Athens were utterly silenced—in fact, because women were denied citizenship, the language did not even have a word for a women from Athens (Loraux 10). Women were deprived of education, literacy, citizenship, and even entry to the public sphere, except during religious festivals. In the words of Aristotle, “between the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject” (1.2.12 Politics, qtd. in Glenn 50). Considering these conditions for women, it’s remarkable that feminist scholars have recovered Aspasia and Diotima, two women who contributed to rhetoric and philosophy in Ancient Greece.
Born in Miletus (now Turkey) in fifth century BCE, Aspasia somehow achieved literacy before immigrating to Athens, where she was considered an exotic “foreigner.” In Athens Aspasia served as a rhetorician, philosopher, political influence, and teacher of male rhetoricians. There are no direct records of Aspasia’s voice; instead, her influence and speech is rendered through the words of men. For instance, in a dialogue between Menexenus and Socrates, Socrates claims that he has in Aspasia “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” (Menexenus par. 235, qtd. in Jarratt and Ong 15).
Pericles, whom Socrates deems “the best among all the Hellenes,” was Aspasia’s lover, a detail that has served to delegitimize her influence. After all, the ideal Greek woman was silent, with a closed mouth and closed body. Aspasia defied both of these traits, and so history has often written her as “self-indulgent, licentious, immoral” (Glenn 39). In fact, there was much about Aspasia that transgressed social norms of the time, including her unique relationship to Pericles. According to Susan Jarratt and Rory Ong, Athenian women who were not slaves were defined by their relationship to men: as wives (who brought dowries to increase family wealth); concubines (who served as sexual companions for men); or hetaerae (who accompanied men to public festivities) (12). Aspasia fit none of these roles. Instead, she served as the divorced Pericles’s “beloved and constant companion” as well as his intellectual equal and teacher (12).
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