Aspasia

Aspasia was born in Miletus around 470 BC and moved to Athens as a metic - a resident without citizenship. Sometime between 452 and 441 BC she began a relationship with Pericles, the city's leading statesman; they had a son, Pericles the Younger, and ancient sources suggest he may have defended her against a charge of impiety, though modern scholars suspect that story came from comic theater rather than court record. After Pericles died in 429 BC, she is believed to have married the politician Lysicles; after his death a year later, she vanishes from the record. What survives are two competing portraits: the comedians' version, which Plutarch echoed centuries later, depicted her as a prostitute and puppet-master; the philosophers saw a teacher of rhetoric whose arguments might have shaped one of the great dialogues. Both images have been recast across centuries - as libertine, as proto-feminist, as whatever the age needed her to be.