It’s not by strength or swiftness or dexterity that great things are
achieved, but by reflection, character, and judgment. In these respects
old age is not poorer but richer.
– CICERO, ON GROWING OLD
WOMEN IN THE ancient world were lucky to live past the age of forty. Given the ravages of disease, the backbreaking work of farm and domestic life, and the dangers of frequent childbirth, most wives and mothers could only dream of attaining the biblical three score and ten years. A Roman gravestone from North Africa records a typical story: “Here lies Ennia Fructosa, dearest wife, whose modesty was evident and obedience praised. She was married at age fifteen and accepted the title of wife. She lived no more than thirteen years after her wedding.”
But there were exceptions. Elderly women from the poorest families who had given birth to many children could be seen gathered around every village well, trading gossip. By fate or natural disposition, they had beaten the odds to reach sixty, seventy, or beyond. In an age when women of succeeding generations gave birth to their first child soon after puberty, it was possible to find five generations of girls and matrons living together in a single household. For a woman like Sappho from a wealthy family with slaves to perform the harshest tasks and access to the best medicine of the day, the odds of long life were even better.
As with most aspects of women’s lives in the ancient world, we know precious little about how they themselves viewed growing older. Men were little help. The Roman orator Cicero composed an entire book on the joys and sorrows of aging without once mentioning what the experience was like for a woman.
The Greeks had no concept of middle age. Men passed from being neoi (young adults) to presbyteroi (elders) with nothing in between. On those rare occasions when a man is called mesos, or “middle-aged,” in Greek literature, it’s usually a term of derision for those who can’t come to terms with growing older, as in a story by the second-century-AD Greek writer Babrius:
There was once a man of middle age who was neither young nor old but had white and black hairs mixed together on his head. Yet still he spent his time carousing with women. He was sleeping with two women, one who was young and the other older. The young woman wanted him to look like a lover her own age, so she plucked out his white hairs. The woman in her prime wanted him to look more mature, so she plucked out his black hairs. Eventually the two women left the man bald.
Adult women were divided into those of childbearing years and those beyond menopause. A wife who bore her husband sons and lived beyond the time when she could bear children was honored and achieved a degree of freedom unknown to younger women. Such a respected matron was free to go outside her home by herself, since she was no longer at risk of becoming pregnant by another man. As the fourth-century-BC Athenian orator Hyperides said: “A woman who leaves her house ought to have reached that stage of life when those who see her don’t ask whose wife she is but whose mother she is.” Greek medical writers, such as Aristotle, agreed that most women reached menopause in their forties. These male commentators were also quick to point out that women going through this change of life could be emotional and unpredictable.
For women who survived into their forties and beyond, life could be very pleasant. Most would have been married in their teens to men almost a generation older than themselves, so that by the time they passed menopause their husbands would often have died from old age. However much they loved their spouses, these women for the first time in their lives were free to make choices for themselves.
The financial support of widowed matrons fell to their sons, who generally treated them with great respect and affection. To ill-treat or ignore his mother brought great shame on a man. A woman without sons faced a more problematic future. Her relatives, daughters, or late husband’s extended family would usually provide for her, but sometimes elderly matrons struggled to eke out a living by serving as midwives or as professional mourners at funerals. Older female slaves could be cherished and valuable members of a household, as was the aged nurse Eurycleia in the home of Odysseus, but there must have been many who were left to starve when they became too sick or feeble to serve their masters any longer.
GREEKS FEARED THE process of dying more than death itself. For most, life after death was a vague and uncertain concept. Even if they believed in an afterlife, it wasn’t necessarily something they looked forward to. This attitude led to an appreciation for living, especially among older people. When the mythical king Admetus hears that he is doomed to death unless he can find someone to take his place, he asks his aged parents to die for him, but his father refuses, even though he is old, saying: “It is precious, this light the gods send, yes precious.”
The earliest literary portrayal of life after death is the dismal Hades of Homer, to which almost everyone went, regardless of their actions in life. When the living Odysseus visits the shade of Achilles in Hades and praises him for being famous in the afterlife, the hero of Troy rebukes him:
O shining Odysseus, don’t try to console me for dying. I would rather follow the plow as the slave of a landless farmer struggling to survive than be king over all the dead.
Homer’s dead spent eternity wandering the twilight realm of Hades unable to speak unless some rare visitor gave them blood to drink. As Sappho herself says to a woman she disliked:
But when you die you will lie there and there will be no memory
of you nor longing for you after, for you have no share in the roses
of Pieria. But you will wander unseen in the house of Hades,
flying about among the shadowy dead.
It was not a fate to be envied, but neither was it feared by most. There were, however, those who hoped for something more, whether philosophers or followers of mystery religions. For these there was the possibility of a pleasant afterlife or reincarnation here on earth.
WHATEVER A GREEK’S attitude about life after death, the proper care of the dead was of the greatest importance—and it was a ritual presided over largely by women. The first stage was the preparation of the body at home, starting with the closing of the mouth and eyes by the next of kin. It was the shutting of the eyes that allowed the psyche, or soul, to leave the body.
The women of the house would next bathe the body with seawater, if available, and then anoint and dress the deceased in a long robe or wrap the body in a shroud of white linen cloth. The corpse was then placed on a wooden bed with the feet pointing toward the door. A virgin who had died would be dressed as a bride, while soldiers were often attired in their uniforms. Jewelry was common for the deceased, depending on the means of the family. Funerals in Sappho’s time could be particularly extravagant, prompting some cities to pass laws against ostentatious displays aimed at impressing the neighbors. Funeral rites required no fixed service or particular words, but images of ritual mourning by women frequently appear on Greek vases. The women would tear at their hair, beat their breasts, and sing songs of lamentation, while the men stood by in quiet grief.
After a respectful time of mourning, the body was taken from the house before sunrise and carried on a bier or transported in a wagon to the site of deposition. Men with weapons led the way, while the women followed behind. A wealthy family might hire musicians to accompany the procession. Families had plots outside the precincts of the town, where the body was either burned or placed in a coffin and buried. With cremation, the fires of ancient times were not usually hot enough to completely burn the bones. These were collected and placed in jars after the ashes had cooled. Priests were not present and, in fact, were forbidden to attend burials, lest they be ritually polluted by the closeness of death. In early Greek times, sacrifices were performed for the dead, perhaps by the women of the household.
After the interment of the remains, men and women left the cemetery separately. It’s likely that the men stayed behind to close the grave and seal the tomb, while the women returned home and prepared a meal for all the family gathered to honor the dead.
AS WITH THE rest of Sappho’s life, we have only glimpses of her later years. We can presume she returned home from exile in Sicily at some point in the early sixth century BC and again took up her life on Lesbos as a poet. We know that her daughter, Cleis, was with her as she grew older, and since she never mentions any sons, it’s likely that Sappho lived with Cleis. We know nothing of Sappho’s relationships with other women in her later years, nor do we know whether the friends who had once gathered around her to hear her songs were still part of her life. But we do know something about how Sappho viewed growing older, thanks to a remarkable poem rediscovered in a two-part story over the last century.
In 1922 there was great excitement among the small community of papyrologists when a new fragment of one of Sappho’s poems was published after being discovered in the familiar trash heaps of Oxyrhynchus. Unfortunately, the papyrus was in even worse shape than most, with only a handful of legible words:
. . . beautiful gifts . . . children
. . . the sweet-sounding lyre dear to song
. . . old age . . . my skin now
. . . hair once black
. . . knees do not carry
. . . like fawns
. . . not possible to become
. . . rosey-armed Dawn
. . . carrying to the ends of the earth.
. . . yet seized . . . wife
The poem clearly showed Sappho writing about growing older, but what was she trying to say? The words were her typical blend of stark reality and beautiful imagery with a possible reference at the end to a well-known myth about the goddess of the dawn carrying off the handsome mortal Tithonus in a futile attempt to make him her immortal lover. But with so little of the poem surviving, there was not much more to say. It was given the catalog number 58 in the Sappho corpus, published in a collection of papyri excavated that year, and soon forgotten by all but a few Greek scholars.
Then, exactly eighty years later, something remarkable happened. An antiquities dealer in Europe let it be known that he had in his possession a small collection of papyrus fragments from Egypt. Where exactly these came from and how he had acquired them were a mystery, but a quick inspection confirmed they were genuine. To save these treasures, the University of Cologne in Germany purchased them for its archives. And only a short time later, two researchers, Michael Gronewald and Robert Daniel, working with one of these fragments from the wrappings of a mummy, announced in a scholarly journal that they had found some of the missing pieces of Sappho 58. With this discovery, a still fragmentary but much more complete poem could be read for the first time in two thousand years:
. . . beautiful gifts of the violet-laden Muses, children
. . . the sweet-sounding lyre dear to song.
. . . my skin once soft is wrinkled now,
. . . my hair once black has turned to white.
My heart has become heavy, my knees
that once danced nimbly like fawns cannot carry me.
How often I lament these things—but what can be done?
No one who is human can escape old age.
They say that Dawn with arms like roses once took
Tithonus, beautiful and young, carrying him to the
ends of the earth. But in time grey old age still
found him, even though he had an immortal wife.
This discovery was so startling that the Times Literary Supplement soon published an article describing the find and included the original Greek text along with an English translation. Newspapers and media outlets around the world picked up the story, so that in a matter of days millions of people were reading the new Sappho poem translated into Afrikaans, Chinese, Spanish, and Urdu.
But regardless of the language in which the poem was published, the talent of its creator was clear. The visual and physical images she creates of aging show that the older Sappho had lost none of the skill that created the moving songs of love she had composed in her youth. Readers can see and feel the aging process that has overtaken her. Those of a certain age can identify with the unfamiliar face in the mirror and pain in the knees on cold mornings. Memories of youthful dances return, as distant now as a light heart and supple limbs.
But, ever realistic, Sappho asks, What can a person do? Growing older is simply part of being human. To fight against time is both foolish and futile. The goddess of the dawn learned this when she fell in love with the young and handsome prince Tithonus and obtained immortality for him from Zeus—but she foolishly forgot to ask for eternal youth as well. And so, as the years went by, her lover shriveled into a creature with only a shrill voice remaining who eventually turned into a cicada.
The Greek scholar M. L. West summed up the reaction of many to the new poem when he called it “a small masterpiece, simple, concise, perfectly formed, an honest, unpretentious expression of feeling, dignified in its restraint.” Others could only borrow the words of the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne: “Sappho is simply nothing less . . . than the greatest poet who ever was.”
WE DON’T KNOW how long Sappho lived after composing her poem on growing older, but it’s likely she died an old woman. One final poem gives us a hint at how she faced death. Maximus of Tyre, in his Orations, quotes these two lines after saying that just as Socrates chastised his companions for weeping as he drank the hemlock cup, Sappho was angry at her daughter Cleis as she cried for her mother at the end and chastised her:
It is not right in the house of those serving the Muses
for there to be lamenting. That would not be fitting for us.
The gift of poetry was Sappho’s comfort in her final days. To complain to the gods about life coming to an end would have been ungrateful for one who had been so blessed. Whatever she believed awaited her after death, Sappho knew her songs would live on.