“The fair-haired Lesbian,” so famed as the poet of nature and passion, was not without a wise philosophy of life, and she assumes the rôle of mentor with pitiless candor. “He who is fair to look upon is good, and he who is good will soon be fair,” is her motto; but she tells Mnasidica that her “gloomy temper spoils her, though she has a more beautiful form than the tender Gyrinna.” Her house is devoted to the service of the Muses and must be cheerful, but she shuts out of an honorable immortality those who prefer worldly fortune to the pleasures of the intellect. To a rich woman without education she says: “Where thou diest there wilt thou lie, and no one will remember thy name in times to come, because thou hast no share in the roses of Pieria. Inglorious wilt thou wander about in Hades and flit among its dark shades.” She does not forget the finer graces of character, and evidently realizes the insidious fascination of material things. A moralist of to-day might be expected to tell us that “wealth without virtue is a dangerous guest,” but we are not apt to credit the gifted singers of the ancient world with so much ethical insight, least of all the women of a sensuous and passionate race, which loved before all things beauty and the pleasures of life.
These few touches of wisdom, satire, and criticism, relieved by the love of Sappho for the friends and pupils to whom she is a model, an adviser, and an inspiration, throw a passing side-light on a group of clever women who flit like phantoms across the pages of history, most of them names and nothing more. They are of interest in showing us that the women of ages ago had the same aspirations that we have to-day, together with the same faults, the same virtues, and the same griefs, though they had not learned to moralize their sensations or intellectualize their passions. They show us, too, another phase of the elusive being who dazzled the world in its youth, leaving a few records traced in flame, and charged with an ever-baffling secret for all coming generations.
“Men, I think, will remember us hereafter,” she says with subtle foresight, a line that Swinburne has so gracefully expanded in words taken in part from her own lips:
I, Sappho, shall be one with all these things,
With all high things forever; and my face
Seen once, my songs once heard in a strange place,
Cleave to men’s lives, and waste the days thereof
With gladness and much sadness and long love.
III
The little coterie that wrote and talked and worked in the direction of finer ideals of life and manners, under the influence of the first woman poet of the world, has made the island of Lesbos, with its varying charm of sea and sky, and beautiful gardens, and singing birds, and sparkling fountains, and white cliffs outlined like sculpture in the crystalline air, luminous for all time. Of its four more or less famous poets, three were women, but Sappho has overshadowed all the rest. The very atmosphere woke the imagination, and made their hearts sing aloud with love and joy, varied by an occasional note of sorrow and pain. They came from all lands, these gifted maidens, to sit at the feet of Sappho, and to carry back to their distant homes the spirit of poesy and song which inspired so many Hellenic women to brave deeds as well as to tender and heroic words. But the passion of southern seas became a religious enthusiasm in the sheltered and somber plains of Bœotia, where the lives of women had been so bare and hard, and Hesiod with his fellow-poets had given them such cold consolation. The songs of love were turned to processional hymns chanted by white-robed virgins as they brought offerings to the shrines of their gods.
It may have been the fame of Sappho that fired the genius of Myrtis and Corinna. Possibly some dark-eyed maiden had come back from Lesbos to spread the cult of knowledge and beauty, to found other esthetic clubs which should give a new impulse to women’s lives. But when we try to give a living form to these famous poets, we grasp at shadows. We simply know that they lived and sang and had their little day of glory, with grand tombs at the end, and statues in various parts of Greece. They were teachers of Pindar, and Corinna is said to have defeated him five times in poetic contests at Thebes. Several centuries later there was still at Tanagra a picture representing her in the act of binding a fillet about her beautiful head, probably in token of these victories. Five crowns on her tomb also told the story. She was the friend and critic of the great lyric poet, but he said some unkind things of his successful rival, and insisted that the prize was due to her beauty rather than her genius. In spite of this, he went to her for counsel. She had advised him to use the Greek myths in his poems, and he did it so lavishly that she wittily told him to “sow with the hand and not pour out of a sack.” She was not quite generous, however, to her other friend, who also won a prize in the same manner. She says, “I blame the clear-toned Myrtis that she, a woman born, should enter the lists with Pindar.” Why it was not proper for a sister poet who had taught both of them to do what she did herself, is not clear. She was called the first of the nine lyrical muses, who were the earthly counterparts of the “celestial nine.” Myrtis was another. As the immortal Maids who dwelt on the slopes of Helicon were apt to visit their rivals with summary vengeance of much more serious character, perhaps their mortal representatives ought to be forgiven for a shade of jealousy so delicately implied.
Corinna left five books of poems, but small trace of them remains. Many of her verses were sung by maidens at religious festivals. Her modest niche in the temple of fame she owes mainly to her victories over Pindar, though she was second only to Sappho. Why her work, which was crowned with so many laurels, has not lived beside his, is one of the mysteries of buried ages. Perhaps it was because she made use of purely local legends and the local dialect, to which many thought she owed her success in her own day.
This wave of feminine genius that passed over the hills and valleys of Greece spent itself in little more than a century on Doric soil. The last of the lyrical muses were Praxilla and Telesilla. We have a faint glimpse of the first at Sicyon, where she lived, and ancient critics gave her a place by the side of Anacreon. She drew her inspiration largely from mythology, and sang successfully on that favorite theme of poetic maidens, the death of Adonis. In the most critical age of Greece she was honored with a statue by Lysippus, which may be taken as sufficient proof that she was much more than a writer of sentimental verses.
More noted was Telesilla, the poet and heroine of Argos, an antique Joan of Arc, whose exaltation took a poetic form instead of a religious one. A curious little story, mythical or otherwise, is related of her. She was very ill and consulted the oracle, which told her to devote herself to the Muses. This species of mind-cure proved more effective than medicine, and she recovered under the magic of music and poetry. But she had the spirit of an Amazon as well as the genius of a poet. At a crisis in the war with Sparta, she armed the women, and manned the walls with slaves too young or too old to fight. The Spartans thought it discreditable to kill the women, and disgraceful to be beaten by them, so they retreated. The event was commemorated by an annual festival at which men appeared in feminine attire. Many centuries afterward a statue of Telesilla was still standing on a pillar in front of the temple of Aphrodite at Argos. She held in her hand a helmet which she was about to put on her head, and several volumes of poetry were lying at her feet. Among her themes were the fated daughters of the weeping Niobe; she also wrote famous hymns to Artemis and Apollo. In spite of her allegiance to the Muses, she was more conspicuous for her service to Ares, who was henceforth worshiped at Argos as the patron deity of women.