SOURCE: Snyder, Jane McIntosh. “Sappho's Challenge to the Homeric Inheritance” and “Sappho's Other Lyric Themes.” In Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho, pp. 63-77, 97-121. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

[In the following excerpts, Snyder examines how Sappho's lyric poetry recontextualizes the patriarchal and heterosexual world of the Homeric epic, also surveying several of her lesser-known poetic fragments.]

Despite obvious differences in scope, purpose, and tone, scholars have frequently noted the similarities between Homer's epics and Sappho's lyrics. Remarking on echoes in diction, phraseology, and themes, one critic inquires, “Why does [Sappho] use a pseudo-Homeric ‘mode of writing’?”¹ He goes on to explain the parallels on the basis of social history, claiming that Sappho must have turned to the language of Homer's epics in an attempt to recover the lost heroic world of the old aristocracy, which was rapidly crumbling away during the period of political chaos in which she lived.

Here I would like to pose the question differently. Rather than viewing Sappho as a “pseudo-Homer,” I ask instead, “In what ways can Sappho's allusions to and echoes of Homer be seen as a challenge to the epic tradition?” In other words, to what extent does Sappho present herself as a new Homer? Can she not be read as modifying and supplanting the old epics rather than as clinging to them? May Sappho perhaps be presenting herself as a “consciously ‘antiheroic’ persona”?² These seem particularly important questions in view of the poet's explicit statement in a programmatic song, fragment “16” V., where she emphatically declares—using Helen of Troy as an example to prove her point—that contrary to what “some” say, the most beautiful thing on earth is “what one loves.”

Sappho refashions the legendary Helen, the bane of all Greeks, as a positive figure in pursuit of her own erotic fulfillment, and in so doing transforms the Homeric material to suit her own purposes. In fragment “44” V., as we will see, she writes her own mini-epic, focusing on the vignette of the wedding reception at Troy for Hektor and his bride, Andromache. Although the subject matter of the piece is based on part of the overall narrative of the Iliad, it is really more reminiscent of the Odyssey in its attention to domestic detail and to a female-oriented world. Although the traditional cast of Trojan characters is present in the narrative—Hektor, Andromache, and Priam—and although the language of the poem is more heavily laden with Homeric epithets (“far-shooting” Apollo, and the like) than is usually the case, the piece is completely removed from the battle context that so constantly informs its Iliadic model. In fact the festive occasion described, in which the various roles of younger and older women are detailed, could perhaps almost be said to reflect Sappho's own society (if we knew what that was) as much as Homeric society. In other words, Sappho is producing her own new version of Homer—minus the warriors carrying on warfare—rather than merely reproducing epic themes in a lyric mode.

Seen in this light, Sappho's songs may be read as challenges to the patriarchal and heterosexually focused stories of earlier epic, particularly the Iliad. They reflect a strong female authorial self who offers the audience a new way of seeing the world, through a female-centered perspective. In challenging the old Homeric tradition in both subtle and obvious ways, Sappho presents a fresh alternative to Homer, not merely recycled epic. At the same time, she does not really reject Homer material so much as make use of it for her own purposes. Ironically, her ties with Homer have most typically interested (male) critics of her work and have in effect contributed to the view of her (especially in the nineteenth century) as a “mainstream” poet. The Homeric garb she chooses to wear from time to time has no doubt protected her from the fate of other women poets whose iconoclastic language has contributed to their marginal status.

HELEN AND EROS

FRAGMENT “16” V.

Some say that the most beautiful thing
upon the black earth is an army of horsemen;
others, of infantry, still others, of ships;
but I say it is what one loves.
It is completely easy to make this
intelligible to everyone; for the woman
who far surpassed all mortals in beauty,
Helen, left her most brave husband
And sailed off to Troy, nor did she
remember at all her child
or her dear parents; but [the Cyprian]
led her away. …
[All of which] has now reminded me
of Anaktoria, who is not here.
Her lovely walk and the bright sparkle of her face
would rather look upon than
all the Lydian chariots
and full-armed infantry.
          [This may be the end of the poem.]

This song about beauty and desire is a striking example of Sappho's power to articulate a uniquely female, woman-centered definition of eros. Sappho's answer to the question “What is the most beautiful thing on earth?” is “what one loves,” eratai (line 4), the verbal form of the noun eros. Although many have tried to deny that gender is a factor in this poem, arguing that Sappho is presenting her audience with universal truth, the appearance of the distinctly female Sappho figure in many of the songs that have already been discussed suggests that the “I” of this song must also be read as gendered.³ The military focus of the opening and closing of the fragment, so obviously male-centered in terms of the Homeric background, may then be seen as contrasted with the female singer's point of view, as I argue further below.

THE PRIAMEL

Scholars in recent years have devoted an extraordinary amount of energy to an analysis of the poem's logic and of the exact import of its chief rhetorical device—the so-called priamel. Derived from a mediaeval Latin word, the term priamel refers to a catalogue or list in which several items are presented in succession, followed by a concluding statement that usually asserts the primacy of one item or otherwise ties the list together in some kind of concluding assertion.⁴ An early example may be found in the Spartan poet Tyrtaios's definition of arete (“excellence,” literally, “manliness”). Writing probably during about the same period as Sappho (second half of the seventh century b.c.), Tyrtaios claims (fragment 9 Diehl) that he would not consider a man truly worthy of account just on the basis of fleet-footedness, or of his wrestling skills, or strength, or good looks, or wealth, or persuasive powers; rather, he says, true “excellence” consists of steadfastness in the front lines of battle. Tyrtaios's catalogue of virtues is thus capped by his own statement of what is of the greatest value as far as he is concerned.

Turning to Sappho's priamel, which occupies the opening stanza of fragment “16,” we see that she lists three groups of unspecified people (oi men, “some,” oi de, “others,” and oi de, “still others”) who have certain preferences involving, in turn, cavalry, infantry, and naval forces. The oi here is simply the definite article (“the,” as in the expression [h]oi polloi), and the particles men … de … de are used to mark a series of contrasting ideas. In the Greek, the first-person statement beginning ego de, “But I [say],” follows immediately after the statement of what these unspecified groups of persons are attempting to define, namely, “the most beautiful thing upon the black earth.” The use of the personal pronoun, ego (“I”), which carries emphatic force in a language such as Greek in which the personal endings are already contained within the verb forms themselves, marks a particularly strong contrast that is reinforced by the third occurrence of the particle de: some people say the cavalry is the most beautiful (kalliston) thing on the earth, others the infantry, others ships, but I [say] it is that which one loves/desires. (In the Greek, the verb going with “I” must be supplied on the basis of the earlier third-person form in line 2, phais' [“they say”].)

In what is clearly the opening stanza of the song (as both the papyrus source and the internal rhetorical structure of the fragment indicate), Sappho has boldly set forth a definition of beauty that is linked directly to eros and that prides itself on its alterity. The Sappho figure, or the female singer of the song, declares a different point of view, and not one that poses simply as an alternative to one other point of view; no—this point of view, like Tyrtaios', follows a list of views against which it is counterpoised. The single figure of the poet-singer stands against the numberless unnamed persons who make up the three unspecified groups of “somes” and “others.”

Perhaps because the form of this song is controlled—at least initially—by the rhetorical strategies of the priamel, critics have often sought in fragment “16” some kind of formal—even Aristotelian—logic.⁵ Scholars argue, for example, over whether the final alternative (“but I say”) is inclusive or exclusive; when the poet says that “whatever one loves” is the most beautiful thing on earth, does she mean that if you love ships or armies the most, then they are kalliston for you? Or does she posit her fourth definition of beauty as excluding mere things, like armies and ships? Does she mean to say, in using the verb eratai (line 4), normally applied to people rather than objects, that only human relationships qualify for the prize of “fairest”?

SAPPHO'S DEFINITION OF BEAUTY

Perhaps the answers to such questions are not really very important to someone listening to this song, for the hearer's attention is immediately diverted in the next stanza to the singer's “proofs” of her generalization. I will examine these proofs (one mythological, one not) in detail below, but first it may be useful to look closely at exactly how the Sappho figure formulates her definition of beauty.

Although some translators render the fourth definition of the most beautiful thing on earth as “she whom one loves,” the Greek word is actually a pronoun (ken', or in Attic dialect, ekeino) that is neither masculine nor feminine in gender, but neuter, “that thing which one loves.”⁶ The fact that Sappho chooses a grammatically “neutral” expression does, of course, render the definition she offers more generalized, and certainly more open to multiple readings than if she had referred to “that man” or “that woman” whom one loves. There is a curious analogue here to modern gay discourse within a heterosexual context, in which a lesbian or gay speaker may render her or his language ungendered through the omission of all personal pronouns; in this way a man might recount events without overtly tipping off the audience that the trip last week to Bermuda, for example, was spent with another man. In the case of fragment “16,” Sappho seems to be taking some pains to cast her generalization about desire in broadly applicable terms. In the phrasing she uses, not only the subject (the one loving) but also the object (the thing loved) are left indefinite—“what one loves” rather than, for example, “she whom I-as-woman love.”

With stunning economy, the song lays forth its bold assertion in the time it takes to sing the opening stanza. The claim of the Sappho figure is immediately reasserted in the first line and a half of the next stanza by the further claim that “it is completely easy to make this intelligible to everyone.” This adjunct claim is marked by the assonance and verbal play in the opening words of lines 5 and 6, pagchu (“completely”) and panti (“everyone”), both from the root pan- (“all,” as in “pan-Hellenic”). Sappho could have gone directly from the priamel to its “proofs,” the examples of Helen and Anaktoria that follow, simply through the use of the particle gar (“for,” line 6), which marks an explanation of what has preceded. The presence of the additional claim further emphasizes the authority of the Sappho figure, the ego of the priamel. Not only can the poet assert her own iconoclastic definition of beauty, but she can also prove it—with ease—to any and all! This is not a poem of self-doubt.

A pair of proofs now follows the pair of claims. In a song about beauty and desire, what could be a more appropriate first example than the archetypal fairest of all women, Helen of Troy? The theme of the song—what is “most beautiful” (kalliston, line 3)—is echoed in the allusion to Helen's own beauty (kallos, line 7). Yet as the example unfolds we begin to see that this Helen is cast in the role of neither helpless victim nor evil betrayer. Rather than being portrayed as the face that launched a thousand ships, this Helen (albeit under the influence of Aphrodite) seems to be captain of her own ship. She leaves behind her noble husband (Menelaus, evidently not named in the song) and sails off—remembering neither child nor parents—in pursuit of what she loves, that is, the (unnamed) Paris. As Page duBois was the first to point out, in this version of Helen's story she is a subject of desire, not merely its object.⁷ Although she herself is beautiful, the emphasis in these lines is on her active seeking after what she regards as beautiful, that is, Paris. Sappho's Helen is not a passive victim but an active pursuer. Nor does Sappho's Helen seem to display the self-reproach evident in the Iliad, where even in the face of King Priam's kindly words toward her, as she recalls her own abandonment of home and child, she calls herself kunopis, “dog-faced” (Iliad 3.180).⁸ Although the gap in the fourth stanza prevents certainty, it appears that this Helen simply forgets her past and goes off to Troy, “led” by someone or something, perhaps Aphrodite, or perhaps the ship in which she sailed.⁹

Those critics who have sought a kind of linear logic in this example of the story of Helen have of course been disappointed, and they complain that Sappho's account of Helen—as the most beautiful woman on earth—seems unclear in its focus. If the myth is cited to show how Helen found her own kalliston (“most beautiful thing”) in her lover Paris, they say, why does Sappho begin the account with the allusion to Helen's own surpassing kallos (“beauty”)?¹⁰ In response we might argue that Helen provides the quintessential proof of the poet's thesis: even one who already possesses kallos within herself is still going to pursue what is kalliston to her—that which she loves. As in fragment “22” V., desire in Sappho has little to do with possession of anything.

Because of the gap at the beginning of stanza four, we cannot tell exactly how Sappho makes the transition from the mythological proof to the personal proof—that is, to a narrative that is part of the poet's own fictive world of the present rather than Homer's fictive world of the past. In any case, in line 15 the temporal adverb nun (“now”) seems to bring us firmly into the present moment as the poet begins to sing of Anaktoria, who is for some unspecified reason absent.

ANAKTORIA AND THE SAPPHIC GAZE

In contrast to Helen, who no longer remembers (oude … emnasthe) those once dear to her, the poet-singer does recall (onemnais', lines 15-16) her beloved, Anaktoria—and as a result of the telling of the myth of Helen. Given the connections between memory and desire that Sappho frequently makes, it is not surprising that the recollection of Anaktoria brings with it the desire, expressed in the first person, to behold her more than anything else in the world. The verb of desiring, boulomai, is here put into the optative mood of the Greek verb system, a mood that is itself often used to express a wish or some other conditional (as opposed to actual) form of action; along with the particle ke, the form bolloiman in line 17 (or in Attic Greek, bouloimen) conveys the notion “I would wish” rather than simply “I wish.” In effect, the mood of the verb here (impossible to render in English except through vague equivalents involving auxiliary verbs like “would”) renders the singer's statement a timeless one; she is not merely saying “I want to see Anaktoria now,” but rather “I would rather see Anaktoria” even if I could look instead upon every war-chariot in Lydia. It is a statement of preference that is true without regard to time, despite the setting of the example within the fictive present.

Before we look more closely at how the desire to gaze upon Anaktoria is articulated, what about her name itself? Commentators note that it is an aristocratic name, but this fact is not surprising given Sappho's own evidently aristocratic status.¹¹ The name is related to the word anax (stem anakt-), meaning “lord” or “master.” In Homer's Iliad the word is frequently used to describe Agamemnon as the chief general of the Greeks, the anax andron (“lord of men,” as in Iliad 1.442). Curiously, then, the name that Sappho chooses for the “real-world” example to prove the thesis of the song has a kind of Homeric echo to it. The Homeric overtones of this most beautiful thing on earth, this “Maestra,” as it were (to render “Anaktoria” in Italian), link this example to the mythical exemplum of Helen with which the proofs began. The “real-world” example, both through its timeless reference and through its epic associations, takes on some of the same larger-than-life qualities as the story of Helen. Both stories, that of Helen's desire for Paris and that of the Sappho persona's desire for Anaktoria, prove the same point: whatever one loves is the most beautiful thing on earth.

A closer look at the language of desire in the song's fifth (and possibly final) stanza reveals several links both to the opening of the song and to the construction of desire elsewhere in Sappho's poetry. In the Greek for line 17, the verb of wanting, bolloiman, is immediately followed by the adjective eraton (“lovely”), which is from the same root as the verb eratai in the song's opening stanza. As we have already noted in connection with fragments “31” and “22” …, desire in Sappho's songs is often configured in connection with gazing upon the beloved woman. Here the speaker would wish to gaze upon—in particular—Anaktoria's “lovely walk” (eraton … bama) and the “bright sparkle of her face” (amaruchma lampron … prosopo). The emphasis is on the dynamic—rather than static—qualities of Anaktoria, on the effect she creates as she moves and on the sparkling aura that surrounds her face.¹² As I argued in connection with fragment 22 (chapter 2), it is not the dress itself but the flow of the dress as it is worn by the beloved woman that elicits desire from the beholder.

Ironically, the language that Sappho chooses here to describe Anaktoria's face also suggests the military imagery with which the song opens and (probably) closes.¹³ Sappho's compatriot Alkaios describes weapons and armor as “bright” (lampron, fragments 383 V. and 357 V.), and in the Iliad (4.432) weapons “glitter” (elampe) on the Greek soldiers as they march toward battle against the Trojans. (The Greek words here are derived from the same Indo-European root that gives us “lamp” in English.) The way that Sappho describes the narrator's desire further strengthens the song's claim in revising the old Homeric values: it is not the flash of weaponry that the narrator would wish to behold. Sappho seems almost to say, “War and weapons may be beautiful to some, but not to me; for I am the new Homer, and I sing not of war but of eros and desire.”

As is the case with most of Sappho's more sensual songs, critics have sometimes tried to set fragment “16” within a strictly heterosexual context. The most amusing attempt has involved the explanation that Anaktoria is “not present” because she has gone off to marry a Lydian soldier—hence the military frame of reference in stanzas 1 and 5.¹⁴ Although this kind of approach cannot completely remove the element of desire on the part of the narrator, it certainly neutralizes it by adding the implication of rejection. We note that the song itself—at least what survives of it—makes no mention as to the reason for Anaktoria's absence, any more than fragments “94” and “96” offer an explanation as to the reason for the separation between lovers. It seems more to the point to concentrate on what is in the song than what is not; just as in fragment “31,” the focus is on the narrator's gaze (in this case, would-be gaze) upon the beloved woman. Here the image of the beloved woman, just as in fragment “96,” must be called to mind through memory, for she is not in fact present at the moment of the song. The military images surely have more significance than as mere props for some alleged biographical underpinning of the song. Rather, they provide the framework within which Sappho argues for a new set of values: the primacy of eros as the determining factor in defining the most beautiful thing on earth.

By concentrating all the alternative definitions in the realm of the military in stanza 1 (whether cavalry or infantry or naval forces) and by setting the example of Anaktoria in opposition to the Lydian forces in stanza 5, Sappho in effect creates an opposition between war and eros. The Sappho persona, although not identified by name as in the “Hymn to Aphrodite” and elsewhere, comes through clearly in the “I” of the narrator's voice, which is set against the anonymous “some” and “others” of the priamel. The “I” of the song confidently asserts that everyone can see the validity of the new values set forth here. The example of Helen appears at first to be traditional in its subject matter and in the technique of drawing on myth to prove a point, but in fact it offers a radical treatment of Helen's story in focusing on her subjectivity and her agency. Even more radically, the narrator of the poem jumps from myth into the narrative of the present—into the story of Anaktoria and the narrator's desire to gaze upon her. In this way, the narrator's desire, her eros, supplants the “masculine” way of seeing the world as a struggle for control through military might; the splendor that the Sappho figure celebrates is not of swords but of the beauty of a woman.

ANOTHER SONG ABOUT EROS AND HELEN

FRAGMENT “23” V.

… of eros (hoped?)
For when I look upon you face to face,
[not even] Hermione [seems] such as
          you,
[nor is it unfitting] to liken you
to fair-haired Helen.
… for mortal women, but know this,
that by your … [you would free me]
of all my cares. …
… river banks …
… all night long. …

Like fragment “22,” found in the same Oxyrhynchus papyrus as this song, fragment “23” is composed in the four-line Sapphic stanza. The fragment opens with a reference to eros and proceeds in the next stanza to portray the narrator as being in much the same position as the man of the opening of fragment “31”—who sits opposite (enantios) a woman and hears her sweet laughter. Here the narrator is standing or sitting opposite (antion, line 3) the woman whose beauty she compares first to that of Hermione, the only child of Helen of Troy, and then to that of Helen herself.

The mention of eros in the first extant line of the fragment and the resemblance to the intimate proximity described in fragment “31” suggest an erotic context for this piece as well, but we cannot be sure exactly what shape the song took. However, the allusion to Helen is likely to have functioned less as a digression into old heroic tales of war and abduction and more as a way of illustrating the present moment of the lyric—the desire of the narrator for the woman who is at first compared to the daughter of the most beautiful woman in the world, and then to the most beautiful woman herself.

The reference to riverbanks (dewy riverbanks, according to the commonly accepted restoration of the partially missing adjective) is reminiscent of another short fragment (“95” V.) in which the lotus-covered dewy banks of the river Acheron in Hades are mentioned in connection with the narrator's desire (imeros, 95.11) to die. If this fragment about the likeness of a woman to Hermione and Helen is indeed erotic in nature, then the possible allusion to dying toward the end of the piece should perhaps be compared to the narrator's self-description in fragment “31” V., where the sensation of almost dying caps the list of the physical responses experienced by the singer as she gazes upon the woman whom she desires. Particularly in view of the apparent resemblance between the description of the narrator's proximity to the woman here and the opening scenario of fragment “31” V., we may not be too far wrong in imagining that the Hermione-Helen fragment began by mentioning the narrator's feelings inspired by eros, praised the beloved woman through the mythical comparisons, and went on to describe the narrator's own sensations resulting from the effects of the goddesslike woman on her.

THE WEDDING RECEPTION OF HEKTOR AND ANDROMACHE

FRAGMENT “44” V.

Cyprus …
The herald came,
Idaeus … swift messenger
[who said]:
“… and of the rest of Asia … the fame is undying.
Hektor and his companions are bringing a quick-glancing girl
from holy Thebes and the river Plakia—
tender Andromache—in ships upon the salty
sea; many golden bracelets and purple garments
… many-colored adornments,
countless silver cups and ivory.”
So he spoke. Quickly [Hektor's] dear father leaped up;
the word went out over the broad-plained city to his friends.
At once the sons of Ilos yoked mules
to the well-wheeled chariots. The whole throng
of women and … of maidens …
But apart, the daughters of Priam …
and unmarried men yoked horses to the chariots,
and greatly …
… charioteers …
[Several verses are missing here.]
… like to the gods …
… holy …
set forth … to Ilium
and the sweet-melodied aulos [and
          kitharis] were mingled,
and the noise of castanets. … Then
          the maidens
sang a holy song; the divine echo
          reached the sky …
and everywhere along the road …
libation vessels …,
myrrh and cassia and frankincense
          were mingled.
But the women, as many as were older, cried out,
and all the men shouted a high-pitched lovely song,
calling upon Paean, the far-shooting and well-lyred;
they sang of Hektor and Andromache, like to the gods.

Fragment “44,” of which all or parts of thirty-four lines have been preserved in another Oxyrhynchus papyrus, describes the return of Hektor to Troy together with his new bride, Andromache, as well as the preparations of the Trojans to celebrate the arrival of the newlyweds. Leaving aside the complete “Hymn to Aphrodite,” this is the longest fragment of Sappho's poetry that we have. From the evidence in the papyrus in which the piece is preserved, we know that it was the last poem in Book 2 of the Alexandrian collection of Sappho's songs. Several writers of late antiquity (including Athenaeus, second century a.d.) also cite the song as they comment on particular details, thus doubly confirming Sappho's authorship.¹⁵

In form fragment “44” is unusual in that it was not written in stanzas but rather in a line-by-line arrangement, each line being in virtually identical rhythms. The meter is usually described as glyconic but with a dactylic expansion: xx/–ss–ss–ss–/s–. The dactylic element, a long syllable followed by two short syllables (–ss), is so named from the Greek word for finger, daktulos, representing one long element from the first to the second finger joint, followed by two short elements on either side of the joint nearest the fingertip. The long-short-short dactylic rhythms in this poem clearly echo, although they do not precisely duplicate, the dactylic hexameter in which both the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed. Thus even without the Trojan subject matter, the hearers of the song would most likely have been expecting something relating to epic.

The epic context would have been suggested as well by the several Homeric epithets and by the number of dialect forms in this song that are peculiar to the Homeric form of the Greek language, as opposed to the dialect spoken on Lesbos (Lesbian-Aeolic dialect). To give just one example, the word for “city” in line 12 takes the Homeric form ptolin, whereas in Sappho's usual dialect the word would have been pronounced polin (or, in the subject case, polis, from which the English word “political” derives).

Although it is hard to say how much of the song is missing, we may have the essential narrative elements more or less intact: the herald Idaeus's announcement of the impending arrival of Hektor and Andromache along with his description of the bridal trousseau; the reaction of Hektor's father, King Priam; the spread of the news throughout Troy and the consequent preparations on the part of the women, girls, and young men; and, finally, the scene of celebration at the end involving musical instruments, incense, and everyone singing the praises of the bride and groom.

We note that in the course of the narrative as we have it Hektor and Andromache still do not seem actually to have arrived in Troy. It is their impending arrival, and the busy preparations of everyone expecting it, that gives this fragment a certain breathless excitement. The Iliadic context of the war fought over Helen's abduction to Troy seems far from the scene. No weapons are mentioned, nor war-chariots, but only the satine of line 13, a special kind of woman's carriage not mentioned in Homer.

The self-referential quality of fragment “44” becomes obvious when we realize that in the absence of the actual narration of the arrival of the bride and groom (at least in the extant portion), the piece is essentially a song about singing.¹⁶ In fact the scene of singing at the end is so vividly presented that we almost sense the arrival of the subjects even though the extant narrative never actually says, “And then Hektor and Andromache disembarked and proceeded through Troy.” Even if the actual arrival was narrated in the gap following line 20, as seems probable, the piece may still have focused more on the reaction of the townspeople and on their celebratory preparations than on the heroic couple themselves.

As I suggested earlier, the attention in this song to domestic details is really more reminiscent of the Odyssey than of the Iliad, except perhaps for the scene of domestic tranquillity that is part of the description of the decoration on Achilles' new shield (Iliad 18.561-72). The herald's report of Andromache's gold bracelets and purple garments and many-colored (poikila) adornments, the music of the aulos (a double-reed instrument of the oboe family), lyre (if the supplement kitharis is accepted in line 24), and castanets, and the myrrh, cassia, and frankincense: all these details appeal to our senses of sight, sound, and smell, and evoke a world of beauty and harmony. The setting may be superficially Homeric, but Homer, or at least the Iliadic Homer, seems to have exited the scene. Instead of war and strife, we hear of finery and music, of joyful sounds to celebrate the union of the happy couple.

TROY RECAST: AN OLD MYTH IN A NEW CONTEXT

Scholars have wondered whether this song about an epic bride and groom might not have been composed to be sung at an actual wedding on Lesbos.¹⁷ While we have no way of knowing the answer to such a question for sure, it does seem relevant to point out that the Homeric subtext of fragment “44” suggests that such a function would have been unlikely.¹⁸ After all, once the war begins (after the narrative time frame of Sappho's lyric piece), Hektor is eventually killed by Achilles (Iliad Book 22), young Astyanax (son of Hektor and Andromache) is thrown from the walls of Troy, and Andromache herself is taken captive and subjected to the life of a slave, as she herself foretells at the close of the Iliad (24.725-45). These tragic outcomes, although not directly alluded to in Sappho's song about the beginning of their relationship, cannot help but color the listener's perception of the joyful celebrations in honor of the two epic figures. Even though Sappho chooses to focus her song on celebration and joyful beginnings and a sense of eager anticipation, thus creating a mini-epic that provides a respite from the usual Iliadic themes of war and suffering and death, the vignette she creates represents only an initial moment of the story that is all too familiar in its unhappy outcome. In fact it is the inevitability of misfortune that gives Sappho's lyric version a special poignancy, for we know that the sounds of joy echoing among the people of Troy will one day be replaced by sounds of lamentation after Hektor meets his doom at the hands of Achilles. For the moment of the song itself, however, Hektor and Andromache are ikeloi theois (line 21, “like to the gods”), a theme echoed in the final word of the song describing them as theoeikelois (literally, “godlike”).

If we consider this song without regard to its intended function (if any), we can turn our attention to the exquisitely colorful detail and the emphasis on women's roles that are characteristics of Sappho's other songs. The bride's dowry, for example, includes golden bracelets, purple robes, many-colored (poikila) adornments, and silver cups. The women and girls ride in mule-drawn carriages, whereas the young men are in horse-drawn chariots. The girls sing a holy song, while the older women (line 31) cry out and the men sing a song to Apollo, and everyone sings the praises of the bride and groom. Page is probably right in his conclusion that Sappho “is not at all concerned to portray a Homeric scene.”¹⁹ In addition to the lack of epic models for the type of scene she describes, the particular details such as the women's carriages (line 13), the castanets (line 25), and the myrrh, cassia, and frankincense (line 30) are not found anywhere in the Iliad or the Odyssey.

What are we to make of this un-Homeric scene drawn from the world of the Homeric heroes? Like fragment “16,” fragment “44” offers us an old myth in a new context. Just as the Sapphic Helen of fragment 16 provides a positive example of erotic self-fulfillment, so here the celebratory scene of joyful anticipation suggests what the union of Hektor and Andromache might have been: a long and happy marriage unmarred by the scars of death and destruction. The sensual details of color, sound, and scent describe a delightful scene that is a far cry from the battlefields of Troy.²⁰ As I will suggest [elsewhere], the details in this song accord perfectly with the aesthetic ideal described elsewhere in Sappho's verses—a world in which delicate variegation (poikilia) is the hallmark of a beautiful and orderly microcosm. Here there is no need for heroic exploits, contests of strength, or battles of will, for none of these is critical to Sapphic eros.

It would be tempting to wonder—if we had more of Sappho's poetry on which to form a judgment—whether or not she tended to use Homeric and other traditional myths in the same way that the great choral lyric poets of the early fifth century did.²¹ Writers like Pindar of Thebes or Bacchylides of Keos routinely include allusions to or retellings of the old myths in their odes in order to illustrate some maxim or suggest a connection between the old story and the subject of the song at hand, usually with a moralizing slant. Sappho's contemporary Alkaios—although it is hard to be certain in view of the fragmentary nature of his songs—also seems to have used the old tales to make moral statements, as in the contrast he draws between the destruction wrought by Helen and the heroic offspring produced by Thetis, mother of Achilles (fragment “42” V.).²² I venture to hazard a guess that Sappho used the old myths as she saw fit to enhance her descriptions of her female-oriented world. The fragments of her songs suggest little concern with moral pronouncements. Instead, she freely adapts traditional material to suit her own purposes, whether to suggest an epic precedent for the primacy of eros as experienced by the archetypal woman, Helen, to compare female beauty to the legendary pulchritude of Hermione and Helen, or to narrate a scene of splendid nuptial celebration seemingly far removed from the epic context of the Trojan War.

.....

Despite the unquestionable prominence of Aphrodite, Eros, and woman-centered passions in the songs she composed, Sappho's role as a lyric poet treated a wide range of other themes as well. The present [essay] provides an overview of most of the remaining fragments of any substance (i.e., more than three or four connected words) that have not been discussed earlier in this book in an attempt to illustrate what that range most likely was. If we were miraculously to discover a complete copy of the nine books of Sappho's lyrics, we would find songs of prayer, marriage songs, folk songs, festival songs, and no doubt a variety of other kinds of lyric musings on everything from the traditional Greek myths to events of daily life.

Although some of the shorter fragments discussed in this [essay] are preserved in tattered papyrus rolls, many of them come from quotations by ancient grammarians or commentators who wrote many centuries after Sappho's time and who were chiefly interested in some peculiarity of dialect or a metrical phenomenon illustrated by the words they chose to quote. Generally speaking, they provide little or no help as to the context of the words quoted. Short of grouping these fragments into five general categories, I have not attempted to supply any missing context. Tempting though it is to try to imagine in what sort of poem the phrase “the black sleep of night [covers] the eyes” (fragment “151” V.) might have occurred, for example, such speculative guesswork is perhaps not as productive as one's simple indulgence in the evocative nature of any fragment. Like the ruins of an ancient temple, these bits and pieces of song stand as hieroglyphic enigmas that stir the imagination without necessarily begging for actual reconstruction.²³ Unlike the ruins of the Parthenon, however, these literary ruins are in no danger of collapse should we choose to let them simply stand as fragments of the original—in most cases no doubt unrecoverable—whole.

PRAYERS

Not surprisingly, many of the shorter fragments take the same general shape as the “Hymn to Aphrodite,” that is, a prayer addressed to some deity or deities. We have already seen that several fragments open with an address to the Charites or to the Muses, and other deities called upon include Hera, the Nereids, Eos (Dawn), and perhaps Apollo and Artemis.²⁴ The most substantial among these is the following prayer addressed to the Nereids (and Aphrodite, if, as is likely, the opening of the song has been correctly restored) for the safe return of the speaker's brother following an unspecified journey. We may assume that the poem's journey was by sea, for the daughters of Nereus are sea-goddesses who assist sailors, a role that the Cyprian Aphrodite (whose name reappears toward the end of the fragment), born from the sea, also took on:

FRAGMENT “5” V.

O [Cyprian] and Nereids, grant
that my brother come hither unharmed
and that as many things as he wishes in his heart to come about
are all brought to pass,
And that he atones for all his former errors,
and is a joy to his [friends],
a [pain] to his enemies; but for us
let there be no misery.
May he wish to do honor to his sister
          … painful suffering …
… millet-seed … of the citizens …
… but you, Cyprian, setting aside …

Like the “Hymn to Aphrodite” and other songs that made up the opening book of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho's work, this prayer is composed in four-line Sapphic stanzas. Voigt and other scholars believe that what we have left is a skeletal version of the entire song, beginning with the opening address to Aphrodite and the Nereids in stanza one, and concluding with a repeated address to Aphrodite in stanza five. Traditionally, the poem has been read autobiographically in conjunction with the statements in the historian Herodotus (2.134 ff.) regarding Sappho's brother Charaxos. Herodotus reports that Charaxos went to Naucratis in Egypt, where he purchased the freedom of a famous courtesan named Rhodopis with whom he was enamored. When he got home, Herodotus continues, Sappho mocked him for his actions in one of her poems. Is fragment “5” that poem? If it is, is our understanding of the fragment likely to be helped much by the remark of a historian writing some one hundred and twenty-five years after Sappho's time?

Perhaps it is more to the point to examine the fragment—since we have a substantial portion of it left—in comparison with other ancient prayers for the safe return of someone from a journey at sea. Such a poem was known as a propemptikon, literally a “send-off” song in which the speaker pleads that a friend or relative will come home safely. If an example by the Roman poet Horace (65-8 b.c.), who was a great admirer and imitator of Sappho's poetry, is any indication, such a piece might use the allusion to the departed person's trip as a taking-off point for other themes as well. In Odes 1.3, Horace entreats Aphrodite and the twins Kastor and Pollux to grant a safe journey to Vergil on his way home to Italy from Athens. But after the first eight lines, the poem veers off into philosophical musings (for another thirty-two lines) on the audacity of human enterprise in seeking to conquer nature—as, for example, in Daedalus's use of wings for human flight.

In Sappho's song, although the gaps prevent us from knowing exactly what direction the poem took, it seems clear enough that the actual wish for the brother's safe return was accomplished within the two opening lines. The remaining eighteen lines seem to have enlarged on this wish by setting forth a program for various kinds of reciprocal actions: the speaker prays that the brother will accomplish whatever his heart (thumos) desires, but that he will also atone for past mistakes; in addition, according to the conventional Greek morality (along the lines of an eye for an eye), she hopes that he will be a “joy” (chara) to his friends and a pain to his enemies. The speaker prays further that no pain will come to themselves, and that the brother will somehow bring honor to his sister. The song thus focuses on the reciprocity of various relationships—between the speaker and the addressees, between them and the brother, between the brother and his friends (or enemies), and between the brother and the speaker herself. Like the “Hymn to Aphrodite,” the song emphasizes the bonds between human and divine—and, especially in this fragment, between one person and another.

Another, more broken fragment (also in Sapphic stanzas) has been closely linked by scholars to fragment “5,” for it appears to contain some of the same language for the notion of atonement, and it mentions a woman named Doricha, identified by the first-century a.d. historian Strabo (17.1.33) as the courtesan Rhodopis with whom Sappho's brother Charaxos was supposed to have fallen in love. Whether or not this is the case, like fragment “15,” this poem, too, seems to be addressed to Aphrodite:²⁵

FRAGMENT “15” V.

… blessed (goddess?) …
[May (s)he atone for] as many errors as
          (s)he made [before] …
Cypris, and may Doricha find you most harsh,
and may she not boast saying this,
how (s)he came a second time [to]
much-desired eros.

Aside from the mention of the feminine name Doricha, the gender of the subjects in this song is not apparent from what is left, but on the basis of Strabo's identification of Doricha with the courtesan Rhodopis, we may perhaps assume a heterosexual context. Evidently the speaker is praying that Aphrodite treat Doricha harshly and not give her assistance in matters of the heart—a plea exactly the opposite of the speaker's request for help in the “Hymn to Aphrodite.” In that song, Aphrodite is requested to assist, as she has done many times in the past, with the repetitive, cyclical, and reciprocal aspects of eros; here, on the contrary, the goddess is to see to it that the flow of eros comes to a dead halt. There is to be no second time.

Another prayer that has survived in skeletal form is fragment “17” V., a five-stanza song (in Sapphic stanzas) that is addressed to the goddess Hera:

FRAGMENT “17” V.

Near to me, lady Hera,
[may your lovely form appear],
whom (famous) kings, the sons of Atreus,
entreated,
When they had accomplished [many labors],
first at Ilium [and then at sea]
setting out to here, they were not able
[to complete the journey],
Until they [called upon] you and Zeus Antiaios
and the lovely [son] of Thuone.
But now kindly [come to my aid]
according to the custom of old.
Holy and beautiful …
maidens …
around …
… to be …
to come to …

Addressed to Zeus's consort Hera, this prayer reminds the goddess of her relationship with earlier Homeric entreaters, namely the Greek kings Agamemnon and Menelaus (the sons of Atreus). In the version told in Homer's Odyssey (3.130-83), the two brothers have quarreled and set out separately on the homeward trip after the Trojan War; only Menelaus stops at nearby Lesbos, where he prays to Zeus for guidance in choosing the best route home. In Sappho's account, however, if the supplement in line 3 is correct, both Menelaus and Agamemnon are present, and they pray not only to Zeus but also to Hera and to Dionysos (the son of Thuone, another name for Semele). In any case, it is clear that the allusion to the Homeric story is meant to serve as part of the “reminder” section of the prayer. …

The mere shreds of the final two stanzas of the song do not permit a reconstruction of what the request to Hera might have been, although the last word of the final line, “to come to” (if the supplement is correct), suggests a journey, perhaps a sea voyage like that of the sons of Atreus. Perhaps Hera is being asked to grant safe passage. Although the song mentions Hera within the context of a trinity of deities especially worshipped on Lesbos (Alkaios fragment 129 V. in all likelihood calls upon the same trinity), Hera is singled out for her especially close relationship to the singer. The goddess is evidently asked to make herself manifest in the singer's very presence—“Near to me.” The woman-centered nature of Sappho's poetry is evident even in her theology, for although gods are mentioned, it is the female deities who seem to occupy center stage.

MARRIAGE SONGS

I have … mentioned [elsewhere] … a few examples of fragments from Sappho's marriage songs (epithalamia), but here it is appropriate to discuss other examples in more detail. Some of these fragments seem to center either on the marriage ritual itself, in allusions to the song sung in honor of Hymen (the god of marriage) or on the appearance of the bridegroom. Here is the beginning of one such song, made familiar in the twentieth century through J. D. Salinger's borrowing of the opening words as the title for one of his long short stories (published in 1963):

FRAGMENT “111” V.

Rise high the roof-beams!
Sing the Hymeneal!
Raise it high, O carpenter men!
Sing the Hymeneal!
The bridegroom enters, like to Ares,
by far bigger than a big man.

Some readers have seen an element of risqué humor in the allusion to the size of the bridegroom as “far bigger than a big man,” perhaps referring to his ithyphallic state of excitement.²⁶ Similar humorous exaggeration is evident in the opening of another marriage song that makes fun of the groom's attendant, the doorkeeper:

FRAGMENT “110” V.

[At the wedding]
the doorkeeper's feet are seven fathoms long,
and his sandals are made of five oxhides,
and ten shoemakers worked away to make them.

Another example in which the groom's appearance is alluded to opens with the following line:

FRAGMENT “115” V.

To what, dear bridegroom, may I suitably liken you?
I liken you most to a slender sapling. …

The description of the groom in this fragment attributed to Sappho by Hephaestion (the second-century a.d. author of a handbook on meter) seems somewhat less than fully heroic, alluding as it may to Odysseus's likening of Nausikaa to the young shoot of a palm tree (Odyssey 6.163) and to Thetis's description of her son Achilles “shooting up like a tree” when he was a young child (Iliad 18.56). If there is any element of risqué humor here in the possibly phallic overtones of the image, the emphasis on slenderness again reduces the groom to less than heroic proportions.

While such instances of bantering raillery may have been a common feature of Sappho's hymeneals (as indeed they are in later Greek examples of the genre), other scraps of the wedding songs seem to emphasize the beauty of the bride or the poignancy of the impending loss of her girlhood status. Perhaps the most vivid example is the following fragment, which was evidently once part of a song in which the groom was likened to the hero Achilles. The meter is appropriately the dactylic hexameter of Homeric epic:

FRAGMENT “105”A V.

[the bride]
just like a sweet apple that ripens on the uppermost bough,
on the top of the topmost; but the apple-gatherers have forgotten it,
or rather, they haven't altogether forgotten it, but they could not reach it.

Here desire becomes on one level the reach for the unreachable.²⁷ The young woman is like a beautiful, ripe red apple enjoying privileged access to the rays of the sun high up at the very top of the tree. The apple is perfect—but has only been able to achieve and maintain such a beautiful state because it was just out of the reach of the apple-pickers, who could not fulfill their desire to pluck the ripened fruit. At least within the context of the fragment itself, then, the bride is suspended in time at a moment of utter perfection.

The image of the apple, so high up among apple boughs such as those in Aphrodite's sacred precinct described in fragment “2,” almost makes us forget that the Achilles-like groom is indeed about to accomplish what the apple-pickers had wanted, but been unable, to do. Indeed, as far as the simile itself is concerned there is no Achilles; at this moment the red apple remains safely on its bough, and desire becomes perhaps not so much the reach for the unreachable as the contemplation of perfect beauty. Even the applepickers, though they could not reach the beautiful apple itself, held on to its image. Sappho makes a point of this in the correction of the original statement in line 2 to the effect that they “have forgotten” (lelathonto) the apple; no, she emends, they really have not “entirely forgotten” (eklelathonto) it, for, she implies, they can still see it in the mind's eye.

The enduring significance of the image of the perfect apple in this small fragment of Sappho's work has been well captured in the title of a book by the contemporary American poet Judy Grahn, The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition. In her view, the apple stands for “the centrality of women to themselves, to each other, and to their society. That apple remained, intact, safe from colonization and suppression, on the topmost branch, and in the fragmented history of a Lesbian poet and her underground descendants.”²⁸

Another simile, one that has been attributed to Sappho by modern scholars, also seems to compare someone (possibly a bride) to the beauty of the natural world, in this instance to a mountain hyacinth:

FRAGMENT “105”B V.

[the bride?]
like a hyacinth in the mountains which the shepherd men
trample with their feet, but the purple flower [flying] on the ground. …

In this case, not enough of the context remains for us to guess what Sappho's hexameter lines (if indeed they are hers) might have said about the fate of the trampled hyacinth. It is only the resemblance (in meter and general structure) to fragment “105a,” the highest apple simile, that has led scholars to presume that these lines, too, were once part of a wedding song by Sappho.

Critics have generally further assumed that the trampled hyacinth may have functioned similarly to the “deflowering” imagery in a wedding song by the Roman poet Catullus (62.39-47), in which the chorus of young girls compare themselves to a wonderful hidden flower nourished by rain and sun, a flower that is about to be plucked and stained, thereby losing all desirability.²⁹ While it is certainly possible that the flower in fragment “105b” functioned as an image of lost virginity (a common enough trope in classical literature), we could just as easily conjecture that it stood for resilience: the hyacinth has been stepped on and some of its blossoms lie on the ground, but after the shepherds have passed it by, its stem, nourished by the mountain air, regains its strength and rises again toward the sun to bloom once more. (If only the ancient grammarian who quoted the lines—without attribution—had quoted one or two more, we would have a better idea as to where the image led!) In other words, it is just possible that the image of the hyacinth, like the image of the perfect apple high up on the tree, performed in some way the role of celebrating a woman's beauty.

A fragment that clearly does belong to the genre of the wedding song, as the remarks of the ancient grammarian who preserved it indicate, is the following dialogue between a bride and her virginity:

FRAGMENT “114” V.

BRIDE:
Maidenhood, maidenhood, where have you gone and left me?
MAIDENHOOD:
No more will I come back to you, no more will I come back.

The bantering tone of this exchange, with its repetition of the address (parthenia, parthenia) for mock-pathetic effect, may suggest a certain disdain on Sappho's part for the conventional notion of the “deflowering” of the bride. “Maidenhood” is something that simply departs, never to return again. It was for this nicety of expression—whereby the figure of speech in the question posed by the bride, who refers metaphorically to parthenia as a traveler, is picked up again in parthenia's reply—that the fragment was preserved for us by the ancient grammarian.³⁰

Other fragments that can be connected with wedding songs are hardly more than scraps. An ancient commentator on Vergil, Servius, quotes a line from a poem that he says came from Sappho's book entitled Epithalamia, no doubt referring to the ninth book of the Alexandrian edition of her poetry, which contained the wedding songs excluded from the other books on the basis of meter:

FRAGMENT “116” V.

Farewell, bride, farewell, honored bridegroom, many …

Similarly, Hephaestion quotes what is likely to have been the opening line of a wedding song:

FRAGMENT “117” V.

May you fare well, bride, and may the bridegroom fare well, too.

The same Oxyrhynchus papyrus (1231) that has preserved several significant fragments of the Sapphic stanzas of the first book of Sappho's poems (including the previously discussed fragments “15,” “16,” “17,” “22,” “23,” and “24a”) also contains two rather more substantial, if mutilated, fragments of what appear to be epithalamia. These songs were the final two poems in Book 1 of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho's work. The incomplete state of the text leaves much open to guesswork in both cases:

FRAGMENT “27” V.

For once you, too, [as] a child …
… come now, sing of these things …
… strive after … and from …
freely grant us charis [favor/grace].
For we are going to a wedding. And you, too,
[know?] this well, but as quickly as possible
send away the girls, may the gods have …
[there is no] road to great Olympus for mortals …

FRAGMENT “30” V.

the night …
The girls …
all night long …
singing of your love for the
violet-bosomed bride.
But wake up and go [to find]
the unmarried youths of your own age.
Let us see as much sleep as
the clear-voiced [nightingale?].

The first of these songs (fragment “27” V.) seems to be addressed to someone, perhaps female (the gender is not apparent from the existing grammatical clues), who is bidden to carry out various instructions. In the first more-or-less extant stanza, we note the familiar association of singing with charis and its underlying implication of pleasurable exchange. The request for song seems somehow tied in to the context of a wedding, for the subsequent stanza includes in its opening phrase the conjuction gar (“for”), which serves to mark an explanation of what has just preceded. Too many gaps remain to allow the certainty of an explanation like that of one scholar, who argues that the song is addressed to Sappho's rival poet Andromeda; Andromeda, he thinks, is being asked to send back the maidens to Sappho so that they may join in public dance and song.³¹

The second example (fragment “30” V.), the one that concluded Book 1 of the Alexandrian edition, is almost as enigmatic. It appears to be addressed to the bridegroom, who is bidden to go off in search of his fellow bachelors. The song is again one about singing, in this case the all-night singing of the girls about the groom's love for the bride. In what Voigt takes to be the end of the piece, the singer implies further nocturnal celebrations, for she says that they will see as much sleep as some “clear-voiced” creature; the gap at the end of line 8 is usually filled in with ornis, “bird,” and the allusion is then assumed to be to the proverbially wakeful nightingale. Like the nightingale, the celebrants will forego sleep in favor of singing. The fragment leaves us with only a glimpse of how this book of Sapphic stanzas came to a close—the book that had begun with the powerful “Hymn to Aphrodite.” It seems unlikely that the Alexandrian editors, who chose to end Book 1 with two wedding songs, would have been so disparaging of their form and content as one modern editor, Denys Page. Page brands the fragments of the epithalamia as “trivial in subject and style.”³² While they may not have carried the emotional force of a song like the “Hymn to Aphrodite” certainly several of these fragments of wedding songs—particularly fragment 105a about the apple on the uppermost bough—suggest a poignant beauty that ought not to be so lightly dismissed.

One other papyrus scrap preserves the end of what could be an epithalamium but might also simply be another kind of song meant for nighttime performance, or at least alluding to such performance:

FRAGMENT “43” V.

                    beautiful …
stirs up peaceful (waters) …
toil … the heart …
sits down …
But come, my dears,
… for day is near.

The speaker's address to o philai (literally, “O dear ones” [feminine gender]) makes clear that the participants in the nighttime ritual or festival (or whatever was described) are other women, who seem to be bidden to depart now that the sun is rising.

FOLK MOTIFS

Another group of short fragments besides the wedding songs are those that contain folk motifs. The beginning two lines of one such poem are preserved for us again by Hephaestion, who reports that the song was in Book 7 of Sappho's collected works:

FRAGMENT “102” V.

Sweet mother, I am not able to weave at my loom,
overwhelmed with desire for a youth because of tender Aphrodite.

Weaving was of course a standard occupation for women all over the Greek world, and in this song the narrator, presumably a girl or young woman, complains to her mother that overwhelming desire for a young man prevents her from carrying out her appointed task.³³ Despite the filial, domestic quality of the setting, with the girl addressing her mother, the language of desire is strong: the girl claims that she is “overwhelmed” or “mastered” by desire (pothos), the same word that Sappho uses of sexual desire in fragments “22.”11 and “94.”23. Thus the opening of the song seems to contain the seeds of both innocence and grand passion at once.

A similar kind of folk element appears in the following fragment addressed to the evening star:

FRAGMENT “104”A V.

Hesperus, you bring all that the shining Dawn scattered,
you bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring the child back to its mother.

The evening star, described in a related fragment (fragment “104b” V.) as asteron panton o kallistos, “the most beautiful of all the stars,” is here lauded for its reunificatory powers; under its idyllic light, the flocks and the children all return home from the activities of the day.

A tantalizingly brief quotation from an ancient work on figures of speech preserves the following remarkably alliterative bit from one of Sappho's songs; the sentiment expressed seems to be based on a Greek proverb:

FRAGMENT “146” V.

Neither the honey nor the bee for me

Although the context is unknown, the ancient commentators suggest that the proverb refers to the desire to avoid the bad things that inevitably come along with good things; to escape the bee-sting, one may have to give up the bees' honey as well. Might this sentiment have been part of a song about eros? We cannot really tell, but we can say that what little evidence remains indicates that folk motifs and proverbial material such as fragment “146” occupied a significant place in Sappho's repertoire of themes.

MYTHOLOGICAL MOTIFS

Another group of short fragments contains mythological figures. In these instances, the fragments are usually too brief to allow any reasonable guesses as to how the myth may have functioned vis-à-vis the major theme of the whole song. In one such song, for example, preserved in a quotation, Sappho describes Hermes as the wine-pourer for the rest of the gods:

FRAGMENT “141” V.

There a mixing bowl of ambrosia had been mixed,
while Hermes, taking up the jug,
poured wine for the gods.
These all held their cups and made libations.
They prayed for all good things for the bridegroom.

Whether this description of a marriage on Olympus formed part of a wedding song, we cannot tell, despite the preservation of several lines of context. In other cases, we have little left beyond the name of a mythological figure, as in fragment “124” V. referring to the Muse Kalliope, or fragment “123” V. describing “golden-sandaled Dawn” (chrusopedilos Auos).

The second-century a.d. scholar Athenaeus preserves two possibly related fragments, the first of which clearly has to do with the story of Leda and the swan (the form taken on that occasion by Zeus), whose union according to some versions in Greek mythology produced two eggs, from which were hatched Kastor, Pollux, Klytemnestra, and Helen:

FRAGMENT “166” V.

Indeed, they say that once Leda found
an egg, colored like a hyacinth, covered with …

FRAGMENT “167” V.

whiter by far than an egg …

Athenaeus preserves another mythological reference in a fragment whose context is known only to the extent that he points out that even in his time free (as opposed to slave) women and girls use the term hetairai (literally, “companions”) in referring to each other, just as Sappho did in her line:

FRAGMENT “142” V.

Leto and Niobe were very dear friends

Perhaps the fragment went on to describe the rift between the goddess Leto (mother of the twins Apollo and Artemis) and the Theban queen Niobe, who rashly boasted that as the mother of seven sons and seven daughters, she had been far more productive than Leto. As punishment, Apollo and Artemis struck down all of Niobe's children with their deadly arrows, and Niobe herself was transformed into a perpetually weeping mountain of stone, forever lamenting her dead offspring.

Hephaestion, in his handbook on meter, preserves what is probably the opening line of a song (in ionic meter) addresed to a woman named Eirana (the name occurs also in fragment “91” V.):

FRAGMENT “135” V.

Why, Eirana, does the swallow, daughter of Pandion, [awaken?] me?

The verb in the question is missing, but the supplement “awaken” seems as likely as any. The myth referred to is the story of Philomela, whose brother-in-law, Tereus, raped her and then cut out her tongue to prevent her telling her sister Procne of his evil deeds. Philomela, however, cleverly wove the story into a tapestry, and when Procne understood what had happened, the two sisters took revenge on Tereus by serving him the flesh of his own son, Itys, for dinner. In the end, all were transformed into birds—Philomela into a swallow, Procne into a nightingale, and Tereus into a pursuing hawk. (In Latin and mediaeval literature, the birds with which the two sisters are identified are sometimes reversed.)

In fragment “135,” we note that Philomela (identified as “daughter of Pandion”) is already transformed into the wordless swallow, who can communicate only through inarticulate musical sound. Sappho's Philomela-swallow seems even further removed from articulate expression than the Philomela of a lost play by Sophocles (called Tereus), in which he referred to her use of “the voice of the shuttle.”³⁴ Unfortunately, however, since so little of Sappho's song remains, we cannot explore further the possibility raised by Patricia Klindienst Joplin that the poet may have given us here “an ominous sign of what threatens the woman's voiced existence in culture.”³⁵ Exactly how the Philomela-swallow functioned in the rest of the song we really cannot tell, but it is certainly tempting to note the irony of the parallels between Philomela's tapestry and the shreds of Sappho's own work, the majority of which must now be read through signs and traces.

One last fragment dealing with mythological figures is more substantial than many, but it cannot be assigned to Sappho with absolute certainty. Although the editors who first published the fragment thought that it was perhaps by Alkaios, Voigt and others attribute the piece to Sappho. Treu, for example, notes the reference in section (b) of the fragment to the Muses and to the Charites, so characteristic of Sappho's verse:³⁶

FRAGMENT “44”A V.

A

[to golden-haired Phoibos], whom the daughter of Koios (Leto) bore
after she had slept with the great-named son of Cronos.
[But Artemis] swore a great oath [of the gods]:
[By your] head, always I will be a virgin
          … upon the tops of the mountains …
          … grant me this favor.
The father of the blessed gods nodded assent.
The gods [called her] far-shooting Huntress,
a great name.
                    Eros never draws near to her. …

B

The splendid [gifts?] of the Muses …
makes … and of the Charites
slender. …
not to forget the wrath …
mortals …

How the story of Apollo and Artemis was tied into the remainder of the song must remain a mystery, but perhaps they were somehow linked to the Muses and the Graces (Charites) as inspirers of song. Artemis is mentioned by name in one other fragment of Sappho's (fragment “84” V.), which is otherwise almost totally unintelligible, and Apollo is referred to in fragment “44.”33 V. in his roles as both hunter and musician. Neither deity seems to have occupied the place of central importance in Sappho's poetry, which as we have seen was unquestionably held by Aphrodite.

MISCELLANEOUS SHORT FRAGMENTS

We come finally to a small group of fragments that seem to treat a variety of subjects. The most controversial of these is a short papyrus fragment (P. Oxy. 2291, col. I.1-9) that Voigt prefers to assign to Alkaios. Others assign it to Sappho, sometimes with cautionary notes to the effect that the poem may in fact be by Alkaios.³⁷ The fragment is badly mutilated but does clearly contain at least one, if not two, references to the sons of Polyanax (“Much-Ruler”), a name that recurs in the following punning line preserved for us in a quotation from Sappho:

FRAGMENT “155” V.

I'm overjoyed to say farewell to you,
          Miss Overlord.

In addition to the repetition of the “p” sounds, the pun on polla (“much”) and Polu-anaktida (“child of Mr. Much-Ruler”) produces a sarcastic tone that occurs occasionally among Sappho's fragments.³⁸ In the papyrus fragment in question, however, the allusions to the house of Polyanax occur in far more obscure contexts, quite possibly within two separate poems:

ALKAIOS FRAGMENT 303A V. (= SAPPHO FRAGMENT “99 L.-P.”)

A

After a little …
… the son(s) of Polyanax …
to strum on the strings. …
receiving the dildo(?) …
… kindly
it quivers. …
…
…
                                        [possibly the end of this poem]

B

[possibly the beginning of a new poem]
O child of (Leto) and Zeus,
come …
leaving wooded [Gryneia?]
… to the oracle
…
sing …
… sister
show (?) … again … the sons of Polyanax …
I want to expose the greedy [man?] …

The chief reason that these papyrus scraps have attracted so much scholarly attention, despite their wretched state of preservation, is the possible reference in line 5 of part (a) to the word olisbos, known from Greek comedy (e.g., Aristophanes, Lysistrata 109) to be a leather phallus, or dildo. To those eagerly seeking information about ancient lesbian sexual practices, however, it must be pointed out that even if these fragments could be definitely assigned to Sappho rather than Alkaios, the occurrence of the word olisbos here is far from certain; every letter of olisb- in line 5 is printed in the Greek editions with a dot underneath, a convention used by editors of papyri to indicate the uncertainty of decipherment. The Sapphic dildo may be a figment of papyrological imagination—and if so, the question then arises as to why scholars have been so eager to find it in an almost illegible fragment of dubious authorship and uncertain context. The elements of scandal and masquerade in the notion of the Sapphic dildo are worth exploring further (“Woman Poet Wears Fake Penis!”), but I will leave that project aside for now. In any case, we certainly cannot accept Giangrande's glib conclusion that this fragment “leaves us in no doubt as to what Sappho and her companions were up to.”³⁹

Several of the shorter fragments offer just enough intelligibility to enable us to admire the vividness of the Sapphic imagery while at the same time savoring the multiple range of possibilities of context that each might have come from. Here are four examples that refer in one way or another to the tender, flowerlike qualities of a girl or young woman; had we more context, we might well find that these songs would illustrate some of the qualities of Sapphic habrosune.⁴⁰ The first of these is the most famous, for many readers have interpreted it as an autobiographical reference on Sappho's part to her daughter Kleis; others, drawing on the analogy of a male homosexual context, see Sappho's description of Kleis (who is referred to as a pais, “child,” “boy”) as crotic rather than familial:⁴¹

FRAGMENT “132” V.

I have a child whose beauty
resembles golden flowers: beloved Kleis,
whom [I would not exchange]
either for all of Lydia or a lovely …

FRAGMENT “41” V.

Toward you, beautiful women, my thoughts
are not changeable

FRAGMENT “122” V.

[I saw] an exceedingly tender girl plucking flowers

FRAGMENT “126” V.

… [a woman]
sleeping on the bosom of a tender companion [hetaira] …

Another vivid but tantalizingly incomplete fragment, whose metrical peculiarities perhaps indicate less than precise quotation on the part of the preserver (Athenaeus), seems to describe the opposite of the aesthetic ideals of charis, habrosune, and poikilia. Here the narrator appears to be rebuking someone (named Andromeda, according to Athenaeus) for succumbing to the charms of a hayseed, a country-bumpkin:

FRAGMENT “57” V.

What bumpkin girl charms [your] mind …
wearing her bumpkin dress …
not knowing how to draw her rags over her ankles?

The insulting overtones of agroïotis are suggested by a fragment from Alkaios, a relatively lengthy piece complaining of the deprivations of life in exile away from the center of the action, which in Alkaios's view consists of the politics of the assembly and the council. The narrator of the song (Alkaios fragment 130b V.) complains, “I in my wretchedness live the life of a bumpkin's lot, while I long to hear the assembly being summoned.” After complaining further of living among the “wolf-thickets” in the middle of nowhere, the narrator provides this curious example of what it means to be away from the urban activities of the male aristocracy: he keeps out of trouble by going to watch a beauty contest of the women of Lesbos!

ALKAIOS FRAGMENT 130B. 16-20 V.

I survive and keep my feet out of trouble,
where the women of Lesbos with their trailing robes
go up and down as they are being judged for beauty,
while all around there rings the marvelous echo
of the women's sacred cries each year.

Ironically, the Alkaios-narrator illustrates the enforced rustic alienation from the urban political process of the male aristocracy with a description of his own “feminization” at what appears to be an annual religious ritual for women, which, according to various ancient commentators, took place at the precinct of the goddess Hera.⁴² No doubt if Sappho alluded to this beauty contest in her songs, it would have been in quite a different context.⁴³

Four brief fragments preserved in quotation present puzzles as to what their original context might have been. All are in the form of the first-person statements so characteristic of Sappho's poetry; whether any of these songs featured the named Sappho persona that we have observed in the case of longer pieces such as the “Hymn to Aphrodite” or fragment “94” V., we cannot tell:

FRAGMENT “51” V.

I do not know what to do; my mind is split

FRAGMENT “52” V.

I do not think that I will touch the sky with my two arms(?)

FRAGMENT “121” V.

But since you are our friend, seek a younger bed.
For I would not dare to live with you, since I am older.

FRAGMENT “120” V.

But I am not someone resentful in
my feelings; I have a gentle heart.

A fuller representation of Sappho's lyrics would surely reveal more songs that, like the following fragment, allude self-consciously to the art of song:

FRAGMENT “118” V.

Come now, divine lyre, speak to me,
and sounding forth be [my companion?] …

Preserved (perhaps somewhat inaccurately) through quotation in a later Greek writer named Hermogenes, the lines were cited as an example of what we would call pathetic fallacy, or the attribution of feelings and the the power of judgment to inanimate objects. Evidently, according to Hermogenes, the poem went on to represent the voice of the tortoise-shell lyre actually responding to the poet's apostrophe. We have noted earlier Sappho's fondness for dialogue embedded in her lyrics, as in the “Hymn to Aphrodite” (between the Sappho-narrator and Aphrodite) and in fragment “94” V (between the Sappho-narrator and the departing woman) and fragment “114” V. (between a bride and her virginity). This song addressed to the speaking lyre may have been yet another example of Sappho's enlargement of the lyric scope through the introduction of multiple “voices” within a given poem.

Another short fragment, the text and meter of which are uncertain, seems to refer to “those who serve the Muses,” possibly poets:

FRAGMENT “150” V.

For it is not right for there to be lamentation
in the house of those who serve the Muses.
That would not be suitable for us.

As we have already noted, Sappho frequently opens a song with an address to the Muses, either in conjunction with the Charites or independently, as in the following beginning of a poem preserved in a quotation in Hephaestion's treatise:

FRAGMENT “127” V.

Hither again, O Muses, leaving your golden [house] …

Three other brief fragments also seem to have to do with the power of song, although the lack of surrounding context makes certainty impossible. In one (in a glyconic meter) Sappho is quoted as praising a young woman (parthenon, literally “virgin,” or at least an unmarried woman) for her “wisdom” or “skill” (sophia), which might be taken to be poetic skill:

FRAGMENT “56” V.

I do not think there will be at any time
a woman who looks on the light of the sun
with wisdom such as yours

Elsewhere, in a two-word quotation, Sappho describes someone as a parthenon aduphonon (“sweet-voiced woman,” fragment “153” V.), and a papyrus scrap preserves bits of a poem that mentions someone named Mika, a reference to the women of the family of Penthilus (one of the aristocratic Mytilenean families alluded to as well in the poetry of Alkaios), and a “sweet song”:⁴⁴

FRAGMENT “71” V.

Mika …
… but I will not allow you …
… you preferred the friendship of the Penthilidae
… o mischievous one … our …
… some sweet song …
… gentle-voiced …
… sweet-sounding [breezes?]
… covered with dew …

If only we had another papyrus copy of this poem that was torn in different places than in this copy, we might have a better idea of the context of these allusions to song. Those who view Sappho as an official music teacher of young women would regard the fragment as referring to a rival “school,” to which Mika has decamped and in so doing has become the object of Sappho's rebuke for her desertion. Of course the fragment may also be interpreted as alluding simply to rival poets or to a rival aristocratic family or to a fiction thereof, without reference to any kind of institutionalized practice.

Another short fragment (again preserved via quotation) seems to promote a “nationalist” concept of the singers of Sappho's homeland. The line is quoted as an example of Sappho's comparison of someone's superior qualities, which surpass the qualities of others by as much as Lesbian singers surpass all other singers:

FRAGMENT “106” V.

… superior, just as when a Lesbian
          singer [outdoes] foreign ones …

Aoidos (“singer”) is the Homeric word for “bard,” a professional singer who (like Phemios and Demodokos in the Odyssey) serves as a court musician and can render the latest song for the entertainment of the assembled guests. Here Sappho seems to be claiming a special status for the post-Homeric tradition of singers of which she was a part, and of which we now know so little beyond the scraps of songs written by Sappho herself and by her compatriot Alkaios. “We are the best,” she seems to say.

I end this [essay] with a beautiful short fragment whose uncertain authorship highlights the tentativeness of nearly everything that can be said about Sappho's poetry. The piece is quoted as a metrical example by Hephaestion, who does not mention the author's name. Since he usually quotes opening lines, we probably have here the beginning of the song. While some modern scholars have rejected the Renaissance attribution of it to Sappho (notably Wilamowitz as well as Lobel and Page), Voigt includes it along with the one complete poem and the two hundred or so fragments of Sappho's work:⁴⁵

FRAGMENT “168B” V.

The moon has set,
and the Pleiades. The night
is at its midpoint, the moment passes,
and I sleep alone.(46)

One of the arguments for Sapphic authorship is that the fragment seems to be faintly echoed in connection with Sappho in both Horace (Satires 1.5.82-83) and Ovid (Heroides 15.155-56), although not closely enough in either case to be conclusive. Certainly the piece has a Sapphic ring to it: the description of the natural setting, the allusion to two female-centered celestial phenomena, namely the moon (Selene, or in Sappho's dialect, Selanna) and the Pleiades (seven sisters transformed into the constellation), a dramatic sense of time, and, finally, an implicitly erotic tone centered around the song's narrator, the ego of the final extant line. The emphasis on the solitary state of the singer implies that she had perhaps hoped it would be otherwise. It is late at night, for the moon has set, and perhaps it is a cold winter's night to boot—if the reference to the setting of the Pleiades alludes not just to their nightly setting but also to their cosmical setting at the end of the sailing season, in November. However we interpret ora at the end of line 3 (“moment,” “hour,” “season,” etc.), the song seems to capture the feeling that tempus fugit. The sky turns inexorably onward as the solitary narrator watches. Did the narrator go on to describe her desire for an absent woman? Was this song composed by Sappho, or only by someone imitating Sappho's images and dialect? Like so many questions about the lyrics of this “tenth Muse” of the ancient world, these must remain open ones. But open questions lead to openings, and … the openings suggested by the remnants of Sappho's work continue to inspire women writers twenty-six centuries after Sappho's lifetime.

Notes

1. Jesper Svenbro, “Sappho and Diomedes: Some Notes on Sappho 1 LP and the Epic,” Museum Philologum Londieniense 1 (1975) 37-49, esp. p. 46. The question of the exact relationship between epic and lyric has been a matter of considerable scholarly debate; see, for example, J. T. Hooker, The Language and Text of the Lesbian Poets (Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, 1977), who argues that Sappho's poetry draws independently from the same source as epic.

2. Deborah Boedeker, “Sappho and Acheron,” in Arktouros: Hellenic Studies Presented to Bernard M. W. Knox, edited by G. W. Bowersock, Walter Burkert, and Michael C. J. Putnam, p. 52 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979).

3. For an opposing view, see George L. Koniaris, “On Sappho, Fr. 16 (L.P.),” Hermes 95 (1967): 257-68, esp. p. 263: “That this ἔγω [ego, “I”] is physically speaking a woman we all understand, but I think that it is absolutely unwarranted to claim that Sappho, when she writes ἔγω, means to say ‘I being a woman.’” Garry Wills, “The Sapphic ‘Umwertung aller Werte,’” American Journal of Philology 88 (1967): 434-42, argues along similar lines: “She does not contrast woman's world with man's, as many think” (p. 442).

4. See William H. Race, The Classical Priamel from Homer to Boethius, Mnemosyne suppl. 74 (Leiden: Brill, 1982).

5. For a recent modification of the approach to the poem through logical principles, see the application of semiotic narrative theory offered by Claude Calame, “Sappho et Helene: Le Mythe comme argumentation narrative et parabolique” in Parole, Figure, Parabole, ed. Jean Delorme, pp. 209-29 (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1987).

6. See, for example, Richmond Lattimore, trans., Greek Lyrics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 40; he renders line 4 as “but I say / she whom one loves best / is the loveliest.” The most recent translations aim for a more literal rendering of the neutrality of the Greek text; compare Diane J. Rayor, trans., Sappho's Lyre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 55 (“I say it is whatever one loves”), and Jim Powell, trans., Sappho: A Garland: The Poems and Fragments of Sappho (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1993), p. 28 (“but I say it's what- / ever you love best”).

7. Page duBois, “Sappho and Helen,” Arethusa 11 (1978): 89-99. See also her chapter on Helen in Sappho Is Burning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 98-126. As Joseph A. Dane, “Sappho Fr. 16: An Analysis,” Eos 69 (1981): 185-92, observes, Helen's status as lover and beloved renders her a complex, multivocal figure whom Sappho uses to good advantage.

8. Might Sappho's choice of Helen as an illustrative example in this song be colored by the Homeric description of what she left behind as a omelikien erateinen (Iliad 3.175), that is, a “lovely” (the adjective deriving from the same root as eros) group of age-mates? Evidently, despite their loveliness, the eros that they inspired in Helen was not as great as that inspired by Paris. I am indebted to Judith Hallett for calling the details of this description to my attention.

9. But see John Winkler, The Contraints of Desire (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 178, who proposes that the missing subject of the verb “led” might have been Helen herself.

10. See Denys Page, Sappho and Alcaeus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 53. The comment of Synnøve des Bouvrie Thorsen, “The Interpretation of Sappho's Fragment 16 L.-P.,” Symbolae Osloenses 53 (1978): 5-23, regarding the opening stanza of fr. 16, would seem to apply to the whole poem: “It cannot be judged by logical reasoning” (p. 9). John Winkler, “Gardens of Nymphs: Public and Private in Sappho's Lyrics,” Women's Studies 8 (1981): 65-91, esp. p. 74, goes so far as to view the poem as a parody of logical argumentation. For an opposing point of view, see Glen W. Most, “Sappho Fr. 16.6-7 L-P,” Classical Quarterly 31 (1981): 11-17, who applies a passage from Aristotle's Rhetoric to his analysis of the poem.

11. On the aristocratic name, see Enzo Degani and Gabriele Burzacchini, eds., Lirici Greci (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1977), p. 136.

12. See Christopher Brown, “Anactoria and the Kαρίτων ἀμαρύγματα: Sappho fr. 16, 18 Voigt,” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 32 (1989): 7-15, who points out (p. 8) that amaruchma refers to a “flashing” or “sparkling,” particularly with reference to the eyes. See also Eleanor Irwin, Colour Terms in Greek Poetry (Toronto: Hakkert, 1974), p. 216, for this and other Greek terms that suggest both brightness and movement.

13. Gregson Davis, Polyhymnia: The Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 34-35, cites Sappho fr. 16 V. as an “elegant example of figurative assimilation,” whereby Sappho incorporates the language of martial spectacles into her description of Anaktoria.

14. The most recent version of this theory may be found in Brown, “Anactoria,” 14; see also Carl Theander, “Studia Sapphica,” Eranos 32 (1934): 57-85.

15. Denys Page, “The Authorship of Sappho β2 (Lobel),” Classical Quarterly 30 (1936): 10-15, disputes Wilamowitz's 1914 attempt to deny Sappho's authorship.

16. See Herman Fränkel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy, trans. Moses Hadas and James Willis (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 174: “The song of Hector and Andromache ends with an account of a song on Hector and Andromache; it leads into itself in a circle.”

17. See, for example, Hermann Fränkel, Wege und Formen frühgriechischen Denkens (Munich: Beck, 1960), 41.

18. See Johannes T. Kakridis, “Zu Sappho 44 LP,” Wiener Studien 79 (1966): 21-26, esp. p. 26.

19. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus, p. 71.

20. On the whole, modern critics have devoted relatively little attention to fr. 44, which is generally viewed as an aberrant poem within the corpus of Sappho's fragments. Here, for example, is the opinion of Richard Jenkyns, Three Classical Poets: Sappho, Catullus, and Juvenal (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 61: “So under the guise of mythological narrative she is really giving her audience a vivid picture of contemporary life. In any case, it cannot be said that this fragment adds to her reputation. Quaint, lively and fluent, it is the work of an able poet; but there is no subtlety in it, and no inspiration.” For a counterargument to Jenkyns, see Lawrence P. Schrenk, “Sappho Frag. 44 and the ‘Iliad’,” Hermes 122 (1994): 144-50; he argues that allusions to Iliad 22.466-72 (Andromache's wedding to Hektor) and to Iliad 24.699-804 (Hektor's funeral) render the poem another example of Sappho's portrayal of love as glukupikron, “bittersweet.”

21. For arguments against the view of Hermann Fränkel regarding what he saw as choral feaures of Sappho fr. 16 V., see E. M. Stern, “Sappho Fr. 16 L.P.: Zur Strukturellen Einheit ihrer Lyrik,” Mnemosyne 23 (1970): 348-61.

22. See William H. Race, “Sappho, Fr. 16 L.-P. and Alkaios, Fr. 42 L.-P.: Romantic and Classical Strains in Lesbian Lyric,” Classical Journal 85 (1989): 16-33; he views Sappho's concern as being with individuals, while Alkaios focuses more on the fate of a whole people and their city.

23. For an intriguing (if sometimes baffling) discussion of the preeminence of the fragment over the whole in modern aesthetic theory in the light of the work of Walter Benjamin, see Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Sage, 1994), pp. 69-73. See also Page duBois, Sappho Is Burning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 31-54 (“The Aesthetics of the Fragment”); as she points out (p. 39), “We can accept the fragmentary for what it is, appreciate the few words of Sappho that we have inherited, rather than setting them, for example, against the fuller, more adequate corpus of Pindar, and naming him the greater poet.”

24. The fragment in which Apollo and Artemis are addressed is assigned by some scholars to Alkaios (as Alkaios fr. 303A by Voigt) and by others to Sappho (as Sappho fr. 99 by Lobel-Page); see discussion of this so-called olisbos fragment at the end of the present chapter.

25. Some scholars also attempt to connect fr. 3 V. with Charaxos, but it is so fragmentary that little sense can be made of it. In addition, fr. 7 V. appears to contain mention of the name Doricha.

26. See G. S. Kirk, “A Fragment of Sappho Reinterpreted,” Classical Quarterly 13 (1963): 51-52, who was the first to propose that the hyperbole involves the notion that the bridegroom is “fantastically ithyphallic” (p. 51).

27. See Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 26.

28. Judy Grahn, The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition (San Franciso: Spinsters, Ink, 1985), p. 11. Despite some minor factual errors (e.g., regarding the mode of preservation of Sappho's one complete song, p. 10), this is a useful study of nine modern poets in the Sapphic tradition: Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Olga Broumas, Paula Gunn Allen, and Judy Grahn.

29. See Kenneth Quinn, ed., Catullus: The Poems (London: MacMillan, 1970), p. 280: “There is almost certainly an allusion to a poem attributed to Sappho of which a fragment survives.”

30. A similar treatment may have occurred in fr. 107 V., er' eti parthenias epiballomai? (“Indeed, do I still desire virginity?”), but the fragment is too short to be sure.

31. Carl Theander, “Atthis et Andromeda,” Eranos 44 (1946): 62-67. He reads es choron (“to the dance”) in place of es gamon (“to a wedding”).

32. Denys Page, Sappho and Alcaeus (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 126.

33. On the importance of weaving as a female occupation in Greek society, see Robert James Forbes, “Fabrics and Weavers,” in Studies in Ancient Technology (Leiden: Brill, 1955—), vol. 4, pp. 220-51; Jane McIntosh Snyder, “The Web of Song: Weaving Imagery in Homer and the Lyric Poets,” Classical Journal 76 (1981): 193-96; and Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women's Work, the First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (New York: Norton, 1994).

34. The phrase is quoted by Aristotle, Poetics 1454b. 36-37.

35. Patricia Klindienst Joplin, “Epilogue: Philomela's Loom,” in Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century, ed. Diane Wood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom, p. 254 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985).

36. Max Treu, ed., Sappho (Munich: Heimeran, 1954), p. 162. The fragment was first published by E. Lobel and D. Page, “A New Fragment of Aeolic Verse,” Classical Quarterly 2 (1952): 1-3, who assign the fragment either to Sappho or to Alkaios.

37. Bruno Snell, “Der Anfang eines äolischen Gedichts,” Hermes 81 (1953): 118-19, points out that the sentiment expressed at the very end of part (b) sounds more characteristic of Alkaios than of Sappho.

38. Another example may occur in fr. 144 V., mala de kekoremenois / Gorgos, where the reference seems to be to people who are “quite fed up with Gorgo.”

39. Giuseppe Giangrande, “Sappho and the ὄλισβοs,” Emerita 48 (1980): 250.

40. See also the references to perfume and expensive gifts in fr. 101 V., to “adornments” (athurmata, as in Sappho fr. 44.9 V.) in fr. 63.8 V., and to soft cushions in fr. 46 V. as possible further examples of habrosune.

41. Judith P. Hallett, “Beloved Cleïs,” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 10 (1982): 21-31, argues that the adjective (agapetos, “beloved,” “highly valued”) that Sappho uses to describe Kleis rules out any erotic connotation, and points out that its use in the Iliad and the Odyssey is always with reference to biological offspring.

42. See Eva-Maria Voigt, ed., Sappho et Alcaeus: Fragmenta (Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak and Van Gennep), p. 239 (regarding line 17).

43. The question of the literary exchange of differing views between the two fellow Lesbian poets is raised by Sappho fr. 137 V. (preserved in Aristotle's Rhetoric); interpretation of the fragment is fraught with difficulties, but Aristotle seems to be implying that Sappho wrote a poem in answer to a poem written by Alkaios.

44. Cf. also Sappho fr. 185 V., meliphonos (“honey-voiced”).

45. On the question of authorship, see Treu, Sappho, pp. 211-12; Diskin Clay, “Fragmentum Adespotum 976,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 101 (1970): 119-29, who favors the attribution to Sappho.

46. Despite the apparent simplicity of the poetry, the interpretation of this fragment is the subject of much controversy. The word that I have translated as “night” is actually plural in the Greek, but such usage is attested elsewhere (e.g., Plato Republic 621b). The word that I have translated as “moment” (ora) is variously interpreted as “hour” or “time” or “right moment.” For a summary of the arguments, see Enzo Degani and Gabriele Burzacchini, eds., Lirici Greci (Florence: La Nouva Italia), pp. 188-90. David Sider, “Sappho 168B Voigt: Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ Σελάννα,” Eranos 84 (1986): 57-59, argues that all three senses of ora are felt.