this is two girls talking to each other; the first editor of the poem, Dirk Obbink, thinks the addressee may be the mother of the speaker.34 Anyway the picture is clear: the speaker should pray to Hera for both the safety of Charaxos (Sappho’s brother) and for the safety of both (?)girls. “Let’s leave the rest to the gods,” she says, followed by a gnōmē: “Blue skies come suddenly after great storms.” There follows an extension of the gnōmē which returns to the theme of almighty Zeus: “Whomsoever’s fate Zeus wishes to turn from troubles to the better,35 they are blessed and very fortunate.” The final stanza then puzzles us: “If ever Larichos (another brother of Sappho) proves himself a man, then we, too, (κἄμμες) might be freed forthwith from great heavy-heartedness.”
The religious dimension of the text is easy to spot. The speaker should pray to Hera for the safety of Charaxos at sea. The world is built upon the superior knowledge and power of the gods: only they can save man from danger. Humans cannot know such things. Their daimon, fate, is in the hands of Zeus and the other immortals. Gregory Hutchinson noted that Horace, for one, echoed the theme of the gods’ superior power in his “Soracte Ode.”36 The piece has been entitled “The Brothers Poem” because it mentions two names known to be brothers of Sappho from Herodotus and Athenaios: Charaxos and Larichos.37 Is it then Sappho speaking? Is the poem autobiographical in quite a simple way? Is the addressee, as Obbink posited, Sappho’s mother, worried about Charaxos at sea? I doubt it; so many of Sappho’s pieces are open-ended. The situation is as it is with popular modern songs; when Bob Dylan sings “You’re the reason I’m travelling on. But don’t think twice, it’s all right,” we do not need to identify the two people involved; in fact we might read aspects of our own lives into the words of the song. True, we can read biographies of Dylan and learn who the woman in the song might have been, but that does not necessarily increase our enjoyment of the song. Similarly even when Leonard Cohen sings about Marianne: “Now so long Marianne. It’s time that we began…” one does not need to know who this Marianne is; the lyric situation is what counts. In the same way, when Sappho, or perhaps someone else, sings this song, we do not need to know the precise biographical details for the words to work. It is the song’s internal world as constructed by the interplay between the recital and the listener which matters.38 I personally prefer to think it is one girl addressing another: the addressee yearns for Charaxos who is engaged in trade with his ship overseas: the girl hopes against hope that he will return home, with a full ship.39 The speaker admonishes her that it is in the lap of the gods whether a man is saved from danger. She phrases her belief in a whole, carefully constructed stanza: only Zeus can steer a man’s daimon from troubled to better, as stormy seas can become calm.40
The poem is a clear example of the way religion is woven into lyric. The human drama would be unthinkable without the gods, who are omnipresent here. The main divinities involved are Hera (βασίληαν Ἤραν, 10) and Zeus (βασίλευς Ὀλύμπω, 17), the great parental pair of the Olympian family, although the remaining gods also play a part (lines 7, 14). Humans should not fret overmuch about their fate, as they cannot decide that, only gods. It is interesting that the same word δαίμων used in the plural in line 14 means gods, while in the singular in line 18 it refers to the daimon, or fate of the individual. Likewise, whom Zeus favors, acquires the attributes of the gods: such people become μάκαρες and πολύολβοι (15–16), blessed and much-fortunate, words normally reserved for the blessed gods on Olympus. There is another interesting parallel between the storms which “suddenly cease” (αἶψα πέλονται, 12) and the misery of the speaker which might “suddenly cease” (αἶψα λύθειμεν, 20) if Larichos behaved properly: as the elements, so the emotions. A certain naïvety has been remarked upon in the poem: it is certainly not Kierkegaard. But the monody is lively and moves with the stanzas in interesting directions. I find it might capture the somewhat naïve exchanges between girls, as for example in Sense and Sensibility, well.41
The new discovery of the “Brothers Poem” shows the same personal religion as we encounter in other poems of Sappho.42 Here Hera is to be invoked to save a brother of Sappho’s; Zeus is said to be responsible for the individual daimon of people. In the third fragment which has emerged from the new discoveries,43 Aphrodite is entreated in a way not dissimilar from the great opening poem of the Alexandrian collection of Sappho’s poems, which we only know through indirect quotation by Dionysios of Halicarnassus (fr. 1 Campbell).44 Here the lyric “I” prays to the goddess for help in a love affair.45
“Immortal Aphrodite of the embellished throne, daughter of Zeus, weaver of intrigues, I entreat you, do not destroy my soul with pains and torments, but come here…” (lines 1–5) …and influence the course of my love affair, the poem goes on. Aphrodite is addressed in a one-to-one manner; although almighty, she is imagined as caring about the speaker’s torment; as in the past she will fly in her winged chariot from Olympus down to earth specially to relieve the speaker’s (singer’s) torment (9–12). “Come to me now,” the speaker prays, “as you have previously” (5–7 paraphrase). The depiction of Aphrodite and her engagement with the singer could not be more personal. This in itself is no major departure in Greek religion. In epic, too, individuals have their patron gods or goddesses; Odysseus his Athena; Paris his Aphrodite; Sarpedon no less than Zeus. Nor is the form of the prayer new: “Da ut dedisti.”46 What is new is Sappho’s dramatization of her personal relations with Aphrodite in the form of a traditional prayer. She depicts her life as repeated engagement with the goddess; in a previous affair Aphrodite managed to swing things the singer’s way; now she needs her good offices again.47
Alcaeus has not been served so well by recent discoveries. Boychenko makes the point that Sappho’s hymns, or prayers, tend to be cletic, that is, they appeal to the god(s) to come, while Alkaios shows a preference for narrative hymns to gods.48 This leads her to a reconsideration of fr. 304 V (=Sappho fr. 44a Campbell), a fragment from a hymn to Artemis, it seems, which had previously been attributed variously to Sappho or Alcaeus. The narrative quality of the fragment points, she says, to authorship of Alcaeus. Although the article makes a case for a categorization of Aeolic hymns as tendentially Celtic or narrative, the distinction does not map cleanly onto the two chief authors of Aeolic hymns known to us.49
Simonides’ Elegy for Plataia
Poets were generally obliged to make a bow to the gods at the beginning of their compositions.50 Thus we have near-complete hymns and prayers at the beginning of a number of melic works. Pindar Ol. 4 is a good example, which gets under way with a magnificent prayer to Zeus. Elegy, too, was often launched by a show of piety, as the Theognidea 51 shows us; here a miniature hymn to Apollo and Artemis stands at the beginning of the work.52 Of particular interest, then, is the newly (partly) reassembled beginning of a long elegaic poem by Simonides on the Battle of Plataea, one of the two major Greek victories of the Persian Wars.53 The poem itself celebrates the heroism of the Spartans marching out from the Peloponnese, over the Isthmus, in pursuit of the Persians to save Greece from the “day of slavery” (25). The poet says they drew strength and courage from their epic forebears, in particular Menelaus (36), and from the twin Spartan “horsemaster sons” of Zeus, the Dioskoroi. At the Isthmus they sacrificed the diabateria, transition sacrifices, as we can extrapolate from the Greek [θεῶν τεράε]σ̣σι πεποιθότε̣ς, “trusting the divine signs” (39). But what interests us here particularly is the beginning of the poem, a hymnic encomium of Achilles, it seems, called the “son of the glorious goddess (Thetis), daughter of Nereus” (19–20). The text is unfortunately not complete. When it begins, Achilles is struck and he falls like a pine felled by foresters in the highlands (1–3). Grief overcomes his people; he himself is much honored and buried in the same urn as his friend Patroklos (4–6).54 Despite his death the goddesses Athena and Hera see to it that Troy falls, as they are angry at Paris’ wickedness (9–10). A gnōmē seals the fate of Paris’ city: “the chariot of divine