Public opinion blamed Aspasia for egging on Pericles to take the Milesian side against the Samians. We have no conclusive evidence, but it would be surprising if Aspasia did not raise the topic with her lover. On the other hand, Pericles was not the kind of man to mix politics with pillow talk. Whether Aspasia used her influence or not, the defeat of Samos meant some release from the imputations of scandal.
Mystery and slander surround Aspasia and the more we look the less we see. Nothing is quite as it appears. She was probably not born before 470, and so was twenty-five or so years the junior of Pericles. She may have moved in with him as early as 452 or 451. This was all highly irregular, and out of character for a well-conducted aristocrat.
To the conventional Greek, the female of the species was lethal to the male. She was sexually rapacious and needed to be kept under strict control. According to the eighth-century poet Hesiod, the first woman was invented by the gods as a living punishment.
From her comes all the race of womankind
the deadly female race and tribe of wives
who live with mortal men and bring them harm,
no help to them in dreadful poverty
but ready enough to share with them in wealth.
…Women are bad for men, and they conspire
In wrong.
It is true that women had authority to manage their own households and that there were happy heterosexual relationships, Aspasia and Pericles being a case in point. For every murderous witch, such as Medea, who killed her children to punish her husband, there was a Penelope, the faithful, brave, and intelligent wife of Odysseus, who waited twenty years for her husband to return from Troy; or an Alcestis, who volunteered to die in place of her spouse. But the misogyny was pervasive. Greek society was indelibly sexist.
Marriages were usually arranged and were designed to advance a family’s standing or to acquire property. To preserve an estate an heiress and only child would wed a close relative (she was known as an epikleros, or “a woman attached to the kleros, or estate”). The bride came with a dowry that was repayable in the event of divorce. Men often waited until they were more than thirty years old before marrying. Their wives could be as young as twelve.
An upper-class woman’s chastity was very carefully guarded. She spent most of her time at home, supervising the household. She spun wool and made her husband’s and her own clothes. When she went out shopping she would take care to be accompanied by servants and slaves. She attended religious festivals and funerals, which were among the few occasions when she might meet men outside the close family circle (her unavailability may help to explain the prevalence of pederasty among young men).
In his dialogue The Estate Manager, Xenophon has a husband give instructions to his new wife:
…your duty is to stay indoors. You must send out those servants who have outdoor jobs and supervise those who are working in the house. You must take in the produce that comes in from outside, and distribute or store it as necessary. When wool is delivered make sure that those who need clothes get them and that grain is made into edible provisions.
In spite of the fact that Pericles led an unconventional private life, he summed up the subordinate status of Athenian women in a funeral speech for war dead that he delivered in 431. Advising the men’s widows, he said:
Perhaps I should say a few words about the duties of women…the greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether they are praising you or criticising you.
Men did not insist on sexual satisfaction from their wives. As the great Athenian orator Demosthenes put it bluntly in the fourth century:
We have
hetairai
or mistresses for pleasure, an ordinary prostitute to service our bodies’ daily needs, and wives so that we can breed legitimate children and have trustworthy guardians of our domestic possessions.
A marriage was a purely private affair and neither priests nor state officials played any part in it. Weddings were often solemnized in the depth of winter during the Greek month of Gamelion (January to February). The bride dedicated a lock of her hair to the protectors of marriage, Zeus and Hera, and pledged her childhood toys to the virgin goddess Artemis (who heartily disapproved of sex and marriage and needed to be placated).
On her wedding day the bride took a ritual bath in holy water and then attended a banquet that her father gave for the two families and their friends. She sat apart from the men alongside a duenna who guided her through the ceremony. Little cakes covered in sesame seeds, believed to make women fertile, were handed round. Towards sunset the groom led his bride to her new home in a wagon drawn by mules or oxen. They were preceded by a torchlight procession. Noisy wedding hymns were accompanied by flute and lyre. On arrival at the bridegroom’s house the happy couple were showered with nuts and dried figs. They entered the bridal chamber and only then did the new wife remove her veil. Outside the door, teenagers of both sexes sang a nuptial praise song, or epithalamium (literally “at the bedroom”) loudly enough to mask the woman’s—or more often girl’s—cries as her husband penetrated her.
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The young Pericles obeyed convention, marrying an Alcmaeonid relative (possibly a woman called Deinomache, who later married the Cleinias who fell at Coronea). However, they were not a loving couple and, although they produced two sons, Xanthippus and Paralus, the marriage came to an end in the second half of the 450s.
The boys do not seem to have turned out well. Plato has Socrates hint that they were simpletons and Xanthippus, the firstborn, was on poor terms with his father. He felt that the allowance he received was insufficient (his wife was high-maintenance). Pericles was uninterested in money and, to avoid having to think about it when busy on public business, had an agent manage his estate. He preferred to watch it tick over rather than strain for large profits.
Xanthippus borrowed a substantial sum from one of Pericles’ friends, pretending it was for his father. Pericles knew nothing about the matter until the friend asked for the sum to be repaid. The great man not only refused, but took his son to court. A furious Xanthippus told amusing and discreditable stories about life at home, making his father into a figure of fun.
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The real reason for his divorce was that Pericles had fallen in love with Aspasia. This tale of a middle-aged man in his fifties shacking up with an attractive bimbo had satirical potential. The gossips of Athens and the city’s comic poets made the most of it.
The allegation they put about was that the general’s live-in lover had been a hooker. The well-known comedy writer Cratinus wrote:
To find our Zeus a Hera, the goddess of Vice
Produced that dog-eyed whore Aspasia for wife
“Dog-eyed” was a cruel parody of Hera’s usual Homeric epithet, “ox-eyed.” Aspasia was reported to be the madam of a brothel on the side, and procured freeborn Athenian women for Pericles (sex outside marriage with a freeborn Athenian woman was illegal and taboo).
However, there is another possibility. We know that Aspasia’s father in Miletus was called Axiochus, a rare Greek personal name. There happens to have been another Axiochus in a branch of the Alcmaeonid family. He was the son of a man called Alcibiades. It seems likely that this Alcibiades, who was ostracized in 460, spent some or all of his exile in Miletus where (we may suppose) he married into Aspasia’s family. In fact, he must have wed a daughter of Axiochus and a sister of our Aspasia. A son, we can reconstruct, was born of the union, who was named Axiochus in honor of the infant’s Milesian grandfather, as was the Greek custom.