'God be with his soul! A' was a merry man.'
J. S. COTTON.
1895.
LIFE OF SAPPHO
Sappho, the one great woman poet of the world, who called herself Psappha in her own Aeolic dialect (in fragments 1 and 59), is said to have been at the zenith of her fame about the year 610 B.C.
During her lifetime Jeremiah first began to prophesy (628 B.C.), Daniel was carried away to Babylon (606 B.C.), Nebuchadnezzar besieged and captured Jerusalem (587 B.C.), Solon was legislating at Athens, and Tarquinius Priscus, the fifth king, is said to have been reigning over Rome. She lived before the birth of Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, the religion now professed by perhaps almost a third of the whole population of the globe.
Two centuries have sufficed to obscure most of the events in the life of Shakspere; it can hardly be expected that the lapse of twenty-five centuries should have left many authentic records of the history of Sappho. Little even of that internal evidence, upon which biography may rely, can be gathered from her extant poems, in such fragmentary form have they come down to us. Save for the quotations of grammarians and lexicographers, no word of hers would have survived. Yet her writings seem to have been preserved intact till at least the third century of our era, for Athenaeus, who wrote about that time, applies to himself the words of the Athenian comic poet Epicrates in his Anti-Laïs (about 360 B.C.), saying that he too—
Had learned by heart completely all the songs,
Breathing of love, which sweetest Sappho sang.
Scaliger says, although there does not seem to exist any confirmatory evidence, that the works of Sappho and other lyric poets were burnt at Constantinople and at Rome in the year 1073, in the popedom of Gregory VII. Cardan says the burning took place under Gregory Nazianzen, about 380 A.D. And Petrus Alcyonius relates that he heard when a boy that very many of the works of the Greek poets were burnt by order of the Byzantine emperors, and the poems of Gregory Nazianzen circulated in their stead. Bishop Blomfield (Mus. Crit. i. p. 422) thinks they must all have been destroyed at an early date, because neither Alcaeus nor Sappho was annotated by any of the later Grammarians. 'Few indeed, but those, roses,' as the poet Meleager said, are the precious verses the zeal of anti-paganism has spared to us.
Of Sappho's parents nothing is definitely known. Herodotus calls her father Scamandrōnymus; and as he wrote within one hundred and fifty years of her death there is little reason to doubt his accuracy. But Suidas, who compiled a Greek lexicon in about the eleventh century A.D., gives us the choice of seven other names. Her mother's name was Clēis. The celebrated Epistle known as that of Sappho to Phaon, of which I subjoin a translation by Pope in the Appendix, and which is commonly ascribed to Ovid,[1] says Sappho was only six years old 'when the bones of her parent, gathered up before their time, drank in her tears'; this is supposed to refer to her father, because in fr. 90 she speaks of her mother as still alive.
She had two brothers, Charaxus and Larichus; Suidas indeed names a third, Eurygius, but nothing is known of him.
Larichus was public cup-bearer at Mitylene, an office only held by youths of noble birth (cf. fr. 139), whence it is inferred that Sappho belonged to the wealthy aristocratic class.
Charaxus was occupied in carrying the highly prized Lesbian wine to Naucrătis[2] in Egypt, where he fell in love with a woman of great beauty, Dōrĭcha or Rhodōpis, and ransomed her from slavery for a great sum of money. Herodotus says she came originally from Thrace, and had once served Iadmon of Samos, having been fellow-slave with Aesop the fabulist. Suidas says Charaxus married her, and had children by her; but Herodotus only says that she was made free by him, and remained in Egypt, and 'being very lovely, acquired great riches for a person of her condition.' Out of a tenth part of her gains (cf. fr. 138) she furnished the temple of Apollo at Delphi with a number of iron spits for roasting oxen on. Athenaeus, however, blames Herodotus for having confused two different persons, saying that Charaxus married Doricha, while it was Rhodopis who sent the spits to Delphi. Certainly it appears clear that Sappho in her poem called her Doricha, but Rhodopis, 'Rosy-cheek,' was probably the name by which she was known among her lovers, on account of her beauty.
Another confusion respecting Rhodopis is that in Greece she was believed to have built the third pyramid; and Herodotus takes pains to show that such a work was far beyond the reach of her wealth, and was really due to kings of a much earlier date. Still the tale remained current, false as it undoubtedly was, at least till the time of Pliny (about 77 A.D.). It has been shown by Bunsen and others that it is probable that
The Rhodope that built the pyramid
was Nitocris, the beautiful Egyptian queen who was the heroine of so many legends; Mycerinus began the third pyramid, and Nitocris finished it.
Strabo and Aelian relate a story of Rhodopis which recalls that of Cinderella. One day, they say, when Rhodopis was bathing at Naucratis, an eagle snatched up one of her sandals from the hands of her female attendants, and carried it to Memphis; the eagle, soaring over the head of the king (whom Aelian calls Psammetichus[3]), who was administering justice at the time, let the sandal fall into his lap. The king, struck with the beauty of the sandal and the singularity of the incident, sent over all Egypt to discover the woman to whom it belonged. The owner was found in the city of Naucratis and brought to the king; he made her his queen, and at her death erected, so the story goes, this third pyramid in her honour.
Suidas says Sappho 'married one Cercōlas, a man of great wealth, who sailed from Andros, and,' he adds, 'she had a daughter by him, named Cleïs.' In fr. 85 (cf. fr. 136) Sappho mentions this daughter Claïs by name, and Ovid, in the Epistle already alluded to, also refers to her. But the existence of such a husband has been warmly disputed, and the name (Pēnifer) and that of his country (Virīlia) are conjectured to have been invented in ribaldry by the Comic poets; certainly it was against the custom of the Greeks to amass wealth in one country and go to seek a wife in a distant island. Some authorities do not mention Andros, one of the islands of the Cyclades, but state that Sappho's family belonged to an Aeolian colony in the Troad.
The age in which Sappho flourished is mainly determined by concurrent events. Athenaeus makes her contemporary with Alyattes the father of Croesus, who reigned over Lydia from 628 to 570 B.C. Eusebius mentions her in his Chronicle for the year 604 B.C. Suidas says she lived about the 42nd Olympiad (612–609 B.C.), in the time of the poets Alcaeus, Stēsichŏrus, and Pittăcus. Her own verses in fr. 28 are said to have been written in answer to those of Alcaeus addressing her—
Ἰόπλοκ' ἄγνα μελλιχόμειδε Σάπφοι,
θέλω τι ϝείπην, ἀλλά με κωλύει αἴδως,
'Violet-weaving, pure, soft-smiling Sappho, I want to say something, but shame deters me' (cf. p. 24). Athenaeus says that Hermesiănax, in an elegy (cf. fr. 26), spoke of Sappho as beloved by Anacreon, and he quotes from the third book of some elegiac poetry by Hermesianax, 'A Catalogue of things relating to Love,' these lines of his:
And well thou knowest how famed Alcaeus smote
Of his high harp the love-enlivened strings,
And raised to Sappho's praise the enamoured note,
'Midst