INTERPRETATION AND ANALYSIS OF "TO APHRODITE"

Interpretation and Analysis

Now we can approach the poem itself, and examine the details of its
language, its sounds and configuration of words, and the way its esthetic
components are interwoven with the communicative meaning of the poem
as a whole.

Let us begin reading carefully, line by line as the text unfolds:

poikilovqron j aqanavt j Afrovdita
"color throned immortal Aphrodita"
poikilo-thron' athanat' Aphrodita

With that first difficult word "you of the many colored throne", clumsily
handling the clear Greek adjective 'poikilos', we start off on a tour of the
poem's visual imagery. This initial adjective is in fact the keyword to the
setting of the whole poem, and three elements are involved: The coloration,
the throne on which the color is painted, and the goddess who is connected
with (seated on) the throne.
The seated statue of a goddess is found in several museum holdings of work
from Sappho's archaic period. The figure of the deity is carved integral
with the rectangular block of marble. This is early statuary and the whole
sculpture is heavy and primitive --- one must not think of the later freestanding
and lithe Aphrodites. Years ago in Greece I noticed clear traces of
several colors of paint on the sides of such block-statues, which didn't seem
surprising since I knew that the Greeks regularly painted all statues, the
metopes of buildings, they waxed columns to a tan for color and waterproofing.
In short their temple world was a blaze of strong, earth-colors. And so here,
the word "many-color-throned" is not an example of imaginative wordpainting,
it is an exact visual term.

The setting of this poem is clear, since statues are in temples, located in the
separated rear-chamber of a small rectangular temple with pillars in front,
much like the small temple of Nike at the entrance to the acropolis on the
right side. For lack of a complete reconstruction, I am going to take the
Treasury of the Athenians at Delphi, which is a small Doric style temple as
a model for this discussion. The public did not enter temples, the sacrifice
was done out in front, only the priest or special person in charge alone
could enter within. Picture now Sappho proceeding from the outside altar
where a sacrifice could be done, into the temple itself as she is about to enter
the inner chamber where the statue of the seated Aphrodite stands.
This is an approaching front view of an early Doric temple from 515 BC,
the Athenian Treasury at Delphi, which should give a fair idea of the kind
of temple in which this poem is set. Behind the front columns is a front
chamber, there will be in Sappho's temple an interior wall with a doorway,
leading into the inner chamber in which the seat statue of the goddess is located.
Any initial sacrifice would have been done in the foreground of this
picture on an alter on the stone pavement.

Since Sappho is directly addressing the goddess of stone on the painted
statue base,. As a person in some special relationship to the religious
requirements, she can enter the temple and must be in the doorway of the
inner wall and now approaching the statue.

In the back chamber before the seated statue she kneels, her eyes level with
the painted designs on the throne. In fact mentioning the "painted throne"
puts her in the chamber bending low to see the throne, eyes cast down before
she dares look at the goddess' countenance. She must be close to the
statue, kneeling before it, since she sees the colors of the statue's polychrome
paint. Now the words of her prayer will continue to unfold:
Her prayer begins, as Greek prayers must, with proper identification of the
god, but there are two specifications which set sets out first:

aqanat j Afrodita
"Immortal Aphrodite"
athanat' Aphrodita
The word "immortal" might seem hardly needed in addressing the goddess,
since she is by definition one of the immortal ones, just as we are all the
mortals, the "thnetoi" or "mortales" of Latin. But remember that this is a
formal prayer, and there are certain ritual words which must be spoken if
the addressed deity is to hear the words, as Sappho notes : "If you have ever
heard.me before..." We can take 'athanata' as a title, a ritual part of the
goddess' name, thus Aqanat j Afrodita, perhaps like the Christian invoking
"Holy Mary".

"O Daughter of Zeus"....but she adds the curious word doloplok, as we
somewhat tentatively translate it "Weaver of Wiles". This is interesting expression,
in English it may be taken as somewhat charming, or beguiling,
but in Greek the noun 'dolos' refers to a "snare, a trap, an ambush" and has
clear associations with hunting. the m,ilitaru and even with treachery. The
Greek who knew Aphrodite as lovely and delightful could remember that
her path was mined with traps and snares for the unaware lover, and it is
this dangerous pathway which Sappho knows she is now treading. Is this insulting
to the goddess whom she is now begging for mercy? No, it is the
nature of Love, and as she cringes and begs release from pain, she surreptitiously
refers to her Lady of Pain very quickly, as the truth of the matter.

pai Dio~ doloploke lissomai se
"child of Zeus, wile-weaver, I entreat you"
pai dios, doloploka, lissomai se

"Child of Zeus" is needed for the identification of the suppliant, since one
has to get the right access code and that depends on knowing the proper
terminology of the address. This will expand later in the poem before
Aphrodite can leave the golden halls of heaven, her it is just a word to
establish the initial contact. Child is perhaps the better word, since daughter
is familiar and human. We only need the relationship to Zeus here, nothing
more.

mh m j asaisi mhd j oniaisi damna
potnia qumon
"do not with pains and reproachs crush
O Lady, my soul"
mé m'asaisi med' oniaisi damna
potnia thumon

Do not crush me down, with "harms" and with "reproaches", but these
words have more than shows here. The Greek verbal stem 'aaó' does mean
"harm" but this is never physical, always purely mental. The noun used here
'asa' is unusual, a shortened from what would actually be 'aasa'. Whether the
word is connected with the Greek verb 'aa-zó' meaning breathe out a sigh
"Ah!" is not clear, but Sappho would know that sighs are not far away.
Now 'onia' as "grief, distress" is a word which shows the distribution of
variants in the literary dialects, with an Attic form 'ania', beside the Ionic
'anié' and this Aeolic has a vowel shift to -o-, as 'onia'. Furthermore Epic
and Sappho make the -i- long, whereas later authors can use it as long or
short as the meter requires. I mention this to make clear that there is no
"standard" Greek language until we come to a much later period. Part of the
standardization we use stems from medieval scribes and even from modern
text editors. And beyond this, words in different periods may have different
associations, which makes the use of the Liddel-Scott-Jones dictionary, even
with its many columns in small print, absolutely indispensable.

O Lady, Potnia! The Homeric title potnia, powerful Lady, coming from the
world of Epic, is used here with specific emphasis, since it stands as a
majestic title right in the middle of a sorrowful and wailing complaint about
the plights of a lover. Even in this first paragraph of the address to the goddess,
there are two strong terms used, one with 'dolor' which traps and ensnares,
and the other Lady 'Potnia', which has a complicated and widespread
linguistic history. The root from IE "pot-" means "rule" and a despot is the
'* dems-pot-es" or ruler of the house, ruler of the social group. It occurs
with females as 'despoina' whether goddesses of women, meaning "O Lady,
Madame, Ma'am" but used alone as Potnia the powerful element of the root
rules. There is even a verb in later use 'despoiniazó' meaning "cry out in
distress or alarm 'O My Lady ", used by both men and women.
So when Sappho says "Potnia", especially in this painful situation, she is
really crying out " do not crust me down OH MY GOD completely". This
is at the same time a proper word of address in prayer, but it is also a cry of
desperation, even a scream. We can understand the imperative of the verb
'damna' as crushing down or even "dominating". But the physical crushing
does not work here, the word means mental crushing l, as when Zeus in the
Iliad 5, 893 it talking about his difficulty controlling his lady Hera, says:

.........thn men egw spoudh` / davmnhmi evpessi
"her with effort I control with my words"
ten men ego spoude damnemi epessi
It is this kind of emotional control which Sappho is speaking about, it is not
the complaint of a battered wife.

The word qumo~ is not a simple as it seems, when translated as "soul". We
might try to translate as "heart" but that would be a bad mistake following
the Aristotelian error of assuming that the heart was the seat of the mind
and emotions. We find it more convenient to say "Yes, with all my heart"
rather than "With all my brain", but that is a local problem for English!
The Greek for 'thumos' is based in air, mist and smoke, cognate with Skt.
dhumas "mist" and Latin fumus or "smoke", and it can be used for a wide
range of notions, from anger, heart felt feelings, even desire. English
"mind" might be what Sappho is saying here. If you think of soul as part of
your mind, that would be reasonable, but not Soul as the personalized part
of the self which has a separate identity here and in heaven. This wword
'thumos' is not a theological Soul.

Now let us look at the internal Form or Microstructure of this first stanza,
which stands complete in itself.
poikilovqron j aqanavt j Afrovdita
pai` Divo~ dolovploke livssomaiv se
mhv m j avsaisi mhd j onivaisi davmna
povtnia qu`mon

"Many colored throned immortal Aphrodita,
daughter of Zeus, wile-weaver, I beg you
with reproaches and harms do not beat down
O Lady, my soul"

poikilo-thron' athanat' Aphrodita
pai dios doloploka, lissomai se
me m'asaisi med' oniaisi damna
potnia thumon

The first thing to strike us is the number and regular succession of Acute
pitched syllables in this passage, a full dozen as against only two circumflexes.
Since the first whole line is an addressing statement, the actual
grammar of the sentences starts with the first word of line 2, which is 'pai'
"child / daughter" .Then we flow with continually up-rising major fifth
pitches (the rest being relegated down to base), and ending with that critical
word 'thumon' crowned with the overlong and melismatic tone curl of circumflex
accentuation.

This is not a matter of academic diacritics, is it a musical score on the basis
of which Sappho performed the song with voice and lyre, following in
artistic sequence the pitches where are here marked out. This has to be
practiced in reading out loud, only when that is made familar by practice
can we sit back and listen to the sound ringing in our ears. This is the way
to read Greek poetry, which is not a paper phenomenon, any more than a
Mozart Symphony is a graphic design written on score sheet. We have to
recreate the score for the musicality of the poem, but with pitches clearly
marked out, this will be entirely feasible.

Of course there are problems. The Aeolic dialect is much less known to us
than the later Attic Greek. Eustathius (515.37-8) discusses the dialects
which did not employ the rough breathing, calling this 'psilosis' or stripping
off, and he states that Aeolic was known as one of those dialects. So there
are no "rough breathings", whether as sign or as sound. As to accentuation
the metricist writer Choreoboskos remarks at various points "The Aeolians
accent this differently...", not generally specifying exactly how. We suspect
that the accentuation we find in our printed Sappho may not actually be that
which she used. On the other hand, since we have the printed accents to
work with, we can proceed tentatively with these, observing how they work
out in actual recited performance.

The vowel sequencing is always of paramount importance in reading Greek,
not only because Greek has a full and pellucid set of vowels, unlike Sanskrit
which has suffered considerable vowel consolidation, but because the
historical vowel changes within Greek often have grammatical meaning and
therefore call for careful attention. The vowel clarity of Greek is one of its
esthetic strong points, and they give a certain clarity to the language which
is especially brillliant in poetic diction.

Note in this first line the location of the -o- vowels:

poikilovqron j aqanavt j Afrovdita
poikilo-thron' athanat' Aphrodita
The first word has three -o- based syllables, while the last word sandwiches
an -o- between two -a-'s. But the whole line sandwiches the word 'athanta'
with its three (+ elided) -a- vowels between the other two -o- bearing
words. This is a very balanced and carefully assembled line of verse

But the next line

pai` Divo~ dolovploka livssomaiv se
pai dios doloploka lissomai se

goes the other way with four -o- sounds in the middle words, while the first
and next-last syllables in the line have the strong diphthong -ai-. Intuitively
conscious of the balance of the first line, the poet alters the arrangement of
the second line to avoid humdrum repetition. And in the third line

mhv m j avsaisi mhd j onivaisi davmna
me m'asaisi med' oniaisi damna

we find, poised on a pivotal center word "nor", two rhyming words with
their ringing -aisi-, each based on an vowel initial stem (aasa / ania = onia).
Then comes the powerful and potent word "Potnia" in a prayerful gasp of
breath, culminating in the pitch-heavy sprit-word 'thumon'.
__________________________
The prayer now goes into the second segment. Sappho is establishing the
identity of the goddess being called upon, using the right ritual words in the
traditional formula, as was done by the priest Chryses in the Homeric
prayer in Iliad I 36 ff:

klu`qi meu, argurovtox j, oJ~ Cruvshn amfibevbhka~
Kivllan et za-qevhn, Tenevdoio te i`fi anavssei~
Sminqeu`....

Hear me, O Silver Bow, who encircles Chrysa
And Killa the holy, and rule with might over Tenedos,
(Mouse-God) Smintheus........

Now having established the address identity, the priest goes on to the second
critical segment of any serious and proper prayer with a reminder of
services performed in the past in the god's honor:

....... eiv potev toi carivent j epi nhon evreya
h ei dhv potev toi kata pivona mhriv j evkha
tauvrwn hde aigw`n --- tovde moi krhvhnon eevldwr

.............if every for you I roofed over pleasing temple
or ever I kindled fat thigh pieces for you
of bull orgoat -----now grant me this wish.

It is not a matter of evening up the score and giving me this for that, it is
the mutual contact with a superior power, who when approached in proper
ritual mode. As further key to the situation, when the litigant actually establishes
that it is HE who is here doing the soliciting ---- then the actual
prayer as prayer can take place and reasonably be expected to reach the deity's
ear.

This Homeric example of a properly tendered and worded prayer was for
Archaic Greece a classic example of how to go about such business, and
Sappho follows the formula with remarkable exactness.

alla tui`d j evlq j aiv pota katevrwta
ta~ evma~ auvda~ ai>vousa phvloi
evklue~.........

"But come hither, if ever at another time
My voice hearing from afar off
You did listen....."

One of the difference between the anxious priest Chryses and the suppliant
Lady Sappho is that whereas he lists his accomplishments of roofing and
legs of goat and bull in workmanlike detail, she says nothing more than that
god listened to her once, at some other time and situation . She compacts all
that into one telling word 'kai-heterota' as "at some other time". This is
archly and deftly done, even to the sutured elision, it saves time and space
as this agitated woman goes to the heart (thumos) of the situation directly,
wasting no words on the unessential.

ta~ evma~ auvda~ ai>vousa phvloi
evklue~.........

These words are all auaral and auditory, there is an acoustic poattern to
them, moving from words based on the -s- vowel (1 - 4) but encapsulating
diphthongs -ae- and -ou- (3 4), then shifting to a long -e- vowel and in
'eklues' shor -e-. If initially the vowel thread is based on -a-, it amplifies
and then shifts to the fronted and much higher -e- series. And there is a corresponding
pattern in the meaning, which shifts the focus:

"my voice -----hearing ----(for off) you heard"

Following the re-focused attention on the listening goddess, we move to a
scene of motion and action, looking toward to an imaginary sun in her mind
s eye, all in the darkness of the inner chamber of the Doric temple.

patro~ de domon lipoisa
crusion elqe~
arm j upasdeuksaisa

your father's home leaving
---golden --- you came
yoking the chariot.

patros de domon lipoisa
chrusion elthes
arm' updeuxaisa.

The golden home of the Father is of course Zeus in his original role as
supreme (= overhead) Sun God. This original function is corroborated by
the cognate words Latin 'dies' and Skt. 'dyaus' as the Sun itself and "day".
The Greek myths moved slowly from nature forces to divine Persons in a
humanizing direction, as suited the anthropocentric Greeks. In this word the
original function of Sun shines through, along with "golden" which visually
calls up the orb of the bright shining sun.

Some have felt that the adjective "golden" could go with the "chariot" as
'arma' or the 'domon' as home of the goddess in the heaven, but best not
consider this an either / or situation. The chariot is a visual burst of the
material of the sun, a ''sun spot" as it were leaping out of the mass of burning
hydrogen.

And the word "golden" can equally well describe the glorious chariot which
carries the Sun-born goddess from there to here. Since the "home" comes
first, we can attach the "golden " to it and then trail its color onto the
moving 'arma' chariot as it leaves home.

The vowels leave a trail too, from the -l- 's of the first of the above lines
via the swift -e- 's of 'elthes' as Aphrodite prepares to travel, to the yoking
of the chariot with that odd pair of high sounding diphthongs ( -eu- -ai- )
and inside that very word 'upa-sdeuks-aisa' , with the slick -s- 's of the verb
'zeugnumi'.

Note the re-spelling in the above version: First the zeta or -z- was
certainly pronounced -s- + -d- rather than as later reversed. Then the
sigmatic aorist -s- is only graphically combined with the -g- of the
stem, so we should see it as -k- + -s-, matching the compounded zeta
before it.

But from Sappho's angle, kneeling in the dark room before the great seated
statue of her protecting (stone) goddess Aphrodite, it is a swirl of visual
imagery. Hermind goes up to heaven, sees the wheel of the sun, sees that
bursting off as wheel of the celestial chariot, sees Aphrodite the daughter
connecting up the chariot for an appearance on earth, about to fly.....

kaloi de s j agon
wvkee~ strou`qoi peri ga`~ melavina~
puvkna dvinnente~ ptver j ap j wravnwiqero~
dia mevssw.
ai`ya d jexivkonto

"And fair, swift
Doves brought you over the black earth
Dense wings whirring, from heaven down
through middle air.
Suddenly they arrived"

kaloi de s'agon
okees strouthoi peri gas melainas
pukna dinnentes pter' ap oranothe-
-ros dia messo
aipsa d'exikonto

.........but immediately the flight of the flaring chariot disappears, and the
scene shifts to the outside of the temple walls, where as Sappho hears, from
the inner chamber a flight of pigeons swirling around the temple roof, with
the fluttering noise of many wings together.

What are the birds 'strouthoi"? It is almost impossible to identify
birdsand plants, as D'Arcy Thompson demonstrated in his studies
years ago,. The strouthoi would seem to be relatively small birds in
Iliad 2.311 since a snake is devouring down eagerly all eight finding
them of them in a nest. On the other hand 'strouthos megas' is an
"ostrich" or in Latin 'avis strix', for the mise en scene unthinkable
here! I opt for the pigeons since they fly in groups and you can hear
the sound of their wings fairly clearly as they swirl in groups.
While considering these philological minutiae, look at the word
'pteron /. ptera" which is originally a feather, as in Odyssey 7.36
wkei`ai w~ ei pteron he novhma "fast as a feather or a thought".
But it is also used for the "wings" as Iliad 23.879 sun ptera pukna
livasqen with the same adjective 'puknos / pukinos' which cannot be
exactly put into English.

The core meaning of this word 'pukna' is "dense, compact, solid,
clever ?, wise ?" in some uses, but Homer uses it for wings as does
Sappho, so it must have a meaning which lies outside English usage.
Something like "en masse, mass" but not "massive" might do it, but
there seems to be no perfect translation.

It is the acoustically massed sound of fluttering wings which Sappho hears
winging around the temple roof, a sign that the goddess is approaching on
her pathway down from heavenly home to the temple where she is drawn
by the prayer of an ardent devotee, calling upon her name.

wvkee~ strou`qoi peri ga`~ melavina~
puvkna dvinnente~ ptver j ap j wravnwiqero~
dia mevssw.
ai`ya d jexivkonto

Looking at this section again, we see massed motions of several sorts, the
swiftness of the birds in flight, then their motion over the Homeric "black
earth", then the actual sounds of fluttering wings, then direction again:
Sappho has to look back to the world of Homer, which is the same world as
hers in one sense, but as a world of spear and warfare an entirely different
world in fact. The reference to Homer's "dark earth" is actually a forwardgoing
allusion, since it prepares the poem for the next-last word in the last
stanza, the military and Homeric word: 'summachos' or "battle ally".
Aphrodite flies swiftly over this over-warred earth in her flight to a woman's
love-trapped heart, but the note on the geographical identity is a sign of
the shift in sense and sensibilities from the epic world to her new one of the
emotions and the heart.

"...from heaven through the middle air", a curious but intentional combination
of words giving us 'ourano + aithér', here combined as 'óran-aitheros'
with dialect shifts of vowels. The combination gives an additional sense of
swiftness, as if heaven and middle air are somehow combined in one mad
dash, as the sun-chariot swirls in a flash from the upper levels of 'ouranos'
down through the middle-air or 'aither', the air-space in which we live our
human lives.

With airplane travel we have moved into this middle range between the
upper reaches of orbiting shuttles, and now use the term "airspace" again
for the territory of powered flight. Sappho was speaking of powered flight
in her airspace also, but it was goddess powered for her the, and the vehicle
did not have to be pressurized.

The phrase 'peri gas melainas' as over Homer's black earth doesn't need
phonetic reinforcement since it is such a familiar phrase out of the Epic
vocabulary, with its own set of images. But look at the birds:

puvkna dvinnente~ ptver
"dense whirring wings"
pukna dinnentes ptera
This almost untranslatable trio is poised on the central whirring word
'dinnentes', with an untranslatable 'pukna' (whooshing?) of "wings" on
either side. But aside from the formal arrangement, there is sheer soundwriting
in these three words, as Sappho inside listens to the whirrrrrr of
wings outside, as they swing the temple roof again and again, until.......

ai`ya d jexivkonto

"There they are..."

aipsa d' exikonto

What is critical here is the rate of speed in the passage from sun to the
temple grounds, the holy 'temenos', as the scene changes from the birds and
sound of fluttering wings, to black earth below and middle brightness
(aither) above and then, all of a sudden : They are arrived.
They have landed, that is the first part of the line. But immediately the
words shift focus: "and you......the Blessed One"

ai`ya d jexivkonto. su d j, w` mavkaira,
mediaisai~ j aqanatw/ proswpw/

"they arrived. And you, Belssed One,
smiling with your immortal face"

aipsa e'exikonto. su d', O Makaira
mediaisais' athanato prosopo

The word which I have translated tentatively as "Blessed" is 'makaira' derived
from 'makar' which Homer uses often of the Gods. But this is not the
same as English "blessed" which has a special meaning in a Western
Christian society, which is quite different from the Hellenic world. The
"theoi makares" are not so much religiously blessed as "happy, rejoicing" in
a special world which knows no pain or responsibility or death. One might
better say "beatific" for their existence, or even call them "the hedonistic
heavenly ones" , but these connotations are all wrong. Later the Greek decided
that "the happy ones" or 'makarioi' mean the blessed dead, those who
have passed on to the fields of flowers, and this meaning which is not found
in Epic, becomes the only regular use of the word.

What seems critical is to establish the inner sense of 'makaira' as a word
belonging to Aphrodite's joyful and celestially blessed existence, here
leading us to that expansive word in the next line, the ethereal Smile of the
goddess, which becomes the visual focus of the whole poem.

mediaisai~ j aqanatw/ proswpw/
"smiling with that celestial smile"
mediaisais' athanato prosopo
Obviously I have trouble with 'athanatos' again, which I established at the
start of the poem as "holy", but now I find it completely out of place. This
is no nun's placid and holy smile, the sign of acceptance of role and a sense
of total forgiveness. It is a smile which goes with something entirely different,
a beatific smile from a jorful and celestial heaven. And it is also something
else. It is a smile which has found a place in our century as the.......
Archaic Smile.