The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Sappho · a body of lyric poems as it survives · the poems and fragments in Voigt’s edition (1971) and numbering, with the Cologne papyrus published in 2004 and the papyri published in 2014 · Lesbos, active about 630 to 570 BC · in Sappho’s Aeolic Greek, read from knowledge with Carson’s facing Greek and Campbell’s Loeb for sense; Greek quoted only where its words are certain, in transliteration, with the desk’s own close English beneath
Mode
Monody: the single voice in song, as hymn, symptom poem, consolation, narrative and wedding song
Mythos
Aphrodite’s descent; Helen, who left the best of men; the Trojan wedding of Hector and Andromache; Tithonus, given immortality without youth; Eros the limb loosener
Phase
Lesbos in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BC; a body arranged by the Alexandrian scholars in nine books, lost, and returned by quotation and by papyrus
Presentation
Lyric in the Aeolic dialect; the Sapphic stanza of three hendecasyllables and an adonic, among other metres; one poem complete, of 28 lines
Register
From a cult hymn with the goddess’s own speech inside it to a body watched failing, a priamel that argues, a simile that forgets its occasion, an invective and a jest about a doorkeeper’s feet
Scale
One voice, one island and its circle of women; Troy and Lydia across the sea; the gods above and the dead below
Governing Proposition
The poems of a woman of Lesbos, sung in the first person to a goddess, to a circle of young women, to brides and to absent friends, survive in one complete hymn, one poem nearly whole, a few substantial pieces and many scraps. The wager of the body is that desire is a condition the self can watch while it takes the self apart, that whatever one loves is the most beautiful thing on the black earth, and that the epic’s means can be turned to say so.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“poikilothron’ athanat’ Aphrodita”
“immortal Aphrodite of the intricate throne.” The one poem of Sappho that survives complete begins with a compound, a name and an epithet, in the dialect of Lesbos. It runs to seven stanzas, twenty-eight lines, and it survives because the critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus copied it out whole in his treatise On Composition as the model of smooth composition. A poet arranged by the scholars of Alexandria in nine books comes down, in her one entire poem, as a teacher’s example.
The second poem kept by quotation came the same way. The treatise On the Sublime set out fragment 31 in its tenth chapter to show how a writer reaches height by choosing particulars and joining them. No manuscript of the nine books reached the medieval copyists. Everything else came out of the ground: papyri recovered from the rubbish heaps of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt from the 1890s onward, the Cologne papyrus published in 2004 with the Tithonus poem nearly whole, and the papyri published in 2014 with the Brothers poem and the Kypris poem. The latest of the body’s returns belong to this century.
This page weighs that body as it is now read and edited: the poems and fragments in Voigt’s edition and numbering, with the papyri of 2004 and 2014, and the fragments quoted by ancient authors; not the testimonia about her life, and not the lost books, which cannot be scored. Their loss is weighed once, as loss. Nor is the ruin credited: the beauty of the bracket and the white page belongs to modern presentation, not to her form. One doubtful item, the poem of midnight known as fragment 168b, has a disputed ascription and is not weighed. Where only scraps survive, nothing is filled in from her name.
Movement II
The hymn is a prayer, and it takes the form of the prayers in Homer: the speaker calls the goddess and reminds her of help given before. But the help was given in a love affair. The speaker remembers how Aphrodite once came down to her in a chariot drawn by sparrows: a full epiphany, told as a remembered scene. The goddess’s own speech stands inside the remembered scene, and in it the word that carries the poem: “dēute”
“again.” She has been called before; she will be called again.
Then the promise: “ai pheugei, tacheōs diōxei”
“if she flees, soon she will pursue.” The goddess speaks of the pattern, and the poem lets her be gently amused at the lover who summons her. What the poem knows is that desire recurs and is known as recurrence, by the one who suffers it and by the power that sends it. The speaker is not deceived about herself, and she prays anyway.
The form is the knowledge. A present plea frames a remembered epiphany, inside which the goddess names a past pattern and predicts its return: three tenses folded into one prayer, so that the poem enacts the recurrence it discloses. The stanza carries it: three long lines and then the adonic, a short fall like a caught breath, with the sense running over the ends of lines and stanzas and coming to rest on the short line when the thought does. Whether the poem is ironic about its speaker is still argued; the question has not closed in twenty-six centuries.
Movement III
“phainetai moi kēnos isos theoisin / emmen’ ōnēr”
“he seems to me equal to the gods, that man.” Fragment 31 opens on a man, and on a girl whose laughter the speaker watches. What he is doing in the poem has never been settled. The poem is about the one who watches.
What follows is a list of symptoms, and each is required: the tongue broken, a thin fire running under the skin, the eyes seeing nothing, the ears roaring, sweat, trembling, and last “chlōrotera de poias / emmi”
“greener than grass I am,” each step further from speech and nearer death. The epic describes a warrior’s fear in such terms; here they are applied to a woman watching a girl laugh. The lover is the observer of her own failing body, and the syntax fails with it, from a sentence of observation to a run of short clauses. The poem discloses a split in the self that no earlier Greek poem had given in the first person.
Then the turn: “alla pan tolmaton”
“but all must be endured,” and there the poem breaks off, four stanzas and the first line of a fifth. Its first readers chose it for their own reasons and kept it alive. The author of On the Sublime set it out as the example of particulars chosen and joined into height. Catullus translated it into Latin, as his poem 51, and added a stanza of his own. Through both it was read without break while the books were lost.
Movement IV
Fragment 16 begins with what others hold most beautiful on the black earth: some say a host of cavalry, some of infantry, some of ships. Sappho says it is “ottō tis eratai”
“whatever one loves.” The epic’s order of goods is named and set below the thing desired, and the proof is the epic’s own cause: Helen, who left the best of men. Recast, she is a woman who chose. The argument turns at the end to Anaktoria, who is absent: the thing loved, here, is a person not present.
Troy appears again in fragment 44, in another metre and another key: the wedding of Hector and Andromache, the bride brought by ship to the city, the women of Troy and the paean sung, a public ceremony told as narrative while the reader knows how it ends. Fragment 96 reaches across the sea the other way. A friend has gone to Lydia, and now she outshines the women there as the “brododaktylos selanna”
“rosy-fingered moon” outshines the stars; and the simile spreads into the dew, the roses and the flowering clover until it has forgotten its occasion.
Fragment 94 gives parting itself, and the dreadful with it: “tethnakēn d’ adolōs thelō”
“I honestly wish to be dead.” Against the grief the poem sets memory, a consolation that is also a wound, as fragment 96 does. Fragment 2 opens a precinct of apple boughs and roses, where trance comes down from the shaking leaves. Fragment 55 turns the same law into invective: the woman with no share in the roses of Pieria will go unremembered among the dead. What is loved and remembered lasts; what is not passes.
Movement V
Eros is a wind falling on oaks on a mountain, shaking the mind. In fragment 130 he comes again, “lysimelēs”
“limb-loosening,” and in one word “glykypikron”
“sweetbitter,” a compound on which a modern poet and critic built a whole book. The particulars of the wedding songs become archetypes while staying particular. In fragment 105a the sweet apple reddens “akron ep’ akrotatōi”
“high on the highest” bough, which the pickers forgot; and the poem corrects itself: not forgot, could not reach. In fragment 105c the hyacinth is trodden under the shepherds’ feet.
The same songs jest: in fragment 110 the doorkeeper has huge feet. The body runs from cult hymn to that joke, and it holds a family: brothers, the poems on Charaxos, the daughter Kleis, the mother. It holds Hera, and the rites of marriage, and the circle of young women with its partings and marriages. What it no longer does is hold these in one structure. The books that ordered them were the editors’, and they are gone.
Fragment 58, read nearly whole only since the Cologne papyrus reopened its text, ends the body as it now stands on age. In about twelve lines it sets beside the speaker Tithonus, who was given immortality without youth, and the myth carries the poem’s acceptance. Ageing is the human lot, and it is accepted. The most recent of her poems to be recovered is the one in which she grows old.
Act III · The Twelve
Within the poems that survive whole or nearly whole, the subtractive test finds almost nothing to remove. The poem of the man “equal to the gods” is a list of symptoms in which each item is required: the tongue, the thin fire under the skin, the eyes that see nothing, the roaring ears, sweat, trembling, and last “chlōrotera de poias / emmi”
“greener than grass I am”, each step further from speech and nearer death. The hymn to Aphrodite needs every stanza: invocation, remembered descent, the goddess’s speech, the present plea. The priamel of fragment 16 has no idle member. What holds the axis here: necessity can be shown for perhaps a dozen poems, and across most of the body the question cannot be asked.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds. Desire is a condition which takes the self apart from within and can be watched while it does so: fragment 31 gives the lover as observer of her own failing body, a split no earlier Greek poem articulates in the first person. Value is argued: the most beautiful thing on the black earth is “ottō tis eratai”
“whatever one loves”, set against the epic order of goods and proved by Helen. Desire is known as recurrence, in the goddess’s “dēute”
“again”. Memory is consolation and wound at once, and in the Tithonus poem age is accepted as the human lot. Held below the top because the body is too broken to show these meanings worked across whole books.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Height is reached often for so small a remnant. Fragment 31 is the passage the treatise On the Sublime chose to illustrate sublimity in the choice and joining of particulars (chapter 10). Fragment 2 opens a precinct of apple boughs and roses where trance comes down from the shaking leaves. In fragment 96 the absent friend outshines the women of Lydia as the “brododaktylos selanna”
“rosy-fingered moon” outshines the stars, and the simile spreads into dew, roses and flowering clover. Eros shakes the mind like a wind falling on mountain oaks; the apple reddens “akron ep’ akrotatōi”
“high on the highest”. The dreadful too: “tethnakēn d’ adolōs thelō”
“I honestly wish to be dead”. Held below the top for frequency across a body that is largely scraps.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Myth is built, not merely evoked, in four places. In the hymn to Aphrodite the goddess’s descent in a chariot drawn by sparrows is a full epiphany, a remembered scene with her own speech inside it: the poem is a myth of the lover’s relation to her own desire. In fragment 16 Helen is load-bearing; the argument cannot stand without her. Fragment 44 narrates the wedding of Hector and Andromache, with the reader knowing the end. In fragment 58 Tithonus carries the acceptance of age. Particulars become archetypes while staying particular: the apple out of reach, the hyacinth trodden by shepherds, Eros “glykypikron”
“sweetbitter”. Held a step down because the myth is mostly exemplum in the archaic manner rather than the structure of a large work.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is epic: hexameter narrative, its formulae, its scale of value in armies, ships and glory. Sappho turns its means to the single voice and its ends upside down. The hymn takes the form of a Homeric prayer, with its appeal to help given before, and gives it to a lover gently mocked by the goddess she summons. Fragment 16 names the epic goods and sets them below whatever one loves, with the Iliad’s own cause, Helen, recast as a woman who chose. Fragment 31 describes the body as epic describes a warrior’s fear, and applies it to watching a girl laugh. The stake was real: a woman’s first-person voice, on desire between women, in a public tradition of male song. Held below the top because Archilochus had already set the first person against epic, and Alcaeus, on the same island, worked the same forms.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. In the hymn the time-structure is the meaning: a present plea frames a remembered epiphany, inside which the goddess names a past pattern and predicts its return, so that the poem enacts the recurrence it discloses, three tenses folded into one prayer. In fragment 31 the movement from a sentence of observation to a run of short clauses is the body failing; that the stanza of the broken tongue is also the most broken in transmission is an accident and is not credited. The adonic, a short fall after three long lines, closes each stanza like a caught breath, and fragment 16’s priamel makes its argument by its order. Held off the top because the form of most of the body, and the shape of the books, cannot now be judged.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The evidence is two and a half millennia of return. Ancient critics came back to the same poems for different reasons: Dionysius of Halicarnassus chose the hymn as the model of smooth composition, On the Sublime fragment 31 as the model of selection, and Catullus translated fragment 31 (poem 51) and added a stanza of his own. Modern reading keeps finding new questions in the same lines: whether the poems were sung solo or by choruses, and to whom; what the man “isos theoisin”
“equal to the gods” is doing in the poem; whether the hymn is ironic about its speaker; how fragment 16 argues. New papyri have reopened settled readings, and Anne Carson built a book of criticism, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), on one compound. Charged: part of the yield is projection into the gaps and into the life.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is Greek poetry of the late seventh and early sixth centuries BC: Homeric and Hesiodic hexameter, the iambus and elegy of Archilochus and Tyrtaeus, Alcman’s choral song, and the Lesbian monody shared with Alcaeus. The intrinsic force is high: the poems make erotic first-person lyric a form capable of thought, and with Alcaeus fix the stanza that bears her name. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: she was counted among the nine lyric poets of the Alexandrian canon; Catullus 51 and Horace’s Sapphic odes, among them Odes 1.22 and the Carmen Saeculare, carried the stanza into Latin, where it became a hymn metre of the Church in “Ut queant laxis”, source of the sol-fa syllables; it passed into the vernaculars, Swinburne’s “Sapphics” among them; Leopardi, Baudelaire, H.D., Pound and Carson wrote from her; and her name and island gave modern languages their words for love between women. Discounted: much of the medieval reach ran through Latin, not her text.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Some twenty-six centuries, so the step begins high. Form is the heavy charge: the nine books are gone, one poem survives entire, under a tenth of the body is extant on any estimate, and much of that is scraps of a word or a line; the defining form, a body of sung poems arranged in books, is legible only in a few poems and in the metres. Presence partly offsets it: her name and standing never lapsed, and the hymn and fragment 31 were read continuously through the critics who quoted them and through Catullus; but most of what is now read went unread from late antiquity to the twentieth century. Fabric, papyrus scraps, is the smallest charge. The charge on form takes the figure to the foot of the band for a fragmentary text of millennia.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of the medium is at the highest level in every poem that survives whole enough to judge. The diction is plain and exact, with compounds that carry a poem: “poikilothron’ athanat’ Aphrodita”
“immortal Aphrodite of the intricate throne” (one tradition reads “of the intricate mind”), and Eros “lysimelēs”
“limb-loosening”. The handling of the stanza is supple: sense runs over line and stanza ends in the hymn and in fragment 31 and comes to rest on the adonic when the thought does. Fragment 31’s construction, observation, symptom, extremity, then “alla pan tolmaton”
“but all must be endured” as the turn, is the making carrying the meaning. The range runs from hymn and symptom poem to the narrative of fragment 44 and the jesting wedding songs. The lost music is neither charged nor credited.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the public, ceremonial narrative of fragment 44, with Hector’s bride arriving by sea to the city’s music, and the private interior of fragment 31, one woman’s body watched by herself. One law governs them: beauty and desire as the measure by which persons and events are known, under the goddess whose power the poems both serve and suffer. The same law holds the invective of fragment 55, where the woman without share in the roses of Pieria goes unremembered among the dead, the consolations of memory in fragments 94 and 96, and the acceptance of age in fragment 58: what is loved and remembered lasts. Held lower because coherence across a body this broken can be shown only between a dozen poems, and the order of the books was the editors’, not hers.
Score: 8.6 / 10
A lyric body is not punished for brevity, and what it encompasses is weighed as it is. Consciousness is held at the highest level, in the hymn, in fragment 31 and in fragment 94. The family: the brothers of the Brothers poem and the poems on Charaxos, the daughter Kleis, the mother. The community: the circle of young women, their partings and marriages. The sacred: Aphrodite, Hera, the rites of marriage. The natural order: moon and stars, the orchard, the hyacinth and the apple. History: Troy, in fragments 16 and 44. Some single poems hold several orders at once, as fragment 96 holds absence, memory, a foreign city and the night. What holds it lowest of the twelve: labour is all but absent, the city’s strife barely shown, and the body does not hold its orders in one structure; much is now listed rather than integrated.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, with The Unconcealment, The Sublime, The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 9.0. A making at the highest level wherever a poem survives whole enough to judge; a stanza and a first-person erotic lyric carried through Latin into the vernaculars for two and a half millennia; a disclosure of desire as a condition the self can watch and of value as whatever one loves; and height reached often in a body so reduced.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6, held because labour is all but absent, the city’s strife barely shown, and a broken body cannot hold its orders in one structure. Then The Inevitable, The Archetypal Deep and The Inner Law at 8.6: necessity and coherence can be shown in about a dozen poems only, and the myth is mostly exemplum in the archaic manner.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.3, The Living Form at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Imperishable at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.6, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone. The twelve sum to 105.5, an average of 8.792 that displays 8.8, short of the 107.4 that would display 9.0; what holds the aggregate down is The Encompassed, and what the ruin leaves undemonstrable under The Inevitable and The Inner Law.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the poems of Sappho of Lesbos in the Aeolic Greek in which they survive, scored as the body as it is now read and edited: the poems and fragments in Eva-Maria Voigt’s edition (1971), whose numbering the page uses, with the Cologne papyrus published in 2004 (the Tithonus poem, fragment 58) and the papyri published in 2014 (the Brothers and Kypris poems). Fragments transmitted by quotation in ancient authors belong to the body; the testimonia about her life do not. The lost nine-book Alexandrian edition is not the unit: its loss is charged once, under The Imperishable, and no other axis charges a gap as a fault of the making or credits the ruin as form. Fragment 168b, the poem of midnight, has a disputed ascription and is not weighed. The poems weighed most are fragments 1, 2, 16, 31, 44, 47, 55, 58, 94, 96, 105a, 105c and 130, and the Brothers poem; the many small book fragments are not argued from. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Sappho’s Greek. Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter (2002), with the Greek facing and closest to the state of the text, was read for the body in English; David Campbell’s Loeb Greek Lyric I (1982) for sense; M. L. West’s Oxford version for comparison. No published translation is quoted, and none is charged or credited to the work: Greek is quoted only where its words are certain, transliterated, with the desk’s own close English beneath. The melodies are lost to every reader, and the metre is judged only as a modern reader of Aeolic can scan it; neither is charged to the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the reported length of the first book, the count of surviving lines, the full range of the metres, the provenance of the 2014 papyri, the material in which the Cologne text was found and the political allusion read in fragment 98, are not given.