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The women of Miletus in Asia Minor had long been celebrated for their intellectual endowments, as for their personal graces. It seemed that this exquisite region (colonized from Crete, whose women were a proverb) was the nido paterno of Grecian wit and beauty; and Aspasia may have been more the disciple than the foundress of that school of intellectual fascination, which gives the permanency of a moral impression to the fleeting witchery of personal charms.* This splendid and mischievous Hetæra flourished at a moment, when, as a modern French writer has observed, "le sort de la Gréce était entre les mains des courtisanes."

Of all the female celebrities of antiquity, none has obtained a greater reputation, for talent, grace, and eloquence, and, above all, for a resistless power over the minds or passions of man, than Aspasia. Still her reputation is but a tradition; and little emanating from herself remains to testify her great intellectual superiority.† No "divine verse," the poetry of passion, like that of Sappho; no philosophical views preserved by a style (like that of Leontium,) which provoked the admiration and envy of Cicero; no brilliant mots, which have passed over the sweep of two thousand years, like the sallies and epigrams of Glycera and Lais, nor any one act of high intellectual energy in favour of public good, such as marks the undeniable endowments of others of her order, stand on record to brighten (if they could not excuse) the private vices of the woman. Her influence over Pericles was that of one well versed in the passions and weakness of man, and capable of governing them only for her own interest and advantage, or for the gratification of her own vanity and ambition.

As the mistress or wife of Pericles, the master of Athens

*It is impossible to omit the fact, that the early people of Miletus planted (according to Seneca) colonies in all parts of the world;--the supposition may, therefore, be indulged that the beau sang of the Cretan women may have been transmitted to the motherhood of Milesian Ireland.

There is still extant a fragment of a dialogue between Aspasia and Socrates (given by Athenæus) and a discourse cited by Cicero. But "conversations" or "discourses" are of doubtful authenticity in any ages. It is easy to make dead men or dead women talk according to the circumstance for which their conversations are to be applied.

and of the Ægean, Aspasia had much at her disposition wherewith to bribe even Philosophy itself, and to purchase eulogy (where superior genius might have been damned with faint praise,") even though the verses of the state courtezan had not been poetry, nor her rhetoric, eloquence. The guests, too, who frequented the republican palace of her protector, and occupied cushions on the couches that surrounded his sumptuous table, (eminent as many of them were,) were after all but men, and may have unconsciously granted much to the ministering agent of all public distinctions, (and of other less honourable gratifications), which they would have hesitated to assign to the same quantum of talent, in women less powerful and corrupt. Allowing, however, to Aspasia the full reputation assigned to her, it is both possible and probable, that talents equally brilliant might have been latent in the neglected minds of many of the contemporary wives, who lived neglected, and who died unknown.

But while they, to whom the "honour and house" of the Athenian husband were consigned, lived on, as it were, by stealth, condemned to an enfeebling intercourse with slaves and children, to the labours of a tapestry frame, or the recreation of playing with Maltese lap-dogs and Sicilian doves, (no bad type of female existence in more modern times), the Hetæra, the all-accomplished, but frequently all-depraved Hetæræ, were benefiting by the conversation and instruction of the most eminent statesmen, philosophers, and military chiefs of the age, who dignified the hired mistress with the name of "fair friend," an order chosen from the oppressed sex, for their special" solace and delight."

The licentious habits of Pericles, (who lived openly with the beautiful Chrysella, after his son had attained to manhood,) the jealousy and indignant resentment of his wife (his own cousin, and the plighted of another, from whom he forced her, an unwilling bride), his dislike of and severity to his eldest son, Xantippus, repaid by an unfilial aversion, as deeply felt as publicly avowed, rendered the domestic life of the chief of the Athenian republic a humiliating contrast to his public career and brilliant reputation. The legislator and hero of the

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people, was the least loved, the least respected, and the least respectable of citizens, in his own home.

It was in the midst of domestic broils, that Pericles first saw and became enamoured of Aspasia, who had been educated by her father, or her master (for her origin is obscure), for that profession which justifies Plato's definition of terrestrial love.*

After the birth of a son, to whom the degraded Athenians, in violation of their laws, accorded the title of “citizen,” Pericles resolved on marrying the mother; and he repudiated his wife, to give that honourable title to a woman, who, with all her admitted talents, had hitherto lived only by her vices. Society, then as now, excluded women from all legitimate sources by which they might provide for their subsistence; and opened its portals only to reward the exercise of their frailties.

The example of Aspasia, her talents and her influence over the chief of the government, produced the most fearful moral results. Athens had from that epoch, her school of pleasure, as of philosophy. The mistress-wife, under the roof of her weak though illustrious husband, was at the head of a society which reduced libertinism to a system, and rendered vice seductive, by the grace and talent with which it was combined. The story of Pagan antiquity had no parallel for this strange contrast of the lofty social position of demoralized habits. It was reserved for the courts of the most Christian kings of the most civilized state of modern Europe to present one; and the court and mistresses of the two despots, whose corrupt reigns and examples hurried on the Revolution of France, may be considered as approaching nearest to the system adopted by Pericles and Aspasia, for the ruin of public liberty by the sure agency of moral depravation.

Aspasia, in the midst of her seducing nymphs, the models of art, and theme of poetry, giving lessons in eloquence to Socrates, and receiving from the mastermind of Greece instruction in dialectics and induction,Aspasia, the wife of Pericles, sharing more than her

* When the birth of the volatile god was ascribed to Zephyr and Flora by a poet, Plato replied: "Know his origin better; he is the offspring of sordid interest."

studies with his friend, the gifted and unprincipled Alcibiades, was a singular instance of the incoherence of the institutes of man, when at odds with his passions. This Omphale of the political Hercules of the age, this Minerva of all the poets, parasites,* sophists, and rhetoricians of Greece, who swallowed her pedantry with her pea-hens' eggs, and repaid her nectar of Naxos with flattery as intoxicating, had finally the triumph of seeing some of the most virtuous women in Athens brought by their husbands to breathe the inebriating incenset which perfumed her voluptuous saloon, and of beholding the law of Solon thus repealed in her favour.

But while Pericles thus availed himself of the arts of Aspasia, her influence over his mind produced the most fatal effect on his policy. To gratify her personal pique, he attacked and took Samos; and to avenge her quarrels (originating in the most shameful causes,) he undertook the expedition against Megara, of which the twenty-three years of the Peloponnesian war was the consequence.

Aspasia, with her usual accompaniment of attendant nymphs, had the effrontery to embark on board the fleet with Pericles, in presence of the Athenian people, when the chief of the government set forth for Samos: but if hers was the effrontery, whose was the weakness which permitted it?

It was on the return of Pericles from this inglorious but conquering expedition, that he was received with triumphal honours, and that even the ladies of Athens were brought forth by their husbands to crown him with flowers and to kiss his hands. But there was one among them who indignantly refused these marks of homage. It was Elpinice, the sister of the immortal Cimon, who, addressing Pericles as he stood in the tribune (where he had harangued the people with his usual sophistical eloquence), asked, "What have you done to wear the triumphal crown?→ have you returned from a victory over the barbarian enemies of Greece ?-have your laurels been gathered in fields where the Medians were put to flight, and the Per

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"Les parasites qui s'établissent chez les gens riches pour faire les honneurs de la maison, et faire rire les convives."--Anacharsis, v. ii. "On y brule d'encens et d'autres odeurs."-Ibid.

sians vanquished?-it was there, that Cimon, my brother, gathered his laurels! You have, indeed, returned victorious; but over whom?-over a free city of Greece! an ancient ally of Athens."

To the epigram of Elpinice, Pericles replied by a smile and a quotation, the point of which is now lost; though its brutality might have been well suited to the gallantry of the "finest gentleman of his times :" for no men are so deficient in true courtesy to women as those who have lived most with the vilest. Still, amidst all the triumphs of a brilliant despotism, supported by a corrupt and licentious oligarchy, there was a voice, neither "small" nor "still," which testified against the vices of the chief of the Athenian government and his partisan and paramour, and which found a deathless echo in the moral instincts of the people. Whether Cratinus and Eupolis, and other satirists, who were wont to set the theatres of Athens in a roar, at the expense of the "Olympian Pericles" and of Aspasia, his Juno, were received or not into the select circles of the government house, certain it is that the wit of those Molières and Scribes of classical antiquity left no weakness of the one, no vice of the other, unridiculed and unreproved.

It was, however, the policy of Pericles to leave the libels unnoticed and the libellers unpunished. He considered these outbreaks of ridicule against his private vices as the safety-valves of his political power; and when all other liberties had been abolished, the apparent liberty of the pen was preserved, during his whole reign, for the purpose of amusing the people, and of blinding them.

The latter days of Pericles were as clouded as his dawn had been brilliant. The priesthood-that priesthood which had spared the vices of Aspasia, and left her life unreproved-became alarmed by the reputation of her philosophy; and when she was denounced as sharing the opinions of Anaxagoras, and exposed to the same persecution, (for the wisest and most pious man of his age stood in the category of accusation before the holy office of Athens, with Alcibiades and Aspasia,) Pericles, who could neither save the sage nor the hero, pleaded with his tears, (more powerful than his eloquence) for his mistress-wife.

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