Stung With Love Read online

  Untainted Graces

  With wrists like roses,

  Please come close,

  You daughters of Zeus.

  Now, Dika, weave the aniseed together, flower and stem,

  With your soft hands, crown yourself with a lovely diadem

  Because the blessèd Graces grant gifts to the garlanded

  And snub the worshipper with no flowers on her head.

  ‘Come close, you precious’ is probably the beginning of a kletic hymn to the Muses and the Graces. Daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory), the Muses are goddesses of music, song and dance, and a source of inspiration to poets. In ancient Greek vase painting the Muses are often depicted as young women with a variety of musical instruments including flutes and lyres. Their number is eventually fixed at nine, and they acquire names and specific spheres of influence – Calliope, the muse of epic poetry; Erato, muse of erotic poetry, etc. On Mt Olympus they sing festive songs in the dining hall of the immortals. On earth the Muses inspire a poet to speak truthfully about subjects in which he or she has no personal expertise. After warning the poet Hesiod that ‘they know how to tell many lies that sound like truth’ but also ‘know how to sing reality, when [they] wish’, they proceed to fill him with the ability to sing of the past and the future (Theogony 26–8). On the Graces, see p. 12.

  Maximus of Tyre (125–185 CE) claims that Sappho is delivering ‘Here is the reason: it is wrong’ to her daughter on her deathbed. Though it is not certain that Sappho had a daughter and one can only wonder how she would have had time and energy to versify this before expiring, Maximus may well have had access to more details from a more complete version of the song. On the Musicians’ House, see pp. xx-xxi.

  Come close, you precious

  Graces and Muses

  With beautiful tresses.

  Here is the reason: it is wrong

  To play a funeral song

  In the Musicians’ House –

  It simply would not be decorous.

  Sappho often mentions and even addresses lyres. After her death she was associated, like the Muses, with the lyre, and subsequent art and literature frequently portray her as a Muse. Catullus 35.16–17 refers to a ‘Sapphic Muse’, and we find the following assertion (attributed to Plato) in the Palatine Anthology 9.506: ‘some say there are nine Muses: how cheap! Look – Sappho of Lesbos is the tenth’. Sappho is credited with the invention of the pēctis (large many-stringed lyre) and the plectrum (pick for a lyre), and Plutarch, On Music 16.1136c, claims that she invented the Mixolydian mode (an emotional mode, suited to tragedy).

  In ‘God-crafted product of the tortoise-shell’ Sappho personifies her lyre. Hermogenes, Kinds of Style 2.4, preserves this fragment as an example of the ‘sweet effect’ which ‘the ascription of conscious choice to things incapable of it produces’. ‘He is unrivalled, like a Lesbian’ became a proverbial expression for excellence in song.

  In Anthology 3.4.12 Stobaeus informs us that Sappho addressed ‘But when you lie dead’ to an uneducated woman; Plutarch in different places claims it is addressed to ‘a wealthy woman’ and ‘an uncultivated and ignorant woman’. Except in a few special cases, Hades’ hall is not a place of punishment like the Christian Hell: it is a gloomy detention area where the psychai (or ‘breaths’) of the deceased remain forever as an insubstantial images or ‘shades’ of themselves. It is not at all painful but very dull. We find in this fragment the same concern for immortality which we find in ‘I declare’. The region Pieria takes its name from Mt Pierus in ancient Thrace (now north-eastern mainland Greece). The Muses were held to dwell on this mountain and a local spring was regarded as a source of wisdom and inspiration. ‘The Pierian spring’ becomes a symbol for poetic wisdom in general, as in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711):

  A little learning is a dangerous thing;

  Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

  There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

  And drinking largely sobers us again.

  (215–18)

  God-crafted product of the tortoise shell,

  Come to me; Lyre, be voluble.

  He is unrivalled, like a Lesbian

  Musician matched with other men.

  But when you lie dead

  No one will notice later or feel sad

  Because you gathered no sprays from the roses

  Of the Pierian Muses.

  Once lost in Hades’ hall

  You will be homeless and invisible –

  Another shadow flittering back and forth

  With shadows of no worth.

  DESIRE AND DEATH-LONGING

  Eros is the god of ardent desire. He appears either as a universal principle promoting procreation or the mischievous son of Aphrodite, armed with bow and arrows. In Hesiod’s Theogony Eros is ‘limb-loosening’, and in Homer a hero’s limbs are loosened in battle when he loses consciousness or dies. Sappho combines these traditions as Eros here loosens limbs by dismembering a body. Though it is difficult to determine exactly what rough beast the god Eros is supposed to be, his predation is both pleasant and painful, and this bitter-sweetness characterizes Sappho’s erotic songs.

  ‘Like a gale smiting an oak’ is in essence an epic simile like those which regularly appear in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. By using this literary device Sappho again suggests that matters of the heart are comparable to military matters.

  ‘But a strange longing to pass on’ is one of a number of erotic songs which express death-longing. Acheron is a lake in the underworld across which the boatman Charon ferries the shades (or ghosts) of the dead. Lotuses (probably the Ziziphus lotus), associated with forgetfulness, grow along its shore. Sappho handles the underworld motif in a conventional manner, and Giuliana Lanata observes that ‘the relative fixity of its formulation expresses a moment typical of the Sapphic experience of Eros, destined to repeat itself more times in analogous situations’ (‘Sappho’s Amatory Language’, in Greene 1996, p. 19).

  The name ‘Gongyla’ appears in the patchy lines which precede our fragment, and we are informed elsewhere that she was a student of Sappho from abroad. The lost lines may have contained a conversation between Sappho (or at least an ‘I’) and another person, who scholars suggest is ‘Hermas’ (or Hermes) on the basis of the ‘–as’ that appears in the damaged text. This possibility is appealing because we also have divine epiphanies in other poems which, it would seem, have a similar structure. Hermes Psychopompus (or ‘conductor of souls’ to the underworld) would then be the addressee of the speech.

  That impossible predator,

  Eros the Limb-Loosener,

  Bitter-sweetly and afresh

  Savages my flesh.

  Like a gale smiting an oak

  On mountainous terrain,

  Eros, with a stroke,

  Shattered my brain.

  But a strange longing to pass on

  Seizes me, and I need to see

  Lotuses on the dewy banks of Acheron.

  Longinus (fl. first century CE) has preserved this famous fragment in his literary treatise On the Sublime. The dramatic setting is simple: the female narrator sees a beloved girl talking and laughing with a man and then proceeds to describe her reaction to the sight. Though the scenario is anachronistic, I have found it helpful to imagine her in the doctor’s office listing the symptoms of her love disease, many of which are paralleled in Homer but not as symptoms of love. Archilochus of Paros (680–c. 645 BCE) also describes the love disease in Homeric terms:

  Just this sort of lust for love crouched at my heart

  And, after he had stolen the gentle senses from my breast,

  Kept pouring thick mist down over my eyes.

  (Martin West, Iambi et Elegi Graeci,

  Vol. I (1971), fr. 191)

  We find the only occurrence of kardia (‘heart’) and glōssa (‘tongue’) in Sappho here as part of a similarly physical description. Since our word ‘heart’ carries sentimental baggage inappropriate
to the Greek kardia, I opted for the medical ‘ventricles’. Thin fire and thunder in the ears are not found as symptoms of love before this poem.

  Scholarship tends to focus on the question: why is the speaker so agitated? Is it jealousy because a man is enjoying the company of her beloved? Or a sympathetic reaction resulting from the speaker’s vicarious experience of what the man is experiencing? If there were a love triangle we would expect to hear more about the speaker’s rival. He remains indefinite – we hear nothing about him after the first stanza. He serves only a formal function and is godlike only because he sits ‘face to face’ with the girl. However, we hear no more of the girl after the first stanza either. Instead of an objectification of the beloved we are given an objectification of the lover: she is broken down piece by piece.

  Catullus wrote an adaptation of this song in the original Sapphic metre, and the following stanza is usually appended:

  Idleness, Catullus, is destroying you;

  Idleness is what delights you and stirs you to passion;

  Idleness before now has proved the ruin of kings

  And prosperous cities.

  (51.13 –16)

  That fellow strikes me as god’s double,

  Couched with you face to face, delighting

  In your warm manner, your amiable

  Talk and inviting

  Laughter – the revelation flutters

  My ventricles, my sternum and stomach.

  The least glimpse, and my lost voice stutters,

  Refuses to come back

  Because my tongue is shattered. Gauzy

  Flame runs radiating under

  My skin; all that I see is hazy,

  My ears all thunder.

  Sweat comes quickly, and a shiver

  Vibrates my frame. I am more sallow

  Than grass and suffer such a fever

  As death should follow.

  But I must suffer further, worthless

  As I am…

  This fragment is one of several in which Sappho recounts a past conversation framed by a poetic present (see ‘Subtly bedizened Aphrodite’). Here the conversation is about activities even further in the past. It is unclear whether Sappho the poet, Sappho the character (who is named) or her female addressee speaks the first line, and it is difficult to determine whether the sentence is merely a hyperbolic commonplace (like ‘I almost died from embarrassment’) or heartfelt expression.

  Myrrh is the reddish-brown dried resin of the tree Commiphora myrrha, native to north-eastern Africa. Mixed in oil, myrrh has been used for embalming and for anointment in the Eastern Orthodox Church. It is still used in perfumes and lotions.

  In Sappho we often find erotic emotion and experience expressed in stylized and ritualized ways. These patterns serve to convert the private and specific into the universal and the generic. The ‘good times’ of which Sappho reminds the girl primarily involve flowers and garlands – the sorts of adornments which choral performers would wear (compare ‘Now, Dika, weave the aniseed together, flower and stem’). Here, as in ‘Off in Sardis’, thoughts of flowers bind females together once they have been separated. The list of activities becomes increasingly intimate: we progress from weaving garlands and necklaces to perfuming the girl’s hair and eventually to the satisfaction of desire on a bed. It is remarkable that even sexual release becomes part of the ritualized pattern. Lyn Wilson observes ‘the song seems designed to give comfort in a way which would be almost maternal if it did not linger over erotic details’ (1996, p. 127). The first-person plural pronoun may expand in this song to refer to all the members of the group. This pronoun and the description of floral adornments make it a likely candidate for choral performance.

  ‘In all honesty, I want to die.’

  Leaving for good after a good long cry,

  She said: ‘We both have suffered terribly,

  But, Sappho, it is hard to say goodbye.’

  I said: ‘Go with my blessing if you go

  Always remembering what we did. To me

  You have meant everything, as you well know.

  ‘Yet, lest it slip your mind, I shall review

  Everything we have shared – the good times, too:

  ‘You culled violets and roses, bloom and stem,

  Often in spring and I looked on as you

  Wove a bouquet into a diadem.

  ‘Time and again we plucked lush flowers, wed

  Spray after spray in strands and fastened them

  Around your soft neck; you perfumed your head

  ‘Of glossy curls with myrrh – lavish infusions

  In queenly quantities – then on a bed

  Prepared with fleecy sheets and yielding cushions,

  ‘Sated your craving…’

  The first two fragments provide contrasting statements of anger and conciliation. ‘May gales and anguish sweep elsewhere’ is a curse. It is striking that the speaker calls both external (gales) and internal (anguish) afflictions down upon an enemy. In ‘But I am hardly some backbiter bent’ the narrator protests so much about her lack of malignance that the effect is an ironic awareness that she probably is all that she denies.

  The next two provide contrasting descriptions of hot and cold. Julian the Apostate (331–363 CE), the last polytheistic Roman emperor, preserved ‘You were at hand’ in a literary epistle addressed to the deceased Iamblicus (245–325 CE), a Syrian Neoplatonist philosopher who defended polytheistic cult practice. Julian adds: ‘Indeed you did come; because of your letter you came even though you were absent.’ The fragment is exquisitely beautiful but difficult to translate because a lover who is driven crazy by a burning desire is now too much of a cliché even for pop songs. In ‘Cold grew’ we are told that pigeons are folding their wings to warm themselves. I have translated the feminine definite article as ‘ladies’ on the assumption that this image was originally a metaphor for human behaviour.

  May gales and anguish sweep elsewhere

  The killer of my character.

  But I am hardly some backbiter bent

  On vengeance; no, my heart is lenient.

  You were at hand,

  And I broke down raving –

  My craving a fire

  That singed my mind,

  A brand you quenched.

  Cold grew

  The spirits of the ladies;

  They drew

  Their wings close to their bodies.

  The Sapphic persona thrives on activity and passion. Deprived of these things, she lapses into a languorous state. Lunar imagery is common in the poems of Sappho (compare ‘Off in Sardis’ and ‘Star clusters near the fair moon dim’), and the moon is consistently associated with feminine beauty. In ‘Moon and the Pleiades go down’ it vanishes from the narrator’s view. The Pleiades (or Seven Sisters) is a prominent star cluster in the constellation Taurus, and in mythology seven nymphs who attend the goddess Artemis.

  ‘Peace, you never seemed so tedious’ is difficult to interpret and to translate. Irēna, the addressee, is either the abstraction Peace or a proper name. I have opted for the apostrophe to Peace, and the fragment thus expresses a general ennui or frustration probably in anticipation of someone’s arrival. But, if addressed to an Irena, it preserves an irritated remark to an annoying woman. This fragment exemplifies the difficulty of translating scraps that have come down to us without context: the tone and meaning of the couplet here hangs on a word which has one of two radically different but equally possible meanings.

  In ‘Over eyelids dark night fell’ the night is invisible because a person’s eyes have already closed. This fragment may, in fact, be the source for Catullus’ expansion on Sappho’s ‘all that I see is hazy’ in his adaptation of ‘That fellow strikes me as god’s double’. In Catullus’ version (51) the speaker’s ‘eyes are covered by a twin night’.

  Moon and the Pleiades go down.

  Midnight and tryst pass by.

  I, though, lie

  Alone.

  Peace,
you never seemed so tedious

  As now – no, never quite like this.

  Over eyelids dark night fell

  Invisible.

  HER GIRLS AND FAMILY

  We know that ‘But I love extravagance’ are the last two lines of a four-line epigram. Before the identification of an Oxyrhynchus fragment in 2003, it was assumed that this couplet was the conclusion of a longer poem that contained ‘Girls, chase the violet-bosomed Muses’ bright’, and previous scholarship had interpreted it as such. On Athenaeus’ introduction to these lines, see p. xxxiv.

  ‘I truly do believe no maiden that will live’ may simply mean: ‘I think no girl will ever be as sophos (clever) as this one.’ However, ‘To look upon the sun’ (a stock epic and tragic phrase meaning simply ‘to live’) raises the register, and the lines may express admiration for a girl who has already come to appreciate all that the sun symbolizes in the preceding poem. The sun here contains, in the abstract, qualities of shiny luxury items – glitter and glamour.

  ‘Stand and face me, dear; release’ exemplifies the importance of eye contact, especially between lovers and rivals, in Greek literature. As we have seen, Sappho reveals an intimate, almost medical knowledge of the symptoms of love in ‘That fellow strikes me as god’s double’. Dilated pupils signal a state of arousal and are thus more attractive. In addition, the ancients assumed that light reflected from the eyes was emitted from the eyes themselves. For example, when Plato argues that the soul is the source of vision, he cites light rays coming from the eyes as evidence.