Aspasia, the leading character in The Immigrant Queen, has been recognised throughout history as a woman of remarkable achievement. She rose from an obscure background as an immigrant outsider, possibly trafficked to Athens as a sex-worker, possibly a distant relative of a member of Pericles’ clan, to become far and away the most important woman in the city. She was the lover and effectively the wife of Pericles, although since she was an immigrant she could not formally marry a citizen.
I try to bring out the scale of her achievement in my novel and to make clear her outstanding combination of passion and ability. But beyond that there must have been something that drove her to confront and overcome the many obstacles in her way.
What Aspasia wanted
There are perhaps five factors that combined to make Aspasia what she was: intellect, wisdom, passion and the desire for glory.
- She was an intellectual, the only woman member of Socrates’ circle. She figures as Diotima in Plato’s philosophical dialogue, The Symposium. Some modern commentators believe that she influenced Socrates’ techniques of argument and certainly he describes her as “the person who taught me how to argue”. She published her own respected dialogues that are quoted by Xenophon and other philosophers). She must have been well-educated, unusual for a woman in Athens.
- She was also a feminist in a society where Demosthenes sums up what men expected of women thus: “we keep sex-workers for the sake of pleasure, female slaves for our daily care and wives to give us legitimate children”. She probably established a school exclusively for the education of women and may have taught in her own philosophical academy as Plato and Aristotle did. It is likely that while most male citizens were well educated in a society with a sophisticated literature, some of which survives to this day, very few women were. I seek to describe her struggles to redress the balance.
- She is described as wise by Xenophon and as politically astute by others. Contemporaries note that she wrote some of Pericles’ best-known speeches and advised him on the tactics to use in handling the Assembly of citizens. These include suggesting the introduction of an attendance payment so that lower-income workers, Pericles’ power-base, could afford to attend.
Aspasia in love
- She was a passionate woman, very much in love with Pericles, the leading citizen in the Athenian democracy and he loved her. Plutarch writes that they never failed to kiss when he left the house for the Council every morning. Other writers, including Aristophanes in his political satire, The Acharnians, comment on how affectionate her relationship with Pericles was and how much influence on him she had. (Archarnia was a rural suburb of Athens) When the political enemies of Pericles and her project – to establish a firm basis for democracy in the city against the former aristocracy – accused her of blasphemy, Pericles wept openly in court as the trial seemed to go against her.
Blasphemy was a serious charge, carrying the death penalty. Socrates was executed for blasphemy, and Phidias the sculptor, a close friend of Pericles, died in prison when convicted of the offence. Immigrants, such as Aspasia were especially vulnerable to this charge since they were presumed to come from a city where alien gods were worshipped. One much later source claims that she stripped in court to remind the jury of what they would lose if they convicted her, but this is probably a slander by Pericles’ enemies and I do not include it in the novel.
She was also very attractive and had a powerful presence enough to make credible the idea that she modelled for the statue of Athene on the Parthenon, the holiest place in Athens (illustrated here).
The thirst for glory
- Another explanation is a distinctively Greek desire for glory, which is sometimes hard for moderns, who often see success in terms of money, security or happiness, difficult to understand. The Greek world-view, unlike the Christian tradition, saw our time in this world as a brief bright episode, followed by a miserable shadow-life in the darkness of Hades. Only a few male heroes might aspire to the splendour of the Elysian Fields.
Greeks vied for glory – to make a name that will be remembered and not go down to the shadows with their souls. It was glory that drove Achilles, hero of The Iliad to fight and die young on the plains of Troy rather than live out a life as an old man, crouched by the fire in a forgotten kingdom. Homer called him “the greatest of the Greeks” and he is remembered wherever people read Homer’s work.
Aspasia’s achievements were glorious and outshine those of any other of the famous women of Athens. Perhaps she was driven by the hunger for glory, just as the men of the city were. She deserves the same treatment as the men of her city, but received less attention after the fall of Athens. Her philosophical work was not copied out by the scribes of Alexandria, unlike that of male thinkers, and we have lost it apart from a small number of respectful quotations.
Why men forgot her
The fact that we now talk of her less than we do of Pericles, her husband, or Alcibiades of Athens or Socrates (who may also have been her lover) is unfortunate since her achievement, considering her starting point, is even more impressive than theirs. That is one of the reasons I wrote The Immigrant Queen.
Aspasia was an intelligent, wise, well-educated and beautiful woman, but what drove her to attain the leading position for a woman in the city that dominated the Eastern Mediterranean? There is no firm answer but perhaps all five of the above explanations contribute to the truth. If she wished to pursue knowledge, express and develop her ideas in the company of other thinkers, to claim some of the opportunities that men had in her society and to live as she wished with her lover, to be Aspasia, First Lady of Athens, she simply had no alternative. She must struggle in a city that largely ignored women and despised immigrants and finally succeed. The life is what I seek to portray in The Immigrant Queen.
The Immigrant Queen is available from Waterstones and most book shops and ebook outlets.
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