Far more sweet-sounding than a lyre.
More golden than gold.
—SAPPHO
“DAMN YOU! SAPPHO,” ALCAEUS shouted, “you are the first woman I ever trusted and you betray me like a common harlot!”
I looked up and there was Alcaeus. How long had he been watching us? I grew defensive, when an apology would have been what my heart dictated.
“You mean like Rhodopis? I know all about you two! She herself boasted of your prowess as a lover. How clever of you to forget to tell me!”
“She meant nothing to me!” Alcaeus raved.
“Can’t you think of a better excuse?”
“I made love to her and thought of you!”
“And you expect me to say ‘I made love to Aesop and thought of you!’” I shouted. We were still inside the little skiff, perched on the afterdeck, and Alcaeus was leaning over the edge, staring at us hatefully.
“Well, it’s true. I did think of you. Only of you.” This I whispered.
“You never told me that!” said Aesop from his supine position in the skiff. “I thought you loved me a little.”
“Forgive me, Aesop, I do love you as a brother, but Alcaeus is my destiny. I know that now. I’ve known it from the first moment I set eyes upon him!”
For a minute nobody said a word. All we could hear was our own labored breathing. Aesop was clinging to me like a baby clutching at its mother. I struggled out of his reach, clambered out of the skiff, and tried to follow Alcaeus as he stormed off the deck. He went below to hide himself among the centaurs. By now I was sobbing desperately.
Why, after all this time, had I chosen to do the deed with Aesop? Had I needed to provoke Alcaeus? I was enraged at myself. I would have done anything to undo my foolishness. The regret I felt was the regret of the damned. I had seen it on my father’s shadowy face in Hades’ realm. I felt that I was back across the rushing river with the dead. Better he dead and numb to all sensation than to feel the way I felt!
I pursued Alcaeus belowdecks. He refused to see me. He sent Chiron to inform me that he was too ill to speak to me. The wise old centaur shook his shaggy white mane and said, “You broke his heart. There’s nothing for it.”
“Help me, Chiron!” I begged. “Tell Alcaeus how much I love him!”
“How can I dispute what he just saw with his own eyes?”
“Tell him it meant nothing. Tell him it was a momentary lapse of judgment. Tell him I love only him. Please. I beg of you.” By now I was on my knees in supplication.
“He will not believe me. He refuses to share you with Aesop. He is a proud man and you have humiliated him.”
“But Chiron, you can cure anything. You know the secrets of healing. Heal his broken heart. I know you can do it. Besides, you have two wives yourself. You’d happily take three and think nothing of it. You love more than one woman. How can you fault me for loving two men? It’s not impossible to love two men!”
“It’s different for men. The phallus can accept no competition. You women are used to it. Deltas are less discriminating.”
All I could do was fall to the deck and wail like one in mourning. I pounded my fists and tore my chiton. But still Alcaeus did not appear.
Alcaeus put both Aesop and me off the boat at Samos. As I watched under the deep blue Aegean sky as the Eye of Horus sailed away bearing all my hopes and dreams, I knew I had lost the love of my life a second time. The first time is heartbreaking, but the second time is like an evisceration.
Why had I brought disaster down upon myself? Perhaps I was afraid to give myself entirely to Alcaeus because I loved him so utterly. And abandonment seemed as inevitable as death. I had broken three hearts—Aesop’s, my own, and Alcaeus’—and I knew I was doomed to live with regret forever.
I remembered the legend of Leucas. It was said that lovers who jumped from the Leucadian cliff either got over their hopeless passion or died trying. In either case they were cured. Now I understood what always seemed so desperate before.
So here we were in Samos, Aesop and I alone together, and desolate. Aesop knew Samos well from his slave days, but he hated the place as crass and gold-loving. He was despondent about what he perceived as my rejection of him. You would have thought that with Alcaeus gone, Aesop would have claimed me as his own, but both of us were devastated. Something was deeply wrong between us. We both now knew we were friends rather than lovers, but we had tainted that long friendship with unrequited love. Sometimes you have to couple to uncouple. Unfathomable, the mysteries of love!
Why is it that you can love two men but love them in totally different ways? Why is it that one may claim your fealty and philosophy and the other your desire and your delta? Why is it that love is so damnably various? And why are men so unprepared to grant that women are as various as they? We are more various, in fact. Little good it did me to philosophize like this! It did nothing to ease the pain. Men were blind and narrow-minded, but I loved one of them!
Aesop and I stayed together for a while, chewing over the past, growing gloomier and gloomier. The more we talked about our dilemma, the less we could resolve it.
One evening we were crying into our wine in a little tavern in a back alley of Samos and we noticed a group of Lydians watching us, listening for every word.
A great gray-bearded fellow with sea-green eyes surrounded by innumerable crinkles finally rose from his table and came over to Aesop.
“Is it Aesop the fable-maker?” he asked.
“Why do you ask?” muttered Aesop grumpily. Then he looked up and his face spread with a smile. “Syennesis!” he exclaimed. “My dear old friend!”
They began a spirited conversation about things and people in the past I had no knowledge of. It turned out that Syennesis was a philosopher and a friend of Aesop’s former owner.
“I always knew you’d become famous!” he said to Aesop. What about me? I thought. Was I a cipher? The man did not recognize me at all, nor did Aesop remedy the slight.
“We are bound for Delphi,” said Syennesis.
“Of course you are!” I said peevishly. “Whenever anyone in this part of the world is at a loss for anything—Delphi is the answer.”
“And who is this?” the Lydian asked Aesop, as if I could not speak for myself.
“Why, this is the famed singer, Sappho of Lesbos,” said Aesop.
At that, the hairy, wrinkled Syennesis fell to his knees, clasped his hands, and began to sing, “I have a daughter like a golden flower. / I would not take all of Alyattes’ gold with silver thrown in for her! I’ll never forget where I first was when I heard that. If you are the divine goddess who first composed that song, then I am at your service, Lady.”
I must admit this softened my mood somewhat—though he had misquoted me.
“Thank you,” I said simply. And then the accumulated tears I had been storing up began to flow. I thought of Cleis as she had been as a baby and great sobs shook my body.
“Forgive me,” I mumbled. Aesop put his arm around my shoulder.
“I think it is time for you to go home,” he said softly. And I knew he was right.
So Aesop went with the Lydians to seek the wisdom of the Oracle of Delphi (that charade again!) and I steeled myself to return to my native isle despite the order of exile probably still in force against me. Aesop and I said farewell sadly, knowing the gods had made us tools of each other’s wisdom but not lifelong partners. Aphrodite had asserted her power over me again in a new and tricky way.
Damn you, Aphrodite, I thought. I knew now how Chiron had felt about Zeus, how angry one could be at the gods, but I humbled myself before Aphrodite, knowing now that she was far shrewder than I. You win, Aphrodite! You’ve ruined my life! You’ve taken me to the edge of the cliff!
ZEUS: Do you intend to let this insult pass unpunished?
APHRODITE: Of course not! Phaon will be waiting to humble her once more.
Then I made my way to Lesbos secretly, not disclosing my identity. I crept upon my native island like a ghost.
I went first to Eresus, not Mytilene, hoping to conceal myself as long as possible. As far as I knew, Pittacus’ minions would dispatch me for daring to return. No doubt I was still under sentence of execution. And yet it was sweet to be home. If I was meant to die here, so be it. I had reached the end of my winding road. I could smell death waiting in the wings.
At the little town where I was born, there was a strange hush. The hills were green as ever, the olives silver, the sea sparkling, but the people were subdued, as after an enemy attack. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something to happen. I asked the boatman who brought me what the trouble was.
“The tyrant’s love is dying,” he said. “Cleis, beloved of Pittacus, may be breathing her last.”
Somehow, I had sensed this. Perhaps it had drawn me back to Lesbos as surely as my longing for my daughter.
“Where does she live?”
“Here in Eresus….A great lady.”
He rowed me to my grandparents’ house—it seemed so much smaller and more modest than I remembered it—and into a courtyard filled with people weeping. I had the feeling I was back in the Land of the Dead. Everything seemed hazy and insubstantial, as if I walked among ghosts.
I drew my veil over my face, still not wanting to be recognized.
Then there was a commotion—guards pushing the people aside, myself included—and a great paunchy man with a white beard sailed in, a golden-haired young woman at his side.
The man was clearly an aged Pittacus. But who was the young woman?
I pushed through the crowd and found myself borne on a sea of sobbing humanity. Two guards restrained me and held me painfully by the arms. But now we were in a chamber where a woman lay dying, and she recognized me.
“Sappho!” she whispered. “Forgive me!”
The grizzled man and the golden girl stood aside in surprise. The man indicated to the guards that I might be released.
I ran to my mother’s bedside and fell to my knees. Her face was gray. Her eyes had lost their luster. She smelled of mortality.
“Forgive me,” she said again. “Is it really you? Am I dreaming? If it is really you, I can die. The pain is so terrible that all I want to do is sleep. Sleep has become my only blessing.”
I knew now that my mother’s dying had somehow reached me even on the Eye of Horus in the middle of the sea.
I thought of so many things I wanted to tell my mother—of meeting my beloved father in the house of Hades; of living with the mythic amazons whom she had so revered; of losing Alcaeus again because of Aesop; of understanding now that a woman could love two men, that a mother could follow her destiny and still love her child more than life itself, that the gods were capricious and uncontrollable—but all I could do was hold her in my arms and weep. She wept too. “Forgive me, forgive me,” she kept mumbling.
“There is nothing to forgive,” I said. “The gods decreed it all—even my return. The gods are in charge, not we.”
We stayed like that for a long time. How long, I don’t know. Little by little her body, which I caressed, began to smell as it had when I was a child—fragrant with the perfumes of the East. Hours, days, and years went by—or seemed to. When I lifted my head, my mother’s mouth was slack and a shining filament of light fell to my hand from her lower lip. Was this my legacy? Her eyes were open but gone. She had left me an orphan, holding her in my arms.
Pittacus and the young woman were standing utterly still and staring at me. Something in the young woman’s eyes reminded me of those that had just closed. Could this be?
“Hang me from the rafters if you must,” I whispered to Pittacus. “But what I want is to see my daughter before I die.”
“Sappho—I pardoned both you and Alcaeus months ago when your mother fell ill. And your daughter stands before you.”
The beautiful young woman came forward to embrace me. I drank her beauty with my thirsty eyes, then sank to the floor in a faint.
When I awoke, it was in the women’s quarters of my daughter’s house in Mytilene. My daughter was caring for me. She was so beautiful that had I met her without knowing of our relationship, surely I would have tried to make love to her. Whenever I looked at her, my breath caught in my throat and a subtle flame heated my blood. Her teeth were straight and white and slightly buck—a sign of sensuality. Her golden hair tumbled over her flushed pink face as she nursed me.
“I forgive you for everything,” she said, “even abandoning me.”
So that was the story she had been told! I did not contradict her—not yet.
My mind journeyed back to the events that had brought me here. I saw myself on the boat with Alcaeus, living in rapture. Then I saw myself ruining it all with Aesop. And then I understood. Had I stayed in the arms of Alcaeus, my mother would have died unforgiven. There was a divine plan, after all—but one I could only see looking back.
My mother was dead. Larichus was dead. My grandparents were long dead. My brother Charaxus was running the family vineyards with the help of his wife—Rhodopis! The beautiful courtesan was now a harridan, everyone said, but she still thought herself bewitching. She, no less than my mother, had perpetrated the story of my supposed abandonment of Cleis. Charaxus had not contradicted her—but then he was afraid to contradict her about anything.
As the adopted child of the tyrant, my daughter had had her choice of men, but had chosen badly and seemed unhappy. Her husband was rich, but he was not clever enough for her. And because he was not clever, he was not kind—for kindness is the highest wisdom.
My son-in-law was called Elpenor—after that fool who fell off the roof in a drunken haze in Homer’s epic of Odysseus. Who calls his son Elpenor? Only the most foolish or venal of fathers! And Cleis’ husband lived up to his name too. He bumbled and stumbled with his tongue if not with his feet. No wonder his wife couldn’t stand him!
Because she was so unhappy, she had fallen into the habit of consulting soothsayers and asking them the unanswerable, but not one of them had predicted my return.
Each day a bird would be sacrificed and brought to her to tell her the way the day would go.
“You’d be better off listening to their song, Cleis, than allowing their slaughter. The unhappy always fall into the traps of soothsayers.”
“Why are you so wise?” she asked.
“Pain and shipwreck, shipwreck and heartbreak.”
“Will you stay with me forever?” Cleis asked.
“I’ll try,” I said.
Of course, it fell to the women of the family to wash and perfume my mother’s body for her funeral rites. There I stood in the courtyard opposite my nemesis Rhodopis while we tenderly washed my mother’s corpse in seawater, attached the golden strap to hold her chin, closed her beautiful eyes, and put a coin in her mouth to pay for her journey to Hades’ realm. We dressed her all in white and pointed her feet toward the door as she lay on her bier. We placed a wreath of gold upon her head to indicate that she had won her battle with life and we placed a ceramic bird on her chest to represent her singing soul. We gave her her mirror and alabastron, a little vase for perfume, to take to the Land of the Dead so that even there she could be beautiful. We set lekythoi of perfumed oil about her crowned head. Then we sang all manner of dirges for her, assisted by all her female friends and a chorus of professional mourners sent by Pittacus.
“I loved her so!” Rhodopis wept. “That was why she promised me her jewels!” She was eyeing the golden crown as if she felt it was a shame to bury it.
I said nothing. At one time, I would have done battle with her over the jewels my mother left behind, but I was too exhausted for that now. However little you depend on your parents from day to day, however you expect their deaths, their final departure is a cataclysm. It is as if you stand on solid ground and suddenly the earth gapes beneath you.
I thought of the Land of the Dead where my mother and father would be reunited.
“At last!” my father would exclaim.
“At least here you have no body to betray me with!” my mother would snap. Then she would be glad to be with him for all eternity. And with baby Eurygius.
Pittacus had prepared a monument for my mother in which she appeared, sculpted in all her youthful beauty, holding a small girl child. The epitaph read: “I hold the dear child of my daughter. May we never be parted in this world as we were inseparable in the world where the sun shines.” Under the little girl’s feet was written: “I am Sappho beloved of Cleis as Cleis is beloved of Sappho.” A riddle worthy of the Oracle of Delphi.
No expense was spared for my mother’s funeral. My mother was carried to her grave in a hearse drawn by four white horses. Even the horses were sacrificed and entombed with her as if she were a great warrior.
“You have dealt the death of my soul by dying!” Pittacus exclaimed at my mother’s graveside. Cleis wept and wept as if she could never be comforted. I took her in my arms, but she subtly pulled away.
The whole island was sunk in official mourning. I was beginning to admire Pittacus for the care he took with my mother’s passing. It was not surprising that the long struggle of Lesbos against Athens had created such a leader. At times of war, people turn to heroes and strongmen and happily give them extraordinary powers. People talk of loving peace, but war cements the powers of tyrants and the military. It will never be abolished as long as men are men. The need for domination is in their blood. We women could bring peace if we did not live as an occupied nation in the world of men. But having seen how even the amazons could be corrupted by evil rulers, I did not hold out much hope for humanity of either gender. Why did the gods let us kill each other so readily? Was it all an entertainment for them in their vast boredom on Olympus? That was the only explanation that made any sense at all.
The war between Lesbos and Athens had dragged on and on for years. Just as it seemed peace was imminent, another expedition of war ships would arrive to skirmish on our shores. The populace feared peace after so many years of war. People would retreat inland from Mytilene to wait out the bloodshed. Then calm would come again. Then another skirmish would erupt. But after so much bloodshed, even the Athenians were exhausted. As the war had receded, both Pittacus and the people had mellowed. Now that he was supreme ruler, secure in his power, Pittacus could be kinder. He could become a Wise Man. In fact, he was promoting himself as such through patronizing minstrels and artists and filling his court with philosophers. He wanted to be known as one of the Seven Sages after he died.
“Even Alcaeus might now come home with no fear,” he told me. “But it seems he prefers Egypt. He was always a wanderer at heart.” When he said that, I began to sob. He put his arms around me as if he had decided he was my real father.
“It is time for you to sing again.”
“What’s the use?” I said. “Song changes nothing. It does not stop war or bloodshed, or raise the dead, or prevent children from being snatched from their mothers, or allow love to last. All my life I have made songs. Now I am ready to be silent.”
And I meant all this in my despair, but the muses still nudged my elbow from time to time and bade me try to sing. All my efforts came to naught. My heart was no longer in my craft.
I tried to write a song for my mother’s passing, but I could not. I kept struggling with my farewells.
As we commit you to Persephone’s dark bedroom, I began. As wind shakes the mountain oaks, grief shakes my heart, I attempted. But nothing was adequate to the pain. I was not an elegist after all, but a love poet, and love had fled forever.
When it came time to divide up my mother’s jewels, Pittacus put them all out on a Lydian carpet in the courtyard of his house. Cleis, Rhodopis, and I were to take turns choosing pieces that we wanted. But whenever I selected a necklace or a ring, Rhodopis would stamp her foot and shout, “I was promised that!” Then she would fall down on the ground, screaming and pounding her fists.
“Don’t tell me you would cry over a ring, Rhodopis,” I said.
“I loved her! I loved her!” Rhodopis wailed. “I am crying for her—not for her jewels.”
What did I care who got the majority of golden trinkets? I gave Rhodopis a necklace and ring she wanted and earrings that matched them. I gave her a golden dolphin clasp encrusted with jewels that my mother had often worn. I gave her earrings cunningly made as leaping dolphins and a diadem of gold that resembled olive leaves. I gave her earrings with rams’ heads crafted in gold. No matter how much I gave, she screamed for more. At last, there was a golden snake necklace with ruby eyes and a tail that could cunningly affix to its neck. I remembered my mother wearing it when I was a child. She had worn it with matching snake earrings that Rhodopis now wore day and night.
“She was my mother!” I shouted. “Give them to Cleis at least. For myself I’ll take nothing.”
“I loved her like a mother!” Rhodopis wailed. “Besides, the earrings and the necklace belong together!” Now even I had to laugh. Rhodopis found nothing funny in her words. Instead, she fell to the floor again and pounded it. Eventually Pittacus had to come in and make the division himself. I got the golden chain with the tiny quinces dangling from it. I wear it every day. I often sleep in it.
But even death recedes in time. Sad as I was, I was happy to be back on my native island. I walked among the olive trees with Cleis, telling her of all my adventures, of my love for her father, Alcaeus, of my despair when she was taken away. I related the whole story of her fever and Isis’ spell—leaving out my love story with Isis. (Children never want to know these things.) Did she believe my version of events? She wanted to, I know.
I visited the family vineyards—which Rhodopis had revived. I took over my grandparents’ house in Eresus where my mother had died.
I had almost forgotten my calling. But my fame had spread as my songs were sung all over the Greek world. Families from Athens and Syracuse, even Lydia, wanted to send their daughters to me to learn the lyre and the art of making song. I became an accidental mentor to the next generation.
Cleis hated this. She had missed me so long that she could tolerate no loss of my attention now. She made fun of my students. She wanted me to live with her and care for her child—Hector, a beautiful little boy who was dark like me—rather than care for making songs. My grandchild melted my heart. I adored him. But I could not do what my mother had done and woo my grandchild away from his own mother. I loved him, but I knew he needed his mother more. Cleis could not understand my reserve. She thought I was holding back my love somehow. That was where our rift began.
But of course it did not begin there. It began with the slander that I had abandoned her—a slander perpetrated by Rhodopis. I had told Cleis the true story, but she only half believed me. She struggled with her feelings. She wanted to love me but she was afraid to be abandoned again. Very well, I told myself, she will come to it in time. She will realize how much I always loved her.
But no, as I settled into the role of mentor to beautiful young ladies from abroad—Dica, Gyrinno, another Anactoria, another Atthis, and another Gongyla—Cleis seethed with envy. I tried to explain to her that my students were no match for a real daughter, but she did not believe me. She wanted me to worship her body and soul and worship her child. And I did! But teaching saved my life. Without it I would have pined away for lack of the love of Alcaeus.
“You love Dica and Gyrinno more than me,” Cleis would accuse.
“Absolutely not. I love you best, I always have.”
“Then why do you need these silly students?” Cleis protested. “Anactoria will play you false. Gyrinno is vain as a peacock. Atthis has no talent for the lyre,” Cleis protested.
“But if I am nothing but a grandmother, I will pine away,” I said. “I need song to keep me whole. My teaching is my calling.”
“Your grandchild is calling you,” Cleis said. “Listen to his cries!”
“I will not neglect him, I promise you,” I said. And Cleis sniffed resentfully.
I built a small temple in the grove behind my family’s house and there we danced and sang our songs to Aphrodite. I had no doubt after my travels that she was the most potent of all the goddesses and I instructed my students in her worship.
“The gods hardly care about us,” I told my students. “We must attract them with the beauty of our song and dance, tempt them with our sacrifices, and make ourselves worthy of their attention. To them our lives are so temporary that we are little more than leaves on a tree. They are concerned with their own intrigues. They love, war, build, destroy, blink and we are gone. If we wish to be more than falling leaves to them, we must sing so divinely they cannot but hear us.
In the grove behind my grandparents’ house we burnt incense to Aphrodite and honored her with song and dance. We sacrificed the first fruits of our vineyards and olive trees. We piled up apples and peaches in her honor. We roasted the fat thighbones of white heifers bedecked with flowers and sprinkled with barley. We had contests for the most beautiful songs, the most beautiful dances, the most beautiful robes. On the warmest summer nights, we flung off our robes and danced naked under the moon, invoking Aphrodite.
From Sappho pressed is this honey I bring thee,
Sticky as love, nourishing as breast-milk to a baby,
Beautiful to Zeus as a maid who is not Hera,
Pleasing to Aphrodite as the stiff phallus of her lover.
How could we know we were being observed in our devotions? Rumors of our naked dancing drifted across the hills from Eresus to Mytilene. One line—Mnasidica has a lovely body, lovelier even than soft Gyrinno’s—was quoted as proof of our debauchery. Rhodopis spread the rumor that I was training maenads to tear men and children apart with their bare hands. It was said that I had seduced my own daughter and now had moved on to the daughters of others.
Songs of mine were always quoted out of context. My desire feeds on your beauty was repeated all over the island. May you sleep on your soft girlfriend’s breasts was another. It was true that some of my students evoked the greatest tenderness in me and wanted to die rather than leave me. But it was the suicide of Timas that started all the trouble.
Timas came to me from Lydia when she was thirteen. Plump, with reddish curls, she had a natural talent for singing and for the lyre. I poured all that I knew of my art into her. She blossomed under my care. It was as if nobody had ever encouraged her before, and she lapped it up as a cat laps milk. This was true of so many girls outside Lesbos. How much freedom I had taken for granted living here—even during the long war. There were so many places where women were treated little better than slaves.
Timas would look at me and say, “Sappho, when I grow to be a woman, I want to be just like you.”
“You don’t know the griefs I’ve tasted. Don’t wish for what you cannot know.”
“You are simply being modest. You are my hero. When I think the world is cruel to women, I think of you and how you’ve overcome all the adversities of a woman’s life. You even have a beautiful daughter and a grandson who looks just like you. I wish with all my heart I were lucky enough to be your daughter!”
This excess of emotion worried me. When a heart is so open, it can accept arrows as well as honey. I was torn between my need for Timas’ adulation and my fear that it would come to a bad end. Yet I loved her and she loved me. I taught her about pleasure as I had done with the amazon maidens and she gave her whole heart to me. I worried about how unstintingly she gave it.
Timas flourished in Eresus. She stayed with us for two years, growing in skill and courage. At first she imitated my style as they all did, but soon she came to have her own voice so that her lyric meters were crisp, playful, and lilting.
Then word came from her father in Sardis that she was to be married to a courtier who was a friend of his. The man was old and rich and loathsome—that old, old story. Timas wrote to her father, pleading to be allowed to stay in Lesbos. He wrote back that she was a disobedient daughter and had disappointed him.
I saw her struggle with this. Her mother had died bearing her and she was sure the same fate was to be hers. She was afraid of marriage and childbirth and she was afraid of losing her freedom. Who could blame her? Female education always provokes this paradox. We teach maidens to be free and then we enslave them to marriage.
“I do not want to disappoint my father, but I can’t do as he asks,” she wept. “I’d rather die than leave you!”
“You must pray to the gods and do what is in your heart,” I said.
“But what did you do when you were young?” Timas asked. “It’s said you ran away with Alcaeus.”
“I cannot deny that.”
“Then if you were a rebel—why do you expect obedience from me?”
“I only expect that you will be true to yourself. No one can ask more of you.”
Timas threw her arms around my neck. “Sappho, help me to escape my father!” she cried.
“I can do everything but that,” I said.
And then I told her what I always told girls of that age—that life is unpredictable, that the future cannot be calculated, that life is full of amazing surprises, good and bad—that death comes soon enough. I sounded like my own mother talking to me when I railed at being married to Cercylas! The irony of it! My mother was dead and I had become my mother! As I aged, I was even beginning to look like her. I would catch a sidelong glimpse of myself and think—there goes my mother.
Timas only seemed to be comforted by my words. She went down to the sea to swim with Dica. She braided herbs and flowers for Atthis’ curls. She brought me as a gift an embroidered headband from Sardis. It was all an act.
We found her in the apple grove, hanging from the oldest tree by one of her gold-embroidered sashes from Sardis. Her feet bounced slightly as if they were dancing in air as they pointed down to a bed of purple hyacinths. On the highest branch of the apple tree, there remained one red fruit nobody could reach.
We cut her down, washed her lovingly, and threw locks of our own hair into the funeral pyre with her. They sizzled and burnt with an acrid smell—the smell of sacrificed youth.
The girls were desolate. They demanded a song for her, which we could sing as we sent her home. We put the urn aboard ship with this inscription:
This is the dust of Timas
Who was led unmarried
Into Persephone’s dark bedroom.
Her life was cut short
Like our hair,
Which, with newly sharpened steel,
We, her companions, gave up.
Word leaked out all over the island that one of Sappho’s students had killed herself. That was the beginning of the end.
My brother Charaxus had become rather pudgy and was losing his hair. Rhodopis had grown into her soul and now looked on the outside the way she was on the inside. Not a pretty sight.
“Sappho,” she said, “we are troubled by the rumors we hear about you and your students. It’s said that one young woman hanged herself for love of you. We worry for your own good. We worry for your reputation.”
“My reputation!” I spat out. “My reputation, like yours, has long been ruined. You know what they say in Naucratis: ‘If your reputation is ruined, might as well have fun!’”
Rhodopis batted her eyes innocently. “Nobody ever said a bad word about me till you included me in your indiscreet songs. Now it’s not so easy to clear my name. But as a respected married woman and the wife of your brother, I must ask you to be more circumspect.”
“Get out of here!” I screamed at Rhodopis and Charaxus. “And never come back again!”
If only Aesop were here to make a fable of it: There is no more perfect prude than a reformed whore.