The influence of Aspasia on Athenian thought, though denounced unsparingly by most critics, may indeed have been beneficial, inasmuch as it tended towards the emancipation of the Attic woman from the over-strict tutelage in which she was kept.
4 Athens was at this time the centre of intellectual life, and could boast an almost unique galaxy of talent - Pericles, Thucydides the son of Melesias, Aspasia, Antiphon, the musician Damon, Pheidias, Protagoras, Zeno, Cratinus, Crates, Euripides and Sophocles.
From 1821 to 1826 he published many separate poems of great beauty in the Aurora, Hebe, Aspasia, and other magazines of polite literature.
In a series of letters to James Hervey, the author of Theron and Aspasia, he maintained that justifying faith is a simple assent to the divine testimony concerning Jesus Christ, differing in no way in its character from belief in any ordinary testimony.
A scandalous charge against his mistress Aspasia, which he defeated by his personal intercession before the court, was taken very much to heart by Pericles.