Waiting for the Barbarians (17 page)

The
Iliad
doesn’t need to be modernized because the question it raises is a modern—indeed, existentialist—one: How do we fill our short lives with meaning? The August 22, 2011 issue of
Time
featured, on its “Briefing” page, a quote from a grieving mother about her dead son. The mother’s name is Jan Brown, and her son, Kevin Houston, a Navy SEAL, was one of thirty-seven soldiers killed in a rocket attack in Afghanistan that summer. What she said about him might shock some people but will sound oddly familiar to anyone who has read the
Iliad
:

Whoever Homer was and however he made his poem, the song that he sings still goes on.

—The New Yorker
, November 7, 2011

ACCORDING TO A
fragment of a Hellenistic elegy called “Loves, or the Beautiful Boys,” by a certain Phanocles, after the legendary poet Orpheus was torn to pieces by the women of Thrace, his head and his lyre—the instrument from which lyric poetry derives its name—were borne by the waves to the island of Lesbos, where they were subsequently buried. This geography was hardly casual. By the time Phanocles was writing, in the later 300s BC (the time of Alexander the Great), Lesbos had long been associated with exceptional achievement in the lyric arts. The reputation of a poet called Terpander, for instance, who came from the Lesbian city of Antissa and is listed on an extant monument as the winner of a song competition that occurred in the 670s BC, was such that he was credited—apocryphally, undoubtedly—with having invented the seven-stringed lyre. Two generations later, Arion, another Lesbian poet, served as a kind of artist in residence at the court of the ruler of Corinth, where he was responsible for raising the genre known as dithyramb to new expressive heights. This same Arion, as Herodotus relates, is said to have
been rescued by a dolphin after being mugged and thrown overboard by hooligans during a voyage home from Syracuse.

But no Lesbian poets were more famous or influential in antiquity than two who, of Arion’s contemporaries, were most renowned for their lyric songs: Alcaeus and Sappho. Both came from the hothouse social milieu of the Lesbian aristocracy, which was known as much for its political intrigues as for its love of pleasure and beauty—a love that in the classical Greek imagination was associated with the slightly decadent cultures that flourished in the coastal cities of Asia Minor, just across a narrow strip of water from Lesbos. The two poets, not surprisingly, seem to have known each other. (There is a fragment of Sappho, quoted by Aristotle, that has often been taken to be a playful dialogue between the two.)

And yet the surviving fragments of their poems bespeak wildly divergent interests. Those of Alcaeus suggest a person, or at least a poetic persona, along the lines of an Elizabethan rake: there are drinking songs, war songs, and quite a few verses, often bitter ones, about the tumultuous political situation in Mytilene, Lesbos’s largest city and the two poets’ hometown. The first-century-BC scholar and critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who taught Greek to Romans, dryly noted that without the meter, certain of Alcaeus’ poems read like political speeches. The poems of Sappho, on the other hand, are famously and almost exclusively preoccupied by erotic yearning for young women. The poetess’s extraordinary gifts—her reputation a scant century after her death was such that Plato could refer to her as “the Tenth Muse”—may bring to mind the rich lyric tradition of her homeland (and thus suggest why Phanocles had Orpheus end up there), but it is her subject matter that explains why the place-name “Lesbos” has come to have connotations for us that are somewhat different from those it had for Phanocles and his readers.

If the fanciful tale told in “Loves, or the Beautiful Boys” inevitably
calls to mind the traditional association of Lesbos with erotic poetry—for Phanocles’ poem, as its name suggests, was a catalog of the loves of various gods and heroes for beautiful young boys—its story of the severed head also introduces another element that becomes crucial in any consideration of Sappho’s verse: fragments.

The library at Alexandria possessed nine volumes—which is to say, rolled papyrus scrolls—of Sappho’s verses; the first book alone contained 1,320 lines. These books were arranged primarily by meter. (The first was a collection of poems composed in the distinctive four-line stanza known as the Sapphic strophe, a complicated and exacting meter later brilliantly adapted by Catullus into Latin; the second featured verses in something called Aeolic dactylic pentameter, composed in two-line stanzas; and so forth.) It is likely that the ninth book was a collection of poems known as epithalamia, songs to be sung during various stages of the wedding ritual; to this book belongs the fragment made famous as the title of J. D. Salinger’s book
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
—the poem written, perhaps, on the occasion of a girl’s wedding to a rather tall man. (“The humour,” as Sappho’s greatest twentieth-century editor, Denys Page, grumpily noted in his definitive 1955 edition of the poems, “not for the last time in the history of weddings, is heavy and flat.”) Even if we grant that not every one of the nine books contained as many verses as did the first, the foregoing catalog should suffice to provide an idea of the extent of the original Sapphic corpus.

Of that extensive output, we possess precisely one complete poem. (A second, nearly whole lyric, about the heartache of old age, emerged only in 2004, when two scholars realized that lines from a papyrus in Cologne completed a fragmentary poem that had been published in the 1920s.) Generally referred to as “Fragment 1” in the standard editions of Sappho’s works, this seven-stanza lyric, composed in
Sapphic strophes, is a self-deprecatingly humorous request for assistance by the lovelorn Sappho to Aphrodite, goddess of love. (“Come to me now … be my ally.”) The reason it has survived, however, has nothing to do with love: the poem was quoted in full by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in an essay on literary composition because he admired its polish and intensity.

It is, indeed, odd to contemporary readers, who are likely to value Sappho for those traits of emotional intensity, self-reflection, and subjective expressiveness that we see as fundamental to lyric poetry, that this most famous of all the ancient lyricists has survived primarily because of what seem to us today to be the dry preoccupations of long-dead pedants. One lovely fragment (“I would not think it right to touch the sky with my two arms”) comes to us because it contained a spelling of the Greek word for “sky” that interested the second-century-AD grammarian Herodian in his treatise “On Anomalous Words.” (Lest you conclude too hastily that Herodian’s interests were overly narrow, it should be noted that his other works included a study of the accentuation of the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
.) Some of the most emotionally stark snippets (“you’ve forgotten me / or you love some man more than me”) or the most tantalizing (“as long as you are willing …”) occur in a treatise by Herodian’s equally learned father, Apollonius Dyscolus, a book that even in antiquity was unlikely to have been a page-turner:
On Pronouns
.

It’s probably safe to say that none of these fragments would arouse a great deal of excitement were it not for two facts: first, that Sappho was a woman, and second—even more, you suspect—that she wrote about desire. The first is a fascinating anomaly, given what we know of the often oppressive grip of Greek patriarchy, even in the comparatively relaxed milieu of the Lesbian elite. (Aristotle remarks that Sappho was honored “even though she was a woman.”) The second dovetails with certain ideas we have that are central not only to our
understanding of lyric poetry but, indeed, to our conception of the self in general—desire and sexuality being so crucial to our contemporary understanding of personality. With a directness seemingly unmediated by vast stretches of time, Sappho seems to speak to us quite clearly today, no matter what the form our desire takes. “No one who has been in love,” the poet and classics scholar Anne Carson wrote at the beginning of
Eros the Bittersweet
, her brilliant and idiosyncratic 1986 study of Greek erotic poetry, “disputes her”—that is, argues with Sappho’s definition of eros as “bittersweet,” a word that Sappho in fact coined. (The Greek is
glukupikron
, which literally means “sweetbitter”; the significance of sweetbitter, as opposed to bittersweet, is just one of the many objects of Carson’s shimmering investigation.)

Hence our hunger for those paltry fragments. And yet many classics scholars have been wondering whether Sappho’s poems meant something wholly different to her and her original audience from what their partial remains mean to us. Some, for instance, believe that those intense expressions of individual subjective yearning were written—as their frequent use of the first-person-plural pronoun has suggested—for performance by large choruses of young girls who sang Sappho’s songs at public occasions. We know that such choruses were a fact of cultural life in Archaic Greece, just as we know of choruses of men and boys who sang other formalized songs, such as the dithyramb, at civic festivals (the origin, so Aristotle tells us, of tragedy). This possibility, in turn, raises further questions. How do we read those frequent addresses to Aphrodite if Sappho was not a desire-crazed proto-Romantic but the leader of a
thiasos
, a formal cult association that met to honor the goddess—or even of a school for girls at which she officiated as a kind of headmistress? What if Sappho was the head of one of several informal associations of young women—her poems mention, with amusing tartness, the leaders of rival groups, as far as we can tell—to whose nubile members, preparing for
their inevitable destinies in Greek society as brides and then mothers, Sappho’s yearning lyrics were meant to provide a kind of emotional instruction? What if, alternatively, the lyrics were meant not to provide a voice to private yearning, or to emphasize in the public eye the desirability of her young female subjects on the occasion of their nuptials (another theory), but to mediate in a yet more subtle fashion between private and public (yet another theory)—to make
eros
manageable by giving it form and voice and a place in society?

The foregoing catalog is intended merely to suggest the range and variety of explanations—given over the years and centuries—of the meaning of Sappho’s lyrics, explanations that put Sappho back in her original social and historical setting. True, some of these explanations were undoubtedly motivated by distaste for the possibility that Sappho was homosexual in the way we understand that word. Yet some are sensitive and informed attempts to understand Sappho’s verse in a fashion that takes into account what we know of Archaic Greek culture—not only that it was patriarchal, and therefore unlikely to tolerate unbridled expressions of lesbian desire (as we understand it to be, at least), but also that the settings for lyric performance were, like so many other aspects of Greek culture, likely to be much more public than the contemporary poetry-reading audience might imagine.

In fact, the controversy about Sappho and her work has raged since the beginning of modern classical scholarship; the discrepancy between the apparent passion of the words that have been preserved and the pedantic dryness of the contexts in which they survived seems to reflect the two sides of the scholarly debate. In one corner are the scholars for whom the “real” Sappho is the one we seem to recognize, the intensely private singer of unique songs about forbidden desire; in the the other are the classicists who argue that she and her work belong—somehow—to the public world of civic and social
practices in a way that is difficult for us today to apprehend. The stakes in this debate are, clearly, more than purely academic. As the classicist Thomas Habinek puts it in his introduction to
Re-Reading Sappho
(1996), a collection of critical essays on the subject:

An extracurricular investment in Sappho is also evident in the work of queer theorists, and indeed of any number of critics—and their constituencies in the larger world—who wish to claim her as a forebear, one who could lend ancient and powerful cultural authority to marginalized identities.

And yet we know that Sappho has not, in fact, survived “in any quantity.” Indeed, one reason that there is no satisfactory way to resolve that controversy about the “real” Sappho and her circle and the “real” meaning of her poems is precisely because so much of the evidence we possess is fragmentary: what we know for certain about Sappho is that she did (or did not?) lead a circle of women who were (or were not?) lesbians in the contemporary sense of that word; that she did compose songs (for public performance? for private delectation?) about young girls (who were students? lovers? disciples? fellow cultists?). And, in what is surely an unproductive circularity, the fragmentary knowledge we use to illuminate Sappho’s poems comes from the precious fragments themselves.