LIFE OF BILITIS

Bilitis was born at the beginning of the sixth century before our era in a mountain village situated on the banks of the Melas, to the east of Pamphylia. The country is stony and sad, shadowed by profound forests, dominated by the enormous mass of Tauros; lime springs issue from the rocks; great salty lakes abide on the heights, and the valleys are filled with silence.

She was the daughter of a Greek and of a Phœnician woman. She seems never to have known her father for he is not mentioned in any part of the souvenirs of her childhood. Perhaps he died before she came into the world. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain how she bore a Phœnician name which her mother alone could have given her.

In this almost deserted land, she lived a tranquil life with her mother and her sisters. Other young girls, who were her friends, lived not far from her. On the woody slopes of Tauros, the shepherds pastured their flocks.

In the morning, at the crow of the cock, she arose, went to the stable, led the animals to drink and busied herself milking them. During the day, if it rained, she remained in the gynæceum and spun wool from her distaff. If the weather was fair, she ran in the fields and played a thousand games, with her companions, of which she speaks.

Bilitis regarded the Nymphs with ardent piety. The sacrifices which she offered, nearly every day, were for their fountain. She often speaks of them but it seems that she never saw them, for she reports with so much veneration the accounts of an old man who, one day, had surprised them.

The close of her pastoral existence was saddened by a love of which we know little, although she speaks of it at length. She ceased to sing of it when it became unhappy. Having become the mother of a child which she abandoned, Bilitis quitted Pamphylia for unknown reasons and never returned to the place of her birth.

We find her again at Mytilene where she went by way of the sea along the fair coasts of Asia. She was then scarcely sixteen years old, according to the conjectures of M. Heim, who established with probability some dates in the life of Bilitis from a verse which alludes to the death of Pittakos.

Lesbos was then the centre of the world. On the main road between beautiful Attica and magnificent Lydia, it had for its capital a city more elegant than Athens and more corrupt than Sardis: Mytilene, built upon a peninsula overlooking the shores of Asia. The blue sea encompassed the city. From the height of the temples one could distinguish on the horizon the white line of Atarnea which was the port of Pergamos.

The narrow streets were always encumbered by a throng resplendent in many-colored stuffs, tunics of purple and of hyacinth, cyclas of transparent silks, mantles trailing in the dust of the yellow shoes. The women carried in their ears great rings of gold set with raw pearls, and on their arms massive bracelets of silver roughly chiseled in relief. The men themselves wore their hair brilliantly perfumed with rare oils. The Greeks wore sandals with the ends fastened to their bare ankles by large serpents of bright metal, while the Asiatics wore soft, tinted boots. The passers-by stood in groups before the façades of the shops where the goods for sale were on display: rugs of sombre colors, cloths worked with threads of gold, jewels of amber and of ivory, according to the quarter. The animation of Mytilene did not end with the day; there was no hour so late that one could not hear, through the open doors, the joyous sounds of instruments, the cries of women, the noise of dances. Pittakos himself, who wished to give a little order to this perpetual debauch, made a law in defense of players of the flute too young to be employed in the nocturnal festivals; but this law, like all laws that pretend to change the course of natural morals, determined the secrecy but not the observance.

In a society where the husbands were occupied at night with wine and dancing-girls, the women could not fail to unite and find, among themselves, consolation for their solitude. Thus it was that they softened to those delicate loves to which antiquity has given their name, and which have, whatever men may think, more of true passion than invoked viciousness.

At this time, Sappho was still beautiful. Bilitis knew her and speaks of her under the name of Psappha which she bore at Lesbos. Without doubt she was the admirable woman who taught the little Pamphilian the art of singing in rhythmic phrases, whereby she preserved to posterity the remembrance of her loves. Unfortunately, Bilitis has given us few details of this woman, today so little known, and this is to be regretted, since the least word is precious which touches that great Inspiration. Instead, she has left us thirty elegiacs, the history of her love for a young girl of her own age whom she calls Mnasidika, and who lived with her. Already we knew the name of this young girl from a verse of Sappho in which her beauty is exalted; but the name even is doubtful, and Bergk almost thinks that she was called simply Mnais. The songs we will read soon, prove that this hypothesis may be abandoned. Mnasidika seems to have been a little girl, very sweet and very innocent, one of those charming persons whose mission is simply to permit themselves to be adored, so cherished that they make little effort to merit that which is given them. Loves without motives last the longest: this one endured for ten years. One knows how it was broken through the fault of Bilitis whose excessive jealousy admitted no eclecticism.

When she felt that nothing held her longer to Mytilene, except unhappy memories, Bilitis made a second voyage; she went to Cypros, an island Greek and Phœnician like Pamphylia itself, which must have recalled to her the aspect of her native country.

It was there that Bilitis began her life for the third time and in a manner my readers will understand with difficulty unless they recall the point to which love was considered holy among the people of antiquity. The courtesans of Amathus were not, like ours, lost creatures, exiled from all worldly society; they were girls from the best families of the city. Aphrodite had given them beauty and they thanked the goddess and consecreated to the service of her worship the beauty they had received. All the cities, like those of Cypros, that possessed a temple rich in courtesans, regarded these women with careful respect.

The incomparable history of Phryne, as transmitted to us from the Athenæum, gives some idea of the nature of this veneration. It is not true that Hyperides stripped her naked to soften the Areopagos, and because her crime was great: she had committed murder. The orator tore off the top of her tunic and revealed only her breasts. And he supplicated the judges: “Do not put to death the priestess and the inspired of Aphrodite.”—In distinction from the other courtesans who went out in transparent cyclas through which all the details of their bodies appeared, Phryne wore a costume which enveloped even her hair in a great folded vestment of which the statuettes of Tanagra have preserved the grace. No one, unless it were her lovers, had ever seen her arms and her shoulders, and she never appeared in the pool of the public baths. But one day an extraordinary thing occurred. It was the day of the festival of Eleusis; twenty thousand people had come from all parts of Greece and were assembled on the sea-shore when Phryne advanced to the waves: she removed her garment, she unfastened her cincture, she removed even her under tunic, “she unrolled her hair and entered the sea.” And in that throng stood Praxiteles who, after this living goddess, designed the Aphrodite of Knidos; and Apelles who, from her, revealed his Anadyomene. Admirable people, to whom naked Beauty could appear without exciting laughter or false shame!

I would that this history were that of Bilitis, for, in translating her songs, I have learned to love the friend of Mnasidika. Without doubt her life was also wonderful. I regret only that she is not spoken of oftener by ancient authors, and that those whose works have survived, give us so few tokens of her person. Philodemos, who pillaged her twice, does not even mention her name. In default of better anecdotes, I beg that you will be contented with the details which she herself has given us about her life as a courtesan. That she was a courtesan is undeniable; and even her last songs prove that, if she had the virtues of her vocation, she had also its worst weaknesses. But I would know only her virtues. She was pious and skillful. She remained faithful to the temple so long as Aphrodite consented to prolong the youth of her purest adorer. “The day when she ceased to be loved, she ceased to write,” she has said. Nevertheless it is difficult to admit that the songs of Pamphylia could have been written at the epoch when the events took place. How could a little shepherdess of the mountains learn to scan verses according to the difficult rhythms of the Æolic delivery? It is more reasonable to believe that, become old, Bilitis found pleasure in singing for herself the remembrances of her childhood. We know nothing of this last period of her life. We know not even at what age she died.

Her tomb was found by M. C. Heim at Paleo-Limisso, at the side of an antique road, not far from the ruins of Amathus. These ruins have almost disappeared within the last thirty years and the stones of the house where perhaps Bilitis lived, today pave the quays of Port Said. But the tomb was subterranean, according to the Phœnician custom, and it had escaped even the treasure hunters.

M. Heim entered it by a narrow pit, once filled with earth, at the bottom of which he found a walled-up door which had to be demolished. The wide, low tomb, paved with slabs of limestone, had four walls covered with plaques of black amphibolite, on which were graven, in primitive capitals, all the songs we are about to read, except the three epitaphs which decorated the sarcophagus.

There reposed the friend of Mnasidika in a great coffin of terra-cotta, under a cover modeled in delicate sculpture which figured in the clay the visage of the dead. The hair was painted black, the eyes half closed and prolonged by the crayon as though she were living and the painted cheek softened by a slight smile which brought out the lines of the mouth. Nothing can ever tell of those lips, so clean-cut, with a soft outward curve, united one to the other and as though intoxicated by their own contact.

When the tomb was opened, she appeared in the state in which a pious hand had placed her, twenty-four centuries before. Vials of perfume hung from pegs of clay, and one of these, after so long a time, was still fragrant. The mirror of polished silver in which Bilitis had viewed herself, the stylus which had trailed the blue pigment over her eyelids, were found in their place. A little naked Astarte, relic forever precious, watched always over the skeleton ornamented with all its jewels of gold, and white like a snow-covered branch, but so soft and so fragile that at the first breath it mingled with the dust.

Pierre Louÿs.

Constantinople. August 1894.