types of choral song, she asks how these contribute to audience reception by bringing with them generic expectations.
Thus new research has turned the microscope on the social and historical background of choral lyric (Kowalzig), the tiered structure of performance (Lozynski), and the reception of lyric genres in Attic tragedy (Swift). Turning now to some new or less well-known texts we may begin with the magnificent new series of Sapphic fragments which have come to light, even if partly under questionable circumstances.27 The poems which have been rediscovered are not purely religious but they contain religion, and this, after all, is typical of much of cult lyric: the poems often contain a religious element, vital to the composition of the whole, and yet not dominating it.
New Discoveries of Sappho
The so-called “Old Age Poem” shows the poet lamenting her old age, although there is no overt indication that the subject is a female, like Sappho herself.28 One could read it as a general indictment of old age. The poem opens on a religious, if conventional, note: the children (probably a fictional girl chorus) are to “employ the fine gifts of the violet-bosomed Muses and the fine-voiced tortoise-shell which loves song.”29 Note that the “song-loving tortoise-shell” evokes a well-known myth here: how Hermes found the “original” tortoise, eviscerated it, and turned its shell into an instrument which “loved song.”30 The opening has evoked both the Muses with a particularly feminine epithet (ἰοκόλπων), and Hermes who turned the tortoise to music. Then the poem progresses, listing the unwelcome attributes of advancing age: wrinkled skin, stiff joints, gray hair, depression. All these things, the text says, “I lament much. But what can I do?” (τὰ ‹μὲν› στεναχίσδω θαμέως· ἀλλὰ τί κεν ποείην;). A gnōmē follows, then the poem suddenly plunges into myth: “they say Dawn of the rosy arms, <overcome> by Love, carried Tithonus off to the ends of the earth, since he was beautiful and young, but nevertheless grey old age overcame him in time, he who was married to an immortal wife.” Is myth religion? Intuitively we will probably say yes.31 The second but last word indicates that a religious dimension is implied: Tithonos aged like a mortal; but his wife and captor, Eos, was immortal. Hence the whole poem suddenly acquires a religious dimension. Everything Sappho has said about advancing old age should be set in relation to immortality. It is not just that mortals age: we are mortals, unlike Eos, who was taken in by Tithonos’ beautiful youth.32 Thus the poem begins with the Muses and ends with Eos; between these immortal brackets humans enjoy—or endure—their life span, their youthful beauty close to divinity at first, but withering unpleasantly and inevitably with the passing of time (χρόνωι). Thus the Greek belief in gods and men frames this poem. Perhaps not a difficult or complicated structure, but nevertheless vital to the full message, to use an unfashionable word.
The new “Brothers Poem” is framed with a similar, but overt, contrast between mortal and immortal.33 We are not quite sure what the context is, as the first stanza is mostly missing. The speaking voice is not identified, and the addressee is also left open. I am tempted to think Sappho left these parameters deliberately undetermined: the poem is, to an extent, open-ended. The speaker admonishes an addressee that she is “always going on about Charaxos returning with a full ship.” Immediately she brings in the gods: “Only Zeus and all the other gods know such things,” she says. “You should not think about such things, but rather you should send me off to entreat Hera that Charaxos may return home with his ship and find us safe and sound.” I think this is two girls talking to each other; the first editor of the poem, Dirk Obbink, thinks the addressee may be the mother of the speaker.34 Anyway the picture is clear: the speaker should pray to Hera for both the safety of Charaxos (Sappho’s brother) and for the safety of both (?)girls. “Let’s leave the rest to the gods,” she says, followed by a gnōmē: “Blue skies come suddenly after great storms.” There follows an extension of the gnōmē which returns to the theme of almighty Zeus: “Whomsoever’s fate Zeus wishes to turn from troubles to the better,35 they are blessed and very fortunate.” The final stanza then puzzles us: “If ever Larichos (another brother of Sappho) proves himself a man, then we, too, (κἄμμες) might be freed forthwith from great heavy-heartedness.”
The religious dimension of the text is easy to spot. The speaker should pray to Hera for the safety of Charaxos at sea. The world is built upon the superior knowledge and power of the gods: only they can save man from danger. Humans cannot know such things. Their daimon, fate, is in the hands of Zeus and the other immortals. Gregory Hutchinson noted that Horace, for one, echoed the theme of the gods’ superior power in his “Soracte Ode.”36 The piece has been entitled “The Brothers Poem” because it mentions two names known to be brothers of Sappho from Herodotus and Athenaios: Charaxos and Larichos.37 Is it then Sappho speaking? Is the poem autobiographical in quite a simple way? Is the addressee, as Obbink posited, Sappho’s mother, worried about Charaxos at sea? I doubt it; so many of Sappho’s pieces are open-ended. The situation is as it is with popular modern songs; when Bob Dylan sings “You’re the reason I’m travelling on. But don’t think twice, it’s all right,” we do not need to identify the two people involved; in fact we might read aspects of our own lives into the words of the song. True, we can read biographies of Dylan and learn who the woman in the song might have been, but that does not necessarily increase our enjoyment of the song. Similarly even when Leonard Cohen sings about Marianne: “Now so long Marianne. It’s time that we began…” one does not need to know who this Marianne is; the lyric situation is what counts. In the same way, when Sappho, or perhaps someone else, sings this song, we do not need to know the precise biographical details for the words to work. It is the song’s internal world as constructed by the interplay between the recital and the listener which matters.38 I personally prefer to think it is one girl addressing another: the addressee yearns for Charaxos who is engaged in trade with his ship overseas: the girl hopes against hope that he will return home, with a full ship.39 The speaker admonishes her that it is in the lap of the gods whether a man is saved from danger. She phrases her belief in a whole, carefully constructed stanza: only Zeus can steer a man’s daimon from troubled to better, as stormy seas can become calm.40
The poem is a clear example of the way religion is woven into lyric. The human drama would be unthinkable without the gods, who are omnipresent here. The main divinities involved are Hera (βασίληαν Ἤραν, 10) and Zeus (βασίλευς Ὀλύμπω, 17), the great parental pair of the Olympian family, although the remaining gods also play a part (lines 7, 14). Humans should not fret overmuch about their fate, as they cannot decide that, only gods. It is interesting that the same word δαίμων used in the plural in line 14 means gods, while in the singular in line 18 it refers to the daimon, or fate of the individual. Likewise, whom Zeus favors, acquires the attributes of the gods: such people become μάκαρες and πολύολβοι (15–16), blessed and much-fortunate, words normally reserved for the blessed gods on Olympus. There is another interesting parallel between the storms which “suddenly cease” (αἶψα πέλονται, 12) and the misery of the speaker which might “suddenly cease” (αἶψα λύθειμεν, 20) if Larichos behaved properly: as the elements, so the emotions. A certain naïvety has been remarked upon in the poem: it is certainly not Kierkegaard. But the monody is lively and moves with the stanzas in interesting directions. I find it might capture the somewhat naïve exchanges between girls, as for example in Sense and Sensibility, well.41
The new discovery of the “Brothers Poem” shows the same personal religion as we encounter in other poems of Sappho.42 Here Hera is to be invoked to save a brother of Sappho’s; Zeus is said to be responsible for the individual daimon of people. In the third fragment which has emerged from the new discoveries,43 Aphrodite is entreated in a way not dissimilar from the great opening poem of the Alexandrian collection of Sappho’s poems, which we only know through indirect quotation by Dionysios of Halicarnassus
