Sappho

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Sappho Rediscovered

Epigraph

Pittakos

Leto

Kerkolas

Erinna

Atthis

Phaon

Copyright

 

F
OR MY THREE DAUGHTERS

 

Johanna, Deborah, & Leslie

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

KEN ATCHITY
, who fell in love with Sappho

MADELEINE FINDLEY
, for her expert guidance

DANA ALBARELLA
, who made it happen

DEANE SHAPIRO
, for his historical insights

PETER DOYLE
, for his critical advice

JEAN SANFORD
, for her technical help

PAT CARROLL
, for her advocacy of the Muses

REBECCA FREY
, for her careful verification

and always
BENEDICT
, for everything

SAPPHO REDISCOVERED

Sappho, the great Lesbian poet, lived six hundred years before Christ, and her work was celebrated throughout the civilized world. Not only was she the first woman to reach such eminence and know such renown, she was the first to seek sexual equality and liberation, and as a result was banished from her island home.

Her lifestyle was extravagant, as was her life. In her banishment she taught Syracuse society how to put on an orgy. But in spite of her many lovers, there was a quiet, virginal spot reserved for her art, and no one intruded there.

Because of the bisexual and homosexual nature of her poems, they were burned centuries later by the early church. A concerted effort was made to erase all memory of her. This effort might have succeeded had her name not come down to us from ancient Roman writers, poets, and playwrights.

Plato called her “the tenth muse.” Socrates “rejoiced” to call her work “beautiful.” Strabo refers to her as “a miracle of a woman.” Plutarch says, “There is magic in the songs of Sappho to enchant and bewitch.” Horace rhapsodizes, “Still lives the flame this Aeolian girl committed to her strings.” To which Pinyto adds, “Her words are deathless.”

But through the centuries her words were lost. Then, in the 1920s, Professors Grenfell and Hunt, excavating Graeco-Egyptian cemeteries at Oxyrhynchus in the Fayum, discovered papier-mâché coffins composed of scraps of writing, which proved to be fragments of Sappho's poems. Here I quote Arthur Weigall, Inspector-General of Antiquities for the Egyptian government: “Out of the dust of Egypt there came one beautiful fragment after another.… Sappho's poetry is to be ranked among mankind's greatest achievements, and it is by her poetry that she must be judged.”

This is what I have attempted. Through her passionate verse Sappho reveals herself, and I ask the reader not to judge her, but to come to know the very human person she was.

Nancy Freedman

 

Some say there are nine Muses

but they are careless, for look!

—there is Sappho of Lesbos,

who is a tenth.

Plato

 

“I want, I want, I want!” these words were most often on her lips when she was a child. What it was she wanted she could not express. For Sappho saw more when her eyes were closed and wanted things she did not know of.

She was the daughter of the noble Skamandronymos. An ugly infant, dark, small, and female, she would have been exposed at birth had her father not descended from Orestes, son of Agamemnon. Although male children came along afterward, it was Sappho her father found time to spoil. He was excessively fond of his daughter and invented her nickname, Little Pebble, for it was his contention that some pebbles have gems hiding in them. And certainly Sappho was a bundle of opposing traits: delicate as she was, her gaze scorched and burned. Her father sometimes wondered if she was alone in that small body, or if there were two Sapphos forever at odds with each other.

Their villa lay sprawled among limestone cliffs that leaned against the sea. The white walls of the garden half hidden in cypress and sycamore were meant to be a boundary to stay within, but Sappho preferred the rocky headlands with moss-waving manes. She liked to search among the humped reefs to see a crab startle, or poke an anemone with a stick and watch it retreat. She counted the colors of starfish that came each season by the hundreds to spawn, and played on the sand shore as children always have, running at the sea because it ran at her.

Perhaps the endless prayers of her mother, Kleis, that her firstborn be a son influenced Sappho, for she was bold and daring as any boy. She scrambled over spray-wet rocks in tides that might easily have swept a man away. Excitement charged through her at the fury of the water monsters born of Ceto and Phorkys. Her nurse and the other servants were afraid of the sea. From them she learned the waters of Ocean were a river that wound around the world. The singers called it the wet waste or sometimes the wine-dark sea. She found endless fascination in spume that one moment lashed the reefs, and the next became tame and gentle. She loved all of Ocean's moods. Most of all she loved the bubbling milky froth curling around her ankles. Holding a conch shell to her ear, she listened to Triton's horn and at times caught glimpses of the Nereids who played in the distant deep—Amatheis of the lovely locks, soft-eyed Halia, Galatea, Doris, and others whose names she did not always remember, but of whom her nurse told her.

She was quick for her years, and at an early age memorized her genealogy and could do simple sums. She knew she lived in the city of sea-swept Eresos on the west coast of Lesbos, to which the waves of the Aegean once washed the head and lyre of Orpheus. She knew her father was an exporter of the famed honey-sweet wine of the region and that the far-stretching vineyards, beyond which she had never seen, belonged to her family, as did the boats riding at anchor in the small, protected harbor.

She understood that as the daughter of the house she commanded slaves and they must do her bidding—but only after they had done everyone else's bidding. She was strangely loved by all in the house, and her smile, slow to appear, always delighted. The slave who had been purchased for his proficiency as a toymaker brought her dolls with movable limbs who lived among miniature furniture, carved as in the great house, with tiny pots and pans on which to prepare meals. There were also small boats, replicas of those her father sailed, with seats for rowers, keels, masts, storage areas, and lastly, string, so they should not be immediately lost to the surf. She had hoops, balls, hobbyhorses, a swing, and her own little cart, pulled by a pair of nanny goats.

She learned to play castanets and flutes. When she made them sound, she drew herself up like a figure on a vase, her fingers creating rhythms which her feet followed. She trod out the geometric frieze of urns and tapestries so exactly that the servants gathered around and her mother watched from the window.

Every hour of the day All-Mother Earth had more to show her. That is why she played outside. The sun didn't shine in temple or house, the narcissus and tamarisk didn't bloom in stone halls. It was in the garden and sacred grove that yellow crocus and the crimson wild rose clambered on walls. There were violets to discover, lilies, windflowers, and cloverlike melilot to pick. Sometimes, if she was very still, she could hear the bird with the secret name.

In the seventh year of Sappho's life a council was called by her father. Nurse told her the terrible Erinyes had been summoned to attend. Those daughters of Night with serpents twined in their hair had started their long journey, beckoning as they passed to the Gray Women, those monstrous birds with human heads, who, with their human arms protruding from feathered wings, passed around their one eye. All the gods and goddesses and those creatures spawned by them in the sea and air, the Hydra, the Chimaera, and the Gorgons, traveled toward Eresos. The coming of these misshapen beings, Nurse said, meant a great war.

Sappho watched the preparation for the council feast with a heart that struck against her small chest. Sun passed early to his rest, removing light, and tallow tapers were set flaming, making long shadows and leaving the in-between places dark.

Nurse bathed her from a golden ewer with the head of the Minotaur, rubbed her with sweet oils and braided flowers into her long black hair. A purple robe was cast over her, gold sandals fastened to her tiny feet, and she was led to the innermost hall, where a fire roared on the great hearth. Standing there were members of the council, of which her father was chief. Close by was her mother, with the fat baby in her arms and the two older boys holding to her skirt. Sappho crept as close as she could, dragging Nurse with her. A slave brought in two black rams dedicated to Apollo and an ox pledged to Zeus.

Her mother brought out the key to the door that was never opened, although all in the household knew what was kept there. The handle of the key was ivory, and Skamandronymos, taking it, shot back the bolt. Sappho strained to see the objects she had been told of, the bronze-shod spears and those of pelican ash, bows made from the horns of wild ibex hanging from a peg. Her father selected a bronze battle-ax with a handle of olive wood that shone in the firelight.

The sacrifices waited, anointed in barley meal, dark wine, and honey. Skamandronymos swung the ax in a great arc through the air and through the throats of the rams. They knelt in their blood which overflowed the chalice, and their bodies rolled to the floor. The broad-headed ox bellowed in alarm and had to be stunned.

Skamandronymos set up a chant, calling the gods to his side. Sappho began to tremble as the cadence of her father's voice rose and fell. There was grandeur in the sound, like that of blind Homer singing his great and terrible songs on craggy Chios long ago. A word repeated in each stanza:
Athens … Athens.

In Athens, her mother once told her, girl children had no freedom to run about as she did. In Athens only males were taught music, the poetry of Ionian Homer, and sums. While it was never said to her directly, she knew that in Athens an unlikely female child would have been exposed.

A sudden haunting intonation in her father's voice indicated that the Gray Women and Erinyes had arrived. They seemed to her to crouch in the shadows, and she clung to her nurse. Abruptly the chant ended, and members of the council stepped forward. The air was filled with angry, exhorting speeches: Athenian merchants had seized the trading post of Sigeum, which Lesbos had established at the Aegean end of the Hellespont near ruined Troy.

Sappho began to understand that the five cities of Lesbos had declared war against Athens. She sought her nurse's hand, but Nurse withdrew it, whispering she was the daughter of the house and must set an example. So the seven-year-old squeezed in beside her father at the head table.

The smell of roasting meat filled the room, and her father poured libation, calling in the same awesome voice, speaking directly to great Zeus: “O Cloud-Compeller, son of Kronos, hear me! For you, Ever-living, know our cause is just. Let the Athenian ships founder. Let Folly, eldest of your daughters, close their eyes to their destruction. Send Ares, the unconquerable, to lead us to Athens. Grant that we who are assembled here live to see our wives and children and offer you fine hekatombs.”

The singer who traveled between the five cities assured them that the oracle at Delphi was favorable. The holy Pythia upon her tripod, in a vision sent by Ares, saw the owl sacred to gray-eyed Athene, guardian of Athens, seized in the claws of the Lesbian vulture. The owl struggled helplessly, but the daughter of Zeus and Metis, born in a snowstorm of gold, was powerless to rescue her bird. Without her owl, that great queen of battle fell to her knees. By this token Ares, god of war, acceded to her father's request and promised supremacy to Lesbos.