Raise high the roof beams!
The groom comes like Ares.
—SAPPHO
WE LIVED IN EXILE in the woods above Pyrrha on the other side of the island. Alcaeus and his men were plotting to rid Lesbos of Pittacus. They hated him for his shrewdness and cleverness. Or perhaps they hated themselves for their own lack of it. The truth was that Pittacus had outwitted them. They cursed his bloody ways while they themselves plotted bloodily.
Alcaeus had once been allied with Pittacus against the previous tyrant Myrsilus, but Alcaeus and Pittacus had fallen out—the gods alone knew how. Pittacus was the sort of leader who switched allegiance according to his own convenience. He had no aristocratic scruples to hold him back. That was the crux of the problem.
At the bottom of the hatred between Alcaeus and Pittacus was a contest between an old way of life and a new. Noble families like Alcaeus’ and mine used to rule these islands and command these waters. Since the war with the Athenians, a rougher breed of men was coming to replace us. Our families were aristocrats who were raised to leisure and the lyre. Warfare was an art to men like my father. Men like Pittacus, on the other hand, were raised to commerce and manipulation. Pittacus would never drop his shield in a display of aristocratic pique like Alcaeus. Pittacus was the consummate politician. He knew how to tell people one thing and do another. He knew how to lie with straight face. He was a passionate orator who believed only in the sound of his own voice. Unencumbered by antique ideas of honor, he was invincible.
Alcaeus had done the unspeakable: mocked Pittacus in witty verses, which were now gleefully repeated all over the island. Ridicule enrages tyrants even if they pretend to be above it.
Pittacus now wanted nothing more than to destroy Alcaeus so he could suppress rebellion and cement his own rule. But he did not dare to kill him for fear the older nobles would mutiny. Exile, therefore, became his solution.
I myself resented Pittacus for taking my mother and reducing her to what I considered whoredom, even if she had sought it herself. The greatest aristocrats of Greece had loved her. Minstrels had sung of her. Artists had painted her. Philosophers had based their theories of love upon her. Noble warriors—my father chief among them—had died for her, and now she was the mistress of a commoner. Even if she was not ashamed of her fall, I was. I was furious on behalf of my poor dead father. Or was I jealous of my mother’s effortless success with men? She could both infuriate and reduce me to tears simultaneously. All my feelings about her warred with each other. I loved her so much that I also had to hate her!
“There is only one person who could lead us to Pittacus when he is not surrounded by guards—and that person is your mother.”
“You ask too much, Alcaeus, if you ask me to betray my mother.”
“I said nothing about betrayal.”
“You didn’t say betrayal, but you meant it.”
“Nonsense. Forget I asked. But remember it is Pittacus who has made you fatherless. He would sacrifice you in a flash. Your mother too. He has no loyalty. He considers loyalty a toy. All he has is a potbelly and a ravenous appetite.”
“From what I’ve seen, all men consider loyalty a toy. My father comes home as ashes in a jar, but I am supposed to be happy that he died gloriously—whatever that means. I hate all these glorious deaths. I hate death. It was my father who decreed I should be raised, not set on a hilltop to die like other girl babies. I loved him. And he adored me. I owe him and my mother loyalty—even if loyalty is no longer the fashion in Lesbos.” So I said, but somewhere in my rebellious heart I must have burnt to betray my heartbreakingly beautiful mother!
Alcaeus cajoled. He beguiled and nagged. He stroked my cheek, my arm, my thigh. He made up songs for me. At last I agreed to accompany his treacherous expedition. I told myself that I would only watch, not become part of the bloodshed. Even after his reckless behavior at the symposium, I thought I could control Alcaeus. I thought I could control myself.
Together in the woods we talked and talked, and the more we talked, the more I fell in love with Alcaeus. I loved his looks, his poetry, his wild talk. Men with eloquent tongues have always swayed me.
“Before the gods, all was shapelessness, chaos, and darkness,” he said, “a black-winged being whose unblinking eyes saw everything. Then the wind came, made love to the night, who hatched a silver egg, giving birth to Eros—without Eros there would be no creatures on the face of the earth….”
“But Eros was born of Aphrodite, who himself was born of the sea foam that bubbled when the testicles of Uranus were tossed into the sea by his son, Cronus,” I said like a dutiful mother’s daughter.
“Believe whichever version you wish, but know that Eros is the root of all….Eros blows through our lives, leaving chaos in its wake…and Aphrodite laughs.”
“I will not believe any philosophy that dishonors Aphrodite,” I said solemnly.
“Aphrodite dishonors herself,” Alcaeus laughed. “And so do her devotees.”
“Blasphemy!” I protested.
When we had been together for a time—long enough for me to see Alcaeus ravish beardless sailor boys—I asked innocently, “When did you last make love to a woman?”
“Women are too complex,” he said, “too unknowable. Sometimes I long to make love to a woman, and then I think how much work it will be to satisfy her. I get tired just thinking about it.”
Did he say this to shock me or to deny his own attraction to me? Anyway, it did the trick. I left him alone. Sometimes I wished I had the courage to seduce him. I didn’t really believe he was as unmoved by me as he claimed.
Maybe I wasn’t conventionally pretty, but I knew I had a kind of power. When I had played the lyre at the symposium, people had stared at me as if I were a great beauty. I would catch Alcaeus staring at me from time to time. Then he’d remember that he was supposed to be indifferent to me and he’d turn away. He seemed to be torn between fascination and derision. He was always trying to impress me with how worldly he was and how many exotic lovers he had conquered.
“I have been to Naucratis in Egypt, the city of the Greek traders in the Nile Delta where Lesbian wine is traded,” he began. “I have been with Egyptian prostitutes who are skilled at beguiling the Greeks with their mouths and hands. In Babylon, I have seen the Temple of Ishtar, where women copulate with strangers for the glory of the goddess, where they set up little tents or huts in the precincts of the temple and remain for weeks at a time to earn their dowries. There is healing in a woman’s delta, the Babylonians believe.”
“Are you saying this to shock me?” I asked. “Because if you are, I can match you obscenity for obscenity. Delta, daleth, kusthos, sacred space, zone of Aphrodite, the triangle of our beginnings, the source of all our blessings, the three-cornered passage to our end. There! You are not the only learned sensualist on this island!”
Alcaeus ignored me and went on with his exotic descriptions of foreign travel. “Not for nothing do the Egyptians smear blood on doorways to symbolize birth and death. They worship the divine delta, that all-seeing eye. The Babylonians do the same.”
“You seem quite fascinated yourself,” I said. “Strange that you sought all these exotic women out if you really prefer boys,” I said teasingly. This encouraged him to try to shock me even more.
“All manner of sickly men would come to try their luck with these temple virgins. I watched all this and took the most beautiful women as my partners, but I always returned to my pretty boys with a great sense of relief.”
“I wish I were a boy,” I said, “so I could experience these things.”
And I meant it. I did want to devour the world and all its pleasures as Alcaeus immediately had known. But maybe I was also thinking that if I were a boy, he’d make love to me.
I tried out this theory on the night before we set sail on our murderous expedition. We found ourselves alone in an olive grove in beautiful Pyrrha. The hills embraced us with their calming green. The olive leaves fluttered their small silver flags. I had made my obeisance to Aphrodite, had burnt incense heavenward, had sung hymns of my own making to my tutelary goddess. Then I dressed myself as a shepherd boy just for the fun of it.
Alcaeus watched all this with a smirk upon his face. He openly laughed at both my devotions and my disguise. Then he challenged me.
“You know, little whirlwind, there is only one way to honor Aphrodite truly.”
“How?”
“I cannot tell, I must show you.”
I looked at him in childish perplexity. Then he pulled me under the silvery trees.
“Here in Aphrodite’s grove, we must do Aphrodite’s bidding,” he said.
I jumped back.
“Are you afraid of your own goddess? You’ll never become a singer that way,” he teased.
I felt my heart race. My knees began to knock. My delta grew wet.
“Are you challenging me to grant you the gift of my virginity?” I was always too direct, too incapable of artifice.
“What a quaint way to say it!” Alcaeus said with a laugh, making me blush furiously.
“I am ready,” I said bravely, closing my eyes and opening my arms, “but I thought you liked boys!”
“Aren’t you a boy? You look like a boy! After all, boys are less trouble in the act—and afterward. They are less apt to whine and cling, less apt to try to trap you forever. Poor darling, you’re shaking,” Alcaeus said, wrapping his arms around me.
“I’m ready,” I trembled.
“Let’s lie under these tender green branches and drink a little wine and water. We don’t have to do anything but hold each other,” he said. (They always say that.)
His arms enfolded me. His heart thundered against mine. We stared into each other’s eyes as if they were torches lighting a pitch-black room. His lips found my lips. The inside of my mouth and the inside of his became one. His huge legs wrapped around my tiny waist. The inside and the outside of my body became one.
Aphrodite smiled down on us and blew her hot breath into all the orifices of our bodies. What was hard and strong opened into what was soft and warm. We moved together like dolphins playing in the waves, tail chasing tail, head nuzzling head. Then we became like horse and rider. There was no beginning of each other and no ending. We were one animal, one demigod, with four legs and two pairs of wings.
So this was the thunder of Pegasus—poetry’s racehorse! So this was where Aphrodite’s softness and the flinty arrows of her devilish son became one. Soft became hard, hard soft, outside in, inside out.
Time vanished. Space collapsed. The stars shone in the day sky. If we stayed together, the sun would never be quenched at night. We would make light with the heat of our bodies and spin off another universe between us. Our loving was that powerful.
At last, under a dawn sky of red and violet, we staggered back to the boat from our idyll in the olive grove. My insides were sore from Alcaeus’ rough love. I wanted to feel sore forever. The sailors stared at me and smirked as if they knew.
“My darling boy,” Alcaeus joked. “I’d almost think you were a girl!”
The next night, we slept aboard ship but did not touch. The wind whipped and whistled in the rigging and the oars slammed against the side of the boat. Several of them floated away. Two men were lost off the bowsprit as if mythical monsters were nearby and the whole sea had turned into Scylla and Charybdis. In the shrieking of the wind, in the screeching and tearing of the ropes, the gods were heard:
“Alcaeus is your first true love,” Aphrodite sang in the voice of the wind, “but he doesn’t know it yet.”
“Then come and guide him,” I whispered.
“When the time is right,” she said. “Love you as I do, I cannot hurry fate. The spinners spin as slowly as they will.”
“Unfair Aphrodite!”
“I have been called unfair before,” she laughed and disappeared.
Aphrodite has everything,
Can renew her virginity
With one immersion in the sea.
What can I give her?
All night the ropes of the ship cried like skinned cats. All night the stars hid behind clouds. The boat rocked precipitously. We were sorry we had not beached our boat and slept ashore in the shelter of the great sail.
The next morning, it was improbably clear and bright. Dawn’s fingertips touched our unfurling sails with rose. We sailed around the island to Mytilene with three of Alcaeus’ men as a practice run. Two would go ashore with him to do the bloody deed. Another and I would remain to watch the ship. We were to seek harbor in a hidden inlet near Hiera, waiting for word from them. But before we reached Hiera, when we were hugging the shore between the Temple of Dionysus at Brisa and the beginning of the Gulf of Hiera, a black ship fitted with a great black sail began following us.
At first Alcaeus dismissed this as coincidence, but soon it became clear that we were its quarry and it was swifter than we.
A race began along the rocky coast. As the black boat came closer, we saw that the sailors wore satyr masks, shields with the emblem of Pittacus, and brandished bronze-tipped spears.
“Pirates!” was Alcaeus’ first thought, but these were no ordinary pirates. Pittacus had sent the boat. Politics played a part in this piracy. I prayed to Aphrodite.
“You are praying to the wrong goddess,” Alcaeus barked. “She doesn’t give a damn about this sort of thing. Try Athena. She’s a warrior! She’s the one who rescued Odysseus!”
Of course he would joke grimly at a time like this.
For a while it seemed that, using only our sail, we could outrun the black ship before the wind. Alcaeus’ sailor boys were good, but not good enough. We had lost too many oars and the black ship had oars aplenty and slaves to man them. The waves were rough and rose on either side. Alcaeus had sung of all this in his songs.
Look before you sail, he had famously sung, once at sea, you have to ride what comes. This was not the time to remind him of his prophecy.
I remember the swell of the waves, the slop of seawater over the sides, and our boat seeming to go backward, as in a nightmare. The black boat was irrevocably gaining on us. The smells of wet wood, pitch pine, and the sea always bring back those terrifying moments. The enemy boat came out of the spray with its fierce eyes staring and its sea-worn battering ram like the tusk of a mythical beast. It approached, gathering speed from its oars, until its bowsprit was poised to pierce our virgin hull. The satyrs crouched on deck, ready to leap aboard our ship and take us.
“Jump!” Alcaeus commanded as the satyrs from the black ship rushed to capture him. I looked at him one last time, tears blinding me. But I could still blurrily see his beloved face. I jumped overboard and began to swim as if furies were behind me.
“We’ll meet again,” he screamed, “in this world or the next!”
I swam like mad for shore while my breath still held.
Because I had loved him but never wholly possessed him, he stayed in my mind like a myth through subsequent adventures. When we met again, we were both older, but were we any wiser?
Shipwrecked, parted from Alcaeus, swimming for dear life to the shore of my green island, I found myself unmoored from time. I became weary, exhausted. My breath felt as if it would fail me. Then, just as I thought I was going down, a sharp nudge in my buttocks awakened me and I looked down to find myself buoyed by dolphins. These playful creatures leapt and dove around me, lifting me up when I was most exhausted. They ferried me to shore on a deserted coast and left me there to brave the elements.
A search party had been sent out for me, led by my grandfather, but of course I did not know this at the time. I lived on the sandy coast for days, until my lips were parched and I was so hungry I took to eating crabs that I caught and cracked open. My chiton torn into rags, my skin burned from the sun, I hardly looked like a woman at all—let alone the boy I was masquerading as—but rather like a strange human crab scuttling along the beach.
I came to know why our ancestors worshiped Poseidon, god of the sea-blue mane, above all other gods. The sea is the source of life for an island people. But it is even more capricious than golden Aphrodite who was born from it, bearing its wildness. The ocean’s roar nearly convinced me to abandon Aphrodite for Poseidon. Perhaps it was because I wavered in my fidelity to the goddess that she cursed me. Aphrodite is a goddess who tolerates no disloyalty. Actually, that is one of the great characteristics of the gods—fierce jealousy of each other. The gods are babies with the appetites of grown men and women. That’s why they torment us so.
I do not know how long I lived on that timeless beach dreaming of Alcaeus to keep myself alive. Day gave way to night, and night to day. I built a hut for myself and learned to catch fish in my bare hands. I wove leaves for my hat and rushes for my bed. After fear left me, I was proud that I could endure this life. And then I was saved yet again. My grandfather arrived with his men in a small boat, expecting to find me dead. They had been circling the seas in search, of me, and fear for my fate had made my grandfather furious instead of tender.
“Pittacus would have you killed for conspiring with Alcaeus,” he screamed. “You are a little fool who hurts no one but herself and her family. But I have saved you. I have made a pact with Pittacus to marry you off instead….I have found this certain Cercylas of Andros who seeks a wife of noble family. He has agreed to take you despite your rebellious nature.”
“Despite my rebellious nature!” I spat. “Are you my grandfather or my jailer?”
My grandfather’s brow lowered in ferocity. Whatever pity he might have shown me was now undone. We sailed back to Eresus, without exchanging a word.
So I was to be married to someone ugly but sufficiently rich to crush my spirit. It was thought that weaving and raising children would substitute for the gifts of the muses, and that, buried in domesticity, I would have no time for political plots or love affairs. Or singing.
Marriage and death were not so dissimilar in those days. When I look back on my marriage procession, I think that it might as well have been a funeral march. My mother, my grandparents, my brothers, and I journeying yet again from Eresus to Mytilene, where I was to be given to the ancient Cercylas.
Strangely, I was less angry with my grandfather than I was with my mother for abandoning me to this ghastly marriage. How could she conspire in exiling her only daughter?
I had demanded this of her as she bedecked me for my marriage—a necklace of golden grapes and quinces, matching earrings that dangled to my shoulders, a golden diadem that held my lustrous hair.
“I would rather you were married than dead, Sappho.”
“I see little difference between the two states.”
“Because you are young and think you know everything. But husbands can die and liberate you.”
“That’s something to look forward to.”
“And you have other gifts that can free you. The way you held the audience at that symposium was extraordinary. Underneath my fury I was proud. It reminded me that when I was pregnant with you, a priestess made a prophecy—that you would be known in times to come.”
“Now you tell me!”
Cercylas the hideous was fifty if he was a day, and he wore a girdle to bind his paunch, which otherwise would have wobbled. His hair was sparse and draped over his baldness, fooling nobody. He smelled strongly of perfume and sweat. And wine. Like a barbarian, he loved to drink his wine unmixed with water.
He also seemed to be the sort of man who rehearsed his jokes before a symposium and then claimed they came to him at the minute as gifts of the gods. (This turned out to be true!) When, at the wedding ceremony, he gravely said to my grandfather, “I take this woman for the ploughing of legitimate children,” my brothers and I could not help but giggle. By the time the guests pelted us with nuts and fruit, I was still terrified of the fate to which I’d committed myself. I thought of Alcaeus—our passionate lovemaking and equally passionate arguments—and I looked at Cercylas as in a nightmare.
The feasting went on and on. It began at noon and continued until midnight. The wine from my grandfather’s vineyards flowed like water. The food was rich and abundant—breads, fish, fowl, meats, sweets of every description. There was singing and dancing, the procession to Cercylas’ house, more singing and dancing, more heaps of delicacies.
At last, at midnight, the horrible time had come. Choruses of maidens singing sweet epithalamia I myself had written accompanied us to the bridal chamber. Cercylas was by then so drunk, he reeled and staggered. I steeled myself to the pain of allowing Cercylas into that sanctuary where only Alcaeus had lovingly trespassed before.
I ate the wedding quince and Cercylas removed my girdle as ritual dictated. The maidens choired. I begged for another chorus. They choired again. Cercylas’ eyes began to close.
“Sing again!” I begged the maidens.
“Damn you, Sappho,” Cercylas raged, “I will have your maidenhead!”
What maidenhead? I thought.
At last we were left alone. Cercylas stripped off his clothes and appeared in all his hideousness. Taking a pomegranate from the many fruits arranged in a bowl at the foot of the bed, he pressed six red seeds into the bridal sheet and hung it up in the window for all to see. Then he collapsed in a drunken swoon.
Raise high the roof beams!
The groom comes like Ares,
Towering above mortals
As the poets of Lesbos
Tower over all the others!
Lucky bridegroom!
We drink your health!
I lay awake in bed and pondered my fate as Cercylas snored. I felt like Persephone transported to the Land of the Dead to be the bride of Hades. I wept until I soaked my bed with tears. I thought of Alcaeus somewhere far away, banished for his treachery.
Then I slept and Aphrodite spoke to me in a dream.
She was dressed as a bride herself and was singing the epithalamium I’d written.
Raise high the roof beams! she sang, smiling wickedly. The groom comes like Ares….
I cried and cried inconsolably even in the dream.
“Don’t cry, my little Sappho,” she said, like a loving mother calming an infant. “A husband is merely a means of transport between childhood and womanhood. If it is love you want, passion you want, that always happens outside the bridal bed…. The bridal bed is where you sleep, but you will find your lovers everywhere—on beaches, in palaces, in apple groves, olive groves, under the shining moon…. It will be full for you—full of lovers, full of love, full of inspiration!”
“But I only want Alcaeus!”
“He is not the only man on earth. Come, now, Sappho—I have had many men—Ares, Adonis, so many others—I have forgotten their names, women too. Life is meant for pleasure. There is more to life than your first man….Your life is just beginning, not ending. It will be rich and full…lucky bride! You will be free and full of life!” Then she drifted off and I slept like the tired child I was.
I have only had one husband, so I have to judge all husbands by him. The truth is he was not an evil man. He was only weak and common and a drunk. He believed that a wife should stay indoors and tend to the looms and the slaves and the larder—except on religious holidays. If you wonder why women were so damned religious in those days, know that the festivals were the only times we got out of the house! I figured pretty quickly that my songs in honor of Aphrodite were my tickets to freedom. Once I grew famous enough to have my presence demanded at festivals, weddings, distant rituals to foreign gods, Cercylas could not hold me back. He was clever enough to know that my renown reflected glory on him. Besides, I left him alone with his dearest love—the wine he drank and drank until he fell headfirst into a delirium.