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Under each poem is a map of how it runs on the page — the order of the moves, where the printed line numbers fall, what the footnotes gloss — plus what's worth knowing about the fragment underneath the translation.
fr. 102
It's no usethe weaving poem — p. 794
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How it runs in the anthology
Stanza 1 is the title line standing alone, as it does in every poem here.
Stanza 2: the address to the mother, the weaving that cannot be finished, and then the indented half-line that hands the blame to Aphrodite.
Stanza 3 is a single line — the concession about the goddess's softness, set off by itself.
Stanza 4 closes: desire for the boy has nearly killed the speaker.
Four stanzas in all. No line numbers are printed, since the numbering starts at 10 and the poem stops short of it.
Underneath. Two lines of Greek, quoted by (c. A.D. 150) as a specimen of — what you're reading is the whole of what survives, not an excerpt. The Greek names Aphrodite as the agent directly; Barnard's "you may blame" is her softening.
fr. 132
Sleep, darlingthe Cleis poem — pp. 794–95
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How it runs in the anthology
Title line alone.
The daughter named and likened to a golden flower.
The refusal that closes it: not the whole kingdom, with love thrown in, would buy her.
Footnote 1 glosses Croesus as the Lydian king, r. 560–546 B.C.E., proverbial for his wealth.
Underneath. Quoted by Hephaestion. Worth knowing for a quiz: the Greek names Lydia, not Croesus. Croesus is Barnard's substitution — he ruled Lydia, so the footnote is glossing her choice rather than Sappho's word. The final place-name in the Greek is damaged and usually restored as Lesbos.
fr. 98
Don't ask me what to wearthe headband poem — p. 795
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How it runs in the anthology
Title line alone.
No embroidered headband from to give Cleis — the kind the speaker herself once wore. The line about wearing it is indented short.
The mother's saying, reported: in her day a purple ribbon looped in the hair counted as high style.
The turn — the admission about being dark — with the indented half-line after it. Line 10 falls there.
Close: hair yellower than torchlight takes fresh flowers and no headdress.
Underneath. From a Berlin published in 1902, and it survives in two separate pieces (98a and 98b) — reading them as one poem is an editor's decision. Barnard's indented half-lines mark where the papyrus breaks. The Greek piece continues past where she stops, into a damaged passage about the Cleanactids, the ruling family whose exile apparently made Lydian goods unobtainable.
fr. 105
Lament for a Maidenheadtwo wedding images — pp. 795–96
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How it runs in the anthology
Speaker labels are printed in the margin: FIRST VOICE, then SECOND VOICE. This is the only poem in the selection staged as a dialogue.
First voice: the on a top branch, passed over by harvesters — then the correction, not unnoticed but unreached.
Second voice: the trampled in the mountains, until only a stain is left. Line 10 falls on the stain.
Underneath. The two images come from different ancient sources — the apple from a on Hermogenes, the flower from Demetrius — and nothing in the manuscripts says they belong to one poem. The two-voice staging is a modern reconstruction. The Greek hyakinthos is not our hyacinth; some translators render it larkspur or iris.
fr. 31
He is more than a herothe jealousy ode — p. 796
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How it runs in the anthology
Title line alone; then the man called a god for being allowed to sit beside her.
The listening — voice, then laughter — and the speaker's heart as the first symptom.
Line 10 falls mid-sentence, where the clause about meeting her suddenly runs across the stanza break.
The symptoms in order: speech, tongue, flame under the skin, sight, hearing, sweat, trembling, pallor.
Close: at such times death is not far off.
Underneath. This one survives because the critic known as quoted it whole in On the Sublime, as a model of how to assemble the symptoms of passion — which is why it is nearly intact while the rest are scraps. The Greek has one further line after Barnard's ending, breaking off mid-thought, and editors dispute whether it belongs. Catullus 51 is a Latin translation of it.
fr. 2
You know the place: thenthe invitation to Aphrodite — p. 797
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How it runs in the anthology
Title line alone; then the summons — leave , come to the grove where we wait.
The catalogue: incense on the altar, cold streams through apple branches, a young rose thicket, sleep poured down from quivering leaves. Line 10 falls on the quivering leaves.
Meadows where horses have grown sleek, spring flowers, dill in the air.
Close: the goddess named outright, and asked to fill the gold cups. Footnote 1 glosses the — Aphrodite conceived from the sea-foam off Cyprus.
Underneath. Until 1937 only two pieces of this were known, quoted by Hermogenes and Athenaeus. The complete poem turned up on a potsherd — the Florentine — badly written by whoever scratched it, which is why editions disagree about the stanza with the horses and the winds. Barnard's fourth stanza is where the Greek is least secure.
fr. 94
I have had not one word from herthe remembered parting — pp. 797–98
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How it runs in the anthology
Title line alone; the death-wish; the parting, with her words given in quotation marks.
Line 10 opens the long quoted reply, which runs unbroken to the end. Everything after it is the speaker quoting herself.
Inside the reply: the gifts to Aphrodite, then the catalogue — violet , braided rosebuds, and , myrrh, soft mats.
Line 20 falls on the choruses; the poem stops on an ellipsis after the woodlot, mid-catalogue. The page turn falls inside the parting speech.
Underneath. Berlin papyrus, published 1902. Two real uncertainties: the Greek begins mid-sentence, so Barnard's opening line supplies a start the papyrus doesn't have, and the death-wish may belong to the departing woman rather than to Sappho. The closing catalogue of shrines and groves is partly restored by editors.
Terms
the words glossed above, once each
quince-apple
A hard, fragrant, golden fruit, too astringent to eat raw — closer to a crab-apple than an eating apple. It was already a wedding object before Sappho reached for it: Greek custom had the bride eat a quince before going in to the bridegroom. The image arrives carrying the occasion; the point is that this one is still on the branch, unpicked.
hyacinth
Not the modern garden flower. The Greek hyakinthos is some dark blue-purple spring bloom — larkspur and iris are the usual guesses — tied to Hyacinthus, the youth Apollo killed by accident with a discus, whose blood stained the petals. Beauty destroyed young is in the word before the shepherds arrive.
violet tiara
A woven circlet of violets worn at festivals, not a jewelled crown — tiara is the translator's English for a flower wreath. Violet-crowned is one of Sappho's standing compliments, and flowers go on the head, at the throat and in the hair all through her poems.
crocus
The saffron crocus, whose stigmas gave the ancient world its yellow-orange dye. Saffron dress belongs to festivals and to women's cult, Aphrodite's especially, so naming it places the remembered scene in ritual rather than private life.
dill
The feathery herb, anethon, woven into garlands rather than cooked with. It appears in Sappho's catalogues of festival dress and again in the grove of "You know the place: then," scenting the air.
myrrh
Aromatic resin tapped from Arabian trees and dissolved in oil as perfume — expensive, imported, eastern. Pouring it over the head marks an occasion. Sappho's circle prized this kind of softness and display, and she defends it elsewhere as a value in its own right.
Sardis
Capital of Lydia, inland in western Asia Minor, and the nearest great non-Greek city to Lesbos. It is where the luxury goods in these poems come from — embroidered headbands, dyed cloth — so a Lydian import stands for wealth the speaker no longer has access to.
Crete
The large island south of the Aegean, and a site of old Aphrodite cults. Summoning the goddess from there is a call across real distance, and it marks the grove in the poem as a proper cult place rather than a private garden.
epithet
A fixed descriptive title attached to a name — Cyprian for Aphrodite, grey-eyed for Athena. Cyprian points to Cyprus, where the goddess came ashore after her birth from the sea, which is the story the anthology's footnote is compressing. It makes her older than the Olympians, a different genealogy from the one Homer follows.
papyrus
The reed-paper of the ancient Mediterranean. Most of what survives of Sappho comes from papyrus recovered in Egypt, some of it reused as packing for mummified animals. Dry conditions preserved it; being torn up for packing is why it reaches us in strips, and why poems stop mid-sentence.
ostracon
A potsherd used as scrap writing material — cheap and plentiful where papyrus was not. "You know the place: then" survives complete only because someone copied it onto one, badly, which is why editors still disagree about parts of it.
scholiast
An ancient or medieval commentator who wrote explanatory notes in the margins of a manuscript. Several Sappho fragments exist only because a scholiast quoted a line to illustrate a point about some other author — the survival is incidental to what he was actually discussing.
Hephaestion
A metrical theorist of the second century A.D. whose handbook quotes short passages purely as examples of rhythm. Two of these poems come down to us that way, which means their length is a function of what he needed to demonstrate, not of how long Sappho wrote.
Longinus
The name attached to On the Sublime, a first-century treatise on great writing. It quotes "He is more than a hero" whole, as a model of how to assemble scattered symptoms into one overwhelming effect — which is the only reason that poem is nearly intact while the rest are scraps.
metre
The rhythmic pattern of a line, measured in Greek by syllable length rather than stress. Sappho gave her name to the sapphic stanza. Barnard does not reproduce it, which is a deliberate choice: she is after the speaking voice rather than the shape of the original verse.
Aphrodite
Goddess of desire, and the deity Sappho addresses most often. She is not the remote Olympian of epic here: she can be blamed for what she does to people, summoned to a particular grove, teased, and spoken to as an ally. The relationship is personal, which is part of what makes these poems feel unlike Homer.
Cyprian
Aphrodite, named for Cyprus, where she is said to have come ashore after her birth from the sea. A standard cult title, so using it is formal address rather than decoration — the summons becomes a proper invocation at that moment.
Croesus
King of Lydia, r. 560–546 B.C.E., proverbial in later Greek for riches. Worth knowing: the Greek of the poem names Lydia, not Croesus, and Sappho was probably dead before he took the throne — so the name is the translator's shorthand for fabulous wealth, not something Sappho could have written.
Lydia
The kingdom across the water in western Asia Minor, capital at Sardis. Wealthy, non-Greek, and close enough to Lesbos that its fashions and goods set the standard for luxury in these poems. When something is Lydian, it is expensive and admired.
Cleis
Named as the speaker's small daughter in one poem and addressed directly in another. Ancient tradition also gives the name to Sappho's mother. Whether any of this is biography is unknowable — the "I" of a lyric poem is not automatically the poet — but the name recurring across poems is one reason readers have always treated them as a single life.
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