Before Ovid and Horace, There Was Sappho
A review of ‘The Poetry of Sappho’.
Thanks to hailing from the island of Lesbos and addressing women in her romantic work, the poet Sappho is probably known less today for her verse than for inspiring the words ‘lesbian’ and the lesser-known ‘sapphic’. But Sappho, described unkindly in Jim Powell’s translation of her work as ‘short, dark and ugly’, was a literary titan. She was on the Greek classics curriculum for over 1,000 years; and in the Western tradition, she more or less invented lyrical romantic poetry. In her own time (the 5th and 4th century B.C.) she was lauded as a poet on a par with Homer. Just as Homer was called ‘The Poet’, she was referred to as ‘The Poetess.’ She was often called the ‘tenth Muse’, too: in his Anthologia Graeca, Plato writes: ‘Some say the Muses are nine: how careless! Look, there’s Sappho too, from Lesbos, the tenth.’ That is quite some praise.
Sappho wrote at least nine volumes of poetry, of which just one complete poem survives. She also wrote at least 10,000 lines, and even the fraction—650 lines or so—that survives today is the product of centuries of scholarship. Her poetry covers diverse subject matter, but her favourite topic is love — erotic and familial. In ‘Ode to Aphrodite’, she asks the goddess of the title to ease the heartache caused by a woman who spurned her, only for Aphrodite to tell her that — good news! — this woman will end up changing her mind. In another fragment, called the ‘Brothers Poem’ or ‘Brothers Song’, Sappho hopes for the safe return of her brother Charaxos from a trading trip, and for the other, Larichos, to grow up and assume his proper role in society. In other snippets, she describes the effects of ageing, or reflects on the impossibility of comparing human to godly beauty.
Reading Sappho, Shakespeare’s sonnets, and the ‘Fair Youth’ sequence in particular, come easily to mind.
The style in which she writes all this is invariably elegant, lucid, and lyrical. It is more personal than Homer’s verse, as well as more intense, and more pleading; and it is much more passionate than Homer’s contemporary Hesiod’s, which, in Works and Days, at least, can be quite stilted, even if his descriptions are striking. Reading Sappho, Shakespeare’s sonnets, and the ‘Fair Youth’ sequence in particular, come readily to mind. Though starkly different in structure, their poetry has the same fervour and intimacy. Both poets equally have the capacity to stand back and mock love and the language of love, including theirs. For Shakespeare, in his Sonnet 130, ‘my mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’; for Sappho, speaking in Aphrodite’s voice:
Who, O, Sappho, is wronging you?
For if she flees, soon she will pursue.
If she refuses gifts, rather she will give them.
In other words, love is silly.
Given how little of Sappho’s poetry is available to us, and given the hurdles a woman in her time (and for a long time afterwards) had to face, it is striking that she left such a mark on Western culture. Her influence is proof of how brilliant she was thought to be. Aristotle writes in his Rhetoric that ‘she was honoured although she was a woman’. She helped to shape the writing of Catullus and Ovid and Horace, who called her ‘a marvellous phenomenon.’ Algernon Charles Swinburne thought she was the best poet ever to have lived. Perhaps some shiny new technology will one day help us piece together more of Sappho’s poetry. But it is telling that, even as single lines, plucked from their context, much of Sappho’s poetry is as epigrammatic and readable as any: ‘There is no place for grief in a house which serves the Muse’; ‘Wealth without virtue is no harmless neighbour’; and—a favourite—‘What cannot be said will be wept.’
