Sappho's Leap (15 page)

W
E STAYED IN DELPHI
for a while after that, piling up gold, trying to see the Pythia again. To no avail. The priests assiduously kept us away no matter how we bribed them. We also looked everywhere for someone who had met Alcaeus when he was in Delphi and could report to us of him, but we never found such a person. Then, just as we had decided to seek passage to Naucratis in Egypt, a sign of Alcaeus' presence was sent to us.

By now we could afford to stay in a luxurious guesthouse, staffed by slaves, full of private gardens, fountains, and rich wall paintings. Our room had been decorated by a skilled Egyptian painter with paintings of suppliants bringing offerings to the Pythia. One of the females in the procession was small, had blue-black hair twined with violets and gold thread, and carried a lyre. She was walking behind a golden-haired warrior in full battle dress.

My heart sang. I was sure the painting depicted Alcaeus and me. All our play in Pyrrha came back to me. I remembered his twining violets in the hair of my delta and kissing the nether lips tenderly. I remembered him telling me that the corners of my eyes turned up like no other in the world. I remembered him discovering a mole on my finger and finding it beautiful. He kissed it again and again. I remembered him saying to me as we lay in bed, “No one, not even Aphrodite, escapes desire.” Then my mood crashed and turned black. What a fool I was, to find portents in wall paintings. This was no sign of anything at all. It was sheer coincidence. I was grasping at straws because I missed him so.

After Delphi, we were lucky to get as far as Crete in another Phoenician boat with a captain who knew of my fame as a singer. On the way, we even stopped at Aphrodite's island, Cythera, where we fervently worshiped at her shrines without a flicker of response from her. Praxinoa knew how excited I was to be visiting the very island where Aphrodite was born from the foam.

“Perhaps she will appear to us,” said Prax, “as she did at Delphi.”

“I dream of it,” I said. “Somehow I feel that only she can restore Cleis and Alcaeus to us.”

“Then pray for that,” said Prax.

“I will,” I said.

So I prayed and sacrificed and sang my “Hymn to Aphrodite,” but the response was silence. Always before, I had felt Aphrodite's daily presence in my life, but now she seemed absent even on the island of her birth. I sang to her and she returned a strange stillness. The predictions of the Oracle of Delphi haunted me. Was I never to see Cleis until she was full-grown? Was Aphrodite to retreat now that she had appeared to us in Delphi in the guise of the Pythia? Who could tell? It was all too terrible to contemplate.

From Cythera, an Egyptian ship took us as far as Naucratis on the Nile Delta. I entertained the Greeks who were sailing to Egypt, and by the time the voyage ended I had replenished still more of my gold. I asked the traders on board of the fate of my brothers Charaxus and Larichus, but they only laughed and would not enlighten me.

“You'll see what has become of your brothers soon enough,” one trader told me. “It happens to most of the Greeks in Naucratis. It probably accounts for the untimely passing of your late husband.”

Coming into the Nile Delta by water is an unforgettable experience. Where the lands of the Greeks are rocky and precipitous, Egypt looks newly reclaimed from the sea. Silty and marshy from constant flooding, the land is so fertile that the Egyptian farmer has only to sow his seeds when the waters recede, wait for them to grow, and harvest his fields as a gift of the Nile.

The Egyptian gods are the oldest of the old and some sages claim they have given birth to our Greek ones. The Egyptians were also the first people to divide the year into seasons, the seasons into months.

The great Egyptian pharaoh Necho, who admired the Greeks inordinately, had made the city of Naucratis a sanctuary for Greek traders from Chios, Samos, Rhodes, and Mytilene. Necho had been born a commoner and had difficulty earning the respect of his people, but once he did, they worshiped him as a god. In part this was because of his open-mindedness and his famous tendency to leaven work with play.

“Just as a bow cannot be strung all the time or it will break, people cannot always work or they will go mad,” he famously said. This was his justification for making Naucratis into a city of luxury and love. It certainly lived up to that reputation.

The harbor was filled with brothels of every description—some cheap, some ruinously expensive. There was a slave market where beautiful Nubian girls were being auctioned.

Praxinoa and I stopped to watch the show with the trader we had met on the boat.

“Don't worry, most of these girls will earn their freedom soon enough. In Naucratis, women go free while men are enslaved. Ask your brothers, Lady Sappho.”

“I have no idea where I will find my brothers.”

“Find out where Rhodopis lives and you will find your brothers.”

“And who is this Rhodopis?”

“She is the most beautiful courtesan in all of Egypt. Her name means ‘rosy-cheeked.' She used to be called plain Doricha and was the slave of a Samian called Xanthes, but she is a slave no more and with her freedom she changed her name. Aesop, the fable maker, used to be a slave in the same household, but he is also free now. He entertains her guests with fables in her palace. He is as handsome as Rhodopis is beautiful, but where she has low cunning, he has true cleverness. She manipulates men with her wiles. He elevates them with his philosophical fables.”

“Are my brothers enslaved to some Circe?”

“Some say they are, Lady Sappho, but that's not for me to say. Love is enslavement, as we know. And Rhodopis trades on love.”

“They were not here for love. They were here to trade the wines of my family's vineyards and increase our fortunes!”

“That's all I know—more I cannot say.”

“I think I will like Naucratis,” Praxinoa said, “where slaves go free.” She looked at me and laughed.

Praxinoa had become so much more to me than a slave that I could hardly believe she still thought of herself as one. On the voyage, she had grown her hair long like a free woman, covered her forehead brand with a beautiful Lydian ribbon of scarlet and gold given us by the admirers of my songs. I had even taught her to play the lyre to accompany me.

“Soon I shall be more Sappho than Sappho,” she joked when I taught her.

“Praxinoa—you are free whenever you want to be free. I cannot, I will not hold you, though I would sorely miss you.”

“Let us meet Rhodopis first,” she said, “but when the time is ripe, I'll hold you to your promise.”

But it was not so easy to meet Rhodopis. She lived in a huge palace, which looked to be a warehouse as much as a dwelling, and was surrounded by guards. Strangers were not encouraged to visit. Adjoining this structure was a millhouse where slaves went to purchase flour for their masters' households. This place was somewhat easier of access—especially in the early morning hours.

The following morning, Praxinoa and I entered there, pretending to be purchasers of flour.

The air was white with flour dust and the millstone made a dull grating sound. There in the clouds of dust I saw six stooped creatures—neither male nor female, neither man nor beast, wearing yokes and plodding around in a circle making the mill wheel turn. I stopped to look at these pitiful emaciated creatures. Suddenly one of the wraiths looked up and shouted, “
Sappho
!”

A man wielding a whip brought it down upon the shoulders of the wretch. Now his white bent back was crossed with rivulets of crimson blood.

“Sappho!” the man called again, as if impervious to the pain. I ran to him and the whip caught me on the cheek, flicking out a piece of my own flesh. The blood mingled with the flour on his back, on the floor, making a murky paste. My cheek stung, but I was more indignant at the outrage. The man with the whip was ready to strike.

Suddenly I looked at the pale wretch with the bloody back and saw it was my brother Larichus! He gave me a look of such sadness it nearly cracked my heart. The man with the whip raised it again as if to strike.

“Out!” he cried.

Praxinoa grabbed me by the hand and dragged me away as fast as she could.

“We cannot leave Larichus here!” I said.

“We cannot liberate him now,” said Prax.

“Larichus—we will return for you!” I vowed.

“If I should be alive,” he muttered. My brother continued to turn the flour-encrusted mill wheel, his blood streaking the whitened floor. The man with the whip flogged him again. I felt the whip as if it had fallen on my own back. I followed Praxinoa out of there in a daze.

Down near the harbor, there was a young Egyptian physician who plied his trade for visiting Greeks. His name was Senmut. As he stitched the wound on my cheek, I asked him if he knew my brothers Charaxus and Larichus and indeed the courtesan Rhodopis, formerly known as Doricha.

“They are your brothers?” Senmut asked. “Then I pity you.”

“What have they done?”

“What many men have done before them. They came here with their sister's husband to trade the wine of their native land. At first they prospered. Much wine is consumed in Naucratis, as you can imagine. Then they began to frequent the brothels of the town and they fell under the spell of Rhodopis when she was still Xanthes' slave. She begged them for her freedom, in fact she swore that if they paid Xanthes a certain sum, they could share her and she would be theirs alone. They fell for that old trick. It is a familiar game here in Naucratis, but they knew nothing of it. Rhodopis and her so-called owner have sold her over and over again to a variety of men. But that is the least of it. At her symposia, they gamble with weighted dice and Rhodopis always wins. She plays for gold if they have any, for property, for ships, for slavery if that is all she can get. She has enslaved many men—not only your brothers. She repeats this game endlessly—always with new victims. Charaxus first bartered away his own brother. Then he became a slave himself. But slaves in Rhodopis' house disappear soon enough and in Naucratis there are always new victims. The black ships disgorge them. They don't live long.”

“Then we must save my brothers soon!” I said.

“I wish you luck,” said Senmut dubiously.

“How shall we get into Rhodopis' house?”

Senmut laughed. “You'll come with me. It's easy to get in when she has a symposium—just very hard to get out!”

The nobles of Lesbos would have been appalled by what went by the name of a symposium at Rhodopis' house. Where we competed for our skill at making songs, her guests competed for their skill at tossing dregs of wine at each other. There were small knots of people playing at dice and other groups watching flute girls disrobe. (Later in the evening they would copulate with mules.)The wine was plentiful—it tasted like my grandfather's wine from Lesbos—but no sooner did I taste a drop than Senmut stopped me.

“Eat and drink nothing here,” he said, “if you value your life.”

I spat out the wine into my hand. It had a strange smell.

“Where is Rhodopis?” I asked.

“I don't see her yet. Sometimes she appears only very late, when the revelers are all quite drunk.”

But then I saw a woman who had to be Rhodopis. She was tall as Athena and beautiful as Helen. Her hair was gold and was bound to her head with ropes of gold. She wore an undyed, transparent linen sheath, which fell in folds to her golden sandals. If Aphrodite came to earth, she would look like Rhodopis—ropes of golden hair, brilliant blue eyes, round breasts with rosy nipples, white thighs, golden nest of tousled hair between them. You could see her beautiful breasts and honey-colored delta through the linen. She floated like a goddess and she smelled like one too. All the flowers of the East had perfumed her hair, her breasts, her navel. She came straight for me.

“Sappho,” she said, “I have been expecting you for some time. Alcaeus of Lesbos said you might turn up here. We have business to discuss.” She spoke as if I were her ally, not her enemy. I was stunned that she even knew my name, and still more stunned that she knew Alcaeus. From the moment I met Rhodopis, I was jealous of her—yet also strangely attracted.

“What have you done to my brothers?”

“What have they done to themselves? I have done nothing to them.”

“You enslaved Larichus, and Charaxus too, I presume.”

“I did nothing of the sort. I only loved Charaxus and cosseted him. Whatever he gave was of his own free will. Come, Sappho, you know yourself how women are slandered by men. Don't believe those who gossip about me.” She looked at Senmut defiantly. “Charaxus is overseeing the Lesbian wine for this symposium. He will appear by and by. Come, drink, enjoy yourself.”

I pretended to drink but did not. Praxinoa never touched wine, so she was safe. There was a sudden sounding of flutes and a ringing of bells. Babylonian dancing girls whirled out, wearing bells on their fingers and wrists and ankles. They carried sticks of incense that scented the room. They began to dance as if they were making love to the air. Their perfume was so strong it made you reel.

As they whirled among us, I scanned the crowd, looking for my brother Charaxus. Like Larichus, who had once poured wine for nobles in Mytilene when we were young, Charaxus had been a handsome fellow. He could not possibly be this puffy serving man in a wine-stained chiton, pouring for the assembled guests and bowing low to those who were his betters.

“Charaxus!”

“Sappho—thank the gods you have come to deliver us! This Circe has bewitched us!” Charaxus exclaimed.

“So it seems. And what of our poor other brother?”

“I would rather pull a millstone with him than be humiliated by serving wine at the symposium.”

“Perhaps you should have thought of this before,” Praxinoa said.

“I did. I warned Cercylas we were in danger of being robbed, but she bewitched him as well. He and I purchased her by borrowing against the next wine harvest in Lesbos. Now she is free and we are slaves to her. It happened faster than anyone might have imagined. I could not write this in my letter. And it gets worse. Now Rhodopis claims she owns part of our family vineyards! We shall never be free of her!”