The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [77]
Plato’s Socrates goes further, ironically citing Aspasia as his teacher in rhetoric.34 They were, it seems, close – the philosopher’s intellectual intimacy with this ‘trumped-up whore’35 was one reason his fellow citizens turned against him. Of her he said, ‘I have an excellent mistress in the art of rhetoric – she who has made so many good speakers, and one who was the best among all the Hellenes, Pericles, the son of Xanthippus …’36 In one text Socrates credits Aspasia with composing Pericles’ funeral speech,37 and some modern historians of the ancient world still consider her to be the ‘power behind Pericles’ throne’.38
Socrates described Aspasia as possessing a perfect mind, as being the finest of politicians – and yet she has consistently been downgraded in the story of fifth-century Athens. At best she is described as Pericles’ manipulative sidekick and the mistress of ‘a house of procurement’. Plato, too, can be less than flattering. He talks of Aspasia synkollosa, ‘gluing together’ words. As you might expect, perhaps because she was unusually gabby, perhaps because of prejudice and blackballing, Aspasia is first written into the historical record not as a feisty and inspirational young woman, but as a troublemaker.
Aspasia’s part in the revolt of Samos
Aspasia’s nemesis was the island of Samos. Samos nestles up to the coastline of Anatolia – from the coast road in Asia it feels within spitting distance; a dream island you want to reach out to, to make real. Recent sub-marine excavations in the area have revealed how busy this stretch of the coastline was in Socrates’ day. In 2002 sponge-divers uncovered the wreck of a local trading vessel, packed with retsina and amphoras – the cargo is a reminder of the natural wealth of the region.39 The blind marble ‘eyes’ of the boat, found on the seabed, would have stared out over the deeply wooded green hills of western Asia Minor and fruit hanging fat on the branches.
Destined by geography to be a footfall between Asia and Europe, Samos has always fiercely guarded its independence. Since the sixth century BC its main city had been ringed with a stone curtain wall – a protection that reached up to 5.2 metres in some places. But now that Athens was mother-henning it across the eastern Mediterranean, the Samians found they were being commanded to sign up to a democratic charter. The ruling oligarchs wanted none of it. And thus the island of Samos, 200 miles due east of Athens, was, between 440 and 439 BC, brutally suppressed for ‘anti-democratic’ activity.
Samos was a member of the Delian League, but entirely autonomous; she maintained her own fleet, she paid no tribute, she kept Athens at arm’s length. And in 440 the island chose to bully the rich settlement of Miletus, Aspasia’s home-town, a morning’s row to the south. The acrid dispute between Samos and Miletus in fact concerned the city of Priene. Samos laid claim to Priene – a handily placed, pliable little settlement traditionally subject to its loftier neighbours, the Milesians, across a wide bay on the Anatolian western coast.
The Milesians could not defend themselves, but they did pay tribute to Athens and so, the argument went, Athens should now provide them with protection. Wiped clean by the Persians just fifty years before, then watching as Athenians efficiently picked off their territories and allies, the Milesians were in no state to fight their own battles. Early in 440 BC a delegation of desperate Milesian diplomats arrived at the Athenian Assembly, begging Athens for help. Pericles responded swiftly and decisively – fifty Athenian triremes were sent to teach the Samians a lesson.
It is a mark of Athens’ confidence and sense of superiority in the eastern Mediterranean that Athenians felt justified when it came to the ‘Samos Question’ in fielding an indisputably interventionist foreign policy.40 But it would mark the beginning of a lifetime of trouble. Pericles was proving that Athens could put her money where her mouth was; yet the General’s critics didn’t like the idea of making an enemy of a powerful