Sappho's Leap (33 page)

“I will not neglect him, I promise you,” I said. And Cleis sniffed resentfully.

I built a small temple in the grove behind my family's house and there we danced and sang our songs to Aphrodite. I had no doubt after my travels that she was the most potent of all the goddesses and I instructed my students in her worship.

“The gods hardly care about us,” I told my students. “We must attract them with the beauty of our song and dance, tempt them with our sacrifices, and make ourselves worthy of their attention. To them our lives are so temporary that we are little more than leaves on a tree. They are concerned with their own intrigues. They love, war, build, destroy, blink and we are gone. If we wish to be more than falling leaves to them, we must sing so divinely they cannot but hear us.

In the grove behind my grandparents' house we burnt incense to Aphrodite and honored her with song and dance. We sacrificed the first fruits of our vineyards and olive trees. We piled up apples and peaches in her honor. We roasted the fat thighbones of white heifers bedecked with flowers and sprinkled with barley. We had contests for the most beautiful songs, the most beautiful dances, the most beautiful robes. On the warmest summer nights, we flung off our robes and danced naked under the moon, invoking Aphrodite.

From Sappho pressed is this honey I bring thee,

Sticky as love, nourishing as breast-milk to a baby,

Beautiful to Zeus as a maid who is not Hera,

Pleasing to Aphrodite as the stiff phallus of her lover.

How could we know we were being observed in our devotions? Rumors of our naked dancing drifted across the hills from Eresus to Mytilene. One line—
Mnasidica has a lovely body, lovelier even than soft Gyrinno's
—was quoted as proof of our debauchery. Rhodopis spread the rumor that I was training maenads to tear men and children apart with their bare hands. It was said that I had seduced my own daughter and now had moved on to the daughters of others.

Songs of mine were always quoted out of context.
My desire feeds on your beauty
was repeated all over the island.
May you sleep on your soft girlfriend's breasts
was another. It was true that some of my students evoked the greatest tenderness in me and wanted to die rather than leave me. But it was the suicide of Timas that started all the trouble.

Timas came to me from Lydia when she was thirteen. Plump, with reddish curls, she had a natural talent for singing and for the lyre. I poured all that I knew of my art into her. She blossomed under my care. It was as if nobody had ever encouraged her before, and she lapped it up as a cat laps milk. This was true of so many girls outside Lesbos. How much freedom I had taken for granted living here—even during the long war. There were so many places where women were treated little better than slaves.

Timas would look at me and say, “Sappho, when I grow to be a woman, I want to be just like you.”

“You don't know the griefs I've tasted. Don't wish for what you cannot know.”

“You are simply being modest. You are my hero. When I think the world is cruel to women, I think of you and how you've overcome all the adversities of a woman's life. You even have a beautiful daughter and a grandson who looks just like you. I wish with all my heart I were lucky enough to be your daughter!”

This excess of emotion worried me. When a heart is so open, it can accept arrows as well as honey. I was torn between my need for Timas' adulation and my fear that it would come to a bad end. Yet I loved her and she loved me. I taught her about pleasure as I had done with the amazon maidens and she gave her whole heart to me. I worried about how unstintingly she gave it.

Timas flourished in Eresus. She stayed with us for two years, growing in skill and courage. At first she imitated my style as they all did, but soon she came to have her own voice so that her lyric meters were crisp, playful, and lilting.

Then word came from her father in Sardis that she was to be married to a courtier who was a friend of his. The man was old and rich and loathsome—that old, old story. Timas wrote to her father, pleading to be allowed to stay in Lesbos. He wrote back that she was a disobedient daughter and had disappointed him.

I saw her struggle with this. Her mother had died bearing her and she was sure the same fate was to be hers. She was afraid of marriage and childbirth and she was afraid of losing her freedom. Who could blame her? Female education always provokes this paradox. We teach maidens to be free and then we enslave them to marriage.

“I do not want to disappoint my father, but I can't do as he asks,” she wept. “I'd rather die than leave you!”

“You must pray to the gods and do what is in your heart,” I said.

“But what did you do when you were young?” Timas asked. “It's said you ran away with Alcaeus.”

“I cannot deny that.”

“Then if you were a rebel—why do you expect obedience from me?”

“I only expect that you will be true to yourself. No one can ask more of you.”

Timas threw her arms around my neck. “Sappho, help me to escape my father!” she cried.

“I can do everything but that,” I said.

And then I told her what I always told girls of that age—that life is unpredictable, that the future cannot be calculated, that life is full of amazing surprises, good and bad—that death comes soon enough. I sounded like my own mother talking to me when I railed at being married to Cercylas! The irony of it! My mother was dead and I had become my mother! As I aged, I was even beginning to look like her. I would catch a sidelong glimpse of myself and think—there goes my mother.

Timas only
seemed
to be comforted by my words. She went down to the sea to swim with Dica. She braided herbs and flowers for Atthis' curls. She brought me as a gift an embroidered headband from Sardis. It was all an act.

We found her in the apple grove, hanging from the oldest tree by one of her gold-embroidered sashes from Sardis. Her feet bounced slightly as if they were dancing in air as they pointed down to a bed of purple hyacinths. On the highest branch of the apple tree, there remained one red fruit nobody could reach.

We cut her down, washed her lovingly, and threw locks of our own hair into the funeral pyre with her. They sizzled and burnt with an acrid smell—the smell of sacrificed youth.

The girls were desolate. They demanded a song for her, which we could sing as we sent her home. We put the urn aboard ship with this inscription:

This is the dust of Timas

Who was led unmarried

Into Persephone's dark bedroom.

Her life was cut short

Like our hair,

Which, with newly sharpened steel,

We, her companions, gave up.

Word leaked out all over the island that one of Sappho's students had killed herself. That was the beginning of the end.

My brother Charaxus had become rather pudgy and was losing his hair. Rhodopis had grown into her soul and now looked on the outside the way she was on the inside. Not a pretty sight.

“Sappho,” she said, “we are troubled by the rumors we hear about you and your students. It's said that one young woman hanged herself for love of you. We worry for your own good. We worry for your reputation.”

“My reputation!” I spat out. “My reputation, like yours, has long been ruined. You know what they say in Naucratis: ‘
If your reputation is ruined, might as well have fun
!'”

Rhodopis batted her eyes innocently. “Nobody ever said a bad word about me till you included me in your indiscreet songs. Now it's not so easy to clear my name. But as a respected married woman and the wife of your brother, I must ask you to be more circumspect.”

“Get out of here!” I screamed at Rhodopis and Charaxus. “And never come back again!”

If only Aesop were here to make a fable of it:
There is no more perfect prude than a reformed whore.

Being above the earth

Holds no pleasure anymore.

I long for the lotus-covered banks

Of Acheron.

—S
APPHO

T
HE FIRST DEATH OF
a contemporary strikes a group of friends like lightning. Grandparents die, parents die, warriors die in battle and wives in childbirth, but when a girl of fifteen takes her own life, her friends suddenly feel their mortality. Death was a myth before. Now it is a reality.

Dica asked, “Why did we not save her, Sappho?”

“Because we did not realize how deep was her despair,” I said. “We cannot save everyone.”

“Why? Why? Why?” Atthis cried.

“Because the gods are capricious and the spinners both spin and snip. Life is distributed unequally.”

“Tell us we will never die!” cried Anactoria.

“If I told you that, I would be lying, and as your teacher I will never lie.”

We huddled together for warmth in my big bed and reminisced about Timas' winning ways.

“Why did the gods allow death into the world?” asked Atthis.

“Because they are jealous of mortals and want to control our fates,” I said. “Accept it and make songs about it. That is your best revenge.”

Perhaps Timas' suicide shattered us because it was a harbinger of everyone's fate. My students tasted freedom, only to have it snatched away. The plan had been to make them skillful adepts of the arts before they turned good wives. But wives in those days were little better than slaves. And art teaches liberty. It is a paradox. We teach maidens to sing and then we give them husbands to silence them. This breeds a desperation that leads to clinging crushes, simultaneous menstruation, hysteria, melancholy. A group of young women together is sweet yet incendiary. There is so much smothered passion threatening to explode.

The more we closed ourselves off from strangers, the more the rumors flew about us. Rhodopis had been poisoning all of Mytilene against us. Charaxus was using her slanders to keep from paying my share of profits from the family vineyards. Whatever dangers I had braved among strangers, my family was a more insidious foe.

Even Pittacus came to call on me in Eresus to warn me of the trouble I was courting.

“Your mother loved you, Sappho, and I swore to her to pardon and protect you, but the rumors that now fly about you in Mytilene make my promise hard to keep. Your fame is the glory of Lesbos, but it is turning to scandal as I watch.”

“Since when is it a crime for girls to sing together? In my youth we were always famed for our swaying choruses of young girls.”

“Sappho, you've been away a long time. While you explored the world, many changes occurred in Lesbos. There was an outbreak of fever that carried away half our citizens. Some said the Athenians and their poisoned spears caused it. In the Troad they were reputed to anoint their spearheads with offal from rotting corpses. Some said the fever was spread by the influx of slaves brought home from the war. Thousands died of this fever, vomiting blood, their faces turning black as earth. Those of us who remained—all of us—became less carefree than in former times. Symposia began to be seen as dangerous places of infection. Songs were snares. Even the pageants of dancing maidens were curtailed. People became less fond of the lyric art and saw it as a danger. They wanted patriotic songs, songs of war and battle, songs of righteousness and revenge. Your mother and I bemoaned this—but we understood. The carefree Lesbos we had known was gone. The climate here has changed. Once we were famed for our easy and luxurious life, now our people are more careful. A long war changes everything.”

“Then we must bring back the Lesbos of old!”

“You can't bring back the past. The carefree Lesbos of my youth, where girls sang to girls and the entire world was made for wine and song, will never come again. We have other struggles now. We have to repopulate our island. We can't afford the luxuries of old. Oh, nobody regrets it more than I do. But we must be realistic.”

“Does that mean song is superfluous?”

“Not all song, Sappho, but the sort of song that celebrates love alone is old-fashioned. We need songs now to inspire the people to community solidarity and unity, songs that celebrate the great
polis
, not songs for lovers alone. Love is selfish. Rebuilding our city is of the essence. Pray teach your girls to sing of civic pride, of Mytilene and its glory, of the joys of wars won and peace achieved. Such songs are needed now—not silly love songs. Look—you are a great singer—you can sing of anything.”

Had I not heard all this before?

“Pittacus—what would you have me sing?”

“Songs about my triumphs in the war—that sort of thing.”

“And if I go on singing of love?”

“I'm afraid I'll have to banish you again—and all your girls.”

When I went to see Cleis, it was no better. I began to see that my fame embarrassed her. When fragments of my songs were quoted, she blushed.

“I wish you could write
other
kinds of songs, Mother—or else just be a grandmother. Hector needs you. Why do you have to write songs
at all
?”

And I tried to be a good grandmother. I would stay in my daughter's house, trying to make myself useful, trying not to offend—and suddenly she would explode at me:

“All through my childhood, I was mocked for being your ‘golden flower'! Everywhere I went, your words preceded me. I hated it! I hated you!”

The longer I stayed with Cleis, the sadder I became. I loved her with all my heart, but my love embarrassed her. The world had changed. The love I offered her was out of fashion.

She would explode at me. I would apologize to her. Then we would both cry and embrace each other and promise to love each other forever. She looked so much like Alcaeus that just being with her made me long for him. I would go back to Eresus and my students with a heavy heart. Of all the people in the world I needed to have understand me, Cleis was the one. There had been a time when I sought my mother's love—now I sought my daughter's. It eluded me.