The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [74]
This was a notion codified throughout Athenian culture. In 594 BC the reformer and law-giver Solon arranged (allegedly) that any woman walking the streets should be thought of as a prostitute.7 Fathers could enslave children only when they were female and ‘damaged goods’ (girls who had lost their virginity), in which case they could be legally sold off as prostitutes. Respectable women of this period were expected to be seen and not to be heard.8 Xenophon promotes the view in his book Household Management: ‘So it is seemly for a woman to remain at home and not be out of doors; but for a man to stay inside, instead of devoting himself to outdoor pursuits, is disgraceful.’9 And again that women should ‘see and hear as little as possible, and ask the fewest possible questions’.10 Censure barbed the Athenian argot: ‘… It is not proper for girls to weave through the crowd’.11 Young women in particular were not to be trusted. The orator Hyperides points out that ‘a woman who leaves the house ought to be at the stage in life where people who meet her ask not whose wife she is, but whose mother.’12 The truly good Athenian woman even trembled in the presence of her male relatives: ‘He came there at night in a drunken state, broke down the doors, and entered the women’s rooms: within were my sister and my nieces, whose lives have been so well-ordered that they are ashamed to be seen even by their kinsmen.’13
So most Athenian women either were silent – or have since been silenced by their absence from the written record. Even if they were allowed to speak out in their day (unlikely), they have left us no account and so have escaped history. They are faceless; voiceless, textless, anonymous.
Not so Aspasia. She is one of the few women who have been written in to the story of Golden Age Athens.
Aspasia turns up in Greek comedies and orators’ speeches, in Roman moral tales and Victorian operettas. In antiquity she is described as that ‘dog-eyed concubine’ (pallaken kynopida),14 a woman-for-sale (porne).15 She rarely features as anything less than lubricious, a voracious flirt. There’s much double entendre; she will ‘know’ both young and old men in Athens. She needs little introduction, other than that ‘we all know what she is like’. There is nothing at all to tell us that Aspasia was in fact debauched, but debauched she became. By the time that Clearchus of Soli was writing, 150 years after her birth, this young woman inhabits a disgusting, murky place. In his Erotika, Aspasia is listed alongside the man who tries to have sex with a statue, but has to make do with a slab of meat or an animal in season.16
Of course, we do not know that any of these wet-lipped accounts are true; in fact, the only intimidating thing we know about Aspasia for certain is that she was energetic, and clever.17
In the salons that Pericles sponsored, Aspasia was an attractive anomaly.
But before she ends up riffing with Socrates, before she shares dinner and a bed with the great statesman-general Pericles and, in the minds of the Athenians, tempts him to dark deeds, we need to take a step back. First Aspasia must make her mark in ‘violet-crowned’ Athens.
She arrives at the polyglot port of Piraeus in around 450 BC, perhaps in the 440s, apparently fatherless and on her own.18 Aspasia is a representative of the influx of ‘alien’ population so disapproved of by a number of Athenians,