Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
is now mainly known for its oil and wine and its salubrity. In ancient times its wine was the most celebrated through all Greece; and Vergil refers to its vines, which trailed like ivy on the ground, while many authors testify to the exceptional wholesomeness of Lesbian wine. But the clue to Sappho's individuality can only be found in the knowledge of what, in her age, Lesbos and the Lesbians were; around her converges all we know of the Aeolian race. As Mr. Swinburne says—
Had Sappho's self not left her word thus longFor token,The sea round Lesbos yet in waves of songHad spoken.
Had Sappho's self not left her word thus long
For token,
The sea round Lesbos yet in waves of song
Had spoken.
'For a certain space of time,' writes Mr. J. Addington Symonds in hisStudies of Greek Poets, first series, pp. 127 ff., 'the Aeolians occupied the very foreground of Greekliterature, and blazed out with a brilliance of lyrical splendour that has never been surpassed. There seems to have been something passionate and intense in their temperament, which made the emotions of the Dorian and the Ionian feeble by comparison. Lesbos, the centre of Aeolian culture, was the island of overmastering passions; the personality of the Greek race burned there with a fierce and steady flame of concentrated feeling. The energies which the Ionians divided between pleasure, politics, trade, legislation, science, and the arts, and which the Dorians turned to war and statecraft and social economy, were restrained by the Aeolians within the sphere of individual emotions, ready to burst forth volcanically. Nowhere in any age of Greek history, or in any part of Hellas, did the love of physical beauty, the sensibility to radiant scenes of nature, the consuming fervour of personal feeling, assume such grand proportions did receive so illustrious an expression as they did in Lesbos. At first this passion blossomed into the most exquisite lyrical poetry that the world has known: this was the flower-time of the Aeolians, their brief and brilliant spring. But the fruit it bore was bitter and rotten. Lesbos became a byword for corruption. The passions which for a moment had flamed intothe gorgeousness of Art, burnt their envelope of words and images, remained a mere furnace of sensuality, from which no expression of the divine in human life could be expected. In this the Lesbian poets were not unlike the Provençal troubadours, who made a literature of Love; or the Venetian painters, who based their Art upon the beauty of colour, the voluptuous charms of the flesh. In each case the motive of enthusiastic passion sufficed to produce a dazzling result. But as soon as its freshness was exhausted there was nothing left for Art to live on, and mere decadence to sensuality ensued. Several circumstances contributed to aid the development of lyric poetry in Lesbos. The customs of the Aeolians permitted more social and domestic freedom than was common in Greece. Aeolian women were not confined to the harem like Ionians, or subjected to the rigorous discipline of the Spartans. While mixing freely with male society, they were highly educated, and accustomed to express their sentiments to an extent unknown elsewhere in history—until, indeed, the present time. The Lesbian ladies applied themselves successfully to literature. They formed clubs for the cultivation of poetry and music. They studied the art of beauty, and sought to refine metrical forms and diction.Nor did they confine themselves to the scientific side of Art. Unrestrained by public opinion, and passionate for the beautiful, they cultivated their senses and emotions, and developed their wildest passions. All the luxuries and elegances of life which that climate and the rich valleys of Lesbos could afford, were at their disposal: exquisite gardens, in which the rose and hyacinth spread perfume; river-beds ablaze with the oleander and wild pomegranate; olive-groves and fountains, where the cyclamen and violet flowered with feathery maidenhair; pine-shadowed coves, where they might bathe in the calm of a tideless sea; fruits such as only the southern sea and sea-wind can mature; marble cliffs, starred with jonquil and anemone in spring, aromatic with myrtle and lentisk and samphire and wild rosemary through all the months; nightingales that sang in May; temples dim with dusky gold and bright with ivory; statues and frescoes of heroic forms. In such scenes as these the Lesbian poets lived, and thought of Love. When we read their poems, we seem to have the perfumes, colours, sounds, and lights of that luxurious land distilled in verse. Nor was a brief but biting winter wanting to give tone to their nerves, and, by contrast with the summer, to prevent the palling of so much luxury on sated senses.The voluptuousness of Aeolian poetry is not like that of Persian or Arabian art. It is Greek in its self-restraint, proportion, tact. We find nothing burdensome in its sweetness. All is so rhythmically and sublimely ordered in the poems of Sappho that supreme art lends solemnity and grandeur to the expression of unmitigated passion.'
The story of Sappho's love for Phaon, and her leap from the Leucadian rock in consequence of his disdaining her, though it has been so long implicitly believed, does not seem to rest on any firm historical basis. Indeed, more than one epigrammatist in the Greek Anthology expressly states that she was buried in an Aeolic grave.[4]
Still Phaon, for all the myths that cluster round his name, for his miraculous loveliness and his insensibility to love, may yet have been a real personage. Like other heroes, he may possibly have lived at a period long anterior tothat of the traditions about him which have been handed down to us. He is said to have been a boatman of Mitylene (cf. fr.140), who was endowed by Aphrodite with youth and extraordinary beauty as a reward for his having ferried her for nothing. Servius, who wrote about 400A.D.(cf. p.39), says she gave him an alabaster box of ointment, the effect of which was to make all women fall in love with him; and that one of these—he does not mention her name—threw herself in despair from the cliff of Leucas. Servius further states, on the authority of Menander, that the temple was founded by Phaon of Lesbos. Phaon's beauty and power of fascination passed into a proverb. Pliny, however, says he became the object of Sappho's love because he had found the male root of the plant callederyngo, probably our sea-holly, and that it acted like a love-charm. And when Athenaeus is talking about lettuces, as to their use as food and their anti-aphrodisiac properties, he says Callimachus' story of Aphrodite hiding Adonis under a lettuce is 'an allegorical statement of the poet's, intended to show that those who are much addicted to the use of lettuces are very little adapted for pleasures of love. Cratinus,' he goes on, 'says that Aphrodite when in love with Phaon hid him in the leaves of lettuces; but the youngerMarsyas says that she hid him amid the grass of barley.'
Those fanciful writers who assert the existence of a second Sappho say that it was not the poetess who fell in love with Phaon, but that other Sappho on whom they fasten all the absurd stories circulated by the Comic writers. The tale runs that the importunate love of Sappho caused Phaon to flee to Sicily, whither she followed him. Ovid's Epistle, before mentioned (p.3), is the foundation for the greater part of the legend. The inscription on the Parian marbles (cf. p.9) also mentions a certain year in which 'Sappho sailed from Mitylene and fled to Sicily.' The chronicle, however, says nothing about Phaon, nor is any reason given for her exile; some have imagined that she was obliged to leave her country on political grounds, but there is no trace in her writings, nor does any report indicate, that she ever interested herself in politics.
Strabo, in hisGeographyalready quoted (p.10), says: 'There is a white rock which stretches out from Leucas to the sea and towards Cephallenia, that takes its name from its whiteness. The rock of Leucas has upon it a temple of Apollo, and the leap from it was believed to stop love. From this it is said that Sappho first, as Menander says somewhere, "inpursuit of the haughty Phaon, urged on by maddening desire, threw herself from its far-seen rocks, imploring thee [Apollo], lord and king."' The former promontory of Leucas is now separated from the mainland and forms one of the Ionian islands, known as Santa Maura, off the wild and rugged coast of Acarnania. The story of Sappho's having ventured the Leucadian leap is repeated by Ovid, and was never much doubted, except by those who believed in a second Sappho, till modern times. Still, it is strange that none of the many authors who relate the legend say what was the result of the leap—whether it was fatal to her life or to her love. Moreover, Ptolemy Hephaestion (about 100A.D.), who, in the extant summary of his works published in theMyriobiblionof Photius, gives a list of many men and women who by the Leucadian leap were cured of the madness of love or perished, does not so much as mention the name of Sappho. A circumstantial account of Sappho's leap, on which the popular modern idea is chiefly founded, was given by Addison, relying to no small extent upon his imagination for his facts, 'with his usual exquisite humour,' as Warton remarks, in the 233rdSpectator, Nov. 27, 1711. 'Sappho the Lesbian,' says Addison, 'in love with Phaon, arrived at the temple of Apollo habited like abride, in garments as white as snow. She wore a garland of myrtle on her head, and carried in her hand the little musical instrument of her own invention. After having sung a hymn to Apollo, she hung up her garland on one side of his altar, and her harp on the other. She then tucked up her vestments like a Spartan virgin, and amidst thousands of spectators, who were anxious for her safety and offered up vows for her deliverance, marched directly forwards to the utmost summit of the promontory, where, after having repeated a stanza of her own verses, which we could not hear, she threw herself off the rock with such an intrepidity as was never before observed in any who had attempted that dangerous leap. Many who were present related that they saw her fall into the sea, from whence she never rose again; though there were others who affirmed that she never came to the bottom of her leap, but that she was changed into a swan as she fell, and that they saw her hovering in the air under that shape. But whether or no the whiteness and fluttering of her garments might not deceive those who looked upon her, or whether she might not really be metamorphosed into that musical and melancholy bird, is still a doubt among the Lesbians. Alcaeus, the famous lyric poet, who had for some time beenpassionately in love with Sappho, arrived at the promontory of Leucate that very evening in order to take the leap upon her account; but hearing that Sappho had been there before him, and that her body could be nowhere found, he very generously lamented her fall, and is said to have written his hundred and twenty-fifth ode upon that occasion.'
It is to be noted in this connection that the part of the cliff of Santa Maura or Leukadi, known to this day as 'Sappho's Leap,' was used, even in historical times, as a place whence criminals condemned to death were thrown into the sea. The people used, it is said, to tie numbers of birds to the limbs of the condemned and cover them with feathers to break the force of their fall, and then send boats to pick them up. If they survived, they were pardoned.
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 395B.C., more than two centuries afterSappho'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 forgoesThe leap, attaining the repose!(Mrs. E. B. Browning.)
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 ofSappho(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 centuryB.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 isnot surprising,' writes Mr. Philip Smith, in his articleSAPPHOin Smith'sDictionary 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 403B.C.a law was passed which enacted that no one was to be represented on the stage by name,μὴ δεῖν ὀνομαστὶ κωμῳδεῖν(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), hasdone 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 (ἑταῖραι) and pupils (μαθήτριαι) 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 theGreek 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.)
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.77refers 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 wereAnagora 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.
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.2was 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.86a 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'sSappho to Phaonis so corrupt that we know not whom she is enumerating there of those she loved; even the name of her 'fair Cydno' varies in theMSS.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.72she says of herself, 'I am not one of a malignant nature, but have a quiet temper.' Antiphanes, in his playSappho, is said by Athenaeus to have represented her proposing absurd riddles,[5]so little did the Comic writers understand her genius. Fr.79is quoted by Athenaeus to show her love for beauty and honour. Compare also fr.11and 31 for his testimony to the purity of her love for her girl-friends:πάντα καθαρα τοῖς καθαροῖς, 'unto the pure all things are pure.'
Plato, in hisPhaedrus, 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 lovelinessThat held the fire eternal.(Swinburne.)
The small dark body's Lesbian loveliness
That held the fire eternal.
(Swinburne.)
The epithet 'beautiful' is repeated by so manywriters 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 epithetἰόπλοκος(violet-weaving) cannot be replaced byἰοπλόκαμος(with violet locks), as someMSS.read. And Damocharis, in theGreek 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 theGreek Anthologyshe 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 hisGeography, calls her 'something wonderful' (θαύμαστόν τι χρῆμα), 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 theGreek Anthology, notes as the mark of an ill-informed woman that she could not even sing Sappho's songs.
Writers in theGreek Anthologycall 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, confessedInferior 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 deadThat mighty songstress whose unrivalled powersWeave for the Muse a crown of deathless flowers?(Francis Hodgson.)
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 workIs 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.
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 Piny̆tus:
This tomb reveals where Sappho's ashes lie,But her sweet words of wisdom ne'er will die.(Lord Neaves.)
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.)
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; hegives 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 theGreek Anthology, describes a statue of her as adorning the gymnasium of Zeuxippus at Byzantium in the fifth centuryA.D.Pliny says that Leon, an artistotherwise 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 herOde 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' (324-261B.C.) being in love with Stratonīce, 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 sheoften 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 lossof 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,
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 sensualitymore 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'sNotes 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 poemAnactoria, 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 ofSappho 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—Εἰς Ἐρωμέναν: 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 odeΕἰς Ἐρωμέναν—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—ἑκὼν ἀέκοντί γε θυμῷ. I tried then to write some paraphrase of the fragments which the Fates andthe 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 (404-340B.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 parodiesof 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)—μὴ δεῖν ὀνομαστὶ κωμῳδεῖν—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.'
Sapphowas the title of comedies by Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphănes, Dīphĭlus, 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 (μετανιπτρίς) 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 (γρῖφος), satirising a subtlety his grosser audience could not understand.
Besides these, Antiphanes and Plato (the Comic writer, not the philosopher) each wrote a play calledPhaon. Of that by Antiphanes but three words remain. Plato's drama is several times quoted by Athenaeus, but only when he is discussing details of cookery—one passage obviously for the sake of its coarseness. Menander wrote a play calledLeucadia, and Antiphanes one calledLeucadius. Antiphanes' play furnishes Athenaeus with nothing but a catalogue of seasonings. Some lines out of Menander'sLeucadiaare quoted above (p.17) from Strabo, and it is referred to by several authors for the sake of some word or phrase; Servius, commenting on Vergil'sAeneid, iii. 274, gives a précis of Turpilius' Latin paraphrase of it, which is mentioned above, p.16.
Such is our knowledge of the Comic accounts of Sappho's history. When we consider the general character of the Middle Comedy, written as it was to please the Athenians after their golden time had passed, it is not unreasonable to take accounts which seem to have originated in such treatment with somewhat more than diffidence.
But it is not only the Greek dramatists who have written plays on the story of Sappho. Two have appeared in English during the last few years, one of which, by the late Mrs. Estelle Lewis ('Stella'), has been translated into modern Greek by Cambourogio for representation on the Athenian stage. The most celebrated, however, and one of considerable beauty, is by John Lilly, 'the Euphuist'; it is calledSapho and Phao, and was acted before Queen Elizabeth in 1584. The whole is allegorical, Sapho being probably meant for Elizabeth, queen of an island, and Phao is supposed to be Leicester. Lilly makes his Sapho a princess of Syracuse, and takes other liberties—though not such as the Greeks did—with her history; strangely enough, however, he makes no reference to the Leucadian leap. 'When Phao cometh,' he makes Sapho soliloquise, 'what then? 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.' Venus is introduced as marring their mutual love, and Phao says: 'This shall be my resolution, wherever I wander, to be as Iwere 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.'
In France, the first opera written by the late M. Charles Gounod was entitledSapho. The libretto was by M. Emile Augier. It was first given at the Académie, April 16, 1851; and in Italian, asSaffo, at Covent Garden, Aug. 9, in the same year. It was reproduced in 1858, and again in the new Opera House, April 3, 1884. Each time both author and composer recast their work, which contains many brilliant scenes and melodies. The celebrated Madame de Staël wrote a drama calledSapho, but it has been long forgotten. Alphonse Daudet's novel,Sapho,mœurs Parisiennes,of which a version dramatised by M. Belot was played for the first time at the Gymnase in Paris, December 18, 1885, bears no reference to the poetess beyond the sobriquet of the heroine. The most artistically finished tragedy of the German dramatist Grillparzer is hisSappho. It was produced at Vienna in 1819, and is still played at many of the principal German theatres. An inferior Italian translation of it received a high encomium from Lord Byron. It is best knownto English readers by Miss Ellen Frothingham's faithful translation.
About forty years ago, however, Messrs. Thomas Constable & Co., of Edinburgh, had issued an earlier translation of the play by L. C. C. [i.e.Lucy Caroline Cumming]; and there are some others.
The Queen of Roumania, under hernom de guerreof 'Carmen Sylva,' is the most distinguished among living poets who have idealised the life of Sappho. But her poem under that title, published in herStürme, owes more to its rich poetic charm than to the actual facts of the Greek story; in it the Lesbian seems to live in the Germany of to-day.
Although so little of Sappho remains, her complete works must have been considerable. She seems to have been the chief acknowledged writer of 'Wedding-Songs,' if we may believe Himerius (cf. fr.93); and there is little doubt that Catullus'Epithalamiawere copied, if not actually translated, from hers. Menander the Rhetorician praises her 'Invocatory Hymns,' in which he says she called upon Artemis and Aphrodite from a thousand hills; perhaps fr.6is taken out of one of these. Her hymn to Artemis is said to have been imitated by Damophyla (cf. p.24). She was on all sides regarded as the greatest erotic poet ofantiquity; as Swinburne makes her sing of herself—