Searching for Sappho

by Philip Freeman

  found him, even though he had an immortal wife.

  This discovery was so startling that the Times Literary Supplement soon published an article describing the find and included the original Greek text along with an English translation. Newspapers and media outlets around the world picked up the story, so that in a matter of days millions of people were reading the new Sappho poem translated into Afrikaans, Chinese, Spanish, and Urdu.

  But regardless of the language in which the poem was published, the talent of its creator was clear. The visual and physical images she creates of aging show that the older Sappho had lost none of the skill that created the moving songs of love she had composed in her youth. Readers can see and feel the aging process that has overtaken her. Those of a certain age can identify with the unfamiliar face in the mirror and pain in the knees on cold mornings. Memories of youthful dances return, as distant now as a light heart and supple limbs.

  But, ever realistic, Sappho asks, What can a person do? Growing older is simply part of being human. To fight against time is both foolish and futile. The goddess of the dawn learned this when she fell in love with the young and handsome prince Tithonus and obtained immortality for him from Zeus—but she foolishly forgot to ask for eternal youth as well. And so, as the years went by, her lover shriveled into a creature with only a shrill voice remaining who eventually turned into a cicada.

  The Greek scholar M. L. West summed up the reaction of many to the new poem when he called it “a small masterpiece, simple, concise, perfectly formed, an honest, unpretentious expression of feeling, dignified in its restraint.” Others could only borrow the words of the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne: “Sappho is simply nothing less . . . than the greatest poet who ever was.”

  WE DON’T KNOW how long Sappho lived after composing her poem on growing older, but it’s likely she died an old woman. One final poem gives us a hint at how she faced death. Maximus of Tyre, in his Orations, quotes these two lines after saying that just as Socrates chastised his companions for weeping as he drank the hemlock cup, Sappho was angry at her daughter Cleis as she cried for her mother at the end and chastised her:

  It is not right in the house of those serving the Muses

  for there to be lamenting. That would not be fitting for us.

  The gift of poetry was Sappho’s comfort in her final days. To complain to the gods about life coming to an end would have been ungrateful for one who had been so blessed. Whatever she believed awaited her after death, Sappho knew her songs would live on.

  EPILOGUE

  Someone, I say, will remember us in time to come.

  – SAPPHO, POEM 147

  OUR PORTRAIT OF Sappho—who she was, what her life was like, and how she was able to overcome such enormous obstacles in a male-dominated world to become one of the greatest poets of all time—is woefully incomplete. In the end we find ourselves longing for so much more than the scattered fragments of her poetry can tell us. We can only hope that more of her poems will be discovered in the future that will help us understand this remarkable woman—but for now we are left wanting.

  Sappho was certainly the first and greatest of the women poets in the ancient world, but she was not the only one. We know of about a hundred such women, though their works also survive mostly in fragments. All of these women would have known Sappho’s works, and many were clearly inspired by her example.

  One of the earliest was Myrtis from Boeotia north of Athens, a lyric poet of perhaps the late sixth century BC who was reportedly the teacher of the famous poet Pindar. None of Myrtis’s songs survive, but we do have a paraphrase in the later Greek author Plutarch, who says she composed a poem about a woman named Ochna who falsely accused a man of rape after he rejected her love. Ochna’s brothers in righteous anger slew the man, but she confessed her lie to save her brothers from death and subsequently threw herself off a cliff. As much as this sounds like a condemnation of Ochna and the deceitfulness of women in general, it’s quite possible that Myrtis was more nuanced in her tale than Plutarch reveals.

  In the next century, a woman named Corinna from the same region of Greece as Myrtis composed lyric poetry that filled five books. She was reportedly a rival of Pindar and beat him five times in poetry contests. Corinna’s works survive, like Sappho’s, mostly in papyrus fragments discovered in modern times. As for her subjects, as Corinna herself says:

  I sing of the great deeds

  of heroes, men and women alike.

  From the scraps of her songs that survive, Corinna’s poems seem to have been based largely on local myths and legends, such as a singing contest between two mountains in which they tell the story of the goddess Rhea saving her baby Zeus from being devoured by his father, Cronos. In another fragment she sings of how the nine daughters of the local river god were taken and raped by Zeus and other male deities, but counsels their father to console himself that they will be immortal and the mothers of demigods.

  Praxilla of Sicyon near Corinth was a popular fifth-century-BC poet who composed hymns, choral lyrics, and drinking songs. Only a few of her fragments survive, but they show a sharp and wicked sense of humor. To those who would be unduly optimistic about life, she warns:

  O friend, watch out for a scorpion under every stone.

  And speaking to a member of her own gender:

  O you who gaze in such beauty from your window,

  a virgin from the neck up but an experienced woman below.

  In the same century as Praxilla lived Telesilla of Argos to the south, a woman known long after for her poetry but even more so for her military abilities. When Argos was attacked by the Spartans while the men were away, Telesilla gave the women of the town weapons and led them to the city walls. They all fought bravely and held the enemy off until the men of Sparta gave up out of shame at being defeated by women. The people of Argos later built a statue in her honor.

  The woman with the best claim of being second only to Sappho in poetic skill is the fourth-century-BC writer Erinna, whose brief but moving poem The Distaff lamenting the death of her childhood friend Baucis we encountered in Chapter 1. Composed in the same hexameter meter as Homer’s epics, The Distaff was considered a short masterpiece in ancient times. Only a little over fifty of the original three hundred lines survive, rediscovered on papyrus in the twentieth century. One ancient writer was so impressed with Erinna’s poem that he gave her the highest compliment by comparing her to both Homer and Sappho:

  This is the Lesbian honeycomb of Erinna.

  Even though it is small, it is flavored with

  the honey of the Muses.

  Her three-hundred lines are equal to Homer,

  though she was only a girl of nineteen.

  She worked the distaff out of fear of her mother,

  and at the loom she stood as a servant

  of the Muses.

  Sappho is better than Erinna at lyric poetry

  by as much as Erinna is better than Sappho at

  hexameters.

  Soon after Erinna, the Hellenistic period began, in which there were several female Greek poets whose fame lasted for centuries. Anyte from the Arcadian mountains of southern Greece lived about 300 BC and wrote beautiful epigrams, often with a pastoral background inspired by the countryside of her homeland. About twenty of these poems survive, all of them short verses of consummate skill set in the form of inscriptions on tombstones. Four are dedicated to young women, including:

  No bedchamber and sacred marriage rites for you.

  Instead your mother has placed upon this marble

  tomb

  a likeness of your girlish shape and beauty,

  Thersis, so I can speak to you though you are dead.

  Anyte also wrote more playful epigrams for animals such as horses, dogs, birds, dolphins, and even insects:

  For her grasshopper, nightingale of the fields,

  and her cicada, dweller in the oak, Myro made a

  common tomb.

  The girls shed a virgin’s
tears, since Hades, hard to persuade,

  twice came and took away her playmates.

  A contemporary of Anyte was Nossis, a woman who lived in the Greek town of Locri in southern Italy. The town was unusual, according to the Greek historian Polybius, for having a ruling aristocracy based on descent from mothers rather than the normal paternal lineage. Nossis was clearly a great admirer of Sappho and echoes Sappho’s themes in her poems:

  Nothing is sweeter than Eros. All other delights are

  second to Love. Even honey I spit from my mouth.

  Nossis proclaims this: Whoever Aphrodite has not loved

  doesn’t know what sort of blossoms her roses are.

  In another epigram, Nossis names Sappho and continues her predecessor’s image of flowers as a symbol of female sexuality:

  Stranger, if you sail to Mytilene of the beautiful dances,

  to be inspired by the flower of Sappho’s charms,

  say that the land of Locri bore one dear to the Muses,

  and when you have learned my name is Nossis,

  then depart.

  Nossis’s other poems are also portraits of women, including a professional prostitute:

  Come to the temple and let us gaze on the image of Aphrodite,

  made with a trim of gold.

  Polyarchis dedicated it, after earning great wealth

  gained from her own splendid body.

  The Hellenistic period yielded to the age of Rome, in which a few educated women took up their pens to write poems in Latin, though always under the influence of Sappho’s Greek verses. The best known of these is Sulpicia, who lived during the reign of the emperor Augustus. Sulpicia’s six surviving poems celebrate a passionate love affair she had with a man before her marriage—a daring blow for women’s sexual independence during the strict moral climate of Augustus’s rule:

  At last love has come—and the rumor that I’ve covered it up

  would cause me more shame than to lay it bare for

  all to see.

  Begged by my Muses, Cytherea has lifted him up

  and put him in my lap.

  Venus has kept her promises. If there’s anyone with no joys

  of their own, let them tell of mine.

  I would not entrust my words to sealed tablets,

  lest someone read them before my beloved.

  I am delighted to have gone astray. It bores me to keep up appearances.

  Let them say that I, a worthy woman, have been

  with a worthy man.

  THE ANCIENT GREEK verb for performing oral sex on a man was lesbiazein—a distinctly heterosexual term derived from the women of Lesbos who were rumored to have unquenchable lust for members of the opposite sex. There was no surer way to get a laugh from an audience at a comedy performance in fourth-century-BC Athens than to include a female character from Lesbos—played by a man, of course, as in Shakespeare’s day—lurching across the stage in search of her latest male conquest. And of all the women of Lesbos, none played to the crowd better than Sappho.

  How a woman so clearly devoted in her poetry to love for other women became a stock figure of same-sex lust and at the same time one of the most admired authors from ancient times to the modern day is a testimony to the power of each generation to re-create historical figures to fit their own desires. The legacy of Sappho for over two thousand years has been that of inspired genius, prostitute, prim schoolmistress, feminist icon, or any number of other roles, depending on whom you read.

  The Greek philosopher Plato was an admirer of Sappho, calling her sophe (“wise”) and reportedly observing:

  Some people say there are nine Muses—how foolish!

  See here now, Sappho of Lesbos is the tenth.

  But not all of Plato’s contemporaries were so respectful. A favorite theme in comic plays had Sappho falling madly in love with a mythical ferryman named Phaon, swearing off of women forever, and then throwing herself off a cliff when Phaon rejected her advances. As the writer Menander says:

  Sappho, so goes the story,

  in crazed love pursued the proud Phaon

  and leapt from a far-seen promontory.

  But throughout classical times, most took Sappho more seriously. The Romans were great readers of Greek poetry, and since any educated Roman knew Greek, Sappho greatly influenced the best of Latin verse. If imitation is the greatest form of tribute, the Roman poet Catullus in the first century BC shows himself one of the leading admirers of Sappho. Generations of Latin students have studied his Poem 51:

  That man seems to me equal to a god,

  that man, if it’s right to say so, surpasses the gods,

  who sitting opposite you,

  looks at you and listens

  to your sweet laughter. This rips away

  my senses, for as soon as I look at you,

  Lesbia, no voice remains

  in my mouth,

  my tongue is paralyzed, a subtle flame

  runs down my limbs, my ears ring

  with their own sound, and my eyes

  are veiled in darkness.

  Catullus keeps much of the language and style of Sappho’s original poem, even rendering his version in the same poetic meter, but the most striking alteration he makes is to change its homoerotic tone to the passionate love of a man for a woman, his mistress Lesbia.

  Other leading Roman poets were equally reverential, including Horace and Ovid. Horace praises Sappho, along with Homer, Pindar, and others, as the greatest of Greek poets:

  . . . the love

  of the Aeolian girl breathes still, and with this key

  her passions still faithfully live.

  In the Days of Sappho, by John William Godward (1904).

  (J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM)

  Ovid, who was banished to the coast of the Black Sea by Augustus for his erotic poetry, wrote back to a young woman poet in Rome that, with effort, she could be second only to Sappho:

  So if the fire still burns in your breast as before

  only the woman from Lesbos will surpass you.

  But Ovid was also responsible for popularizing the myth of Sappho and the ferryman Phaon. So great was his influence in western Europe that from the Middle Ages into modern times, the little anyone knew of her was as a lovesick, suicidal woman unable to win the heart of the man she so desperately desired.

  In time, the Roman Empire passed away and Christianity rose to replace the ancient gods. Knowledge of the Greek language faded in the West and, with it, those who could appreciate Sappho in her original tongue. Only in the Byzantine Empire did a few continue to read the remaining copies of Sappho’s poems. Eustathius, a deacon at the grand church of Saint Sophia in Constantinople and later a saint, was perhaps the last Greek scholar who had access to the whole of Sappho’s writings. He lectured on ancient Greek literature, including Sappho, and preserved a few lines of her poetry in his commentary on Homer’s Iliad:

  The stars around the beautiful moon

  hide back their radiant form

  when she in her fullness shines

  over the earth.

  These are the final words of Sappho from the ancient world. Even scholars from the same century as Eustathius no longer knew her works. As the Byzantine writer Tzetzes says: “The passage of time has destroyed Sappho and her poems, her lyre and her songs.”

  Not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did scholars begin to translate Sappho’s songs into the modern languages of Europe. French, German, and English editions of her works began to appear, pieced together from the scattered fragments preserved in obscure Greek grammatical tracts, so that by Victorian times the poet of Lesbos had again become a major literary figure. The discovery of almost a hundred papyrus fragments of Sappho’s poems over the last century has increased her reputation even more. With each new find, readers can marvel at the genius of a poet whose words are as fresh and vibrant today as they were more than two thousand years ago.

  THE POEMS OF SAPPHO

 
THE FOLLOWING IS a translation of all of Sappho’s surviving poetry for readers to enjoy. In a few cases we are fortunate to have a complete or almost complete poem, though this is the exception rather than the rule. More often we have a single stanza, part of a line, or even just a single word. Yet even a word by itself can have beauty.

  My translation and numbering of the poems is based on the Greek text of Sappho et Alcaeus: Fragmenta (Amsterdam: Athenaeum, 1971), edited by Eva-Maria Voigt. I used other scholarly editions as well, including Edgar Lobel and Denys Page’s Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968) and David A. Campbell’s Greek Lyric I: Sappho and Alcaeus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). In many cases I was able to refer to high-quality photographs of the papyrus fragments themselves. In one instance, I was able to hold the only surviving copy of a Sappho poem (44) in my hands at the papyrology rooms of the Sackler Library at Oxford University. Next to the birth of my children, it was one of the most thrilling moments of my life.

  The sources for each poem, along with occasional brief commentary, are given in the notes. In the poems that survive in fragments, ellipses (. . .) indicate gaps in the lines. In many cases, whole lines are missing between the gaps.

  No translation of an ancient Greek author can do justice to the original, especially when that author is a poet as subtle as Sappho. In rendering her beautiful songs into English, I struggled with the often-competing goals of accuracy and readability. But as much as possible in all the poems, I tried to let Sappho speak to us through the centuries with her own voice.

  1.

  Deathless Aphrodite on your dazzling throne,

  child of Zeus, weaver of snares, I pray to you,

  do not, with anguish and pain, O Lady,

  break my heart.

  But come here now, if ever in the past,

  listening, you heard my cries from afar

  and leaving your father’s golden house,

  you came to me,

  yoking your chariot. Beautiful swift sparrows