"What beauty now wouldst thou draw to love thee? Who wrongs thee, Sappho? For even if she flies, she shall soon follow, and if she rejects gifts shall yet give, and if she loves not shall soon love, however loth."
In the five fragments above quoted there are also two at least which refer to girls. Now I have not the slightest desire to discuss the moral character of Sappho or the vices of her Lesbian countrywomen. She had a bad reputation among the Romans as well as the Greeks, and it is a fact that in the year 1073 her poems were burnt at Rome and Constantinople, "as being," in the words of Professor Gilbert Murray, "too much for the shaky morals of the time." Another recent writer, Professor Peck of Columbia University, says that
"it is difficult to read the fragments which remain of her verse without being forced to come to the conclusion that a woman who could write such poetry could not be the pure woman that her modern apologists would have her."
The following lament alone would prove this:
[Greek: Deduke men a Selana kai Plaeiades, mesai de nuktes, para d' erxet ora ego de mona katheudo.]
MASCULINE MINDS IN FEMALE BODIES
Several books and many articles have been written on this topic,[300] but the writers seem to have overlooked the fact that in the light of the researches of Krafft-Ebing and Moll it is possible to vindicate the character of Sappho without ignoring the fact that her passionate erotic poems are addressed to women. These alienists have shown that the abnormal state of a masculine mind inhabiting a female body, or vice versa, is surprisingly common in all parts of the world. They look on it, with the best of reasons, as a diseased condition, which does not necessarily, in persons of high principles, lead to vicious and unnatural practices. In every country there are thousands of girls who, from childhood, would rather climb trees and fences and play soldiers with the boys than fondle dolls or play with the other girls. When they get older they prefer tobacco to candy; they love to masquerade in men's clothes, and when they hear of a girl's love-affair they cannot understand what pleasure there can be in dancing with a man or kissing him, while they themselves may long to kiss a girl, nay, in numerous cases, to marry her.[301] Many such marriages are made between women whose brains and bodies are of different sexes, and their love-affairs are often characterized by violent jealousy and other symptoms of intersexual passion. Not a few prominent persons have been innocent victims of this distressing disease; it is well-known what strange masculine proclivities several eminent female novelists and artists have shown; and whenever a woman shows great creative power or polemic aggressiveness the chances are that her brain is of the masculine type. It is therefore quite possible that Sappho may have been personally a pure woman, her mental masculinity ("mascula Sappho" Horace calls her) being her misfortune, not her fault. But even if we give her the benefit of the doubt and take for granted that she had enough character to resist the abnormal impulses and passions which she describes in her poems, and which the Greeks easily pardoned and even praised, we cannot and must not overlook the fact that these poems are the result of a diseased brain-centre, and that what they describe is not love, but a phase of erotic pathology. Normal sexual appetite is as natural a passion as the hunger for food; it is simply a hunger to perpetuate the species, and without it the world would soon come to an end; but Sapphic passion is a disease which luckily cannot become epidemic because it cannot perpetuate itself, but must always remain a freak.[302]
ANACREON AND OTHERS
There is considerable uncertainty regarding the dates of the earliest Greek poets. By dint of ingenious conjectures and combinations philologists have reached the conclusion that the Homeric poems, with their interpolations, originated between the dates 850 and 720 B.C.—say 2700 years ago. Hesiod probably flourished near the end of the seventh century, to which Archilochus and Alcman belong, while in the sixth and fifth centuries a number of names appear—little more than names, it is true, since of most of them fragments only have come down to us—Alcaeus, Mimnermus, Theognis, Sappho, Stesichorus, Anacreon, Ibycus, Bacchylides, Pindar, and others. Best known of all these, as a poet of love, is Anacreon, though in his case no one has been so foolish as to claim that the love described in his poems (or those of his imitators) is ever supersensual. Professor Anthon has aptly characterized him as "an amusing voluptuary and an elegant profligate," and Hegel pointed out the superficiality of Anacreontic love, in which there is no conception of the tremendous importance to a lover of having this or that particular girl and no other, or what I have called individual preference. Benecke puts this graphically when he remarks (25) regarding Mimnermus: "'What is life without love?' he says; he does not say, 'What is life without your love?'" Even in Sappho, I may add here, in spite of the seeming violence of her passion, this quality of individual preference is really lacking or weak, for she is constantly transferring her attention from one girl to another. And as Sappho's poems are addressed to girls, so are Anacreon's and those of the other poets named, to boys, in most cases. The following, preserved by Athenaeus (XIII., 564D), is a good specimen:
[Greek:
"O pai parthenion blepon,
dixemai se, su d' ou koeis,
ouk eidos hoti taes emaes
psuchaes haeniocheueis.">[