Biography and poems of Sappho, a poet who lived in Greece in 580 BC. Life of the Greek poet and phrases taken from fragments of her works.
SAPPHO, SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Sappho , a famous poetess, was originally from Lesbos, an island in the Aegean Sea opposite the Troad. She was born between the end of the 7th and the first half of the 6th century BC in Eresos, but lived her life in Mytilene, the most important center of the island. She was a contemporary of another poet from Lesbos, Alcaeus. Both poets are representatives of the melic monodic lyric , that is, the monodic lyric sung and accompanied by the lyre.
Sappho was on great terms with Alcaeus , who paid homage to her with a famous verse : Girdled with violets, pure, honeyed laughter, Sappho . Like him, she was also of aristocratic origin and expressed in her lyrics severe judgments towards the parvenus , men and women not rich by birth. Sappho ‘s criticisms towards them were superior to those – it is said – that Alcaeus directed against the tyrant of Mytilene Pittacus , whom he called kakopatridos, of obscure birth .
To understand Sappho ‘s harsh tones, it is enough to read the verses in which she celebrates caris , grace, or what makes a woman graceful. Here she reproaches a girl from the thiasos for having granted her favors to a particularly ungraceful rival: What boorish woman is bewitching your mind? Sappho wonders . The girls who arrived in the thiasos were educated in refinement, grace, elegance. Sappho was convinced that poetry would grant them glory and immortality.
To define Sappho as a monodic poet would be reductive; we have several choral songs by her, among which the epithalamia stand out, composed on the occasion of the wedding of the girls of the thiasos.
SAPPHO, ALCAEUS AND POLITICS
Like Alcaeus, Sappho also experienced exile . She was involved in the anti-noble repression that followed the advent of Pittacus. Both Sappho and Alcaeus in fact belonged to what could be defined as a club . Sappho belonged to the thiasos , Alcaeus to the hetaeria , an aristocratic and military circle that united people who had in common the same age, sex, moral and political ideas: most of the discussions that took place in the hetaeria were in fact political in nature. Even in the lyrics of Alcaeus some themes are recurrent: the criticism of the aristocracy, incapable of sustaining political confrontation; the love of wine; ephebic love; the observation, also dear to Hesiod , of the passing of time.
THE TIASO
The thiasos is a structure that gathers around the temple; at the same time, however, it is also an extraordinary center of culture because, as in the women’s symposiums, in the women’s thiasos poetry is produced and sung. The thiasos is also an excellent scholastic center.
One of the most important purposes of the thiasos was the intellectual education of young girls, aimed at marriage: those who studied at a thiasos, in fact, received a higher education which guaranteed a good match and therefore a good marriage (consider that the princes of Asia Minor chose their brides within a thiasos).
Very often women reluctantly left the thiasos to get married. This is well described in the fragment The Songs of Memory , where the poqos, the desire that unites women, appears.
The life of the thiasos is one of grace and refinement, the atmosphere is rarefied, almost unreal, because very often the life of the girls was characterized by ecstatic visions, hallucinations of the divinities. In the fragment Ode to Aphrodite , for example, in front of the statue of the goddess Sappho has a hallucinatory experience and talks to the goddess as if she saw her in front of her.
LOVE
Many of the poems are intended for Epiphanies, rituals that precede the appearance of a divinity, which for Sappho is Aphrodite. We do not know how these rituals were carried out: almost certainly on these occasions wine was circulated, a bit like what happened in symposia; at the end of the ritual the presence of the divinity was felt.
It is from the point of view of education and custom that the loving approach that existed between Sappho and her students should be identified. Sappho had a husband and a daughter, but this did not prevent her from having relationships with her girls. What happened in the Doric environment (that is, that boys were educated under the custody and protection of an older man), also occurred in the thiasos; the relationship was never between peers, but was always between the director and a girl. It was a relationship that had a very strong educational aspect: the surprise is that in the Greek environment women had very few opportunities to meet outside, while on the island of Lesbos it was possible to draw on the educational repertoire that was exclusive to men. The scandal, fundamentally, is this: women had the possibility of drawing on a purely male educational and cultural repertoire.
Aphrodite in the thiasos is the guarantor of dikh, that is, of justice . The violation of justice is the adikia of the goddess, which consists either in the refusal of love to another woman or in betrayal. Love in the thiasos had precise rules and prohibitions, so Aphrodite is the guarantor of the rules of Eros. The educational value of song and poetry is therefore to teach who the poets of Aphrodite are and that one must not reject her.
SAPPHO, WORKS. THE FRAGMENTS
This love for girls is expressed by Sappho with an intense erotic participation: this is why we speak of erotic pathology , understood as physical suffering.
ODE OF JEALOUSY
Sappho lays bare her feelings without false modesty or reticence precisely when she expresses the symptomatology of love as occurs in the Ode of Jealousy . According to some, it would be an epithalamium, that is, a song written for the wedding of a young girl. According to others, it would be a courtship where Sappho gets lost, suffers but feels pleasure. The male presence of the scene disappears, is immediately put aside: this makes us understand that in all probability it is not an epithalamium.
It is one of the most sublime texts inspired by passionate love: love seen as an illness.
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING
Sappho considers eros her very reason for living. We understand this in the fragment called The Most Beautiful Thing . Here we find the figure of Helen, to whom Alcaeus dedicates verses full of blame and reproach. But for Sappho she is neither guilty nor victim but a woman chosen by Aphrodite. Helen is admirable because she obeys the dikh of Venus. There is the contrast between the oblivion that blinds Helen and the memory of the beloved woman that debases Sappho . The work begins and ends with the same theme, it has a cyclical composition.
Poetry for Sappho is often poetry of memory that arises from a separation or distance from the loved one. The last of the 9 books into which grammarians divided Sappho ‘s poetry contained the epithalamia, songs that the choir sang during the wedding rite.
EPITHALAMI
The Epithalamia were wedding songs set in the groom’s house and the marital bed. They were sung by the girls the evening before, when the bride was accompanied to the groom’s house, and then the following morning. The first fragment that speaks of Hesperus, the evening star, is translated by Catullus in Carme 62 of the Carmina docta .
Sappho describes a bride who is no longer very young, but she does so in a delicate tone, comparing her to an apple placed on a high branch that was difficult to reach. She speaks of the hyacinth sacred to Aphrodite, then she speaks of virginity that will never return. She then mentions Hymenaeus, the god of weddings, and finally the day after the wedding night is sung.
POEMS DEDICATED TO HIS DAUGHTER
A part of Sappho ‘s poems is dedicated to family affections. Among these is the propempticon , a song of good wishes dedicated to her brother Charaxus, who is leaving for a journey.
Sappho also composed poems dedicated to her daughter Kleis. The name derives from kleos, fame, with the root of kaleo (to call). Kleis is therefore the famous, the renowned. She sings of Cypris, that is Aphrodite, and the Nereids, that is the sea nymphs.
SAPPHO IN CRITICISM AND LEGEND
The critic Thobez famously said that for just one verse of Sappho he would have given all Latin literature: this is of course a hyperbole, but it gives an idea of the fact that what was lost of Sappho was a great loss. She was so famous that many legends were born about her:
- the first says that Alcaeus wanted to marry her, but she refused him;
- the second says that she was in love, but unrequited, with Phaon, a ferryman, to the point that she threw herself into the water from the cliff of Leucas.
These legends are also known because Ovid in Heroides presents Sappho writing a letter to Phaon to foretell her suicide. This famous verse by Ovid has handed down the image of Sappho to posterity. Among the many who have recalled the woman we also find Giacomo Leopardi , who dedicates to her The Last Song of Sappho , the farewell of the poet who is on her way to suicide.
