The special pride of Lesbos was in its music and poetry. In the language of the legend, when that magic singer Orpheus had been torn to pieces in Thrace, his head—with, as some say, his lyre—was carried “down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore.” On the coins of Mitylene, as on the flag of Ireland, may be seen a harp. The first great name in the musical history of Greece is that of the Lesbian Terpander. It is not indeed a probable story that he was the first to increase the strings of the lyre from four to seven, but it is practically certain that he both improved that instrument and invented new forms of composition to embody a lyrical idea. Another world-known poet and musician who shed glory on Lesbos was Arion. Of him in later days the story grew that, when he was thrown overboard by pirates, a dolphin, which had been charmed by his melodies, bore him upon its back safe to the Tarentine shore.
In Lesbos, as in every part of Greece, there were abundant demands upon musician and poet. Every occasion of worship, festivity, and grief required its song. The gods were hymned by groups at their altars and by white-robed maidens in processions; at weddings the hymeneal chorus was chanted along the street, and the epithalamion before the doors of the bridal home; at every banquet were sung lively catches and jocund songs of Bacchus; every season—spring, summer, harvest—had its popular ditty, exultant or pathetic; almost every occupation, of herdsman, boatman, gardener, was beguiled with melody; at the coming of the first swallow, as on the old English Mayday, the children sang the “swallow-song” from house to house. And let it be remembered that the Greeks had none of our modern tolerance for a song of which the words were nought and the tune everything. To them the thought, the sentiment, was first; the melody was simply its proper vehicle. Italian opera, when not a word is intelligible, would have seemed to them a strange anomaly. To them mousikê was the “art of the Muses,” and this meant literature no less than minstrelsy. The poet, unless, like Burns, he wrote his verses to existing tunes, was his own composer. In either case he was poet first and foremost.
Now for generations the songs for special purposes had been shaping themselves on special lines. To use a phrase of Aristotle, experience had found out the right species to fit the case. There were sundry recognised stanzas and metres for a processional, a hymeneal, or a dirge. In most cases, therefore, the task of a new poet was to write new words; the melody would, as in the case of Burns, almost find itself. Nevertheless the complete poet could not dispense with an elaborate training in music. To invent beautiful variations of existing tunes was part of his glory; he must at least write words which should sing themselves to the melody he selected. “Melodies” is the word, for the Greeks knew practically nothing of harmonies. Their songs were sung in unison, or simply with an octave interval when men sang with women or with boys. The accompanying instrument was generally the lyre, or one of many stringed instruments akin thereto; sometimes it was the so-called flute, which was in truth a clarinet. Whatever their musical deficiencies, it has been maintained by competent authorities that in nicety of ear for pitch and time the training of the Greeks incomparably surpassed the modern. Be that as it may, it must never be left out of sight that, when a Lesbian wrote a song, it was in the first place as perfect a poem as he could create, and in the second it was meant to be sung, not merely to be read. Shelley’s Ode to a Skylark is consummate literature. Yet we may doubt if it could ever be sung, and assuredly it was not written to that end. On the other hand, the songs of Moore are often but sickly stuff to read, but they lend themselves perfectly to those touching Irish airs, to which, by the way, the Lesbians seem to have been akin in a peculiar tone of plaintiveness. A Greek lyric aimed at combining the literary mousikê of Shelley’s Ode with the songful mousikê of Moore. It is in the perfection of this combination that Sappho excels all women who have ever written verse.
Where song was for generations so abundant, it follows that there was floating about among the people many an old ballad or favourite ditty whose author had been long forgotten. Numbers of these Volkslieder, or snatches of them, lay, sometimes with consciousness and sometimes unrealised, in the memory of every child of Lesbos. The artistic poet did not scorn them; he feared no charge of plagiarism if he adopted and adapted them; he often acted as Burns acted with the ballads of Scotland; he took them, gave them that marvellous and inexplicable touch of finality which only genius can impart, and so made them his for ever. This also did Sappho do, and her verses, when she deals with well-worn themes, are beyond question often fed with the hints of older nameless songsters.
There is one department of lyric verse in which Lesbos stood supreme, and Sappho supreme in Lesbos. It is the poetry, not of religion or marriage, of the banquet or the seasons, but of personal emotion; the verse of the “lyric cry,” which tells of the writer’s own passion, its waves of joy and sorrow, love and hate. It is the monody, the verse sung, not by a gathered company, but from the one overflowing heart, the song best represented at Rome by Catullus, and in modern times by Burns or Heine. For most of her poems in this kind there is no reason to suppose that Sappho relied upon any promptings but those of her own soul. She took the floating rhythms of the ballads, modified them, and into their mould she poured verse which, as George Sand said of her own writings, came from “the real blood of her heart and the real flame of her thought.”
And here at length we come to the poetess herself. Into this land, devoted to poetry, to music, to flowers, and so regardful of loveliness that a public “prize of beauty” was annually competed for in the temple of Hera, was Sappho—or Psappha, as she apparently called herself—born in the latter part of the seventh century before Christ. Our ancient authorities are sufficiently in agreement as to her date, and we may lay it down that she was in her prime about the year 600 B.C., or nearly a hundred and fifty years before that great period of Athenian literary culture which is represented by Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The ascertainable facts of her career are miserably few, and concerning those matters which are in debate as to her life and character the present exponent must be permitted to express simply his own views, premising that they have been formed with all due and deliberate care.
Whether the names of her parents were or were not Scamandronymus and Clêis is an unimportant question. We may simply remark that both those names are of aristocratic colour, and both are more or less authenticated. Whether again she was born at Mitylene itself, or at the smaller town of Eresos, is of little moment, since we know that at any rate Mitylene was the scene of her life’s work. That she belonged to the ranks of the well-born, and that good looks were in the family, is proved by the choice of her brother Larichus as cup-bearer of Mitylene, an office which was bestowed only on handsome and noble youth. That at least one member of the family possessed considerable means is known from the rather romantic history of a second brother, Charaxus. This young man sailed away in his ship, laden with the famous Lesbian wine—the innocentis pocula Lesbii of Horace—as far as Egypt. There he traded in that merchandise at the Pan-Grecian free-town of Naucratis, which had been established in the Delta under a permission somewhat similar to that by which settlement was first allowed in the treaty-ports of China. Here, however, he fell in love with the world-famed demi-mondaine whose name, Doricha, is less familiar than her sobriquet Rhodôpis—“complexion of a rose”—and his gains were spent in chivalrously ransoming that lady from a degrading slavery. It is of interest to know, though the verses are not preserved to us, that his poetess sister reproved him sharply for this conduct. Her “love of love” did not blind her to the claims of family honour and dignity. It is gratifying to learn that at a later time she expresses her reconciliation to her brother in a poem which, like those of Herondas and Bacchylides, has but recently been disgorged, though in a sadly mutilated state, by the omnivorous sands of Egypt. Sappho herself is said to have married a wealthy islander of Andros, and to have had at least one daughter, whose name, according to Greek custom, was the name of the grandmother, Clêis. It is apparently this Clêis whom she is addressing in a fragment which we may venture to translate thus——
“I have a maid, a bonny maid,
As dainty as the golden flowers,
My darling Clêis. Were I paid
All Lydia, and the lovely bowers
Of Cyprus, ’twould not buy my maid.”
An inscription on the Parian marbles informs us that, at some uncertain date, Sappho fled, or was driven, into banishment to Sicily. There is nothing unlikely in the circumstance, and it is worth noting that more than 500 years later, in the days of Cicero, Verres, the governor of that island, appropriated a bronze statue of Sappho, wrought by a Grecian master and greatly prized at Syracuse.
As Aberglaube which has gathered about Sappho’s history, there are two strange legends, or rather there is one strange legend in two parts, which must here be told briefly.