Aspasia - Later Years and Death

Later Years and Death

In 429 BC during the Plague of Athens, Pericles witnessed the death of his sister and of both his legitimate sons, Paralus and Xanthippus, from his first wife. With his morale undermined, he burst into tears, and not even Aspasia's companionship could console him. Just before his death, the Athenians allowed a change in the citizenship law of 451 BC that made his half-Athenian son with Aspasia, Pericles the Younger, a citizen and legitimate heir, a decision all the more striking in considering that Pericles himself had proposed the law confining citizenship to those of Athenian parentage on both sides. Pericles died of the plague in the autumn of 429 BC.

Plutarch cites Aeschines Socraticus, who wrote a dialogue on Aspasia (now lost), to the effect that after Pericles's death Aspasia lived with Lysicles, an Athenian general and democratic leader, with whom she had another son; and that she made him the first man at Athens. Lysicles was killed in action in 428 BC. With Lysicles' death the contemporaneous record ends. It is unknown, for example, if she was alive when her son, Pericles, was elected general or when he was executed after the Battle of Arginusae. The time of her death that most historians give (c. 401 BC-400 BC) is based on the assessment that Aspasia died before the execution of Socrates in 399 BC, a chronology which is implied in the structure of Aeschines' Aspasia.