Sappho Read Free Page B

of horn, false dreams through gates of ivory. “It was a lying dream!” she shrieked. But she knew that dreams which come at dawn have passed the gates of horn. Her father was dead.
    The war that killed him was to last ten years, until she was seventeen.

P ITTAKOS
    â€œI desire, I desire, I desire!” these words were most often in her mind. Although what it was she desired she could not express. Sappho felt the world press against her and desired it without knowing what it was. Her mind seethed as music and words came together. “I long and I yearn…”
    She had always sung her private thoughts, with a plea first to the Muses that the sacred Nine guide her. She did not regard the poems as something invented, but as given her. Sometimes she asked the Ever-living why she had been so favored. Their rejoinder was gentle mirth and laughter. So she would slip away to the sacred grove where nature itself taught her to weave simple melodies, simply phrased.
    Though few
    they are roses
    She had, over the years, grown in wild, untrammeled ways. There was no one to whom she must give way. Her mother was lenient, and Sappho was the leader of her brothers, who formed a free band, plunging into icy streams, climbing for chestnuts, running down to the sea for warmer bathing. They explored the forests, danced and sang in its glades and on the shore.
    Sappho had a tortoiseshell lyre of four strings with a crosspiece joining two rams’ horns on which she learned her lessons: the great epics of Homer, Hesiod too, she was made to memorize. “He’s an old woman, a scold,” she stormed, impatient of Hesiod’s many admonitions. But hidden in all the moralizing she found the wonderful tale of Pandora’s chest. Two hundred years before, the crusty old poet sang: “Hope was the only spirit that stayed there.”
    Sappho’s memory for songs was faultless, and she made every passing singer sit with her until she knew each word of his repertoire. In this manner she discovered that an Ionian, Archilochos by name, ripped out his soul for a girl named Neobule—first in love, then in hate. From him, Sappho discovered that pure rage uses short phrases.
    She learned the lyric work of Eumelos of Corinth, and of Olympos of Phrygia, inventor of the chromatic scale. She retraced the lines of Tyrtaeos the lame, who made stirring songs to war, and Kallinos, who a century before sang martial songs to his Lydian flute. She brooded over the melancholy poems of Mimnermos of Smyrna; an old man now, he once sang lovingly to Nanno, who accompanied him on the lyre but never loved him. He commenced many of his songs with “The Fig Tree Rune,” which in other days was sung when humans to be sacrificed were pulled along the streets and beaten. Sappho reflected a good deal on this oddly savage prelude to his tender outpourings. Were love and hate one passion then?
    She did not know. Those curious emotions had never touched her half-child’s heart. She had grown up in a city without men. There were only boys—and at the suspicion of a beard, they too joined the endless war, leaving women to rule not only Mitylene but all of Lesbos.
    Sappho grew to womanhood without much thought of men. She was unfamiliar with the sight, sound, or even the smell of them. At seventeen, the usual age for marriage, she was quite untroubled that there was no one available. The emotions that pricked her she channeled playfully in verse:
    They say that Leda once
    found hidden an egg of hyacinth color
    She sang in a lyric Lesbian-Aeolic dialect using a variety of meters. Many she invented. Spoken or sung, there was a conversational quality about them; but her passion was inwardly directed, for she was her own closest friend and confidante.
    Familiar as she was with everyday Mitylene, she did not extol the sound of spinning or the smell of bread baking or any of the daily chores that went on around her. Nature filled her eyes