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Uhland (search for this): chapter 11
he general tendency of modern criticism is to deny his existence. Some suppose him to have been a merely mythical being, based upon the supposed loves of Aphrodite and Adonis, who was called by the Greeks Phethon or Phaon. It was said that this Phaon was a ferryman at Mitylene, who was growing old and ugly till he rowed Aphrodite in his boat, and then refused payment; on which she gave him for recompense youth, beauty, and Sappho. This was certainly, Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee, as in Uhland's ballad; but the Greek passengers have long since grown as shadowy as the German, and we shall never know whether this oarsman really ferried himself into the favor of goddess or of dame. It is of little consequence; Sappho doubtless had lovers, and one of them may as well have been named Phaon as anything else. But to lose her fabled leap from the Leucadian promontory would doubtless be a greater sacrifice; it formed so much more effective a termination for her life than any novelist c
Phaedrus (search for this): chapter 11
the reports of Maximus Tyrius, whom Felton strangely calls a tedious writer of the time of the Antonines, but who seems to me often to rival Epictetus and Plutarch in eloquence and nobleness of tone. In his eighth dissertation he draws a parallel between the instruction given by Socrates to men and that afforded by Sappho to women. Each, he says, appears to me to deal with the same kind of love, the one as subsisting among males, the other among females. What Alcibiades and Charmides and Phaedrus are with Socrates, that Gyrinna and Atthis and Anactoria are with the Lesbian. And what those rivals Prodicus, Gorgias, Thrasymachus, and Protagoras are to Socrates, that Gorgo and Andromeda are to Sappho. At one time she reproves, at another she confutes these, and addresses them in the same ironical language with Socrates. Then he draws parallels between the writings of the two. Diotima says to Socrates that love flourishes in abundance, but dies in want. Sappho conveys the same mean
Myrtis (search for this): chapter 11
lf, I must think that he is too easily pleased with the outside of the lady's head, however it may have been with the inside. The most interesting intellectual fact in Sappho's life was doubtless her relation to her great townsman Alcaeus. These two will always be united in fame as the joint founders of the lyric poetry of Greece, and therefore of the world. Anacreon was a child, or perhaps unborn, when they died; and Pindar was a pupil of women who seem to have been Sappho's imitators, Myrtis and Corinna. The Latin poets Horace and Catullus, five or six centuries after, drew avowedly from these Aeolian models, to whom nearly all their metres have been traced back. Horace wrote of Alcaeus: The Lesbian poet sang of war amid the din of arms, or when he had bound the storm-tossed ship to the moist shore, he sang of Bacchus, and the Muses, of Venus and the boy who clings forever by her side, and of Lycus, beautiful with his black hair and black eyes. Carm. 1.32.5. But the name o
Timocles (search for this): chapter 11
ffrontery to set up for the domestic virtues. The stories that thus gradually came to be told about Sappho in later years — scandal at longer and longer range — were simply inevitable, from the point of view of Athens. If Aristophanes spared neither Socrates nor Euripides, why should his successors spare Sappho? Therefore the reckless comic authors of that luxurious city, those Pre-Bohemians of literature, made the most of their game. Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphanes, Diphilus, Ephippus, Timocles, all wrote farces bearing the name of a woman who had died in excellent repute, so far as appears, two centuries before. With what utter recklessness they did their work is shown by their naming as her lovers Archilochus, who died before she was born, and Hipponax, who was born after she died. Then came, in later literature, the Roman Ovid, who had learned from licentious princesses to regard womanly virtue as only a pretty fable. He took up the tale of Sappho, conjured up a certain Pha
Larichus (search for this): chapter 11
hope, in charity, that it was not Scamandronimus. We have no better authority than that of Ovid for saying that he died when his daughter was six years old. Her mother's name was Cleis, and Sappho had a daughter of the same name. The husband of the poetess was probably named Cercolas, and there is a faint suspicion that he was a man of property. It is supposed that she became early a widow, and won most of her poetic fame while in that condition. She had at least two brothers: one being Larichus, whom she praises for his graceful demeanor as cup-bearer in the public banquets,--an office which belonged only to beautiful youths of noble birth; the other was Charaxus, whom Sappho had occasion to reproach, according to Herodotus, 2.135. for buying and marrying a slave of disreputable antecedents. Of the actual events of Sappho's life almost nothing is known, except that she once had to flee for safety from Lesbos to Sicily, perhaps to escape the political persecutions that preva
Ambrose Philips (search for this): chapter 11
hint that she may have written some of her verses in her character of pedagogue, as exercises in different forms of verse. It is as if Shakespeare had written his sonnet, Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? only to show young Southampton where the rhymes came in. Still more difficult is it to determine the same question — autobiographical or dramatic?-in case of the fragment next in length to this poem. It has been well ingrafted into English literature through the translation of Ambrose Philips, as follows:-- To a beloved woman. Blest as the immortal gods is he, The youth who fondly sits by thee, And hears and sees thee, all the while, Softly speak and sweetly smile. 'T was that deprived my soul of rest, And raised such tumult in my breast; For while I gazed, in transport tost, My breath was gone, my voice was lost, My bosom glowed; the subtile feline Ran quick through all my vital frame; On my dim eyes a darkness hung; My ears with hollow murmurs rung. With dewy damps m
Antiphanes (search for this): chapter 11
If Aristophanes spared neither Socrates nor Euripides, why should his successors spare Sappho? Therefore the reckless comic authors of that luxurious city, those Pre-Bohemians of literature, made the most of their game. Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphanes, Diphilus, Ephippus, Timocles, all wrote farces bearing the name of a woman who had died in excellent repute, so far as appears, two centuries before. With what utter recklessness they did their work is shown by their naming as her lovers Archs riddle. There is a feminine creature who bears in her bosom a voiceless brood; yet they send forth a clear voice, over sea and land, to whatsoever mortals they will; the absent hear it; so do the deaf. This is the riddle, as recorded by Antiphanes, and preserved by Athenaeus. It appears that somebody tried to guess it. The feminine creature, he thought, was the state. The brood must be the orators, to be sure, whose voices reached beyond the seas, as far as Asia and Thrace, and brought
Spring (search for this): chapter 11
e the rose their king. It is the ornament of the earth, the glory of plants, the eye of the flowers, the blush of the meadows, a flash of beauty. It breathes of love, welcomes Aphrodite, adorns itself with fragrant leaves, and is decked with tremulous petals, that laugh in the zephyr. Indeed, that love of external nature, which is so often mistakenly said to have been wanting among the Greeks, is strongly marked in Sappho. She observes the vernal swallow and the melodious nightingale, Spring's herald. The moon, she elsewhere says, was at the full, and they [the stars] stood round her, as round an altar. And again, The stars around the lovely moon withdraw their splendor when, in her fulness, she most illumines earth. Of herself Sappho speaks but little in the fragments left to us. In one place she asserts that she is not of malignant nature, but has a placid mind, and again that her desire is for a mode of life that shall be elegant and at the same time honest, the first wi
Rhodes (search for this): chapter 11
is lazuli. This decaying Turkish village of Mitylene marks the site of what was, twenty-five centuries ago, one of the great centres of Greek civilization. The city then covered the whole breadth of the peninsula, and the grand canal, that separated it from the mainland, was crossed by bridges of white marble. The great theatre of Mitylene was such a masterpiece of architecture, that the Roman Pompey wished to copy it in the metropolis of the world. The city was classed by Horace with Rhodes, Ephesus, and Corinth. Yet each of those places we now remember as famous in itself, while we think of Lesbos only as the home of Sappho. It was in the city of Mitylene that she lived and taught and sung. But to find her birthplace you must traverse nearly the length of the island, till you come to Ereso or Eresus, a yet smaller village, and Greek instead of Turkish. To reach it you must penetrate aromatic pine forests, where the deer lurk, and must ascend mountain paths like rocky lad
Felton (search for this): chapter 11
e phrase more or less ardently,--and Plutarch and Athenaeus use similar epithets. But when Professor Felton finds evidence of her charms in her portraits on the Lesbian coins, as engraved by Wolf, I which it had labored for so many centuries, appears to have been no less pure than glowing. And Felton, who is usually not more inclined than becomes a man and a professor to put a high estimate on lons, except Colonel Mure, an Edinburgh advocate, whose onslaught upon Sappho is so vehement that Felton compares it to that of John Knox on Mary Stuart, and finds in it proof of a constitutional hostices it to have been a school of vice. The German professors see in it a school of science. Professor Felton thinks that it may have resembled the Courts of Love in the Middle Ages. But a more reasoncan come within six centuries of the real Lesbian society in the reports of Maximus Tyrius, whom Felton strangely calls a tedious writer of the time of the Antonines, but who seems to me often to riva
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