> The theory that Sappho's Phainetai moi was referring to a bride and
> bridegroom, on the occasion of the wedding of one of Sappho's favorite
> "pupils,"

I think you misconstrue what I said, Jon.  I *didn't say the poem was a 
traditional wedding hymn or anything like that, but that a plausible subtext 
is that Sappho is *observing a wedding.

Longinus, after all, begins his comment on the poem by saying (trans. 
D.A.Campbell): "Sappho, for example, always chooses the emotions associated 
with love's madness from the attendant circumstances and the real 
situation."

My point is that (unlike, say, the Ode to Aphrodite, where the goddess 
promises Sappho eventual fulfilment of her love), Fragment 31 [to me at 
least] suggests that this poem is about the *impossibility of the fulfilment 
of a particular love.

It could be that the problem is simply that the girl whom Sappo is observing 
is heterosexual, but that seems to me both rather trite and inadequate.  The 
bridegroom/bride scenario gives a plausible context as to why there is some 
specific reason why that particular man [in this poem] has some special 
"right" to the girl.

> was made up pretty much out of thin air by the great
> hatchet-jawed Prussian classical scholar Wilamowitz, who was also
> responsible for the idea that the reason Sappho wrote poems to young
> women was that she was headmistress of a finishing-school ...

Quite.

> heart by Denys Page in his definitive 1959 Sappho and Alcaeus in a
> classic example of odium philologicum, which, after an impeccable
> refutation of the non-evidence concludes:
>
> "There was never such a wedding-song in the history of society, and
> there never should have been such a theory in the history of
> scholarship ... There is in fact neither bride nor bridegroom in this
> poem:  and there is neither schoolteacher nor pupil in the general
> tradition.

The absence of evidence is not necessarily the evidence of absence.  I agree 
even with: "There is in fact neither bride nor bridegroom in this poem," to 
the extent that this is not *explicit in the text.  This doesn't mean that 
the wedding situation is ruled out.  There's a difference between rejecting 
the idea that the poem is wedding-hymn (with which I'd agree), and rejecting 
the possibility that it's *about a wedding, as an explanation of the 
particular emotions dealt with (not simply passionate love but impossible 
love).

> Sappho loves this girl with a passion of which the nature
> is no more disguised than the intensity.  The ancients, who knew this
> poem in its completeness, had no doubt about its meaning.  To
> 'Longinus', to Catullus, to Plutarch,

To whom one could add Plato in the Phaedrus (although he's not referring 
specifically to Fragment 31, but then neither is Plutarch in 'On Music', 
where he is anyway commenting on Sappho's metre rather than her emotions) 
who links Sappho with Anacreon as the among finest love poets ever to have 
written.

But if by the reference to Catullus, you mean "Ille me par esse deo 
videtur," the most we can say is that Catullus thought highly enough of the 
poem to translate it, not just what kind of poem it is.  Otherwise we'd be 
forced to assume that Sappho's poem is spoken by a man, and addressed to the 
particular figure of Lesbia.

However, there *is one inference that can be taken from Catullus' 
translation -- that he found the poem complete as we have it now, since his 
translation doesn't go beyond what we still have.  Alternatively, of course, 
even by the time of Catullus, the end may already have been lost, in which 
case Catullus no more knew the poem in its completeness than we do.

> it was a masterpiece among poems
> of passionate love; the perfect delineations of 'the emotions that
> accompany a love in ecstasy',

I'm afraid I'm forced to part company with Longinus here -- "All this of 
course happens to people in love" seems to me to avoid the particularity of 
the poem.

> in the ancient critic's phrase.  We may
> amend, 'a love in jealousy':

It's more than simple jealousy -- that description could as easily, if not 
better, be applied to the emotions Sappho deals with in the Ode to 
Aphrodite.

> but if we look further we shall find
> nothing.  This is a poem sung by Sappho to her friends;  its subject
> is the emotion which overwhelms her when she sees a beloved girl
> enjoying the company of a man.

Neither is there any evidence that: "This is a poem sung by Sappho to her 
friends."  Equally, of course, there's nothing to absolutely disqualify such 
a reading which would see the poem as a public performance.  I happen to 
find that view of the poem as outre as seeing it as a wedding hymn, I have 
to say.  It puts Sappho in the company of Pindar rather than Archilochus and 
Anacreon.

[I'm not, of course, saying that Anacreon and Sappho's poems weren't read, 
sung to the lyre, perfomed, whatever.  There is however a difference between 
poetry such as Sappho's and Anacreon's, and that constructed and presented 
as a public perfomance (Simonides and Pindar).]

> Only for in generation in 2,500 years
> has it ever been mistaken for anything else."

I'm afraid the misconstruction of Sappho lasted rather longer than simply 
one generation.  When did the attempt to construct Sappho as a thwarted 
heterosexual poet, via the Phaon rubbish and a conflation of her with 'the 
other Sappho' begin?

Robin