VI Sappho
Toward the close of the seventh century before Christ, a singular phenomenon presented itself in the history of Greek womanhood. Heretofore Greek women have been beautiful; they have been fascinating; they have exerted great influence on the course of events; but it cannot be said that they have been intellectual. At the time mentioned, there occurred an unusual movement in the intellectual realm. This remarkable movement centres about the name of the first great historical woman of Greece—Lesbian Sappho, “the Tenth Muse.” In the history of universal woman, Sappho holds a position altogether unique; for she is not only regarded as the greatest of lyric poets, but she was also the founder of the first woman’s club of which we have any record. Sappho consecrated herself heart and soul to the elevation of her sex. As poetry and art constitute the natural channels for the aesthetic cultivation of woman, she trained her pupils to be poets like herself. The result of her lifelong devotion to the service of Aphrodite and the Muses was that she herself not only achieved an immortal reputation as a poet, but through her inspiring influence her pupils carried the love of poetry and of intellectual and artistic pursuits back to their distant homes. Hence, it is not surprising to learn that from this time there were to be found here and there in the Greek world women who in intellectual pursuits were the peers of their male compeers, and that there should be found among women the nine terrestrial Muses, so called as a counterpart to the celestial Nine.
Sappho’s unique greatness is best appreciated when we consider how she has been regarded by the great men of antiquity and of modern times.
Among the Greeks, she possessed the unique renown of being called “The Poetess,” just as Homer was “The Poet.” Solon, hearing one of her poems, prayed that he might not see death until he had learned it. Plato numbered her among the wise. Aristotle quotes without reservation a judgment that placed her in the same rank as Homer and Archilochus. Plutarch likens her “to the heart of a volcano,” and says that the grace of her poems acted on her listeners like an enchantment, and that when he read them he set aside the drinking cup in very shame. Strabo called her “a wonderful something,” and says that “at no period within memory has any woman been known who, in any way, even the least degree, could be compared to her for poetry.” Demetrius of Phaleron adds his word of praise: “Wherefore Sappho is eloquent and sweet when she sings of beauty and of love and spring, and of the kingfisher; and every beautiful expression is woven into her poetry besides what she herself invented.”
Writers in the Greek Anthology continually sing her praises, calling her “the Tenth Muse,” “pride of Hellas,” “comrade of Apollo,” “child of Aphrodite and Eros,” “nursling of the Graces and Persuasion.” Nor have modern critics been less restrained in their praises, notwithstanding the fact that they possess merely a handful of fragments by which to judge “The Poetess.” Addison, for example, says: “Among the mutilated poets of antiquity there is none whose fragments are so beautiful as those of Sappho.” John Addington Symonds is even more enthusiastic. “The world has suffered no greater literary loss,” says he, “than the loss of Sappho’s poems. So perfect are the smallest fragments preserved, that we muse in a sad rapture of astonishment to think what the complete poems must have been.” And Swinburne, her best modern interpreter, calls Sappho “the unapproachable poetess,” and says: “Her remaining verses are the supreme success, the final achievement, of the poetic art.”
Sappho was at the zenith of her fame about the beginning of the sixth century before the Christian era. Her home was at Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos. The lapse of twenty-five centuries has left us few authentic records of her life. There is a tradition that she was born at Eresus, on the island of Lesbos, and later established herself in the capital city, Mytilene. She was of a wealthy and aristocratic family. Herodotus says that she was the daughter of Scamandronymus, and Suidas states that her mother’s name was Cleis, that she was the wife of a rich citizen of Andros, Cercylas or Cercolas by name, and that she had a daughter named after her grandmother, Cleis. Sappho refers to a daughter by this name in one of the extant fragments, but none of these other statements are corroborated. She had two brothers, Larichus, a public cupbearer at Mytilene,—an office reserved for noble youths,—and Charaxus, a wine merchant, of whom we shall speak more fully later. From one source we learn that she went into exile to Sicily along with other aristocrats of Lesbos, but the date is a matter of conjecture. Pittacus was tyrant of Mytilene at this time, and Sappho probably returned to Lesbos at the time when he granted amnesty to political exiles. How long she lived we cannot tell, while how and when she died are also unknown. Judging from the allusions of the writers in the Anthology, her tomb, erected in the city of her adoption, was for centuries afterward regularly visited by her votaries.
These are the few facts we can positively state regarding the life of Sappho; but myth and legend have supplied what was lacking, and those scandalmongers, the Greek comic poets, have woven all sorts of stories about her manner of life. These stories centre chiefly about the names of three men,—Alcæus and Anacreon, the poets, and Phaon, the mythical boatman of Mytilene, endowed by Aphrodite with extraordinary and irresistible beauty.
Alcæus, the poet of love and wine and war, was a native of Mytilene, and a contemporary of Sappho, and the two poets no doubt knew each other well. The comic poets made them lovers. There is still extant the opening of a poem which Alcæus addressed to Sappho:
“Violet-crowned, chaste, sweet-smiling Sappho,
I fain would speak; but bashfulness forbids.”
To which she replied:
“Had thy wish been pure and manly,
And no evil on thy tongue,
Shame had not possessed thine eyelids;
From thy lips the right had rung.”
Anacreon, the lyric poet, was also represented as a lover of Sappho; and two poems are preserved, one of which he is said to have addressed to her, while the other is said to be her reply. But there is no doubt whatever that Anacreon flourished at least a generation after Sappho, so that the two could never have met. It seems to have been one of the stock motifs of the comic poets to represent Greek lyrists as being lovers of the Lesbian; thus Diphilus, in his Sappho, pictured Archilochus and Hipponax, her predecessors by a generation, as her lovers.
The story of Sappho’s love for Phaon and her leap from the Leucadian rock in consequence of his disdaining her, though it has been so long implicitly believed, rests on no historical basis. The perpetuation of the story is due chiefly to Ovid, who, in his epistle, Sappho to Phaon, tells of her unquenchable love and of her determination to attempt the leap. The story is best told by Addison:
“Sappho, the Lesbian, in love with Phaon, arrived at the temple of Apollo, habited like a bride, in garments white as snow. She wore a garland of myrtle on her head, and carried in her hand the little musical instrument of her own invention. After having sung a hymn to Apollo, she hung up her garland on one side of his altar, and her harp on the other. She then tucked up her vestments, like a Spartan virgin, and amidst thousands of spectators, who were anxious for her safety and offered up vows for her deliverance, marched directly forward to the utmost summit of the promontory, where, after having repeated a stanza of her own verses, she threw herself off the rock with such an intrepidity as was never observed before in any who had attempted that leap. Many who were present related that they saw her fall into the sea, from whence she never rose again; though there were others who affirmed that she never came to the bottom of her leap, but that she was changed to a swan as she fell, and that they saw her hovering in the air under that shape. But whether or not the whiteness and fluttering of her garments might not deceive those who looked upon her, or whether she might not really be metamorphosed into that musical and melancholy bird, is still a doubt among the Lesbians.”
Modern critics justly set aside the whole story as fabulous, explaining it as derived from the myth of Aphrodite and Adonis, who in the Greek version was called Phaethon or Phaon. The leap from the Leucadian rock—the promontory of Santa Maura, or Leucate, in Sicily, known to this day as “Sappho’s Leap”—was used by other poets, notably Stesichorus and Anacreon, as a metaphorical expression to denote complete despair, and Sappho herself may have used it in this sense. The legend did not connect itself with Sappho until two centuries after her death, and then only in the comic poets; hence it can have no basis in fact. The tradition of Sappho’s Æolian grave, preserved in the Anthology, indicates strongly that she died a peaceful death on her own island. “Sappho,” says Edwin Arnold, “loved, and loved more than once, to the point of desperate sorrow; though it did not come to the mad and fatal leap from Leucate, as the unnecessary legend pretends. There are, nevertheless, worse steeps than Leucate down which the heart may fall; and colder seas of despair than the Adriatic in which to engulf it.”
The whole story of her love for Phaon is an instance of how her name was maligned by the comic poets of the later Attic school. It was impossible for the Athenians, who kept their women in seclusion, to understand how a woman could enjoy the freedom of life and movement that Sappho enjoyed and yet remain chaste. Consequently, she became a sort of stock character of the licentious drama, and even modern writers have used her name as the synonym for the brilliant, beautiful, but licentious woman. As says Daudet, who of all recent writers has done most to degrade the name: “The word Sappho itself, by the force of rolling descent through ages, is encrusted with unclean legends, and has degenerated from the name of a goddess to that of a malady.” The Greek comic poets invented the misrepresentation; the early Christian writers accepted it, and exaggerated it in their tirades against heathenism; and thus the tradition that Sappho was a woman of low moral character became fixed.
Only in the present century have the ancient calumnies against Sappho been seriously investigated. A German scholar, Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, was the first to show that they were based on altogether insufficient evidence. Colonel Mure, with great lack of gallantry, endeavored, without success, to expose fallacies in Welcker’s arguments. Professor Comparetti has more recently gone laboriously over the whole ground, and his work substantiates in the main the conclusions of Welcker. The whole tendency of modern scholarship is to vindicate the name of Sappho.
We cannot claim that Sappho was a woman of austere virtue; but she was one of the best of her race, and there is no trace of wantonness in any stanza of hers preserved to us. She repulsed Alcæus when he made improper advances, while a recently discovered papyrus fragment shows how keenly she felt a brother’s disgrace, and this aversion to the dishonorable would hardly have existed had her own life been open to censure.
Sappho’s brother Charaxus, who was a Lesbian wine merchant, fell violently in love with the famous courtesan Rhodopis, then a slave in Naucratis, and subsequently the most noted beauty of her day. He ransomed her from slavery, devoted himself exclusively to her whims, and squandered all his substance upon her maintenance. Sappho was violently incensed at his conduct, and resorted to verse for the expression of her anger and humiliation. According to the story in Ovid, Charaxus was fiercely provoked by her ill treatment of him, and would listen to no attempts at reconciliation made by his poet-sister after her anger had cooled, though she reproached herself for the estrangement and did all she could to win him back.
A twenty-line fragment of a poem, found a few years ago among the Oxyrhynchus papyri, in a reference to the poet’s brother, in its tone of reproach, in its expression of a desire for reconciliation, in dialect and in metre, indicates its origin as a part of an ode addressed by Sappho to her brother Charaxus. It is conceived by its editors and translators to be one of her vain appeals that he would forget the past:
“Sweet Nereids, grant to me
That home unscathed my brother may return,
And every end for which his soul shall yearn,
Accomplished see!
“And thou, immortal Queen,
Blot out the past, that thus his friends may know
Joy, shame his foes—nay, rather, let no foe
By us be seen!
“And may he have the will
To me his sister some regard to show,
To assuage the pain he brought, whose cruel blow
My soul did kill,
“Yea, mine, for that ill name
Whose biting edge, to shun the festal throng
Compelling, ceased a while; yet back ere long
To goad us came!”
Was Sappho’s beauty a myth? Greek standards of feminine beauty included height and stateliness. Homer celebrates the characteristic beauty of Lesbian women in speaking of seven Lesbian captives whom Agamemnon offered to Achilles, “surpassing womankind in beauty.” Plato, in the Phaedrus, calls Sappho “beautiful,” but he was probably referring to the sweetness of her songs. Democharis, in the Anthology, in an epigram on a statue of Sappho, speaks of her bright eyes and compares her beauty with that of Aphrodite. According to Maximus of Tyre, who preserves the traditions of the comic poets, she was “small and dark,” a phrase immortalized by Swinburne:
“The small dark body’s Lesbian loveliness,
That held the fire eternal.”
The problem, therefore, is whether she conformed to the Greek ideal of beauty or was small and dark. Our only evidence in this matter is that furnished by art. The portrait of Sappho is preserved on coins of Mytilene, which present a face exquisite in contour. A fifth century vase, preserved in Munich, gives us representations of Alcæus and Sappho, in which Sappho is taller than Alcæus, of imposing figure and exceedingly beautiful. She was frequently portrayed in plastic art. According to Cicero, a bronze statue of Sappho, made by Silanion, stood in the prytaneum at Syracuse, and was stolen by Verres. In the fifth century of our era, there was a statue of her in the gymnasium of Zeuxippus, in Byzantium. The Vatican bust is that of a woman with Greek features, but, of course, lends no corroborating testimony as to her size and complexion.
Alma-Tadema has fixed the current tradition in his ideal representation of Sappho’s school at Lesbos—a marble exedra on the seashore at Mytilene. The poetess is seated on the front row of seats, with her favorite pupil, Erinna, standing by her side. Her chin rests on her hands as she leans forward against the desk, listening intently as Alcæus plays the lyre. She is small, dark, beautiful, intense; and the artist has “subtly caught the prophetic light of her soul, her eager intellect, her unconscious grace, and the slumbering passion in her eloquent eyes.”
Let us now consider the conditions under which Sappho’s genius blossomed to fruition.
There is a legend that after the Thracian women’s murder of Orpheus, the mythical singer of Hellas, his head and his lyre were thrown into the sea and were wafted upon its waves to the island of Lesbos. This legend is an allegory of the island’s supremacy in song, and of the unbroken continuity of lyric poetry from its budding in prehistoric times up to its full flower among the Lesbian poets of the sixth century before the Christian era. Every condition existed in Lesbos for the fostering of the love of beauty and the cultivation of all the refinements of life. The land itself presented mountain and coast, hill and dale, in pleasing and harmonious variety, while about it billowed a brilliant sapphire sea. The island was renowned for the salubrity of its climate, the purity of its atmosphere, and the transparency of its skies. Its inhabitants, owing to the variety of the products of the soil and their attention to commerce, enjoyed unbounded prosperity. They gave themselves up to the enjoyments of life, and cultivated everything that contributed to luxury, elegance, and material well-being. The men devoted their energies to politics and war and the pursuits of pleasure. The women, who were remarkable for their beauty and grace, enjoyed a freedom and rank accorded them nowhere else in Greece. Symonds thus vividly describes the free and artistic life of Æolian women:
“Æolian women were not confined to the harem, like Ionians, or subjected to the rigorous discipline of the Spartans. While mixing freely with male society, they were highly educated, and accustomed to express their sentiments to an extent unknown elsewhere in history—until, indeed, the present time. The Lesbian ladies applied themselves successfully to literature. They formed clubs for the cultivation of poetry and music. They studied the art of beauty, and sought to refine metrical form and diction. Nor did they confine themselves to the scientific side of art. Unrestrained by public opinion, and avid for the beautiful, they cultivated their senses and emotions, and developed their wildest passions. All the luxuries and elegancies of life which the climate and the rich valleys of Lesbos could afford were at their disposal; exquisite gardens in which the rose and hyacinth spread perfume; river beds ablaze with the oleander and wild pomegranate; olive groves and fountains, where the cyclamen and violet flowered with feathery maiden-hair; pine-shadowed coves, where they might bathe in the calm of a tideless sea; fruits such as only the southern sea and sea wind can mature; marble cliffs, starred with jonquil and anemone in spring, aromatic with myrtle and lentisk and samphire and wild rosemary through all the months; nightingales that sang in May; temples dim with dusky gold and bright with ivory; statues and frescoes of heroic forms. In such scenes as these, the Lesbian poets lived and thought of love. When we read their poems, we seem to have the perfumes, colors, sounds, and lights of that luxurious land distilled in verse.”
Amid such surroundings, burning Sappho sang:
“Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity,
Hearing, to hear them.”
The complete works of Sappho must have been considerable. She was the greatest erotic poet of antiquity, the chief composer of epithalamia, or wedding songs, the writer of epigrams and elegies, invocatory hymns, iambics, and monodies. Nine books of her lyric odes existed in ancient times, and were known to Horace, who frequently imitated her style and metre, and who doubtless at times in his odes directly translated her poems. But of all this we have only two poems which may be said to be in any way complete: a considerable portion of the ode to her brother Charaxus, already quoted, and somewhat over a hundred and fifty fragments, the total comprising not more than three hundred lines. Within the last few months, Doctor Schubart, of the Egyptian Section of the Royal Museum in Berlin, has discovered in papyri, recently added to its collection, several hitherto unknown poems of Sappho.
“Few, indeed, but those roses,” as says Meleager, in the Anthology, are the precious verses spared to us in spite of the unholy zeal of antipaganism. And, strange to relate, we are indebted for what we have to the quotations of grammarians and lexicographers, who preserved the verses, not usually for their poetic beauty, but to illustrate a point in syntax or metre. But, though so few and fragmentary, they are, as Professor Palgrave says, “grains of golden sand which the torrent of Time has carried down to us.”
Sappho wrote in the Æolic dialect, noted for the soft quality of its vowel sounds; and her poems were undoubtedly written for recitation to the accompaniment of the lyre, being the earliest specimens of the song or ballad so popular in modern times.
Predecessors of the melic poetry of Sappho are to be found in the chants and hymns in honor of Apollo prevalent throughout Greece, in the popular songs of Hellas, and in the songs sung in the home and at religious festivals by Lesbian men and women,—children’s rhymes, songs at vintage festivals, plaints of shepherds expressive of rustic love, epithalamia or bridal songs, dirges, threnodies and laments for Adonis, typifying the passing of spring and summer.
SAPPHO IN HER SCHOOL OF POETRY IN LESBOS.
After the painting by Hector Leroux.
Wharton, in his great Memoir of Sappho, says she
“seems to have been the centre of society in Mitylene,—
capital of Lesbos,—a kind of æsthetic club devoted to the
service of the Muses. Around her gathered maidens from
even comparatively distant places, attracted by her fame,
to study, under her guidance, all that related to poetry
and music”. In the memoir he defends her character and
speaks of “the fervor of her love and the purity of her
life.” The Encyclopedia Britannica ranks her as
“incomparably the greatest poetess the world has ever seen.”
The form and melody of Sappho’s poems are due to the fact that they were to accompany vocal and instrumental music, which, thanks to the innovations of Terpander of Lesbos, was at that time exquisitely adapted to the purposes of the lyric. Terpander introduced the seven-stringed lyre, or cithara, with its compass of a diapason, or Greek octave, and this became the peculiar instrument of Sappho and her school. The choice of the musical measure determined the tone of the poem. Terpander united the music of Asia Minor with that of Greece proper, and the resulting product of Æolian poetry was the union of Oriental voluptuousness with Greek self-restraint and art. Of Sappho’s numerous songs, two odes alone are presented to us in anything like their entirety, one dedicated to the service of Aphrodite, and the other composed in honor of a girl friend, Anactoria. Dionysius of Halicarnassus embodies the first in one of his rhetorical works, as a perfect illustration of the elaborately finished style of poetry, and comments on the fact that its grace and beauty lie in the subtle harmony between the words and the ideas. Edwin Arnold renders it as follows:
“Splendor-throned Queen, immortal Aphrodite,
Daughter of Jove, Enchantress, I implore thee
Vex not my soul with agonies and anguish;
Slay me not, Goddess!
Come in thy pity—come, if I have prayed thee;
Come at the cry of my sorrow; in the old times
Oft thou hast heard, and left thy father’s heaven,
Left the gold houses,
Yoking thy chariot. Swiftly did the doves fly,
Swiftly they brought thee, waving plumes of wonder—
Waving their dark plumes all across the æther,
All down the azure.
Very soon they lighted. Then didst thou, Divine one,
Laugh a bright laugh from lips and eyes immortal,
Ask me ‘What ailed me—wherefore out of heaven,
Thus I had called thee?
What was it made me madden in my heart so?’
Question me smiling—say to me, ‘My Sappho,
Who is it wrongs thee? Tell me who refuses
Thee, vainly sighing.
Be it who it may be, he that flies shall follow;
He that rejects gifts, he shall bring thee many;
He that hates now shall love thee dearly, madly—
Aye, though thou wouldst not’
So once again come, Mistress; and, releasing
Me from my sadness, give me what I sue for,
Grant me my prayer, and be as heretofore now
Friend and protectress.”
The ode to Anactoria is quoted by the author of the treatise on The Sublime as an illustration of the perfection of the sublime in poetry. John Addington Symonds thus renders it in English:
“Peer of gods he seemeth to me, the blissful
Man who sits and gazes at thee before him,
Close beside thee sits, and in silence hears thee
Silverly speaking,
Laughing love’s low laughter. Oh this, this only
Stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble I
For should I but see thee a little moment,
Straight is my voice hushed;
Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and through me
’Neath the flesh impalpable fire runs tingling;
Nothing see mine eyes, and a noise of roaring
Waves in my ear sounds;
Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes
All my limbs, and paler than grass in autumn,
Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter,
Lost in the love-trance.”
Epithalamia, or wedding songs, were the most numerous of all Sappho’s works, and in them she attained an excellence unequalled by any other poet. Catullus, in despair, seems to have been content with adapting in his marriage odes well-known songs of Sappho. The poet seems to have described all the stages in the ceremony—the Greek maidens leading the pale bride to the expectant bridegroom, chanting their simple chorus to Hymen, the god of marriage. At one time, they sing the approach of the bridegroom:
“Raise high the roof-beam, carpenters,
Hymenæus!
Like Ares comes the bridegroom,
Hymenæus!
Taller far than a tall man,
Hymenæus!”
But their thoughts are all for the rejoicing bride, who blushes “as sweet as the apple on the end of the bough.”
“O fair—O sweet!
As the sweet apple blooms high on the bough,
High as the highest, forgot of the gatherers:
So thou:—
Yet not so: nor forgot of the gatherers;
High o’er their reach in the golden air,
O sweet—O fair!”
We shall arrange the briefer fragments according to subject, not according to metre, in order that through them we may gain a clear conception of Sappho’s attitude toward life and nature, that we may know the poetess in her love and friendship, her longings and her sorrows, her sensibility to the influences of nature and art.
Her conception of love has been already noticed in the longer poems just quoted. A number of the fragments indicate a similar intensity of emotion. Thus she says:
“Lo, Love once more, the limb-dissolving king,
The bitter-sweet, impracticable thing,
Wild-beast-like rends me with fierce quivering.”
In another:
“Lo, Love once more my soul within me rends
Like wind that on the mountain oak descends.”
A being so intense as Sappho, with sensibilities so refined and intuitions so keen, naturally possessed an ardent love of nature. Her power of expressing its charm is shown in a number of fragments. Every aspect of nature seems to have appealed to her.
Of the morning she says:
“Early uprose the golden-sandalled Dawn.”
And of the evening:
“Evening, all things thou bringest
Which Dawn spreads apart from each other;
The lamb and the kid thou bringest,
Thou bringest the boy to his mother.”
And of the night:
“And dark-eyed Sleep, child of Night”
She sings to us also of the
“Rainbow, shot with a thousand hues.”
And of the stars:
“Stars that shine around the refulgent full moon
Pale, and hide their glory of lesser lustre
When she pours her silvery plenilunar
Light on the orbed earth.”
And again of the moon and the Pleiades:
“The moon has left the sky;
Lost is the Pleiads’ light;
It is midnight
And time slips by;
But on my couch alone I lie.”
Trees and flowers and plants appeal to her as if they were endowed with life, and by her mention of them she calls up to the imagination a tropical summer with its attendant recreations. Thus she sings of the breeze murmuring cool through the apple boughs:
“From the sound of cool waters heard through the green boughs
Of the fruit-bearing trees,
And the rustling breeze,
Deep sleep, as a trance, down over me flows.”
Sappho loves flowers with a personal sympathy. She feels for the hyacinth:
“As when the shepherds on the hills
Tread under foot the hyacinth,
And on the ground the purple flower lies crushed.”
She sings also of the golden pulse that grows on the shores, and of the pure, soft bloom of the grass trampled under foot by the Cretan women as they dance round the fair altar of Aphrodite. The rose seems to have been her favorite flower, for, says Philostratus, “Sappho loves the rose, and always crowns it with some praise, likening beautiful maidens to it.”
The birds, too, found in her a most sympathetic friend. Her ear is open to:
“Spring’s messenger, the sweet-voiced nightingale,”
and she pities the wood-doves as “their heart turns cold and their wings fall,” under the stroke from the arrow of the archer.
Sappho’s love for nature is only surpassed by her love for art, for splendor and festivity, as they appeal to the æsthetic nature. She loves her lyre, the song and the dance, garlands, purple robes, and all that attended the worship of Aphrodite and the Muses. Her lyre she thus addresses:
“Come, then, my lyre divine!
Let speech be thine.”
And to Aphrodite she utters this appeal:
“Come, Queen of Cyprus, pour the stream
Of nectar, mingled lusciously
With merriment, in cups of gold.”
She also calls about her the Muses and the Graces:
“Hither come, ye dainty Graces
And ye fair-haired Muses now!”
And again:
“Come, rosy-armed, chaste Graces! come,
Daughter of Jove.”
And yet again:
“Hither, hither come, ye Muses!
Leave the golden sky.”
In the worship of Aphrodite and the Graces, garlands are appropriate for the devotees:
“Of foliage and flowers love-laden
Twine wreaths for thy flowing hair
With thine own soft fingers, maiden,
Weave garlands of parsley fair;
“For flowers are sweet, and the Graces
On suppliants wreathed with may
Look down from their heavenly places,
But turn from the crownless away.”
Such was the joy of the devotees of the Muses. Sappho believed in the adornment of the soul as well as of the body, and she thus addresses one who neglected the services of the Muses:
“Yea, thou shalt die,
And lie
Dumb in the silent tomb;
Nor of thy name
Shall there be any fame
In ages yet to be or years to come;
For of the flowering Rose,
Which on Pieria blows,
Thou hast no share:
But in sad Hades’ house
Unknown, inglorious
’Mid the dark shades that wander there
Shalt thou flit forth and haunt the filmy air.”
“I think there will be memory of us yet in after days,” said Sappho, and the sentiment is one which later poets have often imitated. Thus the poetess had intimations of the immortality that is justly hers, and the reader will heartily enter into the spirit of Swinburne’s paraphrase:
“I, Sappho, shall be one with all these things,
With all things high forever; and my face
Seen once, my songs once heard in a strange place,
Cleave to men’s lives, and waste the days thereof
In gladness, and much sadness and long love.”
Sappho sings of love and its manifestations, of longing and passion, of grief and regret, of natural beauty in sea and sky, by day and by night, of the birds and trees and flowers, and “all this is told us in language at once overpowering and delicate, in verse as symmetrical as it is exquisite, free, and fervid, through metaphor simple or sublime; each word, each line, expressive of the writer’s inmost sense; with an art that, in its Greek constraint, comparison, and sweetness, and in its Oriental fervor, is faultless and unerring.”
Not only as a poet is Sappho of interest to the women of our day, but also because she was the founder of the first woman’s club of which we have knowledge. This Lesbian literary club did not engage, however, in the study of current topics, or seek to gather sheaves of knowledge from the field of science and history, but was consecrated strictly to the service of the Muses. Sappho attracted by her fame young women of Lesbos and of neighboring cities. She gathered them about her, gave them instruction in poetry and music, and incited them to the cultivation of all the arts and graces. Many of these maidens from a distance doubtless sought the society of Sappho because they were weary of the low drudgery and monotonous routine of home life that fell to the lot of women in Ionian cities, and because they felt the need of a freer atmosphere and more inspiring surroundings.
Sappho eagerly sought to elevate her sex. She showed them that, through the more perfect training of mind and body, their horizon would be enlarged, their resources for happiness increased, and their homes become centres of inspiring influences for husband and children.
Never was there a teacher more eager to possess her pupils’ love and confidence. Maximus of Tyre compares her relations with her girl friends to Socrates’s relations with young men. At times, men have seen fit to censure these intimate friendships of Socrates and Sappho with their pupils, and to see in them immoral relations such as characterized the passionate devotion of many Greek men to beautiful youths; but there is no ground for such imputations. While manifesting the beauty and sweetness and satisfaction in woman’s love for woman, Sappho did not attempt to make this love a substitute for the love of men. She herself was married; and there are intimations in her poems that certain of her girl friends exchanged the pleasures of aesthetic comradeship for the joys of wedded life.
From the fragments of her songs, we know the names of at least fourteen of her pupils, and it pleases the fancy to attempt to reconstruct a picture of that delightful band of girl friends, who spent their days in the study of poetry and music and their evenings in every elevating form of recreation. A writer has thus sketched the picture: “Let us call around her in fancy the maidens who have come from different parts of Greece to learn of her. Anactoria is here from Miletus, Eunica from Salamis, Gongyle from Colophon, and others from Pamphylia, and the isle of Telos. Erinna and Damophyla study together the composition of Sapphic metres. Atthis learns how to strike the harp with the plectrum, Sappho’s invention; Mnasidica embroiders a sacred robe for the temple. The teacher meanwhile corrects the measures of the one, the notes of another, the strophes of a third; then summons all from their work, to rehearse together some sacred chorus or temple ritual; then stops to read a verse of her own, or to denounce a rival preceptress. Throughout her intercourse with these maidens her conduct is characterized by passionate love, as between equals in mind and heart, and is expressed in fervid and high-wrought language embodying a purity that cannot be misunderstood or cavilled away.”