The poetry of the Æolians was largely inspired by love, or a religion of beauty. But the Doric genius was not a lyrical one, and the passionate personal note which made the charm of Sappho and her contemporaries was lost in stirring martial strains. Women ceased to write or to be known at all in literature until a later time, when they dipped into philosophy a little, especially in the Dorian colonies, where they were educated and held in great consideration. Pythagoras had many feminine followers, and his school at Crotona was continued after his death by his wife Theano and a daughter who had assisted him. But most of them live, if at all, only as names, or in the reflected light of famous men whose disciples they were.
IV
At no other time in the history of the world has the poetry of women reached the height or the honor it attained in this first flowering of their intellect and imagination. One may doubtless take with a shade of reservation the “female Homers,” like Anyta, of whom we have only a few epigrams, but there is a dim and rather vague tradition of seventy-six women poets in a scattered and by no means large population. In the revival of poetry during the Renaissance, there were about sixty, and none of them had the same quality of perfection which we find in Sappho. No one claims that we have equaled her to-day on her own ground, however superior our achievements may be in other directions.
That the Æolian women did so much with so little, and in spite of their limited advantages, is the best proof of their inborn gifts. Mediocre talents do not thrive in so adverse a soil, though this outburst of mental vigor belongs to a time when women had a degree of freedom and honor which for some reason they lost in the golden age of Athens. But the books they wrote were not printed, the manuscript copies were limited, most of them were lost with other classic works, and the few that escaped the pitiless fingers of time were destroyed by fanatics and iconoclasts. Yet one woman shines across twenty-five centuries as a star of the first magnitude, and we have fading glimpses of others who received honors due only to genius, or to talent of the first order. They were not judged apart as women, for they have come down to us as peers of great men. The divine gift of genius was rare then, as now and always, but even in women it did not lack recognition. To prove the gift and exact the homage, perhaps in any age, we have simply to show the fruit, except in a decadence, when the finest fruit loses its savor for corrupted tastes. If the number who wrote for immortality was small, it must be remembered that probably there were not enough people in all Greece to make a good-sized modern city.
The statues that were reared to these women have long since vanished from the classic hills they graced, and their voices are heard only in the faintest of musical echoes. Most of them have fallen into eternal silence. That there were many others devoted to things of the intellect, but unknown to fame, it is fair to presume, as we see only those who look back upon us from the shining peaks of that far past, while the dark waters of oblivion have settled over the possible treasures of its sunny slopes and fragrant valleys. How many of our own women, with their myriads of books, lectures, and clubs, their university courses, their versatile intellects, and their unlimited freedom, are likely to be quoted two or three thousand years hence, and set in the firmament to live forever?
To be sure, we stand upon a higher moral and social level, we have more knowledge, our field of action is broader, our ideals of virtue are higher, and we have privileges and pleasures of which they never dreamed. It is quite impossible to put ourselves on the simple plane of these women. The world has grown old and sophisticated; we have learned to classify ourselves, to choose our fields of knowledge, to consecrate our talents to what we call larger uses. Perhaps we never again can reach the lyrical heights of these children of passion, imagination, and song. Our triumphs are of another sort. But whatever intellectual distinctions we may attain, it is to this youth of the world that we must look for the apotheosis of love and beauty.
It is needless to ask why we can point to no second Sappho. There is but one Parthenon. Broken and crumbling, it stands in its white majesty forever alone. The Hellenic spirit is as dead as the gods of Olympus.
GLIMPSES OF THE SPARTAN WOMAN
