At no other time in the history of the world has the poetry of women
reached the height or the honor it attained in this first flowering of
their intellect and imagination. One may doubtless take with a shade of
reservation the “female Homers,” like Anyta, of whom we have only a few
epigrams, but there is a dim and rather vague tradition of seventy-six
women poets in a scattered and by no means large population. In the
revival of poetry during the Renaissance, there were about sixty,
and none of them had the same quality of perfection which we find
in Sappho. No one claims that we have equaled her to-day on her own
ground, however superior our achievements may be in other directions.
That the Æolian women did so much with so little, and in spite of their
limited advantages, is the best proof of their inborn gifts. Mediocre
talents do not thrive in so adverse a soil, though this outburst of
mental vigor belongs to a time when women had a degree of freedom and
honor which for some reason they lost in the golden age of Athens.
But the books they wrote were not printed, the manuscript copies were
limited, most of them were lost with other classic works, and the few
that escaped the pitiless fingers of time were destroyed by fanatics
and iconoclasts. Yet one woman shines across twenty-five centuries as a
star of the first magnitude, and we have fading glimpses of others who
received honors due only to genius, or to talent of the first order.
They were not judged apart as women, for they have come down to us as
peers of great men. The divine gift of genius was rare then, as now
and always, but even in women it did not lack recognition. To prove
the gift and exact the homage, perhaps in any age, we have simply to
show the fruit, except in a decadence, when the finest fruit loses its
savor for corrupted tastes. If the number who wrote for immortality was
small, it must be remembered that probably there were not enough people
in all Greece to make a good-sized modern city.
The statues that were reared to these women have long since vanished
from the classic hills they graced, and their voices are heard only
in the faintest of musical echoes. Most of them have fallen into
eternal silence. That there were many others devoted to things of
the intellect, but unknown to fame, it is fair to presume, as we see
only those who look back upon us from the shining peaks of that far
past, while the dark waters of oblivion have settled over the possible
treasures of its sunny slopes and fragrant valleys. How many of our
own women, with their myriads of books, lectures, and clubs, their
university courses, their versatile intellects, and their unlimited
freedom, are likely to be quoted two or three thousand years hence, and
set in the firmament to live forever?
To be sure, we stand upon a higher moral and social level, we have
more knowledge, our field of action is broader, our ideals of virtue
are higher, and we have privileges and pleasures of which they never
dreamed. It is quite impossible to put ourselves on the simple plane of
these women. The world has grown old and sophisticated; we have learned
to classify ourselves, to choose our fields of knowledge, to consecrate
our talents to what we call larger uses. Perhaps we never again can
reach the lyrical heights of these children of passion, imagination,
and song. Our triumphs are of another sort. But whatever intellectual
distinctions we may attain, it is to this youth of the world that we
must look for the apotheosis of love and beauty.
It is needless to ask why we can point to no second Sappho. There is
but one Parthenon. Broken and crumbling, it stands in its white majesty
forever alone. The Hellenic spirit is as dead as the gods of Olympus.