Pericles of Athens (23 page)

In
The Acharnians
, Aristophanes spells out the accusation made against Aspasia, putting the following
long tirade into the mouth of Dikaiopolis, the protagonist:

Members of the audience, my words are harsh but just …
Myself, I detest the Lacedaemonians, and how! …
But all the same, those were but trifles …
Some young tipsy cottabus-players went
And stole from Megara town the prostitute [
pornē
] Simaetha.
Then the Megarians, garlicked with the smart,
Stole, in return, two of Aspasia’s hussies [
pornai
].
From these three Wantons o’er the Hellenic race
Burst forth the first beginnings of the War.
For then, in wrath, the Olympian Pericles
Thundered and lightened and confounded Hellas,
Enacting laws which ran like drinking songs,
“Let the Megarians presently depart
From earth and sea, the mainland and the mart.”
⁵¹

In these lines, Aspasia is portrayed as a brothel-keeper, a familiar enough figure
in both Piraeus and Athens, leading by the nose a besotted Pericles who appears to
be all-powerful but is in reality enslaved by the whims of his companion.

According to her enemies, Aspasia’s seductive powers stemmed not only from her erotic
expertise but also from her decadent, luxury-loving ways. When Pericles took her as
his concubine, he surrendered not only to carnal pleasures but also to the sirens
of Eastern luxury—what the Greeks called
truphē
. Aspasia, who was from Miletus, was seen as one of those Ionian women often characterized
as “debauched and greedy for financial gain.”
⁵²
The comic writers called her the new Omphale, likening her to the eastern queen of
Lydia at whose feet—according to myth—the powerful Heracles languished during a long
period of servitude, spinning wool for her (
Pericles
, 24.6). The suggestion is that Pericles was groveling before his Eastern enchantress
just as did the demi-god fascinated by the queen of Lydia. Certain modern historians
have been so carried away by this image that they have turned Aspasia into a prefiguration
of Mata Hari, Aspasia being the double agent working for the Persians and sent by
malicious Ionian factions to plot on their behalf!
⁵³
In doing so, they picked up on particular accusations leveled at Pericles, even though
no credible argument has ever been found to confirm them.

Aspasia, a Chiaroscuro Figure: Between Literary Fantasies and the Spotlight of Epigraphical
Illumination

What is known for certain about the real Aspasia? The literary texts provide very
little. Only her name and her patronymic seem to be cited with a degree of certainty:
“That she was a Milesian by birth, daughter of one Axiochus, is generally agreed”
(
Pericles
, 24.2). All the rest is largely a matter of fiction and fantasy; now a whore, now
a mistress of rhetoric, she is an inexhaustible source of anecdotes that share but
one feature in common: namely, their
unverifiability. The name of Aspasia serves above all as a screen on to which all
the masculine fantasies surrounding a woman from the East could be projected: she
is lascivious, refined, and manipulative.
⁵⁴

The figure of Aspasia, a prisoner of history written by men, turns out to be totally
indefinable.
⁵⁵
This vagueness is conveyed by all the different descriptions in which the ancient
authors have paraded her. The comic poet Cratinus calls her a concubine (
pallakē
) in the following, hardly flattering lines: “And Sodom [
Katapugosunē
] then fathered [for Cronos] this Hera-Aspasia, the bitch-eyed concubine [
pallakē
].”
⁵⁶
Eupolis settles for “prostitute” (
pornē
),
⁵⁷
while Plutarch reminds us that she “presided over a business that was anything but
honest or even reputable, since she kept a house of young courtesans [
paidiskas hetairousas
]” (
Pericles
, 24.3).
⁵⁸
Diodorus
Periegetes
claims, on the contrary, that she was Pericles’ legitimate wife.
⁵⁹
Now a concubine, now a prostitute, now a courtesan, now a procuress, now a wife:
Aspasia oscillates between different statuses that are by no means all equivalent,
as Apollodorus carefully points out in his speech
Against Neaera
(§ 122). How can we possibly decide? And besides, why should we decide between all
these different views?

What we can at least do is try to establish a few objective facts upon which to reflect.
Aspasia, a native of Miletus, must have met Pericles before 437, since their son,
Pericles the Younger, was a
stratēgos
in 406 at the time of the battle of Arginusae; to be elected to such a magistracy
a man had to be at least thirty years old. She was probably living in Athens even
before the war against Samos broke out, if, that is, we can place any credit in Plutarch’s
account.

There is an inscription that may throw new light on this most shadowy file of documentation.
Peter Bicknell has suggested connecting Aspasia’s history with an Attic funerary inscription
of the fourth century B.C. This mentions the names Aspasius and Axiochus—not to be
found anywhere else in our documentation (
IG
II
²
7349).
⁶⁰
The text makes it possible to reconstruct Aspasia’s family background in a manner
that is, if not beyond question, at least plausible. According to Bicknell, Aspasia,
although a foreigner, belonged to a powerful Athenian
oikos
. His theory is that it all started with the ostracism of the elder Alcibiades, in
about 460. When banished from Athens, he went off to Miletus, in Ionia, where he married
the daughter of a Milesian aristocrat by the name of Axiochus, by whom he had two
children, Aspasius and Axiochus, before 451, and the law then passed on citizenship.
When his ostracism at last ended, he finally returned to Athens, bringing with him,
in his train, not only his wife and children but also his wife’s sister, the beautiful
Aspasia, whom Pericles met as a result of the close links that connected him to Alcibiades’
family.
According to Bicknell’s reconstruction then, Aspasia, when she first met Pericles,
was a young unmarried woman, descended from the Milesian elite, who enjoyed the protection
of a powerful Athenian household. Quite apart from its intrinsic interest, this reconstruction
has the merit of underlining a fundamental feature of the figure of Aspasia: Pericles’
beloved did not fall into any of the habitual preconceived categories by which Athenians
identified the status of women. The figure of Aspasia confused them all: a foreigner
in the city, she was nevertheless connected with an Athenian family very much in the
public eye; so when she was taken for Pericles’ concubine or even his legitimate wife,
her very existence defied classification within the preestablished categories of Athenian
males.

Perhaps it was precisely the uncertainty surrounding her status that explains the
contradictory assessments of her position. As now a whore, now a teacher of rhetoric,
she was impossible to categorize socially, in a precise manner. So, just as the Europeans
were to do in the case of the “free women” of the nineteenth century, the Athenians
tended to interpret that relative liberty as sexual license, as if (relative) social
liberty was inevitably to be associated with moral libertinism.

That is what, ultimately, may lie at the root of the aggression that Aspasia attracted
and concentrated upon herself and that, according to some ancient sources, found expression
in an accusation of impiety in the lawcourts. Even if that supposed trial is just
a fiction, it nevertheless, tellingly enough, raises the question of religious tolerance
in Pericles’ Athens.

CHAPTER 8

Pericles and the City Gods

N
othing was more alien to the Greeks than the notion of a separation between Church
and State. In Athens, the community provided a tight framework for religious manifestations
while, symmetrically, religion was deeply embedded in civic life.
¹
Within this context, participation in the rituals was an action highly political—in
the broadest sense of the term.

In the first place, religious practices shaped in the citizens a sense of belonging.
When, at the end of the Peloponnesian War, the herald Cleocritus urged the Athenians
to seek reconciliation after having torn one another apart, he appealed to the memory
of that shared experience: “we have shared with you in the most solemn rites and sacrifices
and the most splendid festivals, we have been companions in the dance and schoolmates
and comrades in arms and we have braved many dangers with you both by land and by
sea.”
²
Every bit as much as warfare, religious festivals bonded the civic community together
around practices and values shared in common.

Second, to manifest one’s piety also had a more specific political meaning, one that,
this time, played on individual distinction rather than collective solidarity. To
celebrate a cult or to dedicate offerings was a way of distinguishing oneself personally—as
politicians were well aware. However, to make a show of too great a proximity to the
gods was risky: excessive piety, in the same way as a detachment that was too manifest,
might be regarded by the Athenians as a lack of moderation. It was all a matter of
balance.

To analyze Pericles’ relations with the gods, one has to position oneself at the intersection
of the general and the particular, where what was personal and what was shared by
the whole community came together. On the one hand, the career of the
stratēgos
will illuminate the Athenians’ collective relationship to all that was divine. As
a reelected
stratēgos
and a persuasive orator, Pericles was the spokesman of a civic religion that was
undergoing a mutation. He was implicated in a policy of making constant offerings
and of launching huge architectural religious works not only on the Acropolis but
also throughout Attica; and, furthermore, he was engaged in such activities at a time
when the city was
introducing profound changes into its religious account of its origins—that is, autochthony—within
a context of strained diplomatic relations.

On the other hand, the ancient sources made it possible to glimpse the personal relations
that Pericles had developed with the gods. These were relations of proximity in the
first place: he was sometimes depicted as a protégé of Athena, but in Attic comedies
he was also assimilated to Zeus, in an analogy that was in no way flattering. But
then, there were also relations that emphasized distance: some philosophical accounts
presented him as a man close to the sophists or even as a freethinker. And, finally,
there were relations involving irreverence: some later—and untrustworthy—sources made
much of several trials for impiety in which those close to him were involved, and
this raises the question of religious tolerance in fifth-century Athens and, in particular,
how far individuals enjoyed freedom of thought when faced with the civic community.

A S
POKESMAN FOR THE
C
IVIC
R
ELIGION
: C
OLLECTIVE
R
ELATIONS WITH THE
G
ODS

In Athens, the city regulated religious expression down to the smallest details. The
Assembly concerned itself with sacred affairs at regular intervals, and it was the
Assembly that fixed the salaries of certain priests and priestesses and was also empowered
to accept new cults.
³
Symptomatic of this overall civic control was the fact that the gods’ money could
sometimes spill over into the community coffers. Between 441 and 439 B.C., the city
borrowed funds from the treasury of Athena in order to cope with the expenses incurred
in the long conflict with Samos.
⁴
And in the speech that he delivered on the eve of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles
himself presented, as a financial reserve, the heap of offerings that had accumulated
on the Acropolis, at the same time accepting responsibility for restoring to the goddess
the sum borrowed, once the hostilities came to an end.
⁵

At the same time, though, religious rituals were ensconced at the very heart of the
democratic institutional framework. When meetings took place in the Assembly, debates
never began until the Pnyx had been purified by a sacrifice and the herald had pronounced
blessings and curses too. On the tribunes, orators always had to wear a wreath, as
did participants in a sacrifice. As for the juries in popular lawcourts, they pronounced
a solemn oath, swearing by Zeus, Poseidon, and Demeter to give their verdict in accordance
with the city laws.

Religion and Politics: A Festive Democracy

As a magistrate, Pericles participated fully in this rich and intense civic religion.
The presence of Athenian magistrates was required at numerous rituals.
At the opening ceremony of the Great Dionysia, the ten
stratēgoi
all offered libations. They played a prominent part in the Panathenaea procession
and were presented with the portions that were reserved for them from the first sacrifice
in honour of Athena.
⁶
We even know that in the fourth century they were responsible for no fewer than eight
sacrifices a year.

In his capacity as a
stratēgos
, Pericles was thus an actor in an intensely festive democracy. In his funeral speech
of 431, he acknowledges this fact: “We have a succession of competitions and religious
festivals throughout the year.”
⁷
Although it delighted the democrats, this plethora of religious celebrations aroused
hostility among the oligarchs. In a violent pamphlet composed between 430 and 415,
the anonymous author of
The Constitution of the Athenians
—known as the Old Oligarch—regarded it all as specifically Athenian and typical of
a debased mode of government. According to this author, the increasing number of festivals
caused serious institutional problems, constantly interrupting the handling of important
affairs: