Sappho 16

Fragment 16 is a poetic remnant by Sappho, a poet who lived in Lesbos during the 7th century B.C. It is often referred to by the English title given it by one of Sappho's most famous translators, Mary Barnard, "To an Army Wife, in Sardis". This fragment presents a feminine perspective on what beauty is, making allusions to both unknown figures from Sappho’s time such as Anaktoria and figures from Greek myth such as Homer’s Helen. Though not a direct retelling of Homer’s poetry, this fragment imitates his narrative themes and poetic style.

Preservation

Fragment 16 was preserved on Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1231, a second-century manuscript of Book I of an edition of Sappho,^[1] published by Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt in 1914.^[2] In 2014, a papyrus discovered by Simon Burris, Jeffrey Fish, and Dirk Obbink – P. GC. inv. 105^[3] – added a few words to the known text of the poem.^[4] This papyrus dates to the late-second or early-third century,^[5] and is in the same hand as P. Sapph. Obbink, also published in 2014 and preserving five stanzas of Sappho's Brothers Poem.^[6]

Poem

Fragment 16 is, along with the other poems of Book I of Sappho's works, composed in Sapphic stanzas. At least five stanzas survive; whether the poem ends there or continues into what Burris, Fish, and Obbink number fragment 16a is disputed.^[7] The poem is one of five surviving poems by Sappho which is about "the power of love".^[8] It expresses the speaker's desire for the absent Anactoria,^[9] praising her beauty.^[4] This encomium follows the poet making the broader point that the most beautiful thing to any person is whatever they love the most; an argument that Sappho supports with the mythological example of Helen's love for Paris.^[9] Some commentators have argued that the poem deliberately adopts this position as a rejection of typical Greek male values.^[10]

Helen seems to have been a character of interest to many early Greek lyric poets, not just Sappho.^[11] Sappho seems to have presented her version of Helen in a positive light, celebrating her abandonment of Menelaus – normally seen as a transgressive act – as an assertion of female erotic agency.^[12] Indeed, Sappho gives her Helen much more agency than Alcaeus gives his Helen in fragment 283^[13] – a poem which may be in response to, or responded to by, Sappho 16.^[14]

Continuation after line 20

Scholars disagree on whether or not fragment 16 continued after line 20, or whether the poem ended at this point. Before the discovery of the Green Collection papyri, most scholars believed that the poem ended at line 20,^[15] and when Burris, Fish, and Obbink published the Green Collection papyri, they too ended the poem there.^[16] If the poem did end at this point, the priamel around which the poem is based is complete,^[17] and the poem would have had a ring structure.^[18] However, Joel Lidov argues that the stanza which Burris, Fish, and Obbink consider the first of fragment 16a fits better as the end of fragment 16.^[19] Rayor and Lardinois also believe that lines 21–24 of P. GC. inv. 105 are part of fragment 16, drawing comparisons with line 17 of fragment 31 and the ending of the Tithonus poem, two other cases where a poem by Sappho ends with the narrator reconciling herself to an impossible situation.^[20]

References

Works cited