Sappho's Leap (28 page)

“No—it is made of water,” said the second. “A waste of waters spawned this world and, as all living things are made of moisture, water is the essence of the world. At the end of time we shall all merely float away.”

“No—it is made of air. Without air, no fire burns, no waves pound, no lungs breathe. Air is the essence of creation.”

Creon flattened himself on the ground before these sages.

“They have been arguing for decades,” he said. “They commune with the gods and tell us what the gods desire of us. We would be lost without them. As long as they sit and debate the nature of the universe, we are safe. Should they stop, chaos will come again.”

“I'm a priestess too. I know that game.” I stood brazenly before the three philosophers, arms akimbo.

“I say the universe is made of love!” I said.

“Who is that?” said the first philosopher, blinking.

“This is heresy!” said the second.

“Do I hear a woman's voice?” said the third.

“Yes! You hear the voice of Sappho of Lesbos. How can you know what the world is made of if you live in a cave and never see it?”

Creon was apologetic. “Forgive her, fathers, she doesn't know what she is saying.”

“The world is made of love, you say?” asked the first old man.

“Yes, love.”

“And what is love?” asked the second old man. “Is it an element?”

“Yes,” I said. “It is at once a force, an element, a whirlwind. It is pure as gold and fierce as war. It is joyous as birth and melancholy as death. It is all these things.”

“Is it made of air or water or fire?” asked the third old man.

“It is made of all these things,” I said.

“Can you bring it to us?” asked the first old man.

“No—you must go in search of it,” I said.

Creon was ashamed. “Excuse me, sirs, she is mad and merely a woman.”

“Perhaps we have been in this cave too long,” the first old man said.

“That is possible,” said the second.

“Lead us to love!” said the third.

Leaning on me and Aesop and Creon, shielding their old eyes against the light, the three philosophers carefully descended the stone stairs to the harbor. There they saw a vision out of paradise—beautiful young men and maidens provisioning a boat together.

The old men looked and looked. Then they gathered in a huddle and whispered together for some time.

“The gods demand you listen!” shouted the first philosopher. “It has long been prophesied that maidens would come to our island and make it bloom again. We shall choose the most beauteous to be our wives.”

“Each of us requires only seven wives,” said the second old man.

“Ten,” said the third. “And they must all be virgins.”

The maidens looked horrified, but the young men accepted this requirement unquestioningly.

“Let me examine the new recruits,” said the first philosopher. He walked up to beautiful Gongyla and began to touch her breasts. I was outraged. So was Aesop. Creon and his men stood there passively.

“How can you tolerate this?” I shouted at Creon.

“The gods will otherwise be angry,” he muttered.

“How do you know this?”

“The philosophers said so.”

“Philosophers say a great many things. That hardly makes them true. Let's try a little experiment,” I said. “Let's refuse the philosophers and see what happens.”

“We cannot,” said Creon. “They have always made the rules.”

“Then it's time for new rules,” Atthis said, stepping forward. “I for one refuse to be married to an old man. Let's put these three ancients in a boat and float them out to sea. Maybe their gods will save them.”

With the help of Gongyla and two other maidens, she dragged the three old men to Creon's skiff. Without oars or sail, the boat drifted for a time between the beetling cliffs, then the tide floated them out to sea.

“Let your philosophy save you!” she cried merrily. “We'll take the young men!”

We could see the philosophers shaking their fists at the sky and we could hear them screaming as the currents caught them and they drifted out between the high white cliffs. The maidens, meanwhile, paired up with the beautiful young men and led them away. They dispersed among the rocky caves to celebrate Aphrodite.

Aesop watched all this in fascination.

“What are the gods, after all, but another name for our deepest desires? And what are our legends of the gods but ways of celebrating those desires?” he asked.

“But this is to deny the gods,” I said.

“Sappho, look at what we have just beheld. We lost our boys to the sirens on the sea and now we have lost our girls to the sirens of their own desires. These girls want babies. They will worship Aphrodite till it's time to worship Demeter. It hardly matters what we call the gods. The gods are within us. The gods are our deepest dreams. Let me tell you a story. A man and a lion went out walking in Naucratis. They saw a great wall painting on the side of a temple showing a man standing astride a wounded lion.

“‘See how my species subdues yours!' exulted the man.

“‘Wait till you see the pictures we'll paint of you in the jungle!' said the lion. ‘One story is good until another is told.'”

“But if the gods do not exist at all—then we are lost,” I said.

“On the contrary—we are found!” said Aesop.

“But when we are afraid, who can we turn to, if not the gods?”

“Ourselves. We turn to ourselves anyway. We only pretend there are gods and that they care about us. It is a comforting falsehood.”

“Then who created the world, if not the gods?”

“I can't answer that, but I do know that what we have beheld since we left the amazons is the work of people, not gods.”

I thought of Pegasus, of the Land of the Dead, of the erupting volcano that drove us across the sea. I thought of the sirens, of Poseidon's great blue hand, of the coincidence of finding an island of beautiful young men to mate with our maidens.

“I am not ready to give up the gods just yet,” I told Aesop.

Aesop laughed. “Perhaps when the gods give
you
up, you'll be ready.”

That chilled me.

“Without the gods, how would I sing?” I asked.

“With your own voice,” he said.

What life, what pleasure is there

Without golden Aphrodite?

—M
IMNERMUS

F
ROM THE TIME AESOP
declared his love for me, things between us began to get difficult. Say what you like about love and friendship being the same—once it is clear that one person feels passion and the other does not, friendship begins to fade.

“Who have you loved the most in your life?” Aesop asked. The question gave me pause. Was it Cleis, or Alcaeus? How could I choose between them?

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I must know. If you truly believe that the world is love, as you told those poor moth-eaten philosophers, you must have a reason for saying so. You sing of love as if you knew it. Do you?”

Like so many of Aesop's questions, this one gave me pause. “Do you?” I asked.

“I believe I do,” Aesop said. “Once, long ago, I accepted slavery so that another could go free. That, I believe, is love.”

I was astonished as I often was by Aesop. “Who was that other?” I asked.

“I'll tell you,” said Aesop. “But I must object when you use love as a banner under which you march. Love is a quieter thing. It lives in deeds, not words.”

“Aesop—you amaze me. First you tell me you do not believe in the gods, then you tell me I know nothing of love. Then you refuse to tell me why.”

“First I will tell you why I do not believe in the gods—then I will tell you the other. Come, sit with me at the edge of the sea.”

We sat on a rock overlooking the sea. Before us were the high chalk cliffs through which we had sailed. Behind us the chalk caves into which our maidens had vanished with their swains. From time to time sweet singing wafted from the openings of the caves. Aesop began:

“The gods never die, so nothing can matter to them. Time is not important. Their lives go on and on. They sit in the marble halls of Olympus and look down on us. Our troubles look petty to them, but we entertain them. Without us they would be utterly bored. We are their amusement, their way of passing the endlessness of eternity. It is
our
lives that matter—and why? Because of death. When I say I don't believe in the gods, what I mean really is that our lives matter in a way theirs do not. We invented them, rather than the other way around. That's why I never tell fables about the gods. All my fables are about human foibles—even if I disguise them in animal skins. People can learn as the gods cannot. People can change as the gods cannot. I would not tell my fables to the gods. They'd be of no use to them whatever.”

ZEUS:
Get rid of this man! He's dangerous!

APHRODITE:
And leave Sappho without her only friend?

ZEUS:
Why should I care?

APHRODITE:
The future will care!

ZEUS:
Past, present, and future are all the same to me!

“Whom did you give up freedom for?”

“My mother. She was one of the black amazons who lived on the shores of the River Hermus and panned for gold for the Lydian kings. Thinking they were weak because they were women, the Lydian traders swooped down on their encampments and stole all their gold. Then they captured the amazons and their children. I was ten. Without my mother's knowledge, I bargained with the chieftain to go into slavery in her place. I was carried away to the island of Samos and sold to a goldsmith named Xanthes. There I met Rhodopis, who was enslaved in that same household. When Xanthes went to Naucratis to sell his wares to the wealthy Greek merchants, we went too. There we earned our freedom. Rhodopis became a courtesan and I became a sage. The fact that we were former slaves gave us a certain fascination both to the Egyptians and the Greeks.”

“Then you never saw your mother again?”

“Never. Not since I was ten.”

“Do you suppose she is alive?”

“I have a feeling that she is. But perhaps I do not want to believe my sacrifice was in vain. I delude myself just like other mortals—though I make fables out of my delusions.”

A powerful voice boomed out behind us. “Delusions!” it echoed. We looked around. There was a tall, beautiful woman wearing a crown of live snakes that hissed alarmingly.

“You must be the two who took my husbands and gave them to the maidens who came from the sea. You had no right to do that. They were mine. They were perfectly happy with their lives before you brought those maidens. Now I will have to kill them—or turn them into snakes. My sister Circe would, of course, turn them into swine.”

“Your sister? Circe? Then who are you?” I asked.

“Who are
you
? After all, this is my island. I should not have to identify myself on my own island!”

“We were told it was the island of the philosophers,” Aesop said.

“Well, you were certainly told a lot of things that were wrong,” said the snake woman. “I am Herpetia—I can turn even
you
into snakes and add you to my crown. Medusa was also a sister of mine. But I never saw the point of turning men to stone when there are so many more interesting things you can do with them. Why turn more than one part of a man to stone? If I should ever have a problem, I'll call on my sister, but so far her intervention has not been needed!”

She draped her arms around Aesop, who shrank back from the hissing snakes. “If you were mine, I'd leave you just as you are. I wouldn't change you at all. But you are wrong about the gods. They
do
exist. I myself am the daughter of a god and a serpent. The gods would not be happy to know how you doubt them. They hate disobedience. The only thing they hate more is the defiance of death.”

She gestured with her hand and the ground was alive with multicolored snakes. They crawled everywhere—out of the caves the maidens had retreated into with their swains, all over the ground, all over each other. She gestured again—and they were gone.

“Tell me again that you do not believe in the gods,” she said to Aesop tauntingly.

“Trickery and magic do not prove that the gods exist,” said Aesop calmly. “You can turn the men into snakes—turn me into a snake, for all I care—and still it doesn't prove anything…except that you are adept at magic.”

Herpetia frowned fiercely. Her snakes hissed. “Usually this sort of thing silences everyone,” she said. “Now I meet a man who is not afraid of me. Who
are
you?”

“Aesop at your service, madam,” said Aesop.

“The fable-maker?” Herpetia asked.

“The very one,” said Aesop.

“Oh, good!” Herpetia said. “It has been so very boring on this island without fables. I have had to turn myself into various things just to keep from dying of boredom. It was I who became those three philosophers in the cave debating the nature of the universe. I have been turning men into snakes just for the fun of it, then turning them back just for the fun of it. It tires them out. Actually, it tires me out too. The truth is that for centuries I have been looking for a husband who is not afraid of me. Maybe I have found him.”

Herpetia linked arms with Aesop and hurried him along to stroll by the sea with her. What was he up to? Was he trying to make me jealous? As Aesop romanced Herpetia, her snakes became docile and hung at her cheeks like limp curls. She kissed him passionately. He appeared to reciprocate. I went to warn the maidens that we were all in danger.

I found them in their caves still making love to their beautiful swains. Clearly, we were still in Aphrodite's power. I directed the maidens and men to return to our ship while Herpetia was busy courting Aesop.