SOURCE: O'Higgins, Dolores. “Sappho's Splintered Tongue: Silence in Sappho 31 and Catullus 51.” American Journal of Philology 111 (1990): 156-67.

[In the following essay, O'Higgins explicates the Sappho poem referred to as “Phainetai moi” (fragment no. “31”) in the context of a verse response by Catullus.]

Sappho¹ “31” concerns poetry as much as love or jealousy, like Catullus' “response” in 51, a poem which addresses Sappho's poetic claims and poetic stance at least as much as Lesbia's beauty.² This study considers the impact of the beloved on each of the two poets, focusing especially on the disturbing and memorable image of the “broken” tongue in Sappho's poem, and the relative seriousness of Sappho's “fracture” and Catullus' sluggish tongue.

The Greek poem's first line introduces what appears to be a highly charged emotional situation, whose “literary” implications appear only later. Sappho (as I shall designate the speaker) supposes a man who sits—or any man who might sit—opposite the girl she loves.³

φαίνεταί μοι χῆνοσ ἴσοs θέοισιν

Before she identifies the subject of the verb phainetai, Sappho introduces the pronoun moi, the indirect object of the verb and perceiver or interpreter of the scene. The line might translate “It seems to me that he is like the gods. …”⁴ The verb reappears at line 16, where Sappho “seems to herself.” Thus, most of the extant poem is contained within a framework or “ring” of authorial memory, perception, imagination or opinion. Although the poet dramatizes herself as an alien figure, looking wistfully at the unattainable, she is not altogether an outsider. “Phainetai moi” marks the boundary of a world contained within Sappho. By contrast, Catullus begins his poem, and its second line, with the third person pronoun ille, a change which shifts the emphasis from perceiver to perceived. Catullus' naming of his beloved—Lesbia—also grants her a specific identify and a more substantial independent existence than Sappho's anonymous girl.

Lesbia's audience responds to both her visual and her verbal charm; the man watches and listens to (spectat et audit 4) the seductress, who laughs sweetly. In Sappho the man only listens (hupakouei 4), but the girl's aural charms are double; she speaks sweetly (hadu phoneisas 3-4) and laughs caressingly (gelaisas himeroen 5). Thus in Sappho's opening scene the girl's seductiveness is emphatically vocal. The subsequent expression “whenever I see you—even for a short time …” in 7 may suggest that the girl's beauty was such that it could be felt in the briefest glimpse, yet the passage seems at least as concerned with Sappho's extraordinary susceptibility to her beloved's presence as with the girl's appearance.

This thing makes the heart in my breast tremble.
For when I see you even for a short time
I can no longer speak …

(7-8)

The poet's heart is shaken by “this thing,”⁵ i.e., by the girl's voice, the man's reaction to the girl, her own sense of mortality, in fact by the complete “moment and its beauty and anguish” as Ralph Johnson has put it.⁶ The verb eptoaisen (“causes to tremble”), describing the scene's shattering effect on Sappho, connotes more than a frisson of sexual excitement; she feels the debilitating fear that precedes lethal encounters on the battlefield.⁷ The poem gradually unravels the signs and implications of her terror/excitement.

The man faces the girl, listening closely, and seems “like the gods” in his felicity or perhaps his hardihood.⁸ Although the immediate context allows either reading, the tone and imagery of the remainder of the poem point in the direction of hardihood. The man, in his divine invulnerability, may dally in the girl's destructive ambiance, but Sappho fears even a momentary and relatively long range encounter.

Sappho is a battered “veteran,” whose previous encounters with the girl have always had the same outcome.⁹ First she is struck dumb. Then a subtle fever (9-10) is succeeded by blindness, humming in her ears, cold sweat, a grass-like pallor—and finally (15-16), “I seem to myself to be little short of dying.” It has been observed that details of this disintegration echo Homeric descriptions of dying or mortally threatened warriors—for example the pallor, blindness (or faintness) and sweat.¹⁰ I wish to focus on another aspect of Sappho's reaction, however.

Symptoms that do not characterize the beleaguered warrior include the humming, fever and silence.¹¹ Of these the silence—the first in Sappho's catalog—is perhaps the most interesting. Silence does not generally afflict Homeric warriors, even desperate ones. More significantly, it does not afflict the one Homeric poet who is threatened with mortal danger. Phemius pleads eloquently—and successfully—for his life at Odyssey 22.344-53. Yet, just as Sappho evokes the girl with a double description of her voice—speaking and laughing—so Sappho's reaction begins with a double account of the poet's own voicelessness, a double wound to correspond to the double blow. Sappho is no longer permitted to say anything; instead, her tongue has been shattered into silence.

ἀλλ' ἄχαν μὲν γλῶσσα † ἔαγε † …

(9)

The hiatus in line 9 has placed the reading eage in doubt. I believe with Nagy, however, that it is deliberate, intended audially to reproduce the “catch” in the poet's voice; Sappho dramatically represents herself as being almost at the point she describes—losing her voice altogether.¹² It is a critical loss for an oral poet, and a paradoxical and dramatic beginning to the poet's response.

I do not maintain that Sappho was an oral poet in the sense that Homer has been described by Parry and Lord, but, as Ruth Finnegan has shown, oral and written literature form a continuum rather than entirely separate traditions.¹³ Sappho inherits an ancient lyric tradition which sees and describes itself as essentially performative, and communicated, if not created, with the voice.¹⁴ Pindar for example uses the word glossa (tongue) and its compounds—“straight tongued,” “tongueless”—to describe poets and poetry.¹⁵ Although she was almost certainly literate, Sappho's references to tongue and voice reflect a lingering concept of poetry as an oral medium.¹⁶

By contrast, in the aftermath of the Hellenistic revolution, Catullus occupies a point nearer the other extreme of the oral/literary spectrum. Thus for Catullus, being “tongue-tied” does not to the same extent threaten his ability to create or communicate his poetry. His poetry is a libellus, separable from himself and transmitted as a gift to a friend. For Catullus, poetry exists on paper or tablets, and indeed, destruction of the material may mean the end of the poem. At 68.45-46 the paper containing Catullus' poems is imagined as an old woman, transmitting its message:

sed dicam vobis [i.e., Musis, deis], vos porro dicite multis
milibus et facite haec charta loquatur anus.

Poem 36 opens and closes with the famous reference to the cacata charta of Volusius' Annales. This poem also includes a drama between Catullus and his beloved, who has been injured by angry iambics. She wants to burn the poems, but Catullus deliberately misinterprets and consigns Volusius to the flames instead. Burning may be a symbolic gesture of destruction, but in the case of a single copy, burning will end the poems' existence.

In Catullus poetry may be lost, burnt, stolen, but it is not necessarily imperilled by a silenced poet. Poems are comically—but significantly—endowed with independent life and moral responsibility; “little verses” may be wicked while their creator is still unsullied in 16. They are newborn infants in 65. Poems take part as third characters in the little dramas taking place between himself and their recipients; hendecasyllables are sent out to dun for missing tablets in 42. Their effect may be felt in the absence of their creator. In 35, merely reading Caecilius' poem on the Magna Mater has caused a girl (who is described as more learned than Sappho's Muse) to fall passionately in love with him.

For Sappho, however, the poet's voice is the instrument of seduction. Sappho's verb eage (“shattered” 9) describing her tongue metaphorically associates this “symptom” also with a warrior's death on the battlefield. Just as the Homeric warrior defines, defends and justifies himself with a sword, so the poet with a tongue. Sappho is disarmed, her voice a splintered weapon, like the sword or spear of a doomed warrior who has encountered an immortal or immortally aided foe. After only a glimpse, before she can engage in “combat,” Sappho's weapon—the tongue—is destroyed. One might compare Iliad 16.786ff., where Apollo knocks off Patroclus' helmet and destroys his corslet and spear directly before Patroclus is killed by Hector.

At the end of the fourth stanza Sappho marks a break with what precedes with a repetition of the verb phainom' (“I seem to myself”) in 16, which completes the “ring” of the perceptual, imaginary world of the poem's first four stanzas and begins a new phase in the drama. It is followed by a one line fragment of what I take to be the poem's final stanza, as the poem—hitherto an account of the narrator as vulnerable audience—turns to consider its own audience.

ἀλλὰ πὰν τόλματον ἐπεὶ † χαὶ πσνητα †

The expression pan tolmaton is not simply an exhortation to endure, although connotations of endurance are present.¹⁷ In this martial context pan tolmaton may be translated “all can be dared.” It is a call to arms providing a dramatic peripeteia within the poem itself. The poem which ironically records the poet's own near death, repeated in the past and again imminent, now reveals itself as a lethal weapon. Whether it was the girl's voice or appearance (or both) that seduced Sappho, it is her own voice with which she plans to attack in her turn, uncannily recreating her fractured weapon. The rout will become a duel, indeed perhaps an upset victory. In fact pan tolmaton marks a “counter-offensive” already launched—a song, divinely seductive as the Sirens'. Sappho seduces in her turn, by daring to approach her audience and perform it. The poem's various audiences—including the girl—experience the dangerous felicity of listening and coming under its spell.

Sappho probably concluded her poem with a gnomic statement of fortune's reversal. “Even the poor man may become rich—and the rich man poor.”¹⁸ Martin West cites as parallel Theognis 657, which exhorts the addressee to maintain a calm spirit in good fortune and adversity—for reversals of fortune are commonplace. I agree with West that Sappho here speaks of fortune's reversal—for good and ill. It does not follow, however, that she takes the same attitude as Theognis, seeing fortune's vagaries as uncontrollable, simply to be endured. As her Hymn to Aphrodite suggests, a reversal in the fortunes of love can be deliberately achieved: by the lover who enlists the help of Aphrodite. This poem (1 L.P.) consists of a prayer—and a corresponding promise from the goddess—not, as we might expect, to unite Sappho in bliss with her beloved—but to reverse the situation, to inflict on the girl who has wounded Sappho an equal agony. She will give presents instead of receiving them: she will chase instead of fleeing.

It has long been recognized that Sappho's “Hymn to Aphrodite” resembles in tone and diction the lethally vengeful prayer of Diomedes to Athena at Iliad 5.115-20.¹⁹ Sappho's “borrowing” of the Homeric situation establishes a complex, reciprocal literary relationship, many of whose ironies have been well discussed.²⁰

Homer's battlefield afforded little opportunity for relationships between enemies (the exchange between Glaukos and Diomedes in Iliad 6 being a famous exception). The only permanence or stability lay in the shared kleos of death, the poetic fame that united victor and vanquished, incorporating the victim into his conqueror's song of triumph. Similarly on Love's battlefield in the “Hymn to Aphrodite” a reciprocal relationship seems impossible; there is only unequal battle: pursuit or flight.²¹ For the speaker of Sappho “31” also, Love's battleground seems tense, unstable and lethal, with the additional threat of oblivion, since love's imperilled “warrior” is also the singer. This “warrior's” death, far from earning an expensive glory for the hero from the poet or poetic tradition, will necessarily silence the singer.

Sappho's “myriad-mindedness” makes her battlefield less bleak than Homer's, however. Whereas in Homer the victor and victim seem to be clearly distinguished from one another, Sappho incorporates both roles in herself within her poem as she moves from victim of love to conqueror/seducer. Further, for all the grimness of these metaphorical battles, there is also a sense of the generative excitement of the lethal dialogue between lover and beloved, a sense of irony, delight, and of exhilarating—and divine—energy. The expression “paler than grass,” for example, even as it evokes unconsciousness and death, also suggests tender growth and life.²² Moreover, Sappho in a sense achieves the enviable divinity that she attributes to another. It is not merely a question of survival, of enduring recurrent brushes with death or approaches to death; as far as the poem is concerned, death is a threat that is never fully realized. But the terrible silence, which threatens both the poet's existence as a poet, and the existence of this or any poem of Sappho, actually and repeatedly assails her. The act of poiesis resists the obliteration that passion threatens, and the existence of the poema proclaims a permanent triumph over the recurrent threat of poetic non-being. Indeed, to an extent, the act of making a poem replaces the passion, just as epic may be said to replace the mortal organism with a divine artifact.²³

Sappho's poem, in its final stanza, dramatically wills itself into existence despite the silencing nature of its subject. Catullus' final stanza, however, shifts in a different direction. His poem details a disintegration both similar to and subtly different from Sappho's. Sappho records a heart-stopping fear or shock, which she then explains in terms of a recurrent series of past catastrophic symptoms, beginning with loss of her voice and ending in a state near death. Catullus summarizes his entire reaction at the outset. He does not, like Sappho, explain a present sense of fear with reference to repeated past experience; this particular (vicariously experienced) encounter with Lesbia affects him precisely as all other encounters. All of his senses are snatched away (“misero quod omnis / eripit sensus mihi …” 5-6). Whereas Sappho's poem may be located in the moment of fear between the vision of her beloved and the physical breakdown which usually results from such an encounter, Catullus leaves no distance between his vision of Lesbia and his reaction. He sees her and loses all his senses. Catullus' anticipatory summary has the effect of placing on an equal footing all of the symptoms he subsequently lists. Loss of all the senses is unconsciousness, of which loss of speech is merely one aspect. The following catalog of individual symptoms only spells out what has already been said.

Catullus' “lingua sed torpet” achieves roughly the same sense as glossa eage, but lacks the hiatus, the violence and the military connotations of Sappho's expression.²⁴ A slender flame (tenuis … flamma) answers Sappho's lepton pur; the humming in the ears also reappears. But in Catullus unconsciousness (“gemina teguntur / lumina nocte” 11-12) apparently interrupts the poet before he himself can describe his own approach to the edge of death. Catullus depends on his audience's familiarity with the Sapphic poem to create this sense of interruption. His poem enacts the final unconsciousness of which Sappho stops short before he moves to an entirely different plane of reality, stepping abruptly aside from the obvious impossibility of saying anything further within his current dramatic framework.

In place of Sappho's reversing “resolution” (pan tolmaton), Catullus' final stanza moves to self reproach. The disputed meaning of otium in Catullus' final stanza lies at the heart of the poem's notorious interpretative difficulties.²⁵ My treatment is very brief, its purpose merely to suggest how I feel Catullus' final stanza may comment on Sappho's poem and on the question of orality/literariness and the poet's silence.

For the Roman Neoteric poets otium was a symbol—the antithesis of negotium, a responsible citizen's official “activity,” forensic, military, mercantile, or political. It was an attitude as much as the state of leisure, and could be considered the very soil which nourished elaborate, personal poetry.²⁶ Catullus 50, for example, records a day in which Catullus and a friend composed verse “in a leisurely way” (otiosi). Significantly he uses the word scribens (writing) to describe this process; even though each man had a ready audience in the other, they apparently required tabellae to facilitate the process of composition and exchange. Even the most light-hearted and casual symposium requires writing implements. In poem 50 otium facilitates the leisured process of writing poetry.

In poem 51 the effect of otium on Catullus himself apparently is analogous to its destructive effect on “kings” and “wealthy … cities.”²⁷Otium can mean a state of peace, in contrast to the rigors of war, a state which allows the growth of moral degeneration, and renders cities vulnerable to attack.²⁸ By this reading, the word otium responds to Sappho's military imagery of love. Catullus has not been “fighting” in Love's wars, and his idleness has made him unfit for close “combat” with Lesbia—the sort of literary/amatory “confrontation” that Sappho's poem seems to indicate.²⁹

Yet although Catullus seems to rebuke himself for succumbing to otium, he does not indicate that he intends to abandon or resist it. It is significant that, unlike Sappho (with her pan tolmaton), Catullus does not express intention or desires for the future, although it is possible to infer that the poem develops out of the poet's resistance to otium. Thus, to a greater extent than Sappho's, Catullus' poem presents itself as rooted in the poet's present, which is colored by persistent indulgence in otium. I suggest that otium is not inactivity—literary or amatory—so much as a reluctance or failure to confront in one or more areas of life.³⁰ Poems are created and love is expressed—in private. Otium, which I define as a withdrawn and leisurely indulgence in a lover's sensibilities, forms the background of Catullus' poem. The poem can address Lesbia in the absence of its creator, who can thus reproach himself for his otium—a “disengagement” both literary and emotional.

In conclusion, Catullus depicts total breakdown as the direct and immediate result of his vision of Lesbia. He narrates his collapse as an accomplished thing rather than a threatening possibility. Thus his peom does not, like Sappho's, claim to be situated in a terrifying moment of suspense and anticipation. His narrative of disintegration, rather like Horace's ironic description of his own transformation into a swan in Odes II 20, bespeaks a certain detachment. Thus Catullus clearly establishes the poem's existence as separate from the dramatic situation that it describes and independent of the precarious articulateness of its poet. Catullus' final stanza, with its thrice intoned otium, formalizes this emotional and literary distance between himself and his subject.

Sappho's poem, in contrast, appears delicately balanced between the inspiring/destructive girl, and Sappho's daring/enduring response, and between the anticipatory fear or excitement produced by this particular “occasion” and the familiar series of debilitating reactions which such an encounter generally produces. Her fear or tension exists because she expects these reactions, but although they are imminent, they are not yet fully realized. The poem breathlessly describes such an imminent breakdown, beginning with a critical failure of her tongue, the instrument of self-expression. Her tongue “breaks” and seems to doom her, as a fractured spear often dooms a warrior in Homer—before he can harm his opponent.

Sappho's poem is conditioned by the oral culture in which it was created. It is not only a vividly enacted drama of seduction; the poem actually dramatizes its dependence on the vulnerable living organism who must perform it. Of course, as has often been observed, its very existence testifies to a considerable degree of emotional and literary control, but the poem presents itself as suspended in a state of tension between past silences and a future, imminent silence. The song exists in the threat of its own extinction, a threat which is formally confronted and triumphantly survived only at the end, where, in a dramatic peripeteia, Sappho reveals that she has replied to unanswerable enchantment with her own song of seduction. Ultimately Aphrodite proves to be the mother of Persuasion and not the death of the poet.³¹

Notes

1. For bibliography on this and other poems of Sappho, see D. E. Gerber, Studies in Greek Lyric Poetry: 1967-1975 (special edition of CW [Classical World] Vol. 70 #2 [1976]) 105-14; Studies in Greek Lyric Poetry: 1975-85 (part 1) CW Vol. 81 #2 (1987) 132-44. For bibliography on Catullus 51, see James P. Holoka, Gaius Valerius Catullus. A Systematic Bibliography (New York 1985) 195-97. For summary of earlier treatments of the poem's cruces and insightful comment, see G. M. Kirkwood, Early Greek Monody. The History of a Poetic Type (Cornell Studies in Classical Philology Vol. 37 [Ithaca 1974]) 120-23, 255-60.

2. Himerius, Orations 28.2 significantly says that Sappho made a girl's beauty and graces a pretext (πϱόφασιs) for her songs. M. R. Lefkowitz, “Critical Stereotypes and the Poetry of Sappho,” GRBS [Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies] 14 (1973) 113-23, shows how Sappho's work has been seen as the artless outpouring of a woman whose emotional energies have been diverted from the “normal” channel—i.e., child-raising. For the artistry of Sappho 31, see C. Segal, “Eros and Incantation. Sappho and Oral Poetry,” Arethusa 7 (1974) 139-60. This issue of rationality and poetic control is related to the question of poetic persona. My position resembles that of W. R. Johnson in The Idea of Lyric (Berkeley 1982) 40-41. The singer is “partly herself perhaps, the woman Sappho; partly an ideal, universal fiction: their fusion in imagination. …”

3. I agree with J. Winkler, “Public and Private in Sappho's Lyrics” in H. Foley, ed., Reflections of Women in Antiquity (New York 1981) 63-89 (74) that the expression “that man whosoever” is “a rhetorical cliché, not an actor in the imagined scene.”

4. The verb is not used impersonally at this early date—but my translation preserves the order in which the pronouns appear. Catullus' poem reverses that order.

5. The antecedent of to has been the subject of much debate. For recent discussion and bibliography, see E. Robbins, “Every Time I Look at You … Sappho Thirty-One,” TAPA [Transactions of the American Philological Association] 110 (1980) 255-61. Whether or not the ambiguity of the relative pronoun in line 5 is deliberate, it cannot be argued into clarity; to glances cursorily back at all that precedes it—the entire series of images, impressions and opinions.

6. W. R. Johnson (note 1 above) 39.

7. For discussion of the meaning of ptoieo, see L. Rissman, Love as War: Homeric Allusion in the Poetry of Sappho (Königstein 1983) 110, note 22. For comparable uses of the verb in an amatory context, see Mimn. 5.1-3 W; Alcaeus 283.3-4; Anacr. 60.11-12. G. Wills, “Sappho 31 and Catullus 51,” GRBS 8 (1967) 167-97 (186-87) takes eptoaisen as hypothetical (ken being understood) but the aorist makes better sense, and the indicative mood is accepted by most scholars (see G. L. Koniaris, “On Sappho, Fr. 31 (L.-P.),” Philologus 112 (1968) 173-86 [184-85]).

8. E. Robbins (note 4 above) 260 takes the expression as capable of referring both to strength and happiness; I also prefer an inclusive reading. See Koniaris (note 6 above) 181-82 for discussions of isos theoisin.

9. See M. Markovich, “Sappho Fr. 31: Anxiety Attack or Love Declaration?” CQ [Classical Quarterly] N.S. 22 (1972) 19-32 (21), who notes—citing Kühner-Gerth ii 449—that the subjunctive ido in line 7 “denotes the repetition of this chain reaction.” See also Wills (note 6 above) 170 and Koniaris (note 6 above) 184.

10. See L. Rissman (note 6 above) 72-90. Rissman studies the expressions eptoaisen, tromos … agrei, khlorotera … poias, isos theoisin etc. in the context of certain Homeric passages. See also J. Svenbro, “La tragédie de l'amour. Modèle de la guerre et théorie de l'amour dans la poésie de Sappho,” QS [Quaderni di Storia] 19 (1984) 57-79 (66-72). Svenbro remarks that several of Sappho's “symptoms”—trembling, blindness, sweat, pallor—resemble those of wounded, struggling or fearful warriors.

11. See Svenbro (note 9 above) 69 for discussion of the humming and fever, both of which are without parallel in Homer. See also D. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus. An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry (Oxford 1955) 29 for (rare) parallels of these erotic symptoms in Greek and Roman poets. Page cites several Homeric passages where silence afflicts someone who is shocked or afraid. Antilochus' inability to speak at his discovery of Patroclus' death (Iliad 17.695-96) is not, as Svenbro claims, a symptom comparable to the trembling, sweat etc. of an embattled warrior. As in the case of Eurylochus (Odyssey 10.244-46), Antilochus is temporarily too shocked to communicate terrible news.

12. See D. Page (note 10 above) 24-25. G. Nagy, Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter (Harvard 1974) 45 defends the hiatus as Sappho's conscious effort to reproduce the sense in the sound. See also M. L. West, “Burning Sappho,” Maia 22 (1970) 307-30 (311). West also defends the MS reading, which seems to have been the one with which Lucretius was familiar (infringi linguam at DRN 3, 155 seems also to have been a unique metaphorical use).

13. See R. Finnegan, Oral Poetry. Its nature, significance and social context (Cambridge 1977) 272. Finnegan rejects Lord's definition of oral poetry as too narrow. On p. 22 she observes, “If a piece is orally performed—still more if it is mainly known to people through actualization in performance—it must be regarded as in that sense an ‘oral poem.’”

14. See Segal (note 1 above) for the importance of the oral tradition for understanding Sappho's work. See also R. Merkelbach, “Sappho und ihr Kreis,” Philologus 101 (1957) 1-29.

15. See P. 2.86 where Pindar talks about the euthuglossos man and his responsibility to speak out within various political systems. The passage immediately succeeds one in which Pindar speaks of himself and his own function as a poet in society. Aglossos (tongueless) at N. 8.24 signifies (amongst other things) the man who lacks a poet to speak for him. The word glossa is used of the poet's tongue, and the process of poetry making at O. 6.82, O. 9.42, O. 11.9, O. 13.12, P. 1.86, P. 3.2, N. 4.8, N. 4.86, N. 7.72, I. 5.47, Pa. 6.59.

16. For other references by Sappho to the voice and its seductive power see fragments 118, 153, 185 L.P. Of course, like all ancient poets, Sappho is known to us only through the printed page. Athenaeus 13.596cd quotes Posidippus:

    Σατφωαι δὲ μένουσι φίληs ἔτι χαὶ μενέουσιν
    oδῆs αἱ λευχαὶ φθεγγομέναι σελίδεs.

    Frag. 157D, an epigram probably of Hellenistic date, ascribed to Sappho, announces that even though she is aphonos she will speak, because she has a tireless voice (phonan akamatan) set at her feet—i.e., a stone inscription.

17. H. Fränkel, Dichtung und Philosophie des frühen Griechentums² (Munich 1963) 199, n. 16 draws a distinction between the endings -tos and -teos in the verbal adjective. -tos (the ending of tolmaton in line 17 of Sappho's poem) indicates possibility, not necessity. See Smyth 358. I differ from Fränkel and those who translate “may be endured.” See P. Pucci, Odysseus Polutropos, Intertextual Readings in the Odyssey and Iliad (Ithaca 1987) 47 where he remarks with reference to Iliad 10.231 that the verb tolman (as distinct from its cognate, tlenai) usually means to dare rather than to endure, and that is does not appear to be used in the sense of “endure” in the Iliad. Given the martial tone of Sappho 31, valor, rather than endurance, seems particularly appropriate.

18. See M. L. West (note 11 above) 312-13.

19. See Svenbro (note 9 above) 57-63 and Page (note 10 above) 17.

20. See especially J. Winkler (note 2 above) 65-71. For example, Winkler shows how, in the Hymn to Aphrodite, Sappho encompasses within herself both the role of expelled female (like Aphrodite in Iliad 5) and that of aggressive male who seeks the help of a female goddess (Diomedes and Athena in Iliad 5). Thus Sappho shows how she responds, as a subtle and many-minded female reader, to the “male” text of the Iliad. Far from being excluded from the warrior's world, like Homer's Aphrodite, she contains many aspects of it within her single persona.

21. But E. Stehle Stigers, “Sappho's Private World” in Reflections of Women in Antiquity (note 2 above) 45-61 argues that Sappho's description of love exhibits a mutuality characteristic of women, rather than the desire for domination more typical of men. Stigers does not discuss this poem.

22. For khloros see Eleanor Irwin, Colour Terms in Greek Poetry (Toronto 1974) 31-78.

23. See G. Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans. Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore 1979) 144ff. for this question of the living organism replaced by or opposed to inorganic kleos.

24. The final lines of Catullus 11 show a similar “softening” of a Sapphic image; his love is like a flower which has been brushed by the plough and falls. It is not—as K. Quinn points out in his commentary ad loc.—actually ploughed under, merely fatally bruised. Sappho frag. 105 c L.P. depicts a hyacinth trampled underfoot by shepherds.

25. For otium in Latin literature, see J. M. André, L'Otium dans la vie morale et intellectuelle romaine, des origines à l'époque augustéene (Paris 1966); W. A. Laidlaw, “Otium,” G&R. [Greece & Rome] Ser. 2, 15 (1968) 42-52.

26. For discussion of the elegiac poets on otium, see André (note 24 above) 403ff.; Laidlaw (note 24 above) 47-48; L. Alfonsi, Otium e vita d'amore negli elegiaci Augustei. Studi in onore di A. Calderini e R. Paribeni, I (Milan 1956).

27. R. Lattimore, “Sappho 2 and Catullus 51,” CP [Classical Philology] 39 (1944) 184-87 cites similar lines in Theognis 1103-4, where hubris is said to have destroyed famous cities like Colophon and Smyrna. Troy also comes to mind, with its proverbial wealth, the luxurious peace shattered by the Greek expedition. A. Passerini, SIFC [Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica] 11 (1934) 52ff. links Catullus' otium with truphe.

28. For otium as peace as opposed to war, see for example, Sall. Cat. 10.1; Jug. 41.1; Livy 1.19.4; 1.22.2; 6.36.1; Sen. Ep. 51.6.

29. For discussion of the final stanza of Catullus' poem, and its possible relationship with the Sapphic poem, see G. Wills (note 6 above). Wills argues (196) that Catullus is talking about “a lover's code—one that embraces suffering and condemns desertion under trial. … Love is his negotium, and he must be fit for all its encounters.” Wills' interpretation of otium is persuasive, although there is no “must,” no exhortation to abandon otium—which constitutes a major difference between Catullus' poem and Sappho's.

30. C. Segal, “Catullan Otiosi: The Lover and the Poet,” G&R 17 (1970) 25-31 argues that, for Catullus in poems 50 and 51, the concept of otium links love and the writing of poetry. “50 deals primarily with the literary or “poetic” side of otium; 51 with the amatory side; but the two strands of otium are intertwined” (31). I agree that there is a literary and an amatory aspect to otium, but I prefer not to divide its twin aspects between the two poems. Recently J. B. Itzkowitz, “On the Last Stanza of Catullus 51,” Latomus 42 (1983) 129-34 also argued that otium has twin aspects—otium-amor and otium-poesis.

31. Frag. 200 L.P. (a scholiast on the Works and Days) says that Sappho made Aphrodite the mother of Peitho.