“Like the hyacinth on the hills which the shepherd swains
Tread underfoot, and down to the earth the bright flower....”
But translation inevitably spoils the fragrance, as even Rossetti and Swinburne have found. It is of Sappho that Swinburne writes in her own metre:
“Ah the singing, ah the delight, the passion!
All the Loves wept, listening; sick with anguish
Stood the crowned nine Muses about Apollo;
Fear was upon them,
While the tenth sang wonderful things they knew not.
Ah the tenth, the Lesbian! the nine were silent,
None endured the sound of her song for weeping;
Laurel by laurel
Faded all their crowns; but about her forehead,
Round her woven tresses and ashen temples,
White as dead snow, paler than grass in summer,
Ravaged with kisses,
Shone a light of fire as a crown for ever.
Yea, almost the implacable Aphrodite
Paused, and almost wept; such a song was that song....”
The fertile and prurient invention of late Greek scholarship have given this sublime poetess a biography which is as false as it is unpleasant. From her own works, however, we can gather some interesting details. She belonged to the governing aristocracy of Lesbos, and, for a time at least, went into exile with it. The women of Lesbos seem to have formed rival salons of literary culture, and Sappho herself was the head of one. There was a good deal of jealousy between them. Strangely, the most ardent of her verse is addressed to one of her own sex, and since it cannot be true that she is only writing the amatory language of male poets, we must conclude that the women of Ionia imitated the men in that strange passion which ignored sex. To contradict the celebrated fable of her dramatic suicide from a cliff in consequence of an unrequited love, we have a fragment of her message to her daughter from a calm deathbed:
“ ... For it is not right that in a house the Muses haunt
Mourning should dwell: such things befit us not.”
We cannot lightly dismiss as mere gossip the story of tender feeling, or at any rate tender expressions, between Sappho and Alcæus. They were contemporary love-poets of the same city. Sappho sometimes used the alcaic measure, and Alcæus the sapphic. Besides, we have it on the authority of Aristotle. One line of Alcæus to Sappho is preserved:
“Sappho, pure sweet-smiling weaver of violets.”
Alcæus too was a member of the Lesbian aristocracy. He alludes to a short-lived tyranny which was ended by the appointment of a constitutional tyrant or dictator, the wise and generous Pittacus. In the course of these disturbances Alcæus went into exile—among other places, we should note, to Egypt—while his brother took service under the King of Babylon. Such were the cosmopolitan relations of this period. The poet also fought for his country against the Athenians in the struggle for Sigeum, and humorously records the fact that he lost his shield in the rout. Such a loss was the regular mark of defeat, and generally regarded as a brand of ignominy to a soldier. But the Ionians took nothing seriously, not even war. It is strangely illustrative of the prevalence of types in Greek art that many lyric poets lost their shields in battle—Alcæus, Archilochus, and Anacreon—while the Roman Horace was too careful an imitator of the Greek lyric tradition to neglect their example in this respect. The poetry of Alcæus falls into two classes—banquet-songs in praise of love and wine, and political songs attacking his enemies. He too chiefly survives in fragments like
“Wine is the mirror to mortals....”
“Wine, dear child, and Truth....”