One story is good until another is told.
—AESOP
LEFT ALONE ON A boat filled with grieving old men and women and girls who feared they would always be husbandless, Aesop and I wondered what we had done wrong.
“You can educate boys against war, but clearly you cannot save them from sirens,” I told Aesop.
“All creatures must respond to reason,” he said.
“Except young men,” I said. “Reason hardly governs their world. Aphrodite does. It’s my own damned fault for calling on her!”
“How could you not? She is your tutelary goddess. But you cannot blame yourself. We were unprepared,” Aesop said. “We had no beeswax for their ears, no ropes to bind them to the mast. We were helpless. Odysseus was prepared by Circe the sorceress. We were not. I must make a fable of it.”
“You and your fables! Can a fable undo Aphrodite’s power? I doubt it.”
Aesop scratched his curly beard. “We thought about every aspect of their education, but we did not think what would happen when they heard the sirens.”
It was true. Once again the gods had outwitted us.
“It is in the nature of the gods to outwit mortals,” I told Aesop. “If I’ve learned anything from my travels, it’s that. They play with us as little boys play with flies—ripping their wings off. We amuse them with our dreams and desires, our vain hopes of improving the world.”
Aesop looked perplexed. Reason was his god and reason had failed him.
The ship sailed on.
The girls were strong rowers and the winds continued fair. Aphrodite was still in our corner. Poseidon was quiet. Was he in love? From time to time I thought of Maera and her sons transported to the grottoes of the sea god, living among starfish and sharks, octopi and seahorses, bedding down on seaweed, subsisting on sea grapes—those tiny succulent gifts from creatures of the deep, that burst on the tongue and are delicious without cooking.
We sailed and sailed. The girls wept and rowed. I tried to comfort them.
“Now we shall never be married!” cried Arete—one of the prettiest girls and only fifteen. Her shoulders were like dark honey softened by the sun.
“Never mind—there are better things in life than marriage. Marriage is not the beginning of life—it’s the end. Trust me, I know.” And I told them about Cercylas and his paunch and his drunkenness. I recited my ironic epithalamia until they laughed and laughed.
Then they remembered their lost boys and they cried again.
Each night, I would take one of the girls to bed with me and teach her about pleasure—a priestess’ prerogative.
How beautiful they were!
Arete was dark, with a delta that turned plum with pleasure. Atthis was blond; you could see her pink nether lips through her golden fuzz. Gongyla was coppery colored; her zone of pleasure was speckled like an undersea creature’s shell.
I taught each girl not to be afraid of joy and to know how to please herself so as never to be dependent on a man. How sweet they were, with their deltas salty as the sea. Some of them had merest buds for breasts. But deep within them, Aphrodite dwelt.
Atthis was my favorite. Shy at first, she woke to pleasure quickly. I would place her high on the ship’s rail and lick her till she throbbed within, grasping my probing finger with the pulse of life. Then I would bring my lips to that nub, gleaming like a wet ruby, half veiled in cream, and flick my tongue against it till she screamed.
As long as I seduced the maidens, Aphrodite sent us gentle seas. But when Aesop put a stop to my seductions, the weather turned and we were rocked again by ill winds.
“Sometimes I think you’re glad the sirens lured our boys away so you could have the girls all to yourself,” said Aesop.
“Are you jealous?”
“Maybe I am,” said the fable-maker. “I wish you loved me even a little.”
This statement came as an arrow to my heart. I looked at Aesop, with his broad chest, his commanding height, his tawny brown skin. He was a fine specimen of a man, and yet I never thought of him as a lover. Why?
“Is it because I was born a slave?”
“Not at all. Any of us could be enslaved at any moment. I think of you as mentor, guide, and friend—not lover.”
“Cannot a friend be a lover?” Aesop asked. The question hung in the air, waiting for Aphrodite to come answer it.
I turned and paced the deck. Around and around I walked. Aphrodite was a capricious goddess. Yes, she was indispensable, but chaos came in her wake. I thought of the sirens in their bloody meadow surrounded by the clean white bones of the men they had seduced and devoured—the heaps of shinbones, the pelvises like bows, the femurs like arrows.
“O Aphrodite! Moderate your awesome powers a little! Let us live to see home again!”
The next morning we awoke to see an island on our horizon. It was mountainous and green and at first sight it seemed to be uninhabited. We looked for a harbor in which to land and saw none, so we stood off and waited. Then we circled the island again and again. Soon a small craft came up, seemingly out of nowhere. Three stout young men were rowing it. They were followed by other boats with other young men. Their chests were muscled and their arms were thick as tree trunks. The girls looked out their oar-holes and melted with desire. The men gestured for us to follow them. And so we did. They led us to a hidden cove between two tall white cliffs and bade us tie up there.
Dry land! We couldn’t wait to leave our foul-smelling boat and feel our feet upon the earth again. The maidens leapt from the galley, followed by their elders. Aesop and I hastily engaged some of the strong-looking young men to clean and provision our boat. They were more than willing. Some of the maidens lingered, watching them.
“What is this place?” I asked one of the young men.
“You have come to the Island of the Philosophers,” he said. “Here we ponder truth and beauty and study how the world is made. Don’t judge by us.” He gestured to his companions, one handsomer than the next. “We are only the philosophers’ slaves. The philosophers themselves are next to the gods.”
“If you are the slaves, I imagine the philosophers must be blindingly beautiful.”
“You’ll see,” the young man said. He put his fingers to his lips and whistled shrilly. Down from the hills they came—more beautiful young men with broad shoulders and muscled backs. They wore only loincloths of snakeskin and seemed as unaware of their own beauty as the maidens were transfixed by it.
The beautiful young men began to clean and provision the boat. Their leader, Creon—for that was the name of the golden young man who first had greeted us—inquired if I was the captain of the ship.
“Priestess,” I said, “and this is my priest, Aesop.”
“Then come with me,” said Creon, “to the Cave of the Philosophers.”
“Must we go with you?” wailed the maidens.
“Stay and help with the ship,” I said, seeing that they longed to.
Aesop and I followed Creon up a rocky path that led to a narrow staircase cut into the chalk-white rock. Creon leapt ahead of us like a mountain goat. Aesop and I puffed and clutched our pounding hearts. We had to stop often to catch our breath. Weeks on the ship had left our legs feeble and we still expected the ground to pitch under our feet like the ship’s deck. The climb seemed interminable. Up and up and up we went. I was beginning to wish I had stayed on the ship myself.
Near the top of the cliff there was a carved archway. Creon had bounded into it and was lost in the gloom.
“Shall we follow?” I asked Aesop. “Is it safe?”
“Safer than this climb,” said Aesop, panting and wheezing.
We followed Creon into a long corridor cut into the rock. Again we struggled to keep up with him. He rounded a corner in the rock and disappeared into a dark cave.
“Come!” he called, urging us on.
As our eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom, we could see three withered old men sitting cross-legged on the floor around a fire that flickered like the tongues of serpents. They had been sitting there so long that they seemed to grow out of the rock itself.
“The earth is made of fire,” the first one said. “Great rings of fire from which the light shines forth. As light is truth and truth is light, fire set this world in motion and will be its end.”
“No—it is made of water,” said the second. “A waste of waters spawned this world and, as all living things are made of moisture, water is the essence of the world. At the end of time we shall all merely float away.”
“No—it is made of air. Without air, no fire burns, no waves pound, no lungs breathe. Air is the essence of creation.”
Creon flattened himself on the ground before these sages.
“They have been arguing for decades,” he said. “They commune with the gods and tell us what the gods desire of us. We would be lost without them. As long as they sit and debate the nature of the universe, we are safe. Should they stop, chaos will come again.”
“I’m a priestess too. I know that game.” I stood brazenly before the three philosophers, arms akimbo.
“I say the universe is made of love!” I said.
“Who is that?” said the first philosopher, blinking.
“This is heresy!” said the second.
“Do I hear a woman’s voice?” said the third.
“Yes! You hear the voice of Sappho of Lesbos. How can you know what the world is made of if you live in a cave and never see it?”
Creon was apologetic. “Forgive her, fathers, she doesn’t know what she is saying.”
“The world is made of love, you say?” asked the first old man.
“Yes, love.”
“And what is love?” asked the second old man. “Is it an element?”
“Yes,” I said. “It is at once a force, an element, a whirlwind. It is pure as gold and fierce as war. It is joyous as birth and melancholy as death. It is all these things.”
“Is it made of air or water or fire?” asked the third old man.
“It is made of all these things,” I said.
“Can you bring it to us?” asked the first old man.
“No—you must go in search of it,” I said.
Creon was ashamed. “Excuse me, sirs, she is mad and merely a woman.”
“Perhaps we have been in this cave too long,” the first old man said.
“That is possible,” said the second.
“Lead us to love!” said the third.
Leaning on me and Aesop and Creon, shielding their old eyes against the light, the three philosophers carefully descended the stone stairs to the harbor. There they saw a vision out of paradise—beautiful young men and maidens provisioning a boat together.
The old men looked and looked. Then they gathered in a huddle and whispered together for some time.
“The gods demand you listen!” shouted the first philosopher. “It has long been prophesied that maidens would come to our island and make it bloom again. We shall choose the most beauteous to be our wives.”
“Each of us requires only seven wives,” said the second old man.
“Ten,” said the third. “And they must all be virgins.”
The maidens looked horrified, but the young men accepted this requirement unquestioningly.
“Let me examine the new recruits,” said the first philosopher. He walked up to beautiful Gongyla and began to touch her breasts. I was outraged. So was Aesop. Creon and his men stood there passively.
“How can you tolerate this?” I shouted at Creon.
“The gods will otherwise be angry,” he muttered.
“How do you know this?”
“The philosophers said so.”
“Philosophers say a great many things. That hardly makes them true. Let’s try a little experiment,” I said. “Let’s refuse the philosophers and see what happens.”
“We cannot,” said Creon. “They have always made the rules.”
“Then it’s time for new rules,” Atthis said, stepping forward. “I for one refuse to be married to an old man. Let’s put these three ancients in a boat and float them out to sea. Maybe their gods will save them.”
With the help of Gongyla and two other maidens, she dragged the three old men to Creon’s skiff. Without oars or sail, the boat drifted for a time between the beetling cliffs, then the tide floated them out to sea.
“Let your philosophy save you!” she cried merrily. “We’ll take the young men!”
We could see the philosophers shaking their fists at the sky and we could hear them screaming as the currents caught them and they drifted out between the high white cliffs. The maidens, meanwhile, paired up with the beautiful young men and led them away. They dispersed among the rocky caves to celebrate Aphrodite.
Aesop watched all this in fascination.
“What are the gods, after all, but another name for our deepest desires? And what are our legends of the gods but ways of celebrating those desires?” he asked.
“But this is to deny the gods,” I said.
“Sappho, look at what we have just beheld. We lost our boys to the sirens on the sea and now we have lost our girls to the sirens of their own desires. These girls want babies. They will worship Aphrodite till it’s time to worship Demeter. It hardly matters what we call the gods. The gods are within us. The gods are our deepest dreams. Let me tell you a story. A man and a lion went out walking in Naucratis. They saw a great wall painting on the side of a temple showing a man standing astride a wounded lion.
“‘See how my species subdues yours!’ exulted the man.
“‘Wait till you see the pictures we’ll paint of you in the jungle!’ said the lion. ‘One story is good until another is told.’”
“But if the gods do not exist at all—then we are lost,” I said.
“On the contrary—we are found!” said Aesop.
“But when we are afraid, who can we turn to, if not the gods?”
“Ourselves. We turn to ourselves anyway. We only pretend there are gods and that they care about us. It is a comforting falsehood.”
“Then who created the world, if not the gods?”
“I can’t answer that, but I do know that what we have beheld since we left the amazons is the work of people, not gods.”
I thought of Pegasus, of the Land of the Dead, of the erupting volcano that drove us across the sea. I thought of the sirens, of Poseidon’s great blue hand, of the coincidence of finding an island of beautiful young men to mate with our maidens.
“I am not ready to give up the gods just yet,” I told Aesop.
Aesop laughed. “Perhaps when the gods give you up, you’ll be ready.”
That chilled me.
“Without the gods, how would I sing?” I asked.
“With your own voice,” he said.