"The Sappho Companion" by Margaret Reynolds

Genius? Pervert? Seducer and murderer? Homely bluestocking? Nymphomaniac? Every age has its own version of the woman whose 2,600-year-old verses invented the poetry of love.

By Laura Miller

Aug. 1, 2001 | If people know anything at all about Sappho these days, it's probably that she was a lesbian. They're far less likely to know that she was first of all a Lesbian -- that is, a native of the Greek island of Lesbos -- or that she was one of the great poets of ancient times, or that her specialty was lyric verse about the ecstasies and torments of love. (In fact, she practically invented the form.)

Only a few hundred years ago, though, an informal poll would likely have revealed an entirely different image of Sappho, whose life was a popular subject for paintings, operas, ballets and other pageants. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, she was mostly famous for having thrown herself from the top of an enormous cliff out of unrequited love for the beautiful (male) youth Phaon. In those days, she was sometimes depicted as having written verse, sometimes as having a great fondness for girls, but the heartbreak and the leap were the important things. This was only one of many incarnations. Throughout history, Sappho has been labeled a genius, a pervert, a lovely blushing maiden, a homely bluestocking, a nymphomaniac, an uptight schoolmistress, a solitary, a diva, a cult leader, an abandoned lover, an irresistible seducer, the "Tenth Muse," a mother, a feminist, a victim, a masochist and a sadist.

With "The Sappho Companion," British critic Margaret Reynolds has collected bits and pieces of all these Sapphos into a single, diverting volume. The book is like a plate assembled at a vast literary buffet -- a dab of this, a morsel of that, the sweet, the salty, the delectable, the piquant and, occasionally, the cloying. This piecemeal presentation is apropos, since all we have of Sappho's 2,600-year-old poems are 213 fragments gathered from rotting papyri rescued from antique rubbish heaps and, in the form of quotations, gleaned from later works. (That's all that remains of the legendary Nine Books of Sappho, a treasure archaeologists still dream of unearthing.) Some of these fragments consist of a mere line or two, but their impact on Western poetry, and even on the popular culture of romantic love, has been profound, much like the erotic passion that Sappho said shook her heart "like the wind rushing down on the mountain oaks." When a Tin Pan Alley lyricist describes a feeling as bittersweet, or a heart as being as ripe as an apple hanging from a bough, or love as stinging like a bee, he's echoing the Tenth Muse.

We know almost nothing about Sappho's real life, just that she lived on Lesbos (off the coast of what is now Turkey) over two-and-a-half millenniums ago. As Reynolds points out, the gaps in her story and her poetry have invited all kinds of fabrications. "The Sappho Companion" includes a selection of the fragments in their original Greek (which were themselves transpositions of oral works), followed by wildly differing translations and "reconstructions" of the fragments, ranging from classical vamps to high Victorian frippery to spare modern verse.

Some of Sappho's early translators, unsettled by the fact that many of her most passionate poems were clearly addressed to girls, simply changed the gender of a few nouns and pronouns to straighten things out. There are mentions and hints in the fragments of lovers (female, but also possibly male), friends, a daughter, a wayward brother, rival poets and especially the goddess Aphrodite, to whom Sappho addressed several of her poems. Some of the legends about Sappho's life sprang from these references, but the subsequent depictions of her life are pure fantasy. ("Phaon" turns out to be an alternate name for Adonis, the consort of Aphrodite and therefore a fitting subject for poems written by the goddess's devotee.)

The sensuality and emotional intimacy of Sappho's poetry went in and out of fashion, but in general her work was highly esteemed during her own life and ever after. Her personal reputation is another matter entirely. As Reynolds' formidable literary detective work demonstrates, whenever Western men and women have clashed over how the female of the species should conduct herself, sooner or later Sappho's name gets thrown around. Ovid, for example, mocked the poet as unduly confident in her fame and her lesbian paramours, only to be brought down by the devastating masculine splendor of Phaon.

Next page: Complaints that Phaon no longer "clap'd my Buttocks, o're and o're agen"