Greek Women Part 7

Was Sappho's beauty a myth? Greek standards of feminine beauty included height and stateliness. Homer celebrates the characteristic beauty of Lesbian women in speaking of seven Lesbian captives whom Agamemnon offered to Achilles, "surpa.s.sing womankind in beauty." Plato, in the Phaedrus, calls Sappho "beautiful," but he was probably referring to the sweetness of her songs. Democharis, in the Anthology, in an epigram on a statue of Sappho, speaks of her bright eyes and compares her beauty with that of Aphrodite. According to Maximus of Tyre, who preserves the traditions of the comic poets, she was "small and dark," a phrase immortalized by Swinburne:

"The small dark body's Lesbian loveliness, That held the fire eternal."

The problem, therefore, is whether she conformed to the Greek ideal of beauty or was small and dark. Our only evidence in this matter is that furnished by art. The portrait of Sappho is preserved on coins of Mytilene, which present a face exquisite in contour. A fifth century vase, preserved in Munich, gives us representations of Alcaeus and Sappho, in which Sappho is taller than Alcaeus, of imposing figure and exceedingly beautiful. She was frequently portrayed in plastic art.

According to Cicero, a bronze statue of Sappho, made by Silanion, stood in the prytaneum at Syracuse, and was stolen by Verres. In the fifth century of our era, there was a statue of her in the gymnasium of Zeuxippus, in Byzantium. The Vatican bust is that of a woman with Greek features, but, of course, lends no corroborating testimony as to her size and complexion.

Alma-Tadema has fixed the current tradition in his ideal representation of Sappho's school at Lesbos--a marble exedra on the seash.o.r.e at Mytilene. The poetess is seated on the front row of seats, with her favorite pupil, Erinna, standing by her side. Her chin rests on her hands as she leans forward against the desk, listening intently as Alcaeus plays the lyre. She is small, dark, beautiful, intense; and the artist has "subtly caught the prophetic light of her soul, her eager intellect, her unconscious grace, and the slumbering pa.s.sion in her eloquent eyes."

[Ill.u.s.tration 120 _SAPPHO IN HER SCHOOL OF POETRY IN LESBOS. After the painting by Hector Leroux. Wharton, in his great_ Memoir of Sappho, _says she "seems to have been the centre of society in Mitylene,--capital of Lesbos,--a kind of aesthetic club devoted to the service of the Muses. Around her gathered maidens from even comparatively distant places, attracted by her fame, to study, under her guidance, all that related to poetry and music". In the memoir he defends her character and speaks of "the fervor of her love and the purity of her life." The_ Encyclopedia Britannica _ranks her as "incomparably the greatest poetess the world has ever seen."_]

Let us now consider the conditions under which Sappho's genius blossomed to fruition.

There is a legend that after the Thracian women's murder of Orpheus, the mythical singer of h.e.l.las, his head and his lyre were thrown into the sea and were wafted upon its waves to the island of Lesbos. This legend is an allegory of the island's supremacy in song, and of the unbroken continuity of lyric poetry from its budding in prehistoric times up to its full flower among the Lesbian poets of the sixth century before the Christian era. Every condition existed in Lesbos for the fostering of the love of beauty and the cultivation of all the refinements of life.

The land itself presented mountain and coast, hill and dale, in pleasing and harmonious variety, while about it billowed a brilliant sapphire sea. The island was renowned for the salubrity of its climate, the purity of its atmosphere, and the transparency of its skies. Its inhabitants, owing to the variety of the products of the soil and their attention to commerce, enjoyed unbounded prosperity. They gave themselves up to the enjoyments of life, and cultivated everything that contributed to luxury, elegance, and material well-being. The men devoted their energies to politics and war and the pursuits of pleasure.

The women, who were remarkable for their beauty and grace, enjoyed a freedom and rank accorded them nowhere else in Greece. Symonds thus vividly describes the free and artistic life of aeolian women:

"aeolian women were not confined to the harem, like Ionians, or subjected to the rigorous discipline of the Spartans. While mixing freely with male society, they were highly educated, and accustomed to express their sentiments to an extent unknown elsewhere in history--until, indeed, the present time. The Lesbian ladies applied themselves successfully to literature. They formed clubs for the cultivation of poetry and music.

They studied the art of beauty, and sought to refine metrical form and diction. Nor did they confine themselves to the scientific side of art.

Unrestrained by public opinion, and avid for the beautiful, they cultivated their senses and emotions, and developed their wildest pa.s.sions. All the luxuries and elegancies of life which the climate and the rich valleys of Lesbos could afford were at their disposal; exquisite gardens in which the rose and hyacinth spread perfume; river beds ablaze with the oleander and wild pomegranate; olive groves and fountains, where the cyclamen and violet flowered with feathery maiden-hair; pine-shadowed coves, where they might bathe in the calm of a tideless sea; fruits such as only the southern sea and sea wind can mature; marble cliffs, starred with jonquil and anemone in spring, aromatic with myrtle and lentisk and samphire and wild rosemary through all the months; nightingales that sang in May; temples dim with dusky gold and bright with ivory; statues and frescoes of heroic forms. In such scenes as these, the Lesbian poets lived and thought of love. When we read their poems, we seem to have the perfumes, colors, sounds, and lights of that luxurious land distilled in verse."

Amid such surroundings, burning Sappho sang:

"Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven, Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity, Hearing, to hear them."

The complete works of Sappho must have been considerable. She was the greatest erotic poet of antiquity, the chief composer of epithalamia, or wedding songs, the writer of epigrams and elegies, invocatory hymns, iambics, and monodies. Nine books of her lyric odes existed in ancient times, and were known to Horace, who frequently imitated her style and metre, and who doubtless at times in his odes directly translated her poems. But of all this we have only two poems which may be said to be in any way complete: a considerable portion of the ode to her brother Charaxus, already quoted, and somewhat over a hundred and fifty fragments, the total comprising not more than three hundred lines.

Within the last few months, Doctor Schubart, of the Egyptian Section of the Royal Museum in Berlin, has discovered in papyri, recently added to its collection, several hitherto unknown poems of Sappho.

"Few, indeed, but those roses," as says Meleager, in the Anthology, are the precious verses spared to us in spite of the unholy zeal of antipaganism. And, strange to relate, we are indebted for what we have to the quotations of grammarians and lexicographers, who preserved the verses, not usually for their poetic beauty, but to ill.u.s.trate a point in syntax or metre. But, though so few and fragmentary, they are, as Professor Palgrave says, "grains of golden sand which the torrent of Time has carried down to us."

Sappho wrote in the aeolic dialect, noted for the soft quality of its vowel sounds; and her poems were undoubtedly written for recitation to the accompaniment of the lyre, being the earliest specimens of the song or ballad so popular in modern times.

Predecessors of the melic poetry of Sappho are to be found in the chants and hymns in honor of Apollo prevalent throughout Greece, in the popular songs of h.e.l.las, and in the songs sung in the home and at religious festivals by Lesbian men and women,--children's rhymes, songs at vintage festivals, plaints of shepherds expressive of rustic love, epithalamia or bridal songs, dirges, threnodies and laments for Adonis, typifying the pa.s.sing of spring and summer.

The form and melody of Sappho's poems are due to the fact that they were to accompany vocal and instrumental music, which, thanks to the innovations of Terpander of Lesbos, was at that time exquisitely adapted to the purposes of the lyric. Terpander introduced the seven-stringed lyre, or cithara, with its compa.s.s of a diapason, or Greek octave, and this became the peculiar instrument of Sappho and her school. The choice of the musical measure determined the tone of the poem. Terpander united the music of Asia Minor with that of Greece proper, and the resulting product of aeolian poetry was the union of Oriental voluptuousness with Greek self-restraint and art. Of Sappho's numerous songs, two odes alone are presented to us in anything like their entirety, one dedicated to the service of Aphrodite, and the other composed in honor of a girl friend, Anactoria. Dionysius of Halicarna.s.sus embodies the first in one of his rhetorical works, as a perfect ill.u.s.tration of the elaborately finished style of poetry, and comments on the fact that its grace and beauty lie in the subtle harmony between the words and the ideas. Edwin Arnold renders it as follows:

"Splendor-throned Queen, immortal Aphrodite, Daughter of Jove, Enchantress, I implore thee Vex not my soul with agonies and anguish; Slay me not, G.o.ddess!

Come in thy pity--come, if I have prayed thee; Come at the cry of my sorrow; in the old times Oft thou hast heard, and left thy father's heaven, Left the gold houses, Yoking thy chariot. Swiftly did the doves fly, Swiftly they brought thee, waving plumes of wonder-- Waving their dark plumes all across the aether, All down the azure.

Very soon they lighted. Then didst thou, Divine one, Laugh a bright laugh from lips and eyes immortal, Ask me 'What ailed me--wherefore out of heaven, Thus I had called thee?

What was it made me madden in my heart so?'

Question me smiling--say to me, 'My Sappho, Who is it wrongs thee? Tell me who refuses Thee, vainly sighing.

Be it who it may be, he that flies shall follow; He that rejects gifts, he shall bring thee many; He that hates now shall love thee dearly, madly-- Aye, though thou wouldst not'

So once again come, Mistress; and, releasing Me from my sadness, give me what I sue for, Grant me my prayer, and be as heretofore now Friend and protectress."

The ode to Anactoria is quoted by the author of the treatise on _The Sublime_ as an ill.u.s.tration of the perfection of the sublime in poetry.

John Addington Symonds thus renders it in English:

"Peer of G.o.ds he seemeth to me, the blissful Man who sits and gazes at thee before him, Close beside thee sits, and in silence hears thee Silverly speaking, Laughing love's low laughter. Oh this, this only Stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble I For should I but see thee a little moment, Straight is my voice hushed; Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and through me 'Neath the flesh impalpable fire runs tingling; Nothing see mine eyes, and a noise of roaring Waves in my ear sounds; Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes All my limbs, and paler than gra.s.s in autumn, Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter, Lost in the love-trance."

Epithalamia, or wedding songs, were the most numerous of all Sappho's works, and in them she attained an excellence unequalled by any other poet. Catullus, in despair, seems to have been content with adapting in his marriage odes well-known songs of Sappho. The poet seems to have described all the stages in the ceremony--the Greek maidens leading the pale bride to the expectant bridegroom, chanting their simple chorus to Hymen, the G.o.d of marriage. At one time, they sing the approach of the bridegroom:

"Raise high the roof-beam, carpenters, Hymenaeus!

Like Ares comes the bridegroom, Hymenaeus!

Taller far than a tall man, Hymenaeus!"

But their thoughts are all for the rejoicing bride, who blushes "as sweet as the apple on the end of the bough."

"O fair--O sweet!

As the sweet apple blooms high on the bough, High as the highest, forgot of the gatherers: So thou:-- Yet not so: nor forgot of the gatherers; High o'er their reach in the golden air, O sweet--O fair!"

We shall arrange the briefer fragments according to subject, not according to metre, in order that through them we may gain a clear conception of Sappho's att.i.tude toward life and nature, that we may know the poetess in her love and friendship, her longings and her sorrows, her sensibility to the influences of nature and art.

Her conception of love has been already noticed in the longer poems just quoted. A number of the fragments indicate a similar intensity of emotion. Thus she says:

"Lo, Love once more, the limb-dissolving king, The bitter-sweet, impracticable thing, Wild-beast-like rends me with fierce quivering."

In another:

"Lo, Love once more my soul within me rends Like wind that on the mountain oak descends."

A being so intense as Sappho, with sensibilities so refined and intuitions so keen, naturally possessed an ardent love of nature. Her power of expressing its charm is shown in a number of fragments. Every aspect of nature seems to have appealed to her.

Of the morning she says:

"Early uprose the golden-sandalled Dawn."

And of the evening:

"Evening, all things thou bringest Which Dawn spreads apart from each other; The lamb and the kid thou bringest, Thou bringest the boy to his mother."

And of the night:

"And dark-eyed Sleep, child of Night"

She sings to us also of the

"Rainbow, shot with a thousand hues."

And of the stars:

"Stars that shine around the refulgent full moon Pale, and hide their glory of lesser l.u.s.tre When she pours her silvery plenilunar Light on the orbed earth."

And again of the moon and the Pleiades:

"The moon has left the sky; Lost is the Pleiads' light; It is midnight And time slips by; But on my couch alone I lie."

Trees and flowers and plants appeal to her as if they were endowed with life, and by her mention of them she calls up to the imagination a tropical summer with its attendant recreations. Thus she sings of the breeze murmuring cool through the apple boughs:

"From the sound of cool waters heard through the green boughs Of the fruit-bearing trees, And the rustling breeze, Deep sleep, as a trance, down over me flows."