The First Poets Read online

  Alcaeus was regarded as an undisputed classic and his poems were subjected to the scrupulous and methodical editing of one of the scholars at the great library in Alexandria around 200 BC. Aristophanes of Byzantium49 began the task, and, forty years later, Aristarchus completed it. They divided the poems into ten books, it seems (there are no references to books after volume ten), dividing them not as Sappho’s editors did, in accordance with prosodic form and genre, but rather according to subject matter.

  The first poem in the first book of Sappho opens with a dedicatory invocation to Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus; Alcaeus’ may have begun with an invocation to Apollo, son of Zeus. This symmetry between them is significant. It is useful to read Sappho and Alcaeus together if we wish to guard against some of the “excessive readings” of Sappho that modern critics can offer. If a genuinely radical feminist reading of Sappho is possible, for example, if there is a discernible difference in kind between Sappho’s verse and that of her male contemporaries, would the confusion between fragments of her oeuvre and those of her contemporaries exist? The fact that Sappho’s and Alcaeus’ lines can effectively be interchanged in so many instances, and not only when the poems have for their occasion the civic disturbances of Mytilene, would seem to tell against a rigorous feminist reading. So too does Alcaeus’ celebration of women and woman, in terms not remote from Sappho’s. He also writes one poem50 in the voice of a woman—or is the poem in fact by Sappho?

  We learn indirectly, from the second-century AD prosodist Hephaistion (On Critical Signs), something about the manuscript tradition in which the poems of Alcaeus and the other early poets were written down on papyrus in Alexandria and elsewhere. “Among lyric poets, if a poem is mono-strophic, a paragraph sign marks the end of each strophe. The coronis or curved flourish is at the end of the poem … An asterisk is generally used if the following poem is in a different metre, as in the monostrophic poems of Sappho, Anacreon and Alcaeus …”51

  What matters to poetry readers is form, prosody and the moments of felt visualisation that stay in mind, whether they come to us in Greek or in English translation. The cicada, for example, “pours ceaselessly its pure singing from beneath its wings, as burning summer …”52 And in the fourth century AD, the rhetorician Himerus in his Orations summarises a poem which must have been one of the most perfect in the melic tradition.53 It was about Apollo, and perhaps stood first in the first book. Apollo returns in the midst of summer to Delphi. “Now summer has come, the very heart of summer, when Alcaeus brings the god home from the Hyperboreans: in the glare of summer and in Apollo’s presence Alcaeus’ lyre assumes a summer wantonness as he sings of the god: nightingales warble the sort of song you’d expect birds to warble in Alcaeus, and swallows and cicadas, declaring not their own circumstances but talking of Apollo in their songs. Castalia streams by in a poetic current, silver waters, Cephisos floods, rising with his waves, like Homer’s Enupeus: Alcaeus, like Homer,54 must grant even to water the sense to register the presence of the god.” We are back to Homer, but more important, we are in a world in which even ostensibly inanimate things like water, which we believe has movement but no life, are imbued with sense, enough to attest to the presence of the god.

  XII

  Sappho of Eressus

  It is Sappho whom you cover, Aeolian earth, she who among the immortal Muses

  Is renowned as the mortal Muse …

  … Winding the three-part thread,

  Fates, on your spindles, was there a reason you did not spin for her a frayless thread,

  She who composed eternal offerings for the Heliconian Muses?

  ANTIPATER OF SIDON, C. 100 BC,

  Testimonium 27 in the Palatine Anthology

  Gaius Verres was a despicable public administrator. Appointed propraetor1 of Sicily from 73 to 71 BC, he outdid his predecessors in avarice and the injustice of his regime. The young Cicero, already an experienced advocate and familiar with Sicily, where he had been quaestor in 75 BC, was retained by the people of the island to press charges against Verres. Keen to weaken the interests of the corrupt old order and improve the government of the province, Cicero could not have wished for a better illustration than Verres of the system’s unaccountability, its perviousness to human shortcomings. In a devastating preamble, he summarised the charges he intended to level against the defendant, who, rather than face the force of Cicero’s onslaught, packed his bags and went into exile.

  “Packed his bags” is too modest an expression for what he did. In fact, he took away in his caravan to long exile in Massilia “half the wealth of Sicily,” a collection of treasure so valuable that Antony himself coveted it and had Verres’ name added to the list of the proscribed. (Cicero’s name, as fate would have it, appeared on the same proscription list.) Verres, it is said, was murdered, demonstrating how a larger consumes a smaller cupidity.

  The people of Syracuse had set up in the town hall a statue of “the Tenth Muse,” as Plato called her,2 the poet Sappho, carved by Silanion in the fourth century BC, “so perfect, so gracious, so meticulously finished,” Cicero said. This famous piece was among the works of art that Verres carted off, though he failed to carry off the plinth with its inscription, hence his theft was itself monumental and is known forever. The statue has vanished altogether.

  Why is the most famous poet of Lesbos, an island so far to the east that it almost abuts Turkey, associated with Syracuse and Sicily, a sea and a half away? Was this first, greatest Greek woman writer driven there by love, exile, the colonial programme of her city? Did marriage, or an attempt to flee marriage, take her so far from home? Was her presence in Sicily a legend merely? And what had she to do with Epirus, on the Greek west coast, and did she plunge to her death, ballasted by a broken heart?

  Verres stole the statue, but an image of Sappho survives in Munich, on a crater, or wine-mixing bowl, attributed to the Brygos painter, from about 470 BC.3 It shows her contemporary Alcaeus with a harp, his bearded face concentrating on the music he is making, while Sappho looks back at him over her shoulder. She responds to what he is playing, judging from the way her body is inclined to sway into a dance, but she restrains herself. This is not the woman described in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus from around AD 100 as “despicable and very ill-favoured, of dark complexion and very short.”4 This scrawled caricature of Sappho reflects a judgement on her “base” moral character, the stunted body mirroring a perverted spirit.

  Later writers5 say that Sappho invented a type of lyre, the pectis, and the plectrum.6 She and Anacreon certainly mentioned the baromos and the barbitos (Ezra Pound refers to “Sappho’s barbitos” in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” a satire and lament for the decline in culture, Sappho being a high-water mark). Other ancient instruments included the magadis, the trigonon and the sambuke.7 In fragment 214c we hear, fleetingly, “the clatter of castanets.” Historians of music like to suggest that Sappho added not only to the instrumental resources but also to the development of composition. Plutarch declares: “The Mixolydian mode is full of feeling and appropriate to tragedy. Aristoxenus claims Sappho invented it, and the tragic poets learned it from her.”8

  These facts and suppositions are interesting but remote. Why read Sappho today? She is, even among the first Greek poets, an incomparable artist, innovative in her techniques, unique in sensibility. Even in translation it is possible to sense the force of her thinking, the way in which she feels a way through experience with the special language that poetry devised. She brings this language, in the strict prosodies she invented, and with a subtle sense of phrasing and the sounds words make, a quite perfect “pitch” when it comes to the modulation of vowels and the patterning of appropriate consonants, as close as a language can come to the experiences of which she writes. Even when her language draws on conventional elements—the moon, the sea, time passing—she imparts to them a sense of the contingent world, of a voice which inhabits a pulsing body, a body which is alive in time.

  The mysterious first-century AD book
entitled Longinus on the Sublime, addressed to the unknown author’s friend Postumius Terentianus, is a fine anthology of quotations and penetrating criticism, possessing a directness and intimacy we miss in turgid grammarians. “Are you not amazed?” he exclaims, and we are. He preserves a substantial fragment of Sappho’s most famous poem, imitated by the Roman poets and translated by many European and American writers.9 The poem is composed in the eponymous Sapphic stanza, in which the emphases are distributed quite strictly in the pattern outlined. “Where,” asks On the Sublime, “does Sappho best show her qualities? In her skill in choosing and combining the crucial and the unbridled accompaniments [of the madness of love].” He is interested in how she reifies the senses, so that she can freeze and burn, be irrational (even mad) and sane, at the same time: “we witness in her not singled out emotion but a confluence.” His version of the poem begins, “To me he appears as blessed as the gods.” There is a variation preserved elsewhere which makes the opening more forceful still: “To himself he appears more blessed than the gods.”10 Love is real, but its reality is subjective and confined. This is one of Sappho’s themes. William Carlos Williams gets closest, among the moderns, both to the tenor of the poem and to the metre:

  Peer of the gods is that man, who

  face to face, sits listening

  to your sweet speech and lovely laughter.

  It is this that rouses a tumult

  in my breast. At mere sight of you

  my voice falters, my tongue is broken.

  Straightway, a delicate fire runs in

  my limbs; my eyes

  are blinded and my ears thunder.

  Sweat pours out: a trembling hunts

  me down. I grow paler

  than dry grass and lack little of dying.

  That grass at the end can be read differently: Davenport and other translators insist that the jealous speaker is grass-green with envy. And there is the fragment of another line that Williams, like most translators, omits because it mars the lyric closure—quite effectively, in fact. Davenport renders it, “But endure, even this grief of love.”

  Something remarkable happens when Sappho says, in West’s translation, “You came, and I was longing for you; you cooled my heart which was burning with desire.”11 The beloved arrives, even unasked, seeming to anticipate the lover’s need. Such a use of language is enactive, bringing the subject and object into a tense and whole harmony of being. The lines survive because Julian the Apostate, the Roman emperor and cousin of Constantine who reverted to pagan Hellenism when he came to power, quotes them in a letter to the neo-Platonist Syrian philosopher Iambicus in the fourth century AD: some of Sappho’s language of love can be invested in mystical and philosophical themes. There are passages, however, which belong only and potently in the realm of human desire and fulfilment. “Desire has shaken my mind, like a wind that thrashes mountain trees.”12 Those who are untouched by love, human or divine, are to be pitied, Artemis for example: “Love (that loosens the limbs) never visits her.”13

  “That loosens the limbs”: the compound word lusimeles combines lusi, which in other combinations suggests relaxing, easing, even (for childbirth) dilating, bringing peace, freeing from exhaustion, and meles, which means limb but also comes to imply melody, tune; the phrase contains everything from the melting power of love to the movement—almost inadvertent—into dance. She uses the phrase again. Hephaistion of Alexandria in the second century AD quotes it in his Handbook of Metres to epitomise a particular prosody:14 “Once more love that loosens the limbs makes me quiver all over: the irresistible one, both kind and unkind.”15 Was Hephaistion himself moved when, into his dry book of definitions, he introduced this grain of ancient, living passion?

  Words of one of her poems, or a corruption of them, survive on an amphora attributed to Euphronios (around 510 BC, some forty years after the poet’s death). They emerge as song from the lips of a full-featured, beardless young man who plays his harp, and the letters ascend in a curl around his face and head, a sort of faint halo-scroll. Could this be Cybisthus, or Execestides,16 the nephew of the ruler, poet and sage Solon of Athens, Sappho’s near contemporary? When the boy had sung one of Sappho’s exquisite lyrics, Solon commanded that he sing it once again, “so I might take it to heart and die.”17 The youth on the vase is singing mameokapoteo, which may be Sappho’s maomai kai potheo, “I suffer, I desire.”18

  The vase is a lovely evocation of the symposium, the youth entertaining the bearded men with a lyric in the literal sense of the word, a poem sung to the accompaniment of a lyre; the lyre clearly made—as tradition says the first one was—from a good, resonating tortoise-shell.19

  We are used to Greek pot painters naming their characters so that we will not confuse the story they depict. Sometimes on pots that celebrate the pleasures of the symposium they go a step further, making words emerge quite naturally from the symposiast’s mouth: he sings as part of the composition itself. The images speak to us not only as imagery but also as language.

  And her own images? Are they distinct in some way from those of her male contemporaries and successors? Is it part of her sensibility as a woman, or simply an inheritance from Homer, whose world is one of textures, scents and sounds, that she so often dwells upon the specifics of cloth, of apparel, the things which women make and with which they make themselves beautiful to others, to one another? The gods and goddesses are generally well turned out when they appear: they glow in their skin and in their accoutrements. Pollux in his Vocabulary says Sappho was the first poet to use the word clamus in poetry, meaning “mantle” or “robe.”20 He also quotes a line, “and dressed every inch of her in soft shag” (pieces of close-woven linen).21 This detail is extremely specific. She talks of hand cloths which are used as head scarves.22 A one-word fragment survives,23 beudos, or “shift,” which Pollux says is the same as kimberikon, “a short diaphanous dress”; she speaks, too, of the gruta, or “vanity-bag.”24

  She talks of the Graces’ arms as being “rosy,”25 which is striking and humanising, until we find her calling Dawn—sometimes “golden-sandalled”26—“rosy-armed” as well, perhaps remembering Homer’s rosy-fingered dawn, and the Moon too is rosy-fingered. Is the rosy-fingered moon a wry reversal of the Homeric epithet? In fragment 92, the few remaining opening words reveal an autumn wardrobe: robe, saffron, purple robe, cloak, garlands … purple.

  A fascination with textures and elements of dress is certainly a mark of Sappho, whose poems have a specific quality greater, in relation to the object world, than Alcaeus’ and most of her contemporaries’. For her the physical world exists, and though elements in it are emblematic and stand for other things, they retain their primary character as well. Such features respond well to feminist criticism, and yet Homer’s poetry would render the approach an even richer yield. Where direct thematic parallels might be thought to exist between Homer and Sappho, a difference of tone, as much as of scale, is evident. One poem evokes a happy return to Troy, when Hector brought his beloved Andromache back from Cyprus as his bride.27 It is a wedding poem, like so many of Sappho’s, but also a kind of anti-Iliad or anti- Odyssey. No singer of the song would have been unaware of the later story of which this joyful chapter was a prelude. There is no war as such in Sappho, except a sweet engagement of hearts and bodies.

  What of her own character? She does not have a “voice” or a marked personality in the way that modern poets seek to do, often fabricating an identity through eccentricities of language. There is nothing deliberately “I am” about Sappho, whatever we make of the feelings her poems convey. Yet from the many tones audible in her work we can deduce a complex and lively imagination. The first poem in the traditional sequence of her work, a modern editor surmises, is quoted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in On Literary Composition. It begins with a highly formal invocation of Aphrodite: “Sumptuously throned,” “immortal.” Soon the goddess is off her pedestal and ad dressing Sappho familiarly, a little impatiently, because again the poet i
s invoking her not as a mere formality but to enlist her aid in winning, or winning back, the affections of a girl who has stopped or not started loving her.

  Love gives her authority and makes her larger-spirited than others, so she can address an uncultured woman, probably rich, on the subject of her mortality and the afterlife, with an acerbity worthy of Archilochus.

  When death comes, there you’ll lie, and in due course

  No memory of you, no desire: you never risked

  Plucking Pierian roses. Invisible also in the halls of hell,

  You’ll wander back and forth alone among the ghosts.28

  She can be sarcastic, too, to a daughter of the house of Polyanax.29 And in fragment 68, the missing words and breaks cannot conceal the fact that there is considerable anger in what we overhear, as it were through the wall of time. Even here, even in the fragmentary flow that we have, the poem is not arrested on a single note of feeling; there appear to be changes in tone, which provide the poem’s narrative and its occasion. It survives on a papyrus with other fragments which may relate to the same theme, that of one of Sappho’s girls choosing “intimacy with ladies of the house of Penthilus.” It would seem that Sappho is trying to patch up a relationship between two of her girls, one of whom has let her eye wander into the enemy’s camp.

  What in Homer is simile in Sappho becomes a matter of metaphorical language, sometimes personification, not familiarising but humanising, making clear the intimate connection between human endeavour and natural rhythms and patterns: “Hesperus, gathering everything the bright Dawn scattered, you call home the sheep, call home the goat, you call home the child to its mother.”30 The Greek use of syntactical and verbal repetitions is lovely, and its effect trails into even a literal English rendering. Byron teased out these two Greek lines to eight. Another poem evokes the apple and the apple of the eye. Dante Gabriel Rossetti renders it thus: