Stung With Love Read online

  Sappho in Context

  Throughout the Hellenic world the seventh and sixth centuries BCE were a time of transition from inherited kingships, such as Homer describes in the Iliad and Odyssey, to a world in which tyranny, oligarchy and eventually democracy were viable alternatives. The Archaic Greek world (seventh–mid-fifth centuries BCE) remained the ‘agonistic’ (or competitive) society which we encounter in Homer, with honour (timē) as the commodity of highest value. However, with the rise of the polis (or city-state) we find a proliferation of the unconstitutional dictators called ‘tyrants’. The period named after them, the Age of Tyrants, is characterized by conflicts between these rulers and the general population, on the one hand, and aristocrats (the class to which most Archaic Greek poets belonged), on the other.

  For several centuries before Sappho’s time, a family-clan called the Penthelids ruled Mytilene. Like many royal families, the Penthelids claimed descent from a legendary founder, and their patriarch, Penthilus, was said to be the illegitimate son of two mythic figures, Orestes and Ergane, daughter of Aegisthus. According to legend, Penthilus led the Aeolian migration from central and northern Greece (Boeotia and southern Thrace) to Lesbos. The Penthelids were pre-eminent among other noble families on Lesbos through the eighth century BCE, and only they and other arms-bearing landholders counted as citizens. Their government was essentially a monarchy, though the king would meet with the nobles out of courtesy before presenting his policies. Our earliest sources depict the seventh-century Penthelids as cruel – ‘going about striking people with clubs’ (Aristotle, Politics 1311b26). Like other tyrants of the period, this family seems to have surrounded itself with a bodyguard of club-bearers. There are several possible reasons for these security measures: the seventh century saw the colonial expansion of Lesbos, military campaigns in the Troad (the area around Troy) and greater mercantile activity. The aristocrats became wealthy from these activities and most likely chafed under the Penthelids’ rule. On two occasions during the century leaders of aristocratic factions attempted to overthrow the monarchy: first, Megacles ‘with his friends’ rushed the Penthelids but, though he killed many of them, the clan remained in power (Aristotle, Politics 1311b26, b29). Subsequently Smardis killed the last Penthelid king, aptly named after his family’s legendary forebear. This assassination did lead to a change in government, though Smardis, according to Aristotle, acted only to avenge his wife’s rape. We hear little of the Penthelids in the sixth century, and it seems that they became merely one among a number of rival clans.

  The other aristocratic families subsequently competed for supremacy and no stable government emerged. Hetaireiai contributed to the divisiveness on Mytilene, in that they promoted loyalty to clan (fathers, brothers, uncles and more distant family) over the state. The songs of Alcaeus provide vivid glimpses into his hetaireia. We find him praising ancestral deeds and weapons and galvanizing political views. Sappho also clearly belonged to an aristocratic family: she had access to luxury items and education, she seems to have shared some of Alcaeus’ political views, and her brothers held an honorary government post and exported wine.

  To put an end to strife between these clans, Melanchrus, a noble himself, was set up in 612 BCE to rule in the same manner as the Penthelid kings. He became the first ‘tyrant’ of Mytilene, though it should be pointed out that ‘tyrant’ is not necessarily pejorative at this time – it simply means a king who came to the throne by other than hereditary means. A number of noble families, including that of Alcaeus, conspired to kill Melanchrus and selected Pittacus (c. 640–568 BCE) as tyrant-killer. The plot was successful, and the government then reverted to clan-strife. There was no immediate conflict, however, because many nobles soon left Mytilene to campaign against the Athenians in the Sigean War (608 BCE).

  The Athenians had contested the Lesbian claim to the Troad (the region where the legendary city of Troy, now Hissarlik, was located). When the Athenians were about to attack Mytilene, Pittacus challenged their general Phrynon to single combat, with the understanding that the result should decide the war. Pittacus won but, though again the hero, did not seize absolute power. A nobleman Myrsilus was appointed the second tyrant of Mytilene instead. Alcaeus describes Myrsilus’ rise to power as a ‘wave again, greater than before’ (fr. 6.1–2), and Sappho herself refers, with some disapproval, to Myrsilus’ family in a patchy fragment (fr. 98b.7).2 Alcaeus’ family, again in association with Pittacus, conspired to overthrow this second tyrant. At the last moment, however, Pittacus backed out, and the plot failed. He then rose to a position of second-in-command under Myrsilus, and the nobles involved in the plot went into exile in the backcountry of Lesbos. Alcaeus presents a pitiable image of himself during his first exile:

  The property which my father

  And father’s father grew old possessing

  Amid citizens always killing each other

  – from this I have been driven, an exile

  Beyond the hinterland. Like Onomakles,

  I settled here alone in the wolf-thickets.

  (fr. 130b, 5–10)

  During the tyranny of Myrsilus Sappho may have had to go into exile in Sicily, possibly because her family was involved in the plot. In a tattered fragment that refers obscurely to ‘exile’ Sappho seems, for a time, to be cut off from luxuries and utters a frustrated complaint to Kleïs (most likely her daughter):

  I do not have an

  Ornately woven

  Bandeau to hand you,

  Kleïs. From

  Where would it come?

  The Roman orator Cicero (102–43 BCE) mentions a statue of Sappho in the town hall at Syracuse on Sicily but there is no way to determine whether her visit there occasioned a memorial (Against Verres 2.4.125). Both the dates and the very occurrence of Sappho’s exile are contested.

  When Myrsilus died c. 597 BCE, the exiled nobles returned to Mytilene and celebrated, but Pittacus sought to gain further legitimacy among the Lesbian nobility by taking a wife from the Penthelids. Though Sappho’s poems do not comment directly on this union, a patchy fragment does refer, with contempt, to a Mika’s affiliation with this family: ‘I will not allow you… you opted for the friendship of the daughters of the Penthelids… you of bad character’ (fr. 71.2–4). Pittacus then drove his worst enemies again into exile (Alcaeus’ clan among them) and ruled Mytilene as aesymnētēs (or ruler) for ten years until he resigned in 585 BCE. He passed laws discouraging debauchery and other sumptuary laws aimed at aristocrats, including restrictions on funeral expenditure. For all the invective levelled against him in the songs of Alcaeus, Pittacus came to be regarded as one of the Seven Sages of Greece.

  Social Context and Sappho’s Group

  As we have seen, evidence from the poems and later testimony suggests that Sappho was an aristocrat who had a position of leadership over a group consisting of females, most of whom were in a state of premarital adolescence. She addresses females familiarly and affectionately in the plural as korai (girls), paides (children or girls) and parthenoi (maidens). Parthenoi specifically indicates adolescent females in the age group between puberty and marriage. On occasion Sappho addresses these girls as hetairai (companions or fellow group-members). Hetaira in male discourse comes to mean not just ‘female companion’ but ‘prostitute’, and it is likely that the predominance of this second sense contributed to the tradition that Sappho was herself a prostitute.

  The nature of Sappho’s all-female group is a vexed and contentious issue. Scholars have presented a number of competing theories: Sappho as schoolmistress, a performer at symposia and even a leader of a thiasos (religious community). Since there is evidence both in favour of and against each of these theories, it will be helpful to review them briefly before arriving at a general conclusion.

  The School

  Numerous ancient sources attest that Sappho was a teacher of young women, and the great German nineteenth-century scholar Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, on the basis of this evidence, argued that Sapp
ho was headmistress of a Mädchenpensionat, or boarding school for girls, which operated along the lines of nineteenth-century boarding schools. In an attempt to lay this interpretation to rest, Holt Parker contends that ‘nowhere in any poem does Sappho teach, or speak about teaching, anything to anyone’,3 but this is true only in terms of formal education as we understand it today. One of Sappho’s predecessors, the epic poet Homer, was regarded as first and foremost among poet–teachers and, it was alleged, could provide a complete education in himself. Homeric education consisted simply of hearing and memorizing excerpts from his epics – there was no set curriculum involving reading, writing and arithmetic. We do not find ‘schools’ as we understand them until late-fifth-century Athens, and it is in this period that the comic poet Aristophanes, aware of the change, caricatures the outdated style of education: his Stronger Argument, a character in the Clouds, explains that the old education consisted primarily of memorizing traditional poetry and ‘intoning the musical modes [the students’] fathers passed down to them’ (966–72). No doubt Sappho was not running a boarding school for girls in the early sixth century BCE in just the way that modern scholars might imagine.

  Like the other Archaic poets, however, Sappho does pass on advice. We find the most obvious examples in gnomic statements, that is, traditional wisdom pithily expressed so as to be remembered and handed down. Such expressions in Sappho are as didactic as similar statements in Hesiod’s practical manual for farmers, the Works and Days (c. 700 BCE). Take the following example:

  Wealth without real worthiness

  Is no good for the neighbourhood;

  But their proper mixture is

  The summit of beatitude.

  In a largely preliterate culture, formal education as we understand it did not exist, and much instruction consisted of just such pithy, memorable statements.

  As part of her duties as poet Sappho would have trained choruses to perform her choral songs. Though it is difficult in many instances to determine which songs were performed by a chorus, the epithalamia (or wedding songs) have been accepted as choral since antiquity, and the composition of public songs, including epithalamia, would have entailed the training of the chorus and probably the participation of the singer and/or accompanist at the performance. Several fragments suggest that Sappho also instructed girls in monodic (or solo) song. For example, in one we find a speaker exhorting another female to ‘please pick up [her] lyre, / Praise Gongyla’. Musical training would have comprised much of Archaic Greek education for the elite, and another fragment specifically names a Moisopolōn domos (‘House of Those Dedicated to the Muses’ or maybe even ‘Conservatory’):

  Here is the reason: it is wrong

  To play a funeral song

  In the Musicians’ House –

  It simply would not be decorous.

  Though again it is difficult to be certain, ‘the Musicians’ House’ was most likely an institution which provided training in choral and monodic song, if not other arts as well.

  Anne Burnett argues that Sappho’s songs were educational in a more general sense, in that ‘an older woman taught [girls] what it was to be a girl, that they might better become women later on’.4 Thus the speaker of one fragment invites an older woman to teach a community of girls ‘just what to do’ at a wedding ceremony:

  Because once on a time you were

  Young, sing of what is taking place,

  Talk to us for a spell, confer

  Your special grace.

  For we march to a wedding – yes,

  You know it well.

  In the face of this evidence, Martin West’s summation of the issue is inevitable: ‘later writers saw [Sappho] as a chorus-leader or teacher… We cannot tell how accurate a construction this is, but it must have been based on the impression given by the poems, and it is consistent with what we know.’5 Whatever the nature of her group, we can be confident that Sappho passed on proverbial wisdom and instructed girls in choral and probably monodic song. She would no doubt have been very influential on females, especially during their post-pubescent and premarital years. Sappho’s ‘school’ may have been as informal a gathering as the group of young men around Socrates in Athens in the late fifth century BCE. If we must speak of a ‘school’ at all, it more resembled a finishing school and conservatory than a boarding school.

  The Symposium and the Hetaireia

  Drawing on parallels in the poems of Alcaeus and Anacreon, Parker argues that Sappho performed her songs at aristocratic drinking parties called symposia.6 Solo performance was standard at symposia as at hetaireiai, which were, in essence, politically oriented symposia. Parker’s thesis is most revolutionary in its claim that Sappho sang of her love not for girls but for other adult women at all-female symposia. Since there is no evidence to corroborate female symposia and hetaireiai and since many of Sappho’s songs were clearly written for choral rather than monodic performance, this view is untenable. All the same, as Burnett explains, ‘[Sappho’s] circle, like the hetaireia, had a customary role to play in Lesbian society, and it too was aristocratic, musical and constrained only by bonds of love and loyalty.’7 Furthermore, with its clear-cut boundaries dividing the included from the excluded, Sappho’s group served a social function similar to that of a hetaireia.

  Hetaireiai coalesced the values which those included in the group shared and ridiculed those who lacked them. Thus, Alcaeus composed a song for his that ‘focused upon much loved objects and reminded his audience of the solidarity of his band of exiled nobles, the purpose which united them against external forces’.8 Alcaeus’ definitive list consists of weapons associated with famous battles in which his forebears had played a part:

  The whole ceiling has been fitted out for the war-god:

  Bright helmets, from which white horse-hair crests

  Nod to us, decorations for the heads of men;

  Gleaming bronze greaves [shin armor] on hidden pegs,

  Ramparts to stout arrows; fresh linen corselets,

  And hollow shields set down on the floor…

  We have not been able to forget these things

  Since we first took up this task.

  (fr. 140)

  Sappho provides similar litanies, but hers consist of decorative items:

  With sweet red garments, bracelets made of gold,

  Beautiful baubles, ivory and untold

  Chalices chased in silver.

  This taste for finery set standards of dress and appearance. We frequently encounter floral accessories and perfumes (e.g. ‘lavish infusions in queenly quantities’) in her songs, and these beautiful objects and exotic scents clearly had importance for those who wore and admired them. The fragments that linger over details of toilette and fashion imply membership in an exclusive group – the kalai (the ‘gorgeous ones’) who presented themselves in the accepted manner:

  As for you girls, the gorgeous (kalai) ones,

  There will be no change in my plans.

  Sappho’s frequent disapproval of outré taste further underscores the importance of luxuries to her group. We hear of a number of rivals, and the names Andromeda and Gorgo, in particular, recur both as threats and objects of ridicule. The name ‘Gorgo’ may well be a derisive nickname (it means ‘Gorgon’), and Andromeda, we are told, is the rustic female mocked thus:

  What farm girl, garbed in fashions from the farm

  And witless of the way

  A hiked hem would display

  Her ankles, captivates you with her charm?

  It is striking that the déclassée Andromeda is criticized here not for being too free with her favours but for not knowing how to present herself in an enticing manner. At least one criterion for inclusion in this group was dressing attractively or, as Burnett puts it, giving ‘a sign that one was ready to please’.9 In the end, though there is no evidence that Sappho’s group was politically oriented and though it was certainly not a hetaireia like Alcaeus’ all-male club, it operated socially along similar lin
es, using status symbols to define inclusion and songs to express its values.

  Thiasos (or Religious Community)

  We have seen evidence that Sappho’s group involved the cultivation of girls in preparation for marriage and that musical training was part of this preparation. One theory takes this a step further, arguing that Sappho’s group was a thiasos that provided an officially sanctioned rite of passage for adolescent females, but it is difficult to confirm given the absence of contemporary Lesbian evidence for female thiasoi beyond the hints in Sappho’s poems.

  Scholars often cite as a parallel the Spartan public upbringing called the agōgē in which boys and girls separately participated. It is probable that the agōgē for girls began in Archaic times and that the Spartan institution was therefore contemporary with Sappho’s group. Whereas participation in the agōgē was obligatory for the daughters of citizens, membership in Sappho’s circle seems to have been voluntary and even international – that is, if her ‘disciples’ Anagora and Gongyla did, in fact, come to Mytilene from Miletus and Colophon. Furthermore, since Spartan girls lived at home during the agōgē, they were not separated from their families as they were going through the initiation process. Claude Calame, the leading proponent of the thiasos theory, reads the terms adikein (‘to commit an injustice’) and philotes (‘love based on mutual confidence’) in ‘Subtly bedizened Aphrodite’ as evidence supporting an institutional base for Sappho’s group: ‘To betray Sappho was not only to betray the intimate reciprocal relationship of philia [mutual love] the poetess was setting up with the girls of her group, but it meant also to break the bonds sanctioned by a contract.’10 According to Calame, the group provided post-pubescent, unmarried girls with an environment regulated by rules and with activities such as musical training.