Part 6 (2/2)
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 h.e.l.las,” ”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 n.o.ble youths,--and Charaxus, a wine merchant, of whom we shall speak more fully later. From one source we learn that she went into exile to Sicily along with other aristocrats of Lesbos, but the date is a matter of conjecture. Pittacus was tyrant of Mytilene at this time, and Sappho probably returned to Lesbos at the time when he granted amnesty to political exiles. How long she lived we cannot tell, while how and when she died are also unknown. Judging from the allusions of the writers in the Anthology, her tomb, erected in the city of her adoption, was for centuries afterward regularly visited by her votaries.
These are the few facts we can positively state regarding the life of Sappho; but myth and legend have supplied what was lacking, and those scandalmongers, the Greek comic poets, have woven all sorts of stories about her manner of life. These stories centre chiefly about the names of three men,--Alcaeus and Anacreon, the poets, and Phaon, the mythical boatman of Mytilene, endowed by Aphrodite with extraordinary and irresistible beauty.
Alcaeus, the poet of love and wine and war, was a native of Mytilene, and a contemporary of Sappho, and the two poets no doubt knew each other well. The comic poets made them lovers. There is still extant the opening of a poem which Alcaeus addressed to Sappho:
”Violet-crowned, chaste, sweet-smiling Sappho, I fain would speak; but bashfulness forbids.”
To which she replied:
”Had thy wish been pure and manly, And no evil on thy tongue, Shame had not possessed thine eyelids; From thy lips the right had rung.”
Anacreon, the lyric poet, was also represented as a lover of Sappho; and two poems are preserved, one of which he is said to have addressed to her, while the other is said to be her reply. But there is no doubt whatever that Anacreon flourished at least a generation after Sappho, so that the two could never have met. It seems to have been one of the stock motifs of the comic poets to represent Greek lyrists as being lovers of the Lesbian; thus Diphilus, in his _Sappho_, pictured Archilochus and Hipponax, her predecessors by a generation, as her lovers.
The story of Sappho's love for Phaon and her leap from the Leucadian rock in consequence of his disdaining her, though it has been so long implicitly believed, rests on no historical basis. The perpetuation of the story is due chiefly to Ovid, who, in his epistle, _Sappho to Phaon_, tells of her unquenchable love and of her determination to attempt the leap. The story is best told by Addison:
”Sappho, the Lesbian, in love with Phaon, arrived at the temple of Apollo, habited like a bride, in garments white as snow. She wore a garland of myrtle on her head, and carried in her hand the little musical instrument of her own invention. After having sung a hymn to Apollo, she hung up her garland on one side of his altar, and her harp on the other. She then tucked up her vestments, like a Spartan virgin, and amidst thousands of spectators, who were anxious for her safety and offered up vows for her deliverance, marched directly forward to the utmost summit of the promontory, where, after having repeated a stanza of her own verses, she threw herself off the rock with such an intrepidity as was never observed before in any who had attempted that leap. Many who were present related that they saw her fall into the sea, from whence she never rose again; though there were others who affirmed that she never came to the bottom of her leap, but that she was changed to a swan as she fell, and that they saw her hovering in the air under that shape. But whether or not the whiteness and fluttering of her garments might not deceive those who looked upon her, or whether she might not really be metamorphosed into that musical and melancholy bird, is still a doubt among the Lesbians.”
Modern critics justly set aside the whole story as fabulous, explaining it as derived from the myth of Aphrodite and Adonis, who in the Greek version was called Phaethon or Phaon. The leap from the Leucadian rock--the promontory of Santa Maura, or Leucate, in Sicily, known to this day as ”Sappho's Leap”--was used by other poets, notably Stesichorus and Anacreon, as a metaphorical expression to denote complete despair, and Sappho herself may have used it in this sense. The legend did not connect itself with Sappho until two centuries after her death, and then only in the comic poets; hence it can have no basis in fact. The tradition of Sappho's aeolian grave, preserved in the Anthology, indicates strongly that she died a peaceful death on her own island. ”Sappho,” says Edwin Arnold, ”loved, and loved more than once, to the point of desperate sorrow; though it did not come to the mad and fatal leap from Leucate, as the unnecessary legend pretends. There are, nevertheless, worse steeps than Leucate down which the heart may fall; and colder seas of despair than the Adriatic in which to engulf it.”
The whole story of her love for Phaon is an instance of how her name was maligned by the comic poets of the later Attic school. It was impossible for the Athenians, who kept their women in seclusion, to understand how a woman could enjoy the freedom of life and movement that Sappho enjoyed and yet remain chaste. Consequently, she became a sort of stock character of the licentious drama, and even modern writers have used her name as the synonym for the brilliant, beautiful, but licentious woman.
As says Daudet, who of all recent writers has done most to degrade the name: ”The word Sappho itself, by the force of rolling descent through ages, is encrusted with unclean legends, and has degenerated from the name of a G.o.ddess 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 scholars.h.i.+p is to vindicate the name of Sappho.
We cannot claim that Sappho was a woman of austere virtue; but she was one of the best of her race, and there is no trace of wantonness in any stanza of hers preserved to us. She repulsed Alcaeus when he made improper advances, while a recently discovered papyrus fragment shows how keenly she felt a brother's disgrace, and this aversion to the dishonorable would hardly have existed had her own life been open to censure.
Sappho's brother Charaxus, who was a Lesbian wine merchant, fell violently in love with the famous courtesan Rhodopis, then a slave in Naucratis, and subsequently the most noted beauty of her day. He ransomed her from slavery, devoted himself exclusively to her whims, and squandered all his substance upon her maintenance. Sappho was violently incensed at his conduct, and resorted to verse for the expression of her anger and humiliation. According to the story in Ovid, Charaxus was fiercely provoked by her ill treatment of him, and would listen to no attempts at reconciliation made by his poet-sister after her anger had cooled, though she reproached herself for the estrangement and did all she could to win him back.
A twenty-line fragment of a poem, found a few years ago among the Oxyrhynchus papyri, in a reference to the poet's brother, in its tone of reproach, in its expression of a desire for reconciliation, in dialect and in metre, indicates its origin as a part of an ode addressed by Sappho to her brother Charaxus. It is conceived by its editors and translators to be one of her vain appeals that he would forget the past:
”Sweet Nereids, grant to me That home unscathed my brother may return, And every end for which his soul shall yearn, Accomplished see!
”And thou, immortal Queen, Blot out the past, that thus his friends may know Joy, shame his foes--nay, rather, let no foe By us be seen!
”And may he have the will To me his sister some regard to show, To a.s.suage 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!”
<script>