Sappho (19 page)

Never, O Peace,

have I found thee

more irksome!

The poet Alkman was the first guest to respond to her invitation. Alkman was a Lydian, born at Sardis, who migrated to Sparta and wrote love songs to a golden-haired girl named Megalostrata. But that was many years ago. When he visited Sappho, he was a fat, jovial, obscene fellow—and what was worse, the servants came in consternation to tell Sappho that her guest was full of lice. Alkman fit better into Kerkolas's parties than hers. After his third goblet of wine, he unwrapped his himation and, belly jiggling, danced “The Feast of the Naked Youth,” which he had composed twenty years before and which the young warriors of Sparta still chanted. His capering was so odious that it was impossible to imagine the beauty of four hundred Adonises. Gone with his dignity was his love. Megalostrata, he confided, had grown as fat and unlovely as himself. Nevertheless, he had a treat for Sappho, the latest paeon circulated by Alkaios:

He doesn't love me, you say?

I don't suppose fish or wine love me either,

but I take pleasure in them all the same

Sappho clapped her hands and was about to kiss him when she remembered the lice. “Yes, that is Alkaios,” and she gave thanks to whatever gods protected him, allowing him love and laughter and the visitation of the Muses. How close to him she felt.

Another poet arriving from Sparta was Polymnatos, who was also old, obese, and originally Ionian. He was a fine musician. Composing for flute, he worked with semitones and used the enharmonic scale with great effectiveness. He was director of the music school at Sparta, as Terpander had been before him. Terpander was an idol of Sappho's because he added the high octave string to the seven-stringed lyre.

“I grew up playing it,” Sappho said, thinking of home.

“Did you know,” Polymnatos went on, “that Hermes invented it, using a tortoiseshell? He taught Orpheus to play, and when Orpheus was killed by the Thracian women, his lyre along with his head fell into the sea.…”

Sappho finished the tale: “And was washed by the waves onto Lesbos, where a fisherman found it and brought the lyre to Terpander. I often wonder if he brought him the head too,” and she laughed, but almost immediately grew serious.

“Did you know that Terpander was from Antissa, the town nearest Eresos? He died the year I was born.”

“Why do you suppose it is,” Polymnatos asked her, “that so many great poets have come from your tiny island of Lesbos?”

“Freedom,” she answered without hesitation. “When it is lacking, we Lesbians go into exile … or are sent,” she added.

They spoke of Thales and his island, Miletus, everywhere dubbed the Isle of Thought. For he continued asking strange questions. Instead of accepting his fellow man, he asked, “What is man?” as though he were more than the sum of his parts.

The poet Stesichoros of Himera, who wrote in the style of great Homer, also came to visit. But he extracted a moral from everything, and Sappho found him tedious. It was Stesichoros, however, who told her of a young pupil of Thales, one Anaximander, who had set about to draw a map of the world.

This seemed to Sappho an incredible idea, and how one would go about it she had no notion. But what she heard of the young philosopher fascinated her. Although she was scandalized by his calumny of the Moon goddess, who, he claimed, had no light of her own but borrowed light from Sun. It seemed he gave no credence to mighty Atlas, and did not believe the world was held up by anything. Anaximander didn't even espouse his master's thesis that all was water but instead envisioned a substance he called the unlimited, which was in all things, with each part moving while the whole remained unchanging and unchangeable. In the beginning, according to his theory, hot and cold were one. Then they began to separate, forming a moist center of cold. This gradually hardened to become Earth, showering out particles which became Moon, Sun, and Stars. He also preached that human life began in the sea, human infants having once been nurtured by fishlike creatures who acted as nannies.

Sappho nodded. “Men are ever inventive. However, what he says about Selene the beautiful is surely unjust. Her soft light is hers alone, nor would she steal from another. As for the rest, perhaps some god whispered into his ear. I never did think we floated on water.”

Adroitly, she managed that the elderly Stesichoros return home, for she was planning a summer of fun, and was eager to dispense with his presence.

Sappho was the unquestioned social leader of Syracuse. The parties of the Lesbian songstress were famous for being based on novel ideas. It was she who introduced forfeits into the ancient game of blindman's bluff.

No one guessed that at night she worked with waxed wooden blocks to press her poems onto sheets of papyrus. Soon she would have her book, bound even as the book from the sea chest was bound.

Polymnatos told her that he had once seen Homer written down and that Hesiod, too, had been transcribed. But he was rather disapproving: “Such a static thing as writing should be left for ledgers of business. Poetry should fly on the human voice alone.”

“But if the human voice falters? Or the singer misremembers? We are at the mercy of hundreds unknown to us. How can we trust their ability or memory?”

Polymnatos was not interested in the work of scribes. He spoke of the early lyric poets, Eumelos of Corinth and Olympos of Phrygia, whose songs were still sung.

*   *   *

One day Kerkolas had fresh news from his captains, who had recently put in at Corinth. “It seems,” Kerkolas told her, “that there was a defection in the ranks of the nobles against our late host, Periander. So, being a Tyrant, he sent a messenger asking a neighboring Tyrant to visit. The guest—I will not mention his name, other than to say he is from Asia Minor—talked long and earnestly with Periander, who told him his problem and wondered aloud how to deal with it. It seems they were walking through a field of rye and the visiting Tyrant with his walking stick flicked off the heads of the tallest tassels. Upon his visitor's departure, Periander beheaded all the leading nobles of Corinth.”

“Periander?” Sappho gasped in horror. “With whom we made so merry? Who could not do enough for our comfort? Before whom I sang my brightest songs?”

“The same.”

“What thymos possesses the human spirit?” She was quite distracted, for Periander was among the seven wise men of the world. But Kerkolas simply shrugged.

The dog days arrived, Sirius shone bright, and the heat was such that the nobles of the great houses removed to the caves along the shore. Awnings of bright colors were stretched overhead.

Before Sappho could enjoy the cool of the caves she had to be assured there were neither snakes nor priestesses in them, that these practices were not known in Syracuse.

In this informal setting Sappho was permitted to sing, and many gifts were laid before her in thanks. One she prized was a coin minted over two hundred years before in Lydia. It was of gold and silver mixed, with the figure of Pegasus skillfully executed on it. For even in ancient times the finest artists were employed to design coins.

A favorite picnicking place was among smooth diving rocks, below which the outline of a long-vanished city could be discerned through waving kelp. Sappho and Kerkolas, at home in the sea, swam down hand over hand against the still-standing remnants of a wall through which fish swarmed. Wide streets shimmered before their eyes; broken columns were moss-covered perches for barnacles and clustering sea anemones. When they came to the surface, Sappho said, “One never thinks of those that went before. They walked those streets, Kerkolas, lived as we do, knew the same pleasures, the same pain.”

Kerkolas shook his curls from his eyes. “It is thought to be the abode of Eurynome, daughter of the ever-encircling waters of Ocean.”

“I do not think so. I think people like us lived there, that they displeased the Earth-Shaker, Poseidon, who tumbled the city into the sea, and all the people with it.”

She was quiet all day, pondering what she had seen.

The men were drinking and singing skolia. Kerkolas attempted to arrange a boar hunt but was voted down. It was too hot. They decided to award prizes to any who could devise a fresh amusement. The winning game involved sending for doves, whose wings they clipped. These were collected overhead in golden nets, while before them the loveliest of the slave girls were stripped naked, and when the net of birds was untied, it was their task to catch one. If any succeeded, she was to have her freedom. So the girls scrambled over the rocks, slipping, jumping, stretching, tumbling their fair bodies in ways delightful to see.

One of Kerkolas's friends handed Sappho a wonderfully wrought cup, and when the wine was drunk she saw incised on the bottom a nude male mounting a female. The young man smiled across at her, but she returned him his cup. Many guests had slipped away, some catching the slave girls before they caught the doves. Others lolled with young boys. The same youth who had given Sappho the goblet was telling her that prostitutes trained their daughters in their art. “The most gifted teach their female children through three and four generations.”

She looked about for Kerkolas, but he was temporarily absent; so, too, was the Persian cupbearer. Sappho moved to another group, where the talk was of navigation, a skill which the gods had secured for man.

On the way home from this outing, Sappho rode with Kerkolas, who, anxious to be back, lashed the horses. It happened that a man darted in front of them; their chariot wheels struck him and passed over the midsection of his body. Sappho heard the rib cage give way and, looking back, saw him writhing in the dirt. “Stop, Kerkolas, stop!”

He did not so much as slow. “It was a slave. I will inquire tomorrow who the man belonged to, and make recompense.”

“But he can't be left like that, he … turn around, Kerkolas. Surely we can do something.”

“What?”

“Take him to our servants, who will look after him.”

“You can be so strange at times, Sappho, that I scarcely understand you. The man was a slave.”

“But he feels his pain as any would.”

“There you are mistaken. One is born a slave because he has the blunted feelings and inferior mentality of a slave. They do not, I assure you, feel in the way you and I do.”

“I will not ride with you again.” She spoke angrily.

When they were home, she sent her people to the spot where they had run over the man. They reported he was dead.

Kerkolas made due reparation to the man's owner, and the matter should have been at an end. It wasn't. It was like something undigested in the bowels of Sappho. She barely thanked her husband for a carpet from Persia of blue and gold, which he had been at much trouble to procure for her. Almost feverishly she etched her poems at night. The characters were written in columns to be pasted together and unrolled. Several poems were in the shape of ellipses. She liked fitting the layout of the calligraphy to the mood evoked by the individual poems, and hummed as she pressed the wax. It was a task she had come to love.

*   *   *

Once again Kerkolas's sleek, high-prowed ships anchored offshore. Their cargo was evil tidings, for runners brought news that her mother was dead. As oxen receive the blow that stuns them, so Sappho stood. She was mute. She did not cry out but sank slowly to her knees.

Her women ran to lift her, but she got unsteadily to her feet and walked to her rooms. She shut herself in, locked the door with a leather thong, cut a strand of her hair, and proceeded trancelike into the garden. Standing a long moment before the transplanted vine of Eresos, she broke off branches and wove them with her hair into a funeral wreath.

When Kleis clasped her that final time, her presentiment had been true. Sappho's organs knotted together and spasms passed over her.—Mother, never in this life to feel your arms about me. Poor wandering shade, bloodless, lifeless, gone to join All-Time. Wrapped at the last in a flaxen mantle. Who closed your eyes? Was it one of my brothers? Or have they all taken to the roving life of the hollow ships?

She returned to her room and sang dirges and threnodies. She did not take food or share her grief. Her women wailed outside the door. She would not let them in. Sobs choked her as she thought of her sweet-faced mother, bewildered by such a child as she. Yet Kleis had only shaken her head and left her to be Sappho.

Sappho knew that only her Muses rescued her from oblivion. “Some, I tell you”—she raised her fist to heaven—“will remember me hereafter.”

Her songs would be handed down. Long after she had ceased to be, people would repeat her songs in places unknown, in civilizations that had not happened. But Kleis was just a woman who had lived, and lived no more. Sappho took up her kithara:

Night rained her

thick dark sleep

upon their eyes

Was that what it was like? A sleep from which there is no waking?

*   *   *

During these days of loss the gods set before her a revelation. She was with child. She pressed her hand against her hard belly. Her womb was vital with life, yet that which had nurtured her was no longer. Kybele, mother goddess of Eresos, sent by Kleis, whispered it was a daughter.

She hoped it was so. But this was something even the seven wise men could not predict. And what did they know, since she had heard that Pittakos was among their number. He with the gross manners and uncut nails who persecuted her, drove her from her mother, was called a wise man—and now her mother was dead. Sing woe! Sing woe!

She bent herself in two and, when Kerkolas hammered on the door, would not open it. This was her grief, hers! The same was true of the child. She was not ready to share that either.

Some person lodged in her. Who? The gods sent this trespasser to show her she was a woman like any other. This was what happened to the women gossiping at their spinning; loose bowels and vomit, the inability to digest certain foods—this was what life had shrunk to.