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Ep. 104 Aspasia of Miletus: Why This Powerful Woman Had All the Men In Ancient Athens Talking

• Shea LaFountaine • Episode 104

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This week, we're going all the way back to ancient Greece. We'll examine the story of Aspasia of Miletus, a woman who came to Athens around 450 BC and quickly became the talk of the town. Her name appears over and over again in writing from the time, Socrates wrote about her, Plato, Plutarch, Cicero the orator, Xenophon the historian, Athenaeus the writer, Aristophanes the comic playwright, Pericles the leader of the city-state of Athens. One woman’s name was on all of their minds: Aspasia of Miletus. They loved her. They hated her. They called her a great mind, a teacher, a master of rhetoric. They called a prostitute, a cheap whore, a brothel madam. They gave her credit for writing great speeches passed on to men. They gave her credit for starting great wars, the ruin of Athens. But who was Aspasia really and why was everyone talking about her? Join me to find out! 

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Ancient Greece was not a happy place for women. The epitome of a patriarchal society, women in Athens, for example, could not vote, own land, or inherit property. Their place was in the home, in childrearing, cooking, cleaning. Their names were not even spoken publicly. Almost none of their writing, none of their accounts exist and so everything we know about ancient Greek women comes from the writing of men and, unfortunately, men in ancient Greece did not often write about women. But, there is one woman whose name appears over and over again, Socrates wrote about her, Plato, Plutarch, Cicero the orator, Xenophon the historian, Athenaus the writer, Aristophanes the comic playwright, Pericles the leader of the city-state of Athens. One woman’s name was on all of their minds: Aspasia of Miletus. They loved her. They hated her. They called her a great mind, a teacher, a master of rhetoric. They called a prostitute, a cheap whore. They gave her credit for writing great speeches passed on to men. They gave her credit for starting great wars, the ruin of Athens. Historian and philosopher, Plutarch, who came after her questioned quote “what great art or power this woman had, that she managed as she pleased the foremost men of the state, and afforded the philosophers occasion to discuss her in exalted terms and at great length?” end quote. What great art or power indeed? Let’s fix that. 


Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. We’re taking it way way back this week to ancient times. Haven’t been there in a minute. Specifically we’re going to ancient Greece circa 450ish BC, that’s roughly 2,500 years ago. But, before we go there, quick announcement. I did in fact release a mini fix on Wednesday about Marie Curie, discoverer of radium and just all around badass science lady. Here’s a quick preview: 


As far as groundbreaking women go, there are few as impressive and yet, also inspiringly humble, as Marie Curie, or Marie Sklodowksa-Curie, I should say, the name she actually went by. I see you Poland. How groundbreaking was Marie? Well, if being a successful female physicist at the turn of the 20th century doesn’t make her groundbreaking enough, you can add these accolades on as well: first woman to win a Nobel Prize, first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, first person to win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields, part of the first married couple ever to win a Nobel Prize, first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, and the first woman to have her body interred at the Pantheon in Paris based on her own merits. And so you may be thinking, wow, now that’s a successful woman. Discovered two new elements, they’re using radium for all kinds of stuff, big corporations, she must have gotten super rich. But, did you know, Marie chose not to patent the radium isolation process she developed so that the rest of the scientific community could benefit from it. She gave away most of her Nobel Prize money and insisted that monetary gifts and donations be given to scientific institutions rather than her personally. Did you know that fellow physicist Albert Einstein reportedly remarked that Marie was probably the only person who could not be corrupted by fame? Let’s fix that.


You can listen to the first five minutes of that on the Patreon right now that’s patreon.com/historyfixpodcast, linked in the description. You can listen to the full episode for $3 or subscribe for $5 a month to get all the bonus episodes and content plus regular weekly episodes early and ad free and, you know, just support History Fix in one of the most powerful ways you can. Help me keep putting this stuff out there each month. 


Okay, let’s go to ancient Greece. Ancient Greece was not like one strong centralized empire like Ancient Rome would come to be. It was more like a collection of fairly independent city states. According to National Geographic quote “Each city-state [or polis] was organized with an urban center and the surrounding countryside. Characteristics of the city in a polis were outer walls for protection, as well as a public space that included temples and government buildings. The temples and government buildings were often built on the top of a hill, or acropolis. A surviving example of a structure central to an ancient acropolis is the famous Parthenon of Athens… The majority of a polis’s population lived in the city, as it was the center of trade, commerce, culture, and political activity,” end quote. There were over 1,000 city-states in ancient Greece but the main ones, the big guns were Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Syracuse, Aegina, Rhodes, Argos, Eretria, and Elis. These were each self-governing cities. They did their own thing. They had their own separate governments. Kind of like different states within the United States but honestly they were more separate and independent than that. They were really more like separate countries. For example, Sparta was ruled by two kings and a council of elders. They had a super strong military. It was very militaristic and women actually had a few more rights in Sparta. Athens was all about learning and education and it was much more democratic. Every male citizen in Athens voted to elect their leaders but women were nothing. They were practically invisible in Athenian society. 


I know I touched on that in the opener but let’s talk about it a little more because I need you to understand how extreme this patriarchy was. It is the context needed for understanding, or at least trying to understand who our leading lady, Aspasia truly was. As I said before, women in ancient Athens could not vote or own land or inherit property. So they basically had no rights. Now, we do know that in Sparta women were expected to do physical training like men, could own property, and could drink wine. But not in Athens. Athens was completely ruled by men. It was the Mojo Dojo Casa House. But they were all about education there and so girls were actually educated in a manner similar to boys. Unfortunately, they didn’t really get to use any of their education because by the age of 13 or 14 their fathers would be trying to arrange marriages for them, sell them to the highest bidder, literally, it was all based on what kind of dowry the man was willing to pay for her. So, in a sense, women were as good as property. They were owned by their fathers who sold them to their husbands. 


And, just real quick while we’re on the topic of human property, there was slavery in ancient Greece too. I feel like we like to conveniently forget that. Everyone focuses on the slavery of African and Indigenous Americans in the 16, 17, 1800s but it was also a really big part of ancient Greek and ancient Roman society. Just side note I guess but keep that in mind. These Greek patriarchs are also enslavers.  


So a woman gets married, 13, 14 years old. This is not a love match. It’s an arranged marriage. It’s not supposed to be a love match. She’s supposed to bear him an heir, raise the children, take care of the house. They don’t even have to like each other. That’s fine. I mean hopefully some kind of friendship or partnership would develop, this was called philia, right as in Philadelphia, city of brotherly love. Brotherly love, not romantic love. Romantic love was called eros and Greek men sought this type of love outside of their marriages and that was fine and honestly expected of them. This came from relationships with prostitutes or hetaera which were like the Greek version of Geishas, courtesans, live in lovers, basically like concubines, mistresses, whatever term you want me to use. That’s where the eros came from and men in Greek society were free to pursue it as they pleased. The reverse was not the case. Women were absolutely not allowed to engage in extramarital relationships. They were expected to remain faithful to their husbands and only their husbands always and no matter what and if a husband found out that his wife had been unfaithful, he could actually straight up murder her lover, the guy, in cold blood and face no punishment. She would be punished by the law because failing to quote “preserve the honor of the family” was considered a serious crime, but only for women. The men are out there, sleeping around and literally murdering people, no punishment.


Okay, so I need you to understand that women, in Athens at least, were basically nothing without men. They couldn’t inherit anything, they couldn’t own anything, they were under the complete control and authority of their husbands and there was absolutely no place in Athenian society for unmarried women. The great philosopher Aristotle sums up the way ancient Greeks viewed women quite well. He subscribed to the belief that everything in the universe was made up of opposites and so while men were great, women were, the opposite, weak, not great. Kayla Huber writes about this for Lake Forest College quote “He felt that the rational, strong, active, and perfect form of humanity [men] ought to receive an education and hold positions of power. Women, being endowed with irrationality, weakness, passivity, and imperfection, were not capable of abstract reasoning and were bound to the domestic sphere,” end quote. 


And, unfortunately for us in the modern western world, Athens, ancient Athens, this is what we based our modern society on. Athens is considered the birthplace of western civilization. The whole philia Philadelphia thing, that’s not a coincidence. Our founding fathers, at our nation's first capital city, Philadelphia, were heavily influenced by ancient Athenian society. They based our whole everything on it, our government, our democracy, our philosophy, our laws. Women couldn’t vote in ancient Athens, women couldn’t vote in early America. Gosh not even early America, women couldn’t vote in not all that long ago America. Men could enslave people in ancient Athens. Men could enslave people in early America. Sure there was democracy and art and education and all that good stuff that came with it too but came with it for who? Because the majority of the population in either place was not getting that stuff. Thanks a lot Athens, ya jerks. 


But our leading lady was not from Athens. She would make her way there but she was not from there. She was from a smaller Greek city in modern day Turkey called Miletus. Aspasia was born around 470 BC, the daughter of a man named Axiochus who was a prominent scholar, philosopher, statesman, aristocrat, all these dudes were all these things somehow, in Miletus. Now, Miletus would have been a little different than Athens, remember all these Greek city-states kind of did their own things. There’s a good chance that life for women in Miletus was not as restricted as it was in Athens. We don’t have a lot of proof of that, there aren’t a lot of records about what life was like for women in Miletus but when we look at what Aspasia was able to achieve and how far reaching she was as a woman, the fact that we even know her name, there’s a good chance women were at least slightly more liberated there and that she had a less constricting upbringing. 


And this is a good place to pause and tell you that, guys, we know very little for certain about Aspasia. None of her own writings survived. All we know about her was what was written down by men and many of these accounts are obviously extremely biased and unreliable. We can theorize, we can factor in circumstantial evidence, we can draw our own conclusions, but for the most part, she is a historical phantom mostly lost to time. 


But most experts theorize that her father Axiochus, he himself a man of power and a man of learning, would have had his daughter well educated, above average educated. And young Aspasia would have learned about the roles women played in Greek mythology. Despite being second class citizens in the real world, women were surprisingly quite strong and important in myths. Which I find interesting. According to historian Mark Cartwright writing for World History Encyclopedia quote “Considering their limited role in actual society there is a surprisingly strong cast of female characters in Greek religion and mythology. Athena, the goddess of wisdom and patron of Athens stands out as a powerful figure blessed with intelligence, courage and honour. Common to most ancient cultures where agriculture was crucial to the community, female fertility goddesses were extremely important and particularly venerated - Demeter and Persephone being the most revered for the Greeks,” end quote. But he goes on to examine the other edge of that double edged sword saying quote “As in other ancient male-dominated literature, women are often cast as troublemakers, from jealous Hera to Aphrodite employing her charms to make men lose their wits. Myths and literature abound with female characters trying their best to derail the plans of male heroes, from the supreme witch Medea to the deadly, if lovely, Sirens. They can also be represented as ruled only by wild passion and ecstatic emotion,” end quote. Very interesting. As if female power, ability, and intelligence only ever goes hand in hand with destruction, misconduct, and wickedness. It’s Eve in the garden of Eden all over again with the snake and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It’s a character women have been typecast into forever by men… the only ones who got to write things down. 


But I imagine Aspasia would have known these myths well. She would have known of these powerful women in mythology, Athena, Demeter, and Persephone. And she would have learned about real powerful women, though there were few, like Artemisia Queen of Halicarnassus, another Greek city. And she would have marveled, I’m sure, at the way powerful women were perpetually cast as villains by the men in their shadows. I imagine this is something she pondered over and something she ultimately decided would not deter her from rising up as a woman. Because, soon enough, Aspasia would leave Miletus behind and head to Athens. According to an article for PBS quote “Exposed to a melting pot of ideas, cultures, and influences, Aspasia's decision to leave her home city and journey east to Athens would have been quite remarkable for a man, for a young, unmarried woman it was almost unheard of,” end quote. But there’s a good chance she didn’t just up and leave on her own. Some scholars believe there was likely a man involved in that move. And this is all based on circumstantial evidence, but here let me try to unravel it for you. So based on an old grave inscription, some scholars believe that an Athenian politician named Alcibiades was ostracized from Athens, kicked out for a time, cause he was kind of a controversial guy, and he went to Miletus where he met and married Aspasia’s older sister. And they think this because Alcibiades and this woman, who we are theorizing is Aspasia’s sister, named their first child Axiochus, the name of Aspasia’s father which was not at all a common name. And they named their second child Aspasius. So we’re seeing like family names appear here and so that’s why they’re drawing the connection. So the theory is that Alcibiades eventually returned to Athens with his new family and brought his wife’s little sister Aspasia with him. There are even more ties supporting this that I’ll explain in a minute when they’ll actually make sense. 


So Aspasia arrives in Athens as a young woman. She is not an Athenian citizen. She is what was called a metic which is a resident of Athens from another city-state. It’s not the same as citizenship. It’s like what we would call today permanent residency. Now, for a man, it was kind of a bummer to be a metic because you couldn’t vote or own land. You could just like live and work in Athens. For a woman, who couldn’t vote or own land even if she was a citizen, it was actually kind of a good thing to be a metic. Because she wasn’t really held to the same societal standards as an Athenian woman and she could kind of do as she pleased more so than if she had been a citizen. 


So Aspasia arrives probably around 450 BC, and she pretty quickly becomes associated with Pericles. Okay, Pericles was a big deal in Athens. He is credited with the development of both democracy in Athens and the Athenian empire itself. He built Athens basically. He’s the one who built the acropolis with the Parthenon dedicated to Athena (ironically a woman) starting in the 440s BC. Pericles was a big deal and Aspasia quickly became his lover. Now here’s where that other tie to the Alcibiades guy comes in, who we think married Aspasia’s sister and brought her to Athens. Pericles had a ward, a boy in his care, that was a thing, named Alcibiades believed to be the grandson of the older Alcibiades that may have married Aspasia’s sister. So just yet another link there sort of shoring up the theory of how and why Aspasia came to Athens and ended up in the household of Pericles. We know she entered into a romantic relationship with Pericles, that’s pretty well documented. He was, however, already married, with two sons at the time. Now, remember that was fine, for him. That was totally normal for him to seek romantic love, eros, outside of his marriage. He goes a bit further though, and actually divorces his wife. Also fine, also allowed. Not a big deal in Athens. Cartwright explains in World History Encyclopedia quote “Marriages could be ended on three grounds. The first and most common was repudiation by the husband. No reason was necessary, only the return of the dowry was expected,” end quote. So he repudiates his wife and takes up with Aspasia as like his live in lover. 


So he’s not married anymore, why doesn’t he marry Aspasia? Welp, he can’t because of laws that he himself made before meeting her. PBS says quote “Pericles never married Aspasia, probably for the simple reason he could not. In an effort to prevent aristocratic families making alliances with other cities he had introduced a new citizenship law in 451 BC. As a result the sons of non-Athenian women could not become full citizens. Pericles would therefore be risking his whole political career if he married Aspasia in defiance of the very law he had introduced,” end quote. He had two sons from his first marriage already anyway so he didn’t really need an heir from Aspasia. Couldn’t get an heir from Aspasia anyway because of that law he came up with. Although they do have a son together also named Pericles. So they just lived together as like lovers basically. And this would have been actually very scandalous. It’s one thing to be married and take lovers on the side. It’s a totally different thing to divorce your wife and just shack up with an unmarried woman indefinitely. And we know people had issues with this because their relationship, Pericles and Aspasia, it appears over and over again in writing and in plays that have survived. People can’t stop talking about it. Plutarch wrote that Pericles kissed Aspasia every day both when he left in the morning and when he arrived in the evening. And this was shocking. This was not seen as a good thing. Athenaeus wrote that Pericles squandered the better part of his property on her. Also not seen as a good thing. People are very bothered by how much praise and attention and respect Pericles shows to Aspasia. He consults her. He consults her on matters of the state, politics, and law, and, you know, stuff that only men were allowed to be involved in. He consults her. He asks her for advice. And this, as we know, is a big no no in Athens. Women are supposed to be unseen and unheard and unspoken of. They are tucked away in their homes raising their babies and that is it. Pericles brings Aspasia out into the light of day and people do not like it. 


The insults start to fly. Cratinus the poet calls her a quote “dog eyed concubine.” Eupolis, another poet, refers to her as a whore and mother to a bastard. Hermippus, a comedic writer, accused her of impiety, like not being religious enough, and this was a serious accusation. You could be executed for impiety in ancient Athens. Duris of Samos which is such a Game of Thrones name I can’t even but Duris of Samos who was a historian blamed Aspasia for a war between Athens and Samos in the 440s because Pericles had to intervene in order to support Miletus which is where Aspasia was from, so like conflict of interest sort of thing. Similarly, Aristophanes, super famous playwright, blames Aspasia in his earliest surviving play for starting the Peloponnesian War and his reason for this is kind of absurd, but keep in mind, dude wrote comedies. These aren’t like factual accounts of what’s happening. He’s like writing SNL sketches, okay but this is like all we’ve got to go off of so we have to consider it. He writes in this play which is called The Acharnians that the Peloponnesian war which was a big deal, huge war between Athens and Sparta and their supporters, world war of the ancient world basically, he writes that the reason this war got started was because okay so Pericles had passed this decree that excluded the city of Megara from trade with Athens. And, this was like a breaking point right, a catalyst that helped lead to the war. Well Aristophanes writes in his play that the reason Pericles did this was because Aspasia ran a brothel and one of her prostitutes in her brothel had been taken from Megara. So some people came from Megara, in retaliation, and kidnapped a few of the prostitutes from Aspasia’s brothel. And then in retaliation for that retaliation, Pericles banned trade with Megara which led to the Peloponnesian war.  Aristophanes writes quote “and from that the onset of war broke forth upon all the Greeks: from three sluts!” end quote. So here we have emerging the possibility, although it comes from a comedy play remember, that Aspasia ran a brothel in Athens. Athenaeus backs this up adding that she, according to the University of Chicago, quote “brought in large numbers of beautiful women, so that the whole country was filled with her courtesans,” end quote. 


Okay, so did Aspasia run a brothel? Was she like this prominent madam in Athens? Good question. Maybe. Maybe not. I lean more in the not direction though and I’ll try to explain why. Remember that Aspasia was a metic, she wasn’t a citizen of Athens and that meant that she actually had a lot more freedom than Athenian women. She was not confined to the home like married Athenian women were. She could participate in public life in Athens. She could go out and do things and she could host people at her house and mingle and socialize in a way that Athenian women could not. Plutarch, who remember lived around 400 years after Aspasia, keep that in mind, but he wrote a book called Life of Pericles and so this is where a lot of this comes from, but he wrote that Aspasia had quote “rare political wisdom” and that she quote “had the reputation of being associated with a whole succession of Athenians, who came to her to learn rhetoric," end quote. So this suggests something very different than the comic playwrights with their claims of her running a brothel. This suggests that Aspasia ran something much more like a salon. And yes, surprisingly, I do mean like a hair salon. They were all about their beards in Greece. Like, look up a picture, I mean it’ll be a statue, but look up a statue of any one of these dudes I’ve mentioned so far, he will have a beard, a curly full beard and this would have been meticulously shaped and maintained in a salon. But a salon was so much more than that. It was a gathering place for important men to come discuss important ideas and learn from each other. It was like a classroom in much the same way that early coffee shops were, if you listened to my coffee episode, except hair salons came first. And so, some scholars theorize that Aspasia didn’t actually run a brothel, she ran a salon and these powerful men, these big thinkers, philosophers and politicians came to her salon not just to get their beards trimmed but to actually consult her, learn from her, and each other, but also her. Which is remarkable considering thoughts on women at the time. 


We have some evidence of this coming from really big names, Plato and Socrates. According to the Brooklyn Museum, Socrates, in his writing, credits Aspasia as his instructor in rhetoric and says that she was one of the greatest rhetoricians in the city. Which, rhetoric is like the art of effective persuasive speaking or writing. So people who are good at rhetoric are good at writing like speeches and stuff. So this is a super highly valued skill, rhetoric, especially for politicians, men who like to talk. Plato writes about her in two of his writings. So, Socrates was alive at the same time as Aspasia, born around the same year actually 470. Plato was a little younger he was born in the 430s, this is BC so time is moving backwards so that’s younger. Plato was Socrates student. So he writes about Aspasia in two of his writings, in one of them, he reinforces the whole brothel madam thing. In the other, sort of in direct contradiction to that, he reiterates that she instructed Socrates in rhetoric and he has Socrates, who is like a character in this writing by Plato. They do that, it’s confusing. But in his writing, Plato has fictional Socrates recite a famous speech that was given by Pericles called “Funeral Oration” to honor of those who died during the first year of the Peloponnesian war, that really big war. And Plato suggests that it was actually Aspasia who wrote this speech for Pericles. Is that true? I don’t know. He actually says it in a sort of derisive way. Like “look at this guy having his whore write his speeches for him.” It certainly wasn’t to honor or glorify Aspasia. Plato was not an Aspasia fan, don’t misinterpret that.  


So, brothel madam or master rhetoric teacher, we really don’t know. Those seem to be opposite things. But whatever she’s doing, she’s got all the important men talking about it. Let’s jump back into the timeline here. So she’s living with Pericles, ruler of Athens. She bears him a son, though illegitimate because of rules he himself made up. She’s also raising his ward Alcibiades who may actually be related to her through her sister’s marriage. And she’s very much in the public eye thanks to the freedom of not being a woman from Athens. But then the Peloponneisan war hit and with it, a deadly plague that killed around a quarter of the people living in Athens, including both of Pericle’s heirs, his legitimate sons with his wife he divorced. We don’t really know what it was but probably smallpox or typhus. So these are suddenly really rough times, especially for the family that’s ruling the city. People are freaking out. They actually turn on Pericles for a minute, stripping him of his power, and then they’re like “wait, that was dumb, we actually really need him,” and they put him back in power. But Pericles himself is struggling, his health is struggling, he gets this plague, whatever it is and he’s sick for months, he knows he’s going to die, and so he spends his last days doing what he had never thought he would have to do, he tries to get his son with Aspasia, Pericles the younger, declared his legal heir. And then he dies in 429. 


According to PBS quote “Left alone in a foreign city devastated by disease and war, the outlook for Aspasia and her young son seemed bleak. But deprived of their great leader, and with both his legitimate heirs dead, the Athenians responded with a kindness that they had never shown their great leader's mistress while he still lived. The popular assembly voted to allow Pericles' son full citizenship,” end quote. Pericles the younger would later come to a sticky end though. The Peloponnesian war was long y’all. It lasted 27 years. And so even 20 some years after his father died, little Pericles was still fighting this war, which Athens would eventually lose to Sparta by the way. PBS says quote “Twenty-three years after his father's death, the younger Pericles, was elected general in 406 BC. Sadly it was his grave misfortune to be one of the leaders of a major naval fiasco in which the Athenians defeated the Spartans only to be caught in bad weather. Forced to flee home, two thousand sailors who had fallen overboard during the battle were lost. The popular assembly responded by putting the commanders on trial, and despite the protests of the philosopher Socrates, executing every one of them,” end quote. Including Pericles the younger. 


We don’t know if Aspasia was still alive then, in 406 when her son was executed or not. But we do know that she remarried a man named Lysicles who was also very involved in politics and democracy and so it seems likely that she remained active in that sphere, influencing, most likely, these powerful men. And that’s it really. But even that, most of it is so washed in mystery and just question marks. There are so many reports of Aspasia coming from these really big name ancient Greek writer guys, philosophers, historians, playwrights. But are they true? Their accounts seem really biased. In some cases it’s coming from comedies, you know plays, which we know to be exaggerated and embellished for comedic effect. We have a lot of info coming from Plutarch who sort of made himself to be the expert on Pericles but he lived 400 years later. So how reliable is his account, really? Madeleine M. Henry concludes in her book Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition that quote “‘remarkably little’ can be said about Aspasia and that whatever can be known was the reaction of men to what she did or said at the time, which must have been memorable, indeed, to have provoked such comment,” end quote. 


So was she a prostitute? A brothel madam? Or was she a woman of great intellect? A master of rhetoric, consulted by men of power, instructor to the great Socrates himself? Is it even possible that she could be both? We will likely never know unless some secret hidden text written by Aspasia herself someday emerges. But what I love, and hate, about her story is how she’s come to fill that same well worn mold of women that we see in Greek mythology, in the Bible, throughout literature, and honestly still in our world today, in the media. That women are not ever simply powerful, talented, intelligent, in their own right the way that men are without the other edge of the sword cutting through. That edge that says there’s something evil there. Something corrupt, something dirty, dangerous, like a siren luring men to their deaths. These men, these Greek writers, are so quick to call Aspasia a whore. She was dirty, defiled, she ran a brothel, how dare she, which, by the way, something they themselves enjoyed regularly without any judgement cast on them. Why do we do this? We still do this. How often are powerful women raked over the coals, even, you guys, even by other women. She’s evil. She’s too emotional. She did this, she did that, did you hear about her divorce, her affair, whatever it is. We do this to powerful women all the time. We pick them apart. And we don’t do it to men. Not in the same way. Why do we do this? Why have we always done this? Since ancient times we have done this. I’ll tell you why. Because powerful women are a threat. They are a threat to the patriarchal society that we inherited from ancient Athens. And the men who are in charge, if they want to stay in charge, cannot allow women to share their stage. And any time a woman shines she must be cut down and twisted into this same old tired character - jealous Hera, slutty Aphrodite, evil Medea, the temptuous Sirens, weak Eve, Mary Magdalene the whore, right, Bloody Mary, la Malinche, the Mad Queen Ranavalona the cruel, the list goes on and on from the beginning of time. And so it’s really no mystery as to why we don’t have more female world leaders. Why the United States has still never had a female president. We’ve convinced ourselves through lies based in the insecurities of men that women are unfit for positions of power. I’m serious. Whether you believe that willingly or not, it’s in your subconscious. It’s in there because they’ve been pushing it on us for thousands of years. And the story of Aspasia so clearly illustrates that. You guys, we have got to put a stop to this. We are not doomed to repeat the mistakes of ancient Athens, ideas put forth by men 2,500 years ago. We don’t have to listen to them anymore. We know better. Now let’s do better. Pay attention. Look for the women that everyone is talking about, the women who are being raked over the coals in the media. Who are these women? What are they really doing? And why is the patriarchy so afraid of them? Aspasia had all the powerful men talking about her not because she was interesting, not because they liked to gossip. They couldn’t stop talking about her, tearing her down, because they were terrified of her. She was a threat to their social order. Look for these women in our world today there are tons of them, and instead of joining in on the gossip and the trolling and the character defamation, next time take a second to realize where that really comes from and what antiquated social order that’s protecting and lift her up instead.

 

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Information used in this episode was sourced from World History Encyclopedia, PBS, the University of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, National Geographic, Encyclopedia Britannica, History of Women Philosophers and Scientists, and Wikipedia. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.