Our Debt to Greece and Rome
EDITORS
GEORGE DEPUE HADZSITS, PH.D.
_University of Pennsylvania_
DAVID MOORE ROBINSON, PH.D., LL.D.
_The Johns Hopkins University_
[Illustration]
CONTRIBUTORS TO THE “OUR DEBT TO GREECE AND ROME FUND,” WHOSE GENEROSITY
HAS MADE POSSIBLE THE LIBRARY
Our Debt to Greece and Rome
_Philadelphia_
DR. ASTLEY P. C. ASHHURST
JOHN C. BELL
HENRY H. BONNELL
JASPER YEATES BRINTON
GEORGE BURNHAM, JR.
JOHN CADWALADER
MISS CLARA COMEGYS
MISS MARY E. CONVERSE
ARTHUR G. DICKSON
WILLIAM M. ELKINS
H. H. FURNESS, JR.
WILLIAM P. GEST
JOHN GRIBBEL
SAMUEL F. HOUSTON
CHARLES EDWARD INGERSOLL
JOHN STORY JENKS
ALBA B. JOHNSON
MISS NINA LEA
GEORGE MCFADDEN
MRS. JOHN MARKOE
JULES E. MASTBAUM
J. VAUGHAN MERRICK
EFFINGHAM B. MORRIS
WILLIAM R. MURPHY
JOHN S. NEWBOLD
S. DAVIS PAGE (_memorial_)
OWEN J. ROBERTS
JOSEPH G. ROSENGARTEN
WILLIAM C. SPROUL
JOHN B. STETSON, JR.
DR. J. WILLIAM WHITE (_memorial_)
GEORGE D. WIDENER
MRS. JAMES D. WINSOR
OWEN WISTER
The Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of Liberal Studies.
_Boston_
ORIC BATES (_memorial_)
FREDERICK P. FISH
WILLIAM AMORY GARDNER
JOSEPH CLARK HOPPIN
_Chicago_
HERBERT W. WOLFF
_Cincinnati_
CHARLES PHELPS TAFT
_Cleveland_
SAMUEL MATHER
_Detroit_
JOHN W. ANDERSON
DEXTER M. FERRY, JR.
_Doylestown, Pennsylvania_
“A LOVER OF GREECE AND ROME”
_New York_
JOHN JAY CHAPMAN
WILLARD V. KING
THOMAS W. LAMONT
DWIGHT W. MORROW
MRS. D. W. MORROW
ELIHU ROOT
MORTIMER L. SCHIFF
WILLIAM SLOANE
GEORGE W. WICKERSHAM
And one contributor, who has asked to have his name withheld:
Maecenas atavis edite regibus,
O et praesidium et dulce decus meum.
_Washington_
The Greek Embassy at Washington, for the Greek Government.
_The following lovers of Greek literature, and of Sappho in particular,
have kindly consented to act as patrons and have made possible, by
generous contributions, the larger size of this volume in the Series “Our
Debt to Greece and Rome”_:
MR. CHARLES H. CAREY
MR. JAMES CAREY
MISS LILLIE DETRICK
PROFESSOR JOSEPH CLARK HOPPIN
MRS. HARRY C. JONES
MRS. GARDINER M. LANE
MISS EMMA MARBURG
DR. JOHN RATHBONE OLIVER
MISS JULIA R. ROGERS
PROFESSOR HERBERT WEIR SMYTH
DR. HUGH H. YOUNG
[Illustration: PLATE 1. ALMA TADEMA’S SAPPHO
In the Walters’ Art Gallery, Baltimore]
SAPPHO
AND HER INFLUENCE
BY
DAVID M. ROBINSON, PH.D., LL.D.
_W. H. Collins Vickers Professor of Archaeology and
Epigraphy and Lecturer on Greek Literature
The Johns Hopkins University_
[Illustration]
MARSHALL JONES COMPANY
BOSTON · MASSACHUSETTS
COPYRIGHT · 1924 · BY MARSHALL JONES COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
Printed December, 1924
THE PLIMPTON PRESS · NORWOOD · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_To_
THE MEMORY OF
BASIL LANNEAU GILDERSLEEVE
MASTER, COLLEAGUE, AND FRIEND
AND TO MY FORMER TEACHERS
EDWARD CAPPS
PAUL SHOREY
ULRICH VON WILAMOWITZ-MOELLENDORFF
δῶρον ’αντὶ μαγάλου σμικρόν
A trifling gift in return for much.
Ἑτερος ἐξ ἑτέρου σοφὸς τό τε πάλαι τό τε νῦν. οὐδὲ γὰρ ῥᾶστον
ἀρρήτων ἐπέων πύλας ἐξευρεῖν.
Poet is heir to poet, now as of yore; for in sooth ’tis no
light task to find the gates of virgin song.
JEBB, _Bacchylides_, p. 413, frag. 4
Immortal Sappho, maid divine,
Thou sharest with the heavenly nine
All honor. Shout through all the town
That on her head we place a crown.
Hasten with the chaplet green,
Greet her one and all as queen;
The Lesbian, a tenth muse we name,
And prophesy that her bright fame
Shall spread o’er all the world.
This title till the stars do fall,
Nations yet unborn shall call
And glorify her name.
(LUCY MILBURN)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
CONTRIBUTORS TO THE FUND ii
I. SOME APPRECIATIONS, ANCIENT AND MODERN 3
II. SAPPHO’S LIFE, LESBUS, HER LOVE-AFFAIRS, HER PERSONALITY
AND PUPILS 14
III. THE LEGENDARY FRINGE 34
Sappho’s Physical Appearance, The Phaon Story, The
Vice Idea
IV. THE WRITINGS OF SAPPHO 46
V. SAPPHO IN ART 101
VI. SAPPHO’S INFLUENCE ON GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE 119
VII. SAPPHO IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE RENAISSANCE 134
VIII. SAPPHO IN ITALY IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES 139
IX. SAPPHO IN LATIN TRANSLATIONS, IN SPANISH, AND IN GERMAN 148
X. SAPPHO IN FRENCH LITERATURE 160
XI. SAPPHO IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE 188
An Addendum on Sappho in Russian 233
XII. SAPPHO’S INFLUENCE ON MUSIC 234
XIII. EPILOGUE AND CONCLUSION 237
NOTES 251
BIBLIOGRAPHY 268
ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATE
1. ALMA TADEMA’S SAPPHO _Frontispiece_
(_At end of Volume_)
2. BUST OF PITTACUS
3. MYTILENE
4. THE STORY OF PHAON ON A VASE IN FLORENCE
5. PHAON ON A GREEK VASE IN PALERMO
6. THE LEUCADIAN PROMONTORY
7. ROMAN FRESCO IN AN UNDERGROUND BUILDING
8. A PAPYRUS OF THE THIRD CENTURY A.D.
9. A CYLIX BY SOTADES
10. GREEK COIN FROM MYTILENE
11. IMPERIAL COINS
12. A GREEK VASE IN MUNICH
13. SAPPHO ON A VASE IN CRACOW
14. SAPPHO SEATED BEFORE A WINGED EROS
15. GREEK ARYBALLUS AT RUVO
16. A GREEK HYDRIA IN ATHENS
17. PHAON IN HIS BOAT
18. A POMPEIAN FRESCO
19. A BUST OF SAPPHO IN THE VILLA ALBANI
20. THE OXFORD BUST
21. A BUST IN THE BORGHESE PALACE
22. STATUE OF SAPPHO BY MAGNI
23. STATUE OF SAPPHO BY PRADIER
24. RAPHAEL’S PARNASSUS
SAPPHO AND HER INFLUENCE
I. SOME APPRECIATIONS, ANCIENT AND MODERN
The name of Sappho will never die. But it lives in most of the minds that
know it at all to-day as hardly more than the hazy nucleus of a ragged
fringe suggestive of erotic thoughts or of sexual perversion. Very seldom
does it evoke the vision of a great and pure poetess with marvellous
expressions of beauty, grace, and power at her command, who not only
haunts the dawn of Grecian Lyric poetry but lives in scattered and broken
lights that glint from vases and papyri and from the pages of cold
grammarians and warm admirers, whose eulogies we would gladly trade for
the unrecorded poems which they quote so meagerly. Sappho has furnished
the title of such a novel as Daudet’s _Sapho_. It figures in suggestive
moving pictures.[1] The name will answer prettily as that of a bird
or even a boat such as the yacht with which Mr. Douglas defended the
American cup in 1871. The modern idea of Sappho truly seems to be based
mainly on Daudet, who with Pierre Louys in recent times has done most to
degrade her good character and who goes so far as to say that “the word
Sappho itself by the force of rolling descent through ages is encrusted
with unclean legends and has degenerated from the name of a goddess to
that of a malady.” But to the lover of lyrics, who is also a student of
Greek Literature in Greek, this poetess of passion becomes a living and
illustrious personality, who of all the poets of the world, as Symonds
says, is the “one whose every word has a peculiar and unmistakable
perfume, a seal of absolute perfection and inimitable grace.” “Sappho,”
says Tennyson in _The Princess_, “in arts of grace vied with any man.”
She is one whose fervid fragments, as the great Irish translator of the
_Odes_ of Anacreon and the _Anacreontics_, Thomas Moore, says in his
_Evenings in Greece_,
Still, like sparkles of Greek Fire,
Undying, even beneath the wave,
Burn on thro’ time and ne’er expire,
a prophecy still true even in this materialistic day. Sappho, herself,
had intimations of immortality, for she writes with perfect beauty and
modesty:
Μνάσεσθαί τινά φαμι καὶ ὔστερον ἀμμέων
I say some one will think of us hereafter.
This brief, pellucid verse Swinburne in his _Anactoria_ has distorted
into the gorgeous emotional rhetoric of fourteen verses. But its own
quiet prophecy stands good to-day. A fragment first published in 1922[2]
also seems to make her say:
and yet great
glory will come to thee in all places
where Phaëthon [shines]
and even in Acheron’s halls
[thou shalt be honored.]
In general, antiquity thought of her as “_the_ poetess” κατ’ἐξοχήν, ἡ
ποιήτρια,[3] just as Professor Harmon has recently shown[4] that “the
poet” in ancient literature means Homer. Down to the present day Sappho
has kept the definite article which antiquity gave her and has been
called _the_ poetess, though we must be careful to test a writer’s use
of the term. Therefore, we must not understand by the absence of any
added epithet, as Wharton does, that Tennyson rates her higher than
all other poets, merely because in _Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After_
he speaks of Sappho as “The Poet,” having called her in his youth “The
Ancient Poetess,”[5]—for he also speaks of Dante as “The Poet,” when in
_Locksley Hall_ he says, “this is truth the poet sings,” and then cites
verse 121 of the _Inferno_. It is rare, however, even in modern times to
find Sappho classed with any other poet as a peer, as in the beautiful
tribute _To Christina Rossetti_ of William Watson, one of the best modern
writers of epigrams, where Mrs. Browning and Sappho are the two other
women referred to:
Songstress, in all times ended and begun,
Thy billowy-bosom’d fellows are not three.
Of those sweet peers, the grass is green o’er one;
And blue above the other is the sea.
In ancient days Pinytus (1st cent. A.D.) composed this epigram:[6]
This tomb reveals where Sappho’s ashes lie,
But her sweet words of wisdom ne’er will die.
(LORD NAEVES)
Tullius Laureas, who wrote both in Greek and Latin about 60 B.C., puts
into her mouth the following: “When you pass my Aeolian grave, stranger,
call not the songstress of Mytilene dead. For ’tis true this tomb was
built by the hands of men, and such works of humankind sink swiftly
into oblivion; yet if you ask after me for the sake of the holy Muses
from each of whom I have taken a flower for my posy of nine, you shall
know that I have escaped the darkness of Death, and no sun shall ever
rise that keepeth not the name of the lyrist Sappho.” (Edmonds, with
variations.)
Posidippus[7] (250 B.C.) says:
Sappho’s white, speaking pages of dear song
Yet linger with us and will linger long.
(T. DAVIDSON)
Horace[8] says:
vivuntque commissi calores
Aeoliae fidibus puellae.
That inadequate and misleading metaphor of fire, as Mackail says, recurs
in all her eulogists. Μεμιγμένα πυρὶ φθέγγεται, “her words are mingled
with fire,” writes Plutarch,[9] but the “fire” of the burning Sappho is
not raging hot, it is an unscorching calm, brilliant lustre that makes
other poetry seem cold by comparison. No wonder that Hermesianax[10]
(about 290 B.C.) called her “that nightingale of hymns” and Lucian[11]
“the honeyed boast of the Lesbians.” Strabo (1 A.D.) said: “Sappho is a
marvellous creature (θαυμαστόν τι χρῆμα), in all history you will find
no woman who can challenge comparison with her even in the slightest
degree.” Antipater of Thessalonica (10 B.C.) named Sappho as one of the
nine poetesses who were god-tongued and called her one of the nine muses:
“The female Homer: Sappho pride and choice of Lesbian dames, whose locks
have earned a name.”[12] In another epigram in the _Anthology_,[13]
probably from the base of a lost statue of Sappho in the famous library
at Pergamum,[14] and which Jucundus and Cyriac were able to cite many
hundreds of years later, Antipater says,
Sappho my name, in song o’er women held
As far supreme as Homer men excelled.
(NEAVES)
Some thoughtlessly proclaim the muses nine;
A tenth is Lesbian Sappho, maid divine,
are the words of Plato in Lord Neaves’ translation of an epigram of which
Wilamowitz[15] now timidly defends the genuineness. Antipater of Sidon
(150 B.C.)[16] in his encomium on Sappho tells how
Amazement seized Mnemosyne
At Sappho’s honey’d song:
‘What, does a tenth muse,’ then, cried she,
‘To mortal men belong!’
(WELLESLEY)
He also speaks[17] of Sappho as “one that is sung for a mortal Muse
among Muses immortal ... a delight unto Greece.” Dioscorides[18] (180
B.C.) says: “Sappho, thou Muse of Aeolian Eresus, sweetest of all
love-pillows unto the burning young, sure am I that Pieria or ivied
Helicon must honour thee, along with the Muses, seeing that thy spirit
is their spirit.” Again, in an anonymous epigram[19] it is said: “her
song will seem Calliope’s own voice.” Another writer,[20] also anonymous,
discussing the nine lyric poets, says:
Sappho would make a ninth; but fitter she
Among the Muses, a tenth Muse to be.
(NEAVES)
Catullus[21] speaks of the _Sapphica Musa_, and Ausonius in Epigram XXXII
calls her _Lesbia Pieriis Sappho soror addita Musis_.[22]
If we turn now from the praise of the ancients to modern literary
critics of classic lore we shall not find any depredation but rather an
enhancing of that ancient praise. The classic estimate of Sappho holds
its own and more than holds it to-day. J. A. K. Thomson in his _Greeks
and Barbarians_[23] says: “Landor is not Greek any more than Leconte de
Lisle is Greek ... they have not the banked and inward-burning fire which
makes Sappho so different.” Mackail speaks of “the feeling expressed in
splendid but hardly exaggerated language by Swinburne, in that early poem
where, alone among the moderns, he has mastered and all but reproduced
one of her favourite metres, the Sapphic stanza which she invented and to
which she gave her name”—
Ah the singing, ah the delight, the passion!
All the Loves wept, listening; sick with anguish,
Stood the crowned nine Muses about Apollo;
Fear was upon them,
While the tenth sang wonderful things they knew not.
Ah, the tenth, the Lesbian! the nine were silent,
None endured the sound of her song for weeping;
Laurel by laurel,
Faded all their crowns; but about her forehead
...
Shone a light of fire as a crown for ever.
Swinburne himself was thoroughly steeped in Sappho whom he considered
“the supreme success, the final achievement of the poetic art.” He laid
abounding tribute at her feet both in verse and prose. In an appreciation
first published posthumously in 1914 in _The Living Age_,[24] he says:
“Judging even from the mutilated fragments fallen within our reach from
the broken altar of her sacrifice of song, I for one have always agreed
with all Grecian tradition in thinking Sappho to be beyond all question
and comparison _the very greatest poet that ever lived_. Aeschylus is the
greatest poet who ever was also a prophet; Shakespeare is the greatest
dramatist who ever was also a poet, but Sappho is simply nothing less—as
she is certainly nothing more—than the greatest poet who ever was at all.
Such at least is the simple and sincere profession of my lifelong faith.”
Alfred Noyes recognizes in Swinburne’s praise of Sappho a spirit which
would make them congenial companions in another world, when in the poem
_In Memory of Swinburne_ he writes:
Thee, the storm-bird, nightingale-souled,
Brother of Sappho, the seas reclaim!
Age upon age have the great waves rolled
Mad with her music, exultant, aflame;
Thee, thee too, shall their glory enfold,
Lit with thy snow-winged fame.
Back, thro’ the years, fleets the sea-bird’s wing:
Sappho, of old time, once,—ah, hark!
So did he love her of old and sing!
Listen, he flies to her, back thro’ the dark!
Sappho, of old time, once.... Yea, Spring
Calls him home to her, hark!
Sappho, long since, in the years far sped,
Sappho, I loved thee! Did I not seem
Fosterling only of earth? I have fled,
Fled to thee, sister. Time is a dream!
Shelley is here with us! Death lies dead!
Ah, how the bright waves gleam.
Wide was the cage-door, idly swinging;
April touched me and whispered ‘Come.’
Out and away to the great deep winging,
Sister, I flashed to thee over the foam,
Out to the sea of Eternity, singing
‘Mother, thy child comes home.’
J. W. Mackail echoes Swinburne’s high praise: “Many women have written
poetry and some have written poetry of high merit and extreme beauty. But
no other woman can claim an assured place in the first rank of poets”
... “The sole woman of any age or country who gained and still holds an
unchallenged place in the first rank of the world’s poets, she is also
one of the few poets of whom it may be said with confidence that they
hold of none and borrow of none, and that their poetry is, in some unique
way, an immediate inspiration.”
Many another modern critic ranks Sappho as supreme. Typical are such
eulogies as “Sappho, the most famous of all women” (Aldington), or
“Sappho, incomparably the greatest poetess the world has ever seen”
(Watts-Dunton in ninth ed. _Encyclopædia Britannica_).
II. SAPPHO’S LIFE, LESBUS, HER LOVE-AFFAIRS, HER PERSONALITY AND PUPILS
It is my purpose in the limited space at my disposal to show in a general
way, since it will not be possible to go into details, the truth of
Sappho’s prophecy that men would think of her[25] in after-times: to show
her importance as a woman and poetess and our debt to her, and also to
give my readers some acquaintance with the real and the unreal Sappho so
that they can judge how much is fact and how much is fancy in what they
hear and read about Sappho, thus proving again that the warp and woof of
literature cannot be understood without a knowledge of the original Greek
threads. This chapter will consider Sappho’s Life.
Unfortunately we know little of Sappho herself, and about that little
there is doubt. Even the ancient lives of Sappho are lost. If we
had Chamaeleon’s work on Sappho,[26] or the exegesis of Sappho and
Alcaeus[27] by Callias of Mytilene, or the book on Sappho’s metres by
Dracon of Stratonicea, we should not be left so in the dark; but all
these have perished or, what comes to the same thing, are undiscovered.
Like Homer, Sappho gives us almost no definite information about herself,
and we must depend on late lexicographers, commentators, and imitators.
Villainous stories arose about her and gathered added vileness till they
reached a climax in the licentious Latin of Ovid, especially as seen in
Pope’s translation of the epistle of Sappho to Phaon.
Sappho came of a noble family belonging to an Aeolian colony in the
Troad. Though Suidas gives eight possibilities for the name of Sappho’s
father, the most probable is Scamandronymus, a good Asia Minor name
vouched for by Herodotus, Aelian and other ancient writers and now
confirmed by a recently discovered papyrus.[28] He was rich and noble and
probably a wine-merchant. He died, according to Ovid,[29] when Sappho’s
eldest child was six years of age.
Her mother’s name, says Suidas, was Cleïs.[30] Commentators assume that
she was living when Sappho began to write poetry because of the reference
to “mother” in the “Spinner in Love”; but this may be an impersonal poem.
According to the Greek custom of naming the child after a grandparent the
poetess called her only daughter Cleïs.
The poetess had three brothers, Charaxus, Larichus, who held the
aristocratic office of cup-bearer in the Prytaneum to the highest
officials of Mytilene, and, according to Suidas, a third brother,
Eurygyius,[31] of whom nothing is known.
Athenaeus tells us that the beautiful Sappho often sang the praises
of her brother Larichus; and the name was handed down in families of
Mytilene, for it occurs in a Priene inscription[32] as the name of the
father of a friend of Alexander who was named Eurygyius. This shows the
family tradition and how descendants of Sappho’s family attained high
ranks in Alexander’s army.
Charaxus, the eldest brother as we now know, “sailed to Egypt and as an
associate with a certain Doricha spent very much money on her,” according
to the recently found late papyrus biography. Charaxus had strayed from
home about 572 and sailed as a merchant to Naucratis, the great Greek
port colony established in the delta of the Nile under conditions similar
to those of China’s treaty-ports. There he was bartering Lesbian wine,
Horace’s _innocentis pocula Lesbii_, for loveliness and pleasures, when
he fell in love with and ransomed the beautiful Thracian courtesan,
the world-renowned _demi-mondaine_. She was called Doricha by Sappho
according to the Augustan geographer, Strabo, but Herodotus names her
Rhodopis, rosy-cheeked,[33] and evidently thought she had contributed
to Delphi[34] the collection of _obeliskoi_ or iron spits, the small
change of ancient days before coin money was used to any great extent.
Herodotus, the only writer preserved before 400 B.C. who gives us any
details about Sappho tells the story and how the sister roundly rebuked
her brother in a poem. Some four hundred years later Strabo, adding a
legend which recalls that of Cinderella, repeats the story and it is
retold by Athenaeus after another two hundred years. In our own day it
has slightly influenced William Morris in the _Earthly Paradise_. Except
for archaeology, however, we should never have heard Sappho’s own words.
About 1898 the sands of Egypt gave up five mutilated stanzas of this poem
which scholars had for many a year longed to hear, but the beginnings
of the lines are gone and only a few letters of the last stanza remain.
My own interest in Sappho dates from that very year when I wrote for
Professor Edward Capps, then of the University of Chicago, a detailed
seminary paper on _The Nereid Ode_, and for the twenty-five years since
I have been gathering material about Sappho. We must be careful not
to accept as certainly Sappho’s, especially the un-Sapphic idea of the
last stanza, the restorations of Wilamowitz, Edmonds, and a host of
other scholars, who have changed their own conjectures several times.
Wilamowitz goes so far as to think that the words apply to Larichus,
but most critics have restored them with reference to Charaxus. I give
a version which I have based on Edmonds’ latest and revised text,[35]
taking a model from the stanza used by Tennyson in his _Palace of Art_.
In offering a new translation of such songs as these it should be fully
realized that no translation of a really beautiful poem can possibly
represent the original in any fair or complete fashion. Unfortunately
languages differ; and in translating a single word of Sappho into a word
of English which fairly represents its meaning, one may easily have
lost the musical charm of the original, and still further he may have
broken up the general charm or spirit which the word has because of its
associations with the spirit of the whole song. It ought to be clear that
in preserving the literal meanings of the words in a song the translator
may be compelled to part in large measure with the musical note that
comes from assonance, alliteration, and association; or again that in
rendering the music as Swinburne could do, he may have diluted or even
lost the real meaning and spirit of the poem; and finally that, though
the spirit of the poem may be seized ever so effectively, the working out
of the details of music and meaning may fail to respond to those of the
original. Of course a slight measure of successful representation may be
attained. But whatever poetical value anyone senses in these translations
must be almost indefinitely heightened by imagination, if the beauty,
grace, and power of the original are to be realized. Why then translate
at all? Well, just because of a desire to make an English reader share
even in a small measure the pleasure the translator feels in the original
and to furnish him with paths along which his imagination may lawfully
climb toward the height reached by this strangely gifted woman’s pen.
TO THE NEREIDS
O all ye Nereids crowned with golden hair
My brother bring, back home, I pray.
His heart’s true wish both good and fair
Accomplished, every way.
May he for former errors make amend—
If once to sin his feet did go—
Become a joy, again, to every friend,
A grief to every foe.
O may our house through no man come to shame,
O may he now be glad to bring
Some share of honor to his sister’s name.
Her heart with joy will sing.
Some bitter words there were that passed his lip,—
For me the wrath of love made fierce
And him resentful,—just as he took ship,
When to the quick did pierce
My song-shaft sharp. He sought to crush my heart,—
Not distant be the feasting day
When civic welcome on his fellows’ part,
Shall laugh all wrath away!
And may a wife, if he desires, be found
In wedlock due, with worthy rite—
But as for thee, thou black-skinned female hound,
Baleful and evil sprite,
Set to the ground thy low malodorous snout
And let my brother go his way
Whilst thou, along thy low-lived paths, track out
The trail of meaner prey.
(D. M. R.)
In this letter, handed perhaps to Charaxus on his return from Egypt,
the tone is that of reconciliation rather than that of rebuke, and the
rebuke itself may be found in a fragment of another letter, if Edmonds’
restoration is anywhere near the truth.[35]
You seek the false and shun the true,
And bid your friends go hang for you,
And grieve me in your pride and say
I bring you shame. Go, have your way,
And flaunt me till you’ve had your fill;
I have no fears and never will
For the anger of a child.
(EDMONDS)
“Sappho,” or “Sapho,”[36] as the name appears on vases and papyri, or
“Psappho,” as coins and vases have it, or “Psappha,” as she herself
spelled it in her soft Aeolic dialect, is perhaps a nom de plume,—the
word meaning _lapis lazuli_. According to Athenaeus[37] (who wrote at
the beginning of the third century A.D.) she lived in the time of the
father of Croesus, Alyattes, who reigned over Lydia from 628 to 560
B.C. Jeremiah, Nebuchadnezzar, and at Rome Tarquinius Priscus were her
contemporaries. Suidas, a Greek lexicographer of the tenth century A.D.,
says that she flourished about the 42nd Olympiad (612-608 B.C.),[38]
along with Alcaeus and Stesichorus and Pittacus,[39] (Pl. 2) the latter,
one of the seven wise men of Greece and lord of Lesbus. This would
indicate that she was then in her poetic prime. If so, she must have
been born about 630 B.C. or earlier. Mackail dates her birth as far
back as the middle of the seventh century. These early dates given
above are amply confirmed by her explicit reference to Sardis and by
her descriptions of the luxurious life of the Lydians (E.[40] 20, 38,
86, 130, etc.) which have lately been made so realistic by the American
excavations with their finds of gold staters of Croesus, beautiful Lydian
seals, jewelry, pottery, and inscriptions.
In the seventh century after the founding of Naucratis, about 650 B.C.,
many Mytilenaeans migrated to Naucratis and engaged in trade in wine and
other products.[41] Among these was included, as Herodotus’ story shows,
Sappho’s brother Charaxus; the mention of his name furnishes a further
confirmation of the date we have assumed, and proves that Sappho lived at
least after 572 B.C., the year of the accession to the throne of Egypt of
Amasis, in whose reign Herodotus[42] says that Rhodopis flourished. This
would make Sappho’s age at the time about sixty and justify the epithet
of “old” which she applies to herself in the poem given in Edmonds 99.
Fragment 42 in Edmonds seems to say “age now causeth a thousand twisted
wrinkles to make their track along my face.”[43] Stobaeus[44] tells how
one evening over the wine Solon’s nephew, Execestides, sang to him a song
by Sappho, and Solon requested him to teach it to him that he might learn
it before he died. Now Solon was one of the seven to whom Pittacus also
belonged. He died about 559 B.C. at the age of eighty, and the incident
serves to indicate that Sappho’s poems were coming into vogue among the
young Athenians in Solon’s old age.
Sappho’s birthplace was Eresus,[45] the birthplace also of Aristotle’s
famous pupil Theophrastus. She early moved to Mytilene (Pl. 3), chief
city of Lesbus. Lesbus had been renowned for lovely ladies from Homer’s
day, when beauty contests were held there, as they have been down to the
present time. It had also been famous from early days for its sweet wine.
Many an ancient author speaks of this wholesome tipple, and to-day a
thirsty traveller is delighted to sit in a café on the quay and drink a
glass of the fine modern κρασὶ τῆς Μιτυλήνης.
Lesbus was so near to Lydia that it could not help absorbing some of the
Ionian and Lydian luxury. No one has better described the position of
Lesbus in Greek literature than Symonds:[46]
“For a certain space of time the Aeolians occupied the
very foreground of Greek literature, and blazed out with a
brilliance of lyrical splendor that has never been surpassed.
There seems to have been something passionate and intense
in their temperament, which made the emotions of the Dorian
and the Ionian feeble by comparison. Lesbos, the centre of
Aeolian culture, was the island of overmastering passions: the
personality of the Greek race burned there with a fierce and
steady flame of concentrated feeling. The energies which the
Ionians divided between pleasure, politics, trade, legislation,
science, and the arts, and which the Dorians turned to war
and statecraft and social economy, were restrained by the
Aeolians within the sphere of individual emotions, ready to
burst forth volcanically. Nowhere in any age of Greek history,
or in any part of Hellas, did the love of physical beauty,
the sensibility to radiant scenes of nature, the consuming
fervor of personal feeling, assume such grand proportions and
receive so illustrious an expression as they did in Lesbos. At
first this passion blossomed into the most exquisite lyrical
poetry that the world has known; this was the flower-time of
the Aeolians, their brief and brilliant spring. But the fruit
it bore was bitter and rotten. Lesbos became a byword for
corruption. The passions which for a moment had flamed into
the gorgeousness of art, burning their envelope of words and
images, remained a mere furnace of sensuality, from which no
expression of the divine in human life could be expected.
In this the Lesbian poets were not unlike the Provençal
troubadours, who made a literature of love, or the Venetian
painters, who based their art upon the beauty of color, the
voluptuous charms of the flesh. In each case the motive of
enthusiastic passion sufficed to produce a dazzling result. But
as soon as its freshness was exhausted there was nothing left
for art to live on, and mere decadence to sensuality ensued.”
“Several circumstances contributed to aid the development of
lyric poetry in Lesbos. The customs of the Aeolians permitted
more social and domestic freedom than was common in Greece.
Aeolian women were not confined to the harem like Ionians, or
subjected to the rigorous discipline of the Spartans. While
mixing freely with male society, they were highly educated, and
accustomed to express their sentiments to an extent unknown
elsewhere in history—until, indeed, the present time. The
Lesbian ladies applied themselves successfully to literature.
They formed clubs for the cultivation of poetry and music.
They studied the arts of beauty, and sought to refine metrical
forms and diction. Nor did they confine themselves to the
scientific side of art. Unrestrained by public opinion, and
passionate for the beautiful, they cultivated their senses
and emotions, and indulged their wildest passions. All the
luxuries and elegancies of life which that climate and the
rich valleys of Lesbos could afford were at their disposal;
exquisite gardens, where the rose and hyacinth spread perfume;
river-beds ablaze with the oleander and wild pomegranate;
olive-groves and fountains, where the cyclamen and violet
flowered with feathery maiden-hair; pinetree-shadowed coves,
where they might bathe in the calm of a tideless sea; fruits
such as only the southern sun and sea-wind can mature; marble
cliffs, starred with jonquil and anemone in spring, aromatic
with myrtle and lentisk and samphire and wild rosemary through
all the months; nightingales that sang in May; temples dim
with dusky gold and bright with ivory; statues and frescoes of
heroic forms. In such scenes as these the Lesbian poets lived,
and thought of love. When we read their poems, we seem to have
the perfumes, colors, sounds, and lights of that luxurious land
distilled in verse. Nor was a brief but biting winter wanting
to give tone to their nerves, and, by contrast with the summer,
to prevent the palling of so much luxury on sated senses. The
voluptuousness of Aeolian poetry is not like that of Persian
or Arabian art. It is Greek in its self-restraint, proportion,
tact. We find nothing burdensome in its sweetness. All is so
rhythmically and sublimely ordered in the poems of Sappho that
supreme art lends solemnity and grandeur to the expression of
unmitigated passion.”
A young woman of good birth in such surroundings would be sure to have
her love-affairs. When Sappho was at the height of her fame in young
womanhood, the poet Alcaeus, her townsman, was also in his glory. We
are not told whether he was older or younger than she, but probably
Sappho was the older and lived before the political disorders which
led to her exile from Lesbus. Alcaeus was said, perhaps wrongly, to
be her lover. The story is based on the verses quoted by Aristotle in
his _Rhetoric_,[47] “pure Sappho, violet-weaving and gently smiling, I
would fain tell you something did not shame prevent me,” to which Sappho
replied, “If your desire were of things good or fair, and your tongue
were not mixing a draught of ill words, then would not shame possess
your eye, but you would make your plea outright” (Edmonds). Tradition
even in classic times represented her as beloved by Anacreon also,[48]
but the bard of Teos flourished at least fifty years after the Lesbian
poetess. Archilochus and Hipponax, the famous iambic satiric poets, the
former dead before Sappho was born, the latter born after she was dead,
were also represented as her lovers by Diphilus,[49] the Athenian comic
playwright in his play _Sappho_. But as Athenaeus in the third century
A.D. said, “I rather fancy he was joking.”
Mackail says that “she was married and had one or more children,” and
many of the new fragments, as well as Ovid, indicate this. A fragment
long known says:
I have a maid, a bonny maid,
As dainty as the golden flowers,
My darling Cleïs. Were I paid
All Lydia, and the lovely bowers
Of Cyprus, ’twould not buy my maid.
(TUCKER)
Professor Prentice[50] translates this fragment (E. 130), “there is a
pretty little girl named Cleïs whom I love,” etc., and says that it does
not refer to her own daughter. But there is no word for love in the
Greek passage, and the ancient interpretation of Maximus of Tyre[51] is
preferable, especially as Cleïs is definitely mentioned by Suidas and
as the name reappears as that of a young woman in another of the old
fragments and in one of the new pieces.[52] The matter seems now to be
settled by the recent discovery on a papyrus (about 200 A.D.) of a new
late prose biography of Sappho which is so important a source for her
life that a literal translation of it is here given, especially as it is
not in Edmonds’ _Lyra Graeca_.[53]
“Sappho by birth was a Lesbian and of the city of Mytilene and her father
was Scamandrus or according to some Scamandronymus. And she had three
brothers, Eurygyius, Larichus, and the eldest, Charaxus, who sailed to
Egypt and as an associate with a certain Doricha spent very much on her;
but Sappho loved more Larichus, who was young. She had a daughter Cleïs
with the same name as her own mother. She has been accused by some of
being disorderly in character and of being a woman-lover. In shape she
seems to have proved contemptible and ugly, for in complexion she was
dark, and in stature she was very small; and the same has happened in the
case of ... who was undersized.”
The man whom Sappho married, she herself also being a person of some
means, was said to be Cercylas, a man of great wealth from the island
of Andrus. Cercylas sounds like concocted comic chaff, but we can
believe enough of the tradition to say that she was married. A Russian
scholar[54] made her a widow at thirty-five.[55] Thereafter she sought
for love and companionship among the girls whom she made members of her
salon and instructed in the arts.
Sappho must have had a wonderful personality or she could not have
attracted so many pupils and companions whom she trained to chant or
sing in the choruses for the marriage ceremony and for other occasions.
She was president of the world’s first woman’s club. It was a _thiasos_
or a kind of sacred sorority to which the members were bound by special
ties and regulations. We have a long list of the members who were her
friends and pupils, not only from Lesbus but from Miletus, Colophon,
Pamphylia, and even Salamis and Athens. For some of them she had an
ardent passion. When they left her, she missed them terribly (E. 43,
44, 46). “Is it possible for any maid on earth to be far apart from
the woman she loves?” She was so jealous at times that she spited her
wrath on her rivals, especially Gorgo and Andromeda. She “had enough of
Gorgo,” and she scolds Atthis for having come to hate the thought of her
and for flitting after Andromeda in her stead (E. 55, 81). Suidas tells
us that she had three companions or friends, Atthis, Telesippa, and
Megara, to whom she was slanderously declared to be attached by an impure
affection; and that her pupils or disciples were Anagora (Anactoria) of
Miletus, Gongyla (the dumpling) of Colophon, Euneica of Salamis. Ovid
mentions Atthis, Cydro, and Anactoria, the name which Swinburne took for
his poem in which he welded together many of Sappho’s fragments with
fine expression and passionate thought. Maximus of Tyre (xxiv, 9) says:
“What Alcibiades, Charmides, and Phaedrus were to Socrates, Gyrinna,
Atthis and Anactoria were to Sappho, and what his rival craftsmen,
Prodicus, Gorgias, Thrasymachus and Protagoras were to Socrates, that
Gorgo and Andromeda were to Sappho, who sometimes takes them to task and
at others refutes them and dissembles with them exactly like Socrates”
(Edmonds). Philostratus in his _Life of Apollonius of Tyana_[56] tells
of Sappho’s brilliant pupil Damophyla of Pamphylia who is said to have
had girl-companions like Sappho and to have composed love-poems and hymns
just as she did, with adaptations from the lectures of her professor.
Her own fragments mention Anactoria, Atthis, Gongyla, Gyrinno (which
perhaps means Little Tadpole), “Mnasidica, of fairer form than the dainty
Gyrinno” (E. 115), and possibly Eranna.[57] One fragment says, “Well did
I teach Hero of Gyara, the fleetly-running maid” (E. 73). If this is the
famous Hero of the Hero and Leander story so often pictured in Greek art
and on coins of Abydus, Sappho knew the story of two king’s children
who loved one another long before the days of the painter Apelles.[58]
Sappho’s school of poetry in modern times has been prettily pictured in
a painting by Hector Leroux (p. 118), but the best representation of
what her school may have been is given by Alma Tadema (Pl. 1) in his
academic and learned classical painting “Sappho” in the Walters’ Art
Gallery in Baltimore. Archaic Greek inscriptions, of interest to the
specialist in epigraphy, can be read on the marble seats of the theatre
at Mytilene represented in the picture,—the names of Erinna of Telos,
Gyrinno, Anactoria of Miletus, Atthis, Gongyla of Colophon, Dika (short
for Mnasidica), and others. I quote the beautiful appreciation which
Professor Gildersleeve has published:[59]
“A semi-circle of marble seats, veined and stained, a screen
of olive trees that fling their branches against the sky, and
against the sapphire seas, a singing man, a listening woman,
whose listening is so intense that nothing else in the picture
seems to listen—not the wreathed girl in flowered robe who
stands by her and rests her hand familiarly on her shoulder.
Not she, for though she holds a scroll in her other hand, the
full face, the round eyes, show a soul that matches wreathed
head and flowered robe. She is the pride of life. Nor she on
the upper seat, who props her chin with her hand and partly
hides her mouth with her fingers and lets her vision reach
into the distance of her own musings. Nor her neighbor whose
composed attitude is that of a regular church-goer who has
learned the art of sitting still and thinking of nothing. Nor
yet the remotest figure—she who has thrown her arms carelessly
on the back of the seat and is looking out on the waters as
if they would bring her something. A critic tells us that
the object of the poet is to enlist Sappho’s support in a
political scheme of which he is the leader, if not the chief
prophet, and he has come to Sappho’s school in Lesbos with the
hope of securing another voice and other songs to advocate
the views of his party. The critic seems to have been in the
artist’s secret, and yet Alma Tadema painted better than he
knew. Alkaios is not trying to win Sappho’s help in campaign
lyrics. The young poet is singing to the priestess of the Muses
a new song with a new rhythm, and as she hears it, she feels
that there is a strain of balanced strength in it she has not
reached: it is the first revelation to her of the rhythm that
masters her own. True, when Alkaios afterwards sought not her
help in politics, but her heart in love, and wooed her in that
rhythm, she too had caught the music and answered him in his
own music.”
III. THE LEGENDARY FRINGE
SAPPHO’S PHYSICAL APPEARANCE, THE PHAON STORY, THE VICE IDEA
So far we have been dealing with ascertained facts, reasonable inferences
as to other facts, and strong probabilities: in a word, with the real
Sappho so far as her history can be made out with at least some measure
of certainty. There is, however, a legendary fringe attaching to every
great outstanding personality. It is one of the penalties of personal or
literary greatness to become the centre of fanciful stories, personal
detraction, misrepresentation, and wild legends often conceived in a most
grotesque and improbable fashion. To all this Sappho is no exception.
First the question will be discussed whether she was a dwarf. The famous
and far-flung story of Phaon and the Leucadian Leap will then claim our
mention, and thirdly a word must be said about her character.
According to Damocharis[60] Sappho had a beautiful face and bright eyes.
The famous line of Alcaeus refers to her gentle smile. So Burns in his
_Pastoral Poetry_ says, “In thy sweet voice, Barbauld, survives even
Sappho’s flame.” Plato calls her beautiful as does many another writer,
though the epithet may refer, as Maximus of Tyre says, to the beauty
of her lyrics, one of which practically says long before Goldsmith,
“handsome is that handsome does” (E. 58). The word which Alcaeus employs
does not necessarily mean that she had violet tresses as Edmonds
translates it. It has generally been rendered as violet-weaving, and it
is to be regretted that P. N. Ure without evidence, in his excellent
book entitled _The Greek Renaissance_ (London, 1921), tells us that
Sappho had black hair, even if Mrs. Browning does speak of “Sappho, with
that gloriole of ebon hair on calmèd brows.” Tall blondes were popular
in ancient days and Sappho was neither divinely tall nor most divinely
fair. But the ancient busts, the representations of her as full-sized,
on coins of Lesbus and on many Greek vases, belie the idea of the
rhetorical Maximus of Tyre who in the second century A.D. labelled her
“small and dark,” an idea that occurs also in the new papyrus which we
have already quoted. Some have even interpreted her name as derived from
Ψᾶφος, “Little Pebble,” i.e., short of stature. Undoubtedly the epithet
of Maximus reflects the Roman perverted idea which finds expression
in Ovid’s apology for her appearance. The scholiast on Lucian’s
_Portraits_[61] is repeating the same source when he says “physically,
Sappho was very ill-favored, being small and dark, like a nightingale
with ill-shapen wings enfolding a tiny body.” The famous fragment,
This little creature, four feet high,
Cannot hope to touch the sky,
(EDMONDS)
may not refer to Sappho, and if it does, we must remember, that Edmonds’
new reading is doubtful. Perhaps Horace was thinking of this line when he
wrote[62]
sublimi feriam sidera vertice,
which recalls Tennyson’s
Old Horace! I will strike, said he,
The stars with head sublime.
(EPILOGUE)
Edmonds forces the meaning of the Greek to get even four feet out of his
new restoration. Sappho was surely taller than that and there is no
evidence earlier than Roman days to justify even Swinburne’s
The small dark body’s Lesbian loveliness
That held the fire eternal.
In any case Sappho was no dwarf, otherwise her deformity would not have
escaped the notice of the Athenian comic mud-slingers and scandal-mongers
who did so much to spoil her good name. Such is the traditional, not the
real, human, historical Sappho of the sixth century B.C.
The story of Sappho’s love for Phaon is patently mythological, as
indicated by the legend of his transformation by Aphrodite from an old
man into a handsome youth. There can be only slight historic foundation
for connecting Sappho with him and making Sicily the scene of their
first meeting. An inscription on the Parian marble in Oxford says: “When
Critius the First was archon at Athens Sappho fled from Mytilene and
sailed to Sicily.” The date is uncertain as there is a lacuna in the
inscription, but it is between 604 and 594 B.C., perhaps about 598. The
recently discovered hymn to Hera, _Longing for Lesbus_, lends support to
this story of exile. She may have been banished by Pittacus for engaging
like Alcaeus in political intrigues. She probably returned to Lesbus
under the amnesty of 581, as her grave is often mentioned as in Lesbus.
There is even a tradition preserved by the English traveller Pococke that
her own sepulchral urn was once in the Turkish mosque of the castle of
Mytilene. We have already cited one or two fragments which seem to show
that she had more than reached middle age. She was old enough to feel
that she should not re-marry, especially if she had to choose one younger
than herself.[63] Fragment (E. 99) is in the style of Shakespeare’s
“Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.” Nowhere in her poems is
there any evidence that she committed suicide for love of Phaon, but as
her name has started this legend we must speak of it in some detail. The
famous fragment (E. 108), to judge from the context where it is quoted in
connection with Socrates’ death, seems to give her last words: “It is not
right that there be mourning in the house of poetry; this befits us not.”