“The sovereign tyrant and his choice concubine were thus paradigms of both power and love. Wherever a ruler and his consort held such a high place in popular esteem, they were seen as sacral actors, and their sexual union was, ideally, a hieros gamos, a Sacred Marriage performed for the benefit of sovereignty. In classical Greek sources, such a symbolic union is attested in the rites of Sacred Marriage, such as that at Athens, said to be performed between the god, Dionysus, and the Basilinna, the (usually anonymous) wife of the archon basileus. At Athens these roles were played by civic officeholders as an obligation and an honor. In states where monarchs or tyrants exercised sovereignty, the ruler and his consort who assumed such sacral roles could not be treated as ordinary mortals. They assumed a godlike standing in the eyes of their subjects for life, and after life as well.
Men who demonstrated supremacy in rulership, as tyrants, monarchs, or even as successful statesmen, tended to be assimilated in popular imagination to the paradigm of the tyrant, and their consorts to the paradigm of the tyrant’s concubine. The reputation of Aspasia, wife of Pericles, is colored by the stereotype of the choice concubine of the tyrant, and her fame reflects both the abnegation of personal identity and the sacral attributes that accompanied this status. Tradition describes Aspasia as the concubine (pallak) rather than the legitimate wife of the great Pericles, and characterizes their son, the younger Pericles, as illegitimate (nothos). These characterizations almost certainly derive from the satires of contemporary comedy, and from the reputation of the great Pericles as a man of such power that he resembled a tyrant. The contemporary comedies that called Aspasia a concubine also named her Hera, Deïaneira, and the New Omphale. Aspasia, in other words, was likened to the archetypal divine consort whose coupling with Zeus was celebrated in the Theogamia, as well as to the princess of Calydon whose passions inflamed Heracles, and to the queen of Lydia who enslaved the same great hero. These mythical archetypes described a bond between Aspasia and Pericles that their contemporaries found to be one of exceptional, erotic attraction, displayed, as Plutarch remarks, by a kiss of love that Pericles gave her every time he left or returned home. (The authority for these impressions and anecdotes goes back to Antisthenes and Stesimbrotus, both of them younger contemporaries to Aspasia herself.)
Aspasia’s beauty had a political edge to it. Aspasia was likened to a famous Milesian courtesan named Thargelia who had drawn her lovers into allegiance to the king of Persia; likewise Aspasia drew prominent Athenians into the circle of Pericles and into allegiance to his vision of Athens. Aspasia’s charm lay not merely in her grace and beauty, as Socrates affirmed (according to Plato), but in her conversation and intellect as well. Plato’s Menexenus makes much of Aspasia’s eloquence, and even makes Socrates claim that she instructed Pericles in rhetoric and composed many of his speeches. (Hermesianax, a Colophonian poet of the third century b.c.e. (quoted by Athenaeus 13.599a–b), identifies the wisdom that Socrates derives from Aspasia as originating in the fire of Aphrodite.) In fact, in all of these respects—her grace, intelligence, and political influence, as well as her erotic attraction—Aspasia was being described by her contemporaries as the embodiment of the wise maiden who becomes the bride of a man of power, and who together engender sovereignty. Her type was that of the bride of Gordius in the Phrygian story of Midas. Aspasia’s own Milesian ancestry points to the native home of her archetype, in Asia Minor. At Miletus in particular, Herodotus reports, it was the custom of Milesian wives to remember their ancient Carian ancestry in a manner that suggests a ceremony of ritual concubinage. Aspasia at Athens, as the choice consort of Pericles, was clearly thought of as the archetypal Anatolian concubine.
The testimony of Herodotus, the comments of sophists, and the satires of the comic poets all indicate that educated Athenians of the fifth century, and probably much of the public at large as well, were aware of this Anatolian paradigm of the semi-divine concubine who signifies and conveys sovereignty. The type was identified especially with the dominion of the tyrants of Lydia. Herodotus traces the Heraclid dynasty of Lydian tyrants that came to an end with Candaules back to Heracles and the “slave of Iardanus” (Omphale), a description that likens Omphale to a concubine. (Other sources call Omphale the daughter of Iardanus, queen, and the woman tyrant of Lydia.) Another significant Lydian royal concubine (called a pallak; by Herodotus) was the anonymous woman who bore a lion to King Meles. She who gives birth to a lion gives birth to a future king or tyrant, as the Greeks knew this metaphor
Viewed through the storybook window of popular beliefs, the concubine of a tyrant could be no ordinary woman, for a tyrant naturally chooses only that which is exceptional. And the woman who, above all others, commands the special affection of the tyrant or man of great power must therefore be regarded as a paragon of feminine charm. Popular stories give us vignettes of “a love like no other,” where the end of the story defies all mundane experience. The most memorable stories of this sort, like the love of Paris for Helen, are set in Asia Minor. Another such a story with a more historical setting recounts the fame of a poor Greek woman of Phocaea named Milto, who later took the name Aspasia.
Born to poverty, the young Milto found herself in the hands of a procurer who offered her, among other concubines (pallakides), to the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger when he held sway over Ionia. Because of her beauty and modesty, Aspasia (Plutarch says she was given this name after the famous wife of Pericles) immediately attracted Cyrus’ attention. Because she refused to be treated like merchandise, Cyrus favored her company, respected her virginity, and called her “the wise one” (sophe). Between them, Aelian relates, “a love gradually developed into something close to mutual respect, not dissimilar from the meeting of minds and dignity of Hellenic marriage. After Cyrus was killed in battle, the fame of Aspasia was such that she soon became a favorite also of Artaxerxes II. Eventually, Artaxerxes consecrated Aspasia as a priestess of Artemis (or Persian Anahita), we are told by Plutarch, so as to preserve her chastity from the affections of his own son.
The love of Cyrus the Younger for his concubine Aspasia became “famous in Ionia and throughout all Hellas,” according to Aelian. It is no accident that Sardis in Lydia was the seat of power that Cyrus occupied when he encountered the marvelous Aspasia, for the story follows a pattern familiar to the Greeks from the legends and monuments associated with the most famous consorts of the rulers of Lydia. So, for example, Xenophon, in his Cyropaedia, tells a tale of the love of the elder Cyrus for a woman named Pantheia (“All-divinity,” surely a significant name) whose beauty “burns like fire.” Pantheia was the wife of the king of Susa who fought in the army of Cyrus; in her husband’s absence she was kept in Cyrus’ company. A chaste love developed between them, and ended in her noble suicide on the battlefield at Sardis, where her husband had just died fighting to secure the kingship of Cyrus. Befitting his deep affection, Xenophon reports, Cyrus heaped up a monumental burial mound for the couple, “so they say.””
- Mark Munn, The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia: A Study of Sovereignty in Ancient Religion. University of California Press, 2006. pp. 102-105
