The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [75]
Yet Aspasia’s chances of self-advancement were limited. The general Pericles, remember, had passed a law in 451 BC restricting entry to the democratic club. Now only the children of Athenian citizen fathers and mothers could themselves become citizens.20 If Aspasia settled in the city, if she bore children, she was destined to be the mother only of a sub-class of nothoi – bastards.21 The Academy and the Lyceum would be too good for her offspring; their only place of exercise would be the Kynosarges, the ‘White Bitch’ gym.
Despite her disadvantages, like a handful of other determined women at this time, Aspasia does seem to have been able to escape the tedious grind of weaving or sexual servicing, or both, that was the fate of most foreign females in Athens.22 Metics such as she were not tenderly treated by the law, but from the 450s onwards an increasingly institutionalised option of pallakia – concubinage – emerged, where a woman could enjoy not the protection a wife commanded, but some kind of formal (contractual even) relationship with relatively high-born male citizens. By all accounts, malign and benign, Aspasia kept her wits about her. This was an opening that the young refugee seems to have quickly exploited. Although the bawdy renditions of her life suggest that much of what we know of Aspasia was made up, the fact that she attracts so much attention suggests there must have been something special about this girl from the East. Perhaps it was the Lydian rose-oil she used on her skin, the speed of her retorts, the intimate knowledge of new ideas she brought with her from Anatolia’s shores. Because within a few years of arriving at Athens we find Aspasia – as a highly respected concubine-cum-companion – sitting at the very highest table, in Pericles’ household.
There were plenty of ménages à trois in classical Athens. But Pericles’ wife, whom he married in about 463 BC and who was the mother of his two sons, had been disposed of: divorced five or six years before Aspasia arrived. In Athens at this time divorce was relatively simple – effected by mutual consent or on the initiation of a third party. We don’t know exactly how or when, but by 444 BC Aspasia had moved into Pericles’ household. Pericles seems to have cared not a jot for the dynastic hurdle he had put in his own path. His focused sexual energy obliterated it. Aspasia became his consort, his intellectual sparring partner, his lover. For the last fifteen years of his life, until his death in 429 BC, Pericles was elected as ‘chief democrat’ every year – and Aspasia was with him at every turn. Contemporary sources recounted disapprovingly that the two would kiss in public every morning: they were savaged by comic playwrights, and no doubt slandered in the Agora:
Stasis and elderborn Time,
mating with one another
birthed a very great tyrant
whom the gods call ‘head-gatherer’.
Shameless Lust bears him Hera-Aspasia,
a dog-eyed concubine.23
But despite the tongue-wagging through the streets of Athens, the General seems to have stuck by his unorthodox consort. Almost certainly Aspasia was with him to his death. How did she do it? How, in a city crammed with foreign, available women, with exotic beauties, did she manoeuvre herself to be the General’s choice? How did she become one of those lucky ones who laced gold earrings through their ears, or wound