I hate and I love. Why? you might ask. I don’t know. But I feel it happening and I hurt. (Catullus 85) The poets of the Greek lyric tradition sometimes conceptualize the erotic condition as starkly as this, but Sappho and her successors in general prefer physiology to concepts. The moment when the soul parts on itself in desire is conceived as a dilemma of body and senses. On Sappho’s tongue, as we have seen, it is a moment bitter and sweet. This ambivalent taste is developed, in later poets, into “bitter honey” (Anth. Pal. 12.81), “sweet wound” (Anth. Pal. 12.126), and “Eros of sweet tears”
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