Thirteen
The Justice of Aphrodite in Sappho

Anne Carson

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the earliest recorded critic of Sappho's first poem, praised it for its cohesion and smoothness of construction.^[1] Since that time the poetic quality of the poem has not, I think, been doubted but controversy has arisen about the meaning of the poem. Much of the controversy has focused upon the penultimate stanza, lines 21-24. Recent scholarship provides us with several decades of debate about this stanza— particularly about its tone.^[2] There has been no debate about the actual events to which the stanza alludes. It is assumed that the events are obvious. I think that this assumption is untrustworthy, and that debate about the tone of the stanza could be eliminated, or at least radically simplified, if we were to clarify our notion of what is going on in these verses.

Lines 21-24 present the words of Aphrodite to Sappho. Sappho has suffered an injustice at the hands of her beloved, and has called upon Aphrodite to alleviate the pain of this injustice. The girl with whom Sappho is in love has apparently fled from Sappho's advances, rejected her gifts, and refused her love. Aphrodite therefore makes three promises or predictions to Sappho concerning the fate which lies in store for the unresponsive girl. Aphrodite says: "For in fact if she is fleeing, soon she will pursue. And if she is rejecting gifts, instead she will give them. And if she does not love, soon she will love, even if she does not want to."

Although interpreters have differed about the tone of these words of Aphrodite, they have universally agreed about the situation being described. Aphrodite is promising, it is generally held, an ideal erotic revenge in the form of a mutual reversal of the roles of lover and beloved. She is promising to reverse the situation that exists between Sappho and her beloved, to turn the tables, so that the girl who is now indifferent to Sappho will experience a change of heart and will pursue Sappho with gifts and love. This standard view is recently expressed, for example, by Sir Kenneth Dover in his book Greek Homosexuality . Dover says: "The other person, who now refuses gifts and flees, will not merely yield and 'grant favours' but will pursue Sappho and will herself offer gifts."^[3]

This is a plausible interpretation, but it is not what the Greek words say. Aphrodite's statements contain no direct object. She does not say that the girl will pursue Sappho, she does not say that the girl will give gifts to Sappho, she does not say that the girl will love Sappho. She merely says that the girl will pursue, give gifts, and love.^[4] There is an interpretation of these words available to us which imposes no assumptions on the grammar and which, furthermore, is in better agreement with the traditions of Greek erotic poetry. For it is not the case generally in Greek poetry that scorned lovers pin their hopes on a mutual reversal of erotic roles. In general, forlorn lovers console themselves with a much less fantastic thought: namely, that the unresponsive beloved will one day grow up and become a lover himself, or herself, and in the role of lover will pursue an unresponsive beloved and will come to "know what it feels like" to be rejected. Within the strict conventions of Greek homosexual Eros such a revenge is fairly certain. There are clearly defined ages of life appropriate to the roles of lover and beloved.^[5] In the course of time the beloved will naturally and inevitably become a lover, and will almost

inevitably experience rejection at least once. This idea recurs repeatedly in Greek poetry and surely reflects a common human experience.^[6] A vivid example of it is furnished by a graffito from Stabiae:^[7]

The poet Theognis expresses the same thought. Theognis says to his beloved:

[Full Size]

(1331-34)

Respect me, oh lad, and grant me favor, if ever in your turn you will come to another to crave the gift of the violet-crowned Cyprus-born. May the divinity grant that you meet with the same words that I meet now.

This theme becomes a topos in Hellenistic poetry. We meet it, for instance, in the seventh Idyll of Theocritus, in an epigram attributed to Callimachus and in many poems of the Anthology ,^[8] from which I have drawn the following two examples:

 
(AP 12.12)

Just as he is getting his beard, Lado, the fair youth, cruel to lovers, is in love with a boy. Nemesis is swift.

 
(AP 12.16.3-4)

But give me a taste of a happy kiss. The time will come when you will beg such favor from others.

If this line of interpretation can be applied to Sappho's poem, it considerably deepens the impact of her words, for she is not daydreaming about imaginary reversals but looking forward to a concrete and inevitable revenge. This interpretation also gives more point to the phase , (even against her will) in line 24. This phrase has provoked much comment and some emendation of the manuscripts' reading.^[9] The interpretation which I am proposing confirms the reading of the manuscripts on grounds of sense, for, if the beloved is to become a lover, she will naturally take on a lover's state of mind. To find oneself doing things against one's will is the perennial condition of the lover. It is an axiom of Greek love poetry that Eros is (necessity) for the lover but not for the beloved.^[10] Greek lovers describe their experience as that of being coerced by a force outside oneself. In Archilochus, love is a force which "subdues" the lover (; fr. 196 West [W.]). Ibycus sees himself as an old horse compelled () by Eros to line up for another race with love (PMG 287). Theognis speaks of the "compulsions" imposed on him by a boy's love, using the phrase , "many violent things that go against my will" (1343), and echoes Sappho's with (1342). A typical lover in the Anthology complains:

 
(AP 12.85.4-6)

Violent love caught me and drags me here, here where I saw the boy go through the gate; and I am borne swiftly by my feet moving of their own will.

The beloved, traditionally, does not participate in the emotions that move the lover and hence has no occasion to experience love as a coercion.^[11] Xenophon compares the paidika confronting his lover's desire with a sober man watching a drunk (Symp . 8.21) The beloved is the cool and indifferent fulcrum of a magnetic attraction which draws the lover to itself by force.^[12]

So, if the beloved girl in Sappho's poem is to leave behind the role of beloved and take on, properly and completely, the role of lover, this will necessarily involve a coercion of her will. As lover, she will, by definition, find herself acting .

The interpretation I am proposing also mitigates a certain harshness of transition between the fifth and sixth stanzas, which has been criticized by commentators on the poem.^[13] The fifth stanza ends with an emphatic request from Aphrodite for the identity of the unjust beloved. "Who is it who is wronging you?" Aphrodite asks Sappho. This question is never answered. Instead we pass immediately to the sixth stanza and its series of predictions about the future of the beloved. The connective is which permits a translation "for in fact if she is fleeing, soon she will pursue," and so on.^[14] This transition becomes easier if we understand Aphrodite as putting forward not a specific program of revenge tailored to Sappho, but a general theory of lover's justice. For, in the latter case, Aphrodite's line of thought may be seen to be something like "Who is it who is wronging you? Well, whoever it is, you are absurd to worry about it, for in fact if she is now fleeing, soon she will pursue," and so on. In other words, the ellipse of an answer to Aphrodite's question is deliberate: a deliberate dramatization of the universal law of justice on which lovers can rely as surely as they can rely on the passage of time. Aphrodite's words imply that, from the point of view of justice, it does not matter who the unjust girl is: in time everybody grows too old to be pursued. "Brigitte Bardot will never be sixty," said Brigitte Bardot in an interview with Time magazine in 1974. In making this statement Mlle Bardot was referring not, I think, to the likelihood of a tragedy in her fifty-ninth year but rather to the fact that the persona or role called "Brigitte Bardot" would not be compatible with sixty years of life. Similarly in the Greek context, no one can play the beloved forever. That is part of the justice of Aphrodite.

Aphrodite's tone, then, is one of brisk and reassuring dismissal, as the goddess of love disclaims the possibility that Sappho's beloved, no matter who she is, will remain an object of desire forever. Controversy about the tone of the poem was stirred in 1955 with Sir Denys Page's imputation of irony to this passage.^[15] Aphrodite speaks in tones of amused reproof, Page

felt, smiling at Sappho "as a mother with a troublesome child," while Sappho reports the words and smile of the goddess "not without amusement at her own expense." Page further insisted that in Greek it is impossible (to pursue) an object which does not (to flee).^[16] He therefore took line 21 to predict that the beloved girl would pursue Sappho whereupon Sappho would run away. Since Sappho herself is the narrator of Aphrodite's words, this puts the poet in the position of praying passionately for an object which, at the same time, she declares she will reject. The nimble psychology of such an attitude is, in Page's view, an example of the "remarkable detachment" with which Sappho manages her own emotions, a detachment which dictates the amused irony of Aphrodite's tone and the unserious mood of the whole poem. This interpretation of the poem's tone, and the controversy aroused by it, have been based on a misunderstanding of the events of stanza 6. Once we have adjusted our notion of who is chasing whom in lines 21-24, the possibility of irony becomes irrelevant.

If the interpretation of these verses which I have put forward is tenable, it adds a dimension to Sappho's conception of erotic justice. The dimension is time. Sappho imagines that time itself, given the nature of things, will enact the justice of Aphrodite upon the unjust beloved (quickly). The idea that time is the enactor of justice is not an unfamiliar one in archaic and early classical thought. It is implied in the Aeschylean notion of a family curse, as well as in Hesiod's belief that justice and injustice are rewarded by natural occurrences like plague, famine, or the birth of children. Pindar tells us that (force and arrogance stumble in time; Pyth . 8.15). Solon summons the Earth to witness his justice (in the justice of time; 36.3 w.). Anaximander speaks of the order of the universe in terms of dike which is judged (according to the order of time; DK B 1). Sappho's assumption, that justice is an enactment of time in erotic contexts, fits in with the belief of other archaic poets that justice is in general so enacted. Her language emphasizes, especially by repetition of the adverbs (15, 16, 18) and (21, 23), the rhythm of time which orders erotic experience, creating and recreating the same impasse () and ever proposing the same consolation ().

The question remains, what difference does this interpretation make to the sense of Sappho's poem as a whole? The poem begins and ends with a request that Aphrodite release Sappho from the pain, grief, and anxiety that

she feels as a rejected lover. Aphrodite's words in lines 21-24 presumably address themselves in some way to this request. How do they do so?

Aphrodite is reassuring Sappho that her anguish over this particular girl is almost at an end. It is a commonplace of homosexual relations between men in the Greek tradition that the lover's desire fades sharply as soon as the boy's beard begins to grow. Plutarch cites a dictum of Bion the sophist to the effect that the beard making its appearance on the face of the beloved "liberates the lover from the tyranny of Eros."^[17] It is plausible that there were parallel sentiments among Greek women who engaged in homosexual relationships, and that Sappho could expect to be liberated from her desire for this particular girl as soon as the girl became obviously too old to play the role of beloved. Aphrodite's words in lines 21-24, then, are a promise to Sappho of release from erotic tyranny. Her promise is based on the principle of her justice. If we have interpreted it correctly, this is an eternal principle which can be relied on as confidently as can the fact that time passes and young people grow old and lovers love without return, .

The reinterpretation here proposed for the sixth stanza of Sappho's first poem permits clarification of the text, grammar, syntax, choice of words, tone, and overall sense, as well as integrating the stanza much more satisfactorily with the rest of the poem, and integrating the poem more satisfactorily with the traditions of Greek erotic verse and with archaic currents of thought on the subject of justice. The poem is seen to unfold unironically on one plane of sentiment and expression in a way which vindicates the assessment of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and undercuts modern controversies about irony. Sappho is saying exactly what she means—no less, no more. She is not praying to Aphrodite for a reconciliation with her beloved. She is praying for justice.