Latest / The History of Greece: Philosophy, Empire, and Endless Reinvention — Fexingo History / Aspasia of Miletus: The Woman Who Shaped Athenian Thought
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about the great men of Athens—Pericles, Socrates, the politicians and philosophers. But there's one figure who hovered behind all of them, a woman who was called the most brilliant mind in the city, and also a whore, a madam, and the cause of a war. I want to talk about Aspasia of Miletus. Luna: Aspasia—I've heard the name, but I don't really know who she was. Lucas: She was from Miletus, on the coast of Ionia—modern-day Turkey. That made her a metic, a foreign resident in Athens. She had no citizenship rights, no right to own property or speak in the assembly. Yet she became the companion—probably the wife in all but law—of Pericles, the most powerful man in Athens. Lucas: And she wasn't just his partner. She ran a salon, a kind of intellectual gathering place, where the leading thinkers of the day came to debate. Socrates himself claimed to have learned rhetoric from her. Plato later used her as the model for Diotima, the priestess who teaches Socrates about love in the Symposium. Luna: Wait—so Plato based one of his most important characters on a real woman? Lucas: That's the tradition. The Symposium is a dialogue about eros, and it's Diotima who delivers the famous 'Ladder of Love'—the idea that physical attraction can lead to higher spiritual understanding. Socrates says she taught him everything he knows about love. Now, whether Aspasia actually said those things or Plato used her as a literary device is debated. But the choice to make a woman the source of wisdom is striking. Lucas: Aspasia's influence wasn't limited to philosophy. According to Plutarch, she was so skilled in rhetoric that she wrote Pericles' speeches for him, including the famous Funeral Oration. That's the speech Thucydides records, the one that defines Athenian democracy. Luna: So she practically ghostwrote one of the most famous speeches in history. Lucas: If Plutarch is right—and he's writing four hundred years later, so we have to be careful—then yes. But the comedians of Athens had a very different take. Aristophanes and his contemporaries portrayed her as a madam running a brothel, and they blamed her for Pericles' decisions. In the play Acharnians, Aristophanes says the Peloponnesian War started because Pericles was angry that some men stole two of Aspasia's prostitutes. That's a joke, of course, but it shows how she was satirized as a meddling foreign woman. Luna: So she was both revered and attacked. That sounds like a pattern for powerful women. Lucas: Exactly. And the attacks were dangerous. In 432 BCE, a comic poet named Hermippus brought a formal charge against Aspasia for impiety—asebeia. That was the same charge that would later kill Socrates. Pericles defended her in court and supposedly broke down in tears pleading for her acquittal. The jury let her go, but it was a sign of how precarious her position was. Luna: Did she also face attacks because of Pericles' citizenship law? Lucas: That's a very sharp point. In 451 BCE, Pericles pushed through a law restricting Athenian citizenship to those born of two Athenian parents. Aspasia was a metic, so their son—also named Pericles—was not a citizen. That was a huge problem. Later, when Pericles' legitimate sons died in the plague, he had to beg the assembly to make an exception and grant citizenship to his son with Aspasia. They did, but it shows the irony: the man who made citizenship so exclusive had to break his own law for her. Lucas: After Pericles died in 429 BCE, Aspasia supposedly married another Athenian general, Lysicles, and helped him rise to prominence. But our sources are thin. We have almost nothing from her own hand—no writings, no inscriptions. Everything we know comes through male authors: Plutarch, Plato, the comic poets. Luna: So she's a kind of shadow figure—clearly important, but we're seeing her through a veil. Lucas: Exactly. And that veil is frustrating. But even in fragments, she emerges as someone extraordinary. Imagine being a foreign woman in a city that barely tolerated women at all, and yet becoming the intellectual partner of Pericles, the teacher of Socrates, the inspiration for Plato. She had to be brilliant, and she had to be fearless. Lucas: There's also the question of her status. Was she a hetaera—a high-class courtesan—or a respectable companion? The Greeks didn't have a clean category for a woman like her. Hetaerae were educated, often foreign, and they could move in male circles. But they were also stigmatized. Aspasia was called a hetaera by her enemies, but Pericles treated her as his equal. He divorced his wife to be with her. Luna: That's a huge step for a man in his position. Lucas: It is. And it tells us something about her power. She wasn't just a partner; she was a political asset. Pericles' rivals attacked her because they couldn't attack him directly. She was his vulnerability. The comic poets and the prosecutors used her as a proxy. Lucas: And she wasn't the only influential woman in that circle. There's also Diotima—though she may be fictional—and later women like Theodote, a hetaera who debated Socrates in Xenophon's Memorabilia. But Aspasia is the one who left the deepest mark. Luna: What about her earlier life in Miletus? Do we know anything about her family? Lucas: Very little. Plutarch says her father was named Axiochus, but that's all. Miletus was a wealthy city, known for its philosophers and its luxury. Aspasia was probably well-educated—she would have needed to be to hold her own in Athens. Some scholars think she may have been connected to the school of Anaxagoras, the philosopher who taught Pericles. That's speculation, but it fits. Lucas: One more thing: her legacy in later ages. In the Renaissance, Aspasia became a symbol of the learned woman. Painters like Lawrence Alma-Tadema depicted her in the salon. Feminist writers in the 19th century reclaimed her as a pioneer. She's even been the subject of novels and movies. So she's had a second life, even if the first one is hard to pin down. Luna: It's amazing how someone with so few surviving records can still be so influential. Lucas: That's part of what draws us to history, isn't it? The gaps. The challenge of reconstructing a life from fragments. Aspasia reminds us that history isn't just about kings and battles—it's about the people who shaped ideas, even when they were written out of the official record. Luna: And it makes you wonder how many other brilliant women are lost to us. Lucas: Exactly. And on that note—if you've been following along with these conversations, stepping into the ancient world episode by episode, you might have thought about how history itself is a kind of reconstruction. We're always piecing together fragments, whether it's from Thucydides or from a broken statue. And this show exists because listeners like you support it. We keep it ad-free, so it's just us talking—but that's possible because a few people choose to buy us a coffee. If that feels right, you can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, but it helps us keep digging into these stories. Lucas: Back to Aspasia. There's a moment in Plutarch where he says that Pericles used to kiss Aspasia goodbye every morning and hello every evening. It's a small, human detail in the middle of all the politics and satire. And for me, that's the image that sticks: the general and the metic woman, sharing a life, changing Athens together. Luna: That's a beautiful note to end on. Thanks for bringing her story to light.