SYMHC Classics: Sappho

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Today's Saturday Classic is on Greek poet Sappho. We kick it off by talking about our then forthcoming trip to Paris. That trip did happen and it was a great success. We've taken other trip since then, and our next one is coming up to Morocco November four through fifteenth, twenty twenty five. If you would like to join us, you can find out more about the trip at Defined Destinations dot com. It is the trip called a Taste of Morocco. Right now, single rooms are sold out, but there's a wait list and there are still double rooms available. If you would be traveling by yourself but you're open to the idea of sharing a room with somebody, you can get in touch with Defined Destinations to talk about that possibility. That is not why we picked the episode for Today's Saturday Classic, though. We have an upcoming episode on someone who was described as the Sappho of her time, so we wanted to rerun our episode on Sapo, which gets into how the connotations around Sappho's name have evolved over the centuries. One thing we do want to note we talk in this episode about how various transcribers and translators have tried to minimize the homoerotic themes in Sappho's work. For licensing reasons, we needed to use translations that are in the public domain today, which means older translations were the ones that were available for us to read. So, for example, we read from a translation of Ode to Aphrodite, which reads as though Sapho is praying to Aphrodite about a man that she loves, but in most of today's translations, Sappho's unrequited love is for a woman. This episode came out on March thirteenth, twenty nineteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey everyone. Before we get started today, we wanted to let you know that there are only a few spots left on our upcoming trip to Paris. Yes, which startles and delights me. I thought no one would want to come with us, and it turns out everybody does. Yay. So Yes, we are going to Paris June second through ninth, twenty nineteen. If you come to our website, which is missed inhistory dot com, you can click the link that says Paris trip exclamation point in either the top menu bar or under the little menu icon if you're on a mobile device, that will take you to the Sitehere we can learn all about the trip and sign up for it. Yes, so we hope to see you in Paris. We are going to have a splendid time. We're both extremely excited. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. The poet Sappho is the first known woman writer in the European literary tradition, and she is described as the greatest female poet of ancient Greece, or the greatest Greek lyric poet period, regardless of gender, or even the greatest female poet of all time. There's a nineteen twenty six addition to her work where C. R. Haines, who edited that edition, put it this way quote, with the possible exception of Shakespeare, Homer is still the supreme poet, and Sappho, without any exception, the poetess par excellence. Except those last two words were in Greek, so I got to figure out how to translate them, which was a challenge. Sappho's reputation as one of the world's finest poets has persisted for more than twenty five hundred years, and that's fascinating because the overwhelming majority of her work has not. And then also fascinating is that the words sapphic and lesbian, which is derived from the island of Lesbos, where Sappho lived, they've become synonymous with same sex relationships among women. But we actually know very very little about Sappho's life or her relationships, and two thousand years ago those terms had really different meanings from what they do now. So we are going to get into all of this today. Sappho is also a frequent listener request, and over the past few years we've gotten requests from Helen Cillian, pat Esther, and one person who didn't have a name on their emails. And then as a heads up, we talk about people's relationships often enough on the show, we don't usually need to mention a specific sex act. That is not the case today, so use discretion if it seems like that sort of territory might be an issue for you or people that you listen with. Now, I feel like we need to do a show called Sexy History, a whole other thing different, and we wouldn't need those warnings now so, the most referenced source of information about Sappho's life is a tenth century Byzantine compendium called the sh and the Suda is sort of a lexicon or encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean. It has two Sappho entries, and we'll get into why that is a little bit later. Sapo's name also comes up in lots of other entries in the Suda, including ones for her relatives, places she lived, people she knew, and definitions of various literary terms. She's also mentioned in lots of other historical writing that has survived until today, although usually those references are shorter and less detailed than what's in the Suda. This all makes it very tricky to piece together Sappho's biography. The Pseudo was compiled more than a thousand years after Sappo actually lived, and then on top of that, it's not exactly reliable all the time. It's cobbled together from all kinds of different sources, and some of its entries pick up information that is clearly not factual. In terms of the entries on Sappho, it's just not clear how much of the information came from historical sources. How much from what people just knew who in quotation marks about Sappho in the tenth century, and how much of it was gleaned from things that are mentioned in her poetry. It's always tricky to try to use poems as a source for the poet's biographical details, but it's even more of a challenge here because by the tenth century a lot of Sappho's work had already been lost, so we don't know the full context of those lines that we have. According to the Suda, Sapho was born in the forty second Olympiad, which was between six twelve and six oh nine BCE, but the wording of it could also be translated as flourished and not born, which would mean that those years were the height of her career and not her birth. The Pseudoist's eight different men as Sepho's potential father, Herodotus, on the other hand, lived about two hundred years after Sappho did, and he wrote that her father was named scam Andronomus, and that's one of the eight men that the pseudalistid as a possibility. Hundreds of years later, Sepho's mother may have been named Claus and we have to say may have been, because a couple of Sappho's fragments mentioned a daughter named Claus, and it was traditional for daughters to be named after their grandmother. But even that is pretty murky because the word that's used for daughter could also just mean child, and in some cases it could actually be translated as slave. So this Claus, who may or may not have been named after Sappho's mother, may or may not have been her child. This is like the most provisional discussion of hyderia ever. I feel like if you've heard the words possibly and may have been, you've heard most of Sappho's biography. We do know she lived on the island of Lesbos and the Aegean c and that's just across the water from what's now Turkey. At the time that was Sartis, which was the capital of Lydia. Sapho's place of birth on the island was probably the town of Eiresis or the capital of Middelini. She most likely lived most of her life in Middelini, although it is possible that she and her family either moved or fled to Sicily for a time, either because of general political upheaval on Lesbos, or because of their own political affiliations. She may have had three brothers. The Suda names them as Laricos, Carasos, and Eurygios, and two of those names appear in a poem that was on Earthed in twenty fourteen, which we talked about in one of our Unearthed episodes that year, and that poem has been nicknamed the Brother's Poem because it contains these two names. From here, the pseudo wanders into some more questionable territory. It says that Sappho's husband was Kirklius of Andros, but Kirklius is very close to a slang term for the word Penis, and Andros was a real place, but was also the word for man, So the Suda's name for Sappho's husband is sort of like saying he was Dick Johnson of Man Island. So this is more likely to be a crude joke than her husband's actual name. I want to make a sitcom now about Dick Johnson on Man Island. Uh. And then the Suda names three of Sappho's friends Athis, Tellisippa, and Magara, using a word to describe them that could mean companion, but it could also mean cortison, and the Suda says her relationship with them led her to be accused of a friendship or a love that was shameful. From there, the Suda goes into some more mundane territory, naming a few of Sappho's students, saying that she wrote nine volumes of poetry and crediting her with inventing the plectrum, which is like a pick for plucking the strings on a liar. It also describes her poetry as including epigrams, elegaics, iambics, and monodies. Her surviving work also includes a lot of epithalamia, and these are poems that were celebrating a marriage, which she was probably commissioned to write. In addition to the Suda's mention of students, a number of classical sources describe Sappho as a teacher, but none of these us mention what or where she taught. In spite of that lack of detail, a lot of articles that exist today definitively say that Sappho ran a theosos, which is sometimes described as a sort of finishing school for women waiting to get married, and it's also sometimes described as a religious community dedicated to Aphrodite, and sometimes as a group of temple courtisons. But really there's no substantiation to any of this or for the idea of a theosos as an actual established school of some sort. None of Sappho's surviving writing mentions a theosos at all. You will see a lot of just incredibly definitive saying with one hundred percent confidence, statements that are like, Cepho ran this theosos that taught these young women how to be wives and mothers, and maybe it's not no documentation of that. And then there is the story of Sapho and Feon, and the basic gist of this story is that Sappho fell in love with a ferryman named Faon, and when he rejected her, she threw herself off a cliff. That story makes up the bulk of the Suda's second Sappho entry, which says that this supposedly different Sapho was also from Middelini, also played a harp and may have written lyric poetry as well. This story about the ferryman is repeated over and over and over. It's depicted in numerous works of art and literature, including in Avid's herodies or epistles of the heroines. But Faon was a mythical figure, and it seems like this idea that the real Sapho threw herself over a cliff for him dates back to a comedy by Menander written about two hundred years after Sappho died, and in the thousands of years since then, the fact that at least one of Sappho's fragments mentions Faon has been used to try to substantiate this fictional story as though it were fact. So when it comes to Sappho's biography, we have a whole lot of contradictions and questionable and in some cases her poetry has been used to try to substantiate those claims. So we are going to take a look at her poems in some more detail after we take a quick sponsor break. Sapo was a lyric poet, meaning that she composed poems that were meant to be sung accompanied on a liar. In Ancient Greece, lyric poetry tended to be short and very personal, often sung from one person to another or written in the voice of one person addressing another. Many of Sappho's poems that have survived until today either our or are believe to be love poems. It's hard to tell sometimes because what survives can be incredibly short. Homer, on the other hand, wrote epic poetry, and this was much longer, with a narrative that told the story of the heroic deeds of the characters in the poem. And we should also note that it's very possis that the work attributed to Homer was really written by several people and not just one regardless, though in the ancient Western world he was called just the poet and Sappho was the poetess. Lyric poetry really flourished in ancient Greece between about six hundred and four fifty BCE, so that was when Sappho lived. It wasn't newly invented during that time. This was more a revival of an earlier poetic form. And then two people were considered to be the most notable lyric poets of this period. They were Sappho and Alcius, both of whom were from Lesbos and may have known each other and even written to each other. Sappho wrote her poems in Aolic Greek, which is sometimes also called Lesbian Greek, and in that dialect her name was more like Shappa than the Sappho that we know today. In about the third century BCE, Sapho's poetry was compiled into an eight or nine volume collection in Alexandria, Egypt. The volumes were arranged by the meter used for each poem, which set it apart for most other compilations, which tended to be organized instead by subject or seam. There were as many as ten thousand lines of poetry in this compilation, but it's possible that Sappho wrote much more than that, especially since many of her works were commissioned for special occasions like weddings, and they might not have been preserved after they were performed. Today, Sappho is known most for one particular poetic form, and that's the Sapphic, which is also called Sapphic meter or Sapphix stanzas. We don't really know whether Sapho developed this form herself or refined a form that already existed, but she was so skilled at writing in this form that it ultimately carried her name. The Sapphik used four line stanzas, with three longer lines followed by one shorter line, and then within those lines. The meter came from Lesbian Greek's pattern of long and short syllables. When people are translating Sappho's work today, sometimes they approximate the meter u using the characteristics of whatever language they're working in. So, for example, in English, there's a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, with the stressed syllables standing in for the long syllables in Greek, and the unstressed syllables taking the place of the short ones. These tend to be very personal, passionate, and emotional poems, and they're simultaneously very simple and elegant. During Sappho's lifetime, poetry was also believed to be magical, so poetry was thought to be able to influence or shape reality. So Sappho's poetry was considered to be beautiful and melodic and powerful. But we have unfortunately very little of this poetry today, and even less of it in the form of complete poems. The vast majority of what we have is just short fragments, and some of these fragments are from damaged pieces of writing material or pieces of clay pots. Others are quotations from other people's surviving work. For example, Cassius Longinus quoted forcedas by Sappho in On the Sublime, which was published around one hundred CE today, out of those ten thousand or so lines that we think that Sappho wrote, we have roughly six hundred and fifty lines of poetry remaining. That is spread out across about two hundred and fifty fragments. And of those six hundred and fifty lines, fewer than a third of them are even complete lines of poetry. A lot of them are partial lines. Six of the fragments are longer and more substantive, but still not entirely intact, and one of those longer fragments is the Brother's poem that we mentioned earlier, which is missing only its first few stanzas only one of Sappho's poems is believed to be complete today, and that is the Ode to Aphrodite. Different collections of Sappho's poetry use different numbering systems to keep up with all of these fragments, but most of the time Ode to Aphrodite, sometimes translated as Him or Prayer to Aphrodite, is number one. Here's the beginning of Ode to Aphrodite, translated by T. W. Higginson in eighteen seventy one quote beautiful throned immortal Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus beguiler, I implore THEE weigh me not down with weariness and anguish. Oh Thou most holy, come to me now, if ever thou, in kindness hearkenest my words. And in the poem, Aphrodite does come and says, who has harmed thee? Oh, my poor Sappho. Though now he flies erelong, he shall pursue thee, fearing thy gifts. He too, in turn, shall bring them loveless. Today tomorrow he shall woo thee, though thou should spurn him. Another of the longer fragments is the one that was quoted in On the Sublime, which we mentioned earlier, and it describes the speaker's response to sitting across from a woman that the poem is addressing. This is usually interpreted as Sappho herself describing her own response to the woman that she's facing, but that's not really clear here. It is as translated by John Addington's Simmons in eighteen eighty three, Peer of the Gods, he seemeth to me the blissful man who sits and gazes at THEE before him close besides these sits, and in silence hears THEE silverly speaking, laughing love's low laughter. Oh this, this only stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble. For should I but see thee a little moment? Straight? Is my voice hushed? Yeay, my tongue is broken, and through and through me neath the flesh impalpable, fire runs tingling nothing see mine eyes and our noise of roaring waves in my ear sounds. Sweat runs down in rivers. A tremor seizes all my limbs, and paler than grass in autumn, caught by pains of menacing death, eye falter lost in the love trance. But almost all the fragments are not nearly so long as this. Here is an example, Sweet mother, I cannot weave my broken as I am by longing for a boy at soft aphrodite's will. One that we think from a wedding poem goes neither honey nor bee for me. I don't know why I love that. I do too, neither of the above. Another fragment just says shot with a thousand hues, and one reads and I flutter like a child after her mother, and one fragment is simply the words you burn me. Sappho's fragments can be really evocative, and then combined with her pretty mysterious biography, they can just be beguiling. But the fact that they're so fragmented and scattered makes her work really difficult to study. We have a sense that she wrote lots of love poems, and that she wrote lots of poems for people's weddings. Her work seems to carry a lot of affection as well, including physical affection for men and women, but we don't necessarily have the greatest sense of what the whole body of her work is like. There's some guesswork going on, especially since some of the fragments are so short that were not even one hundred percent short that Sappho really wrote them. And we'll get into why there's so little of Sappho's work left today to study after we have another sponsor break. As far as we know, during her lifetime and at least for a while afterwards, Sapo was deeply respected and admired as a poet and a person. Plato, who lived roughly two hundred years after she did, wrote quote some say the muses are nine, but how carelessly look at the tenth Sapho from Lesbus. It doesn't seem as though her contemporaries really questioned her character in any way. I mean, after all, she was getting a lot of commissions to write poetry for people's weddings, and that doesn't seem like it would be happening if she were socially reviled. But in the century since then have interpreted Sappho in vastly different ways. In the words of Holt and Parker quote, every age creates its own Sappho, and many of these creations have imagined Sapho as being, at least in the morality of the time, deviant or depraved. Some of these shifts are thanks to her being from the island of Lesbos. While she was living, Lesbus was considered to be a place full of passion and poetry and sensuality, although also with a lot of political turmoil and infighting, which is why Sappho and her family may have fled at some point. Possibly see R. Haines, who we quoted at the top of the show, described it this way quote. The Aeolians of Lesbos were a vigorous and gifted race, brave in war, enterprising and trade, vehement and politics, eminent in poetry and music. But within a few centuries after her death, prevailing opinion of the island of Lesbus had shifted. That tendency toward passion and wealth moved more into perceived hedonism and excess. Lesbus went from being thought of as a place of beauty and refinement to one of licentiousness and corruption. The Greek word lesbiasen, meaning acting like someone from Lesbus, became associated with impurity and one specific sex act, that being fallatio. It wasn't just about the island, though eventually this also extended to Sappho herself. Greek comedy tended to be in one way or another satirical, although the exact nature and the primary targets of the satire shifted over time in the sort of history of Greek comedy, and starting a couple of centuries after she died, Sappho became the target of this satire. Her name was used for characters in several Greek comedies, and those characters were usually depicted as wanton and lustful and just excessively sexual with young men. Society's understanding of relationships and gender roles shifts over time, so it's certain that romantic and physical relationships were viewed very differently on Lesbis in the seventh century BCE than they are in various cultures today. But we know virtually nothing about the details, and many of the authors who have speculated about it have tried to draw conclusions based on ancient Sparta, But our understanding of Spartan society is also limited, and it was a completely different society from Lesbus, located in a different part of Greece, and it flourished starting two hundred years or so after Sappho's death. However, we do know that same sex relationships became increasingly taboo in parts of Europe in the centuries after Sappho lived, so we don't really know how they were regarded while she was living and where she was living, but we do know that it became more and more taboo afterward, and as that happened, the idea that Sappho was deviant because of her lust for young men morphed into the idea that she was devs because of her lust for young women. The first reference to this that we know about was written in the second or third century CE. In the sixteenth century, humanist scholars claimed that Christian Church officials had burned Sappho's work for this reason at least twice. That Bishop Gregory Nesienzin of Constantinople had done so in three eighty, followed by Pope Gregory the Seventh in ten seventy three, but it's not clear whether these burnings actually happened, especially since Bishop Gregory himself was known to quote from Sappho. Yes, there's some conjecture that over the centuries two different Gregory's were conflated together into this one person who supposedly did this burning. Even if her work was burned by the Church because of perceptions about Sappho's morality, that would not account for so much of its loss. There were also floods and accidental fires, and the aging of the material that the poetry was recorded on, and fewer and they were people speaking Aeolian Greek, meaning that there was less and less demand for new copies of her work to be printed or written or copied. Sappho didn't fade into total obscurity, though we mentioned in our Christine de Pisan episode that she's named in the Book of the City of Ladies, which was written in fourteen oh five. By the sixteenth century, though, what most people knew about Sappho really came from Avid's heroities rather than from anything about her actual biography or her work. By the eighteenth century, even less of Sappho's poetry was known to the world than the six hundred and fifty lines we have today. In the words sapphok and lesbian had taken on entirely different meanings than what they'd initially meant, which was basically related to Sapho or related to the island of Lesbis. Lesbian was first used in writing to describe a woman who is physically or romantically involved with another woman in seventeen thirty two, and saffok was used in association with same sex, desire and relationships among women a few years later. The first appearance of the word sapphik in writing was in a seventeen sixty one translation of Plato, which read quote, their affections tend rather to their own sex, and of this kind are the Sapphic lovers. So by the Romantic era in Europe, both Sappho and the island of Lesbus had become inextricably connected to the idea of homosexuality among women, which was also culturally very taboo and in some cases outlawed. But in spite of that, in the nineteenth century, Sappho's poetry experienced a surge and popularity. The Romantics found the emotional depth of her poems and the fragments really appealing. She started appearing in poems by people like Byron and Bodelaire, although not necessarily in what we would call a favorable light. Then, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a collection of manuscripts was unearthed near the Egyptians city of Oxyrinchus, drastically increasing the number of known Sappho fragments and giving people way more of them to study and read. Running alongside this increasing popularity was an attempt to reform Sappho's image into something that wasn't contrary to nineteenth century morality. In eighteen sixteen, Frederick Gottlin Welker published Sappho Freed from a Prevailing Prejudice, which tried to reinterpret her poetry in a way that minimized the homo eroticism of her work, and this did start to shift people's opinions about Sappho. But then in eighteen ninety five, Pierre Luis published Chansson de Biltice, which was supposedly a collection of newly discovered poems written by one of Sappho's female students, who was named and the French pronunciation Bigtis. These were really a work of poetic fiction. Though these poems were very erotic and sensual, and although people really quickly figured out that they were not really written by one of Sappho's students, it it did reinforce the connection between Sapho and homosexual relationships among women that Welker had been trying to minimize in his earlier work, and that led to another effort to try to reimagine Sappho's identity in nineteen thirteen, led by Ulrich von Velamowitz. His Sapho and Somonodes drew from Welker's eighteen sixteen work, and it depicted Sappho as a spinsterish school marm. This work also really reinforced the idea that Safo was a teacher at a formal school with young women as her pupils, and this depiction is based on his reinterpreting her poetry, not on historical research today Sappho seems really intrinsically connected to the idea of lesbian, which can describe a person's sexual orientation as well as their political or social identity, and that connection was really reinforced during the early years of the gay rights movement in the United States, when it was still known as the homophile movement. In nineteen fifty five, lesbian couples formed the Daughters of Belitas that's spelled the same way as Billets, which Tracy said earlier pronounced differently. They included activists Phyllis Lyon and del Martin, who later became the first same sex couple to get married in San Francisco, and it began allowing same sex marriages in two thousand and four. And this was part social club, part support group, part education and advocacy organization. They named themselves the Daughters of Belitus after that eighteen ninety five Chanson de Bilitice collection, and by this point everyone knew in quotation marks that the historic Sappho was a lesbian, So the name Belitus let the organization connect itself to Sappho and signal to potential members what the organization was for without needing to publicly express who and what the organization was for. Because of the social climate and in some cases the law, just publicly declaring that this was an organization for lesbians was not possible. In nineteen fifty five, the Daughters of Belitas created a newsletter called The Latter, which developed a national readership, and the organization itself became the first national lesbian organization in the United States. And as time went on, Sappho became increasingly present in the pages of The Latter, which also had a poetry column called Saphistries. All of this continued to reinforce that connection between Sappho and the lesbian community. So that is Sappho. We know literally almost nothing about her, And this whole story reminds me a lot of Jenny Lynde, who was supposed to be just the world's most incredible opera singer, but of whom we have no recordings. Yeah, so take people we don't know. Yeah, I think there's always that thing, right. We talked about how there are many attempts to reinterpret and shift her identity over time, and so it is like that trick when you only have these tiny bits and fragments that people can want a thing. So badly that they will interpret it in whichever way mays them the most comfortable with the material, or like aligns with their ideas of this historical figure that we really have just the vaguest smattering of information about. Yeah, well, and there's so many of the things that we in theory know about her are like, Okay, are these three brothers? Are those three brothers her brothers and she mentioned them in her poetry? Or have those names been picked to stand for her brothers because those are names that appeared in her poetry. It's sort of a chicken and egg situation where like we don't really know which thing led to which, or are they someone else's brothers? Right? Nothing to do with her at all? Because it was a commission? Right? Was this poem written in a someone else's voice, not Sappho's personal expressions? Anyway, I love her and I think she's fascinating, even though I know literally tiny amounts about any of it. There you go. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.