Our Debt to Greece and Rome

EDITORS

George Depue Hadzsits, Ph.D.
University of Pennsylvania

David Moore Robinson, Ph.D., LL.D.
The Johns Hopkins University

CONTRIBUTORS TO THE “OUR DEBT TO GREECE AND ROME FUND,” WHOSE GENEROSITY HAS MADE POSSIBLE THE LIBRARY

Our Debt to Greece and Rome

Philadelphia

• Dr. Astley P. C. Ashhurst
• John C. Bell
• Henry H. Bonnell
• Jasper Yeates Brinton
• George Burnham, Jr.
• John Cadwalader
• Miss Clara Comegys
• Miss Mary E. Converse
• Arthur G. Dickson
• William M. Elkins
• H. H. Furness, Jr.
• William P. Gest
• John Gribbel
• Samuel F. Houston
• Charles Edward Ingersoll
• John Story Jenks
• Alba B. Johnson
• Miss Nina Lea
• George McFadden
• Mrs. John Markoe
• Jules E. Mastbaum
• J. Vaughan Merrick
• Effingham B. Morris
• William R. Murphy
• John S. Newbold
• S. Davis Page (memorial)
• Owen J. Roberts
• Joseph G. Rosengarten
• William C. Sproul
• John B. Stetson, Jr.
• Dr. J. William White (memorial)
• George D. Widener
• Mrs. James D. Winsor
• Owen Wister
• The Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of Liberal Studies.

Boston

• Oric Bates (memorial)
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• William Amory Gardner
• Joseph Clark Hoppin

Chicago

• Herbert W. Wolff

Cincinnati

• Charles Phelps Taft

Cleveland

• Samuel Mather

Detroit

• John W. Anderson
• Dexter M. Ferry, Jr.

Doylestown, Pennsylvania

• “A Lover of Greece and Rome”

New York

• John Jay Chapman
• Willard V. King
• Thomas W. Lamont
• Dwight W. Morrow
• Mrs. D. W. Morrow
• Elihu Root
• Mortimer L. Schiff
• William Sloane
• George W. Wickersham
• And one contributor, who has asked to have his name withheld:

Maecenas atavis edite regibus,

O et praesidium et dulce decus meum.

Washington

• The Greek Embassy at Washington, for the Greek Government.

The following lovers of Greek literature, and of Sappho in particular, have kindly consented to act as patrons and have made possible, by generous contributions, the larger size of this volume in the Series “Our Debt to Greece and Rome”:

• Mr. Charles H. Carey
• Mr. James Carey
• Miss Lillie Detrick
• Professor Joseph Clark Hoppin
• Mrs. Harry C. Jones
• Mrs. Gardiner M. Lane
• Miss Emma Marburg
• Dr. John Rathbone Oliver
• Miss Julia R. Rogers
• Professor Herbert Weir Smyth
• Dr. Hugh H. Young

Plate 1. ALMA TADEMA’S SAPPHO

In the Walters’ Art Gallery, Baltimore

SAPPHO
AND HER INFLUENCE

BY
DAVID M. ROBINSON, Ph.D., LL.D.

W. H. Collins Vickers Professor of Archaeology and
Epigraphy and Lecturer on Greek Literature
The Johns Hopkins University

MARSHALL JONES COMPANY
BOSTON · MASSACHUSETTS

COPYRIGHT · 1924 · BY MARSHALL JONES COMPANY

All rights reserved

Printed December, 1924

THE PLIMPTON PRESS · NORWOOD · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To
THE MEMORY OF
BASIL LANNEAU GILDERSLEEVE
MASTER, COLLEAGUE, AND FRIEND
AND TO MY FORMER TEACHERS
EDWARD CAPPS
PAUL SHOREY
ULRICH von WILAMOWITZ-MOELLENDORFF

δῶρον ’αντὶ μαγάλου σμικρόν

A trifling gift in return for much.

Ἑτερος ἐξ ἑτέρου σοφὸς τό τε πάλαι τό τε νῦν. οὐδὲ γὰρ ῥᾶστον ἀρρήτων ἐπέων πύλας ἐξευρεῖν.

Poet is heir to poet, now as of yore; for in sooth ’tis no light task to find the gates of virgin song.

Jebb, Bacchylides, p. 413, frag. 4

Immortal Sappho, maid divine,

Thou sharest with the heavenly nine

All honor. Shout through all the town

That on her head we place a crown.

Hasten with the chaplet green,

Greet her one and all as queen;

The Lesbian, a tenth muse we name,

And prophesy that her bright fame

Shall spread o’er all the world.

This title till the stars do fall,

Nations yet unborn shall call

And glorify her name.

(LUCY MILBURN)

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

SAPPHO AND HER INFLUENCE

I. SOME APPRECIATIONS, ANCIENT AND MODERN

The name of Sappho will never die. But it lives in most of the minds that know it at all to-day 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.[1] 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:

Μνάσεσθαί τινά φαμι καὶ ὔστερον ἀμμέων

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 to-day. A fragment first published in 1922[2] also seems to make her say:

and yet great

glory will come to thee in all places

where Phaëthon [shines]

and even in Acheron’s halls

[thou shalt be honored.]

In general, antiquity thought of her as “the poetess” κατ’ἐξοχήν, ἡ ποιήτρια,[3] just as Professor Harmon has recently shown[4] 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,”[5]—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:[6]

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 Latin 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[7] (250 B.C.) says:

Sappho’s white, speaking pages of dear song

Yet linger with us and will linger long.

(T. Davidson)

Horace[8] says:

vivuntque commissi calores

Aeoliae fidibus puellae.

That inadequate and misleading metaphor of fire, as Mackail says, recurs in all her eulogists. Μεμιγμένα πυρὶ φθέγγεται, “her words are mingled with fire,” writes Plutarch,[9] 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[10] (about 290 B.C.) called her “that nightingale of hymns” and Lucian[11] “the honeyed boast of the Lesbians.” Strabo (1 A.D.) said: “Sappho is a marvellous creature (θαυμαστόν τι χρῆμα), 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.”[12] In another epigram in the Anthology,[13] probably from the base of a lost statue of Sappho in the famous library at Pergamum,[14] 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[15] now timidly defends the genuineness. Antipater of Sidon (150 B.C.)[16] 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[17] of Sappho as “one that is sung for a mortal Muse among Muses immortal ... a delight unto Greece.” Dioscorides[18] (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[19] it is said: “her song will seem Calliope’s own voice.” Another writer,[20] 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)

Catullus[21] speaks of the Sapphica Musa, and Ausonius in Epigram XXXII calls her Lesbia Pieriis Sappho soror addita Musis.[22]

If we turn now from the praise of the ancients to modern literary critics of classic lore we shall not find any depredation but rather an enhancing of that ancient praise. The classic estimate of Sappho holds its own and more than holds it to-day. J. A. K. Thomson in his Greeks and Barbarians[23] 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 favourite 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,[24] 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 storm-bird, 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 may be said with confidence that they hold of none and borrow of none, and that their poetry is, in some unique way, an immediate inspiration.”

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. Encyclopædia Britannica).

II. SAPPHO’S LIFE, LESBUS, HER LOVE-AFFAIRS, HER PERSONALITY AND PUPILS

It is my purpose in the limited space at my disposal to show in a general way, since it will not be possible to go into details, the truth of Sappho’s prophecy that men would think of her[25] in after-times: 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 chapter 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,[26] or the exegesis of Sappho and Alcaeus[27] 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 about 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 Scamandronymus, a good Asia Minor name vouched for by Herodotus, Aelian and other ancient writers and now confirmed by a recently discovered papyrus.[28] He was rich and noble and probably a wine-merchant. He died, according to Ovid,[29] when Sappho’s eldest child was six years of age.

Her mother’s name, says Suidas, was Cleïs.[30] 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,[31] 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[32] 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 innocentis pocula Lesbii, for loveliness and pleasures, when he fell in love with and ransomed the beautiful Thracian courtesan, the world-renowned demi-mondaine. She was called Doricha by Sappho according to the Augustan geographer, Strabo, but Herodotus names her Rhodopis, rosy-cheeked,[33] and evidently thought she had contributed to Delphi[34] 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. My own interest in Sappho dates from that very year when I wrote for Professor Edward Capps, then of the University of Chicago, a detailed seminary paper on The Nereid Ode, and for the twenty-five years since I have been gathering material about Sappho. We must be careful not to accept as certainly Sappho’s, especially the un-Sapphic 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,[35] 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.

(D. M. R.)

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.[35]

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,”[36] as the name appears on vases and papyri, or “Psappho,” as coins and vases have it, or “Psappha,” as she herself spelled it in her soft Aeolic dialect, is perhaps a nom de plume,—the word meaning lapis lazuli. According to Athenaeus[37] (who wrote at the 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.),[38] along with Alcaeus and Stesichorus and Pittacus,[39] ([Pl. 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.[40] 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.[41] 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[42] 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.”[43] Stobaeus[44] tells how one evening over the 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. at 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,[45] the birthplace also of Aristotle’s famous pupil Theophrastus. She early moved to Mytilene ([Pl. 3]), 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 to-day a thirsty traveller is delighted to sit in a café on the quay and drink a glass of the fine modern κρασὶ τῆς Μιτυλήνης.

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:[46]

“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 Ionians 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; river-beds 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 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. 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 quoted by Aristotle in his Rhetoric,[47] “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” (Edmonds). Tradition even in classic times represented her as beloved by Anacreon also,[48] but the bard of Teos flourished at least fifty years after 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,[49] the Athenian comic playwright in his play Sappho. But as Athenaeus in the third century A.D. said, “I rather fancy he was joking.”

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, ’twould not buy my maid.

(Tucker)

Professor Prentice[50] 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[51] 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.[52] 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.[53]

“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[54] made her a widow at thirty-five.[55] 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[56] 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.[57] 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.[58] Sappho’s school of poetry in modern times has been prettily pictured in a painting by Hector Leroux ([p. 118]), but the best representation of what her school may have been is given by Alma Tadema ([Pl. 1]) 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:[59]

“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.”

III. THE LEGENDARY FRINGE
Sappho’s Physical Appearance, The Phaon Story, The Vice Idea

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[60] 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 derived from Ψᾶφος, “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[61] 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[62]

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.

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 re-marry, especially if she had to choose one younger than herself.[63] 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’ précis of Turpilius’ Latin paraphrase of Menander,[64] though he does not mention Sappho by name: “Phaon, who was a ferryman plying for hire between Lesbus (others say he was from Chios[65]) and the mainland, one day ferried over for nothing the Goddess Venus in the guise of an old woman, and received from her for the service an alabaster box of unguent, the daily use of which made women fall in love with him. Among those who did so was one who in her disappointment is said to have thrown herself from Mount Leucates, and from this came the custom now in vogue of hiring people once a year to throw themselves from that place into the sea.” (Edmonds). But neither Phaon nor anything connected with Phaon is mentioned in any of Sappho’s fragments, though Francis Fawkes and others have connected Phaon’s name with the Hymn to Aphrodite. A writer of the second century B.C., Palaephatus,[66] makes the very inconsistent statement that “this is the Phaon in whose honor as a lover many a song has been written by Sappho.” Nor is there any allusion to Sappho’s curing her passion by leaping from the white Leucadian cliff. Athenaeus[67] and Suidas go so far as to say that the victim was another Sappho, and even in the late lists of Leucadian leapers, in Photius, Sappho is not included. Who first conjured up a Phaon, we know not, but the story belongs to folk-lore, and Phaon appears on Greek vases of the time and style of Meidias, who is dated by most archaeologists toward the end of the fifth century B.C., much earlier than Plato’s play (392 B.C.). His indifference to the many ladies who are making love to him is well portrayed, especially on vases ([Pl. 4, 5]) in Florence and Palermo ([p. 107])[68]. The fair Phaon, Aphrodite’s shining star (φάων = shining), is only another avatar of Adonis, who appears in similar style on similar vases, one even found in the same grave with a Phaon vase. Phaon, I believe, is as old as the fifth century; but the story of Sappho’s leap transferred to the white cliffs in the south of the white island of Leucas, the modern Cape Ducato, is later. The Cape is also called Santa Maura, some two hundred feet high, and even to-day this rock of desperation is haunted by Sappho’s ghost and known as Sappho’s Leap ([Pl. 6]). The legend of the Lesbian’s leap first occurs in the poet of the Old Comedy, Plato, who wrote the play called Phaon. Later in the New Comedy, Menander was probably adorning an old tale to point a contemporary moral when he produced his Leucadia of which Turpilius, a contemporary of Terence, wrote a Latin paraphrase. A few anapaestic lines are preserved by Strabo, who speaks of the Leucadian Cliff:

Where Sappho ’tis said the first of the world

In her furious chase of Phaon so haughty

All maddened with longing plunged down from the height

Of the shimmering rock.

(D. M. R.)

Antiphanes probably told the story in both his Leucadius and his Phaon; and Cratinus must have mentioned Phaon, for Athenaeus[69] tells us that he told how Aphrodite, beloved by Phaon, concealed him among the fair wild lettuce, just as other writers say Adonis was hidden.

The practice of abandoned lovers taking the leap may possibly have been known even in Sappho’s day, for Stesichorus tells of a girl throwing herself from a cliff near Leucas because a youth had scorned her. By the time of Anacreon (550 B.C.), the leap had become the symbol of a love passion that could no longer be borne; “Lifted up from the Leucadian rock, I dive into the hoary wave, drunk with Love.” It is the same old story told at every summer resort about some place called Lover’s Leap, but in Anacreon nothing is said about drowning. And legend[70] says that sometimes wings or feathers were attached to the person jumping off the cliff to lighten the fall. In any case the leap, legendary or not, was not suicide but a desperate remedy, killing or curing, for hopeless love. We hear of many who survived the expiatory leap.

In a stucco fresco[71] ([Pl. 7]) (not later than 40 A.D.) in the half dome of the apse at one end of the underground building in Rome near the Porta Maggiore, which served for the cult of some secret neo-Pythagorean sect or possibly as a temple of the Muses or possibly only as the underground summer abode of an enthusiast over Greek poets like the newly discovered underground rooms of the Homeric enthusiast at Pompeii, we have possibly an illustration of the Leucadian leap, at least in symbolism, as personifying the parting of the image of the soul. Sappho, lyre in hand, is springing from the misty cliff, which Ausonius mentions in his sixth idyl ([cf. p. 131]), and below in the sea is a Triton spreading out a garment to break her fall. Opposite on a height stands Apollo, who had a temple on the spot and to whom according to Ovid’s Fifteenth Heroic Epistle Sappho promised to dedicate her lyre if he was propitious. Ovid is the first writer from whom we have the story in detail. It was often used in later literature, as we shall see in a succeeding chapter. Many know Pope’s translation of Ovid,[72] but if my readers desire to read an imaginative and humorous circumstantial account of Sappho’s leap, on which the modern popular idea is mostly based, they may find it in Addison’s Spectator, No. 233, November 27, 1711.

The moral purity of Sappho shines in its own light. She expresses herself, no doubt, in very passionate language, but passionate purity is a finer article than the purity of prudery, and Sappho’s passionate expressions are always under the control of her art. A woman of bad character and certainly a woman of such a variety of bad character as scandal ([cf. p. 128] and [note 147]) has attributed to Sappho might express herself passionately and might run on indefinitely with erotic imagery. But Sappho is never erotic. There is no language to be found in her songs which a pure woman might not use, and it would be practically impossible for a bad woman to subject her expressions to the marvellous niceties of rhythm, accent, and meaning which Sappho everywhere exhibits. Immorality and loss of self-control never subject themselves to perfect literary and artistic taste. It is against the nature of things that a woman who has given herself up to unnatural and inordinate practices which defy the moral instinct and throw the soul into disorder, practices which harden and petrify the soul, should be able to write in perfect obedience to the laws of vocal harmony, imaginative portrayal, and arrangement of the details of thought. The nature of things does not admit of such an inconsistency. Sappho’s love for flowers, moreover, affords another luminous testimony. A bad woman as well as a pure woman might love roses, but a bad woman does not love the small and hidden wild flowers of the field, the dainty anthrysc and the clover, as Sappho did. There is, moreover, in a life of vice something narrowing as well as coarsening. An imagination which like Sappho’s sees in a single vision the moonlight sweeping the sea, breaking across the shore and illuminating wide stretches of landscape with life-giving light, and in the midst of all this far-spreading glory sees and personifies the spirit of the night, listening to the moanings of homesickness and repeating them with far-flung voice to those across the sea,—an imagination with such a marvellous range as this is never given to the child of sodden vice. Here once more is a woman who made it her life business to adorn and even to glorify lawful wedlock, and carried on this occupation in a sympathetic and delightful strain of dance and song which, however passionate in their expression, contain no impure words. It is simply unthinkable that such a woman should be perpetually destroying the very foundations of her own ideals.

IV. THE WRITINGS OF SAPPHO

The number of poems or fragments ([Pl. 8]) of Sappho has increased from a hundred and twenty in Volger’s edition (1810) to a hundred and ninety-one in Edmonds. “Though few they are roses,” and a marvellous vitality and mentality permeates their mangled and marred members. Sappho probably had her own collection of her poems, but they were surely not published in a large edition as has sometimes been said. An introductory poem is possibly preserved on an Attic vase, but even of that we cannot be sure. In Roman days there were two editions, one arranged according to subject and the other according to metre, both based on some Alexandrian source much earlier than the book On the Metres of Sappho, published by Dracon of Stratonicea about 180 A.D. Sappho wrote many forms of literature in many different metres, cult hymns or odes, marriage songs, scolia or drinking songs, songs of love and friendship, besides her nine books of lyrics, epigrams, elegies, none of which has survived or been described by any other author, iambics, monodies, and funeral songs like that for Adonis. The Athenian dramatists even pictured her as proposing puzzles and riddles. Colombarius, as quoted by Meursius in his notes on Hesychius, called Sappho the poetess of the Trojans, the meaning of which has recently been made clear by the discovery of the Marriage of Hector and Andromache.

The first poem is the Ode to Aphrodite which was cited by Dionysius of Halicarnassus for its finished and brilliant style,—the style used by Euripides among the tragedians and by Isocrates among the orators. Though the rhythm, ardor, terseness, and noble simplicity can be given in no translation,[73] nearly every lover of Greek lyrics has tried his hand at it. Ambrose Philips made thirty-four words out of the first stanza which in the Greek has only sixteen; Merivale found forty-three words necessary; but Tucker and Leonard with strict compression and simplicity manage to translate with twenty-three; Gildersleeve in an unpublished version which I also quote here, and Fairclough use twenty-four:

Broidered-throned goddess, O Aphrodite,

Child of Zeus, craft-weaving, I do beseech thee,

Do not crush my soul with distress and sorrow,

Wholly my mistress.

Rather come, if ever didst come aforetime,

Hearkening to my cry from afar in mercy;

And didst leave the palace of thine own father

Golden and gorgeous;

And didst yoke thy chariot, swift thy sparrows

Drew thee, beauteous sparrows, to earth’s dark surface,

Moving quick their wings from the height of heaven

Through the mid ether.

Soon their journey’s end was attained and smiling

Blessed goddess, smiling with heavenly visage,

Thou didst ask of me what it was I suffer’d,

Why I invoked thee,

What it was I wished to receive of all things,

Maddened in my soul, ‘Who is he thou seekest,

Whom shall I ensnare for my darling Sappho?