Volume 50, Number 13 · August 14, 2003
In Search of Sappho
By Daniel Mendelsohn
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
translated from the Greek by Anne Carson
Knopf, 397 pp., $27.50
In a fragment of a Hellenistic elegy called 'Loves, or the Beautiful Boys,' by a certain Phanocles, we are told that after the legendary poet Orpheus was torn to pieces by the women of Thrace, his head and his lyre—the instrument from which lyric poetry derives its name—were borne by the waves to the island of Lesbos, where they were subsequently buried. This geography was hardly casual. By Phanocles' time, Lesbos had long been associated with exceptional achievement in the lyric arts. The reputation of a poet called Terpander, for instance, who came from the Lesbian city of Antissa and is listed on an extant monument as the winner of a song competition that occurred in the 670s BC, was such that he was credited—apocryphally, undoubtedly—with having invented the seven-stringed lyre. (He is also said to have founded music schools in Sparta.)
Review, 5516 words
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