The story goes that once upon a time Aphrodite, goddess of love, disguised as an aged woman, was gallantly ferried across to Lesbos by a young waterman of the name of Phaon. In reward she bestowed upon him marvellous beauty and irresistible charm. Of him, the fable tells, Sappho became enamoured to the point of frenzy, and, unable to win his heart, she resolved to attempt the last and most desperate cure known for her disease. Away in the Ionian Sea was the jutting rock of Leucas, and it was believed that those who cast themselves down from that cliff into the sea either ended their miseries in death or rose from the waters cured of their malady. What became of Sappho when she took that “lover’s leap” may be found narrated by Hephæstion. It is given in Addison’s 233rd Spectator. “Many who were present related that they saw her fall into the sea, from whence she never rose again; there were others who affirmed that she never came to the bottom of her leap, but that she was changed into a swan as she fell, and that they saw her hovering in the air under that shape. But whether or no the whiteness and fluttering of her garments might not deceive those who looked upon her, or whether she might not really be metamorphosed into that musical and melancholy bird, is still a doubt among the Lesbians.” Well, let us share the Lesbian doubt, and a little more. Suffice it to say that, though this story, which has been elaborated by the fancy of Ovid, appears to have been known in some shape to Menander and other comic poets of Athens, there is absolutely no trace of the name of Phaon or of anything connected with him in any fragment of Sappho. Nor was there likely to be, seeing that he is in all probability but another avatar of the mythical youth Adonis. More interesting is it to observe that the rock of desperation is called “Sappho’s Leap” unto this day. Unfortunately we do not know when or by whom it was so baptized.
Of Sappho’s personal appearance we have no certain knowledge. More than four centuries later a philosopher named Maximus Tyrius says that she was considered beautiful, “though” short and dark, and hence is prompted Swinburne’s assumption—
“The small dark body’s Lesbian loveliness
That held the fire eternal.”
If this be true, she was sufficiently unlike the conventional ideal of Lesbian beauty. Her contemporary Alcæus speaks of her “sweet smile,” and Anacreon, in the next generation, of her “sweet voice.” Later writers of epigrams, who can hardly have known much about the matter, call her “bright-eyed,” or “the pride of the lovely-haired Lesbians,” but those are as likely as not mere descriptive guesses of the kind in which poetical fancy may pardonably indulge. If we meet with the untranslatable adjective kalê applied to her by Plato, we have to remember that it is a stock epithet of admiration for a writer of charm and genius, and in such cases contains no reference whatever to beauty of person.
What we really know best of Sappho’s life is that she was acknowledged the choicest spirit of her time in music and poetry, and that, whether as friendly guide or professional teacher or something of both, she gathered about her what may be variously called a coterie, academy, conservatorium, or club, of young women, not only from Lesbos itself but from other islands, and even from Miletus and the distant Pamphylia. Sometimes they were called her “companions,” sometimes her “disciples.” One of them, Erinna of Telos, herself became famous, but unhappily survives for us as a lyrist only in an inconsiderable line or two.
Sappho appears to have taught these damsels music and also the art of poetry, so far as that art is teachable. She appears, moreover, to have taught them whatever charms and graces of bearing and behaviour were most desired by women, whether in their social life or in their frequent appearances in religious or secular processions and ceremonies. There exists a short fragment in which she derides the rusticity of the woman who has no idea how to hold up her train about her ankles. In another place she bids one of her maidens—
“Take sprigs of anise fair
With soft hands twined,
And round thy bonny hair
A chaplet bind;
The Muse with smiles will bless
Thy blossoms gay,
While from the garlandless
She turns away.”
It has often been observed that the relations of Sappho with the young women Erinna and Atthis and Anactoria resembled those of Socrates with the young men Alcibiades and Charmides and Phædrus. But it has apparently not been also pointed out as a parallel that, three centuries later, there similarly gathered about the maître Philêtas, in the isle of Cos, a school of young poets, among whom were no less persons than Theocritus, Asclepiades and Aratus.
The peculiarity of Sappho’s coterie lay to the general mind in the fact that it was a club of women. And here we must handle with brief and gentle touch, but with no false reserve, a topic which no discourse on Sappho can shrink from facing. The reputation of Sappho and her comrades has long been made to suffer from what is probably, and almost certainly, a cruel injustice. Partly through the social depravity of the later Greek and Roman, partly through taking too seriously the scurrilous humours of the comic dramatists of Athens, many ancients and most moderns have formed concerning that Lesbian school a notion which in all likelihood does bitter wrong to Sappho, wrong to art, and wrong to human nature. At Athens, as among all the Ionian Greeks, and later on among Greeks almost everywhere, a woman of character was kept in a seclusion suggestive of the oriental. The woman most to be praised, Pericles declared, was “she of whom least is said among men whether for good or evil.” This, as we have seen, was not the way of the older Æolian Lesbos, where woman still enjoyed much of the Homeric freedom and independence to go and come and live her life. What more natural than for Athenians to imagine that the famous coterie of Sappho consisted of women of the same class as the brilliant Aspasia? Their very talent was proof enough, for the Athenian housekeeper who passed for wife made no pretensions to literature and art. What more natural also than for an Athenian playwright, like him of the Ecclesiazusæ, or “Women in Parliament,” to find scandalous comedy in the Précieuses of Lesbos? Again, the poems of Sappho are nearly all poems of love, and to the ordinary Greek, especially of a later date, it was unseemly for modest women to acknowledge so positive a passion. An Elizabeth Barrett Browning would have received no countenance from the Athenian Mrs. Grundy. The truth seems to be that Lesbos in the year 600 B.C. was in this respect socially and ethically almost as different from the Athens of two hundred years later as the emancipated young woman of America is different from the dragon-guarded Spanish maiden of Madrid.
We may pass by other considerations which might be urged, but it is no surprise that the false notion of Sappho, constructed by decadent Greeks and refined upon by the vice of the Romans, should do her special harm in the days when paganism gave way to Christianity. Among the many works destroyed by the unco’ guid in the early Byzantine days were the poems of Sappho—destroyed the more savagely because that particular pagan, who so passionately invoked the Queen of love, was a woman, and woman’s ideal place was then the cloister. Unhappily certain moderns, who are anything but unco’ guid, have carried on the wrong in a different way, and, for example, the title Sapho of Daudet’s sketch of mœurs Parisiennes is a choice which may pardonably stir the ire of any Hellenist.