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Byron (search for this): chapter 11
he moon and stars look down. I should render it thus:-- The moon is down; And I've watched the dying Of the Pleiades; 'T is the middle night, The hour glides by, And alone I'm sighing. Percival puts it in blank verse, more smoothly:-- The moon is set; the Pleiades are gone; 'T is the mid-noon of-night; the hour is by, And yet I watch alone. There are some little fragments of verse addressed by Sappho to the evening star, which are supposed to have suggested the celebrated lines of Byron; she says,-- O Hesperus, thou bringest all things, Thou bringest wine, thou bringest [home] the goat, To the mother thou bringest the child. Again 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
Archestratus (search for this): chapter 11
ere are more traces of the ancient beauty of the race; and the women on festal days wear long white veils edged with a crimson border, and look, as they follow one another to church, like processional figures on an antique urn. These women are permitted to share the meals of their husbands, contrary to the usual practice 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
Herodotus (search for this): chapter 11
: 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 persecdmit the culture and the women also. Nowhere else in Greece did women occupy what we should call a modern position. The attempt was premature, and the reputation of Lesbos was crushed in the process. Among the Ionians of Asia, according to Herodotus, the wife did not share the table of her husband; she dared not call him by his name, but addressed him with the title of Lord ; and this was hardly an exaggeration of the social habits of Athens itself. But among the Dorians of Sparta, and pr
Hesperus (search for this): chapter 11
gone; 'T is the mid-noon of-night; the hour is by, And yet I watch alone. There are some little fragments of verse addressed by Sappho to the evening star, which are supposed to have suggested the celebrated lines of Byron; she says,-- O Hesperus, thou bringest all things, Thou bringest wine, thou bringest [home] the goat, To the mother thou bringest the child. Again she says, with a touch of higher imagination,-- Hesperus, bringing home all that the light-giving morning has scatteredHesperus, 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 c
Amphis (search for this): chapter 11
spasia than a learned 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
Margaret Fuller (search for this): chapter 11
class of young pupils for instruction, so much the worse. He could no more imagine any difference between Sappho and Aspasia, than could a Frenchman between Margaret Fuller and George Sand. To claim any high moral standard, in either case, would merely strengthen the indictment by the additional count of hypocrisy. Better Aspasit 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 her classes. If Sappho, in addition to all that the American gave her pupils, undertook the duty of instruction in the most difficult music, the most comest religious rites, then she had on her hands quite too much work to be exclusively a troubadour or a savante or a sinner. And if such ardent attachments as Margaret Fuller inspired among her own sex were habitually expressed by Sappho's maiden lovers, in the language of Lesbos instead of Boston, we can easily conceive of sentime
Homer (search for this): chapter 11
r spoke like gods. qeoglw/ssous. Brunck, 2.114. Of these Sappho was the admitted chief. Among the Greeks the poet meant Homer, and the poetess equally designated her. There flourished in those days, said Strabo, writing a little before our era, Sake uncertain, but she lived somewhere between the years 628 and 572 B. C.: thus flourishing three or four centuries after Homer, and less than two centuries before Pericles. Her father's name is variously given, and we can only hope, in charity, th lovely-haired Lesbianis ; Plato calls her the beautiful Sappho or the fair Sappho, *sapfou=s th=s kalh=s. Phaedr. 24. Homer celebrates the beauty of the Lesbian women in his day. Iliad, 9.129, 271.--as you please to render the phrase more or les as a theme for poetry, is a rather low and debasing thing; that the subordinate part it plays in Homer is one reason why Homer is great; and that the decline of literature began with lyric poetry. A ready subjection, he says, to the fascinations
Athenaeus (search for this): chapter 11
alls her the beautiful Sappho or the fair Sappho, *sapfou=s th=s kalh=s. Phaedr. 24. Homer celebrates the beauty of the Lesbian women in his day. Iliad, 9.129, 271.--as you please to render the 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 must think that he is too easily pleased with the outside of the lady's head, however it may have been wine 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 back thence something to th
Muse (search for this): chapter 11
en, 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 appeMuse 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, because she was a woman, and thus subject to harsher criticism in coarse periods of the world's career. Mo
Ovid (search for this): chapter 11
ce. But it seems rather a pity that this memorial of Sappho should be preserved, while her solemn hymns and her Epithalamia, or marriage-songs, which were, as has been said, almost the first Greek effort toward dramatic poety, are lost to us forever. And thus we might go on through the literature of Greece, peering after little grains of Sappho among the rubbish of voluminous authors. But perhaps these specimens are enough. It remains to say that the name of Phaon, who is represented by Ovid as having been her lover, is not once mentioned in these fragments, and the 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,
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