The entire activity of Aspasia, her speculations, her intercourse with men whose opinions were novel and daring, and who were believed, like Anaxagoras and Socrates, to be unsparing innovators; her own hold over the noblest married women in Athens, and her introduction of greater social liberty among them, were all calculated to outrage the conventional spirit. Almost all the prominent members of her coterie were assailed. The greatest sculptor of all ages was meanly and falsely accused of theft, and died in a prison. The outspoken Anaxagoras was charged with impiety, and had to flee. And at length Aspasia was brought to trial on the same accusation. It was easy to get up such an accusation against her. She might have visited some temple, and taken part in some religious ceremony, impelled by truly pious motives; but such an act on the part of a stranger, whatever her motives might be, would have been deemed a great impiety by orthodox Athenians; or she may have induced some Athenian citizen-ladies to go with her and engage in some foreign worship. The Athenians permitted foreigners to observe their own religious rites in their city, without let or hindrance, but they had strong objections to genuine Athenian women becoming converts to any foreign worship. The Athenian ladies did not look on religious matters with the same eyes as the men. They yearned to have the benefit of the more enthusiastic worships which came from Asia Minor; and, accordingly, if Aspasia had been inclined to lead them that way, she would no doubt have had many eager followers. Or, finally, and most probably, she may have been supposed to share the opinions of the philosophers with whom she was on such intimate terms, and to have aided and abetted their opposition to the national creed. What were the grounds of the charge we do not know. All we know is that she was acquitted, but that she owed her acquittal to the earnest pleading of Pericles, who on this one occasion accompanied his entreaties with tears.
There can be no doubt that Aspasia exercised a powerful political influence during her residence in Athens. This fact is assured to us by the abuse which she received from the comic poets. They called her Hera, queen of the gods, wife of Olympian Zeus, as they named Pericles. They also called her Dejanira, wife of Hercules, and the new Omphale, whom Hercules slavishly served—all pointing at the power which she had over Pericles. Aristophanes, in his ‘Acharnians’ asserts that Pericles brought about the Peloponnesian war to take vengeance for an insult offered to Aspasia, and others affirmed that the Samian war was undertaken entirely to gratify her. These are absurd statements on the face of them, and were probably never meant to be anything else than jokes; but they render unquestionable the profound influence of Aspasia. It is probable that this influence was exercised in an effort to break down the barriers that kept the Greek city-States from each other, to create a strong Hellenic feeling, to make a compact Hellenic confederacy.[53] But whatever were the aims of her politics, it may be safely asserted that no woman ever exercised influence by more legitimate means. It was her goodness, her noble aims, her clear insight, that gave her the power. There was probably no adventitious circumstance to aid her. It is not likely that she was beautiful.
I think Sappho was beautiful. The comic poets said that she was little,[54] and had a dark complexion. Littleness was incompatible with beauty in the eye of a Greek, and a dark complexion would also be against her. But all that we can gather about Sappho’s form leads to the conclusion that the comic poets traduced her in this as in other matters. Plato calls her “beautiful,” an expression which most have taken to refer to her poetic genius; but this interpretation is at least doubtful. A vase of the fifth century B.C., found in Girgenti, gives us representations of Alcæus and Sappho, and on these Sappho is taller than Alcæus, and exceedingly beautiful. We have also a portrait of Sappho on the coins of the Mytilenæans; and here again the face is exquisite in feature, and suggests a tall woman. If it has any defect, it is that it is rather masculine. At first one might hesitate to believe that it is the face of a woman, but there can be no doubt as to its beauty. On the other hand, no ancient writer speaks of Aspasia as beautiful. She is called the good, the wise, the eloquent, but never the beautiful. We have one bust bearing her name certainly not beautiful. It represents a comfortable meditative woman, but I doubt very much whether it is genuine. And I am far more inclined to believe that we have a true portrait of Aspasia in a marble bust of which there are two copies, one in the Louvre and one in Berlin. The bust evidently belongs to the best times of Greek sculpture, and, as Bernoulli in the Archæologische Zeitung[55] argues, can well be that of no other than Aspasia. The face is not altogether beautiful according to Greek ideas. It has an expression of earnest and deep thought; but what strikes one most of all is the perplexed and baffled look which the whole face presents—as of some life-long anguish, resulting from some contest which no mortal could wage successfully—not without a touch of exquisite sweetness, tenderness, and charity. Could it be the struggle in behalf of her own sex?
If ever there was a case which might have suggested to the Athenians the propriety of extending the sphere of marriageability, surely it was this case of Aspasia. But we cannot affirm that any one thought of this. The Athenian women, even the citizens, had no political standing. They were always minors, subject to their fathers, or to their husbands, or to some male. Aristotle always classes women and children together. But such was the force of character of these companions, or such their hold on powerful men, that not unfrequently their sons were recognized as citizens, and attained to the full rights of citizenship. This could take place in three ways. There might exist between Athens and another Greek or foreign state a right of intermarriage (ἐπιγαμία), established by treaty. Strange to say, there is no clear instance of such a treaty in the history of the Athenians. There was no such treaty between Athens and Sparta, or Argos, or Corinth, or any other of the famous towns of Greece. The privilege was indeed conferred on the Platæans, but it was when they became citizens of Athens, and were likely in a generation or two to become undistinguishable among the rest of the Athenian citizens. A passage in Lysias[56] has been taken to intimate that the right of intermarriage was ceded to the Eubœans, but the passage occurs only in a fragment preserved in the writings of Dionysius of Halicarnassus.[57] The text exhibits marks of corruption, and the entire history of the relations between Athens and Eubœa speaks strongly against the possibility of the establishment of such a treaty.[58] Mention is also made of the proposal of such a treaty between Athenians and Thebans in the speech of Demosthenes on the Crown,[59] but the decree is unquestionably spurious, as Grote has most conclusively shown and as is now universally acknowledged. It is now agreed that all the decrees in the speech on the Crown are forgeries.[60] In that same speech a decree is quoted in which the Byzantines bestow on the Athenians the right of intermarriage, and it is likely that other States would confer the same privilege on the Athenians, but there is no proof that they ever returned the favour.
A second method of rendering the son of a foreign woman legitimate was by decree of the Athenian Assembly: and it was probably in this way that Pericles, the son of Aspasia, became an Athenian citizen with full rights. There was a third way, not acknowledged by law, by which many such children must have found their way into the ranks of citizens. The ordinary process by which a legitimate child came to the possession of his full rights was by his being presented by his father to the phratria and acknowledged by the φράτερες as a genuine member of their class or brotherhood. The father had to swear that the child was his legitimate child. In many cases fathers had no difficulty in swearing that children born to them of a beloved stranger were legitimate, and the φράτερες doubtless winked at the deception. This was specially the practice with the aristocratic party. In earlier times there had been no such strict law as afterwards prevailed in the democratic period. Indeed, the theory seems to have been held that the blood of a mother could not affect the purity of the birth of a child, because there was really nothing of the mother in the child. She had nothing to do with the production of the child. She was merely its recipient and nurse. Æschylus has very strongly expressed this idea in the ‘Eumenides,’ and we have good reason for thinking that the opinion was held by large numbers of the aristocratic party to the end. It was Pericles that established the law that the child to be legitimate must be the son or daughter of an Athenian male citizen with full rights and an Athenian female citizen with full rights, legally betrothed to each other. It is when a distribution of corn takes place, or similar advantages are reaped, that the law is strenuously applied by the democratic party, and all the children of strangers disfranchised. But always when investigation is made many are found enjoying the privileges of citizens unchallenged, whose mothers were not genuine Athenian citizens. Themistocles was the son of a Thracian stranger, and so was the general Timotheus, according to one account. It was probably through the φρατρία that Sophocles got his favourite grandson through Theoris the Sicyonian, recognized as an Athenian citizen.[61] But though the women may have gained recognition for their children, no interest was taken in their own case, and mankind had to pay dearly for this exclusiveness.
Probably the condition of women in Athens had much to do with the decay of that city. The effort which Aspasia made to rouse the Athenian wives to higher mental exertions must have lost much of its effect after her death. The names of these wives are not to be found in history. But the influence of the Companions came more and more into play. Almost every famous man, after this date, has one Companion with whom he discusses the pursuits and soothes the evils of his life. Plato had Archeanassa, Aristotle Herpyllis, Epicurus Leontium, Isocrates Metaneira, Menander Glycera, and others in like manner. And some of them attained the highest positions. Princes can do as they like. In the earlier days of Athens, when tyrants ruled, princes frequently married foreigners. And now again princes married their Companions, and several of them thus sat on thrones. The beauty of some, especially of Phryne, the most beautiful woman that ever lived, attracted the eyes of all Greece; Apelles painted her, and Praxiteles made her the model for the Cnidian Aphrodite, the most lovely representation of woman that ever came from sculptor’s chisel. Some were renowned for their musical ability, and a few could paint. They cultivated all the graces of life; they dressed with exquisite taste; they took their food, as a comic poet remarks, with refinement, and not like the citizen-women, who crammed their cheeks, and tore away at the meat. And they were witty. They also occupied the attention of historians. One writer described one hundred and thirty-three of them. Their witty sayings were chronicled and turned into verse. Their exploits were celebrated, and their beauty and attractiveness were the theme of many an epigram. But it must not be forgotten that hundreds and thousands of these unprotected women were employed as tools of the basest passions; that, finding all true love but a prelude to bitter disappointment, they became rapacious, vindictive, hypocritical ministrants of love, seeking only, under the form of affection, to ruin men, and send them in misery to an early grave. Nothing could be more fearful than the pictures which the comic poets give of some of these women. But what else could have been expected in the circumstances? There was no reason in the nature of the women themselves why they should not have been virtuous, unselfish, noble beings; but destiny was hard towards them; they had to fight a battle with dreadful odds against them. They succumbed; but which of us could have resisted?
I have already remarked that no one claimed political rights for either the citizen-women or the strangers. I must make a slight exception, and I am not sure but the exception may be owing to the influence of Aspasia. We have seen that she was said to be the teacher of Socrates. Indeed, Socrates appeals to her as his teacher in the ‘Memorabilia.’[62] She was one of the great characters in the Socratic dialogues. She appeared several times in those of Æschines; and in the Menexenus, a Socratic dialogue, if not a Platonic, she prepares a model funeral oration. Is it not likely then that she influenced the opinions of Plato; and in the ‘Republic’ of Plato we have the strongest assertion of the equality of woman with man. Plato, and many others with him who lived after the ruin of Athens at Ægospotami, had become discontented with the Athenian form of government, and probably with the treatment of the women.
Accordingly, in his ideal State, which, however, still remained a city-State he took for his groundwork the Spartan system of education. The State was to be all in all. He went so far as to remove the monogamy which formed the barrier in the Spartan system to communistic principles, and he recommended the same mode of gymnastic exercises for both sexes. But he went further. He affirmed that there was no essential difference between man and woman.
“‘And so,’ he says, ‘in the administration of a State neither a woman as a woman nor a man as a man has any special function, but the gifts of nature are equally diffused in both sexes; all the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, and in all of them woman is only a lesser man.’ ‘Very true.’ ‘Then are we to impose all our enactments on men and none of them on women?’ ‘That will never do.’ ‘One woman has a gift of healing, another not; one is a musician and another is not?’ ‘Very true.’ ‘And one woman has a turn for gymnastic and military exercises, while another is unwarlike and hates gymnastics?’ ‘Beyond question.’ ‘And one woman is a philosopher, and another is an enemy of philosophy; one has spirit and another is without spirit?’ ‘That is also true.’”[63]
From these premises he draws the conclusion that the women endowed with the higher gifts should have the same education as the gifted men, and that they should have the same duties, even to fighting in defence of their country, only that in the distribution of labour the lightest tasks should be assigned to the women, as being naturally weaker in body. Some think that Plato’s community of wives was ridiculed the same year that it was propounded, by Aristophanes, in his comedy of the ‘Ecclesiazusæ or Parliament of Women’; but it is far more probable that the comedy was exhibited before Plato’s ‘Republic’ was written.[64] In fact there is a likelihood that woman’s position was a subject much agitated. Clemens Alexandrinus quotes a line from the ‘Protesilaus’ of Euripides, in which community of women seems to be indicated.[65] Xenophon certainly puts into the mouth of Socrates a decided assertion of woman’s equality with man. “Woman’s nature,” he says,[66] “happens to be in no respect inferior to man’s, but she needs insight and strength.” And it is likely that many others held the same opinion, and proposed methods for elevating the position of women.