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Shakespeare (search for this): chapter 11
ve me from anguish, give me all I ask for, Gifts at thy hand; and thine shall be the glory, Sacred protector! It is safe to say that there is not a lyrical poem in Greek literature, nor in any other, which has, by its artistic structure, inspired more enthusiasm than this. Is it autobiographical? The German critics, true to their national instincts, 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, a
Diphilus (search for this): chapter 11
woman who had the effrontery 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, conju
Maximus Tyrius (search for this): chapter 11
of Boston, we can easily conceive of sentimental ardors which Attic comedians would find ludicrous and Scotch advocates nothing less than a scandal. Fortunately we can 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 rival Epictetus and Plutarch in eloquence and nobleness of tone. In his eighth dissertation he draws a parallel between the instruction shakes her mind as the wind when it falls on mountain-oaks. Socrates reproves Xantippe when she laments that he must die, and Sappho writes to her daughter, Grief is not lawful in the residence of the Muse, nor does it become us. Thus far Maximus Tyrius. But that a high intellectual standard prevailed in this academy of Sappho's may be inferred from a fragment of her verse, in which she utters her disappointment over an uncultivated woman, whom she had, perhaps, tried in vain to influence.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (search for this): chapter 11
oats over the scattered lines of a wedding song, for instance, weaving together the phrases and supplying the innuendoes, is enough to rule him out of the class of pure-minded men. But besides this quality of coarseness, he shows a serious want of candor. For though he admits that Sappho first introduced into literature (in her Epithalamia) a dramatic movement, yet he never gives her the benefit of this dramatic attitude except where it suits his own argument. It is as if one were to cite Browning into court and undertake to convict him, on his own confession, of sharing every mental condition he describes. What, then, was this Lesbian school that assembled around Sappho? Mure pronounces 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 reasonable parallel, nearer home, must occur to the minds of those of us who remember Margaret Fuller and
C. T. Newton (search for this): chapter 11
ce of rural Greece; and as a compensation, they make for their husbands such admirable bread, that it has preserved its reputation for two thousand years. The old Greek poet Archestratus, who wrote a work on the art of cookery, said that if the gods were to eat bread, they would send Hermes to Eresus to buy it; and the only modern-traveller, so far as I know, who has visited the village, reports the same excellent receipt to be still in vogue. Travels and Discoveries in the Levant, by C. T. Newton, 1.99. London, 1865. It was among these well-trained women that the most eminent poetess of the world was born. Let us now turn and look upon her in her later abode of Mitylene; either in some garden of orange and myrtle, such as once skirted the city, or in that marble house which she called the dwelling of the Muses. *mousopo/lwZZZ oi)ki/an.> Let us call around her, in fancy, the maidens who have come from different parts of Greece to learn of her. Anactoria is here from Miletus,
Bacchus (search for this): chapter 11
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 of the Greek singer is still better preserved to Anglo-Saxons through an imitation of a single fragment by Sir William Jones,--the noble poem beginning What constitutes a state? It is worth while to remember that we owe these fine lines to the lover of Sappho. And indeed the poems of Alcaeus, so far as they remain, show much of the
Achilles Tatius (search for this): chapter 11
she says, with a touch of higher imagination,-- Hesperus, bringing home all that the light-giving morning has scattered. Grammarians have quoted this line to illustrate the derivation of the word Hesperus; (espe/ra a)po\ tou e)/sw poiei=n pera=n ta\ zw\a, k. t. l. and the passage may be meant to denote, not merely the assembling of the household at night, but the more spiritual reuniting of the thoughts and dreams that draw round us with the shadows and vanish with the dawn. Achilles Tatius, in the fifth century, gave in prose the substance of one of Sappho's poems, not otherwise preserved. It may be called The song of the rose. If Zeus had wished to appoint a sovereign over the flowers, he would have made 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
Theodor Kock (search for this): chapter 11
on einem herrschenden Vorurtheil befreit, Welcker, Kleine Schriften, II. 80. See also his Sappho, a review of Neue's edition of her works, first published in 1828 (K. S., 1. 110), and Sappho unmd Phaon, published in 1863, a review of Mure and Theodor Kock (K. S., V. 228). from which all modern estimates of Sappho date, was first published in 1816, under the title, Sappho vindicated from a prevailing prejudice. It was a remarkable instance of the power of a single exhaustive investigation to clovelorn lady, residing on an island whose every shore was a precipice, and where her lover was at hand to feel the anguish of her fate, would take ship and sail for weary days over five hundred miles of water to seek a more sensational rock. Theodor Kock, the latest German writer on Sappho, thinks it is as if a lover should travel from the Rhine to Niagara to drown himself. Are not Abana and Pharpar rivers of Damascus? More solid, negative proof is found in the fact that Ptolemy Hephestion,
Ephippus (search for this): chapter 11
had the effrontery 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 c
Cupid (search for this): chapter 11
imes for the poetry of Sappho. In respect to the abundance of laurels, she stands unapproached among women, even to the present day. Aelian preserves the tradition that the recitation of one of her poems so affected the great lawgiver Solon, that he expressed the wish that he might not die till he had learned it by heart. Plato called her the tenth Muse. Others described her as uniting in herself the qualities of Muse and Aphrodite; and others again as the joint foster-child of Aphrodite, Cupid, and the Graces. Grammarians lectured on her poems and wrote essays on her metres; and her image appeared on at least six different coins of her native land. And it has generally been admitted by modern critics that the loss of her poems is the greatest over which we have to mourn in the whole range of Greek literature, at least of the imaginative species. Now why is it that, in case of a woman thus famous, some cloud of reproach has always mingled with the incense? In part, perhaps, b
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