PART I
LANGUAGE AND LITERARY CONTEXT

One
Sappho's Amatory Language

Giuliana Lanata Translated by William Robins

At times, Sapphic poetry—most particularly the amatory lyric of Sappho— has been injured by its own extensive success. It has come about, in other words, that, confronted by such an imposing phenomenon, ancient as well as modern criticism has abdicated its proper nature as an interpreter in order to surrender itself to the "ardent" and "ineffable" tones of dithyrambic exaltation, of mawkish sentimentality, of decadent sensiblerie . A patient (and petulant) excerptor of the vast specialist literature on the topic could compile without too much difficulty a small anthology of bad taste within the field of so-called imitative criticism. Even a critic as sober, moderate, and cautious as D.L. Page let himself take part at one point, introducing in two pages of his Sappho and Alcaeus a description of the "society" of Lesbos fit for the pen of J.A. Symonds, which seems directed less by any kind of critical necessity than by the "Mediterranean" myths of a nineteenth-century Englishman: "exquisite gardens, where the rose and hyacinth spread perfume; pine-tree-shadowed coves, when they might bathe in the calm of a tideless sea."' Welcome, then, are the calls for methodical sobriety put forward by Max Treu at the beginning of the brief interpretive essay included in his edition of Sappho,^[2] and according to which Page's book is, in fact, to such a great degree informed.

From another angle, due to an incomprehension already current in antiquity about the historicosocial context within which to place Sappho's poetry for a correct evaluation of its contents, criticism took the road of

a more or less sensitive or fervent or scandalized denunciation, or more often a hazy and evasive psychologism of a kind that strove (and strives, for this is not a closed chapter) to illustrate "amorous fullness," to reconstruct the interior history of a "beautiful Soul." In this choir there is no lack of voices, animated by chivalric indignation, that in response to any "calumny" point to the "skilled housewife"^[3] in Sappho, the "madame landlady" for some pensioned Edwardian, a second Madame de Maintenon, the "lady professor" of literature and belles-artes. Nor does it seem that any better service has been rendered to the interpretation of Sappho's poetry by those modern critics who have made a great display of the latest Freudianisms.

Thus whoever today would reconsider in its complexity what is usually improperly called Sapphofrage is tempted to repeat, albeit with amused irony and with different motivation, some words that Gunther Zuntz wrote in his tastefully disdainful Latin: "Philologorum in mores inquisituro luculentam sane hae interpretandi rationes praebent materiam: ad Sappho nihil pertinet."^[4] If, among other things, it is true that "the eternal feminine" is exalted more willingly in criticism written, for example, in Italian, in criticism written in German hints of südliche Glut (southern passion) frequently appear.

Naturally, there have been many espousals of positions that were supposed to "de-dramatize" the question and bring it back to more appropriate terms. So, for example, Erich Bethe in an article that remains fundamental^[5] (but also Beloch, DeSanctis, and Marrou, to mention some names) has clarified very lucidly the place that homosexual love occupied in archaic Greek society—in Sparta as well as in Chalcis, in Lesbos as well as in Crete, within both male and female communities or associations—where it constituted one of the bonds and at the same time established itself as an important pedagogic instrument. Typical of this historical moment in Greek civilization is the tendency to consider the learning process as the work of a careful and overshadowing vigilance exercised on the by the , who for his own sake is pledged to make himself worthy of his role as a guide. However, the idealization of this picture as wrought by the idyllic or "prude" moralism of various later sources should not blind our eyes to the reality of the amorous relations to which archaic lyric attests with complete naturalness.

As far as regards Sappho in particular, the question has been restudied recently by Reinhold Merkelbach, who in a long article, "Sappho und ihr Kreis," reexamined the internal and external evidence that enable a reconstruction, around the poetess, of a Mädchenbund , a circle held together by communal life and by sacral bonds, within which they could (no, indeed, they had

to) establish those particular erotic tensions that the poetry of Sappho reveals. Unfortunately, behind this Mädchenbund the still-unexorcised specter of the Mädchenpensionat rises again in some way, even if cum grano salis , and Merkelbach avoids a direct engagement through comparisons with the nature of Sapphic eros, to which he quickly nods in a note that proves sybilline to me.^[6]

On the other hand it is to say the least curiously indiscrete, and not generally justified by language parallel to ephebic poetry, for Page to presume to find in the fragments of Sappho any "evidence for practice" beyond evidence "for inclination" for homosexual love.^[7] For if, for example, Solon or Anacreon can be very explicit,^[8] yet in the ephebic collection that closes the compilation of Theognis (and where Sapphic imitation is widely evident, as I will discuss more thoroughly below) one finds rather rare "evidence for practice" in the sense intended by Page. Moreover, and just to ironize a little in such a "compromising" situation, Sappho certainly did not mean to provide a kind of sociological documentation on the sentimental and sexual initiation of the girls on Lesbos in the manner of Margaret Mead, or like that furnished so prolixly by Mary McCarthy concerning the gifts at Vassar College.

And, it might be said in parentheses, one needs to proceed cautiously here as in any analogous case of using fragments to reconstruct a "biography" that might otherwise run the risk of being "romanticized." For example, in fragment 121^[9] it is certain, it seems to me, that the lady speaking in the first person, rejecting love or marriage with a younger man, is not Sappho. K.J. Dover has recently urged a salutary caution in interpreting the fragments of archaic lyric where the poet seems to speak in propria persona , citing rather conveniently fragment 10.1 of Alcaeus, , where the feminine form shows that the person who speaks is not Alcaeus.^[10] The problem of the right age for marriage appears in a typical Hesiodic sequence (Op . 695 ff.) and recurs with frequency in Greek poetry, as is shown by, among others, the of Stobaeus who cites the Sapphic fragment (4.22.5; IV pp. 542 ff. Hense). Likewise in the case of Sappho, who gives a joking variation of it in her famous fragment 105, one ought to think rather of an epithalamic motif.

I therefore would not like to investigate here the "amorous life" of Sappho or the "life" of the thiasos , but would rather like to attempt a reconstruction,

which will be based above all on data provided by the language (given that others have already clarified the historicosocial assumptions) of the environment and conditions in which a very specific poetic experience, though by no means unique in the archaic Greek world, matured. The problem of the name with which to define the Sapphic circle does not seem truly essential. It could be called , it could perhaps be called ; recurs three times in Sappho (frs. 126, 142, 169), and there is also the masculine in the fragment on the marriage of Hector and Andromache (44.5) with which she to a certain degree can make available some "concrete experience"^[11] of her own time even in the description of a mythic past. Fragment 160, "I shall now sing for my this beautiful song of joy"^[12] — —is a precious testimony of the precise audience to whom Sapphic poetry was originally addressed. Nor do I know if it is simply a coincidence that the feminine , attested only once in Greek, appears in Corinna,^[13] a woman poet in whom the influence of Sappho is evident in various aspects.

In another Sapphic fragment (150) the expression (o ) occurs: "It is not right that there should be a lament in a house of Our source, Maximus of Tyre, affirms that Sappho here speaks to her daughter Cleis, so there would be no reason to think of other "boarders" of the . But, by speaking of herself as , I do not think Sappho is using simply some generic term for designating herself as a "poetess,"^[14] but shows herself belonging within a cultic association whose members count among their bonds that of the cult of the Muse; occurs with precise cultic significance in an epigraphic document described by Franz Poland.^[15] But the divinity that appears with typical prominence in the fragments of Sappho is, as is well known, Aphrodite, who was also, for example, worshiped at Athens and at Ephesus with the appellation ; for and , or as Athenaeus attests, of noble lineage, were joined together in her name.^[16] If the constant copresence in Sappho's poetry of

the Charites and the Muses (whose ties with Aphrodite are attested ever since the Homeric hymn to Apollo)^[17] shows that Sapphic eroticism, however intense and "ineluctable,"^[18] is nevertheless free from the mysterious and relentless frenzy that, for example, Eros connotes in the verses of Ibycus,^[19] and if in ode 1 Aphrodite appears in order to temper rather than to stir up the "aches of the heart," then the choice of Aphrodite as the divinity typically appropriate and almost unique among the Sapphic circle could not have been fortuitous. Page's anxiousness to deny that Sappho might have had an official role as a "priestess"^[20] hinders him from then giving a positive evaluation of the place occupied by this divinity in her poetry.

Now, except for a fragment where she is invoked as goddess of the sea (fr. 5), Aphrodite is, in Sappho's poetry as in Homer or in the Hymns , the goddess who subdues with the torment and passion of love.^[21] And if ode 1 could make us think of a particular and personal type of Sapphic religion, the fragment from the Florentine ostracon (2) brings us back to a precise cultic environment, as is guaranteed by phrases such as the of lines 1-2, and so also to a precise occasion or circumstance in which Sappho and the of her circle celebrated the divinity to whom their existence was most closely linked, in the space sacred to her and in the fullness of her attributes.^[22]

Merkelbach has underlined some coincidences, in elements improperly called "descriptive," between the fragment from the ostracon and fragment 5 of Ibycus, where the description of an "untouched garden," where Cidonian apples blossom irrigated by flowing waters, serves as a backdrop to the frenzy of Eros.^[23] Yet rather than to the "gardens of the nymphs" of which Merkelbach thinks, I believe that fragment 2 of Sappho refers

to a clearly Aphrodisian environment, where elements that in other contexts and other periods would be "landscapist" have a cultic meaning that has already been emphasized by Bruno Gentili with particular reference to the amatory language in Anacreon's poetry and archaic lyric, where the mention of apples or roses always alludes to the presence or power of Aphrodite.^[24]

Besides fragments 4 and 5 K of the Cypria , already cited by Gentili, where the "spring flowers"—crocuses hyacinths violets roses narcissi lilies— embellish the clothes and form the crowns that adorn the and her , Nymphs and Charites, I would like to recall the passage of the ^[25] where, to conceal the embrace of Hera and Zeus, the earth miraculously makes fresh grass and flowers of lotus and crocus and hyacinth shoot up under them. And also in Hesiod's Theogony (1. 279), Poseidon possesses one of the Hesperides "on a soft field and in the middle of spring flowers," , a passage to which lines 9-10 in fragment 2 of Sappho bear comparison: "there a field where the horses graze blossoms with spring flowers," .^[26] That, besides the apples and roses of line 6, the "field where the horses graze," , ought also to be linked to a sacral Aphrodisian environment, and gains confirmation not only from the image of the "horses of Aphrodite" of the girls ready for love in a new fragment of Anacreon,^[27] but also from a quatrain of the ephebic collection of Theognis (ll. 124.ff.), where the commentators generally refer to Anacreon, although here, as is often the case, the most notable similarities are with Sappho:

[Full Size]

O youth, like a horse, since you are sated with fodder, turn again to my stables, desiring a good rider and a beautiful field and a fresh spring and shady woods.

Here, besides the coincidences of (Sappho 2.5) and (Sappho 2.7), we can observe

 . (Sappho 2.9). The   will also be noted, which corresponds to the typical   with which Sappho indicates with a nearly formulaic insistence the recurrence of a well-known situation. And I would also like to note that a word so rarely attested in Greek outside of medical literature as  , which is in line of the ostracon fragment to indicate the drowsiness that falls from the rustling leaves, appears significantly in the above-cited section of the   (1. 359)^[28] to indicate the drowsiness that welcomes Zeus after his embrace with Hera.

Fragment 2, where all the elements allow us to reconstruct a precise sacral environment where everything defines Aphrodite as the goddess who bestows love (and already Page, referring to fr. 96.26ff., , underlined the recurrence and typicality of the situations that prescribe poems of this kind in the Sapphic environment),^[29] can open our understanding for all those fragments, which it is not necessary to cite here in their entirety, where Sappho represents herself and the gifts of her circle who adorn themselves and enjoy the flowers sacred to the goddess. In particular in line 11 of fragment 94, to which I will turn again later, Sappho recalls for a girl who is leaving part of the of their past life, the crowns of violets and roses, the garlands of flowers, and immediately afterward also the "satisfaction of love's longing" (ll. 21-23); and here Page has clearly shown that the of line 23 can mean nothing but "you freed yourself from your desire by giving it satisfaction," as the analogy with the Homeric reveals.^[30] That in Sappho takes on a specifically erotic meaning is made clear above all from fragments 48.2 and 102.2, where it is associated with the typical (I am overcome). So also fragment 126, "sleeping (you would sleep?) on the breast of a tender friend," , seems able to be interpreted in the sense of a tender amorous yielding, at least if, in our ignorance of the context (which in the fact of the matter renders every interpretation conjectural), some light is shed for us by its repetition by Theocritus in the Epithalamium of Helen , so rich in Sapphic reminiscences: "Sleep breathing love and passion, one on the chest of the other," (ll. 54-55).^[31]

Thus, the Sappho addresses herself above all to the united to her both by the ties of the cult of Aphrodite and also sometimes

by ties of a love that cannot in any way be identified with a "maternal tenderness,"^[32] and who were part of the very life of the . And once these amorous ties, like those of the cult, became an object of poetry, this ought to have provided an adequate expressive instrument, a language that could respond to the needs of an experience of a new and particular situation. Merkelbach suggests a comparison between the love poetry of Sappho and troubadour or stilnuovo lyric:^[33] one might be confronted here with an analogous escape into an "impossible love" in environments where, at moments historically, culturally, and socially entirely different, amorous passion did not find satisfying the answer to be had in a relation with a beloved man or beloved woman destined to then become spouse and companion for life. Apart from all the necessary cautions in comparing completely different cultural situations, apart from the "sublimation" of Sapphic eroticism, which Merkelbach starts to introduce in this way but which I cannot share, I believe that this suggestion might be partly used in a different sense. Just as troubadour and stilnuovo lyric develop particular languages typical of these schools and constituting one of the elements distinguishing them from other "styles" of amorous lyric, so in Sapphic lyric one can isolate the elements of a series of amatory representations articulated in a language in which Homeric, Hesiodic, and Archilochean precedents are yoked together to characterize a new situation. In this situation they acquire a new resonance by the unusual frequency with which they are employed to function as thematic words, by the new meanings with which they are invested, and also by the copresence of newer terms dictated by the needs of a changed situation.

A language of this kind naturally finds significant correspondences in Anacreon and in the ephebic lyric of Pindar and Theognis, which accordingly ensure which meanings are to be read in the amorous lyric of Sappho-On the other hand, the "imitations" and later applications of this language, for example by Alexandrian poets, should be examined with greater caution, because in the literary game of allusion, embedding, and citation a twist away from the meaning of the original might always be at work. An analysis of this language should be linked both to the environmental considerations mentioned above and also to a series of researches such as those of Turyn, Treu, Kazik-Zawadzka, and Marzullo, which, even in the diversity of methodological bases and of results, have contributed to defining the historical position of Aeolic poetry, and of Sapphic poetry in particular, in its relations to the epic tradition.^[34]

It is still necessary to warn, in relation to our specific problem, that vague appeals to "universal laws of the human heart," as well as gleanings of loci similes such as those contained in the Studia Sapphica of Turyn, which illustrate the persistence of several topoi up to late Latinity with parallels in the Romance literatures, are insufficient for the aims of a precise evaluation of the amatory lyric of Sappho. Just to present a macroscopic example, one might try to pair the of Sappho's fragment 31.7-8 with the "ogne lingua deven tremando muta" (every tongue becomes mute in trembling) of the Vita Nova . It will be seen that what might perhaps be thought of as a mere physiological response valid in every case, or in the case of every "sensitive soul," in Dante expresses his reverential inhibition before the terrestrial image of Paradise, while in Sappho it is integrated into a very different framework of "signs" as will be analyzed below.

Likewise, nothing is more frequent in amatory lyric than the topos of "love and death," and even in Sappho it recurs with particular insistence. Yet if the "it seems to me I am almost dead," , of the ode handed down by Longinus (fr. 31.15-16) used to appear as the unrepeatable impulse of desperation of a "solitary soul," the Berlin papyrus has since reinstituted two "variations" on the same theme: in fragment 94.1, "truly I wish I were dead," , and in fragment 95.11-13, "a longing to die holds me, and to see the dewy banks of Acheron flowering with lotus," . But the characteristic expressive "conventionality" with which the motif is handled by Sappho reveals that the relative fixity of its formulation expresses a moment typical of the Sapphic experience of eros, destined to repeat itself more times in analogous situations: to be precise, the (helplessness; fr. 130) when faced with the necessity of separation, institutionally germane to the Sapphic circle, or when faced with the impossibility of possession, which thus suggests as a solution the desire for death.^[35] The motif is taken up again, as is well known, by Anacreon, who, perhaps because he uses it outside of a situation or context immediately clear to his listeners, introduces with a clarification that Sappho does not find necessary: "Might I die, for I can find no other release from these sufferings," (fr. 411a P. = 29 Gent.). Similarly, the young gift of the new parthenium of Alcman (3 P.), which even more clearly than the previous example attests to an interlacing of impassioned amorous relations among the instigators,

is gazed at "more consumingly than sleep or than death," (ll. 61-62).^[36]

As is the case with a large part or with all the rest of erotic Greek poetry, the amatory language of Sappho has in common with the Homeric-Hesiodic tradition some terms such as , and , or for example an adjective such as (limb-relaxing) to characterize Eros (an epithet attested in this sense beginning with Hes. Theog . 121, 911). These terms were so diffuse that it is superfluous to cite parallel passages; it is more interesting to try to note how they recur with typical frequency in texts that mention analogous situations to those described in Sappho's poetry as in the already-cited parthenium 3 E of Alcman (ll. 61-62): "she gazes at me with passion that loosens my limbs," ^[37], and in the Chalcidian popular song (fr. 873 P.), where love for the who lack neither nobility of origin nor the favor of the Charites^[38] is likewise called . One could also note, with all the caution demanded by the fragmentary state of the testimonies, that in the Sapphic lexicon (in which, to the degree it is known to us, the greater part of the terms are attested to only once) words such as recur with a significant frequency,^[39] equal only to the frequency of appearance of terms that connote other characteristic aspects of Sapphic sensuality such as , and, naturally, . And it might perhaps be a coincidence ascribable to the tastes and the particular criteria of choice of the later sources, but Sapphic neoformations such as ^[40] (weaver of wiles) to denote Aphrodite, or

(bittersweet; fr. 130.2),^[41] (paingiver; fr. 172), or (weaver of tales; fr. 188) to connote Eros, are also always dictated by this same need to express a particular experience without precise literary precedents.

Moreover, according to the historical process, already amply illustrated by others, that enables words from epic language to assume meanings partly or entirely new in the age of lyric, some terms from epic assume in Sappho a new amatory meaning. , which in Homer for example can be said of the wind that shakes or stirs the trees, of the pestering that puts heifers to flight, and so on, appears in Sappho 130.1 in its first attestation for the love that "stirs, shakes, upsets the soul"; the meaning recurs in Pindar (Pyth . 4.218-19), where the (desired Hellas), and so the passion for Jason, upsets () Medea "burned in the heart," , and in the Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes (l. 954),^[42] where a young lady, vainly awaiting a man, softly sings a love song in which she invokes her beloved to spend the night with her, "for a love upsets me with trembling," K.J. Dover thinks the disposition of this Aristophanic love song, "" (ll. 952, 960), to be typical of popular song,^[43] but it is also clear that in this case the popular song was reelaborated by Aristophanes with an intent of literary parody (, ll. 882-83; "Muses, come here to me, find an Ionian ditty"). This is shown by the interlacing of reminiscences and citations: line 956, "an extraordinary passion is (lies) in me," , is to be compared with Archilochus, fragment 104 D.: "he lay miserable from the passion," . And the response of the youth, lines 973-74: "Oh my care, covered with gold, offspring of the Cyprian, bee of the Muse, raised by the Charites," , is to be compared, as van Leeuwen has already done, with fragment 7 E of Ibycus: "O Euryalus, offspring of the blue-eyed Graces, care of the [8] of the beautiful locks, the Cyprian and Peitho with the soft gaze raised you among flowers of roses," . And if line 954 cited above truly contains, as I believe, a Sapphic reminiscence, this would make it equally believable that also in lines 877 ff. and 911 ff. Aristophanes freely echoes the famous (the moon has

set; 94 D.), as well as assisting the argument of the supporters of the infinitely contested authenticity of the fragment.^[44]

A significant convergence of terms and expressive modules that characterize in no uncertain way the passion of unreciprocated love is naturally found again in the famous ode cited in On the Sublime (31), although I would like to say that, as far as concerns the overall interpretation of this ode, I cannot persuade myself that we are in fact dealing with an epithalamium, even of some less traditional type. For it seems to me that at line 16 the refrain (it seems to me), now fortunately restored by the new Florentine fragment,^[45] excludes for the of the first verse any such meaning as "appear, present oneself as" ("in die Erscheinung treten") that would entail interpreting the arrangement of the ode as a variation of the motif of the makarismos of the spouse, according to the interpretation maintained by Bruno Snell especially.^[46]

The nature of the eros described by Sappho in this fragment should not be identified simply on the basis of the concretely physical or physiological aspect of the well-known sequence of the "signs" of amorous turmoil. The representation of an emotional state or of a cognitive act by means of its ensuing eruption in a concrete physical attitude is normal enough for the Greeks of the archaic age;^[47] and for this reason, as Hermann Fränkel has aptly noted, a passion that is assessed on the plane of its realization does not then have to add anything such as "so much do I love you."^[48] Such an addition is even less necessary since all the language of the ode, it seems to me, sets up a precise kind of reading, which later seems to have been that of the ancients generally—such as that of Theocritus in the second Idyll , just to cite from among many possibilities the example of a poet whom we have seen was influenced often by the amatory language of Sappho.

The (for when I look at you) of line 7 has a precedent in a section of the epic that has already been shown to be important for the interpretation of fragment 2, in the , where Zeus, facing Hera clothed in all of her seductiveness, is said to "hardly see her, love enwraps his prudent soul," ; (Il . 14.294).^[49] It also finds a significant correspondence in the encomium for Theoxenus, in which the old Pindar confesses his melting passion for

the ephebic beauty: "But because of Aphrodite I melt like the wax of the sacred bees beneath the sun, when I see the young limbs of the boys," (fr. 123.10-13). This, in Sappho as in Pindar,^[50] is not the motif of "love at first sight," as one will find it later in its Theocritan reuse,^[51] but rather the express registration in a nearly formulaic manner of the power of erotic seduction that the "bright" spectacle of beauty exercises on the senses and through the senses. However, "the bright love of the sun and beauty," (fr. 58.26) in Sappho are not simply aesthetic longings; the "bright dazzling," (fr. 16.18)^[52] of the face of Anactoria even in memory summons love again, as the "rays that dazzle," (Pind. fr. 123.2-3)^[53] from the eyes of Theoxenus immediately overwhelm in the waves of passion anyone who does not have a heart of iron. In Sappho it is not the image of the wave but that of the "bewilderment of the heart," expressed by a verb such as of "already ancient erotic specificity,"^[54] the particular meaning of which has found confirmations in new fragments of Alcaeus and Anacreon,^[55] but which was already attested earlier by a collage of the collection of Theognis where the turmoil from confronting ephebic beauty is expressed with linguistic elements drawn from Homer, Hesiod,^[56] and especially Sappho: "Suddenly sweat runs unstoppably under my skin, and I am bewildered by the sight of the flower of youth, pleasant and beautiful together,"

(ll. 1017-19).

The "sweat" that floods the limbs (Sappho 31.13) is, for example, already in the Homeric Hymn to Pan: "The soft desire to unite himself with the love of the nymph of the beautiful braids, daughter of Driope, flowered in him and assailed him," (ll. 33-34), while the particular use of (fire) at line 10 is entirely unique in archaic Greek^[57] and might have, I believe, a meaning somewhat close to its meaning of "fever" as attested in the medical literature. And this matching with an entirely different technical language need not seem strange; even in ode 1.3, the term , "agony" (also rather rare, and taken up later with an analogous meaning by Anac. fr. 347.8 P = 71 Gent.) ought in part to be close to the physiological meaning of "nausea" attested in the medical literature, and ought to indicate something more than a "mental discomfort" since, as Page has already noted,^[58] it recurs, fled as in Sappho to , in a medical text that speaks of a man who is prey to "torments and agonies," , through an alteration that exhibits itself in his physical equilibrium.^[59] Here then is love as a partial "malady,"^[60] not in the romantic sense of the term but in the concrete sense of a disturbance that invades the senses. In this sense certain expressions are stiff loaded with all of the expressive violence of their literal meaning, and at the same time are innovators with respect to preceding use even within the ambit of archaic lyric: expressions such as "my soul burned with passion," (fr. 48.2,^[61] where the "soul," , that can be "devoured," [fr. 96.17], or "tossed about," [fr. 47], by Eros as by a wind, is still obviously to be understood in a very concrete sense);^[62] or the "cooing" of passion, of fragment 38, which will later be taken up frequency in Alexandrian literature^[63] —for example, by Meleager, who plays with a rather baroque pointe upon the image of Eros as

"cook" of the soul,^[64] or employs, in a by then highly stylized manner, the contrast "to burn with love—to find relief in coolness."^[65] This contrast is attested for the very first time in fragment 48 of Sappho: "You came, and it was a good thing; I was longing for you, and you gave coolness to my soul burned by passion," , where it seems to me that the conjecture ^[66] finds confirmation in a passage of the second book of Theognis (1. 1273), where he laments that the (boy) that has destroyed his (good mind) later "gave coolness for a short while," . And in the context of fragment 48, , which in Homer or in Hesiod (as in the rest of Greek poetry) indicates a rather general "going in search, pursuing," assumes, along the lines shown above for , the specifically erotic meaning of "to long for."^[67] This meaning is guaranteed by its pairing with in fragment 36, , which is known to us through the Etymologicum Magnum but is also found inscribed on one of the wellknown vases with ephebic inscriptions, the one attributed to Euphronius:^[68]; and notwithstanding the poor accuracy of the transcription, it does not seem doubtful that here we find ourselves in front of a Sapphic citation, and that the author or the commissioner of the vase thus read in the text of Sappho a precise message of love.

Sapphic poetry could thus speak to the common reader who did not close himself to the comprehension of its contents with the same clearness with which it spoke to Pindar or to Theognis. And the selections that Sappho performed within the lexical patrimony of the epic, as the new linguistic means with which she gave expression to a world different from the epic world, were destined in their turn to be "leader of a school" and to become traditional. I have sought to isolate a few elements of this language and, by placing them in the tradition to which even a "marvel" like Sappho has to be associated, to characterize through them some aspects of Sapphic eros, the chorality and the concreteness of a particular erotic experience. I like to hope that the data of this study will also be of use to those who wish to study the poetry of Sappho with different methods.

Two
Critical Stereotypes and the Poetry of Sappho

Mary R. Lefkowitz

Criticism of creative art seems curiously dependent on biography.^[1] It appears difficult to separate an artist's life from his work, or to regard literature or music or paintings primarily as public statements. Since the act of creation is assumed fundamentally to be an emotional response, the artist is viewed as an active participant in the world he has created. In the case of male writers, the assumption seems always to be that the artist, whether Catullus, Brahms, or Goya, uses the full range of his intellectual powers to come to terms with his problems. It is understood that the methods and the problems vary considerably from artist to artist. But in the case of femme artists, the assumptions on which criticism is based tend to be narrowly defined: (1) Any creative woman is a "deviant," that is, women who have a satisfactory emotional life (home, family, and husband) do not need additional creative outlets . The assumption behind this assumption is that "deviance" in the case of women results from being deprived of men—in other words, women artists tend to be (a) old maids or (b) lesbians, either overt femme homosexuals or somehow "masculine." (2) Because women poets are emotionally disturbed, their poems are psychological outpourings, that is, not intellectual but ingenuous, artless, concerned with their inner emotional lives . As a result, criticism of two such different poets as Sappho and Emily Dickinson can sound remarkably alike.

Dr. John Cody's recent analysis of Emily Dickinson's poem "I had been hungry, all the Years" provides a vivid illustration of the special criticism

applied to female artists. I prefer to begin with Emily Dickinson rather than with Sappho, because Dickinson wrote in English (which I understand better than I do Greek) and because the facts of her life are relatively well documented: she was a recluse, unmarried, wore white, wrote in the bedroom of her house in Amherst poems on little pieces of paper, some of which were published in her lifetime.

I had been hungry, all the Years—
My Noon had Come—to dine—
I trembling drew the Table near—
And touched the Curious Wine—

'Twas this on Tables I had seen—
When turning, hungry, Home
I looked in Windows, for the Wealth
I could not hope—for Mine—

I did not know the ample Bread—
'Twas so unlike the Crumb
The Birds and I, had often shared
In Nature's—Dining Room—

The Plenty hurt me—'twas so new—
Myself felt ill—and odd—
As Berry—of a Mountain Bush—
Transplanted—to the Road—

Nor was I hungry—so I found
That Hunger—was a way
Of Persons outside Windows—
The Entering—takes away—
        (579 Johnson, ca. 1862)

My own impression of this poem is that its primary concern is disappointment: something long-awaited comes; once you have it, it disappears; thus in retrospect the anticipation seems more rewarding than the thing itself. The central thought is expressed in the terminology of food: the narrator of the poem is "hungry"; then "noon" (the dinner hour) has come like a guest, to dinner; there is a table with "Curious Wine" (the narrator doesn't know what it is). The narrator had been like the birds, eating what was left; now he/she leaves the wilds, and his/her exclusion, and enters the house. The hunger then goes away and there is nothing. The bread and wine in the poem may take on additional significance if we think of them as elements in the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist: Dickinson was raised by devout churchgoers and drew much of her subject matter and metrical structure from the hymns she heard as a child.^[2]

Then the poem might also say: after receiving Communion, what does one have?

To our impressions we can compare what Dr. Cody says in After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson . He reads the poem as an analyst would interpret dreams, along canonical Freudian lines: hunger connotes sexual experience, and Emily Dickinson's

imbibing of physical affection quickly becomes a glut and overwhelms her painfully. The experience is novel in an uncongenial way and causes her to sicken and feel strange. She feels that sexuality is too common a territory for her (a "Road") because she is acclimated to an unfrequented and lofty habitat. (She comes of a "Mountain Bush" and feels out of place, perhaps degraded, in the "Road"; one senses in this word unpleasant connotations of too easy accessibility, prosaic purposes, dustiness, and commercial transactions.

Once we accept the premise that the poem primarily concerns sex, it is possible to interpret its imagery more specifically:

It is a commonplace that a woman's introduction to sexual intimacies may be frightening and disappointing. The bruising of delicate membranes may draw blood. Thus, the line "The Plenty hurt me—'twas so new" may refer not only to the overpowering emotion generated by her own and another's passion but also to the overwhelming and painful effects of physical force. The transplanted berry may be the hymeneal blood (the first color commonly associated with berries is red); the "Mountain Bush," the mons veneris; and the "Road," the vagina. We cannot imagine that Emily Dickinson was unaware of these anatomical facts.)^[3]

Whether or not she was more than "dimly aware" of these "unconscious sexual preoccupations" is not the issue: Cody's analysis enables us to see that Emily Dickinson, who "has for so long been thought of as an ethereal other world creature" was in fact "a living flesh-and-blood woman who, Victorian Age notwithstanding, was well aware that whether she liked it or not she had no choice but to share in the physiological reactions of the rest of humanity."^[4]

If we in turn analyze Cody's analysis, we find that it rests on several questionable assumptions: (1) That poems are like dreams, that is, are individual expressions of emotional problems, rather than public statements meant to be understood by and communicated to a large audience who had not read Freud on roads, berries, etc. But Emily Dickinson, as her correspondence shows, was most interested in getting into print and being recognized. (2) That Dickinson's problem is sexual deprivation, specifically, inability to accept or to enjoy men, an interpretation read in from her biography.

The same basic assumptions tend to be made about Sappho's famous poem, (31 Lobel-Page [L.-P.]), though in less vividly stated forms. Compared to Emily Dickinson's, we know virtually nothing about Sappho's life. We can glean from biographies and passing references written long after her death the names of her family, that she lived in Mytilene at the end of the seventh century, that she wrote nine books of lyric poetry, that she was a female homosexual, short, dark, and ugly, and that she died by throwing herself off the White Rock in west Greece because of her unrequited love for a ferryman named Phaon ("shining"). Much of this information seems to have been derived from interpretations by ancient scholars (all male) of her poetry, some also from caricatures of her in comedy; the story of her death is obviously based on myth.^[5] Again a portrait emerges of an emotional deviant: deprived because of her ugliness of male attention (like the ferryman's) which she craves.

Thus biography, itself derived from interpretation of the poems, is in turn reapplied to the poems and affects our interpretation of them. In the case of , especially, much influential criticism has tended to center on the "facts" of Sappho's life:

Wilamowitz saw "that man" in the poem's first stanza as the husband of the girl. The girl is one of Sappho's students, and the poem concerns the man

and schoolmistress Sappho's jealousy of him.^[6] This interpretation transposes the poem to the realm of sexual normality: there is no evidence at all in the text that "that man" is a husband, or the girl Sappho's pupil, or that Sappho ran a girl's school.^[7] Page, in what is recognized as the authoritative English commentary on Sappho, is aware of the limitations of Wilamowitz's criticism but still retains the same basic assumptions about the poem. In his analysis, he realizes that the man only appears in the first stanza, but at the same time he is reluctant to take his attention off of him.

But we must not forget that the man was the principal subject of the whole first stanza; and we shall not be content with. any explanation of the poem which gives no satisfactory account of his presence and his prominence in it. If Sappho wishes to describe nothing more than the symptoms of her passion for the girl, what motive could she have for connecting that description thus closely with an occasion when the girl is engaged in merry conversation with a man? Surely that occasion is not devoid of all significance: and then it appears impossible to exclude the element of jealousy from Sappho's emotional response to the scene. Sappho loves the girl: and it is clearly suggested that the girl is not, at least at this moment, particularly interested in Sappho. Sappho is present in the company: but it is the man, not Sappho, who is sitting close by the girl, rejoicing in her laughter and converse. To maintain that Sappho feels no jealousy of the man would be to ignore the certain response of human nature to a situation of the type described, and to deprive the introduction of the man, and his relation to the girl, of all significance. On this point, at least, there is little room for doubt.^[8]

The girl is talking to him, and not to Sappho; the physical symptoms that Sappho describes in such detail result specifically from jealousy. In addition, Page tends to see the poem as a direct outpouring of emotion, in much the same way that Cody read Dickinson. Sappho's language

is realistic, severely plain and candid, unadorned by literary artifice. First, very quietly, "I have no longer any power to speak." Then she says something—we do not know exactly what—about her tongue. Then in simple words, "a subtle fire has stolen beneath my flesh," and still more simply "with my eyes I see nothing;" Then a homely metaphor, "my ears are humming": and the next phrase could not be more bleak and unadorned, whether the words meant "sweat pours down me" or "a cold sweat covers me." Then, without artifice, "a trembling seizes me all over"; thereafter an image which owes nothing to literary tradition, and surely

reflects her own manner of thought and speech, "paler than grass am I"; and finally the homeliest phrase of all, "I seem to fall a little short of being dead." Rarely, if anywhere, in archaic or classical poetry shall we find language so far independent of literary tradition, apparently so close to the speech of every day. Style is in harmony with dialect; both products of nature, not artifice.^[9]

His translation supports his interpretation. Sappho's verbs are attenuated into nouns, "terrifies" ()^[10] becomes the conventional love-song term "a-flutter"; "runs under" () has become "has stolen" (as in "has stolen my heart away"?); "whirrs," like a spinning rhombos () has become "is humming"; pours down (), "covers"; "hunts" () merely "seizes"; the violent "greener" than grass () merely "paler." Missing also is a sense of the military terminology in the opening stanza: the Homeric "equal to the gods" has become somehow "fortunate." "Sits opposite" only represents part of the meaning of , "in opposition," as in battle. In the last stanza, the reassurance "all can be endured" () has become a frustrated "all must be endured."

George Devereux, the anthropologist, sees the poem rather as an emotional outpouring of "envy" of "that man," as opposed to simple "jealousy":

The core of the problem can best be stated in somewhat colloquial terms: "What does this man—and indeed any man—have that Sappho does not have?" " What can a man offer to a girl that Sappho cannot offer?" The answer, I think, is obvious (Od . 11.249 ff. [This is the passage where Poseidon says to Tyro: "rejoice lady, in my love, and as the year goes by you shall bear glorious children, etc."]) and leads to a clinically highly documentable and crucial finding: few women are as obsessed with a (neurotic) feeling of incompleteness<->with the clinically commonplace "female castration complex"—as the masculine lesbian. Moreover, the latter experiences her "defect" with violent and crushing intensity particularly when her girl-friend is taken away from her not by another lesbian, but by a man , who has what she does not have and which she would give her life to have.^[11]

According to Devereux, Sappho in the poem is describing the sort of anxiety attack that Devereux has frequently witnessed in homosexual patients.

If Sappho's poem had just been dug out of the sand and if we had never heard of Wilamowitz or looked in Page or read Devereux's article, our interpretation of the poem might be very different. Perhaps it is impossible for any of us to approach Sappho with the same objectivity that we can maintain in reading Emily Dickinson, because we always seem to come to ancient texts with dictionary in hand. But to look at the text itself, without any preconceptions about the identity of the narrator, the poem says: "That man seems to me like the gods (, a designation that in Homer connotes unusual strength) who sits opposite (or in opposition), who hears you (female) speaking sweetly and laughing passionately.^[12] This (i.e., hearing you) terrifies my heart in my breast (i.e., the effect of you on me, the narrator, is very different from your effect on 'that man'). For whenever I look at you then I can speak nothing still, but in silence my tongue is broken (, a verb used to describe broken bones), and immediately a light fire runs under my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears whirr, and a cold sweat holds me down, and a shuddering hunts all of me, and I am greener than grass, and from dying little lacking I seem to myself to be (repetition 'to myself' signifies a conclusion, and reference to the narrator, a transition to a new subject).^[13] But all is endurable, since even a poor man"—does the poem go on to say that god makes even a poor man rich (as in the introduction to the Works and Days ), that is, that there is some hope for change, or eventual triumph?^[14]

Looking at the text, it seems fair to say that quantitatively at least the main emphasis in the poem falls on the narrator's feelings. It is important to remember that what she is describing is an illusion: "he seems to me" (), "I seem to myself" (). The time is indefinite, the illusion happens over and over: "whenever I look at you" ( with subjunctive ). The man has no specific identity; he is "whoever () sits opposite." The exaggerated terms in which the narrator's reactions are described add to the sense of illusion: the broken tongue, the sweat that grasps, the shuddering that hunts, and being greener than grass do not portray the condition of the narrator in real life. The phrase "greener than grass" at the end of the list of symptoms has particular impact. It translates the Homeric "green fear" for one's life in battle into the context of daily existence. In the same way, the man like the gods in the first stanza is not a

Homeric hero but someone sitting opposite a gift. It is as if Sappho were saying that what happens in a woman's life also partakes of the significance of the man's world of war. When she writes a long narrative poem about Hector and Andromache it is to describe their wedding.^[15] When she speaks in her poem to "Aphrodite on intricate throne, immortal" of pursuing and fleeing, it is describing not the grim chase of Hector by Achilles, "as in a dream one cannot pursue someone who flees" (Il . 22.200), but the conquest of an unwilling lover, "if she flees now, soon she'll pursue you."^[16] Her victory is achieved by the intervention of Aphrodite, not through her own powers. In also, any change that is to come about must take place through endurance. As a woman, she must rely on the special weapons of the oppressed, miracles and patience.

This interpretation may not tell us everything we want to know about the poem, but I think at least it reveals what the poem is not about. There is nothing specifically stated in the poem about jealousy of a rival. What the man has that she (the narrator) doesn't have (malgré Devereux) is not male generatire capacity but physical strength: he seems "like the gods" while she is faint and powerless.^[17] What she (the narrator) feels is not jealousy but the response of lovers to beauty in their beloved: when the suitors see Penelope in Odyssey 18 "their knees were loosened, and their hearts were beguiled with passion" (212). As for Sappho's style, if being untraditional is artless, then we can agree (in Page's words) that she is "without artifice." But it might be fairer to comment on the dramatic personification "trembling hunts me down" or her conversion of Homeric formulae, e.g., taking "like the gods" from the context of war to the struggles of emotion, and turning the conventional "green fear" into the startling, entertaining "greener than grass am I."^[18] The sense of illusion that she creates in the opening "he seems" and its echo "I seem to myself" in the fourth stanza is one of the first expressions of what will later become one of the primary concerns of poetry and philosophy: the effects of the imagination.^[19] The deliberate generality of the poem, the absence of proper names and specific references to time and place, indicate that this poem is meant to bring to mind no particular

place or occasion. It tells of "that man—whoever" and of the narrator's reactions "whenever I look at you."^[20] It is no more directly representative of the historical Sappho's feeling at any given moment in history than the sonnet "Th' Expense of Spirit" is a transcript of a day in the life of William Shakespeare.^[21]

To recapitulate: biographical criticism, in the case of the women poets Dickinson and Sappho, may keep us from seeing what the poets say. Dickinson's dignified, remote poem about disappointment becomes an outcry of sexual frustration, Sappho's song about the weakness of a woman in love a jealous admission of penis envy. Applying assumptions our society makes about "normal" female psychology to the work of women poets can do little to advance our understanding of their poems. This is not to say that their poems are not different because they are by women; I think perhaps they are. Dickinson writes about her "inner life" and Sappho about her love for her female friends and the pleasures of singing and being together because these activities, not war or games or government, were the experiences that her society and times permitted to women. Those who are secluded in some way from the concerns of the larger society are by necessity thrown onto themselves and thus have time and scope to express what others, in more diffracted contexts, do not have time to articulate or to understand. Such enforced withdrawal has made women's poetry distinctive and influential.

Three
Phaethon, Sappho's Phaon, and the White Rock of Leukas: "Reading" the Symbols of Greek Lyric

Gregory Nagy

In the arcane Greek myths of Phaethon and Phaon there are latent themes that help resolve three problems of interpretation in Greek poetry. The first of these problems is to be found in the Partheneion of Alcman (PMG 1). It concerns a wondrous horse conjured up in a simile describing the beauty of the maiden Hagesikhora, center of attention in the song-and-dance ensemble:

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(Alcman PMG 1.45-49)

For she appears
outstanding, as when someone
sets among grazing beasts a horse,
well-built, a prizewinner, with thundering hooves,
from out of those dreams underneath the rock.

So the problem is, what is the meaning of ? I translate it as "underneath the rock" following the scholia of the Louvre Papas, which connect this adjective with pétra , "rock," and quote the following passage from the Odyssey :

 
(Od . 24.11-12)

And they passed by the streams of Okeanos and the White Rock [Leukàs pétra ] and past the Gates of the Sun and the District of Dreams.

This interpretation has been rejected by Denys Page, who argues: "The reference to [Odyssey ] xxiv 11f. is irrelevant; nothing is said there about dreams living under rocks."^[1] Instead, Page follows the Etymologicum Magnum 783.20, where we read , "sustained by wings," so that the wondrous horse being described would be something "out of winged dreams"; in support of this interpretation, Page adduces passages where dreams are represented as winged beings (e.g., Eur. Hec . 70).^[2] All the same, Page retains the reading in his edited text, so that we are left to assume some sort of ad hoc metathesis of to as if the local Laconian dialectal pronunciation of the word for "wing" were pert- rather than pter . Other experts, though hesitantly, go along with the interpretation "under rocks," allowing for some vague notion of dreams abiding underneath some mysterious rock in the Laconian poetic imagination.^[3] In the most accessible chrestomathy of Greek lyric, the editor chooses to take at face value: "the dreams are those of siestas taken underneath a shady rock."^[4]

The second problem of interpretation, then, is the significance of the White Rock, Leukàs pétra , in Odyssey 24.11. This mysterious place has to be viewed in the overall context of Odyssey 24.1-14, describing the passage of the spirits of the suitors of Penelope, who have just been killed by Odysseus, into the realm of the dead. This description, known as the Introduction to the Second Nekyia, represents a distinct subgenre of Greek epic. It is replete with idiosyncrasies in both theme and diction,^[5] and its contents afford a precious glimpse into early Greek concepts of afterlife. Nowhere else in Homeric diction do we find the puzzling expressions , "Gates (púlai ) of the Sun"; "District (demos ) of Dreams"; and , "White Rock (Leukàs pétra )." On the level of content, however, there do exist Homeric parallels to the first two of the three expressions.

In the instance of , "Gates (púlai ) of the Sun," there is a thematic parallelism between púlai , "gates," and Homeric Púlos , "Pylos." As Douglas Frame has demonstrated, the royal name Néstor and the place name of King Nestor's realm, Púlos , are based on mythological models.^[6] I should stress that Frames arguments are used not to negate a historical Nestor and the historical Pylos, but rather to show that the kernel of the epic tradition about Nestor and Pylos was based on local myths linked with local cults. The clearest example is a story, represented as Nestor's own tale within the Iliad , that tells of the hero's retrieving the cattle of Pylos from the Epeians (Il . 11.671-761). Frame argues convincingly that the retrieved cattle are a thematic analogue to the Cattle of the Sun.^[7] The etymology of Néstor , explained by Frame as "he who brings back to light and life," is relevant.^[8] We may note the association of words built out of the root nes- , most prominently nóos (mind) and nóstos (homecoming), with the theme of sunrise.^[9] In fact, the entire plot of Odysseus's travels is interlaced with diction that otherwise connotes the theme of sunset followed by sunrise. To put it more bluntly, the epic plot of Odysseus's travels operates on an extended solar metaphor, as Frame argues in adducing the internal evidence of Homeric theme and diction.^[10] Likewise, when Nestor returns the cattle to Pylos, it is implicit that Pylos is the Gate of the Sun and an entrance to the underworld.^[11] There are survivals of this hieratic connotation in the local Pylian lore of classical times (Paus. 4.36.2-3).^[12] In a Homeric allusion to the myth about Herakles' descent into the underworld and his wounding of Hades (Il . 5.395-404) the name Pylos actually serves to connote the realm of the otherworld rather than any realm of this world: (in Pylos, among the dead; Il . 5.397). Hades himself is the pulártes , "gate closer" (Il . 8.367, etc.). In short, the thematic associations of Púlos imply that the Gate of the Sun is also the Gate of the Underworld, and thus we have a parallel to the context of , "Gates (púlai ) of the Sun," in Odyssey 24.12. Accordingly, a

Homeric expression like , "pass by the gates of Hades" (Il . 5.646; cf. 23.71) implies that the psukhaí (spirits) of the dead traverse to the underworld through the sine passage traveled by the sun when it sets.

In the instance of , "District demos of Dreams" (Od . 24.12), the concept of a community of dreams situated past the Gates of Hades is the-matically consistent with other Homeric expressions involving dreams. After a person dies, his psukhe^[*] (spirit) flies off , "like a dream" (11.222). Hermes, who is conducting the psukhaí of the dead suitors (24.1), is also the conductor of dreams, (h. Hom. Merc . 14). Since it is Hermes who leads the psukhaí of the suitors past the Gates of the Sun (24. 11), it is significant that another of his inherited epithets is puledókos (h. Hom. Merc . 15), to be interpreted as "he who receives [the psukhaí ] at the Gates."^[13] These are the Gates of Hades, or we may call them the Gates of the Sun. But there is also another name available. Since Hermes conducts dreams as well as the ghosts of the dead, and since dreams move like ghosts, it is not surprising that dreams, too, have gates (Od . 19.562; cf. 4.809).^[14] Since the , "Gates (púlai ) of the Sun," are already mentioned in 24.12, we may expect , "District (demos ) of Dreams," in the same line to be a periphrastic substitute for a redundant concept, "Gates of Dreams."

In the instance of , "White Rock" (Od . 24.11), we find no parcel in Homeric theme and diction. All we can say about the White Rock at this point is that its collocation with , "District (demos ) of Dreams" (24.12), seems parcel to the expression "from dreams underneath a rock," in Alcman's Partheneion (PMG 1.49).

As we begin to examine the attestations of Leukàs pétra , "White Rock," beyond Homer, we come upon the third problem of interpretation, concerning the White Rock and a figure called Phaon:

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(Men. F 258 Koerte)^[15]

where they say that Sappho was the first,
hunting down the proud Phaon,
to throw  herself, in her goading desire, from the  rock
that shines from afar . But now, in accordance with your sacred utterance,
lord king, let there be silence throughout the sacred precinct of the headland
     of Leukas.

This fragment, alluding to a story about Sappho's jumping into the sea for love of Phaon, is from a play of Menander's entitled The Leukadia . We infer from Menander's lines that Sappho leaped off the White Rock of Leukas in pursuit of Phaon. It is to Strabo that we owe the preservation of these verses (10.2.9 C452). He is in the process of describing Cape Leukas, a prominent white rock jutting out from Leukas into the sea and toward Kephallenia.^[16] From this rock Sappho is supposed to have jumped into the sea after Phaon. Strabo goes on to describe a shrine of Apollo Leukatas situated on Cape Leukas and an ancestral cult practice connected with it. Every year, he reports, some criminal was cast down from the white rock into the sea below for the sake of averting evil, . Wings and even birds would be fastened to him, and men in fishing boats would be stationed below the rock in order to retrieve the victim after his plunge.

As Wilamowitz has convincingly argued,^[17] Menander chose for his play a setting that was known for its exotic cult practice involving a white rock and conflated it in the quoted passage with a literary theme likewise involving a white rock. There are two surviving attestations of this theme. The first is from lyric:

 
(Anac. PMG 37608)

One more time taking off in the air, down from the  White
Rock  into the dark waves do I dive,  intoxicated  with lust.

The second is from satyr drama:

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(Eur. Cyc . 163-68)

I would be crazy not to give all the herds of the Cyclopes
in return for drinking one cup of that wine
and throwing  myself from the  white rock  into the brine,
once I am intoxicated , with eyebrows relaxed.
Whoever is not happy when he drinks is crazy.

In both instances, falling from the white rock is parallel to falling into a swoon—be it from intoxication or from making love. As for Menander's allusion to Sappho's plunge from a Leukás (white rock), Wilamowitz reasonably infers that there must have existed a similar theme, which does not survive, in the poetry of Sappho. Within the framework of this theme, the female speaker must have pictured herself as driven by love for a certain Phaon, or at least so it was understood by the time New Comedy flourished.^[19] So the third and the last of the three problems is, why should Sappho seem to be in love with a mythical figure?

About Phaon himself we have no reports beyond the meager fragments gathered in Sappho fragment 211 Voight (v.). It appears that he was an old porthmeús (ferryman) who was transformed into a beautiful youth by Aphrodite herself; also, the goddess fell in love with this beautiful Phaon and hid him in a head of lettuce. Besides specifically attesting the latter myth in Cratinus (fr. 330 Kock), Athenaeus (69d-e) also cites striking parallels in Eubulus (fr. 14 Kock) and Callimachus (fr. 478 Pfeiffer), where we see that Adonis, too, was hidden in a head of lettuce by Aphrodite. This thematic parallelism of Aphrodite and Phaon with Aphrodite and Adonis becomes more important as we come to another myth about the second pair.

According to the account in book 7 of the mythographer Ptolemaios Chennos (ca. C.E. 100; by way of Phot. Bibl . 152-53 Bekker),^[20] the first to dive off the heights of Cape Leukas was none other than Aphrodite herself, out of love for a dead Adonis. After Adonis died (how it happened is not said), the mourning Aphrodite went off searching for him and finally found him at "Cypriote Argos," in the shrine of Apollo Eríthios . She consults Apollo, who instructs her to seek relief from her love by jumping off the white rock of Leukas, where Zeus sits whenever he wants relief from his passion for Hera. Then Ptolemaios launches into a veritable catalogue of other figures who followed Aphrodite's precedent and took a ritual plunge as a cure for love. For example, Queen Artemisia I is reputed to have leaped off the white rock out of love for one Dardanos, succeeding only in getting herself killed. Several others are mentioned who died from the leap, including a certain iambographer Charinos, who expired only after being fished out of

the water with a broken leg, but not before blurting out his four last iambic trimeters, painfully preserved for us with the compliments of Ptolemaios and Photius as well. Someone called Makes was more fortunate: having succeeded in escaping from four love affairs after four corresponding leaps from the white rock, he earned the epithet Leukopetras . We may follow the lead of Wilamowitz in questioning the degree of historicity in such accounts.^[21] There is, however, a more important concern. In the lengthy and detailed account of Ptolemaios, Sappho is not mentioned at all, let alone Phaon. From this silence I infer that the source of this myth about Aphrodite and Adonis is independent of Sappho's own poetry or of later distortions based on it.^[22] Accordingly, the ancient cult practice at Cape Leukas, as described by Strabo (10.2.9 C452), may well contain some intrinsic element that inspired lovers' leaps, a practice also noted by Strabo. The second practice seems to be derived from the first, as we might expect from a priestly institution that becomes independent of the social context that had engendered it. Abstracted from their inherited tribal functions, religious institutions have a way of becoming mystical organizations.^[23]

Another reason for doubting that Sappho's poetry had been the inspiration for the lovers' leaps at Cape Leukas is the attitude of Strabo himself. He specifically disclaims Menander's version about Sappho being the first to take the plunge at Leukas. Instead, he offers a version of the arkhaiologikoteroi^[*] , "those more versed in the ancient lore," according to which Kephalos son of Deioneus was the very first to have leaped, impelled by love for Pterelas (Strabo 10.2.9 C452). Again, I see no reason to take it for granted that this myth concerning historical Leukás had resulted from some distortion of the cults features because of Sappho's literary influence.^[24] The myth of Kephalos and his dive may be as old as the concept of Leukás , the White Rock. I say "concept" because the ritual practice of casting victims from a white rock such as that of Leukas may be in inheritance parallel to the epic tradition about a mythical White Rock on the shores of the Okeanos (as in Od . 24.11) and the related literary theme of diving from an imaginary White Rock (as in the poetry of Anacreon and Euripides). In other words, it is needless to assume that the ritual preceded the myth or the other way around.

Actually, there are other historical places besides Cape Leukas that are associated with myths about diving. For example, Charon of Lampsakos

(fifth century B.C.E ., FGrH 262 F 7)^[25] reports that Phobos, of the lineage Kodridai, founder of Lampsakos, was the first to leap , "from the White Rocks," located apparently on the north shore of the Smyrnaean Gulf, not far from Phokaia.^[26] We may compare, too, the myth about the death of Theseus. He was pushed by Lykomedes and fell into the sea from the high rocks of the island Skûros (Heraclides by way of Paus. 1.17.6; scholia to Ar. Plut . 627). The island derives its name Skûros from its white rocks (LSJ, s.vv. skûros and skîros/skírros ).^[27] In fact, the entire Theseus myth is replete with themes involving names derived from skûros/skîros . Even the "grandfather" of Theseus is Skurios (Apollod. 3-15-5), while Theseus himself casts Skíron off the Skironídes pétrai (Strabo 9.14 C391; Plut. Thes . 10; Paus. 1.33.8).^[28] For the moment, I merely note in passing the ritual nature of the various plunges associated with Theseus and his "father" Aigeus,^[29] and the implications of agonistic death and mystical rebirth in both ritual and myth.^[30]

A more immediate concern is that the mythological examples I have cited so far do not attest the lovelorn theme as a feature of the plunges from white rocks. There is, however, a more basic sexual theme associated with the Thoríkios pétros , "Leap Rock," of Attic Kolonos (Soph. OC 1595). Kolonos itself, meaning "summit," is proverbially white or shining bright   ( ; Soph. OC 670). As for the name Thoríkios , it is formally derivable from the noun thorós , "semen" (e.g., Hdt. 2.93.1), by way of the adjective thorikós ; the noun thorós is in turn built on the aorist thoreîn of the verb throisko^[*] "leap."^[31] Even the verb can have the side meaning "mount, fecundate" (Aes. Eum. 660 ). From the form Thoríkios itself, it is difficult to ascertain whether the name may connote leaping as well as fecundating. And yet, thematic associations of the formally related name Thórikos suggest that leaping is indeed involved. The provenience of Kephalos, son of Deioneus, the figure who leaped from the white rock of Leukas (Strabo 10.2.9 C452), is actually this very Thorikos, a town and deme on the southeast coast of Attica (Apollod. 2.4.7).^[32]

The sexual element inherent in the theme of a white rock recurs in a myth about Kolonos. Poseidon fell asleep in this area and had an emission of semen, from which issued the horse Skironítes :

^[33] (scholia to Lycoph. 766)

Others say that, in the vicinity of the rocks at Athenian Kolonos, he Poseidon, falling asleep, had an emission of semen, and a horse Skúphios came out, who is also called Skironítes .

The name Skironites again conjures up the theme of Theseus, son of Poseidon, and his plunge from the white rocks of Skyros.^[34] This Attic myth is parallel to the Thessalian myth of Skúphios Skyphios:

 .
(scholia to Pind. Pyth . 4.246)

Poseidon Petraîos [of the rocks] has a cult among the Thessalians ... because he, having fallen asleep at some rock, had an emission of semen; and the earth, receiving the semen, produced the first horse, whom they called Skúphios .

There is a further report about this first horse ever:

 .
(scholia to Pind. Pyth . 4.246)

And they say that there was a festival established in worship of Poseidon Petraîos at the spot where the first horse leaped forth.^[35]

The myth of Skironites/Skyphios, featuring the themes of leaping, sexual relief, and the state of unconsciousness, may help us understand better the puzzling verses of Anacreon already quoted:

 
(Anac. PMG 376)

     One more time^[36]
taking off in the air, down from the White
Rock into the dark waves do I dive,  intoxicated  with lust.

The theme of jumping is overt and the theme of sexual relief is latent in the poetry,^[37] while the situation is reversed in the myth. In the poem the unconsciousness comes from what is likened to a drunken stupor; in the myth it comes from sleep.^[38] As for the additional theme of a horse in the myth, we consider again the emblem of Hagesikhora's charms, that wondrous horse

of Alcman's Laconian fantasy, who is "from those dreams under the Rock," (PMG 1.49).

We may note that, just as Poseidon obtains sexual relief through the unconsciousness of sleeping at the white rocks of Kolonos, so also Zeus is cured of his passion for Hera by sitting on the white rock of Apollos Leukas (Ptolemaios Chennos by way of Phot. Bibl . 152-53 Bekker). At Magnesia, those who were hieroí (sacred) to Apollo would leap from precipitous rocks into the river Lethaîos (Paus. 10.32.6). This name is clearly derivable from lethe forgetfulness. In the underworld, Theseus and Peirithoos sat on the , "throne of Lethe " (Apollod. Epit . 1.24; Paus. 10.29.9). I have already quoted the passage from the Cyclops of Euripides (163-68) where getting drunk is equated with leaping from a proverbial white rock. We may note the wording of the verses that immediately follow that equation, describing how it feels to be in the realm of a drunken stupor:

[Full Size]

(Eur. Cyc . 169-72)

where it is allowed to make this thing stand up erect,
to grab the breast and touch with both hands
the meadow^[39]  that is made all ready. And there is dancing
and forgetting  [lestis ] of bad things.

Again, we see the theme of sexual relief and the key concept lestis , "forgetting."

In short, the White Rock is the boundary delimiting the conscious and the unconscious—be it a trance, stupor, sleep, or even death. Accordingly, when the suitors are led past the White Rock (Od . 24-11), they reach the demos oneíron , "District of Dreams" (24.12), beyond which is the realm of the dead (24.14).

Even with the accumulation of this much evidence about the symbolism of the White Rock, it is still difficult to see how it relates to the mythical figure Phaon and how he relates to Sappho. One approach that might yield more information is to study the mythical fignre Phaethon, who shares several characteristics with Adonis and Phaon. For now, I postpone the details and citations, offering only the essentials. Like Adonis and Phaon, Phaethon is loved by Aphrodite, and like them, he is hidden by her. Like Adonis, Phaethon dies. Like Phaon, Phaethon means "bright" (for the morphology of Pháon/Phaéthon , we may compare

Homeric phlégo/phlegétho , "burn").^[40] Unlike Phaon, however, about whom we have only meager details, the Phaethon figure confronts us with a wealth of testimony, much of it unwieldy and conflicting; we now turn to this testimony.

In the commentary to his edition of the Hesiodic Theogony , Martin West observes that Phaéthon (1. 987), like Huperíon , is a hypostasis of the sun-god Helios^[*] .^[41] The thematic equation of Helios^[*] with Huperíon and Phaéthon isoo apparent in epic diction, where huperíon , "the one who goes above" (Od . 1.8, etc.) and phaéthon , "the one who shines" (Il . 11.735, etc.) are ornamental epithets of Helios^[*] . The mythological differentiation of identities is symbolized in genealogical terms: in one case, Huperíon is the father of Helios^[*] (Od . 12.176; Hes. Theog . 371-74), while in the other, Phaéthon is the son of Helios^[*] . The latter relationship is a basic feature of the myth treated by Euripides in the tragedy Phaethon .^[42] What follows is an outline of the myth as found in the Euripidean version.

Phaethon, the story goes, was raised as the son of Merops and Klymene. His real father, however, is not the mortal Merops but the sun-god Helios. At his mother's behest, Phaethon travels to Aithiopia, the abode of Helios, in a quest to prove that the Sun is truly his father. He borrows the chariot of Helios for a day; driving too near the earth, he sets it afire. Zeus then strikes him dead with his thunderbolt, and Phaethon falls from the sky.^[43]

A cross-cultural perspective reveals many myths, indigenous to a wide variety of societies, that are analogous to this Greek myth. There are parallels, for example, in the myths of the Kwakiutl and Bella Coola Indians in British Columbia. From the traditions collected by the anthropologist Franz Boas,^[44] the following outline emerges. The Sun impregnates a woman who bears him a son (called Born-to-be-the-Sun in the Kwakiutl version). When the boy goes to visit his father, he is permitted to take the Suns place. Exceeding his limits, the boy sets the earth on fire, whereupon he is cast down from the sky.^[45]

It does not necessarily follow, however, that the Phaethon myth merely represents the sunset. I sympathize with those who are reluctant to accept the theory that "Phaethon's fall attempts to explain in mythical terms why the sun sinks blazing in the west as if crashing to earth in flames and yet

returns to its task unimpaired the following day."^[46] One counterexplanation runs as follows: "Phaethon's crash is an event out of the ordinary, a sudden and unexpected calamity, occurring once and not daily."^[47] In such matters, however, I would heed the intuitively appealing approach of Lévi-Strauss. A myth, he concedes, "always refers to events alleged to have taken place long ago." Nevertheless, "what gives the myth an operational value is that the specific pattern described is timeless; it explains the present and the past as well as the future."^[48] Accordingly; I find it unnecessary to entertain the proposal, based only on naturalistic intuition, that the Phaethon myth represents the fall of a meteorite.^[49] The meteorite explanation, as also the sunset explanation, operates on the assumption that the message of the Phaethon myth is simply a metaphorical expression of some phenomenon that occurs in the sky. I disagree. The Phaethon myth presents a problem, not a solution. Furthermore, this problem addresses the human condition, not just celestial dynamics.

There is another Phaethon myth, preserved in Hesiodic poetry, which is preoccupied with both aspects of the solar cycle, not only with death but also rebirth. In this myth Phaethon is the son not of Helios but of Eos the dawn goddess (Theog . 986-87). In the same context we hear that Eos first mates with Tithonos, bearing Memnon, king of the Aithiopes, and Emathion (984-85); then she mates with Kephalos, bearing Phaethon (986-87); then Aphrodite mates with Phaethon (988-91), having abducted him (990).^[50] The parallelism between the mating of Eos with Kephalos and the mating of Aphrodite with their son, Phaethon, is reinforced in the Hymn to Aphrodite : when Aphrodite seduces Anchises, the goddess herself cites the abduction of Tithonos by Eos as precedent 218. There are also other parallels, as when a hero called Kleitos is abducted by Eos (Od . 15.250-51). Or again, the nymph Kalypso cites the abduction of the hero Orion by Eos as a precedent for her abduction of Odysseus (5.121-24).^[51]

Let us focus on the association of Phaethon with Aphrodite in Theogony 988-91. It arises, I propose, from a sexual theme implicit in a solar transition from death to rebirth. In the logic of the myth, it appears that the setting sun mates with the goddess of regeneration so that the rising sun may be

reborn. If the setting sun is the same as the rising sun, then the goddess of regeneration may be viewed as both mate and mother.

Such an ambivalent relationship actually survives in the hymns of the Rig-Veda , where the goddess of solar regeneration, the dawn Usas^[*] , is the wife or bride of the sun-god Surya (1.115.1, 7.75.5, etc.) as well as his mother (7.63.3, 7.78.3).^[52] In the latter instance, the incestuous implications are attenuated by putting Usas^[*] in the plural, representing the succession of dawns; similarly; Usas^[*] in the plural can designate the wives of Surya (4.5.13). Yet even if each succeeding dawn is wife of the preceding dawn's son, the husband and son are always one and the same Surya, and the basic theme of incest remains intact.

This comparative evidence from the Rig-Veda is important for understanding the Greek evidence, because Indic Surya (Sun) and Usas-^[*] (Dawn) are formally cognate with Greek Helios^[*] (Sun) and Eos^[*] (Dawn);^[53] furthermore, the epithets of Usas^[*] in the Rig-Veda, divá(s) duhitár- and duhitár- divas , both meaning "Daughter of the Sky," are exact formal cognates of the Homeric epithets Dias tfiugáter and thugáter Diós , meaning "Daughter of Zeus."^[54] The Homeric hexameter preserves these epithets only in the following patterns:

A. six times

B. eight times

C. eighteen times

We see from this scheme that it is cumbersome for the meter to accommodate the name of Eos, ', in a position contiguous with these epithets. Thus it is not surprising that Eos is not combined with these epithets anywhere in attested Greek epic, despite the comparative evidence that such a combination had once existed, as we see from the survival of the Indic cognates divá(s) duhiár- and duhiár-divás in the Rig-Veda .

Within the framework of the Greek hexameter, we may have expected at least one position, however, where the name of Eos could possibly have been combined with thugáter Diós , "Daughter of Zeus":

D.

And yet, when (Dawn) occupies the final portion of the hexameter and when it is preceded by an epithet with the metrical shape this epithet is regularly , "rosy-fingered" (or "rosy-toed"), not thugáter Diós , "Daughter of Zeus." I infer that the epithet

 thugater Diós , "Daughter of Zeus," in position D must have been ousted by the fixed epithet  , "rosyfingered," as in the familiar verse   (when early-born rosy-fingered Dawn appeared...; Il . 1.477, etc.).

In short, for both metrical and formulaic reasons, Greek epic fails to preserve the combination of Eos^[*] (Dawn) with thugáter Diós , meaning "Daughter of Zeus."^[55] By contrast, when the name Aphrodite occupies the final position of the hexameter, her fixed epithet is Diós thugáter : (... Daughter of Zeus, Aphrodite; Il . 3.374, etc.). From the standpoint of comparative analysis, then, Aphrodite is a parallel oleos in epic diction. Furthermore, from the standpoint of internal analysis, Aphrodite is a parallel of Eos in epic theme. Just as Eos abducts Tithonos (h. Hom. Ven . 218), Kleitos (Od . 15.250), Orion (Od . 5.121), and Kephalos (Eur. Hipp . 455), so also Aphrodite abducts Phaethon (Theog . 990). When Aphrodite seduces Anchises, she herself cites the abduction of Tithonos by Eos for an actual precedent (h. Hom. Ven . 218-38), as we have already seen. Throughout the seduction episode, Aphrodite is called Diós thugáter , "Daughter of Zeus" (h. Hom. Ven . 81, 107, 191).

The archaic parallelism of Eos and Aphrodite suggests that Aphrodite became a rival of Eos in such functions as that of Diòs thugáter , "Daughter of Zeus." From the comparative evidence of the Rig-Veda , we would expect Eos to be not only mother but also consort of the Sun. There is no such evidence in Greek epic for either Helios or any hypostasis such as the Phaethon figure. Instead, the Hesiodic tradition assigns Aphrodite as consort of Phaethon, while Eos is only his mother (Theog . 986-91). In other words, the Hesiodic tradition seems to have split the earlier fused roles of mother and consort and divided them between Eos and Aphrodite respectively. This way, the theme of incest could be neatly obviated.

Although the epithet Diòs thugáter/thugáter Diós does not survive in combination with Eos, the goddess herself is in fact likewise ambivalent. Homeric diction features her snatching up youths as if she were some Harpy, and yet she gives them immortality. To review this point, the example of Kleitos will suffice (Od . 15.250-51).^[56] Such an ambivalence inherent in the Eos figure

is so uncomfortable that it tends to be attenuated in the diction. For instance, the verb used to describe the abduction of Orion by Eos is not the concretely violent herpasen^[*] , "snatched," but the more abstract héleto , "seized" (Od . 5.121).^[57] Once the wording herpasen^[*] snatched is removed, the connotation of death from Harpies disappears and a new theme is introduced, death from Artemis Od . 5.121-24.

The alternative to a death from Artemis is a violent abduction by a thúella , "gust of wind" (Od . 20.63), the action of which is there described as anarpáxasa , "snatching up." As precedent for being abducted by a gust of wind and plunged into the Okeanos, Penelope's words evoke the story of the daughters of Pandareos, abducted by thúellai , "gusts of wind" (20.66), the action of which is described as anélonto , "seized." This mention of abduction is followed by a description of how the daughters of Pandareos had been preserved by the Olympian goddesses (20.67-72); the preservation of the girls is then interrupted by death, at the very moment that Aphrodite is arranging for them to be married (20.73-74). Death comes in the form of abduction by hárpuiai , "snatching winds" (20.77), the action of which is now described as anereípsanto , "snatched up."^[58]

In this story about the daughters of Pandareos (Od . 20.66-81), we see a sequence of preservation followedby abduction/death .^[59] In the story about Orion and Eos (5.121-24), by contrast, the pattern is abduction/preservationfollowedby death , in that Eos abducts and preserves the hero while Artemis arranges for his death.^[60] Finally, the story about Aphrodite and Phaethon (Hes. Theog . 986-91) presents yet another pattern, that of abduction/death followed by preservation .^[61] In each of these narrative alternatives, we see various patterns of differentiation in the ambivalent function of Eos as the undifferentiated agent of abduction, death, and preservation.

The abduction of Phaethon by Aphrodite is most directly comparable to the abduction of Kleitos by Eos (Od . 15.251-52), where again we see the patternt abduction/death followed by preservation . The Kleitos figure is represented as son of Mantios 15.249 and grandson of the seer Melampous 15.242. As Frame has shown, the Melampous myth centers on the theme

of retrieving the Cattle of the Sun.^[62] The solar function of the Melampous figure and his genetic affinity with the Kleitos figure together imply a solar affinity for Kleitos as well. The wording herpasen^[*] for the abduction of Kleitos at Odyssey 15.251 implies that he was taken by a maleficent Harpy and dropped into the Okeanos. This theme of death is parallel to sunset. On the other hand, the subject of herpasen^[*] is Eos herself, and the theme of sunrise is parallel to rebirth. Since the abductor of Kleitos is represented as the Dawn, it is at least implicit that Kleitos is to be reborn like the Sun and thus preserved.

So long as the Dawn is present, the day waxes. Once the Sun reaches noon, however, the Dawn ceases and the day wanes. This vital role of Eos is explicit in Homeric diction (e.g., Il . 20.66-69). Implicitly, the Sun is united with the light of Dawn until noon; afterward, the Sun descends into the Okeanos, only to be reborn the next day. In the story of Eos and Kleitos a parallel death and rebirth are implied. The sequence of events, to repeat, is abduction/death followed by preservation .^[63] In the Orion story (Od . 5.121-24), on the other hand, the sequence is the inverse: abduction/preservation followed by death .^[64] We may note that Orion's relation to the Dawn is the inverse of the Suns. Translated into the symbolism of celestial dynamics, Orion's movements are accordingly astral, not solar, and we see an astral representation of the Orion figure already in Homeric poetry (Od . 5.174; II . 18.488).^[65] Like the Sun, the constellation Orion rises from the Okeanos and sets in it (Od . 5.275; Il . 8.489), but, unlike the Sun, it rises and sets at nighttime, not daytime. In the summer, at threshing time, Orion starts rising before Dawn (Hes. Op . 598-99). In the winter, at ploughing time, Orion starts setting before Dawn (Op . 615-16). In summer days the light of Dawn catches up with the rising Orion, and he can be her consort in the daytime.^[66] In winter days the light of Dawn arrives too late to keep Orion from setting into the Okeanos. One related star that does not set, however, is Arktos (Od . 5.275 Il . 18.489). The Arktos Bear watches Orion, dokeúei (Od . 5.274 Il . 18.488), and the verb dokeúei implies doom. In Homeric diction it is used when marksmen or savage beasts take aim at their victims (Il . 13.545, 16.313, 20.340).^[67] As for Arktos as "Bear," the name implies the goddess Artemis.^[68] In other

words, the astral passages of Odyssey 5.273-75 and Iliad 18.487-89 implicitly repeat the theme of Orion's dying at the hands of Artemis, explicit in Odyssey 5.121-24.^[69] The latter passage involves two goddesses, a beneficent Eos and a maleficent Artemis.^[70] We may contrast the passage about Kleitos, involving an ambivalent Eos who is both maleficent and beneficent (Od . 15.251-52).^[71] The theme of death is implicit in herpasen^[*] , "snatched" (251), while the theme of preservation is explicit in , "so that he may be with the immortals" (252).

Similarly, Aphrodite is ambivalent in the Hesiodic passage about Phaethon (Theog . 989-91). Again, the theme of death is implied in anereipsaméne , "snatching up" (990). The epithet daímon , "supernatural being" (991), on the other hand, implies divine preservation, as we see from the context of daímon in Works and Days 109-26.^[72]

To sum up: like Eos, Aphrodite is both maleficent and beneficent in the role of abductor, since she confers both death and preservation. When Phaethon's parents are Helios and Klymene, the stage is set for his death, implicit in the Klymene figure. When his parents are Kephalos and Eos, the stage is set for both his death and his preservation, implicit in the Eos figure as well as in her alternate, Aphrodite. Thus, I disagree with the spirit of the claim that "on the evidence available to us the son of Helios and the son of Eos and Cephalus must be pronounced entirely different persons."^[73] Such an attitude is overly prosopographical. We are dealing not with different persons but with different myths, cognate variants, centering on the inherited personification of a solar child and consort.

Since the epithet múkhios (secreted) as applied to Phaethon in Theogony 991 implies that he was hidden by Aphrodite, we see here an important parallelism with Phaon and Adonis, who were also hidden by Aphrodite.^[74] Just as Phaethon implicitly attains preservation in the cult of Aphrodite, so also Adonis in the cult of Apollo Eríthios .^[75] As for Phaon, he explicitly attains preservation in the myth where he is turned into a beautiful young man by Aphrodite (Sappho fr. 211 V.). From the myths of Phaethon, we see that the themes of concealment and preservation are symbolic of solar behavior, and

we may begin to suspect that the parallel myths of Phaon and Adonis are based on like symbolism.

The very name Pháon , just like Phaéthon , suggests a solar theme.^[76] His occupation too, that of ferryman (Sappho fr. 211 V.), is a solar theme, as we see from the studies of Hermann Güntert on other mythological ferrymen.^[77] As an interesting parallel to Phaon, I single out a solar deity in the Rig-Veda , Pusan^[*] ,^[78] who regularly functions as a psychopomp and who is at least once featured as traveling in golden boats (6.58.3); he is the wooer of his mother (6.55.5) and the lover of his sister (6.55.4, 5). A frequent and exclusive epithet of Pusan^[*] is ãghrni- , "glowing, bright," comparable in meaning to Pháon and Phaéthon .

Let us pursue our current center of attention, the solar figure Phaon, in the poetics of Sappho: another solar theme associated with Phaon is his plunge from a white rock, an act that is parallel to the solar plunge of Phaethon into the Eridanos. The Eridanos is an analogue of the Okeanos, the boundary delimiting light and darkness, life and death, wakefulness and sleep, consciousness and unconsciousness.^[79] We have also seen that the White Rock is another mythical landmark delimiting the same opposites and that these two landmarks are mystical coefficients in Homeric diction (Od . 24.11). Even the Phaethon figure is connected with the White Rock, in that his "father" Kephalos is supposed to have jumped off Cape Leukas (Strabo 10.2.9 C452) and is connected with the place name Thórikos (Apollodorus 2.4.7).^[80] The theme of plunging is itself overtly solar, as we see from Homeric diction: (and the bright light of Helios plunged into the Okeanos ; Il . 8.485). In the Epic Cycle the lover of Klymene is not Helios but "Kephalos son of Deion" (; Nostoi fr. 4 Allen),^[81] a figure whose name matches that of Kephalos son of Deioneus, the one who leaped from the white rock of Leukas (Strabo 10.2.9 C452) and who hails from Thorikos (Apollod. 2.4.7).^[82]

If indeed the Phaon and Adonis myths operate on solar themes, it remains to ask about the relevance of Aphrodite. Most important of all, how do we interpret Aphrodite's plunge from the White Rock? We hear of her doing so out of love for Adonis Ptolemaios Chennos by way of Phot. Bibl . 152-53

Bekker,^[83] and the act itself may be connected with her known function as substitute for the Indo-European dawn-goddess of the Greeks, Eos. As we have seen, Aphrodite has even usurped the epithet of Eos, Diòs thugáter , "Daughter of the Sky," as well as the roles that go with the epithet. From the Homeric standpoint, Aphrodite is actually the Diòs thugáter par excellence, in that even her "mother's" name is Dione^[*] (Il . 5.370, 381). It still remains, however, to explain Aphrodite's plunge, from the White Rock as a feature characteristic of a surrogate Indo-European dawn-goddess.

Here we may do well to look toward Aphrodite's older, Near Eastern, heritage. As the Greek heiress to the functions of the Semitic fertility goddess Ištar, Aphrodite has as her astral symbol the planet of Ištar, better known to us as Venus.^[84] The planet Venus is of course the same as Hésperos the Evening Star and Heosphóros "dawn-bearer," "Eos^[*] bearer" the Morning Star. In the evening Hesperos sets after sunset; in the morning Heosphoros rises before sunrise. We have the testimony of Sappho's near contemporary; Ibycus (PMG 331), that Hesperos and Heosphoros were by this time known to be one and the same. From the Indo-European standpoint, on the other hand, Hesperos and Heosphoros must be Divine Twins, as represented by the Dioskouroi, the Greek "Sons of Zeus" who are cognates of the Indic Asvin-s.^[85] At the battle of Aigospotamoi, there is supposed to have been an epiphany of the Dioskouroi in the form of stars, on either side of Lysander's admiral ship; after their victory the Spartans dedicated to the Dioskouroi two stars of gold at Delphi (Plut. Lys . 12, 18).

In the poetics of Sappho, the Indo-European model of the Morning Star and Evening Star merges with the Near Eastern model of the Planet Aphrodite. Sappho's Hesperos is a nuptial star, as we know directly from the fragment 104 V. and indirectly from the celebrated hymenaeus (wedding song) of Catullus 62, Vesper adest . Since Hesperos is the evening aspect of the astral Aphrodite, its setting into the horizon, beyond which is Okeanos, could have inspired the image of a plunging Aphrodite. If we imagine Aphrodite diving into the Okeanos after the sun, it follows that she will rise in the morning, bringing after her the sun of a new day This image is precisely what the Hesiodic scholia preserve to explain the myth of Aphrodite and Phaethon: (the star of Eos, the one that brings back to light and life [verb an-ágo ] the day and Phaethon, Aphrodite;^[86] scholia to Hes. Theog . 990). For the mystical

meaning of an-ágo as "bring back the light and life from the dead," I cite the contexts of this verb in Hesiod Theogony 626 (, "into the light"), Plato Republic 521c (, "to light"), Aeschylus Agamemnon 1023 (, "from the realm of the dead"), and so on.^[87]

From Menander fragment 258 K., we infer that Sappho spoke of herself as diving from the White Rock, crazed with love for Phaon. The implications of this image are cosmic. The "I" of Sappho's poetry is vicariously projecting her identity into the goddess Aphrodite, who loves the native Lesbian hypostasis of the Sun-God himself. By diving from the White Rock, the "I" of Sappho does what Aphrodite does in the form of Evening Star, diving after the sunken Sun in order to retrieve him, another morning, in the form of Morning Star. If we imagine her pursuing the Sun the night before, she will be pursued in turn the morning after. There is a potential here for amor versus , a theme that haunts the poetry of Sappho elsewhere:

 
(Sappho fr. 1.21 V.)

for even if she now flees, soon she will pursue.

Sappho's special association with Aphrodite is apparent throughout her poetry. The very first poem of the Sapphic corpus is, after all, an intense prayer to Aphrodite, where the goddess is implored to be the súmmakhos battle ally of the poetess fr. 1.28 V.. The "I" of Sappho pictures herself and Aphrodite as parallel rather than reciprocal agents:

 
(Sappho fr. 1.26-27 V.)

and however many things my spirit  [thumós  yearns to
accomplish [verb teleo^[*], active ], I pray that you [Aphrodite]  accomplish [verb teleo^[*],
           active ]

I draw attention to the wording , "to accomplish," an active infinitive instead of the expected passive , "to be accomplished."^[88] If someone else needs something done by Aphrodite, Sappho's poetry opts for the passive infinitive , not active :

 
(Sappho fr. 5.1-4 V.)

Aphrodite and Nereids, grant that my brother
come back here unharmed,
and that however many things he wishes in his  spirit  [thumon ] to happen for him
may all be accomplished [verb teleo^[*] , passive ]

The figure of Sappho projects mortal identity onto the divine explicitly as well as implicitly I cite the following examples from one poem:

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(Sappho fr. 96.2-5, 21-23 V.)

Many times turning your attention [nóon ] in this direction

you, a likeness of the well-known goddess.
And it is in your song and dance that she delighted especially.

It is not easy for us
to become equal in lovely shape
to the goddesses.

An even more significant example is Sappho fragment 58.25-26 V., two verses quoted by Athenaeus 687b. Sappho is cited as a woman who professes not to separate tò kalón (what is beautiful) from habrótes luxuriance:

 
(Sappho fr. 58.25-26 V.)

But I love luxuriance  [(h )abrosúuna ] ... this,
and lust for the sun has won me brightness and beauty.^[90]

From Oxyrhynchus Papyri [787 we can see that these two lines come at the end of a poem alluding to mythical topics. According to Lobel and Page, lines 19 and following refer to Tithonos fr. 58 L.-P.. Be that as it may, we do see images about growing old, with hair turning white and the knees losing their strength

(Sappho fr. 58.13-15 V.). The fragmentary nature of the papyrus prevents certainty about the speaker and the speaker's predicament, but somebody is feeling helpless, asking rhetorically what can be done, and bemoaning some impossibility (58. 17-18). Also, the Lesbian Eos is mentioned: , "rosy-armed Dawn" (58.19).

As a coda to this poem, the last two verses, which I interpret as proclaiming Sappho's "lust for the sun," amount to a personal and artistic manifesto. The (h)abrosúna (luxuriance) of Sappho transcends the banal discussion of Athenaeus, who quotes these two verses. For Sappho, (h)ábros (luxuriant) is the epithet of Adonis (fr. 140 V.), as also of the Kharites, "Graces" (128 V.), on whose chariot Aphrodite rides (194 V.). At Sappho fragment 2.13-16 V., (h)ábros (14) is the adverb describing the scene as Aphrodite is asked to pour nectar. The use of (h)ábros (luxuriant) and (h)abrosúna (luxuriance) in Sappho reminds us of the Roman neoterics and their allusive use of lepidus/lepos in expressing their artistic identity. As for Sappho's "lust for the sun" and "love of (h)abrosúna (luxuriance)," these themes combine profound personal and artistic ideals. In verses preceding the coda, the words of Sappho perhaps alluded to Phaon as an old man, compared with Tithonos. Or perhaps Phaon was son of Tithonos. We do hear a myth where Phaethon is son of Tithonos (Apollod. 3.14.3); just as Phaethon was son of Eos^[*] (Dawn), perhaps Phaon was son of the Lesbian cognate, Aúos (Dawn) mentioned in the same poem, Sappho fragment 58.19. The expression , "[she], taking to the ends of the earth," in line 20 of this poem, along with , "snatched," in the following line 21, remind us of Okeanos/Eridanos and Harpies.

In any case, the fact remains that there is a Lesbian myth about Phaon as an old man (Sappho fr. 211 V.); significantly, in this same myth Aphrodite herself assumes the form of an old woman, whom the old Phaon generously ferries across a strait (ibid.) I suspect that the figure of Sappho identifies herself with this figure of an old woman. Similarly, we may compare the myth of the mourning Aphrodite's plunge from the White Rock out of love for the dead Adonis (Ptolemaios Chennos by way of Phot. Bibl . 152-53 Bekker) as pertinent to the poetics of Sappho, where the explicit theme of mourning for Adonis (fr. 168 V.) may be connected with the latent theme of Sappho's self-identification with Aphrodite.^[91]

In short, there is a mythical precedent for an aging lady to love Phaon. The implicit hope is retrieved youth. After Aphrodite crossed the strait, she, became a beautiful goddess again, conferring youth and beauty on Phaon, too (again, Sappho fr. 211 V.). For all these reasons, perhaps, Sappho loves Phaon.

Four
Eros and Incantation: Sappho and Oral Poetry

Charles Segal

I

For Sappho and her audience poetry is public communication. It is not fully separated from gesture, for it retains close associations with dance and with music. It is, in some sense, magic. It is also a necessary and basic Form of handing down and communicating knowledge about the gods, society, the nature of human life.

Our growing awareness of the implications of oral composition and oral performance in early Greek poetry has opened new perspectives on the archaic lyric. We shall try to extend these perspectives to Sappho, taking her most famous and most familiar poem, phainetai moi (fr. 31 L.-P.), as our focal point.^[1] In so remote and so fragmentary a poet much must remain pure speculation. With this caveat in mind, we may still be able to gain some fresh insight into these scanty but beautiful texts.

"Longinus" quotes phainetai moi in order to illustrate the effect of con-joining the signs of intense passion. Given the formalistic bias and rhetorical approach of ancient literary criticism, Longinus's point of view is natural enough. Yet the rapid sequence of the symptoms which the poem lists point in quite another direction. It conveys a ritualizing, incantatory quality.

This incantatory quality has a special relevance for early love poetry. Such poetry seeks to create a verbal equivalent to the magnetic, quasi-magical compulsion which the ancient poets called thelxis , "enchantment," or peitho , "persuasion." The repetitions and recurrent rhythms of the poetic language evoke the magical effect of eros itself; and this "magic" is also the mysterious peitho or thelxis which the archaic poetess undergoes when gripped by the beauty of a young girl. He is like an elemental power of nature, a violent wind or an "overpowering creature" that "looses her limbs":

 
(47 L.-P.)

Eros has shaken my wits, like a wind from the mountain falling on oaks.

 
(130 L.-P.)

Eros, looser of limbs, tosses me about, bittersweet, overmastering creature.

We have to translate such verses into our own psychology and explain this anthropomorphic Eros as a force or a psychic power. But for Sappho the "power" of love is a god, as power often is for the ancient Greeks, and as such is to be summoned before her by the incantatory power and the quasi-magical thelxis of her poetry. Her poetry both portrays thelxis and, in a sense, is thelxis .

The need to deal with complex emotions by projecting them into situations of personal confrontation or vivid exchanges of words and gestures may reflect not some innate flair for drama in Mediterranean peoples or the inadequate psychology of a supposedly primitive stage in the history of Greek thought, but rather the mental habit of a people whose cultural life— values, history, basic lore about nature and the arts—is encoded in an oral tradition and expressed and affirmed in contexts of oral recitation. In such a culture the act of using language to achieve a coherent picture of reality and to transmit it to future generations takes place in a situation of oral interchange. As Russo and Simon have suggested in a stimulating essay,^[2] the personified encounter between a god and mortal in Homer's scenes of decision or doubt may be a function of the mentality which shaped, and was shaped by, oral composition and performance. It is a question of a deeply rooted cast of mind, not of an inadequate psychological vocabulary or deficient powers of abstraction, as the exponents of the genetic and evolutionary interpretation of Greek culture maintain.

Sappho is fond of these situations of personal encounter. In a number of poems she calls forth the love-goddess, Aphrodite, and brings the divinity of love into the speaker's presence.^[3] Now this evocation of the goddess can be regarded as a form of thelxis : by this technique Sappho practices, in a highly sophisticated form, the magic of love. What more appropriate love charm than to bring Aphrodite herself before you?

The fact that some of these love poems are themselves cast into ritual form invites speculation about their social function. A number of scholars have suggested as context some sort of thiasos , an association of girls and women who felt themselves joined by a bond that they could celebrate religiously.^[4] "Religion" is a vague word, and one must be careful to distinguish between its functions in archaic and modern societies. One must be especially careful, in a discussion of archaic Lesbos, to banish any notions of Pre-Raphaelite spiritualism or mystical communion. In archaic Greece one venerates the gods at least as much for their elemental power as for their moral purity. The fragments on Eros cited above will serve as illustration. In the early sixth century B.C.E . the division between sacred and secular is likely to have been slight. Nearly all human activity has a sacred dimension, as the last part of Hesiod's Works and Days suggests. The forms of association that united Sappho and her friends would naturally involve the veneration of a deity; and, on the evidence of the fragments, Aphrodite is the likeliest candidate, though we hear also of the Muses, the Graces, and once of Hera. This divinity presides over and solemnizes their shared activities. Needless to say, the presence of Aphrodite would not inhibit the physical expression of love among the members of this community.

Early Greek society, like many holistic societies, seems to have dealt with erotic emotion and experience in far more public and stylized forms than modern industrial societies. Examples are the conventionalized banter exchanged by choruses in the epithalamia or the ritualized competition, centering often on the question of physical beauty, in Alcman's Partheneion . Some tantalizing lines of Alcaeus indicate that female beauty on Sappho's Lesbos played an important role in cult and had a formalized, agonistic setting (Alc. 130.32-37 L.-P.).^[5]

Not only did much of the choral poetry of early Greece have a ritual and sacral context, but epic too probably has its roots in ritual and incantation as well. We may draw here upon the work done on oral epic by Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Parry long ago observed (but did not explore) the affinity between formulaic repetition in Homer and ritual. Commenting on a recurrent formula in Homer, he remarked "how the use with it of other words which are always the same, and which always bring back the phrase with the same rhythm at the same place in the verse, act[s] strongly in making it habitual: Homer's formulaic diction is in this much like the chant of ritual."^[6] Lord developed this insight in greater detail: "It could be hypothesized," he suggests, "that when myth became ceremonial, told in chant and verse, epic was born."^[7] In works like the Akkadian creation epic known as the Enuma Elish the ritual function of the poetry predominates, but it plays a role, albeit submerged, even in the secular forms of Homeric epic. Commenting on the alliterative effects of a passage in the Iliad , Lord remarks, "To us the effect is poetic magic, the magic of Homer's hexameters."^[8] Lord's expression is not just metaphorical, however, for he goes on to remind us of the similarities between the devices of oral narrative and the "practical magic" of charms and incantation: "Yet the effect which results was surely calculated by the originators of this device, not for poetic, but for practical magic. This is a dynamic method of emphasis used by incantation and inherited by oral epic, if I am not mistaken, from far distant times. Magic spells throughout the world use alliteration and assonance to make the charm effective."^[9]

The poets of early Greece, down through the fifth century, were keenly aware of and sensitive to the incantatory effects of ritualized sound. It could hardly be otherwise for men raised in an oral culture. The chantlike, singsong pattern of such sound they called . According to Homer and Pindar it could staunch blood and heal wounds (Od . 19.457-58; Pind. Pyth . 3.51, 4.217). There is, obviously, a close affinity between this or "incantation" and the of poetic song, between "la formule magique rhythmisée et la diction chantante" (the rhythmical magic spell and the language of song).^[10] At the end of his eighth Nemean Pindar makes explicit the link between the "incantatory" magic of medicine and the "incantatory"

magic of poetry (Nem . 8.49-50), but the "therapeutic" effects of poetry are already familiar from Hesiod (Theog . 98-103).

Homer had also recognized the connection between the magical "enchantment" of herbs and drugs and the magical "charm" or thelxis of love. Circe, enchantress of many drugs (; Od . 10.276), is also the poem's most successful and most dangerous practitioner of erotic seduction. Her thelxis is simultaneously magical and erotic:

 
(Od . 10.213)

[Circe] charmed  them herself, when she gave them baleful drugs.

 
(Od . 10.290-91)

She will fashion a barley drink and cast drugs upon it,
But not even so will she be able to  charm  you.

The experience of love as a magical power has deep roots in Greek literature. Parallels extend from these pharmaka of Circe in the Odyssey to the pharmaka of Nessus in Sophocles' Trachiniae , from the Helen of Gorgias to the iynx of Simaetha in Theocritus's second Idyll .^[11] Sappho herself speaks of the beloved as "charming" or "enchanting" the mind (; 57 L.-P.), and Alcaeus uses the same verb, speaking, apparently, about love magic (B 13 L.-P.). To create a linguistic equivalent to this magical "charm" or thelxis Sappho uses the divine epiphany of poems 1 and 2 L.-E or the simile of fragment 47 L.-P. The four preserved strophes of fragment 31 are bare of myth or simile, but their incantatory effect of sound and rhythm produces an analogous effect.

Homer uses the verb not only of the "charm" of love or desire (e.g., Od . 1.56-57, 3.264) but also of the charm of song or of involving, "spell-binding" narration. He so uses it twice of the Sirens (Od . 12.40, 44), where he mentions "song" explicitly in the second passage (12.44): , "The Sirens charm with sweet song." The verb also describes the fascination which Odysseus's lies exercise on his hearers (Od . 14.387, 17.514). Homer may well be applying to the effects of Odysseus's narratives his own experience of the oral poet's ability to "charm"

or "enchant" his audience: the author of the Homeric Hymn to (Delian) Apollo uses the same verb, directly after , of the chorus's effect upon their audience: (They sing a hymn and charm the tribes of men; h. Hom. Ap . 161).

The idea of magical enchantment in all these passages must be taken quite literally. The formal, rhythmic, and ritual effects of the song are felt to be capable of working real magic on the body and soul of the hearer, whether for healing or for pleasure. The common vocabulary suggests that the process seemed to the archaic poets akin to the effects of love or erotic fascination. In the "Deception of Zeus" in Iliad 14 the sexual "charms" (thelkteria ) of Aphrodite's magical belt or kestos include not only love and desire (philotes, himeros ), but also the "enchanting" power of language, the "cozening speech (parphasis ) which deceives the mind of men, no matter how smart they are" (Il . 14.216-17).^[12]

II

Sappho, I suggest, draws upon this reciprocal relation between poetry and the physical reactions of the body: poetry as thelxis . The magical thelxis of her words seeks to create—or recreate—the magical thelxis of love. And she thinks and lives in a society where ritualized patterns are the essential means of achieving this thelxis . Ceremonial or ritual elements in the background of poetic composition (which, of course, are not necessarily conscious to the poet) need not imply the actual ceremonial function of such poetry. We are concerned primarily with the former, but the division between the two may not have been very clear in archaic Lesbos.

Ritual not only asserts the unity of the society or the group in the presence of the divine, but can also effect a personal transaction with divine powers. This private function of ritual is perhaps dominant in the ode to Aphrodite (fr. 1 L.-P.), where Sappho has the goddess address her by name. In other poems, however, Sappho clearly depicts the public or communal setting, whether real or imagined, of rituals. The grove and altar of fragment 2 L.-P. may have had a number of celebrants. Fragment 154 L.-P. specifically mentions a number of girls standing "about an altar": "The moon shone full, and as they stood around the altar..." ().

Even in the Aphrodite ode (fr. 1 L.-P.) the ritualized language and situation of the hymnos kletikos may have served to relate Sappho's personal experiences to a social context. Her dexterity and wit in evoking the love-goddess and

in creating a suitably graceful atmosphere for her epiphany themselves attest to her mastery of love's violence. The ritualized structure of the poem makes this mastery available and aesthetically comprehensible to others. Whatever its origins, the experience becomes a social act. It is embodied in language and song. Others can participate in it. Indeed, the mastery of love which the poem implies—whether actual or desiderated—becomes repeatable and accessible to the poetess herself on other occasions.

Even in setting forth her personal, emotional life, Sappho is highly conscious of the language of public discourse and familiar formulaic situations. Between these and her own nonformulaic situation and personal discourse she creates subtle and sophisticated counterpoints. In fragment 16 L.-P., for example, not only is there a sharp antithesis, in the opening priamel, between "what some say" and Sappho's "I"; but there is also an elegant contrast between this "I" () and the wish to make her observations "understandable to all":

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(16.1-6)

Some say that the host of horsemen is the loveliest thing on the black earth, others of soldiers, others of ships, but I say that it is whatever anyone loves. And to make this understood to all is very easy.

III

With this framework in mind we may now turn to phainetai moi (3, L.-R). The first lines of fragment 31 set the stage for the power of eros. The adverbial in line 5 sounds the first explicitly erotic note: the effect of the girl's voice and laughter is to awaken "desire," . The strong verb in the next line (6) denotes the violence of this "desire." At this point the rhythmic-ritualizing effects become especially marked. ("Rhythm" as used here is a function not just of the meter but of the interaction of meter with sound patterns, sentence structure, and meaning.) Sappho repeats (7). Then she introduces a rapid succession of short clauses, artfully varied through word order, chiasmus, and enjambment. The recurrence of the conjunction , seven times in eight lines, contributes to the ritualizing, incantatory effect.

The carefully built up patterns of alliteration and assonance reinforce these effects. Unfortunately the state of the text does not allow of equal certainty in all places. I shall confine my remarks to the third and fourth strophes, where these devices s eem especially prominent:

Fortunate as the gods he seems to me, that man who sits opposite to you, and
     listens nearby to your sweet voice
And your desirable laughter; that, I vow, has affrighted my heart within my breast.
For when I look at you a moment, then I have no longer power to speak,
But my tongue keeps silence, straightway a subtle flame has run beneath my flesh,
     with my eyes I see nothing, my ears are humming,
A cold sweat covers me, and a trembling seizes me all over, I am paler than grass, I
     seem to be not far short of death.... But all can be endured, since......
          (Page's translation, modified)

A strong alliteration of k and g in line 9 seems fairly probable (the emendations and would both conduce to the same effect). It is strengthened by the k alliteration of in the next line. The d sound at the beginning of that line (d ') continues in the impressive drumming d 's of , which follows up the chiasmic pu/up pattern in . A similar but more complex pattern recurs in the next line (11) in the or-m-/rom- sequence of . The drumming d beat of line 10 is taken up again in line 13, reading Page's emendation: . Here, as also in line 10, the alliteration of k sounds accompanies the d 's. Vowel patterns also reinforce the repetitive effect, especially the strongly marked sequence of open o sounds in line 11

and the a sounds of line 14: . In all these verses the beat of the meter and the recurrent sound patterns work closely together to produce a rhythmico-ritual or ritual-mimetic equivalent to love's "thelctic" power.

Every verse beginning with line 7 contains at least one conjunction: ,. This polysyndeton enhances the effect of accumulating intensity; but it also creates a rhythmical tempo of excitement and mounting tension analogous to the ritualizing effects of dance or drum beat. The one line that has no conjunction, namely line 16, follows directly after the climactic point of "death" (; 15). Now the rhythm slows down, and the poem turns to what seems to have been a more contemplative, quieter mood: ......(17).^[13] Indeed, line 16 opens upon a new dimension of the experience presented in the poem, a shift away from external, physical actions to something internal and mental: . The slowing down of the alliterative and repetitive tempo in 15-16 corresponds to the movement to another plane of experience. Now the closing cadence of the adonic, for the first time in the poem, marks a full stop in sense. Now too for the first time in ten lines a connective is absent.

Catullus was aware of this incantatory effect of Sappho's poem; and he attempted to reproduce it, albeit in a more regular, self-consciously formalized way, through alliteration and repeated sound patterns. His third stanza provides the clearest illustration (51.9-12):

lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinnant aures, gemina teguntur
lumina nocte.

But my tongue falters, a thin flame flows through my limbs. My ears ring with their own humming, my eyes are covered in twofold night.

Here we should note the complex pattern of t and s and is/us sounds in the first line; the m, a, n, u/o , and t patterns in the second line; the verb tintinnant , whose onomatopoeia imitates Sappho's as well as her . Catullus has also exploited rhythmic and assonantal echoes between gemina and lumina in the last two lines and the sequence of t, g , and c in gemina teguntur /nocte . Sappho's patterns are subtler and less

obvious. Closer to a situation of oral and musical performance, she could count on a finer perception of subtle effects. In the case of her poetry, too, the recurrent beat of the musical accompaniment provided in itself a certain measure of incantatory regularity, thus permitting her greater freedom and variation in her sound patterns.

The kind of rhythmical and repetitive pattern noted above is not uncommon in Sappho's verse, despite its fragmentary condition. The fullest parallel occurs in a poem whose chief subject is the peitho of eros, namely 1 L.-P.

This poem in fact uses the ritual form of the hymn, albeit for personal and possibly humorous purposes. As Page observes, "This is not a cult-song, an appeal for epiphany recited with ritual accompaniment on a formal occasion in honor of Aphrodite: yet it is constructed in accordance with the principles of cult-song."^[14] Page sees humor in the triple recurrence of in lines 15, 16, 18.^[15] Yet this repetition is also a prelude (perhaps in a light vein and certainly on a purely private, moral level) to the more solemn, more markedly ritual effect of the love-goddess's own words in the next strophe (21-24):

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For if she runs away, soon will she pursue. If she receives
not girls, soon will she receive them, and if she does
not love, soon will she love, even unwilling.

Aphrodite, appropriately, speaks in language which itself imitates the incantatory, hypnotic effect of love's thelxis . That effect depends on the repetition of the simple sentence structure ("If she flees, soon will she pursue; if she doesn't receive gifts, she will give them; if she doesn't love, soon will she love"). The rhythmical echo between the first and third lines, , almost seems to assure the success of this spell-like promise.^[16]

Other repetitions and alliterations contribute to this effect of incantation: the threefold repetition of , the double repetition of and of ; the analogous repetition (with an etymological play) of (22); the alliteration and rhyme of (at the end of two successive lines, 22-23); the strong d alliteration in

; the triple rhyme of in the first three lines and the brilliant variation upon that in the assonance between the last two lines (23-24). Sappho then follows up this ritualizing mimesis of the magic of desire with an actual ritual form, the hymnic invocation to the goddess, (come to me now also; 25). The ceremonial effect of this latter phrase is especially prominent because it echoes, in a kind of ring composition, the invocation at the beginning of the poem (5): (but come here).

As the enchantment takes effect, Aphrodite herself becomes gentler. The opening prayer, "Subdue me not with pain and anguish" (3), becomes at the end, "Release me from harsh cares" (25-26). The goddess's power to "conquer" (), which is actually exemplified, later, in her promise to make the unwilling girl fall in love (21-24), now shows its benign side, "release" (; 25). The goddess who inflicts the anguish of love can also remove it.

These ceremonial effects of rhythm, repetition, and alliteration are more striking, naturalize in poems that are closer to public statement and to social situations. Hence one finds a noticeably high proportion of such effects in the epithalamia. These poems, even apart from repetition and alliteration, have strongly ritualistic qualities, as a paper by Marcovich has emphasized.^[17] I list the following examples:

 
(104a)^[18]

Evening star who brings all that the bright dawn scattered.
You bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring the child to her mother.

 
(105a)

As the honey-apple reddens in the topmost bough,
on the top of the topmost bough, and the apple pickers have forgotten it,
No, not forgotten it: they could not reach it.

 
(114)

Maidenhood, Maidenhood, where have you gone and left me?
I'll never come back to you, never come back to you.

 
(115)

To what shall I well compare you, bridegroom?
To a slender sapling do I most compare you.

 
(117)

Hail to the bride, to the groom hail.

Fragment 112 exhibits not only verbal repetition in consecutive lines (more marked if we read Fick's attractive in the second line), but also a rapid accumulation of the groom's attractions listed in polysyndeton and with a run-on effect analogous to fragment 31 L.-P.:^[19]

[Full Size]

Happy groom, the marriage, as you prayed, is accomplished,
You hold the girl whom (?) you prayed for ...
Graceful your figure, sweet your eyes, eros
is poured over your face. Aphrodite holds you in honor.

One other fragment deserves citation in this connection, 140a L.-P.:

"Ripe Adonis, Cytherea, dies. What should we do?"
"Beat your breasts, maidens, your garments rend."

This ritual lament for Adonis, the earliest known in European literature, utilizes a heavy alliteration of k and t sounds and the repetition of

in compound verbs at three of the four main rhythmic pauses in the two lines.^[20]

IV

This poetry is meant to be recited or sung and certainly heard. It is therefore subject to the conditions of oral performance. Eric Havelock has called attention to the mimetic qualities of that performance, the close rapport and interaction built up between poet and audience in the act of oral recitation or, as Havelock calls it, "the total act of poetic representation."^[21] Oral recitation of this type relies upon "the manipulation of verbal, musical and bodily rhythms" and exploits "a set of psychosomatic mechanisms for a very definite purpose."^[22] Havelock is speaking of the effect of the continuous recitation of oral poems of some length. Yet something analogous may occur even in shorter poems. Here, of course, the poet has to concentrate and intensify rhythmical patterns which would accumulate more slowly and gradually in the expansive frame of epic.

Correspondingly, the paideutic effect which Havelock thinks results from the audience participation in the recitation of oral epic would not be the same for lyric poetry such as Sappho's. Here too, however, there may be something analogous. The effect of this poetry would be not so much to reinforce social norms as to lift the daimonic power of eros out of the realm of the formless and terrible, bring it into the light of form, make it visible to the individual poet and, by extension, to his or her society. Eros and its

magical "charm" leave the darkness of the purely private, personal sphere. Its power can be recreated by human verbal means and thus raised to the level of public discourse, shared on a social occasion, in a community of friends or lovers, and, in the case of the epithalamian poetry, enlisted in the service of the social institutions that make for continuity and stability (compare, e.g., ft. 31 L.-P. with 112 L.-P.). Perhaps the desire to control and delimit the uncontrollable and the limitless lay at the origin of the impulses to write such poetry.

Here again we need not necessarily exclude the private and subjective element. By evoking the past, calling up its memories (as in frs. 94 and 96 L.-P), making present the deities and myths of love, and recreating its magical force through incantatory patterns of sound and sense, Sappho creates a pharmakon , a "drug" or "charm," to cure the sufferings of love. Already in Hesiod song can allay pain, and in Theocritus poetry is the surest pharmakon for love's agony (Id . 11.1-3).

In the case of Sappho, however, we cannot be sure where to draw the line between the personal and the conventional.^[23] It is not necessarily the unique but the recurrent and universal features of her experience of love that Sappho seeks to present. The formalized patterns of her language may, in fact, have served to link her own emotional life to situations of frequent and repeated occurrence in the culture or subculture to which she belonged. As Merkelbach and others have suggested, Sappho returns repeatedly to the experience of love and loss not only in order to grasp the nature of her own emotions, but to focus and clarify intensely involving situations which the gifts and women of her society would undergo again and again.^[24] The roots of Sappho's poetry, in other words, may lie not just in the intensity of her own erotic experiences (and I see no reason to deny their reality) but also in her capacity to intuit, to live imaginatively, and to recreate poetically the emotional experiences that were of greatest concern to the circle to which she belonged. The formalized language of love, then, not only expresses private emotionality, but constitutes a means of generalizing erotic experience and translating the personal and private into a visible and communicable form. Considered in this perspective, the epiphany of Aphrodite in fragment 1 would not stand so very far, mutatis mutandis , from her appearance to Helen in Iliad 3 or from the epiphany of Athena to Achilles in Iliad 1 or to Odysseus in Odyssey 13.

In an oral culture, as we have suggested earlier, formalized and ritualized patterns are the natural medium for an exchange of this sort. They cast the private and idiosyncratic into the mold of the universal and the generic.

Hence Sappho's reliance upon a fairly stable and well-defined "vocabulary" of erotic motifs and symbols: the wish to die, memory, roses, garlands, perfumes and unguents, the sheltered grove, the moon. What can be dramatically enacted in situations of confrontation can also be shared: it is assimilable to the society's basic form of cultural transmission. In Sappho's own words, one's personal preference for "what one loves" becomes "intelligible to all" (fr. 16).

We need not conceive of Sappho as a group therapist or assume that the therapeutic function of her work played a conscious role in what notion she may have had of her Dichterberuf . The fragments speak of commemoration and oblivion, not of help or advice.^[25] But there is evidence enough from the fragments to indicate that the desire to understand the emotions of love in herself and in others was, consciously or not, a major aim of her poetry. We may compare, for example, the brief fragment cited by the Stoic Chrysippus, "I know not what to do. Double are my thoughts" (noemmata ; fr. 51 L.-P.).

In recreating the brilliance surrounding the great lovers of heroic myth— Helen and Paris, Hector and Andromache, Leda, Adonis, Endymion, Medea^[26] —Sappho found another way to grasp the essence of love. The need to relive her and others' erotic experiences and to set them against these paradigms from the mythical past may be inextricably intertwined with the desire to shape patterns of beautiful sounds. In both cases she calls up the reality of eros as vividly as she can. In a fictional or at least aesthetically distanced situation she can more freely and more reflectively contemplate that god's dark and dangerous domain.

The result, as in the case of Homeric epic, is a conquest of daimonic violence, an absorption of what is chaotic and threatening into the radiant forms of art, an extension of speech, of the logos , over the unspeakable. The powers of magic and incantation, the thelxis of eros, obeying the measured rhythms of the world of art, lose their raw, savage power. In a poem like 1 L.-P. the incantatory element is already a latent metaphor, several stages removed from primitive magic.

The process provides evident relief and release. The elemental force of eros is not in itself diminished, but it now occupies a place in a human world where it loses the edge of its terror. What Havelock says of the paideutic

effect of oral epic poetry can, mutatis mutandis , be applied to the effects of oral lyric:

In performance the co-operation of a whole series of motor reflexes throughout the entire body was enlisted to make memorization and future recall and repetition more effective. These reflexes in turn provided an emotional release of the unconscious layers of personality which could then take over and supply to the conscious mind a great deal of relief. from tension and anxiety, fear and the like . This last constituted the hypnotic pleasure of the performance . Pleasure in the final analysis was exploited as the instrument of cultural continuity.^[27] (emphasis added).

The personal lyric, of course, does not "exploit" the pleasure of emotional release for the same ends. It sufficed to produce a unique aesthetically and emotionally pleasurable experience, for which the archaic sensitivity to and enjoyment of the ritualistic patterns of word, sound, and rhythm singularly prepared the poet's audience. Havelock calls attention to early Greek culture's

automatic relish in life and its naturalistic acceptance of life's varied and manifold moral aspects. The Greeks, we feel, were both controlled in their experience and yet also unfettered and free to an extent that we cannot share. They seem to enjoy themselves. They seem to take natural pleasure in fine shape and sound which we too sometimes recognize as beautiful not only after we have first pulled ourselves up by our own boot straps to an educated level of perception.^[28] (emphasis added).

V

Sappho's artistry lies in her power not only to create and utilize such rhythmico-ritualizing effects but also to move between this public, social form of utterance and quieter, more relaxed, more private moments. The former is rooted in concrete, physical observation and in the mutual participation between poet and hearer in the rapid, tense rhythmical and repetitive tempo; the latter deals in less tangible experiences and the more inward terms of "seeming," imagining, dreaming. Here the staccato rhythm loosens, as in line 16 of fragment 31: One should hardly assume, however, that at such moments the poet has forgotten her audience or is lost to the world in a self-centered revery. Rather, she has merely shifted to another plane of discourse and another mode of communication. The total aesthetic experience produced by such a work as 31 L.-P. results from a coming together of the two levels of communication, the ritual and the private. It is just here, at these points of juncture between the social, outward-facing,

public dimension and techniques of her art and their private, more personal, less ritualistic aspect, that Sappho especially exemplifies her originality and artistry. It is also where she is most difficult for the modern sensibility to grasp.

The very existence of an interplay between one level of style that is close to ritual and public discourse and another that is freer and more private introduces an essential difference between oral epic and oral lyric in the archaic age. This difference, in turn, is analogous to the differences between Homeric and Hesiodic poetry. Hesiod's intrusion of his self-conscious "I" and, like Sappho, of his own name^[29] accompanies a nascent critical attitude. He feels a certain distance, be it ever so slight, from total absorption in the "truth" of his art.^[30] With this distance there comes a complexity which goes beyond and shatters the unity, continuity, and impersonality of the narrative surface in epic.

Oral epic holds the audience's total involvement and forbids looking away from this absorbing world to the actuality of the poet, as person, standing before his audience. The poet of oral epic becomes transparent to his tradition and his technique. With that transparency he holds his hearers spellbound, literally, to the unbroken flow of his "honey-sweet voice" (Il . 1.249; Hes. Theog . 39-97). Hence the disturbing effect of Penelope or Odysseus's weeping at Phemius's and Demodocus's songs (Od . 1.335 ff., 8.83 ff., 521 if.): it breaks the all-absorbing spell of the epic world with the intrusion of present reality and present grief. The poet of oral lyric or of oral didactic poetry or even of oral hymnic poetry (cf. h. Hom. Ap . 169-73) does not lay claim to this degree of impersonality. Hence he can afford to break the continuity of his narrative surface with more than one type of discourse. Yet the techniques of these latter poets can depend also, at least in part, on the poet-audience relationship of the oral performance; and, as in the case of ritualistic elements in Sappho's love poetry, they draw heavily upon at least one aspect of that relationship—the thelxis created by rhythmed beat and sound—for their major effects.

It follows from this line of approach that we need neither accept the notion of a definitive break in mentality between Homeric epic and lyric poetry advocated by Snell and his followers^[31] nor deny the lyric poets their radical innovation in search of new forms of personal expression. As a number of recent works have suggested, the situation is more complicated

than Snell allowed.^[32] The lyric poets did not simply abandon the mentality and the techniques of oral poetry or merely rework the old epic formulas to fit the needs of their pressing drive for personal expression. The new expressiveness of personal emotion interacts with the older public forms and finds its realization both through and against the conventions and the poet-audience relationship of oral recitation. The balance shifts even within a single poem. But the habits of the oral tradition, as one would expect, remain deeply ingrained. They reveal themselves externally in the deliberate echoing of epic phraseology and epic situations;^[33] but they are reflected, at a deeper level, in the poet's reliance upon the auditory, mimetic reflexes created in oral performance, where insistent rhythm still evokes age-old incantation, where patterned sound, tempo, and ceremonial gesture can still work their magic.