Aspasia

Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics

BBC

Stand-up, History, Comedy

4.8 • 598 Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A fresh look at the ancient world.

Natalie Haynes, critic, writer and reformed stand-up comedian, brings the ancient world entertainingly up to date.

In the first of four programmes, she profiles a figure from ancient Greece or Rome and creates a stand-up routine around them. She then goes in search of the links which make the ancient world still very relevant in the 21st century.

Women in ancient Greece were supposedly not seen, not heard and not talked about. Meet Aspasia -the woman who broke all the rules – all the more remarkably for the fact that she was the partner of one of the most powerful men in Greece at the time, Pericles.

Natalie explores how writers and comedians used Aspasia’s reputation as a way of attacking the statesman – a practice which hasn’t changed much over 2,500 years.

With classicist Sarah B Pomeroy, Dr Ian Jenkins of the British Museum and Cate Haste, co-author with Cherie Booth of a book on the lot of the statesman’s spouse.

Producer: Christine Hall

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April 2014.

Transcript

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0:00.0	He scored goals, lifted trophies and broken records along the way.
0:05.4	And now he's got a podcast.
0:07.2	Welcome to the Wayne Rooney show.
0:09.1	Twice a week, Wayne Rooney, Kay Kerd and me, Kelly Summers,
0:12.6	break down the biggest stories in the Premier League and beyond.
0:15.6	As much as you'd like to say,
0:16.7	loyalty in football now is no existence, whether that's fun players or managers.
0:20.5	Plus, we'll hear the funniest, wildest and most outrageous stories from Wayne's career.
0:25.5	The Wayne Rooney Show.
0:26.5	Everybody's talking about it.
0:28.0	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:30.2	Hello, thank you for coming.
0:31.7	Today, I would like to talk to you about the most celebrated woman in 5th century Athens, Aspasia.
0:42.0	Thank you. celebrated woman in fifth century Athens, Aspasia. Now, Aspasia is somebody about whom we know virtually nothing.
0:45.7	So I'm not going to lie to you, it was a bit of a risk deciding to make a program about her.
0:49.4	She doesn't write anything.
0:50.9	This is the trouble with wanting to do an even vaguely, not entirely male series, is that all writers, apart from Sappho that we have, and, you know, the odd line here and they're all male, because that's what gets, you know, men get more educated and blah, blah, but you're not interested, I'm not either. Well, I am, but not here. Well, what's interesting about her is that she doesn't write, and therefore I think it's very easy to go, well, let's not even try and work out who she is. Do you know who else doesn't write who's her contemporary Socrates?
1:12.8	So frankly, if we can be bothered to know about him, we can be bothered to know about her. So, hmm. Um, uh, with him, you're correct. She has been the most work to do our bodies to go, I don't. No one knows. Ah, but of course, that's the thing with ancient history is that people often don't know. We're often trying to build somebody out of lots of other things. Socrates doesn't write anything. He has the greatest effect on Western thought of anybody other than Jesus Christ, probably, and neither of them wrote a word. So, you know, we can't always go on people for their writings. So Aspasia was born in Miletus, in Ionia, what would now be Turkey.
1:45.6	And she moves to Athens in probably around 450 BC.
1:50.4	And she begins an affair with Pericles, the great statesman of 5th century Athens.
1:55.6	He is married to an Athenian woman.
1:57.3	They have two children at some point in his life.
	...

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