To drag dead Hector round the walls of Troy,
And doom to slavery his wife and boy.
(Marion Mills Miller)
I do not feel that this poem was cold and superficial as Miss De Courten and some other critics say, for to me it is a dignified and simple epic narrative, like the messengers’ speeches in Greek tragedy, introduced into the midst of lyrics. It is almost perfect and well worthy of Sappho. It makes us realize that Sappho’s activity was broader than we had supposed and brings her nearer to her predecessors and successors. It is a unique example, hitherto unknown, of a lyric narrative with epic intonations, throwing new light on the history of the ancient wedding-songs.[96]
A rhetorician of the fourth century A.D., Himerius,[97] has an interesting passage which bears on Sappho’s wedding-songs and helps us interpret the fragments which are preserved:
“So it is time for us, my children, since we are summoning our Muses to marriage-dance and marriage-love, to relax the graveness of our music, so that we may the better trip it with the maidens in honour of Aphrodite. How hard it is to find a tune gentle enough to please the Goddess, we may judge from the poets themselves, most of whom, though past masters in love-poetry, went as bravely to the description of Hera as any boy or girl, but when it came to the rites of Aphrodite, left the song for the lyre and the making of the epithalamy entirely to Sappho, who when the contests are over enters the chamber, weaves the bower, makes the bride-bed, gathers the maidens into the bride-chamber, and brings Aphrodite in her Grace-drawn car with a bevy of Loves to be her playfellows; and her she adorns with hyacinths about the hair, leaving all but what is parted by the brow to float free upon the wayward breeze, and them she decks with gold on wing and tress and makes to go on before the car and wave their torches on high.”
(Edmonds)
Himerius refers to the mock contests which were a part of the wedding ceremonies. There was always an agon or sham fight, as in Greek comedy, running through the hymenaeal, to be succeeded in many cases by a real fight afterwards. The wedding echoed with noise which suggested the conflicts of prehistoric days when brides were captives of bow and spear, and all sorts of characters figured in this drama of real life. There was place for satire and ridicule as well as for praise. Even in recent years I have witnessed in a neighboring island, “Scio’s rocky isle,” the semblance of predatory warfare which the Chians keep up during their bridal ceremonies. And in 1902 I attended a three days’ Turkish wedding at Chiblak, near the site of ancient Troy. On that occasion the frequent shooting and fighting, which resulted even in injuries to Turks and Greeks, made the noisy ceremony seem like a battle. In Sappho’s day, as to-day in the Orient, a wedding was not a brief benedictory reading by a clergyman. It was a long-drawn celebration, a prolonged process rather than a precise pronouncement, with torchlight processions, dance, and song.[98] All these features emerge very clearly in Sappho, where we can trace the whole ceremony from the weaving of the bridal bower (pastas = portico or bower in Himerius as cited above) to the aubade song of the next morning. Here is the charming song, sung, in the same metre as the famous Linus Song, by the bridesmaids as they led the bride to the bridegroom’s bed, proud of their island and of their Sappho:[99]
Up with the rafters high,