Aspasia was born in the Ionian city of Miletus around 470 BCE and arrived in Athens as a young woman, where her circumstances allowed her — uniquely among women of her time — to associate openly with male citizens. She became the lifelong partner of Pericles, the greatest of Athenian statesmen, after he divorced his Athenian wife to live with her; their son was eventually granted citizenship by special decree. She ran what would now be called a salon, attended by Socrates and other thinkers (Plato has Socrates ascribe to her his understanding of love and rhetoric in the Menexenus). Pericles' funeral oration over the Athenian war dead in the first year of the Peloponnesian War — the most famous speech of the ancient world — was rumoured even at the time to have been written by Aspasia. Comic poets attacked her brutally as a foreign whore; Plato and Xenophon defended her as a teacher of rhetoric. After Pericles' death from plague in 429 BCE she lived another three decades in Athens; the date and circumstances of her death are unknown.
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Influential Companion · Salonnière of Periclean Athens
Aspasia of Miletus
c. 470 BCE – 400 BCE
The Ionian woman who ran a salon in Periclean Athens, was the longtime partner of the city's leading statesman, and was reputed to have written some of his most famous speeches.
Lifetime
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