Table of Contents

E. M. Cox.

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Foreward

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THE general English reader, as distinguished from the classical student, has not had presented to him any edition approaching completeness of the remains of Sappho’s poetic genius since that of H. T. Wharton, first published in 1885, and subsequently reprinted several times during the succeeding two decades. That edition was comprehensive and satisfactory as far as it went. The translations which it contained were however, not the work of its editor, but were reprinted by him from various sources and, since the publication of the book, a considerable quantity of new material has come to light in the fragmentary papyri found in the delta of the Nile. This present edition is an attempt to bring the subject more up to date, and at the same time to offer a number of new translations which it is hoped will be acceptable. In some instances a number of the older translations which seemed most suitable and interesting have also been printed. In the case of some of the fragments there have been previously only literal translations, and furthermore, some of them are so short and defective that they are insusceptible of anything but a literal rendering, though they often consist of words or phrases of great beauty, both in idea and in language. The plan adopted in this edition has ​been to print first the Greek text, then the literal or prose translation, then a metrical version, adhering as nearly as possible to the meaning of the Greek, and finally, notes and commentary.

About twenty fragments consisting of one or two words only or such as are of doubtful authenticity, which are included by Wharton and others, have been omitted from the present arrangement.

With the kind permission of the Egypt Exploration Society, and of Mr. J. M. Edmonds the text with emendations of No. 3 has been included in the present volume. Other fragmentary poems which have from time to time been published by the Egypt Exploration Society, and emended and restored with very great industry and learning by several scholars, have not been reprinted. The amount of restoration is so great that the fragments, while of very great interest to the philologist and palaeographer, do not appeal very strongly to the general reader.

In the spelling of Greek proper names, when they are printed in Roman type, the form to which the English reader is accustomed has been adopted. Philological commentary and variant readings have, in nearly all cases, been omitted, as in the present state of the subject Mr. Edmond’s arrangement in his “Lyra Graeca” offers all that the classical student, as distinguished from the general reader, can expect.

Biographical and Historical

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LESBOS, the chief town of which Mytilene claims with Eresus the honour of having been the birthplace of Sappho, has been from the earliest ages famous for its fertility, its beauty, and the perfection of its climate. The nearest point of the mainland of Asia Minor is eight miles distant, and the whole island, with its irregular coast-line, is one hundred and thirty-eight miles in circumference. Though its surface is mountainous, the soil is very prolific, and its oil, wine, and grain have from immemorial times been proverbially celebrated. Even as early as the Homeric poems there ate references to its wealth and its populous cities. Mitylene was the only Aeolian city which maintained a navy, and Lesbos had for generations many flourishing colonies in Asia Minor and in Thrace.

Methymna, Antissa, Eresus, and Pyrrha were the other four important towns which, at the period of its greatness, 700 B.C. to 500 B.C., caused the island to be known as Pentapolis. After the defeat of Croesus, about 546 B.C., ​Lesbos fell under Persian domination, but later was freed and joined the Delian confederacy. The subsequent somewhat dismal history of the island is of no interest to us at present, but the glories of the lyric poetry of its golden age have never sunk into oblivion and can never fail to be a source of inspiration to students of form and language in poetical composition.

It is obvious that after the vicissitudes of twenty-five centuries, the task of disentangling biographical details in connection with an individual however eminent, with any degree of accuracy and completeness must, in the nature of the case, be one of great difficulty. Almost every important writer of ancient times has suffered to a considerable extent from neglect, ignorance, or insensate destructiveness and bigotry, and if we were called upon to designate the period when reactionary forces had reduced culture, art, and literary appreciation to their lowest point, we should be right in choosing the six black centuries from about A.D. 400 to about A.D. 1000. The state of European civilization in general at that period is too well known to need comment, but it may be noted that among the writers singled out from time to time during some centuries for such assaults of bigotry and destructiveness were the ancient lyric poets, and it is a matter of knowledge that among these Sappho was a prominent victim. There is known to have been one orgy of such destructiveness about A.D. 380 at the instigation of ​Gregory Nazianzen, and another in the year 1073 when Gregory VII was pope.

Rome and Constantinople were the chief centres of this madness, and the value of what was destroyed on these and similar occasions is from the present-day point of view incalculable.

A consequence of such occurrences as far as Sappho is concerned is that, notwithstanding the esteem in which she was held by writers who came within a measurable distance of her epoch, her writings have practically disappeared, although a large proportion of the works of many Greek writers living not much after her have come down to us with something approaching completeness. For the story of her life we must depend upon the scanty, more or less casual, and sometimes hostile statements of writers who, in most cases, were, in point of time, further away from her than we are from Shakespeare. It is only by collating the statements of these later writers, while giving much greater proportionate weight to what was written by those who lived nearest to the period of her life, that we can arrive at even approximate accuracy in the details of her biography.

Sappho was the one woman poet in history to whom the somewhat misused term “great” may be justly applied. We do not know with certainty the date either of her birth or of her death, but the years from 610 B.C. to 570 B.C. may reasonably be assumed to have covered the most important ​part of her life. Herodotus, who wrote within about one hundred and fifty years of her death, tells us that the name of her father was Scamandronymus, and in the absence of any trustworthy evidence to the contrary this statement may be accepted as true. Suidas, in his Greek Lexicon, written in the eleventh century, mentions other names, but great importance need not be attached to his statements in the face of what Herodotus has written upon the subject. The place of Sappho’s birth was either Eresus or Mytilene, but if it were the former, she apparently did not remain there long, for tradition soon and ever afterwards associated her with Mytilene.

Among events contemporary with her life were the prophecies of Jeremiah about 628 B.C., the capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 B.C., the period of Solon in Athens, and of Pittacus in Mytilene. Terpander, the first important lyric poet of Lesbos, of whose works we have also only the scantiest remains, preceded her by about a century, and when she flourished Gautama Buddha had not been born. Sappho had two brothers, Charaxus and Larichus, and, according to Suidas, a third, named Eurygius, of whom, if he really existed, nothing is known. From Athenaeus we learn that Larichus held the office of cup-bearer at Mytilene, and as this office appears to have been a perquisite of the aristocracy, it is therefore with good reason inferred that Sappho and her family were patricians. Charaxus, the other brother, was a ​merchant engaged in exporting the highly prized wine of Lesbos to Naucratis in Egypt, and it was apparently on one of his expeditions in this connection that he met the beautiful Doricha, surnamed Rhodopis, to whose charms he succumbed. At great expense he is said to have ransomed her from bondage. According to Herodotus, she later became very rich, and her name, no doubt without justification, was associated with the building of one of the pyramids. Suidas makes the statement that Charaxus and Doricha were married. If this tradition is founded on fact, it would indicate that there was considerable material prosperity in the family of Sappho. The poetess disapproved of the episode, and expressed herself in verse upon the subject.

There was one important event in the early life of Sappho of which we have direct documentary evidence, and that is her sojourn in Sicily. A celebrated inscription cut in a block of marble and found at Paros, now in the British Museum, professes to give a chronological account of the chief events in Greek history from the sixteenth to the third century B.C. Among the other statements which appear in this chronicle is one which tells us that when Aristocles ruled the Athenians Sappho fled from Lesbos to Sicily. When this flight took place the reason no doubt was that she and her family happened to be involved with the losing side in some political convulsion in her native island. She apparently remained in Sicily for some years, though she was still ​comparatively young when she returned to Mytilene, for the tradition is that she soon afterwards married a man called Cercolas, who came from the island of Andros, and that later she had a daughter whom she named Cleis, after her own mother. One of the surviving poetical fragments refers to this daughter by name, but nothing more is known about her. To judge by the absence of any further reference to Cercolas, it may be inferred that he played no very important part in the life of Sappho, or that possibly he did not live very long. In any case, history gives us no later information concerning him. One episode, until comparatively recently always included in biographical accounts of the poetess, is that associating her name with the possibly mythical Phaon. Although this story of Sappho’s alleged love for Phaon, who according to tradition was a boatman endowed with unusual physical beauty, was prevalent in ancient and mediaeval times, and although it helped to inspire the poetical efforts of many writers and has been handed down to very recent times as if it had some authentic foundation, there is no real reason to accept as true the statement that Sappho ever even saw the Leucadian promontory, much less leaped from it as the Phaon legend suggests. The story is no doubt a myth founded on an allegory tricked out in the meretricious trappings of mediocre poetical efforts, and it is probable that any other name than that of Sappho would have served as the incarnation of scorned femininity in the poems upon this ​subject As noted elsewhere, modern English writers justly treat this Phaon legend as incredible and as one founded neither on reason nor on sound evidence. The whole story seems, indeed, to be a legend of a not infrequent type.

It is not known certainly how long Sappho lived, but from the expression γεραίτερα, “rather old,” which she uses about herself it may be supposed that she lived past middle life. Such biographical material is all too scanty, and it contains a considerable amount of conjecture, yet with it we must perforce be satisfied. Our knowledge of Sappho’s life-history is never likely to be amplified materially, though there is always reasonable hope that in the future more of her poems may be recovered.

As already indicated, the position, climate, and natural resources were all favourable to a high degree of material and intellectual development in the island of Lesbos, and such a state of affairs did actually exist even in these early times. The commercial and material prosperity no doubt came first, but it is known that in the seventh century B.C., before the birth of Sappho, there was already in existence a considerable body of lyric poetry, as well as other evidence of artistic, musical, and literary culture in the chief centres of population such as Mytilene. There is, furthermore, evidence that in some ways the customs of the Lesbians differed from, and were in advance of, those of many of the other divisions of the Greek population. The women of Lesbos of all classes ​enjoyed a freedom from restraint unknown among the other Greeks, and it may be reasonably assumed that this freedom, so enjoyed by them in earlier ages, had, with the increase in wealth, luxury, and refinement, lost much of its simplicity, and may later have degenerated into a mode of life in which there was much more licence than had ever been known before in any part of the world inhabited by people of the Greek race. However much such licence might be deplored, if its existence could be proved, it need not therefore be assumed that there was a generally depraved state of society. In the case of Sappho it serves no good purpose to concern ourselves very much with the morality of her sentiments and conduct. We should rather concentrate our attention upon the poetic depth, intensity, and value of what she wrote, and upon its philological and historical interest. One thing is certainly evident and that is that when we read those surviving fragments which describe love and passion, we need never look elsewhere for anything nearer perfection in intensity, in sound, and in rhythm in any language. However the question may be considered, there is no trustworthy evidence to prove that, at the time when Sappho lived, the moral standards in Lesbian society were low, and it is by no means certain that the decadence and corruption which did undoubtedly develop as time went on had even begun during her lifetime.

It should also be remembered that Scandal, like Death, ​loves a shining mark, and such was Sappho for several centuries after her death. The invocation to Aphrodite for aid in securing the affections of a member of the same sex causes some suspicion that the expression of passion contained in it shows an abnormal element, but in endeavouring to reach a decision on this point, it must be remembered that there is no certainty that in the seventh century B.C. the word “Aphrodite” represented the same conception that it does in the twentieth century A.D., and there should not be too much haste in giving judgment upon social and psychological conditions of that early era. Furthermore, if we knew the age of Sappho when she wrote the poem, our conclusion would be influenced by that knowledge. If for example, it could actually be proved that the poem was the work of a girl of eighteen, a not impossible contingency in dealing with genius, our estimate of the psychology of its writer would differ widely from what it would be if we knew that we were dealing with the work of a woman twice that age.