XLV. CLEONE TO ASPASIA. Epimedea, it appears, has not corrupted very Perhaps I may wrong him, for a hope is akin to a doubt; it may be that I am mistaken, since we have not all his poems even here in Athens. Several of these too, particularly the Dithyram-grossly your purity and simplicity in dress. Yet, bics, are in danger of perishing. The Odes on the victors at the games will be preserved by the vanity of the families they celebrate; and, being thus safe enough for many years, their own merit will sustain them afterward. It is owing to a stout nurse that many have lived to an extreme old age. Some of the Odes themselves are of little value in regard to poetry, but he exercises in all of them as much dexterity as the worthies he applauds had displayed in their exploits. remembering your observation on armlets, I can not but commend your kindness and sufferance in wearing her emeralds. Your opinion was formerly, that we should be careful not to subdivide our persons. The arm is composed of three parts; no one of them is too long. Now the armlet intersects that portion of it which must be considered as the most beautiful. In my idea of the matter, the sandal alone is susceptible of gems, after the zone has received the richest. The zone is necessary to our vesture, and encompasses the person, in every quarter of the humanized world, in one invariable manner. The hair too is divided by nature in the middle of the head. There is a cousinship between the hair and the flowers; and from this relation the poets have called by the same name the leaves and it. They appear on the head as if they had To compensate the disappointment you complained of, I will now transcribe for you an ode of Corinna to her native town, being quite sure it is not in your collection. Let me first inform you that the exterior of the best houses in Tanagra is painted with historical scenes, adventures of Gods, allegories, and other things; and under the walls of the city flows the rivulet Ther-been seeking one another. Our national dress, modon. This it is requisite to tell you of so small and so distant a place. CORINNA TO TANAGRA. Tanagra! think not I forget Thy beautifully-storied streets; Be sure my memory bathes yet In clear Thermodon, and yet greets The blithe and liberal shepherd-boy, very different from the dresses of barbarous nations, is not the invention of the ignorant or the slave; but the sculptor, the painter, and the poet, have studied how best to adorn the most beautiful object of their fancies and contempla. tions. The Indians, who believe that human pains and sufferings are pleasing to the deity, make incisions in their bodies, and insert into them imperishable colours. They also adorn the ears and noses and foreheads of their gods. These were the ancestors of the Egyptian; we Upheav'd with sylvan fruit ; away he bounds, and blushes. chose handsomer and better-tempered ones for our worship, but retained the same decorations in our sculpture, and to a degree which the sobriety of the Egyptian had reduced and chastened. Hence we retain the only mark of barbarism which dishonours our national dress, the use of ear-rings. If our statues should all be broken by some convulsion of the earth, would it be believed by future ages that, in the country and age of Sophocles, the women tore holes in their ears to let rings into, as the more brutal of peasants do with the snouts of sows! XLVI. ASPASIA TO CLEONE. Cleone, I do not know whether I ought to write out for you anything of Mimnermus. What is amatory poetry without its tenderness? and what was ever less tender than his? Take however the verses, such as they are. Whether they make you smile or look grave, without any grace of their own they must bring one forward. Certainly they are his best, which can not be said of every author out of whose rarer works I have added something to your collection. I wish not Thasos rich in mines, Nor wider Lydia, where the sound In this whole world enough for me I have been reading works widely different from theirs; the odes of the lovely Lesbian. I think she has injured the phaleucian verse, by transposing one foot, and throwing it backward. How greatly more noble and more sonorous are those hendecasyllabics commencing the Scolion on Harmodius and Aristogiton, than the very best of hers, which, to my ear, labour and shuffle in their movement. Her genius was wonderful, was prodigious. I am neither blind to her beauties nor indifferent to her sufferings. We love for ever those whom we have wept for when we were children: we love them more than even those who have wept for us. Now I have grieved for Sappho, and so have you, Aspasia! we shall not therefore be hard judges of her sentiments or her poetry. Frequently have we listened to the most absurd and extravagant praises of the answer she gave Alcæus, when he told her he wished to say something, but shame prevented him. This answer of hers is a proof that she was deficient in delicacy and in tenderness. Could Sappho be ignorant how infantinely inarticulate is early love? Could she be ignorant that shame and fear seize it unrelentingly by the throat, while hard-hearted impudence stands at ease, prompt at opportunity, and profuse in declarations! There is a gloom in deep love, as in deep water: there is a silence in it which suspends the foot, and the folded arms and the dejected head are the images it reflects. No voice shakes its surface: the Muses themselves approach it with a tardy and a timid step, and with a low and tremulous and melancholy song. The best Ode of Sappho, the Ode to Anactoria, "Happy as any God is he," &c., ness. The description of her malady may be quite correct, but I confess my pleasure ends at the first strophe, where it begins with the generality of readers. I do not desire to know the effects of the distemper on her body, and I run out of the house into the open air, although the symptoms have less in them of contagion than of unseemliBoth Sophocles and Euripides excite our sympathies more powerfully and more poetically. I will not interfere any farther with your reflections; and indeed when I began, I intended to remark only the injustice of Sappho's reproof to Alcæus in the first instance, and the justice of it in the second, when he renewed his suit to her after he had fled from battle. We find it in the only epigram attributed to her. He who from battle runs away May pray and sing, and sing and pray ; He ne'er shall run away with me. In my opinion no lover should be dismissed with contumely, or without the expression of commiseration, unless he has committed some bad action. O Aspasia! it is hard to love and not to be loved again. I felt it early; I still feel it. There is a barb beyond the reach of dittany; but years, as they roll by us, benumb in some degree our sense of suffering. Season comes after season, and covers as it were with soil and herbage the flints that have cut us so cruelly in our course. XLVIII. ASPASIA TO CLEONE. I Alcæus, often admirable in his poetry, was a vain-glorious and altogether worthless man. must defend Sappho. She probably knew his character at the beginning, and sported a witticism (not worth much) at his expense. He made a pomp and parade of his generosity and courage, with which in truth he was scantily supplied, and all his love lay commodiously at the point of his pen, among the rest his first. He was unfit for public life, he was unfit for private. Perverse, insolent, selfish, he hated tyranny because he could not be a tyrant. Sufficiently well-born, he was jealous and intolerant of those who were nothing less so, and he wished they were all poets that he might expose a weakness the more in them. For rarely has there been one, however virtuous, without some vanity and some invidiousness; despiser of the humble, detractor of the high, iconoclast of the near, and idolater of the distant. Return we to Alcæus. Factitious in tenderness, factitious in heroism, addicted to falsehood, and unabashed at his fondness for it, he attacked and overcame every rival in that quarter. He picked up all the arrows that were shot against him, recocted all the venom of every point, and was almost an Archilochus in satire. I do not agree with you in your censure of shows the intemperance and disorder of passion. Sappho. There is softness by the side of power, discrimination by the side of passion. In this however I do agree with you, that her finest ode is not to be compared to many choruses in the tragedians. We know that Sappho felt acutely; yet Sappho is never pathetic. Euripides and Sophocles are not remarkable for their purity, the intensity, or the fidelity of their loves, yet they touch, they transfix, the heart. Her imagination, her whole soul, is absorbed in her own breast: she is the prey of the passions; they are the lords and masters. Sappho has been dead so long, and we live so far from Lesbos, that we have the fewer means of ascertaining the truth or falsehood of stories told about her. Some relate that she was beautiful, some that she was deformed. Lust, it is said, is frequently the inhabitant of deformity; and coldness is experienced in the highest beauty. I be lieve the former case is more general than the latter but where there is great regularity of features I have often remarked a correspondent regularity in the affections and the conduct. XLIX. CLEONE TO ASPASIA. Do you remember the lively Hegemon, whose curls you pressed down with your forefinger to see them spring up again? Do you remember his biting it for the liberty you had taken; and his kissing it to make it well; and his telling you that he was not quite sure whether some other kisses, here and there, might not be requisite to prevent the spreading of the venom? And do you remember how you turned pale? and how you laughed with me, as we went away, at his thinking you turned pale because you were afraid of it? The boy of fifteen, as he was then, hath lost all his liveliness, all his assurance, all his wit; and his radiant beauty has taken another character. His cousin Praxinoe, whom he was not aware of loving until she was betrothed to Callias, a merchant of Samos, was married a few months ago. There are no verses I read oftener than the loose dithyrambics of poor Hegemon. Do people love anywhere else as we love here at Miletus? But perhaps the fondness of Hegemon may abate after a time; for Hegemon is not a woman. How long and how assiduous are we in spinning that thread, the softest and finest in the web of life, which Destiny snaps asunder in one moment! HEGEMON TO PRAXINOE. Is there any season, O my soul, Could I wish to live, it would be for that season, In the hope to trace and follow thy steps! Thou art gone, thou art gone, Praxinoe! The helplessness of childhood, the solitude of age, The laughter of the happy, the pity of the scorner, A colorless and broken shadow am I, Seen glancing in troubled waters. My thoughts too are scattered; thou hast cast them off; I would throw them across my lyre; they drop from it; Or come to the sleep that awakeneth not unto her. L. ASPASIA TO CLEONE. Tell Hegemon that his verses have made a deeper impression than his bite, and that the Athenians, men and women, are pleased with them. He has shown that he is a poet, by not attempting to show that he is overmuch of one. Forbear to inform him that we Athenians disapprove of irregularity in versification: we are little pleased to be rebounded from the end of a line to the beginning, as it often happens, and to be obliged to turn back and make inquiries in regard to what we have been about. There have latterly been many compositions in which it is often requisite to read twice over the verses which have already occupied more than a due portion of our time in reading once. The hop-skip-and-jump is by no means a pleasant or a graceful exercise, but it is quite intolerable when we invert it to a jumpskip-and-hop. I take some liberty in these strange novel compounds, but no greater than our friend Aristophanes has taken, and not only without reproof or censure, but with great commendation for it. However, I have done it for the first and last time, and before the only friend with whom they can be pardonable. Henceforward, I promise you, Cleone, I will always be Attic, or, what is gracefuller and better, Ionian. You shall for ever hear my voice in my letters, and you shall know it to be mine, and mine only. Already I have had imitators in the style of my conversations, but they have imitated others too, and this hath saved me. In mercy and pure beneficence to me, the Gods have marred the resemblance. Nobody can recognise me in my metempsychosis. Those who had hoped and heard better of me, will never ask themselves, "Was Aspasia so wordy, so inelegant, affected, and perverse?" Inconsiderate friends have hurt me worse than enemies could do they have hinted that the orations of Pericles have been retouched by my pen. Cleone! the Gods themselves could not correct his language. Human ingenuity, with all the malice and impudence that usually accompany it, will never be able to remodel a single sentence, or to substitute a single word, in his speeches to the people. What wealth of wisdom has he not thrown away lest it encumber him in the Agora! how much more than ever was carried into it by the most popular of his opponents! Some of my expressions may have escaped from him in crowded places; some of his cling to me in retirement: we can not love without imitating; and we are as proud in the loss of our originality as of our freedom. I am sorry that poor Hegemon has not had an opportunity of experiencing all this. Persuade his friends never to pity him, truly or feignedly, for pity keeps the wound open: persuade them rather to flatter him on his poetry, for never was there poet to whom the love of praise was not the first and most constant of passions. His friends will be the gainers by it: he will divide among them all the affection he fancies he has reserved for Praxinoe. With most men, nothing seems to have happened so long ago as an affair of love. Let nobody hint this to him at present. It is among the many truths that ought to be held back; it is among the many that excite a violent opposition at one time, and obtain at another (not much later) a very ductile acquiescence; he will receive it hereafter (take my word for him) with only one slight remonstrance. you are too hard upon us lovers: then follows a shake of the head, not of abnegation, but of sanction, like Jupiter's. Praxinoe, it seems, is married to a merchant, poor girl! I do not like these merchants. Let them have wealth in the highest, but not beauty in the highest; cunning and calculation can hardly merit both. At last they may aspire, if any civilized country could tolerate it, to honours and distinctions. These too let them have, but at Tyre and Carthage. LI. CLEONE TO ASPASIA. How many things in poetry, as in other matters, are likely to be lost because they are small! Cleobuline of Lindos wrote no long poem. Her lover was Cycnus of Colophon. There is not a single verse of hers in all that city; proof enough that he took no particular care of them. At Miletus she was quite unknown, not indeed by name, but in her works, until the present month, when a copy of them was offered to me for sale. The first that caught my eyes was this: Where is the swan of breast so white I will not ask you at present to say anything in praise of Cleobuline, but do be grateful to Myrtis and Corinna ! LII. ASPASIA TO CLEONE. Grateful I am, and shall for ever be, to Myrtis and Corinna. But what odour of bud or incense can they wish to be lavished on the empty sepulchre, what praises of the thousand who praise in ignorance, or of the learned who praise from tradition, when they remember that they subdued and regulated the proud unruly Pindar, and agitated with all their passion the calm pure breast of Cleone! Send me the whole volume of Cleobuline; transcribe nothing more. To compensate you as well as I can, and indeed I think the compensation is not altogether an unfair one, here are two little pieces from Myrtis, autographs, from the library of Pericles. Artemia, while Arion sighs, "Wait, or you shall not have the kiss," A God who tells me which is fondest. Here is another, in the same hand, a clear and elegant one. Men may be negligent in their hand-writing, for men may be in a hurry about the business of life; but I never knew either a sensible woman or an estimable one whose writing was disorderly. Well, the verses are prettier than my reflection, and equally true. The verses of Myrtis, which you sent me last, are somewhat less pleasing to me than those others of hers which I send you in return. A few loose ideas on the subject (I know not whether worth writing) occur to me at this moment. Formerly we were contented with schools of philosophy; we now begin to talk about schools of poetry. Is not that absurd? There is only one school, the universe; one only school mistress, Nature. Those who are reported to be of such or such a school, are of none; they have played the truant. Some are more careful, some more negligent, some bring many dishes, some fewer, some little seasoned, some highly. Ground however there is for the fanciful appellation. The young poets at Miletus are beginning to throw off their allegiance to the established and acknowledged laws of Athens, and are weary of following in the train of the graver who have been crowned. The various schools, as they call them, have assumed distinct titles; but the largest and most flourishing of all would be discontented, I am | nificent temple, built on somewhat of a Grecian afraid, with the properest I could inscribe it with, model, in the interior of which there are many flat the queer. We really have at present in our city marbles fastened with iron cramps against the more good poets than we ever had; and the walls, and serving for monuments. Continuing queer might be among the best if they pleased. his discourse, he assured us that these monuments, But whenever an obvious and natural thought although none are ancient, are of all forms and presents itself, they either reject it for coming dimensions, as if the Thracians were resolved to without imagination, or they phrygianize it with waste and abolish the symmetry they had adopted; such biting and hot curling-irons, that it rolls and that they are inscribed in an obsolete itself up impenetrably. They declare to us that language, so that the people whom they might pure and simple imagination is the absolute per- animate and instruct, by recording brave and fection of poetry; and if ever they admit a sen- virtuous actions, pass them carelessly by, breaking tence or reflection, it must be one which requires off now and then a nose from a conqueror, and a a whole day to unravel and wind it smoothly on wing from an agathodemon. the distaff. To me it appears that poetry ought neither to be all body nor all soul. Beautiful features, limbs compact, sweetness of voice, and easiness of transition, belong to the Deity who inspires and represents it. We may loiter by the stream and allay our thirst as it runs, but we should not be forbidden the larger draught from the deeper well. FROM MYRTIS. Friends, whom she look'd at blandly from her couch Thy secrets to the earth) have they been true What! shall these holier lights, like twinkling stars LIV. ASPASIA TO CLEONE. Thrace is governed by many princes. One of them, Teres, an Odrysan,* has gained great advantages in war. No doubt, this is uninteresting to you, but it is necessary to the course of my narration. Will you believe it? yet Lysicles is both intelligent and trustworthy.. will you believe that, at the return of the Thracian prince to enjoy the fruits of his victory, he ordered an architect to build an arch for himself and his army to pass under, on their road into the city? As if a road, on such an occasion, ought not rather to be widened! than narrowed! If you will not credit this of a barbarian, who is reported to be an intelligent and prudent man in other things, you will exclaim, I fear, against the exaggeration of Lysicles and my credulity, when I relate to you on his authority that, to the same conqueror, by his command, there has been erected a column sixty cubits high, supporting his effigy in marble! Imagine the general of an army standing upon a column of sixty cubits to show himself! A crane might do it after a victory over a pigmy; or it might aptly represent the virtues of a rope-dancer, exhibiting how little he was subject to dizziness. I will write no more about it, for really I am beginning to think that some pretty Thracian has given poor Lysicles a love-potion, and that it has affected his brain. LV. CLEONE TO ASPASIA. Never will I believe that a people, however otherwise ignorant and barbarous, yet capable of turning a regular arch and of erecting a lofty column, can be so stupid and absurd as you have represented. What! bury dead bodies in the temples! cast them out of their own houses into the houses of the Gods! Depend upon it, Aspasia, they were the bones of victims; and the strange uncouth inscriptions commemorate votive offerings, in the language of the priests, whatever it may be. So far is clear. Regarding the arch, Lysicles saw them removing it, and fancied they were building it. This mistake is really ludicrous. The column, you must have perceived at once, was Lysicles, a young Athenian, fond of travelling, has just returned to us from a voyage in Thrace. A love of observation, in other words curiosity, could have been his only motive, for he never was addicted to commerce, nor disciplined in philosophy; and indeed were he so, Thrace is hardly the country he would have chosen. I believe he is the first that ever travelled with no other intention than to see the cities and know the manners of barbarians. He represents the soil as extremely fertile in its nature, and equally well cultivated, and the inhabitants as warlike, hospitable, and courteous. All this is credible enough, and perhaps as generally known as might be expected of regions so remote and perilous. But Lysicles will appear to you to have assumed a little more than the fair privileges of a traveller, in relating that the people have so imperfect a sense of religion as to bury the dead in the temples of the Gods, and *Teres not only governed the larger part of Thrace, but the priests are so avaricious and shameless as to influenced many of the free and independent states in that country, and led into the field the Getes, the Agrianians, claim money for the permission of this impiety. the Leaans, and the Paeonians. Sitalces, son of Teres, He told us furthermore that he had seen a mag-ravaged all Macedonia in the reign of Perdiccas. |