Starting with Anacreon While Preparing a Compendium of Essays on Sappho and Her Ancient Reception
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Starting with Anacreon while preparing a compendium of essays on Sappho and her ancient reception The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Nagy, Gregory. 2021.02.06. "Starting with Anacreon while preparing a compendium of essays on Sappho and her ancient reception." Classical Inquiries. http://nrs.harvard.edu/ urn-3:hul.eresource:Classical_Inquiries. Published Version https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/starting-with-anacreon- while-preparing-a-compendium-of-essays-on-sappho-and-her- ancient-reception/ Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37367198 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Classical Inquiries Editors: Angelia Hanhardt and Keith Stone Consultant for Images: Jill Curry Robbins Online Consultant: Noel Spencer About Classical Inquiries (CI ) is an online, rapid-publication project of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, devoted to sharing some of the latest thinking on the ancient world with researchers and the general public. 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Please refer to captions for information about copyright of individual images. Citing Articles from Classical Inquiries To cite an article from Classical Inquiries, use the author’s name, the date, the title of the article, and the following persistent identifer: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:Classical_Inquiries. For example: Nagy, G. 2019.01.31. “Homo Ludens at Play with the Songs of Sappho: Experiments in Comparative Reception Teory, Part Four.” Classical Inquiries. http://nrs.harvard.edu/ urn-3:hul.eresource:Classical_Inquiries. Starting with Anacreon while preparing a compendium of essays on Sappho and her ancient reception Gregory Nagy FEBRUARY 6, 2021 | By Gregory Nagy 2021.02.06 | By Gregory Nagy §0. In consultation with the editorial team of Classical Inquiries, I am preparing to submit to them, for a hoped-for free-standing online publication, a compendium of my published essays on the topic of Sappho’s ancient reception. In essays I have published more recently on this vast topic, especially in Classical Inquiries, I have tried to track, more thoroughly than in my less recent essays, other topics that are at least in part relevant to my overall project, which aims to reconstruct not some hypothetical prototype of Sappho’s supposedly original text but, instead, what I am calling the “ancient reception” of Sappho’s songs as they were being performed in earlier phases and as they were being performed or read in later phases and as they were being merely read as texts in still later phases. When I say “ancient” here, I am referring, in the most general terms possible, to a premodern era extending from the late seventh century BCE all the way to the early Byzantine era, where intellectuals like Paul the Silentiary (“Paulus Silentiarius”), who lived in the late sixth century CE, were still imitating what they were reading in their transmitted texts of Sappho. To be contrasted is today’s impoverished state of aairs, where all we have left of the ancient textual tradition is a frustratingly small number of quotations found either in other ancient texts or in fragments of papyri dating from Hellenized phases of Egypt. My project aims at reconstructing considerably more than the textual remnants, concentrating on what I have just dened as her “ancient reception.” For this kind of reconstruction, as I said at the beginning, I need to delve into other topics—which may not always be relevant to what little has actually survived directly from the songs of Sappho but which can still lead to a fuller understanding of the overall reception of her songmaking. In this essay, I track one such topic, which centers on questions about sexual preferences or attractions as expressed or at least implied by female beauties in the poetics of Sappho. And I start by focusing on a song attributed to Anacreon, an old male poet who was supposedly in love with Sappho—according to at least some ancient traditions about the lives of Sappho and Anacreon. Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), Anacreon and a Young Woman. Paris, musée national Eugène Delacroix. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. §1. Why do I start with a song of Anacreon and not with some surviving song of Sappho as I begin to track the topic of female sexual preferences and to consider how this topic applies to the songmaking of Sappho? My answer is simple: given that my aim is to analyze the ancient reception of Sappho, I consider my choice of Anacreon to be most appropriate. The song of Anacreon that I am about to quote and translate is, I argue, the second-earliest attested reference to the songs of Sappho. I have presented an earlier version of this argument in another essay (Nagy 2007:226–246, linked here), where I also argued that a song of Alcaeus, reportedly a contemporary of Sappho, is the rst-attested reference to her. I have my reasons, however, for choosing not Alcaeus but Anacreon here, since the second of the two poets, conventionally dated almost a century after the reported life and times of Sappho, is a bridge for her later reception in Athens, whereas no such claim can be made for the rst poet. §2. Here, then, is the song of Anacreon, which is my starting point for analyzing the ancient reception of Sappho: σφαίρῃ δηὖτέ με πορφυρέῃ βάλλων χρυσοκόμης Ἔρως νήνι ποικιλοσαμβάλῳ συμπαίζειν προκαλεῖται. ἣ δ’ (ἐστὶν γὰρ ἀπ’ εὐκτίτου Λέσβου) τὴν μὲν ἐμὴν κόμην (λευκὴ γάρ) καταμέμφεται, πρὸς δ’ ἄλλην τινὰ χάσκει. Once again [dēute] this time with a purple ball I am hit —it was thrown by the one with the golden head of hair, Eros, and—with a young girl wearing pattern-woven sandals —to play-with [sun-paizein] her does he [= Eros] call on me. But, you see, she is from that place so well settled by settlers, Lesbos it is. And my head of hair, you see, it’s white, she nds fault with it. And she gapes at something else—some girl. Anacreon F 358 in PMG (ed. Page) §3. This song is quoted in a context that has much to tell us about the reception of not only Sappho but also Anacreon himself. The context is provided in a source dated to the second/third century CE, Athenaeus (13.598b-c), who stages a learned discussion about the poet Hermesianax of Colophon (early third century BCE). This poet refers to the love professed for Sappho by Anacreon. The poem of Hermesianax describes Sappho as an aēdōn ‘nightingale’ (F 7 49 ed. Powell), the most beautiful of all the women of Lesbos, and it goes on to tell how a lovelorn Anacreon often journeyed from Samos to Lesbos in seemingly vain attempts to succeed in winning her love (F 7 50–57 via Athenaeus 13.598c). After the quotation of the poem by Hermesianax comes to an end in the text of Athenaeus (13.599b), the learned discussion turns to a questioning of what the poet says about Anacreon. It is claimed that Hermesianax made a big mistake by ‘synchronizing’ Anacreon with Sappho: ἐν τούτοις ὁ Ἑρμησιάναξ σφάλλεται συγχρονεῖν οἰόμενος Σαπφὼ καὶ Ἀνακρέοντα, τὸν μὲν κατὰ Κῦρον καὶ Πολυκράτην γενόμενον, τὴν δὲ κατ’ Ἀλυάττην τὸν Κροίσου πατέρα. Χαμαιλέων δ’ ἐν τῷ περὶ Σαπφοῦς καὶ λέγειν τινάς φησιν εἰς αὐτὴν πεποιῆσθαι ὑπὸ Ἀνακρέοντος τάδε· In these lines Hermesianax is making a mistake in thinking that Sappho and Anacreon are contemporaries. For he [= Anacreon] lived in the time of Cyrus and Polycrates while she [= Sappho] lived in the time of Alyattes the father of Croesus. But Chamaeleon in his work On Sappho [F 26 ed. Wehrli] even says that the following verses were composed by Anacreon and addressed to her [= Sappho]. And it is in this context that Athenaeus quotes the song of Anacreon that I have just quoted. §4. But now things get more complicated. In the text of Athenaeus, we now read further about the source just mentioned, Chamaeleon of Heraclea Pontica, who is dated to the fourth/third centuries BCE. In his work On Sappho (F 26 ed. Wehrli), as we have just seen from Athenaeus, Chamaeleon interpreted what we know as Song 358 of Anacreon to be the words of the poet’s declaration of love for Sappho. After quoting the words supposedly spoken by Anacreon in professing his love, Chamaeleon then quotes the words supposedly spoken by Sappho in talking back to Anacreon (Adespota 35 = F 953 in PMG ed. Page): καὶ τὴν Σαπφὼ δὲ πρὸς αὐτὸν ταῦτά φησιν εἰπεῖν· κεῖνον, ὦ χρυσόθρονε Μοῦσ’, ἔνισπες ὕμνον, ἐκ τᾶς καλλιγύναικος ἐσθλᾶς Τήιος χώρας ὃν ἄειδε τερπνῶς πρέσβυς ἀγαυός.