Sappho (22 page)

Sappho made sure Kleis slept, then went into the garden to pick jonquils so the child would have something glad to look upon. It would awaken in her the desire to be well and bloom like them. She hurried back to the sick chamber and placed her hand upon the silver door handle, then drew back. This punishment was visited upon her for not wanting the child, for eating root of cyclamen, for dashing so madly about on horseback. “But know, O gods, I love her well. Of all the treasures my husband left me, she is my chief joy.” When she entered the room, Kleis would be better—or dying. “Groans then shall be my speech, nor will I afterward sing.” She turned cold at threatening the gods and immediately placated them. “Let her stay with me and I will take her home to Lesbos. Not a hundred Pittakoses will stop me. This I swear. Or if you will, take me in her stead, or any other whom I love.”

She pushed open the door and saw the child was wet from head to foot, the fever broken. The jonquils fell from Sappho's hands and scattered across the floor. She made hekatombs of thanks and freed the slave girl. She wrote once more to Pittakos.

While Sappho waited for a reply, a letter arrived on one of her own ships. It was from her brother Khar. He wrote from Mitylene. His news brought a great cry from Sappho, and she fell upon the floor. Her servants raced about for drink, for covers. Niobe chafed her limbs, which were as in death.

When she opened her eyes, it was to turn against the wall. In a terrible voice she cried them away. What had she done? Had meddlesome Hermes been passing as she made the great oath and, like the tale-bearer he was, carried it to Pallas Athene?

She had slain her friend. Alkaios was dead.

Time flowed darkly, and she could not think past it. With Alkaios deep in ever-receiving Tartarus, her own youth died. She mourned them both. The fine lines she had noticed upon her face this year came from being twenty-nine.

Gradually she allowed herself closer to her grief. For Alkaios she had been violet-haired, of hidden harmonies, always different in her person. They had plotted childish revolt, they had shared an exile. My dear friend, my dear friend—Sappho has brought you this sightless end.

She dragged herself to her brother's letter and read again the manner of Alkaios's dying. It had been without dignity, Khar said, for he had it on good authority that Alkaios, too, had been returning to Lesbos—and of course celebrating himself, and of course drunk. “… Like the ever-young god of flowing locks, when pirates boarded.” According to Khar's information, which was from an escaped sailor on that same ship, Alkaios hid in a wine keg. When he came up for air, one of the invaders cleaved his skull and the wine turned a deeper hue.

Grief overcame her; she spoke to his shade. Even Alkaios's shade could not be too serious: “Remember when we slid down the mountain on our rumps?” And while the shade yet smiled, she spoke quickly. “My little girl is so small. She was so pitiable, you would have forgiven me. You would, Alkaios, I know it.”

But that appeal made her feel no better. She could not bear to think of his wry gaiety expunged by some ruffian's sword. He, who had contempt for violence, to end so. The cask of wine would have amused him, though. He would have thought, not that it was undignified, as her brother wrote, but that it was suitable, an appropriate end, to imbibe wine with his last inhalation.

She looked again at the dreadful missive. She had to know how her brother came to be in Mitylene. She read that Pittakos's only son out of the well-bred sow he had married had died violently by an ax, intended no doubt for his father. Khar wrote that all Pittakos's hopes had been in this boy. With his death, the Pittakos they knew was no more. He cared nothing about old quarrels or old friends. Day was the same as night to him. He allowed all exiles back, declaring total amnesty in memory of his child. Sympathy welled up in Sappho for the boy with the ax in his head, and she sobbed again for her dear Alkaios, who always asked her to take him in hand but to whom she had handed Death, that Kleis might live.

For this crime she was to be rewarded. She was to go home.

*   *   *

Sappho returned to Lesbos like a queen. She and her daughter and her women rode on a ship with well-trimmed sails, followed by three wide-bellied vessels with holes cut into their decks to hold the casks of treasure.

Swift escorts with fighting men at the ready parted the seas on either side. For Sappho had emptied Kerkolas's villa of its ivories, its gems, its bags of lion-faced Samian coins, its tapestries of loomed vestments, its wondrous musical instruments. Nine years before she had left Lesbos in disgrace; she returned with wealth past counting and a reputation as the world's greatest living poet.

The rolled papyri of her work she carried in the carved chest. The collection, including the verse of exile, filled two volumes. She intended to have it copied and distributed among family and friends. The volumes contained lyric poems, cult songs, odes to marriage, and elegies.

When the ship passed craggy Chios, she put a flower in her daughter's hand to throw on the gleaming surface, saying, “Your grandfather died fighting here.”

They hugged the shoreline and, as it grew familiar, Sappho's arm went around the child. “See how near to Lesbos is the steep Ionian shore. The entrance to Heaven is not more beautiful than the twin harbors of Mitylene. There before you lies the Aeolic island of my birth.” She disappeared into the tent erected on deck to have herself prepared. Her slaves rubbed her face and body with sheep's fat that had boiled slowly during the journey, been collected and allowed to cool. Sun-dried, it produced a deep penetrating cream. Her skin was patted with a tincture of the roots of the almond tree. Over this her face was drawn, the face with which she was to greet her city.

All Mitylene crowded dockside. Khar she saw first; garlanded himself, he held a wreath for her. Beside him, Eurygyos—and was that handsome young man Larichos?

Sappho took Kleis by the hand and stepped onto Lesbos. Her three brothers embraced her and passed her child from one to the other. They spoke and laughed and cried the nine years. They tried to hug away the time that had devoured their lives. Droplets of news filtered through the exclamations. Larichos was cupbearer to Pittakos, a mark of great favor indicating he considered theirs the first family of Lesbos.

Eurygyos presented a wife, Antiope, a charming girl whom Sappho remembered having sported with at the baths. They had returned to Eresos, rebuilt the home of their father, and replanted the vineyard which now bore as in her childhood. Khar's plans were to sell his brother's harvest, putting to sea in a fleet of boats he purchased with his inheritance as eldest son. “I am by now too used to wandering,” he told his sister. “I doubt I could stay long in any land.” He invited her to live in their aunt's old home in Mitylene, which had come to his branch of the family.

Sappho replied gaily, “In far-fruited Sicily I made other plans. But since they will take time to carry out, Kleis and I will be your guests for a while.”

The dark-fronted treasure ships were mooring. Her brothers were too polite to comment, except Larichos, who asked brashly if they held the riches rumor endowed her with.

“There are some fine things indeed from the estate of my late husband,” Sappho answered him. They nodded, understanding fully for the first time their sister was wealthy as well as famous.

Friends and neighbors who hung back while the family greeted one another now pressed around the poet. It was a rare and splendid welcome. Sappho remembered her departure, with only Larichos jumping up and down, waving from the pier. Still, she was home and these were her people. She had brought her daughter to grow up among them. Sappho smiled and nodded. She was gracious, she was aloof, she was Sappho.

They were driven to her aunt Tyro's home, and the tablets of her mind were inscribed with the past. Her mother, now in sunless night, should be standing on the stone threshold, lifting her first grandchild, her namesake, in her arms. “She lives no more!” Sappho had to tell herself. For the rolling years were nine.

Sappho entered as a shade from another lifetime, throwing back her Sidonian cloak. Servants carried off her things to a different wing of the house, while she and her brothers and Antiope, her sister-in-law, spilled wine and drank.

“Are we permitted to know our sister's plans?” Khar asked.

“Yes,” Antiope put in, taking note of Sappho's apparel, from her saffron-glowing sandals to the jeweled combs that flashed in her hair. “Those you spoke of.”

Sappho looked at each face before saying anything. A dream had been whispered to her by her way-gods, the Muses, and she had hugged it to her. To utter it, release it to others, would make it seem perhaps mad and impossible. Yet she must try to explain.

“You have met my child, Kleis. My thought is simply this: not to leave her upbringing to others, but to teach her myself from Hesiod, Homer, the great poets…”

“Sappho too,” Larichos laughed, rounding out their number.

She smiled.

“That seems an admirable idea, inspired by the gods,” Khar said.

Sappho hesitated. “It has taken on new form in my mind since then, and grown somewhat. I thought, since I will teach Kleis, why not others as well?”

“Others?”

She could feel how alien her thinking was to them, but she continued. “Yes. I wish to build a school, where I will teach ritual songs and the festival dances of our city. I shall look for a suitable location facing the sea and build first a villa, and then cottages to house my students.” Sensing their mounting puzzlement, she continued rapidly. “They will be young girls from the finest families. They will come to me to learn not only poetry, song, and dance, but something of philosophy, current thought, the unequal laws concerning women, the history of the Danaans, and,” she added impishly, “how to weave daisy chains.”

Her brothers laughed uncertainly and smiled shallow smiles.

“It is a new thing,” Khar said cautiously. “There is no precedent for it. In Miletos wise Thales gathers young men about him for instruction. But when and where has one heard of a school for young women?”

Surprisingly Sappho's support came from Eurygyos. “Any maiden who has been trained by Sappho of Lesbos would be sure to make an advantageous marriage. After all, our sister has experience running a large household which she could pass on.”

“I did not hear our sister mention the management of a household,” Khar put in and looked at Sappho questioningly.

“I will teach that, too,” Sappho said, “if it will win me friends.”

“I think the project a sound one,” Eurygyos reiterated, “and that our sister will increase her fortune.”

“I do not need to increase my fortune. But I am very glad of your good opinion,” Sappho told him. She was radiant. The long-cherished notion had not sounded foolish in the telling.

“You will be married again,” her youngest brother quipped, “before you even lay the foundation of the villa!”

“No,” Sappho said so positively that the four were startled. “I will not marry again. I will have my school.” She had forgotten to add “an the gods will it.” Wine was hastily spilled for this oversight, which could bring misfortune at the outset, even on those in whom it was confided. For great Zeus was willful and had sired a willful bunch.

*   *   *

The site Sappho acquired was removed from the main portion of the city on a sheltered, low-lying spit of land encircled by bluest water. It was from here she watched her brother's fleet of high-riding ships as they pulled toward the horizon. A trip such as Khar was embarked on meant more long years of separation. To stifle her pain she threw herself into the project of building.

On the chosen spot a profusion of wildflowers grew and blossom-working bees filled the air with their drone. Sappho grieved for each colorful head of sweet alyssum or crocus that fell beneath a workman's sandal or that must be uprooted to make way for the slabs of marble she had shipped. Yes, she elected to walk on marble.

But in recompense to the sacrificed flowers she sang:

The wild hyacinth which on the mountainside the

shepherd treads underfoot, and yet it still blooms purple

on the ground

Many of the architectural features she had observed in Sicily were incorporated into her plans. She enclosed extensive gardens with a triple wall. The villa took a year and a half to build. People made excursions from Mitylene to see its progress. Her brothers reported that it was much talked of in the town. Some felt an academy for girls was a dangerous idea, since the students might imagine themselves capable of serious thought. Others believed peerless Sappho would make princesses of their daughters, or that a daughter-in-law trained by her would be an asset to their house. And so the controversy burbled along.

Meanwhile the edifice grew daily in beauty as the plan for it was transferred by the Athenian architect to stone and marble. She named it House of the Servants of the Muses.

Her Kleis, her golden-haired daughter, would grow up to have older sisters and wise friends. For if, as Eurygyos concluded, young girls boasting of her tutelage would make better marriages, they must be older than she had at first contemplated—young maidens, models for her daughter and companions for herself. She liked the idea of companionship. In her life, it seemed to her, she had been too much alone.

*   *   *

The completion of Sappho's estate coincided with an awesome event: the total eclipse of Sun. Both sides in Lydia's war against the Medes were thrown into religious terror at this sign of displeasure from the gods. The opposing forces came together and, bathing their hands in the steaming blood of ox and swine, swore a mighty oath of friendship. With the sealing of the peace, Alyattes gave his daughter in marriage to the King of the Medes.