"Violet haired, pure, honey-smiling Sappho.”
So her poet friend, Alcaeus, called her.
We stood alone upon the promon-tory where the acropolis of the ancient town of Assos stood, a little to the south of the Dardanelles and Troy.
It was in Assos, supposedly one of the loveliest towns of antiquity, that one of Plato’s students founded a branch of Plato’s academy, and that Aristotle lived and married and founded the science of biology. We were exactly where he was. Three columns of the Doric Temple of Athena, built in 540 B.C., still stand. The site is high, clean, spacious, beautiful.
The acropolis looks west across the Gulf of Edremit, slightly downward toward the island of Lesbos, seven miles away, where Sappho lived and wrote.
We looked across the sparkling blue waters of the gulf and into the dark green folds of the island’s northern mountains, now in deep shadows cast by the late afternoon sun. We tried to imagine what the mountains held. We thought of the Greek colonists, who 2,600 years ago did the same as we were doing now, and of the Trojans, who did the same a few hundred years before the Greeks.
The early morning boat went southwest toward Lesbos, coming up to the island a little to the north of the principal town, Mitilini, then coasting south.
We rounded the long breakwater that extends across the north side of the harbor mouth. Five feet of mist lay on the harbor. As we watched, the sun’s warming caused convection currents to move upward, pulling the mist in from the harbor and upward with them, hiding Mitilini. And then the sun began to thin it out along the top, and then in places lower down. And then, as we came on, more of it was burned away, a few wisps shot upward once again and vanished, then only patches of the veil remained. Then all of it was gone.
Now green trees stood out upon the south end of the quay. Blue fishing boats, gunwales striped in green and red and yellow, lay on the beach below the trees. Fronts of buildings in soft tones of white and cream and yellow, some topped with the soft red of the tile roofs of the Aegean, lined the waterfront. Mitilini—clean, bright, and welcoming.
Athis...said
“...One of the gods is being good to us: today we are going at last into Mitylene, our favorite city, with Sappho, loveliest of its women...”
~ Sappho
We were in Ionia. Ancient Ionia, settled by migration from the center of mainland Greece, was a strip along the western coast of what we know as Turkey. About 25 miles deep and a hundred miles long, Ionia extended roughly from Lesbos to the city of Miletus, south of Ephesus. By 700 B.C., as we knew from the Encyclopedia Britannica, the region was spearheading Greek civic development and prospering through trade and colonization; Miletus alone is said to have founded 90 cities. Ionic thought dominated the intellectual and artistic life of Greece, and the Ionic dialect became the basis of later Greek writing.
Standing by my bed
In gold sandals
Dawn that very
Moment awoke me.
~ Sappho
It seemed an act of hubris, after 2,600 years, but we set out to look for some physical trace of Sappho’s presence. Not a cobblestone exists to prove she lived in Mitilini. We were directed to a long beach near Mitilini and told that one legend places one of her homes atop a low hill at one end. But no sign of it exists and that was the best that we could do. We drove west to see Ayiassos and other of the ancient villages, and the beauty of the mountains, of the olive groves, and of the flowers that are everywhere.
All the violet tiaras
Braided rosebuds, dill and
Crocus twined around your young neck
...
You remind me
Of a very gentle
Little girl I once
Watched picking flowers.
~ Sappho
We dropped down to the lovely southern coast, to Plomari, which produces ouzo for the gods, and then went further west. If you had never read a word of Sappho, you still could fall beneath the spell of Lesbos’ green and sparkling coasts, the land that the Turks, when Turkey held the island, called “the garden of the empire.”
Very little is known about Sappho. One of her translators writes that Sappho was born in Mitilini, or in Eresus, which also is on Lesbos, that she was born about 612 B.C. or earlier, or later, and that she either did or did not have a daughter named Cleis.
I have a small daughter called Cleis,
who is
Like a golden
Flower
I wouldn’t
Take all Croesus’
Kingdom with love
Thrown in, for her.
~ Sappho
Was Sappho lesbian? We don’t know and never will. Erotic fragments of certain poems addressed to women suggest it. But the subject is neither relevant nor important to the marvels of her verse.
Without warning
As a whirlwind
Swoops on an oak
Love shakes my heart.
~ Sappho
The Greek cruise ships sail just off the Turkish coast, south to Rhodes and back up north to Salonika and Athens. Rough seas delay them. One must then be vigilant to learn the sailing day and time. When your ship does come in, you go, because you risk having to wait longer than you can.
Someone will remember us
I say
Even in another time.
~ Sappho
Dwight Taylor Harvard ’41, LL.B. ’49, is a retired attorney and corporate executive. This piece is adapted from his recent book of travel recollections, A Kind of a Love Song (Educator’s International Press/www.edint.com; 518-271-5117). The first five translations above are from Mary Barnard’s Sappho: A New Translation (UC, Berkeley Press, 1958); the last is from Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Knopf, 2002).
back to top
