Left on the Shelf: The Immigrant Queen by Peter Taylor-Gooby

Today I am delighted to be hosting Peter Taylor-Gooby, the author of The Immigrant Queen. Peter is going to be addressing the question, why don’t we pay more attention to Aspasia, the leading woman of fifth century Athens? But first let me tell you a little bit about the book.

The Blurb

Hated as a foreigner, despised as a woman, she became First Lady of Athens.

Aspasia falls passionately in love with Pericles, the leading statesman of Fifth Century Athens. Artists, writers and thinkers flock to her salon. She hides her past as a sex-worker, trafficked to the city, and becomes Pericles’ lover.

Her writings attract the attention of Socrates, and she becomes the only woman to join his circle. She is known throughout the city for her beauty and wit and strives to become recognised as an intellectual alongside men.

Pericles’ enemies attack him through Aspasia and charge her with blasphemy. As a foreigner she faces execution, but her impassioned address to the jury shames the city and saves her. Pericles is spellbound, they marry, and she becomes First Lady of Athens.

Sparta besieges the city; plague breaks out and Pericles is once again in danger.

THE IMMIGRANT QUEEN tells the true story of how Aspasia rose to become the First Lady of Athens and triumphed against all the odds.

Book Details

ISBN: 978 1836280606

Publisher: Troubador

Formats: e-book and paperback

No. of Pages: 320 (paperback)

Preorder Links

Welcome to the blog Peter.

So, why don’t we pay more attention to Aspasia, the leading woman of fifth century Athens?

History has paid scant attention to Aspasia. She is typically presented as the partner of Pericles, the leading figure in Fifth-Century Athens, but she was one of the most remarkable figures in the leading city of the Eastern Mediterranean. Probably from the Ionian sea-board, possibly from Miletus, she may have been trafficked to the city as a sex-worker or entered as a distant member of Pericles’ extended family. She certainly became Pericles’ mistress and, after the death of his wife, she took part in a form of marriage to him, although since she was a foreigner, his child by her could not inherit his considerable wealth. And that is her life according to the respected historian Thucydides. Other commentators make clear that the couple were genuinely in love and remained very much attached to each other until Pericles died in 429BCE, the second year of the Peloponnesian war.

She was clearly attractive but she was also a substantial and original thinker. She founded an Academy for women. She was a member of Socrates’ circle (almost certainly Diotima in the Symposium) and wrote philosophical dialogues, quoted approvingly by Xenophon and others. Indeed Socrates refers to her as his “tutor”. Some writers suggest that her ideas about love expressed in the dialogue the Symposium (but relayed by others – she does not speak directly. Would contemporaries not have taken her words seriously?) lie at the heart of the Platonic theory of ideals.

Plato understood our world as simple appearance, resting on an abstract reality to which we somehow have common access and in which the ideal forms of the physical objects we perceive and more importantly our values and ideas exist. The instances in our world only dimly corresponded to the reality of the ideals, but enough to enable debate and the search for truth. Aspasia talks of love as an ideal of which our experience is only a reflection and physical love is the least significant form. It is possible that Plato learned the distinction between an ideal world and our experiential perceptions from Aspasia’s ideas.

She probably wrote many of Pericles’ speeches including, according to Plato in the Menexenus, his most famous speech, the Funeral Oration of 431 BCE, with its extended metaphor of Athens as the school of Greece. There is no obvious reason why Plato should manufacture this claim, although it is clear that he did not support Pericles’ democratic politics and favoured the aristocratic party in Athens.

Yet many contemporary references see her primarily in terms of her body not her ideas. Aristophanes jokingly attributes the Peloponnesian War to her dealings in sex-workers with Megara – the Athenian blockade of Megara, an ally of Sparta provoked the Sparta invasion while ultimately ended Athenian pre-eminence in the region. Another tale is that when she was prosecuted for blasphemy (an easy charge to make against a foreigner who came from a land of different gods and carrying the death penalty) she secured her acquittal by stripping in court. A third is the rumour that she was the model for the statue of Athene in the Parthenon. And of course she is often described as a sex-worker and in terms of Pericles’ love for her.

Statue of Athene in the Parthenon

Why don’t we know more of her intellectual standing when we know so much about prominent Athenian men? She was a woman in a civilisation where school-children copied out the tag: “he who teaches a women to write gives poison to an Asp”, and where even Pericles claimed in the Funeral Oration that “the greatest glory for a woman is to not be spoken of for good or ill” – something that did not apply to his wife. Her philosophical work was not valued alongside that of men, never copied and hence lost. The speeches she wrote were attributed to Pericles and her activities as an educationalist of women were reduced to the equivalent of brothel-keeping. My new novel The Immigrant Queen seeks to set the picture straight and explain the challenges of being successful and a woman in one of the greatest cities of all time.

Many thanks to Peter for being my guest today.

About the Author

Peter Taylor-Gooby is an academic who believes that you can only truly understand the issues that matter through your feelings, your imagination and your compassion. That’s why he writes novels as well as research monographs. He worked in India as a teacher, in a Newcastle social security office and as an antique dealer.

Now he’s professor of social policy at the University of Kent, a Fellow of the British Academy, loves playing with his grandchildren and writes novels in what time is spare.

You can also find Peter at