INTRO TO THE TEXT "TO APHRODITE"

Poem I

This famous poem is in the form of a prayer to Sappho's deity Aphrodite, the only complete poem we have from her work, and we owe its preservation to the literary critic and historian Dionysos of Halicarnassos, who was writing at Rome around 30 BC. His extensive treatise "On Literary Composition" is especially valuable since it gives a detailed analytical account of how an educated Greek would approach the reading of his classics, but its special contribution here is the quotation of this brilliant poem, the longest one we have from Sappho. Having some papyri in bits and pieces with a few lines from this poem, we see how impossible restoration would have been if we had to "reconstruct" it from the scraps, considering the complete poem as here presented.

But Dionysos gives us not only the poem, but also some most revealing remarks about the way he was reading her poetry. These are worth quoting in full, since what he says is quite different from the way we read and analyze poetry today.

"Here the euphonious effect (euevpia) and the grace (cavri~) of the language arise from the coherence (suneceiva/) and smoothness (leiovteti) of the junctures (aJrmoiw`n). The words nestle close to each other and are woven together (sunuvfantai literally ) according
to certain affinities and natural attractions of the letters.........."

"........As a natural consequence the language has a certain easy flow and softness. The arrangement of the words in no way ruffles the smooth waves of sound."

In the middle section of this quotation he goes into a description of some of the phonetic associations of contiguous sounds, which is different from a modern phonetic description, but very revealing since it shows the acoustic approach which an educated Greek would expect in reading poetry. "Almost through the entire ode, vowels are joined to mutes and semivowels, all those which are naturally prefixed or affixed to one another when pronounced together in one syllable. There are very few clashings of the semi-vowels with semi-vowels or mutes, and of mutes and vowels with one another, such as cause the sound to oscillate. When I review the entire ode, I find in all those sounds and verbs and other kinds of words, only five or perhaps six unions of semi-vowels and mutes which do not naturally blend with one another, and even they do not disturb the smoothness of the language to any great extent. As for juxtapositions of vowels, I find that those which occur in some clauses themselves are still fewer, while those which join the clauses to one another are only a little more numerous." This complicated outline of the Hellenistic approach to the phonetics and acoustics of poetry must represent a standardized method of interpretation common in the schools of the time. Dionysos explains at this point that going into full detail on the sounds would make the treatise overlong with needless repetition.

The above paragraphs might just as well have been written by the editor of this study, but in fact it is from Dionysos' pen some two thousand years ago. I quote it because it shows that a full phonetic analysis of poetry was at that time not only conceivable, but also done in the course of the teaching of literature, and done in a full and detailed manner. In this study we will be able go into some of the detail in the commentary, things which our critic felt he could not find space for in his general review of literary composition. What I stress here is that phonetic and acoustic analysis was to an ancient literary analyst not only worthwhile doing, but was normally done in great detail.

Dionysos continues with a final remark:
"It will be open to you as to anyone else, at your full leisure and
convenience, to take each single point enumerated by me and to
examine and review them with illustration. But really I have no time
for this! It is quite enough to give an adequate indication of my views
to all who will be able to follow in my steps."

It is interesting that the translator of the above passages ( W. Rhys Roberts: Dionysus of Halicarnassos, London l910) comments on the above technical passages: "Dionysus shows good judgment in not subjecting Sappho's Hymn to a detailed analysis, letter by letter." But it is that analysis which would have defined for us the Form on which the Ode (not Hymn) is built, in a verifiably authentic manner!

What is remarkable in this description of Sappho's poem is the very physicalness of the wording, which uses Greek terms like "fair-wording" and "grace" resulting from smoothness of the joinery at the junctures. These words are also used in the description of fine joinery of furniture, with phrases like "smooth to the fingernail", which points to care and delicacy in
the finishing craftsmanship. Dionysos is not using these words in a transferred or poetical sense. It is clear that they are for him technical terms regularly used in describing this kind of poetry, since he is ranging over the various types of composition which he finds in Greek classical literature.

He is dealing with the inner structure of the sounds in terms which are virtually identical to what I call the Microstructure, or inner configuration of the minimal sound-components. We can take a cue for our interpretation from this unusual description of a lyrical poem, the more valuable since it is written from within the cultural and artistic milieu of the Hellenistic world, by a man who would by his profession give a fair estimate of the tone of acceptable ancient literary criticism.