CHAPTER II.

The Domestic Life of Pericles-Aspasia.

THE influence obtained over society by these accomplished but dangerous agents of its pleasures and its passions, at last induced the most brilliant and able demagogue of any age or nation to adopt their demoralizing power as a state engine; and Pericles chose the salon of Aspasia as the scene of those corrupting experiments, which preceded the downfal of liberty in Athens, and ended in the entire ruin of Greece.

The character of Pericles was one of those lucky adaptations to cotemporary times and circumstances, which insure success, not by the highest qualities that ought to command it, but by that peculiar fitness (for evil or for good) which almost always wins it. Of illustrious birth, great wealth, brilliant talents, and refined education, the gifted pupil of Xeno, and ardent

disciple of Anaxagoras, was born for the epoch he illustrated. His quick, if not profound, perceptions gleaned a rapid view of the laws of nature from one preceptor, and a contempt of superstition from the other; and he obtained the reputation of a philosopher, from his intimacy with both, though it subjected him to the imputation of being a free thinker. The circumstances of the times gave him an early opportunity of signalizing his intrepid and petulant courage; and, at a moment most favourable to the triumph of sophistry, they also afforded the occasion for exerting that natural eloquence, which adapted its variable character to the passions of each successive audience, to which he addressed it.

With a person distinguished by nobility, and a voice which recalled the traditional melody of that of Pisistratus, (his accomplished type,) ambitious, corrupt, voluptuous, and daring, this brilliant demagogue succeeded in giving his name to an age, for ever memorable in the history of the human mind. By his private vices and selfish views, if he did not originate, he hurried on that revolution in the manners, morals, and institutes of Greece, for which the influx of wealth and luxury had already prepared the way.

The successor of Aristides and Themistocles, the rival and persecutor of Cymon, had already established a personal despotism over the most democratic republican government of the earth. Under frivolous pretexts, he had annihilated the authority of the Areopagus, (the last barrier against licentious innovations both on public and private virtue,) when a new view of demoralisation was suggested to him, by the peculiar endowments of one, whose influence over his life and actions was referable to institutions, giving to vice that power which should alone belong to virtue. Aspasia of Miletus, called the Sophist, was one of those notable personages, whose character and influence best record the manners of the age in which they flourish. 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

* It is impossible to omit the fact, that the early people of Miletus planted (according to Seneca) colonies in all parts of the world;

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

- the supposition may, therefore, be indulged that the beau sang of the Cretan woman 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.

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 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