Part 3

Those modern critics who reject the whole story as fabulous derive it from the myth of the love of Aphrodite and Adonis, who in the Greek version was called Phaëthon or Phaon. Theodor Kock (cf. Preface, p. xvii) is the latest exponent of these views, and he pushes them to a very fanciful extent, even adducing Minos as the sun and Britomartis as the moon to explain the Leucadian leap. Certainly the legend does not appear before the Attic Comedy, about 395 B.C., more than two centuries after Sappho's death. And the Leucadian leap may have been ascribed to her from its having been often mentioned as a mere poetical metaphor taken from an expiatory rite connected with the worship of Apollo; the image occurs in Stesichorus and Anacreon, and may possibly have been used by Sappho. For instance, Athenaeus cites a poem by Stesichorus about a maiden named Calyca who was in love with a youth named Euathlus, and prayed in a modest manner to Aphrodite to aid her in becoming his wife; but when the young man scorned her, she threw herself from a precipice: and this he says happened near Leucas. Athenaeus says the poet represented the maiden as particularly modest, so that she was not willing to live with the youth on his own terms, but prayed that if possible she might become the wedded wife of Euathlus; and if that were not possible, that she might be released from life. And Anacreon, in a fragment preserved by Hephaestion, says, as if proverbially, 'Now again rising I, drunk with love, dive from the Leucadian rock into the hoary wave.'

And Sappho with that gloriole . . . . . Of ebon hair on calmëd brows-- O poet-woman, none forgoes The leap, attaining the repose! (MRS. E. B. BROWNING.)

Sappho 'loved, and loved more than once, and loved to the point of desperate sorrow; though it did not come to the mad and fatal leap from Leucate, as the unnecessary legend pretends. There are, nevertheless,' continues Mr. Edwin Arnold, 'worse steeps than Leucate down which the heart may fall; and colder seas of despair than the Adriatic in which to engulf it.'

Seeing that six comedies are known to have been written under the title of _Sappho_ (cf. p. 37), and that her history furnished material for at least four more, it is not strange that much of their substance should in succeeding centuries have been regarded as genuine. In a later and debased age she became a sort of stock character of the licentious drama. The fervour of her love and the purity of her life, and the very fact of a woman having been the leader of a school of poetry and music, could not have failed to have been misunderstood by the Greek comedians at the close of the fifth century B.C. The society and habits of the Aeolians at Lesbos in Sappho's time were, as M. Bournouf (_Lit. Grecq._ i. p. 194) has shown, in complete contrast to those of the Athenians in the period of their corruption; just as the unenviable reputation of the Lesbians was earned long after the date of Sappho. 'It is not surprising,' writes Mr. Philip Smith, in his article SAPPHO in Smith's _Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography_, 'that the early Christian writers against heathenism should have accepted a misrepresentation which the Greeks themselves had invented.' The licence of the Attic comedians is testified by Athenaeus' mention that Antiochus of Alexandria, a writer otherwise unknown, whose date is quite uncertain, wrote a 'Treatise on the Poets who were ridiculed by the Comic writers of the Middle Comedy'; and by the fact that a little before 403 B.C. a law was passed which enacted that no one was to be represented on the stage by name, [Greek: mê dein onomasti kômôdein] (cf. p. 38).

It was not till early in the present century that the current calumnies against Sappho were seriously inquired into by the celebrated scholar of Göttingen, Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, and found to be based on quite insufficient evidence. Colonel Mure endeavoured at great length, both here and in Germany, to expose fallacies in Welcker's arguments; but the bitterness of his attack, and the unfairness of much of his reasoning, go far to weaken his otherwise acknowledged authority. Professor Comparetti has recently examined the question with much fairness and erudition, and, with the possible exception referred to above (p. 3, note), has done much to separate fiction from fact; but he does not endorse all Welcker's conclusions.

Sappho seems to have been the centre of a society in Mitylene, a kind of æsthetic club, devoted to the service of the Muses. Around her gathered maidens from even comparatively distant places, attracted by her fame, to study under her guidance all that related to poetry and music; much as at a later age students resorted to the philosophers of Athens.

The names of fourteen of her girl-friends ([Greek: hetairai]) and pupils ([Greek: mathêtriai]) are preserved. The most celebrated was Erinna of Telos, a poetess of whose genius too few lines are left for us to judge; but we know what the ancients thought of her from this Epigram in the _Greek Anthology_:

These are Erinna's songs: how sweet, though slight!-- For she was but a girl of nineteen years:-- Yet stronger far than what most men can write: Had Death delayed, whose fame had equalled hers? (J. A. SYMONDS.)

Probably fr. 77 refers to her. Of the other poetess, Damophyla of Pamphylia, not a word survives; but Apollonius of Tyana says she lived in close friendship with Sappho, and made poems after her model. Suidas says Sappho's 'companions and friends were three, viz., Atthis, Telesippa, and Megara; and her pupils were Anagora of the territory of Miletus, Gongyla of Colophon, and Euneica of Salamis.' She herself praises Mnasidica along with Gyrinna (as Maximus Tyrius spells the name) in fr. 76; she complains of Atthis preferring Andromeda to her in fr. 41; she gibes at Andromeda in fr. 70, and again refers to her in fr. 58, apparently rejoicing over her discomfiture. Of Gorgo, in fr. 48, she seems to say, in Swinburne's paraphrase,

I am weary of all thy words and soft strange ways.

Anactoria's name is not mentioned in any fragment we have, although tradition says that fr. 2 was addressed to her; but Maximus Tyrius and others place her in the front rank of Sappho's intimates: 'What Alcibiades,' he says, 'and Charmides and Phaedrus were to Socrates, Gyrinna and Atthis and Anactoria were to the Lesbian.' Another, Dica, we find her (in fr. 78) praising for her skill in weaving coronals. And in fr. 86 a daughter of Polyanax is addressed as one of her maidens. The name is not preserved of her whom (in fr. 68) she reproaches as disloyal to the service of the Muses. The text of Ovid's _Sappho to Phaon_ is so corrupt that we know not whom she is enumerating there of those she loved; even the name of her 'fair Cydno' varies in the MSS. Nor can we tell who 'those other hundred maidens' were whom Ovid (cf. p. 188) makes her say she 'blamelessly loved' before Phaon satisfied her heart. But the preservation of the names or so many of her associates is enough to prove the celebrity of her teaching.

Little more can be learnt about Sappho's actual life. In fr. 72 she says of herself, 'I am not one of a malignant nature, but have a quiet temper.' Antiphanes, in his play _Sappho_, is said by Athenaeus to have represented her proposing absurd riddles,[5] so little did the Comic writers understand her genius. Fr. 79 is quoted by Athenaeus to show her love for beauty and honour. Compare also fr. 11 and 31 for his testimony to the purity of her love for her girl-friends: [Greek: panta kathara tois katharois], 'unto the pure all things are pure.'

Plato, in his _Phaedrus_, calls Sappho 'beautiful,' for the sweetness of her songs; 'and yet,' says Maximus Tyrius, 'she was small and dark,' _une petite brunette,--'est etiam fusco grata colore venus':_

The small dark body's Lesbian loveliness That held the fire eternal. (SWINBURNE.)

The epithet 'beautiful' is repeated by so many writers that it may everywhere refer only to the beauty of her writings. Even Ovid seems to think that her genius threw any lack of comeliness into the shade--a lack, however, which, if it had existed, could not have escaped the derision of the Comic writers, especially since Homer (_Iliad_, ix. 129, 271) had celebrated the characteristic beauty of the women of Lesbos. The address of Alcaeus to Sappho, quoted on p. 8, shows the sweetness of her expression, even if the epithet [Greek: ioplokos] (violet-weaving) cannot be replaced by [Greek: ioplokamos] (with violet locks), as some MSS. read. And Damocharis, in the _Greek Anthology_, in an Epigram on a statue of Sappho, speaks of her bright eyes showing her wisdom, and compares the beauty of her face to that of Aphrodite. To another writer in the _Greek Anthology_ she is 'the pride of the lovely-haired Lesbians.' Anacreon, as well as Philoxenus, calls her 'sweet-voiced' (cf. fr. 1).

But though we know so little of Sappho's personal appearance, the whole testimony of the ancient writers describes the charm of her poetry with unbounded praise.

Strabo, in his _Geography_, calls her 'something wonderful' ([Greek: thaumaston ti chrêma]), and says he knew 'no woman who in any, even the least degree, could be compared to her for poetry' (cf. p. 10).

Such was her unique renown that she was called 'The Poetess,' just as Homer was 'The Poet.' Plato numbers her among the Wise. Plutarch speaks of the grace of her poems acting on her listeners like an enchantment, and says that when he read them he set aside the drinking-cup in very shame. So much was a knowledge of her writings held to be an essential of culture among the Greeks, that Philodemus, a contemporary of Cicero, in an Epigram in the _Greek Anthology_, notes as the mark of an ill-informed woman that she could not even sing Sappho's songs.

Writers in the _Greek Anthology_ call her the Tenth Muse, child of Aphrodite and Erôs, nursling of the Graces and Persuasion, pride of Hellas, companion of Apollo, and prophesy her immortality. For instance, Antipater of Sidon says:

Does Sappho then beneath thy bosom rest, Aeolian earth? That mortal Muse, confessed Inferior only to the choir above, That foster-child of Venus and of Love; Warm from whose lips divine Persuasion came, Greece to delight, and raise the Lesbian name. O ye who ever twine the three-fold thread, Ye Fates, why number with the silent dead That mighty songstress whose unrivalled powers Weave for the Muse a crown of deathless flowers? (FRANCIS HODGSON.)

And Tullius Laurea:

Stranger, who passest my Aeolian tomb, Say not 'The Lesbian poetess is dead'; Men's hands this mound did raise, and mortal's work Is swiftly buried in forgetfulness. But if thou lookest, for the Muses' sake, On me whom all the Nine have garlanded, Know thou that I have Hades' gloom escaped: No dawn shall lack the lyrist Sappho's name.

And Pin[)y]tus:

This tomb reveals where Sappho's ashes lie, But her sweet words of wisdom ne'er will die. (LORD NEAVES.)

And Plato:

Some thoughtlessly proclaim the Muses nine; A tenth is Lesbian Sappho, maid divine. (LORD NEAVES.)

Indeed, all the praises of the Epigrammatists are in the same strain; none but held her, with the poetess Nossis, 'the flower of the Graces.'

Many authors relate how the Lesbians gloried in Sappho's having been their citizen, and say that her image was engraved on the coins of Mitylene--'though she was a woman,' as Aristotle remarks. J. C. Wolf describes six extant coins which may presumably have been struck at different times in honour of her; he gives a figure of each on his frontispiece, but they have little artistic merit.

It is worthy of note that no coins bearing the name or effigy of Sappho have hitherto been discovered which were current before the Christian era, so that no conclusion drawn from inscriptions on them is of any historical importance. In the time of the Antonines, from which most of these coins seem to date, her name was as much sullied by traditions as it has been to the present day.

Some busts there are of her, but none seem genuine. Perhaps the best representation of what she and her surroundings might have been is given by Mr. Alma Tadema in his 'Sappho,' exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1881, which has been etched by Mr. C. O. Murray, and admirably photographed in various sizes by the Berlin Photographic Company; from the head of Sappho in this picture Mr. J. C. Webb has engraved the medallion which forms the frontispiece of this work.

A bronze statue of Sappho was splendidly made by Silanion, and stolen by Verres, according to Cicero, from the prytaneum at Syracuse. And Christodorus, in the _Greek Anthology_, describes a statue of her as adorning the gymnasium of Zeuxippus at Byzantium in the fifth century A.D. Pliny says that Leon, an artist otherwise unknown, painted a picture of her in the garb of a lutist (_psaltria_).

Numerous illustrations of her still exist upon Greek vases, most of which have been reproduced and annotated upon by Professor Comparetti (see Bibliography); but they are all in a debased style, and one would feel more content if one had not seen them.

Not only do we know the general estimate of Sappho by antiquity, but her praise is also often given in great detail. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, when he quotes her _Ode to Aphrodite_ (fr. 1), describes at length the beauty of her style. Some of Demetrius' praise is quoted as fr. 124, but he also elaborately shows her command of all the figures and arts of rhetoric. What Longinus, Plutarch, and Aristoxenus thought of her I have summarised under fr. 2. The story of Solon's praise is given under fr. 137. And Plutarch in his Life of Demetrius, telling a story of Antiochus' (324-261 B.C.) being in love with Straton[=i]ce, the young wife of his father, and making a pretence of sickness, says that his physician Erasistratus discovered the object of the passion he was endeavouring to conceal by observing his behaviour at the entrance of every visitor to his sick chamber. 'When others entered,' says Plutarch, 'he was entirely unaffected; but when Stratonice came in, as she often did, either alone or with Seleucus [his father, King of Syria], he showed all the symptoms described by Sappho, the faltering voice, the burning blush, the languid eye, the sudden sweat, the tumultuous pulse; and at length, the passion overcoming his spirits, he fainted to a mortal paleness.' The physician noted what Sappho had described as the true signs of love, and Plutarch touchingly relates how the king in consequence surrendered Stratonice to his son, and made them king and queen of Upper Asia.

Modern writers are not less unanimous than the ancients in their praise of Sappho. Addison prefixes this quotation from Phaedrus (iii. 1, 5), to his first essay on her (_Spectator_, No. 223): 'O sweet soul, how good must you have been heretofore, when your remains are so delicious!' 'Her soul,' he says, 'seems to have been made up of love and poetry. She felt the passion in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms.... I do not know,' he goes on, 'by the character that is given of her works, whether it is not for the benefit of mankind that they are lost. They are filled with such bewitching tenderness and rapture, that it might have been dangerous to have given them a reading.'

Mr. J. Addington Symonds says: 'The world has suffered no greater literary loss than the loss of Sappho's poems. So perfect are the smallest fragments preserved ... that we muse in a sad rapture of astonishment to think what the complete poems must have been.... Of all the poets of the world, of all the illustrious artists of all literatures, Sappho is the one whose every word has a peculiar and unmistakable perfume, a seal of absolute perfection and illimitable grace. In her art she was unerring. Even Archilochus seems commonplace when compared with her exquisite rarity of phrase.... Whether addressing the maidens, whom even in Elysium, as Horace says, Sappho could not forget; or embodying the profounder yearnings of an intense soul after beauty which has never on earth existed, but which inflames the hearts of noblest poets, robbing their eyes of sleep, and giving them the bitterness of tears to drink--these dazzling fragments

Which still, like sparkles of Greek fire, Burn on through Time, and ne'er expire,

are the ultimate and finished forms of passionate utterance, diamonds, topazes, and blazing rubies, in which the fire of the soul is crystallised for ever.... In Sappho and Catullus ... we meet with richer and more ardent natures [than those of Horace and Alcaeus]: they are endowed with keener sensibilities, with a sensuality more noble because of its intensity, with emotions more profound, with a deeper faculty of thought, that never loses itself in the shallows of "Stoic-Epicurean acceptance," but simply and and exquisitely apprehends the facts of human life.'

And some passages from Swinburne's _Notes on Poems and Reviews_, showing a modern poet's endeavour to familiarise his readers with Sappho's spirit, can hardly be omitted. Speaking of his poem _Anactoria_, he says: 'In this poem I have simply expressed, or tried to express, that violence of affection between one and another which hardens into rage and deepens into despair. The keynote which I have here touched,' he continues, 'was struck long since by Sappho. We in England are taught, are compelled under penalties to learn, to construe, and to repeat, as schoolboys, the imperishable and incomparable verses of that supreme poet; and I at least am grateful for the training. I have wished, and I have even ventured to hope, that I might be in time competent to translate into a baser and later language the divine words which even when a boy I could not but recognise as divine. That hope, if indeed I dared ever entertain such a hope, I soon found fallacious. To translate the two odes and the remaining fragments of Sappho is the one impossible task; and as witness of this I will call up one of the greatest among poets. Catullus "translated"--or as his countrymen would now say "traduced"--the Ode to Anactoria--[Greek: Eis Erômenan]: a more beautiful translation there never was and will never be; but compared with the Greek, it is colourless and bloodless, puffed out by additions and enfeebled by alterations. Let any one set against each other the two first stanzas, Latin and Greek, and pronounce.... Where Catullus failed, I could not hope to succeed; I tried instead to reproduce in a diluted and dilated form the spirit of a poem which could not be reproduced in the body.

'Now the ode [Greek: Eis Erômenan]--the "Ode to Anactoria" (as it is named by tradition)--the poem ... which has in the whole world of verse no companion and no rival but the Ode to Aphrodite, has been twice at least translated or traduced.... To the best (and bad is the best) of their ability, they [Nicholas Boileau-Despréaux and Ambrose Philips] have "done into" bad French and bad English the very words of Sappho. Feeling that although I might do it better I could not do it well, I abandoned the idea of translation--[Greek: hekôn aekonti ge thymô]. I tried then to write some paraphrase of the fragments which the Fates and the Christians have spared us. I have not said, as Boileau and Philips have, that the speaker sweats and swoons at sight of her favourite by the side of a man. I have abstained from touching on such details, for this reason: that I felt myself incompetent to give adequate expression in English to the literal and absolute words of Sappho; and would not debase and degrade them into a viler form. No one can feel more deeply than I do the inadequacy of my work. "That is not Sappho," a friend once said to me. I could only reply, "It is as near as I can come; and no man can come close to her." Her remaining verses are the supreme success, the final achievement, of the poetic art.... I have striven to cast my spirit into the mould of hers, to express and represent not the poem but the poet. I did not think it requisite to disfigure the page with a footnote wherever I had fallen back upon the original text. Here and there, I need not say, I have rendered into English the very words of Sappho. I have tried also to work into words of my own some expression of their effect: to bear witness how, more than any other's, her verses strike and sting the memory in lonely places, or at sea, among all loftier sights and sounds--how they seem akin to fire and air, being themselves "all air and fire"; other element there is none in them. As to the angry appeal against the supreme mystery of oppressive heaven, which I have ventured to put into her mouth at that point only where pleasure culminates in pain, affection in anger, and desire in despair--they are to be taken as the first outcome or outburst of foiled and fruitless passion recoiling on itself. After this, the spirit finds time to breathe and repose above all vexed senses of the weary body, all bitter labours of the revolted soul; the poet's pride of place is resumed, the lofty conscience of invincible immortality in the memories and the mouths of men.' No one who wishes to understand Sappho can afford to neglect a study of the poem thus annotated by its author. As Professor F. T. Palgrave justly says, 'Sappho is truly pictorial in the ancient sense: the image always simply presented; the sentiment left to our sensibility.'

The Greek comedies relating to the history of Sappho, referred to on previous pages, were all written by dramatists who belonged to what is known as the Middle Comedy, two centuries after her time (404-340 B.C.). The comedy of that period was devoted to satirising classes of people rather than individuals, to ridiculing stock-characters, to criticising the systems and merits of philosophers and writers, to parodies of older poets, and to travesties of mythological subjects. The extent to which the licence of the comic writers of that age had reached may be judged from the passing of the law referred to on a previous page (p. 23)--[Greek: mê dein onomasti kômôdein]--though the practice continued under ill-concealed disguise. Writers of such a temper were obviously unfit to hand down unsullied a character like Sappho's, powerful though their genius might be to make their inventions seem more true than actual history--'to make the worse appear the better reason.'

_Sappho_ was the title of comedies by Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiph[)a]nes, D[=i]ph[)i]lus, Ephippus, and Timocles, but very little is known of their contents. Of those by Ameipsias and Amphis only a single word out of each survives. Athenaeus quotes a few lines out of those by Ephippus and Timocles, for descriptions of men of contemptible character. The same writer refers to that by Diphilus for his use of the name of a kind of cup ([Greek: metaniptris]) which was used to drink out of when men had washed their hands after dinner, and for his having represented Archilochus and Hipponax (cf. p. 9) as lovers of Sappho. Of that by Antiphanes (cf. p. 26), who was the most celebrated and the most prolific of the playwrights of the Middle Comedy, we have, again in Athenaeus, a longer passage preserved; but it is merely to show the poetess proposing and solving a wearisome riddle ([Greek: griphos]), satirising a subtlety his grosser audience could not understand.