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Hymn to Aphrodite | Introduction

Sappho’s “Hymn to Aphrodite” is the only poem from her many books of poetry to survive in its entirety. The actual text of the poem was quoted by Dionysus, an orator who lived in Rome about 30 B.C. He quoted Sappho’s poem in full in one of his own works, which accounts for the poem’s survival. Sappho’s poem consists of a plea from a forlorn individual to help secure the ardor of a reluctant lover. Such requests were common for the period in which the poem was written, but Sappho’s poem also provides a dialogue, since it provides the goddess’s response to the poet’s plea. Sappho’s devotion to Aphrodite is reflected in this personal response, which suggests an intimacy, and thus a uniqueness, among such works. As is the case with “Hymn to Aphrodite,” many of Sappho’s poems focus on love and marriage, often addressing pleas to the goddess Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Sappho organized a group of her young female students into a thiasos, a cult that worshipped Aphrodite with songs and poetry, and “Hymn to Aphrodite” was most likely composed for performance within this cult.

The “Hymn to Aphrodite” has no specific date of composition but, like all Sappho’s work, was composed in the sixth century B.C. After Sappho’s death, her poems were preserved in an early third century B.C. library in Alexandria, Egypt, but eventually the texts disappeared and only fragments now remain. Recently, several translations of “Hymn to Aphrodite” were included in Margaret Reynolds’s study of Sappho’s poetry, The Sappho Companion (2001). Another scholarly translation is included in Sappho: Poems and Fragments (1992), by Josephine Balmer.

Hymn to Aphrodite Summary

Overview
This only complete Sappho poem, “Hymn to Aphrodite,” expresses the very human plea for help with a broken heart. The speaker, who is identified in stanza 5 as the poet Sappho, calls upon the goddess of love, Aphrodite, to come to her aid. The goddess has helped the speaker in the past and will leave her golden palace to come to Earth to help her faithful believer. The center of the poem recalls past visits in which the goddess has brought a reluctant lover back. The goddess promises that the lover will soon know love as intense as that suffered by the poet, and so the poem ends on a more hopeful recognition of the goddess’s power to resolve the pain of love.

Stanza 1
In the first stanza, the speaker calls upon the goddess Aphrodite to come to her aid. The speaker begins by acknowledging the power of the goddess, whom she calls “immortal,” the daughter of the mighty Zeus, the greatest of all the Greek gods. After recognizing Aphrodite’s power and lineage, the speaker mentions the goddess’s skills at deception, using a Greek work that different translators have interpreted to mean guile-weaver, enchantress, one who twists lures, snare-knitter, cunning, wily, or love-perplexing. All of these translations suggest that the speaker is calling upon specific skills that Aphrodite employs to ensnare a reluctant lover. In the final line of the stanza, the speaker entreats the goddess not to ignore her pleadings and thereby break a heart already stricken with grief.

Stanza 2
The second stanza continues the plea of the first stanza, again asking the goddess to come to the speaker’s aid. She reminds the goddess of her devotion in the past, of the songs that have been sung to the goddess, and of how the goddess has heard the speaker’s pleas in the past. The speaker asks the goddess to come again, reminding the goddess that she has heard her requests before and that she has responded to these earlier petitions. The speaker offers flattery and acknowledges that the goddess will once again need to leave the glory of Zeus’s palace of gold.

Stanza 3
In the third stanza, the writer recalls past visits from the goddess when she was needed. The speakerpoet provides a vision of how Aphrodite has previously made the trip from her father’s palace to this mortal’s more humble home. The goddess arrived in a chariot, a Greek word occasionally translated as a car drawn not by winged horses, as one might expect, but by a flock of sparrows, which represent... » Complete Hymn to Aphrodite Summary