(no subject)
I wrote the article behind the cut years ago, in response to a particularly foul bit women's-studies illiteracy which I had encountered in an Amateur Press Association (a circle of amateur writers reading each other's work):
SAPPHO DAUGHTER OF SCAMANDRONYMUS
Manyfold-throned, O deathless Aphrodite
Delusion-weaver, child of God, I pray you,
Weave not my soul within a web of anguish,
Lady, of pain;
But come to me, as you've already come
When once my voice reached you from far away,
Was heard, and when you left your Father's house,
And flew to me;
And fair they were, as they took down your chariot,
Your sparrows yoked, with their swift whirl of wings,
To the black Earth, and from Olympus crossing
The middle aether;
Quickly they came. And you, O blissful goddess,
With a smile on your immortal visage,
Asked of me from what again I suffered,
From what I called;
And what again so strongly did I ache for
In my wild heart; who shall I persuade
To love you? Who does you,
Sappho, this wrong?
And if she flees now, soon she'll look for you;
If she accepts no gifts, soon she will offer them;
If she dislikes you, soon she'll be in love,
Willing, unwilling.
Come to me now, then, free me from this cruel
Relentless grief, fulfil my desires,
Deliver what my heart longs for to me,
Remain my friend.
This is my translation of the Hymn to Aphrodite, the only poem of Sappho of Lesbos to come down intact to us. Greek is not exactly my strong suit, but I love her work so much that I made shift, with a dictionary and the ruins of a little elementary grammar (and a couple of other folks' translations), to do it.
C******** W*****'s passage about Sappho was one of the most astonishing experiences of my life, like meeting some mythological monster in the street - a hippogriff, a chimaera, the Fenris wolf: something that cannot exist. The familiar features of the domestic animal are scattered all anyhow in insane patterns, patterns that do not work, make no sense, and, while providing a most extraordinary curiosity, do not answer any sane or credible purpose. The mad form into which a very few of the known facts of history have been twisted by some half-educated and less than half-sane American feminist is so outlandish as to leave one speechless and gasping with incredulous laughter; and the fact that someone has been dishonest or ignorant enough to publish it - when the barrier of a publishing company is meant to separate, if not the wheat from the chaff, at least the competent from the hopeless - is a sour reflection on publishing honesty. C******** W***** is not a pathetic or ineffective person; but for a moment, clutching this sad rubbish as if Holy Writ, she does look rather pitiful.
To make sure that there is no suggestion of unfair treatment, I will reproduce the passage in full, and then show exactly why every single word in it is wrong, right down to "and" and "the". In the 6th century BC, Lesbos was ruled by a group of women who had pledged themselves to worship the female principle, to the service of the Olympian goddesses Aphrodite and Artemis, and to "charis", grace, meaning, in this context, the arts. The arts, of course, included poetry, and it was during this period that Sappho, the greatest female poet of the classical era, lived and worked on Lesbos. Sappho's sexuality has been much debated, for while she married and experienced motherhood, some of the verses she produced undoubtedly express lesbian desire. The fact that so few fragments of her work remain complicates matters, but lyrics such as her "hymn to Aphrodite", in which she invokes the goddess for aid in her seduction of a young girl, and the existence of several references to her female companions as her own, and each other's hetairai ("courtesans") leads to Jeannette Foster's conclusion that "Sappho was certainly [sexually] variant, and, quite probably, what modern theorists term bisexual".
And now, give me a minute to recover...
New archaeological discoveries and the ongoing re-evaluation of known facts - especially from the Hittite and Anatolian area - are enlarging and modifying our view of Greek origins. We know now that, in the last centuries of the second millennium BC, Greece (in Hittite, Ahhiya or Ahhiyawa - that is, Achaia) was ruled by kings powerful enough to address the Hittite emperor as "my brother". At the height of its power, Ahhiya/ Achaia was powerful enough to temporarily expel the Hittites from much of Western and Southern Anatolia and gather an alliance that nearly destroyed them altogether. A generation ago, Ventris and Chadwick's epoch-making decipherment of Linear B script led to a big academic fad for relating Homeric poems and Mycenean history, as it was found that the Myceneans spoke Greek - not an earlier language, but Greek, like Shakespearean English is English - and that a good few details in Homer seemed to correspond to known Mycenean facts. But the Hittite evidence makes it clear that Homer is a very misleading guide to Mycenean politics; while Homer's Greek army is a confederacy of virtually independent kinglets, and Agamemnon's title "King of men" is hardly more than honorary, Hittite documents describe a strong united state, quite like the Hittite and Egyptian empires (or even the contemporary mini-empire of King Solomon).
The reason why I am saying this is that it is important to realize that, when Greece emerges blinking into the light of written history, between 750 and 600 BC, it is a fractured country. It has suffered a great historical shock, and it is at the bottom of a long trough of decline. We are too used to thinking that the Greece we know, poor (Greek poverty is a constant theme of all classical writing) and with its scattered statelets perpetually at war with each other, is in its normal state, and that relationships between Greek cities are exactly like those between modern independent states. They aren't. Too little attention is paid to an important passage of Herodotus [8.2] which describes all wars between Greek cities, as opposed to wars against non-Greeks, as "internal strife" or civil war. That is how the early Greeks saw their country: as a country that ought by rights to be united, but that is in fact perpetually torn by civil war.
The poverty of Greece is important. The collapse of the Mycenean empire was only a part of a major crisis that - according to the "new chronology" proposed by the likes of Peter James and David Rohl, which I tend to accept [though with no certainty] - swept the Mediterranean all the way to Egypt, and encompassed such things as the collapse of the Hittite Empire and the split between the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, with the loss of all their dependent territories. But the Greeks fell farther and harder than anybody else. While Egypt and Mesopotamia emerge from the crisis with their core lands intact, and the two Jewish states do at least maintain some internal cohesion, no large state of any description survives the collapse in Greece. The reason for this is surely Greece's difficult geography; it is half scattered islands, half deep valleys split by rocky mountains, and none of it very fertile. There are no major rivers, and what rain does fall tends more to wash away any fertile soil than to water it.
The mind that develops under these reduced circumstances, in which an impoverished, feud-ridden aristocracy with more caste pride than land or wealth is struggling day by day not to slide to the level of mere free peasants like the author of Hesiod's Works and Days, and to avoid the daggers of enemy families, is well shown in the work of two great poets - "Hesiod" and Theognis, conveniently published together in a nice Penguin edition edited by a charming American don called Dorothea Wender.
Professor Wender praises Theognis' style and expressive power; but, she goes on to say, "unfortunately, as his personality is revealed in the poems, Theognis is not at all likeable. He seems to have been a savage, paranoid, bigoted, bitter, narrow, pompous, self-pitying person. Over and over he reproaches Kurnos [his boyfriend] for being unfaithful to him, for deceiving him, for letting him down. The lower classes are 'the bad'; aristocrats are 'the good'. But even among gentlemen, almost everyone is untrustworthy, and few have any brains."
"It's better not to have been born, second best to die young. Nothing ever works out the way you planned it. Good men suffer; bad men thrive. Old age is an unalloyed disaster, and death is vile and frightening. Everyone lacks gratitude; the 'low' are particularly bad in this respect (yet Theognis himself never, in any poem we have, expresses gratitude to anyone for anything). He is often self-contradictory... He urges Kurnos to act like the sea-polyp which changes colour to match the rock it's on; in many poems he praises duplicity, flattery of 'low' men, adjusting one's behaviour and opinions to match one's neighbours; but then he attacks the two-faced man, the 'mixing-bowl' friend, he complains how hard it is to know the mind of a man, and he says that the worth of a man must be tested in a crisis as gold is rubbed by a touchstone, and that only he, Theognis, has been found as true and pure as fine gold, tested beside mere lead."
"What an impossible person! A major problem about paranoid people is that they attract persecution, and quite possibly this was the case with Theognis. If you call your friends slanderous traitors often enough, sooner or later they will slander and betray you and prove you right. Reading Theognis, one can't help feeling a bit sorry for Kurnos: only his name, really, has been immortalized; the poet neglects to tell us anything about his great love, except that he was unfaithful. We never learn what Kurnos looked like, what made him lovable, what he thought about anything, what he did that was good or brave or amusing or endearing. What kind of love is that?"
"Still, we must remember that Theognis' attitudes were not so pathological in his culture as they would be in ours..." [italics mine]
- and, by contrast with Theognis, what a very "possible" person is Professor Wender! Only those familiar with academic writing can recognize how unusual is the directness and personality of this style; and I think it is just her charm, her lovability, her balance (when Americans are nice, they are really nice) that allow her to see so clearly and describe so inoffensively the flaws in her poet's character. She could be describing (with exasperated affection) some talented but unfortunately-disposed pupil of hers; and I can tell you that she describes Theognis very accurately.
However, her highly personal attitude to him makes her understate, and perhaps underrate, the cultural element in his outlook. Only at the end of her engagingly ladylike tirade does she mention it. In fact, Theognis' poems went on to be taught in schools as, believe it or not, "improving" work (quoth Professor Wender: "I wonder what sort of education for democracy they provided Athenian boys"), and most of his political system and personal attitude can be traced, almost to the point of paraphrase, in Plato. Greek writers of all ages shared it to varying degrees; even the lovable and well-balanced Plutarch paid at least lip-service to it.
I am not saying that Theognis was not himself as Professor Wender describes him; only that the culture he belonged to encouraged those attitudes. Those who, in this day and age, extol the values of ancient Greece, simply don't know what they are talking about. Anyone familiar with Greek literature knows that what Theognis expresses is no more than the commonplaces of Greek thought; that it is better not to be born, that he who dies young is happy, that nobody can be trusted, that "good" means "aristocratic", that the world is ridden with deceit and trickery, are simply the common currency of ordinary Greek talk. Wisdom, as incarnate in Odysseus, meant to trust nothing and nobody. Nobility meant to be as good to your friends as you are dreaded to your enemies. Greek mythology, and especially its heroic legend, is as gory as the Irish without its colour and brilliance, and as gloomy as the Germanic without its grandeur; the Iliad and Odyssey's values are mafia values, the world they describe one of super-hitmen and super-bosses - narrow, petty, oppressive and incredibly vicious. When the greatest of all heroes, Achilles, wants to celebrate the funeral of his tutor and friend Patroclos, he takes twelve Troyan prisoners and slits their throats on the funeral pyre. Such people as Pericles, Aeschylus, Socrates, Plato - and, yes, Sappho - are miracles, and their spiritual greatness cannot be properly measured except against the background of pessimism, selfishness, paranoia and cruelty of the ordinary Greek mind.
At the back of this is fear, and specifically fear of the loss of rank. References to jumped-up nonentities and to "good" aristocratic families losing power and rank are so numerous in Greek writing that they provided Marxist historians with a positive banquet of supposed class conflict; yet social mobility seems to have been fairly limited, and great families remained great over much of Greek history. But they were obsessed by the possibility of decline; hence their paranoia.
A part of this is the appalling Greek hatred and fear of women. Plato's character Pausanias (Symposium 181) states in so many words that the love of man and boy is higher than that between man and woman because women are a lower kind of being; Eryxymachus and Aristophanes agree unreservedly, Aristophanes adding the refinement that only male homosexuals who despise women make good politicians and acceptable rulers (ibid.192). They don't even see the need to describe any particular female flaw; women are inferior and that's it, and nobody would think of loving them unless moved by vulgar lust, whereas the love of boys is noble and un-vulgar! As the dialogue goes on, they are getting drunker (symposion means nothing else than drinking party) and their pseudo-intellectual talk is in fact alcoholic drivel; but these are real people, and while Plato was joking, he was joking about people he knew. These views, or something very like them, must have been credible in their mouths. In vino veritas, truth comes out of drink.
Poverty and paranoia were at the back of this, too. Where family property can cause so much dread, the wife becomes the most dreaded object in the whole mental landscape. She is the weak point; the very thought of her ever turning against the husband is a matter of terror. The misogynous legend of the two sisters, Helen and Clytemnestra, shows it with oppressive clarity; when Helen leaves her husband for a younger and handsomer man, she takes with her the wealth of Sparta; and, having turned against her violent husband, Clytemnestra makes common cause with his enemy - an envenomed member of a dispossessed cadet branch of the family - and connives at her husband's murder. Such things are never absent in any part of the world, but in Greece they are at the heart of the great epic, expressing everything Greek men dreaded most. Because of the actions of the two sisters, the whole world is plunged into war, and the great age of heroes comes to a bloody end. Comparative considerations suggest that this was a peculiarly Greek feature, not found in other Indo-European epics.
Because of this pathological terror, Greek women were kept in a state approaching slavery, locked in the house, forbidden to take any part in public affairs, oppressed, insulted, and traded like cattle. Whatever happened, they could not be allowed to have an independent life, lest the all too fragile property should be endangered. There are a few known cases in which, to avoid breaking up the family inheritance, women were forced to marry their own brothers. (Later, in Roman-age Egypt, incestuous marriage, mostly between father and daughter, became common, and for exactly the same reason: to prevent the further dispersion of already very parcelled land.)
What has this got to do with a group of women who, according to Ms.W*****'s "sources", ruled the island of Lesbos? Precisely nothing. Such a group of women never existed. The history of Lesbos in the seventh century (not the sixth - what a perfection of wrongness this passage is; even the century is wrong) is known, and it was played out entirely between men. Sappho's poetry shows clearly that she, and her whole thiasos or league of friends, were wholly outside politics. The very word thiasos is significant; unlike phratria (brotherhood) or hetaireia (company), this describes a club or association that is specifically unpolitical, mostly dedicated to giving feasts and sacrifices to the gods, with connotations of revelry and harmless fun - the related verb thiaseyo means "to honour with sacred revelry". Right from the start, anyone with any knowledge of Greek knows that Sappho had nothing to do with politics.
In all her fragments, she only mentions politics once [fragment 98] , while the equally fragmentary remains of Solon, Theognis or Heraclitus, contemporary or slightly later writers who really had to do with government and politics, are not too short to be full of it, one way or another. What is far more, we have quite a bit of the work of Sappho's contemporary and friend Alcaeus, who is so political that the nineteenth century saw him as the type of the poet-patriot. They write in the same language and in much the same style, they knew each other, they probably were friends; but he always talks politics, and she never does. Never except once. And how does she come to her one mention of politics? Exiled in Sicily with her daughter Cleis, now a growing girl, she regrets she cannot buy her a pretty Sardian scarf of many colours, like she had as a child in Lesbos. For this reason she regrets being expelled by the sons (note the masculine gender) of Cleanactides! She doesn't even mention, what we find out from Alcaeus and later historians, that many aristocratic families had been expelled with her; her concerns are entirely private.
The most telling of her fragments in this respect is fr.16, where she claims to prefer the beauty of her girlfriend Anactoria to all the armies of Greece. Now, in Greece, the army was not something separate from the civil constitution of the city, but rather the core of it, administratively and politically. The army gathered all free citizens with political rights, and there was no separation between military and political offices. When she says that her girlfriend walking along attracts her more than the whole army assembled, Sappho is clearly stating a complete lack of interest in politics. In fact, she goes further, all but praising Helen of Troy for her disastrous infatuation for Paris, which led her to neglect and overturn every civic and personal duty there was. You are in love? Then to Hell with every civic and personal duty, every legitimate tie, even your own daughter (Helena had a daughter by Menelaus); love is enough. This is probably a fairly youthful composition, with that typical feeling of someone out to shock; at this point, Sappho has not yet learned - as she will later, in exile - that politics can affect her whether she cares for it or not. For that matter, the writer who idealizes the woman who left her daughter to run away with a stranger probably hadn't yet had her own Cleis either.
The supposed debate about whether Sappho was homosexual or not is silly; she was. Any doubts on the matter depend on the notion that she could have chosen not to marry; which, in Greece - and especially among the aristocracy to which she belonged - is ridiculous. Upper-class Greek women were married by their families; and once married, they had children, because the family line must go on. Sappho knew this well. In her heartbroken farewells to beloved girlfriends going off to be married (frs.31, 94, 95), she never once says anything against the bridegroom or shows the least jealousy. It is simply something that happens, and that "has to be borne" (fr.31, line 17), even though the thought of losing one's love is worse than death. "We shall grant her [in marriage], says the father" (fr.109).
Her attitude to women rivals is very different: jealousy and anger do come into it, and there is some fairly stinging invective. Though I for one never doubt that she is in fact a gentle-hearted woman who bears no grudges (fr.120) she can nevertheless get very angry. She has, she says, had far more than enough of Gorgo (fr.144); as for Eirana, she is simply too snotty for words (fr.91). Why has Atthis grown tired of her and fled to Andromeda (fr.130)? At any rate, Andromeda has struck a fine bargain; but why does Aphrodite do things like that (fr.133)? [Yet, Sappho is so ungrudging that she actually writes a poem for Atthis, describing gently Atthis' longing for yet another missing girlfriend - fr.96 - as if it had never occurred to her to be jealous.] In general, "for just the people whom I love the most/ They are the ones who give me the most pain" (fr.26). To lose a girlfriend to a husband is something as natural and inevitable, if as painful, as old age and death; but to lose her to another woman is a betrayal. Do I even have to point out the meaning of this?
Sappho's position is to some extent eccentric, both geographically and in terms of her homosexuality. Her birthplace Lesbos was neither Ionian nor Dorian; that is, it lay outside both the cultural heart and the political and military centre of the country. It was a provincial Aeolian island briefly distinguished by two poets of genius (Sappho and Alcaeus), more than a century before classical Athens. Unlike Athenian praisers of pretty boys, Sappho established no lasting tradition; and indeed Athens, cultural centre of the ancient world, cruelly slandered her. The Athenian legend of Sappho said she was small and dark (that is, in Greek terms, very ugly, since the Greeks, like all Mediterraneans, idealize tall blonde people), and that she fell in love with a young man who wanted nothing to do with her, and threw herself off a cliff. This spread all over the ancient world, and Ovid made a nice poem out of it ; but it is nonsense - the little that remains of her work is enough to blow it apart - and its lasting popularity is good evidence of what the Greeks really thought of female homosexuality.
Ugly? She was irresistible, and knew it: in the Hymn to Aphrodite she is quite confident that she will yet win, with the goddess' help, the love of a girl who turned her down; this, she says, has happened before, and she calls the goddess of love her "ally". In other words, Sappho felt that the power itself of love loved her. (This close and confident relationship with a god - and one of the most dreaded gods in the pantheon! - is highly unusual in Greece; two centuries later, Aristotle said "we would think it odd to hear of anyone loving Zeus".) In a time and climate where women aged fast, she had, already middle-aged, to turn down a besotted boy (fr. 121). Far from committing suicide, she married, had a daughter, and lived to a ripe old age, remembering with sweet sadness her youth and beauty (frs. 21 and 58), and still celebrating her love of beautiful things in unforgettable verse. And finally, every verse we have written in a personal voice, as opposed to "official" poetry written for weddings and religious rites, is about women; there is not a single hint of personal sentiment about any man. The only fragment (102) that describes the love of a woman for a man, cannot be about Sappho: the speaker is a very young girl, and Sappho's poems are all written from the viewpoint of an adult woman. The poetic art that she deployed so brilliantly is the result of years of study, and the timid, naive girl of fr.102 can hardly be reconciled with the skilful master-poet.
Sappho was homosexual, and happiest in her thiasos; she appreciated male beauty, but had not the least attraction to it. Unattractive? Unhappily in love with a man? Early suicide? Sorry: none of the above.
We are familiar with this kind of story. Lesbians are ugly unattractive women who would actually like nothing better than a big fat prick up them. (Sorry about the coarse language, but it is relevant.) And I must insist on the fact that not only is it unhistorical, but that the slightest acquaintance with Sappho's own words, even the little we have, is enough to blow it sky-high. It is the work of ignorant male Athenians with a bad attitude. The very people of Plato's Symposium, who threw themselves into the fad of intellectual/aristocratic pederasty, gave this insulting description of the greatest Greek poet between Homer and Aeschylus; the actors who waved big stuffed phalluses on stage (many of Aristophanes' comedies included a phallus-waving scene) also used "Sappho" as the sterotype of the frustrated bulldyke. Either they were ignorant of their own poetic heritage , which seems likely, or they knew but pandered to their public, which seems even likelier. The crude phallos-display is very much to the point: brutal pride in the male appendage, together with similar views of homosexual women, are by no means infrequent among the more ignorant males in the Mediterranean world to this day.
We are back to the choking, stifling world of Greek values. And it is worth noting that, apart from personal matters of the heart, Sappho lives unquestioningly within that world. It is just that, being a kind and loving and luminous personality, she simply does not - unlike Theognis - show any sign of being personally affected by them; she accepts them as a person accepts the society she lives in, without even realizing it. What is her best hope for her brother? That he may be as pleasing to his friends as he is dreadful to his enemies (fr.5). Class prejudice she has to the full; she repeatedly nags his brother for setting free a Greek prostitute in Egypt, and the worst thing she can say about her is that she is agroiotis, of the country, a peasant (fr.57). She does not bother to even name this woman; she is simply agroiotis, some peasant or other, who doesn't know how to dress or dance - a clumsy, graceless outsider in the world of the beautiful well-bred young women of the thiasos, who were assuredly of a higher caste. And nothing could be more withering than the calm contempt with which she informs some woman, not initiated into the craft of poetry, that she will never be remembered, but will go down to Hades a lightless shade (fr.55), while "I say that someone shall remember us" (fr.147).
Part of this unquestioning acceptance of the status quo is her apparently huge production of wedding poems. I should think a good third of her fragments come from various kinds of wedding song, from the epic (fr.44, perhaps 44A) to the passionate (fr.112, perhaps 102) to the humorous (fr.110). Part of this is because Lesbian marriage ritual seems to have called for several songs at various stages of the ceremonies, but certainly the author of so many songs can have seen nothing wrong with the appalling marriage customs of her time. And finally, nothing could be more Greek - though, typically, in a luminously positive light - than her brief remark on beauty and goodness: "for what is lovely is only lovely for the duration of a look, but what is good immediately becomes lovely too" (fr.50). The Greeks, to be fair to them, were quite obsessed by beauty, and especially by the beauty of the human body; centuries before the great age of Greek sculpture, you can find it in Homer. The connection of beauty with goodness was a question that haunted their imagination from the start, and I doubt whether, without this particular cultural obsession, Sappho would have been the poet she was.
Ms.W*****'s sources show the most utter ignorance of anything to do with this Greek culture. A gorgeous example, worthy of notice, is that of the word hetaira, often used by Sappho for her lovers, which is translated as "courtesan". A little Greek could cleanse us of this sin. The primary meaning of masculine hetairos and feminine hetaira is nothing else than companion, friend. My Liddell and Scott lexicon has at least a dozen entries connected with hetairos, hetaira as companion, and only three of hetaira as rich man's girlfriend. All that Sappho was saying about her friends was that... they were her friends; she did not call them "courtesans". It was a piece of purely Athenian slang, probably invented long after Sappho was dead, to call the lovers of rich and powerful men hetairai, or companions, which is exactly what someone like the celebrated Aspasia, lover of Pericles, was. She was not a prostitute, but a woman who got to the top by becoming the lover of the most important man in Greece... what the old Italian joke calls the Warrior's Rest.
What this shows is that this Jeannette Foster person not only knows no Greek, but gets her ideas from popular and rather vulgar writing. It is a piece of prurient divulgation to expand upon the role of hetairai in ancient Athens without putting it in context; typical of the kind of book that has a lot to say about the sexual habits of the Ancient Greeks - and not much about anything else.
But that is not the only source of misunderstanding. Ms.W*****'s paragraph (and how bad does a paragraph have to be to need so many pages to sift all its mistakes?) is wholly and uncritically steeped in late-20th-century ideas. She and Sappho have at least this in common, that neither of them has the least idea that social ideas can be different in different times and places. A harmless but blatant instance is the matter of "the arts" that the thiasos is said to have cultivated. Greeks had no such concept as "the arts"; only poetry and the pursuit of wisdom - what came, two centuries after Sappho, to be called philosophy - drew the sort of respect that our age gives to all the arts. Painters, architects, actors, sculptors, musicians, counted as craftsmen, not as artists, lower in rank than the noble young women of the thiasos, and certainly the caste-conscious Sappho would never have dreamed of mixing with them. Poetry was the only proper occupation for a well-born young person of either sex.
Though this is a harmless misunderstanding - that is, though it does not seriously affect her argument - it is so radical that it places the whole matter completely in the outer darkness. Anyone who is capable of such utter ignorance of basic Greek categories of thought is not to be listened to under any heading. She is trapped in the late twentieth century. Only such a mind, to whom the idea of women choosing not to marry and to live openly with other women is normal, could have wondered whether Sappho's being married puts her homosexuality in doubt; and only anyone wholly alien to the most basic facts about the Greek mind - facts which become clear on the first perusal of Homer or Sophocles - could possibly have imagined a Greek state, at any time, ruled by a corporation of women. To Greeks of all ages, such an idea bespeaks either comic absurdity (in Aristophanes, for instance, where the notion of women taking over the running of Athens is the biggest joke anyone could think of) or the complete reversal of any sensible norm (as in the legends of the Amazons). I cannot imagine how and where the incredible notion could have arisen that the thiasos was the governing body of ancient Lesbos, but at whatever point it arose, it bespeaks a culture of pseudo-academic scribblers each of them referring to each other's work and failing to check the original sources - ignorance reinforcing ignorance in a vortex of mutual quotation. I've seen it happen in the fourth chapter of Alan Moore's From Hell, where he quotes as an authority some drivel by Marilyn French, who had swiped it from Robert Graves, whose theses were wholly unacceptable in the first place; and no doubt someone, somewhere, is even now quoting Moore himself as an authority. But at least Graves would not have said that hetaira meant courtesan.
Finally, a few words about the so-called feminine principle that the thiasos was supposed to worship. Certainly, this religious club was dedicated to the worship of Aphrodite and the Charites or Graces, and it is probably for this reason that its young women were allowed the homosexual practices that the rest of Greece - as we have seen - despised. (Such passages as "I wish to rest your limbs on a soft bed" (fr.46) and "you calmed your desires [words missing] on a soft bed" (fr.94) and "sleeping on the breast of a tender girlfriend" (fr.126) leave little space for doubt.) Lesbos was not far from Asia, where various form of prescribed sacred sexual performance and prostitution were well-known. But to presume that any sort of feminine principle existed in Greek religion - and that includes Sappho's - is to go against the evidence. Certainly, Sappho has a marked preference for goddesses; even when she wants to invoke the triad of Zeus, Hera and Dionysos, she addresses herself to Hera, and talks to the male gods through her (fr. 17). But it is no less true that Zeus is the religion's one and only core; when Sappho addresses Aphrodite, it is as the daughter of Zeus, and it is from her father's halls that she hurries down to help her mortal friend. Indeed, the habit of addressing female powers may well be an indication, not of their importance, but of her feminine inferiority. In fr.17 she addresses Hera so that Hera may intercede with the male gods, father and son, Zeus and Dionysos. This strongly suggests that she cannot approach Zeus except through Hera; that, as a woman, she is not allowed to pray to him directly. (Milton: "He for God only, she for God in him".) But whether or not this is right, and I do not insist on it, there is no doubt that in Sappho's world there is only one Zeus; if she prays more often to Aphrodite and to the otherwise insignificant group of the Charites, it is because the thiasos was dedicated to them: it was her job to praise them. How, otherwise, could you explain the complete absence of the greatest Greek goddess, the one who was always described as he Thea, The goddess - Athena?
So much, then, for that extraordinary paragraph of Ms.W*****'s. Its density and depth of error was such that I had to start from the basics of Greek studies and build up every point from the ground, not being able to expect that any fact whatsoever would be known to her - or, for that matter, to many other APA members; Classical scholarship is not exactly a universal accomplishment in Britain. Even so, I haven't managed to get in all that was needed: what is Linear B Script? who were the Myceneans? who were Ventris and Chadwick? I have to apologize, and plead absolute desperate lack of space. I can only refer you to any good textbook written in the last few decades.
But there's a difference: you can do something with people who know that they don't know, but what can you do with people who are ignorant and yet think, because they have read a lot of books, that they know? This is the position Ms.W***** found herself in. It seems clear that every single book she ever read on the matter only reinforced her ignorance. These are not misunderstandings or misinterpretations, but gross errors of checkable fact, though of course the errors of fact also involved crass and elementary absurdities of interpretation. And I think it's fair to say that the only phrase of Ms.W*****'s that has survived scrutiny is that Sappho [was] the greatest female poet of the classical era - though, even then, a scholar wouldn't call a seventh-century poet as of the classical era. Anyway, this is as controversial a statement as that Jack Kirby could draw comics.
Sappho is one of the greatest poets who ever lived. She is one of a very small group - the only ones I can think of are Rabindranath Tagore and Goethe - whose expression is so direct and passionate that it can survive any translation. It does not even matter that her work (like that of all other early Greek writers save Homer and Hesiod) survives only in fragments: a single line can pierce to the heart like a fiery knife. Brought up in the jailhouse bonds of a Greek noble house, she does not have the wide experience and philosophical depth of the German and Bengali master-poets; but it is hard to think where else one could come across such verse as
For it is those for whom I've the most love,
They are the ones who give me the most pain
or
To you , so lovely as you are, my thoughts
Shall never change
or
A voice far sweeter than the lyre,
Golden more than gold
or
...Love has struck my heart,
Like a great wind that breaks upon the mountain oaks
or
Restessly she wanders in the memory
Of gentle Atthis, desire crushing the heart
In her soft breast...
or
Evening star, bringing home all creatures that bright Dawn sent away,
Bring home the kid, bring home the lamb, bring home the son to his mother
or
Love the breaker of limbs is driving me once more,
The bittersweet, the invincible child
or
The Earth now wears [her] garlands,
She's bright and shimmering with flowers
- or even such mysterious, yet affecting single lines as
I want neither the honey nor the bee
or
I say that someone shall remember us
or
I do not feel that I'm touching the sky
and certainly the one passage that is always excerpted, quoted in every anthology, universally known as great:
Now the moon and the Pleiades stars
Have set; half-way through her course
Is the night, the hour is passing -
And I sleep alone.
Perhaps in Dante; perhaps in certain Psalms. Poetry so direct, so deceptively simple, so passionately sincere, is beyond even Shakespeare, except for a few lines (If my love swear that she is made of truth/ I do believe her, though I know she lies; and even there there is a suspicion of civilized tongue in cheek behind the passion, quite alien to Sappho's simple, devoted heart). And it doesn't matter that most of it is lost, because what we have left - and I have quoted only a part of it - is enough to grant us a luminous, beautiful poetic experience quite unlike anything else. It is genuinely miraculous.
The ways of human greatness are strange. In another age the frankly predatory and undisciplined sexuality of Sappho, who could not see a pretty young girl without wanting her in bed, would have been unacceptable; but in the dreadful constriction of Greek society it was a way to express nobility, sweetness and love. Closeted, sold into marriage like a head of cattle, left to use her immense talent in a minor female shrine, she exploded out of it with poetry that blazed from one end of Greece to the other, that made her provincial homeland famous (of which she was very proud: Lofty above all, as are Lesbos' singers among strangers..) and that embodied a human greatness far beyond the miserable pseudo-values of her world. She was not only greater than her world, but greater than she herself knew, even though she had a very accurate idea of her own talent. No Greek would have been proud of forgiving enemies and not holding grudges; she does not only say she does, but she does it without saying it. Question her, and she would probably have told you the same as Theognis: that it is better never to be born, that most people are scoundrels, and that it is good to be good to your friends and terrible to your enemies. And yet she wrote poetry that rejoiced in the beauty and variety of life (except for some Psalms, I know no ancient poet who even comes close to her marvelous descriptions of nature), addressed the gods with an affection and confidence rare in Greece, spoke of her lovers with nothing but love, forgave the women who had wronged her, held no grudge against the young men who came to take her young lovers away, even praised their own beauty and courage, and poured out love for her little daughter Cleis like water. The only things - except for caste pride - in which she is typical of her age and time, are, typically, positive emotions: her love for beautiful things, and for her homeland (there is a lovely Classical proverb that "nobody loves his country because it is great, but because it is his "). Everything she could possibly love, she loved. No less petty Greek ever lived.
This article was written as a sort of grave-offering to her shade, something she as a Greek would understand. I had some fun at C******** W*****'s expense - and at the expense of her sources - but the truth is that what I felt was mainly shame. I was ashamed of our culture, embarrassed on Ms.W*****'s behalf (though she will not thank me for it) for making such statements in public, and felt a need to make it up to Sappho's memory somehow. She did not deserve this. Her loving, forgiving soul was so far ahead of her world that, even though her poetic genius was recognized, her whole lesson about life was missed.
The matter of politics is important here: though politics is no worse a setting than any other for human greatness (people like the emperess Maria Theresa come to mind) Greek politics were naturally mean, vicious and vindictive beyond the norm, and if (per impossibile) Sappho's thiasos had been a political body as is suggested, one thing is certain: she could not have become what she was. The political Alcaeus was correspondingly a smaller poet than his friend - though still great enough - because of the mean, vindictive mind he was bound to express; but, not forced to take part in vendettas and civil wars (though she suffered from them, when she was exiled to Sicily) Sappho, in her narrow bounds, could keep her natural sweetness and love intact and cultivate them.
Despite her fame as a poet, everything valuable about her work was totally misunderstood. Interestingly, the Classical world knew that in her work they had something surpassingly beautiful, but did not seem to understand what was so beautiful about it. Her spiritual nobility struck them in parts of their souls that the official culture did not recognize. And so, instead of learning from her how beautiful it is to love and to forgive, all that Athens, heart of the ancient world, could do was tell smutty, homophobic jokes about the small ugly dyke. Her memory was slowly removed, her work, one way or another, lost; and when, twenty-five centuries later, the discovery of Egyptian papyri at last allowed us to reconstruct some sort of poetic corpus, reversing the crime of the ages - this is what we make of her: a political tool for people who know nothing, and care less, for the reality of who she was, how she lived, and why she wrote. Do you understand, now, why I feel ashamed? Here is one of history's losers, a very great woman who has been abused before and after death and for twenty-five centuries since; and instead of finally coming to a proper assessment of her greatness, instead of finally giving her the honour she deserves instead of taking from her all the precious spiritual values she has to give - this is what our culture does. "In the sixth century BC, Lesbos was ruled by a group of women who had pledged themselves to worship the female principle..." Ye Gods.
SAPPHO DAUGHTER OF SCAMANDRONYMUS
Manyfold-throned, O deathless Aphrodite
Delusion-weaver, child of God, I pray you,
Weave not my soul within a web of anguish,
Lady, of pain;
But come to me, as you've already come
When once my voice reached you from far away,
Was heard, and when you left your Father's house,
And flew to me;
And fair they were, as they took down your chariot,
Your sparrows yoked, with their swift whirl of wings,
To the black Earth, and from Olympus crossing
The middle aether;
Quickly they came. And you, O blissful goddess,
With a smile on your immortal visage,
Asked of me from what again I suffered,
From what I called;
And what again so strongly did I ache for
In my wild heart; who shall I persuade
To love you? Who does you,
Sappho, this wrong?
And if she flees now, soon she'll look for you;
If she accepts no gifts, soon she will offer them;
If she dislikes you, soon she'll be in love,
Willing, unwilling.
Come to me now, then, free me from this cruel
Relentless grief, fulfil my desires,
Deliver what my heart longs for to me,
Remain my friend.
This is my translation of the Hymn to Aphrodite, the only poem of Sappho of Lesbos to come down intact to us. Greek is not exactly my strong suit, but I love her work so much that I made shift, with a dictionary and the ruins of a little elementary grammar (and a couple of other folks' translations), to do it.
C******** W*****'s passage about Sappho was one of the most astonishing experiences of my life, like meeting some mythological monster in the street - a hippogriff, a chimaera, the Fenris wolf: something that cannot exist. The familiar features of the domestic animal are scattered all anyhow in insane patterns, patterns that do not work, make no sense, and, while providing a most extraordinary curiosity, do not answer any sane or credible purpose. The mad form into which a very few of the known facts of history have been twisted by some half-educated and less than half-sane American feminist is so outlandish as to leave one speechless and gasping with incredulous laughter; and the fact that someone has been dishonest or ignorant enough to publish it - when the barrier of a publishing company is meant to separate, if not the wheat from the chaff, at least the competent from the hopeless - is a sour reflection on publishing honesty. C******** W***** is not a pathetic or ineffective person; but for a moment, clutching this sad rubbish as if Holy Writ, she does look rather pitiful.
To make sure that there is no suggestion of unfair treatment, I will reproduce the passage in full, and then show exactly why every single word in it is wrong, right down to "and" and "the". In the 6th century BC, Lesbos was ruled by a group of women who had pledged themselves to worship the female principle, to the service of the Olympian goddesses Aphrodite and Artemis, and to "charis", grace, meaning, in this context, the arts. The arts, of course, included poetry, and it was during this period that Sappho, the greatest female poet of the classical era, lived and worked on Lesbos. Sappho's sexuality has been much debated, for while she married and experienced motherhood, some of the verses she produced undoubtedly express lesbian desire. The fact that so few fragments of her work remain complicates matters, but lyrics such as her "hymn to Aphrodite", in which she invokes the goddess for aid in her seduction of a young girl, and the existence of several references to her female companions as her own, and each other's hetairai ("courtesans") leads to Jeannette Foster's conclusion that "Sappho was certainly [sexually] variant, and, quite probably, what modern theorists term bisexual".
And now, give me a minute to recover...
New archaeological discoveries and the ongoing re-evaluation of known facts - especially from the Hittite and Anatolian area - are enlarging and modifying our view of Greek origins. We know now that, in the last centuries of the second millennium BC, Greece (in Hittite, Ahhiya or Ahhiyawa - that is, Achaia) was ruled by kings powerful enough to address the Hittite emperor as "my brother". At the height of its power, Ahhiya/ Achaia was powerful enough to temporarily expel the Hittites from much of Western and Southern Anatolia and gather an alliance that nearly destroyed them altogether. A generation ago, Ventris and Chadwick's epoch-making decipherment of Linear B script led to a big academic fad for relating Homeric poems and Mycenean history, as it was found that the Myceneans spoke Greek - not an earlier language, but Greek, like Shakespearean English is English - and that a good few details in Homer seemed to correspond to known Mycenean facts. But the Hittite evidence makes it clear that Homer is a very misleading guide to Mycenean politics; while Homer's Greek army is a confederacy of virtually independent kinglets, and Agamemnon's title "King of men" is hardly more than honorary, Hittite documents describe a strong united state, quite like the Hittite and Egyptian empires (or even the contemporary mini-empire of King Solomon).
The reason why I am saying this is that it is important to realize that, when Greece emerges blinking into the light of written history, between 750 and 600 BC, it is a fractured country. It has suffered a great historical shock, and it is at the bottom of a long trough of decline. We are too used to thinking that the Greece we know, poor (Greek poverty is a constant theme of all classical writing) and with its scattered statelets perpetually at war with each other, is in its normal state, and that relationships between Greek cities are exactly like those between modern independent states. They aren't. Too little attention is paid to an important passage of Herodotus [8.2] which describes all wars between Greek cities, as opposed to wars against non-Greeks, as "internal strife" or civil war. That is how the early Greeks saw their country: as a country that ought by rights to be united, but that is in fact perpetually torn by civil war.
The poverty of Greece is important. The collapse of the Mycenean empire was only a part of a major crisis that - according to the "new chronology" proposed by the likes of Peter James and David Rohl, which I tend to accept [though with no certainty] - swept the Mediterranean all the way to Egypt, and encompassed such things as the collapse of the Hittite Empire and the split between the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, with the loss of all their dependent territories. But the Greeks fell farther and harder than anybody else. While Egypt and Mesopotamia emerge from the crisis with their core lands intact, and the two Jewish states do at least maintain some internal cohesion, no large state of any description survives the collapse in Greece. The reason for this is surely Greece's difficult geography; it is half scattered islands, half deep valleys split by rocky mountains, and none of it very fertile. There are no major rivers, and what rain does fall tends more to wash away any fertile soil than to water it.
The mind that develops under these reduced circumstances, in which an impoverished, feud-ridden aristocracy with more caste pride than land or wealth is struggling day by day not to slide to the level of mere free peasants like the author of Hesiod's Works and Days, and to avoid the daggers of enemy families, is well shown in the work of two great poets - "Hesiod" and Theognis, conveniently published together in a nice Penguin edition edited by a charming American don called Dorothea Wender.
Professor Wender praises Theognis' style and expressive power; but, she goes on to say, "unfortunately, as his personality is revealed in the poems, Theognis is not at all likeable. He seems to have been a savage, paranoid, bigoted, bitter, narrow, pompous, self-pitying person. Over and over he reproaches Kurnos [his boyfriend] for being unfaithful to him, for deceiving him, for letting him down. The lower classes are 'the bad'; aristocrats are 'the good'. But even among gentlemen, almost everyone is untrustworthy, and few have any brains."
"It's better not to have been born, second best to die young. Nothing ever works out the way you planned it. Good men suffer; bad men thrive. Old age is an unalloyed disaster, and death is vile and frightening. Everyone lacks gratitude; the 'low' are particularly bad in this respect (yet Theognis himself never, in any poem we have, expresses gratitude to anyone for anything). He is often self-contradictory... He urges Kurnos to act like the sea-polyp which changes colour to match the rock it's on; in many poems he praises duplicity, flattery of 'low' men, adjusting one's behaviour and opinions to match one's neighbours; but then he attacks the two-faced man, the 'mixing-bowl' friend, he complains how hard it is to know the mind of a man, and he says that the worth of a man must be tested in a crisis as gold is rubbed by a touchstone, and that only he, Theognis, has been found as true and pure as fine gold, tested beside mere lead."
"What an impossible person! A major problem about paranoid people is that they attract persecution, and quite possibly this was the case with Theognis. If you call your friends slanderous traitors often enough, sooner or later they will slander and betray you and prove you right. Reading Theognis, one can't help feeling a bit sorry for Kurnos: only his name, really, has been immortalized; the poet neglects to tell us anything about his great love, except that he was unfaithful. We never learn what Kurnos looked like, what made him lovable, what he thought about anything, what he did that was good or brave or amusing or endearing. What kind of love is that?"
"Still, we must remember that Theognis' attitudes were not so pathological in his culture as they would be in ours..." [italics mine]
- and, by contrast with Theognis, what a very "possible" person is Professor Wender! Only those familiar with academic writing can recognize how unusual is the directness and personality of this style; and I think it is just her charm, her lovability, her balance (when Americans are nice, they are really nice) that allow her to see so clearly and describe so inoffensively the flaws in her poet's character. She could be describing (with exasperated affection) some talented but unfortunately-disposed pupil of hers; and I can tell you that she describes Theognis very accurately.
However, her highly personal attitude to him makes her understate, and perhaps underrate, the cultural element in his outlook. Only at the end of her engagingly ladylike tirade does she mention it. In fact, Theognis' poems went on to be taught in schools as, believe it or not, "improving" work (quoth Professor Wender: "I wonder what sort of education for democracy they provided Athenian boys"), and most of his political system and personal attitude can be traced, almost to the point of paraphrase, in Plato. Greek writers of all ages shared it to varying degrees; even the lovable and well-balanced Plutarch paid at least lip-service to it.
I am not saying that Theognis was not himself as Professor Wender describes him; only that the culture he belonged to encouraged those attitudes. Those who, in this day and age, extol the values of ancient Greece, simply don't know what they are talking about. Anyone familiar with Greek literature knows that what Theognis expresses is no more than the commonplaces of Greek thought; that it is better not to be born, that he who dies young is happy, that nobody can be trusted, that "good" means "aristocratic", that the world is ridden with deceit and trickery, are simply the common currency of ordinary Greek talk. Wisdom, as incarnate in Odysseus, meant to trust nothing and nobody. Nobility meant to be as good to your friends as you are dreaded to your enemies. Greek mythology, and especially its heroic legend, is as gory as the Irish without its colour and brilliance, and as gloomy as the Germanic without its grandeur; the Iliad and Odyssey's values are mafia values, the world they describe one of super-hitmen and super-bosses - narrow, petty, oppressive and incredibly vicious. When the greatest of all heroes, Achilles, wants to celebrate the funeral of his tutor and friend Patroclos, he takes twelve Troyan prisoners and slits their throats on the funeral pyre. Such people as Pericles, Aeschylus, Socrates, Plato - and, yes, Sappho - are miracles, and their spiritual greatness cannot be properly measured except against the background of pessimism, selfishness, paranoia and cruelty of the ordinary Greek mind.
At the back of this is fear, and specifically fear of the loss of rank. References to jumped-up nonentities and to "good" aristocratic families losing power and rank are so numerous in Greek writing that they provided Marxist historians with a positive banquet of supposed class conflict; yet social mobility seems to have been fairly limited, and great families remained great over much of Greek history. But they were obsessed by the possibility of decline; hence their paranoia.
A part of this is the appalling Greek hatred and fear of women. Plato's character Pausanias (Symposium 181) states in so many words that the love of man and boy is higher than that between man and woman because women are a lower kind of being; Eryxymachus and Aristophanes agree unreservedly, Aristophanes adding the refinement that only male homosexuals who despise women make good politicians and acceptable rulers (ibid.192). They don't even see the need to describe any particular female flaw; women are inferior and that's it, and nobody would think of loving them unless moved by vulgar lust, whereas the love of boys is noble and un-vulgar! As the dialogue goes on, they are getting drunker (symposion means nothing else than drinking party) and their pseudo-intellectual talk is in fact alcoholic drivel; but these are real people, and while Plato was joking, he was joking about people he knew. These views, or something very like them, must have been credible in their mouths. In vino veritas, truth comes out of drink.
Poverty and paranoia were at the back of this, too. Where family property can cause so much dread, the wife becomes the most dreaded object in the whole mental landscape. She is the weak point; the very thought of her ever turning against the husband is a matter of terror. The misogynous legend of the two sisters, Helen and Clytemnestra, shows it with oppressive clarity; when Helen leaves her husband for a younger and handsomer man, she takes with her the wealth of Sparta; and, having turned against her violent husband, Clytemnestra makes common cause with his enemy - an envenomed member of a dispossessed cadet branch of the family - and connives at her husband's murder. Such things are never absent in any part of the world, but in Greece they are at the heart of the great epic, expressing everything Greek men dreaded most. Because of the actions of the two sisters, the whole world is plunged into war, and the great age of heroes comes to a bloody end. Comparative considerations suggest that this was a peculiarly Greek feature, not found in other Indo-European epics.
Because of this pathological terror, Greek women were kept in a state approaching slavery, locked in the house, forbidden to take any part in public affairs, oppressed, insulted, and traded like cattle. Whatever happened, they could not be allowed to have an independent life, lest the all too fragile property should be endangered. There are a few known cases in which, to avoid breaking up the family inheritance, women were forced to marry their own brothers. (Later, in Roman-age Egypt, incestuous marriage, mostly between father and daughter, became common, and for exactly the same reason: to prevent the further dispersion of already very parcelled land.)
What has this got to do with a group of women who, according to Ms.W*****'s "sources", ruled the island of Lesbos? Precisely nothing. Such a group of women never existed. The history of Lesbos in the seventh century (not the sixth - what a perfection of wrongness this passage is; even the century is wrong) is known, and it was played out entirely between men. Sappho's poetry shows clearly that she, and her whole thiasos or league of friends, were wholly outside politics. The very word thiasos is significant; unlike phratria (brotherhood) or hetaireia (company), this describes a club or association that is specifically unpolitical, mostly dedicated to giving feasts and sacrifices to the gods, with connotations of revelry and harmless fun - the related verb thiaseyo means "to honour with sacred revelry". Right from the start, anyone with any knowledge of Greek knows that Sappho had nothing to do with politics.
In all her fragments, she only mentions politics once [fragment 98] , while the equally fragmentary remains of Solon, Theognis or Heraclitus, contemporary or slightly later writers who really had to do with government and politics, are not too short to be full of it, one way or another. What is far more, we have quite a bit of the work of Sappho's contemporary and friend Alcaeus, who is so political that the nineteenth century saw him as the type of the poet-patriot. They write in the same language and in much the same style, they knew each other, they probably were friends; but he always talks politics, and she never does. Never except once. And how does she come to her one mention of politics? Exiled in Sicily with her daughter Cleis, now a growing girl, she regrets she cannot buy her a pretty Sardian scarf of many colours, like she had as a child in Lesbos. For this reason she regrets being expelled by the sons (note the masculine gender) of Cleanactides! She doesn't even mention, what we find out from Alcaeus and later historians, that many aristocratic families had been expelled with her; her concerns are entirely private.
The most telling of her fragments in this respect is fr.16, where she claims to prefer the beauty of her girlfriend Anactoria to all the armies of Greece. Now, in Greece, the army was not something separate from the civil constitution of the city, but rather the core of it, administratively and politically. The army gathered all free citizens with political rights, and there was no separation between military and political offices. When she says that her girlfriend walking along attracts her more than the whole army assembled, Sappho is clearly stating a complete lack of interest in politics. In fact, she goes further, all but praising Helen of Troy for her disastrous infatuation for Paris, which led her to neglect and overturn every civic and personal duty there was. You are in love? Then to Hell with every civic and personal duty, every legitimate tie, even your own daughter (Helena had a daughter by Menelaus); love is enough. This is probably a fairly youthful composition, with that typical feeling of someone out to shock; at this point, Sappho has not yet learned - as she will later, in exile - that politics can affect her whether she cares for it or not. For that matter, the writer who idealizes the woman who left her daughter to run away with a stranger probably hadn't yet had her own Cleis either.
The supposed debate about whether Sappho was homosexual or not is silly; she was. Any doubts on the matter depend on the notion that she could have chosen not to marry; which, in Greece - and especially among the aristocracy to which she belonged - is ridiculous. Upper-class Greek women were married by their families; and once married, they had children, because the family line must go on. Sappho knew this well. In her heartbroken farewells to beloved girlfriends going off to be married (frs.31, 94, 95), she never once says anything against the bridegroom or shows the least jealousy. It is simply something that happens, and that "has to be borne" (fr.31, line 17), even though the thought of losing one's love is worse than death. "We shall grant her [in marriage], says the father" (fr.109).
Her attitude to women rivals is very different: jealousy and anger do come into it, and there is some fairly stinging invective. Though I for one never doubt that she is in fact a gentle-hearted woman who bears no grudges (fr.120) she can nevertheless get very angry. She has, she says, had far more than enough of Gorgo (fr.144); as for Eirana, she is simply too snotty for words (fr.91). Why has Atthis grown tired of her and fled to Andromeda (fr.130)? At any rate, Andromeda has struck a fine bargain; but why does Aphrodite do things like that (fr.133)? [Yet, Sappho is so ungrudging that she actually writes a poem for Atthis, describing gently Atthis' longing for yet another missing girlfriend - fr.96 - as if it had never occurred to her to be jealous.] In general, "for just the people whom I love the most/ They are the ones who give me the most pain" (fr.26). To lose a girlfriend to a husband is something as natural and inevitable, if as painful, as old age and death; but to lose her to another woman is a betrayal. Do I even have to point out the meaning of this?
Sappho's position is to some extent eccentric, both geographically and in terms of her homosexuality. Her birthplace Lesbos was neither Ionian nor Dorian; that is, it lay outside both the cultural heart and the political and military centre of the country. It was a provincial Aeolian island briefly distinguished by two poets of genius (Sappho and Alcaeus), more than a century before classical Athens. Unlike Athenian praisers of pretty boys, Sappho established no lasting tradition; and indeed Athens, cultural centre of the ancient world, cruelly slandered her. The Athenian legend of Sappho said she was small and dark (that is, in Greek terms, very ugly, since the Greeks, like all Mediterraneans, idealize tall blonde people), and that she fell in love with a young man who wanted nothing to do with her, and threw herself off a cliff. This spread all over the ancient world, and Ovid made a nice poem out of it ; but it is nonsense - the little that remains of her work is enough to blow it apart - and its lasting popularity is good evidence of what the Greeks really thought of female homosexuality.
Ugly? She was irresistible, and knew it: in the Hymn to Aphrodite she is quite confident that she will yet win, with the goddess' help, the love of a girl who turned her down; this, she says, has happened before, and she calls the goddess of love her "ally". In other words, Sappho felt that the power itself of love loved her. (This close and confident relationship with a god - and one of the most dreaded gods in the pantheon! - is highly unusual in Greece; two centuries later, Aristotle said "we would think it odd to hear of anyone loving Zeus".) In a time and climate where women aged fast, she had, already middle-aged, to turn down a besotted boy (fr. 121). Far from committing suicide, she married, had a daughter, and lived to a ripe old age, remembering with sweet sadness her youth and beauty (frs. 21 and 58), and still celebrating her love of beautiful things in unforgettable verse. And finally, every verse we have written in a personal voice, as opposed to "official" poetry written for weddings and religious rites, is about women; there is not a single hint of personal sentiment about any man. The only fragment (102) that describes the love of a woman for a man, cannot be about Sappho: the speaker is a very young girl, and Sappho's poems are all written from the viewpoint of an adult woman. The poetic art that she deployed so brilliantly is the result of years of study, and the timid, naive girl of fr.102 can hardly be reconciled with the skilful master-poet.
Sappho was homosexual, and happiest in her thiasos; she appreciated male beauty, but had not the least attraction to it. Unattractive? Unhappily in love with a man? Early suicide? Sorry: none of the above.
We are familiar with this kind of story. Lesbians are ugly unattractive women who would actually like nothing better than a big fat prick up them. (Sorry about the coarse language, but it is relevant.) And I must insist on the fact that not only is it unhistorical, but that the slightest acquaintance with Sappho's own words, even the little we have, is enough to blow it sky-high. It is the work of ignorant male Athenians with a bad attitude. The very people of Plato's Symposium, who threw themselves into the fad of intellectual/aristocratic pederasty, gave this insulting description of the greatest Greek poet between Homer and Aeschylus; the actors who waved big stuffed phalluses on stage (many of Aristophanes' comedies included a phallus-waving scene) also used "Sappho" as the sterotype of the frustrated bulldyke. Either they were ignorant of their own poetic heritage , which seems likely, or they knew but pandered to their public, which seems even likelier. The crude phallos-display is very much to the point: brutal pride in the male appendage, together with similar views of homosexual women, are by no means infrequent among the more ignorant males in the Mediterranean world to this day.
We are back to the choking, stifling world of Greek values. And it is worth noting that, apart from personal matters of the heart, Sappho lives unquestioningly within that world. It is just that, being a kind and loving and luminous personality, she simply does not - unlike Theognis - show any sign of being personally affected by them; she accepts them as a person accepts the society she lives in, without even realizing it. What is her best hope for her brother? That he may be as pleasing to his friends as he is dreadful to his enemies (fr.5). Class prejudice she has to the full; she repeatedly nags his brother for setting free a Greek prostitute in Egypt, and the worst thing she can say about her is that she is agroiotis, of the country, a peasant (fr.57). She does not bother to even name this woman; she is simply agroiotis, some peasant or other, who doesn't know how to dress or dance - a clumsy, graceless outsider in the world of the beautiful well-bred young women of the thiasos, who were assuredly of a higher caste. And nothing could be more withering than the calm contempt with which she informs some woman, not initiated into the craft of poetry, that she will never be remembered, but will go down to Hades a lightless shade (fr.55), while "I say that someone shall remember us" (fr.147).
Part of this unquestioning acceptance of the status quo is her apparently huge production of wedding poems. I should think a good third of her fragments come from various kinds of wedding song, from the epic (fr.44, perhaps 44A) to the passionate (fr.112, perhaps 102) to the humorous (fr.110). Part of this is because Lesbian marriage ritual seems to have called for several songs at various stages of the ceremonies, but certainly the author of so many songs can have seen nothing wrong with the appalling marriage customs of her time. And finally, nothing could be more Greek - though, typically, in a luminously positive light - than her brief remark on beauty and goodness: "for what is lovely is only lovely for the duration of a look, but what is good immediately becomes lovely too" (fr.50). The Greeks, to be fair to them, were quite obsessed by beauty, and especially by the beauty of the human body; centuries before the great age of Greek sculpture, you can find it in Homer. The connection of beauty with goodness was a question that haunted their imagination from the start, and I doubt whether, without this particular cultural obsession, Sappho would have been the poet she was.
Ms.W*****'s sources show the most utter ignorance of anything to do with this Greek culture. A gorgeous example, worthy of notice, is that of the word hetaira, often used by Sappho for her lovers, which is translated as "courtesan". A little Greek could cleanse us of this sin. The primary meaning of masculine hetairos and feminine hetaira is nothing else than companion, friend. My Liddell and Scott lexicon has at least a dozen entries connected with hetairos, hetaira as companion, and only three of hetaira as rich man's girlfriend. All that Sappho was saying about her friends was that... they were her friends; she did not call them "courtesans". It was a piece of purely Athenian slang, probably invented long after Sappho was dead, to call the lovers of rich and powerful men hetairai, or companions, which is exactly what someone like the celebrated Aspasia, lover of Pericles, was. She was not a prostitute, but a woman who got to the top by becoming the lover of the most important man in Greece... what the old Italian joke calls the Warrior's Rest.
What this shows is that this Jeannette Foster person not only knows no Greek, but gets her ideas from popular and rather vulgar writing. It is a piece of prurient divulgation to expand upon the role of hetairai in ancient Athens without putting it in context; typical of the kind of book that has a lot to say about the sexual habits of the Ancient Greeks - and not much about anything else.
But that is not the only source of misunderstanding. Ms.W*****'s paragraph (and how bad does a paragraph have to be to need so many pages to sift all its mistakes?) is wholly and uncritically steeped in late-20th-century ideas. She and Sappho have at least this in common, that neither of them has the least idea that social ideas can be different in different times and places. A harmless but blatant instance is the matter of "the arts" that the thiasos is said to have cultivated. Greeks had no such concept as "the arts"; only poetry and the pursuit of wisdom - what came, two centuries after Sappho, to be called philosophy - drew the sort of respect that our age gives to all the arts. Painters, architects, actors, sculptors, musicians, counted as craftsmen, not as artists, lower in rank than the noble young women of the thiasos, and certainly the caste-conscious Sappho would never have dreamed of mixing with them. Poetry was the only proper occupation for a well-born young person of either sex.
Though this is a harmless misunderstanding - that is, though it does not seriously affect her argument - it is so radical that it places the whole matter completely in the outer darkness. Anyone who is capable of such utter ignorance of basic Greek categories of thought is not to be listened to under any heading. She is trapped in the late twentieth century. Only such a mind, to whom the idea of women choosing not to marry and to live openly with other women is normal, could have wondered whether Sappho's being married puts her homosexuality in doubt; and only anyone wholly alien to the most basic facts about the Greek mind - facts which become clear on the first perusal of Homer or Sophocles - could possibly have imagined a Greek state, at any time, ruled by a corporation of women. To Greeks of all ages, such an idea bespeaks either comic absurdity (in Aristophanes, for instance, where the notion of women taking over the running of Athens is the biggest joke anyone could think of) or the complete reversal of any sensible norm (as in the legends of the Amazons). I cannot imagine how and where the incredible notion could have arisen that the thiasos was the governing body of ancient Lesbos, but at whatever point it arose, it bespeaks a culture of pseudo-academic scribblers each of them referring to each other's work and failing to check the original sources - ignorance reinforcing ignorance in a vortex of mutual quotation. I've seen it happen in the fourth chapter of Alan Moore's From Hell, where he quotes as an authority some drivel by Marilyn French, who had swiped it from Robert Graves, whose theses were wholly unacceptable in the first place; and no doubt someone, somewhere, is even now quoting Moore himself as an authority. But at least Graves would not have said that hetaira meant courtesan.
Finally, a few words about the so-called feminine principle that the thiasos was supposed to worship. Certainly, this religious club was dedicated to the worship of Aphrodite and the Charites or Graces, and it is probably for this reason that its young women were allowed the homosexual practices that the rest of Greece - as we have seen - despised. (Such passages as "I wish to rest your limbs on a soft bed" (fr.46) and "you calmed your desires [words missing] on a soft bed" (fr.94) and "sleeping on the breast of a tender girlfriend" (fr.126) leave little space for doubt.) Lesbos was not far from Asia, where various form of prescribed sacred sexual performance and prostitution were well-known. But to presume that any sort of feminine principle existed in Greek religion - and that includes Sappho's - is to go against the evidence. Certainly, Sappho has a marked preference for goddesses; even when she wants to invoke the triad of Zeus, Hera and Dionysos, she addresses herself to Hera, and talks to the male gods through her (fr. 17). But it is no less true that Zeus is the religion's one and only core; when Sappho addresses Aphrodite, it is as the daughter of Zeus, and it is from her father's halls that she hurries down to help her mortal friend. Indeed, the habit of addressing female powers may well be an indication, not of their importance, but of her feminine inferiority. In fr.17 she addresses Hera so that Hera may intercede with the male gods, father and son, Zeus and Dionysos. This strongly suggests that she cannot approach Zeus except through Hera; that, as a woman, she is not allowed to pray to him directly. (Milton: "He for God only, she for God in him".) But whether or not this is right, and I do not insist on it, there is no doubt that in Sappho's world there is only one Zeus; if she prays more often to Aphrodite and to the otherwise insignificant group of the Charites, it is because the thiasos was dedicated to them: it was her job to praise them. How, otherwise, could you explain the complete absence of the greatest Greek goddess, the one who was always described as he Thea, The goddess - Athena?
So much, then, for that extraordinary paragraph of Ms.W*****'s. Its density and depth of error was such that I had to start from the basics of Greek studies and build up every point from the ground, not being able to expect that any fact whatsoever would be known to her - or, for that matter, to many other APA members; Classical scholarship is not exactly a universal accomplishment in Britain. Even so, I haven't managed to get in all that was needed: what is Linear B Script? who were the Myceneans? who were Ventris and Chadwick? I have to apologize, and plead absolute desperate lack of space. I can only refer you to any good textbook written in the last few decades.
But there's a difference: you can do something with people who know that they don't know, but what can you do with people who are ignorant and yet think, because they have read a lot of books, that they know? This is the position Ms.W***** found herself in. It seems clear that every single book she ever read on the matter only reinforced her ignorance. These are not misunderstandings or misinterpretations, but gross errors of checkable fact, though of course the errors of fact also involved crass and elementary absurdities of interpretation. And I think it's fair to say that the only phrase of Ms.W*****'s that has survived scrutiny is that Sappho [was] the greatest female poet of the classical era - though, even then, a scholar wouldn't call a seventh-century poet as of the classical era. Anyway, this is as controversial a statement as that Jack Kirby could draw comics.
Sappho is one of the greatest poets who ever lived. She is one of a very small group - the only ones I can think of are Rabindranath Tagore and Goethe - whose expression is so direct and passionate that it can survive any translation. It does not even matter that her work (like that of all other early Greek writers save Homer and Hesiod) survives only in fragments: a single line can pierce to the heart like a fiery knife. Brought up in the jailhouse bonds of a Greek noble house, she does not have the wide experience and philosophical depth of the German and Bengali master-poets; but it is hard to think where else one could come across such verse as
For it is those for whom I've the most love,
They are the ones who give me the most pain
or
To you , so lovely as you are, my thoughts
Shall never change
or
A voice far sweeter than the lyre,
Golden more than gold
or
...Love has struck my heart,
Like a great wind that breaks upon the mountain oaks
or
Restessly she wanders in the memory
Of gentle Atthis, desire crushing the heart
In her soft breast...
or
Evening star, bringing home all creatures that bright Dawn sent away,
Bring home the kid, bring home the lamb, bring home the son to his mother
or
Love the breaker of limbs is driving me once more,
The bittersweet, the invincible child
or
The Earth now wears [her] garlands,
She's bright and shimmering with flowers
- or even such mysterious, yet affecting single lines as
I want neither the honey nor the bee
or
I say that someone shall remember us
or
I do not feel that I'm touching the sky
and certainly the one passage that is always excerpted, quoted in every anthology, universally known as great:
Now the moon and the Pleiades stars
Have set; half-way through her course
Is the night, the hour is passing -
And I sleep alone.
Perhaps in Dante; perhaps in certain Psalms. Poetry so direct, so deceptively simple, so passionately sincere, is beyond even Shakespeare, except for a few lines (If my love swear that she is made of truth/ I do believe her, though I know she lies; and even there there is a suspicion of civilized tongue in cheek behind the passion, quite alien to Sappho's simple, devoted heart). And it doesn't matter that most of it is lost, because what we have left - and I have quoted only a part of it - is enough to grant us a luminous, beautiful poetic experience quite unlike anything else. It is genuinely miraculous.
The ways of human greatness are strange. In another age the frankly predatory and undisciplined sexuality of Sappho, who could not see a pretty young girl without wanting her in bed, would have been unacceptable; but in the dreadful constriction of Greek society it was a way to express nobility, sweetness and love. Closeted, sold into marriage like a head of cattle, left to use her immense talent in a minor female shrine, she exploded out of it with poetry that blazed from one end of Greece to the other, that made her provincial homeland famous (of which she was very proud: Lofty above all, as are Lesbos' singers among strangers..) and that embodied a human greatness far beyond the miserable pseudo-values of her world. She was not only greater than her world, but greater than she herself knew, even though she had a very accurate idea of her own talent. No Greek would have been proud of forgiving enemies and not holding grudges; she does not only say she does, but she does it without saying it. Question her, and she would probably have told you the same as Theognis: that it is better never to be born, that most people are scoundrels, and that it is good to be good to your friends and terrible to your enemies. And yet she wrote poetry that rejoiced in the beauty and variety of life (except for some Psalms, I know no ancient poet who even comes close to her marvelous descriptions of nature), addressed the gods with an affection and confidence rare in Greece, spoke of her lovers with nothing but love, forgave the women who had wronged her, held no grudge against the young men who came to take her young lovers away, even praised their own beauty and courage, and poured out love for her little daughter Cleis like water. The only things - except for caste pride - in which she is typical of her age and time, are, typically, positive emotions: her love for beautiful things, and for her homeland (there is a lovely Classical proverb that "nobody loves his country because it is great, but because it is his "). Everything she could possibly love, she loved. No less petty Greek ever lived.
This article was written as a sort of grave-offering to her shade, something she as a Greek would understand. I had some fun at C******** W*****'s expense - and at the expense of her sources - but the truth is that what I felt was mainly shame. I was ashamed of our culture, embarrassed on Ms.W*****'s behalf (though she will not thank me for it) for making such statements in public, and felt a need to make it up to Sappho's memory somehow. She did not deserve this. Her loving, forgiving soul was so far ahead of her world that, even though her poetic genius was recognized, her whole lesson about life was missed.
The matter of politics is important here: though politics is no worse a setting than any other for human greatness (people like the emperess Maria Theresa come to mind) Greek politics were naturally mean, vicious and vindictive beyond the norm, and if (per impossibile) Sappho's thiasos had been a political body as is suggested, one thing is certain: she could not have become what she was. The political Alcaeus was correspondingly a smaller poet than his friend - though still great enough - because of the mean, vindictive mind he was bound to express; but, not forced to take part in vendettas and civil wars (though she suffered from them, when she was exiled to Sicily) Sappho, in her narrow bounds, could keep her natural sweetness and love intact and cultivate them.
Despite her fame as a poet, everything valuable about her work was totally misunderstood. Interestingly, the Classical world knew that in her work they had something surpassingly beautiful, but did not seem to understand what was so beautiful about it. Her spiritual nobility struck them in parts of their souls that the official culture did not recognize. And so, instead of learning from her how beautiful it is to love and to forgive, all that Athens, heart of the ancient world, could do was tell smutty, homophobic jokes about the small ugly dyke. Her memory was slowly removed, her work, one way or another, lost; and when, twenty-five centuries later, the discovery of Egyptian papyri at last allowed us to reconstruct some sort of poetic corpus, reversing the crime of the ages - this is what we make of her: a political tool for people who know nothing, and care less, for the reality of who she was, how she lived, and why she wrote. Do you understand, now, why I feel ashamed? Here is one of history's losers, a very great woman who has been abused before and after death and for twenty-five centuries since; and instead of finally coming to a proper assessment of her greatness, instead of finally giving her the honour she deserves instead of taking from her all the precious spiritual values she has to give - this is what our culture does. "In the sixth century BC, Lesbos was ruled by a group of women who had pledged themselves to worship the female principle..." Ye Gods.