Studies in Sappho and Alcaeus

Kyriakos Tsantsanoglou

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9783110630862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The poetry of the archaic poets of Lesbos, Sappho and Alcaeus, has been imperfectly and poorly transmitted either in book fragments or in later ragged papyri, so that new attempts of interpretation will always be required, especially when new research tools and methods have appeared in classical scholarship.
The book consists of 14 articles by the author, which present and deal with diverse problems of the two poets of Lesbos. Various questions on already transmitted poems, different readings, reconstructions, and interpretations of the new finds are proposed, but, most importantly, new approaches in general topics, such as the division of Sappho's work in Books, the logic leading to this division, the order of these Books, the contents of each of them, the interpretation of the surviving fragments, often quite different than before. A feature that characterizes the old-age poetry of Sappho is her anxiety about the posthumous fate of her poetry and her hope that Kleïs, her only daughter, will ensure its dissemination. Finally, the author investigates the communal festival of Hera in Lesbos, a festival performed in common with Zeus and Dionysus, the so-called "Lesbian Triad". The festival is specified as a welcome to the season of spring at the time of the vernal equinox. Also, the location of the temenos of Hera is investigated, close to Pyrrha of Lesbos, which was the site of Alcaeus' second exile.

1Sappho Illustrated

I am grateful to Gregory Sifakis, Michalis Tiverios, and Stavros Tsitsiridis for their assistance. Special thanks to Jürgen Hammerstaedt for his fruitful advice and good-natured endurance.

The Epithanatians

Fig. 1: National Museum of Athens inv. no. 1260, ARV2 1060, Paralipomena 445.

Figure 1 shows one of the best-known vase-paintings presented on an Attic red-figured hydria-calpis found in Vari.1 It is attributed to a painter of the Polygnotus Group and is dated in 440–430 BC. The main female figure appears seated on a comfortable klismos holding a half-opened papyrus roll, the typical book form in antiquity. She is absorbed in her reading, while three standing girls watch her attentively. The girl on the left, bearing the inscription ΝΙΚΟΠΟΛΙΣ, is stretching her right arm above the seated woman. Two girls are standing on the right. The first, inscribed ΚΑΛΛΙΣ,2 holds out a chelys-type lyre, i.e., one with a tortoise shell resonator, toward the seated woman, while the second uninscribed girl, rests her hand on the shoulder of Kallis. The seated woman can be recognized thanks to the inscription ΣΑΠΠΩΣ (sic) written above her hands that hold the papyrus. It should be noted that the name inscriptions, having been added by the painter after firing the vase, are today invisible. They were, however, still visible in the 19th century, when the vase was excavated and published. The painting was then interpreted as depicting an everyday scene at the circle of the poetess of Lesbos, with herself reading her poems and her pupil-friends listening.

Fig. 2: Drawing by Jules Chaplain. From Albert Dumont and Jules Chaplain, Les Céramiques de la Grèce propre. Vases peints et terres cuites, Paris 1881, pl. VI.

The Book Roll. Former Attempts

Apart from the general interpretations of the painting,3 to which I shall shortly add my own, already since the end of the 19th century there have been attempts to read the text that could be seen in the half-opened roll. These letters belong to the initial painting, before the vase was fired, and so are fairly well discerned. The first attempt seems to have been made by Maxime Collignon, who published the catalogue of the painted vases of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.4 His reading was: Θεοί ἠερίων ἐπέων [ἄ]ρχομαι ἄγγ[ελος] ν[έων] ὔ[μ]ν[ων]. Later, H. Heydemann published his own proposal,5 reading on the rolled up ends of the papyrus ΠΤΕΡΟΕΤΙ ΕΠΕΑ, which he corrected to πτερόε<ν>τ(α) ἔπεα, and on its inside area Θεοί· περ(ὶ) τῶν ἐπέων ἄρχομαι ᾄ[δειν. Still later, Domenico Comparetti, assisted by the archaeologist Federico Halbherr,6 read Θεοί· ἠερίων ἐπέων ἄρχομαι ἄλλων, just like P. Kretschmer,7 who also read ἄρχομαι ἄλλ[ων], though with the ending ων supplemented.8

In 1922, J.M. Edmonds, making use of enlarged photographs and the assistance of the archaeologists B. Leonardos and A.J.B. Wace, proposed a somewhat different reading.9 He first noticed that the flanking words, written on the rolled up ends and therefore on the outer side of the roll, must be the title of the book. The title should read not ΠΤΕΡΟΕΤΑ ΕΠΕΑ, as it seems at first look, but reversely ΕΠΕΑ ΠΤΕΡΟΕΤΑ, as it would become apparent if the roll was spread face downwards. He also noticed that “the rolled-up part of the book held by the right hand [of Sappho] is intended to be bulkier than the part held by the left. The latter indeed may be regarded as the first curl beginning the left-hand ‘roll-up’, a curl which will not be completed till the reader proceeds to the next column”. Thus, the text seen on the interior side of the roll must represent the first column, therefore the opening, of the book. The first word read on this first column is ΘΕΟΙ, which Edmonds takes either as an invocation of the poetess at the opening of her book, similarly to the formula found at the opening of numerous official decrees, or as the heading of the first part of Sappho’s book, which might start with hymns to the gods, as was the case with Alcaeus’ Alexandrian edition. He finally inclines to the view that the presence of the invocation ΘΕΟΙ “is due simply to the artist”. What follows, according to Edmonds, are the letters, written in 11 very narrow lines (or 12 with the inclusion of the first line ΘΕΟΙ), which he read as: ΗΕΡΙ | ΩΝ | ΕΠΕ | ΩΝ | ΑΡΧ | ΟΜ | ΑΙΑ | ΛΛΟ | ΝΑ | ΤΩ | Ν. This leads to his final reading:

Ἔπεα πτερόεντα

Θεοί.

ἠερίων ἐπέων ἄρχομαι ἀλλ᾽ ὀνάτων.

The text following θεοί was considered by Edmonds a verse of Sappho, actually the first verse of an introductory poem to the pre-Alexandrian edition of Sappho prepared by the poetess herself. As for the metrical form of the verse, Edmonds found some similarities with several Sapphic and Alcaic fragments, but none exactly similar. Finally, he translated: ‘The words I begin are words of air, but for all that good to hear,’ ‘beneficial’.

In the same year (1922), Edmonds published Sappho’s fragments in the first volume of his Lyra Graeca. There (180–181), he prefixed to her known fragments, as fr. 1a, the verse he read on the vase-painting. He only changed the initial of the first word from η to α (ἀερίων) for adapting the Ionic ἠερίων to the dialect of Lesbos.10 Another proposal, which, however, went unnoticed by the scholarly community, was C.R. Haines’s in Sappho. The Poems and Fragments, London 1926. His drawing of the book roll (p. 53) seems to be the most faithful of all previous transcriptions, but the reconstruction he proposes is rather odd: θεοι, ηεριων επεων αρχομαι, αλλ᾽ <α>ναιτι<ω>ν. In any case, Edmonds’s views, whether of a first verse or of a pre-Alexandrian Sappho edition collected and arranged by the poetess, did not convince the dominant trend in classical scholarship. There is no mention whatsoever of the Attic hydria verse in E. Lobel, Σαπφοῦς Μέλη (1925), in E. Lobel/D.L. Page, Poetarum Lesbiorum fragmenta (1955), in E.-M. Voigt, Sappho et Alcaeus (1971), and in D.A. Campbell, Greek Lyric (1982). Without mentioning even the possibility that the text may come from Sappho, D.L. Page, Poetae Melici Graeci (1962), includes it in the fragmenta adespota, 938 d, where the text is published as

θεοί· ἠερίων ἐπέων ἄρχομαι ......... ,

and the app. cr. as θεοι|ηερι|ων|επε|ων|αρχ|ομ|α.α|τ..|τ.|ν. He obviously followed J.D. Beazley, who had noted in 1928, Greek Vases in Poland, Oxford, 9 n. 2 (end, continued in p. 10): “the vase shows (besides επεα and πτεροετα) θεοι ηεριων επεων αρχομα.ατ..ν.τ.ν, where my dots represent misshapen and uncertain letters. The last part, where the roll narrows, is evidently meaningless”. Due to an oversight, Page omitted the third last line that contained N. from Beazley’s reading. It was also Beazley’s remark about the meaningless last part of the text that accounts for the numerous dots of Page’s text. Campbell, Greek Lyric (1993), fr. 938 (d), followed Page (with the oversight) both in the text and the apparatus, only omitting θεοί, which he mentions in a note. He translates: “Airy words I begin” and notes “Lofty? Early?”. Henry Immerwahr in his Online Corpus of Attic Vase Inscriptions includes under no. 764 the Athens hydria. He agrees with the prevalent reading down to ἄρχομαι α-, but his last lines are

He proposes that all this is miswritten for ἀείδειν. The latest treatment of the vase-painting text known to me was by D. Yatromanolakis,11 who also agrees with the prevalent reading ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• List of Figures
• 1 Sappho Illustrated
• 2 Sappho on her Funeral Day: P.Colon. 21351.1–8
• 3 Kleïs as Promoter of Sappho’s Poetry (Fr. 59 V.)
• 4 Sappho’s (?) Orpheus Song
• 5 P. Sapph. Obbink: the ‘Kypris Poem’
• 6 Sappho’s Epithalamians
• 7 Sappho Tithonus Poem
• 8 Sappho 1.18–19 V.
• 9 The Banquet of the Gods and the Picnic of the Girls
• 10 The Danaans in Lesbos
• 11 Sappho 27 V., Alcaeus 308 Lib., and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes
• 12 Alcaeus on the Lesbian Triad Festival
• 13 The Location of the Lesbian Triad Temenos
• 14 Who was Onymacles the Athenian?
• Bibliography