Of Cyprus, ’twould not buy my maid.
(Tucker)
Professor Prentice[50] translates this fragment (E. 130), “there is a pretty little girl named Cleïs whom I love,” etc., and says that it does not refer to her own daughter. But there is no word for love in the Greek passage, and the ancient interpretation of Maximus of Tyre[51] is preferable, especially as Cleïs is definitely mentioned by Suidas and as the name reappears as that of a young woman in another of the old fragments and in one of the new pieces.[52] The matter seems now to be settled by the recent discovery on a papyrus (about 200 A.D.) of a new late prose biography of Sappho which is so important a source for her life that a literal translation of it is here given, especially as it is not in Edmonds’ Lyra Graeca.[53]
“Sappho by birth was a Lesbian and of the city of Mytilene and her father was Scamandrus or according to some Scamandronymus. And she had three brothers, Eurygyius, Larichus, and the eldest, Charaxus, who sailed to Egypt and as an associate with a certain Doricha spent very much on her; but Sappho loved more Larichus, who was young. She had a daughter Cleïs with the same name as her own mother. She has been accused by some of being disorderly in character and of being a woman-lover. In shape she seems to have proved contemptible and ugly, for in complexion she was dark, and in stature she was very small; and the same has happened in the case of ... who was undersized.”
The man whom Sappho married, she herself also being a person of some means, was said to be Cercylas, a man of great wealth from the island of Andrus. Cercylas sounds like concocted comic chaff, but we can believe enough of the tradition to say that she was married. A Russian scholar[54] made her a widow at thirty-five.[55] Thereafter she sought for love and companionship among the girls whom she made members of her salon and instructed in the arts.
Sappho must have had a wonderful personality or she could not have attracted so many pupils and companions whom she trained to chant or sing in the choruses for the marriage ceremony and for other occasions. She was president of the world’s first woman’s club. It was a thiasos or a kind of sacred sorority to which the members were bound by special ties and regulations. We have a long list of the members who were her friends and pupils, not only from Lesbus but from Miletus, Colophon, Pamphylia, and even Salamis and Athens. For some of them she had an ardent passion. When they left her, she missed them terribly (E. 43, 44, 46). “Is it possible for any maid on earth to be far apart from the woman she loves?” She was so jealous at times that she spited her wrath on her rivals, especially Gorgo and Andromeda. She “had enough of Gorgo,” and she scolds Atthis for having come to hate the thought of her and for flitting after Andromeda in her stead (E. 55, 81). Suidas tells us that she had three companions or friends, Atthis, Telesippa, and Megara, to whom she was slanderously declared to be attached by an impure affection; and that her pupils or disciples were Anagora (Anactoria) of Miletus, Gongyla (the dumpling) of Colophon, Euneica of Salamis. Ovid mentions Atthis, Cydro, and Anactoria, the name which Swinburne took for his poem in which he welded together many of Sappho’s fragments with fine expression and passionate thought. Maximus of Tyre (xxiv, 9) says: “What Alcibiades, Charmides, and Phaedrus were to Socrates, Gyrinna, Atthis and Anactoria were to Sappho, and what his rival craftsmen, Prodicus, Gorgias, Thrasymachus and Protagoras were to Socrates, that Gorgo and Andromeda were to Sappho, who sometimes takes them to task and at others refutes them and dissembles with them exactly like Socrates” (Edmonds). Philostratus in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana[56] tells of Sappho’s brilliant pupil Damophyla of Pamphylia who is said to have had girl-companions like Sappho and to have composed love-poems and hymns just as she did, with adaptations from the lectures of her professor. Her own fragments mention Anactoria, Atthis, Gongyla, Gyrinno (which perhaps means Little Tadpole), “Mnasidica, of fairer form than the dainty Gyrinno” (E. 115), and possibly Eranna.[57] One fragment says, “Well did I teach Hero of Gyara, the fleetly-running maid” (E. 73). If this is the famous Hero of the Hero and Leander story so often pictured in Greek art and on coins of Abydus, Sappho knew the story of two king’s children who loved one another long before the days of the painter Apelles.[58] Sappho’s school of poetry in modern times has been prettily pictured in a painting by Hector Leroux ([p. 118]), but the best representation of what her school may have been is given by Alma Tadema ([Pl. 1]) in his academic and learned classical painting “Sappho” in the Walters’ Art Gallery in Baltimore. Archaic Greek inscriptions, of interest to the specialist in epigraphy, can be read on the marble seats of the theatre at Mytilene represented in the picture,—the names of Erinna of Telos, Gyrinno, Anactoria of Miletus, Atthis, Gongyla of Colophon, Dika (short for Mnasidica), and others. I quote the beautiful appreciation which Professor Gildersleeve has published:[59]
“A semi-circle of marble seats, veined and stained, a screen of olive trees that fling their branches against the sky, and against the sapphire seas, a singing man, a listening woman, whose listening is so intense that nothing else in the picture seems to listen—not the wreathed girl in flowered robe who stands by her and rests her hand familiarly on her shoulder. Not she, for though she holds a scroll in her other hand, the full face, the round eyes, show a soul that matches wreathed head and flowered robe. She is the pride of life. Nor she on the upper seat, who props her chin with her hand and partly hides her mouth with her fingers and lets her vision reach into the distance of her own musings. Nor her neighbor whose composed attitude is that of a regular church-goer who has learned the art of sitting still and thinking of nothing. Nor yet the remotest figure—she who has thrown her arms carelessly on the back of the seat and is looking out on the waters as if they would bring her something. A critic tells us that the object of the poet is to enlist Sappho’s support in a political scheme of which he is the leader, if not the chief prophet, and he has come to Sappho’s school in Lesbos with the hope of securing another voice and other songs to advocate the views of his party. The critic seems to have been in the artist’s secret, and yet Alma Tadema painted better than he knew. Alkaios is not trying to win Sappho’s help in campaign lyrics. The young poet is singing to the priestess of the Muses a new song with a new rhythm, and as she hears it, she feels that there is a strain of balanced strength in it she has not reached: it is the first revelation to her of the rhythm that masters her own. True, when Alkaios afterwards sought not her help in politics, but her heart in love, and wooed her in that rhythm, she too had caught the music and answered him in his own music.”