Imagine Sappho performing her poems, suggests Adam Nicolson in his latest book, How to Be, a sequel of sorts to Why Homer Matters, his 2014 investigation of the origins of the Homeric epics. Nicolson takes us back to the 7th century BC and the ancient city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, where Sappho lived. There she would share her poems, accompanying herself on her lyre “among a group of her own friends, perhaps with wine, perhaps … in the spring-lit apple orchard that appears in her poems, perhaps in a ceremony celebrating beauty.” The gatherings she led, attended by “honeyvoiced” women with “arms like roses” (often the objects of Sappho’s ardent desire), must have been quite the spectacle. Sappho’s poetic repertoire ranged from songs of praise for the goddess of love (“deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind”) to expressions of pure longing (“you came and I was crazy for you”) to contemplations rich in suggestive imagery (“as the sweetapple reddens on a high branch …”).[1] Her tunes are lost and her lines have survived only in breathless fragments, many of them intensely private and personal. The emergence of this modern-seeming sense of self, born among ancient seafaring people in the Mediterranean long before Socrates encouraged his disciples to “know themselves,” is the central topic of Nicolson’s captivating new book.
In Homer’s world, animated by larger-than-life emotions, gods mingled easily with humans. Both outdid each other in the schemes they produced, in the lies, disguises, and boasts they practiced. In the Iliad and Odyssey, no one ever runs out of words, and there’s so much plotting and double-dealing that people’s inner lives — determined by the thoughts the gods have put into them — have as little transparency as the wine-dark sea plied by Odysseus’s boat. People keep talking even as they are being killed. Thus, the priest Leodes, one of Penelope’s suitors, dies pleading for his life, “his head … still framing words” (Odyssey 22: 328-29, translated by Emily Wilson).
By contrast, Sappho’s poems point us to a state of mind where words stop. Hers is a “singing-about-not-singing,” in Nicolson’s perfect description, a shoring up of fragments on the edge of silence. “When I look at you, even a moment,” Sappho tells her lover in a poem often referred to as Fragment 31, “no speaking is left in me.” When Sappho sees the girl she desires laughing with a man who at that moment seems like a kind of god to her, merely because he is allowed to be where she isn’t, her tongue “is broken” (γλῶσσα ἔαγε in the Greek original). The phrase, in which two open vowels clash, is usually considered textually corrupt by modern editors, but poet-translator Anne Carson believes Sappho may have wanted to create that jarring sound. The metaphor she uses is jarring, too, though also a reminder that her struggles are internal ones, not ones waged on the battlefield. The Roman poet Catullus, when he reworked Sappho’s ode, presenting it as a poem he had written (Carmina 51), mistranslated that line, substituting an image that tamped down Sappho’s lacerating desire: “Lingua sed torpet” — “but tongue grows numb.”
Describing Sappho’s poetic innovations in Fragment 31, Nicolson offers a summary that is as perfect as anything I have come across in recent writing: “This revolutionary poem uses all the vocabulary by which Homer’s warriors shook and sweated and died, but turns the words towards a moment of unaccommodated sexuality and to an intensity of private anguish no previous literature had expressed. Public utterance slips under the skin of private reality; it is as if the individual human voice has been invented.” Note the “as if,” which allows Nicolson both to acknowledge the gulf that separates us from a woman living on a Mediterranean island thousands of years ago, about whom we know absolutely nothing, as well as subtly to bridge it. It is somehow appropriate that broken-tongued Sappho’s poems have come to us mostly in pieces. Marked by loss even as they speak about it, Sappho’s interrupted lines herald the new idea that we’re both a part of and apart from the life that surrounds us, both citizens and self-sufficient individuals. That is certainly one reason why they still speak directly to us today. Nebuchadnezzar and Buddha were Sappho’s contemporaries, yet she strikes us as the embodiment already of what Thoreau later said everyone should strive to be — a Columbus “to whole new continents … within you.”
The literary critic and classicist Daniel Mendelssohn has suggested that Sappho wouldn’t arouse that much interest today “were it not for two facts: first, that Sappho was a woman and, second … that she wrote about desire.” In other words, we value her because eros is central to our understanding of the self today. But what if even her most intimate declarations were, as some scholars have suggested, never written as introspective exercises but always for public consumption? The beauty of Nicolson’s reading is that it accommodates both possibilities. As Sappho, consumed by longing, recedes into the regions of her heart, her words at the same time stretch outward, in the mental drama they describe. Sappho’s loneliness becomes a public fact, her deprivation a daring performance of privacy. Far from being escapist, her work partakes in a world in which people and things are constantly on the move. Sappho’s poems smell of the city, the world of urban sophistication and easy indulgences to which she squarely belongs, but behind them one still hears waves breaking on the light-bathed beach that is just a few steps away.
Composed within sight of the sea, Sappho’s poetry is perhaps the most elaborate example of what Nicolson calls the “harbor mind” of Iron Age Greece — shaped by the rhythms of the tides, the arrivals and departures around which the lives of coastal people have always revolved. In a way, How To Be is not only a continuation of Why Homer Matters but also its counterpoint. In his earlier book, Nicolson had explained how for Homer the sea was “unharvestable,” synonymous with evil, the place where “life and goodness will never be found,” the opposite of home, as Odysseus never fails to remind us. The harbor-minded protagonists of How To Be have made their peace with the sea, have accepted that wandering and restlessness are part of the human condition. In Nicolson’s book, the term “harbor mind” captures a variety of mindsets. Sappho’s all-female gatherings couldn’t have been more different from the all-male symposia also taking place on Lesbos, theaters “for the expression of male togetherness and citizenship, male individuality and male performance,” where participants would engage in everything from high-minded conversation to hard drinking and ribald jokes to sex. Their poet was Archilochus (680-645 BC), allegedly the son of a Thracian slave, in whose work the ocean foams, too, “combed / By the wind / Like a wilderness / Of woman’s hair.” The metaphor — wildness tamed into beauty — captures the productive contradictions of early Greek life, where the benefits afforded by an easy life allowed philosophers to think hard thoughts.
Lesbos was known for its superior olive oil and wine, and Mytilene, where Sappho spent most of her life, was a hub of trade relations between the West and the East, Greece and Asia Minor. Sappho’s brother, Charaxus, exported Lesbian wine to Egypt where he fell for a courtesan named Doricha and stayed. Sappho missed him greatly — in one of her poems, she implored Aphrodite and the nereids (the sea-maidens) to restore her brother to his home port, “undamaged,” as if he were a ship tossed about and lost at sea (Fragment 5). Sappho and her contemporaries were cosmopolitans not only in spirit but in daily practice: They inhabited houses scented with perfumes imported from Egypt and Syria, donned garments dyed with Tyrian purple, drank wine from cups made in Corinth, and dined on salt fish from Thessaly or figs and honey from Anatolia. Lovers of luxury, they ate and drank too much, and they happily relied on the work of people they enslaved.
Ironically, their agreeable circumstances also allowed these early Greeks to dispense with the Homeric worldview in which powerless mortals were dominated by all-powerful gods. Xenophanes (560-470 BC), residing in Colophon on the Ionian coast, found the gods of the old Greeks — their feckless prevaricating, cheating, stealing, and fornicating — painfully embarrassing, a reflection of our basest impulses. Long before Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of religion as a projection, he trenchantly pointed out that “horses would have horse gods and cows cow gods.” For him, God — the God that he was interested in — was pure thought, pure stillness, “a wave interminably flowing,” to quote the poet Wallace Stevens. Past ideals of heroic athleticism now yielded to a kind of cultivated letting-go, which Nicolson finds reflected also in the statues made at the time, featuring fuller, more gently contoured bodies, as if the marble had agreed to soften and had learned to accommodate, rather than limit, the sculptor’s will. Little is left of Xenophanes’s ancient city when Nicolson visits the site today, some crumbling walls among the olive trees, with butterflies dancing among the thistle-heads, the sea only a distant promise.
Heraclitus (540-480 BC), the grim-faced prophet of ever-lasting, ever-burning fire, hated indulgences of any kind and railed against the vulgar decadence rampant in Ephesus, the city on the Ionian coast where he had come to live. His hostility even extended to water: “The soul wants to be wet, but it is death for souls to become water.” No wonder that he is usually considered the polar opposite of the soft-living Xenophanes. But Nicolson looks beyond the dry surface of Heraclitean philosophy and shows that he, too, believed in the fluidity of life. Heraclitus’s marble was his words, which he shaped into the floating equivalent of his thought. His dictum, now threadbare from excessive quoting, that one cannot step into the same river twice, acquires new relevance when one returns to the Greek original or at least a literal translation: “Into the same rivers on those stepping in / Different things and different waters flow.” Heraclitus’s words, writes Nicolson, are like “a stream running over pebbles in its bed.” They model the flowingness they seek to represent. Note how neither the river nor the self are the subject of Heraclitus’s sentence. Instead, the water and “the things” are — another example of Nicolson’s harbor mind in action. But Heraclitus is not suggesting that the mind lets itself be dominated by reality. To him, the mind and reality are one. As he is paraphrasing Heraclitus’s sentences, Nicolson begins to sculpt his own words, too, finding in Heraclitus’s writing “a recognition of the rhyming complexity of reality, same-and-not-same, this-and-not-this, you-and-not-you, now-and-not-now.”
How to be means learning how not to be. In the Odyssey, death makes no sense: “Numb dead people / live here / the shades of poor exhausted mortals,” the dead souls tell Odysseus (Odyssey 11: 475-76, in Emily Wilson’s translation). That vision never appealed to Pythagoras (570-490 BC), “heir to all the interminglings and synthesizings of the eastern Mediterranean,” who had a Greek mother and a father who may have been Phoenician, Syrian, or Italian, who fled from Persian tyranny to Kroton, a Greek colony on the southern Italian coast, where he garnered a large following. He never wrote a word but imparted to his followers a view of the universe as a harmonious whole where enlightened souls commingle and, when their time has come, travel into the unknown with grace, confidence, and ease. As a visual equivalent, Nicolson suggests the famous fresco from a tomb in Paestum showing a lone diver leaping into a pool of water, an image of quiet wonder, the young man’s supple, burnished body the only thing solid in a landscape that has been barely sketched in. And yet the man’s body appears weightlessly suspended in midair, as if the purpose of the dive were not the destination but that moment of arrested motion itself in which he is still preserved today, like a rare, precious insect fixed in amber.
[Cover plate of the Tomba del Tuffatore (Tomb of the Diver), Paestum, 470 BC]
Two dozen miles southeast of Paestum, in the Greek colony of Elea, Parmenides, who flourished in the late 6th or early 5th century BC, took up on the Pythagorean notion of a sphere beyond the one we can see and, in his fragmentary poem On Nature, took it further, proposing that the immaterial world was the only real one, in which death no longer existed: “Thus is becoming extinguished and passing away not to be heard of” (Fragments 8, in John Burnet’s translation). But, as Nicolson adds, even Parmenides could not dispense with the lesser reality our senses perceive, what Nicolson calls “the burning, brilliant, beautifying bazaar of life on earth.” We exist in both realms, one everlasting and ideal, the other colorful and transient but demanding we pay attention — similar to the way “a thinking mind occupies a sensing body.”
How To Be is a writer’s and a reader’s book, written for other writers and readers, not an exercise in minute scholarly analysis, and it is as a reader (and writer) that I most powerfully responded to it. Buoyed by the flow of Nicolson’s fine prose, I coasted through chapter after chapter, immersed in the details but carried along by the seductive sweep of his narrative. Some might wish that he had spent more time on those excluded from contemplating, from positions of privilege, the flux of all things — the enslaved, for example, who erected the temples, built the bazaars, and made the ships, the women who put dinner on the philosophers’ tables. But the wonder of Nicolson’s book is precisely that it’s not beholden to any kind of orthodoxy, that it’s free to practice the flux it talks about. His discussions of ancient philosophy are determined by his own interests, his approach influenced by the impressions he has gathered during his travels. He has sailed along the coasts and followed some of the routes that these early Greeks traveled, swum in the waters (not the same ones, though!) that carried their vessels, and walked through the rubble that is left of the great cities they once inhabited.
As How To Be winds down, Nicolson unabashedly plays favorites, expressing his preference for Empedocles’s writings: “A warm sun shines over [his] words.” Not surprisingly, the amiable philosopher of Acragas, the Greek settlement on the southern coast of Italy (now Agrigento), would also be his favorite dinner guest: “a human harbor, dispensing bonhomie.” (Don’t invite Heraclitus: he’ll just sit at the table and scowl). In Empedocles’ fragments, however, Nicolson finds a pleasurable summation of all he has been interested in throughout the book — the elegant reconciliation of the here and now with the beyond. The universe is shaped by the constant battle between the unifying power of Love and the separating impact of Strife, in an “everlasting cycle of change.” But Empedocles — like Sappho a devotee of Aphrodite — is also very clear that, in his view, Love is the primary driver of the entire cosmic cycle. From “perfect harbors of Love” (“harbors of Aphrodite,” in the original Greek) we came and to them we shall return. To illustrate the harmony wrested from multiplicity that is central to Empedocles’s vision, Nicolson directs us to the Doric columns in the temples to Acragas, each of them “undeniably itself” yet part of a larger whole. Step back and look at them from a distance, in a certain light and from a certain angle, they will melt into a series of “finely graded grey bands,” solid yet fluid.
It is said that, desiring to prove the soul’s immortality, Empedocles jumped into the burning crater of Mount Etna. Unimpressed, the volcano spat out one of his charred sandals. But who is to say that the essence of who Empedocles was doesn’t linger on in someone else today, still encouraging us — as Nicolson’s lustrous book does, too, paragraph by paragraph — to surf, as long as we are alive and maybe beyond that, on the constant “waves of being,” in the hope that, since so little else ever does, Love abides.
— in memory of Chris Carduff, 1956-2023
[1] All Sappho translations are by Anne Carson, from her If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002)
[Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on October 17, 2023, 368 pages, $32.00 hardcover]