Ode to Aphrodite

Preservation

Until the publication of the Tithonus poem in 2005, the Ode to Aphrodite was Sappho's only poem known to be complete which had survived from antiquity. It was preserved in Dionysius of Halicarnassus' On Composition, where that writer quoted its full text as an example of "smooth" or "polished" writing. The poem is also partially preserved on a second-century papyrus discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.

Though the poem is conventionally considered to be completely preserved, there are two places where the reading is uncertain. The first is the first word of the poem: some manuscripts of Dionysios render the word as "Ποικιλόφρον’"; others, along with the Oxyrhynchus papyrus of the poem, have "Ποικιλόθρον’". This latter reading is standard, and both the Lobel/Page and Voigt editions of Sappho print it. Hutchinson argues that it is more likely that "–θρον" was corrupted to "–φρον" than vice-versa. However, Anne Carson's edition of Sappho argues for Ποικιλόφρον’, and more recently Rayor and Lardinois, while following Voigt's text, note that "it is hard to decide between these two readings". The second problem in the poem's preservation is at line 19, where the manuscripts of the poem are "garbled", and the papyrus is broken at the beginning of the line.

Poem

The poem is written in Aeolic Greek and set in Sapphic stanzas, a meter named after Sappho. In Hellenistic editions of Sappho's works, it was the first poem of Book I of her poetry. As the poem begins with the word "Ποικιλόθρον'", this is outside of the sequence followed through the rest of Book I, where the poems are ordered alphabetically by initial letter. At seven stanzas long, the poem is the longest-surviving fragment from Book I of Sappho.

The ode is written in the form of a prayer to Aphrodite, goddess of love, from a speaker who longs for the attentions of an unnamed woman. Sappho asks the goddess to ease the pains of her unrequited love for this girl; after being thus invoked, Aphrodite appears to Sappho, telling her that the girl who has rejected her advances will in time pursue her in turn. The poem concludes with another call for the goddess to assist the speaker in all her amorous struggles. With its reference to a female beloved, the "Ode to Aphrodite" is (along with Sappho 31) one of the few extant works of Sappho that provides evidence that she loved other women. The poem contains few clues to the performance context, though Stefano Caciagli suggests that it may have been written for an audience of Sappho's female friends.

The Ode to Aphrodite is strongly influenced by Homeric epic. Ruby Blondell argues that the whole poem is a parody and reworking of the scene in book five of the Iliad between Aphrodite, Athena, and Diomedes. Sappho's Homeric influence is especially clear in the third stanza of the poem, where Aphrodite's descent to the mortal world is marked by "a virtual invasion of Homeric words and phrases".

Classicists disagree about whether the poem was intended as a serious piece. Arguing for a serious interpretation of the poem, for instance, C. M. Bowra suggests that it discusses a genuine religious experience. On the other hand, A. P. Burnett sees the piece as "not a prayer at all", but a lighthearted one aiming to amuse. Some elements of the poem which are otherwise difficult to account for can be explained as humorous. For instance, at the beginning of the third stanza of the poem, Sappho calls upon Aphrodite in a chariot "yoked with lovely sparrows", a phrase which Harold Zellner argues is most easily explicable as a form of humorous wordplay. Aphrodite's speech in the fourth and fifth stanzas of the poem has also been interpreted as lighthearted. Keith Stanley argues that these lines portray Aphrodite "humorous[ly] chiding" Sappho, with the threefold repetition of δηυτε followed by the hyperbolic and lightly mocking τις ς', ω Ψαπφ', αδικηει;