Sappho ókori görög

But I love extravagance,
And wanting it has handed down
The glitter and glamour of the sun
As my inheritance.

I truly do believe no maiden that will live
To look upon the brilliance of the sun
Ever will be contemplative
Like this one.

Stand and face me, dear; release
That fineness in your irises.

Sappho does not merely study the experience of love and loss in others but actively participates. Here the speaker in a song elides distinctions between herself and Abanthis by bidding her take up the lyre, and desire moves through them both. She takes sympathetic pleasure in Abanthis’ arousal over Gongyla’s flattering attire. As each character is both subject and object, this song perfectly exemplifies the ‘circular, Sapphic law according to which beauty demands love and love, in turn, creates the beautiful’ (Burnett 1983, p. 229).

Her Girls and Family (Penguin, 2009)

Yes, you have all heard
That Leda, long ago, one day
Noticed an egg, hyacinth-coloured,
Hidden away.

Reveal your graceful figure here,
Close to me, Hera. I make entreaty
Just as the kings once made their prayer,
The famous Atreidai –

Yes, you have all heard
That Leda, long ago, one day
Noticed an egg, hyacinth-coloured,
Hidden away.

Reveal your graceful figure here,
Close to me, Hera. I make entreaty
Just as the kings once made their prayer,
The famous Atreidai –

Winning victories by the score
At Troy first, then at sea, they sailed
The channel to this very shore,
Tried leaving but failed

Until they prayed to you, the Saviour
Zeus and Thyone’s charming son.
Like long ago, then, grant this favour,
As you have done…

The nightingale becomes a symbol of poetry and lamentation in Western literature. According to tradition, King Tereus of Thrace, while escorting his wife Procne’s sister, Philomela, back to his palace, rapes the girl and cuts out her tongue to prevent her from accusing him. Philomela weaves a tapestry to show her sister the crime and, in revenge, Procne kills her son Itylus and feeds him to Tereus. Tereus chases them until the gods transform them all into birds: Tereus into a hawk; Philomela, a swallow; and Procne, a nightingale forever grieving for her son. In later sources Philomela is the nightingale, and her sister the swallow.

Maidens and Marriages (Penguin, 2019)

As we have seen, Sappho reveals an intimate, almost medical knowledge of the symptoms of love in ‘That fellow strikes me as god’s double’.

Her Girls and Family (Penguin, 2009)

The gorgeous man presents a gorgeous view;
The good man will in time be gorgeous, too.

In Sappho we often find erotic emotion and experience expressed in stylized and ritualized ways. These patterns serve to convert the private and specific into the universal and the generic. The ‘good times’ of which Sappho reminds the girl primarily involve flowers and garlands – the sorts of adornments which choral performers would wear (compare ‘Now, Dika, weave the aniseed together, flower and stem’).

Desire and Death-longing (Penguin, 2009)

It is striking that Sappho chooses a conventionally ‘feminine’ theme, a wedding scene which has no parallel in Homer. Though she elevates the wedding to epic magnitude, she does not moralize about the fates of Hector (whom Achilles kills), Andromache (who is given as booty to Achilles’ son, Neoptolemos) and their child Astyanax (who is flung from the walls of Troy).

Troy (Penguin, 2009)

Leave Crete and sweep to this blest temple
Where apple-orchard’s elegance
Is yours, and smouldering altars, ample
Frankincense.

Here under boughs a bracing spring
Percolates, roses without number
Umber the earth and, rustling,
The leaves drip slumber.

Here budding flowers possess a sunny
Pasture where steeds could graze their fill,
And the breeze feels as gentle as honey…

Kypris, here in the present blend
Your nectar with pure festal glee.
Fill gilded bowls and pass them round
Lavishly.

That impossible predator,
Eros the Limb-Loosener,
Bitter-sweetly and afresh
Savages my flesh.

Like a gale smiting an oak
On mountainous terrain,
Eros, with a stroke,
Shattered my brain.

But a strange longing to pass on
Seizes me, and I need to see
Lotuses on the dewy banks of Acheron.