Studies in Sappho and Alcaeus

✍ Scribed by Kyriakos Tsantsanoglou

• Publisher: de Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 228
• Series: Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes 79
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The poetry of the archaic poets of Lesbos, Sappho and Alcaeus, has been imperfectly and poorly transmitted either in book fragments or in later ragged papyri, so that new attempts of interpretation will always be required, especially when new research tools and methods have appeared in classical scholarship.
The book consists of 14 articles by the author, which present and deal with diverse problems of the two poets of Lesbos. Various questions on already transmitted poems, different readings, reconstructions, and interpretations of the new finds are proposed, but, most importantly, new approaches in general topics, such as the division of Sappho's work in Books, the logic leading to this division, the order of these Books, the contents of each of them, the interpretation of the surviving fragments, often quite different than before. A feature that characterizes the old-age poetry of Sappho is her anxiety about the posthumous fate of her poetry and her hope that Kle�s, her only daughter, will ensure its dissemination. Finally, the author investigates the communal festival of Hera in Lesbos, a festival performed in common with Zeus and Dionysus, the so-called "Lesbian Triad". The festival is specified as a welcome to the season of spring at the time of the vernal equinox. Also, the location of the temenos of Hera is investigated, close to Pyrrha of Lesbos, which was the site of Alcaeus' second exile.

✦ Table of Contents

Frontmatter......Page 1
Preface......Page 5
Contents......Page 7
List of Figures......Page 9
1. Sappho Illustrated......Page 11
2. Sappho on her Funeral Day: P.Colon. 21351.1–8......Page 38
3. Kleïs as Promoter of Sappho’s Poetry (Fr. 59 V.)......Page 48
4. Sappho’s (?) Orpheus Song......Page 52
5. P. Sapph. Obbink: the ‘Kypris Poem’......Page 82
6. Sappho’s Epithalamians......Page 96
7. Sappho Tithonus Poem......Page 124
8. Sappho 1.18–19 V.......Page 128
9. The Banquet of the Gods and the Picnic of the Girls......Page 131
10. The Danaans in Lesbos......Page 157
11. Sappho 27 V., Alcaeus 308 Lib., and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes......Page 172
12. Alcaeus on the Lesbian Triad Festival......Page 179
13. The Location of the Lesbian Triad Temenos......Page 202
14. Who was Onymacles the Athenian?......Page 214
Bibliography......Page 223