'Now the ode Εἰς Ἐρωμέναν—the "Ode to Anactoria" (as it is named by tradition)—the poem ... which has in the whole world of verse no companion and no rival but the Ode to Aphrodite, has been twice at least translated or traduced.... To the best (and bad is the best) of their ability, they [Nicholas Boileau-Despréaux and Ambrose Philips] have "done into" bad French and bad English the very words of Sappho. Feeling that although I might do it better I could not do it well, I abandoned the idea of translation—ἑκὼν ἀέκοντί γε θυμῷ. I tried then to write some paraphrase of the fragments which the Fates and the Christians have spared us. I have not said, as Boileau and Philips have, that the speaker sweats and swoons at sight of her favourite by the side of a man. I have abstained from touching on such details, for this reason: that I felt myself incompetent to give adequate expression in English to the literal and absolute words of Sappho; and would not debase and degrade them into a viler form. No one can feel more deeply than I do the inadequacy of my work. "That is not Sappho," a friend once said to me. I could only reply, "It is as near as I can come; and no man can come close to her." Her remaining verses are the supreme success, the final achievement, of the poetic art.... I have striven to cast my spirit into the mould of hers, to express and represent not the poem but the poet. I did not think it requisite to disfigure the page with a footnote wherever I had fallen back upon the original text. Here and there, I need not say, I have rendered into English the very words of Sappho. I have tried also to work into words of my own some expression of their effect: to bear witness how, more than any other's, her verses strike and sting the memory in lonely places, or at sea, among all loftier sights and sounds—how they seem akin to fire and air, being themselves "all air and fire"; other element there is none in them. As to the angry appeal against the supreme mystery of oppressive heaven, which I have ventured to put into her mouth at that point only where pleasure culminates in pain, affection in anger, and desire in despair—they are to be taken as the first outcome or outburst of foiled and fruitless passion recoiling on itself. After this, the spirit finds time to breathe and repose above all vexed senses of the weary body, all bitter labours of the revolted soul; the poet's pride of place is resumed, the lofty conscience of invincible immortality in the memories and the mouths of men.' No one who wishes to understand Sappho can afford to neglect a study of the poem thus annotated by its author. As Professor F. T. Palgrave justly says, 'Sappho is truly pictorial in the ancient sense: the image always simply presented; the sentiment left to our sensibility.'
The Greek comedies relating to the history of Sappho, referred to on previous pages, were all written by dramatists who belonged to what is known as the Middle Comedy, two centuries after her time (404-340 B.C.). The comedy of that period was devoted to satirising classes of people rather than individuals, to ridiculing stock-characters, to criticising the systems and merits of philosophers and writers, to parodies of older poets, and to travesties of mythological subjects. The extent to which the licence of the comic writers of that age had reached may be judged from the passing of the law referred to on a previous page (p. [23])—μὴ δεῖν ὀνομαστὶ κωμῳδεῖν—though the practice continued under ill-concealed disguise. Writers of such a temper were obviously unfit to hand down unsullied a character like Sappho's, powerful though their genius might be to make their inventions seem more true than actual history—'to make the worse appear the better reason.'
Sappho was the title of comedies by Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphănes, Dīphĭlus, Ephippus, and Timocles, but very little is known of their contents. Of those by Ameipsias and Amphis only a single word out of each survives. Athenaeus quotes a few lines out of those by Ephippus and Timocles, for descriptions of men of contemptible character. The same writer refers to that by Diphilus for his use of the name of a kind of cup (μετανιπτρίς) which was used to drink out of when men had washed their hands after dinner, and for his having represented Archilochus and Hipponax (cf. p. [9]) as lovers of Sappho. Of that by Antiphanes (cf. p. [26]), who was the most celebrated and the most prolific of the playwrights of the Middle Comedy, we have, again in Athenaeus, a longer passage preserved; but it is merely to show the poetess proposing and solving a wearisome riddle (γρῖφος), satirising a subtlety his grosser audience could not understand.
Besides these, Antiphanes and Plato (the Comic writer, not the philosopher) each wrote a play called Phaon. Of that by Antiphanes but three words remain. Plato's drama is several times quoted by Athenaeus, but only when he is discussing details of cookery—one passage obviously for the sake of its coarseness. Menander wrote a play called Leucadia, and Antiphanes one called Leucadius. Antiphanes' play furnishes Athenaeus with nothing but a catalogue of seasonings. Some lines out of Menander's Leucadia are quoted above (p. [17]) from Strabo, and it is referred to by several authors for the sake of some word or phrase; Servius, commenting on Vergil's Aeneid, iii. 274, gives a précis of Turpilius' Latin paraphrase of it, which is mentioned above, p. [16].
Such is our knowledge of the Comic accounts of Sappho's history. When we consider the general character of the Middle Comedy, written as it was to please the Athenians after their golden time had passed, it is not unreasonable to take accounts which seem to have originated in such treatment with somewhat more than diffidence.
But it is not only the Greek dramatists who have written plays on the story of Sappho. Two have appeared in English during the last few years, one of which, by the late Mrs. Estelle Lewis ('Stella'), has been translated into modern Greek by Cambourogio for representation on the Athenian stage. The most celebrated, however, and one of considerable beauty, is by John Lilly, 'the Euphuist'; it is called Sapho and Phao, and was acted before Queen Elizabeth in 1584. The whole is allegorical, Sapho being probably meant for Elizabeth, queen of an island, and Phao is supposed to be Leicester. Lilly makes his Sapho a princess of Syracuse, and takes other liberties—though not such as the Greeks did—with her history; strangely enough, however, he makes no reference to the Leucadian leap. 'When Phao cometh,' he makes Sapho soliloquise, 'what then? Wilt thou open thy love? Yea? No, Sapho, but staring in his face till thine eyes dazzle and thy spirits faint, die before his face; then this shall be written on thy tomb, that though thy love were greater than wisdom could endure, yet thine honour was such as love could not violate.' Venus is introduced as marring their mutual love, and Phao says: 'This shall be my resolution, wherever I wander, to be as I were kneeling before Sapho; my loyalty unspotted, though unrewarded.... My life shall be spent in sighing and wishing, the one for my bad fortune, the other for Sapho's good.'
In France, the first opera written by the late M. Charles Gounod was entitled Sapho. The libretto was by M. Emile Augier. It was first given at the Académie, April 16, 1851; and in Italian, as Saffo, at Covent Garden, Aug. 9, in the same year. It was reproduced in 1858, and again in the new Opera House, April 3, 1884. Each time both author and composer recast their work, which contains many brilliant scenes and melodies. The celebrated Madame de Staël wrote a drama called Sapho, but it has been long forgotten. Alphonse Daudet's novel, Sapho, mœurs Parisiennes, of which a version dramatised by M. Belot was played for the first time at the Gymnase in Paris, December 18, 1885, bears no reference to the poetess beyond the sobriquet of the heroine. The most artistically finished tragedy of the German dramatist Grillparzer is his Sappho. It was produced at Vienna in 1819, and is still played at many of the principal German theatres. An inferior Italian translation of it received a high encomium from Lord Byron. It is best known to English readers by Miss Ellen Frothingham's faithful translation.
About forty years ago, however, Messrs. Thomas Constable & Co., of Edinburgh, had issued an earlier translation of the play by L. C. C. [i.e. Lucy Caroline Cumming]; and there are some others.
The Queen of Roumania, under her nom de guerre of 'Carmen Sylva,' is the most distinguished among living poets who have idealised the life of Sappho. But her poem under that title, published in her Stürme, owes more to its rich poetic charm than to the actual facts of the Greek story; in it the Lesbian seems to live in the Germany of to-day.
Although so little of Sappho remains, her complete works must have been considerable. She seems to have been the chief acknowledged writer of 'Wedding-Songs,' if we may believe Himerius (cf. fr. [93]); and there is little doubt that Catullus' Epithalamia were copied, if not actually translated, from hers. Menander the Rhetorician praises her 'Invocatory Hymns,' in which he says she called upon Artemis and Aphrodite from a thousand hills; perhaps fr. [6] is taken out of one of these. Her hymn to Artemis is said to have been imitated by Damophyla (cf. p. [24]). She was on all sides regarded as the greatest erotic poet of antiquity; as Swinburne makes her sing of herself—