>>Rob Schaap wrote:
>> > and Pericles's
>>> patronising ravings (funny, that; his wife was a formidable and
>>> intellectual presence by all accounts),
>>
>>No -- his "mistress" was. We know nothing of his wife (or at least I
>>don't -- I've read quite a bit of ancient history and never recall any
>>reference to her)
>
>Right.
Well, Plutarch has it that the lonely Pericles (a divorcee) did in fact marry Aspasia. The marriage was not recognised by Pericles' adversaries (Pericles himself had earlier passed a law that Athenian citizens could marry only other Athenians), however, and they didn't half kick up a fuss when Aspasia delivered herself of Pericles The Younger. Recalling her past as a courtesan, they dragged her before the courts (on the same wrap that iced Socrates), but she prevailed (Pericles was but one to support her).
Aspasia did live with Pericles, and their table was considered the finest in all Athens, with Aspasia playing very much the role those sophisticated salon ladies played in the nascent Habermasian 'bourgeois public sphere' of 18th century France. If anything, Aspasia was able to go that step further, as the Athenian citizenry (definitively men over thirty) accommodated her at supposedly male bastions like the Agora and the Grove of Academus (Athenian women weren't welcome, but there was apparently no such problem with non-Athenian women - go figger). Aspasia engaged in, and publicly advocated, the education of Athenian girls (her father had educated her, obviously very well, in the tradition of the Pythagoreans - who insisted that all should be educated as all should be equipped and encouraged to discuss justice if all were to be subject to it, and, gratifyingly, that 'the dynamics of world structure depend on the interaction of contraries' (so Aspasia was a comrade both in theory and practice). Interestingly, Aspasia not only got away with all this, but started a sustained Athenian resurgence in female education (one that seems to have outlasted the rest of 'The Golden Age', was left alone even after hubby died, and lived into an unencumbered old age with her new husband.
>On one hand, Aspasia is praised for her accomplishment; on the other
>hand, compliment is a backhanded one, in that the point of the
>dialogue (as well as other works by Plato) is to make fun of orators
>& slight the importance of rhetoric (and Plato's contempt for
>rhetoric & rhetoric teachers originates in his dislike of
>participatory democracy under which he thinks the irrational masses
>are often misled by demagogues, instead of being guided by
>philosopher-kings).
Maybe we should distinguish between the Socrates Plato constructed for his arguments and the one of flesh and blood. Socrates died for his rhetoric, and the evidence suggests (to me, anyway) that he was a great fan of Aspasia's - in fact he names his two great mentors as Aspasia and Diotima - both women. Just possibly, our view of gender relations in 5th century Athens is coloured by the particular sources we have available to us, and, whilst the law was exceptionally patriarchal at the time, practice was not quite so universally so, if for no other reason that the outside world differed on a lot of these points.
Cheers, Rob.