(Epilogue)
Edmonds forces the meaning of the Greek to get even four feet out of his new restoration. Sappho was surely taller than that and there is no evidence earlier than Roman days to justify even Swinburne’s
The small dark body’s Lesbian loveliness
That held the fire eternal.
In any case Sappho was no dwarf, otherwise her deformity would not have escaped the notice of the Athenian comic mud-slingers and scandal-mongers who did so much to spoil her good name. Such is the traditional, not the real, human, historical Sappho of the sixth century B.C.
The story of Sappho’s love for Phaon is patently mythological, as indicated by the legend of his transformation by Aphrodite from an old man into a handsome youth. There can be only slight historic foundation for connecting Sappho with him and making Sicily the scene of their first meeting. An inscription on the Parian marble in Oxford says: “When Critius the First was archon at Athens Sappho fled from Mytilene and sailed to Sicily.” The date is uncertain as there is a lacuna in the inscription, but it is between 604 and 594 B.C., perhaps about 598. The recently discovered hymn to Hera, Longing for Lesbus, lends support to this story of exile. She may have been banished by Pittacus for engaging like Alcaeus in political intrigues. She probably returned to Lesbus under the amnesty of 581, as her grave is often mentioned as in Lesbus. There is even a tradition preserved by the English traveller Pococke that her own sepulchral urn was once in the Turkish mosque of the castle of Mytilene. We have already cited one or two fragments which seem to show that she had more than reached middle age. She was old enough to feel that she should not re-marry, especially if she had to choose one younger than herself.[63] Fragment (E. 99) is in the style of Shakespeare’s “Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.” Nowhere in her poems is there any evidence that she committed suicide for love of Phaon, but as her name has started this legend we must speak of it in some detail. The famous fragment (E. 108), to judge from the context where it is quoted in connection with Socrates’ death, seems to give her last words: “It is not right that there be mourning in the house of poetry; this befits us not.”
Now let us discuss the supposititious love affair, to which we have referred, about which I share the ancient and modern Lesbian doubt. The ancients tell of Sappho’s unrequited love for the ferryman prototype of St. Christopher, the beautiful Phaon. The story is well given in Servius’ précis of Turpilius’ Latin paraphrase of Menander,[64] though he does not mention Sappho by name: “Phaon, who was a ferryman plying for hire between Lesbus (others say he was from Chios[65]) and the mainland, one day ferried over for nothing the Goddess Venus in the guise of an old woman, and received from her for the service an alabaster box of unguent, the daily use of which made women fall in love with him. Among those who did so was one who in her disappointment is said to have thrown herself from Mount Leucates, and from this came the custom now in vogue of hiring people once a year to throw themselves from that place into the sea.” (Edmonds). But neither Phaon nor anything connected with Phaon is mentioned in any of Sappho’s fragments, though Francis Fawkes and others have connected Phaon’s name with the Hymn to Aphrodite. A writer of the second century B.C., Palaephatus,[66] makes the very inconsistent statement that “this is the Phaon in whose honor as a lover many a song has been written by Sappho.” Nor is there any allusion to Sappho’s curing her passion by leaping from the white Leucadian cliff. Athenaeus[67] and Suidas go so far as to say that the victim was another Sappho, and even in the late lists of Leucadian leapers, in Photius, Sappho is not included. Who first conjured up a Phaon, we know not, but the story belongs to folk-lore, and Phaon appears on Greek vases of the time and style of Meidias, who is dated by most archaeologists toward the end of the fifth century B.C., much earlier than Plato’s play (392 B.C.). His indifference to the many ladies who are making love to him is well portrayed, especially on vases ([Pl. 4, 5]) in Florence and Palermo ([p. 107])[68]. The fair Phaon, Aphrodite’s shining star (φάων = shining), is only another avatar of Adonis, who appears in similar style on similar vases, one even found in the same grave with a Phaon vase. Phaon, I believe, is as old as the fifth century; but the story of Sappho’s leap transferred to the white cliffs in the south of the white island of Leucas, the modern Cape Ducato, is later. The Cape is also called Santa Maura, some two hundred feet high, and even to-day this rock of desperation is haunted by Sappho’s ghost and known as Sappho’s Leap ([Pl. 6]). The legend of the Lesbian’s leap first occurs in the poet of the Old Comedy, Plato, who wrote the play called Phaon. Later in the New Comedy, Menander was probably adorning an old tale to point a contemporary moral when he produced his Leucadia of which Turpilius, a contemporary of Terence, wrote a Latin paraphrase. A few anapaestic lines are preserved by Strabo, who speaks of the Leucadian Cliff:
Where Sappho ’tis said the first of the world
In her furious chase of Phaon so haughty
All maddened with longing plunged down from the height