This woman determined to do her utmost to elevate her sex. The one method of culture open to women at that time was poetry. There was no other form of literature, and accordingly she systematically trained her pupils to be poets, and to weave into verse the noblest maxims of the intellect and the deepest emotions of the heart. Young people with richly endowed minds flocked to her from all quarters, and formed a kind of woman’s college.
There can be no doubt that these young women were impelled to seek the society of Sappho from disgust with the low drudgery and monotonous routine to which women’s lives were sacrificed, and they were anxious to rise to something nobler and better. We learn this from Sappho herself. It is thus that she addresses an uneducated woman:—
“Dying thou shalt lie in the tomb, and there shall be no remembrance of thee afterwards, for thou partakest not of the roses of Pieria: yea, undistinguished shalt thou walk in the halls of Hades, fluttering about with the pithless dead.”
And one of her most distinguished pupils, Erinna, who died at the early age of nineteen, sang in her poem ‘The Distaff’ the sorrows of a girl whom her mother compelled to work at the loom and the distaff while she herself longed to cultivate the worship of the Muses.
Did she attempt any other innovation in regard to the position of women? What did she think were the relations which ought to subsist between the one sex and the other? These are questions that we should fain wish we could answer; but history remains silent, and we can only form conjectures from isolated facts and statements. A late Greek writer, Maximus Tyrius,[35] compares her association with young women to the association which existed between Socrates and young men. It has to be remembered that even in Sparta the men were thrown into very close and continual intimacy; and that this was still more the case in other States where the women were kept in strict confinement. Even in Sparta the men dined together alone; they were often away on military expeditions for whole months together, and men were the instructors of the youths. In this way passionate intimacies arose between old and young, the old man striving to instruct his favourite youth in all manly and virtuous exercises, and the young man serving and protecting his old friend to the best of his power. These attachments were like the loves of Jonathan and David, surpassing the love of women. It is likely that Sappho did not see why these intimacies, fraught as they were with so many advantages, should be confined to the male sex; and she strove, or at least Maximus Tyrius thought she strove, to establish much closer connexions, such strong ties of love between members of her own sex as would unite them for ever in firm friendship, soothe them in the time of sorrow, and make the hours of life pass joyfully on. And her poetry expresses an extraordinary strength and warmth of affection. Just as Socrates almost swoons at the sight of the exquisite beauty of an Athenian youth, so Sappho trembles all over when she gazes on her lovely girls. And she weaves all the beauties of nature into the expression of the depth of her emotion. She seems to have had a rarely intense love of nature. The bright sun, the moon and the stars, the music of birds, the cool river, the shady grove, Hesperus, and the golden-sandalled Dawn—all are to her ministers of love, of this intense love for her poetical pupils, for one of whom she says she would not take the whole of Lydia. But though this association may have been one great object, it cannot be affirmed that she formed any idea of making the love of women a substitute for the love of men. Some of her girls unquestionably married, and Sappho composed their hymeneal songs. She entered into their future destinies, and sympathized with them throughout their career, following them to the grave with the sad lament which they only can utter who have felt intensely the joys of life, and see in death the entrance to a cold, shadowy, and pithless existence.
It is possible that she may have ventured on new opinions as to the nature of marriage. When we come to treat of Athens, we shall see that the restrictions on marriage in the ancient world were of the sternest and most narrow character. Her Lesbian countrywomen enjoyed considerable liberty, and Heraclides Ponticus[36] says that they “were excitable and daring. Wherefore fondness for drink and love affairs, and every kind of relaxation in regard to food are common among them.” The statement is made in regard to the Æolians, to whom the Lesbians belonged. But they were surrounded by Ionians, among whom the position of women was almost servile. Sappho may have opened her home to the girls who were tired of such close restriction, and may have counselled marriage from choice. Probably this circumstance would account for the treatment which the character of Sappho received in subsequent times, for all women who have dared to help forward the progress of their sex, and all men who have boldly aided them have almost uniformly been slandered and reviled in all ages.[37] All the notices which we have of her from contemporary or nearly contemporary sources speak of her in high terms of praise. Alcæus, her fellow-townsman, sings of her as “the violet-crowned, chaste, sweet-smiling Sappho,” and approaches her in verses which imply a belief in her purity. Herodotus[38] tells how she bitterly rebuked a brother who squandered all his money on a beautiful courtezan. Her fellow-citizens honoured her by stamping her figure upon their coins,—“honoured her,” says Aristotle,[39] “though she was a woman.” And the fragments of her own poems bear testimony to the same fact. They show, indeed, the warm blood of a Southern girl who has no concealments. If she loves, she tells it in verses that vibrate with emotion, that tremble with passion. And she was no prude. Like the rest of her sex of that day, she thought that it was woman’s destiny to love, and that the woman who tried to resist the impulse of the god tried an impossible feat. But there is not one line to show that she fell in love with any man. She may have done so, she probably did so, but there is no clear proof. There is only one reference to a man, and it is most likely that she is celebrating not her own passion, but the love of one of her girls. And if she wrote many a hymn to the golden-throned Aphrodite, she wrote also hymns to the chaste Artemis, and prayed to the chaste Graces.
But when we pass from her contemporaries to the Athenian comic writers, all is changed. No fewer than six comedies, written by six different poets, bore her name and exhibited her loves, and four other plays probably treated the same subject. In these she was represented as loving a poet who died before she was born, and two poets who were born after she died. But especially she fell into an infatuated love at the age of fifty for a kind of mythological young man who was gifted by Aphrodite with the power of driving any woman he liked into desperation for him. Old Sappho became desperate according to these poets, and plunged into the sea to cool this mad passion; but whether she ever reached the bottom, no comic poet or subsequent historian has vouchsafed to tell us. All these villanous stories, which gathered vileness till, as Philarète Chasles remarks, they reached a climax in Pope, seem to me indicative that she ventured on some bold innovations in regard to her own sex which shocked the Athenian mind. And perhaps confirmation is added to this by the statement in the Parian marble, though the document is often untrustworthy,[40] that she was banished and fled to Sicily. She may, indeed, have taken part in some of the numerous political movements which agitated her native island, but it seems more likely that she would give offence by trying to strike off some of the restrictions which in her opinion harassed or degraded her sex.
CHAPTER V.
ATHENIAN WOMEN.
We come now to the Athenians. The phenomenon that presents itself here is as peculiar and striking as anything we have yet examined. In Athens we find two classes of women who were not slaves. There was one class who could scarcely move a step from their own rooms, and who were watched and restricted in every possible way. There was another class on whom no restrictions whatever were laid, who could move about and do whatever seemed good in their own eyes. And the unrestricted would, in all probability, have exchanged places with the restricted, and many of the restricted envied the freedom of the other members of their sex. We proceed to the explanation of this phenomenon.