Sappho (3 page)

She learned the lyric work of Eumelos of Corinth, and of Olympos of Phrygia, inventor of the chromatic scale. She retraced the lines of Tyrtaeos the lame, who made stirring songs to war, and Kallinos, who a century before sang martial songs to his Lydian flute. She brooded over the melancholy poems of Mimnermos of Smyrna; an old man now, he once sang lovingly to Nanno, who accompanied him on the lyre but never loved him. He commenced many of his songs with “The Fig Tree Rune,” which in other days was sung when humans to be sacrificed were pulled along the streets and beaten. Sappho reflected a good deal on this oddly savage prelude to his tender outpourings. Were love and hate one passion then?

She did not know. Those curious emotions had never touched her half-child's heart. She had grown up in a city without men. There were only boys—and at the suspicion of a beard, they too joined the endless war, leaving women to rule not only Mitylene but all of Lesbos.

Sappho grew to womanhood without much thought of men. She was unfamiliar with the sight, sound, or even the smell of them. At seventeen, the usual age for marriage, she was quite untroubled that there was no one available. The emotions that pricked her she channeled playfully in verse:

They say that Leda once

found hidden an egg of hyacinth color

She sang in a lyric Lesbian-Aeolic dialect using a variety of meters. Many she invented. Spoken or sung, there was a conversational quality about them; but her passion was inwardly directed, for she was her own closest friend and confidante.

Familiar as she was with everyday Mitylene, she did not extol the sound of spinning or the smell of bread baking or any of the daily chores that went on around her. Nature filled her eyes and her poems.

Once, in her rambles following the course of a stream, she stopped, enchanted at the sight of a child gathering jonquils as yellow as her fine-spun hair. She was delicate and dainty as the long-stemmed flowers she held.

Sappho asked, “What is your name, little girl?”

“Atthis,” was the shy reply.

Sappho picked up a jonquil the girl had dropped and, smiling, handed it to her.

The picture of the child remained with her. That evening, with a swift prayer to Erato, the Muse who played on a golden lyre, she sang:

I saw one day gathering flowers

a very dainty little girl

Since she could remember, Sappho had loved things of grace and delicacy. Therefore it was odd she should be disturbed when the first poet of Lesbos let it be known that he too intended to leave for the war. Alkaios had neither grace nor delicacy, but was loud and boisterous. He, the children, and a few white-haired elders who guarded the gates were the only males left inside the city. Plucking his lute, Alkaios liked nothing better than to gather a crowd and relate his amorous adventures. Sappho thought him a braggart, and said so, for she spared no one her thoughts. Yet when he sang his lyrics she listened, recognizing their perfect cadences and rhythms. And, although she took care not to let him know, it delighted her that a poet of Lesbos was sung in Lydia and far Sicily.

Alkaios departed for war, laughing and blowing kisses to the children and young women who ran at his side pelting him with roses and invoking the blessing of the gods on him, for the poet was beautiful, tall and fair as Apollo. He spied Sappho in the crowd and, his merry blue eyes twinkling, called, “What, not a word from Sappho of hidden harmonies?”

She flushed. “Do not let yourself be killed” was all she would say.

“Would you care?” The blue eyes were now serious.

“I was thinking of the many who love you,” she retorted evasively.

“Of which you are not one?”

“I am never with the many, Alkaios.”

He came close to her and, bending, whispered, “I heard the footfall of the flower spring.”

It was something she had sung quietly in her room. She could not imagine how he had heard it, and she flushed more deeply than before. He went on his way, doing a twirl or two in the air.

The report reached Mitylene that Alkaios marched into battle, his flute at his lips. Then hearing the bones of a man's skull smashed inside his helmet rattling around like grape pits, he made an about-face and danced his way out of the fray, tossing aside his richly ornamented shield, which the Athenians seized and hung in mockery in their main temple. He returned to Mitylene, still singing. It was a scandal. The same children that had called after him adoringly now cried, “Coward!”

Alkaios laughed. “Wise man, little friends, with my brains inside my skull and my guts inside my skin. For I am here, and the vultures feed on other flesh, not mine.” He was soon making the rounds of the few remaining taverns, voicing paeans to the wine. It was hard to be angry with him, for in spite of having run away he was an asset to Lesbos, which had not many accomplished or famous sons. Besides which, he had added a small, pointed, well-trimmed beard that enhanced his already charming appearance. His ribald ways were more or less condoned by all but Sappho, who was very hard on him. When they met, he was always humble and, if not sober, affected sobriety. His endeavors to please her made an impression on her, and she went to her mother.

“Mother, I know that I am not blond or tall. My features are not in the classic mold. Tell me—you are my mother—am I ill-favored?”

“… You have a very sweet smile,” her mother said.

“Thank you.”

“Sappho, Sappho,” Kleis called after her, but she was gone.

Sappho consulted her polished bronze mirror, finding fault with all but her eyes, which were luminous in their darkness as though just roused from sleep.

Alkaios began singing of her, and to her. One of the things he sang was:

Your appearance is unmatched,

intriguing,

always different

These poems he declaimed in the marketplace, in the main square, and in the public houses. Sometimes he sang them outside the door of her house.

As her father had long ago suspected, there were two Sapphos. One of them was annoyed, one pleased.

A development in the war took her mind from herself. The town of Sigeum, retaken by Lesbos and her allies, was once more in Athenian hands. However, the Lesbians blockaded successfully with their black ships, and at this stalemate the enemies turned to arbitration. The wise man Periander, tyrant of neutral Corinth, agreed to preside as arbiter, and Athens and Lesbos pledged to abide by his decision.

It was the year of the forty-sixth Olympic Games. Lesbos was ten years weary. The priestesses of Dionysos consulted the sacred snakes in their caves, and far-seeing Perse with tangled hair rushed into the main street of the city. Froth was on her lips, she tore her robe, and her eyes rolled from the central place in their sockets to float in a sea of white. People knelt where they were, for this was one divinely possessed; the hand of a god was on her.

Sappho, who had gone picking pomegranates, flattened herself against a wall and let the basket fall. The fruit burst and splattered at her feet. Perse darted at one terrified form and then another. “One must be named!” she cried. “The Fates, those stern spinning women have spun you all at your birth. The shades of those dead in this long war must drink blood.”

“An oracle! An oracle!” the crowd murmured. “Vipers of the cave make utterance through her mouth.”

“One must be seized,” raved the priestess. “No ram, no bull, no oxen. The tribes of the dead make treaty with the gods.” A child screamed and clutched its mother in a spasm of terror. “Not the gilded horns of a heifer…”

The crowd chanted, repeating her words back to her: “Not the gilded horns…”

“Quickly, to the mountain. All will be done!” The prophetess, wild and disheveled, climbed the steep street.

The people streamed after her along the myrtle-lined road toward Lesbian Olympus.

Sappho seemed to have no will of her own; she followed with dazed steps. Priestesses stood along the way under shade trees, offering drink from goatskins. To Sappho alone was handed a golden cup embossed with gems. She drank. A numb feeling spread in her. Further on she was stopped again, another splendid goblet thrust into her hand. “In death is life,” the priestess sang.

“In death is life,” Sappho repeated. A strange sensation of power flowed to the tips of her fingers. She found she held a flute and began to play, improvising harmonies. “O Dionysos, the only immortal to taste death—you are in all places and all hearts. Your death brings life, your black blood renews Earth.”

When she stopped again to drink, nimble fingers braided her hair with flowers. The white stone acropolis towering above shrunk to the height of mushrooms, while those things small, the blue squill and yellow gagea, assumed grotesque proportions, so that she seemed to dance along their petals.

It became harder to climb and there was little breath in her for singing. The people advanced, intoning prayers. The sound floated upward. Wildfowl, startled from the ravine, screamed overhead.

At the top was a worn green-veined stone, the navel of Lesbos. The stone spoke with the voice of a woman, and all who heard fell to the ground. The voice said: “The water of ever-flowing Styx, tenth stream of Ocean, commands you. And the golden generation who were in Kronos's time tell you these words: Not from the throat of sheep, nor the black blood of boar or oxen. The tribes of the dead, the kthonian people demand fresh blood for blood given … and great Zeus, Lord of the Aegis, hungers for it. Pour forth, that the mind of Periander the Wise be inclined toward Lesbos.”

A girl-child was ripped from her mother.

“None live long and the young are pleasing.” With these words the priestess with blank eyes slashed the girl's throat. “The gods would drink.”

The mother's body struck the earth before the child's. Sappho fastened her eyes on the beautiful container of blown glass that filled quickly with spurting fluid. It gushed with a gargling sound, then flowed, then trickled. Every drop was caught and the vessel slowly turned in all directions that the sun might flash from it.

Sappho's eyes no longer saw. Above there seemed to be no sky, and Earth itself was unsteady beneath her feet. But anger for the slaughtered child took command: “Sing woe! Sing woe!” she cried.

The priestesses stopped their chanting and looked at her. And the people looked at her with wondering eyes.

“Death is an evil,” she went on recklessly, her voice elevated to song,

We have the gods'

word for it; they too

would die if death

were a good thing

She was pulled backward, her mouth covered to stop her protest. It was Alkaios, who appeared from nowhere, panting in her ear, “You are mad to contest the priestesses of Dionysos.” With her weight against him, he fell backward into a gully. Gasping and clawing bushes to slow their plunge, sobbing and incoherent, she tried to tell him about Earth falling away, having no bottom.

“We'll have no bottoms at the end of this.” Alkaios set his feet forward like a mule and braced himself against a giant root, swinging her like a limp doll beside him. They were on the gravelly shore of a dry streambed.

“First…” Alkaios stood, groaned, and rubbed his backside. Then he walked to where water, having cut a new path, was meandering. “First, we wash your face, and perhaps some of the snake venom and baneful herbs they grind into their wine will leave you and you will begin to make sense. What thymos caused you to drink their potions?” He was splashing icy water over her.

“Oh,” she said, and again, “Oh!” She began to wash herself with dripping hands, and Alkaios saw that she was shaking.

“The water is too cold?”

“No,” she said.

“Never drink the wine a priestess gives you. It is made to confound the mind and delude the senses.”

“Like your poems.”

He laughed. “Poetry is stronger than magic.”

“Poetry is magic,” she retorted. Then, “She killed a child, Alkaios. She took her from her mother and drove a dagger through her throat. It stuck out both ends and then was withdrawn so the blood could flow unimpeded.”

“Yes, yes, I saw men do such things to one another on the battlefield, and worse. It is why I did not stay.”

“But it was a child … a girl.” She passed her hand across her forehead. “I think it was a child. Or did I dream?”

“Let's say you dreamed. But when it was done you called out…”

“Sing woe. Sing woe!”

“Sappho, one cannot rebuke those ladies. But Zeus is with you, for a treaty has been signed.”

“A treaty?”

“Yes. While that drugged mob scrambled up the mountain to see human blood spilled, news came to the harbor. Periander's judgment went against Lesbos. The priestesses invoked their magic a bit late. Had they succeeded, your life would not be worth the dirt at my feet.”

She stared at him. “Periander found against Lesbos? After ten years and a pile of dead that reaches to the sky?”

“His ruling is that each side will remain in possession of that they already have.”

She continued looking at him in disbelief. “Give up Sigeum, that my father died to win back and all those since him? Lesbos will not accept such a treaty!”

“Lesbos has accepted it.”

She shook her head, denying.

“The war is over, Sappho. The army is weary; the squadrons will no longer obey their captains who whip them to their posts. They will not fight anymore.”

“It is the fault of those up here on the mountain who resort to old ways. They brought this misfortune of an ill peace upon us.”

“So it will be said. And so you are safe.”

“Stop,” she said viciously. “I hate comfortable words.” She sank down, her small body folding inward.

“Come Sappho, men and ships will be sailing into the twin harbors—tired, defeated men. Mitylene must make them feel like heroes. There will be feasts and acrobats, wine and flowers. The sound of the lute must be heard, your aunt Tyro's and the good Kleis's tables must be spread with welcome.”