Violet-crowned, sweetly-smiling, holy Sappho...

~ Alkaios






Sappho & Her Influence

compiled by C. Ravin, B.A, J.D.

Summer/Autumn 2002





Some Appreciations, Ancient and Modern


The name Sappho will never die. But it lives in most of the minds that know it at all today 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. 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:

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 today. A fragment first published in 1922 also seems to make her say:

and yet great
glory will come to thee in all places
where Phaethon [shines]
and even in Acheron’s halls
[thou shalt be honored.]





In general, antiquity thought of her as “the poetess” just as Professor Harmon has recently shown 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,” — 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:

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 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 (250 B.C.) says:

Sappho’s white, speaking pages of dear song
Yet linger with us and will linger long.
(T. DAVIDSON)

Horace says:

vivuntque commissi calores
Aeoliae fidibus puellae.

That inadequate and misleading metaphor of fire, as Mackail says, recurs in all her eulogists. “Her words are mingled with fire,” writes Plutarch, 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 (about 290 B.C.) called her “that nightingale of hymns” and Lucian “the honeyed boast of the Lesbians.” Strabo (1 A.D.) said: “Sappho is a marvellous creature...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.” In another epigram in the Anthology, probably from the base of a lost statue of Sappho in the famous library at Pergamum, 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 now timidly defends the genuineness. Antipater of Sidon (150 B.c.) 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 of Sappho as “one that is sung for a mortal Muse among Muses immortal...a delight unto Greece.” Dioscorides (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 it is said: “her song will seem Calliope’s own voice.” Another writer, 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)
Catallus speaks of the Sapphica Musa, and Ausonius in Epigram XXXII calls her Lesbia Pieriis Sappho soror addita Musis.

If we turn now from the praise of the ancients to modern literary critics of classic lore we shall not find any depreciation but rather an enhancing of that ancient praise. The classic estimate of Sappho holds its own and more than holds it today. J. A. K. Thompson in his Greeks and Barbarians 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 favorite 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, 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 stormbird, 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 of may be said with confidence that they hold none and borrow of none, and that their poetry is, in some unique way, an immediate inspiration.”


Bring Summer flowers, bring pansy, violet,
Moss-rose and sweet-briar and pale columbine;
Bring loveliest leaves, rathe privet, eglantine,
And myrtles with the dew of morning wet:
Twine thy a wreath upon thy brows to set;
With thy soft hands the wayward tendrils twine;
Then lay them lightly on those curls of thine,
Sweet is the breath of blossoms, and the Graces,
When suppliants through Love's temple wend
their way,
Look down with smiles from their celestial places
On maidens wreathed with chaplets of the May;
But from the crownless choir they turn their faces,
Nor heed them when they sing nor when they
pray.

~ J.A. Symonds, The Garland-Bearer (After Sappho), 1884


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. Encyclopaedia Britannica).





Sappho's Life, Lesbus, Her Love Affairs, Her Personality and Pupils


IT IS my purpose to show the truth of Sappho’s prophecy that men would think of her in aftertimes: 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 section 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, or the exegesis of Sappho and Alcaeus 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 out 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 Skamandronymus, a good Asia Minor name vouched for by Herodotus, Aelian and other ancient writers and now confirmed by a recently discovered papyrus. He was rich and noble and probably a wine-merchant. He died, according to Ovid, when Sappho’s eldest child was six years of age.

Her mother’s name, says Suidas, was Cleïs. 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, 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 82 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 infocentis pocula Lesbii, for loveliness and pleasures, when he fell in love with and ransomed the beautiful Thracian courtesan, the world-renowned demimondaine. She was called Doricha by Sappho according to the Augustan geographer, Strabo, but Herodotus names her Rhodopis, rosy-cheeked, and evidently thought she had contributed to Delphi 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. We must be careful not to accept as certainly Sappho’s, especially the unSapphic 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, 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.

(David M. Robinson)

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.

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,” as the name appears vases and papyri, or “Psappho,” as coins and vases have it, or “Psappha,” as she herself said it in her soft Aeolic dialect, is perhaps a nom de plume, — the word meaning lapis lazuli. According to Athenaeus (who wrote at 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.), along with Alcaeus and Stesichorus and Pittacus,39 (P1. 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. 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. 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 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.” Stobaeus tells how one evening over 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. 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, the birthplace also of Aristotle’s famous pupil Theophrastus. She early moved to Mytilene, 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 today a thirsty traveller is delighted to sit in a cafe on the quay and drink a glass of the fine modern wine.

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:

“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 lonians 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; riverbeds 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 seawind can mature; marble cliffs, starred with jonquil and anemone in Spring, aromatic with myrtle 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, 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 by Aristotle in his Rhetoric,7 “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” (Edmunds). Tradition even in classic times represented her as beloved by Anacreon also, but bard of Teos flourished at least fifty years 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, the Athenian comic playwright in his play Sappho. But as Athenaeus in the third century A.D. said, “I rather fancy he was joking.”





Hollywood screenwriter Charles A. Gravina, in his script titled Psappha of Lesbos, gives the following conversation between Sappho and Alcaeus, depicting their first meeting. Sappho has just come from the market where she has heard his letter read aloud, also given below:






Several girls are gathered near a parapet in the city. They are giggling. Psappha, now 14, is walking by herself. She approaches the group.

One of the girls starts to read out loud from a letter. Her name is ERINNA, age 16.

ERINNA
It appears our dear Alkaios is coming home! Here is a letter that he sent. It says, "Your Alkaios is safe, as you see by this, but not his arms: his unconquerable shield, in fact, the Athenians have hung up before the goddess of the Blue Eyes." I wonder when he will appear to us.

PSAPPHA
Has he returned to Lesbos?

ERINNA
Yes, I think so. Yet we would not know it for a while, since he is probably hiding. No doubt Pittakos and his men are not happy with Alkaios. When hard-pressed in an engagement under the walls of Sigeum, he flung away his arms and took to his heels. The Athenians seem to have carried off his beautiful shield to the local temple of Athena and triumphantly hung it up as a trophy before the altar! Yet I assure you girls, sweet Alkaios is no less brave for his actions. And no less enchanting!

The girls all giggle. Psappha smiles and remains talking with the girls.

EXT. ROAD TO PSAPPHA'S HOUSE -- AFTERNOON

Psappha is walking home by herself and carries a basket with some fruit. Suddenly, a handsome bearded man appears from behind a pine tree and startles her. It is ALKAIOS, age 17.

ALKAIOS
Wait! Please, I mean you no harm. And no, I am not a satyr. Well, perhaps sometimes...

PSAPPHA
What do you want?

ALKAIOS
What do I want? Hmmm...I want...to sing and to write and to dance and to drink and to make love...yet I am not able, since I live presently in a state of disgrace.

Alkaios looks askew as he attempts to draw on Psappha's sympathies. Psappha smiles.

PSAPPHA
Why, you must be the fair Alkaios, is that true?

ALKAIOS
Yes, yet I might change my name. And how do you know of me?

PSAPPHA
Well, your name is a legend in Mitylene, perhaps all of Lesbos. Are you not the boy who joined the Athenians at Sigeum for a brief time?

ALKAIOS
What? Is that what they are saying about me? Oh sweet Eros, take me now. It isn't true, I tell you! I but lay down my arms in retreat, I would never join forces with those swine, those dogs, those...

PSAPPHA
Athenian soldiers?

ALKAIOS
Ha! Soldiers, no. For they were no more prepared than our fighters. They are different, they desire control and power, like those born under the star of Capricornus.

PSAPPHA
I see. And you found your cheap heroics preferable to...

ALKAIOS
Cheap heroics?! My, little wench, how shallow the flowers grow back home these days! Nay child, my decision was not wasted. For as long as they see it as unsoldierly, I will for thrice as long and with far more brilliance see my choice as one like many men of brains! That is, I have no overactive sense of pride nor dignity, and find the picture of myself running for my life far preferable to that of my dead body lying upon the field of glory.

PSAPPHA
Oh. That's all right then. Since had you not retreated, we would not be standing here now, enjoying this bit of history as much as we are.

ALKAIOS
You...you mean, you like me?

PSAPPHA
Well, I have heard from others that you are a poet. I find that to be interesting, since I am one too.

ALKAIOS
Indeed! Well, yes, I have many poems, some that I worked on...

PSAPPHA
In the midst of battle?

ALKAIOS
Well, something like that.

PSAPPHA
I tend to prefer the woods. Yet I do not feel that you have been anything less than brave, and I promise not to support what anyone says about you as a deserter.

ALKAIOS
Why, thank you then, dear...

PSAPPHA
Psappha. Perhaps someday we will hear your sweeter words then. Good day, sir.

ALKAIOS
(calling after her) Sweeter words? I thought these words were pretty sweet!

Psappha does not turn around, but keeps walking and waves her arm to Alkaios. He shakes his head and smiles, and seems to be taken with her. Then he hears some men in the distance and ducks back behind the tree.





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, ‘twoud not buy my maid.
(TUCKER)


Professor Prentice 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 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. 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.

“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 made her a widow at thirty-five. 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 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. 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. Sappho’s school of poetry in modern times has been prettily pictured in a painting by Hector Leroux. In his “School of Sappho”, he represents her standing in the atrium of a Roman house, with lyre in her left hand, on a platform inscribed with the name of Lesbian Sappho, evidently giving instruction to her many friends and pupils who stand and sit in various postures in the audience. Yet the best representation of what her school may have been is given by Alma Tadema 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:

“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.


Sappho's Physical Appearance, Her Hetæræ and Bisexuality, The Phaon Story





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, 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 “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 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

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.


Somewhere about 200 B.C., Appolonius of Rhodes wrote a poem called Argonautica, in which occurred the line: “So then, I am not the only woman to go off in quest of the Latmian cave,” the cave, that is to say, in which the legendary Endymion slept; and against this line an ancient scholiast, or marginal commentator, has written: The love-story of Selene (the Moon) is told by Sappho...and there it is said that Selene comes down to Endymion in this cave.”

The famous legend is thus to be traced back to Sappho, who probably gave form to some vague folk-tale current in the Ionian lands around Mount Latmos in Asia Minor, that is to say behind the city of Miletus. There were various versions of the story in circulation in later times, but the most unusual, and perhaps the one told by Sappho, related how Endymion, a young shepherd, was seen by the Moon-goddess while he lay asleep in this cave on Mount Latmos, and she, being enthralled by his youthful grace and beauty, kept him asleep there, eternally young, so that she might come to him every night and arouse his dreaming passions by her kisses, thus enjoying his slumbering love which alone had proved capable of warming her cold, ethereal heart. In another version of the legend, Endymion was described as a King of Olympia of long ago who had happened to be in the neighborhood of Latmos when Selene found him; and by these visitations to him in his sleep he became, as the centuries went by, the father of fifty little moons who were the fifty lunar months of the Olympian four-cycle year. But this is evidently a later elaboration of the story.

Now it may be said in general that narrative poetry discloses in its subject matter the kind of situation to which its author reacts emotionally, and reveals the particular tendencies of the poet’s nature and the paticular angle from which the circumstances of life are viewed. The poet, in fact, must derive some sort of pleasure or stimulating thrill from the story which is told: otherwise the poetic inspiration would not be forthcoming. And if we apply this principle to the case of Sappho’s poem on the subject of Selene’s love for Endymion we shall find, I think, that a most illuminating sidelight is thrown upon her emotional peculiarities.





Her childhood was passed, it will be remembered, at a time when all the young men of Lesbos were away at the wars; and when they came rollicking back at the conclusion of peace their rough manners seem to have offended her fastidious taste, for she did not marry until, considerably later, she met the wealthy and presumably elegant young merchant from Andros. Even the cultured Alkaios evoked from her no response to his passionate love: he was too violent in his sentiments, and he drank too much - a habit which she evidently disliked, since she never sings the usual praises of the vine in her verses. In her widowhood, it was towards the youth of her own sex that her heart opened, for here the extreme delicacy of her nature found a more congenial atmosphere. It is true that her brief unmarried life had been happy, and that, as she says, her husband's rôle of lover had not been unattractive to her; but it is evident enough that the virginal, feminine grace of a girl was nearer to her ideal than either the rough masculinity or the foppish effeminacy of the average young man of her time.

There is clear evidence that, in the abstract, the male character and form could arouse her emotions; but in actuality she seems to have feared or disliked the usual masculine temperment, and to have dreaded that physical mastery of man over woman from which the feminine mind so often derives a certain instinctive pleasure. She was, as Athanæus says, a thorough woman, and her verses are essentially feminine; but this does not mean that therefore she was attracted by the thorough man. On the contrary, her nature, as I read it, was one which was repelled by those qualities usually dominant in the male; and though her physical being was normal to the extent that it demanded - if seldom with overwhelming insistence - its physical completion in the uniting of the sexes, it was abnormal in its almost habitual rejection of that very union because of a dislike of the mental attitude of the generality of men towards women. In a word, she shunned in actuality the male moved by male instinct, yet in thought shunned not the masculine as the physical completion of the feminine.

Therefore, the conception of Endymion, the sleeping lover, charmed her. She took the bare legend and elaborated it into the story we know, because she could read into it so much more than was present in its folk form. She understood the reason why the goddess came night after night to the beautiful shepherd, yet would not permit him to awake. The Moon-goddess in her poem was herself: Endymion was the ideal youth, physically to be desired, and in slumber not to be feared, a man in the response of breath to breath, of caress to caress, but not a man in that forcefulness which displeased her. Something in her temperment, moreover, reacted with warmth to the thought of Selene’s active, not passive, part in these tender pleasures of the night; and his helplessness in her hands, and her gentle, indulgent management of him in his helplessness, enthralled her imagination and inspired her poetic genius. The legend of Endymion as we know it is, I think, Sappho’s creation; and in it, unconsciously, she reveals her own heart’s longings.

In 560 B.C., when Solon was struggling in Athens against the new tyranny of his cousin Pisistratos, when at Sardis the old King Alyattes at last had died and hisson Croesus became sole monarch of Lydia, Sappho was fifty-two years of age. Her black hair was touched with gray, and her face, in spite of the creams and perfumed oils which doubtless she used, was beginhe ning to show those faint lines which are the dread of every woman’s middle age. Yet her heart was young, and the fire within her passionate breast had not died down. She was bitterly conscious of her years, and the slow process of the departure of her charms was watched by her in her mirror with increasing despair. There was still left to her, however, her personal magnetism, her grace, her graciousnes, her elegance, her wit, her brains; and these qualities, together with her fame and her wealth, evidently retained for her her social leadership in Mytilene, and filled her house with friends and admirers.

It must have been at this time that one of the men who frequented her society asked her to marry him; and it would seem that for a while she entertained the proposal with some interest, for, as it has been pointed out, she was not averse to men, provided that they conformed to her exceptional requirements and approximated to her ideal. At length, however, she decided to reject the offer, for, being a woman of very clear sight, she knew that she could not much longer hold the physical love of a man, even though she might retain his admiration. She had no illusions about herself: she was growing old, and sorrowfully she realized the fact. She therefore wrote to this personage an answer in verse, part of which has been found in Egypt amongst the scraps of her published poems (Oxyrhynchus Papyri, 1231, 10; restored by J.M. Edmonds). It is the saddest of letters. It reads:

“If my breasts were still capable of giving suck, and my womb were able to bear children, then to another marriage-bed not with trembling feet would I come; but now on my skin age is already causing innumerable lines to go about, and Love hastens now to fly to me with his gift of pain...of the illustrious...taking for your own...and sing to us of her of the violet-scented breast...”

The last sentences seem to contain her advice to him to seek a wife amongst the noble young ladies of Mytilene, and thus to be able to come to Sappho and sing to her the praises of his bride.





Yet though she declares, in one of those exquisite phrases which characterize her work, that Love with this gift of pain is in no haste any longer to come to her, it seems that there was another man who at about this time made a proposal of marriage to her. He was evidently much younger than she; and it may well be that she had amused herself with him, not realizing that she was still capable of infatuating a young man by those brilliant qualities which sometimes in the case of famous women endure long after the summer of their life is past. Here is the surviving fragment of the verses she wrote to him:

“...but if you love me, choose a more youthful companion of your bed, for I cannot endure to be married to a young man. I am too old.” (Stobæus, Anthology, 71, 4)

Athenæus tells us that one of Sappho’s poems was addressed to a man who was greatly admired for his good looks, and he quotes two lines from it, which read:

“Stand up and look me in the face as friend to friend, and unveil the beauty that is in your eyes.” (Athenæus, xiii, 17)

These words seem to have been written to a youth who was shy of her, for they suggest a certain condescension of her part; and one images her, thus, greatly attracted by the handsome appearance of this young man with the beautiful eyes who, either because of his youth or his humble social standing, had bowed himself before so famous a lady. Perhaps it was this selfsame personage who, having been led on by her and allowed to become intimate with her, lost his head and asked her to marry him, thus evoking that sad cry from her: "I am too old." She could not, like the Moon-goddess, enchant him into an eternal sleep so that he might be her Endymion; she could not halt the process of her decline and be forever a part of his dreams: she knew that soon he would wake up and see her as she really was, a woman whose hair was turning gray, and this she could not endure.

Her age was a torment to her, but, knowing that her malady could not be cured, she faced the situation boldly. When her girls called her the fairest of women, the sweetest player upon the lyre, she wrote to them frankly telling them that to praise her now that her prime was past was to cast a slight upon the Muses. The fragments of a poem of hers to this effect have been found (Oxyrhynchus Papyri, 1787, 1 and 2, 10), but only the ends of the lines have survived, the beginnings have been torn away; yet even so we can get the sense of it by the aid of words which Weigall has placed in brackets, and which will serve to make the theme intelligible. These are a condensation of the restorations offered by J. M. Edmonds in the Cambridge Philological Society Proceedings, 1927.

"[You dishonor] the good gifts [of the Muses], children, [when you say]...'dear [Sappho]...player of the clear, sweet lyre'...[for]...my skin with age is [lined, and turned is] my hair from its blackness...nor do my legs speed about [as formerly when we used to dance] like the little fawns. Yet who can cure it?...It is not possible. [As surely as night follows] the rose-armed dawn, [and darkness]...speeds [to the ends] of the earth, [Death] overtakes [us; and as Death would not restore] the beloved wife [of Orpheus to him, so every ] woman who dies he expects [to keep prisoner, though he should ] let her follow [her rescuer]."





The reference here is to the legend of Orpheus, who went down to Hades in search of his wife, but failed to rescue her, although she had followed him to the brink of daylight before she was caught again.

Then comes a sentence which is quoted by Athenæus:

"But I, be it known, love delicate living, and for me richness and beauty belong to the desire of the sun,"

after which only a word here and there remains, the sense apparently being that she will, therefore, not creep away to her grave until needs must, but will continue, loved and loving, with her girls here on Earth, this being all that she can ask, nor does she desire them to flatter her by praise deserved only when she was younger.

Her occasional interest in men did not deflect her thoughts fom her hetæræ. These girls still came to her from afar and near, and her delight in them, if not as great as formerly, was still considerable.

"Toward you, my beautiful ones, this mind of mine will not change,"

she wrote; and perhaps to this period of her life may be attributed the line:

"To-day for my hetæræ these songs right well will I sing."

She still was enthralled by the beauty of the young girls of Lesbos whom she met, or whom she saw as she took her daily walks in fields or woods; and thus she begins a poem:

"I saw one day gathering flowers a very dainty little girl..."





A torn fragment of another of her poems, on which only the beginnings of the lines are to be seen, has been found in Egypt; but its sense can be gathered by the tentative addition of the words given here in brackets by Weigall:

"You had crouched down frightened, [children,...behind] a bay-tree when [I passed...], and all things sweeter [seemed for the sight of you,]. Truly I drank that [draught with thirsty eyes]; and the women [who were with me thought me a silent] walking-companion, [for I had become heedless of their company], and sometimes I scarcely heard them [...for] my contented spirit, indeed, [had fled back to happy days.] Such things, however, are of my destiny. [I thought], gentle [maidens, that] I would come [and speak to you, but] you were beforehand with me...,[and yet] a fair [sight it was to see you]and the very clothes [you wore, charmed me.]"

There is some reason to suppose that she had a serious illness at this time, and, indeed, her reference to Death in the poem which we read just now may perhaps have been inspired by a recent close approach to the dark portals of the dreaded underworld. Maximus of Tyre quotes two lines of hers, and says in this connection: "Socrates scolds [his wife] Xanthippe for weeping when he is about to die, and similarly Sappho chides her daughter [Kleïs]." He then gives the couplet, which reads,

"For in a house that serves the Muses there must be no lamentation: such a thing does not befit it."

But the fact that these carefully turned lines were included amongst her poems rather suggests that they were not composed when she was actually about to die, but that they were written, when her health was restored, as a poetical record of an injunction given by her at the time when she was ill.

It may be that, as a result of this serious illness, she was obliged to send her hetæræ away, for there is a scrap of a poem of hers (Oxyrhynchus Papyri, 1231, 13) which seems to have been written as a farewell to them. Again part of each of the surviving lines is lost, and a guess at the missing words (given here in brackets by Weigall) has to be made (J.M. Edmonds in the Classical Review, 1916, 100). The fragment reads:

"...[To them] I replied: 'Gentle [ladies], you will ever remember [till you are old]our life together in [the splendor] of our youth. For [many things] both [pure] and beautiful we then did [together]. And now that [you depart hence, love] wrings [my heart]...'"

In the old days she had been torn by jealousy at the thought that a girl whom she loved should transfer her affections elsewhere; but now, that magnanimity which is middle age's great compensation, enabled her to contemplate such an eventuality without pain. Thus she could write to her hetæræ:

"May you sleep in the bosom of a tender companion..."





The word "companion" is the feminine hetæra, the "girlfriend" and it is characteristic of Sappho's outlook that she might lose her heart from time to time to a male lover, she could wish to one of her own sex no greater happiness than that she might experience the tenderness of feminine comradeship.

Perhaps it was not merely magnanimity born of her years which was responsible for this more impersonal reaction towards any change in direction in the affections of her girls. Perhaps in these later phases of her emotional life she was now turning generally, rather than specifically and occasionally, to the opposite sex in matters of the heart. It has always to be remembered that the grammarian Didymus, as Seneca tells us, discussed the question as to whether Sappho was to be classed as a prostitute; and such evidence as we possess indicates clearly enough that the scandals about her current in later years were quite as much concerned with her relations with men as with her attitude towards her hetæræ. Thus it may well be that her interest in her own sex was at this time declining, and that her words addressed to her girls, "Towards you this mind of mine will never change," were written in a vain contradiction of a change in her sentiments of which she and they were vaguely aware. The disbanding of the group of hetæræ who were congregated at her house may have been due to this cause as much as to her illness as to the dimunition of her supreme abilities as a dancer and singer.





Perhaps she was tired of the presence of these girls in her house now that she was no longer young enough to be the absolute mistress of their emotional life. Her house had gradually become a sort of institute, almost an Academy for Young Ladies; for as her years increased there must have been a tendency in her hetæræ, her comrades, to become merely pupils and protégées. In the lines written when she was ill, she spoke of the unseemliness of mourning "in a house that serves the Muses," en moisopolo oikia; but oikia is not merely "a house" - it means a group of buildings, the word being sometimes used, in fact, to signify a palace or headquarters. Thus one pictures it now as a villa surrounded by guest-houses, work-rooms, and other out-buildings - a school, in fact, over which she presided; and it is not difficult to imagine her as becoming suddenly tired of her responsibilities, and as being overwhelmed by the desire to shake herself free of the whole thing. There were still left to her, she must have felt, a few years in which her heart's emotions would animate a body not yet wholly bereft of its attractions, there were still a few years left for love's excitement; and it may have been in this spirit of adventure that she turned her no longer fettered attention to the search for that happiness which a creative artist always looks for, and seldom finds, outside his work. Likely she had several avenues of creativity and pleasure in which she could indulge in the twilight of her life, and likely more than enough than to cause her to take a fatal leap into a watery grave.





I love you, Enchantress!
So much, it’s true, yet
I must hie, for my home
Will remain the sea.
‘Tis not for the beauty
Of the maidens of Sicily;
Nor riches undiscover’d;
And no, my sweet Poetess,
Neither ‘tis it for any lost
Wonder or brilliance
Or the Sun’s radiance in
Your smile, your eyes, your kiss;
Nor anything about you
My Beloved, I swear.
As the Cyprian is our witness,
I shall dream fondly always
Of our passionate embraces
At our little Latmian cave, as
Nightingales sang for us, as
The gods and the fawns
Looked on, my blessed girl;
I swear, nor ‘tis there
Any distraction in my head
At you near thrice my age,
For you are the Tenth Muse,
And how could any man,
Whither slave or sailor or king
Or Endymion,
As I am, all, at once, since you
For ever more; and yet
How may I stay on,
The sea is my home and craft,
Just as the blank page is yours.
Please be happy, for I
Will always be, for having
Loved you, gentle maiden.
There shall be no
Higher treasure for me
As I ply, yet our love
Shall remain sweet
Within my breast,
A miracle cherish’d
Until I die.

~ Carlo Ravin, Love, Phaon, Summer 2001





In a pine forest cooler than the rest of the island,
Lives a young fisherman with eyes like the sea.
He built his own boat, and made his own cabin,
But he's broken the hearts of the likes of me.

Now you must understand, he made me a promise.
There were secrets we shared, we planted a tree.
We lived in his cabin, I fished along side of him
I fell under the spell of his sorcery.

When he cast me adrift at the end of the Summer,
It was not for another, but his own privacy.
I fell apart like a rose, but the scent of my longing
Remains and it weeps like an old willow tree.

At night when it's still, with a yellow Moon rising,
When his candle is snuffed and he's deep in a dream,
I move like a cat, and crawl into his window
And lay down beside him like a golden moonbeam.

The smell of his skin is just like the Summer,
When our love was as fresh as the grass in the fields.
And ever so softly I kiss his eyelids
Before slipping away, my secret concealed.

Though I'm in it alone, I'm still in it, in love.
And love can be lonely like a sweet melody.
But just maybe he feels me like a whisper inside him,
Like an angel beside him, keeping him company.

~ Carly Simon, The Fisherman's Song, 1990





The boat that brought me here is anchored on the other side of the island. I think of all those I have loved - my difficult daughter, Cleis; my difficult mother, for whom I named her; my honey-voiced hetaerae; Alcaeus, my first and last love; Praxinoa, my beloved slave-girl, whom I freed to become an Amazon; Charaxus, my foolish lovesick brother; Larichus, my other surviving brother, who sold himself into slavery because of a whore's tricks; Eurygius, my dead baby brother, whose tiny hand I almost touched in the Land of the Dead; my late drunken husband Cercylas; my lovely golden Egyptian priestess Isis; Aesop, my philosophy tutor; Necho, the Egyptian pharoah who set me free to discover my life; Penthesilea and Antiope, my Amazon guides; Phaon, my most recent conquest and would-be muse - and nothing seems worth living for. I will grow old and people will turn away from me in disgust. Nobody likes the smell of an old woman - not even other old women...

All my songs have been released into the air. They are sung far and wide - from Lesbos to Egypt, from Syracuse to Ephesus, from Delphi to Epidaurus. That frenzied feeling that marks the conception of a song will never be mine again. I am barren and naked as this cliff I climb...

When I reach the top of the promonotory where the wind flails my cheeks and the gulls shriek and glide, I stand for a moment balanced between life and death. The ghostly rows of white islands in the distance seem to beckon to me from Erebus. I can almost feel the icy waters of Acheron lapping at my toes. I tease the gods and myself by leaning, stepping back, and then leaning forward again. My revenge on the gods will be to take command of my own death, to cut the strands the Spinners believe only they can cut, to reweave my destiny as if I were Penelope...

But Penelope lived to see her love again. Will I? Where is he? Alcaeus of the golden words and golden hair. Alcaeus, who could make me laugh like no other. (Of course, the one who can make you laugh will also make you cry. That must never be forgotten.) If Alcaeus came back to me now, I would not have to jump! Or am I lying to myself? I know that love is no cure for mortality...

I will pretend I am jumping into his strong arms! I will conquer mortality by embracing mortality...

When a woman is standing on a cliff about to jump into the wine-dark sea, her life does tend to flash before her. But the times get all mixed up. The boat I sailed with Alcaeus when I was sixteen fades imperceptibly into the boat I sailed with Phaon when I was fifty. It is all the same boat on the same ocean. The ocean is called time...

My feet slip, my heart pounds. I start to teeter over the edge. For a moment, I am not so sure about this final leap. I need feathers, I need wax, like Icarus. My knees are week. My head spins. The dead are waving at the end of a long, torchlit corridor. My father, grandparents, my mother. I feel myself being carried inexorably back to my childhood on my native isle of Lesbos...

Since at every moment of our lives we stand on the brink of eternity, this is a good a place as any to start the story of my life...

~ excerpts from the breathtaking prologue of Sappho's Leap - A Novel, by Erica Jong, May 2003


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 remarry, especially if she had to choose one younger than herself. 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.”

Now let us discuss the supposititious love affair, to which we have 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’ préis of Turpilius’ Latin paraphrase of Menander, though he does not mention Sappho by name: “Phaon, who was a ferry-man plying for hire between Lesbus (others say he was from Chios) 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.





Once more, once more
from Leucade's rock I dive
into the sea;
and once more
amidst the white foam drunk with love.

~ Anacreon





A writer of the second century B.C., Palaephatus, 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 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 folklore, 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 (P1.4, 5) in Florence and Palermo (p. 107) The fair Phaon, Aphrodite’s shining star, 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 today this rock of desperation is haunted by Sappho’s ghost and known as Sappho’s Leap (P1. 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.
(David M. Robinson)





Some say Phaon
was no ordinary ferryman
but a daimon
who plied the glittering waters
between Lesbos & the mainland.

One day I arrived
in the guise of an old woman:
hairs sprouting from my chin,
collapsed jaw, a few brown reeking teeth,
sad dugs with nipples pointing earthward,
feet yellowed with calluses,
an Aeolian lyre with broken strings
in my brown-dappled hands.

But Phaon greeted me
as if I were a girl of twenty.
His bright eyes revived me,
made me young again.

Asking only a kiss
he ferried me safely back to Lesbos.
& for his pains
I gave him the fabled alabaster box
filled with the magic unguent
that makes women love.

Phaon could have his pick
of young buds.
If he loved Sappho,
her loved her truly,
not for her youth
but for her poetry & prescience.

But Sappho was
a mistress of imagined slights
like all you self-singers.

& when he rowed in late,
his muscled arms gleaming,
his ferry decked with flowers,
she cursed me, daughter of Zeus,
for a fabricator of falsehoods,
& cursed him for deceit,
pelting his cheeks
with fiery menopausal tears.

She imagined maidens her daughter's age
spread upon his bed of sea-borne flowers -
& leapt to her death
from the Leucadian cliff
simply to spite him.

I am Aphrodite
& I sail the skies
in a golden chariot
drawn by swans
that beat the air into submission
with their wings.
I see the past & what is yet to come
& I can bend the hearts of men
to passion if I choose.

But here my power stops:
I cannot save a singer
seduced by her own song.

~ Erica Jong, Aphrodite Explains, 1996





The legend about Phaon is equally dramatic. It is not surprising that Phaon was chosen as the hero in the legend about Sappho’s death, for he was, in himself, a legend of beauty. A popular Greek expression says that a man is “a Phaon in looks and deeds.”

The saga about Phaon described him as a young ferryman “ plying for hire between Lesbos and the mainland.” One day, disguised as an old and unattractive woman - so the legend goes - Venus took this ferryboat, and Phaon, being a kindly youth and sorry for the feeble old creature, refused to accept any fare from her.

Venus, deeply impressed by this generosity, presented him with an alabaster box of “unguent, the daily use of which made women fall in love with him,” and besides, he remained young and charming for ever.

Considering that, as this story shows, Phaon himself was a purely legendary figure, it is surprising that the combined legend about him and Sappho has been generally accepted as a fact for so many centuries. Actually Ovid, and not the historians, is chiefly responsible for the widespread acceptance of the Sappho-Phaon tale. For Ovid’s ode, Sappho to Phaon, was known and quoted throughout the ancient world.

The best-known English translation of this “heroic epistle,” made by Alexander Pope in 1707, indicates how little Ovid knew or understood Sappho. If this were possible, one might wonder whether, in fact, he ever read her verse with any real attention or understanding. It is doubtful whether any man who knew anything about the life or work of Sappho could make her say, when she was a woman of fifty, whose dignity had always been an integral part of her nature:

Stung with my love and furious with despair,
All torn my garments and my bosom bare,
My woes, thy crimes, I to the world proclaim,
Such inconsistent things are love and shame.

Naturally Ovid’s interpretation of Sappho’s charac­ter was accepted by many people, for human beings tend to look down upon, or ridicule, the emotions of others which they cannot understand. Few men and women have imagination as far as the emotions of others are concerned, and the Greek comedy-writers of the Middle Comedy, writing in the fourth century B.C., apparently directed many attacks against Sappho, just as Socrates, too, was ridiculed by Aristo­phanes. Six of the Middle Comedy-writers- Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphanes, Diphilus, Ephippus and Timocles - each wrote a comedy called Sappho. Only a few fragments of these plays have been pre­served, but it is clear from records of criticisms of these comedies that they described her as a comic figure.

These attacks from men of her own tradition would have surprised Sappho far more than the ruthlessness with which her poems were later destroyed by a so-called civilization of which she had no conception.

Antiphanes probably told the story in both his Leucadius and his Phaon; and Cratinus must have mentioned Phaon, for Athenaeus 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.

Now, it must be remembered that the poet Stesichoros, whom Sappho perhaps met during her exile in Sicily, and whose works she must assuredly have read, had written a poem about a virtuous young woman - a more or less imaginary character - who, failing to receive a proposal of marriage from the man she loved, committed suicide. In this poem the heroine was said to have flung herself from a cliff which was described by Athenæus as being in the neighborhood of Leucas, and which was probably this particular headland.

Sappho's fame had spread so far that she had become a legendary figure in Greece long before her death. Her profile, as engravers imagined it to be, appeared on coins; busts of her were proudly displayed in city halls all over the Empire. It was little wonder, therefore, that her own contemporaries, and succeeding generations, eagerly accepted a dramatic tale of her death.

Many historians, eager to accept the Phaon legend as a fact, have not allowed themselves to be puzzled by the glaring inconsistencies of this tale. For it is obvious that, if a woman of Sappho's temperment made the effort to leave Lesbos in search of her lover, she would hardly have stopped halfway on this journey to Sicily, and committed suicide before she reached her destination, where she would have found Phaon.

It is obvious why many of these historians, who made a study of Sappho's life, and her death, were willing unquestioningly to accept the Phaon legend. These historians were all men, and they naturally preferred to believe that, at the close of her life, at least, this great woman found a man necessary to her happiness. Consciously or unconsciously, these historians ignored the symbolism of her own story about the eternally sleeping Endymion, or suppressed the story altogether.

These historians, in other words, none of whom were apparently experts in the psychology of extraordinary women, judged her quite arbitrarily, adjusting their opinions to their prejudices. They never took into account her own point of view, so clearly expressed in every one of her poems.

More than that: they seemed to forget, or not wish to remember, that Sappho was and is a very common name in Lesbos, and that the tales about Sappho and Phaon or any other man might be based on the life of "the other Sappho," the famous courtesan of Eresos, the city of Sappho's birth.





Suidas, one of the few historians to review Sappho's life with greater objectivity, categorically denies the Phaon legend in his Lexicon:

They say [he writes about Phaon] that this Phaon was beloved by many women, among them Sappho, not the famous poetess, but another Lesbian, who failing to win him, threw herself from the Leucadian cliff."

Strabo informs us that at the annual festival of Apollo, it was the custom of the Leucadians to fling a criminal down from this cliff as a vicarious sacrifice for the sins of the people, but that the rite had so far been mitigated that attempts were allowed to be made to break the victim's fall, for example by tying a number of large birds to him so that the strokes of their wings might lessen the pace of his descent, while his friends were permitted to wait in boats to rescue him if he were still alive. But these enforced plunges from the cliff have nothing to do with the suicides, nor do we know whether the custom already prevailed in the time of Sappho, or, if it did, whether it was known to her.

So we must ask ourselves which is more likely: that the Poetess, who unquestionably flourished and enjoyed great success on her island as well as an outstanding reputation abroad, was likely to have committed suicide, or at least was she more likely to do so than perhaps a courtesan, who, used to getting what men she wanted and what she wanted from men, perhaps in a moment of stark introspection, came to glimpse the futility of her efforts with one particular man, and took the Leucadian leap? The modern student is left to ponder whether the Tenth Muse acted with such futile abandon over unrequited love, chased the man halfway to Italy, only to abandon her goal midway and take a fatal jump instead, or if not perhaps it was just some other person, or nothing more than a local myth which, having a convenient vehicle on which to attach itself parasitically - Sappho's good name - for its promulgation throughout history, has endured and is now with us as a myth today. There is simply no evidence of Sappho's suicide, and thus it is at once pointless, exhaustive, and chauvanistic to detract from the good and auspicious life of the Poetess by attaching a glorified suicide-over-a-cute-guy story to her otherwise untouchable name.

There are two epigrams in the Greek Anthology which indicate that Sappho's ashes were buried in Lesbos. The one is an epitaph composed by Tullius Laurea, who was Cicero's freedman, and was writing in the middle of the first century B.C., which reads: "Passing by this Æolian tomb, stranger, speak not of the poetess of Mytilene as dead; for though this was built by the hands of men, and such human works sink quickly into oblivion, yet if you make enquiries about me on account of having taken from each of the sacred Muses a flower for my ennead, you shall know that I have escaped the darkness of the Underworld, since there shall never be the light of the Sun that has not the knowledge to the lyrist, Sappho." By "this Æolian tomb," a tomb in Æolian Lesbos is evidently meant.

The other is an epitaph composed by Antipater of Sidon at about the end of the second century B.C., reading: "it is Sappho that you hide, O Æolin Earth, who amongst the immortal Muses is praised as the mortal Muse, who by Aphrodite of Cyrus and by Eros together reared, who with Persuasion wove the everlasting garland of the Muses of Pieria, who was the delight of Hellas, and yourself the glory. O Goddesses of Destiny that spin the thrice-wound thread of fate from your distaffs, why did you not spin an all-imperishable day for the poetess who wove the imperishable gifts of the Muses of Helicon?"

I may also mention another epitaph, this being written by Pinytos, whose date is not known: "This tomb holds the bones and mute name of Sappho, but her wise sayings are deathless."

Thus, it seems indisputable that the ashes and fragments of unconsumed bones collected from Sappho's funeral pyre were buried in Lesbos in a tomb which was to be seen during the ensuing centuries.





It will be well to bring together here the other epitaphs upon Sappho which are preserved in the Greek Anthology. The longest is by Dioskorides, who lived in the third century B.C., and is headed, "Dioskorides on Sappho of Mytilene, the poetess, the marvel of lyric poetry." It reads: "Sweetest pillow of love and fond youth, Sappho, with the Muses surely Pieria or ivied Helicon must honor you whose spirit is theirs - the Muse of Æolian Eesos; and surely Hymen, God of Weddings, holding his bright torch, has you with him when he stands in the bridal bedroom; and surely, too, you mourn with Aphrodite when she laments the fair young son Kinyras, [Adonis], in the sacred grove of the Blessed Dead. In any case, Lady, all hail to you, even as to the gods; for your songs we still hold to be daughters of the Deathless Ones."

Anipater of Sidon has another epitaph in the Anthology, which reads (Palatine Anthology, vii, 15): "My name is Sappho, and my song surpasses the songs of women even as does that of the son of Mæon [Homer] the songs of men." And in this regard we should note that the ancients often speak of her simply as "The Poetess," just as they speak of Homer as "The Poet."

Here is an epitaph by Plato (Idem, ix, 506): "Some say that there are nine Muses; but they are careless, for look! - there is Sappho of Lesbos who is a tenth." Antipater of Sidon writes again (Idem, ix, 66): "Astonishment gripped Mnemosyne" - Memory, Mother of the Muses - "when she heard the songs of the sweet-voiced Sappho, because mankind possessed a tenth Muse." Finally, there is an epigram by an anonymous writer (Idem, ix, 571), who, in speaking of the nine Lyric poets, praises the works of Pindar, Simonides, Stesichoros, Ibykos, Alkman, Bakchylides, Anakreon, and Alkaios, and adds: "But Sappho was not a ninth to these men; rather she is to be classed as the Tenth Muse amongst the lovely Muses."

Strabo writes (Strabo, xiii, 617): "Contemporary with Pittakos and Alkaios was Sappho, who was something miraculous; for not in the whole course of history do we know of any woman who can be said in the least degree to have rivaled her as a poet." The philosopher Plato in his Phædrus, reports Socrates as calling her "the beautiful Sappho," and places her amongst "the Wise"; and Maximus of Tyre writes of "the beautiful Sappho, for so Socrates delights to call her because of the beauty of her lyric poetry, although she herself was small and dark." The Emperor Julian (Epistolæ, xxx) also speaks of "the beautiful Sappho."

Aristotle, writing in the fourth century B.C. (Rhetoric, 139b), tells us that "the people of Mytilene have honored Sappho, although she was a woman"; and it seems clear that from the first her memory was held in the highest respect, in spite of whatever scandals were attached to her name. Her reputation, however, seems to have suffered at the hands of Athenian playwrights, with whom she was an oft-used character; yet I do not think that there is any reason to suppose, as everybody seems to do, that it was mainly they who brought her into ill-repute. Much was said, and always had been said, against her; but as, in her lifetime, the marvel of her genius and her personality had brought every scandal to nothing, so in the centuries after her death, the exquisite beauty of her work and the undying memory of her glamorous figure, lifted her reputation high above the reach of serious slander until the Church pronounced her a menace to public moral and destroyed her work.

Sappho's poetry was arranged in nine books, of which Book I contained thirteen hundred and tweny lines, as a fragment of papyrus states. There were therefore, probably, nearly twelve thousand lines in the whole collection; and of these we now possess only six hundred lines or fragments of lines: that is to say, a tattered twentieth part of the whole. The date of the burning of her works by the Church is not known, but as none of the late grammarians annotated her poetry, it would seem that the destruction began fairly early in the Christian epoch, perhaps under Gregory of Nazianus, about A.D. 380. In the time of Pope Gregory the Seventh, in about A.D. 1073, further wholesale burnings of her books are thought to have taken place; but the only definite information we possess is that provided by Petrus Alcyonius in the sixteenth century, who says that, when a boy, he was told by Demetrius Chalcondyles that the priests of the Greek Church had burnt a large number of her works of the ancient poets, including those of Sappho.

When her works were destroyed there was, in fact, very little by which to remember her, for the reading of the classics in general was discouraged, and the scattered references to her by ancient authors were thus lost to memory. During the Renaissance Italian antiquarians rediscovered the essay by Longinus on the Sublime, and the treatise on Literary Composition by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, by which means two important poems of Sappho were resuscitated; and interest in her at once revived, these poems being translated and published even in England as early as the sixteenth century.

In view of the tremendous and altogether exceptional praise bestowed upon Sappho by ancient writers, it is not surprising, though it is none the less a relief, to find that the newly discovered fragments maintain the highest standard set for us by the verses and single lines which were already known. Before the Egyptian discoveries were made, that great scholar Symonds had spoken of her as "the one, of all the poets of all the literatures of the world, whose every word has a peculiar and unmistakable perfume, a seal of absolute perfection and inimitable grace..."; and Edwin Arnold had called her "that exquisite poetess...whose genius among all feminine votaries of singing stands incontestably highest." Scholars and poets alike had poured out their enthusiastic praise of her; and it may be imagined, thus, that those who first examined the new lines found in Egypt did so with a certain anxiety in cas the judgment of today would not continue to be in accord with that of antiquity.

Yet any such fear that may have been felt was soon set at rest. Out of the dust of Egypt there came one beautiful fragment after another to justify the opinion previously held. The only disconcerting fact was that the new discovered love poems were addressed to women, not to men; and thus those arguments which had sometimes been put forward to explain away the use of the feminine gender in the two most important poems already known, were proved to be untenable. It should be remembered, however, that the tendency in certain men and women to be stirred emotionally by persons of their own sex was not considered by the Greeks to be reprehensible in any serious degree, and that, therefore, all modern censures are out of focus. To judge one age by the standards of another is unscholarly. There are, of course, certain qualities which may be classed as good or bad, virtuous or sinful, in all ages; but the standards of morality in amatory matters change so rapidly and vary so widely that criticism is best suspended altogether, save in so far as it can be advanced as an expression of a purely personal or party opinion.

Beauty, moreover, must be appraised without any regard for the conditions which produce it: that is axiomatic in art. No discerning person, either in antiquity or in our own time, has failed to see that Sappho's poetry is to be ranked amongst mankind's greatest artistic achievements, and it is by her poetry that she must be judged.





In the end it is the experience which Sappho brings that matters. The pleasure to be found in her artistry is surpassed by that to be found in the emotional and imaginative power of her work, which is the reflection of her sensitive, suffering, passionate self. Her words are as fresh today as when she wrote them, and though we have only a pathetically small portion of what she wrote, and much even of this has survived for reasons other than its poetical merits, she still deserves the reputation of being the most gifted woman who ever wrote poetry. Her unfailing senses, her delightful fancy, her scrupulous sincerity, her passionate strength, even her outbursts of anger or scorn, are the qualities of a character endowed beyond mortal measure by the Muses and the Graces. To them, and to Aphrodite, she dedicated her life and art, and their life-giving inspiration filled her verse. To read it is to understand that this woman was, as Alkaios called her, holy.

~ C.M. Bowra





Sources:

Sappho and Her Influence, David M. Robinson, (Marshall Jones Company, Boston, MA, 1924)

Sappho of Lesbos - Her Life and Times, Arthur Weigall, (Frederick Stokes Company, New York, NY, 1932).

Sappho of Lesbos - A Psychological Reconstruction of Her Life, Margaret Goldsmith, (Rich & Cowan, London, 1938)

Sappho Revocata, J.M. Edmonds, (Peter Davies, London, 1928)

Greek Lyric Poetry, C.M. Bowra, (Oxford Univ. Press, 1961)











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