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Aspasia (; Collins English Dictionary, " Aspasia" ; after 428 BC) was a metic woman in Classical Athens. Born in Miletus, she moved to Athens and began a relationship with the statesman Pericles, with whom she had a son named Pericles the Younger. According to the traditional historical narrative, she worked as a courtesan and was tried for asebeia (impiety), though modern scholars have questioned the factual basis for either of these claims, which both derive from ancient comedy. Though Aspasia is one of the best-attested women from the Greco-Roman world, and the most important woman in the history of fifth-century Athens, almost nothing is certain about her life.
Aspasia was portrayed in Old Comedy as a Prostitution and madam, and in ancient philosophy as a teacher and rhetorician. She has continued to be a subject of both visual and literary artists until the present. From the twentieth century, she has been portrayed as both a sexualised and sexually liberated woman, and as a feminist role model fighting for women's rights in ancient Athens.
It is difficult to draw any firm conclusions about the real Aspasia from any of these sources: as Robert Wallace puts it, "for us Aspasia herself possesses and can possess almost no historical reality". Aside from her name, father's name, and place of birth, Aspasia's biography is almost entirely unverifiable, and the ancient writings about her are frequently more of a projection of their own (without exception male) preconceptions than they are historical fact. Madeleine Henry's full-length biography covers what is known of Aspasia's life in only nine pages.
In Athens, Aspasia met and began a relationship with the statesman Pericles. It is uncertain how they met; if Bicknell's thesis is correct then she may have met him through his connection to Alcibiades' household. Kennedy speculates that when Cleinias, the son of the elder Alcibiades, died at the Battle of Coronea, Pericles may have become the kurios (guardian) of Aspasia. Aspasia's relationship with Pericles began some time between 452 and 441. The exact nature of Pericles and Aspasia's relationship is disputed. Ancient authors variously portrayed her as a prostitute, his concubine, or his wife. Modern scholars are also divided. Rebecca Futo Kennedy argues that they were married; Debra Nails describes Aspasia as "the de facto wife of Pericles"; Madeleine Henry believes that Pericles' citizenship law of 451/0 made marriage between an Athenian and a metic illegal, and suggests a quasi-marital pallake ("concubinage") enforced by contract; and Sue Blundell describes Aspasia as a hetaira and mistress of Pericles.
Aspasia and Pericles had a son, Pericles the Younger, born no later than 440/39 BC. At the time of Pericles the Younger's birth, Pericles had two legitimate sons, Paralus and Xanthippus. In 430/29, after the death of his two elder sons, Pericles proposed an amendment to his citizenship law of 451/0 which would have made Pericles the Younger able to become a citizen and inherit. Though many scholars believe that this was specifically for Pericles, some have suggested that a more general exception was introduced, in response to the effect of the Plague of Athens and Peloponnesian War on citizen families.
According to Plutarch, Aspasia was prosecuted for asebeia (impiety) by the comic poet Hermippus. She was supposedly defended by Pericles and acquitted. Many scholars have questioned whether this trial ever took place, suggesting that the tradition derives from a fictional trial of Aspasia in a play by Hermippus. Vincent Azoulay compares the trial of Aspasia to those of Phidias and Anaxagoras, both also connected to Pericles, and concludes that "none of the trials for impiety involving those close to Pericles is attested with certainty".
In 429 BC, Pericles died. According to ancient sources, Aspasia then married another politician, Lysicles, and gave birth to another son, Poristes. As "Poristes" is not otherwise known as a name – it means "supplier" or "provider", and was a euphemism for "thief" – some scholars have argued that the name comes from a misunderstanding of a joke in a comedy. Henry doubts whether Aspasia had a child with Lysicles, and Kennedy questions whether she married Lysicles at all. Pomeroy, however, suggests that Poristes' unusual name may have been chosen by Lysicles for political reasons, to draw attention to his providing for the people of Athens. Lysicles died a year after Pericles, in 428, and nothing is recorded of Aspasia's life after this point. It is unknown where or when she died.
Outside of Aristophanes, mentions of Aspasia are known from the surviving fragments of Cratinus and Eupolis. In a fragment of Cratinus' Cheirons, Aspasia is described as "Hera-Aspasia, a dog-eyed concubine".Cratinus, fr. 259 Eupolis mentions Aspasia by name in three surviving fragments. In Proslapatians, she is compared to Helen of Troy – like Aspasia, blamed for starting a war – and in Philoi to Omphale, who owned Herakles as a slave. Eupolis also alluded to Aspasia in Demes, where Pericles, having been brought back from the dead, asks after his son; he is informed that he is alive, but is ashamed of having a porne as a mother. Aspasia is also known to have been mentioned by Kallias, though the scholion to Plato's Menexenus which reports this is garbled and it is uncertain what Kallias said about her. She may also have appeared in a play by Hermippus – this is possibly the source of the anecdote told by Plutarch that Aspasia was prosecuted by him for asebeia and for supplying free-born women for Pericles to have sex with. Later authors to follow the comic tradition in focusing on Aspasia's sexuality and improper influence over Pericles, for example in Clearchus' Erotika.
In the late medieval and early modern periods, Aspasia appeared in several catalogues, a fashionable genre at the time. She was included in three "medallion books", with an imagined portrait and a brief biography. The first of these was Guillaume Rouille's Promptuarium Iconum, which derives its depiction of Aspasia from Plutarch and focuses on her relationship with Pericles; in Giovanni Angelo Canini's Iconografia, Aspasia is depicted wearing a helmet and shield. Aspasia also featured in two catalogues of women in this period as a teacher and philosopher: in Arcangela Tarabotti's Tirannia Paterna, which portrays her as a teacher of rhetoric, and Gilles Ménage's Historia Mulierum Philosopharum, in which Aspasia is described as teaching rhetoric to Pericles and Socrates, and philosophy to Socrates.
By the eighteenth century, Aspasia was widely enough known to be included in dictionaries and encyclopedias, where depictions of her were largely based on Plutarch. In 1736, Jean Leconte de Bièvre published the Histoire de deux Aspasies, also based on Plutarch's depiction, which portrayed Aspasia as an educated woman and Pericles' teacher as well as his wife. The eighteenth century also saw the first known image of Aspasia to be created by a woman, Marie Bouliard's Aspasie. The painting depicts Aspasia with one breast bared, looking into a handheld mirror and with a scroll in her other hand. Though the bare breast references the eroticised traditions surrounding Aspasia, Madeleine Henry argues that the portrait differs from more pornographic depictions of women, with Aspasia looking into the mirror rather than out at the viewer, and holding a scroll rather than a cosmetic object such as a comb.
In the nineteenth century, Plutarch's narrative dominated the interpretation of Aspasia in both novels and paintings. In the visual arts, the sexualised side of Aspasia was represented by Jean-Léon Gérôme's painting Socrates Seeking Alcibiades in the House of Aspasia, but this pornographised representation was relatively uncommon. Honoré Daumier's lithograph of Socrates at the House of Aspasia depicts Aspasia as a "lorette", an ambiguous social position which referred to "loose, vulgar or 'liberated' women"., quoted in Other artists of the period depicted an Aspasia active in public life, and interacting with the most renowned men of the period. In Henry Holiday's painting of Aspasia on the Pnyx, she is shown with another woman at the site of the Athenian assembly, the center of male public space in the city, while in two paintings by Nicolas-André Monsiau she is shown at the centre of discussions with celebrated Athenian intellectuals and politicians. In Socrates and Aspasia, she converses with Socrates and Pericles; in Aspasia in Conversation with the Most Illustrious Men of Athens, Euripides, Sophocles, Plato, and Xenophon are also among those included. In both of these paintings, Aspasia is speaking and commanding the attention of these men. Melissa Ianetta argues that Germaine de Staël's novel Corinne models its heroine after Aspasia, placing her in the same tradition of feminine rhetorical skill.
An alternative nineteenth-century representation of Aspasia positioned her as a respectable wife. The authors Walter Savage Landor and Elizabeth Lynn Linton portrayed Aspasia as a good Victorian wife to Pericles in their novels Pericles and Aspasia and Amymone: A Romance of the Days of Pericles. Lawrence Alma-Tadema's painting Phidias and the Frieze of the Parthenon also shows Aspasia as a respectable companion to men. By contrast, Robert Hamerling's novel Aspasia showed her as a proto-feminist with far more agency than these romanticised accounts.
The twentieth century saw on the one hand increasing interest in Aspasia separately from her relationships with men, and on the other more prurient concern with her sexuality. The former strand of Aspasia's reception saw the Latvian author, feminist, and politician Elza Rozenberga, who took the pseudonym Aspazija, model her campaigning for women's rights after what she saw as Aspasia's example. Aspasia was also taken as a feminist role-model by Judy Chicago, who included her as one of the thirty-nine women given a place in her artwork The Dinner Party. Recent novels have tended towards the more explicitly sexualised portrayal of Aspasia, including Achilles His Armour by the classicist Peter Green, Madelon Dimont's Darling Pericles, and Taylor Caldwell's Glory and Lightning, in which Aspasia is raised as a courtesan. The 2018 video game Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which features Aspasia in a major role, follows the ancient tradition which portrayed her as a . She is depicted as using her femininity to gain political power by manipulating men and through her connections to other women across the Greek world.
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