[i]

Our Debt to Greece and Rome

EDITORS

George Depue Hadzsits, Ph.D.
University of Pennsylvania

David Moore Robinson, Ph.D., LL.D.
The Johns Hopkins University

---

[ii]

CONTRIBUTORS TO THE “OUR DEBT TO GREECE AND ROME FUND,” WHOSE GENEROSITY HAS MADE POSSIBLE THE LIBRARY

Our Debt to Greece and Rome

Philadelphia

• Dr. Astley P. C. Ashhurst
• John C. Bell
• Henry H. Bonnell
• Jasper Yeates Brinton
• George Burnham, Jr.
• John Cadwalader
• Miss Clara Comegys
• Miss Mary E. Converse
• Arthur G. Dickson
• William M. Elkins
• H. H. Furness, Jr.
• William P. Gest
• John Gribbel
• Samuel F. Houston
• Charles Edward Ingersoll
• John Story Jenks
• Alba B. Johnson
• Miss Nina Lea
• George McFadden
• Mrs. John Markoe
• Jules E. Mastbaum
• J. Vaughan Merrick
• Effingham B. Morris
• William R. Murphy
• John S. Newbold
• S. Davis Page (memorial)
• Owen J. Roberts
• Joseph G. Rosengarten
• William C. Sproul
• John B. Stetson, Jr.
• Dr. J. William White (memorial)
• George D. Widener
• Mrs. James D. Winsor
• Owen Wister
• The Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of Liberal Studies.

Boston

• Oric Bates (memorial)
• Frederick P. Fish
• William Amory Gardner
• Joseph Clark Hoppin

Chicago

• Herbert W. Wolff

Cincinnati

• Charles Phelps Taft

Cleveland

• Samuel Mather

Detroit

• John W. Anderson
• Dexter M. Ferry, Jr.

Doylestown, Pennsylvania

• “A Lover of Greece and Rome”

New York

• John Jay Chapman
• Willard V. King
• Thomas W. Lamont
• Dwight W. Morrow
• Mrs. D. W. Morrow
• Elihu Root
• Mortimer L. Schiff
• William Sloane
• George W. Wickersham
• And one contributor, who has asked to have his name withheld:

Maecenas atavis edite regibus,

O et praesidium et dulce decus meum.

Washington

• The Greek Embassy at Washington, for the Greek Government.

[iii]

The following lovers of Greek literature, and of Sappho in particular, have kindly consented to act as patrons and have made possible, by generous contributions, the larger size of this volume in the Series “Our Debt to Greece and Rome”:

• Mr. Charles H. Carey
• Mr. James Carey
• Miss Lillie Detrick
• Professor Joseph Clark Hoppin
• Mrs. Harry C. Jones
• Mrs. Gardiner M. Lane
• Miss Emma Marburg
• Dr. John Rathbone Oliver
• Miss Julia R. Rogers
• Professor Herbert Weir Smyth
• Dr. Hugh H. Young

[iv]

Plate 1. ALMA TADEMA’S SAPPHO

In the Walters’ Art Gallery, Baltimore

[v]

SAPPHO
AND HER INFLUENCE

BY
DAVID M. ROBINSON, Ph.D., LL.D.

W. H. Collins Vickers Professor of Archaeology and
Epigraphy and Lecturer on Greek Literature
The Johns Hopkins University

MARSHALL JONES COMPANY
BOSTON · MASSACHUSETTS

[vi]

COPYRIGHT · 1924 · BY MARSHALL JONES COMPANY

All rights reserved

Printed December, 1924

THE PLIMPTON PRESS · NORWOOD · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

[vii]

To

THE MEMORY OF
BASIL LANNEAU GILDERSLEEVE
MASTER, COLLEAGUE, AND FRIEND

AND TO MY FORMER TEACHERS

EDWARD CAPPS
PAUL SHOREY
ULRICH von WILAMOWITZ-MOELLENDORFF

[viii]

[ix]

CONTENTS

[xi]

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]

SAPPHO AND HER INFLUENCE

[2]

[3]

I. SOME APPRECIATIONS, ANCIENT AND MODERN

The name of Sappho will never die. But it lives in most of the minds that know it at all to-day as hardly more than the hazy nucleus of a ragged fringe suggestive of erotic thoughts or of sexual perversion. Very seldom does it evoke the vision of a great and pure poetess with marvellous expressions of beauty, grace, and power at her command, who not only haunts the dawn of Grecian Lyric poetry but lives in scattered and broken lights that glint from vases and papyri and from the pages of cold grammarians and warm admirers, whose eulogies we would gladly trade for the unrecorded poems which they quote so meagerly. Sappho has furnished the title of such a novel as Daudet’s Sapho. It figures in suggestive moving pictures.1 The[4] name will answer prettily as that of a bird or even a boat such as the yacht with which Mr. Douglas defended the American cup in 1871. The modern idea of Sappho truly seems to be based mainly on Daudet, who with Pierre Louys in recent times has done most to degrade her good character and who goes so far as to say that “the word Sappho itself by the force of rolling descent through ages is encrusted with unclean legends and has degenerated from the name of a goddess to that of a malady.” But to the lover of lyrics, who is also a student of Greek Literature in Greek, this poetess of passion becomes a living and illustrious personality, who of all the poets of the world, as Symonds says, is the “one whose every word has a peculiar and unmistakable perfume, a seal of absolute perfection and inimitable grace.” “Sappho,” says Tennyson in The Princess, “in arts of grace vied with any man.” She is one whose fervid fragments, as the great Irish translator of the Odes of Anacreon and the Anacreontics, Thomas Moore, says in his Evenings in Greece,

[5]

a prophecy still true even in this materialistic day. Sappho, herself, had intimations of immortality, for she writes with perfect beauty and modesty:

This brief, pellucid verse Swinburne in his Anactoria has distorted into the gorgeous emotional rhetoric of fourteen verses. But its own quiet prophecy stands good to-day. A fragment first published in 19222 also seems to make her say:

In general, antiquity thought of her as “the poetess” κατ’ἐξοχήν, ἡ ποιήτρια,3 just as Professor Harmon has recently shown4 that “the poet” in ancient literature means Homer. Down to the present day Sappho has kept the definite article which antiquity gave her and has been called the poetess, though we must be careful to test a writer’s use of the term. Therefore, we[6] must not understand by the absence of any added epithet, as Wharton does, that Tennyson rates her higher than all other poets, merely because in Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After he speaks of Sappho as “The Poet,” having called her in his youth “The Ancient Poetess,”5—for he also speaks of Dante as “The Poet,” when in Locksley Hall he says, “this is truth the poet sings,” and then cites verse 121 of the Inferno. It is rare, however, even in modern times to find Sappho classed with any other poet as a peer, as in the beautiful tribute To Christina Rossetti of William Watson, one of the best modern writers of epigrams, where Mrs. Browning and Sappho are the two other women referred to:

In ancient days Pinytus (1st cent. A.D.) composed this epigram:6

[7]

Tullius Laureas, who wrote both in Greek and Latin about 60 B.C., puts into her mouth the following: “When you pass my Aeolian grave, stranger, call not the songstress of Mytilene dead. For ’tis true this tomb was built by the hands of men, and such works of humankind sink swiftly into oblivion; yet if you ask after me for the sake of the holy Muses from each of whom I have taken a flower for my posy of nine, you shall know that I have escaped the darkness of Death, and no sun shall ever rise that keepeth not the name of the lyrist Sappho.” (Edmonds, with variations.)

Posidippus7 (250 B.C.) says:

Horace8 says:

That inadequate and misleading metaphor of fire, as Mackail says, recurs in all her eulogists. Μεμιγμένα πυρὶ φθέγγεται, “her words are mingled with fire,” writes Plutarch,9 but the “fire” of the burning Sappho is not raging hot, it is an unscorching calm, brilliant lustre that[8] makes other poetry seem cold by comparison. No wonder that Hermesianax10 (about 290 B.C.) called her “that nightingale of hymns” and Lucian11 “the honeyed boast of the Lesbians.” Strabo (1 A.D.) said: “Sappho is a marvellous creature (θαυμαστόν τι χρῆμα), in all history you will find no woman who can challenge comparison with her even in the slightest degree.” Antipater of Thessalonica (10 B.C.) named Sappho as one of the nine poetesses who were god-tongued and called her one of the nine muses: “The female Homer: Sappho pride and choice of Lesbian dames, whose locks have earned a name.”12 In another epigram in the Anthology,13 probably from the base of a lost statue of Sappho in the famous library at Pergamum,14 and which Jucundus and Cyriac were able to cite many hundreds of years later, Antipater says,

are the words of Plato in Lord Neaves’ translation of an epigram of which Wilamowitz15 now[9] timidly defends the genuineness. Antipater of Sidon (150 B.C.)16 in his encomium on Sappho tells how

He also speaks17 of Sappho as “one that is sung for a mortal Muse among Muses immortal ... a delight unto Greece.” Dioscorides18 (180 B.C.) says: “Sappho, thou Muse of Aeolian Eresus, sweetest of all love-pillows unto the burning young, sure am I that Pieria or ivied Helicon must honour thee, along with the Muses, seeing that thy spirit is their spirit.” Again, in an anonymous epigram19 it is said: “her song will seem Calliope’s own voice.” Another writer,20 also anonymous, discussing the nine lyric poets, says:

Catullus21 speaks of the Sapphica Musa, and Ausonius in Epigram XXXII calls her Lesbia Pieriis Sappho soror addita Musis.22

If we turn now from the praise of the ancients[10] to modern literary critics of classic lore we shall not find any depredation but rather an enhancing of that ancient praise. The classic estimate of Sappho holds its own and more than holds it to-day. J. A. K. Thomson in his Greeks and Barbarians23 says: “Landor is not Greek any more than Leconte de Lisle is Greek ... they have not the banked and inward-burning fire which makes Sappho so different.” Mackail speaks of “the feeling expressed in splendid but hardly exaggerated language by Swinburne, in that early poem where, alone among the moderns, he has mastered and all but reproduced one of her favourite metres, the Sapphic stanza which she invented and to which she gave her name”—

[11]

Swinburne himself was thoroughly steeped in Sappho whom he considered “the supreme success, the final achievement of the poetic art.” He laid abounding tribute at her feet both in verse and prose. In an appreciation first published posthumously in 1914 in The Living Age,24 he says: “Judging even from the mutilated fragments fallen within our reach from the broken altar of her sacrifice of song, I for one have always agreed with all Grecian tradition in thinking Sappho to be beyond all question and comparison the very greatest poet that ever lived. Aeschylus is the greatest poet who ever was also a prophet; Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist who ever was also a poet, but Sappho is simply nothing less—as she is certainly nothing more—than the greatest poet who ever was at all. Such at least is the simple and sincere profession of my lifelong faith.” Alfred Noyes recognizes in Swinburne’s praise of Sappho a spirit which would make them congenial companions in another world, when in the poem In Memory of Swinburne he writes:

J. W. Mackail echoes Swinburne’s high praise: “Many women have written poetry and some have written poetry of high merit and extreme beauty. But no other woman can claim an assured place in the first rank of poets” ... “The sole woman of any age or[13] country who gained and still holds an unchallenged place in the first rank of the world’s poets, she is also one of the few poets of whom it may be said with confidence that they hold of none and borrow of none, and that their poetry is, in some unique way, an immediate inspiration.”

Many another modern critic ranks Sappho as supreme. Typical are such eulogies as “Sappho, the most famous of all women” (Aldington), or “Sappho, incomparably the greatest poetess the world has ever seen” (Watts-Dunton in ninth ed. Encyclopædia Britannica).

[14]

II. SAPPHO’S LIFE, LESBUS, HER LOVE-AFFAIRS, HER PERSONALITY AND PUPILS

It is my purpose in the limited space at my disposal to show in a general way, since it will not be possible to go into details, the truth of Sappho’s prophecy that men would think of her25 in after-times: to show her importance as a woman and poetess and our debt to her, and also to give my readers some acquaintance with the real and the unreal Sappho so that they can judge how much is fact and how much is fancy in what they hear and read about Sappho, thus proving again that the warp and woof of literature cannot be understood without a knowledge of the original Greek threads. This chapter will consider Sappho’s Life.

Unfortunately we know little of Sappho herself, and about that little there is doubt. Even the ancient lives of Sappho are lost. If we had Chamaeleon’s work on Sappho,26 or the exegesis of Sappho and Alcaeus27 by Callias of Mytilene, or the book on Sappho’s metres by Dracon of Stratonicea, we should not be left so in the dark;[15] but all these have perished or, what comes to the same thing, are undiscovered. Like Homer, Sappho gives us almost no definite information about herself, and we must depend on late lexicographers, commentators, and imitators. Villainous stories arose about her and gathered added vileness till they reached a climax in the licentious Latin of Ovid, especially as seen in Pope’s translation of the epistle of Sappho to Phaon.

Sappho came of a noble family belonging to an Aeolian colony in the Troad. Though Suidas gives eight possibilities for the name of Sappho’s father, the most probable is Scamandronymus, a good Asia Minor name vouched for by Herodotus, Aelian and other ancient writers and now confirmed by a recently discovered papyrus.28 He was rich and noble and probably a wine-merchant. He died, according to Ovid,29 when Sappho’s eldest child was six years of age.

Her mother’s name, says Suidas, was Cleïs.30 Commentators assume that she was living when Sappho began to write poetry because of the reference to “mother” in the “Spinner in Love”; but this may be an impersonal poem. According to the Greek custom of naming the child after a grandparent the poetess called her only daughter Cleïs.

[16]

The poetess had three brothers, Charaxus, Larichus, who held the aristocratic office of cup-bearer in the Prytaneum to the highest officials of Mytilene, and, according to Suidas, a third brother, Eurygyius,31 of whom nothing is known.

Athenaeus tells us that the beautiful Sappho often sang the praises of her brother Larichus; and the name was handed down in families of Mytilene, for it occurs in a Priene inscription32 as the name of the father of a friend of Alexander who was named Eurygyius. This shows the family tradition and how descendants of Sappho’s family attained high ranks in Alexander’s army.

Charaxus, the eldest brother as we now know, “sailed to Egypt and as an associate with a certain Doricha spent very much money on her,” according to the recently found late papyrus biography. Charaxus had strayed from home about 572 and sailed as a merchant to Naucratis, the great Greek port colony established in the delta of the Nile under conditions similar to those of China’s treaty-ports. There he was bartering Lesbian wine, Horace’s innocentis pocula Lesbii, for loveliness and pleasures, when he fell in love with and ransomed the beautiful Thracian courtesan, the world-renowned demi-mondaine. She was called Doricha[17] by Sappho according to the Augustan geographer, Strabo, but Herodotus names her Rhodopis, rosy-cheeked,33 and evidently thought she had contributed to Delphi34 the collection of obeliskoi or iron spits, the small change of ancient days before coin money was used to any great extent. Herodotus, the only writer preserved before 400 B.C. who gives us any details about Sappho tells the story and how the sister roundly rebuked her brother in a poem. Some four hundred years later Strabo, adding a legend which recalls that of Cinderella, repeats the story and it is retold by Athenaeus after another two hundred years. In our own day it has slightly influenced William Morris in the Earthly Paradise. Except for archaeology, however, we should never have heard Sappho’s own words. About 1898 the sands of Egypt gave up five mutilated stanzas of this poem which scholars had for many a year longed to hear, but the beginnings of the lines are gone and only a few letters of the last stanza remain. My own interest in Sappho dates from that very year when I wrote for Professor Edward Capps, then of the University of Chicago, a detailed seminary paper on The Nereid Ode, and for the twenty-five years since I have been gathering[18] material about Sappho. We must be careful not to accept as certainly Sappho’s, especially the un-Sapphic idea of the last stanza, the restorations of Wilamowitz, Edmonds, and a host of other scholars, who have changed their own conjectures several times. Wilamowitz goes so far as to think that the words apply to Larichus, but most critics have restored them with reference to Charaxus. I give a version which I have based on Edmonds’ latest and revised text,35 taking a model from the stanza used by Tennyson in his Palace of Art.

In offering a new translation of such songs as these it should be fully realized that no translation of a really beautiful poem can possibly represent the original in any fair or complete fashion. Unfortunately languages differ; and in translating a single word of Sappho into a word of English which fairly represents its meaning, one may easily have lost the musical charm of the original, and still further he may have broken up the general charm or spirit which the word has because of its associations with the spirit of the whole song. It ought to be clear that in preserving the literal meanings of the words in a song the translator may be compelled to part in large measure with the[19] musical note that comes from assonance, alliteration, and association; or again that in rendering the music as Swinburne could do, he may have diluted or even lost the real meaning and spirit of the poem; and finally that, though the spirit of the poem may be seized ever so effectively, the working out of the details of music and meaning may fail to respond to those of the original. Of course a slight measure of successful representation may be attained. But whatever poetical value anyone senses in these translations must be almost indefinitely heightened by imagination, if the beauty, grace, and power of the original are to be realized. Why then translate at all? Well, just because of a desire to make an English reader share even in a small measure the pleasure the translator feels in the original and to furnish him with paths along which his imagination may lawfully climb toward the height reached by this strangely gifted woman’s pen.

In this letter, handed perhaps to Charaxus on his return from Egypt, the tone is that of[21] reconciliation rather than that of rebuke, and the rebuke itself may be found in a fragment of another letter, if Edmonds’ restoration is anywhere near the truth.35

“Sappho,” or “Sapho,”36 as the name appears on vases and papyri, or “Psappho,” as coins and vases have it, or “Psappha,” as she herself spelled it in her soft Aeolic dialect, is perhaps a nom de plume,—the word meaning lapis lazuli. According to Athenaeus37 (who wrote at the beginning of the third century A.D.) she lived in the time of the father of Croesus, Alyattes, who reigned over Lydia from 628 to 560 B.C. Jeremiah, Nebuchadnezzar, and at Rome Tarquinius Priscus were her contemporaries. Suidas, a Greek lexicographer of the tenth century A.D., says that she flourished about the 42nd Olympiad (612-608 B.C.),38 along with Alcaeus and Stesichorus and Pittacus,39 (Pl. 2) the latter, one[22] of the seven wise men of Greece and lord of Lesbus. This would indicate that she was then in her poetic prime. If so, she must have been born about 630 B.C. or earlier. Mackail dates her birth as far back as the middle of the seventh century. These early dates given above are amply confirmed by her explicit reference to Sardis and by her descriptions of the luxurious life of the Lydians (E.40 20, 38, 86, 130, etc.) which have lately been made so realistic by the American excavations with their finds of gold staters of Croesus, beautiful Lydian seals, jewelry, pottery, and inscriptions.

In the seventh century after the founding of Naucratis, about 650 B.C., many Mytilenaeans migrated to Naucratis and engaged in trade in wine and other products.41 Among these was included, as Herodotus’ story shows, Sappho’s brother Charaxus; the mention of his name furnishes a further confirmation of the date we have assumed, and proves that Sappho lived at least after 572 B.C., the year of the accession to the throne of Egypt of Amasis, in whose reign Herodotus42 says that Rhodopis flourished. This would make Sappho’s age at the time about sixty and justify the epithet of “old” which she applies to herself in the poem given in[23] Edmonds 99. Fragment 42 in Edmonds seems to say “age now causeth a thousand twisted wrinkles to make their track along my face.”43 Stobaeus44 tells how one evening over the wine Solon’s nephew, Execestides, sang to him a song by Sappho, and Solon requested him to teach it to him that he might learn it before he died. Now Solon was one of the seven to whom Pittacus also belonged. He died about 559 B.C. at the age of eighty, and the incident serves to indicate that Sappho’s poems were coming into vogue among the young Athenians in Solon’s old age.

Sappho’s birthplace was Eresus,45 the birthplace also of Aristotle’s famous pupil Theophrastus. She early moved to Mytilene (Pl. 3), chief city of Lesbus. Lesbus had been renowned for lovely ladies from Homer’s day, when beauty contests were held there, as they have been down to the present time. It had also been famous from early days for its sweet wine. Many an ancient author speaks of this wholesome tipple, and to-day a thirsty traveller is delighted to sit in a café on the quay and drink a glass of the fine modern κρασὶ τῆς Μιτυλήνης.

Lesbus was so near to Lydia that it could not help absorbing some of the Ionian and Lydian[24] luxury. No one has better described the position of Lesbus in Greek literature than Symonds:46

A young woman of good birth in such surroundings would be sure to have her love-affairs. When Sappho was at the height of her fame in young womanhood, the poet Alcaeus, her townsman, was also in his glory. We are not told whether he was older or younger than she, but probably Sappho was the older and lived before the political disorders which led to her exile from Lesbus. Alcaeus was said, perhaps wrongly, to[27] be her lover. The story is based on the verses quoted by Aristotle in his Rhetoric,47 “pure Sappho, violet-weaving and gently smiling, I would fain tell you something did not shame prevent me,” to which Sappho replied, “If your desire were of things good or fair, and your tongue were not mixing a draught of ill words, then would not shame possess your eye, but you would make your plea outright” (Edmonds). Tradition even in classic times represented her as beloved by Anacreon also,48 but the bard of Teos flourished at least fifty years after the Lesbian poetess. Archilochus and Hipponax, the famous iambic satiric poets, the former dead before Sappho was born, the latter born after she was dead, were also represented as her lovers by Diphilus,49 the Athenian comic playwright in his play Sappho. But as Athenaeus in the third century A.D. said, “I rather fancy he was joking.”

Mackail says that “she was married and had one or more children,” and many of the new fragments, as well as Ovid, indicate this. A fragment long known says:

Professor Prentice50 translates this fragment (E. 130), “there is a pretty little girl named Cleïs whom I love,” etc., and says that it does not refer to her own daughter. But there is no word for love in the Greek passage, and the ancient interpretation of Maximus of Tyre51 is preferable, especially as Cleïs is definitely mentioned by Suidas and as the name reappears as that of a young woman in another of the old fragments and in one of the new pieces.52 The matter seems now to be settled by the recent discovery on a papyrus (about 200 A.D.) of a new late prose biography of Sappho which is so important a source for her life that a literal translation of it is here given, especially as it is not in Edmonds’ Lyra Graeca.53

“Sappho by birth was a Lesbian and of the city of Mytilene and her father was Scamandrus or according to some Scamandronymus. And she had three brothers, Eurygyius, Larichus, and the eldest, Charaxus, who sailed to Egypt and as an associate with a certain Doricha spent very much on her; but Sappho loved more[29] Larichus, who was young. She had a daughter Cleïs with the same name as her own mother. She has been accused by some of being disorderly in character and of being a woman-lover. In shape she seems to have proved contemptible and ugly, for in complexion she was dark, and in stature she was very small; and the same has happened in the case of ... who was undersized.”

The man whom Sappho married, she herself also being a person of some means, was said to be Cercylas, a man of great wealth from the island of Andrus. Cercylas sounds like concocted comic chaff, but we can believe enough of the tradition to say that she was married. A Russian scholar54 made her a widow at thirty-five.55 Thereafter she sought for love and companionship among the girls whom she made members of her salon and instructed in the arts.

Sappho must have had a wonderful personality or she could not have attracted so many pupils and companions whom she trained to chant or sing in the choruses for the marriage ceremony and for other occasions. She was president of the world’s first woman’s club. It was a thiasos or a kind of sacred sorority to which the members were bound by special ties and regulations.[30] We have a long list of the members who were her friends and pupils, not only from Lesbus but from Miletus, Colophon, Pamphylia, and even Salamis and Athens. For some of them she had an ardent passion. When they left her, she missed them terribly (E. 43, 44, 46). “Is it possible for any maid on earth to be far apart from the woman she loves?” She was so jealous at times that she spited her wrath on her rivals, especially Gorgo and Andromeda. She “had enough of Gorgo,” and she scolds Atthis for having come to hate the thought of her and for flitting after Andromeda in her stead (E. 55, 81). Suidas tells us that she had three companions or friends, Atthis, Telesippa, and Megara, to whom she was slanderously declared to be attached by an impure affection; and that her pupils or disciples were Anagora (Anactoria) of Miletus, Gongyla (the dumpling) of Colophon, Euneica of Salamis. Ovid mentions Atthis, Cydro, and Anactoria, the name which Swinburne took for his poem in which he welded together many of Sappho’s fragments with fine expression and passionate thought. Maximus of Tyre (xxiv, 9) says: “What Alcibiades, Charmides, and Phaedrus were to Socrates, Gyrinna, Atthis and Anactoria were to Sappho,[31] and what his rival craftsmen, Prodicus, Gorgias, Thrasymachus and Protagoras were to Socrates, that Gorgo and Andromeda were to Sappho, who sometimes takes them to task and at others refutes them and dissembles with them exactly like Socrates” (Edmonds). Philostratus in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana56 tells of Sappho’s brilliant pupil Damophyla of Pamphylia who is said to have had girl-companions like Sappho and to have composed love-poems and hymns just as she did, with adaptations from the lectures of her professor. Her own fragments mention Anactoria, Atthis, Gongyla, Gyrinno (which perhaps means Little Tadpole), “Mnasidica, of fairer form than the dainty Gyrinno” (E. 115), and possibly Eranna.57 One fragment says, “Well did I teach Hero of Gyara, the fleetly-running maid” (E. 73). If this is the famous Hero of the Hero and Leander story so often pictured in Greek art and on coins of Abydus, Sappho knew the story of two king’s children who loved one another long before the days of the painter Apelles.58 Sappho’s school of poetry in modern times has been prettily pictured in a painting by Hector Leroux (p. 118), but the best representation of what her school may have been is given by Alma Tadema (Pl. 1)[32] in his academic and learned classical painting “Sappho” in the Walters’ Art Gallery in Baltimore. Archaic Greek inscriptions, of interest to the specialist in epigraphy, can be read on the marble seats of the theatre at Mytilene represented in the picture,—the names of Erinna of Telos, Gyrinno, Anactoria of Miletus, Atthis, Gongyla of Colophon, Dika (short for Mnasidica), and others. I quote the beautiful appreciation which Professor Gildersleeve has published:59

[34]

III. THE LEGENDARY FRINGE
Sappho’s Physical Appearance, The Phaon Story, The Vice Idea

So far we have been dealing with ascertained facts, reasonable inferences as to other facts, and strong probabilities: in a word, with the real Sappho so far as her history can be made out with at least some measure of certainty. There is, however, a legendary fringe attaching to every great outstanding personality. It is one of the penalties of personal or literary greatness to become the centre of fanciful stories, personal detraction, misrepresentation, and wild legends often conceived in a most grotesque and improbable fashion. To all this Sappho is no exception. First the question will be discussed whether she was a dwarf. The famous and far-flung story of Phaon and the Leucadian Leap will then claim our mention, and thirdly a word must be said about her character.

According to Damocharis60 Sappho had a beautiful face and bright eyes. The famous[35] line of Alcaeus refers to her gentle smile. So Burns in his Pastoral Poetry says, “In thy sweet voice, Barbauld, survives even Sappho’s flame.” Plato calls her beautiful as does many another writer, though the epithet may refer, as Maximus of Tyre says, to the beauty of her lyrics, one of which practically says long before Goldsmith, “handsome is that handsome does” (E. 58). The word which Alcaeus employs does not necessarily mean that she had violet tresses as Edmonds translates it. It has generally been rendered as violet-weaving, and it is to be regretted that P. N. Ure without evidence, in his excellent book entitled The Greek Renaissance (London, 1921), tells us that Sappho had black hair, even if Mrs. Browning does speak of “Sappho, with that gloriole of ebon hair on calmèd brows.” Tall blondes were popular in ancient days and Sappho was neither divinely tall nor most divinely fair. But the ancient busts, the representations of her as full-sized, on coins of Lesbus and on many Greek vases, belie the idea of the rhetorical Maximus of Tyre who in the second century A.D. labelled her “small and dark,” an idea that occurs also in the new papyrus which we have already quoted. Some have even interpreted her name[36] as derived from Ψᾶφος, “Little Pebble,” i.e., short of stature. Undoubtedly the epithet of Maximus reflects the Roman perverted idea which finds expression in Ovid’s apology for her appearance. The scholiast on Lucian’s Portraits61 is repeating the same source when he says “physically, Sappho was very ill-favored, being small and dark, like a nightingale with ill-shapen wings enfolding a tiny body.” The famous fragment,

may not refer to Sappho, and if it does, we must remember, that Edmonds’ new reading is doubtful. Perhaps Horace was thinking of this line when he wrote62

which recalls Tennyson’s

Edmonds forces the meaning of the Greek to get even four feet out of his new restoration.[37] Sappho was surely taller than that and there is no evidence earlier than Roman days to justify even Swinburne’s

In any case Sappho was no dwarf, otherwise her deformity would not have escaped the notice of the Athenian comic mud-slingers and scandal-mongers who did so much to spoil her good name. Such is the traditional, not the real, human, historical Sappho of the sixth century B.C.

The story of Sappho’s love for Phaon is patently mythological, as indicated by the legend of his transformation by Aphrodite from an old man into a handsome youth. There can be only slight historic foundation for connecting Sappho with him and making Sicily the scene of their first meeting. An inscription on the Parian marble in Oxford says: “When Critius the First was archon at Athens Sappho fled from Mytilene and sailed to Sicily.” The date is uncertain as there is a lacuna in the inscription, but it is between 604 and 594 B.C., perhaps about 598. The recently discovered hymn to Hera, Longing for Lesbus, lends support[38] to this story of exile. She may have been banished by Pittacus for engaging like Alcaeus in political intrigues. She probably returned to Lesbus under the amnesty of 581, as her grave is often mentioned as in Lesbus. There is even a tradition preserved by the English traveller Pococke that her own sepulchral urn was once in the Turkish mosque of the castle of Mytilene. We have already cited one or two fragments which seem to show that she had more than reached middle age. She was old enough to feel that she should not re-marry, especially if she had to choose one younger than herself.63 Fragment (E. 99) is in the style of Shakespeare’s “Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.” Nowhere in her poems is there any evidence that she committed suicide for love of Phaon, but as her name has started this legend we must speak of it in some detail. The famous fragment (E. 108), to judge from the context where it is quoted in connection with Socrates’ death, seems to give her last words: “It is not right that there be mourning in the house of poetry; this befits us not.”

Now let us discuss the supposititious love affair, to which we have referred, about which I share the ancient and modern Lesbian doubt.[39] The ancients tell of Sappho’s unrequited love for the ferryman prototype of St. Christopher, the beautiful Phaon. The story is well given in Servius’ précis of Turpilius’ Latin paraphrase of Menander,64 though he does not mention Sappho by name: “Phaon, who was a ferryman plying for hire between Lesbus (others say he was from Chios65) and the mainland, one day ferried over for nothing the Goddess Venus in the guise of an old woman, and received from her for the service an alabaster box of unguent, the daily use of which made women fall in love with him. Among those who did so was one who in her disappointment is said to have thrown herself from Mount Leucates, and from this came the custom now in vogue of hiring people once a year to throw themselves from that place into the sea.” (Edmonds). But neither Phaon nor anything connected with Phaon is mentioned in any of Sappho’s fragments, though Francis Fawkes and others have connected Phaon’s name with the Hymn to Aphrodite. A writer of the second century B.C., Palaephatus,66 makes the very inconsistent statement that “this is the Phaon in whose honor as a lover many a song has been written by Sappho.” Nor is there any allusion to[40] Sappho’s curing her passion by leaping from the white Leucadian cliff. Athenaeus67 and Suidas go so far as to say that the victim was another Sappho, and even in the late lists of Leucadian leapers, in Photius, Sappho is not included. Who first conjured up a Phaon, we know not, but the story belongs to folk-lore, and Phaon appears on Greek vases of the time and style of Meidias, who is dated by most archaeologists toward the end of the fifth century B.C., much earlier than Plato’s play (392 B.C.). His indifference to the many ladies who are making love to him is well portrayed, especially on vases (Pl. 4, 5) in Florence and Palermo (p. 107)68. The fair Phaon, Aphrodite’s shining star (φάων = shining), is only another avatar of Adonis, who appears in similar style on similar vases, one even found in the same grave with a Phaon vase. Phaon, I believe, is as old as the fifth century; but the story of Sappho’s leap transferred to the white cliffs in the south of the white island of Leucas, the modern Cape Ducato, is later. The Cape is also called Santa Maura, some two hundred feet high, and even to-day this rock of desperation is haunted by Sappho’s ghost and known as Sappho’s Leap (Pl. 6). The legend of the Lesbian’s[41] leap first occurs in the poet of the Old Comedy, Plato, who wrote the play called Phaon. Later in the New Comedy, Menander was probably adorning an old tale to point a contemporary moral when he produced his Leucadia of which Turpilius, a contemporary of Terence, wrote a Latin paraphrase. A few anapaestic lines are preserved by Strabo, who speaks of the Leucadian Cliff:

Antiphanes probably told the story in both his Leucadius and his Phaon; and Cratinus must have mentioned Phaon, for Athenaeus69 tells us that he told how Aphrodite, beloved by Phaon, concealed him among the fair wild lettuce, just as other writers say Adonis was hidden.

The practice of abandoned lovers taking the leap may possibly have been known even in Sappho’s day, for Stesichorus tells of a girl throwing herself from a cliff near Leucas because a youth had scorned her. By the time of Anacreon (550 B.C.), the leap had become the[42] symbol of a love passion that could no longer be borne; “Lifted up from the Leucadian rock, I dive into the hoary wave, drunk with Love.” It is the same old story told at every summer resort about some place called Lover’s Leap, but in Anacreon nothing is said about drowning. And legend70 says that sometimes wings or feathers were attached to the person jumping off the cliff to lighten the fall. In any case the leap, legendary or not, was not suicide but a desperate remedy, killing or curing, for hopeless love. We hear of many who survived the expiatory leap.

In a stucco fresco71 (Pl. 7) (not later than 40 A.D.) in the half dome of the apse at one end of the underground building in Rome near the Porta Maggiore, which served for the cult of some secret neo-Pythagorean sect or possibly as a temple of the Muses or possibly only as the underground summer abode of an enthusiast over Greek poets like the newly discovered underground rooms of the Homeric enthusiast at Pompeii, we have possibly an illustration of the Leucadian leap, at least in symbolism, as personifying the parting of the image of the soul. Sappho, lyre in hand, is springing from the misty cliff, which Ausonius mentions in his sixth idyl[43] (cf. p. 131), and below in the sea is a Triton spreading out a garment to break her fall. Opposite on a height stands Apollo, who had a temple on the spot and to whom according to Ovid’s Fifteenth Heroic Epistle Sappho promised to dedicate her lyre if he was propitious. Ovid is the first writer from whom we have the story in detail. It was often used in later literature, as we shall see in a succeeding chapter. Many know Pope’s translation of Ovid,72 but if my readers desire to read an imaginative and humorous circumstantial account of Sappho’s leap, on which the modern popular idea is mostly based, they may find it in Addison’s Spectator, No. 233, November 27, 1711.

The moral purity of Sappho shines in its own light. She expresses herself, no doubt, in very passionate language, but passionate purity is a finer article than the purity of prudery, and Sappho’s passionate expressions are always under the control of her art. A woman of bad character and certainly a woman of such a variety of bad character as scandal (cf. p. 128 and note 147) has attributed to Sappho might express herself passionately and might run on indefinitely with erotic imagery. But Sappho is never erotic. There is no language to be[44] found in her songs which a pure woman might not use, and it would be practically impossible for a bad woman to subject her expressions to the marvellous niceties of rhythm, accent, and meaning which Sappho everywhere exhibits. Immorality and loss of self-control never subject themselves to perfect literary and artistic taste. It is against the nature of things that a woman who has given herself up to unnatural and inordinate practices which defy the moral instinct and throw the soul into disorder, practices which harden and petrify the soul, should be able to write in perfect obedience to the laws of vocal harmony, imaginative portrayal, and arrangement of the details of thought. The nature of things does not admit of such an inconsistency. Sappho’s love for flowers, moreover, affords another luminous testimony. A bad woman as well as a pure woman might love roses, but a bad woman does not love the small and hidden wild flowers of the field, the dainty anthrysc and the clover, as Sappho did. There is, moreover, in a life of vice something narrowing as well as coarsening. An imagination which like Sappho’s sees in a single vision the moonlight sweeping the sea, breaking across the shore and illuminating wide stretches of landscape with[45] life-giving light, and in the midst of all this far-spreading glory sees and personifies the spirit of the night, listening to the moanings of homesickness and repeating them with far-flung voice to those across the sea,—an imagination with such a marvellous range as this is never given to the child of sodden vice. Here once more is a woman who made it her life business to adorn and even to glorify lawful wedlock, and carried on this occupation in a sympathetic and delightful strain of dance and song which, however passionate in their expression, contain no impure words. It is simply unthinkable that such a woman should be perpetually destroying the very foundations of her own ideals.

[46]

IV. THE WRITINGS OF SAPPHO

The number of poems or fragments (Pl. 8) of Sappho has increased from a hundred and twenty in Volger’s edition (1810) to a hundred and ninety-one in Edmonds. “Though few they are roses,” and a marvellous vitality and mentality permeates their mangled and marred members. Sappho probably had her own collection of her poems, but they were surely not published in a large edition as has sometimes been said. An introductory poem is possibly preserved on an Attic vase, but even of that we cannot be sure. In Roman days there were two editions, one arranged according to subject and the other according to metre, both based on some Alexandrian source much earlier than the book On the Metres of Sappho, published by Dracon of Stratonicea about 180 A.D. Sappho wrote many forms of literature in many different metres, cult hymns or odes, marriage songs, scolia or drinking songs, songs of love and friendship, besides her nine books of lyrics, epigrams, elegies, none of which has survived or been described by any other[47] author, iambics, monodies, and funeral songs like that for Adonis. The Athenian dramatists even pictured her as proposing puzzles and riddles. Colombarius, as quoted by Meursius in his notes on Hesychius, called Sappho the poetess of the Trojans, the meaning of which has recently been made clear by the discovery of the Marriage of Hector and Andromache.

The first poem is the Ode to Aphrodite which was cited by Dionysius of Halicarnassus for its finished and brilliant style,—the style used by Euripides among the tragedians and by Isocrates among the orators. Though the rhythm, ardor, terseness, and noble simplicity can be given in no translation,73 nearly every lover of Greek lyrics has tried his hand at it. Ambrose Philips made thirty-four words out of the first stanza which in the Greek has only sixteen; Merivale found forty-three words necessary; but Tucker and Leonard with strict compression and simplicity manage to translate with twenty-three; Gildersleeve in an unpublished version which I also quote here, and Fairclough use twenty-four:

or, with the translation of doves for sparrows:

[49]

[50]

Here follow two translations where “he” is changed to “she” in the sixth stanza. The controversy as to the sex of the belovèd turns on the admission or omission of a single letter in the Greek.

The second ode, quoted in a mutilated condition by the treatise On the Sublime, is even more difficult to translate. As Wordsworth says, here

In its rich Aeolian dialect the ode glows with true Greek fire. Sappho’s words are clear but far from cold. They are a sea of glass, but a[53] sea of glass mingled with fire such as the Patmos seer saw from his island not far from Sappho’s Lesbian home. They enable us to understand why Byron in Don Juan speaks of “the isles of Greece where burning Sappho loved and sung.” This is what Swinburne means, when he speaks of the fire eternal and in his Sapphics says that about her “shone a light of fire as a crown for ever.” We know from Plutarch75 that an ancient physician, Erasistratus, included this ode (which has influenced realistic descriptions of passion from Euripides and Theocritus to Swinburne and Sara Teasdale) in his book of diagnoses as a compendium of all the symptoms of corroding emotions. He applied this psychological test whenever Antiochus looked on Stratonice. “There appeared in the case of Antiochus all those symptoms which Sappho mentions: the choking of the voice, the feverish blush, the obscuring of vision, profuse sweat, disordered and tumultuous pulse and finally, when he was completely overcome, bewilderment, amazement and pallor.” Perhaps Sappho was influenced by Homer’s76 description of fear and she herself surely suggested such symptoms to Lucretius.77 We must regard the ode primarily as a literary product, but its pathological[54] picture of passion is hardly secondary. Even if the symptoms seem appalling to our cold and unexpressive northern blood, we must remember that this physical perturbation, as Tucker calls it, was in no way strange to the ancients. Gildersleeve put it well in his unpublished lecture on Sappho, which he so kindly placed at my disposal and to which I am greatly indebted: “if a Greek melted, he melted with a fervent heat, and if this is true of the average Greek how much more was it true of an Aeolian and an Aeolian woman, and of Sappho most Aeolian of all.” Byron refers to this ode when he says in Don Juan:

With regard to Catullus’ rendering (LI), Swinburne in his Notes on Poems and Reviews, speaking of his poem Anactoria, says: “Catullus translated or as his countrymen would now say ‘traduced’ the Ode to Anactoria; a more beautiful translation there never was and will never be; but compared with the Greek, it is colourless and bloodless, puffed out by additions and[55] enfeebled by alterations. Let anyone set against each other the two first stanzas, Latin and Greek, and pronounce.... Where Catullus failed I could not hope to succeed; I tried instead to reproduce in a diluted and dilated form the spirit of a poem which could not be reproduced in the body.”

Tennyson has given the best paraphrase in Eleänore:

The following version I have based mainly on Edmonds’ recent text,78 with a conjectural restoration of the last stanza, of which only a few words are preserved in the Greek:

[56]

As J. A. K. Thomson says in his recent fascinating book Greeks and Barbarians (London and New York, 1921), “Sappho, in the most famous of her odes, says that love makes her ‘sweat’ with agony and look ‘greener than[57] grass.’ Perhaps she did not turn quite so green as that, although (commentators nobly observe) she would be of an olive complexion and had never seen British grass. But even if it contain a trace of artistic exaggeration, the ode as a whole is perhaps the most convincing love-poem ever written. It breathes veracity. It has an intoxicating beauty of sound and suggestion, and it is as exact as a physiological treatise. The Greeks can do that kind of thing. Somehow we either overdo the ‘beauty’ or we overdo the physiology. The weakness of the Barbarian, said they, is that he never hits the mean. But the Greek poet seems to do it every time. We may beat them at other things, but not at that. And they do it with so little effort; sometimes, it might happen, with none at all.”

The passion of love is the supreme subject of Sappho’s songs, as shown by these first two and many a short fragment, as for example (E. 81) where Love is called for the first time in literature “sweet-bitter.” Some scholars have credited it to the much later Posidippus, but he and Meleager took the word from Sappho, though it may not have been original even with her. Sappho’s order of the compound word is generally reversed in translation, but Sir Edwin[58] Arnold says “sweetly bitter, sadly dear,” and Swinburne in Tristram of Lyonesse speaks of “Sweet Love, that are so bitter.” Tennyson also has the same order in Lancelot and Elaine (pp. 205-206). To Sappho love is a second death, and in the second ode death itself seems not very far away. The Greek words for swooning are mostly metaphors from death, and so we are not surprised when we read that like death love relaxes every limb and sweeps one away in its giddy swirling, a sweet-bitter resistless wild beast. Here is Sir Sidney Colvin’s translation (John Keats, 1917, p. 332): “Love the limb-loosener, the bitter-sweet torment, the wild beast there is no withstanding, never harried a more helpless victim.” Another fragment (E. 54) also shows the power of love:

Sappho’s range of subjects is much greater than the personal emotions of love, though very personal and individual feelings predominate. She touches almost every field of human experience, so that there is much in her scant fragments to bring her near to us. The wail against[59] ingratitude comes home to those high-strung natures who do good to others but are sensitive to every wrong when they have the unfortunate experience of learning that one’s friends are sometimes one’s own worst enemies. “Those harm me most by whom I have done well” (Mackail). But she is not one of those who bear a grudge long, her heart is for peace. One of the few ethical fragments, as Mackail says, “is a speech of delicate self-abasement, spoken with the effect of a catch in the voice and tears behind the eyes;” “No rancour in this breast runs wild, I have the heart of a child.” Sappho’s love of sermonizing is seen in her commandment: “when anger swells in the heart, restrain the idly barking tongue.” From Aristotle’s Rhetoric Edmonds (91) reconstructs another fragment:

In another fragment of a different nature (E. 120) we read: “Stand up, look me in the face as friend to friend and unveil the charm that is in thy eyes.” In other fragments we enter a Lesbian lady’s home and see woman’s love of dress,—no short skirt for her, for they[60] “wrapped her all around with soft cambric” (E. 105). “A motley gown of fair Lydian work reached down to her feet” (E. 20), or, if we believe Pollux (VII. 93), it is the Greek love of fine shoes. No Lesbian butchery for her tender feet, but she must wear soft luxurious Lydian slippers: “A broidered strap of fair Lydian work covered her feet.” Punning on the name of Timas (precious), another fragment, which perhaps refers to a statue of Aphrodite in Sappho’s home, seems to dote on fancy handkerchiefs; “and hanging on either side thy face the purple handkerchief which Timas sent for thee from Phocaea, a precious gift from a precious giver” (E. 87).79 The fragment (E. 21), “shot with a thousand hues,” refers to dress rather than to the rainbow. The sight of beautiful gowns thrilled her: “Come you back, my rosebud Gongyla, in your milk-white gown.” Again she says: “Many are the golden bracelets and the purple robes, aye and the fine smooth broideries, indeed a richly varied bride-gift; and without number also are the silver goblets and the ornaments of ivory” (E. 66). She coined new words for women; she calls the chest in which women keep their perfumes and like things a gruté or hutch (E. 180). Again[61] she uses (E. 179) the word Beudos for a short diaphanous frock or blouse. She is the first to use the word Chlamys, where she speaks of Love as “coming from Heaven and throwing off his purple mantle” (E. 69). Blondes were much admired among the fair-haired Lesbians, though Sappho herself was a brunette, and so she herself mentions (E. 189) a kind of box-wood or scytharium-wood with which women dye their hair a golden color. She is fond of cassia and frankincense (E. 66), and she dotes on myrrh and royal perfumes (E. 83). She rebukes the foolish girl who prides herself on her ring.80 With “a keen swift flicker of woman’s jealousy,” and well acquainted with the philosophy of clothes and with the new Ionic dresses introduced into Lesbus during her own lifetime at the beginning of the sixth century B.C. from Asia Minor, she jests about her rival Andromeda, the country girl who knows not how to manage the train of her new gown81 (E. 98):

[62]

There is an intimate love of the loveliness of nature in Sappho, as we should expect of one resident on an island under Ionian skies where, as Herodotus (I. 142) says, “the climate and seasons are the most beautiful of any cities in the world.” “The many garlanded earth puts on her broidery” (E. 133). “Thus of old did the dainty feet of Cretan maidens dance pat to the music beside some lovely altar, pressing the soft smooth bloom of the grass” (E. 114). As Thomas Davidson has so well said: “every hour of the day comes to Sappho with a fresh surprise.” We lie down for a noonday siesta in “a murmurous, blossomy June,” as Stebbing puts it, in the orchard of the nymphs where (E. 4),

In the Greek, as Edwin Cox says, “the sound of the words, the repetition of long vowels particularly omega, the poetic imagery of the whole and the drowsy cadence of the last two words give this fragment a combination of qualities[63] probably not surpassed in any language.” The beautiful verses about the pippin on the topmost branch we shall quote below. In another fragment (E. 3) Sappho sees the stars in a way which Tennyson echoes when he writes: “As when in heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful.” Or again Sappho’s love of nature appears in the line (E. 112): “the moon rose full and the maidens took their stand about the altar.” In the new Ode to Atthis the moon is not silver (as in E. 3) but rosy-fingered: “after sunset the rosy-fingered moon beside the stars that are about her, when she spreads her light o’er briny sea and eke o’er flowery field, while the dew lies so fair on the ground and the roses revive and the dainty anthrysc and the melilot with all its blooms” (E. 86). Recently (1922) A. C. Benson in The Reed of Pan has combined fragment (E. 3) with the beautiful half stanza quoted above, under the title Moonrise:

In another fragment, which we quote below, Sappho pictures a spring midnight with almost astronomical exactness. She loves the sun: “I have loved daintiness [from childhood] and for me love possesses the brightness and beauty of the sun.” William Stebbing in his Minstrel of Love expands the two verses into ten, the last “Dazzling my brain with gazing on the Sun.” Sappho knows the golden-sandalled and queenly dawn (E. 19, 177). She wrote an ode to Hesperus, the Evening Star, of which we have only the tantalizing beginning, “fairest of all the stars that shine” (E. 32). Another graceful fragment quoted in antiquity to show the charm of repetition (E. 149)83 on the Evening Star, which comes in Catullus too, has influenced not only Byron in Don Juan but Andrew Lang in Helen of Troy (II. 4) and especially Tennyson (see p. 206). “That Greek blockhead,” as Sir Walter Scott was called, though he knew more Greek than most undergraduate students of Greek to-day, even if he didn’t know the Sappho fragment, expresses the same idea in the Doom of Dever Girl, “All meet whom day and care divide.”

[65]

Sappho is fond of birds, the dove, the lovely or heavenly swallow (E. 122), the nightingale. The doves drive Aphrodite’s car in the first ode and in E. 16 “their heart grows light and they slacken the labor of their pinions.” Ben Jonson took from Sappho (E. 138) his line in The Sad Shepherd, “the dear good angel of the spring, The nightingale,” and Swinburne, “The tawny sweet-winged thing Whose cry was but of spring.” A fragment published even since Edmonds’ book speaks of the “clear-voiced nightingales.” She knows exactly what crickets do at noon of a summer’s day. Listen to their song (E. 94), rescued from Alcaeus, to whom Bergk had wrongly ascribed it:

We see the woman also in her love of flowers as well as of birds. Flowers are her favorites and she worships them with almost the modern reverence of the Japanese, whom I have sometimes seen saying their morning prayers to a beautiful bouquet. Take, for example, this simple but pretty flower-picture of Sappho’s (E. 107):

[66]

She sympathizes with the hyacinth (E. 151), which the shepherd tramples under foot on the mountain, and uses it in one of the most attractive flower-similes in all literature. Listen to this aubade which has been recently found and very tentatively restored (E. 82). It gives a delightful glimpse also of Sappho’s ménage:

Or take this other example of Sappho’s love of flowers which Symonds has expanded into a sonnet[67] too long to quote here. I give Tucker’s new version:

Sappho speaks of the golden pulses (E. 139):

Sappho knows the little and common flowers, the dainty anthrysc and melilot, the violets and the lilies (E. 86, 83, 82), but, like Pindar, she especially loves the rose. Meleager’s garland of song assigned the rose to Sappho. She says in one of the new fragments (E. 83): “with many a garland of violets and sweet roses mingled, you have decked my flowing locks as I stood by your side, and with many a woven necklet made of a hundred blossoms you have adorned my dainty[68] throat.” Philostratus in his Letters (51) says: “Sappho loves the rose and always crowns it with a meed of praise, likening beautiful maidens to it; and she compares it to the bared fore-arms of the Graces.” Fragment E. 68 says: “Hither pure rose-armed Graces, daughters of Zeus.” Sappho’s love of the rose has led earlier collectors of Sappho’s fragments to include among her verses the famous song in praise of the rose quoted by Achilles Tatius in his love romance on Clitophon and Leucippe, which Elizabeth Barrett Browning has translated:

Sappho, however, does mention the roses of Pieria in the famous lines spoken with characteristic teacher’s tone, almost in the manner of Mrs. Poyser. According to Plutarch, in one passage, the verses are addressed to a wealthy woman, in another passage,85 to a woman of no refinement or learning; according to Stobaeus,86 to a woman of no education; probably it was some rich but uncultured Lesbian girl, who would not go to the Lesbian Smith or Vassar or Bryn Mawr:

For another expanded version by Swinburne in his Anactoria I must refer to Wharton. Sappho[70] had known and loved the wee wee maiden Atthis when she was an awkward school girl, but now in the bloom of beauty after a sad parting the fickle Atthis has flitted away to another woman’s college and clean forgotten Sappho for a rival teacher, Andromeda; “I loved you, Atthis, long ago, when my own girlhood was still all flowers, and you—you seemed to me a small ungainly child” (E. 48).87 “So you hate to think of me, Atthis; ’Tis all Andromeda now” (Edmonds).

Lesbus was a land of flowers, of the rose and the violet, “a land rich in corn and oil and wine, in figs and olives, in building-wood and tinted marble,” as Tucker says. But this triangular island (about thirty-five by twenty-five miles) had mountains rising from two to three thousand feet at its corners and two deep fiords on its southern coast. From the northern coast Sappho must often have looked across the short seven miles of laughing sea upon Troyland and thought of the Homeric poems in which Lesbus played such an important rôle.88 The air like that of Athens as described by Pindar, with a glamor wreathing such cities as Smyrna, was so translucent that in the northeast across the dividing sea many-fountained Ida could easily[71] be seen. It is perhaps an accident that there is so little mention of mountain or sea in Sappho. But she was no “landlubber,” as Professor Allinson would have us believe.89 Pindar and the other lyric poets were acquainted with the sea and so must Sappho have known it, as she daily saw the ships fly in and out of their haven on white wings (cf. first stanza of poem on p. 82). In one of the new fragments (E. 86) we have a marvellous picture of the sea in the last stanza of a poem which otherwise, with its love of flowers, with the beautiful simile of the rosy-fingered moon, is one of the most perfect things in literature. The telepathic and telegraphic sympathy of Sappho startles us and the wireless message sent by night across the severing sea, whose sigh you can hear in the original Greek, anticipates the modern radio.90 As this is a memory poem, and Anactoria, like Hallam, is “lost,” for the time being at least, I have followed as a model Tennyson’s In Memoriam in metre, stanza, and rhyming. The first line seems to be “remembered” in rhyme as it were after the interval during which the second and third lines have been made and rhymed.

[72]

This ode alone marks Sappho as a great poetess. The reasons are: (1) the loving notice of little and common flowers, (2) the comparison of Anactoria when surrounded by other women to the moon in the midst of her surrounding stars, the bold personification of the moon secured by the use of the single figure “rosy-fingered,” (3) sudden and masterful survey of land and sea, (4) the successful centering of attention upon Anactoria’s homesickness even in the midst of such far-reaching beauty of land and sea, (5) the remarkably forceful portrayal of what in our day we call thought-transference as[74] seen, for example, in Tennyson’s Aylmer’s Field or Enoch Arden, (6) and not least important, the simplicity and sharpness of outline displayed in the imagery. “Night” is a vague, widely diffused, mystic thing, but Sappho makes us see her a thing of many ears and one of them close to Anactoria’s face. Night does not send a mystic intimation such as Tennyson’s vibration of light might indicate. But she speaks right out in a clear voice that carries far enough to reach across the sea to Sappho. A seventh reason is the strange, hot emotion of love and sorrow and longing that throbs like a pulse in every line and makes the whole letter a living creature. Milton said and lovers of poetry have always agreed that poetry must be simple, sensuous, and passionate. By sensuous he of course meant expressed in images involving the use of the bodily senses. Is there anything in poetry, ancient or modern, that more exactly meets Milton’s requirements than these few lines of Sappho’s letter to her girl friend? Now if this is evident to the reader of an English translation, it is vastly more so to one who knowing the meaning of the words has read them in the Greek and then read them again because they were so sweet, and read them a third time[75] and many times until the music haunts him like the face of a lover. This will rank with Matthew Arnold’s verses To Marguerite in no. 5 of his series of little poems on Switzerland:

Sappho’s last verse also reminds us of Horace’s Oceano dissociabili91 and Tennyson’s “bond-breaking sea.” Fragment E. 41 refers to the mariner at sea in a storm; and E. 66 pictures a beautiful scene on the sea, where “Hector and his comrades bring from sacred Thebe and everflowing Placia, by ship upon the briny sea, the dainty Andromache of the glancing eye.” (Edmonds)

Sappho’s verses are full of color, of bright and beautiful things. She ranks with Pindar in her special devotion to gold, not for its value but[76] for its fine amber lustre and its permanency (E. 110). The Cyprian queen of love sits on a throne of rich color and splendor, with inlaid wood or metal (E. 1); she “dispenses the nectar of love in beakers of gold” in what was perhaps the introductory poem of Sappho’s Wedding-Songs (E. 6):

Aphrodite wears a golden coronal (E. 9), is herself golden (E. 157), and her handmaid is golden-shining (E. 24). The Muses are golden (E. 11), perhaps also the Nereids (E. 36). They have a golden house (E. 129):

The dawn is golden-slippered (E. 19); something or somebody is more golden than gold (E. 60). “Gold is pure of rust” (E. 109); “Gold is a child of Zeus; no moth nor worm devours it; and it overcomes the strongest of mortal hearts”[77] (E. 110).92 Sappho’s daughter Cleïs looks like a golden flower (E. 130); “Golden pulse grew on the shore” (E. 139, cf. O’Hara’s poem Golden Pulse). One of many fragments of interest to the student of Greek life and antiquities speaks of “gold-knuckle bowls” (E. 191).93 Sappho was cited by Menaechmus of Sicyon in his Treatise on Artists as the first to use a lyre called the pectis, and she invented the Mixo-Lydian mode, particularly sensual or emotional, which the Greek tragedians copied from her.

Sappho makes allusions to children which are natural and tender (E. 130). In similes she uses children simply and directly as in The Ode to Hesperus (E. 149) and in the verse, which may refer to a sparrow and which Catullus imitated, “I flutter like a child after her mother” (E. 142).

Sappho from her tender years was inured to the sorrows as well as the joys of love. Two of her fragments (E. 111, 135), the first perhaps a complete poem, represent the loneliness of a long night spent in vain waiting for a lover. Cipollini (1890) and others have often set these to music. They are popular ballads which Sappho must have used just as Burns did in writing Auld Lang Syne. As Tucker says: “It[78] is probable that she is setting one such prehistoric lyrical idea to new words or recasting one such vagrom ditty.” He is thinking, I imagine, of such a Scottish ballad as:

There are a score of versions in Italian, some far from Sappho, and Ronsard’s good French version; and many an American or English poet has tried his hand at translating the lines,94 which in the Greek toll like a curfew bell. All too little known is the rendering by Alan Seeger, the poet who was killed in battle on July 4, 1916, in his poem, Do You Remember Once?

For the Greek silence of nature Seeger substitutes the sympathy of nature in the moaning of the night winds. A more literal translation is:

Sappho’s verses are purer, simpler than the frank poem of Hester Bancroft on an August Night:95

The other popular song about a girl in love, in a metre which Horace imitated in the twelfth ode of the third book, is as imaginative a description as anything in Coleridge or Keats with whom the Maryland poet, Father Tabb, so aptly compares Sappho. It reminds one of Gretchen’s weaving-song in Faust, and of the English folk-song, “O mother, put my wheel away; I cannot spin to-night.” It is beautifully translated by Thomas Moore, in his Evenings in Greece:

[80]

Many fragments deal with the Greek myths. Sappho is one of the first to tell the story of Adonis, who has his analogy in Phaon. “Woe for Adonis” (E. 25); “Woe for him of the four months’ sojourn, Woe for Adonis” (E. 136 uncertain restoration). Another fragment is presumed to be Sappho’s and, probably, to be part of a song sung at the Mytilenaean spring-festival of the marriage of Adonis and Aphrodite, of whose counterpart at Alexandria we have an example in the fifteenth idyl of Theocritus, so well translated by Matthew Arnold:

O’Hara, Bliss Carman, and many another have expanded this lament for Adonis which we know so well from Bion’s Lament for Adonis and from Shelley’s Adonais. I quote the poet laureate of Canada:

Sappho’s knowledge of literature and legend is also not little. She is well acquainted with Homer, who very much influenced Sappho’s language. She knows Helen (E. 38) and her daughter Hermione (E. 44); “Hermione was never such as you are, and just it is to liken you rather to Helen than to a mortal maid.” Or take this complete letter to Anactoria (E. 38), who has eloped with a soldier to Sardis, as beautiful a poem as any of Sappho’s, if not spoiled in the last stanza by the wrong restoration of some scholars. The news of its discovery caused Mr. Osborn to leap out of bed and say he would fight for Sappho to the last with a pen dipt in poison. It reminds one of The Song of Solomon I. 9, “I have compared thee, O my[82] love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots,” or VI. 10, “Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?” Osborn, Mark Telfair, Marion Mills Miller, T. E. R., and others178 have given poetic versions in Sapphics of this new poem. Another rendering seems superfluous, but I could not resist the pleasure of adding it, even though in the main less happy than its predecessors. In some of the lines the love of far-off Sappho’s meaning has lured me astray from the nearer English anapaest:

Agamemnon is mentioned in one of the new fragments (tentatively restored E. 85), which is an especially beautiful dialogue between Sappho and her dumpling pupil Gongyla, which might be called Intimations of Immortality:

Sappho knows the story of Leda and the egg. Edmonds (E. 97) reads a new text: “They say that once upon a time Leda found hidden an egg of hyacinthine hue.” But I prefer the older, better version, which O’Hara renders:

[85]

Sappho makes a sarcastic reference to Leto and Niobe as very dear comrades (E. 140), and gives Niobe nine children of either sex (E. 168). She knows the love of the Moon for Endymion in the cave on Mt. Latmus (E. 167); she wrote about Theseus (E. 169), Prometheus (E. 170), Medea (E. 185), and Philomela and Procne, “the heavenly swallow, Pandion’s daughter” (E. 122). Perhaps Sappho pictured the story of Hero and Leander (cf. p. 31). Stebbing changes the sex of Hero and makes a long poem on Champion, Athlete, and Harpist:

The divinities in Sappho are primarily Aphrodite, Peitho, Ares, Hecate, Hera, Hermes, Hephaestus, and the Muses. There is much reverence in the beautiful Hymn to Hera, the latter half of which Edmonds (E. 40) has so very tentatively restored on the hypothesis that this was written in Syracuse before Sappho embarked to return to Mytilene on hearing of the amnesty of Pittacus.

Sappho was not only the poet of ardent love, as we have seen, but the greatest composer of wedding-songs of antiquity, and much of such poetry in later days is nothing but a translation[86] or a transfusion of Sappho. Her Epithalamia were written for actual wedding ceremonies, but I cannot agree with a great German critic who says that they were not literary productions. I do not mean to say that she published these songs, for I believe that they were not collected into a ninth book until later days. We have already quoted what may be an introductory poem to the Epithalamies; perhaps even some of the other fragments which we have mentioned, such as that perfect weaving-song, which may reflect the awakening of love in the heart of the bride, and certainly the verses on the Evening Star (p. 64) belong to her Epithalamies. The wonderful new poem (E. 66) with its Homeric genitives and datives and its Homeric forms of words on the Marriage of Hector and Andromache could be used as a wedding-song at any wedding:

I do not feel that this poem was cold and superficial as Miss De Courten and some other critics say, for to me it is a dignified and simple epic narrative, like the messengers’ speeches in Greek tragedy, introduced into the midst of lyrics. It is almost perfect and well worthy of Sappho. It makes us realize that Sappho’s[88] activity was broader than we had supposed and brings her nearer to her predecessors and successors. It is a unique example, hitherto unknown, of a lyric narrative with epic intonations, throwing new light on the history of the ancient wedding-songs.96

A rhetorician of the fourth century A.D., Himerius,97 has an interesting passage which bears on Sappho’s wedding-songs and helps us interpret the fragments which are preserved:

[89]

Himerius refers to the mock contests which were a part of the wedding ceremonies. There was always an agon or sham fight, as in Greek comedy, running through the hymenaeal, to be succeeded in many cases by a real fight afterwards. The wedding echoed with noise which suggested the conflicts of prehistoric days when brides were captives of bow and spear, and all sorts of characters figured in this drama of real life. There was place for satire and ridicule as well as for praise. Even in recent years I have witnessed in a neighboring island, “Scio’s rocky isle,” the semblance of predatory warfare which the Chians keep up during their bridal ceremonies. And in 1902 I attended a three days’ Turkish wedding at Chiblak, near the site of ancient Troy. On that occasion the frequent shooting and fighting, which resulted even in injuries to Turks and Greeks, made the noisy ceremony seem like a battle. In Sappho’s day, as to-day in the Orient, a wedding was not a brief benedictory reading by a clergyman. It was a long-drawn celebration, a prolonged process rather than a precise pronouncement, with torchlight processions, dance, and song.98 All these features emerge very clearly in Sappho, where we can trace the whole ceremony[90] from the weaving of the bridal bower (pastas = portico or bower in Himerius as cited above) to the aubade song of the next morning. Here is the charming song, sung, in the same metre as the famous Linus Song, by the bridesmaids as they led the bride to the bridegroom’s bed, proud of their island and of their Sappho:99

Then follows a kind of lyrical marriage drama, the bridesmaids representing the tribe of the bride, the youths the clan of the bridegroom, in this respect foreshadowing Catullus’ double choir. The maidens answer the young men’s praise by chiding Hesperus, the evening star, whose coming heralds the union. The young[91] men in turn reply with the famous words already quoted, to which the sequel probably was “even so bring home the bride to the bridegroom.” We think of Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion and Epithalamion which have many of the motives of the Greek epithalamium, with their reference to Hesper, with their beautiful descriptions of bride and bridegroom. I quote the lines about Hymen, which is Sappho’s Greek refrain, rendered by the word “wedding” in Edmonds’ version:

The men praise marriage bliss; the maidens, virginity (E. 152, “I shall be ever-maiden,” E. 159, “Can it be that I still long for my virginity?”). The bride says, “Maidenhead, maidenhead, whither away?” and the reply is, “Where I must stay, bride, where I must stay” (E. 164)100; a wonderful example of the way in which Sappho treats abstractions and inanimate things (cf. also E. 80, “Up, my lute divine and make thyself a thing of speech”). Sappho is the first to use such a personification101 and it recalls Théophile Gautier in his reverse application[92] in Mademoiselle de Maupin. At least it is difficult to think of the young Gautier independently conceiving the striking figure that is so characteristic of the genius of the Lesbian poetess. This is the Frenchman’s passage. It describes the fair heroine going out into the world dressed in masculine habiliments to test men’s fidelity in love:

In amoebean or antiphonic hexameter verses (E. 150 and 151), as exquisite as Heine’s Du bist wie eine Blume, the maidens liken the virgin[93] state to the unplucked pippin, the married woman to the hyacinth or columbine, with which Aphrodite is also adorned in the passage from Himerius. As Tucker says: “a band of girls mock the men with failure to win some dainty maiden, and the men reply with a taunt at the neglected bloom of the unprofitable virgin. Say the maids (Pl. 9):

Reply the men:

and there unhappily the record deserts us.” These lovely lines are about as well known as anything of Sappho’s, owing to Rossetti’s adaptation in his One Girl, a title altered in 1881 to Beauty, which the reader can find in Wharton. In modern times, Maurice Thompson, Gamaliel Bradford, and others have been influenced[94] by them, though often an un-Sapphic touch not in Sappho’s verses is given, as in Bradford’s Topmost Bough:

The bridegroom now bears off the bride while the chorus of youths praise the bride and the chorus of maidens the bridegroom:

But as to-day the bridegroom disappears in the society column of the newspaper behind the splendor of the elaborate description of the bride’s gown, so in Sappho the praise of the bride is far sweeter than that of the bridegroom. Recall the lines of Rossetti and these verses in the metre of one of Catullus’ epithalamia:

Congratulations were offered also to the bridegroom:

Himerius seems to be quoting such a song of greeting to bride and bridegroom: “Bride that teemest with rosy desires, bride the fairest ornament of the Queen of Paphos, hie thee to bed, hie thee to the couch whereon thou must sweetly sport in gentle wise with thy bridegroom. And may the Star of Eve lead thee full willingly to the place where thou shalt marvel at the silver-thronèd Lady of Wedlock” (Edmonds). Himerius also tells us that Sappho “brings Aphrodite in her Grace-drawn car with a bevy of Loves” to the wedding. And the joy of the earthly festival is repeated far up among the clouds of Olympus where the celestial feast is described (E. 146) in verses the lilt of which Professor Gildersleeve has thus reproduced in his unpublished version:

[96]

Stebbing in his Friends of Man has the Gods descend to the modest hall wherein the marriage feast is spread.

The function of what we Americans used to call the first groomsman, in the primitive times of wife-stealing, was to protect the bridegroom from pursuit and the name “best man” perpetuates the tradition. In the Greek wedding, where the passing and closing of the door was so essential a part of the ritual, he was the door-keeper, and[97] there was much bantering and chaffing at his personal appearance on the part of the maidens, who made much use of the same jokes which have since been applied to the feet of maidens of Chicago. The feet of the porter were put in the laughing stocks somewhat after this fashion (E. 154):

to which Edmonds would make the ingenious but doubtful addition based on Synesius “[and his father lived in other ways an honest life, but claimed to be better born than Cecrops].” The door is shut and the mocking subsides, as all chant for the groom, “Happy bridegroom, the marriage is accomplished, as you prayed it should be, and the maiden you prayed for is yours” (E. 155); and for the bride they sing, “O beauteous one, O lovely one, thine it is to sport with the rose-ankled Graces and Aphrodite the golden” (E. 157). If Edmonds’ tentative restoration of the end of the first book of 1320 verses is correct, “the maidens spend all the night at this door, singing of the love that is[98] between thee, thrice happy bridegroom, and a bride whose breast is sweet as violets. But get thee up and go when the dawn shall come, and may great Hermes lead thy feet where thou shalt find just so much ill-luck as we shall see sleep to-night” (E. 47). Evidently the maidens saw little sleep that night, but finally silence falls and in the early dawn is heard the last song of the serenaders: “Farewell the bride, farewell the bridegroom” (E. 160, 162).

This chapter should not close without a mention of the epigrams. Many have been attributed to Sappho, but three especially (E. 143, 144, 145) have been included in most of the translations. They are, however, written in normal epic language without any essential traces of Sappho’s Aeolic dialect. One, which Wilamowitz would date as late as 400 B.C., according to Edmonds was inscribed on the base of a statue of a nameless infant, dedicated to Artemis in gratitude for her birth by her priestess-mother. I prefer the older interpretation:

The epigram on the fisherman (E. 145) is most unlike Sappho. Fawkes, Elton, Neaves, and many a modern poet have put it into verse:102

The two elegiac couplets on The Dust of Timas, who died before her wedding day, are rather flat and hardly worthy of Sappho’s genius (E. 144); but if Edmonds’ restoration of one of Sappho’s fragments as referring to Timas is correct (p. 60 above), it may be genuine and in that case one of the very few surviving early metrical epitaphs. I give you the recent rendering by one of our[100] best modern American poets, Edwin Arlington Robinson:

[101]

V. SAPPHO IN ART

The high regard of the ancients and moderns for Sappho appears especially in art. In olden days she was honored in town-hall and library. Many a statue and bust of her was erected and she was one of the few historical characters who were painted on Greek vases, which even quote her verses. She was sculptured also in terra-cotta and bronze.103 It is well established104 that her image was engraved on coins of Eresus and Mytilene,—a unique honor in early Greek days. Many (Pl. 10, 11) in the British Museum, in Paris, and elsewhere105 bear representations sometimes of her head on the obverse with the lyre on the reverse, and sometimes her full figure standing or sitting. They differ much in the manner of the arrangement of her coiffure, some even showing the hair covered by a kerchief, a fashion still prevalent in modern Lesbus. They may be traced back to different types. Those which bear her name date from Roman Imperial times. In general Furtwängler106 is right in contending[102] that it was not the custom to honor distinguished persons in such a manner before the days of Alexander. But the beautiful head which appears on early Greek coins of Mytilene of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. may easily be Sappho and not her patron Aphrodite, even in cases where the type is adapted to that of the goddess of love. The lyre on the reverse and the individual features which resemble some of the busts of Sappho point that way. The beautiful face on the old coins was copied from some statue, perhaps one that was even earlier than that of Silanion. Farnell well says:107 “the later hero cults of Homer at Smyrna, Sappho at Lesbus, and Aristotle at Stageira reveal the deep conviction of the Hellenic spirit that science and art are divine powers.” If the head on these Mytilenaean coins is really Sappho, it is a silent but eloquent testimony to the reverence her name acquired after her death and to the perfection of her living work.

The oldest possible representation of Sappho with which I am acquainted is an archaic terra-cotta relief from Melos in the British Museum.108 It dates only a few years after Sappho’s time, and though not inscribed it may represent Sappho and Alcaeus. Sappho appears as a[103] slender lady of average height (not of short stature as Ovid says), dressed in a long Ionic woven tunic and wearing sandals. She sits with lyre in left hand and plectrum in right, and the bearded Alcaeus stands before her with bowl in left and extending his right hand. He seems to be expressing with a smile his admiration of her new poetry, so different from his own archaic measure. There is probably no reference, as in the case of the Munich vase from Sicily,109 to the famous lines which we have quoted (p. 27). On this vase the names Sapho (so spelt) and Alcaeus are painted beside the tall and stately figures who appear with lyre and plectrum. Sappho seems to be rebuking with almost a pouting expression her fellow-townsman Alcaeus, who bows his head as she speaks to him the famous lines. This pictorial translation of her verses and other representations show her great popularity in Athens in the fifth century B.C. This Munich psycter or cooling mixing-bowl (Pl. 12) for wine may date as late as 460 B.C. and has been attributed to a fictitious lady painter of the Free Style by Hauser, but his attribution has not been generally accepted.110 Furtwängler was probably right in connecting the vase with the Brygus painter.[104] My learned friend, the great Oxford expert on vases, Mr. J. D. Beazley writes me that very likely it was not by the Brygus painter himself, but surely in his manner. On an earlier vase, now in the Czartoryski collection in Cracow (Pl. 13), dating from the end of the sixth or the beginning of the fifth century B.C., according to Beazley a vase roughly related in style to the Nicoxenus painter, a contemporary of Euthymides, we have the earliest certain representation of Sappho.111 She is a tall, draped figure with smiling countenance, walking to right and holding a seven-stringed lyre in her left hand and a plectrum in her right. She appears on only this one black-figured vase, which would seem to indicate that she did not become popular in Athens till long after her death, when red-figured vases were the vogue. The story of Solon adds testimony to the same effect, and probably a corpus or collection of her writings used by the later Alexandrian editions was in the book-stalls at Athens even in the last years of the sixth century. Otherwise it is difficult to account for her frequent portrayal on Attic red-figured vases. The lost Middleton vase,112 (Pl. 14), probably of the South Italian (Lucanian) Style, shows Sappho, whose name is now thus spelt,[105] seated on a four-legged stool while a nude winged Eros hastens towards her with a wreath. The painter probably knew the poems of Sappho which pictured Eros as bitter-sweet, and Sappho’s other word-pictures of the sorrows of love, for he has labelled Eros “wretched.” One thinks of Horace’s querentem Sappho puellis de popularibus. Mr. Beazley, however, suspects the inscription talas, and thinks that kalos (beautiful) was written. It is greatly to be hoped that the vase will soon be found again so that we can have a rereading of the letters. On the Michaelis vase in late Polygnotan style,113 which is in the Jatta collection at Ruvo in Italy (Pl. 15), we possibly have an apotheosis of Sappho. Aphrodite is painted with a cupid on her right shoulder like the Aphrodite of the Parthenon frieze, judging the contest of Thamyris. Near Apollo are three Muses, and near Thamyris are four. Sappho is evidently leaning for support on Aphrodite, receiving a little dove from a little Eros, and is pictured as a Muse herself, as in Plato’s epigram. On another red-figured vase114 in private possession, Sappho is in the midst of her pupils.

Several vases even show knowledge of her writings. The most important is the hydria or[106] water-jar in Athens (Pl. 16), dating about 430 B.C.,115 which Mr. Beazley would put in the group of Polygnotus, somewhat in the style of the Hector painter, though not by him. Sappho is seated on a light-backed chair or klismos; she is reading from a papyrus roll, while Nicopolis behind holds a wreath over her head. Two maidens stand in front, one, Callis, holding a lyre. Scholars have long tried to make sense out of the letters on the papyrus, and several, such as Comparetti and Aly, have considered them un-Sapphic; but Edmonds, the great English expert on Sappho, has got a new reading for the last word and thinks this is column 1 of a book entitled Winged Words, a phrase borrowed from Homer. The verses are an introductory poem to Sappho’s works with an invocation to the Gods, after which follows the verse: “The words I begin are words of air, but for all that, good to hear.” I do not feel that the solution is satisfactory or Sapphic, and an examination of the vase itself proves that Edmonds’ reading will not stand; but no one has yet made a better proposal. On another vase, in the Louvre, attributed to Euphronius116 we have an echo of Sappho in the words (E. 23), “I long and I yearn.” A beautiful fifth century cylix (Pl. 9) by the[107] erudite and versatile Sotades,117 whose wonderful signed terra-cotta horse, mounted by an Amazon, has recently been brought to Boston from Meroe in Egypt, pictures a girl on tiptoe trying to pluck the sweet apple which is reddening on the topmost bough. I have no doubt that Sotades was illustrating Sappho’s song.

Possibly on the so-called Steinhauser terra-cotta fragment118 the seated figure is Sappho; she is nude above the waist and holds her lyre in her right hand. She is looking into the air enraptured and sublimely inspired.

Many vases have been interpreted as portraying Sappho and Phaon,119 but in every case there is uncertainty about the interpretation. On two beautiful vases (Pl. 4, 5), the hydria in Florence certainly by the Meidias painter himself, and the crater in Palermo of the school of the Meidias painter, the beautiful Phaon is definitely pictured.120 The inscription on the latter, “Phaon is beautiful,” leaves no doubt in the matter. But the girl called Chryse or Philomele is perhaps wrongly interpreted as Sappho. These vases are probably older than the comedy on Phaon, by Plato (not to be confused with the philosopher). Phaon is painted as handsome; all the girls are adorning themselves and making[108] love to him, but he has had too much attention from the ladies and is sick of them (cf. p. 40 above). On another crater,121 in Bologna (Pl. 17), in style not far removed from the vase-painter Polygnotus, Phaon appears seated at the oar in a boat, about to take aboard the tall goddess, who was to give him a perennial antidote against old age.

Before we leave ancient painting we ought to mention a picture of Sappho in a garb as a lutist which the encyclopaedic Pliny assigns to Leon.122 We know nothing about him, but he was probably one of the numerous second rate artists of Hellenistic times. An epigram in the Anthology and the Christian Father Tatian123 seem to have referred to this portrait. Several Pompeian frescoes, and one from Herculaneum representing a lady with a stilus about to write her thoughts on a tablet, have been named Sappho. Only in the case of one124 do I feel that there is any probability at all that Sappho was meant, and in that one Alcaeus appears standing by the side of the seated Lesbian poetess (Pl. 18).

There must have been statues and busts of Sappho, but so many have been called Sappho without definite evidence that it is difficult to[109] know where to stop. We must always bear in mind that early Greek art in Sappho’s day did not believe in realistic portraiture and that all representations of Sappho are “study heads,” conceptions of later artists. The most famous statue mentioned in literature is that by Silanion, the Greek sculptor of the fourth century B.C., who was so noted for his Plato and Corinna.125 We learn from Cicero’s Oration against Verres126 and from Tatian’s Complaint against the Greeks or Pagans that this bronze statue, on the base of which Cicero was still able to read the epigram, stood in the prytaneum at Syracuse, perhaps a memorial of Sappho’s sojourn in Sicily. Cicero tells us that it was stolen by Verres and praises it highly: “Could this work of Silanion, so perfect, so refined, so finished, be in fitter hands public or private than those of a man so refined and cultured as Verres?... And how sorely this stolen Sappho was missed is almost more than words can tell. Not only was the poetess exquisitely portrayed, but there was a world-famous Greek couplet inscribed upon the base.... For the inscription on the empty base declares to-day what the statue was, thus proclaiming the theft” (Edmonds).

[110]

We know from literature of the existence of two other later statues. We have spoken (p. 34) of the epigram of Damocharis which refers to a portrait of Sappho with bright eyes and mixed expression of gaiety and graveness. An epigram by Antipater127 (p. 8) is thought to come from a statue at Pergamum and since part of an inscription found at Pergamum128 mentions Alcaeus, it is a plausible conjecture that the lost portion contained the name of Sappho. This is probably the same bronze seated statue which in the fifth century A.D. stood in the gymnasium of Zeuxippus at Constantinople and which is described by Christodorus in his Greek Anthology:129 “She seemed to be weaving a well-hymned song, concentrating her thought on the silent Muses.”

No full-size statue which we can certainly identify as Sappho’s has been preserved. The seated lady in the Vatican holding a volume in her left hand is hardly Sappho, and it is not safe to call the standing lady with lyre in New York in the Metropolitan Museum by her name. It would be interesting to believe, as some do, that the famous maiden of Anzio in the National Museum in Rome was Sappho, but some scholars of repute even go so far as to say that[111] it is not even a maiden but rather a boy. Others say that a priestess, not a poetess, is portrayed. After repeated examination of the original I have no doubt of her sex and believe the statue to be that of a poetess, but whether of Praxilla or Sappho or some other cannot be definitely stated. We have, however, many Roman busts of different types130 which have been conjectured to represent Sappho. One type in all probability is copied from Silanion, as it resembles closely in the features of the face and the arrangement of the hair, especially the little curls in front of the face and in the covering of the head, the portrait of Sappho on the early coins of Mytilene. The best example of this type is the bust in the Villa Albani in Rome (Pl. 19). It has the perfection, refinement, and finish to which Cicero referred, and Sappho is “exquisitely portrayed.” In the Biscari collection at Catania, Sicily, there is a Roman copy of a head meant to be inserted in a bust or statue. It is so poorly finished that it was probably placed in a niche or chapel to be seen from a distance. The oval face is young but placid and cold, a characteristic partly due to the Roman copyist. With its corkscrew curls and in other respects it is similar enough to the busts in the Villa Albani and the Galleria[112] Geographica of the Vatican to be classed with them. If they represent Sappho, the Sicilian bust also does. If Rizzo is right that this is a muse or nymph, then a copy of Silanion’s statue still remains to be found.

The so-called head of Sappho in the Pitti in Florence is of a different type, more dream-like, and may not be Sappho at all. More likely to represent Sappho are the busts in Oxford (Pl. 20) and the Vatican. Other busts about which there is considerable doubt are in Naples, in the Riccardi Palace, in the Uffizi at Florence, and there is a double herm in Madrid which has been called Sappho and Phaon. Of the so-called Phaon in Madrid, Amelung has recently found in the storerooms of the Vatican a beautiful replica, and he has also discovered there another Sappho bust of the type on coins. In the summer of 1922 I photographed a bust, which is in the Borghese Palace, and I think that it may represent Sappho (Pl. 21). It resembles a colossal head from Smyrna in Constantinople, the bust in Naples, and the double bust in Madrid in its energetic and individualized features, such as the large nose and thick lips, and in the curl on the forehead beneath the middle of the fillet. Rizzo would trace the Naples bust back to about[113] 420 B.C. and call it an ideal representation of a mortal or perhaps even a courtesan. But Sappho might easily have been represented in the type of a courtesan or even a muse. The large bronze bust in New York which has been published as a portrayal of Sappho can hardly represent the poetess, even if the bronze is genuine and has the sanction of great authorities such as Eisen,131 Babelon, and André, since it resembles none of the known portraits of her. The Romans as well as the Greeks were undoubtedly very fond of statues of Sappho, and some day excavators will turn up for us more authenticated portraits. The recently discovered Roman stucco relief which we have already described (p. 42) shows what we may expect from future discoveries. Even such articles of every-day-use as scales have weights in the form of a Sappho head, such as that recently discovered.132

What we have said about the uncertainty of representations of Sappho in ancient sculpture applies equally to the portrait of her on gems. Cipollini has listed and illustrated many ancient and modern gems and miniatures, but even if those called ancient are forgeries or are from Renaissance times, the great number of them[114] shows the unusual influence of Sappho on the glyptic art in precious stones.

After Roman days Sappho was often pictured and sculptured in various ideal ways.133 Space fails us to discuss the almost endless works of later art influenced by her name and traditions; and it seems idle to detain the reader with a detailed catalogue. But to leave no doubt that Sappho has had a vast and powerful influence on art of all ages, I may mention some of the more important. During the last sixty years especially, sculpture has paid a frequent and international tribute to her. Now she is represented as sad and pensive, now meditating suicide, now about to make the fatal leap from the Leucadian rock as in Pietro Magni’s Saffo (1866), now even as a corpse on the surface of the sea. Magni’s statue (Pl. 22) was much admired during his lifetime and it reminds one of the Roman stucco relief, since it likewise represents Sappho, lyre in hand and with head wreathed, standing on the edge of the rock. She is holding back her skirts with her left hand and looking seriously at the waters below, with the intention of stepping off at the next moment. In 1878 the illustrious Lombard sculptor, Francesco Confalonieri, influenced it may be by the[115] Vatican Agrippina, made a seated statue which represents Sappho in profile with sad and bowed head, clasping her hands on her left side, her lyre abandoned on the floor. France did not approve of this statue because some years before Pradier also had sculptured a draped and dreaming Sappho who was seated on the Leucadian rock with bowed head and hands clasped about her raised crossed left leg, her lyre lying neglected on the rock (Pl. 23). Pradier had also sculptured a standing, draped Sappho with bowed head holding her lyre in her left hand, and supporting her right on an Ionic column on which rest the rolls of her divine poetry.

The great German sculptor Danneker, who was so fond of classical subjects and was the sculptor of the famous Ariadne, chiselled a charming marble statuette of Sappho (1796). The beautiful bas-relief in Greek style in the Vienna Volksgarten, which R. Weyr sculptured for the Grillparzer Monument, represents Sappho’s farewell. She stands in drapery like that of the Erechtheum Caryatids. She is holding a lyre and kissing good-bye to a girl friend who gives her a last embrace. A shepherd kneels nearby and others in the background are recoiling in fear. She herself stands at the edge of the[116] steps in front of Apollo’s temple, and there is much other Greek architecture in this relief.

In France, Claude Ramey (1801) exhibited a seated statue; Duret (1806), a Sappho writing to Phaon; Beauvallet (1817), a bust; Diebolt (1848), a dying Sappho of noble and poetical expression. Other statues of Sappho were made and exhibited in the Salon by Laurent (1849), Grootaers (1852), Travaux (1852, now in the Louvre), Aizelin (1853, bronze), Loison (1859), Grabowski (1859), Clésinger (1859, three statues, “Sappho singing her last song, Seated on the Leucadian rock,” “The youth of Sappho,” and a polychrome statue), Robinet (1861), Doriot (1872), and Signora Maraini. In America, too, from the days of Story and Hezekiah Augur to the bronze doors of the new Detroit Public Library Sappho has been a subject for sculpture. Many are the busts which are inscribed to-day with the name of Sappho, such as that by A. Gennai in the possession of Mrs. W. B. Hill of Baltimore, or that by Sheldon.

In painting, though not often a subject for the greatest painters, Sappho was represented in Greek and Roman days and ever since right down to the most famous modern picture of her and her pupils by Alma Tadema, of which we[117] have given a description above (p. 32). Several pictures, such as Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, have been supposed by great critics to represent Sappho, but it is difficult to agree with Poppelreuter that Titian really meant to paint a Naiad counselling Sappho, who is lamenting her love in the forest, to take the Leucadian leap.134 In some cases fortunately the painters themselves have labelled them. Raphael is perhaps the greatest painter who pictured her. He brings her significantly in his Parnassus (Pl. 24) into juxtaposition with Petrarch, who dedicated four verses of his tenth eclogue to her (see p. 136). She is represented prominently to the left of the doorway, resting her left arm on it and holding in her left hand a papyrus roll with the name Sappho upon it. Other minor painters who have painted Sappho are Treshain (1683, “The Adventures of Sappho”), Ansiaux (1801), Ducis (1812), Vafflard (1819, “Sappho rescued from the water by a stranger”), Girodet (1828, a series of compositions from her first love affair to the legendary leap), Lafond (1831), Vien (1833, “Sappho playing the lyre,” and “Sappho reciting to Phaon”), Chasseriau (1850), Chautard (1855), Agneni (1857, “Sappho rescued from the water by the Nereids”), Credès (1859),[118] Kauffmann (two beautiful pictures, “Sappho inspired by love” and “Sappho talking with Homer;” these like many of the other pictures were also engraved). Barrias painted a sleeping, nude Sappho, with her lyre by her side, and represents her perhaps repeating the words: “The silver moon is set; The Pleiades are gone; Half the long night is spent, and yet I lie alone” (Merivale). Other painters of Sappho are Fragonard, Gros, Devosge, Bartolazzi, Picou (1863), Loir (1864), Chifflart (1865), Bertrand (1867, “Death of Sappho”), Gastaldi (1873, “Sappho meditating suicide”), Gleyre (“Couch of Sappho”). Hector Leroux in his “School of Sappho” represents her standing in the atrium of a Roman house, with lyre in her left hand, on a platform inscribed with the name of the Lesbian Sappho, evidently giving instruction to her many friends and pupils who stand and sit in various postures in the audience.

This is only a partial list and could easily be extended, but enough has been said to show that a knowledge of the real Sappho and her writings and the legends connected with her will help one to be a sound and intelligent critic of much in the realm of art.

[119]

VI. SAPPHO’S INFLUENCE ON GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE

If Sappho’s influence on art has been considerable, her place in literature has been far more remarkable. Nearly every thought in her fragments, which were known before the recent papyrus additions, has been borrowed or adapted by some ancient Greek or Roman poet or some modern poet in English, Italian, French, German, or modern Greek. Even the Spanish, Scandinavians, and Russians (p. 233) know her, though not so well acquainted with her as the authors of other nations. A very remarkable thing is that her writings have in all the ages been almost never unfavorably criticized from a literary point of view, no matter how her character was regarded. We have already, in giving a résumé of Sappho’s writings, cited many an echo, many a translation, many a dilation or dilution, but have seen that the real flavor of Sappho’s Greek cannot be transferred to any other language. In this and succeeding chapters,[120] however, some of the names of writers who owe much to her will be brought together. She herself was original and coined many a new idea, many a new word, and perfected a new form of metre. Just as a modern poet, Tennyson for example, is indebted to his predecessors, Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare, for images and ideas, she was somewhat indebted in language and thought to Homer,135 who filled the fancy of the Lesbians and was himself, probably, born at the neighboring Smyrna. She took little from Hesiod, although we find a few echoes of him which I cite in a note.136 On the other hand, succeeding poets of the next hundred years seem to have taken little from her. Mimnermus probably knew the second ode, and his lines are included in the Corpus of Theognis.137 If the fragment “Gold is Zeus’ child, no moth nor worm devours it (E. 110)” is Sappho’s and not originally written by Pindar himself, then Pindar took that idea from Sappho.138 Herodotus tells the story of Rhodopis, and Plato, who would exclude poets from his ideal state, makes Socrates speak in the Phaedrus of the beautiful Sappho as one of the wise ancients, and he calls her the Tenth Muse in his famous epigram.

Aristotle, who refers to her three times, is the[121] first one definitely to quote her verses and that twice in the Rhetoric (E. 91, 119, and p. 159). Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus, who was also born in Eresus cites her (περὶ λέξεως, Mayer, 1910) as the representative of charm in all its forms. That essential element of charm is emphasized by Plutarch and by Demetrius, the rhetorician of the first century A.D., in his Essay on Style. Another pupil of Aristotle, Chamaeleon (310 B.C.), wrote a book about her.

Sappho’s influence was not great in the field of Greek and Roman tragedy. Aeschylus and Sophocles betray no acquaintance with her, but Euripides was considerably affected by her verses on love. When he writes in Electra (l. 67), “I consider you a friend equal to the gods,” he is thinking of the first verse of Sappho’s second song. Plutarch cites Aristoxenus as saying that the tragedians learned the mixed Lydian mode from her. In comedy Aristophanes had a slight acquaintance with her, and he was thinking of Sappho’s first hymn in his suffragette play Lysistrata (ll. 723 ff.), where a love-sick devotee of Aphrodite endeavors to escape from the Acropolis on the back of the sparrow, Aphrodite’s bird. Epicrates dealt with Sappho in his comedy, Anti-Laïs, before[122] the year 392 B.C.; and Athenaeus applies the words of Epicrates to himself:

Sappho was the title of plays by six different Greek comedians, Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphanes, Diphilus, Ephippus, and Timocles. Of those by Ameipsias and Amphis we have only a single word, and the fragments of the others throw little light on the question as to how much was taken from Sappho herself. To the plays of Plato, Menander, and Antiphanes on the legends of Phaon and the Leucadian Leap, we have already referred (p. 41).

In the Hellenistic Age, after the time of Alexander, Sappho was very popular. Clearchus, the Peripatetic philosopher (300 B.C.) drew on her for his Treatise on Love Matters.139 In the third book of his Biographies Aristoxenus, a writer on music (320 B.C.), classes her among inventors as did Menaechmus of Sicyon in his treatise On Artists. He says that “her books were her companions.”140 The third century B.C. showed a serious interest in the Lesbians, and Theocritus has many imitations of Sappho in dialect,141 metre, and content. In the second[123] idyl Simaetha’s description of her feelings is taken from Sappho. In the seventh idyl, the picture of the farm to which two friends walked out from Syracuse in order to attend a harvest home festival, Theocritus is imitating Sappho’s Garden of the Nymphs, especially in ll. 135 ff.: “Close at hand the sacred water from the nymphs’ own cave welled forth with murmurs musical” (Lang). Probably the eighteenth idyl on Helen and Menelaus borrowed much from Sappho, since the first lines seem to be cited as Sappho’s by Himerius. Line 38, “O maid of beauty, maid of grace,” is lifted bodily from Sappho. The twenty-eighth idyl on A Distaff undoubtedly employed Sappho as a model, and likewise the twenty-ninth and thirtieth idyls.

Callimachus (270 B.C.) in his first hymn (ll. 95 ff.) echoes the fragment which influenced Pindar (E. 100): “Wealth without virtue cannot make men happy, nor virtue without wealth, therefore grant both virtue and wealth.” It was about the same time that a fellow townsman, Callias, interpreted her poems as well as those of Alcaeus. Apollonius of Rhodes (260 B.C.) knew her, and so did the Lament for Bion, which has been attributed doubtfully to[124] Moschus (150 B.C.): “Oh, Bion, Mytilene bewails thy song evermore instead of Sappho’s” (III. 91). Bion (100 B.C.?) in his Lament for Adonis was probably influenced by Sappho’s words about the dying Adonis (E. 103) and used in l. 44 the same word as Sappho did in E. 29. The philosopher Chrysippus (240 B.C.) mentions her (fr. 36, 69), as does Cicero’s contemporary, the poet-philosopher Philodemus (60 B.C.). In fragment 57a he speaks of her, and in an epigram he uses as an “intelligence test” of an educated woman a knowledge of the poems of Sappho. Alexander the Sophist gave a university extension course of lectures on her poems. A little later in the Augustan Age the great literary critic and grammarian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus (20 B.C.), quotes the hymn to Aphrodite, and Strabo calls her a marvel. Living probably sometime in the first century A.D., the anonymous author of the Treatise on the Sublime quotes the second ode. A little later, about 85 A.D., the golden-tongued orator, Dio, cites her, and his contemporary Plutarch often refers to her, in his Essay on Love, 18; in his Dinner-table Problems, VII. 8, 2; in his Moralia, 243b, 622c, and 406a, where there is a comparison with the practice of Paiderastia of Socrates. Plutarch[125] prefers Anacreon, but refers to at least four of the fragments which are preserved from Sappho (E. 2, 48, 71, 137).

Among the Romans Sappho was flattered abundantly, if imitation is the sincerest flattery. As Tucker says: “the most genuine lyric poet of Rome, Catullus, and its most skilful artificer of odes, Horace, both freely copied her. They did more than imitate; they plagiarised, they translated, sometimes almost word for word.” The flattery does not begin until the time of Cicero, for Latin comedy, unlike Greek comedy, paid little heed to the Lesbian poetess. Cicero refers to Silanion’s statue (p. 109). Lucretius must have taken his description at second hand, perhaps from some medical source, if he did not take the verses of the second ode of Sappho direct as his model for his description of fear.142 Catullus (84-54 B.C.),143 who caught the Greek rhythm even better than Horace, translated the same ode in his famous fifty-first poem, addressed to Lesbia, and adapted the fragments on the hyacinth and the evening star in his epithalamia, the sixty-first and sixty-second songs in the Catullian collection. Probably in the sixty-second he is imitating a lost poem of Sappho. The verse of Sappho (E. 142), “I flutter like a child after her[126] mother,” referring perhaps to a wounded bird, has been used by Catullus in his well-known third poem, on the Passer, which probably also imitated a poem of Sappho.

In XI. 22-24, Catullus was perhaps thinking of Sappho’s stricken hyacinth, although some rustic proverb may also have been in his mind:

From these lines and not from Sappho herself, of whom there is no echo in Virgil, Virgil took his description of the dying Euryalus:

We are reminded of Robert Burns’ To A Mountain Daisy:

We refer on p. 9 to Catullus’ allusion to Sappho in XXXV. 17.

In the age of Augustus, even if Virgil neglects Sappho, in Horace (65-8 B.C.) she is re-born. If Edmonds144 is right in his analysis of a passage in Dio’s Corinthian Oration, two fragments (E. 76, 77) of Sappho are incorporated there from a poem which Horace imitated in the same metre:

Edmonds even goes so far as to suggest that Horace imitated not only the poem written by Sappho, but its position. For he thinks that this poem of Sappho was an epilogue to her collection; and Horace placed his imitation at the end of the third book, when he probably thought it would be his last. Horace seems to be adapting Sappho in the twelfth ode of the third book (see Landor’s imitation, p. 202). He composed twenty-six or more odes in the[128] Sapphic metre, which he fitted to Italian measures, and he does them well, though in colder Latin. In him

He pictures her in Hades’ home:146

The meaning is simply that she is “singing plaintively (or complaining) about the girls of her country,” perhaps because they did not all return her love, as Atthis deserted her for Andromeda (E. 81); not that she complained of her fellow-maidens for not loving Phaon. Unconsciously Horace helped to defame Sappho’s character, for the epithet “mascula,” in the Epistle I. 19, 28, repeated by Ausonius, Idyl, VI. 21, has led to gross abuse of Sappho’s good fame.147 It has no relation to mascula libido and should be interpreted in the light of Statius148 as referring simply to the fact that she was an imitator of the measures of Archilochus and the equal of men poets. Of elegiac writers, Tibullus and Propertius (II. 8, 33) were influenced only in a general way by the personal and ardent poetry of Sappho’s lyrics. Ovid in the[129] fifteenth epistle of the Heroides pictured Sappho as a passionate and voluptuous hetaera who could not win the love of the beautiful Phaon. With passion she burns “as when through ripened corn By driving winds the spreading flames are borne,” and seeks release and ease, “from the raging seas.” Ovid (43 B.C.-18 A.D.) in this letter and also in the Tristia (II. 365, Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas) completed the Roman defamation of Sappho’s good name begun by Horace, and so led the way for the modern idea. From this disgrace she has been rescued by Madame Anne Le Fèvre Dacier (1681), by Welcker (1816), the bachelor who loved Sappho’s genius and who by his chivalrous vindication made himself her knight, and by Wilamowitz (1896),—her three great defenders.

Seneca (circa 4 B.C.-65 A.D.) in his Letters to Lucilius (88) quotes a book of the grammarian Didymus on the question Whether Sappho was a prostitute. In the Flavian period, Statius in his miscellaneous poems, called Silvae, mentions her:148

[130]

About the same time Martial (c. 40-104 A.D.) cites a poem149 of Canius on Sappho: “Sappho the lover praised a poetess: more pure is Theophila, yet Sappho was not more learned” (Ker).

In the second century A.D. Sappho was especially popular. In the time of Hadrian, Dracon of Stratonicea wrote a book about Sappho’s metres. In the days of Plutarch150 the songs of Sappho were often sung at dinner parties. And Aulus Gellius (170 A.D.) in his Attic Nights151 shows us that Sappho was all the rage in his day as in the time of Plutarch. It was the custom “after the chief courses were disposed of and the time was come for wine ... to have delightful renderings of a number of the songs of Anacreon and Sappho.” In the second century many writers on grammar, such as Apollonius Dyscolus and his son Herodian, Hephaestion (on metre), Demetrius (perhaps first century A.D.), Hermogenes, Maximus of Tyre, and Aristides (on rhetoric), Aelian, Pausanias, and Pollux quote Sappho abundantly. The great satirist Lucian (c. 120-c. 200 A.D.) calls her “the delicious glory of the Lesbians,”152 makes her the standard for ladies of learning who write poems, and has her contribute to one[131] of his pictures “the elegance of life.”153 In Loves (I, p. 905) he uses almost the very first words of the second ode. That Galen, another writer of the second century A.D., who knew not only medicine but also the popularity of Sappho, was speaking with authority on literature when he said that Sappho was “the poetess,” is shown by the fact that most of the papyri with quotations from Sappho date from his time or from the third century, the century when Athenaeus and Philostratus, who cited much from Sappho, were living.

In the fourth century Eusebius, Themistius, and the Emperor Julian, as well as Himerius, often quote her. Ausonius in Idyl VI says:

Claudian in his work on the Marriage of Honorius and Mary (ll. 229-235) makes Mary “never cease under her mother’s guidance to unroll the writers of Rome and Greece, all that old Homer sang, or Thracian Orpheus, or that Sappho set to music with Lesbian quill” (Platnauer). In the fifth century the Christian writer Synesius and that compiler of chrestomathies Stobaeus often quote from Sappho.[132] There is nothing to be gained by giving a long list of the writers on technical subjects to whom we owe so many fragments of Sappho not found on papyrus or parchment. Enough have been cited to prove that Sappho was much read in the first four and even the fifth centuries A.D. Himerius154 especially proves her popularity in the fourth century, for he rewrites many of her songs in poetic prose and makes much use of Sapphic epithets and repetitions of words. The fragments (E. 68, 101) have influenced him in his Orations,155 and in the epithalamium,156 which he dedicated to his friend Severus in 354 A.D., Sappho’s influence is very apparent (see above pp. 88 ff.). The bride is likened to an apple and the bridegroom to Achilles, although in the fragments preserved we have no Achilles but rather Ares.

The many epigrams157 referring to Sappho, from Plato’s couplet written in the fourth century B.C. to the time of Paul the Silentiary (who died 575 A.D.), some of which we have quoted above, bear out the testimony for Sappho’s continuous influence through these thousand years; and now we can trace the reading of Sappho down to the seventh century, thanks to the finding in Egypt of two manuscripts of[133] that century (E. 34, 82-86). Probably, however, Sappho’s works were not much read even as early as the end of the sixth century. If so, Paul the Silentiary would never have written the epigram that appears in the Greek Anthology.158 I give a literal translation: “Soft Sappho’s kisses; soft the embraces of her snowy limbs, soft every part of her, but her soul is of unyielding adamant. For her love stops at her lips; the rest belongs to her virginity. And who could endure this? Perhaps one who has borne it, will endure the thirst of Tantalus easily.” As Professor Gildersleeve159 says: “Could Paulus have ever read anything of burning Sappho? We often envy the Byzantines their richer stores, but they seem to have been more familiar with Menander than with the early lyrists.... Tell us, Pothos and Himeros, why has Paulus taken the name of Sappho in vain? We forgive him for playing with Theocritus’ Galatea but he ought to have let Sappho sleep alone.” Perhaps Paulus had heard of the question debated in school and society ever since the days of Didymus; and so he came to her defence with an interesting compromise on her tantalizing chastity.

[134]

VII. SAPPHO IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE RENAISSANCE

How long after the seventh century Sappho was read we cannot say, but in mediaeval days men were either entirely ignorant of her or had erroneous ideas. By the ninth century she seems to have become almost unknown, otherwise the critic and compiler Photius160 would have preserved some of her works. He refers only to the tradition of her love for Phaon and the Leucadian Leap, and to the hypothesis that she was different from Sappho the courtesan, as she had been branded by that father of the church, Tatian (about 140 A.D.), who called her a female harlot, love-mad, γύναιον πορνικὸν ἐρωτομανές. That idea undoubtedly led to the burning of her books, according to Cardan, under Gregory Nazianzen, about 380 A.D. According to Scaliger, the burning took place in Constantinople and Rome in 1073. In any case, no manuscript has survived in Europe; and it is strange that now not even her legendary adventures with Phaon appear[135] in the popular literature. The Etymologicum Magnum (1000 A.D.?) mentions her only five times, but in that way preserves for us five fragments. After the time of that lexicon and Suidas, the mediaeval encyclopaedias and the Speculum Historiale of Vincent de Beauvais of the thirteenth century make no mention of her, though they cite many another Greek poet. Georgius Cedrenus (1015 A.D.?), a Greek monk, who in his Compendium Historiarum said that she was “the first of the Muses,” is about the only one of this time who notices her. Anna Comnena,161 daughter of the Emperor Comnenus I, quotes as Sappho’s the verses supposed to be addressed to Sappho by Alcaeus (E. 119). And the archbishop Eustathius preserves a few fragments. Dante makes no reference to her, unless possibly very faintly in the verse “le muse lattar più ch’altri mai.” Boccaccio (1313-1375), who seems to have been forgotten by modern writers on Sappho, includes her among his Delle Donne Famose, “ma confortata da più caldo fervore d’animo (i suoi versi sono famosi) ... e certamente non sono più famose che la sua corona le corone dei re, nè le mitre de’ sacerdoti, nè le lauree de’ trionfanti.” Petrarch[136] (1304-1374) mentions Sappho in his Triumph of Love (IV. 25):162

In his Tenth Eclogue he dedicated four verses to her:

Petrarch’s friend, Domenico di Bandino of Arezzo (1340-c. 1415), professor at Bologna, gave her a brief article in his encyclopaedic Fons Memorabilium Universi. The other commentators on Petrarch ignore her. Giorgio Merula (1424-1494), Poliziano’s adversary, accepts the whole Ovidian legend as historical fact and even adds a new item to Sappho’s life by giving her a son Didas by her wealthy Andrian husband, Cercylas.

The Renaissance. There was now a second “floruit” of Sappho’s fame, but like her previous popularity among the Romans the second renaissance was not favorable to Sappho, and there was no true understanding of the historical[137] Sappho. It was in the fifteenth century that Ovid’s perverse epistle was discovered and from that time on it biased all Sapphic literature. The great humanist Poliziano knew her slightly and has left a Latin version of the epigram on Timas. Domizio Calderini (1447-1477), the learned though not overcritical humanist, based his little knowledge of Sappho on an uncritical use of Suidas. He even falsified Horace’s querentem by forging in its place gaudentem, and transformed Sappho from the leader of a sacred sorority into a tribade163 or lover of her pupils, even of the famous poetess Erinna. The result was that the great injustice done Sappho by Horace and especially by Ovid was much aggravated. Thanks to Tatian and Calderini, working at different times and in different fields, Sappho was even more misjudged in the seventeenth century. It would be idle to cite the many authors who mention or malign her but who give us little material of literary importance: Giraldi (1489-1552), Ludovico di Castelvetro (1505-1571), Giorgio Carraria (1514 A.D.), Iacopo Filippo Pellenagra (1517 A.D.), Francesco Anguillac (1572), who well renders the second ode, “Parmi quell’uomo equale essere à i Dei,” Lorenzo Crasso (1625?), Ugo Foscolo (1776-1827),[138] and many another.164 One needs only to read the long account with many references in the famous Dictionnaire historique et critique (1696) by that learned compiler, Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), who because of his scepticism lost his professorship of philosophy three years before (1693). In his ignorance he assumed that Sappho must have been bad and repeated the usual errors about her. I quote what he says ironically with regard to the charity of Madame Dacier: “charité de Mlle Le Fèvre qui a tâché pour l’honneur de Sappho de rendre le fait incertain; mais je la crois trop raisonnable pour se fâcher que nous en croyons nos propres yeux.” Anne Le Fèvre165 in 1681 had made the first real defense of Sappho’s character, long before Wilhelm Heinse’s Ardinghello, and one hundred and thirty-five years before Johannes Friedrich Welcker,166 who so influenced Goethe and Comparetti and Wilamowitz.

[139]

VIII. SAPPHO IN ITALY IN THE 18th AND 19th CENTURIES

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Sappho was rehabilitated and countless works of literature and art show her influence. Though the old perverse idea pervades all forms of literature and art in many insidious ways and Sappho loses her real personality and becomes a heroine of Romance, and although the legends connected with her are given a prominent place in the sunlight, yet even this proves her great potentiality in modern times.

The romantic Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), who translated passages from the Odyssey and wrote an interesting essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients, composed also a Last Song of Sappho. In this poem, drawn from Ovid, he has given the modern reader a strong impression for better or worse of the stormy and passionate soul of the great poetess. As in his Brutus, Leopardi is giving his own views of life, which are biased by his physical affliction;[140] but he blends his sorrow with that of nature and rises, especially in the third stanza, almost to the heights attained by Aeschylus in his Prometheus. He ends his song with beautiful mysterious pathos:

One is reminded of Sappho’s silver moon in Leopardi’s calm first lines, and also of Sappho’s autumn fragment in the lines “where in shade Of drooping willows doth a liquid stream[141] Display its pure and crystal course....” Leopardi also translated the famous midnight song (p. 78) and imitated the third fragment in La Impazienza. Carducci’s (1888) comment on Leopardi is worth quoting: “la poetessa di Lesbo non fu nè brutta nè infelice come il Leopardi l’accolse a imagine sua da una tarda tradizione, e che della bellezza e dell’amore intese gustò, e cantò più non potesse il Leopardi.” Leopardi believed in two Sapphos, as did Zannoni (1822), following the judgment of Visconti. About 1793, Pagnini (Pilenejo), wishing to praise Teresa Bandettini Landucci, likened her to Sappho in genius but not in habit:

Parini about 1777 dedicated an ode to Lady Pellegrina Amoretti d’Oneglia on her graduation from the University of Padua, La Laurea, in which he said that if instead of studying law she had given herself to literature she would have been the equal of Sappho. In 1782 Verri published Le Avventure di Saffo, in which there is a[142] paraphrase of the second ode. This romance was written in good literary style and had some fine thoughts and considerable Greek atmosphere. It went through more than a dozen editions, and was twice translated into French. In 1787 Parini celebrated the seductive qualities of a Venetian Signora Cecilia Tron in a poem of which I quote the first two stanzas:

One evening in 1827, as the story goes, the great Manzoni in the presence of Lamartine called La Palli, the happy-hearted Italian poetess, a “Saffo novella.” Eurica Dionigi was called the “Saffo Lazia,” and Anassilide was named “Saffo campestre” by the inhabitants on the Piave. Their verses, however, fall far short of the real[143] Sappho. In 1857 Giovanni Meli published La Morti di Saffu; and many another Italian writer has published poems in her honor, Gemma, Cipolla, Botti, etc.

Tragedies on the subject of Sappho in Italy have been few, among others those of Luigi Scevola (1815) and Salvatore Cammarono (1842); that of Leopoldo Marenco (1880) pictured Sappho as one of the Furies who was rejected by Phaon when he became enamored of another woman. Giovanni Pacini (Naples, 1840) first produced an opera on the theme, but changed the figure of Phaon to one who fell in love with Sappho and became jealous of Alcaeus, but was ready to die with him.

In recent years Carducci, in his Primavere Elleniche, makes Sappho and Alcaeus follow Apollo across the Aegean in a boat drawn by two white swans:

The influence of Sappho on Italian literature is also seen in the many Italian translations of some or all of the fragments; Cappone (1670), Rogati (1783), Pilenejo (1793), Broglio d’Ajano (1804), Leopardi (1816), Benedetti da Cortona (1819), Foscolo (1822), Milani (1824), Zanotto (1844), Jacopo d’Oria (1845), Nievo (1858), Viani (1858), Bustelli (1863), Canini (1885), and others have translated the famous folk-song (see p. 78). Giovambattista Possevini (1565), Francesco Anguilla (1572), Pinelli (1639), Cappone (1670), Corsini (1700), Conti (1739), Verre (1780), Pindemonte (1781), Rogati (1783), Vincenzo Imperiale (1784), Pilenejo (1793), Tommaseo (1827), Comparetti (1876), Ardizzone (1876), Fraccaroli (1878), Ambrosoli (1878), Gemma (1879), Cavallotti (1883), De Gubernatis (1883), Canini (1885) have translated the Hymn to Aphrodite. Rogati (1783), Gori (1801), Montalti (1804), Broglio d’Ajano (1804), Sabbione (1817), Venini (1818), Caselli (1819),[145] Foscolo (1823), Milani (1824), Costa (1825), Accio (1830), Monti (1832), Leone (1843), Nievo (1858), Canna (1871), Fraccaroli (1878), Canini (1885) have translated or adapted the second ode. D’Ajano (1804) gave the first complete version of all the old fragments, and in 1863 Bustelli did likewise,—neither of a high order of merit. In 1890 Cipollini published his verse translation of the first two odes and of the fragment about the Pleiades, which his brother set to music. The latest translation I have seen is by Latini (1914) and it is an excellent piece of work. Italy has had for the last hundred or more years a high regard for Sappho. Cipolla, thinking perhaps of Meleager’s comparison of Sappho’s poems to roses, says:

And Zanotto says:

Many of the fragments besides those mentioned have been translated into Italian or[146] imitated by Italian writers, as for example Zanella’s famous imitation, A donna ignorante:

Montalti (1804) imitated the fragment on virginity (p. 91), adding, however, much material of his own; and D’Oria (1845) expanded Sappho’s ten words on the evening star into:

Zanella (1887) says in his Volo in Ellade, which Cipollini quotes at length, that it is sweet to

There is not space to speak further of Sappho’s influence in Italy; we have said enough to show that Italian poetry has many echoes of Sappho and that Italy still takes an interest in the Lesbian lyrist. Ada Negri with her fiery pictures of passion is to-day called the modern Italian Sappho.

[148]

IX. SAPPHO IN LATIN TRANSLATIONS, IN SPANISH, AND IN GERMAN

We have spoken of Sappho’s influence on the ancient Latin authors and especially of Catullus’ translation and elaboration of the second ode. Horace also may have translated whole odes, but we have only Catullus’ preserved. In later days many of the editions of Athenaeus, Dionysius, Pseudo-Longinus, Hephaestion, and of the Anthology included Latin versions, and many other writers have Latinized the fragments of Sappho, especially Ausonius, Stephanus, Thomas Venatorius, Lubinus, Poliziano, and Thomas Moore. One of Moore’s two versions of Plato’s epigram is quoted here:

Among the Latin translators of the odes have been Elias Andreas, Simone Bircovio, Professor Le Fèvre (Tanaquillus Faber), Zacharias Pearce,[149] Valentini, Barbagallo and Allucci, Ambrocio, Emilio Porto and Birkow, etc. Gorsse, A. Stace, Vossius, and Henri Etienne and others have rendered the second ode into Latin.

Spanish. In Spain in 1794 there was a translation of Sappho and many other Greek lyric poets into Castilian verse by D. Jos. y D. Bernabé Canga Arguelles; and in 1832 appeared a prose and verse translation of Anacreon, Sappho, and Tyrtaeus by D. Jose del Castilla y Ayensa. Recently in Paris (1913) has been printed a modern Spanish version by T. Meabe. But in general Sappho has had but little influence on Spanish and German literatures, as compared with her great effect on Italian, French, and English. Mention, however, must not be omitted of the account of Sappho by A. Fernandez Merino. It is written in Spanish and discusses many of the Sapphic problems, giving full references.

German. In 1710 Philander von der Linde translated the second ode, and in 1732 Hudemann translated a few of the fragments, and there were good German editions of all Sappho’s fragments as early as the careful one by Christian Wolf (1734). In 1744 appeared Neukirch’s translation of the first two odes, and in 1746[150] Götz published his translation in rhymeless verse. In the same year appeared Stählin’s translations. In 1764 “the German Sappho,” Die Karshin, mentions Sappho five or six times and Phaon, but has no direct echoes. In 1776 Meinecke put Sappho into verse; in 1782 Ramler; in 1783 Günther Wahl. In 1787 verse translations were published at Berlin and Liebau, and in 1793 Conz published his translation of the fragment, To an Ignorant Girl. In 1809 Friedrich Gottlieb Born edited an edition for schools; in the same year C. Braun translated the fragments; in 1810 Volger published his very important and rare edition with commentary and musical schemes. He was soon followed by Welcker’s defense (1816), which Goethe mentions four times. But Sappho’s poetry remained a closed book to Goethe.166 There were many succeeding editions or translations: Degen (1821), Neue (1827), Brockhausen’s verse imitations (1827), Richter (1833), Jäger (1836), Gerhard’s free rendering for German student songs (1847), Köchly (1851), Hartung (1857), Weise (1878), Theodor Bergk’s great edition of 1882 reprinted in 1914; Schultz-Geffcken’s Altgriechische Lyrik im deutschen Reim (1895), Stowasser, Griechenlyrik in deutsche[151] Verse übertragen (1910); and Wilamowitz, Sappho und Simonides (1913). There is a good German account of Sappho by Paul Brandt in his Sappho, ein Lebensbild aus den Frühlingstagen altgriechischer Dichtung (1905). In Griechische Lyrik (1920) Erich Bethe in a good chapter on Sappho translates into rhymed verse the first two odes and several of the fragments (E. 99, 119, 135, 114, 54, 71, as well as the new papyrus fragments E. 83, 149, 150, 148, 154).

I can quote here only the new fragment 83:

There are only a few distinct cases of Sappho’s influence on the great German poets, and so I limit myself to comparing Grillparzer’s melodramatic adaptation of the Aphrodite ode with the beautiful rendering by the German lyric poet of modern times, Geibel, who as a tutor in Athens learned to love Lesbian lyrics and Greek literature, though he could not reproduce the wonderful soft sound of the Aeolic Greek:

In 1793, Franz von Kleist at the age of twenty-four had written a tragedy Sappho, a typical eighteenth century play of intrigue, an immature performance, however, lacking in clear portrayals of character and in dramatic development. In 1816 F. W. Gubitz had published an unimportant monodrama Sappho, which was[155] almost a caricature of what a dramatic work of art should be. In these dramas there was little of the real Sappho, but the case is different with Grillparzer’s Sappho, which was given April 21, 1818, in Vienna with great success. Some of the motives of von Kleist reappear in Grillparzer, and there are resemblances in language and thought. He may have used Amalie vom Imhoff’s Die Schwestern von Lesbos (1801), where there is a reference to the Leucadian Leap. But he rises to higher heights, and if he did use the above authors, their “crude ore,” as one critic has expressed it, “yields pure gold.” Grillparzer tells us himself in his autobiography167 how he conceived the idea of the drama. On June 29, 1817, he was strolling along the banks of the Danube when at the entrance to the Prater, the great park of Vienna, he met Dr. Joël, who remarked that Weigel, the orchestra-leader, wanted a libretto. Dr. Joël stated that Sappho would be a good subject, and Grillparzer immediately replied that it certainly would make a good tragedy. They parted company, and Grillparzer walked deep into the Prater, and when he returned home late in the evening the plan of Sappho was complete. The next day he went to the Imperial Library and[156] secured a copy of the extant fragments of Sappho, in which he found one of the two complete poems, which is addressed to the goddess of love, entirely suited to his purpose. He translated it at once, and the very next morning began work on the drama. The spirit of the play is German, not Greek, and takes some motives from Goethe’s Tasso. But Sappho is depicted as a woman rather than a poetess, and the story of the tragedy is really that of an unhappy woman disappointed in love. While it is a genuine love-tragedy, it also portrays the hard lot of the poet and the struggle between art and life even more vigorously than Goethe’s Tasso did. At the very beginning of the play Sappho has been crowned with the wreath of victory at the Olympic games and meets Phaon, who is represented as only slightly younger. Carried away by her triumph, he throws himself into her arms, only to spurn her later. To Phaon she sings (Act I, vi) Sappho’s hymn to Aphrodite, which we have just quoted, with a few changes to adapt it to the situation. Of course there were no such contests at Olympia in Sappho’s day, and Sappho’s victory is a pure invention. Neither was the original hymn addressed to Phaon, nor did the usual legend[157] say that Sappho cast herself from a Lesbian cliff; but Grillparzer must preserve the three unities, and such dramatic licenses and many anachronisms, such as the mention of Croesus who lived after Sappho’s time, are permissible to a master of dramatic technique. What interests us is that Grillparzer actually studied Sappho’s fragments and was much assisted by them. In Act I, lines 173 ff., he seems to be referring to the Adonis fragments, including the one on the loneliness of midnight, and to the verses which name Andromeda and Atthis:

The fragment (E. 74) is echoed in lines 671-2:

While Grillparzer is one of the few German poets who has imitated the content of Sappho’s songs, many have tried the Sapphic strophe with success, especially Wilbrandt in the Adonis song, in Der Meister von Palmyra:

[158]

Many a German novel refers to Sappho, but without any special knowledge of her fragments. One of the most interesting, which adapts with many changes the Rhodopis story, has been translated into English, An Egyptian Princess, by George Ebers (A. L. Burt Co., New York, second German edition 1868). Here Charaxus actually marries Rhodopis and names their child Cleïs, who in turn has a child Sappho whose love-scenes with Bartja make up most of the novel.

We may mention also in closing this chapter the lyrics, published in a small volume, called Stürme, by Carmen Sylva, the nom de plume of Rumania’s late queen, because in these lyrics the tragedy of Sapphic love has a German political rather than a Lesbian setting.

[160]

X. SAPPHO IN FRENCH LITERATURE168

The poetess of passion, perfect in expression, is more akin to French literature than to German, and so it is not surprising to discover Sapphic echoes in every period of the former from that of the erudite and artistic poetry of the Pléiade in the sixteenth century to the present day of Maurice Donnay. In the sixteenth century Louise Labé was composing sonnets which burned like an ode of Sappho, and in 1556 Remy Belleau in his Anacréon published the first French translation of Sappho. Only three years later (1559), another of the Pléiade, Pierre de Ronsard, who turned from his admiration of Homer and Pindar to Horace, Anacreon, and Sappho, gave in the second book of his Amours, a translation of the second ode of Sappho:

Ronsard also translated the famous folk-song, which has been so much imitated in all literatures, wrongly calling it an epigram:169

In the second book of his Poèmes a Christophile de Choiseul (Edition Laumonier V, 186), Ronsard (1556) said:

Early in the seventeenth century Malherbe wrote the following stanzas for le Duc de Bellegarde[162] “to a lady who imagined that he was in love with her,” in which he copied from the Lesbian poetess certain symptoms of love:

In 1620 Colletet published a prose imitation of Ovid, entitled Lettre de Saphon à Phaon (Les Epistres d’Ovide. Traduites en prose françoise. Par les sieurs Du Perron, Des Portes, de la Brosse, de Lingendes, Hedelin et Colletet. Paris, 1620). In 1660 Le Sieur Du Four translated the two odes, the first in prose, the second in verse. In 1674 that great classicist, Nicholas Boileau, who ranked the ancient writers above the modern because they had been tested through hundreds of years and because they agreed with nature and reason, included a[163] beautiful and truly classical rendering of the second ode, in his translation of the Treatise on the Sublime:

In 1677 Boileau’s intimate friend, Jean Racine, produced his great tragedy in five acts, Phèdre, based mainly on Euripides and Seneca, but including a translation of Sappho’s second ode, in Act I, scene 3, where Phaedra says about Hippolytus:

Racine’s comment was that he had “rien vu de plus vif ni de plus beau dans toute l’antiquité.” In 1649 Mlle de Scudéry in her Artamène ou le[164] Grand Cyrus and also in her letters calls herself Sappho, perhaps thinking of Sappho as a great literary writer and with a reference to Platonic friendship but no conception of Sappho as a bad character. Bayle rather objects to giving the name Sappho to a “fille qui écrivoit parfaitement bien en vers et en prose, et dont la vertu étoit admirée.” Perhaps Anne Dacier was not then the first to defend Sappho. In any case, Mlle de Scudéry gives the wrong idea of the historical Sappho, for in the tenth volume of le Grand Cyrus she gives a tedious recital of the loves of Sappho and Phaon. What could be farther from the real burning Sappho than desiring “un amant sans vouloir un mari, mais un amant qui, se contentant de la possession de son coeur, l’aime avec respect jusqu’à la mort.” The later French romance, entitled Les Amours de Sapho et de Phaon, also has nothing to do with the real Sappho. In 1680 Hilaire-Bernard de Requeleyne (cf. Baillet, Jugemens des Savans, IV. 392-393) gave with the Greek a poetical version, and in the next year Professor Le Fèvre of the University of Saumur, the Greek scholar and translator of Virgil, made another French translation, which was disloyal to the Greek and did not deserve the praise which has[165] been bestowed upon it. On December 1, 1681,170 his daughter, Anne (Madame Dacier) published Les Poësies d’Anacreon et de Sapho with notes and a life of Sappho. She believed in the Phaon story and that Sappho followed Phaon to Sicily and there composed the “plus beaux vers du monde,” including the hymn to Venus; “Tout le monde sçait qu’elle aima Phaon et qu’elle l’aima d’une manière fort violente.”

Sappho’s name was in vogue at this time wherever love was the subject of conversation[166] or of writing. In 1683 Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle in his Dialogues des morts,171 a title taken from Lucian, has Sapho and Laure discuss which sex should be the aggressor in love-making. Fontenelle displays no knowledge of Sappho herself, but has chosen her name, like so many writers even down to the time of Alphonse Daudet, to lend importance to a story which has already been conceived and for which an attractive title must be found. We can only quote the latter part of the dialogue:

In 1684 une Demoiselle de qualité de la Province de Guienne, only eighteen years of age, published a French prose translation of the two odes in the Mercure for July. In the same year appeared a metrical translation with Greek text, philological notes, and a life of Sappho in which are repeated the stories of disgraceful love, infatuation for Phaon, and the Leucadian Leap, Les Poésies d’Anacreon et de Sapho traduites de Grec en vers François. In 1692 we have another verse rendering by Baron de Longuepierre, who added a feeble poem in which Apollo vainly defends Sappho against the arrows of love. In 1694 Despréaux in his edition of the Treatise on[168] the Sublime gave a poetical version of the second ode which was so artistic that French critics in their enthusiasm pronounced it superior to the original, but its rhetorical phrases are far from the simplicity of Sappho’s Greek. Toward the end of the grand siècle La Fare, the Epicurean and inseparable friend of the Abbé de Chaulieu, translated the famous second ode. In 1704 appeared a verse translation by De la Fosse; in 1712 Gacon’s verse translation of Sappho’s two odes and Father Bougeant’s Anacréon à Sapho, Dialogue en Vers Grecs; and in 1713 appeared in French verse an imaginary epistle of Sappho to Phaon (Mercure for April). In 1716 La Fosse published his verses based on those of the Le Fèvres. In 1758 Poinsinet de Sivry produced his good verse translations. Voltaire (1694-1778) made an elegant adaptation of the second ode, with his eye also on Theocritus’ second idyl:

[169]

In 1766 appeared Blin de Sainmore’s Lettres de Sapho a Phaon with an account of Sappho’s life and verse translations of her poems. In 1773 appeared a new version of Sappho in prose by Moutonnet de Clairfons which proved so popular that it went through at least seven editions. In 1798 Mérard de Saint-Just published his verse translations of Sappho and Anacreon. Toward the end of the eighteenth century,172 an imaginary Greek manuscript, said to have been found at Herculaneum, translated by de Lantier, was published under the title Voyages d’Antenor en Grèce et en Asie, a most interesting and learned story of an imaginary trip to Grecian lands. Antenor and Phanor in the first chapter of the second volume meet Sappho and two unfortunate Greeks. An account is given in chapter three of the love of Sappho and Phaon, and the hymn to Aphrodite, quoted in the notes in Boileau’s translation, is addressed to Phaon: “C’est pour cet ingrat qu’un jour dans l’enthousiasme de la poésie et de l’amour, je composai cette ode qui a circulé dans toute la Grèce, et que sans doute la postérité répétera encore.” In the fourth chapter Antenor and his friend attend the funeral of Sappho and see the ashes[170] deposited in an urn. On the cippus is carved a lyre with this epitaph:

In the seventh chapter an account is given of Sappho’s last days, and Theagenes is revealed as her rival, to whom Phaon has united himself by a solemn bond. To Sappho is attributed a long ode in which she invokes Venus and all the infernal deities against her lover. She ends, however, by returning to the sweetness and generosity which had originally characterized her. I quote only the last two stanzas:

The author evidently was fond of Sappho and would compare with her Louise Labbé, la belle Cordière (1526-1566), a woman of tender heart and with a taste for passion, who wrote verses[171] on love in Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish. At this time Sappho was held in high esteem and it was a compliment to call a writer “a modern Sappho.” So for example in the preface to L’Abbé Le Roy, Le Paradis perdu, poëme traduit de l’Anglais de Milton en vers françois (Rouen, 1775) we read: “Aussi a-t-on fait le plus favorable et le plus juste accueil à la charmante esquisse du Paradis Terrestre, que daigna nous donner une femme célébre, dont le nom seul fait l’éloge, Mme du Boccage, cette Sappho moderne, qui fait d’honneur a la France.”

In 1777173 Sauvigny published his Poésies de Sapho, composed of eighteen odes, four scolies morales, four epigrams, the epitaphs of Timas and Pelagon, some fragments, a letter of Sappho to Phaon, and a hymn to Venus. There are many pretty uses of Sappho, though in no sense can the poems be said to be those of Sappho. The third ode is an echo of the fragment on the Evening Star:

The fifth ode renders the fragment on virginity:

The sixth ode is simply Boileau’s translation of the Aphrodite hymn. The thirteenth, addressed to Atthis, combines two fragments:

The fifteenth ode is a dialogue between Alcaeus and Sappho, and the note interprets as Sappho’s refusal of Alcaeus the famous fragment of which a Latin version is given:

[173]

Other writers of the end of the eighteenth century who paid tribute to Sappho were Bernis in his ode Harmonie, Lebrun in his epigrams, Parny in his Journée champêtre, La Harpe, who knew only ode II, and M. Legouvé who writes:

Other French translators of about this time are Regnier Desmarais, Ricard, Langeac, Deguerle, Marchena, Blin de Sainmore, Abbé Batteux, and Gorsse in Journal des Muses III.

In the nineteenth century the echoes and translations of Sappho are even more numerous. The first of the neo-classicists, André Chénier, follower of Boileau, owed much of his enthusiasm for the Greeks to his Greek mother, and imitated Sappho in the ode which he wrote for his love, the ode so admired by Alfred de Musset, the charming poet who also knew the sufferings of love:

[174]

He also used the fragment about Virginity (Latouche edition I, p. 64). Jacques Delille, the famous translator of Virgil, and the great representative of didactic and descriptive poetry, in his Poésies fugitives (1802) made a good literal translation. In the same year Vanderbourg published some verses camouflaged as the Poésies de Madame Clotilde de Surville, who was supposed to have lived 1405-1495. He gives a translation of the famous second ode, of which I quote only the last stanza:

The two great initiators of Romanticism also knew Sappho. Madame de Staël wrote (1811) a drama published 1821, Sapho, in which Phaon is divided between love for two different women. Chateaubriand in 1809 in Les Martyrs174 makes Cymodocée, who was on the point of becoming a Christian and already betrothed to Eudore, a fervent disciple of Christ, say to her fiancé: “Dis-moi, puisqu’on peut aimer dans ton culte, il y a donc une Vénus chrétienne?... Le[175] colère de cette déesse est-elle redoutable? Force-t-elle la jeune fille à chercher le jeune homme dans la palestre, à l’introduire furtivement sous le toit paternel? Ta Vénus rend-elle la langue embarrassée? Répand-elle un feu brûlant, un froid mortel dans les veines?” Chateaubriand adds here (and also in Revolutions Anciennes) Boileau’s translation and in the same place he cites the passage from Racine’s Phèdre which we have quoted, p. 163. In 1805 L. Gorsse published Sapho, poëme en dix chants.175 He defends Sappho’s character (eleven years before the German Welcker) but believes that her love for Phaon was “un fait incontestable, dont tous les genres de littérature ont le droit, de s’emparer.” He speaks of the Abbé Barthélemy, who in Voyage d’Anacharsis paints “les transports et l’ardeur de Sapho;” also of Lantier, Voyages d’Anténor, who had placed Sappho in such a bright light that he has brought out new beauties in the subject, which had not been seen previously. Both quote Boileau’s translation. Gorsse also praises, as possessing a grace which men can never attain, the fragments of poetry which two ladies, Mesdames de Beaufort-d’Hautpoul and Caroline Wougne, published under the name of Sapho. On pages 181-187 (Vol. II) he[176] quotes a romance by each, attributed to Sappho, which deals with her love for Phaon. In that of Caroline Wougne Sappho meets Phaon on his return from Sicily during a stormy night in a country house where he is asking for hospitality. Gorsse has also consulted Madame Pipelet de Salm, who presented Sappho on the lyric stage with grace and dignity. He himself unites the legends of her love with those of her writings, and drawing also on Tibullus, Propertius, Virgil, Lucretius, and especially Ovid, makes Sappho speak as poetess and lover fifty expanded elegies. There are five in each of the ten cantos besides a prologue and epilogue. In view of the fact that none of Sappho’s elegies are extant, the reconstruction, though fanciful, is extremely interesting. The first five songs picture Sappho’s desire, contentment, happiness, fear, and calmness. Phaon is jealous of Alcaeus and proposes to leave Lesbus to dwell in the Vale of Tempe, but Sappho asks Phaon to share in her poems, which will immortalize their love, and then reveals to him the origin of music. The second five represent her suspicion, grief, torment, and pursuit of Phaon to Sicily, her despair and the Leucadian Leap, after she sees Phaon making eyes at Telesilla. In the fifth elegy of[177] the first canto is an adaptation of Sappho’s second ode, in which the first verse addressed to Phaon is taken without acknowledgment from André Chénier’s Fanny. Phaon seems to be the principal figure, and the legends about him are tremendously expanded with the help of many Greek myths. As in so many other writers he becomes a great athlete and must overcome his opponents in the stadium. The Italian author of Avventure di Saffo had done likewise and made Phaon win with the same throw which Ulysses used in Homer. The Voyages d’Anténor had made Phaon first appear to Sappho after winning in the gymnasium. Likewise Gorsse has Sappho see Phaon for the first time in the stadium at Mytilene. There she describes the impression Phaon made on her, when he won the athletic prize. All these writers forget, however, that women in Sappho’s day were not allowed to witness the nude athletic contests. Gorsse shows his wide acquaintance with the ancient accounts of Sappho when in the fourth elegy of the second canto he mentions: “un foible enfant, Cléis, qui t’est si chère!” With only a few errors he represents all the many friends and pupils of Sappho,—to whom he gives classical epithets,—as helping[178] Sappho to preserve Phaon’s love. He is as keen as the modern critics when he says in a note that Erinna cannot be the famous poet, but he is wrong in picturing Brune Andromède and Blonde Gorgo as friends or pupils rather than rivals of Sappho.

The second elegy in the fourth canto has a pretty imitation of the famous third fragment. Sappho dissuades Phaon from his jealousy of Alcaeus, which of course is not an ancient legend, in the following words:

[180]

In the third elegy of the same canto is an elaboration of the fragment on the power of love, the bitter-sweet irresistible creature, and in the first elegy of the fifth canto there is an echo of the fragment about wealth without virtue. In long notes on the second elegy of the fifth book Gorsse cites de Sivry’s or Sauvigny’s verse translations or paraphrases in French, and Latin versions of a score of other fragments and of the Pelagon and Timas epitaphs. In the first elegy of the sixth canto the Sapphic symptoms of love are used:

The third elegy of the same canto is an adaptation of the hymn to Aphrodite and in the notes[181] are given Latin versions by Gorsse himself, Elias Andreas, and Birkow.

Not many have written elegies on Sappho, but Gorsse was followed in 1812 by Touzet, who wrote Sapho, poëme élégiaque. It was in 1816 that Lamartine wrote his mediocre imitation of Sappho’s great hymn, calling it L’élégie antique. It is in the cold restored pseudo-classical style of Casimir Delavigne:

Here is Lamartine’s own comment: “Un soir, en rentrant d’une de ces excursions, pendant laquelle nous avions relu la strophe unique, mais brûlante, de Sapho, sorte de Vénus de Milo, pareille à ce débris découvert par M. de Marcellus, qui contient plus de beauté dans un fragment qu’il n’y en a dans tout un musée de statues intactes, je m’enfermai, et j’écrivis le commencement grec de cette élégie ou de cette héroïde....” In one of his Nouvelles Méditations poétiques (not printed till 1823) he describes the suffering of the abandoned Sappho and her last,[182] farewell words to the world and to life, before her suicide; the last line is: “adieu chère Lesbos à Vénus consacrée.” Lamartine was followed in his idea of Sappho by Verlaine (1844-1896), the prince of the French poets after the death of Leconte de Lisle. Verlaine speaks of Sappho as “furieuse, les yeux caves et les seins roides.” In writing to his friend Virieu, April 8, 1819, Lamartine mentions the fact that he has planned an opera on Jephté and adds that he is thinking of writing one on Sappho, which, however, was never written: “J’en ai un qui me brûle, c’est une Sapho, superbe sujet d’un opéra pareil.”

In 1815 came Sapho, poème en trois chants par C. T. In 1820 Lazare Carnot published an excellent verse translation of the second ode, Les Symptomes d’Amour, and in 1827 E. Veïssier-Descombes, a translator also of Anacreon, published his classic rendering. In 1828 followed the poetical version of Cousin and Girodet; in 1835, Breghot du Lut., in prose and poetry; in 1836 Alexandre Hope’s Sapho, a poem of about ten pages; in 1843, prose renderings in Michaud’s Biographie Universelle; in 1847, Marullot et Grosset, in verse. In 1842, in the Cariatides, Théodore de Banville, one of the last[183] of the Romantic poets, that Greek “clown” of France, wrote these verses on Sappho:

Baudelaire (1821-1867), the morbid realist, uses the story of the Leucadian Leap in his Lesbos:

In a literary fragment (1845), entitled Sapho, he refers to a famous and remarkable tragedy[184] on Sappho which was to be published soon afterwards by Arsène Houssaye. He quotes some verses which are reminiscent of Sappho’s second ode:

In 1873 we have a translation by Etienne Prosper Dubois-Gucham, La Grecque Pléiade; in 1878 that of P. L. Courier; in 1882, the verses of de la Roche. About this time J. Richepin published in his undated romance, Grandes Amoureuses, prose translations of several fragments, and in 1889 Paul Lenois made a prose version. In 1884, Alphonse Daudet, after writing a novel on French life and customs as a warning to young men, and picturing a courtesan carried upstairs in the arms of her lover, gave the courtesan and the novel the title of Sapho. Soon afterwards appeared anonymously Madame E. Caro’s[185] Sapho. In 1895 were heard the songs of Pierre Louys, who in Les chansons de Bilitis traduites du Grec pour la première fois176 transforms Mytilene into a modern Sodom and Sappho into the mistress of a band of hetaerae. He pretends that he is translating Greek poems that were found in excavating the poetess’ grave on Amathus. He even represents them as published by a Doctor Heim of Leipzig. Further to mystify the reader Louys tells of some of the poems that have not been translated and marks restorations in the text, as if these songs had actually been found marred and mutilated and as if the archaeologist had restored the missing words. He even uses, to give a Greek atmosphere, many Greek expressions such as Kypris Philommeïdès. Many of his Greek forms, such as Dzeus, are absurd. Charming as are these Bucoliques en Pamphylie, Élégies à Mitylène, Épigrammes dans l’île de Chypre, they belong rather to pornographic literature, as does his romance called Aphrodite, in which the pseudo-Lesbian idea of two girls marrying one another is to be found. Such bits of perverted Sapphism as appear in many other French writers have no place in the literature of the real Sappho, who can now, after the discovery of all[186] the new papyri, easily be distinguished from the Sappho of romance and legend. Unfortunately the last French translation by Meunier (1911) does not include these recent relics.

One of the latest French imitations of Sappho is by that great reviver of Aristophanes, Maurice Donnay, whose comedies have attracted such large audiences in Europe. In his Lysistrata (Act I, scene II), Donnay makes the pretty Hirondelle as she walks along the shore of the violet sea recite to the accompaniment of the music of the waves the song which divine Sappho composed for the Egyptian courtesan Rhodopis, although we have no evidence for such a song:

This, of course, is an echo of the famous second ode of Sappho which has influenced all ages and countries and continues so to do. Hardly a year passes without some translation or reminiscence of it in Greece or Italy, in France or Germany, in England or America.

[188]

XI. SAPPHO IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

Sappho was little read in England and as a writer of poetry probably did not exist, except for a few Englishmen of great learning, before the sixteenth century. Even in the seventeenth century Thomas Stanley, a man of considerable culture, omitted Sappho from his translation of Anacreon (1650). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the imitations limit themselves to the Sapphic metre,177 with the exception of the famous line in Ben Jonson’s pastoral drama, The Sad Shepherd (Act II, 2): “But best the dear good angel of the spring, The nightingale,” and of Sir Philip Sidney, who seems to have been entirely forgotten by modern writers on Sappho. But it is interesting to note, in the movement led by Gabriel Harvey in pre-Shakesperian days to write English poetry in classical metres, that sapphics were attempted by Harvey’s friend, Sir Philip Sidney, in The Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia, which was begun in 1580. One stanza will suffice to show[189] how strained were the strophes thus manufactured:

It is rather strange that Sir Philip did not use this metre in his translation of the second ode of Sappho, but employed anacreontics.

This being a wholly iambic measure does not appear so exotic as the sapphics. Indeed, the youthful experimenter achieved a noteworthy success in rhythmic effect by ending each line with a foot composed of one strong syllable.

Most of the knowledge there was of Sappho in the Elizabethan and Jacobean times, however, seems to have been superficially based mainly on the Ovidian legend. Such a wonderful[190] story told by such a wonderful story-teller interested the early classicists in England, and the Phaon myth permeated much literature.

Ben Jonson (Under-Woods, No. 45) says:

Thomas Nashe in his novel, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), is a typical example: “Golde easily bends, the most ingenious minds are easiest moved, Ingenium nobis molle Thalia dedit, said Psapho to Phao.” It is just possible that Robert Herrick (1591-1674), who published so many poems to or upon Sapho, the name of his own love, knew from Athenaeus the fragment (E. 62) “much whiter than an egg,” when he published in Hesperides, No. 350 (1648) the verses:

John Lyly made Sappho an allegorical image of the Virgin Queen: “I will ever be virgin,” says Sappho. The play, Sapho and Phao, was produced in 1584 in the presence of Queen Elizabeth. Lyly makes Sappho a princess of[191] Syracuse and takes many liberties with the historical Sappho. Lyly’s Sappho resembles the Queen, and Phao is supposed to be the Duke of Leicester, but in such an allegory all reference to the Leucadian Leap has to be omitted, and there are no echoes of Sappho’s own fragments. When Phaon comes, Sappho soliloquizes: “Wilt thou open thy love? Yea? No, Sapho, but staring in his face till thine eyes dazzle and thy spirits faint, die before his face; then this shall be written on thy tomb, that though thy love were greater than wisdom could endure, yet thine honour was such as love could not violate.” Aphrodite interrupts their love and Phaon says: “This shall be my resolution, where-ever I wander, to be as I were kneeling before Sapho; my loyalty unspotted, though unrewarded.... My life shall be spent in sighing and wishing, the one for my bad fortune, the other for Sapho’s good.” Even Robert Burton in that famous storehouse of quotations, his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), does not know Sappho as a poetess, and refers only to the Leucata Petra: “Here leaped down that Lesbian Sappho for Phaon on whom she miserably doted, hoping thus to ease herself and to be freed of her love pangs.” The first English translation[192] of Sappho’s second ode (1652), quoted by Edwin Cox, is John Hall’s version in his translation of the Treatise an the Sublime. He does not mention Sidney, and Addison did not know even Hall’s translation or that of Pulteney, for he says that the versions by Ambrose Philips in 1711 were the first. In 1675 Edward Phillips in his Theatrum Poetarum devoted a chapter to Ancient Poetesses and Sappho. He knew the tradition of a second Sappho, but quoted no fragments. In 1680 Pulteney, who had a knowledge of small Latin and less Greek, gave a filtered translation from the French of the Treatise on the Sublime and the second Sapphic ode. In 1695 appeared another translation by an unknown author, but it was not till 1711 that any detailed study of Sappho began. In that year, in the Spectator (nos. 223, 229, and 233), Joseph Addison discussed Sappho at length. Even then we have only the namby-pamby verses of Ambrose Philips, so overpraised by Addison. Soon followed translations by Herbert in 1713, in his edition of Petronius (pp. 325-328); and in 1719, by Green. In 1735 John Addison published the works of Anacreon with Sappho added, in which the Loeb Classical Library idea of putting the Greek text on one page and the[193] translation on the opposite page was anticipated. Philips’ version of the Aphrodite hymn was forty-two lines long, but Addison gives one of his own in twenty-eight lines, which is the number in the original Greek. His own rendering is as good as that of Philips, which perhaps is damning it with faint praise. His translations of the eight fragments which he includes are also not remarkable. In 1748, we have Tobias Smollett’s version of the second ode in Roderick Random. About 1745, Mark Akenside in his tenth Ode on Lyric Poetry based a stanza on Sappho’s first ode. In 1760, “a Gentleman of Cambridge” published his verse translations. In some publications he is considered to be different from Francis Fawkes, who undoubtedly is the gentleman referred to. In 1768 appeared E. B. Greene’s free and mediocre translation, in which Aphrodite’s doves become “feathered steeds,” and which ignores the Sapphic metre. In 1796, Mrs. Mary Robinson published Sappho and Phaon, but these sonnets of hers are not, as she claims, legitimate descendants of the real Sappho.

It was not till the nineteenth century, however, that the actual literary remains of Sappho were scientifically studied. In 1814, we have the[194] translations of Elton, in 1815 of Egerton, in 1833 the Sapphics by Merivale, in 1854 Palgrave, in 1877 Walhouse. In 1869, Edwin Arnold’s Poets of Greece gave one of the best renderings of the Aphrodite hymn in Sapphic metre and included pretty translations of nine of her fragments. Edwin Arnold called her: “that exquisite poetess ... whose genius among all feminine votaries of singing stands incontestably highest.” He protests against Swinburne’s repetition of the scandal against her sweet name which gossiping generations have invented; he rejects the Leucadian Leap and the Phaon myth. In 1871 T. W. Higginson wrote his important article on Sappho for The Atlantic Monthly, which can now be found in his Atlantic Essays. He translated several of the fragments and the hymn than which, he says, “there is not a lyrical poem in Greek literature nor in any other which has by its artistic structure inspired more enthusiasm.” He subjects to many a hard blow that paltry Scot soul, Colonel Mure, whose history of Greek literature ought to be tabooed. He repudiates the calumnies of the comedians and scandal-mongers. His appreciation of Sappho is one of the best that has been written.

[195]

In 1883 J. A. Symonds published his translations, and some of them were made for and included in that charming little book of Wharton’s, which appeared in its first edition in 1885. Even before Wharton, Swinburne had given his high estimate of Sappho and had melted together many of the fragments into his Anactoria. In 1894, Maurice Thompson published in The Atlantic Monthly, “The Sapphic Secret,” and gave a fine appreciation of Sappho with translations of the shorter fragments. During the last thirty years the discovery of new papyri has stimulated interest in Sappho and many books and articles, scientific and popular, have been printed. For a discussion of the recovery of Greek literature from papyri and the difficulties involved in deciphering and restoring Sappho’s new fragments, I refer the reader to my introduction on the subject in Miller-Robinson, The Songs of Sappho. I refer the reader to the bibliography for some of the books and to a note178 for references to some popular articles, and call special attention to the volumes of Easby-Smith, Miss Patrick, Petersen, Edmonds, Cox, Tucker, and Edward Storer, most of whom give their own verse renderings of some, if not all, of Sappho’s fragments. Many modern[196] poets, both British and American, have adapted or expanded Sappho’s fragments in English verse, Lucy Milburn, Bliss Carman, Percy Osborn, that pure Pelasgian, John Myers O’Hara. Recently Dr. Marion Mills Miller, formerly of Princeton University, has published metrical adaptations of all the old and new fragments, which are graceful and witty. He has also given the romance of Sappho’s life in verse and has made a new poetical translation of Ovid’s Sappho to Phaon. In the same volume (cf. Bibliography), I have published the Greek text of all Sappho with a literal translation and two introductions. One deals with the recovery and restoration of Sappho’s relics and shows the romance as well as the difficulties involved in deciphering and restoring her poems. The other discusses Sappho’s life and works.

The influence of Sappho on English and American literature has been large. We have already shown this in our citations, as it seemed better to quote some of the great English writers when we were speaking of Sappho herself. Addison was devoted to her, but his contemporary, Pope, by translating Ovid’s Sappho to Phaon, aggravated the ill-fame which Ovid had given her. Pope often mentions her, but without[197] knowledge of the true Sappho. In Moral Essays (Epistle III, 121) we have the line: “Why she (Phryne) and Sappho raise that monstrous sum?”, referring to Lady Montague and to Miss Skerrett, the latter of whom was the mistress and later the second wife of Sir Robert Walpole. Lady Mary (Montague) is alluded to also in Epistle II, 24:

Also in the Prologue to the Satires, in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 369, we read: “Sappho can tell you how this man was bit.” Sappho is mentioned again in Imitations of Horace (Satire I, l. 83) and in Satires of Dr. John Donne (II, 6), in these words: “As who knows Sappho, smiles at other whores.” In his letters to Cromwell, Pope often mentions two Sapphos, one his own and the other Cromwell’s: “My service, pray, to the other Sappho, who it is to be hoped, has not yet cast herself headlong from any of the Leucades about London, although her Phaon lately fled from her into Lincolnshire.” Even in the letter to Steele, when he makes acknowledgment to the “fine fragment of Sappho,”[198] Pope is disingenuous and affected, as he suppresses the name of Flatman, to whom he was really indebted.

Wordsworth, influenced probably by Welcker’s defense, had a good opinion of Sappho (cf. the quotation, p. 247). But his dear friend, Sir Walter Scott, seems to be ignorant of her, though the lines on the Evening Star, which we have quoted (p. 64), sound strikingly Sapphic. Coleridge seems to echo the famous fragment about the pippin on the topmost bough in his One Red Leaf on the Topmost Twig; but as he shows no other influence of Sappho this is probably an accidental resemblance. Thomas Moore, as a translator of Anacreon with whom Sappho was generally linked, knew Sappho well and translated some of her fragments into Latin as well as English. His rendering of the Weaving Song is especially charming (cf. p. 79). Another contemporary Irish poet, the Reverend George Croly, tells how:

Of the post-Revolution poets the bombastic Byron, who may have learned something about Sappho from his friend and editor, Thomas[199] Moore, refers to her most. In Don Juan (III, 107), he expands, none too well, into a stanza of eight the two lines in which Sappho has painted such a beautiful miniature landscape of reunited village life. As Livingstone says in The Legacy of Greece (p. 265): “the English genius is rich and lavish rather than restrained. It is less in its nature to write like Sappho.” Was Livingstone not thinking also of Swinburne and many another modern poet who plays so many indistinct, un-Greek variations on that divine line: “I loved thee once, Atthis, in the long ago,” which Mackail has called “just one sliding sigh and whisper of sound.” There is another expansion by the poet laureate of Canada, which we have quoted in a note (p. 257). It is Byron who in Don Juan (III, 76) speaks of

and in Don Juan (II) he speaks of “Sappho, the sage bluestocking in whose grave All those may leap who rather would be neuter.” In the controversy between Byron and Boules with regard to the second ode, Byron says: “Is not this sublime and fierce love for one of her own sex? And is not Philips’ translation of it in[200] the mouths of all your women? And are the English schools or the English women the more corrupt for all this?” Byron echoes the element of fire which has so often been noted in Sappho’s songs, by critics from Plutarch to Sara Teasdale. He knows the story derived from Ovid and Maximus of Tyre that she was dark (p. 35) and also the legend of the Lover’s Leap (Childe Harold, II, 39-41):

While Shelley and Keats do not have clear echoes of Sappho, they come nearer to her in spirit than any other modern poets; but, even so, Keats’ sensuousness removes him from[201] Sappho. W. L. Courtney, in a very interesting article on Sappho and Aspasia,178 says: “Shelley has the true lyrical note, and Keats some of that chiselled loveliness which makes each Sapphic stanza a masterpiece.” One might even suspect that Shelley knew the second ode, at least in some secondary source, when he composed To Constantia Singing.

Women poets naturally have taken an interest in Sappho. Mrs. Hemans, the English lyrist (1793-1835), speaks of “Sappho’s fervent heart.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning seems to have known only the song of the rose to which we have referred above (p. 68). She is familiar with the Lover’s Leap legend, as was Byron, for she speaks in A Vision of Poets of

In Matthew Arnold there is much classical influence, but A Modern Sappho has nothing of ancient Sappho. Walter Savage Landor,179 who looked back to Greece from Rome and by his delightful dialogues made the ancient ages live again, is one of the few who decry Sappho. He[202] seems to be jealous when he says that “Sappho is not the only poetess who has poured forth her melodies to Hesperus, or who had reason to thank him.” He composes ten verses himself entitled Sappho to Hesperus, which are not like Sappho’s at all. Likewise he takes eight lines to express the thought of the despair of the love-sick maiden over her faithless lover, which Sappho depicts in a better picture of a single couplet. Landor finds Sappho deficient in delicacy in her answer to Alcaeus and attributes to her an epigram about Alcaeus which she never wrote. He would obliterate no letter of the invocation to Hesperus by a tear of his. Among the poems of Sappho he finds one written in a different hand from the rest, which pleases him as much as any of them, but it reads like Landor and is inferior to what Sappho would have said. In Simonidea he tries his hand at the Weaving Song:

Charles Kingsley wrote a beautiful poem on Sappho, which well represents her mood; but[203] there is hardly even a faint echo of Sappho’s own fragments unless the words “all her veins ran fever” are accidentally suggested by the second ode.

William Cory, famous translator of the Heraclitus epigram, who published poems on Stesichorus and other classical subjects, prettily transformed one of the fragments into:

William Morris, a fine classical scholar, as shown in his Life and Death of Jason, in The Earthly Paradise (1868-1871), expands in a very readable form the story of the Egyptian courtesan, Rhodopis, whom Sappho’s brother, Charaxus, ransomed. About the same time (1870) Rossetti made the combination of two fragments which we have mentioned above (p. 93). Some tell us that Oscar Wilde’s heart goes out to Sappho, but so far as I have read I have not been able to find in him any trace of the real Sappho.178a On the other hand, Tennyson and Swinburne read her fragments over and over. Tennyson, who thought the Sapphics of Horace to be “much inferior to those of Sappho,” beautifully paraphrases the second ode in Eleänore (1832). In the original edition of Fatima (Dec. 1832), published under the title O Love, Love, Love, he prefixed the first line of this ode as a motto. Many as are the echoes of the sweet-bitter, bitter-sweet antithesis of Sappho (E. 81, above, p. 57) in Wharton and other critics, it seems strange that perhaps the most beautiful and deep-hearted of all, Elaine’s song in Tennyson’s Idyl is never cited, so far as I know.180

[206]

Tennyson echoes the third fragment, as we have seen (p. 63); and he re-echoes through Horace another fragment in his Epilogue (p. 36). In Fatima, “Love, O withering might” suggests another fragment. In Leonine Elegiacs we have a better adaptation than in Byron of the Hesperus hymn:

In Locksley Hall Sixty Years After he again uses the same Sapphic fragment: “Hesper, whom the poet call’d the Bringer home of all good things.” His brother, Frederick Tennyson, who was such a good Greek scholar that he won the medal at Trinity College for a Greek poem, in his Isles of Greece (1890) used several adaptations and translations of Sappho, the prettiest being those about Sappho’s child Cleïs, about Hesper and the summer noonday siesta by the cool waters. Many writers of lyrics in England and Scotland have thought of Sappho, but generally of[207] the Phaon story, as recently did Thomas McKie in his Lyric on Love:181

Swinburne is one of Sappho’s greatest admirers, and we have quoted some of his praises among the appreciations of Sappho (p. 11). We have cited Noyes’ appreciation of Swinburne’s love of Sappho, and here are Thomas Hardy’s interesting lines to Swinburne:

While perhaps Swinburne exaggerates in his praise of Sappho, he owes much to the great poetess of love:

He makes her say:

In Tristram of Lyonesse he speaks of “Sweet Love, that art so bitter,” and in Anactoria:

His poems have many Sapphic echoes. In his youth he poured several of Sappho’s fragments into the melting pot of Anactoria, where she is[209] a nerve-racked woman, torn by passion, sensuous and lascivious, altogether too “Sapphic.” The rhetoric in his lines is gorgeous, but he loses much of Sappho’s emotional power. “That one low, pellucid phrase,” as Mackail calls the line, “I say that one will think of us even hereafter,” is expanded into:

The famous fragment of four lines which we have quoted above (p. 69) becomes:

The Aphrodite hymn which he paraphrased in Anactoria is used again in Songs of the Spring-tides:

In the same poem the mature Swinburne comes closer than in his youth to Sappho, when he says: “The tawny sweet-winged thing, Whose cry was but of spring.” But even in this poem he dilutes Sappho’s one line into six or more:

[211]

We cannot take leave of Swinburne without paying tribute to his Sapphics. English and American poets in general have not been successful with the Sapphic strophe, though in modern times Canning’s Needy Knife-grinder is a good specimen; and Tennyson caught the real Greek cadence in his specimen:

Many have experimented with the Sapphic stanza, as recently Clinton Scollard and Thomas S. Jones, Jr., in their Sapphics.

[212]

Sara Teasdale (Mrs. Filsinger), who has been called one of the best of contemporary lyric poets and who is an ardent admirer of Sappho, has written the following striking lyric in the Sapphic stanza:

Marion Mills Miller182 has written some good Sapphics, though his theory of the proper rendition[213] of Sapphic metre will cause some controversy among scholars. We have not the space here to discuss the history of the Sapphic metre, which if not first used by Sappho was first perfected by her. It has been employed extensively in all ages. Horace has it some twenty-six times. Elizabethan renderings can be found in Robinson Ellis’ preface to his translation of Catullus. By Rhabanus (766-856) it was fitted to hymns such as those for the Feast of St. John the Baptist, for Candlemas, Michaelmas, and for the Feast of St. Benedict, and it was employed for his hymns in the Common of Confessors and the Common of Virgins. But no one else has ever caught the Sapphic rhythm and melody so well as Swinburne in his early poem called Sapphics:

[215]

American. In America in early days little attention was paid to the content of Sappho, but the Phaon story is sometimes used, as for example by Philip Freneau of New Jersey, the “poet of the American Revolution,” the “creature of the opposition” (1752-1832). In The Monument of Phaon, a poem published in 1795, in the form of a dialogue between Sappho and the traveller, Ismenius informs her that he saw the tomb of her deserter, Phaon, in Sicily, erected by another lady:

The last lines are:

[216]

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) in the index to the first volume of the Southern Literary Messenger states that a stanza of Sappho’s second ode is embodied in his poem, To Sarah:

In Ulalume there is a possible echo of fragment (E. 16):

In Al Aaraaf, I, 43 ff., Poe says in a note that he is referring to Sappho in the lines:

Dr. Thomas O. Mabbott of Columbia University has called my attention to the fact that Poe[217] published a version of Sappho’s second ode by Mary E. Hewitt in Broadway Journal, I, no. 24 (1845); that he knew “Udoch’s” note (Southern Literary Messenger, I, p. 454, April, 1835) where there is a reference to the Spectator, no. 229; and that the paper, Some Ancient Greek Authors, signed P. in the Southern Literary Messenger for April, 1836, where a conventional account of Sappho is given, was probably written by Poe.

Later American literature, like that of other countries, is full of the name of Sappho, even if it does not show a profound knowledge of the fragments of the actual Sappho. In any case, such dramas and poems and novels reveal the tremendous potentiality of her name. We have referred to translations or adaptations by Easby-Smith, Lucy Milburn, J. M. O’Hara, Bliss Carman, Petersen, Storer, and Marion Mills Miller. There have been renderings of individual poems by Felton, Higginson, Gildersleeve, Shorey, Lawton, Appleton, Whicher, Horton, Drake, and others; the first ode has been well rendered in the metre of the original by Professor Appleton, Professor Fairclough, and others (cf. pp. 47-52 above).73 We cannot list here all the American renderings of single songs or fragments, although we have incidentally in this[218] book mentioned many such, and an abundance of references will be found in the notes. Nor can we give the titles of all the tragedies and poems which have been inspired by the name of Sappho. We select only a few of the more important. There is an interesting tragedy in five acts called Sappho of Lesbos by Mrs. Estelle Lewis (“Stella”), whom Edgar Allan Poe called “the rival of Sappho.” The play was put on the stage in London in 1868 and afterwards was given on the Athenian stage in a modern Greek version. It reached a seventh edition. It should be credited to America, since Mrs. Lewis was Miss Anna Blanche Robinson, born near Baltimore in 1824. She translated Virgil’s Aeneid when a mere schoolgirl, and afterwards married Mr. Lewis of Brooklyn, New York. She travelled much abroad, but returned to America, where she wrote some of the plays before she went to live in London in 1865. In 1876 was published Ellen Frothingham’s translation of Grillparzer’s Sappho. In 1900-1913 H. V. Sutherland wrote his Sappho and Phaon, and in 1907 was published Percy Mackaye’s tragedy with the same title. Even when he was a student at Harvard, he wrote an entirely distinct lyric drama in[219] verse, entitled Sappho, or Archilochus and Hipponax, in which he himself acted with a gathering of Harvard and Wellesley students in January, 1896. Unfortunately this drama has not been published. The published play is written mostly in iambic pentameter blank verse, with a few lyrics and some trochaic and dactylic lines; there are also several excellent Sapphics. It has never been very successful on the stage, although the music given with it is still so popular that it has been recently published by Professor Stanley (cf. bibliography). In the prologue a manuscript of Sappho’s poems is imagined to have been found in excavating the theatre of Varius at Herculaneum, just as Lucy Milburn, who lived in Lesbos for a while, pretended that she procured her poems from papyri which she had discovered in a metal case in the Orient. The scene of the tragedy is an olive grove on a promontory overlooking the Aegean Sea. In the first act we have Atthis betrothed to Larichus, and Anactoria deserted by Alcaeus for Sappho. Pittacus is one of Sappho’s suitors who quarrels with Alcaeus and in trying to strike him hits the slave Phaon. In the second act Sappho releases Phaon from his yoke and they flee from[220] Alcaeus after Phaon has struck him with his spear. In the third act Phaon again strikes at Alcaeus, but this time hits his own boy. Thalassa, his wife, shows him his own dead child and so he returns to her, and the rejected Sappho springs into the misty sea. There are inappropriate prose interludes with a pantomime of the drunken Hercules. Sappho is here again not the real Sappho but the Sappho of tradition, which is rather strange, as several of Sappho’s fragments, by no means all that might have been suitable, are accurately and charmingly paraphrased. This shows that Mackaye knew the fragments of Sappho, but he has no real understanding of Sappho herself, for his Sappho is given to unrestrained love and she rejects a great poet and statesman for the married slave into whom Mackaye has transformed Phaon. I can quote only the very dramatic hymn to Poseidon and Aphrodite:

Many individual American poems have also taken the title or themes from Sappho. Oliver Wendell Holmes refers to her in the fourth stanza of The Voiceless:

Samuel Latham Mitchill (1764-1831) reflects Sappho’s love of the rose in an imaginary dialogue between Sappho and her younger contemporary from Samos, Pythagoras:

[222]

In recent years many poems have appeared on Sappho. For example, thinking perhaps of the story that Solon asked his nephew to teach him a song of Sappho before he died, and echoing the epithet of “sweetly smiling” in Alcaeus’ fragment, Richard Hovey (1864-1900) wrote in The Independent, April 30, 1896, A Dream of Sappho:

We have referred above to Gamaliel Bradford’s use of Sappho’s apple on the topmost bough; and Maurice Thompson, the author of Alice of Old Vincennes and the Sapphic Secret, published as his last song, Sappho’s Apple in The Independent, Feb. 21, 1901:

Renée Vivien (1877-1909), an American poetess of great promise who died all too young and all too unknown to students of Sappho (see bibliography), made some very nice French verse translations of Sappho which were published under a pseudonym in 1903 and reprinted anonymously in 1909. She pays her tribute to Sappho in these two verses:

[226]

The Maryland poet, Father John B. Tabb, the only American who with Emerson was admitted to the Oxford Garland Series on Epigrams, has two poems on Sappho, in the first of which Keats is appropriately classed with Sappho:183

We have already referred to Alan Seeger’s use of the famous midnight fragment (p. 78). The magazines are fond of the subject of Sappho and Phaon and have countless poems which refer to Phaon and the Leucadian Leap. Buchanan has a poem called The Leucadian Rock; and Edward J. O’Brien in the Liberator says:

Sara Teasdale, the modern burning American Sappho, has a poem on Phaon and the Leucadian Leap in Scribner’s Magazine, for December, 1913, pp. 725-6. The poem is too long to quote entire, and I can give only a few lines:

Alfred Noyes, in his poem In Memory of Swinburne uses the fragment which Swinburne himself expanded (cf. p. 12). Edwin Arlington Robinson184 has translated The Dust of Timas (cf. p. 100), which has recently been diluted by William Stebbing into twelve verses in his poem, A Bride in Death. Robinson’s rendering[229] of Posidippus’ epigram on Doricha is also excellent:

There is little of Sappho except in name in Agnes Kendrick Gray’s verses185 or in those of William Alexander Percy.186 Harry Kemp is thinking of Byron rather than Sappho herself when he says that the lines, “the Isles of Greece where burning Sappho loved and sung,” went to his soul like a white hot iron. There is more in George Horton,187 who in the last poem on Sappho which I have seen from his pen has a refrain on “bitter-sweet.” Mr. Horton forgets[230] that we do know that Pittacus, (see illustration Pl. 2) was “lord of Lesbos’ isle,” but the general sentiment is true all the same:

I have quoted enough to discredit “The King of the Black Isles” who in the Line O’Type of the Chicago Tribune for November, 1922, publishes a poem with the alliterative caption, A Lady Lived in Lesbos.188 The last of the three stanzas is:

Even as this book goes to press, Tristram Tupper issues his novel, Adventuring (Doran Co., N. Y., 1923), in which Sappho is discovered even down in the valley of the Shenandoah:

AN ADDENDUM ON SAPPHO IN RUSSIAN

Many Russian writers mention Sappho, especially Vyacheslav Ivanov; and in a volume republished in Berlin, 1923, (Zovy Drevnosti, Echoes of the Past) Konstantin Dmitriyevich Balmont has translated eight of Sappho’s fragments. The same poet (Zacharovanny Grot, The Enchanted Grotto, vol. III, 1908) has published a poem on Sappho which my former student, now of Columbia University, Dr. Clarence Manning, has translated in the original metre:

[234]

XII. SAPPHO’S INFLUENCE ON MUSIC

On the operatic stage Sappho has had much influence; and above I have told how Lamartine said that Sappho was a superb subject for an opera, although he never wrote the opera, and how Grillparzer was asked to write an opera on Sappho. In French we have a lyrical tragedy, Sapho, by Empis and Courniol (1818), Delavault’s Sapho and Gounod’s Sapho (1851); and a few years ago (1897) Massenet produced his Sapho. In Italian there is Pacini’s Saffo (Naples 1840); in Dutch, Bree’s Sapho; in German, Schwartzendorf’s Sappho and Kanne’s Sappho; in Bohemian, there is Reicha’s Sappho; and in Russian, Lissenko’s Sappho.

Brahms composed a Sapphic Ode, which is very familiar because it is often sung to-day and there is an English victrola record of it by Julia Clausen, but while it deals with Sappho’s favorite flower, the rose, it is Sapphic only in name and metre:

From the time of the Schemata Musica printed in Volger’s edition of 1810, down to the music published by G. Cipollini in 1890 in his brother’s Saffo, many have put Sappho’s songs to music. Even in the last few years many have tried their hand at the task. Perhaps the most successful music, with a real touch of the old Greek flavor, is that which was composed by Professor Stanley for several of Sappho’s fragments in connection with Mr. Harrison Grey Fiske’s stage presentation of Percy Mackaye’s Sappho and Phaon. This has been reprinted this year in a general treatment of Greek music by Professor Stanley of the University of Michigan. The selections published include “Builders, Build the Roof-Beam High, Hymenaeon”; “Gath’rers, What Have We Forgot, Hymenaeon!”; “What shall we do, Cytherea?”; “Hollow Shell, Horny Shell”; “Akoue, Poseidon”; “Hesper, Eleleu”, etc. Miss Pearl C. Wilson, of Miss Chandor’s[236] School in New York, a former student of Professor Perry of Columbia University, without making any pretense of reproducing the ancient music has composed musical accompaniments for several of the odes and also of the new fragments, which have been sung with much success. She tried to illustrate the metre of each fragment, but found it more satisfactory to write the music without the modern division into bars and rests, simply indicating the long and short syllables by notes of different values. This makes possible a lyric delivery of the poems, each line determined solely by the words and their meaning. In that way the simple melodies as expressions of the thought gain a great deal when sung. I can testify from my own public experiments in readings from Sappho that her fragments can be much better recited or chanted when accompanied by music, as I am convinced they were originally.

[237]

XIII. EPILOGUE AND CONCLUSION

I venture to hope that out of all I have written in the preceding pages some fairly clear idea of Sappho may have emerged. Yet the discussion has had to wander widely through literature which has, indeed, been influenced strongly by her name but journeys far from the Lesbian lyrist herself. In closing this study it may be well, therefore, to return to the woman and the poet and add some final words.

The fragments of many other ancient poets have been collected for merely scholastic reasons, but Sappho’s literary remains are more than antique specimens. They constitute a great and noble literature and some of the latest found are among the best. They often rank as highly as the completed poems of other writers—surely an unparalleled phenomenon. In them we recognize the creator’s genius as clearly as in a fragmentary torso of Phidias we see the sculptor’s art in every chiselled line. While we miss the fullness of her life, we can restore her[238] figure because the fragments are “the real blood of her heart and the real flame of her thought.” Nearly every line of them has been imitated, dilated or diluted, and, disgraceful to say, many who have drunk of her living water have poisoned it into stagnant and salacious slime. There is nothing like this in the history of literature. Higginson in 1871 summarized the case:

Sappho, then, was a pure and good woman, busily and successfully engaged in the work of her chosen profession. She was a teacher of[239] singing and dancing and the technique of poetry, and to give her pupils the finest models she applied herself so seriously to the lyric art that she reached a perfection in it to which no other classic poet attained. If she ever collected her verse it was only to promote the idealization of marriage pageants, and not with the purpose of publishing a full edition of her songs. It would not be safe to deny that there was a practically useful collection of Sappho’s songs in the archives of her school or guild or in the Temple of Aphrodite, but no copies were sold at the book-stalls in her own day as certainly was later the case in fifth century Athens.

Sappho, in fact, must be listed with two other names which, taken together, form a unique and astonishing group, a group whose peculiar and distinguishing feature is that their enduring thoughts and imperishable words were indispensable necessities in their life-work rather than productions as literature for the sake of literature. It is not because of the accidental alliteration that we rank Sappho with Socrates and Shakespeare. These great exemplars of song, ethics, and drama, respectively, were alike in that it was not by their intention that their works became literature. Shakespeare as a[240] theatrical manager was obliged by his position to write plays that would attract audiences. He was compelled by his genius to make those dramas imperishable. But if he had had his way none of them would ever have been printed. Our gratitude must be given to prompters’ copies and to literary thieves. Socrates was a teacher whose purely oral lessons his pupils, Plato and Xenophon, committed to writing that the master’s inspiring thoughts might not die.

Socrates’ love for his young disciples was a love passing the love of women. The myriad-minded man of Stratford,—“Gentle Will,” as his comrades called him,—had an affectionate sympathy with all sorts and conditions of his fellow-men. Sappho’s love for her girl friends was so intense that there are those who, not knowing how passionate the love of woman can be for woman, still fail, despite the evidence, to recognize a love more sublime even than that for man.

How jealous she could be of her family’s good name! More than once she prays that no dishonor may come to her house. How jealous also of those who sought to win away the love of her girls and of the girls themselves when any[241] of them seemed to have forgotten her! How intensely, too, she could hate, the outbursting passion against the “she-dog” at the close of fragment E 36, which we have translated on page 20, may serve to suggest. The fierceness of her satire is also incidentally shown in this as well as in other fragments. (See E 35, 37, 71, et al.)

Like Socrates and Shakespeare Sappho had a planetary mind swinging in its orbit with ease through all realms, whether of nature, or human nature, or the divine nature of the unseen world. This need not be elaborated here, save in Sappho’s case. But it may be worth while to repeat some of the evidence as to Sappho’s wide range of thought as it is seen in a few typical instances. She loved the roses, the clover, and the anthrysc. She loved the doves and the nightingales, and knew their colorings and discerned their ways. But the unplucked apple on the top of the topmost bough, the myriad ears of the listening night that hears what the girl across the sea says and relays it right over the waves, the rosy-fingered moon well above the horizon and launching light across the rolling sea and over the fields of flowers, reveal even in the fragments which are “small but[242] roses” how surpassing were her instincts for nature’s loftier meanings as well as its minute details and how exquisite were her comparisons. As for the phases of love—they were her daily business,—and each new couple whose wedding festivities she arranged in song gave her new material. Where in all literature is there a finer example of the union of human love along with insight into the soul of nature than in the ode, To Absent Anactoria? (See p. 72).

As we have said, she knew the heart of the Greek bride and her dread at the loss of her free virginity. Mother love, too, was never more exquisitely portrayed than in the song we have quoted on pp. 27-28. But the subject of woman’s love for woman is peculiarly her own. The finest lines in all Sappho’s poetry are those descriptive of Anactoria in a poem which we might call Old Love is Best (E. 38, pp. 82-83 above).

Finished style, the γλαφυρὸς χαρακτήρ, as the Greek critics called it, simple purity but effective luminosity and exquisite rarity of expression, faultless constraint, fine taste in choosing appropriate subjects, marvellous verbal economy, comprehensive power in single words, fiery passion as well as austerity, richness and[243] beauty, good arrangement of words, assonance, alliteration, consonantal harmonies, lingering vowel music and melody, produced often by the repetition of long vowels, the soft Aeolic quality of the Greek sounds, swift changes of nature and enchanting images, varied metres, but above all else, charm, that greatest characteristic of Sappho so emphasized by the ancients and moderns,—all these qualities she used that her songs and hymns might be perfect. It is this simple natural perfection of her art, like the “nothing too much” of the Parthenon frieze, that makes her untranslatable, even though it is precisely the quality which modern literature lacks but needs. Her nature was so great and her genius so marvellous and her purposes so inexorable that, in attending with her whole soul to her business as the poetic and musical caterer for successive weddings upon an ancient and interesting island, she incidentally made word-music and created thought-images which sounded the depths and scaled the heights of human passion and which winged their way to distant shores. The strains of her songs are beginning to be heard everywhere and are ever growing clearer and sweeter in this present timely century, the century of[244] woman’s exaltation and glorification. Her genius is concisely summed up by Watts-Dunton in his Essay on Poetry, as follows: “Never before these songs were sung, and never since, did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry like hers; and, from the executive point of view, in directness, in lucidity, in that high, imperious verbal economy which only nature can teach the artist, she has no equal, and none worthy to take the place of second.”

In the Lesbus and the Asia Minor of Sappho’s day as in those of Homer, women were at their zenith and were allowed greater freedom in life and speech than in later Athens where woman’s position had reached its nadir, even though literature and art had attained their highest bloom. In Athens women were cabin’d, cribb’d, confined. The more ancient Greeks in general, however, even if their law made the wife the property of her lord and master, appreciated their women and considered them close to the divine, else they would not have appointed them to important priesthoods and other offices and to be interpreters of the desires of the gods and counsellors of their own political troubles. Sappho was a twentieth century woman living in sixth century Lesbus, who could go about[245] town without a chaperon and take part in the most intellectual and religious meetings. Of course she was “ni une sainte ni surtout une prude,” as Reinach says. Rarely is a woman who is interesting a “saint.” Reinach compares her also to Madame de Sévigné, who wrote to her daughter “paroles de feu et de fièvre ... tout pareils à ceux de l’amour.” What with her teaching, with her own writings, and with the executive work of the hetairiai, those ancient Y. W. C. A.’s for the cultivation of poetry and music, which Mackail has so aptly compared with the Courts of Love which existed in Languedoc from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, she was too noble and too busy to be devoted to ignobler ways, falsely ascribed to her. But her love was deeper than that of the schoolgirl in convent, conservatory of music, or literary club. She was no Ruskin-like school-mistress presiding over a group of virtuous but bold young women. She was respectable and respected. There was in her sacred guild under the patronage of Aphrodite “l’étroite et tendre intimité de jeunes filles de bonne naissance entre elles et avec leurs dirigeantes” (Reinach). But we utterly reject to-day the Athenian vaudeville idea of[246] Sappho, who never should have been branded a courtesan.

How the fine radiance Sappho shed on woman’s love for woman and on her love of love and on the glory of pure and honorable marriage shines at last across these twenty-five hundred years! Her figure stands there on her isle. In itself it is white marble veined with gold. Much mud from many lands has been flung against it. For centuries, almost for millenniums, it has been soiled and stained. Even good men have come to think of the stains as integral parts of the statue, and of the gold as base metal. But the winds and rains of time have tired out the soilers and washed the figure white and clean of all Attic and all later defilings. It is all pure marble now, veined with warm gold. Something that suggests the Pygmalion miracle is happening to it. The statue is alive and luminous with its own beauty, grace, and power. Sappho’s poetry deals with the eternal experiences of the human heart and carries with it those touches which make the whole world kin. As T. G. Tucker says: “Love and Sorrow are re-born with every human being. Time and civilisation make little difference.”

[247]

[248]

[249]

NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

[250]

[251]

NOTES

(The dates given in the text with authors are generally those of floruit, i.e. about the fortieth year.)

1. Somewhere recently in a newspaper I saw these lines entitled, They Lived Too Soon:

2. Oxyrhynchus Papyri, XV. 1787, frag. 4.

3. Galen, Protrep., 2.

4. Classical Philology, XVIII. 35 ff. (1923).

5. Sir Edward Cook, More Literary Recreations, 1919, p. 205, quotes Wharton with approval to the effect that Tennyson called Sappho “the poet, implying her supremacy by the absence of any added epithet.”

6. Anth. Pal., VII. 16.

7. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae (Doctors at dinner), 596 b.

8. Odes, IV. 9. 11.

9. Amatorius, 18.

10. Athenaeus, 598 b.

11. Loves, 30.

12. Lord Neaves, The Greek Anthology, p. 113.

13. Anth. Pal., VII. 15.

14. Fraenkel, Inschriften von Pergamon, I, p. 118, no. 198; C. I. G. 3555.

15. Sappho und Simonides, p. 41, 1.

16. Anth. Pal., IX. 66.

17. Anth. Pal., VII. 14.

[252]

18. Anth. Pal., VII. 407.

19. Anth. Pal., IX. 189. Cf. A. J. Butler, Amaranth and Asphodel, Oxford, 1922, p. 195. The ending is “you shall fain Deem that Calliope doth hymn the strain.”

20. Anth. Pal., IX. 571.

21. XXXV. 16.

22. Cf. also Epigr. LXX, Jacobs, II, p. 25; Plut., Amat., XII, p. 42.

23. P. 186 (1921).

24. 280, pp. 817-818. Cf. also Posthumous Essays in Sat. Rev., Feb. 21, 1914.

25. Professor Scribner in The Classical Weekly XV, 1921, p. 78, says “there still is room for a work giving a complete critical treatment of Sappho’s influence on ancient and modern literature down to our own time.”

26. Athenaeus, 599 c; Oxyr. Pap., XV. 1800.

27. Strabo, 618; Athenaeus, 85 c.

28. Cf. Herodotus, II. 135; Schol. Plato, Phaedrus, 235 c; Ox. Pap., XV. 1800. The papyrus gives Scamandrus, which is otherwise known as a good Lesbian name, as well as Scamandronymus. Scamandrus like Suidas’ Scamon is an abbreviation or Kosenamen.

29. Her., XV. 61.

30. Confirmed by the new papyrus. The more correct form would be Clévis (Κλεῦις or Κλεῖϊς) after the founder of Lesbus, who was named Κλεύας, Strabo, 582.

31. Cf. Edmonds, pp. 144-147.

32. Hiller von Gaertringen, Inschriften von Priene, 18; for Erygyius cf. also Diodorus, XVII. 81, 83; Arrian, III. 6, 5.

33. The name occurs as a love-name on the interior of an Attic cylix in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, signed by Hieron (480 B.C.), published in American Journal of Archaeology, XXVII. 274 (1923). Near a female figure dancing to the accompaniment of the double flute played by a satyr is the inscription, “Beautiful Rhodopis.” Cf. also Lucian, De Saltatione, 2.

34. Cf. Poulsen, Delphi, London, 1920, pp. 31, 72, 205, 294.

[253]

35. Edmonds’ first poetical translation is given in his Sappho in the Added Light of the New Fragments, p. 8; but he gives a revised prose version in the Classical Review, XXXIV. 5-6 (1920) and in Lyra Graeca, I, p. 207.

36. Solmsen in Rhein. Mus., LVI. 502, 1 (1901) gives arguments for the spelling with double p.

37. 599 c.

38. γέγονε often means flourished, not “was born.” Those who put Sappho’s birth as late as 610 forget this.

39. Strabo, 617, also makes Sappho contemporary with Pittacus and Alcaeus. Eusebius puts the floruit of Sappho in the first year of the forty-fifth Olympiad (599 B.C.). Edmonds, Lyra Graeca, I, p. 142, adopts the reading Ol. 45, 2 (598 B.C.), but this would be rather the date of her exile.

40. The abbreviation E, is used throughout for Edmonds, Lyra Graeca, vol. I.

41. Cf. Prinz, Funde aus Naukratis, 1906, pp. 57 ff.

42. II. 134.

43. In another fragment (E. 35) Edmonds calls Sappho “an old bird,” but this is a very dubious restoration based on only three preserved letters.

44. Flor., XXIX. 58.

45. Dioscorides in Anth. Pal., VII. 407 has Eresus; and coins and Suidas give both towns. Cf. Wilamowitz, Sappho und Simonides, 23; Her. II. 135 and references in Jacoby, Das Marmor Parium, 1904, p. 101. Many sources call Sappho a Mytilenaean, Schol. to Pindar (E. p. 144); Schol. Plato, Phaedrus, 235 c; Arist., Rhet., 1398 b; Anth. Pal., VII. 17. Some scholars assume that there were two Sapphos, but the two traditions can easily be reconciled by supposing that Sappho belonged to both cities, born at Eresus but later living at Mytilene. Edmonds thinks that Strabo would have mentioned Sappho when he is speaking of Eresus (618), had he believed her to have been born there, but Strabo omits many famous writers. The tradition of two Sapphos is found also in Aelian, Historical Miscellanies, XII. 19 and in Suidas. Cf. the novel Beulah by Augusta Evans, pp. 216-218: “Do you think that Sappho’s frenzy was established by the Leucadian leap? You confound the poetess with a Sappho, who lived later, and threw herself into the sea from the promontory of Leucate. Doubtless she too had ‘poetic idiosyncrasies,’ but her spotless life, and I believe natural death, afford no indication of an unsound intellect.”

[254]

46. Studies of the Greek Poets, vol. I., pp. 307 ff. (American ed.)

47. I. 9.

48. Cf. The Poet Loves of Sappho from the third book of A Catalogue of Things Relating to Love, an elegiac poem by Hermesianax, translated by J. Bailey.

49. Athenaeus, 450 e.

50. Class. Phil., XIII. 348 (1918).

51. XVIII. 9.

52. Edmonds, 82, p. 240.

53. Oxyrhynchus Papyri, XV, 1922, 1800. Also now published in Miller-Robinson, The Songs of Sappho.

54. Lunák, Quaestiones Sapphicae, Kazan, 1888.

55. Lucy Milburn, p. 21, makes Sappho say, “When Cleïs, I called her for my mother, was two years old, I found myself a widow.” But we have no such evidence, how old Cleïs was when her father died. Miss Milburn (Letter XIX) is also quite wrong in translating “I would rather have my little daughter know her own worth than to bequeath to her all the treasures of Lydia, were they mine.”

56. I. 30.

57. Edmonds, 116 reads Εἴρηνα (peace) for Ἔραννα so that it is doubtful if Erinna, the poetess who wrote poems worthy of Homer before her early death at the age of nineteen, is really meant by Sappho. Most scholars now date her long after Sappho’s time, some even as late as 350 B.C.

58. Cf. Jahrbuch, XXV. 150 (1910).

59. A. J. P., XXXIV. 106 (1913).

60. Anth. Pal., XVI. 310.

61. XVIII.

62. Odes, I. 1. 36.

63. Cf. Anth. Pal., VII. 14 and 17 for epigrams about Sappho’s grave. Cf. Edmonds, 42 and 99. Tucker translates:

64. My late colleague and dear friend, Kirby Flower Smith, made a brilliant reconstruction of the story which he read several times in public. It is to be deeply regretted that the manuscript has never been printed. Cf. for the Menander fragment, F. G. Allinson’s Menander, in The Loeb Classical Library, pp. 400-401. For fragments of Plato’s Phaon, cf. Kock, C. A. F., I, p. 645. Cf. Servius on Virgil, Aeneid, III. 274.

65. Lucian for example, Dialogues of the Dead, 9, has Phaon carry Aphrodite over in his boat from Chios.

66. Incred., 49 in Apostolius, Paroem., II. 707.

67. 596 b; “according to Nymphis in his Voyage around Asia, the courtesan of Eresus who was a namesake of the other Sappho and lover of the fair Phaon won great notoriety.” Cf. also Suidas, s. v. Phaon.

68. Cf. Furtwängler-Reichhold, Gr. Vas., pl. 59; Milani, Monumenti scelti del R. Museo Arch. di Firenze, pl. 3; Nicole, Meidias, pl. VI, I. Cf. also on Phaon, Wilamowitz, Sappho und Simonides, pp. 33 ff.

69. 69 d.

70. Strabo, 452.

71. Cf. Curtis, A. J. A., XXIV. 146 ff. (1920); Paribeni, Boll. d’Arte, I. 104 (1921); F. Cumont, Rassegna d’Arte, VIII. 44 ff. (1921); Leopold, Mélanges d’Archéologie et d’Histoire, XXXIX. pl. II. 181 ff. (1921); Le Musée Belge, XXVII. 15 ff. (1923), there connected by Hubaux with the cult of the Thracian Cotyto. Cf. Memoirs Am. Ac. in Rome, IV. 85 f., pl. XLV.

72. For another version cf. G. Showerman’s Ovid in The Loeb Classical Library. A new translation by Marion Mills Miller, where the narrative portions are in recitative and the frequent outbursts of emotion in lyrical form, appears in Miller-Robinson, The Songs of Sappho.

[256]

73. Countless translations have been made. Among a few, I mention Philips (1711), Herbert (1713), Akenside’s paraphrase (1745), Fawkes (1760), Merivale (1833), Elton (1814), Egerton (1815), Edinburgh Review (1832), Palgrave (1854), Arnold (1869), Higginson (1871), Walhouse (1877), Symonds (at least two versions), Swinburne, Thomas Davidson, Marion Mills Miller (in The Classics and also in his play The Return of Odysseus, p. 82), Appleton, Fairclough (The Raven, V, 1904, p. 120), Easby Smith, Stobart (The Glory that was Greece, p. 119), Lawton, Tucker, Petersen, Lawrence (Classical Review, XXXVI, 1922, p. 2), Edmonds, William A. Drake (Sewanee Review, April 1923).

74. στροῦθοι in l. 10 are birds of Venus, swans, or better doves, rather than the dirty chatterers of our city streets, who never appear in Greek art. Cf. Throop, Wash. Univ. Studies, IX 282 (1922); Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 723 f.; Statius, Silvae, I. 2. Edmonds p. 183 reads the dual and translates “thy two swans.” For swans drawing Aphrodite’s or Cupid’s car, cf. Reinach, Répertoire des Vases Peints, I, pp. 57, 271.

75. Dem., 38.

76. Iliad, X. 90-95. Cf. also Od., XVII. 518-521. For Homer’s influence on Sappho cf. Smyth, p. 230; H. L. Ebeling, in The Classical Weekly, XVI. 195 ff. (1923).

77. III. 152-158.

78. Edmonds, pp. 186-7, makes the ingenious but very uncertain suggestion that in line 7 a proper noun, Brocheo or Brochea, corresponding to Catullus’ Lesbia, should be read and now translates: “When I look on you, Brocheo, my speech comes short or fails me quite.” Formerly he thought that the poem was sent by the banished Sappho at the age of eighteen to some beloved girl friend soon after her arrival in Sicily in 596 B.C., but Sappho was older than eighteen in 596, and Edmonds now makes an entirely different emendation of the last line, “but now that I am poor, I must fain be content ...” meaning “beggars can’t be choosers.” But the reading is uncertain and I do not believe that Sappho was poor, nor do I agree with Miss Patrick that the words do not describe love at all.

79. For such head-cloths cf. the Latin word struppus and the festival at Falerii, called struppearia, Dion. Hal., XI. 39 and Poulsen, Etruscan Tomb Paintings, p. 23. Edmonds’ new reading is very uncertain; for his previous reading and poetical version cf. Sappho in the Added Light of the New Fragments, p. 28.

[257]

80. I keep Bergk’s reading, “Foolish woman, pride not thyself on a ring.” Edmonds changes the text and translates, “But come, be not so proud of a ring.”

81. Cf. Poulsen, in Jahrbuch, XXI. 209 ff. (1906); Die Bronzen von Olympia, IV., pl. VII. 74.

82. There are many other poetical versions by Merivale, Symonds, F. Tennyson, Tucker, Cox, Edmonds, etc. For an absurd interpretation Sappho in the Rain, cf. Wiener Studien, XXXVIII. 176 ff. (1916).

83. Poetical translations by Merivale, Arnold, Appleton, F. Tennyson, Symonds, Edmonds, Miller, Percy Mackaye, etc.

84. Sappho in the Added Light of the New Fragments, p. 25, but in Lyra Graeca, I, p. 253, he changes his previous emendation and reads a text which I consider very uncertain, “and pours down a sweet shrill song from beneath his wings, when the Sun-god illumines the earth with his downshed flame outspread.”

85. Praec. Con., 48; Qu. Conv., III. 1. 2.

86. Flor., IV. 12.

87. For Swinburne’s expansion cf. p. 210; cf. also Percy Mackaye in Sappho and Phaon. Bliss Carman has evolved the following from Sappho’s one line:

[258]

88. Cf. Miss Shields, “Lesbos in the Trojan War,” in The Classical Jour., XIII. 670 ff. (1918); The Cults of Lesbos (Johns Hopkins University Diss.) 1917.

89. Cf. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, LIII. xvi (1922).

90. For Mnesidice Edmonds would now read Anactoria. There is a good metrical translation by G. M. Whicher in Manatt, Aegean Days, London, 1913, p. 286.

91. Odes, I. 3. 22.

92. O’Hara renders as follows:

93. These may be vases in the form of an astragalus or knuckle-bone, two or three of which in clay are to be seen in museums, or they may be bowls or cups with the bottom rounded like one end of a knuckle-bone. They might be bowls with a mid-boss in the form of a knuckle-bone. For such gold-bossed golden bowls as Pollux (VI, 98) mentions in the context of this quotation see the recently acquired beautiful gold bowl with a Corinthian inscription of about Sappho’s time in the Boston Museum, which, however, is probably a modern forgery. Cf. Bulletin, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, XX. 65 ff. (1922).

[259]

94. German and Austrian scholars have failed to see the lovely lyrical literature in this delightful ballad. Aly considers it only the beginning of a longer ode; and I cannot agree with him that it does not fit in with what we know of Sappho who often expresses her loneliness in the absence of her companions. Even if the thought is of love, we must not expect consistency in a high-strung Aeolian woman. Fragments such as E. 152, 159, 167 may have been in a totally different context. But I do not mean to say that the ballad certainly refers to Sappho herself. The context is gone and it is not even definitely assigned to Sappho. Some of the editions seem to have contained it, but much anonymous literature has been included in the Sapphic corpus as in that of Plato or Hippocrates. However, as it is one of the prettiest and most perfect pieces and quite in Sappho’s style and metre and thought, I consider it genuine. Ovid (Sappho to Phaon, 155 ff.) seems to know the lines. Ruthlessly to insert a negative in the text (“Alone I do not sleep”) as does Lunák (Wiener Studien, XL, 1918, p. 98) spoils the literary quality and makes it insipid. How much suggestive concision in those seventeen words in four verses (four of them small particles), but what vast and profound humanity; silence, solitude, obscurity, waiting, anxiety, sympathy of nature. How the strong and rapid description catches our deepest thoughts. Such things disprove the arguments against its genuineness by Wilamowitz, Textgeschichte, p. 33; and Sappho und Simonides, p. 75. Cf. Münscher, Hermes, LIV. 29, 4 (1919).

95. Scribner’s Magazine, September 1905, p. 304.

96. On the whole tradition of the wedding song cf. Mangelsdorff, Das lyrische Hochzeitsgedicht bei den Griechen und Römern, 1913; Reitzenstein, Hermes, XXXV. 95 ff. (1900); Croiset, Journal des Savants, July 1914; Girard, Le Mariage de Hector, Comptes-rendus Ac. des Sc. et Belles-lettres, 1914, pp. 658-9.

97. I. 4.

98. Cf. Robinson, The Classical Weekly, V. 68 (1911).

99. In this account of Sappho’s wedding-songs I am much indebted to Koechly, Akademische Vorträge und Reden, Zürich, 1859, pp. 153-217.

100. For Usener’s interesting conjecture about Lesbian marriage customs based on this fragment cf. Kleine Schriften, IV, pp. 308 ff.

[260]

101. An excellent modern musical version will be found in A. A. Stanley, Greek Themes in Modern Musical Settings.

102. For the history of dialogue in Greek epigrams and examples of stones speaking with the passer-by and for sepulchral symbolism as in the Pelagon epigram cf., D. M. Robinson, “Two Epitaphs from Sardis,” in Anatolian Studies presented to Sir William Mitchell Ramsay, Manchester, 1923, pp. 341-353.

103. For a bronze in the British Museum supposed to represent the reclining Sappho cf. Walters, Cat. of Bronzes, London, 1899, 203.

104. Pollux, IX. 84.

105. Cf. Bernoulli, Griechische Ikonographie, pp. 59-72; Cat. of Coins in the Brit. Mus., Lesbos, pl. XXXIX; Miss Patrick, pp. 73, 81; Jacoby, Marmor Parium, p. 101; Forrer, Les Portraits de Sappho sur les monnaies, in Revue Belge de numismatique, 1901, pp. 413 ff.; Zeitschrift für Numismatik, IX. 114, pl. IV.

106. Meisterwerke, p. 103.

107. Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of Immortality, Oxford, 1921, p. 367.

108. Walters, Cat. of Terra-cottas in the British Museum, London, 1903, pl. 19.

109. The ancient representations of Sappho on vases have been well studied by Jahn, Darstellungen griechischer Dichter auf Vasenbildern, Abh. d. Sächs. Ges. d. Wiss., VIII. 699 ff. (1861); Comparetti, Museo Italiano di Antichita classica, II, 41-80, pls. III-VI (1888); Cipollini, pp. 319-344; Wilamowitz, Sappho und Simonides, pp. 40 ff. Little new material has come to light, but the individual vases have been better interpreted in the later publications which we cite in other notes. Aly omits the busts, though he mentions the vases, but he calls the Steinhauser fragment a clay relief and fails to recognize that it is part of a vase.

[261]

110. Cf. Jahn, pl. III; Comparetti, op. cit., pl. IV; Furtwängler-Reichhold, Gr. Vas., II, pp. 21 ff., 308 ff., pl. 64; Steiner, Sappho, pp. 54-5; Perrot et Chipiez, Histoire de l’art, X, p. 624, pl. 15; Beazley, J. H. S., XLII, 1922, p. 91; Pfuhl, Malerei und Zeichnung der Griechen, Munich, 1923, p. 399; Hoppin, Handbook of Attic Red-figured Vases, I, p. 461. Hoppin wrongly rejects Furtwängler’s attribution to the factory of Brygus; and wrongly identifies Hauser’s “Frau Meisterin” with Beazley’s Niobid Painter. Perrot (p. 626) says that the Munich vase belongs to a contemporary of Duris but that we shall never know the painter; but on p. 634 he says: “we would be tempted to add the vase to the Berlin amphora painter.”

111. Comparetti, op. cit., pl. III, 1; De Witte, Antiq. de l’hôtel Lambert, no. 32, pl. III; Reinach, Répertoire des Vases, I, p. 524. Formerly in the Dzialinsky collection at Paris.

112. Comparetti, op. cit., pl. III, 2; Steiner, pp. 44 ff.; Cipollini, p. 328; De Courten, p. III; Reinach op. cit., I, p. 525.

113. Comparetti, op. cit., pl. V; Cipollini, p. 331; De Courten, p. 95; Röm. Mitt. III, 1888, pl. IX; Jahreshefte, VIII. 35-40 (1905); Nicole, Meidias, pl. VII; Reinach, op. cit., I, p. 526.

114. B. C. H., IV. 373 (1880); Cipollini, pp. 337-8.

115. Cf. Comparetti, pl. VI; Steiner, pp. 16 ff.; Edmonds, Class. Quart., XVI. 1 ff. (1922), where he fails to cite Jahreshefte, VIII. 40 (1905).

116. J. C. Hoppin, Handbook of Attic Red-figured Vases, Harvard University Press, 1919, p. 410.

117. Murray, White Athenian Vases in the British Museum, London, 1896, pl. XVII; Pfuhl, op. cit., II, p. 546, fig. 527.

118. Ann. d. Inst., XXX, 1858, p. 42, pl. B; Cipollini, pp. 339-341.

119. Cf. Cipollini, pp. 343-4.

120. Cf. Nicole, Meidias, Geneva, 1908, pls. III and VI. I cannot agree with Nicole in dating Meidias as late as 375-350 B.C. He belongs to the time of the Peloponnesian War, 431-404 B.C. This fatal war did not stop the Athenians from producing during war times such great works of art as the Erechtheum, beautiful vases and statues. Cf. also note 68 above.

121. Cf. Pfuhl, op. cit., p. 566, III, Fig. 557; Pellegrini, Museo Civico di Bologna, Catalogo dei Vasi Greci, pp. 133-135, Fig. 77.

[262]

122. N. H., XXXV. 141. Brunn, Kunstgeschichte, p. 299, identifies him with a bronze-sculptor, Leon, but we are equally ignorant about him.

123. Anth. Plan., 310 (Edmonds, p. 173); Tatian, Adv. Gr., 130.

124. Cf. Hermann, Denkmäler der Malerei des Altertums, pl. 28; Pfuhl, op. cit., p. 734; Lippold, Röm. Mitt., XXXIII. 71 ff. (1918).

125. For replicas of the Sappho cf. Rizzo, Rev. Arch., 1901, pp. 301 ff. The latest and best discussion is by Percy Gardner, J. H. S. XXXVIII. 10 ff. (1918). For a copy of Silanion’s Corinna at Compiègne cf. Rev. Arch. XXXII. 161 (1894); XXXVI 169 (1898); Furtwängler, Meisterwerke, pp. 99 ff. would class many of the so-called Sapphos as Aphrodite and thinks that those which are copies of fifth century art may represent the Aphrodite of Phidias which was to be seen in later days in the portico of Octavia at Rome (Pliny, N. H. XXXVI, 15).

126. II. 4. 57.

127. Anth. Pal., VII. 15.

128. Cf. Fraenkel, Inschriften von Pergamon, 198. According to C. I. G. 3555 Jucundus and Cyriac of Ancona still saw the inscription at Pergamum.

129. Ecphr., 69-71.

130. On the Albani bust cf. Jahrbuch, V. 152 ff. (1890), pl. III; Morcelli, Fea, Visconti, Descr. della Villa Albani, 1033; Schneider, Jb. d. Ak. Kunstsammlungen, XII, 72 ff. (1891); Arndt, Brunn-Bruckmann, Griechische und Römische Porträts, pl. 147-148; for the bust in the Pitti cf. Arndt, pls. 149-150; for that in the Uffizi, pls. 145-146; cf. also Cipollini, pp. 345-356. On the Biscari and Naples busts cf. Rizzo, Rev. Arch. XXXIX, 1901, pp. 301-307, pls. XXI, XXII. On the Constantinople head cf. Mendel’s Cat. no. 626.

131. Art and Archaeology, VI. 277 ff. (1917), Robinson, ibid., pp. 285 ff. I have omitted mention of many other ancient works of art wrongly supposed to represent Sappho, such as Stackelberg, Die Gräber der Hellenen, Berlin, 1837, pl. LXX, called Sappho with a female friend sitting in her lap, merely because of the book-roll.

132. Arch. Anzeiger, XXVII. 124 (1912).

[263]

133. Cipollini, p. 405, pictures Magni’s Saffo; p. 409 Confalonieri’s Saffo; p. 413 Pradier’s Sapho; p. 417 Pradier’s standing Sapho; p. 421 Barrias’ painting; p. 425 Gleyre’s couch of Sappho. There is a bust of Sappho by Canova in Turin.

134. Cf. Reinach, in Revue Archéologique, XX, 2. 433-434 (1912), X, 2. 392 (1919).

135. Cf. for influence of Pamphos, a mythical poet earlier than Homer, Pausanias, IX. 29, 8; of Homer, Neue Jahrbücher, XXXIII 227 (1914); De Courten, pp. 74-76.

136. E. 114 influenced by Theogony, 3 ff.; E. 122 by Works and Days, 568; E. 81 by Theogony, 121.

137. Theognis, 1017.

138. Schol. Hesiod, Works and Days, 428.

139. Athenaeus, 554 b, 639 a.

140. Porphyrio on Horace, Satires, II. 1. 30, “ostendit Sapphonem et Alcaeum volumina sua loco sodalium habuisse.”

141. Wilamowitz, Textgeschichte der Bukoliker, p. 88.

142. III. 153 f.; VI. 1181.

143. Wilamowitz, Sappho und Simonides, p. 58, 2. There is an enormous literature on Catullus’ relation to Sappho and much discussion of textual matters. Cf. for the most recent Bursian Jahresbericht, CLXXVIII, 1919, p. 46. Compare E. 32, 147 and 149 with Catullus LXII, 26, 35; E. 151 with LXII, 61; E. 148 with LXII. In XXXV, 17-18 we have “Ignosco tibi, Sapphica puella Musa doctior.”

144. The Classical Quarterly, XVI. 1-14 (1922).

145. IV. 9. 10.

146. II. 13. 24.

147. Cf. Ogle, A. J. P., XLIII. 55 ff. (1922). For Sappho’s influence on Horace cf. Pasquali, Orazio lirico, 1920. Most of the literature on the subject is not fit to read. Cf. Richard F. Burton’s The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Terminal Essay, X, p. 208, for a filthy, wrong interpretation of the word ‘mascula’. It is surprising to find as great a modern scholar as Bloch, Die Prostitution, Berlin, 1912, I, p. 383, saying in his discussion of Homosexuality, ἀσέλγεια τριβακή, “Schon in früher Zeit galten Sparta und die Insel Lesbos als Orte, wo die weibliche Liebe besonders verbreitet war und an letzterem Ort in der Dichterin Sappho eine weltberühmte Vertreterin fand.” Cf. also on tribadie in Lesbos Bloch, Der Ursprung der Syphilis, II, pp. 586-588, where he thinks that he gives definite proof that Sappho was “eine echte Tribade.” It is lamentable that as great a literary critic as J. A. Symonds should say that “Sappho gave this female passion an eminent place in Greek Literature;” see J. A. Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics, An Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, London, 1901, pp. 70-72. Fortunately the monograph was issued only in a very limited edition.

[264]

148. Silvae, V. 3. 154.

149. VII. 69.

150. Symp., VII. 8. 2.

151. XIX. 9. 4.

152. Loves, 30.

153. On Paid Companions, 36; Pictures, 18.

154. On the influence of Sappho on Himerius cf. Rizzo, Saggio su Imerio il sofista, in Riv. Fil. Cl., XXVI 513-16 (1898). In Orations, I. 4 the words τὸ λέχος Ὁμήρου were incomprehensible and Edmonds still omits Ὁμήρου, but the reading is undoubtedly correct and the significance is now apparent from the new epithalamium of Hector and Andromache.

155. XV. 35, 36, 37.

156. I. 16, 19, 20.

157. Cf. Anth. Pal., V. 246; VII. 14, 15, 16, 17, 407, 718; IX. 26, 66, 184, 189, 190, 506, 521, 571; XVI. 310.

158. V. 246. I give a literal translation and Greek texts of all epigrams which mention Sappho in Miller-Robinson, Songs of Sappho.

159. Cf. A. J. P., XXXVIII. 66 (1917).

160. Photius only cites the selections made by Sopater the Sophist, among which in his second book he included some quotations from Sappho’s eighth book.

161. Vita dell’ Imperatore Alessio o Alesseide, XV.

162. IV. 25.

163. His comment on Martial, VII. 67 is “Tribadem autem fuisse carmen indicat quod extat.”

[265]

164. There is an interesting item in Natales Comes, Mythologiae sive explicationes fabularum, Venice, 1551, Book V, c. XVI, p. 286, “Scriptum reliquit Sappho, Adonim mortuum fuisse a Venere inter lactucas depositum.” According to Athenaeus 69 d, Cratinus had Aphrodite conceal Phaon among the “fair wild-lettuces.”

165. In my library I have a copy dated 1696 of Anne Le Fèvre, Les Poësies d’Anacréon et de Sapho. This, however, is a second edition and the first was in 1681.

166. Welcker, Kleine Schriften: II, pp. 80 ff., Sappho von einem herrschenden Vorurteil befreit. Goethe occupied himself much with this article. For references in Goethe to Sappho cf. W. J. Keller, Goethe’s Estimate of the Greek and Latin Writers, Madison, Wis., 1916, p. 51.

167. Sauer, Grillparzer’s sämtliche Werke, Stuttgart, 1892, XIX, pp. 71 ff. For source of Sappho cf. J. Engl. Germ. Phil., XXII, 503 ff. (1923).

168. Cf. Jean Giraud, D’Après Sapho. Variations sur un thème éternel, in Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France, XXVII, 1920, pp. 194-203. I have added considerable material not there, since this article deals only with the second ode. I am indebted in this chapter to my learned colleagues, Professor Henry Carrington Lancaster and Professor Gilbert Chinard, for helpful suggestions.

169. Traduction de quelques autres epigrammes Grecs, Œuvres de Ronsard, Tome 2, Paris, 1889, p. 56.

170. The date is often wrongly given as 1682. In my copy, which is a second edition (Lyon 1696), it is stated that permission to publish the book was granted to Damoiselle Anne Le Fèvre on June 10, 1681, all rights to continue for six years. “Le dit livre a esté achevé d’imprimer pour la première fois le 1, Decembre 1681.” My copy gives only the first two odes and the epigrams on Pelagon and Timas and quotes an inaccurate Latin prose translation of the first ode by her father. He has made several emendations, as in ode II, l. 7, ὡς βρόγχον, “nihil vocis pervenit ad fauces meas,” as good a suggestion as Edmonds’ creation of an unknown proper name Brocheo.

171. Cf. Œuvres de Fontenelle (Paris 1818), II, pp. 187, 188.

[266]

172. My copy is the thirteenth edition published by Bertrand, Paris, 1818. The idea of a manuscript of Sappho found at Herculaneum is repeated by Lucy Milburn and Percy Mackaye.

173. My copy is dated London 1810 and is anonymous, Poésies de Sapho suivies de différentes Poésies dans le même genre. It contains also Les Tourterelles de Zelmis and the Poésies Erotiques of M. de Parny, who was such an admirer of Sappho. The adaptations are the same as those of Sauvigny. Why this edition is anonymous, I do not know.

174. XII, p. 181 ed. Furne, Jouvet et Cie., Paris.

175. My edition is Giguet et Michaud, Paris, 1805. This book with its long notes and citations, though little known, is important for the student of Sappho’s influence.

176. Cf. Wilamowitz, Sappho und Simonides, pp. 63-69 on Chansons de Bilitis, pp. 71-78 on Lesbian Love.

177. Cf. Edwin M. Cox, p. 5, where he quotes Barnabe Barnes’ Parthenophil and Parthenophe, 1593:

In Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody, 1602, are some Sapphics by the mysterious “A. W.” Here is a sample:

In 1601 Campion and Roseter, Lyrics, Elegies, etc., give a clumsy example of Sapphic verse. In 1614 a tract called The Martyrdom of Saint George of Cappadocia contains at the end some “Sapphicks” which resemble the real Sappho only in having the same number of syllables to the verse. Cox and all others, so far as I know, fail to mention Sir Philip Sidney’s translation of the second ode.

[267]

178. Cf. W. C. Lawton, Sappho with some new translations, Lippincott Magazine, 77, 583; W. A. R. Kerr, “Sappho’s Soliloquy,” in Canadian Magazine, 12, 426; E. Saltus, “Sappho” in Lippincott’s Magazine, 51, 503; M. Thompson, “The Secret of Sappho,” in The Atlantic Monthly, 73, 365; M. Gray, “Sappho,” in Argosy, 51, 203; Athenaeum, 1889, 2, 56; F. B. Harte, “Sappho of Green Springs,” in Lippincott’s Magazine, 45, 627; Democratic Review, 7, 18; Higginson, in The Atlantic Monthly, 28, 83; G. Hill, in Appleton’s Journal, 6, 158, 179; Mrs. Hamilton in Harper’s, 56, 177 (has nothing to do with the real Sappho); M. Thompson, “Sappho’s Apple,” in The Independent, 53, 416; A. Chisholm, in Canadian Magazine, 15, 453; Reinach, Révue Archéologique, XXIV, 1914, 2, pp. 336-337; IX, 1919, p. 204; X, 1919, p. 225; H. I. R., Fragment of a Poem by Sappho done into English verse, in The Literary Digest, 48, 1493; “Real Personal Character of the Poetess Sappho,” in The Review of Reviews, 46, 107-8; Swinburne, “Sappho,” in The Living Age, 280, 817-8; W. L. Courtney, “Sappho and Aspasia,” in The Fortnightly Review, N. S. 91 (1912), 479-88; “Sappho from the Dust,” in The Literary Digest, 48, 1362-3; M. M. Miller, “Sappho’s Songs of Exile,” in The Independent, 87, 344; New York Nation, 1914, 1, p. 602; Aldington, “Letters to Unknown Women,” in The Dial, 64, 430-1; W. A. Percy, Sappho in Leukas and Other Poems, New Haven, 1915; Horton, “New Sappho Fragment in English Verse,” in The Dial, 61, 179; Michael Monahan, “Sappho,” in All’s Well or the Mirror Repolished, II, 1922, pp. 87 ff.; Robinson, in The Baltimore Sun, Jan. 22, 1922.

178a. In Charmides he says: “Or from the Lesbian waters plucked drowned Sappho’s golden quill.”

179. See Pericles and Aspasia, Letters 47, 48, 82, 95, 149, 150, 152, 153.

180. Idyls of the King, Lancelot and Elaine, 1003-1004. Not in Mustard, Classical Echoes in Tennyson, New York, 1904.

181. Lyrics and Sonnets (Edinburgh, 1903), p. 66.

182. Miller-Robinson, Songs of Sappho.

183. Litz, Father Tabb, Johns Hopkins Press, 1923, p. 168.

184. Collected Poems, New York, 1922, pp. 227-228.

185. Art and Archaeology, XII. 217 (1921).

[268]

186. Sappho in Leukas and other Poems, Yale University Press, 1915.

187. Art and Archaeology, XV. 13 (1923).

188. J. U. Nicolson, King of the Black Isles, p. 3, Chicago, 1924.

[269]

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF RECENT BOOKS ON SAPPHO

KEY TO ILLUSTRATIONS

Plate 2. PITTACUS, LORD OF LESBUS

One of the seven wise men of Greece, in whose reign Sappho was perhaps banished to Sicily. The bust was found in Asia Minor in a Roman villa (100 A.D.). Formerly in Baltimore in the collection of David M. Robinson, now in the Museum of Budapest. Cf. The Annual of the Budapest Museum, II, 1919-1920, p. 3. For other replicas cf. Lippold, Griechische Porträt-Statuen, p. 72

Plate 3. MYTILENE

Looking across the severing sea to Asia Minor

Plate 4. THE STORY OF PHAON

From a fifth century hydria in Florence by the Meidias painter himself. Phaon, tired of the ladies’ love-making, is seated in the middle below with the inscription “Phaon” over his head. Aphrodite is above in a chariot drawn by Pothos and Himeros. Reproduced from Milani, Monumenti Scelti del R. Museo Archeologico di Firenze, pl. III

Plate 5. THE BEAUTIFUL PHAON

On a Greek vase in Palermo. Reproduced from Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei, pl. 59

Plate 6. THE LEUCADIAN PROMONTORY

From an old engraving reproduced by Miss Patrick, Sappho and the Island of Lesbos, p. 96

Plate 7. ROMAN FRESCO

In an underground building found in Rome near the Porta Maggiore, showing to the left Apollo with lyre on the cliff, and to the right Sappho about to step off the rock into the sea, where a Triton waits with outspread garment. Behind Sappho higher up on the rock a winged Eros

Plate 8. A PAPYRUS OF THE THIRD CENTURY A.D.

With part of the text of a poem by Sappho. Reproduced from Oxyrhynchus Papyri, XV, 1922, No. 1787, fragment 1, pl. II

Plate 9. A CYLIX BY SOTADES

In the British Museum, representing a girl on tiptoe plucking the apple on the topmost bough. Reproduced from White Athenian Vases in the British Museum, pl. XVII

Plate 10. A GREEK COIN FROM MYTILENE

Showing probably Sappho’s head on one side and lyre on other. Enlarged twice the original size. Reproduced from Miss Patrick, Sappho and the Island of Lesbos, p. 73

Plate 11. IMPERIAL COINS

In the British Museum, representing Sappho. Reproduced from Miss Patrick, op. cit., p. 81

Plate 12. A GREEK VASE

In Munich, representing Alcaeus and Sappho. Reproduced from Furtwängler-Reichhold, op. cit., pl. 64

Plate 13. A BLACK-FIGURED CALPIS

Formerly in the Dzialinsky collection at Paris, now in Cracow, in the style of the Nicoxenus painter, with the earliest (about 500 B.C.) inscribed representation of Sappho

Plate 14. LOST LUCANIAN (?) VASE

Formerly in the Middleton collection. Sappho seated before a winged Eros who is bringing her a wreath. Reproduced from Museo Italiano, II, 1888, pl. III, 2

Plate 15. GREEK ARYBALLUS

In the style of the Meidias painter, in the Jatta collection at Ruvo, representing Thamyris giving a musical recital in the presence of Apollo, Aphrodite, and the Muses, among whom Sappho is included. Reproduced from Römische Mitteilungen, III, 1888, pl. IX

Plate 16. A FIFTH CENTURY GREEK HYDRIA

From Vari near Athens, showing Sappho seated and reading from a papyrus. According to Beazley the style is related to that of the Hector painter, though not by him. Reproduced from Jahreshefte, VIII, 1905, p. 40, Fig. 9

Plate 17. PHAON ABOUT TO FERRY APHRODITE ACROSS THE SEA

On a Greek vase in Bologna. Reproduced from Pellegrini, Catalogo dei Vasi Greci dipinti delle Necropoli Felsinee, Fig. 77

Plate 18. A POMPEIAN FRESCO

Supposed to represent Sappho and Alcaeus. Reproduced from Herrmann-Bruckmann, Denkmaeler der Malerei des Altertums, pl. 28

Plate 19. AN ANCIENT BUST PROBABLY OF SAPPHO

In the Villa Albani, Rome. Reproduced from Arndt-Brunn-Bruckmann, Griechische und Römische Porträts, pls. 147-148

Plate 20. THE OXFORD BUST, PROBABLY OF SAPPHO

Reproduced from Journal of Hellenic Studies, XXXVIII, 1918, pl. III

Plate 21. BUST PROBABLY OF SAPPHO

In the Borghese Palace, Rome. Photographed in the summer of 1922

Plate 22. STATUE OF SAPPHO

By Magni

Plate 23. A STATUE OF SAPPHO

By Pradier

Plate 24. RAPHAEL’S PARNASSUS

In the Vatican. Sappho is leaning on the left side of the doorway

Our Debt to Greece and Rome
AUTHORS AND TITLES