Stung With Love Page 3
Evidence from Sparta also provides evidence for homoerotic attachments like those portrayed in Sappho’s poems. In a discussion of Spartan pederasty, Plutarch explains that ‘this sort of love was so esteemed among them that fair and noble women also loved maidens’ (Life of Lycurgus 18.4). The Spartan poet Alcman’s First and Third Patheneia (‘Maiden Songs’, late seventh century BCE) provide evidence of socially sanctioned homoerotic attachments. In the First a chorus of maidens expresses admiration for the awe-striking beauty of its chorus leaders, Agido and Hagesichora. In the Third the chorus looks on Astymeloisa’s beauty with ‘limb-loosening desire’ (61). It is striking that, within this socially sanctioned context, homoerotic expression became a standard theme in public song. Sappho and her girls express similar admiration for members of their sex and sometimes even use similar images. When writing in the first person Sappho expresses a lover’s passion towards other females, and, as Calame observes, it is difficult to deny ‘that the fragments evoking the power of Eros, to mention only these, refer to a real love that was physically consummated’.11 Sappho’s public profession of homosexuality in song, in a sense, provides further support for a socially and religiously sanctioned basis for her group, since, as Chris Bennett explains, ‘Sappho’s feelings could not have been expressed openly unless it had been socially sanctioned, nor socially sanctioned unless religiously sanctioned.’12 There was no local evidence to corroborate the all-female milieu presented in many of Sappho’s poems until 1995 when the Polyxena Sarcophagus, dated to 525–500 BCE, was excavated from a tomb in the Northern Troad. One long side of the sarcophagus represents females in an intimate setting: one holds a mirror, while another pats a third affectionately on the back. Though this scene is not erotic, we can at least be certain that Sappho’s intimate female group had a nearby and roughly contemporary parallel.
To determine whether Sappho’s group was a thiasos we must determine whether it was religious or secular in nature. We find invocations of numerous female deities in Sappho’s poems: Aphrodite, Hera, the Muses, the Graces and the Nereids. While reading the extant fragments, one gets the sense that Sappho is giving Greek mythology a feminine slant. Though Zeus is the ‘father of gods and men’ and the most important of the Olympian deities, he is never an addressee of prayers and is mentioned only in relation to his daughters, Aphrodite, Artemis, the Graces and the Muses. The virgin goddess Artemis appears in one narrative fragment (‘Artemis made the pledge no god can break’) but is never invoked. Athena, another virgin goddess and perhaps the most prominent deity in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, is never mentioned in Sappho. Apollo (as Paeon) and Hermes appear once, and each time in a publicly oriented and Homericizing fragment. Eros, son of Aphrodite, is the most prominent male divinity. Even with numerous invocations of female divinities, however, it is difficult to determine whether Sappho’s hymns were religious in nature or intended only as performance pieces. Writing in the 1950s, Denys Page argues that her hymns must be ‘records of personal experience, designed to be heard rather by mortals than gods, to be judged by the standards not of priesthood but of poetry’.13 Page’s conclusion most likely results from discomfort with the way that Sappho mingles the religious and the erotic. The assumption that these elements cannot coexist, however, is based on a misconception of the jurisdiction of Aphrodite. Surely Aphrodite Pandemos (‘of all the people’), who was responsible for lower sexual life and in particular for prostitution, received hymnal entreaties far more explicit than what we find in Sappho. In short, erotic images and situations do not preclude a song from being a sincere address to Aphrodite. ‘Leave Crete and sweep to this blest temple’, for example, simultaneously presents a cult setting and ‘an extended and multiperspective metaphor for women’s sexuality’.14 In contrast to Page, Walter Burkert asserts that ‘the worship of Aphrodite finds its most personal and most complete expression in the poems of Sappho’.15
Sappho frequently uses formal hymnal structure. ‘Subtly bedizened Aphrodite’ breaks down into the tripartite structure of a traditional kletic hymn (or hymn that summons a god): invocation and summons (1–5), hypomnēsia or citation of previous requests and the god’s past deeds (5–24) and entreaty (25–8). Another hymn, which, as far as we can tell, was not erotic, also adheres closely to this structure:
Reveal your graceful figure here,
Close to me, Hera. I make entreaty
Just as the kings once made their prayer,
The famous Atreidai –
Winning victories by the score
At Troy first, then at sea, they sailed
The channel to this very shore,
Tried leaving but failed
Until they prayed to you, the Saviour
Zeus and Thyone’s charming son.
Like long ago, then, grant this favour,
As you have done…
Nothing in this hymn suggests that it is not sincere. Furthermore, even the erotic hymns are not in any way subversive – they are often striking but never shocking. To make this distinction clear, we need only consider Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer’ (1989), a pop song that also mingles the religious and the erotic. The lyrics, which at one point seem simultaneously to evoke genuflection and fellatio, could be interpreted as intended to shock the devout. Sappho’s erotic hymns, in contrast, do not have a sharp ironic edge. Though, like Aphrodite in Sappho’s most famous hymn, they smile on occasion, they never sneer. If the hymns are subversive, they are so in subtler ways. In the end, though at least some of the hymns are genuine addresses to deities, we cannot be certain that her group had a religious affiliation. Even if it did not, however, Sappho’s poems make clear that certain deities were important in the circle’s everyday life.
Though we cannot with certainty identify Sappho’s group as a thiasos, the literary evidence from Sparta and material evidence from Hellenized Asia corroborate the impressions created by her fragments: the group consisted exclusively of females and involved an (official or unofficial) rite of passage that began after puberty and ended with social integration through marriage. Operating as a discrete social organism, the group had a strong sense of what sorts of taste and behaviour marked it as special. Furthermore, Sappho and a chorus of girls, on occasion, sang genuinely religious hymns and performed songs in public. As these performances required training, Sappho instructed the girls in voice and music, and the songs which the girls learned provided further instruction through role models in the same way as characters in Homeric epic did for males. All of this training served to ease the transition from adolescent to married life and make the girls more attractive as brides.
Epithalamia
Sappho’s epithalamia and Alcaeus’ mythic ‘Marriage of Peleus and Thetis’ comprise the entirety of our evidence for wedding rituals in Lesbos in the late seventh/early sixth centuries BCE. Though practices would have varied from region to region and through time, it will be helpful to provide a general outline of Ancient Greek wedding rituals based on these poems and on comparative evidence.
In fifth-century Athens the engagement ceremony, called engeuēsis, involved a legally binding agreement between the bride’s kyrios (or legal guardian), who was usually her father, and the groom. At this time, the dowry was agreed upon, and oaths were sworn in front of witnesses. The bride usually was not present, and the groom often did not see the bride until her unveiling on the day of the wedding. In a famous monologue in which she argues that women are ‘the most abused creatures of all’, the mythic Medea complains of the bride’s powerlessness in this situation: ‘we bid a very high price in dowries only to buy a man to be master of our bodies… then comes the greatest risk: will we end up with a good man or a bad?’ (Euripides, Medea 231–5). Sappho makes no mention of this ceremony other than the extravagant dowry which Andromache brings with her to Troy. The epithalamia of hers we possess belong to the next stage.
The wedding ceremony proper, called the ekdosis, involved the ‘giving away’ of the bride to her new kyrios, the groo
m. A banquet was held at the father of the bride’s house which included male and female kin and members of the community. Here offerings were made to the gods and wedding hymns were sung. Next, a wedding procession singing ritualized and bawdy songs transferred the bride to the house of the groom.
‘Carpenters, raise the rafter-beam’ most likely was performed at the banquet, as it describes the arrival of the groom separately from that of the bride:
Carpenters, raise the rafter-beam
(For Hymen’s wedding hymn)
A little higher to make room
(For Hymen’s wedding hymn)
Because here comes the groom –
An Ares more imposing than
A giant, a terribly big man.
The groom is ‘terribly big’ here not only because of his pride but because his penis, we are to infer, is fantastically erect. Here we first encounter the bawdy humour which appears in many of the epithalamia. Sappho provides us with a glorified portrayal of the wedding-procession in ‘Idaos, then, the panting emissary’:
… And sweetly then the double-oboe’s cadence
Mingled with rhythmic rattles as the maidens
Sang sacred songs. A fine sound strode the air.
Cups on the roadside, vessels everywhere,
Cassia and frankincense were mixed with myrrh.
Old women (venerable as they were)
Warbled and trilled. The men all in a choir
Summoned first that lover of the lyre,
The long-range archer, Paeon, then extolled
Andromache and Hector, godlike to behold.
Upon arriving at the groom’s house, the bride and groom went straight to the bridal chamber (thalamos) where for the first time the bride removed her veil. This unveiling (or anakalyptēria) was in many instances the first time that the groom saw the bride. We also have clear evidence for the removal of a ‘bridal belt’ (zōma, zōnē in Classical Greek) in Lesbian wedding ritual. Henceforth the bride and groom were considered married. Outside the bridal chamber while the bride and groom consummated their union, loud wedding songs were sung to scare away evil spirits. Giulia Sissa argues that they also served ‘to cover the cry that [the bride] will emit in the midst of her first embrace’.16 The following fragment was most likely sung outside of the marriage chamber:
And may the maidens all night long
Celebrate your shared love in song
And the bride’s bosom,
A violet-blossom.
Get up, now! Rouse that gang of fellows –
Your boys – and we shall sleep as well as
The bird that intones
Piercing moans.
In addition to the songs sung before the chamber door, one groomsman was customarily appointed ‘doorkeeper’. When the bride’s friends staged a ritual attempt to ‘save’ the bride, he would repel them. In the following fragment, the doorkeeper’s feet are broad both so that he can better guard the door and so that the chorus can hint that he has an enormous penis:
It would take seven fathoms to span
The feet of the doorkeeper (the best man);
His sandals are five cows’ worth of leather
And ten shoemakers stitched them together.
True to her duties as public poet, Sappho presents only moments of joy in the festal epithalamia, though, inevitably, the process must often have been traumatic for the bride. Lyn Wilson observes that, for ‘the young woman moving from the safety of her parent’s house or the sensual, female environment of the Sapphic community, the experience is perhaps more ambivalent than this unqualified festivity would suggest’.17
Style
Until very recently Sappho’s longest and best-preserved songs all had to do with erotic situations. With the discovery of a fragment in the Cologne University Archives in 2004, we acquired a new, nearly complete song, ‘Girls, chase the violet-bosomed Muses’ bright’, in which the singer laments old age rather than frustrated love. In fact, a minority of Sappho’s songs are erotic. A survey reveals a remarkable range and versatility: Sappho narrates epic events in a Homeric style as well as recounts what presents itself as intense personal experience in a distinctive voice. We at times admire ‘the uncommon objectivity of her demeanor towards her own extremity’ and at others appreciate a radical subjectivity which can envisage comparisons such as ‘more golden than gold’ (fr. 156.2).18
Scholars often comment on Sappho’s ability to activate multiple perspectives within the same poem and to elide differences between subject and object. The singer of ‘Abanthis, please pick up your lyre’, for example, exhorts Abanthis to sing of her affection for Gongyla, thereby drawing attention to her own act of singing. This singer goes on to state that, when she notices Abanthis is aroused by Gongyla’s attire, she is herself ‘in ecstasy’. The singer thus identifies herself with Abanthis (who is herself a singer) and feels excitement for a second absent girl through her own identification with the first. As part of this process, the singer strives to make herself more appealing to Abanthis, and the two characters are both subjects who feel desire and objects which rouse it – they are mutually lover and beloved. Feminist scholars have pointed out that, in contrast to the power-dynamic common in masculine erotic encounters, the singer ‘does not attempt to impose her will upon the person she loves but instead, through engaging appeals, tries to elicit a corresponding response from her’.19
We can partly attribute Sappho’s ability to bring multiple perspectives into play to the variety of roles she was obliged to play in life: she was a female who engaged with a male-dominated poetic tradition and performed in a male-centric society. She exhibits double consciousness – a simultaneous awareness of the traditional male-authorized view and of her own distinctly feminine ‘take’. Jack Winkler explains that double consciousness develops naturally in women in a male-prominent society, who are ‘like a linguistic minority in a culture whose public actions are all conducted in the majority language. To participate even passively in the public arena the minority must be bilingual; the majority feels no such need to learn the minority’s language.’20 A contemporary poet, Rachel Hadas, succinctly describes the nature of this polyglottal feminine discourse in The Language of Women:
But women’s lives are fissured and to show it
A multitasking tongue is what we need…
we women know
at least two modes of speech and maybe three:
the public and the private, high and low.21
The poems which interact with and reinterpret Homer best exhibit Sappho’s double consciousness. In ‘Subtly bedizened Aphrodite’, for example, Sappho evokes Homeric divine machinery for what is ostensibly a personal matter: the named ‘Sappho’ in the poem begins her hymn in much the same manner as Diomedes in Book 5 of the Iliad. Aphrodite then comes to Sappho in a chariot drawn by swallows just as Hera and Athena descend to Diomedes in a war chariot drawn by flying horses. To drive this extended allusion to the Iliad home, Sappho entreats Aphrodite to be her summachos (‘ally in battle’) in the final stanza. Speaking of this appropriation of Homeric images and situations, Mary Lefkowitz observes that ‘it is as if Sappho were saying that what happens in a woman’s life also partakes of the significance of the man’s world of war’.22 In a tragedy written a century and a half later, Medea makes a similar challenge:
Men allege that we live safe and sound at home
While they must go to war with their spears.
They are so stupid! I would rather stand there
Three times in battle holding my shield up
Than give birth once.
(Euripides, Medea, 148–51)
Like Euripides’ Medea, Sappho uses military images and diction to elevate the events of female life to a level equal with those of a male’s. Furthermore, rather than presenting women simply as objects of desire, Sappho presents us with female characters who act autonomously. In ‘Some call ships, infantry or horsemen’ Helen of Troy, the object of desire par excellence, gives
up her husband and family of her own free will for the thing that she desires – Paris. Page Dubois sees in this poem ‘one of the few texts which break the silence of women in antiquity, an instant in which women become more than the objects of man’s desire’.23
A refined taste for pretty things, both artificial and natural, characterizes Sappho’s songs, and such delights, as mentioned above, served to define the values of her aristocratic circle. In ‘Idaos, then, the panting emissary’ we find a distinctly Sapphic description of the dowry. The richness of the gifts has been compressed into as little metrical space as possible so that the items seem to merge in a single mass. In many fragments flowers appear, both growing in the wild and culled as material for garlands and necklaces. Eva Stehle Stigers observes that, as a general rule, flowers in Sappho symbolize a ‘fragile combination of opposites’ consisting of ‘intimacy and distance, eroticism and innocence’.24 Thus the roses and wild flowers in ‘Leave Crete and sweep to this blest temple’ contribute to an erotic landscape that is simultaneously an inviolable sacred space and a pleasure garden where Aphrodite will abound. In ‘Off in Sardis’ the singer uses an image of flowers in the moonlight to bridge the distance between a girl in Lydia and the present locale where she is addressing the absent girl’s beloved Atthis: