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A Note on Sappho Fr. 11
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
The letters are constant in the tradition of 1. 19 and must be taken as genuine. It follows that we have to do either with ‘lead’ or with one of its compounds. At any rate nobody has found another word of like appearance that will fit the context.
Since the first publication of P. Oxy. xxi.
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2 Page's demands an arbitrary change of σ and introduces an element of military or official jargon that is foreign to the context.
3 It is possible to regard in the first of Aphrodite's assertions (1. 21) as being a response to . You ask me to lead someone, says the goddess, but that person will not need to be led; he (or she) will give chase.
1 Contrast 19, where the length of the syllable indicates to the hearer the presence of the pronoun. (In fr. 31. 7 is restored but is not certain.)
2 The change from the interrogative-relative to the interrogative pronoun need not be significant.
3 Editors usually supply the subject ‘she’, connecting it with . 1. 24; but see below, pp. 182 f.
4 Page translates: ‘fulfil all that my heart desires to fulfil’. In his note, however, he allows the possibility of the rendering I have given. To me it seems that and should be strictly parallel, and therefore that δE should be understood as subject of the infinitive. See above.
1 For this reason we must reject Knox's emendation , despite the fact that it is linguistically unobjectionable and achieved with minimum damage to the paradosis.
1 I have tried to demonstrate this in an article published in Mnemosyne, series iv, vol. ix 2(1956), pp. 103–11,Google Scholar and especially pp. 109 f.
3 Page rightly rejects the notion that Sappho was a priestess of Aphrodite or an instructress in cult matters. The topsyturvy view of Aphrodite and Eros presented in Plato, Symp. 180 c-182 a certainly does not suggest that the goddess would be invoked in the case of a homosexual relationship in real life.
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