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.