Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments of Sappho

by Sappho

We find the only occurrence of kardia (‘heart’) and glōssa (‘tongue’) in Sappho here as part of a similarly physical description.

In Sappho we often find erotic emotion and experience expressed in stylized and ritualized ways.

The Sapphic persona thrives on activity and passion. Deprived of these things, she lapses into a languorous state.

Her Girls and Family

In the second complete stanza Sappho appropriates ‘rosy-fingered’, a famous Homeric epithet of the goddess Dawn, for an elaborate lunar simile.

In Homer’s Iliad, timē is talked about as if it were a physical object. Agamemnon, for example, takes timē away from Achilles when he appropriates the concubine Briseïs in Book 1 of the Iliad.

The focus is on Sappho herself. She lists the symptoms of her ageing as she does those of desire in ‘That fellow strikes me as god’s double’.

The old and withered Tithonous recounts his sad decay in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s dramatic monologue Tithonus (1860), 15–23; in this version, however, it is Dawn herself, rather than Zeus, who gives her lover eternal life: I asked thee, ‘Give me immortality.’ Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile, Like wealthy men who care not how they give. But thy strong Hours indignant worked their wills, And beat me down and marred and wasted me, And though they could not end me, left me maimed To dwell in presence of immortal youth, Immortal age beside immortal youth, And all I was, in ashes. Girls, chase the violet-bosomed Muses’ bright Gifts and the plangent lyre, lover of hymns: Stiffness has seized on these once supple limbs, And black braids with the passing years turned white. Age weighs heavily on me, and the knees Buckle that long ago, like fawns, pranced nimbly. I groan much but to what end? Humans simply Cannot be ageless like divinities. They say that rosy-forearmed Dawn, when stung With love, swept a sweet youth to the earth’s rim – Tithonous. Even there age withered him, Bound still to a wife forever young.

Troy

Mythic narratives are rare in Sappho, with the exception of events from the Trojan saga.

Sappho here uses a distinctly Homeric ambience, that is – an objective viewpoint and a dactylic metre suggestive of the metre of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

Eros is almost always an irrational, destructive force, and the meaning of the verb is much closer to ‘lust after’ than ‘feel love for’.

Maidens and Marriages

The Wisdom of Sappho

Aristotle defines a gnomē as ‘a statement not about particular things, such as what sort of man Iphicrates is, but about generalities, and not about all things, such as that straight is the opposite of crooked, but about kinds of actions and whether they should be taken or avoided’ (Rhetoric 1394a21–6). In short, it offers general advice much like a proverb. Two of the most famous gnomai were written in the entry to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: ‘Nothing in excess’ and ‘Know thyself.’

In Sappho’s case at least, the claim has turned out to be true. I declare That later on, Even in an age unlike our own, Someone will remember who we are.