It is Sappho whom you cover, Aeolian earth, she who among the
              immortal Muses
   Is renowned as the mortal Muse . . .
                                             . . . Winding the three-part thread,
Fates, on your spindles, was there a reason you did not spin
              for her a frayless thread,
   She who composed eternal offerings for the Heliconian Muses?

                                    Antipater of Sidon, c. 100 BC,
                   Testimonium 27 in the Palatine Anthology

Gaius Verres was a despicable public administrator. Appointed propraetor¹ of Sicily from 73 to 71 BC, he outdid his predecessors in avarice and the injustice of his regime. The young Cicero, already an experienced advocate and familiar with Sicily, where he had been quaestor in 75 BC, was retained by the people of the island to press charges against Verres. Keen to weaken the interests of the corrupt old order and improve the government of the province, Cicero could not have wished for a better illustration than Verres of the system's unaccountability, its perviousness to human shortcomings. In a devastating preamble, he summarised the charges he intended to level against the defendant, who, rather than face the force of Cicero's onslaught, packed his bags and went into exile.

"Packed his bags" is too modest an expression for what he did. In fact, he took away in his caravan to long exile in Massilia "half the wealth of Sicily," a collection of treasure so valuable that Antony himself coveted it and had Verres' name added to the list of the proscribed. (Cicero's name, as fate would have it, appeared on the same proscription list.) Verres, it is said, was murdered, demonstrating how a larger consumes a smaller cupidity.

The people of Syracuse had set up in the town hall a statue of "the Tenth Muse," as Plato called her,² the poet Sappho, carved by Silanion in the fourth century BC, "so perfect, so gracious, so meticulously finished," Cicero said. This famous piece was among the works of art that Verres carted off, though he failed to carry off the plinth with its inscription, hence his theft was itself monumental and is known forever. The statue has vanished altogether.

Why is the most famous poet of Lesbos, an island so far to the east that it almost abuts Turkey, associated with Syracuse and Sicily, a sea and a half away? Was this first, greatest Greek woman writer driven there by love, exile, the colonial programme of her city? Did marriage, or an attempt to flee marriage, take her so far from home? Was her presence in Sicily a legend merely? And what had she to do with Epirus, on the Greek west coast, and did she plunge to her death, ballasted by a broken heart?

Verres stole the statue, but an image of Sappho survives in Munich, on a crater, or wine-mixing bowl, attributed to the Brygos painter, from about 470 BC.³ It shows her contemporary Alcaeus with a harp, his bearded face concentrating on the music he is making, while Sappho looks back at him over her shoulder. She responds to what he is playing, judging from the way her body is inclined to sway into a dance, but she restrains herself. This is not the woman described in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus from around AD 200 as "despicable and very ill-favoured, of dark complexion and very short."⁴ This scrawled caricature of Sappho reflects a judgement on her "base" moral character, the stunted body mirroring a perverted spirit.

Later writers⁵ say that Sappho invented a type of lyre, the pectis, and the plectrum.⁶ She and Anacreon certainly mentioned the baromos and the barbitos (Ezra Pound refers to "Sappho's barbitos" in "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," a satire and lament for the decline in culture, Sappho being a high-water mark). Other ancient instruments included the magadis, the trigonon and the sambuke⁷ In fragment 214c we hear, fleetingly, "the clatter of castanets." Historians of music like to suggest that Sappho added not only to the instrumental resources but also to the development of composition. Plutarch declares: "The Mixolydian mode is full of feeling and appropriate to tragedy. Aristoxenus claims Sappho invented it, and the tragic poets learned it from her.⁸

These facts and suppositions are interesting but remote. Why read Sappho today? She is, even among the first Greek poets, an incomparable artist, innovative in her techniques, unique in sensibility. Even in translation it is possible to sense the force of her thinking, the way in which she feels a way through experience with the special language that poetry devised. She brings this language, in the strict prosodies she invented, and with a subtle sense of phrasing and the sounds words make, a quite perfect "pitch" when it comes to the modulation of vowels and the patterning of appropriate consonants, as close as a language can come to the experiences of which she writes. Even when her language draws on conventional elements – the moon, the sea, time passing – she imparts to them a sense of the contingent world, of a voice which inhabits a pulsing body, a body which is alive in time.

The mysterious first-century AD book entitled Longinus on the Sublime, addressed to the unknown author's friend Postumius Terentianus, is a fine anthology of quotations and penetrating criticism, possessing a directness and intimacy we miss in turgid grammarians. "Are you not amazed?" he exclaims, and we are. He preserves a substantial fragment of Sappho's most famous poem, imitated by the Roman poets and translated by many European and American writers.⁹ The poem is composed in the eponymous Sapphic stanza, in which the emphases are distributed quite strictly in the pattern outlined on page 164. "Where," asks On the Sublime, "does Sappho best show her qualities? In her skill in choosing and combining the crucial and the unbridled accompaniments [of the madness of love]." He is interested in how she reifies the senses, so that she can freeze and burn, be irrational (even mad) and sane, at the same time: "we witness in her not singled out emotion but a confluence." His version of the poem begins, "To me he appears as blessed as the gods." There is a variation preserved elsewhere which makes the opening more forceful still: "To himself he appears more blessed than the gods."¹⁰ Love is real, but its reality is subjective and confined. This is one of Sappho's themes. William Carlos Williams gets closest, among the moderns, both to the tenor of the poem and to the metre:

Peer of the gods is that man, who
face to face, sits listening
to your sweet speech and lovely
         laughter.

It is this that rouses a tumult
in my breast. At mere sight of you
my voice falters, my tongue
         is broken.

Straightway, a delicate fire runs in
my limbs; my eyes
are blinded and my ears
         thunder.

Sweat pours out: a trembling hunts
me down. I grow paler
than dry grass and lack little
         of dying.

That grass at the end can be read differently: Davenport and other translators insist that the jealous speaker is grass-green with envy. And there is the fragment of another line that Williams, like most translators, omits because it mars the lyric closure – quite effectively, in fact. Davenport renders it, "But endure, even this grief of love."

Something remarkable happens when Sappho says, in West's translation, "You came, and I was longing for you; you cooled my heart which was burning with desire."¹¹ The beloved arrives, even unasked, seeming to anticipate the lover's need. Such a use of language is enactive, bringing the subject and object into a tense and whole harmony of being. The lines survive because Julian the Apostate, the Roman emperor and cousin of Constantine who reverted to pagan Hellenism when he came to power, quotes them in a letter to the neo-Platonist Syrian philosopher Iambicus in the fourth century AD: some of Sappho's language of love can be invested in mystical and philosophical themes. There are passages, however, which belong only and potently in the realm of human desire and fulfilment. "Desire has shaken my mind, like a wind that thrashes mountain trees."¹² Those who are untouched by love, human or divine, are to be pitied, Artemis for example: "Love (that loosens the limbs) never visits her."¹³

"That loosens the limbs": the compound word lusimeles combines lusi, which in other combinations suggests relaxing, easing, even (for childbirth) dilating, bringing peace, freeing from exhaustion, and meles, which means limb but also comes to imply melody, tune; the phrase contains everything from the melting power of love to the movement – almost inadvertent – into dance. She uses the phrase again. Hephaistion of Alexandria in the second century AD quotes it in his Handbook of Metres to epitomise a particular prosody:¹⁴ "Once more love that loosens the limbs makes me quiver all over: the irresistible one, both kind and unkind."¹⁵ Was Hephaistion himself moved when, into his dry book of definitions, he introduced this grain of ancient, living passion?

Words of one of her poems, or a corruption of them, survive on an amphora attributed to Euphronios (around 510 BC, some forty years after the poet's death). They emerge as song from the lips of a full-featured, beardless young man who plays his harp, and the letters ascend in a curl around his face and head, a sort of faint halo-scroll. Could this be Cybisthus, or Execestides,¹⁶ the nephew of the ruler, poet and sage Solon of Athens, Sappho's near contemporary? When the boy had sung one of Sappho's exquisite lyrics, Solon commanded that he sing it once again, "so I might take it to heart and die."¹⁷ The youth on the vase is singing mameokapoteo, which may be Sappho's maomai kai potheo, "I suffer, I desire."¹⁸

The vase is a lovely evocation of the symposium, the youth entertaining the bearded men with a lyric in the literal sense of the word, a poem sung to the accompaniment of a lyre; the lyre clearly made – as tradition says the first one was – from a good, resonating tortoise-shell.¹⁹

We are used to Greek pot painters naming their characters so that we will not confuse the story they depict. Sometimes on pots that celebrate the pleasures of the symposium they go a step further, making words emerge quite naturally from the symposiast's mouth: he sings as part of the composition itself. The images speak to us not only as imagery but also as language.

And her own images? Are they distinct in some way from those of her male contemporaries and successors? Is it part of her sensibility as a woman, or simply an inheritance from Homer, whose world is one of textures, scents and sounds, that she so often dwells upon the specifics of cloth, of apparel, the things which women make and with which they make themselves beautiful to others, to one another? The gods and goddesses are generally well turned out when they appear: they glow in their skin and in their accoutrements. Pollux in his Vocabulary says Sappho was the first poet to use the word clamus in poetry, meaning "mantle" or "robe."²⁰ He also quotes a line, "and dressed every inch of her in soft shag" (pieces of close-woven linen).²¹ This detail is extremely specific. She talks of hand cloths which are used as head scarves.²² A one-word fragment survives,²³ beudos, or "shift," which Pollux says is the same as kimberikon, "a short diaphanous dress"; she speaks, too, of the gruta, or "vanity-bag."²⁴

She talks of the Graces' arms as being "rosy,"²⁵ which is striking and humanising, until we find her calling Dawn – sometimes "golden-sandalled"²⁶ – "rosy-armed" as well, perhaps remembering Homer's rosy-fingered dawn, and the Moon too is rosy-fingered. Is the rosy-fingered moon a wry reversal of the Homeric epithet? In fragment 92, the few remaining opening words reveal an autumn wardrobe: robe, saffron, purple robe, cloak, garlands... purple.

A fascination with textures and elements of dress is certainly a mark of Sappho, whose poems have a specific quality greater, in relation to the object world, than Alcaeus' and most of her contemporaries'. For her the physical world exists, and though elements in it are emblematic and stand for other things, they retain their primary character as well. Such features respond well to feminist criticism, and yet Homer's poetry would render the approach an even richer yield. Where direct thematic parallels might be thought to exist between Homer and Sappho, a difference of tone, as much as of scale, is evident. One poem evokes a happy return to Troy, when Hector brought his beloved Andromache back from Cyprus as his bride.²⁷ It is a wedding poem, like so many of Sappho's, but also a kind of anti-Iliad or anti-Odyssey. No singer of the song would have been unaware of the later story of which this joyful chapter was a prelude. There is no war as such in Sappho, except a sweet engagement of hearts and bodies.

What of her own character? She does not have a "voice" or a marked personality in the way that modern poets seek to do, often fabricating an identity through eccentricities of language. There is nothing deliberately "I am" about Sappho, whatever we make of the feelings her poems convey. Yet from the many tones audible in her work we can deduce a complex and lively imagination. The first poem in the traditional sequence of her work, a modern editor surmises, is quoted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in On Literary Composition. It begins with a highly formal invocation of Aphrodite: "Sumptuously throned," "immortal." Soon the goddess is off her pedestal and addressing Sappho familiarly, a little impatiently, because again the poet is invoking her not as a mere formality but to enlist her aid in winning, or winning back, the affections of a girl who has stopped or not started loving her.

Love gives her authority and makes her larger-spirited than others, so she can address an uncultured woman, probably rich, on the subject of her mortality and the afterlife, with an acerbity worthy of Archilochus.

When death comes, there you'll lie, and in due course
No memory of you, no desire: you never risked
Plucking Pierian roses. Invisible also in the halls of hell,
You'll wander back and forth alone among the ghosts.²⁸

She can be sarcastic, too, to a daughter of the house of Polyanax.²⁹ And in fragment 68, the missing words and breaks cannot conceal the fact that there is considerable anger in what we overhear, as it were through the wall of time. Even here, even in the fragmentary flow that we have, the poem is not arrested on a single note of feeling; there appear to be changes in tone, which provide the poem's narrative and its occasion. It survives on a papyrus with other fragments which may relate to the same theme, that of one of Sappho's girls choosing "intimacy with ladies of the house of Penthilus." It would seem that Sappho is trying to patch up a relationship between two of her girls, one of whom has let her eye wander into the enemy's camp.

What in Homer is simile in Sappho becomes a matter of metaphorical language, sometimes personification, not familiarising but humanising, making clear the intimate connection between human endeavour and natural rhythms and patterns: "Hesperus, gathering everything the bright Dawn scattered, you call home the sheep, call home the goat, you call home the child to its mother."³⁰ The Greek use of syntactical and verbal repetitions is lovely, and its effect trails into even a literal English rendering. Byron teased out these two Greek lines to eight. Another poem evokes the apple and the apple of the eye. Dante Gabriel Rossetti renders it thus:

    Like the sweet apple which reddens on the topmost bough,
    A-top on the top-most twig, – which the pluckers forgot somehow, –
    Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now.³¹

The apple may represent, detached though it appears to be, the beautiful and unattainable girl.

And how effortlessly she draws the gods into our sphere: Dawn, the Moon and Stars come into language not as things but as beings, alive in the way that human beings are. "Come here now, soft Graces and bright-tressed Muses."³² The comic writers use hyperbole as a form of ridicule: "healthier than a pumpkin" or "balder than a cloudless sky." Sappho's use is intensive and never comical, and generally has to do with beauty and desire. The phrase "goldener than gold"³³ conveys a specific quality. The wonderful fragment "I desire neither the honey nor the bee"³⁴ is another kind of hyperbole, expressing the sufficiency of love.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus in Demosthenes³⁵ evokes the "elegant or spectacular" style, "favouring polish, not majesty." The choice of words is dictated by sound, their collocation by the need to create the most perfect harmonies. "It will always select the mellowest, least emphatic words, striving for euphony and melody and the sweetness that flows from them." Sappho's art is to dovetail, smooth and rub down, to avoid the over-emphatic and over-obvious emphases, to discover appropriate and answering harmonies. Among English poets Algernon Charles Swinburne in his notorious "Anactoria" goes all out for harmony, and Sappho is a protracted rage of passion, now tender, now sadistic, her love taking forms that would have puzzled Queen Victoria:

. . . I feel thy blood against my blood: my pain
Pains thee, and lips bruise lips, and vein stings vein.
Let fruit be crushed on fruit, let flower on flower,
Breast kindle breast, and either burn an hour.
Why wilt thou follow lesser loves? are thine
Too weak to bear these hands and lips of mine?³⁶

Where was Sappho born? Where did she live? Where did she die? What was her actual name? Psappha, Psaffo, and even Pspha are all possible variants, all attested. Were there two Sapphos, the poet and the courtesan, living on Lesbos at about the same time, whose lives have been conflated? We know as little for certain about Sappho as we do about most of the early Greek poets, though many fragments of her work survive, and her influence on poetry persists. She is the one female poet among the "Lyric Nine." The critic Leslie Kurke, having forewarned us that in archaic times poems "construct" the poet (that is, we infer a poet's life from poems at our peril, because the writing may be generic, or spoken by a persona), accepts without demur that Sappho existed and that she was a woman.³⁷ Some of her poems were clearly composed for choric recitation (the nuptial fragments suggest female occasions). Most speak from an "I" and address a single interlocutor. We overhear, and we delight in the artistry of the language. Given the fragmentary nature of the texts, we overhear snatches of poetry and few, if any, poems entire.

Indeed, the textual problems are such that when we say we are "reading" Sappho we are in fact reconstructing her from the tiniest rags of language, much of it ambiguous and elusive. The poems are almost as evanescent as the life. The patristics that surround the poems are usually morally loaded as well. In fragment 70, one phrase can be read as "shrill (breezes?)" or "clear-voiced nightingales." In fragment 99, a phrase may mean "strings which welcome the plectrum" – a musical image appropriate to Sappho – or "women who use the dildo," an insult to the descendants of Polyanax, whom Sappho is assumed to have despised. What is more, the lines may belong to Alcaeus rather than Sappho. Textual problems of one sort or another affect every single line. Only one poem survives more or less entire.

Sappho has appealed to the sexual prurience or moral severity of centuries of scholars and readers. The whispers of sexual irregularity in her conduct and the curious geographical trajectory of the legend of her life mean that she has inevitably stimulated fiction, fantasy, legend. Her homosexual affections, real or (some moral critics claim) mischievously read into the work, mean that her island Lesbos is the etymological port of departure for women who love women, and her name gives rise to the term "Sapphic love." No place nor poet confers a similar romantic legitimacy on male homosexuality. They have to make do with Uranus, a planet and the son and husband of Gea, the Earth, grandfather of Zeus and (as Hesiod tells us) father of a fearful progeny.

The kinds of poetry Sappho composed were all in the lyric mode. Poetry which is inseparable from music (melos) is described as "melic" and includes lyrics that are either ostensibly personal, seeming to relate to occasions and incidents in one life, or choral, for ceremonial use on public or semi-public occasions. In neither case is the verse necessarily didactic or satirical. It is composed in strophic form and the complexities of diction and sound patterning are deliberately heightened, poet and performer enhancing pleasure by demonstrating their skills. Such verse is to be read aloud, composed not for the page but for the ear, and most often for the entertainment of guests at a symposium. It would be wrong to assume that melic poetry is always song. The accompaniment might be rhythmic in function, it might be dramatic; it was not necessary for the performer's voice to be accompanied in the way that a Lieder or a pop singer's is. The recitative of opera may approximate more to what the symposium lyric interludes entailed. There was certainly music without words – played on the aulos, or flute, for example, which later was regularly used to accompany verse (as in the time of Pindar). There was a complementary movement towards words without music.

Apart from Sappho and woman-love, Lesbos was also, legend says, the birthplace of music's inventor, Terpander, and of Arion, who first spoke verse, and who freed the dithyramb into full expressiveness. And here the other great melic poet Alcaeus was born. No one has adequately explained why Lesbos should have received such an abundance of grace from the Muses; certainly that grace was withdrawn in later centuries. The Persians took the island in 527 BC; by the time it was "freed" half a century later, "the nymphs are departed." The poets of Lesbos composed in the Aeolic dialect; its diction and rhythms prevail in Sappho's poems. Many fragments of her work survive because later grammarians made use of them to illustrate the finer points and proprieties of Greek usage and of her dialect.

After Crete and Euboea (which is virtually part of the Greek mainland), Lesbos is the largest of the Aegean islands, as large as a little country. The north-east coast faces the Gulf of Edremit, and the bronzes and greens of the coast of Turkey are clearly visible across the straits. Athens is over 300 kilometres away. On the east side, the rough island is rich in olive groves. On the west it is more barren. The climate is temperate, mild in winter, not too hot in summer. Earthquakes have done as much as invaders to erase the civic and religious monuments from earlier times, though around the Gulf of Kalloni, which cuts deep into the island, herds of horses range freely, harking back perhaps to the horse-breeding traditions of the Troad. The hot springs still flow, and the vintage is good, though not so renowned as in classical times.

Why does it matter whether Sappho was born in Eressus or in Mytilene? Not only because the landscapes differ so much: either she was born and raised in quite a cosmopolitan seaport facing the populous coast of Asia Minor, at a time when the town looked on one of the world's principal waterways; or she grew up in a port facing out into the Aegean and the vacant expanse of sea between it and the other islands, a blank ocean where history was only then about to start happening in earnest. Modern Eressus is a few miles above the sea. The site of the ancient town is at the village of Skála Eressoú on the coast, with a rocky acropolis overhanging a singularly unattractive long beach. Not far up the coast is a fascinating petrified forest. At ancient Eressus was born Theophrastus, the peripatetic philosopher and writer of delightful "characters," who died in 287 BC. But Sappho, who is usually referred to as Sappho of Eressus, belongs in spirit and perhaps in fact to the cosmopolitan east of the island, to its Manhattan, as it were, rather than its Mar Vista. Her face featured from the first to the third centuries AD on the coinage of Mytilene. There were also coins issued at Eressus with her image, and a now-vanished herm inscribed with her name.

Probably between 630 and 620 BC, Sappho came into the world. She was a few years younger than Alcaeus³⁸ She shared with him an aristocratic background. Her father may have been called Scamander, Scamandronymus, Simon, Eumenus, Eerigyius, Ecrytus, Semus, Camon, or Etarchus. Her mother, it is agreed, was Cleis, and no dishonour to her is intended by the uncertainty of Sappho's paternity. We know the mother's name because the poet named her own daughter after her. She also recalls in a poem that her mother told her how, when she was herself young, a purple headband was a fine adornment, but if a girl had "hair brighter than a burning torch," blonde, it was preferable to bind it with wreaths of flowers.³⁹ Of her daughter Sappho says, in C. M. Bowra's translation:

I have a child; so fair
As golden flowers is she,
My Cleïs, all my care.
I'd not give her away
For Lydia's wide sway
Nor lands men long to see . . .⁴⁰

The poem is broken off. If the hair of a child or woman was blonde or yellow, it was probably assisted by what Sappho called "Scythian wood"⁴¹ or "fustic," used for dying wool and hair.

Sappho had three brothers, Eurygius, Charaxus and Larichus. Larichus, her favourite, was a wine-pourer in the town hall of Mytilene, an office held by sons of the best families⁴² Charaxus she chastises⁴³ for having dawdled in Egypt on the lewd day-bed of a courtesan, actually called Rhodopis, whom she dubs Doricha, after buying her out of servitude and sinking a fortune into her.⁴⁴ He was a merchant living in Naucratis on the Nile Delta, on the western branch of the river, not far from where Alexandria would be founded in 331 BC. We learn from another source⁴⁵ that Rhodopis, born in Thrace, was a slave of Iadmon, a Thracian merchant who lived in Mytilene (where, no doubt, Charaxus met her). Iadmon numbered among his possessions another, more famous, slave by the name of Aesop. Walter Savage Landor invented two Imaginary Conversations between the fable-teller and the courtesan.

It would help if we knew how Sappho was implicated in the complex politics of Lesbos (her surviving poems are not directly political, though we can deduce affiliations and hostilities from some of them): was she drawn into public affairs because of her family, or did she come to politics later, on the arm of a man perhaps? On doubtful authority, her husband is named as Cercylas of Andros, a trader from the northernmost of the Cyclades. It is probable that, like Alcaeus, she or her family had trouble with Pittacus of Mytilene, who led the "democracy" in Lesbos and whom we have already encountered as one of the Seven Sages.⁴⁶ These were men whose wisdom, recorded in aphorisms for the most part, was applied to the civic world. Lists of the seven vary, but every list includes four: Solon of Athens, who was an admirer of Sappho, Thales of Miletus, Bias of Priene and Pittacus. Sappho's poems record some hostility to and from the noble house of Penthilus, the house into which Pittacus married.⁴⁷

She probably went into exile in Sicily, accompanied by her daughter, sometime between 604 and 596 BC. This is why her statue was later erected in Syracuse. She returned to Lesbos when the political turbulence – whatever the cause – had subsided. There she was involved in some way with other, generally younger, women. She names and addresses her poems to several, in particular Atthis, Telesippa and Megara, "and she got a bad reputation for her unwholesome friendship with them."⁴⁸

We encounter Anactoria and Cydro and Gyrinna. There is also Damophyla, who, says Philostratus, was Sappho's successor, set up an academy and "devised love-poems and hymns, the way Sappho did."⁴⁹ One poem encourages Abanthis to pursue her passionate desire for Gongyla, and Ezra Pound made a wonderful poem out of a Gongyla fragment, echoing the sound-qualities, the inner assonances and alliterations (never crude rhymes) which are the weave of Sappho's verse:

Spring . . . . .
Too long . . . . .
Gongula . . . . .⁵⁰

Some people will say one thing is the most beautiful on earth, others will point to something else. What is actually most beautiful is "whatever a person loves." Sappho adduces Helen, and her own passion for Anactoria⁵¹ This provides a further, distinctive woman's perspective on Homer.

Was this involvement with girls, this passionate commitment to love, part of a cult of Aphrodite? Was Sappho a prostitute, as one detractor suggests? Is Horace, the Roman poet who loved her work more than any other except Catullus, right in referring to her not only as "the Aeolian girl" but as "boyish Sappho"?⁵² And Ovid puts into Sappho's own mouth the words "Women of Lesbos, you who because of your love made me contemptible, don't huddle round me any more to hear my playing."⁵³ She grew old; she may (fragment 58) refer to her own old age. There is certainly something powerful in her sense of ephemerality, a note that Housman catches:

The rainy Pleiads wester,
         Orion plunges prone,
The stroke of midnight ceases,
         And I lie down alone.⁵⁴

She has been kept alive by love. Loeb has as the conjectural closing line "love has obtained for me the brightness and beauty of the sun." An underpinning myth may be that of beautiful Tithonus, who wed the Dawn. She secured for him eternal life but not eternal youth, and his fate was cruel, a progressive, eternal wizening.

Sappho's was in all likelihood a long life, and she composed many poems. A scholar at the great library in Alexandria organised the work into nine books, the first eight in order of the metres she had chosen, the ninth to accommodate the epithalamia, or wedding poems. The first book had 1,320 lines, between sixty and seventy poems; later books were briefer. Not even a scrap of the elegiac verse survives. Some later verses attributed to her are only dubiously hers. Those who knew the body of her work claim that her sole subject was "Aphrodite and the Loves."⁵⁵

She is the only Greek woman writer with a body of work, however damaged, still to be read. Strabo in his Geography does not understate her merits: "a unique being: in the whole of history I can think of no other woman who can even remotely match her as a poet."⁵⁶ It is remarkable that, despite its manifest quality, so much work by a woman survives, and that verses are still being added, discovered in the Sahara. In a society where the public role of women was (we assume, though we know little about the social systems of Lesbos at the time) restricted, a female poet is inevitably a wonder, so fine a poet a miracle. Poetry survived initially in an oral tradition, in performance. Was there a line of women performers at the symposia, or did male poets incorporate Sappho's poems in their repertoire? Did they impersonate women in performance? Even in Athenian society, a century and more after Sappho's death, few civic occasions were open to women. There were religious festivals, the Thesmophoria for example, but that was reserved solely for women. There was no evident context for the transmission of Sappho's poems, and yet they were transmitted, not only the poems intended for ritual use but more private-seeming ones as well.

Roman poets, Catullus and Horace and Ovid most notably, made use of Sappho's poems in shaping their own. Other types of writer make use of Sappho as a figure. The comic writers and dramatists make her into a figure of ridicule. Some report that she fell in love with a ferryman of Mytilene called Phaon. The story was first designed, we might think, to clear Sappho's name of the stigma of homosexuality. Unless there was historically a second Sappho, a courtesan of Mytilene who met a heartbreak end, as Aelian conjectures, this is so unlikely a story that it is ridiculous.⁵⁷ Aphrodite favoured Phaon – who is sometimes confused with Adonis – because he carried her, disguised as an old crone, across the water without charging her a fee. (Every goddess had a hero of this sort.) She restored his youth and his considerable beauty. Aelian, more than seven centuries after Sappho, declares as fact: "Phaon, the handsomest of mortal men, was laid among lettuces by the Goddess of Love."⁵⁸

Phaon, we are told, repulsed Sappho's advances and fled to Sicily. According to this story, Sappho was not driven out of Lesbos by political pressures but left in pursuit of love. She followed Phaon, failed to gain his love, and so she travelled from Sicily to the west of Greece and threw herself off the two-thousand-foot-high rock of Leucadia on the coast of Epirus, a favourite point of adieu for lovers keen to cure themselves of desire. "To raging Seas unpity'd I'll remove, / And either cease to live, or cease to love!" Strabo says there was a temple of Apollo on the heights, and the cliff is still called Sappho's Leap. Quite apart from the implausible geography – that she pursued him from Sicily to the east coast of Greece – judging from the poems that survive, this is unlikely. If Sappho died around 550 BC, as most scholars believe, her suicide would have taken place when she was in her seventies, by which time she might have been expected to have learned restraint. Indeed, in fragment 150, she seems to chide her daughter for lamenting her natural death, using words which Socrates employed to silence his intolerable wife, Xanthippe, loudly lamenting his impending death: "It is not right for there to be lamenting in a house where the Muses' servants dwell."

The comic poets and dramatists being the gutter journalists of their day, the truths they had to tell were not factual but what Ford Madox Ford called "truth to the impression." This story inspired Ovid, the great Roman amorist exiled from Italy for exercising his amours in the wrong circles, or failing to turn informer, to invent an epistle from Sappho to Phaon, a poem translated by an overheated nineteen-year-old Alexander Pope in 1707:

No more the Lesbian Dames my Passion move,
Once the dear Objects of my guilty Love;
All other loves are lost in only thine,
Ah Youth ungrateful to a Flame like mine!

The vocalic values of the third line are uncannily apposite, true to the art of Ovid and through his to Sappho's.

What we know as fact is only a little more certain than what the comic poets tell us. Was there in Lesbos a female group of hetairai (mistresses, unmarried women) parallel to Alcaeus' male symposium? In fragment 160, Sappho declares that she will sing to delight her female companions who are called hetairai, a word which for her was not burdened with moral denigration but which later came to mean "courtesans" or something worse.

There may have been competing "colleges" of women, and Andromeda and Gorgo are named by Maximus of Tyre as her rivals.⁵⁹ Did her group lounge about, drink and strum like the male symposiasts? Or was it Sappho's vocation to instruct girls leading them towards marriage? Did she run a kind of academy or finishing school teaching what one commentator calls "only the noblest girls" of Lesbos and Ionia, with perhaps other students from further off – boarders – such as Anagora of Miletus, Gongula of Colophon and Eunica of Salamis?⁶⁰ Was it her task to initiate them? Did she teach them, too, to make lyric verses?

Her poems generally touch upon a girl's life between childhood and marriage: would it be reductive to regard the poems as in some sense pedagogic – teaching not only expression but types of feeling, as well as ways of regulating feeling? Are they exercises for the voice, the hands, the dancing body and the shaping spirit of her charges? The epithalamia, composed for performance to a wider audience, were in all likelihood "put on" at actual weddings in Lesbos. Her dialogue poem, for members of the cult of Adonis,⁶¹ was also intended for more public performance. Leslie Kurke suggests that Sappho led "a thiasos of young women, engaging in ritual homoeroticism to prepare them for marriage." It is not unthinkable: in a sense, such an arrangement might replicate some of the purpose and dynamic of the male symposium.

What if we take, as readers down the ages have tended to do, Sappho's first person as a genuine "I," trying at the same time to keep the "I" clear of our individualistic and bourgeois investments in first-person poetry, our hunger for disclosure, confession and individual voice? Sappho's desiring "I" is artful, aware that what she says has to be true to the form she has chosen and must be suitable for performance before an audience; whether a male or female symposium or a class of girls it is for us, and the poem, to determine. Kurke likes this approach, though it breaks the very rules she establishes for reading male lyric poets: "we might read the more intimate and personal quality of Sappho's poetry as a phenomenon of the marginalization and containment to the private sphere of women as a group in ancient Greek culture. Thus the poet spoke intimately to other women, with whom she shared the experiences of seclusion, disempowerment, and separation." Would Sappho have had any sense of what Kurke means? Or is Kurke, like earlier moral critics, applying familiar contemporary ideology to the unfamiliar and unknowable? Scholarly criticism and scholarly projection (which is a form of invention and distortion) are different in kind.⁶²

The longing for other women or for girls taken from her to be married, or friends far away, compelled to go by marriage or by exile, not out of their own desire or on their own quests, might have given rise to Sappho's peculiarly plangent and erotic tonalities. "Because of this pattern of separation, memory played a much greater role in the texture of Sappho's poetry than that of the other lyric poets (and conjures up for us perhaps a stronger sense of the speaker's interiority)." Yet it is not the poetry of separation that makes us return to Sappho over and over again. It is the poetry of presence. The world is present, and the beloved. Even when she – or he – is far away, the beloved is evoked or conjured. In Sappho, too, poetry does make something happen. The magic in it has nothing to do with hocus-pocus, everything to do with the unaccountable force of love which has found phrases and patterns to keep it real. As Horace remarks in the Odes, "her fiery passions, committed to the lyre, live on."⁶³

Alcaeus, since he knew her and her work, is the best contemporary witness – if we assume, that is, that the words attributed to him are actually by him. He called her "lilac-haired, sacred, sweet-smiling Sappho."⁶⁴ Dulce ridentem, as Roman Catullus would write in a translation of and a tribute to her. There was something less, and more, than sexual love between them: they are poetic complementarities, and together they provide a lyric sufficiency. A whole tradition springs from them.

Notes

¹ Administrator.
² "Some say there are nine Muses: how careless! Look – Sappho of Lesbos is the tenth!" test 60.
³ Paul Zanker, The Mask of Socrates, trans. Alan Shapiro (Berkeley, 1995), p. 26.
⁴ test fr I.
⁵ Athenaeus, Scholars at Dinner, test 38, attributes the statement to Menaechmus: the pectis, Menaechmus says, is the same as the magadis, an instrument with twenty strings; David A. Campbell, the editor, tells us it was Lydian or Thracian in origin.
⁶ David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry I: Sappho and Alcaeus (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982), p. x.
⁷ fr 176.
⁸ Campbell, op. cit., test 37.
⁹ fr 31.
¹⁰ fr 165.
¹¹ fr 48.
¹² fr 47.
¹³ fr 44a.
¹⁴ The Aeolic dactylic tetrameter acatalectic.
¹⁵ fr 130.
¹⁶ J. M. Edmonds, Elegy and Iambus II (London, 1931), p. 109.
¹⁷ Aelian, quoted in Stobaeus, Anthology, in Campbell, op. cit., p. 13.
¹⁸ François Lissarrague, Greek Vases: The Athenians and Their Images (New York, 1999, 2001).
¹⁹ See p. 58, this volume, on Hermes' lyre.
²⁰ fr 54.
²¹ fr 100.
²² fr 101.
²³ fr 177.
²⁴ fr 179.
²⁵ fr 53.
²⁶ fr 123.
²⁷ fr 44.
²⁸ fr 55.
²⁹ fr 155.
³⁰ fr 104a.
³¹ fr 105a.
³² fr 128.
³³ fr 156.
³⁴ fr 146.
³⁵ test 42.
³⁶ Swinburne, "Anactoria," ll. 11-16.
³⁷ Kurke, "The Strangeness of 'Song Culture': Archaic Greek Poetry," in Taplin, Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A New perspective (Oxford, 2000) pp. 75 ff.
³⁸ Some accounts make her slightly older than he.
³⁹ fr 98, preserved on the very earliest papyrus, from the third century BC.
⁴⁰ fr 132.
⁴¹ fr 210.
⁴² fr 203.
⁴³ In several poems, cf. 213, series of fragments.
⁴⁴ See Herodotus, The Histories of Herodotus, trans. George Rawlinson (London, 1942), II 135. He confuses Doricha with Rhodopis. "Rhodopis really arrived in Egypt under the conduct of Xantheus the Samian; she was brought there to exercise her trade, but was redeemed for a vast sum by Charaxus, a Mytilenaean, the son of Scamandronymus, and brother of Sappho the poetess. After thus obtaining her freedom, she remained in Egypt, and, as she was very beautiful, amassed great wealth, for a person in her condition; not, however, enough to enable her to erect such a work as this pyramid. Anyone who likes may go and see to what the tenth part of her wealth amounted, and he will thereby learn that her riches must not be imagined to have been very wonderfully great. Wishing to leave a memorial of herself in Greece, she determined to have something made the like of which was not to be found in any temple, and to offer it at the shrine at Delphi. So she set apart a tenth of her possessions, and purchased with the money a quantity of iron spits, such as are fit for roasting oxen whole, whereof she made a present to the oracle. They are still to be seen there, lying of a heap, behind the altar which the Chians dedicated, opposite the sanctuary. Naucratis seems somehow to be the place where such women are most attractive. First there was this Rhodopis of whom we have been speaking, so celebrated a person that her name came to be familiar to all the Greeks; and, afterwards, there was another, called Archidice, notorious throughout Greece, though not so much talked of as her predecessor. Charaxus, after ransoming Rhodopis, returned to Mytilene, and was often lashed by Sappho in her poetry. But enough has been said on the subject of this courtesan."
⁴⁵ Photius; see fr 202.
⁴⁶ See pp. 191-2.
⁴⁷ frs 71, 98b, 213.
⁴⁸ Campbell, op. cit., fr 2, p. 7.
⁴⁹ test 21.
⁵⁰ fr 28.
⁵¹ fr 16.
⁵² test 34: "Boyish Sappho modifies Archilochus' muse by her choice of metre..." (Horace, Epistles).
⁵³ Campbell, op. cit., p. 20.
⁵⁴ fr 168b.
⁵⁵ Campbell, op. cit., p. xii, referring to Himerus: test 50.
⁵⁶ test 7.
⁵⁷ test 4.
⁵⁸ fr 211b.
⁵⁹ test 20, fr 155.
⁶⁰ test fr 2.
⁶¹ fr 140.
⁶² Kurke, op. cit., p. 75.
⁶³ test 51.
⁶⁴ Alcaeus, fr 384.

The First Poets:
Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets
by Michael Schmidt

Alfred A. Knopf
New York

Copyright © 2004 by Michael Schmidt
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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