The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  Like the sweet apple which reddens on the topmost bough,

  A-top on the top-most twig,—which the pluckers forgot somehow,—

  Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now.31

  The apple may represent, detached though it appears to be, the beautiful and unattainable girl.

  And how effortlessly she draws the gods into our sphere: Dawn, the Moon and Stars come into language not as things but as beings, alive in the way that human beings are. “Come here now, soft Graces and bright-tressed Muses.”32 The comic writers use hyperbole as a form of ridicule: “healthier than a pumpkin” or “balder than a cloudless sky.” Sappho’s use is intensive and never comical, and generally has to do with beauty and desire. The phrase “goldener than gold”33 conveys a specific quality. The wonderful fragment “I desire neither the honey nor the bee”34 is another kind of hyperbole, expressing the sufficiency of love.

  Dionysius of Halicarnassus in Demosthenes35 evokes the “elegant or spectacular” style, “favouring polish, not majesty.” The choice of words is dictated by sound, their collocation by the need to create the most perfect harmonies. “It will always select the mellowest, least emphatic words, striving for euphony and melody and the sweetness that flows from them.” Sappho’s art is to dovetail, smooth and rub down, to avoid the over-emphatic and over-obvious emphases, to discover appropriate and answering harmonies. Among English poets Algernon Charles Swinburne in his notorious “Anactoria” goes all out for harmony, and Sappho is a protracted rage of passion, now tender, now sadistic, her love taking forms that would have puzzled Queen Victoria:

  … I feel thy blood against my blood: my pain

  Pains thee, and lips bruise lips, and vein stings vein.

  Let fruit be crushed on fruit, let flower on flower,

  Breast kindle breast, and either burn an hour.

  Why wilt thou follow lesser loves? are thine

  Too weak to bear these hands and lips of mine?36

  Where was Sappho born? Where did she live? Where did she die? What was her actual name? Psappha, Psaffo, and even Pspha are all possible variants, all attested. Were there two Sapphos, the poet and the courtesan, living on Lesbos at about the same time, whose lives have been conflated? We know as little for certain about Sappho as we do about most of the early Greek poets, though many fragments of her work survive, and her influence on poetry persists. She is the one female poet among the “Lyric Nine.” The critic Leslie Kurke, having forewarned us that in archaic times poems “construct” the poet (that is, we infer a poet’s life from poems at our peril, because the writing may be generic, or spoken by a persona), accepts without demur that Sappho existed and that she was a woman.37 Some of her poems were clearly composed for choric recitation (the nuptial fragments suggest female occasions). Most speak from an “I” and address a single interlocutor. We overhear, and we delight in the artistry of the language. Given the fragmentary nature of the texts, we overhear snatches of poetry and few, if any, poems entire.

  Indeed, the textual problems are such that when we say we are “reading” Sappho we are in fact reconstructing her from the tiniest rags of language, much of it ambiguous and elusive. The poems are almost as evanescent as the life. The patristics that surround the poems are usually morally loaded as well. In fragment 70, one phrase can be read as “shrill (breezes?)” or “clear-voiced nightingales.” In fragment 99, a phrase may mean “strings which welcome the plectrum”—a musical image appropriate to Sappho—or “women who use the dildo,” an insult to the descendants of Polyanax, whom Sappho is assumed to have despised. What is more, the lines may belong to Alcaeus rather than Sappho. Textual problems of one sort or another affect every single line. Only one poem survives more or less entire.

  Sappho has appealed to the sexual prurience or moral severity of centuries of scholars and readers. The whispers of sexual irregularity in her conduct and the curious geographical trajectory of the legend of her life mean that she has inevitably stimulated fiction, fantasy, legend. Her homosexual affections, real or (some moral critics claim) mischievously read into the work, mean that her island Lesbos is the etymological port of departure for women who love women, and her name gives rise to the term “Sapphic love.” No place nor poet confers a similar romantic legitimacy on male homosexuality. They have to make do with Uranus, a planet and the son and husband of Gea, the Earth, grandfather of Zeus and (as Hesiod tells us) father of a fearful progeny.

  The kinds of poetry Sappho composed were all in the lyric mode. Poetry which is inseparable from music (melos) is described as “melic” and includes lyrics that are either ostensibly personal, seeming to relate to occasions and incidents in one life, or choral, for ceremonial use on public or semi-public occasions. In neither case is the verse necessarily didactic or satirical. It is composed in strophic form and the complexities of diction and sound patterning are deliberately heightened, poet and performer enhancing pleasure by demonstrating their skills. Such verse is to be read aloud, composed not for the page but for the ear, and most often for the entertainment of guests at a symposium. It would be wrong to assume that melic poetry is always song. The accompaniment might be rhythmic in function, it might be dramatic; it was not necessary for the performer’s voice to be accompanied in the way that a Lieder or a pop singer’s is. The recitative of opera may approximate more to what the symposium lyric interludes entailed. There was certainly music without words—played on the aulos, or flute, for example, which later was regularly used to accompany verse (as in the time of Pindar). There was a complementary movement towards words without music.

  Apart from Sappho and woman-love, Lesbos was also, legend says, the birthplace of music’s inventor, Terpander, and of Arion, who first spoke verse, and who freed the dithyramb into full expressiveness. And here the other great melic poet Alcaeus was born. No one has adequately explained why Lesbos should have received such an abundance of grace from the Muses; certainly that grace was withdrawn in later centuries. The Persians took the island in 527 BC; by the time it was “freed” half a century later, “the nymphs are departed.” The poets of Lesbos composed in the Aeolic dialect; its diction and rhythms prevail in Sappho’s poems. Many fragments of her work survive because later grammarians made use of them to illustrate the finer points and proprieties of Greek usage and of her dialect.

  After Crete and Euboea (which is virtually part of the Greek mainland), Lesbos is the largest of the Aegean islands, as large as a little country. The north-east coast faces the Gulf of Edremit, and the bronzes and greens of the coast of Turkey are clearly visible across the straits. Athens is over 300 kilometres away. On the east side, the rough island is rich in olive groves. On the west it is more barren. The climate is temperate, mild in winter, not too hot in summer. Earthquakes have done as much as invaders to erase the civic and religious monuments from earlier times, though around the Gulf of Kalloni, which cuts deep into the island, herds of horses range freely, harking back perhaps to the horse-breeding traditions of the Troad. The hot springs still flow, and the vintage is good, though not so renowned as in classical times.

  Why does it matter whether Sappho was born in Eressus or in Mytilene? Not only because the landscapes differ so much: either she was born and raised in quite a cosmopolitan seaport facing the populous coast of Asia Minor, at a time when the town looked on one of the world’s principal waterways; or she grew up in a port facing out into the Aegean and the vacant expanse of sea between it and the other islands, a blank ocean where history was only then about to start happening in earnest. Modern Eressus is a few miles above the sea. The site of the ancient town is at the village of Skalá Eressoú on the coast, with a rocky acropolis overhanging a singularly unattractive long beach. Not far up the coast is a fascinating petrified forest. At ancient Eressus was born Theophrastus, the peripatetic philosopher and writer of delightful “characters,” who died in 187 BC. But Sappho, who is usually referred to as Sappho of Eressus, belongs in spirit and perhap
s in fact to the cosmopolitan east of the island, to its Manhattan, as it were, rather than its Mar Vista. Her face featured from the first to the third centuries AD on the coinage of Mytilene. There were also coins issued at Eressus with her image, and a now-vanished herm inscribed with her name.

  Probably between 630 and 620 BC, Sappho came into the world. She was a few years younger than Alcaeus.38 She shared with him an aristocratic background. Her father may have been called Scamander, Scamandronymus, Simon, Eumenus, Eerigyius, Ecrytus, Semus, Camon, or Etarchus. Her mother, it is agreed, was Cleis, and no dishonour to her is intended by the uncertainty of Sappho’s paternity. We know the mother’s name because the poet named her own daughter after her. She also recalls in a poem that her mother told her how, when she was herself young, a purple headband was a fine adornment, but if a girl had “hair brighter than a burning torch,” blonde, it was preferable to bind it with wreaths of flowers.39 Of her daughter Sappho says, in C. M. Bowra’s translation:

  I have a child; so fair

  As golden flowers is she,

  My Cleïs, all my care.

  I’d not give her away

  For Lydia’s wide sway

  Nor lands men long to see …40

  The poem is broken off. If the hair of a child or woman was blonde or yellow, it was probably assisted by what Sappho called “Scythian wood”41 or “fustic,” used for dying wool and hair.

  Sappho had three brothers, Eurygius, Charaxus and Larichus. Larichus, her favourite, was a wine-pourer in the town hall of Mytilene, an office held by sons of the best families.42 Charaxus she chastises43 for having dawdled in Egypt on the lewd day-bed of a courtesan, actually called Rhodopis, whom she dubs Doricha, after buying her out of servitude and sinking a fortune into her.44 He was a merchant living in Naucratis on the Nile Delta, on the western branch of the river, not far from where Alexandria would be founded in 331 BC. We learn from another source45 that Rhodopis, born in Thrace, was a slave of Iadmon, a Thracian merchant who lived in Mytilene (where, no doubt, Charaxus met her). Iadmon numbered among his possessions another, more famous, slave by the name of Aesop. Walter Savage Landor invented two Imaginary Conversations between the fable-teller and the courtesan.

  It would help if we knew how Sappho was implicated in the complex politics of Lesbos (her surviving poems are not directly political, though we can deduce affiliations and hostilities from some of them): was she drawn into public affairs because of her family, or did she come to politics later, on the arm of a man perhaps? On doubtful authority, her husband is named as Cercylas of Andros, a trader from the northernmost of the Cyclades. It is probable that, like Alcaeus, she or her family had trouble with Pittacus of Mytilene, who led the “democracy” in Lesbos and whom we have already encountered as one of the Seven Sages.46 These were men whose wisdom, recorded in aphorisms for the most part, was applied to the civic world. Lists of the seven vary, but every list includes four: Solon of Athens, who was an admirer of Sappho, Thales of Miletus, Bias of Priene and Pittacus. Sappho’s poems record some hostility to and from the noble house of Penthilus, the house into which Pittacus married.47

  She probably went into exile in Sicily, accompanied by her daughter, sometime between 604 and 596 BC. This is why her statue was later erected in Syracuse. She returned to Lesbos when the political turbulence—whatever the cause—had subsided. There she was involved in some way with other, generally younger, women. She names and addresses her poems to several, in particular Atthis, Telesippa and Megara, “and she got a bad reputation for her unwholesome friendship with them.”48

  We encounter Anactoria and Cydro and Gyrinna. There is also Damophyla, who, says Philostratus, was Sappho’s successor, set up an academy and “devised love-poems and hymns, the way Sappho did.”49 One poem encourages Abanthis to pursue her passionate desire for Gongyla, and Ezra Pound made a wonderful poem out of a Gongyla fragment, echoing the sound-qualities, the inner assonances and alliterations (never crude rhymes) which are the weave of Sappho’s verse:

  Spring…¨

  Too long…¨

  Gongula…¨50

  Some people will say one thing is the most beautiful on earth, others will point to something else. What is actually most beautiful is “whatever a person loves.” Sappho adduces Helen, and her own passion for Anactoria.51 This provides a further, distinctive woman’s perspective on Homer.

  Was this involvement with girls, this passionate commitment to love, part of a cult of Aphrodite? Was Sappho a prostitute, as one detractor suggests? Is Horace, the Roman poet who loved her work more than any other except Catullus, right in referring to her not only as “the Aeolian girl” but as “boyish Sappho”?52 And Ovid puts into Sappho’s own mouth the words “Women of Lesbos, you who because of your love made me contemptible, don’t huddle round me any more to hear my playing.”53 She grew old; she may (fragment 58) refer to her own old age. There is certainly something powerful in her sense of ephemerality, a note that Housman catches:

  The rainy Pleiads wester,

  Orion plunges prone,

  The stroke of midnight ceases,

  And I lie down alone.54

  She has been kept alive by love. Loeb has as the conjectural closing line “love has obtained for me the brightness and beauty of the sun.” An underpinning myth may be that of beautiful Tithonus, who wed the Dawn. She secured for him eternal life but not eternal youth, and his fate was cruel, a progressive, eternal wizening.

  Sappho’s was in all likelihood a long life, and she composed many poems. A scholar at the great library in Alexandria organised the work into nine books, the first eight in order of the metres she had chosen, the ninth to accommodate the epithalamia, or wedding poems. The first book had 1,310 lines, between sixty and seventy poems; later books were briefer. Not even a scrap of the elegiac verse survives. Some later verses attributed to her are only dubiously hers. Those who knew the body of her work claim that her sole subject was “Aphrodite and the Loves.”55

  She is the only Greek woman writer with a body of work, however damaged, still to be read. Strabo in his Geography does not understate her merits: “a unique being: in the whole of history I can think of no other woman who can even remotely match her as a poet.”56 It is remarkable that, despite its manifest quality, so much work by a woman survives, and that verses are still being added, discovered in the Sahara. In a society where the public role of women was (we assume, though we know little about the social systems of Lesbos at the time) restricted, a female poet is inevitably a wonder, so fine a poet a miracle. Poetry survived initially in an oral tradition, in performance. Was there a line of women performers at the symposia, or did male poets incorporate Sappho’s poems in their repertoire? Did they impersonate women in performance? Even in Athenian society, a century and more after Sappho’s death, few civic occasions were open to women. There were religious festivals, the Thesmophoria for example, but that was reserved solely for women. There was no evident context for the transmission of Sappho’s poems, and yet they were transmitted, not only the poems intended for ritual use but more private-seeming ones as well.

  Roman poets, Catullus and Horace and Ovid most notably, made use of Sappho’s poems in shaping their own. Other types of writer make use of Sappho as a figure. The comic writers and dramatists make her into a figure of ridicule. Some report that she fell in love with a ferryman of Mytilene called Phaon. The story was first designed, we might think, to clear Sappho’s name of the stigma of homosexuality. Unless there was historically a second Sappho, a courtesan of Mytilene who met a heartbreak end, as Aelian conjectures, this is so unlikely a story that it is ridiculous.57 Aphrodite favoured Phaon—who is sometimes confused with Adonis—because he carried her, disguised as an old crone, across the water without charging her a fee. (Every goddess had a hero of this sort.) She restored his youth and his considerable beauty. Aelian, more than seven centuries after Sappho, declares as fact: “Phaon, the handsomest of mortal men, was laid among lettuces by the Goddess of Lov
e.”58

  Phaon, we are told, repulsed Sappho’s advances and fled to Sicily. According to this story, Sappho was not driven out of Lesbos by political pressures but left in pursuit of love. She followed Phaon, failed to gain his love, and so she travelled from Sicily to the west of Greece and threw herself off the two-thousand-foot-high rock of Leucadia on the coast of Epirus, a favourite point of adieu for lovers keen to cure themselves of desire. “To raging Seas unpity’d I’ll remove, / And either cease to live, or cease to love!” Strabo says there was a temple of Apollo on the heights, and the cliff is still called Sappho’s Leap. Quite apart from the implausible geography—that she pursued him from Sicily to the east coast of Greece—judging from the poems that survive, this is unlikely. If Sappho died around 550 BC, as most scholars believe, her suicide would have taken place when she was in her seventies, by which time she might have been expected to have learned restraint. Indeed, in fragment 150, she seems to chide her daughter for lamenting her natural death, using words which Socrates employed to silence his intolerable wife, Xanthippe, loudly lamenting his impending death: “It is not right for there to be lamenting in a house where the Muses’ servants dwell.”

  The comic poets and dramatists being the gutter journalists of their day, the truths they had to tell were not factual but what Ford Madox Ford called “truth to the impression.” This story inspired Ovid, the great Roman amorist exiled from Italy for exercising his amours in the wrong circles, or failing to turn informer, to invent an epistle from Sappho to Phaon, a poem translated by an overheated nineteen-year-old Alexander Pope in 1707: