Key Words and Forms
Sappho composed in the Aeolic dialect of Greek spoken on Lesbos, in song meters that later Greek editors used to sort her poems. A small group of words in the fragments is rendered in different ways by translators, and several of them also occur in Homer and Hesiod. The Greek forms are given here with their usual English renderings.
The Latin author Apuleius of Madaura, in his Apologia, a speech of self-defense delivered in the second century AD, lists poets of erotic verse and describes Sappho as “a woman, a Lesbian, who wrote with such grace and such passion that the sweetness of her song makes us forgive the impropriety of her words”. The island named in that description is the home of the dialect described below.
Words Translators Render Differently
The entries follow the order of the words in a single line, Voigt 130, which contains all five terms. The line is preserved through ancient writers on meter and describes Eros, the god of desire.
The word combines the particles δή and αὖτε. Αὖτε (again, in turn) is common in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Sappho’s Hymn to Aphrodite, fragment 1 (Voigt 1), uses δηὖτε in the questions that set the speaker’s present suffering against earlier ones, and Voigt 130 opens with it. Translators give the English words again, once more or now again; in the Hymn the sense is recurrence.
The adjective joins λύω (loosen) and μέλος (limb). Homer’s Odyssey applies it to sleep. Hesiod’s Theogony applies it to Eros, who in its account of the first gods overpowers the mind and counsel of gods and men. The poet Archilochus of Paros, writing in the seventh century BC, used it of desire. In Voigt 130 it describes Eros, and translators give limb-loosening, loosener of limbs or similar phrases.
The verb is rendered as shake or drive to and fro. In Voigt 130 Eros is the subject and the speaker the object. A second fragment, Voigt 47, describes Eros shaking the speaker’s mind with a different verb, ἐτίναξε, in a comparison to wind falling on mountain oaks. Translators render the verb of Voigt 130 as shakes, stirs or rattles.
The compound joins γλυκύς (sweet) and πικρός (bitter). In Voigt 130 it qualifies the creature that Eros is called. The usual English rendering is bittersweet; the Greek places the element for sweet first.
The form is the transmitted reading in Voigt 130 and corresponds to the standard Greek ἑρπετόν (creeping thing), from the verb ἕρπω (creep). Homer’s Iliad uses that verb in its description of everything that breathes and moves upon the earth. Translators render the noun as creature, beast or thing that creeps.
The Sapphic Stanza and Other Meters
Greek lyric meter is built from patterns of long and short syllables. The Alexandrian scholars who edited Sappho’s poems in the Hellenistic period arranged them in nine books, with the poems in Sapphic stanzas filling the first book. Their arrangement by meter is the source of the metrical groupings that later editors kept.
The stanza has four lines: three Sapphic hendecasyllables, each of eleven syllables, followed by a shorter closing line of five syllables, the Adonic. The hendecasyllable runs long-short-long-free-long-short-short-long-short-long-free, with the fourth and the final syllable free (anceps). The Hymn to Aphrodite, fragment 1 (Voigt 1), is composed in this stanza. Catullus adapted the stanza in Latin in his poem 51, which follows Sappho’s poem Voigt 31, and Horace used it in his Odes.
The Adonic is a five-syllable line, long-short-short-long-long, that serves as the fourth line of the Sapphic stanza. It is also used on its own and as a close in other stanza forms.
The stanza is named for Alcaeus of Mytilene, the Lesbian lyric poet of the same period as Sappho. It has four lines: two Alcaic hendecasyllables, a line of nine syllables and a line of ten.
The glyconic is a line of eight syllables built around a choriamb, a unit of long-short-short-long. It is a basic building block of Aeolic lyric and appears in stanzas of mixed lines.
Choriambic meter repeats the choriamb, long-short-short-long, as its main unit. Longer lines made from several choriambs are found in Aeolic lyric.
The Ionic a minore repeats a unit of two short syllables followed by two long ones. Its lilting pattern is associated in Greek poetry with songs of love and wine.
Dactylic meter is built on the dactyl, a long syllable followed by two short ones. Its six-foot line, the hexameter, is the meter of Homer’s epics and Hesiod’s poems.
The Aeolic Dialect
Aeolic was the Greek of Lesbos and of the nearby coast of Asia Minor and of Boeotia and Thessaly on the mainland. Alcaeus and Sappho are its chief literary representatives, and the epic dialect of Homer also contains Aeolic elements. In Apuleius’s description Sappho is simply “a Lesbian,” the sense in which she is called a Lesbian poet in later writers.
Sappho’s own form of her name was Ψάπφα (Psappha), with an initial psi that the Attic form Σαπφώ (Sapphō) does not have. The name occurs in the Hymn to Aphrodite, fragment 1 (Voigt 1), where the goddess addresses the poet by name.
Aeolic of Lesbos does not pronounce the initial h sound that Attic and Ionic show as a rough breathing. The feature is called psilosis, literally stripping. The Aeolic poets also retain the old letter digamma, which stood for a w sound that Attic and Ionic had lost.
In Aeolic words the accent moves back toward the beginning of the word, as far as the rules allow. Ancient grammarians described this as a mark of the dialect.
Aeolic has the pronouns ἄμμες (we) and ὔμμες (you, plural), against Attic ἡμεῖς and ὑμεῖς. It has πέμπε (five) where Attic has πέντε, a labial sound in place of a dental. Its dative plural ends in -εσσι, and its feminine participles end in -οισα.