Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/123

 BEGINNING OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR. }(,! had a son by her, who bore his name, and continued ever after wards on terms of the greatest intimacy and affection with her Without adopting those exaggerations which represent Aspasia as having communicated to Perikles his distinguished eloquence, or even as having herself composed orations for public delivery, we may well believe her to have been qualified to take interest and share in that literary and philosophical society which fre- quented the house of Perikles, and which his unprincipled son Xanthippus, disgusted with his father's regular expenditure, as withholding from him the means of supporting an extravagant establishment, reported abroad with exaggerating calumnies and turned into derision. It was from that worthless young man, who died of the Athenian epidemic during the lifetime of Perikles, that his political enemies and the comic writers of the day were mainly furnished with scandalous anecdotes to assail the private habits of this distinguished man. 1 The comic writers attacked him for alleged intrigues with different women, but the name of Aspasia they treated as public property, without any mercy or reserve : she was the Omphale, the Deianeira, or the Here, to this great Herakles or Zeus of Athens. At length one of these comic writers, Hermippus, not contented with scenic attacks, indicted her before the dikastery for impiety, as partici- pant in the philosophical discussions held, and the opinions pro- fessed, in the society of Perikles, by Anaxagoras and others. Against Anaxagoras himself, too, a similar indictment is said to have been preferred, either by Kleon or by Thucydides, son of Melesias, under a general resolution recently passed in the public assembly, at the instance of Diopeithes. And such was the sen- sitive antipathy of the Athenian public, shown afterwards fatally in the case of Sokrates, and embittered in this instance by all the artifices of political faction, against philosophers whose opinions conflicted with the received religious dogmas, that Perikles did not dare to place Anaxagoras on his trial: the latter retired from Athens, and the sentence of banishment was passed against him in his absence. 2 But he himself defended Aspasia befcre lueivrjv [ilv irepu )ov?M[ivttv OVVE&SUKEV, aiirbf de 'Kairaaiav 3.aj3ui' i-i re^t SiaftpovTuc;. ' Plutarch, Perikles. c. 13 36. 8 This seems the more probable story : but there are differences ot tat LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORm