I have a beautiful child who is like golden flowers
in form, my beloved Cleis, for whom
I would not take all of Lydia . . .
– SAPPHO, POEM 132
FOR SAPPHO SCHOLARS, one of the most exciting discoveries from Oxyrhynchus was a fragmentary papyrus scroll written in the early centuries AD that contains a short biography of the poet no more than a paragraph long. The entry on Sappho includes a line written in Greek that says “she had a daughter named Cleis named after her own mother.” This fragment is centuries older than the Byzantine Suda encyclopedia that also mentions Cleis. Sappho’s father, mother, and three brothers are listed, but the papyrus doesn’t name the father of Cleis. This is a surprising omission in a world where a child’s identity was so closely connected with his or her father. Perhaps the author of the papyrus knew about the tradition that Sappho was married to Cercylas (“Penis from Man Island”) but rejected it as absurd. Or perhaps the writer simply didn’t know who the father was. In any case, the importance of the papyrus is that eight hundred years after Sappho lived, it affirms the tradition that she had a daughter named Cleis, whom she herself celebrates in her songs.
The first and longest of Sappho’s poems to mention Cleis comes from the oldest surviving fragments of her songs. It is the same poem, mentioned in Chapter 1, that contains the sole reference to Sappho’s mother:
For my mother used to say
that when she was young it was
a great ornament if someone had her hair
bound in a purple headband.
But for a girl whose hair
is yellower than
a flaming torch . . .
crowns adorned with
blooming flowers.
Recently a decorated headband
. . . from Sardis
. . . cities
But for you, Cleis, I have no beautiful headband
nor do I know how to get one.
But the one in Mytiline . . .
. . . adorned
. . . these things of the family of Cleanax
. . . exile
. . . memories dreadfully wasted away
This badly damaged poem is pieced together from two papyrus fragments, one residing in Copenhagen and the other in Milan, that were revealed to the public just as the Second World War was beginning. Exactly where they originated is unknown, but the style and writing of the scribes place them in Egypt in the third century BC—over five hundred years earlier than most papyri from the garbage dump at Oxyrhynchus. This is still a gap of four hundred years from the lifetime of the poet herself, but these precious bits of writing may be the oldest record we will ever have of Sappho’s poetry.
The context of the poem is uncertain, but the tone is one of longing and regret, with Sappho apologizing to her daughter. She has no way to give Cleis a beautiful and expensive headband from Sardis in Lydia, such as she must have worn herself when she was a girl. Such a decorated purple headband would be available in Mytilene, the chief city of Lesbos, but they are not living there. The rival clan of the Cleanactidae, the family of Cleanax, is now in power and has apparently driven out Sappho’s family. Sappho may be somewhere else on the island, but a more reasonable guess is that this song was composed when she was in exile in Sicily. Her daughter Cleis has accompanied her there and is old enough to wish for the finer things in life that she sees the girls around her wearing. It breaks Sappho’s heart that she is unable to give her child what she had in her youth. She describes the hair of Cleis as “yellower than a flaming torch,” using a term (xanthe) for golden often mixed with shades of red, the same Greek word used by Homer for the fair hair of the heroes Achilles and Odysseus. If Cleis looked like her mother, perhaps Sappho also had golden hair.
The second fragment in which Sappho mentions her daughter is quoted by the second-century-AD scholar Hephaestion in his book on poetic meters. This short piece expresses Sappho’s love for her child in a most moving way that any mother would understand:
I have a beautiful child who is like golden flowers
in form, my beloved Cleis, for whom
I would not take all of Lydia or lovely . . .
The word here for “golden” (chrusios) is different from the term used for Cleis’s hair in the previous verses, but the effect of a radiant, shining girl is much the same, with the metaphor extended to her whole form (morpha), not just her hair. She is like golden flowers, or more specifically, like a bloom of flowers from head to toe. The word translated as “beloved” is agapata, an adjective form of the noun agape later used by Christians to express the love of God for the world. Sappho didn’t invent the term, but she is among the first to use it, with Homer reserving it only for sons. Sappho closes the fragment with the declaration that she would not trade her child for “all of Lydia”—the epitome of riches and luxury in her day—“or lovely . . . ,” but there the poem breaks off. The second thing she wouldn’t trade Cleis for is absent, but some scholars have guessed that the missing word is “Lesbos,” perhaps indicating that this poem, too, was composed in exile.
The last of Sappho’s songs that may refer to Cleis barely deserves to be called a poem, since it is in such a woefully fragmentary state. It comes from a scrap of papyrus found at Oxyrhynchus and now preserved at Oxford University. The text is from a commentary on lyric poetry from the first or second century AD by an unknown author, who says:
About Cleis later on she says this also:
“but if me . . . you looked at . . . the gods give wealth . . .”
One of several problems with this brief fragment is that the name Cleis isn’t actually present on the papyrus, only a final letter that may be from her name. Most of the other words have letters missing as well, so we would be foolish to place too much faith in this broken poem. But if the verse is indeed about Cleis, we might not be amiss in reading the line as a touching phrase by Sappho comparing the look of Cleis to a gift from the gods.
As we have said, arguing on the grounds of what Sappho doesn’t say in her surviving poems is problematic. But the fact that she mentions only one daughter and that ancient commentators who had access to all her songs refer to a single child suggests, at least tentatively, that Cleis was Sappho’s sole offspring. If this is true, it was an unusual situation for a woman in Sappho’s time and may suggest one reason why her love for Cleis was so strong.
In ancient Greece, women prided themselves on the number of children, especially sons, that they bore and raised. For a woman to have a single child—and a girl at that—would have earned her scarcely less pity than if she were barren. A mother with no sons would have no heirs for her husband and no man to care for her as she grew older. It’s certainly possible that Sappho had other children and that she chose not to mention them in her poems or that such poems didn’t survive, but all we can be sure of is that she had a daughter. If we dare to speculate even further, Cleis seems to have been all the more precious to Sappho because she was her only child. Perhaps for this reason, Sappho does something quite unusual for an ancient Greek writer by celebrating her daughter, her own beloved Cleis, in some of her most beautiful poetry.
MALE AUTHORS FROM classical times rarely discuss pregnancy and birth. It’s likely that most found the process mysterious and distasteful. The few references we do have are most commonly from medical texts by men who were often mistaken about the basics of female anatomy and physiology. But enough survives on subjects such as fertility, conception, pregnancy, and childbirth that we can create a picture of how these subjects were viewed, at least by men, in the ancient world. The results are often amusing and sometimes frightful.
A woman’s primary role in ancient Greece was to produce children. However, no one—at least among men—was quite sure how this happened, aside from being the obvious result of sexual intercourse. Male doctors discussed and wrote about various theories of fertility and pregnancy, but we have no surviving records from female practitioners, though we know they existed. Men in the medical profession seemed, in fact, to take great offense at the notion that women might have some insight into reproduction that they did not. Theory usually took precedence over empirical observation, while anatomical knowledge was hampered by the fact that dissection of human bodies was forbidden on religious grounds. The writings of doctors reveal that they could not agree on how or where a man’s seed was formed, what conditions were best for pregnancy, or whether a woman contributed anything to the process of conception.
The prevailing view among ancient doctors and men in general was that women were simply incubators for men. As the playwright Aeschylus says at the conclusion of his Oresteia trilogy:
The mother is not the begetter of the child, merely the nurse of the newly-implanted seed.
Authorities such as Aristotle heartily agreed, but a few medical writers conceded that a mother might have some role in determining the sex and characteristics of her child. It was also thought that the mental state of a woman at the moment of conception could be influential. One ancient medical text tells the story of a notably ugly man from Cyprus who reportedly had his wife look at beautiful statues while they had sex so that she would bear shapely children.
Virtually all Greek medical writers agreed that conception was a tricky and delicate business. It was supposed that the mouth of the womb had to close immediately after intercourse so that the woman would retain the man’s seed. Aristotle also advised that the uterus should be anointed with cedar oil, lead ointment, or frankincense mixed with olive oil to help the sperm stay in place as long as possible. Insertion into the vagina of a clump of wool dipped in ox marrow or the burning of incense made from sulfur, garlic, and beaver testicles was thought to be helpful. Other aids to conception included a woman having a meal and a massage before intercourse and abstaining from wine. Sex during the waxing moon was also advised, on the grounds that actions in the heavens influenced fertility here on earth. It was also believed that men with exceptionally long penises were less fertile because their sperm would cool down too much by the time it was deposited in the vagina.
A woman’s role as a producer of children was taken as seriously by wives as by husbands, and the failure to produce a child could be devastating for a young bride. Archaeologists have uncovered numerous inscriptions by women making pilgrimages to sacred sites, such as the temple of the healing god Asclepius at Epidaurus in southern Greece, to pray for a child. Some women left behind small clay models of their wombs as offerings for a successful pregnancy. Women who were not able to become pregnant were often seen as cursed by the gods and subject to divorce on grounds of barrenness. Men, aside from the well-endowed already noted, seldom bore any responsibility for infertility.
Medical knowledge about fertility increased slowly over the centuries from Sappho’s time to the end of the classical world. It was left to the Roman-era writer Plutarch to offer the most enlightened and balanced view of conception from ancient times: “Nature . . . takes a portion from each partner and mixes it together, producing offspring that are common to both, so that neither the man or woman can distinguish what is his or hers.”
ALTHOUGH A WOMAN’S chief concern was producing children, there were occasions when she would want to prevent pregnancy. These included having several healthy children already, a shortage of food, or concerns about her own health if she bore another child. Contraception doesn’t feature largely in ancient medical texts, because of the emphasis on fertility and the availability of infant exposure as an after-the-fact birth control method, but also because most doctors seemed to have viewed it as something women handled among themselves. Indeed, the few records we have on the subject from male medical practitioners suggest that knowledge passed among women in private would have been just as effective, if not more so, than any recommendations from doctors.
Greek physicians mistakenly believed that a woman’s most fertile time of the month was just before or after menstruation. Thus, those couples following their doctor’s advice and seeking to avoid pregnancy would engage in intercourse during the point of a woman’s cycle when she was, in fact, most likely to conceive. This mistaken belief continued for centuries in the face of what must have been overwhelming evidence to the contrary from legions of pregnant women, but male physicians refused to alter their opinion.
Coitus interruptus was also known but depended on the discipline of the male partner to deny himself pleasure at the moment of its greatest height. Thus, it fell to the woman to prevent the man’s seed, as it was believed, from taking root in her womb. The Greek physician Soranus recommended that women practice the following to ensure the sperm was expelled: “During intercourse when a man is at the point of orgasm, the woman should hold her breath and shift her position beneath him slightly so that his seed doesn’t shoot too far into her uterus. She should then get up immediately and assume a squatting position in which she should make herself sneeze, wipe her vagina all around, and drink something cold.”
One Greek physician offered related advice that could reportedly work up to several days after intercourse. One of his female relatives owned a beautiful slave whom she employed as a prostitute and so needed to prevent from becoming pregnant. One day when the slave believed she might have conceived, the doctor told her to jump up and down touching her heals to her buttocks with each leap to shake loose the fertilized egg, which reportedly came out after seven jumps. This story also shows the blurred line between contraception and early-stage abortion in ancient medicine, with pregnancy viewed as a process taking several days rather than the work of a single night.
Various kinds of ointments and physical barriers to pregnancy were also prevalent, such as pastes made out of myrtle oil and white lead and sponges soaked in vinegar, aged olive oil, or honey. Some physicians recommended inserting into the vagina before sex a squirting cucumber, a plant that forcefully expels its own seeds and would presumably do the same to the semen of any man. Other doctors prescribed a meal of beans and water for women in the vain hope that it would prevent pregnancy for up to a year.
Amulets and other magical devices were also popular, as were various sexual activities designed to give a man pleasure without running the risk of pregnancy. If the images from erotic vase paintings are to be taken as evidence, these techniques seem to have been especially in favor with prostitutes whose owners had economic incentives for them not to bear children. Such activities were undoubtedly popular with husbands as well, who were looking for something different from what they would find at home. Paintings show oral, manual, and anal sex acts with prostitutes, none of which would have been thought proper by most wives.
When, in spite of a woman’s best preparations, an unwanted pregnancy did result, reasonably effective methods of abortion were available, though the practice was often condemned, at least by men, in ancient times. The famous Hippocratic oath includes a provision by which a physician swears he will not give a woman any medicine to induce an abortion. But this opinion was not held by all doctors, many of whom would employ various drugs and instruments for those women who could afford their high fees.
More cautious physicians warned women that abortions could be hazardous: “For abortions are more painful than birth since it is not possible to expel the embryo or fetus except through force with drugs, potions, foods, suppositories, or something else. This risks ulcerating or enflaming the womb.” Less invasive methods were also available, though of questionable effectiveness. Soranus recommended that a woman wishing to terminate a pregnancy should walk about energetically, jump up and down, and carry heavy objects. Long hot baths and bleeding at the hands of her physician were also prescribed.
The majority of women who could not afford professional medical care to induce an abortion were forced to take matters into their own hands with the painful and dangerous insertion of instruments into the womb or the use of powerful drugs. Many of these women ended up seeking the services of a physician in the end. As one doctor reported: “When, as so often happens with women trying to cure themselves, a woman suffers from a deep wound as a result of an abortion or whose uterus has been damaged by powerful suppositories . . . if she is treated promptly she will regain health but will thereafter be sterile.”
The social stigma of abortion also must have discouraged many women from such measures. Women were considered ritually impure for forty days after terminating a pregnancy, and their entire household was thought to be polluted as well. In some Greek cities, a woman who had an abortion after the death of her husband could be charged with a crime and executed, since she was depriving his family of an heir.
Although no evidence suggests that Sappho had to make such a difficult and heartrending decision about a pregnancy herself, the legal and social constraints placed on women in this respect once again reveal how thoroughly men dominated both the private and public aspects of a woman’s life, making her achievements even more remarkable.
CARVED IN STONE at the temple of Asclepius at Epidaurus is a story about a young woman named Ithmonica who came to the healing god to seek a child. As was the custom, she lay down in the shrine to sleep, in hope that Asclepius would come to her in a dream. When he appeared, she asked him whether she might conceive a daughter, and he agreed. When the god asked if there was anything else, Ithmonica said she needed nothing more. She became pregnant, but three years later she had still not given birth. Returning to the temple, she asked the god why this was happening to her, but Asclepius said again in a dream that he had given her exactly what she asked for, since she hadn’t mentioned anything about actually delivering the child. She then begged the god to let her give birth, and the god agreed. She woke up, left the sanctuary, and gave birth to her daughter in the courtyard outside.
Most pregnancies in ancient Greece undoubtedly were easier than that of poor Ithmonica, but doctors had little understanding of the process, and there were many potential dangers along the way. Physicians were divided on whether the fetus slowly became more human inside the womb as the months passed or quickly took on its final shape and merely grew larger over time. One medical text claimed that the developing child first began to breathe, then to feed on the mother’s blood, followed by movement after several months. Aristotle took the unusual step of experimenting with fertilized chicken eggs and reported that the bird’s heart is visible beating after only three days. He thus reasoned that the heart was the first organ to develop in the growing human child.
Males were thought to develop more quickly than females, as they were made from stronger seed, moving in the womb after three months while girls took four. This gender difference was supposedly observable in the mother herself, as she would have a healthy complexion with a male child and a pallid face with a female. Boys were also thought to be carried on the right side of the mother’s body, while girls grew instead on the inferior left side.
Women reportedly faced many medical risks during pregnancy, from fevers to an unnatural craving for harmful foods. A mother was thought to be at greatest risk of miscarriage during the first forty days of pregnancy and was advised, among other warnings of risk factors, to avoid stepping over a raven’s egg. Aristotle advised pregnant women to exercise and eat well but to avoid salt and wine. Physicians were divided about whether or not pregnant women should avoid sex. Some thought an orgasm could bring on miscarriage, though Aristotle believed intercourse could be beneficial for women until the eighth month of pregnancy.
WHEN SAPPHO GAVE birth to Cleis, it would have been in the women’s quarters of her household surrounded by female friends and family members. We don’t know the details of this or any other birth in ancient Greece from a woman’s point of view, since neither Sappho nor any other woman writer mentions it. This information is also incomplete because it consists of accounts from male physicians, who were normally present only at life-threatening deliveries. If no problems were anticipated in the labor, the men of the household withdrew to their own quarters or left the home altogether. Birth was the business of women.
The date of a child’s delivery could hardly be controlled, but the ancient Greeks believed certain days of the month were more auspicious than others. A century before Sappho, the poet Hesiod advised that the sixth, ninth, tenth, and sixteenth of each month were favorable for the birth of boys. Only two days, the ninth and fourteenth, were thought promising for girls.
Midwives were employed to help the expectant mother not just in the hours of delivery, but in the days before and after the birth. A midwife was known as a maia (“good mother”) or omphaletomos (“cord cutter”) and was skilled at the medical, psychological, and religious aspects of delivery. She was typically an older woman who had given birth herself and was beyond childbearing years. Midwives were encouraged to be intelligent, respectable, and strong enough to handle the physical demands of bringing a child into the world. The physician Soranus also recommended that they have long, thin fingers and keep their nails well trimmed.
After a midwife was called to the home, she would begin by purifying the birthing room with rituals and prayers to the goddesses of childbirth. Hera, the wife of Zeus, was among these, as was the virgin Artemis, but it was Hera’s daughter Eileithyia who was most closely associated with labor. When Alcmene, the mother of Hercules, was ready to give birth, Hera in a jealous spite sent Eileithyia to wait outside the women’s quarters of the house and delay the birth by whispering spells and sitting with her legs tightly crossed. A clever old woman attending the birth noticed the stranger in the courtyard and understood then why her mistress was suffering so long in agony. She tricked the goddess into thinking the child had been born and broke the spell so that Hercules could be delivered. Eileithyia was furious and turned the old woman into a weasel. Normally, though, goddesses of birth were thought to be quite sympathetic to women in labor.
When the actual time for delivery came, the midwife and other women present prepared the expectant mother and tried to ease her fears as much as they could. But birth could be a frightening business, especially for the first-time mother. As Medea, a mother twice over, says in a play by Euripides:
I would rather stand in battle three times than give birth once.
Some midwives had the woman stand and hold tightly to a post; others urged the patient to lie down in bed. But as one woman in labor was claimed to have said: “Why would I want to go to bed? That’s how I got into this mess in the first place!”
The most common position for delivery was sitting on a stool or birthing chair—a technique that allowed gravity to aid in the delivery. In representations in Greek art, we see the laboring mother sitting half-naked in such a chair with her hair loose as she is supported by assistants on either side. If a birthing seat was not available, a woman might sit in the lap of another woman, who would hold her tightly.
A midwife would apply a variety of lubricating ointments for easier delivery. Aristotle believed that the birth of baby boys was more painful and difficult than that of girls, on the reasonable grounds that boys tended to be larger. But boy or girl, an experienced midwife stood ready with the tools needed to handle any contingency of birth. These included olive oil, hot water, sponges, wool, bandages, soothing perfumes for the mother, and a pillow for the newborn infant.
If the delivery became protracted, a midwife could employ several techniques to speed things up, such as shaking the woman up and down, wrapping her genital area tightly in a blanket, or having the mother-to-be lie facedown on a couch while the women present grabbed her legs and pulled them to encourage the child to come out. Correct breathing was also said to help, as was induced sneezing and eating small portions of wolf meat.
When at last the baby was delivered, the women let loose a shout of joy. The midwife would then cut the umbilical cord at a distance of four fingers from the baby’s belly with a piece of broken glass or a potsherd. Iron knives were thought to be ill-omened for this important ritual. The exhausted mother and newborn child were then bathed in pure water drawn from a spring, if available, both for cleansing and to begin removing the ritual pollution that was believed to be caused by childbirth. For this act, some physicians recommended wine (as was the custom in Sparta) or the urine of a young child. Visitors would have been discouraged by the religious impurity associated with birth.
Not all births went well, for either the mother or the child. The maternal mortality rate is difficult to determine, but as many as one in ten women may have died in childbirth. In Sparta these women were listed as heroes along with men who fell in battle. In Athens as well, they were honored with tombstones showing them in labor. In many instances it seems the Greeks had no viable way to deal with difficult births. Cesarean sections were practiced, but only as a last resort, since the risk to the mother through blood loss and infection was enormous. When a child could not be delivered whole, the midwife usually resorted to the grisly and dangerous technique of dismembering the child in utero to allow the mother to give birth. The gruesome details of the procedure, described in an ancient medical text, do not make pleasant reading. As an alternative, the physician Soranus recommended using hooks inserted into the obstructed child’s body to forcibly pull it from the womb, a procedure that must have put the mother at great risk and left the baby, if it survived, in a condition that would have made it a likely candidate for exposure.
When a birth was successful, there was great joy in the household, and the new mother, above all, was grateful to the gods for a healthy child. It was the custom soon after the birth to thank the goddesses of childbirth by making an offering of clothing worn during the delivery. One third-century-BC inscription by a new father and mother shows that men, too, were full of gratitude for the birth of a child: “The son of Cichesias dedicates these sandals to you, Lady Artemis, and Themistodice dedicates these folded woolen garments, because you came gently to her without your bow when she was in labor and held your hands above her.” Such acts of devotion must have been common in Sappho’s age as well. A healthy child meant new life for the family and community that all would celebrate.
But in the days after the delivery, when the excitement of the birth was over and the midwife had gone home, the reality of the radical change in her life would have become very real to the first-time mother. In spite of the help she would receive from other women, the endless work of motherhood was now about to begin.
IN A PASSAGE by the historian Xenophon, a grown son complains about his overbearing mother, only to be roundly condemned by Socrates:
It’s the woman who becomes pregnant, carries the child, risks her life for it and gives it nourishment from her own body. Then when she has brought it into the world with difficult labor, she feeds it and cares for it even though she gets no benefit. The infant doesn’t know who is helping it and has no way of clearly expressing its desires. Still, the mother tries to guess what it needs and wants and tries to satisfy it, toiling through the days and nights never knowing if she’ll someday receive thanks in return.
Aside from this laudatory statement and a few others, ancient Greek literature—even that by Sappho and other women—has very little to say about the life and work of mothers. Like childbirth, it was an area few male writers cared about and reflects a general disinterest by men in what they considered women’s work. This leaves us with severely limited sources on what it was like to be a mother in Sappho’s world. But one window into motherhood is provided by a scant selection of surviving pieces of ancient Greek art. These images are as rare as literary references, but they have the advantage of providing an actual pictorial glimpse into the daily life of mothers and their children.
One such image is from a slender fifth-century-BC oil vase that shows a harried mother holding a sleeping infant in her left arm while a little boy tugs at her robe. Both the mother and the older child look off apprehensively to their right. At the woman’s feet is a basket for wool, while hanging on the wall behind her is a storage sack. This picture shows a wife inside the women’s quarters of her household in her two primary roles, as caretaker of children and weaver of clothing. On the opposite side of the vase is a seated man talking with a woman holding a hand mirror. The images may be unconnected, but it’s also possible that this is the husband and father conversing with a prostitute while his wife cares for their children.
Another vase from the same century shows a mother encouraging her baby boy to crawl to her across the floor. She stands at the right of the image, bent forward slightly with arms outstretched to her son. The baby has pulled himself up on his arms and looks up at his mother with excitement. In the background is a man, probably the father, observing the scene but not directly involved in the action. As must have been the case with most Greek fathers, he leaves the business of caring for and training young children to their mother.
A small Athenian terra-cotta figurine from the fourth century BC is a rare image of a young girl just a few months old. The chubby toddler has her left leg bent up and her arms outstretched as she sits and looks upward, demanding to be picked up by someone who is likely her mother. Her impatience to be taken care of now would be familiar to a parent in any age.
One of the most charming and intimate portraits of a mother and child is depicted on a fine Athenian cup from the fifth century BC. It shows a well-dressed young woman seated on a stool smiling as she reaches out to her infant in a high chair with holes cut out for legs that probably does double duty as a potty seat. The child reaches out to her at the same instant and even lifts its right leg in eagerness. The portrait is a snapshot of an intimate moment, seldom seen in ancient art, when loving mother and child are oblivious to the world around them and absorbed only in each other. The cup was found in the tomb of a wealthy family and may depict a mother who passed away while her child was still young.
Finally, a fifth-century-BC terra-cotta figurine from Boeotia in central Greece shows a mother and daughter at a slightly later stage of childhood and is a unique look at a mother teaching her young daughter to cook. The mother sits in front of a kettle used for heating soup positioned on a low tripod above a fire. The mother leans over the pot to place herbs and spices into it with her right hand, but at the same time she raises her other hand to warn her daughter to be careful of the hot kettle. The girl has her left hand on her mother’s arm for reassurance as she peeks into the boiling pot.
Athenian bowl showing a mother and a baby in a high chair (c. 470 BC).
(MUSÉES ROYAUX D’ART ET D’HISTOIRE, BRUSSELS)
Although mothers were the primary caregivers for their children in ancient Greece, most wealthy families, such as Sappho’s, would have employed a nursemaid to help with a child. Many of these women would have been slaves bought specifically for the purpose of child care. Often they were mothers themselves and skilled at the endless chores of child rearing. If they had given birth recently, they would have been employed to nurse the mother’s child on occasion and give their mistress a much-needed rest. These women often remained in the household their whole lives and became beloved members of the family, such as Eurycleia, the faithful old nursemaid who serves Penelope in the Odyssey. Another such nursemaid, in Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers, looks back on a boy now grown and gives a picture of infant care that still rings true today:
Oh, my dear Orestes, I devoted my life to that child from the moment his mother gave him to me to nurse as a newborn babe. He kept me up night after night with his screaming and crying. Such a fuss he made, and all for nothing. Babies are senseless things, you know. You have to care for them like they were little animals and follow their moods. They can’t tell you what’s the matter, whether they’re hungry or thirsty or have soiled themselves. Babies can’t control their emotions, it just comes out and there’s nothing you can do about it. You do learn to guess in my line of work, but by the gods I was wrong often enough. Then I had to wash his clothes—nurse and laundry woman rolled into one I was.
Aside from a nursemaid, the mother would have had some help from her husband’s mother, who ruled as matron of the house, but the relationship between the young wife and her mother-in-law could be fraught with tension. When a new bride moved into her husband’s family home, as was the custom, she had to submit to the authority of her mother-in-law. This woman would have been much older than her, with great experience in running the household. She likely held the loyalty of the servants and the love of her son, who would have naturally supported his mother in any quarrels with his wife. Doubtless there were many cases in which a daughter-in-law and her husband’s mother got along well, but it wasn’t until the mother-in-law died, usually years in the future, that a wife came into her own. Life must have been easier for a young woman once she bore children, especially sons, but the potential for conflict was ever present. If Sappho did indeed give birth to only a single daughter, her relationship with her husband’s mother may not have been a pleasant one, though she never mentions it in her surviving poetry.
The relationship between a mother and her children as they grew into adolescence and beyond remained close. Sons would move out of the women’s quarters at about the age of six, but they were never far from their mother’s care and supervision. Daughters, on the other hand, resided among the women of the house until the day of their marriage. The loss of a child to illness or accident was every mother’s greatest fear, and many heartbreaking inscriptions on gravestones commemorate the tragic death of a child before his or her time. One such tombstone tells the story of a mother named Xenoclea who could not bear the death of her son:
Leaving two young daughters, Xenoclea, daughter of Nicarchus, lies here dead. She mourned the sad death of her son Phoenix who died at sea when he was eight years old. There are none so unfeeling of grief, Xenoclea, that they do not pity your fate. You left behind two little girls and died of grief for your son, who has a lonely tomb where he lies in the dark sea.
Like all mothers, those in ancient times worried about their children as they grew older and left home. One fragmentary papyrus letter found in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, preserves the words of mother to her son Ptolemaeus as he pursues his studies far away:
. . . hurry and write to me about what you need . . . I took care to write your teacher and ask about your health and what you were studying. . . . Your sisters send many greetings as do the children—evil eye be gone!—of Theonis and all of our friends.
It shouldn’t be supposed that fathers were uncaring about their children. Once boys had passed the early years of childhood, fathers were usually quite involved in raising and educating their sons. Daughters were dear to most fathers as well, even though girls were primarily the responsibility of the mother. A father’s love for his daughter is seen clearly in an idealized but quite believable scene in Homer’s Odyssey, when young Nausicaa approaches her father, King Alcinous, and asks for a cart so that she can supposedly wash laundry at the river—though, in fact, she intends to spend a day at the beach with her girlfriends:
She stepped up close to him and spoke confidingly, “Daddy dear,
I wonder, won’t you have them harness a wagon for me,
the tall one with the smooth wheels,
so I can take our clothes to the river for washing?
They are beautiful garments, but they do need a good cleaning.
And you’re so busy sitting among the princes and debating in counsel.
You really should be wearing spotless linen . . .
And like any father of a teenage daughter, Alcinous knows well what his daughter is up to, but indulges her anyway.
A mother’s relationship with her children did not end at their marriage, but continued to the end of her life, as we will see with Sappho and Cleis. A son was responsible for the care of his mother when his father died, and the evidence we have shows that most sons assumed the task gladly. A man’s mother would live with him and his wife until the day she died, all the while enjoying the affection of her son and at least the tolerance of her daughter-in-law. A mother’s bond with her daughter also did not end when the girl married, unless her new husband took the daughter far away. Most mothers and grown daughters would have lived in the same area and seen each other regularly during visits to each other’s homes and at religious festivals. A mother would be present at the birth of her daughter’s children, as Sappho surely would have been at the birth of any children of Cleis, and would rejoice in welcoming a new generation of her family into the world.