Chapter Two. Homer the Classic in the Age of Callimachus 2ⓢ1. An esthetics of fluidity 2§1 Homeric poetry imagines itself as rigid – that is, unchanging like the petrified serpent in Iliad II. That is what I was arguing in Chapter 1. But there is more to it. As I will now argue in Chapter 2, this three-dimensional vision of arrested motion is being expressed by… Read more
Chapter Three. Homer the Classic in the Age of Plato 3ⓢ1. The Koine of Homer as a model of stability 3§1 The Koine of Homer, as approximated by the base text of Aristarchus in the second century BCE, was more rigid and less fluid than the Homerus Auctus, as approximated by the base text of Zenodotus in the age of Callimachus in the third century BCE. Read more
Chapter Four. Homer the Classic in the Age of Pheidias 4ⓢ1. Homer as a spokesman for the Athenian empire 4§1 In Chapter 3, my argumentation was limited to showing that Plato’s Homer, as reflected in such virtual dialogues as the Ion and the Hippias Minor, was the Panathenaic Homer of his day, in the fourth century BCE. I used the internal evidence provided by Plato’s precise… Read more
Chapter 5. Tithonus in the “New Sappho” and the Narrated Mythical Exemplum in Archaic Greek Poetry Lowell Edmunds carminis fi nem statueram, nunc dubito —M.L. West [1] At present, some think that the twelve lines of the “New Sappho” are a complete poem; some think that the poem must have continued, as it appears to do in the… Read more
Chapter 6. No Way Out? Aging in the New (and Old) Sappho Deborah Boedeker I will not rehearse in detail the brief but exciting history of the “New Sappho” Cologne papyrus that was published in 2004 by Michael Gronewald and Robert Daniel, familiar as it is to readers of this volume. [1] Suffice it to say that P.Köln 21351 (with… Read more
Chapter 7. Acceptance or Assertion?Sappho’s New Poem in its Books Joel Lidov That time of year thou mayst in me behold, When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. Shakespeare’s image of the absence of song neatly sums up the familiar notion that… Read more
Chapter 8. The Meter and Metrical Style of the New Poem Joel Lidov POxy. 1787, including Sappho 58 V—and so the “New Poem”—has been assigned to Book Four of the Alexandrian edition of her works since its first publication (Ox. Pap. XV:26; cf. Lobel 1925:xii). Because the assignment is a conjecture, this is a good moment to review the status of the question, and at the… Read more
Chapter 9. “Once” and “Now”: Temporal Markers and Sappho’s Self-Representation Eva Stehle It is well known that memory plays an important role in Sappho’s poetry. As scholars have emphasized, Sappho vividly evokes the past, even “blurs” past and present, through her poetic recall. [1] But the fragment and the apparently complete poem yielded by the new Cologne papyri call attention to… Read more
Chapter 10. The New Sappho in a Hellenistic Poetry Book [1] Dee Clayman While most of the interest in the “New Sappho” (Köln. Inv. Nr. 21351 + 21376) has rightly centered on the “Tithonus” poem, fragments of another precede it on the Cologne papyrus and parts of a third follow. [2] I argue below that the… Read more
Chapter 11. Sappho 58: Philosophical Reflections on Death and Aging [1] Ellen Greene Although most contemporary scholars are in agreement that Sappho’s verse appropriates themes and poetic conventions employed by both Homer and male lyric poets, there is considerable disagreement about the extent to which Sappho’s extant poetry ought to be considered ‘woman-centered,’ that is, poetry chiefly concerned with love, sexuality,… Read more
