Searching for Sappho

by Philip Freeman

  . . . hand cloths

  . . . purple

  . . . sent from Phocaea

  . . . expensive gifts

  Phocaea lay on the coast of Asia Minor only a day’s sail south of Lesbos. Its lands were poor for agriculture, so the citizens of the city had turned to maritime trade. About 600 BC, they founded the colony of Massalia (modern-day Marseilles) near the mouth of the Rhône River in Gaul to profit from merchant goods coming down the river from the Celtic lands of central Europe. The Phocaeans also founded colonies in Corsica and along the Mediterranean coast of Spain, and they had extensive dealings with the Tartessians on the Atlantic coast of Iberia beyond the Pillars of Hercules. The close connections between Lesbos and Phocaea could have opened many doors for trade and profit for the aristocracy of the island, including Sappho’s family.

  Sappho also sang of longing for goods from Lydia in Asia Minor to give to her daughter Cleis during her exile, indicating trade connections to the east, as well as the first references in Greek literature to incense from southern Arabia. But it’s Sappho’s stinging poems about her brother Charaxus, who traded in Egypt, that are the most interesting foreign connection in her poetry.

  Egypt was the oldest center of civilization in the Mediterranean and had long been known to the Greeks. By the time of Sappho, the pyramids were almost as ancient to her as she is to us, but the possibilities for wealth from trade with this land on the bountiful Nile were undiminished and drew many merchants and adventurers from the Aegean and beyond. During the reign of Pharaoh Psammetichus I, who came to power in the seventh century BC with the help of Greek mercenaries, the trading city of Naucratis was founded on the westernmost branch of the Nile.

  Naucratis was a town settled and run by Greeks, especially from the Aegean islands, including citizens from Mytilene on Lesbos. There the Greek residents built temples to Zeus, Hera, and Apollo and operated the port as a center of trade between Greece and the Egyptian heartland to the south. The Greeks exported wine, oil, grain, silver, pottery, and perhaps slaves to the Egyptians, while the Egyptians exported back to Greece linen, papyrus, ivory, and other exotic goods. As with ports and trading centers in any century, the bustling town of Naucratis was full of lonely men with money in their pockets and soon became a leading center for the world’s oldest profession. Among the clients of the high-class prostitutes in the city was Charaxus, Sappho’s brother.

  The first poem of Sappho that the Oxford archaeologists Grenfell and Hunt found at the garbage dump of ancient Oxyrhynchus was a fragmentary prayer and biting satire against her brother Charaxus:

  . . . Nereids, grant that

  my brother come back to me unharmed

  and that all he wishes for in his heart

  comes true.

  And grant that he atone for all his past mistakes.

  Make him a joy to his friends and a grief

  to his enemies. And may no one bring us sorrow

  ever again.

  May he wish to bring honor

  to his sister, but dismal grief . . .

  . . . sorrowing before

  . . . listening, millet seed

  . . . of the citizens

  . . . not again

  . . . but you, Cypris

  . . . putting aside evil

  The most striking thing about this poem is that Sappho would air her family’s problems so openly. It’s possible this was a private composition meant only for Charaxus, but the fact that it survived the ages implies that it was circulated to some degree on Lesbos. Family shortcomings were not commonly discussed outside the household, since anything one member did made the rest look bad. To advertise the sins of Charaxus meant that Sappho was so incensed by her brother’s behavior (and had presumably exhausted quieter means of correcting him) that she was willing to write a satire against him for others to hear. It’s an extraordinary look into the frustration of a sister against her brother because of the shame that he’d brought on the family.

  Sappho deliberately begins in this poem with a reverent and hopeful stanza asking the gods to look after Charaxus, help him to return safely to Lesbos from his voyage abroad, and grant him his heart’s desire. It’s only with the first line of the second stanza that she twists the knife:

  And grant that he atone for all his past mistakes.

  Charaxus has brought great sorrow and grief to his family, but Sappho doesn’t give us details until the third stanza, when she claims that he has brought dishonor to her as his sister. Then the poem breaks off into scattered surviving words and phrases—“sorrowing,” “dismal grief,” “putting aside evil”—that make us long to know what was said in the missing fragments. How the millet seed fits into the song is anyone’s guess.

  In another early and even more incomplete fragment found at Oxyrhynchus, Sappho gives us the name of the woman who has led her brother astray:

  of Doricha . . .

  commands, for not . . .

  arrogance . . .

  for young men . . .

  beloved . . .

  And in another poem she speaks of Doricha with language similar to the earlier prayer:

  . . . that he atone for his past mistakes

  . . . with fortune of the harbor

  . . . Cypris, and may she find you very harsh.

  And may she—that Doricha—not boast, saying

  he came a second time

  to her longed-for love.

  We know from later commentators that Doricha, also called Rhodopis, was born in the wild land of Thrace across the northern Aegean Sea from Lesbos. She was reportedly a slave—along with Aesop, the famous author of fables—owned by a man from Mytilene named Iadmon. And lest we cast Doricha too quickly as the villain in this tale, we should keep in mind that she was a sex slave forced into prostitution by a man who wanted to profit from her use and degradation by male clients against her will.

  The historian Herodotus has an alternate version of the story, saying that Doricha was owned by a man named Xanthes from the island of Samos to the south of Lesbos and was brought by him to Egypt to ply her trade. The Greek geographer Strabo confirms that Doricha was a mistress of Charaxus, whom he describes as a merchant exporting Lesbian wine to Naucratis. The writer Athenaeus also relates that a poem written by Posippus says:

  Doricha, your bones fell asleep long ago . . .

  the bands of your hair, your perfumed shawl

  in which you once wrapped Charaxus

  and joining him to your body

  you grasped the wine cup in the small hours.

  The fact that her brother had a dalliance with a prostitute would not have bothered Sappho or any of the upright citizens of Mytilene. Such affairs were common and expected of men, whether single or married. It’s what Charaxus did next that caused such grief and shame to Sappho and her family. Not content to visit Doricha and take his pleasure with her on distant shores, he purchased her at great cost to the family and brought her back to Lesbos. Once home, he continued to spend lavishly on her, and then fathered children with her. This was simply too much for Sappho. Not only had Charaxus wasted the family’s resources to buy a prostitute’s freedom, but he had brought her back to their hometown, where he had had offspring with her. If he had actually married Doricha, their children might have been legitimate heirs of the family fortune. In the context of the world in which they lived, the shame this would have brought to Sappho and her family merited the unusual step of public satire against her brother.

  There is a hint of the final chapter of the Doricha affair in the Roman poet Ovid’s Letters of the Heroines, a later and mostly fictional work that may nonetheless have some basis in poems of Sappho that are now lost. Ovid puts the words of the poem in the mouth of Sappho, who says that her brother was captured by love and endured shameful financial losses, after which he was reduced to poverty and roamed the sea as a common brigand. If there’s any truth to the tale, it was a sad end for the third and last of Sappho’s brothers.

  UNTIL RECENTLY
, THIS was all we could say about Sappho and her siblings. But in 2014, a previously unknown Sappho poem was revealed to the world that sheds new light on her family relations. Dr. Dirk Obbink of Oxford University, one of the world’s leading experts on ancient papyri, was contacted by an anonymous owner residing in London who had acquired papyrus fragments containing not one but two new poems by Sappho. The poems were copied by a professional scribe in the early Christian era; then later, when the texts were worn, the papyrus was probably recycled as book bindings. The poems lay unread for centuries and then in the 1950s were sold by a Cairo antiquities dealer to a professor at the University of Mississippi. The poems remained there hidden amid a mass of papyrus fragments until they were sold by the university in the 1980s to finance the purchase of papers of the novelist William Faulkner, a native son of the state. The fragments containing the still-undiscovered poems were finally sold at auction in London to the collector, who contacted Dr. Obbink for help in identifying what he had bought. Only then did the lost poems come to light.

  The second of the two poems is a short, fragmentary prayer to Aphrodite, but the first is a remarkably well-preserved poem of five Sapphic stanzas concerning her brothers Charaxus and Larichus. This exciting discovery has been christened “The Brothers Poem” and joins only a handful of complete or near-complete songs by Sappho. There is still much controversy about the correct reading of the poem; a preliminary translation follows:

  But you are always chattering that Charaxus is coming

  with a full ship. These things, I suppose, Zeus

  knows and all the other gods. But you should not

  worry about them.

  Instead send me and ask me to call on

  and make many prayers to Queen Hera

  that Charaxus return here,

  steering his ship,

  and find us safe and sound. Everything else,

  all of it, let us leave to the gods.

  For fair weather comes quickly

  from great storms.

  Those to whom the King of Olympus wishes

  to send a helpful spirit to banish toils,

  these will be happy

  and rich in blessings.

  And we—if someday his head is freed from labor

  and Larichus becomes a gentleman of leisure—

  may we be delivered quickly

  from great heaviness of heart.

  This may be the missing poem mentioned in the Oxyrhynchus fragment that Sappho wrote about her brothers, but the song names only two of the three, though at least one stanza is missing at the beginning. It is, however, the first surviving poem composed by Sappho herself that unambiguously names her brothers Charaxus and Larichus. Like the first Sappho poem discovered by Grenfell and Hunt in the garbage dump at Oxyrhynchus, it is a prayer for the safety of her brother.

  The poem begins with Sappho chiding an unknown person for always chattering on about Charaxus returning home with a ship full of trade goods. We don’t know who this person is, but because Greek endings can identify gender, we do know that it is a woman, perhaps Sappho’s mother. The theme of the first part of the poem is that we should trust in the gods and realize that the dangers we face in life are in their hands. The parallels to an ode by the first-century-BC Roman writer Horace are so striking that he may be drawing on Sappho’s once-lost poem for inspiration:

  Leave everything else to the gods,

  who quickly calm the battling winds

  on the stormy seas . . .

  It is not Poseidon, the god of the seas, that Sappho calls on, but Hera, a goddess, as we have seen, particularly concerned with women. In a beautiful line at the end of the third stanza, Sappho gives us the proverb that “fair weather comes quickly from great storms”—a lesson she suggests that holds for all of life, not just sea voyages.

  In the fourth stanza she declares that Zeus, the “King of Olympus,” will send a daimon to those he wishes to be happy and blessed. This word is the origin of the English “demon,” but in Greek it is a positive term referring to a god (as it does in the plural in the third stanza of this poem) or to any other divine spirit. Here it has the more specific meaning of a kind of spiritual guide or, as we might say, guardian angel. Socrates later used the same word to explain that he had a divine spirit that guided him in his life. Sappho says that those who are fortunate enough to be granted this heavenly guardian by Zeus will be makares, a word later used by Christians to mark those blessed by God.

  In many ways, though, it is the final stanza of this new poem that is the most interesting. Sappho here shifts her gaze from Charaxus to her favored younger brother Larichus, hoping that he will rise up for the good of the family. The leisure she wishes for her brother is not a negative term but is the affluence and freedom from toil that is the mark of the nobility. If he can achieve this, Sappho says, she (using the plural “we” as she often does) will be freed from her baruthumia, a Greek word meaning a weighty depression or heaviness of heart. Sappho, however, isn’t clear about what has caused this heaviness. It may be that she simply worries about the dangerous life of her seagoing brother Charaxus, but it’s also possible that word of Charaxus’s dealings with the prostitute Doricha has already reached Sappho and that here she is praying for Larichus to grow up quickly and set things right for the family. The heaviness of heart could also be due to the family’s political troubles with the ruler Pittacus, or it could be caused by something else entirely. Whatever the trouble might be, Sappho is deliberately echoing Homer in this poem, paralleling Charaxus with the roving Odysseus, Larichus with young Telemachus, and featuring herself as the long-suffering Penelope.

  It would be helpful if we could know exactly when in Sappho’s life the poem was composed. The best guess is that it was fairly early, since Larichus is a young man, but that still leaves a great deal of room for interpretation. Our best hope is that other poems of Sappho await discovery that will fill in the missing pieces of the life of Sappho and her troubled family.

  5

  LOVING WOMEN

  This is why we have an innate love for one another. It brings us back

  to our original state, trying to reunite and restore us to our true human

  form. Each of us is only part of a person that was split in two, like half

  of a tally stick or a filleted fish. We’re all looking for our other half.

  – PLATO, SYMPOSIUM

  THERE WAS NO word for “homosexual” in ancient Greek. The very idea that a person could be defined strictly by sexual preference would have seemed strange to most people in classical times. Of course, there were men who preferred men; women, such as Sappho, who preferred women; and those who favored the opposite sex. But the boundaries between the various types of sexual orientation were not as fixed as they are in the modern world. A man might make passionate love with a woman in the afternoon and then spend an intimate evening with a male companion, with no one giving it a second thought. This isn’t to say there were no socially accepted rules of sexual behavior or that those who strayed from community standards weren’t mocked and condemned. The Greeks considered some sexual acts and inclinations out of bounds, but these standards varied by time and place in a way that is difficult for us to understand, since our evidence is limited and our interpretation so often colored by modern attitudes.

  In recent years it has become popular among scholars to view ancient sexual conduct through a male-centered active/passive model. This means that one partner in an intimate relationship was seen as holding the power and being dominant, while the other was literally on the receiving end of the action. To put it somewhat crudely, one person was the penetrator while the other, whether male or female, was the penetrated. This model works well in some ways, but it doesn’t begin to capture the complexity of intimate human relations in the classical world, nor does it particularly help us understand sexual relationships between women.

  One type of sexual activity in the Greek world was the well-documented pederasty
between grown men and adolescent boys in ancient Athens. It was common, at least among the upper classes in that city, for an adult man to take on a teenage youth as a kind of pupil in the arts of life and love. The older man would act as a mentor and provide the boy with gifts and guidance in all manner of social and political matters, while the younger partner would return affection and physical satisfaction within certain accepted bounds. In theory at least, any sort of penetration of the younger man by the older was considered inappropriate, though plenty of drinking cups show scenes of manual and intercrural (“between the thighs”) sex between adolescent boys and their sponsors. This sort of same-sex relationship certainly existed, at least in Athens, but the evidence we have from classical times shows a great variety of sexual behaviors between members of the same gender.

  Contrary to Athenian pederasty, early poets such as Theognis in the generation after Sappho sang of young men enjoying sex with other males their own age:

  In youth you can sleep through the night with a friend, unloading your desire for lusty action.

  And these relationships did not necessarily end at the time of maturity and marriage. As the Greek poet Strato wrote in the Roman era:

  Although your first down, turning to hair, springs from you,

  and soft blond curls are upon your temples,

  I will not abandon my beloved. His beauty is yet my own, even bearded, even with hair.

  Some grown men even cultivated a feminine appearance as adults so that they would remain attractive to other males, while other pairs of male lovers alternated between active and passive roles. Medical texts recognized that some men, by nature, were attracted to other men throughout their lives and accepted this as normal.

  However, we shouldn’t suppose that all Greeks approved of male same-sex encounters. The poet Archilochus in the generation before Sappho heaps scorn on such sexual relationships as an upper-class indulgence. Later comedy from Athens viciously lampoons effeminate men and passive sexual partners. And speakers in law courts routinely scored points with a jury by accusing their male adversaries of engaging in sexual affairs with other men. In the cosmopolitan city of Pompeii buried beneath the ash of Mount Vesuvius, there are many examples of vulgar sexual graffiti from throughout the town, most of it derogatory. For example: “Cosmos, the slave of Equitia, is a big pervert and sucks cock with his legs spread apart.” One graffito of Jewish or Christian origin compares the whole town of Pompeii to Sodom and Gomorrah.