Posidippus

Song, interrupted

2016.04.28 | By Keith DeStone Further thoughts on the singing of songs of Sappho, inspired by the collegial conversations and shared research that led to the earlier posts by Gregory Nagy and Andromache Karanika and to the more recent post by Ioanna Papadopoulou. Read more

Weaving while singing Sappho’s songs in Epigram 55 of Posidippus

2016.01.07 | By Gregory Nagy Epigram 55 of Posidippus, a poet who flourished in the third century BCE, refers to the songs of Sappho. That is what I argued already in my postings for 2015.11.19 and 2015.12.03. This epigram, as we can see from those postings, is about a girl named Nikomakhe whose happy young life was sadly interrupted by a premature death. Nostalgically, the words of the epigram recall… Read more

Weaving, interrupted

2015.12.03 | By Andromache Karanika Greg Nagy poses an exciting question about the time of female weaving, and, what is more, about song that accompanies the weaving—song that alleviates the monotony of labor but also transforms the sense of time. Is girls’ weaving something that begins with the light of dawn? In Sappho 102, weaving done by girls seems to be a setting for oaroi as ‘love songs’, and the… Read more

Echoes of Sappho in two epigrams of Posidippus

2015.11.19 | By Gregory Nagy Epigrams 52 and 55 of Posidippus, a poet who flourished in the third century BCE, contain references to the songs of Sappho. That is what I argue here. Further, I argue that these references seem to be evoking the main themes that we see Sappho’s Tithonos Song, which is quoted and analyzed in my posting for 2015.11.12. Read more