Stung With Love Read online

  …You see, my mother,

  Back when she was young,

  Thought it was fancy for a girl to wear

  A purple fillet, a headband –

  Yes, this was quite the thing.

  Now, though, we have seen a girl with hair

  More orange than a firebrand

  Sport all the flowers of spring

  Woven together, garlands upon garlands –

  And only lately, fresh from Sardis,

  A spangled headband…

  Athenaeus explains that ‘the towels [mentioned in this poem] are a decorative head-covering, as Hecataeus, or whoever wrote the travel-account entitled The Asia, evinces: “The women wear towels on their heads” ’ (Scholars at Dinner 9.410e). Ancient Greek clothing consisted mostly of swaths of cloth of various lengths and widths which could serve a variety of functions. As we have seen accessories were important to Sappho’s group as status symbols.

  I was delighted to learn that ‘A handkerchief’ has acquired a cult status in some literary critical circles – it is tantalizing and elliptical. Aimitybion, the word Sappho uses for ‘handkerchief’, refers to a piece of cloth smaller than our towels and of some thinner material, such as linen. This rare word appears again in Aristophanes’ comedy Wealth, 729 (388 BCE): ‘he took out a clean handkerchief and wiped his eyes’. In this fragment the cloth is dual-purpose, capable of serving both as a handkerchief and a bandana. What, however, is the handkerchief dripping? Why is it dripping at all? Parallels for the word ‘dripping’ (stalasson, related to ‘stalagmite’) suggest that the liquid is probably blood, sweat or tears.

  Mnasis sent you from Phocaia

  Purple kerchiefs you can tie

  Around your brow to serve

  As headscarves, too –

  Rich gifts which you,

  With your fine cheeks, deserve.

  A handkerchief

  Dripping with…

  TROY

  Mythic narratives are rare in Sappho, with the exception of events from the Trojan saga. I have gathered into this section those fragments which either narrate events pertaining to this war or cite stories from it as exempla (myths used as evidence). Sappho here uses a distinctly Homeric ambience, that is – an objective viewpoint and a dactylic metre suggestive of the metre of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The fragment relates the almost telepathic spread of kleos (renown) through the Trojan community. Kleos is the reputation a Homeric character ‘enjoys among his or her contemporaries, or “what is said” of that individual and his or her deeds…’ (Douglas Olson, Blood and Iron: Stories and Storytelling in Homer’s Odyssey (1995), p. 3).

  It is striking that Sappho chooses a conventionally ‘feminine’ theme, a wedding scene which has no parallel in Homer. Though she elevates the wedding to epic magnitude, she does not moralize about the fates of Hector (whom Achilles kills), Andromache (who is given as booty to Achilles’ son, Neoptolemos) and their child Astyanax (who is flung from the walls of Troy). As Wilson points out: ‘there is no good and evil in [this song], merely a superlative state that could be defined as excellence’ (1996, p. 154).

  Idaos is the principal herald for the Trojans in the Iliad. Though the setting is mythic, many of the details come from Sappho’s time: krotala (rattles or castanets) do not appear in Homer, and myrrh, cassia and frankincense do not appear in Greek literature before her. I have translated the Greek aulos as ‘double-oboe’ to give an impression of the instrument’s appearance and sound. With the merger of the Trojans and guests from Mysian Thebes, we have a mingling of sounds and scents. The singers are of all ages, all classes and both genders. The final makarismos (or blessing in which the couple are compared to gods) dissolves a further division between mortals and immortals.

  A soloist probably performed this song while playing a lyre. We are told that it was an epithalamium, and it may well have been performed at a wedding banquet.

  Idaos, then, the panting emissary,

  Reported:

  ‘Out of Asia deathless glory:

  From holy Thebe and the stream-fed port

  Of Plakia, Hector and his men escort

  The bright-eyed, delicate Andromache

  On shipboard over the infertile sea –

  With sweet red garments, bracelets made of gold,

  Beautiful baubles, ivory and untold

  Chalices chased in silver.’ So he spoke.

  Dear Priam rose at once, and the news broke,

  Spreading to friends throughout the city’s wide

  Expanse. And soon the sons of Ilos tied

  Pack mules to smooth-wheeled carts, and whole parades

  Clambered aboard the transports – wives and maids

  With slim-tapering ankles. Some way off,

  The daughters of King Priam stood aloof,

  And youthful stewards harnessed teams of horses

  To chariots…

  …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.

  The first stanza contains a priamel, a literary focusing device in which alternatives serve as foils for the true subject of the poem, revealed as the climax. Pindar’s First Olympian Ode begins with an elaborate priamel highlighting the Olympic games:

  Water is best, and gold, like a fire blazing at night,

  Outshines all lordly wealth. But, O my heart,

  If you wish to extol great competitions,

  Look no further for any star warmer than the sun

  Shining by day through the empty sky

  Or for a contest greater than the Olympics.

  (1–8)

  In Sappho’s fragment military divisions serve as foils leading up to the climactic declaration: the ‘most beautiful’ thing is ‘whatever a person most lusts after’.

  On the assumption that this fragment is a straightforward love poem for Anaktoria, translators have often rendered the climactic line of the first stanza: ‘whomever one loves’. There are a number of problems with this: first, the verb is eratai, which is related to Eros and expresses a strong physical desire. Eros is almost always an irrational, destructive force, and the meaning of the verb is much closer to ‘lust after’ than ‘feel love for’. Second, this lust is directed at an indefinite and neuter object of desire, not ‘whomever’ but ‘whatever’. More than simply a love song, this poem is a quasi-philosophical treatise on the abstract notion of desire.

  Further confusion has resulted from reading Helen as love object instead of active subject. She decides of her own free will to give up her husband and family for a person that she desires. Her object of desire, Paris, is not named in what we have of the poem, and this omission better serves the initial philosophical proposition. Dubois sees this poem as ‘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’ (1996, p. 79). The audience is left to decide whether Helen’s voluntary abandonment of her family is reprehensible or justifiable.

  Some call ships, infantry or horsemen

  The greatest beauty earth can offer;

  I say it is whatever a person

  Most lusts after.

  Showing you all will be no trouble:

  Helen surpassed all humankind

  In looks but left the world’s most noble

  Husband behind,

  Coasting off to Troy where she

  Thought nothing of her loving parents

  And only child but, led astray…

  …and I think of Anaktoria

  Far away,�
��

  And I would rather watch her body

  Sway, her glistening face flash dalliance

  Than Lydian war cars at the ready

  And armed battalions.

  As Sappho revises the traditional account of Helen’s arrival at Troy, so here she further alters the backstory: everyone must have heard, or so the speaker claims, that Leda simply found the egg from which her children (including Helen) were born. In the standard version Leda is impregnated both by Zeus (in the form of a swan) and her husband Tyndareus. She gives birth to two eggs: one containing Helen and Polydeuces (Zeus’ children) and another with Clytemnestra and Castor (Tyndareus’ children).

  ‘Reveal your graceful figure here’ breaks down into the traditional tripartite structure of a kletic hymn (see Introduction, p. xxvi). The Atreidae, or sons of Atreus, are: Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and leader of the expedition to Troy, and his brother Menelaus, king of Sparta and husband of Helen. Here, after having sacked Troy on the north-western coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey), the brothers have stopped on Lesbos and are attempting to depart for their homeward journey.

  In Odyssey 3.130–46 Nestor tells a story of a quarrel between Agamemnon and Menelaus. While Agamemnon decides to stay with half of the army at Troy to make sacrifice to the goddess Athena, Menelaus departs immediately with the others and then stops at Lesbos to contemplate the rest of the voyage and pray to Zeus. In Sappho’s account the brothers are travelling together, and the Athenian playwright Aeschylus (525/4–456/5 BCE) follows this version (Agamemnon 617–79). Rather than praying to Zeus alone, the brothers here pray to Zeus, Hera and Dionysos (‘Thyone’s charming son’). Alcaeus sings of the foundation of a shrine on Lesbos in honour of these three divinities:

  ‘the Lesbians founded the great conspicuous precinct here to be kept in common. They put altars of the blessed immortals in it, and they named Zeus God of Suppliants and you, the glorious goddess of Aeolia, Mother of All, and third Kemelios, Dionysos, raw-flesh-eater…’

  (129.1–9 Voigt)

  In our fragment the text breaks off before we learn the content of Sappho’s prayer. She may have prayed for fair winds during a friend’s voyage.

  Yes, you have all heard

  That Leda, long ago, one day

  Noticed an egg, hyacinth-coloured,

  Hidden away.

  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…

  MAIDENS AND MARRIAGES

  Sappho frequently mingles eroticism and innocence, and ‘Once as a too, too lissome’ could serve as a motto for this series of fragments. Throughout Western literature maidens are identified with flowers, and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, roughly contemporary with the works of Sappho, makes this identification explicit: ‘the narcissus which Earth bore as a lure for the flower-faced girl’ (10). Persephone’s rape by Hades (or Dis), god of the underworld, serves as the prototype of all such ravishment. Maidens who died before their wedding day are often portrayed in art and literature as brides of Death. John Milton (1608–74) recounts the rape of Persephone (or Proserpina):

  Not that fair field

  Of Enna, where Proserpin gath’ring flow’rs

  Herself a fairer flower by gloomy Dis

  Was gather’d…

  (Paradise Lost, 4.268–71)

  William Shakespeare (1564–1616) makes Death’s defloration of the maiden even more explicit. Old Capulet, believing that his daughter Juliet is dead, states:

  There she lies,

  Flower as she was, deflowered by him.

  Death is my son-in-law, Death is my heir;

  My daughter he hath wedded …

  (Romeo and Juliet, Act 4, Scene 5)

  In Greek literature the culling of flowers indicates that a girl is ready for marriage. The maiden, however, is most tempting at this time, and her plucking of a bloom often leads to her own deflowering. She is both defenceless and seductive.

  Artemis, along with Athena and Hestia, remains a virgin goddess, a deity over whom Aphrodite has no sway. Sappho gives a Homeric air to ‘Artemis made the pledge no god can break’ by using epic diction and rhythms. We find a nearly identical scene, involving Zeus and Hestia, Goddess of the Hearth, in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (21–8):

  The works of Aphrodite do not delight the pure virgin Hestia… both Poseidon and Apollo courted her but she was wholly unwilling, she staunchly refused; laying her hand on the head of Father Zeus… she swore an oath that she would remain a virgin eternally, and indeed it has come to pass.

  Once as a too, too lissome

  Maiden was plucking a blossom…

  Artemis made the pledge no god can break:

  ‘Upon my head and all that I hold dear,

  I shall remain a maid, a mountaineer

  Hunting on summits – grant this for my sake.’

  The Father of the Blessèd gave the nod – yes;

  And all the gods pronounced her Frontier Goddess

  And Slayer of Stags, and Eros never crosses

  Her path…

  These two similes, ‘A ripe red apple grows, the highest of them all’ and ‘A hillside hyacinth shepherds treaded flat’, are both composed in a metre called dactylic hexameter, used in hymns, epithalamia and epic. The Roman poet Catullus adapts them in poem 62, in which choirs of boys and maidens sing in response to each other and which may well be an adaptation of a longer poem by Sappho which included these two similes (see ‘Hesperus, you are’). Like flowers, apples in particular and fruit in general are associated with maidens. In Aeschylus’ tragedy The Suppliants (produced c. 463 BCE) Danaos expounds upon the association of fruit and maidenhood in a warning to his daughters:

  … I urge you not to slip and fall, my dears.

  Remember how flagrantly you have attained

  The buxom age that turns the heads of men.

  A ripe fruit is not easy to protect.

  Winged scavengers and every beast with feet

  To slink on – yes, I mean men also – ache

  To tear it from the branch. How could they not,

  When Aphrodite injects such succulence

  That pulp comes plumping out beneath the rind?

  Tempting, a maiden’s rondure is, the target

  Of every eye, and fingers cannot help

  But to reach out and pluck.

  (996–1005)

  In ‘Maidenhead, maidenhead, where have you gone?’ a former maiden has been separated from a part of herself, and this part, personified as Maidenhood itself, drives the separation home with a mocking, almost ghoulish response. Sappho also uses personification in ‘God-crafted product of the tortoise shell’. The Greek rhetorician Demetrius (first century CE) singles this fragment out for praise, commenting on Sappho’s use of repetition ‘where a bride speaks to her virginity, and it answers her using the same device’ (On Style 140).

  (I)

  A ripe red apple grows, the highest of them all,

  Over the treetop, way up on a tapering spray,

  But apple-gatherers never see it – no,

  Rather, they do see it is far away,

  Beyond their reach, impossible.

  This matter stands just so.

  (II)

  A hillside hyacinth shepherds treaded flat,

  A red bloom in the dust – it is like that.

  ‘Maidenhead, maidenhead, where have you gone?’

  ‘I shall never, ever join you again.’

  I combined two related fragments to make ‘Hesperus, you are’. Hesperus is a pe
rsonification of the planet Venus, known as the Evening Star when it appears at dusk. Catullus adapts these lines, along with ‘A ripe red apple grows, the highest of them all’, in poem 62. A chorus of maidens inverts the imagery of Sappho’s song:

  Hesperus, what more cruel fire than yours moves in the sky?

  You tear a daughter from her mother’s arms,

  From her mother’s arms tear a clinging daughter,

  And give a chaste maid to an ardent youth.

  What worse acts do enemies perform when a city falls?

  Hymn, O Hymenaeus, Hymn, approach, Hymenaeus. (20–25)

  A chorus of boys responds:

  Hesperus, what more delightful fire than yours shines in the sky?

  With your flame you validate the contracted engagements

  Which husbands and parents have pledged beforehand

  But do not consummate until your flame has appeared.

  What do the gods grant that is more desirable than this blessed hour?

  Hymn, O Hymenaeus, Hymn, approach, Hymenaeus. (26–31)

  The nightingale becomes a symbol of poetry and lamentation in Western literature. According to tradition, King Tereus of Thrace, while escorting his wife Procne’s sister, Philomela, back to his palace, rapes the girl and cuts out her tongue to prevent her from accusing him. Philomela weaves a tapestry to show her sister the crime and, in revenge, Procne kills her son Itylus and feeds him to Tereus. Tereus chases them until the gods transform them all into birds: Tereus into a hawk; Philomela, a swallow; and Procne, a nightingale forever grieving for her son. In later sources Philomela is the nightingale, and her sister the swallow.