Some say a force of horsemen, some say infantry
and others say a fleet of ships is the loveliest
thing on the dark earth, but I say it is
the one you love
It is altogether simple to make this understood
since she whose beauty outmatched all,
Helen, left her husband
a most noble man
And went sailing to Troy
Without a thought for her child and dear parents
[Love] made her completely insane
And led her astray
This reminds me of absent Anaktoria
I would rather watch her lovely walk
and see the shining light of her face
than Lydian chariots followed by
infantrymen in arms
“Solon the Athenian, the son of Eksêkestides, when his nephew sang some song of Sappho at a drinking party, took pleasure in it and asked the young man to teach it to him. When someone asked why he was eager to learn it, he responded: “So, once I learn it, I may die.”
“When you die you will lie there and no one will remember you.
And there will no longing for you later on. You will not receive
Any roses from Pieria. But you will wander unseen through Hades’ home
Flitting away from the dirty corpses.”
Some say a force of horsemen, some say infantry
and others say a fleet of ships is the loveliest
thing on the dark earth, but I say it is
the one you love
It is altogether simple to make this understood
since she whose beauty outmatched all,
Helen, left her husband
a most noble man
And went sailing to Troy
Without a thought for her child and dear parents
[Love] made her completely insane
And led her astray
This reminds me of absent Anaktoria
I would rather watch her lovely walk
and see the shining light of her face
than Lydian chariots followed by
infantrymen in arms
“Solon the Athenian, the son of Eksêkestides, when his nephew sang some song of Sappho at a drinking party, took pleasure in it and asked the young man to teach it to him. When someone asked why he was eager to learn it, he responded: “So, once I learn it, I may die.”
Some say a force of horsemen, some say infantry
and others say a fleet of ships is the loveliest
thing on the dark earth, but I say it is
the one you love
It is altogether simple to make this understood
since she whose beauty outmatched all,
Helen, left her husband
a most noble man
And went sailing to Troy
Without a thought for her child and dear parents
[Love] made her completely insane
And led her astray
This reminds me of absent Anaktoria
I would rather watch her lovely walk
and see the shining light of her face
than Lydian chariots followed by
infantrymen in arms
“Solon the Athenian, the son of Eksêkestides, when his nephew sang some song of Sappho at a drinking party, took pleasure in it and asked the young man to teach it to him. When someone asked why he was eager to learn it, he responded: “So, once I learn it, I may die.”
“When you die you will lie there and no one will remember you.
And there will no longing for you later on. You will not receive
Any roses from Pieria. But you will wander unseen through Hades’ home
Flitting away from the dirty corpses.”
Fragment 1 (Preserved in Dionysus of Halicarnassus’ On Literary Composition 23)
“Immortal Aphrodite in your elaborate throne,
Wile-weaving daughter of Zeus, I beseech you:
Don’t curse my heart with grief and pains
My queen—
But come here, if ever at different time
You heeded me somewhere else because you heard
My pleadings, and once you left the golden home of your father,
You came,
After you yoked your chariot. Then the beautiful, swift
Sparrows ferried you over the dark earth
By churning their wings swiftly down through the middle
Of the sky.
And they arrived quickly. But you, blessed one,
Composed a grin on your immortal face
And were asking what it was I suffered that made me
Call you.
“The things which I most wish would happen for me
In my crazy heart”. “Whom, then, do I persuade to
Return you to their love? O Sappho, who is it who
Hurt you?
For if she flees now, she will soon chase you.
If she refuses gifts, then she will give them too.
If she does not love you now, she will love you soon, even if,
She doesn’t want to.”
Come to me now, too, and free me from
my terrible worries. Whatever things my heart longs
to accomplish, you, achieve them—
be my ally.
Some say a force of horsemen, some say infantry
and others say a fleet of ships is the loveliest
thing on the dark earth, but I say it is
the one you love
It is altogether simple to make this understood
since she whose beauty outmatched all,
Helen, left her husband
a most noble man
And went sailing to Troy
Without a thought for her child and dear parents
[Love] made her completely insane
And led her astray
This reminds me of absent Anactoria
I would rather watch her lovely walk
and see the shining light of her face
than Lydian chariots followed by
infantrymen in arms
“No lover can avoid the catalogue of the charms of his mistress. Petrarch is eloquent in sonnet and canzone on the subject of Laura’s eyes. Shall our mistress lack eyes? Again, your true lover is sublimely indifferent to the fact that the audience is utterly unacquainted with the object of his adoration, and so even after many years of close communion with Greek, I was capable in 1869 of holding forth ecstatically on its physical charms, for I am enough of a heathen to recognize in physical beauty the only true incentive of love. It is the physical beauty of Greek that constitutes its intimate attraction, that redeems, for instance, the tedious obviousnesses of the old man eloquent, and I could still rhapsodize, as I did forty years ago, on the sequences of vowels and the combinations of consonants, the concert of mute and liquid, the clear-cut outline of every word in Greek, clear and sharp as the sky-line of the mountains of Greece, as the effigies on Greek coins. I could still wax lyrical about the paradigm of the Greek verb. The Greek verb is, indeed, a marvel.
‘Flexible and exact, simple in its means, abundant in its applications, with varying tones for colorless statement, for eager wish, for purpose, for command, now despatching the past with impatient haste, now unrolling it in panoramic procession, but bringing forth its treasure of vowels and diphthongs to mark the striving of the will, the thought, the desire, toward the future,’ and so on and so on. Perhaps discourse like this might rouse the curiosity of the student and win here and there a friend for Greek. The teacher can never know whether shall prosper either this or that. I remember to have read in Gogol’s ‘Dead Souls’ a eulogy of Russian that would have Inspired me, if I had been endowed with ample leisure, to attempt the acquisition of that difficult idiom. But I am not quite sure that this unverifiable laudation Is the right way to lend vitality to the study. ‘The king’s daughter is all glorious within.’ But he that is without remains cold as a rule. The love of a language from this point of view is a matter of individual experience, a business to be transacted under four eyes only, and as much of the physical beauty of a language depends on the pronunciation, it may be well to relegate the whole thing to the realm of ‘fancy,’ that admirable old word for love. I will, therefore, waive the whole subject of the perfection of the Greek language, both in Its form and Its function, the wealth of its vocabulary, and the flexibility of its syntax, and limit myself to a few remarks on the relation of Greek to our daily life.”
As part of an in-class, group assignment, I had my Greek Lyric class collaborate on writing a commentary on the new Sappho Poem. The students had to read Obbink 2014 (below), scan the poem, translate it, and then we went through and marked the sections which needed to be commented upon. The students worked in groups to create a commentary geared towards students who primarily know attic Greek. The translation below the commentary is mine. We welcome suggestions and additions.
h/t to Armand D’Angour for some improvements to the commentary
Commentary
1. Ἄϊ: take as ἀεί, “always”, while scanning the meter is
read as short-long
Θρύληϲθα: θρυλεω- to blabber or chat incessantly. 2nd, singular, preset, middle,
indicative of θρύλημι, the Aeolic form of θρυλέω.
Χάραξον: Sappho’s brother, referenced by both Herodotus and Posidippus, inclusion
of this name aided in the identification of this poem
ἔλθην: Aeolic aorist infinitive of ἒρχομαι
2. Ϲὺµ: Aeolic form of συν, compare with Latin cum
Πλέαι: adjective, ship full, to not be confused with πλέω (“to sail”)
τὰ µέν̣…ϲὲ δ’: correlative structure; τὰ µέν pronomial use
οἶδε: 3rd singularindicative active of the verb οἶδα, to know
5. Πέµπην: infinitive used as imperative
Κέλ{η}`ε΄ϲθαι: from κέλομαι ; infinitive used as imperative
7. Τυίδε: Aeolic for τῇδε
Ϲάαν: alternative form of adjective “σως”; contract for σόος, σοῦς
8. Νᾶα: aeolic form for accusative singular of ship “ναῦς”
9. κἄµµ’:και + ἄμμε, Aeolic form of Attic ἣμιν
ἐπεύρην: Aeolic aorist infinitive of ἐφευρίσκω
10. Ἐπι̣τ̣ρόπωµεν: hortatory subjunctive
11. µεγάλαν ἀήτα̣ν̣: Aeolic genitive plural form, large gales (of wind). Final syllables
should be scanned as a long
12. πέ̣λ̣ο̣νται: 3rd, plural, present, middle, indicative from πέ̣λ̣ω, an Aeolic equivalent
to εἰμί and γίγνομαι
13. Τῶν κε: genitive used substantively, i.e. “of whomever”; correlative with the κῆνοι in line 15. Obbink (2014) takes it as a relative pronoun used as a genitive of possession.
Βόλληται- Aeolic form of the Attic Βούληται
Ὀλύμπω: genitive, singular, masculine; alternate genitive ending where the -οιο
ending in the uncontracted Ὀλύμποιο is shorted to -ω instead of -ου.
14. Ἐπάρ{η}’ω’γον: a later correction of the manuscript reading of “ἐπάρηγον,” an
unaugmented 1st singular or 3rd plural imperfect form from ἐπάρηγω, to “ἐπάρωγον,”a noun in this context used as a predicate accusative meaning “as a helper.”
17. Κ̣ἄµµεϲ: Aeolic for Attic ἡμεῖς. κἄµµεϲ: Aeolic for καὶ ἡμεῖς (with crasis i.e. stuck together like κἄµµ’ in line 9).
17. αἴ κε: general clause; the protasis is a future more vivid, while the apodosis is a
future less vivid, resulting in a “future more or less vivid”; modal particle in the
apodosis denotes a hyper-unreal situation
17-20. Ἀέργη corrected to ἀέρρη as the former is not attested. ἀέρρη = αἴρῃ ‘raises’ (pres. subj. of the Aeolic equivalent) third person singular, present subjunctive active. Double-rho form appears in Sappho,
fr. 111.3: ἀέρρετε τέκτονες ἄνδρες·
Translation
“But you are always saying that Kharaksos
Is coming with a full ship. These things, I think,
Zeus knows along with the rest of the gods. But it is not right
That you consider them.
Instead, both send me and order me
To plead much with queen Hera
That Kharaksos comes here
Leading a safe ship
And finds us all safe. Let’s entrust the rest of it
To the gods. For days of fair weather
Come quickly from
Great gales.
For whomever the king of Olympos
Wishes to set a god as a helper from toils,
Those people are blessed
And very wealthy.
And we, if Larikos should ever raise his head
And then in some way become a man,
We would be quickly relieved of our
Great heaviness of heart.”
Bibliography
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Bierl, Anton, and André Lardinois. The newest Sappho. P. Sapph. Obbink and P. GC inv. 105, frs. 1-4. Vol. 392. Brill, 2016.
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“When you die you will lie there and no one will remember you.
And there will no longing for you later on. You will not receive
Any roses from Pieria. But you will wander unseen through Hades’ home
Flitting away from the dirty corpses.”
Kypris and Nereids—let my brother
come here unharmed and grant
Everything he wishes to have happen
In his heart
May he make up for all the things he did wrong before
And become a source of joy for his friends
And grief for his enemies, and may he no longer
Be a pain for us.
