The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life

by Bettany Hughes

  Today Miletus is plagued by gnats. Lying low in marshy mudflats, the ruins here can, at times, be immersed neck-deep in water. You may have to hitch-hike your way in and out of the ancient site, as the tourist buses are few and far between. But even so, the remaining stones chronicle a distant, impressive culture.

  There has always been something a little special about Miletus. Inevitable perhaps. Stretching west from the Bati Mentes mountains, her foothills today bristle with olive trees, and the unfeasibly fertile Maeander valley is soft with fields of cotton. This was a valuable natural exit point westwards for the Persian Empire (which in the early fifth century spread from north of the Hindu Kush to southern Arabia), and a gentle segue east for Ionian Greeks. Sitting as it does on a cultural crossroads, Miletus nurtured an unlikely number of original thinkers: Thales, who identified water as a building block of all life; Hippodamus, the architect who laid out the town of Piraeus; Anaximander, who voiced a notion of ecosystem and ecology – that the physical world is a finely balanced game between the weak and the strong and who set down the first map in the sixth century BC.3 Many of those men who provided new ideas for Athens had started life in Miletus. And somehow, whether as a courtesan or the daughter of a noble, the young girl Aspasia has managed to get herself an education in this enlightening coastal city.

  Triple-trouble in Athenian eyes, because Aspasia was not only from the East, not only educated, but was, of course, a female of the species. Women, in the fifth century BC, were generally objects of fear and revulsion. Aspasia would have been considered a ‘leaky’ being, someone who oozed pollution from her genitalia, her mouth, even her eyes. Hippocrates (the Greek medical expert from Cos whose lifespan almost exactly matches Socrates’ own) explains that menstrual blood accumulates in the female body because this sex is organically porous. One of the reasons such a sump-residue gathers is because of women’s ‘sedentary’ lifestyle.4 At the moment of menstruation, women were thought to be infectious in all kinds of ways.

  Aristotle elaborates. He explains that because the release of menstrual blood also impacts on the blood vessels in a woman’s eyes, at her time of the month a glance from a female can infect the air in front of her – Aristotle’s proof: this glance turns the surface of a mirror dark. He tells us that, whereas men are hot and dry, women are cold and clammy. Female bodies are a distasteful, deformed version of a man’s. Their high-pitched voices are indicative of their ‘unhinged’ nature, while a man’s vocal cords are, quite properly, lassoed to their testicles.5 It is little surprise that Sophocles has one of his characters sniff, ‘The best ornament of a woman is silence.’6 We know this because years later Aristotle avidly quotes the line.

  This was a notion codified throughout Athenian culture. In 594 BC the reformer and law-giver Solon arranged (allegedly) that any woman walking the streets should be thought of as a prostitute.7 Fathers could enslave children only when they were female and ‘damaged goods’ (girls who had lost their virginity), in which case they could be legally sold off as prostitutes. Respectable women of this period were expected to be seen and not to be heard.8 Xenophon promotes the view in his book Household Management: ‘So it is seemly for a woman to remain at home and not be out of doors; but for a man to stay inside, instead of devoting himself to outdoor pursuits, is disgraceful.’9 And again that women should ‘see and hear as little as possible, and ask the fewest possible questions’.10 Censure barbed the Athenian argot: ‘… It is not proper for girls to weave through the crowd’.11 Young women in particular were not to be trusted. The orator Hyperides points out that ‘a woman who leaves the house ought to be at the stage in life where people who meet her ask not whose wife she is, but whose mother.’12 The truly good Athenian woman even trembled in the presence of her male relatives: ‘He came there at night in a drunken state, broke down the doors, and entered the women’s rooms: within were my sister and my nieces, whose lives have been so well-ordered that they are ashamed to be seen even by their kinsmen.’13

  So most Athenian women either were silent – or have since been silenced by their absence from the written record. Even if they were allowed to speak out in their day (unlikely), they have left us no account and so have escaped history. They are faceless; voiceless, textless, anonymous.

  Not so Aspasia. She is one of the few women who have been written in to the story of Golden Age Athens.

  Aspasia turns up in Greek comedies and orators’ speeches, in Roman moral tales and Victorian operettas. In antiquity she is described as that ‘dog-eyed concubine’ (pallaken kynopida),14 a woman-for-sale (porne).15 She rarely features as anything less than lubricious, a voracious flirt. There’s much double entendre; she will ‘know’ both young and old men in Athens. She needs little introduction, other than that ‘we all know what she is like’. There is nothing at all to tell us that Aspasia was in fact debauched, but debauched she became. By the time that Clearchus of Soli was writing, 150 years after her birth, this young woman inhabits a disgusting, murky place. In his Erotika, Aspasia is listed alongside the man who tries to have sex with a statue, but has to make do with a slab of meat or an animal in season.16

  Of course, we do not know that any of these wet-lipped accounts are true; in fact, the only intimidating thing we know about Aspasia for certain is that she was energetic, and clever.17

  In the salons that Pericles sponsored, Aspasia was an attractive anomaly.

  But before she ends up riffing with Socrates, before she shares dinner and a bed with the great statesman-general Pericles and, in the minds of the Athenians, tempts him to dark deeds, we need to take a step back. First Aspasia must make her mark in ‘violet-crowned’ Athens.

  She arrives at the polyglot port of Piraeus in around 450 BC, perhaps in the 440s, apparently fatherless and on her own.18 Aspasia is a representative of the influx of ‘alien’ population so disapproved of by a number of Athenians, as voiced by the conservative pamphleteer Isocrates: ‘They filled the public tombs with citizens, and the public registers with aliens.’ Miletus, after decades of Persian and then Athenian dominance, had tired of paying tribute to Athens and revolted, only to be retaken in 452 BC. These were difficult times for the city. Originally allies, then enemies, then subjects of Athens, the Greek inhabitants of Miletus had a somewhat schizophrenic relationship with Athena’s city. There were both blood-ties and blood-feuds. By marriage, Aspasia was almost certainly related to Socrates’ gaudy young companion Alcibiades.19 So she had limped back across the Aegean, hoping to start a new life amongst one-time friends.

  Yet Aspasia’s chances of self-advancement were limited. The general Pericles, remember, had passed a law in 451 BC restricting entry to the democratic club. Now only the children of Athenian citizen fathers and mothers could themselves become citizens.20 If Aspasia settled in the city, if she bore children, she was destined to be the mother only of a sub-class of nothoi – bastards.21 The Academy and the Lyceum would be too good for her offspring; their only place of exercise would be the Kynosarges, the ‘White Bitch’ gym.

  Despite her disadvantages, like a handful of other determined women at this time, Aspasia does seem to have been able to escape the tedious grind of weaving or sexual servicing, or both, that was the fate of most foreign females in Athens.22 Metics such as she were not tenderly treated by the law, but from the 450s onwards an increasingly institutionalised option of pallakia – concubinage – emerged, where a woman could enjoy not the protection a wife commanded, but some kind of formal (contractual even) relationship with relatively high-born male citizens. By all accounts, malign and benign, Aspasia kept her wits about her. This was an opening that the young refugee seems to have quickly exploited. Although the bawdy renditions of her life suggest that much of what we know of Aspasia was made up, the fact that she attracts so much attention suggests there must have been something special about this girl from the East. Perhaps it was the Lydian rose-oil she used on her skin, the speed of her retorts, the intimate knowledge of new ideas she brought with
her from Anatolia’s shores. Because within a few years of arriving at Athens we find Aspasia – as a highly respected concubine-cum-companion – sitting at the very highest table, in Pericles’ household.

  There were plenty of ménages à trois in classical Athens. But Pericles’ wife, whom he married in about 463 BC and who was the mother of his two sons, had been disposed of: divorced five or six years before Aspasia arrived. In Athens at this time divorce was relatively simple – effected by mutual consent or on the initiation of a third party. We don’t know exactly how or when, but by 444 BC Aspasia had moved into Pericles’ household. Pericles seems to have cared not a jot for the dynastic hurdle he had put in his own path. His focused sexual energy obliterated it. Aspasia became his consort, his intellectual sparring partner, his lover. For the last fifteen years of his life, until his death in 429 BC, Pericles was elected as ‘chief democrat’ every year – and Aspasia was with him at every turn. Contemporary sources recounted disapprovingly that the two would kiss in public every morning: they were savaged by comic playwrights, and no doubt slandered in the Agora:

  Stasis and elderborn Time,

  mating with one another

  birthed a very great tyrant

  whom the gods call ‘head-gatherer’.

  Shameless Lust bears him Hera-Aspasia,

  a dog-eyed concubine.23

  But despite the tongue-wagging through the streets of Athens, the General seems to have stuck by his unorthodox consort. Almost certainly Aspasia was with him to his death. How did she do it? How, in a city crammed with foreign, available women, with exotic beauties, did she manoeuvre herself to be the General’s choice? How did she become one of those lucky ones who laced gold earrings through their ears, or wound around her neck ocean-fat pearls and cornelians the size of kidney-beans. (The democratic Athenians were not fond of ostentatious displays of wealth in public – jewellery was often worn in the privacy of your own home – but the scattering of fine golden and silver adornments dropped by chance and now reappearing up in digs across the city is telling.) And more than that, how did Aspasia manage to influence Athens’ greatest general, to share with him in the ‘brains-trust’ evenings that he sponsored at home?

  Although some cry ‘There is no direct evidence’ for all of this, for Aspasia’s active participation in the intellectual life of Athens (other than her confident appearance with Socrates in literature in Plato’s Dialogues),24 in male-dominated European societies to date there has never yet been one that did not sponsor talented, charismatic, intelligent women in private salons. In the courts of the Goths, the Caliphs, the Byzantines, the Carolingians, the Medici, the Rus, the Ottomans – they are always there. Aristotle remarks, with the sneer you expect to hear in his voice when it comes to women, ‘Everyone honours the wise … [T]he Mytilenaeans [honour] Sappho, though she was a woman.’25 Aspasia might have been a trophy, a performing monkey even, but it is more likely than not that she was there, not just in Pericles’ bed, but articulate and at his side.26

  So now, in around 440 BC, picture the scene. In sharp-witted Pericles’ halls there is a new perfume. Hetairas (high-class, often educated female consorts) in saffron-dyed, almost see-through drapes, some with faces whitened with white-lead and then rouged, cross in doorways. Aspasia, now Pericles’ common-law wife, joins her husband as host. She is still a young woman, he is in his mid-fifties. Most Athenian wives are expected to absent themselves when male guests appear. If on occasion a wife is unfortunate enough to open a door when a man arrives unannounced she can, quite properly, be branded a scarlet woman, a tart.27 But Aspasia’s degraded, ‘foreign’ status has become her cloak of invisibility. She can go places, do things that citizen Athenian Greek women would never experience; she can say things that they would never be able to say.28

  Not only does it seem that Aspasia has a voice, but we are given to understand that she speaks with the most exciting men of the day: Anaxagoras, Damon, Alcibiades and Socrates. She brings a new slant to the men’s proceedings. When Socrates (via Plato in the Republic)29 suggests that women are capable of virtue, it is perhaps Aspasia’s example that he holds to the fore. He also quotes Pericles’ consort on the topic of matchmakers and reliability, the value of telling the truth.30

  The good matchmaker is an expert at joining people together – by giving true reports of their good qualities, but refusing to sing their praises falsely.31

  While many of the key writers of the day – Xenophon, Aristotle, Hippocrates – scarcely acknowledged the existence of women, and if they did, mentioned them only in a suspicious or negative light, Socrates (if we can take some of Plato’s scenarios at face value) seems to have been genuinely open to the possibility that women just might have something interesting to say. Plato’s Aspasia, for instance, emphasises the emotional nature, the erotic nature of politics.32 However much Plato employs Aspasia as a handy construct to get across his own message, read between the lines and it seems apparent that Socrates was indeed fascinated by her and her emotional view of the world. Aspasia arrived in Athens living off her wits. When she had nothing, she had to utilise charis – charm, an ability to click with those around her. Given what we know of Socrates’ enquiring mind, his interest in Aspasia is in character. Offered a fresh furrow, a new (female) perspective on things, a different kind of life experience, he is more than happy to plough.

  There’s nothing like investigation. I will introduce Aspasia to you, and she will explain the whole matter [of good wives] to you with more knowledge than I possess.33

  Plato’s Socrates goes further, ironically citing Aspasia as his teacher in rhetoric.34 They were, it seems, close – the philosopher’s intellectual intimacy with this ‘trumped-up whore’35 was one reason his fellow citizens turned against him. Of her he said, ‘I have an excellent mistress in the art of rhetoric – she who has made so many good speakers, and one who was the best among all the Hellenes, Pericles, the son of Xanthippus …’36 In one text Socrates credits Aspasia with composing Pericles’ funeral speech,37 and some modern historians of the ancient world still consider her to be the ‘power behind Pericles’ throne’.38

  Socrates described Aspasia as possessing a perfect mind, as being the finest of politicians – and yet she has consistently been downgraded in the story of fifth-century Athens. At best she is described as Pericles’ manipulative sidekick and the mistress of ‘a house of procurement’. Plato, too, can be less than flattering. He talks of Aspasia synkollosa, ‘gluing together’ words. As you might expect, perhaps because she was unusually gabby, perhaps because of prejudice and blackballing, Aspasia is first written into the historical record not as a feisty and inspirational young woman, but as a troublemaker.

  Aspasia’s part in the revolt of Samos

  Aspasia’s nemesis was the island of Samos. Samos nestles up to the coastline of Anatolia – from the coast road in Asia it feels within spitting distance; a dream island you want to reach out to, to make real. Recent sub-marine excavations in the area have revealed how busy this stretch of the coastline was in Socrates’ day. In 2002 sponge-divers uncovered the wreck of a local trading vessel, packed with retsina and amphoras – the cargo is a reminder of the natural wealth of the region.39 The blind marble ‘eyes’ of the boat, found on the seabed, would have stared out over the deeply wooded green hills of western Asia Minor and fruit hanging fat on the branches.

  Destined by geography to be a footfall between Asia and Europe, Samos has always fiercely guarded its independence. Since the sixth century BC its main city had been ringed with a stone curtain wall – a protection that reached up to 5.2 metres in some places. But now that Athens was mother-henning it across the eastern Mediterranean, the Samians found they were being commanded to sign up to a democratic charter. The ruling oligarchs wanted none of it. And thus the island of Samos, 200 miles due east of Athens, was, between 440 and 439 BC, brutally suppressed for ‘anti-democratic’ activity.

  Samos was a member of the Delian League, but entirely aut
onomous; she maintained her own fleet, she paid no tribute, she kept Athens at arm’s length. And in 440 the island chose to bully the rich settlement of Miletus, Aspasia’s home-town, a morning’s row to the south. The acrid dispute between Samos and Miletus in fact concerned the city of Priene. Samos laid claim to Priene – a handily placed, pliable little settlement traditionally subject to its loftier neighbours, the Milesians, across a wide bay on the Anatolian western coast.

  The Milesians could not defend themselves, but they did pay tribute to Athens and so, the argument went, Athens should now provide them with protection. Wiped clean by the Persians just fifty years before, then watching as Athenians efficiently picked off their territories and allies, the Milesians were in no state to fight their own battles. Early in 440 BC a delegation of desperate Milesian diplomats arrived at the Athenian Assembly, begging Athens for help. Pericles responded swiftly and decisively – fifty Athenian triremes were sent to teach the Samians a lesson.

  It is a mark of Athens’ confidence and sense of superiority in the eastern Mediterranean that Athenians felt justified when it came to the ‘Samos Question’ in fielding an indisputably interventionist foreign policy.40 But it would mark the beginning of a lifetime of trouble. Pericles was proving that Athens could put her money where her mouth was; yet the General’s critics didn’t like the idea of making an enemy of a powerful entity such as Samos. And they chose to lash out, not at Pericles himself, but at his consort. The invasion of Samos, they said, had been sparked by Aspasia’s love of her home-town. It was a dirty, foreign woman who had tempted Athenians across the waters to certain death.