Woman in the golden ages

by Amelia Gere Mason

I

A woman and a poet; adored by men and loved by her own sex; artist, singer, teacher, leader; an exile and an immortal—all this was the Sappho who stood upon the heights twenty-five centuries ago and sang the verses that thrilled the heart of the world. She lived in the brilliant period when lyric poetry reached its zenith and was its finest representative. Before her no woman had appeared in a distinctly literary rôle, so far as we know. To-day she still stands supreme in her own field.

This “violet-crowned, pure, sweetly smiling Sappho,” who sang so divinely, and vanished so theatrically from Leucadia’s “rock of woe,” was long veiled in the mists of romance. The tragical muse pictured in flowing draperies, with a crown of laurel on her head and a lyre in her hand, chanting her swan-song before cooling her heart of flame in the blue sea at her feet, was as intangible to us as one of Fra Angelico’s angels. She looked out of a land of mystery and shadows, with nothing human about her save that she loved, and suffered, and died. “Do thou, gentle Love, place wings beneath me as I fall, that I may not be the reproach of the Leucadian waves,” is her pathetic prayer, and here she fades from our sight.

But it has been fairly settled that this romantic story was a dream; that Phaon was only a mythical Adonis; that Sappho did not follow him across the sea, did not die of love, and never took the fatal leap at all. The sentimental tourist who sighs over her melancholy fate to-day, as he passes the bare white cliffs of Santa Maura, so long consecrated to tragedies of love and sorrow, pays his sympathetic tribute to a phantom. She went to Sicily, it seems, but not for love. It is supposed that she was exiled. There were political conspiracies for which men were banished, and she may have written revolutionary songs. Possibly she held too radical opinions on the privileges of her sex. But all this is the purest surmise. In any case, her offense could not have been a grave one, as she returned in a few years to Mytilene, where she was adored by a fickle public as the glory of her native city, and honored with altars and temples after her death. Her face was stamped upon coins—“though she was a woman,” said Aristotle. The outlines are clear and strong, with the virile quality so marked in most statues of Greek women. She was also represented, with Alcæus, on a vase of the next century, as not only beautiful, but tall and stately.

A thousand years afterward a statue of her is said to have been one of the ornaments of the gymnasium at Byzantium. But coin and bust and statue give us many faces. Which was the real one? We are more familiar with the ideal Sappho in the modern portrait in which Alma-Tadema has so subtly caught the prophetic light of her soul, her eager intellect, her unconscious grace, and the slumbering passion in her eloquent eyes.

But recent critics tell us that even her beauty was a fiction of the imagination. Does she not say of herself, in the burning lines of Ovid, that she was brown and of low stature, though her name filled all lands? Or was it the sweet humility of love that made her own attractions seem to her slender and insufficient? She had been dead six hundred years or so when Ovid wrote, and his knowledge could not have been infallible.

Men of her own time called her the “beautiful Sappho,” the “flower of the graces,” and Greek standards of beauty included height and stateliness. Perhaps they were under the magic spell of her genius, and indulged in glowing figures of speech. At all events, modern scholars are more literal, and they have mostly decided that she was a small, dark woman, of noble birth, who was early left a widow with one fair daughter, “Cleïs, the beloved, with a form like a golden flower.” This was also the name of her own mother. One of her brothers held the honorable office of cup-bearer; the other went to Egypt, and, much to the displeasure of his gifted sister, married a woman of more charms than discretion, for whom he had paid a large ransom. This famous beauty of Naucratis became very rich, and, possibly by way of atonement for her sins, made a generous offering at the temple of Delphi. It was even said that she immortalized herself by building the third pyramid; but these tales, whether true or not, have been relegated to the region of myths. We learn from Sappho herself that she quarreled with her brother on account of this mésalliance. These are scant materials on which to base a life, but they include about all the facts we have of

That mighty songstress, whose unrivaled powers
Weave for the Muse a crown of deathless flowers.

We do not even know when or where or how she died, though epitaphs in the strain of these flattering and prosaic lines are numerous.

If her personality is veiled to us, still less do we know what manner of woman she was. The Attic comedians said unpleasant things about her a century after she died, and no one lived who could dispute them. Unfortunately, no infallible certificate of character can be found to protect a name that has been only a historic memory two or three thousand years. It is certain, however, that Æolian women had an honored place in society and literature. They formed a center of intellectual light in which the brilliant Sappho reigned supreme, and it was no unusual thing to see them at banquets and festivals with men. A well-born Athenian woman would have lost the rather illusory privileges of her position by such freedom. She was decorously ignorant and stayed at home. It was a foregone conclusion in Athens that a woman who was educated and a poet could not be respectable, and if the facts were against this conclusion, so much the worse for the facts.

Hence it was quite natural that Sappho, who did not go into seclusion or hide her light, should be decried by the satirists who had never seen her. A hundred years had sufficed to dim the incidents of her life, and left them free to invent any romance they chose. Her supposed love-affairs were a fruitful theme. That men died before she was born, or were born after she died, were impertinent details which were not held to interfere in the least with their tender relations toward her. It is true that she wrote with a pen dipped in fire, but poems and tales of passion are not held even to-day as evidence against the fair fame of the author, whatever might be thought of her good taste. The Greek standards of morality were, at best, far from ours, and the frank naturalism of that age would be likely to shock our sense of decorum. But there is no indication that Sappho fell below these standards, and there is much to show that she rose above them. “I love delicacy,” she writes, “and for me love has the sun’s splendor and beauty.” Alcæus, her fellow-poet and rival, addresses her as “pure, sweetly smiling Sappho.” When he grows too ardent in his love, she rebukes him with gentle dignity: “Hadst thou felt desire for things good or noble, and had not thy tongue framed some evil speech, shame had not filled thine eyes, but thou hadst spoken honestly about it.” And why did she feel her brother’s disgrace so keenly if her own life was open to reproach?

We gather from herself that she was simple, amiable, and sunny, with a Greek love of life and all that pertains to it. “I am not of revengeful temper,” she says, “but have a childlike mind.” To this naïve confession she adds a choice bit of wisdom: “When anger spreads through the breast, guard thy tongue from barking idly.” She tells her daughter not to mourn for her, as “a poet’s home is not a fit place for lamentation.” In the spirit of her age and race, she insists that “death is an evil; the gods have so judged; had it been good, they would die.”

Whatever her character and personal history may have been, we know that she wrote perfect lyrics with the spark of immortality in them, and gathered about her in the sunny island of Lesbos a circle of educated women who devoted themselves to the study of music, poetry, and the arts of refined living. Her genius has been recognized by poets, philosophers, and critics, as well as by simpler people who felt in her verse the “touch of nature” that “makes the whole world kin.” She was the “divine Muse” of Plato, and shared the lyric throne with Pindar. Aristotle quoted her, and the austere Solon was so charmed with one of her odes that he said he could not die until he had learned it. Strabo writes that “at no period on record has any woman been known who compared with her in the least degree as a poet.” Horace and Catullus imitated her, Ovid paraphrased her, but no one has caught the essence of her fiery spirit. Plutarch likens her to the “heart of a volcano.” Longinus called her celebrated ode, “not a passion, but a congress of passions.” Modern men have tried to put her golden-winged, fire-tipped words into another tongue, and turned with despair from the task. It is like trying to seize the light that blazes in the heart of the diamond, or the fiery tints that hide in the opal. Perhaps Swinburne has best caught the spirit and the music of

Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity.

But even this exquisite artist in words says: “Where Catullus failed I could not hope to succeed.”

There were nine volumes of her works in the days of Horace. To-day scarcely more than two hundred lines survive. Besides the two immortal odes, we have only fragments, gems scattered here and there through the writers of antiquity. To the everlasting discredit of an ignorant and fanatical age, the fathers denounced her, and the Byzantine emperors or the ascetic monks of a later time burned these so-called relics of paganism, to supply their place with books of devotion and lives of the saints. When the Hellenic spirit woke again, after a sleep of more than a thousand years, it was too late. These poems had perished with many monumental works of the intellect, and scholars thought their lives well spent if they found a line or two from the lost treasures.

But what was the life from which Sappho sprang, that she could reach the topmost bough of fame at a single flight? The lucid note, the tropical passion, the musical flow—these nature might give; but where did she learn the fine sense of proportion, the perfection of metrical form, the mastery of the secrets of language, which placed her at the head of the lyric poets of Greece? The voices which might have told us are silent. Sparta was making heroic men and women, not literature. Athens was struggling through her stormy youth, and pluming her wings for the highest flight of all. The great Hebrew poetry was contemporary with Sappho, but she shows no trace of its influence. If she ever saw or heard it, her spirit was utterly alien to it. Still less had she in common with the inspired woman who led the armies of Israel to victory, six or seven centuries before, and chanted in stately measure the immortal song of their triumphs. It may be noted here that it was a woman who fired the hearts of these wandering people to brave deeds, when men drew back, timid and disheartened; it was a woman who went before them into battle; and it was a woman who broke into that impassioned poem which has come down to us across the ages as one of the great martial hymns of the world. But Deborah, the soldier, poet, prophetess, judge, and minstrel, never walked in the flowery paths of beauty and love. Her virile soul rose on the wings of a sublime faith, far above the things of sense. Behind that chorus of joy and exultation lay the long-baffled hopes, aspirations, and energies of an oppressed people, but it celebrated the apotheosis of force. It was a barbaric song, wild and revengeful even in its splendid imagery and patriotic fervor. Miriam took her timbrel, and sang in the same strain of power and majesty, inspired by the same soaring imagination. But we find no touch of a woman’s pity or tenderness in these pæans of victory. Their note is strong and exultant, alive with the lofty enthusiasm of a religious race in which the passion for art and beauty was not yet born. Sappho had caught nothing from these singers of an earlier time. She does not live in the bracing air of great ideals, nor does she dwell upon any vexed moral problems, after the manner of later poets. She is simply human, and strikes a personal note, the charm of which is unfailing, and will be fresh as long as flowers bloom, or men and women live and love.

This sweet-voiced singer seems to have risen full-fledged with the dawn, and her notes were liquid and clear as the song of the lark that soars out of the morning mists, and makes the sky vocal with melody. The freshness of the woods and the wild freedom of the air are in them. She loves the flowers, the running streams, the silver moon, the “golden-sandaled dawn,” the “dear, glad angel of the spring, the nightingale.” Hesperus, fairest of stars, “brings all that bright morning scattered,” and smiles on “dark-eyed sleep, child of night.” Again she says, “The stars about the fair moon hide their bright faces when she lights up all the earth with silver.” Was it the music of her voice that the doves heard “when their hearts turned cold and they dropped their wings”? She sings the praise of the purple hyacinth, the blushing apple-blossom, and the pale Lesbian rose, which she loves best of all. Dica is bidden to twine wreaths, “for even the blessed Graces look kindlier on a flowery sacrifice, and turn their faces from those who lack garlands.” In the garden of the nymphs, “the cool water gurgles through apple-boughs, and slumber streams from quivering leaves.” To this passionate love of nature, so vividly told in rare and exquisite figures and in phrases “shot with a thousand hues,” she adds a sensibility that responds to every breath that passes. “I flutter like a child after her mother,” is her cry. She likens a bird to a flower that grows in a garden and has nothing to fear from the storms. A woman alone is like a wild flower which no one takes care of. She touches every phase of love from the divine tenderness of girlhood to the wild passion that shakes the soul, “a wind on the mountains falling on oaks.” Her words flash and burn with the heart-consuming fire of her race. The lines in which she entreats the “star-throned Aphrodite” to have pity on her anguish, glow with a white heat. The swift-winged doves had brought the fickle goddess once before to soothe her pain with sweet promises and an immortal smile. Will she not come again and lift the ache from her tortured soul, and give her what she asks?

The intensity of passion reaches its climax in the ode to Anactoria. Simple as it is, the vocabulary of “bitter-sweet” emotion is exhausted. In her most impassioned verses, our own Mrs. Browning does not quite forget to reflect about her love. She sets it forth in subtly woven thoughts, and lets it filter through her mind until it takes the color of it. Sappho sings of passion pure and artless. She does not think about it, she does not analyze it. It possesses her heart and imagination, and she tells it so simply, so sincerely, and so truly, that the familiar story never loses its charm. She sang in the childhood of the world, when people felt more than they thought, when love was a sensation, a joy, a passion, a pain, not a sentiment. If she did not spiritualize her theme, she purified it of the coarseness which made the love-songs of men, before and afterward, unfit for a delicate ear. This first touch of a woman in literature was to refine it, though it was many centuries before she had the power to lead men to take love from the exclusive domain of the senses and give it a soul.