But it is not alone as a singer that Sappho has come down to us. She
was the leader of an intellectual movement among women that was
without a parallel in classic times. We may greet her as not only the
first of woman poets, but as the founder of the first “woman’s club”
known to us. It is not certain that it had either a constitution or
by-laws, and it discussed poetry and esthetics instead of science and
social economics. But the measure of the intellect is not so much what
we discuss as the quality of thought we bring into the discussion. It
is easy enough to talk platitudes about literature or philosophy, and
not so easy as one might imagine to talk wisely and well about poetry,
or manners, or the art of living; and it is easier to do any of these
things than it is to write what is worth talking about. The women who
came to Sappho from the isles of the Ægean and the far hills of Greece
seem to have been more intent upon writing poems than talking about
them. There is no trace of brilliant conversation, or critical papers,
or gathered sheaves of the knowledge that comes so freely under our own
hand. Unfortunately, there was no secretary in this primitive club to
take notes for posterity, or, if there was, the records have been lost.
We know little of its sayings, though there are scattered traces of its
doings. A few faint echoes have come to us across the centuries,--a
verse, a line, a trait, a word, a heart-cry,--and that is all. Even
these give us glimpses of its personal rather than of its intellectual
side. Of the quality of its work we cannot judge, as there is little
of it left. That it was thought worthy of praise in its day, with
Sappho as a standard, proves at least a high degree of merit. She was
musician as well as poet, and trained many of the maidens for singing
in sacred festivals, as well as in the arts of poetry and manners.
When they married, she wrote their bridal odes. These she sang with
the lyre, and one of her minor claims to fame was her invention of the
plectrum, which brought out the full resources of this instrument.
For Timas, who died unmarried, she wrote a touching elegy, which was
sung at her tomb by the maidens, who cut off their curls as a token of
sorrow.
The most gifted of Sappho’s friends was Erinna, who died at nineteen,
leaving among other things a poem of three hundred verses, which was
said to deserve a place beside the epics of Homer. She sang of the
sorrows of a maiden whose mother compelled her to spin when she wished
to serve the Muses. There is also a tradition that she wrote an epitaph
for a companion of “birth and lineage high,” who died on her wedding
day, and “changed bridal songs to sound of sob and tear.” She was
thought to surpass her teacher in hexameters. Sappho reproved her for
being so scornful, and this is all the trait we have of this precocious
child of genius, who preferred poetry to spinning. Her own epitaph
speaks for itself:
These are Erinna’s songs; how sweet, though slight!
For she was but a girl of nineteen years.
Yet stronger far than what most men can write:
Had death delayed, whose fame had equaled hers?
The only thing about Andromeda of which we are sure is that she dressed
badly. “What woman ever charmed thy mind who wore a graceless dress, or
did not know how to draw her garments about her ankles?” says Sappho
to this formidable rival who stole away from her the fickle heart of
Atthis. Of the brilliant Gorgo she grew tired. It is supposed that
these two were at the head of other clubs or schools. Damophyla wrote a
hymn to Artemis, the patron goddess of pure-souled maidens, which was
modeled after Sappho and had great praise in its day, but no fragment
of it is left.
“The fair-haired Lesbian,” so famed as the poet of nature and passion,
was not without a wise philosophy of life, and she assumes the rôle
of mentor with pitiless candor. “He who is fair to look upon is
good, and he who is good will soon be fair,” is her motto; but she
tells Mnasidica that her “gloomy temper spoils her, though she has a
more beautiful form than the tender Gyrinna.” Her house is devoted
to the service of the Muses and must be cheerful, but she shuts out
of an honorable immortality those who prefer worldly fortune to the
pleasures of the intellect. To a rich woman without education she
says: “Where thou diest there wilt thou lie, and no one will remember
thy name in times to come, because thou hast no share in the roses of
Pieria. Inglorious wilt thou wander about in Hades and flit among its
dark shades.” She does not forget the finer graces of character, and
evidently realizes the insidious fascination of material things. A
moralist of to-day might be expected to tell us that “wealth without
virtue is a dangerous guest,” but we are not apt to credit the gifted
singers of the ancient world with so much ethical insight, least of all
the women of a sensuous and passionate race, which loved before all
things beauty and the pleasures of life.
These few touches of wisdom, satire, and criticism, relieved by the
love of Sappho for the friends and pupils to whom she is a model, an
adviser, and an inspiration, throw a passing side-light on a group
of clever women who flit like phantoms across the pages of history,
most of them names and nothing more. They are of interest in showing
us that the women of ages ago had the same aspirations that we have
to-day, together with the same faults, the same virtues, and the same
griefs, though they had not learned to moralize their sensations or
intellectualize their passions. They show us, too, another phase of
the elusive being who dazzled the world in its youth, leaving a few
records traced in flame, and charged with an ever-baffling secret for
all coming generations.
“Men, I think, will remember us hereafter,” she says with subtle
foresight, a line that Swinburne has so gracefully expanded in words
taken in part from her own lips:
I, Sappho, shall be one with all these things,
With all high things forever; and my face
Seen once, my songs once heard in a strange place,
Cleave to men’s lives, and waste the days thereof
With gladness and much sadness and long love.