Once again this time in Song 1 of Sappho

2015.11.05 | By Gregory Nagy

§1. In the posting for 2015.10.22, “Diachronic Sappho,” I argued at §3C that the occasion for each of the songs attributed to Sappho was determined by the historical circumstances that shaped the traditions of performing the songs. Such occasions were in some cases seasonally recurrent, as in the context of festivals, and I argue here in this posting for 2015.11.05 that the expression dēute (δηὖτε) as used at lines 15 and 16 and 18 in Song 1 of Sappho refers not only to some episodically recurrent emotion of love as experienced by the speaker but also to the seasonally recurrent performance of the song on festive occasions that I reconstruct back to the earliest attested phases of the song’s evolution. In my work, I have consistently translated this expression dēute (δηὖτε) as ‘once again this time’, and I note with great pleasure that Jonathan Culler, in his interpretation of Sappho’s Song 1, cites with approval this translation of mine.[1]

§2. I now show the Greek text of Song 1, followed by my translation, where I have highlighted the three occurrences of dēute (δηὖτε) ‘once again this time’:

^{stanza 1}||₁ You with pattern-woven flowers, immortal Aphrodite, |₂ child of Zeus, weaver of wiles, I implore you, |₃ do not dominate with hurts and pains, |₄ Mistress, my heart! ^{stanza 2}||₅ But come here [tuide], if ever at any other time |₆ hearing my voice from afar, |₇ you heeded me, and leaving the palace of your father, |₈ golden, you came, ^{stanza 3}||₉ having harnessed the chariot; and you were carried along by beautiful |₁₀ swift sparrows over the dark earth |₁₁ swirling with their dense plumage from the sky through the |₁₂ midst of the aether, ^{stanza 4}||₁₃ and straightaway they arrived. But you, O holy one, |₁₄ smiling with your immortal looks, |₁₅ kept asking what is it once again this time [dēute] that has happened to me and for what reason |₁₆ once again this time [dēute] do I invoke you, ^{stanza 5}||₁₇ and what is it that I want more than anything to happen |₁₈ to my frenzied [mainolās] heart [thūmos]? “Whom am I once again this time [dēute] to persuade, |₁₉ setting out to bring [agein] her to your love? Who is doing you, |₂₀ Sappho, wrong? ^{stanza 6}||₂₁ For if she is fleeing now, soon she will be pursuing. |₂₂ If she is not taking gifts, soon she will be giving them. |₂₃ If she does not love, soon she will love |₂₄ even against her will.” ^{stanza 7}||₂₅ Come to me even now, and free me from harsh |₂₆ anxieties, and however many things |₂₇ my heart [thūmos] yearns to get done, you do for me. You |₂₈ become my ally in war.

Song 1 of Sappho = Prayer to Aphrodite[3]

§3. As I proceed to elaborate on my interpretation of dēute (δηὖτε) ‘once again this time’ at lines 15 and 16 and 18 here, I begin by examining the context of line 18, where we see a shift from the persona of Sappho as the first-person speaker to the persona of Aphrodite herself, who now takes over as the first-person speaker. This shift is correlated with a shift from the persona of Aphrodite as the second-person addressee to the persona of Sappho, addressed by Aphrodite as Psapphă at line 20. Here is how I interpret this correlation:

In the part of Song 1 that we see enclosed within quotation marks in the visual formatting of modern editions (lines 18–24), the first-person ‘I’ of Sappho is now replaced by Aphrodite herself, who has been a second-person ‘you’ up to this point. We see here an exchange of roles between the first-person ‘I’ and the second-person ‘you’. The first-person ‘I’ now becomes Aphrodite, who proceeds to speak in the performing voice of Sappho to Sappho herself, who has now become the second-person ‘you’. During Aphrodite’s epiphany inside the sacred space of the people of Lesbos, a fusion of identities takes place between the goddess and the prima donna who leads the choral performance tuide, ‘here’ (line 5), that is, in this sacred space.[4]

§4. I add here a detail, with reference to line 20: I interpret the underlying vocative form for the name of Sappho here, Ψάπφ’, as Psapphă, to be contrasted with the nominative form Psapphō. In terms of this interpretation, the short final vowel of Psapphă is then elided into the initial vowel of the next word (similarly in the case of Ψάπφ’ at line 5 of Song 94). The morphological variation that I posit here, Psapphă / Psapphō, corresponds to the morphological variation we see in the hypocoristic terms of affection apphă / apphō (ἄπφα / ἀπφώ), meaning something like ‘dear little girl’—and referring to a sister or some other girl or woman who is being addressed in a demonstratively loving way.[5]

§5. That said, I now proceed to analyze further the affectionate exchange that is taking place between the persona of Aphrodite and the persona of Sappho in the context of praying a prayer. Why the prayer? It is because the persona of Sappho is suffering from the torment of unrequited love: some unnamed girl refuses to love her. But what is it that Aphrodite should do about this torment? The answer depends on the wording that we read at lines 18–19: τίνα δηὖτε πείθω |₁₉ βαῖϲ᾿ ἄγην ἐc ϲὰν φιλότατα; ‘Whom am I once again this time [dēute] to persuade, |₁₉ setting out to bring [agein] her to your love?’. The restored form βαῖϲ᾿ ‘going’ at line 19 can be credited to Maryline G. Parca,[6] and I agree with the restoration.[7] The idiom that we see here involves the combining of bainō / bainein ‘go’ as a primary verb with the infinitive of a secondary verb, which in this case is agēn (agein), meaning ‘bring’, and Parca finds a comparable idiom in Homeric usage, citing this example:

βῆ δ’ ἰέναι ‘he set out to go’ (Iliad 4.199)

§6. This idiom, which occurs frequently in both the Iliad and Odyssey—there are almost forty attestations—is the only Homeric example cited by Parca. But there are other examples, and I show two of them here:

βῆ δὲ θέειν ‘he went and ran’ (Iliad 2.183; 11.617, 805; 12.352; 14.354; 17.119, 698; 18.416; Odyssey 14.501; 22.19)

βῆ δ’ ἐλάαν ‘he went and drove off [in his chariot]’ (Iliad 13.27)

§7. In these two Homeric examples, I have chosen to translate the idiom in informal English. Instead of saying ‘he set out to run’ and ‘he set out to drive off’, I have chosen more colloquial expressions that correspond more closely to the meaning of the first part of the idiom: ‘he went and ran’ and ‘he went and drove off’. But what about the first Homeric example, the one that was cited by Parca? In this case, βῆ δ’ ἰέναι, the colloquialism that I used to translate the second and the third examples won’t work. It would be a pleonasm to say in English ‘he went and went off’, matching ‘he went and ran’ or ‘he went and drove off’. That is why I resorted to the wording ‘he set out and went off’. Even in this case, though, colloquial English gives us a useful equivalent: ‘he up and went off’, which could be matched by saying ‘he up and ran’ or ‘he up and drove off’.

§8. Now that I have compared the three Homeric examples I have cited, I am ready to interpret βαῖϲ᾿ ἄγην ἐc ϲὰν φιλότατα at line 19 in Song 1 of Sappho. The prayer spoken by the persona of Sappho here, as understood by Aphrodite, expresses a wish that the goddess should set out and bring the girl, or, to say it more colloquially, Aphrodite should go and bring the girl. And now let me say it even more colloquially: the goddess should go out and get her. But Sappho is too shy to go out and get the girl. She wants Aphrodite to do it for her. In saying it this way, I am thinking of the line in “Hey Jude” . . .

Hey Jude, don’t be afraid | You were made to go out and get her | The minute you let her under your skin | Then you begin to make it better.

[“Hey Jude,” composed by Paul McCartney and performed by The Beatles; recorded 1968, side B: “Revolution”]

§9. In Song 1 of Sappho, to repeat, it is not the persona of Sappho who goes out and gets the girl: rather, she wants Aphrodite to do it for her, and the wording of Aphrodite at lines 13–24 shows that she understands what Sappho wants. Similarly in Iliad 3.399–412, the persona of Helen says reproachfully to Aphrodite that the goddess has a nasty habit of ‘bringing’ her, as a love-object, to her multiple lovers, and the Greek word that is used here for the ‘bringing’ of Helen by Aphrodite is agein (401: ἄξειc)—which is the same word used in Song 1 of Sappho with reference to the wish of Sappho—a wish well understood by Aphrodite—that the goddess should be ‘bringing’ (1.19: ἄγην) the unnamed girl, as a love-object, to Sappho.

§10. As I said before, I agree with the reading and the interpretation of Parca for lines 18–19 of Song 1 of Sappho: τίνα δηὖτε πείθω |₁₉ βαῖϲ᾿ ἄγην ἐc ϲὰν φιλότατα; ‘Whom am I once again this time [dēute] to persuade, |₁₉ setting out to bring [agein] her to your love?’ But I disagree with her view that the adverb dēute (δηὖτε) ‘once again this time’ at line 18 (and, by extension, at lines 15 and 16) is some kind of textual reference to the Homeric exchange between Aphrodite and Helen in Iliad 3.[8] In my view, the poetic language of Sappho does not cross-refer to the text of the Homeric Iliad as we know it: as I argued in my posting for 2015.10.22, the poetic language of Sappho is cognate with but not dependent on the poetic language of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey.

§11. Distancing myself from the argument that the wording of Sappho 1.18–19 is based on “Homeric allusion,” I agree with the position of J. C. B. Petropoulos, who argues instead that this wording, including the insistent dēute (δηὖτε) ‘once again this time’ at line 18 (and, by extension, at lines 15 and 16), is related to the kind of wording we find in the language of love spells.[9] As Petropoulos shows, Sappho’s prayer in Song 1 is asking Aphrodite to go and bring an unnamed girl to Sappho by persuading this girl: τίνα δηὖτε πείθω |₁₉ βαῖϲ᾿ ἄγην ἐc ϲὰν φιλότατα; ‘Whom am I once again this time [dēute] to persuade [peithein], |₁₉ setting out to bring [agein] her to your love [philotēs]?’ But what will it take to ‘persuade’ the girl, peithein, and thus ‘bring’ her, agein, to Sappho? In the traditional language of love spells, as we will now see, the actual ‘bringing’ of the beloved to the lover can readily modulate from ‘persuasion’ into compulsion.

§12. In love spells, as Petropoulos shows, the lover who suffers from unrequited love can pray to the powers of the higher—or the lower—world to compel the unresponsive beloved to start loving in return.[10] The act of compelling the unwilling beloved to become a willing lover can be seen as physical, not just mental and emotional. A striking example comes from a papyrus found at Hawara and dating from around the second century CE. In this text, a woman named Hērais is casting a spell on an unresponsive female beloved named Sarapias:

I adjure you, Euangelos, by Anubis and Hermes and by all the rest of you down below, bring [agein] and bind Sarapias whose mother is Helenē, [bringing Sarapias] to this Hērais here whose mother is Thermoutharin, now, now, quick, quick. By way of her soul [psukhē] and her heart [kardia], bring [agein] this Sarapias herself [to me] . . .

Papyri Graecae Magicae (see PGM in the Bibliography) II 32.1–11

§13. I highlight the sense of urgency in the desire that is being expressed in the wording of this love spell. The ritualized haste that we see at work here in the insistent repetition ἄρτι ἄρτι, ταχὺ ταχύ ‘now, now, quick, quick’ is comparable to the wording of Aphrodite as she responds to the prayer of Sappho about the unresponsive girl: καὶ γὰρ αἰ φεύγει, ταχέωc διώξει, |₂₂ αἰ δὲ δῶρα μὴ δέκετ’, ἀλλὰ δώϲει, |₂₃ αἰ δὲ μὴ φίλει, ταχέωc φιλήϲει |₂₄ κωὐκ ἐθέλοιϲα ‘For if she [= the girl] is fleeing now, soon [quickly: ταχέωc] she will be pursuing. |₂₂ If she is not taking gifts, soon she will be giving them. |₂₃ If she does not love, soon [quickly: ταχέωc] she will love |₂₄ even against her will’. As in love spells, the wording of Sappho’s prayer is meant to compel the unresponsive and unwilling beloved to turn around and love back, all too willingly.[11]

§14. In this love spell, the act of agein ‘bringing’ the beloved to the lover is more a matter of physical compulsion and less a matter of verbal persuasion by way of sweet talk. And the compulsion can get even more intense. In the texts of other love spells, we see that the lover who suffers from unrequited love can pray to the powers of the netherworld to compel the unresponsive beloved to suffer in the same way—that is, to suffer the same physical symptoms of unrequited love as suffered by the compulsive lover.[12] The compulsion can be made visible by the symptoms of the torment caused by the experience of falling in love. For an example, Petropoulos cites the text of a love spell inscribed on a lead tablet from Hermoupolis Magna, dating from the third or fourth century CE. In this text, Supplementum Magicum I 42 (ed. Daniel and Maltomini, as cited in my Bibliography), a woman named Sophia who loves another woman named Gorgonia adjures a nekuodaimōn or ‘demon of corpses’ (line 12) to bring the unresponsive Gorgonia to a balaneion ‘bath-house’ (line 14), where the demon will then change into a balanissa ‘female bath-house attendant’ (again, line 14) who will now heat up the bath-water for Gorgonia. In this steamy situation, the torment of falling in love can begin:

καῦcον ποίρω|cον φλέξον τὴν ψυχὴν, τὴν καρδίαν, τὸ ἧπαρ, τὸ πνεῦμα ἐπ’ ἔρωτι Cοφία<c> ἣν αἴτεγεν ᾿Ιcάρα. ἄξατε | Γοργονία<ν> ἣν αἴτεγεν Νιλογενία, ἄξατε αὐτὴν, βαcανίcατε αὐτῆc τὸ cῶμα νυκτὸc καὶ ἡμαίραc, δαμάcα|ται αὐτὴν ἐκπηδῆcη ἐκ παντὸc τόπου καὶ πάcηc οἰκίαc φιλοῦcα<ν> Cοφία<ν>

Burn and set on fire her soul [psukhē], her heart [kardia], her liver, and her breath with love for Sophia whose mother is Isara. [All] you [powers] must bring [agein] Gorgonia, whose mother is Nilogeneia, [to me]. You must bring [agein] her [to me], tormenting her body night and day. Compel her to bolt from wherever she is, from whatever household, as she feels the love for Sophia.

Supplementum Magicum I 42.14–17 (ed. Daniel and Maltomini)

§15. Reading such attestations of agein ‘bring’ in these love spells, we can see clearly the specialized use of this word in expressing sexual attraction. I suggest that we can see a comparable use of agein ‘bring’ in the expression βαῖϲ᾿ ἄγην ἐc ϲὰν φιλότατα ‘setting out to bring [agein] her to your love’ at line 19 of Song 1, where Aphrodite’s wording refers to the action of attracting most urgently the unresponsive beloved. But the urgency of sexual attraction that we see expressed in the songmaking of Sappho is more subtle, as Petropoulos observes in making this wry comment: “What Aphrodite tactfully omits, it seems, is the provision that Sappho’s new favo[u]rite will suffer the impediments of bodily and psychological functions and activities conventionally associated with love spells.”[13]

§16. Petropoulos concludes his comparison of love spells with Song 1 of Sappho by observing: “Once the girl falls in love and comes to Sappho, the poetess will be only too glad to accept her philotēs [love].”[14]

§17. But there is an alternative interpretation of Sappho’s prayer to Aphrodite, as formulated by Anne Carson. She thinks that Sappho is asking Aphrodite to make sure that the unnamed girl who is being pursued, once she is a woman, will suffer the same torment of unrequited love that Sappho is now suffering: the next time around, it will be this new woman who will be rejected by some new girl emerging from the next generation of girls—and deservedly so, because such is the “justice” of Aphrodite.[15] A variation on this kind of interpretation is offered by Benjamin Bennett: in terms of his argument, the unrequited love that will be suffered by the new woman is better understood as the “revenge” of Aphrodite—or, we may say, the “revenge” of Sappho.[16]

§18. So, how am I to choose between two such interpretations? From a diachronic point of view, as I outlined it in my posting for 2015.10.22, I would argue that I really do not have to choose. Here is what I mean. The persona of Sappho may be praying to Aphrodite to go and bring to her the girl who has so far rejected her love, but this girl may in the future become a woman who prays the same prayer. Now it will be this future woman’s turn to be praying to Aphrodite to go and bring to her the girl, but, this time around, that girl will be a new girl—and, this time around, the future woman will be the new Sappho. Each successive ‘dear little girl’ pursued by Sappho will become a new Sappho in her own turn. And here once again I recall the meaning of the name of Sappho, ‘dear little girl’. So, each successive Sappho was once upon a time a ‘dear little girl’ in her own right.

§19. Support for this diachronic interpretation can be found in the visual arts of Athens in the fifth century. I have in mind an image of Sappho that is painted on a red-figure kalyx-krater dated to the first third of the fifth century BCE and attributed to the Tithonos Painter (Bochum, Ruhr-Universität Kunstsammlungen, inv. S 508).[17] On the obverse side of this vase, we see the image of a woman in a dancing pose.[18] She is wearing a cloak or himation over her khitōn, and a snood (net-cap) or sakkos is holding up her hair. As she “walks,” she carries a barbiton in her left hand, while her gracefully extended right hand is holding a plēktron. The inscribed lettering placed not far from her mouth indicates that she is Sappho (CΑΦΦΟ).

§20. This picture of Sappho on the obverse side of this vase painted by the Tithonos painter must be contrasted with the picture on the reverse side, as Dimitrios Yatromanolakis has shown.[19] He argues that the obverse and the reverse must be viewed together, seeing a symmetry in the depiction of Sappho on the obverse and the depiction of another female figure dressed similarly on the reverse: she too, like Sappho, is wearing a cloak or himation over her khitōn, and a snood or sakkos is holding up her hair.

§21. The correlation of the pictures painted on the two sides of this vase is analyzed further by Yatromanolakis:

The symmetry is clarified as soon as we realize that there is a second, hitherto unknown, inscription on the reverse of this vase. Near the sakkos holding up the hair of this female figure paired with Sappho is lettering that reads ΗΕ ΠΑΙC (= hē pais), meaning ‘the girl’. If the viewer’s eye keeps rotating the vase, the two female figures eternally follow each other, but because their position is symmetrically pictured, they can never gaze at each other. Nor can a viewer ever gaze at both figures at the same time—at least, without a mirror.[20]

§22. So, the pais ‘girl’ is eternally pursued by the singing and dancing Sappho as painted by the Tithonos painter. But Sappho is in turn eternally pursued by the girl. The girl of the present time will become the woman of a future time who will pursue a girl of that future time just as she herself had once been pursued in time past. As we hear in Song 1 of Sappho, line 21, καὶ γὰρ αἰ φεύγει, ταχέωc διώξει ‘for if she is fleeing now, soon she will be pursuing’.

§23. Still, I think that the moment of catching up is eternally deferred. The woman cannot catch up with the girl she once had been, and the girl cannot catch up with the woman she will become. This is not just amor versus, it is amor conversus. It is a yearning for a merger of identities as woman pursues girl pursues woman. Such a merger could conceivably happen, but only in the mentality of myth fused with ritual. I have studied this mentality elsewhere, comparing it to the concept of the “Changing Woman” in the female initiation rituals and songs of the Navajo and Apache peoples:[21] as we learn from interviews with women who experience such rituals, Changing Woman defies old age even as she grows old, since “she is always able to recapture her youth.”[22]

§24. I come to the end of this essay without being able to come to a full stop. A diachronic Sappho will need further contemplation, and I will have to come back to this subject not just once again in further postings.

Bibliography

Basso, K. H. 1966. “The gift of Changing Woman.” Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 196:113–173 (Anthropological Papers No. 76). Washington DC.

Bennett, B. 2014. The Defective Art of Poetry: Sappho to Yeats. New York.

Carson, A. “The Justice of Aphrodite in Sappho 1.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 110 (1980): 135–42. Recast 1996 in Sappho: Contemporary Approaches (ed. E. Greene) 226–233. Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Culler, J. 2015. Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge MA.

Daniel, R. W., and Maltomini, F., eds. 1990. Supplementum Magicum I. Papyrologica Coloniensia 16.1. Opladen.

H24H. See Nagy 2013.

Mace, S. T. 1993. “Amour, Encore! The Development of δηὖτε in Archaic Lyric,” Greek , Roman and Byzantine Studies 34:335–364.

Nagy, G. 1973. “Phaethon, Sappho’s Phaon, and the White Rock of Leukas.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 77:137–177. Recast as Chapter 9 in Nagy 1990:223–262.

Nagy, G. 1990. Greek Mythology and Poetics. Ithaca NY.

Nagy, G. 1996. Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond. Cambridge MA.

Nagy, G. 2007. “Did Sappho and Alcaeus Ever Meet?” Literatur und Religion: Wege zu einer mythisch–rituellen Poetik bei den Griechen I (ed. A. Bierl, R. Lämmle, and K. Wesselmann) 211–269. MythosEikonPoiesis 1.1. Berlin and New York. In Nagy 2012 v2.

Nagy, G. 2010. “The ‘New Sappho’ Reconsidered in the Light of the Athenian Reception of Sappho.” The New Sappho on Old Age: Textual and Philosophical Issues (ed. E. Greene and M. Skinner) 176–199. Cambridge MA and Washington DC.

Nagy, G. 2013. The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours. Cambridge MA.

Nagy, G. 2015. “A poetics of sisterly affect in the Brothers Song and in other songs of Sappho.” The Newest Sappho (P. Obbink and P. GC Inv. 105, frs. 1–5) (ed. A. Bierl and A. Lardinois) Leiden: Brill, 2015.

Parca, M. G. 1982. “Sappho 1.18–19.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 46.47–50.

Petropoulos, J. B. 1993. “Sappho the Sorceress—Another Look at fr. 1 (LP).” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 97:43–56.

PGM = Papyri Graecae Magicae. Die Griechischen Zauberpapyri I–II (ed. 2, A. Henrichs 1974; after ed. 1, K. Preisendanz 1928–1934). Stuttgart.

Rissman, L. 1980. Homeric Allusion in the Poetry of Sappho. Dissertation, University of Michigan. Published 1983 as a book by the same title. Beiträge zur klassischen Philologie 157. Königstein/Ts.

Yatromanolakis, D. 2005. “Contrapuntal Inscriptions.” Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik 152:16–30.

Yatromanolakis, D. 2007. Sappho in the Making: The Early Reception. Hellenic Studies 28. Cambridge MA and Washington DC.

Notes
[1] Culler 2015:356n1, with reference to my translation in Nagy 1996:100. In an article about dēute (δηὖτε) by Sarah Mace (1993), she points to an idea I expressed in an early work of mine: that the specific attestations of this word at lines 15 and 16 and 18 in Song 1 of Sappho should be compared with all other attestations in ancient Greek lyric poetry (Mace 1993:337n8 with reference to Nagy 1973:142n18). While surveying these attestations in the same article, she goes on to say that I do not “pursue the idea to any distinct conclusions” (Mace p. 338n11). I would rather say that my conclusions about this word, as outlined in my essay here, are distinct from hers.

[2] In what follows, I will comment on the restored reading βαῖϲ᾿ ἄγην at line 19.

[3] H24H Hour 5 Text F.

[4] H24H 5§50, with reference to a more detailed analysis in Nagy 1996:97–103.

[5] I elaborate in Nagy 2015 §157.

[6] Parca 1982:47–48.

[7] Nagy 1996:98n34

[8] Parca 1982:60, relying on the argumentation of Rissman 1980.

[9] Petropoulos 1993. At p. 51n51, he specifically argues against the idea that the wording in Sappho 1.18–19 is a matter of “Homeric allusion,” as argued by Parca 1982:49–50. See also Petropoulos p. 44n5.

[10] Petropoulos 1993:45–53. For more on the theme of “compulsory persuasiveness,” see Petropoulos p. 48.

[11] For further examples of ritualized haste in love spells, see Petropoulos 1993:47.

[12] Petropoulos 1993:45–53. For more on the theme of “compulsory persuasiveness,” see Petropoulos p. 48.

[13] Petropoulos 1993:52.

[14] Petropoulos 1993:52.

[15] Carson 1980.

[16] Bennett 2014:14–18.

[17] In what follows, I present a compressed version of what I argue in Nagy 2010:193–95.

[18] I have more to say in Nagy 2007 about the stylized dance implied by such a “walking style” in fifth-century Athenian paintings.

[19] Yatromanolakis 2005; also 2007: 88–110, 248, 262–279.

[20] Nagy 2007:239, following Yatromanolakis 2005, who was the first to read and publish this inscription.

[21] Nagy 1996:101–3.

[22] Basso 1966:151.

By Gregory Nagy, Sappho

Aphrodite, incantations, Sappho

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