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," 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. These
hilariously tendentious interpretations were with excruciating
obviousness meant to spare the blushes of modern sensibilities ("Und
nun Sappho! Eine vornehme Frau, Gattin, und Mutter ..." Wilamowitz.)
The bridegroom theory was killed and buried with a stake through its
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. 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, it was a masterpiece among poems
of passionate love; the perfect delineations of 'the emotions that
accompany a love in ecstasy', in the ancient critic's phrase. We may
amend, 'a love in jealousy': 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. Only for in generation in 2,500 years
has it ever been mistaken for anything else."
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Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/joncpoetics/
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