Sappho's Leap Read Free Page A

a cave where we could hide if the Athenians came to enslave us.
    I was both intrigued and frightened by the idea of marauding Athenians. Fear and desire warred in me. In the cave we ate bread and cheese, making the crumbs last. I adored my younger brothers and knew I was charged with the responsibility of protecting them. I had no idea how difficult that would become as we grew older.
    Larichus was tall and fair, and vain of his beauty. He longed to be Pittacus’ cupbearer, which indeed he would become. Charaxus was short and stocky and always a devil. He devoured every morsel before any of us could eat. He was greedy for bread, for wine—and eventually for women. His greed for women would become his downfall. It almost became mine. And Eurygius? Just saying his name makes tears spring to my eyes.
    I always knew that I was cleverer than my brothers. My father knew it too.
    â€œIf the time ever comes that your brothers need you, Sappho, promise me that you will put all your cleverness at their disposal.”
    â€œI promise,” I told him. “Whatever they need they shall have from me.” How did he know to tell me this? Had he read the future? Later, when he was dead, I thought so. My father had astonishing powers.
    I know now that parents often tell the stronger child to take care of the weaker ones. Does that enforce the weakness of the weak? Sometimes I think so.
    The boys played at war before they knew of women. Women would come soon enough—though not ever for my baby brother Eurygius. He died before he grew to manhood, breaking my mother’s heart, even before my father’s death broke it again.
    So the war informed our lives—perhaps my mother’s most of all. For she lost her love and her youngest child.
    â€œWe are told the war is being fought over the Athenians’ trading rights on the mainland,” my mother used to say. “But I see other motives. In Athens women are little more than slaves, and in Sparta they are only breeding stock. These barbarians are drawn to Lesbos by the beauty and freedom of our lives, but they will try to destroy precisely what they admire and make us more like them. They are in love with chaos and with night. We must fight them with every breath in our bodies.”
    My mother’s hatred of the Athenians later became her excuse for grasping power through men. She wanted to use her beauty before it failed her. I understand the panic of aging women now—though I disdained my mother for it then. Men had always loved her. She was said to look like the round-breasted, jet-haired goddess of the ancient Cretans. With my father gone and four young children to protect, she seized upon the tyrant Pittacus as her life raft and he obliged by floating her. Oh, how contemptuous I was of her wiles! I didn’t realize she was saving her own life and mine.
    It was true that women in Lesbos had far more freedom than women in Athens. We could go out walking with our slaves, meet each other at the market and at festivals. We were not completely housebound as women were in Athens. And our slaves were often companions and friends to us.
    In fact, it was my slave Praxinoa who alerted me to my mother’s intention to journey to Mytilene for Pittacus’s victory feast—a great symposium such as no one had seen since before the war.
    â€œThen we’ll follow her!” I said.
    â€œSappho, you will get in trouble and so will I.”
    â€œI refuse to be left in Eresus, where I know every house and every olive tree,” I said. “I long for adventure and if you love me, Prax, you’ll go with me!”
    â€œYou know I love you. But I fear the punishment. It will fall more upon me than on you.”
    â€œI’ll protect you,” I said.
    Praxinoa had been given to me when I was only five and she could refuse me nothing. We were more than slave and mistress. We were friends. And sometimes we were even more than friends. We