Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition

PRISONER OF HISTORY

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PRISONER OF HISTORY Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition

Madeleine M. Henry

New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1995

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bombay Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1995 by Madeleine M. Henry Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016-43 14 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Henry, Madeleine Mary. 1949Prisoner of history : Aspasia of Miletus and her biographical tradition / Madeleine M. Henry. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-508712-7 1. Aspasia. 2. Pericles, 499-429 B.C. 3. Mistresses—Greece—Athens—Biography. 4. Women in politics—Greece—Athens—Biography. 5. Greece—History— Athenian supremacy, 479-431 B.C. I. Title. DF228.A8H46 1995 938'.504'092—dc20 [B] 94-1250

98765432 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Contents

Introduction, 3 1. Aspasia in Greek History, 9 2. The Story Told by Comedy, 19 3. Aspasia and the Socratic Tradition, 29 4. The Sargasso Sea: Aspasia and the Discourse on Prostitutes in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique Periods, 57 5. Aspasia in the Postclassical West, 83 Afterword, 127 Notes, 131 Bibliography, 177 Index, 195

Acknowledgments

People and institutions have helped Aspasia and me on our journey. Iowa State University gave me a job, several research grants, and a faculty improvement leave, during which much of the work was done. Colleagues in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and in the Classical Studies and Women's Studies Programs offered moral and practical support, and friends in Classical Studies in the United States, Canada, and England sustained me. This work owes more than I can ever say to the sisterhood I have found in the Women's Classical Caucus and to Jim Ruebel's encouragement and collegiality. Special thanks to my friends Achilles Avraamides, John Cunnally, Marie Lathers, Deepa Majumdar, Frank Mariner, Suzanne Mills, Brian LeMay, David Roochnik, and Linda Rutland Gillison, to Jeff Rusten and Philip Stadter, who read the manuscript for Oxford University Press, and to OUP's copyeditor, Lisa Tippett.

PRISONER OF HISTORY

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Introduction

Aspasia of Miletus, a key figure in the intellectual history of fifthcentury Athens, is without question the most important woman of that era. Aspasia left no written works of her own, was lampooned in comedy, and was an important figure in Greek philosophical dialogue—all things she shares with Socrates, a better known and more revered icon, and whose teacher she is said to have been. Aspasia's reputation as teacher has repeatedly been connected with her sexual reputation as a courtesan and the mistress of the statesman Pericles. The historical possibilities for her life and the ebb and surge of her biographical tradition have never before been seriously and comprehensively examined; they are the subject of my study. It is time to remember Aspasia's place in the history of women and of feminist epistemology. During her own lifetime, Aspasia was a notorious woman, one of the few who apparently contradicted the statement, attributed to Pericles, that it is better for women not to be mentioned.1 She has been mentioned in comedy, philosophy, historiography, and art. She has been identified as Pericles' political advisor, as an original "liberated woman," as a philosopher, and as a prototype of the grand horizontal. I hope here to suggest ways in which ancient sources and modern interpreters have constructed her life, and how the possibilities that existed for her life have been misunderstood. Biographical anecdotes that arose in antiquity about Aspasia are wildly colorful, almost completely unverifiable, and still alive and well in the twentieth century. It is arduous but necessary to investigate that tradition from its inception during her own lifetime until the present. The 3

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continued fascination exerted by classical Athens, so near to us and yet so far from us, demands a full treatment of the bios of its most famous woman. 2 Feminist scholarship must be used together with traditional philological methods if we are to see in what ways Aspasia's bios began and has continued to grow, and in what ways it has done her wrong. In Writing a Woman's Life, Carolyn Heilbrun states that women in the West have historically been deprived of the narratives, texts, plots, or examples with which to assume power over their lives. This assertion of the political power of narrative presumes that the forms, structures, and contents of biography, autobiography, and historiography have heretofore supplied insufficient, inaccurate, defective narratives—ones that at best cannot tell the truth of women's lives and at worst create perniciously misleading and stifling narrative plots.3 Furthermore, the very formation of canonical features for biography and biographical tradition has been until recently a process engaged in for the most part by male scholars about male subjects: Aspasia's biographical tradition, although rich, diverges remarkably in its manifestations from those features traditionally considered canonical.4 The paucity of evidence, together with the problems involved in studying the lack of symmetry between men's and women's lives in classical antiquity, has tended to prevent us from considering either that women can legitimately be seen as creative participants in Western intellectual tradition or that they are the proper objects of scholarly inquiry. A standard study of Greek biography categorically, if unintentionally, denies Aspasia a biography: "An account of the life of a man from birth to death is what I call biography."5 This definition of biography merely embellishes the declaration of the great classicist Ulrich von WilamowitzMoellendorff, who declared that Aspasia's life and intellect—and questions about either—have no place in history; we have not come very far.6 The persistence of Aspasia's bios and, in fact, its expansion in the last two centuries suggest that we desperately need to understand both what Aspasia may have been and what she has come to represent. The task is formidable for several reasons. First, the period during which Aspasia lived is one for which there is much conjecture and little good contemporary evidence. At times, it seems that the amount of scholarship produced on a given historical question is inversely proportional to the amount and quality of evidence available. Those who study the lives and biographical traditions of men such as Pericles, Themistocles, or Plato, and of Aspasia face like obstacles, for in each instance it

Introduction

5

is necessary to sift, order, and evaluate evidence of a bewildering quantity, quality, kind, and date (not to mention datability). In order to establish the life events for the greatest figures of classical Athenian history within even a tentative chronology, historians leap perilously among the ice floes of contemporary inscriptions, forward to Plutarch and back to fourth-century revisionist historiographers, only to advance again to papyrus fragments and Byzantine lexica. Over this set of problems lies the "problem" of Aspasia's gender. The male writers of Greco-Roman antiquity perceived, identified, evaluated, and described their female and male subjects very differently. The first consequence of this fact is that far less information has been recorded about women relative to the amount we have about men. Male historians generally did not mention women at all. For example, warfare, a favorite topic of historiographers, affected women in grave ways, but its effect on them is recorded only very indirectly in any sources.7 Even a woman warrior such as Artemisia, who by male standards played an important role in the Persian Wars, is described differently by Herodotus than are Persian men.8 To discern and analyze the gross and fine asymmetries between women's and men's material lives and between their presumed moral and intellectual capacities—and the representation of these in discourse across time and space—is an essential part of feminist critical practice and must supplement traditional philological methods. To classify and evaluate the numerous biographical anecdotes related of Aspasia in exactly the same manner as has been done, for example, for those of Plato, would be a mistake even if it were possible. Because women and men led asymmetrical lives in fifth-century Athens, evidence itself is not "the same" evidence, but different inasmuch as it is informed by a differently gendered relationship for the female object of the male writer's scrutiny. Because of Aspasia's longstanding reputation as teacher, companion to Pericles, and member of an intellectual elite, it has been customary to place her, and then leave her, among other members, all men, of that alleged coterie—Anaxagoras, Phidias, and the scientists and sophists.9 But it is also necessary in the most fundamental sense to consider the ways in which her biographical tradition portrays her as a woman. For example, Aspasia and Pericles are often criticized in comedy and sometimes are mentioned together; it would be erroneous in the extreme, however, to imagine that each is criticized for analogous reasons. It is imperative rather to compare her with other members of the gender class

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"woman" and weigh her representation as a concubine, prostitute, and mother in Old Comedy against the representation of other such women in that genre. This having been done, Aspasia can be seen to participate in a discourse in which men do not. Note that Old Comedy does not celebrate any women thinkers, and that the charge of effeminacy, with strong negative connotations, is leveled against poets. Autonomous "femaleness" and femininity are not revered in Old Comedy. It is likewise perilous to situate Aspasia with Socrates just by denning each as a radical outsider teacher. Like Socrates, Aspasia was criticized in comedy, enjoyed a reputation as a sophistic philosopher, and was an important figure in fourth-century philosophical dialogue. Yet history has largely considered only Plato and other men to be philosophers; women philosophers are footnotes, freaks, groupies, and martyrs—anything and everything but philosophers. It is necessary to explore Aspasia's singular place in the Socratic dialogues and to ask why and with what effect Plato makes Aspasia the only woman outside of Diotima who speaks in any of his works.10 To free Aspasia from the prison of history, we must try to shed any prior notions about what a biography—the writing of a life, the writing of a woman's life—is or must be. First, I suggest the range of historical possibilities for Aspasia's life; these differ substantially from the descriptions and references found in Attic comedy, the only sources contemporary with that life. After identifying the characteristics of her biographical tradition in its first centuries, before Plutarch distilled it into the form that would influence its major reappearances after the end of Greco-Roman antiquity, I trace the evolution of her bios from late antiquity to the present. Next to Sappho's and Cleopatra's, Aspasia's is the longest and richest female biographical tradition to come down to us from the Greco-Roman past. That past has had much to do with current constructions of gender roles and the ways in which women participate, or do not, in intellectual discourse in the West. It is entirely possible that the sexualization of Aspasia's intellect, a key facet of her bios, has negatively affected the development of feminist consciousness. The process of retrieving and reinterpreting the varied aspects of her biographical tradition may help us retrieve earlier moments in the development of feminist consciousness. Perhaps no one will be entirely sympathetic to my treatment of this subject; any topic that is manifested over such a long expanse of time

Introduction

1

and moves among such disparate texts is bound to be unevenly developed by its first investigator. I hope that the reader's dissatisfaction will be born of the recognition that Aspasia and her bios are important and worth much further study. I consider it a positive consequence to have provoked such dissatisfaction.

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1 Aspasia in Greek History

Our ignorance of Aspasia's life course is emblematic of our ignorance of the lives of all women in fifth-century Hellas. This only seems so shocking and our curiosity so keenly and urgently justified because Aspasia's reputation has thrown her into high relief. In fact, however, we are even more ignorant of other women—nameless persons whose lives may have been quite similar to hers. To ask questions about Aspasia's life is to ask questions about half of humanity. One may assume that her early life began typically, that is to say, inauspiciously, and that we must seek its broadest outlines not in the atypical but in the normative bounds. It would be necessary to do this even should it ever become demonstrable that every scurrilous anecdote about Aspasia had a factual basis. We must learn to forget Aspasia's reputation. It is treacherous but obligatory to begin with the most concentrated and connected account of Aspasia's life, that found in chapters 24 and 32 of Plutarch's Life of Pericles. Feminist historians have problematized the authority of male biographers, and classicists painstakingly have dissected out the layers of sources in this imperial author's discussion of Pericles and his associates nearly seven hundred years after the fact. Within Plutarch's brief account, we find scraps of information that may have originated during Aspasia's own lifetime. According to Plutarch, Aspasia came from Miletus, a wealthy city on the coast of Asia Minor, and her father's name was Axiochus.' She had a union with Pericles some time after his divorce from his wife, and she is usually assumed to have given birth to the bastard, Pericles junior. Aspasia is also said to have "married" the Athenian politician Lysides 9

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and to have borne him a son.2 Fifth-century comedy calls her both a concubine and a whore; Plutarch reports that she modeled herself on Thargelia, the Ionian courtesan who attempted to capture the affections of the most powerful men of the day and to influence them politically, but there is no conclusive contemporary evidence. Comedy provides the only fifth-century evidence that she influenced Pericles' political policies.3 In fact, no fifth-century evidence exists for any substantial part of Aspasia's life. It is possible to map only the barest possibilities for that life: to ascertain the approximate date of her birth, her places of residence, the duration and nature of her sexual relationships, the number and birth dates of her children, and the date of her death, are all hazardous endeavors. Additionally, and most importantly, there is no good evidence for her inner or intellectual life. Against the colorful reportage may be set something less sensational, something more documentary. An early fourth-century B.C. Attic gravestone bears the names of persons who were probably Aspasia's collateral descendants. As Oswyn Murray said of ancient historians, "When we do come across evidence, we refuse to believe it, or deny that it is history."4 The possibilities created by the names of the dead allow the hypothesis, suggested by Peter J. Bicknell, that Aspasia was born any time after 470 B.C., that she came to Athens around 450 B.C. as a fatherless refugee of marriageable or nearly marriageable age, and that she was related by her sister's marriage to the Athenian Alcibiades, grandfather of the notorious Alcibiades.5 The elder Alcibiades, ostracized from Athens in 460, may have spent his exile in Miletus. Bicknell proposes that there he met a daughter of Axiochus and by her had two sons, Axiochus (born ca. 458 B.C.) and Aspasios (born ca. 456 B.C.). Aspasia would have been the younger sister of this Milesian wife. Miletus' history was turbulent in the archaic and classical periods. By the 460s, it was a member of the Delian League, a defensive alliance wherein Athens came to assume an increasingly dominant position and to which allied cities contributed ships or tribute in return for protection against Persians and pirates. Around 457/6 there was stasis (factional unrest) in Miletus, possibly caused by oligarchic revolutionaries who did not want to pay tribute, and the city temporarily defected from the league. The oligarchs, hitherto supported by Athens, exiled their opponents to the surrounding communities of Leros and Teichioussa, and others that continued to pay tribute. In the summer of 452, Athens retook Miletus, banned the oligarchs, and reinstated their opponents. It

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is impossible to know what part Axiochus or Alcibiades played in all this, but it is tempting to conjecture that Axiochus was dead and/or his household in disarray by the time Alcibiades' ostracism expired in 450 and he returned to Athens, accompanied by his wife, children, and young sister-in-law.6 The inscription on the grave stele allows the following reconstruction: Alcibiades' son Axiochus is the grandfather of the Aischines named on the stele as the father of the Aspasios commemorated on the stone. Both Axiochoi are identified as demesmen of Skambonidai, and on the stele are mentioned not only Axiochus' wife Eukleia, but also their children, Aischines, Sostrate, and Aspasia. Because sons were commonly named for grandfathers, and because the names Axiochus and Aspasios are themselves rare—in fact, unattested in Attica before the early fourth century—Bicknell's suggestion is plausible. The association within one family of the names Axiochus and Aspasios, of which Aspasia is the feminine form, is also significant. Furthermore, the stele was found in Athens' port city, Piraeus, which was home to many families of foreign origin. Although she may now be tentatively identified as the dependent relation of an Athenian aristocrat, Aspasia was also and unquestionably a resident alien, a metic. If she did in fact arrive in Athens in 450, she would have come at a time when the status of non-Athenian women had recently been radically circumscribed. The question of her status as a metic must now be taken up. The attempt to intelligently assess what it may have meant to be an aristocratic female metic in mid-fifth-century Athens, however difficult it is to make this assessment, will in turn help identify the biases present both in contemporary comic remarks on Aspasia 's life and also in later sources. These sources, because they viewed the fifth century through the lens of subsequent historical and literary developments, have provided their own additional distortions. Recent studies of the ideology of metic status conclude that the concept of the metic was bound up with the concept of citizen; to discuss citizenship is to discuss both its content and its extent. The content and nature of Attic citizenship were not static; they were constantly evolving. Pericles' famous law on citizenship, passed in 451/450, is landmark evidence of this dynamic process. The law seems to have restricted citizenship to persons who had two Athenian parents; but the terminology of the law, the definitions of those terms, the reason(s) that brought the law into being, precisely how citizenship was defined before

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and after the passage of the law, and other restrictions on citizenship, remain somewhat unclear. Nor is it yet entirely clear how the category citizen applied to women versus men; as Cynthia Patterson has shown, major differences obtained for female citizens versus male citizens.7 Pericles' citizenship law was probably passed in response to a substantial and ' 'unnatural" increase in the population of Attica in the years following the Persian Wars of 490-479. This increase was caused by the heavy enrollment into denies and phratries of resident aliens—metics. In his treatise on the subject, David Whitehead translates the term literally as "home-changers."8 Before 490, there is ample evidence that aristocrats, for whom the most evidence survives, commonly married "out"; the illustrious Themistocles, Cleisthenes, Cimon, and Miltiades all had foreign mothers. Before Pericles' law, marriages with such women were probably considered fully valid, and any offspring were given full citizenship rights. Certainly these men's mixed parentage hardly compromised their ability to have political careers, although Pericles is said to have reproached Cimon's sons for having a foreign mother.9 A substantial metic population was assimilating into the Attic body politic by mid-century. The Athens to which Aspasia removed was a city that formerly had been hospitable to metics and in which, until shortly before she arrived, she would have had every expectation of living out a normal woman's life—that is, of marrying and of bearing her husband legitimate sons, sons with political prospects like those of Themistocles and Cimon. It is even possible that Alcibiades and his extended family returned to Athens without knowing that the law had passed; this law, which Patterson has demonstrated was not retroactive, would not have affected Alcibiades' two sons, Aspasios and Axiochus. The Peiraeus grave stele identifies Aspasios, son of Aischines, as a demesman; therefore, he was a citizen.10 Our few sources for the study of the extent and content of metic status in the mid-fifth century are almost completely silent on the subject of women metics.'' Nevertheless, it can be said with confidence that metic status was in general characterized by many liabilities: metics were subject to special taxes, they could not participate politically or own land in Attica, and they were excluded from membership in deme and phratry. And, although the citizenship law of 451/450 fell into abeyance during the Peloponnesian War, it was reenacted in 403/402, a clear indication that the division Athens made between citizen and metic was considered important and worth maintaining. A final proof of the impor-

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tance of boundary maintenance between citizenship and metic status is the fact that enslavement was the penalty for those who falsely represented themselves as citizens.12 The questions of how Pericles and Aspasia met, and how and why they had an apparently lengthy liaison, are vexing ones. If, as is generally assumed, Aspasia was the mother of the bastard, Pericles junior, the union must have commenced before 440, the latest possible birth date for the younger Pericles. If so, this child would have been a little boy in the early years after the passage of his father's citizenship law, and he would have been considered to be of marriageable age by around 420. No ancient sources confirm that Pericles junior was the son of Pericles and Aspasia; it has merely been traditional to assume (as did Demeas regarding Chrysis and the baby in Menander's comedy Samia) that she was the child's mother.13 Pericles had two legitimate sons; therefore, union with a metic woman cannot have been motivated solely by the desire for offspring. Despite the later romantic tradition that has made Pericles absolutely besotted with Aspasia, practical considerations may well have played some part in his liaison with her. It is commonly believed that Pericles made political capital off his ex-wife's remarriage, a practice not uncommon for a man of his class; it is not unreasonable to suspect that his association with Aspasia brought with it some political advantage as well.14 But the tradition does speak of Pericles' love for Aspasia, and the question of its nature haunts us still. If, as the tradition suggests, she was highly intelligent, the love of a powerful and wealthy man could have protected and nurtured her, allowing her to develop her mind in ways not open to other women who lacked either her wisdom or the materially and emotionally supportive environment provided by such a love. In discussing the importance of a supportive environment for the intellectual development of both sexes, Gerda Lerner points out that highly intelligent women have benefited from nurturant and mutually respectful relationships with spouses or partners. But, as she states, "such heterosexual, mutually supportive relationships, while they do occur, are rare in the historical record."15 Because law now deprived Aspasia of the ability to enter a fully valid Athenian marriage, one must ask what kind of union, in the legal exterior sense, she and Pericles had. Metic women seem to have been subject to kyrieia (guardianship) just as citizen women were; presumably Aspasia's kyrios (guardian) would have tried to marry her to another

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metic or possibly place her in pallakia (concubinage) with an actual citizen. Raphael Sealey has recently suggested that pallakia was being institutionalized in the fifth century, and that citizens too poor to provide a dowry as well as well-born metics placed their daughters in a quasimarital "pallakia with stipulations," a status created with "a fully explicit contract." This situation, it is hypothesized, would have guaranteed the bride some security and recourse, though her children would not have been considered legitimate. Even if this were the case, Patterson has shown that a pallake (concubine) was severely disadvantaged by convention and the law. Furthermore, because the citizenship law's negative impact would not have been felt immediately by large numbers of families after its passage, it seems rather unlikely that fathers at this point in time would have hatched an entirely formed concept and practice for pallakia with stipulations and impossible to know under what precise circumstances Aspasia came to be Pericles' sexual property, beloved or otherwise. It was, as David Schaps observed, inevitable for women to wed, and if Aspasia were a dependent relation, it would have been even more in her guardian's interest to get her off his hands at the earliest possible age.16 The tightening of requirements for citizenship was accompanied by the constriction of definitions of legitimacy and the kinds of partnerships that could produce legitimate offspring; the nature of the parents' partnership, as well as their own civic status or lack thereof, determined the status of their children. It is possible that children born of any union other than one between two citizens could be termed nothoi (bastards), though it is most likely that the term was mainly applied to the issue of unions between persons who were not equal.17 Pericles' citizenship law had as an inevitable consequence the elevation of the status of engyetic (formal dowered) marriage between two citizens and a concomitant decline in the status of concubinage, secondary and servile as this had always been. And, because the primary purpose of heterosexual cohabitation was to produce legitimate heirs, the status of nothoi must also have declined in the course of the fifth century.18 S. C. Humphreys maintains that nothoi with foreign mothers were at an even greater disadvantage than were those with two domestic parents; she offers as an example the mixed fortunes of Pericles junior's coeval, Antisthenes the Socratic, another nothos with a foreign mother. Sons of foreign women might also lack the benefits customarily available from avuncular relationships.19 Despite the disadvantages of pallakia for both the woman

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and her offspring, Aspasia's best option as a metic in Athens after 451/450 could have been to become thepallake of a well-born Athenian, and this in fact seems to have been her fate. Cratinus' definition of Aspasia as a pallake in his comedy Cheirons (discussed in the next chapter) probably reflects her true status. The prospects for any children whom Aspasia might have borne to Pericles were indeed mixed. No daughters are attested for either party. This silence is itself unremarkable, inasmuch as daughters tended to be mentioned only with regard to their parentage, husbands, or children. If, in fact, Aspasia ever bore a daughter, she might have been exposed or removed in some other manner; if she lived to adulthood, she might have been consigned quietly to pallakia or married to another metic.20 Evidence suggests, but does not prove, that Pericles junior was Aspasia's son or at least the son of a free woman. Perhaps the increasingly negative remarks found in comedy about Pericles junior reflect a diminishing status for all nothoi in the late fifth century, as well as the disappearance of protection upon the death of his father; perhaps they are purely personal attacks indicating the son's perceived failure to measure up to his illustrious parent. His unhappy fate as one of the generals condemned and executed after the battle of Arginusae surely was not affected by his parentage. (Comedy is discussed in the next chapter; the comic tag Nothippos probably reflects the inferior status of this group.)21 So much for the possibilities of offspring of Aspasia. I turn now to Aspasia's years with Pericles, the terminus for which relationship has traditionally been set with the latter's death in 429. References made by comic writers to their relationship are impossible to put into an exact sequence, but they do suggest a period of some eleven to thirteen years—that is, from the Samian War to 430 B.C.—in which she was publicly recognized as Pericles' mate. Later tradition has dwelt on Aspasia's intellectual acumen, her political influence upon Pericles, and his love for her, but no evidence established as contemporary illuminates these possibilities. Plutarch mentions one more specific incident regarding Aspasia's life. The comic poet Hermippus supposedly prosecuted her on the charge of asebeia (impiety). Scholarly opinion is divided as to whether the suit actually took place or whether, like Philocleon's prosecution of the cheese-pilfering dog Labes in Aristophanes' Wasps, it was a purely imaginary trial, conducted on the comic stage and later insinuated into the historical record. The exact nature of the prosecution and the precise

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meaning of asebeia are also hotly debated. It is most likely that if Aspasia was literally tried in court, it was in order to discredit Pericles. Belief is based on the notion that Aspasia's influence upon Pericles and/ or others was, or was perceived to be, of an actionable nature, and that Pericles was attached enough to Aspasia to defend her, as Plutarch reports, with a singular display of public weeping. As an analysis of comedy will show, this trial was most probably a dramatic fantasy.22 The rapidity with which Aspasia apparently entered a union with Lysicles after Pericles' death invites several explanations. First, her relationship with Pericles may have terminated some time before his death; the alliance with Lysicles might have been far from hasty. Pericles could have tired of her, for comedy reports other sexual interests besides Aspasia.23 Widows, and presumably relict concubines, were "remarried" as soon as possible; thus, if Aspasia's union with Pericles lasted until the latter's death, her subsequent union with Lysicles might have been entirely proper.24 It is also possible that the continued presence of Pericles' "relict" was a liability to his remaining family, particularly in the gloomy days of plague-ridden Athens. Thucydides tersely and movingly tells of the plague's effects on the city's social fabric, and Xenophon shows how quickly and devastatingly female dependents in an aristocratic household could become a financial liability during hard times (see Thuc. 2.47-2.54; Xen. Mem. 2.7; Dem. 57.45). Pericles lost most of his relatives to the plague (Plut. Per. 36); presumably, the surviving females would have been more dependent than ever before. The orators paint a portrait of close and affectionate relations between Athenian mothers and their sons, but this may reflect ideals rather than realities. Aspasia and Pericles junior were no ordinary dyad: the mother may have been an embarrassment to her son, so recently and extraordinarily franchised. As a nothos, Pericles junior was exempted from the legal requirement of supporting his parents in their old age. A son whose irregular parentage would dog him most of his life and who was only adopted after his legitimate stepbrothers had died might have found it politic to settle his mother elsewhere.25 Perhaps there was a positive side to Aspasia's alleged union in middle age with the sheepdealer Lysicles. He was a prominent politician and she might have been able to enhance his political fortunes. How this union came about, if it did, is open to question. There is some evidence that a lone woman could occasionally act on her own behalf, as Me-

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nander says, "heautes kyria" ("as her own kyrios"; Men. Pk. 497); Aspasia may have chosen Lysicles herself. If the citizenship law was in effect at the time of this union, it cannot be entirely correct to term her union with Lysicles a marriage, as late commentators describe it. In any event, Lysicles' death in 428 cuts off our possibility for knowing anything about this union,26 if it was in fact historical. A portrait herm found in Italy in 1777 and inscribed at the base ACIIACIA may have been copied from her grave (Figure 1.1). A rather solemn female head with the melon coiffure is depicted on this 1.7meter-high monument. Although there is no ancient testimony for portraits of Aspasia, the eyes and hair can be traced to fifth-century types, as Gisela Richter argues in making her case for the statue's authenticity. More puzzling to Richter is the fact that Aspasia was rendered as a "simple, expressionless woman" who nonetheless had "a certain beauty." Indeed, no physical description of Aspasia has survived, and she may have been quite ordinary in appearance. Richter, assuming (as had Wilamowitz) that Aspasia "geistig etwas mehr bedeutete," suggests that "Aspasia's extraordinary attraction lay in her animated expression, which the sculptor of the herm was not able to convey." If the herm was copied from an actual grave stele, however, this alone could explain the solemnity of the head's expression, for late fifth-century funerary art depicted the deceased with serene solemnity. Additionally, those who set up her monument may have been attempting to counter such labels as the Cratinan pallaken kynopida (dog-eyed concubine) and the Eupolidean/wrae (whore; literally, "buyable woman"). A "simple, expressionless woman" would have been the family grave's quiet answer to such insults. The possibility that her kin needed to make such a visual statement underscores again the impropriety of naming Aspasia a "female Socrates"; his portraiture is rich in Silenus and sage types. The pensive and virginal maiden of the stele denies the literary reputation of the woman to whom Socrates brought people for instruction, who kept a brothel, instigated wars, and taught rhetoric to Socrates and Pericles. In her study of the Severe Style, Ridgway provides a different interpretation, defining it as a classicizing portrait of a type called "Aspasia/Sosandra." The original, of which many copies besides this herm are known, was Calamis the Elder's fifth-century statue of Aphrodite Sosandra, dedicated by Callias on the Acropolis.27 Although Diodorus of Athens may have seen her grave and noted it in his treatise on funeral monuments, we do not know when or where Aspasia died.28

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Figure 1.1. Marble portrait herm, Aspasia. Vatican Museums inv. 272. Courtesy Vatican Museums.

2 The Story Told by Comedy

Attic comedy, a genre full of commentary about politics, provides the only known contemporary evidence for Aspasia's life. Old Comedy, as this earliest attested phase of Greek comedy is known, is paramount to Aspasia's biographical tradition: though frequently surreal and fantastic, it was nonetheless treated as a historical source by later ancient historians such as Duris and Plutarch. Comedy is also the premier nexus of discourses on sexuality, power, and intellect in the fifth century, discourses to which Aspasia is crucial. Unfortunately, only eleven of Aristophanes' plays have survived intact, and the fragmentary remains of the rest of Old Comedy are exceedingly difficult to date. To correlate undated and/or undatable fragments by their references to the supposed life events of public figures is nearly impossible, for oftentimes these references constitute the only surviving mention of said event. It is easier, therefore, to discuss the treatment of Aspasia in Old Comedy on a playwright-by-playwright basis, beginning with the best-known authors and those whose references to Aspasia are the most significant. Although Attic comedy made Aspasia a public figure, it treats her very differently than it does men. For example, Aspasia, unlike many Athenian men (Solon, Miltiades, Pericles, Socrates et al.) was apparently never put on stage in propria persona. Furthermore, comic allusions to Aspasia are invariably sexual, sexualized, and sexualizing; well-known males receive a broader spectrum of comment than she does. Pericles' sexual integrity was attacked by the poets, but so were his oratorical skills, physical appearance, and political views. The latter attributes could be mentioned without reference to his sexuality.1 19

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Cratinus Cratinus can be considered the founder of political comedy as we know it. His work, rife with topicality and inventive invective, set the tone for subsequent comic treatments of both Pericles and Aspasia. Aristophanes, Cratinus' rival and younger contemporary, was probably more in his elder's debt than we can know. 2 Cratinus is known to have attacked Aspasia in only one play, the Cheirons (frags. 246-268 K-A). The dating of the comedy is problematic; it has been assigned both to the very late 440s—when Pericles became the most powerful man in Athens after the ostracism in 443 of Thucydides, son of Melesias—as well as to around 430, near the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. In either case, this golden age nostalgia drama invidiously contrasts the corrupt life of the time of its writing with the sweet simplicity of the past, and reflects anxieties about Pericles' power and hostility to Aspasia. The violent language Cratinus uses of Aspasia and Pericles certainly represents a strong reaction to some aspect of Pericles' regime.3 Golden age comedies were characterized either by a total absence of women or by a purely subordinate position for them as providers of sexual gratification. The Cheirons is full of epic language and parodies of that language.4 Solon was brought back from the dead as a reminder of the "happy" past and pointed out the populace's moral failures; interestingly, fourthcentury comedy would credit Solon with having founded statesubsidized brothels.5 Salient to the present discussion are Cheirons frag. 258 and 259 K-A, considered on the grounds of meter and sense to be part of theparabasis, that part of the comedy wherein the chorus often spoke the poet's mind and delivered advice to the city. Thus, the lines are attributable to a group, not to a character, and need not have referred to any event or events within the play. Perhaps neither Pericles nor Aspasia appeared on stage in this play, because their mention here was probably part of the chorus' recitation of events that had brought Athens to her present parlous condition.6 Stasis and elderborn Time, mating with one another birthed a very great tyrant whom the gods call "head-gatherer." (258 K-A) Shameless Lust bears him Hera-Aspasia, a dog-eyed concubine (259 K-A)

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Long-standing instability in the state, that is, Chronos (time) and Stasis (civic strife), have bred a monster in the form of Pericles, who is parodied by reference to his large head (cf. the common Homeric epithet "Cloud-Gatherer," used for Zeus). The abuse of Pericles, both anatomical and political, is combined neatly in his identification as the despotic offspring of abstract personifications. Stasis, the feminine abstraction identified as Pericles' mother, is semantically associated in fifth-century historiography and tragedy with women and anandreia (unmanliness).7 The gods deflate Pericles with an undignified mock-epic epithet. Next, katapygosyne ("shameless lust") bore him the dog-eyed concubine Hera-Aspasia. Aspasia is given an actual Homeric tag, but it is not a complimentary one, for it associates her with both the shrewish Hera and the ruinous Pandora. Hephaestus calls his mother "dog-eyed" (//. 18.396); Hesiod's Pandora has a dog's mind and a thief's character (Works and Days 67). Katapygosyne, which really cannot be translated, is a highly abusive word probably coined by Cratinus; it refers not only to the general notion of shameless lust but also to "pathic" practice; Aspasia seems to be the first and only female to be associated with the noun abstract of the word, an association that makes her even more monstrous.8 By identifying Aspasia as apallake, Cratinus suggests not only that she lacks the right to rule with her "Zeus," but also that she is unable to properly transmit his legacy. I believe that the reference pointedly marks the actual type of "marriage" Aspasia had with Pericles and comments on its legally and socially inferior nature; concubinage was, as has been shown, a union whose issue could not claim a place in the polis or the family.9 The Cheirons is paradigmatic of Old Comedy's critique of women vis-a-vis political power. According to this critique, women could not govern the polis; their attempts to do so, especially as would be seen in Arisophanes' Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae, must always be considered an inversion and mockery of the norm; the possibility of their doing so, even when represented as fantasy, indicates a severe crisis in the polis. The importance to this theme of politicians' association with women of ill repute cannot be stressed enough; Aristophanes would make "loose women" the symbols of destruction, death, and intellectual and literary corruption. Cheirons frag. 258-259 K-A demonstrates that there was no natural place for women in the state, that they were believed to serve their lovers rather than the state, and that they could neither inherit nor transmit their lovers' political capital.10

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It would be wonderful to have other Cratinan invective against Aspasia, but nothing conclusive survives. His mythological burlesque Dionysalexandros may revile Pericles, who is likened to both Paris and Dionysus, for having started a war. All that can be said is that the play shows that a politician's irregular sexual behavior has political consequences. If Pericles was Paris, Aspasia might have been seen as Helen— sexually alluring and the cause of a great war. The report that Eupolis, Cratinus' younger contemporary, and occasional plagiarist, called Aspasia "Helen" (Prospaltians 267 K-A) may mean that Eupolis copied or modified a Cratinan epithet.11 Cratinus' Nemesis alludes not only to the Trojan War and to Helen, but also to Pericles' dominance in Athens (118 K-A, assuming that the mention of Zeus refers to Pericles), and it is generally thought that Pericles appeared on stage as a character. The fact that Leda is told to incubate her egg (115 K-A) opens the possibility that Aspasia was also put on stage. The Nemesis may implicate Pericles in the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. But ever since Kaibel, the difficulties of locating Aspasia within the plot have been abundantly apparent. Nemesis herself has been seen as Aspasia and Helen as Pericles junior; the egg has been seen as the Megarian decree or even as the war itself. It can only be said that the political result of bad politics was probably represented comedically as a monstrous birth.12 Without more fragments, it is impossible to say more about this play. If indeed the Nemesis likens Pericles to Zeus, some common threads can be seen in that play and the Cheirons and Dionysalexandros: Cratinus represents Pericles as a man whose irregular domestic life produces "unnatural" results—either tyranny and a concubine co-tyrant (as in the Cheirons), a war (as in the Dionysalexandros), or an improperly engendered egg that may represent war or its prelude (as in the Nemesis). In Cheirons and Dionysalexandros, the playwright stresses the political consequence of the statesman's irregular behavior; in Cheirons and Nemesis, the political result of bad politics is itself represented as a monstrous birth.13

Eupolis Eupolis, a younger contemporary of Aristophanes and Cratinus, mentions Aspasia by name in three comedies and probably alludes to her in a fourth.14 Aspasia is mentioned in his first play, the wartime Prospal-

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tians, as "Helen." But all that can be said of this is that Helen and Aspasia were both accused of sexual impropriety and were alleged to have started wars.15 The plot of the Philoi, which was produced just a few years later at the 424/423 B.C. Dionysia, is also obscure, nor can the one fragment, in which Aspasia is called Omphale tyrannon or Omphaletyrannon, be integrated with the rest of the play. Omphale sexually dominated Heracles, whose earlier cultural image as harddrinking beast master and womanizer was now being sanitized and assimilated to an icon of temperate masculine virtue.16 The play also seems to have had pederastic and sympotic themes, and reviled Rhodia, wife of the Athenian Lykon.17 The Marikas has attracted much critical attention though little is known of its plot. Produced at the festival of the Lenaia in 421, it vanquished the first version of Aristophanes' Clouds. In the second, surviving version of the Clouds, Aristophanes accuses Eupolis of having plagiarized parts of the Marikas play from his own Knights (Clouds 553-555). In the Marikas, the politician Hyperbolus was satirized as the barbarian slave whose name gives the play its title; the chorus was a double one. That there was considerable topical humor is evident from the mentions of the Spartans, Cleon, and Nicias.18 All the more frustrating, then, is the poor preservation of fragment 192, in which "the bastard," Aspasia, and Paralus are all mentioned in the space of three lines (lines 166-169).19 Little can be gained from this except to note that Paralus, and probably Pericles' other legitimate son, Xanthippus, are both named along with Pericles junior, who is perhaps called Aspasia's bastard here. The mention of all of Pericles' sons and identification of one of them as a bastard borne by Aspasia is the third time Aspasia is insulted by name in the comic fragments.20 She was probably singled out for the sake of criticizing the nothos, Pericles junior; at the time of the Marikas' composition, Paralus and Xanthippus would have been dead nearly a decade and the nothos would have been about twenty years old. Why any of them is remarked on here cannot be ascertained, but the comic poets commonly insulted politicians by referring unflatteringly to their mothers. Although Eupolis' exploitation of the mother-son relationship is not unique, he may have been the first to mention Aspasia's motherhood on the stage.21 Eupolis' last play, the Demes (411 B.C.), is, like Aristophanes' more famous Frogs, a catabatic quest for civic salvation. In it Solon, Mil-

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tiades, Aristides, and Pericles are brought back from the dead in order to advise the city, although it is difficult to say more than this about the plot. Aspasia and Pericles junior are mentioned, and Pericles' plaintive query, "And is my nothos alive?" (110 K-A) shows that Pericles himself was a speaking character. The mention here of the bastard and of Pericles' head elsewhere in the Demes (115 K-A) were very old jokes by now; probably these threadbare jests facilitated the recognition of Pericles, who had now been dead for more than fifteen years. The reply to Pericles' question—that the nothos was indeed alive but ashamed of having a porne for a mother (110 K-A)—suggests that after Pericles' death, Aspasia was mentioned with increasing harshness. In the earlier Prospaltians and Philoi, Eupolis had referred to her in mythological travesty and also made references to her sexual allure; he identified her as the mother of a bastard in his mid-career play, Marikas, and called her an outright whore in a play from his later years, Demes, which last reference is the final certain one to her in Old Comedy. The label was resoundingly negative and referred only to her inferior sexual status. The general view of Pericles in this play was probably positive, judging from its fulsome praise of his oratory.22

Hermippus Hermippus was less important in his own day and to posterity than were Cratinus, Eupolis, and Aristophanes, but he merits special attention in the development of Aspasia's bios; according to Plutarch, it was he who prosecuted Aspasia for asebeia (Plut. Per. 32.1).23 He also is said to have accused Aspasia of ensnaring free women for Pericles to dally with (Plut. Per. 32.1), a charge also leveled, without a named accuser, against Phidias (Plut. Per. 13.14). Again, the questions of the historicity of these charges, of whether or not Hermippus prosecuted Aspasia in a fantasy trial on stage or in his actual right as a citizen, cannot be decided conclusively. Certainly a good many accusations against Pericles are those of sexual and political impropriety; accusations of sexual excess, in which Pericles' associates were said to have pimped citizen women for him, may have inspired Aristophanes, and later, Eupolis, to call Aspasia a whore and to imply that she kept other women. These allegations attributed to Pericles a personal behavior somewhat counter to the purpose and spirit of his own citizenship law, and if true, intimated that

The Story Told by Comedy

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in the matter of sexual appetite, Pericles, like other popular politicians late and soon, felt himself above or beyond the law. Hermippus' dialogue could be markedly abusive: in the Artopolides (Breadsellers), someone addresses a woman as ' 'O sapra, kaipasiporne, kai kapraina'' ("O decayed one, and all-whore, and she-goat").24

Aristophanes Aristophanes (457/445-385 B.C.) offers especially rich ground for an investigation of Aspasia's bios, even though he mentioned Aspasia only once in his extant oeuvre (Acharnians, produced at the Lenaia in 425 B.C.). Because eleven of his plays do survive whole, it is possible to discuss Aristophanes' thematic and symbolic uses and definitions of women and gender, to speculate upon the poet's views concerning the relationship of women to the state, and lastly, to discuss his use of female characters as part of the opsis (visual aspect) of Old Comedy. In the reference to Aspasia and in references to other women, we are able also to see the contexts in which real females, as particularities, were used dramatically. Thus the Acharnians, in which the protagonist, Dikaeopolis, concludes a private peace with the Spartans and vanquishes those who would continue to make war, is vital for helping us see in what ways the comic Aspasia, mentioned elsewhere in fragments bereft of a context, might have functioned in those other plays.25 Aristophanes' Acharnians contains a significant reference to Aspasia. Dikaeopolis tells the chorus and audience about the causes of the war: Men from our side—I'm not saying the polis—remember this, I'm not saying the polis, but worthless pipsqueaks, phonies, dishonorable counterfeits, halfbreeds, began to denounce Megara's little cloaks. And if anybody saw a gourd or a hare or a piglet or a garlic or some rocksalt— these were "Megarian" and sold off that same day! Still, this was a minor matter, and not unexpected. But, then some young drunks went to Megara and stole the whore Simaitha. Well, the Megarians were driven crazy by this insult and stole in return two whores from Aspasia. From this began the Great War in all Hellas—from three cock-sucking sluts. (Ach. 516-539)

This little passage has given rise to the immense problem of whether or not the theft was historical. In addition the literary problem of this passage's relationship to the beginning of Herodotus' History, which it

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probably parodies, is not insignificant. Opinions range from Walter Ameling's and Donald Kagan's views that the reference to Aspasia's whores is pure fantasy and a comic topos to a nearly literal "if there's smoke" view. David Sansone's well-argued position that the passage indeed parodies Hdt. 1.1-4 need not vitiate more literal interpretations. Douglas MacDowell suggests that Pericles did have nonpolitical reasons, perhaps even connected with Aspasia, for enacting the Megarian embargo. He argues cogently for a political interpretation of the play that identifies Dikaeopolis' aims with the audience's own and that makes a serious bid for peace, but fails to convincingly show what the nature of Pericles' and/or Aspasia's animus against the Megarians might have been.26 This is no place to settle the problems regarding the Megarian decree. One can but observe that Aspasia's alleged responsibility for the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War sounds suspiciously like the charge attributed to Duris that she was responsible for the Samian War.27 I believe that the accusation is fictional and groundless. Cratinus had already given Aspasia a vicious genealogy, making her a monstrous, illegitimate, shameless, and tyrannical partner for Pericles; he had also associated her with Paris/Pericles, a warmonger, and had identified her with the temptresses Omphale and Helen. Hermippus had called her a procuress and impious. Thus, she had already been attacked—with Pericles—as an abuser of power and in ways that impugned her sexuality and in language that was also couched in parody. Therefore, in a period when it was popular to parody Herodotus, it would have been easy for Aristophanes to weave into his tale of the abduction of women the additional insult that Aspasia was a fellatrix and a procuress. Aristophanes' definition of the activities that led up to the outbreak of war as the deeds of laikastriai (fellatrices) was an extremely coarse and insulting one.28 Aspasia is implicitly a whore and explicitly a fellatrix, a laikastria. Placed finally and emphatically in the period, the word laikastriai situated Aspasia, and by association, Pericles, in disreputable company. As a way of describing her putative association with Athenian politics, it was an insult as grave as any hurled at other public figures in comedy. For Aspasia to be mentioned as a pimp, a fellatrix, and precipitator of a disastrous war was humorous only in the bleakest possible sense. Once she is defined as the keeper of whores, Aspasia is a woman near the center of government who controls men's access to women and whose displeasure could bring on war; at the end of the play,

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order is restored, and Dikaeopolis revels with two whores (Ach. lines 1199 to the end).29 Similarly, Aristophanes' Peace (421) represents Peace both metaphorically as the resumption of men's unlimited access to food and sexual relations, and concretely as a lovely and penetrable virgin. In that play, wherein women are never a threat and seem to be present only to be penetrated by males, Aristophanes again mentioned Pericles, the beginning of the war, and the Megarian decree, but he did not mention Aspasia.30 Aristophanes' abuse of Aspasia in the Acharnians accords with his abuse elsewhere of the female sexual partners of other male politicians. It is possible to compare the treatment Aspasia is given in the first extant play with that of other women associated with politicians in other, complete Aristophanic plays, and to speculate on the function that other references performed in plays now fragmentary fulfilled. Paphlagon, in the Knights (424 B.C.), prays to Athena to confirm that he—after Lysicles and the prostitutes Kynna and Salabaccho—has been the "best man'' and has given the greatest benefit to the demos (Kn. 763-766; note that Kynna and Salabaccho are masculinized here). Lysicles, supposedly Aspasia's mate after the death of Pericles, is here also associated with whores. But the parabasis of Wasps (422 B.C.) and its nearverbatim repetition in Peace, demonstrate the most compelling association of politicians with prostitutes. The chorus defend Aristophanes to the audience: Nor, when he began to produce plays, did he attack men, but rather, with the anger of Heracles, he beset the greatest targets: immediately he screwed up his courage against the jagged-toothed Cleon, from whose eyes beams the looks of Kynna the whore, and whose head is encircled with the tongues of one hundred sycophants, deadly torrents of voice, the stench of a seal, the unwashed testicles of a Lamia, and the asshole of a camel. (1029-1035)

The playwright has attacked not ordinary men (1029) but the greatest of them, the jagged-toothed monster (teras), Cleon. Particularly odd here is the assignment of testicles to the traditionally female monster, Lamia, but here, as in other comic slurs, bad politics is rendered visible as an ugly, misshapen hybrid. Aristophanes' monster elaborately recapitulates Cratinus' genealogy for the "headgatherer" and his tyrannous concubine. Further evidence for this comedic association can be found in the earlier statement by the poet Callias (in his Pedetai) that Aspasia

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taught Pericles how to speak. That statement is the antecedent for Aristophanes' claims that Cleon sees with Kynna's eyes: just so, Pericles speaks with Aspasia's tongue.31 That politicians and prostitutes are interchangeable is also implicit in a statement in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousae (411 B.C.), wherein the chorus declares that Cleophon is no worse than Salabaccho (line 805). The image of Aspasia concocted by comedy retains its potency. So great has been its power that it may now seem heterodox to claim that Aspasia, perhaps a mere war refugee placed in concubinage with an important politician, was unable to avoid colliding with Greek comedy's misogynist scenario and being recast as a pome and procuress. This scenario could not have told the truth about her even if it wanted to. The absence of good historical evidence to the contrary leaves this investigator with the indelible impression, exaggerated as I suspect it to be, of a prostitute near the inner circle of power. The power of comedy to construct Aspasia can be seen in the next stage of her bios, when philosophical dialogue, indebted to both tragedy and comedy, further developed the image of an erotically alluring and intellectually formidable woman among men.

3 Aspasia and the Socratic Tradition

The decline of Athens after the end of the Peloponnesian War would see the demise of tragedy as a viable art form and the movement of comedy from its major bases of surrealism and sexualized political invective to a greater focus on domestic drama and mythological travesty. The nascent form of philosophical dialogue adopted motifs from both tragedy and comedy in its use of historical and mythological characters to articulate and argue its own generic points of view. Many such dialogues were set in the heyday of Athens' greatness; therefore, some of the same individuals who were historical actors and comic butts in the fifth century reappeared as participants in philosophical discourse. The Socratic dialogues of the fourth century, the next locus of Aspasia's bios, took up the comic claim that Pericles spoke with Aspasia's tongue. The function of female characters in Greek drama has been thoroughly, though certainly not definitively, discussed by many scholars; but study of the function of female characters in philosophical discourse and the intersection of these characters with philosophical definitions of femaleness and femininity is rather new terrain. In the fourth century, Aspasia's biographical tradition becomes centrally entwined with these dialogic discussions of politics, sexuality, and gender, and it may be central to them. These conversations have a particularly Athenian cast, however, in that philosophical discourse almost exclusively represents male discussants engaged in an examination of the good life as lived in a community dominated by men. Perhaps philosophical discourse's long neglect of feminist concerns is due both to philosophy's self-validating claim to objectivity, which functions as a 29

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protective bubble, and also to the Western philosophical establishment's traditional restriction to men of its practice, teaching, and self-analysis.1 These new dimensions of Aspasia's biographical tradition maintain the earlier concerns found in comedy and the historical record about the relationship of gender and sexuality to citizenship, civic participation, and moral health. The contribution that philosophical discourse makes to Aspasia's bios elevates these concerns only to dismiss them. In comedy, Aspasia had been used to discredit the historical actor Pericles; in some of the Socratica (in particular, Plato's Menexenus) Aspasia remains a site for the reinscription of Athenian history. It can even be said that she is a phallic woman.2 The use of Aspasia's name, the creation of a persona or personae for her in this very masculinist discourse, and the representations of her speech all require special attention. Aspasia does not appear in any dialogue as a character in her own right, although two dialogues bore her name. The important exception, however, is Plato's Menexenus. It is made up almost entirely of a speech recited by Socrates but which Aspasia allegedly taught him. It is necessary to ask what kind of personae were constructed for Aspasia and what functions the personae performed in each dialogue, and to ascertain the metaphorical dimensions of the speech "she" was given. The language of sexual reproduction and of feminine and masculine social roles looms large in these dialogues. Because the Socratic contributors to Aspasia's bios were reacting largely to ideas first put forth in Old Comedy, it is possible to discuss their treatment of her thematically, rather than chronologically; the latter approach is, in any case, not totally possible.3 The contributions of philosophical dialogue to Aspasia's biographical tradition can be schematized into two components: a negative developmental strand, represented by Antisthenes and Plato, and a positive one, with Aeschines of Sphettos and Xenophon as its representatives. The negative aspects of the tradition resemble the invective already seen in comedy.

Antisthenes Antisthenes (fl. ca. 445 B.C.-360 B.C.), a fascinating and curious figure, was the only follower of Socrates who did not become part of the Socratic diaspora. In the turmoil that followed the end of the Peloponne-

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sian War, it was probably "unimportance rather than acceptability" that helped him avoid Socrates' fate.4 Like Pericles junior, he was a nothos with a foreign mother. If nothoi did form a sociocultural subset, then Antisthenes and Pericles junior probably knew each other. Disfranchised from birth by the law of 451/450 B.C., Antisthenes may have become an Athenian citizen through his own efforts and those of Callias.5 H. D. Rankin recently speculated that "we may ask whether Antisthenes' ridicule of Pericles and Alcibiades was not to some extent nourished by his annoyance at the privileges granted to their family in the matter of citizenship." Rankin saw personal jealousy as the motivation for Antisthenes' "ferocious attacks" against Xanthippus and Paralus in his Aspasia. Rankin believes an additional factor in this dislike of Pericles and his family was Socrates' own anti-Periclean bent as evidenced in Plato's Gorgias and Protagoras.6 This somewhat tenuous evidence for Antisthenes' thought can be bolstered by such sayings attributed to Antisthenes as the claim that one should esteem an honest man above a kinsman (D.L. 6.12) and that nobility belongs to the virtuous (D.L. 6.10-11). Antisthenes composed ten volumes of works. Some are apparently philosophical dialogues titled with the names of historical personages; the Aspasia and the Cyrus, or, On Kingship are the only known works in volume 5. He is considered to be a founder of the Cynics, perhaps because of his presence at the Kynosarges gymnasium (a meeting place for nothoi) and also because of his bitter outlook.7 Apparently devoted to robust hardihood, Antisthenes disregarded feminine beauty and luxury. He was particularly interested in the pursuit of arete (virtue), which he stated was the same for women and men.8 Antisthenes made light of the Athenian claim to autochthony, a predominant theme of Plato's Menexenus, by stating that locusts and snails could also be called children of Attic soil and that he himself wouldn't have behaved so courageously at the battle of Tanagra had his parents both been Athenian (D.L. 6.1).9 Unfortunately, we lack any record of Antisthenean attacks on Pericles junior, whose extraordinary enfranchisement would have created an obvious target. In his Aspasia, however, Antisthenes roundly abuses other members of Pericles' family. The date of the Aspasia is not known, but it is generally thought to have preceded Aeschines' dialogue of the same name.10 Little can be said about the focus of the dialogue and to what extent Aspasia's own character was discussed, although it is

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universally accepted that she was unfavorably represented—as Ehlers puts it, to Antisthenes, Aspasia was the very embodiment of pleasure, of hedone. All of the fragments relevant to Aspasia refer to her sexuality and/or relationship with Pericles.11 The fragments show a definite continuity with comedic invective. Xanthippus and Paralus are both accused of' 'homosexuality of a squalid kind," as Rankin says; one son is accused of living with a male prostitute of the lowest sort; the other, of a long-term liaison with the vulgarian Euphemus (frag. 34 Caizzi = Ath. 5.220d). If Halperin is correct to claim that the "democratic body" was figured as the body of a male citizen, then this species of insult is peculiarly appropriate. It attacks the sexuality and thereby the integrity of Pericles' male kin. Pericles is also here accused of having had sexual relations with Cimon's sister, Elpinike. Furthermore, Antisthenes attacked Alcibiades in his book on Cyrus (frag. 29a Caizzi = Ath. 5.220c) for having had intercourse, Persian fashion, with his mother and sister.12 Other remnants of Antisthenes' thought suggest how and/or why he treated Aspasia so unfavorably. As Rankin says, much of the evidence for Antisthenes' thought is gleaned from "interesting traces in the surviving fragments." He extolled autarkeia (self-sufficiency), and Pericles' excessive love for Aspasia would have demonstrated the statesman's failure to practice this prized virtue. Antisthenes was no moral relativist (frags. 22, 23, 72, 73 Caizzi) and thus may have opposed the inherently relativistic view, attributed to Aspasia by Aeschines and Xenophon, that erotic experience with another person could lead one to arete. Additionally, Antisthenes might have been unable to accept active female subjectivity of the kind that Aeschines and Xenophon would positively attribute to Aspasia and with which comedy had negatively endowed her. In his Choice of Heracles, in a manner similar to Prodicus', he represented the feminized abstractions Arete and Kakia (virtue and vice) as the objects of man's quests. There was no female subject.13

Plato Plato (427-347 B.C.) has dominated the other Socratics, and the fact that his Menexenus is the only one of three ancient dialogues concerned with Aspasia to survive in its entirety has skewed our understanding of her position in philosophical dialogue in ways that are difficult to appreciate

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and describe. That Aspasia is the only provably historical woman to be accorded a speech in his entire corpus is significant and should be considered carefully; with the voice Plato gives her, Aspasia discredits her claims to advise the polis. His position on "the woman question" is far from settled, sometimes being claimed as a protofeminist position and at other times considered as wholly masculinist. If Plato knew Aspasia personally, it was when he was in his youth and she was in her middle or old age.14 His Menexenus, an early dialogue set in 386 B.C., features Socrates and the young Menexenus, who is evidently from a family of politicians (Menex. 234a4-234b2).15 In the opening frame (234al-236d3), the pair meet, and Menexenus tells the older man that the Boule has decided to choose a speaker to deliver an epitaphios, an oration performed in honor of the Athenian war dead (234b4—7). When Menexenus doubts that anyone could compose such a speech on short notice, Socrates remarks that Aspasia has recently recited to him just such a speech (235c6236cl). Of course, the younger man is gratefully willing to hear what she taught him, and Socrates recites the sample oration (236d4249c8).16 Aspasia's speech consists of both the epitaphios proper and a speech within a speech (246dl-248d6) wherein she tells the audience what the war dead advise their survivors to do and to feel. A second conversational interchange (249dl-e7) between Socrates and Menexenus provides the closing frame; the latter expresses gratitude and amazement, and Socrates promises to impart other political speeches (politikoi logof) that Aspasia has also recited to him. The Menexenus has been called a spurious dialogue, a genuine work of Plato that was an ironic joke, an exhortation to philosophy, and a completely serious praise of Athens—a true epitaphios—played straight.17 The present consensus is that although a genuine work of Plato, the Menexenus is nevertheless an ironic critique of the epitaphios and its objects of praise; but the target(s) of the critique and the manner(s) in which Plato effects the critique are much debated. In her brilliant study of the funeral oration, Nicole Loraux names the Menexenus as an important expression of Plato's political thought and as a pastiche more real than the speeches it mocks; the pastiche is both the most powerful of the political orations and an exorcism thereof—a kind of pharmakon. In parodying such epitaphian topoi as autochthony, the definition of who is an Athenian, and the transcendence of parenthood by the city, Plato exposes the hollowness of the epitaphian ideality.18

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Despite her careful and brilliant explication, Loraux, like other commentators, stops short of considering the most significant question: Why is Aspasia made the author of the speech? In containing Aspasia within Socrates, Loraux not only fails to deal with Aspasia herself, but also replicates the Platonic strategies she so illuminatingly dissects: "Against the funeral oration, Plato sets up Socrates . . . " We may compare Bloedow's discussion of "Aspasia, who is of course identifiable with Perikles . . ."'9 Clearly, substitution, interchange, and interchangeability are important thematic and compositional facets of this dialogue. But we must take the observation further. If Plato sets up Aspasia to substitute for someone or something, what does this mean? How does he do this and what are its implications, particularly the implications of the fact that such a lengthy speech is attributed to the woman? It is necessary to analyze the importance of the fact that Aspasia is the speaker. What does it mean for this particular woman to author, and through Socrates to deliver, that particular politikos logos that articulates Athens' selfimage? Besides examining the essential question of how Aspasia functions in this dialogue, we must also pay careful attention to the relationship between certain themes in Old Comedy and certain themes of this epitaphios.20 The Menexenus displays many affinities with comedy and history. Ostensibly historical and "about history," it, as an epitaphios, shares some elements with comedy, in that the performance of the funeral oration occurred during a festival, or perhaps better, an antifestival.21 Making Aspasia author of this speech helped Plato underscore his critique of epitaphian topoi; he exploits not only her actual status as a foreigner, but also her location within Old comedy as a whore and a monstrous producer of the illegitimate. It is important to note that the comedic definition of Aspasia as a porne had rendered her an interchangeable commodity, a particular characteristic that highlights the general theme of interchangeability so important in the Menexenus.22 The term porne, which comedy had applied to Aspasia and to her alleged employees or slaves, literally made her a "buyable woman"; the prostitute, unlike a legitimate wife, was owed no obligation and could be interchanged with other women. Nor could she produce legitimate children. In view of Plato's disapproving presentation of the epitaphios as made up of words or mythologems that are interchangeable in respect to who speaks them (236c5-7, 249dl2-e2), about whom or what they are spoken (235d3-6), and the occasions on which they are spoken (e.g.,

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Aspasia as synkollosa, "gluing together"; see 236b6), Plato's use of Aspasia as speaker, Aspasia who had been defined in the earlier public discourse of comedy as ultimately interchangeable and commodified, is a brilliant reversal that itself proves the interchangeability of one epitaphios with another and thus the genre's ultimate absurdity. The sign is proliferated until its literal meaning is lost; until it becomes utterly arbitrary.23 For an occasion that celebrates andreia (manly courage), Plato supplies the words of a woman, not a man; of a foreigner, not a citizen; of a whore, not a wife; of the parent of a bastard, not a citizen; of Aspasia. Surely the references to Aspasia's interchangeability with other speakers, which are made both before and after Socrates recites her speech (236c5-7, 249dl2-e2), emphasize that the choice of speaker ultimately does not matter. Surely Menexenus' declaration that Socrates makes Aspasia makaria (blessed) if she, a woman, can compose such speeches suggests that ability to give a politikos logos need not be accompanied by the manly courage so lauded in the epitaphios.24 Aspasia herself has made many of the nobles into speakers, and Pericles is but one of them (235e3-7). To call Pericles but one of the speakers instructed by Aspasia damages prior eulogizing of his singular oratorical skill. This tutelage is well known to Menexenus (235e8) even though Socrates has not yet named Aspasia (235e4, "there being a teacher"). Aspasia made speakers of many men. The fact that one is named, and that this one is a man with whom she had a sexual relationship, delicately suggests that she had sexual relationships with the others as well and that they all speak with words she taught them. The propensity of politicians to speak with the mouths of whores and to see with their eyes is a well-known charge of comedy; one need only recall the association of Cleon with Kynna (Wasps 1015-1035 and Peace 739759), and Callias' statement, in the Pedetai, that Aspasia taught Pericles to speak (*21 K-A). Significantly, a scholion to Menexenus 235e is the sole source for this last citation. Plato alludes to Aspasia's comic reputation as a whore in several comments, which include Menexenus' ambiguous "I've met her many times and know what she's like" (249d8-9). He knows what she's like, but what she's like is not specified—it does not need to be.25 We know everything, and nothing, about Aspasia. The implication of this "not telling" is that the male audience does not need to be told. Aspasia is her reputation, and her reputation is what men say it is. The real woman is

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encapsulated within her reputation just as the dead are enclosed within their own reputations (doxa) and fame (eukleia) (247a6-7). Aspasia herself had alluded to future encounters with the youth of Athens as "whenever I encounter any of you " (246b7-cl); the verb for encounter, entynchanein, is a euphemism for sexual intercourse.26 She also refers to her past encounters with their progonoi (forefathers) in the context of reporting what these fathers would like said (246c2-4); she has heard them speak (246c4-6), and having associated with the fathers, knows what would please them. This all suggests scenarios wherein the fathers have conversed with Aspasia—conversations that she will communicate to their descendants. Socrates speaks for her; if Menexenus doesn't give him away, he will recite additional politikoi logoi that Aspasia taught him (249e3-5). What binds these men, then, is the ideality that they share through association with a foreign woman who is, by means of both the conversational aspect and the delicately submerged sexual aspect, "known" to them all. Thus, thepolitikos logos has a sexual tinge, and Athenian men are united with one another and with this logos by means of their association with a foreign woman. Aspasia and the speech she delivers unite the citizens of Athens across generations. Loraux discusses the importance to this epitaphios of the silenced but everpresent Other, which she identifies as the noncitizens. The presence of the foreign Other at the recitation of the epitaphios (Menex. 235b2-8) was "necessary to the city only so that the latter could admire itself in others' eyes.'' The late fifth and early fourth centuries witnessed zealous enforcement of the citizenship law, and the political climate of the early fourth century was therefore likely to have engendered scrutiny of the civic status of those connected with the production of the epitaphios.27 Another important source of civic anxiety and concern was boundary maintenance between citizen and noncitizen. A conservative trend after 403/402 is evidenced in legislation which required the legitimacy of war orphans for the purpose of allotting state subsidies and additionally demanded that public figures be legitimate. The reenactment of Pericles' citizenship law in 403/402 disfranchised some men and precluded the naturalization of others.28 Loraux posits that "the most general propensity of an ideological discourse is to conceal the internal divisions of a society . . ." and finds it significant that metics and slaves were ignored. To note merely that all women except Amazons were excluded, however, again avoids the question of why Aspasia, a metic and the mother of a bastard, authors this discourse.29

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It seems more to the point to observe that women not only make up an essential component of the Other, but that the Other is here in fact, figured as a woman who speaks in order to define the civic Self. A real woman is erased and a constructed woman, "known" to us all but not described, speaks in her place. The Other's presence at such a central point in the composition and delivery of the epitaphios is a way of making absence present and presence, that is, relevance and validity, absent.30 Paradoxically, the quintessential outsider, Aspasia, delivers consolation and hope to the insiders. The epitaphios situates the listener in the Nesoi Makaron, the Isles of the Blessed (235c4), by letting Aspasia traverse the boundaries between the living and the dead and between insider and outsider; she takes her audience with her into "no place." Socrates puts it contrariwise when he states that these speakers can make you believe anything (especially at 234cl-235c5), as does Menexenus when he remarks that Aspasia is makaria (blessed) if she can deliver such a speech.31 That both Aspasia and Socrates must have been dead at the date of this dialogue is, of course, one of its often-noted paradoxes and one that cloaks the speech in falsity and hollowness. Socrates' confession that he feels he has been in the Islands of the Blessed when he has listened to an epitaphios (235c4), and the likelihood that Aspasia as well as he was dead at the dramatic date of the dialogue, additionally contribute to this sense of absence and "dead-ness." He describes his prospective recitation of Aspasia's speech with the verb ekpherein (236c4), a word that can mean to deliver or publish, but whose older and more literal meaning is to carry out, as of a corpse (cf. ekphora).32 To listen to this praise of the dead and to adhere to the precepts of the politikos logos requires the listener to deny the actual bodily death of the warriors. Plato's Socrates denies death by brilliantly evoking a trance, a deathlike state, in which his instructress claims that the dead achieve a new birth. Plato additionally brings about this trance by making Aspasia herself metonymize motherhood within earth and women within men, and by making her contain men themselves within the polis.33 Therefore, far from agreeing with Loraux that in the Menexenus the polis "seems to transcend the distinction between male and female," I believe that Plato reconstructs human parenthood by deemphasizing human motherhood.34 To make his case for autochthony and to deemphasize human motherhood, Plato uses a constructed woman, an Aspasia who equals her reputation, a woman whose own motherhood was,

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according to public discourse, problematic for herself, her child, and the state. The Menexenus makes death the central fact of the warriors' existence. The dead are particularly praised because they are autochthones, born of a true mother (Earth) and living in their own land (237b2-c4). They were not migrants, nor were they reared by a metruia (a stepmother), but by their own mother, who has once more received them. This carefully worded "logic" defines the mother as the one who has received the dead and shares with Aeschylus' definition of parenthood in the Eumenides the suppression of human women's real roles.35 Motherhood is the particular property of ge (Earth), as seen in the use of the participle tekouses (having borne, 237c2), and it is most just to praise this mother (237c3). The part of ge that makes up Attica differs from the rest of Earth. The rest of Earth, "the whole earth," produced monsters—a process Aspasia describes in words not used exclusively or particularly of human parturition: he pasa ge anedidou kai ephye ("the whole earth gave forth and grew," 237d3—4). In contrast, she says of the Athenian portion of Earth, he hemetera . . . egennesen ("our [part of Earth] bore," 237d5-6); the verb (egennesen) immediately evokes the birth of human beings. That Earth nourished our ancestors and the ancestors' ancestors proves that she bore us (237el-5). This sentence and the next would seem to characterize the earth as female and maternal. Earth bears and, like a woman, provides suitable nourishment (237e3). Yet Plato unsexes Earth, even as he calls her "mother," by subsuming the planet in the category of "things that bring forth" through the use of the neuter participle to tekon (that which bears, 237e2-3).36 But the next part of Aspasia's speech is truly extraordinary. In its maternity, Earth is not like a human mother, but rather the other way around: ou gar ge gynaika memimetai kuesei kai gennesei, alia gyne gen ("For Earth does not imitate a woman in respect to conception and birth, but rather woman imitates Earth") (238a4-5). This speech act metonymizes women's abilities within Earth's ability. Aspasia's next claim, that humans, having been endowed by their uniqueness with the tools of learning, enjoy a special nourishment, again denies the physicality of human existence: "government is the nourishment of humans" (238cl). Other poleis, like other parts of Earth mentioned earlier, have populations of diverse origins, a heterogeneity that predisposes them to

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having anomalous constitutions (particularly tyrannies and oligarchies, 238e3^4). This statement is truly ironic because at the end of the Peloponnesian War it was Athens that was beset by tyranny, oligarchy, and stasis. Athenians differ from other people because they are the children of one mother, and all are brothers (238e5-239al). There has been a unity of government since the beginning, and this is due to the citizens' equal birth (238el). Next, Aspasia gives a brief account of some aspects of Athens' mythical-historical past. She privileges the Marathonomachoi, the men who fought at Marathon, by stating that these men are not just the fathers of Athenians' bodies but also of their freedom (240d7-e3). This double paternity of the Marathonomachoi renders bodies and freedom parallel, just as Aspasia had made government and human sustenance parallel. She makes the men and their corporeal legacy of sons no longer wholly literal, just as she makes the spiritual legacy of freedom no longer wholly metaphorical. After reducing the Sicilian disaster to mere misfortune (edystychesan, "they suffered misfortune," 243a5), Aspasia declares that the Athenians were defeated only by themselves and that the ensuing stasis was mild because the Athenians are related to each other (243d7-244b3); this statement is acceptable because of Athens' superiority. As Loraux remarks, civil war becomes a fraternity.37 In a reprise of the language used to describe the wreck of the Sicilian campaign, Aspasia says the internal disarray at the end of the Peloponnesian War was caused not by echthra (enmity) but by dystychia (misfortune, 244a7-bl). Plato repeatedly injects sexually charged language into situations that are not necessarily sexual. In contrast to other poleis with inhabitants who were meixobarbaroi (245d4—5) Athens' status as homophylon ("one race," 244a2) allows its people to mix with each other again (synemeixan, 243e5). More use of this language also occurs when Athens is praised to a fault for being too kind (244el-245c6); the Athenians are too kind because they are "not mixed with barbarians" (amigeis barbaron, 245dl-2) and "we dwell unmixed with barbarians" (ou meixobarbaroi oikoumen, 245d4-5).38 Any pretense on the part of this speech and its speaker to render an objective account of the last one hundred years of Athenian history, including any claim to having analyzed the etiology of key events, is vitiated by the collapsing of categories in this account. Aspasia is herself

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a collapsed category, who both suppresses the more unpleasant facts of Athens' military defeats and stasis and was herself accused in comedy of having helped to cause war.39 In her speech within a speech, Aspasia reports the exhortations of the dead ancestors, particularly stressing the importance of eukleia and doxa, together with that of arete (247a4-b7); it is unmitigated sophistry to ally virtue with its mere reputation. And, in a supremely anti-Socratic move, the war dead, speaking through Aspasia, declare that the life of one who has shamed his forebears—not the unexamined life—is abioton ("not worth living," 246d6). The fallen warriors encourage their own fathers and mothers to bear the loss lightly (247c5-7; cf. 248b4-6); fathers are fit parents if they manfully bear the loss of their sons (247d7e5). Care for the departed warriors' wives and young children is entrusted to surviving children (248c5-dl); care of the fathers and sons of the dead, however, is entrusted to the polis (248d2-5). In a renewed erasure of women from the process of human reproduction, it is now the city that shall rear the war orphans and that will be both a son and heir to the dead, as well as a guardian to the elders, always caring for them (249a3-c3). The polis now occupies all the important roles, those of guardian, son, heir, and father (esp. at249b3-c3). This "second birth," out of the polis, is a theme developed pointedly by Plato in the Laws (11.926d8ff). Only by dying in war can the male citizen be valorized and reborn.40 And Plato, who makes Aspasia speak through Socrates, constructed a world that consists only of Athenian men and the city. Plato's Aspasia is a free-floating phallic signifier who anticipates the construction of Diotima as a kind of Robot-Maria in the perfect male world of his Symposium. Diotima's speech, with its affirmation that males alone matter, is only credible in a thought-world awash in the autochtonous fantasy established here in the Menexenus. The character of Diotima is not a stand-in for the historical Aspasia; rather, Plato constructed both females in order to validate what Katz calls the "dream of a world without women."41

Aeschines of Sphettos Aeschines of Sphettos (fl. 4th c. B.C.), Plato's contemporary, seems to have been the first ancient writer to create an Aspasia in whom eras and

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the search for arete are fused, and the first to have mentioned her in a positive light. To reconstruct his lost dialogue, Aspasia, from its refractions into various facets by later sources is a literary-historical problem of great magnitude. Aeschines' own bios (D.L. 2.60-64) is interesting and suggests conflict, real or imaginary, between himself and Plato. According to tradition, Plato resented and snubbed Aeschines, who, like Plato, had spent time at the Syracusan court (D.L. 2.60-62). It was additionally claimed that Xanthippe presented Socratic dialogues to Aeschines as a token of gratitude after Socrates' death, and that Aeschines passed these off as his own. This tradition of friendship between the great man's widow and his disciple makes Aeschines' relationship to Socrates and his family the opposite of Plato's portrayal of a Socrates emotionally estranged, and with good reason, from the doltish Xanthippe. Not altogether popular in his own day, Aeschines was the target of a hostile speech by Lysias, who called him a swindler, a deadbeat, and an adulterer who corrupted the wife of the perfume-seller Hermaeus.42 Although Aeschines has been overshadowed by Plato, his work enjoyed a time of high regard from the first century B.C. through the second century A.D., from which most citations of his Aspasia come. The dialogue, perhaps written as a reaction to Antisthenes' negative portrayal, has been persuasively reconstructed by Ehlers. As in the other Socratica in which her speech is reported, Aspasia herself does not appear; here, as in the Menexenus, she is quoted by Socrates. For the first and perhaps the only time in classical antiquity, the thought of "Aspasia" stands on its own—her speech is reported by a man, to be sure, but it is reported for its own sake and not primarily to attack or support a man. In fact, Aeschines may be said to have attempted to create a female subject.43 Aeschines' portrait of Aspasia seems to have differed radically from that seen in comedy, which had concentrated on her relationship with Pericles and on her motherhood. He may have transformed these negative treatments in a positive manner, making Aspasia independent of, if not actually in charge of, her lover(s). Ehlers believes that Aspasia was a hetaira (courtesan) in real life and was so represented in this dialogue, but that Aeschines muted the negative aspects of this status. I am not certain that it is possible for Aspasia to have been vividly or explicitly represented as a hetaira. If, as seems the case, Aeschines' dialogue purported that the wives of respectable men associated with

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her, it is unlikely that Aspasia could have been represented as a courtesan.44 The Aspasia was composed between 393 and 384 B.C., but its dramatic date is between 420 and 410 B.C. In the dialogue, Socrates converses with the wealthy Callias, who has asked him to recommend a teacher for his son. Socrates recommends Aspasia, for she had taught him. Aeschines' departure from standard characterizations is evident in his treatments of both Aspasia and Callias. In comedy and in Plato's work, Callias' character exemplifies the sad fact that expensive instruction does not necessarily bring wisdom; here, however, Aeschines apparently presents Callias' quest for instruction for his son without irony. It must also be noted that the dramatic date of the dialogue makes Aspasia not an attractive young woman but an older one, whose erotic life was presumably over.45 At first, Socrates' recommendation would have seemed ironic, and Callias probably asks Socrates for Aspasia's qualifications. Socrates may have begun by citing other women who taught men or behaved in "masculine" ways. Rhodogyne, queen of Persia, was Amazonian and adept at politics. Nothing, not even her beauty—which Philostratus would later contrast with her bellicosity— got in the way of Rhodogyne's political duties. Ehlers states that Rhodogyne, representing a "negative Haltung zum Eros," was contrasted with Aspasia. The Ionian courtesan Thargelia was cited as another exceptional woman; Thargelia had evidently earned political influence over her male lover(s) by giving wise counsel. Both Rhodogyne and Thargelia functioned in the political realm but with important differences: Rhodogyne was motivated by love of her own land and by her inherited position, whereas Thargelia had moved from Ionia to Macedon as an independent agent. It is significant that although all three women were exceptional, none was a copy of the other; neither Rhodogyne nor Thargelia was directly compared with Aspasia, nor did the dialogue aim to demonstrate "the intellectual and moral capacities of women as a gender.' '46 Aspasia was the next exceptional woman to be named. It is quite possible that Aeschines presented Aspasia as a medial figure between the Amazonian Rhodogyne and the hypersexual Thargelia. Nowhere in any fragments ever assigned to this dialogue did Aeschines clearly indicate that Aspasia was a hetaira. Her valence is more that of the partner and wise woman than the enchantress. In diaeretic fashion, Socrates cited as examples two men who had profited from her teaching—their eminence would have flattered Callias. Far from being the focus of this

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section of the dialogue, Pericles is used here as an example of Aspasia's skill as teacher. The story of Pericles' loss of composure at her trial may have indicated his political dependence on her as well as his devotion to her. Plut. Per. 24.5, possibly derived from Aeschines, suggests that both Pericles and Socrates were drawn to Aspasia because she was sophe (wise) and politike (politically astute). Ehlers believes that Aeschines recounted specific instances of Aspasia's actual influence over Pericles. One such example would have been her teaching of rhetoric to Pericles: he was clearly a star pupil.47 Oddly, Aspasia's relationship with Lysicles would have been more important to this dialogue than was her relationship with Pericles. Lysicles, an important Athenian politician of the 420s, is connected with Aspasia here for the first time in the datable testimonia; he was mentioned in this dialogue as even better evidence than Pericles of Aspasia's expertise. If she could make a success out of a mediocre man, then she was truly gifted.48 This dialogue probably did not mention that Aspasia bore Lysicles a son named Poristes ("provider/supplier"); the name is extraordinary, and Aspasia was probably too old to have borne Lysicles a child if their liaison began only after Pericles' death. It is likely that the word poristes was used of Aspasia herself in the dialogue and that something like tes rhetorikes ("of rhetorical skill") fell out of the text.49 After Aspasia's skill as a teacher of rhetoric was established, it remained to establish her usefulness as a teacher for Callias' son. Ehlers, who believes that Aspasia began her adult life as an actual hetaira, also seems to believe that Callias meant his son to receive both erotic and rhetorical instruction. The image of an older man sending his son to a woman for both is unprecedented; nonetheless, if we deny or cast doubt upon the possibility that Aspasia really was a hetaira, then we must explain what other kind of instruction she might provide a young man. It need not be necessary to assume that Aspasia's role was that of involved erotic pedagogue; in fact, nothing in her bios says she ever loved any man. The example of Xenophon and his wife, instructed by Aspasia, seems to have been adduced to show Aspasia's skill as a rhetorician, not as a lover. In fact, Cicero and Quintilian, who preserved this fragment, each cited it as an example of particularly fine argumentation. But it is clear that Aeschines' Aspasia here connects eros and arete. For example, as in Aeschines of Sphettos' dialogue, Socrates shows that Aspasia spoke with Xenophon's wife and Xenophon himself:

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Prisoner of History "Tell me, please, wife of Xenophon, if your neighbor had a better piece of gold jewelry than you, would you prefer hers or your own?" "Hers," said the wife. "So—if she should have a dress or other feminine ornament more expensive than what you have, would you prefer hers or yours?" "Hers, naturally," said the wife. "So now: what if that woman had a better husband than you? Would you prefer hers or your own?" Here the woman blushed. Aspasia, however, began to interrogate Xenophon himself, (frag. 31 Dittmar = Cic. Inv. Rhet. 1.31.51 ff.)

This dialectical strategy, which we have come to call Socratic, moves the discussants up along a set of not-quite-parallel alternatives—from choosing the best property to selecting the best spouse—and is basic to Greek thought; to ask whether one prefers the better or the worse alternative forces the respondent to declare that one wants the better. Aspasia interrogates not only the wife, but the husband as well. She eventually reminds both that in order to have the best spouse, one must be the best spouse.50 The rest of the conversation must have taken place between Xenophon and Aspasia, because the wife aporetically blushes and falls silent (cf. PL Euthydemus 275-277). In it, Aspasia declares that each partner in a marriage should become the best person possible so that each spouse's wish to have the best possible partner might be fulfilled. Significantly, virtue is sought in reference to another human being; eros is the locus of mutual commitment. Moreover, a woman and a man are together considered worthy of this joint pursuit. Each is one another's love object at the same time that they are themselves acting subjects. That Aspasia's bios speaks of Pericles' devotion to Aspasia and never the reverse problematizes Ehlers' contentions that Aspasia knew of eros' power through direct experience and that this experience was the foundation of her work and her success. Aspasia's advice to the wife of Xenophon does not "transcend" anything, nor does it suggest that one should or can run through a variety of mates in the search for an appropriate partner: her advice is contextually limited and must be followed over a long span of time. Because of the contextual limits of her prescription, one might label Aeschines' Aspasia as a relativist. The erotic path to virtue that Aspasia recommends is not abstract, theoretical, or sublimated, as it would be in Plato's Symposium; instead, it is specific and paved with earthly experience. Moreover, both women and men are

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granted an equal stake and responsibility in this partnership. Each is the subject of her or his own quest, even while functioning as the object of the other's. The humble materiality of the oikos and its mortal constitutors and continuants is starkly contrasted to the glittering wordplay that excises mortality and materiality in Plato's Menexenus. This fragment may represent a particular moment in the history of consciousness, namely, an early attempt to create a female subject.51 It is most significant that Aeschines set his dialogue in a time when Aspasia would have been an older woman, perhaps a graus (crone); she could have been figured as one who is liminally or symbolically/ anagogically erotic, rather than as participatively or actively so. This liminal eroticism is also a chief ingredient in Plato's representation of Socrates. The fact of Aspasia's old age balances whatever emphasis Aeschines might have placed on her erotic history. She is a crosser of boundaries, a woman who has had marriage-like relationships, but not marriages, with leaders of the polis and who advises husbands and wives to seek and to be the best possible spouse. It is entirely possible to consider the wisewoman as a credible instructress for the young man without making her carry an active erotic charge; for example, she might have been showing the son how to choose and educate a wife (see the discussion of Xenophon's Oeconomicus, in the next section). Aspasia shows the path to others; her participation as a sort of philosophic sex therapist (as twentieth-century sexology would have her be), is not required. Aeschines might well have identified Aspasia as apromnestris ("matchmaker") in this dialogue and meant it in a literal sense. That function of matchmaker resembles those functions Plato's and Xenophon's Socrates assigns himself—which he would describe literally and metaphorically as pander, fellow hunter, matchmaker, and midwife.52

Xenophon Xenophon (ca. 430-356 B.C.) carries significant portions of Aspasia's bios in his Socratica, the Memorabilia and the Oeconomicus; the two passages in which she is mentioned are both thought to have derived from Aeschines' Aspasia. Scholars devoted to the Quellenforschung of Aeschines' dialogue have not paid much attention to Xenophon's own use of Aspasia.53 Several other sections of the Memorabilia, of the Oeconomicus, and

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of Xenophon's Symposium touch upon Aspasia's biographical tradition. As is conventional, Aspasia neither appears as a character nor speaks directly. But Socrates presents her as an authority and as a friend whom he has frequently visited; she is evidently truthful, intelligent, and trustworthy. Socrates' offer, in the Oeconomicus, to introduce Aspasia to Critoboulus so that she might tell him about the proper training of spouses is comparable to the situation in Plato's Menexenus, where Socrates also promises to take his interlocutor to hear Aspasia, and to the situation in Aeschines' Aspasia, where Socrates recommends that Callias engage Aspasia to teach his son. In the Oeconomicus and the Memorabilia, Xenophon evokes a woman whose life and thought were neither dependent on nor mediated by her sexual relationship with Pericles. She is presented as an authority on male-female relationships, but Xenophon's Aspasia is neither power hungry nor exclusively sexual. Whereas Plato presents Aspasia ironically as an analyst and practitioner of a bankrupt rhetoric, a rhetoric that creates a temporary illusion, a seeming death, a meaningless logos void of ergon, Xenophon makes Aspasia's ability to detect truth and falsehood in the reports of matchmakers a positive thing. Moreover, her reputed ability to educate spouses, taken with her advice that marriages be made honestly, shows her to be interested in helping create ethical and lasting partnerships. Unlike the temporary illusion produced by residence in epitaphian ou-topia, the deceit or openness of the matchmaker and the suitability of a spouse will be endured for many years by husband and wife alike; as Aspasia says, deceived parties will hate both each other and the matchmaker (Mem. 2.6.36). Aspasia, like the Muses, knows lies and truth: Xenophon's Aspasia knows, speaks, and advocates the private truth proper to courtship and marriage, not the glittering public lies of the epitaphios. Nevertheless, Xenophon's Aspasia scarcely transcends her position as secondary to the interests and requirements of men's discourse; Xenophon merely deploys "Aspasian" ideas in a new way, showing us a Socrates who appropriates attributes of the woman and of femininity to his own ends.

The Memorabilia The Memorabilia, or more properly, the Apomnemoneumata, recollects brief conversations between Socrates and various persons. The reference

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to Aspasia as one who understands the duties of the matchmaker is found in its second book, wherein Socrates and the young Critoboulus converse about the proper way to estimate the quality of worthwhile philoi ("friends," or male lovers). A close reading of this section shows how Aspasia, whose bios had never before associated her with male courtship, comes to be cited as a helpful authority in that endeavor.54 At the beginning of this discussion (Mem. 2.6.1), the language is nonsexual. One should carefully consider the prior behavior of a prospective "friend"; his treatment of his old friends can be compared with his treatment of his animals says Socrates (2.6.7). The pursuit of friends can be likened to a hunt (2.6.8; the term is qualified by Socrates at 2.6.9-10). An element of enchantment, resembling the Sirens' song to Odysseus, enters the search (2.6.11); the image of beautiful women is used at this point to exemplify the dangers of sexual allure. When Critoboulus asks if Socrates knows any other spells, the latter replies, "No, but I've heard that Pericles knew many, and using them on the city made it love him" (2.6.13). The politician's relationship to the city is described as lover-like, Pericles' charming language is assimilated into the charm of courtship, and male courtship imagery describes other pursuits.55 Next, Socrates, expatiates on how "noble friendship" helps the man of public life (2.6.21-27); the language is not yet sexually charged, but suddenly Socrates slips seamlessly into the theme of erotic pursuit (2.6.28-29). He once again mentions the Sirens' song as an inducement to erotic friendship, and men, transsexed, are now the Sirens (2.6.31). The feminized city, which consists of autochthonous men, "feels" a human emotion. The kind of friends Critoboulus wishes to attract is once more made clear; they are lovers, and the pursuit of lovers is again a hunt (2.6.2728; cf. 2.6.8-10). The usual terminology of erastesi'eromenos (active lover/passive beloved) is absent here, although sexual intimacy is clearly the object (e.g., see 2.6.6) and Xenophon straightforwardly employs the literal terminology in the Symposium. Socrates now offers to assist Critoboulus by informing any would-be friend that Critoboulus admires him, naming himself an adept at the hunt, a syntheros (' 'fellow hunter," 2.6.36; cf. Ar. Plut. 157). He is a third party who will help Critoboulus in courting.56 The possible means of winning a friend have now been established: these consist of charms, spells, honest praise, and the help of a fellow

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hunter. It is at this point that Critoboulus suggests that Socrates need not scruple in his reports to prospective lovers. Of course, Socrates declines to lie about something so important; Aspasia, who recommends veracity to matchmakers, is associated here with an open and truthful logos, one whose original audience was heterosexual: CRITOBOULUS: "Why then . . . do you tell me this, brought Phidias envy and Pericles slander, from the rumor that Phidias pimped free Athenian women for Pericles when they came to see his work in progress" (13.15).27 In the earlier part of this entire description, Pericles' enemies had characterized the city as a preening impostor woman; here, the chief beautifier of the city pimps for the head of state. The comic poets take up the tale (13.15), making the slander more specific by charging that Pericles had corrupted the wife of another strategos (elected general)

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and that one Pyrilampus had given peacocks to several other female conquests of Pericles. The most damning charge Plutarch reports is that of Stesimbrotus, who accuses Pericles of corrupting his own daughterin-law. That Plutarch disbelieves these charges is apparent in the words he uses to report them: phthonon, blasphemian (envy and slander, 13.15, 13.16); the accusers are men of riotous and improvident ways (satyrikous tois biois), and Stesimbrotus' story is a dreadful and abominable impiety (deinon asebema kai mysodes). Thus, Plutarch deflects charges of Pericles' sexual impropriety by accusing the accusers of equal or worse misbehavior. Once Pericles has consolidated his rule, a string of adulatory metaphors describes how he governs—he is the city's doctor and teacher, and favors using a rein and a rudder to guide the people (14—16). His fiscal honesty is emphasized, as well as his immediate family's resentment of his household economies (15.3,16.4—5), a trait that Anaxagoras bears with somewhat more humor (16.8-9). Plutarch stresses the grandeur of Pericles' vision (17.4, on the Congress decree; cf. 21.1), as well as his reluctance to waste Athenian lives in connection with the revolt of Euboea and the Spartan invasion (18, 21-23). Prudence, foresight, and the conservation of Athenian lives are the hallmarks of Pericles' policy, things to which his deathbed utterance will allude. The expedition to Samos and Aspasia's putative role in it occasion Plutarch's discussion of Aspasia, managed in a brief transition (24.1-2). Plutarch's first and longest discussion of her (24.2-11; 25.1) bears careful reading. In it, Plutarch assembles much reportage but endorses almost none of it. The only things in the bios that he seemed to believe were her birthplace and her father's name: "It is agreed (homologeitai) that she was a Milesian and the daughter of Axiochus" (24.3). He immediately balances this assertion by not agreeing that Aspasia arrived in Athens as a new Thargelia: "But they say" (phasi d' . . . , 24.3). It is surprising that some modern historiographers are so certain about Aspasia's life because Plutarch, the source most often followed, expressed anything but certainty about it. His first words to describe his aim are highly tentative: entauth' an eie kairos diaporesai malista peri tes anthropou ("Perhaps it would be timely to raise the question about this individual here," 24.2). As Philip Stadter aptly translates, diaporesai means "to raise the question about"; the verb indicates doubt and questioning. Plutarch was willing enough to report what others said

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about her, but he specifically located this reportage within the web of conjecture. Even when reporting what others have written about Aspasia, Plutarch casts doubt upon the information, allowing only "this much of historia'' (24.7) in the Menexenus' report, namely, that Aspasia had the reputation of discussing rhetoric with many Athenians. As for her supposed maternity, Plutarch notes that "Apparently (dokei) Pericles had a bastard by her," specifying that Eupolis made (pepoiekeri) Pericles the character ask about his bastard (24.10). He also reports as conjectural both her alleged role in the beginning of the Samian War (dokei, 24.2) and her emulation of Thargelia (24.3). Likewise disclaimed are the statements that Pericles kissed her when he came and went ("as they say," has phasi, 24.9) and that Pericles sought her because she was wise and politic (sophe kai politike, 24.5, reported with "they say," legousi).2S Use of the phrase "they say" also appears to disclaim the report that Socrates and company visited Aspasia, even though her occupation was not at all nice. Plutarch's conclusion to this chapter, with its brief remarks upon the concubine of Cyrus, sometimes called "Aspasia II" (24.11-12), forms a logical if somewhat unexpected end. He had introduced Aspasia of Miletus with the pointedly neutral he anthropos ("this individual") and noted that it would be apanthropon ("misanthropic") not to mention her namesake. The fame and character of the Milesian ("Aspasia I"), who allegedly held men in thrall (echeirosato) and occasioned philosophers neither a bad nor a short logos (24.2), explain why Cyrus renamed his favorite concubine for her. The life of Thargelia, the Milesian's supposed model, also comes into play. For Thargelia, "they say" (phasi d', 24.3), turned Hellenes to the Persian cause; Aspasia I, the object of Pericles' erotic love, reportedly urged him to make war on her homeland's enemy, and finally, Aspasia II gained influence at the Persian court due to the fortunes of war.29 But despite (or perhaps because of) all these data and all these sources, Aspasia remains a mystery. First, Plutarch qualifies most of the information. She is not described physically, although the early mention of Thargelia's beauty (24.4) may suggest that Aspasia too was lovely.30 Plutarch neither answers all the questions his account raised, nor explicitly solves its inconsistencies. He twice mentions the hostile tradition that Aspasia was the alleged instigator of the Samian War (24.1-2,

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25.1); Plutarch, however, consistently defends Pericles' prosecution of the war and squelches Duris' stories about its atrocities (28.2-3), noting that neither Ephorus nor Thucydides recounts these details and concluding that Samos, a grave threat to Athens, carne close to wresting naval supremacy from her (28.8). I find Plutarch's failure to refute the specific charges against Aspasia to be telling: he believed that they were so ridiculous as to require no response and furthermore subtly suggested that Samos needed to be dealt with firmly. In another work, Plutarch mentions this very charge against Aspasia as the kind of statement characteristic of a writer who was dysmenes and kakoethes (De mat. Hdt. 855F-856A). Evidence of careful source criticism can be seen in Plutarch's use of qualifiers such as "on the one hand some say." Stadter believes that "Plutarch clearly accepts the notion that Aspasia supported herself by running a brothel." Because Plutarch's reference to her occupation occurs within a clause that begins "and some say, on the one hand, that . . . ," it does not follow that Plutarch himself believed Aspasia kept a brothel. In fact, Plutarch concedes belief in only one aspect of Aspasia's personality, namely, that Pericles was erotically devoted to her. The evidence for this is that after Pericles' amicable divorce, he "cherished extraordinarily" (esterxe diapherontos, 24.89).31 The next mention of Aspasia comes after Plutarch has provided more information about Pericles' life. After concluding his account of the Samian War and recounting Elpinike's rebuke to Pericles, Plutarch goes on to a discussion of the onset of the Peloponnesian War (29-32). Despite diplomatic efforts to rescind the Megarian decree—a move that Plutarch believed could have helped avoid the war (29.7-8), tensions mounted. Megara denied responsibility for an Athenian messenger's death, blaming Pericles and Aspasia in what Plutarch calls "notorious and vulgar little verses" (periboetois, demodesi, 30.4). These verses are, in fact, the famous lines from Aristophanes' Acharnians. Again, Plutarch's opinion is noncommittal, and he notes "ten men oun archen hopos eschen ou radian gnonai" ("but as far as how it began, it isn't easy to know," 31.1). Plutarch then discusses the persecution of Pericles' associates. The account of Phidias' trial and imprisonment (31.25) precedes and dwarfs the account of the persecutions of Aspasia and Anaxagoras (32). Just as Phidias earlier had been accused of pimping free women for Pericles, so too is Aspasia now accused (32.1). After a

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brief mention of Aspasia's prosecution, Plutarch continues with discussion of Anaxagoras and of Pericles' expenditures (32.2—4) before returning to her acquittal, a decision reached, "as Aeschines says," by Pericles' crying and begging (32.5); the language used resembles that found in the report that Aspasia had begged for war against Samos (24.1-2), a report that Plutarch disqualified. Plutarch completes this portion of the Life by noting to d'alethes addon ("the truth is unclear," 32.6) in regard to Pericles' protection of Phidias and the civic wrath he had incurred. Plutarch opened and concluded this part of the Life with expressions of skepticism.32 A "ring" can be seen, enclosed in doubt: 31.1 "it is not easy to know" 31.2-5 Phidias 32.1-2 Aspasia, Anaxagoras 32.3-4 trial proceedings 32.5 Aspasia, Anaxagoras 32.6 Phidias; "the truth is unclear" The next section contains an account of ineffective Spartan attempts to revive interest in the legend of the curse upon the Alcmaeonids and an account of the Spartan invasion (33.1-6). Of all the comic choruses that attacked Pericles, Plutarch singles out Hermippus' verses, which called Pericles "king of the satyrs" (33.7-8, discussed in chapter 2). As the Life of Pericles continues, the plague malignly robs Pericles of the opportunity for success; the leader is further savaged by the demos, who attack him as one attacks a father or doctor (34.4-5). The final expedition's aim is to heal (iasthai, 35.1), but Pericles is stripped of his strategia and fined (35.4). Nor can Pericles find peace at home. Xanthippus ridicules Pericles (36.4), and Stesimbrotus is reported to have alleged that Xanthippus himself spread slander about Pericles and his daughter-in-law (36.6). Xanthippus dies of the plague unreconciled with his father, and Pericles loses his sister and many other relatives and friends (36.6-7). Plutarch declares that Pericles retained his composure until his son Paralus was laid out, only then bursting into violent tears, a thing that he had never done before (36.9). The assertion that Pericles wept like this but once may have been another way of undermining the veracity of the account of Pericles' tears at Aspasia's trial. When recalled to his strategia, Pericles returns without enthusiasm (37.1), but nonetheless has the presence of mind to ask for a personal

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exemption to the law about nothoi, lest his own name and family die out. The nothos is enrolled in the phratry, and Pericles gives him his own name (37.5). Curiously, the man who best led Athens is portrayed as an outsider; estranged from his family, he entrusts his household accounts to a slave (16.6). Not content to remain with his legitimate wife and rarely in attendance at family functions, he has a deep friendship (philia) with Phidias (13.14) and an erotic love (erotike agapesis) for a foreign woman whom he cherishes extraordinarily (24.7-8).33 Uncritical readings of these sections of Plutarch's Life of Pericles have helped define Aspasia as the planful courtesan who starts wars and holds a great statesman in thrall. I believe that Plutarch considered Aspasia's nature to have been unknowable—that even though such a characterization had been suggested by earlier (unreliable) sources, her nature was by now indefinable. The effect of Plutarch's mention of so many of these sources, even though he seems to have done so only to discount or cast doubt upon them, nonetheless makes Aspasia the archetype of the sexually alluring and politically influential courtesan. The importance of such a construction cannot be stressed enough. To continue to construct Aspasia as a powerful prostitute, and to not read the ancient sources critically and historicize them as necessary, is to nativize two beliefs: first, that an intellectual woman's importance and influence are ultimately traceable to her manipulation of her own sexuality, and second, that intellectual women do not act autonomously, but rather upon and through men. As we shall see, uncritical readings of Plutarch, whose works were influential in the European Renaissance, helped foster the image of Aspasia that is still favored.

The End of the Pagan Tradition Thanks to Plutarch, we have an integrated summation of views about Aspasia. Other Greek intellectuals also mentioned her, but they refracted the wholistic Plutarchan view, using bits and pieces of her bios for purposes ranging from edification and rhetorical persuasion to sheer amusement. Yet, the presence of Aspasia across various discourses in the high and late Empire attests to her ability to function as a revenant of Socrates, Pericles, and the heyday of Athens.34 The sophist Maximus of Tyre (ca. 125-185) claimed to be a follower of Plato and, in his orations, eulogized Socrates. In a passage derivative

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of the Socratica, Maximus identifies Socrates as foremost of the philosophers who exhorted in common talk rather then enigmatically:' 'We hear you many times affirming that you honor episteme more than anything, and recommending one teacher to one youth, and another to another—for example, even exhorting Callias to send his son to Aspasia the Milesian: a man to a woman! You yourself, an elderly man, frequent her company. Nor does she suffice as your teacher, but you glean for yourself erotics from Diotima, music from Konnos, poetics from Euenos, farming from Ischomachus, and geometry from Theodorus" (Oral. 38.4.b-d; cf. 24.4). This scrap is important because it indicates the syncretistic practice of sophists such as Maximus; he cobbled together his Socrates from portrayals in Plato, Aeschines, and Xenophon. Nor did Maximus care particularly about Aspasia, Diotima, or any woman's intellectual capabilities; they, and male teachers, are mentioned as purveyors of knowledge and skill to Socrates and his followers.35 Lucian of Samosata, Maximus of Tyre's more famous contemporary, used Aspasia with great facility in several of his satirical and epideictic works. In some respects, Lucian reprised all the previous treatments of Aspasia, but because he presents Aspasia both seriously and, as was more often the case, humorously, it is impossible to speculate on his actual view of her. In his Imagines, a woman's portrait is planned and discussed in a dialogue between Lykinos and Polystratos. They decide that earlier women shall be models for this portrait: Aspasia, Theano the Pythagorean, Sappho, and Diotima reflect the subject's intellect. Polystratos additionally invokes the virtuous Theano, wife of Antenor; Arete and her daughter, Nausicaa; and Penelope: Next, her wisdom and understanding (sophia and synesis) must be represented. We shall need many examples there, mostly ancient ones, and one Ionic like herself. Aeschines the friend of Socrates and Socrates himself represented her, both of them exceedingly true craftsmen because they worked with eros. That example is the famous Aspasia of Miletus, with whom the most wonderful Olympian <sc. Pericles> lived. Putting before us