The Morphology of Epiphany in Song 1 of Sappho

The epiphany of the goddess Aphrodite in Song 1 of Sappho may seem, from a modern perspective, paradoxical. On the one hand, if one considers epiphany to mean simply the appearance of a divinity, it is not difficult to identify the exact moment in which the song’s epiphany occurs; the arrival of the goddess Aphrodite in her sparrow-yoked chariot crystallizes in a single word: ἐξίκοντο (literally, ‘they arrived’). On the other hand, if one considers the presentation of the epiphany in Sappho 1, one could argue persuasively for a non-instantaneous appearance of the goddess; it is entirely defensible that this particular epiphany plays out gradually as an elision of the mindset of the goddess with that of the chorus. [1] For an example of this phenomenon, let us consider the fifth and sixth strophes of the song, in which we encounter the chorus speaking in the persona of Aphrodite: [2]

In these lines, it becomes plain that a transfer has taken place; the song began with a first person persona, performed by the chorus, addressing the goddess in the second person. Now, however, the chorus quotes the first person goddess addressing them as the second person persona. It is my contention that this fusion of the Sapphic chorus and the goddess Aphrodite exists not only at line 18 but throughout the first six stanzas of the song, and that it becomes increasingly apparent as these stanzas unfold. Through its prayer form and various elements of its language, from its particles to its placement of adverbs, Sappho 1 suggests a progressive melding of choral and divine perspectives.

In what follows, I hope to explain how these two manifestations of epiphany, one sudden and the other gradual, come to bear as textual realities. But I also hope to show how, from the perspective of the chorus, they are inextricably entwined, that is, how the mimetic nature of choral performance would have eliminated any distinction between them. When I use the adjective ‘mimetic’, or its noun form, ‘mimesis’, I invoke the sense that Aristotle expresses in his Poetics; μίμησις ‘reenactment’, he writes, can be summed up in the phrase οὗτος ἐκεῖνος, or “this one is that one”: a mixing of two things such that one becomes indistinguishable from the other. [3] With this concept in mind, we can assert that from a choral perspective, the mimetic nature of Sappho 1 obviates the polarity of the two types of epiphany outlined above; in the moment of re-enactment, the thing being reenacted and the reenactment itself become one and the same: “this thing” (οὗτος) becomes “that thing” (ἐκεῖνος).

It seems fitting to address Sappho 1 first on the level of structure. I will endeavor to show that the song’s prayer form facilitates both the gradual epiphany apparent in the text and the mimesis that would have made such an epiphany imperceptible to the chorus performing it. From a textual perspective, Sappho 1 seems to adhere to the standard form of an Ancient Greek prayer, which Furley describes as comprised of three parts: epiklesis, eulogia, and eukhe (‘invocation’, ‘praise’, and ‘prayer’); in this song, the epiklesis consists of stanza one, the eulogia of stanzas 2 through 6 and the eukhe of stanza 7. [4] This form reflects the chorus’ progressive immersion in, and subsequent emergence from, the mindset of the goddess; the prayer begins with an entreaty of the goddess from afar; thereafter, it moves to a central component that is necessarily more proximal to the deity, one that deals with her specific attributes and actions; finally, it ends with another entreaty from afar. This tripartite structure—of distance, closeness, and distance again—is particularly prominent in Sappho 1, which, by virtue of its immersive epiphany, brings us very close to the goddess indeed.

Another way of thinking about prayer form, which addresses the textual concept of gradual epiphany as well as the performative concept of mimesis, presents itself in Leonard Muellner’s definition of prayer: “a prayer is a physical act of communication (in the etymological sense). It invokes a god, then it promises him a gift or reminds him of a past gift or calls attention to a present one; then, in return, it specifies a favor.” [5] We can see plainly that Sappho 1 fits Muellner’s definition of prayer, and that Muellner’s definition, like Furley’s, reflects the chorus’ emergence in and reemergence from the mindset of the goddess; it, too, features a tripartite structure of invocation, proximity to the deity, and invocation again. The chief difference between Furley’s and Muellner’s definitions of prayer is that Muellner’s is of a contractual nature; and this difference, in turn, implies temporal nuances that we do not find in Furley’s and that lead us back to the concept of mimesis. Prayer, according to Muellner, originates with an invocation, which, by necessity, takes place in the temporal base of the present; in the middle section of the prayer, the temporal base shifts to past time, in the event that the invoker calls attention to a past gift (as is the case in Sappho 1); in the final section, the temporal base shifts back to the present, although the invoker gestures towards the future by virtue of asking for a favor. For Muellner, then, prayer is a blurring of present, past, and future time that captures well the mimetic nature of choral performance, wherein such distinctions cease to exist.

I would like to turn now to a more micro-level examination of the textual phenomenon of gradual epiphany in Sappho 1; I aim to discuss how the chorus’ immersion in, and subsequent emergence from, the mindset of the goddess plays out in the song’s verb forms, and how, again, this phenomenon would not at all have been apparent in the moment of performance. Beginning on a textual level, the song starts off in the temporal base of present time with a typical prayer formulation: the verb λίσσομαι (literally, ‘I beg’) followed by two imperatives, μή … δάμνα and τυίδ᾿ ἔλθ᾿ (‘do not overpower’ and ‘come here’). So typical is this construction that one can find it in the Iliad at the point when Hector begs Achilles to spare his body:

Both the present tense of these verbs, as well as the formulaic nature of their construction, testify to the fact that the members of the chorus have not yet fully immersed themselves in the epiphany; they are still caught up in the here and now, propounding mimetically in the conventions of the form.

In the second stanza, however, the chorus begins to depart somewhat from this highly formulaic variety of recitation:

Here, although the temporal base remains in the present, there appears an aorist verb, ἔκλυες, as well as a hypothetical construction, both of which suggest the chorus’ heightened remove from the here and now. It must be acknowledged, though, that the conditional construction itself is not atypical of prayer form; in fact, in his commentary on Sappho, David Campbell traces this type of conditional through four different works: the Iliad, Pindar’s sixth Isthmian Ode, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos, and Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae. [6] An examination of Campbell’s Iliadic examples, the only ones in his litany that would have predated Sappho, however, reveal how very differently the formulation is treated in Song 1. The first example below is Diomedes’ prayer in Iliad 5 and the second Achilles’ prayer to Zeus in Iliad 16:

Having read the Iliadic examples, one might expect the construction in Sappho 1 to follow the formula, “if you ever helped before, help again now.” However, in Sappho 1 the apodosis of this condition is delayed until the very last stanza of the song. Moreover, in between protasis and apodosis, the song features non-conditional constructions and even direct speech. Rather than arriving at the anticipated apodosis, Sappho loses the sense of the condition in the following indicative: κάλοι δέ σ᾿ ἆγον / ὤκεες στροῦθοι; shortly thereafter, the epiphany itself, ἐξίκοντo, occurs in the aorist and in a non-conditional construction.

Another curious feature of the gradual epiphany of song 1 of Sappho is that it does not cease after the literal appearance of the goddess, as indicated by the verb ἐξίκοντo, takes place; the verb forms continue to express a progressive fusion of the mindset of the chorus with that of the goddess. After the arrival of Aphrodite and her sparrows, the chorus brings itself closer still to the goddess by addressing her by the intimate pronoun σύ; and this pronoun, in turn, triggers a series of lines in free indirect discourse, signaling a departure from the temporal base of present time:

The re-enacted elision of the chorus and Aphrodite becomes more pronounced still when the former begins to speak in the voice of the latter, that is, when we encounter direct speech:

We only arrive at the apodosis and return to the temporal base of present time in the last stanza with its forceful imperative: ἔλθε μοι καὶ νῦν (“come to me again now”).

Although it is possible, as I have demonstrated, to track carefully and by degrees the temporality of Sappho 1 and how it suggests the chorus’ immersion in that which they relate, this process would not have been apparent to the chorus members themselves, engaged as they were in a mimetic act. In fact, it is highly significant that ἔκλυες, the verb that, on a textual level, signals the chorus’ immersion epiphany, is in the aorist tense; aorist means, literally, ‘without bound’, and this etymology speaks to the inattention to demarcations, temporal or otherwise, which accompanies mimesis.

Now that we have touched on the topic of how verbs create a sense of gradual epiphany in the text, if not the performance, of Sappho 1, let us adjust our critical lens to focus on how particles and adverbs affect the same trend. As far as I can tell, the sequence of particles and adverbs in Song 1 of Sappho is as follows; first, we encounter ποτα in line 5 in the protasis of a conditional clause; next, we come across δηὖτε in line 15, repeated in lines 16 and 18, then ταχέως in lines 21 and 23, and finally νῦν in line 25. From this progression, we can see that stanzas two through six revolve around the axis created by the particles ποτα and νῦν, the former lodged in past time, unaccented and indefinite, and the latter accented and close at hand. A glance at the instances in which these temporal markers occur in Sappho’s other songs reveals that they often create a temporal distinction between psychological states. In a study of the Thalia and Tithonos poems, both of which contain a preponderance of these markers, Eva Stehle concludes that pota usually occurs when Sappho describes an “imaginary time of mythic, erotic plenitude,” and that nun usually occurs in “… speech that, among other things, looks forward to the heroization of the poet.” [7] Although I do not think that the second component of Stehle’s argument applies to Song 1 of Sappho, I certainly agree that pota, in this context, launches the chorus into a meditation on an erotic wish, and that nun signals a return to the here and now. [8]

The axis created by these two particles is complicated by the intervening adverbs δηὖτε and ταχέως, both of which erode, in a mimetic fashion, the distinction between past and present. The adverb δηὖτε accomplishes this by implying a systematically iterative phenomenon that Nagy explains as follows: “dēute (δηὖτε),” he writes, “as used at lines 15 and 16 and 18 in Song 1 of Sappho refers not only to some episodically recurrent emotion of love as experienced by the speaker but also to the seasonally recurrent performance of the song on festive occasions that I reconstruct back to the earliest attested phases of the song’s evolution.” [9] In other words, Nagy’s interpretation of δηὖτε as signaling a seasonally recurring event confers an aura of timelessness on the central section of the poem and exemplifies the mimetic nature of the chorus’ performance.

The adverb ταχέως, literally ‘soon’, eradicates temporal demarcations in a similar way; although uttered in the temporal base of past time, this word refers to a moment posterior even to the moment of recitation. To explain why I think this, it seems fitting to bring up an argument by J. C. B. Petropoulos that Nagy addresses in the same paper. [10] In essence, Petropoulos argues that the agent of an Ancient Greek love spell would try to force the beloved to reciprocate his or her own feelings by using language similar to that in Sappho 1. [11] If we accept the similarities that Petropoulos identifies, which include the use of adverbs such as ταχέως in both love spells and Sappho 1, the sixth strophe of this song refers performatively to a time after the moment of recitation in which the beloved comes to his or her senses and returns the affections of the love-stricken. [12] This adverb, then, elides the boundaries between past, present, and future that the words νῦν and ποτα imply.

Having shown, I hope, how the re-enacted elision of the mindset of the goddess with that of the chorus plays out in the text of Sappho 1, I propose to highlight another well-known instance of epiphany: the appearance of the same goddess Athena to Nausicaa at the outset of Odyssey Book VI. I have included below the relevant lines:

There are many striking similarities between this episode and Song 1 of Sappho; on the most obvious level, both feature the epiphany of a goddess, and on a somewhat less apparent level, both present goddesses who undergo transformations; in Sappho 1, Aphrodite fuses with the chorus invoking her, and in the Nausicaa passage, Athena takes the form of the daughter of Dymas (εἰδομένη κούρῃ ναυσικλειτοῖο Δύμαντος). In other words, both passages are mimetic; the chorus of Sappho 1 re-enacts the appearance of Aphrodite, just as the daughter of Dymas, in a sense, re-enacts the appearance of Athena. It is precisely because these similarities are so striking that they illuminate the ways in which the Nausicaa epiphany differs from the epiphany of Song 1 of Sappho. In Nausicaa’s dream, we encounter an epiphany that is clearly demarcated; the goddess appears in the phrase στῆ δ᾿ ἄρ᾿ ὑπὲρ κεφαλῆς (“she stood over her head”) and departs in the phrase ὣς εἰποῦσ᾿ ἀπέβη γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη (“so speaking flashing-eyed Athena left”). Moreover, there is, in the Nausicaa episode, no gradual elision of the persona of the goddess with that of Nausicaa; certainly a physical and mental union transpires when Athena becomes like the daughter of Dymas, but this transformation occurs in a single moment. The clearly defined, instantaneous nature of the epiphany in the Nausicaa episode, then, throws into relief the gradual, mimetic nature of that in Sappho 1.