Woman in the golden ages

by Amelia Gere Mason

“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.