by Emily Hahn
This, I repeat, was part of an ode intended for publication, and not of a private letter. Even twenty-five hundred years ago there was a wide difference between the two. Sappho, as any modern poet would have done, pleasantly replied by the same method of communication.
“If what you wanted had been good or noble,” she retorted, “shame would not show in your eyes; you would speak of it frankly.”
The rest of you may interpret this exchange as you will; for myself I think it proves conclusively that Sappho was a schoolmistress. What could be more schoolmistressy than that? Poor snubbed Alcaeus!
She was head of an academy of young poets, then, who tried their hands, collectively or in competition, whenever an ode was wanted in commemoration of important Lesbian occasions. Probably Sappho’s academy was the source of supply for dancers and musicians at all the temple celebrations, and they sang their own songs as they danced. One shudders to think of the rivalry, the heart-burnings, the mutual accusations of favoritism that must have preceded first nights among these ambitious fledgelings. If Sappho was paid a salary for this work, we can safely declare that she earned it. Some of the young women to whom the headmistress wrote her passionate lines may have been members of the institute: Erinna of Telos was referred to as Sappho’s pupil. What we know about Erinna is interesting if scrappy. For one thing, she was a very good poet; at least contemporary critics said so. (Her works were burned in the Church reformist holocaust.) For another, she did not return Sappho’s love, and Sappho wrote a poem complaining about her coldness. Yet did Sappho really love Erinna? Does a poet necessarily adore the person he addresses openly, in words he intends to endure for centuries? He loves his poem and he uses a name for it, but the interpretation is not always so sweetly simple as all that.
Sappho was fashionable on Lesbos and beyond. All the literati of Greece knew her work, and they claimed, at least, to appreciate it. She was compared to the best writer they knew—to Homer, who even in those distant days was considered an ancient. No one was sure when he had lived, or knew any incontrovertible facts about him. It was rather like us with Shakespeare. There was even a Baconian school of thought which argued that Homer wasn’t Homer at all.
But let us get back to Sappho. It was inevitable that among the praises there should be upraised here and there a dissenting voice. After all, asked one of the critics, a man and himself a writer—after all, what did one learn from Sappho save how to make love to maidens?
It was a sour remark. We will never know just what frustration or jealousy prompted it. It is, as I have said before, too long ago. The speaker may have suffered from an unkind criticism Sappho had made of his work, or perhaps he genuinely disliked her style, or maybe he considered that his own poetry was unjustly neglected because everyone was running, sheeplike, after her. The only thing we can be sure of is a negative one; he was not expressing prudish disapproval of Sappho for loving maidens. It would not have occurred to him to condemn her for that. The Greeks didn’t disapprove of that sort of thing.
In fact, if homosexuality were as dangerous and contagious as it is believed nowadays to be, there wouldn’t be any human race left on the planet by this time. The Greeks would have died out for lack of reproduction, and the races subject to them would have adopted these habits wholesale, and then they too would have died out, and so ad infinitum.
Sappho and her academy were only a small, unimportant part of society: it is to be feared women in general played an unimportant part in the Greek scene, as they have in many another epoch of history. If we believe the intellectuals of the time, the leading men of Attica and Aeolia hadn’t much use for women anyway. They liked boys. Boy love wasn’t just one of those weaknesses which can be winked at, either. On the contrary, it was supposed to be a good thing. It stimulated heroic sentiments, the Greeks said. The boys naturally would want to be popular, and they worked hard at the gymnasium trying to improve their physique. Any boy who had a name for beauty, charm, modesty, and all the rest of it was followed around by crowds of respectable statesmen, philosophers and other V.I.P.s. It was a most extraordinary state of affairs. Under such circumstances it is small wonder that the habits of Sappho and her little group did not attract more attention, or stimulate more resentful criticism.
At that, she didn’t get off scot-free. Even twenty-five centuries ago, the literati were capable of malicious gossip. Some wag, years after Sappho’s death, deliberately made up a story about her, alleging that she had fallen madly, hopelessly in love with a character named Phaon. She was portrayed pursuing Phaon unavailingly, and committing suicide at last because he would have nothing to do with her. People began to believe the silly story after a few years, and the cliff from which she was supposed to have jumped was pointed out to visitors on Lesbos as “Sappho’s Leap.” The longer the tale was bandied about, the more people believed it. Within a hundred years of the real Sappho’s death (which presumably was not by suicide, and not for love), there were at least two comedies written on this theme, both of which represented Sappho as a grotesque, comic figure. The truth could not possibly have resembled the travesty in any particular. Phaon was a mythical character, a comic in his own right: he appeared in other plays and legends as well.
It is an unhappy fate to become grotesque in the minds of posterity. Taken all in all, I think Sappho’s shade has a thin time of it. She couldn’t have had a very good time even when she was alive. In the first place, she was a woman who loved women, in a world made by men for men who prided and preened themselves on loving other men. In the second place, she was a schoolmistress. Schoolmistresses are not always treated with the courtesy they deserve, it being generally supposed that they lack humor and resilience. She would not have dared to take herself too seriously, and I think people must often unwittingly have hurt Sappho’s feelings. It would be a great mistake to think that she lived in an atmosphere that was all rose leaves, vine leaves, music and song.
There must have been compensations, of course. She must have known what a good poet she was. Even the rest of the world, imperceptive though it was, knew that.
And for all the cruel plays men wrote about her, they went on knowing how good she was. Down to Plato’s time they talked about her in admiration. Plato called her the tenth Muse.
There were in the beginning of the world, said Aristophanes, three sexes, male, female, and hermaphrodite. Each male had two faces, four arms, four legs, and two identical sets of procreative organs. The females likewise had two faces, two sets of limbs, and, like the males, two sets of private parts, exactly alike. The hermaphrodites, however, were different: their double reproductive organs were not twins but each creature had one of each.
In a world cataclysm, all these creatures were split into two, and the resulting people were just as we see each other now. Throughout our lives, says Aristophanes, we seek each his original other half. The descendants of the hermaphrodites seek their opposite sexes. It is the descendants of the males and the females who seek their identicals.
Sappho must have been one of these.
I love all delicate things
and Love for me
has the shining, has the beauty
of the Sun.
And I love, dreamily,
to lie beside a shady spring and leaning
touch the cool fronds of its murmuring:
to let loose captive birds and kisses let loose
into a wheeling sky of gold
on wider wings than any bird has grown
and vanishing:
raspberries, and dark lashes to pale eyes,
violets: and then girls
going tired to bed
undressing in the dark without a word,
knowing their own nakedness so well—
the rustling and the quiet hands are heard,
then only nakedness, as the night breathes
and hands reach out to seek …
stripping the darkness too as they go stroking
for Beauty
by the mind’s rose-lanterns fed
yet carven on the cheek:
I love all delicate things—
O Andromeda, bare your body to me.
Very Unpleasant Characters
Cleopatra
Halfway down the stairs, much nearer than Helen and Sappho to the foot where we stand gaping up at all these figures, stands Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt. At first it may be difficult to recognize her. Cleopatra’s role in history was altered strangely long after her death, by an impertinent man named Shakespeare. He took a strong-minded woman who had the almost legendary qualities of a true sovereign, stripped her of the extraneous emotions and thoughts which cluttered his story, and transmuted her into a Great Lover. So vivid was Shakespeare’s Cleopatra that she quite outshone the real one. The Shakespeare Cleopatra was, first of all, a woman (how one slips inevitably into Hollywood speech, discussing her!) whose state and power were merely background to the stirring tale of her passion for Antony. It is rather a shock to turn away from this lovely single-minded creature in tan grease paint, to regard with as unprejudiced an attitude as we can muster, after a lifetime of theater, the human being Cleopatra really was.
Shakespeare’s Cleopatra was a much nicer character than the real one. That is my point.
Perhaps, however, I should qualify these sweeping statements I am making about the real Cleopatra, because I haven’t much to go on. The one in the play was born over three hundred years ago, in the seventeenth century, whereas the original lived some years before Christ. Facts, like royal trappings, decay and are lost in sixteen hundred years, and many facts about Cleopatra have disappeared in that fashion.
Somebody had occasion only the other day to sum up what is called “source material” on the Egyptian queen. After ruthlessly discarding all secondary comment, he was left with a few words in Egyptian, a little in Greek, and several gossipy paragraphs in Latin; not very much considering Shakespeare and Otway and Shaw and all the others who have used her story. There is an argument that because we know something of Julius Caesar and Antony, we also know something more of Cleopatra than is written in the sources. But do we? Can one deduce a woman’s character from the sort of lovers she chose? And, if it comes to that, did Cleopatra choose her lovers? Not really. In her position her choice was too limited to be called choice at all. Her lovers were selected for her by accident of birth and international politics.
For that matter, one may well ask if Caesar was, in fact, her lover at all. It is not a new question. His Anglo-Saxon champions say indignantly that he was not. They say everybody knows the Romans were frightful scandalmongers, and Cleopatra was a vulgar little social climber who merely boasted, for her own advantage, that she had enjoyed his favors. Caesar was a gentleman, they protest; the greatest man in Rome. He wouldn’t have had anything intimate to do with a questionable character like Cleopatra.
Let us study the portrait busts of these two people. Cleopatra looks like an intelligent, handsome Greek woman. Caesar’s face is humorous, clever, and moody. Both appear eminently respectable; admittedly, sculpture has that effect on most faces.
Remember, you must be wary of ascribing your own tastes and codes to Cleopatra, and Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony. After all, whatever happened took place a long time ago and a long way off. We are always being brought up short, even by living peoples like Eskimos, or Indians, or Russians. They are not, we suddenly observe, at all like us. Then why do some of our scholars continue to invest the ancient Romans and Greeks with characters so very much like their own? The spectacle of Mr. H. G. Wells turning up his nose in fastidious disapproval of Cleopatra, as he does in the Outline of History, becomes rather funny when one reflects that the lady is about two thousand years his senior. It’s a rash thing to do anyway. If she were able to read his Outline it would doubtless shock her grievously. Perhaps it would clear the air if we admitted from the very beginning that the ancients, from our point of view, were very unpleasant people.
In those days when the world wasn’t crowded, people in power, those who made up the aristocracy, were few. There was only one set of wealthy rulers. One gossip column, had there been such columns, would have been enough for everyone who could read. Most of the Continent (and Britain as well) had heard of Julius Caesar the Consul, and knew who he was. But they hadn’t heard of Cleopatra in 48 B.C., except in her own country. She was only twenty-one the year she met the Roman general.
Queen of a fabulously wealthy country, she was nevertheless rather weak. In fact, she had just been dethroned, which is why Caesar paid attention to her to begin with. Rome was responsible for Egypt; she maintained a kind of protectorate over the African country, and so the status of Egyptian royalty was of direct interest to a Roman official in Caesar’s position.
Cleopatra’s father had named her, who was his eldest child, and her younger brother Ptolemy as joint heirs to his kingdom. When Ptolemy was old enough he would be his sister’s husband in accordance with the custom of all Egyptian rulers, who in the national tradition were gods. Only god could wed with god, and so prince married sister princess, without breaking whatever incest tabu the Egyptians may have observed among their commoners.
Cleopatra and Ptolemy would marry and rule Egypt together: such were the King’s plans, and on the face of it they were sensible. However, if he remembered his family history he probably reflected that plans might go astray. Intermarriage had intensified certain awkward traits in the Ptolemies. The royal annals were full of parricide, matricide, and fratricide, not to mention much other treachery. Cleopatra heartily disliked all her siblings, and they had no love for her either. As soon as the old King died there was hell to pay. Stirred on by palace slaves, his four children were soon involved in a lively civil war over the succession. When Julius Caesar, himself pursuing the last stages of a Roman civil war, alighted on the beach at Alexandria, he found Ptolemy and the younger Princess Arsinoë in control, with Cleopatra driven out and missing.
Strictly speaking, it was not so much Ptolemy and Arsinoë as their favorite palace eunuchs who were in control. The three children were too young to be more than puppets. Had any one of the party in power known where Cleopatra was, she would have been assassinated.
To Caesar the consul, such quarrels among colonials and other barbarians were nothing new. It was a routine part of his work to stop these people fighting and make the Egyptian throne firm before returning to Rome. He was probably prepared, after studying the question, to take Cleopatra’s side, even before he met her. She was the rightful heir, and when Caesar had nothing to gain he plumped for impartial justice. But to tell the truth, Caesar was too busy with Roman affairs to worry much about Egypt’s domestic troubles; he had not come on purpose to settle them. He was on another mission, which had just come to an ignominious end. His enemy Pompey had fled to Alexandria, and Caesar had pursued him there. It was most vexing to be met on his arrival with the news that Pompey had been murdered, as he disembarked, by overzealous Egyptians led by Ptolemy’s eunuch, who hoped thus to put themselves in Caesar’s good graces. They had made an awkward mistake. In spite of their differences, Caesar held Pompey in great esteem, and the murder, a dingy and dishonorable death for a great general, really grieved him. He was out of temper with both Ptolemy and his apple-polishing eunuch Potheinos.
Now, while he sat in the palace and scowled, Alexandria seethed with Pompey’s troops, who kept stirring up trouble with the consul’s escort. For days there had been riots and little battles in the streets. Potheinos walked softly and everyone was very polite to Caesar.
One night Cleopatra, under cover of dark, sailed over from her hiding place in Pelusium, with her faithful attendant Apollodorus, in order to interview Caesar. Being, quite naturally, afraid of capture on the way to the great man’s rooms, she and her slave evolved the stratagem which was to become so famous. She rolled herself up in a bundle of rugs and was carried past the guard in that undignified posture.
What happened once she got into Caesar’s
apartments has been the subject of much bitter argument among historians, and it all sounds extremely silly to modern ears. In the parlance of the woman’s page, did Caesar fall in love with Cleopatra on sight? Did she set out to win his favor? Was Caesar at fifty-four too old a man to be caught by passion and sentiment? Or was he a libertine, taking advantage of a poor unsophisticated little girl of the provinces? Was he not a tired, dissipated roué, too old to seduce her? Weren’t there a lot of snickering allegations that he was “queer” in any case, and much preferred generals and pretty princes to young ladies?
One cannot but wonder what these people are talking about. Read any account of Caesar’s life. No matter how you may admire him, or how obvious it is that his enemies exaggerated and traduced him, the school of Emily Post would not have approved of the real Julius Caesar. Possibly the allegation wasn’t to be taken seriously; possibly it was just like passing the time of day in Rome when they hailed young Caius Julius Caesar as Queen of Bithynia because he stayed such a long time with King Nicomedes. It was no doubt merely a rough pleasantry when they called him Queen of Rome to Pompey’s King. That sort of remark was lightly tossed about. But whether or not Caesar was double-gaited, it was no mere allegation that he adored women; many wives of his friends could bear witness to the truth of it. Moreover, he was very vain, and must have considered the conquest of the twenty-one-year-old queen of Egypt a challenge to his masculine pride.
On Cleopatra’s side there were overpoweringly good reasons why she should cajole the consul. Caesar was arbiter of her fate. With his good will she would be restored to the throne, and without it she must spend the rest of her life in exile. Perhaps she liked him anyway; most women did. He was much older than she, and many young girls find older men attractive. But even if Caesar had not been an accomplished and practiced lover, even if he had been a drooling, revolting specimen, I feel that Cleopatra would willingly have taken him on. She was no sentimental little thing, but a bold, determined queen. None of her family seems to have been of the tender, delicate type. It was an aunt of hers who got cross with her husband, cut up their son, and sent the pieces, pickled in brine, to his father as a birthday present. No, Cleopatra was no sensitive plant; she came of a stock which never hesitated to commit the bloodiest sort of crime in order to gain power. She really did long to see her sister Arsinoë killed and out of the way. Nobody will ever convince me that she was capable of harboring modern middle-class yearnings for a virtuous life, or of waiting for the right man to come along.