As we approach the annual fete consecrated to the stump-winged, chubby Greco-Roman godlet known as Cupid (alternately Amor or Eros), we might lay a garland or two at the shrine of his often neglected mother, Aphrodite. And while we're at it, let's not forget who first immortalized her in myth, who taught us words to placate the fickle, erotic spirit. I mean poets, of course, and especially the original high priestess of unbridled lust, first Diva of the steamy lyric, the seventh-century BC Bard from the Isle of Lesbos: Sappho.
Few facts about Sappho -- and even fewer of her poems -- survive. We know she came from an aristocratic family, probably from Mytilene, the most populous urban center on the Aegean island of Lesbos, located 100 miles east of the Greek mainland, just off the modern-day Turkish coast. She was probably married to a wealthy merchant, appears to have had a daughter named Cleis, and seems to have played guru to a small coterie of female intellectuals, whom she both prepared for marriage and trained in the poetic arts. Her poems were celebrated throughout the Greek-speaking world, lauded by her male contemporaries including the poet Alcaeus; more akin to singer-songwriters than to today's academic poets -- a k.d. lang of antiquity -- she pioneered new melodic styles for the lyre, and is said to have invented the plectrum, a forebear of the modern guitar pick. Her notorious desire for other women named the category of erotic practice that still honors her island home: lesbianism.
All this is critical fodder for British academic Margaret Williamson, whose lively insights make Sappho's Immortal Daughters a fun read. Although the book purports to be a serious study, Williamson is far too playful for a schoolmarm. None of the reigning factoids on Sappho escapes her witty scrutiny. Sappho's husband, for instance, is generally referred to as "Cercylas from the Isle of Andros." We now learn that, colloquially translated, his name means "Prick from the Isle of Man" -- some ancient scholar's idea of a practical joke. The legend of a love-sick Sappho jumping to her death from a cliff at Leucas -- after being jilted by a boyish heartthrob, the ferryman Phaon -- is equally suspect. The only certainties gleaned from the handful of verse fragments and reliable apocrypha that amount to Sappho's legacy are her devotion to the cult of Aphrodite and her lust for the female companions who populate her poems: Atthis, Gongula, Megara, and Brochea. Even during her lifetime, according to the 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia, the Suda, Sappho had "acquired a bad reputation for her shameful friendship" with these quasi-muses.
Williamson's major contribution is her untangling of ancient Greece's convoluted sexual mores. Our prim Judeo-Christian lens obscures Sappho's clout among her peers. Although her world was cloyingly patriarchal, defining women as satellites of their all-powerful warrior husbands, extramarital sex was the norm. Conjugal intercourse was subject to strict rules of decorum; affairs, on the other hand, were pursued with erotic abandon. Young boys were routinely introduced to sex by experienced older men: the ubiquitous, all-male drinking fests called symposia were a pedophile's heaven. Less is known of such homo-erotic tutelage among women, but Sappho was clearly revered as a cult figure by her Lesbos companions. Williamson highlights her preeminence at yearly, females-only festivals renowned for their orgiastic carousing: the Thesmophoria and Eleusinian Mysteries (dedicated to Demeter, goddess of crops and fertility), or the Adonia, a rite commemorating the tragic love of Adonis and Aphrodite. At these rituals celebrating the social status of women, Sappho presumably functioned as priestess and chief entertainer; many of her longer poems (like the famous "Hymn to Aphrodite") appear to have been composed for these events.
After such rousing stuff, the final chapter is anticlimactic. There we are, swooning with a restless band of lascivious housewives, drums beating while Sappho plays the lyre. You can feel the dry island heat and smell the rosemary in the air. Suddenly, Williamson decides she'll end with a discussion of Sappho's poems. At last, the famous fragments! After all, these are the "immortal daughters" of the book's title, our only real glimpse at the mother of all poets, myth and speculation aside -- and the poems don't disappoint. But Williamson's abrupt plunge into dry, academic explication is almost physically painful to read. There's so much to say about these poems. And after such a stimulating build-up, this finale's staid verbiage feels like textual coitus interruptus.
Click to read a few odes to Sappho.
