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THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION ARTS AND SCIENCES ASPASIA AFTER ANTIQUITY ANELIA G. B. SLAVOFF SPRING 2020 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for baccalaureate degrees in History and Communication Arts & Sciences with honors in Communication Arts & Sciences Reviewed and approved* by the following: Michele Kennerly Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences and Classics & Ancient Mediterranean Studies Thesis Supervisor Lori Bedell Senior Lecturer of Communication Arts & Sciences Honors Adviser * Electronic approvals are on file. i ABSTRACT Scholars have continuously debated who Aspasia of Miletus truly was, starting in the 5th- century BCE to the modern day. She has been presented by the comic poets, ancient philosophers, and now authors of newspaper articles, as both a rhetorician and as exclusively a hetaira. These varying depictions are prominent in newspaper publications in the 20th-century CE, and can be sorted into two categories: positive depictions that reference Aspasia’s intellect and positive influence in Athens, and negative depictions that reference Aspasia as a hetaira and deny her influence in Athenian society. I found that various authors have used Aspasia to promote their own personal ideologies in newspaper articles and magazine covers. This is possible in part due Aspasia’s primary work not surviving in the historical record, making it unclear what her true personal beliefs would have been. I examine the various depictions of Aspasia in newspaper articles from 1874 to 1994, and analyze the ways in which authors use Aspasia to promote their own ideologies. I also discuss how this treatment of Aspasia is indicative of a larger pattern of women’s treatment in the Western rhetorical tradition. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................... iv Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter I Positive Newspaper Depictions of Aspasia of Miletus ............................... 9 Chapter II Negative Newspaper Depictions of Aspasia of Miletus ............................ 29 Chapter III Aspasia of Miletus in The American Weekly ........................................... 41 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 58 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................ 62 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Kylix depicting young Athenian women on their way to academic lessons ............ 19 Figure 2: "The Dinner Party" by Judy Chicago ....................................................................... 22 Figure 3: Aspasia's Place Setting in "The Dinner Party" ......................................................... 23 Figure 4: Aspasia on the cover of The American Weekly ........................................................ 42 Figure 5: Aspasia Graffiti in Monastiraki ................................................................................ 61 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis would not have been possible without the support of members of Penn State’s faculty, my family, and my friends. Thank you to everyone who had any part in my journey at Penn State over the past four years. It’s been one of the best experiences of my life, and I would not change a thing. To my thesis supervisor, Dr. Michele Kennerly, thank you for introducing me to Aspasia during your rhetorical theory course my sophomore year. You have fostered my interest in the intersection of classics and rhetoric, and you have been incredibly supportive these past few years when it came to my thesis, future plans, and really everything else. Thank you for believing in me and my research. To my honors advisor, Lori Bedell, thank you for your guidance in my thesis writing, and for helping me throughout my entire honors journey. You have always been there to give me advice, and for every frantic email you received from me, you were able to get me back on track. To Dr. Ekaterina Haskins, thank you for your help in my analysis of Aspasia in The American Weekly, and for allowing me to conduct some of this research in your rhetorical criticism course. You have been incredibly supportive of both my research and career goals, and for that I am very thankful. To my parents, Anne Boyer and Zlatan Slavoff, thank you for your support in everything I do. I would not be where I am today without you both. And lastly, to my friends who I have been lucky enough to meet during my time at Penn State, thank you. You have supported me through some of the best (and most stressful) years of my life, and I love you all. 1 Introduction How do we take the measure of a life when no primary source material from the person in question remains? How do we know what we are interpreting about their life is correct? What contemporary sources do we trust, and how do we decide upon these sources? These are common questions that must be answered when researching someone whose life story is a mystery. Aspasia of Miletus is one of these historical figures about whom we know very little definitively. From the 5th-century BCE in Athens to the modern day, authors and artists have presented Aspasia as both strictly a sexually promiscuous hetaira to the Athenian leader, Pericles, and as a prominent rhetorician and scholar in ancient Athens, known for teaching Socrates, Pericles, and other esteemed statesmen in the art of rhetoric. Comic poets, authors, scholars, and artists alike have presented these narratives in popular culture during her own time and into the modern day, and they are prevalent in part due to the lack of primary source material from Aspasia herself. It is difficult to determine what sources are trustworthy in their depictions of her, and therefore her history has often been reconstructed in two opposing narratives, although there are the rare sources that depict her as both simultaneously. Authors such as Plato, and later Cicero, Athenaeus, and Plutarch, considered Aspasia to be a member of the intelligentsia during Periclean Athens.1 Plato depicted Aspasia as a rhetorician explicitly within his dialogue, Menexenus. He presented the idea that Aspasia was the 1 Cheryl Glenn, “Sex, Lies, and Manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric,” College Composition and Communication 45, no. 2 (1994): 183. 2 true author of Pericles’s famous funeral oration during the Peloponnesian War, and that she was an influential rhetorician in her own right. Of my own wit, most likely nothing; but yesterday I heard Aspasia composing a funeral oration about these very dead. For she had been told, as you were saying, that the Athenians were going to choose a speaker, and she repeated to me the sort of speech which he should deliver, partly improvising and partly from previous thought, putting together fragments of the funeral oration which Pericles spoke, but which, as I believe, she composed.2 Aspasia’s narrative and accounts of her contributions to rhetoric have been constructed by the men around her, and this bias is crucial to consider when analyzing Menexenus. However, Plato provides one of the only contemporary accounts of Aspasia that cites her as a rhetorician who had heavy influence over Pericles’s orations. Even though Plato’s account seems to be a relatively believable one from an acclaimed philosopher who was her contemporary, we must view the source for what it is – an account that does not provide Aspasia her own voice, but rather uses men’s voices to describe something that may or may not be true. In part due to her status as a metic and the traditional lack of mobility for women in ancient Greek society (although not necessarily applicable to noncitizens), she is also often portrayed in a negative, hyper-sexualized manner throughout history. A core ideology in 5th- century BCE Athens was that a “respectable” woman was separated from civic life, so when noncitizen women defied these norms and engaged in civic life, as Aspasia supposedly did with 2 Plato and Benjamin Jowett, Menexenus (Champaign, Ill: Project Gutenberg, 2013), http://search.ebscohost.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1085304&site=ehost -live&scope=site. 3 her education, they were considered to be indecent and were therefore sexualized.3 Aspasia is an example of a noncitizen woman who engaged in civic life, and these traditional Athenian social norms regarding women’s status in society influenced her reputation. Comic poets critiqued Aspasia for defying these social norms and exhibiting influence over Pericles. Aristophanes used her as a tool to attack and mock Pericles in The Acharnians, where he explicitly calls Aspasia’s friends “whores” and categorizes her as the same.4 Aristophanes presents a contemporary narrative that directly conflicts Plato’s, illustrating the dichotomy in the way Aspasia has often been presented in popular culture such as magazine and newspaper depictions. These depictions are not inherently negative, and I do not mean to say that being a flirt or hetaira is a bad thing, but the authors use these characteristics to discredit her intellectual influence in ancient Athens. Due to this varying portrayal and with none of her own written