here are some little fragments of verse addressed by Sappho to the evening star, which are supposed to have suggested the celebrated lines of Byron; she says, --
Hesperus, thou bringest all things,
Thou bringest wine, thou bringest [home] the goat,
To the mother thou bringest the child.
Again she says, with a touch of higher imagination --
Hesperus, bringing home all that the light-giving morning has scattered.
Grammarians have quoted this line to
illustrate the derivation of the word
Hesperus; [1] and the passage may be
meant to denote, not merely the assembling of the household at night, but
the more spiritual reuniting of the thoughts and dreams that draw round
us with the shadows and vanish with the dawn.
Achilles Tatius, in the fifth century,
gave in prose the substance of one of
Sappho's poems, not otherwise preserved. It may be called "The Song
of the Rose."
"If Zeus had wished to appoint a
sovereign over the flowers, he would
have made the rose their king. It is
the ornament of the earth, the glory of
plants, the eye of the flowers, the blush
of the meadows, a flash of beauty. It
breathes of love, welcomes Aphrodite,
adorns itself with fragrant leaves, and
is decked with tremulous petals, that
laugh in the zephyr."
Indeed, that love of external nature,
which is so often mistakenly said to
have been wanting among the Greeks,
is strongly marked in Sappho. She
observes "the vernal swallow and the
melodious nightingale, Spring's herald." "The moon," she elsewhere
says, "was at the full, and they [the
stars] stood round her, as round an altar." And again, "The stars around
the lovely moon withdraw their splendor when, in her fulness, she most illumines earth."
Of herself Sappho speaks but little
in the fragments left to us. In one
place she asserts that she is "not of
malignant nature, but has a placid
mind," and again that her desire is for
"a mode of life that shall be elegant
and at the same time honest," the first
wish doing credit to her taste, and the
other to her conscience. In several
places she confesses to a love of luxury,
yet she is described by a later Greek
author, Aristides, as having rebuked
certain vain and showy women for their
ostentation, while pointing out that the
pursuits of intellect afford a surer joy.
It is hardly needful to add that not a
line remains of her writings which can
be charged with indecency; and had
any such existed, they would hardly
have passed unnoticed or been forgotten.
It is odd that the most direct report
left to us of Sappho's familiar conversation should have enrolled her among
those enemies of the human race who
give out conundrums. Or rather it is
in this case a riddle of the old Greek
fashion, such as the Sphinx set the example of propounding to men, before
devouring them in any other manner.
I will tender it in plain prose.
SAPPHO'S RIDDLE.
There is a feminine creature who
bears in her bosom a voiceless brood;
yet they send forth a clear voice, over
sea and land, to whatsoever mortals
they will; the absent hear it; so do
the deaf.
This is the riddle, as recorded by
Antiphanes, and preserved by Athenæus. It appears that somebody tried
to guess it. The feminine creature, he thought, was the state. The brood must be the orators, to be sure, whose voices reached beyond the seas, as far as Asia and Thrace, and brought back thence something to their own advantage; while the community sat dumb
and deaf amid their railings. This
seemed plausible, but somebody else
objected to the solution; for who ever
knew an orator to be silent, he said,
until he was put down by force? All
of which sounds quite American and
modern. But he gave it up, at last,
and appealed to Sappho, who thus replied: --
SAPPHO'S SOLUTION.
A letter is a thing essentially feminine in its character. It bears a
brood in its bosom named the alphabet.
They are voiceless, yet speak to whom
they will; and if any man shall stand
next to him who reads, will he not hear?
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