Sappho Or Alcaeus: Authors and Genres of Archaic Hymns

chapter 12 Sappho or Alcaeus: Authors and Genres of Archaic Hymns

Leanna Boychenko

There are 42 fragments listed under the title incertum utrius auctoris fragmenta at the end of Eva-Maria Voigt’s Sappho et Alcaeus. Among these unidentified fragments are some printed in full, while others have found new homes among the comparatively certum fragments attributed to either Sappho or Alcaeus. In the case of this latter group, there is often good reason to attribute the fragments to one author or the other, frequently based on ancient scholarly com- mentary. Voigt’s Sappho 117b, for example, is quoted by a Roman grammarian of the third century ce, Marius Plotius Sacerdos, to demonstrate the Sapphic dimetrum dactylicum: a Ἔσπερ’ ὐμήναον b ὦ τὸν Ἀδώνιον a Hesperus! Hymenaeos! b Oh Adonian!

Even without the ancient attribution, the content of these fragments corre- sponds to some of the known themes of Sappho’s songs. A wedding. Adonis. Certainly these lines look Sapphic.1 Edgar Lobel and Denys Page, however, printed these two fragments as inc. auct. 24 and T. Bergk suggested that example b was made up.2 H. Keil even more discriminately dismissed both as fic- tum.3 These lines certainly look Sapphic, but are they? The authenticity of Sappho 117b v has been questioned, but neither part a nor b has ever been attributed to another poet. For some fragments, however, the question is not whether they were composed by Sappho, but whether we should attribute them to Sappho or Alcaeus. Here, I focus on one such contro-

1 Cf. Campbell (1982) 451. 2 Bergk (1866) 911. 3 Keil (1874) 517.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004339705_014 240 boychenko versial fragment known as Alcaeus 304 or Sappho 44a. Just as we saw with Sap- pho 117b v above, the content of this fragment has contributed to its attribution to Sappho, for it is part of a hymn to Artemis. Praising a virgin goddess seems a fitting topic for a female composer, especially one who may very well have been writing choral songs for young girls.4 It is my supposition, however, that in this case genre is a better criterion than content for determining whether a hymn belongs in the tradition of Sappho or Alcaeus, who I argue wrote different types of hymns.

Publication and Attribution: Sappho or Alcaeus?

Discovered in a papyrus from the second or third century ce, Alcaeus 304/Sap- pho 44a was published by Lobel and Page in 1952. Their article in the Classical Quarterly called the lines “A New Fragment of Aeolic Verse” and identified it as part of a hymn to Artemis. They determined there was insufficient evidence for deciding between the two Lesbian authors, but leaned toward Alcaeus due to a metrical question. I provide their printing of P. Fouad Inv. no. 239 below:

[ ]σανορεσ̣. .[ (1) [ ]μ̣αι τὸν ἔτικτε Κόω .[ [Κρ]ονίδαι μεγαλωνύμω̣⟨ι⟩ [ ]μέγαν ὄρκον ἀπώμοσε

4 Cf. Calame (1977) 367–372; (1997) 210–214. “Artemis” only appears once in the extant works attributed to Sappho in fr. 84 lp: Ἀρτεμι̣.There is not enough of the poorly preserved fragment to determine context. It is possible that Artemis is referred to in the very fragmentary 99 lp (= Alc. 303a v), which seems to be a hymn to Apollo. The word ἀδελφέαν appears in line 11. Camp- bell’s Testimonium 21 (Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana 30.15) speaks of a contempo- rary of Sappho who writes hymns to Artemis, but does not clearly say that Sappho wrote these as well (see p. 242 for discussion of this testimonium) and Testimonium 47 (Menander Rhetor Διαίρεσις τῶν ἐπιδεικτικῶν 333, 334) mentions the cletic hymns of Sappho and Alcman, who call Artemis from the mountains and Aphrodite from Cyprus, but it is not clear whether he is speaking generally or giving specific examples: ἀναμιμνήσκειν γὰρ πολλῶν τόπων ἐκείνοις ἔξε- στιν, ὡς παρὰ τῇ Σαπφοῖ καὶ τῷ Ἀλκμᾶνι πολλαχοῦ εὑρίσκομεν. τὴν μὲν γὰρ Ἄρτεμιν ἐκ μυρίων ὀρέων, μυρίων δὲ πόλεων, ἔτι δὲ ποταμῶν ἀνακαλεῖ, τὴν δὲ Ἀφροδίτην ⟨ἐκ⟩ Κύπρου, Κνίδου, Συρίας, πολλαχόθεν ἀλλαχόθεν ἀνακαλεῖ. (For it is possible for them to recall them from manyplaces, as we find many times in Sappho and in Alcman. For he calls Artemis from many mountains and many cities, and again from rivers, and she calls Aphrodite from Cyprus, Knidos, Syria, and from many other places). τὴν … τὴν in the second sentence is sometimes edited to ὁ … ἡ to avoid the ambiguity. This would also remove the mention of Sappho’s hymns to Artemis.