t is not an exciting species of wit.
Yet this kind of riddle was in immense demand in Greek society, and "if you
make believe very hard, it is quite
nice." But it seems rather a pity that this memorial of Sappho should
be preserved, while her solemn hymns and her Epithalamia, or marriage-songs, which were, as has been said, almost the first Greek effort toward dramatic poetry, are lost to us forever.
And thus we might go on through the
literature of Greece, peering after little
grains of Sappho among the rubbish
of voluminous authors. But perhaps
these specimens are enough. It remains to say that the name of Phaon,
who is represented by Ovid as having been her lover, is not once mentioned
in these fragments, and the general tendency of modern criticism is to
deny his existence. Some suppose
him to have been a merely mythical
being, based upon the supposed loves
of Aphrodite and Adonis, who was
called by the Greeks Phæthon or Phaon.
It was said that this Phaon was a ferryman at Mitylene, who was growing
old and ugly till he rowed Aphrodite
in his boat, and then refused payment;
on which she gave him for recompense
youth, beauty, and Sappho. This was
certainly, "Take, 0 boatman, thrice
thy fee," as in Uhland's ballad; but
the Greek passengers have long since
grown as shadowy as the German,
and we shall never know whether this
oarsman really ferried himself into the
favor of goddess or of dame. It is of
little consequence; Sappho doubtless
had lovers, and one of them may as
well have been named Phaon as anything else.
But to lose her fabled leap from the
Leucadian promontory would doubtless
be a greater sacrifice; it formed so
much more effective a termination for
her life than any novelist could have
contrived. It is certain that the leap
itself; as a Greek practice, was no
fable; sometimes it was a form of
suicide, sometimes a religious incantation, and sometimes again an expiation of crime. But it was also used often
as a figure of speech by comfortable
poets who would have been sorry to
find in it anything more. Anacreon, for
instance, says in an ode, "Again casting myself from the Leucadian rock, I
plunge into the gray sea, drunk with
love"; though it is clear that he was
not a man to drown his cares in anything larger than a punch-bowl. It is
certainly hard to suppose that the most
lovelorn lady, residing on an island
whose every shore was a precipice,
and where her lover was at hand to
feel the anguish of her fate, would take
ship and sail for weary days over five
hundred miles of water to seek a more
sensational rock. Theodor Kock, the
latest German writer on Sappho, thinks
it is as if a lover should travel from the
Rhine to Niagara to drown himself.
"Are not Abanar and Pharpar rivers of
Damascus?" More solid, negative
proof is found in the fact that Ptolemy
Hephæstion, the author who has collected the most numerous notices of
the Leucadian leap, entirely omits the
conspicuous name of Sappho from his
record. Even Colonel Mure, who is
as anxious to prove this deed against
her as if it were a violation of all the
ten commandments, is staggered for a
moment by this omission; but soon
recovering himself; with an ingenuity
that does him credit as attorney for
the prosecution, he points out that
the reason Ptolemy omitted Sappho's
name was undoubtedly because it was
so well known already; a use of negative evidence to which there can be
no objection, except that under it any
one of us might be convicted of having
died last year, on the plea that his
death was a fact too notorious to be
mentioned in the newspapers.
But whether by the way of the Leucadian cliff or otherwise, Sappho is gone, with her music and her pupils
and most of the words she wrote, and
the very city where she dwelt, and all
but the island she loved. It is something to be able to record that, twenty-five centuries ago, in that remote nook
among the Grecian Isles, a woman's
genius could play such a part in moulding the great literature that has moulded the world. Colonel Mure thinks that
a hundred such women might have
demoralized all Greece. But it grew
demoralized at any rate; and even the
island where Sappho taught took its
share in the degradation. But if the
view taken by modern criticism be correct, a hundred such women might
have done much to save it. Modern nations must take up again the
problem where Athens failed and Lesbos only pointed the way to the solution; to create a civilization where the
highest culture shall be extended to
woman also. It is not enough that we should dream, with Plato, of a
republic where man is free and woman but a serf. The aspirations of modern
life culminate, like the greatest of
modern poems, in the elevation of
womanhood. Die ewige Weibliche
sicht uns hinan.
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