[In the following excerpt, Bevington explores Elizabethan dramatist John Lyly's version of the Sappho myth—derived from Ovid—in his 1584 play Sappho and Phao.]

[John Lyly, in his drama Sappho and Phao,] seems unaware of, or uninterested in, much of the historical information that we possess today about Sappho. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature and the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythography¹ report that she was born at Mitylene, or perhaps Eressos, on the island of Lesbos in the eastern Aegean, probably in the seventh century b.c. She was of good parentage, and was a contemporary of the poet Alcaeus. Forced to leave Lesbos, perhaps because of political difficulties, she may have gone to Sicily and died there. Apparently she married and had a daughter, Cleis. Among her brothers was Charaxus, whom she reproached for his involvement with an Egyptian courtesan named Doricha or Rhodopis. Sappho gathered together a group of women dedicated to music and poetry, or perhaps to the worship of Aphrodite. Her own literary production included nine books of odes, epithalamia, elegies and hymns, of which one complete ode and various fragments survive. They are in a variety of metres, including the so-called Sapphic. Some appear to celebrate a passionate love for other women. Virtually none of this information makes its way into Lyly's play.

About Sappho's supposed ‘Lesbianism’ or ‘Sapphism’ in the homosexual sense, references are indeed hard to find not only in Lyly but in most writers before A. C. Swinburne and others in the late nineteenth century. The O.E.D.'s earliest citation for ‘Lesbian’ or ‘Sapphism’ in the homosexual sense is in 1890. If Lyly was aware of the allegation, as he probably was in view of Ovid's reference to Sappho's attraction for young women ‘non sine crimine’ (Heroides, xv.19) and of John Donne's ‘Sapho to Philaenis’ (written of course after Lyly's play), he seems to have chosen to overlook the matter as entirely unsuited to his project of flattering Queen Elizabeth.

His reticence on the subject of Sappho as a poetess is perhaps more surprising. Elizabeth, like her father, Henry VIII, nurtured her self-image as a monarch with a flair for literary pursuits, and so Lyly might have been expected to capitalise on the flattering analogy. Possibly he preferred to think of rulers as patrons rather than as dabblers, as his portrait of Alexander with Apelles suggests. But the larger answer may be simply that Lyly was not interested in what he could have learned about the historical figure of Sappho. Even for the historical association of Sappho with Sicily he seems to have been indebted to a suggestion in Ovid. Lyly was primarily attracted to the Sappho of legend and poetry.

Paradoxically, one legendary source to which he turned does not actually link Sappho and Phao, though it does give information about both. Phaon or Phao is instead linked with Aphrodite or Venus. This legend may have been influenced in turn by the story of Aphrodite and Adonis; indeed, Karl Otfried Müller argues that ‘Phaon’ or ‘Phaethon’ is simply another name for Adonis.² At any rate, Lyly found the story of the encounter between Venus and Phaon in the Varia Historia of Aelian or Claudius Aelianus (fl. c. a.d. 200). This author of De Natura Animalium, to whom Lyly often turned, as he did to Pliny, for abstruse lore in natural history, put together in his Varia Historia a compendium of broad but uncritical learning about political, literary and legendary celebrities of the classical world. Included in it is the following account of Phaon (xii.18):

THAT PHAON WAS OF A FAIR COMPLEXION.

Phaon, a proper youth, excelling all other in favour and comeliness, was hidden of Venus among long lettuce [original text: lettisse] which sprung up and grew very rankly. Some hold opinion that this Phaon was a ferryman, and that he used that trade of life and exercise. So it fortuned that Venus had occasion to pass over the water, whom he, not so readily as willingly, took by the hand and received into his wherry and carried her over with as great diligence as he could for his life, not knowing all this while what she was. For which dutiful service at that instant exhibited, Venus bestowed upon him an alabaster box full of ointment for her ferryage [ferrage in Q1], wherewith Phaon, washing and scouring his skin, had not his fellow in fairness of favour and beautiful complexion alive, insomuch that the women of Mitylene were inflamed with the love of Phaon, his comeliness did so kindle their affections.³

Aelian adds that Phaon was afterwards taken in adultery and killed. The account makes no mention of Sappho, but is set in Mitylene. Aelian reports in his next paragraph of Sappho:

Plato, the son of Aristo, numbereth Sappho, the versifier, and daughter of Scamandronymus, among such as were wise, learned and skilful. I hear also that there was another Sappho in Lesbos, which was a strong whore and an arrant strumpet.⁴

Aelian's reference to two Sapphos, one a poetess and one a whore, may reflect a male Athenian difficulty in coming to terms with the frankness of Sappho's lyric poetry; in many later writers, Sappho the poet is represented as a courtesan. Aelian here makes no explicit connection between his accounts of Phaon and Sappho, but he does present them in such a way that Lyly would have found them in adjacent paragraphs, both figures associated with Mitylene and Lesbos.

Lyly could have encountered this story of Phao and Venus connected with that of Phao and Sappho in Palaephatus' De fabulosis narrationibus (Peri Apistōn in Greek), a widely used compilation of Greek mythography that was surely available to him.⁵ As Bond says (i.157), one occasionally wonders if Lyly may not have used the succinct accounts provided by this and other convenient reference works, though he is very likely to have known Aelian and of course Ovid as well.

The legend of Sappho's love for Phao or Phaon seems to have appeared first in several lost Attic comedies,⁶ but it is not until Epistle xv of Ovid's Heroides, ‘Sappho to Phaon’, that the story becomes available to Lyly in literary form. Here Lyly not only could learn the narrative details of the legendary connection between Sappho and Phao, but, more importantly, could also read an impassioned fictional account of the heroine's suffering. As is his manner, Ovid allows the woman to speak directly of her lost hopes, her fallen fortune, her fatal infatuation for a man who no longer cares for her. To avoid Sappho's love, Phaon has fled to Sicily and Mount Etna. The speaker, consumed in more than Etna's fires, takes no consolation in music or in her own poetry. No more is she moved by guilty love of the Lesbian dames as of yore. She sees herself as greater than Daphne or Ariadne in that they were not lyric poets; she believes herself worthy of comparison with her fellow islander Alcaeus, of world-wide fame, and yet has been deserted by the man she loves. She concedes her inferior stature and beauty, but pleads with Venus to help. Her life has had many sadnesses—the early loss of her parents, a brother, an infant daughter—but none so great as the loss of Phaon. Warning the maidens of Sicily to beware of the tempter now in their midst, she resolves to throw herself off the cliff at Leucadia (off the coast of Epirus). She will die while careless Phaon stays.

It was apparently common to read ll. 51-2 of this Epistle as indicating that Sappho followed Phaon to Sicily, although by no means obligatory in the text itself. Ovid's poem was translated by George Turberville in 1567, although Lyly surely must have known the original. In any event, the combination of Aelian's and Ovid's narrations gave Lyly many of the essentials of his dramatic situation: a high-born and cultivated woman protagonist torn by an unhappy love, the suggestion of a setting in Sicily (though it is Phaon alone who certainly goes there in Ovid), Venus' gift of extraordinary beauty to a ferryman with whom she has taken passage, the infatuation of other women besides Sappho with Phaon and the lack of romantic completion in the love relationship.

Lyly's changes are no less compelling. Sappho is a queen, no poetess. There is no mention of guilty love for other women. Phao is far below Sappho in station; the difference in rank between ruler and subject, a plausible deduction from Phaon's position in Aelian as ferryman used to a ‘trade of life and exercise’, is much emphasised in the play. Phao is not only beloved, as in the classical sources, but is himself in love, with no suggestion of the insolent masculine carelessness so characteristic of Ovid's deserting men. As a consequence, Lyly's Sappho must learn to master her own affection for a willing Phao instead of suffering the pangs of rejection.

The symbolic contest between Sappho and Venus for the control of passionate feeling in love is new in the play; Ovid and Aelian introduce Venus in a conventional role only as the goddess of love and provider of physical beauty. Venus' motive in bestowing beauty on Phao as a means of entrapping Sappho in amorous longing is an invention of Lyly's. So is the inclusion of Cupid, of Vulcan and of the Cyclopes. Lyly adds philosophers and courtiers to the court of Sappho so that they may debate issues already aired in Campaspe, and in turn parodies their debate with the pert badinage of servants. Sappho's ladies-in-waiting are perhaps hinted at in Aelian's women of Mitylene and their infatuation with Phaon, but fill an expanded role in a discussion of court manners and feminine experiences in love. The ancient Sibylla to whom Phao turns for advice is derived from Ovid's Metamorphoses (xiv.130ff.) and perhaps from Virgil's Aeneid (vi.8ff.), but the inclusion of her in the present story is new, while her role as an adviser in love is indebted to medieval traditions of the court of love.⁷

Notes

1. Sir Paul Harvey, ed., The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Oxford, 1937), pp. 381-2, and Sir William Smith, ed., Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythography, 3 vols. (London, 1890), iii.707-11.

2. Karl Otfried Müller, A History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, 3 vols. (rpt. Port Washington, N. Y., 1958), i.231.

3. The translation, here modernised, is that of Abraham Fleming, A Register of Histories, Containing Martial Exploits of Worthy Warriors … Written in Greek by Aelianus, a Roman, and Delivered in English … by Abraham Fleming (London, 1576), pp. 125-6.

4. Trans. Abraham Fleming (1576), p. 126.

5. Palaephatus, De fabulosis narrationibus, published with the Fabularum Liber attributed to C. Julius Hyginus (Basel, 1535), ed. Stephen Orgel (New York, 1976). For the Greek text see Peri Apistōn, Mythographi Graeci, iii, fasc. 2, ed. Nicolaus Festa, Leipzig, 1902), p. 69.

6. Müller, A History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, i.231.

7. See William Allan Neilson, The Origins and Sources of the Court of Love (Boston, 1899); rpt. (New York, 1967), pp. 31, 33, and 134-5.