Searching for Sappho

by Philip Freeman

  A ripe fruit is not easy to protect.

  Winged birds and beasts with feet to slither on—

  and yes I mean men—ache

  to tear it from its branch. How could they not

  when Aphrodite has placed such succulence in it

  that the juice comes pouring out from beneath the skin?

  A maiden’s shapely figure is tempting,

  the target of every eye, and fingers cannot help

  but reach out to pluck it.

  But it’s Sappho herself who gives us a woman’s thoughts on bridal virginity. In one of her surviving wedding songs, she sings of maidenhood in familiar terms of fruit and flowers, but with a particularly feminine point of view. This poem is pieced together from two separate fragments preserved in different ancient authors, the first from a grammatical commentary by a philosopher named Syrianus who lived at the time the western Roman Empire was collapsing:

  . . . like the sweet apple that grows red on the lofty branch,

  at the very top of the highest bough. The apple-pickers have forgotten it

  —no, not forgotten, but they could not reach it.

  The second piece is quoted in a manual on literary style by a writer named Demetrius who lived several centuries earlier:

  . . . like the hyacinth shepherds tread underfoot

  in the mountains, and on the ground the purple flower

  These passages may be from a song performed at a wedding banquet or from verses sung at the bridal chamber on the wedding night. The latter could be quite risqué, as we will see, but they could also be sober warnings directed to the unmarried maidens gathered outside the chamber door. Unlike the male voices urging chastity for the sake of family or community values, Sappho makes clear to her female audience that it is in a maiden’s own best interest to guard her virginity like an apple out of reach at the topmost branch of a tree. Men will try to pluck it if you let them, but if you value your own body and reputation, you will let them look but not touch.

  Sappho doesn’t speak of hiding one’s fruit away unseen or of withholding the fruit forever; she says simply that it is the woman’s responsibility to respect herself and guard her maidenhood until the proper moment. There’s no escaping that even in Sappho’s poetry, virginity is a commodity to be priced and traded within a patriarchal society, but she warns young women that this is the reality of the world in which they live. A maiden can either throw away her virtue so that it is trampled underfoot like a hyacinth on the mountainside or, like Homer’s Nausicaa, take charge of her own body and decide, as much as is within her power, when and to whom she should offer herself.

  Sappho makes the irrevocable nature of this decision clear in a poem of two lines, also quoted by Demetrius. With a clever poetic twist, she has a bride after the wedding night address her own departed maidenhood:

  “Virginity, virginity, where have you gone? You’ve deserted me!”

  And her former virginity responds:

  “Never again will I come to you, never again will I come.”

  For a young woman in ancient Greece, whether she gave herself in youthful passion to a lover in the soft grass of a meadow or to her husband after the marriage ceremony, there was no second chance.

  AN INTRIGUING PASSAGE by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus says the women of Lydia could choose their own husbands. The nearby Asian kingdom of Lydia shows up frequently in the poetry of Sappho and was a major cultural and trading partner with the island of Lesbos. It’s at least possible—assuming Herodotus was correct—that the custom of Lydian women having some voice in choosing their spouses made its way across the strait and influenced the way marriages were arranged in Lesbos. Whether this is true or not, some literary and historical evidence suggests that at least in a few cases, a Greek woman could pick her own husband. The sixth-century-BC aristocrat Callias reportedly granted his daughters the unusual gift of choosing their own spouses from the entire eligible male population of Athens. It was also said that Helen of Troy was allowed by her father, Tyndareus, to select her mate. And of course Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, organizes the famous contest of the bow in Homer’s Odyssey to see which man will take her husband’s place:

  Come now, you suitors, here is your prize set before you. Your challenge is

  to take the bow of godlike Odysseus, and whoever will most easily string it and

  shoot an arrow through all twelve axes, with him I will go.

  But these few instances of a Greek wife choosing her own husband are either of questionable historical validity or in the realm of myth. For most, if not all, Greek women in real life, the decision about who she would marry lay with her father or the male relative who held legal guardianship over her. If her father was dead, her guardian probably would have been her eldest brother or an uncle. But whoever the man was who chose her husband, the decision must have been anything but simple. A loving father, as most Greek men surely were, would not have wanted to make a match for his daughter that left her unhappy or open to physical or psychological abuse by someone who was often a much older man she barely knew. And we can be sure that the mother who had invested so much time in raising a girl would make her opinion clear to her husband in private. For a poor girl, the options would have been limited. For a young woman of the wealthy nobility like Sappho, the possibilities were much greater, stretching even beyond the shores of her island. The idea that she married “Penis from Man Island” is certainly fiction, but the suggestion that her husband was a wealthy merchant is quite plausible, given the trading and business connections of Sappho’s family.

  What qualities would a Greek husband look for in a potential mate? In many ways, Odysseus’s faithful Penelope was the ideal. She was unwaveringly loyal to her long-absent husband, a devoted mother to their son, Telemachus, a hardworking manager of her family’s household, and intelligent and innovative while still being submissive to her spouse. The ghost of Agamemnon—murdered by his own, faithless wife, Clytemnestra—praises Penelope when he speaks from Hades:

  O fortunate son of Laertes, Odysseus of many twists and turns,

  surely you have won yourself a wife of great virtue.

  The heart of blameless Penelope, daughter of Icarius, was proven good.

  How well she has remembered you, her wedded husband. The fame of her

  virtue will never die, but the gods will make for the people of earth a thing of

  grace in the song for prudent Penelope.

  But such women were rare in the minds of Greek men. Hesiod sings of the creation of the beautiful Pandora, the first of all women, as a curse by Zeus and warns his male audience:

  A man couldn’t gain anything better than a good wife,

  just as nothing could be worse than a bad one

  —a freeloader who roasts her husband without a fire

  and serves him up raw old age.

  The Greek poet Semonides, who lived on the Aegean island of Amorgós, in the generation before Sappho, provides grooms with a primer on the different types of women they might choose from. The misogyny of the poem is meant to be humorous, but, like Hesiod’s unfavorable descriptions of women, it must have expressed the underlying prejudice of many Greek men in Sappho’s age:

  In the beginning Zeus created many kinds of women

  with various minds.

  He made one from a hairy sow.

  Her house is filthy with mud and all those inside it are

  disheveled and roll in the dirt. This pig-woman sits around unwashed

  in dirty clothes among the dunghills and grows fat . . .

  The god made another woman from the mischievous fox.

  Her mind gets into everything. No act of wickedness is unknown to her,

  no act of good either . . .

  Another was created from a donkey, dusty grey and stubborn.

  It’s devilishly difficult to get her to work. You have to curse and tug

  to get her going . . .

  Another the god made from a mane
d, prim mare.

  She avoids all housework and the chores of slaves.

  She wouldn’t dream of touching the grain mill or of lifting a sieve

  or sweeping the dung out of doors . . .

  But Zeus also made a woman from the bee.

  It’s a lucky man who gets her, blameless as she is.

  A man’s life grows and blossoms under her touch.

  She loves her husband and he loves her in return.

  They grow old together and their glorious children rise to fame.

  In spite of such generally negative views of women in early Greek poetry, we shouldn’t assume that marriage was a loveless institution tolerated by men (and women) merely for the sake of producing children and providing security in old age. Most husbands and wives, even though they may have been strangers at their wedding, must have taken their vows full of hope that love would grow between them as time passed. Some of the most beautiful expressions of married love in all of literature come from the poet Homer writing in the century before Sappho. When the Trojan hero Hector hurriedly speaks to his wife, Andromache, on the walls of the besieged city before a great battle, she urges him to stay:

  For me it would be better to go down to the grave than lose you,

  for never more will peace be mine when you have met your fate,

  only woes. Neither father nor queenly mother do I have . . .

  Hector, you are to me as a father and royal mother, you are like my brother,

  and you are my own vigorous husband.

  And when the divine Calypso offers the wandering Odysseus eternal life if he will stay with her on her island of paradise, he refuses her so that he might see his beloved wife again:

  Mighty goddess, do not be angry with me. I know very well that wise

  Penelope is less beautiful than you to look upon, for she is only mortal while you

  are immortal and ageless. But even so, I yearn endlessly to reach my home

  again and see the day of my return.

  Such expressions of love are poetic ideals, but if Homer truly embodied the best that a man might aspire to in life, the desire for true love with a woman in marriage could be as real as his hope for honor and glory.

  THE FORMAL MARRIAGE between a man and a woman in ancient Greece began with a betrothal ceremony, similar to a modern engagement. The details varied by time and place, but at its core it was a contract between the bride’s father or guardian and her future husband. Witnesses were in attendance, though the bride, if she was present at all, played no role in the ceremony. The fourth-century-BC Athenian writer Menander probably portrays the brief ritual accurately in a play found on a piece of papyrus in Egypt:

  FATHER: I give you this girl so that she may bring children into this world within the bounds of marriage.

  GROOM: I accept her.

  FATHER: I agree to give you a dowry of three talents for her.

  GROOM: I accept that too, with pleasure.

  The marriage ceremony may have taken place soon after, or if the girl was still too young, there may have been a gap of several years between the betrothal and the wedding. The dowry was a payment by the bride’s father to seal the contract. If the groom repudiated his betrothed before or after the wedding, the money or goods would have to be returned to the bride’s family. This consequence provided an important incentive for a husband to honor his commitments. In Homeric times, which may more accurately reflect the customs of Sappho’s Lesbos, the groom reciprocated by making gifts to the bride’s family when a marriage was pledged.

  As for the marriage ceremony itself, we can use the poetry of Sappho to piece together what wedding festivities in Lesbos must have been like, at least for the wealthy nobility. The celebration centered on the ekdosis, literally the “giving away” of the bride to the bridegroom, beginning with the physical transfer of the bride from the house of her father to that of her new husband. If the bride was a foreign woman, a procession from the ship in port to the new home was in order.

  One of Sappho’s most complete songs surviving on papyrus takes this very theme as its subject. It celebrates the return of the Trojan prince Hector as he brings home his bride, Andromache, but the scene is not found in Homer. What we have instead is a joyous celebration outside the epic tradition that, in all likelihood, represents the marriage procession of an aristocratic man and woman in ancient Lesbos. Sappho may have composed the song for performance at a particular wedding, perhaps one in which a foreign bride was brought to the island, but it could just as easily be that the poem was used to celebrate the arrival of any bride at her new home. By looking closely at the verses, we can learn some important details about Sappho’s world and reconstruct at least a partial picture of what the festivities of a wedding in her own time must have been like:

  Cyprus . . .

  the herald came . . .

  Idaeus, the swift messenger . . .

  “. . . and the rest of Asia . . . undying glory.

  Hector and his companions are bringing the lively-eyed,

  graceful Andromache from holy Thebe and ever-flowing

  Placia in their ships over the salty sea, along with many golden bracelets

  and perfumed purple robes, beautifully-painted ornaments

  and countless silver cups and ivory.”

  So he spoke. Quickly Hector’s dear father rose up

  and the news spread among his friends in the spacious city.

  At once the sons of Ilus yoked mules to the

  smooth-running carts, then the whole crowd

  of women and maidens with . . . ankles climbed on board.

  The daughters of Priam apart . . .

  the young men yoked horses to chariots . . .

  in great style . . .

  charioteers . . .

  . . . like the gods

  . . . holy together

  set out . . . to Ilium

  the sweet-sounding flute and the cithara mingled

  and the sound of castanets. Maidens sang a holy song

  and a wondrous echo reached to the sky . . .

  everywhere in the streets was . . . mixing-bowls and drinking cups . . .

  myrrh and cassia and frankincense mingled.

  The older women cried out with joy

  and all the men erupted in a high-pitched shout

  calling on Paean, far-shooting god skilled with the lyre.

  They sang in praise of god-like Hector and Andromache.

  One of the most striking features of this poem is that Sappho composed it using a type of Homeric meter rather than the shorter lines she normally favored. Even the particular Greek words and phrasing are a deliberate echo of Homer rather than the dialect of Sappho’s native Lesbos. Yet the result is not a poor imitation of epic, but a transformation of the genre into something entirely different. The meter so often used for bloody battles becomes the instrument of an exultant celebration of a new life for a man and woman. If Sappho sang this song at a wedding feast, it must have been striking to watch her rise with her lyre and begin the formal rhythm of epic, but to sing instead of the love and laughter and joy of a marriage. It is a masterful achievement of a poet who is so skilled in a traditional style of poetry that she can transform it into something entirely different.

  Athenian pyxis showing a wedding procession with the bride driven in a chariot from her parents’ home to that of her husband (fifth century BC).

  (BRITISH MUSEUM)

  The poem begins with a broken fragment containing a single word, “Cyprus,” followed by a break in which several words have been lost. Cyprus was the island home of Aphrodite, goddess of love and sex, so the song’s opening is probably an invocation of a deity of fertility most appropriate for the joining of a man and woman in marriage. The chief Trojan herald, a breathless Idaeus known from the Iliad, then arrives at the palace of Priam to announce to the king in suitably Homeric fashion that his son Hector has returned from his short voyage to the south with his bride, the lively-eyed and graceful A
ndromache, daughter of King Eëtion of Thebe. With her are many bridal gifts from her father, including golden bracelets, perfumed purple robes, painted ornaments, silver cups, and ivory. The wealth of these gifts points to a vast trade network of early Greece, and Sappho’s Lesbos in particular. Purple dye, for example, came from a shellfish found on the Lebanese coast, while ivory (Greek elephas) was an expensive luxury item carved from the tusks of Asiatic or African elephants.

  The herald’s announcement rouses the whole palace, indeed the whole city, into action. The young men, descendants of Ilus, founder of Ilium (Troy), yoke mules to the carts for the women and maidens. In Sappho’s Lesbos, the women are as much a part of the public celebration as the men. Stylish chariots are readied for the daughters of Priam, and the charioteers drive them to the harbor to welcome their brother and his bride.

  After an unknown number of missing lines, we find ourselves in the middle of a musical celebration as Hector drives Andromache into the city surrounded by jubilant well-wishers on all sides. The bride’s procession in a chariot to her new home is, in fact, a favorite theme on vases found throughout the Greek world. Flutes, cithara harps, and castanets, along with maidens singing wedding songs, welcome the happy couple into Troy. Bowls of wine are mixed and shared, while the burning of imported incense marks the religious importance of the festivities. This poem of Sappho is the earliest reference to incense in Greek literature. Frankincense and myrrh are not found in Homer, suggesting that these aromatic resins imported from southern Arabia had just arrived in the Greek world in Sappho’s day, though they had long been known in Egypt.

  The climax of the song is a chorus of the whole city. Old women cry out in joy, and men join in with a ritual song addressed to Paean, the god Apollo. In the final line, Hector and Andromache are significantly described as godlike (theoeikeloi), a deliberately Homeric word often used for heroes in battle, but here transformed into an epithet for a groom and his bride. As with the rest of the poem, the conclusion is a striking use of epic language by Sappho transformed for her own purposes.

  In most marriages in Lesbos and throughout ancient Greece, this procession of the bride to her new home probably occurred later in the wedding day, after feasting and songs at the home of the young woman’s father. We’re again fortunate that Sappho preserves different stages of the wedding festivities in her poems, though it’s not always clear which songs belong to which part of the celebration.