Close your eyes.  Relax.  Breathe deeply.  Let your mind wander backward. 
            Remember the first time you fell in love.  Crush.  Obsession. 
            OK, open.
            Where did those feelings, more than feelings, that whole reorientation of your character and life, where did it come from?  From "chemistry", as we tactfully say, meaning that we suspect our emotions are "really run" by our hormone system, specifically the brain’s “love-chemicals,” serotonin, dopomaine and that infamous nine amino acid peptide, C43H66N12O12S2 oxytocin.  It's undoubtedly true that we wouldn't have those feelings without them, but it's equally true that the two aren't identical.  What you actually experience isn't a hormone, any more than your experience of pain is identical with nerve firings. 
            So, if not just from literal "chemistry" alone, then from our history and observation: we've watched our parents and older siblings and our friends and, perhaps most of all, the movies and TV.  We've read novels, gossiped, played voyeur, even willed it to happen.  Again, very true, even central — but all these only move the question back a step.  Where did our parents or the movies or the girl/boy next door get THEIR feelings that we so eagerly, half-consciously imitated that wonderful first time? 
            Or we may give up on these vain attempts to find the precise origins of our love-feelings, and content ourselves with saying, "they're just natural; everyone has them when the time comes."  But a little reflection makes it clear that they aren't simply natural across our species.  Though people around the world may all fall in love, they do so in dramatically different ways.  Even within our own culture people have not always loved in anything like the same ways that we do.  So saying that first love "is just natural" is really to give up on understanding anything about our natures and history as lovers.
            Moving now from your first love, take your most fervent and long-lasting experience of love with a human object, the one that has made the most difference to your life thus far: a parent, a spouse, a child, a cause, a vocation.  Now pretend that you had to explain this experience, bring it fully alive, make clear its fundamental place in your life, to a particular audience — say, to Attila the Hun.   Imagine yourself sitting down, and saying, "Mr. Hun, when I first fell in love with Sam or Samantha....."   Imagine the look on his face.  Or if you don't think Attila is your dream audience, how about Moses?  No, that’s not likely to work either: what stories did Moses ever tell about his wife?  Or if those are hostile or indifferent audiences, how about some of the great lovers in the Hebrew Bible: David, Rachel, Rebecca, Jephtha, the Shulamite maiden of the “Song of Songs.”    It may surprise you, but you wouldn't fare much better with these legendary lovers than you would with Mr. Hun.  And the list goes on: Dr. Ruth or Dr. Phil would understand your account of love, but Plato wouldn't — even though he wrote The Symposium, one of the great "classic" studies of love; or Aquinas, who theologized profoundly about human and divine love; or, frankly, even Jesus, though that one may be a little harder to swallow.  All of these people we associate with love — well, except for Attila — would have great trouble understanding our stories and explanations of our greatest love.  In fact, they would have trouble even taking our version of love seriously.  And, no surprise, they would have similar problems in understanding each other as well. 
            Here's another way into the same subject that may help to make these claims convincing: we are all, here in the West, post-Romantic, and post-Freudian people.  This is true no matter what our personal views of the Romantic poets and thinkers, or with the general suspicion of Freud that I imagine most of you have.  It's a disconcerting truth that many of our understandings of love have nothing to do, directly and exclusively, with us as individuals.  It means rather that we live in a culture that has, for the last 250 years or so, been inventing and re-inventing subjectivity.  Poets, philosophers, theologians, psychologists — let alone all the larger cultural patterns such as the individualism created by capitalism (and there are scores of such factors involved) — have all been carving out an increasingly complex subjective life for us.  And 250 years is enough time for it all to seem "natural" to us.  If you tried to explain to Moses or even the Shulamite maiden why your love takes the particular emotional forms that it does, they wouldn't understand you for the simple reason that they didn't have these complex maps of subjectivity that you’ve inherited.  They had feelings, but not our feelings; their feelings arose and played themselves out on cultural stages markedly different from ours.  Subjectivity was nowhere near as rich, as structured, as BIG a territory for them.  And consequently, they just didn't value it as much.  Whatever our view of Freud, we're nonetheless all Freudians in the sense that all of us accept as more or less true the structure of the psyche that he sought to build in a systematic way.  We believe in the reality of the unconscious, in repression, indeed in the very distinctness and centrality of the mental life itself — and these are all distinctively Freudian notions.  And it's the same with the Romantics: whatever our view of Shelley or Keats or Hölderlin — or even if we've long forgotten or never even read Shelley or Keats or Hölderlin — their metaphoric explorations of emotional and sub-conscious life created a more manifold, intricate organization of the psyche that has passed into the common culture, one that neither Jesus nor even St. Thomas would easily recognize. 
            All this is because our ideas, our dreams, even our visceral experience of love — our quickened pulse rate, the riveting of our attention — are as much cultural as they are "natural."   It's not just that one great Feeling called Love has had a lot of different cultural expressions — like putting different garments on the same basic body — it's that love itself is plural and has a complex history, a development, that parallels our changing conceptions of what it means to be human. 
            At this point, I can imagine a slightly brow-beaten, slightly irritated question arising from one — or all! — of you.  "So if our conceptions and experience of love are so damn different, how is it that love came about at all?  How is it that I can read the story of Jacob and Rachel, of Medea or Isolde, or Cupid and Psyche or whomever?  Aren't there some similarities, some continuities, that let us read these ancient lovers and writers about love with real empathy and understanding?"
            Indeed there are, and we're going to spend the rest of our time looking at two of them.  But we can only see them clearly if we begin with the differences between us and them: otherwise it's all too tempting to simply see them as versions of ourselves, to homogenize them into our post-Freudian world, and not let them be the sort of lovers they were.  So as we read them together, I'll try to keep both the continuities and the differences in play.
            I'm going to start at the beginning, or at least at the provisional beginning.  It's the beginning of love for us because these two Greek poets in my title were the first to set down experiences of love that entered our cultural mainstream.  They weren't the first to set down words about love, of course — inscriptions in ancient Sumeria and Egypt, for example, long antedate them — but these were the descriptions, the evocations, of love that begin the geneaology of our understanding of that all-powerful emotion.  So I mean it quite literally when I say that they “Invented Love” for us.  Their writing and singing, their versions of love, are the ones that launched us.  Again, this isn't to say that people before them didn't love, or that they didn't love in the ways that our poets describe.  But those people wrote nothing, sang, if at all, only to their own generation, were not inscribed by their peers and treasured by their descendants.  Homer and Sappho were.  Their versions composed what love would be for us.  In what follows I use Homer as background, and a foil, for the invention of love’s subjectivity by the woman often called the “Tenth Muse,” Sappho of Lesbos.

 

II

Homer (fl. 700 BCE)

            So first, the background and the foil.  Homer's stories of love center around two sorts of relationships: first, and centrally, the love between men, and then, less importantly but perhaps more beautifully, about heterosexual married love.  In the Iliad it is not the "love" — if that's the right word —  between Paris and Helen, the famous passion that in myth  inaugurated the whole Trojan War, that Homer is most interested in.  That "love" is, darkly, just one more in a series of violent assaults against women with which many Greek stories about the past begin.  For example, Herodotus opens his history by citing a seemingly endless chain of rapes (literally, "to carry off") that inaugurated the relationships between Western Asia and the Aegean cultures since long before his day: Io, Europa (the continent is named for a rape victim), Medea, and of course Helen.  No, that “love” between Paris and Helen is simply an upper-class version of theft that had painful consequences.  Women in the Iliad are first and foremost commodities, mediums of exchange and barter, marks or signs of a hero's true worth.  They may, in spite of this, approximate human equality, that is equality of feeling and temper, with men: Andromache and Hecuba are the poem’s two examples.  But it is only the men's feelings, and their already lofty social position, that makes this possible, a tradition that we also recognize in the narratives of medieval chivalry and Renaissance princes.  In the Iliad the great love story is between the poem's hero, Achilles, and his older mentor, friend and lover Patroklos.  The death of Patroklos, fighting rashly against an Apollo-inspired Hektor in Achilles' own armor, is the pivot of the story, and Achilles' grief-stricken rage at the loss of his lover is the deepest love emotion that poem knows.  It is a loss so powerful that even Achilles' horses weep for the fallen lover.  The death of a woman, any woman, could not have brought about such a change in Achilles, or any other hero of the Iliad.  Here is Achilles when he learns that his lover has fallen to Hektor:

            He [the messenger] spoke, and the black cloud of sorrow closed on Achilles.
            In both hands he caught up the grimy dust, and poured it
            over his head and face, and fouled his handsome countenance,
            and the black ashes were scattered over his immortal tunic.
            And he himself, mightily in his might, in the dust lay
            at length, and took and tore his hair with his hand, and defiled it.
            And the handmaidens Achilles and Patroklos had taken
            captive, stricken at heart, cried out aloud, and came running
            out of doors about valiant Achilles, and all of them
            beat their breasts with their hands, and the limbs went slack in each of them.
            On the other side Antilochos mourned with him, letting the tears fall,
            and held the hand of Achilles as he grieved in his proud heart,
            fearing Achilles might cut his throat with the iron....
                                                                        Translated by Richmond Lattimore

Thetis, A's goddess-mother, is summoned by his grief from her kingdom beneath the sea, and Achilles addresses her only to curse his own birth — the most extreme thing a character in the Iliad could say (and something that has a distinctively modern tone to it):

            'My mother, all these things the Olympian brought to accomplishment.
            But what pleasure is this to me, since my dear companion has perished,
            Patroklos, whom I loved beyond all other companions,
            as well as my own life.  I have lost him, and Hektor, who killed him,
            has stripped away that gigantic armor, a wonder to look on
            and splendid, which the gods gave Peleus, a glorious present,
            on that day they drove you to the marriage bed of a mortal.
            I wish you had gone on living then with the other goddesses
            of the sea and that Peleus had married some mortal woman.'

The strength of Achilles’ love is shown only in the extremities of his grief. Note that the singer of the Iliad describes the actions of grief as a way — indeed his only way —  of showing its strength; he doesn't have Achilles talk through his loss or explore the nuances of his feelings because he simply doesn't have such nuances; such subjectivity simply isn't part of the Iliad's lexicon.  It didn't exist in 700 BCE, or, as far as we know, in the older Mycenaean world that Homer is recreating.  Homer can only show the strength of Achilles' love by the results it produces in his body or in the world; because it is powerful enough to summon Thetis from her undersea home, it is more powerful than that felt by any other mortal.  But if you put Achilles — or Homer — on the psychoanalyst's couch and asked him to talk about the intricacies of his feelings, he would have nothing to say.
            So homoerotic love, that symmetrical love between true equals of the same sex — a very Greek idea — is central for Homer.  But it is not his only love-subject.  He also wrote about love within marriage, i.e. within a long-standing male-female relationship that is shaped by time and history.  While the Iliad is probably a poem of Homer's middle years, the Odyssey is thought to be the work of Homer's great age; this may in part account for the shift in emphasis.
In The Odyssey we first see Odysseus alone, a shipwrecked sailor marooned in paradise.  He is sitting on the beach of an island made glorious by the magic of the nymph Calypso.  Every day for seven years she has offered him everything, in theory at least, that a man might want: perfect beauty, perfect lovemaking, endless freedom, fabulous wealth — in short, a paradise.  But he weeps because she is not his wife.  With Calypso he has pleasure in abundance, pleasure of every description, but no history; nothing of the changing, enriching powers of age, the treasure and surprise and dignity and even pain of long, common experience.  What Calypso offers today is exactly the same as what she has always offered: merely perfection.   And, in a great reversal, she also de facto instructs him in “what it is like to be a woman”; in effect, he is to Calypso as Penelope is to the suitors, Odysseus feminized, placed in the traditionally inferior, disempowered position of the woman.
            When, after his many adventures, he finally returns to Ithaca, both he and Penelope are determined to avoid the disastrous parallel homecoming of Agamemnon, slaughtered by his embittered wife Klytemnestra.  Both Odysseus and Penelope are “Odyssean” in their caution, their disguises, and mutual testing.  Throughout, their son Telemachos is present, and plays a part in their reunion: they are a family, not individual lovers.

The Odyssey: XXIII

She turned then to descend the stair, her heart
in tumult. Had she better keep her distance
and question him, her husband? Should she run
up to him, take his hands, kiss him now?
Crossing the door sill she sat down at once
in firelight, against the nearest wall,
across the room from the lord Odysseus.

There
leaning against a pillar, sat the man
and never lifted up his eyes, but only waited
for what his wife would say when she had seen him.
And she, for a long time, sat deathly still
in wonderment — for sometimes as she gazed
she found him — yes, clearly — like her husband,
but sometimes blood and rags were all she saw.
Telemakhos' voice came to her ears:

“Mother,
cruel mother, do you feel nothing,
drawing yourself apart this way from Father?
Will you not sit with him and talk and question him?
What other woman could remain so cold?         [Klytemnestra!]
Who shuns her lord, and he come back to her
from wars and wandering, after twenty years?
Your heart is hard as flint and never changes!"

Penelope answered:

"I am stunned, child.
I cannot speak to him. I cannot question him.
I cannot keep my eyes upon his face.
If really he is Odysseus, truly home,
beyond all doubt we two shall know each other
better than you or anyone. There are
secret signs we know, we two."

    A smile
came now to the lips of the patient hero, Odysseus,
who turned to Telemakhos and said:

"Peace: let your mother test me at her leisure.
Before long she will see and know me best.
These tatters, dirt — all that I'm caked with now —
make her look hard at me and doubt me still....

And now Odysseus and Telemakhos proceed to make military plans in the midst of this love/reunion scene.  All this is utterly in character: Ody cannot return to Penelope unless he has all the accoutrements of being Odysseus.  He must be restored as a kingly man, not a beggar.  To make such plans is also characteristic of Odysseus, as Penelope knows.

They listened attentively, and did his bidding,
bathed and dressed afresh; and all the maids
adorned themselves.

Then Phemios the harper [down in the main hall]
took his polished shell and plucked the strings,
moving the company to desire
for singing, for the sway and beat of dancing,
until they made the manor hall resound
with gaiety of men and grace of women.
Anyone passing on the road would say:

"Married at last, I see — the queen so many courted.
Sly, cattish wife!  She would not keep — not she! —
the lord's estate until he came."

So travelers'
thoughts might run — but no one guessed the truth.
Greathearted Odysseus, home at last,
was being bathed now by Eurynome
and rubbed with golden oil, and clothed again
in a fresh tunic and a cloak.   Athena
lent him beauty, head to foot.   She made him
taller, and massive, too, with crisping hair
in curls like petals of wild hyacinth
but all red-golden.  Think of gold infused
on silver by a craftsman, whose fine art
Hephaistos taught him, or Athena: one
whose work moves to delight: just so she lavished
beauty over Odysseus' head and shoulders.
He sat then in the same chair by the pillar,
facing his silent wife, and said:
                                                     
"Strange woman,
the immortals of Olympos made you hard,
harder than any. Who else in the world
would keep aloof as you do from her husband
if he returned to her from years of trouble,
cast on his own land in the twentieth year?

Nurse, make up a bed for me to sleep on.
Her heart is iron in her breast."

Penelope
spoke to Odysseus now. She said:   "Strange man,
if man you are... This is no pride on my part
nor scorn for you — not even wonder, merely.
I know so well how you — how he — appeared
boarding the ship for Troy. But all the same...

Make up his bed for him, Eurykleia.
Place it outside the bedchamber my lord
built with his own hands. Pile the big bed
with fleeces, rugs, and sheets of purest linen."

With this she tried him to the breaking point,
and he turned on her in a flash raging:

"Woman, by heaven you've stung me now!
Who dared to move my bed?
No builder had the skill for that — unless
a god came down to turn the trick. No mortal
in his best days could budge it with a crowbar.
There is our pact and pledge, our secret sign,
built into that bed — my handiwork
and no one else's!

An old trunk of olive
grew like a pillar on the building plot,
and I laid out our bedroom round that tree,
lined up the stone walls, built the walls and roof,
gave it a doorway and smooth-fitting doors.
Then I lopped off the silvery leaves and branches,
hewed and shaped that stump from the roots up
into a bedpost, drilled it, let it serve
as model for the rest. I planed them all,
inlaid them all with silver, gold and ivory,
and stretched a bed between — a pliant web
of oxhide thongs dyed crimson.

There's our sign!
I know no more. Could someone else's hand
have sawn that trunk and dragged the frame away?"

Their secret! as she heard it told, her knees
grew tremulous and weak, her heart failed her.
With eyes brimming tears she ran to him,
throwing her arms around his neck, and kissed him
murmuring:

                                            
"Do not rage at me, Odysseus!
No one ever matched your caution! Think
what difficulty the gods gave: they denied us
life together in our prime and flowering years,
kept us from crossing into age together.
Forgive me, don't be angry. I could not
welcome you with love on sight! I armed myself
long ago against the frauds of men,
impostors who might come — and all those many
whose underhanded ways bring evil on!
Helen of Argos, daughter of Zeus and Leda,
would she have joined the stranger, lain with him,
if she had known her destiny? known the Akhaians
in arms would bring her back to her own country?
Surely a goddess moved her to adultery,
her blood unchilled by war and evil coming,
the years, the desolation; ours, too.
But here and now, what sign could be so clear
as this of our own bed?
No other man has ever laid eyes on it —
only my own slave, Aktoris, that my father
sent with me as a gift — she kept our door.
You make my stiff heart know that I am yours."

And at this moment of climax and reunion, Homer returns,
poetically, to that beach on Calypso's island, to the sea
and tears and loneliness now overcome, to convey their
married love.  The Protean sea, site of endless change
and wandering and death, is finally left behind.

Now from his breast into his eyes the ache
of longing mounted, and he wept at last,
his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms,
longed for
as the sun-warmed earth is longed for by a swimmer
spent in rough water where his ship went down
under Poseidon's blows, gale winds and tons of sea.
Few men can keep alive through a big surf
to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches
in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind:
and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband,
her white arms round him pressed as though forever....

So they came
into that bed so steadfast, loved of old,
opening glad arms to one another....

The royal pair mingled in love again
 and afterward lay reveling in stories:

Lovemaking and stories.  In The Odyssey these are two forms of the same thing: holding one another "as though forever," and making and remaking your lives with story.  These are feelings that come to any of us only after years together, when marriage comes to interweave itself with everything that you hold sacred.  One of our great stories of love begins here.

Now let’s look more carefully at how Homer portrays love:
            Penelope speaks of "....her heart in tumult."    Her language for the inner life is literal, not metaphoric; she feels a storm within, nothing more complex or nuanced.  This is a hard idea for us to grasp.  Homer does not have our sense of a deep inner ego, an "I" that comes before any experience, that we take as a human given.  Remember that Achilles' grief could only be shown by action.  Without exception, Homer can only express emotion by linking it to action of some part of the body, or by using a simile that is itself a form of action.  Thought and emotion for Homer are the work of physical organs, bodily activities rather than "mental" as we understand it.
            Here’s another hard idea for us:  Homer can only express conflict temporally: "This," then "that."  And therefore a Homeric character can only feel one thing at a time.  Conflict — as Penelope experiences at the opening — can only be expressed in sequence.  Remember how she puts it: “She turned then to descend the stair, her heart /in tumult. Had she better keep her distance / and question him, her husband?  Should she run / up to him, take his hands, kiss him now?”  Homeric characters often ponder alternatives internally, but they never experience two feelings simultaneously. 
Yet enough similarities remain: we do recognize the poem’s final great affirmation — "...as though forever" —  that married love can take place only in time, and over time.  That is what Calypso — what our ultimate fantasy lives — could never offer.  Homer shows us that love, whether between Achilles and Patroklos, or Odysseus and Penelope, or for any of us, is framed by death, and made most deeply powerful by death's inevitability. 

 

III

Sappho  (fl. 600 BCE)

            Homer’s name is widely known today, even by people who have never read him, but Sappho’s is not.  Though she lived at least a hundred years later than he did, even though we have many stories and fragments of stories about her life, she seems a more mysterious figure to us than her famous predecessor.  The earliest of these biographical stories was written down at least three hundred years after her death, and most from much later than that; it’s like relying solely on what writers from Queen Anne’s England to now had to say about Chaucer.  Even more serious, of the nine scrolls of her lyric poems assembled at Alexandria (not to mention further scrolls of her elegies and other works), scrolls some 35 feet long containing scores of poems, we have only two complete poems (one just pieced together in 2004), substantial portions of half a dozen others, and pages of little phrases — 213 of them at the moment, most likely transcriptions from performances — or sentences fractured by gaps in our manuscripts:  Like classical statues in pieces.  What if John Keats or John Donne came to us in this condition?  What scrolls survived the several lootings of the library at Alexandria were taken care of later.  In 380 Gregory of Nazianzus ordered the first known burning of Sappho's poetry.  Then, in 1073, all known copies of Sappho's “lesbian love poems” — including more recent parchment codex copies — were burned by the Christian authorities in Byzantium and Rome.
So how did even our meager supply of these fragments survive?  Many were quoted by later writers, little tag lines that would have suggested a whole poem to their audiences, but which leave us thirsty.  Others, as with our seven plays of Sophocles’ one hundred or more, were saved by Islamic grammarians to illustrate some fine point to their students.  Some were painted on vases; the most famous one, a terracotta fragment in Florence, sits today on a piece of royal velvet.   A number — including the most recent find — were found inside stuffed animals or written on the wrappings of mummies in Egypt, and well preserved in that dry climate.  Some were even stuffed into the mouths of the corpse, as words to carry him to the next world. 
            These are the rumors, then, about Sappho  (the ancient Greek japfw (“Psap-foe”) is more biting.  Much of this information comes from the biographical papyrus written in the 2nd-3rd CE and found in a rubbish heap at Oxyrhynchus — “Town of the sharp-nosed fish” — in Egypt, 120 miles south of Cairo, in the early 20th century (one saying of Jesus was found there too, but most of the papyri were bills and IOUs!):  She was, most probably:

• A native of Mytilene, Lesbos, the island just off the coast of modern Turkey, and in her time near to the cultivated and wealthy empire of the Lydians.  This gives her an “eastern,” slightly Asiatic flair for mainland Greek audiences.  (One scholar argues that her name was Asiatic. (Loeb Sappho, 3). 
• Her most likely birth-date: about 630 BCE.  We’re told that she flourished “in the 42nd Olympiad” (612-608 BCE).
• several sources, notably the Roman poet Horace, describe her as "small and dark-skinned" & “ugly” (Heroides 15: 31-35)

• She, perhaps, had two brothers, Charaxus and Larichus.
• Political turmoil on Lesbos led to her temporary exile in Sicily from 604 to 594 BCE.  The Roman poet Cicero notes that in his time a statue of her stood in the marketplace of Syracusa. (In Verrus 2.4. 125-127)
• Aphrodite is her patron goddess.

             —  She’s given a husband in these later narratives (Kerkylos of Andros — though this unusual name is probably the creation of a comic writer since it translates literally as “Prick from the Isle of Man”) and a daughter, Cleis, named after her own mother (inferred from Fragment 98: Though “Cleis” may be a word for clitoris [Clei-toris: Winkler in Greene I, p. 103).
             — One writer, Aelian, a 2nd century CE Greek rhetorician living in Rome, apparently wishing to protect her reputation against charges of wrongful love, claims that there were TWO Sapphos: our poetess, and a “courtesan.”  Aelian, as quoted by Stobaeus in his Anthology, tells a wonderful story about Sappho and Solon, a story that gives us our first inkling of her standing among later Greeks (Loeb, 13): When his nephew sang a song of Sappho’s over the wine, the great statesman liked it so much that he asked the boy to teach it to him.  When someone asked why he was so passionate about it, he replied, “so that I may learn it and die.”
—  She operated some sort of education program for girls: Her so-called "school" was, literally, a “moiso-polon domos”: "A house of those who cultivate the Muse.”  So instruction in poetry and in love — with Aphrodite as its reigning goddess — was its principal task.  Girls would leave her school, presumably to marry, and equipped with the arts of poetry and (in the best sense) all the accoutrements of love.  So Sappho was a teacher, roughly in the sense that Raphael was a teacher in the studio of young apprentices that studied with him.

• She wrote in Aeolic Greek, an archaic dialect, and a “country dialect” — comp. Texas — for the mainland people who spoke Attic Greek.  That’s one reason we don’t have more copies.  (Homer incorporated a mixture of dialects: reading Homeric Greek is like reading Cape Town, London, Mississippi and Sydney English all mixed together.)
• At least some of her poems were sung to the four or seven string LYRE: hence “Lyric.”

— These are not "private poems" in our modern sense: they were performed for live audiences.  A few are epithalamia, lit. "bed-chamber song,” poems  for a wedding celebration; they have a ritual as well as a personal quality.  Most of them; however, were performed for a small group of initiates called a thiasos, and their purpose was to produce similar feelings in those initiates and to accompany ritual and cult functions lost to us now.  So these poems were always oral events, not private, silent meditations, and they were deliberately instructive, giving the young women who heard them greater sensual awareness and confidence as they faced marriage (Hallett in Greene I, 125ff).   At the same time, however, they are clearly more internal in subject matter and utterance that Homer’s epics.  This connects decisively to gender, as we’ll see in a moment.  Sappho is a real, unique person, if enigmatic; Homer the bard is more lost to time, more a representative or construction rather than a breathing poet. 
— Legend also has it that she killed herself for a beautiful youth, Phaon (one of the names of Adonis, Aphrodite’s youthful lover), by jumping off a cliff in Leucadia in Western Greece, or on Lesbos itself.... There’s a definite imprint of the male imagination on this one, as there is in the many accounts, particularly from the 19th century, that portray her as “deviant”: a “lesbian,” or more generally subject to emotional outpourings that indicate mental illness.  (Lefkowitz, 1974)  Paradoxically, other 19th century writers, including a dozen prominent English and German classicists who should have known better esteem her as possessing (I’m quoting): “…the purity of a great woman”; or as “…a woman of generous disposition, affectionate heart, and independent spirit”; “…a dazzling extreme of beauty and brilliancy, exhibiting a model of perfection physical and moral, such as was probably never exemplified in woman.” (Jenkyns, 2-3)

            But if our biographical information is scattered and unreliable, we do have several contemporary and near-contemporary tributes to her, all from male writers.  To repeat, the position of women in classical Greece was, with rare exceptions, deeply inferior, an enclosed, private world within the public world of men.  Yet these men held Sappho second only to Homer in status and reputation among the Greeks.  Homer was known as "THE Poet;" Sappho as "THE Poetess."  Here is her fellow lyricist Alkaios, himself, like Sappho, a Lesbian, though not a lesbian:
                        Violet-tressed, holy, honey-sweet, smiling Sappho
                        I wish to speak, but reverence restrains me."
             —  According to later writers, Plato termed her "The Tenth Muse" and Horace said that even the dead are admiringly listening to her songs in holy silence in the underworld.
            — No fewer than five comic poets of Greece and Rome (e.g., Menander) wrote plays about her: we have only the odd line.  And a whole paper could be given on the imitations and recreations of her work over the past 400 years: literally hundred of examples.  Just one: in The Princess (1846) Tennyson wrote that her poems were “jewels five-words-long /That on the stretched forefinger of all time / Sparkle for ever” (II, 355-57).
—  Sappho gives us our ONLY first-hand view of women's life from The Odyssey until the 5th century.
             — There’s a statue (from 1965) to her in the modern Lesbian port of Mytilene, and the local church claims that two of its pillars are from her “Moiso-polon domos”.

 

It’s probable that Plato’s epigram was credited to him by a Hellenistic writer; certainly the phrase became a cliché concerning Sappho in Roman times.

 

IV

Fragment 130
(forgive the unaccented Greek)

 

Ero, dhute m o lusimelhs donei,                 Once again loose-limbed Love makes me tremble,

glukupikron amacanon orteron...            the sweet-bitter, irresistible creature.

Fragment 51

 

ouk oid’ otti qeo,              I don’t know what to do
duo moi ta nohmmata                     I am in two minds (lit. “I have two understandings or two perceptions”)

These two little fragments mark a great dividing line between Homer’s world and Sappho’s. Sweet-bitter, glukupikros: for Sappho, love is two things at once.  Not sweet, then bitter, as Homer would have to describe it, but simultaneously sweet and bitter, both in one, at once.  The second phrase does the same thing: not I think this, then that, but I am IN two minds (“duo ... nohmmata”) both in one, at once.  And that paradox — the gift of thinking, or experiencing, two things at the same time — of speaking and being silent at once, not alternatively, as in Homer — creates an inner space that is new in the written record, and therefore a landmark in the history of subjectivity and love. 
            Let’s see how this develops:

Fragment 16

There are those who say
an array of horsemen,
and others of marching men,
and others of ships, is
the most beautiful thing on the dark earth.
But I say it is whatever one loves.

It is very easy
to show this to all:
for Helen,
by far the most beautiful of mortals,
left her husband
and sailed to Troy
giving no thought at all
to her child nor dear parents,
but was led......  [torn papyrus...]
(by her love alone.)

Now, far away, Anactoria
comes to my mind.
For I would rather watch her
moving in her lovely way,
and see her face, flashing radiant,
than all the force of Lydian chariots,
and their infantry in full display of arms.
                                              

The poems has a gap here, then lines that run as follows:
“…. Impossible to happen
…. Mankind… but to pray to share
[9 lines missing]
unexpectedly…”
Williamson, 170-71, proposes that Helen and Anaktoria are intricately related in the speaker’s erotic imagination.       

….Translated by Suzy Q. Groden

            “There are those who say” — men, we presume, but perhaps some of Sappho’s pupils as well — that cavalry or marching soldiers or ships IS the “most beautiful thing on the dark earth.”  This is the world of Homer, where men set off to war to become fully themselves, to achieve arête, even immortality, and their beauty flashes out from their spear points.  But the poem’s speaker immediately challenges that world with a resounding individualism that stands against the massed troops and triremes.  For a woman to say “I” in public in this way, challenging the standard by which human greatness is measured, is literally revolutionary, turning the patriarchal world upside down.  And what does she oppose to these great displays? — “whatever one loves.”  Note that ”whatever”: the speaker is making an abstract, even a philosophical claim.  Just as men desire war and the fame it makes possible, so she makes the public claim that eros [eratai], loving desire, is fundamental, beneath even virtue:  Eros over arête, eros over glory, sweet-bitter eros over everything.
            Then Sappho proceeds to make a logical argument, allegedly the territory of men not “flighty” women, to support her remarkable claim.  (All this some two hundred years before Socrates.)  She takes her evidence from the heart of Homer’s story, Helen’s flight with the most beautiful man, Paris, to Troy.  In Helen, says Sappho, eros triumphs even over the patriarchal family; love is greater than all conventional morality.  She brilliantly converts the great villainess of The Iliad into the True Heroine of Love, the woman whom men call the most beautiful woman, who sacrificed much that was dear to her in its name, and who stood alone as the poet now stands, in opposition to the epic world.  Sappho’s Helen is the subject of her own desires, not the passive object of men’s desire (Greene I, 4).  Like Agamemnon and Menelaus she journeyed heroically to Troy, but for a different cause. 
Her audience now won over by argument — and perhaps reeling from the daring inversions of their cultural norms into accepting the inverse of what they thought most beautiful, or most traitorous — the speaker calls forth a mysterious vision of her own.  Not an array of horses, and not the most beautiful woman of all, but a third, free-standing woman, a mere ordinary girl, Anactoria, a girl who traveled east as Helen did and is perhaps now married to a Lydian.  Both women, the long-dead Helen and the living Anaktoria, are far away from the poet but present to her mind’s eye.  Anactoria’s image is vague to us — we don’t know her — but crystalline and precise to the speaker.  (I love Sappho’s mock-surprise at Anactoria’s appearance here, as though she didn’t know she would come into the poem.)  And Sappho would rather watch that image of her beloved — let alone her beloved in the flesh — than all the armies of Lydia.  Note that Anactoria’s “not there,” and therefore that she’s silent, but Sappho focuses down on her unique movement, and finally on her face, more beautiful than an army of flashing spear-points, more beautiful indeed than the face of Helen, more beautiful, and more desirable, than anything you can name.  The argument is complete and so is the powerful feeling: love is paradoxically universal desire, and unique to each person (only the poet knows Anactoria’s movements and face; we can only imagine them in her imagining).  This is an argument worthy of Odysseus, and a poem to compete — artistically and culturally — with Homer.  Inner desire, not outward triumphs, is most fundamental.  If that is so, then the poet must begin to chart that inner life, to literally discover interior spaces which the dynamics of love, of desire, open up like new horizons.  As we saw, Homer had little language to help with this task; Sappho will invent, for us, modern love.

 

Fragment 31

RECORDED BY BUTLER UNIVERSITY’S CLASSICIST PAULA SAFFIRE

Fainetai moi khno iso qeisin
emmen wnhr, otti enantio toi
isdanei kai plasion adu fwnei-
sa utakouei

kai gelaisas imeroen, to m h man
kardian en sthqesin eptoaisen
w gar e s idw broce, w me fwnai-
s oud en et eikei,

alla kam men glwssa <m > eage, lepton
d autika crw pur upadedromhken
oppatessi d oud en orhmm, epirrom-
beisi d akonai,

kad de m idrw kakceetai, tromo de
paisan agrei, clwrotera de poia
emmu, teqnakhn d oligw pideuh
fainom em aut[a...

alla pan tolmaton, epei kai penhta
..........

 

Here’s Fragment 31 in The Unicode System of Transliteration

fa'inetai' moi kh^nos i?'sos the'oisin
e?'mmen w?'ner o?'stis e?nanti'os toi
i?za'nei kai` plasi'on a?du
     fwneu'sas u?pakou'ei

kai` galai'sas i?mmero'en to` dh` ?ma'n
kardi'an e?n sth'©£esin e?pto'asen,
w?s ga`r eu?'idon broxe'ws se, fw'nas
     ou?de`n e?'t? e?'ikei,

a?lla` ka'm me`n glwjssa ve'age, le'pton
d' au?'tika xrw^j pu^r u?padedro'maken,
o?ppa'tessi d? ou?de`n orhm?,
     e?pirro'mbeisi d? a?'kouai.

a? de' m? i'?drws kakxe'etai, tro'mos de`
pai^san a?'grei xlwrote'ra de` poi'as
e?'mmi, te©£na'khn d? o?ligw ?pideu'vhn
     fai'nomai [a?'lla].

 

Fragment 31

An equal to the gods, he seems to me,
the man who, with his face toward yours,
sits close and listens to the whispers of
your sweet voice and enticing laugh.
To watch has made my heart a pounding hammer in my breast.
For as I look at you, if only for an instant,
my voice no longer comes to me.
My silent tongue is broken,
and a quick and subtle flame
runs up beneath my skin.
I lose my sense of sight, hear only drumming in my ears.
I drip cold sweat,
and a trembling chases all through me.
I am greener than the pale grass
and it seems to me that I am close to death.

Still, I must endure all this….
Since…. even a pauper…
  (The rest is lost)
                                    Translated by Suzy Q. Groden, with two small additions from the original Greek text: Catullus 51 is an adaptation of this poem, which gives us some further idea of the original.  We have the first part of the poem complete because Longinus quoted it in his famous treatise.)

            The Stanza: three dactylic hendecasyllabic (eleven syllable) lines followed by a short line: what classicists call the “Sapphic meter.”  In Greek poetry, as you just heard, it’s the quantity, or the length of time it takes to say a syllable, that makes the meter.  Longfellow's Evangeline is the closest thing in English to the Greek use of length of syllable, rather than variations in accent, to create dactyls.  Just looking at it, you can see that Sappho’s stanza also features enjambment: carrying meaning across several lines.
            There’s been much speculation about the addressee — the character spoken to — in #31.  Is it a farewell poem to a pupil who is just now meeting with her prospective, or already contracted, fiancée as Sappho looks on?  Or is it part of a more conventional marriage poem, but with another revolutionary turn in subject matter? — we don’t know because we don’t have the final lines.  Whichever, the poet immediately puts forward a world-turning idea: the “god-like” (isotheos Phos) hero, a favorite epithet of Homer’s, depends on the fact that this man’s quasi-divinity comes from a girl’s mere presence, even more radically from her mere whispers and laughter, not from his prowess or honor or great deeds!  He becomes god-like simply by sitting and looking at her face, something neither Achilles nor Odysseus could imagine.  Remember that Athena made Odysseus god-like, not Penelope’s smile.  We’re not even sure if this god-like man is actually there, or if this array of horsemen and Lydian chariots were recollected imaginatively.
            But the poem’s main interest is the effect this scene has on the speaker herself  (“…he seems to me”).  So again, the poetess' internal experience is central, but there’s an immediate ambiguity:  What is it that moves her so much?  Is it her love for the woman, or is it her jealousy and pain over the woman' reaction to the man?  Most plausibly, both feelings are equally present, simultaneously, in the speaker, and Sappho proceeds to shape a psychic world that we still inhabit, and Homer did not.  The effect of her feminine gaze is not to appraise or control its object, as a man might, but to discover something about her inner self.  Notice how her gaze shifts, from “He seems to me…” to “It seems [the same verb, fainetai phaínetai] to me that I am close to death”; her gaze turns inward, seeking knowledge of her own erotic pain.  Just looking at this scene, whether it’s dramatic or imagined, silences the poet, giving us the further paradox of the poet who can’t speak.  Not only can she not hear what the lovers whisper, she herself cannot be heard by either of them.  Sappho tackles this new experience not by discovering external analogies and making an argument, as she did with Helen, but by devising language to express her silent feelings.  They’re wrenching, even violent images — her tongue is “broken” — and a living flame runs beneath her skin without devouring her: more paradox.  Her “I” and her body become identical, and her ego all but disappears as her body metaphorically dissolves before us.  As all her senses fade, her hearing is taken over by an unpoetic, unrhythmic drumming, and her cold sweat marks a trembling that she cannot control. Then comes a rich analogy — “I am greener than the pale grass”  — (“chlorotera” “I  am greener”, with a feminine “a” ending): a sick-feeling (love as illness)  and a pale appearance.  “Pale grass” may be dry, but the root chloris also has connotations of moisture.  (In Homer a hero’s fear is coded as green.)  All this brings her close to death, the final silence for the singing poet-lover.  So this “I” presents itself to us more in space than in time, freezing time’s ongoing motion — Homer’s one thought or action following after another —  to explore the experiences of simultaneously sweet-bitter love.  The “I” that knows itself divided by contrary feelings and possessed by an invisible power whose flames, unseen by anyone, burn through the blood, lives in a larger psychic geography, one with expanding horizons for consciousness.  In a precisely parallel way the paradox of the silent poet singing to us, a woman poet who is silenced by her society and victimized by love, yet singing of her hidden inner life, models for us a new way of seeing our own experience.  Though voiceless, she can speak to others far away in space, and time.
            Does the lyric “I” always think of itself in this way, as we might do?  No. The Greek lyric poets apparently weren't fully conscious of selfhood as we understand it, or of paradox, except at these heightened moments.  The MOMENT, the present, is the place where selfhood comes into relief.  But it's not a state you can choose, or will.       
Did Sappho literally invent all this?  We don’t know — but we do know that, in our literary and therefore our psychological genealogy, she did invent it for us.  It’s what we have.  Compare the interiority of this poem to an Egyptian lyric from the New Kingdom’s last dynasty, the Twentieth, dating from about 1100 BCE ((Papyrus Chester Beatty, #34).  It’s part of a long dialogue between a representative “Boy” and “Girl” from a scroll — like Sappho’s, full of holes, nonce words, and lacunae —  entitled “The Beginning of the Sayings of the Great Entertainer.”  Number 34 is from the voice of “The Girl”; she’s about fourteen, though the actual author was almost certainly an adult.  As with Sappho, these poems were performed, probably at banquets as shown on Egyptian tomb painting, where the sexes mingled freely.  Poems like this also, incidentally, give the lie to the popular conception of the ancient Egyptians as solemn, death-obsessed people.

My heart quickly flits
            away when I remember
your love.  It does not let
            me go as humans go
but has leapt from its proper place.
            It does not allow me to don
a tunic.  I cannot put on
            my cloak.  I cannot paint
my eyes.  I cannot anoint
            with balm by body at all.
‘Don’t give up until
            you’ve got inside his house!’
So speaks my heart to me
            when I remember him.
Do not, my heart, create
            folly in me.  Why
do you behave so
            crazily?  Be still.
Be cool until your brother
            comes to you.  Then I
shall do just such things.
            Don’t let people say,
“This girl collapsed because
            she was so much in love.’
Be staunch, my heart, whenever
            you think of him.  Do not
like an animal  scurry away.

Very lovely, but look at what’s not there: no paradox, no interiority, but a Homer-like debate between a mind and a heart that prevents normal behavior, and a Homer-like worry about the shame such abnormal actions might produce.  This poem is much closer to the epic tradition than Sappho, despite the subject matter.

 

V

The Lyric, the Epic, and Love.

            Like our Egyptian poet, Homer and the epic narrated the ways in which love is a public emotion, with public consequences.  Private life is meaningful and interesting — the "secret signs" of Penelope and Odysseus —  only if situated in the larger life of the society, the kingdom, the world of the warrior-king (and queen).   This means that love is connected to the civic virtues of stability and continuity — and to the aristocracy as well.  Odysseus is transformed by the goddess into the authentic, kingly Odysseus in order that his reunion with his queenly wife can have its full, societal importance.  The story of a return home of a common sailor in Odysseus' retinue would have been of interest to no one — including, probably, the sailor himself if he were listening to stories around the great hearth in his Master's hall.
            The lyric counters this world by privileging individual experience over social continuity.  What matters is the moment, the experience of love; it's that moment that makes the life before it and after it meaningful.  That lyric moment allows you to reinterpret all the events that led up to it, and to forecast what will follow from it.  And it has no necessary relationship at all to social consequences, OR to social status.  Anyone can so love, and everyone does so desire.  And, to repeat, Sappho and her contemporary lyric poets invented this space, this territory of consciousness, that we've been busy mapping and remapping ever since.  It’s a space built on paradox, since for Sappho, love is both victimizing and empowering, both possessive and liberating.       Aphrodite, for Homer and arguably for most Greek men, was a goddess to be controlled by force; for Sappho eros was a force to be understood, and that quest to know opened up interior, conceptual spaces that we have inherited.  (Thorton, 157)
            Next, Homer and the epic privilege love between men over love between men and women; Odysseus and Penelope are the Great Exception. 
But the lyric, in Sappho's hands, privileges love between the so-called inferior sex over love between men, or men and women.  Even worse, at least to later readers though apparently not to her contemporaries, she privileges love between women, lesbian eros, and makes that subject command the attention of an entire culture, male and female alike.  She has no “lesbian identity” — that notion won’t arrive in the West until much later, 1895 to be exact, with the trial of Oscar Wilde — but she does celebrate love between those who have little or no voice in their society.
            Third, the epic narrates past experience which sets the model, the archetype, for our present understanding.  The tale of Odysseus and Penelope shows us how the great figures of the past practiced fidelity and passion, and our task is to imitate them as fully as we can.  This remains a powerful way for us to understand love.  Put into the modern vernacular, The Odyssey is the movie from which we learn to love. 
            But Sappho sees our present, immediate experience as inherently meaningful, and even as the best way to illuminate and understand the past.  She doesn't tell us to act as she acted.  Rather she says, "Here's what happened to me as a lover.  "Gluku-pikros, “sweet-bitter” both in one, at once”: feelings erupted in me that were new and overwhelming, or familiar and overwhelming.  This may sound like a "natural," very human thing to us, but, again, Homer would not understand this "both in one, at once," this paradox of feeling two different things at the same time, let alone think it a sufficient subject for poetry, let alone a model for living. 
             Here's a variant on this idea that is equally important: The idea that you should contrast your ideas with those of another, and make that a subject for a poem, is lyric, not epic (Snell, 47, 50; duBois, 106-7).  Homer does not play off inner qualities against the surface impression; Ody. in disguise is always, to us, Odysseus.  He makes devious plans, but he has no "inner life" in the full sense that we would understand it.  But Lyric begins with that contrast, that is, with revolution against a tradition.  You define your self lyrically by making clear how you are NOT another version of the past.  The individual lover, regardless of class, is of greater moment than "the full array of horsemen," but it’s also true, and at the same time, that some people do love that flashing array of horsemen more than a young girl, while others do not.  So lyric is revolutionary, and lyric's subject is the agent or power behind the revolution.  Love's power legitimizes lyric's revolution against epic values and the sanctity of the past.
            Fourth, in epic, feelings are tied to a specific geography.  Odysseus longs to see the mountains and chimney-smoke of Ithaka, but he never longs for a world of feeling or emotional contradiction.  Homer would never portray Odysseus on Ithaka thinking about Nausikaa; nor does Odysseus return imaginatively to Phaiakia and imagine the “far-away” Nausikaa longing for him as Sappho does for Anactoria.  That’s utterly foreign to him.  In the lyric,  however, feelings can be independent of geography:  With the lyricists it becomes possible to live a life of feeling which need have no immediate reference to a specific location.   And with that move, further psychic space is created that Homer never imagined.
Finally, we have seen that Homer's "physical" view of the mind entails that he cannot say that two people "are of the same mind" any more than we can say they are of the same brain.  Similarly, he does not have our notion of unique individuality, since our physical organs are individual but not unique in ways that matter for our self-understanding; the fact that my liver is different from all of yours doesn’t figure.  Penelope's heart or Achilles' liver is never paradoxical.  Nor can Homer distinguish easily between physical force and the force of the will.  In the lyric poets these distinctions, fundamental to a new kind of empathy, begin to emerge.  
Several things follow from this:  Sappho and her followers can recognize that different, ordinary individuals have different values.  She can also distinguish between the conventional and the genuine: she knows what is really valuable for her.  She still does not conceive of love as arising entirely out of herself — she needs Aphrodite — but she can write about unhappy love, which is not a Homeric subject.  The source of desire may be the goddess, but the helplessness that ensues is her own.  And even though the feeling is painful, she values it, for to wish it away like a physical pain would be to deny the love which gives value to her existence.  Hence "sweet-bitter,”  "gluku-pikros."  She can feel two things at the same time.  So, the problematics of desire make inner conflict the subject.  Love poems begin either with feeling overwhelmed, or with splits.  The pain that "divine love" induces points to a territory of conflict Homer couldn't name, and what we recognize as the modern psyche.  Lyric makes possible knowledge of the self: it is revelatory, not just expressive.  With that discovery, subjectivity as such emerges in the West.  And without that discovery of individuality and opposition in the lyric, the individualizing democracy of 5th century Athens would not have been possible.  Both epic and lyric make their contribution to the emergence of democracy.
                       
Fragment  147
I tell you
            In time to come
Someone will remember us.

Here again is the beached swimmer metaphor from The Odyssey and the “Anactoria” poem.  I’ll leave you with the two traditions incarnate, and with the just-unearthed new complete poem of Sappho.

Now from his breast into his eyes the ache
of longing mounted, and he wept at last,
his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms,
longed for
           as the sun-warmed earth is longed for by a swimmer
spent in rough water where his ship went down
under Poseidon's blows, gale winds and tons of sea.
Few men can keep alive through a big surf
to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches
in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind:
and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband,
her white arms round him pressed as though forever....

 

Sappho: Fragment 16

There are those who say
an array of horsemen,
and others of marching men,
and others of ships, is
the most beautiful thing on the dark earth.

But I say it is whatever one loves.

It is very easy
to show this to all:
for Helen,
by far the most beautiful of mortals,
left her husband
and sailed to Troy
giving no thought at all
to her child nor dear parents,
but was led......
(by her love alone.)

Now, far away, Anactoria
comes to my mind.
For I would rather watch her
moving in her lovely way,
and see her face, flashing radiant,
than all the force of Lydian chariots,
and their infantry in full display of arms.

 

VI: The newly assembled complete poem:

I’ll end on a somber but relevant note, for this assembly, with the “new” second complete poem by Sappho pieced together in 2004.  It extends fragment 58 by linking it to a papyrus at the University of Cologne, which in part contains Sappho poems.  The papyrus was recovered from —  you guessed it — a mummy cartonnage, and is the earliest manuscript that we have (3rd BCE, “just” 300 years after she composed it).  The other part of the text is from one of the 3rd CE Oxyrhynchus papyri mentioned above.  I say “somber” because of the subject matter — ageing and death.  One bit of information: Tithonos was a lovely youth pursued by Eos, the goddess of the dawn.  She loved him so much that she persuaded Zeus to make him immortal.  But, like the Cumean Sybil later on, she forgot to also ask for eternal youth, and so Tithonos aged and withered, but could not die.  Sappho subtly changes gender here, aligning herself with the aged, trapped male.  She does so because of another tradition, that Tithonos ultimately turned into a cicada, and thus can sing forever as the poetess herself hopes to do.  The Greeks believed that the cicada rejuvenated itself by shedding its skin (Greek “geras”, the same word as for “old age”): shed ”old age” and sing.  So “Sappho simply inserts us into a problem of life and then opens it, on a single mythic turn, to time” (Carson, NYROB): the metered time of her poem, and the dilemma of time, death and what remains of Sappho to us.

Cartonnage is a type of cardboard-like material. The ancient Egyptians used it in the same way that we use papier-mâché today. It’s made from layers of linen which had been moistened and stuck together using a kind of paste. This was then coated with a layer of stucco (lime plaster or gesso), and then be molded. The cartonnage is disassembled in enzyme and acid solutions and then the original rolls reconstructed; sometimes even the painted decoration can be rescued

 

Sappho, Fragment 58, in its new, complete version

You, children, be zealous for the
            beautiful gifts of the
            violet-lapped Muses
and for the clear song-loving lyre.

But my skin once soft is now
            taken by old age,
my heart is weighed down
            and my knees do not lift,
that once were light to dance as fawns.

I groan for this.  But what can I
do?
A human being without old age is
            not a possibility.

There is the story of Tithonos,
            loved by Dawn with her arms of roses
And she carried him off to the
            ends of the earth

when he was beautiful and young.
Even so he was gripped
by white old age.  He still has his
deathless wife.
                                    Translated by Anne Carson
 

Sappho, Fragment 16

There are those who say
an array of horsemen,
and others of marching men,
and others of ships, is
the most beautiful thing on the dark earth.
But I say it is whatever one loves.

It is very easy
to show this to all:
for Helen,
by far the most beautiful of mortals,
left her husband
and sailed to Troy
giving no thought at all
to her child nor dear parents,
but was led...... [torn papyrus...]
(by her love alone.)

Now, far away, Anactoria
comes to my mind.
For I would rather watch her
moving in her lovely way,
and see her face, flashing radiant,
than all the force of Lydian chariots,
and their infantry in full display of arms.

The poems has a gap here, then lines that run as follows:
“…. Impossible to happen
…. Mankind… but to pray to share
[9 lines missing]
unexpectedly…”
Williamson, 170-71, proposes that Helen and Anaktoria are intricately related in the speaker’s erotic imagination.
….
Translated by Suzy Q. Groden

 

 

Fragment 31
RECORDED BY BUTLER UNIVERSITY CLASSICIST PAULA SAFFIRE

Fainetai moi khno iso qeisin

emmen wnhr, otti enantio toi
isdanei kai plasion adu fwnei-
sa utakouei

kai gelaisas imeroen, to m h man
kardian en sthqesin eptoaisen
w gar e s idw broce, w me fwnai-
s oud en et eikei,

alla kam men glwssa <m > eage, lepton
d autika crw pur upadedromhken
oppatessi d oud en orhmm, epirrom-
beisi d akonai,

kad de m idrw kakceetai, tromo de
paisan agrei, clwrotera de poia
emmu, teqnakhn d oligw pideuh
fainom em aut[a...

alla pan tolmaton, epei kai penhta
..........

 

Here’s Fragment 31 in The Unicode System of Transliteration

fa'inetai' moi kh^nos i?'sos the'oisin
e?'mmen w?'ner o?'stis e?nanti'os toi
i?za'nei kai` plasi'on a?du
     fwneu'sas u?pakou'ei

kai` galai'sas i?mmero'en to` dh` ?ma'n
kardi'an e?n sth'©£esin e?pto'asen,
w?s ga`r eu?'idon broxe'ws se, fw'nas
     ou?de`n e?'t? e?'ikei,

a?lla` ka'm me`n glwjssa ve'age, le'pton
d' au?'tika xrw^j pu^r u?padedro'maken,
o?ppa'tessi d? ou?de`n orhm?,
     e?pirro'mbeisi d? a?'kouai.

a? de' m? i'?drws kakxe'etai, tro'mos de`
pai^san a?'grei xlwrote'ra de` poi'as
e?'mmi, te©£na'khn d? o?ligw ?pideu'vhn
     fai'nomai [a?'lla].

Fragment 31

An equal to the gods, he seems to me,
the man who, with his face toward yours,
sits close and listens to the whispers of
your sweet voice and enticing laugh.
To watch has made my heart a pounding hammer in my breast.
For as I look at you, if only for an instant,
my voice no longer comes to me.
My silent tongue is broken,
and a quick and subtle flame
runs up beneath my skin.
I lose my sense of sight, hear only drumming in my ears.
I drip cold sweat,
and a trembling chases all through me.
I am greener than the pale grass
and it seems to me that I am close to death.

Still, I must endure all this….
Since…. even a pauper…
  (The rest is lost)
                                    Translated by Suzy Q. Groden, with two small additions from the original Greek text: Catullus 51 is an adaptation of this poem, which gives us some further idea of the original.  We have the first part of the poem complete because Longinus quoted it in his famous treatise.)

Sappho, Fragment 58, in its new, complete version

You, children, be zealous for the
            beautiful gifts of the
            violet-lapped Muses
and for the clear song-loving lyre.

But my skin once soft is now
            taken by old age,
my heart is weighed down
            and my knees do not lift,
that once were light to dance as fawns.

I groan for this.  But what can I
do?
A human being without old age is
            not a possibility.

There is the story of Tithonos,
            loved by Dawn with her arms of roses
And she carried him off to the
            ends of the earth

when he was beautiful and young.
Even so he was gripped
by white old age.  He still has his
deathless wife.
                                    Translated by Anne Carson

Fragment 31

An equal to the gods, he seems to me,
the man who, with his face toward yours,
sits close and listens to the whispers of
your sweet voice and enticing laugh.

To watch has made my heart a pounding hammer in my breast.
For as I look at you, if only for an instant,
my voice no longer comes to me.
My silent tongue is broken,

and a quick and subtle flame
runs up beneath my skin.
I lose my sense of sight, hear only
drumming in my ears.

I drip cold sweat,
and a trembling chases all through me.
I am greener than the pale grass
and it seems to me that I am close to death.

Still, I must endure all this….
Since…. even a pauper…
  (The rest is lost)
                                   
Both poems translated by Suzy Q. Groden, with some line alterations and two small additions from the original Greek text: Catullus 51 is an adaptation of this poem, which gives us some further idea of the original)

---

Précis of Bill McDonald’s paper
Homer and Sappho:
The Invention of Love and Subjectivity.

We naturally think that our experience of our own inner lives — complex, layered, nuanced, separate from the world and from others — must be the same for our species across culture and history.  But in fact our experience of ourselves has a definite genealogy, beginning for Anglo-Europeans with the Greeks and continuing through many permutations — Christian thinkers, especially Augustine and Luther; the tumultuous, radically shifting emotions of Shakespeare’s world;  philosophers such as Descartes and Kant who in different ways isolated our minds from the world,  the Romantic poets, Freud, Darwin, and so on. 
Homer and Sappho, taken together, let us mark how our Western subjectivity, and our experience of human love as both painful and unutterably sweet, came to be.  Homer’s epics celebrate love between men, and also — and to a lesser extent — love between men and women, but always by expressing that feeling in terms of bodily actions and a succession of single-minded mental states.  The great poet Sappho, however, radically claimed that her individual voice carried equal value against the massed armies and authority of Homer’s patriarchal warrior culture.  She discovered that privileging the immediate, present-tense, paradoxical experience of love created new psychic space, a deeper, manifold subjectivity built around simultaneously contrary feelings.  She was the first to set down this process in writing, one that altered decisively our Western idea of individuality and internal consciousness, and our experience of romantic love as bitter-sweet.

Biography

Bill McDonald grew up in Glendale, near the Western end of our lovely local mountains.  Both his parents and most of his relatives were teachers, and he was not a rebellious child.  He earned his B.A. at Colgate in philosophy and religion in 1961, then returned to Claremont for his doctoral work in religion and literature.  This interdisciplinary training allowed him to land a job in a Midwest English depart, where he, his wife Dolores and three boys spent four years before returning to California in 1969 to join the U of R’s new, innovative Johnston College.  Thirty-six years later he’s now retired as Emeritus Professor of English and the Hunsaker Professor of Teaching at Redlands.  It’s rare in education to have the chance to build a new college, and the Johnston program remains at the center of his work at the University.  He’s co-authored one book on the College’s history (1989), and co-edited a second one (2003); in 1999 he brought out a book on the German Nobel prize winning novelist Thomas Mann.  His other interests include British and Irish modernism, the history of the novel, literary theory, the ancient Greeks, the ”History of Love,” roses, wine, opera, the Rams (since 1949, the poor man), and staying in touch with many former students from his forty year teaching career.  This June he and Dolores will lead a UofR alumni trip to Greece.  Finally, he once again claims, as always, to be the adopted son of Fritz Bromberger.

---

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