The text of Sappho exercised readers, scholars, and lovers long before her ‘bright singing columns’, λευκαὶ φθεγγόμεναι σελίδες,¹ appeared in a Hellenistic edition on papyrus sometime in the third century bc.² So vividly were her verses perceived as being orally performed and heard.³ By the Roman period, readers needed a commentary, together with an adequately corrected and annotated copy, in order to make sense of her poems. These contained the written words of the songs she had once sung, as they had been passed down, and corrected back into the dialect once spoken on the island of Lesbos, by some...

Introducing P. Oxy. 2289, Edgar Lobel wrote in 1951 of the then ‘newest’ Sappho papyrus: ‘It cannot be said to add much to our knowledge and in two places it brings new darkness’.² Little could he have foreseen that it would overlap with and identify two previously unknown poems and related fragments of Sappho published last year.³ I begin by summarizing a published report documenting the source of the new fragments and their conservation.⁴ I then show how the content and authorship of the fragments were established, and how analyzing the make-up of the papyrus roll yields a strategy for...

We know about as much, or as little, about Sappho’s own life as we do about other archaic and early classical poets, indeed maybe more if we believe the later ancient gossip about her, but we do not have so clear an idea about the nature of her work: what types of songs the fragments represent, whom she wrote for, on what occasions. Even if these questions cannot be fully answered, at least the newly published fragments that add to our knowledge of Book One of Sappho also add to our ability to understand the internal structures of many of...

At this remove, it strikes us as implausible that the author ofPrincipia Mathematicaalso pennedNotes on Early Church History and the Moral Superiority of the ‘Barbarians’ to the Romans. And how likely is it, we think, that the poet of theIliadwould in addition compose the coarsely comicMargites? We like our authors classifiable, even monotonic. So it seems surprising, if not disturbing, that the Sappho of poems 1, 2, 16, 31, 94 and other expressions of exquisite longing and imagination might also have composed verses of forthright criticism in the style ofiambos, the genre associated...

The discovery of the “newest Sappho” is very exciting, and the attention the poem attracts is more than justified.¹ Not least, it sheds most welcome additional light on the poet’s relationship with her brother (or brothers). Given the general focus of the other chapters in this volume on literary, poetic, performative, and religious aspects, among others, it will perhaps be useful if I discuss some of the social, economic, and political background that underlies the poet’s emotions in this segment of her work. In particular, I shall explore the Greek–Egyptian (or, more broadly, Greek–Near Eastern) connections suggested by...

It is as a performer on thebarbitos—presumably accompanying the singing of her own songs—that Sappho is imagined by late sixth- and early fifth-century Attic vase painters, and was doubtless recognised by many Athenian sympotic users of these vases.¹ Thebarbitos(as was shown by Yatromanolakis) is closely associated with comastic activity, and painters and their patrons seem to imagine Sappho in a context where she can chase (or be chased by, or perhaps both) an attractive young woman,² or can find herself propositioned by an Alcaeus whose bashful down-turned gaze is in some tension with his clearly...

It is a good time to be working on Sappho.¹ Twelve years ago two new poems were published, including the so-called Tithonos poem, in which Sappho (or better: the I-person) complains about the onset of old age.² The number of publications devoted to this poem was starting to dry up, when suddenly a new set of papyri was discovered in 2014. One might be forgiven for suspecting that a creative papyrologist was behind these finds, but it looks like the papyri are genuine and that we owe them to the gods and to the enduring popularity of Sappho’s poetry in...

The longest of the new Sappho fragments, the ‘Brothers Poem’ or, as I prefer to call it, the ‘Charaxos Poem’, engages its twenty-first century audience with a number of questions, to which contributors to this volume propose a variety of solutions.¹ Who is the speaker’s silent interlocutor? Are Charaxos and Larichos historical brothers of Sappho, or ‘types’ in a Lesbian poetic or ritual tradition? How does the first-person speaker relate to each of these male figures, and to the interlocutor? What is meant by the wish at the end of the poem that Larichos ‘lift his head’ and ‘become a...

Not long after its publication, Peter Stothard and Mary Beard commissioned seven translators to produce English translations of the Brothers Song. These were printed side-by-side in theTimes Literary Supplement, and included some surprising differences, anomalies, and nice touches. But none stood out like the following rendition by the poet Anne Carson:¹

There you go windbagging about Charaxos again—will he waft into port?

will he not?—yawn. Let the gods simplify this. Or send me! I’ve got the holy socks and tang to bring Hera over to our side: presto Charaxos, cocktails all round!

Now tip all that other...

In San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor one can enjoy a typical work by Pieter de Hooch, a leading painter of the so-called Delft School and the Dutch Golden Age. The painting, entitledA Woman Nursing an Infant with a Child and a Dog, depicts one of the serene domestic scenes the Delft School is well-known for having repeatedly celebrated, especially around the middle of the seventeenth century (Fig. 10.1). It is a domestic interior, with a woman sitting by a window, where soft, glowing light comes in. Unlike his contemporary Vermeer, whose domestic settings with women sitting...

What is striking to me about the newest Sappho, the Brothers Poem, is its complex combination or interpenetration of two levels or spheres.¹ For here, we find the quotidian—we might even say, a view ‘behind the scenes’—progressively infused with mythic models or resonances. We see something of the same interpenetration of the individual with the divine or with epic or mythic resonances in several of Sappho’s love poems. Thus Sappho fr. 1 combines an individual’s love travails with an epiphany of Aphrodite and distinctive Homeric echoes to expand the poem’s significance, while Sappho fr. 16 weaves together the...

We now have a new poem by Sappho on the subject of her brothers, previously attested only by two fragmentary poems and several testimonia.¹ The testimonia report that Sappho mocked the first brother, Charaxos, a merchant sailor, for spending his earnings to free a courtesan named Rhodopis or Doricha and that she praised the second, Larichos, who poured wine at the town-hall of Mytilene.² The new poem mentions both brothers, but not for the specific activities that the testimonia describe. It therefore gives substance to the idea that there was a series of ‘brothers poems’ involving Charaxos and Larichos.³ It...

Sappho boasts a higher profile in Roman poetry than any other of the Greek canon of lyrists, as we can tell even despite the tiny proportion of her nine Alexandrian books of poetry that survives.¹ This implies high familiarity with her poetry amongst Roman readers, a familiarity that can be illustrated from a striking range of Latin authors: not only Catullus and Horace, but also Plautus,² Valerius Aedituus,³ Statius,⁴ and Juvenal.⁵ Familiarity of this kind did not of course preclude the Sappho with whom Roman writers and readers engaged becoming in important respects a caricature of the author of those...

More than two years have passed since we first heard in January 2014 of the spectacular new discovery of two completely new poems from an Alexandrian edition of Sappho’s famous first book. Mere months after the discovery, Burris, Fish, and Obbink (2014) published four additional papyrus fragments providing new readings at the margin of several Sapphic fragments (5, 9, 16, 17), that—together with other tiny parts—ended up in the Green Collection (gc) in Oklahoma (inv. 105).

These pieces come from the larger cartonnage enveloping the main fragment that gave us these two hitherto unknown texts: the ‘Brothers Song’...

In my contribution on the Brothers Song (chapter 14) I have already dealt with its relation to the second entirely newly discovered text, i.e. the Kypris Song.¹ The new papyrus reproduces the structure of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho’ poetry arranged according to the principle of meter and internally in the alphabetical order. Despite their direct vicinity, both songs, set in Sapphic stanzas, beginning with words featuring the letter π, and assembled in the famous Book One of the Alexandrian scholarly edition, will hardly ever have been performed in sequence. However, it is theoretically possible that at some point in...

Our knowledge of ancient Greece advances in three ways: via the discovery of new documents; via the development of new approaches to ancient materials related to the evolution of technology and experimental sciences; finally, via the evolution of epistemological tools of history and of cultural and social anthropology.¹ The recent discovery of a Sappho papyrus, and especially of the new poem of Sappho’s that has become known as the ‘Kypris Song’, offers papyrologists, historians, and anthropologists this threefold possibility: an unexpected papyrological discovery, which is still being discussed, new technical means of reading the papyrus and working out any overlap...

Since the first notification of a papyrus with two new Sappho poems by Dirk Obbink on the world-wide-web in January 2014, and especially since its publication inZeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphiksome months later together with four other papyri (all poems in ‘Sapphic stanzas’ and belonging to Book 1 of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho), there has already been much debate on the two new incomplete poems. This debate has concentrated on the so-called ‘Brothers Poem’ of which the last five stanzas are almost complete; less has been said on the second poem, the ‘Kypris Poem’, of which the...

It is difficult to fix words or meaning on a text in flux. Yet that is precisely what a translator must do: interpret and then set that interpretation into print. In January 2014, I submitted the page proofs for Andre Lardinois’ and my Sappho book; the very next day, we found out that a new Sappho papyrus had been discovered.¹ Fortunately, Cambridge was willing to ‘stop the press!’. We waited with the same impatience as everyone else until thezpevolume provided the Greek text in April, followed by a flurry of translation. The new Sappho discoveries allow us to...

The opening lines of fr. 17 present a wealth of choices, but nonetheless remain exceptionally difficult to supplement satisfactorily. The following comments are meant to clarify the problems and possibilities. I add an exploratory suggestion for the first two lines.

(1.) In line 1, the sequence …οιϲα[ could be divided …οι σα[ (3rd pers. opt. singular of a thematic verb), …οις α[- (second declension accusative plural or second person optative) or …οισ’ α[ (dative masculine/feminine or—with or without elision—nominative or vocative feminine participle). Meter and spacing make it likely that the preceding traces represent the sequence consonant, vowel,...

Over the last 200 years, scholars of Sappho have concentrated on her audience and consequently her social role: according to various theories she was a teacher, a leader of a female religious group or an initiatory group, a trainer of choruses, a member of a companion group, and so on.¹ Through a comparison between her and Alcaeus, I proposed inPoeti e società(2011) that Sappho was a member of a fairly stable group that consisted of both young and adult ‘friends’.² Although the core of her audience probably consisted of these ‘friends,’³ Sappho’s audience could change when the context...

The Brothers Song and other new papyrus texts, including the first stanza of what is now known as the Kypris Song, reveal some heretofore missing pieces of the poetic personality whom we know as Sappho.¹ In what I have to say here about this personality, I concentrate on the identity of Sappho as sister.

My approach builds on my previous publications about not only Sappho but also Alcaeus.² My general argument in all these publications is that we can see the personalities of Sappho and Alcaeus come to life only if we view them as poetic creations of their songs....