The Newest Sappho: Text, Apparatus Criticus, and Translation

The text of Sappho exercised readers, scholars, and lovers long before her ‘bright singing columns’, λευκαὶ φθεγγόμεναι σελίδες,1 appeared in a Hellenistic edition on papyrus sometime in the third century bc.2 So vividly were her verses perceived as being orally performed and heard.3 By the Roman period, readers needed a commentary, together with an adequately corrected and annotated copy, in order tomake sense of her poems. These contained thewritten words of the songs she had once sung, as they had been passed down, and corrected back into the dialect once spoken on the island of Lesbos, by some of the best scholars of the past centuries. Ancient editors, for example, even reinstated the letter digamma—a letter not used for over half a millenium— where it could be known from Homeric research and meter to have originally stood in herwords,4 a practice thatwould be comparable to puttingRunes back into Old English texts. Their texts were, of course, not perfect: but they knew the poems better (and had at their disposal far more of them to read) than we do today. As a result, in assessing the evidence of the ancient manuscripts of Sappho preserved on papyrus, a judicious attempt must be made to discern the places where their efforts succeeded, where they failed, and where modern erudition can be brought to bear on the text in order to isolate cases where more work, more understanding, is needed.