There was one woman, however, whose individuality was too strong
to be altogether merged into that of the man with whom her name is
associated. Aspasia stands supreme, after Sappho, as the most brilliant
and lettered woman of classic times. The center of a circle so luminous
that the ages have not greatly dimmed its radiance, she is likely to
live as long as the world cherishes the memory of its greatest men.
She was the prototype of the charming and intellectual women who made
the literary courts of the Renaissance so famous two thousand years
afterward; also of the more familiar ones who shone as leaders of the
powerful salons of France a century or two later. Even to-day the
aspiring woman who dreams of reviving the social triumphs of her sex
recalls the golden days of Athens and wonders what magic drew so many
of the great poets, statesmen, and philosophers of the world from the
groves of the Academy, the colonnades of the Lyceum, the porticos, and
the gymnasia, to pour their treasures of wit and thought at the feet
of the fair Ionian. She may remember, too, that this fascinating woman
was not only the high priestess who presided at the birth of society
as we know it, but was also the first to assert the right of the wife
to be educated, that she might live as the peer and companion of her
husband, not as his slave.
Little is known of the facts of her life. She was the first woman who
came from Miletus, the pleasure-loving city of roses, and song, and
beautiful maidens. Why or how she left her home we are not told, but
there is a vague tradition that her parents were dead and that she went
away with the famous Thargelia, whose vigorous intellect, together with
her wit and beauty, made her a political power in Thessaly and the wife
of one of its kings during the Persian wars, though her personality is
the faintest of shadows to-day. It is supposed that Aspasia was young,
scarcely more than twenty, when she came to Athens, possibly to live
with a relative; but this is only a surmise. As a foreigner, whatever
her rank, she was outside the pale of good society. The high-born
Athenian women looked askance at her, were jealous of her, and said
wicked things about her. To be sure, the all-powerful Pericles took her
to his home and called her his wife, but she was not a citizen like
themselves, and could not lawfully bear his name.
The relation, however, left-handed though it may have been, was
a recognized and permanent one, not less regular perhaps than the
morganatic marriages of royal princes to-day, which make a woman a pure
and legal wife but never a queen. So rare was the devotion of the grave
statesman that it was thought worthy of record, and it was a matter
of gossip that he kissed Aspasia when he went out and when he came
in--clearly a startling innovation among Athenian husbands. Still more
astonishing was the fact that he listened to her counsel and talked
with her on State affairs, which, according to their traditions, no
reputable woman ought to know anything about. Plutarch tells us that
some went so far as to say that he paid court to her on account of her
wisdom and political sagacity. Socrates confesses his own indebtedness
to her in the use of language, and says that she made many great
orators. He thinks it no wonder that Pericles can speak, as he has so
excellent a mistress in the art of rhetoric, one who could even write
his speeches. He was himself so pleased with a funeral oration she had
spoken in his presence, partly from previous thought and partly from
the inspiration of the moment, that he learned it by heart. A friend
to whom he repeated it was amazed that a woman could compose such a
speech, and Socrates added that he might recall many more if he would
not tell. This special address was such a masterpiece of wisdom and
eloquence that Pericles was asked to give it every year. As he was
quite able to write his own, there was no room for jealousy, even if
Aspasia sometimes found in the same field a happy outlet for her fine
talent and living enthusiasm.
All this points to a strong probability that the gifted Milesian came
to Athens to teach rhetoric and other arts of which she was mistress,
as a Frenchwoman might seek her fortune in our own country to-day. But
she had not the same immunity from criticism, as the very fact of her
talents, and her ability to utilize them, sufficed to put her under
a cloud. This, too, might account for the wicked things Aristophanes
said of her, but we cannot imagine that Socrates would have advised
his friends to send their sons to her for training had they been true.
He knew her well, had profited by her instructions, and no one will
charge him with gallantry or the disposition to give undue praise. He
was essentially a truth-seeker. It is a matter of note, too, that the
philosophers had only pleasant words for Aspasia. Her detractors were
the satirists and comic poets; but who ever went to either for justice
or truth? She was clear-sighted, penetrating, and versed not only in
letters but in civil affairs, so it was easy enough to say that she was
the power behind the throne in the Samian and Peloponnesian wars. It is
certain, however, that Pericles was too wise a statesman to be led into
a war by any one against his judgment. It is quite likely that she had
young girls in her house who came to be instructed in the refinements
and amenities of life, as poetic maidens had flocked to Sappho from all
the isles of the sea a century or so before. This again was a fruitful
source of calumny and satire. But it is impossible to read the Attic
comedians without a conviction that they measured every one by their
own moral standards, which were of the lowest and coarsest. A woman
who could discuss philosophy with Socrates and Anaxagoras, art with
Phidias, poetry with Sophocles and Euripides, politics and history with
Thucydides, if occasion offered, and affairs of the gay world with the
young Alcibiades, was not likely to escape the tongue of scandal among
people who numbered the silent subjection of women among their most
sacred traditions.
Of the beauty of Aspasia we are not sure. We hear of her
“honey-colored” or golden hair, of her “small, high-arched foot,” of
her “silvery voice”; but no one of her time has told us that she was
beautiful. There is a bust on which her name is inscribed, but it gives
us no clue to the living charm that held great men captive. Did this
charm lie in the depth and brilliancy of the veiled eyes, in the tender
curve of the half-voluptuous mouth, or in the subtle and variable light
of the soul that forever eludes the chilling marble? Another bust,
supposed to represent her, has a gentler quality, a finer distinction,
with a faint shadow on the thoughtful face. But the secret of her power
did not lie in any rare perfection of form or feature. Perhaps this
secret is always difficult to define. Of her fascinating personality we
are left in no doubt. With the qualities of _esprit_ that belonged
to her race, and all the winning graces of her Ionian culture, she
combined an intellect of firm and substantial fiber. She was noted for
the divining spirit which instinctively recognized the special gifts
of her friends; she had, too, the tact and finesse to make the most of
them. This is _par excellence_ the talent of the social leader.
The salon of Aspasia was the first of which we have any record.
The stars of the Attic world gathered there, men who were in the
advance-guard of Hellenic thought. Reclining on the many-colored
cushions beneath the white pillars, with pictured walls and rare
tapestries and exquisite statues of Greek divinities about them, they
talked of the new temples; of the last word in art; of the triumph
of Sophocles, who had just won the prize of tragedy in the theater
of Dionysus; perhaps of Æschylus, who had gone away broken-hearted;
of happiness, morals, love, and immortality. The thoughtful woman
who sat there radiant in her saffron draperies was not silent. Men
marveled at her eager intellect, her grasp of Athenian possibilities;
they were charmed with her graceful ways and musical speech. We hear
of symposia in other houses, where a Theodota dances, the free wit
of Lais flashes, and conversation glides on a low and vulgar level,
but no wife or daughter ever appears. There is nothing to indicate
that the coterie of Aspasia was otherwise than decorous. Music there
was, as the accomplished Ionian played the cithara with skill and
taste. Wit there must have been, as no company of Athenians was ever
without it. But more was said of its serious side. One of the sons of
Pericles, angry because his father would not give him all the money he
wished, ridiculed this circle of philosophers and the hours they spent
in discussing theories or splitting metaphysical hairs. Their learned
disquisitions were not at all to the taste of the pleasure-loving youth.
A few men had the courage to bring their wives, and Aspasia talked to
them of their duties and the need of cultivating their minds. Nor did
she forget the value of manners and the graces. It is said that she
wrote a book on cosmetics; but all her teaching, so far as we know it,
went to show that personal charm lay not so much in physical beauty as
in the culture of the intellect. The few direct words we have from her
lips prove that, with a clear sense of values, she was the true child
of an age and race that was singularly devoid of sentiment. If she
taught Socrates in some things, she was evidently his pupil in others.
This is curiously illustrated in an anecdote related by Æschines.
“Tell me,” says Aspasia, one day, to the wife of Xenophon, “if your
neighbor had finer gold than you have, whether you would prefer her
gold or your own.”
“I should prefer hers,” was the reply.
“Suppose that she had dresses and ornaments of more value than yours;
would you prefer your own or hers?”
“Hers, to be sure.”
“If she had a better husband than you have, which would you choose?”
The lady blushed and was silent.
The hostess then turned to the husband with like questions.
“I ask you, O Xenophon, whether, if your neighbor had a better horse
than yours, you would prefer your own or his.”
“Certainly his,” was the prompt answer.
“If he had a better farm than yours, which would you wish to own?”
“Beyond doubt, that which is best.”
“Suppose that he had a better wife than you have, would you prefer his
wife?”
The conversation became embarrassing, and Xenophon was discreetly
silent.
The conclusion was obvious. This too logical questioner advised those
present to order their lives so that there should be no more admirable
woman or more excellent man; then each would always prefer the other
to any one else--a piece of wise counsel that might be profitably
considered, in spite of its veiled sophistry. Evidently she did not
regard love as a flame that burns without fuel, though in her notions
of human perfectibility she makes small account of the quality of the
material.
This parlor-talk is a trifle didactic, and lacks the modern elements
of popularity, but it is not in the least the talk of such a woman
as the enemies of Aspasia pictured her. It was clearly a party of
innovation that she led, but it was not a party of corrupt tastes. It
was for her opinions that she suffered. Just what connection moral
turpitude has with a question of the infallibility of any special
form of belief is not apparent, but a charge of impiety cast a darker
shadow upon her reputation. In this case it meant little more than a
doubt as to the divinity of their quarrelsome and immoral gods, which
we should consider highly creditable. She was too rational for a good
orthodox pagan. Or it may have meant simply that her house was a
rendezvous for the free-thinking philosophers. Here, too, was a woman
who took the unheard-of liberty of presiding over her husband’s house,
making it agreeable for his friends and attractive for himself. She
had put dangerous notions into the heads of Athenian wives. Who was
this impertinent foreigner, that she should presume to tell them how
to please their husbands? How, indeed, could they please them better
than to keep a decorous silence in their apartments, and let their
noble lords bring dancing- and talking-women to their banquets, and do
otherwise as they liked? Of course she did not respect the gods, and
deserved death.
And so she was taken before the judges. The dignified and austere
Pericles wept as he pleaded her cause, and his tears won it. She was
released, but Anaxagoras, who was under the same charge of impiety
because he gave natural causes to apparently supernatural things, as
Galileo did centuries later, thought it safe to go away until the
fickle Athenians, the French of the classic world, found something else
to occupy them.
Without the poetic genius or the passionate intensity of Sappho,
Aspasia seems to have had greater breadth and largeness of mind, with
the calm judgment and clear reason that belong to a more sophisticated
age. She was evidently solid as well as brilliant. That she was
eminently tactful and had a great deal of the Greek subtlety counted
for much in her success. She had also the perfect comprehension of
genius, which is an inspiration, and nearly allied to genius itself.
In the vast plans for the glory of Athens, she could hardly have been
ignored by the man who adored her and consulted her on the gravest
matters. It is not as the Omphale to this Hercules, the Hera to this
Zeus, that she has come down to us, save in the jeer of the satirist,
but as the watchful Egeria, who whispered prophetic words of wisdom in
the ears of the great Athenian. Who knows how far the world owes to her
fine insight and critical taste the superb flowering of art which left
an immortal heritage to all the ages?
With the death of Pericles and the dispersion of the distinguished
group that surrounded him, Aspasia disappears. There was no place at
that time for talents like hers, apart from a great man’s protection.
It was rumored that she afterward married a rich but obscure citizen,
whom she raised by her abilities to a high position in the State,
though he did not live long enough to reap much glory from it. The
affair savors of the mythical, and perhaps we are safe in giving it
little credence. We should like to believe that the woman who had been
blessed with the love of a Pericles could never console herself with a
lesser man.
Of versatile gifts and endless shades of temperament, teacher, thinker,
artist in words and life, critic, musician, friend of women and
inspirer of men, but before all things a harmony uniting the grace
and sensibility of her sex with a masculine strength of intellect,
this gracious Ionian stands with Sappho on the pinnacle of Hellenic
culture, each in her own field the highest feminine representative of
an esthetic race. Her mission was not an ethical one, and she cannot
be so judged; but against the censure of the enemies and rivals of
Pericles, as well as of her own, we have abundant evidence that, in her
virtues, as in her talents, she surpassed the standards of her class
and time. It was not of a light-minded woman that Pericles said when
dying: “Athens intrusted her greatness and Aspasia her happiness to me.”