“If it is necessary for me indeed to speak of female virtues, to those of you who have now become widows, I shall explain the entire situation briefly. It is in your hands whether you will not fall below your nature. The greatest glory to you is to be least talked about by men, either for excellence or blame” (Thucydides 2.46.1). These words were reportedly uttered by Pericles to the widows at a public funeral honoring those killed during the first year of the Peloponnesian War. We have no idea whether Pericles actually said something like this — Thucydides often inserted speeches to make his history more dramatic — but these words express the Athenian ideal of proper behavior for a citizen’s wife: she should stay at home and limit her talents to her household. This ideal became the reality for most Athenian women, whose names and actions were not recorded and thus are lost to history.

One exception to this silence is Aspasia (as-PAY-zhuh), who was born in the Greek city of Miletus and came to Athens in about 445 B.C.E. Little is known for certain about her life — Thucydides never mentions her — but she appears to have played a role in Athenian society that was far different from that prescribed in Pericles’s speech. Because she was not an Athenian, she could not marry an Athenian citizen. Instead of marrying another non-Athenian, she caught the eye of Pericles. After he had divorced his wife, Aspasia became his mistress and bore him a son, also named Pericles. She may have been a hetaera, one of the high-status courtesans in Athens who provided men with witty conversation at dinner parties as well as sexual services. The first person to mention her status as a hetaera was the comic playwright Aristophanes. Aristophanes was an opponent of Pericles, however, and he may have simply made this up. Other authors, including Plato, do discuss Aspasia, but they focus on her ability with words and her wit (which they see as good) and her influence over Pericles (which they generally see as bad). In one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates even says that Pericles learned his rhetoric from Aspasia and that she wrote the famous funeral oration. Most scholars see this not as a statement of fact, but as an attempt by Socrates to ridicule Pericles and criticize his growing power in Athens.

Aspasia herself was accused by various Athenian authors of causing one or another of Athens’s wars because of personal vendettas or perverse sexual desires. Pericles’s death in 429 B.C.E. in the plague of Athens left Aspasia without a protector, and she disappears from the historical record shortly afterward. Ever more embellished stories about her continued to be told, however. By the time of the Roman biographer Plutarch in the first century C.E., it was said that she held public philosophical discussions, was put on trial for impiety, and became the mistress of another Athenian general after Pericles’s death.

It is almost impossible to separate the historical Aspasia from the imaginary one, but what is clear is that her status was dependent on her personal relationships with prominent men. She may well have been a gifted and intelligent speaker, but her actions were severely limited because of her status as a noncitizen in a place where citizenship was essential and even more because of her status as a woman. Thanks largely to her enemies, we do know her name, but Aspasia lacked the honored social position of the anonymous Athenian citizen women that her lover Pericles may have praised.

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