BURNING LOVE

In antiquity men spoke of her as the tenth muse. Today, Sappho ( 618 BC-565 BC ) remains one of the most famous lyric poets the world has ever known.Sappho was called a lyrist  because, as was the custom of the time, she wrote her poems to be performed with the accompaniment of a lyre. Sappho composed her own music and refined the prevailing lyric meter to a point that it is now known as sapphic meter. She innovated lyric poetry both in technique and style, becoming part of a new wave of Greek lyrists who moved from writing poetry from the point of view of gods and muses to the personal vantage point of the individual. She was one of the first poets to write from the first person, describing love and loss with all the intense emotionsthat love, desire, longing and suffering can arouse.

Yet, paradoxically, only a mere fraction of her work has survived and the reputation she enjoys derives to a considerable degree from her personal legend, much of which is endless strata and obscured by dust and polemic. Only one out of all of Sappho’s poems survives intact. The evidence suggest that Sappho’s poems were destroyed by the church for her articulations of lewd passions and outlandish dialect that the authorities felt went beyond normal allowances for the decadence of learning. The final bonfires for her works and others likely were orchestrated during Gregory VII’s papacy at Constantinople and Rome in 1073.

But, the puritan and repressed mind, as Freud and others were well aware, tends to be far more enflamed by open, candid, happy and above all guiltless passion than by even the nastiest sort of graphic pornography. Sappho’s very spontaneity, her wholly untroubled  and unself-conscious lack of reticence alone would suffice to explain why her poetry was singled out for destruction. The absence of shame is a characteristic of Sappho as her poetry shows no hint that the flesh is inherently sinful and so self torment except over unrequited passion.

Anyone who brings a reasonably open mind to Sappho’s work will have to concede her passionate and violent emotional involvement with other members of her own sex. Whether this orientation was taken to its logical, physical conclusion is a point that can never be proved one way or the other matters very little though she likely did.The 3rd Century philosopher Maximus of Tyre wrote that Sappho was “small and dark” and that her relationships to her female friends were similar to those of Socrates:

”What else was the love of the Lesbian woman except Socrates’ art of love? For they seem to me to have practiced love each in their own way, she that of women, he that of men. For they say that both loved many and were captivated by all things beautiful. What Alcibiades and Charmides and Phaedrus were to him, Gyrinna and Atthis and Anactoria were to the Lesbian.”


Sappho, Charles Augustin Mengin, 1877

The emotional and psychological structure of her personality is the truly important thing. Granted this, one gathers, her sublimated passions were at liberty to express themselves more or less as they pleased. However, in the past scholars  have tried to homogenize this rare and splendid character into someone who could not have been a lesbian in the modern sense of the word, could not have committed suicide and could not have embarked, in late middle age , on a heterosexual affair with a Mytilene boatman. This construction of a persona reflecting post-Christian purity, delicacy and rectitude seems to suffer from misapplied moralizing and misconceived romanticism.  A discussion of the phenomenon of bisexuality is probably a far more frequent condition than psychological conditioning would seem to suppose.

An indifference to public affairs and a preoccupation with her own emotional life rather than with the life of the community at large,

the most characteristic qualities in Sappho’s work. Sappho has got herself into an emotional tangle once more, and, as usual, is appealing to Aphrodite to sort it out. It has all happened so often before, and the end has always been the same.  Today it is you who love and she who is reluctant; tomorrow it will be she who chases, you who run. So constant is your passion, so transient your suffering. Ode to Aphrodite:

Throned in splendor, immortal Aphrodite/Daughter of Zeus, enchantress, I beseech you/Do not let my heart be crushed by anguish.Lady and torment:…

Here in a flash! Then you, Lady most blessed,/Smiling with your immortal face upon me/Asked what was my trouble now,/why has I now called upon you

What new object had my unruly passions/Fastened on this time-”Whom must I now persuade to share your affections?/Which of them is it now, my Sappho, that wrongs you?…

Sappho is not a delicate lady twanging her lyre in a ladylike manner and encircled by late Victorian girl sophomores.She was not a tall beautiful member in good standing of the aristocracy. She was brilliant,wayward, small, vital, ugly creature, with a transfiguring smile,noted for her storms and rages and egocentric tirades and infinite capacity for self-surrender in love.  Even in the depths of her hopeless passion Sappho can stand aside and see how funny it all is, and how ludicrously predictable her behavior seems. Yet, the passion is real and life is no less intractable for being comic.

”It is not only the fragmentary form of her work which contributes to giving her the face of a modern poet. Even in their original state, the poems by the woman who really invented personal poetry were very short, between four and thirty lines and no one else in Greece was to follow this path which seemed too narrow for those used to epics, great odes or tragedies.In this wonderful world of ancient literature, Sappho was the only feminine voice, the only vision of a woman thrown into the ancient world that we know only through men.But by a strange coincidence this woman is a rebel; she says no! No to men who refuse women the right to love. No to the democratic tyranny which was to destroy the aristocratic society in which she was a leading figure (and it exiled her!) and no again, sometimes to the gods.Sappho was finally the first in an often tragic line of people accused in the trials that morality imposes on genius. She was, in her works, burned and broken, as according to legend, Orpheus has been. But if one can tear to pieces the work of a poet as one can the body of a god, one cannot kill her voice. ( Edith Mora )