Brightness. With luck we’ll shelter in
The harbor, solid ground
For our storm-tossed ships.
—SAPPHO
THE LESBOS OF MY childhood was an enchanted land. Between Eresus and Mytilene, there were gentle hills with shrines to Aphrodite surrounded by orchards. Not stony and bare like so many other islands, Lesbos was green and mossy; shimmery with silver olive leaves, round with golden grapes. Its arms embraced two deep bays that seemed like lakes but mysteriously opened out into the sea through narrow birth canals. Lesbos was a female island humming in the masculine tumult of the sea.
It was said that our singers were so great because in ages past the severed head of Orpheus had washed up on our shores, still singing. It’s as good an explanation as any. The fact that Orpheus could sing after the maenads tore him limb from limb tells you something about the power of song. The singer can be dead and go on singing. Even his lyre went on reverberating after his fingers were scattered among the hills and had turned to dust.
The island was also known as a meeting place between east and west. We were just a ferry ride from the coast of Lydia. Travelers would marvel at the greenness of the hills, the sweetness of the grapes, the excellence of the wine, the fineness of the barley bread, the beauty and the freedom of the women. We were known for treating our women far better than women were treated in Athens or Sparta. But that was hardly well enough!
We were also famed for our festivals in honor of Aphrodite. The Adonia, our midsummer festival, brought all the female singers together to vie in making songs to commemorate the death of Aphrodite’s young beloved, Adonis.
The first time my mother took me, I was perhaps ten or eleven. I stood in awe, transported by the festivities, gazing at the women on the roofs of their houses planting seeds that withered in the hot sun. I imagined Aphrodite, whose bare feet make the grass and flowers grow, bent weeping over her beautiful boy, trying to bring him back to life. She cries to her maidens:
Beautiful Adonis is dying.
How can we save him?
But even as she asks, she knows the answer. A gash in his thigh lets life leak out of him. The boar’s tusk has opened his leg as if it were a womb and the ground is clotted crimson with his blood. Everywhere the sticky drops fall, fierce red anemones spring up—even out of season.
Tear your garments, maidens, and weep for Adonis! I wanted to sing out. But I was afraid. All those swaying choruses of girls in white seemed to exude music I would never know. Later I realized that I had first felt the thunderbolt of poetry at that festival and I reclaimed those very words and wove them into a song. At every Adonia in the wide world, maidens in white now sing my song to Adonis. Weep for Adonis, weep! Oh, I am also weeping as I tell this, but am I weeping for Adonis or for myself?
I loved Aphrodite from the first and steeped myself in her legends. My mother told me that in ancient times her rituals were bloody and cruel, but I only half believed it.
“Foam-footed, born of the waves—this is all a later whitewash of the so-called goddess of love,” my mother said. “She was, in olden days, a bloodthirsty goddess, neck ringed with skulls of infants, holding aloft severed phalli still dripping with blood.” My fierce mother always delighted in telling such gory details—the more frightening, the better. “She came from much farther east than Cythera,” my mother continued, “and her triumph was a triumph of death. Without death, there is no life. The ancients believed this even more passionately than we do. They plowed the furrows with pigs’ hearts and placentas to make the corn grow again. They rutted in the seeded trenches with beautiful boys who were later sacrificed to the goddess.”
“Why did they sacrifice these boys?” I asked, horrified, thinking of my brothers.
“Because the goddess required it, Sappho. Gods and goddesses demand blind allegiance. At one time even Aphrodite required human sacrifice. She sacrificed her consort of a year just as the gods sacrificed Adonis. Blood flowed into the trenches and the corn grew high. Our soil is rich because of all that blood.”
“Would my brothers have been sacrificed if we lived in those times?”
“Best not to ask such questions. Today we are more civilized. Later singers made Aphrodite seem almost blameless. They said she was born when Cronus pitched the testicles of his father, Uranus, into the sea. Thus her legend: that she was born of foam. Never forget that the foam is semen of the gods—a potent brew!”
But I would never forget my mother’s words. Beautiful golden Aphrodite had been born out of semen and delighted in the blood of sacrifice. If my mother said so, it must be true.
You cannot understand my life unless you understand my special bond with Aphrodite. She was my goddess, the one who tutored and set traps for me, the one who placed temptation in my path. I knew her first when I was changing from a girl into a woman.
I am lying in an orchard. Bees are buzzing through the apple blossoms and I am looking up at the sunlight sifting through the leaves and daydreaming about becoming the greatest singer the world has ever known. The times are treacherous. We have been through a decade of war with the Athenians and peace is slowly returning to the vineyards and the shipping routes of Lesbos. The young people hardly know what the adults are warring about. And some of the adults themselves hardly know. People are concerned with what always concerns them: love, hunger, money, power. Song is last. Except for the singer.
The island of Lesbos is ruled by Pittacus, sage and benevolent tyrant. Or so he has come down through history. I found him neither so benevolent nor so sage. The aristocrats were feuding, as usual, over their rights as landowners and cupbearers. But I’ll come to politics later. I am young—too young to be a wife, but not too young to think of being a wife—and I am lying in the orchard, dreaming of my destiny. Above me are the gods, making bets:
APHRODITE: A woman singer can be as great as any man—I’ll prove it through my devotee Sappho—lying dreaming in the orchard there.
ZEUS: Perhaps she can be great, but I bet she will throw it all away for the love of an unworthy man.
APHRODITE: Impossible. You grant her all the gifts of song and I’ll prove you wrong. No man could humble her.
ZEUS: Any man could.
APHRODITE: You could, maybe, but I mean a mortal man—even an irresistible mortal man.
ZEUS: Then make him irresistible. You have the power. And I will give her all the gifts. Then we’ll see who’s right. Pass the nectar.
To win the bet, Aphrodite went down to earth disguised as an old crone. She walked among the people. Many men scorned her, and women too. She was amused by how stupid mortals were. Could they only recognize the gods when they sat on rainbow-colored thrones and wore purple? It seemed so. Aphrodite searched all of Lesbos for a likely man. Finally she found a handsome young ferryman called Phaon, who plied the waters between Lesbos and the mainland of Lydia. He treated her with courtesy, as though she were beautiful, and refused to let her pay for the ride. He was so solicitous that for a moment she forgot she had turned herself into a crone. Smitten by his beauty and deference, she decided to bestow the gift of eternal youth upon him.
At the end of the ferry crossing, she presented him with an oval alabaster box containing magic salve.
“If you smear this on your lips, your chest, your penis, women will find you irresistible—and you will never grow old,” the goddess said.
“Thank you,” the ferryman said, suspecting her true identity despite her rags. She flashed her dazzling smile and disappeared.
So I was given gifts of immortal song. And Phaon was given gifts of eternal youth and heartbreaking beauty. And all the while, the gods were laughing.
I divide my childhood into before the war and after. The war caused us to flee Mytilene and move across the island to Eresus, my mother’s birthplace. My grandparents were the only stability I knew. I think of my grandmother with her smell of lavender and honey. I remember my grandfather, fierce in battle but with a special tenderness for me—the only granddaughter.
My father, Scamandronymus, was a distant myth, always coming and going surrounded by men with bronze-tipped spears. When the war claimed him, his death and homecoming as cold ashes in a jar forced me to grow up far too quickly. A father who never grows old remains a legend to his daughter. For me he was forever young and handsome, more god to me than father. Whenever I thought of him, I flew back in time and became six years old again. I could see him picking me up in the air and whirling me around. “Little whirlwind,” he would call me. Little whirlwind I became.
I knew he loved me better than my brothers. They were his legacy, but I was his delight. Some nights when I was little, I would wander the house in the dark middle of the night, hoping that my footsteps would wake him. (Like most warriors, he was a very light sleeper.) Then, when he woke and came to find me, I would throw my arms around his neck and ask him to carry me into the courtyard. There, beside the gurgling fountain, we had our deliriously private conversations.
What did we talk about? I cannot remember much—except that once I asked him if he loved me better than my mother. Charaxus, Larichus, and Eurygius were younger than I, and boys. I knew he loved me more.
“I love you differently,” he said. “I love her with the fire of Aphrodite. But you I love with the nourishing love of Demeter, the intoxicating sweetness of Dionysus, and the warmth of the fires of Hestia. The love for a daughter is serene; for her mother it can be a torment.”
This gave me pause. “And do you love me better than my brothers?”
“Never will I tell,” he said, laughing. But his eyes said yes.
During the years when the grapes were ruined, the barley fields blasted, we lived among slaves and grandparents in my family’s villa in the countryside. We were always in fear that the brutal Athenians would come to slaughter all the men and enslave the women and children. I knew from my earliest days that I could go from free to slave in one turn of fortune’s wheel. We were told that Athenians tipped their spears with sickness from rotting corpses, that they had no qualms about killing children—even pregnant women. We were told that nothing held them back from slaughter. They lacked our Aeolian sense of the beauty of life. They would stoop to anything for conquest. Or so our elders said. We had no reason to doubt this. Even children feel the uncertainty of war. They may not understand what adults understand, but they feel the insecurity in their very bones.
I remember my brothers Larichus, Charaxus, and even the sickly littlest one Eurygius playing at being soldiers in the pine groves above the sea. I remember how they thrashed each other on the head with wooden swords as if they were Homer’s heroes. Little boys love war as much as little girls fear it. I was the oldest and the ringleader. I used to bring them to a cave where we could hide if the Athenians came to enslave us.
I was both intrigued and frightened by the idea of marauding Athenians. Fear and desire warred in me. In the cave we ate bread and cheese, making the crumbs last. I adored my younger brothers and knew I was charged with the responsibility of protecting them. I had no idea how difficult that would become as we grew older.
Larichus was tall and fair, and vain of his beauty. He longed to be Pittacus’ cupbearer, which indeed he would become. Charaxus was short and stocky and always a devil. He devoured every morsel before any of us could eat. He was greedy for bread, for wine—and eventually for women. His greed for women would become his downfall. It almost became mine. And Eurygius? Just saying his name makes tears spring to my eyes.
I always knew that I was cleverer than my brothers. My father knew it too.
“If the time ever comes that your brothers need you, Sappho, promise me that you will put all your cleverness at their disposal.”
“I promise,” I told him. “Whatever they need they shall have from me.” How did he know to tell me this? Had he read the future? Later, when he was dead, I thought so. My father had astonishing powers.
I know now that parents often tell the stronger child to take care of the weaker ones. Does that enforce the weakness of the weak? Sometimes I think so.
The boys played at war before they knew of women. Women would come soon enough—though not ever for my baby brother Eurygius. He died before he grew to manhood, breaking my mother’s heart, even before my father’s death broke it again.
So the war informed our lives—perhaps my mother’s most of all. For she lost her love and her youngest child.
“We are told the war is being fought over the Athenians’ trading rights on the mainland,” my mother used to say. “But I see other motives. In Athens women are little more than slaves, and in Sparta they are only breeding stock. These barbarians are drawn to Lesbos by the beauty and freedom of our lives, but they will try to destroy precisely what they admire and make us more like them. They are in love with chaos and with night. We must fight them with every breath in our bodies.”
My mother’s hatred of the Athenians later became her excuse for grasping power through men. She wanted to use her beauty before it failed her. I understand the panic of aging women now—though I disdained my mother for it then. Men had always loved her. She was said to look like the round-breasted, jet-haired goddess of the ancient Cretans. With my father gone and four young children to protect, she seized upon the tyrant Pittacus as her life raft and he obliged by floating her. Oh, how contemptuous I was of her wiles! I didn’t realize she was saving her own life and mine.
It was true that women in Lesbos had far more freedom than women in Athens. We could go out walking with our slaves, meet each other at the market and at festivals. We were not completely housebound as women were in Athens. And our slaves were often companions and friends to us.
In fact, it was my slave Praxinoa who alerted me to my mother’s intention to journey to Mytilene for Pittacus’s victory feast—a great symposium such as no one had seen since before the war.
“Then we’ll follow her!” I said.
“Sappho, you will get in trouble and so will I.”
“I refuse to be left in Eresus, where I know every house and every olive tree,” I said. “I long for adventure and if you love me, Prax, you’ll go with me!”
“You know I love you. But I fear the punishment. It will fall more upon me than on you.”
“I’ll protect you,” I said.
Praxinoa had been given to me when I was only five and she could refuse me nothing. We were more than slave and mistress. We were friends. And sometimes we were even more than friends. We bathed together, slept together, sheltered from the thunder in each other’s arms.
“Your mother will kill you—and me.”
“She’ll never know, Prax, we’ll be so secretive. We’ll shadow her to Mytilene. She’ll never even guess we’re there, I promise you.”
Praxinoa looked doubtful. I insisted she go with me—flaunting all the rules by which I had been raised. Even in Lesbos, two girls, free and slave, seldom left the family compound without men and without an entourage.
So we set out from Eresus together on the road to Mytilene. We traveled far enough behind my mother’s procession to be invisible to her. Sometimes we even lost sight of the last stragglers in her entourage. We walked and walked in the morning shade, in the noontime sun, in the slanting late sun of the afternoon. It was twilight of the second day before we came anywhere near the villa of Pittacus, and we were exhausted. My mother traveled in a golden litter carried by slaves, but Praxinoa and I had to lean on each other. And sleep on the hillside with the goats.
We were bedraggled and dusty when we arrived. Nor had we bargained on the guards who barred the flower-strewn path to the tyrant’s villa.
“Who goes there?” demanded the first guard, a tall Nubian with the face of an Adonis. Five other men, huge, with muscles and terrifying bronze-tipped spears, stood behind him. They glowered and looked down at us.
“I am Sappho, daughter of Cleis and Scamandronymus. We come from Eresus,” I said bravely.
“We have no orders to admit you,” the first guard said, blocking our way. We were hustled to the side of the road and seized roughly by two of the other guards.
“Sappho—I think we should be going home,” Praxinoa whispered, shaking.
“Sir, if you’ll unhand us, you’ll be rid of us,” I said. With that, they let us go and we started to run away from the villa.
“Who are you running from, little one?” It was a tall young man with a yellow beard and the scarred cheeks of a warrior. He was older than I—a mature man of at least twenty-five.
“I wasn’t running.”
“I know running when I see it,” the man said, his eyes twinkling as he teased me. Those eyes looked deep into mine. “I am Alcaeus, who scoffs at war and heroes. I dropped my shield and fled the last battle. For this Pittacus means to banish me. I am supposed to be ashamed. But I defy shame. There’s no shame in loving life above death. We are not stupid Spartans, after all. Otherwise, I would be dead. What use would that be to the gods, who will not die themselves?”
“Alcaeus the singer?” I asked the handsome stranger. My heart pounded in excitement just to behold him. I wanted him never to leave my sight!
“The same.”
“I know your verses by heart.”
“Well, don’t just stand there trembling—sing one!”
Dog days—our throats are dry,
Our women bleed for love,
Our parched brains rattle like gourds,
Our knees creak.
Douse your voice with wine and water—sing!
“You think to make it better than it was!” he said in his arrogant way. But later, at Pittacus’ symposium, I found out that he had truly liked my version better than his own, because he sang it just as I had rephrased it. He’d be damned before he’d admit his admiration for me. Yet I loved him helplessly from the moment I met him. It was his confidence, his self-possession—even his hubris—that so appealed to me. Eros had pierced me through the heart with his sharpest arrow.
Alcaeus looked like the sun god—an aureole of golden hair, a golden beard, and golden hair curling on his chest. He seemed to have power enough to pull a chariot across the sky. How could I know in an instant that our lives were linked? He walked with a swagger that made me long to open my legs to him—virgin though I was. Except for my father and grandfather, I had never even liked a man before.
“Come—let’s get you two cleaned up!” he said to Praxinoa and me. And then, to the muscular guards: “Let us pass! These two are with me—my serving maids.”
The guards jumped aside to let us pass.
The winding path to the villa was carpeted thick with rose petals, shaded by white linen canopies embroidered in gold thread. You could hear flutes playing within and smell the aroma of grilled fish. The perfumes of the women floated on the hot night air. Dozens of magnificently dressed aristocrats could be seen circulating in the inner courtyard with their admirers and sycophants. Some of the women wore gold crowns. Some of the men wore laurel wreaths of gold. We were hardly well enough dressed for such elegant company.
Alcaeus hustled us to the gynaikeion or women’s quarters and directed the slaves to dress and veil us all in cloth of gold like doe-eyed virgins from the East. Our faces half hidden, our eyes blackened with kohl, we felt strange and exotic. When we emerged, Alcaeus laughed at us.
“You look like temple virgins from Babylon,” he said, “ready to earn your dowries from strangers. Now stay close behind me in my shadow, but disappear when I tell you to. Do as I say!”
Following Alcaeus like simpering servants, we gaped at the many splendors of the house. The feasting rooms had couches in semicircles where guests could recline and eat and drink. (In Lesbos, men and women drank together.) The art and artifacts came from all over the known world—golden statues from Lydia encrusted with precious jewels, Egyptian granite statues of cats and gods, protective lions from Babylon. The wall paintings were the most seductive I had ever seen. In truth, they embarrassed me at first. A painted flute girl was playing a man’s painted phallus as if it were a musical instrument. Three men were making love to a hetaira and to each other. Did nobody notice but me? The guests were so sophisticated that they ambled past these scenes as if they were invisible. From time to time, I glimpsed my beautiful mother, but, distracted by the important guests, she didn’t notice me in my disguise.
Tables were piled high with loaves of barley bread, all the fish of the sea—including crabs and eels—and roasted vegetables piled like gifts gleaming with golden olive oil. There were pyramids of fresh fruit surrounded by fields of tangy cheeses and low bowls of burnished bronze honey. Little tables were brought before the feasters, who half reclined while they ate and drank their fill. Too afraid to eat for fear of dropping our veils, too afraid to speak to each other, Praxinoa and I shadowed Alcaeus. Before he went to recline and eat with the others, he stationed us in the courtyard behind a huge krater for mixing wine and water so we could not be seen.
“Don’t move till I come to get you,” he said. Neither of us had any intention of moving. We pulled our veils across our faces and froze.
As we hid in the courtyard, we could marvel at the magnificence of the feast. We could smell the food but not taste it—and in truth we were starving.
“I’m dying of hunger,” I whispered to Prax.
“Shhhhhh,” she said. “Suck on this.” She stuck her finger in my mouth.
The feasting went on and on. It seemed it would never end. Finally, a battalion of household slaves swept the floors of fishbones and torn bits of bread. The spilled oil was wiped from the mosaic floors and hands were washed clean by the beautiful serving girls carrying bowls of water. The serving tables were whisked away. A huge mixing bowl was brought and an endless supply of flower-scented wine was ritually mixed with clear, pure water. Incense was ignited by invisible hands. It drifted heavenward like smoky prayers. Each guest received garlands and chaplets of flowers and dill. There was a pause as all the party wondered who would first break the silence. Competition at a symposium was always fierce, and skill at making songs was considered a sign of the gods’ favor—particularly here in Lesbos. Guests were frightened that when their turn came they would be seen as tongue-tied clods.
I had observed many symposia at my parents’ house—though none as luxurious as this. Always I held my tongue, wanting to sing but fearing I was too young, too green, and would make a fool of myself.
But Alcaeus was unafraid. He leapt in first and he amazed me by singing his song just as I had sung it. He leered at me flirtatiously as he did—but nobody knew at whom he was leering. Then he recited scurrilous satires about Pittacus and his cohorts, delighting in the outrage of the other guests.
I feared for Alcaeus. He called the company “empty braggarts” almost as if he were daring them—or Pittacus—to strike him down. Standing before this glittering company, he made fun of their clothes, their manners, their hauteur. It was clear that he despised them, and I trembled for him. “Let us drink!” he cried:
Why do we wait for the lamps?
There is barely an inch of day left!
Zeus gave us wine to forget our sorrows—
One part water to two of wine.
Pour in a brimful and let the cups jostle
Like courtiers before a king:
Base-born Pittacus, tyrant of our ill-starred city,
All of them loud in his praise!
Pittacus was drunk and merry, but his ears pricked up as he heard Alcaeus slander him, then describe Lesbos as “my poor, suffering homeland.” This was open treason at the symposium. The guests trembled to see what the leader would do.
But Pittacus was as wily as Alcaeus was brash. He listened. He absorbed it all thoughtfully without reacting. Was he pretending the slurs and insults did not apply to him? He even joked with his henchmen as if he didn’t care about being criticized. But there was little doubt he noted it. He was no fool. He knew a traitor from a sycophant immediately. That was the source of his power.
Then Alcaeus did an even more outrageous thing. Suddenly he dragged me out in front of the whole company and bade me sing then and there as if I were a flute girl or a hetaira. With a theatrical flourish, he thrust his precious lyre—his marvelous wooden kithara—into my hands.
The audience gasped and tittered. Who was this girl, this veiled exotic “visitor” from the East?
I was terrified—not only because my mother was there and Pittacus, but because I was only a girl, and an uninvited girl at that. My heart was pounding in my throat. Somehow I opened my mouth and my tutelary goddess saved me:
Sacred tortoise shell,
Sing!
And transform yourself
Into a poem!
I began. The unseen muses filled my mouth with words. Once I began, I found to my surprise that I forgot all about my fear. It was there at Pittacus’ symposium that I first felt my power to tame an audience, to feel them beating and breathing in the palm of my hand. Little by little I entranced them, and I entranced myself. When I sang, I became tall. When I sang, I became all the voices in the room. When I sang, the air ignited.
No one had ever told me I was beautiful. My mother was the beautiful one. I was small and dark and exotic. But when I claimed the stage that evening, I found I had the power to seduce the audience into a trance. I could feel their hunger, their lust, their throbbing need, and I could express whatever darkness and distraction they were feeling. It was as if their feelings filled me and I became their mouthpiece.
I still don’t remember what I did that night. The music entered me, and with it the spirit of the goddess. I swayed and sang and raised my arms in supplication. I was possessed.
Immortal Aphrodite—
Rainbow-throned
In the shimmering air—
Weaver of webs,
I pray
Do not shackle my heart
With sorrow.
Fly to me
From your father’s house
In a whirling of sparrows’ wings,
Your chariot descending
Over the dark earth
As you smile
Your sly, immortal smile
Asking whom I desire
So desperately this time,
Asking whom to persuade to love me,
Promising to turn
Indifference to passion
To make her pursue
When she longs to flee…
Oh Aphrodite, give what only you can give,
Be my ally, my co-conspirator!
The room fell silent, then burst into mad applause. Where the words and music came from, I don’t know—but fueled by the applause, I made up songs for all the guests. Finally, I sang this for Alcaeus:
You came, and you did well to come—
I needed you.
You have torched my heart
And set fire to my breast.
Everyone was shocked and titillated. My reputation—both as a singer and as a scandal—was made!
Alcaeus took me aside after that.
“You little minx,” he said, “you are so hungry—you want to devour the world. I know ambition when I see it, but I have never seen it blaze so high in a girl.”
“Sir, I don’t know what you mean.”
“Of course you do. Your belly is full of fire. I know because you’re just like me. But don’t think to fall in love with me. The truth is—I prefer boys.”
“You flatter yourself if you think I am in love with you. I love only Aphrodite—my goddess.”
“Then you are in for a difficult life. Devotees of Aphrodite die young.”
“According to whom?”
“According to Aphrodite herself!”
“I am not afraid of Aphrodite, or of you, or of anyone!”
“Listen to you! What a funny little thing you are!”
“Is this your way of wooing?”
“Certainly not!” Alcaeus said.
“I think I pique your curiosity because I am so like you.”
“Now you flatter yourself!”
“I think you wanted to shock the company and make them whisper about you.”
“I think you wanted to!”
It was just then that my mother appeared, her face a mask of rage.
“You have disgraced me, yourself, and your entire family. Go home this instant—and take your little slut with you!”
Until that instant, I had not thought of Praxinoa. She would bear the brunt of this. I felt so terrible!
“Please, Mother, forgive me! And know that Praxinoa had no part in this!”
“Go home this instant! I’ll deal with both of you later.”
Banished back to Eresus for my presumption, having to witness dearest Praxinoa beaten, branded, and shorn for her part in the adventure, I was returned to my grandparents’ house as a humiliated prisoner. I had hurt my only friend with my thoughtlessness. Carried away by my lust for Alcaeus, I had gotten my darling Prax into terrible trouble. Not only was she branded—a fate she had escaped till now—but she was sent to work in the kitchen as a punishment, and forced like all kitchen slaves to wear a horrid wooden hoop called a gulp-preventer around her neck to keep her from tasting the food. I hated myself for that. What sort of friend was I? I had promised to protect her!
My mother came and went between Eresus and Mytilene with her retinue of slaves. She was so angry with me, she did not speak to me for weeks. The slaves whispered that she was taking comfort with Pittacus, who had sent my father to his certain slaughter. My mother knew that her safety depended on the kindness of power and she would use her beauty to soften it as she always had. Since I did not have her beauty, I could only make myself beautiful with my songs. And now I was condemned to silence.
But my grandparents were inclined to be lenient with me, as grandparents so often are. After a few days, I was able to walk down to the sea by myself. There I had my slaves build me a little tent where I could sing and dream:
Wreathe your locks
With sprigs of anise,
Binding the stems
With your soft hands.
For the happy graces
Gaze on what is garlanded
And look away
From the bare heads
Of even the loveliest maidens….
I was dozing in my tent one moonlit night when suddenly I was awakened by a rough whisper: “We sail for Pyrrha tonight—are you with us, Sappho?”
I woke, rubbed my eyes, looked up at the sunny beard of Alcaeus, and thought I saw a vision of Apollo.
“We sail now or never!”
I had been dreaming of him, and here he was!
“Now,” I said and bounded out of bed.
Did I stop to ask why he wanted me if he liked boys so much? Did I think of my mother, of my grandparents, of Praxinoa? Of course not! I was sixteen!
I followed Alcaeus and his men to the harbor, where, after neglecting the proper sacrifices to the gods for fear of attracting attention, we boarded a square-rigged merchant ship to take us from Eresus to Pyrrha. The black ship had two fierce blue eyes emblazoned on its prow as if it could see into the future. I leapt aboard without a backward glance.
If this was dreaded exile, I welcomed it. My real education as a singer had begun.