CHAPTER 7

Pericles and Eros: Caught between Civic Unity and Political Subversion

Eros, not love: this terminological choice is no mere flirtatious quibble. It is intended to draw attention to how far apart the two terms are. In the Greek world, eros did not correspond to any romantic sentiment, nor did it bear any similarity to the wishy-washy notion nowadays conjured up by “love.” Whether homosexual or heterosexual, eros was first and foremost a connective force or, at times, a disconnective one.1

First, as a connective force: eros linked individuals together, as indeed did philia, friendship. However, whereas friendship presupposed a form of equality between the partners, eros functioned in a hierarchical and asymmetrical fashion. The erotic link depended on a form of reciprocity that was structurally inegalitarian, for it always brought together a free citizen, who was in the dominant position, and a woman or an erōmenos—an adolescent—whose status was inferior. When transposed into a political framework, eros retained those same characteristics: it encouraged the development of hierarchical links between on the one hand, the citizens, and on the other, the city.

Next, as a force for disconnection: eros possessed a terrifying power capable of turning the normal functioning of social life upside down. Not content with snapping the very limbs of lovers,² it was capable of destabilizing even the best-established forms of social balance. Eros could destroy relations of philia or lead to adultery or even to treason; it then threatened the very survival of the city, which is why eros and politics often worked together, for better or worse.

Pericles’ life combined those two contradictory aspects of eros. First, the power of connection: the stratēgos was an ardent defender of a veritable civic eroticism, to the point of urging the Athenians to cherish their city as a lover cherishes his loved one. According to Pericles, the citizens should behave themselves as a community of active lovers, linked together by their common love for their country. Yet, far from leaving the people and their city to this loving tête-à-tête, the leader came and involved himself in that relationship. According to the ancient authors, Pericles aroused desire in the crowd both by his rhetoric and by his behavior, as his protégé Alcibiades was later to do. There was thus an erotic dimension to his authority. The citizens loved not only their city but also their leader. Next, a power of disconnection, for Pericles’ story also testifies to the subversive power of eros. The stratēgos was accused of having experimented with the entire range of heterosexual unions, even to the point of placing the city in danger through his multiple and transgressive love affairs. His opponents denounced him for having not only behaved as a seducer, perverting the wives of other citizens, but also for being a man seduced and manipulated by beautiful foreign women.

Aspasia became the target of the barrage of criticisms aimed at Pericles. Presented, as she was, now as a hetaira or even a prostitute, now as a legitimate wife and a skilled mistress of rhetoric, this enigmatic woman deserved the whole study finally devoted to her in M. M. Henry’s Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995). The ancient sources often portray her as a warmonger, a new Helen of Troy, bewitching Pericles and getting him to unleash the conflict against the Spartans. That biased image needs to be evaluated in the light of the prejudices that surrounded all women whose legal status was uncertain.

THE DEMOCRATIC AMOROUS TRIANGLE: THE CITY, THE LEADER, AND THE PEOPLE

Athens (not Hiroshima), Mon Amour

In the funeral speech that he delivered, according to Thucydides’ version, Pericles urged all Athenians to demonstrate their desire for their city. In this case, the purpose of eros was not to link citizens to one another, but to unite them all, collectively, with their country, the object of all their attentions: “You must daily fix your gaze upon the power of Athens and become lovers [erastai] of her.”3 This is how the stratēgos transposed into the civic register the vocabulary associated with erotic masculine relationships. The fact is that, in the Greek world, ritualized pederastic links could connect an older citizen—the erastēs—with a young adolescent—the erōmenos—who was still in the flower of his youth. The importation of this vocabulary now used to describe the links between citizens and their city masked a number of implications. In the first place, this metaphor made it possible to set women radically apart; they were, of course, already excluded from the political scene. No symbolic compensation was offered to them in that speech, since what was proposed for the Athenians to meditate upon was a homoerotic model. Furthermore, that image presupposed the existence of a link of reciprocity between the two parties present: in a pederastic relationship, the erastēs was expected to educate and protect the erōmenos who, in return, offered him his company and favors. As Pericles saw it, the citizens should take the erastēs’ role as guardian of the city, the erōmenos whom one contemplated with passion.

At first sight, this choice may seem surprising. The city appears to be relegated to a passive and subordinate role, leaving on the front of the stage the Athenians, who are described as a “vigorous elite” at the service of their country.4 According to Sara Monoson, the metaphor may even conceal more disturbing implications. In their capacity as the erastai, the citizens may act in a shameful way and take advantage of the city, a naive and defenseless erōmenos.⁵ That is, in fact, how the more or less declared opponents of democracy unhesitatingly interpreted the image, profoundly subverting its original meaning. In the first place, they applied the metaphor not to the links between the Athenians and their city, but to the relations that obtained between the citizens and their political leaders.⁶ In the plays of Aristophanes, it is the demagogues who declare their love for the dēmos: “I love you, Demos, I am your erastēs,”⁷ declares the Paphlagonian—a transparent caricature of Cleon,⁸ in The Knights. Later, the comic poets portrayed those erastai as dangerous corrupters: with their self-interested love, the demagogues did nothing but debase the people, which, for its part, was portrayed as an aging erōmenos, at once capricious and depraved.⁹ According to those ironical criticisms, Athens’s leaders were guiding the city to its downfall, skillfully manipulating feelings and reactions.

However, that polemical view corresponded to a deliberately biased reading of the metaphor used by Pericles. When he resorted to that image, the orator had no intention of depicting a passive Athens, forced to accept whatever its citizens wanted; there is nothing to suggest that the metaphor had to be understood to the advantage of its citizens-erastai. As Mark Golden has shown, the supposed subordination of the erōmenos to the erastēs is not at all obvious if, without any preconceptions, one considers the texts and images that have come down to us.¹⁰ In plenty of cases, the erōmenos seems to possess virtues characteristic of dominant personalities, while, in contrast, the erastēs, gripped by desire, frequently adopts a submissive or even miserable position. He finds himself at the mercy of his erōmenos, who is perfectly free to deny him his favors. Some authors even portray the youth as a tyrant, ruling harshly over his helpless lover.¹¹ Figurative codes repeatedly proclaim the paradoxical superiority of the erōmenos. On vases, instead of being represented as submissive, the adolescent is often facing up to his partner. He stands erect while the erastēs bends his knees and, in some cases, bows his head.12 Sometimes, the latter is even presented in the traditional position of a suppliant, attempting to touch the youth’s chin.¹³

In this context, the Periclean metaphor takes on a quite different meaning. By resorting to the language of pederastic love, the orator was in reality urging the citizens to offer their city extraordinary gifts, in the way that erastai were accustomed to shower their erōmenos with presents. Quite simply, instead of proffering hares or goblets, the citizens ought to offer the city their time, their money, even their lives, by performing many public services of both a financial and a military nature.

The role played by such a metaphor in Athenian democratic ideology no doubt needs to be qualified. This pederastic image is never directly repeated in the other funeral speeches that have come down to us. Generally, these mobilize a different if equally asymmetrical image, representing the city as the father of the citizens: the citizens are urged to sacrifice themselves for the “country,” the land of their fathers.¹⁴ So how should we explain why Pericles chose to resort to this erotic vocabulary? Perhaps it was because he wanted to become the object of desire of his fellow-citizens, so charmed were they by his rhetoric and his behavior.

In Love with Pericles

In his Memorabilia, Xenophon evokes the memory of Socrates, the master who taught him to think, by recording a number of dialogues that Socrates is said to have engaged in with his fellow-citizens. In one of these conversations, the philosopher produces a polemical rewriting of the image used by Pericles in his funeral oration. The philosopher is intrigued by the mechanisms by which one acquires friends.¹⁵ He considers Pericles to have been a specialist in this domain, for he “knew many [spells] and put them on the city [epaidon tēi polei] and so made it love him.”¹⁶ By using the vocabulary of magical enchantment, Socrates ironically relates Periclean rhetoric to a kind of homosexual courtship.¹⁷ At a deeper level, what he says constitutes an implicit response to the civic ideology expressed in the funeral speech. He turns Pericles’ phrase inside out, like a glove: according to Socrates, it is the city that is in love with the famous stratēgos, rather than the other way round.

Xenophon’s Socrates was not alone in drawing attention to the erotic dimension of Pericles’ authority. The comic poets had already emphasized the power of attraction of his language: they considered that Pericles’ speeches could sting his listeners, implanting in their ears their prick (kentron), the usual comic metaphor for a phallus.¹⁸ The suggestion was that the orator wielded a veritable amorous constraint over those who heard him. The implication is clear: by arousing their desire, the leader obtained their consent and their vote. And this erotic seduction had lasting effects. It left its imprint on the souls of the Athenians to the point of arousing a nostalgic regret when Pericles was forced to step down from the political stage. After his deposition and condemnation in 430, the withdrawal of the stratēgos was believed to have aroused in his fellow-citizens the very same type of regret that haunted a lover once his beloved had disappeared—an emotion that the Greeks called pothos.19 According to Plutarch, the city “missed him [pothousēs d’ekeinōn]”²⁰ and the Athenians decided to recall him to the tribune. When, a few months later, the stratēgos died, that emotion was exacerbated: “the progress of events wrought in the Athenians a swift appreciation of Pericles and a keen sense of his loss [pothos].”²¹ The death of the stratēgos unleashed a love-struck grief that the Athenians never were able to surmount in a dignified fashion; according to Aristophanes, they abandoned themselves to the seduction of corrupting demagogues, dragging the city into a downward and catastrophic spiral.

If Pericles bewitched his fellow-citizens in the manner of a seductive erōmenos, it was not only on account of his words, but also because of his behavior, which bore the mark of gravitas, if not frigidity. It seems that Pericles was all the more attractive because, whatever the circumstances, he maintained a solemn distance and great self-control. Even as he invited the citizens to behave as lovers of their city, it was certainly not so that they could form real erotic relationships among themselves. On the contrary, military leaders were, as he saw it, supposed to observe the most absolute chastity while on duty: “Once, when Sophocles, who was general with him on a certain naval expedition, praised a lovely boy, he said: ‘It is not his hands only, Sophocles, that a general must keep clean, but his eyes as well.’”²² The message intended for the tragic poet is clear: a stratēgos must not be distracted from his duties either by money—and the bribes that one accepts with one’s hands—or by erotic pleasures—and the boys that one desires with one’s eyes.

If a leader must demonstrate his self-control in all circumstances, it is not only out of fear of seeming to be corrupt and ready to sell his country. By repressing his libido, he also acquires a certain charisma, as does a monk who owes his aura in part to his ostensible rejection of sexuality. As Socrates’ disciples would theorize, a few years later, eros is the more intense the more it remains chaste, and erotic attraction is all the more powerful when it implies the impossibility of moving into action.²³

All the same, this show of self-control had another purpose: by demonstrating his self-control, the stratēgos sought above all not to appear as a tyrant whose sexuality was uncheckable. For when one was in a position of power, any sexual act immediately took on a connotation of abuse. And Pericles was, indeed, reproached for being less virtuous than he appeared to be in public. His opponents ascribed to him sexual affairs as numerous as they were scandalous: Pericles was accused of perverting the wives of citizens, of cuckolding his own son, and of selling his own country in order to find himself in the beds of beautiful foreign women.

Pericles in Love

Contemporary sources were constantly criticizing Pericles’ behavior in matters of aphrodisia, matters of sexual love. Far from being solely in love with the city, as he recommended his fellow-citizens to be, the stratēgos was said to have made many female conquests and to have been extremely lecherous.24 Pericles was reputed to have lived a particularly dissolute life and even to have endangered the orderliness of families and city life.

In his Life of Pericles, Plutarch refers several times to his equivocal reputation. In the first place, the enemies of the stratēgos criticized him for using Phidias as a go-between or even as a pimp, providing him with sexual prey: “[It was said that] Phidias made assignations for Pericles with free-born women who would come ostensibly to see the works of art.”²⁵ However, such accusations could have seemed quite harmless, as Pauline Schmitt Pantel has pointed out. There was nothing unusual about the type of relations mentioned; meetings with hetairai (these courtesans were free women) were considered perfectly acceptable in the city.²⁶ What was shocking, however, was the secrecy that surrounded such meetings: in a way, the dissimulation was more reprehensible than the act itself, because it was contrary to the transparency that the people demanded from their leaders.

But those were not the only reproaches that Pericles attracted regarding his sexual behavior. “The comic poets took up the story and bespattered Pericles with charges of abounding wantonness, connecting their slanders with the wife of Menippus, a man who was his friend and a colleague in generalship [hupostratēgountos], and with the aviculture [ornithotrophia] of Pyrilampes who, since he was a comrade of Pericles, was accused of using his peacocks and peahen to bribe the women [gunaikes] with whom Pericles consorted” (Plutarch, Pericles, 13.10). According to the rumors rife in the theater world, the stratēgos in this way betrayed the confidence of one of his closest friends, Menippus, and compromised the reputation of the latter’s wife. Given the circumstances, we should try to gauge the scale of the outrage of which he was accused. Adultery was very severely punished by the Athenian laws because it cast doubt on the legitimacy of children born within the framework of marriage. Such an affair was considered so grave that a husband had the right to kill an adulterer caught in flagrante delicto;27 and as for the wife, she had to be repudiated even if her husband did not wish for this. So, as an adulterer, Pericles technically deserved death without a trial.

The story of Pyrilampes completes the list of Pericles’ depravities and adds a further touch. At first glance, Pyrilampes appears to fill exactly the same role as Phidias, for, like the sculptor, he acted as an intermediary of doubtful character for the stratēgos, secretly facilitating the satisfaction of the latter’s pleasures. However, the services that he rendered had a very particular connotation. In fifth-century Athens, the breeding of birds, especially peacocks, was closely associated with Eastern luxury and, more particularly, with the Persian royalty.²⁸ A peacock, like a parasol, was a “Persian fad”—rather like eighteenth-century “Turkish fads”—that were imported into the Greek world to mark the particular distinction of members of the elite.²⁹ Besides, we know from Plato that Pyrilampes went on many embassies to the Great King,³⁰ so it was probably on one of those occasions that he brought back the precious birds as part of his luggage and took to breeding them—an extremely lucrative business given that, at the end of the fifth century, a pair of peafowl was worth about 1,000 drachmas, the price of a really good horse.³¹ In these circumstances, the anecdote takes on a particularly political character: by having these gorgeous birds delivered to his favorites, Pericles became associated with the Great King and his pleasures and, more generally, with Eastern and despotic luxury (truphē). Sex, luxury, and dissimulation: this anecdote drew on a whole collection of connotations, all of which tended to portray Pericles as a tyrant.

There was one more rumor, of an even more serious nature, that circulated about the stratēgos. According to Stesimbrotus of Thasos, who was definitely hostile to Pericles, the stratēgos had even gone so far as to sleep with the wife of his son Xanthippus, committing what Françoise Héritier has called “indirect incest of the second type,”³² so that the semen of both the father and the son mingled in the same womb. Plutarch refuses to believe this “odious and impious attack on the wife of his own son,”³³ and, following suit, most modern commentators have dismissed such anecdotes out of hand. However, over and above the question of their veracity, they do tell us a lot about popular expectations and the moral behavior expected of members of the elite.

It is hardly surprising, in this context, that Pericles was to be represented on the comic stage as the “king of the satyrs.”³⁴ This was not just a way of referring to the Dionysiac universe and the stratēgos’s interest in the theater—for the satyrs were closely associated with Dionysus.³⁵ It was also a transparent allusion to his supposedly rampant sexuality. Given that satyrs were well known for their grotesque hypervirility,36 the poets found it amusing to depict Pericles as the opposite of his well-advertised imperturbable and sober self. Worse still, they blamed him for indulging lasciviously in carnal pleasures just when he should have been leading his fellow-citizens into battle. These attacks on him reached a climax at the start of the Peloponnesian War, when they were targeting in particular his relationship with the lovely Aspasia.

PERICLES AND ASPASIA: THE RESURFACING OF WHAT WAS REPRESSED

Love-Stricken Pericles

“[Pericles] took Aspasia, and loved her exceedingly” (Plutarch, Pericles, 24.5). So here was our imperturbable stratēgos overcome by love for a foreign woman to the point of being accused of sacrificing the city’s interests for her sake. In the fourth century B.C., the Socratic Heraclides Ponticus defined the meeting with Aspasia as one of the major turning points in Pericles’ career. In his book On Pleasure, he declares that the great man “dismissed his wife from his house and preferred a life of pleasure [hēdonē]; and so he lived with Aspasia, the courtesan from Megara, and squandered the greater part of his property on her.”³⁷ So, according to this fourth-century author, Pericles made two separate but symmetrical changes in his lifestyle: first, upon entering public life, he renounced the social life of the sumposion and all its extravagances; then, upon meeting Aspasia, he returned to an aristocratic mode of life that was ruled by expensive extravagance and luxury.

According to the Socratic philosophers, Pericles now abandoned his modest lifestyle and his proverbial imperturbability. In his Aspasia, the Socratic Antisthenes “claims that Pericles was in love with Aspasia and went into and out of her house twice a day just to say hello to her.”³⁸ That anecdote was repeated by Plutarch: “Twice a day, … on going out and on coming in from the market-place, he would salute her with a loving kiss.”³⁹ The reversion was total. Whereas, previously, he had been punctilious about avoiding banqueting and about treading only the path leading to the Agora and the Council Chamber, Pericles would now pay daily visits to a private house in order to embrace the lovely Aspasia. “To love a woman to the point where, even though she was a foreigner and a hetaira, one without compunction made a public show of it—that was a liberty and a nonconformist way of behaving that was found truly shocking.”⁴⁰

The Socratic Aeschines, whose testimony is repeated by Plutarch, tells us that Pericles’ imperturbable stance was shattered when Aspasia was brought to trial by the Athenian lawcourts: “Aspasia he begged off, by shedding copious tears at the trial, as Aeschines says, and by entreating the jurors.”41 The trial of Aspasia kindled within the stratēgos feelings too long repressed, just as the death of his last remaining son, Paralus, caused him to succumb to an irrepressible torrent of tears.

This image of Pericles in tears over the fate of his companion should, however, be interpreted with a measure of reserve, for, contrary to Plutarch’s claims (Pericles, 32.1–2), there is no evidence to confirm that Aspasia was in reality ever accused of impiety. Writing centuries after the event, the ancient authors may have mistaken for reality what was, in truth, just a collection of accusations made in the theater in order to raise a laugh from the Athenian audience. After all, Plutarch does suggest that Aspasia’s accuser was none other than the comic poet Hermippus, “who alleged further against her that she received free-born women into a place of assignation for Pericles” (32.1). From there to believing that the biographer is confusing comedy accusations with legal procedures is only a small step and one that we are perfectly free to take.

Whether the trial was a reality or a fiction, Pericles seems to have lived for several years with Aspasia, who did at least bear him a son, Pericles the Younger. That liaison in itself was quite enough to scandalize some Athenians, who proceeded to accuse the stratēgos of succumbing to the manipulations of this beautiful foreigner.

The Warmonger: Aspasia, the New Helen

Socrates’ followers belittled Pericles by portraying him as Aspasia’s puppet. According to the Socratic Aeschines, this “wise, statesmanlike” woman turned the stratēgos into her disciple, even teaching him her rhetorical skills. That is likewise the ironical representation produced by Plato in his dialogue, the Menexenus (235e): according to Socrates, Aspasia coached plenty of orators, beginning with Pericles and himself. What is more, it was she who composed the funeral speech that the philosopher delivers in this dialogue, drawing on all the commonplaces of patriotic rhetoric. Plato’s irony is at its most biting here: so it was a foreign woman who composed this praise of democratic Athens that was so proud of its masculine autochthonous roots! Implicitly, Plato even suggests that Aspasia could well have composed the funeral speech delivered by Pericles at the start of the Peloponnesian War.⁴² Pericles schooled by Aspasia: that stereotype may well go back to the comic authors of the day, since the comic poet Callias was already repeating it in the second half of the fifth century.43

However, Aspasia is certainly not always represented in such a flattering manner. According to most of the stratēgos’s opponents, this lovely foreign woman charmed Pericles not so much with her words but with her body: in her company, the stratēgos was schooled in matters of the flesh rather than those of the mind, even if, as the Greeks saw it, the one did certainly not rule out the other.⁴⁴ Worse still, Pericles was said to have been obeying the whims of his beloved mistress when he embarked upon two wars: first the Samos campaign, then the Peloponnesian War.

Probably drawing his inspiration from Douris of Samos (ca. 300 B.C.),⁴⁵ Plutarch first evokes the role played by Aspasia in the unleashing of the war against Samos. Aspasia, who was a native of Miletus, with which the city of Samos was in conflict, is said to have persuaded Pericles to intervene in favor of her own country. In fact, the entire campaign was said to have been placed under the sign of eroticism run wild; another Samian author, the historian Alexis, claimed that Pericles’ army included Athenian prostitutes who, in 439 B.C.,⁴⁶ at the end of the conflict, set up a cult to Aphrodite in Samos, by way of celebrating the victory! The anecdote is historically unreliable but it does reflect the hostile rumors that were circulating about the stratēgos, who was accused of having connived at the whims of his companion of ill-repute.⁴⁷

According to the comic poets, Aspasia, not content with having sparked off that ferocious conflict, which was marked by cruel acts of revenge, was likewise accused of starting the Peloponnesian War. In his Dionysalexandros (Dionysus in the role of Paris/Alexander), Cratinus blamed Pericles for having started the war in order to please Aspasia, who was transformed for the occasion into a latter-day Helen of Troy. The play—which is now lost, although its plot is known to us⁴⁸—was probably composed in 430–429 B.C., and, in the mode of an allegory, it likens Pericles to a latter-day Paris who prefers the gifts of Aphrodite to those of Athena and Hera:⁴⁹ the stratēgos is said to have provoked the war out of love for his companion, just as the Trojan hero, in his day, had done for the sake of Helen.⁵⁰

In The Acharnians, Aristophanes spells out the accusation made against Aspasia, putting the following long tirade into the mouth of Dikaiopolis, the protagonist:

Members of the audience, my words are harsh but just …
Myself, I detest the Lacedaemonians, and how! …
But all the same, those were but trifles …
Some young tipsy cottabus-players went
And stole from Megara town the prostitute [pornē] Simaetha.
Then the Megarians, garlicked with the smart,
Stole, in return, two of Aspasia’s hussies [pornai].
From these three Wantons o’er the Hellenic race
Burst forth the first beginnings of the War.
For then, in wrath, the Olympian Pericles
Thundered and lightened and confounded Hellas,
Enacting laws which ran like drinking songs,
“Let the Megarians presently depart
From earth and sea, the mainland and the mart.”51

In these lines, Aspasia is portrayed as a brothel-keeper, a familiar enough figure in both Piraeus and Athens, leading by the nose a besotted Pericles who appears to be all-powerful but is in reality enslaved by the whims of his companion.

According to her enemies, Aspasia’s seductive powers stemmed not only from her erotic expertise but also from her decadent, luxury-loving ways. When Pericles took her as his concubine, he surrendered not only to carnal pleasures but also to the sirens of Eastern luxury—what the Greeks called truphē. Aspasia, who was from Miletus, was seen as one of those Ionian women often characterized as “debauched and greedy for financial gain.”⁵² The comic writers called her the new Omphale, likening her to the eastern queen of Lydia at whose feet—according to myth—the powerful Heracles languished during a long period of servitude, spinning wool for her (Pericles, 24.6). The suggestion is that Pericles was groveling before his Eastern enchantress just as did the demi-god fascinated by the queen of Lydia. Certain modern historians have been so carried away by this image that they have turned Aspasia into a prefiguration of Mata Hari, Aspasia being the double agent working for the Persians and sent by malicious Ionian factions to plot on their behalf!⁵³ In doing so, they picked up on particular accusations leveled at Pericles, even though no credible argument has ever been found to confirm them.

Aspasia, a Chiaroscuro Figure: Between Literary Fantasies and the Spotlight of Epigraphical Illumination

What is known for certain about the real Aspasia? The literary texts provide very little. Only her name and her patronymic seem to be cited with a degree of certainty: “That she was a Milesian by birth, daughter of one Axiochus, is generally agreed” (Pericles, 24.2). All the rest is largely a matter of fiction and fantasy; now a whore, now a mistress of rhetoric, she is an inexhaustible source of anecdotes that share but one feature in common: namely, their unverifiability. The name of Aspasia serves above all as a screen on to which all the masculine fantasies surrounding a woman from the East could be projected: she is lascivious, refined, and manipulative.54

The figure of Aspasia, a prisoner of history written by men, turns out to be totally indefinable.⁵⁵ This vagueness is conveyed by all the different descriptions in which the ancient authors have paraded her. The comic poet Cratinus calls her a concubine (pallakē) in the following, hardly flattering lines: “And Sodom [Katapugosunē] then fathered [for Cronos] this Hera-Aspasia, the bitch-eyed concubine [pallakē].”⁵⁶ Eupolis settles for “prostitute” (pornē),⁵⁷ while Plutarch reminds us that she “presided over a business that was anything but honest or even reputable, since she kept a house of young courtesans [paidiskas hetairousas]” (Pericles, 24.3).⁵⁸ Diodorus Periegetes claims, on the contrary, that she was Pericles’ legitimate wife.⁵⁹ Now a concubine, now a prostitute, now a courtesan, now a procuress, now a wife: Aspasia oscillates between different statuses that are by no means all equivalent, as Apollodorus carefully points out in his speech Against Neaera (§ 122). How can we possibly decide? And besides, why should we decide between all these different views?

What we can at least do is try to establish a few objective facts upon which to reflect. Aspasia, a native of Miletus, must have met Pericles before 437, since their son, Pericles the Younger, was a stratēgos in 406 at the time of the battle of Arginusae; to be elected to such a magistracy a man had to be at least thirty years old. She was probably living in Athens even before the war against Samos broke out, if, that is, we can place any credit in Plutarch’s account.

There is an inscription that may throw new light on this most shadowy file of documentation. Peter Bicknell has suggested connecting Aspasia’s history with an Attic funerary inscription of the fourth century B.C. This mentions the names Aspasius and Axiochus—not to be found anywhere else in our documentation (IG II² 7349).⁶⁰ The text makes it possible to reconstruct Aspasia’s family background in a manner that is, if not beyond question, at least plausible. According to Bicknell, Aspasia, although a foreigner, belonged to a powerful Athenian oikos. His theory is that it all started with the ostracism of the elder Alcibiades, in about 460. When banished from Athens, he went off to Miletus, in Ionia, where he married the daughter of a Milesian aristocrat by the name of Axiochus, by whom he had two children, Aspasius and Axiochus, before 451, and the law then passed on citizenship. When his ostracism at last ended, he finally returned to Athens, bringing with him, in his train, not only his wife and children but also his wife’s sister, the beautiful Aspasia, whom Pericles met as a result of the close links that connected him to Alcibiades’ family. According to Bicknell’s reconstruction then, Aspasia, when she first met Pericles, was a young unmarried woman, descended from the Milesian elite, who enjoyed the protection of a powerful Athenian household. Quite apart from its intrinsic interest, this reconstruction has the merit of underlining a fundamental feature of the figure of Aspasia: Pericles’ beloved did not fall into any of the habitual preconceived categories by which Athenians identified the status of women. The figure of Aspasia confused them all: a foreigner in the city, she was nevertheless connected with an Athenian family very much in the public eye; so when she was taken for Pericles’ concubine or even his legitimate wife, her very existence defied classification within the preestablished categories of Athenian males.

Perhaps it was precisely the uncertainty surrounding her status that explains the contradictory assessments of her position. As now a whore, now a teacher of rhetoric, she was impossible to categorize socially, in a precise manner. So, just as the Europeans were to do in the case of the “free women” of the nineteenth century, the Athenians tended to interpret that relative liberty as sexual license, as if (relative) social liberty was inevitably to be associated with moral libertinism.

That is what, ultimately, may lie at the root of the aggression that Aspasia attracted and concentrated upon herself and that, according to some ancient sources, found expression in an accusation of impiety in the lawcourts. Even if that supposed trial is just a fiction, it nevertheless, tellingly enough, raises the question of religious tolerance in Pericles’ Athens.