Part 1
SAPPHO
A Lecture delivered before the Classical Association of Victoria, 1913.
SAPPHO
T. G. TUCKER, LITT.D. (CAMB.), HON. LITT.D. (DUBLIN)
Professor of Classical Philology in the University of Melbourne
MELBOURNE THOMAS C. LOTHIAN 1914
_PRINTED IN ENGLAND_
COPYRIGHT. _First Edition, May 1914._
SAPPHO
It is hardly possible to realise and judge of Sappho without realising her environment. The picture must have its background, and the background is Lesbos about the year 600 B.C. One may well regret never to have seen the island now called Mytilini, but known in ancient times as Lesbos. There are, however, descriptions not a few, and with these we must perforce be satisfied. On the map it lies there in the Ægean Sea, a sort of triangle with rounded edges, pierced deeply on the south by two deep lochs or fiords, while toward each of its three angles it rises into mountains of from two to three thousand feet in height. One way it stretches some thirty-five miles, the other some twenty-five.
It is twenty-five centuries ago since this island was the home of Sappho, of Alcæus, and of a whole school of the most finished lyric poetry and music ever heard in Greece. From its northern shore, across only seven miles of laughing sea, the poetess might every day look upon the Troad, the land of Homeric legend; and in the North-East distance, over the broadening strait, rose the storied crest of “many-fountained Ida.” The air was clear with that translucency of which Athens also boasted, and in which the Athenian poet rightly or wrongly found one cause of the Athenian intellectual brilliancy. The climate was, and still is, famous for its mildness and salubrity. The Lesbian soil was, and still is, rich in corn and oil and wine, in figs and olives, in building-wood and tinted marble. It was eminently a land of flowers and aromatic plants, of the rose and the iris, the myrtle and the violet, and the Lesbians would seem to have loved and cultivated flowers much as they are loved and cultivated in Japan.
Such was the land. The Greeks who inhabited it belonged apparently to that Achæan-Æolian branch which was the first to cross from Europe to the north-west Ægæan and to oust, or plant colonies among, the older nameless--perhaps “Pelasgian”--occupants. This is not the place to discuss the tribal or even racial differences which once existed between Æolian, Ionian, and Dorian Greeks. Their divergence of character was great; it was of the first significance as exhibited in war, in social life, in art. The fact that each division spoke the Greek tongue, though with various accents and idioms, is no longer held as proof that their racial origin and capacity were the same. Between the Greek of Lesbos and the Greek of Sparta there were differences in temper, in adaptability, and in taste, as great as those between the English-speaking Irishman, with his nimble sympathies and his ready eloquence and wit, and the slower if surer Saxon of Mid-lothian. If we touch upon this question here, it is merely because it casts some measure of light upon those social and literary characteristics of the Lesbians in which Sappho fortunately shared. Almost beyond a doubt the Æolian Greeks who first made Lesbos their home were the nearest of kin to those fair-haired Achæans who, in the _Iliad_, followed their feudal lords to the siege of Troy. Socially a distinguishing mark of these people was the liberty and high position enjoyed by the women in the household, by the Penelopes as well as by the Helens. This fact has hardly been sufficiently considered in dealing with that peculiar position of Sappho and her coterie, concerning which something will be said later on. Artistically their distinguishing mark, as represented first in Homer, was their clear, open-eyed, original observation of essentials, their veracity of description, their dislike of the indefinite and the mystic. This too is clearly reflected in the work of Sappho and her compatriots.
We must not, it is true, make too much of this racial derivation and its consequences. The population of Lesbos doubtless became mixed; the lapse of centuries, the passing away of the feudal relation, increasing ease and wealth in a softening climate, long intercourse with the trade and culture of the neighbouring Asiatic coast--all these had their inevitable effects. Nevertheless, among it all, the frank genius of earliest Greece is still discernible in the classic poetry of Lesbos.
The island naturally possessed its characteristic speech. The dialect of Lesbos was strongly marked. It is altogether unsafe to specify at this distance of time the particular qualities of softness or sonority which belonged to Greek dialects; but, if one may venture where doubt must always be so great, it would not be unreasonable to speak of Lesbian Greek as perhaps the most “singable” of them all. In several ways it is peculiarly like Italian. The aspirate is gone, the double consonants are brought out with an Italian clarity unique in Greece, the vowels are firm and musical. And here we must remember that a local Greek dialect must never be looked upon as a provincial _patois_ simply because it is not Attic. Neither Attic nor any other one speech possessed a pre-eminence in Greece in the year 600 B.C. The poet of every little independent Grecian state was free to compose in his own idiom, with no more hesitation or self-consciousness than would have occurred to a Provençal troubadour, an early _trouvère_ of Normandy, or a Sicilian poet before the age of Dante. The half-doubts of Burns when writing his native Scots would find no sympathy in Sappho or Alcæus. No poetry that profoundly stirs the heart was ever written with effort in an alien speech. Burns perhaps had some reason to be tempted to write in English. The Lesbian singers had no temptation to write in anything but Lesbian. Sappho may indeed be called the Burns of Greece, but if her dialect, like his, was local, it was at the same time the genuine and recognised language of the most cultured men and women of her people.
Having thus spoken of Lesbos, its people, and its language, we may proceed to the social and ethical surroundings into which Sappho was born. The island contained, after the usual Greek fashion, perhaps half-a-dozen little communities independent of each other. All these had their “little summer wars” and their little revolutions; but it is with Mitylene, the chief and largest town, that the life of Sappho is identified. The history of such a town at this period may be compared to that of an Italian city in the later thirteenth century. It was the history of a struggle between a despotism, or an oligarchy of aristocrats, and the rights of the citizens. The _grandi_ and _popolari_ of Florence in the time of Dante find their analogues in the conflicts of nobles like Alcæus and his brother Antimenidas against the champions of the common folk of Mitylene. There were also feuds less immediately explainable, just as there were feuds of Guelfs and Ghibellines, of Blacks and Whites. We need not inquire into the usurpations of Melanchrus and Myrsilus or the dictatorship of Pittacus. Men carried to power by favour of one party might drive their opponents into banishment, just as Dante was exiled to Verona and Ravenna. Among those who thus left their country for a space were the poet Alcæus and his greater contemporary Sappho. Particularly haughty and turbulent were the nobly born, and these often elected to roam abroad and serve as _condottieri_ in foreign armies rather than condescend to obey the rule of the commons at home. It may be mentioned in passing that the brother of the poet Alcæus took service under King Nebuchadnezzar, and in his wars killed a Goliath, who “lacked but a hand’s-breath of five cubits.”
Yet these are after all but surface incidents, of which history often makes too much. As in modern times, the little wars and little revolutions caused but an inconsiderable suspension of social and industrial life. Commerce and art went on very much as before. The vines of Lesbos were pruned, the ships of Lesbos went trading down the coast, the poets and musicians of Lesbos played and sang. We know that while Guelfs were quarrelling with Ghibellines and Florentines were fighting with Pisans or Genoese, the festive processions went with song across the Arno, Giotto’s tower rose from the ground, Guido Cavalcanti composed his sonnets, and Dante, for all that he must fight in the front ranks at Campaldino, found time and hearers for his _Donne ch’ avete intelletto d’amore_. So it was at Mitylene. We need not therefore picture Sappho and her society of maidens as living perpetually among war’s alarms or fluttering in daily expectation of battle, murder, and sudden death. Life in Lesbos must have been passing cheerful, as life goes.
When we proceed next to speak of the lively enthusiasm of this Lesbian folk for beauty in all its forms, and in especial for the beauty of music and poetry, we must guard against a misconception. Under all the love of art which ruled in Lesbos, amid all its eager cultivation of the Muses and the Graces, this isle of Greece “where burning Sappho loved and sung” carried on its daily work as strenuously as any Greeks were wont. Its farmers and fishermen, its quarriers and vine-dressers, laboured like others in sun or cold. There was no doubt plenty of envy, hatred, and malice, and no little that was coarse and gross. Nevertheless the love of art and beauty and the spontaneous appreciation of them penetrated far deeper into a Greek people than it does with us. It was not an artificial outgrowth, a dainty efflorescence of leisure and luxury. It was no private possession of the _virtuoso_, or sequestered playground of the amateur. Even now the popular songs of the village Greeks are in literary grace and thought of a higher quality than many songs familiar to our drawing-rooms. Life without song and dance upon the sward was unimaginable in old Hellas.
The special pride of Lesbos was in its music and poetry. In the language of the legend, when that magic singer Orpheus had been torn to pieces in Thrace, his head--with, as some say, his lyre--was carried “down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore.” On the coins of Mitylene, as on the flag of Ireland, may be seen a harp. The first great name in the musical history of Greece is that of the Lesbian Terpander. It is not indeed a probable story that he was the first to increase the strings of the lyre from four to seven, but it is practically certain that he both improved that instrument and invented new forms of composition to embody a lyrical idea. Another world-known poet and musician who shed glory on Lesbos was Arion. Of him in later days the story grew that, when he was thrown overboard by pirates, a dolphin, which had been charmed by his melodies, bore him upon its back safe to the Tarentine shore.
In Lesbos, as in every part of Greece, there were abundant demands upon musician and poet. Every occasion of worship, festivity, and grief required its song. The gods were hymned by groups at their altars and by white-robed maidens in processions; at weddings the hymeneal chorus was chanted along the street, and the epithalamion before the doors of the bridal home; at every banquet were sung lively catches and jocund songs of Bacchus; every season--spring, summer, harvest--had its popular ditty, exultant or pathetic; almost every occupation, of herdsman, boatman, gardener, was beguiled with melody; at the coming of the first swallow, as on the old English Mayday, the children sang the “swallow-song” from house to house. And let it be remembered that the Greeks had none of our modern tolerance for a song of which the words were nought and the tune everything. To them the thought, the sentiment, was first; the melody was simply its proper vehicle. Italian opera, when not a word is intelligible, would have seemed to them a strange anomaly. To them _mousikê_ was the “art of the Muses,” and this meant literature no less than minstrelsy. The poet, unless, like Burns, he wrote his verses to existing tunes, was his own composer. In either case he was poet first and foremost.
Now for generations the songs for special purposes had been shaping themselves on special lines. To use a phrase of Aristotle, experience had found out the right species to fit the case. There were sundry recognised stanzas and metres for a processional, a hymeneal, or a dirge. In most cases, therefore, the task of a new poet was to write new words; the melody would, as in the case of Burns, almost find itself. Nevertheless the complete poet could not dispense with an elaborate training in music. To invent beautiful variations of existing tunes was part of his glory; he must at least write words which should sing themselves to the melody he selected. “Melodies” is the word, for the Greeks knew practically nothing of harmonies. Their songs were sung in unison, or simply with an octave interval when men sang with women or with boys. The accompanying instrument was generally the lyre, or one of many stringed instruments akin thereto; sometimes it was the so-called flute, which was in truth a clarinet. Whatever their musical deficiencies, it has been maintained by competent authorities that in nicety of ear for pitch and time the training of the Greeks incomparably surpassed the modern. Be that as it may, it must never be left out of sight that, when a Lesbian wrote a song, it was in the first place as perfect a poem as he could create, and in the second it was meant to be sung, not merely to be read. Shelley’s _Ode to a Skylark_ is consummate literature. Yet we may doubt if it could ever be sung, and assuredly it was not written to that end. On the other hand, the songs of Moore are often but sickly stuff to read, but they lend themselves perfectly to those touching Irish airs, to which, by the way, the Lesbians seem to have been akin in a peculiar tone of plaintiveness. A Greek lyric aimed at combining the literary _mousikê_ of Shelley’s _Ode_ with the songful _mousikê_ of Moore. It is in the perfection of this combination that Sappho excels all women who have ever written verse.
Where song was for generations so abundant, it follows that there was floating about among the people many an old ballad or favourite ditty whose author had been long forgotten. Numbers of these _Volkslieder_, or snatches of them, lay, sometimes with consciousness and sometimes unrealised, in the memory of every child of Lesbos. The artistic poet did not scorn them; he feared no charge of plagiarism if he adopted and adapted them; he often acted as Burns acted with the ballads of Scotland; he took them, gave them that marvellous and inexplicable touch of finality which only genius can impart, and so made them his for ever. This also did Sappho do, and her verses, when she deals with well-worn themes, are beyond question often fed with the hints of older nameless songsters.
There is one department of lyric verse in which Lesbos stood supreme, and Sappho supreme in Lesbos. It is the poetry, not of religion or marriage, of the banquet or the seasons, but of personal emotion; the verse of the “lyric cry,” which tells of the writer’s own passion, its waves of joy and sorrow, love and hate. It is the monody, the verse sung, not by a gathered company, but from the one overflowing heart, the song best represented at Rome by Catullus, and in modern times by Burns or Heine. For most of her poems in this kind there is no reason to suppose that Sappho relied upon any promptings but those of her own soul. She took the floating rhythms of the ballads, modified them, and into their mould she poured verse which, as George Sand said of her own writings, came from “the real blood of her heart and the real flame of her thought.”
And here at length we come to the poetess herself. Into this land, devoted to poetry, to music, to flowers, and so regardful of loveliness that a public “prize of beauty” was annually competed for in the temple of Hera, was Sappho--or Psappha, as she apparently called herself--born in the latter part of the seventh century before Christ. Our ancient authorities are sufficiently in agreement as to her date, and we may lay it down that she was in her prime about the year 600 B.C., or nearly a hundred and fifty years before that great period of Athenian literary culture which is represented by Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The ascertainable facts of her career are miserably few, and concerning those matters which are in debate as to her life and character the present exponent must be permitted to express simply his own views, premising that they have been formed with all due and deliberate care.
Whether the names of her parents were or were not Scamandronymus and Clêis is an unimportant question. We may simply remark that both those names are of aristocratic colour, and both are more or less authenticated. Whether again she was born at Mitylene itself, or at the smaller town of Eresos, is of little moment, since we know that at any rate Mitylene was the scene of her life’s work. That she belonged to the ranks of the well-born, and that good looks were in the family, is proved by the choice of her brother Larichus as cup-bearer of Mitylene, an office which was bestowed only on handsome and noble youth. That at least one member of the family possessed considerable means is known from the rather romantic history of a second brother, Charaxus. This young man sailed away in his ship, laden with the famous Lesbian wine--the _innocentis pocula Lesbii_ of Horace--as far as Egypt. There he traded in that merchandise at the Pan-Grecian free-town of Naucratis, which had been established in the Delta under a permission somewhat similar to that by which settlement was first allowed in the treaty-ports of China. Here, however, he fell in love with the world-famed _demi-mondaine_ whose name, Doricha, is less familiar than her sobriquet Rhodôpis--“complexion of a rose”--and his gains were spent in chivalrously ransoming that lady from a degrading slavery. It is of interest to know, though the verses are not preserved to us, that his poetess sister reproved him sharply for this conduct. Her “love of love” did not blind her to the claims of family honour and dignity. It is gratifying to learn that at a later time she expresses her reconciliation to her brother in a poem which, like those of Herondas and Bacchylides, has but recently been disgorged, though in a sadly mutilated state, by the omnivorous sands of Egypt. Sappho herself is said to have married a wealthy islander of Andros, and to have had at least one daughter, whose name, according to Greek custom, was the name of the grandmother, Clêis. It is apparently this Clêis whom she is addressing in a fragment which we may venture to translate thus----
“I have a maid, a bonny maid, As dainty as the golden flowers, My darling Clêis. Were I paid All Lydia, and the lovely bowers Of Cyprus, ’twould not buy my maid.”
An inscription on the Parian marbles informs us that, at some uncertain date, Sappho fled, or was driven, into banishment to Sicily. There is nothing unlikely in the circumstance, and it is worth noting that more than 500 years later, in the days of Cicero, Verres, the governor of that island, appropriated a bronze statue of Sappho, wrought by a Grecian master and greatly prized at Syracuse.
As _Aberglaube_ which has gathered about Sappho’s history, there are two strange legends, or rather there is one strange legend in two parts, which must here be told briefly.
The story goes that once upon a time Aphrodite, goddess of love, disguised as an aged woman, was gallantly ferried across to Lesbos by a young waterman of the name of Phaon. In reward she bestowed upon him marvellous beauty and irresistible charm. Of him, the fable tells, Sappho became enamoured to the point of frenzy, and, unable to win his heart, she resolved to attempt the last and most desperate cure known for her disease. Away in the Ionian Sea was the jutting rock of Leucas, and it was believed that those who cast themselves down from that cliff into the sea either ended their miseries in death or rose from the waters cured of their malady. What became of Sappho when she took that “lover’s leap” may be found narrated by Hephæstion. It is given in Addison’s 233rd _Spectator_. “Many who were present related that they saw her fall into the sea, from whence she never rose again; there were others who affirmed that she never came to the bottom of her leap, but that she was changed into a swan as she fell, and that they saw her hovering in the air under that shape. But whether or no 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.” Well, let us share the Lesbian doubt, and a little more. Suffice it to say that, though this story, which has been elaborated by the fancy of Ovid, appears to have been known in some shape to Menander and other comic poets of Athens, there is absolutely no trace of the name of Phaon or of anything connected with him in any fragment of Sappho. Nor was there likely to be, seeing that he is in all probability but another _avatar_ of the mythical youth Adonis. More interesting is it to observe that the rock of desperation is called “Sappho’s Leap” unto this day. Unfortunately we do not know when or by whom it was so baptized.
Of Sappho’s personal appearance we have no certain knowledge. More than four centuries later a philosopher named Maximus Tyrius says that she was considered beautiful, “though” short and dark, and hence is prompted Swinburne’s assumption--
“The small dark body’s Lesbian loveliness That held the fire eternal.”
If this be true, she was sufficiently unlike the conventional ideal of Lesbian beauty. Her contemporary Alcæus speaks of her “sweet smile,” and Anacreon, in the next generation, of her “sweet voice.” Later writers of epigrams, who can hardly have known much about the matter, call her “bright-eyed,” or “the pride of the lovely-haired Lesbians,” but those are as likely as not mere descriptive guesses of the kind in which poetical fancy may pardonably indulge. If we meet with the untranslatable adjective _kalê_ applied to her by Plato, we have to remember that it is a stock epithet of admiration for a writer of charm and genius, and in such cases contains no reference whatever to beauty of person.
What we really know best of Sappho’s life is that she was acknowledged the choicest spirit of her time in music and poetry, and that, whether as friendly guide or professional teacher or something of both, she gathered about her what may be variously called a coterie, academy, conservatorium, or club, of young women, not only from Lesbos itself but from other islands, and even from Miletus and the distant Pamphylia. Sometimes they were called her “companions,” sometimes her “disciples.” One of them, Erinna of Telos, herself became famous, but unhappily survives for us as a lyrist only in an inconsiderable line or two.
Sappho appears to have taught these damsels music and also the art of poetry, so far as that art is teachable. She appears, moreover, to have taught them whatever charms and graces of bearing and behaviour were most desired by women, whether in their social life or in their frequent appearances in religious or secular processions and ceremonies. There exists a short fragment in which she derides the rusticity of the woman who has no idea how to hold up her train about her ankles. In another place she bids one of her maidens--