The loss of Sappho’s
body of work is mourned by every classicist and a few others besides. Many other works were lost as well; however, Sappho
was heavily quoted and well known in the Roman Greek world and simply should
never have been lost. One wonders just
what else went as well.
Thus this discovery
is wonderful because it possible to really glimpse her oeuvre through it. After all Keats is remembered best for two
odes. It was still a horrible loss. Imagine having only two of Shakespeare’s odes
to evaluate his impact of English.
Perhaps
somewhere in the desert we will round up much more. Collectors will buy up chance discoveries and
who knows what can emerge.
Lost poems of
Greek poetess Sappho found
Lost poems of Greek poetess Sappho found Posted by TANNAncient, ArchaeoHeritage, Archaeology, Breakingnews, Egypt, Europe, Greece, Southern Europe 7:00 PM Only a few poems of the Greek poetess Sappho’s work have survived but thanks to a leading scholar’s investigation two new works have just been recovered—and gives experts hope to find more. One of the recently discovered poems by Sappho
A chance inquiry by an unidentified collector has
led to a spectacular literary discovery: Parts of two previously unknown poems
by Sappho, the great Greek poetess of the 7th Century B.C.
One of the poems is remarkably well preserved and
adds greatly to what is known about Sappho and her poetic technique. The two
poems came to light when the owner of an ancient papyrus, dating to the 3rd
century A.D., consulted an Oxford classicist, Dirk Obbink, about the Greek writing
on the tattered scrap. Dr. Obbink, a MacArthur fellow and world-renowned
papyrologist, quickly realized the importance of what the papyrus contained and
asked its owner for permission to publish it. His article, which includes a
transcription of the fragmentary poems, will appear in a scholarly journal this
spring, but an on-line version has already been released.
Despite Sappho’s fame in antiquity and huge literary
output, only one complete poem of hers survives today, along with substantial
portions of four others. One of those four was substantially recovered only in
2004, also from a scrap of papyrus. Dr. Obbink’s new find adds a precious sixth
poem to the body of Sappho’s surviving work and inspires hope that more such
recoveries lie ahead. “The new Sappho is absolutely breath-taking,” said Albert
Henrichs, a Harvard classics professor who examined the papyrus with Dr.
Obbink. “It is the best preserved Sappho papyrus in existence, with just a few
letters that had to be restored in the first poem, and not a single word that
is in doubt. Its content is equally exciting.”
One of the two recovered poems, Prof. Henrichs
notes, speaks of a “Charaxos” and a “Larichos,” the names assigned by ancient
sources to two of Sappho’s brothers but never before found in Sappho’s own
writings. It has as a result been labeled the Brothers poem by Prof. Obbink.
“There will be endless discussion about Charaxos and Larichos, who may or may
not be Sappho’s brothers,” Prof. Henrichs commented. One important point in
that debate will be the Brothers poem’s clear implication that Charaxos was a
sea-going trader. The historian Herodotus, writing about two centuries after
Sappho, also describes Charaxos as a wayfarer—a man who traveled to Egypt,
where he spent a fortune to buy the freedom of Rhodopis, a beautiful slave he
had fallen in love with. Upon his return home, Herodotus relates, Sappho
brutally mocked her brother’s lovestruck folly in one of her poems.
The Brothers poem contains no such mockery, but
rather depicts an exchange between two people concerned about the success of
Charaxos’ latest sea voyage. The speaker—perhaps Sappho herself, but the loss
of the poem’s initial lines makes this unclear—advises that a prayer to Hera
would be the best way to ensure this success, and expounds on the power of the
gods to aid their favorites.
The poem’s final stanza speaks of Larichos,
presumably Sappho’s younger brother, “becoming a man…and freeing us [Sappho’s
family?] from much heartache.” A horizontal line on the papyrus indicates the
end of the Brothers poem and the beginning of the next, an address to the
goddess Aphrodite. Only scattered words from this second poem can be recovered
from the papyrus, which grows more tattered and illegible toward the bottom. To
judge by what is known of Sappho’s poetry generally, this poem may have taken
the form of a request that Aphrodite aid Sappho in the pursuit of a beloved,
whether male or female.
The two poems share a common meter, the so-called
Sapphic stanza, a verse form perhaps devised by Sappho and today bearing her
name. Both belonged therefore to the first of Sappho’s nine books of poetry,
and their recovery gives a clearer glimpse than scholars have ever had into the
makeup and structure of that book.
“All the poems of Sappho’s first book seem to have
been about family, biography, and cult, together with poems about
love/Aphrodite,” Dr. Obbink writes, adding that the two thematic groups may
have alternated throughout the book as they do on the papyrus. Sappho wrote in
a dialect of Greek called Aeolic, significantly different in sound and
spellings than the Attic Greek that later became standard.
The papyrus in fact contains a few markings where a
scribe, judging that Aeolic Greek might be unfamiliar to readers, made cues for
correct pronunciation. It also bears the marks of an ancient tear and a patch
job—a place where, after some rough handling, the original scroll was spliced
back together with a pasted-on papyrus strip. The handwriting on the papyrus
allowed Dr. Obbink to establish its date as late 2nd or 3rd century A.D.,
almost a millennium after Sappho first wrote.
It was not long after this time that texts written
in Aeolic and other non-standard dialects began to die out in the Greek world,
as the attention of educators and copyists focused increasingly on Attic
writers. Sappho, along with many other authors, became a casualty of the
narrowing Greek school curriculum in late antiquity and the even greater
selectivity of the Middle Ages when papyrus scrolls were recopied into books.
Works that became extinct in this narrowing process
can still be recovered, however, from scraps of papyrus that predate its onset.
Egypt, home to a large Greek-speaking population in antiquity, has been the
source of most of these papyri, since in its dry climate even plant-based
materials can survive intact. An Egyptian town called Oxyrynchus, where
thousands of papyri have been recovered from an ancient trash dump, has
furnished fragments of many formerly extinct texts, and Dr. Obbink, the head of
Oxford University’s Oxyrynchus Papyrus Project, has often played a lead role in
deciphering and publishing their contents.
The new Sappho papyrus probably came from Egypt and
perhaps from Oxyrynchus, but its provenance may never be known. A thriving
black market for papyri means that many of them emerge not from archaeological
digs but from souks, bazaars and antiquities shops. Other important literary
texts are no doubt lurking in these places, awaiting some lucky turn of events
like that which brought the Brothers poem before an expert’s eyes.
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