Читать книгу Sappho and her influence - David M. Robinson - Страница 7

You seek the false and shun the true,

And bid your friends go hang for you,

And grieve me in your pride and say

I bring you shame. Go, have your way,

And flaunt me till you’ve had your fill;

I have no fears and never will

For the anger of a child.

(Edmonds)

“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 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 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 luxury. No one has better described the position of Lesbus in Greek literature than Symonds:46

“For a certain space of time the Aeolians occupied the very foreground of Greek literature, and blazed out with a brilliance of lyrical splendor that has never been surpassed. There seems to have been something passionate and intense in their temperament, which made the emotions of the Dorian and the Ionian feeble by comparison. Lesbos, the centre of Aeolian culture, was the island of overmastering passions: the personality of the Greek race burned there with a fierce and steady flame of concentrated feeling. The energies which the Ionians divided between pleasure, politics, trade, legislation, science, and the arts, and which the Dorians turned to war and statecraft and social economy, were restrained by the Aeolians within the sphere of individual emotions, ready to burst forth volcanically. Nowhere in any age of Greek history, or in any part of Hellas, did the love of physical beauty, the sensibility to radiant scenes of nature, the consuming fervor of personal feeling, assume such grand proportions and receive so illustrious an expression as they did in Lesbos. At first this passion blossomed into the most exquisite lyrical poetry that the world has known; this was the flower-time of the Aeolians, their brief and brilliant spring. But the fruit it bore was bitter and rotten. Lesbos became a byword for corruption. The passions which for a moment had flamed into the gorgeousness of art, burning their envelope of words and images, remained a mere furnace of sensuality, from which no expression of the divine in human life could be expected. In this the Lesbian poets were not unlike the Provençal troubadours, who made a literature of love, or the Venetian painters, who based their art upon the beauty of color, the voluptuous charms of the flesh. In each case the motive of enthusiastic passion sufficed to produce a dazzling result. But as soon as its freshness was exhausted there was nothing left for art to live on, and mere decadence to sensuality ensued.”

“Several circumstances contributed to aid the development of lyric poetry in Lesbos. The customs of the Aeolians permitted more social and domestic freedom than was common in Greece. Aeolian women were not confined to the harem like Ionians, or subjected to the rigorous discipline of the Spartans. While mixing freely with male society, they were highly educated, and accustomed to express their sentiments to an extent unknown elsewhere in history—until, indeed, the present time. The Lesbian ladies applied themselves successfully to literature. They formed clubs for the cultivation of poetry and music. They studied the arts of beauty, and sought to refine metrical forms and diction. Nor did they confine themselves to the scientific side of art. Unrestrained by public opinion, and passionate for the beautiful, they cultivated their senses and emotions, and indulged their wildest passions. All the luxuries and elegancies of life which that climate and the rich valleys of Lesbos could afford were at their disposal; exquisite gardens, where the rose and hyacinth spread perfume; river-beds ablaze with the oleander and wild pomegranate; olive-groves and fountains, where the cyclamen and violet flowered with feathery maiden-hair; pinetree-shadowed coves, where they might bathe in the calm of a tideless sea; fruits such as only the southern sun and sea-wind can mature; marble cliffs, starred with jonquil and anemone in spring, aromatic with myrtle and lentisk and samphire and wild rosemary through all the months; nightingales that sang in May; temples dim with dusky gold and bright with ivory; statues and frescoes of heroic forms. In such scenes as these the Lesbian poets lived, and thought of love. When we read their poems, we seem to have the perfumes, colors, sounds, and lights of that luxurious land distilled in verse. Nor was a brief but biting winter wanting to give tone to their nerves, and, by contrast with the summer, to prevent the palling of so much luxury on sated senses. The voluptuousness of Aeolian poetry is not like that of Persian or Arabian art. It is Greek in its self-restraint, proportion, tact. We find nothing burdensome in its sweetness. All is so rhythmically and sublimely ordered in the poems of Sappho that supreme art lends solemnity and grandeur to the expression of unmitigated passion.”

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 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:

I have a maid, a bonny maid,

As dainty as the golden flowers,

My darling Cleïs. Were I paid

All Lydia, and the lovely bowers

Of Cyprus, ’twould not buy my maid.

(Tucker)

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 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. 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, 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) 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

“A semi-circle of marble seats, veined and stained, a screen of olive trees that fling their branches against the sky, and against the sapphire seas, a singing man, a listening woman, whose listening is so intense that nothing else in the picture seems to listen—not the wreathed girl in flowered robe who stands by her and rests her hand familiarly on her shoulder. Not she, for though she holds a scroll in her other hand, the full face, the round eyes, show a soul that matches wreathed head and flowered robe. She is the pride of life. Nor she on the upper seat, who props her chin with her hand and partly hides her mouth with her fingers and lets her vision reach into the distance of her own musings. Nor her neighbor whose composed attitude is that of a regular church-goer who has learned the art of sitting still and thinking of nothing. Nor yet the remotest figure—she who has thrown her arms carelessly on the back of the seat and is looking out on the waters as if they would bring her something. A critic tells us that the object of the poet is to enlist Sappho’s support in a political scheme of which he is the leader, if not the chief prophet, and he has come to Sappho’s school in Lesbos with the hope of securing another voice and other songs to advocate the views of his party. The critic seems to have been in the artist’s secret, and yet Alma Tadema painted better than he knew. Alkaios is not trying to win Sappho’s help in campaign lyrics. The young poet is singing to the priestess of the Muses a new song with a new rhythm, and as she hears it, she feels that there is a strain of balanced strength in it she has not reached: it is the first revelation to her of the rhythm that masters her own. True, when Alkaios afterwards sought not her help in politics, but her heart in love, and wooed her in that rhythm, she too had caught the music and answered him in his own music.”