Woman in the golden ages

by Amelia Gere Mason

says Sophocles. Did he find in her the talent that inspired his own? And what was the secret of Archippa’s influence, that he should have left her his fortune? Or is she, too, a myth? Nor can we divine the gifts that drew the eloquent Isocrates to Metaneira.

How far the honor accorded to so many of the hetæræ was due to their talents and how far to their personal fascination, it is difficult to say. In many cases, beauty was their chief distinction. Some are known to have been fair and frail; others were apparently of good character as well as brilliant intellect. A poet of the time speaks of one as

Pure and on virtue’s strictest model formed.

It would not be quite safe, however, to measure them by our standards. We may go to the Greeks for art and literature, but not for morals. Things that we consider criminal, they looked upon as quite natural and innocent. No doubt, too, many things which we consider so harmless as to pass unnoted would have been censured by them as violations of all laws of decorum.

III

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.