lower status than that accorded her in the Homeric poems. Among Ionian
peoples, this was doubtless true; but among AEolians and Dorians, woman
had not only attained a greater degree of freedom than was permitted her
in the Heroic Age, but had also shown herself the equal of man in
literary and aesthetic pursuits. In this transition age, the name of one
woman--Sappho--presents itself as the bright morning star in the history
of cultured womanhood.
VI
SAPPHO
Toward the close of the seventh century before Christ, a singular
phenomenon presented itself in the history of Greek womanhood.
Heretofore Greek women have been beautiful; they have been fascinating;
they have exerted great influence on the course of events; but it cannot
be said that they have been intellectual. At the time mentioned, there
occurred an unusual movement in the intellectual realm. This remarkable
movement centres about the name of the first great historical woman of
Greece--Lesbian Sappho, "the Tenth Muse." In the history of universal
woman, Sappho holds a position altogether unique; for she is not only
regarded as the greatest of lyric poets, but she was also the founder of
the first woman's club of which we have any record. Sappho consecrated
herself heart and soul to the elevation of her sex. As poetry and art
constitute the natural channels for the aesthetic cultivation of woman,
she trained her pupils to be poets like herself. The result of her
lifelong devotion to the service of Aphrodite and the Muses was that she
herself not only achieved an immortal reputation as a poet, but through
her inspiring influence her pupils carried the love of poetry and of
intellectual and artistic pursuits back to their distant homes. Hence,
it is not surprising to learn that from this time there were to be
found here and there in the Greek world women who in intellectual
pursuits were the peers of their male compeers, and that there should be
found among women the nine terrestrial Muses, so called as a counterpart
to the celestial Nine.
Sappho's unique greatness is best appreciated when we consider how she
has been regarded by the great men of antiquity and of modern times.
Among the Greeks, she possessed the unique renown of being called "The
Poetess," just as Homer was "The Poet." Solon, hearing one of her poems,
prayed that he might not see death until he had learned it. Plato
numbered her among the wise. Aristotle quotes without reservation a
judgment that placed her in the same rank as Homer and Archilochus.
Plutarch likens her "to the heart of a volcano," and says that the grace
of her poems acted on her listeners like an enchantment, and that when
he read them he set aside the drinking cup in very shame. Strabo called
her "a wonderful something," and says that "at no period within memory
has any woman been known who, in any way, even the least degree, could
be compared to her for poetry." Demetrius of Phaleron adds his word of
praise: "Wherefore Sappho is eloquent and sweet when she sings of beauty
and of love and spring, and of the kingfisher; and every beautiful
expression is woven into her poetry besides what she herself invented."
Writers in the Greek Anthology continually sing her praises, calling her
"the Tenth Muse," "pride of Hellas," "comrade of Apollo," "child of
Aphrodite and Eros," "nursling of the Graces and Persuasion." Nor have
modern critics been less restrained in their praises, notwithstanding
the fact that they possess merely a handful of fragments by which to
judge "The Poetess." Addison, for example, says: "Among the mutilated
poets of antiquity there is none whose fragments are so beautiful as
those of Sappho." John Addington Symonds is even more enthusiastic. "The
world has suffered no greater literary loss," says he, "than the loss of
Sappho's poems. So perfect are the smallest fragments preserved, that we
muse in a sad rapture of astonishment to think what the complete poems
must have been." And Swinburne, her best modern interpreter, calls
Sappho "the unapproachable poetess," and says: "Her remaining verses are
the supreme success, the final achievement, of the poetic art."
Sappho was at the zenith of her fame about the beginning of the sixth
century before the Christian era. Her home was at Mytilene, on the
island of Lesbos. The lapse of twenty-five centuries has left us few
authentic records of her life. There is a tradition that she was born at
Eresus, on the island of Lesbos, and later established herself in the
capital city, Mytilene. She was of a wealthy and aristocratic family.
Herodotus says that she was the daughter of Scamandronymus, and Suidas
states that her mother's name was Cleis, that she was the wife of a rich
citizen of Andros, Cercylas or Cercolas by name, and that she had a
daughter named after her grandmother, Cleis. Sappho refers to a daughter
by this name in one of the extant fragments, but none of these other
statements are corroborated. She had two brothers, Larichus, a public
cupbearer at Mytilene,--an office reserved for noble youths,--and
Charaxus, a wine merchant, of whom we shall speak more fully later. From
one source we learn that she went into exile to Sicily along with other
aristocrats of Lesbos, but the date is a matter of conjecture. Pittacus
was tyrant of Mytilene at this time, and Sappho probably returned to
Lesbos at the time when he granted amnesty to political exiles. How
long she lived we cannot tell, while how and when she died are also
unknown. Judging from the allusions of the writers in the Anthology, her
tomb, erected in the city of her adoption, was for centuries afterward
regularly visited by her votaries.
These are the few facts we can positively state regarding the life of
Sappho; but myth and legend have supplied what was lacking, and those
scandalmongers, the Greek comic poets, have woven all sorts of stories
about her manner of life. These stories centre chiefly about the names
of three men,--Alcaeus and Anacreon, the poets, and Phaon, the mythical
boatman of Mytilene, endowed by Aphrodite with extraordinary and
irresistible beauty.
Alcaeus, the poet of love and wine and war, was a native of Mytilene, and
a contemporary of Sappho, and the two poets no doubt knew each other
well. The comic poets made them lovers. There is still extant the
opening of a poem which Alcaeus addressed to Sappho:
"Violet-crowned, chaste, sweet-smiling Sappho,
I fain would speak; but bashfulness forbids."
To which she replied:
"Had thy wish been pure and manly,
And no evil on thy tongue,
Shame had not possessed thine eyelids;
From thy lips the right had rung."
Anacreon, the lyric poet, was also represented as a lover of Sappho; and
two poems are preserved, one of which he is said to have addressed to
her, while the other is said to be her reply. But there is no doubt
whatever that Anacreon flourished at least a generation after Sappho, so
that the two could never have met. It seems to have been one of the
stock motifs of the comic poets to represent Greek lyrists as being
lovers of the Lesbian; thus Diphilus, in his _Sappho_, pictured
Archilochus and Hipponax, her predecessors by a generation, as her
lovers.
The story of Sappho's love for Phaon and her leap from the Leucadian
rock in consequence of his disdaining her, though it has been so long
implicitly believed, rests on no historical basis. The perpetuation of
the story is due chiefly to Ovid, who, in his epistle, _Sappho to
Phaon_, tells of her unquenchable love and of her determination to
attempt the leap. The story is best told by Addison:
"Sappho, the Lesbian, in love with Phaon, arrived at the temple of
Apollo, habited like a bride, in garments white as snow. She wore a
garland of myrtle on her head, and carried in her hand the little
musical instrument of her own invention. After having sung a hymn to
Apollo, she hung up her garland on one side of his altar, and her harp
on the other. She then tucked up her vestments, like a Spartan virgin,
and amidst thousands of spectators, who were anxious for her safety and
offered up vows for her deliverance, marched directly forward to the
utmost summit of the promontory, where, after having repeated a stanza
of her own verses, she threw herself off the rock with such an
intrepidity as was never observed before in any who had attempted that
leap. Many who were present related that they saw her fall into the sea,
from whence she never rose again; though there were others who affirmed
that she never came to the bottom of her leap, but that she was changed
to a swan as she fell, and that they saw her hovering in the air under
that shape. But whether or not 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."
Modern critics justly set aside the whole story as fabulous, explaining
it as derived from the myth of Aphrodite and Adonis, who in the Greek
version was called Phaethon or Phaon. The leap from the Leucadian
rock--the promontory of Santa Maura, or Leucate, in Sicily, known to
this day as "Sappho's Leap"--was used by other poets, notably
Stesichorus and Anacreon, as a metaphorical expression to denote
complete despair, and Sappho herself may have used it in this sense. The
legend did not connect itself with Sappho until two centuries after her
death, and then only in the comic poets; hence it can have no basis in
fact. The tradition of Sappho's AEolian grave, preserved in the
Anthology, indicates strongly that she died a peaceful death on her own
island. "Sappho," says Edwin Arnold, "loved, and loved more than once,
to the point of desperate sorrow; though it did not come to the mad and
fatal leap from Leucate, as the unnecessary legend pretends. There are,
nevertheless, worse steeps than Leucate down which the heart may fall;
and colder seas of despair than the Adriatic in which to engulf it."
The whole story of her love for Phaon is an instance of how her name was
maligned by the comic poets of the later Attic school. It was impossible
for the Athenians, who kept their women in seclusion, to understand how
a woman could enjoy the freedom of life and movement that Sappho enjoyed
and yet remain chaste. Consequently, she became a sort of stock
character of the licentious drama, and even modern writers have used her
name as the synonym for the brilliant, beautiful, but licentious woman.
As says Daudet, who of all recent writers has done most to degrade the
name: "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." The Greek comic poets invented
the misrepresentation; the early Christian writers accepted it, and
exaggerated it in their tirades against heathenism; and thus the
tradition that Sappho was a woman of low moral character became fixed.
Only in the present century have the ancient calumnies against Sappho
been seriously investigated. A German scholar, Friedrich Gottlieb
Welcker, was the first to show that they were based on altogether
insufficient evidence. Colonel Mure, with great lack of gallantry,
endeavored, without success, to expose fallacies in Welcker's arguments.
Professor Comparetti has more recently gone laboriously over the whole
ground, and his work substantiates in the main the conclusions of
Welcker. The whole tendency of modern scholarship is to vindicate the
name of Sappho.
We cannot claim that Sappho was a woman of austere virtue; but she was
one of the best of her race, and there is no trace of wantonness in any
stanza of hers preserved to us. She repulsed Alcaeus when he made
improper advances, while a recently discovered papyrus fragment shows
how keenly she felt a brother's disgrace, and this aversion to the
dishonorable would hardly have existed had her own life been open to
censure.
Sappho's brother Charaxus, who was a Lesbian wine merchant, fell
violently in love with the famous courtesan Rhodopis, then a slave in
Naucratis, and subsequently the most noted beauty of her day. He
ransomed her from slavery, devoted himself exclusively to her whims, and
squandered all his substance upon her maintenance. Sappho was violently
incensed at his conduct, and resorted to verse for the expression of her
anger and humiliation. According to the story in Ovid, Charaxus was
fiercely provoked by her ill treatment of him, and would listen to no
attempts at reconciliation made by his poet-sister after her anger had
cooled, though she reproached herself for the estrangement and did all
she could to win him back.
A twenty-line fragment of a poem, found a few years ago among the
Oxyrhynchus papyri, in a reference to the poet's brother, in its tone of
reproach, in its expression of a desire for reconciliation, in dialect
and in metre, indicates its origin as a part of an ode addressed by
Sappho to her brother Charaxus. It is conceived by its editors and
translators to be one of her vain appeals that he would forget the past:
"Sweet Nereids, grant to me
That home unscathed my brother may return,
And every end for which his soul shall yearn,
Accomplished see!
"And thou, immortal Queen,
Blot out the past, that thus his friends may know
Joy, shame his foes--nay, rather, let no foe
By us be seen!
"And may he have the will
To me his sister some regard to show,
To assuage the pain he brought, whose cruel blow
My soul did kill,
"Yea, mine, for that ill name
Whose biting edge, to shun the festal throng
Compelling, ceased a while; yet back ere long
To goad us came!"
Was Sappho's beauty a myth? Greek standards of feminine beauty included
height and stateliness. Homer celebrates the characteristic beauty of
Lesbian women in speaking of seven Lesbian captives whom Agamemnon
offered to Achilles, "surpassing womankind in beauty." Plato, in the
Phaedrus, calls Sappho "beautiful," but he was probably referring to the
sweetness of her songs. Democharis, in the Anthology, in an epigram on a
statue of Sappho, speaks of her bright eyes and compares her beauty
with that of Aphrodite. According to Maximus of Tyre, who preserves the
traditions of the comic poets, she was "small and dark," a phrase
immortalized by Swinburne:
"The small dark body's Lesbian loveliness,
That held the fire eternal."
The problem, therefore, is whether she conformed to the Greek ideal of
beauty or was small and dark. Our only evidence in this matter is that
furnished by art. The portrait of Sappho is preserved on coins of
Mytilene, which present a face exquisite in contour. A fifth century
vase, preserved in Munich, gives us representations of Alcaeus and
Sappho, in which Sappho is taller than Alcaeus, of imposing figure and
exceedingly beautiful. She was frequently portrayed in plastic art.
According to Cicero, a bronze statue of Sappho, made by Silanion, stood
in the prytaneum at Syracuse, and was stolen by Verres. In the fifth
century of our era, there was a statue of her in the gymnasium of
Zeuxippus, in Byzantium. The Vatican bust is that of a woman with Greek
features, but, of course, lends no corroborating testimony as to her
size and complexion.
Alma-Tadema has fixed the current tradition in his ideal representation
of Sappho's school at Lesbos--a marble exedra on the seashore at
Mytilene. The poetess is seated on the front row of seats, with her
favorite pupil, Erinna, standing by her side. Her chin rests on her
hands as she leans forward against the desk, listening intently as
Alcaeus plays the lyre. She is small, dark, beautiful, intense; and the
artist has "subtly caught the prophetic light of her soul, her eager
intellect, her unconscious grace, and the slumbering passion in her
eloquent eyes."
[Illustration 120 _SAPPHO IN HER SCHOOL OF POETRY IN LESBOS. After the
painting by Hector Leroux. Wharton, in his great_ Memoir of Sappho,
_says she "seems to have been the centre of society in
Mitylene,--capital of Lesbos,--a kind of aesthetic club devoted to the
service of the Muses. Around her gathered maidens from even
comparatively distant places, attracted by her fame, to study, under her
guidance, all that related to poetry and music". In the memoir he
defends her character and speaks of "the fervor of her love and the
purity of her life." The_ Encyclopedia Britannica _ranks her as
"incomparably the greatest poetess the world has ever seen."_]
Let us now consider the conditions under which Sappho's genius blossomed
to fruition.
There is a legend that after the Thracian women's murder of Orpheus, the
mythical singer of Hellas, his head and his lyre were thrown into the
sea and were wafted upon its waves to the island of Lesbos. This legend
is an allegory of the island's supremacy in song, and of the unbroken
continuity of lyric poetry from its budding in prehistoric times up to
its full flower among the Lesbian poets of the sixth century before the
Christian era. Every condition existed in Lesbos for the fostering of
the love of beauty and the cultivation of all the refinements of life.
The land itself presented mountain and coast, hill and dale, in pleasing
and harmonious variety, while about it billowed a brilliant sapphire
sea. The island was renowned for the salubrity of its climate, the
purity of its atmosphere, and the transparency of its skies. Its
inhabitants, owing to the variety of the products of the soil and their
attention to commerce, enjoyed unbounded prosperity. They gave
themselves up to the enjoyments of life, and cultivated everything that
contributed to luxury, elegance, and material well-being. The men
devoted their energies to politics and war and the pursuits of pleasure.
The women, who were remarkable for their beauty and grace, enjoyed a
freedom and rank accorded them nowhere else in Greece. Symonds thus
vividly describes the free and artistic life of AEolian women:
"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 art of beauty, and sought to refine metrical form and
diction. Nor did they confine themselves to the scientific side of art.
Unrestrained by public opinion, and avid for the beautiful, they
cultivated their senses and emotions, and developed their wildest
passions. All the luxuries and elegancies of life which the climate and
the rich valleys of Lesbos could afford were at their disposal;
exquisite gardens in which 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; pine-shadowed coves, where they might bathe in the calm of
a tideless sea; fruits such as only the southern sea 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."
Amid such surroundings, burning Sappho sang:
"Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity,
Hearing, to hear them."
The complete works of Sappho must have been considerable. She was the
greatest erotic poet of antiquity, the chief composer of epithalamia, or
wedding songs, the writer of epigrams and elegies, invocatory hymns,
iambics, and monodies. Nine books of her lyric odes existed in ancient
times, and were known to Horace, who frequently imitated her style and
metre, and who doubtless at times in his odes directly translated her
poems. But of all this we have only two poems which may be said to be in
any way complete: a considerable portion of the ode to her brother
Charaxus, already quoted, and somewhat over a hundred and fifty
fragments, the total comprising not more than three hundred lines.
Within the last few months, Doctor Schubart, of the Egyptian Section of
the Royal Museum in Berlin, has discovered in papyri, recently added to
its collection, several hitherto unknown poems of Sappho.
"Few, indeed, but those roses," as says Meleager, in the Anthology, are
the precious verses spared to us in spite of the unholy zeal of
antipaganism. And, strange to relate, we are indebted for what we have
to the quotations of grammarians and lexicographers, who preserved the
verses, not usually for their poetic beauty, but to illustrate a point
in syntax or metre. But, though so few and fragmentary, they are, as
Professor Palgrave says, "grains of golden sand which the torrent of
Time has carried down to us."
Sappho wrote in the AEolic dialect, noted for the soft quality of its
vowel sounds; and her poems were undoubtedly written for recitation to
the accompaniment of the lyre, being the earliest specimens of the song
or ballad so popular in modern times.
Predecessors of the melic poetry of Sappho are to be found in the chants
and hymns in honor of Apollo prevalent throughout Greece, in the popular
songs of Hellas, and in the songs sung in the home and at religious
festivals by Lesbian men and women,--children's rhymes, songs at vintage
festivals, plaints of shepherds expressive of rustic love, epithalamia
or bridal songs, dirges, threnodies and laments for Adonis, typifying
the passing of spring and summer.
The form and melody of Sappho's poems are due to the fact that they were
to accompany vocal and instrumental music, which, thanks to the
innovations of Terpander of Lesbos, was at that time exquisitely adapted
to the purposes of the lyric. Terpander introduced the seven-stringed
lyre, or cithara, with its compass of a diapason, or Greek octave, and
this became the peculiar instrument of Sappho and her school. The choice
of the musical measure determined the tone of the poem. Terpander united
the music of Asia Minor with that of Greece proper, and the resulting
product of AEolian poetry was the union of Oriental voluptuousness with
Greek self-restraint and art. Of Sappho's numerous songs, two odes alone
are presented to us in anything like their entirety, one dedicated to
the service of Aphrodite, and the other composed in honor of a girl
friend, Anactoria. Dionysius of Halicarnassus embodies the first in one
of his rhetorical works, as a perfect illustration of the elaborately
finished style of poetry, and comments on the fact that its grace and
beauty lie in the subtle harmony between the words and the ideas. Edwin
Arnold renders it as follows:
"Splendor-throned Queen, immortal Aphrodite,
Daughter of Jove, Enchantress, I implore thee
Vex not my soul with agonies and anguish;
Slay me not, Goddess!
Come in thy pity--come, if I have prayed thee;
Come at the cry of my sorrow; in the old times
Oft thou hast heard, and left thy father's heaven,
Left the gold houses,
Yoking thy chariot. Swiftly did the doves fly,
Swiftly they brought thee, waving plumes of wonder--
Waving their dark plumes all across the aether,
All down the azure.
Very soon they lighted. Then didst thou, Divine one,
Laugh a bright laugh from lips and eyes immortal,
Ask me 'What ailed me--wherefore out of heaven,
Thus I had called thee?
What was it made me madden in my heart so?'
Question me smiling--say to me, 'My Sappho,
Who is it wrongs thee? Tell me who refuses
Thee, vainly sighing.
Be it who it may be, he that flies shall follow;
He that rejects gifts, he shall bring thee many;
He that hates now shall love thee dearly, madly--
Aye, though thou wouldst not'
So once again come, Mistress; and, releasing
Me from my sadness, give me what I sue for,
Grant me my prayer, and be as heretofore now
Friend and protectress."