After his birth, Dionysos was brought up by rain nymphs on Mount Nysa. The gifted boy soon invented the art of wine making. Hera, however, could not forgive his being sired by Zeus and struck him with madness, whereupon he became a wanderer in many lands. In Phrygia, Rhea cured him and taught him religious rites. Then he spent years in India, refining his philosophical resources, and bringing his secrets of wine making to many places in Asia. When he returned, satyrs, maenads, and nymphs followed him, and festivals of dance, song, wine, and ecstatic transcendence were celebrated to honor him. But his very knowledge of wine, the esoteric, and mystery rites frightened the more temperate, who dreaded the possibility of madness that art and ecstasy might bring with it.
Perhaps no Greek god other than Apollo has had so constant and profound an influence on all fields as the Dionysian deity. In Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, the philosopher compares the two tendencies in the Greek drama, the Dionysian, that of the ecstatic creator, with its peaks and pits, and the Apollonian, whose even virtues bring equanimity and refined insight. These attributes may apply to the baroque and romantic versus the archaic and classical, be it art, philosophy, or letters. There have been mystics, saints, and magicians who bore Dionysos’s name. Apollo may have been Sappho’s meter, but Dionysos was her love friend of dance mysteries and song, of beauty’s summits and desolation’s chasms. 17.
DIOSKOUROI (Dioscuri). Kastor (Castor) and Polydeukis (Pollux), the sons of Tyndareus, were twin hero warriors in Sparta after whom the constellation Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux) was named; they are its brightest stars. Kastor was a horseman, Polydeukis a boxer. Though they were “twins” through their mother, they had different fathers, Kastor being the son of Lida (Leda) and Tyndareus, and Polydeukis the son of Lida and Zeus, though often they are both identified as sons or descendents of king Tyndareus of Sparta. Their sisters were Helen and Klytemnestra. After Kastor died, he entreated Zeus to let Polydeukis share with him his own immortality, and Zeus arranged for them to divide their time between the night sky and dark Hades. He created a constellation for them alone called Gemini (Latin for “twins”), and they remain the patron stars of sailors. 166.
DORIHA (Doricha). Probably a girlfriend of Sappho’s brother Haraxos. 7; 15a, b.
EROS. God of love, child or attendant of Afroditi. Sappho makes Eros the son of Gaia (Ge, Earth) and Ouranos (Sky), but she most often uses eros to mean simply love that yearns for beauty, and especially for sexual union.
Sappho describes Eros as sweetbitter and cruel to victims. Eros is not really the boy god but his metaphorical attribute: eros as difficult or joyous love and its erotic flame. Sappho, however, did not make this distinction in capital and lowercase letters, since ancient scrolls ran unpunctuated words together in capital letters. For her, Eros was already eros. While she prayed to and spoke with her ally Afroditi, she largely ignored the mischievous winged god who was to turn into Roman Cupid and, for later painters with Christian themes, a circling chubby cherub. 38, 44a, 54, 130.
GELLO. A ghost of a girl who died young and haunted little children in Lesbos. Apparently it is a term for children who die young, for unknown reasons, and haunt other children. See Zenobios Proverbs in “Sources, Notes, and Commentary.” 178.
GERAISTION. A temple of Poseidon in Euboia. 96 (lines 21–37).
GONGYLA. One of Sappho’s intimate friends. 22, 95.
GORGO. A rival of Sappho’s; perhaps also a poet. 144.
GRACES (Harites). The three Graces were daughters of Zeus and Eurynomi, but are also said to have been daughters of Dionysos and Afroditi. Their names were Algaia, Eufrosyni, and Thalia. They were the personifications of grace and beauty. They were friends of the Muses, with whom they lived on Olympos. Their favored art was poetry—hence they were the poet’s muse. 53, 103, 128.
GYRINNO, GYRINNA. One of Sappho’s companions. In the poetic fragments she is Gyrinno, but she is Gyrinna in Maximus of Tyre’s Dissertations 24.18.9, a commentary on homosexual love, which he compares to the Socratic art of love. 82a.
HADES. Hades refers both to the god and to his underground hell, a gloomy and unseen abyss of the dead ruled by Hades himself and Persefoni (Persephone). Hades was separated from the upper earth by the rivers Styx (hate), Lethe (oblivion), Aheron (sorrow), Flegethon (fire), and Kokytos (wailing). Hades was also said to be located in the far west beyond human habitation, possibly the vast unknown extending through the Atlantic Ocean. The god Hades is Pluto in Latin.
In the war with Hades’ Titan father, Kronos, the Titanomachy (war of the titans), three of his sons, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, won. They confined Kronos to dark Tartaros (an earthly hell); Zeus took possession of the sky, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the underworld. Hades was visited by the famous, among whom were Orfeus, Theseus, Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas. By trickery he abducted Persefoni and made her his wife for six months a year. 55.
HARAXOS (Charaxos). Sappho’s brother. 3, 5.
HEKTOR (HECTOR). Son of Priamos (Priam), husband of Andromache, and hero of the defense of Troy. Hektor was fated to die after he had killed Patroklas, Achilles’ closest friend and lover. Raging with anger and vengeance, Achilles dragged Hektor’s corpse three times around the walls of Troy to humiliate the hero’s name. Hektor’s funeral, portraying the grieving Andromache, is the last moving scene in the Iliad. 44.
HELEN (Eléna). Daughter of Zeus and Lida (Leda), of extraordinary beauty. As the wife of Menelaos, she was seduced and abducted by Paris to Troy and so became the overt cause of the Trojan War. But Helen as a personage and symbol of beauty and candid passion was much greater than the capsule tale of Paris’s girlfriend who irresponsibly skipped off to Ilios (Ilium) and caused a ten-year war. The strongest of the counters to the story about Helen’s venture to Troy is found in a poem by the great Sicilian poet Stisihoros (Stesichorus), who cynically states about the whole “white-horsed myth” in his mocking poem “Recantation to Helen: “I spoke nonsense and I begin again: / The story is not true. / You never sailed on a benched ship. / You never entered the city of Troy.”1 Plato, in the Phaidros, picks up on “the false accusation of Helen,” giving the background of Stisihoros’s recantation: “When Stisihoros was blinded for having slandered Helen, he, unlike Homer, who was blinded for the same sin, wrote a palinode, a recantation, and immediately recovered his sight.”
Of the many approaches, Sappho’s is the most striking and convincing. She goes along with the Homeric legend but draws a different moral, making the power of love supreme. Yes, Helen left her worthy, dull, appointed husband, Menelaos, for the young Paris, but in her poem about her missing lover Anaktoria (16), who has also gone off to Sardis in the East, she cites Helen’s escape to prove the ultimate worth of love, to which all may be sacrificed, including patriarchal conventions, family, and name. 16, 23.
HERA. Queen of the Olympian gods, daughter of Kronos and Rhea, and mother of Hefaistos and Aris. In Rome she was Juno. Hera was the patron goddess of marriage and childbirth, and, beginning at Minoan Kriti, she was worshiped in all ancient periods throughout Greece, and many temples were built to adore her. Her husband and brother was Zeus.
Despite Hera’s notoriety for being a plague to the cheating Zeus, Hera was also a protector of women and a powerful divinity. Sappho saw her in this latter light. Hera appears as a goddess to whom one makes a pilgrimage. There is no hint of the abused and vengeful deity. Rather, she is the closest equivalent to Sappho’s ally Afroditi; Sappho describes her as beautiful and dazzling, and she prays to her for help. See Artemis, and also Ares, Dionysos, and Zeus. 9, 17.
HERMIONI (Hermione). The only daughter of Menelaos and Helen. Her beauty did not match the beauty of her mother, Helen. When Helen eloped with Paris, Hermioni was left to be brought up by Agamemnon’s wife, Klytemnestra. 23.
HERMIS (Hermes). Athletic son of Zeus and Maia, he was the cupbearer and messenger of the gods and a psychopomp, that is, a guide of the dead to Hades. He was also the god of commerce, travelers, good luck, poets, and
thieves and an extraordinary inventor credited with having invented music, the shepherd’s lyre (made of cow intestines and tortoise shell), the flute, numbers, the alphabet, and gymnastics. As a messenger, he was represented with a winged hat, winged sandals, and a caduceus, a winged staff with two snakes twined around it that has become the emblematic staff of the medical profession. He was also a god of fertility and sexuality. His monument was usually the herma, a stone pillar with a head on top and a phallus in the center that was found outside houses as a good-luck symbol. Religious figures were named for him, most notably Hermis Trismegistos (thrice-strong Hermis), and there was the hermetic tradition in philosophy and magic. In literary criticism, we have hermeneutics, which is a method and theory of textual interpretation. Hermis was also a fun god, a humorous messenger often into mischief. He had three sons, of whom the best known was the satyr Pan, an amusing god of the woods and flocks, with a human torso and goat’s legs and horns, whom Picasso resurrected with sensuality and glee. With Afroditi, Hermis fathered Hermafroditos, who became a hermaphrodite. In Rome Hermis was the popular Mercury. 141a, b.
HESPEROS. The evening star, son of Astraios or Kephalos or Atlas and Eos (Dawn), and father of the Hesperides. Hesperos is also the planet Venus (Afroditi). 104a, 104b.
HYMEN (Hymenaios). God of marriage, a handsome youth whom it was customary to invoke at Greek weddings by singing “Hymen, O Hymen,” in the hymneal or bridal song. 111.
IDAOS. The herald or messenger, who is probably from Ida, a mountain area near Troy. In the Iliad, he appears as the chief herald of Troy. 44.
ILION (Ilium, Ilum) is the city of Troy (Troía), now called Hissarlik in Turkish. Homer’s Iliad deals with the siege of Troy. It is not known whether the present site, the nine walls identified and excavated by Heinrich Schliemann in 1871, is actually Troy, where and whether the Trojan war actually took place, or whether Homer made a supreme amalgam of Bronze Age stories. There is no defining archeological or textual evidence of the events of the war. Near the Schliemann site is a Phrygian city called Troy, in a region known as the Troas or the Troad. 44.
ILOS. Father of Priamos (Priam) and founder of Troy. 44.
IONIAN. Referring to Greeks in an area of the west coast of Asia Minor. 98a.
IRANA (Oirana). One of Sappho’s friends. Irana can be a friend’s name or mean “peace.” Its usage here is ambiguous. 91, 135.
JASON. Leader of the Argonauts, who set sail in the Argo to find the Golden Fleece, which he hoped to bring to his uncle Pelias in exchange for his patrimony. He obtained the fleece with the help of Medea, whom he later married. 152.
KASTOR (Castor). One of the Dioskouroi. See Dioskouroi. 166.
KLEANAKTIDAI. The children of Kleanax, including his son Myrsilos; they were a ruling family during Sappho’s life. 98b.
KLEIS. Name of Sappho’s daughter, also her mother, and perhaps a friend. 98b, 132.
KNOSSOS. Ancient capital of the Minoan kingdom and site of the palace of Minos, which has been associated with the labyrinth and the Minotaur (the bull of Minos). 2.
KOIOS (Coeus). A Titan, mother of Lito and hence grandmother of Apollo and Artemis. 44a.
KRITI. The island of Crete. 2.
KYDRO. A friend of Sappho’s. 19.
KYPRIS (Cyprus). One of the names of Afroditi, meaning she is a Kyprian (Cypriote).
KYPROS. The large Greek island of Kypros (Cyprus), near the coast of Syria, was one of the chief seats of worship of Afroditi.
KYPROS-BORN (Cyprus-born). Another name for Afroditi. See also Afroditi.
KYTHEREIA (Kytherea, Cytherea). A surname of Afroditi, meaning one who comes from Kythera. Kythera was a city in Kriti (Crete). Kythera was also the name of one of the seven Ionian islands off the eastern coast of the Peloponnisos. Both the Kritan city of Kythera and the Ionian island of Kythera are associated with a seat for worshiping Afroditi. There was also a tradition that Afroditi rose from the sea near Kythera. See also Afroditi. 86, 140.
LESBIAN. See Lesbos.
LESBOS. The ancient name of the island of Mytilini, whose modern name comes from that of its main city in antiquity. The dialect of Lesbos was Aiolic, in which Sappho and Alkaios wrote. The name Lesbos is still used in speech, and also on maps, though usually in parenthesis. Lowercase “lesbian” refers to a woman whose sexual orientation is to women. 106.
LIDA (Leda). Mother of Helen, the Dioskouroi, and in some versions Klytemnestra, and wife of Tyndareus. She was seduced by Zeus, who came to her, as readers of Yeats know, in the form of a swan. Another version, to which Sappho alludes, has Nemesis lay an egg, which Lida found and cared for and from which came Helen. 166.
MEGARA. A friend of Sappho. 68a.
MIKA. Probably a shortened form of Mnasidika. Mika was a companion or a rival who had gone over to the house of Penthilos, a clan who were the ruling nobles of Mytilini. Sappho’s family opposed the Penthelids, who had probably forced Sappho and her family to go into exile. 71.
MYTILINI (Mitylene). Ancient and modern capital of Lesbos, or Mytilini, where Sappho spent much of her life. The dialect of Lesbos was Aiolic, in which Sappho and Alkaios wrote.
MNASIDIKA. A friend of Sappho’s who appears to have deserted her. See also Mika. 82a.
MUSES (Mousai). Daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyni (Memory), the nine muses lived on Mount Helikon, where they presided over the arts and sciences. They were worshiped early on in mountainous Pieria in Thessaly. Therefore, they were often called the Pierides. The muses were also worshipped on Mount Parnassos, and at Delfi, where Apollo was said to be their leader. 58, 103, 127, 128, 150.
MYRSILOS. Tyrant of Mytilini who probably caused the exile of Alkaios and Sappho.
NEREIDS. Sea nymphs, fifty daughters of Nereus. 5.
NEREUS. Son of Pontos, husband of the Oceanid Doris, and father of the Nereids, Nereus was the wise “old man of the sea.” The Nereids often accompanied Poseidon and helped sailors in time of storm in the Mediterranean.
NIOBI (Niobe). Daughter of Tantalos and wife of Amfion, Niobi boasted to Lito that her family was larger than Lito’s, and to avenge this insult Lito’s children, Apollo and Artemis, killed the twelve to twenty children of Niobi. 142.
OLYMPOS (Olympus). Home of the Greek gods and the highest mountain in Greece. The Olympic Games were held every four years on the plains below the mountain in honor of Zeus. They included not only athletic events but contests of choral poetry and dance, and at times drama, which included choral dance. An Olympian was a Greek god or goddess. 27.
PAEAN. Epithet of Apollo. 44.
PAFIAN. Of Pafos (Paphos), and therefore Afroditi. See also Afroditi.
PANDION. King of Athens whose daughters Filomela and Prokni were turned into a swallow and a nightingale, respectively (Latin tradition reversed the order.) The presence of a swallow often portended a forthcoming event. 135.
PEITHO. The personification of persuasion, and the daughter or attendant of Afroditi. 96 (lines 21–37).
PENTHILOS. A rival family of ruling nobles in Mytilini. See also Mika, Mnasidika. 71.
PERSEFONI (Persephone). Daughter of Dimitir and Zeus, she was a goddess of fertility and vegetation and the unwilling queen of the underworld. In Sicily she was abducted by Hades and taken to the underworld, where he held her captive in his darknesses. Persefoni spent the winter in Hades and rose to the earth in the spring. She had a slight graveyard smell when she arrived, it was said, but she soon became flowery. Her return to the underworld signified the withering of flowers and grain.
The Eleusinian mysteries celebrated Persefoni’s cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, in which she appeared under the name of Kore (a virgin). In Rome Persefoni was Proserpina or Proserpine. See also Afroditi, Dionysos. 158 Diehl.
PERSUASION. See Peitho.
PHOEBUS (Foibus). An epithet of Apollo, meaning “shining.” 44a.
PHOKAIA. A city of Ionia in Asia Minor, southeast of Mytilini. 101.
PIERIAN. Of Pieria, a region of Thrace in Macedonia, where
the Muses were first worshiped. 103.
PITTAKOS. Tyrant, statesman, and sage of Lesbos in Sappho’s time, depending on the view of the inhabitant; married the sister of Drakon; former ruler who was the son of Penthilos. Pittakos was initially an ally of both Alkaios’s and Sappho’s families, but later he joined with the party of another ruler, Myrsilos, an enemy of both Sappho and Alkaios. See also Myrsilos.
PLEIADES. Seven daughters of Atlas and virgin companions of Artemis. When pursued by the giant hunter Orion, their prayers were answered when they were changed into doves (pleiades) and placed among the stars. Their names were Maia, Meropi, Elektra, Kelaino, Taygeti, Sterop (or Asteropi), and Alkyoni. 168b.
POLYANAX. Father of Polyanaktidis and member of the important Polyanaktid family in Lesbos. 155.
POLYDEUKIS (Pollux). One of the Dioskouroi. See Dioskouroi. 166.
PRIAMOS (Priam). King of Troy during the Trojan war, he was the father of twenty children by Hecuba, including Hektor, Paris, and Kassandra. When his son Hektor was killed, he went into the Greek (Achaean) camp and begged Achilles for the body so he could be properly buried. Achilles agreed to the request. See also Hektor. 44.
PSAPFO (Sappho). Born about 612 B.C.E. in either Eressos or Mytilini on the island of Lesbos, Sappho wrote lyric poems in her own Aiolic dialect, in which she referred to herself as Psapfo. 1; 65; 94; 133a, b.
SAPPHO. See Psapfo.
SARDIS. Ancient city of Asia Minor and capital of the kingdom of Lydia. 96, 98a.
SEMILI (Semele). See Thyoni and Dionysos.
THEBE, THEBES. Not the more famous cities in Boitia and Egypt but a holy city near Mount Ida in the Troad in which Andromache’s father, Etion, was both king and high priest.
The Complete Poems of Sappho Page 13
