After his nephew had sung one of Sappho’s songs over the wine, Solon of Athens, the son of Execestides, told the lad to teach it to him immediately. When someone asked why he was so eager, Solon replied, ‘So that I may die knowing it.’1
Solon’s instantaneous and uncomplicated delight in Sappho’s poetry typifies the attitude of the Ancient Greeks to her work. She was considered one of their finest poets, an integral part of their cultural history. Her face was engraved on coinage, her statue erected, her portrait painted on vases. Many ancient commentators praised her literary genius, while Plato, among others, called her ‘the tenth Muse’.2
For the modern reader Sappho’s poetry can be far more difficult. Over the centuries much of her work has been lost and those poems which have survived are fragmentary – a few lines quoted in passing by later writers or pieced together from scraps of papyri excavated in Egypt. Often there is little indication of the context of the piece, of what precedes or follows. Greek literary traditions can also be alienating; the composition and performance of poetry was very different as, more importantly, were its social function and the expectations of its audience.
The greatest problem Sappho’s poetry presents is its eroticism – a problem because so many translators and commentators have found it so. Sappho’s reputation has changed since Solon’s time; today her name is synonymous with ‘unnatural sexual relations between women’, as the OED puts it, rather than artistic excellence. Many studies of her work are preoccupied with her sexuality, with discussing whether she was ‘morally pure’ or a ‘disturbed pervert’, whether she was merely inclined towards ‘inversion’ or whether she practised it as well.
The feminist scholar Mary Lefkowitz has pointed out that these biographical obsessions are typical of the critical treatment of women writers.3 In literary mythology, male genius derives from an overpowering urge to create, a devotion which surpasses the mundane claims of the material world and triumphs admirably over superfluous domestic ties. Female genius, on the other hand, evolves as compensation for the lack of a ‘normal’ domestic life – the correct outlet for women’s creativity. Hence Virginia Woolf is frigid, Emily Dickinson is a frustrated spinster, Charlotte Brontë is disappointed in love and throughout history Sappho has been physically repellent (i.e. unable to attract a sexual partner), promiscuous and passionately jealous.
Because women’s creativity has been so directly linked to the circumstances of their lives, their work is often regarded as autobiographical; an emotional outpouring which is divorced from literary artifice and intellectual precision. One scholar, for example, has written that Sappho’s poetry has the ‘air of reality, of being derived immediately and directly from Sappho’s own experience’. Similarly, in a discussion of No.32 (94LP) in which Sappho describes the parting dialogue of two separated lovers, he comments: ‘it is not hard to believe that some conversation took place and that its substance was not entirely different from this record of it.’4
These comments and many like them appear to praise Sappho’s work but in fact deny the strength of her poetic imagination, denigrate the artistry and subtlety of her work and ignore the importance of inherited literary and social convention. They are typical of a great many commentators who consistently project on to the text contemporary male assumptions about the nature of women’s art. A more balanced assessment, as some classical scholars are beginning to argue,5 should attempt to discard prejudices, while acknowledging the difficulties of interpretation and appreciation. It is necessary to place Sappho in her historical context, to examine the importance of her gender and sexuality and to ask what was the nature of her genius and the extent of her achievement.
Despite the many theories, claims and counter-claims, very little is known about Sappho’s life. Evidence is slight and, as is so often the case with classical history, most of the details are tentative. The main difficulty is that the oldest surviving biographical accounts were written several centuries after Sappho’s death and the longest, an entry in the Suda, an historical and literary encyclopaedia, was written in the tenth century A.D. Piecing together all the available facts, historians agree that Sappho lived c.600 B.C. on the island of Lesbos, in the eastern Aegean sea off the coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey), probably in Mytilene, its largest city. Beyond this little else can be substantiated. Most of the sources give details about Sappho’s family – parents, brothers, husband, daughter – but these cannot be proved. Her poetry mentions a daughter, Cleis, an unnamed mother and brother and it can only be assumed that these are her own. The lifestyle described in her poems suggests that she was a member of the wealthy, ruling aristocracy and this is reflected in the sources.
What sort of society did Sappho live in? In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the epic poems attributed to Homer and completed about 700 B.C., an aristocratic warrior class exercises complete control. Its wealth is based on land and its society is grouped around the extended family, the oikos, who live on rural estates. By 600 B.C. the basis of power was the city state, the polis, where the aristocracy still clung to a tenuous control. Greek civilisation was in a period of transition, caught between the demise of the old ruling class and the rise of a new political system and consciousness, democracy. Rival family factions struggled for power and, in many cities, tyrants seized control.
Lesbos, and Mytilene in particular, were not immune to these troubles. The aristocracy still held power but they were a class in crisis. In the late seventh century B.C., the ruling tribe or family in Mytilene was the Penthilidae, who misused their power and clubbed their opponents to death in the street. When they were overthrown, feuding aristocratic families fought for control. The exact sequence of events is unclear and the evidence is confused. To complicate matters, from c.610 B.C. Lesbos was involved in a war with Athenian colonists at Sigeum, near Troy on the coast of Asia Minor.
There is some evidence that Sappho was involved in this turmoil. Around 600 B.C. the family faction of the aristocratic male poet Alcaeus attempted to overthrow the current regime of the tyrant Myrsilus. But his fellow conspirator, Pittacus, went over to Myrsilus’s camp, betrayed his companions and Alcaeus’s faction was expelled. Sources note that Sappho was a contemporary of Alcaeus and Pittacus and one states that she was exiled to Sicily.6 In her poetry she mentions some of the rival groups; the Penthilidae in No.46 (71 LP); the Polyanactidae in Nos. 45 (155 LP) and 99LP and in No.74 (98bLP) the Cleanactidae. The fragmentary text of 98 also contains the word ‘exile’ or ‘flight’, although the rest of the sentence is lost and its meaning is obscure. In the poem, Sappho laments the fact that she is unable to provide her daughter with a headband from Sardis. The context of this statement may well be that Sappho is in exile and unable to obtain the luxuries of Lesbos but it is impossible to prove this conclusively.7 What is important is that these references show that Sappho was aware of, if not involved in, contemporary political events.
One important consideration is the position of women in this period and the way in which they were affected by social changes. Aristocratic society in Lesbos was similar to that described in the Homeric epics. Fundamental to this patriarchal and militaristic culture was a sharp division between male and female activities, a delineation of their separate roles and spheres of influence. Government, trade, but mainly war were the business of men, and glory in battle their greatest achievement. Women, often the spoils or prizes of combat, were excluded from political or economic activity. Their purpose was marriage, their glory, chastity, their world, the home. ‘Go home and attend to your work, to your loom and spindle,’ Hector tells his wife, Andromache, in the Iliad, ‘and see that the woman servants attend to theirs – war is the concern of men.’8 Outside the home, religion was the only public activity in which women could participate. They supervised the cults of the female deities such as Aphrodite, Hera and Artemis and it is therefore not surprising that these figure prominently in Sappho’s poetry.
Despite this role division, the evidence of Homer’s poems suggests that women were less restricted than they were a few centuries later. They appear to mix freely with men, they are present at public feasts and their opinion is often sought and respected.9 In the Odyssey, Odysseus prepares to visit his father. ‘My house and my belongings,’ he tells his wife Penelope, ‘I leave in your care.’10 In a society in which tribal and family ties were politically important, marriage was considered desirable and a bride was respected, if only for her family connections.11 Many commentators believe that women were particularly valued and esteemed on Lesbos.12 To a certain extent this might be true: Sappho, at the very least, had some knowledge of political events, she was certainly educated and her poems illustrate that men and women were not totally segregated on Lesbos.
Yet the old world was vanishing. The individual warrior, for example, was being replaced by soldiers in group formation, the phalanx. This had a far-reaching effect on aristocratic society which was gradually transformed from a military into a leisured class.13 Male culture remained deeply competitive but the emphasis turned from war to athletics and sport. Men began to congregate at the gymnasium and wrestling-ground and the symposium, a male drinking party, became the focus for political and social life. These changes led to an increased segregation of the sexes and the seclusion of women inside the house.
On a wider scale, the structure of society was changing, from large rural estates to the smaller households in the city state, from the extended tribal groups to self-contained nuclear families. Women were valued less and less for their family connections or for the political alliance their marriage might cement. Instead their position within their husband’s family became important as well as their ability to provide sons for the inheritance of property and citizenship from which they were themselves excluded. Marriage began to be seen as a burden to men and women’s sexuality thought dangerous and alarming.14 The philosopher Solon, for example, who lived in Athens in the early sixth century B.C., was reputed to have said that a man should try to have sex with his wife at least three times a month.15 An explicit misogyny, absent from Homer, appears in later poets. Hesiod, who wrote epic poetry at the beginning of the seventh century B.C., tells the story of Pandora’s box, attributing the presence of evil in the world to women, ‘a bane to mortal men’. Semonides of Amorgos wrote a long invective against women in the mid-seventh century, comparing them to various unpleasant species of animals.16
This devaluation of women is reflected in changing attitudes to the mythical heroine, Helen of Troy. In the Iliad, war breaks out between Greece and Troy when Paris, a prince of Troy, steals Helen from her husband, Menelaus of Sparta. Later Greek writers found it impossible to believe that a ten-year war could be fought for the sake of a woman.17 Significantly, Helen was an important image for Sappho who uniquely invests her with autonomous thought and action. Whether women on Lesbos were valued or not in Sappho’s lifetime, it was still a society in crisis. And the outcome of this turmoil, as we have seen, brought fundamental ideological and social changes for women. It therefore seems reasonable to expect Sappho’s poetry to contain responses to these changes and to reflect the increasing tension between the sexes.
A few centuries after her death, Sappho’s name began to be surrounded by scandal. Faced with the anomaly of a woman poet, many commentators reported that she was a prostitute, while others told apocryphal stories about her unrequited love for a ferryman, Phaon, and her subsequent suicide.18 Much of this information originated in comic plays about Sappho written and produced at Athens in the fourth century B.C., although only a few scattered references survive.19 These comedies probably made biographical assumptions about the eroticism of Sappho’s poetry and may well have been used as a source of information by later biographers. A papyrus fragment from the second or third century A.D., for example, claims that ‘some people accused’ Sappho of being ‘a lover of women’. Porphyrion, writing in the third century A.D., comments that Sappho was called ‘masculine’ either because of her poetic skill or because of her homosexuality. The entry in the Suda states that she had a reputation for ‘shameful liaisons with women’.20
But the fascination for salacious details really began at Rome in the first century A.D. with the Latin poets Horace and Ovid. In Ovid’s famous poem, the ‘Epistle of Sappho and Phaon’, later translated by Alexander Pope, Sappho relates how she once loved Anactoria, Atthis and all the other women mentioned in her poems but now she has rejected her ‘shameful’ past for the love of a man, Phaon: ‘what once belonged to many women,’ she tells him, ‘now you alone possess’.21 The concept of vicious forbidden love, of shame and guilt and the rejection of a deviant lifestyle for a man who does not love her all became standard features of the mythology of Sappho.
This image was adopted in particular by nineteenth-century French writers, obsessed by decadent sexuality. In Baudelaire’s poem ‘Lesbos’, Sappho indulges in lurid frenzied relationships with women until she is overcome by her passion for Phaon. Verlaine’s poem ‘Sappho’ follows a similar pattern. Pierre Louÿs’ semi-pornographic work, Les Chansons de Bilitis, appeared in 1895 and contained the familiar description of life on Lesbos; Bilitis, a newcomer to the island, is seduced on arrival by Sappho. Gradually, through the work of these and other writers, Sappho had become a sexual rather than a literary celebrity.
Classical scholars were horrified by these portraits of Sappho. One, Wilamowitz, was so outraged by Louÿs’ inferences in particular that he immediately rushed to Sappho’s defence. In his book, Sappho und Simonides, published in 1913, he repudiated all claims that Sappho was a sexual deviant. Instead, he said, she was a wife and mother, a paragon of womanly virtues. He noticed that a few ancient commentators referred to the women in Sappho’s poetry as her ‘pupils’ and claimed that she was the leader of a formal cult at Lesbos, dedicated to the worship of Aphrodite. The women in her poems were young initiates whose literary and moral education she supervised. But his sources were highly suspect; the main piece of evidence, a comment by Maximus of Tyre that Sappho’s relationship with the women in her poems was similar to the philosopher/teacher Socrates’ relationship with his male following, is extremely ambiguous.22
Although Wilamowitz’s views are no longer fashionable, some modern scholars are still influenced by them. C.M. Bowra, for example, in his book Greek Lyric Poetry (1961) writes that it is wrong to compare Sappho’s poetry to that of the male homosexual poets, although ‘in later times…Sappho’s emotions were misjudged and hard names were given to her’.23 Judith Hallett, in a recent article in Signs, claims that Sappho held a ‘formal’ position at Lesbos which she links to the segregation of the sexes. She denies Sappho’s lesbianism and sees her as a ‘sensual consciousness raiser’ whose poetry is a ‘social vehicle for imparting sensual awareness and sexual self-esteem to women on the threshold of marriage and maturity’.
In general, recent commentators concede that many of Sappho’s poems are passionate expressions of love between women. Yet most scholars are still worried about the nature of this passion. Albin Lesky, for example, states that Sappho’s love is a ‘desire for spiritual domination’ and that ‘there is nothing to suggest that it had any base origin’. Denys Page comments that Sappho’s poetry displays ‘a lover’s passion’ as well as ‘an overwhelming emotion of the intensest love’ but concludes that there is no evidence to suggest ‘practice as well as inclination’. The anthropologist George Devereux takes this discussion a stage further. He decides that Sappho was a ‘masculine lesbian’ with a ‘clinically commonplace female castration complex’.24
The application of these theories to Sappho’s text results in some strange readings of her poetry. No.20 (31LP), in particular, has been subjected to some unusual interpretations. Wilamowitz, faced with such sensual writing, explained that it was a wedding song performed at the marriage of Sappho’s favourite pupil. ‘That man’ is the bridegroom and Sappho’s emotion is sorrow at being parted from the girl. Page refutes this theory but, like many other male scholars, sees the man as the focus of interest. Sappho, he claims, feels passionate jealousy towards the man who is favoured by the woman she loves.25
George Devereux cites the poem as evidence of Sappho’s homosexuality which he sees as a pathological condition. She is not jealous of the man, he writes, because she cannot help but identify with his masculinity. She finds him ‘equal to the gods’ because he has something which she cannot offer the woman – it is all a simple case of phallus envy. Devereux concludes that Sappho’s emotions affect her so violently because her ‘girlfriend is taken away from her not by another lesbian but by a man who has what she does not have and what she would give her life to have’.26
In search of evidence to support their theories, scholars scour Sappho’s poems for references which could be construed as conclusive either way. Judith Hallett, attempting to prove that Sappho was exclusively heterosexual, notes that she had a daughter (No.75 [132LP]), while others point to No.41 (121LP) in which marriage with a younger man is discussed. For the other side, four lines are presented which are said to contain explicit proof of physical contact: No.4 (46LP), No.12 (126LP), No.32 l.22 (94LP) and No.47 (213LP). One fragment, which seems to include the word olisbos, the Greek word for a leather phallus, has been adopted as evidence by both camps (99LP).
But the real difficulty is not the evidence but attitudes towards it. Sappho’s poems are not autobiographical tracts and should not be treated as such. First there is the consideration of poetic persona, of the subtle and complex use of ‘I’ in poetry. The transformation of experience into art is rarely straightforward and although Sappho’s own voice is certainly representative of personal feelings, it is also governed by literary conventions and by the intentions of her poetry. There is also the practical problem. It is impossible to ascertain the context of many fragments, especially the shorter pieces; they might well be part of reported speech or dialogue as in Nos 39 (137LP), 78 (1LP) and 61 (109LP), for example, or even from an account of a mythological story as in Nos. 97 (142LP) and 88 (54LP).27
Scholars who attempt to “explain” or classify Sappho’s eroticism in pedantic, clinical terms refer only to contemporary thought. But what was the attitude of the Greeks and how was it reflected in Sappho’s poetry? As we have seen, segregation and a sharp division of sexual roles led to women’s sexuality becoming an object of fear for Greek men. Women were thought to have a larger sexual appetite than men and heterosexual sex was thought to strip men of their virility.28 The story of Actaeon, who was torn to pieces by his own hounds when he caught sight of the goddess Artemis bathing, illustrates the strong taboo against female nudity.29 In the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., votive statues of young men, kouroi, depicted nude figures, whereas those of women, korai, were clothed.30 Historians link increased segregation, the growing exclusiveness of male culture and the emphasis on male prowess in war, with male homosexuality and concede that in aristocratic Greek society it was considered not only acceptable but desirable; the male rather than the female form was thought to be the embodiment of beauty, love between men, the romantic ideal.31
It is also often inferred that aristocratic Greek women, neglected and despised before and after marriage, imitated male society and turned to their own sex for physical gratification, almost as a last resort.32 Certainly, as well as Sappho’s poetry, there is other evidence which refers to love between women and some which links it with Lesbos. The male poet Anacreon who lived on the mainland of Asia Minor in the sixth century B.C., describes how the woman he loves ignores him because ‘she is from Lesbos and gapes after another woman’.33 An early sixth-century plate from Thera and an Attic red figure vase c.500 B.C. show women ‘courting’34 and arousing each other. An epitaph from Athens dating from the late fifth century B.C. also records the love of two women:
Because of the truth and sweetness of your love,
your companion, Euthylla, placed this stone
on your grave, Biote; she remembers you
forever in her tears and weeps for the youth
you have lost.35
Perhaps the most important reference to female homosexuality is in Plato’s Symposium, written in the early fourth century B.C. At a drinking party each guest is called on to make a speech about love. The comic playwright Aristophanes relates a spurious myth to explain sexual longing; once people were double beings but when they angered the gods, they were split in two. Now they long to be complete again. Those who were once a man and a woman seek each other out, as do those who were once two men and those who were once two women; for it is only in the sexual act that they can temporarily regain their wholeness.36 Plato’s attitude is singularly lacking in moral judgement; to him, sexual preference was merely a matter of chance.
Sappho’s work has a similar shamelessness and lack of self-consciousness. Her poetry is sensual and emotional rather than sexually explicit. The erotic intensity of her work is well illustrated by No.32 (94LP), in which she describes a parting from, and memory of, a loved companion. All attention is centred on the absent woman and, in particular, on her body: Sappho tells us that her friend sat by her side; that she wove garlands around her neck – in vase painting a common feature of homosexual courtship; that she anointed herself, which was usually done while naked after a bath; and finally that she satisfied her desire. The description of their surroundings is also imbued with sensuality: the various flowers; the rich perfume; the soft bed; the stream. Sappho heightens the emotional strength of the poem by creating an imaginary world of memory, occupied only by herself and her lost lover.37 In the context of this coherent poetic focus it seems trite and redundant to ask whether ‘the girls of Lesbos…sought to induce orgasms in one another by bodily contact’.38 Rather more important is the internal poetic meaning of Sappho’s sensuality and exclusive concern for women.
In male Greek poetry, desire for women is expressed in vague terms. Romantic intensity is reserved for relationships between men. These are traditionally described in terms of military combat, as a hopelessly imbalanced struggle for domination with one partner, the eromenos or loved one, inexorably running away from the other, the erastes or lover. Some scholars claim that Sappho’s erotic concentration on women illustrates the transference of dominant male values to the world of women.39 But this view represents a fundamental misunderstanding of her poetic intentions. No.78 (1LP), for example, in which Aphrodite is summoned for help in a love affair, certainly echoes male conventions; Sappho calls Aphrodite her summachos, her ally in battle, and begs her not to allow her heart to be subjugated or conquered. In the sixth stanza, in particular, flight, pursuit and the giving of gifts are all elements of formalised male relationships.40 Yet in Sappho’s poems, this exchange is not static; roles will be reversed, beloved will soon be lover and vice versa. Love between women is not a matter of domination and subordination – their desire is mutual and equal.41 Using the framework of male literary conventions, Sappho creates an alternative world in which a set of female values are asserted in direct opposition to those expressed in male culture. In this poetic world, desire between women, sensuality and an appreciation of female beauty do not represent an imitation or transference but a rejection of male values and a response to the increasing devaluation of women and fear of their sexuality.
After asking, ‘Is Sappho fit to read?’ J.A.Davison, like many other critics, turns to consider the question, ‘Is she worth reading?’ Although most scholars eventually answer in the affirmative, a brief survey of their comments suggests that it is a close-run thing. Denys Page, for example, writes that No.33 (96LP) is ‘devoid of anything profound in thought or emotion or memorable in language’. Most believe that Sappho’s poetry derives directly from her own experience and therefore decide that her language is ‘simple’ or ‘homely’, her style, ‘unadorned with literary artifice’. Often, we are told, her emotion proves stronger than her art; she is carried away by a flight of fancy, an irrelevant train of thought or an unsuitable image. Alternatively, it is said that she uses conventional settings – a farewell speech or a prayer – as a backcloth for a descriptive piece with no ulterior poetic design.42
Most of these scholars ignore the difficulties involved in appreciating Sappho’s poetry. To begin with, sixth-century Greece was an oral culture and poetry was performed to an audience. Furthermore, it was not spoken but sung or recited to musical accompaniment. This convention created its own needs such as the repetition of key words, a fluency of thought, a logical movement of expression and a powerful climax, all of which can be found in No.78 (1LP), the prayer to Aphrodite, Sappho’s only complete surviving poem.
Similarly, the lyric form, used by Sappho and her contemporaries, was still in its infancy. Earlier Greek poetry, the Iliad and the Odyssey for example, had been epic. But in the seventh century a new type of poetry emerged, the lyric, which was short, personal and spoke directly to its audience about individual emotions. There were different kinds of lyric, including the choral, sung by a choir at a formal ceremony, such as a religious festival or wedding, and the monodic, favoured by Sappho, which was sung by a single voice and was more personal in subject matter. The youth and freshness of the lyric genre should always be considered in any judgement of Sappho’s work. In No.112 (34LP), for example, she calls the moon ‘silver’, which is an extremely ordinary analogy by modern standards, common in the popular literature of romance. Yet ancient commentators praise Sappho for this comparison and record that she was the first to use it. This point might seem obvious in studies of, say, Shakespeare, many of whose metaphors have become part of everyday speech, but has often been overlooked in those of Greek poetry.
Another problem is that little is known about the performance of Sappho’s poetry. Some scholars believe that all of her poems were designed to be presented at a cult ceremony while others argue that she performed them privately on informal occasions. Scholars also dispute whether her audience consisted of both men and women or whether they were exclusively female. The only reference in Sappho’s extant work to the performance of her poetry is No.98 (160LP), which seems to suggest that at least some of her poems were sung to a private audience of her women companions. Her marriage songs were obviously performed at weddings, some by a choir. There is also evidence that some of the fragments had their origins in cultic worship, particularly No.95 (140aLP) in which young women are invited to mourn the death of Adonis, the beautiful young lover of Aphrodite whose worship had arrived in Lesbos from the East. All in all, it seems reasonable to suppose that Sappho’s poetry served not one but a variety of purposes.
Finally there is the question of Sappho’s position as a woman poet. A.R. Burn has commented that Sappho appears to take this for granted and argues that on Lesbos in particular, but elsewhere in Greece as well, poetry was a common pursuit of women.43 There are references in Sappho’s poetry to the poetic skill of her friends; in No.22 (22LP), for example, she invites Gongyla to ‘take up your lyre and sing for us’ and here, as in many other fragments, the practice of poetry is linked with desire. The ancient sources contain information about several women poets from other parts of Greece, some of whose poetry still survives. But even in antiquity their work was often denigrated. Praxilla, who lived in Sicyon in the fifth century B.C., was famous for the silliness of her poetry. There is also a story which tells how Corinna, who is also thought to have lived in the fifth century, defeated the male poet Pindar in several poetry competitions, although her victory is imputed not to her poetic skill but to her outstanding beauty which is said to have swayed the judges.44 A surviving fragment of Corinna’s verse scolds another woman poet, Myrtis, for competing with Pindar, ‘although she is only a woman’ and this illustrates that women writers themselves felt far from confident about their work.45
The first charge made against Sappho’s work by modern scholars is that her language and style are prosaic and simplistic. She records events as they are, as they have happened to her, it is said, and makes no attempt to display an artistic discernment. No.33 (96LP), for example, has been the subject of many criticisms. Scholars are worried by the central image of the poem which compares a woman absent in Sardis to the moon and extends the simile to include a description of the natural world over which the moonlight falls. Some critics believe that the moon and woman are mutually identified; as the moon sheds its light over the sea and fields, so does the woman.46 Others argue that, instead, the moon and the woman are contrasted; the calm of the moon is placed in opposition to the restless grief of the absent lover.47
But most commentators see the image and subsequent description as a literary red herring. Denys Page writes that the moon begins as a symbol of the woman’s beauty but rapidly becomes nothing more than a charming digression which has little to do with the rest of the poem.48 Richard Jenkyns also adopts this attitude and believes that Sappho’s account is nothing more than a catalogue of names.49 Such comments fail to grasp the essence of Sappho’s art. Her images cannot be decoded or exchanged for another single meaning nor do her descriptive passages focus on objects at random. Instead she is concerned with a wholeness, with a unity of expression. In No.33, the extended simile exhibits an overall richness, a sense of ripeness and weight which is echoed in each of the objects mentioned; the sea is filled with salt, the fields with flowers; the dew moistens the earth and the blossom blooms. This impression links the woman with the natural world for her heart also is ‘heavy with grief’.
Many scholars have been puzzled by Sappho’s use of the epithet ‘rose-fingered’ to describe the moon in this poem. Homer applied the phrase to the dawn and this has been interpreted as a reference to the red light which streaks across the sky as the sun rises. Some critics claim that Sappho’s description must mean there is a ‘rosy glow’ around the moon and most assume that rose equals red in colour.50 But it makes far more sense to assume that Sappho refers to a white rose, to the white light of the moon. This is reflected in the remainder of the simile, for each of the other elements of the night are also white in colour; stars, salt, dew and flowers – roses, chervil (cow parsley) and honey-clover (white meliot).
Again these images connect Sappho’s description of the moonlit night with the woman in Sardis. Ancient commentators report that Sappho loved the rose and used it in her poetry to express her appreciation of female beauty.51 In Ancient Greece this was often associated with pale skin; on vases, for example, women’s bodies were painted in white. Through the image of the rose, the woman, the moon, the flowers and night are mutually associated. Sappho further identifies the woman with the natural world by interweaving some of her favourite descriptive adjectives, usually applied to her companions, between the two; the chervil, for example, is ‘delicate’, the woman’s heart, ‘tender’ and the dew, ‘beautiful’.
A similar unity may be found in No.79 (2LP) in which Aphrodite is summoned to her sacred temple and grove on Lesbos. Here Sappho is concerned with creating a sense of atmosphere; the grove she describes is not necessarily a real place at any given time but an imaginary paradise which reflects and contains Sappho’s vision of Aphrodite. The season – spring; the garden setting; the apples – a symbol of fertility and Aphrodite’s own fruit; the flowers – again roses; the horses; the soft breezes and the drowsiness are all highly erotic. The description is also extremely sensual, containing references to sight, touch (the breezes and the cups), sound (the murmuring streams and rustling leaves), smell (the burning frankincense and the blossom) and taste (the nectar).52 But Sappho is concerned with the spiritual as well as the sensual. Each exotic element of the grove echoes the cult of the goddess it houses. Through the strength of Sappho’s imagery, the place of worship and the experience of worship become inseparable. Sappho’s poetic skill here and elsewhere lies in a strict control of subject, a tension between language and emotion and a resonance of image. Her powerful and direct style might well be ‘simple’ but in its simplicity it is also extremely sophisticated.
The subject and themes of Sappho’s poetry have been criticised in much the same way as her language and style. Modern scholars report rather scathingly that her poems are mostly concerned with the minutiae of daily existence, with ‘trivia’, ‘tittle-tattle’ and ‘back-biting’. Denys Page, for example, writes that her principal themes are the ‘ephemeral pleasures and pains of an idle but graceful society’. He points to a ‘narrow limitation of interests’ and claims that more serious matters than those discussed in her poetry must be left to ‘more reflective minds on graver occasions’.53
As ever, belief in the autobiographical nature of Sappho’s poetry prejudices appreciation of her work; critics claim that in her poems she is ‘bitchy’ or ‘gossipy’, that the women she ‘sneers at’ are leaders of rival associations or friends who have deserted her group for another. In this context, the lines ‘I do not have a spiteful temper/but a tender heart’ (No.10 [120LP]) have been quoted with irony. Scholars also note that Sappho is excessively concerned with the fripperies of fashion. Albin Lesky writes that in No.72 (44LP), Sappho ‘betrays’ her ‘female heart’ by her description of Andromache’s dowry. Again, in a discussion of No.74 (see above, page 9), Lesky states that Sappho’s juxtaposition of ‘the politics of her menfolk’ with her interest in fashionable headgear, ‘delightfully illustrates her exclusive and immediate concern with the feminine’.54
In one sense, Lesky is correct – Sappho is exclusively concerned with the world of women, with their everyday life and occupations; ‘mother, dear’, she writes in No.40 (102LP), ‘I cannot weave my cloth’. Many of her poems describe religious cults which, as we have seen, were important to women – their only opportunity to participate in public life. But Lesky’s comments, intended to expose Sappho’s frivolity, serve only to trivialise the intentions of her work. They illustrate a bias against women’s art, a contempt for women’s experience and a firm belief that there are more suitable subjects for serious literature. Sappho’s poems do contain references to clothing (see No.22 [22LP], No.24 [100LP] and No.25 [39LP]) but these are not fashion bulletins. Instead, Sappho draws attention to women’s clothing and hence their bodies as an expression of her sensual appreciation of female beauty. Again, in No.74, her purpose is not to discuss the availability and purchase of headbands but to portray the relationships of mothers and daughters over three generations.
Another poem which celebrates love between mother and daughter has been described by Richard Jenkyns as ‘charming but slight’.55
I have a beautiful daughter, golden
like a flower, my beloved Cleis,
for her, in her place, I would not accept
the whole of Lydia, nor lovely… (No.75 [132LP])
But far from being ‘slight’ this small fragment expresses one of the main concerns of Sappho’s poetry. To the inhabitants of Lesbos, the kingdom of Lydia, their neighbour on the mainland of Asia Minor, represented wealth, power and luxury. It was a country with extensive natural resources and was also a centre for trade. During Sappho’s lifetime, Alyattes, the Lydian king, extended its frontiers by military conquest and began to amass a vast personal fortune. Sappho’s rejection of Lydia for Cleis represents a preference for the experience of women over the male world of politics, trade and war. The image appears again in No.21 (16LP); for Sappho, beauty rests in the sight of Anactoria’s face rather than Lydian chariots and so it is Anactoria she loves and values, desire between women she asserts over the male concept of military glory.56
The poems which Sappho wrote for performance at wedding ceremonies also illustrate her concern with women’s experience. As we have seen, marriage was considered a woman’s sole purpose, the height of her achievement, but gradually her role within it became devalued. In the work of male poets such as Semonides and Hesiod, wives are characterised as shrewish, lazy, greedy and promiscuous. The only positive advantages of ‘acquiring’ a wife were the heirs she might bear and the work she would do, providing she was carefully trained and her disposition proved suitably malleable.57 In Sappho’s wedding songs emphasis is laid on the qualities of the bride and the good fortune of the groom. In No.63 (113LP), she tells the groom that ‘no woman was ever lovelier’ than his bride. In addition, men in her poems are eager for marriage; in No.62 (112LP), the groom has ‘prayed’ for his marriage and ‘dreamed’ of his bride. Sappho understood the significance of marriage for women. She reaffirms their importance within the marriage partnership, the value of their contribution and characterises relations between husband and wife in terms of mutual love and respect, not fear and hatred.
Linked to Sappho’s poems on love and marriage are those concerned with virginity. In Greek society, chastity was a symbol of female honour and some of Sappho’s poems reflect this: ‘I will remain a virgin/for ever,’ she writes in No.70 (152E). But society also insisted that women should marry and have children, that their virginity should be surrendered:
[Why am I unhappy?]
Am I still longing
for my lost virginity? (No.69 [107LP])
Sappho stresses the physical trauma of loss of virginity but more importantly her poems symbolise the emotional trauma of marriage and its effect on women’s lives – the separation from family and friends and the move from their own home to the strange surroundings of their husband’s house and family.58
A poem by Alcaeus, Sappho’s male contemporary, describes the marriage of the mythical Peleus and Thetis: ‘he took her from the halls of Nereus to the home of Chiron; he unclasped the pure virgin’s girdle and the love between Peleus and the best of Nereus’ daughters was consummated.’59 Thetis’s role is passive. She is not even mentioned by name but identified only by her chastity and by her father’s name. In comparison, Sappho’s poetry is startling; by focusing entirely on the reactions of women to virginity and its loss, on their sense of honour, their distress and sorrow, she animates their experiences and takes them far beyond the dumb, shadowy figures of Alcaeus.
Another interesting point of comparison between Alcaeus’s poem and Sappho’s work is their contrasting attitudes to Helen of Troy. Alcaeus compares the ‘wicked deeds’ of Helen, which, he believes, were responsible for the destruction of Troy, to the virtue of Thetis who remained faithful to her husband and whose son, Achilles, was instrumental in the downfall of the city. Alcaeus’s view is derived from Homer; in the Iliad, Helen is blamed for the war between Greece and Troy and is shunned and despised by many Trojans. Furthermore, she voices her own shame at her elopement with Paris, calling herself ‘evil-minded and detestable’. In one passage she weeps as she remembers her home and the family, parents, husband and daughter she has left behind.60
Sappho makes no moral judgement on Helen. In No.21 (16LP) she asks the question ‘what is the loveliest sight on earth?’ and answers that it is subjective – ‘whatever you desire’. Helen is cited as an example to prove the point. Sappho dismisses Homer’s claim that Helen was ashamed of her actions and longed to go home and defiantly tells us, echoing Homer’s exact words, that Helen forgot all the ties which bound her to Sparta. In Homer, Helen is passive; she is first abducted by Paris, lives in misery in Troy and is finally reclaimed by the victorious Greeks as a prize of war. Sappho’s Helen has a will of her own. She is not stolen like an inanimate object but deliberately leaves Sparta and sails away to Troy. Paris is not even mentioned. Helen is no longer a puppet of kings but a woman who makes her own decisions, who desires and acts on that desire, forsaking her traditional role as daughter, wife and mother. For these reasons, Page duBois has described this poem as ‘one of the few texts which breaks the silence of women in antiquity, an instant in which women become more than the object of men’s desire’.61
Sappho does not reject or even criticise the accepted place of women within her society. But the tension between male and female experience implicit in her poems reflects the changing status of women. In reality this tension was resolved by the devaluation of women and a restriction of their freedom. Sappho’s poetry creates an alternative world in which aspects of women’s lives are celebrated and a preference for their concerns is expressed. This preoccupation with women, which has troubled so many scholars, is unique in classical literature. Far from a source of weakness, it is closely linked to Sappho’s poetic achievement, to her passionate sensuality, her exploration of beauty and desire and her concentration on the emotions of the lover, all of which had a profound influence on subsequent literature. At least the Greeks were in no doubt:
Wherever you are, lady, equal of the gods, greetings;
for we still have your immortal daughters, your songs.62
Abbreviations used in Introduction and Notes:
| LP | = Edgar Lobel et Denys Page (eds.): Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (Oxford, 1955, repr. 1963). | |
| E | = J.M. Edmonds (ed.): Lyra Graeca Vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1928). | |
| PMG | = Poetae Melici Graeci, ed. Denys Page (Oxford, 1962). |
1. Aelian, quoted by Stobaeus, Anthology 3.29.58.
2. Palatine Anthology 9.506.
3. ‘Critical Stereotypes and the Poetry of Sappho’, Lefkowitz, pp.59-68.
4. Bowra, pp.187, 192.
5. See especially McEvilley and ‘Advice on How to Read Sappho’, Lefkowitz, pp.69-70.
6. Suda iv 322s; Eusebius, Chronicle 01.45.1; Strabo 13.2.3; Parian Marble Ep.36.
7. See Page, p.102, note on ll.7-9.
8. Iliad 6.490-92.
9. In the Odyssey, Odysseus and Nausicaa converse freely (6.110-315), although Nausicaa is worried that her reputation will be damaged if she is seen with a strange man. She also advises Odysseus to supplicate himself before her mother, Queen Arete, rather than her father, King Alcinous, because her opinion is influential (6.310-15).
10. Odyssey 23.355.
11. See Pomeroy, p. 34, who cites Herodotus’s account of the competition for the hand in marriage of Agariste, the daughter of Cleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon, 600-570 B.C. (Herodotus 6.126-31).
12. See J.A.Symonds, quoted by Page, pp.140-2; Pomeroy, p.55; Bowra, p.178.
13. See Murray, pp.192-208.
14. Hesiod, Theogony 603-12.
15. Plutarch, Life of Solon 20.3.
16. Hesiod, Works and Days 54-105; Theogony 567-612.
17. Herodotus 2.112-20; see Pomeroy, pp.17-18.
18. Suda iv 323; Strabo 10.2.9.
19. Athenaeus 10.450e; 11.487a; 8.399c; 13.572c.
20. Porphyrion on Horace, Epistles 1.19.28. Suda iv 322s; P. Oxy 1800 fr. 1.
21. Ovid, Heroides 15.20.
22. Wilamowitz, p.56ff; Maximus of Tyre 18.9.
23. Bowra, pp.178, 238.
24. Lesky, p.146; Page, pp.143-4; Devereux, p.22.
25. Wilamowitz, p.56ff; Page, p.28ff.
26. Devereux, p.22.
27. See Tsagarakis, pp.69-82, for a detailed discussion of Sappho’s use of the first person.
28. Hesiod, frag. 275, relates a myth in which Tiresias, who had been both male and female, is asked to solve a dispute between Zeus and Hera, the king and queen of the gods, about who enjoyed sex more, men or women. Tiresias replied that women enjoyed it nine times more than men. See also Murray, p.204.
29. Tiresias was also said to have been struck blind because he saw the goddess Athena bathing. See also the story of Gyges and Candaules, Herodotus 1.8-12.
30. See Pomeroy, p.47.
31. See Murray, pp.204-8.
32. Murray, pp.149, 204.
33. Anacreon 358PMG.
34. In Greek vase painting, ‘courtship’ was depicted by chin-chucking, the wearing or carrying of garlands and the exchange of gifts.
35. Inscriptiones Graecae II2 10954, see Lefkowitz and Fant, No.25.
36. Plato, Symposium 191e.
37. See McEvilley for a full discussion of imagination and memory in this fragment.
38. Dover, p.182.
39. See Murray, p.149.
40. See Marry.
41. See Dover, p.177.
42. Davison, p.226; Page, pp.95, 30, 83, 91ff.
43. Burn, p.229.
44. Praxilla: Zenobius 4.21; Corinna: Pausanias 9.22.3.
45. Corinna 664aPMG.
46. See Bowra, p.195.
47. See Campbell, The Golden Lyre, p.16; Page, pp.93-96.
48. Page, p.94.
49. Jenkyns, p.68.
50. See Page, p.90, note on l.8; Jenkyns, p.68; Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry, p.280, note on l.8.
51. Philostratus Ep.51.
52. See Campbell, The Golden Lyre, p.17.
53. Page, pp.133, 110, 56.
54. Lesky, pp.142, 140.
55. Jenkyns, p.72.
56. See duBois for a full discussion of this fragment.
57. Hesiod, Works and Days 695-705.
58. See Arthur, p.72.
59. Alcaeus 42LP.
60. Iliad 24.762-75; 6.344-48; 3.173-76.
61. duBois, p.89.
62. Palatine Anthology 7.407: Dioscorides on Sappho.