chapter three of the love of Sappho and Phaon, and the hymn to Aphrodite,
quoted in the notes in Boileau’s translation, is addressed to Phaon: “C’est pour cet ingrat qu’un jour dans l’enthousiasme de la poésie et de l’amour, je composai cette ode qui a circulé dans toute la Grèce, et que sans doute la postérité répétera encore.” In the fourth chapter Antenor and his friend attend the funeral of Sappho and see the ashes deposited in an urn. On the cippus is carved a lyre with this epitaph:
Ci-gît Sapho, la gloire de nos jours; Muses, pleurez, pleurez, Amours.
In the seventh chapter an account is given of Sappho’s last days, and Theagenes is revealed as her rival, to whom Phaon has united himself by a solemn bond. To Sappho is attributed a long ode in which she invokes Venus and all the infernal deities against her lover. She ends, however, by returning to the sweetness and generosity which had originally characterized her. I quote only the last two stanzas:
Et toi, mes amours, ô ma lyre, Douce compagne de mes jeux, Repose toi, ma muse expire; Reçois ici mes longs adieux.
Mourons; allons au noir rivage: Heureuse, si, dans mon ennui, De Phaon emportant l’image, Je peux aux morts parler de lui.
The author evidently was fond of Sappho and would compare with her Louise Labbé, _la belle Cordière_ (1526-1566), a woman of tender heart and with a taste for passion, who wrote verses on love in Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish. At this time Sappho was held in high esteem and it was a compliment to call a writer “a modern Sappho.” So for example in the preface to L’Abbé Le Roy, _Le Paradis perdu_, poëme traduit de l’Anglais de Milton en vers françois (Rouen, 1775) we read: “Aussi a-t-on fait le plus favorable et le plus juste accueil à la charmante esquisse du Paradis Terrestre, que daigna nous donner une femme célébre, dont le nom seul fait l’éloge, Mme du Boccage, cette Sappho moderne, qui fait d’honneur a la France.”
In 1777[173] Sauvigny published his _Poésies de Sapho_, composed of eighteen odes, four _scolies morales_, four epigrams, the epitaphs of Timas and Pelagon, some fragments, a letter of Sappho to Phaon, and a hymn to Venus. There are many pretty uses of Sappho, though in no sense can the poems be said to be those of Sappho. The third ode is an echo of the fragment on the Evening Star:
Belle étoile du soir, digne ornement des cieux, ... Tu fais rentrer le paisible troupeau, Qui du loup ravisseur craint la dent meurtrière; La fille qui, joyeuse, a quitté le hameau, Tu la ramènes à sa mère.
Ces timides amans que Vénus a touchés, Qui brûlent d’être unis ensemble, Et que l’éclat du jour avait tenus cachés, C’est ton retour qui les rassemble.
The fifth ode renders the fragment on virginity:
La Jeune Épousée. Rose de la pudeur que l’amour a cueillie, Votre premier éclat me sera-t-il rendu?
La Virginité. Ingrate, vous l’avez perdu; Vous l’avez perdu pour la vie.
The sixth ode is simply Boileau’s translation of the Aphrodite hymn. The thirteenth, addressed to Atthis, combines two fragments:
La lune au front d’argent et sa cour lumineuse Echappent à mes yeux; D’un voile plus obscur la nuit silencieuse Enveloppe les cieux.
Heure que j’attendais, qui dut m’être si chère, Tu t’es évanouie, et je suis seule, ô dieux!
The fifteenth ode is a dialogue between Alcaeus and Sappho, and the note interprets as Sappho’s refusal of Alcaeus the famous fragment of which a Latin version is given:
Si nobis amicus es, torum accipe junior; Non enim sustinebo consvescere cum seniore, Dum junior sim.
Other writers of the end of the eighteenth century who paid tribute to Sappho were Bernis in his ode _Harmonie_, Lebrun in his epigrams, Parny in his _Journée champêtre_, La Harpe, who knew only ode II, and M. Legouvé who writes:
Vois Sapho; par Phaon trahie Elle rendit son art confident de ses pleurs Et merita la gloire en chantant ses malheurs.
Other French translators of about this time are Regnier Desmarais, Ricard, Langeac, Deguerle, Marchena, Blin de Sainmore, Abbé Batteux, and Gorsse in _Journal des Muses_ III.
In the nineteenth century the echoes and translations of Sappho are even more numerous. The first of the neo-classicists, André Chénier, follower of Boileau, owed much of his enthusiasm for the Greeks to his Greek mother, and imitated Sappho in the ode which he wrote for his love, the ode so admired by Alfred de Musset, the charming poet who also knew the sufferings of love:
Fanny, l’heureux mortel qui près de toi respire Sait, à te voir parler, et rougir, et sourire De quels hôtes divins le ciel est habité ...
He also used the fragment about Virginity (Latouche edition I, p. 64). Jacques Delille, the famous translator of Virgil, and the great representative of didactic and descriptive poetry, in his _Poésies fugitives_ (1802) made a good literal translation. In the same year Vanderbourg published some verses camouflaged as the _Poésies_ de Madame Clotilde de Surville, who was supposed to have lived 1405-1495. He gives a translation of the famous second ode, of which I quote only the last stanza:
S’ennuagent mes yeux: n’oy plus qu’ennuy, rumeurs, Je brûle, je languis; chauds frissons dans ma veine Circulent: je pâlis, je palpite, l’haleine Me manque, je me meurs.
The two great initiators of Romanticism also knew Sappho. Madame de Staël wrote (1811) a drama published 1821, _Sapho_, in which Phaon is divided between love for two different women. Chateaubriand in 1809 in _Les Martyrs_[174] makes Cymodocée, who was on the point of becoming a Christian and already betrothed to Eudore, a fervent disciple of Christ, say to her fiancé: “Dis-moi, puisqu’on peut aimer dans ton culte, il y a donc une Vénus chrétienne?... Le colère de cette déesse est-elle redoutable? Force-t-elle la jeune fille à chercher le jeune homme dans la palestre, à l’introduire furtivement sous le toit paternel? Ta Vénus rend-elle la langue embarrassée? Répand-elle un feu brûlant, un froid mortel dans les veines?” Chateaubriand adds here (and also in _Revolutions Anciennes_) Boileau’s translation and in the same place he cites the passage from Racine’s _Phèdre_ which we have quoted, p. 163. In 1805 L. Gorsse published _Sapho, poëme en dix chants_.[175] He defends Sappho’s character (eleven years before the German Welcker) but believes that her love for Phaon was “un fait incontestable, dont tous les genres de littérature ont le droit, de s’emparer.” He speaks of the Abbé Barthélemy, who in _Voyage d’Anacharsis_ paints “les transports et l’ardeur de Sapho;” also of Lantier, _Voyages d’Anténor_, who had placed Sappho in such a bright light that he has brought out new beauties in the subject, which had not been seen previously. Both quote Boileau’s translation. Gorsse also praises, as possessing a grace which men can never attain, the fragments of poetry which two ladies, Mesdames de Beaufort-d’Hautpoul and Caroline Wougne, published under the name of _Sapho_. On pages 181-187 (Vol. II) he quotes a romance by each, attributed to Sappho, which deals with her love for Phaon. In that of Caroline Wougne Sappho meets Phaon on his return from Sicily during a stormy night in a country house where he is asking for hospitality. Gorsse has also consulted Madame Pipelet de Salm, who presented Sappho on the lyric stage with grace and dignity. He himself unites the legends of her love with those of her writings, and drawing also on Tibullus, Propertius, Virgil, Lucretius, and especially Ovid, makes Sappho speak as poetess and lover fifty expanded elegies. There are five in each of the ten cantos besides a prologue and epilogue. In view of the fact that none of Sappho’s elegies are extant, the reconstruction, though fanciful, is extremely interesting. The first five songs picture Sappho’s desire, contentment, happiness, fear, and calmness. Phaon is jealous of Alcaeus and proposes to leave Lesbus to dwell in the Vale of Tempe, but Sappho asks Phaon to share in her poems, which will immortalize their love, and then reveals to him the origin of music. The second five represent her suspicion, grief, torment, and pursuit of Phaon to Sicily, her despair and the Leucadian Leap, after she sees Phaon making eyes at Telesilla. In the fifth elegy of the first canto is an adaptation of Sappho’s second ode, in which the first verse addressed to Phaon is taken without acknowledgment from André Chénier’s _Fanny_. Phaon seems to be the principal figure, and the legends about him are tremendously expanded with the help of many Greek myths. As in so many other writers he becomes a great athlete and must overcome his opponents in the stadium. The Italian author of _Avventure di Saffo_ had done likewise and made Phaon win with the same throw which Ulysses used in Homer. The _Voyages d’Anténor_ had made Phaon first appear to Sappho after winning in the gymnasium. Likewise Gorsse has Sappho see Phaon for the first time in the stadium at Mytilene. There she describes the impression Phaon made on her, when he won the athletic prize. All these writers forget, however, that women in Sappho’s day were not allowed to witness the nude athletic contests. Gorsse shows his wide acquaintance with the ancient accounts of Sappho when in the fourth elegy of the second canto he mentions: “un foible enfant, Cléis, qui t’est si chère!” With only a few errors he represents all the many friends and pupils of Sappho,—to whom he gives classical epithets,—as helping Sappho to preserve Phaon’s love. He is as keen as the modern critics when he says in a note that Erinna cannot be the famous poet, but he is wrong in picturing _Brune Andromède_ and _Blonde Gorgo_ as friends or pupils rather than rivals of Sappho.
O vous, pourtant, qui faites mes délices, Du noeud sacré qui vous attache à moi, J’attends encor les plus tendres offices, Je les réclame au nom de votre foi.
Blanche Cydno, délicate Amynthone, Douce Pyrine, intéressante Athis, Brune Andromède, agréable Gellone, Blonde Gorgo, séduisante Mnaïs!
Par vos attraits, par vos grâces naïves, Auprès de moi captivez mon amant; Pour qu’il y trouve un doux enchantement, Soyez sans cesse à lui plaire attentives.
Vous dont Euterpe anime les accens, Belle Mégare, adorable Gyrinne, Docte Gougile, ingénieuse Erinne, Pour le charmer adressez-lui vos chants.
Vous qui brillez dans l’art de Therpsycore, Aimable Eunique, élégante Anagore, Devant ses yeux, avec agilité, Formez les pas qu’aime la volupté.
Toi, Damophile, ornement de la Grèce, Dis à Phaon qu’au milieu des neuf Soeurs J’ai quelquefois, sur les bords du Permesse, Respiré l’air qu’y parfument les fleurs.
Et toi, surtout, sensible Télésile, Accorde-moi ton bienfaisant secours, Pour conserver Phaon à mes amours, Que ton esprit en moyens soit fertile.
Dans ses regards interroge ses goûts, De ses desirs occupe-toi sans cesse, Pour que mon coeur par tes soins les connoisse, Et qu’aisément il les prévienne tous.
Parmi les sons dont retentit ma lyre, Répète-lui ceux que Vénus m’inspire; Et, par l’objet dont il est adoré, Qu’il ait l’orgueil de se voir honoré.
Toutes, enfin, ô mes tendres amies! A mon amant composez une cour; Le doux lien dont nous sommes unies S’affermira par les noeuds de l’amour.
The second elegy in the fourth canto has a pretty imitation of the famous third fragment. Sappho dissuades Phaon from his jealousy of Alcaeus, which of course is not an ancient legend, in the following words:
Comme un léger brouillard fuit aux rayons du jour, Que ton soupçon expire à la voix de l’amour! Sois sans crainte, Phaon! Contre un sexagénaire Est-ce à toi de lutter dans l’art heureux de plaire? A toi dont la jeunesse et les riants attraits Du chantre de Lesbos effacent les succès, Autant qu’on voit Diane effacer la lumière De ces astres dorés dont se pare la nuit, Quand l’éclat argenté du char qu’elle conduit Annonce que des cieux elle ouvre la barrière?
In the third elegy of the same canto is an elaboration of the fragment on the power of love, the bitter-sweet irresistible creature, and in the first elegy of the fifth canto there is an echo of the fragment about wealth without virtue. In long notes on the second elegy of the fifth book Gorsse cites de Sivry’s or Sauvigny’s verse translations or paraphrases in French, and Latin versions of a score of other fragments and of the Pelagon and Timas epitaphs. In the first elegy of the sixth canto the Sapphic symptoms of love are used:
Je sens mes cheveux se dresser, Mon sang brûler d’une flamme rapide, Ou dans mes veines se glacer.
The third elegy of the same canto is an adaptation of the hymn to Aphrodite and in the notes are given Latin versions by Gorsse himself, Elias Andreas, and Birkow.
Not many have written elegies on Sappho, but Gorsse was followed in 1812 by Touzet, who wrote _Sapho, poëme élégiaque_. It was in 1816 that Lamartine wrote his mediocre imitation of Sappho’s great hymn, calling it _L’élégie antique_. It is in the cold restored pseudo-classical style of Casimir Delavigne:
Dieux, quels transports nouveaux! ô dieux, comment décrire Tons les feux dont mon sein se remplit à la fois? Ma langue se glaça, je demeurai sans voix, Et ma tremblante main laissa tomber ma lyre.
Here is Lamartine’s own comment: “Un soir, en rentrant d’une de ces excursions, pendant laquelle nous avions relu la strophe unique, mais brûlante, de Sapho, sorte de Vénus de Milo, pareille à ce débris découvert par M. de Marcellus, qui contient plus de beauté dans un fragment qu’il n’y en a dans tout un musée de statues intactes, je m’enfermai, et j’écrivis le commencement grec de cette élégie ou de cette _héroïde_....” In one of his _Nouvelles Méditations poétiques_ (not printed till 1823) he describes the suffering of the abandoned Sappho and her last, farewell words to the world and to life, before her suicide; the last line is: “adieu chère Lesbos à Vénus consacrée.” Lamartine was followed in his idea of Sappho by Verlaine (1844-1896), the prince of the French poets after the death of Leconte de Lisle. Verlaine speaks of Sappho as “furieuse, les yeux caves et les seins roides.” In writing to his friend Virieu, April 8, 1819, Lamartine mentions the fact that he has planned an opera on Jephté and adds that he is thinking of writing one on Sappho, which, however, was never written: “J’en ai un qui me brûle, c’est une Sapho, superbe sujet d’un opéra pareil.”
In 1815 came _Sapho_, poème en trois chants par C. T. In 1820 Lazare Carnot published an excellent verse translation of the second ode, _Les Symptomes d’Amour_, and in 1827 E. Veïssier-Descombes, a translator also of Anacreon, published his classic rendering. In 1828 followed the poetical version of Cousin and Girodet; in 1835, Breghot du Lut., in prose and poetry; in 1836 Alexandre Hope’s _Sapho_, a poem of about ten pages; in 1843, prose renderings in Michaud’s _Biographie Universelle_; in 1847, Marullot et Grosset, in verse. In 1842, in the _Cariatides_, Théodore de Banville, one of the last of the Romantic poets, that Greek “clown” of France, wrote these verses on Sappho:
Et toi, grande Sappho, reine de Mitylène! Lionne que l’Amour furieux enchaîna. Près de la mer grondante, avec son Erinna, Elle enseignait le rhythme et ses délicatesses Au troupeau triomphal des jeunes poétesses, Et glacée et brûlante, au bruit amer des flots Elle mêlait ses cris de rage et ses sanglots. O toi qui nous atteins avec des flèches sûres, De quels feux tu brûlas et de quelles blessures Son chaste sein meurtri par le baiser du vent! Mais comme rien ne meurt de ce qui fut vivant, Sa colère amoureuse et de souffrance avide, Plus tard devait dicter sa plainte au fier Ovide, Qui, choisissant l’amour, eût la meilleure part, Et frémir dans les vers d’Horace et de Ronsard.
Baudelaire (1821-1867), the morbid realist, uses the story of the Leucadian Leap in his _Lesbos_:
—L’oeil d’azur est vaincu par l’oeil noir que tachète Le cercle ténébreux tracé par les douleurs De la mâle Sapho, l’amante et le poète! Plus belle que Vénus se dressant sur le monde.
In a literary fragment (1845), entitled _Sapho_, he refers to a famous and remarkable tragedy on Sappho which was to be published soon afterwards by Arsène Houssaye. He quotes some verses which are reminiscent of Sappho’s second ode:
Oui, Phaon, je vous aime; et, lorsque je vous vois, Je perds le sentiment et la force et la voix. Je souffre tout le jour le mal de votre absence, Mai qui n’égale pas l’heur de votre présence; Si bien que vous trouvant, quand vous venez le soir, La cause de ma joie et de mon désespoir, Mon âme les compense, et sous les lauriers roses Etouffe l’ellébore et les soucis moroses.
In 1873 we have a translation by Etienne Prosper Dubois-Gucham, _La Grecque Pléiade_; in 1878 that of P. L. Courier; in 1882, the verses of de la Roche. About this time J. Richepin published in his undated romance, _Grandes Amoureuses_, prose translations of several fragments, and in 1889 Paul Lenois made a prose version. In 1884, Alphonse Daudet, after writing a novel on French life and customs as a warning to young men, and picturing a courtesan carried upstairs in the arms of her lover, gave the courtesan and the novel the title of _Sapho_. Soon afterwards appeared anonymously Madame E. Caro’s _Sapho_. In 1895 were heard the songs of Pierre Louys, who in _Les chansons de Bilitis traduites du Grec pour la première fois_[176] transforms Mytilene into a modern Sodom and Sappho into the mistress of a band of _hetaerae_. He pretends that he is translating Greek poems that were found in excavating the poetess’ grave on Amathus. He even represents them as published by a Doctor Heim of Leipzig. Further to mystify the reader Louys tells of some of the poems that have not been translated and marks restorations in the text, as if these songs had actually been found marred and mutilated and as if the archaeologist had restored the missing words. He even uses, to give a Greek atmosphere, many Greek expressions such as _Kypris Philommeïdès_. Many of his Greek forms, such as Dzeus, are absurd. Charming as are these _Bucoliques en Pamphylie_, _Élégies à Mitylène_, _Épigrammes dans l’île de Chypre_, they belong rather to pornographic literature, as does his romance called _Aphrodite_, in which the pseudo-Lesbian idea of two girls marrying one another is to be found. Such bits of perverted Sapphism as appear in many other French writers have no place in the literature of the real Sappho, who can now, after the discovery of all the new papyri, easily be distinguished from the Sappho of romance and legend. Unfortunately the last French translation by Meunier (1911) does not include these recent relics.
One of the latest French imitations of Sappho is by that great reviver of Aristophanes, Maurice Donnay, whose comedies have attracted such large audiences in Europe. In his _Lysistrata_ (Act I, scene II), Donnay makes the pretty Hirondelle as she walks along the shore of the violet sea recite to the accompaniment of the music of the waves the song which divine Sappho composed for the Egyptian courtesan Rhodopis, although we have no evidence for such a song:
Rhodopis, ton amant est comme Un dieu: son bonheur me courrouce. Quand je pense que c’est un homme Pour qui ta voix se fait si douce, Et que c’est Charaxos, mon frère, Qui possède ta chair superbe, Et ta Beauté dont j’étais fière, Je deviens plus verte que l’herbe. Mes yeux se troublent, mes oreilles S’emplissent de murmures vagues Et de grandes rumeurs pareilles Au bruit que fait le choc des vagues. Et voilà qu’une sueur froide Inonde tout mon corps qui tremble, Puis, je reste sans souffle, et froide Ainsi qu’un cadavre, il me semble Que je meurs! que je meurs!
This, of course, is an echo of the famous second ode of Sappho which has influenced all ages and countries and continues so to do. Hardly a year passes without some translation or reminiscence of it in Greece or Italy, in France or Germany, in England or America.
XI. SAPPHO IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE
Sappho was little read in England and as a writer of poetry probably did not exist, except for a few Englishmen of great learning, before the sixteenth century. Even in the seventeenth century Thomas Stanley, a man of considerable culture, omitted Sappho from his translation of Anacreon (1650). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the imitations limit themselves to the Sapphic metre,[177] with the exception of the famous line in Ben Jonson’s pastoral drama, _The Sad Shepherd_ (Act II, 2): “But best the dear good angel of the spring, The nightingale,” and of Sir Philip Sidney, who seems to have been entirely forgotten by modern writers on Sappho. But it is interesting to note, in the movement led by Gabriel Harvey in pre-Shakesperian days to write English poetry in classical metres, that sapphics were attempted by Harvey’s friend, Sir Philip Sidney, in _The Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia_, which was begun in 1580. One stanza will suffice to show how strained were the strophes thus manufactured:
If mine eyes can speak to do hearty errand, Or mine eyes’ language she do hap to judge of, So that eyes’ message be of her received, Hope we do live yet.
It is rather strange that Sir Philip did not use this metre in his translation of the second ode of Sappho, but employed anacreontics.
My Muse, what ailes this ardor? Mine eyes be dim, my limbs shake, My voice is hoarse, my throat scorch’d, My tongue to this my roof cleaves, My fancy amaz’d, my thoughts dull’d, My heart doth ake, my life faints, My soul begins to take leave.
This being a wholly iambic measure does not appear so exotic as the sapphics. Indeed, the youthful experimenter achieved a noteworthy success in rhythmic effect by ending each line with a foot composed of one strong syllable.
Most of the knowledge there was of Sappho in the Elizabethan and Jacobean times, however, seems to have been superficially based mainly on the Ovidian legend. Such a wonderful story told by such a wonderful story-teller interested the early classicists in England, and the Phaon myth permeated much literature.
Ben Jonson (_Under-Woods_, No. 45) says:
Did Sappho, on her seven-tongu’d lute, So speak (as yet it is not mute) Of Phaon’s form?
Thomas Nashe in his novel, _The Unfortunate Traveller_ (1594), is a typical example: “Golde easily bends, the most ingenious minds are easiest moved, _Ingenium nobis molle Thalia dedit_, said _Psapho_ to _Phao_.” It is just possible that Robert Herrick (1591-1674), who published so many poems to or upon _Sapho_, the name of his own love, knew from Athenaeus the fragment (E. 62) “much whiter than an egg,” when he published in _Hesperides_, No. 350 (1648) the verses:
Fain would I kiss my Julia’s dainty leg, Which is as white and hair-less as an egge.
John Lyly made Sappho an allegorical image of the Virgin Queen: “I will ever be virgin,” says Sappho. The play, _Sapho and Phao_, was produced in 1584 in the presence of Queen Elizabeth. Lyly makes Sappho a princess of Syracuse and takes many liberties with the historical Sappho. Lyly’s Sappho resembles the Queen, and Phao is supposed to be the Duke of Leicester, but in such an allegory all reference to the Leucadian Leap has to be omitted, and there are no echoes of Sappho’s own fragments. When Phaon comes, Sappho soliloquizes: “Wilt thou open thy love? Yea? No, Sapho, but staring in his face till thine eyes dazzle and thy spirits faint, die before his face; then this shall be written on thy tomb, that though thy love were greater than wisdom could endure, yet thine honour was such as love could not violate.” Aphrodite interrupts their love and Phaon says: “This shall be my resolution, where-ever I wander, to be as I were kneeling before Sapho; my loyalty unspotted, though unrewarded.... My life shall be spent in sighing and wishing, the one for my bad fortune, the other for Sapho’s good.” Even Robert Burton in that famous storehouse of quotations, his _Anatomy of Melancholy_ (1621), does not know Sappho as a poetess, and refers only to the _Leucata Petra_: “Here leaped down that Lesbian Sappho for Phaon on whom she miserably doted, hoping thus to ease herself and to be freed of her love pangs.” The first English translation of Sappho’s second ode (1652), quoted by Edwin Cox, is John Hall’s version in his translation of the _Treatise an the Sublime_. He does not mention Sidney, and Addison did not know even Hall’s translation or that of Pulteney, for he says that the versions by Ambrose Philips in 1711 were the first. In 1675 Edward Phillips in his _Theatrum Poetarum_ devoted a chapter to Ancient Poetesses and Sappho. He knew the tradition of a second Sappho, but quoted no fragments. In 1680 Pulteney, who had a knowledge of small Latin and less Greek, gave a filtered translation from the French of the _Treatise on the Sublime_ and the second Sapphic ode. In 1695 appeared another translation by an unknown author, but it was not till 1711 that any detailed study of Sappho began. In that year, in the Spectator (nos. 223, 229, and 233), Joseph Addison discussed Sappho at length. Even then we have only the namby-pamby verses of Ambrose Philips, so overpraised by Addison. Soon followed translations by Herbert in 1713, in his edition of Petronius (pp. 325-328); and in 1719, by Green. In 1735 John Addison published the works of Anacreon with Sappho added, in which the _Loeb Classical Library_ idea of putting the Greek text on one page and the translation on the opposite page was anticipated. Philips’ version of the Aphrodite hymn was forty-two lines long, but Addison gives one of his own in twenty-eight lines, which is the number in the original Greek. His own rendering is as good as that of Philips, which perhaps is damning it with faint praise. His translations of the eight fragments which he includes are also not remarkable. In 1748, we have Tobias Smollett’s version of the second ode in _Roderick Random_. About 1745, Mark Akenside in his tenth _Ode on Lyric Poetry_ based a stanza on Sappho’s first ode. In 1760, “a Gentleman of Cambridge” published his verse translations. In some publications he is considered to be different from Francis Fawkes, who undoubtedly is the gentleman referred to. In 1768 appeared E. B. Greene’s free and mediocre translation, in which Aphrodite’s doves become “feathered steeds,” and which ignores the Sapphic metre. In 1796, Mrs. Mary Robinson published _Sappho and Phaon_, but these sonnets of hers are not, as she claims, legitimate descendants of the real Sappho.
It was not till the nineteenth century, however, that the actual literary remains of Sappho were scientifically studied. In 1814, we have the translations of Elton, in 1815 of Egerton, in 1833 the Sapphics by Merivale, in 1854 Palgrave, in 1877 Walhouse. In 1869, Edwin Arnold’s _Poets of Greece_ gave one of the best renderings of the Aphrodite hymn in Sapphic metre and included pretty translations of nine of her fragments. Edwin Arnold called her: “that exquisite poetess ... whose genius among all feminine votaries of singing stands incontestably highest.” He protests against Swinburne’s repetition of the scandal against her sweet name which gossiping generations have invented; he rejects the Leucadian Leap and the Phaon myth. In 1871 T. W. Higginson wrote his important article on Sappho for _The Atlantic Monthly_, which can now be found in his _Atlantic Essays_. He translated several of the fragments and the hymn than which, he says, “there is not a lyrical poem in Greek literature nor in any other which has by its artistic structure inspired more enthusiasm.” He subjects to many a hard blow that paltry Scot soul, Colonel Mure, whose history of Greek literature ought to be tabooed. He repudiates the calumnies of the comedians and scandal-mongers. His appreciation of Sappho is one of the best that has been written.
In 1883 J. A. Symonds published his translations, and some of them were made for and included in that charming little book of Wharton’s, which appeared in its first edition in 1885. Even before Wharton, Swinburne had given his high estimate of Sappho and had melted together many of the fragments into his _Anactoria_. In 1894, Maurice Thompson published in _The Atlantic Monthly_, “The Sapphic Secret,” and gave a fine appreciation of Sappho with translations of the shorter fragments. During the last thirty years the discovery of new papyri has stimulated interest in Sappho and many books and articles, scientific and popular, have been printed. For a discussion of the recovery of Greek literature from papyri and the difficulties involved in deciphering and restoring Sappho’s new fragments, I refer the reader to my introduction on the subject in Miller-Robinson, _The Songs of Sappho_. I refer the reader to the bibliography for some of the books and to a note[178] for references to some popular articles, and call special attention to the volumes of Easby-Smith, Miss Patrick, Petersen, Edmonds, Cox, Tucker, and Edward Storer, most of whom give their own verse renderings of some, if not all, of Sappho’s fragments. Many modern poets, both British and American, have adapted or expanded Sappho’s fragments in English verse, Lucy Milburn, Bliss Carman, Percy Osborn, that pure Pelasgian, John Myers O’Hara. Recently Dr. Marion Mills Miller, formerly of Princeton University, has published metrical adaptations of all the old and new fragments, which are graceful and witty. He has also given the romance of Sappho’s life in verse and has made a new poetical translation of Ovid’s _Sappho to Phaon_. In the same volume (cf. Bibliography), I have published the Greek text of all Sappho with a literal translation and two introductions. One deals with the recovery and restoration of Sappho’s relics and shows the romance as well as the difficulties involved in deciphering and restoring her poems. The other discusses Sappho’s life and works.
The influence of Sappho on English and American literature has been large. We have already shown this in our citations, as it seemed better to quote some of the great English writers when we were speaking of Sappho herself. Addison was devoted to her, but his contemporary, Pope, by translating Ovid’s _Sappho to Phaon_, aggravated the ill-fame which Ovid had given her. Pope often mentions her, but without knowledge of the true Sappho. In _Moral Essays_ (_Epistle_ III, 121) we have the line: “Why she (Phryne) and Sappho raise that monstrous sum?”, referring to Lady Montague and to Miss Skerrett, the latter of whom was the mistress and later the second wife of Sir Robert Walpole. Lady Mary (Montague) is alluded to also in _Epistle_ II, 24:
As Sappho’s diamonds with her dirty smock; Or Sappho at her toilet’s greasy task, With Sappho fragrant at an evening mask.
Also in the _Prologue to the Satires_, in the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_, 369, we read: “Sappho can tell you how this man was bit.” Sappho is mentioned again in _Imitations of Horace_ (_Satire_ I, l. 83) and in _Satires of Dr. John Donne_ (II, 6), in these words: “As who knows Sappho, smiles at other whores.” In his letters to Cromwell, Pope often mentions two Sapphos, one his own and the other Cromwell’s: “My service, pray, to the other Sappho, who it is to be hoped, has not yet cast herself headlong from any of the Leucades about London, although her Phaon lately fled from her into Lincolnshire.” Even in the letter to Steele, when he makes acknowledgment to the “fine fragment of Sappho,” Pope is disingenuous and affected, as he suppresses the name of Flatman, to whom he was really indebted.
Wordsworth, influenced probably by Welcker’s defense, had a good opinion of Sappho (cf. the quotation, p. 247). But his dear friend, Sir Walter Scott, seems to be ignorant of her, though the lines on the _Evening Star_, which we have quoted (p. 64), sound strikingly Sapphic. Coleridge seems to echo the famous fragment about the pippin on the topmost bough in his _One Red Leaf on the Topmost Twig_; but as he shows no other influence of Sappho this is probably an accidental resemblance. Thomas Moore, as a translator of Anacreon with whom Sappho was generally linked, knew Sappho well and translated some of her fragments into Latin as well as English. His rendering of the _Weaving Song_ is especially charming (cf. p. 79). Another contemporary Irish poet, the Reverend George Croly, tells how:
Passion gave the living breath That shook the chords of Sappho’s lyre.
Of the post-Revolution poets the bombastic Byron, who may have learned something about Sappho from his friend and editor, Thomas Moore, refers to her most. In _Don Juan_ (III, 107), he expands, none too well, into a stanza of eight the two lines in which Sappho has painted such a beautiful miniature landscape of reunited village life. As Livingstone says in _The Legacy of Greece_ (p. 265): “the English genius is rich and lavish rather than restrained. It is less in its nature to write like Sappho.” Was Livingstone not thinking also of Swinburne and many another modern poet who plays so many indistinct, un-Greek variations on that divine line: “I loved thee once, Atthis, in the long ago,” which Mackail has called “just one sliding sigh and whisper of sound.” There is another expansion by the poet laureate of Canada, which we have quoted in a note (p. 257). It is Byron who in _Don Juan_ (III, 76) speaks of
The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung;
and in _Don Juan_ (II) he speaks of “Sappho, the sage bluestocking in whose grave All those may leap who rather would be neuter.” In the controversy between Byron and Boules with regard to the second ode, Byron says: “Is not this sublime and fierce love for one of her own sex? And is not Philips’ translation of it in the mouths of all your women? And are the English schools or the English women the more corrupt for all this?” Byron echoes the element of fire which has so often been noted in Sappho’s songs, by critics from Plutarch to Sara Teasdale. He knows the story derived from Ovid and Maximus of Tyre that she was dark (p. 35) and also the legend of the Lover’s Leap (_Childe Harold_, II, 39-41):
Childe Harold sail’d, and pass’d the barren spot, Where sad Penelope o’erlook’d the wave; And onward view’d the mount, not yet forgot, The lover’s refuge, and the Lesbian’s grave. Dark Sappho! could not verse immortal save That breast imbued with such immortal fire?
Childe Harold hail’d Leucadia’s cape afar; ... But when he saw the evening star above Leucadia’s far-projecting rock of woe, And hail’d the last resort of fruitless love, He felt, or deem’d he felt, no common glow.
While Shelley and Keats do not have clear echoes of Sappho, they come nearer to her in spirit than any other modern poets; but, even so, Keats’ sensuousness removes him from Sappho. W. L. Courtney, in a very interesting article on _Sappho and Aspasia_,[178] says: “Shelley has the true lyrical note, and Keats some of that chiselled loveliness which makes each Sapphic stanza a masterpiece.” One might even suspect that Shelley knew the second ode, at least in some secondary source, when he composed _To Constantia Singing_.
Women poets naturally have taken an interest in Sappho. Mrs. Hemans, the English lyrist (1793-1835), speaks of “Sappho’s fervent heart.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning seems to have known only the song of the rose to which we have referred above (p. 68). She is familiar with the Lover’s Leap legend, as was Byron, for she speaks in _A Vision of Poets_ of
—Sappho, with that gloriole Of ebon hair on calmèd brows— O poet-woman! none foregoes The leap, attaining the repose.
In Matthew Arnold there is much classical influence, but _A Modern Sappho_ has nothing of ancient Sappho. Walter Savage Landor,[179] who looked back to Greece from Rome and by his delightful dialogues made the ancient ages live again, is one of the few who decry Sappho. He seems to be jealous when he says that “Sappho is not the only poetess who has poured forth her melodies to Hesperus, or who had reason to thank him.” He composes ten verses himself entitled _Sappho to Hesperus_, which are not like Sappho’s at all. Likewise he takes eight lines to express the thought of the despair of the love-sick maiden over her faithless lover, which Sappho depicts in a better picture of a single couplet. Landor finds Sappho deficient in delicacy in her answer to Alcaeus and attributes to her an epigram about Alcaeus which she never wrote. He would obliterate no letter of the invocation to Hesperus by a tear of his. Among the poems of Sappho he finds one written in a different hand from the rest, which pleases him as much as any of them, but it reads like Landor and is inferior to what Sappho would have said. In _Simonidea_ he tries his hand at the _Weaving Song_:
Mother I cannot mind my wheel My fingers ache, my lips are dry, Oh if you felt the pain I feel! But oh, who ever felt as I?
Charles Kingsley wrote a beautiful poem on Sappho, which well represents her mood; but there is hardly even a faint echo of Sappho’s own fragments unless the words “all her veins ran fever” are accidentally suggested by the second ode.
SAPPHO
She lay among the myrtles on the cliff; Above her glared the noon; beneath, the sea, Upon the white horizon Atho’s peak Weltered in burning haze; all airs were dead; The cicale slept among the tamarisk’s hair; The birds sat dumb and drooping. Far below The lazy sea-weed glistened in the sun; The lazy sea-fowl dried their steaming wings; The lazy swell crept whispering up the ledge, And sank again. Great Pan was laid to rest; And Mother Earth watched by him as he slept, And hushed her myriad children for a while. She lay among the myrtles on the cliff; And sighed for sleep, for sleep that would not hear, But left her tossing still; for night and day A mighty hunger yearned within her heart, Till all her veins ran fever; and her cheek, Her long thin hands, and ivory-channelled feet, Were wasted with the wasting of her soul. Then peevishly she flung her on her face, And hid her eyeballs from the blinding glare, And fingered at the grass, and tried to cool Her crisp hot lips against the crisp hot sward: And then she raised her head, and upward cast Wild looks from homeless eyes, whose liquid light Gleamed out between deep folds of blue-black hair, As gleam twin lakes between the purple peaks Of deep Parnassus, at the mournful moon. Beside her lay her lyre. She snatched the shell, And waked wild music from its silver strings; Then tossed it sadly by.—‘Ah, hush!’ she cries, ‘Dead offspring of the tortoise and the mine! Why mock my discords with thine harmonies? Although a thrice-Olympian lot be thine, Only to echo back in every tone The moods of nobler natures than thine own.’
(CHARLES KINGSLEY)
William Cory, famous translator of the Heraclitus epigram, who published poems on Stesichorus and other classical subjects, prettily transformed one of the fragments into:
Woman dead, lie there; No record of thee Shall there ever be, Since thou dost not share Roses in Pieria grown. In the deathful cave, With the feeble troop Of the folk that droop, Lurk and flit and crave, Woman severed and far-flown.
William Morris, a fine classical scholar, as shown in his _Life and Death of Jason_, in _The Earthly Paradise_ (1868-1871), expands in a very readable form the story of the Egyptian courtesan, Rhodopis, whom Sappho’s brother, Charaxus, ransomed. About the same time (1870) Rossetti made the combination of two fragments which we have mentioned above (p. 93). Some tell us that Oscar Wilde’s heart goes out to Sappho, but so far as I have read I have not been able to find in him any trace of the real Sappho.[178a] On the other hand, Tennyson and Swinburne read her fragments over and over. Tennyson, who thought the Sapphics of Horace to be “much inferior to those of Sappho,” beautifully paraphrases the second ode in _Eleänore_ (1832). In the original edition of _Fatima_ (Dec. 1832), published under the title _O Love, Love, Love_, he prefixed the first line of this ode as a motto. Many as are the echoes of the sweet-bitter, bitter-sweet antithesis of Sappho (E. 81, above, p. 57) in Wharton and other critics, it seems strange that perhaps the most beautiful and deep-hearted of all, Elaine’s song in Tennyson’s Idyl is never cited, so far as I know.[180]
Love, art thou sweet? then bitter death must be: Love, thou art bitter; sweet is death to me. O Love, if death be sweeter, let me die.
Tennyson echoes the third fragment, as we have seen (p. 63); and he re-echoes through Horace another fragment in his _Epilogue_ (p. 36). In _Fatima_, “Love, O withering might” suggests another fragment. In _Leonine Elegiacs_ we have a better adaptation than in Byron of the Hesperus hymn:
The ancient poetess singeth, that Hesperus all things bringeth, Smoothing the wearied mind: bring me my love, Rosalind.
In _Locksley Hall Sixty Years After_ he again uses the same Sapphic fragment: “Hesper, whom the poet call’d the Bringer home of all good things.” His brother, Frederick Tennyson, who was such a good Greek scholar that he won the medal at Trinity College for a Greek poem, in his _Isles of Greece_ (1890) used several adaptations and translations of Sappho, the prettiest being those about Sappho’s child Cleïs, about Hesper and the summer noonday siesta by the cool waters. Many writers of lyrics in England and Scotland have thought of Sappho, but generally of the Phaon story, as recently did Thomas McKie in his _Lyric on Love_:[181]
Bewildered with her love and grief, From lone Leucadia’s stormy steep Distracted Sappho sought relief, By plunging in the whelming deep. The deep that closed upon her woes Not half so wild, impetuous flows.
Swinburne is one of Sappho’s greatest admirers, and we have quoted some of his praises among the appreciations of Sappho (p. 11). We have cited Noyes’ appreciation of Swinburne’s love of Sappho, and here are Thomas Hardy’s interesting lines to Swinburne:
—His singing-mistress verily was no other Than she the Lesbian, she the music-mother Of all the tribe that feel in melodies; Who leapt, love-anguished, from the Leucadian steep Into the rambling world-encircling deep Which hides her where none sees.
And one can hold in thought that nightly here His phantom may draw down to the water’s brim, And hers come up to meet it, as a dim Lone shine upon the heaving hydrosphere, And mariners wonder as they traverse near, Unknowing of her and him.
One dreams him sighing to her spectral form: “O teacher, where lies hid thy burning line; Where are those songs, O poetess divine Whose very arts are love incarnadine?” And her smile back: “Disciple true and warm, Sufficient now are thine.” ...
(THOMAS HARDY, _A Singer Asleep_)
While perhaps Swinburne exaggerates in his praise of Sappho, he owes much to the great poetess of love:
Love’s priestess, mad with pain and joy of song, Song’s priestess, mad with joy and pain of love.
(_On the Cliffs_)
He makes her say:
My blood was hot wan wine of love, And my song’s sound the sound thereof, The sound of the delight of it.
In _Tristram of Lyonesse_ he speaks of “Sweet Love, that art so bitter,” and in _Anactoria_:
My life is bitter with thy love; thine eyes Blind me, thy tresses burn me ...
His poems have many Sapphic echoes. In his youth he poured several of Sappho’s fragments into the melting pot of _Anactoria_, where she is a nerve-racked woman, torn by passion, sensuous and lascivious, altogether too “Sapphic.” The rhetoric in his lines is gorgeous, but he loses much of Sappho’s emotional power. “That one low, pellucid phrase,” as Mackail calls the line, “I say that one will think of us even hereafter,” is expanded into:
Yea, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine Except these kisses of my lips on thine Brand them with immortality; but me— Men shall not see bright fire nor hear the sea, Nor mix their hearts with music, nor behold Cast forth of heaven with feet of awful gold And plumeless wings that make the bright air blind, Lightning, with thunder for a hound behind Hunting through fields unfurrowed and unsown— But in the light and laughter, in the moan And music, and in grasp of lip and hand And shudder of water that makes felt on land The immeasurable tremor of all the sea, Memories shall mix and metaphors of me.
The famous fragment of four lines which we have quoted above (p. 69) becomes:
Thee too the years shall cover; thou shalt be As the rose born of one same blood with thee, As a song sung, as a word said, and fall Flower-wise, and be not any more at all, Nor any memory of thee anywhere; For never Muse has bound above thine hair The high Pierian flower whose graft outgrows All Summer kinship of the mortal rose And colour of deciduous days, nor shed Reflex and flush of heaven above thine head, etc.
The Aphrodite hymn which he paraphrased in _Anactoria_ is used again in _Songs of the Spring-tides_:
O thou of divers-coloured mind, O thou Deathless, God’s daughter subtle-souled ... Child of God, close craftswoman, I beseech thee; Bid not ache nor agony break nor master, Lady, my spirit.
(_On the Cliffs_)
In the same poem the mature Swinburne comes closer than in his youth to Sappho, when he says: “The tawny sweet-winged thing, Whose cry was but of spring.” But even in this poem he dilutes Sappho’s one line into six or more:
‘I loved thee’—hark, one tenderer note than all— ‘Atthis, of old time once’—one low long fall, Sighing—one long low lovely loveless call, Dying—one pause in song so flamelike fast— ‘Atthis, long since in old time overpast’— One soft first pause and last.
We cannot take leave of Swinburne without paying tribute to his Sapphics. English and American poets in general have not been successful with the Sapphic strophe, though in modern times Canning’s _Needy Knife-grinder_ is a good specimen; and Tennyson caught the real Greek cadence in his specimen:
Faded every violet, all the roses; Gone the glorious promise, and the victim Broken in this anger of Aphrodite Yields to the victor.
Many have experimented with the Sapphic stanza, as recently Clinton Scollard and Thomas S. Jones, Jr., in their _Sapphics_.
TO A HILL-TOWN
(Last two stanzas)
Sighing winds and crooning of gentle waters; Ilex boughs that tremble with tender music,— Nightingales that sing in the scented gloaming,— These for thee, Sappho!
Immortelles and chaplets of crimson roses,— Roses loved of thee and beloved of Lesbos,— Plaintive notes of lyres and the tears of lovers, These for thee, Sappho!
(T. S. J.)
TO THE LESBIAN
You, who first unloosed from the winds their burden On that lyre of magical trembling heart-strings, Merged within all sorrow and human gladness— So sang for all time:
Do you never still through the drifting shadows Seek unseen the ways that you loved in Lesbos,— Or alone for song’s everlasting splendor Were you made mortal?
(T. S. J.)
Sara Teasdale (Mrs. Filsinger), who has been called one of the best of contemporary lyric poets and who is an ardent admirer of Sappho, has written the following striking lyric in the Sapphic stanza:
THE LAMP
If I can bear your love like a lamp before me, When I go down the long steep Road of Darkness, I shall not fear the everlasting shadows, Nor cry in terror.
If I can find out God, then I shall find Him; If none can find Him, then I shall sleep soundly, Knowing how well on earth your love sufficed me, A lamp in darkness.
Marion Mills Miller[182] has written some good Sapphics, though his theory of the proper rendition of Sapphic metre will cause some controversy among scholars. We have not the space here to discuss the history of the Sapphic metre, which if not first used by Sappho was first perfected by her. It has been employed extensively in all ages. Horace has it some twenty-six times. Elizabethan renderings can be found in Robinson Ellis’ preface to his translation of Catullus. By Rhabanus (766-856) it was fitted to hymns such as those for the _Feast of St. John the Baptist_, for Candlemas, Michaelmas, and for the Feast of St. Benedict, and it was employed for his hymns in the _Common of Confessors_ and the _Common of Virgins_. But no one else has ever caught the Sapphic rhythm and melody so well as Swinburne in his early poem called _Sapphics_:
All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids, Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather, Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron Stood and beheld me.
...
Saw the reluctant Feet, the straining plumes of the doves that drew her, Looking always, looking with necks reverted, Back to Lesbos, back to the hills whereunder Shone Mitylene;
...
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, Round her woven tresses and ashen temples White as dead snow, paler than grass in summer, Ravaged with kisses,
Shone a light of fire as a crown for ever. Yea, almost the implacable Aphrodite Paused, and almost wept; such a song was that song, Yea, by her name too
Called her, saying, ‘Turn to me, O my Sappho;’ Yet she turned her face from the Loves, she saw not Tears for laughter darken immortal eyelids, Heard not about her
...
Clothed about with flame and with tears, and singing Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven, Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity, Hearing, to hear them.
AMERICAN. In America in early days little attention was paid to the content of Sappho, but the Phaon story is sometimes used, as for example by Philip Freneau of New Jersey, the “poet of the American Revolution,” the “creature of the opposition” (1752-1832). In _The Monument of Phaon_, a poem published in 1795, in the form of a dialogue between Sappho and the traveller, Ismenius informs her that he saw the tomb of her deserter, Phaon, in Sicily, erected by another lady:
Not distant far a monument arose Among the trees, and form’d of Parian stone, ... A sculptured Venus on the summit wept, A pensive Cupid dropt the parting tear.
The last lines are:
I’ll go! and from the high Leucadian steep Take my last farewell in the lover’s leap, I charge thee Phaon, by this deed of woe, To meet me in the Elysian shades below, No rival beauty shall pretend a share, Sappho alone shall walk with Phaon there. She spoke, and downward from the mountain’s height Plung’d in the plashy wave to everlasting night.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) in the index to the first volume of the _Southern Literary Messenger_ states that a stanza of Sappho’s second ode is embodied in his poem, _To Sarah_:
In such an hour when are forgot The World, its cares and my own lot Thou seemest then to be A gentle guarding spirit given To guide my wandering thoughts to heaven If they should stray from thee.
In _Ulalume_ there is a possible echo of fragment (E. 16):
In terror she spoke, letting sink her Wings till they trailed in the dust, In agony sobbed, letting sink her Plumes till they trailed in the dust.
In _Al Aaraaf_, I, 43 ff., Poe says in a note that he is referring to Sappho in the lines:
... lilies such as rear’d the head On the fair Capo Deucato, and sprang So eagerly around about to hang Upon the flying footsteps—deep pride— Of her who lov’d a mortal—and so died.
Dr. Thomas O. Mabbott of Columbia University has called my attention to the fact that Poe published a version of Sappho’s second ode by Mary E. Hewitt in _Broadway Journal_, I, no. 24 (1845); that he knew “Udoch’s” note (_Southern Literary Messenger_, I, p. 454, April, 1835) where there is a reference to the _Spectator_, no. 229; and that the paper, _Some Ancient Greek Authors_, signed P. in the _Southern Literary Messenger_ for April, 1836, where a conventional account of Sappho is given, was probably written by Poe.
Later American literature, like that of other countries, is full of the name of Sappho, even if it does not show a profound knowledge of the fragments of the actual Sappho. In any case, such dramas and poems and novels reveal the tremendous potentiality of her name. We have referred to translations or adaptations by Easby-Smith, Lucy Milburn, J. M. O’Hara, Bliss Carman, Petersen, Storer, and Marion Mills Miller. There have been renderings of individual poems by Felton, Higginson, Gildersleeve, Shorey, Lawton, Appleton, Whicher, Horton, Drake, and others; the first ode has been well rendered in the metre of the original by Professor Appleton, Professor Fairclough, and others (cf. pp. 47-52 above).[73] We cannot list here all the American renderings of single songs or fragments, although we have incidentally in this book mentioned many such, and an abundance of references will be found in the notes. Nor can we give the titles of all the tragedies and poems which have been inspired by the name of Sappho. We select only a few of the more important. There is an interesting tragedy in five acts called _Sappho of Lesbos_ by Mrs. Estelle Lewis (“Stella”), whom Edgar Allan Poe called “the rival of Sappho.” The play was put on the stage in London in 1868 and afterwards was given on the Athenian stage in a modern Greek version. It reached a seventh edition. It should be credited to America, since Mrs. Lewis was Miss Anna Blanche Robinson, born near Baltimore in 1824. She translated Virgil’s _Aeneid_ when a mere schoolgirl, and afterwards married Mr. Lewis of Brooklyn, New York. She travelled much abroad, but returned to America, where she wrote some of the plays before she went to live in London in 1865. In 1876 was published Ellen Frothingham’s translation of Grillparzer’s _Sappho_. In 1900-1913 H. V. Sutherland wrote his _Sappho and Phaon_, and in 1907 was published Percy Mackaye’s tragedy with the same title. Even when he was a student at Harvard, he wrote an entirely distinct lyric drama in verse, entitled _Sappho, or Archilochus and Hipponax_, in which he himself acted with a gathering of Harvard and Wellesley students in January, 1896. Unfortunately this drama has not been published. The published play is written mostly in iambic pentameter blank verse, with a few lyrics and some trochaic and dactylic lines; there are also several excellent Sapphics. It has never been very successful on the stage, although the music given with it is still so popular that it has been recently published by Professor Stanley (cf. bibliography). In the prologue a manuscript of Sappho’s poems is imagined to have been found in excavating the theatre of Varius at Herculaneum, just as Lucy Milburn, who lived in Lesbos for a while, pretended that she procured her poems from papyri which she had discovered in a metal case in the Orient. The scene of the tragedy is an olive grove on a promontory overlooking the Aegean Sea. In the first act we have Atthis betrothed to Larichus, and Anactoria deserted by Alcaeus for Sappho. Pittacus is one of Sappho’s suitors who quarrels with Alcaeus and in trying to strike him hits the slave Phaon. In the second act Sappho releases Phaon from his yoke and they flee from Alcaeus after Phaon has struck him with his spear. In the third act Phaon again strikes at Alcaeus, but this time hits his own boy. Thalassa, his wife, shows him his own dead child and so he returns to her, and the rejected Sappho springs into the misty sea. There are inappropriate prose interludes with a pantomime of the drunken Hercules. Sappho is here again not the real Sappho but the Sappho of tradition, which is rather strange, as several of Sappho’s fragments, by no means all that might have been suitable, are accurately and charmingly paraphrased. This shows that Mackaye knew the fragments of Sappho, but he has no real understanding of Sappho herself, for his Sappho is given to unrestrained love and she rejects a great poet and statesman for the married slave into whom Mackaye has transformed Phaon. I can quote only the very dramatic hymn to Poseidon and Aphrodite:
God of the generations, pain, and death, I bow to thee. Not for love’s sake is love’s Fierce happiness, but for the after-race. Yet, thou eternal Watcher of the tides, Knowing their passions, tell me! Why must we Rapturous beings of the spray and storm That, chanting, beat our hearts against thy shores Of aspiration—ebb? ebb and return Into the songless deep? are we no more Than foam upon thy garment?
Another wave has broken at your feet And, moaning, wanes into oblivion. But not its radiance. That flashes back Into the morning, and shall flame again Over a myriad waves. That flame am I, Nor thou, Poseidon, shalt extinguish me. My spirit is thy changeling, and returns To her, who glows beyond the stars of birth— To her, who is herself time’s passion star.
Many individual American poems have also taken the title or themes from Sappho. Oliver Wendell Holmes refers to her in the fourth stanza of _The Voiceless_:
Not where Leucadian breezes sweep O’er Sappho’s memory-haunted billow, But where the glistening night-dews weep On nameless sorrow’s churchyard pillow.
(_The Atlantic Monthly_, Oct. 1858)
Samuel Latham Mitchill (1764-1831) reflects Sappho’s love of the rose in an imaginary dialogue between Sappho and her younger contemporary from Samos, Pythagoras:
PYTHAGORAS AND SAPPHO, _or_ THE DIAMOND AND THE ROSE
Long time ago, ’tis well expressed, Pythagoras the seer This question artfully addressed To beauteous Sappho’s ear:
“When hence thou shalt be forced to flee, By transmigration’s power, Wouldst thou indeed prefer to be A jewel or a flower?”
The Lesbian maid these words returned To greet the Samian sage, “For gems my taste has never burned, And flowers my choice engage.
“The glittering stones, though rich and rare, No animation know, While vegetables fine and fair With vital action glow.
“The senseless gem no pleasure moves, Displayed in fashion’s use, But flowers enjoy their gentle loves, And progeny produce.
“Then when I shall surmount,” she cried, “Rude dissolution’s storm, Oh! let me not be petrified, But wear a living form.
“Those matchless rays the diamond shows, With promptness I decline, That I may dwell within the rose And make its blossoms mine.”
In recent years many poems have appeared on Sappho. For example, thinking perhaps of the story that Solon asked his nephew to teach him a song of Sappho before he died, and echoing the epithet of “sweetly smiling” in Alcaeus’ fragment, Richard Hovey (1864-1900) wrote in _The Independent_, April 30, 1896, _A Dream of Sappho_:
I dreamed of Sappho on a summer night, Her nightingales were singing in the trees Beside the castled river; and the wind Fell like a woman’s fingers on my cheek, And then I slept and dreamed and marked no change; The night went on with me into my dream, This only I remember, that I said: ‘O Sappho! ere I leave this paradise, Sing me one song of those lost books of yours For which we poets still go sorrowing; That when I meet my fellows on the earth I may rejoice them more than many pearls;’ And she, the sweetly-smiling, answered me, As one who dreams: ‘I have forgotten them!’
We have referred above to Gamaliel Bradford’s use of Sappho’s apple on the topmost bough; and Maurice Thompson, the author of _Alice of Old Vincennes_ and the _Sapphic Secret_, published as his last song, _Sappho’s Apple_ in _The Independent_, Feb. 21, 1901:
SAPPHO’S APPLE
A dreamy languor lapsed along, And stirred the dusky-bannered boughs; With half a sigh and half a song The crooning tree did nod and drowse, While far aloft blush-tinted hung One perfect apple maiden-sweet, At which the gatherers vainly flung, And could not get to hoard or eat.
“Reddest and best,” they growled and went Slowly away, each with his load Fragrant upon his shoulders bent, The hill-flowers darkening where they trode; “Reddest and best; but not for us; Some loafing lout will see it fall; The laborer’s prize—’twas ever thus— Is his who never works at all!”
Soon came a vagrant, loitering, His young face browned by wind and sun, Weary, yet blithe and prone to sing, Tramping his way to Avalon; Even I it was, who, long athirst And hungry, saw the apple shine; Then wondrous wild sweet singing burst Flame-like across these lips of mine.
“O, ruby-flushed and flaring gold, Thou splendid lone one left for me, Apple of love to filch and hold, Fruit-glory of a kingly tree! Drop, drop into my hand, That I may hide thee in my breast, And bear thee far o’er sea and land, A captive, to the purple West.”
Renée Vivien (1877-1909), an American poetess of great promise who died all too young and all too unknown to students of Sappho (see bibliography), made some very nice French verse translations of Sappho which were published under a pseudonym in 1903 and reprinted anonymously in 1909. She pays her tribute to Sappho in these two verses:
Les siècles attentifs se penchent pour entendre Les lambeaux de tes chants....
The Maryland poet, Father John B. Tabb, the only American who with Emerson was admitted to the Oxford _Garland Series on Epigrams_, has two poems on Sappho, in the first of which Keats is appropriately classed with Sappho:[183]
KEATS—SAPPHO
Methinks, when first the nightingale Was mated to thy deathless song, That Sappho with emotion pale, Amid the Olympian throng, Again, as in the Lesbian grove, Stood listening with lips apart, To hear in thy melodious love The pantings of her heart.
SAPPHO
A light upon the headland, flaming far, We see thee o’er the widening waves of time, Impassioned as a palpitating star, Big with prophetic destiny sublime: A momentary flash—a burst of song— Then silence, and a withering blank of pain. We wait, alas! in tedious vigils long, The meteor-gleam that cometh not again! Our eyes are heavy, and our visage wan: Our breath—a phantom of the darkness—glides Ghostlike to swell the dismal caravan Of shadows, where thy lingering splendor hides, Till, with our tears and ineffectual sighs, We quench the spark a smouldering hope supplies.
We have already referred to Alan Seeger’s use of the famous midnight fragment (p. 78). The magazines are fond of the subject of Sappho and Phaon and have countless poems which refer to Phaon and the Leucadian Leap. Buchanan has a poem called _The Leucadian Rock_; and Edward J. O’Brien in the _Liberator_ says:
Stir not the grasses here, O wandering zephyr, For Phaon travelled far over alien foam Before his footsteps turned in soft contentment Home to the green threshold He had forgotten.
Sara Teasdale, the modern burning American Sappho, has a poem on _Phaon and the Leucadian Leap_ in _Scribner’s Magazine_, for December, 1913, pp. 725-6. The poem is too long to quote entire, and I can give only a few lines:
Farewell; across the threshold many feet Shall pass, but never Sappho’s feet again. ... ‘Whither goes Sappho lonely in the night?’ Whither goes Sappho? Whither all men go, But they go driven, straining back with fear, And Sappho goes as lightly as a leaf Blown from brown autumn forests to the sea. ... Yet they shall say: ‘It was for Cercolas— She died because she could not bear her love.’ ... Others shall say: ‘Grave Dica wrought her death.’ ... Ah, Dica, it is not for thee I go. And not for Phaon, tho’ his ship lifts sail Here in the windless harbor, for the south. ... How should they know that Sappho lived and died Faithful to love, not faithful to the lover, ... The gods have given life, I gave them song; The debt is paid and now I turn to go.
Alfred Noyes, in his poem _In Memory of Swinburne_ uses the fragment which Swinburne himself expanded (cf. p. 12). Edwin Arlington Robinson[184] has translated _The Dust of Timas_ (cf. p. 100), which has recently been diluted by William Stebbing into twelve verses in his poem, _A Bride in Death_. Robinson’s rendering of Posidippus’ epigram on Doricha is also excellent:
So now the very bones of you are gone Where they were dust and ashes long ago; And there was the last ribbon you tied on To bind your hair, and that is dust also; And somewhere there is dust that was of old A soft and scented garment that you wore— The same that once till dawn did closely fold You in with fair Charaxus, fair no more.
But Sappho, and the white leaves of her song, Will make your name a word for all to learn, And all to love thereafter, even while It’s but a name; and this will be as long As there are distant ships that will return Again to your Naucratis and the Nile.
There is little of Sappho except in name in Agnes Kendrick Gray’s verses[185] or in those of William Alexander Percy.[186] Harry Kemp is thinking of Byron rather than Sappho herself when he says that the lines, “the Isles of Greece where burning Sappho loved and sung,” went to his soul like a white hot iron. There is more in George Horton,[187] who in the last poem on Sappho which I have seen from his pen has a refrain on “bitter-sweet.” Mr. Horton forgets that we do know that Pittacus, (see illustration Pl. 2) was “lord of Lesbos’ isle,” but the general sentiment is true all the same:
BALLADE OF SAPPHO’S FAME
Oh, who was lord of Lesbos’ isle When Sappho sang for many a year, And great Apollo’s self the while, Ceased from the lyre and bent to hear? The titles to his heart so near, His lineage, who can now repeat? Yet she escaped oblivion drear Who said that love is “bitter-sweet.”
And who by wealth or selfish guile became the island’s proudest peer? What siren with voluptuous wile Was potent at the royal ear? Who gained renown with sword and spear? Their fame is dust beneath the feet Of Time, and she alone is dear Who said that love is “bitter-sweet.”
Our joy is sadder than the smile Of grief that cannot shed a tear; Our lives are like a little mile Marked on the orbit of a sphere; The wisdom that we most revere Is mixed with folly and defeat: Her laurel never can grow sere Who said that love is “bitter-sweet.”
ENVOI
From out that pallid atmosphere Where dawn and darkness vaguely meet, Comes but her lark-note cool and clear Who said that love is “bitter-sweet.”
I have quoted enough to discredit “The King of the Black Isles” who in the _Line O’Type_ of the _Chicago Tribune_ for November, 1922, publishes a poem with the alliterative caption, _A Lady Lived in Lesbos_.[188] The last of the three stanzas is:
We have forgotten beauty and all our goods are good, And little we remember now the dryads and the wood, And only old philosophers and foolish dreamers know What lady lived in Lesbos a weary time ago.
Even as this book goes to press, Tristram Tupper issues his novel, _Adventuring_ (Doran Co., N. Y., 1923), in which Sappho is discovered even down in the valley of the Shenandoah:
“On such a night Jay Singleton discovered the most beloved singer of all the ages. Not in the Lesbian starlit dusk, nor yet in the golden-sandaled dawn, but beneath a smoky lamp in the valley of the Shenandoah. Found her in a book. And he liked the cut of her verses—three pentameters followed by a dipody; and he liked the cut of her clothes—sort of loose and careless before the Christian era. ‘No use falling in love,’ said Jay Singleton to himself. ‘She sang her songs six hundred years B.C.’
“But he pored over another fragment, translated another quatrain, looked up each word, strung them together, made a kind of rime. In a word, Jay Singleton tried to improve a bit on the inimitable Sappho. And that night out on his porch where no one could hear, not even at the post office quarter of a mile away, he struck the strings of his guitar and he sang this surprising Sapphic:
Man is peer of gods in those moments after Love has silenced song and has banished laughter; Then—to her who smiles at him softly through tears— He has no peers.
“He laid aside his guitar and lit his pipe, that made a pink glow in the darkness. He tried to form in his mind an image of Sappho and of her Isle of Lesbos, tried to wander back through the labyrinthine ages, ages misty with music, dusky with gold, red with wars, and blushing with roses—forgotten wars, faded roses mingling to form the perfume of the centuries. He pulled on his pipe. ‘Where is she now?’ Easy enough to imagine Sappho with her ivory throat, her violet eyes and sandals of golden dawn, back in the golden dawn of poetry. For, overhead, these were her stars. But he wondered about the form her singing soul had taken after she had leaped into the Ionian Sea. Had the waters quenched the spark, or was her soul immortal—a flame that twenty-five hundred years had failed to extinguish? Again he asked: ‘Where are you now? Where in this, the most cluttered up of all the ages?’ He tried to imagine her beside the Little Calfpasture—Sappho beside the Calfpasture Creek, sighing, laughing, singing her lyrics! ‘No use falling in love! Sang your songs twenty-five hundred years ago!’”
In May, 1922, Miss Bertha Bennett of Carleton College produced an interesting pageant “A Grecian Festival” on the Sappho and Phaon story, with adaptations of Sappho’s first two odes and representing Sappho as leaping into Lyman lake. It ends with the union of Sappho and Phaon, after death, on Mt. Olympus.
AN ADDENDUM ON SAPPHO IN RUSSIAN
Many Russian writers mention Sappho, especially Vyacheslav Ivanov; and in a volume republished in Berlin, 1923, (_Zovy Drevnosti_, _Echoes of the Past_) Konstantin Dmitriyevich Balmont has translated eight of Sappho’s fragments. The same poet (_Zacharovanny Grot_, _The Enchanted Grotto_, vol. III, 1908) has published a poem on Sappho which my former student, now of Columbia University, Dr. Clarence Manning, has translated in the original metre:
O Sappho, thou dost know alone How hard the poet strives revealing The secrets beauty once has shown In moments of immortal feeling.
O Sappho, thou dost know alone— Thy name a perfume’s sweetness holy— The dreams that we one day have known But lost unspoken, faded wholly.
O Sappho, thou dost know alone How clearly in uncounted masses Still unreached flowers yet are grown Where life through the charmed grotto passes.
XII. SAPPHO’S INFLUENCE ON MUSIC
On the operatic stage Sappho has had much influence; and above I have told how Lamartine said that Sappho was a superb subject for an opera, although he never wrote the opera, and how Grillparzer was asked to write an opera on Sappho. In French we have a lyrical tragedy, _Sapho_, by Empis and Courniol (1818), Delavault’s _Sapho_ and Gounod’s _Sapho_ (1851); and a few years ago (1897) Massenet produced his _Sapho_. In Italian there is Pacini’s _Saffo_ (Naples 1840); in Dutch, Bree’s _Sapho_; in German, Schwartzendorf’s _Sappho_ and Kanne’s _Sappho_; in Bohemian, there is Reicha’s _Sappho_; and in Russian, Lissenko’s _Sappho_.
Brahms composed a _Sapphic Ode_, which is very familiar because it is often sung to-day and there is an English victrola record of it by Julia Clausen, but while it deals with Sappho’s favorite flower, the rose, it is Sapphic only in name and metre:
Rosen brach ich nachts mir am dunklen Hage. Süsser hauchten Duft sie, als je am Tage; Doch verstreuten reich die bewegten Aeste Thau, der mich nässte. Auch der Küsse Duft mich wie nie berückte, Die ich nachts von Strauch deiner Lippen pflückte; Doch auch dir bewegt ein Gemüth gleich jenen, Thauten die Thränen.
(Words by HANS SCHMIDT)
From the time of the _Schemata Musica_ printed in Volger’s edition of 1810, down to the music published by G. Cipollini in 1890 in his brother’s _Saffo_, many have put Sappho’s songs to music. Even in the last few years many have tried their hand at the task. Perhaps the most successful music, with a real touch of the old Greek flavor, is that which was composed by Professor Stanley for several of Sappho’s fragments in connection with Mr. Harrison Grey Fiske’s stage presentation of Percy Mackaye’s _Sappho and Phaon_. This has been reprinted this year in a general treatment of Greek music by Professor Stanley of the University of Michigan. The selections published include “Builders, Build the Roof-Beam High, Hymenaeon”; “Gath’rers, What Have We Forgot, Hymenaeon!”; “What shall we do, Cytherea?”; “Hollow Shell, Horny Shell”; “Akoue, Poseidon”; “Hesper, Eleleu”, etc. Miss Pearl C. Wilson, of Miss Chandor’s School in New York, a former student of Professor Perry of Columbia University, without making any pretense of reproducing the ancient music has composed musical accompaniments for several of the odes and also of the new fragments, which have been sung with much success. She tried to illustrate the metre of each fragment, but found it more satisfactory to write the music without the modern division into bars and rests, simply indicating the long and short syllables by notes of different values. This makes possible a lyric delivery of the poems, each line determined solely by the words and their meaning. In that way the simple melodies as expressions of the thought gain a great deal when sung. I can testify from my own public experiments in readings from Sappho that her fragments can be much better recited or chanted when accompanied by music, as I am convinced they were originally.
XIII. EPILOGUE AND CONCLUSION
I venture to hope that out of all I have written in the preceding pages some fairly clear idea of Sappho may have emerged. Yet the discussion has had to wander widely through literature which has, indeed, been influenced strongly by her name but journeys far from the Lesbian lyrist herself. In closing this study it may be well, therefore, to return to the woman and the poet and add some final words.
The fragments of many other ancient poets have been collected for merely scholastic reasons, but Sappho’s literary remains are more than antique specimens. They constitute a great and noble literature and some of the latest found are among the best. They often rank as highly as the completed poems of other writers—surely an unparalleled phenomenon. In them we recognize the creator’s genius as clearly as in a fragmentary torso of Phidias we see the sculptor’s art in every chiselled line. While we miss the fullness of her life, we can restore her figure because the fragments are “the real blood of her heart and the real flame of her thought.” Nearly every line of them has been imitated, dilated or diluted, and, disgraceful to say, many who have drunk of her living water have poisoned it into stagnant and salacious slime. There is nothing like this in the history of literature. Higginson in 1871 summarized the case:
“What other woman played such a part in moulding the great literature that has moulded the world? Colonel Mure thinks that a hundred such women might have demoralized all Greece. But it grew demoralized at any rate; and even the island where Sappho taught took its share in the degradation. If, on the other hand, the view taken of her by more careful criticism be correct, a hundred such women might have done much to save it. Modern nations must again take up the problem where Athens failed and Lesbos only pointed the way to the solution,—to create a civilization where the highest culture shall be extended to woman also. It is not enough that we should dream, with Plato, of a republic where man is free and woman but a serf. The aspirations of modern life culminate, like the greatest of modern poems, in the elevation of womanhood. ‘Die ewige Weibliche zieht uns hinan.’”
Sappho, then, was a pure and good woman, busily and successfully engaged in the work of her chosen profession. She was a teacher of singing and dancing and the technique of poetry, and to give her pupils the finest models she applied herself so seriously to the lyric art that she reached a perfection in it to which no other classic poet attained. If she ever collected her verse it was only to promote the idealization of marriage pageants, and not with the purpose of publishing a full edition of her songs. It would not be safe to deny that there was a practically useful collection of Sappho’s songs in the archives of her school or guild or in the Temple of Aphrodite, but no copies were sold at the book-stalls in her own day as certainly was later the case in fifth century Athens.
Sappho, in fact, must be listed with two other names which, taken together, form a unique and astonishing group, a group whose peculiar and distinguishing feature is that their enduring thoughts and imperishable words were indispensable necessities in their life-work rather than productions as literature for the sake of literature. It is not because of the accidental alliteration that we rank Sappho with Socrates and Shakespeare. These great exemplars of song, ethics, and drama, respectively, were alike in that it was not by their intention that their works became literature. Shakespeare as a theatrical manager was obliged by his position to write plays that would attract audiences. He was compelled by his genius to make those dramas imperishable. But if he had had his way none of them would ever have been printed. Our gratitude must be given to prompters’ copies and to literary thieves. Socrates was a teacher whose purely oral lessons his pupils, Plato and Xenophon, committed to writing that the master’s inspiring thoughts might not die.
Socrates’ love for his young disciples was a love passing the love of women. The myriad-minded man of Stratford,—“Gentle Will,” as his comrades called him,—had an affectionate sympathy with all sorts and conditions of his fellow-men. Sappho’s love for her girl friends was so intense that there are those who, not knowing how passionate the love of woman can be for woman, still fail, despite the evidence, to recognize a love more sublime even than that for man.
How jealous she could be of her family’s good name! More than once she prays that no dishonor may come to her house. How jealous also of those who sought to win away the love of her girls and of the girls themselves when any of them seemed to have forgotten her! How intensely, too, she could hate, the outbursting passion against the “she-dog” at the close of fragment E 36, which we have translated on page 20, may serve to suggest. The fierceness of her satire is also incidentally shown in this as well as in other fragments. (See E 35, 37, 71, _et al._)
Like Socrates and Shakespeare Sappho had a planetary mind swinging in its orbit with ease through all realms, whether of nature, or human nature, or the divine nature of the unseen world. This need not be elaborated here, save in Sappho’s case. But it may be worth while to repeat some of the evidence as to Sappho’s wide range of thought as it is seen in a few typical instances. She loved the roses, the clover, and the anthrysc. She loved the doves and the nightingales, and knew their colorings and discerned their ways. But the unplucked apple on the top of the topmost bough, the myriad ears of the listening night that hears what the girl across the sea says and relays it right over the waves, the rosy-fingered moon well above the horizon and launching light across the rolling sea and over the fields of flowers, reveal even in the fragments which are “small but roses” how surpassing were her instincts for nature’s loftier meanings as well as its minute details and how exquisite were her comparisons. As for the phases of love—they were her daily business,—and each new couple whose wedding festivities she arranged in song gave her new material. Where in all literature is there a finer example of the union of human love along with insight into the soul of nature than in the ode, _To Absent Anactoria_? (See p. 72).
As we have said, she knew the heart of the Greek bride and her dread at the loss of her free virginity. Mother love, too, was never more exquisitely portrayed than in the song we have quoted on pp. 27-28. But the subject of woman’s love for woman is peculiarly her own. The finest lines in all Sappho’s poetry are those descriptive of Anactoria in a poem which we might call _Old Love is Best_ (E. 38, pp. 82-83 above).
Finished style, the γλαφυρὸς χαρακτήρ, as the Greek critics called it, simple purity but effective luminosity and exquisite rarity of expression, faultless constraint, fine taste in choosing appropriate subjects, marvellous verbal economy, comprehensive power in single words, fiery passion as well as austerity, richness and beauty, good arrangement of words, assonance, alliteration, consonantal harmonies, lingering vowel music and melody, produced often by the repetition of long vowels, the soft Aeolic quality of the Greek sounds, swift changes of nature and enchanting images, varied metres, but above all else, charm, that greatest characteristic of Sappho so emphasized by the ancients and moderns,—all these qualities she used that her songs and hymns might be perfect. It is this simple natural perfection of her art, like the “nothing too much” of the Parthenon frieze, that makes her untranslatable, even though it is precisely the quality which modern literature lacks but needs. Her nature was so great and her genius so marvellous and her purposes so inexorable that, in attending with her whole soul to her business as the poetic and musical caterer for successive weddings upon an ancient and interesting island, she incidentally made word-music and created thought-images which sounded the depths and scaled the heights of human passion and which winged their way to distant shores. The strains of her songs are beginning to be heard everywhere and are ever growing clearer and sweeter in this present timely century, the century of woman’s exaltation and glorification. Her genius is concisely summed up by Watts-Dunton in his _Essay on Poetry_, as follows: “_Never before these songs were sung, and never since, did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry like hers; and, from the executive point of view, in directness, in lucidity, in that high, imperious verbal economy which only nature can teach the artist, she has no equal, and none worthy to take the place of second._”
In the Lesbus and the Asia Minor of Sappho’s day as in those of Homer, women were at their zenith and were allowed greater freedom in life and speech than in later Athens where woman’s position had reached its nadir, even though literature and art had attained their highest bloom. In Athens women were cabin’d, cribb’d, confined. The more ancient Greeks in general, however, even if their law made the wife the property of her lord and master, appreciated their women and considered them close to the divine, else they would not have appointed them to important priesthoods and other offices and to be interpreters of the desires of the gods and counsellors of their own political troubles. Sappho was a twentieth century woman living in sixth century Lesbus, who could go about town without a chaperon and take part in the most intellectual and religious meetings. Of course she was “ni une sainte ni surtout une prude,” as Reinach says. Rarely is a woman who is interesting a “saint.” Reinach compares her also to Madame de Sévigné, who wrote to her daughter “paroles de feu et de fièvre ... tout pareils à ceux de l’amour.” What with her teaching, with her own writings, and with the executive work of the _hetairiai_, those ancient Y. W. C. A.’s for the cultivation of poetry and music, which Mackail has so aptly compared with the Courts of Love which existed in Languedoc from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, she was too noble and too busy to be devoted to ignobler ways, falsely ascribed to her. But her love was deeper than that of the schoolgirl in convent, conservatory of music, or literary club. She was no Ruskin-like school-mistress presiding over a group of virtuous but bold young women. She was respectable and respected. There was in her sacred guild under the patronage of Aphrodite “l’étroite et tendre intimité de jeunes filles de bonne naissance entre elles et avec leurs dirigeantes” (Reinach). But we utterly reject to-day the Athenian vaudeville idea of Sappho, who never should have been branded a courtesan.
How the fine radiance Sappho shed on woman’s love for woman and on her love of love and on the glory of pure and honorable marriage shines at last across these twenty-five hundred years! Her figure stands there on her isle. In itself it is white marble veined with gold. Much mud from many lands has been flung against it. For centuries, almost for millenniums, it has been soiled and stained. Even good men have come to think of the stains as integral parts of the statue, and of the gold as base metal. But the winds and rains of time have tired out the soilers and washed the figure white and clean of all Attic and all later defilings. It is all pure marble now, veined with warm gold. Something that suggests the Pygmalion miracle is happening to it. The statue is alive and luminous with its own beauty, grace, and power. Sappho’s poetry deals with the eternal experiences of the human heart and carries with it those touches which make the whole world kin. As T. G. Tucker says: “Love and Sorrow are re-born with every human being. Time and civilisation make little difference.”
And not unhallowed was the page By wingèd Love inscribed, to assuage The pangs of vain pursuit; Love listening while the Lesbian Maid With finest touch of passion swayed Her own Aeolian lute.
(WORDSWORTH, _Upon the Same Occasion_, 1819)
NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES
(The dates given in the text with authors are generally those of _floruit_, _i.e._ about the fortieth year.)
[1] Somewhere recently in a newspaper I saw these lines entitled, _They Lived Too Soon_:
I fear Cleopatra was wasted Way back in her misty old realm. As matters befell, she did fairly well But she’d have been great in a film. If Dido and Sappho were with us— They’re advertised widely, you see— And Helen of Troy—good gracious My boy, what movie successes they’d be.
[2] _Oxyrhynchus Papyri_, XV. 1787, frag. 4.
[3] Galen, _Protrep._, 2.
[4] _Classical Philology_, XVIII. 35 ff. (1923).
[5] Sir Edward Cook, _More Literary Recreations_, 1919, p. 205, quotes Wharton with approval to the effect that Tennyson called Sappho “the poet, implying her supremacy by the absence of any added epithet.”
[6] _Anth. Pal._, VII. 16.
[7] Athenaeus, _Deipnosophistae_ (Doctors at dinner), 596 b.
[8] _Odes_, IV. 9. 11.
[9] _Amatorius_, 18.
[10] Athenaeus, 598 b.
[11] _Loves_, 30.
[12] Lord Neaves, _The Greek Anthology_, p. 113.
[13] _Anth. Pal._, VII. 15.
[14] Fraenkel, _Inschriften von Pergamon_, I, p. 118, no. 198; _C. I. G._ 3555.
[15] _Sappho und Simonides_, p. 41, 1.
[16] _Anth. Pal._, IX. 66.
[17] _Anth. Pal._, VII. 14.
[18] _Anth. Pal._, VII. 407.
[19] _Anth. Pal._, IX. 189. Cf. A. J. Butler, _Amaranth and Asphodel_, Oxford, 1922, p. 195. The ending is “you shall fain Deem that Calliope doth hymn the strain.”
[20] _Anth. Pal._, IX. 571.
[21] XXXV. 16.
[22] Cf. also Epigr. LXX, Jacobs, II, p. 25; Plut., _Amat._, XII, p. 42.
[23] P. 186 (1921).
[24] 280, pp. 817-818. Cf. also _Posthumous Essays_ in _Sat. Rev._, Feb. 21, 1914.
[25] Professor Scribner in _The Classical Weekly_ XV, 1921, p. 78, says “there still is room for a work giving a complete critical treatment of Sappho’s influence on ancient and modern literature down to our own time.”
[26] Athenaeus, 599 c; _Oxyr. Pap._, XV. 1800.
[27] Strabo, 618; Athenaeus, 85 c.
[28] Cf. Herodotus, II. 135; Schol. Plato, _Phaedrus_, 235 c; _Ox. Pap._, XV. 1800. The papyrus gives Scamandrus, which is otherwise known as a good Lesbian name, as well as Scamandronymus. Scamandrus like Suidas’ Scamon is an abbreviation or _Kosenamen_.
[29] _Her._, XV. 61.
[30] Confirmed by the new papyrus. The more correct form would be Clévis (Κλεῦις or Κλεῖϊς) after the founder of Lesbus, who was named Κλεύας, Strabo, 582.
[31] Cf. Edmonds, pp. 144-147.
[32] Hiller von Gaertringen, _Inschriften von Priene_, 18; for Erygyius cf. also Diodorus, XVII. 81, 83; Arrian, III. 6, 5.
[33] The name occurs as a love-name on the interior of an Attic cylix in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, signed by Hieron (480 B.C.), published in _American Journal of Archaeology_, XXVII. 274 (1923). Near a female figure dancing to the accompaniment of the double flute played by a satyr is the inscription, “Beautiful Rhodopis.” Cf. also Lucian, _De Saltatione_, 2.
[34] Cf. Poulsen, _Delphi_, London, 1920, pp. 31, 72, 205, 294.
[35] Edmonds’ first poetical translation is given in his _Sappho in the Added Light of the New Fragments_, p. 8; but he gives a revised prose version in the _Classical Review_, XXXIV. 5-6 (1920) and in _Lyra Graeca_, I, p. 207.
[36] Solmsen in _Rhein. Mus._, LVI. 502, 1 (1901) gives arguments for the spelling with double p.
[37] 599 c.
[38] γέγονε often means flourished, not “was born.” Those who put Sappho’s birth as late as 610 forget this.
[39] Strabo, 617, also makes Sappho contemporary with Pittacus and Alcaeus. Eusebius puts the _floruit_ of Sappho in the first year of the forty-fifth Olympiad (599 B.C.). Edmonds, _Lyra Graeca_, I, p. 142, adopts the reading Ol. 45, 2 (598 B.C.), but this would be rather the date of her exile.
[40] The abbreviation E, is used throughout for Edmonds, _Lyra Graeca_, vol. I.
[41] Cf. Prinz, _Funde aus Naukratis_, 1906, pp. 57 ff.
[42] II. 134.
[43] In another fragment (E. 35) Edmonds calls Sappho “an old bird,” but this is a very dubious restoration based on only three preserved letters.
[44] _Flor._, XXIX. 58.
[45] Dioscorides in _Anth. Pal._, VII. 407 has Eresus; and coins and Suidas give both towns. Cf. Wilamowitz, _Sappho und Simonides_, 23; Her. II. 135 and references in Jacoby, _Das Marmor Parium_, 1904, p. 101. Many sources call Sappho a Mytilenaean, Schol. to Pindar (E. p. 144); Schol. Plato, _Phaedrus_, 235 c; Arist., _Rhet._, 1398 b; _Anth. Pal._, VII. 17. Some scholars assume that there were two Sapphos, but the two traditions can easily be reconciled by supposing that Sappho belonged to both cities, born at Eresus but later living at Mytilene. Edmonds thinks that Strabo would have mentioned Sappho when he is speaking of Eresus (618), had he believed her to have been born there, but Strabo omits many famous writers. The tradition of two Sapphos is found also in Aelian, _Historical Miscellanies_, XII. 19 and in Suidas. Cf. the novel _Beulah_ by Augusta Evans, pp. 216-218: “Do you think that Sappho’s frenzy was established by the Leucadian leap? You confound the poetess with a Sappho, who lived later, and threw herself into the sea from the promontory of Leucate. Doubtless she too had ‘poetic idiosyncrasies,’ but her spotless life, and I believe natural death, afford no indication of an unsound intellect.”
[46] _Studies of the Greek Poets_, vol. I., pp. 307 ff. (American ed.)
[47] I. 9.
[48] Cf. _The Poet Loves of Sappho_ from the third book of _A Catalogue of Things Relating to Love_, an elegiac poem by Hermesianax, translated by J. Bailey.
[49] Athenaeus, 450 e.
[50] _Class. Phil._, XIII. 348 (1918).
[51] XVIII. 9.
[52] Edmonds, 82, p. 240.
[53] _Oxyrhynchus Papyri_, XV, 1922, 1800. Also now published in Miller-Robinson, _The Songs of Sappho_.
[54] Lunák, _Quaestiones Sapphicae_, Kazan, 1888.
[55] Lucy Milburn, p. 21, makes Sappho say, “When Cleïs, I called her for my mother, was two years old, I found myself a widow.” But we have no such evidence, how old Cleïs was when her father died. Miss Milburn (Letter XIX) is also quite wrong in translating “I would rather have my little daughter know her own worth than to bequeath to her all the treasures of Lydia, were they mine.”
[56] I. 30.
[57] Edmonds, 116 reads Εἴρηνα (peace) for Ἔραννα so that it is doubtful if Erinna, the poetess who wrote poems worthy of Homer before her early death at the age of nineteen, is really meant by Sappho. Most scholars now date her long after Sappho’s time, some even as late as 350 B.C.
[58] Cf. _Jahrbuch_, XXV. 150 (1910).
[59] _A. J. P._, XXXIV. 106 (1913).
[60] _Anth. Pal._, XVI. 310.
[61] XVIII.
[62] _Odes_, I. 1. 36.
[63] Cf. _Anth. Pal._, VII. 14 and 17 for epigrams about Sappho’s grave. Cf. Edmonds, 42 and 99. Tucker translates:
As friends we’ll part: Win thee a younger bride: Too old, I lack the heart To keep thee at my side.
[64] My late colleague and dear friend, Kirby Flower Smith, made a brilliant reconstruction of the story which he read several times in public. It is to be deeply regretted that the manuscript has never been printed. Cf. for the Menander fragment, F. G. Allinson’s _Menander_, in _The Loeb Classical Library_, pp. 400-401. For fragments of Plato’s _Phaon_, cf. Kock, _C. A. F._, I, p. 645. Cf. Servius on Virgil, _Aeneid_, III. 274.
[65] Lucian for example, _Dialogues of the Dead_, 9, has Phaon carry Aphrodite over in his boat from Chios.
[66] _Incred._, 49 in Apostolius, _Paroem._, II. 707.
[67] 596 b; “according to Nymphis in his _Voyage around Asia_, the courtesan of Eresus who was a namesake of the other Sappho and lover of the fair Phaon won great notoriety.” Cf. also Suidas, s. v. _Phaon_.
[68] Cf. Furtwängler-Reichhold, _Gr. Vas._, pl. 59; Milani, _Monumenti scelti del R. Museo Arch. di Firenze_, pl. 3; Nicole, _Meidias_, pl. VI, I. Cf. also on Phaon, Wilamowitz, _Sappho und Simonides_, pp. 33 ff.
[69] 69 d.
[70] Strabo, 452.
[71] Cf. Curtis, _A. J. A._, XXIV. 146 ff. (1920); Paribeni, _Boll. d’Arte_, I. 104 (1921); F. Cumont, _Rassegna d’Arte_, VIII. 44 ff. (1921); Leopold, _Mélanges d’Archéologie et d’Histoire_, XXXIX. pl. II. 181 ff. (1921); _Le Musée Belge_, XXVII. 15 ff. (1923), there connected by Hubaux with the cult of the Thracian Cotyto. _Cf. Memoirs Am. Ac. in Rome_, IV. 85 f., pl. XLV.
[72] For another version cf. G. Showerman’s _Ovid_ in _The Loeb Classical Library_. A new translation by Marion Mills Miller, where the narrative portions are in recitative and the frequent outbursts of emotion in lyrical form, appears in Miller-Robinson, _The Songs of Sappho_.
[73] Countless translations have been made. Among a few, I mention Philips (1711), Herbert (1713), Akenside’s paraphrase (1745), Fawkes (1760), Merivale (1833), Elton (1814), Egerton (1815), Edinburgh Review (1832), Palgrave (1854), Arnold (1869), Higginson (1871), Walhouse (1877), Symonds (at least two versions), Swinburne, Thomas Davidson, Marion Mills Miller (in _The Classics_ and also in his play _The Return of Odysseus_, p. 82), Appleton, Fairclough (_The Raven_, V, 1904, p. 120), Easby Smith, Stobart (_The Glory that was Greece_, p. 119), Lawton, Tucker, Petersen, Lawrence (_Classical Review_, XXXVI, 1922, p. 2), Edmonds, William A. Drake (_Sewanee Review_, April 1923).
[74] στροῦθοι in l. 10 are birds of Venus, swans, or better doves, rather than the dirty chatterers of our city streets, who never appear in Greek art. Cf. Throop, _Wash. Univ. Studies_, IX 282 (1922); Aristophanes, _Lysistrata_, 723 f.; Statius, _Silvae_, I. 2. Edmonds p. 183 reads the dual and translates “thy two swans.” For swans drawing Aphrodite’s or Cupid’s car, cf. Reinach, _Répertoire des Vases Peints_, I, pp. 57, 271.
[75] _Dem._, 38.
[76] _Iliad_, X. 90-95. Cf. also _Od._, XVII. 518-521. For Homer’s influence on Sappho cf. Smyth, p. 230; H. L. Ebeling, in _The Classical Weekly_, XVI. 195 ff. (1923).
[77] III. 152-158.
[78] Edmonds, pp. 186-7, makes the ingenious but very uncertain suggestion that in line 7 a proper noun, Brocheo or Brochea, corresponding to Catullus’ Lesbia, should be read and now translates: “When I look on you, Brocheo, my speech comes short or fails me quite.” Formerly he thought that the poem was sent by the banished Sappho at the age of eighteen to some beloved girl friend soon after her arrival in Sicily in 596 B.C., but Sappho was older than eighteen in 596, and Edmonds now makes an entirely different emendation of the last line, “but now that I am poor, I must fain be content ...” meaning “beggars can’t be choosers.” But the reading is uncertain and I do not believe that Sappho was poor, nor do I agree with Miss Patrick that the words do not describe love at all.
[79] For such head-cloths cf. the Latin word _struppus_ and the festival at Falerii, called _struppearia_, Dion. Hal., XI. 39 and Poulsen, _Etruscan Tomb Paintings_, p. 23. Edmonds’ new reading is very uncertain; for his previous reading and poetical version cf. _Sappho in the Added Light of the New Fragments_, p. 28.
[80] I keep Bergk’s reading, “Foolish woman, pride not thyself on a ring.” Edmonds changes the text and translates, “But come, be not so proud of a ring.”
[81] Cf. Poulsen, in _Jahrbuch_, XXI. 209 ff. (1906); _Die Bronzen von Olympia_, IV., pl. VII. 74.
[82] There are many other poetical versions by Merivale, Symonds, F. Tennyson, Tucker, Cox, Edmonds, etc. For an absurd interpretation _Sappho in the Rain_, cf. _Wiener Studien_, XXXVIII. 176 ff. (1916).
[83] Poetical translations by Merivale, Arnold, Appleton, F. Tennyson, Symonds, Edmonds, Miller, Percy Mackaye, etc.
[84] _Sappho in the Added Light of the New Fragments_, p. 25, but in _Lyra Graeca_, I, p. 253, he changes his previous emendation and reads a text which I consider very uncertain, “and pours down a sweet shrill song from beneath his wings, when the Sun-god illumines the earth with his downshed flame outspread.”
[85] _Praec. Con._, 48; _Qu. Conv._, III. 1. 2.
[86] _Flor._, IV. 12.
[87] For Swinburne’s expansion cf. p. 210; cf. also Percy Mackaye in _Sappho and Phaon_. Bliss Carman has evolved the following from Sappho’s one line:
I loved thee, Atthis, in the long ago When the great oleanders were in flower In the broad herded meadows full of sun. And we would often at the fall of dusk Wander together by the silver stream, When the soft grass-heads were all wet with dew And purple misted in the fading light, And joy I knew and sorrow at thy voice, And the superb magnificence of love— The loneliness that saddens solitude, And the sweet speech that makes it durable, The bitter longing and the keen desire, The sweet companionship through quiet days In the slow ample beauty of the world And the unutterable glad release Within the temple of the holy night; O Atthis, how I loved thee long ago In that fair perished summer by the sea.
[88] Cf. Miss Shields, “_Lesbos in the Trojan War_,” in _The Classical Jour._, XIII. 670 ff. (1918); _The Cults of Lesbos_ (Johns Hopkins University Diss.) 1917.
[89] Cf. _Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association_, LIII. xvi (1922).
[90] For Mnesidice Edmonds would now read Anactoria. There is a good metrical translation by G. M. Whicher in Manatt, _Aegean Days_, London, 1913, p. 286.
[91] _Odes_, I. 3. 22.
[92] O’Hara renders as follows:
Gold is the son of Zeus, Immortal, bright; Nor moth nor worm may eat it, Nor rust tarnish.
So are the Muse’s gifts The offspring fair, That merit from high heaven Youth eternal.
[93] These may be vases in the form of an _astragalus_ or knuckle-bone, two or three of which in clay are to be seen in museums, or they may be bowls or cups with the bottom rounded like one end of a knuckle-bone. They might be bowls with a mid-boss in the form of a knuckle-bone. For such gold-bossed golden bowls as Pollux (VI, 98) mentions in the context of this quotation see the recently acquired beautiful gold bowl with a Corinthian inscription of about Sappho’s time in the Boston Museum, which, however, is probably a modern forgery. Cf. _Bulletin, Boston Museum of Fine Arts_, XX. 65 ff. (1922).
[94] German and Austrian scholars have failed to see the lovely lyrical literature in this delightful ballad. Aly considers it only the beginning of a longer ode; and I cannot agree with him that it does not fit in with what we know of Sappho who often expresses her loneliness in the absence of her companions. Even if the thought is of love, we must not expect consistency in a high-strung Aeolian woman. Fragments such as E. 152, 159, 167 may have been in a totally different context. But I do not mean to say that the ballad certainly refers to Sappho herself. The context is gone and it is not even definitely assigned to Sappho. Some of the editions seem to have contained it, but much anonymous literature has been included in the Sapphic _corpus_ as in that of Plato or Hippocrates. However, as it is one of the prettiest and most perfect pieces and quite in Sappho’s style and metre and thought, I consider it genuine. Ovid (_Sappho to Phaon_, 155 ff.) seems to know the lines. Ruthlessly to insert a negative in the text (“Alone I do not sleep”) as does Lunák (_Wiener Studien_, XL, 1918, p. 98) spoils the literary quality and makes it insipid. How much suggestive concision in those seventeen words in four verses (four of them small particles), but what vast and profound humanity; silence, solitude, obscurity, waiting, anxiety, sympathy of nature. How the strong and rapid description catches our deepest thoughts. Such things disprove the arguments against its genuineness by Wilamowitz, _Textgeschichte_, p. 33; and _Sappho und Simonides_, p. 75. Cf. Münscher, _Hermes_, LIV. 29, 4 (1919).
[95] _Scribner’s Magazine_, September 1905, p. 304.
[96] On the whole tradition of the wedding song cf. Mangelsdorff, _Das lyrische Hochzeitsgedicht bei den Griechen und Römern_, 1913; Reitzenstein, _Hermes_, XXXV. 95 ff. (1900); Croiset, _Journal des Savants_, July 1914; Girard, _Le Mariage de Hector_, _Comptes-rendus Ac. des Sc. et Belles-lettres_, 1914, pp. 658-9.
[97] I. 4.
[98] Cf. Robinson, _The Classical Weekly_, V. 68 (1911).
[99] In this account of Sappho’s wedding-songs I am much indebted to Koechly, _Akademische Vorträge und Reden_, Zürich, 1859, pp. 153-217.
[100] For Usener’s interesting conjecture about Lesbian marriage customs based on this fragment cf. _Kleine Schriften_, IV, pp. 308 ff.
[101] An excellent modern musical version will be found in A. A. Stanley, _Greek Themes in Modern Musical Settings_.
[102] For the history of dialogue in Greek epigrams and examples of stones speaking with the passer-by and for sepulchral symbolism as in the Pelagon epigram cf., D. M. Robinson, “Two Epitaphs from Sardis,” in _Anatolian Studies presented to Sir William Mitchell Ramsay_, Manchester, 1923, pp. 341-353.
[103] For a bronze in the British Museum supposed to represent the reclining Sappho cf. Walters, _Cat. of Bronzes_, London, 1899, 203.
[104] Pollux, IX. 84.
[105] Cf. Bernoulli, _Griechische Ikonographie_, pp. 59-72; _Cat. of Coins in the Brit. Mus., Lesbos_, pl. XXXIX; Miss Patrick, pp. 73, 81; Jacoby, _Marmor Parium_, p. 101; Forrer, _Les Portraits de Sappho sur les monnaies_, in _Revue Belge de numismatique_, 1901, pp. 413 ff.; _Zeitschrift für Numismatik_, IX. 114, pl. IV.
[106] _Meisterwerke_, p. 103.
[107] _Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of Immortality_, Oxford, 1921, p. 367.
[108] Walters, _Cat. of Terra-cottas in the British Museum_, London, 1903, pl. 19.
[109] The ancient representations of Sappho on vases have been well studied by Jahn, _Darstellungen griechischer Dichter auf Vasenbildern_, _Abh. d. Sächs. Ges. d. Wiss._, VIII. 699 ff. (1861); Comparetti, _Museo Italiano di Antichita classica_, II, 41-80, pls. III-VI (1888); Cipollini, pp. 319-344; Wilamowitz, _Sappho und Simonides_, pp. 40 ff. Little new material has come to light, but the individual vases have been better interpreted in the later publications which we cite in other notes. Aly omits the busts, though he mentions the vases, but he calls the Steinhauser fragment a clay relief and fails to recognize that it is part of a vase.
[110] Cf. Jahn, pl. III; Comparetti, _op. cit._, pl. IV; Furtwängler-Reichhold, _Gr. Vas._, II, pp. 21 ff., 308 ff., pl. 64; Steiner, _Sappho_, pp. 54-5; Perrot et Chipiez, _Histoire de l’art_, X, p. 624, pl. 15; Beazley, _J. H. S._, XLII, 1922, p. 91; Pfuhl, _Malerei und Zeichnung der Griechen_, Munich, 1923, p. 399; Hoppin, _Handbook of Attic Red-figured Vases_, I, p. 461. Hoppin wrongly rejects Furtwängler’s attribution to the factory of Brygus; and wrongly identifies Hauser’s “Frau Meisterin” with Beazley’s Niobid Painter. Perrot (p. 626) says that the Munich vase belongs to a contemporary of Duris but that we shall never know the painter; but on p. 634 he says: “we would be tempted to add the vase to the Berlin amphora painter.”
[111] Comparetti, _op. cit._, pl. III, 1; De Witte, _Antiq. de l’hôtel Lambert_, no. 32, pl. III; Reinach, _Répertoire des Vases_, I, p. 524. Formerly in the Dzialinsky collection at Paris.
[112] Comparetti, _op. cit._, pl. III, 2; Steiner, pp. 44 ff.; Cipollini, p. 328; De Courten, p. III; Reinach _op. cit._, I, p. 525.
[113] Comparetti, _op. cit._, pl. V; Cipollini, p. 331; De Courten, p. 95; _Röm. Mitt._ III, 1888, pl. IX; _Jahreshefte_, VIII. 35-40 (1905); Nicole, _Meidias_, pl. VII; Reinach, _op. cit._, I, p. 526.
[114] _B. C. H._, IV. 373 (1880); Cipollini, pp. 337-8.
[115] Cf. Comparetti, pl. VI; Steiner, pp. 16 ff.; Edmonds, _Class. Quart._, XVI. 1 ff. (1922), where he fails to cite _Jahreshefte_, VIII. 40 (1905).
[116] J. C. Hoppin, _Handbook of Attic Red-figured Vases_, Harvard University Press, 1919, p. 410.
[117] Murray, _White Athenian Vases in the British Museum_, London, 1896, pl. XVII; Pfuhl, _op. cit._, II, p. 546, fig. 527.
[118] _Ann. d. Inst._, XXX, 1858, p. 42, pl. B; Cipollini, pp. 339-341.
[119] Cf. Cipollini, pp. 343-4.
[120] Cf. Nicole, _Meidias_, Geneva, 1908, pls. III and VI. I cannot agree with Nicole in dating Meidias as late as 375-350 B.C. He belongs to the time of the Peloponnesian War, 431-404 B.C. This fatal war did not stop the Athenians from producing during war times such great works of art as the Erechtheum, beautiful vases and statues. Cf. also note 68 above.
[121] Cf. Pfuhl, _op. cit._, p. 566, III, Fig. 557; Pellegrini, _Museo Civico di Bologna, Catalogo dei Vasi Greci_, pp. 133-135, Fig. 77.
[122] _N. H._, XXXV. 141. Brunn, _Kunstgeschichte_, p. 299, identifies him with a bronze-sculptor, Leon, but we are equally ignorant about him.
[123] _Anth. Plan._, 310 (Edmonds, p. 173); Tatian, _Adv. Gr._, 130.
[124] Cf. Hermann, _Denkmäler der Malerei des Altertums_, pl. 28; Pfuhl, _op. cit._, p. 734; Lippold, _Röm. Mitt._, XXXIII. 71 ff. (1918).
[125] For replicas of the Sappho cf. Rizzo, _Rev. Arch._, 1901, pp. 301 ff. The latest and best discussion is by Percy Gardner, _J. H. S._ XXXVIII. 10 ff. (1918). For a copy of Silanion’s Corinna at Compiègne cf. _Rev. Arch._ XXXII. 161 (1894); XXXVI 169 (1898); Furtwängler, _Meisterwerke_, pp. 99 ff. would class many of the so-called Sapphos as Aphrodite and thinks that those which are copies of fifth century art may represent the Aphrodite of Phidias which was to be seen in later days in the portico of Octavia at Rome (Pliny, _N. H._ XXXVI, 15).
[126] II. 4. 57.
[127] _Anth. Pal._, VII. 15.
[128] Cf. Fraenkel, _Inschriften von Pergamon_, 198. According to _C. I. G._ 3555 Jucundus and Cyriac of Ancona still saw the inscription at Pergamum.
[129] _Ecphr._, 69-71.
[130] On the Albani bust cf. _Jahrbuch_, V. 152 ff. (1890), pl. III; Morcelli, Fea, Visconti, _Descr. della Villa Albani_, 1033; Schneider, _Jb. d. Ak. Kunstsammlungen_, XII, 72 ff. (1891); Arndt, Brunn-Bruckmann, _Griechische und Römische Porträts_, pl. 147-148; for the bust in the Pitti cf. Arndt, pls. 149-150; for that in the Uffizi, pls. 145-146; cf. also Cipollini, pp. 345-356. On the Biscari and Naples busts cf. Rizzo, _Rev. Arch._ XXXIX, 1901, pp. 301-307, pls. XXI, XXII. On the Constantinople head cf. Mendel’s _Cat._ no. 626.
[131] _Art and Archaeology_, VI. 277 ff. (1917), Robinson, _ibid._, pp. 285 ff. I have omitted mention of many other ancient works of art wrongly supposed to represent Sappho, such as Stackelberg, _Die Gräber der Hellenen_, Berlin, 1837, pl. LXX, called Sappho with a female friend sitting in her lap, merely because of the book-roll.
[132] _Arch. Anzeiger_, XXVII. 124 (1912).
[133] Cipollini, p. 405, pictures Magni’s Saffo; p. 409 Confalonieri’s Saffo; p. 413 Pradier’s Sapho; p. 417 Pradier’s standing Sapho; p. 421 Barrias’ painting; p. 425 Gleyre’s couch of Sappho. There is a bust of Sappho by Canova in Turin.
[134] Cf. Reinach, in _Revue Archéologique_, XX, 2. 433-434 (1912), X, 2. 392 (1919).
[135] Cf. for influence of Pamphos, a mythical poet earlier than Homer, Pausanias, IX. 29, 8; of Homer, _Neue Jahrbücher_, XXXIII 227 (1914); De Courten, pp. 74-76.
[136] E. 114 influenced by _Theogony_, 3 ff.; E. 122 by _Works and Days_, 568; E. 81 by _Theogony_, 121.
[137] Theognis, 1017.
[138] Schol. Hesiod, _Works and Days_, 428.
[139] Athenaeus, 554 b, 639 a.
[140] Porphyrio on Horace, _Satires_, II. 1. 30, “ostendit Sapphonem et Alcaeum volumina sua loco sodalium habuisse.”
[141] Wilamowitz, _Textgeschichte der Bukoliker_, p. 88.
[142] III. 153 f.; VI. 1181.
[143] Wilamowitz, _Sappho und Simonides_, p. 58, 2. There is an enormous literature on Catullus’ relation to Sappho and much discussion of textual matters. Cf. for the most recent _Bursian Jahresbericht_, CLXXVIII, 1919, p. 46. Compare E. 32, 147 and 149 with Catullus LXII, 26, 35; E. 151 with LXII, 61; E. 148 with LXII. In XXXV, 17-18 we have “Ignosco tibi, Sapphica puella Musa doctior.”
[144] _The Classical Quarterly_, XVI. 1-14 (1922).
[145] IV. 9. 10.
[146] II. 13. 24.
[147] Cf. Ogle, _A. J. P._, XLIII. 55 ff. (1922). For Sappho’s influence on Horace cf. Pasquali, _Orazio lirico_, 1920. Most of the literature on the subject is not fit to read. Cf. Richard F. Burton’s _The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night_, Terminal Essay, X, p. 208, for a filthy, wrong interpretation of the word ‘mascula’. It is surprising to find as great a modern scholar as Bloch, _Die Prostitution_, Berlin, 1912, I, p. 383, saying in his discussion of Homosexuality, ἀσέλγεια τριβακή, “Schon in früher Zeit galten Sparta und die Insel Lesbos als Orte, wo die weibliche Liebe besonders verbreitet war und an letzterem Ort in der Dichterin Sappho eine weltberühmte Vertreterin fand.” Cf. also on _tribadie_ in Lesbos Bloch, _Der Ursprung der Syphilis_, II, pp. 586-588, where he thinks that he gives definite proof that Sappho was “eine echte Tribade.” It is lamentable that as great a literary critic as J. A. Symonds should say that “Sappho gave this female passion an eminent place in Greek Literature;” see J. A. Symonds, _A Problem in Greek Ethics, An Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion_, London, 1901, pp. 70-72. Fortunately the monograph was issued only in a very limited edition.
[148] _Silvae_, V. 3. 154.
[149] VII. 69.
[150] _Symp._, VII. 8. 2.
[151] XIX. 9. 4.
[152] _Loves_, 30.
[153] _On Paid Companions_, 36; _Pictures_, 18.
[154] On the influence of Sappho on Himerius cf. Rizzo, _Saggio su Imerio il sofista_, in _Riv. Fil. Cl._, XXVI 513-16 (1898). In _Orations_, I. 4 the words τὸ λέχος Ὁμήρου were incomprehensible and Edmonds still omits Ὁμήρου, but the reading is undoubtedly correct and the significance is now apparent from the new epithalamium of Hector and Andromache.
[155] XV. 35, 36, 37.
[156] I. 16, 19, 20.
[157] Cf. _Anth. Pal._, V. 246; VII. 14, 15, 16, 17, 407, 718; IX. 26, 66, 184, 189, 190, 506, 521, 571; XVI. 310.
[158] V. 246. I give a literal translation and Greek texts of all epigrams which mention Sappho in Miller-Robinson, _Songs of Sappho_.
[159] Cf. _A. J. P._, XXXVIII. 66 (1917).
[160] Photius only cites the selections made by Sopater the Sophist, among which in his second book he included some quotations from Sappho’s eighth book.
[161] _Vita dell’ Imperatore Alessio o Alesseide_, XV.
[162] IV. 25.
[163] His comment on Martial, VII. 67 is “Tribadem autem fuisse carmen indicat quod extat.”
[164] There is an interesting item in Natales Comes, _Mythologiae sive explicationes fabularum_, Venice, 1551, Book V, c. XVI, p. 286, “Scriptum reliquit Sappho, Adonim mortuum fuisse a Venere inter lactucas depositum.” According to Athenaeus 69 d, Cratinus had Aphrodite conceal Phaon among the “fair wild-lettuces.”
[165] In my library I have a copy dated 1696 of Anne Le Fèvre, _Les Poësies d’Anacréon et de Sapho_. This, however, is a second edition and the first was in 1681.
[166] Welcker, _Kleine Schriften_: II, pp. 80 ff., _Sappho von einem herrschenden Vorurteil befreit_. Goethe occupied himself much with this article. For references in Goethe to Sappho cf. W. J. Keller, _Goethe’s Estimate of the Greek and Latin Writers_, Madison, Wis., 1916, p. 51.
[167] Sauer, _Grillparzer’s sämtliche Werke_, Stuttgart, 1892, XIX, pp. 71 ff. For source of _Sappho_ cf. _J. Engl. Germ. Phil._, XXII, 503 ff. (1923).
[168] Cf. Jean Giraud, _D’Après Sapho. Variations sur un thème éternel_, in _Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France_, XXVII, 1920, pp. 194-203. I have added considerable material not there, since this article deals only with the second ode. I am indebted in this chapter to my learned colleagues, Professor Henry Carrington Lancaster and Professor Gilbert Chinard, for helpful suggestions.
[169] _Traduction de quelques autres epigrammes Grecs, Œuvres de Ronsard_, Tome 2, Paris, 1889, p. 56.
[170] The date is often wrongly given as 1682. In my copy, which is a second edition (Lyon 1696), it is stated that permission to publish the book was granted to Damoiselle Anne Le Fèvre on June 10, 1681, all rights to continue for six years. “Le dit livre a esté achevé d’imprimer pour la première fois le 1, Decembre 1681.” My copy gives only the first two odes and the epigrams on Pelagon and Timas and quotes an inaccurate Latin prose translation of the first ode by her father. He has made several emendations, as in ode II, l. 7, ὡς βρόγχον, “nihil vocis pervenit ad fauces meas,” as good a suggestion as Edmonds’ creation of an unknown proper name Brocheo.
[171] Cf. _Œuvres de Fontenelle_ (Paris 1818), II, pp. 187, 188.
[172] My copy is the thirteenth edition published by Bertrand, Paris, 1818. The idea of a manuscript of Sappho found at Herculaneum is repeated by Lucy Milburn and Percy Mackaye.
[173] My copy is dated London 1810 and is anonymous, _Poésies de Sapho suivies de différentes Poésies dans le même genre_. It contains also _Les Tourterelles de Zelmis_ and the _Poésies Erotiques_ of M. de Parny, who was such an admirer of Sappho. The adaptations are the same as those of Sauvigny. Why this edition is anonymous, I do not know.
[174] XII, p. 181 ed. Furne, Jouvet et Cie., Paris.
[175] My edition is Giguet et Michaud, Paris, 1805. This book with its long notes and citations, though little known, is important for the student of Sappho’s influence.
[176] Cf. Wilamowitz, _Sappho und Simonides_, pp. 63-69 on _Chansons de Bilitis_, pp. 71-78 on Lesbian Love.
[177] Cf. Edwin M. Cox, p. 5, where he quotes Barnabe Barnes’ _Parthenophil and Parthenophe_, 1593:
O, that I could make her, whom I love best, Find in a face, with misery wrinkled, Find in a heart, with sighs over ill-pined, Her cruel hatred.
In Davison’s _Poetical Rhapsody_, 1602, are some Sapphics by the mysterious “A. W.” Here is a sample:
Hatred eternal, furious revenging, Merciless raging, bloody persecuting; Slanderous speeches, odious revilings; Causeless abhorring.
In 1601 Campion and Roseter, _Lyrics, Elegies_, etc., give a clumsy example of Sapphic verse. In 1614 a tract called _The Martyrdom of Saint George of Cappadocia_ contains at the end some “Sapphicks” which resemble the real Sappho only in having the same number of syllables to the verse. Cox and all others, so far as I know, fail to mention Sir Philip Sidney’s translation of the second ode.
[178] Cf. W. C. Lawton, _Sappho_ with some new translations, _Lippincott Magazine_, 77, 583; W. A. R. Kerr, “_Sappho’s Soliloquy_,” in _Canadian Magazine_, 12, 426; E. Saltus, “_Sappho_” in _Lippincott’s Magazine_, 51, 503; M. Thompson, “_The Secret of Sappho_,” in _The Atlantic Monthly_, 73, 365; M. Gray, “_Sappho_,” in _Argosy_, 51, 203; _Athenaeum_, 1889, 2, 56; F. B. Harte, “_Sappho of Green Springs_,” in _Lippincott’s Magazine_, 45, 627; _Democratic Review_, 7, 18; Higginson, in _The Atlantic Monthly_, 28, 83; G. Hill, in _Appleton’s Journal_, 6, 158, 179; Mrs. Hamilton in _Harper’s_, 56, 177 (has nothing to do with the real Sappho); M. Thompson, “_Sappho’s Apple_,” in _The Independent_, 53, 416; A. Chisholm, in _Canadian Magazine_, 15, 453; Reinach, _Révue Archéologique_, XXIV, 1914, 2, pp. 336-337; IX, 1919, p. 204; X, 1919, p. 225; H. I. R., _Fragment of a Poem by Sappho done into English verse_, in _The Literary Digest_, 48, 1493; “_Real Personal Character of the Poetess Sappho_,” in _The Review of Reviews_, 46, 107-8; Swinburne, “_Sappho_,” in _The Living Age_, 280, 817-8; W. L. Courtney, “_Sappho and Aspasia_,” in _The Fortnightly Review_, _N. S._ 91 (1912), 479-88; “_Sappho from the Dust_,” in _The Literary Digest_, 48, 1362-3; M. M. Miller, “Sappho’s Songs of Exile,” in _The Independent_, 87, 344; _New York Nation_, 1914, 1, p. 602; Aldington, “_Letters to Unknown Women_,” in _The Dial_, 64, 430-1; W. A. Percy, _Sappho in Leukas and Other Poems_, New Haven, 1915; Horton, “_New Sappho Fragment in English Verse_,” in _The Dial_, 61, 179; Michael Monahan, “_Sappho_,” in _All’s Well or the Mirror Repolished_, II, 1922, pp. 87 ff.; Robinson, in _The Baltimore Sun_, Jan. 22, 1922.
[178a] In _Charmides_ he says: “Or from the Lesbian waters plucked drowned Sappho’s golden quill.”
[179] See _Pericles and Aspasia_, Letters 47, 48, 82, 95, 149, 150, 152, 153.
[180] _Idyls of the King, Lancelot and Elaine_, 1003-1004. Not in Mustard, _Classical Echoes in Tennyson_, New York, 1904.
[181] _Lyrics and Sonnets_ (Edinburgh, 1903), p. 66.
[182] Miller-Robinson, _Songs of Sappho_.
[183] Litz, _Father Tabb_, Johns Hopkins Press, 1923, p. 168.
[184] _Collected Poems_, New York, 1922, pp. 227-228.
[185] _Art and Archaeology_, XII. 217 (1921).
[186] _Sappho in Leukas and other Poems_, Yale University Press, 1915.
[187] _Art and Archaeology_, XV. 13 (1923).
[188] J. U. Nicolson, _King of the Black Isles_, p. 3, Chicago, 1924.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF RECENT BOOKS ON SAPPHO
ALY, see Pauly-Wissowa.
BASCOUL, J. M. F., _La chaste Sappho de Lesbos et le mouvement féministe à Athènes au IVe siècle av. J. C._ Paris. 1911.
BASCOUL, J. M. F., _La chaste Sappho de Lesbos et Stésichore. Les prétendues amies de Sappho_. Paris, 1913.
BERGK, TH., _Poetae Lyrici Graeci_. Vol. III, Leipzig, 1914.
BETHE, E., _Griechische Lyrik_. Berlin, 1920.
BRANDT, LIDA R., _Social Aspects of Greek Life in the Sixth Century B.C._ Philadelphia, 1921.
BRANDT, P., _Sappho, ein Lebensbild aus den Frühlingstagen altgriechischer Dichtung_. Leipzig, 1905.
BUNNER, ANNE, see Wharton.
CARMAN, BLISS, _Sappho, One Hundred Lyrics_. Boston, 1904.
CARROLL, M., _Greek Women_. Philadelphia, 1907.
CHRIST, W. VON—SCHMID, W., _Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur_. Munich, 1912.
COX, E. M., _Sappho and the Sapphic Metre in English_. London, 1916. _Poems of Sappho._ London, New York, 1924.
CIPOLLINI, A., _Saffo_. Milan, 1890.
CROISET, A., _Histoire de la Litterature Grecque_ (vol. II, pp. 226-244). Paris, 1898.
DE COURTEN, MARIA L. G., _Saffo_ (Supplementi ad “Aegyptus”). Milan, 1921.
DIEHL, E., _Supplementum lyricum_[3] (Kleine Texte, 33-34). Bonn, 1917.
EDMONDS, J. M., _The New Fragments of Alcaeus, Sappho and Corinna_. Cambridge, 1909.
EDMONDS, J. M., _Sappho in the Added Light of the New Fragments_. Cambridge, 1912. (Has some poetical translations.)
EDMONDS, J. M., _Lyra Graeca_, I, in _The Loeb Classical Library_. New York, 1922. [Abbreviated as E.]
EDMONDS, J. M., Various articles in _Classical Review_, _Classical Quarterly_ and _Cambridge Philological Society’s Proceedings_, from 1909 to 1922.
FARNELL, G. S., _Greek Lyric Poetry_. London, 1891.
GLASER, R., _Sappho, die zehnte Muse_ (Südwest-deutsche Monatsblätter). 1916.
GRENFELL, B. P., and HUNT, A. S., _The Oxyrhynchus Papyri_. Vols. I-XV, especially I, X, and XV. London, 1898. 1922.
HIGGINSON, T. W., _Atlantic Essays_. Boston, 1871.
LATINI, GIOV., _Saffo, Mimnermo e Catullo_. Viterbo, 1914.
LAVAGNINI, B., _I Lirici Greci_. Turin, 1923.
LOBEL, E., _Sappho_. Oxford, 1925.
MACKAIL, J. W., _Lectures on Greek Poetry_ (pp. 83-112). London and New York, 1911.
MEABE, T., _Saffo_ (Spanish translation). Paris, 1913.
MERINO, A. FERNANDEZ, _Estudios de Literatura Griega. Safo ante la crítica moderna_.[3] Madrid, 1884.
MEUNIER, M., _Sappho, Traduction nouvelle de tous les fragments_. (Has not recent fragments.) Paris, 1911.
MILBURN, LUCY MCD., _Lost Letters from Lesbos_. Chicago, 1902.
MILLER, MARION MILLS, and ROBINSON, D. M. _The Songs of Sappho_ (Greek text of all Sappho, of all the epigrams about her, of Erinna, of the new papyrus biography of Sappho, etc., prepared and annotated and literally translated by D. M. Robinson.) Introduction on _The Recovery and Restoration of the Egyptian Relics of Sappho_ and a critical _Memoir of the Real Sappho_ by D. M. Robinson. Introduction by M. M. Miller on the Sapphic Metre, and Poetical Adaptations of Sappho. New York, 1924.
MUSTARD, W. P., _Classical Echoes in Tennyson_. New York, 1904.
O’HARA, J. M., _The Poems of Sappho_. Portland, 1910.
OSBORN, PERCY, _Poems of Sappho_. London, 1909.
PASELLA, PIETRO, _I Frammenti di Alceo e di Saffo tradotti_. Rome, 1922.
PATRICK, MARY MILLS, _Sappho and the Island of Lesbos_. Boston, 1914. Reprinted, 1924.
PAULY-WISSOWA,—KROLL-WITTE, _Real-Encyclopädie_. Exhaustive article on Sappho by Aly. Stuttgart, 1920.
PETERSEN, W., _The Lyric Songs of the Greeks. Translated into English Verse_. Boston, 1918.
REINACH, TH., _Pour mieux connaître Sappho (Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres)_. Paris, 1911.
ROBINSON, D. M. _See_ Miller-Robinson.
SCOLLARD, C. L.,—JONES, T. S., _Sapphics_. Clinton, N. Y., 1910.
SITZLER, J., _Bibliography on Sappho_ in Bursian (Kroll) _Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft_. CXXXIII, 1907, pp. 104 ff., pp. 176 ff., CLXXVIII, 1919, pp. 46 ff.
SMITH, J. S. EASBY, _Songs of Sappho_. Washington, D. C., 1891.
SMYTH, H. W., _Greek Melic Poets_. London, 1900.
STACPOOLE, H. D. V., _Sappho, a new rendering_. London 1920.
STANLEY, ALBERT A., _Greek Themes in Modern Musical Settings_. (Includes, pp. 1-68, Music to Percy Mackaye’s _Sappho and Phaon_). _University of Michigan Humanistic Studies_, XV, 1923.
STEBBING, W., _Greek and Latin Anthology thought into English Verse_.