Sappho was contemporaneous with Nebuchadnezzar.  While he was chastening the Jews, she was creating love.  In her day the condition of Hellenic women differed from what it had been.  Generally they were shut apart, excluded from any exercise of their possible minds, restricted to strict domesticity.  At Athens a girl might not so much as look from a window.  If she did, she saw nothing.  The window did not give on the street.  But in the temples the candor of her eyes was violated.  In the festivals of Ceres the modesty of her ears was assailed.  Otherwise, she was securely guarded.  If, to her detriment, she eluded guardianship, she could be sold.  With marriage she entered into a form of superior slavery.  When her husband’s friends supped with him, she was not permitted to be present.  Without permission she could not go from one apartment to the next.  Without permission she could not go out.  When she did, it was at her husband’s side, heavily veiled.  With his permission, she might go to the theatre, but only when tragedy was given.  At comedies and at the games she was forbidden to assist.  In case of disobedience the penalty was death.  Pleasures and privileges were limited to housekeeping and motherhood.  At the immanence of the latter her surroundings were embellished with beautiful trifles, with objects of art, with whatever influences might prenatally affect, and, in affecting, perfect the offspring.  Otherwise, her existence was simple and severe.  The peplos tissue of gold was not for her.  Garments colored or flowered were not, either.  These were reserved for her inferiors and superiors, for the hierodules of Aphrodite Pandemos and the images of the gods.  Though her robes were simple, they had to be heavy.  If light, a fine was incurred.  If they did not hang properly, another fine was imposed.  If, to the detriment of her husband, a man succeeded in approaching her, she could be killed or merely repudiated; in the latter case, she could no longer enter a temple, any one might insult her.  Still a slave, she was an outcast as well.

Such were the laws.  Their observance is a different matter.  In Aristophanes and the comic poets generally Athenian women of position were dissolute when they were not stupid, and usually they were both.  They may have been.  But poets exaggerate.  Besides, divorce was obtainable.  Divorce was granted on joint request.  On the demand of the husband it could be had.  In the event of superscandalous conduct on his part, it was granted to the wife, provided she appeared before a magistrate and personally demanded it.  The wife of the wicked and winning Alcibiades went on such an errand.  Alcibiades met her, caught her in his arms and, to the applause of the wittiest people in the world, carried her triumphantly home.  Aristophanes and Alcibiades came in a later and more brilliant epoch.  In the days of Sappho severity was the rigorous rule, one sanctioned by the sentiment of a people in whose virile sports clothing was discarded, and in whose plays jest was too violent for delicate ears.

In Sparta the condition of women was similar, but girls had the antique freedom which Nausicaa enjoyed.  Destined by the belligerent constitution of Lacedaemon to share, even in battle, the labors of their brothers, they devoted themselves, not to domesticity, but to physical development.  They wrestled with young men, raced with them, swam the Eurotas, preparing themselves proudly and purely to be mothers among a people who destroyed any child that was deformed, fined any man that presumed to be stout, forced debilitated husbands to cede their wives to stronger arms, and who, meanwhile, protected the honor of their daughters with laws of which an infraction was death.

The marriage of Spartan girls was so arranged that during the first years of it they saw their husbands infrequently, furtively, almost clandestinely, in a sort of hide-and-go-seek devised by Lycurgus in order that love, instead of declining into indifference, should, while insensibly losing its illusions, preserve and prolong its strength.  Otherwise, the Spartan wife became subject to the common Hellenic custom.  Her liberty departed with her girlhood.  Save her husband, no man might see her, none could praise her, none but he could blame.  Her sole jewels were her children.  Her richest garments were stoicism and pride.  “What dower did you bring your husband?” an Athenian woman asked of one of them.  “Chastity,” was the superb reply.

Lesbos differed from Lacedaemon.  The Spartans declared that they knew how to fight, not how to talk.  They put all their art into not having any.  The Lesbians put theirs into the production of verse.  At Mitylene, poetic development was preferred to physical culture.  The girls there thought more of immortality than of motherhood.  But the unusual liberty which they enjoyed was due to influences either Boeotian or Egyptian, perhaps to both.  Egypt was neighborly.  With Lesbos, Egypt was in constant communication.  The liberty of women there, as generally throughout the morning lands, religion had procured.  Where Ishtar passed, she fevered, but also she freed.  Beneath her mantle women acquired a liberty that was very real.  On the very sites in which Islam was to shut them up, Semiramis, Strantonice, Dido, Cleopatra, and Zenobia appeared.  Isis, who was Ishtar’s Egyptian avatar, was particularly liberal.  Among the cities especially dedicated to her was Naucratis.

Charaxus, a brother of Sappho, went there, met Rhodopis, a local beauty, and fell in love with her.  Charaxus was a merchant.  He brought wine to Egypt, sold it, returned to Greece for more.  During one of his absences, Rhodopis, while lolling on a terrace, dropped her sandal which, legend says, a vulture seized, carried away, and let fall into the lap of King Amasis.  The story of Cinderella originated there.  With this difference:  though the king, after prodigal and impatient researches, discovered the little foot to which the tiny sandal belonged, Rhodopis, because of Charaxus, disassociated herself from his advances.  Subsequently a young Naucratian offered a fortune to have relations with her.  Because of Charaxus, Rhodopis again refused.  The young man dreamed that she consented, dreamed that she was his, and boasted of the dream.  Indignantly Rhodopis cited him before the magistrates, contending that he should pay her as proposed.  The matter was delicate.  But the magistrates decided it with great wisdom.  They authorized Rhodopis to dream that she was paid.

Rumors of these and of similar incidents were probably reported in Lesbos and may have influenced the condition of women there.  But memories of Boeotia from which their forefathers came was perhaps also a factor.  Boeotia was a haunt of the muses.  In the temple to them, which Lesbos became, the freedom of Erato was almost of necessity accorded to her priestesses.

Lesbos was then a stretch of green gardens and white péristyles set beneath a purple dome.  To-day there is no blue bluer than its waters.  There is nothing so violet as the velvet of its sky.  With such accessories the presence of Erato was perhaps inevitable.  In any case it was profuse.  Nowhere, at no time, has emotional aestheticism, the love of the lovely, the fervor of individual utterance, been as general and spontaneous as it was in this early Academe.

In the later Academe at Athens laughter was prohibited.  That of Mitylene was less severe.  To loiter there some familiarity with the magnificence of Homer may have been exacted, but otherwise a receptive mind, appreciative eyes, and kissable lips were the best passports to Sappho, the girl Plato of its groves, who, like Plato, taught beauty, sang it as well and with it the glukupikros-the bitterness of things too sweet.

Others sang with her.  Among those, whose names at least, the fates and the Fathers have spared us, were Erinna and Andromeda.  Sappho cited them as her rivals.  One may wonder could they have been really that.  Plato called Sappho the tenth muse.  Solon, after hearing one of her poems, prayed that he might not die until he had learned it.  Longinus spoke of her with awe.  Strabo said that at no period had any one been known who in any way, however slight, could be compared to her.

Though twenty-five centuries have gone since then, Sappho is still unexceeded.  Twice only has she been approached; in the first instance by Horace, in the second by Swinburne, and though it be admitted, as is customary among scholars, that Horace is the most correct of the Latin poets, as Swinburne is the most faultless of our day, Sappho sits and sings above them atop, like her own perfect simile of a bride: 

   Like the sweet apple which reddens atop on the topmost bough,
   Atop on the topmost twig which the pluckers forgot somehow. 
   Forget it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now.

It is regrettable that one cannot now get Sappho.  But of at least nine books there remain but two odes and a handful of fragments.  The rest has been lost on the way, turned into palimpsests, or burned in Byzance.  The surviving fragments are limited some to a line, some to a measure, some to a single word.  They are the citations of lexicographers and grammarians, made either as illustrations of the AEolic tongue or as examples of metre.

The odes are addressed, the one to Aphrodite, the other to Anactoria.  The first is derived from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who quoted it as a perfect illustration of perfect verse.  The second was given by Longinus as an example of the sublime in poetry-of the display, as he put it, not of one emotion, but of a congress of them.  Under the collective title of Anactoria, these odes together with many of the fragments, Swinburne has interwoven into an exquisite whole.

To appreciate it, Sappho herself should be understood.  Her features, which the Lesbians put on their coins, are those of a handsome boy.  On seeing them one does not say, Can this be Sappho?  But rather, This is Sappho herself.  They fit her, fit her verse, fit her fame.  That fame, prodigious in her own day, is serviceable in ours.  It has retained the name of Phaon, her lover; the names of girls for whom she also cared.  Of these, Suidas particularly mentioned Atthis and Gorgo.  Regarding Anactoria there is the testimony of the ode.  There is more.  “I loved thee once, Atthis, long ago,” she exclaimed in one fragment.  In another she declared herself “Of Gorgo full weary.”  But the extreme poles of her affection are supposably represented by Phaon and Anactoria.  The ode to the latter is, apart from its perfection, merely a jealous plaint, yet otherwise useful in showing the trend of her fancy, in addition to the fact that her love was not always returned.  Of that, though, there is further evidence in the fragments.  Some one she reproached with being “Fonder of girls than Gello.”  Elsewhere she said “Scornfuller than thou have I nowhere found.”  But even in the absence of such evidence, the episode connected with Phaon, although of a different order, would suffice.

Contemporaneous knowledge of it is derived from Strabo, Servius, Palaephatus, and from an alleged letter in one of Ovid’s literary forgeries.  According to these writers, Phaon was a good-looking young brute engaged in the not inelegant occupation of ferryman.  In what manner he first approached Sappho, whether indeed Sappho did not first approach him, is uncertain.  Pliny, who perhaps was credulous, believed that Phaon had happened on the male root of a seaweed which was supposed to act as a love charm and that by means of it he succeeded in winning Sappho’s rather volatile heart.  However that may be, presently Phaon wearied.  It was probably in these circumstances that the Ode to Aphrodite was written, which, in Swinburne’s paraphrase-slightly paraphrased anew-is as follows: 

     I beheld in sleep the light that is
     In her high place in Paphos, heard the kiss
     Of body and soul that mix with eager tears
     And laughter stinging through the eyes and ears;
     Saw Love, as burning flame from crown to feet,
     Imperishable upon her storied seat;
     Clear eyelids lifted toward the north and south,
     A mind of many colors and a mouth
     Of many tunes and kisses; and she bowed
     With all her subtle face laughing aloud,
     Bowed down upon me saying, “Who doth the wrong,
     Sappho?” But thou-thy body is the song,
     Thy mouth the music; thou art more than I,
     Though my voice die not till the whole world die,
     Though men that hear it madden; though love weep,
     Though nature change, though shame be charmed to sleep. 
     Ah, wilt thou slay me lest I kiss thee dead? 
     Yet the queen laughed and from her sweet heart said: 
     “Even he that flees shall follow for thy sake,
     And he shall give thee gifts that would not take,
     Shall kiss that would not kiss thee” (Yea, kiss me)
     “When thou wouldst not”-When I would not kiss thee!

If Phaon heard he did not heed.  He took ship and sailed away, to Sicily it is said, where, it is also said, Sappho followed, desisting only when he flung at her some gibe about Anactoria and Atthis.  In a letter which Ovid pretended she then addressed to him, she referred to the gibe, but whether by way of denial or admission, is now, owing to different readings of the text, uncertain.  In some copies she said, quas (the Lesbian girls) non sine crimine (reproach) amavi.  In others, quas hic (in Lesbos) sine crimine amavi.  Disregarding the fact that the letter itself is imaginary, the second reading is to be preferred, not because it is true, but precisely because it is not.  Sappho, though a woman, was a poet.  Several of her verses contain allusions to attributes poetically praised by poets who never possessed them, and Ovid who had not written a treatise on the Art of Love for the purpose of displaying his ignorance, was too adroit to let his imaginary Sappho admit what the real Sappho would have denied.

Meanwhile Phaon refused to return.  At Lesbos there was a white rock that stretched out to the sea.  On it was a temple to Apollo.  A fall from the rock was, at the time, locally regarded as a cure for love.  Arthemesia, queen of Caria, whom another Phaon had rebuffed and who, to teach him better manners, put his eyes out, threw herself from it.  Sappho did also.  It cured her of the malady, of all others as well.

Such is the story, such, rather, is its outline, one interesting from the fact that it constitutes the initial love-tragedy of the Occident, as, also, because of a climax befitting the singer of the bitterness of things too sweet.