The Woman Who Taught Socrates About Love

The New Anglo-Hellenic Review

by Armand D’Angour, Professor of Classics at Jesus College, Oxford

Socrates tells his companions in Plato’s Symposium that he once learned everything he knows about love from a clever woman. Readers have long assumed this is either a joke or a convenient fiction, a mouthpiece called “Diotima” invented so that Plato need not put certain ideas directly into his teacher’s mouth. Renewed scrutiny of the text, along with external evidence, points to a different and disconcerting conclusion: “Diotima” is Plato’s disguise for a real woman, Aspasia of Miletus. Socrates’ debt to her may be the most underappreciated fact in the whole history of Western philosophy.

Aspasia was the most remarkable woman of fifth-century Athens. Born around 470 BC in Miletus, once the intellectual centre of the Greek-speaking world, she arrived in Athens in her twenties and became the influential long-term companion, and probably the wife (since she was later said to have “remarried”), of the city’s dominant statesman Pericles. She was something Athens had no ready category for: a woman celebrated for eloquence and philosophical acumen. She ran what amounted to a salon, advising elite Athenians on marriage and relationships, and ancient sources agree that the young Socrates, close to her in age, was among those who sought her out. Contemporary comic playwrights naturally reached for misogynistic descriptions such as ‘prostitute’.

The first clue sits in plain sight. “Diotima” means “honoured by Zeus” in Greek; Zeus was the common nickname Athenians gave to Pericles, on account of his commanding presence and oratory; and Pericles was notorious for giving honour to Aspasia, even embracing her in public, apparently quite unusual behaviour for an ancient Athenian. A name implying “honoured by Pericles” is too precise a code for Plato to have chosen at random. Plato elsewhere shows no reluctance to name Aspasia outright: in his dialogue Menexenus, she appears under her own name, coaching Socrates in the composition of a funeral oration. If Plato was happy to depict Aspasia teaching Socrates rhetoric in one dialogue, the case for suspecting a veiled reference to her in another dialogue becomes stronger.

A second, independent clue involves a date. Diotima is said in the Symposium to have used religious sacrifice to postpone the great plague of Athens by ten years, which places her intervention in 439 BC. That was the year Pericles returned from crushing a revolt on Samos without burying the enemy dead, a sacrilege that in Greek eyes was liable to provoke divine visitation such as a plague, and that called for expiation through public sacrifice. The only non-Athenian woman positioned to encourage such expiation on Pericles’ behalf was his own wife. A precise date tied to Aspasia’s circumstances is unlikely to have been accidental.

External testimony reinforces the pattern. A pupil of Socrates named Aeschines wrote a dialogue, now lost but partly preserved through quotation by Cicero, in which Aspasia is shown arguing that a good marriage depends on the ethical alignment of the partners rather than on physical attraction or material advantage. This is recognisably the same logic that “Diotima” unfolds in the Symposium: that love properly understood begins with attraction to a body but should ascend towards higher, less physical objects, ending in something closer to a shared pursuit of goodness. Two independent sources, neither making the connection explicit, converge on the same woman offering the same style of argument.

That same lost dialogue preserves something yet more striking: the method by which Aspasia reaches it. Cicero reports that she brought Xenophon and his wife to their own conclusion not by lecturing them but by questioning each in turn, asking what qualities they would want in the best possible neighbour or the best possible horse, until the couple were led, by their own answers, to see what they ought to want in each other. That is recognisably the technique later celebrated as the Socratic method: extracting truth from an interlocutor through a sequence of questions rather than asserting it outright. If Aspasia was using this technique before Socrates made it famous, then his signature method of enquiry, and not only his view of love, should be credited to the woman he calls Diotima.

Just before the argument turns to the immortality of the soul and the eternal Forms, Diotima tells Socrates, “Up to this point even you might be initiated” (209e), drawing a line between a Lesser Mystery anyone could grasp and a Greater Mystery reserved for the few. That line falls precisely where the doctrine stops resembling anything we hear of Aspasia’s own teaching on love and marriage, and starts resembling Plato’s distinctive metaphysics. The later stages of Diotima’s speech, concerning the immortality of the soul and the eternal Forms, bear Plato’s unmistakable fingerprints and represent his elaboration rather than Aspasia’s teaching. My conclusion is that Socrates’ encounter with a woman who argued for the ethical governance of desire left a mark on his thinking, and that Plato knew this, marked its limit, and built beyond it.

Aspasia was, in her own lifetime, subjected to some of the crudest character assassination in Greek comedy. She was labelled a “whore” and a “brothel-madam”, and was blamed for wars she had no part in starting. Yet two sober contemporaries, Plato and Xenophon, describe her only as a respected teacher; it is the comic poets, writing for laughs, whose slanders became the default memory of her. A woman who stands at the root of the Western tradition’s most influential account of love has instead been remembered, when remembered at all, as a joke at Pericles’ expense.

If the identification holds, a formative element of Socratic and hence Platonic philosophy came not from a Presocratic physicist but from a non-Athenian woman that Athenians by convention would find it hard to consider a serious intellectual. That such an origin could be effaced so thoroughly, and for so long, says less about Aspasia than about the misogynistic inclinations of the historical tradition. Restoring Aspasia to her proper place does not diminish Socrates or Plato. It adds one more name, overdue by two and a half thousand years, to the list of Greek thinkers who shaped not only how the Western tradition has understood love, but how it has argued about the truth.

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Armand D’Angour is Professor of Classics at Jesus College, Oxford, and the author of Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher (Bloomsbury, 2019) and How to Talk About Love: an Ancient Guide for Modern Lovers (Princeton, 2025).