Stung With Love Read online

  But I love extravagance,

  And wanting it has handed down

  The glitter and glamour of the sun

  As my inheritance.

  I truly do believe no maiden that will live

  To look upon the brilliance of the sun

  Ever will be contemplative

  Like this one.

  Stand and face me, dear; release

  That fineness in your irises.

  ‘May you bed down’ may have been part of an epithalamium (or wedding poem). Theocritus (third century BCE) alludes to this fragment in Epithalamium of Helen, 49–58, during the final valediction and makarismos (blessing) of the couple:

  Farewell, bride, and, farewell, groom – you are the son of a mighty father.

  May Leto, Child-Rearing Leto, grant you fecundity;

  And Kypris, divine Kypris, to love one another in equal amount,

  and Zeus, the son of Kronos, Zeus, an imperishable prosperity

  Which will pass in turn from noble stock to noble scion.

  Sleep on, breathing affection and desire on one another’s breast

  But do not forget to rise at dawn. For we shall come at dawn,

  As soon as the earliest riser, the rooster, raises his ruffled neck to crow.

  Hymn, O Hymenaios, may you take joy in this marriage.

  ‘May you bed down’ may have belonged to a similar context, and one of Sappho’s very brief makarismoi fragments may have appeared shortly before it, such as fragment 117: ‘Farewell, bride, and farewell, groom’.

  The cryptic and haunting ‘As for you girls, the gorgeous ones’ is addressed to paides (girls) who are kalai (beautiful/gorgeous). The kalai may have been tantamount to an official title in Sappho’s group. It is unclear what the speaker has in mind for them.

  In ‘What farm girl, garbed in fashions from the farm’ the girl is criticized for not knowing how to present herself in an enticing manner. Athenaeus informs us that she is Sappho’s rival Andromeda (Scholars at Dinner 1.21c). Though several other fragments linger over details of fashion, this one is interesting for its focus on the ankle area, which is an erogenous zone in Ancient Greek poetry. In ‘Idaos, then, the panting emissary’ Sappho refers to ‘maids / With slim-tapering ankles’. As discussed in the Introduction, this fragment implies membership in an exclusive group, and at least one of the criteria for inclusion is knowledge of ways to dress attractively.

  May you bed down,

  Head to breast, upon

  The flesh

  Of a plush

  Companion.

  As for you girls, the gorgeous ones,

  There will be no change in my plans.

  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?

  In ‘Off in Sardis’ we first meet Atthis, who will also appear as the speaker’s current beloved, a traitor who ‘goes over’ to the rival Andromeda, and an old flame. As in ‘That fellow strikes me as god’s double’ and ‘Abanthis, please pick your lyre’, there is a triangular arrangement of characters: the speaker talks to Atthis about a girl who once admired Atthis greatly but has gone off to start a new life.

  It is clear that the absent girl now resides in Sardis, the capital of Lydia, and often has Atthis in mind. In the second complete stanza Sappho appropriates ‘rosy-fingered’, a famous Homeric epithet of the goddess Dawn, for an elaborate lunar simile. Red moons are a visually striking phenomenon which occur when a concentration of particles in the air (i.e. dust or smoke) scatter the short and intermediate wavelengths of light (violet, blue and yellow) and only the longer ones (orange and red) reach our eyes. Here the moon brings the dew and opens flowers. In addition to roses, we find chervil (Anthriscus cerefolium), an annual herb with white flowers related to parsley, and sweet clover or melilot (Melilotus), a plant which has flowers in a variety of colours.

  Though the transition into the lunar simile is smooth, it is not clear where it ends and the poem returns to the literal world. One is left to ponder: what do the dew and the flowers have to do with Atthis and/ or the girl who has gone away? The images seem both to belong to the ‘flower-rich fallows’ on which the moon shines in the third stanza and to be what the departed girl in the fifth stanza encounters when she wanders off alone. The girl walks under the very moon to which she was compared. The poem moves without any explicit indication from a figurative night to a real one, from the world of the simile to the ‘real world’ where the girl resides.

  A tattered subsequent stanza (not translated) suggests that the distance between the three of them is bridged. It begins with ‘to go there’ and ends with the ‘the middle’.

  …off in Sardis

  And often turns her thoughts back to our shores.

  The girl adored you more than anything,

  As if you were a goddess –

  But most of all she loved to hear you sing.

  Now she outshines those dames with Lydian faces

  Just as, when the sun

  Has set, the rosy-fingered Moon surpasses

  The stars surrounding her. With equal grace

  She casts her lustre on

  The flower-rich fallows and the sterile seas.

  Dew is poured out in handsome fashion; lissome

  Chervil unfurls; Rose

  And Sweet Clover with heady flowers blossom.

  Often on long walks she commemorates

  How tender Atthis was.

  Her fortune eats at her inconstant thoughts…

  Sappho repeatedly removes memories from their specific contexts, generalizes and idealizes them, and then presents them in song as a form of consolation. ‘You will have memories’ preserves a part of this process. However, we are left to wonder just what beautiful things the speaker and addressee ‘did back then’ when they were young, which, the speaker asserts, will remain with the addressee throughout her life.

  In ‘I loved you once, years ago, Atthis’ the speaker reveals her former affection for an Atthis, who was still a maiden and still in an awkward stage of adolescence. Through refinement she has acquired charis (‘grace’) but, by implication, lost many things, including an appealing innocence. In a Latin note the grammarian Terentianus Maurus (end of the second century CE) preserves the phrase that I have translated as the second line. I take his sua (‘her own’) as referring to Atthis’ flower of virginity rather than the speaker’s.

  In the next fragment Atthis has turned the tables on the speaker and gone over to Andromeda, the rival in ‘What farm girl, garbed in fashions from the farm’.

  You will have memories

  Because of what we did back then

  When we were new at this,

  Yes, we did many things, then – all

  Beautiful…

  I loved you once, years ago, Atthis,

  When your flower was in place.

  You seemed a gawky girl then, artless,

  Without grace.

  Atthis, you looked at what I was

  And hated what you saw

  And now, all in a flutter, chase

  After Andromeda.

  These three fragments show the speaker in various sorts of relationships with others – she is frustrated and flattered and then flatters in turn. ‘Because’ consists of a gnomic (general and proverbial) statement and probably belonged to a poem that related a specific instance of unrequited love. The speaker’s advances have come to nothing, and she may have called for divine aid, as in ‘Subtly bedizened Aphrodite’.

  In ‘By giving me creations of their own’ the girls give the speaker timē – a word which means both honour and value. In Homer’s Iliad, timē is talked about as if it were a physical object. Agamemnon, for example, takes timē away from Achilles when he appropriates the concubine Briseïs in Book 1 of the Iliad. As in the Homeric world the girls here publicly acknowledge Sappho’s value by awarding her prizes. These gifts, how
ever, are special because Sappho has inspired their creation, and her own value is literally coming home to her.

  ‘And this next charming ditty I’ is charming indeed. The singer cleverly suggests that her girls are as pretty as the song being performed in their honour. She is clearly addressing an audience, i.e. this is a public performance for people other than herself and her girls. The girls were probably present at the performance as well, as dancers who accompanied the song.

  … because

  The people I most strive to please

  Do me the worst injuries…

  By giving me creations of their own

  My girls have handed me renown.

  And this next charming ditty I –

  In honour of my girls –

  Shall sing out prettily.

  Sappho does not merely study the experience of love and loss in others but actively participates. Here the speaker in a song elides distinctions between herself and Abanthis by bidding her take up the lyre, and desire moves through them both. She takes sympathetic pleasure in Abanthis’ arousal over Gongyla’s flattering attire. As each character is both subject and object, this song perfectly exemplifies the ‘circular, Sapphic law according to which beauty demands love and love, in turn, creates the beautiful’ (Burnett 1983, p. 229).

  In its triangular arrangement of singer, addressee and absent girl, the fragment operates as ‘Off in Sardis’ does. However, by gazing at an object (a flattering garment and the girl admiring the garment) Abanthis and the speaker experience a physical reaction comparable to the speaker’s reactions in ‘That fellow strikes me as god’s double’, another song with a triangular arrangement of characters. The manuscript falls apart just at the turn – we learn that Aphrodite has censured the speaker for an inappropriate prayer. That last legible word is a tantalizing ‘… I wish…’ André Lardinois speculates that performance involved exchanges between Sappho or another soloist and a chorus and expressed a collective desire for the absent Gongyla (1996, p. 170).

  ‘As you are dear to me, go claim a younger’ is a mysterious fragment. On the assumption that the speaker is addressing a male, Stobaeus (fifth century CE) comments in a gloss that ‘in marriage the age of the partners should be considered’ (4.22.112). We cannot determine the gender of the speaker and addressee or the original context.

  Abanthis, please pick up your lyre,

  Praise Gongyla. Your need to sing

  Flutters about you in the air –

  You gorgeous thing.

  Her garment (when you stole a glance)

  Roused you, and I’m in ecstasy.

  Likewise, the goddess Kypris once

  Disciplined me

  Blaming the way I prayed…

  As you are dear to me, go claim a younger

  Bed as your due.

  I can’t stand being the old one any longer,

  Living with you.

  In 2004 Michael Gronewald and Robert Daniel announced the identification of a papyrus in the University of Cologne as part of a roll containing poems of Sappho. This song was copied early in the third century BCE and later served as Egyptian mummy cartonnage. Its discovery provided the left-hand side of a poem whose right-hand side had been known since 1922 from an Oxyrhynchus papyrus, also of the third century BCE. The two texts together form a nearly complete poem.

  The focus is on Sappho herself. She lists the symptoms of her ageing as she does those of desire in ‘That fellow strikes me as god’s double’. A singer probably performed this song while a chorus danced, and the poem becomes more poignant if we imagine Sappho complaining of age while her girls ‘pranced nimbly’ as fawns around her.

  The Muses here are ‘violet-bosomed’ like the bride in ‘And may the maidens all night long’ and Dawn is ‘rosy-forearmed’ like the Graces in ‘Untainted Graces’. In the last four lines Sappho cites the story of Dawn and Tithonous as an exemplum (myth used as evidence). The goddess Dawn takes the beautiful youth Tithonous as her husband and then spirits him away to the eastern edge of the known world from which she rises every morning. At her request Zeus grants Tithonous immortality but she forgets to ask for eternal youth as well, and he withers away with age. In some accounts he merely chatters and is too weak to move; in others he turns into a cricket.

  The old and withered Tithonous recounts his sad decay in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s dramatic monologue Tithonus (1860), 15–23; in this version, however, it is Dawn herself, rather than Zeus, who gives her lover eternal life:

  I asked thee, ‘Give me immortality.’

  Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,

  Like wealthy men who care not how they give.

  But thy strong Hours indignant worked their wills,

  And beat me down and marred and wasted me,

  And though they could not end me, left me maimed

  To dwell in presence of immortal youth,

  Immortal age beside immortal youth,

  And all I was, in ashes.

  Girls, chase the violet-bosomed Muses’ bright

  Gifts and the plangent lyre, lover of hymns:

  Stiffness has seized on these once supple limbs,

  And black braids with the passing years turned white.

  Age weighs heavily on me, and the knees

  Buckle that long ago, like fawns, pranced nimbly.

  I groan much but to what end? Humans simply

  Cannot be ageless like divinities.

  They say that rosy-forearmed Dawn, when stung

  With love, swept a sweet youth to the earth’s rim –

  Tithonous. Even there age withered him,

  Bound still to a wife forever young.

  Sappho’s eldest brother Charaxus exported wine to Naucratis in Egypt, a Greek settlement and trading post established c. 615–610 BCE. There he became attached to a courtesan named Doricha. The historian Herodotus confuses Doricha with a later and more famous courtesan named Rhodope and mistakenly assigns the affair to the reign of Amasis II (570–526 BCE) (II.134f.). In ‘Kypris, may Doricha discover’ Sappho entreats Kyprian Aphrodite (or Aphrodite of Cyprus) to punish Doricha for having entangled a man, most likely her brother.

  Sappho invokes the same goddess in ‘Nereids, Kypris, please restore’, along with the Nereids, the sea deities who had a cult centre on Lesbos. This fragment was part of a propempticon or bon voyage poem. We soon learn, however, that Charaxus’ past behaviour has clearly been a source of embarrassment for Sappho and their family. Therefore she asks also that her wayward brother mend his ways and behave in accordance with the heroic code by helping his family and friends and harming his enemies. What begins as prayer for safe travel trails off with ‘gloomy’ misgivings concerning her brother’s future. After an initial first-person singular (‘My brother’) Sappho uses the first-person plural to include other members of her family and/or friends and perhaps also a chorus which danced while the song was performed.

  Ancient sources inform us that Sappho composed invective against her brother Charaxus but nothing harsher than this fragment has survived.

  Kypris, may Doricha discover

  You are the bitterest thing of all

  And not keep boasting that a lover

  Twice came to call.

  Nereids, Kypris, please restore

  My brother to this port, unkilled.

  May all his heart most wishes for

  Now be fulfilled.

  Excuse the misdeeds in his past,

  Make him his friends’ boon and foes’ bane,

  And may we never find the least

  Cause to complain.

  May he choose to give his sister

  Her share of honour but my gloomy

  Misgivings…

  Ancient biographies attest that Sappho had a daughter named Kleïs. She may well have, but we should admit that our evidence – ‘I have a daughter that reminds me of’ – is not conclusive: pais (which I have translated as ‘daughter’) can mean either ‘child’ or ‘slave’, and the spe
aker of the poem may not have been Sappho. Here, as in ‘But I love extravagance’ the speaker possesses something of even greater value than the luxuries she esteems. This fragment is one of several in which Sappho sets up an alternative marketplace in which desire, beauty and the people who inspire or possess them are more valuable than luxury items and other commodities.

  ‘I do not have an’ may belong to Sappho’s exile to Sicily or to Pittacus’ ten-year rule in Mytilene (595–585 BCE), during which he passed laws prohibiting some luxuries. The speaker does not address Kleïs as if she were a slave, and the fragment makes the most sense if we imagine her as a young girl whining for the accessories to which she had been accustomed. This fragment is preserved on a third-century-BCE papyrus (one of the oldest manuscripts) along with ‘You see, my mother’.

  I have a daughter who reminds me of

  A marigold in bloom.

  Kleïs is her name,

  And I adore her.

  I would refuse all Lydia’s glitter for her

  And all other love.

  I do not have an

  Ornately woven

  Bandeau to hand you,

  Kleïs. From

  Where would it come?

  The Suda biography informs us that Sappho’s mother’s name was Kleïs. Since daughters were to be named after grandmothers as sons were after grandfathers, the biographer may have first concluded the name of Sappho’s pais was Kleïs and then, for just this reason, assumed her grandmother’s was Kleïs too. Still, he may have had access to more information than we do. For feminine apparel Sardis was the Paris of the ancient Aegean. This fragment runs through a complete cycle of fashion: from outmoded ornate headbands to simple floral garlands and back again.