Love Conquers Nothing
A Glandular History of Civilization
Foreword
Bibliographies are growing overornamented. If we do not look out they will suffer the fate of the trilobite, which committed race suicide by adding more and yet more trimming to itself. The same danger threatens the customary author’s acknowledgment, which is getting sillier and sillier. “Thanks are due the gallant public libraries of Maryland, Louisiana, and Vancouver. Thanks are due my courteous, loyal typing agency, without which this book would never have been typed.”
It is high time to ask the question: what should a bibliography be? If only critics would get their ideas sorted out on the subject, I would be less confused when preparing mine. I’ve always thought a bibliography is there to show where the writer got his source material. It need not be a dump heap of all the books from which I may possibly have extracted vague bits of atmosphere, nor a list of titles included in the name of general culture. A bibliography is not intended for showing off, on either the author’s or reviewer’s part. According to my ideas, it’s included for the convenience of that forgotten man, the reader.
Anyway, I’ve now worked myself into such a temper that I am not going to use a bibliography at all. The list would be too long and pretentious, considering the number of characters discussed in the text. After all, any reader who wants to can employ a library card index. I did. Let it be understood between us, then, that I’ve read a lot, though not nearly everything there is to be read on my subjects.
A few comments, nevertheless, seem to be in order. Grudgingly I vouchsafe the information that I used E. V. Rieu’s translations of Homer for the Helen chapter. My husband found me the material on Nzinga, mostly in Dapper’s Africa. Thanks are due my husband.
The direct quotation in the Cleopatra chapter I owe to Weigall.
The Sappho translations come from various anthologies. Two are from the Lindsay Homage to Sappho, which, for some incomprehensible reason, is on the restricted list of the British Museum Reading Room, and so must be read very close to the main desk, under the attendant’s suspicious eye. It really isn’t as shocking as all that. Thanks are due the attendant.
EMILY HAHN
Preface
Most decidedly, love does not conquer all. Why we have all grown up believing the tarradiddle that it does, handing it on to our children as an article of faith, passes my comprehension. It should be banished to a corner with such other quaint oddities among proverbs as “Early to bed and early to rise,” or “Cold hands, warm heart.” Love seldom conquers anything; it only makes a mess of arrangements once in a while and for a little time.
History proves it with negative evidence. Where did love conquer? Who are the great lovers we immediately think of, when we are asked to think of great lovers? Well, there are Cleopatra and Antony, for two; there are Tristan and Isolde, and Dante and Beatrice, and so forth. Cleopatra and Antony, when you come down to facts, were a political and economic merger. I cannot swallow that famous saying about the length of Cleopatra’s nose. It might have been a good deal shorter or longer for all Antony would have cared. Egypt, not her nose, was what Antony admired about Cleopatra. Dante and Beatrice were hardly a love affair; had they been, we would never have had Dante’s poetry; there would have been a lot of little Dantes instead. Tristan and Isolde, I grant you, are a model couple and everything lovers ought to be—fated to meet, constant if not faithful through long years of separation, clinging to hopes of each other, and dying tragically at the end for their love. But, alas, they never lived in fact. They are myths, like most of the other great lovers.
Not for a minute do I wish to deny that love meddles in things. It does. It swings the course of events this way and that way, so that history runs like a meandering river and not the neat canal we always try to build. Love does not, however, deflect the river so far as to carve out a new path that winds somewhere, unlike Swinburne’s, to a different sea. It would take a mighty love and a long-lived lover to do that, and humanity affords neither. The longer the river the easier it is to see the unflattering truth that we are puny people, with truncated lives and swiftly passing loves even shorter than our lives.
This, I grant you, is a pity. It would be a better thing for the world if love did conquer, for then all the captains and the kings would forget to go out and make conquests of their own. Love instead of power! It is not a new ideal, but it never seems to be attained. All the world loves a lover, and with reason, for a genuine lover is not a dangerous nuisance. Soothed and happy, or at least hopeful that he will soon be soothed and happy, he wanders harmlessly under his own bright star and doesn’t try to hurt anyone, or grab things. The other sort of lover, the type who goes in for short fierce affairs, like Henry VIII or Napoleon, is not a lover at all. He is love’s archenemy, the maker of history.
I have tried in this book to give a few examples of the struggle that goes on ceaselessly between love and ambition, and how it affected, or was affected by, people whose ambitions won the argument. There will be some characters you recognize, and perhaps a few who are unfamiliar. All of them, however, made a splash in their time. All of them played a part in spoiling the line, the neat, canal-like river bed of history as it might have happened. All, fortunately or unfortunately, had their weaknesses as well as their strength. Otherwise, who knows where we would be now? Catching cold, perhaps, in More’s Utopia, or doing each his bit in an artificial fertilizer factory dreamed up by H.G. Wells.
The thoughts of might-have-been are endless, but the facts are these: we are still, as we have always been, caught between two strong desires—love and ambition. Ambition still wins in the long run, as it always did.
Love does not conquer all. It tries to, but as far as we can make out from the archives, ambition is forever slamming doors in love’s face. Love in history usually runs a bad second. When it does win the race you have no history at all. Happy men do not make history.
Unhappy Helen
Helen of Troy
BASED ON E. V. RIEU’S TRANSLATION OF THE Iliad
Considering that the gods on Mount Olympus are not ours, we are well acquainted with them. There is good reason for our fondness for Homer; the ties between the godlike company and us are many, though our feelings are those of fellowship rather than worship. We know where we are with those imposing rapscallions. We do not know where we are, in the same way, with God, and that is as it should be. The Galilean, in spite of all the centuries we have spent trying to understand Him, remains an enigma; perhaps it is because of the centuries rather than in spite of them, but there it is. Save for those clear moments of exaltation vouchsafed to very few humans, we are left to wonder. There is, of course, no comparison. Jesus was born of woman, but He is God. The gods of the Greeks were human. Certainly they were too unpleasant on occasion to be anything else.
In those enormous beautiful bodies dwelt correspondingly enormous passions; pride, greed, jealousy, and lust. Their lives and those of the mortals they directed (with great interest in the smallest detail) evoke in us delighted sensations of recognition and agreement. That is, they have this effect when we reread the Iliad, but unfortunately we don’t read it much, because it’s a classic. It is very bad luck on Helen’s memory that her story should have become a classic; one is apt to forget the true versions of such literature. Helen and Paris have become stereotyped characters, great lovers in the worst sense of the phrase. White Helen is a cliché. This is not fair. Helen was better than that; she was a personality and a riddle; she had a most unfortunate life, but not a banal one. (For my purposes of argument, as the reader must already be aware, Homer was retailing history, not fiction. I cannot see that at this late date there is very much difference between the two.)
Helen, the daughter of mortal Leda and immortal Zeus, was a very pretty woman. I say “pretty” rather than “beautiful” deliberately, because of an idiosyncrasy which I may possibly share with my readers; the word “beautiful” in such a connection immediately bringing to my mind cold white marble, a broad waist, and one of those straight noses that make the ancient Greeks seem so heavily in earnest. Helen could not possibly have looked like that. She was a very pretty woman, then, and she was married to Menelaus, who was brother to the great Agamemnon, King of Argos. They had one child, a daughter, and were presumably happy enough together—though one feels that Menelaus may have been rather too old for his wife—until Prince Paris appeared on the scene. Yet sometimes I wonder how happy an intelligent woman could have been with Menelaus, or any other Greek king of his stamp.
If her husband had been able to make of her an important queen, Helen might have calmed her restlessness with pride of power. But Menelaus wasn’t head of the family; he deferred to his elder brother Agamemnon, and no doubt Helen’s secondary position as his wife was irritating. It wasn’t very amusing at best to be a married woman. The households of ancient Greece were always crowded with females as a matter of course, overflowing with wives and handmaidens who occupied themselves endlessly with weaving cloth, sewing it, and washing it. Life was dull for women, as it is apt to be in a polygamous society; their only outlets were domestic or sex intrigues. Helen, like the other females, was a chattel, something to be seized by the conqueror after a war and sold for a slave with the rest of the weaklings in the community.
Slaves, of course, enjoy certain advantages. Even a male slave is free from responsibility; someone else must see to his keep. And a Greek woman, who was always something of a slave even though she might not be in legal bondage, was not held responsible for her virtue. There was a certain amount of lip service paid to the ideal of chastity, but no girl seems to have been blamed when she was abducted. Abduction is a term which is significant in itself; women were not seduced so much as carried off. The term “seduction” places on a woman the onus of choice, and the Greeks never took a woman’s choice into consideration. (N.B.: The name of Helen came to my mind in the Belgian Congo, when a native girl accused a man of her village in open court, saying he had raped her. The white magistrate asked her to describe the crime, and she said, “I met him by chance on the forest path and he asked me to sleep with him. I refused. Then he asked me again. Again I refused. Then he asked me again, and then he slept with me.” “But why did you allow it?” “Bwana, I have just told you. He asked me three times.”)
Very well, then. The situation was hopeless from the start. Helen, a famous beauty, was married to a dull though able man, and languished among her looms and laundresses. It is difficult not to believe that Paris was merely a means to an end, that if it hadn’t been Paris it would inevitably have been someone else. Moreover, we must not forget the gods, who were forever meddling with the Greeks. Aphrodite less than any of them would have let Menelaus alone in domestic bliss. She was a restless goddess at the best of times, a snapper-up of idle mortals; she fidgeted, owing, I think, to a strong sense of inferiority. One can scarcely blame her for this. The other goddesses, perpetually jealous, never missed a chance to snub Aphrodite, and the male gods were not much better in their own way. Though they were swayed with admiration and desire of her beauty, they balanced these occasional moments of weakness with an attitude of affectionate contempt for Aphrodite. They were always telling her to stick to her own line and not to attempt any other activity. It was enough to annoy any goddess, and set her to experimental mischief-making.
As a bribe for his bestowal on her of the golden apple (we all know that story) Aphrodite had promised the beautiful youth, Paris, the most desirable prize in the world, which was Helen. It was not playing fair to get the apple in this manner, of course, and it was gratuitous besides. Aphrodite would have been entitled to it in any case, but that fatal sense of inferiority overwhelmed her judgment and robbed her of self-confidence, and so she stooped to bribery. Alas, the gods hardly ever did play fair, and that is one reason, no doubt, why humanity eventually deserted them in search of a less human code of honor. However, in those days they still flourished, which was convenient for mortals, because they always had an excuse for unpleasant behavior. Paris, for example, was not just a cad. He didn’t abduct Helen, the wife of his host, merely because he suddenly wanted her, or because of the evil in his heart. It was Aphrodite who put the idea into his head.
As moderns we are apt to deprecate his action the more, perhaps, because he did not content himself with Helen. He took as well all of Menelaus’s portable property that he could manage to get aboard his swift-sailing ship: the cooking pots and spears, the lumps of iron, the gold drinking cups and fine linen, all those valuable goods which meant wealth to the Greeks. Today we feel, in keeping with our code but erroneously, that what Helen did with her person was her own affair, but that it was shocking for Paris to steal caldrons and clothing. We forget that Helen wasn’t responsible. Like the rest of Menelaus’s household utensils she was, quite simply, stolen.
I am sure she enjoyed it, nevertheless.
What was Prince Paris like? According to the book, he was very beautiful; supple, young, and foppish. He departs from the customary pattern of the time; the usual Homeric hero was bigger than Paris and less volatile in his emotions. I feel, though I do not speak with authority, that Menelaus and Agamemnon and Hector and the other great warriors cultivated their beards and were proud of the resulting growths, whereas Paris, with more sense of the aesthetic, kept himself clean-shaven. As a child, no doubt, he trotted after his brother Hector in the nursery. He had a wide selection of companions, Priam having begotten fifty sons, but Hector was his chosen hero. Hector must have been pleased and flattered by this preference, and so he made a pet of his golden-haired baby brother. The women petted him, too, with the inevitable result: Paris grew up a sissy. He wasn’t a weakling; he was good at games, and his enormous vanity kept him up to the mark at fighting, but he was unstable emotionally.
A good many women adored him. This fact is not in accordance with the Greek conventions, which decreed that women should prefer great hulking males who habitually knocked down other enormous males and abducted their wives in proof of superiority. It is obvious, nevertheless, that women loved Paris. Nor should we wonder at this, knowing as we do that Aphrodite herself once fell in love with Adonis, a beardless boy. Besides, why should not any girl like Paris, who was lovely and sweet-smelling and sympathetic? In the monotony of household life, would not any woman welcome a man who obviously preferred her company to that of his companions-at-arms? Paris loved women and was not ashamed of it. He didn’t merely use them for mating; he loved to talk to them about things they understood—personal comment on their friends, linen, fur, jewelry. He must have been the complete antithesis of Menelaus, and thus a great relief to Helen at the moment.
At the moment only, mark you. Here, undoubtedly, we come to the heart of the matter, and here, too, we must pause to consider Helen’s character, which was not that of an ordinary woman. She had been endowed with certain gifts at her birth; she was practically a professional charmer, with whatever a charmer needs and nothing she doesn’t. Helen aroused desire and admiration in all men, evidently, but she did not in turn desire or admire all men. She liked powerful men, not ingratiating, pettable creatures. She liked men she could respect. She was not like the women who had brought up Paris; Paris was not really her type.
Nevertheless, she must have been infatuated with him at the beginning. She was carried away, figuratively as well as literally. Her captor’s person must have appeared to her in a glowing light, and besides, there were all the trappings of royal abduction: the excitement of flight in the dark, the blessed sense of escape from all the cats in her husband’s house, the speeding ship cutting the water and throwing up phosphorescent foam. Then the delight of a stolen honeymoon must have been intoxicating. Honeymoons come to an end, however, and so did Helen’s. Once more she found herself an inmate of a king’s palace, weaving and embroidering and sitting all day indoors with the women. It was then that she first looked with clear eyes at her new husband, and realized that she had committed herself to a flighty stripling. It must have been an unpleasant shock.
To love a pretty boy like Paris one wants a strong maternal instinct. As far as I can see, Helen was devoid of all that sort of thing. Her emotions went into love-making rather than motherliness; she had run away from home, for instance, without giving a thought to her baby daughter. If such a thing had been permitted to females in those days I would dare to say that she was more in love with herself than with any man, and she naturally wanted her mate to be worthy of her. As a Greek she could enjoy certain qualities only by proxy—position and power and strength—and yet she was now farther from them than she had been with Menelaus. Paris was a younger son, like Menelaus, which status automatically deprived him of position and power. His strength lay more in amorous talents than anywhere else, and Helen was not sensualist enough to find complete satisfaction in bed. The unfortunate woman must often have looked wistfully at her brother-in-law, mighty Hector. Hector would have been the perfect answer to all her longing thoughts.
I am sure that Hector knew how Helen felt about him. He may have agreed, secretly, that he should have been her husband. He, above all Priam’s other sons, knew how weak Paris really was; many a time he must have pitied Helen. We know that he was very decent to her, though there was never a breath of scandal against those two. There would have been no reason for scandal; Hector was always a gentleman. Besides, Andromache suited him. It was only that he would have pitied any woman Paris married.
Considering everything, her chagrin, her disappointment, her suppressed admiration for Hector and all the rest of it, Helen behaved remarkably well in Troy. Priam’s women never had cause to complain of her manners. She was a well-bred woman, and had learned patience in a hard school. Besides, it must have been some alleviation to her boredom to know that for nine long years the Achaeans besieged the city of Troy, ostensibly on her account, though according to my ideas the abduction of Helen was only a small match flame to a fuse that set off the big fireworks. I think that the Achaeans, with the exception of Menelaus, would never have fought so long merely for a woman, and she another man’s wife they’d never even have a chance to abduct. No, they fought first in hopes of sacking the rich town of Troy, and later because they would have looked very silly if they had stopped. Then there were all kinds of private feuds mixed up in the affair, and they grew in importance as time lengthened, until every single officer’s honor was somehow bound up in the siege. The war became a habit, and Helen, the original cause, was nearly forgotten.
Even Menelaus must have had to remind himself sometimes that he was a cuckold and that his honor demanded repair. Never for a moment did he lose sight of his dearest wish, to carve the heart out of Paris, but it was only to be expected that his mind should dwell more on that satisfaction than on the loss of a wife. Also he probably thought of his property, his wealth, now dispersed among the tall pillars of Paris’s house, and then he would grind his teeth and look forward to getting it all back with interest. But to think of the siege of Troy as a clear-cut example of a love battle is, I am sure, a gross oversimplification, and equally gross flattery of Helen.
Fortunately for her spirits, that lady did not have to remain cloistered and immobile for the duration. The cold war waxed hot at last, Menelaus sensibly suggesting a private duel between Paris and himself, and pledging that he would stand by the result, whatever the outcome. But Helen’s bad luck in marriage continued. She was invited to the Scaean Gate to witness the encounter, and she went forthwith, tears of homesickness running down her cheeks. It would have been far better for her pride not to be in the public eye at that particular time, for, ultimately, Paris did not show up well.
It began in an orderly manner enough. After a considerable amount of palaver and ceremonial sacrifice, for the ancients were a talkative people and the gods resented the slightest neglect, the duel began. Paris won the toss as to who should have first chance to throw his spear, but Menelaus parried the blow with his shield. The King’s spear had more effect; it came very close to killing, but Paris swerved and saved himself. Menelaus’s sword broke on Paris’s helmet, and then, mad with rage, the wronged husband leaped at his rival, seized him by the crest of his helmet, and started to drag him back to the Achaean lines. “Paris was choked by the pressure on his tender throat of the embroidered helmet-strap,” and Helen would have seen the end of her pretty lover then and there if Aphrodite, with her customary unscrupulousness, had not broken the strap and whisked him off, wrapped in a dense mist. She put him down in his own perfumed bedroom and went back to Helen, who was still sitting over the Scaean Gate, trying not to betray her humiliation and fury.
“Come!” Aphrodite said. “Paris wants you to go home to him. There he is in his room, on the inlaid bed, radiant in his beauty and his lovely clothes. You would never believe that he had just come in from a duel. You would think he was going to a dance or had just stopped dancing and sat down to rest.”
If Helen was irritated, one can well understand and sympathize. There she sat, bitterly absorbed in homesick remorse, and as if that were not bad enough, she had to swallow the unpalatable fact that Menelaus, her despised and discarded husband, had just proved himself a far better man than Paris, whose property she had become. Hardly a tactful moment, one would say, to suggest amorous dalliance with that same Paris. Helen lost her temper.
It was not often that any goddess received the tongue-lashing she now gave Aphrodite. All her frustration and shame came pouring out in hot words. Perversely, she gloried that Menelaus was evidently still interested in her and would be willing to take her home.
“… Go and sit with him [Paris] yourself,” she said at last, wildly. “Forget that you are a goddess. Never set foot in Olympus again, but devote yourself to Paris. Pamper him well, and one day you may be his wife—or else his slave. I refuse to go and share his bed again.…”
As might be expected, there was an explosion from the furious Aphrodite. She threatened the arrogant mortal until Helen was somewhat cowed and consented at last to an interview with Paris. Reluctantly she left her place on the tower; sulkily she accompanied the goddess to her own bedroom. There Aphrodite pushed home her victory: she seized a chair, carried it herself across the floor to the waiting Paris, and plunked the refractory Helen down on it.
Even then Helen showed spirit. She was still so angry with Paris that she could not refrain from scolding him, as bitterly as she had rated Aphrodite. And as she was never a hypocrite she continued to talk of Menelaus, that great soldier.
Was Paris perturbed? Did he hang his head in shame? Or, better still, did he shout at her to hold her tongue, nor mention Menelaus again? Not he; he replied quite calmly and sweetly. Next time, he assured her, he would win. One couldn’t always win. In the meantime——
“Come, let us go to bed together and be happy in our love,” he said. “Never has such desire overwhelmed me, not even in the beginning—never until now have I been so much in love with you or felt such sweet desire.”
The unfortunate Helen could only obey him. Out on the battlefield Menelaus searched in vain for Paris. Once more he had been balked of his revenge.
Some moments later Hector came in haste to his father’s palace, panting and sweaty with the effort of fighting, hot with anger against his young brother.
“I wish the earth would open and swallow him up,” he said to Hecuba, his mother. “The gods brought him to manhood only to be a thorn in the flesh of the Trojans and my royal father and his sons. If I could see him bound for Hades’ halls, I should say good riddance to bad rubbish.” Hecuba did not demur. It would have taken a reckless woman to argue with Hector just then; besides, she probably agreed with him.
The hero stormed over to Paris’s house next door and stamped up to the bedroom. There, as he had expected, he found Paris, at his ease with Helen and a number of handmaidens, examining his armor with the anxious eye of a fop, but showing no urgency to put it on again. Vigorously Hector delivered himself of his opinion of such behavior. Helen’s presence did not deter him. He probably felt that she was his ally; I think she may have signaled her approval to him with a flash of her lovely eyes.
Even Hector, however, could not stir Paris to more than a good-natured, half-sincere apology. Yes, he was probably right, said Paris. The whole thing had been regrettable, but Athene had obviously been on Menelaus’s side. Better luck next time. Yes, he realized it might look rather odd that he hadn’t gone right back to the fighting—Helen had just been saying the same thing, as a matter of fact.
“Brother,” interrupted Helen, “I am indeed a shameless, evil-minded, and abominable creature. I wish I had found a better husband.”
Altogether one of the most miserable of family scenes. I pity Helen from the bottom of my heart.
The war dragged to its close, and all that the gods foretold came to pass. It was a bloody conclusion. Hector was killed and so was Achilles, who had killed Hector. Ilium was sacked and burned; during the final fighting Paris fell. But Menelaus lived to sail away to Argos in triumph, Helen regained.
One wonders what her opinion was of all this. The Odyssey gives us as sequel an attractive family scene, a conversation piece which reminds us of an eighteenth-century painting. It is just as artificial in its way as any Zoffany. Helen, sitting in her high-backed chair, reigning over her household gathering, recognized a likeness to Odysseus in the newcomer Telemachus. She became reminiscent. She referred calmly and cheerfully to the bad old days.
“Shameless creature that I was,” she said to her husband mechanically, in passing reference to the ten years’ war.
I cannot help feeling that things were not quite on this good-natured basis when she and Menelaus found themselves alone. Even after several years’ time he must have lost his temper when he thought of his wife’s abduction, and there were no doubt plenty of quarrels, inconclusive as such altercations always are, with the pattern monotonously repetitive.
Menelaus would refer to the best ten years of his life wasted in regaining his wife. Helen would retort that any man who called himself a man need not have taken such a long time about it. Followed a lively discussion as to Paris’s merits and demerits, with due attention to the fatal day when Menelaus had him on the run, to the great detriment of Paris’s dignity. Doubtless Menelaus called Paris a pansy, or the Greek equivalent thereof.
“Muscle isn’t everything,” Helen retorted.
“Yet if memory serves me,” said Menelaus, “you admired Hector’s.”
One thing led to another, and the quarrel always ended, I am sure, in exasperated tears on Helen’s part and a slammed door on Menelaus’s. Really, one doesn’t know which to be sorrier for.
I hope that when they grew old they made it up for good. I like to think of them then, taking care of each other when they had rheumatism or stubborn summer colds.
The Warm Voice
Sappho
Lo! love the looser of limbs stirs me, that creature irresistible, bitter-sweet; but you, Atthis, have come to hate the thought of me, and run after Andromeda in my stead.
And what countrified wench in countrified clothes fires your breast, though she knows not how to draw her gown over her ankles?
So I shall never see Atthis more, and in sooth I might as well be dead. And yet she wept full sore to leave me behind and said: “Alas, how sad our lot; Sappho, I swear ’tis all against my will I leave thee.” And I answered her: “Go your way rejoicing and remember me, for you know how I doted upon you. And if you remember not, O then I will remind you of what you forget, how dear and how beautiful was the life we led together. For with many a garland of violets and sweet roses mingled you have decked your flowing locks by my side, and with many a woven necklet made of a hundred blossoms your dainty throat; and with unguent in plenty, both of the precious and the royal, have you anointed your fair young skin in my bosom, and upon a soft couch had from the hands of gentle serving-maids all that a delicate-living Ionian could desire; and no hill was there, nor holy place nor waterbrook, whither we did not go, nor ever did the crowded noise of the early spring fill any wood with the medley-song of nightingales, but you wandered thither with me.…
A Chinese woman I knew, who had a brilliant career at Oxford and specialized in Greek, once said to me, “Chinese poetry can’t compare with Greek. It’s not only poetry: Chinese literature in general isn’t comparable with Greek literature. Don’t believe the scholars who tell you ancient Chinese is rich and beautiful. They don’t necessarily think so themselves. After spending all their lives on it, though, they aren’t going to admit they’ve wasted their time.”
She was particularly fond of Sappho’s poetry, and insisted that no one in early China ever wrote anything so fresh, passionate, and spontaneous. Of course, I told myself, she herself has spent a lifetime on Greek. By her own reasoning, she would not wish to admit—— Still, I see her point about Sappho, however dimly through my own ignorance of Greek.
The Lesbian poetess, you may argue, has no place in this book, because she had no effect on history. She caused no war, no political reform. Her love affairs, being Sapphic, were sterile; we do not even know exactly who her beloveds were, or, save for Erinna the poetess, what they did. I can only reply to you that Sappho is history. Most of her life is unknown, but that doesn’t matter: she is the first human being whose voice we actually hear. She talks through the ages straight to us, and we understand her. That is inexpressibly important to the world’s story.
Beyond her on that long road leading back to antiquity the forms we see are indistinct. It is too long ago. All we can swear to is that there were people in those days, and it is for some reason comforting to be sure even of that much. Since they were people not unlike us, I tell myself, they must have loved and quarreled and eaten and slept as we do. Still, one cannot wonder that some races thought and still think of the ancients as monstrously different from themselves—mountain-hurling giants, or many-armed creatures with extra eyes in their foreheads. The innocents know no better, for they have not heard Sappho. She is not a part of their love tradition as she is of ours.
The moon has set, and the Pleiads; it is the middle of the night and time passes, time passes, and I lie alone.
The warm voice is heard across twenty-five centuries, as if it were ringing today in the ear. Sappho is as miraculously akin to you and me as is that Dordogne hunter with his buffalo, brightly colored after all the dark years he has endured on the cave wall. Poem and picture reassure me; I am not to be left in solitude, after all, to face the whistling emptiness of Time.
And I am not the only one she speaks to. Everyone who has listened to Sappho takes possession of her and builds an image of her, usually in reflection of his own. All of which is, I suppose, natural, but it makes discussion of her difficult. The minute you talk about Sappho you step on toes. People are touchy about her. People are touchy in any case about what are generally called The Classics, and when you ask for more trouble by mentioning so controversial a topic as Sappho’s love life, you find yourself floundering in very deep water. Helen of Troy is a far less disturbing subject, but then Helen is a symbol, whereas Sappho is a woman. Symbols are always simpler.
Examined in clear cold light, without anyone’s theories to confuse the issue, the facts about Sappho are sparse but explosive. She lived about the end of the seventh century B.C., she wrote poems, she loved women. Some of her poems were about girls she loved and others were not. Those others, by our lights, were the conventional ones, but the poems she wrote to women may have been, by her lights, far more conformist and natural. I don’t know. You don’t know. He or she does not know. It doesn’t matter.
The Greeks do not seem to have thought it mattered either. They admired Sappho’s poems when she wrote them and for at least seven centuries thereafter. But when Jesus Christ had lived and died and the Church took hold of His memory, Sappho, like other early Greeks, came under a cloud. Every writer who had worshiped the pagan gods was suspect. Their literature was suppressed by methods unhappily familiar to us today; their scrolls were burned, and the priests did their best to expunge all memory of pagan poems from the people’s minds, regardless of intrinsic beauty. These censors did a lot of damage, as censors so often do, but in spite of their most earnest and well-meaning efforts a few of Sappho’s writings survived.
If the essential Sappho has herself survived in some afterworld or otherworld, she may wonder ruefully if these remnants would not have been better undiscovered. She could not deny that they have been the source of sententious foolishness among scholars and readers. The world we inherit has changed. It is still recognizably the same world; we realize that whenever we come upon cave drawings and ancient poems. Nevertheless, there have been changes, and one especially becomes glaringly, painfully evident whenever Sappho’s name is mentioned.
Today we do not think women should love women, or men, men. We carry it further; in the words of the etiquette books, such love simply is not done. Of course you know what etiquette books are: this statement does not make sense. It is done, actually. Indeed, such love adds up to reams of pages in best-selling novels. Psychoanalysts all over Europe and America (I don’t know about modern Greece) spend a good part of their working days trying to adjust the facts of such a love to a world which does not officially admit them.
It is possible that this state of affairs annoys Sappho’s shade. But I prefer to believe it doesn’t worry her as much as something else does: the way her name is taken in vain as patron saint of a number of crackpot modern institutions. The word Lesbian itself—what vision does it conjure up? A stocky woman in tailor-made coat and skirt, collar and tie, and heavy brogues, who possibly breeds dogs. I have never understood what in the name of Heaven she has to do with Sappho. She rejects beauty, which Sappho loved. She is a misfit, poor woman, and Sappho was more than accepted as a member of society; she was admired and honored. Our modern Lesbian imitates men, and Sappho never thought such imitation necessary.
I have arrived too swiftly, as one always does when one talks about Sappho, in the region of conjecture. Was she officially a poet, a government laureate as it were? It seems likely. Did she run a school, an academy, where she taught younger people to write and dance and sing for the temple ceremonies? I am sure of it, not only because many savants seem to think so, but because of what is called “internal evidence,” which as far as I can figure out means one part solid evidence to about five parts intuition. (This shows my amateur status. Real scholars never refer to intuition; they prefer to call it “interpretation.”)
Here is the slender anecdote which set my mind working. Alcaeus, a brother poet of Lesbos, wrote an ode to Sappho in which he said, “Dark-haired, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho, I would like to say something, but shame holds me back.”
This, I repeat, was part of an ode intended for publication, and not of a private letter. Even twenty-five hundred years ago there was a wide difference between the two. Sappho, as any modern poet would have done, pleasantly replied by the same method of communication.
“If what you wanted had been good or noble,” she retorted, “shame would not show in your eyes; you would speak of it frankly.”
The rest of you may interpret this exchange as you will; for myself I think it proves conclusively that Sappho was a schoolmistress. What could be more schoolmistressy than that? Poor snubbed Alcaeus!
She was head of an academy of young poets, then, who tried their hands, collectively or in competition, whenever an ode was wanted in commemoration of important Lesbian occasions. Probably Sappho’s academy was the source of supply for dancers and musicians at all the temple celebrations, and they sang their own songs as they danced. One shudders to think of the rivalry, the heart-burnings, the mutual accusations of favoritism that must have preceded first nights among these ambitious fledgelings. If Sappho was paid a salary for this work, we can safely declare that she earned it. Some of the young women to whom the headmistress wrote her passionate lines may have been members of the institute: Erinna of Telos was referred to as Sappho’s pupil. What we know about Erinna is interesting if scrappy. For one thing, she was a very good poet; at least contemporary critics said so. (Her works were burned in the Church reformist holocaust.) For another, she did not return Sappho’s love, and Sappho wrote a poem complaining about her coldness. Yet did Sappho really love Erinna? Does a poet necessarily adore the person he addresses openly, in words he intends to endure for centuries? He loves his poem and he uses a name for it, but the interpretation is not always so sweetly simple as all that.
Sappho was fashionable on Lesbos and beyond. All the literati of Greece knew her work, and they claimed, at least, to appreciate it. She was compared to the best writer they knew—to Homer, who even in those distant days was considered an ancient. No one was sure when he had lived, or knew any incontrovertible facts about him. It was rather like us with Shakespeare. There was even a Baconian school of thought which argued that Homer wasn’t Homer at all.
But let us get back to Sappho. It was inevitable that among the praises there should be upraised here and there a dissenting voice. After all, asked one of the critics, a man and himself a writer—after all, what did one learn from Sappho save how to make love to maidens?
It was a sour remark. We will never know just what frustration or jealousy prompted it. It is, as I have said before, too long ago. The speaker may have suffered from an unkind criticism Sappho had made of his work, or perhaps he genuinely disliked her style, or maybe he considered that his own poetry was unjustly neglected because everyone was running, sheeplike, after her. The only thing we can be sure of is a negative one; he was not expressing prudish disapproval of Sappho for loving maidens. It would not have occurred to him to condemn her for that. The Greeks didn’t disapprove of that sort of thing.
In fact, if homosexuality were as dangerous and contagious as it is believed nowadays to be, there wouldn’t be any human race left on the planet by this time. The Greeks would have died out for lack of reproduction, and the races subject to them would have adopted these habits wholesale, and then they too would have died out, and so ad infinitum.
Sappho and her academy were only a small, unimportant part of society: it is to be feared women in general played an unimportant part in the Greek scene, as they have in many another epoch of history. If we believe the intellectuals of the time, the leading men of Attica and Aeolia hadn’t much use for women anyway. They liked boys. Boy love wasn’t just one of those weaknesses which can be winked at, either. On the contrary, it was supposed to be a good thing. It stimulated heroic sentiments, the Greeks said. The boys naturally would want to be popular, and they worked hard at the gymnasium trying to improve their physique. Any boy who had a name for beauty, charm, modesty, and all the rest of it was followed around by crowds of respectable statesmen, philosophers and other V.I.P.s. It was a most extraordinary state of affairs. Under such circumstances it is small wonder that the habits of Sappho and her little group did not attract more attention, or stimulate more resentful criticism.
At that, she didn’t get off scot-free. Even twenty-five centuries ago, the literati were capable of malicious gossip. Some wag, years after Sappho’s death, deliberately made up a story about her, alleging that she had fallen madly, hopelessly in love with a character named Phaon. She was portrayed pursuing Phaon unavailingly, and committing suicide at last because he would have nothing to do with her. People began to believe the silly story after a few years, and the cliff from which she was supposed to have jumped was pointed out to visitors on Lesbos as “Sappho’s Leap.” The longer the tale was bandied about, the more people believed it. Within a hundred years of the real Sappho’s death (which presumably was not by suicide, and not for love), there were at least two comedies written on this theme, both of which represented Sappho as a grotesque, comic figure. The truth could not possibly have resembled the travesty in any particular. Phaon was a mythical character, a comic in his own right: he appeared in other plays and legends as well.
It is an unhappy fate to become grotesque in the minds of posterity. Taken all in all, I think Sappho’s shade has a thin time of it. She couldn’t have had a very good time even when she was alive. In the first place, she was a woman who loved women, in a world made by men for men who prided and preened themselves on loving other men. In the second place, she was a schoolmistress. Schoolmistresses are not always treated with the courtesy they deserve, it being generally supposed that they lack humor and resilience. She would not have dared to take herself too seriously, and I think people must often unwittingly have hurt Sappho’s feelings. It would be a great mistake to think that she lived in an atmosphere that was all rose leaves, vine leaves, music and song.
There must have been compensations, of course. She must have known what a good poet she was. Even the rest of the world, imperceptive though it was, knew that.
And for all the cruel plays men wrote about her, they went on knowing how good she was. Down to Plato’s time they talked about her in admiration. Plato called her the tenth Muse.
There were in the beginning of the world, said Aristophanes, three sexes, male, female, and hermaphrodite. Each male had two faces, four arms, four legs, and two identical sets of procreative organs. The females likewise had two faces, two sets of limbs, and, like the males, two sets of private parts, exactly alike. The hermaphrodites, however, were different: their double reproductive organs were not twins but each creature had one of each.
In a world cataclysm, all these creatures were split into two, and the resulting people were just as we see each other now. Throughout our lives, says Aristophanes, we seek each his original other half. The descendants of the hermaphrodites seek their opposite sexes. It is the descendants of the males and the females who seek their identicals.
Sappho must have been one of these.
I love all delicate things
and Love for me
has the shining, has the beauty
of the Sun.
And I love, dreamily,
to lie beside a shady spring and leaning
touch the cool fronds of its murmuring:
to let loose captive birds and kisses let loose
into a wheeling sky of gold
on wider wings than any bird has grown
and vanishing:
raspberries, and dark lashes to pale eyes,
violets: and then girls
going tired to bed
undressing in the dark without a word,
knowing their own nakedness so well—
the rustling and the quiet hands are heard,
then only nakedness, as the night breathes
and hands reach out to seek …
stripping the darkness too as they go stroking
for Beauty by the mind’s rose-lanterns fed
yet carven on the cheek:
I love all delicate things—
O Andromeda, bare your body to me.
Very Unpleasant Characters
Cleopatra
Halfway down the stairs, much nearer than Helen and Sappho to the foot where we stand gaping up at all these figures, stands Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt. At first it may be difficult to recognize her. Cleopatra’s role in history was altered strangely long after her death, by an impertinent man named Shakespeare. He took a strong-minded woman who had the almost legendary qualities of a true sovereign, stripped her of the extraneous emotions and thoughts which cluttered his story, and transmuted her into a Great Lover. So vivid was Shakespeare’s Cleopatra that she quite outshone the real one. The Shakespeare Cleopatra was, first of all, a woman (how one slips inevitably into Hollywood speech, discussing her!) whose state and power were merely background to the stirring tale of her passion for Antony. It is rather a shock to turn away from this lovely single-minded creature in tan grease paint, to regard with as unprejudiced an attitude as we can muster, after a lifetime of theater, the human being Cleopatra really was.
Shakespeare’s Cleopatra was a much nicer character than the real one. That is my point.
Perhaps, however, I should qualify these sweeping statements I am making about the real Cleopatra, because I haven’t much to go on. The one in the play was born over three hundred years ago, in the seventeenth century, whereas the original lived some years before Christ. Facts, like royal trappings, decay and are lost in sixteen hundred years, and many facts about Cleopatra have disappeared in that fashion.
Somebody had occasion only the other day to sum up what is called “source material” on the Egyptian queen. After ruthlessly discarding all secondary comment, he was left with a few words in Egyptian, a little in Greek, and several gossipy paragraphs in Latin; not very much considering Shakespeare and Otway and Shaw and all the others who have used her story. There is an argument that because we know something of Julius Caesar and Antony, we also know something more of Cleopatra than is written in the sources. But do we? Can one deduce a woman’s character from the sort of lovers she chose? And, if it comes to that, did Cleopatra choose her lovers? Not really. In her position her choice was too limited to be called choice at all. Her lovers were selected for her by accident of birth and international politics.
For that matter, one may well ask if Caesar was, in fact, her lover at all. It is not a new question. His Anglo-Saxon champions say indignantly that he was not. They say everybody knows the Romans were frightful scandalmongers, and Cleopatra was a vulgar little social climber who merely boasted, for her own advantage, that she had enjoyed his favors. Caesar was a gentleman, they protest; the greatest man in Rome. He wouldn’t have had anything intimate to do with a questionable character like Cleopatra.
Let us study the portrait busts of these two people. Cleopatra looks like an intelligent, handsome Greek woman. Caesar’s face is humorous, clever, and moody. Both appear eminently respectable; admittedly, sculpture has that effect on most faces.
Remember, you must be wary of ascribing your own tastes and codes to Cleopatra, and Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony. After all, whatever happened took place a long time ago and a long way off. We are always being brought up short, even by living peoples like Eskimos, or Indians, or Russians. They are not, we suddenly observe, at all like us. Then why do some of our scholars continue to invest the ancient Romans and Greeks with characters so very much like their own? The spectacle of Mr. H. G. Wells turning up his nose in fastidious disapproval of Cleopatra, as he does in the Outline of HistoryOutline