The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [73]
She was a woman called Aspasia.
17
ASPASIA – SOPHE KAI POLITIKE, WISE AND POLITICALLY ASTUTE
Piraeus harbour, c. 470–411 BC
The resident aliens of Athens include not only Greeks from other states, but many Phrygians, Lydians, Syrians, and other assorted barbarians.1
WHEN ASPASIA STEPPED OFF THAT BOAT in Piraeus, she brought with her the whiff of Eastern spices and the whiff of trouble. She was a girl from Miletus, the natural harbour that lies low, just inland on the Turkish coast. It was a rich, busy little place, perfectly situated to trade both with ocean-edged civilisations and deep into the interior of Anatolia via the Maeander valley.
Miletus is a settlement with a profound history.2 It is where the Mycenaean Greeks and the Hittites fell out a long time ago – its name is scratched into those clay tablets that bear Linear B, the Greek writing that pulled Europe forward from prehistory in around 1450 BC. AS early as 1260 BC, this settlement in the Asian land-mass belonged to the Greeks. At its height its territories were larger than most other contemporary Greek poleis. But come the early fifth century BC, Miletus was back in Eastern hands – and in 494 BC the archaic city was razed to the ground and many thousands of Milesians were slaughtered. A year longer under the Persian yoke than the Athenians, Milesians must have watched, dismayed, powerless, as Athens, the new ‘protector’ of the eastern Mediterranean, in 479 BC stepped in to take control over some of the Milesians’ long-fought-for trade-routes and allies. Injury added to injury.
Today Miletus is plagued by gnats. Lying low in marshy mudflats, the ruins here can, at times, be immersed neck-deep in water. You may have to hitch-hike your way in and out of the ancient site, as the tourist buses are few and far between. But even so, the remaining stones chronicle a distant, impressive culture.
There has always been something a little special about Miletus. Inevitable perhaps. Stretching west from the Bati Mentes mountains, her foothills today bristle with olive trees, and the unfeasibly fertile Maeander valley is soft with fields of cotton. This was a valuable natural exit point westwards for the Persian Empire (which in the early fifth century spread from north of the Hindu Kush to southern Arabia), and a gentle segue east for Ionian Greeks. Sitting as it does on a cultural crossroads, Miletus nurtured an unlikely number of original thinkers: Thales, who identified water as a building block of all life; Hippodamus, the architect who laid out the town of Piraeus; Anaximander, who voiced a notion of ecosystem and ecology – that the physical world is a finely balanced game between the weak and the strong and who set down the first map in the sixth century BC.3 Many of those men who provided new ideas for Athens had started life in Miletus. And somehow, whether as a courtesan or the daughter of a noble, the young girl Aspasia has managed to get herself an education in this enlightening coastal city.
Triple-trouble in Athenian eyes, because Aspasia was not only from the East, not only educated, but was, of course, a female of the species. Women, in the fifth century BC, were generally objects of fear and revulsion. Aspasia would have been considered a ‘leaky’ being, someone who oozed pollution from her genitalia, her mouth, even her eyes. Hippocrates (the Greek medical expert from Cos whose lifespan almost exactly matches Socrates’ own) explains that menstrual blood accumulates in the female body because this sex is organically porous. One of the reasons such a sump-residue gathers is because of women’s ‘sedentary’ lifestyle.4 At the moment of menstruation, women were thought to be infectious in all kinds of ways.
Aristotle elaborates. He explains that because the