SAPPHO.

Sappho was one of the most famous women of all antiquity for her verses and her amours: she was a native of Mitylene, in the isle of Lesbos, and lived in the time of Alcæus, her countryman, and in the time

of Stesichorus, that is to say, in the forty-second Olympiad, six hundred and ten years before Christ. This fully confutes the story of the amours of Anacreon and Sappho; for though we ought not to place between them an interval of one hundred or one hundred and twenty years, as Mad. le Fevre does, yet it is true that their ages do not well enough agree for a commerce of gallantry. We may very well suppose that in the fifty-second Olympiad Anacreon was capable of love; but since the chronologers placed Sappho in the forty-second Olympiad, we must conclude that she was then in her greatest reputation, and that she might be about thirty years old. Now when she threw herself headlong from the rock, she was in love with a young man she had hoped to regain; therefore there is no probability that she lived, till the time when Anacreon was born, and we may be well assured he never saw her, nor ever was in love with her. It was only to give bis fancy a full scope that Hermesianax supposed she was beloved by Anacreon. Others, by the same poetical liberty, handed about some verses, wherein Anacreon played the gallant to Sappho, and she answered him. Diphilus, a comic poet, introduced Archilochus and Hipponax courting Sappho in one of his plays; and this is a witty conceit of the same kind. Mad. Scuderi has not, therefore, made use of this anachronism without examples, when she supposes that Anacreon courted Sappho. If Sappho had been such a one as she is characterized in the grand Cyrus, she had been the most accomplished person of her age. The lady who made her so great a model of perfection went a long time by the name of Sappho in the ingenious writings wherein she was spoken of. This was to do a great deal of honour to the ancient Sappho, since they gave her name to a lady who wrote perfectly well in verse and in prose, and whose virtue was admired,—one of whom we might have said:

Castior hæc et non doctior ilia fait.

Martial. Epigr. lxviii. lib. vii.

In learning equal, she surpast
The other by her manners chaste.

For the rest, there is reason to think that if Anacreon and Sappho had seen one another in their youth, they would have made love to one another, and that we should have had a more certain account of the gallant’s good success than we have of that of Alcaeus. Nay, perhaps they would have married together, but I know not whether they would have long agreed: each of them loved too much his like.

Sappho composed a great number of odes, epigrams, elegies, epithalamiums, &c. All her verses run upon love, and had such natural and moving charms that one ought not to be surprized if she was called the tenth muse. Pausanias observes that Anacreon was the first who, after Sappho, wrote scarcely any thing but love verses, and that Sappho wrote a great many things upon this subject which did not agree well together. The meaning of it is that she turned the subject so many ways, that she spoke of it sometimes in one manner, and sometimes in another; the sport pleased her. Among other things she had made a calculation of the signs by which one might know an amorous person; and she had so good success in it, that the physician Erasistratus knew by those very signs the distemper of Antiochus. Plutarch in Demetrio, pag. 907. ⁷³ Every body knows that this young prince was desperately in love with Stratonice his mother-in-law, and that not daring to discover it, he pretended to be sick, and the cause of his illness being known, his father parted with her to him: but as often as this adventure is spoken of, people do not think , as it is fit they should of Sappho, who afforded the physician the necessary indications. Those who

intended to denote the poems of this woman by their true character, called them her fires and her amours.

Spirat adhuc amor
Vivuntque commissi calores
Æoliæ fidibus puellæ.

Horat. Od. ix. lib. iv.

And Sappho’s charming lyre
Preserves her soft desire,
And tunes our ravish’d souls to love.

Creech.

Plutarch compares her to Cacus the son of Vulcan, of whom the Romans wrote that he cast out of his mouth fire and flame: “What she sings is a composition of fire,” says he, “her verses are the expulsion of the flame she has in her heart.” Plutarch on Love. ⁷⁴

There remains nothing but some small fragments; a hymn to Venus and an ode to one of her mistresses. The hymn to Venus was preserved by Dionysius Halicarnassus, who inserted it in bis works as an example of a perfection he had a mind to characterize. With the same view Longinus has preserved to us the ode to her mistress. Catullus has translated part of this ode: all these circumstances are a proof of the singular esteem the ancients had for her verses.

Her amorous passion extended even to the persons of her sex, and this is that for which she was most cried down. Suidas has preserved the names of three of her mistresses who ruined her reputation, and disgraced themselves by a strange singularity which was imputed to their commerce. He has also preserved the names of three of her female disciples, whom she did in all probability, initiate into her mysteries. Since Lucian does not observe that the women of the Isle of Lesbos, who he says were very subject to this passion, learned it of Sappho, it is better to believe that she found it already established in her country, than to ascribe to her the invention of it.

I cannot blame the charity of Madame le Fevre in the life of Sappho, who has endeavoured for the honour of Sappho to render the fact uncertain; but I think her too reasonable to be angry with us for believing our own eyes. The ode which Longinus has mentioned, is not in the style of one female friend writing to another; it savours of love all over, and not of friendship: otherwise, Longinus who was so good a judge, would not have brought it as a model of the art with which great masters represent things; he would not, I say, have given us an example of that art, the manner wherewith the symptoms of an amorous fury are collected in that ode; nor would Plutarch have cited this same ode to prove that love is a divine fury which causes more violent enthusiasms than those of the priestess of Delphos, or the Bacchantes and of the priests of Cybele. People Were so persuaded in Ovid’s time that Sappho loved Women as men do, that he makes no difficulty of introducing her making a sacrifice to Phaon of the female companions of her debauchery.

Lesbides infamen quae me fecistis amatæ,
Desinite ad citharas turba renire meas.

Ovidius, Epist. Sapph. ad Pbaon.

Ye Lesbian virgins, and ye Lesbian dames,
Themes of my verse and objects of my flames;
No more your groves with my glad songs shall ring,
No more these hands shall touch the trembling string.

Pope.

Horace is another evidence against her in the complaints he supposes she made of the maids of Lesbos;

Et Æoliis fidibus querentem
Sappho puellis de popularibus.

Horat. Ode xiii. lib. ii.

And Sappho, in Æolian strains,
Who of the Lesbian maids complains.

For if she had reason to complain that the ladies of

her country envied her merit, she would not have chosen the young ones for the subject of her complaint; but because she had spoken to them of love, and the greatest part of them were either too simple, or to speak better, too crafty to be caught, and those who had complied had made her infamous; for this reason she complained of the young maids. This verse of Ovid, “Desinite ad citharas turba venire meas,” shows that the women of Lesbos had done justice to her fine verses. For the rest, I leave it to a new father Sanchez to decide whether a married woman who had complied with the passion of Sappho, would have committed adultery, and cornuted her husband properly speaking? I do not know whether this question has escaped the inexhaustible curiosity of the casuits about matrimonial causes. If the design of Sappho were to dispense with the other half of mankind, she was frustrated of her expectation; for she fell desperately in love with Phaon, and did in vain all that she could to make him love her; but he despised her, and forced her by his coldness to throw herself headlong from a rock, to extinguish her devouring flame. She could not forbear following him into Sicily, whither he retired that he might not see her; and during her stay in that island, she made the finest verses in the world, and it is very probable that she made there the hymn to Venus that is still extant, in which she begs so ardently the assistance of that goddess. Her prayers proved ineffectual; the sweet and tender verses she composed so often on this subject were to no purpose, Phaon was cruel to the last degree. The unfortunate Sappho was forced to take a dangerous leap, for so I may justly call the remedy to which she had recourse, which was to go upon the promontory Leucas, and throw herself into the sea. It was looked on in those days as the true means to cure the pains of love, and for this reason that place was called the

Lovers’ Leap. Some say that Sappho was the first that made a trial of this way of curing love; others assert that she was the first woman that did it , but that before her time, some men had done so. Several poets have spoken of this despair of Sappho; one of them having exhausted all the counsels he could give to an unfortunate lover, and at last referring him to the great remedy of all evils, makes use of this expression:

Quod sibi suaserunt Phaedra et Elissa dabuot,
Quod Canace, Phyllisque, et fastidita Phaoni.

Auson. Epigr. xcii.

What Phædra and the Tyrian queen advis'd,
And she whom Phaon cruelly despis'd;
What Canace and Phillis did approve
As the best remedy for hopeless love,
That you may chuse, by their example taught.

See here what Statius says:

Stesichorusque ferox, saltusque ingressa viriles
Non formidata temeraria Leucade Sappho.

Stat. lib. v. Silv. 3, ver. 154.

And fierce Stesichorus with Sappho join'd,
Who, when she took her manly leap of old,
With rash unshrinking courage did behold
Leucate's dreadful precipice ....

The cruelty of Phaon will not surprise us so much, if we reflect that Sappho was only a widow upon the decline who had never been handsome, who was ill spoken of in her widowhood, and who kept no measure in showing the violence of her passion. A man that is never so little nice does not care for such unbecoming addresses, and draws ill conjectures from them. Add to this that Sappho had not the endearment of novelty, which often even with nice people makes amends for the defect of beauty and the flower of youth. Phaon knew all she was capable of; the trees and the grass had been her confidants; and

perhaps his flight proceeded more from weariness than indifference. Consider what she herself writes to him by the pen of Ovid.

Haec quoque laudabas, omnique à parte placebam,
Sed tum praecipue cum fit amoris opus,
Tunc te plus solito lascivia nostra juvabat,
Crebraque mobilitas, aptaque verba joco:
Quique, ubi jam amborum fuerat confusa voluptas,
Plurimus in lasso corpore languor erat.

Invenio silvam quae saepe cubilia nobis
Praebuit, et multa texit opaca coma.
Agnovi pressas noti mihi cespitis herbas;
De nostro curvum pondere gramen erat.
Incubui tetigique locum qua parte fuisti.

In all I pleas'd, but most in what was best,
And the last joy was dearer than the rest.
Then with each word, each glance, each motion fir’d,
You still enjoy’d, and yet you still desir’d,
Till all dissolving in the trance we lay,
And in tumultuous raptures dy’d away.

I find the shades that did our joys conceal,
Not him that made me love those shades so well.
Here the press’d herbs with bending tops betray,
Where oft entwin’d in am’rous folds we lay;
I kiss that earth which oft was press’d by you.

Pope.

She was not then so capable of hearkening to reason, as when she represented to a young man who courted her for marriage, that being older than he, she would not marry him. The younger Phaon bad been, the more she would have found her account in him. If I have said that she was not handsome, it was because I thought we should prefer to the authority of Plato, who calls her the beautiful Sappho, the authority of Ovid who makes her speak thus:

Si mihi difficilis formam natura negavit,
Ingenio formae damna rependo meae.

Sum brevis. At nomen quod terras impleat omnes
Est mihi: mensuram nominis ipsa fero.
Candida si non sum: placuit Cepheia Perseo.

To me what nature has in charms deny’d,
Is well by wit's more lasting charms supply'd.
Though short by stature, yet my name extends
To heaven itself, and earth’s remotest ends.
Brown as I am, an Æthiopian dame
Inspir’d young Perseus with a gen’rous flame.

Pope.

Mad. le Fevre had set me an example for not giving credit to Plato or Athæneus; for she says that Sappho was not beautiful, that she was neither tall nor little, that she had a very brown complexion, and very lively and sparkling eyes. What shall I say of Maximus Tyrius, who pretends that as she was black and little, Socrates called her beautiful only by reason of the beauty of her verses.

With respect to the Leucadian or Lovers’ Leap, Leucas was at first a peninsula joining to the continent of Acarnania, but became an island by the industry of the Corinthians. They cut the isthmus, and built a city upon the canal, which they called Leucas, whither they transported the inhabitants of the town of Neritus. This undertaking did not much promote navigation; and if we believe Pliny, the sands driven in by the winds, restored the isthmus; it is now called Sancta-Maura. As to its ancient state, if any circumstance of it deserve to be related, it is I think the ceremony of the leap; in respect to which there seems to have been a set of people who appear to have been hired to undertake it as a spectacle every year. The manner was as follows: "There stood upon the promontory of Leucas a temple of Apollo, and there was an ancient custom that annually on the festival of this God, a criminal should be thrown from the top of this promontory, in order to avert all impending evils. However, they fastened

a great many feathers and live birds to the criminal, whose flight it was hoped would break the violence of the wretch’s fall. They endeavoured to catch him at the bottom in small barges lying round in a circle, and if he were saved they only banished him. All this was enacted by public authority and for the public good; but there were private persons who voluntarily leaped from the precipice to put an end to the pains they suffered from love; whence this place was called the Lovers’ Leap. Strabo informs us on Menander’s authority, that Sappho desperately in love with Phaon who slighted her, was the first who took the leap of Leucas. He cites Menander’s verses, but probably he had not quoted the whole passage; for by what he has quoted, it does not appear that Sappho was the first who took this dangerous leap. Besides, Strabo does not come over to this poet’s opinion: he says that they who have most exactly searched into antiquity, declare that Cephalus was the first who made trial of that desperate remedy, when he was in love with Ptaola. An author whom Photius has given some extracts of, traces the origin of this practice. He says that Venus after the death of Adonis sought him every where, and found him at last at Argos, in the isle of Cyprus, in the temple of Erithian Apollo. As she made no secret to this god of her passion for Adonis, he led her to the rock of Leucas, and bid her throw herself headlong from that precipice. She took his advice, and finding herself cured of her passion, she desired to know the reason of it. Apollo answered, that by virtue of his gift of prophecy he had discovered that Jupiter finding himself smitten with the love of Juno, came constantly to sit upon this rock, and thus abated the violence of his flame. He adds that numbers of both sexes had been cured of their love by leaping from the top of this mountain. Photius gives us a long catalogue of persons who had recourse to this remedy; some found themselves cured, others lost their lives by it. I have not met with Calyce among them, and am the less surprised because he omits the unfortunate Sappho. She tells us in a letter that Ovid has written as her secretary, that Deucalion, in love with Pyrrha the coy, took the leap of Leucas without hurting himself; upon which his passion wore off, and Pyrrha began to love in her turn.

Hinc se Deucalion Pyrrhae succensus amore
Misit, et illaeso corpore pressit aquas.
Nec mora: versus amor tetigit lentissima
Pyrrhae Pectora; Deucalion igne levatus erat.

Ovid. Epist. Sapph. ver. 167.

His breast from Love’s tyrannic power to free, D
eucalion leap’d unhurt into the sea:
The force of love a different way was turn’d,
Deucalion cool'd and thoughtless Pyrrha burn’d.

Several have mentioned this strange remedy of love, and others have even said that some took this leap for another thing, namely to learn news of their relations.

I have said that Calyce is not to be found in the catalogue of the Leucas-leapers. She had fallen in love with a young man called Evathlus, and in vain solicited the goddess Venus to bring about their marriage. Evathlus persisted in his obstinate coldness, and Calyce threw herself down the precipice of Leucas. I believe if the account were faithfully cast up, we should find that more women than men have taken this desperate leap.

A passage of Servius has furnished Vinet with the conjecture that people were hired to take this leap. Servius’s words are these: “Fæminas in sui amorem trahebat (Phaon) in queis fuit una quae de monte Leucate, cum potiri ejus nequiret, abjecisse se dicitur; unde nunc aucturare se quotannis solent qui de eo monte jaciunt in pelagus.” Vinet thinks this passage

ought to be restored thus: “Unde nunc auctorare se quotannis solent qui se de eo monte jaciunt in pelagus;” and this may signify that there were some who ventured for a sum of money to take this leap, as others articled at such a price to kill one another on the amphitheatre. The curious will do well to search to the bottom of this particular. It is certain they engaged themselves by a vow to take this leap, as appears by the answer of a Lacedemonian who was insulted for drawing back at the sight of the precipice. “I knew not,” said he, “that my vow would stand in need of another vow still greater.” Menander’s verses cited by Strabo, shew that Sappho made a vow to Apollo before she threw herself down, that is, probably she consecrated this action to the god. I forgot to say that there were two verses of Anacreon concerning the Lovers’ Leap. Scaliger mentions them, but I think that they who say Hephestion has preserved them are mistaken.

Arts. Sappho and Leucas.