It is hardly possible to realise and judge of Sappho without realising
her environment. The picture must have its background, and the
background is Lesbos about the year 600 B.C. One may well regret never
to have seen the island now called Mytilini, but known in ancient times
as Lesbos. There are, however, descriptions not a few, and with these
we must perforce be satisfied. On the map it lies there in the Ægean
Sea, a sort of triangle with rounded edges, pierced deeply on the south
by two deep lochs or fiords, while toward each of its three angles it
rises into mountains of from two to three thousand feet in height. One
way it stretches some thirty-five miles, the other some twenty-five.
It is twenty-five centuries ago since this island was the home of
Sappho, of Alcæus, and of a whole school of the most finished lyric
poetry and music ever heard in Greece. From its northern shore, across
only seven miles of laughing sea, the poetess might every day look upon
the Troad, the land of Homeric legend; and in the North-East distance,
over the broadening strait, rose the storied crest of “many-fountained
Ida.” The air was clear with that translucency of which Athens also
boasted, and in which the Athenian poet rightly or wrongly found one
cause of the Athenian intellectual brilliancy. The climate was, and
still is, famous for its mildness and salubrity. The Lesbian soil was,
and still is, rich in corn and oil and wine, in figs and olives, in
building-wood and tinted marble. It was eminently a land of flowers and
aromatic plants, of the rose and the iris, the myrtle and the violet,
and the Lesbians would seem to have loved and cultivated flowers much
as they are loved and cultivated in Japan.
Such was the land. The Greeks who inhabited it belonged apparently to
that Achæan-Æolian branch which was the first to cross from Europe
to the north-west Ægæan and to oust, or plant colonies among, the
older nameless--perhaps “Pelasgian”--occupants. This is not the place
to discuss the tribal or even racial differences which once existed
between Æolian, Ionian, and Dorian Greeks. Their divergence of
character was great; it was of the first significance as exhibited in
war, in social life, in art. The fact that each division spoke the
Greek tongue, though with various accents and idioms, is no longer held
as proof that their racial origin and capacity were the same. Between
the Greek of Lesbos and the Greek of Sparta there were differences in
temper, in adaptability, and in taste, as great as those between the
English-speaking Irishman, with his nimble sympathies and his ready
eloquence and wit, and the slower if surer Saxon of Mid-lothian. If
we touch upon this question here, it is merely because it casts some
measure of light upon those social and literary characteristics of the
Lesbians in which Sappho fortunately shared. Almost beyond a doubt
the Æolian Greeks who first made Lesbos their home were the nearest of
kin to those fair-haired Achæans who, in the _Iliad_, followed their
feudal lords to the siege of Troy. Socially a distinguishing mark of
these people was the liberty and high position enjoyed by the women in
the household, by the Penelopes as well as by the Helens. This fact
has hardly been sufficiently considered in dealing with that peculiar
position of Sappho and her coterie, concerning which something will be
said later on. Artistically their distinguishing mark, as represented
first in Homer, was their clear, open-eyed, original observation
of essentials, their veracity of description, their dislike of the
indefinite and the mystic. This too is clearly reflected in the work of
Sappho and her compatriots.
We must not, it is true, make too much of this racial derivation and
its consequences. The population of Lesbos doubtless became mixed; the
lapse of centuries, the passing away of the feudal relation, increasing
ease and wealth in a softening climate, long intercourse with the trade
and culture of the neighbouring Asiatic coast--all these had their
inevitable effects. Nevertheless, among it all, the frank genius of
earliest Greece is still discernible in the classic poetry of Lesbos.
The island naturally possessed its characteristic speech. The dialect
of Lesbos was strongly marked. It is altogether unsafe to specify at
this distance of time the particular qualities of softness or sonority
which belonged to Greek dialects; but, if one may venture where doubt
must always be so great, it would not be unreasonable to speak of
Lesbian Greek as perhaps the most “singable” of them all. In several
ways it is peculiarly like Italian. The aspirate is gone, the double
consonants are brought out with an Italian clarity unique in Greece,
the vowels are firm and musical. And here we must remember that a
local Greek dialect must never be looked upon as a provincial _patois_
simply because it is not Attic. Neither Attic nor any other one speech
possessed a pre-eminence in Greece in the year 600 B.C. The poet of
every little independent Grecian state was free to compose in his own
idiom, with no more hesitation or self-consciousness than would have
occurred to a Provençal troubadour, an early _trouvère_ of Normandy,
or a Sicilian poet before the age of Dante. The half-doubts of Burns
when writing his native Scots would find no sympathy in Sappho or
Alcæus. No poetry that profoundly stirs the heart was ever written with
effort in an alien speech. Burns perhaps had some reason to be tempted
to write in English. The Lesbian singers had no temptation to write in
anything but Lesbian. Sappho may indeed be called the Burns of Greece,
but if her dialect, like his, was local, it was at the same time the
genuine and recognised language of the most cultured men and women of
her people.
Having thus spoken of Lesbos, its people, and its language, we may
proceed to the social and ethical surroundings into which Sappho was
born. The island contained, after the usual Greek fashion, perhaps
half-a-dozen little communities independent of each other. All
these had their “little summer wars” and their little revolutions;
but it is with Mitylene, the chief and largest town, that the life
of Sappho is identified. The history of such a town at this period
may be compared to that of an Italian city in the later thirteenth
century. It was the history of a struggle between a despotism, or an
oligarchy of aristocrats, and the rights of the citizens. The _grandi_
and _popolari_ of Florence in the time of Dante find their analogues
in the conflicts of nobles like Alcæus and his brother Antimenidas
against the champions of the common folk of Mitylene. There were also
feuds less immediately explainable, just as there were feuds of Guelfs
and Ghibellines, of Blacks and Whites. We need not inquire into the
usurpations of Melanchrus and Myrsilus or the dictatorship of Pittacus.
Men carried to power by favour of one party might drive their opponents
into banishment, just as Dante was exiled to Verona and Ravenna. Among
those who thus left their country for a space were the poet Alcæus and
his greater contemporary Sappho. Particularly haughty and turbulent
were the nobly born, and these often elected to roam abroad and serve
as _condottieri_ in foreign armies rather than condescend to obey the
rule of the commons at home. It may be mentioned in passing that the
brother of the poet Alcæus took service under King Nebuchadnezzar, and
in his wars killed a Goliath, who “lacked but a hand’s-breath of five
cubits.”
Yet these are after all but surface incidents, of which history
often makes too much. As in modern times, the little wars and little
revolutions caused but an inconsiderable suspension of social and
industrial life. Commerce and art went on very much as before. The
vines of Lesbos were pruned, the ships of Lesbos went trading down the
coast, the poets and musicians of Lesbos played and sang. We know that
while Guelfs were quarrelling with Ghibellines and Florentines were
fighting with Pisans or Genoese, the festive processions went with song
across the Arno, Giotto’s tower rose from the ground, Guido Cavalcanti
composed his sonnets, and Dante, for all that he must fight in the
front ranks at Campaldino, found time and hearers for his _Donne ch’
avete intelletto d’amore_. So it was at Mitylene. We need not therefore
picture Sappho and her society of maidens as living perpetually among
war’s alarms or fluttering in daily expectation of battle, murder, and
sudden death. Life in Lesbos must have been passing cheerful, as life
goes.
When we proceed next to speak of the lively enthusiasm of this Lesbian
folk for beauty in all its forms, and in especial for the beauty of
music and poetry, we must guard against a misconception. Under all
the love of art which ruled in Lesbos, amid all its eager cultivation
of the Muses and the Graces, this isle of Greece “where burning
Sappho loved and sung” carried on its daily work as strenuously as
any Greeks were wont. Its farmers and fishermen, its quarriers and
vine-dressers, laboured like others in sun or cold. There was no doubt
plenty of envy, hatred, and malice, and no little that was coarse and
gross. Nevertheless the love of art and beauty and the spontaneous
appreciation of them penetrated far deeper into a Greek people
than it does with us. It was not an artificial outgrowth, a dainty
efflorescence of leisure and luxury. It was no private possession of
the _virtuoso_, or sequestered playground of the amateur. Even now the
popular songs of the village Greeks are in literary grace and thought
of a higher quality than many songs familiar to our drawing-rooms.
Life without song and dance upon the sward was unimaginable in old
Hellas.
The special pride of Lesbos was in its music and poetry. In the
language of the legend, when that magic singer Orpheus had been torn to
pieces in Thrace, his head--with, as some say, his lyre--was carried
“down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore.” On the coins of Mitylene,
as on the flag of Ireland, may be seen a harp. The first great name
in the musical history of Greece is that of the Lesbian Terpander.
It is not indeed a probable story that he was the first to increase
the strings of the lyre from four to seven, but it is practically
certain that he both improved that instrument and invented new forms
of composition to embody a lyrical idea. Another world-known poet and
musician who shed glory on Lesbos was Arion. Of him in later days the
story grew that, when he was thrown overboard by pirates, a dolphin,
which had been charmed by his melodies, bore him upon its back safe to
the Tarentine shore.
In Lesbos, as in every part of Greece, there were abundant demands upon
musician and poet. Every occasion of worship, festivity, and grief
required its song. The gods were hymned by groups at their altars
and by white-robed maidens in processions; at weddings the hymeneal
chorus was chanted along the street, and the epithalamion before the
doors of the bridal home; at every banquet were sung lively catches and
jocund songs of Bacchus; every season--spring, summer, harvest--had
its popular ditty, exultant or pathetic; almost every occupation, of
herdsman, boatman, gardener, was beguiled with melody; at the coming
of the first swallow, as on the old English Mayday, the children sang
the “swallow-song” from house to house. And let it be remembered that
the Greeks had none of our modern tolerance for a song of which the
words were nought and the tune everything. To them the thought, the
sentiment, was first; the melody was simply its proper vehicle. Italian
opera, when not a word is intelligible, would have seemed to them a
strange anomaly. To them _mousikê_ was the “art of the Muses,” and this
meant literature no less than minstrelsy. The poet, unless, like Burns,
he wrote his verses to existing tunes, was his own composer. In either
case he was poet first and foremost.
Now for generations the songs for special purposes had been shaping
themselves on special lines. To use a phrase of Aristotle, experience
had found out the right species to fit the case. There were sundry
recognised stanzas and metres for a processional, a hymeneal, or a
dirge. In most cases, therefore, the task of a new poet was to write
new words; the melody would, as in the case of Burns, almost find
itself. Nevertheless the complete poet could not dispense with an
elaborate training in music. To invent beautiful variations of existing
tunes was part of his glory; he must at least write words which should
sing themselves to the melody he selected. “Melodies” is the word,
for the Greeks knew practically nothing of harmonies. Their songs were
sung in unison, or simply with an octave interval when men sang with
women or with boys. The accompanying instrument was generally the
lyre, or one of many stringed instruments akin thereto; sometimes it
was the so-called flute, which was in truth a clarinet. Whatever their
musical deficiencies, it has been maintained by competent authorities
that in nicety of ear for pitch and time the training of the Greeks
incomparably surpassed the modern. Be that as it may, it must never be
left out of sight that, when a Lesbian wrote a song, it was in the
first place as perfect a poem as he could create, and in the second
it was meant to be sung, not merely to be read. Shelley’s _Ode to a
Skylark_ is consummate literature. Yet we may doubt if it could ever
be sung, and assuredly it was not written to that end. On the other
hand, the songs of Moore are often but sickly stuff to read, but they
lend themselves perfectly to those touching Irish airs, to which, by
the way, the Lesbians seem to have been akin in a peculiar tone of
plaintiveness. A Greek lyric aimed at combining the literary _mousikê_
of Shelley’s _Ode_ with the songful _mousikê_ of Moore. It is in the
perfection of this combination that Sappho excels all women who have
ever written verse.
Where song was for generations so abundant, it follows that there was
floating about among the people many an old ballad or favourite ditty
whose author had been long forgotten. Numbers of these _Volkslieder_,
or snatches of them, lay, sometimes with consciousness and sometimes
unrealised, in the memory of every child of Lesbos. The artistic poet
did not scorn them; he feared no charge of plagiarism if he adopted
and adapted them; he often acted as Burns acted with the ballads of
Scotland; he took them, gave them that marvellous and inexplicable
touch of finality which only genius can impart, and so made them his
for ever. This also did Sappho do, and her verses, when she deals with
well-worn themes, are beyond question often fed with the hints of older
nameless songsters.
There is one department of lyric verse in which Lesbos stood supreme,
and Sappho supreme in Lesbos. It is the poetry, not of religion or
marriage, of the banquet or the seasons, but of personal emotion; the
verse of the “lyric cry,” which tells of the writer’s own passion, its
waves of joy and sorrow, love and hate. It is the monody, the verse
sung, not by a gathered company, but from the one overflowing heart,
the song best represented at Rome by Catullus, and in modern times by
Burns or Heine. For most of her poems in this kind there is no reason
to suppose that Sappho relied upon any promptings but those of her own
soul. She took the floating rhythms of the ballads, modified them, and
into their mould she poured verse which, as George Sand said of her own
writings, came from “the real blood of her heart and the real flame of
her thought.”
And here at length we come to the poetess herself. Into this land,
devoted to poetry, to music, to flowers, and so regardful of loveliness
that a public “prize of beauty” was annually competed for in the
temple of Hera, was Sappho--or Psappha, as she apparently called
herself--born in the latter part of the seventh century before Christ.
Our ancient authorities are sufficiently in agreement as to her date,
and we may lay it down that she was in her prime about the year 600
B.C., or nearly a hundred and fifty years before that great period of
Athenian literary culture which is represented by Æschylus, Sophocles
and Euripides. The ascertainable facts of her career are miserably
few, and concerning those matters which are in debate as to her life
and character the present exponent must be permitted to express simply
his own views, premising that they have been formed with all due and
deliberate care.
Whether the names of her parents were or were not Scamandronymus and
Clêis is an unimportant question. We may simply remark that both
those names are of aristocratic colour, and both are more or less
authenticated. Whether again she was born at Mitylene itself, or at the
smaller town of Eresos, is of little moment, since we know that at any
rate Mitylene was the scene of her life’s work. That she belonged to
the ranks of the well-born, and that good looks were in the family, is
proved by the choice of her brother Larichus as cup-bearer of Mitylene,
an office which was bestowed only on handsome and noble youth. That
at least one member of the family possessed considerable means is
known from the rather romantic history of a second brother, Charaxus.
This young man sailed away in his ship, laden with the famous Lesbian
wine--the _innocentis pocula Lesbii_ of Horace--as far as Egypt.
There he traded in that merchandise at the Pan-Grecian free-town of
Naucratis, which had been established in the Delta under a permission
somewhat similar to that by which settlement was first allowed in
the treaty-ports of China. Here, however, he fell in love with the
world-famed _demi-mondaine_ whose name, Doricha, is less familiar than
her sobriquet Rhodôpis--“complexion of a rose”--and his gains were
spent in chivalrously ransoming that lady from a degrading slavery. It
is of interest to know, though the verses are not preserved to us, that
his poetess sister reproved him sharply for this conduct. Her “love of
love” did not blind her to the claims of family honour and dignity.
It is gratifying to learn that at a later time she expresses her
reconciliation to her brother in a poem which, like those of Herondas
and Bacchylides, has but recently been disgorged, though in a sadly
mutilated state, by the omnivorous sands of Egypt. Sappho herself is
said to have married a wealthy islander of Andros, and to have had at
least one daughter, whose name, according to Greek custom, was the name
of the grandmother, Clêis. It is apparently this Clêis whom she is
addressing in a fragment which we may venture to translate thus----
“I have a maid, a bonny maid,
As dainty as the golden flowers,
My darling Clêis. Were I paid
All Lydia, and the lovely bowers
Of Cyprus, ’twould not buy my maid.”
An inscription on the Parian marbles informs us that, at some uncertain
date, Sappho fled, or was driven, into banishment to Sicily. There
is nothing unlikely in the circumstance, and it is worth noting that
more than 500 years later, in the days of Cicero, Verres, the governor
of that island, appropriated a bronze statue of Sappho, wrought by a
Grecian master and greatly prized at Syracuse.
As _Aberglaube_ which has gathered about Sappho’s history, there are
two strange legends, or rather there is one strange legend in two
parts, which must here be told briefly.
The story goes that once upon a time Aphrodite, goddess of love,
disguised as an aged woman, was gallantly ferried across to Lesbos by
a young waterman of the name of Phaon. In reward she bestowed upon him
marvellous beauty and irresistible charm. Of him, the fable tells,
Sappho became enamoured to the point of frenzy, and, unable to win his
heart, she resolved to attempt the last and most desperate cure known
for her disease. Away in the Ionian Sea was the jutting rock of Leucas,
and it was believed that those who cast themselves down from that
cliff into the sea either ended their miseries in death or rose from
the waters cured of their malady. What became of Sappho when she took
that “lover’s leap” may be found narrated by Hephæstion. It is given in
Addison’s 233rd _Spectator_. “Many who were present related that they
saw her fall into the sea, from whence she never rose again; there were
others who affirmed that she never came to the bottom of her leap, but
that she was changed into a swan as she fell, and that they saw her
hovering in the air under that shape. But whether or no the whiteness
and fluttering of her garments might not deceive those who looked upon
her, or whether she might not really be metamorphosed into that musical
and melancholy bird, is still a doubt among the Lesbians.” Well, let
us share the Lesbian doubt, and a little more. Suffice it to say that,
though this story, which has been elaborated by the fancy of Ovid,
appears to have been known in some shape to Menander and other comic
poets of Athens, there is absolutely no trace of the name of Phaon or
of anything connected with him in any fragment of Sappho. Nor was there
likely to be, seeing that he is in all probability but another _avatar_
of the mythical youth Adonis. More interesting is it to observe that
the rock of desperation is called “Sappho’s Leap” unto this day.
Unfortunately we do not know when or by whom it was so baptized.
Of Sappho’s personal appearance we have no certain knowledge. More
than four centuries later a philosopher named Maximus Tyrius says that
she was considered beautiful, “though” short and dark, and hence is
prompted Swinburne’s assumption--
“The small dark body’s Lesbian loveliness
That held the fire eternal.”
If this be true, she was sufficiently unlike the conventional ideal of
Lesbian beauty. Her contemporary Alcæus speaks of her “sweet smile,”
and Anacreon, in the next generation, of her “sweet voice.” Later
writers of epigrams, who can hardly have known much about the matter,
call her “bright-eyed,” or “the pride of the lovely-haired Lesbians,”
but those are as likely as not mere descriptive guesses of the kind
in which poetical fancy may pardonably indulge. If we meet with the
untranslatable adjective _kalê_ applied to her by Plato, we have to
remember that it is a stock epithet of admiration for a writer of
charm and genius, and in such cases contains no reference whatever to
beauty of person.
What we really know best of Sappho’s life is that she was acknowledged
the choicest spirit of her time in music and poetry, and that,
whether as friendly guide or professional teacher or something of
both, she gathered about her what may be variously called a coterie,
academy, conservatorium, or club, of young women, not only from Lesbos
itself but from other islands, and even from Miletus and the distant
Pamphylia. Sometimes they were called her “companions,” sometimes her
“disciples.” One of them, Erinna of Telos, herself became famous, but
unhappily survives for us as a lyrist only in an inconsiderable line or
two.
Sappho appears to have taught these damsels music and also the art of
poetry, so far as that art is teachable. She appears, moreover, to
have taught them whatever charms and graces of bearing and behaviour
were most desired by women, whether in their social life or in
their frequent appearances in religious or secular processions and
ceremonies. There exists a short fragment in which she derides the
rusticity of the woman who has no idea how to hold up her train about
her ankles. In another place she bids one of her maidens--
“Take sprigs of anise fair
With soft hands twined,
And round thy bonny hair
A chaplet bind;
The Muse with smiles will bless
Thy blossoms gay,
While from the garlandless
She turns away.”
It has often been observed that the relations of Sappho with the young
women Erinna and Atthis and Anactoria resembled those of Socrates
with the young men Alcibiades and Charmides and Phædrus. But it has
apparently not been also pointed out as a parallel that, three
centuries later, there similarly gathered about the _maître_ Philêtas,
in the isle of Cos, a school of young poets, among whom were no less
persons than Theocritus, Asclepiades and Aratus.
The peculiarity of Sappho’s coterie lay to the general mind in the fact
that it was a club of women. And here we must handle with brief and
gentle touch, but with no false reserve, a topic which no discourse
on Sappho can shrink from facing. The reputation of Sappho and her
comrades has long been made to suffer from what is probably, and almost
certainly, a cruel injustice. Partly through the social depravity of
the later Greek and Roman, partly through taking too seriously the
scurrilous humours of the comic dramatists of Athens, many ancients
and most moderns have formed concerning that Lesbian school a notion
which in all likelihood does bitter wrong to Sappho, wrong to art,
and wrong to human nature. At Athens, as among all the Ionian Greeks,
and later on among Greeks almost everywhere, a woman of character was
kept in a seclusion suggestive of the oriental. The woman most to be
praised, Pericles declared, was “she of whom least is said among men
whether for good or evil.” This, as we have seen, was not the way of
the older Æolian Lesbos, where woman still enjoyed much of the Homeric
freedom and independence to go and come and live her life. What more
natural than for Athenians to imagine that the famous coterie of Sappho
consisted of women of the same class as the brilliant Aspasia? Their
very talent was proof enough, for the Athenian housekeeper who passed
for wife made no pretensions to literature and art. What more natural
also than for an Athenian playwright, like him of the _Ecclesiazusæ_,
or “_Women in Parliament_,” to find scandalous comedy in the
_Précieuses_ of Lesbos? Again, the poems of Sappho are nearly all poems
of love, and to the ordinary Greek, especially of a later date, it was
unseemly for modest women to acknowledge so positive a passion. An
Elizabeth Barrett Browning would have received no countenance from the
Athenian Mrs. Grundy. The truth seems to be that Lesbos in the year 600
B.C. was in this respect socially and ethically almost as different
from the Athens of two hundred years later as the emancipated young
woman of America is different from the dragon-guarded Spanish maiden of
Madrid.
We may pass by other considerations which might be urged, but it is
no surprise that the false notion of Sappho, constructed by decadent
Greeks and refined upon by the vice of the Romans, should do her
special harm in the days when paganism gave way to Christianity. Among
the many works destroyed by the unco’ guid in the early Byzantine days
were the poems of Sappho--destroyed the more savagely because that
particular pagan, who so passionately invoked the Queen of love, was a
woman, and woman’s ideal place was then the cloister. Unhappily certain
moderns, who are anything but unco’ guid, have carried on the wrong in
a different way, and, for example, the title _Sapho_ of Daudet’s sketch
of _mœurs Parisiennes_ is a choice which may pardonably stir the ire of
any Hellenist.
The few fragments of Sappho which have been preserved are not those
which have been spared by the saints or which have been culled for
special innocence. They simply happen to be quoted here and there by
ancient critics, grammarians, and even lexicographers, to illustrate
some æsthetic doctrine, the use of some word, or even some peculiarity
of grammar. And no understanding man or woman can read them without
feeling that what we find is sheer poetry, sound and true, free
from dross in either form or thought. Says Sappho herself, “I love
daintiness, and for me love possesses the brightness and beauty of the
sun.” To Alcæus, her fellow-countryman and acquaintance, she was the
“violet-weaving, pure, sweetly-smiling Sappho.” To Plato, who judged
even art by ethical standards, she is “beautiful and wise.” Her reply
to her fellow-poet, when he was too bashful to say something which was
in his mind, was this--
“Had your desire been right and good,
Your tongue perplex’d with no bad thought,
With frank eye unabashed you would
Have spoken of the thing you ought.”