Stung With Love Read online

  Dew is poured out in handsome fashion; lissome

  Chervil unfurls; Rose

  And Sweet Clover with heady flowers blossom.

  The flowers respond to the moonlight as the singer and Atthis respond to the absent girl’s beauty, and the moonlight which opens the flowers bridges the distance by creating the same private world for the three of them.

  There is evidence that Sappho incorporated these pretty things into a sort of aesthetic credo. Athenaeus claims that she ‘did not separate to kalon (the beautiful) from habrotēs (extravagance)’ (Scholars at Dinner 15.687a). The following best expresses the sublimation of habrotēs into something greater:

  But I love extravagance,

  And wanting it has handed down

  The glitter and glamour of the sun

  As my inheritance.

  An appreciation for luxury has led to an abstract quality, ‘the beautiful’ itself perhaps, symbolized here by the ‘glitter and glamour of the sun’. In one very short fragment (‘more golden than gold’, fr. 156.2) a comparison involving a luxury paradoxically points to something that surpasses the luxury in its own quality, most likely the appearance of a girl. Burnett explains the relationship between extravagance and beauty as part of a ‘circular, Sapphic law according to which beauty demands love and love, in turn, creates the beautiful’.25 Sappho’s frequent use of eraton (lovely), an adjective which expresses both desire and loveliness, embodies this symbiosis. Her songs, then, begin with a love for the beautiful which, in turn, generates even more beauty.

  Sappho’s style is deceptively simple. The sentence structure is most often paratactic, that is, sentences occur one after the other without subordinating clauses, like beads on a string. This style serves her well in ‘Idaos, then, the panting emissary’ in which she relates a sequence of events: sentence by sentence, the glory (kleos) of Andromache’s arrival at Troy spreads from the messenger’s mouth to King Priam’s ear and from there to the entire community. This style is also effective for representing simultaneous symptoms of love, such as speechlessness, fever and blurred vision in ‘That fellow strikes me as god’s double’. Both in modernity and in antiquity Sappho’s songs have been admired for their sonic richness. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (60–after 7 BCE) cites Sappho’s poetry as an example of the ‘elegant style’ which ‘judges which collocations will make the music more melodious, and assesses by what arrangements the words will result in more pleasing combinations, and thus it strives to fit each word in place, taking care to have everything planned and rubbed smooth and all the junctures neatly fitted’ (Demosthenes 40). Charles Segal takes this sonic richness a step further, arguing that Sappho’s language is incantatory and its effect is thelxis (enchantment): ‘… for Sappho the “power” of love is a god, as power often is for the ancient Greeks, and as such is to be summoned before her by the incantatory power and the quasi-magical thelxis of her poetry. Her poetry both portrays thelxis and, in a sense, is thelxis.’26 The fragments do resonate a dense, voluptuous texture of sound. The sounds and rhythms of poetry serve, in general, to distinguish poetry from everyday speech. Sappho, however, uses them not merely for this purpose but also, in effect, to draw a magic circle around her songs.

  Performance Context

  Scholars have traditionally maintained a canonical distinction between choral poets, whose compositions were performed publicly by singer-dancers, and monodic poets who performed solo to the accompaniment of the lyre. Pindar (522–443 BCE) and Bacchylides (fifth century BCE), as authors of publicly performed victory odes, were assigned to the former class, and other ‘lyric’ poets, including Sappho, to the latter. Monodic poetry was held to express ‘personal’ sentiment whereas choral poetry expressed ‘public’ sentiment. The lyre is indeed an inextricable attribute of Sapphic iconography: she mentions and addresses them, she is credited with the invention of the pēctis (large many-stringed lyre) and the plectrum (pick for a lyre), and artists both in antiquity and modernity most often represent her with lyre in hand.

  All the same, scholarship has called this polarizing distinction between choral and monodic poets into question. In the Partheneia of Alcman a chorus of girls expresses ‘personal’ sentiments traditionally regarded as typical of monodic song. The question then arises: if choruses express personal sentiment in Alcman, were any of the equally ‘personal’ songs of Sappho also performed by a chorus? André Lardinois sums up the ‘personality’ debate thus: ‘can we be sure that any of the early Greek poems is “personal”…? What is “personality” in such a group-oriented society as archaic Greece? Central to the debate [over “personality” in Archaic poetry] have been poems in which the poet clearly impersonates a character. Some of these we find, interestingly enough, among Sappho’s fragments as well.’27 Lardinois’s studies have established that, for most of Sappho’s songs, there is more evidence in support of choral performance than monodic. The epithalamia have been accepted as choral since antiquity, and these songs were sung during the wedding ceremony by age-mates of the bride. Ancient sources also claim that Sappho wrote cult hymns. Of the remaining poems, ‘Kytherea, precious’ provides the strongest evidence for choral performance – it is clearly antiphonal. A chorus of girls asks Aphrodite:

  ‘Kytherea, precious

  Adonis is nearly dead.

  How should we proceed?’

  A singer impersonating Aphrodite responds:

  ‘Come, girls, beat your fists

  Down upon your breasts

  And shred your dresses.’

  By analogy, ‘Maidenhead, maidenhead, where have you gone?’ a dialogue between a girl and Virginity personified, was also performed by a chorus (or at least by more than one singer).

  Other songs seem to involve a solo singer and chorus of dancers. The following fragment is a good example:

  And this next charming ditty I –

  In honour of my girls –

  Shall sing out prettily.

  It is implicit here that the singer is addressing an audience, i.e. this is a public performance for people other than the singer and her girls. The girls she so charmingly flatters, however, were probably present as well and dancing during the performance. ‘Girls, chase the violet-bosomed Muses’ bright’ suggests a similar situation: the singer states explicitly that she is too old to dance and exhorts ‘girls’ to engage in the choral activities she used to enjoy. Again, the singer is presumably playing the lyre while a chorus danced.

  But which of Sappho’s poems were performed solo? This becomes a difficult question. One ancient source does mention Sappho’s ‘monodies’ as separate from her nine books of lyric songs, and, as we have seen, the singer of ‘Abanthis, please pick up your lyre’ exhorts Abanthis to sing solo. However, not even the mention of Sappho by name as a speaker in a poem requires us to conclude that a chorus did not perform it. Since in some victory odes of Pindar and in the parabaseis of Aristophanes’ comedies the chorus speaks on behalf of the poet in the first-person singular, a chorus may have performed even those poems of Sappho which give the impression one is overhearing ‘personal’ communication, such as an intimate conversation or monologue. Furthermore, any song in which a first-person plural (‘we’) appears is a candidate for choral performance, since this pronoun always refers to a group or a solo performer who wants to include others (an addressee, or a group, or all of humanity). Thus, we cannot be certain that even the most likely candidates – those in the first person – were performed solo. The Homericizing ‘Idaos, then, the panting emissary’ is a likely candidate for monodic performance with a lyre, and the singer would have performed it in the same manner as the bards in the Odyssey perform their songs. Odysseus himself provides the best description of bardic performance:

  I say that nothing is more delightful than when mirth takes hold of a whole people, and banqueters, seated in fitting order, listen to a bard. Beside them tables stand full of bread and meat, and a cup-bearer draws off wine from the mixing bowl and carries it around and
pours it into the cups. To my mind this seems the most beautiful thing there is.

  (Homer, Odyssey 9.5–11)

  In most instances it is impossible to say whether the speaker is a chorus or a soloist or even whether a given speaker is Sappho. In discussions of performance context, as with most things having to do with Sappho, we must content ourselves with probabilities.

  Woman, Poet and Woman Poet

  It is difficult to talk about Sappho as a woman poet. One can make statements like Strabo’s (64 BCE–24 CE): ‘in all of recorded history I know of no woman who even came close to rivalling her as a poet’ (Geography, 13.2.3). With this kind of classification, however, one runs the risk of relegating Sappho to a separate ‘female’ league for poetry and overlooking what she owes to her predecessors (Homer in particular), what she has in common with her contemporaries (Alcaeus in particular) and how greatly she influences subsequent poetry. In contrast to Strabo, Plutarch (46–120 CE) makes the useful observation:

  If, by comparing Sappho’s poems with Anacreon’s, we show… that the art of poetry… is not different when practiced by men and by women but the same, will anyone be able to find just cause to reject our argument?

  (Virtues of Women 243b)

  The art is the same – Sappho fits squarely into the development of poetry from Homeric epic to Greek lyric. She appropriates themes, epithets and other diction from Homer, and in this she is no different from male lyric poets such as Archilochus and Alcaeus. In fact, the style of Sappho and Alcaeus is similar enough that scholars dispute whether certain fragments in the Lesbian dialect should be ascribed to one or the other of them. Furthermore, Sappho is greatly influential on subsequent poets, both female and male. Take this example: the Sapphic stanza, which she popularized and may have invented (some attribute it to Alcaeus), becomes a fixed form in Western literature. The Roman poets Catullus (84–54 BCE) and Horace (65–27 BCE) compose Sapphics in Latin and, in the modern period, Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), Allen Ginsberg (1926–97) and the contemporary American poet Tim Steele (b. 1948) in Sapphics Against Anger adapt the form to English prosody. The mainstream of Western poetry flows through Sappho and on down through the centuries. That she happens to be female, in this respect, is immaterial.

  Sappho does have conventionally feminine interests. As we have seen, she exhibits a rich and intimate knowledge of toilette and fashion. She composes many songs for weddings, which were traditionally a female responsibility in Ancient Greek society. The question remains, however: was Sappho a feminist? In Ancient Greek literature male poets tend not simply to portray women as lecherous but to attribute to them a species of lust different from that of males: a subhuman and automatic reflex, an animalistic urge. Sappho is important because she gives a fully human voice to female desire for the first time in Western literature. Since she defiantly chooses the quintessential love-object Helen of Troy as her freethinking agent, she seems fully conscious of the revolutionary claim she is making.

  NOTES

  1. Gregory Nagy interprets the rock as a boundary marker between the worlds of the living and the dead (‘Phaethon, Sappho’s Phaon, and the White Rock of Leukas: “Reading” the Symbols of Greek Lyric’, in Greene 1996, pp. 35–57).

  2. Except where noted, I cite the texts of Sappho and Alcaeus from Sappho et Alcaeus: Fragmenta, ed. Eva-Maria Voigt (1971).

  3. Holt Parker, ‘Sappho Schoolmistress’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 123 (1993), p. 314.

  4. Burnett 1983, p. 210.

  5. Martin West, ‘A New Sappho Poem’, Times Literary Supplement, no. 5334 (24 June 2005), p. 8.

  6. Parker, ‘Sappho Schoolmistress’, pp. 339–51.

  7. Burnett 1983, p. 209.

  8. Wilson 1996, p. 104.

  9. Burnett 1983, p. 297.

  10. Calame 1996, p. 114.

  11. Ibid., p. 121.

  12. Chris Bennett, ‘Concerning “Sappho Schoolmistress” ’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 124 (1994), p. 345.

  13. Page 1955, p. 42.

  14. Jack Winkler, ‘Gardens of the Nymphs: Public and Private in Sappho’s Lyrics’, in Greene 1996, p. 108.

  15. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (1985), p. 155.

  16. Sissa 1990, p. 98.

  17. Wilson 1996, p. 145.

  18. Page 1955, p. 27.

  19. Skinner 2005, p. 59.

  20. Winkler, ‘Gardens of the Nymphs’, p. 95.

  21. Hudson Review 60:4 (Winter 2008), pp. 591–2.

  22. Mary Lefkowitz, ‘Critical Stereotypes and the Poetry of Sappho’, in Greene 1996, p. 33.

  23. Dubois 1995, p. 79.

  24. Stigers 1977, p. 92.

  25. Burnett 1983, p. 229.

  26. Segal 1996, p. 59 (his emphasis).

  27. Lardinois 1996, p. 159.

  Further Reading

  Burnett, Anne Pippin, Three Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho (1983). Comprehensive treatment of Sappho’s poems with historical background and deep, thorough readings of all the major fragments.

  Calame, Claude, ‘Sappho’s Group: An Initiation into Womanhood’, in Greene 1996, pp. 113–24. This seminal essay argues that Sappho’s group was a religious organization in which adolescent girls underwent a rite of passage into womanhood.

  Dover, Kenneth J., Greek Homosexuality (1989). This landmark study of homosexuality in the Ancient Greek world focuses on the man–boy pattern of relationships in Athens.

  Dowden, K., Death and the Maiden: Girls’ Initiation Rites in Greek Mythology (1989). A fascinating but highly speculative book which uses myth to reconstruct rituals of initiation in prehistoric Bronze Age Greece.

  Dubois, Page, Sappho Is Burning (1995). A collection of her essays which offers nuanced and sensitive readings of most of Sappho’s fragments, along with critiques of Foucault and feminist theory. It is best suited to graduate students and advanced academics.

  Greene, Ellen (ed.), Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches (1996). A collection of essays covering a range of themes, including Sappho’s language and relationship with oral tradition, her social context and her eroticism.

  Lardinois, André, ‘Subject and Circumstance in Sappho’s Poetry’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 124 (1994), pp. 57–84. Refutes the theory that Sappho performed her poems solo at symposia for women of her own age and argues that, for many fragments, public choral performance is more likely.

  —, ‘Who Sang Sappho’s Songs?’, in Greene 1996, pp. 150–72. Argues that far more of the extant fragments of Sappho were originally performed by a chorus than had been traditionally maintained.

  Page, Denys L., An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry (1955). This classic (but dated) treatment provides texts, translations and commentaries for the best-preserved fragments and fits most of the remaining fragments into useful essays on Sappho’s style and character.

  Segal, Charles, ‘Eros and Incantation: Sappho and Oral Poetry’, in Greene 1996, pp. 58–75. Argues that Sappho uses repetition, alliteration, assonance and other stylistic elements typical in Greek religious and magical song to produce an incantatory effect.

  Sissa, Giulia, Greek Virginity tr. Arthur Goldhammer (1990). Studies images of matrons and virgins in the Ancient Greek world in order to determine how the female body was conceived.

  Skinner, Marilyn, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture (2005). This authoritative reference work provides an inclusive and up-to-date history of sexuality in Greco-Roman culture, along with a bibliography for in-depth study of particular issues.

  Stigers, Eva Stehle, ‘Retreat from the Male: Catullus 62 and Sappho’s Erotic Flowers’, Ramus 6 (1977), pp. 83–103. As part of an interpretation of Catullus 62, Stigers argues that flowers are simultaneously associated with innocence and eroticism in the poems of Sappho.

  Wilson, Lyn Heatherly, Sappho’s Sweet-Bitter Songs: Configurations of Female and Male in Ancient Greek Lyric (1996). Though flawed by preconceived an
d anachronistic notions of masculinity and femininity, this study does provide sensitive readings of individual fragments.

  A Note on the Text and Translation

  It is important to point out that Sappho, as far as we know, did not gather her poems into a collection. Since society on the island of Lesbos was largely preliterate during her lifetime, she would have assumed that her poems would survive by being memorized rather than committed to papyrus. We owe those scraps of Sappho that have come down to us to two Alexandrian scholars, Aristophanes of Byzantium (c. 257–180 BCE) and Aristarchus of Samothrace (c. 220–c. 143 BCE): they arranged the poems which survived to the third and second centuries BCE into nine books. Each poem was selected for inclusion in the first eight books on the basis of its metre. The first book, for example, contained roughly 1,300 verses and included poems composed in the Sapphic stanza. Two epithalamia in this metre (‘Because once on a time you were’ and ‘And may the maidens all night long’) appeared at the end. Along the same lines the wedding poem ‘Idaos, then, the panting emissary’ appeared last in the second book, which consisted of poems in a metre readily accommodating Homeric diction. Books 3–8 consisted of poems in a variety of other metres, sometimes with two or more metres per book. The ninth and final book, called ‘The Epithalamia’, consisted of those wedding poems which did not did not fit into any of the eight groupings. Though Books 2–9 were probably shorter than the first, the complete collection may well have included around 9,000 lines.

  Tullius Laurea, the learned freedman and librarian for Cicero (106–43 BCE), attests in an epigram that the nine-book collection survived into the first century BCE (Anthologia Palatina 7.17), and Sappho’s poetry was influential on the Roman poets Catullus and Horace. Subsequently the depredations of time, chance and puritanical taste so reduced the number of poems available that the Byzantine grammarian John Tzetzes of Constantinople (1110–80 CE) could declare ‘time has frittered away Sappho and her works, her lyre and songs’ (On the Meters of Pindar 20–22). Frustrated as he was, Tzetzes still seems to have had access to more of Sappho than we do. But those texts were probably destroyed when the Fourth Crusade sacked and burned Constantinople in 1204, and for almost seven centuries the world knew only those poems of Sappho which happened to have been preserved as citations in the works of other authors.