Aspasia - Historicity of Her Life

Historicity of Her Life

The main problem remains, as Jona Lendering points out, that most of the things we know about Aspasia are based on mere hypothesis. Thucydides does not mention her; our only sources are the untrustworthy representations and speculations recorded by men in literature and philosophy, who did not care at all about Aspasia as a historical character. Therefore, in the figure of Aspasia, we get a range of contradictory portrayals; she is either a good wife like Theano or some combination of courtesan and prostitute like Thargelia. This is the reason modern scholars express their scepticism about the historicity of Aspasia's life.

According to Wallace, "for us Aspasia herself possesses and can possess almost no historical reality". Hence, Madeleine M. Henry, Professor of Classics at Iowa State University, maintains that "biographical anecdotes that arose in antiquity about Aspasia are wildly colorful, almost completely unverifiable, and still alive and well in the twentieth century". She finally concludes that "it is possible to map only the barest possibilities for life". According to Charles W. Fornara and Loren J. Samons II, Professors of Classics and history, "it may well be, for all we know, that the real Aspasia was more than a match for her fictional counterpart".