Sappho's Leap (40 page)

But I say, “Do not go to Lesbos. Home is no longer where you think it is and life is happier here among our friends.” Sometimes Alcaeus frets and will not be comforted. Then I take him in my arms, saying, “You and I are true kin. Children must have their own lives. When they are ready, they will come to us.”

One day in summer, we are walking on the strand of our green island and we see a sail in the distance. Nobody ever comes to visit us—so Alcaeus and I are fascinated. We watch the sail as it comes closer and closer. When the ship is almost at our strand, a ferryman leaps out and tows it closer. He looks for a place to beach.

“Not here!” I scream. “The rocks are lethal! You will tear your hull!”

“Then swim to us!” shouts the ferryman.

“Who are you?” Alcaeus bellows. But the wind carries away his words.

For a while, the little boat bobs with nobody on deck.

“Shall we swim to it?” I ask Alcaeus.

“How do you know he is friend, not foe?” he asks.

“I don't, and yet I think he comes in peace.”

“Then I'll swim out, Sappho. You stay here.”

My heart stops.

“I cannot bear to lose you again!” I tell Alcaeus. But before I can stop him, he leaps into the water like a dolphin and swims like mad to the unknown sailboat.

I see him pull himself aboard. I see the ferryman help him. I see a beautiful golden-haired woman come on deck with a golden child in her arms. I see a brave boy at her side who can only be my own Hector!

My heart! My heart!

I leap into the water and swim to the boat.

“Grandmother!” Hector cries.

Alcaeus is on deck, weeping tears of joy.

“I've come to introduce you to my daughter, Mother.”

On her hip is a child of six months. She gurgles at me happily.

“I have named her Sappho after you!” Cleis says. “There is so much to say to you, Mother.”

Dripping wet, I take my dry granddaughter in my arms. I think I have never felt anything so tender before, greener than grass, so newly made, so blessed. I see the light of the sun in my daughter's eyes, the same sun that sparkles on the sea and spreads to the distant horizon.

“In truth nothing more needs to be said,” I say.

Aeolian earth, you cover Sappho, who among the immortal muses is celebrated as the mortal muse, whom Cypris and Eros together reared, with whom Persuasion wove the undying wreath of song, a joy to Hellas and a glory to you. You fates twirling the triple thread on your spindle, why did you not spin an everlasting life for the singer who devised the deathless gifts of the muses of Helicon?

—A
NTIPATER OF
S
IDON

S
EVEN YEARS AGO, SAPPHO
set her delicate sandaled foot in my life and since then I've never been the same.

I had read her fragments before, but they had not struck me with the force they later carried. She'd seemed so remote. The world of the eastern Aegean 2,600 years ago had seemed so remote. But now it seemed suddenly close. It is in the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them. I read Sappho again in my fifties and suddenly I understood. I saw that her legend had been confabulated with the legends of Aphrodite. And I began to write a sequence of poems in Sappho's voice, in Aphrodite's, and in my own.

The poems, which follow this afterword, led me to
Sappho's Leap
. Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express.

I wrote these poems and then went on to other things. I continued to read Sappho from time to time, but the novel I dreamed of writing about her was stalled. Perhaps it was growing what Nabokov called “wings and claws” in secret. I began a play about Sappho in which she is about to jump off the Leucadian cliff to her death but stops to tell her story. I never finished it.

I don't know why books come in this zigzag way. The great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska says, “Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous ‘I don't know.'” That has been my experience. The poems presage the novels, but why the subject goes underground for a period of years while life catches up to it, I have no idea. Perhaps all mysteries don't have to be solved. Perhaps the mystery of how novels emerge is better left unplumbed.

As I say in my prefatory note, not much is known about Sappho's biography other than that she flourished in Lesbos circa 600
BCE.
Even the date of her birth is uncertain. There are, however, many traditions and legends about her life—including the most famous one: that she threw herself off a cliff in middle age for the sake of unrequited love for a beguiling young ferryman called Phaon. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, had granted Phaon the gifts of great beauty, sensuality, and irresistibility in love—and Sappho fell.

Aphrodite is the goddess most passionately and frequently invoked in Sappho's songs. Could sending a beautiful young man to tempt the greatest singer of love between women have been a trick of the gods? Was Aphrodite testing Sappho? These questions provoked my story.

A novel always begins with a “What if?” What if Sappho was about to jump but stopped to tell her story? At first that was all I had. Yet I strongly felt that the tradition of her suicide was wrong. It seemed a myth attached to Sappho by those who wanted to mock her. I decided that she had thought of jumping but changed her mind. Could she have toyed with suicide and fallen by accident? Now my research began. The more I read, the more I realized that there were remarkably few agreed-upon facts about Sappho. For a historian, this is an obstacle; for a novelist, it may be a blessing.

Sappho is an icon to women everywhere despite the fact that so little is known about her. She is associated with women's sexuality and gay rights—but she may not have been homosexual at all; or she may have loved both women and men, as was common in the ancient world—and is in ours. The concept of homosexuality as a distinct lifestyle did not exist in classical antiquity. People were bisexual, free of sexual guilt as we know it; it was a pagan world. Attitudes toward love, toward sex, toward conquest, toward slavery, toward money, toward social climbing were uncannily like our own—and yet fascinatingly different. Women were sexual chattel, yet, as in all times, there were rebellious, adventurous women. This is the fun of setting a story in the world of 2,600 years ago.

But who was Sappho really? Every age that fell in love with her made her its own. Since she became a muse to later poets, they fashioned her in their own image.

We have few facts, but we do have the sound of her voice. Sappho's is one of the few female voices that has come down to us from antiquity. Passionate, personal, searingly erotic, the fragments of her songs that have reached us show how much women of 2,600 years ago were like us. Yet there are immense gaps in our knowledge. You might say that our knowledge is
mostly
gaps—surrounded by tantalizing legends.

Sappho comes from a time in which the oral tradition was only beginning to give way to the written. Her songs were learned by other singers and performed throughout the ancient world. She was widely heralded and imitated. If you wanted to be glib, you could say she was a cross between Madonna and Sylvia Plath—like Madonna in her huge fame and like Plath in her ferocious truthfulness and legendary suicide. In fact, there has never been
anyone
like her. She became an inspiration to the singers who followed her. She has remained a muse into our own time.

Plato called Sappho the “tenth muse.” Ovid fell in love with her songs and paid tribute to them, bringing her into the Roman tradition—which eventually delivered her to us. Every modern poet, from Rainer Maria Rilke to A. E. Housman to Thomas Hardy to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath, has fallen for her combination of voluptuous sexuality and fierce honesty. Her subjects were: erotic love, the hypocrisies of marriage, the ecstasy of motherhood, bisexual passion, the fickleness of Aphrodite—the goddess of love whom even the gods obey. Her work still seems modern today.

She may never have transcribed her own songs. Perhaps other singers learned them and passed them on. Of these, many were lost—because of prudishness, the burning of ancient libraries, destruction caused by wars—but the fragments that remain have cast their spell over succeeding generations.

Using Sappho's surviving fragments, the few biographical markers—all of them disputed—my own reinvention of archaic Greece, and the songs, epics, and histories of her contemporaries, I began to imagine Sappho as the greatest singer of all time.

I saw her as an adventurous young girl who got involved in political intrigues, fell in love with the handsome rebel poet Alcaeus, and then was married off to a drunken old husband to keep her out of trouble. She gets into plenty of trouble anyway—no trouble, no story.

Sappho's life is a story of love, adventure, and heroism. It takes us from ancient Lesbos to ancient Syracuse (a Greek colony then) and throughout the Mediterranean world. Sappho was contemporary with Pharaoh Necho of Egypt, Aesop of the fables, Nebuchadnezzar of Biblical fame, the philosopher Heraclitus, and the legendary Alyattes of Lydia, whose court in Sardis was the most luxurious the world had ever known.

Sappho's contemporaries consulted the Oracle of Delphi before they made a move either in love or battle. They were obsessed with witchcraft and magic. They were trained for war and conquest, but they also worshiped the muses and valued song above all the arts.

It was an age of inspired amateurism in which a well-educated aristocrat was expected to be able to make up songs and perform them at a symposium (the classical term for an elegant dinner party), play musical instruments as accompaniment, and converse brilliantly of politics, philosophy, and love.

Not the world of fifth century Athenian male chauvinism we know from Plato's
Symposium
, not a world that excluded women—though it did limit them to certain roles—archaic Greece (circa 800
BCE—
500
BCE)
was every bit as cosmopolitan and international, in its way, as our own world. People traveled widely for trade, for war, for love. They regularly traversed the Middle East, from Lesbos to Sicily to Gibraltar to North Africa, from Persia and Egypt to Etruscan Italy, in their small, rudderless boats with square sails.

They traded Lesbian wine for Egyptian grain. They used windmills to pump seawater in order to garner salt. They navigated by the stars. They were fascinated by the customs of other cultures, learned much about art from the Egyptians, about coinage and trade from the Lydians, about the alphabet from the Phoenicians. They thought their world as advanced and modern as we think ours. They worshiped many gods and disputed about the creation of the universe even as we do.

A slave society that invented our basic ideas about democracy, a world in which women were valued primarily as breeders, which nonetheless produced the singer who gave us the imagery of erotic love that has lasted until this day, a world of magic that gave birth to our world of science, Greece is the very foundation on which our civilization is built. Sappho is at once the voice of ancient Greece and a voice we recognize as ours.

In naming the characters in the novel, I decided to use the most familiar, usually Latinized spellings—Alcaeus not Alkaios, Cleis not Kleis, Pittacus not Pittakos. These spellings are still used in most dictionaries and encyclopedias. Though it is sometimes fashionable today to play with pseudo-Greek spellings—Kronos, not Cronus—my aim was to make the reader as comfortable as possible with Greek names and to be as consistent as I could in transliterating from another alphabet. Occasionally, where Greek words seem particularly beautiful, I have used them in the text, defining them on first appearance.

Translations of Sappho have always reflected the age in which they were created and the personalities of the translators. My reading showed me that different translators tend to produce different Sapphos. After much deliberation, I decided to attempt my own versions—not literal translations but adaptations of Sappho's verses in a style appropriate to the flow of the novel. In my versions I have tried to capture the essence of Sappho's ideas, in a way that approximates (as much as possible) the original Greek. If the reader is inspired to go back to Sappho herself, I will be delighted.

I have also taken the novelist's prerogative of adding some pseudo-Sapphic texts. It must be acknowledged that the historical novel is an artifice. The ancient Greeks did not speak English. Moreover, this is a novel that incorporates myth and fantasy into its plot. The novelists who inspired me—from Robert Graves and Marguerite Yourcenar to Mary Renault and Gore Vidal—all were aware of the contradictions built into the making of historical fiction. One writes of the past in part to hold a mirror up to the present and in part to honor one's literary ancestors.

It is my pleasure to express my gratitude to Robert Ball, the classics scholar who vetted the manuscript and translations for errors. His generosity has been a great gift. I would like to thank the intrepid Star Lawrence of Norton, exceptional editor and fellow novelist, as well as freelance editor Leslie Schnur. My agent Ed Victor encouraged this daunting project from the start. Ken Follett, Susan Cheever, Shirley Knight, and Naomi Wolf gave me valuable notes and criticism. Lucilla Burn of the British Museum guided my early research. Linda Brunet helped me plunder the rich resources of the libraries of Barnard College and Columbia University, as well as the New York Society Library. Carolyn Block and Lisa Wright transcribed the ultimate edits. Patrick and Narelle Stevens sailed me all over the eastern Aegean on two occasions. I hope I have captured something of the light of those islands and seas in these pages.