Deux poèmes inédits de Sappho

Par DIRK OBBINK

An “Oxford secret” is supposed to be a secret you tell one person at a time. Add social media and it’s across the world within hours, often in garbled form. In this case, the “secret” was the discovery on a fragment of papyrus of two new poems by the seventh-century BC Greek poetess, Sappho. The first concerns her brothers, “The Brothers Poem” for short. The second, “The Kypris Poem”, is about unrequited love and addressed to Aphrodite (by her other name, “Kypris”). The full evidence will be presented in an article in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik (2014), and I am grateful to the editors Jürgen Hammerstaedt and Rudolf Kassel for permission to publish some preliminary facts here, and to raise some key questions: why is the discovery important, what do the poems tell us about Sappho, and how do we know they are genuine?

One important implication does not concern Sappho at all – but vindicates the historian Herodotus, who mentions a poem in which she criticized her brother Charaxos or his mistress. A trader in Lesbian wines, he conceived a passion for a notorious courtesan then a slave in Egypt, and ransomed her at a great price, at which Sappho gave vent to her indignation in a song. Although Herodotus’ account is retold by several later authors, the very existence of Charaxos in Sappho’s poetry has been doubted by many scholars. In “The Brothers Poem” (below) a speaker addresses someone, criticizing this person for always chattering about “Charaxos” coming with a full ship, instead of leaving such things to the gods; and it closes by wishing that Larichos (whom we know from elsewhere as a brother of Sappho) might grow up to be a man, and so bring joy in place of sorrow.

The identity of the addressee who chatters incessantly “Charaxos came” (or perhaps “comes”, or “may come”) is unknown, since the text as we have it begins at least a stanza or two into the poem. But it gives us a firm attestation for Charaxos (even though not explicitly called “brother”), and strongly suggests that Herodotus did in fact draw on earlier poetry for his historical evidence. It also gives a glimpse into Sappho’s family drama under the boom-or-bust economic conditions of international trade in the “Archaic Age” and the pressures of inheritance, marriage and class.

But how does the poem fit into Sappho’s known work? What we seem to have is, like others in her oeuvre, a prayer (for the safe return of the merchant-gone-to-sea) embedded in a song. It suggests performance on some ritual occasion. Here a prayer for the safe return expands to envisage what such a return would mean for the family. And there may be literary, Homeric, echoes too: Charaxos might be seen as an Odysseus figure (with Larichos as a potential Telemachos) in a family drama with epic overtones; if so, then Sappho herself evokes the figure of Penelope.

Yet some critics have already been unimpressed with its poetic quality. Martin West, for example, commented that “The poem is not one of her most poignant: as I see it, we have a young Sappho, perhaps still a teenager, addressing her mother and worried about their domestic circumstances”; others have cautiously concluded that it is not her best poem. Is this fair?

Probably not. So far from frigid juvenilia, the verses show an ear for balancing and texture, the pulse of rhythm, graceful shaping of words, and an atmospheric ending to a poem. Echoes of “The Brothers Poem” in Latin poets certainly suggest that they found it memorable: Ovid has Sappho say that she “advised” her brother “extensively” with good intentions, freely, but with pious speech (hoc mihi libertas, hoc pia lingua dedit). This looks like the frank speech (verging on the colloquial in “chattering”) of “The Brothers Poem”, combined with its pious hymnic discourse. So far from jejune, its proverbial wisdom was thought worthy of adaptation (as Gregory Hutchinson points out) in Horace’s “Soracte Ode”:

permitte diuis cetera, qui simul 
strauere uentos aequore feruido
deproeliantes, nec cupressi
nec ueteres agitantur orni.

(Leave everything else to the gods, who in a moment still the winds when they do battle on the raging sea, and neither the cypresses nor the old ash trees are blown around.)

What might seem like cliché or conventional wisdom in the central section of “The Brothers Poem” has expressive point in its mere assertion, just as gnomic statements in Pindar or at the end of a Greek tragedy do. Here they form part of the articulation of a lyric narrative, one that shifts almost imperceptibly from the envisaged distress that sparks the prayer to the envisaged happiness that comes with the prayer’s fulfilment. The desired good becomes more specific or personal in the end, and may (as often in Sappho’s poems) include or imply marriage. Many will find the last two stanzas, in particular the last two lines, especially moving, with their sisterly exhortation to Larichos to go and play a Telemachos-like role and show himself “a man”, while the heavy and rare word βαρυθυμία – “weightiness of spirit”, “depression”, raising the stylistic level, correlates with the devastating erotic love we find elsewhere in Sappho. Here she is the devoted sister, worrying about her younger brother, as in other poems she does about girls, one of whom (after all), if he lifts his head, Larichos will grow up to marry. In another she is the mother of “darling Kleis, my beautiful child who looks like golden flowers”, who is worth more to her than all Lydia.

“The Kypris Poem” that follows in the new papyrus is less well preserved and in various places harder to reconstruct. But it returns to the subject of erotic love, filling out into near-complete verses what were previously only a few letters per line in another papyrus (“Frag. 26”), and showing where previous reconstructions went wrong:

“How could one indeed not repeatedly feel
anguish
Queen Kypris, over whomever one really
wanted to make one’s own?”

This powerful opening invocation parallels the recurrent onslaught of unrequited desire dramatized by the appeal to the goddess in Sappho’s famous “Hymn to Aphrodite” (“Frag. 1”), and it makes the indefinite object of desire its defining focus, as in the “what one loves” of “Frag. 16” (“Some say a troop of horses . . . is the finest thing on earth, but I say it is what one loves”).