The "New" Sappho (Fr. 58) and Some of its Indo-European and Greek Resonances (abstract)

by Edwin D. Floyd

Several recent articles in ZPE (Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik ), by Gronewald and Daniel (147:1-8 [2004] and 149:1-4 [2004]), Luppe (149:7-9 [2004]), and West (151:1-9 [2005]) have established about 90% of the text of a complete poem by Sappho. Part of this poem was already known as fr. 58.11-22 (Voigt) on the basis of an Oxyrhynchus papyrus. With the new papyrus material from Köln, this is now our second best preserved poem by Sappho (after fr. 1, Ποικιλόθρον᾽ ἀθανάτ᾽ ᾽Αφροδίτα ...), and the text can be even more fully restored on the basis of various allusions to it in later Greek literature and by considering Rig-Vedic parallels to Sappho's poetic practice.

Quite a bit of infomation is available on the internet concerning the "new" Sappho. In TLS for June 24, 2005, Martin L. West briefly discusses the poem and provides a translation. The online version of this does not include a Greek text; however, a JPEG version of the Greek text, as reconstructed by West, is available. There is also an article (in German) by Jürgen Langenbach with Gronewald and Daniel's translation (based on a different restoration from West's in lines 1-4, 7, and 10), along with photographs of the Köln papyri.

Despite West's claim that phi should be read as the fourth letter in line 10, the original editors' reading of delta is more likely. Taken with theta, which West reads, a few letters later on in the papyrus, in place of Gronewald and Daniel's sigma, a new reading ἔρῳ δέπα θεῖσαν "placing / dedicating cups to Eros" emerges.

Among the Vedic parallels to be discussed is Rig-Veda 1.113, available online in Griffith's translation. Also, for the underlying premise that Indo-European poetic patterns can be important in understanding Greek lyric poetry, see the abstracts of my forthcoming (2006) APA (American Philological Assocation) presentation on "Indo-European Poetic Patterns in Pindar, Olympian 10 and 11" and of my 1998 University of Pittsburgh presentation "Sappho the Indo-Europeanist: Fr. 44.4 and 96.8 (Voigt)" .