Sappho 110aLP: a Footnote

Extract

Critics comment on the simplicity of the jest here, not without reason.1 But the levity also has some sophistication, of a literary kind. For a start,andare aptly long and are carefully left to the end of their clauses and lines for maximum effect. In addition, these striking words, which appear for the first (and last) time in Sappho, may well have been deliberate adaptations of two adjectives which had previously occurred only in Homer,2 and they would in any case have called to mind the Homeric ones, because of their close similarity and because there are no other variants of these compounds in surviving literature down to the time of the j poetess.3 At Odyssey11.312 the poet had said of Otus and Ephialtes and at Iliad 7.220, 222, 245, 266 and 11.545 he had described the shield of Ajax asSo, given the epic flavour of Sappho′s epithets, it was amusing of her to include them at all in such a light and frivolous context. There is also pawkiness in the poetess′s application of these terms I with their Homeric tinge to quite different and very mundane objects; and the humour is increased when one takes into account the associations that these words had (in connection with the feet of a human she uses an adjective that recalls the extent of the whole bodies of two Giants; and with reference to the sandals of an ordinary man she uses one which conjures up the huge shield of a hero).This strikes me as an early instance of witty adaptation of epic diction such as is found in Anacreon 358 and 417 PMG.4