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In Syracuse (after Ψαπφω)
Equal to the gods that man seems to me there,
Often face to face sitting spellbound with you,
Hearing your soft laughter and beautiful voice,
Which is what truly
Makes my heart flutter in my bosom. For as
Soon as I glimpse you even briefly, then no
Longer can I speak, and my tongue is scattered
Also, while fine fires
Fly below my skin, and my eyes see no thing
As my ears are purring aloud. And then sweat
Trickles, trembling holds all my body, I am
Paler than straw and
Seem to myself now to need little to die.
Yet I will dare everything, even though a
Penniless lute player, when once I sing for
You and him only.
A different take on this fragment. Christina A. Clark points out in The Poetics of Manhood in the July 2008 issue of Classical Philology (University of Chicago) that at least four Latin poets closely alluded
to Sappho's self-description in fragment 31: Catullus (ffr 51 all; 64
line 99) and Horace (Ode 1.13) of course; but also Lucretius
(discussing fear) and Valerius Aedituus (the first of two epigrams in the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius). Christina Clark, p 261:
"All these poets except Lucretius use elements
in Sappho 31 in their own amatory poems, whereas Lucretius, who
translates her most faithfully, changes the context of the affect
displays back to epic fear. Lucretius gives his fearful man all of the
affect displays seen in Sappho 31,..."
A table on p 258 lists the
symptoms of fear given by Lucretius: "Mind disturbed, soul feels fear. Tongue breaks: voice disappears. Eyes black out. Ears ring. Sweat. Limbs give way. Pallor."
I would myself note that in his own version (fr 51), Catullus becomes upset first at the moment when he sees his male rival in the love triangle contemplating the darling of both men (". . . again and again he gazes at you ... which snatches all my senses away from wretched me -- identidem te spectat ... misero quod
omnis eripit sensus mihi"). Sappho was said to be 'plain' in
appearance (whatever that means!), or at least not flashy by archaic
standards, and who could judge for certain now? But reading Sappho's
fragment 31, we will note that Sappho's troubled state begins when she sees the superbly charming other woman,
the third party in her own inimitable romantic triangle. Sappho is not
physically upset by the fortunate and/or good-looking man that she
flatters. Given our ignorance about Sappho's many friendships one
cannot say, but one might venture that it is reasonable to allow the
possibility for a moment at least that Sappho's symptoms of fear were
caused by the other woman, that other
woman who upset her body so much, and who was commanding the attention
of a heavenly man whom Sappho for some reason (doubtless intellectual)
wanted to pay attention to herself.
On the correct way of saying Sappho's name, and Her Exile In Syracuse
In her songs Sappho spelled her own name with the consonants given above, using Ψ ('Psi') and φ ('phi'). Psi then had the sound of the last two letters in the English word 'lips' (just like it does today). On the other hand, in her own early time phi was spoken rather differently from way we say it now. Phi then was actually a combination of two sounds said very rapidly one after the other: a 'p' sound, and then a soft explosion or puff of breath 'h', like one might use to blow out a candle. Later speakers of other variants of Greek than her own dialect let the 'p' sound in the psi slip away and started writing her name with an 'ess' sound at the beginning. Also, phi evolved from a 'p + soft h' to an 'eff', and in Roman times this completely blurred the letter pi (sounded like our own p) that came in her name right before. So Sappho actually called herself something like Psapp-ho : kind of snappy and bright I think.
Sappho was born into a prosperous land-owning and mercantile family. In her
days, such families all over the Greek islands and mainland came under
pressure from strongmen who maneuvered the less wealthy to gain power,
with varying results in different city states. During the struggles on
her own island, a marble inscription states that Sappho was exiled far off for a time by one such strongman (probably Pittakos) to the new Greek-speaking city of Syracuse on Sicily (now part of Italy).
Land travel was impractical and the long route from her northern island of Lesvos (not too far from Troy) to Syracuse went south completely around the Greek mainland, and then west across the Mediterranean Sea. How she supported herself in
Sicily is quite unknown. No one knows her age at this time or if she went
alone. As far as we can now know, Sappho was very little interested in politics.
However, temporary exile also came to the 'other' excellent Lesviot poet, Alkaios, a troublous man, whose songs were later highly esteemed in antiquity, notably by the Latin poet Horace who wrote in Rome's early Imperial period (dying in 8 BC, very roughly 550 years later than Sappho). It appears that Alkaios did not spend any time in exile at Syracuse.
Because of various library destructions, facts are
few and the chronology of her surviving fragments is almost a complete
blank. She might have already been a singer and independent
musician when the exile occurred. Perhaps even the fragment which some
think was addressed to Alkaios had been composed by this time. Since Sappho was certainly a very intelligent young woman and later mother, by using her song-composing skills in exile
she might have been able to make a secure living among sympathetic
members of the Syracusan upper class. Eventually either the strongman that exiled Sappho (or a later strongman) relented on the exile and she returned home, as did Alkaios.
Although from her songs we know that Sappho had a brother who was a sea trader and who was successful enough to waste considerable money on a type of courtesan in near the Nile delta in Egypt (about as far away to the southeast from Lesvos as Syracuse is to the west), we do not know
how a woman (possibly unmarried at the time) such as Sappho, even of the aristocracy, might have managed the necessarily long and fairly risky journeys to Syracuse and back in those rough-and-ready days.
I had a thought that she might
have somehow persuaded a wealthy sea-faring merchant, one who was rather more stable than her brother, to navigate her the
great watery distance back to her island in the northeast
Mediterranean. It is pure speculation, but what a pretty story if such
a friendly man (perhaps from the island of Andros as the Suda
says) had eventually married Sappho and fathered her daughter Kleis
(named after Sappho's own mother) of the bright hair. This is the thought behind the last eleven words of this translation, which are my paste and paint addition to her famous fragment φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν .... It is found further on this website by following the link: Ψαπφω.
On Sappho's travel to Sicily, there are some comments at this link here.
It is important to mention that though it is virtually certain Sappho went to Syracuse, there is no certain evidence that she returned (as I have suggested in the discussion above). However, it is clear from a later Roman source (Cicero) that the city of Syracuse erected a beautiful statue in honor of its one-time resident, Sappho. Possibly she might have lived the rest of her life there, or she might have returned home. Until a fortunate discovery of new evidence from a location such as Herculaneum or Oxyrhynchus, we cannot know.
In Syracuse (after Ψαπφω), (translation of Sappho frag. 31).
NEWS of the Classical Association (UK),
number 27, December, 2002, p 18.
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