, p. 233, ad Pericles 24.2. 4. The view that Machon composed the Chreiai in a manner conducive to memorization is expressed by his editor and commentator, A. S. F. Gow, in Machon: The Fragments, Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 23-24. 5. For Matro, see Parodorum Epicorum Graecorum et Archestrati Reliquiai, vol. 1, Corpusculum Poesis Epicae Graecae Ludibundae, ed. Paul Brandt (Leipzig: Teubner, 1888), and Supplementum Hellenisticum, ed. Hugh LloydJones and Peter Parsons (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983). For Duris, who used comedy as a source for Plutarch's report that Aspasia caused Athens to become involved in the Samian War, see discussion of Plutarch's Life of Pericles below. 6. For fragments of Hegesander (fl. mid-second century B.C.), see Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, ed. Carolus Mueller, 5 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1841-1938), (Reprint, Frankfort/Main: Minerva, 1975, 5 vols.) 4:412422; all but two fragments are found in Athenaeus. Ingemar Dueling, in Hero-
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diem the Cratetean. A Study in Anti-Platonic Tradition (Stockholm: Wahlstroem & Widstrand, 1941), 14, claims on the strength of Ath. 11.507a8-10 that Hegesander wrote a Peri tou Platonos Kakoetheias (' 'On the Malice of Plato''). Compare Herodicus' anti-Platonic tract and Plutarch's later work, On the Malice of Herodotus. For the view that books of the Hypomnemata were arranged topically and that hetairai were treated in the sixth book, see Franz Susemihl, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur in der Alexandrinerzeit, 2 vols (Leipzig: Teubner, 1891, 1892), vol. 1, 491 n. 27, 28. For Metaneira's witty retort: FHG 4.419 = Ath. 13.584f7-585al; for Sophocles and the courtesan Archippe: FHG 4.418-419 = Ath. 592b4-10, not attributed to any named work; Hetairideia: FHG 4.418 = Ath. 13.572d7~e2, attributed to the Hypomnemata. 1. For fragments and discussion of Heraclides, see SA; for general discussion, see Gottschalk, Heraclides ofPontus. For the view that the "Peri" treatises were dialogic in form, see H. W. Parke, "The Problem of an Oracle in Heraclides Ponticus," Hermathena 120 (Summer 1976): 50-54, esp. 52. Diogenes Laertius states of Heraclides' tone here, komikos peplaken ("he wrote it in the style of comedy," D.L. 5.88); although he noted that Heraclides might have taken his examples of wasteful politicians from comedy, Wehrli did not remark upon Heraclides' generally comedic treatment (p. 80, ad fr. 58). For the view that Heraclides himself opposed tryphe and that tryphe was characteristic of peoples at their acme, see Wehrli, 77-78, on the Peri Hedones; fragments of Peri Dikaiosynes ("On Justice") also condemn luxury. Dittmar, Aischines von Sphettos, believes that Heraclides was indebted to Antisthenes for inspiration (17 nn. 56, 57). Aelianus, in Varia Historia 4.23, assigns lonely ends like that of Callias in fr. 58 to Pericles and Nicias son of Pergasthes; see Schule des Aristoteles, 80 ad loc. Moreover, Callias' lonely end befits one who would consider sending his son to Aspasia for an education. 8. Clearchus (ca. 340-250 B.C.) wrote bioi, paradoxes, erotica, an encomium of Plato, zoological and mystical works, and collections of proverbs. His fragments, edited by Wehrli, were mostly preserved by Athenaeus. For later use of Clearchus, see, for example, Josephus, Contra Apionem 1.176. All surviving fragments of the Erotika are preserved in Athenaeus, who assigned most of the tales of lovers' excesses to bk. 1 (frags. 21, 22, 24, 27, 29, 30, 32 Wehrli). 9. For Satyrus (second half of third century B.C.), see RE 2A:1 (1921/1964) 228-235; for his fragments, see FHG and POxy 9.1176 (Life of Euripides). In addition to the life of Euripides, Satyrus composed other bioi of such men as Sophocles, Plato, Pythagoras, and Philip of Macedon; the Peri Charakteron (FHG 3.164, frag. 20 = Ath. 4.168c3-d3) is also attributed to him. For varying estimates of Satyrus' competence and of what we know of his life, see West, "Satyrus" and Mary Lefkowitz, "Satyrus the Historian," mAtli del xvii Congresso Internazionale di Papirologia (Naples, 1984), 339-343. 10. Idomeneus (ca. 325-265 B.C.) was discredited by Plutarch (e.g., in Peri-
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cles 10.7 and elsewhere), see Stadter Ixxxi. Themistocles and chariot drawn by whores: Ath. 13.576cl-3; for Matro, see SH frag. 534, lines 121-122. 11. For a study of Alexandria in this important period, see Peter M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Fraser also discusses those scholars who left Alexandria after the diaspora of 146 B.C. For an account of classical scholarship of this time, see Rudolf Pfeiffer. For fragments of Aristophanes, sec Aristophanis Byzantii f'ragmenta, ed. and comm. by William J. Slater, vol. 6., Sammlung griechischer und lateinischer Grammatiker, eds. Klaus Alpers, Hartmut Erbse, and Alexander Kleinlogel (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986). For an assessment of his contributions to classical scholarship, see Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, vol. 1, 459^461. Lycophron of Chalcis (third century B.C.) may have been the first to write a Peri Komoidias treatise, at the instigation of Ptolemy Philadelphus: see Fraser, vol. 1,449; vol. 2, 649-650 and nn. 17-19. Aristophanes' Peri ton Athenesin Hetairidon is mentioned along with other treatises of similar name by Athenaeus (13.567a); Susemihl, Geschichte, vol. 1, 442, speculates that it dealt with the lives of actual prostitutes. For the Komoidoumenoi treatises in general, see Josef Steinhausen, Komoidoumenoi: De Grammaticorum Veterum Sludiis ad Homines in Comoedia Attica Irrisos Pertinentibus (Bonn, 1910). Stadter (1989) Ixv n. 87 thinks that Peri Hetairon treatises may have provided Plutarch with information about Aspasia; for my own doubts, see the discussion of Callistratus (inf.). Plutarch noted that one needed a grammaticus to explain the identities of persons mentioned in Old Comedy (Symp. 712A), an indication of the scholarly or pseudoscholarly nature of these treatises. 12. Callistratus (fl. second century B.C.) wrote commentaries on some Aristophanic comedies; Symmikta ("Miscellanea"), apparently in the manner of Aelian or Aulus Gellius; and works on various authors. For fragments, see FGrH no. 348, 3B210-211; for discussion of Callistratus, see RE 10.2, 1738; Susemihl, Geschichte, vol. 1, 449-^-50; Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, vol. 1, 467, and vol. 2, 675-676. Gow, Machon, notes Athenaeus' tendency to cluster information about select individuals from a variety of sources; this might have been due to his use of prosopographical material such as the various Komoidoumenoi or Peri Hetairon treatises; these presumably grouped together in one citation all available information about individual women. 1 should note three things: (a) when Athenaeus cites Aspasia, it is not in such a cluster, but rather in scattered other contexts; (b) unlike other hetairai, she is not assigned any speech of her own (from this one may conclude that she probably did not appear in Chreiai); and (c) there is no real "prosopographical" information about her in Athenaeus. Therefore, the disorganized nature of Athenaeus' citations of Aspasia, in addition to the fact that no speech was attributed to her by him, suggests that she appeared seldom, if at all, in Peri Hetairon treatises— which supposedly concentrated information about individuals together in one
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place—nor in works like Machon's Chreiai, which was made up of the witty sayings of symposiasts and their companions. I conclude that almost all of the information about her came out of Old Comedy and the continuation of her bios in the Socratica. 13. For Ammonius grammaticus (fl. second century B.C.), see FGrH No. 350 38:212-214; for discussion, see RE 1.2 (1894/1958), 1865-1866. 14. For fragments and commentary, respectively on Apollodorus (Apollodorus grammaticus, fl. second century B.C.), see FGrH 208-212; and Susemihl, Geschichte, vol. 2, 33^U. His Bibliotheke ("Library," of mythology) survives in a summary; other works include a chronology, commentaries on Epicharmus and Hellenistic mime, the rationalistic Peri Theon ("On the Gods"), and the playful Peri tou Krateros ("On the Wine-Mixing Bowl"). For nicknames and identification of women with the same name, see FGrH F208, F210-212. For his hetaira treatise as a corrective supplement to Aristophanes of Byzantium's, see FGrH F208 = Ath. 13.583d4-e9. 15. For fragments of Antiphanes the Younger, see FGrH No. 349, 3B211212. For fragments of Gorgias of Athens (fl. late first or early second century A.D.), see FGrH no. 351 3B 214; for Gorgias' interest in politicians and prostitutes, see FGrH Fl = Ath. 13.596f. Suetonius (fl. 769-122? A.D.) is credited with the treatise Peri Episemon Pornon ("On Distinguished Whores"), but no fragments remain. See Laurentius Lydus de Mag. Ill 64 = 144 Wue., cited in RE 4A:1 (1931/1960) 624. 16. For the Phryne story, see Quint. Inst. 2.15. 17. For discussion of modern critics' failure to identify pornography across generic lines, see Susanne Kappeler, The Pornography of Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); for application of this view to Greek and Roman literature, see Richlin, Pornography and Representation, pass. For the presence and construction of the whore across a variety of nineteenth-century French texts, see Bernheimer, Figures of III Repute, pass. For the problems of disentangling historical prostitutes' identities from their representation in fictional literature, see, e.g., Karl Holzinger, "Kritischexegetiker Kommentar zu Aristophanes Ploutos." Siztungsbericht der Akademie der Wissenschaft, Wien, philosophische-historische Klasse 218 (1940), esp. pp. 50-63 on Lais and others. As to the presence of whores across various discourses in the Hellenistic period: pornographic elements may have been present in such chroniques scandaleuses as the Hypomnemata (24 books) of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II, who listed the mistresses of his ancestor, Pt. Philadelphus (see Ath. 13.576ef and FGrH F2 = Ath. 14.654bc. Athenaeus gave 11 fragments of this work. 18. For the fragments of Hermesianax (fl. second century B.C.), see Collectanea Alexandrinea, ed. J. U. Powell (1925, reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). As to the contents of the Leontion: bk. 1 told the tale of Polyphemus and
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Galatea, bk. 2 of Arkeophon and Arsinoe. Note that another tradition has Aristippus deny Lais' power to hold him (D.L. 2.75). 19. For fragments and analysis of Herodicus (fl. mid-second century B.C.), see Duering, Herodicus the Cratetean; and Supplementum Hellenisiicum, frags. 494-495. Duering, following Steinhausen, suggests that Herodicus arranged the Komoidoumenoi in books according to what kind of person was mentioned in comedy, and that he discussed prostitutes in the sixth book. 20. The poem is found in SH frag. 495 and in Ath. 5.219b-221a, which Duering identifies as "fragment 4" of the Pros ton Philosokraten. For discussion, see Duering, Herodicus the Cratetean, 63-64. 21. For fragments of Didymus (fl. first century B.C./first century A.D.), see Didymi Chalcenteri Grammatici Alexandrini Fragmenta, ed. M. Schmidt (Leipzig: Teubner, 1854; reprint, Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1964), and Didymi in Demosthenem Commenta, ed. Lionel Pearson and Susan Stephens. (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1983). See Stephanie West, "Chalcenteric Negligence," Classical Quarterly, n.s., 20 (1970): 288-296 for a recent estimate of the quality of his scholarship (frag. 7 Schmidt = Clem. Al. Strom. 4.19 p. 618 P, q. v. inf.). Earlier in frag. 7, Didymus had mentioned Leaina, who died under torture rather than reveal what she knew about the plot against Hipparchus, but without mentioning, as do later discussions of her, that she was a hetaira (cf. Pliny HN 7.87, 34.72; Pausanias 1.23.1-2; Ath. 13.596fl-5). For speculation about whether Sappho was a prostitute (publicd), see Didymi Chalcenteri Fragmenta, 384-385, on Sen. Ep. 88). 22. Cicero (106-43 B.C.) defined inductio thus in his early rhetorical work, De Inventions Rhetorica (1.31.51). Quintilian (35 to before 100 A.D.) defined inductio in the Institutio Oratorio (5.11.3); at 5.11.27 he cites Cicero as the source for his own knowledge of the fragment (which he provides at 5.11.28). These fragments make up Aesch. Asp. frag. 31 Dittmar, discussed in chap. 3 above. 23. Cicero's longer account includes not only Aspasia's conversation with the wife, whom Aspasia reduces to blushes (Hie mulier erubuit, "here the woman blushed") but also her parallel conversation with the husband, whom she reduces to silence: Atque hie Xenophon quoque ipse tacu.it ("And here Xenophon himself also fell silent," 1.31.52). 24. For Plutarch's biographical works, see Alan Wardman, Plutarch's Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). For the Pericles, see Stadter, Commentary; for his germinal influence on biography and historiography, see Friedrich Leo, Die griechisch-roemische Biographic nach ihrer litterarischen Form (Leipzig: Teubner, 1901), 145-192; Stadter, Commentary, Iviii. For Plutarch's contemporary readership, see Wardman, p. 43; see Russell 1983 on Plutarch's later audience; for his moralizing purpose and attempt to show philosophy in action, see Wardman, p. 45, Stadter, Commentary, xxv; for his view
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that philosophical training was a requirement for the active life, see Wardman, p. 45. Pericles' life as an example of "philosophy in action" can be demonstrated in Plutarch's account of Pericles' attitudes to the eclipse (Per. 35.2) and the fact that his relationship with Aspasia was the object of debate among philosophers (Per. 24.2). For Plutarch's basic concept of kakoethia, see Wardman, pp. 189-196; he finds treatments of Aspasia exhibit kakoethia in de malign. Her. 855f, 856a. Stadter notes that Plutarch's treatment of Aspasia exemplifies the techniques of "misdirection and false dichotomy" and identifies the biographer's tendency to retract "a potentially scandalous relationship . . . [to] within acceptable limits of behavior" (p. xliii). 25. Pericles as tyrant and for his motives in the Peloponnesian War are discussed by Stadter, Commentary, who notes (p. xliii) that Plutarch reported more hostile statements about Pericles than did any other ancient author. 26. For sources for the Pericles, see Stadter, Commentary, Iviii-lxxxv; for the lack of evidence for a prior biographical tradition, see ibid., 88 ad 7-8 et pass.). 27. Note the very similar language at 32.1, where it is used to describe Hermippus' accusation that Aspasia received free women for the use of Pericles; the repetition strongly suggests that the charge was an invective topos. 28. Reports of what some have said: "Aeschines says" (phesi, 24.6); "Cratinus has declared" (eireken, 24.9); "she is called" (prosagoreuetai, 24.9). Much information is left to conjecture: "it is thought" (dokei, 24.2, 24.10); "they say/he says" (legousi, 24.5, 24.11; phasi, phesi, 24.3, 24.6, 24.9 (this last has phasi, "as they say"). Philip Stadter points out that dokei often means "apparently," that is, as corroborated elsewhere. 29. As for Plutarch's sources of information about Aspasia, it is clear that Wilamowitz' postulation of a Hellenistic biography is incorrect. Dittmar, Aischines von Sphettos, 4-9, follows Wilamowitz, who had expressed that notion in Aristoteles und Athen, 2 vols. (1893; reprint, Berlin: Weidmann, 1966), vol. 1, 263-264 n. 7. On the idea of a Hellenistic biography for Aspasia, see Stadter, Commentary, 234 (at 24.2). But Plutarch did identify as sources Aeschines (at 24.6), Plato (at 24.7), nameless comedies (at 24.9), Cratinus (at 24.9), and Eupolis (24.10); probable sources for the twenty-fourth chapter also include Duris, Theophrastus, Antisthenes, and the Komoidoumenoi treatises. Other sources identified by Stadter are Duris and Theophrastus (p. 233, ad 24.2) and Antisthenes (p. Ixxx of Introduction 3.3 and p. 240 ad Per 24.9). 30. Recall the elusive nature of Aspasia's physical appearance as suggested in the portrait herm discussed in chap 1; for additional portraits, see below. 31. For Stadter's views on Aspasia, see Commentary, 235-237 (ad 24.5); he
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also believes that Xenophon confirmed the notion that Aspasia was a madam (p. 236). 32. Stadter, Commentary, believed the trial occurred because Aeschines said so, and suggests that Aspasia's asebeia consisted in her having entered sanctuaries closed to prostitutes, beliefs apparently founded in the assumption that Aspasia was a prostitute and bolstered by analogy to events recounted in the fourth-century forensic speech [Dem.] Neaira (see Stadter, 297-298 ad 32.1). 33. Stadter, Commentary, 333, notes with Humphreys ("Nothoi of Kynosarges," 94), that Pericles seems more disturbed by a lack of heirs than he is concerned for his bastard son's welfare and future. There was also a tradition that Pericles did not care much about his legitimate sons' education: cf. PI. Prt. 319e-320a (et alibi). We can note that Pericles' bios, like the bioi of Aspasia and Socrates, makes him an outsider. 34. For the intellectual epoch known as the Second Sophistic and/or Greek Renaissance, see George Kennedy, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World 300 B.c-A.D.300 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972) and Glen Bowersock, Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). 35. For the text of Maximus of Tyre, see Maximi Tyrii Philosophoumena, ed. H. Hobein (Leipzig: Teubner, 1910); for comment, see Bowersock, Greek Sophists; Duering, Herodicus the Cratetean, 64; and Kennedy, Art of Rhetoric, 590 ff. Maximus devoted his third, eighth, ninth, and eighteenth through twenty-first Orations to Socrates; the eighteenth through the twenty-first were specifically devoted to Socrates' erotic nature. 36. For a recent critical study of Lucian, see R. Bracht Branham, Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). Other models for the portrait are cited in Lucian Imagines 18-20. 37. A remnant of Aspasia's placement within the categories of sexually abnormal cum wise is seen in ps.-Lucian's Erotes ("the Loves"), which discusses homosexuality and pleads for the right of women as well as men to have sexual relationships with one another. One discussant notes that Telesilla, Sappho, or Theano the Pythagorean could not have pled so zealously for women; nor, perhaps, could even Pericles for Aspasia (Erotes 30). 38. For the text of Themistius, see Themistii Orationes Quae Supersunt, ed. H. Schenkl and G. Downey, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1965); ed. H. Schenkl, G. Downey, and A. F. Norman, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1971). The opinion that one should not praise only those of classical Athens is found at Or. 26, p. 396 Dind. 39. Kennedy, Art of Rhetoric, 608. 40. For this portion of the Stromateis, see Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte, 3rd. ed., ed. Otto Staehlin and Ludwig
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Fruechtel, vol. 2 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1960). For "women worthies" and the representation of heroic women in European art, see Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Lerner, Creation of Feminist Consciousness, passim, discussed at greater length in chap. 5 of this book. 41. For the Dion of Synesius, see Synesii Cyrenensis Hymni et Opusculi, ed. Nicolaus Terzaghi (Rome: Polygraphica, 1944); for a recent study, see Jay Bregman, Synesius ofCyrene, Philosopher-Bishop, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage, vol. 2 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982). On p. 58, Bregman states that, "the battle to save Hellenism from barbarism . . . was more important to him [sc. Synesius] than the battle between paganism and Christianity"; Bregman's view (p. 134) that for Synesius, ' 'The monk and the philosopher have the same ends . . . ." may help explain why Aspasia could not play a larger role in the Dion. 42. For Theodoret, see Therapeutique des maladies Helleniques, ed. Pierre Canivet, Sources Chretiennes, vol. 57 (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1958). 43. For a survey of Tertullian, see Timothy D. Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). luseH. Hoppe'stextof the Apologeticum in CSEL 69 (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1939; reprint, New York: Johnson, 1964). For Tertullian's views on women, see Barnes, 136-141; for Tertullian's use of pagan sources in the Apologeticum, see Barnes, 196-199; for Tertullian on sexual depravity: see Barnes 94, 95, 98, 216, 217. For Leaina in the Apologeticum, see Barnes, 218, and note ad loc. 44. For the text of Salvianus, see Salvianus, Opera Omnia, ed. F. Pauly, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 8. (Vienna: C. Geroldi Filium, 1883; reprint, New York: Johnson, 1967). For his dependence on Tertullian, see Barnes, Tertullian, and bibliographic references. 45. For Aspasia's appearances in lexica: Harpocration (2nd century A.D.), s.v. Aspasia, stated that she seemed to have been responsible for the Samian and Peloponnesian wars and that she taught Pericles ( = Duris FGrH 76 F65); Souda (10th century A.D.), s.v. demopoietos, stated that Pericles junior was made a citizen; ibid., s.v. Aspasia, stated that she was a Milesian and was skilled at speaking, that Pericles was her student and beloved, that she was responsible for the Samian and Peloponnesian wars, that she was the mother of Pericles' bastard, that there were two hetairai named Aspasia, that the Milesian was responsible for Pericles' Megarian decree, that she was a lady sophist (sophistria} and teacher of rhetoric, and that she was later Pericles' wife (gamete); ibid., s.v. Perikles, the information is repeated that he married (egeme) Aspasia the Milesian, and that she was the mother of Xanthippus and Paralus! All of Souda's information is derivable from Plutarch, except the repeated use of marital terminology and the amazing intelligence that Aspasia was the mother of his two legitimate sons. For her appearances in the scholia: to Ar. Knights 1329, that she
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wed Lysicles; ibid., 969, that Pericles got her off the impiety charge; to Ar. Ach. 523, that she was blamed for the Peloponnesian War and kept a bordello; ibid., 527, that Aspasia taught Pericles; to Thuc. 8.48.6, that there was a son of Lysicles and Aspasia named Poristes (the same information is found in scholia to Ar. Frogs 1505); to PI. Menex. 235e, that her father was Axiochus, that she taught Pericles, that they were married, and that she bore him a son. 46. The Vatican portrait herm and affiliated portraits discussed in chap. 1, above, may have been inspired by a fifth-century statue of Aphrodite Sosandra. Again, that herm's date is uncertain, for scholars are divided as to whether it is classical or classicizing. 47. For the first relief, see Gisela Richter, Portraits of the Greeks, vol. 1,117 (item "i"), who noted its function as a handle attachment and doubts that the man is Socrates; Andreas Rumpf, Festschrift Fremersdorf'1960 pp. 93 ff, identifies the group as Eros, Aphrodite, and a teacher. For the Roman relief, see Richter, Portraits of the Greeks, item "j," and fig. 564; and see Schefold, Die Bildnisse, 162, fig. 2. Of the reliefs' original, Schefold said "kann kaum juenger sein als 330 v. Chr.," that it can scarcely be more recent than 330 B.C. because the Eros is represented as the robust youth of the classical period. 48. For discussion of the sarcophagus, see Richter, Portraits of the Greeks, vol. 1, 118 (item "k"); ibid., vol. 2, 19ff, fig. 21; Kekule von Stradonitz, "Die Bildnisse des Sokrates," 58 no. 28, 44. 49. For the bone carvings, see Cornelius C. Vermeule III, "Socrates and Aspasia: New Portraits of Late Antiquity," Classical Journal 54 (1958):49-55; he also suggests on p. 54 that there were pairs of statues of Socrates and Aspasia in libraries and basilicas during the Roman period.
Chapter 5 1. For a history of the development of feminist consciousness in the modern period see Lerner, Creation of Feminist Consciousness, pass. 2. Heloise's preserved output consists of three personal letters to Abelard, Problemata (correspondence with Abelard on scriptural matters), and a Letter to Peter the Venerable. For the text of Abelard's Historia Calamitatum, see Peter Abelard, Historia Calamitatum, 3rd ed.; ed. J. Monfrin (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1967). For the texts of Heloise and other writings by Abelard, see J. T. Muckle, "The Personal Letters Between Abelard and Heloise," Medieval Studies 15 (1953): 47-94, and "The Letter of Heloise on Religious Life and Abelard's First Reply," Medieval Studies 17 (1955): 240281. Peter Dronke, in Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) discusses the question of the authenticity of Heloise's letters (esp. on pp. 140-143) and Abelard's stylistic dependence on her
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(esp. on pp. 110-112). See also Glenda McLeod, '"Wholly Guilty, Wholly Innocent': Self Definition in Heloise's Letters to Abelard," in Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre, ed. Karen Cherewatuk and Ulrike Wiethaus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 64-86. For further analysis, see Peggy Kamuf, Fictions of Feminine Desire: Disclosures of Heloise (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). 3. A discussion of Heloise's distinction of sapientia from philosophia, although interesting, would be out of place here; what is important is that Heloise believed Aspasia's discourse transcended the privileged concept of philosophy. 4. For the popularity of the De Inventione Rhetorica, see L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 82, 83, 89, and 101. Marius Victorinus (fl. 4th century A.D.), whose work was also well known at this time, might have supplied Heloise with this information; Ehlers, vorplatonische Deutung, 86 n. 187, observes his dependence on Cicero in a passage cited at Rhet. La!. Min. 240, 33 ff. Halm. For Boethius' description of whorish muses, see Cons. Phil. 1.1. Hroswitha of Gandersheim (b. ca. A.D. 935) had claimed the right to snatch some shreds of Lady Philosophy's robe for herself, in an assertion of intellectual independence similar to that of Heloise (Cons. 1, pr. 1,5, cited in Dronke, Women Writers, 74—75). 5. Kamuf, Fictions of Desire, 1-43 et pass. 6. Heloise's sole pagan reference is to Seneca (Monfrin 112, lines 70-78). For discussion of Seneca as an honorary Christian, see Barnes, Tertullian, 6. Kamuf, Fictions of Desire, 8 also notes Heloise's capitulation in this letter to "Abelard's consistent substitution of the Christian symbolic context for the personal, erotic one." 7. Michele Le Doeuff, Hipparchia's Choice, 59 et pass. 8. For the development of feminist thought, see first Lerner, Creation of Feminist Consciousness. For early modern feminist thought, see Joan Kelly, "Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes 1400-1789," Signs 8 (1982): 4-28. For the continued development of feminist thought, see Joan Kelly, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 137-164. Catalogues of women have also been discussed recently by Glenda McLeod, Virtue and Venom: Catalogs of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991). For information on the translation history of Plutarch, see R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 522; and Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (Clarendon Press, 1949; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). The first French translation of Plutarch's
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Lives was made by J. Amyot in 1557 (Classical Tradition, 210; Bolgar, Classical Heritage, 522, claimed it to be 1559), partial translations into German were done in 1508 (thanks to Philip Stadter for the information), and a complete translation into Italian of the Lives by Campano occurred in 1470 (Bolgar, Classical Heritage: 523). 9. For this portrait, see Guillaume de Rouille, Promptuarium Iconum, 2 vols. (Lyons 1553). The pictures of Aspasia and Pericles are found in vol. 1, 119. 10. Arcangela Tarbotti [pseud. Galerana Baratotti], La semplicita ingannata, O Tirannia paterna (Leiden: Sambix, 1654) is cited in Garrard (1989), p. 153 and discussed by Ginevra Conti Odorisio, Donna e societd nel Seicento: Lucrezia Marinelli e Arcangela Tarabotti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979), pass. 11. For recent translation of, and an introduction to, Menage, see Beatrice Zedler, who uses the 1690 Latin edition, in Gilles Menage: The History of Women Philosophers (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984). On p. vii, Zedler points out that Menage intended the Historia as a supplement to Diogenes Laertius. An earlier French work on a similar topic, Madeleine de Scudery, Lesfemmes illustres, ou les harangues heroiques de Mr Scudery avec les veritables portraists de ces portraists heroines, tirez des medailles antiques (Paris: Compagnie des Libraires du Palais, 1665), does not include Aspasia. Menage's In Diogenem Laertiam Observationes et Emendationes was published in 1663; the first (Latin) publication of Historia Mulierum Philosopharum occurred in 1690 at Lyons. The French translation appeared as Abrege de I'histoire de la vie des femmes philosophes de I'antiquite in vol. 3 of Les vies les plus illustres philosophes de I'antiquite (Amsterdam: J. H. Schneider, 1758; ref. in Zedler, xvii, xxvi n. 23). 12. Sects covered by Menage included Platonists, Academicians, Dialecticians, Cyrenaics, Megarians, Cynics, Peripatetics, Epicureans, Stoics, and Pythagoreans. Menage's ancient sources for his comments on Aspasia are PI. Menex., Clem. Strom., Souda s.v. Aspasia, Ar. Ach., Athenaeus (and, in him, Herodicus the Cratetean), Plutarch (and, in him, Aeschines, Cratinus, and Hermippus), and Diogenes Laertius (and, in him, Antisthenes). As for Giovanni Angelo Canini (1617-1666), Zedler, Gilles Menage, 67 n. 13, states that he "designed from medals and antique gems a series of portraits of the most illustrious characters of antiquity. His Iconogrqfia (1699) contains 150 engravings." Louis Aime Victor Becq de Fouquieres, Aspasie de Milet: Etude historique et morale (Paris: Didier et i.e., 1872), refers to a medallion of a very similar description, illustrated in Gronovius. Zedler, Gilles Menage, also refers to a picture of Aspasia in Peter Bellorio (16157-1696): Giovanni Pietro Bellorio, Veterum Illustrium Philosophorum, Rhetorum et Oratorum Imagines (Rome: lo, 1685); she says Aspasia is found on p. 2 of the Rhetores section. 13. A typical encyclopedic dictionary was that of Pierre Bayle. Of its many editions, I have seen The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle,
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2d English ed. trans. Des Maiseaux, F. R. S. 5 vols (London: J. J. and P. Knapton, 1734-1738). His articles on Aspasia and Pericles are heavily dependent on Plutarch; he corrects Souda on the matter of Xanthippus' and Paralus' mother at vol. 4, 580 n. "P" (cf. chap. 4 n. 45, above). See Jean Joseph Francois Leconte de Bievre, Histoire des deux Aspasies, femmes illustres de la Grece. Avec des remarques historiques et critiques (Paris: Mesnier, 1736). Important women deserve equal treatment: introduction, i-iii; Thargelia: 9; Aspasia's education: 5-8; her ability to teach: 11-12; Pericles' love for her: 3132; his marriage to Aspasia: 32-33. 14. For Bouliar's life, see Francoise Maison, Tresors des Muse.es du Nord de la France, 11. Peinture francaise 1770-1830 (Arras, France: Musee d'Arras, 1975) for the entry on Bouliar, whose Aspasie was part of this exhibit (no. 17, shown on p. 47; the entire entry on Bouliar is on pp. 46-48). I am indebted to my friend and colleague, Frank Mariner, for locating additional bibliographic information on Bouliar in her dossier at the Musee du Louvre. The dossier contains notes and correspondence regarding archival materials that suggest Bouliar was not the daughter of an engraver, as has sometimes been thought, but of a tailor, and that she died at the home of friends (letter from M. Maison to LaVeissiere of the Musee du Louvre, July 29, 1975, reporting on research by Mme. RolandMichel). See also Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, eds., Women Artists 1550-1950 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art 1976; reprint, New York: Knopf, 1989); for Bouliar, see pp. 202-204. Over forty of her paintings and drawings are attested; ten paintings and one drawing survive. 15. For the influence of material circumstances on the development of women's artistic genius, see Linda Nochlin, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" Art News 69:9 (1971): 22-39, 67-71; and Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979). For a full treatment of a great woman artist, see Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi. For artistic representations of heroic or antiheroic ancient women up to the Baroque period see Garrard's discussion of literary and artistic femmes fortes and examples of Weibermacht, On women's painters' attraction to heroic women as subjects, see Garrard, 178; the quote is from p. 47. Bouliar was possibly inspired by Marie de Medici's cycle of heroic women in the Luxembourg Palace. 16. Harris and Nochlin (Women Artists, 203) describe the Aspasie as Bouliar's masterpiece. It may be the largest of her surviving works; it is 163 cm x 127 cm. Compare this to two portraits by Bouliar in Harris and Nochlin, which are, respectively, 73 cm x 60 cm and 82 x 62 cm. For the painting's ownership history, see Harris and Nochlin, 348. 17. Harris and Nochlin, Women Artists, 204, imagined that the painting pleads for women's equality. 18. The divine instructress' advice is given in Christine de Pizan, The Book of
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the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982), 1.3.2 (p. 9). For Christine and the mirror, see Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, 154. Garrard notes the pornographic and voyeuristic aspects of many paintings of Susanna (pp. 188-194) and of Cleopatra and Lucretia (p. 214). 19. For more on the iconography of the mirror: Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, 337 ff., esp. p. 361, and 564 n. 58. For the use of the mirror by female artists in particular to represent the search for self-knowledge, see ibid., 565 n. 71. The locus classicus for the mirror is D.L. 2.33. 20. See Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, 111, on the process by which early feminists transformed women from "signifier to significant." 21. Note Mary Daly's observations on the "potted passions" in Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 206-221, especially 206: "they [the potted passions] are twisted and warped versions of genuine passions. Like the nine-inch-high potted bonsai tree that could have grown eighty feet tall, these passions are dwarfed; their roots are shallow." On the difficulty of functioning as a "cognitive minority of one," see Mary Daly, Outercourse (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 112. 22. The view that Aspasia was a saloniere is expressed by Madame de Stae'l in her entry on Aspasia in the Biographic universelle and in vol. 17 of Oeuvres completes de Mme. la Baronne de Stael, 17 vols. (Paris: Treuttel and Wuertz, 1820), 339-345. For a study of Aspasia later in the century, see Becq de Fouquieres, Aspasie de Milet. His statement about Pericles' and Aspasia's union, p. 66; the view that she was the first saloniere, 225-226; the opinion that Aspasia wanted women to have freedom of choice, 224. Nicolas-Andre Monsiau (1755-1837) was an Academic painter who frequently rendered classical subjects. His first attempt to paint Aspasia seems to have been the 1798 Aspasie s'entretenant avec Alcibiade et Socrate (Pushkin Museum, Moscow); a chalk study for this painting entitled Socrate et Alcibiade rendant visile a Aspasie is also in the Pushkin Museum. He followed this in 1801 with the oil Socrate et Aspasie, also in the Pushkin Museum (inv. 1248). The 1806 work which is pictured in the present study is now at the Musee du Chambery (inv. D.83.1.1). It shows Pericles, Socrates, Alcibiades, Xenophon, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Phidias, Parrhasius, Isocrates, and Aspasia. There is an ink drawing of the 1806 work at Smith College, Northampton, MA (inv. TR 4985). A curious Salon painting by J. L. Hamon, La comedie humaine (1852), now in the Musee d'Orsay (inv. C 53 D 25) shows Aspasia synchronistically in the company of various other sages of Western history (e.g. Diogenes the Cynic, Dante, and Shakespeare) as all of them watch a performance of the Theatre Guignol puppetshow. I am deeply indebted to Frank Mariner for locating information on Monsiau and Hamon in the former's dossier at the Musee du Louvre. Thanks to the
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Musee du Louvre, Service d'Etude et Documentation du Departement des Peintures. Jean-Leon Gerome (1824—1904 exhibited Socrates Seeking Alcibiades in the House ofAspasia at the Salon of 1861 (now in a private collection), according to Gerald M. Ackermann, The Life and Work of Jean-Leon Gerome with a Catalogue Raisonne (London: Sotheby's Publications/Philip Wilson Publishers Ltd., 1986), pp. 54-55; see catalogue plate 131. According to Ackermann, p. 56, this Salon was one of "the most important of Gerome's career." For more information on that Salon and on sketches of its paintings, see p. 210; see p. 337, n. 183 for other paintings of Alcibiades among prostitutes. Narrative themes implied in Gerome's 1861 painting are developed by Philippe-Auguste d'Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam in his short story "Sagacite d'Aspasie" (1886) and collected in vol. 5, pp. 33-39 of Oeuvres Completes de Villiers de I'Isle-Adam. 11 volumes in 6 (Edition de Paris, 1922-1931; reprint, Geneva, Slatkine, 1970). I am most grateful to Marie Lathers for the reference to this story. 23. For text and commentary, see The Poems of Leopardi, ed. and trans. Geoffrey L. Bickersteth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923; reprint, New York: Russell & Russell, 1973). For recent critical studies, see Daniela Bini, A Fragrance from the Desert: Poetry and Philosophy in Giacomo Leopardi, Stanford French and Italian Studies, vol. 27 (Saratoga, Calif.: ANMA Libri & Company, 1983); and Gian Piero Barricelli, Giacomo Leopardi (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986). 24. For a full study of Victorian classicism, see Frank Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981). For the specific image of Athens, see Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, "Athenians on the Sceptered Isle," Classical Journal 84 (1988): 193-205. For biographies of Savage Landor, see John Forster, Walter Savage Landor, A Biography (Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Co., 1869, reprint, St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press Inc., 1972); R. H. Super, Walter Savage Landor: A Biography (London: John Calder, 1957); and Malcolm Elwen, Savage Landor (New York: Macmillan, 1941). For a brief biocritical study, see Ernest Dilworth, Walter Savage Landor (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971). For a Savage Landor bibliography, see Thomas J. Wise and Stephen Wheeler, A Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of Walter Savage Landor (Folkestone, England: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1971). No article or book devoted solely to Landor has appeared in the last ten years. Wise and Wheeler list the first printing of Pericles and Aspasia as published in two volumes in 1836 by Saunders & Otley, a London publisher; it was republished in 1876 in the fuller form of his collected works. My page references are to the Chiswick Library of Noble Writers edition; numbers refer to the numbering given the letters in that edition. The most recent edition of his complete works is the sixteen-volume set edited by T. Earle Welby and Stephen
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Wheeler (London: Chapman and Hall, 1927-1936). Landor discussed his sources and construction of the novel in a letter to Robert Southey early in 1835 (quoted in Forster, Walter Savage Landor, 490); more is mentioned on the book in an April 14, 1836, letter to an unidentified addressee (quoted in Forster, 498). Aspasia was also mentioned very briefly in one of Lander's Imaginary Conversations between Plato and Diogenes. (Imaginary Conversations in Complete Works, vol. 1, pp. 94—95. Aspasia in Diogenes' view would never have spoken "The chaff and litter" [p. 95] of the Menexenus.) 25. The letter can be divided into groups accordingly: 18 are from Pericles to Aspasia, 17 from Aspasia to Pericles, 40 from Cleone to Aspasia, 108 from Aspasia to Cleone; 12 from Anaxagoras to Aspasia, and 5 from Aspasia to Anaxagoras. The rest are among Pericles, Aspasia, Anaxagoras, Herodotus, Cimon, and Alcibiades, as well as several fictional individuals. Landor also inserts 7 "replies" or speeches by Pericles. 26. References to Pericles' and Aspasia's common home are made in letters 162 and 163; Pericles is called Aspasia's husband in letter 166; Aspasia is named as his wife at letter 186. 27. Of the fragments Landor ascribed to Aspasia, Forster says that they are "for the intensity and vividness of the dramatic expression, unequalled in the dramatic writings of our time" (p. 498). Dilworth, Walter Savage Landor, 40, notes Lander's fondness for composing fragmentary verse dramas. In the "tragic fragments," Iphigeneia praises daughters over wives upon welcoming her father to the underworld (letter 225); Electra blames herself for inciting Orestes to murder Clytemnestra (letter 227); and Electra prays that Orestes be healed (letter 229). 28. Eliza Lynn Linton, Amymone, A Romance of the Days of Pericles, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1848). The title page reads "By the author of 'Azeth the Egyptian.' " For the life of Linton, see An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers (1988), 295-296, with recent bibliography; to which should be added Kathryn Kress Osterholm, "Eliza Lynn Linton's Female Characters and the Double Bind of the Feminine Novelist" (Ph.D. diss.), abstract in Dissertation Abstracts International xx (1989): 1314A. 29. The painting is at the City Museum of Birmingham (inv. 118.23). For studies of Alma-Tadema, see Helen Zimmern, L. Alma-Tadema R. A.: His Life and Work (London: n.p., 1886); Vern G. Swanson, Sir Lawrence AlmaTadema: The Painter of the Victorian Vision of the Ancient World (London: Ash & Grant, 1977) (biocritical study); and Richard Tomlinson, The Athens of Alma Tadema (Wolfeboro Falls, N.Y.: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1991). The characterization of Alma-Tadema's brand of classicism is given in Richard Jenkyns, "Hellenism in Victorian Painting," in Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination, ed. G. W. Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 83-119.
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30. Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (New York: Blackwell, 1988), points out the polyvalent importance of the prostitute in Victorian representations of women; it seems that Alma-Tadema avoids suggesting that image in the work discussed here. On the other hand, his paintings of Lesbia and Catullus can certainly be said to associate Lesbia with "the soiled woman of men's projections at the time of the Contagious Diseases Acts," as discussed by Joseph A. Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny: The Social Discourse of Nineteenth-Century British Classical-Subject Painting (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 274. Chrysis, the wife-like concubine and former hetaira in Menander's fourth-century B.C. comedy, Samia, is represented with similar ambivalence in an ancient mosaic; for discussion, see Henry, Menander's Courtesans, 73. 31. The positive interpretation of Alma-Tadema's Aspasia is given by Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny, 281; for his reading of Alma-Tadema's dangerous doubles, see p. 273; for his discussion of Sappho and Alcaeus, see p. 274. At pp. 275-277, Kestner aptly compares the fear of and hostility toward women's sexuality visible in some of Alma-Tadema's paintings with Linton's lifelong antifeminism. See Eliza Lynn Linton, "The Partisans of the Wild Women," Nineteenth Century 31 (1892): 455-^64, and "The Wild Women as Social Insurgents," Nineteenth Century 30 (1891): 596-605. For recent discussion of Sappho's biographical tradition, see Holt Parker, "Sappho Schoolmistress," TAPA 123 (1993): 309-351. 32. C. Holland (pseud. Caroline Holgate, Aspasia (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1869). = Wright's American Fiction vol. 2 (microfilm). 33. The reference to Aspasia's "saloon" was made by Caroline H. Dall, The College, the Market, and the Court; or Woman's Relation to Education, Labor, and the Law, pp. 52-53, quoted in Sarah B. Pomeroy, "The Persian King and Queen Bee," American Journal of Ancient History 9 (1984), 103 and n. 31. 34. I have used the text of translator Mary Safford, Aspasia: A Romance of Art and Love in Ancient Hellas, 2 vols. (New York: William S. Gottsberger, 1881). The music that this novel inspired is that of Kurt Karnauke, Aspasia; Singspiel in zwei Akten nach dem Romane Hamerlings (Leipzig: Friedrich Schuertner Verlag, n. d., 24 pp.). It may have been intended to accompany the Hamerling-inspired play written by the Latvian feminist "Aspazija," q.v. inf. At about the same time Hamerling was writing about Aspasia, there was a small explosion of treatments of Theodora, the colorful and scandalous Byzantine empress: Pottinger, Blue and Green; Debidour, The Empress Theodora; Rhangabe, Theodora (drama); Sardou, Theodora (drama). 35. Hamerling pointedly compares the boyishly beautiful Aspasia with the mustached matrons at 1.25-26 and 1.41. 36. Thanks to Marie Lathers for the term register. 37. For the life and work of George Grote, see the entry by John Vaio in
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Ward Briggs and William M. Calder III, eds., Classical Scholarship: A Biographical Encyclopedia, Garland Reference Library in the Humanities, vol. 928 (New York: Garland, 1990), 119-126. I have used George Grote, A History of Greece; From the Earliest Period to the Close of the Generation Contemporary with Alexander the Great, New Edition, 12 vols. (London: John Murray, 1870). Aspasia is mentioned in vol. 5, 361-366. Grote calls her the mistress of Pericles (361), claims it is unlikely she kept a brothel (362), discusses her role in the Samian War (291), mentions the Megarian embargo (362-363), and expresses the belief that the trial was historical (364—365). For additional analysis of Grote's general perspective and influence, see F. Turner, Greek Heritage, pass., esp. 213, 225; and Roberts, "Athenians on the Sceptered Isle," pass. 38. See William Watkiss Lloyd, The Age of Pericles: A History of the Politics and Art of Greece from the Persian to the Peloponnesian War, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1875). He mentions Aspasia as a hetaira in place of a wife at 2.150 and as more interesting than Athenian wives at 2.149; he finds Pericles' reserve to be due to his unhappiness at Aspasia's second-class status (2.150). The Menexenus is literally taken at 2.153 and 2.154; Lloyd saw Aspasia's trial as persecution at 2.306-307. 39. See Evelyn Abbott, Pericles and the Golden Age of Athens (New York: Putnam, 1895 [copyright page says 1891]). Abbott was the general editor of Putnam's Heroes of the Nations series, of which this volume was a member. He states at p. v that Pericles destroyed democracy; at p. 339, that Pericles desired the demos' pleasure; at p. 194, considers Aspasia as an adventuress; at p. 168, discusses the destruction of Athenian domestic life. For comment on Abbott, see Turner, Greek Heritage, 252. 40. For Curtius, see the entry by Mortimer Chambers (pp. 37-42) in Briggs and Calder, Classical Scholarship. See Ernst Curtius, Griechische Geschichte, 3 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1857-1861). I have used The History of Greece, trans. Adolphus William Ward, 5 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1869). The description of Aspasia is found at 3.461. 41. See Ivo Bruns, Frauenemancipation in Athen. Bruns' view of Euripides as a champion of women, at odds with the opinions of Wilamowitz and Christ, is found at p. 4. Euripides' and Aristophanes' works as evidence for a women's movement, and their heroines drawn from real leaders of this movement, are discussed at pp. 18-20; the opinion that hetairai were the leaders of the movement is found at p. 19. Bruns adopts views of Meyer, Forschungen zur alien Geschichte 2.55 ff., against those of Wilamowitz at p. 19; the view that Aspasia, Praxagora, and Lysistrata were all rhetorically instructed women who taught other women is found at p. 20. Interestingly, Samuel Butler's protofeminist The Authoress of the Odyssey had appeared only three years previously, in 1897. 42. For a lucid sketch of the conditions under which feminist consciousness
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can arise, see Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, 242-243, and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993), pass. 43. Brims' naive interpretation of Menexenus is found at p. 21; he acknowledges the irony but claims "a grain of historical truth.'' The reformist interpretation of Oeconomicus is given on pp. 28-31. 44. For the life and work of Wilamowitz, see the entry by Robert Fowler in Briggs and Calder, Classical Scholarship, 489-522. The discussion of Aspasia is given in Aristoteles und Athen, vol. 1, 263-264 n. 7. His statement that those who need perfume in their history should turn to Hamerling is found at 2.99-100 n. 35. Wilamowitz attacks Brans' viewpoint in "Lesefruechte," sec. 66, 548553. 45. Wilamowitz' view that Aspasia's intellect is not a historical question is found in "Lesefruechte," p. 553. His revised view is given in Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. Platan: Sein Leben und seine Werke, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1919); rev. ed., ed. B. Snell (Berlin: Weidmann, 1948; reprint, 1959), 19. The second and third editions appeared in 1920 and 1929, respectively. 46. For Rozenberga, see Astrida B. Stahnke, Aspazija: Her Life and Her Drama (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984). See also Aspazija's autobiography, Mana Dzive un Darbi (Riga: Gulbis, 1931-1940). For her father and mother, see Stahnke, 5-21; Stahnke takes this information from Aspazija's autobiography (1.5). For the marriage, desertion, and adoption of pseudonym, see Stahnke, 34—36. 47. Stahnke characterizes both Aspasias, identifies Jansons as a source for the pseudonym, and interprets Aspazija's psychological state at this time at p. 36; she discusses The Avengeress at p. 37 and The Lost Rights at p. 42. The papers of Victor Zednick (b. 1895), a state senator from Washington, contain items related to an "Aspasia Club," possibly organized by his wife. The papers are located in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. (This information was found on the EUREKA database of the Research Libraries Group (RLG), consulted on July 23, 1993, with the help of Jon Corelis of RLG, Stanford University, Stanford, California.) 48. The quotation from Aspazija's writings is cited by Stahnke, Aspazija, 43, without attribution to any particular work; the account of how Aspazija's career was stifled is given at pp. 44-46; that Rainis found Aspazija a heroine is evident in one of his letters to her, quoted on p. 49. During her years with Rainis, Aspazija collaborated with him on a translation of Faust, which first appeared in its entirety in 1898. Aspazija's part in this work has been denigrated; she herself apparently abrogated claim to collaboration in 1903, when the reprint ascribed authorship to Rainis alone. She later claimed co-authorship (see Stahnke, Aspazija, 54 and n. 28). Compare this to Colette and Willy's argument at about the same time about who had written the Claudine novels. 49. For Aspazija's translations of Hamerling into Latvian, see Stahnke,
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Aspazija, 57; for her work in the feminist movement, ibid., 119-122. The play Aspasia premiered on September 1, 1923; for a discussion, see Stahnke, Aspazija, 124—127. (Stahnke is translating this play from Latvian to English at present (telephone conversation in October of 1991 j.) For the products of Apazija's second phase of creativity, see Stahnke, Aspazija, 127; for her last years, see ibid., 140-157. 50. The following is a partial list of twentieth-century novels not discussed here but based closely or loosely on Aspasia's bios or its themes. Kristofer Janson, Aspasia (Copenhagen: Nordisk Forlag, 1914); Jan Parandowsky, Aspazja (Lwow: H. Altenberg, 1925); Fritz Thurn (pseud, for Gustav Mueller), Die Weisheiten der Aspasia (Paris: Edition des Livres d'Or, 192-); Carlos Buenaventura Quiroga, Aspasia en Atenas: Novela griega (Buenos Aires: Editorial Claridad, 1965); Aleksander Krawczuk, Perykles i Aspazja (Wrocoaw: Zakoad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, 1967); Elisabeth Hering, Angeklagt ist Aspasia (Leizig: Prisma-Verlag, 1967); Petros Pikros, He Hetaira pou Kyvernese ten Hellada (Athens: Ekdoseis Kaktos, 1976); Anna Twose, The Lion of Athens (London: Chatto and Windus, 1976); Franciszek Conczynski, Aspazja z Miletosu (London: Oficyna Poetow i Malarzy, 1979); Daniele Calvo Platero, Aspasie: Roman (Paris: O. Orban, 1986). Gertude Atherton's The Immortal Marriage (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927) is an extravagant novel of manners, in which Aspasia comes with her kinsman Hippodamas to Athens, determined never to marry but, as an exceptional woman, falls in love with the exceptional Pericles. Atherton's knowledge of the sources is clear, as is her understanding of current scholarship on the subject; she appends a list of sources and scholars (after p. 465). But the work never comes to life, and it resembles Alma-Tadema's stiff picture of Aspasia among Phidian stones. 51. Berthe Le Barillier (pseud. Jean de Bertheroy), Aspasie etPhryne (Paris: Editions d'Art et de Litterature, 1913). Le Barillier follows de Bievre's practice of pairing Aspasia with another woman; like him, she provides a completely bipartite structure. Aspasia is treated on pp. 1-135; Phryne is discussed on pp. 139-270. There is no common conclusion. 52. W. L. Courtney, Old Saws and Modern Instances, 2d. ed. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1919). The direct quotation is taken from p. 105; Aspasia is identified as a great woman at p. 108. 53. R. E. Money-Kyrle, Aspasia: The Future of Amorality (London: Kegan Paul, 1932). Aspasia is described as ' 'amiable'' at p. 19; we need to sacrifice our morality, says the author at p. 10; remarks on removal of frustration appear at p. 13 and on relaxation of sexual taboos at p. 15. For a perceptive analysis of sexology in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880-1930 (London: Pandora Press, 1985), and Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution (London: Women's Press Limited, 1990). For intercourse as a practice
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essential to constructing woman in patriarchy, see Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: Free Press, 1987). 54. See Peter Green, Achilles His Armour (London: John Murray, 1955). Green's comment on Aspasia's seduction of Alcibiades is found on p. 27; for the idea that Pericles is incomplete until he meets Aspasia, see p. 28; for Aspasia's origins, see pp. 29, 68. 55. Aspasia blames herself for Alcibiades' worldview on p. 47; she blames herself for Pericles' strained relations with his kin on p. 93 and for the plague on p. 107. Alcibiades is banished from Pericles' house on p. 50. 56. For Lysicles as a predator, see pp. 123-124 (cf. Linton's rendering of Lysicles as a friend in need in Amymone). The quote "whether Athens won or lost" is on pp. 136-137. Aspasia chooses to stay in Athens after the death of Pericles at pp. 140-147. For Alcibiades' and Hipparete's wedding night, see p. 222; he fears her love on p. 232. For the temporary exorcism of Aspasia's ghost, see pp. 260-261; for the sexual relationship of Alcibiades and Timaea, see pp. 379, 391-392; for Timaea's makeup awakening old memories, see pp. 397, 398. 57. See Madelon Dimont, Darling Pericles (New York: Atheneum, 1972). For the gynophilic behavior of Aspasia's father, see p. 6; for Aspasia's blissful first sexual experience, see pp. 29-31. 58. See Taylor Caldwell, Glory and the Lightning (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974). The novel is divided into parts: I. Aspasia; II. Pericles; III. Pericles and Aspasia; IV. Prologue. The decision by her mother concerning Aspasia is found at p. 5; for her view that women rule men, see p. 6. Aspasia's mental growth and masculine mind are discussed on pp. 13-14; her first intercourse is described on p. 49. 59. Aspasia's sexual relationship with Ali Taliph is mentioned at p. 106; for her emancipation in Damascus, see p. 158. For radical feminist analysis of the concept of Sadeian woman, see Kappeler, Pornography of Representation, pp. 90-91. 60. For Pericles' yearning for Aspasia, see p. 229; for Aspasia's school, see p. 287. Pericles and Aspasia meet on pp. 287-288; Aspasia is said to combine the best qualities of courtesan and wife at p. 312; Aspasia's realistic view of her circumstances is found at p. 313. 61. Aspasia encourages honest courtships on p. 334. For her views on education, see p. 341; for her confidante Helena, see p. 360; for the birth of Pericles junior, see pp. 372-375. She lives with Pericles on p. 392; for Aspasia's arrest and trial, see pp. 448^149; for the death of Helena, see p. 450. Aspasia is called a symbol on p. 464. 62. Quotations from the Prologue are found on p. 468. 63. See Gore Vidal, Creation (New York: Random House, 1981; reprint, Ballantine Books, 1982). Darling Pericles did have a final page where Aspasia
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appends to her memoirs the life events of other Athenians—Socrates, Euripides, Sophocles, Alcibiades, and her own son—but doesn't say anything about herself except that "I have held court on my own for the last half of my life" (p. 218). 64. For Chicago's own account of the project, see Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1979). Aspasia's plate is described on pp. 66-67. See also Judy Chicago, Embroidering Our Heritage (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1980), for discussion of the embroideries. The guests are called symbolic images in Chicago, Dinner Party, 52; women of achievement are described at p. 55. For discussion and analysis of the work's vicissitudes, see Riane Eisler, "Sex, Art and Archetypes," The Women's Review of Books 8:6 (1991): 16. 65. The first table is described by Chicago, Dinner Party, 53; the schema appears on p. 56; the description of Sappho's place setting on p. 66.
Afterword 1. Le Doeuff, Hipparchia's Choice, 115. 2. See Cheryl Glenn, "Sex, Lies, and Manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric," College Composition and Communication 45 (May 1994): 180-199; and Susan C. Jarratt, "The First Sophists and Feminism: Discourses of the 'Other,'" Hypatia 5 (1990): 27-41. 3. Le Doeuff, 115, discusses the concept of the imaginary plane: "no philosophical thought is without its imaginary plane and it is perhaps on this level that the most fundamental changes take place." 4. For a discussion of Xanthippe and others, see Teri Marsh, "The (Other) Maiden's Tale," 269-284. 5. Le Doeuff, Hipparchia's Choice, 205, claims that Hipparchia's words were the only words a woman philosopher of antiquity spoke about women's lives. Aspasia's marital advice certainly is a statement about women's lives, and from the philologist's or historian's point of view, is as well attested as the speech of Hipparchia (in D.L. 6.98). Whether or not the real Aspasia gave such advice, her bios presented it as such, and it could have been read as such by Hipparchia. 6. Daughters: for Cleobulina, see Plutarch, Dinner of the Seven Wise Men 148C-e; 150e, f; for Hypatia, see Snyder, Woman and the Lyre, 113-121. For mothers: see Didymus' catalogue and discussion in chap. 4, above. For Theano, wife and/or student of Pythagoras: see D.L. 8.42-43 and Snyder, Woman and the Lyre, 108-113. For Leontion, mistress of Epicurus: see D.L. 10.4-6 and Synder, 103-105. For Hipparchia, partner of Crates: see D.L. 6.96-98 and Snyder, 105-108. 7. The remark on polygenesis is made by Le Doeuff, Hipparchia's Choice,
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170. Of her own polygenesis the author said,' 'I was born just about everywhere, under the now shattered sky of the Greeks, in a Brittany farmer's clogs, in an Elizabethan theatre, in my grandmothers' famines and destitution, and in the secular, compulsory and free schooling that the state was so good as to make available to me, but also in the rebellions that were mine alone" (p. 172). 8. For Thales and the Thracian girl, see PI. Tht. 174a, 175d; for the same anecdote, but with Thales and a crone, see D.L. 1.33-34. At 1.33, Diogenes Laertius also gave the statement, attributed to both Thales and Socrates, that he was grateful to Fortune for having been born human and not animal, man and not woman, and Greek and not barbarian. For the significance of this latter anecdote, see Page DuBois, Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982; reprint, 1991), pass.
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Bibliography
Abbreviations and Short References APF Ath. CA CAH D.L. FCG FGrH FHG K-A/PCG Kock/CGF de Mag. POxy. PEG RE SA SH Souda
J. K. Davies, Athenian Propertied Families 600300 B.C. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae Collectanea Alexandrinea The Cambridge Ancient History Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers Fragmenta Comicorum Graecorum Die Fragments der griechischen Historiker Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum Poetae Comici Graeci, ed. R. Kassel and C. Austin Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed. Theodor Kock Laurentius Lydus, de Magistratibus The Oxyrhynchus Papyri Parodorum Epicorum Graecorum Paulys Realencyclopaedie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft Die Schule des Aristoteles, ed. Fritz Wehrli Supplementum Hellenisticum Suidae Lexicon 111
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Index
Abbott, Evelyn, 111; Pericles and the Golden Age of Athens, 111 Abelard, Peter, 83-86, 90, 99, 120, 129; Historia Calamitatum, 83; Letters, 83-86 Aeschines of Sphettos (Aeschines Socraticus), 30, 41-45, 46, 50, 52, 54, 55, 56, 73, 75, 77, 84, 85, 112, 128; bios, 41 Aeschylus, Eumenides, 38 Alcibiades the Elder, 10, 11, 12 Alcibiades the Younger, 10, 31, 32, 64, 65, 101, 103, 117-118. See also Hipparete Alciphron, 76; Letters of Courtesans, 76-77 Alexandria, 58, 61, 78, 80-81; Library, 62 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 103-105; Caracalla and Geta, 104; At Lesbia's, 104; Phidias and the Frieze of the Parthenon, 103-104, 104 fig. 5.5; A Reading from Homer, 104 Amazons/Amazonian, 36, 42, 94 Ameling, W., 26 Ammonius grammaticus, 62, 64; Komoidoumenoi, 62; Peri Hetairon, 62 Anaxagoras, 5, 69, 72, 73, 99-100
Antiphanes the Younger, 63; Peri Hetairon, 63 Antisthenes Socraticus, 14, 30—32, 41; Aspasia, 30-32; as character, 54, 55; Choice of Heracles, 32; Cyrus, 30 Apollodorus of Athens, 62; Peri Hetairon, 62—63 Aporia (perplexity), 44, 66, 70, 125, 128 Arete (virtue), 31, 40, 43-45, 50, 54, 56; and Kakia (vice), 32 Arete, wife of Aristippus, 66 Arginusae, battle of, 15 Aristarchus, 62 Aristippus, 64, 65 Aristophanes comicus, 20-28; 111-112; Acharnians, 25-27, 60, 72; Frogs, 23; Knights, 27; Peace, 27, 35; Wasps, 15, 27, 35 Aristophanes of Byzantium, 61—62; Lexis Komike, 62; Peri Komoidias, 62; Peri Prosopon, 62; Peri ton Athenesin Hetairidon, 62 Aristotle, 59; Poetics, 61 Artemisia, 5 Artists, female, 91, 94 Aspasia of Miletus: as aesthete, 107; artistic representations of, 17,18, 80-81, 195
196 Aspasia of Miletus (Cont.) 87-88, 89, 90, 91-95, 96, 103-105, 111, 121-125; as concubine, 6, 15, 17, 20-22, 138-139n. 9; as dominatrix, 60, 71, 94, 117, 118; as "female Socrates," 17, 56; as feminist activist, 107-108, 112, 122-123; as friend of Socrates, 46, 57, 64; impiety trial, 15-16, 24, 43, 72-73, 94, 99, 100, 103, 108, 110, 120, 135n. 22; life events: birth, parentage, and early years, 9-12, 132nn. 1-5; —, collateral descendants, 10, 132n. 5; —, latter years and death, 15—17, 33, 42; and Lysicles, 9, 16-17, 43; as matchmaker, 48-52, 54-56, 151n. 53; as metic, 15; as mother, 6, 15, 23, 24, 120; —, of Pericles junior, 9, 13, 16-17, 71, 91, 99, 133-134n. 13; —, of "Poristes," 10, 43, 136n. 26; as phallic signifier, 37, 40, 94— 95, 98, 127; as philosopher, 5, 2956, 66, 84, 89, 90, 102, 107, 110, 111, 114-116 (see also Salonieres); physical appearance of, 17, 71; as prostitute, 24, 25-28, 34-36, 4950, 58, 68, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 138139n. 9; reflected in Greek tragedy, 137n. 1; as relativist, 38, 44-45, 86; as rhetorician, 33, 35, 36, 43, 71, 107; as role model, 83-86, 106, 114115; as solitary, 93, 95, 104-105, 106, 120; as teacher of Pericles, 29, 35, 43, 66, 77, 78, 88, 89; as teacher of Socrates, 30, 33, 36, 51, 64, 66, 76, 78, 79, 89; as warmonger, 23, 26-27, 58, 70, 71-72, 74, 87; as wife of Pericles, 89, 91, 99, 101, 108 "Aspasia II" (concubine of Cyrus), 71, 89-91 Aspazija (Elza Rozenberga), 114-116; Aspasia, 115; The Avengeress, 114; The Lost Rights, 115 Atherton, G., 109; The Immortal Marriage, 109
Index Autarkeia (self-sufficiency), 32 Autochthony, 31, 33, 37, 47, 130 Axiochus, father of Aspasia, 9, 10, 11, 70 Becq de Fouquieres, L., 95-96, 130 Bellorio, P., 89 Bergk, Th., 138n. 8 Bicknell, P. J., 10 Bievre, Leconte de, 89-91; Histoire des deux Aspasies, 89 Bios (biographical tradition), defined, 131n. 2 Bloedow, E., 34 Boccaccio, 88 Boethius, 85 Boudicca, 122 Bouliar, M.-G., 91-95, 104, 105, 124, 129; Aspasie, 91-95, 92 fig. 5.3 Bruns, I., 111-113; Frauenemancipation in Athen, 111-113 Calamis the Elder, 17 Caldwell, Taylor, 119-121; Glory and the Lightning, 119-121 Callias, 17, 31, 42-43, 46, 59, 75 Callias comicus, Pedetai, 27-28, 35 Callistratus, 62; Peri Hetairon, 62 Canini, G., 89, 90 fig. 5.2 Catabasis, 23, 141n. 22 Catalogues, 87-89, 123 Chicago, Judy, 121-125; The Dinner Party, 121-125 and figs. 5.6, 5.7, 5.8 Chreiai (witty sayings), 58-59 Christian writers, 66, 67-80 Christianity and paganism, 77-80, 8485, 105 Chronos (time), 20, 21 Cicero, 43, 57, 66, 87; de Inventione Rhetorica, 43-44, 67, 85 Cimon, 12, 32, 69, 139n. 9 Citizens/Citizenship, 11-14, 30, 36, 38. See also Citizenship Law of 451/450; Metics
197
Index Citizenship Law of 451/450, 11-17, 31, 36, 74, 99 Clearchus of Soli, 60; Erotika, 60 Cleisophus of Selymbria, 60 Cleisthenes, 12 Clement of Alexandria, 77—78; Stromateis, 78 Cleobulina, 129 Cleon, 23, 35, 101 Cleopatra VII, 6 Cleophon, 26 Comnena, Anna, 89 Courtney, W. L., 116; Old Saws and Modern Instances, 116 Cratinus, 17, 24, 27; Cheirons, 15, 20-22, 138n. 8; Dionysalexandros, 22; Nemesis, 22 Critias, 77 Critoboulus, 46-48, 49, 50-51 Crones, 42, 45, 55, 59, 130 Cross-dressing, 99, 101, 107 Curtius, E., Ill Cynics, 31, 129 Dacier, A. L., 88 Dall, C., 106 Daly, M., 95, 166n. 21 The Dead/Death, 20, 21, 23, 24, 36, 37-38, 40, 97-98. See also Metaphor Demes/Demesmen, 12, 133nn. 10, 12 Demosthenes, 16 Dictionaries, 89. See also, Catalogues; Encyclopedias; Lexicographers; Medallion Books Didymus Chalcenteros, 66, 75, 78, 129; Lexis Komike, 66; Symposiaka, 66, 78 Diodorus of Athens, 17, 113 Dimont, M., 118-119, 123; Darling Pericles, 118-119 Diogenes Laertius, 88 Diotima, 6, 40, 76, 79, 80, 89, 98 Doubles/Doublets, 43, 63, 104-105, 108, 116, 136n. 26 Dover, K. J., 135n. 22
DuBois, P., 55-56 Dueling, I., 65 Duris of Samos, 19, 26, 58, 59, 72 Earth, 38-39 Ehlers, B., 41, 42, 43, 44, 49 Elpinike, 32, 69, 72, 107-108, 139n. 9 Encyclopedias/Encyclopedists, 79-80, 89. See also Catalogues; Dictionaries; Lexicographers; Medallion Books Ephorus, 72 Epitaphios, 33^0, 46, 78, 120. See also Plato, Menexenus Eriphanis, 60 Eros, 32, 40, 43^5, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 64, 80, 97-98; erotic pedagogy, 55, 65
Essentialism, 63
Esther, 78 Euphemus, 32 Eupolis, 17, 22-24, 71; Denies, 23-24; Marikas, 23, 24; Philoi, 23; Prospaltians, 23, 24 Euripides, 100, 106, 111 Favorinus, 76 Fellow-hunter, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54. See also Hunting; Metaphor Female subjectivity, 32, 41, 45, 9395, 130 Feminist consciousness, 6, 83-87, 93, 112, 128-130, 134n. 15 Foreigners, 14, 31, 36. See also Metics French Revolution, 91 Freudianism, popular, 116-117 Fuller, M., 106 Garrard, M., 91, 94, 95 Gentileschi, A., 91, 94-95 Gerome, J.-L., 96; Socrates Seeking Alcibiades in the House of Aspasia, 96 Glykera (hetaira), 61 Gorgias of Athens, 63 Gorgias sophistes, 77
198 Green, P., 117-118; Achilles His Armor, 117-118 Grote, G., 110, 111; History of Greece, 110 Guardians/Guardianship, 13, 14, 16-17, 136n. 26 Gyges, 60
Index Hunting, 47, 49, 55, 65 Hybrids. See Monstrous births Hypatia, 78, 120, 129 Hyperbolus, 23
Idomeneus of Lampsacus, 61; Peri ton Sokratikon, 61 Inductio (induction), 84; defined, 67 Halperin, D., 32 Ischomachus, 50-52, 53, 106 Hamerling, R., 106-109, 110, 113, 116, Infanticide, 15, 135n. 20 119; Aspasia, 106-109 Jenkyns, R., 103 Harris, L. S., 92-93 Judith, 78 Redone, 32 Hegesander of Delphi, 59; HypoJulia Domna, 89, 104 mnemata, 59 Kagan, D., 26 Heilbrun, C., 4 Helen, 22, 23, 24, 26 Kamuf, P., 85 Heloise, 83-86, 89, 90, 114, 129, 130; Katapygosyne, 20, 21, 138n. 8 "Heloise complex," 86; Letters, Katz, M. A., 40 83-86 Kelly, J., 86 Hera, 20, 21 Kennedy, G., 77 Heraclides Ponticus, 59-60; Peri Komoidoumenoi, 62-64 Hedones, 59-60 Kynna, 27, 28, 35 Heracles, 23 Kynosarges, 31 Hermesianax of Colophon, 64, 65; Leontion, 64 Laikastriai, 25-26 Hermippus, 15, 24-25, 26, 73, 102, Lais, 64 103, 108; Artopolides, 25; Moirai, Lamia, 27 Landor, W. S., 98-101, 103, 104, 108, 135n. 23 Herodicus of Babylon (the Cratetean), 109, 111, 116; Pericles and Aspasia, 64—65; Komoidoumenoi, 64; Pros 99-101 ton Philosokraten, 64-65 Le Barillier, B., 116 Herodotus, 5, 25-26, 76; critique of, 68 Le Doeuff, M., 86; "Heloise comHeroic women in art, 78, 91-92, 94 plex," 86; "imaginary plane," 128, Hesiod, 21 174nn. 3, 5; "imaginary plane" deHetairai (courtesans), 48, 58, 59, 102, fined, 174n. 3; polygenesis, 130 110, 112; denned, 41 Leaina, mistress of the tyrannicides, Hetairideia, 59 79 Hipparete, wife of Alcibiades, 118 Leontion, the Epicurean, 129 Hipparchia, the Cynic, 129 Leopardi, G., 96-98; "Aspasia" cyHolland, C., 105-106; Aspasia, 105cle, 96-98 106 Lerner, G., 13 Homer/Homeric language, 20, 21 Lesbia, 104 Homoeroticism, male, 32, 47-49, 50, Lexicographers/Lexicography, 79-80. 52-56 See also Catalogues; Dictionaries; Humphreys, S. C., 14 Encyclopedias; Medallion Books
199
Index Libraries, ancient, 81 Liminality, 37, 45, 52, 56, 67, 85, 91-92, 112 Linton, E. L., 101-103, 104, 105; Amymone: A Romance of the Days of Pericles, 101-103, 105 Lloyd, W. W., 110-111; The Age of Pericles, 110-111 Logos/Ergon, 46 Loraux, N., 33, 34, 36, 37 Lucian, 66, 75-76; The Dance, 76, 79; The Dream, 76; Erotes, 76; The Eunuch, 76; Imagines, 75; Okypous, 76 Lykon, 23 Lynceus of Samos, 58, 59, 61; Deipnetikai Epistolai, 58; Memorabilia, 58; Opsonitike Techne, 58 Lysias, 41 Lysicles, 16, 17, 27, 43, 103, 113, 117, 118. See also Aspasia of Miletus MacDowell, D. M., 26 Machon of Sicyon, 58, 62; Chreiai, 58-59 Maison, F., 93 Marriage, 12, 46, 50-56, 67, 84, 96, 108, 111, 128-129, 134nn. 17, 18, 19. See also Matchmaker; Wives Matchmaker (Promnestris), 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54-56, 128; defined, 45 Matro of Pitane, 59, 61; Deipnon Attikon, 59, 61 Maximus of Tyre, 74-75; Orations, 74-75 Medallion Books, 87, 89, 88 fig. 5.1, 90 fig. 5.2, 123 Megarian Decree, 25-26, 72-73, 108 Menage, G. de., 88-89, 99; Historia Mulierum Philosopharum, 88—89 Menander comicus, 13, 16-17, 61, 97 Metaneira (hetaira), 59 Metaphor, 32, 47, 54-56, 70, 137n. 1, 139n. 10
Metics (resident aliens), 11-15, 36, 101. See also Citizens; Citizenship Law of 451/450 Metis, and Zeus, 130 Metonymy, 34, 36, 37, 40, 146147n. 19 Midwives, 45, 48, 52, 54-56 Miltiades, 12, 19, 23-24 Money-Kyrle, R. E., 116 Monsiau, N.-A., 95; Aspasie s'entretenant avec les hommes les plus illustres d'Athenes, 95, 96 fig. 5.4; Moliere lisant son Tartufe chez Ninon de I'Enclos, 95 Monstrous births, 21, 22, 27, 34, 38, 138n. 8 Motherhood/Mothers, 23, 24, 36-38, 40. See also Aspasia of Miletus as mother Murray, O., 10 Muses, 46, 80; as harlots, 85 Mutuality, 55. See also Female subjectivity; Feminist consciousness Nausicaa, 75, 78 Nicias, 23 Nochlin, L., 93 Nothoi (bastards)/bastardy, 14, 15, 16, 23, 24, 31, 34 Oikos (household), 45, 54 Outsiders. See Liminality PallakailPallakia (concubines/ concubinage), 14, 15, 16, 17, 71, 84. See also Aspasia of Miletus as concubine Pander/Pandering (mastroposl mastropeia), 45, 52-55, 69-70, 79 Pandora, 21 Parabasis, 20, 27, 138n. 6 Paralus, 23, 31, 32, 73, 103, 109 Patterson, C., 12, 14 Peloponnesian War, 12, 20, 22, 2526, 29, 30, 31, 39, 72-73, 110 Penelope, 75
200 Peri Hetairon treatises, 63—64 Pericles of Athens, son of Xanthippus: divorce, marriage(s), 13, 87, 89, 117; as intellectual, 5, 116, 131n. 9; love for Aspasia, 13, 15, 32, 43, 44, 59, 60, 71, 72, 73, 74, 87, 94, 106; sexuality, 16, 19, 24-25, 47, 69, 70, 71, 74. See also Aspasia of Miletus, as wife of Pericles; Marriage; Plutarch, Life of Pericles Pericles junior, 13, 14, 16, 23, 24, 31, 74, 109. See also Aspasia of Miletus; Nothoi Persian Wars, 5, 39 Phidias, 5, 24, 68, 69, 72, 73, 103, 106, 109 Philoi (Male loves). See Homoeroticism, male Philosophers, female, 6, 29-30, 56, 65, 66, 76, 88-89, 129, 130, 132n. 10, 174n. 5. See also Aspasia of Miletus; Hipparchia; Hypatia Philostratus, 77; Letter 73, 11 Phratries, 12, 74, 133n. 12 Phryne, 62, 63, 116 Pizan, C. de, 86-87, 93-94; Book of the City of Ladies, 86-87 Plague, at Athens, 16 Plato philosophus, 40, 50, 54, 55, 56, 59, 65, 75, 79; bios, 41; Euthydemus, 44; Gorgias, 31; Laws, 40; Menexenus, 30, 31, 32-40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 61, 71, 98, 110; Symposium, 40, 44, 56, 98; Theaetetus, 55 Platonism/Platonists, 74-75, 96-98, 110, 112 Plutarch, 19; de malignitate Herodoti, 68, 72; Life of Pericles, 9-10, 15, 16, 24, 61, 63, 67-74, 87, 88, 94, 96, 99; translation of Lives, 87 poristes (provider), 43 "Poristes." See Aspasia of Miletus Pome, defined, 17. See also Prostitutes pornography, 57-59, 61-64, 66, 93, 96, 138nn. 1, 5 Prodicus of Ceos, 59, 140n. 16
Index Prosopography, 57, 62, 156-157n. 12. See also Komoidoumenoi; Peri Hetairon treatises Prostitutes/Prostitution, 62-64, 79; and philosophers, 61, 65, 76-77; and politicians, 21, 24-28, 35, 42, 62, 65, 76-77, 138n. 6, 139-140n. 9 Pythagoras, 64, 65, 79 Quintilian, 43, 57, 66, 87; Institutio Oratoria, 67 Rainis, J. (Janis Plieksans), 114-115. See also Aspazija Rankin, H. D., 31, 32 Rhodia, wife of Lykon, 23 Rhodogyne, 42 Richter, G., 17 Ridgway, B., 17 Roman writers, 66, 67 Rouillc, G. de, 87-88; Promptuarium Iconum, 87-88, 88 fig. 5.1 Rozenberga, E. See Aspazija Salabaccho, 27, 28, 138n. 6 Salonieres/Salons, 88, 91, 94, 95, 96, 106, 111, 116. See also Aspasia of Miletus as intellectual Salvianus, 79; de Gubernitate Dei, 79 Samian War, 15, 26, 70, 71, 73, 100 Sansone, D., 26 Sappho, 6, 66, 75, 100, 105, 116, 122, 123 Sarah, 78 Satyrus, 61; Bioi, 61; Peri Charakteron, 61 Schaps, D., 14 Schefold, K., 80 Scudery, Mme. de, 88 Sealey, R., 14 Self/Other, 36-37, 94, 127 Seneca the Younger, 85 Sexology, 45, 116-117 Sexual intercourse, 36, 116-117, 118, 119 Sirens, 47
201
Index Socrates: artistic representations of, 17, 80-81; 136-137n. 27; as lover of Alcibiades, 64-65; as lover of Aspasia, 64; as "male Aspasia," 56. See also Aspasia of Miletus; Midwives; Pander; Platonism Solon, 19, 20, 23, 79 Sommerstein, A., 139n. 9 Sophists, 5 Sophocles, 59, 100, 106; Antigone, 107 Spartans, 23 Stadter, P., 70, 72, 135n. 20 Stahnke, A., 114 de Stael, Madame, 95 Stasis, 20-22, 39-40; defined, 10 Stesimbrotus of Thasos, 70, 73 Subjectivity/Objectivity, 50 Suetonius, 63 Susanna, 78 Synesius of Cyrene, 77; Dion, 78
Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrrhus, 78-79, Hellenikon Therapeutike Pathematon, 79 Theophrastus, 61; Peri Charakteron, 61; Peri Komoidias, 61 Thucydides historicus, 16, 72, 77, 87, 99, 113, 120 Thucydides, son of Melesias, 69
Tarabotti, A., 88, 89; La semplecitd ingannata, o tirannia paterna, 88 Targioni-Tozzetti, F., 97, 98 Telecleides, Hesiods, 135n. 33 Telesilla of Corinth, 135n. 23 Tertullian, 79, Apologeticum, 79 Thargelia, 10, 42, 70, 71, 76, 90, 108 Theano the Pythagorean, 64, 66, 75, 129 Themistius, 77; Orations, 77 Themistocles, 12, 61 Theodote, 48-50
Xanthippe, wife of Socrates, 41, 53, 54, 65, 129, 130, 139n. 9 Xanthippus, son of Pericles, 23, 31, 32, 73, 103, 109 Xenophon, 16, 30, 32, 43-45, 67, 75, 84, 87; Memorabilia, 45, 46-50, 52, 53, 54, 55; Oeconomicus, 45, 46, 50-52, 53, 55, 65, 112; Symposium, 45, 47, 53-54, 65 Xenophon's wife, 43-44, 67, 85
Vidal, G., 121; Creation, 121 Whitehead, D., 12 Widows. See Crones Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von, 4, 17, 113; Aristoteles und Athen, 113 Wives, 41, 43-45, 79, 107. See also Marriage Women's movement, 106, 111-113, 122-123
Zeno, 69