SAPPHO.
After the Spartan women, we should naturally discuss the position and
influence of women among the Athenians. But a singular phenomenon
chronologically anterior arrests our attention. The Spartan
Constitution remained nearly in the same condition from the ninth
century to the fourth. Our knowledge of the life of the Athenian
women relates mainly to the fifth and later centuries. In the seventh
and sixth occurred the movement among women to which I allude.
Unfortunately many features of it are obscure. The ancients did not
feel much interest in it, and the records in which its history was
contained have nearly all perished. The centre of the movement was
the poetess Sappho. She of herself would deserve a passing notice in
any account of ancient women, for she attained a position altogether
unique. She was the only woman in all antiquity whose productions by
universal consent placed her on the same level with the greatest poets
of the other sex. Solon, on hearing one of her songs sung at a banquet,
got the singer to teach it to him immediately, saying that he wished
to learn it and die.[33] Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, refer to her in
terms of profound respect. Plato called her the tenth Muse. And Strabo
seems to express the opinion of antiquity when he says that she was
something quite wonderful; “for we do not know,” he says,[34] “in the
whole period of time of which there is any record, the appearance of a
single woman that could rival her, even in a slight degree, in respect
of poetry.”
This woman determined to do her utmost to elevate her sex. The one
method of culture open to women at that time was poetry. There was no
other form of literature, and accordingly she systematically trained
her pupils to be poets, and to weave into verse the noblest maxims of
the intellect and the deepest emotions of the heart. Young people with
richly endowed minds flocked to her from all quarters, and formed a
kind of woman’s college.
There can be no doubt that these young women were impelled to seek the
society of Sappho from disgust with the low drudgery and monotonous
routine to which women’s lives were sacrificed, and they were anxious
to rise to something nobler and better. We learn this from Sappho
herself. It is thus that she addresses an uneducated woman:--
“Dying thou shalt lie in the tomb, and there shall be no
remembrance of thee afterwards, for thou partakest not of the
roses of Pieria: yea, undistinguished shalt thou walk in the
halls of Hades, fluttering about with the pithless dead.”
And one of her most distinguished pupils, Erinna, who died at the
early age of nineteen, sang in her poem ‘The Distaff’ the sorrows of
a girl whom her mother compelled to work at the loom and the distaff
while she herself longed to cultivate the worship of the Muses.
Did she attempt any other innovation in regard to the position of
women? What did she think were the relations which ought to subsist
between the one sex and the other? These are questions that we should
fain wish we could answer; but history remains silent, and we can only
form conjectures from isolated facts and statements. A late Greek
writer, Maximus Tyrius,[35] compares her association with young women
to the association which existed between Socrates and young men. It
has to be remembered that even in Sparta the men were thrown into very
close and continual intimacy; and that this was still more the case in
other States where the women were kept in strict confinement. Even in
Sparta the men dined together alone; they were often away on military
expeditions for whole months together, and men were the instructors of
the youths. In this way passionate intimacies arose between old and
young, the old man striving to instruct his favourite youth in all
manly and virtuous exercises, and the young man serving and protecting
his old friend to the best of his power. These attachments were like
the loves of Jonathan and David, surpassing the love of women. It is
likely that Sappho did not see why these intimacies, fraught as they
were with so many advantages, should be confined to the male sex; and
she strove, or at least Maximus Tyrius thought she strove, to establish
much closer connexions, such strong ties of love between members of
her own sex as would unite them for ever in firm friendship, soothe
them in the time of sorrow, and make the hours of life pass joyfully
on. And her poetry expresses an extraordinary strength and warmth of
affection. Just as Socrates almost swoons at the sight of the exquisite
beauty of an Athenian youth, so Sappho trembles all over when she gazes
on her lovely girls. And she weaves all the beauties of nature into
the expression of the depth of her emotion. She seems to have had a
rarely intense love of nature. The bright sun, the moon and the stars,
the music of birds, the cool river, the shady grove, Hesperus, and
the golden-sandalled Dawn--all are to her ministers of love, of this
intense love for her poetical pupils, for one of whom she says she
would not take the whole of Lydia. But though this association may have
been one great object, it cannot be affirmed that she formed any idea
of making the love of women a substitute for the love of men. Some of
her girls unquestionably married, and Sappho composed their hymeneal
songs. She entered into their future destinies, and sympathized with
them throughout their career, following them to the grave with the sad
lament which they only can utter who have felt intensely the joys of
life, and see in death the entrance to a cold, shadowy, and pithless
existence.
It is possible that she may have ventured on new opinions as to the
nature of marriage. When we come to treat of Athens, we shall see
that the restrictions on marriage in the ancient world were of the
sternest and most narrow character. Her Lesbian countrywomen enjoyed
considerable liberty, and Heraclides Ponticus[36] says that they “were
excitable and daring. Wherefore fondness for drink and love affairs,
and every kind of relaxation in regard to food are common among them.”
The statement is made in regard to the Æolians, to whom the Lesbians
belonged. But they were surrounded by Ionians, among whom the position
of women was almost servile. Sappho may have opened her home to the
girls who were tired of such close restriction, and may have counselled
marriage from choice. Probably this circumstance would account for the
treatment which the character of Sappho received in subsequent times,
for all women who have dared to help forward the progress of their
sex, and all men who have boldly aided them have almost uniformly been
slandered and reviled in all ages.[37] All the notices which we have
of her from contemporary or nearly contemporary sources speak of her
in high terms of praise. Alcæus, her fellow-townsman, sings of her as
“the violet-crowned, chaste, sweet-smiling Sappho,” and approaches
her in verses which imply a belief in her purity. Herodotus[38] tells
how she bitterly rebuked a brother who squandered all his money on a
beautiful courtezan. Her fellow-citizens honoured her by stamping her
figure upon their coins,--“honoured her,” says Aristotle,[39] “though
she was a woman.” And the fragments of her own poems bear testimony to
the same fact. They show, indeed, the warm blood of a Southern girl
who has no concealments. If she loves, she tells it in verses that
vibrate with emotion, that tremble with passion. And she was no prude.
Like the rest of her sex of that day, she thought that it was woman’s
destiny to love, and that the woman who tried to resist the impulse of
the god tried an impossible feat. But there is not one line to show
that she fell in love with any man. She may have done so, she probably
did so, but there is no clear proof. There is only one reference to a
man, and it is most likely that she is celebrating not her own passion,
but the love of one of her girls. And if she wrote many a hymn to the
golden-throned Aphrodite, she wrote also hymns to the chaste Artemis,
and prayed to the chaste Graces.
But when we pass from her contemporaries to the Athenian comic
writers, all is changed. No fewer than six comedies, written by six
different poets, bore her name and exhibited her loves, and four other
plays probably treated the same subject. In these she was represented
as loving a poet who died before she was born, and two poets who were
born after she died. But especially she fell into an infatuated love
at the age of fifty for a kind of mythological young man who was
gifted by Aphrodite with the power of driving any woman he liked into
desperation for him. Old Sappho became desperate according to these
poets, and plunged into the sea to cool this mad passion; but whether
she ever reached the bottom, no comic poet or subsequent historian has
vouchsafed to tell us. All these villanous stories, which gathered
vileness till, as Philarète Chasles remarks, they reached a climax in
Pope, seem to me indicative that she ventured on some bold innovations
in regard to her own sex which shocked the Athenian mind. And perhaps
confirmation is added to this by the statement in the Parian marble,
though the document is often untrustworthy,[40] that she was banished
and fled to Sicily. She may, indeed, have taken part in some of the
numerous political movements which agitated her native island, but it
seems more likely that she would give offence by trying to strike off
some of the restrictions which in her opinion harassed or degraded her
sex.