Sappho
9781465636317
311 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
It is hardly possible to realise and judge of Sappho without realising her environment. The picture must have its background, and the background is Lesbos about the year 600 B.C. One may well regret never to have seen the island now called Mytilini, but known in ancient times as Lesbos. There are, however, descriptions not a few, and with these we must perforce be satisfied. On the map it lies there in the Ægean Sea, a sort of triangle with rounded edges, pierced deeply on the south by two deep lochs or fiords, while toward each of its three angles it rises into mountains of from two to three thousand feet in height. One way it stretches some thirty-five miles, the other some twenty-five. It is twenty-five centuries ago since this island was the home of Sappho, of Alcæus, and of a whole school of the most finished lyric poetry and music ever heard in Greece. From its northern shore, across only seven miles of laughing sea, the poetess might every day look upon the Troad, the land of Homeric legend; and in the North-East distance, over the broadening strait, rose the storied crest of “many-fountained Ida.” The air was clear with that translucency of which Athens also boasted, and in which the Athenian poet rightly or wrongly found one cause of the Athenian intellectual brilliancy. The climate was, and still is, famous for its mildness and salubrity. The Lesbian soil was, and still is, rich in corn and oil and wine, in figs and olives, in building-wood and tinted marble. It was eminently a land of flowers and aromatic plants, of the rose and the iris, the myrtle and the violet, and the Lesbians would seem to have loved and cultivated flowers much as they are loved and cultivated in Japan. Such was the land. The Greeks who inhabited it belonged apparently to that Achæan-Æolian branch which was the first to cross from Europe to the north-west Ægæan and to oust, or plant colonies among, the older nameless—perhaps “Pelasgian”—occupants. This is not the place to discuss the tribal or even racial differences which once existed between Æolian, Ionian, and Dorian Greeks. Their divergence of character was great; it was of the first significance as exhibited in war, in social life, in art. The fact that each division spoke the Greek tongue, though with various accents and idioms, is no longer held as proof that their racial origin and capacity were the same. Between the Greek of Lesbos and the Greek of Sparta there were differences in temper, in adaptability, and in taste, as great as those between the English-speaking Irishman, with his nimble sympathies and his ready eloquence and wit, and the slower if surer Saxon of Mid-lothian. If we touch upon this question here, it is merely because it casts some measure of light upon those social and literary characteristics of the Lesbians in which Sappho fortunately shared. Almost beyond a doubt the Æolian Greeks who first made Lesbos their home were the nearest of kin to those fair-haired Achæans who, in the Iliad, followed their feudal lords to the siege of Troy. Socially a distinguishing mark of these people was the liberty and high position enjoyed by the women in the household, by the Penelopes as well as by the Helens. This fact has hardly been sufficiently considered in dealing with that peculiar position of Sappho and her coterie, concerning which something will be said later on. Artistically their distinguishing mark, as represented first in Homer, was their clear, open-eyed, original observation of essentials, their veracity of description, their dislike of the indefinite and the mystic. This too is clearly reflected in the work of Sappho and her compatriots.
