Fragment 62 (Voigt 140?)

Κατθνάσκει, Κυθέρη’, ἄβρος Ἄδωνις, τί κε θεῖμεν·
Καττύπτεσθε κόραι καὶ κατερείκεσθε χίτωνας.

Quoted by Hephaestion, and presumed to be Sappho’s from a passage in Pausanias, where he says she learnt the name of the mythological personage Oetolĭnus (as if οἶτος Λίνου, ‘the death of Linus’), from the poems of Pamphōs, a mythical poet of Attica earlier than Homer, and so to her Adonis was just like Oetolinus. The Linus-song was a very ancient dirge or lamentation, of which a version (or rather a late rendering, apparently Alexandrian) has been preserved by a Scholiast on Homer (Iliad, xviii. 569), running thus: ‘O Linus, honoured by all the gods, for to thee first they gave to sing a song to men in clear sweet sounds; Phoebus in envy slew thee, but the Muses lament thee.’ A charming example of what the Linus-song was in the third century B.C., remains for us in Bion’s Lament for Adonis.

The dirge was chiefly sung by the Greek peasants at vintage-time, and so may have arisen from a mythical personification of Apollo, as the burning sun of summer suddenly slaying the life and bloom of nature. It is said to have been of Phoenician origin, and to have derived its name from the words ai le nu, ‘woe is us,’ which may have been the burden of the song. The word αἴλινος, so frequent a refrain in the mournful choral odes of the Greek tragic poets, seems to indicate that the personality of Linus was the invention of a time when the meaning of the burden had been forgotten.