The Complete Poems of Sappho

by Willis Barnstone

  I convulse, am greener than grass

  and feel my mind slip as I go

  close to death.

  In another poem she is one of the speakers:

  Honestly I wish I were dead.

  When she left me she wept

  profusely and told me,

  “Oh how we’ve suffered in all this.

  Psapfo, I swear I go unwillingly.”

  And I answered her,

  “Be happy, go and remember me,

  you know how we worshiped you.”

  At times, as in the interior conversations of the English metaphysical poet George Herbert, we are the poet. We become Sappho as she is talking with her friend Atthis or, in the famous ode to Afroditi, conversing almost fiercely with her ally the love goddess. In each case she uses the device of speech in poetry to achieve both close intimacy and objectifying distance. We discover a Sappho who is a wholly distinctive personality as opposed to a voice construed by thematic and prosodic convention. Though clearly descending from a tradition of earlier singers, she is never other than herself. Her contemporary could be Constantine Cavafy, for time does not separate their use of conversation and the recollection of past happiness, or the objective and overpowering confessional voice of these two poets of modernity. Line by line, with relentless and sly frankness and outrage, they construct the biography of a voice.

  By contrast, Homer, the first man in Western literary history, is but a shadow in his own poetry. By some he is considered to be two Homers, one of the Iliad and one of the Odyssey, and by others, an editor whose composite voice combines elements of a bardic tradition. Sappho, despite scanty and often mythical biographical tradition, emerges as a realized figure through her poems. Homer was of the epic-heroic tradition, but it took a lyric age to produce the first major woman lyric poet. Or more justly, we can say that Sappho, along with Archilochos, who lived in the early part of the seventh century B.C.E, created the lyric age of antiquity. She talks, laughs, insults, speaks with irony or despair. As Longinos1 tells us, she knows how to assemble details from true life to give us the lightning force of sublimity. We find such ecstatic transcendence in later poets, notably in the Persian Sufi poets and the English metaphysical poets, and in the mystico-erotic poems of Saint John of the Cross. But Sappho also conveys a different intensity—easy, spare, and piercing—in the meeting of two lovers, as in this very mutilated fragment, “Behind a Laurel Tree”:

  You lay in wait

  behind a laurel tree

  and everything

  was sweeter

  women

  wandering

  I barely heard

  darling soul

  such as I now am

  you came

  beautiful

  in your garments

  We know Sappho more intimately than any other ancient poet, with the possible exception of Catullus, who was enthralled by Sappho’s poetry, imitated and translated her, and addressed his lover and muse in his poems as “Lesbia.” She has permitted us to overhear her longing and intelligence, her humor and anger, and her perception of beauty. Her conversations have the naturalness of a storyteller improvising in formal verse.2 Though her poetry, with the exception of two complete poems,3 survives only as fragments, her emerging portrait is as precise and profound as a Vermeer or a Goya. Yet that fresh image exists only as these fragments (some substantial), not at all in the unreliable testimonia, all from at least a century after her death.

  A few essential facts can be drawn from external sources—where she was born, her approximate lifetime, a possible exile around 600 B.C.E., and that her fame as a lyric poet exceeded all others in Greek and Latin antiquity. As for her looks, character, family history, her profession and lifestyle, the abundant assertions in later writing are contradictory and mythical, and often no more than pleasant aphoristic gossip. Her father’s names are multiple; her husband’s name, Kerkylas; someone by the name Kleis is probably her daughter or possibly a favorite young friend. But these uncertainties are what we have. Ovid’s Letters of the Heroines, 15, on Sappho and Phaon, is beautiful and fantastic and has nothing to do with Sappho other than that its tale reveals and celebrates the poet’s enduring fame. I regret that I cannot read about the poets from Lesbos as one can about the lives of such extraordinary figures as Plotinos, Plato, and Pindar. But the absence of contemporary information should not trouble. The world’s best-known writer, Shakespeare, wrote in a century of extensive documentation, but his portrait derives only from what may be guessed from the poems and plays and a history of the folio editions. Yet Sappho and William Shakespeare do very well, largely concealed from media fact and chronology but resonating in perfect pitch in their verse.

  Sappho was born on Lesbos, an island in the Aigaion Sea a few miles off the coast of Asia Minor. Lesbos was then, as it is today, an island of grains, grapes, redolent orchards, and salt flats, spotted with five coastal cities that each commanded its harbor from a rocky acropolis. Greece is a country of light and sea rock—its source of beauty and too little farmland—and shows off its few precious valleys and plains of fertile land, along with its many hills and mountains, which are often terraced for wheat and olive trees up to their steep tops. Lesbos was unusual in having largely tillable terrain, along with its salt flats, dry hills then wooded, and a three-thousand-foot mountain called Olympos, after the traditional abode of the gods in Thessaly. It was known in ancient times for its grains, fruit trees, and, above all, the large valleys of olive groves. In twenty-six hundred years the island has probably changed very little in its village architecture and landscape. As one should know Baeza and Soria to understand Antonio Machado, or Vermont and New Hampshire to know Robert Frost, so there is no better way to know the images of Sappho’s poetry than to see today the light, sea, and land of Mytilini, ancient Lesbos.4

  The biographical tradition of Sappho begins after her death and is a mixture of possible fact, contradiction, malice, and myth. Virtually all the testimonia are found in later grammarians, commentators, and historians such as Strabon, Athinaios, Herodotos, and Suidas (The Suda Lexicon). From all this at least some statements of probable truth may be made. Sappho’s birthplace in Lesbos was either Eressos or Mytilini; in any case, it was in Mytilini that she spent most of her life. She was born ca. 630 B.C.E. Her name in Attic Greek (the language of Athens and of the bulk of ancient Greek literature) was Sappho (Σαπφώ), by which she is known, but in her native Aiolic she called herself Psapfo (Ψάπφω). She wrote as she spoke, and the speech of Lesbos was Aiolic Greek. In this work I predominately use Sappho, her Attic name, to refer to the poet. In the poems, however, I have preserved her own Aiolic spelling, Psapfo.

  Her father’s name was given as Skamandronymos, but it also appears as Skamandros, Simon, Euminos, Ierigyios, Etarhos, Ekrytos, Simos, and Kamon. Her mother’s name was Kleis. Some suggest—and some deny—that she married a rich merchant from Andros named Kerkylas, who may have been the father of her daughter, Kleis. She had two brothers, perhaps three: Haraxos, Larihos, and possibly the more shadowy Eurygios. Several poems speak disapprovingly of Haraxos, a young man who paid for voyages abroad by trading wine from his estates and who had spent large sums of family money to buy the freedom in Egypt of a courtesan named Doriha. Larihos was a public cupbearer in Mytilini. We know nothing of Eurygios, if indeed he existed. As for Sappho’s personal appearance, there were no statues, coins, or vase paintings until long after her death. But she was frequently referred to as the “lovely Sappho,” and with the same authority she was described as short, dark, and ugly, “like a nightingale with misshapen wings enfolding a tiny body.” These are the words of the scholiast on Lucian’s Portraits. Yet the same Lucian, referring to her person, calls Sappho “the delicious glory of the Lesbians.” In a poem ascribed to Plato from the Greek Anthology (or Palatine Anthology), she is called the “tenth Muse.” What are certainly Plato’s words are in the Phaidros, in which he has Socrates speak of her as “the beautiful Sappho.”
In this, Plato was reflecting at least one contemporary belief in her feminine beauty, and in the existing statues and coins the “nightingale with misshapen wings” is depicted with the idealized features and beauty of Afroditi.

  The evidence of her activities is no more conclusive. Sappho lived during the reigns of three tyrants in Lesbos: Melanhros, Myrsilos, and Pittakos the Sage. When she was young, it appears that she and her family went, for political reasons while under Myrsilos, to the Lesbian hill city of Pyrrha, and later, about 600 B.C.E., to Syracuse in Sicily, probably in the time of Pittakos. To have left for political reasons implies that her family was important in city affairs. As for her own social position, there is no question that her wealth and class distinction gave her privilege and, largely, immunity from male domination. Her relationship with men was not, at least in the surviving verse, political or societal but was, rather, a question of affection and sexuality. In perhaps her most famous poem, fragment 31, she is pitted as an outsider woman, for the love of another woman, against an impossibly superior competitor, a man who in her eyes seems godlike and completely excludes her from the erotic agon. In this attitude she differs from her aesthetic cousin, the Shulamite of the Song of Songs, who is one of the earliest voices to speak eloquently and powerfully from a woman’s vantage point. The Shulamite celebrates erotic love and protests against the night guards of the city who have beaten her, “those guardians of the walls.” Sappho is at least free from the bullying of such “night guards,” but is nevertheless confined by her sex to a parallel world of aristocratic women.

  This should not suggest, however, that Sappho and other women were viewed by men, or viewed themselves, as equals. Although the Greeks did honor nine male poets—Pindar being first among them—we find Aristotle stating superciliously in the Rhetoric (1398b): “The Mytilinians honored Sappho although she was a woman.” But with all the hits and misses, Sappho is universally honored as the foremost lyric poet of Greek and Roman antiquity.

  The women mentioned in Sappho’s poems as companions are Anaktoria, Atthis, and Gongyla; she loved them passionately and shared catalogs of happiness with them, which she recalls with pain and pleasure after they have left her. Other friends are Mika and Telesippa and Anagora; she was angry with Gorgo and Andromeda, who had left her to become her rivals. But of the widely held theory of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and others that her relationship to all these women was that of high priestess in a cult-association (thiasos), or in a young lady’s academy of manners, the most one can say is that she was probably known as a teacher of young women. As for using her position of teacher at any level (and surely “cult” is a stretch) as a means of explaining away her homoerotic poems, this is unpleasant nonsense and traditional bigotry, and has no basis in the ancient biographical tradition and no support in the existing remains of her poems. Unfortunately, the cover-up theory, born of moral desire to conceal Sappho’s gay romances, remained dominant until the midtwentieth century.5

  The ancient commentators have also told us that there were really two Sapphos—one a poet and one a prostitute who also wrote poems—or that Sappho herself was a prostitute, and Ovid recounts the legend that she threw herself from the Leukadian Cliff out of love for the ferryman Phaon. It should be remembered when considering these more extravagant tales about Sappho and her family that there were perhaps thirteen plays dealing with Sappho in later Attic comedy, and that by then she had become a stock figure on the Athenian stage. It was on the stage, her modern apologists contend, that the black legend of Sappho originated. The black legend extended to her husband, Kerkylas, whose name only appears in testimonia found in the late Byzantine Suda. The same wild Aristophanic imagination and comic nastiness that portrayed Socrates as a fool standing on clouds and made Sappho into a babbling stage clown surely took shots at her husband, Kerkylas.

  As we are told, Sappho’s husband was from the island of Andros, meaning “man.” In “Kerkylas” one can hear the word kerkís, meaning “rod,” “peg,” or “weaver’s spindle,” which has led some scholars to speculate that both Sappho’s husband’s name and his origin were an invention and “indecent pun” from one of the many later comedies—such as the six comedies entitled Sappho, the five entitled The Leucadian, or two entitled Phaon—all lost plays known to us only by their titles, but in which Sappho was a target for lampoon. So, according to ancient comedic reasoning, “Kerkylas of Andros” yielded “Penis of Man,” or, in more futsy academic jargon, “Prick from the Isle of Man.”6

  Sappho is credited with certain technical innovations. She is said to have been the first to use the pectis (a kind of harp), and to have invented the Mixolydian mode and the Sapphic stanza, which was imitated by Horace and Catullus. Sappho was not the first Lesbian to contribute innovations to Greek poetry. Before her were the semilegendary poets Arion, inventor of the dithyramb, and Leshes, author of the Little Iliad, and then Terpandros, who invented and wrote poetry for the seven-string lyre, of whom we have four small and doubtful fragments, the earliest examples of lyric poetry in Greece. Sappho’s Lesbian contemporary Alkaios wrote in Alcaics (quatrains in tetrameters), which were also imitated by Horace and other Latin poets.

  There is good reason to believe that Sappho was a prolific writer. We do not know how she recorded her work—whether on papyrus, on wooden tablets overlaid with wax, or orally through song—but centuries later, when the Alexandrian grammarians arranged her work according to meter into nine books, the first book contained 1,320 lines (330 four-line stanzas in sapphics—three eleven-syllable lines followed by a five-syllable line; in reality, Sappho used many metric forms, not only the prosodic form that carries her name).7 Judging from this, we may suppose that the nine books contained a very extensive opus. Her work was well known and well preserved in antiquity. We have Athinaios’s claim in the third century C.E. that he knew all of Sappho’s lyrics by heart. But the best indication, perhaps, of the general availability of her works in the classical age lies in the number of quotations from her poems by grammarians, even late into Roman times, which suggests that both commentator and reader had ready access to the corpus of the work being quoted.

  Of the more than five hundred poems by Sappho, we have today about two thousand lines that fit into intelligible fragments, and these come from no single collected copy but are pieced together from many sources: from the scholia of ancient grammarians to the mummy wrappings in Egyptian tombs. Plato’s entire work has survived virtually intact, having been both popular with and approved by pagan and Christian alike. Sappho’s work did not lack popularity. As Ovid put it, “What did Sappho of Lesbos teach but how to love women?” (Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas?) But nonetheless, she did not always win approval.

  To the church mind, Sappho represented the culmination of moral laxity, and her work was treated with extreme disapproval. About 380 C.E., Saint Gregory of Nazianzos, bishop of Constantinople, ordered the burning of Sappho’s writings wherever found. She had already been violently attacked as early as 180 C.E. by the Assyrian ascetic Tatian: “Sappho was a whorish woman, love-crazy, who sang about her own licentiousness.”8

  Then in 391 a mob of Christian zealots partially destroyed Ptolemy Soter’s classical library in Alexandria. The often repeated story of the final destruction of this famous library by the Arab general ‘Amr ibn al-‘Āṣ and Caliph ‘Umar I is now rejected by historians. Again we hear that in 1073 Sappho’s writings were publicly burned in Rome and Constantinople by order of Pope Gregory VII. Until late in the eleventh century, however, quotations from Sappho still appeared in the works of grammarians, suggesting that copies of her poems were still preserved. We will never know how many poems by Sappho were destroyed in April 1204 during the terrible pillage of Constantinople by the Venetian knights of the Fourth Crusade, or by the Ottoman Turks at the fall of Byzantium in 1453.

  But apart from official hostility, Sappho’s works suffered equally from the general decline of learning in the early Middle Ages and t
he consequent anger of oxidizing time upon neglected manuscripts. It is probable that some of her work was lost in about the ninth century when classical texts, preserved in uncial script, were selected and recopied in modern letters. No single collection of her poems, in whole or in part, survived the medieval period. Nevertheless, in the Renaissance, Sappho came back into light. Italian scholars found the essays On the Sublime by Longinos and On Literary Composition by Dionysios of Halikarnassos, which contain two of Sappho’s most important poems: fragment 31, “Seizure,” and the complete ode to Afroditi (fragment 1, “Prayer to Afroditi”). Every stanza, line, and isolated word by Sappho that appeared in the works of other Greek and Latin writers was assembled, including indirect poems, that is, summaries or retellings of her poems.9

  Very few fragments of original papyrus manuscripts have survived in continental Greece,10 but in parts of rainless Egypt in the Fayum, an oasis semidetached from the Nile Valley near Krokodilopolis, important papyrus manuscripts with poems by Sappho were discovered in 1879. The Egyptian expeditions by the English scholars B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, beginning in 1897, yielded a wealth of material. In addition to important poems by Sappho, parts of four plays of Menandros were found in a refuse heap near Afroditopolis; at Oxyrhynhos, Alkman’s maiden-song choral ode, the first in Greek literature, and twenty odes by Bacchylides were discovered. Bacchylides ceased to be simply a name and became again a major poet of antiquity, rivaling Pindar.

  But above all, the range of Sappho’s work was dramatically expanded. The precious papyri had been used as papier-mâché in mummy wrappings. Unfortunately, many were torn in vertical strips, and as a result the Sappho fragments are mutilated at the beginning or end of lines, if not in the middle. The mummy makers of Egypt transformed much of Sappho into columns of words, syllables, or single letters, and so made her poems look, at least typographically, like Apollinaire’s or e. e. cummings’s shaped poems.