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 SAPPHO, who called
herself in her Æolic dialect Psappha, one of the
greatest of the Greek lyrists, was a Lesbian, who flourished
in the latter half of the 7th century B.C., being at the zenith
of her fame about 610 B.C. Of her life almost nothing certain
is known; from the mass of legend and of scurrilous anecdote
which gathered round her name nothing trustworthy can be extracted.
She belonged to, and was the chief glory of, the Æolian
race in Asia Minor, a people who carried to their highest point
the Hellenic love of beauty, their sympathy with all animate
and inanimate nature, and their passionate emotions of love and
joy. Sappho appears to have been the center of a luxurious society
in Lesbos, devoted to art, poetry, and all forms of culture;
and she collected around her a sisterhood of girl friends and
pupils, with whom she formed a school of poetry and art. She
was believed by the ancients to have been small in person, dark,
with bright eyes, and of vivid passions; but all that is personal
of her, her loves and her jealousies, has been completely overlaid
with late and unfounded legend.
All antiquity combined to praise her genius as matchless and
perfect. She was called simply "the Poetess"--just
as "the Poet" meant Homer. No defect was ever suggested
as entering into her art. She was named "the tenth Muse";
and from Heredotus, Plato, and Plutarch, down to the extinction
of Paganism, the ancient world spoke of her with rapture, and
she was considered to be, without question, the greatest genius
to have appeared amongst women. She reached the highest range
of lyric art. There is about every extant phrase of Sappho a
peculiar stamp of exquisite and unique loveliness. It is no exaggeration
when Mr. Symonds says: "Of all the poets of the world, Sappho
is the one whose every word has a seal of absolute perfection
and inimitable grace." It may be that her range was restrained
to the praise of beauty and the expression of passion. But within
that range, Sappho has never been surpassed--we may almost say,
has never been equalled--by any poet in ancient or modern times.
Professor Gilbert Murray writes: "She is a love-poet of
a peculiar kind. She is the type of those natures to whom Love
is no God of Joy, but a God of Terror. There is no thought of
lightness or recreation, nothing frivolous, hardly anything cheerful,
in her extant poems. Love, with her, is a consuming passion which
burns all life away, and leaves the lover sick, miserable, and
half-mad. Her poems have the solemnity and passion of Dante's
Vita Nuova; though not the same spiritual mysticism."
Her inimitable phrases, in the wonderful language of her country,
have proved the attraction and the despair of poets from Catullus
to Swinburne.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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