I won't be forgotten

 

 

She worshipped Aphrodite, the last child of the most ancient of all sentient beings.

As a baby, Zeus, not unlike Moses or William the Conqueror, needed to be hidden from his enemies in a wicker basket and grew up in the care of a human foster mother. How he possibly could think of Aphrodite as his own daughter, when in fact she was his aunt or even grandaunt, is one of the mysteries of mythology. We know how susceptible to the charms of women the philandering Lord of the Pantheon could be, and to charm and enslave under her spell was of course Aphrodite's domain. So much so, that Homer is depicting her as helping out Zeus' lawful wedded wife with a tip or two on how to seduce her husband. Yet if blood ties meant anything in her world, Aphrodite was a sister of the titans, the most ancient enemies of Zeus.

So Sappho's attachment to Aphrodite may have had a much older pedigree than we suspect reaching all the way back to the Great Mother and to the Minoan empire and even farther back to the flat bodied, one dimensional figurines with a square head and three tiny markings for their gender.

"Aphrodite of the leopard spotted throne, she sings, “eternal daughter of Uranus, you knitter of snares! Don't, I beg you, cow my heart with grief! Come, as before, when you heard me calling from the distance, and come to listen, and step out from your father's house, and hitch to your golden chariot the winged team, whose beautiful thick-feathered wings beat heaven’s air like oars and carry you to a swift arrival on the dark earth. Again, my Lady, dispense your blessing, smile your immortal smile and ask what is ailing me, why I call on you again.”

"Ask what distracts my heart, what its greatest desire might be. Ask who it is that needs persuading to open up to my affection. Speak to me and say: ‘Who, Sappho, is unfair to you? Let her (sic!) walk, she will soon run after you. And not accepting your gifts, she will one day give you hers. And if she won't love you now, she soon will be in love, albeit unwillingly.’ So if you come, do it now Aphrodite! Relieve this intolerable pain! What my heart is hoping to happen, make it happen; pull your weight on my side!" (Sappho).

To the Romans Aphrodite was known as Venus. But Venus, despite of her charms, was not all caprice and frolic and had her share of domestic duties. Even dictators and emperors laid claim on her patronage. The last great temple in her honor was consecrated by Emperor Hadrian, not far from the Coliseum, in 135 AD., yet the observances in Venus' service had already become a far cry from the original "Aphrodisiacs" in Athens and Corinth, where the worshipper allegedly had intercourse with Aphrodite's priestesses.

The remains of her work seem to indicate that Sappho, too, not only had been such a priestess, but also had officiated to both sexes: "You know the place! So depart from Crete and come to us. We wait for you at the pleasant grove, the spot so sacred to you. Smoking incense rises from the altar, the cold stream murmurs under the apple branches, a young rose thicket is spilling shade over the ground and from quivering leaves descends soothing sleep. Horses grew sleek in this meadow and spring flowers and dill are scenting the air. Queen! Cyprian! Fill our gold chalices with affection and stir it into clear nectar." (Sappho).

At the beginning of every autumn Aphrodite and her retinue left her native Cyprus - Sappho often addresses Aphrodite as "the Cyprian" - and held court at Mount Aetna in Sicily. With her traveled the three graces, Aglaea ("Splendor"), Euphrosyne ("Mirth"), and Thalia ("Good Cheer"), and her son Eros (or Cupid), together with the young man’s sweetheart, Psyche. It was when the locals turned out to celebrate the night of Venus' arrival. Eros would be practicing his archery and in the moonlit night the virgins cried out in their lovers’ embrace under the olive branches.

Even the goddess herself could fall in love with a mere mortal, or make the mortal fall in love with her. "At noontide when the earth is bright and a flaming heat is beating straight down, the shrill cricket is singing in its wings, and without warning, like a whirlwind that swoops down on an oak, infatuation is shaking my heart and Earth with many flowers puts on her spring embroidery" (Sappho). The most tragic of Aphrodite's escapades was her infatuation with Adonis. It caused jealousy among the immortals, and Artemis, not satisfied to take turns with others, invited the young man to a hunting party. Whether by ruse or accident, the Caledonian Boar killed Adonis in the prime of his beauty. Since then, at the end of the harvest, the women of Judah and Lebanon “wept over Adonis' death” (Ezek. 8:14) and carried in procession a long pole, adorned with wreaths, to sent it floating in the sea. “Young Adonis is dying! O Cytherea, what do you want us to do? Make fists and beat your breasts girls and tear your dresses!" (Sappho).

Of Sappho's work only 270 lines have reached us, most of them incomplete. Only three poems consist of more than one stanza, the rest are phrases and short quotes. "Although they are only breath, the words I command are immortal," Sappho said, and in the 3rd century BC. the Great Library in Alexandria still listed nine volumes of her work, some three hundred songs, litanies, and obituaries such as this: "In memory of Pelagon, the fisherman. His father Meniscus laid down here a fish-basket and an oar, the tokens for a life without fortune" (Sappho).

In the esteem of the ancients, Sappho was the poetess in the same sense as Homer was the poet. In as late as the fifth century AD., Christodorus still saw Sappho's statue in the gymnasium of Zeuxippus at Byzantium.

"Tell everyone! Today, I shall give my best song for the pleasure of my friends. You know the place. In the twilight of spring under the full moon. As if around an altar, the girls will take their positions and move their feet to the rhythm, just like the tender feet of Cretan girls, when they assemble to dance around an altar of Venus, and crush a circle in the soft flowers and the grass" (Sappho).

Saphho’s unashamed praise of sensuality - "we shall enjoy it. As for him who is finding fault, may silliness and sorrow overtake him!" - was completely lost on St. Paul, a militant male chauvinist if ever there was any, but even the old Taliban could brighten up and quote from Sappho with approval: "panta kathara tois katharois, unto the pure all things are pure" (Titus 1:15). A purity that became incomprehensible for the Christians of a later age. The Christian Taliban Tatian (110-180 AD.), made it his mission to drag this icon of Hellenistic civilization through the filth of his own sweaty fantasies.

He called Sappho a "love-crazed fornicator who even sings about her own licentiousness." The attitude caught on.

Under Emperor Hadrian (117-138 AD.) the grammarians still continued writing commentaries on Sappho’s prosody and in the next century, Athenaeus said that he, too, had learned "all her songs" by heart. But in 380 AD., Bishop Gregory Nazianzen (330-390 AD.), a man I once used to give credit for learning and culture, then put his parishioners to work and had them collect all the copies of Sappho's work they could find. He burned the lot (Girolamo Cardan, 1501-1576). What had escaped the holy arsonist fell in neglect and the papyrus was recycled for tax receipts and the wrappings of mummies. But 700 years later, in 1073, according to Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609), there was still enough left of Sappho's work to send a refreshing breeze through the stuffy scriptoria in the monasteries. So the prudish Pope Gregory VII and his counterpart in Constantinople joined forces and burned the remains of Sappho and Alcaios, it is stated, "to celebrate the reunification of the two Churches." The new found union lasted eight years.

Personally, I think it is more likely, that the Pope thought to burn the old witch in effigy as part of his campaign to enforce celibacy among his clerics (W. E.H. Lecky, 1838-1903, History of European Morals). Either way, only one, very incomplete manuscript escaped and surfaced 300 years later in Florence, together with the notes of an anonymous critic from the first century AD., by now known to us as Longinus.

This connoisseur of the well turned phrase praised Sappho's never failing felicity to create emotion and passion around the symptoms which accompany infatuation and love in real life and Longinus demonstrated at an example “the skill with which she selects and combines the most striking and intense of those elements" (Longinus, On the Sublime). It is her most famous poem:

"He is more than a hero, he is a god in my eyes, the man who is allowed to sit at your side. He who hangs at your lips and listens to the sweet murmur of your voice, the inviting laughter that spurs my heartbeat. I meet you and I suddenly can't speak, my tongue is tied. A thin flame runs under my skin; I see nothing, hear only my own pulse drumming, I drip with sweat. I tremble, my body has the shakes and I turn paler than dry grass. At such times death is not far from me" (Sappho).

"Is it not wonderful,” says Longinus, “how she summons at the same time, mind, body, hearing, tongue, sight, color, all as though they have a life of their own? She feels torn between the sensations, the chills, the heat, raves and reasons as one who is on the point of death and who is beside herself. Her representation gives not just one emotion but the whole assembly. Every lover experiences signs as these, but the supreme merit of her art is the skill with which she chooses and combines the most striking elements."

True enough, but hands up, who has noticed that it is the woman that is the subject of the poetess’ infatuation, not the man? The poem has a long history of its own. In his Life of Demetrius, Plutarch (45-125 AD.) is telling us the story of the infatuation of Antiochus (324-261 BC.) with Stratonice. Unfortunately the young woman was already married: to his father. Antiochus’ condition soon received the right diagnosis by a reader of Sappho’s poem at his father’s court. The courtier noticed the symptoms, the faltering voice, the burning blush, the languid eye, the sudden sweat, the racing pulse, and he drew his conclusions. It was a story with a happy ending. The man persuaded the old king to give up his wife and let his son marry Stratonice.

Apparently nobody asked the woman.

Apart from what she is telling us herself, we know very little of Sappho's life. She grew up and died in Lesbos, an island with steep slopes and sweltering olive groves. Like Virgil I noticed the vines, "which trail like ivy on the ground" (Georgics) and my wife and I strolled along the slapping surf that cautiously is probing the dozing beaches. I headed the old songstress’ warning: "If you are squeamish don't prod the pebbles in the sand" but when she asks: "Do you remember the golden broom growing on the beaches at the sea?" I just can’t remember for the world of it.

There is an orthodox monastery up in the hills; in the winding village lanes a mob of sleepy cats survey the blazing scene from whitewashed garden walls. The people were as friendly and hospitable as in Sappho’s days - "if you come I shall put out new pillows for you," she writes to a visitor - and the tourists point their cameras at a half finished sculpture in a long abandoned marble quarry. I made friends among the locals. I learned to play backgammon and it was a good time to get a seamless tan. It was my first honeymoon and Sappho would have smiled at us: "Yes it is pretty, but come, dear, need you pride yourself that much on a ring?"  And when the "stars covered their bright faces as the lovely moon was at her roundest and lit the earth with her silver" we went to our room and "night rained her thick dark sleep" upon our tiredness.

I photographed with disapproval the brutal killing of an octopus, but had no problem eating it. I even earned a little money and published in the local newspaper my photographs from the National Holiday, with parades and marching bands. It occurred to me why Homer in his epics never uses the word "blue." On a clear day when the wind is still, the sea at dawn is black and mother of pearl pink.

"Some say a cavalry corps, some that infantry, others that the swift oars of our navy is the finest sight on earth; but I say it is the one you love. Has not Helen - she who had the flower of all the world’s manhood on parade - chosen as first among men the one who laid Troy's honor in ruin? Bent to his will, forgetting the love due to her own blood, even to her child, she followed this man. So, Anactoria, you too, in that distant place, will forget us, but the fall of your footstep and the blink from your eyes has moved me more than all the glitter of Lydian horse or the armored march of mainland infantry" (Sappho).

Sappho (631-572 BC.) was a member of the local aristocracy. Her brother, Larichus, was a public cup-bearer at Mitylene, an office held by youths of noble birth. Sappho addresses the members of her own class with an air of slightly ironic familiarity: "Greetings to Gorgo! I profusely salute, madam, the descendant of many great kings." But at one point the bitter feuds between gentry and the rising powers of the commoners hit close to Sappho's home. "Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting a justifiable means of self-defense. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder. Revenge was held of more account than self-preservation" (Thucydides 471-400 BC.). There was a massacre and in 592 BC. "the hearts in the pigeons grew cold and their wings dropped to their sides" (Sappho).

By then Sappho had become a mother. "Darling I have a small daughter, her name is Cleis. She is my golden flower; I wouldn't trade her for all of Croesus' kingdom even with your love thrown in," she says. We know nothing of the father. So Sappho took her daughter by the hand, emptied her jewelry box, and went into exile. "When Aristocles reigned over Athens, Sappho fled from Mitylene and sailed to Sicily," records the chronicler from the 3rd century BC. Of her life in Sicily nothing is known. "As for the exiles, I think, they had never found you, Peace, more difficult to endure!" she says.

Ten years later, Sappho and her family returned to Lesbos; a long time, when people used to die young and not every of the exiles made it home alive: "We take the urn with us on board the ship. It has an inscription. ‘This is the dust of little Timas. Unmarried and before her time she was led into Persephone's black bedroom.’ Home is far from here and girls of her age mourn and with a sharp blade cut soft curls from their hair" (Sappho).

Of Sappho's parents only Herodot (485-425 BC.) mentions a name for her father, Scamandronymus. That’s all we know of him. To her mother Sappho refers in a fragment: "It's no use Mother dear, I can't finish my weaving. You may blame Aphrodite. Gentle as she seems, she almost kills me with longing for that boy." We also know that Sappho had dark hair in contrast to the golden blond of her daughter: "Don't ask me what to wear, I have no embroidered headband from Sardis to give you, Cleis. Once I wore one and my mother said that in her days a purple ribbon looped in the hair was high style indeed. But we were dark; a girl whose hair is yellower than torchlight should dress her hair with nothing but fresh flowers" (Sappho). Herodot also has preserved a few anecdotal memories of Sappho's two brothers, Charaxus and Larichus. Charaxus was a wine merchant who exported his goods to Naucratis in Egypt (now Nebireh). The Egyptian authorities kept foreigners under strict curfew, and for centuries Greeks were permitted to carry on their commerce on Egyptian soil in only one panhellenic emporium. Sappho's brother fell in love with a slave girl of great beauty, Doricha, and bought her freedom for a great sum of money. Herodotus then says that she remained in Egypt, and "being very lovely, acquired great riches for a person of her condition."

Sappho was not amused and had a few choice words for this Doricha: "As you love me Cyprian, make her find even you too bitter! Stop her loudmouthed bragging, don’t allow her to say 'See! Twice now, Doricha has received the kind of love she likes!'" Who that second lover might have been, has been the stuff of gossip ever since. Strabo (BC. 63-24 AD.) and Aelian (170-235 AD.) tell a story about Pharaoh Psammetichus (the Pharaoh Hophra from Jeremiah 44:30) saying that in 588 BC. he held court in his capital, when suddenly, out of nowhere, a circling eagle dropped a lady's pretty sandal into the Pharaoh's lap. The king took this as an omen and had the whole country search for the sandal's owner. They found Doricha, who had lost her shoe to the same bird in a public bath. The Pharaoh married his Cinderella and they lived happily ever after until the Persians invaded Egypt and this last of the indigenous pharaohs was sent into retirement.

Meanwhile Sappho was becoming famous across the Aegean. A still parochial fame, carried by word of mouth from migrating members of Sappho’s inner circle.

"Not a word of her, I wish I were dead. When she left, she wept so much; she said to me, ‘we must endure this parting, Sappho; I go against my wishes.’ I said, ‘go, and be happy and remember, you know whom you leave in the shackles of longing. Before you forget me, think of our offerings to Aphrodite, of all the loveliness that we shared, all the violet tiaras, braided rosebuds, the dill and crocus we twined around your neck, the myrrh poured on your head. Think of the girls on soft mats with their precious things beside them. Remember that no other voice chanted in a chorus but ours, none of the groves in spring bloomed without song" (Sappho).

The intimate highlights come as a surprise. Only a century after Homer’s congested formality, Sappho loosens up and, with grace as much as ease, opens a window to the daily life of her people. "Even in Sardis Anactoria will continue thinking of us, of the life we have shared, when you appeared to her as the Goddess incarnate, and she was in love with your singing. Now with the Lydian women it is her turn to stand out, just as the red-fingered moon at sunset outshines the stars around her and spreads her light everywhere across the salty sea and the wealth of fields in bloom. Her dew pours down and refreshes the roses, the delicate thyme and the sweetness of clover in bloom. There she wanders aimlessly, with gentle Attis in her thoughts; her heart heavy with longing in that little breast. She cries out aloud: ‘come!’ We know she does; the night has a thousand ears for that cry across the shining divide of the sea" (Sappho).

Being a priestess, Sappho uses to communicate with Aphrodite in ecstatic visions: "Cyprian, in my dream the folds of a purple head scarf did cast shadows on your cheeks, the same that Timas once had sent from Phocaea, a timid gift. Then, the morning, standing by my bed on golden heels, awoke me at this very moment." Her poems give us the names of many friends and foes, and it is not always sunshine and honeymoon.

"It was you, Attis, who said, ‘Sappho, if you don’t get up and let us look at you I shall never love you again! Get up, unleash your suppleness, lift your Chian nightdress and, like a lily leaning into the spring, come and bathe. Cleis will bring down your best purple frock and a yellow tunic from the chest of clothes. You throw over a cloak and wear a crown of flowers in your hair. One of the gods has been good to us. Today we shall go to Mitylene, our favorite city, with Sappho, the loveliest of its women, walking among us like a mother who came from exile, with her daughters around her.’ So why have you forgotten everything?" (Sappho).

Apparently not everybody shared Sappho's benign projection of herself - "Really, Gorgo, my disposition is not all spiteful, I have a childlike heart. But strange to say, people I treated well are those who do me the most injury now" – and in reality she was not the one to take kindly to personal insult: "But you, you monkey face, I was in love with you when you were still an ungracious child, and now after all this, Attis, you hate even the thought of me and dart off to Andromeda?"

This Andromeda was Sappho's favorite person she loved to hate: "I hear that you caught fire over Andromeda, this hayseed in hayseed finery, even without having her to lift the skirt over her ankles."

And that's pretty much all the positive knowledge we have. Back in 582 BC. parochial life in Greece seemed deceptively idyllic. At sunset we hear Sappho singing: "Shepherd of the evening, Hesperus! You herd homeward whatever the morning’s light has dispersed. You herd the sheep and goats, herd children home to their mothers." Her world seemed to breathe in a slow and meditative rhythm. History was something that happened across the Aegean, in Palestine and Iraq. It was the time when the Hebrews as a nation became extinct, and the exiles in Babylon became the founders of a new and cosmopolitan form of Judaism.

It was during Sappho's lifetime that young Jeremiah made his first appearance at the Jewish Court in 628 BC. and she just had returned from exile in Sicily when Nebuchadnezzar began laying siege to Jerusalem and captured the city in 587 BC. Sappho also was the exact contemporary of King Croesus, who reigned over Lydia from 628 to 570 BC.

Ominously it was also during her lifetime that the King of Judah invented censorship. "The king sent Jehudi to fetch the roll and he read it in the ears of the king, who sat in the winterhouse and there was a fire on the hearth burning before him. And when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire, until all the roll was consumed” (Jerem. 36:19-23).

Babylon was a cosmopolitan metropolis, the hub of the world, the oyster in heaven, but this was far away, and at home things were not all that idyllic, as Sappho’s lyrics crack it up to be.

In reality the Greek were a loquacious lot, forever divided in blood feuds between the clans of the aristocracy and self-styled tyrants, who held a precarious mandate based on referenda and silent support by the commoners: "The cry of political equality for the people on one side, and of a moderate aristocracy on the other, provided each side with the fairest promises, but sought prizes for themselves in those public interests which they pretended to cherish, and, recoiling from no means in their struggles for ascendancy engaged in the direst excesses, making the party caprice of the moment their only standard. Meanwhile the moderate citizens perished between the two." (Thucydides).

The unending vendettas and frequent banishments paused only when the Greeks assembled in Olympia.

Being a Greek meant to be young and fit and in an unending competition for this one moment of glory. Women competed as well and Sappho had her own stake in the games - "I’ve instructed Hero, who was a track star from Gyara, and did rather well" - which must have been the 42nd Olympiad (612-609 BC.) according to Suidas.

It was the hour of Solon of Athens (638-558 BC.), the father of our liberties, the man who gave to the world the gift of democracy, although his reforms did not immediately lead to changes. In 560 BC. Peisistratos (602-527 BC.) promised the people of Athens prosperity and security. They accepted his dictatorship and he forced Solon to leave the city. After the tyrant’s death, Peisistratos’ successors turned to Sparta for help, and the Spartans were only too willing to intercede and keep the people down. But 64 years after Sappho's death, in 508 BC. the commoners of Athens finally rose in arms, expelled the garrison of their Spartan puppeteers from the Acropolis and recalled the exiles. Cleisthenes (570-507 BC.), who himself was an aristocrat, then restored Solon’s charter and initiated for Athens a century of unsurpassed glory, giving living proof, that democracy really works.

Not surprising it caused a stampede among tyrants and oligarchs, who ran for political cover under the ankle long cassock of the King of Persia. The king and Sparta then combined their efforts to extinguish the flame. They almost succeeded. Athens remained a democratic state until 267 BC., still the longest living democracy in history. Would Sappho, the aristocratic society woman, have approved?

It is not unthinkable to see her agree with Euripides (480-406 BC.) that there is "nothing more hostile to the state than a despot," because "allow a tyrant to rule and the law resides in his keeping alone and there is no law common to all."

But for Euripides the issue was equality: "when the law is put in writing, rich and poor alike have equal justice, and the weaker prevails over the stronger if justice is on his side" (Euripides, The Suppliants). For Sappho, on the other hand, equality didn’t mean a whole lot, if anything at all, she was not exempt from the prejudices of her class. We even catch her snubbing an upstart: "Rich as you are, death will be the end of you. Afterwards no one will remember or even want to remember you. You had no share in the Pierian roses. You just dart about and flitter invisibly among the indistinct dead in the Palace of Hades."

So what seemed from Euripides' perspective to be the "mark of freedom that he who has wholesome counsel gains renown, while he, who has no wish, remains silent, what greater equality can there be?" (Euripides), may have looked from Sappho’s point of view very different and rather a product of the “fatal power of envy, always rebelling against the law and now, as its master, gladly showing itself ungoverned in passion and the enemy of all superiority" (Thucydides). What “superiority” is supposed to mean is of course everybody’s guess.

Sappho fell in love for a last time: "Be kind to me Gongyla. I only ask that you wear at your arrival the cream white dress. Desire darts out to your loveliness and at the sight of you sails in narrowing circles around you. I am glad. I, too, have quarrels with Aphrodite. I pray to her for you to come. With his venom, irresistible and bittersweet, this loosener of limbs, infatuation lunges like a reptile, and strikes me down. Tonight I've watched the moon and then the Pleiades going down. The night is now half-gone. Youth passes, and I am in bed and alone."

The weight of her years began to tell and even in her privileged life occurs the unbearable moment: "Pain has penetrated me drop after drop. At my age, why does the swallow from heaven, the daughter of King Pandion, bring more news to plague me? Of course I love you, but if you love me, marry a young woman! I couldn't stand it to live with a young man, I being older. I have often asked you not to come now, Lord Hermes. You lead home the ghosts. But this time I am not happy; I want to die and see the moist lotus at the banks of Acheron." Like almost everything of her work, these words come from an isolated fragment. The context is lost. There is no way of knowing the cause for her anguish. Was it the loss of a loved one? An incurable illness? Or just the dark side to a manic depressive personality? But we do know that Sappho approached the inevitable with courage and even confidence: "We know this much, death is an evil. We have the gods' word for it, they too would die if death were a good thing. But I shall not complain. The prosperity the golden Muses have bestowed on me was no delusion. Dead, I won't be forgotten. So must I remind you, Cleis, that sounds of grief are unbecoming in a poet's household, such as ours?"

Prophets and "Saviors" come a dime a dozen; we can reinvent Einstein and the infinitesimal calculus, if we have to. We cannot reinvent Sappho and the unique combination of circumstance and time to which her work is giving testimony and which was the seed and soil of her emotional life.

In 1497, in the backyard of Medici's library, Savonarola (1452-1498), another of those superfluously frequent religious radicals and iconoclasts, stood barefoot next to a blazing fire. He hollered up to the windows to toss him the manuscript. A torch could fly through the window, so the intimidated librarian parted with the last remnants of Sappho's work. Since then we have only the quotes from lexicographers and grammarians and the occasional find on a mummy wrapper.

 

© - 1/29/2007 - by michael sympson,

5,150 words, all rights reserved