by León, Vicki
Having a superb education and a gift for eloquence didn’t do much to improve Aspasia’s reputation, either. She may or may not have been a courtesan or hetera—the latter being a Greek term for the classiest female companions. She was certainly labeled those things, and epithets even coarser, such as harlot and brothel keeper.
Although we have very little in the way of reliable testimony about her, one fact does seem clear: she entered into a long and loving relationship with the most brilliant political and military leader that Athens ever had. She and Pericles had what may have been the most rewarding long-term affair between consenting heterosexuals. In Athens, that was saying something.
Athens had a Hall of Famer in Pericles: canny general, brilliant politician, and truly great husband material.
Because she was a non-Athenian, she and Pericles could never marry. Thus they were in a no-man’s land in terms of legal standing—unable to be a wife, she had a shadow existence as his mistress. In Rome, there existed a legal cohabitation called concubinage between a free man and a free woman who for some specific reason could not marry. Athens, however, did not recognize that sort of arrangement; Greek concubines were slaves, not free women.
On the other hand, the idea of marriage Athens-style would not have been very appealing from Aspasia’s point of view. She was a dame who could participate deeply in the political, intellectual, and creative life of her home city of Miletus, a place where women had more independence of movement, more options, more say-so.
In Athens, marriage was something that male citizens aged thirty and up dutifully did in order to beget legitimate offspring. Everyone wanted children, despite the risks. But in marriage, the typical Athenian lass went from childhood to bride to life as a secluded matron somewhere between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. Marriage partners were arranged by the families, based on connections, wealth, who had the most sublime ancestors, and how much dowry the girl’s family was able to offer. Love and affection were very low priorities, if considered at all.
After marriage, Athenian husbands could continue to patronize prostitutes and dally with slaves of either gender. Athens nightlife consisted of a round of dinner and drinking parties, where the guests were all males and various female sex workers were on offer, from flute girls and other entertainers to heterae. The latter were independent women, most of them non-Athenians like Aspasia, who could pick and choose their lovers. And often choose their male clients, who paid for the evening’s privilege of their lively conversation, sexy flirting, eye-candy appearance, and optional sexual services.
After marriage, Athenian wives stayed home. Whether newlywed or nearly dead, married women never ever got taken out to dinner. (The only exceptions? Women from poorer families who had to work to keep bread and feta on the table.) From time to time, husbands would spend evenings at home, usually with the goal of impregnating the little woman.
Given these polarized circumstances, love, affection, and even communication between married couples was probably in short supply.
Unlike today’s couples, Aspasia couldn’t effectively argue that she and Pericles should go live in her home city, where they could be married. He was Athenian and an important man in his city. Greeks were rooted to their homes, their birthplaces. (They still are, for that matter.)
Aspasia and Pericles went on to have a son together and probably did long to wed. Ironically, however, because of a law Pericles himself had passed, stipulating that Athenians could only wed other Athenians, he had legislated away that possibility! Aspasia never complained (that we know of) about the hardships of a relationship without formal recognition or rights, or those of Pericles Junior, who was born as his dad neared fifty years of age.
Pericles had two boys from a former marriage, both of whom he saw die in the Great Plague of 430 B.C. After he was no longer leader of Athens, an anguished Pericles did some hard groveling to persuade Athenians to amend the citizenship law so that his son with Aspasia could become a citizen and legitimate heir.
Tragically, in the autumn of 429 B.C. Pericles too was stricken—the victim of the second wave of the Great Plague. (Today’s scientists now think it was an epidemic of typhoid fever or, alternatively, of the ebola virus.) Aspasia survived him but did not witness two final tragedies: the death of her son Pericles, who’d become an Athenian general; and the suicide of Socrates, Aspasia’s firm friend and supporter.
Berenice & Titus:
Jewish princess almost makes empress
A romantic at heart, gorgeous and zaftig Berenice didn’t plan on being married thrice and widowed twice. She didn’t plan on committing incest, either. Things just worked out that way.
Berenice belonged to the elite Herodian clan, a dynasty that had ruled the Jews for over a century. Over time, many of the Herodians had lived in the imperial household in Rome and had gotten educated with the emperor’s kids, but Berenice did not get that luxury. Chased by creditors, her hapless dad, Agrippa, shuttled the family between Palestine, Syria, and Judaea province until A.D. 37, when their luck suddenly changed.
A new Roman emperor, Caligula, occupied the imperial chair. Being a longtime pal of her dad’s, he appointed Agrippa to govern chunks of the province of Judaea. On the heels of that announcement, she had a marriage offer from the richest Jewish family in Alexandria, Egypt. Since Berenice hadn’t hit puberty yet, the wedding was scheduled for A.D. 41, when she would turn thirteen.
That same year, Caligula was assassinated and Claudius became the Roman emperor. This continued Berenice’s streak of luck, since Claudius was another one of Dad’s friends, made during his Roman childhood. Berenice was only halfway through her teens when her first spouse died. The family wasted no time in arranging another marriage, this go-round with her own uncle Herod. No spring chicken, Herod, but he did his best, giving Berenice two sons. Unfortunately, the strain of having toddlers and a teenage wife-niece put him in the grave four years later.
Now a woman, Berenice eagerly moved in with her brother Agrippa II, a year older than she. Before long, ugly rumors of incest surfaced, but Berenice took it in stride, having already committed incest with husband number two. Eventually Berenice asked her brother to find her a decent new mate. Somebody with a little spark and longevity would be grand, she thought.
He came up with Polemo, the king of Cilicia (in modern-day Turkey), who seemed to enjoy her sexy dowry more than he did her. Into divorce court she went, and back to cohabit with her brother, gossipers be damned.
With her wealth, intelligence, and gift for diplomacy, Berenice gradually found herself doing meaningful work as an active philanthropist and an ad hoc arbitrator between Jewish and Roman factions. Eventually she was looked at as an equal partner in co-rule with her brother Agrippa. From time to time, she fretted about her personal life; she wasn’t getting any younger. But she, like all Jews, had bigger issues to worry about. For some time, the Romans had discriminated against the Jews, favoring Greek populations in the Holy Land.
Things got uglier when a Roman-appointed governor stole from the temple in Jerusalem. The Romans crucified the leaders of the ensuing riot. Although Berenice and her brother pleaded with the Roman authorities on behalf of the Jewish population, their efforts went unheeded. As the situation grew more intense, the Jewish insurgents turned against the Herodian families and burned down their palaces, citing their close ties with the Roman imperial families. Berenice kept trying to negotiate on behalf of the Jews but was nearly killed in one of the skirmishes roiling throughout the city.
By A.D. 66, a rebellion was in full swing; the Romans responded harshly, sending General Vespasian and later his son Titus, along with 60,000 seasoned soldiers, to crush it. After three years of merciless siege, the Romans retook Jerusalem. And Rome (along with the Jews) had a new emperor: Vespasian himself.
Bernenice’s entire family had fled north to the Galilee. The war came to an end at a heinous cost: the holy city of Jerusalem sacked, countless dead, and nearly 100,000 Jews taken as pris
oners of war.
Amid the carnage, somehow Berenice met the man she’d been longing for. It was the emperor’s son Titus, eleven years her junior, who would later be called “the delight and darling of the human race,” a genial man gifted with extraordinary personal empathy. Two nations at odds and different religions separated them, but it did not seem to matter. They fell deeply in love. As deft with languages as he was keen in military matters, Titus wrote poetic verse, played the harp, and sang to her.
They had a mere year or two together in Judaea before he was called back to Rome to assist his father Vespasian in the monumental task of governing the empire.
Berenice and Titus did not see each other for four years. In A.D. 75, she and her brother Agrippa II came to Rome. Very soon she was living openly and lavishly with Titus in the palace. Their love was still ardent, but their lives were not without unpleasantness.
People had long memories. Romans saw her as “Little Cleopatra,” an echo of the foreign queen who’d tried to co-opt the empire and its ruler. The public gossiped and fumed over her “barbaric” jewels, particularly a huge diamond she often wore. Titus and Berenice were publicly denounced by outspoken philosophers, and when Titus punished those who trash-talked his love, it made the situation worse. Finally, Emperor Vespasian, who’d always liked Berenice, regretfully ordered Titus to dump her.
In terms of influence and political pull, Berenice of the Herodians was at her most powerful but Roman public opinion trumped true love. As the historian Suetonius said in his biography of Titus, “He sent her away though he was unwilling and so was she.”
She’d had just two more years with her lovely prince. But leave she did, with dignity. When Vespasian died in June of A.D. 79, however, she hurried back to Rome. A fresh start! Now her lover would put things right, convince the world that they belonged together. He didn’t. He sent her away again, mumbling platitudes about “timing” and “public perceptions.”
Time, fate, and circumstance were no longer their allies. Two months after her arrival in Rome, Mount Vesuvius erupted, creating a national disaster that Titus had to handle immediately. On the heels of it, a massive fire hit Rome, followed by a deadly wave of plague. Titus had his hands full. He did all he could to comfort and console his people.
Rome’s Colosseum, originally known as the Flavian Amphitheatre, played a part in the ill-fated romance between Titus and Berenice.
It wasn’t enough—so he gave them entertainment. The Flavian Amphitheatre (known to us as the Colosseum), begun by Titus’s dad and dedicated to him, had finally reached completion in A.D. 80. To cheer the battered spirits of the Romans, Emperor Titus immediately held one hundred days of games in the arena, the most elaborate and costly bloodfest ever witnessed.
Berenice tried to comfort herself about the realities of rule that her lover faced. He would send for her later, when things got back to normal. Normal never arrived, however. On a September day in the year 81, Titus died suddenly of a fever. He was forty-two. His grieving lover Berenice, now fifty-three, disappeared from public notice, the rest of her life unremarked to this day.
Hadrian & Antinoos:
Turned his lover into a god
No one really expected a Roman emperor to behave himself when it came to his relationships; marriage was often a dynastic affair, political and calculated. Still, the most egregious example of a one-sided commitment may have been the loveless yet highly public marathon marriage between Emperor Hadrian and his empress, Sabina.
Starting with the wedding night, relations between Sabina and Hadrian went from tepid to ice-cold. All of thirteen or fourteen at the altar, Sabina may have been a sweet kid; over time, loneliness and lovelessness turned her arid and sour.
The couple never had children. Sabina was rumored to have outwitted pregnancy through abstinence and/or anal intercourse. In any event, she didn’t face overwhelming male demands in the bedroom, since throughout their marriage Hadrian played the field, and on both teams. His affairs with married women were so plentiful that he was publicly accused of “addiction” to them.
Many Roman emperors collected boy-toys by the dozen, and Hadrian was no exception. Spiritually and culturally, he considered himself more Greek than Roman, so the classical Athenian relationsip of erastes-eromenos, mature men hooking up with teens, suited him beautifully.
But on a goodwill trip to Bithynia in Asia Minor, Hadrian’s wife Sabina was confronted with the last straw. Hadrian met a curly-headed young teen with deepset eyes, his demeanor by turns shy and soulful. The emperor, now pushing fifty, was smitten. From that moment on, Antinoos never left Hadrian’s side.
While Hadrian dutifully took care of state business, built splendid and lasting structures (Hadrian’s Wall and the Pantheon makeover, for instance), carried out wars, and extricated Rome from other conflicts, he spent more than half of his twenty-one-year reign getting to know his subjects and his empire, making years-long trips from Germany to North Africa, from Greece to the British Isles. Empress Sabina was obliged to accompany him.
They weren’t alone by any means. His retinue numbered over a thousand. Around A.D. 128, Hadrian and company, including his lover Antinoos, his wife, her attendants, plus a sea of aides and hangers-on, embarked on another grand circle tour, this time headed to Asia Minor, Greece, Palestine, and Egypt.
The eloquent, intelligent face of Emperor Hadrian, one of Rome’s better rulers.
As they traveled, the emperor’s couriers kept him apprised of political news, army movements, and disasters. Like other superstitious men in high places, Hadrian also got daily updates on portents, omens, scary dreams, and astrological news. An astrology adept, Hadrian obsessively checked his stars. He even forecast the date of his own death; and correctly.
In the year A.D. 130, while they were in Alexandria, Egypt, Hadrian felt a growing unease. Did some new catastrophe loom in his immediate future? In the fall, he looked up a magician named Pancrates, who demonstrated a spell involving mice, beetles, frankincense, myrrh, and dung that was guaranteed to kill a man in seven hours. After the spellbinding, a man showed up and promptly expired on the seventh hour. That was “proof” enough for Hadrian to pay a huge fee for Pancrates’ services.
Intimations of tragedy continued to plague Hadrian’s mind. One balmy October evening, as everyone excitedly discussed the field trip that Hadrian, Sabina, and their high-status guests were to take the next day, Antinoos disappeared. A frantic search ensued on land and in the Nile, but the boy was never seen again. The cruel mystery of his disappearance drove Hadrian wild with sorrow. Antinoos would have been eighteen years old.
Within weeks, Emperor Hadrian made Antinoos into a god. Earlier emperors and empresses had been deified, but they were imperials. Deifying a commoner, a non-Roman, a catamite? Appalling bad taste to honor a sexual companion. Sacrilegious, perhaps. Ignoring the disapproval and snide remarks of Romans high and low, Hadrian commissioned the building of temples around the Mediterranean Sea, and ordered that worship of Antinoos commence empirewide. Immediately.
To give people something concrete to worship, Hadrian set in motion the last new era of Greek sculpture, commissioning what was likely over a thousand statues and busts of his young lover. Hundreds still remain on display at museums worldwide; as Elizabeth Speller, author of Following Hadrian, describes them: “A new face appeared, and it was one of manly, though submissive beauty … a well-proportioned body, with downcast eyes and thick, curly hair nestling at the nape of the neck.”
Hadrian’s grief and grandiosity had no bounds. On the east banks of the Nile, at the spot where his lover had vanished, he founded a city called Antinoopolis. No expense was spared to make it splendid and luxurious. Before the city even rose on the site, the emperor honored Antinoos with a Great Games competition and festival.
A huge, hieroglyph-covered obelisk now reposing on the Pincian Hill in Rome may be a memento of those first games. On it, an inscription more lengthy than memorable, written by Hadrian, includ
ed these phrases: “The god Osiris-Antinoos, the justified—he grew into a youth with a beautiful countenance and magnificently adorned eyes … whose heart is in very great jubilation, since he had recognized his own form after being raised again to life and seen his father, God of the Rising Sun … The god whose place this is, he makes a sports arena in his place in Egypt, which is named after him, for the strong ones [athletes] that are in this land, and for the rowing teams and the runners of the whole land and for all men who belong to the place of the sacred writing where Thoth is present. They receive the prizes awarded and crowns, while they are repaid with all sorts of good things.”
Antinoos, the sultry young nobody that Hadrian desperately loved and lost. His unexplained vanishing act led to the final flowering of imperial art.
Despite the initial scorn and shock at Antinoos’s deification, he came to be enthusiastically worshipped alone, or in conjunction with other gods from Dionysus to Osiris, for centuries around the empire but especially in the eastern provinces and the boy’s native Bithynia, today the northwest coast of Turkey.
The lovelorn emperor never got over his loss; and no one ever discovered why or how the boy vanished. The body was never recovered, either.
Was his death foul play? An accident? Suicide? Murder by a jealous rival? Or, as some have theorized, was it Antinoos’s gift, a deliberate and loving sacrifice of a life to preserve the safety of the one who ruled? That question remains unanswered, but it’s one of history’s most heart-rending, fascinating mysteries.
And Sabina? Marital longevity won her what love could not. When she died in A.D. 137, her husband Hadrian had her deified as well. The marvelous bas-relief of her apotheosis still holds pride of place in Rome’s Palazzo dei Conservatori museum.