Talk:Sappho/Archive 5

This is an archive of past discussions about Sappho. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

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Archive 3

Image of the "New" Sappho

There's a great image of the most recently published text on this page, but the file name is P. Oxy. X 1232.jpg. The papyrus is actually P.Köln XI 429 (inv. 21351 + 21376). Does anyone know the best way to clear this up? Thank you, The Cardiff Chestnut (talk) 20:29, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

{{Rename media}} Wareh (talk) 02:41, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Done—thanks so much, The Cardiff Chestnut (talk) 03:01, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Someone did something in response to my tagging, but it didn't fix the problem. I'll try to figure it out when I (try to) upload my first image. In the meantime, I'll stick the info in the caption on the off chance that someone might need it and might be misled by the file name. In case anyone really needs to know, P.Oxy. X 1232 is actually Sappho fragments 43 and 44, not part of the New Sappho. The Cardiff Chestnut (talk) 21:56, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm not seeing your effort or the response (probably my carelessness: I'm in an airport). But note that (1) the file resides on Commons not Wikipedia, (2) the talk page of the user who moved it to its current title is here; if you explain the right thing to do, this editor may take care of it for you. Wareh (talk) 01:11, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

(Have a great trip!) What I did was just deleted by someone. I think your response tells me exactly what I did wrong. There was a big pink warning about the file being at Commons and I just added the tag. Tomorrow I'm going to try to get a handle on image stuff and will also contact that user. I don't think that anyone will be coming to wikipedia over the next day trying to figure out which papyrus is the "New Sappho", but will try my best to figure this out soon. Thank you for your help. The Cardiff Chestnut (talk) 01:50, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

"Gynaeon Pornikon Erotomanes": Real or not? 95 percent of her works lost, but no mention?

I haven't done any research on this, but assume that his alleged decree, with this phrase, exists, so I'm not buying "Older Discussion's" shrillish assertion (Savonarola, anyone?). I do, however, strongly agree with Older Discussion that facts should be found. If the phrase "Gynaeon Pornikon Erotomanes" is real, and if Nazianzus did indeed issue said decree, the statement made in this article -- that he "liked" her poetry, would seem to be historically refuted and the record ought to be corrected in both this and «his» Wikipedia entries.

Can someone find and post the document to the Internet so that it can be analyzed? (Should be in public domain, and I bet that Disney and Warner Music won't be coopting her soon.) Can proof be provided (as in referenced) that he indeed liked her poetry, and if so, why he would issue such a decree? We «are» talking about book-burning here.

Also, the claim is made on the web that an estimated 95 percent of Sappho's works were destroyed/lost. The article makes no mention of this. Again, verifiable documents should be found and cited, since 95 percent is a very large percentage....

In the end, I think this section has a opinional, unsupported slant:

It appears likely that Sappho's poetry was largely lost through action of the same indiscriminate forces of cultural change that have left us such paltry remains of all nine canonical Greek lyric poets, of whom only Pindar (whose works alone survive in a manuscript tradition) and Bacchylides (our knowledge of whom we owe to a single dramatic papyrus find) have fared much better.

You can say that if you attribute it. If not, it's not encyclopedia material. Better to say:

However Sappho's, and indeed seven of the nine canonical Greek lyric poets' works have been lost, only the works of Pindar (whose works alone survive in a manuscript tradition) and Bacchylides (our knowledge of whom we owe to a single dramatic papyrus find) have been significantly preserved.

Dstlascaux (talk) 20:55, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

I don't know where that info about Greg Naz. issuing a "decree" to burn Sappho comes from, but, knowing his education and literary proclivities (not to mention his conduct as an officer of the church), it's probably utter nonsense from some late hagiography. The phrase gynaion pornikon erotomanes is actually from Tatian, Oratio ad Graecos 33.2: καὶ ἡ μὲν Σαπφὼ γύναιον πορνικὸν ἐρωτομανές, καὶ τὴν ἑαυτῆς ἀσέλγειαν ᾄδει, "And then there's Sappho—that lewd, sex-crazed "lady"—she sang of her own liscentiousness". This is from a discussion about how much purer Christian women were than those dirty pagan ladies. These sites that associate the phrase with this Greg-decree aren't reliable. I'll add a citation for the percentage of Sappho work surviving if I come upon one, but 95% seems very high, and might be a relic some 19th c. work, before the papyri started appearing. The Cardiff Chestnut (talk) 22:41, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

And I've just stumbled upon a good little summary of the myth of the burning (note, however, a typo in the Tatian quote: gynaikon for gynaion). I've got to run, but will clean up and cite that section if no one else does in the meantime. The Cardiff Chestnut (talk) 23:16, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

I have seen Cataudella's article. Not only is it completely persuasive on Gregory Nazianzen's poetic imitation of Sappho, but it has been cited with agreement and approval by scholarly sources from M.L. West to Anne Carson. I would strongly object to removal of this point ("that he 'liked' her poetry"). If such a range of secondary sources can agree on this, it is true for Wikipedia's purposes and should stand as is until we produce equally notable sources that specifically reject it. (Then we would record both views, not "correct" the one that has such solid acceptance.)

While the notion that Sappho's transmission is in any way unusually subject to suppression seems pretty bankrupt, I do agree that it would be a good thing to document better the how & why the notion has become so widespread. Wareh (talk) 19:31, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

According to link I give above (and stuck in the article) it's from Scaliger & contemporaries, but I wonder if one of the recent "classical receptions" series/journals have done an article/chapter on this very topic. The Cardiff Chestnut (talk) 20:14, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

Haw haw

Sappho was an _ancient_ Greek poet? I'm sure she was very current in her day. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.111.204.57 (talk) 21:42, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Discovery of tomb

See Wikipedia:Help desk#New Evidence about Sapho the Ancient Poet --202.28.181.200 (talk) 07:05, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Hoax. Wareh (talk) 01:12, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

File:Godward-In the Days of Sappho-1904.jpg

Anyone think this is worth including? — Crisco 1492 (talk) 08:47, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps somewhere in the legacy section? davidiad { t } 12:45, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

Talk page header size

I've collapsed the WikiProjects listing at the top of the page to make the talk page header smaller in size. Hopefully people agree with this move. It Is Me Here ^{t / c} 21:34, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Sappho

what are some other legends about Sappho? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.237.228.36 (talk) 00:27, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

As the talk page header mentions, Wikipedia article talk pages are mainly for discussing the Wikipedia article itself, rather than the topic the article covers more generally. You are more likely to get help with your question at WP:REFDESK. It Is Me Here ^{t / c} 11:51, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

cultural reference

Mlle de Scudery links the names of Sappho and Phaon in her epic romance Artamene ou le Grand Cyrus (Book 10). Of course, Sappho and Cyrus were not contemporaries and the romance is a roman a clef about the times of Louis XIV, Louise la Valliere, and Princess Henrietta who was married to Louis' younger brother. 71.163.117.143 (talk) 12:56, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

Sexual partners

I have changed the wording in the picture caption from "friends" to "sexual partners". Some edits attempted to change the wording to "gal pals", which is informal slang that shouldn't be used on Wikipedia. I think "sexual partners" most accurately describes the picture, not "friends" and certainly not "gap pals". wia (talk) 01:34, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikiisawesome (wia), you were dealing with WP:Vandalism. See here. Because of that, the article is currently WP:Semi-protected (seen here). Flyer22 (talk) 12:30, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Looking at your reverts, such as this one, I see that you are aware that you were dealing with vandalism. Above, you made it sound like a simple dispute. Flyer22 (talk) 12:33, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

@Flyer22: Ah yes, I was trying to justify the change in case anyone had legitimate questions about it. Perhaps I should have been clearer in my original post though. wia (talk) 12:50, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Something missing?

Lots about her poetry .. but not a single example, or even a word, of it is in this article. Surely not a copyright issue? :-)

New translation with all the fragments including the 2014 discoveries; should be included in list of translations: <Rayor, Diane. Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works, Cambridge University Press, 2014.> Reviewed by <Daniel Mendelsohn: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/girl-interrupted?> "For readers who want a complete, up-to-date collection of all Sappho’s extant oeuvre in faithful and cautious English translation, this new edition, by two acclaimed classical scholars, is currently the sole satisfactory option. It contains translations by Diane Rayor, a professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan and author of reputable translations of other ancient poetry including the Homeric Hymns and Callimachus. Her Sappho translations, some of which she has been working on for more than thirty years, are presented along with carefully selected suggestions for further reading and André Lardinois’s introduction and notes. Almost everything an undergraduate or interested lay reader requires to embark on a first voyage into Sappho’s world can be found within this elegant volume." <p.5 Sensual Sappho by Edith Hall | The New York Review of Books 2015/may/07/>JillLion (talk) 23:36, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

Loss and preservation of Sappho's work

The recent edit to this section (diff) has prompted me to take a closer look, and I think that the whole section really needs overhauling.

The first paragraph is entirely uncited, and could do with being more specific and less POV in places (e.g. "the greatest poets and thinkers of ancient Rome" could be something along the lines of "ancient Roman poets such as Catullus continued to emulate Sappho's work"). Paragraph 2 is a single sentence, and could either be concatenated with p.1 or (preferably) expanded so have some more of a progression than "ancient Rome" (when?) "Byzantine empire" "12th century". Like, when did Byzantine academies drop Sappho from the curriculum?

Paragraph 3 is where the real trouble begins, though. We have "Modern legends say", cited to Reynolds (which I don't have on hand to check, but have to assume is fine). Then we have "modern scholars have noted the echoes of Sappho Fragment 2 in a poem by Gregory of Nazianzus". As this is currently written, there's a serious WP:SYNTH problem here: the implication is that because one church father may have written a poem referring to a work of Sappho, then no church leaders tried to destroy Sappho's work. If someone has actually argued this, then fine, but that needs to be cited; otherwise maybe the info about Gregory could be moved into the reputation in antiquity section? And then the IP's new addition: 'On the other hand, historian Will Durant, citing Mahaffy, reports that "In the year 1073 of our era the poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus was publicly burned by ecclesiastical authorities in Constantinople and Rome."' Durant's work is more than 80 years old, Mahaffy's is older still, and the book cited is a general work on ancient Greece, not specific to either archaic Greece or Greek lyric and certainly not specific to Sappho. This just feels like undue weight.

The final paragraph, again, is sadly lacking a citation.

I'll see what I can do for the section when I have the opportunity, but I thought I'd note this on the talk page in case anyone can get to it earlier... Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 12:05, 30 June 2016 (UTC)