Searching for Sappho

by Philip Freeman

  One such fragmentary and enigmatic Sapphic poem is considerably shorter than the previous song of Hector and Andromache:

  . . . for once you were a child

  . . . come sing these things

  . . . talk to us, grant us

  your favors.

  For we are going to a wedding, as you

  well know. But as quickly as possible,

  send away the virgins.

  May the gods have . . .

  . . . a road to great Olympus

  . . . for mortals

  If this is a choral wedding song, as seems likely, the setting appears to be a group of young women en route to a marriage celebration. They come upon an older woman along the way and ask her to share her memories and wisdom of such events in her own life. The driving off of the maidens may be an encouragement to them to find husbands of their own as soon as possible, or it could be part of the ritual separation of the bride from her childhood companions before she begins the next stage of her life with the wedding night.

  The last, broken lines are particularly puzzling. Is the joy of marriage optimistically compared to a trip to heavenly Olympus, or does the missing space in the papyrus before the line warn more darkly that “(there is not) a road to great Olympus for mortals,” so we better grab what joy from life we can? The latter is a thought expressed by the Spartan poet Alcman. “No mortal may go soaring to the heavens,” he declares—a thought more in keeping with the pessimism of the ancient Greeks. Since Sappho strikes most readers as a romantic yet realistic poet, we may well assume that her final lines reflect the latter mood.

  Another song of Sappho, preserved in Hephaestion’s second-century-AD book on poetic meter, may also have been performed at weddings. It’s a remarkable little poem in that it expresses feminine sexuality in a way not found in male Greek writers:

  Truly, sweet mother, I cannot weave on the loom,

  for I am overcome with desire for a boy because of slender Aphrodite.

  What is so compelling about these deceptively simple lines is that the young woman is allowed to express her desire in such an open way. While sitting with her mother in the familiar environment of her home working the loom as all good Greek girls did, in a moment of exasperation she confesses that she is overwhelmed not with eros (“love, passion”) but an even more powerful emotion, pothos—the same word used of Alexander the Great to describe his desire to conquer the world. Proper Greek maidens as found in male authors did not express such emotions, their sexuality being rarely if ever acknowledged. Only in a female writer like Sappho could a young woman find the safe space to express these feelings.

  The word Sappho uses for the object of the girl’s affection is also telling. Greek pais (translated “boy” here) is usually reserved for a child or young person of either gender, meaning the girl is presumably in love with a young man—or conceivably a young woman—of her own age, not an older groom. If this poem was performed publicly at a wedding, it shows an amazing openness to youthful female sexuality in ancient Lesbos. Of course, it may never have been intended to be a wedding song, but rather a private poem composed by Sappho for her friends. The subject matter may have been simply too shocking for a male audience to hear.

  Other songs of Sappho strike a more conventional chord of praising both the bride and the groom at a wedding, but in ways that may sometimes surprise a modern audience. In a papyrus fragment dating to the late second or early third century AD, Sappho praises a:

  . . . bride with beautiful feet

  This may seem like an odd compliment, but in the earlier Greek poetic tradition, Homer portrays the goddess Hera as having “shining feet,” and Hesiod praises a divine daughter of Ocean with “beautiful ankles.” To describe a mortal bride as having lovely feet is therefore to liken her to a goddess. There is also an element of class to the praise, since delicate feet were a sign of the leisure enjoyed by aristocratic women, unlike those who spent their lives toiling on a farm.

  Another passage from Hephaestion’s metrical handbook records one of Sappho’s wedding songs addressed to both the groom and bride:

  Blessed bridegroom, your wedding has been accomplished

  just as you prayed and you have the maiden bride you desired.

  Your form is graceful and your eyes . . .

  honey-sweet. Love pours over your lovely face . . .

  . . . Aphrodite has greatly honored you

  The first stanza is addressed to the groom, but the second addresses the bride. Here the word for “love” pouring over the young woman’s face like honey is the more conventional eros, with the implication of desire for her new husband within the proper context of marriage.

  Other lines of Sappho quoted by the literary critic Dionysius in the first century BC, which he describes as from a wedding song of Sappho, tell the groom to appreciate what he has been given:

  for never,

  bridegroom, was there another girl like this one.

  And Sappho offers this final wedding praise for the groom, again from Hephaestion:

  To what, dear bridegroom, can I in handsomeness compare you?

  To a slender sapling most of all I do compare you.

  The Greek word for “sapling” here (orpex) is often used for offspring as well. As a firm and flexing rod, the implied comparison to the groom’s genitals would not escape the revelers at the wedding feast.

  At the conclusion of the marriage feast, the bride was escorted by the groom to her new home while well-wishers followed behind:

  Farewell, bride, farewell, much-honored bridegroom

  sings Sappho in two similar fragments. At the groom’s home, the couple was escorted to the wedding chamber where the marriage would be consummated and the young woman would make the physical transition from maiden to wife. Here the groom would “loosen the pure virgin’s girdle,” as Sappho’s contemporary Alcaeus puts it in his poem on the wedding of the mortal Peleus and the goddess Thetis, parents of the hero Achilles.

  As if the moment weren’t terrifying enough for the young woman, it was traditional for guests who had followed the couple to their new home to gather outside the bedchamber and sing risqué songs called epithalamia while the pair made love for the first time. This lewd and ribald charivari probably has its origin in ancient fertility rituals meant to encourage pregnancy and deflect the attention of any jealous gods away from the amorous actions of the couple. It must have also been great fun for the wedding guests, who likely would have been quite intoxicated by this point. To keep unwanted intruders from the chamber so that the couple might carry out the business at hand, a sturdy doorkeeper was appointed to guard the bedroom. It seems, too, that a symbolic attempt by the bride’s friends to rescue her from her new husband was part of the festivities.

  The prudish grammarian Demetrius apparently didn’t approve of such activities, writing, “Sappho makes cheap fun of the rustic bridegroom and the door-keeper at the wedding, using vulgar rather than poetic language.” More than fifteen hundred years after Sappho, a Byzantine churchman was still complaining about her vulgar wedding songs. But Demetrius and others failed to appreciate that a gifted poet can compose equally great works both sublime and profane, depending on the occasion. The entrance of the bridegroom into the wedding chamber is, in fact, celebrated in one of Sappho’s most famous and thoroughly bawdy songs:

  Raise high the roof—

  Hymenaeus!

  Raise it up, carpenters—

  Hymenaeus!

  The bridegroom is coming, the equal of Ares,

  and he’s much bigger than a big man.

  Or, as J. D. Salinger puts it in the title of his novella borrowed from this poem, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. What allegedly makes the raising of the roof necessary is the giant erection of the approaching bridegroom in anticipation of bedding his bride. His penis is so large that he is compared to enormous Ares, the god of war, who is a frequent symbol of unrestrained masculinity. The traditionally invoked Hymenaeus was a god o
f marriage whose name derives from the soon-to-be-ruptured hymen of the bride.

  The doorkeeper is also the brunt of phallic humor in Sappho. The relationship between the size of a man’s feet and his penis is an ancient one:

  The door-keeper’s feet are as long as seven outstretched arms,

  and his sandals are made from five ox-hides,

  ten cobblers labored hard to make them.

  The revelry outside the chamber apparently could go on through the night. In a final fragmentary papyrus, Sappho sings of maidens gathered outside the bedroom until the dawn, calling to the groom:

  virgins . . .

  all night long . . .

  might sing of the love between you and the bride

  with violets in her lap.

  But rise up! Call the young men

  your own age, so that we may see

  less sleep than the . . .

  with a clear voice.

  But now that the marriage has been properly consummated, the sensual eros of the wedding celebrations has been replaced by another Greek word for love, philotes, a more subdued and proper term to honor the relations between a husband and wife.

  NONE OF SAPPHO’S surviving poetry mentions the duties of a wife, but we can use other ancient sources to create a picture of what was expected from a woman after marriage. In classical Athens, wives led a very restricted life hidden from the gaze of men outside their family, but in the age of Sappho there seems to have been more latitude for married women to move freely about in society, though always within the boundaries set for them by men.

  The poems of Homer provide some of the best hints about the daily life of aristocratic women in early Greece. Epic poetry is not history, but the values shown in the Iliad and Odyssey are as close as we are likely to get to those shared by the upper-class men and women of Sappho’s Lesbos. The ideal wife in Homer is, as we’ve seen already, Penelope, faithful spouse of Odysseus, while the paradigm of the troublesome woman is Helen of Troy.

  As the Odyssey opens, Odysseus has been gone from his island home of Ithaca for almost twenty years fighting at Troy and then wandering the world. Greedy suitors press Penelope to remarry so that they can control the kingdom and wealth of her husband. But she has a son who has almost reached the age when he can inherit his father’s property, so she is determined to preserve his inheritance for him. The household is threatened by disloyal servants, and Odysseus’s father, Laertes, has withdrawn to the country in despair. The future of Penelope’s family has fallen on her shoulders—and she rises to the occasion.

  Odysseus may be fighting monsters and journeying to the land of the dead, but the odyssey of Penelope is just as perilous. Yet in the midst of these enormous threats, the wife of Odysseus continues to hope and prepare for his return. She manages the household, raises their son, weaves clothing, and never shares her bed with another man. Helen, on the other hand, abandons her husband, Menelaus, to run off to Troy with a handsome young prince named Paris. On the walls of Troy she calls herself a whore, though there seems to be little regret in her voice. Even when the Greeks win the war and she returns with Menelaus to Sparta, the tension between the two is thick enough to cut with a knife.

  When Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, comes to visit in search of his father, Helen assures him she was secretly on the side of the Greeks:

  The rest of the Trojan women cried in grief, but not me.

  My heart, which had changed by now, leapt up and I yearned

  to sail back home again. I grieved too late for the madness

  sent by Aphrodite, luring me to Troy, far from my dear land,

  abandoning my own child, my bridal bed, my husband too,

  a man lacking in neither brains nor handsome form.

  Menelaus then responds with dripping sarcasm: “That was a tale, my dear—so well told.” He continues, telling Telemachus how Odysseus saved them when Helen tried to betray the Greeks as they hid inside the wooden horse at Troy:

  You came along, Helen—roused no doubt by some dark power bent on

  giving glory to Troy—accompanied by your dashing young Prince Deiphobus.

  Three times you walked around the hollow horse, feeling and stroking its flanks,

  challenged our warriors, calling them by name.

  Yours was the voice of their long-absent wives.

  Theirs is not a happy marriage. Helen is every bit as intelligent and capable as Penelope, but she uses her beauty and her wits to weaken rather than strengthen her husband and his honor.

  In his poetry, Homer does offer one hint about the particular qualities of the women of Lesbos themselves. When Agamemnon is trying to appease Achilles so that he will return to the war and fight again for the Greeks, he offers Achilles seven female slaves from Lesbos, making a point that they are both beautiful and highly skilled at household work. These are not wives, but servants, though the attributes valued by men in both were similar.

  In the centuries after Homer and Sappho, the expectations put on Greek wives changed little, though their freedoms seem to have become more restricted. One of the clearest pictures we have of these expectations comes from the early-second-century-AD writer Plutarch, who composed a handbook for brides called Advice on Marriage. In it he urges husbands to be patient and understanding of their spouses, but he expects wives to make any necessary adjustments to married life. He begins by urging women to remember that the Athenian wise man Solon, who lived at the same time as Sappho, urged wives to eat the sweet fruit of a quince before getting into bed with their husbands so that their speech might be delightful.

  This is followed by more practical advice from Plutarch himself, such as:

  A good wife ought to be visible only when she is with her husband. When he is not present, she should hide herself away.

  The harmony between a man and a woman should be like music, but it is he who leads and makes the decisions.

  A married woman ought not to shrink away when her husband wants to make love but embrace him with appropriate enthusiasm. On the other hand, she should never initiate sex. This is the behavior of a prostitute, not a wife.

  A wife should not make friends on her own, but restrict herself to those who are known to and approved of by her husband.

  A wife should realize she is never going to get along with her mother-in-law. Still, she should try her best to be friendly with her.

  If a husband found his wife displeasing in bed, there were other socially acceptable options available to him. As one ancient writer put it: “We have prostitutes for sexual pleasure, mistresses to look after our daily comforts, and wives for the procreation of legitimate children and to act as managers of our households.” Or, as the Greek historian Xenophon said: “Surely you don’t think men have children with their wives because of sexual desire, when the streets and brothels are full of women who can satisfy such needs?”

  Slave women of his own household were natural and convenient targets of a man’s desires, but for a modest fee, a man could engage the company of a professional prostitute—or for a few coins more, an evening with one of the high-class hetairai, the companions often pictured on ancient Greek drinking cups. These latter women were idealized as petite and graceful, with small, firm breasts and great dexterity. Unlike common prostitutes, they were skilled not only in giving sexual pleasure, but also in music and conversation. As they aged and began to lose their physical appeal, they were forced to engage in much more coarse sexual acts (also pictured vividly on cups) that no hetaira in her prime and certainly no proper wife would ever consider. The only limit on men’s sexual liaisons recognized by law was adultery with a married woman, which was seen as the abuse of another man’s property and was reportedly punishable in ancient Athens by the offending man’s having a large radish or mullet fish rammed into his anus.

  Wives may not have liked it when their husbands sought companionship elsewhere, but they were expected to bear it with grace and not complain. Needless to say, no such options for sexual ad
ventures, at least with men, were allowed to married women. A woman who committed adultery faced immediate divorce, as a mark of shame was forbidden to wear jewelry, and was banned from participation in the all-important public religious ceremonies.

  But a wife need not be unfaithful to her husband to face the trauma of divorce. A man could dissolve a marriage simply by expelling his wife from their home. A wife seeking the end of a marriage on the other hand, faced much greater difficulties. She would need to seek the approval and help of her father or former guardian. Even if her wish was granted, the prospects of returning in shame to her parents’ house and the unlikelihood that another man would marry her and provide the economic security a woman needed must have discouraged all but the bravest or wealthiest women from pursuing such action. In the minds of most women, a bad husband must have seemed preferable to separation from her children, as it was their father who retained custody of any sons and daughters she produced. For in the ancient Greek world of Sappho, children were the center of a woman’s life.

  3

  A MOTHER’S LOVE

  I have a beautiful child who is like golden flowers

  in form, my beloved Cleis, for whom

  I would not take all of Lydia . . .

  – SAPPHO, POEM 132

  FOR SAPPHO SCHOLARS, one of the most exciting discoveries from Oxyrhynchus was a fragmentary papyrus scroll written in the early centuries AD that contains a short biography of the poet no more than a paragraph long. The entry on Sappho includes a line written in Greek that says “she had a daughter named Cleis named after her own mother.” This fragment is centuries older than the Byzantine Suda encyclopedia that also mentions Cleis. Sappho’s father, mother, and three brothers are listed, but the papyrus doesn’t name the father of Cleis. This is a surprising omission in a world where a child’s identity was so closely connected with his or her father. Perhaps the author of the papyrus knew about the tradition that Sappho was married to Cercylas (“Penis from Man Island”) but rejected it as absurd. Or perhaps the writer simply didn’t know who the father was. In any case, the importance of the papyrus is that eight hundred years after Sappho lived, it affirms the tradition that she had a daughter named Cleis, whom she herself celebrates in her songs.