by Will Durant
With wasting care;
For grief will profit us no whit, my friend,
Nor nothing mend;
But this is our best medicine, with wine fraught
To cast out thought.72
It was his misfortune—though he bore it with lighthearted unconsciousness—to have among his contemporaries the most famous of Greek women. Even in her lifetime all Greece honored Sappho. “One evening over the wine,” says Stobaeus, “Execestides, the nephew of Solon, sang a song of Sappho’s which his uncle liked so much that he bade the boy teach it to him; and when one of the company asked, ‘What for?’ he answered, ‘I want to learn it and die!’”73 Socrates, perhaps hoping for similar lenience, called her “The Beautiful,” and Plato wrote about her an ecstatic epigram:
Some say there are Nine Muses. How careless they are!
Behold, Sappho of Lesbos is the Tenth!74
“Sappho was a marvelous woman,” said Strabo; “for in all the time of which we have record I do not know of any woman who could rival her even in a slight degree in the matter of poetry.”75 As the ancients meant Homer when they said “the Poet,” so all the Greek world knew whom men signified when they spoke of “the Poetess.”
Psappha, as she called herself in her soft Aeolic dialect, was born at Eresus, on Lesbos, about 612; but her family moved to Mytilene when she was still a child. In 593 she was among the conspiring aristocrats whom Pittacus banished to the town of Pyrrha; already at nineteen she was playing a part in public life through politics or poetry. She was not known for beauty: her figure was small and frail, her hair and eyes and skin were darker than the Greeks desired;76 but she had the charm of daintiness, delicacy, refinement, and a brilliant mind that was not too sophisticated to conceal her tenderness. “My heart,” she says, “is like that of a child.”77 We know from her verses that she was of a passionate nature, one whose words, says Plutarch, “were mingled with flames”;78 a certain sensuous quality gave body to the enthusiasms of her mind. Atthis, her favorite pupil, spoke of her as dressed in saffron and purple, and garlanded with flowers. She must have been attractive in her minuscule way, for Alcaeus, exiled with her to Pyrrha, soon sent her an invitation to romance. “Violet-crowned, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho, I want to say something to you, but shame prevents me.” Her answer was less ambiguous than his proposal; “If thy wishes were fair and noble, and thy tongue designed not to utter what is base, shame would not cloud thine eyes, but thou wouldst speak thy just desires.”79 The poet sang her praises in odes and serenades, but we hear of no further intimacy between them.
Perhaps they were separated by Sappho’s second exile. Pittacus, fearing her maturing pen, banished her now to Sicily, probably in the year 591, when one would have thought her still a harmless girl. About this time she married a rich merchant of Andros; some years later she writes: “I have a little daughter, like a golden flower, my darling Cleis, for whom I would not take all Lydia, nor lovely Lesbos.”80 She could afford to reject the wealth of Lydia, having inherited that of her husband on his early death. After five years of exile she returned to Lesbos, and became a leader of the island’s society and intellect. We catch the glamour of luxury in one of her surviving fragments: “But I, be it known, love soft living, and for me brightness and beauty belong to the desire of the sun.”81 She became deeply attached to her young brother Charaxus, and was vexed to her finger tips when, on one of his mercantile journeys to Egypt, he fell in love with the courtesan Doricha, and, ignoring his sister’s entreaties, married her.82
Meanwhile Sappho too had felt the fire. Eager for an active life, she had opened a school for young women, to whom she taught poetry, music, and dancing; it was the first “finishing school” in history. She called her students not pupils but hetairai—companions; the word had not yet acquired a promiscuous connotation. Husbandless, Sappho fell in love with one after another of these girls. “Love,” says one fragment, “has shaken my mind as a down-rushing wind that falls upon the oak-trees.”83 “I loved you, Atthis, long ago,” says another fragment, “when my own girlhood was still all flowers, and you seemed to me an awkward little child.” But then Atthis accepted the attentions of a youth from Mytilene, and Sappho expressed her jealousy with unmeasured passion in a poem preserved by Longinus and translated haltingly into “sapphic” meter by John Adding-ton Symonds:
Peer of gods he seemeth to me, the blissful
Man who sits and gazes at thee before him,
Close beside thee sits, and in silence hears thee
Silverly speaking,
Laughing love’s low laughter. Oh, this, this only
Stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble!
For should I but see thee a little moment,
Straight is my voice hushed;
Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and through me,
’Neath the flesh, impalpable fire runs tingling.
Nothing see mine eyes, and a voice of roaring
Waves in my ear sounds;
Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes
All my limbs, and paler than grass in autumn,
Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter,
Lost in the love-trance.*84
Atthis’ parents removed her from the school; and a letter ascribed to Sappho gives what may be her account of the parting.
She (Atthis?) wept full sore to leave me behind, and said: “Alas, how sad our lot! Sappho, I swear ‘tis against my will I leave you.” And I answered her: “Go your way rejoicing, but remember me, for you know how I doted upon you. And if you remember not, oh, then I will remind you of what you forget, how dear and beautiful was the life we led together. For with many a garland of violets and sweet roses mingled you have decked your flowing locks by my side, and with many a woven necklet, made of a hundred blossoms, your dainty throat; and with unguent in plenty, both precious and royal, have you anointed your fair young skin in my bosom. And no hill was there, nor holy place, nor water-brook, whither we did not go; nor ever did the teeming noises of the early spring fill any wood with the medley-song of the nightingales but you wandered thither with me.”85
After which, in the same manuscript, comes the bitter cry, “I shall never see Atthis again, and indeed I might as well be dead.” This surely is the authentic voice of love, rising to a height of sincerity and beauty beyond good and evil.
The later scholars of antiquity debated whether these poems were expressions of “Lesbian love,” or merely exercises of poetic fancy and impersonation. It is enough for us that they are poetry of the first order, tense with feeling, vivid with imagery, and perfect in speech and form. A fragment speaks of “the footfall of the flowering spring”; another of “Love the limb-loosener, the bitter-sweet torment”; another compares the unattainable love to “the sweet apple that reddens on the end of the bough, the very end of the bough, which the gatherers missed, nay missed not, but could not reach so far.”86 Sappho wrote of other topics than love, and used, even for our extant remains, half a hundred meters; and she herself set her poems to music for the harp. Her verse was collected into nine books, of some twelve thousand lines; six hundred lines survive, seldom continuous. In the year 1073 of our era the poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus was publicly burned by ecclesiastical authorities in Constantinople and Rome.87 Then, in 1897, Grenfell and Hunt discovered, at Oxyrhynchus in the Fayum, coffins of papier-mâché, in whose making certain scraps of old books had been used; and on these scraps were some poems of Sappho.88
Male posterity avenged itself upon her by handing down or inventing the tale of how she died of unrequited love for a man. A passage in Suidas89 tells how “the courtesan Sappho”—usually identified with the poetess-leaped to death from a cliff on the island of Leucas because Phaon the sailor would not return her love. Menander, Strabo, and others refer to the story, and Ovid recounts it in loving detail;90 but it has many earmarks of legend, and must be left hovering nebulously between fiction and fact. In her later years, tradition said, Sappho
had relearned the love of men. Among the Egyptian morsels is her touching reply to a proposal of marriage: “If my breasts were still capable of giving suck, and my womb were able to bear children, then to another marriage-bed not with trembling feet would I come. But now on my skin age has brought many lines, and Love hastens not to me with his gift of pain”—and she advises her suitor to seek a younger wife.91 In truth we do not know when she died, or how; we know only that she left behind her a vivid memory of passion, poetry, and grace; and that she shone even above Alcaeus as the most melodious singer of her time. Gently, in a final fragment, she reproves those who would not admit that her song was finished:
You dishonor the good gifts of the Muses, my children, when you say, “We will crown you, dear Sappho, best player of the clear, sweet lyre.” Know you not that my skin is all wrinkled with age, and my hair is turned from black to white? . . . Surely as starry Night follows rose-armed Dawn and brings darkness to the ends of the earth, so Death tracketh everything living, and catcheth it in the end.92
VI. THE NORTHERN EMPIRE
North of Lesbos is little Tenedos, whose women were accounted by some ancient travelers to be the most beautiful in Greece.93 Then one follows the adventurous Hellenes into the northern Sporades: to Imbros, and Lemnos, and Samothrace. The Milesians, seeking to control the Hellespont, founded, about 560, the still-living town of Abydos on its south shore;* here Leander and Byron swam the straits, and Xerxes’ army crossed to Europe on a bridge of boats. Farther eastward the Phocaeans settled Lampsacus, birthplace of Epicurus. Within the Propontis lay two groups of islands: the Proconnesus, rich in the marble that gave the Propontis its current name, the Sea of Marmora; and the Arctonnesus, on whose southernmost tip the Milesians established in 757 the great port of Cyzicus. Along the coast rose one Greek city after another: Panormus, Dascylium, Apameia, Cius, Astacus, Chalcedon. Up through the Bosporus the Greeks advanced, hungry for metals, grain, and trade, founding Chrysopolis (now Scutari) and Nicopolis—“city of victory.” Then they made their way along the southern shore of the Black Sea, depositing towns at Heracleia, Pontica, Tieum, and Sinope—a city splendidly adorned, says Strabo,94 with gymnasium, agora, and shady colonnades; Diogenes the Cynic was not above being born here. Then Amisus, Oenoe, Tripolis, and Trapezus (Trebizond, Trabzon)—where Xenophon’s Ten Thousand shouted with joy at the sight of the longed-for sea. The opening up of this region to Greek colonization, perhaps by Jason, later by the Ionians, gave the mother cities the same outlet for surplus population and trade, the same resources in food, silver, and gold, that the discovery of America gave to Europe at the beginning of modern times.95
Following the eastern shores of the Euxine northward into Medea’s Colchis, the Greeks founded Phasis and Dioscurias, and Theodosia and Panticapaeum in the Crimea. Near the mouths of the Bug and the Dnieper they established the city of Olbia (Nikolaev); at the mouth of the Dniester, the town of Tyras; and on the Danube, Troesmis. Then, moving southward along the west shore of the Black Sea, they built the cities of Istrus (Constanta, Kustenje), Tomi (where Ovid died), Odessus (Varna), and Apollonia (Burgas). The historically sensitive traveler stands appalled at the antiquity of these living towns; but today’s residents, engrossed in the tasks of their own generation, are undisturbed by the depth of the centuries that lie silent beneath them.
Then again at the Bosporus the Megarians, about 660, built Byzantium*—yesterday Constantinople, now Istanbul. Even before Pericles this strategic port was becoming what Napoleon would call it at the Peace of Tilsit—the key to Europe; in the third century B.C. Polybius described its maritime position as “more favorable to security and prosperity than that of any other city in the world known to us.”97 Byzantium grew rich by exacting tolls from passing vessels, and exporting to the Greek world the grain of southern Russia (“Scythia”) and the Balkans, and the fish that were netted with shameful ease as they crowded through the narrow straits. It was its curving form, and the wealth derived from this fishing industry, that gave the city its later name, the “Golden Horn.” Under Pericles Athens dominated Byzantine polities, levied tolls there to fill her treasury in time of emergency, and regulated the export of grain from the Black Sea as a contraband of war.98
Along the northern or Thracian shore of the Propontis the Greeks built towns at Selymbria, Perinthus (Eregli), Bisanthe, Callipolis (Gallipoli), and Sestus. Later settlements were established on the southwestern coast of Thrace at Aphrodisias, Aenus, and Abdera—where Leucippus and Democritus would propound the philosophy of atomistic materialism. Off the coast of Thrace lay the island of Thasos, “bare and ugly as a donkey’s back in the sea,” Archilochus described it,99 but so rich in gold mines that their proceeds paid all the expenses of the government. On or near the eastern coast of Macedonia Greek goldseekers, chiefly Athenians, founded Neapolis and Amphipolis—whose capture by Philip would lead to the war in which Athens was to lose her liberty. Other Greeks, mostly from Chalcis and Eretria, conquered and named the three-fingered peninsula of Chalcidice, and by 700 had established thirty towns there, several of them destined to play a role in Greek history: Stageirus (birthplace of Aristotle), Scione, Mende, Potidaea, Acanthus, Cleonae, Torone, and Olynthus—captured by Philip in 348 and known to us now through the oratory of Demosthenes. Recent excavations at Olynthus have unearthed a town of considerable extent, with many houses of two stories and some of twenty-five rooms. In the time of Philip Olynthus appears to have had 60,000 inhabitants; we may judge from this figure for a minor city the abounding fertility and energetic expansion of the pre-Periclean Greeks.
Finally, between Chalcidice and Euboea, Ionian migrants peopled the Euboean Isles—Gerontia, Polyaegos, Icos, Peparethos, Scandile, Scyros. The orbit of empire in east and north had come full turn, the circuit was complete; Greek enterprise had transformed the islands of the Aegean and the coasts of Asia Minor, the Hellespont, the Black Sea, Macedonia, and Thrace into a busy network of Hellenized cities, throbbing with agriculture, industry, trade, politics, literature, religion, philosophy, science, art, eloquence, chicanery, and venery. It only remained to conquer another Greece in the West, and build a bridge between ancient Hellas and the modern world.
CHAPTER VII
The Greeks in the West
I. THE SYBARITES
SKIRTING Sunium again, our ship of fancy, sailing westward, finds Cythera, island haunt of Aphrodite, and therefore the goal of Watteau’s Embarkation.* There, about A.D. 160, Pausanias saw “the most holy and ancient of all the temples that the Greeks have built to Aphrodite”;1 and there, in 1887, Schliemann dug its ruins out of the earth.2 Cythera was the southernmost of the Ionian Islands that bordered the west coast of Greece, and so named because Ionian immigrants settled them; Zacynthos, Cephallenia, Ithaca, Leucas, Paxos, and Corcyra made the rest. Schliemann thought that Ithaca was the island of Odysseus, and vainly sought under its soil some confirmation of Homer’s tale;3 but Dorpfeld believed that Odysseus’ home was on rocky Leucas. From the cliffs of Leucas, as an annual sacrifice to Apollo, the ancient Leucadians, says Strabo, were in the habit of hurling a human victim; but being men as well as theologians, they mercifully attached to him powerful birds whose wings might break his fall:4 probably the story of Sappho’s leap is bound up with memories of this rite. Corinthian colonists occupied Corcyra (Corfu) about 734 B.C., and soon became so strong that they defeated Corinth’s navy and established their independence. From Corcyra some Greek adventurers sailed up the Adriatic as far as Venice; some made small settlements on the Dalmatian coast and in the valley of the Po;5 others crossed at last through fifty miles of stormy water to the heel of Italy.
They found a magnificent shore line, curved into natural harbors and backed by a fertile hinterland that had been almost neglected by the aborigines.6 The Greek invaders took possession of this coastal region by the ruthless law of colonial expansion—that natural resources unexploited by the native population will draw in, by a kind of chemical attraction, some other people to exploit
them and pour them into the commerce and usage of the world. From Brentesium (Brindisi) the newcomers, chiefly Dorian, traversed the heel of the peninsula to establish a major city at Taras—the Roman Tarentum (Taranto).* There they grew olives, raised horses, manufactured pottery, built ships, netted fish, and gathered mussels to make a purple dye more highly valued than the Phoenician.8 As in most of the Greek colonies, the government began as an oligarchy of landowners, passed under dictators financed by the middle class, and enjoyed vigorous and turbulent intervals of democracy. Here the romantic Pyrrhus would land, in 281 B.C., and undertake to play Alexander to the West.
Across the Tarentine Gulf a new wave of immigrants, mostly Achaeans, founded the cities of Sybaris and Crotona. The murderous jealousy of these kindred states illustrates the creative energy and destructive passions of the Greeks. Trade between eastern Greece and western Italy had a choice of two routes, one by water, the other in part by land. Ships following the water route touched at Crotona, and exchanged many goods there; thence they passed to Rhegium, paid tolls, and moved cautiously through pirate-ridden seas and the swirling currents of the Messina Straits to Elea and Cumae—the northernmost Greek settlement in Italy. To avoid these tolls and perils, and a hundred extra miles of rowing and sailing, merchants who chose the other route unloaded their cargoes at Sybaris, carried them overland some thirty miles to the western coast at Laus, and reshipped them to Poseidonia, whence they were marketed into the interior of Italy.
Strategically situated on this line of trade, Sybaris prospered until it had (if we may believe Diodorus Siculus9) 300,000 population and such wealth as few Greek cities could match. Sybarite became a synonym for epicurean. All physical labor was performed by slaves or serfs while the citizens, dressed in costly robes, took their ease in luxurious homes and consumed exotic delicacies,† Men whose work was noisy, such as carpenters and smiths, were forbidden to practice their crafts within the confines of the city. Some of the roads in the richer districts were covered with awnings as a protection against heat and rain.11 Alcisthenes of Sybaris, says Aristotle, had a robe of such precious stuffs that Dionysius I of Syracuse later sold it for 120 talents ($720,000).12 Smyndyrides of Sybaris, visiting Sicyon to sue for the hand of Cleisthenes’ daughter, brought with him a thousand servants.13