The Meter and Metrical Style of the New Poem

POxy. 1787, including Sappho 58 V—and so the “New Poem”—has been assigned to Book Four of the Alexandrian edition of her works since its first publication (Ox. Pap. XV:26; cf. Lobel 1925:xii). Because the assignment is a conjecture, this is a good moment to review the status of the question, and at the same time to observe, and try to appreciate, an apparent peculiarity in Sappho’s use of the meter in this poem. First, however, I will attempt to place the meter into the context of what we have of the work of Sappho and Alcaeus.

The Metrical Type of the New Poem

The meter seen in the New Poem had been known from complete examples provided by four quotations: Sa. 58.26 V, 81.4–8 V, 82a V, 91 V. The last two are from Hephaestion Enchiridion 7.5 (p. 36.15–16 C = Sappho 154 V Test.) who calls it aiolikon and says that “Sappho used it often (πολλῷ αὐτῷ ἐχρήσατο).” In general, such statements should be taken with a grain of salt. The ancient metricians, who liked to identify the “first discoverer” of each metrical form, also often named the “frequent user”; it is likely that both identifications were driven by a desire to explain the often inconsistent nomenclature. In this case, Hephaestion associates the aiolikon with an Aeolic poet. [1] Sappho’s use of the form is now also confirmed in several of the lines restored by the combination of the old and new papyri, and the number of fragments in P.Oxy. 1787 makes it clear that in this case we can take Hephaestion literally.

Modern handbooks mostly describe it (in the terminology established by Bruno Snell) as an acephalous hipponactean with a double choriambic expansion, or ^hipp^2c:

It belongs to a larger group of metrical forms, or cola, which in modern usage are also often called aeolic. Individual aeolic forms allow no variations that would change the syllable count (contraction or resolution), but a few examples suggest that they can tolerate internally an exchange in the order of a long and short syllable. This is consistent with the theory that they represent more conservatively than other forms the derivation of Greek meters from an Indo-European syllable-counting system. More specifically, this form belongs with a group of cola that are most easily described in terms of the relation of each to the glyconic (or glyconean, gl): x x — ⏑ ⏑ — ⏑ —. The hipponactean is one syllable longer than a glyconic, the pherecratean one syllable shorter. The extra syllable of the hipponactean can be long or short, but as the final syllable of a verse line, it is conventionally assumed to be long. Here the hipponactean has only one indeterminate syllable at the start, and so is called acephalous, on the assumption that two syllables are normal in the aeolic basis. Since in fact one syllable bases are a normal variant, there would be some advantage in using West’s term hagisichorean (1982:30) to avoid the impression that the verse is somehow felt to be foreshortened, but I will retain the traditional term in this discussion. The acephalous hipponactean and the glyconic are both eight syllables long, and there is no reason to give one formal priority over the other (although the glyconic may descend from an earlier prehistoric stage). It is probably more useful to retain the emphasis on syllable-count and think of them as eight-syllable forms of the same type that have different endings: one blunt, — ⏑ —, and one pendant, ⏑ — —. Aeolic forms of this type can be expanded by repetition(s) of the internal sequence of two short syllables: choriambic expansion when the whole sequence — ⏑ ⏑ — is repeated and dactylic expansion when — ⏑ ⏑ is repeated. Lines could also be expanded externally by a full or partial iambic metron (x — ⏑ —, — ⏑ —, ⏑ — —) before or after the specifically aeolic segment, but there are only a couple of examples in the Lesbian poets of internal and external expansion of the same verse. Given that the iambic metra and the aeolic forms can merge seamlessly, how one divides a verse line between them and identifies the exact aeolic form involved generally depends on the theoretical assumptions behind the analysis.

Aeolic forms, especially the various expanded forms, make up the great bulk of what has been recovered of Lesbian poetry. Poems of unexpanded gl are not found, but in Sappho, stanzas variously formed from unexpanded glyconics and expanded ones are found together in one papyrus (P.Berol. 9722); in Alcaeus there is evidence of several such stanzas from a variety of sources. Simple ^hipp is found in four lines attributed to Sappho (168b V), but the attribution is disputed. Expanded forms are much more common. Examples of dactylic expansion of glyconic, especially, and of pherecratean are found for both poets, and choriambic expansion of glyconic—in particular, gl^2c—is well represented in both. Sappho also has choriambic expansion of pherecratean, and of course, ^hipp^2c. There is no firm evidence that Alcaeus ever used ^hipp^2c, although two of his fragments (48 V, 61 V) have line ends that are compatible with it. Alcaeus, in fact, has very few examples of hipponacteans at all; the ones that do occur are the product of uncertain analyses. [2]

The description I have just given follows one entirely modern theory, and I have tried to set it out in a way that is compatible with a description in terms of Indo-European derivation. [3] Other modern descriptions have put more emphasis on the choriamb as the distinctive element (making dactylic expansion secondary); some have focused on the mix of dactylic and trochaic feet (and make choriambic expansion secondary); some follow more closely ancient authorities. All of these latter are from the late Hellenistic or Roman imperial period and offer entirely different groupings. Hephaestion, for example, in the passage cited above, calls the meter of the New Poem an acatalectic major ionic tetrameter. The corresponding glyconic form is an acatalectic antispastic tetrameter (10.6, p. 34.11–12 C). Other contemporary theories would have described both in terms of internal segments that could be related to the more familiar forms of iambic or dactylic poetry. Forms with dactylic expansion were usually related to dactylic verse, rather than to other forms of aeolic. If we want to know what Sappho or Alcaeus would have thought of the relation of the various meters to each other, we can only infer it from how they combined them in stanzas.

Most of the metrical forms we know occur as single lines; that is, we know more line types than stanza types, especially in the case of Sappho’s poetry. This may be in part because ancient authorities tended to quote only single lines, even in cases in which we know that the lines are parts of stanzas. But, as will be discussed below, a series of identical lines arranged in couplets seems to have been a frequent form of composition. The stanza types that do survive—and there are more for Alcaeus than Sappho—are especially valuable for the negative evidence they give (the examples are most easily seen in Voigt’s “Conspectus” for each poet; see also West 1982:31–33). There is no stanza which combines both choriambic and dactylic expansion, although there are stanzas which combine each with the simple forms or (more rarely) with externally expanded forms. The use of the contrast between blunt and pendant endings to set off sections of verse—for example glyconic and pherecratean—familiar from the versification of Anacreon and throughout dramatic lyric, is not found in the Lesbian poets; with the exception of the Alcaic stanza, they use one or the other type of ending consistently in a stanza. [4] Variations between lines in a stanza are largely achieved by the amount of internal or external expansion. [5] To put this positively, by maintaining uniformity in construction, they were able to make a variety of distinctive song types out of a smaller variety of often similar materials. And within the limits of the state of our evidence, the New Poem, written entirely in ^hipp^2c, appears to exhibit a metrical form that is distinctively Sappho’s.

I will consider below the particular similarity of the New Poem with others written in repeated lines and with the corresponding metrical type gl^2c.

The Arrangement of Meters in Books

While it is generally assumed that the Alexandrian edition of Sappho arranged the poems by meter, the evidence associating different metrical patterns with different books is quite sparse (unless otherwise cited, see Sappho 226–234 V and Sappho T29–T36 Campbell with his notes). No ancient source actually says that the poems of Sappho were arranged by meter, but the descriptions that say certain meters were found in certain books leads to this conclusion. In addition, the papyri that show multiple poems in the same (or very similar) meters or stanzas (P.Berol. 5006, 9722; P.Oxy. 1231+2166(a), 1787) suggest a metrical arrangement. And in the case of the first three books the ancient sources tell us that each of them contained poems of a single metrical type. Since any hypotheses we make about the distribution of meters in the remaining books need to take account of all of them, my discussion of Book Four here is necessarily somewhat simplified. [6]

There is no evidence whatsoever, direct or indirect, for Book Four. As Page explained, the assignment of the meter used in the New Poem to Book Four was based on the observation that P.Oxy. 1787 contains fragments of “a considerable number of poems, … The evidence, as far as it goes, indicates that these manuscripts come from a book wholly or largely homogeneous in metre; if so, it appears reasonable to assign to it the fourth place in the series, since the first three books were metrically homogeneous whereas the fifth was not” (1955:114–115). In fact, there are not enough lines assigned to this papyrus (or in this meter) to guarantee that they constitute a book “wholly or largely” in one meter (nor do they guarantee enough columns), not even one half the size of the 1320 lines recorded by the colophon to Book One, but we can safely say that there were many poems in this meter which apparently belonged to one book. I emphasize this because of a potential complication in the idea of a “book.” Hunt reported in his original edition of P.Oxy. 1787 (Ox. Pap. XV:126–127) that fragments of other poetry in the same hand were found with these. Now that we possess one (albeit much earlier) papyrus combining poems in this meter with non-Lesbian poetry, the possibility that P.Oxy. 1787 does not represent a book roll from an edition of Sappho, but some other kind of compilation, seems less far-fetched. [7] I shall proceed, however, on the assumption that there are a sufficient number of poems in the same meter to represent a selection from a single book, even if the roll whose fragments we possess is not actually from a complete edition.

In addition to the book-by-book evidence for metrical patterns, we can also consider the possibility that stanza structure played a role in the arrangement of poems into books. In the Greek sources, [8] poems are distinguished on the basis of whether they are written in lines or in systems (i.e., stanzas). The latter can be composed of similar or dissimilar metra. Sappho Book Two is cited in the Peri Poematon as an example of poems composed in stanzas in similar metra (1.1, p. 63.7–8 C). This is then further explained under the rubric of “common” systems, and the example given this time is poems such as those in Sappho Books Two and Three: these are in stanzas because they are marked off every two lines and the total number of lines is always even (that is, they are written in couplets, or distichs), but since the lines are identical, they could also be said to be written in lines (1.2, p. 63.15–24 C). Paragraphoi that represent such markings are in the papyri for Book Two, in which all the poems are in the meter gl^2d. And both the Oxyrhynchus and Cologne papyri have paragraphoi that mark off distichs in the poems we are now attributing to Book Four, even though that book is not cited as part of the example. However, since the author of Peri Poematon was only using Sappho as an example—not describing her edition—he did not need to include Book Four when he cited Two and Three. But there may have been another reason to omit it. P.Oxy. 2290 = Sa. 88 V contains lines that are compatible with ^hipp^2c. The papyrus fragment contains the right edge of a column and every third line appears to be distinctly shorter—although not very much shorter—suggesting that it contained three-line stanzas (see Voigt’s apparatus and the note ad loc. added in Lobel-Page 1963:67). Some poems from P.Oxy. 1787 appear to follow the same pattern; in that case, Book Four would have contained at least that one other type of stanza form. [9]

I suggest that a series of considerations affected the distribution of meters. Books One to Three contained poems in the only three meters in which there was enough material to fill a book. That would be consistent with the fact that no source associates other books with a single meter. Beginning with Book Four, then, different meters were combined in each book. [10] One source, the single piece of evidence for the meter of Book Seven, indirectly suggests that within each book poems were still grouped by meter. [11] Unfortunately, this passage is corrupt: Hephaestion Enchiridion 10.5, p. 34.7–8 C reads: …ᾧ μέτρῳ ἔγραψεν ᾄσματα καὶ Σαπφὼ ἐπὶ † τῆς τοῦ ἑβδόμου· (the mss. vary in regard to the extra article), “a meter in which Sappho also wrote songs at † the of the seventh Book.” It appears to indicate that the use of this meter characterized one part of the book. [12] If we accept that as a general rule of arrangement, the next question is, what governed the selection of meters to be combined into a single book. The possible combination of two- and three-line stanzas in P.Oxy. 1787, and the collection of similar stanzas in P.Berol. 9722 (whatever book they belonged to) suggest that perceived metrical similarity determined the groupings. At the same time, the order of the books themselves might reflect a movement from those with uniform lines to stanzas with similar lines of varying length to more mixed stanzas. Although Book One may owe its position to the special prominence of the Sapphic stanza, it may also have been seen to use continuous identical lines in a system, since the “epodos” that concludes the Sapphic stanza may not have been considered a line in the same sense as the previous ones. [13]

Book Three included lines with double choriambic expansion, but only of the form gly^2c; since there were in addition poems in lines with double expansion in the form ^hipp^2c, it is reasonable to think that they would have been assigned to Book Four. It is reasonable because the general similarity of the two lines seems obvious—they have the same number of syllables and the same relationship to each other as the hendecasyllables of the Sapphic and Alcaic strophe—and the pattern of couplets continues. [14] A variant three-line stanza, using the same long line twice, could have been part of the same book if metrical similarity was a determining criterion. Perhaps this book could have also contained the fifteen-syllable pher^2c (which shares the further similarity of a pendant ending with ^hipp^2c); that verse pattern is illustrated by Sappho 140 V, the mourning for Adonis (it may share thematic affinities with the New Poem; the original editors [Gronewald and Daniel 2004] made an explicit connection between the New Poem and Phaon/Adonis, and, at the least, the irreparability of death is common to both sets of lines).

In the absence of direct evidence of any sort, anything we say about Book Four is subject to doubt. There is also no evidence for Book Six, and in fact we have no explicit reason to exclude any meter from any book after Book Three. But until more evidence is discovered, the criteria I have described at least confirm the reasonableness of assuming that the New Poem belongs to Book Four and give us some sense of its place in the whole. If this is the case, the reader of the ancient edition of Sappho encountered poems in each of the first four books—half the edition—that were in repetitions of single, long verse forms. First, the externally expanded eleven-syllable line of the Sapphic stanza filled Book One, and this was followed by even longer lines with internal expansion written mostly in couplets: the fourteen-syllable lines of glyconics with double-dactylic expansion in Book Two, and the sixteen-syllable lines of glyconics and of acephalous hipponacteans, both with double choriambic expansion, in Book Three and much of Book Four.

Metrical Style in the New Poem

I turn now to how Sappho used the verse form in the New Poem. In her Conspectus Metrorum Voigt indicates that the lines with double choriambic expansion tend to have a word-end between the choriambs. This is true for gl^2c (also called the major asclepiad) in both Sappho’s and Alcaeus’s practice, [15]

and Sappho’s treatment of ^hipp^2c is similar:

Voigt marks a word-end preference when word-end occurs in at least half of the instances. Such counting depends on many assumptions, not least on how a “word” is to be defined and how to treat partial or uncertain lines. I have not tried to double-check her counts, but they can certainly be accepted as broadly indicative, and in themselves they are not surprising. (Horace turned the division between choriambs into a rule in his asclepiads.) Thus, the ine which Hephaestion first quotes (Sappho 83a V) to illustrate the meter that also occurs in the New Poem can be taken as a model: [16]

As a matter of style, however, we expect that Sappho will not follow this pattern rigidly; one of the characteristics of her composition is variety. [17] And when variety is absent, it is typically absent for a reason. This can be seen most clearly in Book One, where she normally avoids long sequences with word-ends (or with no word-ends) in any one given position but does have continuous word-ends in two passages. Both of these have a strongly unified and marked character: in every line but the last of fr. 31 V there are word-ends after the fourth position—where they are, in addition, unexpected, since there tends to be a bridge in that position in other poems—and, less remarkably, in Poem 1.18–25 V, the epiphany of Aphrodite, word-ends fall unvaryingly in the position after the fifth syllable (see Lidov 1993:510–513). We can use two four-line fragments, Sappho 55 V in major asclepiads and Sappho 81.4–7 V in this meter, as samples of her style of composition in a verse with extended choriambic expansion. In the following schemes, broken lines indicate word-ends formed by appositives, and light type textually uncertain passages. [18]

Sappho 55:

In these lines disparaging the unmusical lady, the second halves of the lines are marked both by the consistent word-end at the tenth and fourteenth position and by the sense. The content is repetitive, but, notwithstanding the enjambments, every line rises to a point of emphasis at the end. (There is reinforcement in the sound of the responding alphas of μναμοσύνα and κἀν Ἀίδα, picked up in the close of the six-syllable finale.) But the word-end pattern that is stressed is the normal one, with a cut between the choriambs. Before the tenth position there is more variety, with no or almost no word-ends repeated two lines in a row, save, as expected, between the first two choriambs.

Sappho 81:

Here the cut between the choriambs is not so strongly marked, though it occurs at least once in the four lines at each position. What pattern of cuts there is, after the tenth syllable, is muted by elision (and a prepositive). These lines tend to have longer words (individual words of three or more syllables account for 50 of the 64 syllables in Sappho 81, 39 in Sappho 55), and the general effect is of variety and continuous flow, without any prominent interior structure. The sense, too, develops continuously across the two couplets.

Even if one deems such judgments excessively subjective, the patterning in these lines makes a clear contrast with what happens in the New Poem (West’s text, without supplements):

The expected cut between the second and third choriamb is entirely missing in the second half of the verse for the first six lines, whereas a pyrrhic-shaped word—in every case an unelided, lexical word—is marked off in five of these lines. Such words are neither rare nor common. They occur on average about once in every ten lines of the hendecasyllable of Book One, but never twice in a row. They were entirely absent from the eight lines I analyzed above. [19] The series of words here—κάλα, χρόα, τρίχες, γόνα, ἴσα—represents a notable rhythmic variation. This is combined with the persistent deviation from the normal line structure in the preceding four syllables of the first five lines, in which the preserved or highly probable word occupies a minor ionic shape that bridges the expected cut: ἰ]οκ[ό]λπων, φιλάοιδον, π̣οτ’ [ἔ]ο̣ντα, ἐγ]ένοντο, πεπόηται. Together these oddities must both unify the six lines that describe the singer’s woes and contribute to a peculiar effect. There is an obvious parallel in the persistence of cuts after the fourth syllable and the absence of them after the fifth in the “pathography” of fr. 31. In this poem the deviations come to a sudden halt with punctuation between the choriambs in line 7, as the singer dismisses the complaints and turns to the consolation or recompense suggested by the myth. After that there are no more isolated pyrrhic words in the poem (only the word group καὶ νέον in line 11), and we find varied expressions of the normal structure for the last half of the verse. On the other hand, the trisyllabic final cadence—weakly (after a prepositive) and inconsistently marked in the first six lines—is enunciated with increasing clarity, so that only a god’s name violates it in the last six lines.

The absence of the opening of the first four lines makes it impossible to know whether a similar rigidity characterized the beginnings of the verses, but the persistent absence of a cut between the choriambs from lines 5–10 and the word-end following the spondee in the fifth and sixth syllables in lines 5–7 suggest that it did. The supplements Μοίσαν and λεῦκον for lines 1 and 4, which seem certain for other reasons, would also fulfill the pattern, so it seems all the more likely. This could have consequences for how we supplement the rest of the text. Given the pattern, the article in line 2, καὶ τὰ]ν, printed by West (following Gronewald-Daniel’s πάλιν τὰμ̣), which would be unexpected simply as an article, seems all the more improbable; I have suggested φώνα]ν or αὔδα]ν as the object of a verb (allowing the last two words of the line to be read as genitive plurals). If we are to keep ἄπαλον in line 3, then Gronewald’s and Daniel’s original suggestion of ἄπαλόν μοι would cause less variation than Di Benedetto’s ἄπαλον πρὶν, printed by West.

In the last couplet of the poem, the expected cuts are expressed in all instances, softened only by elision. The return to the normative structure brings the myth and the emotional journey to a close (one can again compare Sappho 31 V, where, in the final hendecasyllable, the normative cut after the fifth syllable returns, and there is no cut after the fourth). This pattern is maintained by as much as can be recovered from the quotation by Athenaeus that would occupy lines 15 and 16, if these are part of the same poem.

The observation of these tendencies can have, at best, a suggestive value when it comes to answering the questions of what to print, and a cautionary value when we try to fill in verses with our own composition; more importantly, they can also aid us in appreciating the artistry of the texts that we do have or can reconstruct.

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Footnotes