referred, about which I share the ancient and modern Lesbian doubt. The
ancients tell of Sappho’s unrequited love for the ferryman prototype of
St. Christopher, the beautiful Phaon. The story is well given in Servius’
_précis_ of Turpilius’ Latin paraphrase of Menander,[64] though he does
not mention Sappho by name: “Phaon, who was a ferryman plying for hire
between Lesbus (others say he was from Chios[65]) and the mainland,
one day ferried over for nothing the Goddess Venus in the guise of an
old woman, and received from her for the service an alabaster box of
unguent, the daily use of which made women fall in love with him. Among
those who did so was one who in her disappointment is said to have
thrown herself from Mount Leucates, and from this came the custom now in
vogue of hiring people once a year to throw themselves from that place
into the sea.” (Edmonds). But neither Phaon nor anything connected with
Phaon is mentioned in any of Sappho’s fragments, though Francis Fawkes
and others have connected Phaon’s name with the Hymn to Aphrodite. A
writer of the second century B.C., Palaephatus,[66] makes the very
inconsistent statement that “this is the Phaon in whose honor as a lover
many a song has been written by Sappho.” Nor is there any allusion to
Sappho’s curing her passion by leaping from the white Leucadian cliff.
Athenaeus[67] and Suidas go so far as to say that the victim was another
Sappho, and even in the late lists of Leucadian leapers, in Photius,
Sappho is not included. Who first conjured up a Phaon, we know not,
but the story belongs to folk-lore, and Phaon appears on Greek vases
of the time and style of Meidias, who is dated by most archaeologists
toward the end of the fifth century B.C., much earlier than Plato’s play
(392 B.C.). His indifference to the many ladies who are making love to
him is well portrayed, especially on vases (Pl. 4, 5) in Florence and
Palermo (p. 107)[68]. The fair Phaon, Aphrodite’s shining star (φάων =
shining), is only another _avatar_ of Adonis, who appears in similar
style on similar vases, one even found in the same grave with a Phaon
vase. Phaon, I believe, is as old as the fifth century; but the story of
Sappho’s leap transferred to the white cliffs in the south of the white
island of Leucas, the modern Cape Ducato, is later. The Cape is also
called Santa Maura, some two hundred feet high, and even to-day this
rock of desperation is haunted by Sappho’s ghost and known as Sappho’s
Leap (Pl. 6). The legend of the Lesbian’s leap first occurs in the poet
of the Old Comedy, Plato, who wrote the play called _Phaon_. Later in
the New Comedy, Menander was probably adorning an old tale to point a
contemporary moral when he produced his _Leucadia_ of which Turpilius, a
contemporary of Terence, wrote a Latin paraphrase. A few anapaestic lines
are preserved by Strabo, who speaks of the Leucadian Cliff:
Where Sappho ’tis said the first of the world
In her furious chase of Phaon so haughty
All maddened with longing plunged down from the height
Of the shimmering rock.
(D. M. R.)
Antiphanes probably told the story in both his _Leucadius_ and his
_Phaon_; and Cratinus must have mentioned Phaon, for Athenaeus[69] tells
us that he told how Aphrodite, beloved by Phaon, concealed him among the
fair wild lettuce, just as other writers say Adonis was hidden.
The practice of abandoned lovers taking the leap may possibly have been
known even in Sappho’s day, for Stesichorus tells of a girl throwing
herself from a cliff near Leucas because a youth had scorned her. By the
time of Anacreon (550 B.C.), the leap had become the symbol of a love
passion that could no longer be borne; “Lifted up from the Leucadian
rock, I dive into the hoary wave, drunk with Love.” It is the same old
story told at every summer resort about some place called Lover’s Leap,
but in Anacreon nothing is said about drowning. And legend[70] says that
sometimes wings or feathers were attached to the person jumping off the
cliff to lighten the fall. In any case the leap, legendary or not, was
not suicide but a desperate remedy, killing or curing, for hopeless love.
We hear of many who survived the expiatory leap.
In a stucco fresco[71] (Pl. 7) (not later than 40 A.D.) in the half dome
of the apse at one end of the underground building in Rome near the Porta
Maggiore, which served for the cult of some secret neo-Pythagorean sect
or possibly as a temple of the Muses or possibly only as the underground
summer abode of an enthusiast over Greek poets like the newly discovered
underground rooms of the Homeric enthusiast at Pompeii, we have possibly
an illustration of the Leucadian leap, at least in symbolism, as
personifying the parting of the image of the soul. Sappho, lyre in hand,
is springing from the misty cliff, which Ausonius mentions in his sixth
idyl (cf. p. 131), and below in the sea is a Triton spreading out a
garment to break her fall. Opposite on a height stands Apollo, who had
a temple on the spot and to whom according to Ovid’s _Fifteenth Heroic
Epistle_ Sappho promised to dedicate her lyre if he was propitious. Ovid
is the first writer from whom we have the story in detail. It was often
used in later literature, as we shall see in a succeeding chapter. Many
know Pope’s translation of Ovid,[72] but if my readers desire to read
an imaginative and humorous circumstantial account of Sappho’s leap,
on which the modern popular idea is mostly based, they may find it in
Addison’s _Spectator_, No. 233, November 27, 1711.
The moral purity of Sappho shines in its own light. She expresses
herself, no doubt, in very passionate language, but passionate purity
is a finer article than the purity of prudery, and Sappho’s passionate
expressions are always under the control of her art. A woman of bad
character and certainly a woman of such a variety of bad character as
scandal (cf. p. 128 and note 147) has attributed to Sappho might express
herself passionately and might run on indefinitely with erotic imagery.
But Sappho is never erotic. There is no language to be found in her
songs which a pure woman might not use, and it would be practically
impossible for a bad woman to subject her expressions to the marvellous
niceties of rhythm, accent, and meaning which Sappho everywhere exhibits.
Immorality and loss of self-control never subject themselves to perfect
literary and artistic taste. It is against the nature of things that a
woman who has given herself up to unnatural and inordinate practices
which defy the moral instinct and throw the soul into disorder, practices
which harden and petrify the soul, should be able to write in perfect
obedience to the laws of vocal harmony, imaginative portrayal, and
arrangement of the details of thought. The nature of things does not
admit of such an inconsistency. Sappho’s love for flowers, moreover,
affords another luminous testimony. A bad woman as well as a pure woman
might love roses, but a bad woman does not love the small and hidden
wild flowers of the field, the dainty anthrysc and the clover, as Sappho
did. There is, moreover, in a life of vice something narrowing as well
as coarsening. An imagination which like Sappho’s sees in a single
vision the moonlight sweeping the sea, breaking across the shore and
illuminating wide stretches of landscape with life-giving light, and in
the midst of all this far-spreading glory sees and personifies the spirit
of the night, listening to the moanings of homesickness and repeating
them with far-flung voice to those across the sea,—an imagination with
such a marvellous range as this is never given to the child of sodden
vice. Here once more is a woman who made it her life business to adorn
and even to glorify lawful wedlock, and carried on this occupation in
a sympathetic and delightful strain of dance and song which, however
passionate in their expression, contain no impure words. It is simply
unthinkable that such a woman should be perpetually destroying the very
foundations of her own ideals.
IV. THE WRITINGS OF SAPPHO
The number of poems or fragments (Pl. 8) of Sappho has increased from a
hundred and twenty in Volger’s edition (1810) to a hundred and ninety-one
in Edmonds. “Though few they are roses,” and a marvellous vitality and
mentality permeates their mangled and marred members. Sappho probably
had her own collection of her poems, but they were surely not published
in a large edition as has sometimes been said. An introductory poem is
possibly preserved on an Attic vase, but even of that we cannot be sure.
In Roman days there were two editions, one arranged according to subject
and the other according to metre, both based on some Alexandrian source
much earlier than the book _On the Metres of Sappho_, published by Dracon
of Stratonicea about 180 A.D. Sappho wrote many forms of literature in
many different metres, cult hymns or odes, marriage songs, scolia or
drinking songs, songs of love and friendship, besides her nine books of
lyrics, epigrams, elegies, none of which has survived or been described
by any other author, iambics, monodies, and funeral songs like that
for Adonis. The Athenian dramatists even pictured her as proposing
puzzles and riddles. Colombarius, as quoted by Meursius in his notes on
Hesychius, called Sappho the poetess of the Trojans, the meaning of which
has recently been made clear by the discovery of the _Marriage of Hector
and Andromache_.
The first poem is the _Ode to Aphrodite_ which was cited by Dionysius of
Halicarnassus for its finished and brilliant style,—the style used by
Euripides among the tragedians and by Isocrates among the orators. Though
the rhythm, ardor, terseness, and noble simplicity can be given in no
translation,[73] nearly every lover of Greek lyrics has tried his hand
at it. Ambrose Philips made thirty-four words out of the first stanza
which in the Greek has only sixteen; Merivale found forty-three words
necessary; but Tucker and Leonard with strict compression and simplicity
manage to translate with twenty-three; Gildersleeve in an unpublished
version which I also quote here, and Fairclough use twenty-four:
Broidered-throned goddess, O Aphrodite,
Child of Zeus, craft-weaving, I do beseech thee,
Do not crush my soul with distress and sorrow,
Wholly my mistress.
Rather come, if ever didst come aforetime,
Hearkening to my cry from afar in mercy;
And didst leave the palace of thine own father
Golden and gorgeous;
And didst yoke thy chariot, swift thy sparrows
Drew thee, beauteous sparrows, to earth’s dark surface,
Moving quick their wings from the height of heaven
Through the mid ether.
Soon their journey’s end was attained and smiling
Blessed goddess, smiling with heavenly visage,
Thou didst ask of me what it was I suffer’d,
Why I invoked thee,
What it was I wished to receive of all things,
Maddened in my soul, ‘Who is he thou seekest,
Whom shall I ensnare for my darling Sappho?
Who is it grieves thee?’
‘Nay, if thou but flee he will soon pursue thee,
If he get no presents, he’ll give thee presents,
If thou love him not, he will love thee quickly,
E’en if thou wilt not.’
Come then now again and relieve me, goddess,
From my carking cares and whate’er my spirit
Longeth for accomplish, and on my side do
Battle, my mistress;
(GILDERSLEEVE)
or, with the translation of doves for sparrows:
Guile-weaving child of Zeus, who art
Immortal, throned in radiance, spare,
O Queen of Love, to break my heart
With grief and care.
But hither come, as thou of old,
When my voice reached thine ear afar,
Didst leave thy father’s hall of gold,
And yoke thy car,
And through mid air their whirring wing
Thy bonny doves did swiftly ply
O’er the dark earth, and thee did bring
Down from the sky.
Right soon they came, and thou, blest Queen,
A smile upon thy face divine,
Didst ask what ail’d me, what might mean
That call of mine.
‘What would’st thou have, with heart on fire,
Sappho?’ thou saidst. ‘Whom pray’st thou me
To win for thee to fond desire?
Who wrongeth thee?
Soon shall he seek, who now doth shun;
Who scorns thy gifts, shall gifts bestow;
Who loves thee not, shall love anon,
Wilt thou or no.’
So come thou now, and set me free
From carking cares; bring to full end
My heart’s desire; thyself O be
My stay and friend!
(TUCKER)[74]
Here follow two translations where “he” is changed to “she” in the
sixth stanza. The controversy as to the sex of the belovèd turns on the
admission or omission of a single letter in the Greek.
Deathless Aphrodite, throned in flowers,
Daughter of Zeus, O terrible enchantress,
With this sorrow, with this anguish, break my spirit,
Lady, not longer!
Hear anew the voice! O hear and listen!
Come, as in that island dawn thou camest,
Billowing in thy yokèd car to Sappho
Forth from thy father’s
Golden house in pity!... I remember:
Fleet and fair thy sparrows drew thee, beating
Fast their wings above the dusky harvests,
Down the pale heavens,
Lighting anon! And thou, O blest and brightest,
Smiling with immortal eyelids, asked me:
‘Maiden, what betideth thee? Or wherefore
Callest upon me?
‘What is hers the longing more than others,
Here in this mad heart? And who the lovely
One belovèd thou wouldst lure to loving?
Sappho, who wrongs thee?’
‘See, if now she flies, she soon must follow;
Yes, if spurning gifts, she soon must offer;
Yes, if loving not, she soon must love thee,
Howso unwilling....’
Come again to me! O now! Release me!
End the great pang! And all my heart desireth
Now of fulfilment, fulfil! O Aphrodite,
Fight by my shoulder!
(W. E. LEONARD, unpublished)
Richly throned, O deathless one, Aphrodite,
Child of Zeus, enchantress-queen, I beseech thee
Let not grief nor harrowing anguish master,
Lady, my spirit.
Ah! come hither. Erstwhile indeed thou heardest
When afar my sorrowful cry of mourning
Smote thine ears, and then from thy father’s mansions
Golden thou camest,
Driving forth thy chariot, and fair birds bore thee
Speeding onward over the earth’s dark shadows,
Waving oft their shimmering plumes thro’ heaven’s
Ether encircling.
Quickly drew they nigh me, and thou, blest presence,
Sweetest smile divine on thy face immortal,
Thou didst seek what sorrow was mine to suffer,
Wherefore I called thee.
What my soul, too, craved with intensest yearning,
Frenzy’s fire enkindling. ‘Now whom,’ thou criest,
‘Wouldst thou fain see led to thy love, or who, my
Sappho, would wrong thee?’
‘Though she flees thee now, yet she soon shall woo thee,
Though thy gifts she scorneth, she soon shall bring gifts;
Though she loves thee not, yet she soon shall love thee,
Yea, though unwilling.’
Come, ah! come again, and from bitter anguish
Free thy servant. All that my heart is craving,
That fulfil, O goddess. Thyself, my champion,
Aid in this conflict.
(H. RUSHTON FAIRCLOUGH)
The second ode, quoted in a mutilated condition by the treatise _On the
Sublime_, is even more difficult to translate. As Wordsworth says, here
the Lesbian Maid
With finest touch of passion swayed
Her own Aeolian lute.
In its rich Aeolian dialect the ode glows with true Greek fire. Sappho’s
words are clear but far from cold. They are a sea of glass, but a
sea of glass mingled with fire such as the Patmos seer saw from his
island not far from Sappho’s Lesbian home. They enable us to understand
why Byron in _Don Juan_ speaks of “the isles of Greece where burning
Sappho loved and sung.” This is what Swinburne means, when he speaks
of the fire eternal and in his _Sapphics_ says that about her “shone a
light of fire as a crown for ever.” We know from Plutarch[75] that an
ancient physician, Erasistratus, included this ode (which has influenced
realistic descriptions of passion from Euripides and Theocritus to
Swinburne and Sara Teasdale) in his book of diagnoses as a compendium of
all the symptoms of corroding emotions. He applied this psychological
test whenever Antiochus looked on Stratonice. “There appeared in
the case of Antiochus all those symptoms which Sappho mentions: the
choking of the voice, the feverish blush, the obscuring of vision,
profuse sweat, disordered and tumultuous pulse and finally, when he
was completely overcome, bewilderment, amazement and pallor.” Perhaps
Sappho was influenced by Homer’s[76] description of fear and she herself
surely suggested such symptoms to Lucretius.[77] We must regard the ode
primarily as a literary product, but its pathological picture of passion
is hardly secondary. Even if the symptoms seem appalling to our cold
and unexpressive northern blood, we must remember that this physical
perturbation, as Tucker calls it, was in no way strange to the ancients.
Gildersleeve put it well in his unpublished lecture on Sappho, which he
so kindly placed at my disposal and to which I am greatly indebted: “if
a Greek melted, he melted with a fervent heat, and if this is true of
the average Greek how much more was it true of an Aeolian and an Aeolian
woman, and of Sappho most Aeolian of all.” Byron refers to this ode when
he says in _Don Juan_:
Catullus scarcely has a decent poem,
I don’t think Sappho’s Ode a good example,
Although Longinus tells us there is no hymn
Where the sublime soars forth on wings more ample.
With regard to Catullus’ rendering (LI), Swinburne in his _Notes on
Poems and Reviews_, speaking of his poem _Anactoria_, says: “Catullus
translated or as his countrymen would now say ‘traduced’ the Ode to
Anactoria; a more beautiful translation there never was and will never
be; but compared with the Greek, it is colourless and bloodless, puffed
out by additions and enfeebled by alterations. Let anyone set against
each other the two first stanzas, Latin and Greek, and pronounce....
Where Catullus failed I could not hope to succeed; I tried instead to
reproduce in a diluted and dilated form the spirit of a poem which could
not be reproduced in the body.”
Tennyson has given the best paraphrase in _Eleänore_:
I watch thy grace; and in its place
My heart a charmed slumber keeps,
While I muse upon thy face;
And a languid fire creeps
Thro’ my veins to all my frame,
Dissolvingly and slowly: soon
From thy rose-red lips my name
Floweth; and then, as in a swoon,
With dinning sound my ears are rife,
My tremulous tongue faltereth,
I lose my color, I lose my breath,
I drink the cup of a costly death,
Brimm’d with delirious draughts of warmest life.
I die with my delight, before
I hear what I would hear from thee.
The following version I have based mainly on Edmonds’ recent text,[78]
with a conjectural restoration of the last stanza, of which only a few
words are preserved in the Greek:
O life divine! to sit before
Thee while thy liquid laughter flows
Melodious, and to listen close
To rippling notes from Love’s full score.
O music of thy lovely speech!
My rapid heart beats fast and high,
My tongue-tied soul can only sigh,
And strive for words it cannot reach.
O sudden subtly-running fire!
My ears with dinning ringing sing,
My sight is lost, a blinded thing,
Eyes, hearing, speech, in love expire,
My face pale-green, like wilted grass
Wet by the dew and evening breeze,
Yea, my whole body tremblings seize,
Sweat bathes me, Death nearby doth pass,
Such thrilling swoon, ecstatic death
Is for the gods, but not for me,
My beggar words are naught to thee,
Far-off thy laugh and perfumed breath.
(D. M. R.)
As J. A. K. Thomson says in his recent fascinating book _Greeks and
Barbarians_ (London and New York, 1921), “Sappho, in the most famous of
her odes, says that love makes her ‘sweat’ with agony and look ‘greener
than grass.’ Perhaps she did not turn quite so green as that, although
(commentators nobly observe) she would be of an olive complexion and had
never seen British grass. But even if it contain a trace of artistic
exaggeration, the ode as a whole is perhaps the most convincing love-poem
ever written. It breathes veracity. It has an intoxicating beauty of
sound and suggestion, and it is as exact as a physiological treatise. The
Greeks can do that kind of thing. Somehow we either overdo the ‘beauty’
or we overdo the physiology. The weakness of the Barbarian, said they,
is that he never hits the mean. But the Greek poet seems to do it every
time. We may beat them at other things, but not at that. And they do it
with so little effort; sometimes, it might happen, with none at all.”
The passion of love is the supreme subject of Sappho’s songs, as shown
by these first two and many a short fragment, as for example (E. 81)
where Love is called for the first time in literature “sweet-bitter.”
Some scholars have credited it to the much later Posidippus, but he
and Meleager took the word from Sappho, though it may not have been
original even with her. Sappho’s order of the compound word is generally
reversed in translation, but Sir Edwin Arnold says “sweetly bitter,
sadly dear,” and Swinburne in _Tristram of Lyonesse_ speaks of “Sweet
Love, that are so bitter.” Tennyson also has the same order in _Lancelot
and Elaine_ (pp. 205-206). To Sappho love is a second death, and in the
second ode death itself seems not very far away. The Greek words for
swooning are mostly metaphors from death, and so we are not surprised
when we read that like death love relaxes every limb and sweeps one
away in its giddy swirling, a sweet-bitter resistless wild beast. Here
is Sir Sidney Colvin’s translation (_John Keats_, 1917, p. 332): “Love
the limb-loosener, the bitter-sweet torment, the wild beast there is no
withstanding, never harried a more helpless victim.” Another fragment (E.
54) also shows the power of love:
Love tossed my heart as the wind
That descends on the mountain oaks.
(EDMONDS)
Sappho’s range of subjects is much greater than the personal emotions
of love, though very personal and individual feelings predominate.
She touches almost every field of human experience, so that there is
much in her scant fragments to bring her near to us. The wail against
ingratitude comes home to those high-strung natures who do good to
others but are sensitive to every wrong when they have the unfortunate
experience of learning that one’s friends are sometimes one’s own worst
enemies. “Those harm me most by whom I have done well” (Mackail). But she
is not one of those who bear a grudge long, her heart is for peace. One
of the few ethical fragments, as Mackail says, “is a speech of delicate
self-abasement, spoken with the effect of a catch in the voice and tears
behind the eyes;” “No rancour in this breast runs wild, I have the heart
of a child.” Sappho’s love of sermonizing is seen in her commandment:
“when anger swells in the heart, restrain the idly barking tongue.” From
Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_ Edmonds (91) reconstructs another fragment:
Death is an ill; the Gods at least think so,
Or else themselves had perished long ago.
In another fragment of a different nature (E. 120) we read: “Stand up,
look me in the face as friend to friend and unveil the charm that is in
thy eyes.” In other fragments we enter a Lesbian lady’s home and see
woman’s love of dress,—no short skirt for her, for they “wrapped her all
around with soft cambric” (E. 105). “A motley gown of fair Lydian work
reached down to her feet” (E. 20), or, if we believe Pollux (VII. 93),
it is the Greek love of fine shoes. No Lesbian butchery for her tender
feet, but she must wear soft luxurious Lydian slippers: “A broidered
strap of fair Lydian work covered her feet.” Punning on the name of
Timas (precious), another fragment, which perhaps refers to a statue of
Aphrodite in Sappho’s home, seems to dote on fancy handkerchiefs; “and
hanging on either side thy face the purple handkerchief which Timas
sent for thee from Phocaea, a precious gift from a precious giver” (E.
87).[79] The fragment (E. 21), “shot with a thousand hues,” refers to
dress rather than to the rainbow. The sight of beautiful gowns thrilled
her: “Come you back, my rosebud Gongyla, in your milk-white gown.” Again
she says: “Many are the golden bracelets and the purple robes, aye and
the fine smooth broideries, indeed a richly varied bride-gift; and
without number also are the silver goblets and the ornaments of ivory”
(E. 66). She coined new words for women; she calls the chest in which
women keep their perfumes and like things a _gruté_ or hutch (E. 180).
Again she uses (E. 179) the word _Beudos_ for a short diaphanous frock
or blouse. She is the first to use the word _Chlamys_, where she speaks
of Love as “coming from Heaven and throwing off his purple mantle” (E.
69). Blondes were much admired among the fair-haired Lesbians, though
Sappho herself was a brunette, and so she herself mentions (E. 189) a
kind of box-wood or scytharium-wood with which women dye their hair a
golden color. She is fond of cassia and frankincense (E. 66), and she
dotes on myrrh and royal perfumes (E. 83). She rebukes the foolish girl
who prides herself on her ring.[80] With “a keen swift flicker of woman’s
jealousy,” and well acquainted with the philosophy of clothes and with
the new Ionic dresses introduced into Lesbus during her own lifetime at
the beginning of the sixth century B.C. from Asia Minor, she jests about
her rival Andromeda, the country girl who knows not how to manage the
train of her new gown[81] (E. 98):
What rustic hoyden ever charmed the soul,
That round her ankles could not kilt her coats!
(THOMAS DAVIDSON in _Warner’s Library
of the World’s Best Literature_)
There is an intimate love of the loveliness of nature in Sappho, as we
should expect of one resident on an island under Ionian skies where, as
Herodotus (I. 142) says, “the climate and seasons are the most beautiful
of any cities in the world.” “The many garlanded earth puts on her
broidery” (E. 133). “Thus of old did the dainty feet of Cretan maidens
dance pat to the music beside some lovely altar, pressing the soft smooth
bloom of the grass” (E. 114). As Thomas Davidson has so well said: “every
hour of the day comes to Sappho with a fresh surprise.” We lie down for a
noonday siesta in “a murmurous, blossomy June,” as Stebbing puts it, in
the orchard of the nymphs where (E. 4),
around
Through boughs of the apple
Cool waters sound.
From the rustling leaves
Drips sleep to the ground.
(Unpublished, RHYS CARPENTER)[82]