SAPPHO AND THE FIRST WOMAN’S CLUB
· Golden Age of Lyric Poetry ·
· The Mythical and the Real Sappho ·
· Her Poems ·
· Contrast with Hebrew Singers ·
· Poet of Nature and Passion ·
· The First Woman’s Club ·
· Æolian and Doric Poetesses ·
· Honors to the Genius of Hellenic Women ·
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.