of Sappho and her work. Until the late nineteenth century, when the papyri started turning up, there were only the ancient quotations. Since then, the amount of Sappho that we have has more than doubled.
In 1897, two young Oxford archaeologists started excavating a site in Egypt that had been the municipal dump of a town called Oxyrhynchus – ‘the City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish’. In ancient times, the place had been home to a large Greek-speaking population. However lowly its original purpose, the dump soon yielded treasures. Papyrus manuscripts dating to the first few centuries AD, containing both Greek and Roman texts, began to surface. Some were fragments of works long known, such as the Iliad, but even these were of great value, since the Oxyrhynchus papyri were often far older than what had been, until that point, the oldest surviving copies. Others revealed works previously unknown. Among the latter were several exciting new fragments of Sappho, some substantial. From the tattered papyri, the voice came through as distinctive as ever:
Some men say cavalry, some men say infantry,
some men say the navy’s the loveliest thing
on this black earth, but I say it’s what-
ever you love
Over the decades that followed, more of the papyri were deciphered and published. But by 1955, when the Cambridge classicist Denys Page published Sappho and Alcaeus, a definitive study of the two poets from Lesbos, it seemed that even this rich new vein had been exhausted. ‘There is not at present,’ Page declared, ‘any reason to expect that we shall ever possess much more of the poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus than we do today, and this seems a suitable time to begin the difficult and doubtful task of interpreting.’
Sappho herself, it seems fair to say, would have raised an eyebrow at Page’s confidence in his judgment. Human fortune, she writes, is as variable as the weather at sea, where ‘fair winds swiftly follow harsh gales’. And, indeed, this verse was unknown to Page, since it comes from the papyrus fragment that Dirk Obbink brought to light last year: the ‘Brothers Poem’.
For specialists, the most exciting feature of the ‘Brothers Poem’ is that it seems to corroborate the closest thing we have to a contemporary reference to Sappho’s personal life: an oblique mention of her in Herodotus’ Histories, written about a century and a half after her death. During a long discussion of Egyptian society, Herodotus mentions one of Sappho’s brothers, a rather dashing character named Charaxus. A swashbuckling merchant sailor, he supposedly spent a fortune to buy the freedom of a favourite courtesan in Egypt – an act, Herodotus reports, for which Sappho ‘severely chided’ her sibling in verse. Ovid and other later classical authors also refer to some kind of tension between Sappho and this brother, but, in the absence of a surviving poem on the subject by Sappho herself, generations of scholars were unable to verify even the brother’s name.
So it’s easy to imagine Dirk Obbink’s excitement as he worked his way through the first lines of the poem:
but you’re always nattering on that Charaxus must come,
his ship full-laden. That much, I reckon, Zeus knows …
The pious thing to do, the speaker says, is to pray to the gods for this brother’s return, since human happiness depends on divine good will. The poem closes with the hope that another, younger brother will grow up honourably and save his family from heartache – presumably, the anxiety caused by their wayward elder sibling. At last, that particular biographical titbit could be confirmed.
For non-classicists, the ‘Brothers Poem’ may be less enthralling than the other recent Sappho find, the poem that surfaced in 2004, about old age – a bittersweet work indeed. After the University of Cologne acquired some papyri, scholars found that one of the texts overlapped with a poem already known: Fragment 58, one of the Oxyrhynchus papyri. The Oxyrhynchus fragment consisted mostly of the ends of a handful of lines; the new Cologne papyrus filled in the blanks, leaving only a few words missing. Finally, the lines made sense.
As with much Archaic Greek poetry, the newly restored Fragment 58 – the ‘Old Age Poem’, as it is now called – illustrates its theme with an example from myth. Sappho alludes to the story of Eos, the dawn goddess, who wished for, and was granted, eternal life for her mortal lover, Tithonus, but forgot to ask for eternal youth:
[I bring] the beautiful gifts of the violet Muses, girls,
and [I love] that song lover, the sweet-toned lyre.
My skin was [delicate] before, but now old age
[claims it]; my hair turned from black [to white].
My spirit has grown heavy; knees buckle
that once could dance light as fawns.
I often groan, but what can I do?
Impossible for humans not to age.
For they say that rosy-armed Dawn in love
went to the ends of the earth holding Tithonos,
beautiful and young, but in time grey old age
seized even him with an immortal wife.
Here as elsewhere in the new translation, Diane J. Rayor captures the distinctively plainspoken quality of Sappho’s Greek, which, for all the poet’s naked emotionality and love of luxe, is never overwrought or baroque. Every translation is a series of sacrifices; in Rayor’s case, emphasis on plainness of expression sometimes comes at the cost of certain formal elements – not least, metre. The late classicist M. L. West, who published a translation in the Times Literary Supplement, took pains to emulate the long line of Sappho’s original:
But me – my skin which once was soft is withered now
by age, my hair has turned to white which once was black …
Still, given how disastrously cloying many attempts to recreate Sappho’s verse as ‘song’ have proved to be, you’re grateful for Rayor’s directness. Her notes on the translations are particularly useful, especially when she alerts readers to choices that are left ‘silent’ in other English versions. The last extant line of Fragment 31, for instance, presents a notorious problem: it could mean something like ‘all must be endured’ or, on the other hand, ‘all must be dared’. Rayor prefers ‘endured’, and tells you why she thinks it’s the better reading.
Rayor makes one very interesting choice in translating the ‘Old Age Poem’. The Cologne manuscript dates to the third century BC, which makes it the oldest and therefore presumably the most reliable manuscript of Sappho that we currently possess. In that text, the poem ends after the sixth couplet, with its glum reference to Tithonus being seized by grey old age. But Rayor has decided to include some additional lines that appear only in the fragmentary Oxyrhynchus papyrus. These give the poem a far more upbeat ending:
Yet I love the finer things … this and passion
for the light of life have granted me brilliance and beauty.
The manuscript containing those lines was copied out five hundred years after the newly discovered Cologne version – half a millennium further away from the moment when the Poetess first sang this song.
And so the new Sappho raises as many questions as it answers. Did different versions of a single poem coexist in antiquity, and, if so, did ancient audiences know or care? Who in the ‘Brothers Poem’ has been chattering on about Sappho’s brother Charaxus, and why? Where, exactly, does
