DR. CHRISTINA CLARK
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I. Sappho and her Poetry
“Violet-haired, holy, sweetly smiling Sappho” - Alkaios (fr.384)
Sappho of Mytilene, a city on the Ionian island of Lesbos (six miles off the coast of Lydia, modern day Turkey), was a poet and musician so talented that later Greeks called her the “tenth Muse” (Palatine Anthology 9.506). An aristocrat who lived in the late seventh and early sixth centuries B.C.E., Sappho composed poetry in Aeolic Greek set to the lyre (although we have lost the musical accompaniment). We have no reliable evidence for her biography other than these few facts. At this time Greece had what we call a "song culture," that is, a culture which conveyed its important information and cultural values through song. Nine papyrus rolls of Sappho's songs existed in antiquity, arranged by the Alexandrian scholars according to poetic meter; sadly, today only one song survives complete – the rest are fragments, or lost. Editions of Sappho now have been culled from quotations in other authors’ works and from papyrus finds. However, we can nevertheless glimpse the breadth of Sappho’s versatility in the fragments that remain. Her subjects are common ones in archaic poetry: marriage, cult activities, love, politics, praise, and blame. Like the male poets contemporary with her, Sappho made songs that emphasized the beauty of nature and the human emotions nature evokes. Some songs were for public performance, others for private. We are not sure who sang Sappho’s songs. Perhaps choruses of girls performed her songs for religious and public rituals, while solo performers sang the songs for private occasions.
To us Sappho is important not just because of her poetry's outstanding technical and aesthetic quality, but also because she was a woman. While we have much literary evidence concerning women in antiquity, the majority is male-authored. A few fragments of poetry survive of other female poets such as Corinna, but Sappho is our main female voice from ancient Greece. Her songs open a window for us into the world women inhabited in archaic Greece’s largely sex-segregated society.
The spaces of archaic Greek life were gendered. Men spent most of their time outdoors playing sports, hunting, participating in politics, law, and business. They did, however, also spend time at home attending private drinking parties in special dining rooms reserved for men and their guests. Often, these men’s dining rooms were separated from the main house, with their own private entrances off the streets, to prevent respectable women from coming into contact with men not of their family. In contrast, the majority of women spent most of their time indoors, making cloth, doing domestic tasks and raising children. They got out of their houses primarily to participate in religious rituals. In sum, men and women spent their days in different places doing different things.
Sappho's songs entice us into the female world of domestic concerns and religious ritual. In fragment 98, the speaker recounts her mother’s advice on hair decorations: purple headbands are lovely, except for girls with lighter hair, who should instead wear flower wreaths. We read of incense burning, flowers blooming, cool water running; we enjoy the sight of leaves shivering and feel the wind blow in fragment 2, a song that invokes Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic love:
Sappho of Mytilene, a city on the Ionian island of Lesbos (six miles off the coast of Lydia, modern day Turkey), was a poet and musician so talented that later Greeks called her the “tenth Muse” (Palatine Anthology 9.506). An aristocrat who lived in the late seventh and early sixth centuries B.C.E., Sappho composed poetry in Aeolic Greek set to the lyre (although we have lost the musical accompaniment). We have no reliable evidence for her biography other than these few facts. At this time Greece had what we call a "song culture," that is, a culture which conveyed its important information and cultural values through song. Nine papyrus rolls of Sappho's songs existed in antiquity, arranged by the Alexandrian scholars according to poetic meter; sadly, today only one song survives complete – the rest are fragments, or lost. Editions of Sappho now have been culled from quotations in other authors’ works and from papyrus finds. However, we can nevertheless glimpse the breadth of Sappho’s versatility in the fragments that remain. Her subjects are common ones in archaic poetry: marriage, cult activities, love, politics, praise, and blame. Like the male poets contemporary with her, Sappho made songs that emphasized the beauty of nature and the human emotions nature evokes. Some songs were for public performance, others for private. We are not sure who sang Sappho’s songs. Perhaps choruses of girls performed her songs for religious and public rituals, while solo performers sang the songs for private occasions.
To us Sappho is important not just because of her poetry's outstanding technical and aesthetic quality, but also because she was a woman. While we have much literary evidence concerning women in antiquity, the majority is male-authored. A few fragments of poetry survive of other female poets such as Corinna, but Sappho is our main female voice from ancient Greece. Her songs open a window for us into the world women inhabited in archaic Greece’s largely sex-segregated society.
The spaces of archaic Greek life were gendered. Men spent most of their time outdoors playing sports, hunting, participating in politics, law, and business. They did, however, also spend time at home attending private drinking parties in special dining rooms reserved for men and their guests. Often, these men’s dining rooms were separated from the main house, with their own private entrances off the streets, to prevent respectable women from coming into contact with men not of their family. In contrast, the majority of women spent most of their time indoors, making cloth, doing domestic tasks and raising children. They got out of their houses primarily to participate in religious rituals. In sum, men and women spent their days in different places doing different things.
Sappho's songs entice us into the female world of domestic concerns and religious ritual. In fragment 98, the speaker recounts her mother’s advice on hair decorations: purple headbands are lovely, except for girls with lighter hair, who should instead wear flower wreaths. We read of incense burning, flowers blooming, cool water running; we enjoy the sight of leaves shivering and feel the wind blow in fragment 2, a song that invokes Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic love:
(Come) here to me from Crete to this holy temple,where is your charming grove of apple-trees, and altars smoking with frankincense,
and in it cold water sounds through apple branches,
and the whole land is shadowed by roses,
and from shimmering leaves sleep drops down;
in it a meadow grazed by horses blooms with spring flowers, and the winds blow gently.
There you, Kypris, having taken up gold cups delicately pour nectar, mingled with festivities.Sappho’s poems in general evoke the senses and strong emotions such as desire, joy, grief, and longing. She achieves an incantatory effect by playing with sound, using alliteration, assonance, rhythm and word repetition. Anne Carson incorporates such effects in her translation of fragment 112, addressed to a bridegroom:
Blest bridegroom, your marriage just as you prayed has been accomplished
and you have the bride for whom you prayed
gracious your form and your eyes as honey:
desire is poured upon your lovely face
Aphrodite has honored you exceedingly.
What makes Sappho's poetry different from that of the male poets of her time is her portrayal of women in love. Sappho's lovers are active subjects who desire, rather than just passive objects who are desired. They pursue their beloveds, as Sappho illustrates in fragment 16, in which she uses the famous Helen of Troy as an example of the power of erotic love. While most male authors blamed Helen for the war, they also portrayed her as an object of male desire. Sappho instead shows us an actively desiring Helen, who abandons her husband, daughter, and parents to be with her beloved Paris:
Some say a host of horses, some say an army of infantry, and some
say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing on the black earth.
But I say it is whatever one loves. Easy to make this entirely understood
by all. For Helen, who surpassed mortals by far in beauty, left her
noble husband and went sailing to Troy, nor did she remember at all
her child or her dear parents, but ] led her astray . . .] for lightly . . .
Sappho’s speakers also give us first person expressions of desire for women by women. For example, song 16 continues: “. . . reminded me of Anaktoria, who isn’t here. I would rather see her sexy walk and the shining sparkle of her face than Lydian chariots or armed infantry.” Another famous example of this is in poem 1 (the only complete poem we have), in which the female speaker “Sappho” prays that Aphrodite will spare her heartbreak by making the woman she desires return her feelings.
II. The Construction of Sexuality in Ancient Greece
Ancient Greek ideas about the nature of sexuality and sexual norms are different from most modern ones, which divide people into two groups: heterosexuals and homosexuals, based on whether they have sex with others of the same sex or not. The Greeks did not have the idea of "sexual orientation.” One could say that the Greeks were omnisexual, rather than heterosexual or homosexual. They thought of sex in terms of power. Men, because they performed all the political, military, and judicial functions of the state, were held to be the ones in charge. Therefore, adult men were expected to perform the active role in sex - to be the penetrators. Those without civic power were expected to be passive recipients of sexual activity - the penetrated. In classical Greece, it was a normal thing for adult men to have sexual relationships with teenage boys who had not yet grown beards. These boys were presented as sexually passive. In return, the older men helped the boys learn how to become men in the community. Later on, when the boys matured and entered the male spheres of law, politics, and the military, their former adult lovers became their patrons. Sexual activity between two adult men was considered unacceptable because it meant that one of the men was behaving passively - taking on the powerless role appropriate to women, minors, and slaves. To be perfectly clear: the man who penetrated another man was considered perfectly normal; the adult man who submitted to penetration was considered a sexual deviant.
In terms of female sexuality, Greek men were mainly concerned that their wives bear only their own children. For aristocratic men, especially, who had the most to lose, the fear that their wives might bear other men’s sons led them to keep their women largely shut up at home, out of the sight of other men. Since female homoerotic relationships could not cause pregnancy, Greek men were not very concerned about them. All Greek men were expected to marry and produce male heirs to inherit the household and carry on the family name and honor; all Greek women were expected to marry and provide heirs for their husband's househhold. Therefore even if, as we see in some of Sappho's songs, a woman had a homoerotic relationship with another woman, it did not mean that she would not marry, or was not married with children. She almost certainly would, or was.
In terms of female sexuality, Greek men were mainly concerned that their wives bear only their own children. For aristocratic men, especially, who had the most to lose, the fear that their wives might bear other men’s sons led them to keep their women largely shut up at home, out of the sight of other men. Since female homoerotic relationships could not cause pregnancy, Greek men were not very concerned about them. All Greek men were expected to marry and produce male heirs to inherit the household and carry on the family name and honor; all Greek women were expected to marry and provide heirs for their husband's househhold. Therefore even if, as we see in some of Sappho's songs, a woman had a homoerotic relationship with another woman, it did not mean that she would not marry, or was not married with children. She almost certainly would, or was.
III. Sappho's Reception in Western Scholarship
Curiosity about Sappho has increased over time because of the fragmentary condition of her poems, the lack of any real information about her life, and the implications of homoeroticism in her work. Both scholarly and literary traditions reflect an interest in Sappho because her poetry relegates men to peripheral roles, and concentrates on women. In addition, as I mentioned earlier, it is different from that of the male poets of her time because she portrays women lovers as active subjects, rather than passive objects. Of course, interpretations of Sappho's poetry have been influenced by readers' cultures and historical contexts: “every age creates its own Sappho” (Parker 1993: 12). Here are a few examples. To fifth–century Greek philosophers and playwrights, Sappho was the sublime poet, the tenth muse, an authority on matters of love in general. To writers in Late Antiquity, she was a priestess of song and the paradigm of a woman who died for love - she supposedly jumped off a cliff out of love for a ferryman named Phaon. In the Renaissance, Sappho was of great interest mostly for her life rather than her poetry. She was portrayed at this time as a contented heterosexual. In 1681 Madame Dacier published an edition of Sappho's poetry with a biographical introduction stressing her heterosexuality. She claimed that Phaon the ferryman rejected Sappho when she was a middle-aged widow and no longer attractive; the disappointed Sappho then killed herself. She denied homoerotic affairs in Sappho's poetry, for she wanted Sappho to be "morally blameless." In 1782 Alessandro Verri published Le Avventure di Saffo, poetessa di Mitilene. In this novel, Sappho served as an emblem of unhappy female heterosexual love; her poetry was of secondary importance. Verri’s novel was an enormous success, generating at least fifteen Italian editions and being translated into many languages. In addition to scholars and writers, artists too were interested in Sappho. For example, Gustave Moreau painted four images of Sappho from 1864-1876, which portray the stories of Sappho as a beautiful, young, lovelorn heterosexual.
Only forty fragments of Sappho’s extant poetry are long enough to interpret. These fragments have posed a problem for scholars: how should we piece them together? In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars focused on textual and philological reconstruction and analysis, trying to make sense of the scrappy remains of Sappho's poetry. Like others before them, they constructed a biography of Sappho based on the content of her poems. Some declared her to be a teacher in a religious cult for young girls, in honor of Aphrodite - this interpretation rationalized away the homoerotic aspects of her poetry. In response to this type of scholarship, Mary Barnard (34) wrote:
Only forty fragments of Sappho’s extant poetry are long enough to interpret. These fragments have posed a problem for scholars: how should we piece them together? In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars focused on textual and philological reconstruction and analysis, trying to make sense of the scrappy remains of Sappho's poetry. Like others before them, they constructed a biography of Sappho based on the content of her poems. Some declared her to be a teacher in a religious cult for young girls, in honor of Aphrodite - this interpretation rationalized away the homoerotic aspects of her poetry. In response to this type of scholarship, Mary Barnard (34) wrote:
I wanted to hear
Sappho's laughter
And the speech of
Her stringed shell.
What I heard was
Whiskered mumble-
Ment of grammarians:
Greek pterodactyls
And Victorian dodos.
Scholars stopped being concerned with reconstructing the text of Sappho's poems to a large extent when Edgar Lobel and Denys Page published a definitive edition in 1955. After this, scholars began to read Sappho's poetry for its content in relation to the Greek literary and mythical tradition. More recently, since the 1970s, feminist and gender theory have provoked discussions about how Sappho's gender has both shaped her poetic discourse and influenced the social context of her poetry.
In the 1990s, Holt Parker published a very influential article, "Sappho Schoolmistress," in which he argues that the canonical image of Sappho presiding over a school of virgins, inherited from Victorian scholars, gave rise to many related speculations about Sappho as a music teacher and sex educator for a circle of well-born girls. Instead of imagining such positions for Sappho, he suggests that we strip away our own notions of gender roles and see Sappho's social role as a poet, who, like her male counterparts, had an association of friends; friends who were also aristocratic, musical, and concerned with erotic love. He asks: "Since she does the same things as other poets and writes the same things as other poets, why is she not treated like all other poets? This rhetorical question has an answer: scholars for the most part are still refusing to treat Sappho as a poet and instead are turrning her into a . . . freak of nature" (1993: 342). It is certainly true that Sappho writes about the same sorts of things as her male poetic counterparts, but she often does so from a different perspective.
Most scholars would agree that the prejudices about women, sexuality and poetry in a given culture determine the ways in which Sappho's texts are understood, edited, and translated. While I agree with Parker's arguments, I must emphasize that Sappho is now required reading for many university literature classes not simply because of the outstanding technical and aesthetic quality of her poetry, which is among the best ever composed by anyone in any culture at any time, but also because she was a woman, and because she gives an alternate viewpoint into ancient Greek society.
IV. Sappho’s Love Poetry
Because Sappho’s love poetry has generated such interest in modern times, let us focus now on that. Many of her poems evoke the aesthetics that trigger desire for the Greeks, such as the charming laughter of young women (fr. 31), the sight of a dress swirling around a girl's ankles (fr. 22) and a girl's sexy walk (fr. 16). Fragment 31 is one of Sappho's most famous homoerotic poems. It illustrates two main features of Sappho's overall poetic style: an evocation of sensory experiences and the portrayal of strong emotions.
He seems to me to be equal to the gods, that man, whoever sits opposite you
and listens to you speaking so sweetly and close to him, and hears too
your tempting laughter. Truly that makes the heart (kardia) in my breast pound,
for when for a moment I look at you, I cannot speak at all; my tongue breaks,
and a subtle flame runs immediately beneath my skin. My eyes see nothing
at all and a roaring fills my ears. Sweat pours down me, and shaking seizes
me all, paler than grass I am, and little short of dead I seem to me. But all
must be endured since …Selecting, combining, and exaggerating the body’s reactions to erotic desire, Sappho nevertheless leaves her speaker’s intellect intact and unaffected. In other lyric songs, poets explicitly say that they are maddened by love, that they have lost their reasoning capacity, their wits (the Greek word is phrenes). The phrenes are vulnerable to many things, including erotic desire. Love steals, shakes, conquers, engulfs, and flutters the phrenes by heating them up. For example, the male poet Archilochos writes: “Such was the desire for sex that twisted beneath my heart, poured a great mist over my eyes, and stole the tender phrenes from my breast” (191 W). Sappho herself varies the internal organ affected by erotic love, occasionally invoking the phrenes, the wits. In fr. 96, the speaker says: “Often she wanders to and fro, remembering gentle Atthis, and desire gnaws her tender phren.” In fragment 47, she tells us that "Eros shook my mind (phrên) like wind falling on oaks down the mountain." She observes, in fragment 48: "You came, and I was mad for you. But you cooled my phrenes, burning with desire." It could be that in fragment 31, Sappho leaves her speaker’s wits unaffected to mock gently her society’s gender stereotypes. The stereotype that women were sexually insatiable and uncontrollable both explains and justifies women’s confinement to the domestic sphere, and exclusion from the political. Crafting traditional viewpoints and forms (such as prayer formulas and epic conventions) into spontaneous expressions of emotion, Sappho cleverly reworks them in subtle ways.
Perhaps fragment 168B can hint at Sappho's overall aesthetic and emotional power as translated by poet and classicist Anne Carson: "The moon has set, and Pleiades: middle night, the hour goes by, and I sleep alone." This poem reminds me very much of a tenth century C.E. poem written by the Japanese poet Ariwara Narihira, one of the most famous in the Kokinshu. The poet remembers a night in which he had made love with a palace lady. Soon after, she moved away without telling him. The next year, on a spring night when the plum blossoms were blooming, he lay on the floor of the room until the moon sank low in the sky, and said: "Is this not the moon? And is this not the springtime, the springtime of old? Only this body of mine the same body as before . . . (747). Both poets use the night and the night sky to evoke human loneliness and the passage of time. In another poem, Sappho captures the emotional ambivalence and nostalgia of a bride: “Virginity, virginity, where are you gone leaving me behind? No longer will I come to you no longer will I come” (fragment 114, trans. Anne Carson). Such fragments drive home the tremendous loss to world literature of the majority of those nine books of Sappho’s poems.
Dash N N, Antarleena Sappho-Life & Times of Sappho(Oriental Academy of Arts & Letters, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, 751007, India, 2008)
Painting at the right: Sappho, by Mengin(1877)
