A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country/Sappho
SAPPHO.
This excellent poetess, who enjoyed the title of the tenth muse, was a native of Mitylene, the capital of the Molian cities in the Island of Lesbos. She flourished, about 500 years before our Saviour, and was cotemporary with Pittacus, tyrant of Mitylene and one of the seven Grecian Sages, and with the two famous poets Stesichorus and Alcæus. The last of these is said to have been her suitor; and a rebuke which she gave him is still extant in Aristotle. He informs us that Alcæus one day accosting Sappho, told her he had something to say to her, but was afraid to utter it: "was it any thing good," answered she, "you would not be ashamed to disclose it."
Diphilus the comic poet, and Hermesianax the Colophonian, assure us that Anacreon of Teos was one of her lovers; but this is supposed too repugnant to chronology to be admitted, as Sappho was probably dead before Anacreon was born. What perhaps was the origin of this, is the latter having mentioned her name in one of his odes.
We have no records by which we can judge of her quality, whether she was of noble or vulgar extraction; for though Strabo informs us, that her brother Charaxus traded in wines from Lesbos to Egypt, yet we can conclude nothing from this anecdote, since people of the highest rank among the ancients employed themselves in traffic, and frequently used it as an expedient to travel. She had two other elder brothers, Larychus she highly extolled in her verses for virtue and munificence, but against Charaxus she bitterly inveighed for the extravagant love he bore to Rhodope.
She married one Cercolas, a man of great wealth and power in the island of Andros, by whom she had a daughter named Cleis. Becoming a widow very young, she renounced all thoughts of a second marriage; but imputations with which her memory is loaded, should not be too easily credited; since perhaps they rest but on the faith of Ovid. Had not chronology contradicted her amour with Anacreon, that would still have been considered as a fact; and the cause of truth is so holy, that we ought not more implicitly to believe ill reports of the dead than of the living; or at least, if there is a doubt, candour ought to incline one to give it its full force.
She fell desperately in love with Phaon, a young man of Lesbos, who is said to have been a kind of ferryman, and thence fabled to have carried Venus over the stream in his boat, and to have received from her, as a reward, the favour of becoming the most beautiful man in the world. She took a voyage into Sicily in pursuit of him, he having withdrawn thither on purpose to avoid her. It was on this occasion, and on this island, she composed her Hymn to Venus, which is extant, and considered as a pattern of perfection; but her prayer was ineffectual, and she was so far transported with her passion, that she resolved to get rid of it at any rate.
There was a promontory in Acarnania, called Leucate, on the top of which was a little temple dedicated to Apollo. In this temple it was usual for despairing lovers to make their vows in secret, and afterwards to fling themselves from the top of the precipice into the sea. For it was an established opinion, that all those who were taken up alive, would immediately be cured of their former passion. Sappho tried the experiment, but perished in the attempt. Some write that she was the inventress of this custom; but Strabo tells us, that those who understood antiquity better, have reported, that one Cephalus first made the desperate descent from that fatal precipice, called the Lovers Leap.
The Romans erected a most noble statue of porphyry to her memory; and the Mitylenians, to express their sense of her worth, and the glory they received from her being born amongst them, paid her sovereign honours after her death, and coined money with her head as the impress.
The best idea we can have of her person, is from her own description of it in Ovid, who is supposed to have borrowed the most beautiful thoughts in this epistle, confessedly far superior to his others, from works of her's no longer extant.
To me what nature has in charms denied,
Is well by wit's more lasting charms supplied.
Though short my stature, yet my name extends
To heaven itself, and earth's remotest ends.
Brown as I am, an Ethiopian dame,
Inspired young Perseus with a generous flame.
&c. &c.
To give the English reader a true notion what opinion the ancients entertained of her works would be to collect volumes in her praise.
On the revival of learning, men of the most refined taste accounted the loss of her writings inestimable, and collected the relics with the utmost assiduity: though Mr. Addison (in the Spectator, No. 223), judiciously observes, "I do not know, by the character that is given of her works, whether it is not for the benefit of mankind that they are lost. They were filled with such bewitching tenderness and rapture, that it might have been dangerous to have given them the reading."
Vossius says that none of the Greek poets excelled Sappho in sweetness of versification, that she made Archilochus the model of her style, but at the same time took great care to soften and temper the severity of his expression. What remains to us of Sappho carries in it something so sweet, luxuriant, and charming, even in the sound of the words, that Catullus himself, who has attempted an imitation of them in Latin, falls infinitely short; and so have all the other poets, who have delivered their own ideas upon this subject.
She was the inventress of that kind of verse which from her name, is called the Sapphic. She wrote nine books of odes, besides elegies, epigrams, iambics, monodies, and other pieces; of which we have nothing remaining entire, but an hymn to Venus, an ode preserved by Longinus, which, however, the learned acknowledge to be imperfect, two epigrams, and some other little fragments; in one of which, like other great people, she promised herself immortality. I shall conclude my account of this celebrated lady in the words of Mr. Addison:
"Among the mutilated poets of antiquity, there is none whose fragments are so beautiful as those of Sappho. They give us a taste of her way of writing, which is perfectly conformable with the extraordinary character we find of her in the remarks of those great critics who were conversant with her works when they were entire. One may see, by what is left of them, that she followed nature in all her thoughts, without descending to those little points, conceits, and turns of wit with which many of our modern lyrics are so miserably infected. Her soul seems to have been made up of love and poetry: she felt the passion in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms. She is called by ancient authors the tenth muse; and by Plutarch is compared to Cacus, the son of Vulcan, who breathed nothing but flame."