The Satyricon - Petronius

It is not surprising that the Satyrica has a long history as a banned book. Pierre Pithou, a humanist from the 1560’s joked that he kept his copy “in jail”. (1)  In an archaic version of “Words with Friends” Lord Byron had “Codes with Friends” in which quoting portions of the Satyrica became a code for talking about his illicit sexual relationships. That being said, in Amy Richlin's essay “Sex in the Satyrica: Outlaws in Literatureland” she tells students reading Petronius that they are part of a brief moment in history where not only is reading the Satyrica accessible to the masses, (I found my copy for $2 at a thrift shop), but the Satyrica is also being taught to students as a study in literature rather than being sequestered away as corruptible material. 

I’m not going to lie, after reading through the Satyrica I felt fully corrupted. Like Alice in Wonderland crawling through a rabbit hole only to find a world of x-rated Mad Hatters and general obscenity. I needed a guide. And thanks to our modern world of instant gratification I was able to find a digital copy of Petronius: A Handbook, edited by Jonathan Prag and Ian Repath almost instantaneously. I found this book to be invaluable. It is comprised of twelve essays that cover everything from contemporary architecture: “Freedmen’s Cribs: Domestic Vulgarity on the Bay of Naples” by Shelley Hales, to mortality in “At Home with the Dead: Roman Funeral Traditions and Trimalchio’s Tomb” by Valerie Hope. So good. 

Ok, here we go. 

It is largely agreed that Petronius was the author of the Satyrica and a courtier of Nero. Upon gaining entry to Nero's coterie he became known as the “Arbiter of Elegance”. Tacitus mentions in his Annals that Petronius became more and more indispensable to Nero, until “in the end Nero’s jaded appetite regarded nothing as enjoyable or refined unless Petronius had given his sanction to it.” Here’s Tacitus’ review: 

“Gaius Petronius deserves a further brief notice. He spent his days sleeping and his nights working and enjoying himself. Industry is the usual foundation of success, but with him it was idleness. Unlike most people who throw away their money in dissipation, he was not regarded as an extravagant sensualist, but as one who made luxury a fine art. His conversation and his way of life were unconventional with a certain air of nonchalance and they charmed people all the more by seeming so unstudied…” (Annals 16.18)

So what kind of book would a Neronian arbiter of elegance write? A very, very complicated one. First of all what makes matters difficult for the modern reader is that what we have are fragments, roughly three books out of a potential twenty-four. The Satyrica begins almost mid sentence and we have to race to catch up with protagonists that always seem one step ahead, weaving from one reference to another, throughout a web of literary obfuscations. It is a satire about satires, a comic epic that destructs cultural norms and literary expectations.

Our protagonists are an awkward love triangle comprised of Encolpius, Giton and Ascyltus. They live outside the law, (❡125.4) and outside the normative cultural positions of slave/free, man/woman.  Ultimately, Encolpius is on a quest in search of his lost virility and his wayward lover, while the other two seem along for the ride. When the narrative opens, Encolpius is at a school of rhetoric with his teacher Agamemnon, yet it is the student we hear from first: 

“…I’m sure the reason such young nitwits are produced in our schools is because they have no contact with anything of any use in everyday life. All they get is pirates standing on the beach, dangling manacles, tyrants writing orders for sons to cut off their father’s heads, oracles advising the sacrifice of three or more virgins during a plague - a mass of cloying verbiage: every word, every move just so much poppycock. (❡1.1) (2)

While Encolpius’ complaint references those made by Seneca, this isn’t a philosophical treatise but rather the voice of a jaded student thinking up ways to prove there’s no point to learning so he can selfishly go back to his personal quest.  In an almost modern complaint he says it’s the parents that are to blame, they rush their children through their studies when they are still young and frivolous. If only the parents would allow their children to mature to a point where they are intellectually capable of appreciating the “noble art of oratory” then this honorable art would have its true weight and dignity. Within the next paragraph the framework begins to emerge. This book will be a playful criticism of everything held dear, nothing will escape the brutal wit of the narrator. 

“Your smooth and empty sound effects provided a few laughs, and as a result you took the guts out of real oratory, and that was the end of it. Young men were not tied down to rhetorical exercises when it was Sophocles or Euripides who developed the proper language for them. Academic pedants had not addled their wits when Pindar and the nine lyric poets shrank away from the Homeric style. And apart from the poets I can cite, I certainly cannot see Plato or Demosthenes going in for this sort of training.” (❡2)

What Petronius is about to do will make Plato roll over in his grave. He is about to systematically destroy everything sacred in a brilliant and hilarious way. A way that is without precedent or genre. In book III of the Republic, Socrates talks about how to tell stories, what meters to use, what meters to avoid, but most importantly he fundamentally forbids the artist or poet to represent characters that are vicious, unrestrained, slavish and graceless. He’s pretty specific, in a hyper controlling kind of way.

Petronius breaks everything apart. He not only combines poetry and prose, but he combines meters as well. He mixes iambic and hexameters within the same poem, which becomes an inside joke for the contemporary literati. When it is at last Agamemnon’s time to respond to Encolpius’s accusations he does so through poetry, saying “Just to show you how I’m not above a bit of low-level improvisation in the manner of Lucilius, I’ll throw you off a few lines expressing my feelings…” what follows is a mash-up of iambic and hexameters. The joke is that while Lucilius did write in different meters, we have no evidence that he did so within the same poem. And therefore the poem is completely un-Lucilian. (3)  The joke follows a thematic trail throughout the Satyrica of the uneducated posing as educated. It is grandiose posturing on a Neronian scale. 

After a description of the appropriate meter and mode for the most manly and heroic themes, Plato goes on to discuss the correct relationship between a boy and a man. The teacher/student relationship is sacred. It is not to be erotic and passionate but pure and chaste.  Petronius’ heroes are unrestrained, slavish and graceless and make fun of sexually normative behaviors. They are anything but chaste.

Giton to Encolpius: So thank you for loving me in such an honorable Platonic way. Alcibiades himself couldn’t have been safer when he slept in his teacher’s bed.” 

Encolpius to Giton: Honestly, dear lad, I can’t realize I’m a man, I don’t feel it. The part of my body that once made me an Achilles is dead and buried. (❡128-129)

I mentioned Encolpius’ quest above. Another genre that Petronius plays around with is the epic. Homeric references saturate the text and the Satyrica can be read as “sustained rewriting of the Odyssey". (4) Just as Ulysses faces the wrath of Poseidon after killing his son the cyclops, Encolpius faces the wrath of Priapus after desecrating a sacred ritual. 

Side note: Priapus is the guardian of the gardens and he protects his property with his huge erection, threatening to rape any attempting thieves. So…yikes. 

Priapus thwarts Encolpius’s romantic success at every turn ending in the sustained impotence of our hero. But while Ulysses is the penultimate masculine hero, Encolpius is effeminate, and frequently confused for a prostitute. While Ulysses is married to the faithful Penelope, Giton is hardly a faithful lover, the only absolute being his predictable fickleness. The majority of the humor focuses on Encolpius constantly losing Giton to Ascyltus and many others, both men and women. Again and again Encolpius tends to “epicize” his own non-adventures. 

When Encolpius gives Giton the choice between himself or Ascyltus, without much of a thought, “before the last syllable is out of his mouth” Giton picks Ascyltus. As the two wander away, Encolpius is wracked in grief. He packs up his belongings and spends three days in a quiet place along the seafront mourning the loss of his beloved. As he struggles to come to terms in his classically histrionic way he ponders how this has happened and who has done this to him: 

“…who brought this loneliness upon me? An adolescent wallowing in every possible filth, who even on his own admission had been rightly run out of town, free - for sex, freeborn, for sex, whose youth you’d buy with a ticket, who had been hired as a girl even by someone who thought he was a male. As for the other one! Putting on women’s clothes the day he became a man, talked into effeminacy by his mother, doing only women’s work in the slave pen, and after he couldn’t meet his debts and had to change his sexual ground, he abandoned the claims of an old friendship and - in the name of decency! - sold out everything like a whore on the strength of a one night stand.” (❡81)

It’s not clear whom each epithet belongs to. The descriptions seem to fit all three reasonably well. When Encolpius decides to rouse himself for battle and fight for his ‘Penelope’, he girds his loins, puts on his belt, grabs his sword and races to the market prepared to wreak havoc along the way. This is his most soldierly and heroic behavior. When a soldier seeing the rage and hell bent blood and destruction written all over his face he asks for the name of his regiment. Encolpius lies, thinking he has perpetrated a successful deception. The soldier then asks him if it’s normal for the soldiers in his regiment to walk around in slippers? And Encolpius realizes the ruse is up. He walks away, almost thankful that he didn't have to injure someone (most likely himself) with his soldiering. 

By far, the most famous portion of the Satyrica is Dinner with Trimalchio, where the three heroes make there way for a free dinner. This is where Petronius riff's on Horace (Dinner with Nasidienus 2.8), and this is where the narrative becomes the most elaborate and cacophonous. Everything drips and glitters with garish theatric stage appeal. Trimalchio is a self made man (a slave that slowly earned his way to the top) and he’s proud of his prodigious wealth. The definition of satiric elegance, with a clock that ticks away telling him how much longer he has to live. 

The three find themselves at the bath with their soon to be host, who is involved in all sorts of glamorous and esoteric sporting endeavors surrounded by a host of “long haired boys” (capillati) and eunuchs. A friend runs up and tells them that this bald old man in the red shirt is their host and they watch in amazement as:

“…Trimalchio snapped his fingers. At the signal the eunuch brought up the pissing bottle for him, while he went on playing, With the weight off his bladder he demanded water for his hands, splashed a few drops on his fingers and wiped them on a boy’s head…

[they all go into the bath and Trimalchio gets smothered in perfume while his masseurs drink and spill Falernian wine]

Wrapped in this scarlet felt he was put into a litter. Four couriers with lots of medals went in front, as well as a go-kart in which his favorite boy was riding, a wizened , bleary-eyed youngster, uglier than his master. As he was carried off, a musician with a tiny set of pipes took his place by Trimalchio’s head and whispered a tune in his ear the whole way.

"We followed on, choking with amazement by now, and arrived at the door with Agamemnon at our side.” (❡27-28)

Already our protagonists have witnessed the hight of self congratulatory conceit. Trimalchio makes a triumphal procession the short distance to his front door, glorying in his as of yet unattained victory. Besides taking a bath he has little to be “triumphant” about. This is reminiscent of Nero, the emperor without militaristic prowess. His victories were over “musicians, poets and playwrights, epitomes of high culture rather than barbarians.” (5) Oh yes, and family members. Tacitus mentions (Annals 14.13) the people lining up to watch Nero’s triumphal entry after murdering his mother…

After contemplating the murals decorating the entrance of Trimalchio’s mansion, which include signage that reads: “Any slave leaving the house without his master’s permission will receive one hundred lashes” and “Beware of Dog” the three enter a literary hall of mirrors, surrounded by guests representing the poverty of high culture. (The “Beware of Dogs” sign is a throw back to “Virgil’s Cerberus, who guards the gates of Hades (Virgil Aen. 6.417-23) The allusion makes explicit that dining at Trimalchio’s is a living hell.” (6)

As one would expect, working for Nero was perilous and unpredictable. Eventually Petronius’ popularity lead to a jealous rival, Tigellinus, who sewed seeds of discord and manipulated the emperor’s penchant for cruelty. 

Side note: Nero forced his tutor and advisor Seneca to commit suicide for his alleged complicity in the Pisonian conspiracy. Seneca’s grandson Lucan after a brief literary success was also accused of treason (this time accurately) and forced to commit suicide as well at the age of 25. Nero himself was a self professed actor, poet, musician and charioteer and did not share the spotlight well. It was a dangerous time to be a literary man. 

So according to Tacitus (Annals 16.19):

“Petronius got as far as Cumae and was prevented from going any further. He refused to prolong the suspense that hope or fear involved. Not that he was hasty in taking leave of his life. On the contrary, he opened his veins and then, as the fancy took him, he bound them up or re-opened them, and all the while talked with his friends, but not on serious topics or anything calculated to win admiration for his courage..simply gay songs and light verses. He dealt out rewards to some of his slaves and floggings to others. He began a lavish dinner and took a nap, so that his death, although forced on him, should appear natural. Even in the codicils of his will he refused to flatter Nero or Tigellinus or anyone else powerful. Instead he wrote out a full description of the Emperor’s vicious activities, giving the names of his male and female partners and specifying the novel forms his lust had taken…”

And from Pliny the Elder (Natural History 37.20): 

“T. Petronius, a consular, when he was going to die through Nero’s malice and envy, broke his fluorspar wine dipper so that the Emperor’s table would not inherit it. It had cost 300,000 sesterces.” 

In a world where daily survival took risk and intrigue, Petronius created a world to hide inside, a jest within a jest, a hall of mirrors, which allowed him to simultaneously critique his contemporaries and poke fun of everything else. In the end, life will be short and your fate will be in the hands of pernicious and vindictive gods. So like Trimalchio, Petronius rose a glass and surrounded himself with songs and light verses as he took his last breath:

‘What comes next you never know, 

Lady Luck runs the show,

So pass the Falernian, lad.”

(❡55)

1. Richlin, Amy. "Sex in the Satyrica: Outlaws in Literatureland."Petronius: A Handbook, edited by Jonathon Prag and Ian Repath, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 

2. All Satyrica quotes are from Sullivan 1965

3. Slater, Niall W. "Reading the Satyrica." Petronius: A Handbook, edited by Jonathon Prag and Ian Repath, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

4. Andreau, Jean. "Freedmen’s Cribs: Domestic Vulgarity on the Bay of Naples." Ibid. 

5. Klebs, E. 1889. Ibid. 

6. Vout, Caroline. "The Satyrica and Neronian Culture." Ibid. 

The Complete Poems of Sappho

Sappho: (born 630 BC) Daughter of Simon or Eumenos or Eerigyios or Ecrytos or Semos or Camon or Etarchos or Skamandronymos. Her mother was Cleis. She was a woman of the island of Lesbos, from the town of Eresus, and was a poet of the lyre.She flourished during the 42nd Olympic games, when Alcaues, Stesichorus, and Pittacus were also living. Her three brothers were Larches, Charades, and Ergyius. She was married to a very wealthy man named Cerkylas who traded from the island of Andros. Her daughter was Cleis. She had three companions and friends named Atthis, Telesipps, and Megera, but her relations with them earned her a shameful reputation. Her pupils were Angora of Miletus, Gongyla of Colophon and Eunica of Salamis. She composed nine books of lyric songs and invented the plectrum. She also composed epigrams, elegiac verse, iambic poetry and solo songs. 

 -Suda Encyclopedia (Tenth Century AD) 1

At face value it seems like we’re unsure of Sappho’s paternity; she has some girl friends that got her into trouble; she was a prolific writer, and contributed three major inventions to the lyrical/ musical world: the plectron, the pektis and the mixolydian mode. Upon further review, we realize that the name of her husband is actually a dirty joke, Cerkylas of Andros being loosely translated as “Prick from the Isle of Man.”2  Almost everything we know of her is suspect except for her own words and of these we have roughly one percent in fragmentary form and only one poem, "The Ode to Aphrodite" in its entirety. She is more of an enigma than anything else. 

I say “suspect” because many of her contemporary male writers were not huge fans. Since there was no way to refute her talent, her ancient contemporaries often slandered her. “She was called a prostitute and mocked on stage as immoral. And in a world where males prized a woman’s fair skin and well shaped form, second only to her modesty, she was described as short, dark, and ugly, even though the earliest portraits of her on vases portray a beautiful woman.” 3  Lucian describes her as a “nightingale with deformed wings enfolding a tiny body.” A rumor was spread that she jumped off a cliff because of the unrequited love of the boatman Phaon. Tough crowd. 

Return, Gongyla - Fragment 22

A deed

your lovely face

if not, winter

and no pain

I bid you, Abathis, 

take up the lyre

and sing of Gongyla as again desire 

floats around you

the beautiful. When you saw her dress

it excited you. I’m happy.

The Kypros-born once

blamed me

for praying 

this word: 

I want 

Willis Barnstone (2006) 

By the time we get to the first century AD, Seneca seems exhausted by the endless uninformed besmirching.

The grammarian Didymus wrote four thousand books. I would pity anyone who simply had to read so many supremely empty works. Among his book he inquires about the birthplace of Homer, the real mother of Aeneas, whether Sappho was a prostitute,and other things which you ought to forget if you know them. And then people complain that life is short. 

-Seneca Letters to Lucile's Ep.88

Ann Carson echoes Seneca when talking about Sappho’s sexuality: “Controversies about her personal ethics and way of life have taken up a lot of people’s time throughout the history of Sapphic scholarship. It seems that she knew and loved women a deeply as she did music. Can we leave the matter there?”4  Carson thinks such inquiries are merely a modern obsession that have little place and add little value to the discussion.

Despite the frenzy of intrigue she created, and of which we have an historical breadcrumb trail, she also left a trail of admirers. Her work is astounding. Plato calls her the Tenth Muse, and even our misogynistic friend Aristotle has to concede that she has earned her place in history as wise and honored, “although she was a woman.” (Aristotle Rhetoric 1398B)

In a world where everything from Homer to Augustine was written by men, what Sappho did was significant. Sappho provided a window into the lives of her contemporary fellow women, her poems brought the epic narrative into the home and took their place at the hearth. They are poems of friendship and love, desire and heartache. 

Ode to Aphrodite - Fragment 1

Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind,

child of Zeus, who twists lures, I beg you

do not break my heart

but come here if ever before

you caught my voice far off

and listening left your father’s

golden house and came,

yoking your car. And fine birds brought you, 

quick sparrows over the black earth

whipping their wings down the sky

through midair-

they arrived. But you, O blessed one, 

smiled in your deathless face

and asked what (now again) I have suffered and why

(now again) I am calling out

and what I want to happen most of all

in my crazy heart. Whom should I persuade (now again)

to lead you back into her love? Who, O

Sappho, is wronging  you?

For if she flees, soon she will pursue.

If she refuses gifts, rather will she give them. 

If she does not love, soon she will love 

even unwillingly. 

Come to me now: loose me from hard 

care and all my heart longs

to accomplish, accomplish, You 

be my ally. 

(Ann Carson, 2002)

In this prayer, not only is Sappho placing herself within the confines of the poem, the object of her desire and the deity she prays to are both women. Within the confines of this safe place she pours out her heart and her longings to the goddess, whom she has an obvious relationship with. And gently, almost like a mother hen, Aphrodite responds with humor and compassion. Again she comes to Sappho’s aid. Again she is called upon to help Sappho restore a broken heart and unrequited love, as an ally, as a comrade in arms. Even against her will Aphrodite will do this thing, and the sixth stanza becomes almost an incantation. A magical love potion. 

Interesting side note: Not only was Aphrodite worshipped as a goddess of war, but she was also the patron goddess of prostitution. And it was also a spat between Aphrodite, Athena and Hera that lead to the Trojan War. 

According to Philip Freeman “Most of her poems are songs of love wholly unlike the epics of Homer, who lived in the century before her. Gone are the blood and glory of the Trojan War and the monster-battling adventures of Odysseus. Instead, the verses of Sappho are deeply personal and celebrate the joys and agony of the human heart.” (Searching for Sappho, xvii) 

While this is true in a way, both the Trojan War and monsters still find their way into her world, but from an entirely different view point. The Trojan War is referenced constantly but from a distance, such as in poems about the wedding of Hector and Andromache or the beauty of Helen. The monsters of Homer become the nightmares of children, as the monster Gello haunts all the little children, snatching them away to their death.  

What Sappho does is change the perspective. The magnifying glass zooms in on the life and context of Homer, but then focuses on the unlikely subject of women and children, who in that day and age were only marginally separated. According to Hesiod, the best age for marriage for a young woman was four to five years after puberty, but girls from wealthy families tended to get married even younger, some as early as twelve or thirteen. Even when Plato and Aristotle encouraged families to wait at least until the Spartan custom of eighteen, this suggestion was largely overlooked. In this sense the very really monsters where not the ones far off on a distant shore but the ones between the bedsheets. While there is no way to ascertain the childbirth mortality rate, it would have been high. 

Many of Sappho’s poems would have been sung at weddings. They were performance pieces, and at times both celebratory and mournful. Between the lines (or fragments) is a world where women were esteemed slightly higher than the family ox; an almost invisible world of pain and heartache and fear. 

Walking to a Wedding - Fragment 27 

Yes you were once a child

come sing these things

talk to us and give us 

your grace

We are walking to a wedding, and surely 

you know too, but quickly as you can 

send the young virgins away. May gods

have 

Yet for men      road to

great Olympus 

Willis Barnstone (2006)

During the Renaissance two of Sappho’s poems, “Seizure” (Fragment 31) and “The Ode to Aphrodite” (Fragment 1) were included by Longinos in his essay On The Sublime and Dionysius On Literary Composition. Besides these two poems, for more than two thousand years, the works and writings of Sappho had almost completely disappeared. Then, in 1896, two archeology students from Oxford, discovered a cache of papyrus scraps in an ancient cemetery in the city of Oxyrhynchus, and since then there as been a fairly exciting trickle of discoveries, the most recent being the discovery of the “Brothers Poem” in 2012. 

My introduction to Sappho was through Willis Barnstone’s translation and I was completely blown away. Here’s his translation of fragment 88a:

As Long As There is Breath - Fragment 88

You might wish 

a little

to be carried off

Someone

sweeter

you also know

forgot

and would say

yes

I shall love   as long as there is breath in me 

and care

I say I have been a strong lover

hurt

bitter

and know this

no matter

I shall love

Willis Barnstone (2006)

But then to round it out I read Ann Carson’s translation and a completely different view emerged. What Barnstone had rendered as being legible, Carson leaves with the footprint of the illegible. These are after all fragments, and so much of the translation has to do with how each word is not only translated but stitched together with the fragments surrounding it. Here’s Carson’s version: 

88B

]me

]

]

]you

]

]

shall love

]

]

]

88A

]

]in front

]toward

]loosen

]you would be willing

]slight

]to be carried

]someone

]more sweetly

]and you yourself know

]forgot

]

]someone would say

]and yes I

]as long as there is breath in me

]will be a care

]I say I have been a strong lover

]

]painful

To echo Strabo, Sappho is an amazing thing. She is the poet for anyone who has ever been in love or suffered loss. She speaks of the joy of the dawn, in a world where each day was governed by the goddess Fortuna, the goddess of fate, where life slips through your fingers and the years slip away, and your knees refuse to dance. In a world of pain and heartache her poetry is breathtakingly immortal. 

Seizure - Fragment 31

He seems to me equal to the gods,

that man who sits opposite you

and listens near

to your sweet voice

and lovely laughter. My heart

begins to flutter in my chest. 

When I look at you even for a moment. 

I can no longer speak. 

My tongue fails and a subtle

fire races beneath my skin, 

I see nothing with my eyes

and my ears hum

Sweat pours from me and a trembling

seizes my whole body. I am greener

than grass and it seems I am a little 

short

of dying

But all must be endured, for even a poor

man…

Philip Freeman (2016)

The raw emotions and the physicality of this poem are almost visceral. Philip Freeman dives into her language and finds interesting comparisons again between the language of Sappho and that of Homer: 

“First her heart begins to flutter. Sappho was not the earliest to imply this motif; Homer uses the same Greek word (ptoeo, “to flutter, fly away”) to describe the emotions of Penelope’s suitors in the Odyssey, as does Alcaeus when he says Helen was overcome by her lover, Paris. This is not just a quaint metaphor, but a physical description of a heart set racing by passion and pounding wildly in the poet’s chest.” 5

While modern readers might miss the extreme eroticism of the final stanzas…it gets pretty intense. 

Sappho is using language previously reserved for warfare. The word to describe her weakening tongue is the same word Homer uses to describe “a chariot falling to pieces on the battlefield.” 6  Her language is militaristic, because the boundaries between love and war at times are murky, and as a woman, she is positioning herself from a vantage point where despite never fighting a battle with shields and swords, she is living one every day. 

To a Woman of No Education - Fragment 55 

When you lie dead no one will remember

or long for you later. You do not share the roses 

of Pieria. Unseen here and in the house of Hades, 

flown away, you will flitter among the dim corpses. 

Willis Barnstone (2006)

Footnotes:

1. Freeman, Philip. Searching for Sappho: The Lost Songs and World of the First Woman Poet. New York; London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016. pg. xi

2. Campbell, David, ed. Greek Lyric Poetry: A Selection. London: Macmillan, 1967. 5n. 4.

3. Freeman, Philip. Searching for Sappho: The Lost Songs and World of the First Woman Poet. New York; London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016. pg. xxi

4. Carson, Anne. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. New York: Vintage Books, 2002. pg.12

5. Freeman, Philip. Searching for Sappho: The Lost Songs and World of the First Woman Poet. New York; London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016. pg. 123

6. Ibid. 

Reading List:

Searching For Sappho - Philip Freeman 

The Complete Poems of Sappho - Willis Barnstone 

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho - Anne Carson 

Girl Interrupted: Who was Sappho: The New Yorker - Daniel Mendelsohn
Her Master's Voice: Sappho's Dialogue with Homer - P.A. Rosenmeyer 
The Sapphic Revolution- Ryan Platte

The Confessions - Augustine

There is a misconception about belief, stemming from Plato’s cave, that once we have crawled out into the light we have found the answers. The ancient philosophers poured themselves into the questions of ‘what is good’ and ‘what is reality’ in order that they might understand their place in the cosmos. The oracle at Delphi commanded them to “know thyself”. When Descartes picked up the baton with cogito ergo sum there was the fundamental supposition that it is possible to locate the self in the midst of reality. 

For Augustine, only through truly knowing God will he ever then know himself, and the act of writing is a way of synthesizing his quest. This ‘knowing’ is not a singular definitive act, but a relationship. Augustine blazes a trail where the soul is allowed to wrestle with the complexity of the world around us while still holding fast to truth. His life quest to know God would be constant, always seeking and searching, “created to be the creature who beats its fists against the breast of the divine: ‘because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.’”(xxii)

According to Patricia Hampl (1997) what would have made Augustine’s contemporary readers of The Confessions gasp “was not his admission of lust, but his acknowledgement that, after conversion, indeed even as a bishop of the Church, he is still searching and speculating about God and himself.” (xvi) 

The Confessions is comprised of thirteen books, the first nine are autobiographical and begin with his conception and end with the death of his mother Monica and his subsequent overwhelming grief. Then, abruptly, almost without warning or interlude in Book X he begins an inquiry into memory and then delves into speculations on time and eternity, and finishes off with Book XIII, his own treatise on the allegorical retelling of the Creation narrative in Genesis. While this all feels very abrupt and disjointed to the uninitiated (me) Patricia Hampl says this: 

“In fact, the movement from his life to his reading of Genesis is not smooth- it is ablaze. The writing becomes more, and not less, urgent. His story, for Augustine, is apparently only part of the story. There is a certain logic at work. Having constructed himself in the first nine books, Augustine rushes on to investigate how God created the universe- how God, that is, created him. And all of us, all of this. Reading Genesis with his laser-beam gaze is a form of concentrated life. Reading, pondering, is experience.” (xxiii) 

What makes Augustine’s work so profound is the strength he has to ask questions. There are more questions than assertions peppered throughout his work, nothing is taken for granted in this mysterious world and in this incomprehensible process we call living. As we get into the narrative, Augustine is clearly troubled by the mystery of existence. Instead of David Copperfield’s succinct “I was born”, or Felix Krull’s self congratulatory platitudes “there you lay in the subterranean twilight…etc” Augustine, the Bishop of Milan, is honestly stymied by his existence.

“Yet allow me to speak, though I am but dust and ashes, allow me to speak in your merciful presence, for it is to your mercy that I address myself, not to some man who would mock me. Perhaps you too are laughing at me, but still you will mercifully toward me, for what is it that I am trying to say, Lord, except that I do not know whence I came into this life that is but dying, or rather, this dying state that leads to life? I do not know where I came from.” 

(Book I 6:7)

This is crazy. I have conversations on a regular basis with people about existence and cosmology and I am frequently shocked by the level of certainty that people express about life. There’s a certain adherence to a simplistic worldview. Life is simple. Existence is simple. The words of Jesus are simple. I find this whole acceptance of simplicity to be somewhat disconcerting. Augustine gets right to the heart of the matter: we exist, but how and why now?

Between the lines there is a constant narrative with contemporary philosophical thought. The complexity of life, the omniscient and omnipresent creator is in direct contradiction to The One of the Neoplatonists. The One from whom all things exist is ultimately unknowable. Existing not as a being but rather an emanation. The further away from the source of being we get the more we lack the ability to discern what is good, therefore evil exists within us as a result of our distance from truth. 

According to Plato, we all have a postnatal memory of being good, and deep within the recess of our soul, if we excavate far back enough we can regain our goodness. This baton will be picked up by Rousseau and his conception of the ‘noble savage’…if we can get back to the moral simplicity of the savage, unsullied by the degradation of society we can find untarnished moral truth. To Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’, Augustine counters with an actual savage, using the narrative of his youth to dispel any notion of a pure being existing at birth. Every base impulse exists within him without prompting or nurturing and he finds himself upon adolescence a petrie dish of lust and desire.

“From the mud of my fleshly desires and my erupting puberty belted out murky clouds that obscured and darkened my heart until I could not distinguish the calm light of love from the fog of lust.” (Book II 2:2) 

I’ve read reviews of the Confessions that say that Augustine was trying to come to terms with his early lifestyle of depravity. These reviews tend to equate “confessing” with shame and guilt. What Augustine is doing is the exact opposite of this. Despite his youthful depravity God is not far off, his relationship with his creator is not conditional on his being good or just or faithful, but on the faithfulness of God. 

“You were ever present with me, mercifully angry, sprinkling very bitter disappointments over all my unlawful pleasure so that I might seek a pleasure free from all disappointment.” (Book II: 2,4)

Left to himself he becomes infected with the ‘foul mange of the soul’. He blindly struggles through, until he happens upon Cicero. It is while reading Cicero that there is a trickle of hope for something more. Cicero promises an immortality that comes only through wisdom. Yet ultimately proper speech and style are not enough, one must also seek truth. Augustine hangs up the mantle of his youth, and instead dons the cloak of a seeker. 

“Feverishly I thrashed about, sighed, wept and was troubled, and there was no repose for me, nor any council. Within me I was carrying a tattered, bleeding soul that did not want me to carry it, yet I could find no place to lay it down.” (Book IV 7:12)

Here’s the thing, Augustine doesn’t live in a vacuum of faith. He happens to have an overbearing mother, who has been praying for his salvation from day one. She seems to discredit the life trajectory he has been on by the faith based assertion that God will draw him to himself. She simplifies his quest for truth into something almost pitiable. He resents her faith, he resents her assurance, and more than that he has grown up as a casual observer of this faith and finds it wanting. 

There are at least two serious hurdles for him with this christian faith:

#1: He views the bible as a series of inelegant writings, even at times barbaric. How can a christian synthesize the embarrassing scenarios of violence, rape and deceit that are found throughout the Old Testament?

#2: The origin of Evil. If God is supreme and pure goodness, evil could not be a divine creation. If all things were created by the Divine, including evil, God could not be as good as the church claimed. 

In Book V he finds an answer to the first problem in the renowned rhetorician and  Bishop of Milan, Ambrose. Initially Augustine listens to his sermons fascinated by his style and presentation of the scriptures, but before long, he finds Ambrose’s exegesis of the scriptures compelling. Augustine had been reading everything literally, and through the lens of the allegorical a whole new interpretive meaning becomes illuminated. He realizes that the christian faith is after all intellectually respectable. His rational arguments against the christian faith are faltering, so he decides to become a catechumen in the Catholic Church, and with one foot in the door, he waits until some kind of overt certainty presents itself. 

As to the origin of evil, by Book IX we have a clear understanding of where it comes from. Not from God but from man. Augustine uses himself as a case study for original sin. After spending nine years with the Manichaeans that believed every person is comprised of the spiritual light and material darkness, he moves on to the Neoplatonists, where evil is simply moving away from the one eternal source. They believed the solution to evil was diligent study, discipline and mystical contemplation that would lead them back toward the ineffable One.

Sounds great. But how exactly does one do this? Is study and contemplation enough? What about the part of him that enjoyed doing what was wrong? Augustine wants us to realize this: “well after his intellectual questions had been answered, he continued to resist conversion because, to him, baptism means chastity. In fact, the most famous line in The Confessions is the prayer: ‘Grant me chastity and self-control, but please not yet.’”(xxi)

How do you get beyond the hump of ‘please not yet’? Augustine comes to the realization that there is only one way: through the mediator between God and humankind, the man Jesus Christ. Recognizing truth is not enough, we must be picked up and carried into it. 

“Come Lord, arouse us and call us back, kindle us and seize us, prove to us how sweet you are in your burning tenderness; let us love you and run to you.” (Book VIII 4:9) 

He sees truth. He sees God, he is at the entrance of the cave, and yet that human gesture to reach out and grasp it, to step out into the light is impossible. Every night he says to himself, ‘tomorrow, tomorrow I will put an end to my depravity’. His weakness is soul crushing. Eventually he finds himself in a garden, under a fig tree and pours out his heart to God. He has found him, but he is too weak to embrace him. Then he hears a little child shout out “Pick it up and read, pick it up and read!” He finds his bible and at random opens it up and begins to read: 

“‘Not in dissipation and drunkenness, nor in debauchery and lewdness, nor in arguing and jealousy; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh or the gratification of your desires.’ I had no wish to read further, nor was there need. No sooner had I reached the end of the verse that the light of certainty flooded my heart and all dark shades of doubt fled away.” (Book VIII 12:29) 

This brings us to Book X. After nine books illuminating his need for a redemption and his ultimate salvation, he wants us to know that this is not the end of the story. He is daily beset by temptation, whether from his senses seeking after their own pleasure or the occasional images of Roman dancers in his dreams; even his dreams are in need of redemption. The only ‘safe haven’ for his soul is in God. 

After spending time looking at himself under the microscope of introspection, he zooms out to the macro. Just as God was the author of the narrative of his life, He is the author of the universe. While he needed to be carried into truth, creation needed to be carried into existence through the spoken Word. The Logos. In Plato’s Timaeus the offspring of the Demiurge is called the Logos, the creative source behind existence, yet incapable of relationship. For the christian, the Logos, while being the author of creation, is also our mediator and exists to daily intercede on our behalf as the man Jesus Christ. Neoplatonist philosophy led Augustine back to Christianity, but eventually even this philosophical template was wanting. He found the Truth that is written in the scriptures to be even greater.  The Logos is more than an impersonal creator, He is the Son of God, indeed God himself. The Word that is uttered eternally and through Him all things come into being in one simultaneous creation that exists beyond time and our ability to comprehend.

The next three books are an act of worship; an act of seeking relationship with the incarnate wisdom. He searches the scriptures, listening for the voice of God. 

“Augustine, grappling with Genesis in his study, is no less heated - more so really- than Augustine struggling famously with the flesh. He invents autobiography not to reveal his memory of his life, but to plumb the memory of God’s creative urge. ‘My mind burns to solve this complicated enigma.’ he says with an anguish more intense than anything that accompanies his revelations about his own life. He understands his life as a model of the very creation that is beyond him and of course within him. He writes and writes, and reads and reads his way through the double conundrum, the linked mystery of his own biography and of Creation.” (xxiv) 

The Confessions are bookended between his birth and in the birth of creation, he’s starting all over, but this time from a different perspective. While the Spirit of God was brooding over him, when he was still formless, this same Spirit of God hung poised above the void of creation. Augustine has found his way into the complexity of the Trinity. While his contemporaries had differing views on hierarchy and substance of the godhead, Augustine avoided the fray by turning his attention to a similar triad that exists within ourselves. An imperfect reflection of our creator, summed up as: I am, I know and I will. 

“Let anyone with the wit to see it observe how in these three there is one inseparable life: there is one life, one mind and one essence.” (Book XIII 11:12)

Book X was a tour de force of the complexity of the self. We are multifaceted and in this we reflect our creator. To ‘think” and to ‘know’ is not enough, there is another part of ourselves that exists outside of our knowledge of it; it hovers and broods, coaxing and guiding. When physically Augustine was in anguish about his need for salvation, when he intellectually had been persuaded of truth, the last remaining hurdle was the sanctification of his spirit. This is where we recognize the love of God, in a place beyond intellect, where the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given us.

And what is the conclusion of all of this? Again, Augustine uses himself as an example. When he first found the joy of his salvation he wanted to sequester himself in Cassiciacum, a small community devoted to study. He wanted his days to be spent in quiet meditation and worship. But things don’t go according to his plan. In 391 he travels from Cassiciacum, a small village on the outskirts of Milan, to Hippo, which is in modern day Annaba, Algeria. His goal was to convince a friend of his to join his quiet little community back home, but instead Bishop Valerius decides that Augustine should be his successor. Very much against his will Augustine is ordained as a bishop and a life of quiet contemplation seems to evaporate before his eyes. 

God wants more than reflection and contemplation, he wants charity. Augustine is called into community, and this is where The Confessions end; with an allegorical interpretation of the days of Genesis that doesn’t take place in a vacuum but within the hearts of the church. When god speaks light into creation and into our hearts, it isn’t for our benefit as individuals but for the kingdom. 

“Let there be light; repent for the kingdom of heaven is near, repent, and let there be light.” (Book XIII 12:13) (Gn 1:31; Mt 3:2; 4:17)