Fiction: Pericles and Aspasia

Overview
Walter Savage Landor’s Pericles and Aspasia (1836) is an epistolary historical fiction that recreates the brilliance and turbulence of mid-fifth-century BCE Athens through a network of imagined letters. Centered on the love and intellectual companionship of Pericles, the city’s preeminent statesman, and Aspasia, the Milesian-born woman famed for her wit and learning, the book intertwines private reflection with public life, letting politics, philosophy, art, and affection mingle in the intimate medium of correspondence. Rather than a single plotted arc, it offers a living portrait of an age, following the couple from their first attraction through triumphs on the Acropolis to the shadow of war and plague.

Form and Voices
The letters move chiefly between Aspasia and her confidante Cleone in Miletus, and between Aspasia and Pericles themselves, while other figures, philosophers, artists, dramatists, and statesmen, enter as occasional correspondents or reported presences. Anaxagoras lends calm, lucid inquiries into nature and mind; a youthful Socrates sends shrewd, unvarnished judgments; Phidias speaks through workshops and statues that rise under Periclean patronage. Landor embeds short poems and epigrams throughout, some as supposed translations from Greek lyric and the Anthology, others as original effusions that give the letters a second register of feeling, by turns playful, elegiac, and severe.

Athens in Its Prime
Aspasia’s early letters delight in the city’s ascent. She guides Cleone through the agora and the theatre, up to the scaffolds of the Parthenon, into salons where argument is a form of grace. Pericles answers with a statesman’s clarity and a lover’s reserve, weighing the temper of the Assembly and the limits of power while conceding how art and conversation refine a people. The pair’s domestic intimacies, quiet meals, the education of children, visits to artists’ studios, alternate with public scenes: debates on tribute and alliances, the Samian revolt, embassies and festivals, the ostracism of rivals. Aspasia’s position as a foreign-born, uncitizened woman sharpens the book’s sense of Athenian democracy’s reach and exclusions; she is celebrated in private and suspect in public, a paradox Landor uses to question the city’s ideals of freedom and reason.

Trials and Loss
As war pressures intensify, malice gathers around Pericles’ circle. Charges of impiety and mismanagement fall upon Anaxagoras and Phidias; rumors darken Aspasia’s name. The letters record a narrowing of air: civic gratitude sours into envy; triumphal stonework stands amid lawsuits. Then the plague descends. Its pages turn grave as Pericles endures the deaths of his sons and friends, and as Aspasia writes with restrained anguish about suffering bodies and a city’s morale. Political opponents rise in the Assembly, and Pericles’ measured eloquence can no longer steady the multitude he once led. His last letters, tempered and lucid, reconcile public failure with private steadfastness; Aspasia’s reply clings to memory and the continuance of thought and beauty even when the city’s health is broken.

Style and Design
The prose is sculpted with classical poise yet warmed by intimate address. Landor’s letters refuse antiquarian dust, drawing Athens forward as a place of present-tense feeling, sunlight on marble, the murmur of crowds, the astonishment of first seeing a statue alive in stone. The interleaved verse raises the emotional key, distilling grief, praise, and moral reflection into brief, crystalline forms. Throughout, the portrait of Aspasia counters caricature: she is neither mere courtesan nor abstract symbol, but a mind equal to Pericles’, catalyzing his judgment and enlarging his tastes.

Scope and Effect
Pericles and Aspasia offers history transmuted into intimate conversation, a chronicle of the Periclean age that breathes through love letters and marginal notes. It captures the paradox of Athens at its height, art flowering beside faction, free inquiry shadowed by superstition, and lets the city’s greatness be measured not only in temples and victories, but in the eloquence with which its finest spirits faced loss.