Homer, himself described as the Nightingale of Chios, alludes to the tale of Philomela (Odyssey 19.512–24), and the Greek tragedian Sophocles calls the nightingale the ‘messenger of Zeus’ because it signals the coming of spring (Electra 149). Algernon Charles Swinburne portrays a nightingale as Philomela in a chorus from his tragedy Atalanta in Calydon (1865):
And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.
Hesperus, you are
The most fetching star.
What Dawn flings afield
You bring back together –
Sheep to the fold, goats to the pen,
And the child to his mother again.
Nightingale,
All you sing
Is desire;
You are the crier
Of coming spring.
Here a speaker representing a group en route to a wedding asks an older woman to impart her wisdom. An anticipatory excitement suffuses those epithalamia set before the ceremony itself. One gets the feeling that we should ‘pack the maids off quickly’ only so that there will be more weddings in the near future, and the speaker talks of weddings as if they were an end in themselves. Indeed, for a Greek female, all of her life leads either towards this one event or away from it. Burnett cites this fragment as evidence for the importance of female role-models in Sappho’s group and argues that songs such as this taught the girls of the community ‘just what to do’ (1983, p. 218). The shift in focus to deities at the end of the translated text is curious. All that we can make out from the subsequent text is the elliptical phrase: ‘[no?] road to great Olympus for mortals’. Choral performance is standard for epithalamia and the speaker exhorting the woman to ‘Talk to us for a spell’ is almost certainly a chorus.
Because once on a time you were
Young, sing of what is taking place,
Talk to us for a spell, confer
Your special grace.
For we march to a wedding – yes,
You know it well. So pack the maids off
Quickly, and may the gods possess…
A chorus probably sang ‘Groomsmen, kings with bastions’ during the procession from the father of the bride’s house to the groom’s house. The groomsmen are compared to kings with hilltop fortresses and exhorted to keep the bride impregnable until she arrives safely at her new home.
‘It would take seven fathoms to span’ is the first in a series of bawdy wedding songs which turn on phallic double entendre. On what happened when the bride and groom retired to the wedding chamber, see Introduction, pp. xxix–xxx.
Groomsmen, kings with bastions
In strong positions,
Keep this bride
Well fortified.
It would take seven fathoms to span
The feet of the doorkeeper (the best man);
His sandals are five cows’ worth of leather
And ten shoemakers stitched them together.
In ‘What do you resemble, dear husband-to-be?’ the answer (a sapling) suggests both the youth of the groom and the ‘family tree’ that will grow from him. Genital joking is not far beneath the surface of this fragment as well.
Sappho presents us with a paradox at the end of ‘Carpenters, raise the rafter-beam’ – the groom is bigger than a big man. The audience is left to riddle out the hyberbole, and the answer is inevitably that he has an erection which extends so far above his head that the roof must be raised. Compare the anonymous phallic song: ‘Get up and give the god some room to grow, for the god – upright, in full throb – longs to pass through our midst’ (Denys Page, Poetae Melici Graeci (1962), 851a). Refrains such as ‘For Hymen’s wedding hymn’ are common in epithalamia and appear in a number of the wedding poems of Theocritus and Catullus (see ‘May you bed down’ and ‘Hesperus, you are’).
‘What do you resemble, dear husband-to-be?’
‘You resemble a supple seedling, a green tree.’
Carpenters, raise the rafter-beam
(For Hymen’s wedding hymn)
A little higher to make room
(For Hymen’s wedding hymn)
Because here comes the groom –
An Ares more imposing than
A giant, a terribly big man.
For ‘Blest bridegroom, this day of matrimony’ I have done my best to preserve the ceremonial effects of rhythm, repetition and alliteration. After the ellipsis the rapid accumulation of the bride’s attractions in the Greek equivalent of a run-on sentence achieves an effect similar to the list of symptoms in ‘That fellow strikes me as god’s double’. Eros, however, ceases to be destructive in a matrimonial context but is ‘enlisted in the service of the social institutions that make for continuity and stability’ (Segal 1996, p. 71). Here we find an intimate and even eroticizing description of the bride in a public wedding performance. The ending of this fragment may be a makarismos. In the last line we learn that Aphrodite has graced the bride with immortal beauty, just as goddesses enhance the appearance of certain heroes in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
‘The ambrosial mixture’ presents an immortal wedding scene, perhaps the marriage of Peleus and Thetis (the parents of the hero Achilles). This fragment is exceptional in that no females are mentioned and we are left with an impression of male solidarity. The customary cup-bearers for the gods are Hebe (the daughter of Zeus and Hera) and Ganymede (a Trojan prince carried off to Olympus by Zeus). Here, as in a song by Sappho’s contemporary Alcaeus, Hermes is serving as cup-bearer. There is a certain irony in the drink offerings which the wedding guests pour on to the ground – since at least some of them are gods, they are pouring offerings to themselves.
Blest bridegroom, this day of matrimony,
Just as you wished it, has come true:
The bride is whom you wished for…
‘You
Move gracefully; your eyes are honey;
Charm was showered on your radiant face –
The ambrosial mixture
Ready in the mixing bowl,
Hermes went round with a pitcher
And served the gods. When all
Had tipped their goblets and poured offerings,
They prayed that the groom suffer only the good things.
In ‘Because there is no other bride than she’ the speaker acts as salesperson for a bride who is still a pais (child). The proper age for marriage is a recurring theme in Greek literature. The poet Hesiod (c. 700 BCE) gives this advice in Works and Days: ‘Make sure your bride has been grown up for four years, and marry her in the fifth. And be sure to marry a virgin, so that you can school her in useful habits’ (698–9).
Imagery of the moon surrounded by star clusters has a long history in Western literature, and this note will only cover the beginning of it. Homer compares the Trojan watchfires around Hector to stars around a moon: ‘The stars around the shining moon are pre-eminently bright’ (Iliad 8.555). Eustathius of Thessalonica (1110–98 CE) in his commentary on the Iliad notes that ‘in the expression “around the shining moon” one should not understand the light of the full moon; for then the stars are dim because they are outshone’. The image of a full moon eclipsing surrounding stars is not attested before Sappho. Bacchylides (c. 507 – c. 450 BCE) adapts it for an ode in honour of a victor in the pentathlon (consisting of discus, javelin, long jump, foot race and wrestling events): ‘He shined among his fellow pentathletes / as the beautiful moon on a mid-month night / outshines the light of stars’ (9.27–8). If this fragment of Sappho were, in fact, part of an epithalamium, a solo singer or chorus of maidens would here be praising the bride in much the same way.
‘And may the maidens all night long’ was probably sung outside the wedding chamber. A chorus of bridesmaids is exhorting one of the groomsmen to invite his friends to the groom’s house to
keep watch with them before the door. The bride has a violet bosom like the Muses in ‘Girls, chase the violet-bosomed Muses’ bright’. ‘The bird that intones / Piercing moans’ is the nightingale (see ‘Nightingale’) but also evokes the bride on the wedding night.
Because there is no other girl than she,
Bridegroom – a child still, of such quality.
Star clusters near the fair moon dim
Their shapely shimmering whenever
She rises, lucent to the brim
And flowing over.
And may the maidens all night long
Celebrate your shared love in song
And the bride’s bosom,
A violet-blossom.
Get up, now! Rouse that gang of fellows –
Your boys – and we shall sleep as well as
The bird that intones
Piercing moans.
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.’ Whereas each phrase or line on its own might sound banal, what is important in gnomic poetry is the combination. The poet displays his or her art in the joining of them.
In addition to implying that beauty is more than skin deep, ‘The gorgeous man presents a gorgeous view’ suggests a sublimation of mere visual appeal, inasmuch as goodness has its beauty as well. This fragment is to be compared with ‘whatever a person / Most lusts after’ in ‘Some call ships, infantry or horsemen’. An anonymous ancient commentator preserves ‘Wealth without real worthiness’ in his explication of a gnomē in Pindar’s Second Olympian Ode: ‘Wealth decorated with virtues brings all kinds of opportunities’ (96–7).
In Figures of Speech the Greek grammarian Tryphon (late first century BCE) cites ‘Neither the honey nor the bee’ as an example of a proverb, and the anthologist Diogenian (early second century CE) explains in his work on Proverbs that it ‘is used of those who are unwilling to take the good along with the bad’. The original is mēte moi meli mēte melissa. I was unable to preserve its striking alliteration.
The gorgeous man presents a gorgeous view;
The good man will in time be gorgeous, too.
Wealth without real worthiness
Is no good for the neighbourhood;
But their proper mixture is
The summit of beatitude.
Neither the honey nor the bee
For me…
These three fragments consist of dilemmas and alternatives. ‘I want to tell you something but good taste’ was composed in the Alcaic stanza, named after Sappho’s contemporary who frequently employed it. Aristotle informs us that it is poetic ‘correspondence’, the first line and a half composed by Alcaeus and the rest by Sappho. Sappho uses the Alcaic stanza because it is the preferred metre of her correspondent and the one in which the original comment was written. Thus, Alcaeus’ poem prompted a response much as Christopher Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ did Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’. The Greek aidōs, which I have translated as ‘good taste’, ‘bears a certain surface resemblance to what we call “respect”, but is distinguished from it by the fact that its implications are essentially negative, so that it normally restrains action rather than requiring it’ (Douglas Olson, Blood and Iron: Stories and Storytelling in Homer’s Odyssey (1995), p. 17). Aristotle cites this fragment in support of his claim that ‘men are ashamed to speak of, do and intend shameful things’ (Rhetoric 1367a).
The Greek grammarian Apollonius Dyscolus (fl. second century CE) cites ‘Either I have slipped out of your head’ in a treatise on Pronouns because it contains a dialectical variant of the first-person singular. The fragment captures the fatalistic mindset of the lover. Certain that she has been scorned, the lover only wonders why.
The Stoic philosopher Chrysippus of Soli (c. 280–207 BCE) preserves ‘I don’t know what the right course is’ in a treatise On Negatives.
‘I want to tell you something but good taste
Restrains me.’
‘If you wanted to express
Some noble or gorgeous thought – that is, unless
Your tongue were keen to utter in hot haste
Some shameful slur, “good taste” would not have dressed
Your face in red, no, you would have professed
Whatever you would say upfront and straightaway.’
Either I have slipped out of your head
Or you adore some fellow more, instead.
I don’t know what the right course is;
Twofold are my purposes.
‘I declare’ appears near the end of a Discourse wrongly ascribed to the Greek orator, writer and historian Dio Chrysostum (c. 40 – c. 120 CE). Upset that a statue of him has been taken down, the speaker (who has yet to be identified with any certainty) learnedly lectures the Corinthians on immortality through art. 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.
Index of First Lines
LP Edgar Lobel and Denys Page (eds.), Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (1955).
V Eva-Maria Voigt (ed.), Sappho et Alcaeus: Fragmenta (1971).
W Martin West, ‘A New Sappho Poem’, Times Literary Supplement, no. 5334 (24 June 2005), p. 8.
Source Page
A full moon shone
154V 11
A handkerchief
119V 53
A hillside hyacinth shepherds treaded flat
105bV 67
A ripe red apple grows, the highest of them all
105aV 67
Abanthis, please pick up your lyre
22V 43
And may the maidens all night long
30V 79
And this next charming ditty I
160V 41
Artemis made the pledge no god can break
44AaV 65
As for you girls, the gorgeous ones
41V 35
As you are dear to me, go claim a younger
121V 43
Atthis, you looked at what I was
131LP 39
Because
26V 41
Because once on a time you were
27V 71
Because there is no other girl than she
113V 79
Blest bridegroom, this day of matrimony
112LP 77
But a strange longing to pass on
95LP 21
But I am hardly some backbiter bent
120V 27
But I love extravagance
58V 33
But when you lie dead
55V 17
By giving me creations of their own
32V 41
Carpenters, raise the rafter-beam
111V 75
Cold grew
42V 27
Come close, you precious
128V 15
Either I have slipped out of your head
129a and bV 85
Girls, chase the violet-breasted Muses’ bright
W 45
God-crafted product of the tortoise shell
118V 17
Groomsmen, kings with bastions
161V 73
He is unrivalled, like a Lesbian
106V 17
Here is the reason: it is wrong
150V 15
Hesperus, you are
104a and bV 69
I declare
147V 87
I do not have an
98bV 49
I d
on’t know what the right course is
51V 85
I have a daughter who reminds me of
132V 49
I loved you once, years ago, Atthis
49V 39
I truly do believe no maiden that will live
56V 33
I want to tell you something but good taste
137V 85
Idaos, then, the panting emissary
44V 57
‘In all honesty, I want to die’
94LP 25
It would take seven fathoms to span
110V 73
Kypris, may Dorchia discover
15V 47
Kytherea, precious
140V 11
Leave Crete and sweep to this blest temple
2LP 5
Like a gale smiting an oak
47V 21
Maidenhead, maidenhead, where have you gone?
114V 67
May gales and anguish sweep elsewhere
37V 27
May you bed down
126V 35
Mnasis sent you from Phocaia