It is not to be imagined that Aspasia excelled in light and amorous discourses. Her discourses, on the contrary, were not more brilliant than solid. It was believed by the most intelligent Athenians, and amongst them Socrates himself, that she composed the celebrated funeral oration pronounced by Pericles in honour of those that were slain in the Samian War.[240]
It is recorded of her that many Athenians resorted to her lecture-room on account of her skill in the art of speaking. Not only did she teach rhetoric, philosophy, and the proper relations of the sexes, but so renowned was she for statesmanship that Pericles is said to have surrendered to her the government of Athens then at the height of its glory and renown. On this subject Plutarch remarks: “Some, indeed, say that Pericles made his court to Aspasia only on account of her wisdom and political abilities.”
It has been said that the expedition against the Samians was merely to gratify Aspasia. The Milesians and Samians who had been at war were ordered to lay down their arms. When they refused to obey, Pericles, in company with Aspasia, sailed with a fleet to Samos and abolished the oligarchical form of government. Although he was offered large sums of money, he “treated the Samians in the manner he had resolved on; and having established a popular government in the island, he returned to Athens.”[241]
Plutarch, quoting from Æschines, says that Lysicles, who was “of a mean, ungenerous disposition, by his intercourse with Aspasia after the death of Pericles, became the most considerable man in Athens.”[242] Notwithstanding the scandalous reports which have come down to us of this woman’s character, in view of the facts which it has been impossible for sex-prejudice to conceal, we are constrained to ask: “What manner of woman was this who was able to control statesmen, impart instruction to world-renowned philosophers, and leave a name which even bigotry, envy, and malice may not efface from the history of human events?”
In seeking for an explanation of the exalted character of Aspasia, we have something more than a hint in the fact that she is reported to have “trod in the steps of Thargelia,” a woman who by her exceeding brilliancy had gained the sovereignty of Thessaly. Indeed, we have found a key to the entire situation when we learn that this Thargelia, in whose steps Aspasia trod, “was descended from the ancient Ionians,”[243] a people who, originally worshipped the female principle, and who still preserved the customs peculiar to the matriarchal system, under which it will be remembered women, as aliens, did not follow the fathers of their children to their homes. So soon as these facts are understood, we are not in the least surprised to learn that Aspasia discountenanced the institution of marriage as it existed in Athens. Neither is it remarkable, when we remember that the underlying principles involved in the philosophy which she taught were justice and equity, that she should be found using her great influence, as in the case of the Milesians and Samians, in substituting democracies in the place of oligarchies; nor that, in an age when women had come to be regarded simply as the tools and slaves of men, she should be found teaching the dignity of womanhood to her own sex, and the principles of equality to males.
According to Xenophon, Aspasia’s efforts were to a great extent directed to the duties of husbands and wives; indeed, her foremost object seems to have been to educate Athenian women. During the Periclean age the position of women was one of the leading topics discussed in Athens. Socrates says to his companions that he has been of the opinion “of a long time that the female sex are nothing inferior to ours, excepting only in strength of body or perhaps steadiness of judgment.”[244] The coarse picture painted by Aristophanes, of women with beards going in male attire to the agora, “to seize the administration of the state so as to do the state some good,”[245] although a vulgar attempt to ridicule the female philosophers of Athens, furnishes something more than a hint of the fact that the ideas subsequently set forth in Plato’s Republic had been openly discussed by the philosophers of the Periclean age.
That the word hetairai was originally employed in no mean or compromising sense is plain, since Sappho uses it in the sense of “female companion (ἑταίρα) of the same rank and the same interests.” We are assured that these women were able to preserve a friendship “free from trickery.” Of them even “Cynulcus does not venture to speak ill.”[246] They “of all women are the only ones who have derived their name from friendship or from that goddess who is named by the Athenians Venus Hetæra.”[247]
“Accordingly, even to this day,” observes Athenæus, “free-born women and maidens call their associates and friends their ἑταίρα; as Sappho does where she says:
And now with tuneful voice I’ll sing
These pleasing songs to my companions.