Sappho and Censorship

Censorship and Sappho

The disappearance of the poems of Sappho inevitably brings up the matter of Censorship of Publication, whether in a post-Gutenberg pressing machine or copied out in a scriptorium by a battery of monks. The usual milquetoast explanation is that people only have copied what they need to read in their schools or libraries, and unused materials which naturally deteriorate with age need not be replaced if not in use. But the life of books, whether cartaceae on paper, on papyrus which was used for Papal writs well into the 14th century, or parchment as the standard material once the papyrus reeds of Egypt were endangered, is fairly long. Books of which there are many copies don't disappear unless they are forbidden and then systematically destroyed. It seems that the allegation of female homosexual behavior which was tentatively drawn from the poems of Sappho, became firmly centered in the mind of a growing Christianity, which from the beginning or even as early as with St. Paul was not favorably inclined toward women in the first place, and certainly not interested in homosexuality, the mark of the earlier centuries of pagan degeneracy. Population growth was one of the keys to the early success of the new faith before Constantine, and anything 'unnatural' which would limit family and children would be anathema politically as well as theologically.

We have had bad times with Censorship since the days of the Western Church's condemnation of the new science in the l6th century, and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum has persisted one way or another into our times. But this has not been a purely religious matter. Steinbecks' "Of Mice and Men" was outlawed in Boston because Lenny pissed out behind a building, and D. H Lawrence's "Lady Chatterly's Lover" was for years available here only in surreptitious copies printed in Europe. I have the first American edition, which was published in newsprint the very day the censorship bans were lifted in the '60's. There was change in the air. Now we find ourselves deluged by a free flood of uncensored materials, whether verbal, printed or electronically transmitted as part of the porno trade, and some might wish for a return to censorship, forgetting the lessons of the past. The right to think one's own thoughts is closely followed by the right of conscience and the right to speak out. Coming from the political and religious control of free speech in Europe, the American constitutional designers stated these rights as inalienable and made them a key part of the American legal framework. Challenged often and sometimes even regretted, these rights remains firm. On the other side of the fence is the Nazi's burning of the books, or a press condoled by the state, with the loss of self-expression down to the grass roots of the individual novelist or poet. When Sappho disappeared from early Medieval Europe, more was lost than a few hundred pages of exquisite poetry. It was part of something associated with the development of free thought-processes, whether in poetry or astronomy or mathematics, and it took the world a long and painful fight to recover the openness which the old Hellenic world had assumed to be its natural arena for thought.

Lest this argument seem overly alarmist, I should note that this study on Sappho is liable to a new type of automatic censorship, since it contains the word "lesbian" in several instances, and this is one of the key words which can be used to deny access on the Internet on the basis of pornographic material. The web is especially liable to such censorship since nobody is happy with the huge influx of porno sites in public view, but the danger of censorship on the basis of some person's or some electronic filter's judgment always outweighs the danger of personal annoyance at bad taste.