Greene, Ellen, and Marilyn Skinner, eds. 2007. “The New Sappho on Old Age: Textual and Philosophical Issues.” Special issue, Classics@ 4. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.jissue:ClassicsAt.Issue04.The_New_Sappho_on_Old_Age.2009.
[In order to help prevent the looting of objects collected as samples of material culture, the Center for Hellenic Studies supports (1) the statement of the 1970 UNESCO convention with reference to the illicit trafficking in cultural property, (2) the code of ethics adopted by the Archaeological Institute of America, and (3) the 2007 resolution of the American Society of Papyrologists.
As a publishing institution, CHS also supports a proactive stance in facilitating awareness of any illegalities in the acquisition of any objects of material culture, including papyri.
For more information, please see the CHS statement on looted objects and papyri.]
The world has long wished for more of Sappho’s poetry, which exists mostly in tantalizing fragments. So the apparent recovery in 2004 of a virtually intact poem by Sappho, only the fourth to have survived almost complete, has generated unprecedented excitement and discussion among scholarly and lay audiences alike. This volume is the first collection of essays in English devoted to discussion of the newly-recovered Sappho poem and two other incomplete texts on the same papyri. Containing eleven new essays by leading scholars, it addresses a wide range of textual and philological issues connected with the find. Using different approaches, the contributions demonstrate how the “New Sappho” can be appreciated as a gracefully spare poetic statement regarding the painful inevitability of death and aging.
The New Sappho on Old Age is Issue 4 of the Center for Hellenic Studies journal Classics@. The goal of Classics@ is to bring the best of contemporary classical scholarship to a wide audience. Each issue is dedicated to its own topic for an in-depth exploration of important current problems in the field of Classics. This issue is the first one also made available in a print volume (available from Harvard University Press, here) with the intention of reaching an even wider audience. Although the print volume is necessarily static, the digital issue can remain dynamic, responding to new developments and reconsiderations of the evidence.
Contents
Marilyn B. Skinner, “Introduction.”
Dirk Obbink, “Sappho Fragments 58–59: Text, Apparatus Criticus, and Translation.”
Jürgen Hammerstaedt, “The Cologne Sappho: Its Discovery and Textual Constitution.”
André Lardinois, “The New Sappho Poem (P. Köln 21351 and 21376): Key to the Old Fragments.”
Lowell Edmunds, “Tithonus in the ‘New Sappho’ and the Narrated Mythical Exemplum in Archaic Greek Poetry.”
Deborah Boedeker, “No Way Out? Aging in the New (and Old) Sappho.”
Joel Lidov, “Acceptance or Assertion? Sappho’s New Poem in its Books.”
Joel Lidov, “The Meter and Metrical Style of the New Poem.”
Eva Stehle, “‘Once’ and ‘Now’: Temporal Markers and Sappho’s Self-Representation.”
Dee Clayman, “The New Sappho in a Hellenistic Poetry Book.”
Ellen Greene, “Sappho 58: Philosophical Reflections on Death and Aging.”
Marguerite Johnson, “A Reading of Sappho Poem 58, Fragment 31 and Mimnermus.”
Gregory Nagy, “The ‘New Sappho’ Reconsidered in the Light of the Athenian Reception of Sappho.”