A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Aspasia
ASPASIA,
Of Miletus, and daughter of Axiochus, lived principally at Athens. She gained the affections of Pericles, who, according to Plutarch divorced his first wife, with her own consent, in order to marry Aspasia. We are told little of her beauty, but much of her mental powers and cultivation. In eloquence, she surpassed all her contemporaries. She was the friend, and, according to Plato, the instructress of Socrates, who gives her the high praise of "having made many good orators, and one eminent over all the Greeks, Pericles, the son of Xanthippus." On this and similar authority we learn, that Pericles was indebted to Aspasia for much of his high mental cultivation. The Athenians used often to bring their wives to hear her converse, notwithstanding what was said of her immoral life. She is accused of having excited, from motives of personal resentment, the war of Peloponnesus; yet, calamitous as that conflict proved to Greece, Aspasia inflicted on the country still more incurable evils. Her example and instructions formed a school at Athens, by which her dangerous profession was reduced to a system.
Aspasia, on occasion of the check of the Athenian army, came herself into the assembly of the people, and pronounced an oration, inciting them to rally and redeem their cause; her speech was followed to be far more eloquent than those of Gorgias, and other famous orators who spoke on the same conjuncture.
Hermippus, a comic poet, prosecuted Aspasia for impiety, which seems to have consisted in disputing the existence of their imaginary gods, and introducing new opinions about celestial appearances. But she was acquitted, though contrary to the law, by means of Pericles, who is said to have shed tears in his application for mercy in her behalf.
It should not be omitted that some modern writers have maintained opinions on the life of Aspasia very different from those popularly entertained. They say, the woman whom Socrates respected, the woman who for years was the bosom counsellor of so eminent a man as Pericles, never could have been devoid of personal purity; vice palls; vice may please by charms of exterior, but never could keep up mental enthusiasm such as Aspasia certainly excited and retained with Pericles. They suggest that aspersions were thrown upon her character by Aristophanes, to wound Pericles through her bosom but that the friend, the adviser, the sympathize companion of the man who has been called Princeps Gracia, was not a courtezan.
Pericles died at the age of seventy, B. C. 429; and after this we hear nothing of Aspasia, excepting that she transferred her affections to Lysicles, a grazier, who, in consequence of her influence, became, for a time, one of the leading men in Athens.